261–270 of 478 posts
How to fight back when you see this happening at line management level, but not yet proliferated to upper management? Indian product owner taking mostly to Indian peer developers, bypassing normal communication channels. Indians being friendly with each other and stone cold with the rest. Indians bringing Indian jokes to the table, with no outsider hoping to understand these. Indians bonding to go to Indian restauran…
I just posted this comment with a new account to check how easily hearsay influences people's opinions with no backing, whatsoever. I hope this thread will stay up as a reminder to stay civil and not get carried away by clouded judgement.
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Since there's a lot of negativity about Indians in the comments here: I just worked for a startup with many Indians (including the founder). It was all fine, and I liked my coworkers. I can understand that other people had different experiences: companies and people differ. For context, everything was remote, and I worked from Singapore. I'm not India, but I do like to prepone my meetings.
The contracting companies probably single-handed build and maintain lots of racist stereotypes against indians, because the level of service those companies offer is always unmitigated failure, even internally. I once accidentally stumbled into working on a contract through WiPro myself, and it was a horrific experience. The way I see it, the line workers that end up the target of ire and stereotypes are just victims of actions taken way above them.
The people who can, apparently avoid working for them, or use every opportunity to escape. Those who can't yet but have ambition for more, apparently use every opportunity to escape - whether it is by jumping ship on H1B, or otherwise. Those currently stuck are in no way encouraged to do a good job, and for obvious cost cutting you get people who were in no way prepared to do the job.
Occasionally a client will get angry enough and they will pull an actually skilled person to smooth the ruffled feathers, someone they usually trot for dog&pony show when winning the contract as example of who is supposed to work on it.
But the "important" people, upper management who decide to contract with WITCH, and the upper management of WITCH who run such strategy, they all profit. The managers and/or C-level who outsource sight-unseen with no quality enforcement disappear with their rewards before institutional inertia stops papering over their decisions. The WITCH companies pocket huge amounts of money while paying pittance to line workers and providing worse than zero service.
Seeing this happen at an originally Australian unicorn after the technical co-founder stepped down and new CTO swapped out all of their engineering leadership with Indian hires from Microsoft. Previously saw it at a lesser degree to older unicorns and places like Oracle, IBM, etc. Although it’s normalised in the latter ones.
Is anyone really surprised? At the risk of sounding racist (though I'm Indian, so I guess I get some leeway here), there are likely more biases at play than it seems. You’ll see South or North Indians from a particular state prefer hiring employees from the same state, who speak the same language, and who look like them. And it doesn’t stop there. Caste discrimination plays a role too, and it even has its own Wiki pa…
It's weird how racism against Indians online is so normalised. I see the same on reddit too.
I wrote about this in another comment, but I've typically found that public US companies hiring a majority of Indian/Indian-origin staff seem to perform (in market cap terms) on par with companies have just 10% of their total employee headcount.
It's weird how racism against Indians online is so normalised. I see the same on reddit too.