Posted by b_mc2 9/12/2025
The lure of H1-Bs is the money savings, and the fact that if you're on an H1-B, you're practically an indentured servant (Yes, things have changed recently and it is easier on paper to switch jobs while on H1-B). It used to be that if you lost your job as an H1-B, you had 30 days to uproot your life and get out of the US otherwise you'd be in violation of immigration laws.
The practical effect of an H1-B is to act as a non-compete, punitive termination clause, and a time bounded employment contract. These are very expensive terms to ask for in conventional US employment contracts - most of them are now effectively banned for standard W-2 workers. Forcing top wage earners to compete with illegal employment terms does not seem reasonable.
Health insurance, parental leave† and retirement are also employer-driven. This seems to be a US default that incidentally gives a lot of leverage to employers.
† Yes there are government mandated minimums, but when compared to other developed countries, substantive parental leave is largely left to the generosity of the employer
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/upshot/the-real-reason-th...
> In 1942, with so many eligible workers diverted to military service, the nation was facing a severe labor shortage. Economists feared that businesses would keep raising salaries to compete for workers, and that inflation would spiral out of control as the country came out of the Depression. To prevent this, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9250, establishing the Office of Economic Stabilization.
> This froze wages. Businesses were not allowed to raise pay to attract workers.
> Businesses were smart, though, and instead they began to use benefits to compete. Specifically, to offer more, and more generous, health care insurance.
> Then, in 1943, the Internal Revenue Service decided that employer-based health insurance should be exempt from taxation. This made it cheaper to get health insurance through a job than by other means.
----
Hysterical raisins strikes again.
http://www.catb.org/esr/jargon/html/H/hysterical-reasons.htm...
The fact that your statement is a truth indicates a problem with the program.
If H1-Bs are being abused (by hiding job openings to US citizens), or seen as unfair competition for American labor, then the government has the authority to modify or terminate the program. This thread has been primarily about exploring other paradigms for enabling immigration.
I think the "H-1B is indentured servitude" thing is a bit of a red herring, tbh. Many US employers are generally crappy.
I cannot see how to justify H-1B as a benefit the employer provides for the worker, because it just sounds exploitive, like the comment above.
I can see justification only as a benefit to the employer (and the society allowing the immigration) when there are truly not enough acceptable candidates. I'm left wondering how that can be true when so many employers routinely hide postings.
I understand that H1-Bs are currently likely to create an abusive relationship with the visa-ed employee, but just because you have identified a valid diagnosis doesn’t mean your suggested prescription would be much better.
The immigrants are all going to be paying taxes on their earnings. If you can boost H1B salaries by an average of $20k/yr by doing a price auction, that brings govt revenue and maybe even gives opportunities to balance the budget by creating more H1B slots.
Your proposal will mean 99% of all of the H1-B allocation will go to hedge fund quants and 1% maybe go to an AI researcher, but all of the materials science (eg. Cutting edge battery tech), semiconductor fabrication, neuroscience, pharmaceutical research etc will have to go without the skilled workers they currently get from visas. This is a recipe for the Boeingization of the US economy.
the Boeingization of the economy is mbas and bean counter middle management realizing that an H1-B is much cheaper than a citizen and opting to buy that labor, even if it's worse quality. as management, you put an ass into a seat, so job accomplished, here's your accolade.
Boeing is full of bean counters now, but they are optimizing things like opening factories in poor non-unions states (the South Carolina factory has had lots of whistleblowers screaming about lack of training and pressure to build faster than is safe), convincing the FAA to let Boeing employees do regulatory review on their own company, etc. few or none of Boeing’s problems are solved by eliminating/reducing H1-Bs for that company/industry, which is why I chose them as the example.
“Americans are dissuaded…”
This has an emotional appeal to intuition, but I don’t think it’s what’s causing Americans not to compete for jobs/industries that heavily use H1-B. If it was, there would simply be a market competition and those programmer salaries would drop. Instead, I think Americans have been convinced by Theil types to avoid US universities (either for cultural reasons or ROI reasons). You seem to be making an argument that the ROI would be better if H1-Bs were scarce, but that wouldn’t change the fact that tuition in elite US institutions is expensive and seats are scarce+competitive. Without also changing either the university system to seat more students or companies to hire from different signals (instead of highly prizing the bland name of the university), American job applicants won’t be dissuaded from getting those degrees.
Arguably H1-Bs have done the most damage to US programmers, but there are several other structural problems regarding programmer hiring in the US. The big tech collusion to reduce employee poaching (not current, but recent past), application process (“resume firewall”, ghost jobs, deluge of automated applications), the interview process (we seem to have optimized for gotcha questions and LeetCoding tests, rather than real world requirements), high interest rates (higher than the recent past) have squeezed VC funding and closed the wallets of employers, and the race to replace/augment salary employees with AI agents. All of these are structural problems that arguably do more dissuading than the visa system.
If we can only bring 85,000 people into the country on one type of visa, doesn't it make sense to prioritize those that will bring the most value (tax revenue, in this case)?
And if that's not enough people... raise the limit? And be confident that a raised limit is still keeping a high quality bar on entrants?
Option 2: you give a visa to a PhD to work for 150k/year in a small biopharma startup that thinks it has the solution to cancer.
This salary stacked ranking optimizes for today’s worth of work. Not its potential.
> hedge fund quants
A lot of H1Bs are not working on anything you described though.
This is a beautiful fantasy for H-1B, that is totally disconnected from reality. What is that 1% of the H-1Bs currently? It is mostly IT and software slop jobs.
Here are the top 40 employers, it isn't going to hurt research in the US to cut them to zero.
Amazon.Com Services
Cognizant Technology Solutions
Ernst & Young
Tata Consultancy Services
Microsoft
Infosys
Meta Platforms
Intel
Hcl America
Amazon Web Services
IBM
Jpmorgan Chase
Walmart
Apple
Accenture
Capgemini
Ltimindtree
Deloitte Consulting
Salesforce
Qualcomm
Tesla
Amazon Development Center
Wipro
Fidelity Technology Group
Tech Mahindra
Compunnel Software Group
Deloitte Touche
Mphasis
Nvidia
Adobe
Bytedance
Goldman, Sachs
Cisco
Pricewaterhousecoopers Advisory Services
Paypal
Ebay
Servicenow
Visa USA
For non-slop jobs, give them a green card and fast track to citizenship. For an IT consultant, no thanks.
If they're that necessary, let companies hire them on green card visas.
