The competition is cut throat to get into major IT companies (GPA of 3.75 or higher is required by most "Grade A" companies just to take the preliminary written tests.)

Unfortunately, most of the companies value grades and how "consistent" you have been through school, going all the way back to 10th grade. (I'm looking at you Infosys. I should write up my own interview experience with them :)

As long as they get their grades, the students are least bothered about how they got it.

Given this pressure, one can hardly expect 18-21 year olds to be cognizant of how rest of the world perceives them. What matters to them is their social circle and family priorities. If it means asking 100 people to bump up the grade, so be it.

Most of these "polite Indians" are college students from not-so good colleges (or bad students at good colleges). They are studying Engineering just because of parental/peer pressure. I'm sure every Indian would know more than 3-4 friends who are studying just to make somebody else proud.

Each semester, these students have some courses with assignments. The first thing they do is "Google" the assignment. If they don't find the solutions on the front page of Google, they either raid forums (including comment sections of blogs) asking for help or else they contact a small coding shop and "outsource" their assignments. These coding shops are small shops that charge extremely low rates too, so they don't have the best programmers either. Quite often coding shop employees raid the web for help too. A friend of mine has actually hired 3-4 "sub-standard" coders proceeds of which he uses to bootstrap his main startup.

Unfortunately, in this storm sometimes even genuine students who just wish to learn get crowded out. My suggestion (and what I do generally) is to answer people as long as it is just about concepts. If you start doing somebody else's homework the whole batch might start asking you for help. So, my advice is just don't do anybody's homework.

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/high-expectations-asian-father

"indian software giants misleading talent in india"

http://www.dkoustubha.com/indian-software-giants-misleading-...

When these students start engineering studies, they are flabbergasted by lack of "guides" for problems. These students will fail the FizzBuzz test, however will be able to answer questions about C++ quirks. They can not ask intelligent questions because they can neither understand problem nor investigate the root cause. They are studying just to get a degree (which would help them get a job) not to get educated.

Even if we assume that only 50% of the students fit this criteria, there are over five hundred thousand students who are looking for shortcuts! Which should account for these kind of posts.

The education system in India is geared towards producing clerks not free thinking individuals. Sadly, this the is the end result.

When I was in school, I was always told by my teachers to memorize the solution/essay rather than understand them. And whenever I tried to answer a question using my own words I always got less marks because my answer was not as per what's in the book

Recently they introduced a new type of question in their exams, which are called High Order Thinking questions. They tend to test the knowledge and problem solving skills of an individual.

But yes, most of the state boards, do put much more emphasis on rote learning

But this was about 18 years ago so things may have changed (unfortunately for the worse) by now, especially to cater for a spike in demand for outsourcing.

Imagine going through 10-12 years of schooling in Spanish, where instead of making an effort to teach you to conversate in Spanish, you just memorize the words in the book with little emphasis on what they mean?

Crazy!! It's like no-child-left-behind times 100.

The chapter is online here http://randomgraphs.blogspot.com/2009/06/feynman-on-educatio...

Nah, there are guides for that.

Turbo C++ quirks. :)

(edit: not sure why I was modded down. Anyone who's gone through the system in India knows that most colleges are still stuck in 1992 and use an ancient version of Turbo C++ for everything.)

1) Someone in another group hired some fresh-out-grad-school Indians, and a few months ago I was bored and googled their names. One of them was asking for code for some algorithm on a java forum. I didn't care much about it, I was more impressed that the guy used his full name on the forum. I realized though that indians have a bigger problem with not fully sharing the problem they're trying to solve, and just come off as asking for random things instead.

2) I had to work with a big name customer who hired two foreign university kids trying to leverage an API I wrote. On a call they demanded source code for everything the API supplied in order to write their app (they didn't need it all), and constantly emailed me about questions reading a industry-wide spec would've answered. Luckily they eventually stopped working there and my email got a lot easier.

