Re: Qualifications for an off shore writer?

[John Garison <john -at- garisons -dot- com>]

I second Peter's  comments.

When I was in India training our offshore team, I told them many times 
that the way we would determine their progress was by the number and 
quality of questions they asked. They still didn't ask very many.

I specifically recall one instance. I asked if they understood something 
in class and they all nodded. I asked again and got more nods. After 
class one of them came up to me and said "I have doubts." What that 
turned out to mean was that he doubted his understanding of something.

It is a difficult and time-consuming thing to build the trust where they 
feel free enough to ask questions as in their culture asking questions 
could be interpreted to mean that your explanation wasn't very good.

My 2¢,


John G



Peter Neilson said the following on 2/17/2009 3:22 PM:
> Culture can be a great difficulty when it is not anticipated. It's hard 
> to know what to anticipate, too. A TW candidate in India may have very 
> high grades in English, but be unable to warp code-focused comments from 
> a software team into good user-focused documentation, because all his 
> training has been in academic-style writing.
>
> You can find that you are spending all your time pushing on a string, 
> when your stellar writing candidate comes on board and starts turning 
> out stuff like this:
>
> "The user is requested to make an entry in the form provided for data 
> entry with respect to the amount of product it is desired to purchase."
>
> In certain Asian cultures it is impolite to say anything negative, and 
> if you ask the writer directly, "Will you have this finished by Friday?" 
> you might need to distinguish between this answer:
>
> "Certainly. I can assure you that it will be done by Friday," which 
> means yes, and this one:
>
> "Yes, I am thinking that by Friday it will be done," which means no.
>
> You might ask the candidate if he finds American culture too abrupt. I'd 
> be wary of any overly polite answer. I'd rather hear, "Certainly not! 
> I'm abrupt, too.
>   
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