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I was a consultant for an American company that also hired dozens of cheap consultants from development countries. Mostly India but also neighbouring countries

by mkl95 4y ago

I was a consultant for an American company that also hired dozens of cheap consultants from development countries. Mostly India but also neighbouring countries and some Eastern European countries. Indians were by far the hardest to work with. They ghosted women systematically which was a nightmare for our project manager. They also lied shamelessly about their qualifications which led to absurd situations. The problem doesn't lie in hiring Indian people though. It's in hiring cheap labour for the sake of it. If you want to get from point A to point B you either hire people who can do it or you don't. If you believe those guys have actually been delivering quality software for a decade with some technology despite being dirt cheap, you are just an idiot.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
notart666 4y ago
Many of them just can't speak English correctly. Only a small percentage of the individuals who speak English at a proficient level of those who do, they predominately come from very wealthy upper caste families and now you have a new problem. And well. When it comes to caste, many Indians simply believe it to not exist anymore in India because of how deeply engrained it is in their social classes they never notice it.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  I don’t understand the English thing. I lived in Singapore for 10 years and have heard so many words pronounced wrong. To give an example one of my ex coworkers used to say the word swap as sw-app. Another one said return as ret-urn. I did ask them and they said they are taught phonics and so they just say the words how they are written. English is such a turd language. We have so many rules and then all those rules get broken all the time. (Despite the English thing which didn’t get in the way of working together, my single team are the best team I’ve ever had in my career and I’ll really miss them)
  - alephnerd 4y ago
    You’re giving the original poster too much credit. He’s just straight up being racist. If he heard Singaporean English m, ai lah this ang moh would also call it incomprehensible.
    - philliphaydon 4y ago
      > He’s just straight up being racist. I don't know if he's being racist or not. But the claim they can't speak english is not uncommon. I don't know what they are like in America or UK, but having worked with many while living in Singapore, I think they can speak english, but pronunciation is difficult. > Singaporean English I wasn't referring to Singaporean Indian speaking English, but can see how that it may have come across as that. The company I worked for in SG, all the devs were on EP, so their English was learnt in India.
  - notart666 4y ago
    English is the simplest Latin based language. This has nothing to do with pronunciation but not even knowing basic words. Or how to communicate. Only a small percentage of Indians speak English and most statistics on it are heavily inflated. The Indian English Education system is the same one the Japanese and Koreans use. And they don't know English. The reality is it's like if you learned Spanish in middle school to highschool. That's the average English proficency. Most Indians do not interact with people outside their groups as most things are written in the languages they use. It's not Singapore or even close to it in English proficency trying to claim it is, is a lie.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - gsich 4y ago
      Pronunciation and orthography vary in many cases, not simple at all. Unless you already come from a germanic language, then it's relatively easy.
      - 4y ago
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  English is an official language over there, but it is spoken differently.
  - lloydatkinson 4y ago
    Different indeed. Every sentence sounds like a question with a small delay before the last word of the sentence. I have no idea why this is, but you can see it in literally any Indian engineering lecture recording on YouTube. It definitely does not inspire confidence they know the topic they are teaching.
    - secondcoming 4y ago
      I find this quirk quite endearing for some reason.
    - programmer_dude 4y ago
      Hmm, this is interesting. Never realized this was a thing. Care to submit a specimen link?
    - mavelikara 4y ago
      > It definitely does not inspire confidence they know the topic they are teaching. Only to people who judge competence based on diction.
  - sk0g 4y ago
    Hindi in the cities is interesting, it can turn into a 50-50 blend of English and Hindi, with English used for most nouns, and sentences strung together with Hindi otherwise. Having said that, actual conversational skills in English were lacking even in Delhi. You can throw out words and hope there's enough of a shared vocabulary to get ideas across, but the majority of people aren't fluent, or even conversational in it. I've heard the Southern part is somewhat better though, as Hindi is less pervasive, and English is used more often as a second language if you travel out of state and the likes.
- azangru 4y ago
  > Many of them just can't speak English correctly. Only a small percentage of the individuals who speak English at a proficient level of those who do, they predominately come from very wealthy upper caste families and now you have a new problem. There is something very confusing to me in this paragraph. You put forth as a premise (at least if I am understanding the logic of the paragraph correctly) that fluency in English is an important skill for doing a job properly. You also say that it is the wealthy part of the population that will have access to resources to train their children in that skill. All good so far. But then you say that it is a problem, and this is where I am lost. Are you suggesting that money should not buy good education? Assuming good education is a scarce commodity, that would go against the principles of markets. Or are you suggesting that English fluency (or other consequences of good education) should not be considered when screening for a job in a tech company? But that goes against your initial premise, and also makes one wonder what purpose a good education has if not getting one prepared for a high-skilled job.
