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Comment by eksith | Hacker News Reader

This isn't from HN, but I've noticed an implicit bias against devs from South and Southeast Asia (can't speak for China). On my resume, I go by the shortened form of my first name, not "eksith" and that was a conscious decision after putting my full name resulted in very few calls and emails.

I'm not sure if that has to do with a perception of talent or simply a presumption of a language barrier, since I've also seen a fair number of devs from India post content (both on blogs and on places like Stack Overflow) that make me question their communication skills.

It may simply be a case of many people = higher number of proportional incompetence.

Edit: To add, it may be a higher number of proportional sub-par content coming from India due to greater degrees of internet access.

Full disclosure: I'm originally from Sri Lanka, now living in New York.

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I remember reading a study (it is pretty generic and I'm sure done many times), where a research group put a stereotypical 'white name' on a resume and sent it out, then put a stereotypical 'black name' on the same resume and sent it out. I'm sure you see where this is going in that the 'white' resume received many more calls and interviews. This bias is unfortunate but pretty prevalent in most organizations, and is even seen in university admissions frequently (same ethnic bias, different reasons).

I have had several professors/GTAs at uni who are native Indians that I highly respect for their CS knowledge. The accent can be a little hard to pick up at first if you've never been around it but after that its all gravy :) Likewise I've had some who I've completely despised, just like every other person of every other ethnicity. I'm sorry you have to deal with that.

Edit: expand on last para

It is possible to test yourself for such biases:

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

That "test" is completely ridiculous and meaningless.

Would you like to make an argument in favor of your assertion?

The implication is that by changing the word/picture associations at each level, they will eventually trick you into revealing that you are racist, as you mistakenly associate the negative words to the race which you are allegedly prejudice against. Wouldn't it be just as likely that people would click because they simply mixed up which side of the screen the association was supposed to go on? Such a mistake could also be attributed to a lack of attention or even clumsiness. It seems like the test takes a huge leap of logic by automatically associating the mistakes with racism. Twice throughout the test I mistakenly clicked the wrong side for a negative word association. Once it was with an African American portrait and once it was with a European American portrait. One would think that this would even things out, but the test determined that I'm a racist because I got blue and red mixed up.

As I said, it's utterly ridiculous.

I would definitely say that's a presumption for many people, but I think things are changing. Working at a very large fortune 100 that dealt with a lot of H1-Bs and foreign talent, I saw a lot of managers who learned to shed that bias, and it helped them.

Jerry average american building a real estate site may have some different biases though, and that bias may cost him some really good talent.

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