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Comment by anonymousJim12 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if this will be seen but I'm very curious to hear from Indian folk:

I am the hiring manager at a well known software company that employs a lot of Indians on H1B visas. A while back I brought in an Indian person for a full round interview. This person happen to have pretty dark skin. On the interview team was a light skinned Indian person with a very Brahmin last name that I'd say is pretty average technically and wasn't my first choice to be on the interview team. The unbiased interview feedback sent to me was 5 yes to hire and the only no to hire (and strong at that) was the Indian interviewer...

A few days later I read about this caste situation at Cisco and I had to wonder...

Any recommendations on how I can avoid having this uncertainty if discrimination was at play? Seems like a pretty hard thing to prove.

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Don't you have a process where you ask the basis for both yes and no?

Both yes and no need to be substantiated by examples by the interviewers and that should be able to tell you whether there is any bias or not.

Yes, they do provide a basis. In this case the basis was weak and lazy, though that is the style of work I've come to expect from working with this person.

IMO that should be concerning regardless of the caste angle. Throw out their feedback, raise this with their manager or HR, and recommend that they go through interview training again.

Pardon me for making assumptions but you seem to be not Indian, which makes me wonder how did you know that one of the persons on the interview panel had "very Brahmin last name"?

I know this is a caste thread, but there might be a more general issue at play here - a mediocre person may not be able to recognize a talented person, a good solution or a good design. Not putting mediocre people on interview panels would be way higher on my list before getting to cultural or discrimination issues. I am almost inclined to bet that more talented people are less likely to discriminate anyway based on race caste etc... because they don't have the same insecurities.

A mediocre person may also be threatened by someone they see as being more talented. They will fight against having that person on their team with them because it makes them look worse.

Do you have meetings where you talk about the interviewee? A strong no usually merits some kind of explanation. In addition, we always have at least 2 persons in each interview to ensure that a bad interviewer doesn't just make shit up.

Companies also have bias training which can be very useful.

I wonder if a blind interview would help.

Could you guess a person's caste through his accent?

If you are willing to presuppose the proposition that caste correlates to socioeconomic status (I have no idea), then a sufficiently experienced person probably could. There would probably be slang, mannerisms, or common sayings that would give away your background, just like most Americans of different socioeconomic groups have different behaviors

You can guess a person's caste through their last name

No.

This seems hard to prove regardless of skin/race/sex/religion. That's why you have multiple interviewers and hire mixture of all of the above.

I’m not entirely sure if skin color maps well to caste. Perhaps it’s likely that lighter skinned Indians are likely to be upper caste. I don’t know. It wouldn’t surprise me but I don’t know.

Anyways, back to the question of discrimination. I’d wager a bet that biases exist against dark skinned Indian people. India, as a society has had that baggage.

It’s like you said; proof is hard to establish at an individual level without a thorough investigation etc etc. But it’s to counter these biases that we have multiple rounds.

Much like the conversation around other forms of discrimination — gender, race etc —- the best thing to do is participate in the conversations around it. In the case of learning more about caste, I have been listening to material shared on Newlaundry podcasts, watching Kahaniaya Kumar’s speeches/interviews and reading/consuming material published by Stalin K (no relation to the Soviet politician), tweets/works from Kavitha Krishnan.

Disclaimer: I’m an upper caste Indian person on an H1B. I’d say that it’s no surprise to me that I’ve been a beneficiary of the caste system than otherwise.

I would really like hear from other folks with Indian background on their experiences around caste.

As Napoleon said, do not ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence.

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