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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

#461

Post by sumedh »

kamaal wrote: post #305
wslh wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely asking as someone not deeply familiar with the complexities of Indian culture: India now has the largest population in the world, is the biggest democracy, and has significant potential for growth (e.g. reducing poverty). At the same time, we see Indian leaders in top positions in major U.S. companies, like the CEOs of Google (1st gen) and Microsoft (2nd gen). How do these factors all connect? What drives t…

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…

> as fixing India is largely a long term

You can also get killed in India if you go against some powerful politician or people close to power.

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

#462

Post by sumedh »

Eumenes wrote: post #310
kamaal wrote: 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…

> Indians are way overrepresented in tech leadership positions (not just CEO/CTO).

Lot of Indians do focus on learning/studying hard, get good grades to get a good job and move up the ladder. Ofcourse that does not automatically mean you get to be a CEO/CTO but the pool of people who hard hard and ambitious is bit bigger compared to other countries.

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

#463

Post by sumedh »

matrix87 wrote: post #418
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

Edit: And I will say, they've shown me a great deal of hospitality I see a lot of negative feelings in the comments here. If anyone is having negative feelings they should be directed to corporations who have artificially engineered this situation. The people involved are not to blame

> The people involved are not to blame

You can blame the people as well. Some of them will have a preference for people from their own state and who speak the same language compared to a non Indian or even an India from a different part of India.

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

#464

Post by qnleigh »

varun_chopra wrote: post #4

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…

> At the risk of sounding racist...

I wouldn't consider it racist to call out racism.

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

#465

Post by bsoles »

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.

These documented cases even in the US would like to disagree: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_discrimination_in_the_...

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

#466

Post by ljsprague »

sien wrote: post #400
red-iron-pine wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

It's so weird. Why didn't big tech companies fight tooth and nail to get Asian recognised as a minority so they could then turn around and say look 'We employ minorities at a rate way higher than other companies' ?

We all realize what a scam all of this is, right?

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

#467

Post by fakedang »

hnbad wrote: post #458
fakedang wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nevermind that "race" as a concept did not exist in the modern sense in Western cultures prior to colonization despite the exposure to other peoples with other skin tones from other parts of the world. https://x.com/MohabMo5102/status/1494070281731809281?mx=2 Also someone please tell me why were harems in Mamlukian and Ottoman courts largely filled with Slavic and Circassian men and women?

I'm not sure what the tweet has to do with your question. To your question: I'm referring to modern Western racism which is built on the scientific racism that became popular when there were economic incentives to explain why chattel slavery is okay when you do it with some people when it's otherwise not okay to do with others. This was downstream from a massive need for cheap labor in the colonies to produce exotic…

> I don't know why you're asking for an explanation of random unsourced and unqualified historical factoids (without mentioning e.g. which harems, which courts, where and in what time period, which seem kind of important specifics when using vague generalisations like "largely") - maybe ask whoever you learned that from unless you're "just asking questions".

I literally said Ottoman and Mamlukian harems. There was only one Ottoman dynasty in one place in one historical time period. As there was only one Mamlukian harem in one place in one contiguous historic period.

FYI both of those dynasties, as did many other kingdoms and empires, had a strong preference for Slavic and Caucasian (as in from the Caucasus) consorts, as can be seen from the ethnicities and religions of most of their dynastic rulers' mothers. And Islamic and Mongol rulers were notorious for keeping younger male slaves from both regions as companions. Heck, the Mamluk dynasty itself was formed by a bunch of Cuman and Circassian slaves who ended up being so powerful as to control their Ayyubid masters.

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

#468

Post by matrix87 »

sumedh wrote: post #463
matrix87 wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: And I will say, they've shown me a great deal of hospitality I see a lot of negative feelings in the comments here. If anyone is having negative feelings they should be directed to corporations who have artificially engineered this situation. The people involved are not to blame

> The people involved are not to blame You can blame the people as well. Some of them will have a preference for people from their own state and who speak the same language compared to a non Indian or even an India from a different part of India.

I mean, maybe the ones making the prejudiced hiring decisions. But everyone else, no I can't blame them

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

#469

Post by thisislife2 »

Saline9515 wrote: post #441
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…

The article says explicitly that senior software developers were fired to replace them with less qualified Indians. This is not about vibes, this is a mix of racism and greed. If roles were reversed, you would be crying about racism.

I guess it could be construed as a kind of a racism - they were fired or forced to resign because cheaper, younger and more subservient workers were available.

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

#470

Post by thisislife2 »

Eumenes wrote: post #66

This is obvious at a number of these big box consulting firms for many years (Tata, Cognizant, HCL, Capgemini). Its so easy to verify too - go on linkedin and comb through dozens of search results of exclusively Indians (I'm not talking about American-Indians who go to undergrad in the US like every other person). These firms also take a lions share of the h1b visas which is another conversation - why does India get…

> why does India get to have 75% of all h1b visas? Seems not very diverse.

I'd wager it's a deliberate US state policy. It's because we indians are good immigrants - whether it be US, Europe or the middle-east, we tend to respect (even if we necessarily don't like) the local culture and laws and try to avoid trouble and be good citizens (often better than in our own country :). And the US is a country built by immigrants that needs people. That is why Indians today are one of the largest immigrant group in the US. Also, cheap labour. That's capitalism at work - why hire American when the whole world can be your HR pool?

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