India To Overtake US On Number of Developers By 2017 157
dcblogs writes "There are about 18.2 million software developers worldwide, a number that is due to rise to 26.4 million by 2019, a 45% increase, says Evans Data Corp. in its latest Global Developer Population and Demographic Study. Today, the U.S. leads the world in software developers, with about 3.6 million. India has about 2.75 million. But by 2018, India will have 5.2 million developers, a nearly 90% increase, versus 4.5 million in the U.S., a 25% increase though that period, Evans Data projects. India's software development growth rate is attributed, in part, to its population size, 1.2 billion, and relative youth, with about half the population under 25 years of age. Rapid economic growth is fueling interest in development. India's services firms hire, in many cases, thousands of new employees each quarter. Consequently, IT and software work is seen as clear path to the middle class for many of the nation's young. For instance, in one quarter this year, Tata Consultancy Services added more than 17,000 employees, gross, bringing its total headcount to 263,600. In the same quarter of 2010, the company had about 150,000 workers."
India Has More People Than USA! News @ 11! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:College Costs and Preceived Value (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not convinced the US has a problem. TFA projects the number of developers in the US will grow by 25% over the same 5-year period, which is pretty darned robust. That growth looks feeble only by comparison to India.
Meanwhile, keep blaming lack of jobs to H1Bs.. (Score:1, Insightful)
At the same time, every single of them fails to realize that there isn't even a need for foreigners to be in America to take away their jobs.
There are plenty of countries with great universities, which are either free or where students don't have to pay with their life for tuition. India is one of the most extreme examples, but places like eastern Europe or South America are also full of software factories that work for American companies and clients.
The quantity over quality argument is also moot, foreigners not only keep improving but their low cost allows them to make mistakes while still being more affordable than Americans.
So, for the Americans here, the question you should be asking yourself, next time you hear news about H1B and immigration is not whether or not you want your job taken by someone else, but if you would rather to have that people live, contribute and keep most the industry in your country, or not.
Developers? Yeah. Okay. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, the educational system over there is little more than a diploma mill.
The quality of developers over there is somewhere between "bad" and "not qualified to sell slurpees".
Yes, as with any group, there's always the exceptions. A few, here and there, with a knack for doing good, solid work.
But that's just what they are. Exceptions.
Anyone can play baseball/football/soccer/hockey.
A much smaller contingent of the population do it well.
An even smaller contingent of that sub-population do it well enough to warrant getting paid to do it.
Re:It's all relative (Score:5, Insightful)
That's exactly what the people of Detroit said about Japanese car manufacturers way back in the 1970s.
Re:You get what you pay for... (Score:0, Insightful)
neither of which wanted these barely-trained, fundamentally incompetent programmers to begin with.
Err.. If YOU hire someone who cant perform a particular job, its YOUR fault, not the fault of the person who was hired. There is no one else to blame but you Americans. You have a shitty process in place to determine competency. Makes me wonder how how YOU got hired too. Maybe you're shitty and are right where you belong.
Re:Meanwhile, keep blaming lack of jobs to H1Bs.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time there is a bit of news about H1Bs or immigration on tech sites, most Americans display their usual xenophobia and blame immigrants for the lack of jobs in the US.
Dismissing legitimate economic concerns as "xenophobia" is either a false assumption on your part, or a common but cheap trick. Sorry, ain't buying it.
At the same time, every single of them fails to realize that there isn't even a need for foreigners to be in America to take away their jobs.
True only to a certain extent. Being on-site, meeting face-to-face, and understanding more about a customer and a culture so that you can be more than a code monkey, are still useful.
The quantity over quality argument is also moot, foreigners not only keep improving but their low cost allows them to make mistakes while still being more affordable than Americans.
Of course "their low cost allows them to make mistakes while still being more affordable than Americans". It's the very fact that they do make so many mistakes that's part of why they're so affordable! If what you meant was that some people will always buy cheap crap, then that's an obvious truism. Whether or not that's penny wise and pound foolish is another story.
As for "foreigners not only keep improving", or more accurately the quality of foreign sourced work keeps improving, I've found just the opposite to be true. I don't know why, or even why the foreign sourced work is often of such poor quality, and I have little interest in debating theories about why. What I do know is that it's true.
would rather to have that people live, contribute and keep most the industry in your country
No, not if it means sacrificing my job for that. Save the "it's good for the country as a whole" garbage for the congressional hearings. Bonus points for honesty if you say "for the good of the American economy we must screw American programmers, IT people and engineers". Really, go ahead and say it, because it won't matter. The hearings are a formality and congress will just vote however the people that bribe them want congress to vote.
Re:Quanity over Quality? ~nt~ (Score:5, Insightful)
It's worse that just the offshoring aspect.
When my company decided to outsource, they fired pretty much all the local developers except for one 'business analyst' who knows the code and how it works. That wasn't me, but they also kept me on as a 'consultant' to the outsourcers so something still gets done and the whole project can be viewed as something other than a total failure. The Indian devs were not great, but I figured that at least they'd be captive. Prior to outsourcing the company had taken to hiring (cheap) young programmers, and (surprise!) had a retention problem. But Indian programmers are 'happy just to have a job', right? Wrong - if anything, they're more mobile than their American counterparts, because the big outsourcing firms want it that way. They're constantly moving people off of our project, and bringing in new people to learn it all on our dime.
