NEVER, EVER do a business in a third-world country where the law isn't imposed properly. NEVER, EVER do business with a third-world company before taking up-front payment. Know this: It's impossible for them to transfer money. There are few cases when they can, and it'll take it to their central bank authorization before the money makes your hands.

Basically, I think his story indicates to me that there were people who were given money? Or maybe they were promised, but never received it, don't know.

Point is: Be careful making a business in 3rd world country.

Edit: Do you have his phone number or somehow to contact him? Maybe I could help him or something.

BTW, the author's story would actually be much more powerful if he used a more neutral tone and avoided references to "bunch of fucking assholes".

Most non-western countries have a habit of under-quoting software development, blowing out schedules and producing poor quality code. It's simply a culture gap because of pressures to preform. Countries where there's no social welfare, government labour oversight or business ethics tend to resort to these tactics just to stay alive. I can't blame them as I'd do the same thing in their shoes. Private contracts are no different to business contracts, so everyone's in the same boat.

Unfortunately for the author, he (assumption) got caught in the double f*kup - an incompetent HR dealing with an bureaucratic Govt. ruleset regarding foreign currency, tax and payments.

This is NOT the exception. He did NOT get unlucky. This is the norm for Indian systems. If they work seamlessly first time around, it is a miracle. Let this be a warning to those with Great dreams of coming to India and making it big. The level of dysfunction, inefficiency, bureaucracy and corruption in India is just staggering.

My solution (which isn't too practical, perhaps not even legal, yet works)- travel to India once a year and collect your fee in cash, you'll also enjoy a great trip (Bangalore Butter Dosas and mysore pauks with south Indian filter coffee, culinary heaven) ;)

And this Government bashing, is only partially correct. It is not that hard to exchange money across borders like it has been described in SISO case. Seems more like an issue of the company, and its people at hand.

The cost of traveling and meeting people to collect money in cash is exactly what you wouldn't want to do when working on the SME tier. That doesn't scale, rather burns.

I've done and still do a lot of work in/for India -- mostly for the government and various quasi-governmental agencies. A couple of rules for having a successful outcome:

1.) Cash in advance: 10% to 25% the project fee, depending on my familiarity with the client. Expect to negotiate for 3-6 months before this is agreed to.

2.) Additional milestone-based payments, with a contract stipulating that no milestone will be delivered until the prior milestone payment has been received. Make sure that ALL project expenses are covered by these intermediate milestones.

3.) A final payment of 10%-25%, which is basically all margin. Expect to receive this 6-12 months late, and adjust your project costs accordingly.

This might sound unbelievably aggravating, but if you go in with these expectations then it's really not so bad. The bureaucracy just kind of washes over you eventually. (Oh, and tip #4: if you can at all afford to, pay somebody else to deal with the bureaucracy....). In truth, most Indians are tremendously honest people -- despite the impression that their bureaucracy gives -- and although I've endured screw-ups and delays that have been significantly worse that what the article describes, I've never not been paid. And in the end, India is a fantastic country with fantastic opportunities (and fantastic people and fantastic food), and it would be a shame to miss out on all that.

So I hope that this article (and others like it) doesn't scare anybody off India. Just calibrate your negotiations accordingly, and enjoy it!

Or just go do business with people living in countries where the insanity is more toned down, and enjoy it more.

Cash deposits into a bank above a certain amount need a PAN number.

It is widely used as an id document in India (where a passport or voter id document was once used).

I didn't know people without Indian citizenship could get PAN cards.

PS. One way of handling Indian bureaucracy is by hiring a middleman (say a tax consultant) who handles the necessary formalities, including bribes and leg work.

India is what India is.

There are plenty of guides and advice on what you should be doing to avoid this as an SME or sole contractor.

India is what India is: which can be traumatically scarring, especially when dealing with the bureaucrats - as the blog points out.

Also - the idea of hiring a middle man, to just fill paper and interface with the system, is probably unthinkable to anyone who deals with a working system.

