Indiavsthe United States
インドとアメリカINUS
Seen from India: each line below describes the United States relative to India.
Culture Map: eight scales
Erin Meyer's eight scales, sorted by how far apart India and the United States sit, largest gap first.
Filled dot: India, where you are looking fromHollow ring: the United States
Where you will notice the difference5 scales
Trusting
The United States builds trust through reliable work more than India (5 steps)
India +2, the United States −3, on a line from −3 (Task-based) to +3 (Relationship-based).
Communicating
The United States spells things out more explicitly than India (4 steps)
India +1, the United States −3, on a line from −3 (Low-context) to +3 (High-context).
Scheduling
The United States sticks to fixed plans and deadlines more than India (3 steps)
India +2, the United States −1, on a line from −3 (Linear time) to +3 (Flexible time).
Evaluating
The United States gives negative feedback more directly than India (1 step)
India +1, the United States 0, on a line from −3 (Direct negative feedback) to +3 (Indirect negative feedback).
Disagreeing
The United States is more willing to disagree openly than India (1 step)
India +1, the United States 0, on a line from −3 (Confrontational) to +3 (Avoids confrontation).
Where you are close1 scale
Deciding
India and the United States sit on the same step
India +1, the United States +1, on a line from −3 (Consensual) to +3 (Top-down).
Not placed2 scales
These scales are left unmarked: either Meyer leaves a country off the scale or no source places it, and drawing it anyway would be guessing.
- Persuading, LeadingNo source places India on these scales
Hofstede: six dimensions
Scores from 0 to 100, sorted by the gap between India and the United States. They describe national averages, not either country's character.
Indulgence
The United States scores 42 points higher than India (68 against 26)
India 26, the United States 68, on a line from 0 (Restrained) to 100 (Indulgent).
Power distance
The United States scores 37 points lower than India (40 against 77)
India 77, the United States 40, on a line from 0 (Low power distance) to 100 (High power distance).
Individualism
The United States scores 36 points higher than India (60 against 24)
India 24, the United States 60, on a line from 0 (Collectivist) to 100 (Individualist).
Motivation towards achievement and success
The United States scores 6 points higher than India (62 against 56)
India 56, the United States 62, on a line from 0 (Consensus-oriented) to 100 (Decisive).
Uncertainty avoidance
The United States scores 6 points higher than India (46 against 40)
India 40, the United States 46, on a line from 0 (Tolerant of ambiguity) to 100 (Avoids ambiguity).
Long-term orientation
The United States scores 1 point lower than India (50 against 51)
India 51, the United States 50, on a line from 0 (Short-term) to 100 (Long-term).
What the sources say, theme by theme
Entries for India and the United States, side by side on wide screens. Each keeps its own confidence label and citations.
Design & quality
India4 claims
TCS announced in 2011 that it had been assessed at CMMI Level 5 enterprise-wide for both CMMI-DEV and CMMI-SVC, and says it was the first company in the world to reach enterprise-wide Level 5 for SVC.
Well attested1 source2011Datedin-design-1
Hiring-industry articles contrast services firms ("specs are king, process-heavy, ticket-driven") with product companies ("design docs, code review, CI/CD"). Neither is backed by research.
Thin2 sourcesin-design-2
The idea that jugaad (improvised fixes under constraints) is a virtue in software development draws criticism from Indian engineers themselves, on Hacker News and elsewhere. Others defend it as frugal engineering, such as designing apps that work on 2G connections.
Thin3 sourcesin-design-3
Zerodha is India's largest stockbroker, yet its tech team of 33–35 people self-hosts the entire stack. CTO Kailash Nadh says it is a misconception that team size must grow in proportion to the number of users.
Attested2 sources2024in-design-4
United States3 claims
At Google, engineers write a relatively informal design doc before writing code. According to Malte Ubl (2020), the point is not an exhaustive specification but a record of the trade-offs and alternatives considered.
Thin1 source2020us-design-1
Ubl says a design doc should be as long as necessary and as short as possible, and distinguishes it from a heavyweight waterfall-style specification.
Thin1 source2015Datedus-design-2
Meyer places the United States on the applications-first side of the Persuading scale. A book summary describes this as starting from conclusions and examples and favoring the practical how over the theoretical why.
