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We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

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411–420 of 653 posts

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Indian students Is this cultural? I ran a small business some years ago (later failed) and was paying for contract work to various people. 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 cal…

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…

Thanks for all this, what you wrote and the discussion that followed has been genuinely helpful, and I think it might help bridge some cultural divides that I've experienced when working with Indian people.

Another question I'd like to ask of you is, do you see any aspects of the western style of cooperation that are the inverse? i.e. which create divides in which the westerner's ways of working can be the source of conflict?

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#412
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Indian students Is this cultural? I ran a small business some years ago (later failed) and was paying for contract work to various people. 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 cal…

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 pa…

In my experience trying to outsource to India, there is a strong systemic bias towards lying and cheating to get ahead (and that was even before AI), and a focus on milking as much money as possible rather than building great technology.

While there is real talent there, there is also a lot of overhead to find people you can trust.

This is probably just a reflection of the competitive nature of the market and the social ladder tech salaries enable there.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

Denial in the face of incontrovertible evidence undermines trust to an extent incompatible with working in any serious organisation.

I’m Indian. I absolutely loathe this part of Indian culture. My uncle was once eating a pizza like a naan (ripping pieces off straight from the box) and I called him out on it, and he said he wasn’t doing anything like that…while holding a piece of naan and the pizza looking like rats had a party with it.

It happens basically constantly, I have never heard my family admit to a mistake unless violently confronted by someone with authority.

Leads to all sorts of issues and societal breakdowns, like police beating people up before even trying to communicate.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#414

Long time ago Sourceforge and then GitHub promoted into the current default the model of open source distribution which is not sustainable and I doubt it is something that the founding fathers of Free Software/Open Source had in mind. Open source licenses are about freedom of using and modifying software. The movement grew out of frustration that commercial software cannot be freely improved and fixed by the user to…

> I doubt it is something that the founding fathers of Free Software/Open Source had in mind Who cares? That was 30 years ago. How different were computers, programming, and the world back then? Things change over time. The world is not immutable.

The original model works, the new model significantly fails. LLMs have taken many cases that were on the border over the line into failure, by changing the resource management tradeoffs. (Both by giving valuable contributors a cheap way to get 'extra eyes' on their own terms, and by empowering a new generation of trisectors and trolls to flood out even the most efficient public submission pipelines).

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#415
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Good Indian devs out of college make atleast 30k USD. Good senior devs make atleast 50k. 1. How can you be a good dev if you've never developed professionally in your life? 2. I know Indian numbers and this is complete bs. Like complete. Maybe there are extremely rare exceptions to it, but this is like claiming that good US devs out of college make 350k. That's beyond rare, may happen, but it's beyond rare.

1. "out of college". I'm sure you can figure out how to interview new grads and identify good devs.

2. They are not. FAANG in India pays higher than what I quoted. My senior numbers are especially on the lower end of the spectrum. If your numbers are lower then you aren't working with good devs.

These are the numbers for good devs. The ones who get into great startups/companies. 95% make less and it shows in the quality. Infosys pays new grads 4000 USD/yr.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read their reports before. When there's not enough information to reproduce, they do a good job of asking for more information first, and I've never seen a reasonable good-faith report elicit anything overt. If you failed to give them proper reproduction information when asked, then yeah, you were wasting their time and they should rightfully close your issue. I've never seen anyone on the curl team undeservedly…

It says in the curl file that they will ridicule time-wasters in public and here is one pression confirming that it happened to them, yet somehow that's not enough? Come on.

When people don't provide a citation online when discussing some specific instance like this-- which could be provided with a couple clicks and would radically improve their argument a reasonable assumption is that the citation would undermine their argument.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#417
post #11

I've been helping a bit with OWASP documentation lately and there's been a surge of Indian students eagerly opening nonsensical issues and PRs and all of the communication and code is clearly 100% LLMs. They'll even talk back and forth with each other. It's a huge headache for the maintainers. I suggested following what Ghostty does where everything starts as discussions - only maintainers create issues, and PRs can…

Heh, reminds me of that free T-shirt contest thing... Submit crap PRs to random FOSS projects for a chance of winning a shirt, what could go wrong? https://ongchinhwee.me/shitoberfest-ruin-hacktoberfest/

The funniest/saddest part is that you could just game it on your own repos, you never had to go out and spam any real projects. If you just made 5 PRs in a repo you owned with the appropriate hacktoberfest tags, that was enough to pass the mark and to get the free shirt and stickers.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

all curl team came here to downvote you, don't be so cruel :D

Heh. I understand they people hate to to waste time. They should just be polite about it. Or you know .. update or delete the CoC.

Well, I guess this could be considered an update:

> We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#419
post #30

Creating crap vuln reports or PRs on popular OSS projects has been an issue long before LLMs. Remember Hacktoberfest? Students would often abuse it since there’s no adult in the room to teach them how to behave. I guess this is one hard way to f around and find out. But this is by no means condoning this sort of behavior. Point is, LLMs made the situation more dire: it’s cheap to generate code, whereas reviewing stil…

Problem is that the LLM operators don't care if you're rude. They copy and paste your response to the LLM and probably don't read it themselves. If they do read it they don't suffer any ego hit from it because if there was any error it was the LLM's not theirs and their LLM is busy telling them how brilliant and unparalleled they are and how wrong the haters are in any case.

CURL is free to try it, but I'm doubtful being rude will meaningfully improve things. I'm confident it won't improve the ratio of good to bad reports because non-chatbot powered submitters are sensitive to rudeness or even the threat of potential rudeness, and so this approach could easily reduce total volume some but mostly in the reduction of good submissions.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#420
post #295
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Particular topic (1) is also trained in cross cultural trainings. Another topic is: do not expect a remote dev to pickup ambient knowledge, particular if they are juniors with no life experience. And since outsourcing to India is trying to get the resources for the lowest possible price, the result is: you get them as junior / fake senior / bad senior as you think. Pay better in India, get better people.

How do you stop the better people from moving out of India (and/or to another firm) once they have your work exp on their resume?

Q: How do you stop anyone from moving to a better company or better-paying role?

A: You don't. Unless there isn't a better company or better-paying role.

If a person is motivated to move out of the country altogether it's got nothing to do with you and there's nothing you can do.

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