Another Indian-born tech CEO? It's incredible. IBM joins Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Nokia, and Harman in this regard. Also, MasterCard and PepsiCo (until 2018). I wonder how much it's a cultural thing.
This is a biased, but honest observation that I'd like to share. I've been working for a big corp for about 5 years now. I was born in a SE Asian country and came to the US for college. I have worked with a lot of India-born people.
As a fellow foreigner and as an Asian, I can tell that more often than not Indian people are bolder and more aggressive in asking for what they want (e.g., one of my Indian colleague asked for salary raise and the permission to go back to India in December for a month every year as part of his negotiation when he applied and got offer from another company; what he told me was simple, "It's my responsibility to ask. It's my boss' task to refuse or accept.") On top of that, some (not everyone; some are meek/introvert like myself). Because of their boldness, Indian people seem to be more successful at making themselves more visible, which is very important in corporate culture to get ahead. On top of that, some of them are pretty clever at courting favor of their superiors and/or playing office politics. I have seen quite a few of my peers/acquaintances from India who climbed corporate ladder pretty fast, so I'm not surprised they are doing well in terms of representation in C-level roles.
ALSO. the people you are describing are (I'm guessing) immigrants. Meaning they are a subset of people from their home country with the internal initiative, drive, and resources to move halfway around the world and make their way in a culture besides the one they grew up in
This is under appreciated. I spent significant time living and working in China and it’s HARD. I came back to the US with a MUCH deeper respect for any immigrants I work with. Everything is much more confusing and frustrating.
The language / the cultural barrier isn't as high as it is for an American living in China though. I've grown up speaking English and watching a lot of American / British movies and TV, reading a lot of english literature. I assume this is not the case for most Americans with Chinese culture.
There's definitely a culture shock when you first move here and are figuring stuff out - How do you order food at a subway or a chipotle? (not a big deal anymore given the explosion of these restaurants in India in the last few years). Why is called Cilantro and not Corinander? How do I get a phone when I don't have any credit history at all? What is a turn-pike?
I lived in both UK and Germany for about 4 years on each. My native language is Spanish (Mex) and I found it more difficult to adapt/blend with Britons than with Germans. Even though my English is Ok and my German is terrible...
You probably know this, but in the US Cilantro is the leaves and Coriander is the seeds of the same plant. Possibly because only the leaves are used in Mexican cooking, and a huge amount of US cuisine these days originates from Mexico, or pretends to.
A turn-pike is usually a toll road, a road that you can use only if you pay. There are often slower or less convenient roads running mostly in parallel which are free.
This feels somewhat strange. A more plausible explanation (one given in some of the sibling threads) is that most of these folks are immigrants, and simply being an immigrant tells you something about the nature of this groups of people.
But there is a twist: most of the immigrants from South Asia are also highly educated and here legally.
That is quite a powerful combination in itself. Considering the large population of India, there are bound to be a ton of smart, driven people that immigrate to the US. And in a system that doesn’t actively discriminate against them based on their race, they do well.
I am not sure why this is surprising. South Asia has a LOT of people. Many of them are well versed in English because colonialism. A small (but still significant) number of them emigrate to the US and do very well.
Indian Brahmins (the traditionally educated class) mostly getting kicked out of the country and not finding space in its social hierarchy after imposing thousands of years of the untouchability/caste system on everyone else.
No other country had as many priests who were suddenly displaced from social hierarchy after their independence movement.
They're hardly getting kicked out. They still occupy positions of power and leave only because they have the choice and privilege to do so.
The caste system, like racism in Western countries, is only abolished legally - in social settings it continues to exist - though it's not as bad as it was before independence.
The Indian tech sector is better explained by a confluence of a few things, IMO:
1. English being the predominant spoken language, and the fact that North Indian languages share common roots with English meaning English is easier for Indians to pick up.
2. A cultural emphasis on education, and primarily engineering and medicine. You see similar cultural mores in former soviet nations and in Jewish communities which also end up having similar disproportionate success.
3. The existence of the IITs which provide an extremely high quality undergrad education (at the very least, it provides a high quality filter function) which then funneled engineers into Masters programs in the US especially in the mid to late 1900s, which is now benefitting America and American companies.
