Why most Hacktoberfest PRs are from India
pulkitsharma07.github.io
pulkitsharma07.github.io
In India, all people at all times are building their resumes for a semi-vague goal usually wealth or a happy retirement. This idea is embedded quite early on in age as the article author suggested - you’re usually pointed at a career in middle school that makes it easier to achieve above said goal.
The flywheel then spins ever faster as every decision you make thereafter is about getting closer and closer to this vague goal of “success/wealth/societal perception”. You pick universities based on rankings, large tech companies over startups, management over individual contributor work and of course America over everything else.
This problem isn’t isolated to India by any means, and like all stereotypes isn’t applicable to all people from India but in a country of 1B+ people, it’s just dialed up to 11. Hacktoberfest and GSOC are just unfortunate victims to this resume building. The fastest way to put these on your resume and flex it, is to create a spam commit and shortcut your way to a tshirt or certificate.
Its actually 2 fold, the short term goal of raking up some youtube views and getting the youtube ad money. Second is to pad the CV as an "advanced developer with lots of knowledge to share", it helps to put on CV and also be considered for some training positions which is demand as many are rushing to get into tech where "even kids are minting money".
I know a guy that put up some coding videos on youtube to be a "youtuber" and one of the big tech firms in India hired him to train their new recruits.
I feel as though I've read numerous parables like this, except describing modern America.
We don't tend to choose our careers so early, but is it really so different? In New York City you typically have parents/children competing for spots in the "best" preschools, and throughout the country high school is basically a big competition to be accepted into the most prestigious college. Only among a certain social group, of course, but I'm sure that applies to India too.
This was one of the major factors cited by the article here; it would seem to lend credence to the "why".
It's useful to target and engineer certain behaviors in students. Many of them conflate their value and status with those papers.
You can make money by holding competition to handout these and charge for chairs, food and other stuff.
Many students won't talk about certificates and medals with their classmates because they will be aware of how easy it is to get one but they will boast about it to kids from other schools and their parents. Ha, better conversion rate if someone is looking to transfer their kid to a better school.
I don't understand how not enough schools are doing this and still cheap out on $100 total spend every month at best.
My current employer has a goal of X% of all consultants must be cloud certified and bringing these certificates to pre-sales meetings with clients helps a lot.
Ha, Ha, Ha! Very funny but true.
This is exactly privilege speaking. Starving Artists/Musicians/Humanities/Literature major are practically a meme and have become a cautionary tale on what to avoid until you have established yourself financially. Whether it is fair or not, life does not reward them in today's economic system (ignore outliers). Hence the need for "safe and boring" jobs like Doctor/Engineer/Lawyer/anything else that helps you earn money to lead a "boring" life.
I'm not disagreeing with you here, but how is that even relevant in this discussion? This was about the path students from a high-level school took.
It may be boring to you, and that is ok, but it does not negate the fact that it is a challenging field and demands immense hard work to be one.
I'm white British and would rather call them different attitudes.
(I'll also be the first to joke about 'PC gone mad 'differently abled'' etc. - that's not my point here - it's not out of an abundance of caution or respect for all, I just think, honestly, yeah, why not push your children into something they don't enjoy but is high-paying, professional, and comfortable? There are reasons 'why not', of course, but also 'why'; so it's a different attitude, not 'backward', unless you only mean to say 'out of favour'.)
You miss the entire point of the article. You are privileged not only to have Americanized parents, but you are privileged because you are an American. Your world is way better than that of a common Indian student. Most Indian students need a job, just to be able to feed their families. Quoting from the article:
"When push comes to shove (which is the permanent state for most Indians), we only care about one thing, survival."
When it's about survival, everything else goes out the window. That's one of the points the article is trying to highlight.
What does is say about a person if their attitude is that these things are okay if you are from a certain background? It says that they care about the background of the person more (for whatever reason, good or bad) than the damage it does to the communities that they interact with. Consider the consequences of this.
I am in no way encouraging hacky ways for resume grooming. I am just stating why it is a phenomena in India. You're doing a good job by not employing these tactics to further yourself. Also, a key difference could be that you're maybe not from India. And if you are, you're an exception not the norm.
This right here is the truth. The article is simply a rant from somebody who has yet to grow up and understand the real world i.e. they are in a privileged position in life. When you have so much competition for limited opportunities, you cannot apply the same yardstick from a different environment. The Fight for Survival is as true of social structures as it is in biological ones. It seems this Indian American has no idea of the sacrifices his parents made in establishing themselves in America and providing him the privileged position from which he pontificates.
Any Indian with access to a computer can potentially be a (much) better hire than the one from the most desired engineering college. In fact, I’d almost have to expect so since they don’t have to waste time on all that signalling.