But I agree rhat H1B should not be about hiring cheap labour. I'd prefer a system where H1B salaries must be competitive with the top of the field. There are incredibly smart talents around the world, and if you hire someone from outside then it should be because they are the best of the best, so they should get paid accordingly.
Overregulation can reduce the effective freedom in a market (usually by increasing costs or reducing choice) but good regulation is there to shepherd this equilibrium of a fair deal between buyers and sellers by doing things like getting externalities priced in (if youre buying x you should pay the cost of x, not your neighbor); preventing monopolies, cartels, other price fixing / choice reducing things that makes one side of the market not have to meet in the middle; and adding standards or visibility so market participants can be more efficient and safe when choosing (instead of having to do things like research all of a company's supply chain and employees to decide if it's safe to eat there or to fly in their planes).
Some things get imposed onto the market intentionally like protection for unions (in theory an alternative/shortcut to grouping up into inefficient passthrough companies), tarrifs to give someone an advantage in what they can offer, subsidies to intentionally prevent the market from contracting to the current size of demand (like if the country wants to maintain a certain ability to produce food or doctors or certain goods), and government programs to effectively set a floor on the price of something (like interest rates so lending/borrowing will never be worse than a certain mark).
All these things are useful tools in a market of self motivated actors trying to maximize their own gain in the short term but, like all tools, they get abused and out maneuvered often so it's a constant game of cat and mouse to keep the system running.
Pros and cons all over the place; most things have a huge downside of vulnerability to truly bad actors having too much control (which is where the idea of democracy comes in but I have to stop myself I already word dumped).
tl;dr yes absolutely call it a free market until people are forced to participate too much
There's a balance though, and as heavily regulated as immigration is I just don't see how it could fall into the range of being a roughly free market. Work-based immigration into the US specifically is heavily regulated and there are a lot of blocks in the way making it infeasible or impossible for one to take part in it.
I mean that on both sides too, both employers and potential employees are heavily burdened by the process and often they just can't take part in the process for any number of regulatory reasons.
A famous supermodel can most likely get an O1 visa, for people of extraordinary ability. But agency models more commonly work on H1-B. Melania Trump is a famous example. These visas are tied to an employer and there's less portability. It's a two tier system.
Personally I think that there is some harm here. Agencies bring in young women from relatively poor countries and they are put in conditions where abuse, even sexual assault, is common and can face pressures to tolerate conditions and shoots that a local person with a safety network would not.
If these other professions don’t pay as much as swe, then doesn’t that indicate that domestic supply is meeting those industries needs better than it is swe?
If their art's got enough value to be valuable in the real sense, they're well above all this. Otherwise they're nothing.
Tying H1B to salary is imo a reasonable solution for most companies. Thing is, in that case, most companies would simply resort to bringing in more L1 employees.
The key difference here is that the L1 is a non-immigrant visa with a period of 7 years. The H1B isn't.
Linus developed Linux, but we wouldn’t be able to hire the next version of him because hedge funds would dominate the high salary reqs in this hypothetical system.
You can also get an employer sponsored green card similarly to what you’d do if you were on an H-1B.
So you apply for green card and if you don't immediately get it (particularly because of the backlog for some countries), you have to leave the US.
(I'm not an immigration lawyer and these are only my personal interpretation).
“Labor Certification Exception:
Under the doctrine of dual intent, the fact that a U.S. employer has filed a labor certification, or an individual has filed a permanent residence petition on behalf of the non-immigrant, shall not be a basis for denying the O-1 petition, a request for extension of stay, admission to the US, or change of status for that O-1 non-immigrant.”
There's no long answer.
Artistic talent is not important.
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
The normal fix for companies that can't afford to hire, is to let them go broke.
If this is the effect, is there a reason these starved orgs couldn't just hire Americans? If not, I think implicit in your argument is that H1-Bs exist to provide cheap labor to firms at the expense of American lives.
Then they need to pay better?
There are not 85,000 quant PhDs jobs paying a megabuck+ in spite of what many vocal people claim (and if they really wanted someone at those prices--they're more likely to just open a satellite site wherever the candidate already is and avoid the whole immigration issue). Any decent engineering salary would almost certainly qualify.
And if you can't qualify for an H1-B because the engineering salary isn't high enough, then I don't have much sympathy.
Nobody has a _right_ to cheap labor! Not attracting enough talent? Offer more!
Visas could be allocated in some kind of priority order, but salary alone would probably concentrate visas to just the relatively high-paying tech sector, leaving other professions out entirely.
I'm not sure that's good; the US also needs people with expertise in science, industrial and agricultural control systems, clean power, and more. But these professions tend to earn a fraction of what a software developer makes. Other countries have gone with points systems that try to balance for this.
Then the market says it doesn't need them. Fix market mechanics so hiring another tech worker isn't worth multiples of things people say society should value. I.e. maybe there is too much upside in software sales since copies are free to the IP owner, liability is limited, lock-in is often impractical to escape, etc.
Why should we work to lower salaries in professions where we agree the salary is already depressed enough to lose new entrants to an easier and higher paying profession? (I think I can say this since I'm a lazy STEM drop out developer who makes more than twice what I estimated for my preferred path that I also found more challenging.)
The truth is we should be much more open to temporary work permits, and much less open to this sort of thing for granting permanent residency. Tons of people getting employment based green cards hold jobs that could easily be filled by an American.
From a purely economic perspective, the ideal is no borders, and total freedom of movement – but, of course, there are reasons that people don't want that: the real world doesn't run on economics. Pretty much all of these measures are compromises of some description, with non-obvious (and sometimes delayed) consequences if you start messing about with them. Most arguments involving "$CountryName jobs for $Demonym!" ignore all that, and if that leads to policy decisions, bad things happen. (That's not to say there's no way to enact protectionist employment policies, but you'd need to tweak more than just the one dial if you wanted that to work.)
Could be filled by an American, sure. Is the American willing to do the work? Probably not...
This is not a uniquely American problem.
In tech, I've always felt it was hard to hire Americans because it seems there's such a push for degrees in business/law etcetera as opposed to engineering.
I also know many new grads looking for jobs and having a lot of trouble.
Unfortunately, their experience is telling their younger peers not to go into tech - it's full.
What I'm trying to say is that all the 'good' resumes that made it through were almost exclusively for non citizens or naturalized people.
When you’re a hiring manager, you need to do whatever it takes to be the first filter, or at least get the permissions needed to see candidates excluded by recruiting/hR.
