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Comment by JohnBrookz | Hacker News Reader

This happened at intel and was very noticeable even back in 2010. Indians hires other Indians. At every company I’ve been at if you were not Indian you were not invited to the conversation. Sitting in meetings where you were excluded from 30% of the conversation was wild. I never felt like they were rude or anything though- just that I was an outsider.

Best team I worked with was very diverse and they actively worked to help each other get promoted and protect each other.

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Same experience here.

On a positive note I got replaced by a guy in India. Then after a year of them clambering over each other’s corpses for promotion and destroying the org from the inside, I got hired back on contract to unfuck the mess at 4x my previous salaried rate.

Nothing against India or Indians but the reason outsourcing fails is no one wants to be an outsourced workforce so they go for promotion first to get a better job. And I don’t blame them.

> Sitting in meetings where you were excluded from 30% of the conversation was wild.

I am curious, was this due to them speaking in a different language in actual professional meetings at Intel? I have often heard these reports, but in a social context.

I have never personally observed this in professional settings; but am curious to hear more so I can watch out for it if/when I do encounter it. It's odd because I would struggle to hold a professional conversation in any of the Indian languages that I speak (I have no idea how to say something like "thermal characteristics" or "power dissipation" in them); and would likely keep lapsing into English.

I have many Indian colleagues and they do tend not to speak English among them in the office. There needs to be someone else involved in the conversation for them to stick to English.

Another aspect is that I have found that they are quite hierarchical, probably a cultural trait. So how much they stick to English also depends on how senior the "non-Indian(s)" are compared to them. If you are their senior they are very nice.

> was this due to them speaking in a different language in actual professional meetings

This happened frequently at a WITCH I worked at out of college. The meeting would be in English then have segments change in the middle as certain speakers switched languages. Luckily, I often had a coworker stand up for me to mention to use English although I did miss many conversations.

> WITCH stands for the Indian tech giants – W- Wipro I- Infosys T- TCS C- Cognizant H- HCL A- Accenture India

In case anyone else was wondering about that acronym.

I have no idea what they were talking about. For all I know they could have been talking about soccer.

There was an article exposing it wasn't just for / between Indians.

Indians were actively discriminating against other Indians if they weren't born into the "highest" caste of hinduism (the few percent only allowed to learn to read and write), or avoiding the "lowest caste" of hinduism (way over 90 percent).

This caste system discrimination in tech, is also used to discriminate against other minorities who are not Indian, originating from the Indian subcontinent.

Trapped in Silicon Valley's Hidden Caste System https://www.wired.com/story/trapped-in-silicon-valleys-hidde...

Insight: Caste in California: Tech giants confront ancient Indian hierarchy https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/caste-...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/big-techs-big-pro...

More: https://www.google.com/search?q=silicon+valley+caste+system

Canada has been dealing with this more proactively than most counties with Indian diasporas, a process no doubt aided by the by the significant number of indo-canadian politicians familiar with the issue.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-human-rights-...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/caste-discri...

https://www.trtworld.com/americas/toronto-school-board-recog...

I worked at a company with a large multi-ethnic workforce. They had an Indian subsidiary but didn't play the H1B game. The rule was English only in the office to avoid exclusion.

If this has really been going on for more than a decade I wonder what your labor regulators are doing. This is a clear-cut issue of bad labor policy.

Safe to say that 2010 was the beginning of Intel's downfall

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