Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway_dcnt | Hacker News Reader

The reason for my current user name here at hn was this exact form of racism. It is the first post I made when I created this throwaway. I was assured that my experience was unique and not widespread. I am both sad and happy to see this, sad because it exists, happy because it is getting some attention here at HN.

I would like to take this opportunity to point out that everyone of us needs to be vigilant about this type of racism. One thing I recommend to my hiring managers is to not allow people from frictioned backgrounds to manage and interview people from the other side. Example problematic pairs for candidates/interviewers (not including the cast situation) include: Indians and Pakistanis, Serbians and Bosnians, Greeks and Turks, Chinese and Japanese.

One way I solve this is by introducing an independent observer/participant when situations like this emerge. This is costly but it has really worked to not only address this problem but also created an amazing diversity in my teams because it takes care of some of the implicit bias we all have to some degree.

View on HN

>> One thing I recommend to my hiring managers is to not allow people from frictioned backgrounds to manage and interview people from the other side.

What? This is racist in and of itself and would be blatantly illegal for any number of reasons.

Also the problem is not necessarily limited to Pakistani and Indians. It's Indians and Indians. Not sure what you want done there. I freely believe that the caste system of the host country carries over to the United States, but attempting to subvert that via "good" racist methods is not going to fly, especially if documented.

It's called a conflict of interest, and anyone who has a conflict of interest in a given business situation should absolutely be removed from making any decisions around that conflict of interest (and they should be more than forthcoming about those conflicts of interest). Standards of Business Practice 101.

I agree that genuine conflicts of interest need to be addressed.

It seems absurd to declare a-priori that “no Indian shall be the unsupervised leader of a Pakistani (nor vice-versa) because that’s a conflict of interest”.

I didn't say that. What you've said here is a straw man

The original comment that spawned this discussion definitely was.

> One thing I recommend to my hiring managers is to not allow people from frictioned backgrounds to manage and interview people from the other side.

Huh? You said it is a conflict of interest when people from frictioned backgrounds are allowed to manage and interview people from the other side. It's right here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30523177

What is the strawman?

Interviewing someone from an opposite “frictioned background” is not considered a conflict of interest in law or ethics.

“Conflict of interest” is when someone has a clearly defined interest, usually in something of value, that opposes the interests of someone they have a duty towards.

In ethnic prejudice, there’s no clearly defined interest.

I know this sounds pedantic. But when a conflict of interest arises, the next questions are “when did it begin?”, “when will it end?”, “how big was it?”, and “can we mitigate it somehow?”

You can’t do any of those things with ethnic bias.

Ethnic bias is bad, but it’s not a conflict of interests.

> In ethnic prejudice, there’s no clearly defined interest.

> Ethnic bias is bad, but it’s not a conflict of interests.

Okay, so - for sure, if you're from an opposite "frictioned background" and you can interview someone neutrally, you should be able to.

But if you have an ethnic prejudice, you literally have an interest against the person you are interviewing.

> But when a conflict of interest arises, the next questions are “when did it begin?”, “when will it end?”, “how big was it?”, and “can we mitigate it somehow?”

(one example) > when did it begin?

hundreds of years ago

> when will it end?

not soon

> how big was it?

the US literally fought an entire war over it

> can we mitigate it somehow

Yes, by having a variety of people from different backgrounds interview the candidate.

That wasn't that hard, was it?

> But if you have an ethnic prejudice, you literally have an interest against the person you are interviewing.

The original comment by throwaway_dcnt -- "Example problematic pairs for candidates/interviewers (not including the cast situation) include: Indians and Pakistanis, Serbians and Bosnians, Greeks and Turks, Chinese and Japanese." -- doesn't make any qualifications. I read it the same way that icelancer seems to: they make the determination themselves, assuming it's going to be a problem without actually establishing that it will be. If that is the case, that is literally racism.

Maybe not in the legal sense of conflict of interest, a kind of conflict of interest non the less.

The way that you deal with ethnic bias and conflicts of interest is very different.

For example, employees are required to declare a conflict of interest. Declaring ethnic bias is a firable offense.

Imagine a mostly white business in rural Georgia where all the employees have declares they have racial bias against Black people.

As a result, they avoid hiring Black people because they don’t trust they can fairly evaluate their skills.

Realistically if you applied normal conflict of interest rules, it would be very hard to make a company more diverse.

wouldn't it be deeply discriminatory to assume that person X has a conflict of interest with person Y based solely on their religion, ethnicity or nationality?

You cannot assume these things because of protected classes having potential issues with one another. Not all Indians have caste issues with other Indians, and excluding them on the basis of nationality/race is strictly prohibited.

