Is this cultural? I ran a small business some years ago (later failed) and was paying for contract work to various people. At the I perceived the pattern that Indian contractors would never ever ask for clarifications, would never say they didn't know something, would never say they didn't understand something, etc. Instead they just ran with whatever they happened to have in their mind, until I called them out. And if they did something poorly and I didn't call them out they'd never do back as far as I can tell and wonder "did I get it right? Could I have done better?". I don't get this attitude - at my day job I sometimes "run with it" but I periodically check with my manager to make sure "hey this is what you wanted right?". There's little downside to this.
Your comment reminded me of my experience, in the sense that they're both a sort of "fake it till you make it".
Indian here (~15+ years in tech). I've seen this behavior a lot, and unfortunately, I did some of this myself earlier in my career.
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.
> 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.
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.
I've seen an interesting behavior in India. If I ask someone on the street for directions, they will always give me an answer, even if they don't know. If they don't know, they'll make something up.
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.
No, but I have noticed that somehow it's hard for them to say "no". This is impolite apparently. So you ask: "Can you do this before friday" and they say yes and then don't do it at all. Which of course is a lot less polite and causes a lot of friction.
However this was a thing 10-15 years ago. Lately I've not seen that.
> Which of course is a lot less polite and causes a lot of friction.
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 use "about the same", thanks to a friend. I love the reactions (from Americans, where everyone is expected is to say "Great" or "Good" or something similarly positive).
Is that just a reflex response though? I would expect people to be more deliberate in their interactions with medical professionals, but I can easily imagine hearing “How are you?” and my brain goes on autopilot.
Yeah, this is something I had to learn over my teenage/early 20s years. "How are you?" Is often not a question but just a generic greeting like "Hello" or "Nice to meet you". Sometimes it is though, but that's just one of the many examples of unwritten rules about how to tell whether someone literally means what they're saying or if there's a better way to interpret it.
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.
> that’s an example of a fixed answer to a fixed question.
That's my whole point! The expected answer seems pretty obvious to you, given the context, 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.
similarly, in the west, when your boss takes you to HR for an honest and open discussion, it's not really an honest and open discussion. normies know this instinctively. I didn't.
A fairly common conversation starter for eastern europeans is "how are you doing?", "it sucks", "yeah it does, doesn't it?". The American style of being all flowers and butterflies can indeed be perceived as lying.
To be fair we Americans also poke fun at this. Here in the South I usually say, “Can’t complain,” and most people will finish the adage, “and it wouldn’t do any good if you did.”
It is fine if it is not lying but so often you ask how are you and get the flowers and butterflies response but when you sit 10 min more they start explaining how miserable they are: as a Dutchman, I do tend to ask why they said how great and excellent they were just minutes ago. And no, it is not just something you do out of politeness: if you just canned response to one thing, how do I know you don't have canned responses to many more things which are in fact lies at this point in time? I don't want to talk with Zendesk, I want to chat with someone I just met in the pub.
It isn’t lying, it is what we consider an appropriate level of sharing. We don’t tend to want to put our burdens on people who may not be interested in hearing it.
After talking to many folks from US I appreciate that. It's like going through the original `SYN ; SYN ACK ; ACK` flow. You are just establishing the conversation, but then the content can start flowing after if there's interest.
My experience is the same, to put it charitable a lot of people from that culture are often eager to please. I think about this a lot when I hear about billionaires like Elon Musk wanting more immigration from India specifically. I think this cultural trait often serves them well in western corporate contexts, despite the frustration it causes their coworkers.
> I've seen an interesting behavior in India. If I ask someone on the street for directions, they will always give me an answer, even if they don't know. If they don't know, they'll make something up.
Isn’t this the precise failure pattern that everybody shits on LLMs for?
Only on surface. The difference is the LLM doesn't know it doesn't know. An LLM provides the best solition it has regardless of whether that solution is in any way fit for purpose.
> 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.
I've recently learned that this particular type of "saving face" has a name: "izzat". Look that up if you want to know more.
A lot of the stuff written on "izzat" is questionable or wrong, but it is true that India has a collective concept of saving face. This can be an adjustment even if you're used to the East Asian concept of saving face.
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.
I’ve seen this with some of my Indian colleagues, though definitely not all. In fact, most are more than eager to disagree with me :D (even though I’m their superior)
I moderate an airline subreddit, and it's interesting that many of the lazy or entitled-sounding questions (e.g. "can I get compensation for this?") come from people flying to/from Indian cities.
