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yodsanklai 13 hours ago

I wonder how this is also related to the attacks on the H1B visa.

rat9988 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm not american, but it seems to me there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B.

I'm not sure anyway what is the relationship between the potential difficulty of hiring new folks, and firing current folks in USA to offshore roles, are relates.

Rijanhastwoears 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> it seems to me there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B.

Anecdotal so hold on to your salt but in my social circle here in the US natural-born US citizens vs visa-holders self-select for types of jobs. For example, if my the starting pay is < $80k most of my natural-born American friends don't bother applying. Whereas, my visa-holding friends routinely go well below $50k when searching for jobs or "2 year internships". So, when a company posts a certain type of a job they have a certain demographic in mind already.

Not saying my US friends are uppity as much as visa holders are desperate.

ge96 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I suppose that is "in the tech field" too, as non-tech people would be happy with an $80K job where a lot are under $50K

I will say my first tech job was $40K and now I have to have a six-fig job just because of my debt.

overfeed 10 hours ago | parent [-]

> I suppose that is "in the tech field" too, as non-tech people would be happy with an $80K job where a lot are under $50K

Indeed. The median salary in America for full time employment is a little over $63K.

Edit: if the message from H1B folk earning $300k+ to voters who earn $63k on average[1] is "You need our superior intellects, you uneducated rubes", then its unlikely to be well-received, especially at a time when blaming foreigners is in vogue.

1. Or a laid-off American tech worker

12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]
[deleted]
x0x0 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> as visa holders are desperate

That is the point of most of these programs. If we (as a country) do h1b, those people should be on an automatic path to a green card.

profdevloper 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Why? They are obviously being weaponized to suppress wages for native Americans in an environment where tech leaders were saying "learn to code". I think the H1B needs to be cancelled and companies should incur financial penalties for using foreign labor to undercut American workers.

BobaFloutist 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>native Americans I know you don't mean indigenous people, so what's the cutoff?

Is it birthright citizenship? But then what about naturalized citizens? And if they count, thennare they screwing over "natives" up and until their swearing in when they instantly join the screwed, or is it more of a continuous spectrum of screwer/screwed? Or, in the other direction, does your family need to have been here a couple of generations for you to count?

fragmede 11 hours ago | parent [-]

However many generations it takes for your skin tone to be white. See also: the President's wife.

x0x0 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Making h1b an automatic track to a green card (partially) removes the ability for employers to exploit employees on an h1b.

profdevloper 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Hiring American workers at current market wages avoids this problem entirely.

weaksauce 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

you see the reason h1b is so popular with the c-suite in a lot of cases is that you get absolute loyalty to a company that holds all the power of your being allowed to stay in the us. you lose the h1b job and you have limited time to find a new valid employer to sponsor you or else you go back to your country. it's one of the reasons musk loves it for twitter.

square_usual 13 hours ago | parent [-]

H1B transfers are easy. You aren't beholden to an employer.

rkomorn 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've had three different H1Bs. Yes, transfers are easy, but they're sure a hell more risky than staying at your current job and enduring whatever you have to.

You're not beholden to your employer, but you have borderline coercive reasons to stay.

boelboel 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Even a 5% chance you and your partner/kids have to uproot their life is a bigger sacrifice than a 30% wage increase, at least to some people.

square_usual 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Great, yes, but you sure as hell don't have "absolute loyalty" to a company.

johnnyanmac 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Its all relative. A burned out American can drop out tomorrow with no short term plan. H1Bs cannot fo that unless they are ready to go back to their previous country.

liveoneggs 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You have 60 days to find a new job or get deported. It's a pretty strong lever.

square_usual 11 hours ago | parent [-]

How is that related to a transfer? If you have a job on an H1b, you can get another job and switch to it any time with a transfer.

liveoneggs 9 hours ago | parent [-]

re-read OOP, not your own jump to "transfer"

SilverElfin 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It is unbelievable the kind of misinformation that is spread about immigrants. Thanks for pointing that out

ProllyInfamous 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The "problem" is that you have to compensate natives better / treatment.

waynesonfire 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just look at the open roles for these companies, all India. They're not hiding it. Don't even need H1B.

adamsb6 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's not a surplus of American developers that can pass interview loops at top tech employers.

Xirdus 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They are creating this very surplus by firing 16,000 people who already did. And that's on top of all the mass firings last year.

