You hit a vein of deep true thought. I can share my personal experience that can help exemplify your point.
Disclaimer: Personal experience. Not saying this is the case foe everyone.
My first job was to work for one of the biggest Indian outsourcing companies. Soon after joining, I realized that their business model has nothing to do with real engineering work or genuine solutions to problems. They were essentially looking for people to tick the boxes, sit around and do stuff that could easily be automated, or maintain software that should have been rewritten decades ago. Their goal is to bill the western clients and prolong the maintenance work as much as they could.
Now, there is no need for creative thought or engineering prowess here. It is not surprising that someone doing this task is not passionate or creative. This is what translates to "Listen to western managers, and do just what they ask for, and the infamous never say NO". Saying No is not the engineer's prerogative here.
On the other hand, several Engineers from the same country who work for product companies with the right incentives(you get paid and recognised for a good product) show the true passion and creativity. I have friends who work for both categories of companies and I can clearly see this distinction.
Personal experience - I worked for Bank of America - Merill Lynch development center in India, maintaining a COBOL application. I once received an email from a senior team member(from Florida) to just translate his logic from the attached Word document to COBOL and not to do anything more. You get what you pay for. I quit that job a week after, and flew to the states to do my graduate studies soon after.
TLDR; Dont expect passion from cheap outsourced labor. Many people do those jobs because they do not have access to a better alternative.
Sorry for the rant. I know some friends of mine in the industry shared my experience. It does not mean everyone does/feels the same way. I apologize if I unintentionally belittled anyone's serious effort.
>>Saying No is not the engineer's prerogative here.
Outsourcing or no outsourcing, if someone walked up to me and said no to doing something in software team setting, I will likely be finding somebody else to do the job. And yes, I will likely never ask that person for doing anything ever again.
Its not as simple as you make it to be. In this age and era, quitting is a sure sign of a loser.
>>On the other hand, several Engineers from the same country who work for product companies with the right incentives(you get paid and recognised for a good product) show the true passion and creativity.
For saying NO? Doing nothing and saying NO requires 'true passion and creativity', while doing what it takes to achieve the task doesn't?
>>I once received an email from a senior team member(from Florida) to just translate his logic from the attached Word document to COBOL and not to do anything more.
These things are called requirements documents, and yes you are supposed to code what the requirements say.
>>I quit that job a week after, and flew to the states to do my graduate studies soon after.
Please. Passport tourism among Indians is now well known. Also bad mouthing your former employers and colleagues isn't exactly how you go about justifying other reasons to move out of the country.
I'm amazed by the negativity and prejudice in your response.
>> Outsourcing or no outsourcing, if someone walked up to me and said no to doing something in software team setting, I will likely be finding somebody else to do the job. And yes, I will likely never ask that person for doing anything ever again.
Precisely why I said - "Saying No is not the engineer's prerogative here." in the context of a developing world. You just explained my words :-)
>> For saying NO? Doing nothing and saying NO requires 'true passion and creativity', while doing what it takes to achieve the task doesn't?
I said - "Engineers working for product companies where they get paid and recognised for good product instead of outsourcing companies show true passion and creativity." Somehow you connect it to saying NO?
>> These things are called requirements documents, and yes you are supposed to code what the requirements say.
Although I could have explicitly said it was not a requirements doc, I hoped that you'd give me the benefit of doubt that I wouldn't ramble about a basic software engineering artefact. In this case, it was a Word doc with variable names(not variable naming conventions), loop variables, and pretty much the entire code within quotes. That is what I was pissed about. The doc screamed - "I don't want you to think, just be a monkey and do this."
>> Please. Passport tourism among Indians is now well known. Also bad mouthing your former employers and colleagues isn't exactly how you go about justifying other reasons to move out of the country.
So, you call going to another country for studies "Passport tourism"? I sure am very happy that I'm not as close-minded to think like that. I pursued what I wanted to study, and what I wanted to do with my career.