> attempting to subvert that via "good" racist methods is not going to fly, especially if documented.

It would because it did and it does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Steelworkers_v._Weber

Looks like you didn’t get the point from OP.

You needn’t be ham handed and stupid about it, just use meaningful internal controls.

Not just for this issue. If everyone hires friends and family, people from the hometown, place of worship, etc you run into other conflicts of interest. It’s always good to have disinterested parties involved in the hiring process.

On the basis of race, either documented or not, is asking to eat a massive civil lawsuit and get canceled in the media for doing so.

That’s why I said to not be ham handed about it.

Make a policy with respect to nepotism and discrimination, include a representative from other organizational groups in the interview process and be attentive to following policy.

You also have to be aware of culture issues and manage them without being a jerk. If you hire managers with background/experience whose norms are not inline with your culture you need to manage that. A McKinsey alum, a former outsourcing manager, and a web agency manager are going to have different positive and negative biases.

One of the primary things these stories never truly elaborate properly on in the quest to establish social rank out of a caste-based society is that Black Americans, that were native to the US, and even for black migrants to India and other countries, are some of the most affected by caste politics of this kind in employment and work opportunity.

Often having darker skin, Black Americans are even prone to more discrimination domestically. Any editorial that doesn't recognize that fact as a truth has no legs to stand on in my opinion. The fact that people still hang on to caste ideology in any way, and treat it as a continuing reality should disqualify them from any role concerning equal opportunity. "Gradual change and understanding" is not a reasonable discussion in America, or we're all coddling the same violent and hateful past that America was born from.

I write this as someone who has lots of Pakistani and Indian friends, and has regularly struggled to get them to understand how different each of the dynamics are on this matter, but zero tolerance is essential to get people to understand that the issue is more serious and damaging than they could ever know.

> Often having darker skin, Black Americans are even prone to more discrimination domestically. Any editorial that doesn't recognize that fact as a truth has no legs to stand on in my opinion.

Nigerian immigrants outperform most domestic US groups. So clearly "skin color" isn't the main factor (if at all).

Jamaicans are even more prone to be poorer than Americans.

Would your retort be "but Jamaicans who've won multiple gold medals in sprinting are wealthier than most Americans?"

People who smoke are more likely to get lung cancer.

Would your retort be "13 year olds who smoke have less incidents of lung cancer than the non-smoking population?"

If you subsample enough, you'll find outliers. That doesn't invalidate general trends/statistics.

No, but it does introduce other variables.

E.g. age is important for lung cancer as well as smoking. Only when controlling for age do you get correct estimate about the danger of smoking.

What other variables does "Nigerian immigrants" introduce besides skin color and culture? The latter is eliminated by most US sociologists that keep screaming "it's not about culture!" so only race remains...

Isn't the fact that they immigrated likely bias towards the higher skilled echelon that managed to go through the visa process?

When you say "outperform most domestic US groups", are you normalising for the same skillset and education levels?

Perhaps a source to accompany your statement will help shed some light.

Don't forget to control for:

- Wealth upon entry (If all Nigerian immigrants come from millionaire families, then it doesn't matter if they're underpaid; they'll be far wealthier than most Americans)

- Location (If all Nigerian immigrants live in New York City, then the effect size of being underpaid can be masked by the higher income (and cost of living) in New York City)

- Profession/Job Title (if all Nigerian immigrants are neurosurgeons, then it doesn't matter if they're underpaid; they'll be way above average income)

- Age (if all Nigerian immigrants are older, then they'll have had more time to generate skills/wealth, which could mask the effect of being underpaid)

- Health (if all Nigerian immigrants are healthy, then the effect of being underpaid could be masked by the fact that many Americans are less productive due to health issues)

There are obviously more confounders, but doing an analysis using these would be a good place to start to actually answer the question.

That's not at all how I interpreted the parent comment.

I read it as the types of hardships and barriers that, say, a US descendant of slaves faces can be very different from a Nigerian immigrant, and that's one problem with lumping everyone with the same skin color together as "Black" when calculating diversity metrics.

This reminds me of an individual from South America I worked with many years ago. Some well-meaning individuals were asking him how the company could reach out to its Hispanic employees better. He looks at them and wryly says, "Well to start, you could stop thinking of us as 'Hispanic' since it encompasses people from 3 different continents, a dozen different countries and doesn't mean much."

Because you're getting the elite of the elite.

I don't understand how this is still such a difficult concept for people.

> Nigerian immigrants outperform most domestic US groups. So clearly "skin color" isn't the main factor (if at all).

