Workers from India0
As a business owner online, I’ve had the opportunity to work with many different ethnic backgrounds and at this point after running my business online since 2002, I have to say that trying to work with East Indians is very very difficult.
Not that there aren’t other ethnic people out there that are difficult too, but I have given East Indians chance after chance after chance to prove themselves to me as hard, intelligent workers and they have failed every time, especially when it comes to communication skills.
Not to mention that from a personal point of view, I cringe every time I call a company as a customer (consumer) and have to deal with East Indians in a call center in India. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that by the time I hang up that phone, I will have spent more time speaking to them than I would have speaking to English speaking workers, or they will make mistake after mistake after mistake.
But that’s besides the point, I’m only writing this post based on my experience as the boss, someone who hires people to work for my company online.
There are times when I have taken a break and have said never again will I even consider screening East Indians if they respond to my hiring ad, but then I feel like I’m being racist, so after a few months or a year has passed, I give it another try and EVERY single time I am left kicking myself for giving them another chance.
This is now for SURE the last time I will EVER take an application from an East Indian and here is why.
I recently had an East Indian respond to our hiring ad looking for a website coder. I had his code screened, and I was told it was good, so that was fine. Now onto the screening of the person, as you should NEVER hire someone to work for your company just because they have good skills, you want to be able to work with this person long term, and skills alone just don’t cut it. So I started to screen him further and also screen him for our programmer (web developer’s) position we also have open because that is a very important position we want to fill and he had the supposed Cake PHP experience.
He was asked to send me a sample script, something he was surprised he was being asked for since he claimed no other company had ever asked him to give them a sample script. This shocked me, that this guy had managed to get positions with companies that didn’t even bother to screen his code. How can an owner of a company be professional if they don’t even care about the quality of the code. Geeze.
After two people told me his PHP code wasn’t that good, I decided to only hire him for the website coder’s position for xhtml/CSS.
He was given his first task, but since I’m almost an expert now on dealing with independent contractors online, I suddenly remember that I should ask him how long it would take him to take the graphical template we had, splice it, and code it onto our site in our CMS. Understand this is work on only ONE page.
I asked my assistant how long it would take him to do the work, and he’s not a day-to-day website coder, so I knew what ever answer he gave me, this experienced website coder should be able to do it in 25-50% less of the time.
My assistant Andy told me it would take him 2 hours.
I then went and asked this xhtml/CSS website coder I had hired, how long it would take him and do you know what his answer was???
12 HOURS LOL
That’s when I remembered something I had read online a year or two ago, plus I vaguely remember experiencing this in the past myself.
East Indians usually charge less than North Americans, but what they do to rip off the companies, is they take much longer to do the work so in the end you are paying double, triple or sometimes even quadruple the amount you would have paid had you hired someone who does his work fast and for a higher price.
I was furious that I had wasted sooo much time giving this guy so many chances because I had. He had made a few very simple mistakes and then had begged me to give him additional chances.
I probably wasted around 5 hours of my precious time (my assistant wasted hours on him too) giving this guy a chance, and in the end he thought I was stupid enough, and that I was going to let him rip me off.
So owners of companies out there, or HR people of companies out there, be very much aware that this is a common rip off scheme that East Indians use to take advantage of unsuspecting companies who don’t know how long it would take to code a simple template.
In all fairness to East Indians, I’m sure there are other ethnic backgrounds out there and even Caucasians who do the same thing, it just seems to be very very common when it comes to East Indian workers.
I hope this has helped you run your business online.
Michelle