Frameworks
You won’t find developers with 10+ experience in India
IT industry is all about writing software and providing consulting, support and other services for that software. For some people, writing code and creating innovative software is a passion which they can’t let forgo for the sake of some extra bucks from moving up in corporate ladder.
This is more of a trend in US. I have interviewed candidates from US who had 15+ years of experience and developing softwares is what they are still interested. They had worked on Pascal, C, C++, Unix, Python, PHP, Java, Scala, .Net and as diverse technologies as possible which is bound to happen in such a long span of time. To these kind of people, solving the problem at hand is success and they take it as pride to use technology in order to solve some big problems.
But contrary to what I said above, people in India after experience level of 5-6 years, want to lead a team with minimal coding assignments and after 10 years of experience, strict no to coding and only project management. These people don’t have the passion to create products and services which are innovative but they want that pride of being the boss of 10-15 people. They see moving up the ladder in corporate hierarchy as success and they want the project being managed to succeed in all terms.
Its not a bad thing to say no to coding and I don’t want to judge people on how right and wrong they are in terms of making decisions but I intend to present the picture as it is.
Again there are exceptions to what I said above, there are people from Indian origin, who after 20 years of experience are writing code and also mentoring the junior members but they are not at all out of touch from coding.
Do share what you feel about who is right and who is wrong.
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Comments
Suresh
You are right, everyone want to become boss or project management it’s to easy compare to coding. Project management only instruct do this and does this.
Karthik
If this is true, then it’s good for me! Less competition. I’m Indian in India, am just short of 10 years exp, will be in hands-on coding and technical roles all my life by choice, and don’t care two hoots what “society” will say about it!
Jigar Shah
Sometimes i come to conclusion that people are lazy. They don’t want to do hard work.
But then I look at services industry…there people are more concerned about hiring mediocre and get a “manager” to “handle” them..basically project manager=people manager (pun intended). Most important factor I found was special treatment to those no-work managers who just know ordering not really knowing what. (I spent 6 months to explain a manager whats junit. :) ).
Hence people start feeling that they are important …and not the Programmers/Developers.
Just look at recent advertisement from LifeOK. Its all hierarchy. US and other western countries have learnt how to reduce it or how to make those hierarchy invisible. someday Indian companies will too learn….May be hard way.
Mr. President
Let’s look at the picture from the other side.
How many IT services companies do you know in India which would hire a 10+ years experienced developer? Most of the companies in India are IT services companies, which are driven by pyramid, revenue per employee and profitability metrics. A 10+ years pure developer is just too expensive. It is an expectation that a person post 5 to 6 years in technical role will move on to becoming a manager. This ensures that the pyramid remains in good shape and so does the organization’s profitability. Pure tech. guys migrate to tech roles like designer or architect.
Pure developer roles exist only in product based companies whose revenue has a non-linear relationship with revenue. Here in-depth knowledge of a platform or technical domain is at a premium; this justifies the cost associated with a 10+ year(the no. of years is purely used as an example) developer.
The bottomline is the salary. Will a 10+ year developer get the same salary as that of a manager with equivalent years of experience? In US a person can continue to be a developer without affecting his compensation, in India that is not the case.
From a career progression point of view growing beyond technical architect is difficult. In delivery, there are a no. of roles like project manager, account manager, group/business unit head etc. And career progression has a one-to-one relationship with compensation. Unless this is changed, we will continue not to see a 10+ years experienced developer.
Vishal Raj
I guess it is because, beurocracy not only prevalent in govt. bodies, but also in the private sectors. The more people you manage, the more respectable you ought to be. Strange though.
jayesh raikar
Lets take an lay man analogy. We have seen the way buildings are built. There are architects (the team leader) and the laborers (programmers). The laborers may work with large bricks, small bricks, red bricks, black bricks, all kinds of cement, (technologies) etc. But what they are doing is still labor work. They may continue doing the same for ten to fifteen years. Its their life. At the end of the project, no one is going to ask which labor built the wall on the thirteenth floor.
