ahead

Note: all references to "Indian" here refer to nationality, not ethnicity. Indian-Americans seem to be magically exempt from the case I outline below.

Anyone who's worked with an Indian student on any kind of project can probably agree with me that, while they're fantastic test-takers, they generally fail at critical thinking and design. If it's not a process they can memorize and reproduce with little or no alteration of the original steps, they're going to struggle with it. In every single software engineering presentation I have seen or participated in, the non-Indians (this includes non-Indian Asians and foreign students from the Middle East and Europe) have, on the average, been capable producers.

We got a new guy on my team a month ago. He is Indian - got his bachelor's in EE in India and his master's in CS. Okay. Well, maybe the Indians at my school were incompetent, and they were the exception to the rule. A very concentrated exception to the rule.

This guy...
I want to throttle him. I can tell him one thing, ask him to confirm that he understands it, and, less than a day later, he'll have forgotten it. If it isn't a cookie-cutter design that he can write down on a pad of paper, he doesn't understand it. Let's start with some of his gems:

"when u say richard michaels and i say bob matthews r u referring to the same person?"

"is a change request the same thing as a service request?"
(Keep in mind, he spent a month in training discussing issues like these before working on our team)

As I'm talking him through one of our software's process over IM...
Fifteen minutes into it...
Me: "So, on the left, you should see a button that says 'Code Review'. Do you see it?"
Him: "no"
Me: "Why?"
Him: "i culdn't log in"

His grasp of sentence flow is fantastic, too. A software engineer e-mailed him and said, "Is it safe to run this failed script?"

His reply? "Go ahead and run the script and I don't know why it failed."

Please note that everything after "and" was taken from what I said in an IM conversation.

I have to dictate his e-mails for him. Why? Because he can't. His terrible grasp of sentence flow and structure aside, he won't learn the material. He writes something, and I explain that it's wrong and why[/b] it's wrong. I ask if he understands it, and he says yes. I tell him a better way to word it. He rewrites it, and, in the five seconds between my saying it and it being typed, he horribly maligns it.

And, for a longer example, yesterday he received the following request:



A very simple request. I tell him that he will need to use the template script we have on our team share. I show where our document templates are. Now, the hardest part of this is the documentation, as it's not exactly clear about what goes where. So, I take the documentation for an earlier project that dropped another index and said to use the documentation as a basis (and I sent him the documentation).

He sends me his first draft. Okay, not bad. I tell him what template leftovers need to be removed, what he missed, and send it back to him. He sends it back, having removed all I told him - and copied over the document I sent to him as a basis into the new document. So, to make this clear: he took a document from a completely different project, copied its contents into this new project, and didn't understand why that didn't work. So, I politely told him why it wasn't right. He finally fixed it on the third time around.

At this point, I inform him that he will now need to implement the template (which I had informed him to do the previous day). I told him it's on the share (again) and that, once he had finished that, he should send the script and the documents out to the team for review.

Five minutes later, I get an e-mail from him to the entire team asking for us to review the documents. There is no script attached. I inquire to the script, and he says, "o yah, is there a template i can use?"

:smack: At this point, I'm getting pissed off, so I tell him, "Yes, as I said above, it's on the share. Implement that and then send out the documents again." I left work at that point.

Beyond this one story, he routinely writes code without understanding what it's doing. You tell him, "Implement this query into the script in the same way that it's implemented on line 23 of that same script." He can't do this. I tell him to learn some code and figure out what it's doing. I ask if he understands it, and he says yes. If I ever ask him to walk me through his code, he can't.

tl;dr: Indians suck.

Racist...

Holy Christ Wolfy, I thought you were smarter than that.

Wait, is this a joke? Did I just fall for a joke thread? Is the joke on me?

Growing up I had two 'best' friends. One was Indian, and he was always really smart. Whenever I hung out with his friends at Indian gatherings, all the people there seemed to be doctors and scientists. He scored higher than anyone I know on both the math and English sections of the SAT.

So... yeah. Sharp guy. It makes me sad to think we're not really in touch anymore.

I just thought the song was applicable to this thread... and even if it's not, it's a good song.

The most aggravating part about racism is that some times it seems to be correct.

More to the point, there does indeed to be a systemic problem with the Indian education system. My college has a HUGE exchange student population. For most of my classes somewhere around 40% of the students are Indian Exchange students.

Unfortunately everything Wolfy said abive, I have seen in person. For some reason a large proportion of our Indian exchange students seem completly incapible of creative though or problem solving, but perfectly happy to sit there and slog away at an assignment without ever understanding what they are doing or why it works.

More worryingly I have seen a depressingly large propensity for our Indian exchange students to cheat on assignments that would otherwise require creative thought or problem-solving. So they slog through the menial stuff, cheat through the hard stuff, and at the end of the day they completely outshine the rest of us grade wise, but are completely incapable of actually put their "knowledge" to use.

I am not calming this as a racial issue, but it is most certainty an issue. And there are of course exceptions. I by no mean claim that ALL Indians are this way, but I am laying out an observation I have made.


Now, if I were to say that all Indians smell... that would be Racist...

Those puppets don't even have FEET! Jeff Dunham still wins!

