> Indian engineers are street smart

If we are going to generalize, I would have to say the exact opposite. In my experience they are definitely smart and capable, but usually extremely naive and somewhat sheltered by western standards.

I think both can simultaneously be true in a typical outsourcing scenario. The incentive for an outsourcing agency is billable hours and not rocking the boat. Couple that with the different management cultures in the US and India, and it makes perfect sense that the American company would see the quiet and overly optimistic compliant attitude as not being street smart, while the Indian company sees that they are keeping the gravy train rolling and making bank off fat and somewhat stupid American companies.

Yeah. My generalization is of no use in a discussion. I only meant to say a lot of them(that I know) are. I can't vouch for billions of us :-)

Could you elaborate "sheltered by western standards"?

The culture of always say yes, and never contradict what the western project manager says, regardless how ridiculous it might be?

Until it explodes and escalates all the way to the top.

I feel like a horrible person for this - but in an outsourcing scenario: listening a LOT to direction and not explore solutions very much themselves. This is probably amplified by their management giving them hell if they spend too much on exploring instead of ticking off the boxes that they can bill for.

I.e. not only "you get what you pay for" in the sense that cheap labour might not be the most skilled labour, but in the deeper sense in that if the outsourcing scenario is such that the western company orders a bunch of stuff from a checklist done, well, that's what's going to get done.

This is the same problem a large organization has locally too, but it gets amplified when you try to outsource things and increase turn-around time.

You hit a vein of deep true thought. I can share my personal experience that can help exemplify your point.

Disclaimer: Personal experience. Not saying this is the case foe everyone.

My first job was to work for one of the biggest Indian outsourcing companies. Soon after joining, I realized that their business model has nothing to do with real engineering work or genuine solutions to problems. They were essentially looking for people to tick the boxes, sit around and do stuff that could easily be automated, or maintain software that should have been rewritten decades ago. Their goal is to bill the western clients and prolong the maintenance work as much as they could.

Now, there is no need for creative thought or engineering prowess here. It is not surprising that someone doing this task is not passionate or creative. This is what translates to "Listen to western managers, and do just what they ask for, and the infamous never say NO". Saying No is not the engineer's prerogative here.

On the other hand, several Engineers from the same country who work for product companies with the right incentives(you get paid and recognised for a good product) show the true passion and creativity. I have friends who work for both categories of companies and I can clearly see this distinction.

Personal experience - I worked for Bank of America - Merill Lynch development center in India, maintaining a COBOL application. I once received an email from a senior team member(from Florida) to just translate his logic from the attached Word document to COBOL and not to do anything more. You get what you pay for. I quit that job a week after, and flew to the states to do my graduate studies soon after.

TLDR; Dont expect passion from cheap outsourced labor. Many people do those jobs because they do not have access to a better alternative.

Sorry for the rant. I know some friends of mine in the industry shared my experience. It does not mean everyone does/feels the same way. I apologize if I unintentionally belittled anyone's serious effort.

>>Saying No is not the engineer's prerogative here.

Outsourcing or no outsourcing, if someone walked up to me and said no to doing something in software team setting, I will likely be finding somebody else to do the job. And yes, I will likely never ask that person for doing anything ever again.

Its not as simple as you make it to be. In this age and era, quitting is a sure sign of a loser.

>>On the other hand, several Engineers from the same country who work for product companies with the right incentives(you get paid and recognised for a good product) show the true passion and creativity.

For saying NO? Doing nothing and saying NO requires 'true passion and creativity', while doing what it takes to achieve the task doesn't?

>>I once received an email from a senior team member(from Florida) to just translate his logic from the attached Word document to COBOL and not to do anything more.

These things are called requirements documents, and yes you are supposed to code what the requirements say.

>>I quit that job a week after, and flew to the states to do my graduate studies soon after.

Please. Passport tourism among Indians is now well known. Also bad mouthing your former employers and colleagues isn't exactly how you go about justifying other reasons to move out of the country.

I'm amazed by the negativity and prejudice in your response.

>> Outsourcing or no outsourcing, if someone walked up to me and said no to doing something in software team setting, I will likely be finding somebody else to do the job. And yes, I will likely never ask that person for doing anything ever again.

