Please don't post in this inflammatory style on HN. You've set off a whole flamewar – nearly 100 comments so far – with many of the comments debating the definition of racism. This is the last thing we need here.
The overall topic is important, which is why it needs to be discussed with comments that are thoughtful and substantive, which the guidelines clearly ask us to do:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
I've noticed this as well, but see it mostly as "A players hire other A players, B players hire C players". The top tier of Indian execs/management that I've met will hire diverse teams, just like the top tier of every other ethnicity will as well. There's simply not enough people at the top to put a racial/ethnic/caste filter on it. But then once you get down to the second tier, people will happily hire people like themselves, because at that level you're hiring on vibes rather than data and similar people give you fuzzy comfortable vibes.
Unfortunately most Fortune 500 companies are in the hands of B players now, and it goes all the way up, with the government (multiple governments, really) being in the hands of B/C players. The A players are happily retired and pulling strings in the background with their 501(c)4s.
I'm not sure if the motive behind such behavior is racism. Instead, I think it's more likely the power play. That is, they would pick the population that is the easiest to command and to push them up the corporate ladder.
I made the mistake once of insinuating the reason no else was complaining about current conditions was that everyone else was on a visa. That was pretty much the end of my job there. Which only made me more confident in my opinion in the end.
How do we draw the line between whatever -ism and Bayesian inferences? You are seasoned manager for years, you found that your fellow countrymen are much more likely to follow your leadership style than any other group of different cultural background. Let's say it's a fact that you identified through years of trial and error. Based on this fact, you decide to hire only certain groups. How is this racism? How is this different from a university has a college list. Any graduate who does not graduate from the list will not have an interview with your company -- It's super narrow minded and it can considered discrimination, but is that some kind of -ism?
Yup. You see this when any org hires a top exec externally: they bring their trusted lieutenants/golf buddies and push out the old brass, and then this repeats down the chain when these hires do the same.
Unsurprisingly, an Indian exec's trusted lieutenants and golf buddies will also be Indian, likely from the same university, caste, etc. They will not be hiring random people just because they happen to be Indian; if anything, there's been plenty of lawsuits over Indians of the "wrong" caste, language group etc getting pushed out.
In the past, having to work with Indians from firms like Cognizant or HCL is pretty much torture. Instead of working with 2-3 Americans, you get stuck working with 10-20 Indians who dont know jack shit about shit.
Thankfully the company recently nuked their contracts and brought everything back on shore because of how much of a shit show dealing with those companies is lol. Literally tens of millions of dollars wasted.
Im kinda convinced that's their entire business plan. They lure these mega companies with omg "skilled labor" and having to pay them less, sign XX-XXXM contracts, 2-3 years go by and these mega corpos finally see how shit it is and just cancel them. HCL and Cognizant make money still regardless.
I have seen this myself. I have also experienced more than a few Indian colleagues who were far more critical of Indians in management than the rest of us were. I feel like there is an extra layer of dynamics that just isn't apparent if you are not accustomed to seeing it.
It's been awhile since I've seen it, but there was a very brief and small wave of articles perhaps a few years back claiming a lot of Indians in the US were still facing caste-based discrimination (by skin color, name or something else, I'm not sure) by other Indian managers and execs.
Newsom vetoed the ban [1]. A pair of professors are having a bad time trying to got CSU’s ban on caste-based discrimination thrown out on the grounds of being religiously discriminatory [2].
> but there was a very brief and small wave of articles perhaps a few years back claiming a lot of Indians in the US were still facing caste-based discrimination
Those articles based on a lawsuit were very heavily promoted on HN, however the complaint was by a single disgruntled employee who just happened to invoke the caste card and the suit was thrown out by the court.
The California DoJ failed to do basic due diligence before filing the lawsuit to the extent that the defendants filed a civil suit saying they were being discriminated against because of their race by the CA DoJ. Of course, these followups never got any traction on HN, because they didn't fit the narrative.
