[briandear]

The bar has been lowered in many respects. 14 years experience, 5 of them at a FAANG. Successful startup exit for a small company I founded, and and endless array of India-based recruiters that, for example, want me to mention “Ruby 3.2” in my resume when the resume says I have 14 years of Ruby experience including using it daily in my present job. I could literally say “I invented Ruby and have worked with it daily for 20 years,” and they’d say, “but you don’t have 3.2 listed.”

I play the game then they pass me off to another Indian who is less understandable than the first guy and then they offer $45/hour. I say yeah sure, submit me to the potential client. Then I never hear anything back.

The Indian 3rd party recruiting industry is absolutely horrible. Another anecdote was spending 10 minutes explaining how Java and JavaScript aren’t the same thing. I am convinced there is rampant discrimination happening as well against non-Indians, and especially those who aren’t H1Bs. (H1B is a trap that makes it easy to hire people at lower wages and then also makes it harder for them to switch employers.)

I’m not well articulating the problem, but anyone who has done this dance knows exactly what I’m talking about.

By the way, I used to contract at $95/hour and now I can’t get calls back for $45/hour.

The outsourcing offshoring business needs to be significantly reformed. I had a gig at Best Buy ($70/hour) and I got to spend 3 months training some Accenture H1Bs to replace me. I thought H1B was to fill “critical shortages of highly skilled workers?” Best Buy didn’t have a shortage — they fired my entire team and replaced it with Accenture. Best Buy should be heavily taxed for that and Accenture et al should have their offshore labor tariffed into oblivion. (They typically have onshore H1Bs directing offshore teams.) The Best Buy CEO talks all sorts of DEI crap, while firing people to cut costs. Not very inclusive if you ask me.

[mathverse]

Indians,Brazilians,Portuguese,Ukrainians,Russians are possibly the worst clique of discriminative nationalities. You can be 100% assured that you will be driven out of a company/job if more of them take a hold and get into higher up positions. This is not racism. This is a pure fact based on statistical evidence.

You will be sold a dream of infinite scalability by hiring "talent" in those countries for cheap and what you will get is usually disfunctional teams riddled with incompetence and nepotism.

Even if a job/team is meant to be multicultural,diverse they will find a way how to hire more and more of their countrymen until knowing the language is basically a requirement for the job.

I am not even an american and i've seen this happen in Europe as well so I imagine in the US it must be 1000 times worse.

[jacobyoder]

Odd... you're not the first person I've heard this from, but have been hearing this particular process happening from multiple colleagues over the last 18 months. They are all out of work, all have had multiple interviews with various size companies, and they can never get past an Indian interviewer, and the teams seem to be growing in Indian folks, while non-Indians are let go or passed over for advancement, and eventually leave.

I was slightly skeptical when I heard of this the first time. It sounds a bit like some post hoc justification for why they didn't get hired. But nothing about it sounds far-fetched, really. It sounds more like a natural progression and part of human nature. But still stinks for a lot of my friends/colleagues who can't seem to get hired anywhere.

[snapcaster]

Can you link some of the facts/evidence?

[randomdata]

What are you offering in return?

[red-iron-pine]

credulity. extra-ordinary facts require extortionary evidence.

plus the above poster mentioned how it's well known, "based on statistical evidence". so show us.

[Discordian93]

Portuguese don't do that lol

[randunel]

You're describing the effects of normalising remote work. Employees now are able to work from anywhere in the world, so companies get employees from all over the world. Since we're already looking at employing anywhere, why not also contract from anywhere?

[raydev]

Normalizing remote work requires lowering standards for getting interviews and roles?

[mock-possum]

Yeah I feel like the recent application experience is almost coercing me into racism - I don’t actually believe in racial superiority, I’m not into any kind of bigotry or mistreating other people… buuuuuut I’ve noticed that I have this visceral reaction to seeing a typical Indian name on an email from a potential employer, or a thick Indian accent on a phone or zoom call. It always just seems like an indication that I don’t actually have a chance and am just wasting my time.

It’s awful catching myself in a “I’m not racist but” situation. It really worries me.

[randomdata]

On the bright side, racist thoughts creeping into classes who haven't been exposed to circumstances that lead to racist thoughts before might become more understanding of and helpful towards those who have contended with them for ages instead of simply dismissing them as people born with "incorrect thoughts". Racism is never actually about race.

[tharkun__]

[flagged]

[dang]

Please don't start flamewars on HN, and please avoid generic ideological tangents (and ideological battle generally). It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[_heimdall]

This has been my experience in the US as well, but I'm not so sure that this paradigm extends outside the US.

I lived in Europe for a few years and didn't feel that same context as well - it wasn't almost assumed that white people were racist and anyone might be seen as racist regardless of their skin color or heritage.

[defrost]

In your opinion.

Outside of that, examples abound of racist behaviour by non white peoples, often toward other non white people.

[tharkun__]

I think there is a misunderstanding there.

I my opinion all of those are racist.

But in the current woke public opinion it's not and only whites can be racist.

I would love if it was possible to label racism whenever it appears but it's not possible without being called a racist yourself if you are white.

Looking at sibling parent poster there mentioning Germany, a similar example would be trying to make rational arguments about Israeli conduct with regards to settlements in the west bank. Any German even thinking out loud about those would be labeled a Neo-Nazi.

[defrost]

> But in the current woke public opinion it's not and only whites can be racist.

In my opinion "the current woke public opinion" is almost entirely a bogeyman construction of primarily the US right wing media with trailing support from their UK, AU, and CA siblings.

It's rare (ie. never.) that I read in "left wing" media of any substance articles about the pressing need for kitty litter trays for Furry students.

It's disturbingly commonplace to hear of what can only be performative manufacted outrage about such things from the asshole tanning bowtie wearing media wing.

The conclusion is that the statement " in the current woke public opinion it's not and only whites can be racist" is very much a localised subjective opinion and not any kind of actual global truth.

[nicbou]

India is a big place with the widest cultural and socioeconomic range I’ve ever witnessed. You might just be facing the less pleasant ends of those ranges.

I experience the other end of the spectrum. The skilled Indians that made it to Germany and write to me through my website are usually delightful people.

Consider just how different your experience of most countries would be if you just interacted with their people with the most imbalanced incentives. This is sort of what’s happening.

[fluorinerocket]

It's ok to notice

[fluorinerocket]

Had similar experiences a decade ago and now I hang up if the voice on the phone has an Indian accent and block all domains that send recruiting emails where the name is Indian sounding.

Don't give these people an inch.

[jp42]

anecdata - I am Indian and on h1b. Intel hired Accenture folks, they just put more people with no experience, it took more time to train them than doing stuff ourselves.

Another instance, Intel gave tens of millions to do something that few employees could have done in couple of months. Its basically creating two conda environments, one with intel optimized software stack & one with default and compare the results for 20 use cases.

Not sure its the case with all the contract companies, but this was my experience.

[em-bee]

i believe they are doing this because it gives them the ability to only pay people while they are working on that project, and then let them go because they are not employed by IBM. they think it is cheaper, or they just abhor the idea that the people they hire are not busy the whole time, even if that would be cheaper.