This is crazy and I don’t understand it but HR and recruiters do not pass along the majority of strong candidates. I have no idea why, often the resumes are indistinguishable from ones they forward on, and plenty of the candidates they forward to me are just prima facie not qualified.
5 years ago all of big tech massively overhired, they let go a lot of people later, so that's not a fair comparison.
Also, you cannot expect a hiring manager to do everything. If the company decides I shouldn't be spending my time screening candidates then that's not what I do.
> Also, you cannot expect a hiring manager to do everything. If the company decides I shouldn't be spending my time screening candidates then that's not what I do.
Maybe it’s different for you. I hire people I have to work with, so I am going to do whatever it takes to make sure I get good candidates. I can’t imagine a better possible use of my time.
In tech, yes. In general I don't know and not all h1b's are tech
> I hire people I have to work with, so I am going to do whatever it takes to make sure I get good candidates.
Same, but that doesn't mean I'm going to do the work someone upstream from me has already done again
To me it's hilarious how on the one hand America is outraged about how all manufacturing has left the US, then after venting about that they buy a super cheap phone charger on Alibaba...
Put your money where your mouth is. If the customer had rejected overseas cheaper products then more jobs would've stayed in the US. Those salaries are a lot higher though so the products are more expensive...
It's the standard of living that Americans expect. In order to afford that you need x amount of money. For example, if people in a different country don't need a car (let alone 2) and live in a 800sqft home with a family of 4. What does that mean for an acceptable minimum wage?
I don't even know what you mean by cheap labor. If you mean illegal practices below minimum wage, sure. But the average farming salary for example is over 17 [1] dollars an hour. Meanwhile in China, the average manufacturing salary was 97500 yuan [2], which is ~13680 dollars a year. That's 13680/12/168 = 6.8$ an hour.
So knowing this the basic question is: Is the American consumer willing to pay more for the same product because American workers need to be paid 2.5x more. The answer is just simply no.
Can you impose tarifs to offset that difference? Sure, the end result cannot be anything other than prices going up
1: https://www.indeed.com/career/farm-worker/salaries 2: https://www.statista.com/statistics/743509/china-average-yea...
But yes, undercutting the labor market with immigration policy is wrong for Americans as a whole and a big giveaway to the business class. Yes, paying Americans a higher labor rate would raise prices to their natural level (much less than you would think in most cases, particularly food) and reduce income inequality.
PERM has nothing to do with H-1B, it's a part of the employment-based immigration process. The reason companies do this shit is because they claim to the US that there are no willing and able citizens or permanent residents for a commodity job such as "front end" or "project management". I.e. committing fraud.
The real problem here is that the way the current system is set up, you have to prove that there are no citizens available for a position by listing a job and interviewing candidates. The problem with that is that you will never be able to prove that by this method. Say you have 1000 jobs for a specific role in the economy and 700 US citizens qualified to do that job and are already employed. The minute you try to file PERM for the 1 foreign national, if you list the job out, the chances of at least 1 person applying out of the 700 are very high because, you know, people change jobs. This puts companies and immigrants in a very difficult position because you literally cannot prove the shortage at an industry level on your own using this method. So they just have to resort to working within the laws to make it work.
This all would be completely unnecessary if congress fixes the immigration laws and asks BLS to setup market tests that are data driven to establish high demand roles.
Why? If you know as much as you claim about immigration you should know that any EB1 application will dwarf any EB2 application in amount of work and documentation needed. Also, having rare skillset is not enough to get EB1, as you also might know. You need to meet a set of requirements, none of if which has anything to do with rarity of the skillset.
> You may be eligible for an employment-based, first-preference visa if you are an alien of extraordinary ability, are an outstanding professor or researcher, or are a certain multinational executive or manager.
Yet you went for EB2, which is designed for a different set of immigrants where the proof of exceptional ability is a lot more lax
> You may be eligible for an employment-based, second preference visa if you are a member of the professions holding an advanced degree or its equivalent, or a person who has exceptional ability.
And you’re concerned about gaming the system? And you’re also claiming that EB system was designed to work for exactly the scenario that you fit?
>> You may be eligible for an employment-based, first-preference visa if you are an alien of extraordinary ability, are an outstanding professor or researcher, or are a certain multinational executive or manager.
Yep, and I am none of this.
>Yet you went for EB2, which is designed for a different set of immigrants where the proof of exceptional ability is a lot more lax
Yep, because EB2 does not require any exceptional ability, just the lack of a US worker available, willing, and able to do the job and a master's degree.
>and companies have lawyers who are good at following the text
Apparently not very good lawyers at Apple: https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-11/ier-apple_settlement_agre...
Or Meta: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-labor-depart...
Just a couple of recent high-profile busts. The problem is not "good lawyers" but the fact that the only punishment for breaking the law is a pittance of a settlement.
>The problem is not "good lawyers" but the fact that the only punishment for breaking the law is a pittance of a settlement.
That's how settlements go. The government gets to do its theater, the constituents believe that the government is fighting for them, and companies write this off as the cost of doing business.
Yes. And as the topical article and countless other ones state - they don't. They actively obfuscate their job openings so they do know they act against the law. And it's so easy to observe that their "good lawyers" cannot help here.
>The government doesn't believe that it can win on the merits, and hence they settle.
That's just, like, your opinion, dude.
That's the official opinion of the government, the judiciary, and the defendants. A settlement is not admission of guilt - the opposite actually. What are we even debating here ?
> "good lawyers" cannot help here
A settlement for a pittance, as you said, is the mark of a good lawyer.
If it has been an official opinion it would have been published and you had a link to it, would not you? Settlement is not an admission of guilt nor is it admission that the case can't be won on merit.
>A settlement for a pittance, as you said, is the mark of a good lawyer.
Different lawyer handle DOJ prosecution and immigration (immigration lawyers are usually not even members of BAR). The government settles this kind of cases because of politics, not merit. If there had been a modicum of will to go after lawbreakers, these cases would try themselves - tons of witnesses, tons of evidence zero traces of "good faith".
The government also files these cases in the first place because of politics, not merit. See my point about theater earlier.
>If there had been a modicum of will to go after lawbreakers, these cases would try themselves - tons of witnesses, tons of evidence zero traces of "good faith".
That's just like, your opinion, dude.
Yeah, a completely different case by a different organization means this case is also political... I don't really know what to say at this point. You seem to be arguing on random tangents without touching the issue of this HN item: companies obfuscating job adverts for the positions involved in PERM. For all I know you might not even know what does "good faith" mean and truly think it's a good faith behavior so you are more interested in discussing random stuff. I am sorry that I am not.
