The waitlist for Indians to get a green card (i.e. second-class citizenship) is 134 years currently. By the end of this decade, it will touch 200. No regular Indian going on a work visa to the US currently has any significant scope of ever being recognized a citizen.
Think of that what you will, but the list of incentives an Indian has to bother integrating into American society is rather short.
Cognizant, Infosys, etc. are also quite well known to avoid putting their H1B (or equivalent) in position to consider staying or have opportunity to stay.
Genuinely asking as someone not deeply familiar with the complexities of Indian culture: India now has the largest population in the world, is the biggest democracy, and has significant potential for growth (e.g. reducing poverty). At the same time, we see Indian leaders in top positions in major U.S. companies, like the CEOs of Google (1st gen) and Microsoft (2nd gen). How do these factors all connect? What drives this mix of internal challenges and global success? I’m not naive in thinking that a few successful individuals represent an entire population, but I do see a signal there.
India's claim to be a democracy is getting increasingly tenuous https://freedomhouse.org/country/india
No more than usa’s
Yes, I think the democracy issues are more general.
1. India has a low gdp per capita. What that means is quality of life for masses is low. That also means slum/ghetto like neighbourhoods. Even if you have the money you mostly stay in a gated community, sandwiched between those areas. So you want to leave ASAP and stay in the west.
2. The Indians in top leadership positions you see in tech firms are rare exceptions. To some extent they also come from fairly well off families and communities in India, who have social capital. Can afford cram school fees for Ivy league exams, money and ability to take loans to study abroad etc.
3. Any body who once makes non-trivial money or sees non-trivial career success instantly realises, given how big India is. Given its politics, and overall spending on Education, R&D, and the rate of industrialisation. The only hope for a good life for their, or atleast at their children is to move to the west.
Basically people want to leave India, as fixing India is largely a long term, and also a nearly impossible project.
The Indians migrating to the US via h1b visas are not coming from the slums or ghettoes. Higher education to foreigners in the US is essentially an immigration scheme - they pay $60-$100k (+living expenses) for a useless graduate degree which only the rich can afford, then get funneled into consulting firms like Cognizant/Infosys on OPT/EAD visas before picking up their h1b for ~ 6 years. This pretty much gets you in the US for ~ 10 years before getting a green card.
> The Indians in top leadership positions you see in tech firms are rare exceptions
This is absolutely not the case. Despite being 2% of the population, Indians are way overrepresented in tech leadership positions (not just CEO/CTO). I recall in a meeting at a med size tech firm I worked at, the recruiting/HR department no longer considered Asians of any ethnicity a minority and lumped them in with white males.
>recruiting/HR department no longer considered Asians of any ethnicity a minority and lumped them in with white males.
Why does HR even need to keep track of ethnicities? Is this a US thing?
Here in my EU country you're just employee/applicant #3215, that's it, nobody asks or enters your ethnicity anywhere to even be able to keep tabs on how many are of what ethnicity, since everyone is considered equal by default and judged exclusively on performance (in theory at least, in practice there are still biases, but tracking ethnicities won't fix that, since that's human nature).
What you're saying would even be against the law here since then it opens the door to bias and potential discrimination.
> the recruiting/HR department no longer considered Asians of any ethnicity a minority and lumped them in with white males.
there was, IIRC, an infamous spat at a FAANG about that
The only point of contention I have with this whole debate is the general premise that it's wrong to make citizens of a country redundant (lay them off) in order to replace with cheaper labor brought in from other countries.
From an accounting standpoint perhaps it makes sense, but from the view of the workers, and the community, it just seems wrong.
Although I'm not deeply familiar with the specifics of this particular case, it raises broader questions about the industry that specializes in outsourcing, particularly to countries like India. If outsourcing is a core part of a company's business model, isn’t it inevitable that more jobs will continue to be funneled to countries like India, and, consequently, to Indian workers?
While I understand this particular case involves allegations of discrimination within U.S. offices, the larger trend seems unavoidable. As companies prioritize cost-efficiency, it may no longer make economic sense for citizens of HCOL countries, to seek employment with such firms. Similarly, these companies are likely incentivized to constantly try and minimize the number of high-cost employees—whether they are Indians on H1B visas or American citizens—on their payroll.
This raises a concern about whether the government should intervene to address this industry trend of outsourcing. However, if we look at what happened with manufacturing and China, one wonders if such intervention will ever come, or if the shift is already inevitable.
Unionization could, at least in principle, offer a solution.
definitely my experience dealing with them at F500s. Indian mafia running the IT org, and a PITA to get things out of them.
personal favorite was that someone from network support ran a script that changed ownership of all of the docker containers and associated configs, outputs, and logs to root. we had pretty clear proof in the logs that a Cog support tech did it, and basically had to escalate to the CTO and get him to threaten a lawsuit to get them to fix it.
Also watched caste bulling play out in real time in a cramped meeting room in the RDU Triangle, in NC. Wasn't clear what the strain was until later when a full-timer of Indian extraction explained it to me.
Yup. Currently working at a large multinational. Pretty much 90% of developers and managers are Indian. Very few Americans. Some Chinese and some Slavic.
I have never seen such ratios is 20+ years of my career.
The worst HR case I ever got involved in was a semi-onshore (Indian) development team who couldn't deal with having a female (Indian) tech lead. She was eminently qualified for the role, but they would attempt to undermine her at every turn, speak over her, hold meetings without her, always going over her head... Caste did not appear to be a factor; it seemed to be good old fashioned sexism.
Who knew that backwards cultures have people who act backwards. I'm talking relative to western standards. Because if in their culture sexism is normalized then the west are the weirdos by considering women equals.
sexism and non-egalitarian behavior is pretty common across the globe. I'd argue that the west, esp. N America, is the exception, not the rule. and even there, there are pressures working against it.
What N. America is doing right now seems to be the opposite of egalitarism: discriminate straight white males at every step of the way, which is supposed to be OK somehow because some of their ancestors did bad things 200 years ago, so discrimination should't count form them, because of their presumed privilege or something.
They way N America seems to do egalitarism now is not by uplifting minorities towards equality but by actively discriminating those some considered to be privileged aka straight white males as if vengeance for past mistakes brings equilibrium.
It's weird how racism against Indians online is so normalised. I see the same on reddit too.
Thank WiPro/Infosys/Tata/Cognizant/HCL and everyone who apes their practices.
The end result is that you see a mention of "Bangalore" and you get immediate shivers because it doesn't matter how nice and good as a person the people you are forced to work with are, if the entire qualification you can discern is that they are statistically expected to speak english, and their work environment and supervisors enforce certain counter-productive behaviours. Which is honestly abusive to the poor person in Bangalore, because it's not like they can learn the skills this way either.
To the point that I once had security team in a company where specific area of security might involve "uncomfortable questions from government" in cases of failure (fortunately not defense industry) actually sponsor my efforts to bypass supposedly crucial firewall - because connectivity including said firewall were handled by TCS.
sometime saying stuff blunt, is not racism. india, has a lot of issues to fix, and I think will be fix maybe in the next 100 years from now.
I'd say you're generalising quite a bit there, bud.
Just my experience. I reckon a lot of recent events like buying oil from Russia has sadly justified it for a lot of people.
Not the parent commenter, but from what I've seen, they are correct, and as far as Reddit is concerned, especially so.
Genuine criticism of India's government and some Indian/Hindu cultural practices can quickly devolve into disgusting racist diatribes and stereotypes that wouldn't fly against people from other countries. Try using the hard-r n-word as a non-black person, or calling someone with East Asian phenotypes a 'Chinaman', or any Native American stereotype today, and see how quickly you bring a firestorm upon yourself.
Meanwhile, people on Reddit call Indians street-sh*tters or cow pi*s drinkers, and no one bats an eyelid. I have seen these words verbatim on places like /r/worldnews, without censorship or bans whatsoever.
Racism against Indians is normalised, full stop.
Yeah. Just questioned someone saying he doesn't like working with companies with Indians and Indians managers as he potentially being a racist and my comment got flagged.
It's okay to be racist against Indians according to hacker news guidelines because it's somehow justified.
And his comment is still there unflagged.
I mean, it's his/hers opinion if they don't want to work with Indians, what's the problem? I know people who hate working with Swiss, Austrians and Germans.
Read their comment again. He never said "I hate Indians" which would ba racist, he said "I don't want to work with Indians" which is not racist.
Similarly, there's people I like and I hang out with at the pub, but I would hate living or working with them even if I don't hate them, simply because their habits and behaviors would clash with mine if forced to live or work together.
Hating working with someone is not racism, since it's based on diverging habits, work and management cultures which other people find incompatible with their own, but that doesn't imply hate of a person. That's why it's not flagged.
Maybe stop dividing yourselves and others along the caste and religious line?
Generalizing everyone from a region/group with some negative trait is racisam.
If your brain try to label me as someone who practice caste system because you think I am from India is lazy/stupid computation and racism.
Actually vast majority of the Indians suffer from negative consequences of Castisam since they are supposed to be lower classes and society descrimated against them historically.
They want equality more than probably anyone you know of.
Indian constitution has done a lot for eliminating this. But there is a lot of cultural baggage that needs cleanup.
>Generalizing everyone from a region/group with some negative trait is racisam.
It's stereotyping not racism. It becomes racism when the stereotype is held against the target with prejudice or hostility.
I've never seen let alone worked in a team that only had white people. Not once. I've never seen nor heard of a team that only had Japanese or Koreans or Russians or any other singular group except two: Chinese and Indians. These two groups have a unique tendency to form ethnically exclusive teams at companies and get away with it.
I have seen exclusively white people teams, especially at smaller startups. They were all Americans though, so not much diversity of nationalities.
Given that China and India are countries with 1.4B population, no surprise that one can find enough people to form exclusively Chinese (or Indian) teams. Another factor is that people from other backgrounds do not want to join such teams even if the hiring manager makes them an offer. When I was at a FAANG, my team composition slowly drifted towards only Chinese and Indian, as people from other backgrounds left in 6-12 months after an Indian manager came in.
I'm sure it happens at small companies, but at large companies I've never seen it. It wouldn't be allowed to stay that way if it did happen. The number of times I've seen it happen with Chinese and Indians teams, relative to how rare it is for white-only teams to exist, seems highly improbable. White people are the plurality if not majority at most big American tech companies, so if it's all just statistical noise it should happen more with white people and that just isn't what happens.
