Indians prefer to hire their own, this is very well known. And because this can’t even be discussed honestly, US corporations are powerless against this preferential treatment.
If we're giving anecdotes, I'll dish out some too. Maybe you're getting at something - communities looking out for their kind. It might be seen as good or bad depending on the situation. I've seen academic research labs that are heavy on certain ethnicities. I've seen heavy tilt of Chinese students with a Chinese PI, similarly for Iranian, Turkish. Heck, I've seen silicon valley teams that are Indian heavy, Turkish heavy, Filipino heavy.
Yes, in fact currently I am working in a team which has a disproportionate percentage of Iranians. They too like to hire Iranians. I wouldn’t have any problem with any of this if eg it was OK for Americans to prefer Americans too. If we’re going to play games, let’s at least all play by the same rules.
> Yes, in fact currently I am working in a team which has a disproportionate percentage of Iranians. They too like to hire Iranians. I wouldn’t have any problem with any of this if eg it was OK for Americans to prefer Americans too.
In the US, it is no more OK, legally, to discriminate in hiring on the basis of nationality for any nationality compared to any other.
There is an exception for work that must be done by US citizens though. No country permits foreigners to do certain security-sensitive jobs, generally.
There are places where firms are compelled by regulations to hire people who are currently US citizens, sure. That's not really employer-discretionary (and I really should have said ethnicity or national origin, and not nationality, anyway.)
But even then, it is not, as suggested upthread, more OK for Iranians to hire Iranians than for Americans to hire Americans, whether talking about nationality, national origin, or ethnicity. (Fir nationality, there are narrow cases where the latter is mandatory and the former is prohibited no matter who is hiring, sure, but that's the opposite of what was suggested.)
US citizens come from many historical nationalities.
I would wager that conditioning on US citizenship is less restrictive than conditioning on any other citizenship when seeking diverse historical nationality.
There are exceptions to everything. But only native-born US citizens are eligible for some jobs, e.g. in the military. Other countries may be even more particular and require your parents to be natives too. This is not discrimination but plain old common sense. What foreigner or foreign-adjacent person can really be trusted? If there is an exception to be made, the trust extended must be minimal.
> But only native-born US citizens are eligible for some jobs, e.g. in the military.
There are exactly two jobs where that is required, and only one is kind-of in the military, in that it is legally the apex of all military chains of command.
(There are other security-related, especially in the military, jobs where actual or potential dual citizens, the latter more commonly being an issue when people have foreign born parents, may be required to renounce any other citizenship than American.)
It is absolutely discrimination, but legal (and legally-mandatory) discrimination. That it may be “common sense” does not change that it is, absolutely, discrimination.
I think it's de facto required to be a US citizen (and preferably by birth) in more jobs than you think. It makes lots of sense. We have had scientists come from other countries to infiltrate our nuclear program, and we may not have even caught them all. This type of espionage is expected, and it is righteous to stop it. "Discrimination" or not, it is entirely reasonable for nationality and background to rule people out for any nationally sensitive job. I don't think you can find any country outside the West where the legitimacy of this criterion is questioned on the basis of fairness.
Is it because of bias, or because there are just a lot of Indians in our industry? In my case, I have more than a few levels of managers from India, but there doesn’t seem to be any favoritism going on (I was even asked once if I was interested in people management, and said no).
I watched a company go through lawsuits because of layers of Indian middle management. Turns out, they had essentially recreated a caste system inside of a massive American corporation. At the bottom was a staggering number of female engineers from North India who got a handsome payout on the other end. This is just another anecdote. I'm not saying that's what is happening where you work. But the signs where I worked were abundantly clear for anyone who happened to look in the direction of that specific department.
I've worked at Silicon Valley startups that were that way. I remember thinking this is really odd how high the concentration was (probably about 70% Indian). Didn't really bother me because it was a great team and honestly one of the best companies I worked at.
It didn't really seem like they discriminated in hiring and I never felt discriminated against at work. It was just that coworkers referred people they already knew.
Some people will hit each other up for paid references. The guy doing the referral can get paid by the new hire and the company. Idk what threshold of acquaintance is enough for a referral, but the worst things you can imagine have been done and are even routine in some places.
I'm sure that is also true. But I know the other thing happens too. I've heard about it and read it. Some Indians even asked me for a referral, as a stranger.
