I'm not sure if the motive behind such behavior is racism. Instead, I think it's more likely the power play. That is, they would pick the population that is the easiest to command and to push them up the corporate ladder.
Ignoring whether the claim is accurate or not, if Indian hiring managers are preferentially hiring other Indians, yes of course this is racism, because it means they are also discriminating against all other PoC candidates, not just white people.
Please think a little bit harder before claiming something isn't racism because it might somewhat counteract the structural privilege enjoyed by white people. Yes, white privilege is a thing, and if the claim was that Indian hiring managers were giving preference to non-white people, your comment would at least be worth discussing in the context of a society which overall still privileges white people. But that wasn't even the claim.
You can't compress the complexities of all social dynamics to a single axis. What's the distinction you're trying to make between "act of discrimination" and "racism"? Usually the distinction people try to draw is something like "systematic" vs "one-off" (the difference between one person yelling at you on the street, and lots of people yelling at you in particular throughout the month), but the behaviour alleged here is systematic. I suspect you don't have any particular meaning in mind, instead having taken a habit of language that works well in certain situations, and falsely generalised it outside of its domain of validity.
The -ism suffix implies it's about a systemic hierarchy. Are you implying that power in the US is systemically, structurally, in the hands of "indians" and that this is reflected in and reproduced by the dominant social ideology?
Please don't comment in this cross-examination style on HN. The guidelines ask us not to do this. Please observe the guidelines if you want to participate here, especially these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Eschew flamebait.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Also, having lived in Asia before - Americans are totally amateur racists compared to Asians (well, east, southeast, and south anyway. Never lived in Central Asia).
Those aunties and uncles can discriminate you down to damn near the block you came from, even if it was on the other side of the planet, and tell everyone exactly why you’re a bad idea for reasons even you didn’t know about.
I never understood this redefinition of the word...
Racism means prejudice based on race. Period. Thats all it means. Redefining the word like you suggested is moving the political goalposts
I think you've earned a Godwin point. "The Nazis weren't prejudiced" isn't a great start to an argument, even as a strawman of someone else's position.
Ism doesnt mean systenic hierarchy. Does gigantism mean a systemic hierarchy of giants? Does botulism mean systemic hierarchy of botulinum. Hobestly what the hell are you talking about?
I made the mistake once of insinuating the reason no else was complaining about current conditions was that everyone else was on a visa. That was pretty much the end of my job there. Which only made me more confident in my opinion in the end.
How do we draw the line between whatever -ism and Bayesian inferences? You are seasoned manager for years, you found that your fellow countrymen are much more likely to follow your leadership style than any other group of different cultural background. Let's say it's a fact that you identified through years of trial and error. Based on this fact, you decide to hire only certain groups. How is this racism? How is this different from a university has a college list. Any graduate who does not graduate from the list will not have an interview with your company -- It's super narrow minded and it can considered discrimination, but is that some kind of -ism?
If you're a seasoned manager, you have learned to work across cultural differences. Being a lazy manager who doesn't want to understand how to work with others is shortsighted on its own and is not an excuse for being a racist.
> you found that your fellow countrymen are much more likely to follow your leadership style than any other group of different cultural background
Two points.
First: a good, seasoned manager adapts their leadership style to their employees. So the premise is a bit backwards.
But second, let's suppose we use something more valid like "ability to follow instructions". And suppose there are real differences in groups. You still don't stereotype on groups, because lower-performing groups still have high-performing members. So you have your interview examine the actual skill you need on an individual basis. You don't make assumptions based on group membership.
Now, for practical reasons candidates need to be reduced to a reasonable number to interview. That should be done according to personal accomplishments and experience, not groups.
The college you went to is tricky. Only hiring from a select group is not very defensible mainly because it's a bad signal. It reflects mostly your high school test scores and grades, which was years ago. On the other hand, some colleges teach in certain departments better or worse, your grades might matter and depend on the college, etc. So you need to calibrate for a bunch of achievement-based signals where the college name can matter, rather than whitelist only certain colleges.
Because, in general, there is more variance within groups than across groups, so you are generalizing that an individual person within a group is more talented / capable / whatever than an individual person from outside that group. Ergo, you are treating that second person "unfairly" due to his / her group membership or lack thereof.
Yup. You see this when any org hires a top exec externally: they bring their trusted lieutenants/golf buddies and push out the old brass, and then this repeats down the chain when these hires do the same.
Unsurprisingly, an Indian exec's trusted lieutenants and golf buddies will also be Indian, likely from the same university, caste, etc. They will not be hiring random people just because they happen to be Indian; if anything, there's been plenty of lawsuits over Indians of the "wrong" caste, language group etc getting pushed out.
> The tragedy isn’t that China is winning, it’s that the West stopped imagining better futures
This one hits close to home. Case in point, many people on HN argue that having fewer goods and higher prices is part of being an developed country. I think it's deadly wrong. A hallmark of a modern industrialized society is to make once-expensive products accessible to the majority of the people, if not everyone. That's how we got electricity, got clean water, got food like butter (which only wealthy families could afford), got cars, got iphone, got all kinds of appliances, and got amazing infrastructure. And somehow now it's okay to accept that China can manufacture and build faster, and cheaper, and better?
> The fast pace of economic growth didn't necessarily come from authoritarianism
You're right. The fast pace of growth came from the policies that encourage ruthless capitalism. You can see that Chinese government controls business like oil and tobacco, but it gives tons of freedom for business owners to run wild.
> Chinese government [...] gives tons of freedom for business owners to run wild
This claim is provably incorrect.
> Analysis of all 37.5 million registered firms in China reveals that 65% of the largest 1,000 private owners have direct equity ties with state owners […] The number of private owners with direct equity ties with the state almost tripled between 2000 and 2019, and those with indirect equity ties rose 50-fold.
> Provincial and local government officials in China enforce laws and control resources, such as land and loans, but these officials change positions every few years. […] Publicly listed firms increase perk spending (travel, dining, and entertainment) by an average of 3.6 million yuan (20%) when new local officials take charge. […] The results are consistent with the view that local officials are important gatekeepers and firms seek to influence them with perks and positions of power within SOEs.[1][2]
> China’s domestic politics have changed significantly over the past decade, with the top leadership enacting much more muscular policies to limit the power of large corporations while also deploying extensive measures to support firms, especially in key industries. According to Hsieh, this trend means that companies need to navigate the state’s “two strong hands,” one supportive and the other restrictive which aim to increase the party’s control over the economy even as the private sector continues, in one form or another, to grow. Moreover, political control is likely proving oppressive for companies as the party-state increasingly weights national security over economic growth. […] These findings […] suggest that not all government intervention in the economy is welcome by Chinese companies, especially if it comes with national security strings attached. The findings from the experiment suggest that state and party influence on private firms may have evolved to prioritize politics above economic growth, creating new challenges for companies that would naturally seek to maximize political support alongside autonomy.[3]
Thanks. I can't argue with facts. When I was commenting, what I had in mind were business like retail, manufacturing, and internet services, which somehow fiercely competed with the US companies and often won. That said, anecdotes are enough...
Not even mastery. The other day I was trying to figure out how to pass an external label to Prometheus alert rules when unit testing the rules with "promtool test rules". Man, all the models gave all kinds of hallucinated answers, and I had to resort to reading the promtool code. In the end, mastery means we get apply our skills to solve new problems, yet in the current state AI can only interpolate already solved problems.
I'm not sure if the motive behind such behavior is racism. Instead, I think it's more likely the power play. That is, they would pick the population that is the easiest to command and to push them up the corporate ladder.