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Cognizant found guilty of discriminating against non-Indian employees

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

#401

Post by Izkata »

sourcepluck wrote: post #198
the_gorilla wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think the word "Flyover" means? You live in it now, they let you in so you're not flying over it. It's obviously derogatory, and even your link says it's derogatory. That'd be like me going to India, and then complaining "As an American living next to untouchables..."

Here's the relevant quote from the wikipedia that you're misusing: > The origins of the phrases and the attitudes of their supposed users are a source of debate in American culture; the terms are often regarded as pejoratives, but are sometimes "reclaimed" and used defensively.[1] So no, it is not "obviously derogatory", and the link does not say that.

The non-derogatory term for the same geographic area is "Middle America": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_America_(United_States)

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

#402

Post by ssbash »

dang wrote: post #389
commandlinefan wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a lot of negativity about Indians There isn't, though. There's a lot of negativity about _H1B_s in the comments here, but you conflate that with Indian.

There was, unfortunately, but most of it has since been (correctly) flagged.

Respectfully, I don’t think enough has been removed.

As someone with Indian heritage it’s super disheartening to see plenty of comments negatively generalizing a diaspora of over 1B people.

Treating anyone who presents as Indian as apart of cultural monolith is absurd. I was born and raised in the US, and have no connection to the alleged cronyism or caste-based discrimination.

Many of these comments make blanket statements about Indians. I don’t think the same moderation guidelines are being applied in this case. Replace Indians with Europeans, Black people or any other ethnicity and it should become clear that this violates the site’s guidelines.

Here are a few top level examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41786112

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41786205

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41786534

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

#403

Post by smugma »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #343
Eumenes wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They aren’t “under-represented” minorities. They, at least in California, provide the breakdowns.

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

#404

Post by harshaxnim »

ErigmolCt wrote: post #365
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #48

My guess would be that a lot of non-Indians at these companies are rejected on the basis of "vibes"; which is slightly different from racism as I explain below, although it probably ends up having the same net effect as overt racism. As an Indian, I've observed that collectivism and subservience towards authority figures are taught as virtues; this obviously makes it quite easy for employers to extract unreasonable d…

When these hiring decisions are based on gut feelings or "vibes," these subjective judgments often reflect an unconscious bias

You’re not wrong, but that bias is not stemming out of Racism imo. Also I’m not saying that the bias is acceptable, but it shows a different kind of social problem that often transcends classes and gender.

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

#405

Post by kenjackson »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #337
Eumenes wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>recruiting/HR department no longer considered Asians of any ethnicity a minority and lumped them in with white males. Why does HR even need to keep track of ethnicities? Is this a US thing? Here in my EU country you're just employee/applicant #3215, that's it, nobody asks or enters your ethnicity anywhere to even be able to keep tabs on how many are of what ethnicity, since everyone is considered equal by default an…

It's because of the history of racial discrimination in the US. While there's talk of affirmative action in the news, I suspect plain'ole racial discrimination is probably far more common.

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

#407

Post by simfree »

matrix87 wrote: post #406

something weird on my team is that most of them (around 40) are from the exact same province in india just seems kind of bizarre to me, like deciding to only hire people from Florida for a team in California

Indian communities in the US can often be clanish, and self-segregate to specific areas of a neighborhood or town.

You can see this in action on the eastside of Lake Washington, always fun to get glared at for being at the wrong block in Samamish, or the wrong (or sometimes right) condo building in Bellevue. Do not bring a dog! You will get solid stares, does not matter how said dog behaves or what local policy is.

Seattle notably legislated against the caste system persisting in the city, but from what I hear it still is a thing stateside. Most of the Indian community lives outside Seattle though.

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

#408

Post by matrix87 »

ewuhic wrote: post #54

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…

> Indians bonding to go to Indian restaurants during lunch break, so now most of the colleagues follow suit

I mean, if you're going out with a group, it's usually majority vote anyway

And frankly they have good food

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

#409

Post by [deleted] »

throw49sjwo1 wrote: post #260
dx034 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. I‘ve been at several companies that self host Jira. With the amount of critical data and processes in Jira, it can be comforting to have it on-prem with no one else being able to access the server.

Are you sure they're not just "preparing for the migration" and plan to stay on premise? I also worked at many places that had it on premise - all of them planned to migrate ASAP (where asap is sometimes years).

[deleted]

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

#410

Post by odux »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #394
jl6 wrote: 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.

Caste is not the driving factor in Indian culture.

As an Indian, this, unfortunately, is not true. Within India caste is very ingrained with the culture and in some aspects it is very difficult to separate culture from caste.
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