Why do investors prefer start-ups in India, Pakistan over Bangladesh?

[Bilal9]

It is tiresome to repeatedly see on this forum, the lack of understanding of what constitutes the IT industry and what role India plays in it.

Cheap billing alone is not enough to get IT work. Vendors are first shortlisted on technical capabilities, which includes depth and breadth of support. Commercial qualification is the 2nd or 3rd round.

Support work is getting rapidly automated. Who is making this support automation software? It is Indian companies, because they understand support. Are they scuttling their own boat? No. Because that is the future. Support is no longer about cheap manpower. When support is provided by software, it is far cheaper than even the cheapest manpower. Automation results in ultra low costs, and allows you to target clients who would have never thought of customer support, thereby increasing the market size. If Bangladeshis don't understand this and develop skills in automation, they are not going to be able to compete.

I have said this in the past and saying it again - Constantly dissing India has a low cost coolie works well for India because you are grossly underestimating our capabilities and therefore not learning from someone senior. There is no shame in learning from someone senior. We do it all the time in colleges and office don't we?

Your concepts are divorced from reality. Both you and @HydraChess who do not see things from a cold hard cost perspective.

Labor cost trumps everything (at every skill level). Clearly neither of you are in business and don't have that mindset.

Cloud-based Backoffice support work skills (however complicated) will only be competitive in India until a country like Bangladesh trumps India for the same skills at a lower cost point.

Both of you are speaking like noob H1B workers. And not seeing the big picture.

You can't be serious in saying that Bangladeshis do not possess the talent to develop cloud software or support backoffice tools and processing software in the cloud.

Most cloud vendors will be selling in Bangladesh for the country itself, and not be a satellite operation from India, with accompanying set of issues.

The entire gov-cloud infra in Bangladesh was developed by locals. I'd say e-governance is better developed in Bangladesh and offers more features than a lot of states in India. Though India has marginally better ranking.

UN EGDI ranking

When (not if) Bangladeshi companies get into this en-masse at a lower cost point, what advantage will Indian IT labor have ??

If it is so easy to support backoffice products using the cloud at such high Indian pay levels for higher Indian skills, then no one really needs large amounts of Indian talent, they can go to Lithuania or Poland for support at the higher pay level.

The type of work which will come to India (as well as Pakistan and Bangladesh) is LARGELY low-wage and low-cost support work. Which could be even be Tax support work or Simple software tech support work, which the filipinos with their English skills cannot handle.

India is strategically making the same mistake again (like it did in apparel) - focusing on top-down industry growth rather than bottom up growth, which provides a higher number of people to get jobs at lower wages. Your loss.

Stuff Polish or Eastern Europeans (with their higher skills and higher wages) cannot handle will head to India and based LARGELY ONLY ON ONE OVER-RIDING FACTOR, LOWER HOURLY WAGES.

India is (for the most part) not a high quality work destination, it is a low-wage work destination. Has been forever and will remain that way. A few shiny buildings in Navi Mumbai, Gurgaon, Pune, Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad will not change anything.

Indian businesses can get into Bangladesh opportunity at the ground floor - or be left behind. The future is calling.

Now tell me WIPRO and TCS Indian labor are charging more than Eastern EU people for the same work and there is a bridge I'd like to sell you....

 

[HydraChess]

Your concepts are divorced from reality. Both you and @HydraChess who do not see things from a cold hard cost perspective.

Apparently, you are confusing IT / Software with lots of service works like VFX, CAD/CAM etc. So .... I don't know where to even start with.

Labor cost trumps everything (at every skill level). Clearly neither of you are in business and don't have that mindset.

*Ahem* I am an engineer who develop and also recruit for a FAANG company and I do know what I am talking about. Problem with you is that you do not know what it takes to make a real software and not a toy 3D walkthrough for some random real estate company.

ALL the major companies will prefer to recruit people at a given skill level (even skillsets can be taught but meeting the skill bar of a company is a must).