Honestly that's just the massive population talking. There really isn't a "Hindi web" for India unlike for the Chinese, so we all come to roost in the WWW. Hence you'll get bad questions like these but you'll also get YouTube videos on obscure engineering and science topics, which I think is a fair deal.
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.
1 billion internet users, some of whom may have an inkling of how to speak in English.
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.
That's not been my experience living in the UK. Whe I've asked for directions people either give correct ones (as far as I remember) or say they don't know. When people ask me and I don't know, I say I don't know.
> This behavior appears in software projects as well. It's difficult to work like this.
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.
According to Hal Roach, the Irish do this too, because they don't want to disappoint you. I haven't asked for a lot of directions in Ireland, but I can imagine this is true, or that they will just keep you chatting and see if you forget about your question.
This reminds me of the time when I got lost when visiting LA about 20 year ago. Asked some guy on the street for help. He gave me directions as he was smirking at me. Turns out he pointed me in the opposite direction from where I was going to and most likely he was just being a dick.
> 1. 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.
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.
I also worked with japanese, including on site in Tokyo and quickly learned that asking "did you understand it?" is useless. I always had to keep in mind to ask "what did you understand?".
> Pay in India is still severely (seriously low, with 12-14+ hour workdays, even more than the 996 culture of China) low for most people.
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.
Avoid middlemen in India.. sorry for the word, but they are the biggest leechers. We hate them too here.
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.
The good engineers in india know their value and get it. 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).
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.
Responding to you in this thread, because this is the way: the only success I've seen to offshoing to india, is to actually run the office yourself, have an exec over there, manage and control hiring, pay above market rates, etc...
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 good engineers in india know their value and get it.
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
Senior/staff type engineers are not a union position so great people refuse promotions and responsibility because they don't want to leave the union. Thus they won't mentor juniors, and other things that you need great engineers for. (At least that is how the union people I work with in Europe are, there are other unions with different rules)
Like siblings comments, I would be really interested to know to which country and union you are referring to. In France it's certainly not true (I have a very senior engineering role and I am in a union and it never was an issue, and anyway, the percentage of unionized engineers here is so low that even if that was true, it would hardly be noticeable)
Which country is that in? Can you not offer them better conditions than the union? Are they forced to leave the union or just no longer required to be in it?
> 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.
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.
Do you mean that they were dinged if a PR they opened received too many comments? Can you elaborate on how the communication style changed after this? Like they were more willing to seek clarification/discussion?
> Can you elaborate on how the communication style changed after this? Like they were more willing to seek clarification/discussion?
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.
> 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.
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.
As a gent with some years under his belt, I have to humbly admit that it was quite late in my career before I realized how much culture influences how people operate. Two separate incidents with two different cultural contexts brought it to the fore about ten years ago. I sought some advice from a senior exec that I was close with and he just laid it out in very unflinching way. It was just one conversation but it has helped me tremendously in the years since.
I thought about it when I posted but it felt like an invitation to dunk on the cultures involved. In one case it was a communication pattern that I found to be very unprofessional by an entire team, the other was nearly instant and *intense* conflict between a former direct of mine and their new manager that I got sucked into the middle of.
Particular topic (1) is also trained in cross cultural trainings.
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.
With higher salaries (is happening) and better quality of life (I do not know, do not life there). Within company obviously quality of the culture matters there.
However considering how things are worldwide right now, I think that trend stops soonish.
This is one reason, the other is just fraud. Being from a developing country, I am well aware of the stigma of saying I don't know, which I had to strip out of me as I became an engineer to the point of me being immediately suspicious when someone tells me they know about some moldy complex topic, even if it's in their profession.
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.
You’re not allowed to admit it’s fraud. It’s just a cultural difference. You explained it wrong. You didn’t pay enough. You were supposed to try to become their best friend first. Anything not to say “well some cultures just have no problem committing fraud at any opportunity”
Perfectly put. Scamming is a cottage industry. No ethics whatsoever.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Work cultures are brutal in SEA and South Asia countries. And there is no job security, no social security, no labour laws(on paper they are, but, are not applied) and no liveable pay(this is changing though).
> 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.
Damn me, Scotland is going to be quite the culture shock for you.
Thanks for all this, what you wrote and the discussion that followed has been genuinely helpful, and I think it might help bridge some cultural divides that I've experienced when working with Indian people.