Sevii 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

FAANG has been engaged in mass layoffs for two years now. How can you possibly make the claim that there is a surplus of people who can pass the interview loops? Obviously, there isn't because they are firing people who passed those loops.

drecked 12 hours ago | parent [-]

You’re ignoring the part where FAANG massively overhired in the years preceding.

Meta and Amazon doubled their headcount in the 2-3 years of the pandemic.

Others like Google increased by 60+%.

You’re also forgetting about this little thing popularly called AI that happened in the intervening years.

There may be an argument that H1B isn’t fit to purpose in a post AI world (although that argument is also false if we think software engineering will remain a viable job going forward, but that’s a different topic).

But it’s much harder to argue that H1B hurt US employers when thr industry they hired the majority of H1B employees in the first 2 decades of the 2000s, also saw some of the highest growth in jobs while simultaneously posting the highest growth in salaries (there may have been certain minor industries hiring a few thousand people, like Oceanographer that had a slightly higher increase, but even that was likely not true because BLS data doesn’t factor compensation in the form of stock options which disproportionally provided wealth for SW engineers relative to other workers).

johnnyanmac 9 hours ago | parent [-]

>You’re ignoring the part where FAANG massively overhired in the years preceding.

Yes, because overhiring is a lie generated to justify layoffs. I'd hope by year 3 that we'd see through this. If they "overhired", why is hiring still up globally while down in the US?

>You’re also forgetting about this little thing popularly called AI that happened in the intervening years.

What about it? Hiring numbers are still up. Its clearly not replacing workers as of now.

varjag 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Quality outcomes of top tech employers are still somehow lacklustre despite all that.

eli_gottlieb 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Then why all the layoffs? You don't fire people you've got a shortage of.

toomuchtodo 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://layoffs.fyi/

The domestic talent exists, and companies can leverage it or be punished financially for attempting to “contain labor costs” through leveraging visa workers.

VirusNewbie 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Ok, then hire them on an O-1 visa. H1B is the problem as it creates a indentured servitude class that is going to work for less.

SilverElfin 12 hours ago | parent [-]

H1B workers cost more on average than permanent residents. That’s just based on salary. Once you account for the fees and legal costs and risks of the immigration process, H1B workers are way more expensive. Also, these visas can be transferred between companies.

There’s no such thing as an indentured servitude class here - this is just part of the giant racist misinformation machine of the right, to make it seem like shutting it down would somehow be doing those employees a favor. In reality it’ll hurt the entire country.

jujube3 6 hours ago | parent [-]

None of what you're saying is related to what the parent post is saying at all. He's saying, if the immigrants are exceptional, they should be on an O-1 visa, which is specifically designed for exceptional people. If they're not exceptional, then why not hire an unemployed American worker instead?

H1B supposedly is designed to address "shortages", but there are no actual shortages.

pdntspa 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

bUt wE wAnT tHe BeSt oF tHe BeSt!!!11

dheera 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> there are enough american job seekers in CS

To be blunt: Not enough qualified ones. Look at the names of all the top AI papers of the past 3 years, not too many are American.

When you get bullied in American public schools for being a "nerd" and liking science and math, your country doesn't exactly produce a lot of state-of-the-art STEM professionals. You get a small handful of exceptional people who overcame the adversity but that's it.

The top 0.1% are perhaps mostly American-educated. The top 10% on the other hand are mostly not American. And you need the top 10% to code for the top 0.1%.

hajile 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Producing AI papers isn't the job requirement for 99.9% of STEM jobs.

I won't talk about other fields, but American devs (regardless of race) tend to be much more passionate about computer science and (perhaps as a result) tend to be much better at their job than those from the big-name outsourcing countries.

I was tasked with finding an Indian hire a while ago. I lost count of exactly how many people I had to interview. (I spent a huge portion of my time for over a year doing interviews). We were looking for a senior developer, but settled for at most an intermediate developer. We swapped between multiple top-rated Indian recruiting firms, gave automated tests, had their interviewers ask pre-screening questions, but nothing helped improve candidate quality in any real way. I caught more people than I could count cheating answers on technical interviews (probably how they got past the screeners). We didn't even look at anyone without at least 10 years of "experience", but less than 10% of candidates could write basic fizzbuzz (and some of them accidentally showed that they were using GPT to try to code what we wanted because they didn't have a clue).

It may be an anecdote, but the sample size was quite large and we are a F500 company with the ability to attract talent, so I think its likely that we were attracting better-than-average candidates too.