Bullshit. Not just Brahmins are responsible for caste system and all. Now that Brahmin vote bank is literally smallest, every other community gets benefits from government, while Brahmins do not.
Some people like to hate on Brahmins. It is not even like all Brahmins are in religious professions either.
I remember reading a study about gender pay disparity (where it actually exists between similarly skilled people in the same industry) was because the female members of the group were less likely to ask for pay raises than their male peers. They may have felt more intimidated or less entitled to simply ask, possibly as a cultural side effect (maybe as a result of childhood stuff like the way males are highly competitive early on).
I know a female software engineer friend of mine had read about that and got inspired and ended up asking for a serious raise when she got a new contract. I remember being both surprised and jealous the person said yes and took it as a life lesson.
I also remember tptacek on here always talking about the value in asking for more money as a software person, product, or consultancy because you're probably worth it.
So as the other commented mentioned the qualities of new immigrants might certainly select for this sort of thing, ie, people with high-motivation, bold life plans, taking advantage of their opportunity to really buy into the American dream, etc. That combined with a local-cultural confidence thing could certainly help explain it.
I didn’t say anything about female engineers in general in my comment or compared them to Americans. So I’m not sure which part is “nonsense” which you are talking about.
The reasons why there are more females going into engineering in India and other countries on the developing side like Romania have been well discussed on HN (yet the pattern of women not being as frequently in math or engineering remains in many developed countries, hardly just the US) I don’t think it’s particularly unique to India or Indian women.
I think a lot of this also comes down to class and your environment growing up.
For example: I grew up in an environment where you're meant to resent your boss, complain about them, and see them as an adversary. They are not someone you try to become because bosses are bad.
How much harder do you think that makes it to climb corporate ladders if your internal narrative is that being the boss means you're a bad person?
In big companies, not a small family owned business, I see bosses or mamagers have their own bosses or managers which give them difficult tasks like refusing promotion, or increment or such. When I started seeing my boss and his/her duty as two different things, that he is just doing his job; I started feeling less resentful against boss & more towards the company or its policy makers. Obviously there can be exceptions & great & worst bosses can be there enjoying themselves.
This followed my own similar observations with Indian people that I know. They, more often than not, are more confident and straightforward in their actions whether it be how they honestly feel or not.
I’ve seen (while working at Google) that on paper they seemed to have lots of “education” and in meetings the ones in management were overly confident and talked the talk but in 1:1 rarely did they know anything that wasn’t in a book, jargon or memorized. Rarely did they think up their own ideas or challenged the status quo. My manager was from India. He told me to make my solutions look more complicated and more lines of code to “make it on his team”. Engineers I found amazing, but once they decide to go the management path stay away, they would step over and on anyone, claim ownership for others ideas. not in a productive, supportive, work hard way, but a calculating negative way.
Been doing this a long time, and every culture has differences but only with Indians in management from India did I feel I had to watch my back. Nepotism was so obvious I’m shocked it isn’t researched more. Maybe something with that ridiculously stupid and inhuman caste system.
Ymmv
To be fair, the Indian education system was crafted to create 'Brown Sahibs' to manage the Colonial Govt., and unlike say SE Asia and E. Asia, the system remains in essentially the same state that the British left it in. Indeed, most 'Indian Americans' are united in their hatred for their home countries IMO.
On the other hand, it's very unsurprising that India's greatest export remains Human Labour. For those who don't realize this, India's balance of payments is actually positive inspite of the imports being about ~$150 billion more than exports (that is about 5% of nominal GDP). This comes about because of the amount of money that is being repatriated by Indians.
Perhaps it is for this reason that India maintains a linguistic apartheid, whereby only the English speakers have access to education, and higher wrungs of the state like the judiciary, civil services etc. It's also a testament to the nation's collective stupidity that it thinks exporting cheap labour over building skills within the country, is a justifiable strategy.
This is echoed, unsurprisingly, by 'body traders' like Infosys (c.f Nandan Nilekani), but is a common state doctrine after 'independence'. Unlike China, which emphasized mass education access, and local technological ability, India's schools specialize basically in serving Anglo-Saxon nations - most IITians etc. leave the country on graduation (esp. in CS).
Within a country like India, where each of the major languages have a speaking population of an average 6+ million (similar to S. Korea, Germany etc.), and where Hindi has a speaking population of 400+ million, you'd be hard pressed to find a single university of repute that can educate people in any of the native languages. Even the bombastic Tamils in the south or the Hindi pushers in the north have little to show after 70+ years of bitter politicking.
