Trapped in Silicon Valley’s hidden caste system

It's effectively a French guy hiring another french guy or a German guy stacking their team with other Germans. It's a bit more complicated than that because if you look at things like power distance index (PDI), India measures way higher in the chart than any western country (i.e., culturally Indians are more accepting of hierarchy than their western counterparts, so an Indian subordinate is more deferential to their boss than an American one for example)

And this is coming from someone that went to a mid-sized state school.

My parents changed my, and their names, and surname to Slavic sounding for reasons you can understand. Out of many, lower risk of being drafted (being non-white, and living in far-east increases likelihood of draft 10x,) ease of getting into a good school, or university for me, and simply lower chances of getting into random troubles with officials.

At the same time, knowing this, I am as much as discomforted by practice of meritless "diversity hire" just for the sake of putting people of colour to pass the diversity checkbox.

Pretending to play a role of "smart south Asian" while yes-manning, and knowing you being a decoration is as bad as discrimination, if not worse.

This is why remote work is so important, the politics of the office and "culture" is more about delivery with remote over internal politics. Remote work emphasizes the external view over the internal view which is always skewed in office environments. Remote work opens up a broader market of workers and can flow with life changes of employees easier like a move, families or travel.

We all do lots of remote already to everyone outside the office. Most communication is virtual now even within the same company, across offices in different areas and most importantly, to the customer of the product. The external view is most important, always. Remote can help automatically focus on external perception over internal perception. Remote work can minimize the weight of office politics and "culture".

Another legacy area we need to change is removing health insurance from the job. We don't get our home/auto/life insurance through work and it would be a pain if we did, imagine changing all that on jobs. Contracting or entrepreneurship helps to get your own benefits for healthcare and it is truly a better way. Health insurance removed from the job will help businesses compete with countries that do have public options or private markets not connected to the employer, allow workers more freedom to change jobs, allow people to start jobs easier and isn't constantly a hassle. Getting healthcare on your own or not requiring it to be business level is both pro-business and pro-worker. It also can fix pricing as the customer is now individuals/families not employers, all we need to do is group similar to Medicare groups. Right now grouping is based on the company and this puts sole/small/medium companies at a disadvantage in pricing.