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?
1. Same here. I too learnt a lot more from the following discussions.
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).
Thank you for this cultural explanation - I've experienced the same thing with Japanese co-workers - there is often a "no" but to American ears its so subtle that it often goes in one ear and out the other.
Both the cultures suffer from "a senior is always right" mentality. Therefore, with my juniors, I used to intentionally (sometimes, and mostly during early days of their joinings) make stupid little mistakes (harmless) and used to let those folks figure that out and then appreciate them on catching it. Worked like wonder. Never ever anyone hesitated to discuss anything with me anytime.. even personal issues many times :)
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.
Could this cultural difference explain why they're set up LLMs to do work for them, though? No authority asked them to, but I guess it would look nice in their resume if successful.
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).
The sweet spot is being authoritative without being overbearing. When leadership feels supportive rather than controlling, people engage honestly... and that balance comes from experience.
my managers are indian, and honestly Im struggling. Do you have any advice? I feel like im not allowed to ask questions, a lot of our processes dont make sense to me.
Not the advice Im proud to give (or anyone should give), but the one that will work: Create dependency on yourself, company-wide, and make sure the boss knows about it. Avoid direct confrontation with your manager.
Since we are talking about LLMs, what I've noticed about the Indian/Pakistani "LLM" is they follow this way of structuring thoughts:
1. They
2. Always
3. List
4. Things
... and end up with a conclusion/punchline/takeaway.
I always wanted to ask, is that due to training?
I could imagine all schools around there have a specific style, like all their assignments need to follow this general form, and then they just get used to it and it permeates to their everyday life.
It's due to training (I suspect both OpenAI/Microsoft and Google have been training on their entire corpus of internal comms and technical docs). After almost 10 years in a FAANG I also tend to write like that.
I bet you haven't seriously communicated with others in a language that is not native to you. You'll probably end up doing similar things if you have to.
An Indian person basically is used to not making any decisions for themselves until maybe they're married off (and even then, probably not until age 40). /s
This sounds like a real cross-cultural mismatch, but it’s doing too much work with nationality alone. In a lot of Indian (and broader South Asian) work contexts, questioning instructions can be read as challenging authority or admitting incompetence, so people default to executing without asking. That’s often reinforced by education systems and contractor dynamics where producing something quickly feels safer than pausing to clarify.
Add in time zones, language friction, and fear of losing work, and "just run with it" becomes a rational strategy. Meanwhile, many Western workplaces treat clarification and check-ins as professionalism, so the behavior reads as strange or careless.
The key point is that this usually isn’t lack of curiosity or reflection, but risk management under different norms. The pattern often disappears once expectations are explicit: ask questions, check back, iteration is expected.
Yeah, I agree, the time zones are killer, and this can't be ignored. I work at a company spread over most of the world, with SMEs coming and going as the globe spins.
Back-and-forth iteration and consultation is a genuinely hard problem. Certain kinds of feedback cycles have a minimum latency of "overnight". Which means we need to invest heavily in good communication.
But also, it means more people need to have the "big picture", and they need to be able to make good decisions (not just arbitrary ones). So the ideal goal is to prevent people from going off in random nonsensical directions based on miscommunication, and equip them to actually think strategically about the overall plan. Continent X might make different decisions than continent Y, but they're all talking, and enough people see the goal.
A lot of the international teams I've seen pull this off are ones where an Eastern European or Indian team is just another permanent part of the company, with broad-based professional expertise. Contractors on any continent are a whole different story.
So I think what a lot of people try to blame on Indian management culture (or whatever) really is just a case of "we hired contractors in a different time zone." I mean, there are always cultural issues—Linus Torvalds came from a famously direct management culture, and many US managers tend to present criticism as a not-so-subtle "hint" in between two compliments—but professionals of intelligence and goodwill will figure all that out eventually.
> But also, it means more people need to have the "big picture", and they need to be able to make good decisions (not just arbitrary ones). So the ideal goal is to prevent people from going off in random nonsensical directions based on miscommunication, and equip them to actually think strategically about the overall plan. Continent X might make different decisions than continent Y, but they're all talking, and enough people see the goal.
Very common pattern you see in literature about military strategy, actually. The answer is delegation, heavy use of NCOs, and in general explaining the plan all the way down to the individual soldier. Under the western school it all falls under "initiative".