Thin1 sourceus-design-3
Failure & risk
India3 claims
According to Meyer's 2017 HBR article, in top-down decision-making cultures, India among them, decisions are made quickly but can change as new input or arguments arise. A decision is treated as a placeholder that can be adjusted later, not a firm commitment.
Attested1 source2017in-failure-1
On Meyer's Scheduling scale, India is on the flexible-time side, described as running several things in parallel, accepting interruptions and prioritizing adaptation.
Attested1 sourcein-failure-2
The claim that offshore teams do not escalate bad news rests on anecdotes on Hacker News. Other HN commenters counter that US-side managers often have not built a structure that invites pushback.
Thin2 sources2024in-failure-3
United States2 claims
The Google SRE Book (2016) codifies the blameless postmortem. It identifies contributing causes without blaming individuals or teams and assumes that everyone involved acted with good intentions.
Well attested1 source2016us-failure-1
At F8 in 2014, Zuckerberg changed Facebook's motto from "Move fast and break things" to "Move fast with stable infra." His reason was that at Facebook's scale, the time spent fixing breakage outweighed the gain in speed.
Attested1 source2014Datedus-failure-2
Feedback & code review
India2 claims
An article summarizing Meyer's eight scales places India toward the high-context end and on the side that avoids confrontation.
Attested1 sourcein-feedback-1
Rastogi et al. (ESEM 2018), analyzing about 70,000 GitHub pull requests, found that in 16 of 17 countries, pull requests were more likely to be accepted when the submitter and reviewer were from the same country. India was the exception: acceptance fell by 7.4% when the maintainer was also from India.
Attested1 source2019in-feedback-2
United States3 claims
According to Meyer, Americans are often taught to wrap negative messages in positive ones (the feedback sandwich). For this reason she places the United States in the middle of the scale for delivering negative feedback.
Attested1 source2014Datedus-feedback-1
A blog explainer on Meyer's evaluating scale notes a common mismatch: Dutch and German colleagues take American praise at face value, while Americans find Dutch and German criticism too harsh.
Thin1 source2016us-feedback-2
A study of more than 70,000 GitHub pull requests from 17 countries (Rastogi et al., 2018) found that pull requests were more likely to be accepted when the reviewer and the submitter were in the same country.
Well attested1 source2018us-feedback-3
Hierarchy & decisions
India3 claims
Meyer's 2017 HBR article places India in the top-down, hierarchical quadrant, together with Brazil, China, France, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia and Saudi Arabia.
Attested1 source2017in-hierarchy-1
India scores 77 on Hofstede's power distance (PDI), its highest of the six dimensions. The Culture Factor describes this as an appreciation of hierarchy and top-down structure.
Attested1 source2026in-hierarchy-2
A hiring-industry article contrasts services firms, which run on approval chains and hierarchy, with product startups, where engineers can talk to founders directly and decisions are fast.
Thin1 sourcein-hierarchy-3
United States2 claims
Meyer classifies the United States as egalitarian but top-down (HBR, 2017). People use first names and are encouraged to speak up, but the boss decides quickly, and the decision can be revisited when new arguments appear.
Attested1 source2017us-hierarchy-1
In the same article, Meyer reports that to Japanese managers an American boss can look flat on the surface yet highly autocratic in how decisions are made.
Attested1 source2017us-hierarchy-2
Communication & docs
India2 claims
In the EF EPI 2024, India ranked 69th of 116 countries and regions. English is widely used as a working language, but India's rank on this test is mid-table.
Attested1 source2024in-communication-1
Explainers of Meyer's Trusting scale place India on the relationship-based side, where trust built through personal relationships is needed before work begins.
Thin1 sourcein-communication-2
United States4 claims
Meyer places the United States at the most low-context end of the Communicating scale. A book summary describes a preference for saying things explicitly and for repeating and summarizing key points.
Thin1 sourceus-communication-1
According to Bezos's 2017 shareholder letter, Amazon does not use PowerPoint. Meetings start with everyone silently reading a six-page narrative memo, and memos carry no author's name because they come from the whole team.
