Hey folks!

! Do not read further or open this rant if you are likely to be offended!

I always wanted to know but had no nice way to ask so I'm just gonna shoot.

Most of you must have worked/be working with foreign people: canadians, french, chinese, etc. How would you describe those people as colleagues [e.g. lazy, stubborn, chatty, etc.]? The goods and the bads would be perfect.

The topic is sensitive. Please be polite but sincere. This question nor its answers are not meant to offend anyone. We all have our cultural differences, we all have been taught different. I'm just wondering what could I or anyone else expect from each foreign teammate.

No offense taken. But I don't think that it's right to call the people of this or that country certain things just because of the few people of one or the other country that I happened to work with.

So I'd describe myself as a lazy bum but that's about it :)

@Condor i know what you mean. But there's a reason why some job positions require xp in 'working in multicultural environment', right?

When you work in one team with guys from x-land and y-land and notice some tendencies, work in another team with xlandians and ylandians and the tendencies repeat, the third team in different company... I'm quite confident to treat those tendencies as cultural qualities.

@netikras

Hmm, I see. Well I can say this much.. but I'll likely offend many people. Be offended, I feed on it.

Indians, many of my friends on Facebook are. There's a handful of great people and all of my friends from there are. But there's a lot of corruption and while India invests heavily on outsourcing for programming jobs, I think that the code originating from there is often subpar to the rest of the world.

Chinese, all of my electronics components come from there. And they're generally very nice people, but they don't speak English very well. This makes communication difficult. Also, their low-price consumer electronics are just like Indian code often subpar. Just the other day I received a 500W power supply (48V 10A, voltage adjustable to 50-ish volt with a trim pot) but when I opened it, the big coil in there wasn't properly wound. Wire excess all over the place. I'm surprised that it still worked without blowing up.

Japanese and German, great stuff from there. Their products come at a premium, but especially the Japanese tend to have this motto of "if it isn't good, it won't leave our borders" which I think is amazing. The li-ion cells that I use in projects come from there and they work great.

US people, they don't seem to deem privacy as important as Europeans tend to do. Not sure why, because that means that their very few ISP's can easily fuck them in the ass whenever said ISP's feel like it. Why? Americans seem so weird to me for doing things the way they do.

Us Belgians.. beer or GTFO! :P

@AlexDeLarge and you expected what? 'who has the longest....' contest? :)

Here's my 2 cents

gents from Denmark - very chatty :) this is my wife's xp, not mine, but most people she works with could talk about a task for an hour, then about their weekend, about their favourite meal, and only then start actually working on a task :) that's nice IMO

brits. I like their company. They seem to think first and do afterwards. The former part can be somewhat annoying when it involves calling you directly and working all the questions out one-by-one - especially if you are an introvert. But the quality of their work is very good. Also very keen on helping you with whatever you're struggling with

Japan - the people I had honor to work with were very respectful and polite. Work quality also very high. Communicating is a lil difficult because of the accent (very understandable - different lingual family) but bearable.

India. Some people (especially mgmt staff) are very nice to work with: polite, patient, know exactly what and how they want. Others are quite difficult to deal with. The most annoying thing I've noticed in all India-related teams is that they can promise you to do the task by tomorrow and tomorrow come to you with 'no I didn't do it' as if it were a very normal thing.

South Africa - i like those folks :) they might not know how to do the job at the time of asking but they'll take the task and will figure it out afterwards :) loved this quality!

Canada - very keen to help, very polite, patient and careful people - at least the ones I've worked with. It bugs me - I am not a polite person hence replying w/o 'best regards' feels very wrong :)

States - seem to be very confident people. 'will do, sure thing', 'I'll sort it out', etc. Dunno how but they indeed make things happen :)

@Condor This. I've worked (even as team leader) with quite some Polish guys at a distribution center and a few of them were assholes and hardly did shit but quite some where amazingly hard workers and very nice.

I've had this with people from multiple countries including my own.

Heartening to see level-headed comments here.

Our group is very international by default. We have a noticible large amount of people from romania. As far as i can tell their education is generally better and they are very smart, polite and good working.

The guy from costa rica is amazing. Also very funny.

In mexico apprently they don't teach how to properly code so the people from there strugelled but were good in the end.

Germany: depends on the person a lot. Some universities are demanding others not so much. So one can get very different knowledge levels.

Russians will be generally super good at maths usually.

This is what i have observed so far, as a belarussian person living in germany. But the working group I'm in is very demanding. So you either are super talented, hard working or just have lots of stamina and nerves. Otherwise you wont survive there long. So they tend to have good people generally.

There are also people from korea, iran, kasachstan... all over the world.

@xzvf Yeah, I've noticed the same in many cases. The ~100 Indian friends I have weren't the only ones I had to deal with.. about 10x more I just booted at some point because they were phony's. And that doesn't even cover the truckload of idiots from there that hit our Pages.. bobs and vagine, that's nothing compared to the idiocy that seems to breed like fire there! No wonder that some of my friends from there want to emigrate to Europe or Canada.

With people from Asia (India counts), you just don't ask them closed questions, i.e. "can you do this by $DATE?". They will always say "yes", but that doesn't mean "yes we will do that", it means "yes we will try". Gross simplification, but a working one: Asia doesn't have a "no" because it's impolite. They have different degrees of yes where the weakest one means no.

Instead, ask open questions like "so what does your schedule look like, and where are we?". When it comes to the deadline, ask something like "can you show me your plan how you want to achieve this?". If nothing convincing comes, that means "no dice bro".

With India in particular, they have that way of shaking their head along an imaginary horizontal axis that comes out of their nose, accompanied by a "huh" sound. Both the movement and the sound can mean anything from "yes" to "I see" to "I don't care/know" to "no".

It depends on the intensity and is more like a continuum of meanings, but as a rule of thumb, more vigor pushes the whole thing more in the "yes" direction.

If you can "read" what they say, you will find out that they don't actually promise everything and deliver nothing - that's mostly translation errors into Western speak.

@daegontaven Well if Western companies outsource shit to India because they want dirt cheap labour, then it's no wonder when they get fools.

The other mistake is to ignore that India is a different culture and think that "just doing tech" is universal everywhere. That's a great way to screw up projects.

@daegontaven take a barrel of honey. Pour one tablespoon of oil in. Keep it for a day. What do you get? A barrel of spoiled honey.

How should you feel? Like someone whose gents are massively spoiling your country image tech-wise. I know how I would feel if people were complaining about lithuanian teammates - I'd feel obligated to do better than them, teach my buddies to better at tech and spread the good example around the world. To prove [no just cry in a corber complaining] that we are actually good at what we do. That is what, I believe, would change people's minds - not getting offended, hurt or complaining.

@daegontaven The problem is that weeding out the good ones from the (many more) bad ones is an extremely tedious job. I hear you because I have the same feeling about certificates as you do about biases from nationality. But as @Floydian already pointed out, India has quite a bit of filth within its borders. That's not everyone, but certainly a majority.

If you want to change the view of the world about India, strive to do better and improve the Indian image in the tech field. But indeed, companies need to change as well. Nationality and certs are an easy way to select the most interesting candidates, but it isn't a good or accurate one. And preferring female engineers just to fill a quota and because they have a pussy... In India this seems to happen a lot, in schools, workplaces, everywhere.. I hate it. Talk about gender inequality.

@netikras I think stereotypes about one's own country are somewhat useful so that you know what tends to come across badly for other people. Stereotypes don't come out of the blue because where there's smoke, there must be fire.

Germans have a kind of directness that would count as outright rudeness in most other countries, so I try to tone it down a bit in international context.