21 ms·

Indians are taking over corporate America–and tech layoffs won’t stop them

61 points by jesuscript 4y ago

known 4y ago
[dead]
strikelaserclaw 4y ago
I personally think Indians are very good at institutional politics in the western world compared to other groups, hence why they rise to prominent positions in established organizations.
- Havoc 4y ago
  > Indians are very good at institutional politics Yes. It's the how that gets me. Who needs problem solving when you can just bury them.
- jesuscript 4y ago
  Can you explain what makes them good at it? I’m guessing be a grade A yes-man has a lot to do with it.
  - mindover 4y ago
    In my experience many Indians are very career oriented (mean that with no criticism). Ie they focus on promotions, career advancements, power consolidation, and not as much on work as the end goal in itself. Again, not criticizing, just an observation. In some cases I wish I was more career oriented too.
    - 0xcafefood 4y ago
      "they focus on promotions, career advancements, power consolidation, and not as much on work as the end goal in itself." If true, that behavior in anyone should be criticized. This sounds to me like "gaming the system."
      - mindover 4y ago
        I disagree. This is just a different relationship with work - not better and not worse. Being focused on career advancements doesn’t make them (sorry for generalizing again) worse engineers or worse colleagues. Eg I don’t care about my IC level and enjoy coding, someone else cares more about their IC level and enjoys coding. Why should I care?
        0xcafefood 4y ago
        Can you explain how focusing on "power consolidation" and not as much on the actual work makes someone a good colleague?
- 0xcafefood 4y ago
  [flagged]
Originami 4y ago
High in-group preference and no feelings of camaraderie with 'legacy' workers. Looking at levels of corruption in India, this 'takeover' is not a good thing for America.
- strikelaserclaw 4y ago
  Once an Indian becomes a manager, you can guarantee his/her whole team will slowly become Indian.
  - UncleOxidant 4y ago
    I've seen this at a large semiconductor company I used to work in. But to be fair, it was the same for many Chinese managers as well. The weird thing is that nobody from HR seemed to find it strange, like maybe telling managers that they should not prefer hiring from their own ethnic group - nobody seemed to care.
    - 0xcafefood 4y ago
      I saw this behavior at a bank I used to work for. There was a Chinese team, an Indian team, a Korean team, a Russian team, etc. Many western European ethnic groups are largely unwilling to act like this, i.e. to act on strong in-group preference when hiring. So the most interesting aspect of the status quo is about second-order effects. Will it be stopped somehow? Will it lead other groups to start behaving similarly? Will it lead to an Ottoman-style millet system but adapted to corporate culture and needs in the 21st century west?
      - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
        I'm curious whether this will continue into the second generation (as people begin to naturalize), and especially how multi-ethnic people are treated by in-group preferences.
        jesuscript 4y ago
viableSprocket1 4y ago
This is a non-article as there's nothing shocking about a large population of people who are generally fluent in English and generally have undergraduate and graduate education doing well in knowledge work. But it won't stop the the casually racist tropes masquerading as "anecdotal data" --- there are a couple of thought starters already in here already. Apparently Indians hiring Indians and this somehow ties to corruption. Alternatively, Indians are good at office politics because they are yes-men and therefore succeed. Just replace the word Indian with Jewish to see whether these comments would still be made. Yikes.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  Nepotism and in-group hiring is problematic regardless of if it's English Gentlemen or any other group. It's not always bad (it can be very beneficial for historically marginalized groups of people, for example). But it is problematic. That said, "Indian" is too big of a group. How much does this involve cross-caste versus intra-caste hiring?
  - 0xcafefood 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
      "English gentleman" is, within the last 400 years, the most world-shaking in-group. And it preferentially hired and promoted within the in-group into the present era. Dalits and scheduled castes and tribes (forgive me if I'm getting this wrong) make up about 40% of Indians, but are historically about as marginalized as Native Americans and Blacks are in the US. And this marginalization continues with hiring practices in the US.
  - viableSprocket1 4y ago
    I'm not defending Nepotism. I'm saying there is an obvious explanation of the effect the article is talking about (and several bad explanations that rely on cultural tropes)
raincom 4y ago
One thing to watch for Indian management chain: sycophancy is rampant. Sycophancy hides company's ills.
- mindover 4y ago
  Never noticed that in tech. I guess flattery is not very common in this industry in general.
newbalance 4y ago
Truthfully, over the course of a decade in tech, my experience working with this group has revealed certain cultural issues that make collaboration challenging. These include poor language fluency, a large gap in power dynamics, insufficient attention to detail, a reactive approach to problem-solving, and a lack of motivation to question and improve upon the status quo.
- rramadass 4y ago
  Do you realize what your comment sounds like in a post touting the success (with evidence) of this "group"?
  - newbalance 4y ago
    Indians are the new Irish.
delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
Can someone explain why every single thread about Indians—whether it be here, on Reddit, or on Quora—is somehow allowed to become insidiously racist? 'Indians are sycophants', 'Indians don't speak English well', 'Indians are corrupt', 'Indians are good at office politics'—all from this thread alone. I am trying to respond as civilly as possible without swearing, but this phenomenon is making it increasingly hard to do so. Somehow white people are allowed to be 'sycophants', but Indians aren't? Somehow white people were allowed to trod all over Asia and Africa (many still are) for half a millennium, and coughed up racist theories to justify their borderline enslavement of non-whites, and evangelise their religion and culture[1]. But then when non-white people succeed, it's 'corruption' or 'nepotism'? India is a country of 1.5 billion people. Include the rest of the Indian subcontinent and that number becomes nearly two billion. One quarter of the human population is from that region. Given these numbers, is it that surprising that Indians are quickly reaching the highest echelons of corporate America/Europe? By numbers alone, Indians still outnumber both the US and the EU, combined. The region is still developing. India is a democracy, and the democracy is an absolute cacophony. It has taken its time to develop, and is frequently compared to a certain other neighbouring country with a similarly large population. That country had (and still has) no qualms in murdering millions of people to achieve its goals. India does not do that, and will bring its populace forward and upward, slowly but steadily. These stereotypes are old, unfair, and unjustified. I am extremely unhappy that this is silently accepted, while racism against Blacks is white-knighted against. [1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/Civilization_and_religion_map_1821.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/Civiliza...
