Comment by tristor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tristor | Hacker News Reader

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Related, Washington Post previously published an anonymous open letter from Dalit women in 2020 in the wake of Cisco being sued for caste discrimination: https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/a-statement-on-caste-...

One of the most interesting things that stood out to me from this letter and that lawsuit was the assertion by those affected that discrimination on the basis of caste was more impactful and more severe than discrimination suffered due to immigration status, race, and gender in US society, and the letter goes so far as to state "We know that we thrive when we work under a non-Indian boss. Our work is seen and evaluated on merit, and we are integrated rather than being excluded."

It makes these discussions of castes even more important, especially as Indian immigration continues to rise and Indian culture begins to take precedence in the tech industry. Being a white American from the Midwest, I had no awareness of caste or caste discrimination when I began my career, but as I got more experienced began to learn about it and unfortunately I have personally witnessed some incidents in the workplace during my career. I wish that Google had allowed this talk to move forward, because I think ending workplace discrimination is a critical path to ensuring a merit-based free market open to all.

What did you witness?

Personally, I've witnessed issues with the Indian caste system in many large corporations. From Johnson & Johnson - where there is actually a development team - where they hired other Indians who were horribly unqualified (multiple times they were poached from IT support - I enjoy seeing people move up in tech, but they were entry level techs with no programming experience) and almost exclusively hired other Indians to a larger tech firm in the US (where I am now) that is not Google or Cisco.

I've also seen this in smaller companies and startups, but there it is usually the Indian CTO or manager hiring an Indian contracting company, where big surprise, there is some prior relationship. I haven't ever had these arrangements work out.

I have nothing against Indian people - but this is an issue in tech, and I feel like it is becoming a larger issue.

I hear a lot of instances of favoritism or nepotism in what you describe, possibly even corruption, but not much sounds like caste-based discrimination. "Incompetent person hires a lot of people they know instead of qualified candidates" is not really what's being discussed here, and I think Ms. Soundararajan would agree.

As a side note, this illustrates quite neatly why most of us who come from India are somewhat reluctant to talk about caste and explain how typical discrimination takes place, because Americans will try to slot it into their preconceived notions about class or race-based discrimination, and tend to jump to conclusions like you're doing here, complete with an "I have nothing against Indian people" disclaimer at the end (Really?).

So, a reasonable question is, "Well, what does a real instance of caste-based discrimination look like?"

Imagine that among a bunch of Indian candidates, an Indian hiring manager hires only Indian people who order vegetarian meals at lunch, and rejects any Indian candidate who orders a dish containing meat. Also, suppose you see this happening pretty frequently, and the manager inexplicably rejected some pretty great candidates, and the only common factor is that they ordered meat at lunch. Then it might be caste discrimination! (please please please note the operative word might, I really don't want to start a witch hunt here)

But something like that sounds pretty weird and far-fetched to most Americans, so it's hard to communicate what it looks like, let alone explain the somewhat complicated backing reasons.

Well said.

Americans have no idea of what caste-based discrimination looks like and hence merely use it to foist their own prejudices (i.e. "they terk err jerbs") onto the Indian community. Indians have such diversity amongst themselves (North vs. South, State vs. State, Linguistic, Religious etc.) that anything can be used as a bone of contention (real or imagined).

The first thing to realize is that people with grievances whether factual or not, often use the American platform to push their agenda. While it makes some sense to raise Caste-based discrimination etc. within the Indian Workplace, it absolutely does not make any sense to raise it in the American Workplace simply because the repercussions would be vastly detrimental to the entire Indian Community. It is also the case that Caste-based discrimination has declined greatly in Urban India (since Independence) and more specifically in the IT sector where everybody is only after the almighty USD/INR and nothing else matters.

Hence i think Google did the right thing in cancelling this talk.

I may be an American, but sometimes it doesn't take an expert on the Indian caste system to spot caste discrimination. I have literally heard people say "I don't have to listen to him, he is of a lower caste" or some variation of that sentence. In fact, just yesterday, I was watching an episode of one of Gordon Ramsay's kitchen shows. The chef was Indian and said "he can't tell me what to do, we are the same caste and I am older."

Not everything in life is simple and in particular; nuances matter very much when it comes to understanding other Cultures/Social Structures.

Anecdotes like yours really bother me because they sound so outlandish that their veracity cannot be taken on faith. Having spent a considerable part of my working life in the US, i can state that never once has the subject of Caste ever been a topic of relevance with my Indian colleagues i.e. it has never ever come up in any discussions, implicit or otherwise. None of my American colleagues knew much about it; and i have worked across a bunch of companies so the sample space is quite spread out.

So you have no evidence, he has evidence, and your argument is simply "I don't believe you." These are the same forum discussion strategies of white nationalists, and this has been a fascinating thread to read!

I wrote;

>their veracity cannot be taken on faith

If you think what he "claims" is evidence, i have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

I will place my decade and a half of working experience across half a dozen companies in the US over any anonymous person's "evidence".