It's the same issue - the DOJ is going after companies and their ads. In SpaceX's case, the ads said citizen/LPR only due to export control, and DOJ got mad that it would exclude asylees and refugees for some of these positions which may not actually have export control requirements. Your complaint is also about ads and whether they are in print media or online or obfuscated etc. If you think that ads in print media violate the law, you need to prove that in a court of law. Note that the law explicitly requires ads in Sunday newspapers, whereas online ads are not mandatory. There is a check list of what is and is not required, and the lawyers are following the text (https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/20/656.17). The government doesn't think that there is positive EV in taking it to trial, and hence settles. You, as an individual, can still pursue a civil suit if you are injured.
>For all I know you might not even know what does "good faith" mean
There are thousands of bogus laws in the books and the government is not your friend. Good faith in this context means doing the minimal amount of work needed to comply with the law. Innocent until proven guilty, and the government has the burden of proof. This is how I view all interactions with the state.
~
I'm all for immigration reform in ways that empower the workers.
Want to bring in the best talent from elsewhere? Fine, Make sure they cost the company MORE than you'd pay a US worker, with the government getting the excess as a tax on hiring non-local labor.
That worker should also be either a guest worker OR on a pathway to citizenship at their own discretion.
What is also part of the process, is the requirement that you pay more than the median wages. Undercutting wages will get this petition denied and the process itself costs thousands of dollars on top of the thousands of dollars it takes to file for the underlying visa.
Again, the immigration system doesn’t work as you think it does. Yes there are abuses and those need to be addressed and I’m fully onboard with reforms that fix it. But the first step would be to understand the system and how it works.
It should be a notable cost, and the worker needs to be making a premium for it to be a rush on immigration.
Further note, this is to also encourage more _entry level_ jobs for local workers and train up citizens to become more highly skilled workers.
It exists for internal candidates - often companies are encouraged to fill vacancies by first allowing internal candidates to apply. Obviously this creates a cascading effect where a new role opens up in the candidates old position once they fill up the new one. At some point they just need to hire externally or we will be perpetually filling up vacancies.
I wonder how every company managed to understand the cascading effect and just hire externally instead.
A: were the top end pay, so they pushed the pay scale up
B: were uncoupled from employment. A company could pay the cost to let someone enter, but that person should be able to jump jobs day 0.
I’m not suggesting the specific implementation but I feel like if those two guiding directives were kept, both society and the individual workers would benefit from brain draining the rest of the planet while simultaneously pushing worker comp higher.
Has anyone suggested a significant change to the h1b system like this beyond just a close it all/open it all binary?
Would my point B not limit that fraudulent behavior as now the brought in migrant would be free to compete for a better position with higher pay and/or better benefits to the detriment of the company that paid an entry fee?
I would also expect this to result in massively less immigration for the same reasons companies are loathe to train entry level employees nowadays as they can jump ship as soon as they become valuable
I don't see how. As I understood, you mean that you want H-1Bs to be able to change jobs, not to hang in the country unemployed? It is already so. Of course, H-1Bs are not the only way foreign labor is imported, L-1s, for example, cannot change jobs and there is no limit on them and every big corp in the US has an office in Canada, where they hire foreigners from all over the world and move them on L-1s to the US, it's much easier and cheaper than H-1B.
However, the fraud here is: a) committed by a US business, not a foreigner and b) is not related to any non-immigrant visa such as H,L,or O are. It's a fraud in immigration process. And the immigration is the expected perk of working for a company on a temporary visa. If companies stopped filing for immigration then they would not be able to hire as many temporary visa employees.
No explicitly not that. I want whoever sponsors and h1b or the equivalent in my fantasy world here to pay for the cost to society up front and then for that h1b person to have the same freedom as a citizen.
My thinking behind that is that if a company is saying we can not find a single citizen who can fill this role so we need to import one, then this makes it real. If that argument is true then I want said immigrant to be in the workforce with the same rules that I have, instead of being a second class citizen which makes them more attractive to companies because they are cheaper/more controlled
I believe that allowing for the corporation hiring said h1b to have any say, direct or indirectly, in said h1bs ability to remain in the market will necessarily make them an employee that US companies prioritize.
The only way to stop that, from my current understanding, is to make it so that corporations have to pay the cost to add a person to society, but have no say in the decision making process after.
Upon review of my post and thinking through why I feel that way, I realized I just want the same deal applied to corporations for bringing in new entrants to society as is applied to people marrying foreigners.
I married someone outside the country and as part of their green card application I was required to commit myself to personally covering their social security checks if they divorced me before they made, iirc the exact number was 40, enough payments into social security.
Somehow companies aren’t required to have that level of skin in the game
That would be too much - an alien having all the privileges of a citizen but no obligations is above a mere citizen. If you want to become a citizen there is an employment-based immigration, if you don't - you are going to be restricted in any developed country because normal countries do not put foreigners above citizens.
>My thinking behind that is that if a company is saying we can not find a single citizen who can fill this role so we need to import one, then this makes it real.
Nothing like this happens with temporary visa workers. All that company claims in such a case is that they want to hire a foreigner and are going to pay no less than the minimum wage determined for the position. This system is based entirely on the temporary nature of the employment so there is not much scrutiny as the legal fiction here says that the foreigner is going to leave in 6 years tops.
My point is that issuing h1bs are a service for corporations in the us, ostensibly under the reason that no one in the country is capable of the job.
I am saying that assuming that is true, and assuming that we value brain draining other countries of talent, then we allow for corporations to import workers, but they need to both pay for the cost of the worker and have no control over them afterwards.
I don’t know whether the cost to society that would cover importing a worker is 10 dollars or 10 billion, but whatever is decided on as the amount I am suggesting is paid up front.
Assuming the corporation paying for the import is correct that the immigrant has a unique skill, then we would want them to be generally available to our labor market instead of tied to a single company.
That is my reasoning at least. Again poke holes in this but I do want a system that prioritizes improvements to my society or people in my society. If the benefits for whatever we end up in are centralized primarily in any single private actor, single human or organization, then I am probably against that plan
> Nothing like this happens with temporary visa workers. All that company claims in such a case is that they want to hire a foreigner and are going to pay no less than the minimum wage determined for the position. This system is based entirely on the temporary nature of the employment so there is not much scrutiny as the legal fiction here says that the foreigner is going to leave in 6 years tops.