This is very true. Most of the time when people think they're talking about race, they're actually talking about culture, which happens to be a much trickier concept. The Nigeria example, for instance, is an inconvenient truth that doesn't mesh well with the dominant race-essentialist narrative right now, so it typically gets ignored or outright dismissed.

...Yet, at any company where I've worked, a qualified candidate for a professional position in, say, accounting--who also happens to be black--has HR falling all over themselves in excitement. (The accountant I'm thinking of developed kind of a dark sense of humor in response.) Obsessing over the arbitrary characteristics that originally were used in discrimination doesn't fix it, and never will.

It makes it worse.

It is called a 'conflict of interest'. (in this case it is national interest).

Fifa has often rules for this, where it avoid drawing to teams to play together when they are in constant/active conflict.

So, if there are some national tempers flaring, or a war somewhere, it is a better idea to have some boundaries.

Why we hope most people are good natured, we don't live in a perfect world, and it would be insane, or completely naive to believe that 'biases' do not exist.

The other side of it is 'ethnic nepotism', where people hire and favor people from their own countries, creating this pools of mono-ethnic teams in a company which statistically are not probable. This is actually a very common sight in Tech companies and we all know it.

> What? This is racist in and of itself and would be blatantly illegal for any number of reasons.

And, as a half-Croat, needed. The ethnic tensions between former Yugoslavian countries have never been resolved, and many emigrants took the unresolved issues with them. The youngest generation is one thing, they grew up without having to live through all that bullshit, but a lot of people 35 and older have lost relatives and friends in one of the wars.

FFS Bosnia is at the moment creeping into the breakout of yet another conflict.

> I freely believe that the caste system of the host country carries over to the United States,

Until relatively recently, the United States has always had a very strong strictly enforced caste system, even written into law, still the case in some Southern states. Some people were even allowed to buy and sell other types of people! As we can see some people are still allowed to kill certain types of other people with no consequences.

Okay? That has nothing to do with my point. I am merely agreeing with the article's thrust that the Indian caste system probably carries over to the US, but despite that, discrimination on the basis of race for employment is strictly prohibitive due to protected class statuses.

> Okay? That has nothing to do with my point.

I disagree. The phrasing you used implied that you believed the United States did not already have a caste system and that foreigners were bringing it to the US. This is factually incorrect since the US always had a very strict caste system pretty much from the inception of the nation only repealed recently, and even then still functionally present.

No it didn't imply that, because I have no idea what you are talking about. I am merely commenting on the caste system literally described in the article written and linked here about India.

Then what exactly is implied by " Not sure what you want done there. I freely believe that the caste system of the host country carries over to the United States, but attempting to subvert that via "good" racist methods is not going to fly, especially if documented. ".

Not sure what you want done there? Aren't you implying that the US is a caste-free system with the there?

That's... not even a little bit true.

>> What? This is racist in and of itself and would be blatantly illegal for any number of reasons

Not going to touch the moral implications here, but _is_ that actually illegal discrimination? Is there any benefit for interviewing a particular candidate than an employee would miss out on? Again, not picking a side here; just curious.

How would you enforce this? In the US this is completely illegal.

In addition, you would have to ask extremely invasive questions of everyone. So is your proposal that you require that your company ask for the detailed ethnicity of everyone? What happens when people refuse, do you just not allow them to interview or manage?

What about people who were born in the US, do you assume that if they are of Japanese descent they can't interview someone of Chinese descent?

In India the surname might indicate caste. Then easy to tell in States.

True, but in diffrent indian states people from diffrent caste can have the same surname.

How would you know which is which if you are not Indian?

The solution you propose is arguably just as bad and I suspect it might be illegal in the US. If I am a qualified manager or tech lead, and there is an opportunity to lead a new project, I would be furious to learn that I was passed over for the opportunity because someone believed I was ethnically incompatible with one of the people on the team.

The comment was about not allowing them in the interviewing process.

…it says “manage and interview”?

If interviewing is considered a normal job function, isn't not allowing certain people to interview certain people a violation of EEO laws by discriminating based on a protected class(national origin)? Unless you have some specific knowledge that an employee just can't handle people of nationality X, I would be very hesitant to institute OP's advice, at least in the US.

Probably not?

I know plenty of tech companies that make sure female applicants get interviewed by at least one female engineer during the hiring process. They have a good faith belief this reduces discrimination rather than increasing it.

Of course, it could stray into discriminatory territory if you're doing something dumb - like sending all minority applicants to a hardass interviewer who rejects everyone; or giving certain employees a burdensome number of interviews on the basis of their race, at the cost of their other duties. But you should already be on top of issues like that anyway.

