[mistermann]

All I know hands on about outsourcing is trying a few jobs on rentacoder, and in my experience the negative perception of Indian programmers is justified.

The same logic stated by the OP (the bad programmers end up on rentacoder sites) applies to other countries as well, yet I haven't had nearly the problem with eastern European programmers.

My speculation, based purely on my limited experiences, is that the difference derives from underlying cultural standards of behavior. I find eastern europeans (on rentacoder as well as in real life) to be extremely straight spoken people (compared also to North Americans), whereas people of Indian descent to have a rather more "flexible" view of reality, depending on the circumstance.

I have no idea if there is any basis of this in fact, it just seems to be a reasonable possibility. Considering there are in cultural differences between countries, it wouldn't surprise me at all that there are varying levels of success between outsourcing, as well as the type of outsourcing that is done.

But then this assumes there are in fact cultural differences between countries...whether someone believes this is true or not often depends on what the underlying topic of discussion is.

[kranner]

"people of Indian descent ... have a rather more flexible view of reality"?

That is sugar-coating a pretty strong generalization. Perhaps if it were said straight it would be much more obviously ridiculous.

Best regards from India.

edit: I realize that this response is snarky. I am just astonished that people can say something like this in a public forum like HN. It is no better than saying "Chinese people can't drive".

If we're going to have a reasonable discussion about outsourcing and sort out what's what, can we please be careful not to say things like "Americans are fat and promiscuous" and "Indians are liars, idiots or both", regardless of whatever opinions we may hold privately?