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Why most Hacktoberfest PRs are from India

261 points by pulkitsh1234 6y ago

paxys 6y ago
This is all a very long winded way to say "a popular YouTuber asked teenagers to do something and they did it". Take out all the cultural aspects of it, and an Instagram/TikTok/Twitch influencer doing this here in the USA would have the exact same result, so I'm not sure I buy all the later reasoning.
- google234123 6y ago
  Yeah, all cultures are the exact same. Very appropriate dismissal.
- dewey 6y ago
  Wasn't this the same problem in all the previous Hacktoberfests?
  - pvtmert 6y ago
    was not that popular (first one being in 2016)
  - wccrawford 6y ago
    Yeah, people have been saying they had the same problem the last couple years. It wasn't as bad, but it was there. 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.
- phoe-krk 6y ago
  > This is all a very long winded way to say "a popular YouTuber asked teenagers to do something and they did it". 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".
- captain_price7 6y ago
  I disagree. I think the key point was that most Indians don't even know what they're doing is immoral. And the post spends majority of its space explaining why this problem is kind of unique to India.
  - sumedh 6y ago
    > I think the key point was that most Indians don't even know what they're doing is immoral. Well they know its immoral they just dont care.
- scrollaway 6y ago
  Either you haven't read the article, or you stopped after the first couple of paragraphs, or you misread it altogether. I don't think you're qualified to give a TLDR.
- sanju2306 6y ago
  Isn't two invalid PR going to ban you?
aplummer 6y ago
It’s interesting comparing this to Australia / NZs cultural career issue, “tall poppy syndrome” [1]. People really need to be coached to even say a personal achievement let alone sell it when apply for jobs. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
- dudul 6y ago
  I had never heard of this syndrome! I think it can be found in Europe as well. 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.
  - splonk 6y ago
    Another variant of this is "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down." I've usually heard it in reference to Japan, but occasionally other Asian countries as well.
    - wccrawford 6y ago
      The opposite is "the squeaky wheel gets the grease". It's interesting how both views are opposite and yet both true.
      - cutemonster 6y ago
        "the squeaky wheel" is about someone who complains. But "tall poppy" is someone who is talented. No contradiction between punishing talented people, and serving those who complain.
        wccrawford 6y ago
        "The nail that sticks up" isn't necessarily about talent. It's about standing out in any way.
kelnos 6y ago
> Somehow Indian parents will become self sufficient, so that children are free to do and discover what they actually want. 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.
- ssivark 6y ago
  Social nets are also “sacrifices from their children”. Ultimately a morsel of food must be produced around the same time it is consumed, so however we might do the book-keeping and resource apportioning (govt welfare through taxes, charities funded by donations, family obligations, etc), the working population at any time needs to produce the “surplus” necessary to take care of the young and the old. In a society dominated by market forces, giving the elderly enough market power to be able to consume is an independent (lower-order) question — a matter of detail consequent of adopting a market framework.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    The current individual approach puts the burden on individuals, and often that burden falls disproportionately on those who can least afford it. Spreading the responsibility around reduces pressure on any one person, and also gets the more fortunate/wealthy in on taking care of society. They've depended on society to enrich them throughout their lives; doing their part to help take care of our aging population should be a cost of doing business.
- saagarjha 6y ago
ssivark 6y ago
I’ll duplicate a comment I made on another thread today. 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:
- monksy 6y ago
  I'm not sure if you get it. India has a lot of people, some terrible infrastructure, has high amounts of competition, and the idea of craftsmanship is incredibly rare. 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.
pvtmert 6y ago
tl;dr because of population, people step on each other to feel 'successful' and get approved by their family/peers. 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
- HowTheStoryEnds 6y ago
  Belgium and the Netherlands have a higher population density, the flanders subregion even more so, you don't see such behaviour propagate there in such prevalence.
  - pvtmert 6y ago
    The point is life-quality is way less than Netherlands or Belgium. 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.
dhruvarora013 6y ago
I think the author touched on this lightly, but I feel like there is a little more to be said about “signaling” or what I like to personally call, “resume flexing”. 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.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  I find the obsession with certificates interesting. One of my past school used to hand them out like candies. It costs like a dollar for 10 and made everyone happy. Same with trophies and medals. After some questioning and feedback from a lot of people indirectly, I concluded that it's one of the best investment any school can make. It results in lot of good PR, recognition, talks, feel good, etc. 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.
  - dheera 6y ago
    That's interesting because I've always found someone being "certified" for e.g. Microsoft something is a huge turnoff for hiring.
gautamcgoel 6y ago
I am Indian-American, and while I cannot comment much about the culture of Indians in India, I can comment a bit about the culture of Indian-Americans, especially second-gen Indian Americans like myself. Many of my Indian-American classmates exhibit the behaviors described in this article. For example, in my high school (a magnet program for gifted students), there were several Indian-American students, many of whom were "high-achieving". Most of them put a lot of effort into trying to buff their resumes to get into good colleges, for example by volunteering on causes they didn't really care about. Cheating was rampant; the attitude many students seemed to have was why actually learn stuff when you can just cheat and get the same career rewards? Almost all of them followed very conventional (read: boring) career paths; in fact most of them became doctors. True creativity and risk-taking was not a personality trait I commonly observed, I'm sorry to say. I was lucky to have very "Americanized" parents who didn't raise me with these backward attitudes.