So the one expected productivity benefit is not there - but it's even worse. Since these guys don't hang around, there is no next generation coming up with the in-depth knowledge of these products to become the 'business analysts' and senior devs to replace us. So when I and the other guy who are still sustaining the whole contraption retire (and we're both older than 55), the whole thing sinks. Prior to outsourcing, there were other dev's with seniority that could've stepped in to take our places.
In today's world of perverse incentives, though, this isn't a 'problem'. The company is owned by a private equity firm that expects to dump it long before that final crash. But if I were a private equity firm looking to buy a piece of crap like this, I'd certainly ask what plans exist to produce the next generation of senior techs to keep the place going. As it is, it's musical chairs, at some point a buyer will get stuck with no chairs left.
Re:Is it me or... (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Bids and proposals are submitted to American client 2) Middle management of said American client decides to go with lowest bidder (typically from India) 3) Lowest bidder can't satisfy contract due to incompetence 4) 1 year later, project still can't satisfy requirements. 5) American client back peddles to find American developers to fix and complete project 6) American developers review the code... it's a steaming pile of shit. 7) If American developers have sense, they decline the project and quote the client for the whole project
Now, if you're working in-house, the same thing happens except that you can't politely decline the project and are forced to deliver on a steaming pile of shit and you have to have your name attached to garbage.
It's not racism. Developers are objective; if it were good, quality code there wouldn't be any pushback or resentment.
Re:Meanwhile, keep blaming lack of jobs to H1Bs.. (Score:5, Insightful)
There has been a war on the white male since the signing of Hart Celler by LBJ in 1965.
As a white American man who has been around since the civil rights era, I must say I've never noticed that. If they're waging war against me, they're sure doing a lousy job.
The deeper question is "Why is it OK for the rest of the world to be xenophobic when the same is disallowed for the Anglosphere?"
There is no such deeper question because xenophobia, by or against whomever, has nothing to do with this subject. It's about economics. It's the H-1B proponents who frame it as a xenophobia issue, and thus try to distract from what's really at stake.
BTW, it's not clear how excessive guest workers in a particular field targets white males. It targets Americans in the 99%. Last time I checked though, not all Americans are white, and they're not all male. Get your categories straight.
h1b visas (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, outsourcing will kill your jobs. Here's why: (Score:4, Insightful)
I reside in South America. The big American companies opened up shop here a long, long time ago. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Citrix, Cisco, Capgemini, KPMG, etc. Every single of them is here and own several skyscrapers. There is a good education level here and university is often free or cheap, so there is a large pool of potential hires. By the time most americans heard about outsourcing, there was already a huge outsourcing industry in place here.
They started by bringing managers from other regions with experience and hire entire local teams. The teams are cheaper to hire, (or the governments offer tax exceptions in exchange of know how transfer) here are trained and put to work. The work done is pretty much the same that they do at the headquarters, except outsourcing allows them to scale. Sometimes they work for other local clients, sometimes they work for American clients. A plane ticket is cheap anyway.
Teams started with little experience, and are allowed to do a few mistakes, but quickly gained experience and become competitive with other regions.
Once the team is experienced enough, the leaders are sent to new, nearby regions to start over while the company expands. It's the same in Asia, probably an order of magnitude worse.
So, for the companies, this is really profitable of course. For the American jobs this is devastating, but you guys can't see what you don't know, and keep believing your lack of jobs is due to the tiny amount of foreigners on H1B. H1Bs don't even compare! Outsourcing worldwide is in the order of millions while H1Bs are in the order of thousands.
So, yes, It's true. To all Americans reading this, I'm out there and I see every day how outsourcing steals your jobs much more dramatically than immigrants, but you are free to believe your own self-comforting lies, and keep thinking that outsourcing was just about hiring a bunch of retarded indians that are so stupid that it's impossible they will do code right, so your jobs must be safe because at this point everyone in the industry must have realized how retarded foreigners are.
Re:Quanity over Quality? ~nt~ (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree on your points. The employee turnover in many outsourcing firms is unsustainable for major, longer projects. However sometimes the unreliability and the cultural gap are even greater nuisance than the high fluctuation or the low quality results. I found that asian developers will often claim that everything is understood and fine, when in fact they barely understand requirements and are having great difficulty finding a solution. As if admitting to difficulties or asking questions is a sign of weakness or incompetence. Development will drag on like this until someone on the team starts to heavily inquire on their progress and figures out that they don't really know what they're doing.
In one company I worked for in the past, we once had two green card workers (or the German equivalent of that) from India. They stayed in Germany and worked at our company for one month, when they left everyone stumped because they decided to go back home to 'marry'. That was the official explanation at least. I still don't get it, because at that time the barriers for green card workers in Germany was very high -they had to earn more than about 64000€ to be accepted- which must have been a fortune to someone from India.
There are many aspects which make outsourcing software development a lot less feasible than many managers would like to believe. The main one in my opinion is that software development is very complex work and requires -a lot- of communication and coordination. It doesn't help if your workers are spread across several time zones and barely speak your language. However the most overlooked aspect are the cultural differences.