Indian here (~15+ years in tech). I've seen this behavior a lot, and unfortunately, I did some of this myself earlier in my career.

Based on my own experience, here are a few reasons (could be a lot more):

1. Unlike most developed countries, in India (and many other develping countries), people in authority are expected to be respected unconditinally(almost). Questioning a manager, teacher, or senior is often seen as disrespect or incompetence. So, instead of asking for clarification, many people just "do something" and hope it is acceptable. You can think of this as a lighter version of Japanese office culture, but not limited to office... it's kind of everywhere in society.

2. Our education system mainly rewards results, not how good or well-thought-out the results are. Sure, better answers get more marks, but the gap between "okay" and "excellent" is usually not emphasized much. This comes from scale problems (huge number of students), very low median income (~$2400/year), and poorly trained teachers, especially outside big cities. Many teachers themselves memorize answers and expect matching output from students. This is slowly improving, but the damage is already there.

3. Pay in India is still severely (serioualy low, with 12-14+ hour work days, even more than 996 culture of China) low for most people, and the job market is extremely competitive. For many students and juniors, having a long list of "projects", PRs, or known names on their resume most often the only way to stand out. Quantity often wins over quality. With LLMs, this problem just got amplified.

Advice: If you want better results from Indian engineers(or designers or anyone else really), especially juniors (speaking as of now, things might change in near future), try to reduce the "authority" gap early on. Make it clear you are approachable and that asking questions is expected. For the first few weeks, work closely with them in the style you want them to follow.. they usually adapt very fast once they feel safe to do so.

This sounds like a real cross-cultural mismatch, but it’s doing too much work with nationality alone. In a lot of Indian (and broader South Asian) work contexts, questioning instructions can be read as challenging authority or admitting incompetence, so people default to executing without asking. That’s often reinforced by education systems and contractor dynamics where producing something quickly feels safer than pausing to clarify.

Add in time zones, language friction, and fear of losing work, and "just run with it" becomes a rational strategy. Meanwhile, many Western workplaces treat clarification and check-ins as professionalism, so the behavior reads as strange or careless.

The key point is that this usually isn’t lack of curiosity or reflection, but risk management under different norms. The pattern often disappears once expectations are explicit: ask questions, check back, iteration is expected.

It is cultural - the whole "not losing face" thing. In a project, I once was squad lead - I was onsite, my squad members were in Bangalore of course. Same experience as you. Once I wanted to talk about a piece of code that we need to improve and refactor, and I was acting in good faith calling the dev that commited that code. When I braught up the code on my screen to start a pair programming, he immediately denied having written the code. Unfortunately for him, being a junior, he did not know about git blame - I entered it in the terminal and his name showed up on that code. Still, he would simply just deny that he wrote it. I then took the git commit hash and looked it up in gitlab, able to bring up the MR he created and the reviewer (wasn't me). Even with that on screen, he still denied being the author - with no arguments or alternative reasoning, he just constantly would repeat "No, I haven't written that". "No no, but I haven't written it". I pulled even the JIRA ticket up, that was about that feature and guess what - he was the assigne and moved it to "In Progress" and "Done". Still with that on screen all I got was a "no, haven't written it".

I had more of those interactions, and we also exchanged some of the indian devs (they were sold to the client by a big consulting group, and immediately replaced by someone else if we wished). I later found out, people that I have had replaced in my sqaud for not being qualified, ended up in different teams in the same corporation, they were basically just moving around inhouse.

After a few month in the project I swore to myself never to work with offshores again. And as a side note, the bank I did the project with, does not exist anymore :)

I don't know if it is, but I can swear every time I post a job opening (generally contracting work) on LinkedIn 95% of the applicants are Indians/Bangladesh/Pakistanis/Sri Lankans.

I ignore all of their resumes, not because I don't think there's valid individuals among them, I did hire them in the past, but:

1. because the signal to noise ratio is absurd. The overwhelming majority didn't even read the actual post.

