alt Hacker News"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.
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"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.
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.
> "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
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.
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.