If you work in software development how good is Indian written code?

[stares at error messages]

Please vote in the poll for what matches your experiences of Indian written source code.

Some people believe Indians do a very poor job. Other people claim Indians are par none the best. I don't know what to think. Both positions are too hyperbolic. What is a realistic judgment?

 

[Nagato Kai Ni Surigao]

The boring and honest answer is it depends entirely on the person. I've worked with competent and incompetent indians. The good ones are normal people, the bad ones embody the stereotypes you hear about.

 

[Grim_Autismo]

For me, the Indian hardware engineers are pretty competent. I don't have a lot of interaction with the low level guys doing templating crap you could farm out to ChatGPT. The guys I chat with, we can sit around having fun conversations about defeating DRM with kernel-level nonsense all day, they're fun. I don't know how long that will hold out with AMD's new AI fuckery, though, but it's an eternal arms race, and as they build tools, so will the opposition.

But also, it really depends on what they're (Indian programmers) doing and why they're doing it. A lot of younger programmers in general are just producing garbage now, regardless of whatever country they're coming from. Many people are getting into programming and CS in general to "buy a Lambo", not out of any sense of intellectual curiosity or a love of computers. The academic programs going right now, some of them don't even start people coding until their second or THIRD year. They're not preparing people and it's a shame, especially considering how much people are spending on their degree.

Some of the most interesting graduate stuff I've come across were from Indian and Pakistan in the last two years, especially in the autonomous/AI space. Pakistan is sinking a LOT of money into drones, as is India, but Pakistan is generating a lot more interesting research programs from what I've seen because they're pouring defense spending into it. This one kid I ran into was trying to create an interface layer on top of standard programming for people who didn't speak English, so they could code. It was a garbled mess, but in the interim he had accidentally created a really good translator.

India, up until recently, was farming a lot of its security apparatus out to a private firm, who in turn was doing a lot of private hacking for the Israelis, lol. Some of the best engineers I've known were Indians, but some of the skeeviest pieces of shit I've also known were also Indian. There's just a lot of them so you get a big cross-section. There's like a hundred ethnic groups in India, it would be like trying to ask "Are Europeans good programmers?" Some are, some aren't. You have to ask, if someone is willing to work for $2 an hour and 80 hours a week, they're not going to care about their work. BUT not everyone is like that, some are working hard to get the fuck out of India and are very brilliant people who have a lot to offer their specific industries.

 

[Whatevermancer]

I never dealt with hindus, but one of my coworkers was from Pakistan. He was a nice guy, but he wasn't a good programmer, I spent a lot of time debugging his code and explaining to him basic shit like caching the results of some computation instead of recomputing it every time.
He got better over time, though. And that was just one guy, which is a very small sample size.

 

[9th year in hell]

Please post which number matches your experiences of Indian written source code:

Some people believe Indians do a very poor job. Other people claim Indians are par none the best. I don't know what to think. Both positions are too hyperbolic. What is a realistic judgment?

I don't work with software, but I know an Indian computer scientist who droped the ball on this question, I will paraphrase it:

India has so many people, it's with no doubt the most overpopulated place hell on earth. For every exceptional talented Indian (a legit one) you have 1000 brown bugmen cheating and cutting corners before you ever get a glimpse of him/her existence. That's why it's rare to find an Indian that actually knows their stuff, because it's hypercompetitive and overpopulated (it's 100x worse than East Asia). Add the part of them migrating and you get the worst combination ever. That's why you don't trust an Indian, they screwed over their own tatent at home and will do the same with you. That's how they got that visum to get to the West.

Again, paraphrased (I added the "hell" and "bugmen" part...). But I assume his take was truethful since it really matches the experience I have with Indians: Really good credentials on paper, nothing to show for it. "Most educated population" as Elon would say, but have the same knowledge as a high school student in the West.

The boring and honest answer is it depends entirely on the person. I've worked with competent and incompetent indians. The good ones are normal people, the bad ones embody the stereotypes you hear about.

It really depends on the person, I would argue anyone "remotely good" at something is rare today. Most people in general are "all talk, nothing to show". But since we are talking about statistics, Indians are really bad in most of their endeavours and that stereotype is spreading life wildfire amongst the normies now.

So there is no answer to your question, it depends where you got your Indian from, but if I had to take a statistical guest: not so good code.

 

[jewsernotfound]

keep in mind that buying fake diplomas is a very big thing over there like it is in Japan. that could have something to do with the experience people have when working with these jeet-programmers

 

[9th year in hell]

keep in mind that buying fake diplomas is a very big thing over there like it is in Japan. that could have something to do with the experience people have when working with these jeet-programmers

Fake diplomas have been a problem for decades. Top of my head:

• East Europe: American companies invested (in ex Soviet controlled areas) in schools in the 90s and resulting in universities shitting out diplomas for money, that's why you got the fake nurse problem from those places. Got solved when they they joined the EU (and the university got owned by the government or a national owner again), I would argue they are stricter than Western EU countries now...
• China having universities with many "blind spots" so you can get an easy diploma if you can affort to go to those schools. Kinda got solved when they had to actually compete internationaly on RnD with in-house tech (I know people will cope with muh chink stealing West tech, be real here... how much is there to "steal" now?).
• Private schools in Scandinavia: Just giving out grades for free since they get money per student from the government. This has lead to an absolute disater of a high school grade inflation. Of course, imigrants go to these schools since the level is so low (to know Swedish...), the worst ones you can get grades enough to enter university without knowing English or Swedish in practice, despite you having on paper that you have Swedish and English level 3! Status: NOT SOLVED! I'm litrally in a grade hell since I went to a "good" school (quality wise), but that meant that they grade you fairly. Which means you have to work and you will not get A in everything...
• American universities: Holy shit it's a mixed bag, some of the exchange students there are some of the dumbest retards I have ever meet. Not defending globohomo HR, but I can see why American corporations would not hire based on university there. Seems to me it's you pay your tuition and just "go through it".