3) I tried to hire a contractor recently, and after struggling with agencies, I decided to give craigslist a try. I'm going to write a blog post about this one day, but basically 75% of the names I received were of south asian descent. Nothing wrong with that, I read every one of those emails. The problem is that of that 75%, half of those were outsourcing "$9 / hour" agencies, and a good portion of the other half didn't have experience relevant to the position.

Big lesson learned with 3. As an indian american, I gotta really step up my networking skills in order to find other positions. If I want to apply for a position over the internet, I ABSOLUTELY must do things to stand out from the piles of emails. I already take time to write personalized cover letters, but have to have a non-standard title to stick out, and have some internet presence for them to feel comfortable with me.

Make no racial generalizations though. I've met indian folks out there that are truly amazing geeks, and can comfortably talk to you about lisp / clojure / rethinkdb / etc. I last met one in an IRS office of all places.

From personal experience there are some nationalities that I associate with stupid questions, but I think I treat the clued resp. the clueless from these nationalities equal to the clued resp. the clueless from other nationalities.

But I'd be interested in your perspective.

Agreed! Regardless of your background, taking the time to write a specific cover letter and tweak your resume to highlight experience you think a particular place would appreciate is well worth it.

Consider it this way: your application is one entry into a huge priority queue heap. You want it to be picked up by the comparison operator in every significant way you can. Don't be afraid to leave out work you did if it doesn't seem relevant; it will just dilute the signal.

Some people would like nothing better than shoe horn every Indian student into "them stupid Indian" and feel smug.

The amount of clue-less students is fairly constant across countries. But, when you multiply that with the huge number of Indian students taking CS for better job prospects, you end up with this horde of n00bs.

It's just that most Indian students can read/write/speak English than, say, Chinese or eastern Europeans. So, all the English speaking world's internet is their internet too.

Chinese have their own internet. Russians have their own language forums and websites. Indians don't need that. So, India has "outsourced" student "guidance" system to the internet.

sorry about that? ;)

Most Indians (including me unfortunately) consume far far more content than we produce. I am concerned about this too and I've been thinking about this and I do not have concrete reasons for this yet.

I could throw up a few reasons though. It may be cultural, since many of us just do not know how to share. It may be a work-life balance issue where people who-know-stuff consider this work and won't do this in their free time. It may also be because the Indian economy is growing fast, growth opportunities are immense, so spending time on tasks that don't directly give them anything has a huge opportunity cost.

There is no obvious cultural incentive for smart Indians to share their knowledge on the "anonymous" internet. People look for "leverage". Sad, but true. This is the same reason why contributions to Open Source is so low from Indians.

As Aniket pointed out, knowledgeable Indians give back far less than they are capable of.

I have had the chance of observing this closely. My own mentor who is a PhD wouldn't divulge anything to anybody unless there was something in it for him. He is a great teacher, but not when it comes to sharing the "jewels".

I trust it was clear from my original post that I was trying to understand this group of people and not Indians in general.

English is only my second(?) language. I did not mean to drive any such meaning from what you said. :)

I might have generalized the answer too much to answer all the comments I've been reading here and on reddit.

This is not the only factor.

It seems that a substantial fraction of people are not suited to computer science. For instance in usability studies, most adults - even educated adults - are just unable to get the metaphor of a directory tree. They can and do learn to do sequences of actions with them by rote, but don't understand them. (These usability studies are one of the reasons why companies like Apple keep inventing UIs that hide the directory tree from people.)

In the USA this population of students is happy to ignore CS and instead study something else that they are more suited to. And can still have a good chance of getting a high paying job.

In India this population of students is under pressure to go into CS anyways because that is where the good jobs are. The distribution of clue in the population is similar, but the distribution of clue among students studying CS is not. Worse yet, universities are under pressure to avoid delivering the bad news that these students are going into the wrong line of work.

Non-technical users don't "get" the directory tree because it is a leaky abstraction that fails to consistently deliver on the assurances offered to users. It helps when deterministically planning a Unix filesystem but over time the system destabilizes due to inevitable mismatches between the expectations of OS maintainers, package authors, and end users.

