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Comment by adrya407 | Hacker News Reader

>These people are mainly relatively unskilled

Not only that I agree with that, but I'd like to add the fact that after 2 years of working in a team splitted in Romania and India, the working experience with Indian programmers is relatively difficult. It's not something isolated to an individual, all of my colleagues have been complaining that they would really like to work with someone else, but not from India. I think it comes from their culture, they are not used to work hard or to do something willingly. They are doing it if they must, if someone tells them that they have to do it.

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> I think it comes from their culture, they are not used to work hard or to do something willingly.

Cut the crap. India is a country of 1.3 billion people, don't peddle bullshit stereotypes. Not working hard doesn't come from the culture; it's quite the opposite if anything.

>They are doing it if they must, if someone tells them that they have to do it.

Maybe the firm you are dealing with doesn't pay the employees well enough, which in turn causes demotivation?

I am part Indian (albeit ethnically, not culturally) and work in finance. I always had a great experience working with Indian bankers, investors and VCs. The stereotypes puzzled me.

Then I spoke to a few IT outsourcing/consulting companies. It’s horrible. Starting sentences with “no” even when agreeing, jargon-laid bullshitting, lying about simple things, overt sexism (e.g. if my female colleague asks a question, the response is addressed to me), et cetera. I fully blame a small handful of firms for nurturing a toxic culture and then projecting it to the world.

(Indian tech start-ups have, in my experience, a wonderful culture.)

From the outside looking in ( and a handful of anecdotal encounters and work experiences) I feel like the educated Indian workforce is bifurcated between one cluster of brilliant hard working people and another cluster of... Bullshitters who try to project the visage of knowing what's going on.

But maybe that's because for better or for worse India does have an articulate culture of speaking up for yourself, and these two outlier groups just become memorable.

It depends on what one's career goals are. From what I understand (I'm not Indian, but I've worked with many over the years), for a sizable portion of the workforce, the goal isn't to be senior programmer but rather management.

The way you get to management is by having people report to you and then get a new job higher up on the ladder at another company (it is my understanding that promotions from within the company are difficult compared to hiring outsiders).

One puts in time in grade, switching projects frequently to build up the resume. Unfortunately, this makes institutional knowledge at the client companies not something that is preserved easily.

(anecdote: when I was laid off to be replaced by someone from India, the 12 years of how the system works was transferred in 4 weeks of 4h a day meetings, 5 days a week (that was painful)... keeping in touch with my old coworkers, the person who replaced me left 6 months later and explained everything about how my job worked and what they learned in just a few days... who left six months later and only did one day of information transfer)

So, switch companies, go from developer to sr. developer in a year (2x 6 month projects) to team lead (with 5 people reporting - another year or so) to architect (with 3 team leads reporting - another year or so)... and you've got a manager.

If someone is on the track "I want to be a manager", switching projects frequently and never actually diving too deeply into the project is probably the best approach.

The technical people are harder to find. They're not switching jobs quickly and so they're unlikely to get hired into the project that the client sees. Maybe they're tapped as a "work on this 25%" but I know how that goes... it means one week out of the month you're catching up on everything for that project and trying to fend off context switches before you're not thinking about it for another month.

For the technical people, many of them are able to find a visa and move to the US for some extended period of time. This contributes to a brain drain in India. Also the indentured servitude aspect of the H1B visa means that there is less mobility and again, its harder to meet these people in random places. They do exist - and I've worked with a number of them... but I've worked with far more people who are in a position for six months to a year and then moving on to another contract at another contracting company.

Most people in India don't seem to be bothered by a brain drain and don't treat it as a problem as such.

You have to remember that India has more than a billion people and struggles to find work for all of them.

I was surprised to see (in contrast to other countries trying to stem brain drain) that its a stated goal by the Indian prime minister that they want to see some 50 million (more than the population of many countries?!?) workers sent abroad in the coming decade. Whether it eases their unemployment issues or if they see it as a genuinely beneficial strategy is not clear to me. A bit of both I guess.

This plays into another very interesting phenomenon. Indians tend to look up to the western world a lot and I think it shows in their approach to tech.

For example, if you ask most Indians who the top tech people in their country are they'd probably mention Indian CEOs of western tech companies in the US. This is in very stark contrast to say, China, where their own entrepreneurs such as Jack Ma are most influential.

That is to say, rather than build their own ecosystem or companies most Indians aspire to work for Western firms and deeply synthesize their economy to them.

Absolutely correct. The brain drain for a small fraction of a percent that get visas to work in other countries is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. It's a mere trickle compared to the reservoir of people behind it.

Though, its more of a next generation thing that will be interesting - the changing demographics. The US has birthright citizenship - all the children born in the US to visa holders will be US citizens. That will do some interesting things in a few places when they start needing to pay taxes in the US if they are overseas and haven't given up their citizenships (n.b. I'm not an expat and so am not completely versed in the associated tax law).

