Discussion: What are Western programmers in the eyes of Oriental programmers?

Introduction: This article is translated from a discussion post on StackExchange: What are Western programmers in the eyes of Oriental programmers ?, Some netizens posted questions:

In my opinion, it is an interesting and important question for programmers in the east to think about their western counterparts.

It is generally believed that Eastern countries (India/China/Philippines) provide outsourcing services for Western countries (the United States and Europe.

Have you ever participated in offshore development? If so, what do you think?

What are your impressions of Western programmers (such as collaboration, product delivery on time, or quality of work )?

The following are answers from programmers from different countries in the east:

I. Indian programmers

Danish

As an Indian, I want to talk about Indian programmers.

I think the problem lies in the culture, that is, the way people think. Since our childhood, we have been trained to follow the rules and then enter high-paying jobs like engineering, medicine, and business management. Innovation, exploration, and entrepreneurship are not common in India.

Most people enter the IT industry to earn money, not because they love programming or computer. Due to lack of interest, most of us will become programming machines and will only execute instructions without concern about their meaning. Most developers never think about problems from the perspective of end users, nor what value the modules they develop will provide for a larger system.

In India, it is hard for you to find inventors, but you will find many outstanding workers. Growth here means an increase in revenue and a rise in position. Knowledge is worthless here.

This is true even for leading IT companies. They recruited graduates from the school and trained them as robots. The most sad thing is that their salary is relatively higher than that of other industries, so no one is willing to leave these companies. In India, almost no IT company will recruit talented people.

Another important factor is that most talented people go to the United States or other countries to show their talents and earn more income than their Indian counterparts. Therefore, if you are an Indian developer, you will have a chance to succeed only when you become a process expert rather than a new technical talent.

Although there are some changes, we can see that some start-ups have emerged, but there are still a few.

Update: My Opinion on Oriental programmers is my personal opinion. In my opinion, Western programmers are generally result-oriented, focused, Frank, and more professional. I often work with clients/clients from the west and find that they are collaborative, patient, flexible, and enthusiastic.

Vinoth Kuma

I am from India and used to work for a large American retail company. The American team I contact knows exactly what I want to do. As discussed in other articles, "Indians have this almost religious attachment to politics and rules, but are not fully aware of the problems to be addressed ".

I have also encountered some American colleagues who have unclear about the task deadline. They will say, "You only need to submit the code on April 9, February 26." However, the outsourcing project manager replied, "No, we should close before March 23 ", this increases the pressure suddenly. This is a kind of tendency to entertain leaders regardless of actual development time requirements.

This may be caused by India's social structure.

Aufather

I work in a multinational company in India. Although it is a production company (telecommunications equipment), the Indian Branch is also an independent company legally owned by the US parent company to provide engineering services for the parent company. This is the legal status of Indian subsidiaries.

In general, I found that Americans are more responsive and straightforward, while Indians are more smooth. In my impression, Indians spend more time (10 hours) doing the same job than Americans (8 hours), but the main difference is the speed of action. I think this is more caused by culture. In terms of technical capabilities, I feel almost the same. Another interesting phenomenon is that most American programmers (accounting for 60-70%) are Indians who have lived in the United States for 5 to 15 years.

I also felt that most of the Platform work (especially hardware design) was completed in the United States, while India focused more on application development. Although more and more platform software has been moved to India for development now.

Another trend is that many Indians have been working in the United States for 5-20 years and then return to India. I personally know many people like this. At the same time, many Indians work on site in the United States and learn local culture. Therefore, corporate culture differences are gradually decreasing.

Kuma

I am an Indian. So far, apart from Japanese in the east, I have worked with Americans, British people, and Australians. India became a colony of the British Empire in 300. Until now, people still think that Western technology is far more advanced than India, including other countries in South Asia. Although these countries are proud of their own family concepts and culture, you will find that more product innovations come from the West rather than the East. The most important thing is that I respect Western programmers as well as Eastern programmers and understand Indians and mathematicians (except for Indian managers of course)

Rahularyansharma

In India, most programmers are influenced by the surrounding environment not by their own choice.

In one example, tata, a very famous company, consulted its employees to answer such questions on KBC (who wants to become a millionaire in India. The problem is:

Which of the following options cannot be found on the Google homepage?