------------------------------------------------

If anyone thinks that this is an opportunity, have at it. I hope you succeed.

More importantly I hope that you survive and are better for it.

Reminds me of Dev Dutt's TED Talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/devdutt_pattanaik.html

Pro-tip: Don't toy with people. Most times you will get away with it but sometimes you will get fucked.

Generalizations about country/etymology shouldn't qualify to be up-voted in HN, please.

I don't mind when people use bad words or flu as long as I can emphatically or technically understand why and the location allows it. In this sense I can feel and understand why Mr. Koch got upset.

I think he should've put the generalizations into Pandora's Box, because the internet is a public space that never forgets.

The victim's explanations are usually generalizations and overreactions, in rare cases I've seen people reacting accordingly. It's part of being gentle to react accordingly, we know it's hard to apply. You can be harsh when the situation requires it. That said, I'm sure there are better ways to "fight" for your right and the money. I agree that this looks like it's not worth the effort, but you will not know this for sure unless you try it. As long as all you loose is time, you can tell that you're enriched by another experience that will guide you in your next project into a better management.

(I'm not an Indian and my opinions aren't set in stone.)

One last word: Trust what your feeling tells you. If your customer replies after months you know you've a bad customer, even before the project starts.

What country? (and what does etymology have to do with the whole mess?) He said not to do business with a private company, ranted at lengths on the subject and clearly explained that the issue was solely HR/business and that his relations with the engineering side had been nothing but good?

What generalization are you talking about?

> The victim's explanations are usually generalizations and overreactions, in rare cases I've seen people reacting accordingly.

Considering PPK's history of not being a sanguine lad, the mere fact that they got him to react to such length, on a former business partner, is a huge red flag with warning sirens.

> You can be harsh when the situation requires it.

I'm guessing he thought the situation did require it.

> As long as all you loose is time, you can tell that you're enriched by another experience that will guide you in your next project into a better management.

You're joking right?

While we are ranting, here's one of mine - it does not involve international payments or any such "usual suspects" of bureaucratic morass.

Warning: very long rant TL;DR - my chances at working for (what was then) my dream employer foiled by incompetent HR exec and the companies unwillingness to be accessible on phone.

A few years back (I was already back in India), a friend of mine, working for Google Mountain View, submitted my resume to their internal HR system as a hiring lead. Initially Mountain View handled the process directly from the US, and I had 5 rounds of telephonic interviews. The interviews were intense, and amazingly fun. Each lasted between 1.5 to 2 hours - during one, my interviewer challenged me repeatedly into rearchitechtecting the entire Youtube stack. Another interviewer told me at the end, "I hope I get to have you as a collegue soon". A third one, when I thanked him at the end for taking the time out to thank me, told me - "No, the pleasure was entirely mine. Its rare for me to have enjoyed an interview so much". Needless to say, I thought I'd done really well.

After this, I guess my file was transferred to Google India (Bangalore). Instantly the entire "feel" of the process changed. While earlier all phone calls, emails etc were polite, well written, clear and quick, now things flipped. This google HR exec - responsible for my file, initiates her first contact with me not with a phone call, or email, but as a "xyz@google.com wants to be able to chat with you" request on gtalk. No introduction, no idea who she is. I generally refuse requests that I am not expecting, but here I guessed that the person was a google employee and thus this could possibly be related to the interviewing process and accepted the request. I also sent her an email asking her about this and to let her know that the place where I was working at that time blocked gtalk (for good reason) but I had a personal blackberry so it would be better to communicate over a phone call or email rather than over gtalk IM. This mail went unanswered.

A few days later, I return from work to see a message from the HR exec saying "are you there?" on my gtalk window from earlier in the day. I see she is no longer online. I again drop her an email restating preference for email/phone. No answer yet again. She has never given me a phone number I can call so there is nothing else I can do. Google-ing also does not give me a phone number I can call either.

