Infosys asked HR not to hire 'Indian-origin candidates', 'women with children' • Hacker News Board

Re: Infosys asked HR not to hire 'Indian-origin candidates', 'women with children'

#121

Post by Morgawr » Sun, Oct 09, 2022, 2:09 PM UTC

chrischattin wrote: post #65

gilbetron wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are running a marathon, half way through it is discovered half of them had been given weighted shoes that made them run significantly slower. The organizers and racers agree this is wrong and unfair, and so they make sure everyone has correct shoes for the rest of the race. Yet those half of the racers that had weighted shoes are several miles behind the rest. What would you suggest be done?

Bad analogy. That’s like suggesting we give racers in the next race an advantage because of what happened in the current race, which creates obvious unfair outcomes.

That's not what they are suggesting. That's what you came up with as a solution for the problem which they presented. You're arguing against your own conclusion.

Re: Infosys asked HR not to hire 'Indian-origin candidates', 'women with children'

#122

Post by gilbetron » Sun, Oct 09, 2022, 2:09 PM UTC

luckylion wrote: post #83

gilbetron wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are running a marathon, half way through it is discovered half of them had been given weighted shoes that made them run significantly slower. The organizers and racers agree this is wrong and unfair, and so they make sure everyone has correct shoes for the rest of the race. Yet those half of the racers that had weighted shoes are several miles behind the rest. What would you suggest be done?

You give weighted shoes to other people in another location a few years down the line, right?

Or you move the affected runners up to a position they would have been in.

Re: Infosys asked HR not to hire 'Indian-origin candidates', 'women with children'

#123

Post by perfecthjrjth » Sun, Oct 09, 2022, 2:09 PM UTC

Infosys wants non-Indians for sales positions, but Indians for code-monkeys, scrum masters, project managers, etc.

Re: Infosys asked HR not to hire 'Indian-origin candidates', 'women with children'

#124

Post by conception » Sun, Oct 09, 2022, 2:11 PM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #23

Huh1337 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pushing for more women/minorities in STEM/leadership positions = you're fixing the global problem, doing the opposite = you're making the global problem worse.

People aren't fungible. Discriminating in favor of some women/minorities doesn't help other other women/minorities elsewhere who have been harmed by discrimination. The goal should be to reduce injustice, not to incur more injustice as a mechanism to achieve parity between arbitrary identity groups.

>Discriminating in favor of some women/minorities doesn't help other other women/minorities elsewhere who have been harmed by discrimination.

This line of thinking seems logical but is missing out on the human experience part of the equation. It doesn’t address why things are the way they are today. Affirmative Action, for lack of a better phrase, does a lot of things:

1) It provides representation for the future. “Mom went to college so so can I!”, “Wow, if Susan Wojcicki can run Youtube, then I can do something like that too!” Seeing people you can identify with being successful affects how you view yourself.

2) One of the reasons diverse teams are more productive is it helps stamp out the “oddball” feeling. If you are the only person in your peers that looks like you, it can have a chilling effect on how you interact with the team, how your success is measured, and your mental well being. If you don’t believe this, go to a club where no one looks like you and see how much you feel like standing out even more than just existing there.

3) It normalizes it. The only reason we are talking about it is because people in these positions are extraordinary. Normalizing it reduces implicit bias, gets other, previously discriminated against people back into the conversation and is the path towards it being a nonissue. The most powerful force for gay acceptance was Will and Grace because it was primetime gay people just being there and it being normal.

4) Last, resume vs resume can be apples and oranges because it cannot account for their path to that. Was there significant harassment, discrimination and other social tribulations to earning whats on the sheet of paper? The stronger candidate may have unseen potential because of the social barriers they had to climb.

There are important reasons for these sorts of hiring decisions that have lasting consequences. And if we want to make the issue disappear we have to start at the top, not at the bottom.

Re: Infosys asked HR not to hire 'Indian-origin candidates', 'women with children'

#125

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Oct 09, 2022, 2:11 PM UTC

peteradio wrote: post #75

azangru wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is the assumption here? Marginalized groups will be hired even if they aren't the better candidate? If a person making hiring decisions says that the next candidate for such-and-such role should be a person from such-and-such group (a woman, a person of color, etc.), then the criterion of being the better candidate doesn't apply. Or, rather, it gets adjusted such that belonging in the desired group is included…

That is in interesting way to define "better candidate" being that it does not tie to the bottom line except unless there are explicit business incentives to discriminate.

[deleted]

Re: Infosys asked HR not to hire 'Indian-origin candidates', 'women with children'

#126

Post by azangru » Sun, Oct 09, 2022, 2:11 PM UTC

notart666 wrote: post #73

mkl95 wrote: post #53

I was a consultant for an American company that also hired dozens of cheap consultants from development countries. Mostly India but also neighbouring countries and some Eastern European countries. Indians were by far the hardest to work with. They ghosted women systematically which was a nightmare for our project manager. They also lied shamelessly about their qualifications which led to absurd situations. The proble…

Many of them just can't speak English correctly. Only a small percentage of the individuals who speak English at a proficient level of those who do, they predominately come from very wealthy upper caste families and now you have a new problem. And well. When it comes to caste, many Indians simply believe it to not exist anymore in India because of how deeply engrained it is in their social classes they never notice i…

> Many of them just can't speak English correctly. Only a small percentage of the individuals who speak English at a proficient level of those who do, they predominately come from very wealthy upper caste families and now you have a new problem.

