There's a big caveat here: Middle-eastern engineers will have significant problems working with more liberal/woke companies. They have a strong tendency to be homophobic/transphobic/misogynist.
Last year I fired an off-shored team of 10 otherwise excellent Egyptian engineers because their homophobic statements on LinkedIn and in Slack made people in the company uncomfortable.
If your company's engineers lean more right-wing/republican, then middle-eastern engineers are probably a great untapped resource. If your company is more of a Silicon Valley company, they are a liability which can get you sued.
I think your one(?) experience with Middle-eastern engineers has unfortunately given you a bad impression, but I'm not sure that necessitates making such a dogmatic and blanket "caveat".
Following the logic in your own statement equating Republicans to Middle-eastern homophobes, mid-west engineers will(!) have significant problems working with more liberal/woke companies. They have a strong(!) tendency to be homophobic/transphobic/misogynist. They are a liability which can get you sued.
Does that sound like a correct, or even fair, assessment to you?
I'm a Republican software engineer from Kansas and it doesn't to me.
Beyond that, from my time living in Beirut and traveling the Middle-east I can assure you there are many, many liberal (in both the Western and US sense) and metropolitan software engineers who would have no "problems working with more liberal/woke" companies".
> I think your one(?) experience with Middle-eastern engineers has unfortunately given you a bad impression, but I'm not sure that necessitates making such a dogmatic and blanket "caveat".
I've directly managed 6 teams in Istanbul / Beirut / Cairo, another 4 in Belarus / Kiev, and one somewhere in Russia (I forget, it's been 20 years). Those in Belarus were by far the best, probably because they aren't mobile (it's very difficult to emigrate from Belarus into Europe or the USA). They work hard, are paid well and retention is great.
The worst were in Cairo, by far. I enjoy working with Istanbul engineers, but I steer away from Ankara / Konya teams because they tend to be conservative and just aren't great for startup environments, they're more well suited to work for the financial industry or the large retail holdings.
Beirut isn't a fair comparison, because it's a fairly liberal / western city (heck, they even do their day to day transactions in dollars instead of lira). Most of the engineers I've recruited there were also female.
And yes, my preference is to avoid mid-western / southern engineers. I don't hire people I wouldn't want to socialize with after work. I always vet hires and contractors on LinkedIn / Facebook. If I see pro-trump / anti-lgbt / proudly / qanon activity, their resumes are round-filed. If the firm's owners donated to trump, those firms are blacklisted.
I wouldn't hire you into the companies where I tend to work. If I worked in something more soulless like advertising / finance / government where I just wouldn't care about my job or employer, I would hire you because you'd fit in.
Call it discriminatory hiring, I don't care, my projects succeed, my teams are successful, and my engineers are loyal, some have followed me around for 25 years.
Last year I fired an off-shored team of 10 otherwise excellent Egyptian engineers because their homophobic statements on LinkedIn and in Slack made people in the company uncomfortable.
If your company's engineers lean more right-wing/republican, then middle-eastern engineers are probably a great untapped resource. If your company is more of a Silicon Valley company, they are a liability which can get you sued.