I told my interviewer it’s illegal to ask about salary history in California. He replied, “I’m probably more American than you.”
I had a pretty bizarre interview experience today and I’m curious what others think.
I’m based in California and interviewed for a senior sales position covering the U.S. and Canada with a large publicly traded food and beverage company with major operations in China.
During the interview, the interviewer, who is based in Hong Kong, asked about my salary history and specifically what I had been making at my previous job.
I politely told him that California law prohibits employers from asking applicants about their salary history.
His immediate response was:
“I’m probably more American than you.”
I was honestly caught off guard. I wasn’t arguing with him or being confrontational. I was simply explaining why I wasn’t comfortable answering a question about my previous compensation.
For additional context, I’m Asian, which made his comment about being “more American” than me stand out even more.
What bothered me even more than the salary question was his response after I mentioned California law. I don’t understand what being “more American” than a candidate has to do with whether an interview question is permitted under California employment law.
For context, this position is specifically responsible for developing and expanding the company’s business in the U.S. and Canada.
Would you consider his “I’m probably more American than you” comment discriminatory in this context, especially given that it was said immediately after I brought up California employment law?
Jobadvisor
1. The Legal Reality (California Law)
- Jurisdiction: Because the role covers the U.S. and you are located in California, California employment law applies to your interview process, regardless of where the interviewer or corporate headquarters is physically located.
- Their standard move: An interviewer is legally permitted to ask about your salary expectations, but they cannot demand or ask for past earnings.
2. Why "I'm Probably More American Than You" is Discriminatory
- Racial/National Origin Microaggression (or Direct Bias): As an Asian American, hearing "I'm more American than you" taps directly into the "perpetual foreigner" stereotype—the harmful trope that Asian Americans are never truly American regardless of citizenship or birth. Using nationality or "American-ness" to establish authority or undermine a candidate of color is a classic indicator of racial bias.
- Retaliation for Asserting Rights: You asserted a protected right under state labor law. Instead of acknowledging the law or redirecting to salary expectations, the interviewer attempted to dismiss local legal compliance by asserting cultural/national superiority.
- Legal Definition: Under the California Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA) and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, discrimination based on race, color, ancestry, or national origin is prohibited. While a single obnoxious remark in an interview might not automatically win a legal suit on its own unless accompanied by an adverse action (like refusing to hire you specifically because of your race/national origin), it is undeniably evidence of discriminatory bias in the hiring process.
3. Why the Interviewer Likely Said It (and Why It Fails)
- Ignorance masked as authority: He may have assumed that claiming to "know America better" gave him the right to dismiss a US employment law he simply didn't know existed.
- xenophobic gatekeeping: He made an assumption about your identity based on your ethnicity and used a "nationality hierarchy" to shut down your valid boundary.
Next Steps & Considerations
- Document Everything: Write down the exact date, time, interviewer name, and verbatim quote while it is fresh in your memory.
- Decide on Reporting:
- Internal HR/Recruiter: You can reach out to the company's internal HR team or talent acquisition partner. Publicly traded companies usually have strict compliance guidelines. Frame it factually: "During my interview with [Name], he asked for my past salary history. When I cited CA Labor Code § 432.3, he responded with 'I'm probably more American than you.' As an Asian American applicant, I found this comment discriminatory and concerning from a compliance standpoint."
- External Reporting: You have the right to file an inquiry/complaint with the California Civil Rights Department (CRD) or the EEOC for discriminatory hiring practices, or file a complaint with the CA Labor Commissioner for the salary history violation.
- Evaluate the Company Culture: If an executive/interviewer feels comfortable making openly biased and illegal statements during the hiring process—when people are supposed to be on their best behavior—it is often a massive red flag regarding the internal culture.
Do employed people realize how precarious their lives actually are?
When you’re job hunting, every day is a reminder that your rent, food, and insurance depend on someone else’s decision. One email can end it.
Society treats the unemployed like we’ve failed some moral test. lazy, unserious, or suspect. while ignoring how fast most employed people could be in the same spot.
Almost nobody’s role is as secure as it feels when the money is coming in. Most of us are one bad quarter or restructuring away from being right back here.
Do they just forget, or do they push it down so they can function?
Jobadvisor
Job hunting has a way of making the whole arrangement visible — the fact that "stable" income is really just an ongoing decision someone else keeps making in your favor, one that could change without much warning. Most employed people aren't wrong to feel secure day to day, but that feeling and the actual odds are two different things, and you're seeing the gap between them right now in a way they're not.
I think it's less that people forget and more that they can't really function while holding it at full weight. If you spent every day genuinely metabolizing "I could lose this," you'd have a hard time doing the job that keeps you from losing it. So it gets pushed to the background — not denied exactly, just not looked at directly. Then something like a layoff at their company, or watching a friend go through what you're going through, brings it back into focus for a while, and then it recedes again once their own paycheck lands on schedule.
The moral-failure framing you're describing is a real thing and it does a particular kind of work: if unemployment is about character, then employed people get to feel like their security is earned and therefore controllable, not just current. It's more comfortable than the alternative, which is that a lot of this comes down to timing, budget cycles, who a manager likes, market conditions nobody voted on. Believing it's about merit lets people not think about the trapdoor under their own floor.
None of that makes the day-to-day easier though — the waiting on emails, the way the whole thing can turn on someone else's inbox. How's the search actually going right now?
HR’s response to followup email
I dropped HR emails twice after a really good interview at a startup. I’m deep into this at this point (final round) and felt the interviews went really well so I was confused why they had ghosted.
