This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I've had... bizarre experience with Indian's professionally. Every Indian coder, support staff, offshore worker, project manager, etc I've ever worked with over 20 years, had this peculiar mode of communications failure. It's hard to even describe. On my end it looked like some part of their cognition was just broken. Like they'd make all the right mouth sounds that they understood certain questions, comments and directives, and then proceed to perform tasks or give answers that were totally detached from any context we were operating under. It's how I imagine p-zombies would behave. It actually reminds me of trying to get ChatGPT to understand my point, and it just failing to over and over again. Because ChatGPT doesn't think, or really comprehend anything at all. It's just a statistical model of what words come after what other words.
Like, one time I was having a conversation with the Indian project manager we were subcontracted to. There were three requirements on the project, that when taken all together, only a subset of 2 could be satisfied. And trying to have this conversation with the PM just went round and round in circles. I explained that I implement requirement 1 and 2, then requirement 3 cannot be satisfied. They'd come back to just do 3. I'd return that if I implement requirement 3, requirement 1 cannot be satisfied. They'd come back and insist I implement requirement 1. I'd explain if I implemented requirement 1 and 3, requirement 2 could not be satisfied. We went round and round and round like this, with me giving detailed technical and logical reasons why these requirements in aggregate created a paradox, or a double bind. After two weeks of beating my head against a wall, they handed me off to a non-Indian and we had the issue sorted in 5 minutes as he immediately understood what I was pointing out.
This person was a project manager.
I've had far worse experiences with lower level Indians I've had to work with. Simple instructions like "DO NOT RESTART THE SERVER" just get flatly ignored routinely. Like, I tell the guy, to his face, looking directly into his lazy eye not to do it. He proceeds to do exactly that 5 minutes later.
So, I just donno. I hate to generalize. Generally I'm not a fan of "different forms of intelligence" discussions. But my every professional interaction with an Indian, at all levels of an organization, have been frustrated by them seeming to just not ever grok anything I tried to explain to them. Conversational knowledge just refused to penetrate their skull in any meaningful way. I simply cannot account for it. I've had people tell me it has to do with their culture, and never ever under any circumstances admitting they don't understand, or don't know something. I guess I can't rule it out.
That matches pretty well with my experience. At my current job ~90% of my coworkers are Indian, most of them offshore. The ones good enough to get to the US are noticably better, but not by much. I look like a miracle worker to them with some really simple, CS101 tier crap.
Real (but slightly simplified) conversation a few weeks ago:
Them: "The API client library you wrote only takes a single instance of this object, could you change it to take an array/list/whatever?"
Me: "Well the third party API only takes a single instance at a time so I can't change it directly, but I can add a method to the library that takes a list and loops over it while sending it to the API."
Them: "That would be great, how long would it take you to implement that change? We have a project that's going to use your library starting in a month and need it reasy by then."
Me: "I can have it done in... 5 minutes?"
Them: "Really? That's amazing, how can you do it so quick?"
Maybe ChatGPT will replace more jobs than I thought.
I've long though ChatGPT would replace offshore work. Or at least executives would give it a try. They'd probably still discover that everything it ever does is wrong, just like offshore workers. But they'll give it the old college try for a decade or two.
And the poor bastard who has to oversee the quality of work it produces will be driven just as mad by ChatGPT pretending it understands the request and returning nonsense, as he was by the offshore workers who did the same. If anything it will be worse, since ChatGPT will return results instantly, and the Indians take a week or two. He will have zero reprieve from the stupidity. Just complete idiocy, in his face, all the time, that he must fruitlessly attempt to wring productivity out of.
Maybe with instant results he could iterate over the stupidity faster and figure out what approach works, so,...
Anyway - apart from the weird hype, I saw a lot of reasonable coders saying chatGPT increased their efficiency at making stuff that works by a factor of 3-5x over doing things the old fashioned way (reading a lot of stackexchange).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
>making the right facial expressions and mouth sounds to get coworkers to go away
>half or quarter-assing a task until it solves itself or becomes someone else's problem
Indians be just like me, fr fr.
(I wish, it sounds like I'm far more virgin and less Chad when it comes to work than your [former?] Indian co-workers).
Part of it might be that Indians are disproportionately and stereotypically in functions like IT or IT-adjacent, where both the perceived upside (bonuses, promotions) and downside (getting fired) could be limited, and there is high perceived ease of finding a similar role if fired (hence the meme of IT-workers working multiple remote roles simultaneously). As opposed to roles such as investment banking, where it's relatively easy to get let go or "subtly" pushed out, bonuses are a large chunk of your compensation, and finding a replacement role can be difficult (even at a lesser firm, or a "lesser" job function like corporate strategy/finance/development where you would even need to mingle with normie corporate plebeians).
It's like perpetual quiet quitting. Such effort efficient Indians could even view their counterpart Americans (or Westerners in general) as naive try-hards who feel intrinsically motivated to kindly revert and do the needful without any external incentive to do so.
More options
Context Copy link
At Facebook I once wrote a diagnostic for a piece of hardware that was causing trouble for my team. The folks who qualify hardware wanted to integrate it into their qualification process to guard against hardware with this particular fault from getting deployed again. It was a Python script with well defined args discoverable via
--help.This is was my first and only interaction with a contractor. The guy was Indian, and it was mind-blowing. After three meetings of explaining that he just needs to run the script and collect output via whatever mechanism qualification already uses, I gave up. I couldn't have simplified the task anymore without just doing it for him.
At one point he just copied and pasted my script, with no modifications and nothing to invoke it, and put me on as a reviewer.
More options
Context Copy link
I've had similar experiences managing a remote team in India and it sapped my will to live. They'd tell me a task was complete and then when I reviewed it it was obviously broken in a way I had specifically told them to avoid. If they ran into a problem they'd sit there for days at a time without trying anything to solve it.
They may be cheap but they aren't a good value.
More options
Context Copy link
I think these are just ordinarily low-intelligence (or maybe even average intelligence, when the task requires more) people who have learned how to smile and nod well enough at things they don't understand that it's not obvious immediately that they have not a clue in the world. Indian, because Americans of that intelligence level usually don't get into IT in the first place (although I have run into a few) and Chinese of that intelligence level aren't good enough at the faking it part (at least not in English).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link