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Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

> names that didn’t match their ethnicity

The people I've known from China and Korea have a tendency to adopt traditional English names (Steve, Joe, Mike, etc) because their native names are hard to pronounce for English speakers.

Further, the 2nd generation Asian Americans I've met do often have traditional English names.

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Certainly someone of obvious Asian descent and accent who introduces themselves as “Simon” is not a red flag. As you say, some people understandably prefer not to hear their real name mangled every day.

But someone of obvious Asian descent and accent who introduces themselves as “Simon Cartwright” and has vague tales of growing up in London… again, it’s possible, and we should treat each individual with respect and assumption of good intent, but that might make me dig a little deeper.

There is simply more noise than signal with this style of racial profiling and I implore you to do some soul-searching and reconsidering because you are probably harming people without even intending to with your current behavior.

The person you are responding to led with red flags about locations in their stories.

You are the only person trying to turn this into a racial issue.

IANAL, but I think it's flat-out illegal in the US, not just harmful. (And if it's not illegal, it should be.)

From https://www.eeoc.gov/prohibited-employment-policiespractices:

> An employer may not base hiring decisions on stereotypes and assumptions about a person's race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information.

It's really not that complicated...

Life is essentially always that complicated. I have never really had a case where something was less complicated than I thought

Can you expand on what you mean? What’s not that complicated?

Adoption makes it entirely possible for an Asian-presenting person to have a European first name _and_ surname and, frankly, is not something you should be asked about in an interview.

Of course, in theory, there's a possibility that someone named Simon Cartwright, with a North Korean accent, who has amnesia and can't remember a thing about the place they claim they grew up in, is actually not a spy. I personally don't think that's a situation where an employer is required to give the benefit of the doubt.

How many employers can reliably distinguish a North Korean accent from a South Korean one?

Quite a few South Korean descent owned and operated companies are in America. I assume that they would have a decent detection rate.

Don't ask about it in the interview.

But it might be worth paying extra attention to any clues that they might not have lived in that place and have a falsified history.

As he said, "we should treat each individual with respect and assumption of good intent." But a decent proportion of people showing this particular characteristic will be engaging in employment fraud, and we shouldn't be blind to that signal.

It's very rare for kids adopted from Asia to Europe to have an Asian accent.

I know more than one, and I don’t even live in Europe. Please avoid racial profiling, it’s a fool’s errand.

It's not racial profiling to say that people usually have an accent similar to where they grew up. Or that they usually don't have the accent of somewhere thousands of miles from where they grew up.

Agreed. It’s racial profiling to assume where someone was raised based on their name.

You'd expect an adoptee to have perfect English

You can make no such assumption I'm afraid. You might expect a native speaker to have perfect English, but you'd be wrong.

There are people with issues like dyslexia and people who don't fit the education system and perform poorly.

I've met non-native speakers who have far better spelling, grammar and an enlarged vocabulary than people who have lived in my English-speaking country for their whole lives.

Name alone is not a red flag, almost every Asian maintains an English name.

We're talking about English/European _last_ names though. Definitely possible in today's international world, but much less common.

Every Chinese, dunno about other countries.

What I'm still trying to figure out is how exactly the next step is supposed to work.

One of the first things we ask from both employees and freelancers is a copy of their passport/ID. Would they also have a fake ID with the name they give you (much easier to fake a PDF than a real passport) or just a story, passing you through a legit company? Or is it common to hire people without really knowing who they are?

My nephew’s last name is Brown but his mom is Vietnamese so he looks Vietnamese. Obviously a “mismatched” name isn’t red flag.

But someone named Sam Smith who supposedly grew up in an English speaking country, but barely speaks English is something that might trigger you to look further.

Yeah, it's hard to know exactly what they meant by that comment, but it seems pretty presumptuous to judge whether someone's name "matches" their ethnicity for so many reasons, not the least of which is that there really isn't any way you should know for certain someone's ethnicity when they're applying at all! Asking about it in an interview is certainly illegal, and even in countries that are mostly homogeneous, there are going to be at least _some_ immigrants (maybe not for North Korea, but the entire premise of the article is that the applicants aren't claiming to be from North Korea in the first place)

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