Notably, a lot of non-western militaries are terrible at it, and a number of military failings in africa, the middle east, and the soviet union (*cough*russia*cough*) are viewed as failures in flexibility with very low initiative, as well as lacking/unskilled NCO corps.
Dunno how you apply that to an organization, but maybe sending skilled workers as a kind of non-comissioned officer could work. Who knows.
> Dunno how you apply that to an organization, but maybe sending skilled workers as a kind of non-comissioned officer could work. Who knows.
The most successful engagements I've had with contracting firms have been when we've shelled out for a team manager and a software architect (in addition to the number of straight developers we want).
The software architect builds a solid understanding of our solution space, and from then on helps translate requirements into terms their engineers are familiar with, and provides code reviews to ensure their contributions are in line with the project goals. The team manager knows how to handle the day-to-day reporting, making sure everyone is on task, escalates blockers over the fence to our engineers and managment, etc.
Without those two roles from the contracting firm's side, I find that timezones and cultural mismatches (engineering culture, that is) pretty much erase the impact of the additional engineering headcount when adding contractors.
Explaining the plan to the individual soldier also works better when the individual soldier is expected to care at all about the overall goal. (Such as believing in the mission of defending the home country.) When the soldier only has extrinsic motivation such as money, top-down command and control and treating soldiers solely as equipment to be spent makes more "sense", in a terrible way.
IT also only works if the soldier is well trained in the things he can do. I can teach you to shoot a machine gun in a couple hours - and half of that time will be figuring out how to shoot and clean it myself (I've used hunting rifles and have enough mechanical knowledge that I think I can figure out the rest - but someone who knows that gun can likely find something I would not figure out). That will be enough for "spray and pray" which is a large part of what a machine gun is used for.
However in a real war you need to figure out what direction to point the gun, and need to know when to fire and when to not. I don't know how the army handles "we are advancing now so don't shoot", or "we are crawling along the ground so make sure you shoot high": someone else needs to give anyone I train those orders. The army trains their machine gun operators better so they can figure a lot of that out without being told.
> the time zones are killer, and this can't be ignored
100% agree, especially when there is minimal overlap during normal office hours. I was managing a dev team in India from the US and it was a real challenge. The company ended up moving team to the US, relocating most of my team. Despite all the people being the same, management became much easier.
Since then I've done US and EU, and EU and IN, and those have all worked fine because we had sufficient overlap during business hours.
He didn't need 8 hours, but zero didn't work. The us and india are about 12 hours apart (there are 4 times zones in the us, day light savings time, and india is offset half an hour, but it rounds out to 12 hours for discussion)
> If you needed 8 hour overlap you were micromanaging?
...ok. I didn't need 8 hours of overlap.
As I mentioned in my first comment, I've also now done US/EU and EU/IN. Both of which have only partial overlap and things have gone well.
With US West Coast and India, I was often doing meetings at 7AM and my devs were doing meetings at 9 or 10PM. That was challenging, irrespective of any cultural differences.
> Contractors on any continent are a whole different story.
Having spent the last ~7 years working for different startups before pivoting, my advice to any founder is this: do not hire overseas consultants. They're good, competent people, but you and your company do not have the tools or the culture to actualize them.
To add to that, it is culturally acceptable and even lauded in India to achieve something by "gaming the system", something usually considered unethical in the west (okay maybe less so in the US).
I would be ashamed to submit an AI slop PR or vulnerability report.
An indian might just say "I have 25 merged PRs in open source projects"
In my experience trying to outsource to India, there is a strong systemic bias towards lying and cheating to get ahead (and that was even before AI), and a focus on milking as much money as possible rather than building great technology.
While there is real talent there, there is also a lot of overhead to find people you can trust.
This is probably just a reflection of the competitive nature of the market and the social ladder tech salaries enable there.
It is cultural - the whole "not losing face" thing. In a project, I once was squad lead - I was onsite, my squad members were in Bangalore of course. Same experience as you. Once I wanted to talk about a piece of code that we need to improve and refactor, and I was acting in good faith calling the dev that commited that code. When I braught up the code on my screen to start a pair programming, he immediately denied having written the code. Unfortunately for him, being a junior, he did not know about git blame - I entered it in the terminal and his name showed up on that code. Still, he would simply just deny that he wrote it. I then took the git commit hash and looked it up in gitlab, able to bring up the MR he created and the reviewer (wasn't me). Even with that on screen, he still denied being the author - with no arguments or alternative reasoning, he just constantly would repeat "No, I haven't written that". "No no, but I haven't written it". I pulled even the JIRA ticket up, that was about that feature and guess what - he was the assigne and moved it to "In Progress" and "Done". Still with that on screen all I got was a "no, haven't written it".