Having a woman in the room when other women are getting interviewed isn't discriminatory. Telling a woman she can't interview someone because she is a woman (or other protected class) is.

They both are explicitly sexist. Hard to define that away.

Maybe it's not bad; but it's sexist. Just as it would be racist if the criteria was making sure one of the interviewers was of specific race or nationality.

That's your opinion, most people probably disagree.

A common way to define racism is: negative prejudice + power

(The same can be done for sexism, though obviously on different characteristics)

From that point of view, making sure that a marginalized candidate is also interviewed by at least one member of the same marginalized community, if possible, is neither racist nor sexist.

(Because you're not negatively discriminating, and in fact to define the rule you don't even need to single out which marginalized community they are part of)

The "+ power" only exists in deep academic redefinitions of racism(where many terms are redefined away from their commonplace meaning), and leftist twitter which latched onto the former for some reason.

Most normal Americans, if asked to rank the statements "Black people are disgusting pigs", and "White people are disgusting pigs", would rank them as equally racist, regardless of whether white or black people have "power" in America.

But didn't the term originally come from academia? I'd be curious to know about the actual etymology here.

It's not uncommon for words to have a technical meaning and a colloquial one. I don't see HN getting upset that "theory" is used differently by those awful academics compared to the common man.

It really isn't a common way to define it. The colloquial definition of racism is still racial prejudice, regardless of power. This is also the way it was used historically - both W.E.B. DuBois and MLK referred to "black racists", for example. It was redefined to "... + power" after the Civil Rights Era, but it didn't really catch up outside of the more academic social justice circles.

About MLK, I presume you're referring to this quote:

"We must never substitute a doctrine of Black supremacy for white supremacy"

That's fair, but we're talking about ensuring that the interview process is not discriminatory. I.e. having some extra safeguards for marginalized people (safeguards which are not needed for those in power), a special process that you could maybe define akin to "positive discrimination" vs negative discrimination...

And MLK was totally in favour of that:

"society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro."

Affirmative action in general does not involve prejudice, although some particular instances of it do.

> A common way to define racism is: negative prejudice + power

This is an idiotic way to define racism that makes it completely subjective to give the wielding accuser of racism to be highly discriminatory while claiming not to be bad.

Idiotic or not, it's widespread in academia.

And some would argue that there are fairly objective ways to define "power"

Personally I'm on the fence about these definitions but it annoys me to see people dismiss them as "idiotic" without engaging with the level of serious thought that has been put into them by sincere people.

Disagree once you've spent a day or two surveying the subject. Or even an hour or two.

It doesn't matter if it is popular in academia. Nobody outside of academia uses it and they are trying to force a language change. Languages of course change, but it should be done naturally not by force.

I have surveyed it, and it’s still idiotic. It’s no different than horoscopes or numerology, both of which have immense depth from “experts”. It doesn’t change the fact that not of it is grounded in any kind of scientific discovery or logic.

> And some would argue that there are fairly objective ways to define "power"

Funny how elusive these “objective ways” are when it comes to actually defining them.

Even if there were an objective way to define that power, it still doesn’t change how dumb and divisive the whole approach is of making asymmetric the criteria for being “racist”. It has enabled blatantly bigoted behavior by tons of people against downtrodden “majorities” and has done more to divide society than the segregation in the 60s.

> it's widespread in academia.

This is very damming to sociology and to associate it with “academia” is a disservice to people who practice the objective discovery of science.

The law (in the US) protects everyone against discrimination on the basis of sex. Women have no special status under these laws.

I have been the token woman interviewing a woman and also joined teams where the only other woman interviewed me. It always struck me more as "look, we have one and she's not mouthing 'get out' so we're a good employer".

Usually once I join the one other woman leaves and the cycle repeats.

> "look, we have one and she's not mouthing 'get out' so we're a good employer".

Yes, we have done this in the past with minorities...

How else would you recommend they approach the situation? Should the other woman not have been bothered to interview you?

Maybe a more generous interpretation is that people are flawed, and they're making an effort as imperfect as it is. I I feel the alternative is a catch-22, and everybody be damned regardless of the motive, effort, our outcome - nothing will be good enough.

And if you do “have some specific knowledge that an employee just can’t handle people of nationality X”, disallowing them from interviewing them is a woefully inadequate response.

“Yeah we know Pat’s a racist a-hole, but we fixed it by just not letting Pat interview people he’s racist against. It’s an elegant solution.”

Affirmative action does that!

