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

Any sources for this? The lack of certain complex features (eg. gendered words) does make it seem true, but English borrows from a lot of sources and is very inconsistent.

A comparison I like to make is that Japanese is one of the simplest to pronounce languages. If you learn the kana, you essentially learn all of the phonemes (there's a bit more nuance).

I'd like to know what the simplest languages are on each dimension : pronunciation (has to be Japanese), grammar, overall consistency, vocabulary complexity, writing, etc.

It would be awesome if we gradually evolved English to be easier to learn, such as in [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...

Or what are the other "Latin based languages" that you are comparing it to?

Do you know anything about India or are you merely talking out of your ass? This is patently false—nearly all documents are in three languages: English, Hindi and the state’s local language.

It's not a Latin-based language (French, Italian, Spanish etc are Latin-based languages).

It's not clear how you measure simplicity, but, in terms of phonetics, English is quite the nightmare as the link between the spelling and the pronunciation is often determined by the history of the word, rather than by a clear set of phonetical rules.

So, at least by that measure, English is far from being the simplest.

What? At this point I think you are troll account. You have already made wild and ridiculous statements like caste system being a form of "systemic slavery" in India. Now you are saying that only a "small percentage" of Indians speak English? Are you serious mate? English is the official language of India for literally everything. From giving exams to Government communications.

> Only a small percentage of Indians speak English and most statistics on it are heavily inflated

Where is the data for this?

> It's not Singapore or even close to it in English proficency trying to claim it is, is a lie.

And where do you get this data from?

I don't know if he's being racist or not. But the claim they can't speak english is not uncommon. I don't know what they are like in America or UK, but having worked with many while living in Singapore, I think they can speak english, but pronunciation is difficult.

> Singaporean English

I wasn't referring to Singaporean Indian speaking English, but can see how that it may have come across as that. The company I worked for in SG, all the devs were on EP, so their English was learnt in India.

Only to people who judge competence based on diction.

Yes, it has been used on HN as a bludgeon but the reality is a little different!

Yes, the ancient caste system still exists in India. But today it is only relevant when it comes to politics and marriage. Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/opinion/sunday/caste-is-no...

Thank you for your suggestion :-) Can you show where this specific point: "...and those whealty families have been raised to treat people from lower caste poorly" is made in his (we are assuming it's a he, aren't we? how bad of us) comment?

Refusal to do obvious time saving tasks when instructed to would probably put you on the “does not meet” list next review cycle.

Imagine if I were a minority doctor who benefited from this, my patients will always wonder if I'm less-than. Nobody wants to go to a cardiologist that was bottom of their class, so why instill that doubt and call it a leg up?

You do not date X bc you prefer Y (higher value). You do it with everything... we do it. It is just how things are... that you choose one over the other makes the other the not chosen side of the thing. So yes, in some way you can see that as discrimination (even if we do not give it political meaning, it is still)

Moreover, if one woman was discriminated against, you can't make up for it by hiring a different woman in some other job because humans aren't fungible.

Any data to show this is happening? From what I have seen, the primary benefactors of diversity initiatives come from the upper crusts of society(mostly upperclass white women, white lgbt, and some asian sprinkled in).

I have yet to see a diversity report that bins by intersections instead of broad categories. There's a reason for it.

I think there are additional externalities that need to be considered. For example, some of these discriminatory policies are going to cause strife, hate, and resentment, etc. in the people who need to be discriminated against. I think there may be unintended consequences that we're only beginning to see.

Discrimination causes problems that can take a long time to emerge and a long time to address. We're STILL seeing the effects of this on many minority groups - but the solution IMO isn't to do it all over again.

It feels BAD to be discriminated against.

As a migrant from dirt poor family from ex-Soviet Republic, I seem to forgot to collect my generational merit, where and when can I do that? And can I add it to my own merit?

Counter that by providing less privileged people with more opportunities, not by changing the definitions of merit.

It's basically impossible for anyone to become a chess grandmaster without exposure to competitive chess when you're less than 10. This obviously favors the children of the well off, but you can't deny that these children end up being better at chess.

The same goes for education in general. If elite preparatory schools didn't offer a better education than public schools, nobody would pay for them. You shouldn't use their doing better on standardized tests as an indictment on standardized tests because they're genuinely better educated. Asians tend to have the highest SAT scores of all races, and they're the least likely to drop out. Black people tend to have the lowest SAT scores, and they're also the most likely to drop out. This is a sign that the SAT is a good metric. Yet, the far left frames this two examples of racism: that both the SAT and colleges themselves are systemically racist.

By principle, I actually am in favor of affirmative action, but I'm tired of all the anti-merit rhetoric used to justify it.

But it's not. It's being applied with the same level of knee-jerk emotional reaction and sloppiness of classic "I don't like people of skin color x" racial prejudice - which is what it is.

The theory that you're describing is quite different from what is being applied in the real world.

Rather than fight to make the system equal and fair, you favour tilting it in your direction assuming it will never tilt the other way?

In Norway years back they promoted a program for women to study engineering disciplines. They increased a lot.

So at some point they thought they could stop doing it and percentages came back to where they were before after some time I recall.