About 10 days go by, suddenly I receive an email from her, this time simply stating, with no preamble:

"I am arranging for you to travel to Google Bangalore for face to face interview on $date. I am booking flights for you to travel...."

This is accompanied by departure times of flights from my place of residence to Bangalore and back on the same day. The trouble is, the flight time each was is 2 hours, and she is arranging a flight that departs at 4:30AM, reaching 6:30AM to Bangalore, me arriving at Goog Bangalore office @ 9AM (yes, Bangalore traffic is THAT bad) and then return flight at 8pm. TO catch the 4:30AM departure, means I'd need to be at the airport latest by 3:00-3:15AM, which means I'd need to leave home by 2AM. That implied not sleeping at all the entire night. Having done interviews before while not having slept the previous night, I did not want to do this and told her that I'd rather fly in the previous evening, spend the night at a hotel in Bangalore, and then attend the interviews the next day. I even find an itinerary from the same online travel site she had used that would suit me perfectly, and was quite a bit cheaper, easily covering the cost of an overnight stay in a cheap hotel. No replies for a whole week. She does leave me messages "r u thr?" on gtalk a couple times which of course I am unable to respond to.

Then she gets back saying to me saying they didn't provide hotel stays at all (I know for a fact this wasn't true then, and it isn't true now). I immidiately reply again insisting that I'd not do interviews without having slept the previous night. I expressed surprise that google did not arrange for a stay in such circumstances, but then proposed to arrange for my overnight stay at my own cost if she'd just take care of the flight bookings as per my previous recommendations. Yet again I fail to hear from her for a week, except for one "r u there?" message during the week on gtalk. Each such message I respond with "I can't access gtalk during the day, could you please call or email instead" - these continue to be ignored.

Then she sends in an email, no content, just a flight itinerary and a hotel stay voucher attached as pdfs in the email. She has, in her infinite wisdom, booked me on that same 4:30AM flight that I did not want to take, but the gem is this: instead of having me fly back the same day, after the interviews on the 8:00pm flight, she had booked me on a 10AM flight the next day, and she has booked me a hotel room for me to spend the night in, AFTER having done the interviews. Both of these are already paid for.

At this stage I am having serious second thoughts about working for Google India, and am tired of the whole thing. I just decide to go with it. So I tell her simply that her itinerary was alright with me - certainly a mistake now that I look back upon the whole thing, but at that time she had had me totally worn down with her failure to communicate. So she replies, tells me she will have a taxicab waiting to pick me up from the airport on my arrival and to bring me to google. she finally gives me "her" cell number. I reply back asking for the address I am supposed to arrive at and the contact number of the cab company cause pickups at the bangalore airport were really chaotic. She doesn't reply. I try calling her, she doesn't pick. I text her, she doesn't respond.

D-day arrives. I try to sleep on the plane as much as I can. I arrive at the airport, find the cabby and we swing out of the airport. The cabby asks me - "so where am I supposed to take you?". I told him I was interviewing and lacking any other information, to take me to the google "office". He says there were six "google offices" in Bangalore. I try calling the HR exec, phone goes unpicked. After about a dozen tries, I simply tell the driver to take me to the "biggest" one guessing that largest office would probably be the engineering location, while others being possibly sales or corporate. He takes me to this large building which possible holds 800-1000 employees, entirely occupied by google. I goto the reception, and tell them I was there to interview, tell them the name of the HR exec who I was in touch with. At her name, the two people at the reception share a "look". It takes them about 45 minutes to find out that I am supposed to be at another location, they again call me a taxi, and off I goto another location. Repeat. Now I am at the third location, its past noon. I finally get to meet this HR exec and I am so mentally tired and angry that I just barely manage to maintain my civility. She takes me to a meeting room and the wait for the first interviewer begins. He comes in, 45 minutes later, looks rushed, tells me he had been given the wrong floor and meeting room number and that "there was a whole mess". We start the interview, by the end of which even he notices that my eyes are swollen and red - he asks me and I give him a brief recap. He doesn't say anything in response. I can tell I haven't done well at the interview, and at that stage I am beyond caring. In any case, I can't imagine working for a company (and here I mean Google Bangalore, not Google as a whole) that has its head stuck so far up its a. The interviewer leaves, I have another interviewer come in, I do a bit better here, but I am basically only half awake by now. There is no talk of lunch.

to be continued...