Options:

Gmail youtube facebook Orkut

He chose youtube.

So you should know that in India, most companies only hire new people and give them some daily work training. Therefore, in daily work, there is no challenge, no learning, or research to do the same job at the same time.

Tarun

There are many older and experienced programmers in the west, while there are more new and older managers in India. Well, there are indeed programmers in India. I hate this idea of switching from a programmer to a manager as his career advances.

Rishabh Jain

I have been in the software development industry for four years. It mainly works with developers in Europe, such as Germany, Spain, and Italy. As in other places, these developers are superior and less outstanding. What surprised me most is that, unlike developers in India, they always strive to pursue excellence in their work and enjoy themselves very much and take pride in their work.

This does not mean that Indian developers are inferior in some aspects. For most developers in India (Asia), there is a lack of thinking about what they like and what they really want to do. As most people have pointed out, this is the result of a lack of free parental education and social environmental impact. In India, a person's life carries a lot of social responsibilities, and both adventure and failure are unacceptable. Otherwise, they will be rejected by the whole society. As a result, students will choose a safer life plan, which is shaped like a product produced by a factory ".

I am not saying that this is a very bad choice, because it ensures more or less social respect and better income. However, in the long run, these people cannot really communicate with their profession because they are not interested in their work. Once you make money, it is especially difficult to jump out of this malformed cycle because they are already financially bound.

In general, people are given the opportunity to make mistakes when the western environment is relatively loose. Even if a person makes things worse, he still has the opportunity to find his or her own interests and will not bear any burden. Therefore, developers in the West work for interest rather than economic and social responsibility, which will help them achieve excellence.

I also found that Westerners are relatively more professional and tolerant (they know that people make mistakes, because they have also made mistakes, so they know the value ).

I also found that project managers in Asia are usually heartless, fraudulent, and speculative. They do not focus on the value of people. Most of the time, they regard people as resources, such as resource 1 and resource 2, and suppress developers' personality at desperate costs. They will not give up any opportunity to seize others' honors. This is mainly because they have been in this "Factory" for too long. This also reduces the sense of belonging of Asian developers.

Westerners are relatively flat and provide a more free working environment.

But looking into the future, the situation is constantly changing. I believe that there will be an environment where East and West are more mutually trusted and conducive to innovation.

(Bole online matching)

2. Japanese programmers

Rei Miyasaka

I am from Japan.

I don't think Japanese programmers really understand what Westerners do half of our time. We live in our own little galapos bubble (isolated from globalization), turning a deaf ear to other things in the world. Apart from scientific software (simulation systems, development tools, etc.), I don't think we are passionate about academics. In Japan, we regard software as a slave of hardware, so innovation often appears in the hardware field.

Therefore, when Bill Gates says that "software is the source of innovation", most Japanese will only think that "Ah, he is rich and he knows what he is talking about ", then go back and design the application without thinking.

At the same time, whether or not we are aware of this, the hatred and persecution of foreigners have been deeply rooted in Japanese society. A member of the Tron project (a real-time development operating system kernel project) is like this, although I hope they are very extreme:

Unfortunately, there are Japanese people who spread rumors. These Japanese, including other foreigners involved in spreading rumors about the TRON program, should be more aware that they ignore the fact that TRON is not a short-term business project, it is not necessary to take two to three years to occupy a specific market as the criteria for evaluating its success.

Unfortunately, this cannot dispel some Japanese opinions. They really believe that Microsoft will reward anonymous hackers with WinMoible7 mobile phones for attacking Sony. (It may be possible to pay, but why do they want to provide non-expensive mobile phones to these hackers ??)

It is said that Japanese programmers seem to be very interested in availability and UI-so it is often seen that the UI from Japan is very convenient and intuitive despite getting rid of the tradition. This is even reflected in the Ruby design style:

Matsumot (inventor of the Ruby language) is designed to improve the efficiency of programmers and bring them pleasure. This follows the design principles of excellent user interfaces. He stressed that system design should focus more on people rather than machines ,......

If my cynicism surprised you, I will explain more here.

3. Pakistani programmers

Armir

I am from Pakistan.