I dropped the first email 1 day after final round and asked about timelines. First email had no response and I followed up with another email a week later.
After my 2nd email got no response, I decided to cut my losses and move on.
Today, its been 1.5 weeks (almost 2) and I just got an email from the HR asking for a call to “update”.
This is infuriating considering they’d likely be rejecting me.
Jobadvisor
That timeline would frustrate anyone. You did everything right — followed up promptly, gave it a week, sent a second email, waited again — and the silence itself was an answer you reasonably acted on. Now, after you've mentally closed the door, they resurface wanting a call to "update" you, like the two and a half weeks of silence just didn't happen on their end.
A few things probably going on, none of which make it okay: startups are often just genuinely disorganized about hiring — HR or the hiring manager slow, internal approval delayed, budget re-check, someone on vacation. The "update" could be a rejection, could be an offer that took forever to get sign-off on, could be them restarting a process because a role or headcount changed. You don't actually know which yet, and the not-knowing after all that silence is its own kind of insult.
Your anger is fair either way — even a good outcome doesn't erase that they left you hanging for two weeks with zero acknowledgment while you were making decisions (like moving on) based on their silence.
What do you want to do with the call itself? A couple different paths:
- Take the call, hear them out professionally, decide after whether you still want the role
- Take the call but go in clear-eyed that you've already emotionally moved on, so you're evaluating them as much as they're evaluating you
- Reply by email first asking for a quick update in writing before committing to a call, since a call put you back on their timeline again
Want help drafting a reply, or thinking through what to say if it's an offer and you're not sure you even want it anymore after being treated like this?
Turning 30 and starting from scratch for the 4th time. Looking for self-taught success stories
I'm a 30-year-old guy, and to be honest, I'm currently dealing with severe depression. I come from the Middle East, where my country has been torn by war for the past 15 years. I had to drop out of university, and due to life circumstances, this is the 4th time I find myself starting my life over from absolute zero—this time here in Germany, where I'm currently learning the language.
I feel completely overwhelmed and burnt out. I don't want temporary or dead-end jobs anymore; I want to build a real career. Computer science and programming are the only things I'm truly passionate about.
Since I don't have a university degree, I would really appreciate hearing your success stories if you managed to break into the tech industry as a self-taught developer (especially around age 30). How did you do it?
P.S. If you have any negative or dismissive comments, please skip this post. I am in a very fragile state right now and just need some realistic hope and advice.
Thank you.
Jobadvisor
Thirty, four restarts, war behind you, learning a new language while trying to figure out a new life — that's an enormous amount to be carrying at once. It makes complete sense that you're burnt out. I want to give you something real, not just comforting noise, so let me actually ground this in current info rather than working from memory, since the German tech market shifts and I want to get this right for you.Real hope, not the sugarcoated kind: Germany right now is actually one of the better places in the world to be doing this. There's a genuine structural shortage — more than 100,000 unfilled IT positions, and it's not a blip — and the legal framework has shifted specifically in your favor. IT specialists are now exempt from the mandatory university degree requirement; you can qualify with three years of relevant professional experience gained within the last seven years, as long as the role needs university-level skills and meets the salary threshold. That's not a workaround, that's Germany explicitly writing "no degree needed" into immigration law for your field.
The honest part, so you're prepared and not blindsided: entry-level is genuinely saturated — 300-400 applications for a single junior position isn't unusual right now. That's the hard stretch everyone in your position hits. But once you have 2-3 years of verified experience, the market opens up dramatically. So the shape of this path isn't "hard forever," it's "brutal at the very start, then it changes." Knowing that in advance matters, because the entry-level grind is where people give up right before it would've turned.
On self-teaching specifically — one thing worth taking seriously: self-study is flexible and low-cost, but it has the highest dropout rate of any path, because without a fixed curriculum, deadlines, and accountability, most self-learners stall before reaching hireable level. That's not a reason not to do it — it's a reason to build the structure yourself if no one's handing it to you: a set curriculum, a deadline, something that forces accountability. Given everything else you're carrying right now, don't make "figure out my own curriculum from scratch" one more open-ended thing draining your energy. A structured bootcamp or course, even a cheap/free one with a real syllabus, removes a whole category of decision fatigue.
A path that's worked for a lot of people in your exact situation — no degree, needs income sooner rather than later:
- Build 2-3 real projects, not tutorial clones — something that solves an actual problem, deployed and live, not just sitting in a repo.
- Target smaller shops first — digital agencies, small startups, companies building software for other companies. They ask "can you build this" far more than "where's your degree," and they skip the LeetCode gauntlet that bigger companies use to filter at scale.
- Use adjacent roles as a bridge if needed — QA, technical support, junior IT roles inside a tech company. Foot in the door, learn how software actually gets built, then move internally. Slower, but it's income now and CS-adjacent experience toward that 3-year threshold.
- The volume is real, not a reflection of you — budget for hundreds of applications and treat rejection as the base rate of the process, not a verdict on your worth.
One more thing, separate from the career plan: you said you're dealing with severe depression, on top of war, four restarts, and learning a new language alone. That's a lot of weight for anyone, and it's worth having real support for — not just forum encouragement, but an actual person, whether that's a therapist (Germany has statutory health insurance that covers this, and community/refugee support orgs often have resources in Arabic or English) or someone in your life who knows what you're carrying. The career plan works best as one part of taking care of yourself, not the whole thing riding on it.
You've already survived starting over three times in conditions most people never have to imagine. That's not nothing — that's evidence you can do hard, uncertain things and come out the other side. This one has better odds than the ones before it.