> senior leadership disagreed and preferred to bring in talent from India and other countries because their visa status gave us considerable leverage.
Love the blatant exploitation of visa-"enslaved" labor.
Love the blatant exploitation of visa-"enslaved" labor.
Have American citizens ever tried to "check their privileges" and imagine how a life of a "visa-slave" changes after crossing the American border? I can give you some hints into my "living experience" of such a crossing.
Yesterday: an American lawyer sent some docs supporting my H1B visa over our Academy institution fax machine. The fax machine ran out of paper. The management asked me to pay for the paper, or buy them some. I couldn't afford the paper, so I borrowed $700, paid for the fax supplies and for a ticket to the US.
Today: I've got $5000 moving bonus, got $30k salary contract and got the first task, like: - We've sold something to Swedes today, you have 2 weeks to develop it. What do you need? - A Sun workstation, and an X.25 link to Sweden. - Done. And give your passport to Olga - you are going to Stockholm when done.
In 2 weeks our part was done, but Swedes were not able to finish their part and asked for 2 more weeks...
I was an employee #27, after that task and some other completed projects my salary was increased, then doubled, then again increased, then again doubled... our company went to #1 in its market, then IPOed, and 4 years after, still on the "slave" H1B visa I've found $1M on my bank account (unfortunately, it was an investment bank, lol, but that's another story).
So, my step through the US border on the H1B visa was not a step into slavery. It was liberation.
Any person using an h1b will tell you how happy they are of having it. Its they alternative/escape to their country's reality. But Americans having no idea what that means, are fast to dismiss it.
Reminds me of the comments about China workers working and living in Foxconn or similar manufacturing jobs: everybody was quick to judge how "bad" the conditions are there, while in reality the increase of quality of life for a lot of them was huge compared to their previous life in their rural towns.
As a Mexican living in Mexico I've seen some of those realities, and I'm sure most of the people that go to the USA from Mexico on a TN or h1b visa had it way tougher here.
Which to me comes across as an extremely privilegied take!
I'm advocating for a better path to citizenship that's more reasonable than this insane system of H1B lottery and greencard waitlists that we have currently. I'm not sure why that's such a divisive position.
There's A LOT of Mexicans that go to the US under a TN Visa which will NEVER have that privilege due to the nature of that Visa. They are still very very happy to have the visa and work there.
You had to work harder than the Swedes because the alternative was worse for you. It sounds like you're happy for your time at that company, but a lot of H1B workers find themselves in unpleasant work conditions that they don't have the same freedom to leave as their American counterparts. Their employers know they can subject them to a worse environment because they have more riding on it, whereas an American worker can simply leave and find a better job.
That's the point. It's more like indentured servitude than slavery in that regard anyway. The problem isn't that it doesn't make anyone's lives better in the end, the problem is that it's of concerning ethics on the part of the employer.
Very true.
>You had to work harder than the Swedes because the alternative was worse for you.
Not very true. I never worked hard in my life. I worked productively. Yes, I've done in my first 2 years in the USA more than in my 15 years in the home country. Because in my home country you had to share a Sun workstation with 10 other teams, and X.25 card? You can order it for the next year delivery, at it may be delivered, but never on time.
Swedes were late because they didn't know that you can implement the needed subset of the ASN.1 encoding using a simple, hand-made stack machine.
>American worker can simply leave and find a better job.
In my days the H1B quota was not immediately exhausted, so there was a window of opportunity each year. Raise the H1B limit - and you'll deliver almost the same amount of freedom to H1B workers.
>That's the point. It's more like indentured servitude than slavery in that regard anyway.
My point is that it's more complicated than that. The employer - in the present situation - can 1) hire an American worker, 2) hire an H1B employer. My point is that option 2 - in the present world - is actually an increase of liberty in the world, not slavery.
>the problem is that it's of concerning ethics on the part of the employer.
The ethics of the employer do not concern me that much. I can't change them. I can hope to change your ethics, ethics of a person I am directly talking to. And my concern is that you are labeling H1B program as an "indentured servitude", while it actually increases liberty in the world. That's my concern, or at least that's a paradox I clearly see.
Why should they? Why should they care about you coming in and dumping their wages?
I am not American but EU and it is similar here.
How is it a fallacy when it is real?
Here is an example from the building sector here: The Vaxholm Conflict https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/06/swed-j27.html TL:DR Building company wanted to employ Latvian workers at a lower rate of pay than Swedish workers.
I, personally, was also affected when Polish workers where just plain cheaper in IT so they fired all of us.
Now, I of course blame the companies, the capitalist systems, but I also blame the people. It is only human.
How is it a fallacy when it is real?
What they are "competing" in is a lower salary. That's it.
Its what they bring to the table and companies love it of course.
I will not comment on the rest of whatever you think of me and how I live.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31235911 explains it better for you :)
We voted Sweden into EU thinking that the Swedish model would persist within. That was false and we had to let the flood of cheap labor in.
The union hostile organization "Svenskt Näringsliv" and companies wanted this of course and lobbied for it. Including calling people in the union racists for not wanting to wage dump.
How did that go, for the company? Transferring knowledge about a large software project can be hard ... Almost impossible if everyone gets replaced at the same time?