The claim you're debating - "does caste-based discrimination exist" is more likely to be true with an anecdote "I've seen it" than with an anecdote "I haven't encountered it."

Those two anecdotes can both truthfully coexist, but the first one proves the statement while the second doesn't disprove it. The evidence needed to disprove such a statement is pretty large; an individual's work history is not enough to say confidently that discrimination isn't happening.

How many companies have you worked at, 6? How many companies are there with significant indian representation? At Google alone there are far more than six TEAMS with majority indian representation. How could you claim that your experience invalidates someone else's?

Meanwhile, if there are a handful of anecdotes that folks have experienced or witnessed caste-based discrimination, we should be pretty confident that it's a problem.

This is a classic example of wrong Critical Thinking. Let me write out the "proof" for you;

1) You have one anecdata from a person who IS NOT hiding behind anonymity. You have another anecdata from a person who IS hiding behind anonymity. Therefore Person 2's claims cannot be taken on faith.

2) The topic under discussion is part of Person 1's culture and hence he is familiar with all its nuances. Person 2 has no knowledge of the subject or at best a cursory knowledge from tabloids and not from any authentic sources. Therefore Person 2 cannot claim equal relevance with Person 1's knowledge.

3) Person 1 has lived and worked across both his and Person 2's cultures for a significant period of time. Thus he is familiar with thought processes of both sides w.r.t. the topic under discussion. Person 2 does not have any such experience. Thus Person 2's "claims" do not have the same weight as Person 1's.

QED.

I was just saying their perspective would "prove it" assuming you and the other person's personal experiences are both valid. But you are making the assumption that it's invalid and your own experience is the only one you can trust as valid. I'm not saying this particularly commenter's experience is hard proof of anything, but it's not hard to find enough perspectives from other people to convince yourself that caste discrimination is likely to be a real problem. The rest of the comment probably bears re-reading on your part. P(N people with perspectives different from your experience are all liars) < P(perspectives different from your experience can be true)

Also writing qed at the end of your comment doesn't make it a rigorous proof, lol. Like, you've already failed to understand the basic concept of sampling bias.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31607927

I’ve worked in the technology departments of major American investment banks you’ve heard of. I’ve seen Indian colleagues openly discuss caste and speculate someone’s caste based on their name and regional background openly in the company cafe

You'll do whatever you can to maintain the fragile worldview that you haven't been the beneficiary of a class-based system that discriminates and gives you an unfair advantage.

The interesting thing here is the isomoprhism between your reaction and those of other privileged groups forced to examine their ill-gotten gains, but on the other hand maybe it's not surprising, we're just chimpanzees with tools after all

> You'll do whatever you can to maintain the fragile worldview that you haven't been the beneficiary of a class-based system that discriminates and gives you an unfair advantage.

I find this POV extremely fascinating outside India. Here's the thing in case you are unaware: in India, roughly 50-60% of jobs in the government sector, seats in government funded colleges and private colleges (and soon probably even in private companies) are set aside for the "lower" castes and tribes[1]. I use scare quotes here, because there is a whole other discussion of how many "lower" castes actually need this kind of affirmative action since they are extremely well off that I won't get into here. I come from an "upper" caste family (scare quotes here because I find the terminology stupid and divisive, I definitely don't consider myself "upper" in any way) where my grandfather was a dirt-poor farmer who moved from the village to the city, died dirt poor as well (think Slumdog Millionaire level poverty). My father worked hard, educated himself and got himself a job in the government sector despite having nothing "reserved" for him. I did the same too with nobody handing me anything. This is the same story across millions of families across India. So tell me, what unfair advantage or privilege did this system really afford me? And then I see this enlightened person on the Internet who has probably heard/read about caste in the last couple of days have a fully formed opinion on all things caste, with no real intention of really understanding the issue. A superficial understanding is only going to get you so far without descending into all out stereotypes and bigotry, like another commenter on here who equated wearing the sacred thread with a Klan hood. But then I guess you are right in a way: we're all just different groups of chimpanzees with tools.

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_in_India

Or it can be is as simple as saying a caste system is dumb, Americans and I assume other nationalities find it fascinatingly backward. The idea that there are “upper” and “lower” castes is inherently discriminatory that seem abundantly obvious and there’s no real nuance to it.

> Or it can be is as simple as saying a caste system is dumb

Agreed.

And this ironically is the crux of the problem: most Indians find it dumb, don’t care for it and hope it dies out soon. But some groups would like to keep using it as yet another way to divide for myriad reasons: vote bank politics being the biggest if you follow any Indian politics at all. Preventing base bigoted discrimination is a reason too, but a very small reason.

This group equality labs is less of the latter and more of the former.

You seem to be under the misapprehension that this thread is about "The Indian Caste System" as a whole; it is not. That is a different discussion altogether. For some authentic sources on this topic see my other comments in this thread.

This thread is about "Caste based Discrimination" amongst the Indian IT Community in the USA. My contention is that it is not all the issue that it is made out to be by some vested interests who may have their own agenda in raking this up. Hence American companies need to be cautious before giving them a megaphone and a platform.