Perhaps the law needs to be updated... Maybe the current state of US law reflects a misunderstanding or a lack of context on how important these things can be and Law's dynamic it evolves over time so it's not inconceivable that at some point these kind of considerations would be worked into law and policy somehow. And it's important to note that the legal issue is going to be a large inertial blocker for companies to consider this because of the risk aversiveness on hiring the funny thing is in trying to do the right thing by avoiding discrimination they may actually be enabling the perpetuation of it by not providing processes that are able to address bring attention to an and focus on some things like the article talks about. I'm no expert and we're not going to come up with a solution today I think but it's good to see discussion of this on hacker News I think. As sad as it also is that this is something that so greatly affects many people and it's clearly not the responsibility of a particular company or the tech industry to solve these social and international problems but I don't think that means there's nothing that could be done there to address them.

I'm sorry, but can you please elaborate a bit more on Greeks and Turks?

I happen to be Greek and have worked with 2 Turkish colleagues without any issues. On top of that, during my many travels across Europe, Turks (along with other Balkan nationalities) are by far the most welcoming people I meet once they learn that I come from Greece and I befriended a few of them.

Do you have any different experiences to share?

I’m under the impression some people are still upset over Cyprus.

Edit: corrected cypress misspelling. Thanks repliers!

I mean sure, TJ Rodgers was a controversial guy but he hasn't been involved since the Infineon acquisition.

Cyprus and it always depends how far back you want to go to determine the 'cause' of grievances.

"Upset over" is kind of an understatement for invasion and occupation (condemned by the UN even).

There still seem to be some deep-seated resentments from some Greeks towards Turks due to the Greek genocide and exodus a hundred years ago. Turks on the other hand have never heard about that (it's illegal to teach in Turkey), so they are pretty chill. There is some bitterness due to the more recent (and still unresolved) conflict regarding Cyprus.

Similar in some (minor) ways to the North and South in the US civil war. Folks in the North (winning side) learn about it in school for a few weeks and it's like studying ancient history. But in parts of the South, it feels like it just happened yesterday.

NSFW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzL_MXgc24E

Ottomans (Turks) occupied Greece for 400 years, ending in 1821. Turkey constantly trying to take over Greek islands, etc. Turkey dropping off immigrants on rafts just outside Greek shores. But it doesn't seem to translate to the US much, especially in second generation.

Greeks dropping off immigrants in front of Turkish shores, killing some of them, also seems to happen: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/feb/17/i...

It is a sad situation. I think this article says the Turks dropped the immigrants at the Greek shore, and the Greeks tried to send them back. The Greeks either have to accept/absorb all of the immigrants strategically sent from the Turks, or face consquences when they try to send them back and tragedy strikes. It's a strong strategy by the Turks. Of course the immigrants are sadly just pawns in this situation.

That's quite far ago?

If that's your criteria, who can interview Germans without bias?

Some cultures hold on to bitter historical sentiments more than others.

It is far ago, but being occupied for 400 years and not being able to openly practice your religion leaves a lasting memory.

I'm Greek as well, and now that you mention it, Turks were indeed the people I tended to have very good relationships at work with. They are especially welcoming, at least the ones I've worked with.

Countries with long intertangled histories often have a lot of cultural similarities as well as deep national grudges. If you remove the people from the national grudges, they tend to get along.

The borek spanakopita wars are eternal. And don’t get the Bulgarians started on Banitza.

Yeah, we've been living with the Turks for centuries so we're pretty similar. Much, much more similar than, say, to the English.

Though, yes, all the food is Greek and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

I work in sales and saw a Greek salesperson kick a deal out that cost him thousands because he didnt want to spend another few hours with someone that was Turkish. And this is in California. The easy money didn't matter to him. If someone is willing to lose thousands of dollars to feel good, imagine what little things theyre willing to do that dont really have a cost to them.

As with many other one-off cases in this & other threads, one instance does not a rule make.

Just because your experience was fairly positive, that does not negate the general trend of such occurrences in hiring decisions among such pairs ( Greek-Turk, Indian-Pakistani, Japanese-Korean, Japanese-Chinese, Russian-Polish, Serb-Bosniak, Serb-Croat French-Algerian and countless other pairs in the Middle East & other parts of the world )

Theres surely some information that can be gleaned from anecdotes & oral histories. But we need data & objective studies to back them up if we are to make any progress on these issues.

but by using this pairing logic you would have to rule out any British person from interviewing basically more than half of the planet. french people from interviewing almost anyone from an African country and many more, Americans-UK, etc ...

if you do the exhaustive listing probably no one can interview/manage anyone.

and this is before taking into account more finer grained ethnic/religious/cultural/social clashing differences.

Are you saying that

  a) since such a cumbersome effort to weed out highly
  probable biases, that go unnoticed or unchecked, would
  likely be too prohibitively expensive for employers to
  undertake and hence any such lofty expectations should be
  done away with or 
  b) are you denying the possibility that such biases can
  exist in huge numbers in hiring & career growth decisions?

