> 1. Unlike most developed countries, in India (and many other develping countries), people in authority are expected to be respected unconditinally(almost). Questioning a manager, teacher, or senior is often seen as disrespect or incompetence. So, instead of asking for clarification, many people just "do something" and hope it is acceptable. You can think of this as a lighter version of Japanese office culture, but not limited to office... it's kind of everywhere in society.

Way back, when I first started working with Indian offshore teams, the contracting company at the time had a kind of intercultural training that addressed that issue.

> Advice: If you want better results from Indian engineers(or designers or anyone else really), especially juniors (speaking as of now, things might change in near future), try to reduce the "authority" gap early on. Make it clear you are approachable and that asking questions is expected. For the first few weeks, work closely with them in the style you want them to follow.. they usually adapt very fast once they feel safe to do so.

That's exactly the advice they gave. They advised was to try to make your relationships and interactions as peer-like as possible. The more "authority" is present in the relationship, the more communication breaks down in the way you describe.

I've seen an interesting behavior in India. If I ask someone on the street for directions, they will always give me an answer, even if they don't know. If they don't know, they'll make something up.

This was strange. I asked a lot of Indian people about it and they said that it has to do with "saving face". Saying "I don't know" is a disgraceful thing. So if someone does not know the answer, they make something up instead.

Have you seen this?

This behavior appears in software projects as well. It's difficult to work like this.

> 1. You can think of this as a lighter version of Japanese office culture, but not limited to office... it's kind of everywhere in society.

Having worked in Japan, while there is a strong respect for authority, there's also much less hesitation about asking for clarification. I worked with an Indian offshore team and in a Japanese company and, while there's a lot to dislike in Japanese office culture, this kind of pattern of behaviour doesn't happen.

2 & 3 do make sense though.

I've had mixed result with your advice at the end. I'd say that it worked for about 30% of the offshore engineers I've worked with and indeed I had more success with juniors than with more senior developers.

> Pay in India is still severely (seriously low, with 12-14+ hour workdays, even more than the 996 culture of China) low for most people.

My employer outsources some work to Indian contractors. I know how much we are paying the contracting firm, which is low. Knowing the firm takes a cut before the contractors are paid, I feel terrible for how little they are compensated. I frequently wonder if we’d get better output if we paid more.

> Advice: If you want better results from Indian engineers(or designers or anyone else really), especially juniors (speaking as of now, things might change in near future), try to reduce the "authority" gap early on. Make it clear you are approachable and that asking questions is expected. For the first few weeks, work closely with them in the style you want them to follow.. they usually adapt very fast once they feel safe to do so.

Semi related to this, one of the biggest 'breakthroughs' in building the right trust/rapport with an offshore team was sending an email to their leadership making it clear and on the record that "Comments against pull requests should not be used against the employee in reviews, if there is a recurring issue I will discuss it via other channels."

That one email changed PR back-and-forth entirely, cause yeah I guess sometimes they'd get dinged for too many PR comments on some metric. At first their management wasn't thrilled, thankfully there was a good enough improvement in quality and defect rate that in a couple months they were won over.

> Make it clear you are approachable and that asking questions is expected. For the first few weeks, work closely with them in the style you want them to follow.. they usually adapt very fast once they feel safe to do so.

Very true. I’ve hired (super cheap) engineering talent and this is the key to getting a project to run the way a westerner expects; where everyone is constantly open to challenging each other, where everyone can bring ideas to the table, and where there’s no such thing as a stupid question. I’ve done this during a big phase of time others locally shunning this huge talent pool as the results were crappy/unpredictable. Even to the point they’ll hire local for 100x the cost. It’s just a management problem though and a pretty simple one at that. The other thing is if you train them in your style, keep using them on the next project if you can. It compounds if you have the ability to work with them over a longer time. You have to be very insistent that you’re not proposing the best solution at expect them as engineers to point out any opportunities for improvement. If something later has to be rebuilt or isn’t working well, sometimes it’s good (if it makes sense, case by case) to do a post mortem and understand why the version 2 wasn’t built during the version 1. I think that helps them really understand it in a concrete way if they’re struggling with it.

In any case, I’d much rather take a budget for 1 local dev and spend it on a whole team of Indians and take on the management burden if it means retaining more equity or profits or building something I otherwise wouldn’t do myself due to scale.

As a gent with some years under his belt, I have to humbly admit that it was quite late in my career before I realized how much culture influences how people operate. Two separate incidents with two different cultural contexts brought it to the fore about ten years ago. I sought some advice from a senior exec that I was close with and he just laid it out in very unflinching way. It was just one conversation but it has helped me tremendously in the years since.

Particular topic (1) is also trained in cross cultural trainings.