There is something very confusing to me in this paragraph.

You put forth as a premise (at least if I am understanding the logic of the paragraph correctly) that fluency in English is an important skill for doing a job properly. You also say that it is the wealthy part of the population that will have access to resources to train their children in that skill. All good so far. But then you say that it is a problem, and this is where I am lost. Are you suggesting that money should not buy good education? Assuming good education is a scarce commodity, that would go against the principles of markets. Or are you suggesting that English fluency (or other consequences of good education) should not be considered when screening for a job in a tech company? But that goes against your initial premise, and also makes one wonder what purpose a good education has if not getting one prepared for a high-skilled job.

Re: Infosys asked HR not to hire 'Indian-origin candidates', 'women with children'

#127

Post by NeverFade » Sun, Oct 09, 2022, 2:12 PM UTC

nerdponx wrote: post #11

aliqot wrote: post #4

How does this differ from companies and elected officials openly saying right now that females and minorities are preferred for X position, like vice president of USA or CEO of Reddit?

Emphasizing hiring of groups that have been traditionally discriminated against absolutely has a different moral character from discriminating against those people. There are a variety of ways to argue against the former practice, but to draw equivalence with the latter practice is dishonest and/or willfully ignorant.

I'm sure that will be a great comfort to the Asian kid who was born in poverty, got bullied in school, struggled all his life to achieve the grades and stats to qualify for a top school, then got rejected in favor of a rich black American kid, since he was born with the wrong skin color.

Re: Infosys asked HR not to hire 'Indian-origin candidates', 'women with children'

#128

Post by tsimionescu » Sun, Oct 09, 2022, 2:12 PM UTC

phpisthebest wrote: post #86

pfisch wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not making a pro or con judgement but it does help future women/minorities for current women/minorities to break glass ceilings and get into new industries/positions. Just like the first black kids sent to white only schools during integration helped make things less terrible for future minorities.

>>Just like the first black kids sent to white only schools during integration helped make things less terrible for future minorities. it is nothing like that for 3 reasons 1. first and foremost the "white only" schools was legally required segregation, it was imposed by law and the elimination of that required law to reverse. These laws have now been absent for decades 2. Primary education is where this battle shoul…

Regarding 1, even after whites-only schools became illegal, little changed. Previously legally whites-only schools stayed in-practice whites-only, often with explicit discrimination by racist parents and teachers to discourage any black people from sending or keeping their children in the school, but other times simply as by-product of housing inequality. It was hard for people in a black neighborhood - itself created by now-defunct discriminatory laws that had huge long-term impact - to send their children to a school in a farther away white neighborhood.

The fix was to forcibly integrate schools: explicitly mandate not just that black students be allowed, but actually that they are integrated in significant numbers, including by providing special facilities (school buses) to take them to the better schools that were farther away from their homes - the policy known as "busing" [0]; a form of (positive) discrimination.

Of course, as the article notes, this can also have negative consequences, so any such measure is far from easy to apply.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegregation_busing

Re: Infosys asked HR not to hire 'Indian-origin candidates', 'women with children'

#129

Post by dmix » Sun, Oct 09, 2022, 2:12 PM UTC

huggingrear wrote: post #107

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't get ahead of yourself there. Racial preferences are very common around the world. It becomes part of self-worth to value one's cohort above those that are seen as opressive. Such as the ubiquitous western culture in media. Anyway, the melting pot of the USA has created a dialog about race that may be missing or very small elsewhere. Witness the apparent race-tone-deaf attitudes in Japanese mainstream, where bei…

Japan is 98% ethnically homogenous, with the remaining 2% primarily consisting of Koreans and Chinese. I don't see why Japan would have any need for a discussion on 'race'.

That’s not an accident.

Although I don’t think any country should be obligated to take in foreigners if their situation doesn’t warrant it (such as being a small island nation).

Re: Infosys asked HR not to hire 'Indian-origin candidates', 'women with children'

#130

Post by jfim » Sun, Oct 09, 2022, 2:13 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #71

peteradio wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the assumption here? Marginalized groups will be hired even if they aren't the better candidate? Doesn't that Peter-Principle them right out of the gate? Are we sure that this leads to better long term outcomes?

I am always amazed by this assumption that firms hire "the better candidate", absent DEI initiatives or such. In reality, people often hire the one they like best - which often tends to naturally be someone who resembles themselves. Not to mention, very very few companies and positions within those companies operate at a level where they will succeed or fail based on whether they have the best possible candidate. For…

That really depends on the industry. If your idea of tech is web apps and mobile apps, then yeah, most candidates would do the job.

If you're working on cutting edge technology, then finding ten adequate candidates is actually pretty tricky, because by definition the applicant pool is very small. Doubly so for fields that have high demand compared to the supply.