Who are the polite Indians?

49 points

16 years ago

There's a post over on Reddit about the large number of polite Indians who seem to pop up when interesting programs are posted asking for help (often, really basic or odd help).

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/e39xr/the_posting_of_an_open_source_payroll_app_with_a/

I've experienced exactly this on my own blog (see, for example, comments on this post: http://blog.jgc.org/2008/02/tonight-im-going-to-write-myself-aston.html)

Does anyone have insight into who these folks are? Are they students? This seems like an interesting cultural phenomenon. These folks are universally polite, but seem to have little clue. Often asking the most basic questions which seem to indicate that they have little knowledge. Given their low level of knowledge it's striking that they are often trying to download and understand quite complex programs. Many times they seem to not even be able to locate the download link for source code.

In almost all cases it appears that these folks are from India.

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