They are quite subjective. IMO it's not very controversial to say they often exclude interesting corners of discussion. The nitty gritty of employee/employer dynamics for one.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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.

That’s simply an outlandish claim. Most people are not in control of any level of the government.

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.

If you genuinely believe that the "single axis" approach is valid, please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality.

[flagged]

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That's a made up deffinition only recently invented. Racism is hating another group of people based on physical or cultural background.

The US is the most powerful country does that mean if I go to india I can't experience racism because technically India is "weaker" ?

Isn't this example literally a group of stronger indians being racist to weaker individuals (job applicants)?

This also implies they are not hiring black, asian, or hispanic people either but because they're a minority that's ok?

Such a bad take.

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

So are you saying that if you were to put white people into a country that is systemically ruled by non-whites, they can’t be racist there?

What about these cases happening outside of the US?

At certain companies and it’s org structures yeah

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.

Newsom vetoed the ban [1]

From that article:

In a statement explaining his veto decision, Newsom said the measure was “unnecessary” because discrimination based on caste is already prohibited in the state.

(Just adding context that I would have missed if not for another commenter pointing it out further down)

What do you think the intersection between HN and Blind is?

Does caste discrimination still exist in India?

If yes, what leads you to believe that all first gen immigrants from India to the US magically stop doing it?

Unless they have any personal advantage in doing so.

> Not a single Indian in tech that I know in my personal or professional life

Your dataset is very small. I come from India

Except in Seattle, which explicitly bans caste discrimination as of 2023, and in California, which interprets its own state anti-discrimination laws to already include caste discrimination in other broader categories (which was the reason Governor Newsom gave when he vetoed a bill in 2023 to explicitly ban caste discrimination).

Quite a lot of tech companies hire in either Seattle, California, or both.

I think he means since they aren’t originally “Indian” but are colonizers of India who arrived through invasion.

This reminds me of the aphorism "The purpose of a system is what it does."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_w...

I've never met a single HR person that could be characterized as coming from, or even brushing up against, an academic circle.

> HR departments [...] believe that having white skin is a sin

Can we just stop? This is a meme, it's clearly never been true. It's extrapolating from a bunch of intemperate stuff said by oddball losers (yes, often in academic environments which encourage out-of-the-box thinking and speech[1]) to tar a bunch of extremely bland policies enacted by HR and hiring managers (to ensure that their masters don't get sued) with an ideological brush.

We people with "white skin" are very clearly doing just fine in the job market.

[1] Something that in other contexts we at HN think is a good thing!

One of the knock-on benefits of DEI is that it allows second rate minds to self-identify. Empathy is massively important in this line of work, and you need to be curious instead of confused and upset when you run into Chesterton's Fence.

At Amazon how I saw this work out was that we hired African immigrants rather than ADOS African-Americans.

Hilariously, we had an executive who said that his goal was to have the demographics of his division more closely resemble that of America. Until someone realized that South Asians are approximately 2% of the US population and were 50% of his division.

It's been years since I checked, but for non-DC jobs, Amazon's demographics are significantly less white than America as a whole. That's mainly Asians being hired in place of ADOS African-Americans and hispanics.

Or ‘even better’, someone in the same circle who can somehow check the box you need. Harvard grads hiring other Harvard grads, etc.

Coarse grained attributes like race, gender, sex, religion, etc. are not useful predictors of individual behavior or background.

Software Engineering is not some obscure thing it is a known science that anyone can learn and become better at. I see Juniors who outpace Senior developers all the time.