http://desicritics.org/ Superior South Asian bloggers on Culture, Media, Politics, Sport, Business, and Technology. en Copyright 2006 by the authors Sat, 1 Apr 2006 19:59:57 EST http://backend.userland.com/rss BC custom software http://desicritics.org/2006/04/01/001636.php#comment-6662 SC, if you would like to be a Desicritic, <a href="http://desicritics.org/2006/01/25/205846.php">see this page</A> and email me 6662@desicritics.org Sat, 1 Apr 2006 19:59:57 EST http://desicritics.org/2006/04/01/001636.php#comment-6660 I mostly agree with the author's opinions. Having worked in India and US for about 12 years in various roles, I experienced every single situation the author explained so effortlessly. Kudos for putting real life experiences in words. I jsut wanted to share some thoughts (incoherent probably so please be patient).. In India, most of us are Slave Drivers. In US and most European countries the philosophy is slightly different - Personal Life comes before professional life. Afterall, we work so we can earn decent money to live our personal lives. If works kills your personal life styles, it is not worth. Or is it? In India we burn the midnight candles for every darn thing out there. In India, your wife and your kids will put up with your late night work schedules and lack of vacations, lack of fun, lack of a life style. In the West, if u do the same, you can probably say good-bye to your marriage and say hello to child support, alimony and the ever daunting date games. So I don't find blame with people wanting balanced personal and professional lives. When it comes to middle management, the US managers seem to not do anything about ineptitude. I work with a number of Indians and Americans on a daily basis. I see a lack of desire to excel at what they do among both equally. But the American Managers do not want to kick those out. They don't even put them on a performance tracker. They simply keep giving them 3% raises year after year. They think their employees are working 40-60 hours a week, but when you see their status reports, one can not but wonder why it would have taken that much time to complete those tasks! People surf web at work. I am not against it, but if you only work 40 hours a week and at least 20% of your time is spent in surfing web and making calls to your family and friends..did you really put in 40 hours of work? I am not sure. Meetings is another thing that annoys here in US. I don't remember which program it was in India, but in the late 80's or early 90's a Sikh guy had a comedy show on TV and one of his episodes was about meetings at workplace. They simply call for a meeting for no reason! And there are at least 10 people in that meeting. They hash the same thing again and again and again. Every one attending the meeting has to recap the meeting. Geeez, give me a break! Recently we had a memo from the top management- not to send too much email but to actually walk to the person's office or cube and talk with them. Oh well..imagine 20 people walking to your cube every day simply because they had a stupid question. When can you get your work done? Where would you hide from these people? BTW, My projects are outsourced sofar to India and now to China due to the raising costs of oursourcing to India! 6660@desicritics.org Sat, 1 Apr 2006 19:54:32 EST