I have seen enough white-only teams while at FAANG. Those were not in SV but in smaller US cities. Of course that was rare but then again, chinese-only or indian-only teams were rare as well.
Also (18 points, 1 day ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41774300
I am a proud Indian-American (naturalized after h1b) and I think this kind of discriminatory mindset has no place anywhere, definitely not in the workplace. I think my community can be secure in its success and learn to do better and be open to critique. Let's work to abolish these attitudes by being more self-aware and raising awareness & use cautionary tales like this as a wake-up call.
This is HN, not LinkedIn.
This is obvious at a number of these big box consulting firms for many years (Tata, Cognizant, HCL, Capgemini). Its so easy to verify too - go on linkedin and comb through dozens of search results of exclusively Indians (I'm not talking about American-Indians who go to undergrad in the US like every other person). These firms also take a lions share of the h1b visas which is another conversation - why does India get to have 75% of all h1b visas? Seems not very diverse.
> why does India get to have 75% of all h1b visas? Seems not very diverse.
Not to defend the Indians or their paymasters, but the H1B isn't diversity based, and there are a lot of Indians who also speak English, so...
Because there are just that many applicants from India? The result of this is also that Indians have virtually no scope of settling down in the US, since the waitlist for green card for them goes beyond 134 years. Which means none of those H1B holders are going to stay.
Who processes the applicants? Indian bosses (see the tweet/articles). Many US permeant residents are being passed over at these big consulting firms in favor of Indians. Its nepotism, 100%. Indians in the US are not discriminated against. Despite being < 2% of the population of the US, they have an oversized influence in many industries/management level roles.
Is anyone really surprised?
At the risk of sounding racist (though I'm Indian, so I guess I get some leeway here), there are likely more biases at play than it seems.
You’ll see South or North Indians from a particular state prefer hiring employees from the same state, who speak the same language, and who look like them. And it doesn’t stop there. Caste discrimination plays a role too, and it even has its own Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_discrimination_in_the_Un.... See also:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalit
[2] https://harpercollinsin.medium.com/how-does-anyone-know-what...
This kind of thing is so rampant in India that you hear about it all the time on Reddit.
So yeah, Cognizant has been found guilty against non-Indians but they probably do this to other Indians.
>Is anyone really surprised?
Not really, but it's still worth to be cognizant of the fact.
I see what you did there
The beauty of casteism, and religious discrimination (and less so racism/sexism, though it is certainly possible) is the near fractal nature of the ability to discriminate against someone. After all, there are 3000 ‘main’ castes and 25,000 sub-castes. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India], and with religious discrimination you can always go into sectarianism/what guru to follow.
It’s the discrimination version of the world’s largest choose your own adventure book.
The fractal nature of it is truly remarkable. When you zoom out, you see what was essentially one people split along religious borders with India and Pakistan. Zoom in, and you see finer and finer levels of cultural discrimination.
> The fractal nature of it is truly remarkable. When you zoom out, you see what was essentially one people split along religious borders with India and Pakistan. Zoom in, and you see finer and finer levels of cultural discrimination.
In-group, Out-group Theory at play
Yup. One of the most fundamental parts of the human experience is that everything is relative.
So, when someone wants to feel better, or even objectively have it better, the easiest way to do it is to make sure there is someone else having it worse nearby.
And doing that all the time based off fuzzy, changeable things like merit is a lot of work. Or even worse, something that someone has to do all the time or maintain, like results or wealth.
Both for the downtrodden trying to improve their station, and the ones ‘on top’ trying to keep them down.
Much more stable to systematize it, and use things like permanent labels on entire family lines, eh? And bonus points if you can do it in a fine grained enough way, that essentially everyone has someone lower than them to shit on.
Then all anyone has to do is exist, and push the buttons provided for them. Easy peasy.
All discrimination is contextual and local. The number of groups has nothing to do with it.
So you say, but history has shown that if groups don’t exist to allow easy discrimination, they will be created to allow such discrimination.
So it’s a good sign of long, well established, and ingrained discrimination, eh? With associated infrastructure to make it easier to continue, and ‘fairer’ in that it allows almost everyone to have someone under them to take their own angst out on. (Except those ‘outside the system’ anyway, which historically were the Dalits, but now even they are in the system eh?)
> So you say, but history has shown that if groups don’t exist to allow easy discrimination, they will be created to allow such discrimination.
Yes, that's what I am saying. In- and out-groups are made contextually in each unique situation.
> So it’s a good sign of long, well established, and ingrained discrimination, eh? With associated infrastructure to make it easier to continue, and ‘fairer’ in that it allows almost everyone to have someone under them to take their own angst out on. (Except those ‘outside the system’ anyway, which historically were the Dalits, but now even they are in the system eh?)
Can't understand what you're trying to say here.
Can’t understand, or refuse to understand?
Why create new groups when you have proven and well trod ones handy to choose from?
your thoughts seem to align closely with René Girard's theories on mimetic desire and scapegoating.
I am going to disclose my own bias here: I tend to look for multicultural teams and somewhat evenly distributed.
As an African so far I have worked and learnt a lot from a Brazilian-Japanese, Bulgarian, Portuguese, Dutch, Belgian, Israeli, Russian, English, Indian, Pakistani, German, Argentinian, and a Polish.
Some of which I have the pleasure to call friend.
Also an African here, and this is exactly how I feel about it - the world is too interesting to ignore.
Hello, potential friend.
dang? Where are you?
This comment section has gone to the gutter. Please flag this thread. This isn't even that significant of a news - we can come back to this when the court actually hands a ruling.
Source article is here: https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/10/07/h-1b-visa-company-sup...
Paywall workaround: https://archive.is/PiMNU
Another non-paywall article on the same topic: https://insider.govtech.com/california/news/jury-finds-discr...
It's about the (previously) Indian outsourcing firm and H-1B body shop supplying contractors to SV companies. It's unrelated to the Indian manager only hiring Indians phenomenon which many people here are discussing; FWIW I believe it was quite widespread at least back when I was in the Valley, but this ruling doesn't address that in any way.
Why is the submission a link to a twitter screenshot of a news article?
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/10/07/h-1b-visa-company-sup... is the paywalled source.
That said, https://www.siliconvalley.com/2024/10/07/h-1b-visa-company-s... seems to be the exact same article (author, timestamp, and all) published by the same group (Bay Area News Group) but without a paywall. (Both siliconvalley.com and mercurynews.com are registered to MediaNews Group, which is the owner of Bay Area News Group as of 2006.)
Discrimination and biases are part of everyday life, whether we like it or not. This is an observation, not an endorsement. Ignoring them is akin to denying human nature or believing that the logical mind can fully control the entirety of our thinking. This is why there are a few academic papers that explore this often-taboo topic. I recommend reading Cultural Biases in Economic Exchange? [1] where there is a table of trust between different European countries.
[1] https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/sapienza/htm/cu...
Sorry, nowadays we're supposed to believe everything is programmable/reprogrammable.
Discrimination has largely been "reprogrammable" though. E.g. America doesn't have segregation anymore.
I don’t think so. It’s astonishing that segregation laws in America ended in the mid-1960s, just a few years before Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. Other countries, including some with fewer economic resources, abolished segregation much earlier. Although formal segregation laws are gone, racism in America persists, as reflected in ongoing disparities and public perceptions [1].
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/25/americans...
Some of favorite coworkers have been from India during my career. This includes both their personalities as I got to know them and their demeanor at work.
I have worked at Cognizant for just over a year. Though we don't have this problem on my immediate team, it is something we talk about because it's obvious in other teams and as an overall culture at the company.
It doesn't seem like overt discrimination (from me and my coworkers limited perspectives). There's a couple factors
1. People hire who they know. About two thirds of the employees are of Indian descent. So on average they hire their friends and former coworkers who are also Indian.
2. Leadership requires the offshore teams to be on every project. This is to keep costs down and because the other lines of business besides their main and original one (staff augmentation) are relatively new.
3. A minority (but not a small one) of Indians really are just blatantly discriminatory.
This happened at intel and was very noticeable even back in 2010. Indians hires other Indians. At every company I’ve been at if you were not Indian you were not invited to the conversation. Sitting in meetings where you were excluded from 30% of the conversation was wild. I never felt like they were rude or anything though- just that I was an outsider.
Best team I worked with was very diverse and they actively worked to help each other get promoted and protect each other.
> Sitting in meetings where you were excluded from 30% of the conversation was wild.
I am curious, was this due to them speaking in a different language in actual professional meetings at Intel? I have often heard these reports, but in a social context.
I have never personally observed this in professional settings; but am curious to hear more so I can watch out for it if/when I do encounter it. It's odd because I would struggle to hold a professional conversation in any of the Indian languages that I speak (I have no idea how to say something like "thermal characteristics" or "power dissipation" in them); and would likely keep lapsing into English.
> was this due to them speaking in a different language in actual professional meetings
This happened frequently at a WITCH I worked at out of college. The meeting would be in English then have segments change in the middle as certain speakers switched languages. Luckily, I often had a coworker stand up for me to mention to use English although I did miss many conversations.
I have many Indian colleagues and they do tend not to speak English among them in the office. There needs to be someone else involved in the conversation for them to stick to English.
Another aspect is that I have found that they are quite hierarchical, probably a cultural trait. So how much they stick to English also depends on how senior the "non-Indian(s)" are compared to them. If you are their senior they are very nice.
I worked at a company with a large multi-ethnic workforce. They had an Indian subsidiary but didn't play the H1B game. The rule was English only in the office to avoid exclusion.
There was an article exposing it wasn't just for / between Indians.
Indians were actively discriminating against other Indians if they weren't born into the "highest" caste of hinduism (the few percent only allowed to learn to read and write), or avoiding the "lowest caste" of hinduism (way over 90 percent).
This caste system discrimination in tech, is also used to discriminate against other minorities who are not Indian, originating from the Indian subcontinent.
Trapped in Silicon Valley's Hidden Caste System https://www.wired.com/story/trapped-in-silicon-valleys-hidde...
Insight: Caste in California: Tech giants confront ancient Indian hierarchy https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/caste-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/big-techs-big-pro...