So India shitting out fake diplomas is not the only issue itself, it can be fixed if they really want to, again look at the East Europe and China. The problem is how many they are population wise, their morals and behaviour. No degree/diploma will ever fix that.


Fun / horrifying thing I noticed: Some finance/economy programs in Africa (I think I was looking at some universities in Ghana) have more mandatory math classes than some Western schools now. Because they don't have much "economy" to work with so they throw in raw math courses to to fill it (based?). Meanwhile the West have mostly retarded pseudo economy courses. So if you look at a bachelor degree in finance, the Ghana one is actually "better" (content wise), because they require some undergrad math courses which we don't have here. This should be a wake up call to how retarded some university programs are here. TLDR Niggers have more math requirements in their economy programs than the Western ones.

WAKE UP WHITE MAN! THE NIGGERS ARE STUDYING MORE MATH!

 

[Lapsus of the bepsus]

its the same quality as whatever comes out of their asshole 4 times a day. how can you expect good quality code from a 80 iq mud who literally cant even spell a word the same way twice without fucking it up
now some people will say "but i worked with this one pajeet who wasnt bad"
bro the very fact you remember him as "wasnt bad" says something about all the rest doesnt it. also the worst subtype of pajeets are the "security experts" and the fact that western companies outsource security architecture to shitstaindia will be our fucking downfall mark my words

 

[hog cranking frog]

Couple of decades in the trade. Worked with two that stand out as good. One an IT server room jockey that was chill and competent, the other, a untouchable that legit worked his way up in the world, used a computer for the first time at 19 years old, could code well. Smelled awful though.

 

[PixarsTedKennedy]

From my experience they are functional but don't really future proof anything. I've had to re-write many a pajeet code to ensure that updates don't break shit.

 

[Hweeks]

I also agree it depends on the person - I've worked with great indian coders, and terrible ones.

 

[ForkyMeetsPorky]

My general experiance is they are complacient at coding, though it depends on their experience and background. They tend to struggle with troubleshooting or just using the OS in general, or just changing features within the OS. One example i had was when we were setting up multiple monitors and noticed they were dragging the window to the opposite side since it didnt occour to them they could change the monitor placement within the Windows display settings from the default. They also insist on having every window maximized, as if they are using it as a large smartphone.

 

[Fcret]

Maybe 1 in 5 is worth his salt. And by that I mean, "can complete a work item on their own without needing their hand held the entire time."

There's definitely talent from the subcontinent but all this bluster about superior jeet academic culture is nonsense.

EDIT: I should probably also add that most of the good engineering talent from India is already picked clean. The late 2010s is when Indian normies (ie the 80 IQ jeetard that you read about in the India hate thread) started flooding into the industry lured by the tech boom in the US and potential riches they could skim off from doing nothing (or worse - the potential to become a manager which is what every low IQ Indian thinks is the optimal position in life). If you're dealing with an Indian who's working in America/Europe and has been doing so since before 2015, it's much more likely that they're actually competent. This is because they usually have an organic interest in software developed from an early age that they've honed into a career as opposed to some mushmouthed grifter with a fake diploma and the right keywords on his CV.

 

[SouthernBitchBob]

Let your soul be filled with dread when you hear your management gleefully tell you they're either farming something out to Indian contractors or you're being assigned to work with some. You're in for some amateur poorly-architected ChatGPT authored dogshit.

 

[Owlbear]

Let your soul be filled with dread when you hear your management gleefully tell you they're either farming something out to Indian contractors or you're being assigned to work with some. You're in for some amateur poorly-architected ChatGPT authored dogshit.

The good news is that everything an Indian developer could do, ChatGPT can do better. ChatGPT is coming for the Indians before it comes for the high-skill Americans/Europeans.

 

[macrodegenerate]

There are tiers of Indian programmers when it comes to outsourcing/immigration.

The ones most people will work with are WITCH hires. They are bottom of the barrel, and are contracted out ala body shop. Most of them are in India. These are the people who AI are going to filter out.

The second tier is H1Bs. Now this is where things get weird. Depending on the hiring process they are either very good or worse than body shop. The former contribute to the planning of a project. The later just coast by.

Both of them have a tendency to approach the creation of a product as a finite set of features, as opposed to a product which can be extended. This leads to issues later on. Most don't care about SOLID or common patterns, or good practices. The same is true of a lot of their Western counter parts.

Edit: It's important to note, I've been out of the field for a year, and I have no idea what Gemma 2 at 16K context or Deep seek have done to hiring or coding. My take has been from working in the industry before that, and I assume their code was hand made back then.

 

[Sperg_rancher]

it's hard to tell if an Indian wrote a bit of code

it's easy to tell if Indians designed and wrote an entire program.