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

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

#291

Post by steveBK123 »

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 years ago I worked at big dumb banks.

There was a lot of top down forced offshoring with ultimatums like - hey you can have +4 headcount in Mumbai or +0 in NY.

Further, we found we had to spend $10Ks at a time to send NY/London staff over there monthly to figure out wtf was going on. These offshoring firms were running some serious scams. We once had a guy come back (mid 2000s) and say that his 5 devs in Hyderabad were equipped with 4 PCs and 3 phones between them!!

We had one bank offshore its datacenter ops (while the datacenter physically remained onshore). It was incredible. We'd have a RAID disk failure in a datacenter across the Hudson River in Jersey City, practically visible out my window, raise a ticket which would take 36 hours to get picked up by someone in India, to bounce around the globe and eventually get back to the onshore datacenter ops person who would do the physical disk replacement. Finally one ticket took so long to address that we had a cascade of disk failure and lost the whole RAID.

Just anecdote after anecdote of crazy stuff like this. Lot of these deals ended up in litigation.

There were many very smart developers over there, but the offshoring industrial system creates a race to the bottom and quantity over quality preference. With the turnover of good staff, the only way to keep the better ones was to get the visas sorted to nearshore them in US - largely defeating the purpose of the cost saving.

A lot of the banks moved away from this model and created "centers of excellence" in UK/US/Canada nearshore locations. You get competent staff for decent rates who are happy to have a great job without moving to the big city away from home/school/family. Not everyone who writes software wants to live in Bay Area/NYC/London. Time zones line up more humanely. Win win.

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

#292

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

I am a bit sad to read some of the comments in this thread.

I’ve had the privilege to work with really high-functiong engineers, from many cultures, including Japan, India, Germany, Romania, Russia, Mexico, Colombia, Pakistan, Egypt, Ukraine, Poland, Ireland, China, Israel, Iran, Viet Nam, UK, Spain, Italy, France, etc. Many were women. Most folks we worked with (of any gender) were parents, because we tended to work with experienced people.

That was mostly because the corporation I worked for, had high standards. They didn’t just throw money at people that looked good. They made sure that we hired the best (but they were cheap -relying on their reputation, so hiring was a pain).

As far as I know, they never outsourced to save money (my team was actually an “outsourced” team). They hired people that could do the work necessary.

I have come to realize that this was a real aberration. I am sad to know that. There were many frustrations in that company, but it was still a signal Honor to work there.

I wish folks the best, and hope that the tech industry can get past the problems that, I suspect, have actually been caused by all the money being made.

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

#293

Post by unclebucknasty »

aliqot wrote: post #47
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.

This falls apart because it quickly becomes a question of who are the accepted minority classes, as we see certain groups being excluded.

>quickly becomes a question of who are the accepted minority classes

This is only a dilemma if you completely ignore the history that precipitated such efforts.

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

#294

Post by steveBK123 »

spoonjim wrote: post #276
nonamechicken wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They ghosted women systematically which was a nightmare for our project manager. What do you mean by this? That they refuse to work with women based on their gender? "India has more women STEM grads than US, UK or France". And I see way way more women employees in software companies in India compared to US. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/india-has-more-wom...

Absolutely there is more gender parity, largely because the type of IT work done by the bodyshop firms like Infosys and TCS is more like a decently paid white collar McJob than anything else. You see a lot of female developers in Infosys because it’s (accurately) seen in the same universe as accounting or secretarial work.

Yes, when I was there for training a large 20+ person team, the women stood out as some of the best & the brightest doers. Unfortunately none of them were ever onshored or promoted up. They were all kept behind the scenes while the men tried to control the comms to onshore.

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

#295

Post by P5fRxh5kUvp2th »

NoraCodes wrote: post #281
P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They accused the other poster of making up the situation in which asian students are unfairly disadvantaged. drives a semi through the weasel wording of 'other factors' One wonders if slaves had other factors too.

Most of the words in the comment I replied to were dedicated to describing the economic status of the hypothetical people involved, and I think I did a good job of making it clear that that's what I was responding to. > One wonders if slaves had other factors too. This strikes me as deeply irrelevant and a major rhetorical escalation. My argument was that it's unreasonable to link economic discrimination and racial a…

You opened your post with the following quote:

> this is not a good criticism of affirmative action programs.

I then pointed out we have statistics showing affirmative action unfairly disadvantages Asians and that the supreme court is going to hear arguments about it.

"but but ... I was talking about ECONOMIC discrimination!".

No, you're just a fan of weasel words.

What you were trying to imply with your comment about "other factors" is that these asian students have less soft skills than other ethnicities (I know because this is a common defense). Apparently citing standardized test scoring as a reason for accepting less black applicants is racist, but citing soft skills as a reason for accepting less asian students isn't.

discrimination for me, but not for thee?

