Comment by sfamiliar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sfamiliar | Hacker News Reader

it's interesting to hear this from what some folks think of as the 'other side'. i spent a month in india this may training a dozen replacements for US programmers. this was in a company that has had traditionally very low salaries, and is located in Backwater, VA. the spiel from the CTO was that it's being done to provide 'round the clock' coverage, but in practice, not having an american developer on hand who can make decisions can hold up the indian developers.

the problems i saw in the dev team across the ocean had nothing to do with their technical skill: they were for the most part technically competent. but they were by and large incapable of self-direction. there were a few exceptions, but for most of the team, once they got into a corner they didn't know how to get out of, they punted to an american developer and asked for help.

in my career i've worked with outsourced labor many times. i'd happily trade 5 butts in seats overseas for one guy locally, or even just stateside that understands initiative and can solve their own problems, even if the overseas developers are more 'technically competent'.

you can learn technical competence. you can't learn initiative. getting rid of those on the team with the most initiative can be very expensive.

"incapable of self-direction" ... well, as fellow IT worker from a developing country, I feel sort of offended when I hear such comments. Not that it's untrue, but more because this seems to be a commong perception.

I know where it comes from, managers in developing nations seems to suck more than the avg manager in say europe or USA.

Managers in developing nations, tend to give unclear direction and then become agressive when their subordinates do not do as they were told, so eventually in many workplace ppl become very passive so not to anger their manager.

What aggrevate the issue is that being a developing nation, it means opportunities are fewer, and you tend to get stuck where you are longer than you usually want.

The solution is simple, just tell your new co-workers from this developing nations, that they are empowered and allowed to do mistakes without being attacked,thats all!

The line "being a developing nation, it means opportunities are fewer, and you tend to get stuck where you are longer than you usually want," is very interesting me. I can't speak to that notion exactly, but here in the US people very often feel exactly the same about managers in any job so far as becoming "very passive so not to anger their manager."

It's often much easier to survive the day-to-day by being passive and doing things inefficiently or wrong than it is to trying to 'do the right thing'. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say most management _everywhere_ prefers employees to do things "their way" over "the right way."

And insofar as how to combat it, your simple suggestion pretty much hits the nail on the head. Just make sure on-site management understands that too.

Is this not more of an east/west culture difference though? To be fair, North Americans are known for having and expecting a tremendous amount of initiative and opinion.

You see this everywhere from talk radio to the boardroom. I don't think a simple instruction to a team can change a learned culture overnight, no matter how well intentioned.

In a small startup, everyone needs to take a lot of initiative. But in a BDC (big dumb corp), there are several roles where initiative doesn't matter much. In fact it's challenging to both encourage initiative as well as control chaos at a large scale.

It's a slow cultural change: Indians are starting to feel more confident, and -subjectively- it looks like technology innovation in India is growing.

Yes; arguably, the goal of initiative in startups is to reduce the need for it. Like programming.

What to do attribute that to? The situation: They're an overseas code shop, strategic desicions are made in the US, etc or the corporate culture of the Indian office or something else.

i actually attribute that to the overall culture of india. i was in south india; chennai. the folks that live there have been in a caste system for a long time -- it's integral to their culture. when the caste system was abolished it didn't go away, it just manifested differently. russians can't exist without dictators, indians can't get by without brahmins.

at its core, it is a fundamental need for permission. it's not that indian software developers can't make decisions, and can't make good decisions -- they can. they're sharp folks. rather, there's an inherent prohibition within the culture not to jump without being told to. not to strike out on their own and forge new code. it's the injunction to wait for orders from a superior, or else face the consequences. it's a very subtle thing, a cultural trend that's hard to identify the origin of in an individual, just like it's hard to figure out why all americans need to have credit cards. credit cards are just what we do. they wait for someone to tell them to do something.

it's even more insidious than that, especially if you're closely partnered: if you tell them to do something, and it's a bad idea, 9 times out of 10 they won't correct you. i, as a fallible human, depend on other people to correct my dumbass mistakes, especially in matters of software development. no one gets everything right. that's what's so fantastic about pair programming -- both people get the best judgment of their partner. if you're paired with an indian, and they perceive that you are in a higher position than they (even if it's on a subconscious level), they'll follow you right into hell, or at least an ill-advised has_many :through relationship, even if they know better. it's the way they're raised, the way they live.

i'm not passing judgments on the culture, it just makes for bad programming partners and strange traffic patterns.

