[HN Gopher] Ask HN: One team lead always builds a monoethnic tea...
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: One team lead always builds a monoethnic team - what to do?
Have you experienced people trying to always build / maintain
monoethnic teams? How do you approach this problem and how do you
even talk about it? This is very specific to my EU/Singapore
experience so I am not sure how big of a problem this is in the
US/North America. Even though the working language is english
there's usually teams where one person decides to always hire
people of his ethnicity or people that speak a specific language.
Meetings with such team is always awkward as they internally
discuss the topic in their own language during the meeting. Also
their hiring practices are essentially discriminatory.
Author : mathverse
Score : 35 points
Date : 2022-07-17 13:25 UTC (9 hours ago)
| aristofun wrote:
| What exactly is wrong with that?
|
| As long as the team works good, doesn't do any harm, doesn't
| break any laws, doesn't hurt other teams performance etc.
|
| I am really trying to understand.
|
| Instead of downvoting, please explain to me what is wrong with
| people tending to work with other people whose language and
| mentality they understand better (with best intentions in mind)?
| mplewis wrote:
| If you only work with people who are like you, you will only
| ever build products suited for people like you.
|
| Plus, you're clearly missing lots of good candidates if you let
| your implicit bias primarily select for people who look like
| you.
| cudgy wrote:
| This sounds nice, but without defining what "people like you"
| means, it's meaningless. Is the criteria class, race,
| religion, consumer behavior, geographical location,
| educational background, work ethic, experience level,
| proficiency level with tools, or a multitude of other
| criteria? Furthermore, measurement of some of these criteria
| is difficult and in some cases illegal.
|
| Ignoring the complexities in people and simply focusing on
| race and ethnicity is short-sighted and likely to do more
| harm than good.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| it is a system of thinking that was developed in response to
| ethnic division historically. In the United States, a series of
| Federal laws were enacted in the last one hundred years to make
| discrimination based on attributes, in the workplace,
| explicitly illegal. Some argue that these tests are themselves,
| a form of discrimination. Meanwhile, humans of every skin color
| or religion continue to make, build, do and socialize at
| remarkable levels.
|
| A legal system of oversight has to deal with problematic
| behavior, yet external attributes never tell the whole story of
| human interactions and productivity.
| aristofun wrote:
| Does it essentially mean that hiring managers can't possibly
| have preferences toward certain professional qualities and
| features?
|
| And shared language or cultural background being one of such
| features crucial for team cohesion and communication?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| there is no answer without the company, the legal
| obligations in your country and city, the existing team and
| their expectations, your leadership and their expectations,
| and your trade-offs between best performers, pay scale,
| availability, risk, internal culture and timeline, at
| least.
|
| The whole collection there results in "a priori"
| conditions, legal Latin .. meaning "what has come before"
| fleetwoodsnack wrote:
| These are a priori questions: theoretical and naive.
|
| If you're sincere about wanting an answer to your question,
| we in the United Stated have more or less forfeited the
| argument that we're capable of discrimination without harm
| based on our historical treatment of minorities.
|
| Now, I know the instinct is to launch into more a priori
| questioning, but for every "what about..." or "if only..."
| there's a historical counterpoint that shows how we (the
| United States), were not able to fulfill those theoretical
| promises or ambitions.
|
| I have some time today, so if you'd like me to trawl the
| archives, I can probably do some historical resurfacing for
| the benefit of this thread some counter examples to the
| idealized forms of harm-free discrimination, for more than
| just laughs.
| aristofun wrote:
| Those were simple practical questions. As a hiring
| manager why can't i give preference to someone sharing
| the same language and cultural background?
|
| Knowing that it will definitely benefit the team
| performance.
| legutierr wrote:
| > As long as the team works good, doesn't do any harm, doesn't
| break any laws, doesn't hurt other teams performance
|
| Discriminating against people of other ethnicities who are
| applying for a job on the team hurts those candidates, surely.
| In the US, doing so would break anti-discrimination laws. And
| if the team is too insular, or if their business is conducted
| in languages that other teams in the company don't speak, then
| other teams' performance will definately be negatively
| impacted. If records--even emails--are written in a language
| other people in the company can't read, that's even worse; it
| can become impossible to audit the team's work, fix things that
| might go wrong, or pick up the pieces if the team breaks up.
|
| Even if the internal effectiveness of a team like this is high,
| that effectiveness is almost certainly outweighed by these
| negative effects.
| aristofun wrote:
| Ive been working in a very successful international company
| where English was an official language of communication.
|
| At the same time there were plenty of teams who used other
| languages within the team for verbal communication when
| possible.
|
| And nobody to my knowledge ever felt discriminated, neither
| there were major issues with performance and team audit.
|
| So your generalization seems theoretical to me. I've know
| multiple teams with near zero negative effects.
| mathverse wrote:
| It's very unlikely that people of that specific nationality are
| always the best candidates for the job. It wastes other
| applicants time, it's discriminatory and creates awkward
| tensions in the company.
