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Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

It's really not that complicated...

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Every Chinese, dunno about other countries.

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

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