[zionic]

Hiring devs who are bottom of the barrel and located in India (super low CoL) =/= claiming all Indian devs are bottom of the barrel.

Please try not to jump to racism accusations immediately, it makes the world a worse place. It even goes directly against the rules here at HN, where you are instructed to take the best interpretation of someone’s comment.

[PieUser]

But they deliberately chose to point out "Indians" and "Westerners", using a subpar adjective for the former. What gives? Sounds like casual racism to me.

[Jensson]

A common thing companies does is fire their expensive developers and outsource development to a cheap country. And those companies usually pick the cheapest developers in the country they outsourced to, hence "bottom of the barrel Indian developers", implying you aren't competing with Googles Indian office but you pick the cheapest people you can find there. And "western product managers" refers to the people who did the outsourcing.

The example might have been a bit too real for your liking, but there is no value judgement here about either group. Or rather, it is a judgement against those western product managers who think it is a good idea to fish for the bottom of the barrel developers anywhere, you can get great developers in India if you pay like Google, Google didn't lower their bar in India. Just that companies that decides to outsource doesn't do it to find quality, they do it to find cheap headcount.

[dabei]

You are right logically. However given the amount of confusion in this thread surely you can see a lot of people _feel_ offended. It’s worth thinking about how to avoid such ambiguity in the future.

[rgoulter]

I'm worried that, as far as you go to avoid offending others, people might go further to be offended, if "being offended" means "I get to silence others".