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.

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.

We operate globally and official internal language and 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.

Polylingual communication can exists alongside a lingua franca. It's important that each individuals request to (re)explain in another language/the lingua franca is respected.

Rather than exclude these older colleagues, my younger English-speaking Brazilian colleagues would just excuse themselves (with my agreement) and dip into Portuguese to help everyone get on the same page. I felt it was fair -- why should we exclude expertise on the basis of language? Fairness works both ways.

(I later learned Portuguese so this became a moot point)

This looks like it would’ve helped tremendously.

>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.

Ethnic issues in the office include: taking off shoes at work, toilet paper or lack of it, policy on alcohol and non-halal food at the workplace, Friday/Sunday prayer policies, dog policy. We've had people burning incense in the office. We've had people playing prayers on loudspeaker every morning. On one team, we'd only buy vegan non-garlic pizza to be inclusive.

So I think here you actually have to go to significant effort to be inclusive.

Something being worthwhile and it being hard to achieve are unrelated. It might be hard to drink a bottle of hot sauce, but it's not particularly worthwhile. It's easy to lock the door when leaving the house, but it's likely to be worthwhile.

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...

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.

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.

You are using "worthwhile" as "(morally) worthwhile (for (an appeased) society)".

The parent is clearly stating that, for a corporation, the main goal is to make money by out-competing its rivals. Society is not relevant, here. If such goal was reached by diversity hiring (no need to add "only" : if this policy added even 1% to the end goal, that would be a net positive), laws wouldn't be needed because, except for the most racist ones, companies would be fighting to get all those racially diverse people. Tech companies percentage of indians or chinese workers are very high without any coercion.

The simple reality is that talents can be found anywhere but that everybody doesn't have the same amount of talent.

The implication here is that worthwhile efforts don't take a lot of work. That doesn't ring true at all.

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.

Does that mean a Brazilian company should hire someone who only speaks Urdu? Probably not.

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.

I've worked in many multilingual teams and I doubt that enforcing 100% a single language to the point that you forbid even brief clarifying "aside" discussions in another language would improve overall results.

One possibility is bringing up the benefits of a diverse team. First is holidays - nobody has to sacrifice Christmas/CNY/Eid/Diwali, because there's someone there who doesn't celebrate it.

More importantly is talent. Talent is not a commodity here. It's randomly distributed across different ethnic groups. Someone doesn't become a 10x-er by reading in only one language or hanging with a specific group of people. People on the high end of the talent scale tend to favor multicultural environments.

It is, at least in startups. At one startup I worked at, the entire engineering team in the US was Indian. At another one, my counterpart team in the US was almost entirely Chinese. IMHO though, even if the manager/lead doesn't do this intentionally, once there is a "critical mass" of one ethnicity, people of different ethnicities may hesitate to join the team.

I was not in as bad a situation as OP though as we still used to conduct our meetings in a common language (English) only.

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.

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.

I have been living in Asia for a while, indeed diversity is not seen as anything useful. It's not considered a criteria to be taken into consideration.

I have worked in diverse team and I have worked in a monoethnic team. I haven't seen any difference whatsoever in term of performance.

From my own experience I like working in a monoethnic team. And I like working within a team with a little bit of diversity. But when diversity is going too the roof, then my degree of joy at work start declining.

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.

This is such a narrow view on things. It's akin to saying that you can't complain about weather unless you're homeless. OP can have other problems in their life in addition to this as well, you're just projecting here that they must have sheltered life and don't have any "real" problems.

> One theory of management is to hire people who understand each other via common culture and language.

Slippery slope right there. Why would you hire a woman when team consists of all men that do regular male bonding things together after work? Why would you hire a 40+ year old with family when team currently is 25yr single guys? Generational gap would surely bring friction into communication and values, right?

In many places that'd be called discrimination.

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.

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).

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.

There's a good reason for that. If you're CEO you do not want to have potential misunderstandings because your foreign language skill is not up to C1 level. You want to be able to express yourself fluently and have professional interpreter for your target language instead of your stammering, looking for right words and generally slowing your speech just because you're not fluent.

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.

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.

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)

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?

"a system of keeping groups of people separate and treating them differently, especially when this results in disadvantage for one group"

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.

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.

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.

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)

So I’ve never experienced the low performer aspect of what you’re talking about. When everyone is a low performer, no one is, ha.

The only people I’ve needed to “fire” were bodyshop contractors forced onto the team who had never seen a computer before.

I don't know how reassuring this is, but on the flip side there's often a lot of opportunity and positive conditioning that a man will get, which will help them land a job ultimately because they're a man. I suppose the idea is to try to balance that out, although it's understandable for a woman not to feel like they're being evaluated appropriately.

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.

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.

How long do you think your enlightened post-racial individualism will remain tenable against groups that proudly organize along ethnic lines?

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.

The company where I work recently published such a report. Population demographics have nothing to do with the hiring quotas.

I recently worked with a diversity recruiter and was allowed to select from one of 7 black candidates. Just black candidates.

> 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.

Communication is hard in an organisation. Anything you can do to make it easier is going to improve outcomes for the business.

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.

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.

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)?

You dont find it odd when an indian / filipino / chinese manager hires only people of their ethnicity for the team?

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).

The only "issue" here is whether or not the chosen company language is being used effectively to communicate between teams.

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.

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.

A legal system of oversight has to deal with problematic behavior, yet external attributes never tell the whole story of human interactions and productivity.

And shared language or cultural background being one of such features crucial for team cohesion and communication?

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.

Knowing that it will definitely benefit the team performance.

The whole collection there results in "a priori" conditions, legal Latin .. meaning "what has come before"

If you accept “oh yeah, that team hires people from <pick the group>”, you’re basically accepting that whomever the head guy is likely running some sort of grift, whether that’s hiring his friends (at best), to taking kickbacks or or hiring shills and outsourcing work to some boiler room back home at worst.

Ditto for any group. Ethnic, church, fraternity, whatever. If I can hire all of my mens bible study pals, the company’s hiring process is broken. That’s why smart companies do employee referrals - by flushing out the actual relationships with cash, you avoid low quality referrals and maintain some control of who’s coming in.

Ignoring the complexities in people and simply focusing on race and ethnicity is short-sighted and likely to do more harm than good.