- Underinformed users make best-guess choices (that contradict the intentions of the system designers) as to where to put new files

- Software authors publish conflicting install guides e.g. "sudo make install" vs. "extract to ~/bin/ and add it to your path"

- Symlinks - which are fabulously useful by the way - undermine the promise of a canonical location for each file.

Sorry, but people's comprehension problems are much more basic than that. The very idea of a hierarchical filing system where things can be put at any level hits a mental block. This is well before any detailed discussion of how any particular thing should be organized.

The underlying problem users have with software - as illustrated by the hierarchical file system model - is being required to make decisions than they are comfortable with. If you as an iPhone user simply want to edit and store a text file, you're not going to want to have to know the stories behind emacs vs. vim, the "everything is a file" ethos of Plan 9, or the sordid history of Hans Reiser.

Apple (and other minimalist UX designers) have the right idea here: remove all unnecessary choices and questions so that the user can solve their basic need. This is minimum viable product. This is Basecamp vs. MS Project. Add extra features (i.e. extra decisions to confront the user with) if necessary, but only if they prove themselves.

I don't like it very much either, because in real life I have to pay the price for the stereotyping. However, stereotyping is a perfectly normal thing for humans to do, and I strongly recommend that we DO NOT make people feel guilty for it, especially in cases where it'd be quite warranted. This doesn't mean that we are all free to stereotype - it just means that we should not expect extremely unnatural behavior from others.

Indians I'm sure don't have any qualms exploiting any positive stereotypes associated with us. I suggest we own the negative stereotypes as well.

These companies are fuelled by a large pool of people, who learn computers only because these jobs pay well than any other job. Engineering is a basic eligiblity criteria to get into these IT companies. Hence people flood into engineering schools to take up engineering courses in computers or electronics or mechanical or even civil courses.Most of the engineering institutes here are of quite poor quality(needs a seperate thread to discuss ;) ).

Sometimes, in order to patch up the lag between academics and employability they take up crash courses in Java or .Net. Even worse, IT services companies pick hundreds from campuses(from different disciplines like mechanical) and put them for training programmes in J2EE or .Net which lasts for 3-5 months. Clearly without getting the basics of computers right many get into the jobs.

Most of the job is outsourced from other companies and folks here in these companies work on maintenance or support projects which doesn't require much of designing or programming skills. Sometimes in need they turn to internet forums, open-source mailing lists etc. May be thats the reason behind "polite Indians" ;).

Sadly enough, most of the folks here are deliberately into computers rather than by passion.

They don't know where to start BUT they need to submit the assignments soon. They start asking their friends (through phone, chat and email). If they don't have friends, they ask on the net.

The anonymity that internet affords makes these normally polite Indians aggressive -- if you were to meet these Indians, they certainly would NOT demand the same of you.

Most of them don't understand that asking a question the wrong way(http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html) is considered offensive. I wish more forums had an auto-responder which sent this link to "clue in" those Indians.

The root problem is population. Only few elite colleges have phd/masters teachers. To get into these elite few the ratio of candidates appearing is 130 PER SEAT !!

Now even if you are a brilliant student, you are not guaranteed admission due to a certain 'balancing factor'. You need good marks in all subjects equally, not just the ones you are interested in. (I scored 4 times the cutoff in physics but still couldn't get into IIT, due to 2 marks lower in chem. I hated cramming inorganic salt colors.) As a result even many brilliant students enter bad colleges with very bad teachers. Again the 'balancing factor' jumps in. The aim, it seems, is to keep the student busy (with useless things that mostly involve nothing more than microsoft office.) At the end of degree, you know nothing. (Nobody in my class could write a c program if you mentioned the word file handling).

Infosys hired 40% of my class and only one student was asked 1 technical question. 6 students were asked riddles. Rest 48 were just thrown through a basic HR.

In the pre-final year of college 'balancing factor' by the parents jump in. Students are mostly advised (family/peer pressure) to ride the 'MBA' wave. Nothing is knowledge driven. Everything is money driven.

