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Well I've got the viewpoint from the other side here. I work for a large company in the US that has set up an office abroad for outsourcing some of the engineering. (I'm actually planning to leave to start my own thing soon, but that's a different story.) I think points 1 through 7 you made are typical in any large company. I've found that I've had to just pick a few things, and learn to ignore the rest. It helps to have at least one higher-up who agrees with you...find that person and get them to like you. It's probably better for your career not to be the one who always complains and upsets people. This is pretty difficult when you get attached to a project and think that the contributions of others are making it worse, but you have to be diplomatic about it. Your last two points are intriguing thought. I recently had to sit through a training session on "How to work with India". It was chock full of ridiculous generalizations, mixed in with a few useful comments on the cultural differences. They have an equivalent "How to work with the US" class over there and I'd love to sit through that one too. However, the two things you mentioned echo a lot of my experience with our foreign counterparts. I rarely get a "no" or any pushback, and I really wish I did. Our management here relies on the low-level engineers to make the implementation decisions. They, after all, are closest to the problem and have the most information to base their decision upon. For some reason our management here however treats our Indian counterparts as a black box project factory - requirements go in, solution comes out, and there's little to no feedback in between. The class we sat through made this out to be a cultural difference, where it's disrespectful to disagree with a superior, and the manager is always supposed to have all the answers. Maybe that is a cultural difference, but it's not benefiting either party in the long-term. I tend to think it's really because we've treated them as cut-rate engineers for so long that it's now an ingrained behavior. Of course, if we didn't and instead genuinely expected their productivity to match ours, then we'd have to pay them a full engineer's salary and that sort of defeats the purpose. I'd love to hear some comments on how this plays out at other companies... In any case, it sounds like you're unhappy. In that sort of situation, your output will eventually decline to average, at which point you're doing neither them nor yourself a favor by staying. At a minimum you now know what to look for when finding a new job. But if you take a job at another big company, know that some of these issues will follow you there and you'll have to learn to pick your battles. But if you can at least find a boss you respect (and get him to respect you), it'll really help to mitigate the issues. |