I think the author touched on this lightly, but I feel like there is a little more to be said about “signaling” or what I like to personally call, “resume flexing”.
In India, all people at all times are building their resumes for a semi-vague goal usually wealth or a happy retirement. This idea is embedded quite early on in age as the article author suggested - you’re usually pointed at a career in middle school that makes it easier to achieve above said goal.
The flywheel then spins ever faster as every decision you make thereafter is about getting closer and closer to this vague goal of “success/wealth/societal perception”. You pick universities based on rankings, large tech companies over startups, management over individual contributor work and of course America over everything else.
This problem isn’t isolated to India by any means, and like all stereotypes isn’t applicable to all people from India but in a country of 1B+ people, it’s just dialed up to 11. Hacktoberfest and GSOC are just unfortunate victims to this resume building. The fastest way to put these on your resume and flex it, is to create a spam commit and shortcut your way to a tshirt or certificate.
Is this also why there are so many low quality videos on technical topics by people which seem to be from India? A way to pad their resumes? Or is this a result of a course requirement or something else?
You must have been looking at the wrong places then (Youtube is not a good indicator). Here is "National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL)" which publishes a lot of high quality courses from various top-ranking universities in India - https://nptel.ac.in/
You misunderstood what I meant. I did not say that there are no high quality tech topic videos coming from India, I am sure there are as I have watched a few myself. What I said was that there is a lot of low quality content and I was wondering if the reasons for that were related to what the parent mentioned.
I think you are referring to the Youtube gurus teaching stuff.
Its actually 2 fold, the short term goal of raking up some youtube views and getting the youtube ad money. Second is to pad the CV as an "advanced developer with lots of knowledge to share", it helps to put on CV and also be considered for some training positions which is demand as many are rushing to get into tech where "even kids are minting money".
I know a guy that put up some coding videos on youtube to be a "youtuber" and one of the big tech firms in India hired him to train their new recruits.
> The flywheel then spins ever faster as every decision you make thereafter is about getting closer and closer to this vague goal of “success/wealth/societal perception”. You pick universities based on rankings, large tech companies over startups, management over individual contributor work
I feel as though I've read numerous parables like this, except describing modern America.
We don't tend to choose our careers so early, but is it really so different? In New York City you typically have parents/children competing for spots in the "best" preschools, and throughout the country high school is basically a big competition to be accepted into the most prestigious college. Only among a certain social group, of course, but I'm sure that applies to India too.
I find the obsession with certificates interesting. One of my past school used to hand them out like candies. It costs like a dollar for 10 and made everyone happy. Same with trophies and medals. After some questioning and feedback from a lot of people indirectly, I concluded that it's one of the best investment any school can make. It results in lot of good PR, recognition, talks, feel good, etc.
It's useful to target and engineer certain behaviors in students. Many of them conflate their value and status with those papers.
You can make money by holding competition to handout these and charge for chairs, food and other stuff.
Many students won't talk about certificates and medals with their classmates because they will be aware of how easy it is to get one but they will boast about it to kids from other schools and their parents. Ha, better conversion rate if someone is looking to transfer their kid to a better school.
I don't understand how not enough schools are doing this and still cheap out on $100 total spend every month at best.
Agreed -- and an especially big turnoff is a "cert collector", most of which have done the absolute minimum required to get each of them, i.e. mostly rote memorisation. It's a very Quantity over Quality mindset.
In my experience it’s a turn off for HN types of commenters, but out in the “real world” it’s a big deal.
My current employer has a goal of X% of all consultants must be cloud certified and bringing these certificates to pre-sales meetings with clients helps a lot.
I largely agreee, with the exception of CAD design certificates for Solidworks, etc. I don't even have one, but everyone I've met who has are actually functionally better at CAD than those without, so I acknowledge it.
I am Indian-American, and while I cannot comment much about the culture of Indians in India, I can comment a bit about the culture of Indian-Americans, especially second-gen Indian Americans like myself. Many of my Indian-American classmates exhibit the behaviors described in this article. For example, in my high school (a magnet program for gifted students), there were several Indian-American students, many of whom were "high-achieving". Most of them put a lot of effort into trying to buff their resumes to get into good colleges, for example by volunteering on causes they didn't really care about. Cheating was rampant; the attitude many students seemed to have was why actually learn stuff when you can just cheat and get the same career rewards? Almost all of them followed very conventional (read: boring) career paths; in fact most of them became doctors. True creativity and risk-taking was not a personality trait I commonly observed, I'm sorry to say. I was lucky to have very "Americanized" parents who didn't raise me with these backward attitudes.
