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Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians

zdnet.com

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Re: Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians

#331

Post by bluGill »

thesz wrote: post #157
LatteLazy wrote: post #19

The core issue in market heavy economies is that people with money make money and everyone else doesn't. Being smart and hard working and having poor parents means you will be poor. Being dumb and lazy with rich parents means you will be rich. Maybe with 3 or 4 full generations of nothing but hard work and luck you might make it up from working to middle class. Maybe. This is never really discussed directly. Only usi…

Actually, it goes almost exactly backward. Third generation of rich goes to much poorer life. And most billionaries are first-generation: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/07/16/how-to-stay-rich-for-three-g...

Middle class not rich. Getting out of being poor is hard on its own. Getting from middle class is "easy" in that random children from middle class raise to rich all the time. However poor have other disadvantages that they need to deal with, and that is hard to do in one generation.

Re: Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians

#332

Post by _7fvc »

My dad told me how the South Vietnam government divided and excluded people. That was why they didn't have the people's support. They had better fire power. But they couldn't win the war. The communists came and reduced everyone to poverty. China doesn't have these class problems because they too had a Cultural Revolution. India has this problem for so long.

In America, everyone tells you how bad Communism is. But they ignore the inequalities produced by crony capitalism. I see the same movie being played again. If we don't address these problems, the crazy revolution is coming.

Re: Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians

#333

Post by MisterBastahrd »

heavyset_go wrote: post #211
rvn1045 wrote: post #92

The lack of self awareness amongst upper caste Indians in India and abroad is interesting to witness. They often think of themselves as having come from humble backgrounds and 'made it' in society all on their own. Not realizing that the vast majority of Indians in India live in abject poverty without any meaningful access to basic education and other amenities. Upper caste Indians are more likely to have access to b…

> They often think of themselves as having come from humble backgrounds and 'made it' in society all on their own. The number of people I've run into that claim this, but their parents paid their rent, or bought them a house, or they work for their family's company, is staggering. It's a common blind spot for upper middle class and rich people.

Yep. All them liberal arts grads who have "made it" in their respective industries who then turn around and defend unpaid internships because they had parents willing to support them as young adults for the first half decade out of college.

Re: Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians

#334

Post by kelnos »

tomp wrote: post #295
cvhashim wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I scoff and roll my eyes at individuals who argue that tech is a meritocracy when discrimination between countrymen is happening even in companies like Google.

Nobody argues that tech is a meritocracy. Meritocracy is just an ideal, just like freedom, equality and defensive driving; it’s worth striving towards but you cannot ever reach it (and if you think you’ve reached it, you’ll inevitably start falling behind). Having said that, it’s one of the most meritocratic industries; do you know any billionaire doctors or lawyers that are college dropouts?

> Nobody argues that tech is a meritocracy.

That's not true even in the trivial "well I mean that most people don't argue that". I think people in tech are a lot more self-aware then they were 10-15 years ago (when most people in tech I knew would assert that tech is a meritocracy), but I still hear plenty of aspirational rhetoric that either assumes or explicitly asserts this "fact".

Re: Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians

#335

Post by hombre_fatal »

zapdrive wrote: post #263
macintux wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please reference the site guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Accusing someone of lying violates several of them.

But it IS a blatant lie. If the OP can provide any evidence of a student's caste listed on a notice board in a college, I'll eat my hat.

I know what it's like to see something on HN where you 100% doubt the story someone is telling. The problem is that hostile skepticism and cynicism are devoid of content, at best.

If you want to clarify to other readers that you find something very uncharacteristic or unlikely, then just keep it conversational and assume they are telling the truth. What would you say if a crystal ball revealed that their story did happened? "Whoa, I'm from India and I've never heard of anything like that, it's hard to believe. Which college/region was that?" would make the same point yet possibly provoke more info from other people/OP. And people are unlikely to downvote an earnest inquiry.

Re: Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians

#336

Post by KhoomeiK »

specialp wrote: post #303

Just for some clarification: What percentage of Indians are "upper caste"? What exactly is the cut off for being lower caste vs upper? I know this article says 90% of Indian US tech workers are upper caste but what is their representation as a whole in Indian population?

Brahmins are ~5% of India's total population and another 15% are also considered "forward caste", mainly from warrior or mercantile subcastes. So yeah pretty significant overrepresentation.

Re: Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians

#337

Post by currymj »

bluGill wrote: post #225
mywittyname wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point, wouldn't it be difficult for people to tell? A person who grew up outside of India will only have a passing understanding of this nuance anyway, because they would not have been regularly exposed to the other group, so their entire understanding will be from what is passed to them by their parents. And the next generation will have next to zero understanding. Plus, those nuances will probably get erase…

Maybe. The slave class in the US was in theory gone by 1870 (I don't care to look up the end of the civil war. 150 years latter a lot of people still know who is a descendant of that class. Somehow, something, fueled that through several generations.

a lot of this was legally enforced until the 1970s. see e.g. the Racial Integrity Act in Virginia for one example. the state had a legally-codified definition of race ("one-drop rule") and put a lot of bureaucratic effort into keeping records of everyone's race, so that they could enforce segregation and bans on interracial marriage.

if Reconstruction had succeeded and Jim Crow had never happened, who knows what the salience of this would be today?

Re: Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians

#338

Post by gonehome »

mabbo wrote: post #304

At no point do they say "Our company does not and did not allow discrimination against a person for being dalit". That is all they would have to say to take a clear stance- and they don't. > "Cisco is committed to an inclusive workplace for all," the company said in a statement to online news site thewire. > "We have robust processes to report and investigate concerns raised by employees which were followed in this c…

Cisco is also the company that tried to pitch building the 'great firewall' for the CCP: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/13/zoom-in-china.html

They don't care about right or wrong, they only care about making the most money they can while staying within the technical legal constraints of the countries they operate in.

I doubt they'd stop at workplace discrimination, if the CCP or Indian government wanted to leverage their tech to kill people (Dalit or Uighur) I'm sure they'd line up to do it (of course they’d rationalize some reason why it wasn’t their problem).

Re: Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians

#340

Post by shuckles »

magicalhippo wrote: post #180
_jgdh wrote: post #80

For people who discuss this with Indian co-workers - don't be surprised if they find this bizarre or far fetched. For most upper caste folks, it appears as if the caste system doesn't exist because they've never been at the receiving end of it. Most people (me included) would be tempted to say - I've never discriminated, I've never seen it happen in front of me, I'm confident none of my friends would do it so therefo…

I'm Norwegian, living there. A very good friend is Indian, her parents moved here while she was just a few years old. I never heard her talk about her caste, or the system in general really. That is, until one day, out of the blue, she said she was getting married. Her parents had found a boy who also grew up here in Norway that she was to marry the following year. After a bit of talking it was clear she was not very…

If caste only came up in a mutual interest decision like a wedding where there aren't power imbalances, isn't that fine? Who someone chooses to marry seems like an unreasonable place to intervene to resolve disparities.
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