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

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

#241

Post by whitenoice » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 4:30 AM UTC

robryan wrote: post #214

finid wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indian universities are terrible... That's a very broad statement. They are so terrible they manage to produce engineers and scientists who then come here and other parts of the world for higher degrees.

A more accurate statement might be that non top tier universities are terrible? After doing a little hiring of Indians and working with them I get the impression that the top tier universities are pretty good, but the second tier and below are a lot worse in comparison to similarly ranked institutions in the US.

I initially agreed to your post, but as I reminisced the interviews I took I disagree and I think its the same everywhere. Second tier schools in US are equally bad and students lack practical knowledge. If I were to take an interview without knowing the persons race I don't think I will be able to bucket them into specific countries based on their performance.

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

#242

Post by spangry » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 4:34 AM UTC

shouldbworking wrote: post #216

spangry wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading through l3m0ndr0p's comment history is quite a surreal experience. Almost every one of their posts is downvoted to grey, even the extremely uncontroversial and mundane ones. I can get how, with a comment history like that, whatever algos HN has running might automatically drop them to the bottom of the page since it would just run blindly on whatever metrics it sees. What I find harder to understand is how th…

The account is likely shadowdead or some variant of it. A lot of places have a "silent ban" to stop unwanted trolls from continuing to make accounts. The "silent" part means the user is cajoled into believing they're not banned. One of the ways to do this is to not kill their comments until a couple people reply to them. That way the system can tell them they have +3 votes or whatever when in reality nobody after the…

Fair enough. Sounds like, in all probability, it's just an 'overly twitchy' algorithm somewhere; no system is perfect I guess.

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

#243

Post by davidgay » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 4:44 AM UTC

hiram112 wrote: post #196

rajathagasthya wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in any case, we should let every person seeking higher education in the US work indefinitely in this country This is the discussion that's always missing whenever H1B is discussed anywhere. It always gets hijacked by Indian IT companies abusing the system. Does the administration have a plan on how to deal with students who get their degrees from US universities, who also seek H1Bs to work? If they don't make this…

> Guess who benefits then? Not the US. If demand at US universities goes down, they might just have to reduce prices. Yeah that would certainly suck for the millions of recent college grads working gig jobs, indebted with tens of thousands of dollars.

The context was PhD students.

None of those, at good universities at least, pay for tuition (be it from research grants or TAships). So I would expect the effect on prices to be minimal.

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

#244

Post by FooBarJmp » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 4:51 AM UTC

jeevand wrote: post #236

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…

It is not a miracle. Indians immigrating to US are more educated than the general US population [1] (40.6% have graduate degree, 32.3% have bachelor's). Have you also thought about why Indian American kids win spelling bee's or Jews win Nobel Prize disproportionately when compared to their population? Comparing Indians or Asians to blacks is not fair. They are mostly recent immigrants (except few brought in as labour…

So, this is a topic I've very passionate about. I work quite of few H1Bs. Most of them have Masters degrees from India. The QA team is 80% H1Bs, all with Masters degrees from India. Of the 8 QA engineers, only 1 writes code. The others did do some programming when they got their undergrad and graduate degrees in India, but for some reason, none of the 7 write code. None, zero. Can't even get them to press the F12 key, look at the details of a failed request, and add it to the bug. To me this says three things, either the schools in India are horrible, there is lots of cheating going on, or lack of passion in a chosen career renders all advance degrees to null.

So, you do realize that Indians have been coming to the USA for a long time? You do realize that there were pioneers from India in the USA that fought for rights that you are just dismiss as trivial. Here, read something - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Bhagat_Singh_...

Lastly just because someone has more degrees doesn't make them smarter or more intelligent.

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

#245

Post by gragas » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 4:52 AM UTC

jeevand wrote: post #236

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…

It is not a miracle. Indians immigrating to US are more educated than the general US population [1] (40.6% have graduate degree, 32.3% have bachelor's). Have you also thought about why Indian American kids win spelling bee's or Jews win Nobel Prize disproportionately when compared to their population? Comparing Indians or Asians to blacks is not fair. They are mostly recent immigrants (except few brought in as labour…

>Have you also thought about why Indian American kids win spelling bee's or Jews win Nobel Prize disproportionately when compared to their population?

You make me laugh. Indians are nowhere close to Jews. Sure, Indians make up 1% of the US population, but they also make up almost one fifth of Earth's population as a whole. There are more than one billion Indians on Earth.

If you want to play the "maybe they're just biologically superior" card, (1) that's contradicting your own argument and (2) it just doesn't work with Indians. Of course you will see a generally smart group of people when you specifically only let in the top 0.0001% of the Indian population to begin with.