How a mob of uneducated rabble, neither interested in agriculture nor equipped for industry, will be beneficial for India is a puzzle that only Indians appear to be able to "bend" around.
For these reasons, those who compare India with China, have neither an awareness of India's history, its present British colony run by "Brown Sahibs", or even about its historic role as the "pivot for Asia", whereby it was used to colonize the whole of Asia. This is not surprising, since its own 'eminent' academics are often at a loss in doing anything that doesn't involve mimicking their long gone masters.
That's both a little harsh and doesn't stand up to scrunity. As a counterexample, consider Singapore, which also has inherited and retained the British education & legal systems, as well as standardized on English as the lingua franca despite it being nobody's mother tongue. Yet Singapore has still become one of the world's richest countries, while Malaysia next door, starting from almost the same position (they were part of the same colony/country!), has not.
My equally unpopular opinion is that Gandhi's ruinous Swaraj/socialist economies theories that basically involved blocking off imports and central planning of everything were the primary cause India stagnated for so many decades, and has now fallen so far behind China in everything except exporting brainy IT engineers to work in the US.
Nonsense. Russian(Ex-USSR), China are more extreme in central planning and inward focus than India will ever be.
The real problem is insatiable desire among Indians for Managerial/Administrative jobs. Or Govt bribe income potential jobs(Again in Administration). Most people want to be in abstract boss level administrative/managerial jobs because they think they can just give orders and make 10x more money than people who do 10x work to make things happen and make 0.1x money.
Indians do well in administration/management because it's the most aspirational job here. Lastly India is a country of shopkeepers and resellers. We are NOT an engineering or industrialization intensive country.
There is a fundamental cultural problem and that is unlikely to be solved soon given the misaligned incentives.
I am actually happy English is the language. India has several languages each with small population of speakers. Having access to education in English is big plus. If it was Hindi, all south and east Indians will be in serious disadvantage.
This comment seems to be assuming that Indians are over-represented at the C-suite, but that seems doubtful. Given the huge proportion of the tech workforce that Indians occupy, the number of CEOs being discussed seems perfectly... average. If I were to draw any conclusions at all, it would be that Indians are just like everyone else in tech, not the opposite.
You notice it as well. :) My division was managed by an Indian managing director, who succeeded a Caucasian boss prior 2018. Within 2 years of his arrival (and his departure for another company at the end of 2019), our department has the ratio of Indian to non-Indian ratio suddenly goes from around 20% to 70% (this increase in ratio accelerated because quite a few of the non-Indian people left in the past year).
The guy that I mentioned above who asked for one whole month of vacation also encouraged another Indian guy to do the same and they both took off last December to India while some team members from other projects were asked to cover for their absence by the ex-managing director. Worse, that guy also somehow convinced our management to hire his then-fiance in mid 2019 directly from India as a manager. I just can't believe how he pulled these off, but I have to give it to him for being really good at getting things done the way he wants them.
Good for him and good for you you can appreciate another man running his own show. I sometimes have the feeling a lot of guys are more jealous than women.
At Microsoft we called this phenomenon the "Indocritical mass", for obvious reasons. Russians are the polar opposite of this, BTW. If a Russian is interviewing a Russian, _less_ slack will be cut than if they were interviewing anybody else.
As an Indian person I frankly don’t think there’s anything special about Indians. The immigrants you meet are not representative of the country as a whole... in India you will meet plenty of lazy imbeciles. It’s just that India has a vast population of technically educated people, and in contrast to China, these people have grown up in a heavily British-influenced society (esp. language) so they integrate in the US and UK better than Chinese.
I attended an interview of a major non-tech CEO and he attributed the cultural attitude of Jugaad [0] as the reason why so many CEOs are of Indian descent.
I don't like to be a downer. But this Jugaad (or hack your way) attitude is one of the reasons why we (Indians) haven't become good at manufacturing stuff (unlike China). The world needs more solutions than hacks.
I don't think Jugaad is a significant factor in that disparity. China has a similiar, and arguably much worse, widespread philosophy called Cha bu duo (close enough)[1], and it doesn't seem to slow them down much.
