How Big Tech Is Importing India’s Caste Legacy to Silicon Valley
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Re: How Big Tech Is Importing India’s Caste Legacy to Silicon Valley
#52Who's worked with Brahmin IITians, raise a paw? :paw emoji here: I hope the Valley absorbs all of the world's horrible tech sociological antipatterns because I ejected from that heap. Transient gold miners descended on the place where I grew up, treated it disposably, and failed to make any effort to integrate because they're just visiting to make their coin. Sunnyvale Costco is like an airport in Burma (okay, Myanma…
I’m neither Brahmin nor IITian but am in the immediately adjacent category of Indians. Are many of these IIT alumni (and others as well) from India basically rednecks with engineering degrees? Probably yes. Does it mean your “learn the language” attitude is actually relevant to this discussion? Probably not. Guess who else tells me, a Tamil guy, to learn the language? The same IITians (Hindi is the most popular langu…
"Absolute belief" is something you inferred that wasn't there.
Human nature is what it is. Bring enough of any group of people to another place, there will be cultural replacement.
What about the self reflection of those who let themselves be underpaid and displace the local culture for a quick buck? It seems like you're being sanctimonious.
The Bay Area can keep Man Jose, Sunnyvale, and the East bay. I avoid American yuppies without life experience and the precariat too, so don't feel too special.
Re: How Big Tech Is Importing India’s Caste Legacy to Silicon Valley
#53It looks like hiring IIT dropouts over graduates would be an epic talent arbitrage opportunity. I didn't know about vegetarianism as a proxy for class purity, and I can see why high-caste Indians get so offended when I joke that growing up in my meat and potatoes family vegetarianism was treated with a kind of sympathy because they considered it an eating disorder, why some Indians found that so funny, and why I get along better with the people whose English isn't as refined.
This extremely vulgar expression of privilege on my part mainly offends what we would call the petit bourgeois here, where working people tend to find the lack of pretense a relief. This is the horror of being middle class anywhere, because it's living with the fear of exposure that we aren't really all that different from the people we were raised to hate.
Welcome, my Indian sisters and brothers! We are more alike than we ever knew. :)
Re: How Big Tech Is Importing India’s Caste Legacy to Silicon Valley
#54There's a long Wikipedia article that covers this topic entirely:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India
Some strange observations for me from the article:
- There's 200M people in the world born into a life where they are/were considered physically untouchable by other "higher-ranked" people around them
- The usage of the label "backwards" in “other backwards classes,” or OBCs. I'll chalk it down to English not being the native language, but "disadvantaged" is more appropriate as "backwards" has a negative meaning.
I wonder if a better solution for the mental health of these people at the IITs is to simply have their own IIT where they make up the bulk of the student population. Then again, they might face discrimination by "upper-caste" professors refusing to work there or being "that" IIT that tech companies shouldn't hire from.
To the Americans on HN: is this type of discrimination comparable to being born as an African American in a city like Baltimore?
Re: How Big Tech Is Importing India’s Caste Legacy to Silicon Valley
#55Who's worked with Brahmin IITians, raise a paw? :paw emoji here: I hope the Valley absorbs all of the world's horrible tech sociological antipatterns because I ejected from that heap. Transient gold miners descended on the place where I grew up, treated it disposably, and failed to make any effort to integrate because they're just visiting to make their coin. Sunnyvale Costco is like an airport in Burma (okay, Myanma…
>failed to make any effort to integrate because they're just visiting to make their coin I mean, have you seen the waiting times for Indian US green cards? You may literally die of old age before getting through the queue right now. The system is structured to make them disposable temporary workers and not future American citizens. So why is it surprising that they act like it?
My cousin reminded me the other day that back in the 80s I was introduced by innumerable mums as “attends MIT and has a green card”. Literally that was my entire “biography”.
Edit: seems like thing have diverged since I had to worry about these things: The waiting time for non-Indian green cards is the same btw.
Re: How Big Tech Is Importing India’s Caste Legacy to Silicon Valley
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> because of the predominant "fuck it" attitude: don't learn the customs, don't speak the language, don't put down roots, and don't interact with locals [...] when you bring in a junior software engineer's extended family, you're getting a swath of average people too There isn't a huge amount of difference between what you're saying and what the previous president had to say on immigrants coming to the US - "when Mex…
Wonder how he got that idea: > “Chiva,” his uncle said. Goat, the Mexican slang term for black tar heroin. “This is how we make our money.” Cora Indian campesinos grew the poppies in the mountains above Xalisco. They harvested the opium goo from the flowers and sold it to cookers whom Enrique’s uncles knew. A newly cooked kilo of vinegary, sticky chiva would head north in a boom box or a backpack within a couple days…
so mexican people are bad because some guy wrote a book about a town where some mexican people sell drugs?
very scientific, thank you Hacker News
Re: How Big Tech Is Importing India’s Caste Legacy to Silicon Valley
#57I once was volunteering at an event. I was having a causal conversation with another guy and after a while he asked me my last name and decided to not indulge in any further conversation anymore. This is one of many instances I experienced. There is a paper about caste oppression. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3725938
I was visiting a professor in Germany as part of my research work. One day the professor brought me five resumes and asked me who out of them were upper caste Hindus. I said all, why? So while doing her PhD she had an experience where a Brahmin refused to do experimental lab work as it was considered manual work which was beneath him. So professor first asks fellow Indians about applicants caste and then tailors her hiring process.
There's also this tam-bram pat where people feel janeu (can be worn only by upper caste hindu men), you don't even have to ask last name...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/27/indian-...
Re: How Big Tech Is Importing India’s Caste Legacy to Silicon Valley
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a fucked-up system that perpetuates fetishization of a "golden Willy Wonka ticket" in order to mint underpaid workers on a leash. I've seen such tech workers make 3-10% of equivalent native salaries, and live in appalling group housing conditions to save money. (TCS, anyone?) There isn't a magic or easy answer. It is what it is.
>There isn't a magic or easy answer. It is what it is. I mean, sure there is, people just don't want to fix it for various reasons. For example, reform the H1B and Green Card processes. Make the H1B an actual path to a green card and citizenship which most people seem to want nowadays. Cap H1Bs per nation (so there's a clear concise path to citizenship if you're in the US) rather than Green Cards or increase the Gree…
Capping H1Bs per nation is an effective cut since Indians dominate the program.
The solution is actually to clear the EB Green Card backlog with a one time allocation to all backlogged applicants followed by removing the per country cap.
Re: How Big Tech Is Importing India’s Caste Legacy to Silicon Valley
#59This podcast talks about this. Casteism is a disgusting remanent of Hinduism — the least someone can do is be AWARE of their privilege and ensure that they are inclusive and fair to their fellow citizens regardless of caste or race.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rough-translation/id12...
Re: How Big Tech Is Importing India’s Caste Legacy to Silicon Valley
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very prevalent - but less likely to see in workplace than in social life (relationships, housing). This article also alludes to social aspects (study groups, etc) in IITs and not so much on academics. Not based on any formal survey but my perception is 80-20 tilts towards higher caste population believing in superiority of their caste. I would also add many believe reservations for backward caste is unfair. Hindu nat…
One of my friends had a story, where he was conducting a job interview with an American-born Indian teammate, and the interviewee was an Indian; when the interviewee went to the bathroom, she offhand guessed at the interviewee's caste, and then immediately felt mortified that she said that to a non-Indian and apologized. Just hearing that story secondhand was pretty wild for me to process!
In the US that is illegal, your friend should have immediately reported it to HR.