|
| You dont find it odd when an indian / filipino / chinese
| manager hires only people of their ethnicity for the team?
| aristofun wrote:
| Being both immigrant and experienced developer myself, I
| would consider each individual case independently.
|
| Knowing how crucial is a team cohesion for any serious effort
| in such a complex area as software engineering - i can
| understand (even if not support as a candidate) this
| preference most of the time.
|
| Guess why -- because the communication side is exactly what
| makes a candidate better for the job than someone else with
| totally different cultural background.
|
| And from my experience it rarely has to do anything with skin
| color, religion or anything outside communication realm
| (otherwise I obviously don't support it).
| flippinburgers wrote:
| So like, the subset of people within an _entire_ nation that
| are programmers (or whatever you are looking for) cannot
| produce a team good enough to get the job done?
|
| The only "issue" here is whether or not the chosen company
| language is being used effectively to communicate between
| teams.
| [deleted]
| indymike wrote:
| > How do you approach this problem and how do you even talk about
| it?
|
| This is one of the few times I'd recommend talking to a senior HR
| person. Ask them if that behavior is a problem, and then if it
| is, tell them about the specifics. If it is not a problem, you
| might want to go work somewhere that values diversity.
| s-lambert wrote:
| If you're talking about the Singapore side of things, is it
| possible that it's not intentional? The working hours for that
| team are likely going to be whatever convenient for the Singapore
| team, so they might only have Singapore locals applying. There
| could be other factors like maybe the pay rate isn't good enough
| for expats in Singapore to apply (assuming they make more than
| the locals).
| wernercd wrote:
| I'd say: What's managements position? are they happy with it?
| unhappy with it? Without support from above? you're screaming at
| the air.
|
| If they have support? Then I would say a restructure should
| happen. People get switched around in teams to start to "balance
| out" the "diversity" so it's not all one ethnicity in a pot.
|
| Second... hiring should happen with multiple inputs. That manager
| is biased? Are all the managers biased? No? Then he doesn't make
| the decision alone anymore. If it's a 3 manager panel that
| decides? 5? and there has to be consensus or majority rules
| votes?
|
| Third... teams in my company come with a maximum size. If the
| team has no more room then new hires go elsewhere. If his team is
| too big? Time to break it up or move some program from his group
| to other groups. Something to "rebalance" the equation.
|
| But really, these are decisions that are generally make or break
| by corporate culture and without buy-in from above? Then there's
| nothing you can do.
| akudha wrote:
| Unless there is some compelling reason (that you haven't shared)
| for you to stay, just leave. Find another job.
|
| Life is too short to put up with shit like this. Or to stay and
| fix the problem. Maybe let them know politely the reason when you
| leave, but that is likely to fall in deaf ears too.
| mathverse wrote:
| I found this to be the norm in EU/Singapore so unfortunately it
| would be very hard to find a company that does not work like
| that.
| twoxproblematic wrote:
| cj wrote:
| As a hiring manager across all departments at a US tech company
| (fully remote), the biggest challenge creating a diverse team is
| a lack of candidates from diverse background/ethnicities/etc.
|
| We're able to balance male/female across most departments without
| overtly favoring one gender over another, but for some reason
| it's different for engineering roles. 95%+ of applicants are
| male, and an overwhelming majority are white.
|
| We try to do things like post and advertise jobs on minority-
| targeted job boards, but still, it's very difficult to find
| minority applicants.
|
| Aside from lowering our hiring standards for minorities, I'm not
| sure what else we could be doing better.
|
| Edit: just to clarify I'm not trying to undermine your concern,
| just raising that it's possible the problem has to do with the
| candidate pipeline rather than overt discrimination. Your
| specific case may be different, of course. Building a diverse
| team is very difficult even when it's made a priority.
| mathverse wrote:
| The US definition of diverse is a bit tricky. I am talking
| about really obvious things as when an indian / filipino /
| chinese manager hires only people of their ethnicity.
|
| Or in case of Europe in an international company where english
| is the working language a team comprised of german / russian /
| french speakers decides to hire only people that speak that
| language.
| cj wrote:
| Thanks for clarifying. In that case it sounds like the
| problem likely isn't a lack of diverse candidates, unless
| your team lead is sourcing candidates and hiring from their
| personal network (the demographics of an individual's
| personal network often heavily "favor", perhaps
| unintentionally, that person's gender/ethnicity/language).
|
| If you're seeing overt discrimination, you may want to
| consider raising it to management anonymously if your company
| is large enough (or non-anonymously if you're accepting that
| there could be a negative knee jerk reaction from others
| hearing your concerns)
| alldayeveryday wrote:
| At a company All Hands our company CEO, while talking about
| diversity, said overtly "we will increase the % of non-
| White males working here. It does not mean we will
| discriminate, but we will hire more people who are not
| White."