Precisely why I said - "Saying No is not the engineer's prerogative here." in the context of a developing world. You just explained my words :-)

>> For saying NO? Doing nothing and saying NO requires 'true passion and creativity', while doing what it takes to achieve the task doesn't?

I said - "Engineers working for product companies where they get paid and recognised for good product instead of outsourcing companies show true passion and creativity." Somehow you connect it to saying NO?

>> These things are called requirements documents, and yes you are supposed to code what the requirements say.

Although I could have explicitly said it was not a requirements doc, I hoped that you'd give me the benefit of doubt that I wouldn't ramble about a basic software engineering artefact. In this case, it was a Word doc with variable names(not variable naming conventions), loop variables, and pretty much the entire code within quotes. That is what I was pissed about. The doc screamed - "I don't want you to think, just be a monkey and do this."

>> Please. Passport tourism among Indians is now well known. Also bad mouthing your former employers and colleagues isn't exactly how you go about justifying other reasons to move out of the country.

So, you call going to another country for studies "Passport tourism"? I sure am very happy that I'm not as close-minded to think like that. I pursued what I wanted to study, and what I wanted to do with my career. For the record, I still proudly hold my Indian passport.

Living outside your home country, and exploring other cultures opens one's mind like no other. Please give it some thought.

>> Bad mouthing former employers...

Seriously? I was contextually explaining my personal case about what I didn't like, to provide an example of things that happen at an outsourcing setup. So, you think one should never speak of what happens at work and be "loyal" to companies? Welcome to the open world of discussions and improving for the better.

>>I said - "Engineers working for product companies where they get paid and recognised for good product instead of outsourcing companies show true passion and creativity."

How does this change in a service company? Programmers who write code in a service company show none of these traits, same programmer writes code in a product company and magically becomes passionate and creative.

>>In this case, it was a Word doc with variable names(not variable naming conventions), loop variables, and pretty much the entire code within quotes. That is what I was pissed about. The doc screamed - "I don't want you to think, just be a monkey and do this."

This is how CMM levels worked. You'd also be interested in looking at the engineering practices at NASA.

>>So, you call going to another country for studies "Passport tourism"? ....

None of this wrong. But you wrote you served notice and moved as soon as you saw the requirements doc, and how that killed your creativity.

"How does this change in a service company?"

You need to work for a good product company to understand that. From your other comments, clearly you work for a non-FANG, perhaps for a services company or another non-services company that do not seem to have the kind of work and expertise Google or Amazon has. You are also too biased to be completely blind to the possibility that must be some factors other than money because of which so many people want to work for the big product companies even though they are not the highest payers anymore. No amount of answering your questions is going to convince you how services companies and product companies are world apart unless you have seen both sides. And by product companies I don't mean companies like Cisco or Juniper (although they are technically) but they are now like dinosaurs moving slowly and are only marginally better than the services company. I mean the types of Amazon or Facebook or Google or LinkedIn in their India offices or the types of Directi or Flipkart (now Walmart Labs -- another great workplace) or Ola.

Any responses to you in this thread seems futile because you come with a very negative outlook about other companies and you are not ready to look back and question your assumptions.

Sorry, not everyone shares this pessimistic view and try to understand many of us have enjoy very productive and happy careers in these big product companies that you seem to believe are no better than the services company.

And no amount of writing going to convince you that a programmers job at cognizant is better than being sysadmin at Google.

"I'm amazed by the negativity and prejudice in your response."

Yes, I am amazed too at this kind of comments.

Your parent commenter seems to be exhibiting a strange mix of ignorance and arrogance. Likely works for an unhappy place in Bangalore where people are always bickering about their work which has made this commenter believe that the whole of industry in Bangalore must be like that.

I think it's worth contemplating the legacy of colonialism. The British Raj didn't exactly encourage initiative, which has undoubtedly left some scars. My ancestors did some unspeakably ugly things to the people of the Indian subcontinent in the name of "management".

I can also only speak for the friends I know :)

But I mean overly protected to a late age, and very strongly influenced by their parents.

The flip side is that on average my Indian friends are also the politest people that I know, which makes me realize it's really a lost quality.

I've found quite the opposite to be the truth. On average, my Indian friends are the most arrogant, rude people I know.

