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Comment by manish_gill | Hacker News Reader

I'm extremely disappointed by the vitriol and generalisations against Asians in this thread. Marginalising individual candidates because there are trends in the community is the textbook definition of racial profiling.

I'm a dev from India. I work hard and always try my best to stay as honest as I possibly can, and I think I'm fairly competent. For the last job offer I received, I had to take around 7 interviews (phone + in-person) along with take home problems. Recently I'd been wondering if it would be a good idea to do a Masters in US, maybe specialisation in Machine Learning/Deep Learning. But it seems most people here would dismiss candidates like me because "Asians people cheat" or "Asians aren't competent enough".

I expect better from my fellow HN-ers.

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Please don't take these comments personally.

I've seen lots of very incompetent Indian applicants. That doesn't mean I won't happily interview another Indian developer because I also know that there are lots of very competent Indian developers. Some of the best coworkers I've ever had were Indian.

Anyone who lazily dismisses you because "Asian people cheat" are themselves incompetent interviewers. In my experience, it's actually incredibly cheap/easy to suss out the competent people with a quick 15-minute phone screen.

Whenever I see white programmers complaining about how "Asians aren't competent" I am mystified. They think themselves better programmers than Raj Reddy, Umesh Vazirani, Vinod Khosla, Arvind, R.V. Guha, and T.V. Raman? That requires a truly special combination of arrogance, racism, and stunted intelligence.

I too expected more from HN and I think it's because HN is generally more civil than other webs forums. I think the credit of this civility goes to the HN moderators and the enforcement of the policies, not because HN types are special. I used to think technical minded folks are more analytical and thus have less tendency for bias and generalizations but I've concluded that ultimately tech people are still people and subject to the same filters as "normals".

I hope you not discouraged from pursuing your specialization in the US.

Actually the definition of racial profiling is more specific and related to law enforcement: https://www.aclu.org/other/racial-profiling-definition

What is happening here is more like cultural racism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_racism

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