EDIT: I'd add that it's not just my team. I've sat as an observer for a lot of other hiring interviews and they had the same problem. Across our company, we've had massive turnover in our outsourced India centers because the people they hired did such poor work.

liveoneggs 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

tell us more about your racial-based hiring

dheera 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I won't talk about other fields, but American devs (regardless of race) tend to be much more passionate about computer science and (perhaps as a result) tend to be much better at their job than those from the big-name outsourcing countries.

Then why are half the websites I use broken? Why is my hospital's billing estimate system broken? Why did my FSA provider send a request of documentation to the wrong e-mail address? Why is my bank's website always broken? Why did Equifax leak data? Why did Doordash mis-charge me?

> Indian recruiting firms

There's your problem. Most top talent doesn't find jobs via recruiting firms.

TheOtherHobbes 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Why is everything broken? American MBA culture. PE wealth extraction. A bought and paid for political class.

Zero situational awareness, DGAF as long as number go up.

irishcoffee 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Then why are half the websites I use broken? Why is my hospital's billing estimate system broken? Why did my FSA provider send a request of documentation to the wrong e-mail address? Why is my bank's website always broken? Why did Equifax leak data? Why did Doordash mis-charge me?

Well… you may be answering your own question if you think about it really, really hard.

cultofmetatron 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> When you get bullied in American public schools for being a "nerd" and liking science and math, your country doesn't exactly produce a lot of state-of-the-art STEM professionals.

Its worse than that. when I lived in america, I found that being a software engineer was a dealbreaker when it came to dating most women. Imagine my surprise going to other countries and finding that my chosen profession made me high value proposition to most women.

rune-dev 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

As an American this does not match my experience at all.

What profession were those women looking for?

ipaddr 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Vets, climate change scientists, doctors, environmental lawyers and athletics. Bonus points for trustfunds and influencers. Women want to make as much as men but also want their partner to make more than them.

Ever see a female doctor marrying a plumber or construction worker? No they marry Male doctors or lawyer of higher status.

triceratops 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> climate change scientists

They aren't known for making a lot of money, but I guess "I'm saving the world" is an attractive quality in a mate.

mghackerlady 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Has it ever occurred to you that all those fields have one thing in common? it's empathy. The people in those positions tend to not be the kind to murder you when you say no. Not saying that's true for blue collar men, but the odds are significantly higher. Also doctors and lawyers naturally tend to be around doctors and lawyers, that's hardly the crazy observation you seem to think it is

ipaddr 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not sure lawyers or climate scientists have more empathy then a middle age man who lives with his mother and cares for her while getting a disability check. But woman prefer the former.

The answer is woman value status.

Getting murdered is a hollywood / news fear that rarely happens. People should be worried about deadly things that happen often like cancer or heart attacks. Those are rarely the leading story on the nightly news.

Programmers are around programmers but the rate they marry another programmer is much less. Even with a gender imbalance women programmers are not seeking male programmers like women doctors.

mghackerlady an hour ago | parent [-]

I implore you to look at r/whenwomenrefuse

johnnyanmac 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure but that doesn't fit the notion of "being a software engineer is a turnoff".

johntarter 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Bartenders, starving artists, musicians, and athletes?

mghackerlady 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They tend to have personality, which I and most women consider more important than looks or money in my experience

johnnyanmac 9 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think most professional athletes are lauded for their "personality".

The other 3, sure. Bartenders need to be good at talking to people to succeed, and artists need to be more eccentric (in a different way from nerds) for their own success.

linksnapzz 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Those are the ones they fool around with; not the ones they marry.

irishcoffee 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Ha yeah. “You’re a really interesting person and a great fuck, but you don’t make enough money for this to be serious”

the same person, a short while later

“Why doesn’t anyone love me!?”

the_real_cher 4 hours ago | parent [-]

What is going on in this page haha

shimman 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Tech industry has no problems working with state police forces to imprison woman that get abortions or just generally profit off of making teenage girls depressed.

We should applaud those women for not willing to date people that inflict misery and death upon them.

Maybe the kids are alright after all?

johnnyanmac 9 hours ago | parent [-]

What industry has put actual resistance to these in these times? Plenty of Hollywood has wool over their eyes (though a few are starting to speak out), Sports bent the knee for a full year (especially FIFA), law firms capitulated, hospitals aren't gonna lose their massive profit margins over the health care stuff.

No industry is coming out of this with a clean bill of health. You as an individual can only choose to not work with the most evil ones.

shimman 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Industries don't, people do. One thing to keep in mind is that corporations have always worked with fascism, they will never resist but workers can. Sabotage takes many forms and one can just look at how Dutch resistance worked against the Nazis.