After this, the HR exec comes in, hands me a google t-shirt, tells me there is a taxi waiting to take me to my hotel. I go out, find the taxi, ask him if he could take me to the airport instead, he says he can't as he is only allowed to take me to the hotel. I tell him to not bother, flag down an auto, rush to the airport, negotiate with the airline to let me fly the 8:00pm instead of the 10:00AM the next day, pay the are difference, and just return home.

I am thinking finally that the ordeal is over, but theres a twist. I summarize the whole thing for my friend @ Google MV, who says he will try and find out what happened, but turns out theres not much in file in their referral system.

Two weeks after this, the same HR lady send me a mail, yet again no preamble, nothing. "We want you to come in for a second day, I am booking tickets" and then the exact same content from her first email - same day return, 4:30AM flights etc, follow. I reply to her, telling her that I'd prefer to make my own bookings and inquiring if google would reimburse me for them (and any policy about such reimbursements, limits, etc). She doesn't reply. Ten days later, when she has still not responded, I request my friend @ Mountain VIew to see if he can find me another contact (and berating myself that I did not do this a lot earlier). He says he doesn't have another contact for me, but that he has conveyed my concerns to "some people". A day after his email telling me this, I get an email from the same HR person - this time responding to my last email about booking my own flight tickets, tersely telling me - "that email was for someone else. sorry. thanks for applying to google".

/end_rant.

What I have come to accept is, dealing with engineers is fine (as long as language doesn't become an issue), but others, in government, or even in most private organizations in India, are just not up to doing their jobs 99% of the time. Its not merely an issue of corruption, its just the culture does not provide for shaming people who are bad at their jobs, firing incompetents is considered evil, and its not even a solution as incompetence is everywhere. One recent report suggested that a full 80% of Indian graduates with a 4-year degree were so bad they were not employable at all in their chosen fields - not even with additional training.

That helps shed some light on why the developers from India who are good are so good, and the rest leave you wondering.

http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011-04-07/news... refers to a report from Nasscom (an Indian software industry lobby group).

http://www.nasscom.org/NASSCOM-PERSPECTIVE-2020-Outlines-Tra... is the best match I can find on their website.

Coupled with the mad rush for real estate here has led to spoiling a whole generation of people in convincing, regardless of whatever, no matter how inefficient, under performing they are. Or even if they never work. Merely joining the Software Industry will make them millionaires in no time.

During discussions with people I find people constantly cribbing, whining and complaining. How badly their expectations(misplaced expectations) have gone down the drain, How they haven't gotten lucky, and no special shine of destiny has made them millionaires. And most of them(who come from other branches of engineering like mechanical, Civil) would have actually been better off in their original disciplines. The constant comparisons are between themselves and other people who got lucky by traveling abroad and saved money through foreign exchange factors.

The society has a unbelievable perspective. They think if you are not a manager in 5 years of joining software industry you are useless. Programming and tech jobs are considered low profile jobs meant for ordinary people who don't want to do much in life. And managerial jobs are considered for the 'masters of the universe'. The big IT bellwethers are full of useless layers and layers of management out which nearly 80% is useless.

In fact college kids when they first come in to the industry and find that 'Manager within 5 years' no longer a feasible option get pretty disgusted and loose hope. Most of them run away to do their MBA. In hope of becoming a manager quickly.

