Infosys asked HR not to hire 'Indian-origin candidates', 'women with children'

https://www.timesnownews.com/business-economy/companies/infosys-asked-hr-executive-not-to-hire-indian-origin-candidates-women-with-children-complainant-to-us-court-article-94725018

by webmobdev • 4 years ago

172 366 4 years ago

timesnownews.com

webmobdev6• 4 years ago

This seems like a management fuck-up. It's kind of funny because indian outsourcing companies like Infosys, TCS, etc. have often been accused of hiring a disproportionately high percentage of South Asians and Indians within the United States. In fact, this same company named here (Infosys) has also been earlier accused of favouring asians and not hiring "stupid Americans" - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/india... ... Looks like Infy management wanted to fix this problem (or at least appear to do so) and add more diversity but fell foul of US laws by explicitly communicating their desires to HR.

raincom• 4 years ago

In this particular case, Infy wanted to hire non-Indians for executive positions so that they can sign more deals.

webmobdev6• 4 years ago

I don't find this surprising - I remember that one case study often discussed in indian MBA courses showed that in a European country, indian-origin salespersons often performed worse than salespersons who are local citizens.

aliqot9• 4 years ago

How does this differ from companies and elected officials openly saying right now that females and minorities are preferred for X position, like vice president of USA or CEO of Reddit?

seper8• 4 years ago

It doesn't, but you can't discriminate against white men.

dendriti• 4 years ago

Folks, this is not difficult to understand unless you're deliberately being obtuse.

There's legal and illegal discrimination.

Some forms of legal discrimination do amount to discrimination against White people.

When we say "Discrimination is wrong" we are almost always talking about illegal discrimination.

Just crying out that "But.... but you said discrimination is wrong!" really isn't the 'argument' you think it is.

germandiago8• 4 years ago

you can discrimnate against anyone and you do it every day.

When you choose your gf you discriminated another girl that liked you.

When you choose another coffee brand also.

When you hire someone also.

Ppl who pay the cost should be able to choose.

Any solution forcing the party paying to choose what you would like them to choose without you paying the cost is, IMHO , plain wrong.

thrown_223• 4 years ago

How does this differ from companies and elected officials openly saying right now that females and minorities are preferred for X position, like vice president of USA or CEO of Reddit?

Companies like reddit haven't been sued enough for it to sink in that this is discrimination yet.

azangru5• 4 years ago

Companies like reddit haven't been sued enough for it to sink in that this is discrimination yet.

Assuming that courts would uphold that it is discrimination. Which, in today's climate, I am not even sure would happen.

NaughtyShiba3• 4 years ago

Doesn’t. Gender/minority preference is radical liberalism, which in long run causes more damage than it helps. Germany requires company boards to include females too (could be executive positions, can’t recall exactly) yet market just doesn’t have enough supply for these positions.

Quit telling women that math or toy cars ain’t for them, instead of enforcing stupid rules

oblak• 4 years ago

My niece told my wife dinosaurs are for boys. She likes her pink disney junk very much. It's not the kid's fault.

Huh1337• 4 years ago

Pushing for more women/minorities in STEM/leadership positions = you're fixing the global problem, doing the opposite = you're making the global problem worse.

newsclues2• 4 years ago

Both are discriminatory, but one is virtuous and the other is bad?

belorn2• 4 years ago

The classical view about violence. It is good when its done against bad people, bad when its done against good people. The world has no place for pacifists.

throwaway89434510• 4 years ago

People aren't fungible. Discriminating in favor of some women/minorities doesn't help other other women/minorities elsewhere who have been harmed by discrimination. The goal should be to reduce injustice, not to incur more injustice as a mechanism to achieve parity between arbitrary identity groups.

nailer• 4 years ago

People that are for race based hiring generally consider Indian and Asian people to be overrepresented in tech so they’re not considered minorities.

throw827474737• 4 years ago

Yeah, the motivation if this idea is honorable (if it would just work out to some degree).. but in the end it is a late workaround doomed for he issue to come back in another way (if the experience from 99.9% of issues is transferable here) and not tackling the root cause.

danmur• 4 years ago

I dunno what other industries are like but I've interviewed quite a few software engineers this year and only had a couple women apply. I don't have much of an opinion on hiring incentives but it seems like focusing on the education system would be more effective.

phpisthebest5• 4 years ago

You fix the issue of Women / Minorities in STEM and leadership in primary schools if you wait until adulthood to shoe horn a equity solution using discriminatory policies you end up making everything worse

I wish people would understand that.

germandiago8• 4 years ago

what global problem? I think the way to fix a problem is to discriminate individuals just becaise we wish the composition of hires is different.

dmix5• 4 years ago

Indians not getting hired by global tech companies isn’t a global problem and women not joining tech isn’t usually for lack of hiring policies. That starts way before in University or even high school.

seer-zig2• 4 years ago

Discrimination is discrimination

nerdponx3• 4 years ago

Emphasizing hiring of groups that have been traditionally discriminated against absolutely has a different moral character from discriminating against those people.

There are a variety of ways to argue against the former practice, but to draw equivalence with the latter practice is dishonest and/or willfully ignorant.

