This was strange. I asked a lot of Indian people about it and they said that it has to do with "saving face". Saying "I don't know" is a disgraceful thing. So if someone does not know the answer, they make something up instead.
Have you seen this?
This behavior appears in software projects as well. It's difficult to work like this.
Lots of the material the LLMs are trained on is Reddit spam written by indians.
It's a weird circle.
The Chinese web is on similar lines, although there is a lot more country bashing, especially against Indians and Americans. But nevertheless just the same.
At least none of these come nowhere near to the brainrot that is the Arabic web.
It's not the population size that's talking.
My father's former property groundskeeper, a daily wage labourer, could speak poor English but he could string a few words together and understand the basic gist of a Hollywood movie, even without much of an English education. Imagine 100s of millions of those people and there's your answer.
Isn’t this the precise failure pattern that everybody shits on LLMs for?
AGI = A Guy/Gal in India
Imagine that
Someone should really write a paper on that (hint: it’s the entire basis of information theory)
I've recently learned that this particular type of "saving face" has a name: "izzat". Look that up if you want to know more.
I'm not sure how to write that better, but the way you worded that made me suspect it was NSFW and I hesitated, but eventually decided I'd risk it. At least everything I found was work safe, and I learned a lot. I encourage everyone else who hasn't heard the word to look it up.
The only time I've ever experienced made-up directions were trying to get out of the souk in Marrakech.
Wouldn’t know. After the first two instructions I can never remember what came next.
However this was a thing 10-15 years ago. Lately I've not seen that.
Most cultures have this, but it goes mostly unnoticed from the inside because one can read between the lines. "How are you?" can be asked just to be polite, and can cause friction when answered truthfully (rather than just politely, as the cultural dance requires). An Eastern European may not appreciate the insincerity of such a question.
I work in a radiology practice and greet patients regularly.
99% of them say the are good/great etc.
It’s quite a striking response when they are limping, bandaged and on crutches.
I think I actually gave my line in a 1:1 to my manager at a job, they did not pick up on it. I was gone not long after.
When I do hear people respond in the negative it tends to be an opening up about stress.
Having only lived in the US, I don't have nearly enough firsthand experience with other cultures for me to be the one to comment on them, but I suspect that every culture has some things like this where the actual intent of the communication isn't direct. I suspect that if people in tech were asked to identify which cultures they considered to be the most direct in their communication, American culture probably wouldn't be ranked first. Generally the stereotypes of other cultures that are perceived as more direct get described in more pejorative terms like "blunt" though.
When somebody sneezes and you say “bless you” you’re not expressing your belief in god, and you’re not lying about one either.
That's my whole point! The context and expectations seem pretty obvious to you, doesn't it? Why then are you surprised that a different culture has an equally obvious (to them) fixed answer ("Yes") to any question asked by someone with power/authority to their lesser? Both depend on mutual learned cultural awareness, and can fail spectacularly in cross-cultural contexts.
Edit: my regional favorite is "We should meet for lunch some time" which just means "I'm heading out now", but you have to decode the meaning from the nature of the relationship, passive voice usage, and the lack of temporal specificity.
Some cultures are better than others, where “better” might mean better at doing stuff (no comment on morally/socially)
Somehow none of my non/Indian colleagues over the course of more than a decade have faced these ridiculous situations. They must be unlucky.
They must have spent a lot of time out of India or they are in senior roles.
I have seen that across just about every culture in the software engineering world.
And not just in the 'business' itself. I still remember the argument I had with an Infosec guy where he absolutely insisted that every Jeep had AWD or 4WD from the factory, Even naming ones that didn't did nothing until I more or less passively aggressively sent him wikipedia links to a few vehicles.
At which point he proceeded to claim "No I said it was always a standard option" ... To be clear this whole argument started because someone asked why I swore by Subarus and mentioned 'Every US Model but the BRZ has AWD standard' but Heep owners gotta have false pride, idk.
People do weird shit with imposter syndrome sometimes, IDK.
And always with a cheerful: "...you can't miss it."
Yeah, sure.
My employer outsources some work to Indian contractors. I know how much we are paying the contracting firm, which is low. Knowing the firm takes a cut before the contractors are paid, I feel terrible for how little they are compensated. I frequently wonder if we’d get better output if we paid more.
India is filled with small one-room service-based companies(the middlemens') that hire interns, for ZERO pay, make them work 12-14 hour days under extremely "humiliating" conditions and then when it comes to giving them internship completion certificate, they demand huge sums of money just to release them... think about it.
As for how you are gonna do without the middlemen, I dont have the anwer yet... ideas are welcome.
wages for good people in india are worse similar people in the us, but often high than in europe. But there are other problems with europe and so it can be the better deal.
There is probably more.
I've been with two companies that have been aquired, and the first thing the PE/New Companies do is aggressive offshoring for cutting costs.
1) worked, because the aquiring company had an established office in Hyderabad, and we flew the tech leads over to the US to spend six weeks embeddeed with the team, etc.
