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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.

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.

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.