A senior account manager, Mr. R, sent me an email asking to fill out an application.
Yesterday evening I got a call from Mr. R’s office. I picked the phone and realized that he had made the call by mistake, I also realized that Mr. R and his two women colleagues are having a conversation about my application. What followed was a real surprise to me. I heard them making racial and derogatory comments about India, Cricket, IT and my background.
The incident left me with couple of questions:
- Why so much hatred against someone who you haven’t met or even talked to for God’s sake.
- While filling the application I gave them my personal information including EIN, SSN, License. Now I am worried about that, is there anything I can do?
What I've noticed is that India is a really big place and the spectrum consists of some of the smartest people you'll ever meet and some of the absolute dumbest people.
Unfortunately, most people only really have access to the dumb ones. So they extrapolate that into a stereotype of all Indians.
I guess there's not much to do but keep going. I'm not sure whether you can report the incident to anyone, but it sounds awfully difficult without evidence.
Wouldn't that be true for every country ?
What does it do? Well, next time Mr. R will make racist comments, he will always remember this embarrassing moment. Racism will be tied to an embarrassing moment and that is exactly how you want him to feel like. Who knows? Maybe he'll think twice next time before opening his mouth. React and go straight at the source of the problem, don't be passive...
Despite the talk that "coders are masters of the universe", "girls should learn to code", "Mark Cuban wants you to learn machine learning", software development is a labor intensive business (I see managers with a $120k a month payroll wringing their hands over a $9k a month AWS spend) and labor-management conflict as real as it is for coal miners, longshoremen, hotel workers, fast-food workers, etc.
IT workers in many parts of the U.S. have seen operations and jobs go to India. Some Indian companies execute very well, but some do not and then we see the double whammy that IT workers lose their jobs and then system failures have a negative impact on remaining workers, customers, investors, etc.
In terms of call centers, sometimes you talk to an Indian person for customer support and you get great results, but often you don't. Worse, I have received many calls in the last two years from people from India who want to steal my money on the pretense of being the U.S. tax authority or take over my computer and I read that this experience is common. Now many call centers are moving to the Philippines because U.S. citizens can't place the accent.
(Note it is a big labor conflict because displaced coal miners and manufacturing workers and their families could be doing this sort of work. I think of many black people who got into call centers in the south in the 1980s who are great at what they do.)
That said, hate is not good for business. Should you hate your customers, employees, suppliers, partners, community, government? No. There is not profit in that.
If I were you I would contact the supervisors of those people and tell them what happened. That kind of behavior hurts their business directly, probably more than it hurts you.
If I was the supervisor I would probably not fire the people immediately but I would put them on warning, let everyone know this behavior is unacceptable, and if it happened again they would be out.
What they do is up to them, but you should put the ball in their court.
There ain't a lot of terrorism in CZ, though the country is filled with hatred mainly towards gipsies and now muslims. Even the government in order to remain elected boycotts EU's directives about accepting migrants and anyone who's not white. I kid you not.
This is bullshit.
My name is Michael Wright, I am the VP of Sales at PaymentCloud Inc. I was alerted to your thread and wanted to take a minute to respond. This incident is absolutely not in line with our corporate philosophy and an issue that we take very seriously.
I would implore you to call our main office and request to be directed to me so we can discuss the issue and take appropriate action. I agree with PaulHoule below that "hate is not good for business" on many different levels.
Just to touch on your second point, I can assure you that your personal information is secure. We do not share, transmit, or distribute any personal data from our merchants and is only accessed inside our secure underwriting and risk environment.
I look forward to speaking with you and taking the necessary steps to resolve this issue.
What was said? Why is that not part of the conversation we are having?
Cultures meeting takes time. Think world history. Resist the urge to fight fire with fire. Cook meals on them or put them out.
Who's to say that these derogatory comments were not actually based on a documentary is about India that only highlighted the bad parts? Or who's to say that these peoples limited interactions were simply poor so far. A stern talking to is in order but not without further conversation about WHAT was said and WHY. Let these individuals walk away with a positive, personal interaction not a story about being caught.
Fix your PR problem by using this as an opportunity to put that person on the plane to India for the same price that it would cost for you to fire them and re-train someone else.
I would say in general, in America, Indian culture here is just catching on and it's going to take the persistant exploration of people's comments, and pulling them apart and not saying "all racial comments or bad or wrong" or "any comment that hurts anyone is wrong or bad" but what if we said: Can we talk about it?
Call the manager. We don't know enough about the situation to assume that those people are hateful. So far, just ignorant!
PS I am Ankit's classmate and he asked for my opinion.
That's the takeaway here? Are we aiming so low these days?
If three employees at a company are sitting around a table making derogatory and racist remarks during business hours, that's symptomatic of a much deeper issue at PaymentCloud.
