As someone that has worked for them a decade ago, some of their division are >90% Indian. Those are all good engineers and not dunking on them at all but it should be unacceptable to bring over competing workers on a visa while also laying off so many people.
we were acquired and part of our org moved into cisco HQ.
the entire floor were Indian other than our org, and over time our org was filled out with incoming transfers and new hires.
i'll never forget some irony in that one of the engineering leaders brought us together for a mini townhall once and praised our "diversity" but by then the percentage of people in the room were basically the same as you described, including said leader. even our twice a week catered lunches were almost always indian.
just an interesting experience being part of cisco for a couple of years.
Shocking. I had an interview for an Australian job with JP Morgan recently and even the interviewers were based in India. Super rude, could barely understand him due the strong accent, he couldn’t ask a single intelligent question and it was kinda clear that the org basically just hires other Indians. They always end up talking a lot while doing almost nothing and only hiring their friends and family while Chinese engineers just get stuff done. I’m sure there are exceptions but in my 15 years in tech I can count with two hands how many good Indian engineers I worked with.
Or maybe you just aren't that good of an engineer (or whatever profession you are into) and find the easiest group to blame on your failures. I found that people who often are quick to judge and group of people in one bucket based on their color/ethnicity/gender/... are often not that bright people and like to focus on directing it on others. Somewhat like MAGA.
Wow this escalated quickly. What OP is saying is not anecdotal but true to every major US tech company. You can cope all you want, won't make a difference
Well, can you refute any of the points in the thread?
Indians hire only Indians.
We cannot understand them due to the accent.
Having worked with many of them, I am not impressed either. So maybe... you are not good either :)
Concrete examples, master student in networking could not ssh into a Cisco router, as in, did not know what ssh was (thread related)
On various company teams meetings internationally they are just warm chairs doing "project lead" until the USA & EU people join and actually start working on the problem.
They just say yes to everything, despite not understanding, then doing 0 work.
H1B should be limited. (and/or what it is called in EU)
I'm sure you do. But your real life experience is not everyone else's real life experience, so there's no really need to make blanket statements about people.
The reason is basically that you are "required" to hire other "Indians".
If you get a job at a good company on your own merit, you immediately start getting calls to "refer" your college friends, family, people from your region/state.
Refer here means refer it to HR and make some "setting" that you are guranteed to be hired based on your "reference".
Naturally reference would mean that considering you are an employee you would know about open positions and may refer the position to your friend, who would later on get the job on his own merit considering that he is skilled for the position along with required experience.
But the case for Indian employees is that a reference entails to scam the company itself, by letting a less skilled person into the company by making a "setting" with HR etc, who may themselves be from the same region/state.
And if you try to be morally upright person to deny such a scammy "reference", you would then get to listen verbal abuses from your friends and even from your own family members. To deny such a reference leads to straight up "banishment".
Tip:- Among 100 Indians if you see, only 1 or 2 are actually good at their job (or by morality).
Jokes aside, if in 15 years you have worked with only few good Indian engineers, you probably have not yet worked at places with high talent density. I could understand if you had said you have (a) worked with many low quality engineers from India, or (b) worked with far more low quality engineers from India than high quality ones. But if, in absolute numbers, you haven't come across many good engineers from India, I can only infer than you probably haven't worked with very good engineers across the board.
Diversity is the term to disguise cheaper labor. Call it women, ethnic minorities, trans, neuro divergent, on wheelchair, or those having criminal records.
It's a brilliant slogan, not just because virtue signalling, but because it spawns cross cultural factions, all selfishly united to defend it. At no further brainwashing cost to you.
You dare to attack it? You are out. Pack your stuff, and your shame.
Consolation? It would at least provide opportunities to those who always suffered injustice. Yet many who claim their right to a seat don't bother with competence.
It works, because the goal isn't more talents, we never lacked them: it's to pressure the overall labor cost.
One faction, whether we adhere to its other political views or not, hating DEI doesn't disprove the mechanism. The other factions still defend it selfishly. That's exactly why it holds.
Please don't export US labour and safety standards. The amount of paid time off is hard to argue is not unethical, the conflation of vacation time and sick time clearly is unethical, the amount of parental leave (especially maternity) is a crime against humanity. The firing procedures are also something you'd expect to read about in a history book besides a picture of a child visibly yearning for the coal mines, contracts with a mutual resignation period giving both parties adequate time to transition is a bare minimum. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Please please America spend serious efforts developing your labour standards to a humane level instead of exporting them.
Abolishing restricted borders, collectively would push the logic to its final destination. Such sweat shops exist because humans are confined.
Cross border inspectors is mostly PR theater. Even if it was feasible, local verticals spill into others, so it would always be lower costs in less developed/regulated nations.
That's essentially colonialism. You can't go into other countries and change their labour laws, it's a violation of their sovereignty. Obviously there's a huge problem with uneven development across the world that makes outsourcing possible and difficult for workers in the developed world, but I'm not sure such a solution would be politically feasible.
Don't be embarrassed. Most don't see it, because the moral framing blocks economic analysis.
As for learning Hindi, it may help. But don't make the mistake of confusing cultural diversity with competence uniqueness. One expands the number or silos in the labor pool. The other justifies better pay.
My thinking was, the goal of "diversity" is to have people reject their cultural backgrounds and form a shapeless blob that absorbs commands more easily and resists less. Basically "divide and conquer" applied to workplace.
Studying Hindi has felt very rewarding to me, and it impresses people disproportionately to my actual skill, but I don't feel it has affected my ability to communicate with coworkers whatsoever.
lol that depends. If they are mostly from South India, learning Hindi might not move the needle as much. Might want to pick up some Kannada, Telugu and/or Tamil. Would be pretty cool for trying, and it’ll probably make your outlook favorable
In the bay area, I've met relatively few NRIs who don't know Hindi well, even if it's not their first language. Most of them that I've met are not even Kannadiga, Mallu, Telugu, or especially not Tamil. Sample size of at least several dozen.
