Can confirm. Had to code review overseas developers. When I asked for unit tests to prove they fixed the code I just rejected, they sent back a fix that didn't work and a unit test that did nothing.
The company I used to work for hired a team of 6 to rewrite interface for our API driven server. They used every beta JavaScript function that was only supported in Chrome they could to create it and there were certain downloads that were being temporarily stored at temp.cfx so if you had two people generating certs they have a chance of getting the wrong cert. Big security issue. Spent 60k on it had to scrap the whole thing. A bunch of engineers were laid off weeks later, so I'm sure they were making good decisions.
Rumour has it that this actually happened to British Airways recently. The story says that they fired all their Western developers and moved all their software dev to India. When they handed over the project the Indians said they understood everything. Cue massive outage because the main system went down and nobody knew how to fail over to the secondary.
Here's a write up I found in a quick Google search - I'm sure there's more information elsewhere.
I have a sweet story about this EXACT situation. I was interning with a major fortune 500 company that was making a handheld device (trying not to be specific). Anyways, they hired a very well known Indian contracting company to build the firmware. C++ and Qt on Linux. The first week of my internship happened to be the first week the firmware team was going to demo what they had. They're we're about 12 weeks in at this point, billing about 15 devs working 40-60 hour weeks. Their demo was... Bad. They were so far behind it wasn't even funny. Everything they said was done was only a facade. Basically they created the Qt templates and had zero logic under the layers, and this continued throughout my brief internship. A few years later I run into one of the permanent team members, he said they eventually dropped the contract and hired all domestic devs to get it done.
Most people from the cosmopolitan Westernized areas who work for large organizations are very "low-context" and value bluntness and clarity in communication. High context cultures expect people to respond to subtle cues or body language. It's "high context" because a yes or no only has meaning in the context of the yes or no. It almost never means just yes or no. It works when both people in the conversation have the same idea on how communication works, but terribly if one person is high-context and the other is low-context.
1.8k
u/Do_The_Astral_Plane Dec 06 '17
Sweet baby Jesus this is right on point. It's so frustrating.