|
| So, imagine me going to management and saying "I think
| person X is showing discrimination against White candidates
| in their hiring practice." What would you anticipate the
| outcome of that conversation to be?
| Jcowell wrote:
| Your approaching it from the wrong angle. You need to
| narrow it down that a better qualified candidate was
| passed on for being white. The resume/recruiter stage
| would be the easiest as you have comparable data. But if
| it's at the final stage and both candidates are equally
| qualified, a cultural fit, and can be taken either or,
| then it wouldn't matter since it would be up to the
| hiring managers preference either way.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Piling on to say that yes, this is a real problem. My wife is a
| fantastic engineer and one day her company's recruiter straight
| up told her that she was an absolute outlier and that there's
| almost nobody who ever applies like her. He phrased it very
| poorly, but I think the frustration was the lack of candidates.
|
| Watch out for the flip side, too. One of her biggest fears is
| that she's only gotten jobs because she's a woman and not
| because she's talented. And it kills me that she's better than
| I am in so many ways and still has to live with this fear.
| Fantastic engineer is an understatement to describe her, and
| every company has ended up replying on her in a key role. She's
| worked at multiple YC cos now.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| I have two nieces who are engineers (one robotics, one
| aerospace). They're both young, just starting their careers,
| but it seems clear to me that both are very talented, and
| certainly very conscientious hard workers.
|
| It really bugs me that they'll always have this asterisk on
| their careers. Regardless of what they achieve, there will
| always be that footnote saying "but they got special
| advantages because they were women". Even if they didn't need
| those special advantages, they were there, and so the two of
| them will always have to wonder how much of their
| accomplishments are truly their own.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| Getting hired and benchwarming isn't an accomplishment and
| it is often discriminatory. Given two candidates within a
| standard deviation, HR mandates we hire the woman.
|
| Once on the team though, there's no more discrimination.
| Work accomplished is work accomplished. I know of more
| companies with positive hiring discrimination, so you
| shouldn't wonder if it's happening. It is happening.
| bradlys wrote:
| This really varies. Among managers I personally know - we
| all agree that even if X engineer is basically
| contributing less to the team significantly... it doesn't
| matter because they're underrepresented and the company
| would never fire them. Instead, at most, they'll be
| managed out.
|
| Diversity pipelines and standards very much exist and are
| alive even within small startups all the way to FAANG.
| Even in the interview process - it's very different. I
| was talking to a black woman who is transitioning out of
| being a software engineer - we were talking about
| leetcode and prep.. and she said she just talks her way
| out of those problems, she doesn't ever have to actually
| solve them. This is explicitly different from my
| experience and most experiences of men I know - where you
| get LC mediums and hards and you have to have a solution
| on the board and it needs to be optimal otherwise you
| won't pass. This was a repeated thing for her across many
| jobs she interviewed for from startup to FAANG.
| Completely different bar for hiring and often even for
| staying.
|
| I've also been in the hiring loops for these candidates -
| no technical questions asked but if your bog standard
| Asian/white/Indian man interviewed you can bet they're
| going through the system design and leetcode grinder.
| They'll be put on a PIP at first sign of not conforming
| or having below average performance.
|
| I used to think maybe only the hiring process was
| different but the entire thing is different. I've seen
| how the meat is made too much across too many companies.
| Women fearing they only get hired and retained because
| they're women is justified - because it's just true.
| Fortunately - most women I've run into are good engineers
| and try probably harder than some should because of
| imposter syndrome. That said - most men I've met are also
| good and are because they've had to grind so hard to get
| where they are. (Silicon Valley being so intensely
| difficult to break into repeatedly. Interviews here are
| very hard)
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| Even after hiring, I've seen HR doing analyses comparing
| raise percentages between men and women, or different
| nationalities of employees, trying to ensure that we're
| not showing favoritism to a particular group.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Token hires are the outcome when HR departments play
| diversity Pokemon. That seems obvious.
|
| That diversity tends to be diversity as defined by legally
| protected classes here in the US. Because the point of
| corporate "diversity" is really to avoid lawsuits, despite
| the kumbaya, drum circle inclusion rhetoric.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Be honest up front with your straight white engineers.
|
| Got hired into a diverse team. Didn't give it any thought as I
| couldn't care less on race / sex whatever.
|
| Was then informed how they hated hiring me because of my race.
| But they had way to many unqualified people and were desperate.
|
| Lots of people liked me as an individual. But constantly ranted
| on how much they despised white males.
|
| I would rather they not hired because of my race / sex. Then to
| hire me despite it.
| AinderS wrote:
| > I couldn't care less on race / sex whatever. [..] they
| hated hiring me because of my race [..] constantly ranted on
| how much they despised white males.
|
| How long do you think your enlightened post-racial
| individualism will remain tenable against groups that proudly
| organize along ethnic lines?
| treeman79 wrote:
| What is the end game? Because dividing up a country along
| ethnic lines often leads to ethnic cleansing.