The way you can phrase it: you may jsut get people that are happy to do a good job for the pay they get. In many areas your typical white/cis/hetero/neurotypical male is not present, because you cannot get the maximum reward for their well-trained ego. I think diversity/pay is pretty munch confounded for plausible reasons.
That's saying the white/cis/hetero male is absent because ego demands more reward. Exactly. Diversity fills that gap at lower cost. That's my point, or a counter?
The scheme's motive is the overall effect. Lower wages. It doesn't care about white hetero, or black trans who happen to participate in paralympics.
I was a contractor at Cisco as the only non-indian in my group. But, I think the entire floor (100+ people) was Indian except for me. I'd always heard of "toxic work environments" but was pretty dismissive, until working at Cisco. I never knew people could bring high school bullying, manipulation into a supposed professional workplace.
When tech companies lay off large amounts of workers like this, they often immediately replace them with H1Bs. These layoffs are almost always cost-cutting measures, not caused by lack of work - the work is still there and still has to be done, they just don't want to pay expensive white people to do it.
If a company is set on hiring foreign workers who will work for less than Americans and we don't let them bring them over here, won't they just offshore instead? I don't ask this to be contrarian but more to wonder how to combat it.
By penalizing offshoring. I don't say this as a particularly nationalistic person either. All companies in all countries should be heavily incentivized to hire local labor and sell to the local market. Globalization is extremely beneficial of course but the various side effects need to be managed.
An offshored worker is already much cheaper than an H1B worker, I would expect any easy substitutions along those lines to already be performed. Probably some effect on the margins, but I would doubt it outweighs the primary effect.
(Of course, it would be a problem if you think H1Bs are for hiring people who cannot be found domestically, but it does not seem like many people think that these days.)
This. Once Indians get in, they hire other Indians only. It is a disgrace. They are here in Sweden too studying for masters, terrible. They should be barred from EU honestly... sadly we just did a trade agreement...
As I understand it, the fee doesn't apply in many situations and is fairly easy to work around. Apparently it was neutered immediately after being announced.
You know the FCC is going to do this and still be completely unable to stop spam calls. You're going to get all of the drawbacks and none of the benefits.
Indeed Costco is a very practical store. You can trust most of the food to taste good because they test it first, vs a throw everything at the wall and see what sticks approach to a standard grocery store. Trader Joe's is is probably the best in this regard.
The return policy also takes away a lot of concern. If you don't like it you can easily just take it back without any hassle.
Costco is such a family friendly place. My kids love going there.
They've made some deliberate decisions to make it family friendly:
1. The aisles are wide so the whole family can walk through the store together.
2. The kids love free samples
3. The food court is a great place to have an inexepensive dinner.
4. The store is designed so there's nothing really to grab at ground level if you're a little kid. Everything is up higher.
Contrast this with a standard grocery store: small aisles and tons of little things on the shelf at ground level (including random toys) that can get grabbed or knocked over. Every time I take my family to Albertsons I have to pick a dozen things off the ground that we accidentally knocked off.
I feel compelled to add that we took our toddler to Costco after daycare today. He had his slice of pizza, I got my guacamole and gluten-free, high protein Magic Spoon cereal. Somehow we spent $500. Everyone left happy and thoroughly exhausted.
Once or twice a year I have a chance to go to costco in the middle of a work day and I'm absolutely blown away at how busy the place is at that time. People everywhere young and old, even kids! Long lines and nobody is rushed.
I want to live like Costco people because apparently they don't work in the middle of the day!
For several years I worked the weekend night shift. This left me with 4 free days each week to do whatever. I thought this put me on the fridges of society to some respect, and I would constantly wonder what all these people were out doing all day and why weren't they at work.
I think the same thing when a majority of businesses are primarily open 9-5 when they are consumer facing. I have to assume most consumers need hours on evenings and weekends, but I guess it all works out.
I suppose a decent number of people work on the weekend have have varying days off during the week and there are those who don't work for one reason or another (retirees, people with disabilities, single-income homes with more than a single person, vacation days, etc). I guess that all adds up.
As if anything in the executive branch of the US still works properly.
Isn't the FBI already raiding the homes of political opponents for intimidation?
The famed US constitution with all its 'checks and balances' they would never shut up about turned out to be papier mâché and completely trampled by the first person that tried.
> The famed US constitution with all its 'checks and balances' they would never shut up about turned out to be papier mâché and completely trampled by the first person that tried.
If we're being completely honest, the checks and balances in the constitution ended within the first decade. They were only designed to work in the case that the three branches of government were truly separate and adversarial with one another.
The creation of political parties largely eliminated them, both because they cross-cut branches and because the first-past-the-post, winner-take-all electoral system virtually guaranteed the parties would have nearly even representation most of the time.
That it's greatest likelihood of collapse comes between 236 and 243 years later (depending on whether you count from the end of the revolutionary war or ratification of the constitution) is a goddamn miracle.
I dont think the problem is parties by themselves. I think it's more the fact that the US system cannot accomodate more than 2 parties.
Plenty of other democracies have parties, including cross government branches.
What makes the US unique, and fragile, is that no party other than democrats and republicans can realistically exist.
It over emphasizes partisanship above anything (including honesty, morality) because career politicians in one party just have nowhere to go if they are dissident.
You can see that in plain sight currently, with republicans being in the total incapacity of contradicting their party line on anything, even the most obvious of lies.
In most other democracies, dissidents would have just created a new party and moved on, that wouldnt be "carrier ending" for them.
reply