Well… in my two decades of doing software and running large software projects I’ve met a lot of different people… so, here’s my (possibly biased, and by necessity over-generalized) list of what different nationals are good or bad for:

* Indians: speak English reasonably well, produce readable documentation. Debugging/troubleshooting skills are usually poor. The code tends to be very voluminous, repetitive and unimaginative (and full of bugs, too, due to repetitiveness). Very poor architectural skills. They are manager’s delight.

Resume: good for maintaining existing products, QA and tech writing; don’t let them do any original design/coding.

* Chinese: poor English, slow learners, slow coders. Code is typically of uneven quality, apparently Chinese do not like to admit that they don’t understand something, particularly if manager is asking them to do something non-trivial. Often very thourough and careful. Weak design/architecture skills. They are quiet, and appear obedient and unassuming; I’ve run into several situations when a Chinese backstabbed a colleague while making a pleasant face to him.

Resume: good for QA and non-critical coding tasks.

* Russians: moderate English skills, often technically brilliant. Generally hate writing any documentation and tend to have cowboyish coding style. They usually have excellent educational background, and exposure to computers now found only in museums, with resulting skills in very tight coding and finding elegant solutions to engineering problems (compared to the prevalent in the industry more predictable but wasteful brute-force approach). They do have huge egos, and need to be stroked the right way. A manager needs to teach them teamwork (particularly indoctrinate on the necessity of design documentation), but that is an effort well spent; Russians also tend to have “let’s reengineer that crap from scratch” attitude, their quest to build a perfect product has to be contained. Good design and excellent troubleshooting skills. There’s a reason why only USSR managed to compete with US in space and in military despite its non-existant “socialist” economy. They dislike any kind of politics, corporate politics included.

Resume: hire them if you need top-notch all-purpose code geeks, particularly at the initial project stages, and for critical, assembly-language, or non-trivial parts. Hire a strong manager, which is not fazed by a bunch of geeks considering him a moron, too. Be prepared for shouting matches in the engineering department.

* Israeli: pretty much the same as Russians, which is not surprising, considering that many “Russians” in US are actually Jewish, and many Israelis are former Soviets. Israeli corporate culture have one additional annoying feature – they are very insensitive, and it is common to hear something like “you won’t understand it anyway” from them.

* Mid-Easterners: poor English, poor education, paternalistic clannish culture. My experiences were very negative; your mileage may vary.

* Western Europeans and Australians: pleasant people to have around, those who went to US are here to work and to make money. They usually have excellent English and communication skills. They are less technically-inclined than Russians, and make good managers and technical writers (but do not let French to introduce their management style!). Their education, coding, design and debugging skills are on par with Americans. They tend to avoid overtime, and generally do not consider work to be the most important part of their lives; that means they’re less prone to burnout, but do not rely on them if you’re in “mission impossible” situation.

* Eastern Europeans: in between Russians and Western Europeans. That says all 🙂

* Latino Americans: for some reason, they are relatively rare in high-tech, so I do not have any representative sample. So far, my expereiences were positive, but not exceptional in any way.