On Indians

The tech bros are demanding their tribute. It was bound to happen, though the time took everyone by surprise. On Christmas Day, Elon Musk and his Silicon Valley sycophants took to Twitter for an all-man-on-deck push to steer the conversation towards demanding more high-skilled immigration, largely from streamlining the H1B process.

It’s hard to say whether Elon got so high off his success he thought stirring the conversation to his advantage would be easy, possibly assuming the influencer accounts could back him up, rout the immigration restrictionist right, and win the day, or whether this wasn’t directed at us, but Trump himself. In any case, what happened instead was a brutal pushback, a sense a deep betrayal among his supporters, and the multi-billionaire getting clowned on his own platform. It can’t be understated how much social capital Musk, Graham, Ramaswamy, and many others lost so stupidly.

Throughout the debacle, everyone knew what they meant by high-skilled immigration. They were not thinking about recruits from the best parts of Europe, or even Asian countries like Korea and Japan. They weren’t thinking of another Van Braun or Einstein coming over, but hundreds of thousands of cheap programmers. Everyone knew the influx would come largely from a single country, once with a notorious reputation among whispered circles in the tech center, and now totally in the open. If there was one group of people Trump’s vanguard doesn’t want more of, outside of maybe Africans, it’s the Indians.

I’ve worked in the tech sector for two decades, mostly employed in large multi-national corporations. I’ve seen the evolution of Indian immigration from its younger days in the early 2000’s to its current iteration. I was a lucky grad who landed a direct-hire job straight out of college in a firm that became notorious for exploiting the H1B visa programs. One of the first projects I worked on was an airliner project, and our contracted part was to develop some of the core avionics software that would fly the plane. For this, our software had to follow the most stringent regulations at the time to pass muster with the FAA. Because of the necessary manpower and the gravity of testing, an outside firm was brought in from India as contractors to work with the regular employees in testing our output.

There was a cohort onsite in the United States put in largely sweatshop conditions, with a dozen in a room no larger than a small bedroom, with another crew in India. Every day, I would see the Indians stand around the bus stop after work to cram themselves into the small residence they were all staying.

At first everything was fine. Their output was consistently solid, and the contractors were cordial and communicative, even the remote ones with the time difference, and everything was on time. It wasn’t to last though. The competence level on the on-site contractors was all over the map, ranging from excellent to barely being able to code. Worse, the quality of work from the engineers in India dropped dramatically, and we later found out they are notorious for putting their best employees on a project, then shifting to their B-Team after six months once they felt like they were locked in.

While Indian management had much to be desired, the on-site employees were mostly fine socially, except they tended to have some of the worst stereotypes of their people. Specifically, the odor of their offices and restrooms always stunk of curry and it got quite dirty. Overall, everyone felt that while there were a few duds, the foreigners were overall a useful addition, with the regular employees going so far as to force management to allow them to come to the Christmas potluck, where they blew everyone away with their delectable dishes.

It was a superior experience to working with the Chinese on the next project, where all they did was lie, cheat, and steal to get what they wanted, all the while refusing to pay for services rendered. It was only a few months into that shitshow before I moved on to another opportunity.

My next job was a boutique firm that was entirely American and I did not work with an Indian again until my third job in mid 2015. This was a global corporation with offices all over the world, but one of their larger ones placed in India. One of my first projects with the company involved work in multiple locations, with India and the United States offices being the main centers. We flew to Asia and met the remote team, the trip giving me a personal glimpse into the filth and danger that is most of India. Our hotel was surrounded by tall gates and security cameras, with guards stationed at every entrance. Everywhere was dirty and unkempt, with even their historical sites strewn with trash. When we went to work, next to the modern corporate offices were rows of slums to pass by, along with the random strangers who beckoned me to go to their store couple blocks away for good deals on jewelry. Because getting mugged wasn’t my idea of an ideal trip, I refused. It was typical of haggling that these guys would never argue in good faith, and the hotel actually designated a local to come with us when going out to ensure we didn’t get swindled.

I had few complaints regarding the people I worked with, however. They were excellent hosts and knew their stuff, though were often too submissive in following clearly wrong instructions. The men were largely modern and western in their dress, while half the women were traditional, with the other half wearing jeans. When they took us out at night, the women would suddenly vanish around 8:00 or so, and I was told it was both uncouth for a woman to be out late and also dangerous. It was an enlightening cultural experience, and when I got home my wife begged me to stop cooking Indian dishes after a couple weeks. Yes, you can cook foreign food without importing the people.

Outside of the usual frustrations of working with people with a 12-hour difference in time zones, the cream of the crop in India had a lot to offer, and one in the group, now in a high-power position, was one of the best engineers I’ve worked with.