NeverFade5• 4 years ago

I'm sure that will be a great comfort to the Asian kid who was born in poverty, got bullied in school, struggled all his life to achieve the grades and stats to qualify for a top school, then got rejected in favor of a rich black American kid, since he was born with the wrong skin color.

3np2• 4 years ago

Emphasizing hiring of groups that have been traditionally discriminated against absolutely has a different moral character from discriminating against those people.

This is your personal opinion.

There are a variety of ways to argue against the former practice, but to draw equivalence with the latter practice is dishonest and/or willfully ignorant.

This rests on sharing the former assumption. Hence, not necessarily dishonest or ignorant.

Or if you want to maintain it: Want to lay out that difference for those of us who are (in your opinion) ignorant? Because I don't see it.

DisjointedHunt2• 4 years ago

As someone who's spent time in countries where discrimination is rampant, i can tell you my personal opinion that it is not different at all.

In fact, that is a dangerous trend in liberal America that needs to be debated on its merits (or lack thereof).

You can't FORCE these things by doing the exact thing you stand against.

steve_taylor• 4 years ago

You naively believe that quotas come from a desire to end discrimination, when in fact it comes from the “it’s our turn” mentality. It’s not liberal at all.

andsoitis• 4 years ago

The University of South Florida has this to say about affirmative action and how it isn’t the same as discrimination rooted in prejudice: https://www.usf.edu/compliance-ethics/equal-opportunity/ten-...

gilbetron3• 4 years ago

Some people are running a marathon, half way through it is discovered half of them had been given weighted shoes that made them run significantly slower. The organizers and racers agree this is wrong and unfair, and so they make sure everyone has correct shoes for the rest of the race. Yet those half of the racers that had weighted shoes are several miles behind the rest. What would you suggest be done?

chrischattin7• 4 years ago

Bad analogy. That’s like suggesting we give racers in the next race an advantage because of what happened in the current race, which creates obvious unfair outcomes.

luckylion2• 4 years ago

You give weighted shoes to other people in another location a few years down the line, right?

4gotunameagain• 4 years ago

Okay, let's play the silly analogies game.

Some people from group A enjoy running and can run fast, therefore join marathons and are good at it.

Some people from group B enjoy playing table tennis and have great reflexes, therefore join table tennis tournaments and are good at it.

Some other people realise that marathons have way more A people than B people, and since marathons are prestigious they force equal ratio of A/B people in marathons, effectively reducing the overall quality of marathons and keeping A people (who would thrive) out of them.

Everyone is unhappy, except the ones who forced the outcome and the ones who got into the prestigious sport without deserving it.

antiterra3• 4 years ago

Imagine shoe weight is first randomized among all racers. Then, a second round of additional random weight is given to one half of the runners. Now, the problem is individualist vs collectivist.

From a collectivist view, adding a time penalty that corresponds to which half the runner was in looks good.

From an individualist view, they note some runners who didn’t receive extra weight still got a debilitating amount of weight from the first distribution. They note that some of the extra-weight runners are actually positioned well at the front. Accordingly, their mind reels at the idea of a time penalty applied based on which half the runner was in. “How is it first group runner’s fault that someone else added weight to the second group?” they wonder.

I do understand the individualist objections, but I also don’t accept that doing nothing is the most fair approach.

seer-zig2• 4 years ago

Bad analogy. It’s already established that there are innate differences between males and females even shortly after birth, and that translates to different behavioral outcomes and career preferences.

lifeformed• 4 years ago

Because some societal imbalances are stuck in a local minimum, and it requires some artificial pressures to get out of it. The goal is to improve opportunities for groups that historically had less of them. Manually adjusting the workforce demographics is one of the tools to nudge things towards the goal, to help shift attitudes and education. It's not perfect, but it's not like market forces are going to do it.

chrischattin7• 4 years ago

You can’t fix racism/sexism by being racist/sexist.

makeitdouble• 4 years ago

Is this a question you will bring up every time discrimination is discussed ?

And does any answer to your question bring anything to what's described in the article or are you really expecting that we condone the discrimination against indian origin and women because of affirmative action also exists ?

acegopher• 4 years ago

While 'reverse discrimination' can end up being a concern, the societal reason for it's use is to correct for past legal or defacto discrimination that may have become structural.

Discrimination can have long-lasting or multi-generational effects that can persist. Men may consciously or subconsciously prefer other men, calling it "culture fit". Today's minorities may not have the same wealth distribution, which allows for greater risk taking, due to historical redlining and discrimination for jobs.

So 'reverse discrimination', when applied correctly, can help to break those structural inequities.

ajsnigrutin3• 4 years ago

So 'reverse discrimination', when applied correctly, can help to break those structural inequities.

Can the irish apply to get priviliges? Or is the only factor here the persons skin color?

alistairSH• 4 years ago

You’re assuming there is only one qualified person for a given position. And that the woman/minority is not that person. In most cases there are multiple qualified people.

Handytinge2• 4 years ago

Agreed. And if you make that decision between multiple qualified people based on sex or race, that's a problem.

davidcbc5• 4 years ago

Few things make me feel as gross about reading this website than all the whining about discrimination against white men.

jwond5• 4 years ago

Could you explain why?

