“Client wont wait” - lol :)
For some people, they spend their entire lives inside the matrix. Only when they get old, they realize that none of the work they did matters. Unless it was for the good of humanity.
The client will always wait. These hustle addicts forget all the times they had to reschedule to accommodate ((wow 2 c and 2 m? Seems excessive)) others. Life happens and we work around it.
We have an office in India and I’ve interacted with them a fair bit and in my experience they’re all come off as lunatics. They seem to take great pleasure in been mindless drones and doing everything by the book, which often results in more work than would have happened if they had engage some in common sense.
Here is an example that you can use to see how they just make their own lives harder
So one of the things we have to do occasionally is security incident reports, if anything happens like there is a data breach or even if just a potential data breach on one of our brazilian servers, it has to be thoroughly investigated and a report written up about it, so far, so good. Most of the report is written by us or our office in the US depending on what server was breached and what exactly happened, but some of the fine detail work is done by the office in India. A lot of what they do is correlate data and write reports, which are then packaged into the whole folder and then sent off to upper management, who probably ignore it to be honest.
We have this whole knowledge base article that tells everybody how to do every part of the job, the problem is it’s awful and out of date so no one reads it anymore. One of the managers in the India office went to look up the report procedure and couldn’t find any mention of the India office, because as I said it’s out of date. They know it’s out of date because the last updated date is sometime around 2018 which was before the India office even opened. So because of this they started to refuse to do the correlating of data, but they didn’t say anything to us, they just stopped doing it. So it rolls around to the day before the report is supposed to go up to management, and we realise that they haven’t sent us anything yet. So we have a meeting where they state that they are no longer going to do this because the knowledge article doesn’t mention them. This results in more meetings to try and work out what the problem is and ultimately the knowledge article gets updated to include them. So now they have 24 hours to do a task that normally takes them a week, and if they don’t do it they’ll be the ones that get in trouble.
And I’m wondering now having read this if most of it was in fact just the manager being a dictator and everyone else not feeling like they’re in a position that lets them argue with him. My manager absolutely would listen to her subordinates but maybe he won’t.
My own experience of being, within a large transnational company, technical lead of a small team based in India for a cross-border software development project, is that their own management structures over there were spectacularly incompetent (and I come from a country - Portugal - were management practices are, IMHO, shit compared to the rest of Europe).
Amongst other things, they still had ancient management practices such as “managers must always earn more than technical personnel” which meant that even a junior manager earned more than a senior developer, in turn directly leading to bright young developers moving to management (were they were invariably shit) within maybe 5 years purelly because it was the only way to earn more money, so as a result the broader team (so, not just my project) there had no good senior developers - it was either “senior” in the sense of lots of years working there rather than senior-level expertise or a handful of junior and mid-level devs who were good at that level and could turn into competente senior techies, but were bound to transition to management as even a junior manager earned more than a senior techie.
Other “funny” things were how nobody there would never, ever, ever admit not to have fully understood something or needing more clarification during an open call about the project next-steps with the rest of the team, so I had to do “special handling” for my remote team of talking to each one individually and carefully tease away their questions with some kind of “it’s on me” excuse, for example, saying that “I want to make sure I explained things correctly and didn’t miss anything important”. Notice that my Indian colleagues who were not based in India but rather sat with the rest in London, did not have that peculiar behaviour.
Unsurprisingly, that outsourced team which existed as part of an outsourcing division the senior management of the company had decided to set up in India to cut development costs, didn’t actually add significant value because of the overhead of dealing with them and the need to check and correct their work, mean that the vastly more senior - and costly, as half of us were contractors - team in London (of which I was part) ended up losing almost as much time dealing with them and the side-effects of the low quality of their work as was gained from having that India-based team doing part of the development work.
I would have held it together for a while, but that condescending “mind your language” would set me OFF
Piss off. Some things are more important than economic growth of 1%, like family and friends.
It’s not like India has a particularly good economic outlook anyway so I’m not even sure what this guy’s on about.
Sounds par for the course for Indian work-life balance, from what I’ve heard
2 jobs ago, the business partner for the company I was working at basically outsourced all of their programming work to india. Not a single person in the US on their team knew how either their code or our machine worked.
Anyway, I remember quite a few timesnhearong the work schedule these people had. Theu had one dude who regularly was up until like 5 in the god damn morning so that they could have someone testing their code with our machine.
With people like Modi and Bulldozer Baba in charge, India’s economic future is bleak regardless of how much you agree to be whipped.
Unfortunately being good / not authoritarian and economic outlook do not go hand in hand.
India has been the fastest growing major economy since it started aligning with the West and embraced the Western capitalist mantra.
Even with profound income inequality, the living standard for the average person in urban India is completely different from 10 years ago.
I doubt that rate of growth changes anytime soon with or without Modi.
The Berlin Global Dialogue was a few weeks ago. The CEOs of Airbus and BMW were gushing over entrepreneurial spirit in India and India’s demographic dividend (having more young than old people) which nearly guarantees economic growth over the next 10-20 years.
Economists globally have estimated India will be a high income nation by the late 2040s on its current growth trajectory.
So we consider India’s growth a success even when we know it’s being built on the backs of the underpaid? Like, if they were actually feeding people into a concrete mix to build walls and roads, it’s the only way India’s growth can be more strongly tied to abuse of the working class.
If their success is by all but eating their own, can we call that a success? Can we call that growth without drawing parallels to rising humanitarian debt like a gambler’s bank account? They’re spending the lives of their workers the way Ai companies spend investment money, with no escape function to get out of the loop.