| AinderS wrote:
| You're already divided - the team that hired you told you
| so to your face.
| colpabar wrote:
| Just for clarification, your definition of "diverse" here is
| effectively "not white," correct?
| flippinburgers wrote:
| Isn't that the standard these days? It totally ignores ethnic
| diversity within the "white" population but ... "whatever"
| would be the general response I guess.
| mathverse wrote:
| Probably standard only in NA/Anglosphere.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| Weird, I've had the opposite experience. The vast majority are
| Asian, and most of those are of Indian descent. I would say
| about 30% of the candidates we get are white and many of those
| are European.
| rr808 wrote:
| I was going to say this too. In my new team 4 out of 9 are
| European and its the highest proportion I've ever worked
| with.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| I'm SO glad you said this. We've been trying, for years, to
| hire more diverse, but if the resumes that come in are white
| male, that's the only pool we have to choose from.
|
| Things are getting better, our T1 and T2 incident responders
| are more diverse, and our Data Scientist positions were much
| easier to fill from a diversity standpoint.
| alldayeveryday wrote:
| An anecdote: the head of recruiting one time approached me
| and made a comment about there being a lack of diversity on
| my team (my team was all White males). She (head of
| recruiting) was Indian. Every few weeks an email goes out
| about new hires. I noticed that a department head, who is
| Indian, has a team entirely comprised of other Indians. I
| asked the recruiter "I am not seeing a lot of diversity on
| that team. Are you also concerned with that?" Recruiter was
| totally caught off guard - of course the reason is clear.
| Diversity always means less White people. A team of no Whites
| is the epitome of diversity. She stopped bothering me at that
| point.
| issa wrote:
| I think it is worth pointing out that this simply is not
| true. The epitome of diversity is when the makeup of a team
| reflects the demographic makeup of the larger society.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| Wrong. Look at D&I reports that are published publicly.
| Diversity is the percent of non white, or non male, or
| non heterosexual employees depending on the graph.
|
| The company where I work recently published such a
| report. Population demographics have nothing to do with
| the hiring quotas.
| mathverse wrote:
| Do white europeans in general fall into the category of
| "white people" in the US? As in they are not treated as
| diversity hires compared to african americans?
| issa wrote:
| American racism is VERY complicated. President Trump
| accidentally explained it pretty well in his comments
| about "shithole countries". But essentially, people from
| most European countries are considered "white" when it
| comes to hiring and diversity issues.
| mathverse wrote:
| That's unfortunate but not unexpected. Europeans consider
| white americans / african americans / latino americans to
| be just "americans". There's no distinction.
| issa wrote:
| That's just how silly racism is. By the same token,
| Americans consider all Europeans to be "just Europeans".
| We don't distinguish if you're from Ireland or England,
| Greece or Macedonia, etc.
| issa wrote:
| There is a lot to unpack here, but what you are saying is
| only true in the context of an all-white, all-male
| company that is trying to become more diverse.
| Veelox wrote:
| Here is my 2C/ on the matter. Most tech companies currently
| have publicly stated goals to hire more under-represented
| minority engineers. Almost all of them publicly say they want
| to hire more of these engineers. Thus I conclude the demand for
| these engineers outpasses supply.
|
| > Aside from lowering our hiring standards for minorities, I'm
| not sure what else we could be doing better.
|
| Your options when supply constrained are to pay more, buy lower
| quality, find untapped supply or do without. It sounds like you
| are doing without. I don't see many issues with that approach.
| TheGigaChad wrote:
| ryandrake wrote:
| I worked for a place once that was essentially a US satellite
| office of a Chinese company, although it was technically
| registered as a US company. I'd guess roughly 75% of the company
| were Chinese. We had a "meetings should be in English only" rule
| to benefit the US minority who were not multi-lingual. The
| English proficiency of the Chinese guys ranged from "passable" to
| "perfectly fluent". It was not always easy to discuss technical
| concepts or project requirements using English-only, with the
| majority of the team translating in their heads in real time. So
| the English-only rule kind of slowed everyone down, for the
| benefit of diversity. It was a trade-off the company deliberately
| made with eyes open.
|
| To help this, there was a norm where, if something needed to get
| done quicker or some technical point was not getting across, the
| Chinese eng manager would say "OK, we are going to speak Chinese
| for a minute" and the team would deliberate some point in their
| native language. Then, when it was resolved, we'd continue on in
| English with the better English-speakers summarizing. This seemed
| to work pretty well, and was not awkward for anyone. It allowed
| the majority-Chinese team to contribute as full team-members
| regardless of their English proficiency, and also allowed the
| monolingual US minority to contribute equally.
|
| For OP, it might be good to suggest leadership sits down and
| figures out good "rules of the road" for language use in the
| office, and to make sure they enforce them.