Now here is a reality which you are unaware of it seems. An engineer employed in India at a mid level for say Microsoft earns about 30-40 LPA, about USD 50K. Now yet Microsoft has a massive presence in places like Canada and US, many times employing the SAME Indian engineers in these places, supporting their transfer and PR in both places. Now if labour cost was such a massive factor, why will likes of Microsoft even support movement of their employees across geography?

There lies the rub. Labour cost is actually very small fraction of software revenue. It does not matter if you spend 50K or 150K per engineer to get a software developed if you can make USD 100 million out of it. You just get the best engineers and get your software developed, where ever they are.

Today, top Indian companies like FlipKart, Inmobi are also taking this appraoch.

This is why I said BD has very little chance of reaching this maturity if it keeps on doing penny counting like you are doing and keep on working on these freelance jobs. All of these jobs teach you bad business practices and self limiting thinking.

Cloud-based Backoffice support work skills (however complicated) will only be competitive in India until a country like Bangladesh trumps India for the same skills at a lower cost point.

Can you tell me what or where is the front office of Microsoft?
Or front office of Intel?
Or front office of Google?
Or Amazon?

It seems you do not know difference between technology first companies of present (think Amazon, Google etc) and have-some-tech businesses of past like Walmart, Sears etc. One of them have been booming and growing and other shrinking. If you claim to know so much you would have known which is which.

Honestly, I doubt if "Cloud-based Backoffice support" is a real industry and comes under IT or Software development. I think you are again confusing IT and Computer Science based industry with something totally different -- may be call support or something.

Both of you are speaking like noob H1B workers. And not seeing the big picture.

*Ahem* I guess you have a vision problem as well.. Look at my location flag. What does it show? Does it show USA?

One last thing, I made north of CDN 300K last year and north of USD 5 million in shares that I got for remuneration during this pandemic. So, yeah I am fine .... being a n00b

You can't be serious in saying that Bangladeshis do not possess the talent to develop cloud software or support backoffice tools and processing software in the cloud.

*Ahem*
Take a look at Times higher education ranking of universities in BD for CS and then take a look at those in India. The lowest rank BD univs get is 600-800 and there are only two of them. India get 88 rank univ and then many 200-600 range rank.

Most cloud vendors will be selling in Bangladesh for the country itself, and not be a satellite operation from India, with accompanying set of issues.

May I ask, can you elaborate what do you mean by "cloud vendors" and what do you mean by "selling" here?

I surmise you do not know what you are trying to instigate here given that you confound VFX, CAD and support work with software development.

The entire gov-cloud infra in Bangladesh was developed by locals. I'd say e-governance is better developed in Bangladesh and offers more features than a lot of states in India. Though India has marginally better ranking.

Again, reality intrudes in these fairy tales.

Whats the total expenditure budgeted of BD? USD 90 billion for 2020. India? 960 billion for 2020.
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_government_budget

And your own source shows India has better e-governance index. Not to mention the scale it needs to operate.

When (not if) Bangladeshi companies get into this en-masse at a lower cost point, what advantage will Indian IT labor have ??

This is where you are wrong. Unlike Chaddi stiching, Software and especially distributed software has a very different cost and business model which you do not understand. The modern software market is about one and one thing only : SCALE. Let me try to teach you.

Imagine, you are launching a taxi hailing service like Ola-Uber with a brand new app and related backend. You don't have much market penetration right now. Now lets do the maths :

What will be cost to build and operate a App and Backend for 500 users at a time?

Development cost of App + Development cost of Backend + 500 x Average Cost of operating backend infra.

Now if your engineers are good and actually built a scalable infra, what will be the cost for building and operating the same for 500 million customers?

Development cost of App + Development cost of Backend + 500M x Average Cost of operating backend infra.

Notice which part scales the most? The infra and operating one. NOT the development one.