I had more of those interactions, and we also exchanged some of the indian devs (they were sold to the client by a big consulting group, and immediately replaced by someone else if we wished). I later found out, people that I have had replaced in my sqaud for not being qualified, ended up in different teams in the same corporation, they were basically just moving around inhouse.
After a few month in the project I swore to myself never to work with offshores again. And as a side note, the bank I did the project with, does not exist anymore :)
I’m Indian. I absolutely loathe this part of Indian culture. My uncle was once eating a pizza like a naan (ripping pieces off straight from the box) and I called him out on it, and he said he wasn’t doing anything like that…while holding a piece of naan and the pizza looking like rats had a party with it.
It happens basically constantly, I have never heard my family admit to a mistake unless violently confronted by someone with authority.
Leads to all sorts of issues and societal breakdowns, like police beating people up before even trying to communicate.
I'm curious if you tried to explain to the guy that lying to you undermined his reputation far more than any mistake he made in the first place, and if so how that went. That's something I would fire someone for if it was in my power. Making mistakes is ok, but lying about it is absolutely not.
Pretty sure the right move as soon as he said "I didn't write that" was to just say. "It isn't important who wrote it, we all make mistakes, let's see together how we could have done better."
Today, I would maybe agree and have grown wiser. But software engineering is 50% failure management. And admitting failure should be normal for every level, I am very open and outspoken that I (just as every other guy) makes errors all day. We literally have error management system in place because of that - Bugtrackers, Test pyramid, QA departments etc. It is simple not helpful if people not take accountability and grow on their mistakes.
Pretty sure that can be the wrong move in an instance where it does matter who wrote that. Freely allowing derogation of authorship soon fosters derogation of responsibility.
I don't know if it is, but I can swear every time I post a job opening (generally contracting work) on LinkedIn 95% of the applicants are Indians/Bangladesh/Pakistanis/Sri Lankans.
I ignore all of their resumes, not because I don't think there's valid individuals among them, I did hire them in the past, but:
1. because the signal to noise ratio is absurd. The overwhelming majority didn't even read the actual post.
2. Even when they are okay developers, communication is always a huge issue. Sync communication in call is though because urdu and other indian area accents are extremely heavy so I really struggle understanding their english, my bad but what can I do about it. If I try to keep it async or chat based then they tend to not ask feedback, clarifications, provide updates, etc. So you feel like you need to micro manage them half the time and they'd rather give you answers to make you immediately happy than surfacing problems.
3. Paying them is always an hassle. Wiring them money through bank accounts is difficult. They generally set up some Paypal or similar service or ask you to pay them on some Hong Kong account from a friend of theirs. I need traceable invoices and simple wires for tax purposes and when sending money to Pakistan multiple times anti-laundering got involved in my country, and we talking low hundreds of euros.
Still, props to the few good ones I've met, they've been critical on some projects of mine. Very professional and knowledgeable. But it's just too bad of a signal/noise ratio, seriously most applicants don't even read job descriptions.
That is a cultural thing, and one of the first things you learn to handle when working tightly together with Indians as an outsider.
I can't remember all the techniques but a simple trick is to ask them to repeat their understanding back to you before they start working on a thing.
But I don't think it's connected to sending "malicious" reports. That seems rather to be to pad their resume and online presence while studying to get an edge in hiring.
You know who also needs a lot of micro-management but doesn’t live in a time zone, is way faster than offshore contractors, scales up and down instantly, has no onboarding period and is (still) cheaper? Opus.
My guess would be yes, it's cultural. I'm not Indian but spent about 5 months there. Overall my impression was that people act much more on direct feedback.
It would be typical to do the first thing that comes to mind, then see what happens. No negative feedback? Done, move on. Negative feedback? Try the next best thing that makes the negative feed back go away.
People will not wonder whether they might bother you. Just start talking. Maybe try to sell you something. That's often annoying. But also just be curious, or offer tea. You react annoyed and tell them to go away? They most likely will and not think anything bad of it. You engage them? They will continue. Most likely won't take "hints" or whatever subtle non-verbal communication a Westerner uses.
