generalization is not always correct, and isn't intended to be. that i have to explain this makes me sad.
i have worked with 120 or more indian programmers over the course of many jobs and several years, in bangalore, kochi, and chennai. i have met a few that were technically solid, self-directed, and would give me hell for my code, or the code of another american on my team. i'd have been happy to hire these folks if they'd walked off the street into my office at the market rates. i've invited a few to come visit when they get to the states. some i'd even call friends. by and large, it was through these individuals explaining the mindset of their coworkers that i came to understand it. i didn't drop in, make a bunch of judgements and bail. i asked the people who were driven why the other people on their team weren't. they made the generalizations, i just observed their correctness.
in observation, those driven and enterprising developers are the exception, and the exception by a wide margin. i can't speak to Absolute Truth here, and maybe there's a secret society of programming ninjas in india that few people have ever heard of or interacted with, but i have to lean on my own observations, my conversations with indian developers over half a decade, and the observations of a wide swath of software development community.
In all matters dealing with a foreign culture, remember the Heisenberg principle - by your very act of being in a situation, you are subtly altering it. Americans in technology have a lot more experience with foreigners arriving in America than each kind of foreigner living in their own land has with any American. That's just the way the numbers work.
Asians, in particular, are good at acting deferentially, particularly in front of foreigners. The most extreme case are the Japanese - they are the easiest to underestimate race in the world (and the West did underestimate them). As you move west from Japan, you can progressively reduce the deference factor, crank up the self-confidence factor, until you arrive in California, perhaps the most self-confident place in the world. That deference - self-confidence dial works to a very good first approximation :)
i have worked with 120 or more indian programmers over the course of many jobs and several years, in bangalore, kochi, and chennai. i have met a few that were technically solid, self-directed, and would give me hell for my code, or the code of another american on my team. i'd have been happy to hire these folks if they'd walked off the street into my office at the market rates. i've invited a few to come visit when they get to the states. some i'd even call friends. by and large, it was through these individuals explaining the mindset of their coworkers that i came to understand it. i didn't drop in, make a bunch of judgements and bail. i asked the people who were driven why the other people on their team weren't. they made the generalizations, i just observed their correctness.
in observation, those driven and enterprising developers are the exception, and the exception by a wide margin. i can't speak to Absolute Truth here, and maybe there's a secret society of programming ninjas in india that few people have ever heard of or interacted with, but i have to lean on my own observations, my conversations with indian developers over half a decade, and the observations of a wide swath of software development community.