12 ms·

I have to say, as an Asian male I found this comment by dirtyid in the article to be succinct and all too true: > "Pour one out for Asian males. Get screwed by

by colmvp 9y ago

I have to say, as an Asian male I found this comment by dirtyid in the article to be succinct and all too true: > "Pour one out for Asian males. Get screwed by affirmative action in education, media representation and now employment but can't get screwed on dating apps." Asian men constantly get grouped as a single entity when it comes to tech and aren't considered an added element of diverseness within the industry despite Japan, China, Korea, India, etc. being quite different from one another. Then you look at industries where Asians are under-represented and you can read articles from actors like Steven Yeun who talk about how they rarely get offered roles and when they do, it's often for roles that stereotype their ethnicity. For example, I just watched Annihilation and the only Asian actor they had in it of course had a broken English accent despite the fact that in real life, the actor actually has a British accent. Pull up an article on diversity in the U.S., and chances are if you search "Asian" in the article you'll get 0 results. I've always looked up to tech because it's a realm where we Asians are judged by our skill level and output, not the color of our skin or how attractive we look. It's a realm that rewards people who study hard and work tirelessly to refine their craft. And so it's absolutely frustrating to hear that we're too successful and that people scale back our representation despite the fact that they never happens for us in other industries.

so_obviously 9y ago
all of what you said is true, and that's why i (asian male) will always run my own business, no matter what the perceived opportunity cost may be, because it's nothing but a mirage. counting on the white establishment, political right OR political left to give us any kind of a leg up or break is foolish in the extreme. this google episode is a perfect example of why. because we are merely 5% of the US population, we are treated as naive pawns by two sides in a larger game of ideological chess. i contribute financially to asian-interest causes i deem worthy, but i'm under no illusion of this changing in my lifetime. the american social fabric is configured heavily against us and will be for at least one more generation, likely another 2.
burlesona 9y ago
Thanks for sharing this. I hadn’t heard this specific perspective before.
gedy 9y ago
Agreed, and it's a failing of humanity that we lump people together based on their appearances. That ironically includes the people who try and "fix" discrimination.
- Slansitartop 9y ago
  I would say that only applies to the people who try to fix discrimination by using group-identity-based adjustments. I'd think that attempts to fix discrimination that focus on forming shared identity (replacing the old categories) would not be susceptible to the same problems.
  - mintplant 9y ago
    In psychology this is referred to as the common ingroup identity model for reducing intergroup bias. There are indications that the effects achieved are only temporary in nature, and negative outcomes can result from the loss of the overridden identities.
    - Slansitartop 9y ago
      It probably depends on the scale. If you try to form a new in-group identity over a short time in a smallish group against a background that reinforces the existing categories, then I can believe the effects will be temporary. However, if the group is larger, the background identities weakened and de-emphasized, and enough time given, I think it'd work. My impression is that current "anti-discrimination" attitudes actually reinforce the existing categories, even more strongly and explicitly than had been done before. There's a lot more labeling and "reasoning" through labels going on in places where it seems very counterproductive.
raker 9y ago
You can use this sort of thing as a measuring point; when something like this is overlooked and inconvenient, you can tell they're making statements based on their agenda (the trend in the MSM, which is why you can see public trust dropping in them; they're not all stupid, they know it's not consistent). On the other hand, you've got people that make statements based on principle, and even if you still disagree with them, you feel it would still be nice to hang out with them, like they didn't establish their relationship with you by trying to lie to you through selective truths? The cost of raising agenda above both principle and truth comes at the cost of a massive amount of people and freedoms, and their pretty statements about caring about any group of people don't hold water. (I'm looking at you SJWs and Aryan Supremacists)
soreasan 9y ago
As an Asian male this article also frustrates me. Google has always been a company I've wanted to work for but if this article is true and Google discriminates against Whites and Asians in their hiring process then they're not the dream company I previously believed they were.
- romanpoet 9y ago
