Hacker News Reader

Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

Genuinely asking as someone not deeply familiar with the complexities of Indian culture: India now has the largest population in the world, is the biggest democracy, and has significant potential for growth (e.g. reducing poverty). At the same time, we see Indian leaders in top positions in major U.S. companies, like the CEOs of Google (1st gen) and Microsoft (2nd gen). How do these factors all connect? What drives this mix of internal challenges and global success? I’m not naive in thinking that a few successful individuals represent an entire population, but I do see a signal there.

View on HN

1. India has a low gdp per capita. What that means is quality of life for masses is low. That also means slum/ghetto like neighbourhoods. Even if you have the money you mostly stay in a gated community, sandwiched between those areas. So you want to leave ASAP and stay in the west.

2. The Indians in top leadership positions you see in tech firms are rare exceptions. To some extent they also come from fairly well off families and communities in India, who have social capital. Can afford cram school fees for Ivy league exams, money and ability to take loans to study abroad etc.

3. Any body who once makes non-trivial money or sees non-trivial career success instantly realises, given how big India is. Given its politics, and overall spending on Education, R&D, and the rate of industrialisation. The only hope for a good life for their, or atleast at their children is to move to the west.

Basically people want to leave India, as fixing India is largely a long term, and also a nearly impossible project.

The Indians migrating to the US via h1b visas are not coming from the slums or ghettoes. Higher education to foreigners in the US is essentially an immigration scheme - they pay $60-$100k (+living expenses) for a useless graduate degree which only the rich can afford, then get funneled into consulting firms like Cognizant/Infosys on OPT/EAD visas before picking up their h1b for ~ 6 years. This pretty much gets you in the US for ~ 10 years before getting a green card.

> The Indians in top leadership positions you see in tech firms are rare exceptions

This is absolutely not the case. Despite being 2% of the population, Indians are way overrepresented in tech leadership positions (not just CEO/CTO). I recall in a meeting at a med size tech firm I worked at, the recruiting/HR department no longer considered Asians of any ethnicity a minority and lumped them in with white males.

>recruiting/HR department no longer considered Asians of any ethnicity a minority and lumped them in with white males.

Why does HR even need to keep track of ethnicities? Is this a US thing?

Here in my EU country you're just employee/applicant #3215, that's it, nobody asks or enters your ethnicity anywhere to even be able to keep tabs on how many are of what ethnicity, since everyone is considered equal by default and judged exclusively on performance (in theory at least, in practice there are still biases, but tracking ethnicities won't fix that, since that's human nature).

What you're saying would even be against the law here since then it opens the door to bias and potential discrimination.

> (in theory at least, in practice there are still biases, but tracking ethnicities won't fix that, since that's human nature)

That’s what we’re trying to fix (or at least mitigate) in the US. You say it is just human nature, but we’re a pretty diverse country, so we have a strong incentive to proactively try and see if we can make it work.

You still haven't answered how employers keeping track of the ethnicities of employees helps against discrimination in any way.

To me that's exactly what helps lead to discrimination versus not knowing ethnicities and treating employees as anonymized numbers which would be fair to everyone.

Nope, and I won’t. There are a lot of programs, and with various levels of effectiveness, and I don’t particularly want to dive into the nitty-gritty details of whether or not each one is working well. We haven’t got a perfect solution. But, I think it is self-evident that without collecting any data, we are just… hoping it’ll all work out? That’s not a plan.

Currently in the US, businesses don’t actively have official policies of bigotry. If they did, collecting that data could be harmful. But instead we have bigotry as a sort of soft social thing, a compounding of many little challenges, “bad culture fit,” that sort of thing. Because it is subtle, we need to keep it from slipping under the radar.

Handwavy answer with zero substance - sounds like an HR reply. I encourage everyone reading to lie/fib about race/ethnicity data. Also, make up a pronoun/gender identity. Waste these suckers time.

It's because of the history of racial discrimination in the US. While there's talk of affirmative action in the news, I suspect plain'ole racial discrimination is probably far more common.

Taht still doesn't answered how employers keeping track of the ethnicities of employees helps against discrimination in any way.

To me that's exactly what helps lead to discrimination versus not knowing ethnicities and treating employees as anonymized numbers which would be fair to everyone.

The history of racism in the US is long and complex. In essence we keep track of this sort of thing to try to prevent ongoing systemic racism. "You can't fix what you don't measure" and all that. It also doesn't need to be systemic racism per se. People tend to hire people like them due to unconscious biases so if your company is mostly "X" there are is a good chance it will continue hiring "X".

Here is one example that might be interesting: https://www.npr.org/2024/04/11/1243713272/resume-bias-study-...

> the recruiting/HR department no longer considered Asians of any ethnicity a minority and lumped them in with white males.

there was, IIRC, an infamous spat at a FAANG about that

It's so weird.

Why didn't big tech companies fight tooth and nail to get Asian recognised as a minority so they could then turn around and say look 'We employ minorities at a rate way higher than other companies' ?

We all realize what a scam all of this is, right?

DEI? I’d hope so, but somewhat half of the population seems oblivious.

They aren’t “under-represented” minorities. They, at least in California, provide the breakdowns.

> Indians are way overrepresented in tech leadership positions (not just CEO/CTO).

Lot of Indians do focus on learning/studying hard, get good grades to get a good job and move up the ladder. Ofcourse that does not automatically mean you get to be a CEO/CTO but the pool of people who hard hard and ambitious is bit bigger compared to other countries.

> as fixing India is largely a long term

You can also get killed in India if you go against some powerful politician or people close to power.

The "upward trajectory" we're all so familiar with is not (yet) as big a part of their culture yet. (I believe this is changing... the chronically online young generation seem to be absorbing a lot more of international culture than their ancestors). The regulatory environment for any business is an absolute nightmare of hostile patchwork policies different in every city and state. When foreign companies come in, the government babus want to yell Imperialism! at every turn, which leads to 51/49 ventures being the way to go, which are overly bureaucratic.

It brings me hope to see shark tank getting popular there. Not to say the hosts or the contestants have been as honest as they should be, but it shows a big shift in mindset since India's 80s/90s economic policies

Reply on news.ycombinator.com