And now there are so many people, especially on HN and other developer forums that are utterly convinced caste based discrimination is very prevalent.
funny question, I believe we're more precisely talking about Brahmin "upper" caste hiring only from their caste. Muslims don't even come into the picture...
I don't think so. I feel Indian managers have a tendency to hire anyone else but Indians. If they have to favor Hindu, Brahmin, Muslim is very subjective, depending on that person's background, but I would say very rare. If they really have a prefrence, it will be "the connect", like if they both can connect based on region (ex: Delhi or that region) but very few Indians of current generation would care about caste or religion.
This is a remarkable claim. Not a single Indian in tech that I know in my personal or professional life - numbering over a hundred - has ever disputed that Indians have strong (sub)ethnic affinities that color their views hiring.
In addition, nepotism is a real thing in Indian culture.
I’d be laughed out of a room with aforesaid folks if I claimed “Indian managers have a tendency to hire anyone else but Indians”. This is either deliberately misleading to “save face” on behalf of the community (another cultural trait), or you’re utterly oblivious in an outlying way to how things work.
I wouldn’t say it’s people ‘preferring’ it. The fact is, finding people that are competent enough to be hired is easier through referrals than other ways. And if you are receiving referrals, why wouldn’t you put them through the hiring process to see if they’re talented enough to hire? Rejecting those because they share the same race as the hiring manager is itself racist (since it would be taking race/ethnicity as a factor). In most big companies the hiring process has enough checks and balances to prevent nepotistic hires anyways (for example hiring panels or bar raisers or whatever).
Yeah, "racist" seems to fail the Occam test here. But at the same time that makes it clear that the now-suddenly-unpopular opinion is also wrong. Diversity takes work, and companies need to guard against this kind of decisionmaking. "DEI" protects the native-born too!
The word has lost meaning due to semantic overinclusivity.
By the Civil Rights era definitions, the process is racist. The people may not be. The process explicitly favours Indians. This isn’t some statistical mumbo-jumbo anti-racism construct, it’s the clear intent of the people involved and a clear effect of their actions.
What we can’t conclude from this is if the people involved think Indians are superior (versus just familiar).
DEI arose to public consciousness around the same time that "whiteness" was often used as a synonym for bigotry and privilege. So long as academic circles (and those who come from them, such as the people now in HR departments) believe that having white skin is a sin, DEI will never be D, E or I.
The three words themselves are nice and generally good things to believe in, but the packaging philosophy it is wrapped up in is poisonous.
That's not what DEI does in practice. When you move away from merit hiring, you just end up hiring the minorities in your social network. Who, if they're from an "underprivileged" group, are usually even more privileged within that group than you are in yours, or else they wouldn't have met you.
i.e. you're in the top 20% of white people hiring from the top 1% of black people.
It is not just racist, it also allows all kinds of exploitation and unethical practices.
I briefly worked for one such CEO in a major tech city. Core of Indian H1-B staff coders and about same amount of US white staff in both coding, customer-facing, and administrative roles. A lot of hiring was done rapidly. After less than six months the staff discovered the product being sold was basically a fraud (think summarization & classification of emails that could be handled by ChatGPT today, but back in early 2000s, the work was actually secretly being transmitted to staff in India every night, not the "AI" claimed). Of course, that was just one of the many layers of fractal dishonesty about that CEO and company.
So, within a few weeks the entire white staff quit. During the process of organizing to quit, we also found out we were at least the third wave of [all the white staff quitting]. Of course, through all of these waves of quitting all the H1-Bs stayed, because they had no choice.
Ironically, if it had been packaged honestly, it could have been a valuable and profitable service, but that wouldn't have been sellable to VCs (who were also being scammed).
So yes, cheaper, fully compliant with fraudulent practices, and racist to boot. A toxic brew.