  - voidwtf 4y ago
    I think he might be implying some issues related to the caste system. It’s been discussed on HN before about how some members of the upper caste may not treat other team members from a lower caste appropriately. Despite no longer being in India, and despite that behavior not being acceptable in the host country.
    - petilon 4y ago
      > It’s been discussed on HN before... Yes, it has been used on HN as a bludgeon but the reality is a little different! Yes, the ancient caste system still exists in India. But today it is only relevant when it comes to politics and marriage. Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/opinion/sunday/caste-is-not-past.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/opinion/sunday/caste-is-no...
      - notart666 4y ago
        The fact you believe it to only be relevant in marriage and politics goes to show the naivety of your understanding of how prevalent this 2000+ year caste system is. I'd go as far as calling it the oldest system of systemic slavery in the world. The fact it plays such a level to this day in the modern lives of individuals shows how the Indians have normalized it in their society and often directly bring it into our own. It even goes as far as impacting children, and starts from their. Who they know. Who they can interact with. Where they're accepted. At every step impacting and controlling their lives. To claim what you have said to trivialize it is kind of shocking to me.
- mikrl 4y ago
  > Many of them just can't speak English correctly. I’m someone who loves seeing well written and hearing well spoken English. The standards I hold myself to are quite high. However, I have never had a problem with people- native or foreign born- with less than perfect English communication skills. Going down that route smacks of elitism, xenophobia and a hyper-normative mindset. The way you get good at standard English is by practice, which they are doing every day at work using the skills (technology) they have mastered. Some of my family are ESL and my place of birth (in the UK, for God’s sake) was and is looked down on for the dialect. Is it really that hard to just ask someone to repeat or restate themselves?
  - throwaway102233 4y ago
    if only we could all be as enlightened as you are, you are obviously not of this earth :pray:
  - therealdrag0 4y ago
    I agree, though there’s a point at which no repetition helps, which is really awkward. And honestly stresses me out going into meetings with them (not Indians in my case).
  - Yoric 4y ago
    I'm not a native English speaker. I've been practicing English pretty much every day for decades but speaking with someone who has an unfamiliar enough accent or dialect – or sometimes culture – is really hard for me. After asking them to repeat/rephrase a few times, I feel rude and/or stupid. Me speaking with an Indian with a non-{US, British} accent means that very little information is going to get across during the conversation, because this problem shows up in both directions. Of course, the issue essentially vanishes when the conversation is written down. Unfortunately, many native English speaker that I've been in touch with fail to understand the cognitive cost of oral communication.
- TMWNN 4y ago
  >Only a small percentage of the individuals who speak English at a proficient level of those who do, they predominately come from very wealthy upper caste families and now you have a new problem. As a non-Indian, the caste problem seems so endemic that the only solution seems to be to not hire anyone born in India. Their American-born children will, presumably, have overcome the issue. (Not 100% serious, but not 100% joking.)
- 1letterunixname 4y ago
  It's one of those dumb human antipatterns like racism, sexism, and most other legitimately bad -isms: pick attribute A and make that undesirable while making attribute B desirable. Perhaps in Indian and Western schools alike, they should consider the (in)famous eye color discrimination exercise to give a glimpse of how horrible it is. Comfortable, sheltered children tend to grow up to be ignorant adults bordering on clueless. It's only when someone has experienced what it feels like can they grow a modicum of empathy or sympathy.
NaughtyShiba 4y ago
Eastern Europe ain’t developing countries…
- betaby 4y ago
  As the the opposite to? And by what metric? Maternal mortality? Human development index? Access to clean water?
- mccorrinall 4y ago
  Depends on who you ask. The following graphic is on the article about developing countries and includes emerging markets in the „lesser developed“ category: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IMF_advanced_economies_and_UN_least_developed_countries.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IMF_advanced_economi...
- fruit2020 4y ago
  Indeed. They may not be at the top when you sort countries by their metrics, but still great to live in.
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  Depends where. For example Ukraine (before the war) had a similar gdp per capita to my home country, Morocco, which is definitely a developing country. Belarus is richer, but not by much. I guess those two countries are more of an exception now though.
29athrowaway 4y ago
My observation is that the Indians that make it to the US via companies like TCS, Infosys and others, are the product of a highly political environment where you are expected to worship your manager and tend to be political as fuck. They are very different to Indians that have not worked in such environments, who tend to be much more trustworthy and ethical. In America, a manager is another employee who can be wrong just as often as anyone else. I am glad to see in recent years that the startup scene in India is empowering capable engineers to escape the fucked up reality that can be the corporate work culture over there.
- alephnerd 4y ago