What caste are you personally in?

The GP's profile indicates he's comfortably upper caste.

I was also initially surprised when I heard about caste based discrimination in USA. There are few points which helped me in understanding: 1) Personally a person may not have seen or heard of sexual harassment incidents. It doesn't mean "sexual harassment" doesn't exist. 2) Even if a lower caste person is not being discriminated, but if the person is feeling "uncomfortable" about revealing his/her caste it means that there is something wrong in the society which needs to be fixed. (very much like racism)

As such USA does much better job of telling about racism, then India does about casteism.

However India did a superb job of asking Dr.Ambedkar to write the constitution, by which the upper caste will abide. I am not aware of any other society which has said, "we believe in equality and will allow someone who was discriminated to make the rules by which we all will live".

Allowing rabble-rousers to deliver 'talks' about caste discrimination is not going to change the hearts and minds of people who set store by caste affiliations. There will always be people who will be cagey about revealing aspects about themselves, including gay, queer, furries, upper-caste, lower-caste, nudists... the list goes on. People seem to take the aphorism 'bring your real self to work' a bit too literally. We all put a lid on certain aspects of our personalities at work, and endeavors to change that or eradicate that are highly misguided.

There’s so much wrong with this comment.

You pejoratively dismiss those who seek to bring attention to discrimination they experience as “rabble-rousers”. You then proceed to acknowledge that this is discrimination is very real (“we can’t change their hearts and minds!”).

You then mention caste with nudism in the same sentence as nudism, like that’s appropriate.

You then blame the victims of the aforementioned discrimination for ‘bringing their real selves to work,’ as if it’s somehow their fault they are being discriminated against.

I’ve heard horror stories from Indian friends in tech. When they start at a new company, upper-caste Indian managers and coworkers will persistently ask them seemingly innocuous questions like where they are from, where they went to school, what Neighbourhood of which city did you grow up in, are you vegetarian, are you vegetarian by choice or birth, what do your parents do, etc. There was an even an episode of planet money where a person who had been discriminated against describes a coworker patting them on the back in the area where Brahmins sometimes where a white thread.

Being born into a caste isn’t some “personality quirk,” and it’s exceedingly offensive to imply it is. Dalit peoples who face discrimination don’t have a choice in the matter, some will always see them as “untouchables” regardless of whether or not they disclose their caste openly.

I seriously suggest you reevaluate your thinking.

> Americans have no idea of what caste-based discrimination looks like

> [...]

> Hence i think Google did the right thing in cancelling this talk.

It seems to me that this talk could have been an opportunity for Americans to learn about caste discrimination and what it looks like.

The speaker is very lopsided and is not accurate. It will give a very much one sided distorted message. Great google listended to its employees and canceled. Will any company invite a fae right or far left activist to talk on campus.

Google is a technology company, not a liberal or conservative think tank. Let us get back to tech talks!

> The speaker is very lopsided and is not accurate

How exactly?

I think you should be able to criticize the discrimination that happens by Indian managers just like you should be able to criticize racist cops.

Except that this is not just weird and far-fetched. It is also very unusual for such diet-based discrimination to happen. I am a vegetarian. All managers (with the exception of one) who hired me in the past 12 years (in India) were not vegetarians. Unlikely that they saw vegetarians discriminating, and did not practice a little reverse discrimination themselves. The problem today in India is not that there is a caste competition between one caste and another, it is that the IT field is desperately in need of developers and testers. And, the employers are unable to pay the high salaries being demanded.

The instance being described is mainly in the US, where the talk described was given. I know that such discrimination is highly unlikely, especially in the Midwest where there aren't a ton of Indian employees to begin with, and probably even fewer Indian hiring managers.

However, I was merely stating it as an example of caste discrimination – which you seem to grasp readily, probably because you're Indian or work in India.

Explaining to an American person how diet-based discrimination can be an instance of caste discrimination is harder than you'd think. The OP is basically going "I saw an Indian person doing this bad thing, so it must be caste-based discrimination!", which I'm trying to correct by citing an example of (so to say) actual discrimination on the basis of caste.

>So, a reasonable question is, "Well, what does a real instance of caste-based discrimination look like?"

Given that the example came in the context of this question, the answer is a resounding "not like that".

I think hiring other Indians is the core of it. These aren't people they know, outside of recognizing their last name.

This is a case of corruption, which is endemic in Indian culture. There are countless examples of mid-high level Indian Managers convincing management to move work to bodyshops from which they either receive kickbacks, are started by close friends so they get to profit also, or use as a side-channel to push their own people (relatives, immigrants from back home) into the organization.

It's shockingly widespread and because the management structures at many tech and IT companies are Indian, no-one bats an eyelid. This is one example of foreign cultures actually degrading American work culture. There are a few others in this category.

I have seen bad hiring in Cisco, which seemed to be based on membership in some sort of clique centered on Pune. I don't know if it was normal "friends hiring friends" or something else.

> Our work is seen and evaluated on merit

This line of arguments will not work with the sensibilities of the priestly caste not native to India.

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