The former might be somewhat of a valid concern - corporate governance may not have evolved enough to make room for such things yet. Although, given the pace with which other reforms have been addressed in areas of women & BIPOC representation in the workplace, this sort of thing may not be too far out in implementation.

But the latter surely is wrong. It's just that no one wants to be the first to open that can of worms. Thats all.

Turk here.. no problem working with and being friends with Greek folks. I actually prefer to work with them over Turkish people since we do not need to worry about cultural baggage from Turkey (politics, religion, etc.), and we can focus on finding the best Baklava in town.

Your idea is unfair and would be illegal to carry out. Because it's racist, obviously.

Furthermore, I live in the Balkans area (Croatia) and it so happens that companies from this area do employ people of varied ethnicity, and those do work on the same teams.

Exactly, the only way to get people to accept everyone as they are is to see that they're exactly the same as them. If a person can't put this sort of thing aside and work with a basic dose of professionalism then they should frankly be fired. You can't tolerate intolerance.

You'd think that a nation as varied as the US would know that.

I understand your overall argument but one anecdote does not a rule make, whether in this scenario or any other scenario.

You're okay working with people so bigoted that you have to hide them away from certain parts of their job because they might fuck it up with their bigotry? Why are they still employed? How can you be okay with coworkers that can't be expected to treat everyone in the company with a certain level of respect?

Do you believe that's just the way "they" are? Is that the way you are?

Remind me never to apply for a job at your company. JFC.

I think the idea is that people’s biases are often not obvious or detectable. Not saying this idea is a good way to avoid making decisions on such biases, but I don’t think it’s as black and white as you put it.

I'm black and white on the behavior. I absolutely agree with your point about biases being often not obvious.

In this case, though, the biases are so apparent that these employees can't be expected to interact with other potential employees. If an employee's behavior is so abhorrent you have to work around them, they should be replaced.

Another way to think of it - I'm sure the company has language in it's employee handbook around non-discrimination. These employees are overtly violating this language. By letting them stay on and accommodating their behavior, a clear message is sent that they're not serious about non-discrimination.

> One thing I recommend to my hiring managers is to not allow people from frictioned backgrounds to manage and interview people from the other side.

Great - as a British person, this gets me out of conducting interviews entirely!

I'm a Pakistani American and I've worked well with many Indians. This is overcompensating.

also as an Indian it's my experience that Pakistanis and Indians in foreign countries tend to hang together rather than separately, at least in the circles I've been a part of.

I think Indians and Pakistanis quickly understand that outside their native countries they are probably the same and almost have similar culture/language/food.

They do in their native countries as well, what changes when they leave is they leave behind a tense political rivalry that gets used in service of explaining the shortcomings of the respective countries. Without the political climate as background noise both parties tend to get along

Another angle is that really nationalistic people don't tend to leave the country they love.

I was happy to move to the US in part because I was pretty tired if my home country.

Under-appreciated point about immigrants. My parents left Bangladesh because they weren’t huge fans of Bangladesh or Bangladeshis.

There are multiple distinct ethnic / cultural / religious groups in Bosnia. Serbians (from Serbia or Kosovo) tend to get along well with Bosnian Serbs, but there can be conflicts on occasion with Bosnian Croats and Bosniaks (Muslims).

As a practical matter within US companies it's not feasible to assign team members based on avoiding those potential conflicts. Nor can we afford to hire independent observers. I can't imagine trying to justify that additional headcount request to Finance and HR, they would laugh me out of the room! Instead employees are expected to act professionally regardless of their personal feelings and if they can't do so then manage them out.

In all of the interviews I've conducted there have been 2 interviewers to 1 interviewee because everyone has biases and people remember things differently according to those biases.

The biases don't even have to involve people to throw off the results. They could be against the usage of a particular API, for example, which I find insane, but I've seen it happen.

Personally, I’ve much more “empire building” type behavior (let’s hire tons people from my background who will probably support my initiatives), than discrimination against “others.”

I've also seen this far more often, especially when there is a major change in a C-level position.

GE, is that you?

I’m native Chinese and I don’t hold any opinion against Japanese people… especially in my job, that’s just not professional and seems very childish and immature…

It's the other way around. Japanese look down on Chinese.

To put parent poster's comment in context, the Japanese committed unthinkable atrocities on the Chinese civilian population during WW2, a lot of which they haven't even bothered to apologize for to this day. Ergo, a lot of Chinese hate the Japanese with a passion.

