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Comment by kinkrtyavimoodh | Hacker News Reader

> to Indian low level contractors

So this style of casual racism / xenophobia is ok if directed at approved targets?

Pretty sure if it happened to be 6 African American individuals who were indicted it would not be acceptable to say "Don't outsource your work to low-level Black contractors".

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Consider that the US DOJ has no authority to investigate, arrest or prosecute in India, India being a sovereign independent state.

Also,

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

>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

What a good rule to live ones life by!

Many examples can be hiddenly loaded, not well-constructed rule

> Pretty sure if it happened to be 6 African American individuals who were indicted it would not be acceptable to say "Don't outsource your work to low-level Black contractors".

Notice the word in italics? The US would still have jurisdiction.

GovCloud is also not allowed to be administered by Indians but is allowed to be run by Indian Americans. It can’t be run by people from Great Britain either.

The difference is that people from other countries are generally not subject to US jurisdiction. Certainly the deterrence effect from stories like this is far larger for US based employees and contractors than foreign ones.

It's not xenophobic to prefer US employees for sensitive positions of trust, where the rule of US law is relevant.

So it'd be okay to say it for contractors in Africa, who are black and who are also not under US jurisdiction?

If a company was outsourcing critical business logic to, say, Nigeria, I would absolutely criticize them for that. The color would have nothing to do with it.

Yes, generally putting critical access in the hands of foreign contractors, especially in third world or developing countries is a terrible idea. It has nothing to do with race. If you outsource to white Russian contractors in Russia you could be just as fucked.

Except the fact that Amazon's office in Hyderabad India is the their largest in the world [1]. We are not talking about contractors - they are employees like any in their Seattle one, many actually do relocate back from US to India office.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/25/business/amazon-hyderabad...

I think the implication is that someone poorly paid and lightly supervised is more susceptible to bribery. Whether they are a contractor or full employee, or the color of their skin, is irrelevant. I personally doubt pay makes a difference, either you have integrity or you do not.

All in all, this is very embarrassing for Amazon.

Correct, and if a US political party outsources their IT management to white folks overseas in eastern Europe (outside of EU) / Russia or former Russian states where US law does not apply they'd be equally idiotic.

Yeah I think that would be fine, ignoring the fact that Africa isn't a country and India is. American isn't a race, and neither is Indian.

The point was that the two Amazon employees were citizens of India and took the bribes in India, so they were outside US jurisdiction.

Than why not say 'in India', instead of 'Indian'? There are many Indian people living and working in the US, with US citizenship. Conversely, if they had been US citizens ('Americans') living in India, the legal problem may have been similar.

Saying 'low-level Indian contractors' brings to mind a specific, at least somewhat xenophobic, image,and is very often used very casually.

Well said. There are Indians under US jurisdiction. It is painful to see people contorting themselves to defend xenophobia and casual racism.

Legally speaking, US citizens would still be liable.

The vast majority of people living on India are Indian, no?

Almost everyone living in India is Indian, but not all Indians live in India.

But if I were a betting man, I'd wager that the vast majority of Indians in the world do live in India, based purely on the population total of India.

True. But most of the people commenting here in this thread are not from India, so most of the Indians we interact with are probably not in India.

You seem to have assumed that the poster is talking about ethnicity or heritage rather than citizenship or geographical location.

One of the things that I like about HN over (say) Reddit is the guidelines for comments work pretty well. I’m particularly thinking of “Assume good faith.” - absent any other evidence, it’s better to assume that other posters are not racist assholes if you’re not sure if someone is talking about citizenship versus ethnicity.

Referring (india, a country not a color) to Issues relating to doing business/relying on decisions via work takin plce in a country other than the one where the business and its customers are is a bit different than ‘black’

Credible research suggests that levels of honesty differ across countries:

Gächter, S. and Schulz, J.F., 2016. Intrinsic honesty and the prevalence of rule violations across societies. Nature, 531(7595), pp.496-499. Hugh-Jones, D., 2016. Honesty, beliefs about honesty, and economic growth in 15 countries. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 127, pp.99-114.

NB: I'm the author of the latter.

This doesn't have to imply racism, there are numerous reasons why people might behave differently in different environments. Different culture, different institutional incentives, a different economic environment....

I assume it would be perfectly fine if they directed these kinds of decisions to Indian high level FTE’s. The problem here is not that they’re Indian :P

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