  I'm here to report to you that unfortunately they are not that company. I hear they used to be everything the nerds dreamed, but as the company grew, the original culture was unable to defend itself.
- bitL 9y ago
  Go to FaceBook, they still retained hacker spirit, at least for time being. You can meet a lot of previously frustrated Googlers there.
  - jnbiche 9y ago
    I like Facebook as an engineering organization, and was tempted when I was heavily recruited there. Problem is, many feel Facebook the social media company is making the world a worse place in many different ways, and their leadership had their head in the sand. Otherwise, I'd love to work there.
- memo_ree 9y ago
  If you are a $race $gender, Google will hire you. The diverse candidate pool just means you need to work harder on your resume, interviewing skills, etc - since there's more competition.
- thr0waway1776 9y ago
  Oh, and check out their incredibly diverse board of directors: https://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/company-officers/GOOG.O https://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/company-officers/GOOG... /sarcasm
Clanan 9y ago
As a white Irish guy from New Mexico, this attitude irks me as well. No, I'm not the same as every other white guy out there. (I have far more interesting "gringo" stories than a white guy from Connecticut.) No one should be judged or labeled by their skin color or ethnicity.
- rvo 9y ago
  "Hire people not due to the content of their character, but by the gender they identify with and the melanin in their skin" #civilrights2018
- jeshbreadnan 9y ago
  Hey, a fellow New Mexican! Don't see too many of those on here. Would love to hear your stories.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- gaius 9y ago
  As a white Irish guy from New Mexico But see https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/apples-diversity-chief-lasts-just-six-months/ https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/apples-diversity-chief-lasts-j... No one should be judged or labeled by their skin color or ethnicity Agreed, and that includes “all X are the same”.
southphillyman 9y ago
>I've always looked up to tech because it's a realm where we Asians are judged by our skill level and output Do you think model minority or "Asians are good at math/science" stereotypes have any impact here?
PKop 9y ago
It's because Asian's don't "need" the diversity agenda to help them that they are screwed over by it's policies. You aren't useful to them. Your last paragraph is an explanation for why "tech" is becoming increasingly under attack by the diversity industry.
daxorid 9y ago
Given this (correct) understanding of what "diversity" really means in American culture, why do you think it is that Asian-Americans overwhelmingly vote for pro-diversity policies?
- toyg 9y ago
  As he says, because they do get screwed in all the other sectors. They do happen to be in the "privileged majority" only in tech, so there they see redressing as a negative, but only there (or rather, here). The ideal answer is not to completely drop any diversity effort, but on one side (the "revolutionaries") to recognise where they turn into zealotry, and on the other ("the entrenched", of any type) to accept they might have to lose something to gain something.
- jerf 9y ago
  There's a time dependency in some of this. What "diversity" is, even from a purely left-wing perspective, has changed a lot within my lifetime. I was born in 1978, and when I was growing up, the left-wing diversity perspective focused on "race blindness", MLK's dream about his children being measured by the quality of their character and not the color of their skin, and that sort of thing. Now... well... I know a lot of you on HN are very, very leftist; how does that sound to you now? I'm serious about that question. I'd guess a lot of you, if you were careful and thought about it, would have a hard time answering that question, because it isn't a "right wing" perspective, but it certainly isn't a left-wing perspective any more, which now focuses intensely on looking at people by their identity groups, to a degree that (very, very much no sarcasm here) greatly exceeds anything like the KKK, who merely looked at your race, rather than race, gender, disability status, and all the rest of the intersectional categories. The idea that anyone can be race-blind is seriously heterodox stuff now; grounds to get one instantly accused of not just racism, but subconscious racism. There's a lot of people still operating under the assumption that the older meanings of the terms are in use, because most people have better things to do than to stay up-to-date on this sort of stuff when they've got lives to lead and their own problems, not to mention the fact that there's some deliberate obfuscation that tends to go on.
  - 9y ago
arsey 9y ago
You're conflating issues, and that's fine because you're frustrated. But we are over-represented in tech, and not anywhere else. There are obvious systems-level hiring problems that this company has and they're trying to fix that. It's so strange and selfish to hear "they should not try and fix this".
- commandlinefan 9y ago
