What you just said applies to almost any business with more than 1K employees. I'd say any programmer considering a career at General Electric (random pick) is insane. It's a government job without government benefits.
Blaming "rote learning" for lack of technical capability of a considerable majority of a "regular" Indian programmer is simplistic.
If I may list the issues that are possibly unique to Indian programmer, they are, in no particular order:
* Money triumphs everything. Most Indian programmers don't care for the technology as long as money comes
a) in ever increasing quantities
b) from a reputed, brand-name company
c) offers foreign travel, with US being first choice.
* Admissions to Engineering courses depends entirely on how "HOT" the market is for that degree. couple of years back it was CS. Now it is Electronics and Communcation Engg (ECE), just because it allows you to compete both for CS jobs and Electronics jobs.
* "Work Ethic" - that can be quantified as pride in one's individual contribution, quality of output, constant drive to improve one's skills and knowledge as a distant measure after social status, money for many Indian programmers.
* Enjoying Programming for the sake of it is considered trivial pursuit and not "serious". For instance, being a Python/Rails/Lisp/Haskell programmer of some capability is a matter of pride in US etc. Not so in India. If you are not working on "Enterprise" stuff, all you get is a "oh.. ok".
Of course generalising the above behaviour to ALL Indian programmers is a disservice and wrong. As a hacker(if I may claim so myself) and a native of Bangalore, I'm proud of many excellent programmers I have met in the last 10 years and I feel that many of us are on par with hackers from elsewhere in the world.
To answer your "selection bias" question.
There are many reasons why you will not get a qualified hacker to appear on your radar. Getting a US visa is a huge pain in the neck. If you want a H1B you will have go through a lot of circus.
Any self respecting hacker would balk at paying upto 60% of their salaries to body shopping firms.
H1B applications are flooded on the first day of applications by big name companies and body shoppers. This leaves no space for a hacker (who by nature are content to be hacking on their own) to "hustle" to get into USA.
I wouldn't touch a lot of these H1B programmers myself. My own hiring processes back home in India have been similar to yours. I would typically give a programming test and a computer to the interviewees and ask them to solve them for me. A significan percentage of candidates from large, brand name companies would fail. Some of them wouldn't even know how to use command line SQL query tools.
So, your sampling population is the one which is contaminated by people who are largely motivated by the desire to work in US and not by technology.
well I can tell you for sure that is only a San Francisco/Bay area thing. I lived in the east coast (Boston), and have many friends that live in NYC, and the culture is very different over there.
If you are not in by 9 am., it looks bad. Even if you are done with your work, and more, or can't be any more productive, you still have to stay in to put your hours.
You feel extra guilty just for asking a couple of hours off to go to the dentist or fix your car. etc. etc. Management doesn't trust you for sure, and half of the sites or the internet are blocked.
If you work in the financial industry, you can't use any external/personal email, im, or whatever. My company even disabled SMS from company phones.
Yes, it can be that bad even in the US.
So, what you discribing, as rolling in a 10-11am is ok, is just a California thing, and most importantly a startup world thing, so don't generalise it for the whole US.
My handwriting was always pretty bad and erratic; no doubt because I spent most of my time at a keyboard. But a couple years ago I decided to basically engineer myself a style of handwriting, first designing an alphabet, then training myself to use it (and only it). That project has grown to something of a full-fledged writing system. I would recommend to any geeks that they take a couple weeks to work out something for themselves and then try to learn it. It's been quite satisfying.
So I have a personal experience with this idea. I was living in Finland for the past year and a half, and came across this same idea with a site called fiksuhuuto.fi. I didn't have any moral opposition to the idea, because I believe that its no different than any other sort of lottery or game of chance. Adults should have the right to risk their money for the possibility of reward.
I was working remotely for a company at the time, so gave them 2 months notice and started developing, with the intention of launching a similar company in Canada in 6 months time. I had another Canadian partner, and started looking into all facets of the idea. The site development went fairly straight forward and allowed me the chance to return to web development after 5 years of Mac and Windows application development.
We had contacted the best law firm we could find with experience in gaming and intellectual property. After spending a fairly large sum of money to get a risk assessment, it was clear that the idea was definitely illegal. Because many people were paying for the chance to win a product, it was online gaming and illegal in Canada. We had a few options, none of which were very reassuring.
I am rambling now, but I just wanted to mention that I paid nearly $10K to have this looked into by lawyers, quit my job to implement it, and moved back to Canada from Finland to go ahead with the project. I am stunned that this is being done in the US, and am no going to be surprised at all when it goes bad for them. If it doesn't, then I made the wrong bet of calling it quits.
On a side note, if anyone wants to buy a nearly completed site with the same idea as this, feel free to contact me.
That's a sensible position to have for an established company that has a lot of cash in the bank, doesn't pay its engineers very much and has a long-term view.
However, if you're established but don't have cash, have low margins and expensive personnel, you're not in a very good position to start doing heavy R&D.
Apple doesn't reflect the state of tech startups. Lessons learned from Jobs should be taken into context.