Do you think white men aren’t being discriminated against? Do you think white men are being discriminated against and just don’t like seeing people talk about it? Or maybe some other reason?

DisjointedHunt2• 4 years ago

Wow, while this has been an open secret forever that HR recruiting for senior executives is highly "picky" going to racial lines, i found this hard to read.

Lets hope for a better future where ignorant hate like this doesn't exist as much as it does today. People deserve more than being judged on the basis of the circumstances of their birth.

anon23anon• 4 years ago

Wow - so Indian companies hires all Indians even in American offices. CEO gets caught on a hot mike saying they don't want to hire stupid Americans which forces said CEO to change hiring policy but they blunder it and tell HR not to hire Indian candidates which back fires.

yrgulation8• 4 years ago

Wow you are right he did say that. Had to google it to confirm. How is that not racist? And why is racism so prevalent among indians?

JoeAltmaier4• 4 years ago

Don't get ahead of yourself there. Racial preferences are very common around the world. It becomes part of self-worth to value one's cohort above those that are seen as opressive. Such as the ubiquitous western culture in media.

Anyway, the melting pot of the USA has created a dialog about race that may be missing or very small elsewhere. Witness the apparent race-tone-deaf attitudes in Japanese mainstream, where being Japanese is so obviously superior to everyone else its baked into plots and dialog without apparently even noticing.

NayamAmarshe• 4 years ago

And why is racism so prevalent among indians?

This statement almost seems ironic...

illegalmemory• 4 years ago

From your comments history, it looks like you have strong feelings against India, which might be leading to a negative bias. But such favoritism is prevalent in all cultures to some extent.

booleandilemma• 4 years ago

Diversity is only for white people.

Look at the diversity on the board of Mitsubishi:

https://www.mitsubishicorp.com/jp/en/about/bmembers/

aaomidi3• 4 years ago

I mean I’ll take a stab at this:

https://www.bmwgroup.com/en/company/leadership-and-governanc...

sephlietz• 4 years ago

Japan's population is something like 98% Japanese ethnicity.

ceres• 4 years ago

A Japanese company filled with mostly Japanese people in Japan - a country with 98% Japanese people. Who would've thunk it.

petilon4• 4 years ago

Did you read the linked article?

she was asked by the Bengaluru-headquartered IT company to avoid hiring people of Indian origin

This is a claim by a fired former VP.

dominotw2• 4 years ago

and candidates aged 50 or above.

Ageism is so bad they didn't even bother include the complete sentence in the headline.

My main 'career goal' at the moment is find an exit path out of software development. Nothing else really matters. Its now or never.

abledon• 4 years ago

learn COBOL, lots of old contractors over here :)

chii• 4 years ago

an exit path is one where you earn enough from your career to obtain passive income and retire - preferably early enough to still have mental and physical strength left to do what you are passionate about, without having to worry about finances.

notacoward• 4 years ago

While that is a good path (the one I took BTW), an exit path could also mean transitioning to a different moderately-lucrative career. Or perhaps even the same career in a different business. I know quite a few people who avoid 90% of tech-industry BS by doing fairly basic kinds of automation and web stuff for other kinds of companies, local governments, or non-profits. They don't make anywhere near unicorn money, of course, but they're still well above median and generally seem happier than other people I know who are still in The Grind. If you already have some savings from those intense years, you can let them compound while the easier job takes care of current expenses.

bkav• 4 years ago

What about federal jobs? The pay is definitely lower but it comes with amazing health insurance, you can stay for the rest of your career, move wherever you want, & they can’t really afford to be ageist—they don’t have enough candidates.

93po• 4 years ago

there's a really short character limit for headlines on HN

yalogin• 4 years ago

Infosys is based in India and so naturally they get a lot of candidates of Indian origin. That is just how referrals work. May be they wanted to hire diverse candidates but the huge issue is the ask about not hiring women with children and people over 50. I wonder how common this is in the valley, particularly not hiring people over 50

sk0g3• 4 years ago

I've had Infosys and TCS reach out to me, and when pressed for salary figures said the upper end was a half of my current salary, and this is in Australia. I'm not even on a particularly high salary, could have gotten a ~30% pay rise had I joined an industry I wasn't keen on...

Not convinced it isn't some sort of legal obligation thing to bring in cheap labour, or just preying on people who need a quick job to maintain their visa obligations. Offering {minimum_wage + 30%} for a software engineer with a few years of experience seems like an exercise in futility otherwise.

anovikov• 4 years ago

I seen it so many times. Indian companies try to avoid hiring Indians whenever they can do otherwise (i.e. for better paying positions). There are good and bad explanations for that, but all of them politically incorrect.

germandiago8• 4 years ago

I would not get the point of someone telling me what I should do wirh my investment, home, or property of any kind.

If I do NOT want to put MY money somewhere actively that is not discrimination.

In fact it is denying the freedom to choose.

I do not care they hire all indians or no indians. Same for any other combination.

Because they are incurrimg the cost of doing so.

yrgulation8• 4 years ago

Companies such as infosys creep me out.

sidcool• 4 years ago

Why so?

mkl952• 4 years ago

I was a consultant for an American company that also hired dozens of cheap consultants from development countries. Mostly India but also neighbouring countries and some Eastern European countries.