| protomyth wrote:
| _if something needed to get done quicker or some technical
| point was not getting across, the Chinese eng manager would say
| "OK, we are going to speak Chinese for a minute" and the team
| would deliberate some point in their native language. Then,
| when it was resolved, we'd continue on in English with the
| better English-speakers summarizing._
|
| So, the native English speakers were not part of the debate and
| just got a summary? I'm not sure that jibes with _contribute
| equally_.
| sokoloff wrote:
| It's also not entirely equal if native Chinese, German, or
| Dutch speaking colleagues are constantly required to discuss
| work in a non-native language, while native English speakers
| are not.
|
| We operate globally and official company docs are in English
| (and optionally others) and probably 99% of cross-cultural
| discussions are in English, but I take no offense when
| colleagues switch to Dutch or German temporarily in the name
| of efficiency.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Granted, we (the English-only teammates) kind of had to trust
| that our point of view was being translated and represented
| properly, and it never really felt like it wasn't. It was
| mostly "Hey, let's take a moment in our native language to
| catch the whole team up with the conversation, and deliberate
| some points that are harder in English." and not so much
| "Let's secretly debate something and then present the
| decision to the US guys." Does that explain it better?
| ibejoeb wrote:
| I'm having a hard time reconciling a complaint about a lack of
| diversity with the notion that the problem is rooted in certain
| members of a team speaking languages other than English. Is the
| only allowable monoculture the Anglo one?
|
| update: to the person asking how it is helpful to have team
| members speaking different languages: I don't know. It's a
| different question. We started with the premise that the team
| should be multiethnic, and the way it shakes out is that that
| often means being multilingual. We can ask that question, but it
| changes the whole thing. That's the problem with these topics.
| zzzzzzzza wrote:
| if 10 team members can speak english and 4 members french and
| english, how is it helpful for the company for that clique of 4
| to converse only in french unless forced otherwise?
| Ekaros wrote:
| Why don't these team members take an effort to learn language
| of the team? Shouldn't be too hard to do in couple of years.
| sp332 wrote:
| Make it clear that picking the best people for the team is part
| of the job. Excluding good candidates or including worse ones is
| a decrease in job performance, and will be a negative in
| performance reviews. Decreased pay, demotion, and termination are
| all on the table here because this is materially hurting the
| company.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| Does team performance always suffer though? I've seen teams
| with relatively homogenous backgrounds that are very effective
| because of that. I've seen teams with diverse background that
| suffer due to some disconnect. Diversity is promoted for
| societal good, not necessarily as a local performance
| optimization.
| wreath wrote:
| I worked in two teams where we all had different ethnic
| bckground but otherwise very similar in personalities,
| interests etc. work and conflict resolution was much easier
| especially that we had a competent manager. Same company but
| different team with "diverse personalities" was an awful mess
| yrgulation wrote:
| How does this happen if not due to poor management? I had
| transgender, straight, gay, catholic, white, black, chinese,
| east european, muslim and hindu people all working in the
| same team without a "disconnect" due to their backgrounds. We
| agreed to accommodate specific needs of each of them and not
| once had one an issue with another. This was in the uk. We
| did have issues with our german branch tho but hr dealt with
| it rather nicely and it didnt happen again, showing that
| proper management can sort out discriminatory ...
| "disconnects".
| flyinglizard wrote:
| There's a chasm between "not having issue with another" and
| "high performance". Military infantry units are trained to
| be high performance and cohesive despite different
| backgrounds but it takes years in awful conditions.
| yrgulation wrote:
| In all honesty we did have awful conditions. We were
| given a few months to transition from a monolith to
| microservices or else we'd have to keep maintaining a
| decade old codebase written in php!
| [deleted]
| issa wrote:
| Speaking for the US, I wish this is something that everyone could
| think about slightly differently. There are a lot of white males
| in this thread who take the lack of diversity in tech so
| personally. As if those in favor of diversity blame THEM for the
| lack thereof. The truth is that this is an old, deep, and very
| complex problem that goes WAY beyond the borders of tech. The
| solutions to the problem do not start and end with how tech
| companies hire. Honestly, if a company is even making a small
| effort to hire more diversely, they are ahead of the curve.
|
| There are some great things that people can do to help the
| situation. Mentor young engineers, try to expand your recruiting
| pipeline. For larger companies, who have the most latitude, bring
| in more diverse interns, etc.
|
| We're not going to solve this alone, but we can make a
| difference.
| Veelox wrote:
| > There are a lot of white males in this thread who take the
| lack of diversity in tech so personally.
|
| I understand this example lacks some important nuance but
| directionally useful. Imagine there was explicit hiring goals
| for left handed people and industry conferences for left handed
| and organisations for promoting left handed people in tech. In
| that world I don't see why right handed people are wrong for
| taking it personally that a whole bunch of effort is put into
| hiring not them.
| issa wrote:
| I think the difference is pretty obvious. But maybe it is
| not. The important context is that, in your example, those
| left handed people haven't been kept out of power and
| influence in society for generations.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Your proposed "solutions" are inherently racist and only
| accomplish more animosity between races.
