I have to be careful in responding because an honest reporting of my experiences will have some people screaming "racism!" at me. I'll just restrict it to three observations, all of which I swear to be true.
1) the two best managers I have ever had in over thirty years of software work were both Indian.
I have to be careful in responding because an honest reporting of my experiences will have some people screaming "racism!" at me. I'll just restrict it to three observations, all of which I swear to be true.
1) the two best managers I have ever had in over thirty years of software work were both Indian.
2) a few of the best programmers I have ever worked with were Indian (none of these worked from India)
3) every single one of the worst programmers I have ever worked with, both in terms of being programmers and in being coworkers, were Indian. Every single one. If you knew anything about the work I could tell you stories that would have your jaw on the floor,
I had a manager who led the way to hiring in/from India. My field was not exactly "programming" although I wrote tons of it. It was test engineering where I developed hardware interfaces and wrote software for automatic test of avionics hardware. Early on she brought in programmers who didn't understand the electronics that they were writing software to test. It did not go well. By the time I retired they were taking over much, if not most of the software work I did, except in areas of ITAR and dual use restricted technology. I was still doing the hardware stuff and was the technical lead on projects they were involved in.
I will say that the ones I worked with in the end were competent, hardworking and pleasant to work with. Like Americans and the ones that I worked with from other countries, some were very good and some not so much. But this thread of conversation is about them as people. They were people. In the end, race and culture made little to no difference in my experience with working with them.
With the exceptions I noted my experience has been starkly different.
I don't want to talk about race. It's a huge country with many distinct ethnicities and languages. What I will mention, at risk of being called names, is work ethic. The coworkers I mentioned who did solid work had been in the USA for some time and picked up the (long dead) culture of excellence in software. Most never did.
Far more common, universal among recent arrivals, was an adamant and aggressive mediocrity, doing the absolute least they could get away with doing, triumphally announcing every (badly) cleared task in email (when nobody else did) but otherwise completely uncommunicative.
In 2020 I was on a distributed team on a project that ultimately died as I knew it would because the guy doing the back end, named Lijo. was completely incompetent and wouldn't listen to anyone. On the daily zoom call (ugh) his voice was three times louder than anyone else's and he insisted on doing a screen share when he had nothing to demonstrate, hijacking our machines so we could watch him wiggle his mouse. I needed analgesics after every call. There were three other Indians on this team and they were soft-spoken and did good work.
Once I wrote a new back end entrypoint in a language called Django I didn't know very well; I asked him to review it and touch up the syntax. He completely rewrote it, very badly, changing the HTTP status codes so the code calling it wouldn't work anymore, reformatted it to his own preferred illegible slop (reformatting others' code is a serious provocation). It was terrible work. I tried three times to talk to him about it, maybe he had his reasons (wrong. A server exception is 500, not 400, and that's not a matter of style) and he never answered. I finally went to management, something I abhor doing, and all they heard was "conflict in the team." Since the company didn't do much testing they didn't know that his back end was going to fall flat on its face as soon as they prepared for release. I knew it because I usually do back end work. They never released, all that work wasted.
I mentioned hiring. OK, back in the days of the HIV epidemic I went to give blood and they wouldn't take mine because I'm gay and even though most gay men didn't have HIV, we were nevertheless more likely to. Well, such was the case in software hiring; sure there are a lot of good Indian developers but most companies tossed any Patel resume in the trash because the probability of getting a Lijo was just too high. OTOH when the hiring manager was Indian, nobody but other Indians was ever hired. Outsourcing to Indian companies risks having them go silent just before the project is done and then having them steal it and market it themselves.
I wrote about my Lijo experience on Medium, omitting his nationality and his name. I made $2500 from that one article. Apparently it resonated for a lot of people. I bought a Moog with the money.
OK, filter my remark with the following. At first, they were not so good and there were some do as little as possibles in the crowd. Over time a culling process improved them but as you wrote, their best work was when they came to the US which decreased the savings in replacing Americans with them. I moved to a joint venture project with the Chinese and people from India moved off my radar for years. Before I retired, we lost an engineer who was doing a lot of work with people from India, and I was assigned some of it. The ones I had visibility to were doing alright but there was demand for validation at every step.
I think that one difference in our experience may be in your statement. "Since the company didn't do much testing they didn't know that his back end was going to fall flat on its face as soon as they prepared for release." Since my work was about safety of flight and air worthiness for commercial aircraft, rigor was extreme. A great deal of time spent on documentation and review. We were less likely to have ugly surprises although there were ugly revelations during the course of programs that led to terminations and rework, but not whole projects tossed into a dumpster.
I'm a programmer (well, retired now), and I'd be interested. In the stories about bad colleagues, that is; I'm not interested in elaboration about their ethnicities unless especially relevant.