Well attested1 source2018us-communication-2
According to CNBC (2018), the practice began with a 2004 email from Bezos. He explained that a good four-page memo is harder to write than a 20-page slide deck because the narrative structure forces better thinking.
Attested1 source2018us-communication-3
According to a blog post by Slab, Stripe also rarely uses slides. Meetings begin with silent reading of a memo, followed by comments on the document.
Thin1 sourceus-communication-4
Work & careers
India5 claims
NASSCOM estimated India's tech industry revenue for FY2025 at about $282.6 billion, with 5.8 million employees (a net addition of 126,000). A 2026 revision raised these to $297 billion and 5.82 million.
Attested2 sources2026in-work-1
According to NASSCOM and Zinnov, India had more than 1,700 global capability centers (GCCs) of foreign companies employing more than 1.9 million people as of FY2024. GCCs are also spreading to tier-2 cities.
Attested2 sources2024in-work-2
Attrition at the large IT services firms swings with the business cycle. In Q2 FY23 it was 27.1% at Infosys, 23% at Wipro and 21.5% at TCS; by Q4 FY24 it had fallen to 12.5% at TCS and 12.6% at Infosys.
Attested2 sources2024in-work-3
According to USCIS, 72.3% of H-1B petitions approved in FY2023 were for people born in India; 11.7% were for people born in China.
Well attested2 sources2025in-work-4
In 2023, Infosys founder Narayana Murthy said young Indians should work 70 hours a week. The remark drew strong backlash on social media but support from some business leaders, and public opinion split.
Attested2 sources2023in-work-5
United States5 claims
According to the BLS, median employee tenure in January 2024 was 3.9 years overall, the lowest since January 2002. In the private sector it was 3.5 years.
Well attested1 source2024us-work-1
- BLS: Employee Tenure in 2024 (2024)
At-will employment is the default in every state except Montana. Unless the reason is illegal, either the employer or the employee can end the employment relationship at any time.
Well attested1 sourceus-work-2
According to layoffs.fyi figures cited by TechCrunch, tech layoffs in 2024 exceeded 150,000 people at 549 companies. The peak was 2023, with about 260,000.
Attested1 source2024us-work-3
In the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025, 45% of US respondents work fully remote, the highest share among the top responding countries. Median salaries were $200k for engineering managers, $175k for back-end developers, and $138k for full-stack developers.
Well attested1 source2025us-work-4
In Staff Engineer (2021), Will Larson sorts Staff+ individual-contributor roles, which do not require becoming a manager, into four archetypes: Tech Lead, Architect, Solver, and Right Hand.
Attested1 source2021us-work-5
- Will Larson: Staff Engineer (2021)
Open source & community
India4 claims
According to GitHub Octoverse 2025, India has 21.9 million developers, second only to the US (up from 4.5 million in 2020). More than 5 million joined in 2025 alone.
Well attested1 source2025in-oss-1
- GitHub Octoverse 2025 (2025)
The same Octoverse 2025 report says India has already overtaken the US to have the world's largest base of public and open source contributors, and projects 57.5 million developers in India by 2030.
Well attested1 source2025in-oss-2
- GitHub Octoverse 2025 (2025)
Zerodha launched FLOSS/fund in October 2024 to give $1 million a year to open source projects worldwide. In 2025 it paid out a total of $1 million to projects including Blender, FFmpeg and OpenSSL.
Attested2 sources2025in-oss-3
Zerodha CTO Kailash Nadh says India uses FOSS heavily but its contributions are negligible, and has proposed a government-backed sovereign FOSS fund.
Attested1 sourcein-oss-4
United States2 claims
According to Octoverse 2025, the number of US developers on GitHub grew from 10.2 million in 2020 to 28 million in 2025, the most of any country. The US ranks second to India in open source contributors and first in total contributions.
Well attested1 source2025us-oss-1
- GitHub Octoverse 2025 (2025)
The same Octoverse 2025 report says the US, UK, and Canada more than doubled their developer counts from 2020 to 2025, while India and Brazil more than quadrupled. Its 2030 projection puts India ahead of the United States.
Well attested1 source2025us-oss-2
- GitHub Octoverse 2025 (2025)