Hard truths about outsourcing: you’re always dealing with a cultural, political, and legal gap.
Stuff that’s hella-illegal, that not even the remotest WFH citizen would ever try to pull, might look very tasty from another perspective. Economics that favour that cheap labour also means even marginal scams can seem wildly tempting on the other side.
Sad thing is that it works, and more than it works, it gives you an advantage over the people who actually do the right thing.
If you can work it out as you go and get away with it by definition you become the "first mover" over someone who only sells once they have the full capability. The incentive is there to do the wrong thing to win in the market as a whole.
I don’t see that as Indian culture as much as outsourcing. I’ve had tons of that from entirely domestic contractors, including people who’d bid on a project only to admit their team didn’t have the domain experience promised. I’m talking about things as basic as telling the client that they needed to buy an enormous SQL Server cluster because their “developers” didn’t know how to limit joins and were had deeply-nested loops processing duplicate results.
They do this because it often works: business people often lack the experience to tell whether excuses are correct, and large organizations have enough project churn that it’s entirely possible to wing it for the duration of a contract / pivot, get paid, and move on before someone knowledgeable notices that the old deliverables didn’t really work.
What they had in common was greed, and I think that’s where the association with India comes from, too, but as a selection bias affecting people who don’t otherwise have exposure to Indian workers: there’s a floor on what a productive developer is going to get paid – someone smart enough to do the job is also smart enough to realize when they’re being underpaid and all of the abuses I’ve seen were cases where some combination of the outsourcing outfit and senior management were basically saying “why cut our cost by just 30% when we can find someone who’ll show up to work for ¼ of our staff rate?” and then acting surprised when they can’t retain decent people (e.g. I once talked to a guy who had two clues to rub together as he was leaving and learned he was getting ⅓ of the hourly rate and bailed as quickly as possible to get closer to market rate). Less ethical American companies do that, too, but they still lose to the even cheaper body shops so they aren’t as successful, but in all cases I would say it’s not the entire nation’s culture but the subset of fake-it-til-you-make-it business types. Plenty of people in both countries detest that and don’t deserve to be lumped in with them.
Have you ever lived in India? (not just visited, but actually lived there)
I have, and while of course not 100% of any society is ever any specific way, Indian society is this way.
In the same way as german society is very ‘rules oriented’ (to put it mildly), even when individual germans can (and sometimes are!) the opposite.
Don’t mess with the Polizei and expect to come out unscathed, and don’t expect to get what you paid for (or what you’re asked to pay being a fair price) without fighting for it in India. Or for people to follow the rules if they can profit from not following the rules, even if it’s short term.
It’s just the way things work.
Occasionally, there are exceptions, but they typically prove the rule. (Ikea in India is awesome, for instance. And some individual local vendors are too. Autorickshaw drivers, cabbies, landlords, and vendors in busy markets tend to be the worst. Like 5x a fair price sometimes, or a fair price and 1/5 of what you should get. And in some situations, the Polizei are very kind. Like if you’re lost and a pleasant drunk. But do not argue with the Polizei, it will go very badly.).
Like in any society, these have reasons which are extremely obvious to most people in the society, and may not be obvious until you live there.
In India, for example, when everyone is trying to penny pinch/get rich quick because of a history of extractive behavior from authorities and economic/social instability to an extreme degree (including historically, famines, religious wars, purges, etc.) and so many factions/groups that ‘us vs them’ is just the norm - and once enough people start doing it, you’ll be screwed if you don’t do it yourself. It’s the prisoners dilemma writ large, but when there are already a ton of people floating around doing the ‘wrong’ thing. The rich can get away with not doing this (as much) sometimes, when they are dealing with foreigners, but it’s pervasive.
Or in Germany, when there is a history/culture of strong willed people doing what they want and making life harder for everyone else (in an environment where that can get people killed) but a reasonably consistent and obvious majority ‘us’ group, for instance. In weather that WILL kill the unprepared/weak without assistance a large portion of the year, and requires significant energy to be spent just to not freeze to death for everyone.
Source: lived in India for a year.