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Comment by shihab | Hacker News Reader

> Google filed dozens of applications for foreign workers to serve as software engineers...

For comparison, Google laid off 12,000 employees this cycle.

And there was no one capable for these roles in those 12,000 people? I find that hard to believe. If the answer is “no”, prove it (I have been the sponsor of H1Bs, and am familiar with the paperwork and the process).

Edit:

> Normalizing reneging on job offers is a bad path to go down.

Google has already done this previously during economic uncertainty.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/29/google-said-to-rescind-job-o...

These folks were already hired. You seem to be suggesting that Google should have rescinded their offers.

Normalizing reneging on job offers is a bad path to go down.

This happened to many when the layoffs started

Not at Google!! I know some smaller companies did it because they had no choice.

That’s not really how it works. It’s hard to be fine-grained when firing 12k people. It’s operational much easier to do the layoff and then fix the gaps.

Indeed, the gist of my complaint to my Congressional reps is going to be “Google appears incapable of managing Human Resources at scale and defaults instead to hiring folks on visas at the same time letting a bunch of existing domestic workers go.”

“Too hard” to sorting hat a subset of 12k employees into other roles and slash and burn instead? You shouldn’t get H1B quota.

We are coming up on an election cycle after all.

> but there is no logical or legal reason to do so.

Edit: throttled, can’t reply @bubblethink that is what the law and legislation is for, helping corporations along when their actions are too efficient for society’s liking. I expect regulation to catch up to their labor practices.

The visa status is only incidental in all this. You expect them to prioritize training existing employees or maybe even hire citizens, but there is no logical or legal reason to do so. At Google's level, they have access to the entire global market and they do not care about visa stuff.

Big tech does have such a mechanism. The individuals laid off generally get a couple of months to find a new job within the company. In these times there are few open positions but many do get filled by internal applicants who were laid off.

OK, that is fair. However, it's not fair to claim you cannot find someone to do what probably amounts to run-of-the-mill development work domestically and need to import talent - aka. what H1B's were supposed to be for.

For all but highly specialized sub-fields, it is really hard to convince me H1B's are necessary - other than to artificially suppress wages for citizens.

> It’s hard to be fine-grained when firing 12k people.

Its a good thing that Google is a AI first company. It can use AI to do such fine grained search.

This is not ok.

This is not an ok way to think about it and certainly not something we should accept, let alone justify as a viable business practice

Doing a lot of the wrong thing doesn’t absolve you from responsibility that you have to each individual.

A bunch of Googlers who were fired managed to get rehired in new positions.

But you can imagine that a lot of the people who were laid off would be justifiably pissed and uninterested in that sort of thing.

Its not about capability, but power and money

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