I found it quite exhausting in the beginning, it feels like constantly having to defend myself when I want to be left alone. But after I started understanding this mode and becoming more firm in my boundaries, I started to find it quite nice for everyday interactions. Much less guessing involved, just be direct.
Professionally I haven't worked much with Indians, but my expectation would be that it's necessary to be more active in ensuring that things are in track. Ask them to reflect back to you what the stated goal is. Ask them for what you think are obvious implications from the stated goal to ensure they're not just repeating the words. Check work in progress more often.
Of course it’s cultural, they have to compete with thousands people just like them in environment where human life is cheap and anyone is replaceable. Any authority have huge weight, which comes from historical system how society is separated.
And then any education they receive assumes cheating at exams, then cheat with CV, then cheat with work they do. It’s all about appearances.
Maybe. I have hated crowds all my life. I can always see filth in people. I have helped people cheating at interviews. I want to vomit everytime somebody asks me to make a CV. Vomit in the sense I genuinely hate overselling myself but if I don't, I just don't. And what I'm open if you want to ask any question about me?
I had the same exact experience with an Indian contractor. I requested that he used git instead of Shopify CLI for his changes to a store's theme. He acknowledged my request but kept using the CLI. I once again asked him to use git and even offered a detailed, step-by-step guide on how to pull, branch and then push changes. He absolutely ignored everything and simply kept using the CLI. That was actually amazing to witness. The only hypothesis I have is that it's some kind of cultural thing where asking for help is worse than doing the opposite of what's expected from you. I don't know, but your story supports my hypothesis.
Ask culture scales a lot better in a fast changing world full of strangers. Guess culture saves friction, but only in situations where people are mostly guessing correctly because the social structure and expectations are fixed.
Many of my Indian friends say it is, but sometimes I feel they can be as self-critical of their country as many Americans are of the USA.
Demographics show that it doesn't have to be cultural - it could just be that India has 9x as many people under the age of 35 compared to the USA. Even if we were culturally similar, for every annoying US youngster "hustling" to try to get employment, there would be 9 early-career Indians doing the same. That alone is enough to drown the "Vox Agora" with Indian voices. Chinese citizens generally don't participate in English-language fora, so their large numbers would be massively under-represented.
If anything else is biasing the populations, the difference in numbers could be even more stark.
I used to work with colleagues from China in contracting and I had the same experience with them. If they don't know something they have hard time saying that they don't know something or don't understand something.
Ficticious Example could be
Q: is this car red?
A: it's not green.
Q: yeah I know it's not green. But is it red?
A: today is Thursday.
One thing I leaned it's not worth pressing forward and causing a scene. Instead it's better to use other ways of finding the information.
When guiding team members I always found it useful to have them explain back to me in their own words what they're tasked to do. It become immediately obvious if they were on the right track or not.
Exactly this. You just put them on the spot and they lose face and you're embarrassing them.
Besides this interaction has already made it know they they don't know the answer so what's the benefit of forcing them to announce they they don't know something?
I've only been in a peer to peer type of working relationships with people I'd consider coworkers so I wouldn't think it'd be very fruitful to start agitating people in such a position.
What position? If you let it pass, you encourage this kind of behaviour.
If they are working for a western company, they should adjust their behaviour, not the company. Just imagine working for an Indian company (or manager), and expecting them to tolerate your individualist behaviour and audacious questions. You would be punished immediately.
If it's a peer-to-peer relationship, all the more reason to be firm. If you don't speak up you will never be respected. And don't think that just because you keep quiet the shitty types of people won't stab you in your back at their first opportunity (ask me how I know).
The people having a terrible time with Indian contractors always deal with folks making 3k-10k USD/year. Of course the quality is bad.
For reference:
Good Indian devs out of college make atleast 30k USD. Good senior devs make atleast 50k. The really good ones make much more. Most American companies outsource to bottom of the barrel contracting companies like Infosys.
> Good Indian devs out of college make atleast 30k USD. Good senior devs make atleast 50k.
1. How can you be a good dev if you've never developed professionally in your life?
2. I know Indian numbers and this is complete bs. Like complete.
Maybe there are extremely rare exceptions to it, but this is like claiming that good US devs out of college make 350k. That's beyond rare, may happen, but it's beyond rare.
1. "out of college". I'm sure you can figure out how to interview new grads and identify good devs.
