Honestly the constant jump cut style of editing feels so unnatural to me... I'd rather watch someone takes pauses and not be taken out of the moment.... I'm sure this has applications particularly in advertising/marketing but it's not without outs issues.
Most people can read 5-10x faster than they can speak. Videos are very difficult to skim compared to text. If your video is trying to inform people, and there is no emotional content that's lost by cutting, then you're playing a losing game time-wise against just publishing text. People get bored pretty quickly, so people use jump cutting on YouTube to increase information bandwidth from the default that's frankly unacceptably slow to many viewers. None of it actually ends up fast enough for me, it is rare that I will suffer through a YouTube video that I could read about instead. In order to beat reading, IMO you need to use the visual bandwidth too, like 3Blue1Brown does. A talking head YouTube video is the worst of all worlds, but that's where people's audiences are, so they're just trying to make it bearable.
Cutting also removes ums and ahs. Newsreaders take ages to get good at this at speed, so giving people these tools makes video more accessible as a publishing medium.
Your criticism is fair. However "obedient" isn't always what an engineering organization needs. Many times, I wish that our Indian contract workers, would speak out when they see something wrong, about process, quality, or business requests. I'm not sure if it's a cultural thing or what, but it seems they are more hesitant to speak out. It has been my anecdotal observation that our US-born hires are way quicker to say something to management if they feel something is wrong.
Absolutely. There's some cultural aspect that doesn't always work well in an engineering environment. Almost 3 years ago I had to hire 4 new team members, and two had to be from TCS. At some point in the process, I was happy to just find someone who was able to say "I don't know" to a question. Several tried to bullshit their way through by answering a completely different question than what I asked.
Eventually I found two. One of them was a really solid hire. Backbone of the team. Still not as vocal as any of the non-TCS devs (one of whom was also Indian, but very vocal about his opinion), but he got stuff done and did it well.
I've seen when an Indian team (doesn't matter though, could be from any other country) was hired with one reason - to shift the blame as the project was going to shits. Also if you are on a sponsored visa, you gonna stay quiet no matter what's happening - your interest is somewhat to stay afloat, not to seek truth or revenge.
Read "Speaking of India" by Storti. It really helped me understand a lot of the strangeness I also observed working with India-born coworkers and contractors.
> Apparently the obvious and easy solution here is to only get US-born hires. So why don't you?
This seems to be an unnecessarily aggressive take on it.
If I (an American) were working for an Indian company, I would plan to learn and understand what the culture is like in Indian companies, and then do my best to conform to that. If I didn't believe I'd feel comfortable in that environment, then I wouldn't take the job. I would expect an Indian working at an American company to do the same.
I get that it can be difficult, and that some of these cultural things aren't just company culture, but are deeply ingrained, real cultural differences between people of different backgrounds.
Having said all that, I do think a US manager who hires reports from India (or from any other country with a different culture than the US) should be aware of what cultural differences exist, and try to meet their employees in the middle as much as they can.
I do agree with the grandparent, though, that I don't want to work with people who are "obedient", at least in the way I'm guessing the great-grandparent meant (perhaps I'm inferring the meaning incorrectly, though). I agree that I want people who won't just do what management says, and will instead apply critical thinking to the work they get assigned, and question things that don't make sense.
I remember reading about a team (I think in Japan) which had a "brash foreigner." If someone noticed something, they'd mention it to the foreigner, who would bring it up with higher ups. Everybody won. Problems got fixed, the foreigner was safe because they "didn't know better," and their coworkers felt safe.
FYI, if you want that job and don't happen to be in Japan, this is exactly what consultants are hired for in many cases: To be a blunt voice of reason in an environment which isn't able to listen to itself.
I've many times been hired in companies to say things employees didn't have the political clout to say out loud. If anything goes wrong, or someone isn't happy, I'm the fall guy.
