Indian programmers who have loads of experience overseas.
By Dileep Thekkethil
BENGALURU: Snapdeal.com, a promising e-commerce company in India that received funding from e-bay and SoftBank, is now searching for coders who are the backbone of any e-commerce firm.
Snapdeal is currently sourcing talented programmers from the US with a decade or more experience in dealing with big data, cloud computing and software capable of interacting with customers, say reports.
Recently, Snapdeal hired a cloud specialist from Silicon Valley and is also in the process of hiring an additional 12 talent in this area. Due to the shortage of talent in India, the $2 million Indian start-up is also planning to set up a development centre in the US soon, and they are also thinking of buying firms that already have talented coders.
It is startling that in a country like India, where thousands of software graduates pass out every year, companies are experience shortage of talent. This scenario is the result of Indian outsourcing companies focusing more on off-the-shelf software to build and maintain systems for their clients.
Rohit Bansal, co-founder and chief operating officer of Snapdeal was quoted by the Wall Street Journal saying “If you think about the landscape in India, not too many product companies got built here.”
After failing to find software engineers in India, the Delhi-based e-commerce company, which is owned by Jasper Infotech Pvt., shifted focus to finding talents from companies that have successfully done similar business in other countries.
The growth of e-commerce in India demands companies like Snapdeal to hire experts in every field. This is considered as one of the decisive factors in deciding who will become the Amazon of India (Amazon itself is a major e-commerce player in India). Snapdeal currently has over 150,000 merchants and over 40 million users and is one among the forerunners in the race to become the top online market place.
The growth of e-commerce in India is closely associated with the expansion of smartphone market in the country. Due to the flourishing of low end smartphones, more people started accessing e-commerce websites through apps. Fashion online-retailer Myntra, which was acquired by Bangalore-based Flipkart, announced plans of going mobile by the end of the year. Going by the numbers provided by Mobile Association of India in 2014, roughly 300 million Indians are using internet, which is more than twice the number in 2011.
As more and more users’ access internet, companies like Snapdeal and Flipkart will have busy time tweaking and building new software to keep their user base in tack. This requires talented programmers who can make the experience as fluid as possible for the buyers.
According to Snapdeal, even though the company is going abroad for talent, it will try to hire more Indian programmers trained overseas. The company’s plans to hire 10 experts is also aimed at training software developers in India. Snapdeal already has a team of 1,000 software engineers in India. It plans to double this number by the end of next year.
“Many of these people moved to the U.S. because opportunities for doing (such) high-quality work were not available in India. Now those opportunities are not only available in India, but (India) is a more exciting place,” said Bansal.