2. They are not. FAANG in India pays higher than what I quoted. My senior numbers are especially on the lower end of the spectrum. If your numbers are lower then you aren't working with good devs.
These are the numbers for good devs. The ones who get into great startups/companies. 95% make less and it shows in the quality. Infosys pays new grads 4000 USD/yr.
No you can't. Because the real difficulty is not bullshit leetcode questions, but professionalism, ability to handle pressure, requirements collection and research, soft skills, design, etc. you can't interview for those.
You build these skills by writing good software under constraints not by building personal pet projects and farming leetcode.
It's quite strange though when you consider the fastest way to get egg on your face is to do something badly because you didn't understand and just made it up instead of looking it up
I ran into this when I went to India to help train our team over there.
I tried specifically asking questions where the correct answer was “no” and they wouldn’t tell me no. In some cases I told them I was expecting them to say “no” and they still wouldn’t do it.
It was very difficult to figure out what they knew or didn’t know without putting them through a test and seeing how they did.
Possibly as a consequence of this, what I have observed working with Indians is a very hierarchical structure in which you have a "lead" or "architect" who spells out what to do and how to do it in minute details and micromanages, and "devs" who execute as instructed.
I've worked with offshore a number of times and had to recruit there. Even for mid to junior positions, you'd see most people you interview with senior-lead-architect (over heard a random design discussion at the cafeteria), master-of-the-engineering-quality (wrote disfunctional selenium tests), CTO-confounder-Founding-engineer (unpaid internship for his cousin who had an app idea), expert-senior-executive who managed teams of 60 people (summer job as a goat herder).
I guess that's one way to stand out when you are lost in an ocean of people, working thousands of kilometers away from the white dude exploiting you.
I've worked with mixed nationality teams at a certain 4 letter austinite corporation a couple thousand moons ago. One thing in common with my Asian colleagues back then (many of which i still keep in touch with to this day), is that they would usually refrain from saying things that could rock the boat or disappoint you. If they lacked knowledge for the task at hand, they wouldn't let you know. If they were late on a delivery, they'd insist it would be ready by a certain date. This led to situations where other regional managers would have to plan contingencies to work around the issue.
I recently heard from a friend that this is due to something called "izzat". Admitting any sort of wrongdoing would reflect poorly on them and their family, to the point they would rather lie or do the wrong thing than damage their family's reputation.
What I don't understand about this is that, if you become "the guy that always does the wrong thing", doesn't that also damage your family's reputation? I don't mean to come off insulting here, just trying to understand.
Culture and what companies want there. I was running a operational team with a couple of incredibly talented guys who had been escalation engineers for large software companies in India.
They were trained really hard to "restore" things in a way that hit some minimal level of the SLA, but not really. It created alot of issues initially in the organization as the "don't question anything" had really been ingrained into them. My observation there is that it made many of the useless support engagements I've experienced make sense, and that a place with that level of discipline and process must be pretty awful.
Could be, but there are a number of very popular Youtube and other video based classes/bootcamps (taught and targeted from/to Indian students) that teach how to work with git and github that show how to create PR's and comments in repos, and then a lot of students do that, on public (and popular) repos.
I was contacted by a guy who said he found a vulnerability on my site. Something like phpinfo being available or something. I informed them that I was aware of it and it's not a vulnerability but did offer to give them a small Amazon gift code if they wanted.
This might be part of the motivation. What's pocket change in the west might be good money in the 3rd world.
> At the I perceived the pattern that Indian contractors would never ever ask for clarifications, would never say they didn't know something, would never say they didn't understand something, etc. Instead they just ran with whatever they happened to have in their mind, until I called them out
Its incentives. If you’re an Indian student in India, unless you go to a prestigious university, your prospects of landing a job, let alone a good one are very small. Even tech companies that claim to be meritocratic elsewhere, rarely screen resumes beyond the top universities in India. The only other real prospect is to get your resume to stand out. Open source contributions, research papers etc are some ways to do that. And the talented ones make contributions, while the rest just try to fake it in the hopes to make it (it obviously doesn’t work).
There are similar incentives if you want your college application to stand out if you’re trying to go abroad for higher education. And if you’re already outside India, those incentives extend to job applications outside India. If you’re an international student looking for a job, even if you have work experience at known multinational companies, if it’s in India, the experience doesn’t count.