Its like the human evolution path baby, teenager, adult, programmer, manager. Managers are considered ultimate stage in your career evolution. So it follows that most people don't want to do tech jobs, because they want to be managers. Another disease here is rapid ultra fast job hopping candidates.

Thankfully things are now changing.

The first day the HR lady gave me the address, actually there are two buildings separated by 15 minutes of walk, across the roads. She asked me to be there by 9:45 AM and so I did. The road was so dusty due to some construction work going, I don't if I had eaten some grams of dust while I was driving my bike. Nevertheless battling traffic for two hours I managed to reach their office. The moment I reached there I had no contact but her's and the security refused to let me in. She called me, after I trying to call her for 30 mins waiting in the sun and dust and now she tells me know that the office is a goddamn 15 mins walk across the road. I didn't want to fight the traffic again so I walked. But two hours of bike ride, the dust and the 15 mins of walk in summer had sapped the energy out of me.

I reached there and then a guy escorted me in. He was an engineer and he was good enough to ask me if I needed water and needed to use the restroom. I took the water. Then the first interview lasted for two hours straight, where he bought me in a laptop and asked me to code. And I wrote all the programs. Then for the next hour, there was no communication I didn't know if I had to stay or leave. I tried calling the HR lady and she didn't pick up the call. Then another engineer came in, so the interview went on for the whole day. And they were all fine people and the interviews went great. Looks like this was some special department with a different culture.

All engineers were pretty good and they even took me to the cafeteria and even paid for my lunch and snacks. After that there was dead air, no communication from them ever again. I tried emailing, calling her but no avail. Suddenly after two weeks she wrote me an email. Asking me to 'be there' at the office. Again no proper address. This time I went to the office where I was interviewed previously, only to be told that this time(again after trying to reach her for 30 minutes) it was other office. Again I walked to the other office for 15 minutes in the scorching sun taking in all the dust.

This time its probably the worst kind of people I ever faced. It rounds and rounds of interviews with people who had completely decided to humiliate me and send me out no matter what. This time no idea where I had to take lunch, no idea about restrooms, no water. The whole day was miserable. I had to run to the nearest hotel to relieve myself and eat something at the end of the day. Again after this no communication and she refused to pick up the call for three days.

Then again they asked me to come in for a third day. This time I was clever enough to take a bus, carry my own water and lunch. And careful enough to avoid myself to having need a restroom. This time it was more pathetic, none of the interviewers looked serious. One guy was continuously chatting with some one, another guy was answering emails on his Blackberry, another guy continuously reading something on his mobile and laughing. None of them were serious to listen to answers to their own questions they asked.

They asked me to come in for the fourth time 'I just plainly turned it down'. And didn't want to work with such people

But my other experiences have been good. I think some times its just purely Murphy's law and some people with horrible work culture.

I am not saying that being patient is a the right way to fix the bureaucracy, but being patient looks to me like the right way to navigate your way around.

BTW I am not judging the way the OP responded to his particular scenario.

Or just avoid situations involving bureaucracies instead of bending over for them.

I've had my fun with W8BEN forms, EID numbers, and US customers. I still don't understand why technicalities of the US tax system were suddenly my problem instead of the customers, but realistically you either deal with this or you don't do business.

Unfortunately, the US seems to get away with tax colonialism, whereby you automatically owe them money until proven innocent even though you never set foot there; and US citizens get taxed by the US even if they don't reside or work there. Sounds like India is even worse in that you can't get around their tax even after filling in the forms.

If I do business with non-EU customers in the future, it's going to have to pay at least mid 5-digits, and a sufficient premium above my EU rates to just pay for an expert to handle the bureaucracy and hassle for me. I'd recommend a similar policy to anyone. The anti-EU moaners have no idea how beneficial it is to small businesses doing something easily importable or exportable - it's actually slightly less hassle for me to do business with customers in the rest of the EU than in my own country because I never see the VAT (which isn't too bad to begin with).

No, but you can at least minimize the amount of bureaucracy you deal with.