7 ms·

So I work at Microsoft and I live in Redmond (Seattle suburb). I live in a large neighborhood that is 95% Indian families. My family is white and my daughter is

So I work at Microsoft and I live in Redmond (Seattle suburb). I live in a large neighborhood that is 95% Indian families. My family is white and my daughter is the only white girl on the playground. It's a weird change from growing up in a place that was 95% white people for most of my life. Everyone is friendly but it hasn't been easy for us to integrate hyper-locally. I sometimes feel like our family is intruding in this neighborhood with our non-Indian-ness. I've noticed that there are lots of teams that are primarily Indian folks and this is true not just of the contractors and India based teams. I really don't know about the dynamics of the caste system and whether not they are at play within MSFT, AMZN or other Seattle/tech companies, but just like most (all?) ethnicities there is certainly a tendency to stick together and live in the same areas / work on the same teams from what I've seen. On a mostly unrelated note, Seattle proper (as I mentioned, I live in a suburb which is an affluent one) has really gone downhill in the last 10 years. The homeless/drug problem is very bad and the local government seems so entirely incompetent to do anything other than woke signaling.

emodendroket 4y ago
Why wouldn't the caste system be in play? If you imagine a company in a foreign country that hired a lot of Americans, would you not expect the same problems with racial discrimination that happen in the US to arise among these American employees?
- locusofself 4y ago
  oh, I assume it definitely is, I just mean that I'm not really privy to the dynamics of it myself. My comment was mostly only tangentially related
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- rippercushions 4y ago
  Having worked at the overseas operation of an American company that had a lot of American expats, no, not really, because those expats are not a random sampling of American society: they're overwhelmingly white and Asian, and the few that weren't were all upper class/highly educated and not viewed as threats. You can see the same effect in the Indian diaspora in America as well. I'm having trouble finding stats on this, but by and large it's also highly educated, from the upper crust of society in India, overwhelmingly Brahmin and many groups (eg. Gujaratis) are statistically overrepresented compared to the Indian population at large. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/nri/us-canada-news/gujaratis-6-of-indians-but-20-of-us-indians/articleshow/45746350.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/nri/us-canada-news/gujar...
  - onetimeusename 4y ago
    I have this theory that caste discrimination is more common in the US for some of the reasons you told. First of all India banned caste discrimination a long time ago and has an affirmative-action-like law that discriminates in the other direction against upper castes for things like university placement. Caste discrimination (upper caste against lower) is still a thing there but I wasn't really aware of it being seen as a pressing issue in India and it gets merged into religious and ethnic conflict. My friend is Brahmin but non practicing. For her it's just something she is proud of and a lot of upper caste Indians end up going to the US for school because they didn't get into IIT. There are big differences between the older and younger generations but I wonder if maybe the immigrants from India come here with kind of their own distinct culture where caste is a part of identity so not having that caste makes you an outsider here. idk =/
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  Not necessarily: foreign workers are a not at all representative of the country they come from, there's huge selection bias at play. For a real-world case, the vast majority of Russian co-workers I've met over the course of my software career are very much against the invasion of Ukraine versus ~70% of the Russian populace as a whole. I don't think this is preference falsification, given that they're open about other things like opposition to NATO expansion. This disparity exists even inside of Russia, professionals support the war less than average, but I bet among people who choose to work abroad there's greater degree of cosmopolitanism [1]. And for discrimination, I bet foreign workers are more empathetic about discrimination being a minority themselves in a different country. Of course every company should be vigilant against discrimination, regardless of the demographics of their workforce. 1. I don't mean to lean into any negative connotations of the term, quite the contrary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmopolitanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmopolitanism
  - emodendroket 4y ago
    This cohort is less likely to engage in the crudest forms of racism but that does not mean that the problem is exactly solved.
flangola7 4y ago
[flagged]
ackbar03 4y ago
>The homeless/drug problem is very bad I just came back from attending a conference in the US. I stopped by san francisco to visit a friend before going to DC for the conference. I hadn't been in DC before but visited California 10 years ago. I was surprised by how pervasive homelessness and drug use was in both places too, especially San Francisco where it definitely felt like things took a turn for the worse. Even in DC there were guys just collapsed on the sidewalk, not sure from drug use or whatever (there were people there who called an ambulance). People also just didn't seem very happy in general, although I could be imagining that since I was only there for a few days. In any case it was very surprising and not quite what I expected.
techsupporter 4y ago