This is why penny saving model of Chaddi stitching will NEVER work in modern distributed software. This is why companies just hire engineers wherever they are and are even fine in moving them across geography. Software development cost is NOT what defines their business. This cost remains same (if done properly) while revenue can grow several thousand times.

I hope it was instructive to you.

The type of work which will come to India (as well as Pakistan and Bangladesh) is LARGELY low-wage and low-cost support work. Which could be even be Tax support work or Simple software tech support work, which the filipinos with their English skills cannot handle.

*Ahem*
We are talking about IT work here, not support desk work. This is mostly software development work these days. Support has been mostly automated with ticketing and logic tree based system. You do not need people with good spoken english anymore because self-serv is the new mantra. That business model is long dead. Same with "IT" Support work. No one these days calls to know why their microsoft PC and their Telly installation is not working. They usually just operate everything using browser so no PC updating is required neither software updates on application is visible to customer.

You are living in 1995-2004 world. Which is long dead now.

India is strategically making the same mistake again (like it did in apparel) - focusing on top-down industry growth rather than bottom up growth, which provides a higher number of people to get jobs at lower wages. Your loss.

I doubt you even know about what you are talking.

India is (for the most part) not a high quality work destination, it is a low-wage work destination. Has been forever and will remain that way. A few shiny buildings in Navi Mumbai, Gurgaon, Pune, Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad will not change anything.

*Ahem* find out who is the leader and innovator in mobile ads networks? A "little" company called Inmobi.

Which is one of the highest paying company in India? Something called as Flipkart which was recently acquired by Walmart because they could not find a technology partner in USA to create a e-commerce business in India.

Which company has been giving salesforce nightmare? Something called Zoho which has since grown to about 700 million dollars in revenue. And they do not build software for any client but for themselves.

India has long moved up the value chain. You better catch up.


Last but not the least. Let this sink in....

Total size of Bangladesh's IT and ITES industry is 2.3-2.6 billion dollars for 2020 (https://lict.gov.bd/uploads/file/publication_5a3f7c94c9458.pdf). Revenue of Inmobi and Zoho (both are non-outsourcing companies) alone is north of 1.0 billion dollar.

 

[Protest_again]

@Bilal9 if this is your level of clarity on where IT outsourcing is today, then only God can help Bongos. You are confusing your chaddi stitching model to IT business model. Just wait even that chaddi stitching business will leave you after you come out of LDC.

 

[HydraChess]

@Bilal9 if this is your level of clarity on where IT outsourcing is today, then only God can help Bongos. You are confusing your chaddi stitching model to IT business model. Just wait even that chaddi stitching business will leave you after you come out of LDC.

Problem with Bilal is that he is applying Chaddi-stitching costing and revenue model to Software Development and IT. No wonder he is wrong. Though confidentially.

 

[itsanufy]

Why are you quoting news from 2017 Dada??

This is the reason for Accenture leaving - effed up mentalities of Indian bosses having superior attitudes. All work was being done in Hyderabad, with no skills transfer to locals.

Terminated: The inside story of Accenture’s departure from Bangladesh

'All everyone will remember is that Accenture’s Bangladesh venture failed'

archive.dhakatribune.com

Bangladesh is not India, it is a sovereign country with a different work culture. Either learn to work with locals or get the hell out.

Eventually main contract went to WIPRO, who abided by local rules and sensibilities.

You come seeking revenues in OUR COUNTRY - not the other way round.

I am glad these Indian Accenture bosses were given a huge middle finger. Eff off and don't come back.

They were threatened with being beat up on the street and they would have - too. Good riddance.

I am sure these faida-lootnewallah Indians learned their lessons.

Accenture can't get another contract in Bangladesh without paying overdue pay.



Thank you for replying like an Indian. Please change your flag.

It was a landmark decision which changed BD IT landscape.
Accenture is the second largest service company in the world. It earns more revenue than the whole BD put together. it ranks around 250 in fortune 500.
They were first to start an offshore center in BD with local workforce working for global clients. Not only Telenor, but they were serving some other clients as well.
They left the country. Others thought its risky to have their centers in BD.

