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Comment by pabloivan57 | Hacker News Reader

I worked at Amazon for almost 10 years and I hate, repeat hate working with India teams. Their quality is subpar, period. No other way to put it

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Racist much? I work out of Europe and manage teams both in India and Europe. My experience have pleasantly gotten better with Indian teams. If the quality is sub-par then perhaps you're not a good manager? perhaps failing upwards?

There are cultural factors you need to overcome, and it's with every international team. I am not going to simplify this, because it's a multi-faceted thing, but focusing on a single thing, for instance, propagation of bad news, India is an intensely competitive market and I need to make it abundantly clear I want to hear the bad news as soon as possible, and that I don't care about blame, as long as we learn from mistakes. From the US, I often get bad news sandwiched between good ones, so I need to redouble attention.

This is a huge topic.

I am from Europe and I have worked with many Europeans, Americans and Asians. Quality of sub-contractor colleagues from India was, same as from anywhere else, directly proportional to what the company paid for them. Good pay = skilled and hard-working. Cheap labour = barely any skills and hardly working.

Nah. Its probably a case of 'you get what you pay for'. They pay for cheap teams, and those teams give them what they pay for. Good talent is expensive in all countries - even if it is relatively cheaper in India compared to SF. The MBAs don't even want to pay that much. They want dirt cheap.

India is just like every other country. Ive worked with very bad developers in India, unbearable, and I've worked with excellent developers that I would hire again in an instant.

quality is at par with price you pay

offshoring isn't limited to India. devs in Canada, Europe, and South America are superb and cheap

We are inexpensive but not cheap ;)

I have similar experience but with Americans. They knew very superficially about the business and completely dependent on our Indian team to get them out of their troubles. Troubles caused by again not knowing and just trusting another team (donno where they were from) to handle their issues. This isn't a one off case either. So get off your high horse. Both countries have qualified and unqualified people in tech and other fields. Just calling yourself the greatest country in the world doesn't change the fact that all of US depends on immigration

I gotta agree with the parent comment about teams in india. No high horses required.

Just seemed like a bunch of Bootcamp grads not caring about work and quality. There were, of course, some competent workers there, but most seemed to have gotten hired through favoritism, not competency.

India seems to have this reputation that the entire population is made up of tech geniuses, but they have a similar ratio of idiots as anywhere else.

The geniuses came to the USA and became people like Satya Nadella

US college grads cant get jobs at Google. Google uses a staffing agency called "Cognizant" that is based 100% in India. $15/hr Cognizant workers recently asked for minimum wage & benefits in CA & Google announced they will not pay workers minimum wage or benefits IN THE US.

Google replaced long-term workers with these contractors to evade labor laws. There are over 275k workers on H1 visas in Santa Clara county alone. Those contracts end & Google replaces them with lower paid positions doing the same work. This is why Google's products don't work as well & also why it can no longer compete or innovate. Google's terrible AI is not the reason for these layoffs. Google's mass layoff have a chilling effect on workers. The message is that if they make any waves or stand up for their rights, they will be replaced. The goal is not to innovate. The goal is to cut costs while minimally maintaining products the entire world is forced to use. Since users have no options, they dont need good products.

I am sure workers try as hard as they can due to the massive power imbalance of having your citizenship status tied to your job. Tech has literally replaced the population of an entire region with H1 visas for one reason only, to cut costs. After starting a severe homeless crisis & destroying a state, Google is now moving to the cheap labor in India & Mexico. This is called transnationalism & US corporations have been doing since the 70s. It might seem like this could be good for India, but Google has no interest in bringing India up. Google only wants to make sure it always has a cheap, desperate pool of labor to exploit. This is the real reason for Googles constant layoffs. Google has been breaking US antitrust & tax laws for years. Its now blatantly breaking US labor laws & neither CA or the US govt cares. The US seems to be more interested in protecting the worst monopoly in history. The only reason Google makes money is by selling user data to anyone & with predatory ads. I am certain US enemies are very aware of the huge data breach thats likely to happen through the sketchy staffing agencies Google uses & the sheer number of unvetted temporary employees that revolve in and out of Googles doors.

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