> On a mostly unrelated note, Seattle proper (as I mentioned, I live in a suburb which is an affluent one) has really gone downhill in the last 10 years. The homeless/drug problem is very bad and the local government seems so entirely incompetent to do anything other than woke signaling. I don't mean to be unduly harsh (yet probably will come across that way anyway) but did we have to drag that into this conversation? I have lived in Seattle my entire life, was born in Ballard, and raised two kids here. It's getting kind of frustrating that every time my hometown comes up, someone inevitably mentions this without bringing up any of the complexities as to why. (For one, it would be nice if your suburb, nominally one of Seattle's regional partners in the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, would actually do their part and construct some social services for various groups.) Our mayor, who lives half-time in Bellevue I hasten to point out, is busy saying it's all the Council's fault and the Council passes budget items and ordinances that the mayor simply ignores. Meanwhile, every city in the region is busy shoving everyone who looks like they earn less than $75,000 per year over to Seattle and then crying about how Seattle is "doing nothing". The Council is attempting to do something good, so sure, let's bring up the massive social services crisis that's by no means unique to Seattle or Puget Sound, but probably looks like a Seattle-specific problem from a perch on the Eastside.
- meowtimemania 4y ago
  Homeless services have probably gotten better in the last 10 years (I assume) while homelessness has gotten much worse. I assume the underlying issue isn’t the services but rather something else. My guess is housing has become too expensive.
  - yeahbutiguess 4y ago
    Housing has gotten more expensive and there's been a huge wave of immigration to the region. I've lived here 35 years, the resistance from single family homeowners on any push to improve is staggering.
  - holler 4y ago
    It's more complex than housing imo. There's an entire culture of people who wouldn't take the housing if you gave it to them. I've seen it first hand.
sdan 4y ago
Yeah this is very true. I'm Indian born in the Bay Area and oddly enough there's entire apartment communities that end up being 95% indian families because of costs/school districts. This translates to housing too (Mountain House, San Ramon) though it typically has nothing to do with caste, just circumstance.
yeahbutiguess 4y ago
I've lived in Seattle for almost 40 years. The homeless issue is not really unique to our city, and there's a hugely complex systemic set of issues causing it. (Not least of which is the incredibly high median income driving up home prices, due in part to tech immigration). The city council has been trying to fix the issue, but had been stalled by the mayor, stalled by other cities in the region, and stalled in how they can build systemic fixes.
whateveracct 4y ago
Have you actually lived in Seattle? Or is that your opinion from visiting?
- pfannkuchen 4y ago
  How would living in Seattle proper provide a qualitatively different perspective from living in Redmond and visiting? Are you saying you eventually get used to people on mind altering drugs living in tents (sometimes growling at you as you walk by), and it stops bothering you? Genuinely asking. I have a similar opinion of the city but also have never lived on that side of the lake, and I wonder what I am missing…
  - whateveracct 4y ago
    It gives you an actual sense of what is dangerous rather than one built upon fear of the unknown and media spin, mostly. I went up to Seattle recently and spent an evening running around Belltown. Not the nicest area of the city but also not the worst. I lived there for years. It was fine. I did see and interact with homeless people and I wouldn't be surprised if some were high. Still better than any night out on the Eastside
    - pfannkuchen 4y ago
      Thanks for the reply. The Eastside is for sure boring. I agree that media consumption in general leads to instinctive overestimation of danger, since our brains are built to live in small villages where if you hear about 10 people being assaulted in a year it means you are really in serious danger of being assaulted personally. Whereas in a city, 10 assaults barely moves the needle in terms of actual risk to each person, and our instincts can’t tell the difference. It’s interesting though, if I’m hearing you correctly you are indeed basically saying that you do become desensitized to the ambient homeless through exposure over time. This is assuming that a person without any media exposure at all would still find the homeless situation shocking and unpleasant to be around, which I imagine you wouldn’t disagree with?
drewrv 4y ago
What is Redmond or the rest of the Eastside doing to help homeless people that Seattle has failed to do?
- peanuty1 4y ago
  Eastside is tougher on crime, more conservative, and actually enforces laws frequently unlike Seattle, which is more progressive and extremely soft on crime. A man bashed in the head of a female Amazon software engineer in Seattle and last I checked, they were considering letting him go free.
  - drewrv 4y ago
    I asked what they’re doing to help homeless people on the Eastside. If you think crime and punishment are related somehow then please be more explicit as to how that helps because I don’t follow.
    - schemester 4y ago
      Being homeless is better when there’s less crime.
      - drewrv 4y ago
        "Tough on crime" policies don't actually lead to less crime. If they did, the US would be among the safest countries on the planet. Seattle, which is "soft on crime", is a relatively safe city with lower rates of violent crime per capita than Phoenix, Des Moines, Denver, Corpus Christi, and more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... But getting back to my original question, I seriously doubt "tough on crime" policies in Redmond were implemented to help the homeless. More likely, they were implemented to keep poor people away. My theory is that most people complaining about homelessness in cities like Seattle don't actually care about the homeless people. What they care about is that they have to see homelessness. So long as homelessness isn't visible then it's not a problem and whether that's done through charity or relocation or incarceration is irrelevant. But I hope I'm wrong! I'd like to believe people aren't that cruel, so if Redmond has a solution that is compassionate and helpful I would genuinely love to know what they're doing.
seanmcdirmid 4y ago
The irony in Seattle being Kashma Sawant the socialist city council member for Capitol Hill being partially responsible for a lot of the chaos. I guess it just goes to show you can’t really generalize based on ethnicity.

