I hate working with Indians!!!! They are chaotic, their code is a pile of mess, and their mouth full of best practices! It's a nightmare!

Possible communication problem?

I can relate. There are some aspects worth noting:

1) In India, "yes" has many meanings because there is no "no". The Indian "yes" is more of a continuum between "yes" and "no".

2) It's also ambiguous what a "yes" even refers to. It doesn't have to mean "yes, we will get this done", but instead rather "yes, we will try (but it's unrealistic anyway)", or "yes, I understand (but don't necessarily agree)".

3) If something is important, Indians express this by saying it several times. Only then it's clear that it isn't just verbiage. Don't mistake that for the other side being stupid.

4) India has numerous structural problems, such as lack of a tech career, which means that good devs get out of dev and into management as soon as they can.

5) The best Indian devs don't work in India for Indian dev salaries. If they work as devs at all (see previous point), then in e.g. the US for American salaries.

@Fast-Nop Good points, thanks

6) The attrition rate is high because changing jobs is the only way to even keep up with inflation. Which means that you will see the same fuckups over and over by ever fresh people even in the same project.

7) Usually, Indians don't question what you demand. Their pride in their work is to make it as the customer demanded with no argument or critical review. Didn't specify modularity? Extensibility? Coding style? Too bad.

8) If there's anything with the family, Indians won't even give company needs a second thought because their family is the only safety net that they can rely on. There is nothing like a proper social welfare system or so. That means that a dev can be gone right in the hot phase of a project.

Oh and avoid closed questions (with yes/no answers) in favour of open ended ones. So, not "will you get feature X done by date Y". The "yes" that this question will field will have differing degrees of firmness, but you have to be already fine tuned to it for noticing.

Rather ask how they have planned it, what their timeline is, who will be working on it, these things. That makes it easier to see when they're trying to evade.

And remember that India isn't as Asian as Japan (nobody else is), but the "loss of face" thing is still there. They are shy to ask if they don't understand something because it might make them look stupid. They will rather try something and postpone the moment of truth.

That's really important, and you have to make that clear repeatedly and gently. It's half in joke when I say you have to "tame" a wild Indian, but there's a point to it. In personal contact, this will require one or two weeks until they trust you.

@Fast-Nop Thanks, that's very good to know!
In my situation, however, it's a big company with low turnover rate, these ppl are arrogant and stubborn, and force solutions outside their experience. And the code is a mess even in their own domain. Unfortunately, these are put in charge by the client.

It's not the Indians - it's usually the conditions they're working in. I've worked with some great offshore places who hire great people and give them the time & resources to do the job properly, but that's the minority.

@littlesparrow Uh-oh, big Indian companies are just as bad as any big company anywhere else. No customer orientation because they're too big to care. Big companies are mostly busy with themselves.

I hate working with Indians in IT, I hate it so much, they are so unprofessional, make a mess of everything, pure chaos, they lie, they are irritating, they cannot handle any criticism, they seem to think they are good at what they do but in reality they are the total opposite, they all just want to be managers, it seems thats all they really care about. Their accent, don't even get me started with that.

They are also racist and tend to favor "lighter skin" over "darker skin" even in their own culture. If I ever get an interview offer from an American manager of Indian ethnicity, I'll just ignore it as I know they don't hire people of color (dark complexion) in the highest technical engineering positions and only interview such to keep diversity requirements up and to say, "I did interview black people but their skill set didn't meet the criteria" or some other b.s. excuse.