Bollocks

Nevermind. The point of the article was not so much about the growth of the Indian developers share but rather what it means in the PHP world.

India has been leading the outsourcing market since many years ago. That is not new. What is new is this sudden growth in the last 3 years of Indian PHP developer market.

Something happened since then. Maybe PHP finally picked up in the enterprise world, or it was something besides that. Reflecting about the causes of this sudden growth was the purpose of the article.

Unfortunately, some people did not like to hear that the Indian PHP developer market is booming because it is bad news for them. That is what people are complaining. That is why there are so many comments, mostly against or for the quality of the work of Indian developers.

They are not complaining about whether the title or lead paragraphs are misleading. That is just you and the person that started this thread.

The purpose of the article, like every other article in the PHPClasses blog, is to share useful information, even if it carries bad news for some.

I do not mind criticism, not at all. Actually I appreciate criticism that is well justified because it provides me opportunity to improve.

But when people use a personal attacking tone and try to minimize an article and the site just because they wish it did not carry bad news for them, that is not criticism to me, it is just "shooting the messenger".

I still try to clarify misunderstandings, but if people insist on the attack tone just to minimize the value of the information that the site passes, I think there is nothing else worth giving attention.

Manuel And Sandeep, you are dead right! I like your article and I would really like to hear more from the PHP community in PHP.

Just a few years ago, PHP itself was dismissed as a language for "script kiddies" and not suitable for prime time applications. Today Twitter and WordPress are the backbone of "social media". http://number10.gov.uk (and other Whitehall bodies ) and the UK government outline for politcians to embrace Twitter (http://blogs.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/digitalengagement/post/2009/07/21/Template-Twitter-strategy-for-Government-Departments.aspx) are testiments to this!

Some people feel threatened by the facts you present... I do hope they sober up and see the possibilities instead of the seeing this as a problem.

Another piece of statistics that would be interesting to see would be downloads. Do we see the same trend in downloads in India as the upload trend?

Although it is possible to extract statistics of downloads for each user that is logged, the site does not extract such statistics because it would cause much load to the server. I would take to take a backup of the site database and analyze figures off-line.

What may be easier is to extract is newly registered users over time. That influences directly the number of downloads, but it would not tell if users of India or other countries are downloading more or less packages.

Anyway, these numbers are not available in a site statistics page. Just let me know if it is really important, so I can make time to take a look.

I'm not sure, but I think Twitter uses RoR...

Well, my thought is that it would be interesting to see if usage from India corresponds to uploads...

Not a biggie, just something that I found interesting..

I see. I can take a look over the weekend when the audience of the site is lower.

I am not sure either, but I think they gave up on Ruby on Rails and are using just Ruby.

...not one in three speak English. Maybe one in 3000 in Delhi and Hyderabad speak enough English to get useful information reading a newspaper, and maybe one in 3000 of THOSE are proficient enough in Business Standard English and/or technical English to make a meaningful contribution to a business or technical effort.

Hasn't anybody else ever actually travelled outside the big cities there? Even in the big cities, firms like Tata and Satyam simply can't find enough QUALIFIED English-speakers to meet their existing needs; look at how much salaries have increased over the past ten years for even the most basic help-desk positions.

On top of that, the inescapable fact remains that the Indian educational system, like that in South Asia generally (I speak from experience in Malaysia, Singapore, India and Pakistan) is simply incompatible with the type of skills required to be USEFUL in a development environment. If all possible requirements are fully spelt out to the nth-to-the-nth degree, then there are any number of people there who can do the job - but if you've done that much work already, writing code is pretty mechanical. If you want to be able to outsource part of the thinking process as well, your best bets aren't in south Asia - especially if you care about effective communication. And 'lack of effective communication' is a leading cause of death for projects whose stakeholders all work in the same building; how much harder is it across time zones and cultures?