codegeeks

recently I read an interesting post in thoughtclusters which talks about indian software developers.

The recent 40th StackOverflow podcast with Michael Lopp had some pretty harsh words for Indian software programmers and the outsourcing industry in general. The transcript is incomplete, so you have to hear the podcast, but what I heard went something along these lines.

The cost of an Indian developer is one-third the value of the cost of a developer in the United States. People assume it is because of the lower cost of living in India. But that is not why. It is because the value is one-third. If they produced the same quality of code, they would be charging the same amount.

You can read the rest of the post here. One of the line which caught my attention was a comment about outsourcing.

Developers from India, sorry to say, are what I call “Code Donkeys”. They do crud, boring, repetitive nothing innovative business applications and in many occasions they need blue prints and directions on how to start. I have never seen any shrinkwrap software made in India.

Krishna@thoughtclusters have given some valid points to prove that this is wrong.

At first this seemed to be a little harsh comment and it was disturbing as I am a software developer from India and I work for an outsourced company. But after giving some thought about his comment for few minutes I realised what he said was right. I completely agree with the comment that Indian software developers are “code Donkeys“. I am glad that he is referring to only outsourced software developers as code donkeys. Now let me explain why I feel he is right.

Projects are very less in outsourced companies. Most of the work include maintenance of existing projects (not developed by the so called code donkeys) and this means there is very little room for applying new ideas or innovations. So developers don’t have any other choice other than follow the existing coding standard for maintenance and support. This reminds me of the Monkey and the Hat seller story so I prefer calling outsourced software developers as code monkeys. I have seen applications which use variables names like orange, blue, green etc. and these applications were not developed by the code donkeys in India but unfortunately these applications are supported by them.

Now here is another reason. Most of the outsourced companies have their own coding standards so new projects automatically follow the standards (Which is full of nothing but rubbish writeen years back). Most of the standards dont allow the developers to think outside the box or apply innvoative ideas. Again the reason for a bad application goes back to the outsourced company.

Now you know whay outsourcedsoftware developers are called code donkeys. Above are some of my personal thoughts. What do you think?

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