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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   26653 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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I've been thinking about Indians today. In my current management position in tech, I deal with a lot of Indians. On one hand, Indians are some of my most trusted colleagues and friends who I rely on who have a CS degree from a legit US college like University of Colorado Boulder or Ohio State. These people are the best and I love working with them. These are people who went to school in the US and are legit. Not only that, but my favorite two teachers in college in math and CS were both Indians who taught CS.

On the other hand, the Indians we hire as support are absolute trash. You compare them to Philipno or Eastern European people we hire as support, and they are so bad. The funny thing is that the Indians that are in the US are our best people for support. Obviously, there is a massive selection bias, but what the hell is going on with this?

I actually have a real world example. I worked at a telecom company as a software engineer and most of the managers were former Army or Air Force people. The majority of the people in the US who were doing support are/were Indian. But these people were Indians in America and everyone liked them and they all eventually got promoted. But the overnight people in India were again absolute trash.

What is going on in India with their leadership? Why are Indians so bad in India but ones that come hear and get a taste of American corporate structure so good? I know this is probably a best fit for the questions thread, but this legitimately puzzles me.

And obviously Indian-Americans I don't include in this. They are just like all other Americans.

I don't know about the Indians, but I've been working a lot with Poles lately, and it's been a thoroughly positive experience. Somewhat better on average than with Germans, even. Similarly competent. Much better than the Turks and Russians - a lot more open to just saying "I don't know, this looks like a mess" rather than "Ah yes, I see, clearly you must do X, Y and Z", only for the entire alphabet to turn out to have been irrelevant to the issue; i.e., they're not faking competence, but are seemingly more honest. And I don't know whether it's due to the organization or a cultural characteristic, but the Latvians I worked with were all extremely unapproachable. Edit: Unapproachable at work. Other Latvians were great fun when drunk at a company party.

I don't know

I do not wish to bitterly complain about people from other countries. But, in my experience, many Koreans have a tendency to say "yes" when they truly mean to say "no" or "I don't know". And when planning schedules or tasks it really matters being accurate. So repeatedly saying "yes" and then not delivering is enormously worse than truthfully saying "no" from the beginning.

For what it's worth they've improved in the past few years. It's gone from completely unjustifiable and by American cultural norms insulting lies to mostly true communication with a rare few horrible gotchas that would ruin Americans.

And this is at different companies. So I'm not talking about one small group.

That makes sense- Poland being poorer than Germany is almost entirely due to economic mismanagement for most of the 20th century(as demonstrated by meteoric polish growth rates), you’d expect them to be very good workers on average. On the other hand no one in their right mind expects Turkey or India to reach Western Europe levels of wealth anytime soon.

Poles are often very stubborn, in my experience, but often good people. The women are all much more politically left than the men, even moreso (in terms of the size of the gender gap) than in the US, I’d say. Almost all the most militant feminists I’ve ever met have been Slavic.

Are they socialist left, or just feminist left?

The artist/humanities/hipster types are socialist, the PMCs just feminist left.

Would you gauge them radfemmish or modern western lib feminist? In my experience it’s much more the former.

The far end of libfem, maybe.

You probably should modulate the above by the social strata 2rafa hangs out with. Look at the way she talks about the Indian masses, and maybe it will become clear why elites from poorer countries might be a bit too eager to show that they're one of the good ones.

I worked with Poles and Ukrainians and had a similar experience. They meshed very well with the American engineering team.

My sample size is a little small, but the Ukrainians, especially the Women...do they all talk a lot?

The Ukrainians I’ve dealt with have all been extremely talkative, albeit often gruff, to the extent of their English language knowledge.

In my experience (pretty small sample) Ukrainians are pretty tight lipped compared with Americans until they know you very well. They're a lot more frank in their speach than Americans though (both before and after they know you well).

The ones I worked with were all men. They were friendly but mostly introverted.

The Ukrainian men I worked with didn't talk excessively.

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