That's the most egregious hiring practice I've actually seen. The white/black/hispanic/asian american managers all hire teams with multiple ethnicities based on the most qualified candidates for the job, while Indian born managers frequently seem to end up with teams that are 80+% Indian. I don't think I've ever seen a team that's 80% white, even in roles that require US Citizenship, but 80% Indian happens frequently.
> I don't think I've ever seen a team that's 80% white
I assure you this is very common in the industry, at least in the US. I can even go further: that 80% white team will usually also not have any women. 80% white men on a team describes most of the teams I've worked on over the decades.
How many women were doing Comp Sci in your year at uni? Mine had 6 out of 110. And they mostly hated it and don't work in IT now the ones I know about.
At my university it looks like the CS program is currently just shy of 40% women. This is higher than it was when I went. But the degree is a red herring.
Most of the engineering teams I have worked with have had members who did not have CS degrees. In fact, it's unusual in my experience for e.g. project managers, QA, or design to have CS degrees. Most performing engineering organizations include people who did not study computer science at a university, and that is a good thing.
Quite a number of good engineers do not have CS degrees. Whether or not a person studied CS at age 20 has almost no bearing on their capability to excel at engineering at age 30. Checking degrees is not a useful gauge in the field, and doing so often makes one appear snobbish.
There’s a simpler non malicious explanation for this. Asians know other Asians in tech and hire based on who they are familiar with rather than their ethnicity. It’s also why women managers tend to have more women in their teams.
It’s not malicious. Just a side effect of people’s network. Should that change? Yes. You want a heterogenous team. And this is exactly why DEI is important hahaha
This isn't just a meta phenomenon, it happens at all the big tech companies and it's always asians and indians that form insular groups (indians slightly less so). It is common and not an accident.
Are you sure? there are particular combinations of ethnicity and gender for which people seem to be quite convinced it's "malicious" when hirers stick to their own
Never join one of these teams if you're not the modal race. This isn't the case for every team, but there will be important conversations in a language you don't know, and worst case, you were brought on so they have someone to let go when the company demands another 5%.
OP was present in the conversation and was able to figure out it's important without knowing the language. Otherwise they can just say they had a very important conversation in a place where OP was not present.
Also curious what happened after OP figured it out and asked them to switch to English. Did they refuse? Did OP reach out to his manager? Did manager ignore OP? Did OP reach out to skip or HR about the manager?
No I think what they're saying is that they want ability to be the only (or at least by far the primary) metric used to evaluate the fitness of a candidate.
There's no magical measure for ability. People tend to hire people who look like them and act like them, simply because in their mind that is what seems correct. That's how humans have always behaved, and it isn't going to change.
Then they're saying specifically Chinese and Indian managers hire people who are less skilled than the best candidates available to them. It's a fishy claim that needs proof.
More mediocre than other people in the company? Presumably the manager is themselves an immigrant, possibly also on a visa. OP's saying they deliberately saddle themselves with people who are worse on every dimension, and thereby make their own job harder. And only managers from 2 countries do this. That should be suspicious to anyone possessed with logic.
> Really, not one other candidate from a slightly different <group> hit your bar?
See now that's a very different question. Are you, like OP, also arguing for diversity considerations in hiring?
> from the same country of origin
But not any random country. Literally the 2 largest countries in the world, which produce massive quantities of software engineers. Preferentially hiring from your "in-group" is never morally or legally right. But why is there automatically a presumption of lower competence when that "in-group" is such an enormous hiring pool?
Folks from a given country tend to network with and feel more comfortable with people from said country, affecting their hiring and promotion practices. That’s only natural.
I’m an immigrant and I’ve never felt that way. The U.S. has a melting pot of cultures with everyone able to relate to everyone in some way shape or form. Generally with food. Americans eat German food, Italian food, Indian food, Cantonese food etc. and best of all, we fusion them together…curry pizza for ex.