  A lot of it is due to lack of resources. Even Indian grads view TCS and TCS type companies as the choice of last resort. They’re still paying the same wages as they were in the early 2000s (3.5 Lakh), while ignoring inflation (3.5 lakh would be around $10k in the 2000s but only around $5k in 2022). Lots of Indian companies and western companies pay way more than that. Heck, even farming would get you a guaranteed 3 Lakh subsidy with MSP
  - 29athrowaway 4y ago
    They should just go on strike.
    - broke_idiot 4y ago
rvba 4y ago
So the problem is hiring cheap labor, yet you didnt list any problems with Eastern European. Since some Indians fucked something up somewhere, there is subtle racism towards Eastern Europeans?
- pid_0 4y ago
- wiseowise 4y ago
  Eastern Europe candidates are consistently better from my experience.
la64710 4y ago
Is that why Infosys HR was directed to NOT hire Indian origin candidates? BTW what are these development countries?
deodar 4y ago
nonamechicken 4y ago
> They ghosted women systematically which was a nightmare for our project manager. What do you mean by this? That they refuse to work with women based on their gender? "India has more women STEM grads than US, UK or France". And I see way way more women employees in software companies in India compared to US. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/india-has-more-women-stem-grads-than-us-uk-or-france/articleshow/84571128.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/india-has-more-wom...
- petilon 4y ago
  Right on! Technology firms in India have a better female to male staff ratio than the tech giants of Silicon Valley [1]. India has a much better male-to-female ratio compared with the U.S. Engineering male-female ratio in India is 1.96 as compared with 4.61 in the U.S. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-professional/2015/jun/24/why-women-in-stem-may-be-better-off-working-in-india-and-latin-america https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-professional/2015/jun/2... [2] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/engineering-is-a-mane28099s-field-changing-a-stereotype-with-a-lesson-from-india/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/engineering-... What India Can Teach Silicon Valley About Its Gender Problem https://www.wired.com/2014/08/silicon-valley-sexism/ https://www.wired.com/2014/08/silicon-valley-sexism/ https://blog.hackerrank.com/which-countries-have-the-most-skilled-female-developers/ https://blog.hackerrank.com/which-countries-have-the-most-sk... The 2015 stackoverflow survey has this interesting statement: "Developers in India are 3-times more likely to be female than developers in the United States." See https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2015 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2015 Actually it is worse than it sounds because most of the female developers in the United States are first generation immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe.
- giantg2 4y ago
  I have a relative that worked for a US medical company. There were certain people who would take women's lunches out of the microwave right in front of them just so they could cook their own. She said they were mostly from the south central area of Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangledesh). It was only a few individuals, not everyone. Obviously this is a secondhand story, so I can't vouch for it directly. I was shocked and could barely believe what I was hearing.
giantg2 4y ago
My company quickly realized that outsourcing to an offshore Indian company was a mistake. We tried giving them new projects, but it was useless. We still use them, but only for very simple support work. My project was outsourced to them for support. The transition of our mature project to them took about a year. They wanted to replace our 10-12 person team with about 19 of their people. They also needed some of the people onshore due to regulations. So much for cost savings. And as soon as someone got good, they left the team/company because they could get a better job anywhere else. My company also outsourced onshore to another Indian company to modernize an area of our business (same area as rhe above example). It's a mess. They're behind schedule by years. They promised they had an ML system to handle this type of business case, but it's not working. They're also telling people to only record 40 hours on their time sheet even if they're working 50-60 hours. They've had so many people leave that they're throwing money at the remaining expert people to stay.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  When I worked with a large team for 2 years, including going over to run a week long training program .. I found just a general disinclination for efficiency, automation or time saving... which cynically wouldn't surprise you when you consider they are running a quantity/body shop. The craziest conversation I had was trying to convince a guy who came in every morning and ran a script that he could put it on a timer/scheduler/cron/anything to just run the report so it was in his inbox every morning. It's not that he was incapable technically, or did not understand it. It was as if I was asking him to violate a religious oath. "Thou shall not reduce billable hours." His workflow remained - login to desktop, open IDE, open script, modify date, save, execute script, open FTP app, login to server, download file to desktop, open email app, create new email, attach file, email file to onshore. Solid 30min++ of work if you do it right.
  - ramphastidae 4y ago
    Devils advocate: would he get paid any more to be more efficient? Or would he just get more work?
kfk 4y ago
The problem here is the idea that offshore country labor arbitrage can give you ridicolous cost savings way over 50% compared to local resources. Of course this is pipe dreams and especially with remote work good people have a cost, no matter where they work. But companies like Infosys still are forced on selling with that sales pitch… so what happens? They hire mostly unqualified people. This is not a problem with Indian employees, it’s a problem of Western executives having unrealistic IT costs expectations. Want to save IT costs? Have realistic expectations on the number of digital initiatives your company can run, do less things basically, don’t try to do a lot and hire cheap labor to keep IT cost low.