Indians were by far the hardest to work with. They ghosted women systematically which was a nightmare for our project manager. They also lied shamelessly about their qualifications which led to absurd situations.

The problem doesn't lie in hiring Indian people though. It's in hiring cheap labour for the sake of it. If you want to get from point A to point B you either hire people who can do it or you don't. If you believe those guys have actually been delivering quality software for a decade with some technology despite being dirt cheap, you are just an idiot.

notart6665• 4 years ago

Many of them just can't speak English correctly. Only a small percentage of the individuals who speak English at a proficient level of those who do, they predominately come from very wealthy upper caste families and now you have a new problem. And well. When it comes to caste, many Indians simply believe it to not exist anymore in India because of how deeply engrained it is in their social classes they never notice it.

philliphaydon2• 4 years ago

I don’t understand the English thing. I lived in Singapore for 10 years and have heard so many words pronounced wrong. To give an example one of my ex coworkers used to say the word swap as sw-app. Another one said return as ret-urn. I did ask them and they said they are taught phonics and so they just say the words how they are written.

English is such a turd language. We have so many rules and then all those rules get broken all the time.

(Despite the English thing which didn’t get in the way of working together, my single team are the best team I’ve ever had in my career and I’ll really miss them)

29athrowaway4• 4 years ago

English is an official language over there, but it is spoken differently.

azangru5• 4 years ago

Many of them just can't speak English correctly. Only a small percentage of the individuals who speak English at a proficient level of those who do, they predominately come from very wealthy upper caste families and now you have a new problem.

There is something very confusing to me in this paragraph.

You put forth as a premise (at least if I am understanding the logic of the paragraph correctly) that fluency in English is an important skill for doing a job properly. You also say that it is the wealthy part of the population that will have access to resources to train their children in that skill. All good so far. But then you say that it is a problem, and this is where I am lost. Are you suggesting that money should not buy good education? Assuming good education is a scarce commodity, that would go against the principles of markets. Or are you suggesting that English fluency (or other consequences of good education) should not be considered when screening for a job in a tech company? But that goes against your initial premise, and also makes one wonder what purpose a good education has if not getting one prepared for a high-skilled job.

mikrl• 4 years ago

Many of them just can't speak English correctly.

I’m someone who loves seeing well written and hearing well spoken English. The standards I hold myself to are quite high.

However, I have never had a problem with people- native or foreign born- with less than perfect English communication skills.

Going down that route smacks of elitism, xenophobia and a hyper-normative mindset. The way you get good at standard English is by practice, which they are doing every day at work using the skills (technology) they have mastered. Some of my family are ESL and my place of birth (in the UK, for God’s sake) was and is looked down on for the dialect.

Is it really that hard to just ask someone to repeat or restate themselves?

TMWNN• 4 years ago

Only a small percentage of the individuals who speak English at a proficient level of those who do, they predominately come from very wealthy upper caste families and now you have a new problem.

As a non-Indian, the caste problem seems so endemic that the only solution seems to be to not hire anyone born in India. Their American-born children will, presumably, have overcome the issue.

(Not 100% serious, but not 100% joking.)

1letterunixname• 4 years ago

It's one of those dumb human antipatterns like racism, sexism, and most other legitimately bad -isms: pick attribute A and make that undesirable while making attribute B desirable. Perhaps in Indian and Western schools alike, they should consider the (in)famous eye color discrimination exercise to give a glimpse of how horrible it is. Comfortable, sheltered children tend to grow up to be ignorant adults bordering on clueless. It's only when someone has experienced what it feels like can they grow a modicum of empathy or sympathy.

NaughtyShiba3• 4 years ago

Eastern Europe ain’t developing countries…

betaby• 4 years ago

As the the opposite to? And by what metric? Maternal mortality? Human development index? Access to clean water?

mccorrinall• 4 years ago

Depends on who you ask. The following graphic is on the article about developing countries and includes emerging markets in the „lesser developed“ category: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IMF_advanced_economi...

fruit2020• 4 years ago

Indeed. They may not be at the top when you sort countries by their metrics, but still great to live in.

mardifoufs• 4 years ago

Depends where. For example Ukraine (before the war) had a similar gdp per capita to my home country, Morocco, which is definitely a developing country. Belarus is richer, but not by much. I guess those two countries are more of an exception now though.

29athrowaway4• 4 years ago

My observation is that the Indians that make it to the US via companies like TCS, Infosys and others, are the product of a highly political environment where you are expected to worship your manager and tend to be political as fuck.

They are very different to Indians that have not worked in such environments, who tend to be much more trustworthy and ethical.

In America, a manager is another employee who can be wrong just as often as anyone else.

I am glad to see in recent years that the startup scene in India is empowering capable engineers to escape the fucked up reality that can be the corporate work culture over there.

alephnerd3• 4 years ago

A lot of it is due to lack of resources. Even Indian grads view TCS and TCS type companies as the choice of last resort. They’re still paying the same wages as they were in the early 2000s (3.5 Lakh), while ignoring inflation (3.5 lakh would be around $10k in the 2000s but only around $5k in 2022). Lots of Indian companies and western companies pay way more than that. Heck, even farming would get you a guaranteed 3 Lakh subsidy with MSP

rvba• 4 years ago

So the problem is hiring cheap labor, yet you didnt list any problems with Eastern European.