More: https://www.google.com/search?q=silicon+valley+caste+system
Canada has been dealing with this more proactively than most counties with Indian diasporas, a process no doubt aided by the by the significant number of indo-canadian politicians familiar with the issue.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-human-rights-...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/caste-discri...
https://www.trtworld.com/americas/toronto-school-board-recog...
Same experience here.
On a positive note I got replaced by a guy in India. Then after a year of them clambering over each other’s corpses for promotion and destroying the org from the inside, I got hired back on contract to unfuck the mess at 4x my previous salaried rate.
Nothing against India or Indians but the reason outsourcing fails is no one wants to be an outsourced workforce so they go for promotion first to get a better job. And I don’t blame them.
If this has really been going on for more than a decade I wonder what your labor regulators are doing. This is a clear-cut issue of bad labor policy.
Safe to say that 2010 was the beginning of Intel's downfall
It's going to be interesting to see what happens to the Indian folks if Trump gets elected.
He's been talking a lot about deporting immigrants and how immigrants are polluting the gene pool[0]. He's even threatening to deport those who are documented or naturalized[1].
Many IT/tech jobs may open up in a big hurry.
0:https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/07/trump-immigrants-cr... 1: https://newrepublic.com/post/186693/donald-trump-threatening...
Highly misleading. From 1:
> During an exclusive interview with NewsNation, Trump said he planned to strip the legal status of the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, who have been granted Temporary Protected Status.
Temporary Protected Status[0] is not nearly the same thing as having a green card or being naturalized.
[0] https://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/temporary-protected-statu...
Nothing? Trump talks a lot. He didn't "drain the swamp" while he was president and he did not release the Kennedy CIA archives (he promised both).
He'll get a call from Thiel or Musk that they still need H1Bs, and that will be the end of it.
(I still think Trump is the lesser evil, since he is far more competent in foreign policy and the economy will improve. And he does exactly nothing w.r.t the scary sounding election talk.)
> since he is far more competent in foreign policy
The guy foreign leaders call the "laughing fool"?
> the economy will improve.
Trump's plans would cause the economy to shrink by 10% and cause 28% inflation, according to independent analysis. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/26/business/economy/trump-ec...
The world was far more stable in 2016-2020. It does not matter what someone is called. Just watch what actually happens and overlook all the talk (we might as well explore what Harris is called; I think the attribute is "cackling" and not "laughing").
The NYT is not unbiased when it comes to Trump and none of these plans will be implemented. Again, the economy was good in 2016-2020.
Judge not by absolute standings but by relative standings. During the Trump presidency our competitor's economies were growing faster than America's: China, Germany, et cetera. America was losing its status as #1. During the Biden presidency every economy but America's took an absolute beating. Britain & Germany went into a deep recession. China's growth flatlined. America was pretty much the only economy to avoid getting curb-stomped and regained its status as the clear #1 economy.
Anybody can do well when there's a rising tide raising all boats. It takes a true master to do OK when everybody else is doing poorly.
P.S. The NYT has a significant both-sides-ism bias and is the only place you'll find pro-Trump articles outside of the right wing media.
> every economy but America's took an absolute beating. Britain & Germany went into a deep recession.
If you blow up Nordstream and lead the Europeans in a war that they only lose from, then their economies will tank. Inflation and job losses for ordinary Americans are high as well. Perhaps on paper the economy is doing relatively well.
(It is the first time that I have heard anyone describing Biden as a true master.)
You have to be consistent. If you say that presidents aren't responsible for external events, then you can't give Trump credit for the smooth sailing lack of external evennts of 2016-2019. If you say that they are, then you have to give Biden credit for weathering the storm during his presidency.
> (It is the first time that I have heard anyone describing Biden as a true master.)
Just letting the Fed do their job deserves most of the credit. Should be table stakes, but Trump has promised to %^@# that up.
I don't need or even want a US president to be respected by other countries leaders. All I need is for the POTUS to not get this country involved in more foreign wars. Trump is a lapdog of Israel so he doesn't fit this bill, but what I'm saying is "foreign leaders laugh at him" falls flat. IDGAF.
He talks of deporting illegal immigtants —something Harris also now claims is a problem and moreover claims they are more efficient at the border than Trump was ;that’s a dubious claim but it shows she sees it as a problem as well. Over 60% of voters also see illegal immigration as a very serious problem, more see it as an issue. In addition India itself is strict and also deports illegals.
Seeing this happen at an originally Australian unicorn after the technical co-founder stepped down and new CTO swapped out all of their engineering leadership with Indian hires from Microsoft.
Previously saw it at a lesser degree to older unicorns and places like Oracle, IBM, etc.
Although it’s normalised in the latter ones.
This is unfortunately a widespread practice even in less tech heavy companies. It starts with a very aggressive C suit or manager responding to everything 24/7, supported by “cheap” labor who say yes to everything and promise the World, usually extra complicated. Fast forward a couple years and the company/project is a expensive hell-hole of disfunction and suffering. CEOs and the board also are to blame for this, they are aware, they just don’t care as they like people who say yes and don’t give them any bad news.
I've been at a number of companies that had a significant Indian workforce, often hired through the likes of Infosys and the like. I don't believe that's down to nepotism or whatever though, but simple market forces: "you need two dozen SAP experts and can't find them locally? We have them".
That said, there's frequently islands of Indian and "the other" developers, in part that'll be cultural, but in part it's down to simply having a different job, expertise, department, etc.
Which explains why its market value is hovering at $160 while its former worth, when it was properly managed, was $3-400. Am I spot on?
The problem is that every Fortune 500’s internal systems are hooked up to it.
Atlassian? As a user, I haven't noticed any decline in quality; it's just as painful to use now as it was a decade ago.
You can’t notice decline in quality when the quality is already so bad that any change feels like an improvement while still being bad.
> You can’t notice decline in quality when the quality is already so bad that any change feels like an improvement while still being bad.
In this case we don't have a decline in quality.
A decade ago, you could self-host though.
Nobody (important) wanted that, though. It was done only because the cloud wasn't available, the moment it became available every big company migrated.
Self-hosting JIRA and Confluence was a double edged sword:
Done badly it meant you suffocated the application server with too little resources giving dreaded "super slow JIRA" effect.
Done well it meant you didn't have to deal with Atlassian underprovisioning resources in the cloud or having rigid maintenance times that didn't fit with your company needs.
I’ve never seen or worked with a company using the cloud version of any of their products. I worked at a place with one of the largest bitbucket installs in the world, so they weren’t little shops.
The rise of self-hosted GitLab and GHES suggests that's not true.
Rise? I don't see anything other than migration to cloud.
Migrated from self hosted Atlassian to cloud Atlassian.
Not true. I‘ve been at several companies that self host Jira. With the amount of critical data and processes in Jira, it can be comforting to have it on-prem with no one else being able to access the server.
Are you sure they're not just "preparing for the migration" and plan to stay on premise? I also worked at many places that had it on premise - all of them planned to migrate ASAP (where asap is sometimes years).
This. Every single Atlassian product I have used has always been painfully slow garbage; and I have been forced to use them at various jobs over a decade.
I don't think it was ever a magically good Australian product that Indian hires from Microsoft suddenly ruined.
It’s also probably 5x more expensive than a decade ago. As you said, still painful to use.
Maybe cheaper labour brings hidden expenses.
You can ask Boeing ;)
Joking, I do not think it is the case, BUT I do know that cheap is often more expensive
…are we complaining about people living in India, or American/Australian citizens that have Indian national heritage? The former seems more like an outsourcing issue than an Indian issue. The latter… didn’t we learn in the 90s not to stereotype people?
If I posted a comment complaining about how black Americans are criminals, I think I’d rightfully be called out for oversimplifying in a hurtful way. What am I missing here?
How to fight back when you see this happening at line management level, but not yet proliferated to upper management?
Indian product owner taking mostly to Indian peer developers, bypassing normal communication channels. Indians being friendly with each other and stone cold with the rest.
Indians bringing Indian jokes to the table, with no outsider hoping to understand these. Indians bonding to go to Indian restaurants during lunch break, so now most of the colleagues follow suit, how to stop it all?
All these culture things (except for the first regarding PO which is spit-in-the-face level of unprofessionalism) add up, and then you find yourself in a corporation described in other messages of this thread.
I had to offboard from multiple projects throughout my career because development was hijacked by Indian cronyism.
> Indians bringing Indian jokes to the table, with no outsider hoping to understand these. Indians bonding to go to Indian restaurants during lunch break, so now most of the colleagues follow suit, how to stop it all?
Are you seriously asking how to "fight back" on Indians going to restaurants and joking with each other?
As an Indian in a flyover state who has been routinely excluded from golfing events, and had my dietary needs totally ignored while organizing things like steakhouse lunches, this is sort of darkly funny to read.
I think that's an unfairly dismissive take and the "going to restaurants" bit is a mischaracterization at best.
There massive difference is WHERE the discrimination is taking place. Most would not move to India or any other place and impose their culture and exclude locals in a fair and just world. I'm not saying it doesn't take place, and yes colonialism happened and was far worse, but we're talking about what SHOULD be.
> Most would not move to India or any other place and impose their culture and exclude locals in a fair and just world.
I'm trying to say that going to restaurants as a group of people and having in-jokes does not qualify as "imposing your culture" in any way. These things routinely happen at companies that have few to no Indians, they just take a different form.
Also, are you really claiming that if you moved to Bangalore, and had 2-3 coworkers from your hometown that you knew and shared cultural ties with; that you wouldn't tend to hang out together at lunch?
The point is not the restaurant or jokes, but whether business decisions are made there (or if relationships built there drive business decisions).
Sure, but Americans have been doing this for hundreds of years through exclusionary hobbies like golf, fantasy football, and a hundred other things. That's just how social groups work. They are often cliquey and exclusionary.
That's why I think it's weird to only target Indians in this regard. They are building an in-group just like everyone else; the difference is that OP seems to have little experience not being part of the in-group.
That's true and they have.
But that doesn't make it okay for others to do.
We should be working to decrease it in all exclusionary groups by working to make them more inclusionary. That means intentionally rotating comfort zones.
And it is a historically seductive siren call that once an immigrant community in any country attains some power, they use it to ramp up exclusion and cronyism.
In all fairness, to protect their tenuous grasp on that power from external racism, but it also succumbs to use for less noble, more human ends. E.g. getting ones friend hired.
