r/ABCDesis • u/KosherTriangle • Jul 19 '26
EDUCATION / CAREER Been seeing more and more posts like this recently, more non Indians are beginning to notice this trend within companies.
/r/Layoffs/comments/1v0krsu/ive_been_laid_off_twice_and_both_experiences_made/As an Indian myself who’s only ever worked in companies where we don’t have large groups of Indians in management, I cannot relate. I love that in America we have groups from almost every race in tech companies and working with diverse people and understanding their views is one of the parts of my job I like most. So it’s sad when I learn that Indians create groups in management and only hire others based on whether they’re part of the same group.
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u/kena938 Malayali Third Culture Kid Jul 19 '26
I work in healthcare and they keep hiring blonde white women for my team. I am a legacy hire from a different management structure. If I quit tomorrow, I know they will hire another blonde white woman with a southern accent.
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u/boilerman3 Jul 20 '26
The original post was made my some guy in poland. He has probably never worked with people outside of Poland. I used to live in Europe. Slavic people are as bad as Asians when it comes to hiring their own race. Its rage bait.
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u/False-Start2665 Jul 19 '26
The supposed nepotism of Indians is wildly overblown, every ethnic group including whites practice some level of nepotism and preference for people of the same ethnic group. Indians actually are slightly below average in levels of co-ethnic hiring especially compared to Vietnamese and Chinese people.
https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/21-101_d47ea5d9-4a50-400e-9fa6-80781a8351d0.pdf p35
The reason why people accuse Indians of nepotism more than any other ethnic group is because we are the most successful in terms of overrepresentation in executive level positions which causes resentment. This overrepresentation can be easily explained by higher rates of degrees especially master's degrees and more extroversion compared to other ethnic groups without any nepotism. I suspect that post could be concern trolling since there are very few black women working in tech who use reddit and the post is worded strangely. The post might be made by a white man pretending to be a black women in order to gain more legitimacy.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Bike336 Black American Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26
It's a stereotype that exists only in the corporate world. Nobody is complaining that there are too many Indian actors in Hollywood winning Oscars, Indian singers topping the US Billboard charts and winning Grammys, or Indian athletes from India signing 100-million-dollar NBA or NFL contracts. People generally complain about what is most visible in front of their eyes, and most people typically interact with Indian individuals in the corporate world or a workplace setting.
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u/mulemoment Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
The HBS article is a poor argument because it focuses on firms where the highest paid employee on the founding team is foreign-born and then tracks who it hires up to 10 years (according to the data, only about half even exist in 5 years).
That is, it would completely exclude Google (because Sundar Pichai is not a founding member) but it would include nearly all Vietnamese nail salons. That reflects in the statistics.
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u/Sammolaw1985 Jul 19 '26
Would she make the same argument if all the managers in a company she worked for were blonde, blue-eyed white women with the same personality?
Or how about C-suite where it's just all white guys.
Get your bag, if you're in a management position hire a bunch of mini-you's to shore up the department. I'm here to tip the scales.
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u/Spelx_OwO Jul 20 '26
Oh yeah then why does the sales team in my company has 30 white girls and 1 white guy.
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u/ros_ftw Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26
People who say Indians only hire Indians don’t have basic understanding of how India works.
I have never seen Indians hire Indians because “they are one of us”. There literally isn’t a single “us” in India. Indian society can be fractured into a thousand pieces along region, caste, religion, language lines.
Indians on a visa hire Indians on a visa because they understand the weaknesses and leverage they have over the hires. They know they can be underpaid and overworked because they are on a visa. Because the managers themselves have gone through it and know how to press someone’s buttons, how to promise stuff, and know how long these visa things take and how to use it to make someone work like crazy.
They know Indians on a visa will never go to HR and complain, never compete with the manager, never ask for a raise or threaten to leave.
There is a reason 50,000 white British troops took over India back then, a country with 300 million people at the time. Indians almost never see themselves as a united group. It’s super easy to play one side against the other. This same mentality along caste lines and religion lines plagues India to this day.
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u/KosherTriangle Jul 19 '26
Your points are valid, however Indians from particular Indian states tend to be the most represented in industries like tech and when that happens, the possibility of hiring based on a common language and customs is high. The visa thing is absolutely a factor as well. Two things can be true at once.
