
How Indian IT Workers Discriminate Against Non Indian Workers - edandersen
https://www.brightworkresearch.com/enterprisesoftwarepolicy/2019/01/31/how-indian-it-workers-discriminate-against-non-indian-workers/
======
middleclick
The caste system is very much a part of Indian society even though the law
forbids discrimination on the basis of it. Anyone who tells you otherwise -
that there is no caste system anymore - is lying or is from one of the upper
castes and therefore don't know what it feels like to be a non-Brahmin.

My parents didn't believe in the caste system, were opposed to it strongly and
therefore it's impossible to figure out which caste I am from just by my name
(ambiguous last name). I can't count the number of times people have tried to
fish for information about my caste. Some ask me directly while others try to
be "more polite" about the question. I just smile and tell them I am not
telling you because it's not relevant and I don't believe in it. This makes
them _very_ upset. Then some of these people try to make guesses based on the
colour of my skin (light skin in India is consider superior and dark skin is
looked down upon), my height and other characteristics.

And this has happened not just in India but more so in the US and Canada,
where I now live.

~~~
amriksohata
" is lying or is from one of the upper castes and therefore don't know what it
feels like to be a non-Brahmin."

Seriously brahmins barely make up 5% of Indians. Before British rule, Indians
switched caste just like people move between classes in the UK. The British
used caste as a divide and rule tool to create further wedges between
different castes so it was easier to rule them all.

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-
india-48619734](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-48619734)

[https://www.jerusalemonline.com/how-the-british-empire-
inven...](https://www.jerusalemonline.com/how-the-british-empire-invented-the-
caste-system-to-control-india-35730/)

~~~
gauku
I'm not much educated on the subject and hope to read more one day but a few
weeks ago I found this twitter response from an associate professor of history
which begs to differ with you on this.

[https://twitter.com/achakrava/status/1141945588482625536](https://twitter.com/achakrava/status/1141945588482625536)

Though Would like to add the that original brightwork article sounds like a
conspiracy theory

~~~
amriksohata
If you read the vishnupuran there are various stories of how khastriyas
(warriors) became teachers (brahmins) and vice versa. Even ashwatamma was
called the son of a brahmana, his father was Drona, a Brahmin, but he was
referred to as a son of a Brahmin because of his alliance with the crown
prince Duryodhana and deeds he was determined more of a warrior

~~~
gauku
I think you missed a lot of time jumping from Vishnupuran to when British
arrived. And are we already believing Mahabharatha to be not just a work of
fiction?

------
belltaco
>Unless you’re Indian, don’t even think about applying to Microsoft, Hewlett
Packard, Adobe, many federal and state gov’ts, Google, Apple, T-Mobile, Dell,
etc.

That's it guys. Pack it up, this Quora commenter is omniscient. To solve this
problem at Microsoft, fire Satya Nadella because he's from Hyderabad, Andhra
Pradesh. After all, he's a no-talent and was only hired by a board of Telugu
speaking Brahmins because he belonged to their caste, right?

Wonder what other narratives can be built from cherry picked frog-in-the-well
anecdotes on Quora? Pretty much anything you want to.

Here's the truth: A high percentage of resumes you normally get are Indian.
Plus, the green card situation has made it hard for such folks to switch jobs,
so they are almost guaranteed to work for several years reducing training
costs. Some anecdotes in the article may be true but apply to only very
specific cases. Trying to apply this to a broad set of people from one region
in India is a conspiracy theory with no footing.

Infosys, Tata, HCL etc. will recruit anyone as long as they can pay them less,
and make more money from them. Also, the courts have ruled that workplace
discrimination based on immigration status is legal. i.e You can legally dump
more work on someone that's not a citizen, because they're not a citizen.

As an aside, all the grammatical mistakes in the article don't inspire
confidence in the author.

~~~
_iyig
Oof, yeah. That ridiculous anecdote throws the rest of the article under
shadow.

------
strikelaserclaw
This whole article sounds like a hit piece against Indians. "I can personally
vouch that your average Indian IT engineer is very ethnocentric, clannish, and
completely unamerican in every sense of the word", ...., sounds legitimate.
I've worked in many IT departments all over America. Yes there were many
Indians who worked there, but i don't think the reasons for this is as
nefarious as this article makes it sound. In general when i was working for a
small company, like 80% of the resume we got were Indians (Just by pure %
alone, we would have had to hire an Indian). Do people of same ethnic groups
show a unconscious bias for people of their kin ? Yes, but you will find this
among any group of people. Wasn't there an experiment where a White(Anglo)
sounding name got more callbacks for a job interview than a black sounding
name? In my experience, there was no Brahamin sitting up top as an overlord,
and the Indians i met were like any other group I've met, most were decent,
hard working, intelligent people.

