viableSprocket1

I get this is tongue in cheek, and it's true that everyone's brown, but a couple of points of note:

1. ISRO has reserved spots for Scheduled Castes / Tribes (historically under-represented castes and tribes), which is far more explicit than having a DEI committee [1]

2. There are probably 10-15 primary languages spoken across the teams given regional differences in India. I would guess society is closer to EU than US in terms of homogeneity but that's pure speculation.

No opinion on whether or not it helps anyone soft-land on the moon, though.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaSpeaks/comments/cjnf07/clarifi...

Oversimplifying for brevity (and there is definitely more nuance to this). This is basically the modeling approach:

1. Have a biological brain do a task, record neuronal data + task performance

2. Copy some of those biological features and implement in an ANN

3. Tune the many free parameters in the ANN on task performance

4. Show that the bio-inspired ANN performs better than SOTA and/or shows "signatures" that are more brain-like.

The major criticisms of Yamins' (and similar) groups are either that correlation != causation, or correlation != understanding, or that it is tautological (bio-inspired ANNs will be more biological). I'm not sure how seriously this work is taken vs. true first principles theory.

yep. that's 100% a strategy.

i'm sure it's happened somewhere...I'm not sure but from what I've seen, incredibly hard to game recruitment. Even if you do, the kid won't survive long -- it's up or out every ~2 years.

Seems like a lot of work for not much payoff.

What is encouraged is treating everyone leaving whether regrettable/non-regrettable with a great deal of love and care -- placement services are pretty good. There is a good chance those ex-McK folk are future clients.

Is it more or less difficult than counteracting Dunning-Kruger?

(for the record...former salary, several years ago)

Not my experience over a decade or so, but sorry it was yours. Sounds awful.

These topics on HN (where I know the industry well) make me realize how stupid I must sound when I have strong opinions on things I have nothing but anecdotal experience with. It's humbling to realize that I must also say things that are on par with "can't chatGPT do their job" or "all they do is make slides".

In aggregate and over the long term (~100 years or so in the case of consulting), most services find a fair market value. If McK is a ~$15B company running at ~30-40% margins, it is likely delivering some value to someone who is willing to pay for it. That value may be overstated to people not paying for it, or they may not understand the value because they are not faced with the same challenges as the typical McK customer.

...and that's ok, they are not the intended market.

Questioning is useful. Stereotypes also can be useful. But that doesn't preclude recognizing and calling out bias and correlation/causation issues. My views are:

1) Size of population, education and language are better explainers of the effect than any of these stereotypes or anecdata people bring up

2) These anecdata are generally biased negatively. Note the lack of positive (though equally bullshit) explainers like "they're just smarter and work harder than white people". This negative tilt is socially acceptable for Indians, but has become socially not acceptable for Jews. I don't particularly care either way as long as people call out the bias when they see it.

Implicit in all of this is how we as humans ascribe characteristics to our own groups vs. other groups, e.g. my asshole white boss is just an asshole, but my asshole Indian boss is an asshole because she's Indian.

Or as an Indian, my white co-workers is entitled and lazy because he's white etc. etc.

I'm not defending Nepotism. I'm saying there is an obvious explanation of the effect the article is talking about (and several bad explanations that rely on cultural tropes)

This is a non-article as there's nothing shocking about a large population of people who are generally fluent in English and generally have undergraduate and graduate education doing well in knowledge work.

But it won't stop the the casually racist tropes masquerading as "anecdotal data" --- there are a couple of thought starters already in here already. Apparently Indians hiring Indians and this somehow ties to corruption. Alternatively, Indians are good at office politics because they are yes-men and therefore succeed.

Just replace the word Indian with Jewish to see whether these comments would still be made.

Yikes.

I've lived here (Lower Manhattan, BK, and now Astoria) for the last 10 years and wouldn't move anywhere else.

For reference, I lived in SF (Pac Heights) for ~4 years during and after grad school and a couple of other metros tooThe density of stuff to do / people is much higher in NYC. The diversity of people, language, backgrounds is amazing. You are signing up for dirt, grime, homeless people, weird smells and terrible traffic. But also new restaurants, an amazing music and art scene, very interesting people and an increasingly growing tech scene. On housing:

- You don't need to pay $5K for a 1 Br. Greenpoint/Astoria and even UWS has good-ish places for cheaper. You can find a 2 br in the 80s-90s on the west side for 5K, 1 br should be meaningfully cheaper.

- Look at more neighborhoods. Start at times square, and make three circles that are a 20-30-40 min subway commute from there. Not that you would ever go to times square, but it is central and gives you an idea of relative distance.

- Don't live in Jersey City or Hoboken

- Don't expect a lot of space. I know you think you are used to small spaces in SF, but expect smaller. Prioritize clean and quiet over space.