2) the second one failed miserably becasue we had an Exec VP who told our engineers that he was replacing them in India for half the price, and his strategy was to hire a contracting company.... after several months of "contractors" coming and going, someone else in the company realized what needed to happen....
The job market is not that efficient anywhere, especially India. Lots of people work their way up from crappy jobs to good ones, just like in the US.
>My company has offices in india because you have to manage them yourself not use middlemen. You can train the locals to be great managers (at least some).
"some members of this primitive tribe can be taught our sophisticated ways"
The issue with middlemen is they are basically labor arbitrageurs and have an incentive to hire the cheapest people possible and inflate their credentials/abilities. Same thing happens with onshore consulting firms.
>wages for good people in india are worse similar people in the us, but often high than in europe.
"Often higher than Europe" is a stretch. Typical big co with an India office pays maybe 20-30k USD per year for an engineer. And that is a good job relatively speaking. Top tech companies pay more but they also pay more in Europe
Another topic is: do not expect a remote dev to pickup ambient knowledge, particular if they are juniors with no life experience. And since outsourcing to India is trying to get the resources for the lowest possible price, the result is: you get them as junior / fake senior / bad senior as you think. Pay better in India, get better people.
A: You don't. Unless there isn't a better company or better-paying role.
If a person is motivated to move out of the country altogether it's got nothing to do with you and there's nothing you can do.
However considering how things are worldwide right now, I think that trend stops soonish.
Thanks a lot!
1. They
2. Always
3. List
4. Things
And end up with a conclusion/punchline/takeaway.
I always wanted to ask, is that by training?
I can imagine all schools over there have a specific style, like all their assignments need to have this general form, and then they just get used to it and it permeates in their everyday life.
1. The first thing
2. The second thing
3. The last thing
Makes perfect sense in that case.
Way back, when I first started working with Indian offshore teams, the contracting company at the time had a kind of intercultural training that addressed that issue.
> Advice: If you want better results from Indian engineers(or designers or anyone else really), especially juniors (speaking as of now, things might change in near future), try to reduce the "authority" gap early on. Make it clear you are approachable and that asking questions is expected. For the first few weeks, work closely with them in the style you want them to follow.. they usually adapt very fast once they feel safe to do so.
That's exactly the advice they gave. They advised was to try to make your relationships and interactions as peer-like as possible. The more "authority" is present in the relationship, the more communication breaks down in the way you describe.
Having worked in Japan, while there is a strong respect for authority, there's also much less hesitation about asking for clarification. I worked with an Indian offshore team and in a Japanese company and, while there's a lot to dislike in Japanese office culture, this kind of pattern of behaviour doesn't happen.
2 & 3 do make sense though.
I've had mixed result with your advice at the end. I'd say that it worked for about 30% of the offshore engineers I've worked with and indeed I had more success with juniors than with more senior developers.
Very true. I’ve hired (super cheap) engineering talent and this is the key to getting a project to run the way a westerner expects; where everyone is constantly open to challenging each other, where everyone can bring ideas to the table, and where there’s no such thing as a stupid question. I’ve done this during a big phase of time others locally shunning this huge talent pool as the results were crappy/unpredictable. Even to the point they’ll hire local for 100x the cost. It’s just a management problem though and a pretty simple one at that. The other thing is if you train them in your style, keep using them on the next project if you can. It compounds if you have the ability to work with them over a longer time. You have to be very insistent that you’re not proposing the best solution at expect them as engineers to point out any opportunities for improvement. If something later has to be rebuilt or isn’t working well, sometimes it’s good (if it makes sense, case by case) to do a post mortem and understand why the version 2 wasn’t built during the version 1. I think that helps them really understand it in a concrete way if they’re struggling with it.
In any case, I’d much rather take a budget for 1 local dev and spend it on a whole team of Indians and take on the management burden if it means retaining more equity or profits or building something I otherwise wouldn’t do myself due to scale.
I hadn’t heard of this, thanks.
Working 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week.
The fraud part is that I developing countries, almost all activities that require some skill have lots of people claiming to be experts. 99% of them are lying. You take your car to a shop and they tell you they will solve your problem. With skepticism, (because they asked no clarifying questions) you try to give them some context and they tell you not to worry.
1 day later they tell you parts X, Y and Z need to be replaced, it will just cost $$$. You ask if there is no way the current parts can just be repaired, and they tell you no, they must be replaced.
You ask what was the actual issue, and they tell you the parts are completely damaged, or worn out, need to replace.
Sure, you pay, and they give you the car, works for a few days, maybe week, then breaks down. You plug in a portable OBD scanner and it tells you the exact component they just put in is failing (likely not even compatible with the car).
You give them back the car, tell them since you paid $$$, you will only take the car back once it works perfectly, and you won't pay a cent more.
They then spend the next few days looking for an actual expert, that comes in and repairs the original parts, for $, and they take the "new" ones back to the store and give you your money back.
They don't know anything about cars, they experiment on yours, with your money, by swapping parts. This was easier when cars were less strict with parts.
This is fraud, not face saving, and it's in every developing country.