  Well, that's not quite what he's saying. Remember, nobody is even claiming that underrepresented groups are actually applying and getting turned away - the statistics just suggest that they never even show up in the first place. Yet the suggested fixes are always like the ones in the linked article: turn away the people who _do_ show up until some underrepresented people come in to take their place.
JustAnotherPat 9y ago
The USA is a capitalistic society. We only pretend to look at diversity as something that should be egalitarian. Asian Americans don't have a large enough base to provide capital for any of these areas for people to see them as beneficial.
throwaway1584 9y ago
You are entirely correct that despite immigrants being the largest source of diversity in tech, all diversity and inclusion programs in tech misclassify immigrants into US demographic categories from the EEO-1 Instruction Booklet [2] that underpins all diversity and inclusion programs. For instance all of the following are categorized as white Americans; my German colleague, my French colleague of Iranian descent, my Iranian colleague, my white american colleague from Colorado, and my Iraqi colleague. Silicon Valley recruits outliers from around the world. Applying US demographics to an industry where ⅔ [1] of the workers are immigrants does not make sense. [1] https://jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/index2018.pdf https://jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/index2018.pdf [2] https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo1survey/2007instructions.cfm https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo1survey/2007instructions.c...
- andromeduck 9y ago
  Iranians are considered white?!
  - throwaway1584 9y ago
    Yes, according to my Iranian colleagues.
  - astrange 9y ago
    Many of them consider themselves white. Actually, some Kurds are beyond white: https://aliozturk.deviantart.com/art/Kurt-kizi-Kurdish-Girl-245475285 https://aliozturk.deviantart.com/art/Kurt-kizi-Kurdish-Girl-...
KAdot 9y ago
> Asian men constantly get grouped as a single entity As an immigrant who came to the US from a poor Eastern European country just a few years ago I feel the same about being labeled as "white". It blows my mind that for many people a guy of British descent who was born in the US and a woman from Russia who speaks very poor English are both just "white".
- Asooka 9y ago
  Well, it's obviously because as a white slavic person you have never been under oppressive slavery like a wealthy black immigrant from Africa! /s
- jnbiche 9y ago
  It's not just between foreign whites and American whites. Take a wealthy, white, highly-educated person from Connecticut, and a dirt-poor, white, high-school dropout from rural W. Virginia. Both have "white privilege". And so the poor, under-educated W. Virginian who claws his way up to being a self-educated programmer will be disregarded by Google along with the wealthy Connecticuter. That simple fact bothers me immensely.
rayiner 9y ago
People don’t care about Asian males (and I am one) because they’re the highest earning demographic in the country. In a country where you die if you can’t afford health care, it’s quite reasonable to take the tack that economic challenges are in a different league than dating challenges. Combatting discrimination isn’t about some platonic abstraction. It’s about money, wealth, jobs, health and criminal justice outcomes. And when economic concerns are implicated (e.g. advancement into leadership roles), I definitely have seen the media address Asians. E.g. https://www.law.com/americanlawyer/almID/1202779428743/ https://www.law.com/americanlawyer/almID/1202779428743/.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
thr0waway1776 9y ago
Serious question - why is affirmative action always OK when Asians bear the coast but not OK otherwise? - Why isn't there affirmative action in the NBA? There are practically no Asian basketball players, they should lower the standards until more Asians get accepted, and there should be a quota. - Why isn't there affirmative action in the US Presidential Cabinet? There are practically no Asian policymakers - Why isn't there affirmative action in Hollywood? There are few no Asian actors aside from the classic stereotyped actor nerd/goofball/terrorist/etc
frrp 9y ago
Be So Good They Can't Ignore You.
- jnbiche 9y ago
  > Be So Good They Can't Ignore You. That's pretty much the story of Asian Americans (and Jewish Americans, for that matter).
hoki1 9y ago
google is based in California, which in 1996 passed proposition 209 which essentially ended affirmative action in education. and how many hispanics, women or blacks do you see in movies or tv? google is multi-national company with billions of users so it makes sense that they value having people of different skin colors and gender. with a more diverse workforce maybe things like this[0] would not happen [0]https://twitter.com/jackyalcine/status/615329515909156865 https://twitter.com/jackyalcine/status/615329515909156865
dlwdlw 9y ago
Yep. Two former world powers each making up 20% of the world , India and China, are grouped together as "Asian" in the US