It’s unfortunate that that apparently doesn’t matter to the companies doing the hiring :/
Quoting from the article:
"In middle school children have dreams to become a Pilot in the airforce, or maybe a Police officer, or maybe a Opera Singer ! But by the time of high school, everyone is just either on road to become an Engineer, a Doctor, a Lawyer, a Chartered Accountant …. or a failure. This may seem harsh but that’s how most of the society operates here in India."
The problem here is that students are forced by their parents into a field of education they don't even like. How do you expect someone to understand the intricacies of fluid dynamics when they don't give a rat's ass about it. When you give exams on topics you are not even remotely interested in? Therein lies the privilege of being American. When you're a common Indian student, you don't have a choice in choosing your field of study
>> Any Indian with access to a computer can potentially be a (much) better hire than the one from the most desired engineering college.
This only works well for computer science. What about students who want to become doctors? Do you know that to get a seat in an Indian medical college, a common Indian student will most likely have to pay a "donation" just to get their foot in the door.
The same way I studied everything in high school? I certainly didn’t give a fuck arout the molecular mass of hydrogen, but since I was going to be there anyway, I might as well spend my time there actually learning instead of sleeping.
It’s unfortunate if that situation continues into university, but hardly the end of the world.
And then from university, goes on to become your career. On, which you spend 1/3 of your day for 40 years.
And please do elaborate on why/how a career in medicine boring?
Asians with far better scores are deemed to be less worthy due to "uninteresting personalities" than others far less qualified.
I don't think it's difficult to understand why the children of people motivated enough to emigrate for better opportunities would themselves be ambitious and would want to establish themselves with stable, high performing careers (having almost no generational wealth to fall back on.)
In my experience, the prestige of a college definitely correlates with how rewarding your time at college is going to be.
Of course, the career I chose just happened to be programming, so it did end up that way.
Also, if scores were the only reason to enroll a student, people from poor background, especially black and Latinos would basically never get in.
There is cutting-edge research and also pretty boring business app development. Also, some jobs are pretty specialized and not the sort of thing you can get as a generic software engineer.
A PhD from Caltech in machine learning and optimization doesn't sound very different from being a doctor if we're speaking of conventional (read: boring) career paths
So he chose the highly unconventional path of PhD in STEM. After finishing it he would chose uncustomary and also forward looking job at FAANG.
While the Untermenschen from his school mates of indian origin chose to become doctors or did not persue the much forward looking career in TE.
How did they not get filtered out during residency?
Years later, my cousin laughingly confided in me that he had access to all the old exams that were just questions shuffled around through the years. He got them through his campus Indian student group. I confirmed this with some other people I knew in that group, all of who treated it like common knowledge. Changed the way I saw and interacted with people I’ve known my whole life. Certainly changed the way my ex felt about those haunting exam scores.
My personal take? Residencies have n spots. The people qualified to succeed in those spots is n * y (where y > 2). It may be that people who cheat to get into a residency were qualified to do the job, but it doesn’t mean they deserved to be there. This can be true in a lot of other positions that require the applicant to jump through different hoops.
Only shared with fellow Indians?
How does an unaffiliated student get access to those prior year exams? Fortunately, the internet is levelling this somewhat.
When teaching at a college level, I used to go out of my way to provide any historical resources. I want my class to be fair to everyone involved.
I also used to redraft my exams and assignments every single year. This is quite a lot of work and a lot of professors simply won't do it. However, if you don't, then some students will take advantage of it, and your class isn't being fair to everyone.
Though in both cases, I think it's on the question asker (either teacher or interviewer) to make sure that questions change up frequently enough and aren't easy to study without having genuine understanding.
It just means the method of interviewing is flawed.
It's common for professors to not allow students to keep exams for this reason. Students in such classes do a "brain dump" by writing down all the questions they remember immediately after leaving the test to get around this.
"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles."
But I am not sure about the accuracy. There are other reports with similar or lower numbers.
Wildly different experience depending on the state and part (South is good in comparison to North).
There is a shortage of doctors despite everyone aiming for a medical degree. It is worse in rural areas so there are less qualified people treating others. Pseudoscience and pseudomedicine is a big industry too. Actors, news channels, babas, politicians, etc all encourage it.
The most recent example of above is baba ram dev's covid cure: https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2020/aug/05/covid-19...
He promoted his pseudoscience on multiple news channels as a cure for covid. Ayush ministry (which is a branch of government to regulate/approve pseudomedicine) stopped him on some advertising basis so he rebranded the thing to covid immunity booster.
Do you really think 90% of Americans doing CS are not doing because of an easy FAANG job ? That they had some deep passion for CS since long ?
Unfortunately the reason here is definitely cultural. I was lucky that my parents didn't force me to become an engineer or doctor (though it was by choice) but for majority of my friends since 9th std, it was about getting into IIT and their whole life and their whole parent's world revolve around getting a good job in a top MNC and that's the Indian version of American dream.
