Cognizant discriminated against non-Indian workers in H-1B visa case, US jury finds A US jury has found that employment practices at Cognizant constitute discriminatory conduct toward non-Indian workers in a case that originated in 2013 and claimed the tech giant favored H-1B visa holders from India over local workers. Last week's verdict [PDF] says the IT service giant should pay punitive damages. It …
One has to wonder why all of the leadership are ethnic Indians (with dots). Perhaps it's racism, perhaps they all just have established work ties and just need more time to integrate. Nah, it's racism.
I worked for The Cog at Faecebook HQ downtown. They weren't horrible bosses, but they were a bit inept. Mgt delegated mgt work to us gora (white people) so they didn't have to do any work. The worst part was that we were forbidden to participate in the FB employee chat rooms where people in our role (internal help desk) asked for help because they were afraid that it would show how poorly we'd been trained.
Now if we can turn the spotlight to another Indian-dominated subcontractor; HCL. I worked for them at NXP Semiconductor. My immediate supervisor was Latin, but passed quite nicely as an ethnic Brahmin. He told us he'd been invited to meetings until they found out he was Latin. At these meetings, ethnic Indians would speak English as it was a common language. They would laugh and joke about how nobody but Indians would be getting promotions or raises. But they were serious.
My experience was quite different. I have never worked for an Indian firm, not for lack of trying. I have had more than a few interviews that ended abruptly after the first question. That question being "what is your visa status." After explaining I have been a citizen since birth, I am awkwardly told they require someone more experienced for the role.
Once I had to take a technical interview. We only got to one question:
Interviewer: How would you recover from a a corruption in your primary domain controller?
Me: I would promote another DC to that role, then wipe and rebuild the one that was corrupt.
I: There is no other DC, only the one
Me: I would restore it from a snapshot or backup
I: There is no backups or snapshot, what would you do?
Me: (jokingly) I reckon I would be looking for another job considering I have not done the basic DR planning and tasks
I: (Not amused)
Me: Ok, I guess the only thing is to do a recovery restoration if not just building a new one outright.
I: That would be the correct answer (the restore/recover feature)
I realized later he was basically reading from the Microsoft certification test. (or at least a study guide)
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Later that year I interviewed with a large and respected accounting firm. Among the things I noticed:
All the wall clocks where on Pune time
The lead was bragging about how his system was so big Microsoft said it was passed the limits of what SQL Server was capable of handling. He did not like me asking if they had plans to migrate to a more capable system.
At the end I was straight up asked what my role on the team would be ("What are you going to do if we hire you:Powershell, database tuning, development, etc") This was hands down the most confusing interview question I have ever heard. The interviewer was visibly frustrated when I asked what role he was hiring for along with a list of my capabilities.
I was later informed they needed someone more accustomed to a fast paced environment.
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Since, I have had the pleasure of working with teams that work directly out of India. I found the management culture to be something like "throw enough bodies at it till it works" if someone couldn't figure it out, it simply got ignored with the hope somebody somewhere would fix it.
I even had a manager describe an engineer's explanation of a problem and fix as "magic." The problem was with a bug in Microsoft Defender that caused it peg the cpu with excessive scans which ran everytime NTFS acls were checked.
Also, everything had to be Microsoft and Microsoft support was heavily relied upon. If it wasn't a Microsoft product, they would ignore it completely.
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I have since steered clear of any recruiters or angencies with a strong H-1B vibe.
After explaining I have been a citizen since birth
They want H1Bs because they're willing to work for less. As a citizen you have freedom to switch jobs easily, which H1Bs do not. That means even if you're willing to work at the pay they're offering, you're much more likely to leave for a better offer.
The "more experience for this role" they want is "more experience getting screwed and underpaid".
Since, I have had the pleasure of working with teams that work directly out of India. I found the management culture to be something like "throw enough bodies at it till it works" if someone couldn't figure it out, it simply got ignored with the hope somebody somewhere would fix it.
That was my experience as well. For a couple years I was a consultant who had a team of something like two dozen midlevel storage guys in India at my disposal who I could assign tickets to to complete stuff off hours / over weekends. It would always be the same guy who would pick up my tickets, who I got the impression was their team lead. The first couple times one would work with me he'd seem unsure of himself and would ask questions, but he'd obviously know what he was doing just wanting to have everything clarified down to exact details. He'd complete the work without problems. The thing was, every month or two that guy would disappear and there'd be a new guy, and the cycle would begin anew.
I eventually found out the reason I kept getting new guys was because the last guy would jump to another job for double or triple the money once he'd skilled up enough to pass more demanding interviews. Turned out the contractor who staffed that India team didn't pay very well. I never did figure out what most of the team did. They were supposed to be working for the same client I was, but when I checked a few times to see who had completed tickets I'd see only two or three people from that team had worked a ticket in the past month. I thought "oh well maybe these guys aren't all storage even though they're all listed there in the email list". Maybe they did multiple things so they were in every list. When I expanded the search to ALL tickets for the client for everything from SAP to desktop support they only had storage tickets.
So apparently they were paying two dozen guys, and having like 3 or 4 them doing any work at all, and I guess were fine with it? Maybe the rest were someone's cousin, who knows lol
It is one giant tribe infiltrating other tribes and driving them out. Same story at whichever company that has already been infiltrated. They have a caste system, so not only do they discriminate against other races but they discriminate within. Welcome to diversity!
...had the basic practice of hiring people overseas, then moving them to the US. Once they had been working on the code for a couple of years they had "the special skills not available locally" to deal with immigration law. They only rarely attempted to hire inside the US.
WFH shows you dont actually have to import anyone. The USA political class try to outdo each other with the sticking up for the USA.
Meanwhile just like the UK there seems like no local staff employed in this field anymore. What do they all do now. Walk dogs?
Urban myth is a lot of AI responses are just indians responding with some naff answer from vast call centres.
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