Referrals are encouraged by internal recruiters in most companies...and they incentivize it with a few thousand dollars for a successful hire. Why are you making it sound so nefarious?
It's normal for companies to pay for referrals based on personal familiarity, but not for candidates to pay for fake recommendations. Outside of a fully disclosed consultancy-type arrangement, it is unacceptable for the candidate to pay anything to the referrer.
Never a popular topic on HN, but I’ve been through some appalling diversity training as a white man that seems a-ok in the broader culture. I’ve left one high paying prominent fintech job over such nonsense.
Sadly, I feel this is the result - if we’re not going to be colorblind as a rule everyone is going to “wise up” (and I use the phrase loosely) and start attacking everyone else.
Sorry to hear that. I find those kinds of trainings rather distasteful as well, and I'm not even white. I'm lucky I can ignore that kind of crap for the most part. Except when people start inventing nonsense to libel Indian people with.
Broadly speaking this is undeniable, and as an Indian you know it. This is precisely what I meant when I mentioned this can’t be honestly discussed: you’re denying reality to score some grievance points. I do personally know Indians who do not play these games. They exist, you might even be one of them. Congrats!
But do consider the following statistics: 30% of Fortune 500 CEOs are Indian, and one third of all Silicon Valley engineers. While India represents a large talent pool, eg China represents an even larger pool, and yet we do not observe a large percentage of Chinese managers or CEOs. Care to theorize why that is?
> China represents an even larger pool, and yet we do not observe a large percentage of Chinese managers or CEOs. Care to theorize why that is?
I think one reason is that Indians are culturally much closer to Americans than East Asians are, specifically in terms of attitudes toward selling and self-promotion. I think language also has something to do with it. English is not only mandatory in Indian K-12, it’s widely used even among Indians. For example, the main India government web portal (India.gov.in) goes to an English site. You need to go to India.gov.in/Hi to access the Hindi site.
Exactly this. What OP sees is likely survivorship bias. Indians are the biggest population compared to China who have learnt English pretty much as a first language. It makes a big difference, especially for managerial positions in American companies.
But do consider the following statistics: 30% of Fortune 500 CEOs are Indian, and one third of all Silicon Valley engineers.
First of all, I'm pretty sure that number is NOT 30%. I want a citation.
Second - English has been taught to generations of primary school students throughout India. English is the language of business. It makes sense that business people with a good grasp of English make it to the top levels of business in Silicon Valley, which almost exclusively transacts in English. I know that English was not widely taught in China (maybe things have changed) - because China wasn't ruled by the British for almost 100 years. As for the engineers, see above stats - there is an enormous talent pool to filter the best from.
It seems like you had some experiences where you observed what appeared to be preference for Indian candidates. Maybe some of those observations were of an Indian person selecting another highly-qualified Indian person for a job. I don't know. Maybe it's also preferential treatment in some cases. I don't know.
Just because you think something is happening, doesn't mean you get to grab a hold of an Indian person and shake them down for a confession. I can make any number of generalizations about your race of people, and demand your justification. But I don't, because I try not to be a shitty person.
You want an honest discussion, there it is. The world is a lot more complex than you think it is. Indian-Americans are not sitting here committing transgressions against you. They are smarter, more educated, and more qualified than the typical American STEM graduate. Step up your game or find a different career with less-qualified people to compete with.
>Sure - it's because Indian people coming from India represent the top cut of a workforce that has an extremely high level of engineering training.
That is a small percentage of incoming Indians IMO. Most are average or worse.
>The world is a lot more complex than you think it is. Indian-Americans are not sitting here committing transgressions against you. They are smarter, more educated, and more qualified than the typical American STEM graduate. Step up your game or find a different career with less-qualified people to compete with.
Indians themselves tell me all the time that they only do software because that's socially desirable in a way that Americans simply don't experience. If they could come to the US with a BS or less, they would, because salaries are so much higher here.
Even if this skill thing was true, it is a privilege for Indians to come here. The US government has a duty to not ruin the lives of US workers by importing the entire world, no matter how many of the foreign workers are believed to be better than average. Your claims about average Indian students is generally wrong but I will give you that most Indian imports have a MS or something, because that is about the minimum requirement to stay here. That doesn't mean they are more talented than US students who pay 10x to get their requisite 4 years of education.