I don’t know how to respond to this section. I am either missing some part of the h1b visa rules or we are talking about different things. What you described to me sounds like an agricultural visa or an au pair like J2 visa
As a de facto description of the current situation in the United States I agree with you.
The de jure description for why h1bs would be allowed is due to them, again _ostensibly_, having skills or a specific skillset that could not be found in a reasonable time frame and are worth importing.
I am trying to game theory out ways to make the h1b system achieve the ostensible goals. I am not trying to defend the current system as it stands
edit: I realized this might be our point of contention right now
> There are no such requirements so you whole reasoning is based on a fantasy.
I was under the impression that h1bs positions were supposed to pay a “higher than prevailing wage” but there has been a surge of activity around these terms the past few months on the internet and I can’t find definitive proof of that. If that fact isn’t true it would modify my view on the system
There is no such description in law (this is what de jure means) so I have no clue why you think so.
>I was under the impression that h1bs positions were supposed to pay a “higher than prevailing wage”
They are. It does not mean they are for jobs, which cannot be done by an American worker, ostensibly or otherwise.
I was under the impression that was the case and do not need you to prove to me otherwise. But I agreed with that de jure description and would like a system that achieves that
We often get into these problems when we start down a path of control, find it isn't working, and layer even more control onto it. See: the history of diesel engines since emission control systems were required.
This is still true, right?
Overall, the only hard requirement of the H1B seems to be "can you hold down a job 100% of the time, until you choose to depart or receive a green card?" It is quite hard to think of other requirements that are possible to implement at scale, but I do wonder.
The difficulty of switching jobs on H1-B has always been a myth. Voluntary job switches are just as easy as U.S. citizens. You just line up things well without the possibility of taking a long break in between jobs. Dealing with unexpected job terminations (fired or laid off) is the problem.
> Dealing with unexpected job terminations (fired or laid off) is the problem.
Herein lies the problem. This gives employers absolutely massive leverage over the employees, which lets them coerce things like ridiculous unpaid overtime and downright abuse.
Even if you pay the same nominal salary, the H-1B is "cheaper" if you can force them to work 60-80h whereas a top-class American is just going to demand 40h weeks. (Though in practice, those extra hours rarely see increased productivity, so whether it's actually cheaper for outputs obtained is up for debate.)
Contrast: Europe. Tech salaries are low by US standards, but you don't see as much of the outsourcing & migrant worker hype around it. European labour laws mean you can't set up a sweatshop in your branch office, and European migrants to the US won't put up with labour abuses as much.
Europe actually has had more direct export of the jobs. No need of specialist visas when the jobs were already exported away to EE. The EU allowed for companies to arbitrage away tech jobs to relatively poorer countries in the EU. And there's very little need for native top talent as there's very little native innovation happening within the EU in software - it's only a fraction of the amount happening in the US. And that's why those who can often tend to work for American companies in the EU, or migrate if they can.
Then why did my wife's friends that lost their H-1B jobs have to leave America?
American citizens don't face deportation with job loss.
Also, as a US citizen, I'm free to quit my job anytime I want. If I don't like putting up with my job because of some bullshit my employer pulls, I can easily leave. That is absolutely not the case for sponsored workers.
H-1B workers are stressed out and paranoid about their employment. They'll put up with far more, for far longer, with less compensation.
Anecdotal statistic, in my department all the people in US and Canada hired in the past 10-15 years are from Africa or India. The only Americans or Canadians are the managers, they joined 20-30 years ago and slowly retiring, now being replaced mostly by Indians.
It is happening the same in Western Europe, just with a different demographic.
larger pool means lower wages. this is so fundamental and obvious that it feels like i'm being gaslit when i see shit like this.
The real answer is that immigrants create enough economic demand to be net positive even for Americans, for much the same reason as Americans are generally more prosperous when there's more of us.
Seriously, you live in some dumpy parts of the country and you can have the exclusive rights on being the town cloud guru locked down and in principle get higher wages in a smaller labor pool, but for some strange reason few of us want to do that.
At least if these other Americans are from a different "tribe" than your own, this does not sound like a dumb strategy if people from your own "tribe" are deeply ingrained in programming jobs. :-D
> Well it's because by this logic we should just stop Americans from studying for computing jobs as well, that way those who remain will have higher wages.
generally speaking, the point of 'having a country' is not 'offering opportunities to talented foreigners at the expense of citizens'. major employers routinely violate federal employment law in the pursuit of wage suppression; cursory googling will show you the biggest names you can think of losing lawsuits for hundreds of millions of dollars for their h1b pipelines, and yet they continually do this.
Not really, it's well explained by people realizing that wages are relatively high in tech relative to the labor required, which saw lots of college students pursuing computing degrees, the rise of coding bootcamps, and so on.
The industry was growing, but so was the labor pool. You'd not expect wages to continue shooting up in that situation except for micro-segments where the demand for labor grew without labor supply going up (which is something you see in part of the AI field).
> generally speaking, the point of 'having a country' is not 'offering opportunities to talented foreigners at the expense of citizens'
Of course not, but the point of having a country is to improve the general welfare of the citizens of that country, and immigration contributes to that.
It is good for Americans collectively to have easier (i.e. cheaper) access to good software, even if it is worse for the very small subset of the American population that provides it to allow for there to be more software developers.
We saw the field of medicine self-limit admission in that labor pool out of fear that wages would drop, and it has been disastrous for Americans' healthcare even long after the AMA removed the rules acting to limit new medical graduates. We should earn our wages based on the actual value we provide to our fellow Americans, rather than based on artificial rent-seeking behavior.
At the expense of the citizenry?
> the rest are impacting negatively the economy
> If you import cheap labor
What happens if you import middle class and above labour? In the USA, I assume this is about 75 USD per year salary.
In group preferences at least in tech is not a hypothetical.
I'm not denying that immigrants haven't employed millions of Americans, but that the investment for creating such companies is limited. If some product space is going to be a duopoly why not have the duopoly have American founders if possible?
I have been in the valley for 25+ years, and worked with a ton of visa holders.
The majority of them were better educated and all well compensated for the work they did. The fact that many of them stayed for green cards and citizenship says a LOT. There is a reason that the boss of both google, and MS came through these programs.