by colmvp 9y ago

so_obviously 9y ago

all of what you said is true, and that's why i (asian male) will always run my own business, no matter what the perceived opportunity cost may be, because it's nothing but a mirage. counting on the white establishment, political right OR political left to give us any kind of a leg up or break is foolish in the extreme. this google episode is a perfect example of why. because we are merely 5% of the US population, we are treated as naive pawns by two sides in a larger game of ideological chess. i contribute financially to asian-interest causes i deem worthy, but i'm under no illusion of this changing in my lifetime. the american social fabric is configured heavily against us and will be for at least one more generation, likely another 2.

burlesona 9y ago

Thanks for sharing this. I hadn’t heard this specific perspective before.

gedy 9y ago

Agreed, and it's a failing of humanity that we lump people together based on their appearances. That ironically includes the people who try and "fix" discrimination.

Slansitartop 9y ago
I would say that only applies to the people who try to fix discrimination by using group-identity-based adjustments. I'd think that attempts to fix discrimination that focus on forming shared identity (replacing the old categories) would not be susceptible to the same problems.
- mintplant 9y ago
  In psychology this is referred to as the common ingroup identity model for reducing intergroup bias. There are indications that the effects achieved are only temporary in nature, and negative outcomes can result from the loss of the overridden identities.
  - Slansitartop 9y ago
    It probably depends on the scale. If you try to form a new in-group identity over a short time in a smallish group against a background that reinforces the existing categories, then I can believe the effects will be temporary. However, if the group is larger, the background identities weakened and de-emphasized, and enough time given, I think it'd work. My impression is that current "anti-discrimination" attitudes actually reinforce the existing categories, even more strongly and explicitly than had been done before. There's a lot more labeling and "reasoning" through labels going on in places where it seems very counterproductive.

raker 9y ago

You can use this sort of thing as a measuring point; when something like this is overlooked and inconvenient, you can tell they're making statements based on their agenda (the trend in the MSM, which is why you can see public trust dropping in them; they're not all stupid, they know it's not consistent). On the other hand, you've got people that make statements based on principle, and even if you still disagree with them, you feel it would still be nice to hang out with them, like they didn't establish their relationship with you by trying to lie to you through selective truths? The cost of raising agenda above both principle and truth comes at the cost of a massive amount of people and freedoms, and their pretty statements about caring about any group of people don't hold water. (I'm looking at you SJWs and Aryan Supremacists)

soreasan 9y ago

As an Asian male this article also frustrates me. Google has always been a company I've wanted to work for but if this article is true and Google discriminates against Whites and Asians in their hiring process then they're not the dream company I previously believed they were.

romanpoet 9y ago
I'm here to report to you that unfortunately they are not that company. I hear they used to be everything the nerds dreamed, but as the company grew, the original culture was unable to defend itself.
bitL 9y ago
Go to FaceBook, they still retained hacker spirit, at least for time being. You can meet a lot of previously frustrated Googlers there.
- jnbiche 9y ago
  I like Facebook as an engineering organization, and was tempted when I was heavily recruited there. Problem is, many feel Facebook the social media company is making the world a worse place in many different ways, and their leadership had their head in the sand. Otherwise, I'd love to work there.
memo_ree 9y ago
If you are a $race $gender, Google will hire you. The diverse candidate pool just means you need to work harder on your resume, interviewing skills, etc - since there's more competition.
thr0waway1776 9y ago
Oh, and check out their incredibly diverse board of directors: https://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/company-officers/GOOG.O https://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/company-officers/GOOG... /sarcasm