To be completely clear, I don't mean that any specific race is inherently bad or good. I'm just providing a viewpoint as a non-Indian person who is a part of the situation.

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

#246

Post by DrJokepu » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 4:57 AM UTC

yks wrote: post #176

idaw wrote: post #124

I'm intrigued between the contrast of a sanctuary city, like Los Angeles, and various tech companies in LA hiring H1B employees. My roommate's on an H1B but he can't just quit his tech job and work on a startup, despite having a few hundred thousand dollars in the bank and being a very successful developer. Yet there are organizations like Define American, whose founder is an undocumented worker, encouraging people t…

H-1Bs are law-abiding people and therefore the easiest immigrant group to attack, unlike illegals they will leave when told so.

H-1B visa holders are not immigrants as the H-1B is not an immigrant visa.

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

#247

Post by wsxcde » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 5:00 AM UTC

Although Infosys and the like apply for a lot of H1Bs, they make very very few (we're talking double-digit numbers) successful applications for green cards. This means most of these people on H1Bs for the consulting companies are actually going back home.

Which means that Infosys, TCS and the like are contributing a rotating pool of about ~30k-40k "migrant" software labor consisting of individuals who live in the US for a maximum of a couple of years. Could this be the reason why Americans wages are depressed? Well, let's run the numbers. There are 3.6 million software developers in the US. 40k is an insignificant fraction of that. So no. That's not it.

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

#248

Post by FooBarJmp » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 5:02 AM UTC

neeleshs wrote: post #231

flukus wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I never said white people have monopoly on racism. Like your ancedata, my experience with white people have been completely unracist, very welcoming and acknowledging talent. Believe me, I've seen indian racism first hand back home, and it's as ugly as it can get. "Racism", somehow, seems to be hardwired in humans, given its prevalence. Also, ancedata, I've seen engineering departments evenly split between Indian and…

So, my two cents. Individuals enjoy working with other Individuals from similar backgrounds. I worked for a very well know software company on the west coast for 15 years. In that company, there were groups you didn't interview in, because they were controlled by the "Indian Mafia". There weren't any teams of all native born Americans. There were a lot of teams of just men, but that changed a lot towards the last few years in the company. In my current job, I was asked to sit in some interviews by lead/mid-level engineers. The lead engineer couldn't make it to the interview, not sure why. One of the engineers started by asking what the candidates immigration status was. The candidate said they were a GC. The engineer said, we don't need to continue this interview, we only want H1Bs. Of course in my 20+ years, I had never actually witnessed someone asking a question that could end up as a lawsuit. Of course I let HR know and they barred that engineer from conducting interviews. But it took the HR about six months to realize that the interviewers were looking for any reason to reject anyone not H1B from India. They barred them all from interviewing and made it so that HR could over rule any rejected candidate. Most of other companies I had been at, this would have been grounds for immediate dismissal.

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

#249

Post by solidsnack9000 » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 5:03 AM UTC

clairity wrote: post #136

dmitrygr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing is, nobody wants that effect. We want the PhDs. What we do not want it companies that bring in cheap barely-qualified labour for cost-cutting. This hurts the people brought in (they are stuck in bad jobs with bad pay and no way out). This hurts the local workers who cost too much compared to this effectively-slave-labour. The hard part changing the rules such that PhDs and other productive uses of H1B do not su…

"This hurts the people brought in (they are stuck in bad jobs with bad pay and no way out)." ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ i agree with everything you said except for this part. many of the indian workers are still better off economically than they might otherwise be, even if they are not as well off as their american counterparts. in any case, we should let every person seeking higher education in the US work indefinitely in this…

> in fact, anyone who wants to work hard should be allowed in.

Do you think other countries should do the same? Do you think it would work out well for all of them?

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

#250

Post by FooBarJmp » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 5:04 AM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #233

usernametbd wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is Microsoft villain? Does it provide its H1B employees below market salary? Genuinely asking as I've seen H1B employees at MS paid a huge salary, equal to their citizen counterparts, and also they've been freely jumping companies to get an even bigger pay raise.

As an ex-H1B MSFT employee, there are a few data points I can share. First, to the best of my knowledge, my salary was not lower than that of my colleagues with citizenship at any point. Nor did I get fewer perks, formally or informally (ability to take days off as and when needed etc). Second, my H1B status was never used as leverage when talking about raises, amount of time spent at work, and so on. I was never pre…

As a manager in MSFT. I can assure you that salaries aren't any different for H1B versus Citizens. I myself had a hard time find great native talents that I ended up hiring quite a few Canadians.