Same deal. My personal favourite is always the difference between the actual technical interview passer, and individual doing the work. I know of many companies that blanket ban India, Ukraine, and Belarus because of this.
I just interviewed a guy from Moldova who was very good on his phone interview and so absolutely terrible in his in-person interview (flat out refusal to do the simplest whiteboard coding question imaginable) that I'm convinced they were two different people.
What is it about these countries that makes people that way? There are plenty of other poor countries where this doesn't happen as much. What about India, Ukraine, and Belarus makes people think it is okay to be dishonest?
It's a cultural thing. These countries have a very different set of ethics that's really hard for westerners to get their head around. Basically, the one who got scammed was stupid for allowing it to happen and the scammer is smart for pulling one over on them.
It leads to an extremely inefficient and low trust business environment. In many cases the idea of a win-win is almost non-existent because if the other side wins too then it means you didn't squeeze them hard enough in negotiations.
Most of South America operates like this also, in fact I find Ukraine to be far more oriented towards western ethical ideals than India or any country I've done business with in South America. Much of Eastern Asia also operates on this level.
My guess is a history of scarcity of resources. When there literally isn't enough to go around, you'll cut in line, lie, cheat, defraud to get ahead.
I remember someone from Brazil once telling me that if you get swindled, society looks at you as a sucker who clearly deserved it, not at the swindler as a bad person.
Good point. Another problem is that there is a saying "The example comes from the top" which in my opinion applies here. In many countries (also ones you listed) the government is corrupt and can't be trusted by the people, so they do the same.
This isn't quite right, since there are many poor or poorer countries where this isn't the case. However it does seem more common in poor developing countries so I don't doubt it's a contributing factor.
Demand:
The vast majority of customers they get are seeking to get a lower price. Many of the customers are in non-technical companies, doing non-technical things, and they are told to acquire a software service company to develop something. They approach it as a bidding process and they go for the lowest bidder since they can't really assess anything else. Larger companies usually select a few long-term vendors and they work with them exclusively. Therein starts the problem.
Supply:
Likewise, many of those software services companies will actually go out and try to compete on price. When they do that, they know that most of the customers they sell to have very little technical knowledge (think of banks, retailers, insurance companies, freight companies, telcos, etc.). When they're one of the few (or exclusive) vendors that the work with the client, they're creating a bulk deal for x amount of resources (i.e. a number of people). So they have to provide those people. However, the supply of skilled developers is low, since there are many great product companies within those countries (India, Ukraine, and Belarus) who offer great jobs to the experienced developers. So the fastest and cheapest way to meet the quota is with "freshers" (as they appear to be called in India). So now they're billing for people who have no experience at a very low rate in order to be competitive, they're also paying those developers pennies, and they're patching it up by having the few seniors within the company act as leads. And those seniors are split between 2-3 projects, and on each one of those projects, they have 4-5 juniors below them. This gives them a good "blended rate," but they still can't make a profit higher than 20%. The rate at which they lose talent is fast because the product companies are always stealing their good developers.
Overall, when I ask them why don't they just sell the senior developers at a higher margin and have fewer JR devs, the answer is that they'd never get a project because the competition is undercutting them on the price.
(speculation) Is it about countries that changed to poor maybe? I've seen echos of this in post-war Poland as well, but the issue seemed to largely go away with time. Before, being clever/cheating was a common motif in movies (trading diluted alcohol, illegal currency exchanges, tradesmen avoiding doing any actual work, etc.) It seems to be gone now that economy is in a much better state.