I'm glad that you're admitting this is happening.
The better question is: if you had a Bangalore company founded by Indians, then a management hire from the US or Britain started hiring immigrants from there too, and they excluded or sidelined Indians, especially ones who didn't speak English - you'd be annoyed too right?
Actually you'll find that this happens a lot. Search up expat communities, for example. They don't necessarily "impose their culture and exclude locals", but they are for and by the expats from a certain country.
Seeking "your" people when living/working abroad, or when working in a diverse workspace, is pretty normal and happens everywhere. It's usually harmless though.
i’m not sure that’s the point though. i think the point is lost in op layering restaurants and jokes and such into their narrative. i think the actual point and concern is how being “out-group” affects their employment due to what they perceive as deliberate exclusion.
Brits living in Spain is a classic example
Brits living anywhere outside of Britain is a classic example - exemplified by the clubs and societies formed around the world when the sun didn't set in/on their empire.
You seem to be fixating on the term "fight back," when the commenter you're replying to is asking for ways to not feel excluded at his/her job, where s/he spends a majority of his/her waking hours.
As someone who has experienced this, I encourage you to draw on that experience and have empathy, even if that experience is expressed in ways that don't immediately resonate with you. You have more in common with the commenter you're replying to than you appreciate.
> [looking] for ways to not feel excluded at his/her job, where s/he spends a majority of his/her waking hours.
And the people GP is talking about are trying to do the exact same thing, though obviously in highly detrimental ways. Part of professionalism entails not making your job into an identity that overwhelms every other aspect of your life. If you just focus on delivering good results to the best of your ability, there's no need to be dependent on constant social approval from 'insider' peers.
this is fascinating to me because it’s how i have handled my career and it’s had unexpected positive and negative effects. all-in-all i’m more satisfied than my friend group with my day to day work existence but am steps behind them in the traditional career path milestones. though i lack the titles they have, i’m squarely median when it comes to annual base income, which is comfortable and provides very well for my family. however, i’m beginning to age and realize that potential employers are beginning to balk at my title/“informal” leadership (read “experience”) with my age and salary and duration in the workforce.
The parent post was clearly asking how to fight back against a culture of exclusionism against non-Indians, which leads to racism.
I would hope any sensible person would look at two comments by two people saying that they are being excluded by each others groups and think "the issue is people being excluded because they are not part of the 'in' group in their workplace, and people should work to be more inclusive" rather than concluding that the problem lies with Indian or non-Indian people specifically
And quadrifoliate (this comment's grandparent) showed that exclusionism against Indians similarly exists and is harmful. Very much on topic in my opinion.
I am sorry for your experience. I also feel for GP.
Neither of you should experience that. Your experience does not negate his. Nor his yours.
One is likely the majority, the other the minority.
It doesn’t negate any behaviour based on bias but would require an honest reflection on the unconscious biases existing in the workplace prior to this.
Aren't they both the minority in their respective situations ?
One way to look at it is minority groups who can’t turn off being visible minorities can be different than people who may be minorities in a a few areas of life but still have access to benefit from privilege in others.
Yeah, and I'd expect that treatment as a white person working/living in India, and I would adapt to fit in with local customs / culture or else leave. But they are in the US, working for a US company - why is it somehow acceptable when you are a foreigner to create these isolated professional enclaves that exclude the "native" population?
(A group of people casually getting together is totally different to someone's work environment where they have to attend to bring a paycheck home - I'm talking exclusively about professional/work environments)
Thats a typical western mentality. If you do it then it is a problem but if I do the same thing it is somehow justifiable!
> I would adapt to fit in with local customs / culture or else leave
What? It's apparently white to want to fit in with the local culture now.
> Yeah, and I'd expect that treatment as a white person working/living in India, and I would adapt to fit in with local customs / culture. But they are in the US, working for a US company - why is it somehow acceptable when you are a foreigner to create these isolated professional enclaves that exclude the "native" population?
Non-Hispanic white Americans are not native to the US, and I don't see a reasonable basis for concluding that non-Hispanic white culture should be the "native" or "default" culture in the US.
Sure, it might be the dominant culture — but there are other subcultures like Black or Hispanic cultures that are pretty strong here. Would you feel comfortable asking how to stop a group of Black coworkers from going to a restaurant that serves Black cuisine, or Hispanic coworkers from going to the local taqueria? If not, then why are you singling out Indians?
Hence the quotation marks: "native" - you're just derailing a legitimate line of reasoning.
> I don't see a reasonable basis for concluding that European-American culture should be the "native" or "default" culture in the US
Like it or not, it is the dominant culture especially in professional environments. If you want to have a conversation about why that is the case, what else it could be, etc. thats fine! But it's not the kind of conversation I'm looking to have here.
> Would you feel comfortable asking how to stop a group of Black coworkers from going to a restaurant that serves Black cuisine, or Hispanic coworkers from going to the local taqueria?
If they are doing it to the detriment of the overall business yes! - the line of reasoning follows for a predominantly Black business that is having a White enclave forming. Or a Hispanic cultured business with a Slavic enclave forming. Even more importantly a multicultural environment which is having 1 group overtake it. It's fundamentally a job of business leaders to set the tone and direction of company culture - and this is one aspect of it.
> Like it or not, it is the dominant culture especially in professional environments.
At least sometimes it's not, which is why the OP feels so excluded and is asking for tips on how to navigate the clearly unfamiliar feeling of not being able to just "fit in" as part of the dominant culture.
The reality is that the US is a melting pot with a lot of subcultures, and you should learn to navigate those subcultures instead of demanding that they conform to some mythical default.
Maybe next time the OP should show some curiosity about what their coworkers are joking about, and shyly ask for a seat at the table. I have done it plenty of times.
Shouldn't the members of the enclave proactively reach out themselves, then? As the host country has tried to make things more comfortable for them to start with.
That seem to be the major difference between Western and non-Western countries; we're more cognisant of things like racism/being excluded and have taken steps to try to resolve it - you do not get the same in many other countries at all.
It seems it's much more acceptable to be exclusionary and racist if you're non-white, sometimes.
> Maybe next time the OP should show some curiosity about what their coworkers are joking about, and shyly ask for a seat at the table. I have done it plenty of times.
Yep 100% this is the only decent solution OP has barring leaving the company. It leads to really interesting conversations and you get to learn a lot about a huge portion of the planet's population. Some people go out of their way for these experiences. But it also shouldn't be forced on someone who just wants to collect a paycheck.
A lot of arguments here are getting caught on the wrong details.
It's good to experience new cultures and stretch out of ones comfort zone!
But cultural similarity is also the strongest form of bias in office dynamics.
So, it's great if people go to Indian restaurants. It's not great if people only go to Indian restaurants. It's not great if people only go to steakhouses.
And it's especially not great if colleagues don't make efforts to include less culturally similar colleagues in events, whatever the cultures in question.
When an ethnic group makes a tacit decision to form an enclave and exclude others, there is no "learning to navigate the subculture". Either you are pushed out or you find the leverage to make them stop doing that.
>Non-Hispanic white Americans are not native to the US...
The word Hispanic comes from Hispania meaning "Iberian Peninsula", which, I have news for you, is in Europe. They are hardly native to the USA either.
It was an amazing statement to read. I'm glad someone else caught that
I am aware of Hispania, etc. The thing you're perhaps missing is that 'minignape began their comment with "as a white person...".
That is usually a characterization used by non-Hispanic white people; hence my reply referenced non-Hispanic whites. I also wanted to highlight that they would probably be tolerant of an unfamiliar Hispanic white in-group at their company, but weren't tolerant of a South Asian one.
Text makes communication hard. Have a good day bud.
> And that's just false. And rude.
Sorry, I'm just going to have to go with the consensus of the majority of scientific study on this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Americans_in_the_United....
I'm sure you'll find some like-minded people that share your worldview and are not "rude".
Actually Whites have as much if not more claims to North America than any other group; there’s multiple times that they came to NA, including the Solutreans of about 12000 years ago: https://insider.si.edu/2012/03/ice-age-mariners-from-europe-... ; plus the Viking settlement of 1021; plus the more recent fact of the USA being settled and turning wildernesses into the agricultural and technological powerhouse of today.
That’s funny I don’t see anything about this in the constitution
Also, weren’t Solutreans brown skinned?
The dominant culture of Google and Microsoft when they were founded was [...]. Now they have Indian CEOs and companies like Cognizant bring in H1B visas from India.
There is nothing organic about that.
Personally I have no experience with Indian co-workers, but I do know that Black and Hispanic people do not exclude whites at all. I have only great experiences with them.
People born in the US are native to the US -or are you arguing for de sanguinis citizenship? Chinese and Indians do follow de sanguinis, so maybe you’re making the case?
> Non-Hispanic white Americans are not native to the US,
Weird exclusion; Hispanic white Americans aren't native to the US either; their ancestors came from Spain.
>> non-Hispanic white Americans are not native to the US
Then to where is it native? Don't deny a culture its existence just because it isn't the first culture to arise within a particular area. Example: Mormon culture and religion is "native" the US despite certainly not being the first culture in the area.
I am not the one throwing around the word "native" casually. To cite your example, Salt Lake City was founded less than 200 years ago whereas Puebloans have been living in the area for several thousands of years.
You can certainly make a claim that Mormon culture is "native" to Utah, but I think at 200 v/s 5000+ you can expect that claim to be contested.
Funny enough, the definition has nothing to do with ancestry. "Native: a person born in a specified place or associated with a place by birth, whether subsequently resident there or not."
Yeah, this is the exact sense in which I wrote it originally - but I sensed the screams of 1000 idiots and wrote "native" to try avoid that entire line of conversation. It seems though that my efforts went unnoticed - oh well!
I'm not sure what your point is. "You can't talk about your problem because I have a problem as well" seems to be all you're saying.
A better question would be how to prevent people from excluding each other based on group membership.
> I'm not sure what your point is.
That's a good question. I suppose my point is that this is not something you have "fight back" against. Lots of people get excluded from social groups in professional settings due to some silly link that their coworkers have with each other.
Learning to overcome your lack of cultural commonality with coworkers and and breaking into social groups is something that all of us need to do at some point. In my case — I sucked it up, refused to learn golf but bonded with coworkers over board games; and ate the appetizers at the steakhouse.