Do you have any big names in BD now?

You have a tendency to propagate false information.
There is nothing called Indian Accenture. Its an US- Irish company and Indians are not in it management. Accenture policies are controlled by Accenture Global Management Committee, where CEO is one of the member.
Between Accenture has projects in BD and many of them run from their center in Kolkata.

For your information, WIPRO is fully an Indian company and the project used to run from Kolkata and Pune.
Last lines from Dakha Tribune
Shahin called on the government to intervene, saying Accenture’s departure would send the wrong signal to the international BPO industry. He said: “No one will remember that Accenture left because the management here fell out with Grameenphone. “All everyone will remember is that Accenture’s Bangladesh venture failed.”

 

[Maula Jatt]

wooh 12 pages, damn

this is the first time I am opening this thread lol

 

[X-ray Papa]

wooh 12 pages, damn

this is the first time I am opening this thread lol

That's because the Indians are here.

 

[jamahir]

I have said this in the past and saying it again - Constantly dissing India has a low cost coolie works well for India because you are grossly underestimating our capabilities and therefore not learning from someone senior. There is no shame in learning from someone senior. We do it all the time in colleges and office don't we?

Let us not call them coolies because "Coolie" is legitimate work that exists because of Capitalist socio-economics. Call these great grand Infosys, HCL, Cyient types as code monkeys. I didn't expect you of all people to side with these non-intellectual mostly-right-wing wastrels. You ask Bangladeshis like @leonblack08, @Bilal9 bhai, @Atlas and @bluesky to learn what exactly from the Infosys, HCL, TCS types ? TCS has existed for five decades and Infosys for four decades and they have huge human, material and financial resources yet they couldn't put together a small team of five each to design even an operating system software since they claim to be mostly software companies ? They are so unaware and non-intellectual that they didn't even establish workers unions which makes of course natural to be right-wingers and here I am not talking only about Hindutvadis but also about the Tableeghis.

I will tag the two Indians who thanked your post - @Protest_again and @itsanufy.

 

[Paitoo]

Let us not call them coolies because "Coolie" is legitimate work that exists because of Capitalist socio-economics. Call these great grand Infosys, HCL, Cyient types as code monkeys. I didn't expect you of all people to side with these non-intellectual mostly-right-wing wastrels. You ask Bangladeshis like @leonblack08, @Bilal9 bhai, @Atlas and @bluesky to learn what exactly from the Infosys, HCL, TCS types ? TCS has existed for five decades and Infosys for four decades and they have huge human, material and financial resources yet they couldn't put together a small team of five each to design even an operating system software since they claim to be mostly software companies ? They are so unaware and non-intellectual that they didn't even establish workers unions which makes of course natural to be right-wingers and here I am not talking only about Hindutvadis but also about the Tableeghis.

I will tag the two Indians who thanked your post - @Protest_again and @itsanufy.

I did not use that word coolie to describe my own opinion of them. It is your friends who use it all the time.

No company has any obligation to produce anything. People are most welcome to start their own companies and make them worth gazillion dollars producing OS or Paan Masala.

 

[HydraChess]

Let us not call them coolies because "Coolie" is legitimate work that exists because of Capitalist socio-economics. Call these great grand Infosys, HCL, Cyient types as code monkeys.

I made 5 million dollars on my Amazon stocks that I got as my remuneration and I get paid north of 300K CDN. You are welcome to call me monkey or coolie or whatever catches fancy, my bank account will not mind it.

IT/CS/SE is the best thing happened to me in my life till date. I don't mind its "illegitimate" or whatever you think it is.