If you don't have cash, get some by cutting everything you don't need. Build up a reserve and invest in long-term projects. Preferably ones that tie into a strategy of supplying services that other companies need but are currently supplied by companies that are going bust. Also, be pessimistic on your revenue projections.
And don't take random advice on forums as your guideline.
A question to those here who have experienced both IT work in both the US and in India:
Over the past year, I conducted well over thirty technical phone screens in hope of finding a single, somewhat-skilled Java development contractor. The majority of those interviewed were Indian people who were working in the US on H1B visas. Interview results ranged from the mediocre down to the abysmal. The resumes of all these candidates claimed several years of work exclusively in Java, and many also purported to have had lead/architect roles.
My screening technique is an insult to a good developer. I ask questions that anyone who has written any decent Java code should be able to answer without pause. For example, I email a small snippet of code containing a try/catch block and ask the candidate to trace through the flow of program execution if the checked exception is thrown. Literally half of candidates think that program execution terminates whenever a catch block is entered and the contents of that block done executing. How could someone have written any quality code and not know this? I'm not asking Java trivia.
What's going on here? If I was going to travel half way around the world to work as a Java developer, I'd be sure to read a couple of Java books on the plane. Is there something uniquely American/Western about expecting people to "know their stuff"? I'd attribute my observations to general, world-wide idiocy except that the rate of ineptitude relative to claimed experience was far worse with Indian candidates. Perhaps a Mid-Western, Fortune 1000 company isn't a compelling place to spend six months on a contract? The role was to do back-end engineering work on a pretty large, well-know site -- something I would think would be compelling compared to the average "maintain a crappy legacy banking system" gig. If I claimed to be a Java developer and didn't know much Java, I'd be so embarrassed that I'd study every night to achieve competence.
I feel like such an Ugly American asking this question, but I can't discount my observations. What am I missing? Is there some selection bias in my data set that I'm unaware of? I also find a general lack of creativity in these candidates, but I attribute that to the rote nature of Indian education (at least that's what I've read about most schooling in India).
Note: I'm not trying to start a "Java sucks" language war here...When looking at a candidate for the long term, I don't care if he/she knows Java at all. However, when you claim to have done Java for five years and don't know basic stuff, I have to question if you know anything at all.
I really admire how honest Steve Jobs is with his own products:
Take the iPhone. We had a different enclosure design for this iPhone until way too close to the introduction to ever change it. And I came in one Monday morning, I said, 'I just don't love this. I can't convince myself to fall in love with this. And this is the most important product we've ever done.'
Taking higher level math classes is a good way to force yourself to maintain good handwriting. You quickly learn that if you want to have any chance of finishing a question, your going to have to write your solution neatly and in easily readable steps.
The three elements are the capacitor, inductor and resistor.
I think when they say "fundamental elements" they mean the fundamental passive elements of analog circuit theory (mentioned above), as opposed to active elements like op-amps or transistors.
I lived in the east coast (Boston), and have many friends that live in NYC, and the culture is very different over there. If you are not in by 9 am., it looks bad. Even if you are done with your work, and more, or can't be any more productive, you still have to stay in to put your hours.
You feel extra guilty just for asking a couple of hours off to go to the dentist or fix your car. etc. etc. Management doesn't trust you for sure, and half of the sites or the internet are blocked.
If you work in the financial industry, you can't use any external/personal email, im, or whatever.
The email firewall is there for security reasons, or so it's said.
I don't know that what you're describing is a "New York" phenomenon, but it's certainly true on Wall Street. I worked at a hedge fund where I ran into exactly what you're talking about. I developed substantial health problems for a period of about 2 months. Having a strong work ethic, and not wanting to call in sick needlessly (it wasn't contagious) I showed up to work whenever I could-- sometimes arriving late or leaving early, or taking a midday break, but still putting in the 45-50 hours that was expected.
I found out the hard way that it's worse to show up a half-hour late because of illness than to call in sick and throw out a day-- this is obviously stupid, inefficient, and bizarre. I had a new boss who gave me a ration of shit for showing up 8 minutes late (I was puking during that 8 minutes; thanks) and threatened to fire me. I sent him an email basically telling him that I worked for the company, not him, and that it was unfair both to me, but "more importantly" unfair to the company, to destroy a day's worth of my productivity over 8 minutes in the morning.
I am a person born in Bangalore and currently live in Bangalore. First i want to make this clear, Bangalore is not a threat to Silicon Valley or any Technology hub. With the way things are going on here, i would say pretty soon, it won't be a threat to anyone's job either.
Most of the top-tier companies are not actually technology companies but intermediateries between $5 Software or Electronics Engineers, $7 MBA's and Clients in Developed Countries. If these companies existed in Ancient Egypt, they would be in the business of supplying slaves to build Pyramids. There are hardly any Technology companies here which are actually in the business of creating and branding products. Most of them are sweatshops where you can buy a Fresh Engineer whose expertise is Java, C, C++, VB, Python, Ruby ( add languages as you hear them is the motto here).