Please. Being a doctor is boring? It is challenging to be a doctor, and it is almost impossible to cheat through the USMLE (US Medical Licensing Exam) process. It is a 3 step process, which includes four tough exams taken at registered centers, which are actively monitored. I'm saying this as a spouse of a physician who has gone through the journey, and the amount of work they put in through their med school, USMLE, and then residency is unfathomable. Seeing someone put 14 hours of work every day to achieve their goal is not boring, rather a representation of their desire to drive, achieve, and excel. Also, with so many Indian doctors, it says a lot about their grit and hard work.
Three things: first, I never said it was easy, only that it was fairly conventional. Second, I never said that anyone cheated on the USMLE (I agree that would be quite hard). Third, some of these comments suggest that somehow I have no idea what it takes to be a doctor. As a matter of fact, my mother is a pediatrician and a professor at one of the top 10-15 medical schools in the US, so I have a pretty good idea what it takes. I acknowledge that it is an important and demanding job; nevertheless, I think it is a fairly conventional and unimaginative path to take in life, compared to, say becoming an artist or doing a startup.
>nevertheless, I think it is a fairly conventional and unimaginative path to take in life, compared to, say becoming an artist or doing a startup.
This is exactly privilege speaking. Starving Artists/Musicians/Humanities/Literature major are practically a meme and have become a cautionary tale on what to avoid until you have established yourself financially. Whether it is fair or not, life does not reward them in today's economic system (ignore outliers). Hence the need for "safe and boring" jobs like Doctor/Engineer/Lawyer/anything else that helps you earn money to lead a "boring" life.
From the outside it does seem boring; a lot of rote learning and not a lot of flexibility once you're out, high risk of getting sick and or sued. 99.99% or more Doctors are not House.
To be a doctor is as hands-on as you can be unless you speak of radiology, but that too is fascinating. You spend four years of your life doing hands-on work during the residency (rote learning?). There is an infinite amount of learning in medicine! Even after so many years of research, we do not understand the human body completely. I don't know what is you mean by boring; as a layperson, everything will seem boring unless you put in the effort to learn more about a field. But still, liver transplant, heart transplant, lung transplant, surgeries, anesthesia, diagnosing unknown diseases are not interesting? (flexibility? there are so many fields) I suggest you visit a Level 1 Trauma center close to your home and see what goes on in there. Reality is more brutal than TV in this case.
It may be boring to you, and that is ok, but it does not negate the fact that it is a challenging field and demands immense hard work to be one.
> I was lucky to have very "Americanized" parents who didn't raise me with these backward attitudes.
I'm white British and would rather call them different attitudes.
(I'll also be the first to joke about 'PC gone mad 'differently abled'' etc. - that's not my point here - it's not out of an abundance of caution or respect for all, I just think, honestly, yeah, why not push your children into something they don't enjoy but is high-paying, professional, and comfortable? There are reasons 'why not', of course, but also 'why'; so it's a different attitude, not 'backward', unless you only mean to say 'out of favour'.)
>> I was lucky to have very "Americanized" parents who didn't raise me with these backward attitudes.
You miss the entire point of the article. You are privileged not only to have Americanized parents, but you are privileged because you are an American. Your world is way better than that of a common Indian student. Most Indian students need a job, just to be able to feed their families.
Quoting from the article:
"When push comes to shove (which is the permanent state for most Indians), we only care about one thing, survival."
When it's about survival, everything else goes out the window. That's one of the points the article is trying to highlight.
I'm from a poor background and I didn't cheat. Nor did I commit bogus pull requests just to pad my resume. These things poison any community trust, put people into positions that jeopardize other peoples lives, and make meritocracy a joke.
What does is say about a person if their attitude is that these things are okay if you are from a certain background? It says that they care about the background of the person more (for whatever reason, good or bad) than the damage it does to the communities that they interact with. Consider the consequences of this.
To give you a hypothetical example, in India, there are maybe 10k jobs but a million aspirants for that job. And 90% of those million people are poor. In USA, you have social security to fall back on if you don't get a job. In India, if you don't get that job, you're on your own until the next attempt. Being poor in USA and being poor in India are very different.