The ones who flew into the United States on H1B visas, however, were a far different story, and begins the modern saga of ethno-narcissism and shameless cheating. While our team in India was the utmost of professionalism, that can’t be said for many of their compatriots. The 2010’s saw a huge influx of Indian visa holders flying into the country, largely ones who had no business doing so. One H1B contractor we received was a whole different level of incompetence. His first code check-ins were so wrongheaded they didn’t even compile, seemingly just copy-pasted from Stack Overflow. We had to constantly hold his hand through solving the issues in the code review until someone had enough and just did it himself. We asked our lead to delegate him more menial tasks, which he obliged. His next task was to update a JIRA script to automatically change status when an item was filled out. It was literally a two-line code change. He made no progress for two weeks, stating he was “looking at the documentation”. Then he called in sick for a week. Then we guided him through the solution, and he still fucked it up. Then he called in sick for another week. Again, we did the job for him, and he asked us to email the code so he could check it into Github under his own name. We refused.

He “resigned” and left for India. The next one we got from India was marginally better, but was let go after her short contract expired. After that HR stopped hiring from that contracting firm.

If the issue with H1Bs just extended to some lousy employees that cheat the system, it would be an annoying but workable problem. My next project, where our company had a joint project with a major automotive manufacturer, showed a far more insidious side. The project manager was Indian, and he originally had a small team that slowly grew as the project expanded. Every week we would see different names in meetings, distinctly Indian. It struck me as quite a coincidence that every expert they hired in was from this particular ethnic group, something not lost on the team, though we never explicitly said it. At the end there was a total of one white guy and about twenty Indians. A few engineers were very good, better than I was, but not all were competent, and it was clear the project manager was building his own little empire.

The project failed, but not because of the Indian team to their defense. There were so many messes circulating in so many sub-teams the death spiral was inevitable. Because so many at my company were on this project that abruptly ended, we had massive layoffs. This also isn’t a rare thing in automotive, and it’s also not rare for the automobile company with whom they did contract work for to grab useful employees after they are released. What was rare was every single Indian we had to lay off was hired, and not a single white.

When I moved to a pre-sales role, I began to interface with many software firms in the automotive space. One aspect that always seemed strange is either the American companies walking the floors in trade shows were either all Indian or all white. One such company was very interested in joint efforts with us to increase visibility and build a broader platform to get the interest of the Big Three car companies. It was odd that through all the interactions with their teams, I never talked to a non-Indian. Later, it made complete sense.

I have had many nice relationships with my Indian colleagues, both the ones I communicated with remotely and many of the ones here on a visa. I have nothing but kind words for the engineer whose house I visited to get a circuit board and saw a Hindu Shrine in the corner of his kitchen. I have nothing but nice things about the man who showed me pictures of his farming family in India, going into great detail how they stored the produce. He worked in a tech firm for long hours during the week and then did back-breaking labor for his parents on the weekend. That sort of love and dedication is what saints are made of, regardless of location.

Overall, my experience was a mixed bag. According to online sentiment, this is better than most. When you open the floodgates the good people, the ones you can trust, the ones who learn to think like westerners, dwindles. As the green cards expand from a few thousand to a hundred thousand, you start to see the corruption India is rife with, where people are all-too willing to cheat, lie, and engage in flagrant nepotism to get themselves and their friends ahead.

Still, I have deep respect for a people that sticks together. The wild colors in their culture and long, festive celebrations long into the night are, while not my cup of tea, something to be respected. However, those strange, foreign traditions, their willingness to enter tribal politics above social norms, and capability of creating little fiefdoms that exclude Heritage Americans make them a danger to my children who will inherit this country. If I went to India and began a nepotistic parallel system to benefit American expats, the Indian Government would throw us all out without blinking, and rightfully so. So why does our own government treat us like immoral racists for wanting our own institutions for our own progeny without being forced to share it with a people who don’t share Western values?

If they don’t want to follow Western norms, they can follow their own norms in India. The good engineers who worship foreign gods can be good engineers in India. It’s true we will miss out in some talent when we do this, and that’s okay. We are missing recruiting talent among our underemployed white population by design. I sponsored capstone projects for Computer Science seniors, and my largely white teams were astounding in every respect and showed how shameful and out-of-touch Vivek’s screed on Twitter was. These guys are hungry, think outside the box, and do more than study like drones for a standardized test. This was a mid-tier college, so the talent pool we are ignoring at home is clearly immense. This also doesn’t go into how many good engineers are totally wasted in corporate America due to management thinking every one of us is the same cog, looking at spreadsheets instead of trusting our top talent.

Luckily, even the most ardent Civic Nationalist and creedal American understands the game being played now. They understand you don’t import millions of foreigners simply for cheap labor at the expense of the native population and understand you can only import so many people in a country rife with corruption and ethnic solidarity before you find yourself disenfranchised in your greed for cheap labor. The go-to “racist” attack is falling on deaf ears as they see an imported people clearly unwilling to play by the social norms of their new country.

I wish all my previous Indian co-workers well. I wish all the people of India well. I wish all Indian citizens living in the United States well, but I don’t want any more of your here. Simply put, the well-being of my children trumps the well-being of your ethnic cohort, just like you believe the well-being of your ethnic cohort trumps my family’s well-being. It’s nothing personal. That’s why we have separate countries.

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