Hey, this is overpass insights my name is Eric and I make apps today let's ask the question
are most software developers just
terrible
so a few years ago I did a video about Indian app developers see one of the things in my
business and in my day-to-day life is I hear a lot of things about developers from India
so I'll be talking to clients and they'll say oh you're going to give this to India I heard
that Indian developers aren't very good or I'll be talking to other developers saying
and they'll say something like well there's your problem eric you gave it to an indian team
you should have given it to a team from Bulgaria or Russia or America or whatever and honestly
my response has always been there are some really really good developers in India I work with some
excellent developers in India and I work with a whole lot of really really bad ones right and
it's the same everywhere, my personal belief in fact my personal and my professional belief is you
could be a good software developer no matter where you come from but you have to put in the work and
you can't you have to be the kind of person who digs and digs and is always improving because
the industry is always changing anyway on that video i got a a new comment on that video just
this morning which is really really good and i wanted to share it with you it's from b199r
it's a bit long but I it was it's really in-depth and I wanted to get your guys
opinion on this so uh b1999er says uh it's a numbers game to be true brutally honest 90
of developers suck nine percent can be used to develop competitive software but only one percent
are decent and as in they can really think have a sense of direction design architect and create
core engines slash frameworks for the worker bees the other 99 to work on usually this one
percent are the John Carmax the game developers the indie game developers true programmers
have a passion for the art aka back bedroom programmers in the 80s Westerners and Russians
usually go into programming for passion rather than being drawn into the industry for money
in contrast India's large volume of programmers are largely cranked out through institution like
college slash university slash coding schools this simply cannot create the same caliber
after working in the industry for a decade or so some will develop skills to move into that
one percent rank however the vast majority will never sit in a software team doing anything other
than donkey work it's the 90 10 rule 10 of coders uh in a team do 90 of the create a framework core
engine come up with architectural design-build standalone product the other 90 do the other 10
add a button here add a feature here fix a bug there that's a general problem in software teams
all over the world, I've read that equality of Indians is that they're comfortable working with
ad hoc systems a tangled mess of wires i think this could be a blessing and a curse most western
programmers i talk to always [ __ ] about crappy co-designs uh to the point where the only way that
bitching will stop the code gets refactored to something more elegant in this regard I suspect
that indians culturally are less unnerved about such mess so they're more inclined to just add
more code uh increasing in complexity and it goes on and on and on and it says that said
India is a big country and has a large number of programmers one percent of that large number
is quite an impact so I wouldn't say that India is notable for having good programmers they're
known for having a large number of programmers especially in the context of English-speaking west
in contrast to a lot of China's programmers developed for Chinese companies for the
western market the best route to develop your own programming skills especially architecture and
design is by developing your own hobby projects making action video games tend to be the best way
ask Elon Musk games industry heavyweights tend to be western developers and Japanese Korean and
Chinese I wouldn't doubt India's capabilities but hope they're going in this direction
one thing i know one thing i know is never to make assumptions about a country or people not being
able to do something because ignorant stereotypes eg Japan can't innovate China can't innovate etc
usually end up being proven wrong so i hope that's not the case here but that's the stereotype of
indian programmers in the west is this quality quantity over quality so i thought that was a
fantastic comment by b199r uh if you want to read the entire game I did leave out a few paragraphs
there just for brevity but if you want to uh read the entire one go back to the video on Indian app
developers, I'll leave a comment to it in the in the description and let him know what you
think because I thought it was a really poignant I mean I've been thinking about it all morning
I happen to agree with that I think most people get in the software industry are not that good but
I think they all have the potential to be but some of them just don't have the drive to be right I've
worked with the software industry for 20 years and that's one of the problems i see i you know
you could I tend to hang around like when I was working in software teams I tend to hang around
people who are really good at what they do because they make you better at what you do and you're
constantly improving and thinking about this kind of things and I love what you said about the 90 10
rules so 90 of developers are 90 developers just suck 10 are really good it's a problem I deal with
on a constant basis right i try to find really good developers to work with you know always being
in that situation where we got client projects going on and it's happened more than once uh where
you know I've given something to somebody and it's just they're just not they're not progressing
they're not getting there even when it comes to simple things like i just need to put a button
here I just need to do something like that so a lot of times I'm working on that core bit which
is the where api integration or actually being able to you know validation that kind of stuff
and giving it to somebody else and then I just watched them run the clock out on me to where I
have to take it back and work on it myself but I do think that anybody can become a great developer
but it's a constant you have to constantly evolve that skill right I would like when it comes that
90 10 rule and the one percent being the the elite the ones that are actually worth something
I wish I could say i was in the one percent I mean maybe I yeah I hope I'm
blaming the 10 but it is um it is definitely something to think about um one of the things
that I mean when I talk about the differences between a good developer and a bad developer
people are really shocked you think well a bad developer may you know it might take twice as
long to do something or three times as long but you know there's been projects where I've had
I've given something to somebody else and I think okay I just need you to do this so I'll give you
an example of something just recently I brought on a new developer and again I don't want to drop
he was a nice guy right I'm not good I don't want to like make a big deal but it didn't work out
so basically it was like I just want you to this application I want to connect to firebase
so i know i wrote the logic to do the firebase authentication and to connect to firestore and
write the firestore so I did all those kind of functions just the basic mechanics and I told
them I said it's not pretty but you know you've got like you know plenty of time to work on it
and he did he worked on it for five weeks after five weeks we hadn't really progressed anywhere
it was a lot of head-scratching there was a lot of I can't figure out what it was it was a lot
of I asked a question on stack overflow whatever and in the end, I took the project back did the
entire thing like just in a week i basically took everything he's done because there was a lot of
it's a bit of a bit messy take it and scrapped it and then did everything in
in two days i mean there were two long days i'm not don't get me wrong but
basically finish a project in two days as a two days opposed to five weeks and you see this
across the board, you'll give something to somebody you will give something to a developer who's just
they it's almost like a learned helplessness right and this is why being a software developer
is hard being a hot software developer means you're constantly thinking you're trying to find
solutions to problems because code is never simple I mean sometimes it is when it
is it's nice when something just works but more often than not you're dealing with some sort of
dependency issue you're dealing with some sort of network issue you've got something where you got
you know some something isn't installed right something isn't working right on a certain machine
and it's just dig dig dig and spending a lot of time finding that kind of stuff out and that's i
mean a lot of being a software developer is a slog and just pushing forward and every time you push
forward into a new field and a new thing you just you get better at it and the better you get at it
it gets frustrating because it's hard to find other people to help you out
those are just my thoughts for that I thought it was a really good comment you guys might
totally disagree with me you might think I have my head up my own bum but that when did I start
saying bum I've been in England too long you may think I have my head up my own butt but
I don't know it's just what I think I do think it's really really really hard to find
good software developers I mean it's really hard to find excellent software developers they're out
there uh but you know you have to over you have to turn over a lot of rocks to find them
anyway let me know what you guys think do you agree do you disagree
thank you very much b one nine niner oh my god right this time without looking at it
that was an excellent comment I really appreciate that anyway
hope you guys are having a fantastic day that is it for today I'll talk to you next time