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Google’s caste-bias problem

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Re: Google’s caste-bias problem

#231

Post by toast0 »

Manuel_D wrote: post #173
thot_experiment wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

white + male is still obviously the best build for life and it still needs more nerfs, but the devs are all playing white male and think the balance is fine

At Google, whites are underrepresented in engineering roles. In 2022, 36% of tech hires were white, about half their national population. Asians on the other hand, made up 55% of tech hires despite making up 6% of the population [1]. Why do an underrepresented group deserve a "nerf" while vastly overrepresented groups do not? Certainly, there are demographics influences at play: higher Asian concentration in Californ…

Google isn't exactly hiring from the national population. They're hiring from a population of engineers, but they're not limited to the US national population of engineers, they also hire from abroad, sometimes directly, other times by hiring in overseas offices and then transferring.

Re: Google’s caste-bias problem

#232

Post by mrguyorama »

jaywalk wrote: post #66

> The Google spokesperson told The New Yorker, "We made the decision not to move forward with this proposed talk which was pulling employees apart rather than bringing our community together and raising awareness." If the talk was standard DEI fare (shitting on white men) I'm sure any complaints would have been ignored.

lol claims of white people being the victims are so not ignored that it's common discussion fodder right here on this board, and Oracle has been sued for not hiring white people in certain roles

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/01/labor-department...

Re: Google’s caste-bias problem

#233

Post by mrguyorama »

nojito wrote: post #84

As a US born individual with immigrant parents, I had NO idea how many times I got scoped for my caste. It’s quite amazing how routine simple questions have ulterior motives behind them. Now that I am a more senior in my career, I’ve made it my mission to always call it out when it happens. I hope others start doing it as well.

I'm an unworldly white boy in a sea of Indian immigrants, probably several generations in. How can I help prevent that kind of discrimination from going on? I don't know what to look for and how to not take part in it.

Re: Google’s caste-bias problem

#234

Post by woweoe »

sreevisakh wrote: post #193
thunkshift1 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

That isn't even right because almost every single victim of caste discrimination is an Indian themselves. If there are caste allegations outside India, then it can only be from Indians themselves. Covering it under the wide umbrella of anti-India smear campaign is disingenuous at best.

Yes and no.

Casteism is virtually a non-existent concept among the Indian diaspora in the West, who are mostly in the second generation or further, though the US is possibly an exception. If you asked an Indian person in Australia about casteism then they would look at you as if you were asking something about India history and implied they weren't Australian.

Furthermore casteism in the Indian American circles or even the Indian American IT industry may actually be worse than the casteism in India, because caste is a rare discussion point in the Indian tech world, and casteism is a less poignant issue in South India where most of the tech industry is based.

Re: Google’s caste-bias problem

#235

Post by hitekker »

hadlock wrote: post #163
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I'm saying a group of relatives from India methodically only hire eachother and use vicious politics to climb the ladder in american corporations. I watched it occur over a decade and still see the hiring updates on LinkedIn, "I am proud to announce we have hired XYZ from other big corp as the new head of data and governance."

This is very common/normal. My last company got eaten in a merger (acquisition) most of the senior leadership from the old company, are now at a competing company. They did not all end up there by random chance. Network network network. It's self reinforcing, because those people know who will get the job done, and make them look good doing it. It's often better to hire a known good person, rather than roll the dice…

Ethnic nepotism is not normal. It's one thing to hire people you know, it's another thing to discriminate and hire members of your own family.

Re: Google’s caste-bias problem

#236

Post by upupandup »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #217
upupandup wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Indian managers against non-Indian employees This happens all the time in Canada. When you have a large ethnic majority and they start identifying with the language and start bringing toxic work culture with management fully aware of the issues and exploiting this. For example for a startup I worked for in Vancouver had a large Chinese/Russian majority in the development team. They would stay behind past working ho…

Sounds like you had a terrible experience at an awful company but I've never seen anything like this in my 15+ years of working in tech in Vancouver and I'm not sure we should take your experience to be extrapolated to a greater Vancouver or Canada trend in general. Canada and multi-ethnic diversity go hand in hand. I've always worked at companies with plenty of people of Asian and South Asian heritage. Never noticed…

The thing is this is not limited to the tech industry but in all areas of life in Vancouver which contributes to low social trust and lack of belonging or a commonly shared identity.

