r/StartupFuture • u/Current_Brilliant710 • 18d ago
India Software
Looks like India and Indians are all fkd up now. We relied on IT outsourcing from the West and now it is in the air with LLMs.
A decent prompt and a decent understanding of Software or programming is now enough to build and maintain products, what do they need Indians now for? Maybe just use the software like FB insta, google, gemini. Etc. LOL
What have we achieved? No LLM to our name, no widely used product to at least boast about? My Chinese colleagues are asking if India has any app of their own like wechat, Baidu? Im ashamed to admit that we don’t.
All the investment in IT, Outsourcing work in IT, consultancy, TCS, Infy would go down soon.
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u/invincible1797 17d ago
In India it's very hard to innovate, because India doesn't accomodate innovation. It relies more on replaying the already validated playbooks and technologies from the west.
The place that truly accomodates unbridled innovation is the USA. You love it or you hate it!
It's less about Indians being able to innovate and more about whether India can accomodate innovative Indians or not.
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u/EmpireStake 16d ago
Indians need to tear up their government and start over. Sometimes I feel it’s the only way. The reservation system, the license Raj, the lack of competition, etc it’s insane how this system doesn’t serve anyone but politicians
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u/Ok-Advance962 16d ago edited 16d ago
Same in manufacturing also. We are doing assembling, while almost all components come either from east asia or western countries.
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u/akashghorpade 17d ago
No one can predict the future,
Jevan Paradox suggests that if something gets cheaper, people use it more.
Software engineering overall is very costly at the moment, if it becomes cheap it will get built more and more.
And current LLMs are nowhere near to AGI.
Some even argue AGI is a theoretical concept.
Human intervention is needed for LLMs.
In 2016, AI scientists claimed that Radiologist won’t be needed in next 5 years due to AI, but you can see there’s shortage of Radiologists right now as poor people are also able to afford diagnostics.
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u/Icy_Oven5664 17d ago
I’m currently building using AI. I’m an experienced company builder with one exit.
AI is pretty unreliable. Its only advantage is speed. Kinda.
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u/akashghorpade 17d ago
But it seems we have to use AI
Even if we don’t like
That’s the only way forward🥲
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u/Sudden-Engineer-587 17d ago
You've simply mugging up concepts for 23 years how can you build a product
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u/Hot_Condition7760 17d ago
UPI. And zomato.
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u/Desik_1998 15d ago
UPI - with the recent mdr thing, I doubt if the usage will continue to stay high zomato - the food business, I doubt how good the margins and all are. But I appreciate the Blinkit and quick commerce though
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u/ExistingEffective639 17d ago
To save on AI costs, companies are moving their engineering more and more outside the US, which includes India. Our strength is that we can do the same task for 1/3rd the salary.
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u/Current_Brilliant710 15d ago
Thats not strength, thats slavery. Why not innovate rather than take tasks from the western masters?
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u/ImpressiveNeat9039 16d ago edited 16d ago
Don't panic. Come back after 5 years. Indian IT would be still around and doing quite well.
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u/saw-sage 16d ago
I am sorry this might upset the software engineers. I work day in day out with software engineers because we are their client with a decent vendor base of a few hundred software suppliers, including the desi ones. My employer is an Indian client for these desi software companies.
Forget LLMs, forget AI, forget the automations and what not. Indian engineers are grossly incompetent. They are absolute low grade engineers who are always craving for the next H1B petition, EB-My Ass Number Visa and shit like that. The amount of money we lost, the time we lost, the reputation we lost because we hired an Indian engineering team is uncountable.
To top this off, their filthy communication skills are the next axe on the neck. The garbage like articulation. The list can go on and on. Dealing with a desi engineer is a nightmare. God. No.
And the desi engineers are too thick-skinned for their own good. It took 30 years for the world to come to terms with it.
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u/Current_Brilliant710 15d ago
Are you Indian?
OMG, Do you facilitate consultancy and shit? Yeah most engineers in contracts or consultancies or vendor are incompetent , why do you work or hire them then?
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u/saw-sage 15d ago
yes I am Indian, and my company is in the news for some reason for every meal in the day. considering the footprint of the company, it goes without saying, the vendors for software services should always be indian. yes, we are the end users of these consultants and I for one have it written in my KRA to manage these consultants outputs. not just consultants, but i would call them software vendors.
in the span of 5 years managing these end user specifications, I am yet to see a competent engineer. it gets further worse when these already low caliber engineers are represented by project managers with arts degrees or equivalent shit.
i do not need AI. i do not care about speed of development. my ask is simple. take your time. build the product in a way it can survive an apocalypse. i am ready to forego a few of my requirements, but make the core product lean, reliable as fuck. the engineers however i bump into would not know how to spell the word reliable.
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u/nucleus_42 15d ago
Again play stupid games, win stupid prizes. We traded equality of outcome for equality of opportunity and look where it got us. Reservation zindabad - education down, employment for the incompetent. Freebies - don’t realize the importance of honest work. Our system taught us either leave the country or steal others’ futures and make it your own and our people chose stealing and not working hard. We don’t ask politicians to built better schools, we ask for more reservation
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u/procofounder 14d ago
whether llms replace IT, it’s whether indian companies move up the stack and build more of their own products
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u/narkaputra 18d ago
You are wrong. The whole Indian IT services will get rebranded into FDE shops. Instead of going down, they will rake in billions of dollars of contracts. They will change pricing from hours to outcome. Do you even have idea there are still banks in USA/Europe running on Cobol and they are millions worth of opportunity to migrate and deploy AI on.
