Ask HN: There is caste system in the Silicon Valley?
People from India keep on follow to the caste system in the Silicon Valley? Suppose developer is from higher caste than CTO. Or even CTO is outcaste. Is it possible?
So the only sort of software team that would have roles linked to caste would be one built by an immigrant (or maybe the child of immigrants) of high caste from India. Which is a tiny fraction of the software teams in this country.
It is possible that families who were of higher caste back in India tend to have a head start in terms of savings and education when they arrive in the US, but once they get here that wealth and education are the only advantages they keep. Which is not to say they are small advantages. But Americans don't recognize caste.
Most US companies would hire a CEO whose family in India was outcaste. And they would do so simply because even if they knew about castes and knew this person's standing among them (which is highly unlikely), Americans don't care one bit about what caste you came from in another country. They only care whether you're the most capable person to do the job.
There is arguably a certain amount of classism in Silicon Valley based on wealth and upbringing. And studies recently have shown that class mobility here is worse than it used to be and worse than in other developed countries. But we don't have rigid classes in this country. Americans pride themselves on being egalitarian, even if they don't always live up to that ideal.
That said, you'll notice that (for instance) African-American CTOs are vanishingly rare despite African Americans representing about 15% of the country's population. If we really want to be egalitarian, we should be asking ourselves harder why that is and how to fix the underlying inequalities that cause it.
Consequently, I don't see how an explicit caste system would carry over.
America's class system is much more implicit and based on social cues and habits of the sort talked about here: http://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/550-trash-food. Also Race... which is far too complex a topic to be summarised here. As a mixed-race person who is light-skinned enough to that people think I'm Mediterranian, I still find it confusing despite many years of paying attention.
People get uncomfortable when talking about class in America, which leads to little discussion about addressing real problems