this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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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this whole knowledge base article that tells everybody how to do every part of the job, the problem is it's awful and out of date so no one reads it anymore.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office went to look up the report procedure and couldn't find any mention of the India office, because as I said it's out of date. They know it's out of date because the last updated date is sometime around 2018 which was before the India office even opened.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 fucking hate it when people do that at work.
Guess i will do MBA then lol.
"Be underworked and overpaid"
I have a coworker who is from India, and he's a great guy, but this describes him pretty well:
It doesn't help that his supervisor is pretty new himself. Sometimes he asks me for advice, or how to do something, and it feels like I'm deprogramming him or something... I think he's slowly getting there, but you can tell that, "yes, that is technically what it says, but this is how we actually do it..." just breaks his brain sometimes lol
I honestly wonder if they have someone that comes through and regularly beats them with the employee handbook or something.
We have a couple offshore guys who are decent most of the time, but every once in a while they will suddenly forget how to do anything that isn't explicitly written down and will try to escalate to on call stupid shit they know how to do. And when that happens, my team starts beating up on them because they know what to do, they're just choosing not to do it.
Happening a lot less now that I've documented most things, but periodically they try to play dumb and we have to do this song and dance again.
I'm glad you got that off your chest; it's a fun story.
I don't really see the correlation between doing the work and the India office being mentioned. Was it like "the US office does this, Brazilian office does that" and since India wasn't mentioned they thought you were handing off extra work to them that you were supposed to do?