Since some Indians fucked something up somewhere, there is subtle racism towards Eastern Europeans?

wiseowise2• 4 years ago

Eastern Europe candidates are consistently better from my experience.

la64710• 4 years ago

Is that why Infosys HR was directed to NOT hire Indian origin candidates? BTW what are these development countries?

nonamechicken3• 4 years ago

They ghosted women systematically which was a nightmare for our project manager.

What do you mean by this? That they refuse to work with women based on their gender?

"India has more women STEM grads than US, UK or France". And I see way way more women employees in software companies in India compared to US.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/india-has-more-wom...

petilon4• 4 years ago

Right on!

Technology firms in India have a better female to male staff ratio than the tech giants of Silicon Valley [1]. India has a much better male-to-female ratio compared with the U.S. Engineering male-female ratio in India is 1.96 as compared with 4.61 in the U.S.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-professional/2015/jun/2...

[2] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/engineering-...

What India Can Teach Silicon Valley About Its Gender Problem https://www.wired.com/2014/08/silicon-valley-sexism/

https://blog.hackerrank.com/which-countries-have-the-most-sk...

The 2015 stackoverflow survey has this interesting statement: "Developers in India are 3-times more likely to be female than developers in the United States." See https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2015 Actually it is worse than it sounds because most of the female developers in the United States are first generation immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe.

giantg24• 4 years ago

I have a relative that worked for a US medical company. There were certain people who would take women's lunches out of the microwave right in front of them just so they could cook their own. She said they were mostly from the south central area of Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangledesh). It was only a few individuals, not everyone.

Obviously this is a secondhand story, so I can't vouch for it directly. I was shocked and could barely believe what I was hearing.

KingOfCoders2• 4 years ago

Not sure how your argument works. Because there are more women in STEM in India, Indians in the US can't ghost women?

spoonjim• 4 years ago

Absolutely there is more gender parity, largely because the type of IT work done by the bodyshop firms like Infosys and TCS is more like a decently paid white collar McJob than anything else. You see a lot of female developers in Infosys because it’s (accurately) seen in the same universe as accounting or secretarial work.

ShredKazoo• 4 years ago

The pattern seems to be that as a country becomes more gender-equal, gender-specific preferences become stronger: "the more that women have equal opportunities, the more they differ from men in their preferences"

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.aas9899

giantg24• 4 years ago

My company quickly realized that outsourcing to an offshore Indian company was a mistake. We tried giving them new projects, but it was useless. We still use them, but only for very simple support work. My project was outsourced to them for support. The transition of our mature project to them took about a year. They wanted to replace our 10-12 person team with about 19 of their people. They also needed some of the people onshore due to regulations. So much for cost savings. And as soon as someone got good, they left the team/company because they could get a better job anywhere else.

My company also outsourced onshore to another Indian company to modernize an area of our business (same area as rhe above example). It's a mess. They're behind schedule by years. They promised they had an ML system to handle this type of business case, but it's not working. They're also telling people to only record 40 hours on their time sheet even if they're working 50-60 hours. They've had so many people leave that they're throwing money at the remaining expert people to stay.

steveBK1236• 4 years ago

When I worked with a large team for 2 years, including going over to run a week long training program .. I found just a general disinclination for efficiency, automation or time saving... which cynically wouldn't surprise you when you consider they are running a quantity/body shop.

The craziest conversation I had was trying to convince a guy who came in every morning and ran a script that he could put it on a timer/scheduler/cron/anything to just run the report so it was in his inbox every morning. It's not that he was incapable technically, or did not understand it. It was as if I was asking him to violate a religious oath. "Thou shall not reduce billable hours." His workflow remained - login to desktop, open IDE, open script, modify date, save, execute script, open FTP app, login to server, download file to desktop, open email app, create new email, attach file, email file to onshore. Solid 30min++ of work if you do it right.

tatpacc3• 4 years ago

And as soon as someone got good, they left the team/company because they could get a better job anywhere else.

they left the company because they could get a "better pay" anywhere else.

For offshore outsourcing company, their only business model is: amount they receive per resource - A. salary per resource - B. fix cost at company level. i.e. office rent, office maintenance, etc.

And Project manager's OKR are mostly to increase margin. Project manager have only control over A. hence they will always try to hire junior resource. So good resource often have to waste time in spoon feeding to rest of the team and they will leave the company as soon as they got better offer/company.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 4 years ago

Racism is thick here.

kfk• 4 years ago

The problem here is the idea that offshore country labor arbitrage can give you ridicolous cost savings way over 50% compared to local resources. Of course this is pipe dreams and especially with remote work good people have a cost, no matter where they work. But companies like Infosys still are forced on selling with that sales pitch… so what happens? They hire mostly unqualified people. This is not a problem with Indian employees, it’s a problem of Western executives having unrealistic IT costs expectations. Want to save IT costs? Have realistic expectations on the number of digital initiatives your company can run, do less things basically, don’t try to do a lot and hire cheap labor to keep IT cost low.

dominotw2• 4 years ago

Main problem with hiring through these shops is you never know who exactly is working on your project. They would present us with resumes of some experienced candidates but it looked like that person is being sold to multiple companies with expectation that he would be exclusive.

