At 07:56 AM 5/8/97 -0700, you wrote: >My understanding of the Indian software industry is different from that >which Louis expressed. I was under the impression for large projects with >a modular structure, that the Indians were actually superior -- so long as >the jobs were well defined. I have also been reading about the lack of a >cowboy mentality, which makes them less good for certain type of projects. The usefulness of the cowboy mentality is vastly overrated--in no small part because it fits the American propaganda about entrepreneurial individuals (and I speak here as somebody who likes playing cowboy hacker). If you did a body count, you'd find that the vast majority of folks who get paid to program work on projects where hacking is cheap at the beginning and very expensive when it comes to maintaining the sucker. Most U.S. programmers spend their days plodding through the boring tripe that makes corporate America run, mostly databases of some sort. As far as Indian programmers are concerned, if a large corp is hiring folks from overseas to act as cogs in a wheel, do you think they'd go looking for cowboys? I do think there are some cultural differences on the whole between Indian and U.S. programmers--which you'd expect given that they come from very different cultures--but I don't think it's that relevant for most programming jobs. The reason AIG screwed up didn't have anything to do with Indian programmers; it was because the company was run by Dogberts. What I find interesting about the fuss around foreign programmers is that no one in this country is using it as a leverage point for forcing corporate America to deal with the inner city. As someone who's taught programming, I think lot of programming is fairly straightforward--certainly much less complex than your average skilled construction job. Rather than bashing foreign skilled workers, we ought to ensure that this industry is opened up to poor people, particularly poor people of color, in this country. Anders Schneiderman Progressive Communications
