Is there something inherently bad about "visa workers"?

It’s captured audience who will not push back as hard as they maybe should. That and depressing wages of course

I saw this myself. When Amazon started Amazoning with me and I knew the PIP was coming, I didn’t panic. I did just enough to make them think I was taking the “focus” seriously, waited until my next vest and then the “severance or PIP offer”.

For those who don’t know how toxic Amazon really is, once you get the try to work through the PIP or severance offer, if you try to work through the PIP and fail (and you will), your severance amount is decreased to a third of the original.

But you can appeal the failed pip and if your appeal is denied, that gets cut to another 1/2.

So $40K would have quickly become less than $7K.

All of my coworkers on H1B were scared shitless it would happen to them. I was doing my 40 hours a week during my focus, refusing extra work, going on vacations and of course putting feelers out to all of my former clients (working in AWS’s consulting department) and former coworkers.

I had already paid off all of our debt, built up savings, sold all of my AMZN stock, and moved to state tax free Florida.

I knew someone would give me a job or a contract. H1B visa holders can’t work contracts and maintain their status.

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kelipso 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Most tech workers can’t get a contract job to save their lives, they have no idea how. But those people still have mortgages to pay and mouths to feed. Your scenario is actually pretty rare.

	▲	JustExAWS 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		My coworkers were in AWS ProServe with me. Any of us who were halfway decent would have contracts for AWS implementations falling out of the sky if we left. Companies loved to contract ex AWS ProServe folks. It was a win win for both sides. Even if we charged $100-$120 hour W2 contract, that was still much less than the same companies would pay AWS or any of the well known 3rd party cloud consulting companies where consultants work full time for the consulting companies. All of the people I know who were laid off from ProServe during the great Amazon purge starting in 2023 just reached out to former clients and got jobs or contracts almost immediately. Remember all of us worked remotely at the time so $100-$120 hour as a W2 contractor went a long way. Now for the software developers who worked at AWS, that would be a different story. I don’t know any of them up to and including a senior that would have been capable of both talking to a customer and sussing out their needs and going from an empty AWS account to leading a full working solution. Since leaving AWS, I’ve been in a position to hire directly for the company and recommend candidates for clients [1] and I’ve never been impressed with software developers from BigTech when I needed to hire at smaller companies. They just don’t know how to operate in green field, ambiguous environments where they don’t already have infrastructure and processes in place. [1] I don’t do or lead staff augmentation projects. My goal is to have success criteria at the beginning of the project, teach the client how to support and expand the implementation and move on. Sometimes they need us to be in their internal hiring loop to make recommendations on who to hire.

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Muromec 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Been there, done that, was very lucky that this country’s work visa is easily transferrable and iron law less forgiving to this kind of bullying

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patrick451 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We have a lot of unemployed American tech workers. There is no reason hire people on visas other than suppressing wages and getting what amounts to an indentured servant.

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sieabahlpark 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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