Someone posted a mail about Bangalore as a Silicon Valley or Coolie Valley… I couldn’t agree more…In the last few years I have met several programmers (more than the usual ones that I come across in MSDN/Techeds of the world)
They fell in 4 categories
(1) MSDN events
(2) Interview candidates
(3) ISV developers
(4) Embedded/Lifesciences developers working on Open Source
If you notice carefully, this is arranged in ascending order of my assessment of their skills. A lot of people have learnt how to drag ‘n’ drop, earned MCA/GNIIT or you name it degree here and come to the industry. They cram to pass exams. Of the 40 candidates I interviewed I asked them to write a program to reverse a string. Only 1 could write the right program, or even conceptualize it. We have created an army of programmers, who don’t understand why things are done a certain way, but are only interested in how things are done. I don’t blame them either! The real burden for this blame has to go to those companies in Bangalore etc which flip flop them from project to project without letting them acquire domain knowledge, or long term exposure and understanding of the technology.
A programmer who has been in the industry for a few years is quickly made a lead or manager and he loses his core skills of programming and becomes a people’s manager and does not do the work he was somewhat trained for. All compensations and rewards (including Microsoft India) are linked to how high a person is vertically. There is hardly any scope for horizontal growth. Architects are laughable entities in India.
Peter’s Principle: Every man rises to the level of his incompetency in an organization’s hierarchy.
The secondary blame goes to vendors like Microsoft which does not make a lot of effort to improve the quality of the programs being written by its partners. How many eLearning, ERP, CRM solutions do we need ? How good are they ? No wonder, they will get killed when Navision and Great Plains hit the market under MS brand. Because although MS makes a lot of effort in making sure that its developers are world class and so are its products, it has not shared that knowledge with the outside world.
And that is where the developers in the (4) category really impressed me. They may not have the “time to market” advantage that someone on MS platform has but they certainly have a better understanding of the system and how their software interacts with it and their coding is generally speaking a lot better. Yes, maybe when there are as large a number of developers in OSS as in the commercial vendor space, they might suck, but that remains to be seen..
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