Why most of the Indian developers code so bad? I face it very often, with my colleagues, with the freelancers we hire, even with our clients.

I am an Indian, and I feel so much disgusted (& sad as well) when a client tell us that they have a dedicated team to rework on the code which they outsource from India. If you visit a freelancing website you will see that the Indian developers have the least price, and they bid on literally anything even without understanding what they need to do. And finally when they get a job, they complete it, but with a fully f*cked up code and the worst architecture possible.

I have a lot of friends working in IT, and I personally know that they do not have any passion about programming. They just work for money, nothing else. I don't understand, why? My 7 years of IT career is probably not long enough to find a suitable answer for this 'why'.

Shit you tell me. I have been wondering about this for the longest time possible. And I know that there must be some amazing developers out there just like in anywhere else, but current experiences point at something different and I will be the first to complain about outsourcing to indian developers.

@1989 exactly my point! I am specialized in a specific domain and I do that with the best effort. Even I get a lots of freelancing offers, but most of those people do not work with me because I charge more than the other developers (read 'cheap' developers).

@AleCx04 the problem is the average Indian software engineers choose their career due to their family pressure (basically their parents force them), not exactly by their own choice. It may sound weird, but it happens here.

@1989 I do not do freelancing as well. But the people I am talking about are the people who get my contact from some source, contact me for a project and then back off due to my charge. It's ridiculous that they prefer quantity over quality, even in such cases where quality is the only thing which matters.

@1989 and I will believe you bro. I have no doubt that there are amazing developers from India (hell I learnt Python from one) just like I said before. My only worries is that from 4 outsorced experiences 3 have been absolutely horrible which makes me not wanna risk it.

Indian developers are often paid for lines of code written. So they just copy shit to get more lines of code in less time

I was wondering this for some time, and came up to interesting conclusions
1. If you working for Indian IT company, then it is number game for them, quantity over quality, when they get project by showcasing their star developers, they hire people with almost no experience or understanding to fill in the role instead (so called shadowing to get the competent developer out of project and fill with crap).
2. Then they have egotistical so called team leads to drive the development directions.
3. Add it to that, the managers are with one agenda and one agenda only, to increase business, cost cutting at any cost (I know sounds oxymoronic)
4. These companies don't spend money to improve skills of developers.
5. Now, other developers see these company employees, they know they don't know anything and still have job and earning good (by local standards) and decide why the fuck not try myself either in freelance or get such job.
6. Currency value plays major part, 20 USD is more than 1000 INR. That's decent amount for someone who is just starting, and if you don't get assignment due to lack of experience then easiest option is undercutting that price (same to Indian IT companies with their offshore models)
7. Other on-site companies which hire these offshore models understand that skill level is crap and send crappy work (mostly msintainance and support) to offshore.
8. And the cycle continues.

tldr: as it is said before in earlier comment, Indian IT is lucrative salary machine, and very very few care to look beyond that and be good in their field.

Phew.

You get what you pay for... And it happens everywhere else. Its not a India thing, probably you see it more often because there are many indians, just that...

More like... Why do low cost developers code so bad? #amirite

This may not be a direct answer to the question posed, but when it comes to bad code, I believe the main reason is closed source mindset.

By closed source mindset, I mean having a mindset where you see bad code but don't guide the friend, colleague or student on how it can be improved, so that you always stay ahead of that developer.

When by guiding the developer, you can then slowly but surely have them on a path where one day they can highlight to you what can be improved in your code.

For example, we have a team member (who has been a part of the team for 5 years), who, I recently realized doesn't know about the Don't Repeat Yourself principle. The team member is surely to be blamed for this, but I would put the blame equally on all the developers who have seen his/her code thought the years but never took out the time to guide him/her not even a bit.

Was this App written in India? Can’t post a longer comment

I also experienced that a lot of times and still suffer from it I a regular basis.

My observation: of course it doesn’t apply to all.

But the bad ones:
- Bad failure culture
- Not learning from Feedback
- very limited mind, not interested in new technologies, methodology, frameworks
- just writing their crap code day in, day out

I don't think so that all Indian developers are same. I too work with Indian developers and they are excellent in coding.

According to my experience below are the reasons

- Almost all companies of the world need some IT solution & world don't have those many good developers, so to cop up with the quantity they have to compromise on developers' quality & so...

- Gradually almost all non-Indian client companies who ran by managers became too much cost saving (due to recession or too many alternative Indian companies) so they don't care or don't understand importance about code quality.

- Bad code quality is good for Indian IT company as they can get more money from client in the name of "improvement". As mostly projects are TnM (Time & Material) based client has to pay also if they want "improvement".

- Good devs won't be appreciated for good code quality as it's not important for manager if your code finish particular task 2 second faster or saves 20MB memory. It's fine as far as application is not crashing.
1/2

- Indian devs mostly careless & just do frugal tricks to finish tasks without caring about memory leak, speed etc.

- Indian developers mostly work for money & they don't want to 'waste' time in 1 project's good quality code when more projects' bad quality code can give enough money.

- There is almost no learning culture for domain speciality. Even top Indian IT companies prompt developers to take stupid crash course of a week or 2 in any language & expect them to start working in that.
Now after that those half knowledge having developers will do experiments for even basic things in live projects of any client.

- Lastly due to hardware revolution now a days good quality code may make only around 10-15% difference in performance.

Like in even in Android like lower H/W requirement platform, apps' speed improvement like 1-2 seconds or saving 20-30 MB memory in 4GB RAM phones won't be noticeable. Compare this with server side dev with around 32/64 GB RAM, cloud computing etc.

2/2