A tip for OP would be to try doing the equivalent thing in their context. Go up to your Indian coworkers and ask if you can accompany them to the restaurant. I promise you it will be fine.
> I promise you it will be fine.
Just pass on the gulab jamun if you value your liver.
Pass on like 90% of the stuff that has fat and sugar. It is not representative of a household Indian meal, but rather of a rare feast.
If you go more regularly, a somewhat healthy meal at an Indian restaurant is:
- The tandoor chicken (not the one in gravy)
- The veggie salads and/or yogurt raita
- Whole wheat rotis if you can find them
- Any of the vegetables that don't have a ton of cream (cauliflower is one that's reliably dry)
I can't pretend that I don't indulge with anything beyond that; but I tend to not be a regular at the Indian restaurants here.
> Are you seriously asking how to "fight back" on Indians going to restaurants and joking with each other?
Yes? Or is it just a problem when white people choose to associate with one another at work?
I am saying that neither is a problem. We all have to break into social groups at work and even before that (ever watch "Mean Girls"?). This is not a problem specific to any group of people; and OP's fixation is unnecessary in my opinion.
i’m sorry for your experience(s) and how frustrating that must be. what you’ve experienced isn’t “right” and while it’s valid that you bring it up as a general concern and experience, it comes across as though you’re justifying how OP experiences their own work environment. as someone who has essentially experienced the same treatment, but from the opposite side, this is an opportunity you had to validate and confirm the presence of such behavior while expanding the scope of its presence. now we’re hung up on restaurants and golf courses and choosing sides instead of discussing the core problem
> this is sort of darkly funny to read.
I'm hopeful that some light will be shed on how ridiculously dystopian it is to force D.I.E. mandates with posters like "United Colours of Benetton" as if "All Men/Women/Etc Are Created In Test Tubes Equivalent And Interchangeable" and we Voters of American Progressive Enlightenment must lobby to crush out every aspect of culture that suggests otherwise.
https://youtu.be/vvDYuj1Bs6Y?si=sodV00r3eefBoZ79 Harrison Bergeron for ya
So it goes. Namaste.
> As an Indian in a flyover state
This really shows how much contempt Indians have for a state that allows them to live in it. That's disgraceful.
I am just using a signature American phrase[1]. If anything, this is a mark of how assimilated I am!
I mean no contempt; I am happy to live in a flyover state. Also, the state did not "allow me" to live here, the Federal Government did; as anyone with an elementary knowledge of American government principles should be able to discern.
Your response though, seems to show some anti-immigrant anger. I am sorry you feel that way, and hope you find happiness!
----------------------------------------
What do you think the word "Flyover" means? You live in it now, they let you in so you're not flying over it. It's obviously derogatory, and even your link says it's derogatory. That'd be like me going to India, and then complaining "As an American living next to untouchables..."
Here's the relevant quote from the wikipedia that you're misusing:
> The origins of the phrases and the attitudes of their supposed users are a source of debate in American culture; the terms are often regarded as pejoratives, but are sometimes "reclaimed" and used defensively.[1]
So no, it is not "obviously derogatory", and the link does not say that.
I'd identify it as self deprecation as a form of social ingratiation, just have to be careful with that as self deprecation can go beyond the boundary of self.
That's a possibility. Here are other possibilities - the US resident who originally commented may have been:
- unaware of the phrase's derogatory meaning - aware, but relishing it, as they resent the state and don't like living there - aware, but they think the word has a useful non-derogatory use - aware, and has no strong opinion either way
All things which in reality would be legitimate in various circumstances. Speculating in the first place seems silly to me, and only started because one commenter apparently didn't like the idea of a non-US native having a negative opinion about the US so much that they are (pardon my bluntness) a bit overly sensitive on the issue.
His/her comment articulately justifies using it. And the context is relevant because Americans assume and observe differences off the coasts.
Flyover practically means “does not have a football team” and is just as derogatory as “college town” or “Bible belt”.
What do you mean "allows them"? Whatever happened to the ideals of freedom and liberty and whatnot in the US?
American States have their own culture and identity. The ideals of America was never being an economic zone to house the entire third world, who think the only utility of a state should be to fly over it.
Are you aware that the US ranks below Romania, Belarus, Serbia, Cuba and Thailand on the UN's sustainable development report from 2024?
It might be appropriate to update your picture of the place to reflect the reality. Your views here seem to be predicated on some notion of the US as a place the entire "third world" wants to move to - perhaps you should consider the fact that it's not really top of everyone's list anymore?
With some notable exceptions where it may well be top of the list - the obvious example being some third-level institutions there who have prestige and networking opportunities which are hard to beat, if you can afford it.
> Are you aware that the US ranks below Romania, Belarus, Serbia, Cuba and Thailand on the UN's sustainable development report from 2024?
Are you aware of how shit of a metric that is? It's literally the %age of GDP spent on sustainable energy, so the US could still be spending more than all those countries combined and still have a lower %age.
Let's also not forget who gives out the loans for sustainable development, and who sets up the economic incentives.
This is also the equivalent of saying "You're much less likely to get robbed in Africa, they have a faster declining crime rate than Europe." As a baseline Europe is safer and it's therefore harder to decrease the crime rate further[0]. Going from 100 murders a day to 89 is not better than going from 10 to 9.
[0] I made up this example - no clue if it's true
The founding of the American colonies was very much a gutter for economic classes. Warren Buffet wouldn’t exist today without European trash being indentured.
you chose to move to another country. thats the difference
As an Indian immigrant I had noticed this very early on too. It made me very uncomfortable when some of us would crack jokes in non-English language while there were others around who didn't understand the language. After first few years I stopped working for companies that had mostly Indians in IT. I must say I have been lucky since then to always find a good mix of diverse backgrounds in my team that it has not been a problem.
I am from slavic lands, and found out that I prefer not to work within mostly slavic teams, as any other teams with high genetic and cultural cohesions.
As a fellow Indian immigrant, I actually share your discomfort, and always try to be inclusive and diverse in my social groups. Most of my Indian coworkers and friends behave this way — we came to the US to be a part of a mixed culture, so our social groups should be diverse.
What makes me uncomfortable is that this inclusivity is increasingly being taken for granted to the point where not having it starts conversations about how to "fight back".
Even though it's not my preference I don't think there is anything wrong with Indians cracking jokes in a non-English language, or going to a restaurant by themselves. You will find that Americans will mysteriously be far more tolerant of, say, a group of French people talking among themselves in French; and going to a French restaurant as a group.
In public, yeah people probably wouldn't care about french speakers, but in a shared environment I definitely would prefer they speak English. My brother use to have to tell his Dutch-Canadian in-laws to speak English when we were at his house. I'd feel the same way at work.
I’ve actually had a very different experience — including in my interactions with Cognizant as a vendor. Indian managers acting utterly cruel and abusive to Indian line workers (especially remote or H1B), while being generally kind and accommodating to non-Indian team members. Maybe there was a class/caste thing at play that was totally opaque to me. It was an extremely uncomfortable environment to work in.
Tribalism and slave mentality can coexist.
Even as an Indian, I don't know how that could be tackled, it seems to be kind of systemic.
I'd always been around people from all sorts of places, and many of the schools I went to would intentionally keep kids of similar origins apart to force them to mingle with others, so I grew up to prefer being around people from different places over just sticking with other Indians. I've had several experiences of running into people who seem to take pride in being the way you describe. My interpretation has been that they have a chip on their shoulder about not being "westerners" and view anyone who is better integrated as being some sort of traitor.
For now, I've only had to experience it in school and university. It's been awful every time. Yours is also a sentiment many people have expressed to me about other Indians once they've opened up to me and realized I won't care if they say something that could be racist.
Cultural bonding is natural, but it's critical that it doesn't undermine team spirit or create divisions. Is there any possibility to escalate the issue with your immediate manager?
> How to fight back when you see this happening at line management level, but not yet proliferated to upper management?
Vote with your feet, if you don't like it?
Best course of action is symmetrical response.
What makes you think so?
Usually, the sanest recourse in these kinds of situations is to cut your losses and vote with your feet.
It may feel satisfying, but it risks escalating tensions and fostering more division rather than solving the core issue.
I’m gonna dip into politics a bit for my assertion that “fight racism with racism” isn’t a great move, either for the societal long term or the personal/legal short term.
That is the entire premise of DEI initiatives. It's yet another "an eye for an eye".
This is a delusional and hateful lie.
Are you claiming positive discrimination has not been advanced under the banner of DEI, or that it has but wasn't true DEI?
You could perhaps assume idealism in 2020. Four years later it is clear that DEI is used as a wedge to displace those you do not like and replace them with unskilled believers.
From your comment, I'm guessing you're talking about the first consequence of DEI policies?
- Using candidates' loud belief in DEI as a litmus test, even if the candidate themselves has no diverse characteristics
- Hiring diverse candidates
DEI is hardly about unskilled alternatives.
It’s only about getting people to the table who are equally qualified and capable and overlooked and under represented.
Often to the chagrin of most people who are lamenting on it changing.
Please don't take this personally, or as an attack on you. But having seen DEI first-hand, and the "equally qualified" people it has actively displaced and disenfranchised, I'd have to say that this view avoids the ugly reality on the ground wrt DEI. There is an entire country currently affected by it's poor implementation, and it's failure is just seen as more reason for efforts to be doubled and for more-extreme quotas to be put in place.
There's nothing personal to take. So you shouldn't take it personally.
Perhaps, instead we can think about how could it be taken it professionally..
There's equal or better qualified candidates for every position that don't make it to the table because of existing gatekeeping.
That would likely have the effect of helping borderline candidates who can fail upwards, maybe do that a little less... or level up.
What's curious is the presumption that one persons experience or interpretation (yours) doesn't mean a better perspective, experience can't exist.
Is it possible you might not be the only one experiencing DEI?
Gatekeeping has been a thing that's existed for a very, very, very long time. Often to the benefit of many of the people complaining about new kinds of space-making that affect gatekeeping that they didn't realize benefitted them.
This current wave of DEI is definitely early. It's not perfect. Neither was the gatekeeping that preceded it.
Other things that were early got a lot more leeway and understanding. But it can shows what some folks want to see happen (or not happen) one way or the other.
