How India is saving capitalism

The 40 some-odd programmers, quality-assurance engineers and customer support staffers who work in CollabNet's two-floor outpost in Chennai are mostly in their mid-20s. By mid-2004, the managers here hope to recruit about 15 more of them. The market for their skills has become so heated in Chennai that headhunters brazenly call them up in their cubicles to solicit their services, dangling pay hikes of 30 percent.

"A programmer with two or three years of experience gets a salary of more than a big government official who had to struggle to get to that level," explains P.V. Gopinath, 41, a development manager. And Chennai, a southern port city formerly known as Madras, is sleepy compared to Bangalore, with considerably less job-hopping and salary inflation; it's an Austin, Texas, to Bangalore's Silicon Valley.

For these programmers, a job working for an American company like CollabNet is a ticket to the good life -- and a lot of long hours. When 29-year-old Venkat, an engineer who once worked Q.A. but now fixes the bugs he found as a tester, first started working with the CollabNet developers in Brisbane, he would work from 2 p.m. to midnight, so he'd have more time to chat with his remote colleagues in the chat rooms. But despite the late nights, he says, "I.T. [information technology] improves your lifestyle. You make more money. You have more satisfaction." But he adds, "You don't get a lot of holidays to go around and enjoy it."

Ramaswamy Subbaroyan, 34, a senior software developer who worked for 18 months in Boston for another company on an H1B visa, says that the rise of the I.T. industry in India has "put a lot of money in middle-class people's pockets." And the lifestyle that an I.T. job in India brings beats the ones back in the States. "Once you reach the middle level with 10 to 12 years experience, life is pretty good here, compared to people in the U.S. with 10 to 12 years experience."

But, he says humbly, the developers in the U.S. are superior: "The best programmers are still in the U.S. It's more of a do-it-yourself, self-starter culture." But he sees that changing in India, where a government job used to seem attractive because of the decades of job security it could offer. "Young people are cutting loose," he says. "They're not bothered by job security."

The same is not true for American programmers.

Since the merger, the programmers in Brisbane have not been axed en masse, as some had feared, but in the last year there have been some layoffs of individuals. And some developers have gone from coding almost all the time into very different roles; they've been put to the task of training and mentoring the staff in India. "You have to be a people leader, and not just sit in your small cube working on stuff," says Muthu Krishnan, one of Enlite's original U.S.-based founders. It's a real-life version of the advice that venture capitalists and economists have for American programmers who are concerned about their own prospects: Move up the food chain.

That means more documentation and lots of late-night sessions answering questions on chat. One insomniac Bay Area developer who happened to be online a lot was on the receiving end of so many of these queries that he started getting small tokens of thanks in the mail from his colleagues in India. One present was a small plaque with a formal declaration of friendship.

But moving from writing code to encouraging and managing a team of coders remotely is not for everyone. "I was a technical lead, but I didn't want to lead a team remotely. I didn't want to stay up all night bringing people along," says Michael Stack, who quit to work at another software company. "I remember interviewing someone long-distance over the phone, and just thinking. 'This doesn't work.' Interviewing is one of the most important things you do in a company. Trying to get a reading off of somebody off a bad phone line, I was at a loss."

"Their jobs changed or are changing," says Sandhya Klute, a director of engineering in Brisbane. Although she was hired eight months ago, well after the merger, Klute found herself still trying to reassure the 22 engineers here that they wouldn't be irrelevant as soon as the developers over in India got up to speed on the product.

Klute, who worked for Hewlett-Packard for 21 years as a middle manager, argued: Why would the company hire a new manager in Brisbane if they were just going to get canned? But she also struck a tough-love note: "The reality is we don't have to like it. Just look outside, it's happening in every other company."

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of the merger has been ironing out workplace culture issues. In Chennai, programmers call their managers "sir," and lofty job titles command respect. A tester wouldn't feel comfortable disagreeing with the CTO or a V.P. But in Brisbane, programmers treat each other as peers and respect is accorded based on contribution -- a style that comes directly out of the open-source world of software development.

So it's hard for a 26-year-old technical lead in Brisbane to understand why a programmer in Chennai might be too intimidated by him or just too shy to ask a lot of questions that could speed the training process along. "They can't just pop on over to my desk and ask me a question," says Dan Rall, 26, a senior software engineer. "But if they could, would they?"

No wonder that when Behlendorf spoke to those IIT students in Chennai his biggest piece of advice to them was to not be shy about participating. "I understand there are big cultural differences," Behlendorf told them. "The culture here is a lot more polite," but it's by jumping into the sometimes-bruising online fray that you can contribute and build your reputation.

"We don't get as much work out of them as we wish we did," says Repenning. Is the culprit the cultural mismatch? Are the American developers still not communicating clearly enough? Do they need to write more documentation? Is it the stupid time zone problem? Or do the developers there just need more time to ramp up? Or some combination? Repenning is not sure.

"You find yourself spending about equal time worrying about them moving up the value chain to take your job, and wishing that they would move up the value chain faster so they could do their jobs," says Repenning, who now leads a team of four engineers in Chicago and two in Chennai.

On the American side, the tension of working in a shrinking job market can make the cross-cultural interactions uneasy.

"This industry is having a hard time. Friends are losing jobs. Sitting beside someone who makes a 10th of what you do, it's a pressure you feel," says Stack, the American developer who left CollabNet to work for another company. "On the surface, all goes along swimmingly, but there is an underside not being discussed. That colors your interaction no matter how you might dismiss it."

Rall, a tech lead, is obviously proud of how fast some of his team's Indian engineers have adapted to their new roles at CollabNet -- such as Venkat, whom he dubs "a total star." And he says that some of the fears of job loss in Brisbane have abated over time. But he still wonders what the company's new deal means to American engineers just a little younger than he is, who are just getting out of school:

"A 21-year-old who just got out of school here with $100,000 in debt, what did he get for that debt? What does he have to look forward to now?" says Rall. "We don't hire those people anymore. We only hire senior engineers." He's not the only one wondering, since in the U.S. the the number of unemployed college graduates has recently surpassed the number of unemployed high-school dropouts.

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It's morning in the CollabNet office in Chennai, and Behlendorf has just come in after staying up until 4 a.m. in his hotel room at the Sheraton answering the flood of e-mail from California that arrives after dinner in India, when it's 9 a.m. back in Brisbane. This is his second visit to Chennai in the past 10 months, and he thinks he's already seeing signs of change in the streets. There's less litter. Road conditions seem to be improving -- at least there's a lot of construction on them. He's optimistic that the influx of Western capital is playing a role in helping improve things here.

In the early 1990s, Behlendorf was the founder of SF Raves, the San Francisco mailing list that launched countless all-night underground parties in the name of "community." He still deejays until dawn. Is this the man American workers are thinking of when they rail against "Benedict Arnold executives" sending "our jobs" overseas?

Behlendorf says that CollabNet could have hired 10 people back in San Francisco for what the India office costs them: That's a ratio of about 4 to 1. But he thinks that wouldn't have been enough people to make the company's product succeed.

"We saved the jobs of the people who are employed in San Francisco by hiring people here [in India]," he says. "I don't know that we would be around as a company if we hadn't done that. What was the right thing to do, morally?"

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