2. Even when they are okay developers, communication is always a huge issue. Sync communication in call is though because urdu and other indian area accents are extremely heavy so I really struggle understanding their english, my bad but what can I do about it. If I try to keep it async or chat based then they tend to not ask feedback, clarifications, provide updates, etc. So you feel like you need to micro manage them half the time and they'd rather give you answers to make you immediately happy than surfacing problems.

3. Paying them is always an hassle. Wiring them money through bank accounts is difficult. They generally set up some Paypal or similar service or ask you to pay them on some Hong Kong account from a friend of theirs. I need traceable invoices and simple wires for tax purposes and when sending money to Pakistan multiple times anti-laundering got involved in my country, and we talking low hundreds of euros.

Still, props to the few good ones I've met, they've been critical on some projects of mine. Very professional and knowledgeable. But it's just too bad of a signal/noise ratio, seriously most applicants don't even read job descriptions.

That is a cultural thing, and one of the first things you learn to handle when working tightly together with Indians as an outsider.

I can't remember all the techniques but a simple trick is to ask them to repeat their understanding back to you before they start working on a thing.

But I don't think it's connected to sending "malicious" reports. That seems rather to be to pad their resume and online presence while studying to get an edge in hiring.

My guess would be yes, it's cultural. I'm not Indian but spent about 5 months there. Overall my impression was that people act much more on direct feedback.

It would be typical to do the first thing that comes to mind, then see what happens. No negative feedback? Done, move on. Negative feedback? Try the next best thing that makes the negative feed back go away.

People will not wonder whether they might bother you. Just start talking. Maybe try to sell you something. That's often annoying. But also just be curious, or offer tea. You react annoyed and tell them to go away? They most likely will and not think anything bad of it. You engage them? They will continue. Most likely won't take "hints" or whatever subtle non-verbal communication a Westerner uses.

I found it quite exhausting in the beginning, it feels like constantly having to defend myself when I want to be left alone. But after I started understanding this mode and becoming more firm in my boundaries, I started to find it quite nice for everyday interactions. Much less guessing involved, just be direct.

Professionally I haven't worked much with Indians, but my expectation would be that it's necessary to be more active in ensuring that things are in track. Ask them to reflect back to you what the stated goal is. Ask them for what you think are obvious implications from the stated goal to ensure they're not just repeating the words. Check work in progress more often.

Of course it’s cultural, they have to compete with thousands people just like them in environment where human life is cheap and anyone is replaceable. Any authority have huge weight, which comes from historical system how society is separated. And then any education they receive assumes cheating at exams, then cheat with CV, then cheat with work they do. It’s all about appearances.

I had the same exact experience with an Indian contractor. I requested that he used git instead of Shopify CLI for his changes to a store's theme. He acknowledged my request but kept using the CLI. I once again asked him to use git and even offered a detailed, step-by-step guide on how to pull, branch and then push changes. He absolutely ignored everything and simply kept using the CLI. That was actually amazing to witness. The only hypothesis I have is that it's some kind of cultural thing where asking for help is worse than doing the opposite of what's expected from you. I don't know, but your story supports my hypothesis.

> Is this cultural?

Many of my Indian friends say it is, but sometimes I feel they can be as self-critical of their country as many Americans are of the USA.

Demographics show that it doesn't have to be cultural - it could just be that India has 9x as many people under the age of 35 compared to the USA. Even if we were culturally similar, for every annoying US youngster "hustling" to try to get employment, there would be 9 early-career Indians doing the same. That alone is enough to drown the "Vox Agora" with Indian voices. Chinese citizens generally don't participate in English-language fora, so their large numbers would be massively under-represented.

If anything else is biasing the populations, the difference in numbers could be even more stark.

From a half-Indian friend of mine, he described this as "ask vs guess" culture. https://medium.com/redhill-review/navigating-ask-and-guess-c...

Ask culture scales a lot better in a fast changing world full of strangers. Guess culture saves friction, but only in situations where people are mostly guessing correctly because the social structure and expectations are fixed.