Unfortunately the competition is fierce and there are 10 candidates for every spot, so you buff, cheat, cut corners and do everything in your power to get ahead. Because if you don't the other person still will and he will take your spot (it's like SEO).
There is an amazing web series called Kota factory. If you want to understand the culture it offers some great insights into it in a very entertaining way!
People really need to be coached to even say a personal achievement let alone sell it when apply for jobs.
There's an unspoken agreement that if someone puts in overtime and others don't, it makes the non-overtimers look bad and that that the overtimer should be _cut down_.
Probably not quite tall poppy syndrome, but maybe an adjacent phenomenon.
So that with cost taken into account, the overtime employee isn't much different from the others. Instead, skill would matter more.
The post was really illuminating. I don't know the Indian culture very well, but now I can understand why sometimes Indian resumes are so lengthy, difficult to parse, and essentially filled with air.
But "tall poppy" is someone who is talented.
No contradiction between punishing talented people, and serving those who complain.
Here's two others: aim for the stars and hit the moon. And,
He who tries to get everything gets nothing
(Translated.)
Those sayings also disagree with each other
This bit near the bottom (under "improbable futures") really struck me as necessary, and not just an Indian problem. The pressure to be generally successful and support their immediate family is hard enough on anyone, but adding onto that the pressure to be able to care for your parents when they're old is even worse.
I'm not saying people shouldn't care for their parents, or that people shouldn't live in multi-generational households, but humanity really needs to figure out how to care for our older members without requiring huge sacrifices from their children. Some countries have mostly figured this out with strong social safety nets, but many... have not. And beyond that, we shouldn't have to rely on a social safety net. Increasing income inequality makes it harder and harder for people to build enough wealth during their lives so they can retire comfortable, or even at all.
This has less to do with India, and more about what happens when there’s no prior culture of open source, to balance against the willingness to “hustle”. The fact that a lot of these PRs might originate in India is only relevant insofar as there are a lot of people willing to hustle, and don’t have much open source experience to understand the culture and the role played by maintainers. Chances are that they are oblivious to what happens on the other side of the table, and open source projects are abstract entities (which might as well be run by Github, or some other bureaucracy!) A useful reminder that the celebrated “hustle” is susceptible to the unintended consequences of Goodhart’s law.
If this was Sean Parker with Napster or Zuck with early Facebook, we’d be celebrating their initiative.
For all those who advocate for growth hacking techniques, or annoying ads, this is exactly how scummy most such techniques / dark patterns feel to users. I don’t think that is geographically localized in any way.
As for comments trying to characterize “Indian culture”, it’s really complicated! With a population of ~1.4B people, you’ll easily get a LOT of examples for any kind of behavior (including stark polar opposites, sometimes competed to optimality). The same people writing such articles will often also turn around and write articles about the lack of entrepreneurial hustle in India and the need for more jugaad :smh:
Their value for life is much lower. There's just too many people. The idea of a pedestrian lights is a tourist thing. They don't pay attention to it. Have 8 rows of cars on the road per each side? How do you cross? You just walk across it during traffic. (I'm not even joking.. I've done it) (Another thing.. traffic is extremely chaotic and dagerous.. lines on the road have no meaning there) Extremely poor and begging with a <5mo. They'll let it crawl around where people are walking in connaught place. (Btw go a little further to north and there is a good chance that baby was stolen [That's a thing])
Competition: Theres little to no social support from the government. Also, the families are hyper aggressive in getting their kids to succeed. This is shown in the marriages and determination of what their kids will do for work.
Craftsmanship: they produce quite a lot in that country. They're also having to deal with a market that won't support luxury goods. (Ok Goa can.. but Goa isn't buying domestically for that.. they're not buying their employees Tata motors cars, they're buying Mercedes SUVs)
You could never honestly convince me that they're not entrepreneurial. They are very much. There are aspects I love about it and there are parts that make me sick.
Reference for this? I was raised a Hindu still am. I don't and have never condoned cheating. The religion doesn't condone cheating. I smell good ole bigotry in the comment.
I'm going to have to see if I can find it again, or if this is a misunderstanding.
EDIT: I can't find the original statement about the religious values. I've removed it as that I can't find anything to confirm and accept that as it was where I was wrong.
Of course, false religion and immorality go hand in hand, say true religions. Here, false religion is 'Hinduism'; immorality of 'Hindus' makes them not honor ethics. Are we hearing anything new here?
I'd say those are both very controversial examples, certainly not heroes.
As for "growth hacking" and generally the ethics of programmers that appeared after the internet bubble, I wonder if one can even describe this as a purely American cultural thing. This is a field which is practically synonymous with internationality.
Whereas certain other cultures are more about working together to create an ideal environment for all to be emancipated and enjoy life to its fullest.