- Waterluvian 6y ago
  Does cheating work or are there a bunch of horrible doctors out there? How did they not get filtered out during residency?
  - meritganset 6y ago
    To answer your first two questions: yes and yes.
  - gautamcgoel 6y ago
    I'm talking about cheating in high school. It worked in terms of college admissions (presumably these students cheated in college to get into med school, but I can't speak to that with certainty).
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      This is an American high school, right? I don’t think I’ve seen anyone blatantly cheat their way through it (though I’m well aware of “volunteering” and “science projects”); where did you attend?
sarmasamosarma 6y ago
Being cheap and unethical is certainly part of the Indian culture. Whenever I was haggled in price for something it was an Indian. If I’m getting spam phone calls it’s the Indian on the other end. Do the most likely people that can bother doing this for a t-shirt are probably Indians. And look, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a part of the culture and the only way prosper in that society. It’s a shame that the West is too politically correct and DigitalOcean can’t say that they won’t ship t-shirts to India and eliminate the issue.
userbinator 6y ago
IMHO calling it "Hacktoberfest" and not expecting a Jugaad flood seems rather naive of DO. 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.
- wyclif 6y ago
  That was also my initial thought: isn't there anyone in DO management who understands the concept of perverse incentives? "Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome", says Charlie Munger.
  - userbinator 6y ago
    Given how popular I've seen "metrics-driven management" become in the past little while, not specifically in DO but many other places, I'd guess not.
nine_zeros 6y ago
The poster is being too harsh. It's just a t-shirt. Clearly they haven't met art majors in America attending tech talks for free pizza.
- ladberg 6y ago
  I'd bet most companies are incredibly happy to get an otherwise uninterested art student to listen to their presentation for $1 worth of pizza.
  - respondo2134 6y ago
    An early post on HN highlighted how it's the open source projects that get flooded with dummy PRs in the process of DO handing out all those t-shirts that is the problem. For DO it's just a minor marketing expense; for your OS project with several hundred PRs it's a giant problem
    - ladberg 6y ago
      Yep I totally agree with you on that, I was just commenting on the free pizza thing :)
didibus 6y ago
A lot of places have societies where culturally the game is about getting ahead of others. You're all together in a society competing for the top spots. 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
- arebhaibhai 6y ago
  There sure is a difference about always working on own happiness and family/parents happiness. Both are stressful at times and both are rewarding at times. One might feel like foolish and other one just selfish but there is lot more overlap than you think. But then you don't see so many old age home types of things in the latter. It's just culture where people care more for others happiness than their own. 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.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- Aeolun 6y ago
arebhaibhai 6y ago
I agree with some points but most of the problems described in the article are not limited to India. People need coaching/training for things they don't know about, parents have expectations, don't want to see their children failed and want to guide(or control, given the chance), people prefer easy ways to survive. Sure, culture makes difference but not everything is unique. It's just the magnitude of visibility due to population. 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.
calibas 6y ago
> The prevalence of extreme signalling brews the classic and infamous herd mentality in our minds. 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. Sounds remarkably similar to how I was raised here in the US.
- zanny 6y ago
  It seems the more unequal the society the more pressure there is on children to "beat the odds" to avoid languishing in poverty by being useful to capital in some way. 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.
- imheretolearn 6y ago
  >> Sounds remarkably similar to how I was raised here in the US 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"
mraza007 6y ago
Read the entire post. I must say you talked about the things that aren’t really talked about. Showed a different perspective Really good post :)
higerordermap 6y ago
Very well written. Couldn't have said this better myself, while also being politically correct. 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.pdf 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.
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pastelsky 6y ago
Thanks for writing this. I do agree that the idea of resources being constrained and the mentality to do the minimum required to meet bar is quite prevalent — and the educated & well-paid aren't immune at all. 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.
known 6y ago
Indians among most corrupt while doing business abroad https://archive.is/ppsJF https://archive.is/ppsJF
ankurpatel 6y ago
There is a story about this mocking Indian culture. One day the captain of the ship was transporting containers filled with crabs. When he discovered it was crabs he got upset and said to his fellow sailors to make sure there is lids on those containers so that they do not get out. To that one sailor said “Dont worry captain. These are Indian crabs. If one gets up another will pull him down.” I remember thinking of this story and feel we are like crabs in India and some of it has to do with huge population and limited resources. If we had a limited population and plenty of resources we would not be doing Jugad.
- kubanczyk 6y ago
  I was told on Sri Lanka that if you put one crab in the bucket, he can easily get out. But if you put five, not one can get out because the others pull it down. Is it true? They didn't mention the crabs' nationality though.
  - ankurpatel 6y ago
    This is just a joke.
  - snazz 6y ago
    The “crab bucket mentality” is a pretty common idiom.
    - kubanczyk 6y ago
      Oh, TIL. I searched for some real zoological evidence, but found none. Fun fact, my native language has no comparable idiom, although the phenomenon is very much present. We just call it "the mentality".
palerdot 6y ago
Disclaimer: Indian > 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'
championswimmer 6y ago
Thanks for this very detailed article. One of my own videos on GSoC from 3 years back is featured there, and looking back (hindsight is 2020, they say) I see how I was a part of the problem back then. I was naive to think I was just making people more aware and getting people into open source more. 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.