dominotw 4y ago
Main problem with hiring through these shops is you never know who exactly is working on your project. They would present us with resumes of some experienced candidates but it looked like that person is being sold to multiple companies with expectation that he would be exclusive. They would all be committing to code repo with single "git@congnizant.com" so you never know who the man behind the screen is. All conference calls would have the person we hired on the call but his voice would sound different everytime. It was freaking nightmare. I will never ever work for a company that does hybrid onshore/offshore development. That evnviroment is a proxy that they treat software dev as mundane cost center that deserves no respect.
- tatpacc 4y ago
  > They would all be committing to code repo with single "git@congnizant.com" it really depends, what's the process of end client. In many cases, even each offshore developers have client's email and it's used as SSO with GIT/Slack/etc. Not saying that what you are describing is not possible with this but it certainly makes it difficult and almost not feasible.
fellellor 4y ago
In this lawsuit, an American woman alleges that a bunch of high level (probably white) American executives in the American branch of an Indian company were very biased against women and workers of Indian origin. And while expressing their biases through their actions they created a very hostile work environment for this person. At least read the thing for a minute before going on a tangent?
- mkl95 4y ago
  One of my favourite things about HN is that a mod would never say something like this.
TrueGeek 4y ago
Some humans suck, some don’t. I don’t think it’s accurate to say this divide is mostly split between countries. I’ve worked with multi-national companies that have great culture and diversity and multi-national companies that are much like you describe. The problem is not that “x people are by far the worst”. The problem is that culture needs to be led top down. It needs to be thought of during hiring. Intolerance needs to be addressed after hiring.
steveBK123 4y ago
Many years ago I worked at big dumb banks. There was a lot of top down forced offshoring with ultimatums like - hey you can have +4 headcount in Mumbai or +0 in NY. Further, we found we had to spend $10Ks at a time to send NY/London staff over there monthly to figure out wtf was going on. These offshoring firms were running some serious scams. We once had a guy come back (mid 2000s) and say that his 5 devs in Hyderabad were equipped with 4 PCs and 3 phones between them!! We had one bank offshore its datacenter ops (while the datacenter physically remained onshore). It was incredible. We'd have a RAID disk failure in a datacenter across the Hudson River in Jersey City, practically visible out my window, raise a ticket which would take 36 hours to get picked up by someone in India, to bounce around the globe and eventually get back to the onshore datacenter ops person who would do the physical disk replacement. Finally one ticket took so long to address that we had a cascade of disk failure and lost the whole RAID. Just anecdote after anecdote of crazy stuff like this. Lot of these deals ended up in litigation. There were many very smart developers over there, but the offshoring industrial system creates a race to the bottom and quantity over quality preference. With the turnover of good staff, the only way to keep the better ones was to get the visas sorted to nearshore them in US - largely defeating the purpose of the cost saving. A lot of the banks moved away from this model and created "centers of excellence" in UK/US/Canada nearshore locations. You get competent staff for decent rates who are happy to have a great job without moving to the big city away from home/school/family. Not everyone who writes software wants to live in Bay Area/NYC/London. Time zones line up more humanely. Win win.
- tatpacc 4y ago
  > With the turnover of good staff, the only way to keep the better ones was to get the visas sorted to nearshore them in US > largely defeating the purpose of the cost saving. agree on most part including that onshore billing is obvious more than offshore but still for client it's saving as oppose to hiring FTE. Often client also want good resource to stick so they allow them to move to onsite. In my case, we informed client after my H1B was stamped, that I have to move to States either in this project or other project, client approved in 2-3 hours. For the another resource, client took 4-5 months to decide and then replied that we don't have budget for onshore billing. So in case of good resource, it's often win-win for everyone involved.
arinlen 4y ago
> Indians were by far the hardest to work with. They ghosted women systematically which was a nightmare for our project manager. I recall that Amazon went through the trouble of paying for TV ads proudly stating that they now have in India delivery posts manned exclusively by women, and the ad is comprised of indian delivery women delivering packages to indian men who in turn are giving them all sorts of weird looks. I recall seeing this ad and thinking to myself: are things in India so bad to the point that this sort of measure and ad passes off as something to be proud about?
- bongoman37 4y ago
ksec 4y ago
> They also lied shamelessly about their qualifications which led to absurd situations. This I have experience with. The word absurd is not an exaggeration, it might not even be enough to describe it. >They ghosted women systematically which was a nightmare for our project manager. I dont understand this sentence. Does Ghosted here mean something different to ghosting in hiring?
- wongarsu 4y ago
  I assume they didn't answer questions or requests from women, or otherwise silently refused to directly work with them.
  - ksec 4y ago
    Sigh. I would have thought people who worked in Tech would be open minded ( and sometimes too open minded ). My next question would be if they are doing this to Indian woman or every woman?
    - nalaz 4y ago
      What in tech makes you open minded? I work in tech and many of my friends work in tech too and we aren’t particularly open minded. Of course we don’t tell anybody about that…