I have been working for seven years. I work with my colleagues in the United States most of the time. I have participated in the following work:

• Offshore Outsourcing

• Branches of American companies in Pakistan

Here I want to share my feelings. American colleagues are very frank and Frank (it is hard to comment on people from other countries because they only have the experience of working with American colleagues ). What I want to talk about here is that if a task is to be completed next week, the main developers need to ask for leave for various reasons. In most cases, I will tell my colleagues in the United States that they will take the leave seriously.

However, in Pakistan, most people try to satisfy each other even if they cannot do it. They tried to hide the idea that the local team might affect the business. I think this is wrong. A practical example is that I recently resigned from a very important position of Team Coordinator. The job in this position is to coordinate overseas teams and local teams. When I quit, the manager of the overseas team informed the local team about who is my successor. However, only 15 days after I resigned, my next employee also resigned. This time, they did not tell the local team and blocked the message about my successor's resignation. Now someone else should take over for this position.

All of these are intended to avoid negative effects on business relations, which are common in Pakistan.

Therefore, the general view of Western and Western teams is that although they do not have an absolute technical advantage over ours, they need high-quality work. The second point is also very important. They need to work honestly. If things get worse, tell them the real situation. After all, they will not send CIA detectives to follow us.

4. Korean programmers

Jeong

I am from Korea. To be blunt,

South Korea has many programmers, but South Korea does not provide outsourcing services for Western countries. Programmers have many types of work, but most of them are

1. gaming companies (the online gaming industry is huge)

2. Internet search companies (you may not know that Google is not a leader in South Korea)

3. product companies (such as Samsung and LG ......)

Different from the west, programmers are not a "Qian tu" job in South Korea, although it is also a good job. For programmers, overtime is also common. What I want to talk about is really common.

Therefore, many Korean Programmers think that they work very well in the West, and some even consider working abroad. Unfortunately, unlike India, many Koreans do not have good English.

Finally, what do Koreans think about Western programmers?

1. Rich (maybe ...... You are ?)

2. More freedom

3. Love Programming

5. Bangladesh programmers

Gulshan

I'm from Bangladesh. In my opinion, the difference is:

• Technology: Western technologies are always one step ahead of us. Any technology was used here two years after its appearance in the West. For example, we haven't started to use. net4 in the production environment so far (not a framework, but a feature ). It can be implemented only when. net5 is available.

• Knowledge: To be blunt, the best carrier of knowledge is books. Almost all the latest technical books are collaborated in English. This is not a big problem. The problem lies in the price of books and the publishing time. Before the advent of lower-price versions, these books were expensive for us. Even after we are ready to pay, it takes a long time to get it in a local bookstore. Even if you order the service, it will take one month to arrive. Therefore, the West is obviously ahead of us in this regard. It may take two years ahead. We hope that more e-books can improve this situation in some aspects.

• Best practice: IT is still an emerging industry in Bangladesh. Therefore, many non-technical people are engaged in management. In some cases, this may cause communication barriers. There are many other obstacles to accepting new habits. So sometimes we are still using the old one. I believe that the West is more open to changes and new things.

• License: we do not pay enough attention to license software/tools than in western countries.

• Open Source: I think western programmers are more involved in open source than us.

• Language trend: we will start from the C language, followed by C ++, C #/Java or PHP. This shows a trend: imperative, object-oriented, and most adopt static languages. But functional programming languages like Python, Rub, and LISP or Haskell are not popular here. Even functional programming styles supported by C # are not common. C # is used as Java.

Some of them are only for my region and are not applicable to other Eastern or Asian countries. I think this trend should change, excluding economic considerations.

(Bole online matching)

6. Filipino programmers

Joset

I'm from the Philippines. Based on my understanding, I have estimated the following figures.

I dare say that 70% of programmers in the Philippines want to build their own companies and focus on innovation. When there is rain and lack of funds and is tempted by high salaries of foreign companies (IT companies and non-IT companies), programmers put on "golden handcuffs" for themselves (to prevent employees from leaving the company's financial system, such as employee stock options ). Because you can only use your spare time, innovation becomes increasingly slow.

By nature, the pursuit of the best culture makes it possible to have many outstanding employees in the Philippines. Here I want to emphasize that programmers are result-oriented. One disadvantage of this kind of orientation is that because social culture emphasizes friendliness, smile, hospitality, and optimism, most programmers, especially when dealing with foreigners, are not so confident and Frank. But in the workplace this is undergoing dramatic changes, and Western work culture is being replaced.