| issa wrote:
| Say you're a racist without saying you're a racist.
| protomyth wrote:
| _There are a lot of white males in this thread who take the
| lack of diversity in tech so personally._
|
| I'm not fond of this implicit prejudice in assuming your "white
| male" has not lead a diverse life. Its the same crap that gets
| the kid who grew up on the reservation a major set of
| disadvantages for their whole life because people only look at
| other people's skin and have no clue what path they have walked
| for their whole life. I keep thinking these skin-judgers don't
| know much about the human experience.
|
| The only cure for getting more diversity in technology is to
| change our elementary schools so they have more diversity in
| teachers so children get a broader view of STEM. Everything
| else is ignoring the problem because people like the current
| female / male ratio in elementary teachers.
| issa wrote:
| I don't think I am "assuming" anything. Read the thread (or
| internet comments on any number of similar threads).
| protomyth wrote:
| If you don't know anything about a person other than their
| appearance, then you are assuming a lot. Internet threads
| or tweets are not representative of most people's lives.
| issa wrote:
| I actually don't know anything about these people's
| appearance aside from that they type. But I do know the
| content of their comments, and that is what I am
| referring to.
| voldacar wrote:
| Since you don't have the lived experience of being a white
| male, this is a very problematic statement. Might want to
| consider running your posts past a sensitivity reader in the
| future
| NonEUCitizen wrote:
| Why not ask the company to pay for lessons in that non-English
| language? And ask your colleagues to teach you informally as
| well.
| elif wrote:
| Jerrrry wrote:
| elif wrote:
| alldayeveryday wrote:
| > Of course the former alone on its face is reprehensible {...}
|
| Can you elaborate on why?
| elif wrote:
| Why apartheid is reprehensible? No I don't think I have to
| explain that one...
| alldayeveryday wrote:
| "On its face" is commonly used when a person does not have
| the capacity to explain something. I see this is the case
| here. Further, your invocation of "apartheid" is a straw
| man.
| elif wrote:
| How do you distinguish "deliberately monoethnic" from
| "apartheid"
|
| OR
|
| When is monoethnic team building praiseworthy?
|
| There's two options for you. I hope the form of my
| rebuttal is acceptable.
| mathverse wrote:
| Well the US definition of diverse is much more picky about what
| diverse means. I am talking about situations where indian /
| filipino / chinese hire only people of their ethnicity.
|
| Or in case of Europe in an international company a team decides
| to hire only people that speak german / russian / french even
| when the interaction with other teams is obviously just in
| english.
| aikah wrote:
| > Or in case of Europe in an international company a team
| decides to hire only people that speak german / russian /
| french even when the interaction with other teams is
| obviously just in english.
|
| You're clearly conflating ethnicity with language.
|
| 1/ Just because people talk the same language doesn't mean
| they have the same ethnicity.
|
| ex: French is spoken as a native language on every continent.
|
| 2/ Just because people have allegedly the same ethnicity,
| doesn't mean they share the same language or even culture.
|
| ex: All black people living in Africa do not share the same
| culture, yet Americans reduce black people to a single ethnic
| group.
|
| > Well the US definition of diverse is much more picky about
| what diverse means.
|
| Yes, in US the definition of "diverse" is politically loaded,
| implying you subscribe to a specific partisan ideology. It's
| so loaded that you can't talk about diversity as "diversity
| of opinion", it has to be racial
|
| https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/apples-diversity-chief-
| lasts-j...
| mathverse wrote:
| I am not conflating anything. I have had a very similar
| experience in EU and Singapore and while the case of
| Singapore is ethnic preference in EU it's about the
| language even if the working language is english.
|
| They are the different sides of the same coin.
| aikah wrote:
| > I am not conflating anything. I have had a very similar
| experience in EU and Singapore and while the case of
| Singapore is ethnic preference in EU it's about the
| language even if the working language is english.
|
| Are you complaining that people in Europe talk their
| native language instead of English and that a company
| located somewhere prefers hiring locally? Whether a
| company is international or not is irrelevant.
|
| You are certainly implying that 2 distinct situations are
| equivalent and it's "a problem" for you. I don't see
| where the problem is, personally.
|
| Now if you have witnessed specific instances of racism or
| racial discrimination at work or during the hiring
| process, then you should report it to HR or the proper
| local authorities.
| mathverse wrote:
| You have an international company located in Europe where
| daily business is conducted using english. There are
| naturally diverse teams with people from different
| countries (as is the case in Europe) and then there's one
| team where a hungarian manager decides to hire only
| hungarians.
|
| You dont find this to be problematic in any way?
|
| The same applies to Singapore where the pool of
| candidates is large and diverse but a certain for example
| indian manager decides to hire only indians.
| mobileexpert wrote:
| This definitely exists in the US as well. You can see a variety
| of caste discrimination lawsuits against tech companies.
