When you get to know the university system well and the professors doing research, ask them about Chinese and Indian students entering Masters and Ph.D. programs. It's not bias or racism. Their supervisors find a common frustration in how poorly the students are prepared to think independently.

From: http://biz.yahoo.com/indie/080328/1152_id.html?…

“Under Nortel's stock ownership guidelines, Zafirovski must own 5X his annual base salary of approximately $1.2M in stock within five years of being named to his post, and Pearce must own $1.6M in shares within five years of being named to his position. Share units are counted towards Pearce's holdings.

Due to the significant decline in Nortel's stock price, Zafirovski is only about 40% of the way towards reaching the required ownership level, while Pearce is about 44% of the way there. This is despite the fact that Zafirovski has purchased more than $1.5M in stock on the open market and that he was awarded shares of restricted stock that had a value of more than $7M when issued in 2005. Nortel insiders were prohibited from conducting transactions for seven months in 2005 and four months in 2006 due to delinquent filings and other issues, narrowing the window when insiders could buy stock. Additionally, the vesting of Zafirovski's restricted stock award in late 2006 forced him to sell some shares to deal with the tax liability, locking him up for a further six months due to short-swing rules.”

I have two friends that are professors at their universities and it is a common complaint at how poorly prepared Chinese engineering students are for graduate research. These students don't question. Everything is procedural. And the point of the degree is to get a job. Drones. It's a quiet but well understood fact in the community. People are just averse to talk about it outside of the community. You can see why here.

But these students did fit in well at Nortel. I can't argue about that.

You think people from China and India are drones because of the way they interact with you. Just remember this, they come from a different culture and they interact with you in your language…but their dogs understand a lot more of their language than you do. Think about that. You are less able to interact with them in their language than their dogs are. And I think that's likely a good representation of how you're regarded.

It's been my experience, which is likely a lot more than yours, that the strength of offshore labs is a reflection of who manages the interface. Person-for-person, the offshore developer is usually more educated and skilled than the local developer but their performance suffers because of management and communication issues that are solvable.

China literally owns (and pwns) North America now. Who do you think the US and Canada are borrowing all their money from?

The Russians and the Europeans may appear to be more proactive to you because they aren't trying to treat you like a customer and they don't feel the need to respect your leadership position.

So, you ex-nortel^2 and those who share your attitude are the problem. Get your heads out of your xenophobic butts and recognize that the world isn't flat and if you want something to work you need to help *make* it work, not sit on the sidelines and whine. You need to make the effort to understand how to effectively interact with other cultures or the world will leave you behind.