I worked in situations where things were outsourced and yeah the Indian experience was horrific. But that also was influenced by the nature of the relationship.... they didn't work "for us" in any real way.
I worked for a company where we (a Midwestern company) were acquired by a valley company and at HQ there was a clear divide between the Indian (US citizens, not H1B) folks and the local CA team. It wasn't bad, but you could see it socially and feel the vibe and such.
I traveled there a few times and I was just friendly and ... man they were great. Very friendly, very professional, and highly capable.
Sometimes I think the business relationships also creates the informal "working culture" too.
We once hired an Indian programmer who absolutely didn't get along with his boss, who was also Indian. Turns out the boss was a Dalit and the programmer was a Brahmin. And this is how I learned about the Indian Caste system.
I am of Indian descent. Apparently from the penultimate caste. Anyway, I had someone from another team inform me of the inferior caste of one of our clients, and why I shouldn’t take shit from them.
That said, going back to New Delhi, at least in the circles I travelled in, it’s incredibly taboo to ask about caste. (Comparable to Americans using the n word.)
I've learned it is normally pretty easy to tell what caste someone is from.
But watching a Brahmin who really believes they are vastly better than Dalits act like as arrogant as the Goa'uld from Stargate SG1 was really something.
> I've learned it is normally pretty easy to tell what caste someone is from
With all due respect, you’ve fooled yourself into ignorance.
Many Indians haven’t had a relationship with caste for generations, particularly in the cities or upper and middle classes. (Intermarriage and wealth have rendered it indiscernible.)
There are also something like 25,000 castes and subcastes. It’s not a system designed for anyone to get right. That convolutedness is almost the point. Moreover, there are tens of millions of Indians who have never had a caste because they belong to a different religion or sect of Hinduism.
> There are also something like 25,000 castes and subcastes.
That makes it sound like castes are professions (which IIRC used to be somewhat inherited in the UK, hence names like Smith and Cooper), but where people then tried to assign ranks to those professions (like the family names Bishop and King)?
I am almost totally ignorant of how it really works, but I'm an omni-curious nerd, if you want to enlighten me :)
Yup. In the West one of the Byzantine emperors calcified the economy by making trades heritable (Justinian?). We don't know the historic source of the same in India, just that it happened earlier and was allowed to develop for much, much longer.
With respect, it is you who has fooled themselves into ignorance.
If you are open to having your views challenged (and proven wrong), please listen to The Seen And the Unseen podcast, specifically the episode with Chandra Bhan Prasad.
I've heard of this claim so often that I assume it to be true, though personally I've only had the fortune to work in better environments where my Indian colleagues aren't nepotistic. I suspect this might be related to the hiring bar: if a company only hires the top talent perhaps this would not be an issue.
Unfortunately I think it depends on the number and position of Indian folks.
Small numbers where you deal with people individually, I've not seen issues and it's nice to work with Indian devs.
In larger numbers or when in charge of hiring, there seems to be a prevalent issue of Indian cultural norms and favors kicking in and it can happen fast.
The linked article is about a fraud conducted by a few bad apples. I can see people colluding with others that are similar to them for criminal activities - gangs, drug smuggling, and probably other frauds too. I am not sure how you inferred caste based nepotism among *all* indians in tech from that article.
For one, I didn't say "all Indians" are bad apples, just that the nepotism and cast issues are rampant enough that it's a know issue at this point in the tech industry where Indians are sometimes overrepresented.
Secondly, do you expect people to post links to all cases of Indian nepotism/cast issues in the tech industry, when Google is at your fingertips with enough cases that it's not an isolated incident? That link was one an Indian friend shared right now when I sent him the Subaru link, when I asked him if the nepotism is real.
Fair enough that you did not say all Indians. But, your statement was broad enough to say nepotism is widespread among Indians in tech. And the article you linked was about fraud which doesn’t imply widespread nepotism in tech. I am not asking for articles for all instances but something that is more relevant to the point that you are making.
Sure, but if an group of Indian employees within Apple US are going out of their way to scam their employer for money, it's another black mark on the graph for that demographic being into unethical activities, since then you can't say anymore "well it's just one rouge bad apple, not representative for the whole group" when it's a coordinated effort of a whole group.
If they're wiling to go that far to scam their employer it's not a far fetch the fact they're also into nepotism when hiring.
You’re making the same mistake others here are. People hire from their networks just like they hire referrals. If you worked in India or China or wherever, you probably know some talented people of those ethnicities just as a result of your experience. Using your network to hire those talented people is normal and not discriminatory. Everyone does it. Somehow Indians are singularly attacked for it on hacker news and all kinds of assumptions (like nepotism) are made with zero evidence.
> Indians are some of the most racially nepotistic out there
I’ve heard this claim made often here but never observed it in real life. I think you and others who repeat this claim are confusing nepotism with just using one’s network to accelerate hiring. If someone happens to have a social or professional network mostly of one race, that doesn’t mean they’re automatically nepotistic when they draw from that network. Somehow this label rarely arises when white managers end up with mostly white teams. Why is that?
> Somehow this label rarely arises when white managers end up with mostly white teams. Why is that?
Easy: If you're in a country that's ~90% white, why would it be a surprise that 90% of the labor ends up being white? Are you seriously trying to play dumb and question obvious stuff like demographics under the nepotism/racism playing card? Similarly, why would it be surprising that a team in India is ~100% Indians?
But if in a country with a majority white demographic, Indian managers hire their wives, extended family members and Indian connection to work in their teams, therefore excluding a lot of the local, mostly white candidates, from the resume pile out of the get-go, you can't not raise eyebrows and assume potential discriminatory hiring practices, which are illegal in most western nations.
You’re making up the assumptions of nepotism. Everyone hires from their network or their employees’ networks. What do you think referral programs are, which are basically at every company? If you’ve worked with someone before and had a positive experience, they’re a much better bet than other candidates. Even if candidates are mostly white locally, the person doing the hiring may have past experiences where their network looks more like wherever they worked previously. That doesn’t mean they’re doing anything discriminatory or nepotistic now - they may just be hiring qualified people from their network, like everyone does.
By the way, I haven’t personally seen or heard of any examples of Indians (or other races) hiring wives and family members. This is often alleged and yet I’ve never come across a real life example. I am not saying it doesn’t happen at all, but that if it does, it is probably very rare and no different than how often it can happen with any other group. What I often see is people claiming that Indians hiring Indians (regardless of familial relations) is nepotistic, and I think that’s an assumption without basis.
First of all the term nepotism doesn’t get used there because white managers with mostly white teams simply get called racist, and “in violation of our DEI policy.”
For white people, just having your whole network be mostly white is itself said to be a red flag to a lot of people, regardless of how it came to be that way. So the same should apply to Indian people too. Their network ought to be more diverse if that’s the only place they are going to hire from.
(Or else we can drop the quotas, and hire on merit only - I’m absolutely fine with that!)
Personally my network has plenty of both. I’ve worked with some incredible Indian, American, and Indian-American people and they’ve each earned my respect.