Sending workers abroad and having them send money home to family outsources the social support structures needed in India and reduces the pressure for unemployment. This feeds into the growing nationalism and xenophobia in many western countries. In other countries it allows people with fewer scruples to take advantage of this labor force and essentially turn them into slaves (confiscation of passports and financial trickery).

I'm not sure where this is going to come back and where the ultimate costs with this policy are going to be paid - but they're going to be paid somewhere.

The Indian tech industry is certainly going for a synergy approach with western markets rather than... say, Japan ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galápagos_syndrome ) or China (copy and maintain behind the Great Firewall).

Its going to be interesting to see how this all plays out over the years to come.

This is spot on. The incentive system so much more promotes management careers that anybody who wishes to go down the tech path comes across as stupid.

Its very common in services companies to treat tech people as somebody who don't have the chops to do prestigious management work.

Do this for sufficient number of years and eventually you will have very few people who want to do any real work and most will want to be managers.

> Then I spoke to a few IT outsourcing/consulting companies

You get what you pay for. The quality of low level employees in IT outsourcing companies (not just the Indian ones) is at par with (or lower than) American minimum wage workers

>Maybe the firm you are dealing with doesn't pay the employees well enough, which in turn causes demotivation?

This. I had the same complaint about the India based team I had to work with, until one of them came on rotation to the states, we had a beer together, and he told me all about the working environment they have there. Nightmarish commutes, extremely nitpicky and punitive performance management, no commitment to career development, limited benefits, brutal hours, and meagre pay even adjusted for Indian CoL.

Under those conditions, it's no wonder people were hard to work with. They were overworked, held to stupid performance metrics that demoralized them, and were under the boot of a "beatings will continue until morale improves" management style.

If you hire based only on cost, nickel and dime each other to maximize your value for money in the short term, and generally treat your workforce like chattel, it shouldn't be surprising when they're disengaged and unable to be as forward leaning as you would like.

Plus, massive turnover.

Yup. First company I worked for had a team in India and they couldn't do a damn thing. The next company had some REALLY great talent in India. Having local managers helped. Paying market rate instead of bottom dollar helped.

Another problem with outsourcing to India is now so many companies do it just because XYZ other company does it -- no regard for quality. Just copying the moves someone else does isn't enough. You need to understand WHY and HOW to do it well.

Managers at the level that makes that decision get bonuses for cost cutting. The cheaper the firm, the bigger the bonus. By the time the house of cards crashed, it either wasn't their crash (sales problem) or they've jumped ship to cost-cut at another company.

> Cut the crap. India is a country of 1.3 billion people, don't peddle bullshit stereotypes. Not working hard doesn't come from the culture; it's quite the opposite if anything.

Actually, I know this is anecdote but my buddy was an manager type position moved up from software and he had to deal with Indians. He had to go over cultural slides to how to deal with Indians and the slide explicitly talk about their world ethnics and how their culture view time.

The time slide was super interesting and the few thing I recall from it. It was talking about setting time line for the offshore team. And when they say they will have it done, it can mean anything, and that you have to have them to explicitly state a real date.

I'm not trying to shoot ya down or anything, just wanted to point out another experience in culture. The slides he showed me was suppose to be on the downlow too >___<. But the whole thing is about how to manage Indian programmers and many aspect of it was dealing with culture or how culture affects their actions.

Maybe it is something else, like the differing power-distance relationships that Americans and Indians have.

What makes you say this? Don't stereotypes come from something? Do you think it's a coincidence that a stereotypical Asian American is reserved, disciplined, and good at math, and that Asian Americans in America make considerably more than any other race[1]?

Btw, "Cut the crap" is an unprofessional, unproductive way to start a conversation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_wage_gap_in_the_United_...

Edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain? What did I say in my post that was inaccurate?

For some background, the 'model minority' myth that you're perpetuating here is being increasingly rejected by the Asian-American community because its both reductive and dehumanizing in its characterization ('Asians are all inscrutable math wizards that get straight A's but are essentially invisible in any romantic or leadership capability') and most often trotted out by race supremacists in some twisted form of concern trolling as a way to attack other minority groups who are seen as less subservient. Asian-americans are often seen in america as the "perpetual foreigner"[1] no matter how far they go to integrate, and the 'model minority' myth just makes integration and the freedom to be treated as an 'American' _individual_ so much harder - unlike Caucasians in the US who in their virtue as the majority demographic do not have each and every one of their actions/behaviors scrutinized as being representative of "white people."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotypes_of_East_Asians_in_...

>Do you think it's a coincidence that a stereotypical Asian American is reserved, disciplined, and good at math, and that Asian Americans in America make considerably more than any other race[1]?

You are stating a set of what you believe as stereotypes of "Asian American[s]" and then citing a wage survey. There seem to be a lot of assumptions you are making.

What would you define as "Asian" in this scenario? Do you consider all people living in America having some form of roots in the entire continent of Asia, Asian?

Next, are you attributing personal traits listed by you as: reserved, disciplined, and good at math, which equates to "make[ing] more than any other race". Do those traits really do that?