I am in no way encouraging hacky ways for resume grooming. I am just stating why it is a phenomena in India. You're doing a good job by not employing these tactics to further yourself. Also, a key difference could be that you're maybe not from India. And if you are, you're an exception not the norm.
His comment was about Indian Americans, who are on average much much better off than the average American, so really there isn't much need to bring third world resource scarcity mentality into raising your children here, but alas, you can take the immigrant from the country of origin but you can't take the country of origin from the immigrant.
This right here is the truth. The article is simply a rant from somebody who has yet to grow up and understand the real world i.e. they are in a privileged position in life. When you have so much competition for limited opportunities, you cannot apply the same yardstick from a different environment. The Fight for Survival is as true of social structures as it is in biological ones. It seems this Indian American has no idea of the sacrifices his parents made in establishing themselves in America and providing him the privileged position from which he pontificates.
I don’t understand why you seem to imply that half arsing your education is fine if it means you get a job? Why not make the best of it and get a job?
Any Indian with access to a computer can potentially be a (much) better hire than the one from the most desired engineering college. In fact, I’d almost have to expect so since they don’t have to waste time on all that signalling.
It’s unfortunate that that apparently doesn’t matter to the companies doing the hiring :/
>> I don’t understand why you seem to imply that half arsing your education is fine if it means you get a job? Why not make the best of it and get a job?
Quoting from the article:
"In middle school children have dreams to become a Pilot in the airforce, or maybe a Police officer, or maybe a Opera Singer ! But by the time of high school, everyone is just either on road to become an Engineer, a Doctor, a Lawyer, a Chartered Accountant …. or a failure. This may seem harsh but that’s how most of the society operates here in India."
The problem here is that students are forced by their parents into a field of education they don't even like. How do you expect someone to understand the intricacies of fluid dynamics when they don't give a rat's ass about it. When you give exams on topics you are not even remotely interested in? Therein lies the privilege of being American. When you're a common Indian student, you don't have a choice in choosing your field of study
>> Any Indian with access to a computer can potentially be a (much) better hire than the one from the most desired engineering college.
This only works well for computer science. What about students who want to become doctors? Do you know that to get a seat in an Indian medical college, a common Indian student will most likely have to pay a "donation" just to get their foot in the door.
> How do you expect someone to understand the intricacies of fluid dynamics when they don't give a rat's ass about it.
The same way I studied everything in high school? I certainly didn’t give a fuck arout the molecular mass of hydrogen, but since I was going to be there anyway, I might as well spend my time there actually learning instead of sleeping.
It’s unfortunate if that situation continues into university, but hardly the end of the world.
I recognize that these "backwards" attitudes I described may make sense in India, since as you say, the culture and society is very different there. I consider these attitudes to be backwards in the US.
I am sure you didn't intend for it to be this way but your comment is very arrogant. It seems you are coming from privilege and haven't really interacted with the real world yet. Perhaps you are still in college/ have only had high paying jobs like software engineering. Most people are not looking for high-risk jobs, they want a stable source of income that can enable them to provide a stable living for their family. This is especially true for people in countries like India. There is nothing boring or backwards about that. Especially not to someone who is not privileged.
And please do elaborate on why/how a career in medicine boring?
Asians with far better scores are deemed to be less worthy due to "uninteresting personalities" than others far less qualified.
I don't think it's difficult to understand why the children of people motivated enough to emigrate for better opportunities would themselves be ambitious and would want to establish themselves with stable, high performing careers (having almost no generational wealth to fall back on.)
I think it's backwards to believe that the measure of your life is how prestigious a college you went to, or how much money you make, especially if these goals lead you to cheat and lie to advance.
You had a shitty circle of friends and are now projecting. I know many Indian-Americans who are hard working, creative and NEVER cheated. One doesn't need "Americanized" parents to be a decent person.
So the solution to being rejected due to high grades and uninteresting personality is to study more, cheat for higher grades and spend less time developing an interesting, genuine personality?
Also, if scores were the only reason to enroll a student, people from poor background, especially black and Latinos would basically never get in.
What's weird is how many students work their asses off, get amazing grades, go to top schools...and end up at a big tech company working with people who went to state school and community college. Of course going to a top school makes the application process easier, but only insofar that you clear the resume screen and get some confirmation/credential bias in your favor. Don't get me wrong, it's great that tech companies can have Stanford alongside community college. But honestly it seems a bit of a waste when my classmates who went to Stanford and Harvard end up at Facebook or Google. Truly the best minds of my generation devoted to getting people to click on ads.