They would all be committing to code repo with single "git@congnizant.com" so you never know who the man behind the screen is. All conference calls would have the person we hired on the call but his voice would sound different everytime.

It was freaking nightmare. I will never ever work for a company that does hybrid onshore/offshore development. That evnviroment is a proxy that they treat software dev as mundane cost center that deserves no respect.

tatpacc3• 4 years ago

They would all be committing to code repo with single "git@congnizant.com"

it really depends, what's the process of end client. In many cases, even each offshore developers have client's email and it's used as SSO with GIT/Slack/etc. Not saying that what you are describing is not possible with this but it certainly makes it difficult and almost not feasible.

fellellor• 4 years ago

In this lawsuit, an American woman alleges that a bunch of high level (probably white) American executives in the American branch of an Indian company were very biased against women and workers of Indian origin. And while expressing their biases through their actions they created a very hostile work environment for this person.

At least read the thing for a minute before going on a tangent?

mkl952• 4 years ago

One of my favourite things about HN is that a mod would never say something like this.

TrueGeek• 4 years ago

Some humans suck, some don’t. I don’t think it’s accurate to say this divide is mostly split between countries. I’ve worked with multi-national companies that have great culture and diversity and multi-national companies that are much like you describe. The problem is not that “x people are by far the worst”. The problem is that culture needs to be led top down. It needs to be thought of during hiring. Intolerance needs to be addressed after hiring.

steveBK1236• 4 years ago

Many years ago I worked at big dumb banks.

There was a lot of top down forced offshoring with ultimatums like - hey you can have +4 headcount in Mumbai or +0 in NY.

Further, we found we had to spend $10Ks at a time to send NY/London staff over there monthly to figure out wtf was going on. These offshoring firms were running some serious scams. We once had a guy come back (mid 2000s) and say that his 5 devs in Hyderabad were equipped with 4 PCs and 3 phones between them!!

We had one bank offshore its datacenter ops (while the datacenter physically remained onshore). It was incredible. We'd have a RAID disk failure in a datacenter across the Hudson River in Jersey City, practically visible out my window, raise a ticket which would take 36 hours to get picked up by someone in India, to bounce around the globe and eventually get back to the onshore datacenter ops person who would do the physical disk replacement. Finally one ticket took so long to address that we had a cascade of disk failure and lost the whole RAID.

Just anecdote after anecdote of crazy stuff like this. Lot of these deals ended up in litigation.

There were many very smart developers over there, but the offshoring industrial system creates a race to the bottom and quantity over quality preference. With the turnover of good staff, the only way to keep the better ones was to get the visas sorted to nearshore them in US - largely defeating the purpose of the cost saving.

A lot of the banks moved away from this model and created "centers of excellence" in UK/US/Canada nearshore locations. You get competent staff for decent rates who are happy to have a great job without moving to the big city away from home/school/family. Not everyone who writes software wants to live in Bay Area/NYC/London. Time zones line up more humanely. Win win.

tatpacc3• 4 years ago

With the turnover of good staff, the only way to keep the better ones was to get the visas sorted to nearshore them in US
largely defeating the purpose of the cost saving.

agree on most part including that onshore billing is obvious more than offshore but still for client it's saving as oppose to hiring FTE. Often client also want good resource to stick so they allow them to move to onsite. In my case, we informed client after my H1B was stamped, that I have to move to States either in this project or other project, client approved in 2-3 hours. For the another resource, client took 4-5 months to decide and then replied that we don't have budget for onshore billing.

So in case of good resource, it's often win-win for everyone involved.

arinlen2• 4 years ago

Further, we found we had to spend $10Ks at a time to send NY/London staff over there monthly to figure out wtf was going on. These offshoring firms were running some serious scams. We once had a guy come back (mid 2000s) and say that his 5 devs in Hyderabad were equipped with 4 PCs and 3 phones between them!!

Oh this brings back memories. A few years ago I worked for a company which offloaded functional testing to a team in Chennai, including pre-release shakedown tests. We did that until there was a release which started to blow up in a critical point that was very hard to recover from, right after being deployed to all customers. We were baffled because we had test sets covering precisely this scenario, and the tests all passed. To cut to the chase, we soon discovered that our trusty Chennai team was not to be trusted and in reality was signing off releases without performing a single test. Everyone in that team was fired and replaced by other replacement testers also based from Chennai, and once the new testers started running the exact same test sets then all sorts of red flags started to surface. Now, here's the kicker: it only took a couple of weeks until the new Chennai-based testers started to flag tests as passes even though they never ran them at all, which we discovered because we also added telemetry to track those.

Anecdotal evidence, but we only ceased to have problems with Chennai-based teams once we finished automating away their job.

arinlen2• 4 years ago

Indians were by far the hardest to work with. They ghosted women systematically which was a nightmare for our project manager.

I recall that Amazon went through the trouble of paying for TV ads proudly stating that they now have in India delivery posts manned exclusively by women, and the ad is comprised of indian delivery women delivering packages to indian men who in turn are giving them all sorts of weird looks.