~~~
ajross
> Wasn't there an experiment where a White(Anglo) sounding name got more
> callbacks for a job interview than a black sounding name?

There was. And it was really bad there, and deserved to be called out.
Likewise women in programming, etc... For the same reason, it's bad here, and
pointing out the bias is certainly not "a hit piece against Indians".

~~~
strikelaserclaw
If it was a slightly balanced article which pointed out some of problems in
the IT industry with regards to Indians, i would have fully endorsed it and
added my opinions on it, but it turned into essentially a one dimensional
attack backed by Quora quotes.

------
devxpy
Its so heartbreaking to read this.

And the worse part is that this is the culture that the education system
promotes from a very early age.

I have seen 6th graders divided into tribes based on how well they perform on
specialised tests that are essentially tickets to high paying corporate firms.

Instead of focusing on teaching kids the value, importance and the beauty of
STEM, we're teaching them how to game a stupid test and get ahead in a rat
race. No wonder you get such a tribal mindset out of all this!

And the scale is absolutely HUGE. We have around half a million students
actively preparing for this specialised test, which in practice involves
literally leaving school education for at least 2-3 years to prepare for this
monstrosity exclusively.

There's literally a whole city dedicated to tuitions for this one goddamn
test.

Just recently India removed the need for publishing Ph.D thesis to get a
degree because most of the research was just republication of already
published research, after slight modification.

And It's only getting worse with politicians getting into this game, and
literally manipulating children's textbooks, making an already broken
education system into a net negative for society :/

~~~
sn41
A STEM Ph.D from India here. The subject I most liked in school was grammar. I
can tell you why grammar, prosody and poetry are as beautiful (more so, imho)
as STEM. But in a third world country with limited opportunities, and for the
most part shitty universities (outside a few good engineering and medical
schools), had I followed my "passion" as so many ignoramuses on youtube
profess, instead of the more sensible STEM option, I would now be nowhere in
terms of an assured livelihood.

I agree with your sentiment. I hope that in the next generation, India will
become economically prosperous and following the subject of your interest will
become a viable way to lead your life. Until then, the grind working on a
subject that's a distant second choice cannot be avoided. I feel sorry for the
kids.

~~~
devxpy
That sounds about right. I am fortunate to have my interests and sense of
beauty mostly in alignment with STEM.

But the part that I want to emphasize on, is the pseudo-STEM that we as a
nation promote. This is a battle that G.H. Hardy seems to have fought before.

[http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Hardy_Tripos....](http://www-
history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Hardy_Tripos.html)

Particularly, the description of the Tripos as a "game", full of imaginative
tricks and stunts that are merely a figment of human imagination is very much
in resonance with the exam we have in India today.

In my experience, the "distant second choice" is not a first choice, even for
the STEM loving community :(. It benefits no one other than the tutors who
earn large bucks by mastering this game, which in reality, is far from the
game of nature, that engineers and scientists IMO are supposed to play!

------
throwaway8474
I am an Indian working at Facebook and can confirm that what the article says
is true. The team I work is 100% Indian and that is fairly common. Managers
hire not just based on "Indian" but the state where the applicant is from. The
Chinese also do it. This puts folks from other communities at a major
disadvantage and needs to be addressed.

~~~
throwaway6502
Just left big tech after seeing an entire branch of the company go this
direction. Zero management skills, either you didn't hear from them for weeks
at a time or they'd be on you aggressively... nothing in-between. Also, zero
training when being on-boarded.

The problem was everyone on an H1B visa would work any hours, pick their phone
up 24/7 etc. Effectively they were always on-call and for a lot of the
local/US engineering talent we disagreed with the "always-on" culture they
brought. They also contributed to that "always-on" culture by never finishing
work, pushing deliverables out the door with zero security review, no
documentation etc. It's also worth mentioning these budget teams of H1B
"engineers" come in and create their own cyclical work by constantly fixing
problems they caused. This is what happens when you treat engineering and
management as a "cost center" :(

Mostly though, it was insane to hear how blatant they were with bigoted
comments, like "we don't hire _those_ kind of Indians", and "if it wasn't for
foreign talent we'd have none at all." I felt the need to speak up on this one
but when you're a middle-aged white male you're not afforded the right to
speak up on any of this without being IMMEDIATELY labeled a racist (hence the
throwaway!).