You can do many things to sabotage that are nonviolent and also highly effective:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_resistance

I'd also be weary with your examples; many hospitals are experiencing effective strikes or law firms that capitulated are struggling finding clients or lost valuable workers.

johnnyanmac 6 hours ago | parent [-]

>I'd also be weary with your examples; many hospitals are experiencing effective strikes or law firms that capitulated are struggling finding clients or lost valuable workers.

Well yes. That was partially my point. Tech is no different; there's a lot of companies capitulating but I see a huge surge of people speaking out against this. Even people you largely think of as non-partisan previously. I don't think it's fair to pit me into some fascist state because of a company I no longer work for nor perhaps never worked for.

But tech lacks the unions that other industries have and by its nature is a lot more scattered out. I can't do much more than the ones criticizing the companies with regards to providing a "Dutch resistance"; I don't work for them (heck, I don't even have a full time job as of now) and I've done a lot of culling of what I use over the decade. Probably more than what many have done, but still seemingly insignificant in terms of their bottom line.

I'm all for collective action, but I'm still looking for that collection. It seems like things need to get as bad as Minneapolis before that collection emerges.

mghackerlady 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean, I'm a woman and a software dev.. I suppose I'm not most women though.

Anecdotally men in tech jobs tend to either be the best I've ever met or the worst I've ever met (loosely related to why they're in the field to begin with)

vineyardmike 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Look at the names of all the top AI papers of the past 3 years, not too many are American.

There are plenty of Americans who don’t have a European names.

tmoertel 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> When you get bullied in American public schools for being a "nerd" and liking science and math, your country doesn't exactly produce a lot of state-of-the-art STEM professionals. You get a small handful of exceptional people who overcame the adversity but that's it.

Is bullying nerds still happening? It was commonplace when I was young in the 1980s. (In fact, it was so common that it was the basis of the 1984 movie Revenge of the Nerds.) But I had thought the social status of nerds and geeks had leveled up a few times since then. Did the level-ups not happen?

mghackerlady 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes and no. Generally, you don't necessarily get bullied but you lose opportunities to interact with people. Most students in the US do not care about academics more than they need to, and the kind of "nerd" to care about math and science likely doesn't have much to talk about with these people or even is able to have a meaningful conversation without being told something along the lines of "it's not that deep" or "I'm not reading allat"

dheera 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> But I had thought the social status of nerds and geeks had leveled up a few times since then.

Only in places like Palo Alto, Boston, Seattle, etc.

Not in most of the cornfield country.

efskap 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What's an American name? Are you referring to WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) names?

VirusNewbie 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sorry man, American raised autists beat chinese 996 every day of the week. shrug.

I mean that in the cultural sense, not racially. ABC autists are S tier too.

SilverElfin 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I’m not sure why you’re getting downvoted. The most important paper in the AI era was written by a team of immigrants.

boelboel 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Because it's an attack on 'american culture', I'm not even sure if nerds get bullied that much in school anymore.

Often "nerds" are the ones bullying, i say "nerds" because the people getting good grades and into great universities, the ones getting into tech, are often just strivers instead of nerds.

"Real nerds" are a tiny minority of people in any country and I doubt they account for most immigrants in the US, it's mostly just upper middle class strivers I've noticed.

yodsanklai 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B.

As an interviewer in a big tech company, it seems all candidates I interview are foreigners who often graduated in the US. Either the company discriminates (which I really doubt it does), or there aren't enough qualified Americans for some jobs. And even if there are, the largest pool of candidates, the better.

a99p 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> And even if there are, the largest pool of candidates, the better.

More competition is not inherently "better" nor does it necessarily yield greater innovation. Trying to impose arbitrary competition as some abstract principle is just masochism.

zdragnar 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Big tech companies are biased to sourcing from big name universities that have a lot of foreign students, and big tech companies were much more likely to go through the effort of H1B than smaller companies. As such your candidate pool is more heavily skewed than elsewhere.

drecked 11 hours ago | parent [-]

All the conspiracies theories can be put to bed by walking into any engineering department (maybe outside of biomedical engineering…which makes me think this may be related to how Americans demonize math) and observing that the majority of students are foreign or maybe second generation immigrants.