I recall seeing this ad and thinking to myself: are things in India so bad to the point that this sort of measure and ad passes off as something to be proud about?

ksec2• 4 years ago

They also lied shamelessly about their qualifications which led to absurd situations.

This I have experience with. The word absurd is not an exaggeration, it might not even be enough to describe it.

They ghosted women systematically which was a nightmare for our project manager.

I dont understand this sentence. Does Ghosted here mean something different to ghosting in hiring?

wongarsu3• 4 years ago

I assume they didn't answer questions or requests from women, or otherwise silently refused to directly work with them.

29athrowaway4• 4 years ago

In all my years working in software, I have only had 2 colleagues with white hair. It is clear there are many older engineers out there that are having a hard time getting a job. Whatever is going on, it's clear there's a system in place to remove the older guys.

Then, breaking news: HR fucking sucks everywhere. That's the whole idea of HR in the first place. It's a legal shield for the company, it has nothing to do with improving people's lives.

All fucking HR surveys have the objective of removing unhappy employees and are not anonymous, talking to HR about a problem is another way in which unsatisfied employees get detected and kicked out of companies. HR fucking sucks.

Bakary2• 4 years ago

The solution could be to increase stress so that employees get white hair at an earlier phase of their lives.

dmix5• 4 years ago

I've done a lot of hiring for startups and I rarely (if ever) got resumes from older people. I just assumed the JS/Ruby tech stack I worked for the last decades isn't being learned by the older demographic.

buzzwords2• 4 years ago

If all companies try to hire from the same small pool say women in tech. Don't they have to compete with each other? And therefore pay them more than others?

I have been wondering about this, but always too scared to ask it as it comes a cross as an attack. I assure you it's not an attack but a genuine question.

pjc50• 4 years ago

The pool is not of a fixed size, and there's no evidence of women being paid a premium to fulfil a quota.

Conversely, there's plenty of evidence of both individual and systematic discrimination against women candidates and women "thought leaders" in tech.

buzzwords2• 4 years ago

Oh wow, really? So the women in tech is a growing pool? Enough to stop companies paying premium to fulfil quotas?

perfecthjrjth• 4 years ago

Infosys wants non-Indians for sales positions, but Indians for code-monkeys, scrum masters, project managers, etc.

dartharva• 4 years ago

This entire comment section seems to have gone down the drain to Reddit-tier exchanges. People giving their own false commentary on broad topics just for the sake of it without even trying to understand contexts, this is totally not expected on HN.

pdimitar• 4 years ago

Same was happening during the pandemic and it was much worse even.

alephnerd3• 4 years ago

Agreed! I’ve complained about this before recently on HN and was flagged for this.

Also, a lot of these accounts appear to be new accounts (less than 1 year tenure on HN), so most charitably they might be users who aren’t used to the norms on HN.

On a separate note, Dang can you please moderate this entire section? The dog whistles and mean spirited comments on here are insane.

the_doctah• 4 years ago

Ironically, "dog whistle" has become a dog whistle for censorship. At least you didn't hide the intent.

rchaud3• 4 years ago

The top comments as of 10:50AM ET are openly backing and rationalizing discriminatory hiring practices.

Compare that to the reaction to IBM pushing out over-50s: empathy and compassion.

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19507447

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24471903

thumbsup-_-3• 4 years ago

Unfortunately not hiring married women with kids or asking women about their plan to have kids, not hiring older candidates or candidates with sick family members is a common practice in India. Glad that these evil companies are being called out in other parts of the world

nonamechicken3• 4 years ago

I don't believe this at all. I see the exact opposite happening in my Indian company. They are encouraging women leaders so much. I am right now working with one who climbed 2 grades in 2-3 years (which normally would take several years), and she has an all female team now (which is discriminatory by the way). Her male Indian bosses encourage and support her so much, while my male managers treat me (a male) like shit most of the time.

Indian companies are required to give paid maternity leave of 26 weeks by the way.

https://www.startuphrtoolkit.com/maternity-leave-in-india/

MisterSandman• 4 years ago

I find it hard to believe that you live and work in India and don't believe this. It's literally everywhere, I'm glad your company isn't like that but even spending 15 minutes talking to someone working at an MNC will tell you that this is unfortunately common.

And India offering maternity leave does nothing to solve the prejudice against women by hiring managers.

thumbsup-_-3• 4 years ago

Glad to hear your company is a good employer. This is just a guess but is it an Indian tech company? Culture is changing for sure but what’s happening at tech companies doesn’t shows the full picture (though it is also true the other way around). I know several women who were asked about their plan to start family in their job interview. I was myself asked a few years back about my family background and I decided to hide that my father was ill.

The fact that India doesn’t have strong labor laws allows all this to happen. Many existing laws were created for factories and the way they are worded they exclude many present day industries. Also, this is all when considering white collar jobs. Blue collar jobs are just another level of misery.

Again, happy for you but there are people who have suffered because of these practices.

rchaud3• 4 years ago

This is a US lawsuit, filed by a non-Indian Infosys employee, against other non-Indian executives at their US office.

thumbsup-_-3• 4 years ago

I know but there’s also a thing called company culture

rossdavidh2• 4 years ago

So, I have only my own limited, American, anecdotal experience, but I did work for Infosys for a little while, so I suppose I should share that here. We were a team of less than a dozen developers, and we had a woman, who as I recall was a mother, as one of our devs.