by mkl95 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

notart666 4y ago

Many of them just can't speak English correctly. Only a small percentage of the individuals who speak English at a proficient level of those who do, they predominately come from very wealthy upper caste families and now you have a new problem. And well. When it comes to caste, many Indians simply believe it to not exist anymore in India because of how deeply engrained it is in their social classes they never notice it.

philliphaydon 4y ago
I don’t understand the English thing. I lived in Singapore for 10 years and have heard so many words pronounced wrong. To give an example one of my ex coworkers used to say the word swap as sw-app. Another one said return as ret-urn. I did ask them and they said they are taught phonics and so they just say the words how they are written. English is such a turd language. We have so many rules and then all those rules get broken all the time. (Despite the English thing which didn’t get in the way of working together, my single team are the best team I’ve ever had in my career and I’ll really miss them)
- alephnerd 4y ago
  You’re giving the original poster too much credit. He’s just straight up being racist. If he heard Singaporean English m, ai lah this ang moh would also call it incomprehensible.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    > He’s just straight up being racist. I don't know if he's being racist or not. But the claim they can't speak english is not uncommon. I don't know what they are like in America or UK, but having worked with many while living in Singapore, I think they can speak english, but pronunciation is difficult. > Singaporean English I wasn't referring to Singaporean Indian speaking English, but can see how that it may have come across as that. The company I worked for in SG, all the devs were on EP, so their English was learnt in India.
- notart666 4y ago
  English is the simplest Latin based language. This has nothing to do with pronunciation but not even knowing basic words. Or how to communicate. Only a small percentage of Indians speak English and most statistics on it are heavily inflated. The Indian English Education system is the same one the Japanese and Koreans use. And they don't know English. The reality is it's like if you learned Spanish in middle school to highschool. That's the average English proficency. Most Indians do not interact with people outside their groups as most things are written in the languages they use. It's not Singapore or even close to it in English proficency trying to claim it is, is a lie.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - gsich 4y ago
    Pronunciation and orthography vary in many cases, not simple at all. Unless you already come from a germanic language, then it's relatively easy.
    - 4y ago
29athrowaway 4y ago
English is an official language over there, but it is spoken differently.
- lloydatkinson 4y ago
  Different indeed. Every sentence sounds like a question with a small delay before the last word of the sentence. I have no idea why this is, but you can see it in literally any Indian engineering lecture recording on YouTube. It definitely does not inspire confidence they know the topic they are teaching.
  - secondcoming 4y ago
    I find this quirk quite endearing for some reason.
  - programmer_dude 4y ago
    Hmm, this is interesting. Never realized this was a thing. Care to submit a specimen link?
  - mavelikara 4y ago
    > It definitely does not inspire confidence they know the topic they are teaching. Only to people who judge competence based on diction.
- sk0g 4y ago
  Hindi in the cities is interesting, it can turn into a 50-50 blend of English and Hindi, with English used for most nouns, and sentences strung together with Hindi otherwise. Having said that, actual conversational skills in English were lacking even in Delhi. You can throw out words and hope there's enough of a shared vocabulary to get ideas across, but the majority of people aren't fluent, or even conversational in it. I've heard the Southern part is somewhat better though, as Hindi is less pervasive, and English is used more often as a second language if you travel out of state and the likes.
azangru 4y ago
> Many of them just can't speak English correctly. Only a small percentage of the individuals who speak English at a proficient level of those who do, they predominately come from very wealthy upper caste families and now you have a new problem. There is something very confusing to me in this paragraph. You put forth as a premise (at least if I am understanding the logic of the paragraph correctly) that fluency in English is an important skill for doing a job properly. You also say that it is the wealthy part of the population that will have access to resources to train their children in that skill. All good so far. But then you say that it is a problem, and this is where I am lost. Are you suggesting that money should not buy good education? Assuming good education is a scarce commodity, that would go against the principles of markets. Or are you suggesting that English fluency (or other consequences of good education) should not be considered when screening for a job in a tech company? But that goes against your initial premise, and also makes one wonder what purpose a good education has if not getting one prepared for a high-skilled job.
- voidwtf 4y ago
  I think he might be implying some issues related to the caste system. It’s been discussed on HN before about how some members of the upper caste may not treat other team members from a lower caste appropriately. Despite no longer being in India, and despite that behavior not being acceptable in the host country.
  - petilon 4y ago
    > It’s been discussed on HN before... Yes, it has been used on HN as a bludgeon but the reality is a little different! Yes, the ancient caste system still exists in India. But today it is only relevant when it comes to politics and marriage. Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/opinion/sunday/caste-is-not-past.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/opinion/sunday/caste-is-no...
    - notart666 4y ago
      The fact you believe it to only be relevant in marriage and politics goes to show the naivety of your understanding of how prevalent this 2000+ year caste system is. I'd go as far as calling it the oldest system of systemic slavery in the world. The fact it plays such a level to this day in the modern lives of individuals shows how the Indians have normalized it in their society and often directly bring it into our own. It even goes as far as impacting children, and starts from their. Who they know. Who they can interact with. Where they're accepted. At every step impacting and controlling their lives. To claim what you have said to trivialize it is kind of shocking to me.
mikrl 4y ago
> Many of them just can't speak English correctly. I’m someone who loves seeing well written and hearing well spoken English. The standards I hold myself to are quite high. However, I have never had a problem with people- native or foreign born- with less than perfect English communication skills. Going down that route smacks of elitism, xenophobia and a hyper-normative mindset. The way you get good at standard English is by practice, which they are doing every day at work using the skills (technology) they have mastered. Some of my family are ESL and my place of birth (in the UK, for God’s sake) was and is looked down on for the dialect. Is it really that hard to just ask someone to repeat or restate themselves?
- throwaway102233 4y ago
  if only we could all be as enlightened as you are, you are obviously not of this earth :pray:
- therealdrag0 4y ago
  I agree, though there’s a point at which no repetition helps, which is really awkward. And honestly stresses me out going into meetings with them (not Indians in my case).
- Yoric 4y ago
  I'm not a native English speaker. I've been practicing English pretty much every day for decades but speaking with someone who has an unfamiliar enough accent or dialect – or sometimes culture – is really hard for me. After asking them to repeat/rephrase a few times, I feel rude and/or stupid. Me speaking with an Indian with a non-{US, British} accent means that very little information is going to get across during the conversation, because this problem shows up in both directions. Of course, the issue essentially vanishes when the conversation is written down. Unfortunately, many native English speaker that I've been in touch with fail to understand the cognitive cost of oral communication.
TMWNN 4y ago
>Only a small percentage of the individuals who speak English at a proficient level of those who do, they predominately come from very wealthy upper caste families and now you have a new problem. As a non-Indian, the caste problem seems so endemic that the only solution seems to be to not hire anyone born in India. Their American-born children will, presumably, have overcome the issue. (Not 100% serious, but not 100% joking.)
1letterunixname 4y ago
It's one of those dumb human antipatterns like racism, sexism, and most other legitimately bad -isms: pick attribute A and make that undesirable while making attribute B desirable. Perhaps in Indian and Western schools alike, they should consider the (in)famous eye color discrimination exercise to give a glimpse of how horrible it is. Comfortable, sheltered children tend to grow up to be ignorant adults bordering on clueless. It's only when someone has experienced what it feels like can they grow a modicum of empathy or sympathy.