- jesuscript 4y ago
  It’s left over resentment over Indians being cheaper for the sake of being cheaper. It’s a more economic resentment than a racial one. I personally don’t think this dynamic is as true anymore because Indians can command market rate globally and are going to have to compete less on undercutting price.
  - delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
    > It’s left over resentment over Indians being cheaper for the sake of being cheaper. You're actually presenting this as an excuse for racism against Indians? Holy shit. > 'Cheaper for the sake of cheaper'—India launched a probe to Mars for $75 million. That's less than the budget of many Hollywood films about space. India manufactures drugs extremely cheaply and supplies much of the Global South that is unable to afford the rates demanded by EU-US pharmaceutical companies. Your 'market rate' cannot be afforded by about two-thirds of the human population.
hgsgm 4y ago
The country with 10% of the world population produced CEOs of 10% of companies (by valuation).
- calibas 4y ago
  Actually around 17% of the human population.
rayiner 4y ago
> Earlier in July, Sowmyanarayan Sampath took over as the CEO of Verizon Business and Jayathi Murthy became the President of Oregon State University–the first woman of color to take this position. This is why I don’t answer to “person of color.” Indian Americans have nearly double the median white income. They live almost 8 years longer than white Americans. (Heck, Asian women make more money than white men, while Asian men live longer than white women.) Even the ones that grow up here in poverty have vastly higher income mobility as adults than whites. What clarity or insight is gained by grouping them together with other minorities suffering from generational poverty? In fact if the goal is helping people, it would make way more sense to include folks like Appalachians and Cajuns, who also suffer from generational poverty. That might give you real insight into root causes. And when white people use the label, it’s offensive as fuck. “We are going to group you together with people you have nothing in common with economically, historically, or culturally, because you’re all ‘coloreds’ to us!”
- farnsworth 4y ago
  > “We are going to group you together with people you have nothing in common with economically, historically, or culturally, because you’re all ‘coloreds’ to us!” Don't you think it's _describing_ this grouping, not _prescribing_ it? The truth is that racism isn't rational or know what your net worth is.
  - mindover 4y ago
    How is it describing it though? What does a white-looking immigrant Brazilian of European ancestry have in common with a Native American? How does labeling both as PoC address any inequality?
    - xyzzyz 4y ago
      Funnily enough, according to official government racial classification scheme, the white looking immigrant Brazilian of European ancestry from your example is a non-Hispanic white, whereas native Spaniard immigrant from actual Spain is Hispanic white.
gatorvh 4y ago
As an Indian living outside it’s great to see us doing well as a group. I think this comes from traditionally Indian families and parents putting extensive focus on getting skilled and educated as the focus of bringing their children up. For non-Indian folks, a few interesting movies to watch that go into this aspect of the culture l: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_Idiots https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_Idiots https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_30_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_30_(film) This cultural phenomenon is not unique to Indians though, it’s also seen in China and may be other countries in Asia that I’m missing. I’m also a little surprised by some of the comments here, I would expect comments on hackernews to be intellectually stimulating and balanced arguments that are atleast with some effort removed of personal biases. Some examples of biases that I see — lumping Indians as a group or general human tendencies quoted as exclusive to Indians such preferring your group over others (in-group out of group mentality) On the flip side though, I’m not much surprised. As the under developed countries industrialize they’re taking back what has been historically their share of the world GDP. And as a result a larger Indian influence is visible and likely to grow as the Indian economy continues to grow. I think some folks should find it in themselves to reconcile the changing world around us.
- jesuscript 4y ago
  I think there is a big difference between Indian tech/medical workers and the nearly billion people living in India. Indians will most likely deal with what America deals with, but with even greater contrast between the haves and have nots. The proverbial luxury condo building adjacent to a slum in the third world. It’s funny, I’m not sure if I can claim the last sentence as an analogy because that’s exactly what you see in India. It is what it is.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ppsreejith 4y ago
To add to people's experiences in this thread, there's also some selection/sampling bias to consider: - Indian immigrants are selected from the top 0.1% of Indian society (often urban, educated Indians with significant social, economic, and knowledge capital who speak English growing up). - Most Indian american immigrants are knowledge workers/students (Medicine, Tech, Science) coming to the US through the two govt blessed visa routes of University and Business.
unpopnapolog 4y ago
Generation Z is going to be incredibly bitter that the boomers and genders sold them out to cheap foreign labor, and found it preferable to import foreign labor instead of educating our own people. Good for India. Just like China, they will become a world power thanks to the American economy, then they will turn on us, become our enemies, and threaten to nuke us at every turn.
theGnuMe 4y ago
News at 11. People who work hard and get educations tend to succeed.
known 4y ago
[dead]

