Sometime Today, AD cobbled together some glyphs to say:
Why is it so difficult for people to digest the fact that an "Indian"
or a "Chinese" company can be truly world class; i.e. Global in all
respects?
I've worked with people from many countries around the world. I've sat
in pubs and had drinks with techies from all these places. Some
observations I've made...
Language causes communication problems everywhere, some people work
around it and others make it the reason for their failure. I've seen
guys in Korea who couldn't speak a word of English (and therefore
couldn't read most documentation available), but they learnt PHP by
reading and writing code, and are excellent programmers. OTOH, I've
seen Indian devels who after 7 years of PHP experience do not know the
difference between GET and POST. In general, I've seen more programmers
from China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea who are keen on learning than
in India. Indians seem to want people to tell them what to do and
they'll gladly do it.
Internet resources are available equally to everyone if you understand
the language. Web standards, accessibility, new trends are available
online for anyone to study and build prototypes. Yet, I see more
people from the US and UK, and even Taiwan trying these things out than
from India. When interviewing candidates in India, I've found so few
webdevs that have even heard that an HTML and HTTP specification exists
that it's amazing. In the UK, US and Korea, people are so well versed
with the specs that they crack jokes about it in pubs. Again, this has
to do with how keen people are to learn rather than being told what to
do.
I'm not really interested in the reasons. I just find that Indians in
general do not like to take the initiative. They're very good at doing
what they're told to do as long as you don't tell them to think.
Needless to say, this reflects in the number of people I've rejected
during interviews (I've pursued something like 5 people in 2 years).
So, to answer the question - people can't accept the fact that an Indian
company is truly world class, because it isn't. It's not like there are
no bad/lazy engineers in other countries (I've encountered a few
terrible American engineers), it's just that in India, it's far more
likely to encounter a bad engineer than it is to encounter a good one.
Philip
--
The moon is made of green cheese.
-- John Heywood
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