[spprashant]

"offshore Indian devs" are no slouches. They have access to the same GPT models and likely cost a tenth of the median US salary. Businesses are always looking to lower marginal cost. They will hire 1 software architect in US to write specs and 10 software developers in India to babysit 100 agents.

[CuriouslyC]

This is short-sighted. The problem with offshore Indian devs is the communication friction/overhead. You're 9 hours offset, with people who have decent-but-not-great English skills and wildly different cultural priors. If the product people/decision makers are in the US, you're getting a ~50% savings to suffer all those issues, while the cost of tokens remains unchanged. That 50% savings doesn't look very impressive when you're taking a 20% productivity hit from comms friction and crossed wire, and 35% of your total cost is from tokens anyhow. Then it comes out to be a very marginal savings, at the cost of a VASTLY worse hiring experience and VERY high variance of outcomes.

Offshore Indian devs make sense when you can have a large Indian division so you can amortize communication infrastructure/process management over a lot of heads, and you're building for international customers so you're not paying an English -> X tax inherently.

[runtime_terror]

Obviously this is just anecdotal but over my 20+ year career I've worked with a lot of outsourced teams in India and my experience has nearly always been that they require a frustratingly specific degree of direction to product anything of quality.

Just recently I asked a dev there for a POC of a feature with decent specificity and ended up with about 8k LOC of spaghetti. I re-wrote it later in a few hundred. This is about in-line with my career experience.

I've had a few standout devs there but it does feel like a lot are putting in the bare minimum or are just working really far outside of their abilities.

[spprashant]

Companies are also pivoting away from mere outsourcing to setting up entire GCCs in there.

[mikeocool]

"They will hire 1 software architect in US to write specs and 10 software developers in India" is exactly what everyone said was going to happen in 2004 as software engineering outsourcing really started to gain traction. Malcolm Gladwell's The Earth Is Flat basically made the argument that software engineering in the US was going the way of manufacturing.

And outsourcing certainly became a thing though not in the way everyone predicted. There are far more software engineers in the US today than there were in 2004.

[opsnooperfax]

Why do you need a mid career software developer to babysit ChatGPT? Why don’t you just use an American intern who’s paid half of what in Indian developer is paid? You just can’t take the people who do your plumbing and get them to design your water treatment plant. If you want someone who really knows what they are talking about, and that’s what you need where an AI fails, then you are just going to have to pay what someone at that level asks.

I work for a global corporation. We have offices in India. For the technical professionals I deal with the wage differential is maybe 30-50% and is actually quite a bit less than the cost of living difference. My personal experience is that there is a tendency for them to massively inflate their qualifications and level of experience to a point that Americans would call fraud. The only kind of people who think this is a good idea are people like Larry Fink, and I would attribute his motives to greed and malice, probably an equal parts.

[ern_ave]

> "offshore Indian devs" are no slouches.

What evidence is there of the quality of Indian devs specifically?

One signal I'd expect to see, for example, would be success in programming competitions. Here's the list of winners of the IOI competition [1] - India has won 3 times.

Meanwhile, Turkey has won 4 times, Estonia has won 5 times, and Vietnam has won 22 times!

Why should we suspect that there are more or better developers in Indian than in any of the countries that has produced more winners??

[1] https://stats.ioinformatics.org/countries/?sort=medals_desc

[blauditore]

Programming competitions are not the same as real-world engineering, plus these countries have way more people trying to use these competitions as a gateway to good jobs. Also, many good engineers emigrate to higher-income countries given the chance, and almost none will imigrate to low-income regions. The consequence is some sort of brain drain.

[ern_ave]

> Programming competitions are not the same as real-world engineering

That's true but irrelevant. Nothing is "the same" as anything else. My question was, what evidence is there that offshore Indian devs are of high quality. One expected signal with be ...that they demonstrate their programming skill.

> these countries have way more people trying to use these competitions as a gateway to good jobs

That's ridiculous!! You're claiming that Turkey, with a population of under a million, has "more people trying to use these competitions" than India, with a population in the billions????

> many good engineers emigrate to higher-income countries

Okay, but the claim was, "offshore Indian devs are good" - that cohort (i.e. the ones INSIDE INDIA) excludes the cohort you're talking about (emigrate to higher-income contries).

So, unless your point is, "yes, I agree with you, there is no evidence that offshore (still in India) devs are of high quality, and the reason is that the good ones emigrated" I think this statement is irrelevant.

[esafak]

Turkey's population is around ninety million.

[ern_ave]

Sorry. I meant to write, "population under a hundred million"

[ifwinterco]

I'm sure there's some good ones but most are bad.

Not because all Indian devs are bad (this is of course absolutely not true), but most of the good ones are either no longer in India or working in India but for something more prestigious and interesting than an offshoring shop

[pritambarhate]

Which can be said of any country. Most of the good devs in US are working for the best US comapnies and not for small companies with less budgets.

[ifwinterco]

Yes, but this is a strong argument against Indian offshoring purely for cost reasons if you're a half-decent company in North America or Europe that could attract decent local engineers if you tried

[gedy]

While people will do what they need for money, that is a miserable type of role and the quality of architect will suffer from that.