No offense
Dan Howard
I think the bigger reason is that once an India developer has more than 5 or 6 years experience, it’s fairly easy to get the paperwork together and move out of India for a job in Britain or somewhere else where they can make a lot more money.
Sandeep
@Dan
Yes moving abroad is everybody aspiration but moving to managerial role after 5-7years of experience is more because of the huge number of developers being hired by companies in India. There are companies having employee strength >200000 and hence the number of people required to manage them as pointed by @Mr.President above.
Javin @ java classpath tutorial
@Sandeep, I don’t agree in terms of passion because Indians certainly has passion for technology , coding and programming and most people who don’t want to go on management side develop themselves as technical architect or solution architect so that they can participate not only on coding but also every step of software development lifecycle. Yes you see lot of people in US and UK with more than 10+ experience or 15+ experience because technology is older there than India, Indian programmers are relative on younger side of age and as time will grow you will definitely find 10+ years programmers in India :)
No_nick
I’m seeing this first hand. In our team of 7 developers, 5 of which are Indian, we had a management position open up. All the Indians applied. I thought it was strange, but now it makes sense.
John
>There are architects (the team leader) and the laborers (programmers).
And there’s the classic mistake. Despite the same name “architect” being used in both professions, you can’t compare a programmer to a brick layer.
The very best and brightest people behind the technical most advanced systems that we have, actually always do programming.
Take Linus Torvalds (Linux kernel), is he only drawing fancy UML diagrams or does he do hardcore coding?
The idea that you have a big-brained architect that designs an application completely in UML in such a way that dumb workers only have to literally translate his diagram into code is insane.
If that was the case, the architect would actually be a programmer and the dumb workers could be easily replaced by a compiler. Of course, this is not how it works, so you analogy is flawed.
There are such things as lead developers, senior developers, mid-level developers, but at the end they are all developers.
Maybe cooking is a better analogy. Does the master chef only write down recipes on paper and do (dumb) cooks do the cooking, or does the master chef always remain deeply involved with the actual cooking?
a99weeker@yahoo.com
Just a couple of IMHO (In my humble opinion) observations:
1) the US has turned away from the actual hand-on building of anything anymore. It seems we are changing into a country of nothing but dreamers, thinkers, managers WITHOUT do’ers. Thus why the “managers” send everything off-shore to actually be built with hands, tools and machines.
2) when was the last time one saw a “large” number of developers/coders with business cards from the company they work for?
3) with titles come prestige, respect, feeling important. Or, so it is believed.
4) developers tend to reach a level in the “pyramid” whereby they cannot advance anymore. All that is left is management, staying where they are or entrepreneurship (self-employment, building your own company).
5) US companies seem to hire offshore management “talent” to collaborate, coordinate and communicate with their offshore development counter-parts.
6) WOW… feels like I am building a “David Letterman Top 10 list”.
7) In the US as more and more coding type jobs go overseas, there is not as many here to absorb the IT talent glut of out of work developers. So, they go into management (only road available) and end up working with an offshore counterpart.
8) It is not true that US developers can keep obtaining higher and higher salaries. Right now the US is in a recession (ie: depression but must use a non-scary word). As such, all the companies seem to hire for are “short term” contracts. Gone are the days of full-time/permanent employment. Granted, sometimes gaining experience in several industries & environments is helpful in the salary game. But it is only short-term. We have to “fight” for decent jobs against the offshore “talent” that comes to the US and are willing to accept much less and live 5 to 10 to an apartment.
9) Like the “pyramid” analogy. It is almost like a financial ponsi scheme. Have to keep hiring younger/inexpensive talent to help afford the more experienced talent wages. Ideas like these are a “house of cards” just waiting to collapse.
Welcome to the “jungle” people, where we have “fun & games” and “.. we have everything you need ..” you can “buy just about anything you want” if you are willing to pay the price… Corporate profits are #1, customer satisfaction is #2, employee retention is #3.
Allen
Semi-Dilbert Principle: People who inept in technical stuff, will be ‘pushed’/push themselves to managerial positions in order to avoid them from propagating further damage and incurring technical debt.