Personally, I prefer the latter, as it just seems much more enjoyable and fun to live in such a culture. The former culture is stressful and doesn't really seem to bring as much value out of my life, it feels a lot more artificial in its end goal. Instead of appreciating the time on a planet full of wonders, you spend the time feeling good knowing you beat others and ended on top. I honestly couldn't really find salvation in that goal, on my last day breathing, I'd feel like the king of fools, a fool none the less, and like I just missed out on a life that could have been so much more. But off course that must just show my cultural bias. And I wonder if happiness is cultural, while I would be happier in the latter culture, someone born in the former might be happier in that one. Just something for me to keep pondering about
But if you're financially or materialistically motivated, there are some drawbacks with this, though.
- Higher taxes
- More compressed wages (an Engineer with a Master's Degree will for example "only" earn around 1.5-3 times what low-skill minimum wage workers earn - compared to other countries where this multiple could be 5-10)
- A bit less entrepreneurial spirit
With that said, I enjoy living here. Life is comfortable, and there's no endless pursuit of getting richer, just for the sake of becoming rich. Retirement is not the be-all and end-all goal of life here.
One example of such culture you may find interesting: Since most of the India lives in rural areas and journalist live in cities, you may never hear it. When in a village someone makes a lot of money, he will give a feast to the entire village, sometimes even 7 or 11 villages. You can say how foolish he is.. He can roam entire Europe with that kind of hard earned money, meet new people, be happy. Right? But for him, seeing so many of his fellow villagers having one delicious meal is far more fulfilling. And this keeps happening often here. Earlier they used to make wells for water for all, etc.
While the latter is generally a lot more relaxed. It’s also really bad at rewarding exceptional people, so I find that basically all the exceptional people I met there have moved to different countries/cultures.
From a friend who moved back I heard that he suffered from some severe reverse culture shock. “Like, people just drink coffee half of the day.”
Sounds remarkably similar to how I was raised here in the US.
In many European countries and other strong first world nations like Japan and Oz that provide strong social safety nets and baseline standards of living you see the inverse passive effect described in other comments where people can stop trying to sell themselves at all.
So it seems like people will eat each other until the average is good enough at which point a segment of the population stops competing at all.
However, there are 2 differences:
1. In the US, it's not about survival.
2. And, I remember reading this somewhere and it's struck a chord.
"If you're one in a million, there are 1300 others just like you"
That said, a very similar culture exists in China and the Asian subcontinent (with the exception of Japan and possibly the Koreas), in particular SE Asia, so I wouldn't say it's specific to India.
They didn't mention the crabs' nationality though.
Fun fact, my native language has no comparable idiom, although the phenomenon is very much present. We just call it "the mentality".
About quality content, well, have you checked out all github projects? In thousands of YouTube videos being uploaded daily, you can easily find "quality" content by searching it in native language. If mind blowing local newspapers articles are not your thing, you can still find a lot depending how you search through the noise.
I can't generalize it, but I see a subtler version of this in the corporate spaces as well – lack of care towards accessibility, missing attention to details in PRs, focus on "getting things done" with the current knowledge set, not worrying too much about the "commons" .
I do hope though that this is a just a phase a developing nation has to go through — because we've seen more than enough exceptional talent originate from here as well.
> We people like the wear the “tightly knit society” as badge of honour, let me tell you this “tightly knit society” has done more harm than good.
That is a sweeping statement that can be dismissed as garbage rightly. It would be better if author backs up with some examples on how he arrived at this conclusion. In any case, whether a tight knit society is good or bad for us is entirely subjective and should not be trivially generalized.
PS: The next line of the highlighted statement has some typo.
>We Indian people have no India of the amount of mental Probably should be fixed.
Maybe author meant 'idea', but came of as 'India'
Sadly the very people who need to understand this, care to watch spicy Youtube videos more than they care to read a nuanced article. Nevertheless, I'll share this with as many people I can.
Here is an old paper on the problem of coaching industry, written by someone at an IIT.
https://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/hk/jee/press/currScienceJEE...
The coaching is a fucking big industry and it needs to stop if we want the currently best institutes keep sanity.
Really good post :)
unfortunately this happens in many places if not all. (eg same cr*p applies here in Turkey, if you're male and not a doctor or engineer or government employee, basically seen as failure)
it is apperantly much more visible/causing problem because of lack of resources, strict cultural values as well as driven by high population
Ofc when I throw party in my studio apartment, It becomes one of the most dense places in the world. But that does not result people fighting for beers, as long as there are enough beers in the fridge ;)
Essentially, there are a few beers in India's fridge. That results in a fistfight.
Well they know its immoral they just dont care.
You have completely skipped the why. The answer in the article is so much more nuanced and complicated than "because a popular YouTuber asked them to do that".
Apparently this year they aren't requiring that the PR gets accepted. It just can't be rejected immediately.
Which means that lots of spam will do the job, where before you had to have a decent PR to get it done.