BTW try this exercise before calling IT/CS/SE industry anywhere illegitimate. Take 100 random numbers and build a machination to sort it in order. Try different means. Mechanical, pure electrical with no uP. You will see why software engineers and IT business make so much money and why is TCS/Infosys is legitimate. They are legitimiate because any other way of solving problems they solve is exceptionally expensive and cannot scale from 100s to millions of users for that price point.

Thats the real legitimacy of IT/CS/SE industry. We do thing which are simply impossibly costly otherwise.

 

[Protest_again]

Let us not call them coolies because "Coolie" is legitimate work that exists because of Capitalist socio-economics. Call these great grand Infosys, HCL, Cyient types as code monkeys. I didn't expect you of all people to side with these non-intellectual mostly-right-wing wastrels. You ask Bangladeshis like @leonblack08, @Bilal9 bhai, @Atlas and @bluesky to learn what exactly from the Infosys, HCL, TCS types ? TCS has existed for five decades and Infosys for four decades and they have huge human, material and financial resources yet they couldn't put together a small team of five each to design even an operating system software since they claim to be mostly software companies ? They are so unaware and non-intellectual that they didn't even establish workers unions which makes of course natural to be right-wingers and here I am not talking only about Hindutvadis but also about the Tableeghis.

I will tag the two Indians who thanked your post - @Protest_again and @itsanufy.

Arey year, get a life and a job. Indian IT guys are making 30-40 lpa by doing some work. And you are such a lazy guy who is still waiting for some one to invest 30 lakhs to work on your idea. Who in their right mind would want to invest in your stupidity. Please don't mention me again.

 

[jamahir]

I did not use that word coolie to describe my own opinion of them. It is your friends who use it all the time.

OK.

No company has any obligation to produce anything. People are most welcome to start their own companies and make them worth gazillion dollars producing OS or Paan Masala.

TCS, a self-celebrated and socially-celebrated company in the computing field in India that has existed for 54 years and now has 528,748 workers with most of them being computer engineers if not designing its own variety of one of the fundamental elements in the computing field, namely the operating system, has no right to exist. It should be dissolved. It is like our dear Mr. @Chat SAMOSA, he of the "40-year experience in operating systems including kernels".

I made 5 million dollars on my Amazon stocks that I got as my remuneration and I get paid north of 300K CDN. You are welcome to call me monkey or coolie or whatever catches fancy, my bank account will not mind it.

IT/CS/SE is the best thing happened to me in my life till date.

The stock market concept is irrational and inhumane and must be abolished. You made money off it but this Chinese man :

China - Man loses money in stock market and jumps into steel furnace

Man in China jumps into steel furnace and dies after reportedly losing money on stock exchange A steelworker was caught on surveillance camera jumping into a blast furnace in China, local police have reported The man had allegedly accrued large financial losses trading in stocks, his colleagues...

defence.pk

Arey year, get a life and a job. Indian IT guys are making 30-40 lpa by doing some work. And you are such a lazy guy who is still waiting for some one to invest 30 lakhs to work on your idea. Who in their right mind would want to invest in your stupidity. Please don't mention me again.

And 99.99 percent of those Indian IT guys who earn 30-40 lakhs per annum are middle-class-poverty people who can are just able to afford a car on loan ( when personal vehicles should have been banned ), a house on loan in some stupid 30 storey apartment complex in a gated community, send their parents on religious pilgrimage three times every five years, plan a destination wedding in Sri Lanka and of course purchase two "doggos". What else can they do ? Nothing ! As for me I co-founded a company some years ago with a financing partner and will do so again. You should rather tell those code monkeys to get a life.

 

[Paitoo]

TCS, a self-celebrated and socially-celebrated company in the computing field in India that has existed for 54 years and now has 528,748 workers with most of them being computer engineers if not designing its own variety of one of the fundamental elements in the computing field, namely the operating system, has no right to exist. It should be dissolved. It is like our dear Mr. @Chat SAMOSA, he of the "40-year experience in operating systems including kernels".