I used to work with colleagues from China in contracting and I had the same experience with them. If they don't know something they have hard time saying that they don't know something or don't understand something.

Ficticious Example could be

Q: is this car red? A: it's not green. Q: yeah I know it's not green. But is it red? A: today is Thursday.

One thing I leaned it's not worth pressing forward and causing a scene. Instead it's better to use other ways of finding the information.

When guiding team members I always found it useful to have them explain back to me in their own words what they're tasked to do. It become immediately obvious if they were on the right track or not.

How much are the contractors being paid?

The people having a terrible time with Indian contractors always deal with folks making 3k-10k USD/year. Of course the quality is bad.

For reference:

Good Indian devs out of college make atleast 30k USD. Good senior devs make atleast 50k. The really good ones make much more. Most American companies outsource to bottom of the barrel contracting companies like Infosys.

> never ever ask for clarifications, would never say they didn't know something, would never say they didn't understand something

I experienced this same thing working with offshore Indian contractors 20 years ago. Interesting to hear someone else echo my observations.

I ran into this when I went to India to help train our team over there.

I tried specifically asking questions where the correct answer was “no” and they wouldn’t tell me no. In some cases I told them I was expecting them to say “no” and they still wouldn’t do it.

It was very difficult to figure out what they knew or didn’t know without putting them through a test and seeing how they did.

> Is this cultural?

https://burakpsych.weebly.com/uploads/5/6/0/6/56066915/ethni...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_distance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede%27s_cultural_dimensio...

This is called "saving face"[0] and it's very common in some Asian cultures. Western societies prefer directness, and eastern ones prefer harmony.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)

> > Indian students

> Is this cultural?

Could be, but there are a number of very popular Youtube and other video based classes/bootcamps (taught and targeted from/to Indian students) that teach how to work with git and github that show how to create PR's and comments in repos, and then a lot of students do that, on public (and popular) repos.

There are a couple very famous examples of this.

I believe it has to do with saving face.

I've worked with mixed nationality teams at a certain 4 letter austinite corporation a couple thousand moons ago. One thing in common with my Asian colleagues back then (many of which i still keep in touch with to this day), is that they would usually refrain from saying things that could rock the boat or disappoint you. If they lacked knowledge for the task at hand, they wouldn't let you know. If they were late on a delivery, they'd insist it would be ready by a certain date. This led to situations where other regional managers would have to plan contingencies to work around the issue.

Culture and what companies want there. I was running a operational team with a couple of incredibly talented guys who had been escalation engineers for large software companies in India.

They were trained really hard to "restore" things in a way that hit some minimal level of the SLA, but not really. It created alot of issues initially in the organization as the "don't question anything" had really been ingrained into them. My observation there is that it made many of the useless support engagements I've experienced make sense, and that a place with that level of discipline and process must be pretty awful.

Indians gaming the system, discussed before the AI on Hacker News, about Hacktoberfest

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658052

I recently heard from a friend that this is due to something called "izzat". Admitting any sort of wrongdoing would reflect poorly on them and their family, to the point they would rather lie or do the wrong thing than damage their family's reputation.

Definitely not. Anyone growing up immersed in face-saving, high pressure, competition and possibly self-help influencers telling them how to achieve will exhibit these sorts of behaviors. Doesn't matter if you're white or black.

I was contacted by a guy who said he found a vulnerability on my site. Something like phpinfo being available or something. I informed them that I was aware of it and it's not a vulnerability but did offer to give them a small Amazon gift code if they wanted.

This might be part of the motivation. What's pocket change in the west might be good money in the 3rd world.

Yes it's "fake till you make it" without the making part

> Is this cultural?

Absolutely. I've been traveling for the last 10 years and lived in 50+ countries. I believe that all cultures have unique pros and cons and that the cultural diversity of the world is an amazing thing. There are good and bad people everywhere, so I rarely leave a place with such a strong opinion as the multiple times I've been to India. I really wanted to love India because of their rich history and diversity, but I ended up leaving with a feeling that their culture is overwhelmingly objectively bad.

