shiv sastry wrote:
>
> This need not "institutionalize technical incompetence". It will only give a
> management position to a technically incompetent but "loyal" person while
> junior and technically competent people come under his "leadership" and end
> up resenting it as described in Kiran's rant.
>
It is not just that. Local management "styles" tend to be far more
authoritarian and formal than elsewhere, so that even free and easy
workplaces like Yahoo / Google in the USA might end up enforcing dress
codes, "business english" etc in their indian offices.
A reason I often see cited for this is that a lot of the fresh grads
coming into the industry are likely to be bachelors, away from home and
staying in "rooms" with college friends / colleagues (again bachelors,
same age group etc) so that they end up looking slovenly, unshaven etc.
Another point that gets made [read this in an article printed in The
Hindu's jobs / careers supplement a few days back, quoting some HR
manager or the other] is that a lot of people's english is not "up to
the mark" (ungrammatical, poorly spelled etc) so that enforcing a
consistent "business english" policy helps bring everybody down to a
baseline [I prefer the term "least common denominator" here].
Never mind that the HR manager's idea of business english is of the
familiar old "Wren and Martin" vintage. PC Wren, one of the authors of
that book, died in 1949, and wrote "Beau Geste" (yup, the book that old
Paul Newman movie was based on) in 1924, so that dates the english
considerably, I'd say.
One amusing consequence of this kind of business english policy is that
when these guys post a question to a tech mailing list, they often end
up triggering spamassassin filters looking for nigerian scams (which use
a very similar variety of english)
srs