261 points by pulkitsh1234 6y ago

This is all a very long winded way to say "a popular YouTuber asked teenagers to do something and they did it". Take out all the cultural aspects of it, and an Instagram/TikTok/Twitch influencer doing this here in the USA would have the exact same result, so I'm not sure I buy all the later reasoning.

google234123 6y ago
Yeah, all cultures are the exact same. Very appropriate dismissal.
dewey 6y ago
Wasn't this the same problem in all the previous Hacktoberfests?
- pvtmert 6y ago
  was not that popular (first one being in 2016)
- wccrawford 6y ago
  Yeah, people have been saying they had the same problem the last couple years. It wasn't as bad, but it was there. 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.
phoe-krk 6y ago
> This is all a very long winded way to say "a popular YouTuber asked teenagers to do something and they did it". 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".
captain_price7 6y ago
I disagree. I think the key point was that most Indians don't even know what they're doing is immoral. And the post spends majority of its space explaining why this problem is kind of unique to India.
- sumedh 6y ago
  > I think the key point was that most Indians don't even know what they're doing is immoral. Well they know its immoral they just dont care.
scrollaway 6y ago
Either you haven't read the article, or you stopped after the first couple of paragraphs, or you misread it altogether. I don't think you're qualified to give a TLDR.
sanju2306 6y ago
Isn't two invalid PR going to ban you?

aplummer 6y ago

It’s interesting comparing this to Australia / NZs cultural career issue, “tall poppy syndrome” [1]. People really need to be coached to even say a personal achievement let alone sell it when apply for jobs. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome

dudul 6y ago
I had never heard of this syndrome! I think it can be found in Europe as well. 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.
- splonk 6y ago
  Another variant of this is "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down." I've usually heard it in reference to Japan, but occasionally other Asian countries as well.
  - wccrawford 6y ago
    The opposite is "the squeaky wheel gets the grease". It's interesting how both views are opposite and yet both true.
    - cutemonster 6y ago
      "the squeaky wheel" is about someone who complains. But "tall poppy" is someone who is talented. No contradiction between punishing talented people, and serving those who complain.
      - wccrawford 6y ago
        "The nail that sticks up" isn't necessarily about talent. It's about standing out in any way.

