>What I've found is that only Americans exhibit self-starting and creativity.

Isn't that mostly a function of how incentives are aligned? I had a job with a lot of outsourcing to India. The Indians were given specific bits of code to write. They didn't even know how their code fit into the application.

Their entire incentive structure was geared toward getting them to write those bits of code as quickly as possible, finish, and take another task. There just wasn't any room for "self-starting and creativity".

I have a feeling if the entire application had been moved to India things would have been different.

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jedberg 6 days ago | parent [-]

It could be. But I worked at companies where we had full time employees all around the world, all of whom had full access to the same information the rest of us had. And I still saw this behavior generally. There were of course exceptions.

Interestingly the biggest exceptions were ones that had at some point lived and worked in the USA, and then had returned to their home country for some reason or another.

> I have a feeling if the entire application had been moved to India things would have been different.

I had direct experience with this. We had an office of full time employees in India tasked with a project, but I still had to hand hold them through most of the key decisions (which I didn't have to do with the US based teams nearly as much).

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closewith 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I think what you saw is more related to work/life balance than any innate difference in people. That's certainly my experience.

Employment is central to American's identity in a way that's almost considered perverse elsewhere.

	▲	Imustaskforhelp 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly!! Its also like, no I don't think a family is supposed to be where some guy on the top extracts all the money and then trickes it down and I get %'s of what I did. This doesn't sound like a family. Someone create a blog post on this phenomenon as to me, this seems like americans having an parasocial bond with companies (I vaguely remember the stripe CEO had said my name once or something along that lines, a blog post and it felt parasocial man) I mean, I just feel like americans complaining about indians devs are complaining about the wrong things, like maybe I don't get them but its not true as to what they are saying. I just don't get it man. I have seen Indian govt jobs to be much more like american private jobs in the sense that employment becomes central to their identity and there is this sense of tightknit community for the most part and maybe that has to do with the fact that the govt isn't usually exploiting its own workers and the tight knit sense of community comes from helping really poor children in teaching, building roads that my uncle flexes on me that I built this road or this college and showing me the absolute chad he sometimes is.

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spwa4 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Cultural differences do exist. I don't understand why this isn't a major problem, because it's behavior I've seen again and again and again: Indians seem terrified of showing any initiative whatsoever (including asking), any own contribution, and do what you've asked them and only what you've asked them. They are also terrified of being accused of doing nothing. This goes to extremes, such as purposefully taking a very long time to finish a simple task simply because they haven't gotten a new one, don't dare ask for one, have to be seen to be working, and can't come up with anything themselves.

You want a long list of simple tasks finished? Excellent workers. An endless ticket queue with simple problems? There's a few issues with them not escalating real problems, but ok.

You want an application developed and a lot of problems solved? Stay away.

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Imustaskforhelp 5 days ago | parent [-]

Well when you are paid peanuts, you do the bare minimum.

And an incentives issue.

Some software engineers work and they do the job and if they finish the work early, the company just start having more expectations of them WHILE PAYING THE SAME. So you are effectively catered if you don't work or take more to do the same atleast in the consultancy or similar business in India.

I feel like a lot of Indians especially software devs don't have this allegiance to a company where we consider a company to be our "family", and I find it really fair. My cousins always tell me that a company extracts 10x more value from you than what they give you back. Not sure how much of that is true in US but some developers are literally exploited in India, they couldn't care less about an application developed if they are this stuck state of limbo where they won't get fired if they do shitty work but they won't really get higher up the ladder either and even if they do the good work, it would take years for the company to notice it and its better to just change companies for that raise.

An incentive issue at its finest which could and is fixed by many people, just because you used a consultancy that sucked or had people that sucked doesn't make us all shitty software devs man.

Its Not a cultural issue, It really offended me as by coating us all in this "culture", you said somethings which are clearly offending.

Maybe I can get the point that maybe software attracts a lot of shy people and so they are shy towards taking the first initiative but that's not a cultural issue.

The culture of our school depends, most schools don't incentivize extracurricular activities that much so we don't do it and that's why we don't usually take initiative, because boom everything matters what you wrote in 3 hours

The incentive system is flawed but maybe I have hope, I mean to be honest, Things aren't that better anywhere else in the world too. I just feel like either the devs I have met irl are absolutely really good from what I've seen or your guys experience hasn't been that good but it isn't that big of a difference and I feel like things are a little exaggerated when I come to such forums.

	▲	spwa4 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		I have often experienced that it isn't a problem of pay or of incentives. They're terrified of asking for something to do for example. As in scared, and not a little bit. Not underpaid. I'm not claiming they're well-paid, but I don't think this is the issue, or at least not the primary issue.

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rompic 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

IBM / Hofstede has a lot of studies on this.