Have you been on the receiving end of DEI? The same way a minority has been on the receiving end of racism?
We can all wax lyrical and paint pretty pictures about the noble goals of DEI. But till we get an equal and fair world, the ugly picture is that DEI starts by dividing the pie into smaller parts, and taking from one to give to another, instead of making the pie bigger for everyone.
And if history is anything to go by, most "DEI"-like efforts never ever reach that end-goal. They perpetuate indefinitely until they create yet another oppressed or previously-disadvantaged class, and the cycle will just repeat.
The biggest problem with DEI policies in practice was that companies entrusted HR to implement them.
HR at most companies doesn't do nuance or complexity.
DEI is more about getting equally qualified candidates to the table that are ignored or missed.
Yes that makes it more competitive.
Or less-competitive at an advantage to some and both others if it stayed the same way.
That's the motte of the DEI motte-and-bailey. The bailey contains policies like race based quotas or preferential treatment.
Race based quotas seem like very US things.
Theres lots of ways to improve hiring.
If holding space for equally qualified candidates is preferential treatment, is it having to exist because of the gatekeeping that existed before it?
Still, it remains important for any practice to do a good job of helping everyone understand how it's working better.
Too often companies jump to signal trends and keep doing whatever they were all along. Like organizations who's leadership looks nothing like the pool of qualified candidates in the respective country.
Oh that may be the "on-paper" goal of DEI, and I'd be all for it if it stayed that way; it sounds very very fair. But it never stays that way, and quotas enter the picture before long.
Tricky and slippery rationalizations are something I try to be mindful of.
I put forward a single simple point. Since it's resonating in a response, it might be worth considering why, and see how our viewpoints form and how much of it might be rooted in isolating emotions like fear.
In discussing, an open mind to me is one that can openly entertain a viewpoint that isn't their own, and seeing if they're open to growing or changing their viewpoint.
Maybe.. the way your country does DEI is trying to do the opposite of the race based separation it did prior and doesn't know if any other levers exist?
One nice thing is you're inheriting the world and can help make it the way you think it should be instead of wanting to be a passive beneficiary of past gatekeeping baselines.
Hypothetically speaking... could openly entertain a viewpoint that isn't our own.. be similar to believing software could be better, if it was only improved, by trying to improve ourselves and building software better?
> DEI is more about getting equally qualified candidates to the table that are ignored or missed.
This is the first time I've heard that. The normal party line is that, yes, they're worse at the job but it's because they never got the opportunity to learn. You can observe in colleges that DEI-appointed students do massively worse overall despite probably being given even more leeway than normal students.
Wow, ok. So that kind of idea is really completely new, so it can't be valid?
I think it's pretty easy to go learn the spectrum of DEI.
The world is generally run with gatekeeping, which means withholding access to opportunity to improve one's life to a selected group for a long time.
It's possible that your country may codify gatekeeping and privilege, and the only way they may know how is to do the same thing in the opposite way.
It might not be a good way of holding space for qualified candidates to get to the same table, or even, not allowing an average person to "get a chance" to fail upwards except if you're from one background.
The relevance of DEI shouldn't be held exclusively with its implementation at any given time, as long as it's improving. Kind of like software, maybe.
I'm not sure where your observation is based on - happy to learn and read from any studies though beyond anecdotal differences.
It would be like generalizing that lots of rich kids end up doing nothing as well after their parents pay for their way into and school. Doesn't make it true as a generalization of everyone though.
> Wow, ok. So that kind of idea is really completely new, so it can't be valid?
Theoretically it could be, but you should be aware if your argument directly contradicts years of other people advocating for DEI. The idea being sold isn't "we need jobs to be more merit based" but "we don't have enough merit and have to discriminate".
> It's possible that your country may codify gatekeeping and privilege, and the only way they may know how is to do the same thing in the opposite way.
My country, the US, codifies that you're not allowed to racially discriminate. Somehow this doesn't stop people from declaring that we must explicitly perform racially discrimination in order to offset some perceived discrimination.
> The relevance of DEI shouldn't be held exclusively with its implementation at any given time, as long as it's improving. Kind of like software, maybe.
The relevance is that I'm a race it explicitly disadvantages, and so it my family. It's illegal, racial discrimination is apparently immoral when it's done to anyone else, and it needs to go.
> I'm not sure where your observation is based on - happy to learn and read from any studies though beyond anecdotal differences.
Go look at medical schools. High scoring Whites and Asians are about as likely to get in as extremely poorly performing Black students.
https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/med1.jpg?x850...
Thanks for sharing.
Your country, explicitly codifies race based tracking in universities, long before this DEI wave. It's so incredibly wack. Other countries have better language to identify anything unique and under-represented, and maybe are less awkward but still awkward at it.
Historically, the creation of places of higher learning in the US were not created for women to be accepted, let alone people of color.
It's helpful to take a more historical look at how those pesky college application forms got the checkboxes they did, and how they were added at the moments of change in the particular decade. Imagine all the people who don't get counted.
What kind of system names an entire group of people a whole continent like Asia? :)
There is historical merit to people not being counted... not counting... or existing.. or qualifying as human enough to vote.
When it comes to data.. what gets measured, gets managed.. and maybe some of the wording of what got measured had some unconscious bias.
It's also not about whataboutism seeking a perfect solution to undermine change that is trying to be better for more people.
I have some international experience in the academic industry and student data collection, management, etc. Race based data in the US always stands out compared to other countries.
While it's true that disadvantaged children regardless of background can have similar challenges, its no contest that people of color experience it so very much more.
Discrimination starts with the contract that there is a privileged contract place prior to it being adjusted for said offence.
There are awful references to suggesting people of color "work harder" .. maybe that is advice for everyone?
I'm not going to participate in taking shots at any one group of students, especially black students who are way more disadvantaged per capita than any other.
About the med-school link - isn't it a little dated (and risking a stereotype) to believe that the best grades are the only thing important about getting into med school? Great doctors are well rounded people who connect with and help all walks of life - understanding people is a key skill beyond maniacal memorization and regurgitation for years of study to only stop and impossibly be behind research after graduation.
It is if you look at it in a divisive, "us" vs "them" fashion. However, it's to try and make up for hundreds or more years of active suppression and exclusion from society and opportunities.
Ask yourselves, who paid for your education? Was it pulled up by the bootstraps rags-to-riches, or did you get help from e.g. family? Where did you grow up, and how did that contribute to your current career / life?
Now imagine you didn't have those opportunities, because your family (going back generations) never was able to build up generational wealth and comfort.
DEI is an attempt to make up for that. Is it ideal? No. Does it come across as discrimination to the priviledged people / classes? Sure. Does it personally affect you? Probably not, but I don't know you (generalised you, the reader).
That said, if you don't like DEI, vote and act accordingly. Work to make sure everyone earns a liveable wage, owns a house, gets a good education and consequent steady job opportunities regardless of familial wealth. Be and act anti-racist and anti-classist, because it's not enough to simply "not be racist".
>All these culture things (except for the first regarding PO which is spit-in-the-face level of unprofessionalism) add up,
you said it yourself, the first one was unprofessional and should be avoided and may be cause for action. The other things, learn to live as the minority in a group and accept what the group values.
I mean maybe your colleagues follow suit about eating Indian food because Indian food is delicious? "Hey you guys know a good Indian food place around here - that's great!" would be my response.
It sounds like they do have a group with its own values.
Imagine being autistic and rarely having that bonding you talk about, and certainly not with entire teams.
It is hard only about the first 10 years. Then you'll learn to stop worrying and love that. And the whole country will get closer to that with the first Indian President. And there will also be the first Chinese, and the first Hispanic Presidents. World is changing. And the "fighting back" is like pissing against the wind.
For some reason that sounds like how white men are described in general, in many quarters now.
Now imagine being a minority. You're white colleagues making white jokes. Hiring only white people. Going to white restaurants. Etc... I like when a privileged class gets a contact high of the real world for so many and can't handle it. Employment discrimination is one thing. Having friends and going to lunch is another. For the record, as a white man I've never met, in my entire life, a single Indian person who refused to be friends with me and was only friends with other Indian people. I'm sure they exist. There are ass holes everywhere. This is not an epidemic. However, your response reeks of privilege. "How is it possible I'm not on top?!?!?"
I think thats an unfair reading of the comment you replied to - racist and exclusionary behaviour is rightly no longer tolerated in policy intent (if not always in actuality) at professional corporations.
The issue highlighted here is that it seems at times that there are exceptions that people are afraid to call out and criticise, especially at lower levels.
I don’t have an opinion if someone is wondering whether one of those cultures is more worthwhile to seek acceptance. But I learned a lot about exclusion from an Indian coworker who was not heterosexual.
> You're white colleagues making white jokes. Hiring only white people. Going to white restaurants.
Pretty sure white people aren't mass immigrating to India and doing this there.
Eat Pray Love?
What a surprise, racism is imbedded in Indian culture...
My guess would be that a lot of non-Indians at these companies are rejected on the basis of "vibes"; which is slightly different from racism as I explain below, although it probably ends up having the same net effect as overt racism.
As an Indian, I've observed that collectivism and subservience towards authority figures are taught as virtues; this obviously makes it quite easy for employers to extract unreasonable demands such as long working hours, transgressions of ethical limits, things that are "bad", but that generates benefits for the employer.
On the other hand, European and American societies generally focus on individualism and autonomy, which obviously causes a conflict when an Indian hiring manager sees anything other than complete deference to them as a threat, and proceeds to reject such candidates.
>collectivism and subservience towards authority figures are taught as virtues
Remind me to never fly on a plane piloted by an Indian flight crew.
(Protip: If you can't stand up to your captain, your plane is going down.)
See cultural `power-distance`.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_culture_on_aviation_...
> Remind me to never fly on a plane piloted by an Indian flight crew.
(Protip: If you can't stand up to your captain, your plane is going down.)
Not sure if you're joking, but this is actually cited as one of the reasons behind one crash.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_India_Express_Flight_134...
Same with South Korean airline crashes: https://www.salon.com/2013/07/10/cnn_asks_if_koreas_hierarch... But who knows if any of this is true or if "hierarchical cultures cause airline crashes" is just pop-sci bs.