Another topic is: do not expect a remote dev to pickup ambient knowledge, particular if they are juniors with no life experience. And since outsourcing to India is trying to get the resources for the lowest possible price, the result is: you get them as junior / fake senior / bad senior as you think. Pay better in India, get better people.

This is extremely valuable insight for me, a non-Indian manager.

Thanks a lot!

Alternatively you could hire people from cultures where this crap doesn’t fly.

This is one reason, the other is just fraud. Being from a developing country, I am well aware of the stigma of saying I don't know, which I had to strip out of me as I became an engineer to the point of me being immediately suspicious when someone tells me they know about some moldy complex topic, even if it's in their profession.

The fraud part is that I developing countries, almost all activities that require some skill have lots of people claiming to be experts. 99% of them are lying. You take your car to a shop and they tell you they will solve your problem. With skepticism, (because they asked no clarifying questions) you try to give them some context and they tell you not to worry.

1 day later they tell you parts X, Y and Z need to be replaced, it will just cost $$$. You ask if there is no way the current parts can just be repaired, and they tell you no, they must be replaced.

You ask what was the actual issue, and they tell you the parts are completely damaged, or worn out, need to replace.

Sure, you pay, and they give you the car, works for a few days, maybe week, then breaks down. You plug in a portable OBD scanner and it tells you the exact component they just put in is failing (likely not even compatible with the car).

You give them back the car, tell them since you paid $$$, you will only take the car back once it works perfectly, and you won't pay a cent more.

They then spend the next few days looking for an actual expert, that comes in and repairs the original parts, for $, and they take the "new" ones back to the store and give you your money back.

They don't know anything about cars, they experiment on yours, with your money, by swapping parts. This was easier when cars were less strict with parts.

This is fraud, not face saving, and it's in every developing country.

> 1. Unlike most developed countries, in India (and many other develping countries), people in authority are expected to be respected unconditinally(almost). Questioning a manager, teacher, or senior is often seen as disrespect or incompetence. So, instead of asking for clarification, many people just "do something" and hope it is acceptable. You can think of this as a lighter version of Japanese office culture, but not limited to office... it's kind of everywhere in society.

I was a manager at Deloitte in their tech consulting practice. I led fairly large teams of devs based in India. This is very true, and it takes a lot of time and trust-building to overcome. Making Indian devs, especially early-career ones, comfortable enough to oppose something or offer feedback is non-trivial, and often Indian engineering managers make it more difficult. Overcoming cultural hierarchy is hard.

> Advice: If you want better results from Indian engineers(or designers or anyone else really), especially juniors (speaking as of now, things might change in near future), try to reduce the "authority" gap early on. Make it clear you are approachable and that asking questions is expected. For the first few weeks, work closely with them in the style you want them to follow.. they usually adapt very fast once they feel safe to do so.

I've found that this is also true of American engineers, particularly those fresh out of college. So many people have internalized that open curiosity will yield no result at best and direct punishment at worst.

> 996 culture.

I hadn’t heard of this, thanks.

Working 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

> 1. Unlike most developed countries, in India (and many other develping countries), people in authority are expected to be respected unconditinally(almost). Questioning a manager, teacher, or senior is often seen as disrespect or incompetence. So, instead of asking for clarification, many people just "do something" and hope it is acceptable. You can think of this as a lighter version of Japanese office culture, but not limited to office... it's kind of everywhere in society.

Damn me, Scotland is going to be quite the culture shock for you.

Thanks for all this, what you wrote and the discussion that followed has been genuinely helpful, and I think it might help bridge some cultural divides that I've experienced when working with Indian people.

Another question I'd like to ask of you is, do you see any aspects of the western style of cooperation that are the inverse? i.e. which create divides in which the westerner's ways of working can be the source of conflict?

Thank you for this cultural explanation - I've experienced the same thing with Japanese co-workers - there is often a "no" but to American ears its so subtle that it often goes in one ear and out the other.

Could this cultural difference explain why they're set up LLMs to do work for them, though? No authority asked them to, but I guess it would look nice in their resume if successful.

In my experience working with developers from India, there are two ways:

1. You have no authority and they ignore you. 2. You have authority and they become yes-men.

Real dialogue: - Is it done? - Yes! But not yet.

my managers are indian, and honestly Im struggling. Do you have any advice? I feel like im not allowed to ask questions, a lot of our processes dont make sense to me.

Since we are talking about LLMs, what I've noticed about the Indian/Pakistani "LLM" is they follow this way of structuring thoughts:

1. They

2. Always

3. List

4. Things

... and end up with a conclusion/punchline/takeaway.

I always wanted to ask, is that due to training?

I could imagine all schools around there have a specific style, like all their assignments need to follow this general form, and then they just get used to it and it permeates to their everyday life.

An Indian person basically is used to not making any decisions for themselves until maybe they're married off (and even then, probably not until age 40). /s