Programmers are educated at the university and intensive programming training in the enterprise. As a result, software development fully follows the best practices of the industry.

Programmers who have talent and do not want to venture to start a company usually choose to work abroad, such as Singapore, the United States, Australia, Hong Kong and Malaysia, to find a better space for development.

In my opinion, Western programmers are generally considered skilled, better, Frank, result-oriented, and focused professional programmers.

7. Chinese programmers

Wondering

In my 15 years of programming, I spent half of my time dealing with Western developers. I once reported it directly to the Belgian director and led the team members from India and the United States.

In general, programmers in different countries have no big difference. Most of the programmers I see are hardworking and innovative. Westerners are at the same level as Westerners in dealing with various programming skills and office politics. Most experienced Chinese programmers are not very good at English, which brings about problems in communication, while India and Americans have advantages in this regard. Maybe it is because my European team and I have fought too many times for projects and resources. I personally feel that Americans are easier to work with than Europeans.

Additionally, I am a Chinese and live in mainland China.

Baobao

Hello everyone, I am a Chinese programmer. I want to tell you some truth.

1. In China, most people become programmers for a relatively high income. All we need is to survive.

2. In my personal experience, when I was in junior high school, I only knew about the computer and used and got in touch with it when I was in college. 3. It's just a matter of mutual understanding, and it's a magic to answer the question through the thesis?

4. After arriving in Shanghai, I found a job as a user experience engineer. I just followed the feeling and did not have any training at all. I tried my best for my first job, but it still ended in failure three months later.

5. Fortunately, I found my own field, so I started to read related books, such as CSS and Javascript.

6. These books are all found on some free English e-book sites in English. One by one, I know what a programmer is. No, maybe it is more appropriate for us to write code.

7. Unfortunately, some good English books in China are regarded as professional manuals in China.

8. There is no doubt that the Chinese are very smart and can copy all types of software. We call it "shanzhai ".

9. Do not say "no" to all Chinese bosses, whether or not the company is in the IT field.

10. It is very far away from design and pattern. There are only a lot of speculators here. For them, money is everything. In fact, everyone needs money.

11. "The customer is God", so the demand is always changed once and again. Believe it or not, this is what happens every day.

Kim

I am a Chinese programmer. I used to work in a Chinese software company and met many talented programmers. My capabilities have been quickly improved.

One day I joined a so-called famous American company. That is really a nightmare. Chinese employees in the company are either very stupid or fighting each other all day. They hardly think about, design, and coding. Almost no other Chinese enterprises need such people. Daily work is to test the product or repair several irrelevant bugs.

I quickly escaped from this American company and entered another local company. The company bought software from Germany and received technical support from German companies. I think I have made the right choice and the salary is higher than before.

I have met many Western programmers in the American company who have done a great job and know how to respect their subordinates, including Chinese employees.

Matthieu

The east follows the West in the following aspects:

• Standard

• Attitude

• All Aspects

Almost all the IT books I have read come from the West.

I was very happy when I first met Apache Jakarta/Struts. I think it is really made in Asia.

Appendix 1: After the previous article was published on Sina Weibo, some friends shared their views on Western programmers.

@ Lucky_eagle ......

@ Xibo: I personally contacted some of them and heard from my colleagues. The general feeling is that most programmers in various countries are almost the same. They are too confident, can postpone delivery, and shirk their responsibilities. They are so careless about quality that they can cope with delivery. They have a poor balance between work and family members and occasionally have the courage to challenge. But it is also normal, after all, programming is a high mental activity, but the human brain is not strictly logical.

@ Zhang Handong: I have been dealing with the United States in my early years, and I often mix various technical forums. My biggest impression is that no matter how many dishes you ask, they will answer you patiently and seriously.

@ Carlos_Tse I want to change myself: I have worked with the pseudo-western countries. I always like to use very avant-garde technologies. The documentation is very detailed. The most important thing is that I have a dead line and can submit it at any time, not limited to working in the company.

@ Yanbin: Let's talk about the situation of our company. Those Western colleagues are more serious in their work attitude than on our side. They prefer communication at work. And the age is older than ours.

Have you ever worked with Western programmers? What are their impressions? Continue to share with you ~

StackExchange, compilation: bole online-Tang Yuhua