Clanan 9y ago

As a white Irish guy from New Mexico, this attitude irks me as well. No, I'm not the same as every other white guy out there. (I have far more interesting "gringo" stories than a white guy from Connecticut.) No one should be judged or labeled by their skin color or ethnicity.

rvo 9y ago
"Hire people not due to the content of their character, but by the gender they identify with and the melanin in their skin" #civilrights2018
jeshbreadnan 9y ago
Hey, a fellow New Mexican! Don't see too many of those on here. Would love to hear your stories.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
gaius 9y ago
As a white Irish guy from New Mexico But see https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/apples-diversity-chief-lasts-just-six-months/ https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/apples-diversity-chief-lasts-j... No one should be judged or labeled by their skin color or ethnicity Agreed, and that includes “all X are the same”.

southphillyman 9y ago

>I've always looked up to tech because it's a realm where we Asians are judged by our skill level and output Do you think model minority or "Asians are good at math/science" stereotypes have any impact here?

PKop 9y ago

It's because Asian's don't "need" the diversity agenda to help them that they are screwed over by it's policies. You aren't useful to them. Your last paragraph is an explanation for why "tech" is becoming increasingly under attack by the diversity industry.

daxorid 9y ago

Given this (correct) understanding of what "diversity" really means in American culture, why do you think it is that Asian-Americans overwhelmingly vote for pro-diversity policies?

toyg 9y ago
As he says, because they do get screwed in all the other sectors. They do happen to be in the "privileged majority" only in tech, so there they see redressing as a negative, but only there (or rather, here). The ideal answer is not to completely drop any diversity effort, but on one side (the "revolutionaries") to recognise where they turn into zealotry, and on the other ("the entrenched", of any type) to accept they might have to lose something to gain something.
jerf 9y ago
There's a time dependency in some of this. What "diversity" is, even from a purely left-wing perspective, has changed a lot within my lifetime. I was born in 1978, and when I was growing up, the left-wing diversity perspective focused on "race blindness", MLK's dream about his children being measured by the quality of their character and not the color of their skin, and that sort of thing. Now... well... I know a lot of you on HN are very, very leftist; how does that sound to you now? I'm serious about that question. I'd guess a lot of you, if you were careful and thought about it, would have a hard time answering that question, because it isn't a "right wing" perspective, but it certainly isn't a left-wing perspective any more, which now focuses intensely on looking at people by their identity groups, to a degree that (very, very much no sarcasm here) greatly exceeds anything like the KKK, who merely looked at your race, rather than race, gender, disability status, and all the rest of the intersectional categories. The idea that anyone can be race-blind is seriously heterodox stuff now; grounds to get one instantly accused of not just racism, but subconscious racism. There's a lot of people still operating under the assumption that the older meanings of the terms are in use, because most people have better things to do than to stay up-to-date on this sort of stuff when they've got lives to lead and their own problems, not to mention the fact that there's some deliberate obfuscation that tends to go on.
- 9y ago

arsey 9y ago

You're conflating issues, and that's fine because you're frustrated. But we are over-represented in tech, and not anywhere else. There are obvious systems-level hiring problems that this company has and they're trying to fix that. It's so strange and selfish to hear "they should not try and fix this".

commandlinefan 9y ago
Well, that's not quite what he's saying. Remember, nobody is even claiming that underrepresented groups are actually applying and getting turned away - the statistics just suggest that they never even show up in the first place. Yet the suggested fixes are always like the ones in the linked article: turn away the people who _do_ show up until some underrepresented people come in to take their place.

