| > Ok, so, I have a friend who works big tech and he has no chill for Indians (SWEs, PMs, etc). Is there a grain of truth to the “lazy Indian” trope? Indian here. First generation, naturalized American, et cetera. I'll be honest and say that my initial response was, “Ugh! Your friend is a big old racist”. Moving on from that reflexive thought, I'll attempt to answer your question of: > I’m asking is there a perceptual issue due to some factor that’s obvious to the typical Nth-generation American? Well, perhaps. There are a bunch of factors: - The H1B program is terrible in that it ties your immigration status to your current employer. Couple this with the “you can be legally fired because your boss doesn't like the color of your shoes” climate in the US and you have a pretty stressed-out bunch of people.
- A lot of consulting companies seem to pay just enough wages that attract Indian H1B employees of a average to low caliber of talent, and hire them out for random software projects. The Americans on the other side of those contractors get mad at the contractors, who happen to be all Indian.
- There is a genuine cultural gap where Indians are more deferential to someone they perceive as having higher authority. It is sometimes possible that a young Indian employee might call you “Sir”, because that was how they addressed superiors. So...all these are perceptual issues of the sort you are looking at. But honestly, these sorts of cultural misunderstandings are not exactly uncommon among Europeans and Americans as well. Big Tech tends to have far fewer of the issues above. Salaries are high (I don't even work in Big Tech and my salary as an H1B was verifiably higher than some of my American coworkers), and IMO there isn't a huge difference between Indians and the N other cultures that make up the boiling pot of tech. But then that brings me to the part about “friend who works big tech and he has no chill for Indians”. Like, Indians period? What does he think about Sanjay Ghemawat? What about Vinod Khosla? How about Amit Patel, who came up with Google's “Don't Be Evil”? What about the engineers/PMs/etc. in big tech to whom those issues don't apply? All of this leads me to conclude (this time after some reflection) that your friend is actually just a...big old racist if he has a problem with all Indians in general, especially those working in Big Tech. Take from that what you will. Hope you find better friends :) |
I very much like a lot about Indian culture and people, and I've met a couple of very sharp Indian programmers who I'd gladly work with again, but I think it's understandable that some tech workers in countries like the US have a reflexively negative impression of working with them even before considering some of the cultural differences in the workplace.
* I feel very bad in these interactions, but it is an immense struggle to understand some very thick accents that some Indians have. To be frank, remote work has made this communication even tougher, as any imperfection in the audio makes already difficult communication very awkward. There's only so many times you can say "I didn't quite catch that" or "Can you please repeat that, the audio glitched out" before it becomes obvious that you just can't have a normal discussion with them.
* Many peoples' experience with Indians is through very low-quality recruitment sweat shops. Traits these recruiters exhibit include being bad communicators, pushy, disrespectful of social norms, have questionable motives, barely understand anything about the tech they're recruiting for to the point of even getting the names of technologies they're looking for wrong, and are rarely worth dealing with.
* I don't blame Indians for doing this out of their own self-interest, but nepotism seems to be rampant. Any company that gets a few Indians in positions to hire eventually seems to focus on hiring their own people first. Not good for your future in a company if you're not in that group.
* I don't blame anybody for trying to seek the best deal they can in life, but the H1B program has shitty properties for both immigrants as well as the existing workers in countries who get displaced. The main beneficiary of the H1B program is companies that use it to drive wages down. Hard to have reflexively pleasant feelings about this circumstance, despite it not being their fault.