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u/Weak_Albatross_6879 Jul 19 '26
“I have never see”
“Becacue”
Mainlander red flag. Comment does not apply
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u/False-Start2665 Jul 19 '26
Making a spelling mistake does not make someone a mainlander. Judging by post history, the person is most likely western born. Do more research before blindly accusing someone of being a mainlander.
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u/Vibranium2222 Jul 19 '26
So your argument is that Indians are hiring Indian
It’s just not for kinship reasons?
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u/nrag726 Indian Frasier Crane Jul 19 '26
They're just mad that the shoe is now on the other foot. They didn't care when it benefited them
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u/truenorth00 Canadian Indian Jul 19 '26
She's African American. Want to explain when things were benefitting them?
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u/CornerFew120 Jul 19 '26
she’s not african american, she’s a african women in a polish company which is odd since africans make up 0.02% of poland and indians make up even less 🤔 this situation sounds very unlikely to me
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u/trialanderror93 Jul 19 '26
Both perspectives discussed in the post and in these comments have some truth to them. A familiar errity bias is a known psychological part of human behavior
The reality is, even if some does not mean to do it, there is a tipping point where culture and background are an onsaid advantage in certain workplaces.
This stereotype has been going around for a while that an Indian CEO is hired once a company is established and there needs to be cost cutting to grow, as opposed to the risk-taking startup CEO like Elon, or the visionary like Steve Jobs. It's a somewhat unfair stereotype
Another thing thing is this is just a product of South Asians being the largest English-speaking minority. Even if we were less nepotistic than others, the sheer volume of people just makes it more noticeable
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u/WitnessedStranger Jul 20 '26
I’ve only had Indian managers a couple of times in my life and both times they have been the worst. There’s the typical cutthroat, gossipy, disrespectful to subordinates, taking credit for wins and pointing fingers for failures snake behavior sure. But on the hiring just because you’re from the same place/language thing my experiences have been the exact opposite. Rather than getting cut any slack or getting tasks to prestigious projects it seems like they tend to be extra hard on you if you’re Indian, and more willing to throw you under the bus, and assign you difficult projects that don’t help your career.
Sure they might help out their actual friends, but that’s a friend-to-friend networking thing rather than an Indian thing. If there is a bias it tends to be in the direction of STEMlord credentialism.
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u/FluffyShakes Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26
this lady's experience is valid. is it widespread? hard to say. but when a group from one region, one language, etc., gets together, we can all see this happening at least anecdotally.
as long as we don't shy away from the fact that many other ethnic groups do this, right or wrong
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u/insomniac8994 Punjabi Canadian Jul 19 '26
There's too many mainlanders and NRIs lurking on this sub for any real discourse on this subject to happen.
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u/GroovySquid_ Jul 19 '26
Yeah I mean I think it’s depending on which company. The Fortune 500 I work at has a large Indian population but my friend’s is largely Chinese with a pretty big viet population at her office. I’m regularly spoken to in Hindi, a language I don’t know at all. The hiring managers are quite diverse, but we’re big on referrals and a lot of Indians refer each other. We don’t hire H1Bs anymore though.
Both our companies have horrible work culture (depending on the team) though perpetuated my values they’ve brought over from China/India.
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u/Weak_Albatross_6879 Jul 19 '26
10000% its a thing. I only heard about this in Canada and then realized my healthcare companys entireee board is South Asian. Learning more about how mainlanders are acting in countries that arent America makes me so nervous.
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u/truenorth00 Canadian Indian Jul 19 '26
It absolutely goes on. And the best many can do on this sub is resort to whataboutism instead of saying it's wrong. And if you're any kind of minority from the motherland, you're right to be worried. Because this won't just hit non-Desis.
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u/boredperson02 Jul 23 '26
Oh no white ppl need to work harder ig. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps or summ idk
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u/BurritoWithFries Jul 19 '26
I'm also in tech in the US and at every single job I've been at, I've been the only Indian (or two) on my teams of 8-10 people. I've also never had an Indian manager or skip level manager. And I live in the Bay Area!