How could anyone know? Google is vast and has many kinds of jobs, and so there simply isn't enough information to say.
There is cutting-edge research and also pretty boring business app development. Also, some jobs are pretty specialized and not the sort of thing you can get as a generic software engineer.
I might have agreed had the comment been made by an Indian-American comedian, actor, author, journalist, ... someone in liberal arts, from someone with a truly unconventional career path.
A PhD from Caltech in machine learning and optimization doesn't sound very different from being a doctor if we're speaking of conventional (read: boring) career paths
Highly anecdotal, but my ex at the time (white), bio major, had a real tough time studying for midterms and finals in undergrad. Meanwhile, my cousin (Indian) in the same class was breezing through the exams, partying more than me (a liberal arts major!), generally screwing around and somehow consistently ended up with a better score. My ex couldn’t parse this and just assumed my cousin was smarter or more qualified academically. An understatement to say that she second-guessed if she was qualified to be in medicine.
Years later, my cousin laughingly confided in me that he had access to all the old exams that were just questions shuffled around through the years. He got them through his campus Indian student group. I confirmed this with some other people I knew in that group, all of who treated it like common knowledge. Changed the way I saw and interacted with people I’ve known my whole life. Certainly changed the way my ex felt about those haunting exam scores.
My personal take? Residencies have n spots. The people qualified to succeed in those spots is n * y (where y > 2). It may be that people who cheat to get into a residency were qualified to do the job, but it doesn’t mean they deserved to be there. This can be true in a lot of other positions that require the applicant to jump through different hoops.
Yep, it was the official Indian student group registered on campus. Nothing wrong with the association itself, but a large subset of it were Bio majors so I’d imagine that’s how many were involved.
Just FYI, this is far more prevalent than is implied in this thread and not tied to a particular nationality/subgroup of people on college campuses. Established clubs, fraternities, sororities, arts/performing groups, and even niche majors/honors programs all tend to accumulate "academic resources" (i.e. past exams + homework) as members take courses over the years.
How does an unaffiliated student get access to those prior year exams? Fortunately, the internet is levelling this somewhat.
When teaching at a college level, I used to go out of my way to provide any historical resources. I want my class to be fair to everyone involved.
I also used to redraft my exams and assignments every single year. This is quite a lot of work and a lot of professors simply won't do it. However, if you don't, then some students will take advantage of it, and your class isn't being fair to everyone.
Since you bring it up, I think studying questions that a company has been known to ask in the past is somewhat in poor taste, especially if the candidate gives the impression that this is the first time they've seen the question. Usually, when I've done interviews, I'll try to throw a wrench into the question and see how the candidate reacts if I suspect they've seen the question before.
Though in both cases, I think it's on the question asker (either teacher or interviewer) to make sure that questions change up frequently enough and aren't easy to study without having genuine understanding.
When interview questions are generally of the ‘have I seen this question before’ kind, it’s hardly cheating to try and memorize as many of them as possible.
It just means the method of interviewing is flawed.
If the instructor says you can't do it then it is cheating.
It's common for professors to not allow students to keep exams for this reason. Students in such classes do a "brain dump" by writing down all the questions they remember immediately after leaving the test to get around this.
I remember when I was in college, we had this end of semester exam for stochastic processes. Our exams are usually about 2 hours long and have about 4-5 problems to solve. After this particular exam, a friend of mine was surprised that I hadn't seen the last problem with the answer in our professor's book (she has seen it the night before. Looks like all her friends had too). Ina mathematics exam with 4 problems, I can't exaggerate the relief one would feel if one of the problems is already solved for you. Not sure how often this happens, but it seems like it's quite common. I was in a special scholar's group. I was more into going to the library, exploring related theorems and stuff while except for a handful of others, most my peers were just doing past papers and practice questions for the exam. I did okay, but I felt like trying to learn more and explore things in university was a liability as far as exams concerned. I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Felt like a waste of time.
You are right. It mattered when I was applying for jobs as a fresh grad. But it no longer matters. On the other hand, I still remember lots of the ideas behind theorems though I haven't done any pure math in a long time. While most of the people I know can't remember what a vector space is anymore despite high grades. Universities need to cut down the number of exams and let kids have sometime to think and try things out. When you have competitive quizzes every two weeks whole life revolves around them. Professors used tell us that those frequent quizzes were there to help us spread the eggs in multiple baskets so that our grades didnt depend on just one exam. I think they missed the point that I wasn't there for their exam grades in the first place. Well.