The Canadian multiculturalism model is broken and increasing number of immigrants, PR and Canadian citizens are leaving Canada in record numbers.

One positive of a melting pot culture is that there are common boundaries that define what is and what isn't. In Canada we do not have this and the post-state ideology that Trudeau dynasty has pushed resulted in a highly fragmented, silo'ed, patchwork of cultures that live separately and do not identify with Canadian values.

If you've only worked in tech, you won't get to see the entire picture of this city and nation like I have done starting with blue collar work. I've had relatives who were bullied and working conditions worsened on purpose simply because they didn't speak the same language as their counterparts who didn't bother using English at work with an indifferent management that were exploiting the cheap labour to suppress wages. Nobody wants to work in this type of environment very long and who wants to keep paying taxes to a broken system for less pay and more stress?

Still water runs deep and you won't know if you can't know.

Re: Google’s caste-bias problem

#237

Post by dhosek »

trashtester wrote: post #145
encryptluks2 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't racism based on race or ethnic groups. Caste bias can be like a white person judging another white person because one grew up in the Bronx while the other is from New Jersey. That is not racism but classism maybe mixed in with some religious discrimination.

I disagree. Normal classism can be overcome to a much greater degree than Caste. An upper class person may have 4 working class grandparents. A person with 4 lower caste grandparents will never be an upper caste, just like someone with 4 black grandparents will not be seen as white. The caste system has been enforced strictly enough to even have an imprint on the DNA: https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/Caste-s…

Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste has a really good overview of the caste system in India and how it’s very distinct from class issues.

Re: Google’s caste-bias problem

#238

Post by anonymoushn »

jquery wrote: post #180
lotsofpulp wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nepotism is a failure, and working against it is definitely a worthwhile effort. But I have also seen non Indian nephews/nieces get hired into internships because their relative knows someone in the decision making process, etc. We very openly have universities in the US that favor admitting children and relatives of alumni. Hell, we just had a US President that installed his own kids and son in law in various govern…

No, what Indians are doing is not unique to them. Americans discriminate against black people, notoriously so. I’m sure the Indians who support these caste systems would merely say it’s meritocracy in action, same as all the whites/asians opposing any governmental rule that tries to level the playing field for black people in America. (This comment will of course be downvoted heavily and/or flagged)

No downvotes, but I haven't yet figured out why racial quotas for Jews were bad and racial quotas for Asians are good.

Re: Google’s caste-bias problem

#239

Post by lamontcg »

flak48 wrote: post #49

From what I understood, the former Google employee being interviewed here is discussing the problem of not being allowed to discuss 'caste discrimination in India', eg. during Uttar Pradesh elections - and in companies like Cisco. They seem to focus on this blanket ban against discussing this issue at Google, as the discriminatory act - rather than alleging that actual caste discrimination is being perpetrated at Goo…

> They seem to focus on this blanket ban against discussing this issue at Google, as the discriminatory act - rather than alleging that actual caste discrimination is being perpetrated at Google

Seems weird to me that a ban on talking about discrimination wouldn't automatically be seen as being discriminatory rather than somehow the reverse.

Re: Google’s caste-bias problem

#240

Post by [deleted] »

Manuel_D wrote: post #199
joshuamorton wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll just casually mention here that in the last week or so someone on hn claimed very insistenly to me that they, as an asian man, were the primary "victim" of modern dei policies and that white people weren't harmed by them. And that this was why dei was bad and that I was engaging in white supremacy to suggest anything to the contrary. You cannot both be correct in the reasons you dislike dei. They're contradictor…

It's entirely possible for both to be right: different companies have different DEI policies. At Dropbox from 2015-2019 we had 4 diversity categories, from most to least desirable: * Double diverse: Black or Latin + female * diverse: white or Asian female, or Black or Latin male. * standard: white male * Negatively diverse: Asian male So it definitely is the case that asian males are even more undesirable than white…

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