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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'

#301

Post by Morgawr »

NoraCodes wrote: post #183
huggingrear wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

Japan is 98% ethnically homogeneous in part because of an immigration system that keeps foreigners from immigrating for work and in part because of lots of systemic racism - different from that in, say, the US, but still systemic - in Japanese society. It's not magic or an accident of history, it's due to social factors.

>because of an immigration system that keeps foreigners from immigrating for work

Okay so let me dispel this myth. I don't know when it started, how, and where, but Japan is not that hard to immigrate into if you have a job or are a student enrolled in a Japanese school. The biggest issue is probably the language and the fact that most jobs are in Japanese, but if you speak Japanese (or can find an English-speaking job) then it's not that hard to immigrate into Japan. Work visas are pretty easy to obtain. Permanent residency is relatively easy to obtain too, and even better, citizenship is even easier to obtain (although you have to renounce your former citizenship). With that in mind, the US are objectively harder to immigrate into compared to Japan, on paper at least.

Which brings me to...

>and in part because of lots of systemic racism

I think the main issue of Japan is just cultural and the language itself. A lot of what can come across as racism is just a misunderstanding of societal expectations and behavior. Language barriers are really hard to overcome and Japanese is one of the hardest language to learn if you come from an English speaking background (or most European languages, really). The fact that most people in Japan don't speak English well, and that they are a culture that is significantly different from a lot of the west doesn't help.

And yes, there is still quite a bit of sexism and racism (although I'd argue the latter is more from a position of "unknown" rather than actual hatred/disdain). Stuff is improving fortunately, but it takes time.

This said, I don't think racism and xenophobia as a whole, or the country's own immigration policies, are what are keeping Japan so non-diverse.

source: Live and work in Japan, speak Japanese. This is obviously just my opinion.

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

#302

Post by mkl95 »

fellellor wrote: post #216
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…

In this lawsuit, an American woman alleges that a bunch of high level (probably white) American executives in the American branch of an Indian company were very biased against women and workers of Indian origin. And while expressing their biases through their actions they created a very hostile work environment for this person. At least read the thing for a minute before going on a tangent?

One of my favourite things about HN is that a mod would never say something like this.

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

#303

Post by P5fRxh5kUvp2th »

KrishnaShripad wrote: post #288
newyankee wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a very far fetched statement. I am an Indian and technically from Other backward class (OBC) as classified in the system. I have never had a problem in my city. Off course that doesn't mean that India is not a huge and complex country with 100s if not thousands of groups differentiated based on region, class , caste etc. You are colouring a very complicated and nuanced issue with your personal biases.

The only comment here that actually spoke the Facts as it is. Another commenter even said there is "systemic slavery" in India. Don't know whether to laugh or cry at the naivety of this individual. To think that 1.4 billion people, of which 80% belong to the so called "lower caste" strata, and that the rest 20% are enslaving the 80% is not only laughable but downright insane proposition. I wanted to respond but I kno…

I said nothing about slavery, what are you talking about?

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

#304

Post by KrishnaShripad »

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #303
KrishnaShripad wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only comment here that actually spoke the Facts as it is. Another commenter even said there is "systemic slavery" in India. Don't know whether to laugh or cry at the naivety of this individual. To think that 1.4 billion people, of which 80% belong to the so called "lower caste" strata, and that the rest 20% are enslaving the 80% is not only laughable but downright insane proposition. I wanted to respond but I kno…

I said nothing about slavery, what are you talking about?

Did I say it was you? I said "another commenter". If I wanted to say it was you, I would have said it was you.

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

#305

Post by NoraCodes »

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #295
NoraCodes wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abou…

I see your point, and I apologize for not being as clear as I could have been. I do still think that "this could make a poor, hardworking Asian kid not get a college position because of a rich Black kid" is a very bad criticism; it conflates some very emotionally resonant topics in a way that isn't justifiable. I also think that this conflation was done for ideological reasons.

I do want to respond to this, though:

> What you were trying to imply with your comment about "other factors" is that these asian students have less soft skills than other ethnicities

No, I wasn't. By other factors I meant the other things the GP brought up: economics (" born in poverty"), being 'weird' or just not fitting in (which I felt was implied by "got bullied in school"), and nationality ("a rich black American kid" implies, at least to me, that our hypothetical Asian student isn't American). All of these have significant impacts in school admissions, especially nationality, which can make prospective students ineligible for some kinds of aid.

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

#306

Post by Stupulous »

mattmanser wrote: post #202
throwaway894345 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any evidence at all that women or minorities are in "unhirability loops"? Something like 80% of the managers I've had in my career have been Indians, and the majority of them were women. Every company I've worked at has many Indian employees, and I strongly suspect the male/female ratio was at least at parity with the hiring pipeline. Moreover, if one woman was discriminated against, you can't make up for it…

Yes, for example even after decades of saying there should be more women and minority people on corporate boards, it's all still dominated by white men. California brought in a law banning all male boards in 2018 because the problem is so endemic. Not 1988, 2018. A majority of companies in the S&P 500 have at least one woman on their boards, but only about a quarter have more than two, according to a study from PwC.…

The average age of a corporate board member is ~60. If they joined the workforce at 22, it would have been in 1984. That makes it a very poor measure of present-day discrimination, because it has up to a 40 year lag on top of whatever delay exists between legislation and effect. Also, this:

>A majority of companies in the S&P 500 have at least one woman on their boards, but only about a quarter have more than two, according to a study from PwC.

is an arbitrarily defined measure (I expect intentionally to make things look worse) when we care about how many women hold board seats. In 2022, 29% of board seats are held by women. In 2018 it was something like 21%. Not at all good, but nearly double the 11% you'd get for a token woman on every board (assuming the average of 8.9 seats/board from Russell 3000).

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

#307

Post by echelon »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #169
echelon wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> English is the simplest Latin based language. Any sources for this? The lack of certain complex features (eg. gendered words) does make it seem true, but English borrows from a lot of sources and is very inconsistent. A comparison I like to make is that Japanese is one of the simplest to pronounce languages. If you learn the kana, you essentially learn all of the phonemes (there's a bit more nuance). I'd like to kn…

Well, I learned it by watching HBO, so it can't be that hard...

Congrats! That's awesome.

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

#308

Post by philliphaydon »

alephnerd wrote: post #275
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…

You’re giving the original poster too much credit. He’s just straight up being racist. If he heard Singaporean English m, ai lah this ang moh would also call it incomprehensible.

> He’s just straight up being racist.

I don't know if he's being racist or not. But the claim they can't speak english is not uncommon. I don't know what they are like in America or UK, but having worked with many while living in Singapore, I think they can speak english, but pronunciation is difficult.

> Singaporean English

I wasn't referring to Singaporean Indian speaking English, but can see how that it may have come across as that. The company I worked for in SG, all the devs were on EP, so their English was learnt in India.

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

#309

Post by ksec »

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…

> They also lied shamelessly about their qualifications which led to absurd situations.

This I have experience with. The word absurd is not an exaggeration, it might not even be enough to describe it.

>They ghosted women systematically which was a nightmare for our project manager.

I dont understand this sentence. Does Ghosted here mean something different to ghosting in hiring?

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

#310

Post by the_only_law »

alex028502 wrote: post #210
sephlietz wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan's population is something like 98% Japanese ethnicity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883680

> I think this article goes through a lot of micro-exercizes and micro-corrections and semantics to avoid the obvious conclusion that Japan is mostly honogenous, and to a far more degree than the US or a lot of European countries.

Ah yes, thank you HN comments.

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