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Comment by gragas | Hacker News Reader

>I assure you, most american-born students get a free pass in stanford/berkeley/CMU if you pit them against a foreign-born.

You have no idea what you're talking about. I have first hand experience with this and Americans don't "get a free pass" by any means.

Also, what about black people and hispanic people? Are they the lowest earners in America by far because they "don't want to make $$"? According to common consensus, it's okay to just pin it all on white people and call it "systemic racism". But when Indians miraculously make the highest median income by far, it's because they "want $$" more than other cultures? You are so out of touch with reality it's unbelievable. I can say without a doubt in my mind that there is enormous cronyism and nepotism going on in the US.

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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14145034 and marked it off-topic.

It is not a miracle. Indians immigrating to US are more educated than the general US population [1] (40.6% have graduate degree, 32.3% have bachelor's).

Have you also thought about why Indian American kids win spelling bee's or Jews win Nobel Prize disproportionately when compared to their population?

Comparing Indians or Asians to blacks is not fair. They are mostly recent immigrants (except few brought in as labourers) and did not have to suffer through the horrors of slavery which left blacks with broken family structure and other things (It is complex, like housing seggregation where the black neighbourhoods did not increase in wealth when compared to white neighbourhoods, criminal justice system)

[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/30/5-facts-abou...

So, this is a topic I've very passionate about. I work quite of few H1Bs. Most of them have Masters degrees from India. The QA team is 80% H1Bs, all with Masters degrees from India. Of the 8 QA engineers, only 1 writes code. The others did do some programming when they got their undergrad and graduate degrees in India, but for some reason, none of the 7 write code. None, zero. Can't even get them to press the F12 key, look at the details of a failed request, and add it to the bug. To me this says three things, either the schools in India are horrible, there is lots of cheating going on, or lack of passion in a chosen career renders all advance degrees to null.

So, you do realize that Indians have been coming to the USA for a long time? You do realize that there were pioneers from India in the USA that fought for rights that you are just dismiss as trivial. Here, read something - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Bhagat_Singh_...

Lastly just because someone has more degrees doesn't make them smarter or more intelligent.

I said most Indians are recent immigrants (not all). I cared about most Indians because when you are speaking about median income it is the most that matters not outliers. How is the Bhagat Singh case is anyway related to when you are speaking about median income?

I did not say more degrees makes you smarter but there is a direct correlation between education and income. That was the point being discussed

> Have you also thought about why Indian American kids win spelling bee's

Because their parents and education system still focus on rote learning, we moved on from that waste of time decades ago.

Asians are good at Math than Americans. Is that rote learning too ?

> we moved on from that waste of time decades ago.

No wonder Asians are taking over.

You'll have to be more specific. Quite a lot of what schools consider math is rote learning, from time tables in early years to forumalas in later ones.

I'm genuinely curious to know what you are implying here. Indians in the US are making highest median income because of some kind of racism/cronyism favoring them? I always thought it's because a significant percentage (not all) who immigrate are at the top already

Or a combination of both. It is something I've noticed, companies with indians doing the hiring end up with a lot of indians, companies with chinese doing the hiring end up with a lot of chinese. It's rare to find indians in a chinese software shop and vise versa.

White people don't have a monopoly on racism.

I never said white people have monopoly on racism. Like your ancedata, my experience with white people have been completely unracist, very welcoming and acknowledging talent. Believe me, I've seen indian racism first hand back home, and it's as ugly as it can get. "Racism", somehow, seems to be hardwired in humans, given its prevalence.

Also, ancedata, I've seen engineering departments evenly split between Indian and Chinese, marketing and sales mostly towards Caucasian.

So, my two cents. Individuals enjoy working with other Individuals from similar backgrounds. I worked for a very well know software company on the west coast for 15 years. In that company, there were groups you didn't interview in, because they were controlled by the "Indian Mafia". There weren't any teams of all native born Americans. There were a lot of teams of just men, but that changed a lot towards the last few years in the company. In my current job, I was asked to sit in some interviews by lead/mid-level engineers. The lead engineer couldn't make it to the interview, not sure why. One of the engineers started by asking what the candidates immigration status was. The candidate said they were a GC. The engineer said, we don't need to continue this interview, we only want H1Bs. Of course in my 20+ years, I had never actually witnessed someone asking a question that could end up as a lawsuit. Of course I let HR know and they barred that engineer from conducting interviews. But it took the HR about six months to realize that the interviewers were looking for any reason to reject anyone not H1B from India. They barred them all from interviewing and made it so that HR could over rule any rejected candidate. Most of other companies I had been at, this would have been grounds for immediate dismissal.

Looking at the distribution of h1b's from the Asian subcontinent it would be interesting to break it down by caste.

Maybe Caste needs to be added to the protected classes as we did in the UK I know one of the MP's that was involved in this

> I can say without a doubt in my mind that there is enormous cronyism and nepotism going on in the US.

And do you have any evidence that is more than anecdotal?

FWIW (not much) I am finishing up a CS PhD, and there are many Indian students in our grad department, and many Chinese in undergrad. Haven't seen much favoritism towards these groups at either grad or undergrad (by my observations TAing) over the 5 years I've been here.

It's crazy to me that not only you think there is epidemic cronyism, but that you also have "no doubt" about your beliefs...

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