NaughtyShiba 4y ago

Eastern Europe ain’t developing countries…

betaby 4y ago
As the the opposite to? And by what metric? Maternal mortality? Human development index? Access to clean water?
mccorrinall 4y ago
Depends on who you ask. The following graphic is on the article about developing countries and includes emerging markets in the „lesser developed“ category: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IMF_advanced_economies_and_UN_least_developed_countries.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IMF_advanced_economi...
fruit2020 4y ago
Indeed. They may not be at the top when you sort countries by their metrics, but still great to live in.
mardifoufs 4y ago
Depends where. For example Ukraine (before the war) had a similar gdp per capita to my home country, Morocco, which is definitely a developing country. Belarus is richer, but not by much. I guess those two countries are more of an exception now though.

29athrowaway 4y ago

My observation is that the Indians that make it to the US via companies like TCS, Infosys and others, are the product of a highly political environment where you are expected to worship your manager and tend to be political as fuck. They are very different to Indians that have not worked in such environments, who tend to be much more trustworthy and ethical. In America, a manager is another employee who can be wrong just as often as anyone else. I am glad to see in recent years that the startup scene in India is empowering capable engineers to escape the fucked up reality that can be the corporate work culture over there.

alephnerd 4y ago
A lot of it is due to lack of resources. Even Indian grads view TCS and TCS type companies as the choice of last resort. They’re still paying the same wages as they were in the early 2000s (3.5 Lakh), while ignoring inflation (3.5 lakh would be around $10k in the 2000s but only around $5k in 2022). Lots of Indian companies and western companies pay way more than that. Heck, even farming would get you a guaranteed 3 Lakh subsidy with MSP
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  They should just go on strike.
  - broke_idiot 4y ago

rvba 4y ago

So the problem is hiring cheap labor, yet you didnt list any problems with Eastern European. Since some Indians fucked something up somewhere, there is subtle racism towards Eastern Europeans?

