It rarely arrives as a slur. It does not appear in the job description or the company values slide. On a tech team, casteism tends to look like something else entirely: a full review that never comes, a promotion cycle where the same names keep surfacing, a better idea absorbed into the room and attributed to someone else by the end of the meeting.
The thesis is simple and uncomfortable. Caste travels with people past the office door: into standups, into Slack threads, into the unspoken calculus of who gets sponsored and who gets managed out. The technology industry’s self-image as a meritocracy is precisely what makes it so effective at hiding this.
This is not a hypothetical. In June 2020, California’s civil rights agency sued Cisco Systems and two of the Indian-American engineer’s own supervisors, alleging he had been demoted, denied a raise, and isolated from projects after his managers learned, and disclosed to colleagues, that he came from a Dalit background rather than the dominant caste they shared. The agency later dropped its claims against the two individual managers, but its case against Cisco itself continued. A separate attempt to undo the state’s authority to bring the case at all has since failed: the Hindu American Foundation sued California’s Civil Rights Department, arguing that treating caste as a protected category violates Hindu Americans’ First Amendment rights, and on July 18, 2025, a federal court dismissed that suit, finding the foundation lacked standing and, more broadly, affirming the state’s authority to act against caste discrimination. The underlying case against Cisco continues on its own separate track. Whatever a court eventually finds about that specific workplace, the shape of the allegation is the same mechanism: not a slur, but a manager deciding, quietly, who gets isolated from projects and who doesn’t. After the suit became public, Equality Labs, a South Asian civil-rights group, said it received close to 260 complaints from tech workers describing similar treatment. Its own 2018 survey of the Indian-American diaspora, a self-reported, snowball-sampled group of just over 1,500 people rather than a random national sample, found two-thirds of Dalit respondents said they had faced unfair treatment at a US workplace because of their caste.
Consider what informal networks are. Mentorship, referrals, after-hours conversations, the warm introduction to a senior engineer: these are not neutral professional courtesies. They are systems of transmission. Who gets pulled into those systems and who is left to perform competence without the social capital that accelerates careers is rarely random. Caste shapes those patterns long before anyone enters a hiring pipeline.
The counterargument is predictable: tech rewards output, not identity. But output is never judged in a vacuum. People embedded in social structures they did not choose, and rarely examine, decide how it gets evaluated, attributed, amplified, and remembered. A Dalit engineer navigating that environment is not competing on the same terrain, no matter how elegant their policies are.
Naming this is not grievance. It is precision. Until tech teams learn to see the hierarchy inside the flat org chart, they will keep reproducing it, and calling it excellence.