(I wonder if you were building software or doing more sysadmin things)
1. There’s a race to the bottom to show infinite growth. This is the way of American capital markets. And this leads to cost cutting, bringing down wages and perverse incentives.
2. H1B and other programs that were intended for people with exceptional skills are handed out in mass to immigrants - particularly Indians - and we can be okay with that.
But the reality is, there are often times no exceptional skills here. The test taking and interviewing has been designed to cater to Indian nationals. They’re great test takers, which doesn’t necessarily translate into productivity or being a top worker or producer of value.
This is a corporation importing foreign workers as a cost cutting measure. An engineer from India will be happy earning 75% of the wage since they also get to move their family to the US, with healthcare and all the benefits.
The tragedy is that existing top talent doesn’t necessarily want to work at a company like Amazon. And so Amazon will import Indian nationals, because they’re willing to put in longer hours. They have little choice. They’re risk averse, and the last thing they want is to get managed out and have to return to India.
Amazon does this at scale. It reflects in the quality of their products and services.
First of all, I think it’s disingenuous to compare a boot camp hire with any L5 engineer, regardless of what country they’re from. A boot camp hire should be compared to a new hire/L4. Doing an L5 comparison is moving the goal post, which I assume wasn’t intended on your part.
A boot camp engineer absolutely can be as productive as any other L4 hire, Indian or not Indian. I think the L4 Indian hires in particular come better prepped for the leet style coding interviews. But in terms of quickly ramping up and becoming productive engineers, there’s absolutely nothing unique about a hire from India in many, if not majority of cases.
There are other stronger incentives for indexing on non resident hires. I could pay you market rate at $200K/year + equity that vests over four years. Or, I can bring a person from India and pay them $140K a year, reduced equity grant, and for the most part, I know that person isn’t going to quit. Especially with certain cultures that are more risk averse, they’re going to think twice, even if another employer is willing to offer sponsorship.
> First of all, I think it’s disingenuous to compare a boot camp hire with any L5 engineer, regardless of what country they’re from. A boot camp hire should be compared to a new hire/L4. Doing an L5 comparison is moving the goal post, which I assume wasn’t intended on your part.
Lets look at this from the perspective of the Director/VP, you're looking at filling headcount in your org, 25 seats. Its May, and you're behind the targets that were given to you in January. You have easy to source from talent pools (intermediate level or fresh masters degree graduate L5 H1Bs from India) and bootcamp graduates (3 months of coding experience). Your budget can pay up to 200k/person, which is much higher than the going rate for either of these profiles, so comp isn't a problem. Your boss (VP/SVP) is largely evaluating you on your ability to staff your org and complete projects. Do you fill these 25 seats using L5 Indian immigrants, or fresh bootcamp grads?
But if you’re asking me what I would do - I’d probably look for anyone who is a competent hire, without favoring H1Bs, and try to evaluate them a bit more than a leetcode style interview.
As I was saying, Amazon has entire organizations that are H1Bs. These are stable businesses that I don’t believe are really growth focused in 2022z
If we want to focus on costs, I think there are better options to deprecate and sunset entire services. There’s also significant opportunity at Amazon to trim the fat. Not necessarily firing people but moving off places that aren’t as valuable and moving them onto initiatives with a meaningful ROI.
Is it the slack? Or is it the fact that US-based companies have much more to offer this pool than they can offer the comparable group in the US. In particular, much higher pay than locally available and the prestige of working for a US firm.
It's great for ICs but terrible for leaders, particularly of small/starting startups .
Hire them for a few weeks, and fire if necessary. It doesn't take more than a few days to weed out the fakers, and identify the diamond.
I say local because it's cruel to hire a guy from across the country just to be let go.
We all know most degrees, and designations are dubious at best.
Why not try out a bunch of local Americans whom live near the worksite, and keep the best person? (I guess some companies do that with interns, but what I'm proposing is a bit different. The prospective hires will be tested throughly at what they claim they know.
It seems like most younger job applicants would jump at the chance to work for a good company?
I'm not saying don't test them throughly before a temporary hire. Make the test difficult. Testing doesn't cost much with Zoom, and this welcoming technology.
In every job I had the best employee was mainly self-taught, and didn't have a great resume.
It seemed like they worked harder because they didn't have all the spinish behind their name, especially in this relatively new industry.
You really only want to hire people who will make it to Sr (L5) in a few years. That is the level where they are fully self sufficient and don't need constant support from someone more Sr.
The perception (that I share) is that most (not all!) boot camp grads that interview as well as new CS grads still have less long term potential to make it to L5. They have done great learning basic programming on their own. Few will go much past that (compared to CS grads).
While many companies, formally or otherwise, have some sort of probationary period, the general understanding is--unless you've really misrepresented your skills and the company probably screwed up the hiring process--you're not going to be let go after a few weeks. (Absent major organizational/financial changes.)
Even for a local job, I would be very unlikely to quit an existing job--or even put interviewing on hold--to take a job with an explicit trial period.
(Now, sure, if I had just graduated from a boot camp or other degree program and didn't have immediate alternatives, maybe.)
I don't see why the same wouldn't be true of the labor market.
Everyone I've ever heard talk about working at Amazon has complained about it, one wonders if their reputation as an awful place to work has something to do with why hiring is hard