[screye]

Huh, my experience is the opposite. Indians work themselves to death, while Americans have very clear boundaries on when they stop working. Chinese Americans & Indian Americans work about the same as Americans, but 1st generation Chinese immigrants easily take #1 for the most hours put in.

> Is there a grain of truth to the “lazy Indian” trope?

I wonder if it has to do with out-sourcing farms. I have been lucky enough to work with Indians who were all full-time employees and generally my equals. The typical Indian who works at an outsourcing farm makes so little, that they don't exactly care to work hard.

> no chill for Indians (SWEs, PMs, etc).

I'll be honest. I occasionally run into people with very strong and vapid opinions about entire countries based on 1-2 anecdotal experiences. I haven't seen this issue with other fields. It is oddly CS specific. In no other field have I met people who are so obsessed with the productivity of their peers, when the entire organization works on making ads software 5% faster.

[tock]

For context: your average outsourcing companies like Infosys pay their new hires ~$4500/year. And before you say thats a lot for India: it's not. That's paycheck to paycheck life in cities where these outsourcing companies have offices.

[next_xibalba]

> 1st generation Chinese immigrants easily take #1 for the most hours put in.

My experience echoes this. I worked with a guy who basically built every important thing the company depended on and he seemed to be available 24/7. I’d get on calls with him at 12am and then hear he’d been on with someone the following morning at 7am. He was also notoriously prickly (possible bc he was working so damn much!). I distinctly remember him screaming at me, in his broken English, “WHO HERE IS THE ENGINEER!?”* when I had the temerity to question a minor technical decision of his. Nevertheless, I walked away respecting the hell out that guy and still get a chuckle out of the memories.

*I was a mere data analyst at the time and thus a barely functioning human in his eyes.