Is it work ethic or is it nepotism/corruption?

I mean if I'm going to make really large generalizations about Software Engineering talent by country, Swiss people are the absolute bottom of the barrel maybe followed by the cheap outsourcing countries next, but ymmv.

I'm also sure i've worked with a lot more very good Indian engineers than German engineers here in America, but that might have more to do with who immigrates here.

> Swiss people are the absolute bottom of the barrel maybe followed by the cheap outsourcing countries next

Just by fact of population, a generalization may or may not hold more weight. Anecdotes are also tricky to really apply broadly: it's simply impossible for you to have encountered that many Swiss software engineers because few exist... few Swiss people exist. In 2019, there were over 300,000 Indian H-1B petitions to Switzerland's total of 202.

> I'm also sure i've worked with a lot more very good Indian engineers than German engineers here in America, but that might have more to do with who immigrates here.

Relative quality of life in Germany is objectively better in India by pretty much every metric, so there's an automatic/inherent bias - it's probable that more Indians wish to immigrate to the United States. (More than 10% of the Indian population doesn't have access to modern toilet facilities, for instance.) The competition for U.S. immigrant visas is far higher amongst Indians simply by the numbers, so there may also be a filtering function at play.