The comment that you posted, from my own personal experience, is disheartening because it attributes qualities to a broad set of peoples and cultures which may or may not be related. Even if you might consider some things like being disciplined as positive, it's disempowering because it removes each "Asian" person's ability to achieve based on their own merit.

Stereotypes typically don't come from anything. The "stereotype" of an Asian male is someone who

* can't talk to women

* doesn't understand social skills

* has poor hygiene / manners

* values STEM above softer skills

* values hard work and effort

It's pointless to make these claims because such broad generalizations immediately break down the second you meet an Asian man. There's no way to know which (if any) of these stereotypes they uphold.

Some of these sterotypes have a positive bend: Poor social skills imply that they are reserved. Valuing hard work makes you a disciplined person. etc. But these stereotypes are still bad. They lead people to make unfair assumptions about Asian men because they are Asian. There's plenty of literature out there about stereotypes and prejudice and especially about the "model minority" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_minority

From there you may see why folks are downvoting you:

> A common misconception is that the affected communities usually hold pride in their labeling as the model minority. The model minority stereotype is considered detrimental to relevant minority communities because it is used to justify the exclusion of minorities in the distribution of assistance programs, both public and private, as well as to understate or slight the achievements of individuals within that minority. Furthermore, the idea of the model minority pits minority groups against each other by implying that non-model groups are at fault for falling short of the model minority level of achievement and assimilation

EDIT: And as a bonus (since that Wikipedia article is DAMN good) "Scientific studies have revealed that positive stereotypes have many negative and damaging consequences both socially and psychologically." The citations are in the article.

Since you are an Indian too, I think your remarks are kind of subjective and your reply a bit harsh, but I'll add more facts that sustain my point of view.

>Not working hard doesn't come from the culture

Yes it truly does. Since every individual has inherited from the environment and has been cultured that he needs to do just what he is told (the minimum), this is how he grows.

>Maybe the firm you are dealing with doesn't pay the employees well enough

You can't hide behind your finger with this excuse. If you want a raise you tend to work harder, do the extra mile, you defenly don't get a raise by doing the minimum. Also, if you are good at what you are doing but you are not happy with the salary then why accept the job in first place?

Assigning attributes to an entire country based on experience with a few people is poor logic. It is the same if someone worked with a few people at Google India or one of the IITs, and claimed all Indians are super smart and it comes from their culture.

how do you explain the anamoly of indians in virtually all top jobs from ceo's of microsoft,google,pepsi etc. to pulitzer winners? while i agree with you that culture does impacts work but may be its not "indian" culture and more of a "company"culture. Having said that i don't see any contribution of india in sports, i don't know why.

They are one of the top nations for cricket. Famous stars like

Sachin Tendulkar, Mahendra Singh Dhoni or Dada - Sourav Ganguly

Checkout youtube for some amazing highlights.

Their main national sport (cricket) is really only played in handful of countries. And in those countries (AU/NZ) soccer is still more popular.

Don’t stereotype an entire country of people.

That said, the Indians I have worked with were diligent workers who all but ignored instructions. They produced lots of work but most of it was not to spec. It was only a few groups though so I really can't speak with any scale backing me up.

Especially a country as particularly large and diverse as India. Each state is nearly it's own country from a linguistic, historical, and cultural standpoint. It's almost as overgeneralized as referring to all Africans, or Europeans as some sort of collective. I'd almost consider India along the same lines as the entire EU.

>These people are mainly relatively unskilled. These companies are notorious for hiring entire batches of graduating students.

Please follow the discussion, I was talking only about the fresh graduates and entry-level employees, I was not at all stereotyping the whole country. On the contrary I find them a pretty impressive nation with outstanding potential in the next century.

>Yes it truly does. Since every individual has inherited from the environment and has been cultured that he needs to do just what he is told (the minimum), this is how he grows.

that is stereotyping at its worst.

Just curious -- were the two team (Romania vs India) working on the same project? Were you paying them the same money? Did the team members have the same number of years in experience (in absence of a better comparitive metric)?

I might be able to provide some insight. In my MSc program, we had a number of Indian students.

The students who were expected by their parents to become computer scientists had much worse attitudes and were much harder to work with than the ones who were doing it on their own initiative.

I was told becoming a computer professional is something parents pressure their offspring to do, and this could be the root cause of this phenomenon.

A fun fact, if you may. Every company doing actual, industrial field work has huge problems finding people who are willing to do field work at Indian plants (and are qualified, obviously). If you know a field guy, ask him if he has had any experience there. Industry doesn't really matter...

For those of us who don't know any field guys with experience in India, can you elaborate?

Google and Microsoft and even trading firms like DE Shaw for example have hundreds of engineers in India. Hiring talent is difficult at smaller outsourcing shops, the economics demands that you hire at low wages. Your perspective is severely limited.

Yep, any Indian with decent would have long run away from sweet shop to go to a software company.

I know you meant sweat shop, but I find the typo hilarious.

I'd sure hate to be judged by the "Average" American.

american people who judge indians is pathetic, and the fact the they feel "superior" is really funny. i bet that with the same education an indian is way more smart than an american.

most of the comments in this thread are bullshit.

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