I have to be careful in responding because an honest reporting of my experiences will have some people screaming "racism!" at me. I'll just restrict it to three observations, all of which I swear to be true.
1) the two best managers I have ever had in over thirty years of software work were both Indian.
2) a few of the best programmers I have ever worked with were Indian (none of these worked from India)
3) every single one of the worst programmers I have ever worked with, both in terms of being programmers and in being coworkers, were Indian. Every single one. If you knew anything about the work I could tell you stories that would have your jaw on the floor,
I had a manager who led the way to hiring in/from India. My field was not exactly "programming" although I wrote tons of it. It was test engineering where I developed hardware interfaces and wrote software for automatic test of avionics hardware. Early on she brought in programmers who didn't understand the electronics that they were writing software to test. It did not go well. By the time I retired they were taking over much, if not most of the software work I did, except in areas of ITAR and dual use restricted technology. I was still doing the hardware stuff and was the technical lead on projects they were involved in.
I will say that the ones I worked with in the end were competent, hardworking and pleasant to work with. Like Americans and the ones that I worked with from other countries, some were very good and some not so much. But this thread of conversation is about them as people. They were people. In the end, race and culture made little to no difference in my experience with working with them.
With the exceptions I noted my experience has been starkly different.
I don't want to talk about race. It's a huge country with many distinct ethnicities and languages. What I will mention, at risk of being called names, is work ethic. The coworkers I mentioned who did solid work had been in the USA for some time and picked up the (long dead) culture of excellence in software. Most never did.
Far more common, universal among recent arrivals, was an adamant and aggressive mediocrity, doing the absolute least they could get away with doing, triumphally announcing every (badly) cleared task in email (when nobody else did) but otherwise completely uncommunicative.
In 2020 I was on a distributed team on a project that ultimately died as I knew it would because the guy doing the back end, named Lijo. was completely incompetent and wouldn't listen to anyone. On the daily zoom call (ugh) his voice was three times louder than anyone else's and he insisted on doing a screen share when he had nothing to demonstrate, hijacking our machines so we could watch him wiggle his mouse. I needed analgesics after every call. There were three other Indians on this team and they were soft-spoken and did good work.
Once I wrote a new back end entrypoint in a language called Django I didn't know very well; I asked him to review it and touch up the syntax. He completely rewrote it, very badly, changing the HTTP status codes so the code calling it wouldn't work anymore, reformatted it to his own preferred illegible slop (reformatting others' code is a serious provocation). It was terrible work. I tried three times to talk to him about it, maybe he had his reasons (wrong. A server exception is 500, not 400, and that's not a matter of style) and he never answered. I finally went to management, something I abhor doing, and all they heard was "conflict in the team." Since the company didn't do much testing they didn't know that his back end was going to fall flat on its face as soon as they prepared for release. I knew it because I usually do back end work. They never released, all that work wasted.
I mentioned hiring. OK, back in the days of the HIV epidemic I went to give blood and they wouldn't take mine because I'm gay and even though most gay men didn't have HIV, we were nevertheless more likely to. Well, such was the case in software hiring; sure there are a lot of good Indian developers but most companies tossed any Patel resume in the trash because the probability of getting a Lijo was just too high. OTOH when the hiring manager was Indian, nobody but other Indians was ever hired. Outsourcing to Indian companies risks having them go silent just before the project is done and then having them steal it and market it themselves.
I wrote about my Lijo experience on Medium, omitting his nationality and his name. I made $2500 from that one article. Apparently it resonated for a lot of people. I bought a Moog with the money.
OK, filter my remark with the following. At first, they were not so good and there were some do as little as possibles in the crowd. Over time a culling process improved them but as you wrote, their best work was when they came to the US which decreased the savings in replacing Americans with them. I moved to a joint venture project with the Chinese and people from India moved off my radar for years. Before I retired, we lost an engineer who was doing a lot of work with people from India, and I was assigned some of it. The ones I had visibility to were doing alright but there was demand for validation at every step.
I think that one difference in our experience may be in your statement. "Since the company didn't do much testing they didn't know that his back end was going to fall flat on its face as soon as they prepared for release." Since my work was about safety of flight and air worthiness for commercial aircraft, rigor was extreme. A great deal of time spent on documentation and review. We were less likely to have ugly surprises although there were ugly revelations during the course of programs that led to terminations and rework, but not whole projects tossed into a dumpster.
I'm a programmer (well, retired now), and I'd be interested. In the stories about bad colleagues, that is; I'm not interested in elaboration about their ethnicities unless especially relevant.
I'd be interested in hearing about them too. Race redacted!
Well thanks for sharing, however obliquely :) I understand why.