Numbers differ. Some sources say 30%, some say 12%, could be there’s weighting by revenue or something idk (Indians run two of the six multi-trillion dollar companies, including the top most valuable one), but I think you’ll agree that whichever way you run the numbers their share is quite disproportionate for a minority comprising 1.3% of the country’s population (4.4M people).
I'll take the downvotes. I've seen enough Indian cultural nonsense play out at several industries and businesses that the answer is yes: first generation Indian immigrants recreate their obnoxious cultural problems within American businesses and cities.
And stereotypes are typically rooted in truth. I have no qualms about calling out the cultural problems of India which are rampant be it sexism, caste system, or worse: personal hygiene.
When it's a one or two indians, the problems aren't there. But when an indian manager gets hired or there becomes a critical mass of first Gen indian immigrants watch out, because the same cultural nonsense gets perpetuated out.
The worst part is I sometime see the sins of the parents in the 2nd generation children.
This is just a guess, but I think the problem appears more among low-level employees and managers. Maybe CEOs look the other way but I doubt they have anything real to gain by referring strangers who only look like them.
>The American workers say that India’s Tata Consultancy Services illegally discriminated against them based on their race and age, firing them
Question to the Americans: if in the US you don't need a reason to fire someone, how can you prove the company was discriminating you when they fired you if they didn't give a reason.
> In their complaints, the former employees cite comments that TCS’s global human resources head Milind Lakkad made in an interview with Indian media last year. He said TCS is trying to reduce the number of Americans it employs in the U.S. and would like to provide more opportunities to Indians there, according to the report.
> One former worker said in a complaint that TCS human-resources staff told employees in an all-hands meeting that the company planned to use money saved by closing down a unit that employed many of the American workers to provide jobs to more Indian nationals in the U.S.
> in the US you don't need a reason to fire someone
That's not quite what "at will employment" in the US actually means. What it means is that an employer can fire you at any time for any reason that isn't an unlawful reason. It doesn't mean the employer doesn't have to give a reason at all, or that the employer can simply refuse to give a reason if questioned, particularly if there is an allegation that the firing was for an unlawful reason.
Correct. "At will" isn't quite the dystopian corporate nightmare some make it out to be. You can't just make up a reason. It has to be valid, and even if it is, it will be a headache for the legal department if there is even a hint that the person was targeted for being in a protected class. If it's proven the company fabricated the reason, well, you might as well name the company after person at that point.
That's why companies still go through an enormous amount of procedural and documentation hoops before they fire someone, including PIPs.
It doesn’t have to be valid. You can fire someone because you don’t like them, or for no reason at all.
You just can’t fire them for a prohibited reason, such as race, age over 40, sex, disability etc.
Needing a reason is more of a practical problem - every person is a member of at least two protected classes (everyone has a race and sex). If you have no reason for firing a person, it’s often pretty easy for them to argue it was really based on a protected characteristic.
No, there has to be a reason to determine unemployment benefit eligibility.
No smart company will ever put down "don't like them" or something more PC like, "culture misalignment." That's an invitation for legal issues. They're going to tie it back to performance as much as they can, and that takes time and effort.
I always called it "being Tata'ed". I know multiple people that have had to train their direct replacement at TCS. The trick is, the companies subcontract whole functions to Tata who are then free to hire H1Bs that then aren't "direct replacements" for the former employee.
Well first of all, for protected groups, you don't need to prove the reason, you need to prove "disparate impact". Don't need intent.
And even when you need intent, these people are like people who do insider trading. They tend to leave a trail. They think they're smart. Then they talk in detail about the crimes they are doing in logged chat rooms. It's hilarious.
Because there usually is in fact a reason and just because they did not disclose it to you does not mean the reason does not exist and it does not mean that it won't/can't be found via subpoena/deposition.
Or what do you do when the reason is something somewhat objective like "performance" because you didn't meet your deadlines or something. Can you claim discrimination then?
Otherwise what's stopping everyone from claiming discrimination every time they get laid off?
>>Otherwise what's stopping everyone from claiming discrimination every time they get laid off?
You can claim discrimination, but then you'll need somebody (usually an attorney you hire) to file a lawsuit against the company. I'm not a lawyer, but I believe you'll also need to cite a specific type of discrimination for your case to have standing.
