Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

timesnownews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 414 posts

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

#401

Post by chrischattin »

unethical_ban wrote: post #384
chrischattin wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sincere. Engaging in racial discrimination does not fix racism. It perpetuates it. It blows my mind that I have to state this in the current year. We have regressed so far.

It blows my mind we can enslave, murder, ostracize an entire people and culture for hundreds of years and think "alright we're good" will fix it all. It isn't a simple problem, there is no one simple solution, but saying "never provide any extra help in education nor acknowledge systemic issues in criminal justice and housing" is pretty shallow. Of course, being an actual social democracy would get us really far, but…

That is twisted logic to justify racist behavior.

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

#403

Post by starkd »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #173
starkd wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Affirmative action is heavy handed when it involves hard quotas. There's nothing wrong with an affirmative action policy that sets a goal to be more inclusive by reaching out to other groups yet does not require limits strictly on the basis of skin color.

How about just taking the best candidate, and be done with it? I live in a former socialist state, and a combination of grades and standardized testing is calculated into a score in that score determines if you get accepted to a college or not. Colleges have no idea who you are, until you get an e-mail that you're accepted and come to sign in.

Good idea! It's just so crazy, it might work!

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

#404

Post by throwaway894345 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #108
throwaway894345 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A big problem is that work is a cultural phenomenon. Most people choose career paths early in life, and do so to a great extent based on role models and general cultural attitudes. This is before adding explicit biases in such fields (in my country at least, I have heard several older professors at university claiming that female students that got better grades than their male counterparts were probably cheating, and…

Affirmative action wasn't necessary to open the medical, legal, etc fields to women in the 80s and 90s (in the USA) and those fields were far more misogynistic than STEM is today. Moreover, I don't see much of a difference between your professors who say "girls are probably cheating" versus our wider society who contend that "boys are only successful because of privilege". Both seem wrong. Further, it's not clear to me that affirmative action is known to be successful. I've read several reports recently that indicate that corporate DEI initiatives (which I think is roughly revamped affirmative action) may increase discrimination because people believe that minorities are benefiting from their identity rather than their qualifications. Lastly, it's not clear to me that we need exactly 50% of a given field to be female--it seems like we need enough representation to ward off sexism and so on, which shouldn't require very much considering men don't act as a class (they don't advocate for "men's rights" and so on).

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

#405

Post by webmobdev »

WirelessGigabit wrote: post #346

[flagged]

Everyone of us has such personal guidelines / biases when it comes to social interactions. We all form such conscious and unconscious biases about certain community based on whom we interact with and it is ok up to a point, if you don't take them too seriously (or these biases can become narrower and fundamentalist). Working with people of different culture always requires us to step out of our comfort zone to varying degree. Obviously this is uncomfortable. But as with any learned behaviour, avoidance only exacerbates the issue and practising it more and more makes it easier.

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

#406

Post by nerdponx »

3np wrote: post #194
nerdponx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Emphasizing hiring of groups that have been traditionally discriminated against absolutely has a different moral character from discriminating against those people. This is your personal opinion. > 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. This rests on sharing the former assumption. Hence, not necessari…

I think it's inherent. One is a countervailing force against an historical wrong, with good intentions. The other is deliberately malicious, serves no benefit (not even an imagined one), and is a direct historical connection to widespread human suffering.

To ignore all of that context and to treat them as exactly equivalent is reduction to absurdity, to the point where debate involving in any matter of subtlety is impossible, from my perspective.

Furthermore, I would encourage you to state the equivalent case on your side. Why should I ignore all context and subtlety, and treat the two scenarios as morally equivalent?

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

#407

Post by levleontiev »

hulitu wrote: post #332
maest wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> English is the simplest Latin based language. It's not a Latin-based language (French, Italian, Spanish etc are Latin-based languages). It's not clear how you measure simplicity, but, in terms of phonetics, English is quite the nightmare as the link between the spelling and the pronunciation is often determined by the history of the word, rather than by a clear set of phonetical rules. So, at least by that measure,…

> It's not clear how you measure simplicity Compared with other european languages the english grammar is much simpler and the number of words needed to communicate is also not so high.

Compared with German, it's complicated. German has only "Past Perfect" and "Past simple" tenses.

English has at least 4.

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

#408

Post by 3np »

nerdponx wrote: post #406
3np wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Emphasizing hiring of groups that have been traditionally discriminated against absolutely has a different moral character from discriminating against those people. This is your personal opinion. > 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. This rests on sharing the former assumption. Hence, not necessari…

I think it's inherent. One is a countervailing force against an historical wrong, with good intentions. The other is deliberately malicious, serves no benefit (not even an imagined one), and is a direct historical connection to widespread human suffering. To ignore all of that context and to treat them as exactly equivalent is reduction to absurdity, to the point where debate involving in any matter of subtlety is im…

I'm not saying you should. You are entitled to your moral framework. My point is that others can have honest and well-intentioned conclusions that differ from yours.

You are not in a position to impose it on the rest of us.

See some of the comments of human fungibility and realize that it may be a matter of perspective and that neither of you really are "wrong", "right", "good", "bad" or have an objectively higher ground.

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

#409

Post by mattigames »

wongarsu wrote: post #287
mattigames wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you think racism has nothing to do with that being the case? Meaning why do you think a country as successful as Japan is not filled with a diversity of immigrants from other races?

I think it's no secret that Japan has a reputation for racism, and that you have it harder as an immigrant. Still, the board of Mitsubishi is perfectly reflective of the Japanese population (ignoring the gender ratio, which isn't great but in line with the global average for boards of directors)

It's a self fulfilling prophecy, you apply to Mitsubishi or any other company as an immigrant and don't get picked and you tell your friends how hard it is so they don't apply either, and you leave the country instead of starting a family there.
Post reply on HN