Thanks, was actually my main question on reading the article. "Why go to all that effort if an American will accept the job for the same pay and you don't have to deal with sponsorship?" This seems like one of the most likely reasons. Racism's been mentioned, yet leverage over employees who have very little other alternative seems somewhat more likely. American's will just leave and go look for another job. Probably much larger chance of having them lateral to a different company also.
fmajid in another thread had a similar paraphrase
> H1-B holders have to find a new employer within 2 weeks or lose their visa, the threat of firing is the same thing as deportation, making for a form of indentured servitude.
It's probably greater difficultly to lateral also, since then there's another company talking with the government about sponsorship on somebody you're already sponsoring. A lot of banks and financials already have standing threats to fire anybody they even find looking around.
What makes you think they’re racist versus just hiring the best available talent? There are more Indians in universities than the general population, and a lot more of them in engineering degrees than other degrees. It makes sense there are lots of Indians in some industries, both in the management roles and in the populations that managers are hiring from.
You really think nobody in the continental US can do good work in tech? You will have to fight really hard to convince me that all the talent is non existent.
> What makes you think they’re racist versus just hiring the best available talent?
Yeah that’s never considered an acceptable argument whenever the ratio of white people in a company gets “too high”, don’t see why it should be any different with Indians.
Please don't post in this inflammatory style on HN. You've set off a whole flamewar – nearly 100 comments so far – with many of the comments debating the definition of racism. This is the last thing we need here.
The overall topic is important, which is why it needs to be discussed with comments that are thoughtful and substantive, which the guidelines clearly ask us to do:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I've noticed this as well, but see it mostly as "A players hire other A players, B players hire C players". The top tier of Indian execs/management that I've met will hire diverse teams, just like the top tier of every other ethnicity will as well. There's simply not enough people at the top to put a racial/ethnic/caste filter on it. But then once you get down to the second tier, people will happily hire people like themselves, because at that level you're hiring on vibes rather than data and similar people give you fuzzy comfortable vibes.
Unfortunately most Fortune 500 companies are in the hands of B players now, and it goes all the way up, with the government (multiple governments, really) being in the hands of B/C players. The A players are happily retired and pulling strings in the background with their 501(c)4s.
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Only because the politics of most common idiot id the cheapest for monied interests to manufacture.
Business is much worse at the same scale.
Infact, you probably cant find any org at large scale that functions in rational, logic driven capacity.
So theres just a bogeyman, not a useful critique of government.
That’s extremely racist to assume that Indian execs are all D tier or worse.
That's clearly not an assumption that this sentence is based on: > The top tier of Indian execs/management that I've met will hire diverse teams
> It's extremely racist
I'm not sure if the motive behind such behavior is racism. Instead, I think it's more likely the power play. That is, they would pick the population that is the easiest to command and to push them up the corporate ladder.
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I made the mistake once of insinuating the reason no else was complaining about current conditions was that everyone else was on a visa. That was pretty much the end of my job there. Which only made me more confident in my opinion in the end.
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How do we draw the line between whatever -ism and Bayesian inferences? You are seasoned manager for years, you found that your fellow countrymen are much more likely to follow your leadership style than any other group of different cultural background. Let's say it's a fact that you identified through years of trial and error. Based on this fact, you decide to hire only certain groups. How is this racism? How is this different from a university has a college list. Any graduate who does not graduate from the list will not have an interview with your company -- It's super narrow minded and it can considered discrimination, but is that some kind of -ism?
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Yup. You see this when any org hires a top exec externally: they bring their trusted lieutenants/golf buddies and push out the old brass, and then this repeats down the chain when these hires do the same.
Unsurprisingly, an Indian exec's trusted lieutenants and golf buddies will also be Indian, likely from the same university, caste, etc. They will not be hiring random people just because they happen to be Indian; if anything, there's been plenty of lawsuits over Indians of the "wrong" caste, language group etc getting pushed out.
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There are also Indians who loathe being on such teams and actively seek diverse meritocratic teams, as one of those Indians.
In the past, having to work with Indians from firms like Cognizant or HCL is pretty much torture. Instead of working with 2-3 Americans, you get stuck working with 10-20 Indians who dont know jack shit about shit.