61 points by jesuscript 4y ago

[dead]

I personally think Indians are very good at institutional politics in the western world compared to other groups, hence why they rise to prominent positions in established organizations.

Havoc 4y ago
> Indians are very good at institutional politics Yes. It's the how that gets me. Who needs problem solving when you can just bury them.
jesuscript 4y ago
Can you explain what makes them good at it? I’m guessing be a grade A yes-man has a lot to do with it.
- mindover 4y ago
  In my experience many Indians are very career oriented (mean that with no criticism). Ie they focus on promotions, career advancements, power consolidation, and not as much on work as the end goal in itself. Again, not criticizing, just an observation. In some cases I wish I was more career oriented too.
  - 0xcafefood 4y ago
    "they focus on promotions, career advancements, power consolidation, and not as much on work as the end goal in itself." If true, that behavior in anyone should be criticized. This sounds to me like "gaming the system."
    - mindover 4y ago
      I disagree. This is just a different relationship with work - not better and not worse. Being focused on career advancements doesn’t make them (sorry for generalizing again) worse engineers or worse colleagues. Eg I don’t care about my IC level and enjoy coding, someone else cares more about their IC level and enjoys coding. Why should I care?
      - 0xcafefood 4y ago
        Can you explain how focusing on "power consolidation" and not as much on the actual work makes someone a good colleague?
0xcafefood 4y ago
[flagged]

Originami 4y ago

High in-group preference and no feelings of camaraderie with 'legacy' workers. Looking at levels of corruption in India, this 'takeover' is not a good thing for America.

