H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms • Hacker News Board

Re: H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms

#221

Post by somberi » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 3:49 AM UTC

Couple of questions.

1. Who decides this is an abuse?

2. What is being abused? The possibility of a visa being earmarked for "High skill" being used for "low cost low skill jobs"?

3. If the companies that do have a need for high skill, what is preventing them from "rushing to the queue"?

4. Is it that Indian companies have learnt the ropes of how to get a H1 visa (which has its own calendars, short open-and-close gates)? Is it that hard for, say a Google to replicate and act on this knowledge?

I am an Indian, who had been on H1 work visa early in my career, and was mostly engaged in the the R&D end of the tech world than say Manual QA.

Re: H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms

#222

Post by Rumudiez » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 3:49 AM UTC

flukus wrote: post #203

Rumudiez wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The going expectation for professional résumés is about honesty and modesty. What you say on that piece of paper should reflect what you would be able to come in the next day and be productive doing. I interviewed over 15 applicants for just front end development last week and not a single one of all the 6-page résumés from candidates who all apparently have their masters was honest: only 5 even knew what JSON is.

Are these graduates? Are they real developers or people that know html, css and photoshop thinking their front end devs? Have they spent their lives in big companies that are still in xml land? That's all the excuses I can think of. Some of them may be honest, just ignorant.

They generally don't have a clue, or sometimes have had job titles like "Software Engineer" but all they did was basic GUI testing, which is also the case at my company.

Re: H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms

#223

Post by flukus » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 3:49 AM UTC

neeleshs wrote: post #211

gragas wrote: post #200

>I assure you, most american-born students get a free pass in stanford/berkeley/CMU if you pit them against a foreign-born. You have no idea what you're talking about. I have first hand experience with this and Americans don't "get a free pass" by any means. Also, what about black people and hispanic people? Are they the lowest earners in America by far because they "don't want to make $$"? According to common consen…

I'm genuinely curious to know what you are implying here. Indians in the US are making highest median income because of some kind of racism/cronyism favoring them? I always thought it's because a significant percentage (not all) who immigrate are at the top already

Or a combination of both. It is something I've noticed, companies with indians doing the hiring end up with a lot of indians, companies with chinese doing the hiring end up with a lot of chinese. It's rare to find indians in a chinese software shop and vise versa.

White people don't have a monopoly on racism.

Re: H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms

#224

Post by Rumudiez » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 3:54 AM UTC

somberi wrote: post #221

Couple of questions. 1. Who decides this is an abuse? 2. What is being abused? The possibility of a visa being earmarked for "High skill" being used for "low cost low skill jobs"? 3. If the companies that do have a need for high skill, what is preventing them from "rushing to the queue"? 4. Is it that Indian companies have learnt the ropes of how to get a H1 visa (which has its own calendars, short open-and-close gat…

Just to explain another perspective, since you're asking: some people feel there are a lot of H-1B visas out there for people who are only doing trivial, entry level work, or even have misleading job titles – not exactly whom many would consider "specialists."

Re: H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms

#225

Post by ThomPete » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 3:54 AM UTC

zzleeper wrote: post #98

I went through the entire comment thread and feel like you guys are missing a lot of the H1B benefits by focusing just on tech and the effect of the Indian consultancies. Most PhDs, specially in STEM, math, stats, econ, etc. are not American. And almost all of them end up with a H1B visa at some point if they remain in the US. It might be lottery based if you go to work at any firm, or quota-free if it is in academia…

Couldn't they come in on an O1?

Thats what I did.

Re: H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms

#226

Post by letitgo12345 » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 3:54 AM UTC

notyourwork wrote: post #114

zzleeper wrote: post #98

I went through the entire comment thread and feel like you guys are missing a lot of the H1B benefits by focusing just on tech and the effect of the Indian consultancies. Most PhDs, specially in STEM, math, stats, econ, etc. are not American. And almost all of them end up with a H1B visa at some point if they remain in the US. It might be lottery based if you go to work at any firm, or quota-free if it is in academia…

> (how easy is it to replace a CS PhD working on LIDARs for self driving cars?) I have no problem with specializations but how many are in the US doing full stack web or general application development. It seems to me the problem is not surrounding engineers who specialize in a minority field like LIDAR. The problem is when you have a team of 15 engineers building a web application platform and 13 are H1Bs. Also, don…

PhD in CS at a top university in the US and from India originally. To be honest, from my perspective, the H1B basically doesn't exist (unless I'm working at a university which doesn't have a quota). No way am I gonna gamble on getting lucky with the lottery vs just seeking more stable circumstances outside the US.

Re: H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms

#227

Post by jitix » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 3:55 AM UTC

IMO one of the easiest ways to tackle the entire issue around H1B visas is to remove or separate the category where a visa is sponsored by company A for someone working as a contractor in company B. This arrangement is the major cause of the scenario where American workers are replaced by people on H1Bs.

If there is genuine skill shortage then the company in need of the said skill can hire the engineers directly instead of going through a middleman whose business model relies entirely on keeping wages low.

Re: H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms

#228

Post by djrogers » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 3:57 AM UTC

s73ver wrote: post #109

gragas wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Like all the other executive orders, it’s just words The hypocrisy here is truly disgusting. One moment, executive orders are the end of the world. The next moment, they don't mean anything at all. If a person can't see past this man's partisanship, then they are hopeless; when reason and logic are out the window, it's over. For those who want evidence from the mouth of Chuck Schumer himself [1]: >Schumer said that…

"The hypocrisy here is truly disgusting. One moment, executive orders are the end of the world. The next moment, they don't mean anything at all." Talking about different orders which say different things, one which actually does change rules and one which simply directs an agency to "perform a study", doesn't seem hypocritical at all. >If a person can't see past this man's partisanship, then they are hopeless; when…

What he said was: "Like all the other executive orders, it’s just words"

He didn't distinguish between two different orders here, he said all of the other ones were just words.

Re: H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms

#229

Post by jitix » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 4:00 AM UTC

anupshinde wrote: post #220

The article concludes with a great suggestion: "A better change would be to end the rule whereby H-1B recipients must stay with the company that sponsored them" Its the companies like TCS that get the profits while kind-of-abusing their H1B employees who get stuck for 5-10 years because they want to pursue the American dream 1. Increase the minimum salary a bit - but not too much - you don't want to kill startups 2.…

H1B employees can already change jobs. However there are some caveats around the time interval between jobs so (4) would be great.

Re: H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms

#230

Post by jitix » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 4:02 AM UTC

alistproducer2 wrote: post #185

I work for a large company that used to outsource all of it's IT to a large contractor. Almost all of the applications and code I've worked with that was done by the outsourcing company was substandard crap. Obviously over complicated to support large (profitable) estimates. From my experience working with a lot of tech immigrants, I can say that compared to the native population, they seem about the same in terms of…

As a former employee with TCS (India) I can say that most of the development work is done with an intention to make the client coming back for improvements, maintenance, fixes, etc.