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?

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).

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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"

Because it’s a flag for nepotism.

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.

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.