I don't think so, this isn't the first time Wolfy's posted long complaints about this

I'm not claiming this is a racial issue, either. It's a flaw of some kind within either the Indian educational system or Indian culture. According to my friend, whose parents moved here from India when she was five, it's a real problem in India - she's got the same problem with two members on her team, who happen to be from India. They're taught to memorize, not to think critically. Her cousin was reading a "A Tale of Two Cities" - the required reading was a summary of the book, because it was more important to commit the storyline to memory than it was to learn any message of the story.

This isn't racist.

One of the guys in the "group" here at school is from India. He is most definitely eccentric, but he knows English better than most of the rest of us and he can write code.

There are a lot of Indians here at GT, and some of them are how you described. I've only noticed it from some guys, though. All of the Indian girls I've associated with seem capable enough.

I don't see what the OP has to do with the nation of India. Seems more like an anti-Indian rant (and no it doesn't make it less racist if you just say "this isn't racist")

Except it's not an issue of race, nor did he say it was. It's an issue of poor educational standards in India resulting in Indians not being prepared for either their field of study or communicating in the language of the people they work with.

Simply shouting "racist!" every time someone points out a problem with a group of people that happens for whatever reason to be strongly defined by racial boundaries, only gives credence to actual racism. A better response would be to clearly point out the real underlying problem.

In a way it kinda does. The problem with Racism is that, at least according to the nature of the arguments themselves, there is often no real difference between a racist statement and one attempting to identify a systemic problem.

The only real difference between saying

"Indians are stupid."
and
"The Indian educational and cultural system is producing individuals with poorly developed critical thinking skills."

is intention behind the statement. They are both functionally equivalent, but one is intended to slander the racial qualities of Indians, while the other simply intends to point out a proposed deficiency in the racial qualities of Indians.

The OP reads like it. He didn't clarify until later.

I love that fact, that as a society, we're conditioned to scream racism instead of actually looking at the inherent problem. Sure makes getting to the bottom of issues like this a whole lot easier.

He didn't mention anything about the education in India in his original rant. What he said was this:



Which is racist. He didn't come in with the context until later.

Well, if he's new, you should give him time. He'll have good communication skills like Samir Nagheenanajar.

This thread fails. Way to overgeneralize Wolfy.



And why do you hate India? I have met with and disliked people from all ethnicities and nationalities. I wouldn't go as far as to say I hate their entire country.

I love the fact that some use personal anecdotes to generalize entire nationalities.

The problem may exist, that doesn't mean it's not racism.

I once saw a group of fat Americans.
Thus all Americans are worthless and fat.

[quote=Me, at the very top of the original post]Note: all references to "Indian" here refer to nationality, not ethnicity. Indian-Americans seem to be magically exempt from the case I outline below.[/quote]

.

If he were French he would have stunk up the place and surrendered when danger appeared.

Oh. I took both those sentences together as a differentiation between Indians from India from American-Indians.

It was obvious in the context unless you happen to be a person who likes shouting "racism lolz" at the slightest provocation.

I only used Indian-Americans as an example as the only people of the Indian race I've met are those from India and those who are descendants of immigrants to America (or who moved here so early that they've pretty much been raised in the American culture, as opposed to the traditional Indian culture).

I also typically refer to people like the Sioux, Cherokee, etc. as Native Americans, for future reference. "Indians" is just too damn vague, especially since I haven't heard anyone refer to the Caribbean as "the West Indies" ever.

And I should have specified in my original post; I have no experience with Indians outside of engineering. I think it is important to note, however, that medical fields (outside of research, perhaps) key on how well you can retain knowledge - you observe symptoms through a process and, based on the findings of those tests, use information you've already learned or has been researched and match up the test results with data you already know.

Tests can be indicative of how smart a person is, yes, but it's more of a measure of how well someone can learn knowledge. Too often, tests don't challenge you to apply what you learned.

Engineering is the practice of taking what you've learned and applying it. Specifically, in software engineering, you learn various algorithms, concepts of clean and efficient code, etc., etc. and then take requirements and apply these concepts you've learned to meet these requirements.

The difference between the two is that, in engineering, it's not necessarily something you can study and be good at. It's not something that you can learn by memorizing what's in a book. Knowing what the equations and various related concepts get you is important, yes, but the knowledge of how to use these concepts and equations is far more important.

Jesus Christ guys. You all are quite quick to call out Wolfy as racist. I suppose we cannot point out deficiencies of other humans if their skin color is any bit naturally dark.

Silly JG -- we can't call out on albinos either.

If I were to say Americans can't do creative work, no one would take me seriously. Everyone would think I was joking. That's because, many of you being Americans, you're easily able to tell what I'm saying is false. I have no reason to believe it is not the same for the average Indian.

Seriously. If it's not WASP (male), you can't call them out.

Right, but on the flipside, if I made the sweeping generalization that the American education system is not focusing enough on developing proficiency in math and science, leading to a gradual decline in our competitive advantages in these fields, even if you disagreed with me, you would be more likely to concede my point as reasonable. Additionally, I could make a generalization about an American culture of anti-intellectualism and "sufficiency" (good enough/who cares?) and, once again, even if you disagreed with me, you might be able to see where I came to that conclusion.

Exactly my point. It's absurd.

Where's Ubuu when you need him? Seriously.

Right, sorry. I seriously thought you were going on a huge tirade about the race.



That isn't what I was posting about.

Another I'm better than non-nerds because people don't grasp things as easily as I do and I'm therefore entitled to treat them poorly FURTHERING THE PROBLEM. Oh, and I get to throw a hissy fit, thread.

Why, do we need him to steal something?