JustAnotherPat 9y ago

The USA is a capitalistic society. We only pretend to look at diversity as something that should be egalitarian. Asian Americans don't have a large enough base to provide capital for any of these areas for people to see them as beneficial.

throwaway1584 9y ago

You are entirely correct that despite immigrants being the largest source of diversity in tech, all diversity and inclusion programs in tech misclassify immigrants into US demographic categories from the EEO-1 Instruction Booklet [2] that underpins all diversity and inclusion programs. For instance all of the following are categorized as white Americans; my German colleague, my French colleague of Iranian descent, my Iranian colleague, my white american colleague from Colorado, and my Iraqi colleague. Silicon Valley recruits outliers from around the world. Applying US demographics to an industry where ⅔ [1] of the workers are immigrants does not make sense. [1] https://jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/index2018.pdf https://jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/index2018.pdf [2] https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo1survey/2007instructions.cfm https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo1survey/2007instructions.c...

andromeduck 9y ago
Iranians are considered white?!
- throwaway1584 9y ago
  Yes, according to my Iranian colleagues.
- astrange 9y ago
  Many of them consider themselves white. Actually, some Kurds are beyond white: https://aliozturk.deviantart.com/art/Kurt-kizi-Kurdish-Girl-245475285 https://aliozturk.deviantart.com/art/Kurt-kizi-Kurdish-Girl-...

KAdot 9y ago

> Asian men constantly get grouped as a single entity As an immigrant who came to the US from a poor Eastern European country just a few years ago I feel the same about being labeled as "white". It blows my mind that for many people a guy of British descent who was born in the US and a woman from Russia who speaks very poor English are both just "white".

Asooka 9y ago
Well, it's obviously because as a white slavic person you have never been under oppressive slavery like a wealthy black immigrant from Africa! /s
jnbiche 9y ago
It's not just between foreign whites and American whites. Take a wealthy, white, highly-educated person from Connecticut, and a dirt-poor, white, high-school dropout from rural W. Virginia. Both have "white privilege". And so the poor, under-educated W. Virginian who claws his way up to being a self-educated programmer will be disregarded by Google along with the wealthy Connecticuter. That simple fact bothers me immensely.

rayiner 9y ago

People don’t care about Asian males (and I am one) because they’re the highest earning demographic in the country. In a country where you die if you can’t afford health care, it’s quite reasonable to take the tack that economic challenges are in a different league than dating challenges. Combatting discrimination isn’t about some platonic abstraction. It’s about money, wealth, jobs, health and criminal justice outcomes. And when economic concerns are implicated (e.g. advancement into leadership roles), I definitely have seen the media address Asians. E.g. https://www.law.com/americanlawyer/almID/1202779428743/ https://www.law.com/americanlawyer/almID/1202779428743/.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

thr0waway1776 9y ago

Serious question - why is affirmative action always OK when Asians bear the coast but not OK otherwise? - Why isn't there affirmative action in the NBA? There are practically no Asian basketball players, they should lower the standards until more Asians get accepted, and there should be a quota. - Why isn't there affirmative action in the US Presidential Cabinet? There are practically no Asian policymakers - Why isn't there affirmative action in Hollywood? There are few no Asian actors aside from the classic stereotyped actor nerd/goofball/terrorist/etc

frrp 9y ago

Be So Good They Can't Ignore You.

jnbiche 9y ago
> Be So Good They Can't Ignore You. That's pretty much the story of Asian Americans (and Jewish Americans, for that matter).

hoki1 9y ago

google is based in California, which in 1996 passed proposition 209 which essentially ended affirmative action in education. and how many hispanics, women or blacks do you see in movies or tv? google is multi-national company with billions of users so it makes sense that they value having people of different skin colors and gender. with a more diverse workforce maybe things like this[0] would not happen [0]https://twitter.com/jackyalcine/status/615329515909156865 https://twitter.com/jackyalcine/status/615329515909156865

dlwdlw 9y ago

Yep. Two former world powers each making up 20% of the world , India and China, are grouped together as "Asian" in the US