If it was a cultural thing... they would have stayed. On the way u had discrimination by sex (AFAIK men were not paid for choosing engineering and women were paid FOR choosing, a privilege under any circumstance since noone forbid them to choose that).

All in all what happened is that some ppl saw a chance (incentive) in dtudying cheaper or whatever. But was the real reason to choose those degrees bc they really liked it?

I really think promoting good stuff is nice. But distorting it via positive discrimination is not the solution.

it is nothing like that for 3 reasons

1. first and foremost the "white only" schools was legally required segregation, it was imposed by law and the elimination of that required law to reverse. These laws have now been absent for decades

2. Primary education is where this battle should be fought, even today there are still battle that need to be fought when it come to resource alloation, school choice, etc. You do not attempt to fix a bad casting after the poor you need to fix the mold.... We do that by fixing primary education which is being used by various political factions on both the left and the right to push political agenda and not education.

3. Once we get to adulthood, using discrimination to "fix" historic discrimination will not resolve the underlying problem (see #2) and will likely create more discrimination against the very groups you are attempting to assist, it is in all cases a general net negative.

The “oddball” feeling is also very real in profession where a single gender represent over 80%. It was one of the finding in a government report in Sweden why so few men chooses to enter the education profession. With a majority of people working in profession with significant gender imbalance, universal affirmative action would help to reduce the problem of people perceiving a toxic working environment. A universal problem should be solved using universal methods.

For normalizing, there is two primary strategic methods. You can treat people special as with affirmative action, or you can treat people being there as being normal by treating people as individuals. Both methods works, but they also work against each other. Treating people as special create hostility and resentment, while treating everyone as individuals has the risk being perceived as supporting statues quo.

And yes, we can start at the top. Affirmative action at college applications is not the same as affirmative action at board members. Affirmative action should be universally applied using common rules, but that is sadly not how it get applied. The few times people try to make common rules for affirmative action it get abandoned quickly because the wrong group benefited from it, or it get removed based on anti-discrimination laws.

Moreover, while I believe that diversity is a benefit, I suspect returns diminish beyond 5-10% (beyond that, it's no longer "wow, a career woman! I've never seen that before!"--similarly, a team that is 50% black is probably not going to produce a facial recognition product that is 40% better than the team that is only 10% black, although the team that is 0-5% black may well make a product that performs poorly on black faces).

> The most powerful force for gay acceptance was Will and Grace because it was primetime gay people just being there and it being normal.

I'm not sure this is true; I think it's mostly just that "gays are harmful" was a really hard position to support, and the gay rights movement didn't try to bash their opponents over the head (they weren't trying to cancel people for questioning dubious narratives, for example).

> Last, resume vs resume can be apples and oranges because it cannot account for their path to that. Was there significant harassment, discrimination and other social tribulations to earning whats on the sheet of paper? The stronger candidate may have unseen potential because of the social barriers they had to climb.

You can't assume someone had greater social barriers based on race or gender. What is true for a large, diverse group of people (like a race or a gender) is often not true for individuals. This is just stereotyping.

What this does is distribute the injustice evenly between the races, but this sort of concern about races (rather than the individuals that comprise them) strikes me as the very essence of racism: it's treating individuals within a race as unimportant and treating race itself as all-important.

> As a population however, you can tell that it occurs. People within these groups get no benefit of the doubt. They will have to overachieve to get the same opportunities as others.

We can tell that it occurs, but we can't even accurately measure the degree to which it occurs. Our discourse generally just assumes that the degree of disparity is the degree of discrimination on the really, really awful assumption that disparities can only be caused by discrimination.

You can look at who buys military history books vs romance novels on amazon (something that's a far more voluntary, personal choice than a job which has financial and local incentives). From that you wouldn't be surprised men are far more likely to want to be in the military.

It's funny what society selectively decides to deem controversial and important to change, while ignoring the million other ways that same phenomenon exists uncontroversially everywhere else in society.

I don't think people care that women aren't interested in technology, they just want to see more women with x popular good paying jobs, then blame the industry for it as if there's some giant conspiracy to not hire them.

> Arcidiacono shows that, after narrowing down applicants to those with the strongest objective academic qualifications, Asian Americans were far more likely than blacks or Hispanics to receive a low personality score from admissions officers.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/06/harvar...

So we know for a fact that Asians received lower "personality" scores than blacks and hispanics, as a racial group and regardless of their financial status, and these lower "personality" scores were used as a basis to reject Asians and accept black and hispanic candidates.

TL;DR we know for a fact this exact thing is happening.

https://nypost.com/2022/09/10/affirmative-action-hurts-asian...

How confident you are that you are not the ignorant one.

You are not in a position to impose it on the rest of us.

See some of the comments of human fungibility and realize that it may be a matter of perspective and that neither of you really are "wrong", "right", "good", "bad" or have an objectively higher ground.

If that makes you feel gross then you’ll just have to deal with it I guess.

Although I don’t think any country should be obligated to take in foreigners if their situation doesn’t warrant it (such as being a small island nation).

Or do you mean, it makes sense that they are the way they are? I agree.

Still, the board of Mitsubishi is perfectly reflective of the Japanese population (ignoring the gender ratio, which isn't great but in line with the global average for boards of directors)

Ah yes, thank you HN comments.