April 16, 2004

The Bubble in India

InfoWorld: India upbeat about grappling with labor crunch

There's something about this article that seems reassuring for the best software developers in the U.S. There is a shortage of IT professionals -- we'll take that to mean software developers -- in India. Now, that means either:

  1. The quality of the software development there will decline, as they give jobs to everyone who claims to be a programmer.

  2. The work that those programmers are doing is grunt work, not the advanced design and development work that requires truly talented professionals.

I would bet that both of these statements are true.

To be a truly good software developer requires talent and it requires a love for the job. When the demand is high and the salaries are good, and everyone wants to be a developer, you get a lot of mediocre or even bad developers. We saw that in the U.S. in 1999 when lots of people with a liberal arts degree, or even no degree, became web developers.

It looks to me like India is facing its own bubble.

Posted by Doug Sauder at April 16, 2004 05:37 PM