Ask HN: How to deal with Indian people? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to deal with Indian people?

20 pointsurigagarinulti14 comments

I work for very a famous company in north west part of US. We have a very large number of Indian employees. Most of them are here on the h1b visa. I am from eastern europe, but I have lived in the US for 10+ years now.

I joined this company based on its reputation and the impact this company is making on day-to-day basis. Before you brand me as a racist,please hear me out.

I work in the engineering department of the company and it is quite expected or in fact a norm now-a-days to expect Indians. I am baffled by their behavior in general, lack of long term vision, speaking in Hindi language regularly. Every single day, there is smell of Indian food in the kitchen on most the floors from 12 to 2. Many people speak while eating, which I sincerely frown upon.

Majority of these people are unwilling to listen. It's incredibly hard to convince them that their solution is wrong or doesn't scale or make sense in the long term. It seems to me most of these people started as database or informatica developers and they carry same mindset for every problem at hand. We are doing migration to aws platform right now and one person kept same data warehouse design structure in redshift as if it was oracle. Majority of the managers are also Indians and unwilling to listen. I now see that most of complexities are artificial and in fact there are no major technical challenges.

I think I got hired for a lower position than I deserved. I plan to stay here for a while because I made a big move from the another city.

What is effective strategy to deal with Indian people in general? How to convince them and help them understand to listen to others? This is first time I am dealing with majority of Indians even though this is an American company.

How did you manage to deal with Indian people?

Edit - This is not a troll post. I am genuinely curious.

2% of Americans identify as partly or entirely American Indian. That means that like you, 98% of the rest of us have an ethnic heritage as immigrants to the US.

We, or our ancestors, were able to assimilate into the US because enough of our society was accepting of people from other cultures, with other social norms, other perspectives, other histories, etc. We're basically all from some other country.

You need to clearly separate ethnicity (cuisine, preferred language) from technical approaches to engineering. In doing so, the way you work with any engineer will be the same, no matter their ethnicity. After all, you'd like them to afford you the same professionalism.

From my experience this typically happens with a mediocre engineering team working on a new project/technology. Unless you have immense patience and communication skill to overcome this over time, look elsewhere. I have been in a similar situation with mostly white colleagues.

Hi there!

Thanks for the comment. I apologize if I did not express my frustration in proper way. I have been here for 5 months only. It will look bad on my resume to abandon ship in the middle. Do you have recommendation for adapting my communication style or dealing with feeling my of annoyance?

Gotem

How should you deal with "Indian people in general"?

Same way you deal with any people in general--by treating them as individuals, each with their own ideas, prejudices, background, etc. Just like you.

If you cannot convince someone of something then it basically means you yourself don't understand the concept/idea well enough and concretely. Generally people won't get convince about something if you just keep speaking abstract, hand waving ideas which is prevalent in Software Engineering folklore. Show them "real stuff", show them how approaching something in a specific way will lead to something tangible and useful for them and the project as well. And yeah, it has nothing to do with any specific group of people, it applies to everyone.

> If you cannot convince someone of something then it basically means you yourself don't understand the concept/idea well enough and concretely.

It takes two sides to have a meaningful communication. No matter how well I understand (or don't) something, the other person has to have the ability to step outside of where they're at in order to meet at some common ground.

In the generalized case you can't unilaterally blame a single side in a multi-party conversation.

I am from Europe and I've worked in the past with Indian, I have to say that they αρε short-tempered ανδ always acting like children. I remembered once, one of them was welling and whining at everyone because he got a parking ticket. They're a nightmare...IMHO

I'm Indian. Now I was born in America, raised here, and more than one of my ex-girlfriends has told me "You're not Indian" or "You're not culturally Indian."

I currently work with some amazing (cultural) Indian developers. They know their shit, they're easy to work with and they're sticklers for well designed stuff with little technical debt. I've worked with some Indians who were utterly incompetent developers and I was surprised how they made it through University.

Same with Chinese people (both in American and in Australia -- some were amazing, a few were terrible).

It sounds like you work at a shit company. It probably has shit managers who hire the wrong people. It has little or nothing to do with their ethnicity or cultural heritage.

Go work somewhere else. Stop blaming an entire race and/or culture for your personal bias.

By the way, you should know that my experiences with indians are similar to yours but you speak of them as though you or your kind are somehow better. no your not!!! Get off that fricken judgement seat of yours. A little bit of humility might help.

Need I go into the backstabbing, rude self important behavior of slavic/eastern euros. The ones I have met think they are Gods gift to mankind, and what they lack in coding ability they often hide by distraction. Taking a shower on occasion seems beyond their ken. So stfu you are no better.

Epic troll lol

:)

Look dude, you are a guest here. These Indian guys...they are guests as well.

What you need to do, is start being a bit more tolerant.

I get it. You don't think these guys are at your same skill level.

So what.

Follow your project managers lead, do you part, and try some tikka masala - Indian food is pretty good.

remember, you are a weirdo, the exact same way they are.

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