This is hilarious and reminded me of the two stints I had in India, for about 8 months in total at the turn of the century. I was a hippy traveler and asking directions for almost anything was par for the course. I never had anyone local say they didn't know where something was once asked, even though me following their directions lead to the intended target maybe 10% of the time. It was funny and infuriating at the same time :)

selfishness, laziness, lack of self-awareness, lack of shame, etc are obviously universal traits. But cultures absolutely reinforce them to different degrees. Many cultures around the world are built around the sorts of behaviors we both described.

Whereas other cultures have at least some (if not a lot of) resistance to it - eg publicly ridiculing when people step flagrantly out of line. This is good. My impression is that British culture is like this - "taking the piss", or worse, out of people whose egos start to get too large

Edit: what about this comment could possibly be worth a downvote...? Not that I care about points, but it just seems to be an objective assessment of human nature and cultures, without even singling out any cultures that need improvement.

> Is this cultural?

In my experience, yes, but I hope that's just my personal experience over the past 20 years.

Possibly as a consequence of this, what I have observed working with Indians is a very hierarchical structure in which you have a "lead" or "architect" who spells out what to do and how to do it in minute details and micromanages, and "devs" who execute as instructed.

There are also a lot of Indian students (there are 1.4bn Indians). There are lots of IT jobs, therefore presumably lots of IT students, and unlike in China Internet access (e.g. to GitHub) is not restricted.

> At the I perceived the pattern that Indian contractors would never ever ask for clarifications, would never say they didn't know something, would never say they didn't understand something, etc. Instead they just ran with whatever they happened to have in their mind, until I called them out

Sounds like an LLM

Indian students were the reason that Google's Hacktoberfest was critiziced and ultimately terminated

Indian students have a long history of disrupting free/libre projects, this is nothing new

there are definitely cultural issues you have to be aware of, and it's not just India, there are many cultures where questioning authority or admitting to uncertainty are less welcome - and some companies and managers reinforce these.

Always consider relative status and power imbalance regardless of nationality too. If someone is afraid to say no you have to factor that in - and 'calling them out on it' is maybe not the most effective reaction, especially if in public.

I always had frustrations with this as a manager until I could establish a personal relationship. Sounds extra hard with short-term remote contractors!

Askers vs Guessers: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/2010/05/askers-vs-guess...

they probably assumed you knew what you were asking for.

it's interesting how it parallels the issue with llms today, they are basically perverse instantiation genies. your wish is my command.

It's desperational. The desperation of not having to lose any contract. The desperation of being just one bad year away from being on the streets and having to live a terrible life (no food security).

For students, often there is no pathway to actually become good due to lack of resources. So, the only way is to fake it into a job and then become good.

I worked at a company where we had a untouchable manager who had some Brahman caste devs report to him and they absolutely HATED this.

I think it's mostly not cultural but just bad engineers lying. IT jobs pays the best in India, and it attracts people who have no skills in IT to just fake their way in.

So for every good developer in India there are probably 20 bad ones who have no idea what they are doing.

In the sense that it's racist, yes.

> Is this cultural?

Its incentives. If you’re an Indian student in India, unless you go to a prestigious university, your prospects of landing a job, let alone a good one are very small. Even tech companies that claim to be meritocratic elsewhere, rarely screen resumes beyond the top universities in India. The only other real prospect is to get your resume to stand out. Open source contributions, research papers etc are some ways to do that. And the talented ones make contributions, while the rest just try to fake it in the hopes to make it (it obviously doesn’t work).

There are similar incentives if you want your college application to stand out if you’re trying to go abroad for higher education. And if you’re already outside India, those incentives extend to job applications outside India. If you’re an international student looking for a job, even if you have work experience at known multinational companies, if it’s in India, the experience doesn’t count.

It’s all about incentives and responding to them.