------
nullwasamistake
There's some truth to this article but it's overtly racist by generalizing
"all" Indians to be this way. I've had Indian friends and co-workers over the
years openly admit that this happens, and that they hate it.

It's a side effect from hiring people from a culture with a caste system.

What should we do about it? No idea. A good start would be only allowing a
certain percent of hires from each country through the H1B program. You can
create a curturally mixed team without denying any visas.

~~~
carlmr
In my previous company we had one Indian employee. He had been in the company
for years and did very solid work. When my boss hired another Indian group
manager, he assigned the employee in question to that guys project. First the
new group manager was not shaking hands with him, not communicating with him
properly etc. We found out that the previous employee was from a lower caste,
and that the new group manager refused to work with him. The group manager was
then fired.

However this requires that the person in charge actually nips this kind of
behaviour in the bud. And the group manager had a 15 year career in a very big
company. So apparently he could do what he did without a problem for 15 years.

Of course the other employee (that we kept) was not happy about this "system".

~~~
throwaway6502
> First the new group manager was not shaking hands with him, not
> communicating with him properly etc.

Yeah - and for an American this is just the weirdest thing ever. I struggle
with this a lot and have been told to not equate it with racism - but what the
hell is it otherwise?

~~~
0815test
Well, I don't know about 'racism' but assuming that the behavior was
accurately reported, it _is_ prejudice, and fairly blatant discrimination. I
don't think people should get to be immune to criticism simply because of
their race or any such characteristics, that just doesn't seem right to me.

~~~
throwaway6502
You're 100% right - and it's just semantics.

It's just that I feel the R-word carries so much more weight on how we're
judging something. When I hear people talk down on other people like that I
have the same physical reaction of unease in my stomach that I have with the
classic "brown people are bad" American racism that I was taught to fight.

------
JulianMorrison
Everything substantive addressed here can be handled by proper and ruthless
application of anti-nepotism and anti-discrimination policies, cracking down
hard on abusive management styles, plus such tools as "blinding" the names and
addresses on CVs.

This seems like a severe memetic hazard for ill considered racist responses.

~~~
sn41
It's not that easy. I can easily find out which school, which school board and
college you graduated from. If you are not a graduate of an IIT, I will
conclude that you are subhuman. (By I, I mean a general recruiter.) None of
this needs names or addresses.

~~~
JulianMorrison
Then that's just more information to "blind", isn't it?

~~~
sn41
Sure, but it is hard to make a decision without knowing educational
background. That level of blinding is not really feasible. Unfortunately many
Bay Area recruitments happen based on IIT/Tsinghua snobbery, not the caste
system as others mention. Many Westerners do not know about this. For the most
part, this does not affect quality since they are the top Asian schools, and
their graduates are very competent.

There's a different level of nepotism promoted by insecure Indian managers -
this is to attract a bevy of cheap and deliberately chosen incompetent
engineers who are reliant on the manager for their sustenance and continuing
immigration status. This is where the trope of the incompetent Indian s/w
engineer comes from. A good example can be seen in the behaviour of Sunny
Balwani from Theranos - you can read about it in "Bad Blood".

------
_iyig
This is one failure mode of an open-ended immigration system. If you admit
large numbers of migrants in a short amount of time, they cannot possibly
assimilate quick enough to avoid forming cliques and bringing with them
certain problems from the old country. If these cliques and problems are big
enough, they attract the attention and ire of natives and other migrant
groups, and you wind up with new problems.

I don't know what the solution is. As a non-Indian tech worker in America,
I've had great 1:1 experiences with many Indian co-workers, but I've also
heard of and witnessed many of the problems described in the article.

------
shanth
Unpopular opinion for non Indians: People favor ones from same caste is very
unreal. They don't like to see others in same caste being as successful as
they are.

------
bobosha
This is someone who has an axe to grind against Indians and found "evidence"
to support his views. Such posts can be written about any ethnic group: Irish
in police and fireman, jews in banking, italians in construction, landscaping
companies etc. on and on...This is an embittered, disgruntled person's rant.
Hope s/he feels better after this.

------
LordAtlas
Well, that wasn't racist at all.

Isn't "Proof by Quora" a wonderful thing?

------
QuickToBan
People hire people that they can get along with. This is easy to overlook.

If truth be told, just statistically, non-Indian non-white minority women are
the hardest to get along with in a workplace. They routinely make false
complaints. I say this after more than a decade of workplace experience. If
there is one of them in the team, I wouldn't join the team.

