| This is a brilliant article. It captures everything that's gone wrong with the Indian software services industry — no emphasis on curiosity, exploration, or problem solving. If you think about it for a moment, that's also exactly what's wrong with CS education in the country. I've been trying to hire a good engineer for the last four months to expand our dev team. We're not a startup — we're part of one of the largest ad/PR networks in the world. We're great paymasters and offer the opportunity to work on some really cool products. And we're based in New Delhi, India. I've met at least 10 people in the last eight weeks — all of them engineers, and none of them seem to know what we're talking about the moment we say things like NLP or Node. In fact, they're not even curious. Just scared, and uninterested in being pushed out of their comfort zone. For eg, one guy told me he ONLY does PHP using the Cake framework. I asked if he had played around with any other framework, he said no. The only reason he was stuck with Cake was because the place he worked at said Cake, he learnt Cake and he used Cake ever since. I asked about MVC and I got a blank look. I just wish I could come across another computer engineer (outside the existing team) who's curious about programming, who still thinks it's magical when the code you write translates in to cool stuff happening on your screen and in boxes all over the world. Who realizes that you're not writing software, you creating an experience for a user and every bit matters. Either they're terribly hard to find, or I don't know where to look :) |
But there are always some cream of engineers every year who are passionate and looking forward to learn. We attract them with higher pay. In our culture (I know it's same in India) you can get almost anyone you want if you are willing to pay more (30% higher than the market rate). Add a bit of benefits like relaxing developer-friendly environment etc. and you can get some really great guys in your ranks.