emodendroket 4y ago

Why wouldn't the caste system be in play? If you imagine a company in a foreign country that hired a lot of Americans, would you not expect the same problems with racial discrimination that happen in the US to arise among these American employees?

locusofself 4y ago
oh, I assume it definitely is, I just mean that I'm not really privy to the dynamics of it myself. My comment was mostly only tangentially related
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
rippercushions 4y ago
Having worked at the overseas operation of an American company that had a lot of American expats, no, not really, because those expats are not a random sampling of American society: they're overwhelmingly white and Asian, and the few that weren't were all upper class/highly educated and not viewed as threats. You can see the same effect in the Indian diaspora in America as well. I'm having trouble finding stats on this, but by and large it's also highly educated, from the upper crust of society in India, overwhelmingly Brahmin and many groups (eg. Gujaratis) are statistically overrepresented compared to the Indian population at large. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/nri/us-canada-news/gujaratis-6-of-indians-but-20-of-us-indians/articleshow/45746350.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/nri/us-canada-news/gujar...
- onetimeusename 4y ago
  I have this theory that caste discrimination is more common in the US for some of the reasons you told. First of all India banned caste discrimination a long time ago and has an affirmative-action-like law that discriminates in the other direction against upper castes for things like university placement. Caste discrimination (upper caste against lower) is still a thing there but I wasn't really aware of it being seen as a pressing issue in India and it gets merged into religious and ethnic conflict. My friend is Brahmin but non practicing. For her it's just something she is proud of and a lot of upper caste Indians end up going to the US for school because they didn't get into IIT. There are big differences between the older and younger generations but I wonder if maybe the immigrants from India come here with kind of their own distinct culture where caste is a part of identity so not having that caste makes you an outsider here. idk =/
Manuel_D 4y ago
Not necessarily: foreign workers are a not at all representative of the country they come from, there's huge selection bias at play. For a real-world case, the vast majority of Russian co-workers I've met over the course of my software career are very much against the invasion of Ukraine versus ~70% of the Russian populace as a whole. I don't think this is preference falsification, given that they're open about other things like opposition to NATO expansion. This disparity exists even inside of Russia, professionals support the war less than average, but I bet among people who choose to work abroad there's greater degree of cosmopolitanism [1]. And for discrimination, I bet foreign workers are more empathetic about discrimination being a minority themselves in a different country. Of course every company should be vigilant against discrimination, regardless of the demographics of their workforce. 1. I don't mean to lean into any negative connotations of the term, quite the contrary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmopolitanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmopolitanism
- emodendroket 4y ago
  This cohort is less likely to engage in the crudest forms of racism but that does not mean that the problem is exactly solved.

flangola7 4y ago

[flagged]

ackbar03 4y ago

>The homeless/drug problem is very bad I just came back from attending a conference in the US. I stopped by san francisco to visit a friend before going to DC for the conference. I hadn't been in DC before but visited California 10 years ago. I was surprised by how pervasive homelessness and drug use was in both places too, especially San Francisco where it definitely felt like things took a turn for the worse. Even in DC there were guys just collapsed on the sidewalk, not sure from drug use or whatever (there were people there who called an ambulance). People also just didn't seem very happy in general, although I could be imagining that since I was only there for a few days. In any case it was very surprising and not quite what I expected.

techsupporter 4y ago

> On a mostly unrelated note, Seattle proper (as I mentioned, I live in a suburb which is an affluent one) has really gone downhill in the last 10 years. The homeless/drug problem is very bad and the local government seems so entirely incompetent to do anything other than woke signaling. I don't mean to be unduly harsh (yet probably will come across that way anyway) but did we have to drag that into this conversation? I have lived in Seattle my entire life, was born in Ballard, and raised two kids here. It's getting kind of frustrating that every time my hometown comes up, someone inevitably mentions this without bringing up any of the complexities as to why. (For one, it would be nice if your suburb, nominally one of Seattle's regional partners in the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, would actually do their part and construct some social services for various groups.) Our mayor, who lives half-time in Bellevue I hasten to point out, is busy saying it's all the Council's fault and the Council passes budget items and ordinances that the mayor simply ignores. Meanwhile, every city in the region is busy shoving everyone who looks like they earn less than $75,000 per year over to Seattle and then crying about how Seattle is "doing nothing". The Council is attempting to do something good, so sure, let's bring up the massive social services crisis that's by no means unique to Seattle or Puget Sound, but probably looks like a Seattle-specific problem from a perch on the Eastside.