kelnos 6y ago

> Somehow Indian parents will become self sufficient, so that children are free to do and discover what they actually want. 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.

ssivark 6y ago
Social nets are also “sacrifices from their children”. Ultimately a morsel of food must be produced around the same time it is consumed, so however we might do the book-keeping and resource apportioning (govt welfare through taxes, charities funded by donations, family obligations, etc), the working population at any time needs to produce the “surplus” necessary to take care of the young and the old. In a society dominated by market forces, giving the elderly enough market power to be able to consume is an independent (lower-order) question — a matter of detail consequent of adopting a market framework.
- kelnos 6y ago
  The current individual approach puts the burden on individuals, and often that burden falls disproportionately on those who can least afford it. Spreading the responsibility around reduces pressure on any one person, and also gets the more fortunate/wealthy in on taking care of society. They've depended on society to enrich them throughout their lives; doing their part to help take care of our aging population should be a cost of doing business.
saagarjha 6y ago

ssivark 6y ago

I’ll duplicate a comment I made on another thread today. 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:

monksy 6y ago
I'm not sure if you get it. India has a lot of people, some terrible infrastructure, has high amounts of competition, and the idea of craftsmanship is incredibly rare. 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.

pvtmert 6y ago

tl;dr because of population, people step on each other to feel 'successful' and get approved by their family/peers. 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

HowTheStoryEnds 6y ago
Belgium and the Netherlands have a higher population density, the flanders subregion even more so, you don't see such behaviour propagate there in such prevalence.
- pvtmert 6y ago
  The point is life-quality is way less than Netherlands or Belgium. 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.

dhruvarora013 6y ago

I think the author touched on this lightly, but I feel like there is a little more to be said about “signaling” or what I like to personally call, “resume flexing”. 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.

searchableguy 6y ago
I find the obsession with certificates interesting. One of my past school used to hand them out like candies. It costs like a dollar for 10 and made everyone happy. Same with trophies and medals. After some questioning and feedback from a lot of people indirectly, I concluded that it's one of the best investment any school can make. It results in lot of good PR, recognition, talks, feel good, etc. 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.
- dheera 6y ago
  That's interesting because I've always found someone being "certified" for e.g. Microsoft something is a huge turnoff for hiring.

gautamcgoel 6y ago

I am Indian-American, and while I cannot comment much about the culture of Indians in India, I can comment a bit about the culture of Indian-Americans, especially second-gen Indian Americans like myself. Many of my Indian-American classmates exhibit the behaviors described in this article. For example, in my high school (a magnet program for gifted students), there were several Indian-American students, many of whom were "high-achieving". Most of them put a lot of effort into trying to buff their resumes to get into good colleges, for example by volunteering on causes they didn't really care about. Cheating was rampant; the attitude many students seemed to have was why actually learn stuff when you can just cheat and get the same career rewards? Almost all of them followed very conventional (read: boring) career paths; in fact most of them became doctors. True creativity and risk-taking was not a personality trait I commonly observed, I'm sorry to say. I was lucky to have very "Americanized" parents who didn't raise me with these backward attitudes.

Waterluvian 6y ago
Does cheating work or are there a bunch of horrible doctors out there? How did they not get filtered out during residency?
- meritganset 6y ago
  To answer your first two questions: yes and yes.
- gautamcgoel 6y ago
  I'm talking about cheating in high school. It worked in terms of college admissions (presumably these students cheated in college to get into med school, but I can't speak to that with certainty).
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    This is an American high school, right? I don’t think I’ve seen anyone blatantly cheat their way through it (though I’m well aware of “volunteering” and “science projects”); where did you attend?

sarmasamosarma 6y ago

Being cheap and unethical is certainly part of the Indian culture. Whenever I was haggled in price for something it was an Indian. If I’m getting spam phone calls it’s the Indian on the other end. Do the most likely people that can bother doing this for a t-shirt are probably Indians. And look, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a part of the culture and the only way prosper in that society. It’s a shame that the West is too politically correct and DigitalOcean can’t say that they won’t ship t-shirts to India and eliminate the issue.