strikelaserclaw 4y ago
Once an Indian becomes a manager, you can guarantee his/her whole team will slowly become Indian.
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
  I've seen this at a large semiconductor company I used to work in. But to be fair, it was the same for many Chinese managers as well. The weird thing is that nobody from HR seemed to find it strange, like maybe telling managers that they should not prefer hiring from their own ethnic group - nobody seemed to care.
  - 0xcafefood 4y ago
    I saw this behavior at a bank I used to work for. There was a Chinese team, an Indian team, a Korean team, a Russian team, etc. Many western European ethnic groups are largely unwilling to act like this, i.e. to act on strong in-group preference when hiring. So the most interesting aspect of the status quo is about second-order effects. Will it be stopped somehow? Will it lead other groups to start behaving similarly? Will it lead to an Ottoman-style millet system but adapted to corporate culture and needs in the 21st century west?
    - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
      I'm curious whether this will continue into the second generation (as people begin to naturalize), and especially how multi-ethnic people are treated by in-group preferences.
      - jesuscript 4y ago

viableSprocket1 4y ago

This is a non-article as there's nothing shocking about a large population of people who are generally fluent in English and generally have undergraduate and graduate education doing well in knowledge work. But it won't stop the the casually racist tropes masquerading as "anecdotal data" --- there are a couple of thought starters already in here already. Apparently Indians hiring Indians and this somehow ties to corruption. Alternatively, Indians are good at office politics because they are yes-men and therefore succeed. Just replace the word Indian with Jewish to see whether these comments would still be made. Yikes.

anonymouskimmer 4y ago
Nepotism and in-group hiring is problematic regardless of if it's English Gentlemen or any other group. It's not always bad (it can be very beneficial for historically marginalized groups of people, for example). But it is problematic. That said, "Indian" is too big of a group. How much does this involve cross-caste versus intra-caste hiring?
- 0xcafefood 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    "English gentleman" is, within the last 400 years, the most world-shaking in-group. And it preferentially hired and promoted within the in-group into the present era. Dalits and scheduled castes and tribes (forgive me if I'm getting this wrong) make up about 40% of Indians, but are historically about as marginalized as Native Americans and Blacks are in the US. And this marginalization continues with hiring practices in the US.
- viableSprocket1 4y ago
  I'm not defending Nepotism. I'm saying there is an obvious explanation of the effect the article is talking about (and several bad explanations that rely on cultural tropes)

raincom 4y ago

One thing to watch for Indian management chain: sycophancy is rampant. Sycophancy hides company's ills.

mindover 4y ago
Never noticed that in tech. I guess flattery is not very common in this industry in general.

newbalance 4y ago

Truthfully, over the course of a decade in tech, my experience working with this group has revealed certain cultural issues that make collaboration challenging. These include poor language fluency, a large gap in power dynamics, insufficient attention to detail, a reactive approach to problem-solving, and a lack of motivation to question and improve upon the status quo.

rramadass 4y ago
Do you realize what your comment sounds like in a post touting the success (with evidence) of this "group"?
- newbalance 4y ago
  Indians are the new Irish.

delta_p_delta_x 4y ago

Can someone explain why every single thread about Indians—whether it be here, on Reddit, or on Quora—is somehow allowed to become insidiously racist? 'Indians are sycophants', 'Indians don't speak English well', 'Indians are corrupt', 'Indians are good at office politics'—all from this thread alone. I am trying to respond as civilly as possible without swearing, but this phenomenon is making it increasingly hard to do so. Somehow white people are allowed to be 'sycophants', but Indians aren't? Somehow white people were allowed to trod all over Asia and Africa (many still are) for half a millennium, and coughed up racist theories to justify their borderline enslavement of non-whites, and evangelise their religion and culture[1]. But then when non-white people succeed, it's 'corruption' or 'nepotism'? India is a country of 1.5 billion people. Include the rest of the Indian subcontinent and that number becomes nearly two billion. One quarter of the human population is from that region. Given these numbers, is it that surprising that Indians are quickly reaching the highest echelons of corporate America/Europe? By numbers alone, Indians still outnumber both the US and the EU, combined. The region is still developing. India is a democracy, and the democracy is an absolute cacophony. It has taken its time to develop, and is frequently compared to a certain other neighbouring country with a similarly large population. That country had (and still has) no qualms in murdering millions of people to achieve its goals. India does not do that, and will bring its populace forward and upward, slowly but steadily. These stereotypes are old, unfair, and unjustified. I am extremely unhappy that this is silently accepted, while racism against Blacks is white-knighted against. [1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/Civilization_and_religion_map_1821.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/Civiliza...

