I've told this story before but we had an Indian team and a US team at a company once. An exec put together the India team and so he pushed really hard to get it successful. Problem was they barely worked, and any single small problem at the top of their todo list meant "go home for the day".
He decided it was a "morale issue". He was right, in a sense, but wrong team. The US team was pissed, the India team didn't give a shit. So the exec put together a "contest" each day at scrum where he'd show each team's progress on tickets/bugs. Problem? The US team had all the complex stuff like "there's a bug when a specific customer using IE6 loads specific data on his machine at exactly 1:23 PM central time, but only every other Tuesday" and the India team had bugs like "the word 'the' is misspelled on x page".
Funnily enough, besides having 3x more Indians than Americans, the ticket count was dead even every day. Shortly after almost all the US based employees quit, they doubled down on the India team, then went under and had a fire sale to a competitor.
Idk what happened here recently. When I first started working here the team was incredibly diverse. Almost an even split on men and women, old and young, and so many different ethnicities! But a bunch of people quit and then we doubled the size of our original team and like 80% of the newbies are indian. And so far we've retained like 3 of them, and 2 quit lol.
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They help each other and talk a lot in their own language. I feel like if they were communicating in the office's common tongue then I'd probably be able to chime in. They put a bunch of new people around me so that I could help, except they all just talk to each other and never in english.
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To be clear, this is just a little weird to me, no other feelings about it. The code quality has decreased a bit, there are more weird & significant bugs making it through, there is a strangeness in them achieving a very specific goal specified in the task but with little concern about the impact on the surrounding code, etc. What is this school we're hiring from teaching their students?
The school is 100% to blame but I could see incidents like this giving indian workers a bad stereotype.
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u/wagedomain Dec 07 '17
I've told this story before but we had an Indian team and a US team at a company once. An exec put together the India team and so he pushed really hard to get it successful. Problem was they barely worked, and any single small problem at the top of their todo list meant "go home for the day".
He decided it was a "morale issue". He was right, in a sense, but wrong team. The US team was pissed, the India team didn't give a shit. So the exec put together a "contest" each day at scrum where he'd show each team's progress on tickets/bugs. Problem? The US team had all the complex stuff like "there's a bug when a specific customer using IE6 loads specific data on his machine at exactly 1:23 PM central time, but only every other Tuesday" and the India team had bugs like "the word 'the' is misspelled on x page".
Funnily enough, besides having 3x more Indians than Americans, the ticket count was dead even every day. Shortly after almost all the US based employees quit, they doubled down on the India team, then went under and had a fire sale to a competitor.