But I am not sure about the accuracy. There are other reports with similar or lower numbers.
Wildly different experience depending on the state and part (South is good in comparison to North).
There is a shortage of doctors despite everyone aiming for a medical degree. It is worse in rural areas so there are less qualified people treating others. Pseudoscience and pseudomedicine is a big industry too. Actors, news channels, babas, politicians, etc all encourage it.
He promoted his pseudoscience on multiple news channels as a cure for covid. Ayush ministry (which is a branch of government to regulate/approve pseudomedicine) stopped him on some advertising basis so he rebranded the thing to covid immunity booster.
I'm talking about cheating in high school. It worked in terms of college admissions (presumably these students cheated in college to get into med school, but I can't speak to that with certainty).
This is an American high school, right? I don’t think I’ve seen anyone blatantly cheat their way through it (though I’m well aware of “volunteering” and “science projects”); where did you attend?
I tutored math in university, had many freshmen who straight up couldn't plug a number into a function and evaluate. They cheated the whole way through and nobody did anything to stop them. I'm sorry to say this, but US high school is a real joke in a lot of places.
You just stereotyped a country + immigrants to the tune of billions. I'm sick of minorities being judged as a group and "Americans" being treated as individuals.
Do you really think 90% of Americans doing CS are not doing because of an easy FAANG job ? That they had some deep passion for CS since long ?
I'm also an Indian from one of the "top" engineering colleges and what you say is very much true for what I have seen first hand during the 4 year degree course.
Unfortunately the reason here is definitely cultural. I was lucky that my parents didn't force me to become an engineer or doctor (though it was by choice) but for majority of my friends since 9th std, it was about getting into IIT and their whole life and their whole parent's world revolve around getting a good job in a top MNC and that's the Indian version of American dream.
Unfortunately the competition is fierce and there are 10 candidates for every spot, so you buff, cheat, cut corners and do everything in your power to get ahead. Because if you don't the other person still will and he will take your spot (it's like SEO).
There is an amazing web series called Kota factory. If you want to understand the culture it offers some great insights into it in a very entertaining way!
This is reality... so why is this being downvoted? Too much clashes with the morals of the privileged audience here who mostly grew up in an environment where no cutting corners was needed?
Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting to HN, we'd be grateful.
It was not a personal attack per se. This person was insulting all Indian-Americans; so it seemed only fair to call him an "Uncle Tom" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Tom . I am sure you would feel the same way if a person of your group was insulting all of the members of that group.
Working for an American company from Australia, I've noticed a tendency for Americans to work overtime to meet a deadline, and Australians to vigorously oppose their peers from doing so. I've even seen people set up alerting if anyone makes commits outside of work hours.
There's an unspoken agreement that if someone puts in overtime and others don't, it makes the non-overtimers look bad and that that the overtimer should be _cut down_.
Probably not quite tall poppy syndrome, but maybe an adjacent phenomenon.
And the overtimer should be cut down. That kind of working leads to management expecting the same thing every time, and before you know it everyone is expected to work 12 hour days.
I had never heard of this syndrome! I think it can be found in Europe as well.
The post was really illuminating. I don't know the Indian culture very well, but now I can understand why sometimes Indian resumes are so lengthy, difficult to parse, and essentially filled with air.
Another variant of this is "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down." I've usually heard it in reference to Japan, but occasionally other Asian countries as well.
It has been quantified as well, there was research I found at one point showing lower educational attainment and worse life outcome despite IQ for gifted students if they weren't placed in accelerated programs.
> Somehow Indian parents will become self sufficient, so that children are free to do and discover what they actually want.
This bit near the bottom (under "improbable futures") really struck me as necessary, and not just an Indian problem. The pressure to be generally successful and support their immediate family is hard enough on anyone, but adding onto that the pressure to be able to care for your parents when they're old is even worse.
I'm not saying people shouldn't care for their parents, or that people shouldn't live in multi-generational households, but humanity really needs to figure out how to care for our older members without requiring huge sacrifices from their children. Some countries have mostly figured this out with strong social safety nets, but many... have not. And beyond that, we shouldn't have to rely on a social safety net. Increasing income inequality makes it harder and harder for people to build enough wealth during their lives so they can retire comfortable, or even at all.