You can easily google/ask chatgpt the answer to your questions - the answer is that some companies are nowadays very risk averse in laying people off precisely because they are afraid of discrimination lawsuits, which is why they generally have very solid documentation of performance problems (hence the reason for the modern Performance Improvement Plan as a papertrail)
I'm asking since I live in an EU country where you can get laid off for no reason and employers usually provide no exact reason in writing precisely to potentially avoid getting sued.
They just terminate your contract and let you know they terminate your contract by giving you your notice and that's that, you're gone in 30-90 days, no need to provide an explanation as to why they decided to terminate you since they're not required by law.
So I'm asking to know how it's like in the US if it's like here. If employers aren't required by law to provide termination reason, why would they?
In most US states the employer doesn’t need to provide a reason for dismissal. Whether they do or don’t you may sue your employer or file a complaint with the state oversight agency. In that lawsuit if you have persuasive evidence of discrimination (race, age, pregnancy, gender, etc) then you may win a large settlement or a judgment if it actually goes to trial. The company will provide evidence why they fired you for non-discriminatory reasons.
The reason I was always told was that terminating an employee for cause is the only way not to take a hit to your unemployment insurance if they file for unemployment. So if they have any "good" reason for firing you, it's in their best interests to provide that reason.
>>I'm asking since I live in an EU country where you can get laid off for no reason and employers usually provide no exact reason in writing precisely to potentially avoid getting sued.
Wow weird. I've been there and l thought it was a really socialist country. Especially because the housing in Vienna seems very well regulated to avoid extreme prices.
But I didn't really discuss this topic with the coworkers I visited so clearly I was wrong :(
Oh it's socialist all right when it comes to taxing everything that moves to pay for pensions and welfare. It's not socialist when it comes to employment laws and protections, there it's a capitalist paradise. In most non unionized business it's at will employment.
Wow, I had no idea we even had at will employment anywhere in Europe!
Like here in Spain if I'd get fired I would get a redundancy package for sure. And of course France has even better protections (we're all jealous of their 2 months holidays of course :P ).
I'm not sure if we're unionised though.
Thanks for letting me know. I was not really considering it as a place to live but I won't now - especially as I'm getting older.
UK is completely 100% at will within the first 2 years of your employment, no redundancy package in that time either. In the first 2 years you can be let go without any reason, only after 2 years your employer has to make you redundant to let you go.
Yes but everywhere in the EU you have to call it a probation period, in the UK you can pass your probation and be on a normal full time contract and still if it's your first 2 years you can be let go for any reason.
> Ok, but what do you do when the reason is something somewhat objective like "performance" because you didn't meet your deadlines or something. Can you claim discrimination then?
Usually if that's the reason the company will go to great pains to document it and fire you properly, for cause. This is where PIPs (performance improvement plans) come in—they document the specific areas where performance is lacking, set specific targets for improvement, show that those targets were not met in the time allotted, and then fire you.
If a company doesn't do that then yeah, they're leaving themselves open to a discrimination suit. It doesn't usually happen because lawsuits are expensive and unemployed people tend to not have the resources to fight back, but larger companies will usually take pains to be sure they're covered.
I'm genuinely curious why a company would go out of their way to fire Americans in America...to hire folks on temporary visas. If you're going to do the first part, why not just hire people in the countries they are from? I understand the article says the folks on the visas are able to be paid less, but isn't the H1-B process long, complicated, expensive, and somewhat unpredictable? Surely it's cheaper to just outsource the work. Hell, it's probably cheaper to outsource the work and fly the folks to America for a few days every now and then to meet with clients.
I don't have strong feelings about what they should do, it just seems like what they're doing isn't really in anyone's interest. What am I missing?
You've a lot less negotiation power as your visa is tied to your job, so you get paid less. You have to leave the country after 30 days if you loose your job and don't get another one.
So if you're keen to move up the US, H1B sounds amazing but then you are in quite a vulnerable position.
It is about control. I worked with India-based engineers writing IoT C++ on deadline (alongside a US team) at 5 PM ET. They had already put in 8 hours by the time I woke up. Total madness and abuse, in my opinion.
I left because the management team clearly valued control over competence. Every person in management either was a (white) connected executive salesperson or a member of the CEO's family.
