Where software is king: IT in India
If you are an USA software engineer, you may soon discover that your real rival for a next project isn’t a smart aleck working in the next door garage or at a company down the street. Your serious rival works at a modern office on the other side of the world. This point of view is based on a recent tour through Asia, moreover we surely can tell that India will be the global leader in software development in fifteen years.
Everybody knows the core benefit of India: it has a vast pool of inexpensive while talented and well-trained people. But India is still gaining its competitive traits: the rise of a pervasive IT culture. Software is the activity that most excites Indians today. The distinctive mark of people engaged in technology in the Bay Area, the heart of the American software monster, doesn’t grade up to India level.
You can’t help surprising how mainstream software development penetrated into Indian culture. All major national newspapers run ads on promoting training in C# and ASP.NET. Banners are sticked to lamp poles in Mumbai for courses in Java and J2EE. Hotel book stores are abundant with technical and technology books. IT is a hip everyone wants to be engaged in. Even people from the lowest layers are players.
India’s largest publicly-held and private software companies have campuses in Bangalore, the heart of India’s Silicon Valley. This software development complex is reminiscent of Microsoft’s Redmond campus. The largest of software development company has hired more than 4,000 developers last year. The most fascinating thing about this is that all these newbies were selected from around 400,000 CVs the company had received that year. All these resumes belong to highly qualified people —all of them were engineers. Not all of them were software engineers, but typically all newly hired people undergo a rigorous training program. India’s universities so far can’t seat in all people who wish to become software engineers, so often those who stay overboard begin to study engineering crafts instead. But still most of them long to bу engaged in IT.
It is a kind of mass breakout – IT is sucking in the best of the best in their country today. They also need doctors and lawyers and civil engineers, however we see no obvious reason why the lure of software would decrease soon.
Lots of big companies in North America and Europe selected India to find there help in completing development projects. There are no differences in costs of computers and software tools in India and anywhere else on the globe and doing offshore development one may spend significantly more on telecommunications costs. The largest savings is in human resources. A seasoned developer in India can do the same job as developer in US but four times cheaper. Salaries constitute the largest part of software development projects and Indian companies can present an impressive cost benefit.
However, some parts of a software project must be done in-house. Requirements collection, for instance, includes talking to people who will use the system under development. Moreover, up to date tools let people working in US automatically replicate their use cases to Bangalore. Also, due to different time zones of US and India, development can be performed around the clock. India possesses more reliable electricity today than, for example northern California. Different from most US companies, Bangalore firms are prone to have their own power generators—for they are used to power outages.
But in spite of all above benefits, lots of Indian developers are scared a bit for their future. Almost all projects come from North America, but considering the burst of the dot.com bubble, and American recession, make developers worry for the future. The abbreviation B2B acquired a new meaning in India “Back to Bangalore,” and reflects the number of developers coming back to India after the American dot.coms for which they worked folded.
The rarest global resource is not diamonds or gold – it is qualified software developers. Despite temporary reduction observed currently, India’s future as a capital of IT looks bright. In the world of connectivity and competition talented and qualified developers will not stay jobless. And now, India is producing most of them.