Social nets are also “sacrifices from their children”. Ultimately a morsel of food must be produced around the same time it is consumed, so however we might do the book-keeping and resource apportioning (govt welfare through taxes, charities funded by donations, family obligations, etc), the working population at any time needs to produce the “surplus” necessary to take care of the young and the old. In a society dominated by market forces, giving the elderly enough market power to be able to consume is an independent (lower-order) question — a matter of detail consequent of adopting a market framework.
The current individual approach puts the burden on individuals, and often that burden falls disproportionately on those who can least afford it. Spreading the responsibility around reduces pressure on any one person, and also gets the more fortunate/wealthy in on taking care of society. They've depended on society to enrich them throughout their lives; doing their part to help take care of our aging population should be a cost of doing business.
Having your elderly parents live with you isn’t necessarily all a burden: often they help out in household chores, cooking, babysitting your children…I mean, yes, the expectation might be that they’re living rent-free but in a productive relationship they are also providing tangible benefits by being present.
I’ll duplicate a comment I made on another thread today.
This has less to do with India, and more about what happens when there’s no prior culture of open source, to balance against the willingness to “hustle”. The fact that a lot of these PRs might originate in India is only relevant insofar as there are a lot of people willing to hustle, and don’t have much open source experience to understand the culture and the role played by maintainers. Chances are that they are oblivious to what happens on the other side of the table, and open source projects are abstract entities (which might as well be run by Github, or some other bureaucracy!) A useful reminder that the celebrated “hustle” is susceptible to the unintended consequences of Goodhart’s law.
If this was Sean Parker with Napster or Zuck with early Facebook, we’d be celebrating their initiative.
For all those who advocate for growth hacking techniques, or annoying ads, this is exactly how scummy most such techniques / dark patterns feel to users. I don’t think that is geographically localized in any way.
As for comments trying to characterize “Indian culture”, it’s really complicated! With a population of ~1.4B people, you’ll easily get a LOT of examples for any kind of behavior (including stark polar opposites, sometimes competed to optimality). The same people writing such articles will often also turn around and write articles about the lack of entrepreneurial hustle in India and the need for more jugaad :smh:
I'm not sure if you get it. India has a lot of people, some terrible infrastructure, has high amounts of competition, and the idea of craftsmanship is incredibly rare.
Their value for life is much lower. There's just too many people. The idea of a pedestrian lights is a tourist thing. They don't pay attention to it. Have 8 rows of cars on the road per each side? How do you cross? You just walk across it during traffic. (I'm not even joking.. I've done it) (Another thing.. traffic is extremely chaotic and dagerous.. lines on the road have no meaning there) Extremely poor and begging with a <5mo. They'll let it crawl around where people are walking in connaught place. (Btw go a little further to north and there is a good chance that baby was stolen [That's a thing])
Competition: Theres little to no social support from the government. Also, the families are hyper aggressive in getting their kids to succeed. This is shown in the marriages and determination of what their kids will do for work.
Craftsmanship: they produce quite a lot in that country. They're also having to deal with a market that won't support luxury goods. (Ok Goa can.. but Goa isn't buying domestically for that.. they're not buying their employees Tata motors cars, they're buying Mercedes SUVs)
You could never honestly convince me that they're not entrepreneurial. They are very much. There are aspects I love about it and there are parts that make me sick.
Reference for this? I was raised a Hindu still am. I don't and have never condoned cheating. The religion doesn't condone cheating. I smell good ole bigotry in the comment.
I'm not hindu, nor would I claim I am. What I've read a long time ago was that there is a god in the religion that promotes that behaviour (it's not about the action of deceiving, it's if the person that was deceived is gullible enough)
I'm going to have to see if I can find it again, or if this is a misunderstanding.
EDIT: I can't find the original statement about the religious values. I've removed it as that I can't find anything to confirm and accept that as it was where I was wrong.
Of course, false religion and immorality go hand in hand, say true religions. Here, false religion is 'Hinduism'; immorality of 'Hindus' makes them not honor ethics. Are we hearing anything new here?
> If this was Sean Parker with Napster or Zuck with early Facebook, we’d be celebrating their initiative.
I'd say those are both very controversial examples, certainly not heroes.
As for "growth hacking" and generally the ethics of programmers that appeared after the internet bubble, I wonder if one can even describe this as a purely American cultural thing. This is a field which is practically synonymous with internationality.