There are two instances on this website where supply and demand seemingly do not apply. Wages in tech engineering, and housing costs. Specific carve outs are always made to make the conclusion that, for some reason, this positive supply (workers) and demand (housing) shock has no or marginal impact on wages and housing respectively. It’s very odd since most here work in roles where supply and demand of course apply so it’s not like people are unfamiliar with the math here.
Show me the American born doctors on the street going hungry while foreigners take their jobs. Show me the reduction in wages or costs.
> supply and demand seemingly do not apply. Wages in tech engineering, and housing costs.
Were drowing in data on both of these things and if you want to understand either of these markets from an economic standpoint then your going to need more than a surface level "supply and demand" argument when they look much more like "I, Pencil" levels of complexity.
Im going to say this bluntly, every terrible engineer I have worked with, who has been fired for being bad at their job has been American born and raised. We're not importing dead wood and dummies to fill in roles as cogs on the h1b program. These are smart people who end up in high level roles who end up staying and becoming Americans (agin raising the bar).
If this is true it is a genuine national security emergency, not least because foreign standards for practicing medicine are not the same as they are here. I've never encountered a foreign born medical grad in all my years. Where do they work?
>These are smart people who end up in high level roles who end up staying and becoming Americans (agin raising the bar).
I didn't make any claim about the intelligence of H1b visa holders, though it's interesting that you immediately went on the defensive there. I'll say this: if you had a poor experience with American engineers that suggests there is a pipeline problem, no? Ostensibly, my government should be interested in fixing that problem since, allegedly, that's where its priorities lie. I totally get it that the H1b program allows companies to lower their demand signal to US-based institutions that would otherwise produce more of these people that you need. Sorry you worked with some shitty engineers, it happens.
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/immigrant-health-car...
It’s real phenomena too - US developer wages are so high in part due to the business ecosystem which depends on part on recent graduates and a flexible labor pool.
That is, your analysis is only true in the static case. Starve US startups of talented junior developers and you might kill the next Facebook in the process.
As opposed to the rest of the graduating class that is already considered a legal citizen?
Your logic doesn’t make sense. “In addition to every option available that doesn’t have additional legal framework attached, these specific people are also desirable.”
Why?
Basically large tech companies want to hire whomever passes their interviews, regardless of whether they are citizens or not. The hiring process is intentionally blind on their immigration status.
Small companies will ask you in the application form "will you now or in the future require sponsorship to work in the U.S." and larger companies simply don't ask.
You can't be serious. On every job application I've ever filled out the last question is always a variation of: "Do you now or will you in the future require employer sponsorship to work in this country?"
This might be the most amusing thing I’ve read all day.
But people would have to implement it. Sorry.
People seem to have a moral problem with cutting social services, I wonder why this doesn't go both ways when hiring foreign nationals who can only work because their country doesn't.
They don't even have to be foreign red states have been supplying silicon valley with cheap labor for decades. If you want the pure solution you would have to block hiring from these states too, not just H1B. Do you really want to exploit someone who was taught that the earth is 6000 years old and will also have to uproot their live when they are fired?
You can try to classify underprivileged workers and scale compensation based on their class, but any mistakes would lead to unfair wages. The real solution is to increase the standard of living in developing countries and decrease the standard of living in advanced countries starting with relatively wealthy people. Your solution is just a weird soft ban that implicitly buys into the propaganda that there are genius H1B workers when we all know why companies hire them.
Is it HR, is it the leadership directing HR? No idea, but it feels like the company is shooting itself in the foot. Especially a growing company where these jobs are high responsibility and require a lot of initiative. I just don't see it happening with these candidates. Getting a simple point across takes long enough.
After a week of that, interviewing someone who actually knows English feels like turbo charged discussion. I get through interview questions in half the time, with literally 10x more information communicated.
This. It's getting to a boiling point now with so many people out of work who are more than qualified for these jobs being shunned from them, and now they are fighting back. I'm sure there are many here who work in tech that can relate who have gone through hundreds, possibly thousands, of applications and not hearing anything back.
There’s two ends to this market, the super smart people and the super dumb jobs. The volume is in people slinging COBOL, J2EE or whatever for awful wages.
The reality is the H1B in the dumb categories are keeping jobs onshore. Nobody is paying 2x for the work… the alternative is shipping everything, including the “better IT” and administrative jobs offshore.
To your point, the sense is that diploma mills exist and the corporations mostly want bodies to work 20 hours a day and indentured servitude is what they want most. That 25% tax on international workers is nothing. It will be gamed like the tax code.
If we want to fix things, the Double Dutch/Irish/ Shell companies need to be eliminated. Stock buy backs also need to be eliminated. There is no reason for it to be allowed, it is direct manipulation.
When Corps have to pay their fair share, they'll invest in people as a expense and write it off. Which is what they were doing before tax evasion, outsourcing, and the shell game.
Eliminate the tax evasion and punish corps with fines until they are above board.
It was usually related to them recruiting a certain specialist or acquiring a team at another company. But the only way to get these people visas was to post the jobs publicly and hide them as much as possible. They did this by the hundreds, and it wasn't really a cost saving measure - if you are trying to get anybody in particular from Microsoft or Amazon and they are already here on a Visa, you have to go through the process all over again to sponsor them.
So it was less about racism and more about hoops to jump through to hire someone that you have already basically hired. If you've ever had experience with how a government RFP works, maybe don't throw rocks from glass houses.
Is it unfair? Maybe. But in my opinion anything is fairer than our country's evil immigration requirements.
That said... there is still the question of why companies choose to go down this road instead of simply hiring Americans. We can speculate about their intentions (cost saving via lower wages, employees willing to work more hours and under worse conditions, racism, etc) but it's unlikely that they're violating federal law just for fun. This is a lot of hoops to jump through and risk to take on without a compelling reason to do so.
The whole point of the system is that you shouldn't do this, and you legally can't.
So it really is as nefarious as it seems.
For some reason those stupid racist citizens don't want to compete with the whole world in a borderless economic zone. Thankfully we have wise corporations to subvert democracy for the better.
If the country’s goal was really to avoid direct competition with people outside its borders, you wouldn’t deliberately import so many of them, and you’d also take steps to prevent businesses from depending so much on undocumented immigrant labor.
Now, you might say that you don’t agree with the government’s position on all these things, but in that case you ought to be more in line with the comment you replied to.
The spirit of the law is that this should not be your intent---that your intent should be to fill the job requirements, not to hire a particular person.
The problem is, a lot of people don't agree, and would rather have your former employer prosecuted for the fraud.
I agree. There's 8 billion people in the world and we should let them into the US if they really want to be here.