Thankfully the company recently nuked their contracts and brought everything back on shore because of how much of a shit show dealing with those companies is lol. Literally tens of millions of dollars wasted.
Im kinda convinced that's their entire business plan. They lure these mega companies with omg "skilled labor" and having to pay them less, sign XX-XXXM contracts, 2-3 years go by and these mega corpos finally see how shit it is and just cancel them. HCL and Cognizant make money still regardless.
I have seen this myself. I have also experienced more than a few Indian colleagues who were far more critical of Indians in management than the rest of us were. I feel like there is an extra layer of dynamics that just isn't apparent if you are not accustomed to seeing it.
Out of curiosity, do they favor hiring Indians in general, or Hindu Indians in particular. (To the exclusion of Muslim Indians)
It's been awhile since I've seen it, but there was a very brief and small wave of articles perhaps a few years back claiming a lot of Indians in the US were still facing caste-based discrimination (by skin color, name or something else, I'm not sure) by other Indian managers and execs.
Newsom vetoed the ban [1]. A pair of professors are having a bad time trying to got CSU’s ban on caste-based discrimination thrown out on the grounds of being religiously discriminatory [2].
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/09/us/california-caste-discrimin...
[2] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/23...
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> but there was a very brief and small wave of articles perhaps a few years back claiming a lot of Indians in the US were still facing caste-based discrimination
Those articles based on a lawsuit were very heavily promoted on HN, however the complaint was by a single disgruntled employee who just happened to invoke the caste card and the suit was thrown out by the court.
The California DoJ failed to do basic due diligence before filing the lawsuit to the extent that the defendants filed a civil suit saying they were being discriminated against because of their race by the CA DoJ. Of course, these followups never got any traction on HN, because they didn't fit the narrative.
And now there are so many people, especially on HN and other developer forums that are utterly convinced caste based discrimination is very prevalent.
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funny question, I believe we're more precisely talking about Brahmin "upper" caste hiring only from their caste. Muslims don't even come into the picture...
I don't think so. I feel Indian managers have a tendency to hire anyone else but Indians. If they have to favor Hindu, Brahmin, Muslim is very subjective, depending on that person's background, but I would say very rare. If they really have a prefrence, it will be "the connect", like if they both can connect based on region (ex: Delhi or that region) but very few Indians of current generation would care about caste or religion.
> I feel Indian managers have a tendency to hire anyone else but Indians
I'd guess this varies massively depending on whether the hiring manager and the people they're hiring are H1-Bs.
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This is a remarkable claim. Not a single Indian in tech that I know in my personal or professional life - numbering over a hundred - has ever disputed that Indians have strong (sub)ethnic affinities that color their views hiring. In addition, nepotism is a real thing in Indian culture. I’d be laughed out of a room with aforesaid folks if I claimed “Indian managers have a tendency to hire anyone else but Indians”. This is either deliberately misleading to “save face” on behalf of the community (another cultural trait), or you’re utterly oblivious in an outlying way to how things work.
that is definitely part of it
Yep. And caste based discrimination is legal in the USA. Its not a protected EEOC class, as much as that doesn't matter in our legal environment.
So yeah, you can discriminate against Dalits, and hire predominantly Brahmins.
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What’s the evidence? I remember seeing allegations but all the court cases resulted in nothing, because there was no evidence of such discrimination.
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How so? There are 172 million Muslims in India.
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Most people (regardless of race) prefer to hire from within their network. It makes sense that Indians' networks would consist of other Indians.
I wouldn’t say it’s people ‘preferring’ it. The fact is, finding people that are competent enough to be hired is easier through referrals than other ways. And if you are receiving referrals, why wouldn’t you put them through the hiring process to see if they’re talented enough to hire? Rejecting those because they share the same race as the hiring manager is itself racist (since it would be taking race/ethnicity as a factor). In most big companies the hiring process has enough checks and balances to prevent nepotistic hires anyways (for example hiring panels or bar raisers or whatever).