| zepolen wrote:
| Considering you didn't mention once if the results of this team
| are good or not I would say this is pure racism.
| satisfice wrote:
| If I were experiencing this, I would not consider it a problem.
| This is because I, like you, have the ability to adapt to a wide
| range of social situations.
|
| If dealing with awkwardness is your biggest concern,
| congratulations on your wonderful life.
|
| One theory of management is to hire people who understand each
| other via common culture and language. Sounds like this manager
| has done that. Such a monolithic team can more easily work
| together in certain respects. A different approach is to hire
| diversely, which reduces a certain kind of cohesion while
| possibly creating more interdependence. I have become a fan of
| the latter way, but it does bring a lot of headaches for a
| manager.
| Jerrrry wrote:
| Two "issues," not to be conflated:
|
| >Meetings with such team is always awkward as they internally
| discuss the topic in their own language during the meeting.
|
| If English/lingua franca is to be expected, then that can be
| asserted thru HR or thru placatable means.
|
| >Also their hiring practices are essentially discriminatory.
|
| "essentially" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The
| alternative is blind hiring, which may not "solve" the "problem"
| - because equal opportunities does not guarantee equal equitable
| results. Anything else is intentionally discriminatory.
|
| If diversity was actually a strength, then it wouldn't take such
| a monumental effort (of actual discrimination, no less) to
| achieve it.
| XorNot wrote:
| > If diversity was actually a strength, then it wouldn't take
| such a monumental effort (of actual discrimination, no less) to
| achieve it.
|
| This is not even slightly supported by any available evidence:
| discrimination is so systemic that you can take a white
| applicant, put a black-sounding name of it and watch as
| callbacks for that literally exact same CV in the marketplace
| fall through the floor[1].
|
| [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-29/job-
| appli...
| azangru wrote:
| > This is not even slightly supported by any available
| evidence
|
| Look at it the other way -- the article that you cited may
| serve to support the parent's argument, if this argument is
| that if diversity were actually a strength, then the
| companies that have embraced it would have outcompeted the
| backward companies that haven't; and we wouldn't be seeing
| discriminatory practices among the Fortune 500 companies, as
| the authors of the study that you cite claim to have
| observed.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| _> if this argument is that if diversity were actually a
| strength, then the companies that have embraced it would
| have outcompeted the backward companies that haven't; and
| we wouldn't be seeing discriminatory practices among the
| Fortune 500 companies_
|
| You're assuming that companies outside of this set of
| Fortune 500 companies are less discriminatory. Maybe the
| Fortune 500 are the least bad.
|
| Even if the Fortune 500 were the most discriminatory, their
| size and entrenched position in the market could allow them
| to stay on top in spite of this and many other weaknesses.
| kaczordon wrote:
| I wouldn't call 2% "dropping through the floor". It wasn't
| able to replicate the previous studies results. Could be a
| lot of confounding variables here i.e. distinctive names may
| signal class as well as race.
| enumjorge wrote:
| > If diversity was actually a strength, then it wouldn't take
| such a monumental effort (of actual discrimination, no less) to
| achieve it.
|
| The implication here is that worthwhile efforts don't take a
| lot of work. That doesn't ring true at all.
| Jerrrry wrote:
| You are assuming "diversity" is worthwhile, then working
| backwards from that assumption, justifying the actual
| discrimination, all to arrive at a begged conclusion.
|
| If diversity was worthwhile - leading to productivity gains
| or whatever metric, then evidence of that would had
| manifested by now; and we wouldn't have to put an inordinate
| amount of effort into shoehorning diversity, for its own
| sake.
| [deleted]
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Unless you're working in an English-speaking country, speaking
| English on the workfloor is actually quite tiring. Speaking a
| second language requires more thought and more deliberate speech
| to get the message across. I can understand why people coming
| from another country, who likely already need to speak their
| second language all day anyway, might not realise this, as this
| is "normal" for them anyway.
|
| I work within a team of mostly Dutch people, with a few Eastern
| European/West Asian people. We try to stick to English, at least
| when our foreign coworkers are around, but everyone automatically
| switches back to Dutch every now and then. Some of the Bulgarian
| people in our team do the same when they're talking amongst
| themselves and I can't blame them!
|
| I've only started noticing the mental impact of speaking a second
| language all day when there were days that there were only Dutch
| speaking people in the office. At the end of the day, I didn't
| feel as tired as during the "English speaking" days, even though
| I feel my English is good enough to express myself most of the
| time. This makes me think there's a subconscious toll in working
| with internationals that might not be apparent to some.
|
| However, having a meeting with someone who doesn't speak the
| local language and not even trying to stick to English is just
| plain rude and unprofessional in my opinion. I can understand
| someone making a quick comment to a colleague, but switching
| between languages to have an actual discussion is just rude.
|
| It sounds to me like the goals of the company and the goals of
| the individual teams don't align. The teams seem to want to talk
| in their native language, but the company seems to want to
| attract international workers.