Still very rarely, just significantly more often
As a casual observer, their culture seems to include considerable classism; to the degree that 'where are you from?' appears to be an extremely common and loaded question [saved for the locals]. I only recognize it because it exists in mine, not a judgement.
Don't tiptoe around the topic. By class you mean caste. As a white guy who has worked in tech for 25+ years and has made many Indian friends, I continue to be astounded by how fixated many (obviously not all) of them are on caste. In particular, how much time and effort gets spent trying to suss out each others' caste by asking questions like you noted. Every time we get a new Indian team member and the existing ones start asking him where his parents are from and I see him start to uncomfortably evade answering while all of the other non_Indians in the room have no idea what is happening, it starts to make ME feel uncomfortable.
Can't tiptoe around words I don't know :P I did say 'casual observer'! Thank you for sharing, reading to do. Seems related to my frustrations as a low-born but now well-made American.
edit: I say 'seems' here lightly; a system is conveniently reinforced by depriving participants words and the ability (or even desire) to identify. Time and time again the gut feeling is a well-established thing.
I hope that the caste system is on its way out though, although for that to really happen there need to be long-term societal reforms, just like with classism in e.g. Europe. Especially in the UK, working/middle/upper class is still very much a thing.
Caste is a disease for sure. Divides people for the benefit of dividers and the few..
And as an Indian who has lived for 25+ years in India, I continue to be astounded by how fixated white guys like you are on caste when I have never once witnessed caste-based discrimination in my life, despite belonging to a categorized "originally backward" caste.
That exists in the EU as well, although certainly not to the same extent.
If you've never felt it, that just means you're from the countries that look down on other european countries :)
Interesting projection. Do I understand you correctly, you know that other countries look down on you because you think they do?
Classism exists basically everywhere. The most obvious example is the country bumpkin, he's gonna have a hard time impressing a metropolitan.
I’m not talking about classism (or racism), but about xenophobia.
What do you think the difference is between those?
Indian society can be pervaded by a grotesque shadow practice of caste which still exists today.
And it's been used in the US by Indians who practice caste-centric Hinduism who feel they are at a certain step of the caste ladder to those below them, or non-Hindus.
Racism is embedded in every culture to some extent. As always it depends on the details.
not a cultural reason, it's financial, they wanted to pay less to Americans.
But, western countries do not need to tolerate it. If we are importing the third world en-masse, we should also make sure that they respect the Judeo-Christian foundations of the West, and leave their ideas behind when they leave their countries.
I believe you to be a culture war bot or shill, given your standpoints and hiding behind a new account.
First off, third world is an archaic word, it stopped being relevant after the cold war ended. Using that now is a clear dogwhistle.
Second, you mention Judeo-Christian foundations, isn't one of the base tenents of that to "love your neighbour"? Anyway, that too is archaic, as most developed countries have a clear separation of church, state, and culture ever since the Enlightenment. It's a shame the US seems to be backsliding.
Western countries aren't strong or desirable because of narrow minded monotheistic religion.
Every culture has some good and bad traits. Ideally immigration makes us all better as we learn from one another. Isolated cultures tend to become stagnant and weaker over time.
I do expect new arrivals to acculturate, not to Judeo-Christian values but rather to liberalism. (In the philosophical sense, not the bastardized way the term is used in American politics.)
This is because liberalism evolved as a response to sectarianism and developed tools to allow people with different worldviews to live and work together.
It's the same as saying all whites are racist. Both are wrong.
If you put it like that, all humans and cultures can be racist, xenophobic and discriminatory to others who they don't like, but Indian culture is infamous for its caste system built on discriminating the other Indians of lower castes.
It's similar to how white people from developed rich countries routinely discriminate other white people from poorer less developed countries, except they have much better PR and washing on it than India's caste system which is out in the open.
It's nothing to do with skin color or ethnicity in the end, it's all to do with wealth and social status, and people are always trying to climb up the status ladder, and that usually implies bootlicking those with higher status, and kicking down the ladder on those with lower status.
If you zoom out and look at this issue more abstractly, we're still acting like those groups of apes you see on National Geographic documentaries.
I'm American and we're infamous for lots of things.
"What did America give the world besides Cheerios, George Bush and the Thigh-Master™?"
- Jean Girard
There are only four things (US) do better than anyone else: music, movies, microcode (software), and high-speed pizza delivery.
- Neal Stephenson
>(US) do better than anyone else: music, movies
That was true till 10-20 years ago or so when we had things like the Matrix and Lord of the Rings, but most of the modern entertainment content coming out of the US right now is not only low quality predictable slop but also filled with US-centric political messaging, identity politics and virtue signaling that nobody else outside the US identifies with or wants to pay for. Taht why so many bomb.
And most of those are being challenged... except maybe high-speed pizza delivery.
Reading this piece right now. better late than never!
Some people say it to mean that. But another perspective is that there can be racist structures which do not sit in any one individual. So you can be personally non-racist but somewhat trapped in such structures. If you go against the grain, you can risk life-and-limb (hey, Godwin!) or in a less extreme setting, socially ostracized.
>> that there can be racist structures which do not sit in any one individual. So you can be personally non-racist
This is exactly what I understand under “racist culture”, certainly not “all indians are racist”
I don't think everyone is racist but I do believe that everyone has strong tribal preference. In my opinion, people feel most comfortable around those who are most like them. This is why you can look at any food market, friend group, etc. and see so few groups of people of mixed cultures. It's very natural. Racism is when you discriminate against another race/culture, even if it's just "he speaks my language, I can understand him better.."
I do not understand “… is in culture X” same as “all X are …”
There's a not insignificant group of people who go out of their way to avoid their culture. So no, they are not the same.
To say that some quality is embedded in a culture isn’t even close to the same as saying all people originating from that culture possess that quality. The extent to which India’s (racist) caste system is embedded in its culture is hardly up for serious debate, the influence it has in India has basically been proven by science at this point.
> https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/the-caste-system-has...
A hypothetical claim that all Indians are racist would clearly be absurd, but it’s hardly surprising to find a group of Indians practicing something that is openly part of their native culture.
Can I say then - what a surprise a blanket racist statement. And to add comments by others on how superior their culture is. Must be a American/European.
Racism is embedded in human nature and in every culture. Though it takes different forms. I don't think "Indians" deserve any special mention on that one.
It's telling that we're quick to ascribe anything bad to "human nature" while balking at the notion that anything positive might also be human nature. Greed and exploitation? Yes, absolutely, human nature, nothing you can do about it. Racism? Totally human nature, just look at this random animal species. Cooperation, trust, hospitality? No, those must be unique virtues expressed only by the pure of heart or the naive, just think of the wolves.
Nevermind that "race" as a concept did not exist in the modern sense in Western cultures prior to colonization despite the exposure to other peoples with other skin tones from other parts of the world. Nevermind that cooperation and aiding the weak and forming alliances has been the only thing keeping us alive as naked, defenseless animals that need to sustain our young for years before they can carry their weight, feed themselves, let alone fend for themselves.
Before there was race there were tribes. Which goes back to the very roots of humanity.
There were also species, denisovans, Neanderthals etc.
With respect, it can be hard to see the nuance in this if you're from the US (a country that is so racist even the government openly practices it, but sanctimonious enough to pretend it is instead free).
> Nevermind that "race" as a concept did not exist in the modern sense in Western cultures prior to colonization despite the exposure to other peoples with other skin tones from other parts of the world.
https://x.com/MohabMo5102/status/1494070281731809281?mx=2
Also someone please tell me why were harems in Mamlukian and Ottoman courts largely filled with Slavic and Circassian men and women?
Some of the reasons why this is happening :
-> Getting an assignment in the US is viewed as a reward for employees who work in the company for 5+ years.
-> H1B visa employess are given a 50% minimum discount to market rate. cause lol what are you gonna do . Quit and go back in the Queue for H1B.
-> nepotism / favoritism self explanatory.
-> Are more willing to work 40+ hours a week. Less likely to take vacations.
These are the observations of myself and members of my family who are from India.
Is that discount really true? There is a definite discount but I have never seen 50%, all of this data is online, you can see the payroll for H1B employees.
thanks for the ref , but it kinda proves the point . your source suggests the avg comp for senior software engineer is 100-150 K . on glass door it 178-263 . https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/senior-software-engineer-... .
Your analysis is flawed. Its much better to run through a FAANG and compare to levels.fyi. I just did for Meta and the base salary numbers are within the ranges I saw on Levels. Actual level is not outlined so its a broad range.
These numbers are set using prevailing wage calculations for a geographical area and role. There is an incentive for companies to figure out ways to get it as low as possible but I have never seen 50% myself, that is a hard stretch to pass the DOL.
so your telling me my analysis is flawed because i didnt take META as a base. MY guy the article is about CTS. NOT META.
H1B is to tech what H2A is for agriculture . Yall want to Drive the combine ( Managment, Software development, VC ) but dont want to do the dirty work ( QA, Devops, IT admin )
>Yall want to Drive the combine ( Managment, Software development, VC ) but dont want to do the dirty work ( QA, Devops, IT admin )
Woah, less caps and racist thoughts and more critical thinking please. I am saying taking a simple average between the two like you did is flawed for a number of reasons.
1) You don't even have an apples to apples comparison. H1B data is based on prevailing wage which is just base pay. So taking your link, 129K - $171K/yr comparing to your other data, 100-150k. Lets take a simple average. and say the glassdoor wage is 150k, that means 50% minimum, remember you said minimum, is 75k. That does not really track with 125k.
2) Prevailing wage is based not only on the role but the geographical location too. An overall average between those two datasets is a very rough guide and I think its better to do direct comparisons at a company level or regional level. Again there is still a lot of normalization and cleanup to do in the datasets, the H1B data is not great for analysis right out of the gate.
Your case of a minimum 50% reduction in base pay is hard to defend except in outlier cases. If it was closer to 25% I think its a much easier number to defend.
so you would admit that a 25% diff in base pay would be plausible . so would you also admit a 25% diff in benifits would also be plausible . granted the total diff would work out to somewhere around 30~40% range , but i still hold if we are comparing true apple to apple and we exclude FAANG , we would most likely get in the 50% range.