A lot of places have societies where culturally the game is about getting ahead of others. You're all together in a society competing for the top spots.
Whereas certain other cultures are more about working together to create an ideal environment for all to be emancipated and enjoy life to its fullest.
Personally, I prefer the latter, as it just seems much more enjoyable and fun to live in such a culture. The former culture is stressful and doesn't really seem to bring as much value out of my life, it feels a lot more artificial in its end goal. Instead of appreciating the time on a planet full of wonders, you spend the time feeling good knowing you beat others and ended on top. I honestly couldn't really find salvation in that goal, on my last day breathing, I'd feel like the king of fools, a fool none the less, and like I just missed out on a life that could have been so much more. But off course that must just show my cultural bias. And I wonder if happiness is cultural, while I would be happier in the latter culture, someone born in the former might be happier in that one. Just something for me to keep pondering about
That's one thing I enjoy about Scandinavia - we have a very collaborative culture, where the community is above the individual. The concept of "gaming the system" is extremely frowned upon, and everyone should strive to be the morally best person they can be.
But if you're financially or materialistically motivated, there are some drawbacks with this, though.
- Higher taxes
- More compressed wages (an Engineer with a Master's Degree will for example "only" earn around 1.5-3 times what low-skill minimum wage workers earn - compared to other countries where this multiple could be 5-10)
- A bit less entrepreneurial spirit
With that said, I enjoy living here. Life is comfortable, and there's no endless pursuit of getting richer, just for the sake of becoming rich. Retirement is not the be-all and end-all goal of life here.
There sure is a difference about always working on own happiness and family/parents happiness. Both are stressful at times and both are rewarding at times. One might feel like foolish and other one just selfish but there is lot more overlap than you think. But then you don't see so many old age home types of things in the latter. It's just culture where people care more for others happiness than their own.
One example of such culture you may find interesting: Since most of the India lives in rural areas and journalist live in cities, you may never hear it. When in a village someone makes a lot of money, he will give a feast to the entire village, sometimes even 7 or 11 villages. You can say how foolish he is.. He can roam entire Europe with that kind of hard earned money, meet new people, be happy. Right? But for him, seeing so many of his fellow villagers having one delicious meal is far more fulfilling. And this keeps happening often here. Earlier they used to make wells for water for all, etc.
Having grown up in the latter culture, and moved to the former (or at least a country where it’s more prevalent), I think I’d find it hard to go back.
While the latter is generally a lot more relaxed. It’s also really bad at rewarding exceptional people, so I find that basically all the exceptional people I met there have moved to different countries/cultures.
From a friend who moved back I heard that he suffered from some severe reverse culture shock. “Like, people just drink coffee half of the day.”
> The prevalence of extreme signalling brews the classic and infamous herd mentality in our minds. In middle school children have dreams to become a Pilot in the airforce, or maybe a Police officer, or maybe a Opera Singer ! But by the time of high school, everyone is just either on road to become an Engineer, a Doctor, a Lawyer, a Chartered Accountant …. or a failure. This may seem harsh but that’s how most of the society operates here in India.
Sounds remarkably similar to how I was raised here in the US.
It seems the more unequal the society the more pressure there is on children to "beat the odds" to avoid languishing in poverty by being useful to capital in some way.
In many European countries and other strong first world nations like Japan and Oz that provide strong social safety nets and baseline standards of living you see the inverse passive effect described in other comments where people can stop trying to sell themselves at all.
So it seems like people will eat each other until the average is good enough at which point a segment of the population stops competing at all.
IMHO calling it "Hacktoberfest" and not expecting a Jugaad flood seems rather naive of DO.
That said, a very similar culture exists in China and the Asian subcontinent (with the exception of Japan and possibly the Koreas), in particular SE Asia, so I wouldn't say it's specific to India.
That was also my initial thought: isn't there anyone in DO management who understands the concept of perverse incentives? "Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome", says Charlie Munger.
There is a story about this mocking Indian culture. One day the captain of the ship was transporting containers filled with crabs. When he discovered it was crabs he got upset and said to his fellow sailors to make sure there is lids on those containers so that they do not get out. To that one sailor said “Dont worry captain. These are Indian crabs. If one gets up another will pull him down.” I remember thinking of this story and feel we are like crabs in India and some of it has to do with huge population and limited resources. If we had a limited population and plenty of resources we would not be doing Jugad.