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

#296

Post by KrishnaShripad »

notart666 wrote: post #109
philliphaydon wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand the English thing. I lived in Singapore for 10 years and have heard so many words pronounced wrong. To give an example one of my ex coworkers used to say the word swap as sw-app. Another one said return as ret-urn. I did ask them and they said they are taught phonics and so they just say the words how they are written. English is such a turd language. We have so many rules and then all those rules…

English is the simplest Latin based language. This has nothing to do with pronunciation but not even knowing basic words. Or how to communicate. Only a small percentage of Indians speak English and most statistics on it are heavily inflated. The Indian English Education system is the same one the Japanese and Koreans use. And they don't know English. The reality is it's like if you learned Spanish in middle school to…

> Most Indians do not interact with people outside their groups as most things are written in the languages they use

What? At this point I think you are troll account. You have already made wild and ridiculous statements like caste system being a form of "systemic slavery" in India. Now you are saying that only a "small percentage" of Indians speak English? Are you serious mate? English is the official language of India for literally everything. From giving exams to Government communications.

> Only a small percentage of Indians speak English and most statistics on it are heavily inflated

Where is the data for this?

> It's not Singapore or even close to it in English proficency trying to claim it is, is a lie.

And where do you get this data from?

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

#297

Post by webmobdev »

buzzwords wrote: post #77
pjc50 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pool is not of a fixed size, and there's no evidence of women being paid a premium to fulfil a quota. Conversely, there's plenty of evidence of both individual and systematic discrimination against women candidates and women "thought leaders" in tech.

Oh wow, really? So the women in tech is a growing pool? Enough to stop companies paying premium to fulfil quotas?

No. Unfortunately, one of the sad truth is that companies hire women because they can pay them less than their male counterpart. It's a fact that women earn less than men in almost all industries.

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

#298

Post by arinlen »

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…

> Indians were by far the hardest to work with. They ghosted women systematically which was a nightmare for our project manager.

I recall that Amazon went through the trouble of paying for TV ads proudly stating that they now have in India delivery posts manned exclusively by women, and the ad is comprised of indian delivery women delivering packages to indian men who in turn are giving them all sorts of weird looks.

I recall seeing this ad and thinking to myself: are things in India so bad to the point that this sort of measure and ad passes off as something to be proud about?

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

#299

Post by Lio »

philliphaydon wrote: post #98
notart666 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t understand the English thing. I lived in Singapore for 10 years and have heard so many words pronounced wrong. To give an example one of my ex coworkers used to say the word swap as sw-app. Another one said return as ret-urn. I did ask them and they said they are taught phonics and so they just say the words how they are written. English is such a turd language. We have so many rules and then all those rules…

> English is such a turd language.

I disagree, but then I would, I'm English. ;)

Tolerance of mispronunciation is one of the great strengths of English.

Even within the UK we have a plethora of different regional pronunciation. Even with the strongest accents only takes a couple of words to pick up what they're saying[1].

It's the same for those comping to English from another language. I've been lucky enough to work with people from all over the world, including India, with various standards of English. With a bit of practice on both ends it all works out.

That doesn't seem happen so much with other languages such as French. Even practicing with tolerant French or Belgian friends, my mangling of words is very hard for them to understand. They're not being difficult either, it's a case of get it exactly right or they can't understand you even with context.

1. If you're thinking Rab C Nesbit or that 19080s Nissan Sunderland advert the Japanese translator[2] you get what I'm talking about.

2. It was an advert for a new Japanese car plant in the UK. The joke being that a Japanese guy is translating a deliberately over the top English regional accent back into "English" for the audience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiK5BWmKSqE

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

#300

Post by steveBK123 »

giantg2 wrote: post #176
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…

My company quickly realized that outsourcing to an offshore Indian company was a mistake. We tried giving them new projects, but it was useless. We still use them, but only for very simple support work. My project was outsourced to them for support. The transition of our mature project to them took about a year. They wanted to replace our 10-12 person team with about 19 of their people. They also needed some of the p…

When I worked with a large team for 2 years, including going over to run a week long training program .. I found just a general disinclination for efficiency, automation or time saving... which cynically wouldn't surprise you when you consider they are running a quantity/body shop.

The craziest conversation I had was trying to convince a guy who came in every morning and ran a script that he could put it on a timer/scheduler/cron/anything to just run the report so it was in his inbox every morning. It's not that he was incapable technically, or did not understand it. It was as if I was asking him to violate a religious oath. "Thou shall not reduce billable hours." His workflow remained - login to desktop, open IDE, open script, modify date, save, execute script, open FTP app, login to server, download file to desktop, open email app, create new email, attach file, email file to onshore. Solid 30min++ of work if you do it right.

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