Not saying this means it didn't happen elsewhere in Infosys.

rossdavidh2• 4 years ago

...forgot to say that the woman in question was Indian.

nonamechicken3• 4 years ago

Infosys stopped hiring Indians in US at least 2-3 years ago, may be before President Trump moved out. Al their job ads (in Indeed) would have this line: "U.S. citizens and those authorized to work in the U.S. are encouraged to apply. We are unable to sponsor at this time."

Example: https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=b8ca8d3db6e11c9e

Majority of those who need visa sponsorship are Indians & Chinese.

And this is not just Infosys. I have seen the same wording in job ads of many American companies.

My friend who worked in Infosys told me that they were so desperate to hire Americans that they conducted a job fair and if selected, they would give offer letter on the same day.

I am pretty sure Infosys did this because of all the negative media about them preferring to hire Indians in US causing Americans to loose jobs.

llampx2• 4 years ago

The irony of having to do affirmative action to hire the majority in the country you are operating in.

velavar• 4 years ago

As an Indian woman that studied and worked for a bit in India, this is not surprising at all. When prepping for job placements in my University, we would sometimes practice answers to questions around why they should hire a woman who might just get married and leave the company for her kids. I remember the recruiter for a multinational company asking me this very question and 22-year old me desperately trying to convince her that I was not interested in having kids. I now understand that this is more tied to the country's culture than the companies themselves. If everyone around you can discuss this without blinking, it becomes normal to ask such questions I suppose.

I've been in the US for the last 7 years now and as a woman in my thirties, it's an incredible relief that nobody ever asks me my plans for kids and the like in my interviews! I know that my child-bearing age shouldn't be a factor, but thanks to my past experiences, I'm always wondering if the decisions behind the scenes are silently taking this into account.

Edit: my personal experiences may be different even from someone of the same gender/age/origin. Please consider this with a pinch of salt :)

falkda• 4 years ago

From wired " So unless nature is working contrarily in South Asia, something about the culture of the Indian educational system and tech industry is more hospitable to women than the American one".

Seems directly opposite to what you state. That too 8 years ago. Too many fakes stories been peddled here.

https://www.wired.com/2014/08/silicon-valley-sexism/

rchaud3• 4 years ago

Seeing as how this article didn't even link to the court filing, here you go:

https://regmedia.co.uk/2022/10/04/prejean_infosys_complaint....

Excerpt:

85. After approximately a month, Plaintiff had a complete partner list and began taking meetings with partners regarding their hiring needs.
86. Consistently in these meeting with Plaintiff, partners talked openly about their hiring prejudices and discrimination preferences. 87. These illegal criteria were more important to partners than anything else. 88. Plaintiff consistently heard from at least a dozen partners, to her shock, that they preferred not to hire additional consultants of Indian national origin, that they wanted women without children at home, and candidates not approaching 50.
89. These preferences were open and notorious and seemed to be the company culture.
90. In each of her meetings Plaintiff apprised the partners that they were advancing illegal criteria and that she would not act on them.
91. Among the partners who endorsed illegal criteria were Defendants Kurtz and Albright, who expressly stated them to Plaintiff.

ChrisMarshallNY• 4 years ago

I am a bit sad to read some of the comments in this thread.

I’ve had the privilege to work with really high-functiong engineers, from many cultures, including Japan, India, Germany, Romania, Russia, Mexico, Colombia, Pakistan, Egypt, Ukraine, Poland, Ireland, China, Israel, Iran, Viet Nam, UK, Spain, Italy, France, etc. Many were women. Most folks we worked with (of any gender) were parents, because we tended to work with experienced people.

That was mostly because the corporation I worked for, had high standards. They didn’t just throw money at people that looked good. They made sure that we hired the best (but they were cheap -relying on their reputation, so hiring was a pain).

As far as I know, they never outsourced to save money (my team was actually an “outsourced” team). They hired people that could do the work necessary.

I have come to realize that this was a real aberration. I am sad to know that. There were many frustrations in that company, but it was still a signal Honor to work there.

I wish folks the best, and hope that the tech industry can get past the problems that, I suspect, have actually been caused by all the money being made.

WirelessGigabit• 4 years ago

[flagged]

webmobdev6• 4 years ago

Everyone of us has such personal guidelines / biases when it comes to social interactions. We all form such conscious and unconscious biases about certain community based on whom we interact with and it is ok up to a point, if you don't take them too seriously (or these biases can become narrower and fundamentalist). Working with people of different culture always requires us to step out of our comfort zone to varying degree. Obviously this is uncomfortable. But as with any learned behaviour, avoidance only exacerbates the issue and practising it more and more makes it easier.

amriksohata• 4 years ago

All the talk of not hiring people of certain backgrounds, ghosting women etc. Is not restricted to Infosys. Working in many British companies I have seen this at rampant scale, the only difference is it's not officially spoken or written but often wrapped up with some other excuse like "oh they weren't the right fit"

Infosys asked HR not to hire 'Indian-origin candidates', 'women with children'

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