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.

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.

Devils advocate: would he get paid any more to be more efficient? Or would he just get more work?

Sure but I can’t imagine that mindset from an onshore FTE dev, can you? Let me do stuff as slowly as possible so my boss doesn’t give me more work. Can be applied to any job.

Refusal to do obvious time saving tasks when instructed to would probably put you on the “does not meet” list next review cycle.

I agree but the reason for the difference is because the “offshore” folks have zero incentive to do so. There’s literally no point beyond keeping their job (and because of the incredibly low bar and compensation, it’s not at all difficult to find another one). They are there to fill seats and hours, not be productive or efficient.

Even if the client complains, the company won't fire the person. They can just move them to one of their many other projects.

And let me follow up by saying the problem with many of these offshoring firm arrangements is that the number of layers in between the person assigning tasks and person doing tasks.

Purposeful inefficiency is harder to sniff out because it’s not a manager-ic relationship. There’s often 2-3 hops inserted into the middle with the work going into a pool for the offshore team lead to manage. The offshore team lead is also consulting company so they have no efficiency incentives either.

> And as soon as someone got good, they left the team/company because they could get a better job anywhere else.

they left the company because they could get a "better pay" anywhere else.

For offshore outsourcing company, their only business model is: amount they receive per resource - A. salary per resource - B. fix cost at company level. i.e. office rent, office maintenance, etc.

And Project manager's OKR are mostly to increase margin. Project manager have only control over A. hence they will always try to hire junior resource. So good resource often have to waste time in spoon feeding to rest of the team and they will leave the company as soon as they got better offer/company.

Yeah, I don't blame the person for leaving. It's either the company increasing margin too much, or more likely the executives in this country not understanding the full implications of this model on tech projects. It might work for call centers where you read off a script, but building software is different.

Racism is thick here.

> 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-wom...

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.

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/2...

[2] 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://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 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.

Not sure how your argument works. Because there are more women in STEM in India, Indians in the US can't ghost women?

"Indians ghost women" is an assertion made without proof. More women engineers is a provable fact.

"The sun rises each morning" is also a provable fact but has no correlation (I guess) to the alleged ghosting of women by Indian men in the US. Again I'm not understanding the argument.

Absolutely there is more gender parity, largely because the type of IT work done by the bodyshop firms like Infosys and TCS is more like a decently paid white collar McJob than anything else. You see a lot of female developers in Infosys because it’s (accurately) seen in the same universe as accounting or secretarial work.

Yes, when I was there for training a large 20+ person team, the women stood out as some of the best & the brightest doers. Unfortunately none of them were ever onshored or promoted up. They were all kept behind the scenes while the men tried to control the comms to onshore.

The pattern seems to be that as a country becomes more gender-equal, gender-specific preferences become stronger: "the more that women have equal opportunities, the more they differ from men in their preferences"

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.aas9899

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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-no...

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.

A lot of false claims in this thread are being made by people who see these immigrants as a competitive threat.

From personal experience, I've heard plenty of caste-based insults when I was there a decade or so ago, as well as other forms of prejudice. This manifests most explicitly when it comes to marriages I think, but it would be naïve to assume nepotism, and by extension caste-based discrimination, doesn't proliferate to other aspects of life.

The sentence referred to here:

> All good so far. But then you say that it is a problem, and this is where I am lost.

…Is not referring to a problem that has, at that point in the story, been revealed. It is being evocative in a sort of dog-whistle technique - before jumping into the generalisations that follow.

India works on a caste system, said caste system being very discriminatory.

What the other poster meant is that you'll end up hiring out of the upper castes and they'll display a lot of bias towards other castes.

It's to the point that many from India won't admit to the caste they're in.

I mean, legally they are not in a caste, right? Does the Indian state recognize caste?

Yes Indian state recognizes all castes. That is the core problem. For the system to be dismantled you need the Indian state to stop recognizing castes and implement US style Affirmative Action and only provide Reservation opportunities to those from low income groups.

But the first ones to fight against this reform would be the "lower caste" strata of the population. Who would give up freebies, Government jobs as well as in education Prestigious Universities where you can guaranteed it based on your birth caste and not on merit? No one would. If I am born in any of the "lower caste" groups I can easily get a Government job, free/subsidized education in any Prestigious University irrespective of my scores/performance. Now there is talk of reservation/quotas in land distribution as well (comments by a politician in a recent speech to his base). Idea is that if you want to purchase land some section of the land is reserved if you belong to a particular caste (and will probably be available for lower than market rate as well). However ridiculous it might sound.

Affirmative Action in US doesn't have a quota system or reservation. It instead focuses on equal opportunity (no denial of opportunity to anyone based on their race/creed/color/sex/religion etc). This is different from India's Caste based reservation system where you are guaranteed of a job/education if you belong to lower caste. Doesn't matter if you are merited or not. Doesn't matter if you are rich or not. Even seats in the Parliament of India have reservations/quotas for lower castes.

It is ridiculous to talk about dismantling caste system while in the same breath prop up structures that actively promotes this same caste system on the Government level. And the Politicians do not want to dismantle said system because it helps with their vote bank.