This ratio gets worse because American students are disproportionately more likely to follow up their engineering undergrad with law or business school, so even if they may be engineers they’ll get into business and/or something like patent attorney going forward.

circus1540 7 hours ago | parent [-]

The conspiracy here is that somehow US spending on primary/secondary education ranks among the top, yet we are unable to produce competitive college students. And we mask this very serious problem from directly rippling into our economy by... importing students and workers.

coliveira 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's really easy to see that big tech is interviewing only people who passed an initial filter which at this point is AI based. They're clearly filtering for some characteristics they want in a candidate, and most probably the filter is giving you the people you mentioned.

pickleRick243 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Better for whom?

mattnewton 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Businesses, the consumers who buy their products, and the global workforce.

eli_gottlieb 12 hours ago | parent [-]

The global workforce benefits from higher salaries and higher demand for labor, not from zero- or negative-sum moves of jobs from one place to another.

eli_gottlieb 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

1) There's a very reasonable chance the company discriminates. Sorry, but once bitten, twice shy. One company gets caught at it and the whole industry develops a reputation.

2) If you've got a problem finding candidates, there's 16,000 more on the market now. Congratulations!

3) If you think there must be something wrong with those 16,000, well, that would explain where your pipeline is going wrong.

yodsanklai 12 hours ago | parent [-]

> There's a very reasonable chance the company discriminates

I don't see how this is even possible. There would be a memo from the CEO to 1000s of recruiters asking them to favor foreigners? that would leak immediately.

ipaddr 11 hours ago | parent [-]

They pay the top Indian firms for candidate referrals. And a CEO would say we need more diversity and make that a company goal.

SoftTalker 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"foreigners who often graduated in the US"

This is still the case in US Comp Sci programs. There are some Americans in these programs but it's mostly Indian and Chinese. The American kids gravitate to the business schools.

snerbles 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The company itself might not discriminate as a policy, but some hiring managers certainly have their preferences. Or exclusively pull talent from their overseas cousin's brother's spouse's college roommate's consulting firm that is most certainly not a grift.

12 hours ago | parent [-]
[deleted]
hajile 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There haven't been any meaningful attacks on H1b visa. When running for office, Trump said very clearly that H1b was good for his companies (saving money), but bad for the American people.

Today, he's claiming that we need H1b because we don't know how to build computer chips (~75% come from India with zero advanced production and another ~12% come from China which is also far behind).

His "massive" $100k increase over 7 years is just a bit over $14k/yr. I had a former H1b programmer (now legal immigrant) I worked with tell me about his experience. Getting paid less than $40k to live in Austin, TX and living with a half-dozen other H1b indenured servants/slaves in a tiny shared apartment just so they could survive the 7 years and get on the path to citizenship.

Do you think those companies would bat an eye about increasing their expenses from $40k to $54k per year when median dev salary back then (2015) was around $92k/yr? After a decade of inflation, that $14k is even less important.

Over-immigration with H2b and illegal immigration suppresses blue-collar wages (Bernie Sanders famously called open borders a "Koch brothers proposal"). H1b and outsourcing to India centers suppresses white-collar wages.

Do you see prices dropping as they cut worker salaries and outsource? Can you even buy things when you don't have a job?

Trump (and the rest of the uniparty) has enabled corporate theft on a scale that's never been seen before and the chickens are going to be coming home to roost really soon.

pram 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Sorry but making around $40k in 2015 would not, under any circumstance, require you to live with 6 roommates in Austin. That is EXTREME hyperbole lol

My first IT job in Austin in 2010 paid $18 an hour and I had my own apartment and car.

hajile 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe they wanted to live together to save money (remember, the rest of their family isn't in the US), but that is irrelevant to the fact that they were paid way less than half the going rate in that city (I remember his stated salary being a little over $30k, so I errored on the high side). We were pretty close and when he told me the story, there wasn't any reason for him to lie. Who am I to say his experience isn't real?

malshe 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you read this person's comments, looks like they are just making up crap. Apparently this one person has met or interviewed all the Indian H1Bs in the US.

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nothing to do with it, just following a trend before the attacks: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-nadella-pledges-3-b...

oytis 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Very related IMO. Even before Trump US workforce was expensive, now limit the influx of new workforce and hiring abroad looks like a logical decision

nerdponx 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Imagine that! It's almost like it's coordinated. Surely the US government would never do something like that on purpose.

oytis 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I can't imagine Donald Trump would harm the US on purpose.

nerdponx 10 hours ago | parent [-]

He absolutely would harm some people in the US to benefit other people in the US. The same is true for many many other businesspeople and politiciansl