One of the funniest board meetings I have ever sat in on was in a recruiting company based heavily in diversity and inclusion. The investor (non-Indian) was listening the Founders (Indian) talk about the advancements we made and showed the talent marketplace (scraped people data).
The investor stopped the CEO and was like, "Why are they all Indian?".
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.
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?
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.
I doubt it. If they only hire themselves, eventually they will have to compete with each other. That’s when the gloves come off and they’ll hire whoever to beat the other Indian.
The Indian on Indian war is inevitable. How do you think they got hired in the first place? Some white executive beat another white executive by cutting costs by offshoring.
I think that's probably a natural tendency for any type of people, so I can't say I blame them.
It's just that, in the USA at least, white people have been guilted for years into specifically not doing that. I suspect the same would happen to any majority, with time, but we'll see.
> I think that's probably a natural tendency for any type of people...
I agree about the natural tendency, the call of the "tribe" (ethnic group, common language, etc.) is there for all kinds of people, more or less.
But there is a difference, and I'm talking about frequency distributions of behaviors, not naive black and white: some groups of people are aware of these tendencies, and they act purposefully and conscientiously to counteract them; other groups, well, it's hard to tell whether they are aware of these tendencies or not, but what is certain is that they don't practice any countermeasure to a natural bias.
Now, for some ethnic groups or nations, it is quite forbidden to talk about any kind of "tribal" behavior that they exhibit. But if within Facebook or Google or Netflix or whatever there was a team led by a Bulgarian citizen with all Bulgarian members, some complaints about the oddity of the situation, I am sure, would be heard.
The investor stopped the CEO and was like, "Why are they all Indian?".