That is a very far fetched statement. I am an Indian and technically from Other backward class (OBC) as classified in the system. I have never had a problem in my city. Off course that doesn't mean that India is not a huge and complex country with 100s if not thousands of groups differentiated based on region, class , caste etc. You are colouring a very complicated and nuanced issue with your personal biases.

What bias is it you think I have?

The only comment here that actually spoke the Facts as it is. Another commenter even said there is "systemic slavery" in India. Don't know whether to laugh or cry at the naivety of this individual. To think that 1.4 billion people, of which 80% belong to the so called "lower caste" strata, and that the rest 20% are enslaving the 80% is not only laughable but downright insane proposition. I wanted to respond but I know it is not worth spending my time and energy on such individuals.

Just goes to show how bias clouds reason and logic. Propaganda in full swing!

Thank you for speaking facts.

I said nothing about slavery, what are you talking about?

Did I say it was you? I said "another commenter". If I wanted to say it was you, I would have said it was you.

you lumped me in with them, implying an attitude I don't have.

And before you try to claim otherwise, don't bother. The English language has implicature.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/implicature/

I lumped you in with propagandists. Some spread propaganda of there being "systemic slavery" while others say "What the other poster meant is that you'll end up hiring out of the upper castes and they'll display a lot of bias towards other castes".

Both are not borne out of facts but malicious propaganda.

"It's to the point that many from India won't admit to the caste they're in."

You are implying this in a negative manner. The reason people don't talk about caste is because we have progressed a lot in the past century. No one gives a damn about caste in their day-to-day life. It only props up in political rallies where talking about caste based discrimination is a precursor to lay the stage for either increased reservation or introducing new reservation in the already prevalent discriminatory quota system that exists in India (which should have been done away with in 10 years after our Independence as envisaged by Ambedkar himself but nevertheless continues to exist 70+ years after Independence corroding our society further).

> And before you try to claim otherwise, don't bother

I don't have to. You are a propagandist. I stand by that.

right, you lumped me in with someone talking about slavery.

That might have been the first indication you were being unfair.

The poster I responded to thought they were talking about money, the poster was talking about castes.

Leave your religious wars at the door please.

About a month ago I watched an Indian man absolutely go off on another Indian man after hearing his name (this was over zoom). The Indian Man being accosted just took it, and yes, the disagreement was about the name.

I've both read about it and seen it first hand. You don't typically see it expressed so publicly as the above anecdote, most of the time it comes across as an odd sort of subservience. Almost the way you would expect a mail room worker to act towards the CEO.

No one said all Indian's are like this, but it has to do with the Paradox of Intolerance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

> The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant.

All it takes is for 1 or 2 individuals to have this attitude and it will eventually take over.

No one ever said it was everyone, but the issue exists.

I assume that he meant they are well educated, skilled and thusly won’t be working for dirt cheap as they’d have better options.

He said the problem isn’t with hiring Indians, it is with cheap labor.

It's used to be the case that, high caste people (Brahmins mostly) are the ones who can afford higher education and in turn they can speak English fluently compared to others in India. They were also the first to emigrate and likely hold high level positions in many companies.

Fortunately, this situation is changing rapidly. I don't see any caste discrimination in my line of work (urban IT companies). Nearly none of my coworkers know my caste, they don't care, neither am I.

It does happen in rural villages, specially inter caste marriages are still frowned upon. But it getting less effective over time. Determined people go make money and caste is not a hinder in many cases.

Maybe you should dust off your reading compression skills, his paragraph is pretty self explanatory. He is saying that those who speak English usually come from wealthy families and those whealty families have been raised to treat people from lower caste poorly.

> Maybe you should dust off your reading compression skills, his paragraph is pretty self explanatory

Thank you for your suggestion :-) Can you show where this specific point: "...and those whealty families have been raised to treat people from lower caste poorly" is made in his (we are assuming it's a he, aren't we? how bad of us) comment?

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)

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.

Whilst it uses a lot of Latin words (mostly via French), English is actually a Germanic language.

I know it comes from the Angles of Angaland.

What do you mean by Latin based language?

Or what are the other "Latin based languages" that you are comparing it to?

Pronunciation and orthography vary in many cases, not simple at all. Unless you already come from a germanic language, then it's relatively easy.

Coming from another Germanic language helps you deal with pronunciation and orthography varying in English?

What's the relationship?

You can just speak it in your native way and you will mostly be understood. But the "relatively easy" was to the language as a whole.

English grammar is very simple to learn if you come from a Germanic language, but I think English pronunciation and orthography is a mystery to all of us.

Even if you know the origins of the word, you still have to guess: facade is pronounced correctly, but the pronunciation of Uranus was apparently left up to a 5-year old to decide. Kindergarten and doppelganger are pronounced the German way, angst and flak aren't. The non-loanwords are somehow as inconsistent, after pronunciation changed but the spelling was preserved (and the other way around). For an unknown word you can come up with reasonable guesses, but they might be totally wrong. The only thing that makes us good English speakers is extensive exposure to English media.

> English is the simplest Latin based language.