There's a bit of a culture clash. Hindi has no direct equivalent of the English word "please" and the closest equivalent of "thank you" has very different connotations that can be perceived as rude. Politeness in the Hindi language is subtle and complex. The verb forms used to express intimacy and formality in Hindi don't translate into English, so Indian speakers often seem a bit blunt and direct to native speakers. To grossly generalise, Indians tend to be less private and more personally inquisitive than Americans, which can sometimes seem intrusive or overly familiar.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/06/th...

What are the naive about

> pick up new tech and tools very quickly

And then they go on StackOverflow and Github issue trackers, begging anyone and everyone to help them and appearing completely out of their depth.

To be fair, silly questions are fair game from everybody on SO and GH. There are just so many of us Indians, which makes us more visible. I browse SO just for curiosity, I have seen plenty of silly questions with all sorts of usernames.

(Let me preface by saying that of course there are world-class Indian devs, and ones who contribute to FOSS and who answer questions on all kinds of forums. What follows is obviously a generalization based on my limited and flawed perceptions. I've never been to India, so might lack some cultural insight here.)

For better or worse, Indian developers in general have positioned themselves in the bottom of the market by working for rates lower than anything devs from developed countries can accept.

By doing so, they're under a lot of pressure to implement things as quickly and cheaply as possible and to cut corners where-ever they can.

On top of this, they are happy to accept jobs which require expertise in tech stacks that they simply don't have.

Due to this, I sense a level of desperation that other devs usually don't have, hence the annoying spamming of SO and Github and the begging for help.

This combination of pressures to be cheap and quick, and not being able to know all the tech stacks but still taking on jobs for those stacks, contribute to shoddy quality and workmanship.

Probably this is a development phase, and as India becomes wealthier and more developed, this trend will reverse, which will be a good thing for all of us.

What I really notice is many of the GPL projects I've trialled that were developed by Indian devs have 90% of the features one would expect, but often the way these features have been implemented ignore how whatever their building atop was designed to support these features.

For example, in one project that needed multi-tenancy, what was being built on supported subdomains per customer, with a strong permission system, all that was needed was a simple webui plastered on front. Instead, this frontend slammed all the customers into one domain, and generated random user IDs that customers will never remember. Worse yet, you were now either a user, or super-admin.

Problems like this are fixable, but I'd rather move on then work on rewriting poorly implemented frontends.

Ok generalization again, but I see a lot more Indian names asking questions rather than answering them.

I'd bet every country has more people asking questions than answering them.

Yes but the ratio is different. Americans produce most of the most popular services even if most Americans consume rather than create them.

Stack overflow generally has more than one answer per question, so probably not. People more likely up vote an existing question.

No way. Even on Stack Overflow the ratio of answers to questions is below 1.

Yup, found it:

select 1000 * (select count() from Posts where PostTypeId = 1 and AnswerCount = 0) / (select count() from Posts where PostTypeId = 1);

https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new

=> 132 for me.

so 132 answers for 1000 questions, on average.

You're looking at popular questions, that have a ton of answers. But the long tail is huge and most of those questions have 0/1 answers, most likely 0.

I encounter answers now and then by Indian names, and unfortunately my first thought is "can probably skip this one and look at the next answer". The reason is that the answerers _very_ often didn't read the question properly (or misunderstood it) and consequently are giving a completely irrelevant answer.

Nothing wrong with asking questions and seeking to learn.

Yes but where are the ones who have already learned and are answering other people's questions? And why so many silly questions? That was the question. There's a similar situation on Quora. You can look up just about any question and find multiple low quality answers from Indians. On both stress I there seems to be no attempt to do the hard work of diagnosing/debugging the problem to produce the minimal example scenario required by the site; instead it's just "fix my problem here's the code". It's just a different way of handling development which only works if other Stack Exchange users are prepared to spoon feed lazy developers. It's easy to see why many of the original Stack Exchange users have given up.

I don't think it has anything to do with Indian and rather everything to do with the nature of the outsourcing business model. Outsourced engineers (from India and from several other countries I've encountered) in my experience tend to have low standards of code and terrible engineering practices. I'd outsource for repetitive tasks but never for anything I expect to be rock solid and future proof or handling sensitive data.

May I ask which technologies have you worked on?

Not sure why it'd help the discussion :-)

Here is my public CV : https://aravindh.net/cv_2018.pdf

Yours is one awesome CV. I was just curious to know.

Thanks!

</ blatant generalization >