What I do is I go to the top guy, tell him I need an expert and nothing else. No experimentation whatsoever on my vehicle etc. I pay slightly extra for the troubles. Before I go for repairs I try to learn as much as possible to know what they will screw up next. If you go in as a layman, then it is fraud and incompetence central all the way.
Another question I'd like to ask of you is, do you see any aspects of the western style of cooperation that are the inverse? i.e. which create divides in which the westerner's ways of working can be the source of conflict?
2. None. We absolutely adore the ways westerners work. Your ethics, discipline, hardwork, attention to detail, inventive and creative nature, the support structures, and fair pay (and many more).
1. A lot more can be done in a given amount of time. Looks good on resume. Recall that India is still extremely poor (dont get influenced by the GDP numbers.. ) and getting a job as fast as you can after college can make a real difference to your living standards here.
2. Our education system is shit. And so are our teachers(mostly). Meaning, when folks are out of college, they generally are not as competitive as maybe their counterparts from western regions are(not in terms of hardwork, but, knowledge and hands-on tasks). LLM's makes it possible to do complete much more complex work than otherwise was possible at current experience.
Indians are extremely hard-working. The problem is people are extremely poor (~2400 median income... that's per YEAR). Even after adjusting for PPP. this translates to less than 10K USD/YEAR. Now think about living on 10K/year and supporting 5 family members (partner with 4 kids, or parents with 2 siblings).
You just have to make it easy for others to do their jobs. Removing barriers, of any kind, helps. This is even more true with juniors.
1. You have no authority and they ignore you. 2. You have authority and they become yes-men.
Real dialogue: - Is it done? - Yes! But not yet.
Semi related to this, one of the biggest 'breakthroughs' in building the right trust/rapport with an offshore team was sending an email to their leadership making it clear and on the record that "Comments against pull requests should not be used against the employee in reviews, if there is a recurring issue I will discuss it via other channels."
That one email changed PR back-and-forth entirely, cause yeah I guess sometimes they'd get dinged for too many PR comments on some metric. At first their management wasn't thrilled, thankfully there was a good enough improvement in quality and defect rate that in a couple months they were won over.
More willing to seek clarification and less likely to try to defend choices with 'This is what the scope of work said'. And also more willing to jump in on colleagues and my own PRs to provide feedback.
Which was also an important part of how to frame the communication "I'm not telling them they are doing their jobs wrong, I am telling them how to do it better to make all the stakeholders happier."
> Do you mean that they were dinged if a PR they opened received too many comments?
It was never explicitly said at first, however the communication was inspired by past work experiences where yes, too many comments on a PR or similar review could get held against you for far longer than was productive or even healthy, and yes it was something the whole team had to deal with (i.e. very much a shared experience amongst colleagues.)
In fact I'd argue that the time I've been at shops where people weren't afraid to give feedback has been about 50-50, while also noting that the shops that had a culture shift where giving feedback became OK and safe for all parties, quickly became more productive.
Cause, the other thing to consider, is that people don't necessarily want to risk causing animosity by jumping into a colleague's PR and pointing out a problem, they don't want to be the guy that makes their colleague "look bad". Which is of course unhealthy, but again by re-framing the context of PR feedback for Taylorist robot management, you get better response from their management as far as buy in.
Damn me, Scotland is going to be quite the culture shock for you.
I've found that this is also true of American engineers, particularly those fresh out of college. So many people have internalized that open curiosity will yield no result at best and direct punishment at worst.
I was a manager at Deloitte in their tech consulting practice. I led fairly large teams of devs based in India. This is very true, and it takes a lot of time and trust-building to overcome. Making Indian devs, especially early-career ones, comfortable enough to oppose something or offer feedback is non-trivial, and often Indian engineering managers make it more difficult. Overcoming cultural hierarchy is hard.
Based on my own experience, here are a few reasons (could be a lot more):
1. Unlike most developed countries, in India (and many other develping countries), people in authority are expected to be respected unconditinally(almost). Questioning a manager, teacher, or senior is often seen as disrespect or incompetence. So, instead of asking for clarification, many people just "do something" and hope it is acceptable. You can think of this as a lighter version of Japanese office culture, but not limited to office... it's kind of everywhere in society.
2. Our education system mainly rewards results, not how good or well-thought-out the results are. Sure, better answers get more marks, but the gap between "okay" and "excellent" is usually not emphasized much. This comes from scale problems (huge number of students), very low median income (~$2400/year), and poorly trained teachers, especially outside big cities. Many teachers themselves memorize answers and expect matching output from students. This is slowly improving, but the damage is already there.
3. Pay in India is still severely (serioualy low, with 12-14+ hour work days, even more than 996 culture of China) low for most people, and the job market is extremely competitive. For many students and juniors, having a long list of "projects", PRs, or known names on their resume most often the only way to stand out. Quantity often wins over quality. With LLMs, this problem just got amplified.
Advice: If you want better results from Indian engineers(or designers or anyone else really), especially juniors (speaking as of now, things might change in near future), try to reduce the "authority" gap early on. Make it clear you are approachable and that asking questions is expected. For the first few weeks, work closely with them in the style you want them to follow.. they usually adapt very fast once they feel safe to do so.