Sadhana recently joined Ita Richardson's research group as a research assistant, and we also explored possible collaboration directions together. She, together with her younger sister, started a software development company in India in the 90's and her portfolio includes some very important projects undertaken for the local government.
Gabriela brought into discussion some of the assertions encountered in interviews and publications regarding the collaboration with Indian software engineers, and it was extremely interesting to hear that things are not what they seem to be when we look at them through the lenses of Western culture!
Just a few examples:
- Female Indian managers don't use their first names on business cards not because they are women, but because it's impolite to address any superior there on the first name!!
- Indians are very adaptive when it comes to learning a foreign language other than English; they do this naturally, as India is a huge country and there are lots of languages spoken only in specific regions.
- Indian developers who spent time working abroad are not rejected by their teams when returning to India; on the contrary, this is considered the norm - people should spend time abroad in order to refine their education and get acquainted to different cultures;
- The high turnover in software development personnel the big multinational companies complain about is part of the Indian software development culture; changing jobs every 1-2 years is a way of advancing in their careers and learning about different technologies. This trend is manifested only in software development and associated industries.
No comments:
Post a Comment