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There are quirks to speaking with developers or workers in India who haven't also been trained partly in the US or Europe. A scattered assortment of unusual phrases or idiosyncrasies you may hear:

-- "please revert at the earliest"

-- Using the non-standard 10,000 base comma system when expressing numbers, versus 1,000 standard

-- A tendency to use abbreviations or acronyms which are not commonly understood, even by the direct team. E.g. "please excuse the IVR not working properly today" as if everyone is familiar with that abbreviation for the phone mail system.

There are other more amusing quirks to I'll try to remember and post. Such as, "do the needful". And not working on state holidays, aka Tuesdays.




I once was late for a meeting because it was "preponed" – I heard "we are ...ing the meeting" and assumed it was going be pushed to a later date.

Not even angry. It's a great word.


Do the needful is such an awesome expression! I wish it were standard worldwide. I enjoy it a lot more than "do what's needed" or "do what you need."


>-- Using the non-standard 10,000 base comma system when expressing numbers, versus 1,000 standard

To be clear, India does not use a 10000 grouping system; that's China's and Japan's system. India's system is that the first group is three digits, and subsequent ones are two digits. eg 10^9 is 1,00,00,00,000


I work as a Software Engineer in Japan. We have a lot of "non-standard" abbreviations and phrasings too. Here's a few that come to mind:

MTG = meeting

MGR = manager

DL = download

expressing dates without separators: 2020/07/25 becomes 20200725 (of course, this is alwais in the Japanese field order which I find the most sensible one)


I think those are pretty understandable, in comparison to what I've seen from my Indian colleagues.




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