Yeah, "racist" seems to fail the Occam test here. But at the same time that makes it clear that the now-suddenly-unpopular opinion is also wrong. Diversity takes work, and companies need to guard against this kind of decisionmaking. "DEI" protects the native-born too!
> ”racist" seems to fail the Occam test here
The word has lost meaning due to semantic overinclusivity.
By the Civil Rights era definitions, the process is racist. The people may not be. The process explicitly favours Indians. This isn’t some statistical mumbo-jumbo anti-racism construct, it’s the clear intent of the people involved and a clear effect of their actions.
What we can’t conclude from this is if the people involved think Indians are superior (versus just familiar).
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DEI arose to public consciousness around the same time that "whiteness" was often used as a synonym for bigotry and privilege. So long as academic circles (and those who come from them, such as the people now in HR departments) believe that having white skin is a sin, DEI will never be D, E or I.
The three words themselves are nice and generally good things to believe in, but the packaging philosophy it is wrapped up in is poisonous.
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This is why DEI is so important. It’s a blunt tool, but still a tool, to short circuit the basic human desire to be within their network.
That's not what DEI does in practice. When you move away from merit hiring, you just end up hiring the minorities in your social network. Who, if they're from an "underprivileged" group, are usually even more privileged within that group than you are in yours, or else they wouldn't have met you.
i.e. you're in the top 20% of white people hiring from the top 1% of black people.
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It is not just racist, it also allows all kinds of exploitation and unethical practices.
I briefly worked for one such CEO in a major tech city. Core of Indian H1-B staff coders and about same amount of US white staff in both coding, customer-facing, and administrative roles. A lot of hiring was done rapidly. After less than six months the staff discovered the product being sold was basically a fraud (think summarization & classification of emails that could be handled by ChatGPT today, but back in early 2000s, the work was actually secretly being transmitted to staff in India every night, not the "AI" claimed). Of course, that was just one of the many layers of fractal dishonesty about that CEO and company.
So, within a few weeks the entire white staff quit. During the process of organizing to quit, we also found out we were at least the third wave of [all the white staff quitting]. Of course, through all of these waves of quitting all the H1-Bs stayed, because they had no choice.
Ironically, if it had been packaged honestly, it could have been a valuable and profitable service, but that wouldn't have been sellable to VCs (who were also being scammed).
So yes, cheaper, fully compliant with fraudulent practices, and racist to boot. A toxic brew.
Thanks, was actually my main question on reading the article. "Why go to all that effort if an American will accept the job for the same pay and you don't have to deal with sponsorship?" This seems like one of the most likely reasons. Racism's been mentioned, yet leverage over employees who have very little other alternative seems somewhat more likely. American's will just leave and go look for another job. Probably much larger chance of having them lateral to a different company also.
fmajid in another thread had a similar paraphrase
> H1-B holders have to find a new employer within 2 weeks or lose their visa, the threat of firing is the same thing as deportation, making for a form of indentured servitude.
It's probably greater difficultly to lateral also, since then there's another company talking with the government about sponsorship on somebody you're already sponsoring. A lot of banks and financials already have standing threats to fire anybody they even find looking around.
Do you see them selectively picking based on the caste of the Indian?
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What makes you think they’re racist versus just hiring the best available talent? There are more Indians in universities than the general population, and a lot more of them in engineering degrees than other degrees. It makes sense there are lots of Indians in some industries, both in the management roles and in the populations that managers are hiring from.
You really think nobody in the continental US can do good work in tech? You will have to fight really hard to convince me that all the talent is non existent.
I didn’t say non existent. But in short enough supply at the appropriate level of skill to have different skews without any discrimination happening
> What makes you think they’re racist versus just hiring the best available talent?
Yeah that’s never considered an acceptable argument whenever the ratio of white people in a company gets “too high”, don’t see why it should be any different with Indians.
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