> - Ask an Indian if he understands something, he'll always answer "Yes" even if he doesn't understand it.That has absolutely been my experience. After so many instances where I found out later they had actually no clue about the thing they claimed to fully understand, I started to follow up with questions like, "OK, now explain to me how you're going to proceed," or "just to make sure we're on the same page, explain to me what ____ is and how it works." Not to embarrass them or anything, just to find out if they were being truthful, which often they weren't.
- Indians will not admit fault or mistakes. They seem to take it as a personal attack when you critique their work, rather than take it a suggestion for improvement.
I've seen this in members of all ethnic groups I've worked with, but I've found it to be quite common among Indian developers.
One time a rush bug-fix ended up letting a showstopper regression bug get into production. (The getting into production part was entirely my fault.) The dev was calling (Java) toString() on a value that had just been read from a nullable column of a relational database, without null-checking it first. When I asked him, "do you understand why you can't do this?", he would not admit any error, instead arguing "that column should not have been allowed to contain nulls." (The table/column in question predated his presence on the team by years.)
The answer I would have preferred to have gotten would have been something like, "OMG, I can't believe I did something so stupid, I absolutely DO understand what I did wrong and I'll make sure it never happens again." I don't, after all, expect people to make zero mistakes. I just want them to own up to them and hopefully learn something from them.
That's just one particularly egregious example out of many I've witnessed over the years.