meowtimemania 4y ago
Homeless services have probably gotten better in the last 10 years (I assume) while homelessness has gotten much worse. I assume the underlying issue isn’t the services but rather something else. My guess is housing has become too expensive.
- yeahbutiguess 4y ago
  Housing has gotten more expensive and there's been a huge wave of immigration to the region. I've lived here 35 years, the resistance from single family homeowners on any push to improve is staggering.
- holler 4y ago
  It's more complex than housing imo. There's an entire culture of people who wouldn't take the housing if you gave it to them. I've seen it first hand.

sdan 4y ago

Yeah this is very true. I'm Indian born in the Bay Area and oddly enough there's entire apartment communities that end up being 95% indian families because of costs/school districts. This translates to housing too (Mountain House, San Ramon) though it typically has nothing to do with caste, just circumstance.

yeahbutiguess 4y ago

I've lived in Seattle for almost 40 years. The homeless issue is not really unique to our city, and there's a hugely complex systemic set of issues causing it. (Not least of which is the incredibly high median income driving up home prices, due in part to tech immigration). The city council has been trying to fix the issue, but had been stalled by the mayor, stalled by other cities in the region, and stalled in how they can build systemic fixes.

whateveracct 4y ago

Have you actually lived in Seattle? Or is that your opinion from visiting?

pfannkuchen 4y ago
How would living in Seattle proper provide a qualitatively different perspective from living in Redmond and visiting? Are you saying you eventually get used to people on mind altering drugs living in tents (sometimes growling at you as you walk by), and it stops bothering you? Genuinely asking. I have a similar opinion of the city but also have never lived on that side of the lake, and I wonder what I am missing…
- whateveracct 4y ago
  It gives you an actual sense of what is dangerous rather than one built upon fear of the unknown and media spin, mostly. I went up to Seattle recently and spent an evening running around Belltown. Not the nicest area of the city but also not the worst. I lived there for years. It was fine. I did see and interact with homeless people and I wouldn't be surprised if some were high. Still better than any night out on the Eastside
  - pfannkuchen 4y ago
    Thanks for the reply. The Eastside is for sure boring. I agree that media consumption in general leads to instinctive overestimation of danger, since our brains are built to live in small villages where if you hear about 10 people being assaulted in a year it means you are really in serious danger of being assaulted personally. Whereas in a city, 10 assaults barely moves the needle in terms of actual risk to each person, and our instincts can’t tell the difference. It’s interesting though, if I’m hearing you correctly you are indeed basically saying that you do become desensitized to the ambient homeless through exposure over time. This is assuming that a person without any media exposure at all would still find the homeless situation shocking and unpleasant to be around, which I imagine you wouldn’t disagree with?

drewrv 4y ago

What is Redmond or the rest of the Eastside doing to help homeless people that Seattle has failed to do?

peanuty1 4y ago
Eastside is tougher on crime, more conservative, and actually enforces laws frequently unlike Seattle, which is more progressive and extremely soft on crime. A man bashed in the head of a female Amazon software engineer in Seattle and last I checked, they were considering letting him go free.
- drewrv 4y ago
  I asked what they’re doing to help homeless people on the Eastside. If you think crime and punishment are related somehow then please be more explicit as to how that helps because I don’t follow.
  - schemester 4y ago
    Being homeless is better when there’s less crime.
    - drewrv 4y ago
      "Tough on crime" policies don't actually lead to less crime. If they did, the US would be among the safest countries on the planet. Seattle, which is "soft on crime", is a relatively safe city with lower rates of violent crime per capita than Phoenix, Des Moines, Denver, Corpus Christi, and more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... But getting back to my original question, I seriously doubt "tough on crime" policies in Redmond were implemented to help the homeless. More likely, they were implemented to keep poor people away. My theory is that most people complaining about homelessness in cities like Seattle don't actually care about the homeless people. What they care about is that they have to see homelessness. So long as homelessness isn't visible then it's not a problem and whether that's done through charity or relocation or incarceration is irrelevant. But I hope I'm wrong! I'd like to believe people aren't that cruel, so if Redmond has a solution that is compassionate and helpful I would genuinely love to know what they're doing.

seanmcdirmid 4y ago

The irony in Seattle being Kashma Sawant the socialist city council member for Capitol Hill being partially responsible for a lot of the chaos. I guess it just goes to show you can’t really generalize based on ethnicity.