When I've dealt with teams in India (rather than Indian folk in western nations) I've had problems with this. It's not niceness, it's being non-confrontational. To excess. When you ask if they understand (so you could offer help or training on a technical question, for example) it's "yes, certainly". And then a week later you get the email saying no progress has been made because they don't understand something.
It's irritating.
Although, when the collapse finally comes, and you've just accused someone of lying about understanding and they finally come clean and it walks all the way back to a guy they paid in school to help with their CS classes, then you can start to make progress. I was not in the office but the stories I heard of people being scared of being fired because they didn't "know" something were rampant. NetApp really tried to amplify the message that saying you knew when you didn't was a more egregious affront than saying you didn't know.
>>getting around people unwilling to confront their managers
Almost every time I've tried to do this, I've been screwed. The only option after that even I have is to go work under a different manager. You really have to play nice, actually that's putting in mildly. You have to show super sycophancy towards your manager, if you want anything that looks like a raise, promotion or a foreign travel.
Often you are just screwed if you don't belong to your manager's state, or don't speak his mother tongue.
I've been pulled up and scolded inside meeting rooms even for mild and faint feedback, let alone direct confrontation. Some times in the line of 'You don't want me as your enemy'.
That's one big reason why Indian IT is such deep irrecoverable mess. Good people get nothing, have no scope for growth. If you are good its assumed you are going to sacrifice your life working for everybody. To get anything you have to be a super sycophant. Or belong to your manager's state or speak his/her mother tongue.
So the only option for good people here is:
1. Immigrate to a western country. Get treated like crap. If you are luck you might get citizenship in a decade or two. Else get ready to go through putting up with crap for years.
2. Work in smaller teams of your mindset and do a start up.
I can suggest another option though, start building a portfolio and have open source contribution that put you out of the cheap crowd.I am sure there are enough jobs at good hourly rates for people who can deliver quality. Even our hacker news "seeking freelancer" thread s offer pretty amazing set of opportunities.
This is a typical South India problem. Not to say that North would be a fair game for south indians but it is still not that harsh from what I have seen.
People do try to get in a comfortable group based on common factors and Language in India is a great factor.
In short, you have to deal with offshore teams in a way that is different from the way you'd deal with someone in your office. You either have to manage them in a way that is effective for them - but probably feels foreign to you - or you need to go back to local teams (or at least teams from cultures closer to your own).
Essentially, if you were a pilot, and your indian dev-lead was your co-pilot, you'd both probably crash a plane because he would be too polite to tell you that you forgot to put the wheels down. His way of saying this would be something like 'we found that more research into the wheels problem might be a useful idea', rather than 'hey captain, you idiot, the wheels aren't down!'.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede's_cultural_dimensions_...
You're most likely spot on about the cultural reasons for the behaviour, I just wanted to point out that it doesn't come across to me as nice. It comes across as passive and obstructive.
And I'm English, we're pretty good at passive...
Actually, I just want to point out if you've had any training on how to run a training session, you ought to know that asking "do you understand?" is pointless in every culture. From an asian culture it can even come across as threatening and dominating. Its like asking "do you want to keep your job?". Who is going to stand up and say "actually, no I don't" to that? Work in a western company is often the very first time in peoples lives where voluntarily admitting you don't know something doesn't carry significant penalties.
I guess my point is that unless you're well versed in the culture, it's easy to trip over these things.
