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Avoid middlemen in India.. sorry for the word, but they are the biggest leechers. We hate them too here.

India is filled with small one-room service-based companies(the middlemens') that hire interns, for ZERO pay, make them work 12-14 hour days under extremely "humiliating" conditions and then when it comes to giving them internship completion certificate, they demand huge sums of money just to release them... think about it.

As for how you are gonna do without the middlemen, I dont have the anwer yet... ideas are welcome.

2 comments

The good engineers in india know their value and get it. My company has offices in india because you have to manage them yourself not use middlemen. You can train the locals to be great managers (at least some).

wages for good people in india are worse similar people in the us, but often high than in europe. But there are other problems with europe and so it can be the better deal.

Responding to you in this thread, because this is the way: the only success I've seen to offshoing to india, is to actually run the office yourself, have an exec over there, manage and control hiring, pay above market rates, etc...

I've been with two companies that have been aquired, and the first thing the PE/New Companies do is aggressive offshoring for cutting costs.

1) worked, because the aquiring company had an established office in Hyderabad, and we flew the tech leads over to the US to spend six weeks embeddeed with the team, etc.

2) the second one failed miserably becasue we had an Exec VP who told our engineers that he was replacing them in India for half the price, and his strategy was to hire a contracting company.... after several months of "contractors" coming and going, someone else in the company realized what needed to happen....

> The good engineers in india know their value and get it.

The job market is not that efficient anywhere, especially India. Lots of people work their way up from crappy jobs to good ones, just like in the US.

>My company has offices in india because you have to manage them yourself not use middlemen. You can train the locals to be great managers (at least some).

"some members of this primitive tribe can be taught our sophisticated ways"

The issue with middlemen is they are basically labor arbitrageurs and have an incentive to hire the cheapest people possible and inflate their credentials/abilities. Same thing happens with onshore consulting firms.

>wages for good people in india are worse similar people in the us, but often high than in europe.

"Often higher than Europe" is a stretch. Typical big co with an India office pays maybe 20-30k USD per year for an engineer. And that is a good job relatively speaking. Top tech companies pay more but they also pay more in Europe

Could you expand on the other problems with Europe other than hiring and firing laws?

Senior/staff type engineers are not a union position so great people refuse promotions and responsibility because they don't want to leave the union. Thus they won't mentor juniors, and other things that you need great engineers for. (At least that is how the union people I work with in Europe are, there are other unions with different rules)

There is probably more.

Like siblings comments, I would be really interested to know to which country and union you are referring to. In France it's certainly not true (I have a very senior engineering role and I am in a union and it never was an issue, and anyway, the percentage of unionized engineers here is so low that even if that was true, it would hardly be noticeable)

Which country is that in? Can you not offer them better conditions than the union? Are they forced to leave the union or just no longer required to be in it?

Never heard of that, and I've worked in about 7 EU countries...

Never heard of that, nor of a union in tech. What part of Europe?

What union ? In which country ?

Don't apologize for saying "leech", man. That's part of the problem.