pid_0 4y ago
wiseowise 4y ago
Eastern Europe candidates are consistently better from my experience.

la64710 4y ago

Is that why Infosys HR was directed to NOT hire Indian origin candidates? BTW what are these development countries?

deodar 4y ago

nonamechicken 4y ago

> They ghosted women systematically which was a nightmare for our project manager. What do you mean by this? That they refuse to work with women based on their gender? "India has more women STEM grads than US, UK or France". And I see way way more women employees in software companies in India compared to US. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/india-has-more-women-stem-grads-than-us-uk-or-france/articleshow/84571128.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/india-has-more-wom...

petilon 4y ago
Right on! Technology firms in India have a better female to male staff ratio than the tech giants of Silicon Valley [1]. India has a much better male-to-female ratio compared with the U.S. Engineering male-female ratio in India is 1.96 as compared with 4.61 in the U.S. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-professional/2015/jun/24/why-women-in-stem-may-be-better-off-working-in-india-and-latin-america https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-professional/2015/jun/2... [2] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/engineering-is-a-mane28099s-field-changing-a-stereotype-with-a-lesson-from-india/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/engineering-... What India Can Teach Silicon Valley About Its Gender Problem https://www.wired.com/2014/08/silicon-valley-sexism/ https://www.wired.com/2014/08/silicon-valley-sexism/ https://blog.hackerrank.com/which-countries-have-the-most-skilled-female-developers/ https://blog.hackerrank.com/which-countries-have-the-most-sk... The 2015 stackoverflow survey has this interesting statement: "Developers in India are 3-times more likely to be female than developers in the United States." See https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2015 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2015 Actually it is worse than it sounds because most of the female developers in the United States are first generation immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe.
giantg2 4y ago
I have a relative that worked for a US medical company. There were certain people who would take women's lunches out of the microwave right in front of them just so they could cook their own. She said they were mostly from the south central area of Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangledesh). It was only a few individuals, not everyone. Obviously this is a secondhand story, so I can't vouch for it directly. I was shocked and could barely believe what I was hearing.

giantg2 4y ago

My company quickly realized that outsourcing to an offshore Indian company was a mistake. We tried giving them new projects, but it was useless. We still use them, but only for very simple support work. My project was outsourced to them for support. The transition of our mature project to them took about a year. They wanted to replace our 10-12 person team with about 19 of their people. They also needed some of the people onshore due to regulations. So much for cost savings. And as soon as someone got good, they left the team/company because they could get a better job anywhere else. My company also outsourced onshore to another Indian company to modernize an area of our business (same area as rhe above example). It's a mess. They're behind schedule by years. They promised they had an ML system to handle this type of business case, but it's not working. They're also telling people to only record 40 hours on their time sheet even if they're working 50-60 hours. They've had so many people leave that they're throwing money at the remaining expert people to stay.

steveBK123 4y ago
When I worked with a large team for 2 years, including going over to run a week long training program .. I found just a general disinclination for efficiency, automation or time saving... which cynically wouldn't surprise you when you consider they are running a quantity/body shop. The craziest conversation I had was trying to convince a guy who came in every morning and ran a script that he could put it on a timer/scheduler/cron/anything to just run the report so it was in his inbox every morning. It's not that he was incapable technically, or did not understand it. It was as if I was asking him to violate a religious oath. "Thou shall not reduce billable hours." His workflow remained - login to desktop, open IDE, open script, modify date, save, execute script, open FTP app, login to server, download file to desktop, open email app, create new email, attach file, email file to onshore. Solid 30min++ of work if you do it right.
- ramphastidae 4y ago
  Devils advocate: would he get paid any more to be more efficient? Or would he just get more work?

kfk 4y ago

The problem here is the idea that offshore country labor arbitrage can give you ridicolous cost savings way over 50% compared to local resources. Of course this is pipe dreams and especially with remote work good people have a cost, no matter where they work. But companies like Infosys still are forced on selling with that sales pitch… so what happens? They hire mostly unqualified people. This is not a problem with Indian employees, it’s a problem of Western executives having unrealistic IT costs expectations. Want to save IT costs? Have realistic expectations on the number of digital initiatives your company can run, do less things basically, don’t try to do a lot and hire cheap labor to keep IT cost low.