No this is so important. I agree that the reality of international and domestic generational conflict there we are mostly oblivious to in the West, should inform HR policy.

These things are real, and discrimination based on them can be concealed and is often as the very fascinating article says, invisible to outsiders. I'm with you on the way to address this is by bringing more attention to it than with other commenters who suggest that it's actually racist or discriminatory to acknowledge and address this. It's hard to refute the line of the other commenters cuz on the face of it it is racist and discriminatory to provide affordances for these types of issues because you're assuming someone faces them based on their background. But let's remember something important which is that the words racist and discriminatory in their essence are actually neutral... they simply mean discernment based on something, in one case race.

That can be used negatively but it can also be used to try to write the wrongs that were done by the inverse of that. So sometimes to address a specific wrong you have to deal with the same parameters as created the wrong but invert the effect. Otherwise you're basically giving all the power for the use of racial and discriminatory actions to the side that wants to use them for bad. You have to be able to use them for good too but obviously you need to be careful in how you go about this but I don't think that less attention on this issue is the solution, so I like to jump behind the point that this person is making because it seems like a very brave point that they're making but it sounds like a good idea to me.

I mean I have no idea how these observers would work in practice but maybe one way to do this is to sort of have like a pre hiring congress where all parties meet and have a chance to discuss their background and any bias and how they feel about people from another place. But saying it, I don't think that would really work so easily, tho it might. Every group of people is unique to some extent...I think it's a very tricky thing to do... But closing one's eyes and not talking about is probably not the way to get progress on this.

That's all well and good, and the policy might indeed actually work. Unfortunately it's absolutely illegal. Protected classes are not protected from just racism, but discrimination of all forms.

Well maybe the law needs to change...I mean you're saying that protected groups are protected from positive discrimination? Taking into account biases faced might actually help prevent those biases.

edit: actually I realized I'm not sure what you're saying..also I'm not sure I understand how you see what I describe as illegal, if you care to share more about how you feel about that, that might be cool :) :p xxx ;p

It's weird, the implicit bias is sometimes an advantage--or at least it sheilds us from knee jerk discrimination. Being white and clean cut in America has always afforded me a status that I did not enjoy until I was able to move away from where I grew up. There everyone knew my circumstances and kids who were from "better families" excluded me because I was just other. And school...I had to leave before high school, it was unbearable. Surviving the years up til that point nearly crushed my soul.

This caused a lot of anxiety in me and it still does. I suppressed the anxiety through abject narcism.

Once I was able to leave school and eventually move away I was assumed to be of the same class as my other white peers. Privileged, university educated etc. There was constant paranoia of being asked about my background and having to see the look on peoples faces when they asked where I got my degree from.

Again, I mostly floated through life benefitting from the implicit bias of my peers and others. Luckily I was smart and gravitated to tech at a very young age.

To this day I'm still wracked with anxiety at the possibility of discussing my financial situation, upbringing, or education.

Seeing this described as a denial of basic human rights in the article shocked me. I had never even thought about the anxiety objectively, until recently.

Jesus fucking Christ what a terrible take and highly illegal in most sane countries.

I'm Serb, I've hired and worked with Croatians. I've had colleagues who were Lebanese and worked along side Israelis. I've had a Palestinian coworker report to a Jewish manager. I have seen an adjacent team's Japanese manager rely on their Chinese report as their right hand.

Maybe it's because I live and work in Canada where there is absolutely zero tolerance for this kind of garbage thinking.

> Maybe it's because I live and work in Canada where there is absolutely zero tolerance for this kind of garbage thinking.

You’ll be quite disappointed if you read about your new country’s history. Even the recent one (the last residential school where natives children were forced to attend and where children unmarked graves were found was closed in … 1998). Or about the province that tried to gain independence twice. Or what happened to the Metis people or the French speakers to the east..

Or just what happens when the dogma of multiculturalism takes over [0].

[0] https://www.thestar.com/vancouver/2019/01/15/as-ndp-leader-j...

> Indians and Pakistanis

What do you do with Bangladeshis. :D

At the organisation where I worked at in the UK, all interviews were panel interviews - it's not ideal in various ways but it does it harder for discrimination (not just racial discrimination) to slip through the net - obviously just because something is illegal doesn't mean that it can't happen and people can't get away with it. I think they also tried to make sure all panels had a woman on them for example - I ended up on more than my share of panels as a result.

>Serbians and Bosnians

I think you might be mistaken with this, even lower class people from these nationalities (the least educated ones) have no problem working with each other. Especially untrue for those with higher education (high school and above).

How did your hiring managers respond? That sounds terrible and racist in itself.

Is there a way to privately message you?