userbinator 6y ago

IMHO calling it "Hacktoberfest" and not expecting a Jugaad flood seems rather naive of DO. 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.

wyclif 6y ago
That was also my initial thought: isn't there anyone in DO management who understands the concept of perverse incentives? "Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome", says Charlie Munger.
- userbinator 6y ago
  Given how popular I've seen "metrics-driven management" become in the past little while, not specifically in DO but many other places, I'd guess not.

nine_zeros 6y ago

The poster is being too harsh. It's just a t-shirt. Clearly they haven't met art majors in America attending tech talks for free pizza.

ladberg 6y ago
I'd bet most companies are incredibly happy to get an otherwise uninterested art student to listen to their presentation for $1 worth of pizza.
- respondo2134 6y ago
  An early post on HN highlighted how it's the open source projects that get flooded with dummy PRs in the process of DO handing out all those t-shirts that is the problem. For DO it's just a minor marketing expense; for your OS project with several hundred PRs it's a giant problem
  - ladberg 6y ago
    Yep I totally agree with you on that, I was just commenting on the free pizza thing :)

didibus 6y ago

A lot of places have societies where culturally the game is about getting ahead of others. You're all together in a society competing for the top spots. 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

arebhaibhai 6y ago
There sure is a difference about always working on own happiness and family/parents happiness. Both are stressful at times and both are rewarding at times. One might feel like foolish and other one just selfish but there is lot more overlap than you think. But then you don't see so many old age home types of things in the latter. It's just culture where people care more for others happiness than their own. 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.
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Aeolun 6y ago

arebhaibhai 6y ago

I agree with some points but most of the problems described in the article are not limited to India. People need coaching/training for things they don't know about, parents have expectations, don't want to see their children failed and want to guide(or control, given the chance), people prefer easy ways to survive. Sure, culture makes difference but not everything is unique. It's just the magnitude of visibility due to population. 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.

calibas 6y ago

> The prevalence of extreme signalling brews the classic and infamous herd mentality in our minds. 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. Sounds remarkably similar to how I was raised here in the US.

zanny 6y ago
It seems the more unequal the society the more pressure there is on children to "beat the odds" to avoid languishing in poverty by being useful to capital in some way. 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.
imheretolearn 6y ago
>> Sounds remarkably similar to how I was raised here in the US 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"

mraza007 6y ago

Read the entire post. I must say you talked about the things that aren’t really talked about. Showed a different perspective Really good post :)

higerordermap 6y ago

Very well written. Couldn't have said this better myself, while also being politically correct. 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.pdf 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.

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pastelsky 6y ago

Thanks for writing this. I do agree that the idea of resources being constrained and the mentality to do the minimum required to meet bar is quite prevalent — and the educated & well-paid aren't immune at all. 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.

known 6y ago

Indians among most corrupt while doing business abroad https://archive.is/ppsJF https://archive.is/ppsJF

ankurpatel 6y ago

There is a story about this mocking Indian culture. One day the captain of the ship was transporting containers filled with crabs. When he discovered it was crabs he got upset and said to his fellow sailors to make sure there is lids on those containers so that they do not get out. To that one sailor said “Dont worry captain. These are Indian crabs. If one gets up another will pull him down.” I remember thinking of this story and feel we are like crabs in India and some of it has to do with huge population and limited resources. If we had a limited population and plenty of resources we would not be doing Jugad.

kubanczyk 6y ago
I was told on Sri Lanka that if you put one crab in the bucket, he can easily get out. But if you put five, not one can get out because the others pull it down. Is it true? They didn't mention the crabs' nationality though.
- ankurpatel 6y ago
  This is just a joke.
- snazz 6y ago
  The “crab bucket mentality” is a pretty common idiom.
  - kubanczyk 6y ago
    Oh, TIL. I searched for some real zoological evidence, but found none. Fun fact, my native language has no comparable idiom, although the phenomenon is very much present. We just call it "the mentality".

palerdot 6y ago

Disclaimer: Indian > 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'

championswimmer 6y ago

Thanks for this very detailed article. One of my own videos on GSoC from 3 years back is featured there, and looking back (hindsight is 2020, they say) I see how I was a part of the problem back then. I was naive to think I was just making people more aware and getting people into open source more. 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.