dominotw 4y ago

Main problem with hiring through these shops is you never know who exactly is working on your project. They would present us with resumes of some experienced candidates but it looked like that person is being sold to multiple companies with expectation that he would be exclusive. They would all be committing to code repo with single "git@congnizant.com" so you never know who the man behind the screen is. All conference calls would have the person we hired on the call but his voice would sound different everytime. It was freaking nightmare. I will never ever work for a company that does hybrid onshore/offshore development. That evnviroment is a proxy that they treat software dev as mundane cost center that deserves no respect.

tatpacc 4y ago
> They would all be committing to code repo with single "git@congnizant.com" it really depends, what's the process of end client. In many cases, even each offshore developers have client's email and it's used as SSO with GIT/Slack/etc. Not saying that what you are describing is not possible with this but it certainly makes it difficult and almost not feasible.

fellellor 4y ago

In this lawsuit, an American woman alleges that a bunch of high level (probably white) American executives in the American branch of an Indian company were very biased against women and workers of Indian origin. And while expressing their biases through their actions they created a very hostile work environment for this person. At least read the thing for a minute before going on a tangent?

mkl95 4y ago
One of my favourite things about HN is that a mod would never say something like this.

TrueGeek 4y ago

Some humans suck, some don’t. I don’t think it’s accurate to say this divide is mostly split between countries. I’ve worked with multi-national companies that have great culture and diversity and multi-national companies that are much like you describe. The problem is not that “x people are by far the worst”. The problem is that culture needs to be led top down. It needs to be thought of during hiring. Intolerance needs to be addressed after hiring.

steveBK123 4y ago

Many years ago I worked at big dumb banks. There was a lot of top down forced offshoring with ultimatums like - hey you can have +4 headcount in Mumbai or +0 in NY. Further, we found we had to spend $10Ks at a time to send NY/London staff over there monthly to figure out wtf was going on. These offshoring firms were running some serious scams. We once had a guy come back (mid 2000s) and say that his 5 devs in Hyderabad were equipped with 4 PCs and 3 phones between them!! We had one bank offshore its datacenter ops (while the datacenter physically remained onshore). It was incredible. We'd have a RAID disk failure in a datacenter across the Hudson River in Jersey City, practically visible out my window, raise a ticket which would take 36 hours to get picked up by someone in India, to bounce around the globe and eventually get back to the onshore datacenter ops person who would do the physical disk replacement. Finally one ticket took so long to address that we had a cascade of disk failure and lost the whole RAID. Just anecdote after anecdote of crazy stuff like this. Lot of these deals ended up in litigation. There were many very smart developers over there, but the offshoring industrial system creates a race to the bottom and quantity over quality preference. With the turnover of good staff, the only way to keep the better ones was to get the visas sorted to nearshore them in US - largely defeating the purpose of the cost saving. A lot of the banks moved away from this model and created "centers of excellence" in UK/US/Canada nearshore locations. You get competent staff for decent rates who are happy to have a great job without moving to the big city away from home/school/family. Not everyone who writes software wants to live in Bay Area/NYC/London. Time zones line up more humanely. Win win.

tatpacc 4y ago
> With the turnover of good staff, the only way to keep the better ones was to get the visas sorted to nearshore them in US > largely defeating the purpose of the cost saving. agree on most part including that onshore billing is obvious more than offshore but still for client it's saving as oppose to hiring FTE. Often client also want good resource to stick so they allow them to move to onsite. In my case, we informed client after my H1B was stamped, that I have to move to States either in this project or other project, client approved in 2-3 hours. For the another resource, client took 4-5 months to decide and then replied that we don't have budget for onshore billing. So in case of good resource, it's often win-win for everyone involved.

arinlen 4y ago

> Indians were by far the hardest to work with. They ghosted women systematically which was a nightmare for our project manager. I recall that Amazon went through the trouble of paying for TV ads proudly stating that they now have in India delivery posts manned exclusively by women, and the ad is comprised of indian delivery women delivering packages to indian men who in turn are giving them all sorts of weird looks. I recall seeing this ad and thinking to myself: are things in India so bad to the point that this sort of measure and ad passes off as something to be proud about?

bongoman37 4y ago

ksec 4y ago

> They also lied shamelessly about their qualifications which led to absurd situations. This I have experience with. The word absurd is not an exaggeration, it might not even be enough to describe it. >They ghosted women systematically which was a nightmare for our project manager. I dont understand this sentence. Does Ghosted here mean something different to ghosting in hiring?

wongarsu 4y ago
I assume they didn't answer questions or requests from women, or otherwise silently refused to directly work with them.
- ksec 4y ago
  Sigh. I would have thought people who worked in Tech would be open minded ( and sometimes too open minded ). My next question would be if they are doing this to Indian woman or every woman?
  - nalaz 4y ago
    What in tech makes you open minded? I work in tech and many of my friends work in tech too and we aren’t particularly open minded. Of course we don’t tell anybody about that…