> Chinese and Japanese

When I interviewed last time; the only company i did not make through phone screen was by a Japanese interviewer. I gave a three viable solutions to an easy question. Had no idea why I failed but probably because of racism

It's definitely possible that there were other factors in play. I hope you see the danger or irony of automatically assuming that the Japanese interviewer rejected you because of their racial bias.

I hope you see the danger or irony of stigmatizing the discussion of bias.

You threw a racism uno card by asserting that the Japanese guy was racist with zero proof. You’re stereotyping people as much as you accuse others of.

It was a different commenter -- franklampard.

Well, then we can certainly say he wasn't hired based on a review of past performance. Lamps has had a terrible managerial career.

I didn’t think of racism until I saw this.

I hope we can have more nuanced discussions on these topics.

Most of these discussions of bias are about as scientific as phrenology, and ought to be treated with as much respect.

Can we please stop conflating casteism as racism? While both equally horrible, one is not same as the other. One can possibly hide their caste. But a person cant change their racial phenotypes.

How can I hide me caste without changing my last name?

I know I might be oversimplifying this. But you can legally change your last name. But you cannot change your race. Unless, your phenotype is somewhat ambiguous and can pass as a person of the majority racial group. But that is rare. By conflating casteism with racism, you're diluting the meaning of what racism is and systemic effects it has had on minorities in the United States.

By the way I'm a person of Indian ancestry born and raised in the U.S. According to my grandparents, we're of lower caste as well. But no one has ever asked me what my caste is simply based on my last name. I'm not denying that casteism isn't a problem within the Indian diaspora. But it is entirely different societal problem within the United States compared to racism. In India , it might be similar to racism. But not the same in the U.S.

Let me put it this way - a person who hates all minorities or specific ethnic groups, isn't going to care what caste you belong into. He's going to hate you and the higher caste Indian person equally.

If your argument is that one is worse than the other because you can hide then you didn't take into account things like plastic surgery or bleaching one's skin or straightening one's hair. If you're going to tell someone to just abandon their family name then why not tell them to get plastic surgery or anything else to modify their appearance?

It's a bad argument.

If simply bleaching one's skin or straightening hair allowed one to hide their racial phenotype ,then millions would be doing it and we wouldn't have all these problems. Race is immutable in most parts of the world.

> If simply bleaching one's skin or straightening hair allowed one to hide their racial phenotype

Lots of people do do this. Aren't you aware of skin creams to whiten the skin, hair straightening products, eye lid surgeries, etc. The list goes on and on.

> then millions would be doing it and we wouldn't have all these problems

But those alone aren't enough. You need massive amounts of plastic surgery.

Financial cost is one but also the cost to one's identity.

But more importantly, millions of people wouldn't just throw away their identity. For this same reason, telling someone they can just change their last name is makes no sense.

> Race is immutable in most parts of the world.

Identity is just as immutable. You can tell someone to change their last name but that is about as effective as wearing different clothes. You cannot change a person's upbringing, how they were socialized, their memories, how they view the world. All of that is more or less set in stone from childhood.

You're better off getting plastic surgery. At least that will be effective.

And this is why I am so thankful to Periyar and the social justice movement in the 60s in South India. The only state where it caught on with a fervor was TamilNadu, and thanks to the vast majority of the population opting to shift from caste-based surnames to Patronymical surnames, it is very difficult to identify caste from the name alone in today's Tamil Nadu.

This is not so cut and dry. The US has a long history of people “passing”.

So what percentage of people do you think are "passing"?

High.

People that can pass of as white are more often of mixed heritage. Even then its really rare for them to be passable into the majority racial population. It all depends on their racial/ethnic composition. If one is half-latino/half-North African/levant and half-white, chances are they're going to be passable and most likely identify as white. Even the U.S census considers people from MENA as white. There are also white-Hispanics. But same can't be said of people that are a mix of African-American + Caucasian. See Barack Obama, Jordan Peele or Keegan-Michael Keys as examples. What you consider "high" for passable are still a small fraction of the minority population.

Also passable isn't a think most people do these days. At least not since the 1960s where racial barriers were much higher. These days people of mixed heritage will most likely identify with the minority side of their heritage. (For many reasons).

As a Brazilian friend of mine once told me - Racial classification and categorization in the United States is just weird.

If one is half-latino/half-North African/levant and half-white, chances are they're going to be passable and most likely identify as white.

What exactly is the difference between the old concept of “passing” and the new concept of “identifying as white” other than nomenclature?

https://www.amazon.com/Chosen-Exile-History-Passing-American...

An excellent book on this subject.

Had to look up what "passing" meant in this context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_(racial_identity)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com