Comment by throw_xyz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw_xyz | Hacker News Reader

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Amen.

There are very strong racial stereotypes. They also vary by who holds them.

I'm a 40+ yo Russian system programmer, moved to States when I was 25, worked in a bunch of places from smaller startups to Fortune-500 shops. Here are my stereotypes:

* Russians are frustrated know-it-alls with strong NIH syndrom wanting to redo everything from scratch. The language barrier often makes it hard for them to clearly express their grand ideas, hence the frustration. They will solve things backwards because it's more interesting that way.

* Chinese will cut corners to fit deadlines. They can write beautiful code, but more often than not they don't bother and go with absolute minimal something that fits the spec.

* Swedes, Finns, Germans and Brits are very much OK. Easily the best in terms of working together.

* Canadians and Australians are solid if a bit slow.

* Eastern Europeans are immensely productive hacks, opinionated as hell, but very good for rapid prototyping.

* Indians ...

Now, Indians are arrogant know-it-alls that _lust_ for respect and power. Frequently the source of pointless drama in the workplace. They are very smart, write good code, but they also have very hard time admitting their mistakes. This often makes it hard to work with them as colleagues.

Stereotypes are VERY important to keep in mind, because that's the starting point for every candidate assessment. The best the OP can do is to throw the interviewers off their footing. Say something like I'm Indian, but I was born in Argentina - and, bam, they can't sort you in a default bucket, so they are forced to actually start assessing you from scratch. The same goes for dyeing your hair, fixing the accent, changing the name - it's all for trying to separate yourself from a stereotype and make them view you as an individual.

I think this is due to "saving face" aspects of their culture.

I oversaw a team of Indian-based Indians while working for a software company in Austin, TX.

My stereotypical experiences:

- Ask an Indian if he understands something, he'll always answer "Yes" even if he doesn't understand it.

- Indians will not admit fault or mistakes. They seem to take it as a personal attack when you critique their work, rather than take it a suggestion for improvement.

> - Ask an Indian if he understands something, he'll always answer "Yes" even if he doesn't understand it.

That has absolutely been my experience. After so many instances where I found out later they had actually no clue about the thing they claimed to fully understand, I started to follow up with questions like, "OK, now explain to me how you're going to proceed," or "just to make sure we're on the same page, explain to me what ____ is and how it works." Not to embarrass them or anything, just to find out if they were being truthful, which often they weren't.

- Indians will not admit fault or mistakes. They seem to take it as a personal attack when you critique their work, rather than take it a suggestion for improvement.

I've seen this in members of all ethnic groups I've worked with, but I've found it to be quite common among Indian developers.

One time a rush bug-fix ended up letting a showstopper regression bug get into production. (The getting into production part was entirely my fault.) The dev was calling (Java) toString() on a value that had just been read from a nullable column of a relational database, without null-checking it first. When I asked him, "do you understand why you can't do this?", he would not admit any error, instead arguing "that column should not have been allowed to contain nulls." (The table/column in question predated his presence on the team by years.)

The answer I would have preferred to have gotten would have been something like, "OMG, I can't believe I did something so stupid, I absolutely DO understand what I did wrong and I'll make sure it never happens again." I don't, after all, expect people to make zero mistakes. I just want them to own up to them and hopefully learn something from them.

That's just one particularly egregious example out of many I've witnessed over the years.

> Russians are frustrated know-it-alls with strong NIH syndrom wanting to redo everything from scratch.

That's my stereotype for all engineers.

Nice, as an Australian I concur.

I live in Paraguay, could anyone shed light on what stereotypical views/biases I would experience in a job interview as an Aussie living in Paraguay?

That's interesting. Are you aware of any stereotype about/against italians?

In Canada the stereotypes I heard about Italians weren't the nicest ones but I see their reasons

But the perception is usually neutral it seems

What kind of reasons? Old stuff like mafia or instead something (semi-)factual like our relaxed relationship with time management?

The Mafia is not "old stuff" in some parts of Quebec (and maybe other places)

anecdata of 1: I used to work for an italian boss who worked her ass off to become a professor. I had a lot of respect for her. But I could tell that at some level she had been fighting stereotypes (both on the nationality/gender issues) her whole life. She hired an italian postdoc who was basically a walking stereotype. He never came in to work, did shoddy work when he did come in. It was a disaster. Generally I thought of her as a very "tough but fair" boss, there was one time where she got extremely upset at grad students for using the wrong instrument for critical experiments (but really, they should have known better). But. I could see steam coming off of her head in her interactions with him. She eventually quit being a professor, but didn't tell him that she was quitting, basically he showed up to work one day with no job.

My understanding is that there's a north/south work ethic stereotype within Italy, and maybe that the regional attitude differences are not as well appreciated outside of Italy, moreso outside of Europe. She was from the north. Non so de dove il postdoc viene.

Just for curiosity, I would like to hear your thoughts about western europeans ;)

I would like to hear your thoughts on:

* Israeli jewish people

* non-Israeli (eg US) jewish people

(edit: Formatting)

Unfortunately, I haven't met anyone who gathers those requirements so far.

For American Jews, I think the stereotype is that they are rich and well connected.

Too bad you've posted from the throwaway, otherwise I'd give you an UPvote :)

Curiously, if I had to come up with stereotypical descriptions, I'd say I'd come with something similar. :)

What's wrong with posting as throwaway. Probably the author of the post want to avoid racial bias over his name ?

An up vote on a throwaway doesn't earn your main account any internet points, so it's be a thrown away up vote.

Who cares about points? I'll sell you some cheap

What's the use of the point if it stops u from expressing your opinion without racial bias.

> Curiously, if I had to come up with stereotypical descriptions, I'd say I'd come with something similar. :)

That's the whole point of stereotypes, isn't it? ;)

The interesting thing is that we're divided by an ocean, and still have same stereotypes ;)

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