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Cognizant found guilty of discriminating against non-Indian employees

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341–350 of 478 posts

Re: Cognizant found guilty of discriminating against non-Indian employees

#341

The only point of contention I have with this whole debate is the general premise that it's wrong to make citizens of a country redundant (lay them off) in order to replace with cheaper labor brought in from other countries. From an accounting standpoint perhaps it makes sense, but from the view of the workers, and the community, it just seems wrong.

Unionization could, at least in principle, offer a solution.

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Re: Cognizant found guilty of discriminating against non-Indian employees

#342
definitely my experience dealing with them at F500s. Indian mafia running the IT org, and a PITA to get things out of them.

personal favorite was that someone from network support ran a script that changed ownership of all of the docker containers and associated configs, outputs, and logs to root. we had pretty clear proof in the logs that a Cog support tech did it, and basically had to escalate to the CTO and get him to threaten a lawsuit to get them to fix it.

Also watched caste bulling play out in real time in a cramped meeting room in the RDU Triangle, in NC. Wasn't clear what the strain was until later when a full-timer of Indian extraction explained it to me.

Re: Cognizant found guilty of discriminating against non-Indian employees

#343
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. India has a low gdp per capita. What that means is quality of life for masses is low. That also means slum/ghetto like neighbourhoods. Even if you have the money you mostly stay in a gated community, sandwiched between those areas. So you want to leave ASAP and stay in the west. 2. The Indians in top leadership positions you see in tech firms are rare exceptions. To some extent they also come from fairly well off…

The Indians migrating to the US via h1b visas are not coming from the slums or ghettoes. Higher education to foreigners in the US is essentially an immigration scheme - they pay $60-$100k (+living expenses) for a useless graduate degree which only the rich can afford, then get funneled into consulting firms like Cognizant/Infosys on OPT/EAD visas before picking up their h1b for ~ 6 years. This pretty much gets you in…

> the recruiting/HR department no longer considered Asians of any ethnicity a minority and lumped them in with white males.

there was, IIRC, an infamous spat at a FAANG about that

Re: Cognizant found guilty of discriminating against non-Indian employees

#344
post #295

The worst HR case I ever got involved in was a semi-onshore (Indian) development team who couldn't deal with having a female (Indian) tech lead. She was eminently qualified for the role, but they would attempt to undermine her at every turn, speak over her, hold meetings without her, always going over her head... Caste did not appear to be a factor; it seemed to be good old fashioned sexism.

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sexism and non-egalitarian behavior is pretty common across the globe. I'd argue that the west, esp. N America, is the exception, not the rule. and even there, there are pressures working against it.

Re: Cognizant found guilty of discriminating against non-Indian employees

#345

definitely my experience dealing with them at F500s. Indian mafia running the IT org, and a PITA to get things out of them. personal favorite was that someone from network support ran a script that changed ownership of all of the docker containers and associated configs, outputs, and logs to root. we had pretty clear proof in the logs that a Cog support tech did it, and basically had to escalate to the CTO and get hi…

Yup. Currently working at a large multinational. Pretty much 90% of developers and managers are Indian. Very few Americans. Some Chinese and some Slavic.

I have never seen such ratios in 20+ years of my career.

Re: Cognizant found guilty of discriminating against non-Indian employees

#346
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The beauty of casteism, and religious discrimination (and less so racism/sexism, though it is certainly possible ) is the near fractal nature of the ability to discriminate against someone. After all, there are 3000 ‘main’ castes and 25,000 sub-castes. [ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India ], and with religious discrimination you can always go into sectarianism/what guru to follow. It’s the discrimi…

The fractal nature of it is truly remarkable. When you zoom out, you see what was essentially one people split along religious borders with India and Pakistan. Zoom in, and you see finer and finer levels of cultural discrimination.

> The fractal nature of it is truly remarkable. When you zoom out, you see what was essentially one people split along religious borders with India and Pakistan. Zoom in, and you see finer and finer levels of cultural discrimination.

In-group, Out-group Theory at play

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_and_out-group

Re: Cognizant found guilty of discriminating against non-Indian employees

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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sexism and non-egalitarian behavior is pretty common across the globe. I'd argue that the west, esp. N America, is the exception, not the rule. and even there, there are pressures working against it.

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Re: Cognizant found guilty of discriminating against non-Indian employees

#348
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All discrimination is contextual and local. The number of groups has nothing to do with it.

So you say, but history has shown that if groups don’t exist to allow easy discrimination, they will be created to allow such discrimination. So it’s a good sign of long, well established, and ingrained discrimination, eh? With associated infrastructure to make it easier to continue, and ‘fairer’ in that it allows almost everyone to have someone under them to take their own angst out on. (Except those ‘outside the sy…

your thoughts seem to align closely with René Girard's theories on mimetic desire and scapegoating.

Re: Cognizant found guilty of discriminating against non-Indian employees

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen let alone worked in a team that only had white people. Not once. I've never seen nor heard of a team that only had Japanese or Koreans or Russians or any other singular group except two: Chinese and Indians. These two groups have a unique tendency to form ethnically exclusive teams at companies and get away with it.

I have seen exclusively white people teams, especially at smaller startups. They were all Americans though, so not much diversity of nationalities. Given that China and India are countries with 1.4B population, no surprise that one can find enough people to form exclusively Chinese (or Indian) teams. Another factor is that people from other backgrounds do not want to join such teams even if the hiring manager makes t…

I'm sure it happens at small companies, but at large companies I've never seen it. It wouldn't be allowed to stay that way if it did happen. The number of times I've seen it happen with Chinese and Indians teams, relative to how rare it is for white-only teams to exist, seems highly improbable. White people are the plurality if not majority at most big American tech companies, so if it's all just statistical noise it should happen more with white people and that just isn't what happens.

Re: Cognizant found guilty of discriminating against non-Indian employees

#350
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One is likely the majority, the other the minority. It doesn’t negate any behaviour based on bias but would require an honest reflection on the unconscious biases existing in the workplace prior to this.

Aren't they both the minority in their respective situations ?

One way to look at it is minority groups who can’t turn off being visible minorities can be different than people who may be minorities in a a few areas of life but still have access to benefit from privilege in others.
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