I was told on Sri Lanka that if you put one crab in the bucket, he can easily get out. But if you put five, not one can get out because the others pull it down. Is it true?
They didn't mention the crabs' nationality though.
An early post on HN highlighted how it's the open source projects that get flooded with dummy PRs in the process of DO handing out all those t-shirts that is the problem. For DO it's just a minor marketing expense; for your OS project with several hundred PRs it's a giant problem
I agree with some points but most of the problems described in the article are not limited to India. People need coaching/training for things they don't know about, parents have expectations, don't want to see their children failed and want to guide(or control, given the chance), people prefer easy ways to survive. Sure, culture makes difference but not everything is unique. It's just the magnitude of visibility due to population.
About quality content, well, have you checked out all github projects? In thousands of YouTube videos being uploaded daily, you can easily find "quality" content by searching it in native language. If mind blowing local newspapers articles are not your thing, you can still find a lot depending how you search through the noise.
Thanks for writing this. I do agree that the idea of resources being constrained and the mentality to do the minimum required to meet bar is quite prevalent — and the educated & well-paid aren't immune at all.
I can't generalize it, but I see a subtler version of this in the corporate spaces as well – lack of care towards accessibility, missing attention to details in PRs, focus on "getting things done" with the current knowledge set, not worrying too much about the "commons" .
I do hope though that this is a just a phase a developing nation has to go through — because we've seen more than enough exceptional talent originate from here as well.
> We people like the wear the “tightly knit society” as badge of honour, let me tell you this “tightly knit society” has done more harm than good.
That is a sweeping statement that can be dismissed as garbage rightly. It would be better if author backs up with some examples on how he arrived at this conclusion. In any case, whether a tight knit society is good or bad for us is entirely subjective and should not be trivially generalized.
PS: The next line of the highlighted statement has some typo.
>We Indian people have no India of the amount of mental
Probably should be fixed.
Thanks for this very detailed article. One of my own videos on GSoC from 3 years back is featured there, and looking back (hindsight is 2020, they say) I see how I was a part of the problem back then. I was naive to think I was just making people more aware and getting people into open source more.
Sadly the very people who need to understand this, care to watch spicy Youtube videos more than they care to read a nuanced article. Nevertheless, I'll share this with as many people I can.
tl;dr because of population, people step on each other to feel 'successful' and get approved by their family/peers.
unfortunately this happens in many places if not all. (eg same cr*p applies here in Turkey, if you're male and not a doctor or engineer or government employee, basically seen as failure)
it is apperantly much more visible/causing problem because of lack of resources, strict cultural values as well as driven by high population
Belgium and the Netherlands have a higher population density, the flanders subregion even more so, you don't see such behaviour propagate there in such prevalence.
The point is life-quality is way less than Netherlands or Belgium.
Ofc when I throw party in my studio apartment, It becomes one of the most dense places in the world. But that does not result people fighting for beers, as long as there are enough beers in the fridge ;)
Essentially, there are a few beers in India's fridge. That results in a fistfight.
This is all a very long winded way to say "a popular YouTuber asked teenagers to do something and they did it". Take out all the cultural aspects of it, and an Instagram/TikTok/Twitch influencer doing this here in the USA would have the exact same result, so I'm not sure I buy all the later reasoning.
I disagree. I think the key point was that most Indians don't even know what they're doing is immoral. And the post spends majority of its space explaining why this problem is kind of unique to India.
> This is all a very long winded way to say "a popular YouTuber asked teenagers to do something and they did it".
You have completely skipped the why. The answer in the article is so much more nuanced and complicated than "because a popular YouTuber asked them to do that".
In India, all people at all times are building their resumes for a semi-vague goal usually wealth or a happy retirement. This idea is embedded quite early on in age as the article author suggested - you’re usually pointed at a career in middle school that makes it easier to achieve above said goal.
The flywheel then spins ever faster as every decision you make thereafter is about getting closer and closer to this vague goal of “success/wealth/societal perception”. You pick universities based on rankings, large tech companies over startups, management over individual contributor work and of course America over everything else.
This problem isn’t isolated to India by any means, and like all stereotypes isn’t applicable to all people from India but in a country of 1B+ people, it’s just dialed up to 11. Hacktoberfest and GSOC are just unfortunate victims to this resume building. The fastest way to put these on your resume and flex it, is to create a spam commit and shortcut your way to a tshirt or certificate.