Definitely not. Anyone growing up immersed in face-saving, high pressure, competition and possibly self-help influencers telling them how to achieve will exhibit these sorts of behaviors. Doesn't matter if you're white or black.
there are definitely cultural issues you have to be aware of, and it's not just India, there are many cultures where questioning authority or admitting to uncertainty are less welcome - and some companies and managers reinforce these.
Always consider relative status and power imbalance regardless of nationality too. If someone is afraid to say no you have to factor that in - and 'calling them out on it' is maybe not the most effective reaction, especially if in public.
I always had frustrations with this as a manager until I could establish a personal relationship. Sounds extra hard with short-term remote contractors!
selfishness, laziness, lack of self-awareness, lack of shame, etc are obviously universal traits. But cultures absolutely reinforce them to different degrees. Many cultures around the world are built around the sorts of behaviors we both described.
Whereas other cultures have at least some (if not a lot of) resistance to it - eg publicly ridiculing when people step flagrantly out of line. This is good. My impression is that British culture is like this - "taking the piss", or worse, out of people whose egos start to get too large
Edit: what about this comment could possibly be worth a downvote...? Not that I care about points, but it just seems to be an objective assessment of human nature and cultures, without even singling out any cultures that need improvement.
people who actually have a life generally don't spend time hanging around internet forums so it's important to consider that a disconnection from reality is involved in places like these , thru my eyes you have restated the idea of low trust vs high trust societies without building on top of the idea , which isnt downvote worthy but isnt upvote worthy either
I didn't expect up votes. I also wasn't about to write a treatise. And saying "low trust vs high trust societies" wouldn't be meaningful, nor would it actually be accurate. The issue here isn't trust - it's humility, integrity, conscientiousness, etc. Trust often comes along with such traits, but it's not the core issue.
Your grammar and syntax is fine for the medium and audience. I did downvote that post, somewhat ironically because you edited it to ask about someone else’s downvote. But otherwise carry on.
This is hilarious and reminded me of the two stints I had in India, for about 8 months in total at the turn of the century. I was a hippy traveler and asking directions for almost anything was par for the course. I never had anyone local say they didn't know where something was once asked, even though me following their directions lead to the intended target maybe 10% of the time. It was funny and infuriating at the same time :)
Absolutely. I've been traveling for the last 10 years and lived in 50+ countries. I believe that all cultures have unique pros and cons and that the cultural diversity of the world is an amazing thing. There are good and bad people everywhere, so I rarely leave a place with such a strong opinion as the multiple times I've been to India. I really wanted to love India because of their rich history and diversity, but I ended up leaving with a feeling that their culture is overwhelmingly objectively bad.
There are also a lot of Indian students (there are 1.4bn Indians). There are lots of IT jobs, therefore presumably lots of IT students, and unlike in China Internet access (e.g. to GitHub) is not restricted.
I think it's mostly not cultural but just bad engineers lying. IT jobs pays the best in India, and it attracts people who have no skills in IT to just fake their way in.
So for every good developer in India there are probably 20 bad ones who have no idea what they are doing.
I honestly think its a symptom of having almost no "career mobility". If it's impossible to get promoted / find better jobs, then being skilled doesn't go as far as brown-nosing.
People will only apply themselves if they think it will help them get to a better place.
Not exactly - there is career mobility in IT, but for many IT is seen as the only place they can get it people who shouldn't be in IT go there.
There also seems to be an expectation that after about 30 you move into management. This means people experienced in IT are not socially valued (they can be paid well if they are great).
It's desperational. The desperation of not having to lose any contract. The desperation of being just one bad year away from being on the streets and having to live a terrible life (no food security).
For students, often there is no pathway to actually become good due to lack of resources. So, the only way is to fake it into a job and then become good.
Is this cultural? I ran a small business some years ago (later failed) and was paying for contract work to various people. At the I perceived the pattern that Indian contractors would never ever ask for clarifications, would never say they didn't know something, would never say they didn't understand something, etc. Instead they just ran with whatever they happened to have in their mind, until I called them out. And if they did something poorly and I didn't call them out they'd never do back as far as I can tell and wonder "did I get it right? Could I have done better?". I don't get this attitude - at my day job I sometimes "run with it" but I periodically check with my manager to make sure "hey this is what you wanted right?". There's little downside to this.
Your comment reminded me of my experience, in the sense that they're both a sort of "fake it till you make it".