I am wary of attributing things to 'overall culture' too much. It can be hard to tell what elements of culture are difficult to alter & which aren't.

As a case, I'd point to the fact that outside of India, many do not exhibit that sort of subordinate mentality.

I wouldn't bet against being able to create a work environment in India where that was all brought down to a manageable level.

Your observation is for the most part correct, but your attributing it to the caste system is typical western stereotype.You say you were in Chennai- Chennai is in the state of Tamil Nadu which has the one of the lowest populations of Brahmins in India - they are less than 1% of the population and the majority of employees in sw companies are not Brahmins. On the other hand if you had said that if this slavish attitude is due to being subjected to outside rule (the Brits and before them the Mughals) it might make more sense.

Overall I agree with your observations, especially "they'll follow you right into hell".

I think that attributing anything cultural to history is a sloppy subject. Sounds like it makes sense, but very little predictive power, like stock analysts.

On a side note, look over your (plain English) sentence: "this 'slavish' attitude is due to being subjected" Slave comes from slavic. Can't live without dictators.

" russians can't exist without dictators, indians can't get by without brahmins."

I can see you don't over generalize or stereotype people!

Sorry, this is stereotypical and stupid generalization. How can you attribute the characteristics of a bunch of programmers you met in a small outsourcing company, to a whole country of 1.2 billion people?

There are more entrepreneurial and enterprising people in India than you think...

generalization is not always correct, and isn't intended to be. that i have to explain this makes me sad.

i have worked with 120 or more indian programmers over the course of many jobs and several years, in bangalore, kochi, and chennai. i have met a few that were technically solid, self-directed, and would give me hell for my code, or the code of another american on my team. i'd have been happy to hire these folks if they'd walked off the street into my office at the market rates. i've invited a few to come visit when they get to the states. some i'd even call friends. by and large, it was through these individuals explaining the mindset of their coworkers that i came to understand it. i didn't drop in, make a bunch of judgements and bail. i asked the people who were driven why the other people on their team weren't. they made the generalizations, i just observed their correctness.

in observation, those driven and enterprising developers are the exception, and the exception by a wide margin. i can't speak to Absolute Truth here, and maybe there's a secret society of programming ninjas in india that few people have ever heard of or interacted with, but i have to lean on my own observations, my conversations with indian developers over half a decade, and the observations of a wide swath of software development community.

In all matters dealing with a foreign culture, remember the Heisenberg principle - by your very act of being in a situation, you are subtly altering it. Americans in technology have a lot more experience with foreigners arriving in America than each kind of foreigner living in their own land has with any American. That's just the way the numbers work.

Asians, in particular, are good at acting deferentially, particularly in front of foreigners. The most extreme case are the Japanese - they are the easiest to underestimate race in the world (and the West did underestimate them). As you move west from Japan, you can progressively reduce the deference factor, crank up the self-confidence factor, until you arrive in California, perhaps the most self-confident place in the world. That deference - self-confidence dial works to a very good first approximation :)

Think of it this way: It's not so much India's culture that is different from the norm, but America's.

I work from Chennai and I don't and haven't seen or heard this stuff before!!

Your observations are mostly correct, and so is the assertion that it's more of a cultural thing here. But the root cause of this behavior is not the evil caste system.

In India, kids are taught to be respectful to elders/seniors, and it is often taken to an extreme, and one is not encouraged to present a different point of view to them most of the times. You can also add to this mix the earlier generation's 'yes-sir-ism' to Britishers and people in power, and it would give you an idea why most Indians you have worked with, do not tend to speak up much.

I have commented about this earlier on HN, things are changing and changing fast here. The next generation of Indians, is far more open, direct and confident. Globalisation after 1991 and more exposure to 'western' ideas, has had a very positive effect, both economically and culturally.

"incapability to handle situations themselves.."

being in this field for the last 2 years, i completely agree to this. But, as someone else has pointed out, this has to do with the bad management practices followed. Also,kids directly from college expect a spoon feeding kind of situation and are afraid to take decisions of their own.

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