Story 261
It looks like story 258 is referring to the Tampa office, but I want to echo what they describe about the Tech & Data culture. I’m an Indian woman who studied at a top IIT. I was relocated from Madras to the Dallas office in 2019. What people say about an “Indian mafia” probably sounds offensive to everyday people, but what it’s getting at is a pattern of tight, insular networks and why it’s important is because of how exclusionary it is.
In my experience, opportunity flows through a small circle: the same people get pulled into high-visibility projects, the same voices are heard in meetings, and the same names come up for sponsorship. If you’re outside that circle, it’s impossible to break in, no matter your qualifications. As an Indian woman, I’ve often felt doubly on the outside because in our culture, Indian men place Caucasian women above us. We are bottom rung. We are expected to deliver, but with limited visibility about what is really going on.
The Dallas office has always been an even stranger outlier. For many years, the building itself wasn’t managed by ESPA—it operated under a special exception and was overseen by the bank’s CTO, [REDACTED], who visiting executives joked ran it as a “cult of personality.” There was even a “[REDACTED]” book club and other anomalies I haven’t seen anywhere else. He’s no longer here, but that culture hasn’t fully gone away—the Indian Mafia is less loud because [REDACTED], COO, appears to have been sidelines but the same tight-knit dynamic continue to shape how things operate here.