jesuscript 4y ago
It’s left over resentment over Indians being cheaper for the sake of being cheaper. It’s a more economic resentment than a racial one. I personally don’t think this dynamic is as true anymore because Indians can command market rate globally and are going to have to compete less on undercutting price.
- delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
  > It’s left over resentment over Indians being cheaper for the sake of being cheaper. You're actually presenting this as an excuse for racism against Indians? Holy shit. > 'Cheaper for the sake of cheaper'—India launched a probe to Mars for $75 million. That's less than the budget of many Hollywood films about space. India manufactures drugs extremely cheaply and supplies much of the Global South that is unable to afford the rates demanded by EU-US pharmaceutical companies. Your 'market rate' cannot be afforded by about two-thirds of the human population.

hgsgm 4y ago

The country with 10% of the world population produced CEOs of 10% of companies (by valuation).

calibas 4y ago
Actually around 17% of the human population.

rayiner 4y ago

> Earlier in July, Sowmyanarayan Sampath took over as the CEO of Verizon Business and Jayathi Murthy became the President of Oregon State University–the first woman of color to take this position. This is why I don’t answer to “person of color.” Indian Americans have nearly double the median white income. They live almost 8 years longer than white Americans. (Heck, Asian women make more money than white men, while Asian men live longer than white women.) Even the ones that grow up here in poverty have vastly higher income mobility as adults than whites. What clarity or insight is gained by grouping them together with other minorities suffering from generational poverty? In fact if the goal is helping people, it would make way more sense to include folks like Appalachians and Cajuns, who also suffer from generational poverty. That might give you real insight into root causes. And when white people use the label, it’s offensive as fuck. “We are going to group you together with people you have nothing in common with economically, historically, or culturally, because you’re all ‘coloreds’ to us!”

farnsworth 4y ago
> “We are going to group you together with people you have nothing in common with economically, historically, or culturally, because you’re all ‘coloreds’ to us!” Don't you think it's _describing_ this grouping, not _prescribing_ it? The truth is that racism isn't rational or know what your net worth is.
- mindover 4y ago
  How is it describing it though? What does a white-looking immigrant Brazilian of European ancestry have in common with a Native American? How does labeling both as PoC address any inequality?
  - xyzzyz 4y ago
    Funnily enough, according to official government racial classification scheme, the white looking immigrant Brazilian of European ancestry from your example is a non-Hispanic white, whereas native Spaniard immigrant from actual Spain is Hispanic white.

gatorvh 4y ago

As an Indian living outside it’s great to see us doing well as a group. I think this comes from traditionally Indian families and parents putting extensive focus on getting skilled and educated as the focus of bringing their children up. For non-Indian folks, a few interesting movies to watch that go into this aspect of the culture l: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_Idiots https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_Idiots https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_30_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_30_(film) This cultural phenomenon is not unique to Indians though, it’s also seen in China and may be other countries in Asia that I’m missing. I’m also a little surprised by some of the comments here, I would expect comments on hackernews to be intellectually stimulating and balanced arguments that are atleast with some effort removed of personal biases. Some examples of biases that I see — lumping Indians as a group or general human tendencies quoted as exclusive to Indians such preferring your group over others (in-group out of group mentality) On the flip side though, I’m not much surprised. As the under developed countries industrialize they’re taking back what has been historically their share of the world GDP. And as a result a larger Indian influence is visible and likely to grow as the Indian economy continues to grow. I think some folks should find it in themselves to reconcile the changing world around us.

jesuscript 4y ago
I think there is a big difference between Indian tech/medical workers and the nearly billion people living in India. Indians will most likely deal with what America deals with, but with even greater contrast between the haves and have nots. The proverbial luxury condo building adjacent to a slum in the third world. It’s funny, I’m not sure if I can claim the last sentence as an analogy because that’s exactly what you see in India. It is what it is.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ppsreejith 4y ago

To add to people's experiences in this thread, there's also some selection/sampling bias to consider: - Indian immigrants are selected from the top 0.1% of Indian society (often urban, educated Indians with significant social, economic, and knowledge capital who speak English growing up). - Most Indian american immigrants are knowledge workers/students (Medicine, Tech, Science) coming to the US through the two govt blessed visa routes of University and Business.

unpopnapolog 4y ago

Generation Z is going to be incredibly bitter that the boomers and genders sold them out to cheap foreign labor, and found it preferable to import foreign labor instead of educating our own people. Good for India. Just like China, they will become a world power thanks to the American economy, then they will turn on us, become our enemies, and threaten to nuke us at every turn.

theGnuMe 4y ago

News at 11. People who work hard and get educations tend to succeed.

known 4y ago

[dead]