‘Working With Indians Was a Nightmare’: Citi Employee Fired After 12 Years Over Alleged Racist Comment
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/working-indians-was-nightmare-citi-employee-fired-after-12-years-over-alleged-racist-comment-1738315
Posted by globalgazette
23 comments
But what if they can prove it’s true? I once had cancel something and had to call tech support, it took 2 hours and it didn’t work…
I don’t think her comments would ever come as a surprise to anyone.
If only she had said outsourcing things overseas can create its own problems she would have got the job
Today’s workplace meta is about smiling and nodding while professionally answering queries.
Your social media should read and look like a recruiter’s profile on LinkedIn. There’s no room for going off-script in this job market.
Yes, that guy has just made your life a nightmare by putting live some extremely broken code without telling anyone for a week. Smile and nod. Ask him about his day. Don’t directly criticize him to others, but make sure you distance yourself from his error, and if possible, stealthily highlight the error he has made to a senior member of staff as anonymously as you can. Don’t get yourself associated with negativity.
I hope she wins because she is not wrong. Working in IT for 40 years and saw the outsourcing shift first hand, working with Indians is a nightmare. There are people in India that do an excellent job but they are a minority. Most are below mediocre and cause a net loss in productivity. But hey, they are cheap.
It is a nightmare in some cases. Multiple companies I have worked with have just fired off their developers and contracted a company in India to take over. They have no prior knowledge of the codebase, are working with multiple clients, code a lot of times is really basic or rushed and they takes ages to get back.
My take was their company culture was one of a sweat shop where they were expected to be working on multiple projects at once, didn’t / couldn’t care about their work for the client and were just rushing to get things done.
I also know others who work in the banking system who have said similar, including multiple data breaches of customer’s data due to lack of process.
I have also worked with some really good teams in India who worked for a division of the company and that was fine. Same company culture whatever the office, obviously they were working odd hours to be on western time, but no complaints.
So it is much about the company doing the outsourcing as it is the workers in India.
The Indian people i worked with here in the uk at my last call centre job were generally great but when ever i was calling the internal helpdesk the Indian and South African staff were a fucking nightmare.
Depending on your issue you’d get through to Northern Ireland, SA or India and the folk in Ireland would try and help no matter but the people in South Africa and India have no fucks to give at all and would always try and avoid actually helping. Honestly outsourcing like that to foreign companies may be cheaper but it’s such a shitty experience actually phoning them it made me far less productive for a good couple hours just trying to get them to solve the issues I had.
They do not give a fuck and tbh if they knew there were little to no repercussions for that behaviour because the people calling are thousands of miles away I can see why they don’t care.
Is that it? Why wait 12 years for this lol
I’ve heard a lot similar stuff in work but never thought it was racist.. Not everyone has good English etc. so obviously can be more frustrating to work another timezone or explain something over and over
There is no argument that outsourcing is awful
But my god she could have gone about it in a better way
It sounds like they wanted her out and searched back for anything they can do her for.
they should cut her some slack. A lot of Indians have said working with (some) Indians is a nightmare.
The headline is highly misleading, it implies she was fired 12 years after the comment, she wasn’t. 12 years is her length of service. She was fired a month after the comment following an investigation, which is a reasonable amount of time.
Honestly I think she’s taken advice from the same person as Greg Wallace here. She’s claiming that various medical conditions made her make a racist comment, and her employer didn’t support her. it wasn’t even a slip of the tongue.
I remember when I finished with software dev. Our entire department was outsourced to Indians on H1B visas. They criminally underpaid them aswell.
Members of staff were encouraged to stay on temp contracts to help ease the new staff in (most refused and just left) for 6 months or so. All of the ones who did were pulling their hair out. The new staff barely understood English, could barely code, didn’t comment their code, so it was a mess debugging and just slap dashed bits from youtube tutorials anywhere and everywhere, so the programs never ran. When more senior members would come along and see how the code was going, offering help ect they’d just smile and pretend it was working fine and decline any help.
Well done Citi. Now she can go find a job in this awful market and explain to her future employer why she is out looking for a job.
If your company is hiring unskilled people because they’re cheap, it’s not the people’s fault. It’s the company’s fault. Hire better people and stop using it as an excuse for racism
It’s a general statement, it’s unfair to label over a billion people, however the root of what she was trying to say ‘there are a lot of poor quality workers that are used in outsourcing that are Indian’ is an entirely fair comment and not racist.
Unreasonable imo, the wording is poor but the core message is entirely reasonable.
I remember a remote Indian IT worker trying to remotely fix my computer at work. He wasn’t able to fix it, but tried to give himself a 5 start review whilst still in control of my computer! I had to disconnect him and report it lol
Anybody who’s been on the line with their ISP or cable tv support at least once can sympathize with her pain. People just don’t say anything because ‘its racist’.
People don’t realize that once you travel, others people a full racist in other countries.
I work for a website. We get approached by prospective Indian clients a lot and I can confirm – nightmare.
Lol show me a person that says working with Indians is a pleasure and I will show you a liar
Well… she ain’t wrong.
They just nod their head and say “yes sir I understand” to everything. Call for status reports every 3 days, and everything is always on schedule, then 2 months later it turns out they have no clue what you told them to do, and nothing’s been done.
I have worked with *multiple* indian tech teams, always the same experience. You need to force them to *explain the problem to you*, only then can you be sure they know what’s expected of them.
Contrast that to working with Polish developers who will just straight up go: “what you said did not make sense, you need to clarify this, this and that before we continue”… and it’s SO much easier to manage those projects 🙂
Not Racist in the slightest.
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