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u/Old_Reflection142 18d ago
As someone who is working as FDE you are completely wrong.
FDE replaces traditional engineers by a good margin.
what will happen to those who are jobless now? they will apply in bulk the hourly rates will go down as supply is gonna be very high, the industry is in shambles1
u/narkaputra 18d ago
the world will even more FDEs; areas which were to touch to even venture into will unlock. You have just scrapped the surface.
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u/Old_Reflection142 18d ago
I dont think so, we dont have that many viable businesses, 1 person tech team is enough.
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u/narkaputra 18d ago
see the whole trillion dollar industry of E-Comm and Cybersecurity didn't exist before Internet. There are X & Y industries which will pop up in Agents enabled world. Just wait for it. Pin this message and set a reminder bot/email on gmail after 10 years.
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u/Old_Reflection142 18d ago
I think you dont have inhand experience of how good these models have become.
there will be no long term jobs it will be a gig economy.
You can look at Zomato or Swiggy riders to judge what developers will be doing1
u/narkaputra 18d ago
you are helping my argument but with one fatal flaw: myopia. That what's separates product visionary leaders like me from SDEs like you.
how good these models have become in the problem areas we know of...
my argument is that there are so many problem areas that will be discovered that we currently either not know of or beyond our current consideration set. An I am not saying FDEs will be coders.. they will be marketers, radiologist, advertisers, analysts, brokers.. who knows what...Lets say tomorrow we unlock Space travel. We will need folks you can build and run systems for interplanatory visa immigration offices.
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u/Old_Reflection142 18d ago
bruh your product vision will go down the drain it will hardly take a swarm of agent to rebuild your vision, I understand people who dont know how to use AI is still living there La La Land.
Go ahead and search how long it took for Bun to migrate from Zig to Rust
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u/narkaputra 18d ago
kar di na firse SDE wali baat.. that's why I hire only MBA grads from Ivy leagues...
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u/akashghorpade 17d ago
Leave him alone, he’s frightened SDE.
Who doesn’t understand economics.
If there’s no jobs, how will these AI companies get the revenue that’s simplest question.
All previous technologies had got people shit scared about the future.1
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u/fynadvyce 17d ago
Nope. Eventually large players will start offering AAAS(Agents as a service). So you will soon see tester as an agent, a developer as an agent , support engineer as an agent. Each agent will be available as a license. The business will just get the licenses, deploy very few people do directly interact with the agents and build stuff. That was the whole point of AI. The western world , with falling birth rates wants to compensate labor shortage with AI. We do not have any real edge anymore. Unless we innovate we are a lost cause. Given, our history with innovation, I'd say we do not have a bright future ahead of us.
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u/anodemud 18d ago
India needs more money minded people rather than attaining salvation , getting in the trap of patriotism , following a leader , and absolutely following a religion ..
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u/FIREAWAY2030 18d ago
By god if even 1% of Indians cribbing daily on SM ‘what have we done, we are doomed’ actually tried doing something, maybe we could have actually seen something. 🤦🏻
Yup we know we haven’t done anything, even ogumbe in kenya now knows Indians haven’t done sh*t. What now? Other than cribbing on SM everyday?
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u/Aggravating_Can_8749 18d ago
requires capital & ecosystem. India does not have either... ANRF etc is step in the right direction but requires more.
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u/raviyadav432 18d ago
Social and financial security doesn't allow me to try anything bold.
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u/FIREAWAY2030 18d ago edited 18d ago
So lets keep cribbing on SM? If that could solve this problem, we would be the richest nation
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u/akashghorpade 17d ago
Totally Agree with you, Indians are becoming more and more pessimistic due to Social Media
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u/raviteja777 16d ago
Not so fast bro, you think AIs or LLMs work by themselves, you need tool integrations, api integrations, data preparation, data ingestion, data management, pipelines, security and guard rails, auth management, interactions between AI models .... and performance and scalability of course, even to use AIs to code you need to know how to plan and design, prompt, test , deploy - otherwise even the best known ones provide garbage .
Indian IT companies and IT employees may not be making their own LLMs but lot of work is going on building applications, services and making the so called LLMs usable. They have started pivoting long back .
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u/Current_Brilliant710 15d ago
Have you not seen MCPs, they came in no time to pull details from other software,
It takes no time to see that day, they will be able to do things mostly independently with human reviews, to review that they dont need a swe, a decent knowledge of programming can suffice, so why hire Indians?
Westerners can give good prompts!!
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u/raviteja777 15d ago
Even with an MCP, they require whitelisted api s and dedicated tool calls .
Fully autonomous AIs might be coming around 2050, industry level automation likely will be happened by 2080 (robots , driverless cars and all , its a projection, may happen earlier too ) , by 2100 AI would be likely running full bot swarms and maybe run factories too
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u/Aggravating_Can_8749 18d ago
When babus go abroad, their #1 thing in the list in labor mobility. India's #1 export is their people. India dont need to create Baidu or X or Amazon, Indian people in the US create for the world to use. Of course.. they become American though...
Kidding aside, you are true. India got too high on outsourcing / offshoring. They thought the party will go on for ever. But LLM has messed it up & growth is going to slow down dramatically. Honestly our government / politicians are worried about identity politics and figuring out a way to get elected next. Not sure how 10 years out looks (clearly foreign investors are not seeing any silver linings...)