Darned Indian Programmers

Comments

# William said on December 12, 2004 1:19 AM:

Oh man !!! I'm all embarassed now .. I've met quite a few smart American programmers (and dumb Indian programmers too).

Personally, my operating system is definitely American, but my ROM-BIOS is Indian. I don't know if I can be qualified as either.

About the cobra -

Arraylist al = new Arraylist() ;
al.Add(cobra) ;
al.Add(turban) ;
al.Add(basket) ;

Bill.DataSource = al ;
Bill.Databind() ;

// Happy now?

# William said on December 12, 2004 1:21 AM:

Yes except your forgot my flute. What am I supposed to charm the cobra with? My good looks?

# William said on December 12, 2004 2:22 AM:

not talking away from Sahil ... but the title got me riled up. i've had 3 offshore encounters with India now. all of them have been the most WTF code you have ever seen. sometimes the code actually works, and then i do a code review and tell them why it runs so slow or why it isn't secure ... and 2 out of 3 times they threw all of the code away. i have yet to meet any programmer that admits to having a good experience with offshore code. anybody ...?

# William said on December 12, 2004 2:24 AM:

oh yeah, i should say that i have worked with 1 very smart Indian programmer. Jehangir Abdulla. probably the best i've ever worked with.

# William said on December 12, 2004 4:04 AM:

Not sure if you're referring to pure knowledge and intelligence, or actually getting things going. I inherited an overseas project and it was... astouding. IIRC, there was a 120-table database, with zero relationships. Easily trimmable to 30 tables. I'm not a SQL guru, but it seems like that was a bit too screwed up.

# William said on December 12, 2004 12:02 PM:

Outsourced projects need to be managed differently. There are a couple of issues that most people who were not born in India donot realize -

a) Propensity to hire fresh college grads and pawn them off as "consultants". You'd shit in your pants if you knew the background of some of the people you just paid $100 an hour for.
b) CEO takes pretty much all you pay for the "consultants" so you cannot hire anything but fresh college grads.
c) You've gotta realize - indians will not understand the US healthcare of taxation system as well as americans will.

Having said that, both Microsoft and Oracle, alongwith a few other companies have had successful ventures in India, because they managed it right.

And yes I've had bad code quality come from India too - being on both sides of the shore, I can vouch for what you guys just said is true.

One more thing - intelligence isn't limited to a country.

# William said on December 12, 2004 12:57 PM:

India is a pretty big place so there's no doubt some incompetent people in the field over there. However, every Indian guy I've worked with has been top notch. I'm not extrapolating to the whole market by any means though.

In SC there have been a lot of textile mills closed because they couldn't cut it in the international market. So there's a lot of folks around here that constantly complain about 'offshoring' as though folks in India or Mexico are somehow stealing jobs. I think offshoring is probably peaked because it's hard to manage. Most companies have to put in enough effort documenting and spec-ing the project for it to move out of house that the savings are negated to a large extent.

But I think that there's an attidunal difference overall. Sure, there are tons of exceptions. But I listen to some folks around here act like they are owed a job and foreigners should just stay in their countries and not come here b/c having a good paying job and job security is some sort of entitlement.

America has TONS of great programmers and I would never put them down... but we also have a lot of cats that read Teach Yourself VB in 21 days, that pass themselves off as programmers, recruiters fall for it and viola, they are programmers.

# William said on December 12, 2004 1:00 PM:

KC, I wasn't referring to offshoring in any way. I think taking stuff out of the office usually has bad results, whether it's another state or another country. I've recently had experience with some people working on the same project in another city, and it's been a nightmare. Mainly b/c they just didn't 'get' what the code was supposed to do. We ended up having to take it over and will probably have to start from next to scratch.

Offshoring has so many variables involved in it that it's pretty hard to control. It's a beast unto itself.

in no way was I putting down American workers although I can see how I may have given off that impression.

# William said on December 12, 2004 1:35 PM:

right, i just made the leap to offshoring from the Indian programmer comments ... because all the offshore code i've seen has been from India. i agree with anything out of office is usually fucked up. but back to meeting dumb Indian programmers ... i've met (and not met) my quota already.

regardless, i just needed to rant because you would not believe the F'd up code i've been looking at lately. could keep the WTF website with new content everyday for at least a month. and its not like WTF is strong enough. its more like YGTBFKM ... you've got to be f#cking kidding me!

# William said on December 12, 2004 1:47 PM:

Gotcha. I haven't worked with much offshored stuff but certainly heard both good and bad, usually the extreme in either category.

The stuff I mentioned done by in a different office, it's YGTBFKM all the way. I really like that notion. One of the contenders I've seen is filling an untyped dataset and copying the data to a typed one, then when you're done, doing the reverse for an Update.

Even though I hate support groups - we should start one Victims of YGTBFKM. Instead of coffee and donuts, we could have beer and strippers and laugh about the coding nightmares we've had to deal with ;-)

# William said on March 4, 2005 12:50 PM:

i had a chance to work with an indian programmer once, amit akhalakar ..very very sharp ...before that i used to think this outsourcing is a lot of hype...but maybe they are not all that bad.

# William said on March 4, 2005 12:59 PM:

Every one I've worked with has beenb a total bad a33 - It amazes me such a talented and pleasant group of folks get such an unfairly bad rap.

# William said on April 28, 2005 7:14 PM:

I have been developing a project with an Indian programmer offshores for 8 months. He said it would take less then 3 and it appears that it's not near completion. Does anybody know a php and java coder in denver colorado?