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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   26664 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 had a very different experience working the India portion of tech company a few years back. Our company was considered an outlier though, and many other companies were often asking us "how do you get the India office to work so well for you".

From what I know, the secrets of success were actually very straightforward, but doing them is difficult.

The history:

The company started with a standard "outsourcing" by hiring a company in India to provide them with support workers. They quickly ran into quality issues. Anytime they found a good worker or support staff through this company, that worker would then go on to get a better job elsewhere. And the intermediary company often just made it difficult to keep using the same support staff.

The company decided this wasn't sustainable and didn't make sense. They opened up their own office in India, sent over a trusted Indian executive, and tasked that exec with building a functioning India office. A decade later those efforts seemed clearly successful. Their own stated reasons for success:

  1. A focus on hiring and retaining good talent. India has a large labor pool. Even if US immigration has a good filtering mechanism, its still going to leave plenty of conscientious and smart Indians back in India. Find those people, pay them well, and try to keep them.
  2. Mirrored offices. Meaning that the India office has a full company structure equalish to the main US office. Finance, HR, Legal, Support, Development, Sales, etc. There is something intangible about having access to the full support system of a corporate environment. Companies in the US have a specific structure often because that structure works and produces good results. It seems a little insane to think you can reproduce that success in another country by gutting the entire support structure.
  3. Inter office travel and connections. The executives in both America and India made it a point to have regular visits to the other office. Also managers and even low level workers could make the trip too. They created an infrastructure to support inter office travel, and it was low marginal cost to let low level employees use that same infrastructure. So I got to take a trip to the India office just 2 years into my career as a software developer. I had a driver, an apartment, a maid, a cook, and a phone all given to me. A 6 week trip, I was paid a per-diem, and given free meals, and given PTO for the travel hours. The real value from the company's perspective is that I stopped disliking my Indian coworkers as much. I understood more of the frictions they had interacting with the US office, and I found better ways to work around it.

They have a world-class support team at that company. American customers would call in and ask to speak to the India support team members sometimes. They had talented developers that managed to get visas through us and then go on to work at a FAANG company. They had quality engineers in India that were respected bloggers and thought leaders on quality engineering.

I feel like I'm selling an ad about the company. They talked this stuff up while I was there, but it was my first job and I just thought 'whatever, gotta talk yourself up, right?'. But no, it took me some more life experience to realize they were actually impressive and unique.

Its possible to have a good company in India, but I think there is going to be a real problem if you are just doing it as a random cost saving measure and not putting much thought into how it should be done.

I love to see a success story here. I'm always frustrated with the difficulties around getting great offshore help, because statistically there's no way there aren't great people available in India, even if they're very tough to find.

I wish my company had the ability to have a high-quality offshore presence, though now it's "too late" in that we've built our brand around being 100% US-based.

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