Some emphasis should be made on the total percentage of H1B applicants 75% are Indian and at-least ~90% of those are in the TECH working for CTS, TCS both are consulting firms They dont sell any products or services (and dont have offices in SF). They survive by giving the lowest bid for a service . And when the minimum wage is the lower bound why bother paying any higher (60-75% discount), This was the case prior to trump. After Trump H1Bs became scarce and to justify it you needed "highly skilled" employees and they made the paygap more justifiable to 45-50%.
So i still hold my original statement H1B is for tech what H2A is for agriculture.
> so you would admit that a 25% diff in base pay would be plausible . so would you also admit a 25% diff in benifits would also be plausible . granted the total diff would work out to somewhere around 30~40% range , but i still hold if we are comparing true apple to apple and we exclude FAANG , we would most likely get in the 50% range.
25% of the pieces summed would be 25% of the whole. I am not sure how we hand wave to 30-40% and then jump to 50%. Your 50% minimum is still dubious but hey go with it!
I have personally experienced this in all my previous projects and my current one.
H1B does suppress wages as employees don’t care how much they are paid. They only care that they stay on H1 so they get their green cards.
However, one they get their green card they feel the same that H1B’s suppress wages…lol…
Eh, your not wrong but my counter point is when I have looked up people before in the public data, their salary was in line what I and others were making in the same role. The H1B data does not list name but it is detailed enough that you can generally guess who it is in small-medium size companies.
I just posted this comment with a new account to check how easily hearsay influences people's opinions with no backing, whatsoever. I hope this thread will stay up as a reminder to stay civil and not get carried away by clouded judgement.
I hear you, brother. I am an Indian Muslim and I have essentially stopped considering any company that has a considerable number of Indians. I actively filter these companies out when searching for jobs. The daily micro-aggressions are detrimetal to my mental health, and I have finally come to terms that this is beyond my power to reform, hence my decision to simply ignore. This is sad, really really sad.
I can relate. Countless awful experiences but avoidance seems futile. Filtering out these work environments pre-hire is difficult and also, environments change. I've been cut out of information chains by the "Indian mafia" and sidelined in financially impacting ways. It's a terrible feeling when you first realize how outgunned you are and how cohesive they are in their tactics. I find it more scary than sad actually because of how unconstrained by empathy and ethics their mob approach is towards anyone they perceive as a challenge to their hegemony. It's actually one of my biggest issues with working in the tech sector and I don't see any way around it.
How is this discrimination manifested? How do these managers know your country of origin?
An Indian person can spot a Pakistani (and vice versa) easily. There’s a good bit of historical enmity between the two nations.
Does this apply to castes as well? I mean in western Europe you can often pick out the classism based on how people dress, have their hair and what their accent is (I'm very obvious because of my "provincial" accent and terrible sense of style, lol).
Classism in the Netherlands isn't too bad though, unless you're from the old aristocracies (they live in certain areas, go to private schools, often have archaic letter combos like Y, AE, CK, or apostrophes in their multi-word surnames, etc [1]), they definitely live on their own island. Often end up in politics, too, because so it goes.
[1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lijst_van_Nederlandse_adellijk...
> Classism in the Netherlands isn't too bad though
Wait until they figure out you earn less than them. "You cannot understand [rich people bs 'struggle']" I've had the misfortune of hearing over and over again, them showing a complete lack of any form of empathy for anyone except their own class.
No? I am an Indian living in India, and if a Pakistani person were to live next door I wouldn't be able to make it out unless he told me himself.
Im neither but I can tell a Pakistani accent from an Indian one. Is that not the case there?
And you would certainly know if you were working with someone, at least here.
I suppose I have spent a lot of time with Indian Americans but not as much with Indians in India (just zoom calls) so that’s interesting.
>>A lot of hatred passes unnoticed beacuse of the lumping together of the South Asian immigrants in all discussions.
>How do these managers know your country of origin?
The irony.
Pakistani’s are almost always Muslim (due to Partition [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India]), and will often act and speak differently in several telltale ways for anyone who knows what to look for. Both given and family/surnames are also often telltales.
And if you think Casteism is a bitch, Pakistani/Indian (or Indian Hindu vs Indian Muslim) is a bitch and a half. Just try to apply for a visa for India and see how many times they ask if you or any of your relatives are from Pakistan to get a taste.
Edit: ooh, downvotes away. Hah! No better way to tell when you hit a nerve than the torches come out.
Since there's a lot of negativity about Indians in the comments here:
I just worked for a startup with many Indians (including the founder). It was all fine, and I liked my coworkers. I can understand that other people had different experiences: companies and people differ.
For context, everything was remote, and I worked from Singapore. I'm not India, but I do like to prepone my meetings.
The big problem are WITCH companies (of which "C" is for Cognizant usually) and those that, through osmosis or purposeful actions, copy their practices.
The contracting companies probably single-handed build and maintain lots of racist stereotypes against indians, because the level of service those companies offer is always unmitigated failure, even internally. I once accidentally stumbled into working on a contract through WiPro myself, and it was a horrific experience. The way I see it, the line workers that end up the target of ire and stereotypes are just victims of actions taken way above them.
The people who can, apparently avoid working for them, or use every opportunity to escape. Those who can't yet but have ambition for more, apparently use every opportunity to escape - whether it is by jumping ship on H1B, or otherwise. Those currently stuck are in no way encouraged to do a good job, and for obvious cost cutting you get people who were in no way prepared to do the job.
Occasionally a client will get angry enough and they will pull an actually skilled person to smooth the ruffled feathers, someone they usually trot for dog&pony show when winning the contract as example of who is supposed to work on it.
But the "important" people, upper management who decide to contract with WITCH, and the upper management of WITCH who run such strategy, they all profit. The managers and/or C-level who outsource sight-unseen with no quality enforcement disappear with their rewards before institutional inertia stops papering over their decisions. The WITCH companies pocket huge amounts of money while paying pittance to line workers and providing worse than zero service.
Yeah, that sounds pretty dreadful.
A few jobs ago, when I was working for a third-tier legacy bank, my manager joked that all the outsourcing they were doing was actually really useful and pragmatic, because it means they can fail their IT projects cheaper. (The implication being that their projects were by and large inevitably doomed anyway.)
basically, currently even if the market is shit, I try to avoid working with companies that tend to have a lot of indians, and indians managers. :(
I wrote about this in another comment, but I've typically found that public US companies hiring a majority of Indian/Indian-origin staff seem to perform (in market cap terms) on par with companies have just 10% of their total employee headcount.
Even if true it doesn't prove anything because the arrow of causation could go either way. These businesses could be already worse from a financial or working environment perspective, and thus unable to hire from a pool of workers who have more options.
Source? Would be an interesting finding if there were figures behind it.
Do you have a link to your other comment?
Everyone on Blind says this all day, and thats basically an Indian social network
I've personally experienced Indian cronyism at Deutsche Bank in the early 2000s. It's a rough approximation, but the liberal elite who run the Democratic party and the MSM never concede any racism unless perpetrated by whites (preferably males). And this is why, despite Trump being a monster, I will probably vote for him.
Damm Microsoft its crazy company
I am seeing the flight to low cost countries now termed as "Best" cost countries is afoot in Europe. Germany has shot itself in the foot by destroying its energy sector. Now that the energy prices have shot through the roof most of the industries are going to get outsourced. The thirst for cheap labour and where the laws especially labour laws are lax is a wet dream for management.
Hm, the available data does not support your point/sentiment that energy prices are increasing for industrial customers in Germany. (see https://www.bdew.de/service/daten-und-grafiken/bdew-strompre... or https://www.statista.com/statistics/1050448/industrial-elect...)
From https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/industry-electricity-pr...
> Economist and economy ministry advisor Jens Südekum called the analysis’s results “astonishing.” Commenting on social media platform X, Südekum pointed out that industry prices had fallen “significantly” and that price indicators continued to point downwards. The trend would be similar for private households, albeit at a slower pace, he argued. Once current contracts expire, Südekum said lower prices should become widespread in new ones. “Overall, the BDEW figures don’t chime with current mood in debates, which is that everything is going down the drain due to high energy prices,” he argued.
Well, electricity consumption has fallen quite a bit, because energy intensive industries (like chemical industry) already left the country. Energy prices are still high (not as high as 2022) and they would probably be much higher if those industries were still there.
Unfortunately there is little reason to invest in Germany at the moment. It will get worse(they are already announcing an increase in health insurance rates) before it will get better.
FWIW there was a huge surge in energy costs following the war in Ukraine (due to the reduction in supply of Russian gas) which was dampened by the government with a subsidized price cap at 0.40€/kWh - for consumers anyway, as far as I'm aware there were different subsidies for industry.
But consumer prices have largely stabilized at a range of 0.25€ - 0.35€ although you'll also find some prices listed as low as 0.20€ or less if you are willing to price hop a lot.
Apparently there will also be price cuts in the North and East of Germany as well as Bavaria in the near future but I don't know the specifics of that.
> FWIW there was a huge surge in energy costs following the war in Ukraine (due to the reduction in supply of Russian gas)
And due to the fact that they decided to shut down the last nuclear power plants directly after that, which further reduced supply and until today I consider this one of the most stupid political decisions ever made.
I think the 4.1 percent that nuclear was providing was not having the impact you are assuming. Also the amount of energy produced by natural gas and renewables more than offset the cost of nuclear.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
The comments on this story are very interesting - not in the good way. This rhetoric is very similar to previous ones that existed in over the decades like Jewish/Polish/Chinese/etc people only doing business with other people of their groups. Or democrats/republicans in deep blue/red states sticking with their own.
Back to the topic:
I know a lot of 2nd, 3rd generation Indians who definitely do not fit the stereotypes.
What we're likely seeing is the effect of three things:
- Indian has a very community based dynamic that prioritizes group identity over individual identities, a number of folks have never experienced being outside their groups
- Newly arrived Individual are likely experiencing culture shock, it happens to most people. It's very much a fight or flight response. People either choose the tribe they know, or find a new one. The later is rare
- Most other ethnic groups we're hearing about took a few generations to get to white collar jobs, they already understood local norms, because these were their norms. We're seeing a lot of 1st generation Indians (and some other groups) start in white collar professions, and that will play out differently.
I think it's offloading well known problematic companies issues like Cognizant onto nationality.
It's the nature of service that WITCH prefers to provide and puts people in position where it's hard to change it, and the executives who contract with WITCH.
Good point. That initialism is new to me, I can see how companies that fall into that group can be problematic.