@jamahir, you are a good and liberal guy at heart, but some of your notions regarding business are grossly misplaced. You are literally propagating the view that if person X cannot get 100/100 marks, he should stop studying. Leave alone the fact that person X may be interested in Geology while you want to evaluate him on Botany.

You keep talking of innovation as if only colonizing Mars amounts to innovation and every other person must drown himself in shame for not being able to do so. I refrain from getting personal, but I have your good interests in my mind, therefore I am advising you that if you approach investors or businesses with the kind of attitude you display here, you will be making this revolutionary OS of yours for another 3 decades. Please widen your horizon, look at the world around you. People working in the IT industry are not evil or stupid. You might find someone to work with. Don't be like that proverbial scientist who never steps out of his lab and believes he alone is capable of saving the world. Because frankly that is the attitude of someone who failed and grudges other people their success. Actual successful people never diss anyone else's progress like the way you do.

 

[itsanufy]

@jamahir, you are a good and liberal guy at heart, but some of your notions regarding business are grossly misplaced. You are literally propagating the view that if person X cannot get 100/100 marks, he should stop studying. Leave alone the fact that person X may be interested in Geology while you want to evaluate him on Botany.

You keep talking of innovation as if only colonizing Mars amounts to innovation and every other person must drown himself in shame for not being able to do so. I refrain from getting personal, but I have your good interests in my mind, therefore I am advising you that if you approach investors or businesses with the kind of attitude you display here, you will be making this revolutionary OS of yours for another 3 decades. Please widen your horizon, look at the world around you. People working in the IT industry are not evil or stupid. You might find someone to work with. Don't be like that proverbial scientist who never steps out of his lab and believes he alone is capable of saving the world. Because frankly that is the attitude of someone who failed and grudges other people their success. Actual successful people never diss anyone else's progress like the way you do.

Well said.

 

[itsanufy]

Well think about it :

20-25 years back, if you needed a website with a database and transaction processing for payment, you need to (at the very minimum):

1. Setup a webserver, install database server, install a transaction co-ordinator on perhaps same or other server.
2. Resolve whatever network, configuration etc issues.
3. Secure setup with firewalls.

All of this needed :
1. A network engineer
2. A technician to setup servers
3. An IT pro to setup applications, DBs
4. A DBM to configure and manage DBs.
5. A Web-developer to develop the actual website

These days what you need :
1. An AWS account
2. A fullstack developer

Need Database? A dynamo DB table can be instantiated instantly. Need transacations? Its supported on that table. Need networking? Just create a VPC on AWS. Need web server? Host your content in S3 and front it with cloudfront (2 minutes). Need application server? Run your code directly in a lambda or AWS ECS fargate without ever managing a single server or even aware of servers! Need firewall? Just create a security group.

All of the above can be done by writing code in javascript and using Amazon CDK. One person in a day can complete this setup and then go and write code for website. Best part? No server to patch or network to secure.

The cheap and donkey skills IT pro advantage of India has long gone. Its not there for past 10-15 years. And the software industry in India has gone up only.

Let us not call them coolies because "Coolie" is legitimate work that exists because of Capitalist socio-economics. Call these great grand Infosys, HCL, Cyient types as code monkeys. I didn't expect you of all people to side with these non-intellectual mostly-right-wing wastrels. You ask Bangladeshis like @leonblack08, @Bilal9 bhai, @Atlas and @bluesky to learn what exactly from the Infosys, HCL, TCS types ? TCS has existed for five decades and Infosys for four decades and they have huge human, material and financial resources yet they couldn't put together a small team of five each to design even an operating system software since they claim to be mostly software companies ? They are so unaware and non-intellectual that they didn't even establish workers unions which makes of course natural to be right-wingers and here I am not talking only about Hindutvadis but also about the Tableeghis.

I will tag the two Indians who thanked your post - @Protest_again and @itsanufy.

Since these are big companies, quite old, has large workforce so they will create new OS or microprocessor?

Do you understand there is something called line of business?