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Do you really think it's something about Indians, or just the large numbers of candidates and the selection process? In my experience Indians are a lot more wi
by neilk 18y ago
Do you really think it's something about Indians, or just the large numbers of candidates and the selection process?
In my experience Indians are a lot more willing to commit to long-term, difficult projects at the urgings of elders. But they share that with other Asian cultures. This also helps explain the spelling bee thing; Indian families are used to the idea of rote education being very important, and even participating in the education of their child that way. Really, almost anybody can get that good at spelling, it's just that more European-American parents would tend to see it as pointless.
The one thing I do find interesting is how the gender split works. Asian minorities (in the American sense: China, Japan, SE Asia) seem to have very different expectations of boys versus girls. But modern Indian families, from the castes that are likely to produce US-bound immigrants, seem to encourage their daughters to go for technology jobs. For me at least, almost 100% of the female engineers I've worked with in the Valley were Indian-born.
And the other thing I've always found strange: the QA departments of many companies in the Valley are dominated by Indian-born women.
- chiffonade 18y ago> Asian cultures. Oh my god dude. You mean all the people from Asia who came to the US for the explicit reason to bust their ass and get rich. Go to Asia, if you've never been (I'm guessing not). You're going to find plenty of lazy people who aren't that smart.
- neilk 18y agoUh, I have? Also, I am half Indian, half mix-of-all-European-countries-Canadian, so I know what North American families are like as well as Indian immigrant families. In Indian families, children obey and rely on their parents well into adulthood. At pretty much all levels of society. I am a committed Western-style individualist, so I actually think this is a very bad thing. So you're right that not everyone is a careerist, and that immigrants are self-selected for ambition. But, the thing I was drawing attention to was that an Indian parent can and will suggest a long-term career like going to medical school, and many Indian kids actually do it just because their parents said so. This is changing -- today, Indian kids assert their own choices more and more -- but it is amazing to me that there are Indian bachelors I know in their 30s, even some living in North America, who still expect mummy and daddy to find them a bride.