H1B is pretty straightforward and cheap: it's about $5K, most of which are lawyer fees, if you have a law firm signed up for mass processing you get wholesale discount. And it's only unpredictable for an individual, for an employer who submits thousands of applications the laws of statistics make it pretty reliable, if the approval rate is 34.5% then out of 1000 applications you will get 345 +/- few approvals.
And outsourcing does not work for these companies as their business is putting bodies into chairs on their customer's site.
Paywall, but it is clear that companies are literally starving for cheap labor. They are willing to do anything, including bringing over workers on potentially inappropriate visas ( I am not a lawyer, just what I have seen).
Honestly I am surprised that they didn’t just hire directly in India.
If the people predicting re-onshoring of production are correct (same people are predicting generally the collapse of China from demographics, which is a tad dramatic), companies need to get used to paying more for labor.
Globalization is coming to an end. An unparalleled period of worldwide navigational stability and political stability enabled indirect access to labor markets of a vastly larger size. Why is that? Because the USA is increasingly not seeing value as the world's police, because increasing totalitarian aggression from China/Russia, from inevitable stress due to climate change.
There was also demographic bulges from the boomers in this period, compounded with both-parents/partners work that also increased the labor supply.
Re-onshoring manufacturing, combined with the demographic bombs in China, Korea, Germany, Russia and the lesser demographic shrinks virtually everywhere else will mean that labor supply will decrease, and companies better get used to paying the worker bees more and the financial wizard CEOs less.
You know, unless AI and Robotics waves their magic wand, but even then ... things are going to change.
It definitely is a lot of Zeihan in there, but a lot of what he says is compelling. I don't necessarily buy the "pirates are coming" because the US abandons patrolling the high seas.
I think China can replace its demographic losses in the cities by pulling from the rural areas.
But... with the end of oil as a paramount geopolitical concern due to our domestic production and EVs/alt energy ... why would we keep 13 carrier groups around? WHy are we doing all this "free defense"? Why are we essentially allowing China to own our production and give them a massive technology transfer?
And China is definitely turning totalitarian and incompetent and there are real signs of distress coming out of the country.
Zeihan used to be mocked, but then we signed the chips-in-the-USA and batteries-in-the-USA and more "moving production to Mexico" stories in the news. So there is definitely some re-onshoring happening.
Zeihan also poo-poos alt energy and EVs, he doesn't seem to understand the economics of alt energy in LCOE terms or the recent developments in battery chemistry that free us from nickel/cobalt constraints.
WHy are we doing all this "free defense"? Why are we essentially allowing China to own our production
you have it backwards. china is not owning your production, you are exploiting chinese labor. and it's not "free defense" you are bullying sovereign states with your army to extract submission to your exploitative economics
However, politically China owns your physical factories, and switching production if there's a war over Taiwan is not a two week sprint / 5 point ticket.
Hot take, solving housing prices on the west coast would provide a huge boost to the US economy. The nightmare that city councils in the Bay Area and the Seattle metro have caused are detrimental to America as a whole.
If they discriminated based on age and race, that's problematic, but if they selected on some other justifiable measure and it created this result then it's no different from any company having fewer women engineers than engineers who are men.
Skilled immigration policy very typically targets skills shortages where they cannot be recruited domestically. Simply firing a workforce to get those same skills cheaper, which is what is happening here, is a terrible move for a countries workforce.
- Wages wind up going backwards.
- Wages fail to keep up with inflation meaning lower discretionary expenditure flowing into the economy.
- You wind increasing involuntary unemployment.
- With rises in involuntary unemployment you wind up increasing crime, from petty theft through to more major crime.
- With lower returns to economy on an individual basis you economically have less to invest in things like health, education, infrastructure, creation of export businesses on a per individual basis, despite growing GDP. You've created a hole but made it look like growth.
You don't need to go full domestic industry protectionism to avert the above, but you absolutely should not be firing an existing skilled domestic workforce with the explicit intent to replace them with skilled immigration if you want to perform better as an economy.
Because individual businesses can and will try to exploit the issue, this is why it should be regulated. To fail to do so hurts the economy at large when you are not filling a genuine skills shortage.
The H1-B program allows a large number of people into the US, and frankly they vary a ton in how 'skilled' they are. Some are super-smart, some are mediocre, some are just bad. This really confounds the human tendency to make simplistic snap judgements about things.
