← Back to context

Comment by teachrdan

9 hours ago

Out of curiosity, do they favor hiring Indians in general, or Hindu Indians in particular. (To the exclusion of Muslim Indians)

26 comments

teachrdan

Reply
zdragnar  9 hours ago

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.

  • JumpCrisscross  9 hours ago

    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...

    • snozolli  9 hours ago

      Newsom vetoed the ban [1]

      From that article:

      In a statement explaining his veto decision, Newsom said the measure was “unnecessary” because discrimination based on caste is already prohibited in the state.

      (Just adding context that I would have missed if not for another commenter pointing it out further down)

      3 replies →

  • ivewonyoung  9 hours ago

    > 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.

polotics  9 hours ago

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...

srameshc  9 hours ago

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.

  • JumpCrisscross  9 hours ago

    > 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.

  • tmule  1 hour ago

    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.

throwmeaway222  9 hours ago

that is definitely part of it

  • mystraline  9 hours ago

    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.

    • jkaplowitz  9 hours ago

      Except in Seattle, which explicitly bans caste discrimination as of 2023, and in California, which interprets its own state anti-discrimination laws to already include caste discrimination in other broader categories (which was the reason Governor Newsom gave when he vetoed a bill in 2023 to explicitly ban caste discrimination).

      Quite a lot of tech companies hire in either Seattle, California, or both.

  • SilverElfin  4 hours ago

    What’s the evidence? I remember seeing allegations but all the court cases resulted in nothing, because there was no evidence of such discrimination.