> Tesla prefers to hire these candidates [H-1B workers] over U.S. citizens, as it can pay visa-dependent employees less than American employees performing the same work, a practice in the industry known as “wage theft.”
> At the same time Tesla applied for these visa applications, it laid off more than 6,000 workers across the United States. On information and belief, Tesla laid off these workers, the vast majority of whom are U.S. citizens, so that it could replace them with non-citizen visa workers.
> The email also bluntly stated that the Tesla position was for “H1B only” and that “Travel history/i94 are a must” (i.e., proof of legal entry into the U.S.).
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71325887/taub-v-tesla-i...
[2] https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/lawsuit-say...
Americans are waaaay too corporation friendly.
Salaries are extremely high in SV, why would they bother hiring foreigners if they can find good candidates locally?
I work in a big US tech company, and I do interview lots of candidates. Most of them graduated outside of the US. I can't believe that leadership would go to such great lengths to avoid local candidate. I think there are just not enough qualified applicants.
It's really that simple. SV likes foreign workers BECAUSE SV salaries are high. Businesses will do literally anything to save a few cents, at any cost.
There are enough qualified domestic candidates. Your bosses don't want them because domestic workers demand wages that fit domestic cost of living. Foreign workers can be extorted into accepting much less than a domestic worker will.
This is all very simple and straightforward. Your big mistake here is in assuming that capitalism is fundamentally moral or logical. It is not. Literally only one thing matters and it's maximizing profit at any cost.
Do immigrants earn less than locals?
My impression is that the salary is similar. I am not in the US, but I rejected job offers from across the pond in the past and the salary seemed to be on the level with what I know is paid in the US for that position.
My guess is that what they like in H1B workers is that they are sort of stuck with that employer, as changing jobs under such a Visa can be tricky no?
Fundamentally how prices are set is someone sets a price, and if there are no takers they change the price. If a company offers a salary, and they bring in an H1-B to fill the role, they don't have to raise the salary. Over time it suppresses the wage.
Employee works for a company under an H1B, company likes their work, wants them to stay longer (H1B has a max of 6 years unless you sponsor the employee for permanent residence). Employee doesn't want to be in this weird temporary worker status forever (and again, after 6 years they'll need to), so the company has two choices: either hire a new employee, hope they've as good as the one you already have under the H1B, train them up to be as familiar with the job and its work as the H1B, and then forget about getting the existing employee permanent residence, OR, just sponsor them for the PERM process, put out a job ad with a really low likelihood of anyone applying, and move on with their lives.
The way the PERM process is set up, there's really no reason not to do the hidden job ad, it's not really regulated against, there's not much financial harm in doing it, and they already have an employee they like and who wants to stay, so for those two parties (and presumably anyone who likes working with this person, and any friends they have in America and so on), there's no reason not to just put out the hidden job ad.
The thing is that all these mega-corporations have offices across the world, but currently want to hire in the US. You and I want our personal jobs to be expensive, but we don't want the prospect of hiring us where we live to be too expensive. And even aside from cost, you also don't want them to say "there's not enough employees there, it's not worth hiring."[0]
[0] I'm technically no longer living in the US, but I was until recently.
Wouldn't say it's necessarily easy to do so, but it's not an automatic deported from the country kind of deal.
I could afford to spend the next six months out of work looking for a replacement job. No one on an H1B can because they would be in violation of their visa. They will tolerate far more nonsense than I will.
H1B always sounded to me like a shitty deal for the immigrant, and it also does seem to be detrimental to native workers.
The overall topic is important, which is why it needs to be discussed with comments that are thoughtful and substantive, which the guidelines clearly ask us to do:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Unfortunately most Fortune 500 companies are in the hands of B players now, and it goes all the way up, with the government (multiple governments, really) being in the hands of B/C players. The A players are happily retired and pulling strings in the background with their 501(c)4s.
Business is much worse at the same scale.
Infact, you probably cant find any org at large scale that functions in rational, logic driven capacity.
So theres just a bogeyman, not a useful critique of government.
Thankfully the company recently nuked their contracts and brought everything back on shore because of how much of a shit show dealing with those companies is lol. Literally tens of millions of dollars wasted.
Im kinda convinced that's their entire business plan. They lure these mega companies with omg "skilled labor" and having to pay them less, sign XX-XXXM contracts, 2-3 years go by and these mega corpos finally see how shit it is and just cancel them. HCL and Cognizant make money still regardless.
I'm not sure if the motive behind such behavior is racism. Instead, I think it's more likely the power play. That is, they would pick the population that is the easiest to command and to push them up the corporate ladder.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Eschew flamebait.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Please think a little bit harder before claiming something isn't racism because it might somewhat counteract the structural privilege enjoyed by white people. Yes, white privilege is a thing, and if the claim was that Indian hiring managers were giving preference to non-white people, your comment would at least be worth discussing in the context of a society which overall still privileges white people. But that wasn't even the claim.
If you genuinely believe that the "single axis" approach is valid, please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Eschew flamebait.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
The US is the most powerful country does that mean if I go to india I can't experience racism because technically India is "weaker" ?
Isn't this example literally a group of stronger indians being racist to weaker individuals (job applicants)?
This also implies they are not hiring black, asian, or hispanic people either but because they're a minority that's ok?
Such a bad take.
Those aunties and uncles can discriminate you down to damn near the block you came from, even if it was on the other side of the planet, and tell everyone exactly why you’re a bad idea for reasons even you didn’t know about.
Signed, your good little gwailou.
Two points.
First: a good, seasoned manager adapts their leadership style to their employees. So the premise is a bit backwards.
But second, let's suppose we use something more valid like "ability to follow instructions". And suppose there are real differences in groups. You still don't stereotype on groups, because lower-performing groups still have high-performing members. So you have your interview examine the actual skill you need on an individual basis. You don't make assumptions based on group membership.
Now, for practical reasons candidates need to be reduced to a reasonable number to interview. That should be done according to personal accomplishments and experience, not groups.
The college you went to is tricky. Only hiring from a select group is not very defensible mainly because it's a bad signal. It reflects mostly your high school test scores and grades, which was years ago. On the other hand, some colleges teach in certain departments better or worse, your grades might matter and depend on the college, etc. So you need to calibrate for a bunch of achievement-based signals where the college name can matter, rather than whitelist only certain colleges.