From my experience, the best H1-Bs go to the FAANGs (or whatever we're calling them these days). The middle of the pack go to consulting companies like Accenture or Wipro. And the subpar ones are C2C consultants for dodgy sweatshops, the kind who fill our inboxes with their 'hotlists' (if you know then you know). While most of them got a STEM Master's here in the US, if you look at the resumes of the weaker ones it's generally from some college you've literally never heard of- Northern North Dakota State or something. I would imagine that they're basically running a borderline diploma mill that's profiting off of foreign families who hope their child will get a Green Card
Actually, as a hiring manager, you can't discriminate between whether someone is a U.S. Citizen or an H1B. So in reality, you're going through a stack of applicants in order. If your HR group puts a bunch of H1B's in front of a citizen candidate, that's it.
So no, your assertion that there is an implicit "there is no American we can hire to fill this" is false. We can't even consider that.
You absolutely can discriminate on the criteria of 'will this person require a visa now or at any point in the future', and tons of companies put that requirement right in their job postings. If your company told you otherwise they are mistaken
> The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) makes it illegal for an employer to discriminate with respect to hiring, firing, or recruitment or referral for a fee, based upon an individual's citizenship or immigration status. The law prohibits employers from hiring only U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents unless required to do so by law, regulation or government contract
Your quoted text says 'unless required to do so by law, regulation'.
H1-Bs would legally require a visa transfer to switch employers, and the company can simply choose to not sponsor or transfer that visa. Thus, the worker is not eligible to work for them. Here are 3 immigration attorneys explaining this in another way https://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/can-a-company-refuse-to-c...
Also, what hiring manager is letting HR decide in what order their candidate pool is meritorious? HR can barely judge a local talent contest let alone someone's ability to undertake skilled work. If I say to my HR that a candidate needs to know Python with environmental experience I'm just as likely to have a candidate put forward who was a wildlife carer 20 years ago since they handled pythons as I am to find someone who can script and understands climate data. They will probably also give me someone who is good with Java, since it's all just computer programming.
Look, like it or not, we all have to work with our HR apparatus. If I have the choice between running their department and keeping mine functional, I have to accept that they at some level know what they are doing. Not to mention, when your HR head has the JD, and you don't, what you think you know is outweighed by their credential.
Now, was I misinformec by an HR person during my time as a hiring manager? Maybe. But guess what, I didn't control their pipeline, and I had work to make sure got done. I'll definitely be adding HR people to my list of groups to talk to when interviewing companies interested in hiring for a hiring manager position though, because the sheer amount of hell that experience came with was beyond unreasonable.
97% of the population of the United States has family trees that immigrated into America less than 500 years ago. We're all bringing parts of our culture with us. We're all creating America together. That's what America is.
This isn't a question pro/against immigration, this is a question of did Tata break existing laws protecting domestic labor.
> If anything, we should change the law to encourage much more high-skill immigration.
I don't think any reasonable person would argue argue against importing highly skilled laborers to increase GDP per capita, that is, to fill a genuine labor shortage that domestic supply cannot fill within a reasonable span of time.
All increases in the number of people doing work and creating things can increase GDP per capita (especially if you count the increase in the income of the person who immigrated, as you should). Inexpensive Indian IT guy makes IT cheaper, which is good for everyone except those who directly compete (and even for them it's not really that bad). This makes it so more things that are complementary to IT can be done. Broad-based benefit that outweighs a narrowly-experienced cost.
Maybe the company simply prefers to hire Indians better cultural fit etc. this is one of the main things considered when making a hiring decision. Will this person get on well with the team, be productive etc.
> Maybe the company simply prefers to hire Indians better
That completely ignored the fact that they went out of their way to fire the American employees. If what you're saying was a reasonable answer they wouldn't have hired Americans in the first place.
TCS is a very Indian organisation, it would make sense for them to hire Indians in the US. The reason this lawsuit is proceeding at all is because a senior exec said exactly this, they want to have more Indians working for TCS in the US. There is no evidence they were fired because they were American they’re just latching onto this throwaway comment which was stupid but at the same time completely understandable.
TSMC wants more Taiwanese working on its semi plants in US for similar reasons, but at least their executive team is a bit more diplomatic in how they say these things.
