throwaway313371

> I think your one(?) experience with Middle-eastern engineers has unfortunately given you a bad impression, but I'm not sure that necessitates making such a dogmatic and blanket "caveat".

I've directly managed 6 teams in Istanbul / Beirut / Cairo, another 4 in Belarus / Kiev, and one somewhere in Russia (I forget, it's been 20 years). Those in Belarus were by far the best, probably because they aren't mobile (it's very difficult to emigrate from Belarus into Europe or the USA). They work hard, are paid well and retention is great.

The worst were in Cairo, by far. I enjoy working with Istanbul engineers, but I steer away from Ankara / Konya teams because they tend to be conservative and just aren't great for startup environments, they're more well suited to work for the financial industry or the large retail holdings.

Beirut isn't a fair comparison, because it's a fairly liberal / western city (heck, they even do their day to day transactions in dollars instead of lira). Most of the engineers I've recruited there were also female.

And yes, my preference is to avoid mid-western / southern engineers. I don't hire people I wouldn't want to socialize with after work. I always vet hires and contractors on LinkedIn / Facebook. If I see pro-trump / anti-lgbt / proudly / qanon activity, their resumes are round-filed. If the firm's owners donated to trump, those firms are blacklisted.

I wouldn't hire you into the companies where I tend to work. If I worked in something more soulless like advertising / finance / government where I just wouldn't care about my job or employer, I would hire you because you'd fit in.

Call it discriminatory hiring, I don't care, my projects succeed, my teams are successful, and my engineers are loyal, some have followed me around for 25 years.

Sorry bro, I forgot that it is verboten to point out the rampant right-wing / libertarian philosophy which took over HN as the YC bros got wealthier and wealthier.

Yes massah, we have a really nice pseudo-intellectual, crypto-fascist bulletin board here massah!

11th commandment: Though shall not suggest that a bunch of upper middle-class white American tech bros cannot solve all the world's problems with greed.

Nobody:

Hacker News: I know! Let's ask Ayn Rand to solve it!

I'm in the same boat. Before Covid finding a company which would hire me (American) while living in Istanbul was easy. Now the competition with unemployed Americans has made me leave the tech industry, as I'm no longer employable.

There's a big caveat here: Middle-eastern engineers will have significant problems working with more liberal/woke companies. They have a strong tendency to be homophobic/transphobic/misogynist.

Last year I fired an off-shored team of 10 otherwise excellent Egyptian engineers because their homophobic statements on LinkedIn and in Slack made people in the company uncomfortable.

If your company's engineers lean more right-wing/republican, then middle-eastern engineers are probably a great untapped resource. If your company is more of a Silicon Valley company, they are a liability which can get you sued.

Proof? My understanding is that the Twitter block in 2016 had less to do with Twitter as a company and more to do with Tayipp not being able to control the flow of information.

Remember Wikipedia was blocked because Tayipp's page was painted honestly, which he found to be very unflattering, and because Wikimedia refused to remove references to the recorded/leaked conversations about money laundering with his (Berkeley-educated) nitwit song Bilal (There is a saying here when somebody does not understand what you are saying: "Explain it as if you are explaining it to Bilal".

This is also why soundcloud was blocked for 3 years, because people used it to post the recordings of him telling Bilal to remove all of the cash from the family houses in case they were searched.

Depends on the AKP supporters. Those who are barely literate, live in Asherates (villages which are run by often corrupt patriarchs and are told how to vote), and who go to school at imam-hatips? Probably not. The Turks who are educated in the conservative universities in Konya? You'd be surprised. AKP is basically the post-Bush GOP, but Muslim instead of Christian.

I'm not defending the AKP, but painting all of them as rednecks is a huge mistake.

> quite a lot of Kurds will beg to differ?

Huh? Which Kurds? Istanbul Kurds? Black Sea Kurds? Eastern border Kurds? South-Eastern mountain Kurds? My neighborhood in Beşiktaş is 30% Kurd, and 70% of the neighborhood voted HDP (the Kurdish party), including my atheist, liberal family of scientists and engineers.

Kurds hate Tayipp too. That's why the HDP won 13% of the vote which finally gave them parliamentary representation in 2015, then again maintained the in the post-coup election.

I know Kurds in my neighborhood who RAN down to the bridge to fight the Gulenist tank drivers with their fists. They stood in the streets and screamed at the F-16s flying over the city all night long, and they throw rocks and shot at the black helicopter which hovered over Fulya looking for a place to land. When they realized the helicopter was going to try and land at the BJK youth football field in Dikilitaş, no less than 50 of them went to that field and started shooting at the helicopter, which eventually went down and landed in Besiktas stadium.

This isn't a Hollywood movie. The good guys cannot just snap their fingers, fire a few bullets, and win liberation.

Tell me exactly, why did Obama and Trump harbor Gülen? Did you know that the secretary of education, DeVos, has thrown fundraising events with Gülen, because he is a fellow billionaire who made his fortune running religious charter schools (Türk lisesli) throughout the world, scamming voucher programs, just like DeVos.