Any sources for this? The lack of certain complex features (eg. gendered words) does make it seem true, but English borrows from a lot of sources and is very inconsistent.

A comparison I like to make is that Japanese is one of the simplest to pronounce languages. If you learn the kana, you essentially learn all of the phonemes (there's a bit more nuance).

I'd like to know what the simplest languages are on each dimension : pronunciation (has to be Japanese), grammar, overall consistency, vocabulary complexity, writing, etc.

It would be awesome if we gradually evolved English to be easier to learn, such as in [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...

There are people who measure language difficulty. The uS state department does it from a US perspective but I’ve seen others

https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/

Well, I learned it by watching HBO, so it can't be that hard...

Congrats! That's awesome.

> most things are written in the languages they use

Do you know anything about India or are you merely talking out of your ass? This is patently false—nearly all documents are in three languages: English, Hindi and the state’s local language.

> English is the simplest Latin based language.

It's not a Latin-based language (French, Italian, Spanish etc are Latin-based languages).

It's not clear how you measure simplicity, but, in terms of phonetics, English is quite the nightmare as the link between the spelling and the pronunciation is often determined by the history of the word, rather than by a clear set of phonetical rules.

So, at least by that measure, English is far from being the simplest.

> It's not clear how you measure simplicity

Compared with other european languages the english grammar is much simpler and the number of words needed to communicate is also not so high.

Compared with German, it's complicated. German has only "Past Perfect" and "Past simple" tenses.

English has at least 4.

> Most Indians do not interact with people outside their groups as most things are written in the languages they use

What? At this point I think you are troll account. You have already made wild and ridiculous statements like caste system being a form of "systemic slavery" in India. Now you are saying that only a "small percentage" of Indians speak English? Are you serious mate? English is the official language of India for literally everything. From giving exams to Government communications.

> Only a small percentage of Indians speak English and most statistics on it are heavily inflated

Where is the data for this?

> It's not Singapore or even close to it in English proficency trying to claim it is, is a lie.

And where do you get this data from?

English is a language borne out of centuries of diversity. Its turdness is its strength.

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.

> 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.

> English is such a turd language.

I disagree, but then I would, I'm English. ;)

Tolerance of mispronunciation is one of the great strengths of English.

Even within the UK we have a plethora of different regional pronunciation. Even with the strongest accents only takes a couple of words to pick up what they're saying[1].

It's the same for those comping to English from another language. I've been lucky enough to work with people from all over the world, including India, with various standards of English. With a bit of practice on both ends it all works out.

That doesn't seem happen so much with other languages such as French. Even practicing with tolerant French or Belgian friends, my mangling of words is very hard for them to understand. They're not being difficult either, it's a case of get it exactly right or they can't understand you even with context.

1. If you're thinking Rab C Nesbit or that 19080s Nissan Sunderland advert the Japanese translator[2] you get what I'm talking about.

2. It was an advert for a new Japanese car plant in the UK. The joke being that a Japanese guy is translating a deliberately over the top English regional accent back into "English" for the audience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiK5BWmKSqE

English is an official language over there, but it is spoken differently.

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.

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.

Hmm, this is interesting. Never realized this was a thing. Care to submit a specimen link?

I find this quirk quite endearing for some reason.

> It definitely does not inspire confidence they know the topic they are teaching.

Only to people who judge competence based on diction.

> 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?

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).

if only we could all be as enlightened as you are, you are obviously not of this earth :pray:

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.

>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.)

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

Eastern Europe ain’t developing countries…

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_economi...

Indeed. They may not be at the top when you sort countries by their metrics, but still great to live in.

As the the opposite to? And by what metric? Maternal mortality? Human development index? Access to clean water?

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.

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

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 "[email protected]" 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.

> They would all be committing to code repo with single "[email protected]"

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.

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.

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

They should just go on strike.

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?

Eastern Europe candidates are consistently better from my experience.

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.

> 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.

Yes when viewed this way it can be an alternative recruiting pipeline for good nearshore staff. It would be better to just directly recruit this way and skip the middle man consulting firms taking so much margin and having to hire teams of 20-30 to poach the top 5 nearshore.

> 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!!

Oh this brings back memories. A few years ago I worked for a company which offloaded functional testing to a team in Chennai, including pre-release shakedown tests. We did that until there was a release which started to blow up in a critical point that was very hard to recover from, right after being deployed to all customers. We were baffled because we had test sets covering precisely this scenario, and the tests all passed. To cut to the chase, we soon discovered that our trusty Chennai team was not to be trusted and in reality was signing off releases without performing a single test. Everyone in that team was fired and replaced by other replacement testers also based from Chennai, and once the new testers started running the exact same test sets then all sorts of red flags started to surface. Now, here's the kicker: it only took a couple of weeks until the new Chennai-based testers started to flag tests as passes even though they never ran them at all, which we discovered because we also added telemetry to track those.

Anecdotal evidence, but we only ceased to have problems with Chennai-based teams once we finished automating away their job.

> 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?

> 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?

I assume they didn't answer questions or requests from women, or otherwise silently refused to directly work with them.

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?

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…