For the record, I still proudly hold my Indian passport.
Living outside your home country, and exploring other cultures opens one's mind like no other. Please give it some thought.
>> Bad mouthing former employers...
Seriously? I was contextually explaining my personal case about what I didn't like, to provide an example of things that happen at an outsourcing setup. So, you think one should never speak of what happens at work and be "loyal" to companies? Welcome to the open world of discussions and improving for the better.
>>I said - "Engineers working for product companies where they get paid and recognised for good product instead of outsourcing companies show true passion and creativity."
How does this change in a service company? Programmers who write code in a service company show none of these traits, same programmer writes code in a product company and magically becomes passionate and creative.
>>In this case, it was a Word doc with variable names(not variable naming conventions), loop variables, and pretty much the entire code within quotes. That is what I was pissed about. The doc screamed - "I don't want you to think, just be a monkey and do this."
This is how CMM levels worked. You'd also be interested in looking at the engineering practices at NASA.
>>So, you call going to another country for studies "Passport tourism"? ....
None of this wrong. But you wrote you served notice and moved as soon as you saw the requirements doc, and how that killed your creativity.
You need to work for a good product company to understand that. From your other comments, clearly you work for a non-FANG, perhaps for a services company or another non-services company that do not seem to have the kind of work and expertise Google or Amazon has. You are also too biased to be completely blind to the possibility that must be some factors other than money because of which so many people want to work for the big product companies even though they are not the highest payers anymore. No amount of answering your questions is going to convince you how services companies and product companies are world apart unless you have seen both sides. And by product companies I don't mean companies like Cisco or Juniper (although they are technically) but they are now like dinosaurs moving slowly and are only marginally better than the services company. I mean the types of Amazon or Facebook or Google or LinkedIn in their India offices or the types of Directi or Flipkart (now Walmart Labs -- another great workplace) or Ola.
Any responses to you in this thread seems futile because you come with a very negative outlook about other companies and you are not ready to look back and question your assumptions.
Sorry, not everyone shares this pessimistic view and try to understand many of us have enjoy very productive and happy careers in these big product companies that you seem to believe are no better than the services company.
"I'm amazed by the negativity and prejudice in your response."
Yes, I am amazed too at this kind of comments.
Your parent commenter seems to be exhibiting a strange mix of ignorance and arrogance. Likely works for an unhappy place in Bangalore where people are always bickering about their work which has made this commenter believe that the whole of industry in Bangalore must be like that.
Disclaimer: Personal experience. Not saying this is the case foe everyone.
My first job was to work for one of the biggest Indian outsourcing companies. Soon after joining, I realized that their business model has nothing to do with real engineering work or genuine solutions to problems. They were essentially looking for people to tick the boxes, sit around and do stuff that could easily be automated, or maintain software that should have been rewritten decades ago. Their goal is to bill the western clients and prolong the maintenance work as much as they could.
Now, there is no need for creative thought or engineering prowess here. It is not surprising that someone doing this task is not passionate or creative. This is what translates to "Listen to western managers, and do just what they ask for, and the infamous never say NO". Saying No is not the engineer's prerogative here.
On the other hand, several Engineers from the same country who work for product companies with the right incentives(you get paid and recognised for a good product) show the true passion and creativity. I have friends who work for both categories of companies and I can clearly see this distinction.
Personal experience - I worked for Bank of America - Merill Lynch development center in India, maintaining a COBOL application. I once received an email from a senior team member(from Florida) to just translate his logic from the attached Word document to COBOL and not to do anything more. You get what you pay for. I quit that job a week after, and flew to the states to do my graduate studies soon after.
TLDR; Dont expect passion from cheap outsourced labor. Many people do those jobs because they do not have access to a better alternative.
Sorry for the rant. I know some friends of mine in the industry shared my experience. It does not mean everyone does/feels the same way. I apologize if I unintentionally belittled anyone's serious effort.