It is cultural - the whole "not losing face" thing. In a project, I once was squad lead - I was onsite, my squad members were in Bangalore of course. Same experience as you. Once I wanted to talk about a piece of code that we need to improve and refactor, and I was acting in good faith calling the dev that commited that code. When I braught up the code on my screen to start a pair programming, he immediately denied having written the code. Unfortunately for him, being a junior, he did not know about git blame - I entered it in the terminal and his name showed up on that code. Still, he would simply just deny that he wrote it. I then took the git commit hash and looked it up in gitlab, able to bring up the MR he created and the reviewer (wasn't me). Even with that on screen, he still denied being the author - with no arguments or alternative reasoning, he just constantly would repeat "No, I haven't written that". "No no, but I haven't written it". I pulled even the JIRA ticket up, that was about that feature and guess what - he was the assigne and moved it to "In Progress" and "Done". Still with that on screen all I got was a "no, haven't written it".

I had more of those interactions, and we also exchanged some of the indian devs (they were sold to the client by a big consulting group, and immediately replaced by someone else if we wished). I later found out, people that I have had replaced in my sqaud for not being qualified, ended up in different teams in the same corporation, they were basically just moving around inhouse.

After a few month in the project I swore to myself never to work with offshores again. And as a side note, the bank I did the project with, does not exist anymore :)

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nmstoker 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Denial in the face of incontrovertible evidence undermines trust to an extent incompatible with working in any serious organisation.

	▲	uygg777 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I’m Indian. I absolutely loathe this part of Indian culture. My uncle was once eating a pizza like a naan (ripping pieces off straight from the box) and I called him out on it, and he said he wasn’t doing anything like that…while holding a piece of naan and the pizza looking like rats had a party with it. It happens basically constantly, I have never heard my family admit to a mistake unless violently confronted by someone with authority. Leads to all sorts of issues and societal breakdowns, like police beating people up before even trying to communicate.

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bigstrat2003 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm curious if you tried to explain to the guy that lying to you undermined his reputation far more than any mistake he made in the first place, and if so how that went. That's something I would fire someone for if it was in my power. Making mistakes is ok, but lying about it is absolutely not.

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nicpottier 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Pretty sure the right move as soon as he said "I didn't write that" was to just say. "It isn't important who wrote it, we all make mistakes, let's see together how we could have done better."

	▲	littlecranky67 43 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Today, I would maybe agree and have grown wiser. But software engineering is 50% failure management. And admitting failure should be normal for every level, I am very open and outspoken that I (just as every other guy) makes errors all day. We literally have error management system in place because of that - Bugtrackers, Test pyramid, QA departments etc. It is simple not helpful if people not take accountability and grow on their mistakes.
	▲	chrisjj 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Pretty sure that can be the wrong move in an instance where it does matter who wrote that. Freely allowing derogation of authorship soon fosters derogation of responsibility.
	▲	pseudalopex 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Mistakes are allowed is a good lesson. Lying is allowed is a bad lesson.