Note that I didn’t even need to identify L’s nationality but of course your guess is correct.

To be fair, I worked with a few really great Indian developers at Microsoft, and both of the two best managers I ever had were Indian. But these were exceptions.

The notion of excellence is simply not part of Indian culture; a few gifted individuals can acquire it but most take the attitude of “do the absolute least you can get away with doing.” At Microsoft around 2006 I took over a project that had been the work of six “senior software engineers” at Tata in the Windows Mobile group; it was a PC app written in C++ and it crashed before it even displayed a window. They demanded to get paid.

My manager asked me to look at their code and see if anything was salvageable; I could open any source file, look 20 lines in either direction, and find memory leaks. It probably crashed because it leaked so much that it never got to display. I advised my manager to burn it, and said that if he paid hem I would not fix it.

I rewrote it from scratch, singlehandedly, in four months and mine worked perfectly, even though I had to solve problems like undocumented flag bits in named pipes. And I’m no Isaac Newton, I just have this funny thing about doing good work.

Everything L did was half-assed. He’d learned English but not how to pronounce it correctly; his code was an illegible mess; he made the changes I described and wouldn’t communicate them to anyone … I wanted to knock his teeth down his throat.

And his voice. Jesus H. God. “Let me share my screen”