Programmers of India

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..

Comments

[Sanjay Vyas]

A software company in Bangalore actually makes sure that their devs dont get too much of domain knowledge or become expert on a particular platform lest they switch jobs. As soon as they start becoming good in one platform (say Java), they will be shifted to another platform (.NET). We are creating syntax factory workers. But devs are to be blamed too. People switch jobs every 12-18 months for incremental pay rise of 1000-1500. Today switching IT jobs quickly is a guarantee to go from 12,000 to 25,000 in few years. I am not opposed to the pay rise, but this ia all being done at cost of acquiring skill and relevant knowledge.

[RA]

Our education system, politicians and business is built on only one mantra. Let someone do all the ground work and take the risk.As a "smart" indian, you just go and get a job in that company. Why the so called IT giants like Wipro,TCS and Infosys never invest on creating a new product like Nokia phone or a Play station?. They just want BPO from USA, which is nothing but a Cybercoolie business!.

[Kirk Herzog]

Hello

I Need a Add on that will use information in a access 2003 to populate a Calendar form or program that information can be displayed in and if information is changed will update the information in access.

This will need to be used for many users to View and be able to change data.

Something like Microsoft map point would be a good format