“U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination” (Reuters) says that “the technology company systematically paid its white, male employees more than other workers” and then “Oracle was far more likely to hire Asian applicants – particularly Indian people – for product development and technical roles than black, white or Hispanic job seekers.”
Does this make sense? Suppose that Larry Ellison wants to run a club where white guys can talk about their college frat days and steals from shareholders by overpaying these guys. But at the same time he tries to avoid hiring any more white guys to join the backslapping and beer pong club? Going forward, he prefers to hire Indians?
For all of this to be true, doesn’t the company need to have multiple personality disorder? It doesn’t care about profit for existing workers so it just ladles out way more cash than it needs to, as long as the worker is a white male. When it comes to new workers, though, the company would much rather hire an Indian applicant than a white applicant because the white applicant would cost more (see above).
Readers: Can anyone explain how both allegations could be simultaneously true?
Makes sense to me. Essentially all Oracle’s Asian employees are H1Bs. Silicon Valley companies prefer them since they can pay them less than US citizens or permanent residents since they have the threat of deportation if they try to leave for a higher paying job. So if you look at their pay statistics the non-Asian i.e. white male employees are not deportable so they get paid more on average.
The white over payment stuff is probably just nonsense, but Indian ethnic favoritism in technical departments is rampant across the industry. Indian managers hire and promote indians.
I don’t know why it’s a confusing idea that managers at big companies wouldn’t be purely rational actor automatons, that they have racial and ethnic motivations. Seems obvious enough to me.
The important thing to note here is that diversity isn’t our greatest strength. It’s inevitably a huge and expensive pain in the ass. Which is why they all have to go back.
Funny isn’t it that a majority of the nine bozos on the Supreme Court have said that it is ok under the Constitution to discriminate based on race so long as it is done under the aegis of affirmative action but that this sort of alleged discrimination is not ok.
Most likely, various employees aren’t interchangeable. The H1Bs are the rank-and-file laborers in the trenches; the older, better-paid white employees represent the entrenched-knowledge of the company, the people whom have been at Oracle or a similar company for decades and hold deep knowledge of the Oracle Database; and the senior management.
Thiel and Palantir – sued for discrimination – Trump supporter
Oracle and Ellison – sued for discrimination – $4M to Marco Rubio
Leon Cooperman, Omega Advisors – sued for rinky dink insider trading – vocal Obama critic
What is the DOJ going to do, go after Sandberg and Zuckerberg’s Facebook? Not going to happen.
Oracle is notorious for its toxic corporate culture.
The DOJ’s allegations are perfectly consistent with frat-bro managers hiring their buddies at inflated salaries, and underpaid Indians to do the actual work. They don’t care about white men in general, just the small proportion made of their bros.
This can happen at any level, not necessarily with Ellison’s knowledge or approval, i.e. a case of middle managers stealing from Larry, not Larry stealing from shareholders.
Not saying this is what’s going on, but the complaint is much more plausible than you seem to think.
Marxists want equality by dragging people down, rather than lifting them up.
This duality of workers has been going on in SV for at least 20 years. Back in the 1990s there were not enough US born workers to do all the jobs. So SV people started hiring H1B engineers right out of college. Then SV managers found out H1B workers could be abused with lower wages and long hours. So they started hiring more of them. Some of those Indian guys got promoted and are now the middle managers. They like to hire more Indians. When they hire indians they can communicate better. So now there are no low end white guys getting hired and only a few high end white guys still working. So big salary differences.
Oh and the Indians are willing to live and work in very close quarters. So the companies can build real small desk farms with no doors or walls and provide few benefits and still have happy workers. So the companies spend less in multiple ways.
This is the reality in SV.
You can’t hire white guys in SV for what you would pay the H1Bs, and you really do need some white guys. Also, some of the white guys have been there longer and racked up compounded annual increases.
This is mostly true at the enterprise companies in SV. Startups are a whole different ball of messy wax.
Won’t matter after CA secedes.
Larry Ellison has had multiple personality disorder forever.