For some, this is when things start to turn around for good :)

I got comments like this:

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No idea where it all came from. The links they leave are along the lines of http://Yourwebsite, so can't really be spam I guess. I don't get what the angle is.

I get stacks of these daily, so I make sure I only approve rude or unflattering comments on my blog.

If they are using their real names, I think these are more likely ego-trips. People are probably trying to flood their names online. This may also be about portraying a clean online image whenever anyone searches about them.

In any environment of that size you're going to get idiots as well as great people. Thankfully most of my experiences with Indians in and out of India have been with great, hard working, optimistic and fun people.

"What seems like forever ago, I made the mistake of mentioning in one or the other of the developerWorks forums that I had a way to create a pretty-looking categorized calendar on the web. I say 'mistake' because the requests for the code have reached the level that they actually swamp out the spam in my inbox (proving once and for all that Domino, at least, is not dead yet). I've sent out demo databases in response, and they have helped a few people. Many, many more people have just turned around and outright demanded that I do the work it would take to integrate the calendar into their applications. For free, mind you.

"When did that kind of behaviour become acceptable? I really hate to unfairly categorize these requests, but the vast majority have come from the same people and organisations that are trying to put me out of work by claiming to be able to do my job for less money. (I should point out here that I make a whole lot less than most Americans and Europeans in the Notes development game would make as the consequences of being Canadian, of how I got this job, and of the vagaries of corporate M&A.) Now, I've been beyond broke, and I can understand beggars, but I never imagined that I would regularly encounter the equivalent of streetcorner beggars who are fully employed and ask not for spare change, but for passers-by to go to the office and do their work for them, gratis, so that they can collect their salaries.

"I'm quite well aware that there are a lot (and I do mean a lot) more people working in places like Bangalore and Mumbai than have ever requested code from me, but there still seems to be a disproportionate number of people from the major outsourcing centres who feel entitled to demand that I do their work for them. I'm not talking about 'borrowing' code here — anyone who has embarked on a developer's career without peeking at other people's code can probably be fairly classified as an idiot. Nor am I talking about people who are merely trying to learn the sort of stuff you don't get in the 'Introduction to Domino Designer' course; I generally have a high tolerance for newbies who actually seem to want to learn. I did, after all, offer the code base, and I have no problem working with people who have made an effort to understand what I've done and may have a lingering question or two. I'm just wondering what kind of cultural climate would persuade anyone, anywhere, to believe that it's perfectly okay to demand that I (or anyone else, for that matter) do work for free so that they can be paid for 'work' they got by undercutting my wages."

Information that a particular person is helpful spreads fast within organizations (and with the web across organizations). So a barrage of request might happen.

I'd actually recommend turning this situation to your advantage. Create a template mail that quotes your consulting charges. Whenever somebody makes such a request, send them your template mail.

Some outsourcing shops would actually gladly pay you top dollars for your services.

(By the way, Indians were not and are not the only people who had a highly developed sense of entitlement. It's the thin and poorly applied synthetic varnish of politesse laid over the demand that made the Asian emails especially annoying. An honest "gimme-e-e!" hurts the teeth much less than dishonest, disrespectful "respect".)

The mentality plays a second role: once you're in some position of power (a manager), you want to boss around everyone and prove that you're the person in charge. So managers of projects want everything in 20 days when they might charge clients for 90 days. There's hardly time for the people involved to understand the problem and solve it: they just want to make sure the manager gets what he wants.

Moreover, the employees are in a different set of mentality: they think they don't have much power and that they shouldn't question the manager else their job/backside will be on the line. So they just do what's needed, else come up with creative arguments on the last day.

That means we get Indians who can't get into US colleges and/or can't get US jobs: ie, the second rate developers. Unfortunately that means that any good Indians here will have to work twice as hard to overcome that reputation.

Interestingly, for some reason we seem to get a lot of really good Chinese students and immigrants, so they don't have the reputation problems to overcome.

Throwaway account for the first time on HN :(

HTH

Regards, basileis

They make us all look stupid. I started bidding on some freelancer projects a few days back and 1 out of 3 projects from US or UK have a strict No-Indian policy.