|
| In the end, productivity of the team is based on how well people
| work together. People from similar backgrounds, with similar
| experiences, tend to have fewer hurdles to get through. A team of
| ethnically diverse people, sharing the experience of moving to
| another country and culture, might have more in common as well;
| they might just work together better than if they were to be
| mixed homogeneously across the company.
|
| I don't know what people apply to jobs in your company so I can't
| say if they're being discriminatory or not. Maybe the "diversity
| hiring manager" likes to accept inferior applicants to fill some
| diversity quotum; maybe the other ones are actually
| discriminating against applicants. If you think they're actively
| discriminating against foreign applicants, you should probably
| tell someone.
|
| However, I wouldn't call preferring someone who speaks the local
| language fluently "illegal discrimination", although the
| distinction is often difficult to make. Just because official
| policy says that English is the language on the workfloor doesn't
| mean people will want to speak it all day. If you try to enforce
| a policy people don't seem to like, you'll probably only end up
| seeing the policy get changed.
|
| Lastly: the EU may be somewhat culturally connected, but these
| issues will be different from country to country, region to
| region, and even city to city. There's a running joke on how the
| Germans won't speak anything but German, even during corporate
| meetings with other companies. I've heard stories of CEOs meeting
| with other companies where they spoke English and their German
| counterpart only answered in German, requiring someone who spoke
| both languages to translate for them, for example; this was such
| an alien concept to me that I laughed at the story, but I
| wouldn't ever want to work in such a situation!
|
| There are just ways in which the Dutch do business differently
| from the Germans, the French, or the English, despite centuries
| of close trade and cultural exchange. I'm not saying this makes
| your situation right in any way, but you should know that your
| experience might not apply to the entire EU (or even the country
| you're in).
| naet wrote:
| I work in the USA at a fully remote agency, and my company has
| a small offshore team of 3 Ukrainian developers. Are we being
| discriminatory because all our offshore devs are in Ukraine,
| when we could have hired anyone globally?
|
| I don't think so. We originally looked at a global pool of
| applicants for the first hire, and the guy we chose just
| happened to be Ukrainian. He ended up being great, and when we
| wanted to scale up and make another hire he referred two people
| he knew from his local community, who we also were impressed
| with and hired. Since they are all in the same area they get
| together and collaborate on issues (and on english
| translations) and so they become an even more productive team
| that we love working with.
|
| Despite being really smart and technically capable you can tell
| that using English is a bit of a burden, so being able to use
| their native language when breaking out into groups together I
| think helps.
| badrabbit wrote:
| I have seen similar things several times. When the business
| language is say english and there are people who use any other
| langauge at work that is a big red no-no. This applies to any
| language not just english.
|
| First, people do gossip and "talk shit" about other team members
| in their presence by using another langauge. I have seen an
| english speaking team member who was previously married to a
| speaker of a certain language but at her current role several
| team members were speaking that language at work and she heard
| all the terrible comments they made about her and it was overall
| a terrible situation. That person was the only person I have ever
| seen get bullied at work and I am truly ashamed for not having
| done something about it at the time.
|
| Second, even if what is discussed in the second language is
| something innocent, it will be interpreted as anything but
| eventually. You will never have adequate trust and synergy
| between teams and team members because of this. I had a person
| who spoke yet another language on the team tell me his conspiracy
| theory about the second language speakers and how they conspire.
| he even told me a person who started in the company at the same
| team as him and did everything he did but got ahead of him
| because he learned a certain language.
|
| Third, even if no one interprets the second language conversation
| as malicious in nature it will make team members feel excluded.
|
| There is simply no need for it, if everyone is required to speak
| the first language. Work is work, off work no one cares what
| langauge you speak.
|
| The last sentence you said about discriminatory hiring practices,
| I believe you even if it may be hard to prove. In the US you have
| a lot of options to fight this, generally speaking HR would do a
| lot for you just to stop a potential lawsuit.
|
| In my experience, this issue is mainly caused by english speakers
| who are afraid to be considered racist or something for requiring
| english. They only see racism as coming from a white english
| speaker while in reality just about every person is racist unless
| taught otherwise and it gets worse when nationality and race are
| the same thing to some people. The same standards that apply to
| prevent discrimination by majority white english speakers should
| apply everywhere.
|
| If I was betting on diversity of departments blindly at any US
| bigcorp I am fairly confident my guesses would be mostly right.
| This isn't right or sustainable.
|
| Tribalism is a cancerous disease at the work place.
|
| For any corporation, people who work within a specific country
| should be required to use a specific language while at work
| unless speaking to a client. This should be an immediate firable
| offense.
| rr808 wrote:
| Be also aware that many contracting companies that supply staff
| pay big backhanders to hiring managers, 10%+ of salary, a few
| hires quickly grows to big money. Maybe this could be the reason.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-17 23:02 UTC)