Unsurprisingly, an Indian exec's trusted lieutenants and golf buddies will also be Indian, likely from the same university, caste, etc. They will not be hiring random people just because they happen to be Indian; if anything, there's been plenty of lawsuits over Indians of the "wrong" caste, language group etc getting pushed out.
I briefly worked for one such CEO in a major tech city. Core of Indian H1-B staff coders and about same amount of US white staff in both coding, customer-facing, and administrative roles. A lot of hiring was done rapidly. After less than six months the staff discovered the product being sold was basically a fraud (think summarization & classification of emails that could be handled by ChatGPT today, but back in early 2000s, the work was actually secretly being transmitted to staff in India every night, not the "AI" claimed). Of course, that was just one of the many layers of fractal dishonesty about that CEO and company.
So, within a few weeks the entire white staff quit. During the process of organizing to quit, we also found out we were at least the third wave of [all the white staff quitting]. Of course, through all of these waves of quitting all the H1-Bs stayed, because they had no choice.
Ironically, if it had been packaged honestly, it could have been a valuable and profitable service, but that wouldn't have been sellable to VCs (who were also being scammed).
So yes, cheaper, fully compliant with fraudulent practices, and racist to boot. A toxic brew.
fmajid in another thread had a similar paraphrase
> H1-B holders have to find a new employer within 2 weeks or lose their visa, the threat of firing is the same thing as deportation, making for a form of indentured servitude.
It's probably greater difficultly to lateral also, since then there's another company talking with the government about sponsorship on somebody you're already sponsoring. A lot of banks and financials already have standing threats to fire anybody they even find looking around.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/09/us/california-caste-discrimin...
[2] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/23...
From that article:
In a statement explaining his veto decision, Newsom said the measure was “unnecessary” because discrimination based on caste is already prohibited in the state.
(Just adding context that I would have missed if not for another commenter pointing it out further down)
It can win you a few friends but you lose more.
Those articles based on a lawsuit were very heavily promoted on HN, however the complaint was by a single disgruntled employee who just happened to invoke the caste card and the suit was thrown out by the court.
The California DoJ failed to do basic due diligence before filing the lawsuit to the extent that the defendants filed a civil suit saying they were being discriminated against because of their race by the CA DoJ. Of course, these followups never got any traction on HN, because they didn't fit the narrative.
And now there are so many people, especially on HN and other developer forums that are utterly convinced caste based discrimination is very prevalent.
If yes, what leads you to believe that all first gen immigrants from India to the US magically stop doing it?
I'd guess this varies massively depending on whether the hiring manager and the people they're hiring are H1-Bs.
Your dataset is very small. I come from India
So yeah, you can discriminate against Dalits, and hire predominantly Brahmins.
Quite a lot of tech companies hire in either Seattle, California, or both.
However, when you get people to tell you various 'beliefs' of Hinduism , it's often very discordant, much more so than protestant/ Catholic / etc.
This is because there's hundreds of different sets of practices with various links. Due to migration selection, only some subset are commonly discussed in a western context.
But, in reality, the common people of India had a wide range of practice that is not the typical 'Indian' you hear about.
For example, many Indians in the west claim that Indians don't eat meat. This is a lie. Many groups have eaten meat since the time of the Indus Valley Civilization and still continue.
https://www.waterstones.com/book/why-i-am-not-a-hindu/iiaiah...
The word has lost meaning due to semantic overinclusivity.
By the Civil Rights era definitions, the process is racist. The people may not be. The process explicitly favours Indians. This isn’t some statistical mumbo-jumbo anti-racism construct, it’s the clear intent of the people involved and a clear effect of their actions.
What we can’t conclude from this is if the people involved think Indians are superior (versus just familiar).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_w...
The three words themselves are nice and generally good things to believe in, but the packaging philosophy it is wrapped up in is poisonous.
Can we just stop? This is a meme, it's clearly never been true. It's extrapolating from a bunch of intemperate stuff said by oddball losers (yes, often in academic environments which encourage out-of-the-box thinking and speech[1]) to tar a bunch of extremely bland policies enacted by HR and hiring managers (to ensure that their masters don't get sued) with an ideological brush.
We people with "white skin" are very clearly doing just fine in the job market.
[1] Something that in other contexts we at HN think is a good thing!
And I’m not the only one.
In fact, consent decrees with the DOL and at least one major fortune 50 (Google) explicitly required them to do so, to maintain ‘proportional representation with the population’ because of ‘over representation’. Meanwhile, Indian men got a free pass (for one example).
Trump is mostly bullshit, but he’s in power because of bullshit like this pissing people off. That is a threat to society.
Mostly because none of the things he’s doing are going to actually solve the problem but just get people angrier and angrier at each other. But the problem, at least at one point, was very real.
It's a really good litmus test for finding those with empathy and good intellect, AKA the best kind of co-workers.
i.e. you're in the top 20% of white people hiring from the top 1% of black people.
Hilariously, we had an executive who said that his goal was to have the demographics of his division more closely resemble that of America. Until someone realized that South Asians are approximately 2% of the US population and were 50% of his division.
It's been years since I checked, but for non-DC jobs, Amazon's demographics are significantly less white than America as a whole. That's mainly Asians being hired in place of ADOS African-Americans and hispanics.
Coarse grained attributes like race, gender, sex, religion, etc. are not useful predictors of individual behavior or background.
Yeah that’s never considered an acceptable argument whenever the ratio of white people in a company gets “too high”, don’t see why it should be any different with Indians.
The recruiter told, "I have no idea how you applied for this job, but its not available for you. let me have you interview a different, but similar, role."
What was I supposed to do other than say, "ok! Send over the other job description."?
Because they'd gave to commit outright fraud with no plausible deniability if they have to hide US Citizens applications for jobs they've earmarked for current immigrant employees' PERM. Hiding the jobs gives them deniability.
"And this has given rise to a cottage industry of chronically-online types — in other words, typical tech workers — seeking to expose them."
> How many 20-something software engineers even know how to use a post office in 2025?
What like... any... other... store or building where you walk in, perform an action, and leave?
Personal anecdote: I hired an exceptional H-1B worker to a role while I worked in SF, but was legally required to first advertise their role in 2 places. We put it in a 2am TV spot and a Modesto newspaper ad. But the whole thing was a legally required farce. We already knew from months of aggressive sourcing that no other qualified candidates existed - in fact we were over the moon to hire this person.
Since the advice was given in a clear way and was very procedural, I treated it as necessary, did as told, and moved on to work that has actual impact as fast as possible.. I had actually forgotten about this until now. Hence banal.