This caste problems continue in the US, instead of leaving behind such ridiculous biases it becomes a part of an US company…
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/googles-caste-bias-pr...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/googles-caste-bias-pr...
> The Google spokesperson said that caste discrimination has “no place in our workplace and it’s prohibited in our policies.”
I can testify that Ads was very heavily Indian, much more than the general employee percentages would predict. I don't know if it still is. Sridhar Ramaswamy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sridhar_Ramaswamy) probably had something to do with that. From informal observation, IIT was a very common alma mater for them.
Yet, within the SmartASS team in Ads, a huge percentage of the engineers were Canadian. I worked in the office right next door to them for a while.
What does this tell you? People tend to refer their friends and give good recommendations to people they know. A Canadian is more likely to know other Canadians. So is that "discrimination?"
Probably for the government, it's the entire company, or maybe each large strata of it.
But it still can be useful to spot-check smaller teams. If that team of 10 is, say, 100% male, or 100% Chinese, maybe that's something that deserves a second look. Not with guns-blazing, "you all are obviously sexist/racist", but... a second look, nonetheless.
that's the nonsense question. This isn't 100%, but there were Google managers who prided themselves on having very disproportionately large numbers of black or female employees. SRE groups, especially.
In addition, there are plenty of teams that are almost all Chinese. Or Indian. Or, of course, white male.
Yes, absolutely. It may be passive and unconscious, but it's still discrimination. I bet a lot of more-than-qualified candidates -- many likely even more qualified than the people who ended up getting hired -- were rejected.
Unless you're going to assert that Indian people are uniquely the most qualified and best at building advertising systems (which I hope we can agree would be an absurd assertion to make), it's a near certainty that better candidates were passed over.
And looking at it from the potential candidate perspective, I personally wouldn't want to work on a team that is heavily over-represented by any one race (even my own), and I wouldn't be surprised if that "scared away" some great candidates (of other races) for positions as well. This is no different than the archetypal example of a woman engineer being uncomfortable joining a team full of men.
> People tend to refer their friends and give good recommendations to people they know.
I've come to believe that referrals are great when you're a tiny startup trying to find people whose work you can trust (since dead weight can be fatal to a new company), but become less and less useful -- and sometimes even counterproductive -- as a company grows in size.
At any rate, at any non-tiny company, any referral should be put through the same interview process as the other candidates, and should be judged based on the interview, not on the referrer's opinion. The referrer should not even be a part of the interview process, anyway. Not just when it comes to their referral, but (if possible), they shouldn't be a part of the other candidates' interview panels either, as they may be (at best) unconsciously biased against the others.
> A Canadian is more likely to know other Canadians.
Canadians aren't a racial group (and a Canadian may be white, black, native, Asian, Indian, whatever), so I don't think this particular example has anything to do with the rest of what you're talking about. If that team mostly or exclusively comprised white Canadians (or Canadians of any other single race), then yeah, maybe there's an issue there. And regardless, a team comprised of the same $X -- where $X is pretty much anything -- should be a red flag. To me, that's a sign that the team may be cliquish and discriminate (even unconsciously) against anyone who might join the team but be an "outsider" from the perspective of $X.
They're not, but it has absolutely everything to do with it. As you agreed (I think): People tend to refer their friends. Canadians often went to the same schools (Waterloo, McGill, UBC) and if you asked one about another one, quite possibly they'd know someone who knew him or her.
so if the "why" is "I worked with this person" that's bad? Or not?
There are far too many caste grifters in USA pushing an "agenda". Equality Labs for example is an Islamic Organization with a Christian Thenmouzi as its face who talks about "caste" but in reality is she is born to very rich doctor parents in central California. Most of these claims and propaganda is not just bogus but outright harmful for the very people they pretend to fight for.
The "Islamists" tag made it harder for this organization to get any traction with politicians and corporate world. Everyone would look at them suspiciously so they quietly dropped all the muslim names from their site and removed most references to Islamophobia.
Equality Labs is behind these sort of plans and propaganda.
The thread is filled with white progressives who know nothing about caste. There are what 2 cases of caste discrimination in US companies. In one of the cases (the famous Cisco) case was proven there was no discrimination.
The professor who wrote this blog is literally a Jatt. A land owning caste & one of the most powerful castes in India. Any Indian reading this blog will know this is BS. I would understand if the author was at least Dalit or ST.
If you know more than others, that's great, but then the thing to do is to share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.