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Comment by jcbrand | Hacker News Reader

> pick up new tech and tools very quickly

And then they go on StackOverflow and Github issue trackers, begging anyone and everyone to help them and appearing completely out of their depth.

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To be fair, silly questions are fair game from everybody on SO and GH. There are just so many of us Indians, which makes us more visible. I browse SO just for curiosity, I have seen plenty of silly questions with all sorts of usernames.

Ok generalization again, but I see a lot more Indian names asking questions rather than answering them.

I'd bet every country has more people asking questions than answering them.

Yes but the ratio is different. Americans produce most of the most popular services even if most Americans consume rather than create them.

Stack overflow generally has more than one answer per question, so probably not. People more likely up vote an existing question.

No way. Even on Stack Overflow the ratio of answers to questions is below 1.

Yup, found it:

select 1000 * (select count() from Posts where PostTypeId = 1 and AnswerCount = 0) / (select count() from Posts where PostTypeId = 1);

https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new

=> 132 for me.

so 132 answers for 1000 questions, on average.

You're looking at popular questions, that have a ton of answers. But the long tail is huge and most of those questions have 0/1 answers, most likely 0.

I encounter answers now and then by Indian names, and unfortunately my first thought is "can probably skip this one and look at the next answer". The reason is that the answerers _very_ often didn't read the question properly (or misunderstood it) and consequently are giving a completely irrelevant answer.

Nothing wrong with asking questions and seeking to learn.

Yes but where are the ones who have already learned and are answering other people's questions? And why so many silly questions? That was the question. There's a similar situation on Quora. You can look up just about any question and find multiple low quality answers from Indians. On both stress I there seems to be no attempt to do the hard work of diagnosing/debugging the problem to produce the minimal example scenario required by the site; instead it's just "fix my problem here's the code". It's just a different way of handling development which only works if other Stack Exchange users are prepared to spoon feed lazy developers. It's easy to see why many of the original Stack Exchange users have given up.

(Let me preface by saying that of course there are world-class Indian devs, and ones who contribute to FOSS and who answer questions on all kinds of forums. What follows is obviously a generalization based on my limited and flawed perceptions. I've never been to India, so might lack some cultural insight here.)

For better or worse, Indian developers in general have positioned themselves in the bottom of the market by working for rates lower than anything devs from developed countries can accept.

By doing so, they're under a lot of pressure to implement things as quickly and cheaply as possible and to cut corners where-ever they can.

On top of this, they are happy to accept jobs which require expertise in tech stacks that they simply don't have.

Due to this, I sense a level of desperation that other devs usually don't have, hence the annoying spamming of SO and Github and the begging for help.

This combination of pressures to be cheap and quick, and not being able to know all the tech stacks but still taking on jobs for those stacks, contribute to shoddy quality and workmanship.

Probably this is a development phase, and as India becomes wealthier and more developed, this trend will reverse, which will be a good thing for all of us.

What I really notice is many of the GPL projects I've trialled that were developed by Indian devs have 90% of the features one would expect, but often the way these features have been implemented ignore how whatever their building atop was designed to support these features.

For example, in one project that needed multi-tenancy, what was being built on supported subdomains per customer, with a strong permission system, all that was needed was a simple webui plastered on front. Instead, this frontend slammed all the customers into one domain, and generated random user IDs that customers will never remember. Worse yet, you were now either a user, or super-admin.

Problems like this are fixable, but I'd rather move on then work on rewriting poorly implemented frontends.

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