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Andrew Ng: The suspension of H1B is bad for the US and bad for innovation

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Re: Andrew Ng: The suspension of H1B is bad for the US and bad for innovation

#221

Post by codeisawesome »

guyzero wrote: post #127
automated_toast wrote: post #8

I for one am ecstatic about this. I want less competition for my role, not more. It is hard to compete when the top 5% of every other economy comes in and crowds me out.

Unbelievable how naked the anti-immigrant sentiment from you and numerous other commenters. I'm honestly shocked.

Academia and “intellectual” circles in the West are not universally enlightened about the equality of humans (comments here, and on BLM threads on many forums). It doesn’t even appear to be an opinion of the conclusive majority. I was quite shocked and disappointed when I learned this too. People are just that, I suppose.

Re: Andrew Ng: The suspension of H1B is bad for the US and bad for innovation

#222

Post by fredfoobar »

georgeburdell wrote: post #163
gbronner wrote: post #5

H1B is terrible for the employees, and for those who work alongside them. Companies try to slow down green cards, and use H1Bs as virtual indentured servants. They also fake looking for Americans- in practice, many of the jobs are earmarked for a specific person, and you are wasting your time applying for it. Losing your job as an h1b requires you to leave almost immediately, which isn't great for anyone. Hopefully t…

When I was a new grad, I interviewed at Qualcomm for an embedded software job. I studied hardware, and was very up-front with the hiring manager in the phone screen, and he responded “not to worry about it”. I was flown out to do an on-site interview, and the first thing that struck me, sitting in the lobby for 20 minutes while my first interviewer arrived, was that 100% of the employees who walked through the front…

Are you sure that's the only reason you were dinged? be honest georgia tech guy. I see you.

Why is this flagged? because I supposedly misinterpreted a "fake job interview"?

Re: Andrew Ng: The suspension of H1B is bad for the US and bad for innovation

#223

Post by adventured »

srean wrote: post #193
umvi wrote: post #78

There are 2 sides to every coin. It can be frustrating/demoralizing to American software developers as well, when they go to interview for a job, to see they are competing with an absolute flood of Indian and Chinese H1Bs. Then, when all of your interviewers are Chinese and Indian as well and you don't get the job, you sort of feel like the victim of favoritism and that you've been pushed out of your own country's in…

Well, wasn't the US about capitalism, free market and all that they have been lecturing others about in a rather holier than thou fashion. What gives ?

> Well, wasn't the US about capitalism, free market and all that

That's an appropriate use of was. The US hasn't been a Capitalist nation in nearly a century.

It's a heavily regulated mixed economic system. That transition largely occurred from roughly 1930 to 1980, and the tsunami of unnecessary regulations have continued to rapidly pile up by the thousands ever since.

Free market? Ha. Sweden is more of a free market than the US. The US has a very large market with some free market remnants; the big economic outcomes that enables is what confuses people into thinking the US is still a bastion of Capitalism (while it rapidly speeds toward the French model of economic stagnation with persistently falling growth rates).

Re: Andrew Ng: The suspension of H1B is bad for the US and bad for innovation

#224

Post by dragonwriter »

arunkd13 wrote: post #218
gbronner wrote: post #5

H1B is terrible for the employees, and for those who work alongside them. Companies try to slow down green cards, and use H1Bs as virtual indentured servants. They also fake looking for Americans- in practice, many of the jobs are earmarked for a specific person, and you are wasting your time applying for it. Losing your job as an h1b requires you to leave almost immediately, which isn't great for anyone. Hopefully t…

I think the point of H1B being tied to an employer is that a H1B entry needs to be temporary and not long term immigration. If you don't like your employer, or your employer is shafting you, then return back to your country and look for another job. If it happens to be another job in US with H1B visa, good for you. Start another temporary stint.

> I think the point of H1B being tied to an employer is that a H1B entry needs to be temporary and not long term immigration.

If it needs to be temporary response to a shortage, it should be tied to a job category in which the shortage is certified to exist, not an employer. There should be no special restriction within the category within which the shortage is certified to exist, so long as it exists, since employer restrictions within that category will obviously exacerbate a real shortage, though they benefit the particular employer.

But H-1B doesn't exist to deal with real shortages, it exists to leverage the pretext of contrived shortages to mitigate wage pressure in highly skilled industries via captive labor.

Re: Andrew Ng: The suspension of H1B is bad for the US and bad for innovation

#225

Post by throwawaygh »

copperx wrote: post #164
mehrdada wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you may fail at interviews because for you it’ll be conducted in English vs their native language. Not a hypothetical. At least an anecdote. Old colleague casually admitted to this despite company policy. Also note that most interviews are known to be more extreme than the actual job needs: e.g. leetcode is the interview; random CSS manipulation is the actual job. I wonder how hard would it be to teach a top 15% h…

Top high schoolers can develop algorithms. The average high schooler can manipulate CSS, no problem.

Right. Most software engineering isn't the sort of hard-to-source skilled labor that the H1B program was intended to provide. Until we can be honest about that and have a real healthy debate about allowing the sort of mid/low skill labor that smart high schools can do, our immigration will continue to suck and breed resentment on all sides.

NB I'm pro-mid/low skill immigration. But these H1B conversations are intractable without first pointing out that, if the goal is low/mid skill immigration, then we need to fight for a new visa class aside from the H1B.

Re: Andrew Ng: The suspension of H1B is bad for the US and bad for innovation

#226

Post by akhilcacharya »

throwmehaweh wrote: post #52
qppo wrote: post #16

The largest H1-B visa sponsors are Cognizant, Tata, Wipro, Infosys, and Deloitte. None of those scream "innovation" to me. The system absolutely needs reform, and I think most people can agree with that. But that said, blanket bans on immigration by the white supremacists and nationalists currently running our government and deciding our immigration are probably not designed to help America or innovation either. The…

> by the white supremacists and nationalists currently running our government and deciding our immigration This type of baseless rhetoric is rooted in identity politics and underlies the current division in the US. Directly from the Whitehouse Proclamation[0]: "American workers compete against foreign nationals for jobs in every sector of our economy, including against millions of aliens who enter the United States t…

As a person of color whose parents immigrated to America via H1B and saw the footage out of El Paso and Charlottesville and the murder of people that look like my uncles in Olathe Kansas the rhetoric has tangible effects and is anything but “baseless”.

Re: Andrew Ng: The suspension of H1B is bad for the US and bad for innovation

#227

Post by foota »

pylua wrote: post #185
foota wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I don't think it matters much. So what if we allow more software engineers from other countries? We haven't done anything special to deserve a job more than they have. My only concerns with it are about their well-being and freedom under the current system.

The problem is that it doesn’t cut both ways. You will not be able to get a job in their country.

I mean, I don't really want a job in a country paying a fraction of what I make now? It's true though, there is not an existing reciprocal program afaik, but so what? We have things much better economically. And who knows, maybe we could arrange a labor trade deal of sorts with these countries.

Re: Andrew Ng: The suspension of H1B is bad for the US and bad for innovation

#228

Post by wang0109 »

umvi wrote: post #78

There are 2 sides to every coin. It can be frustrating/demoralizing to American software developers as well, when they go to interview for a job, to see they are competing with an absolute flood of Indian and Chinese H1Bs. Then, when all of your interviewers are Chinese and Indian as well and you don't get the job, you sort of feel like the victim of favoritism and that you've been pushed out of your own country's in…

I think there's a real shortage in software industry driving what you see. H1Bs come from mainly two sources - OPT students and oversea outsourcing company bringing in contractors. The US companies have incentives to hire contractors, mainly for shitty IT projects that no Americans like to do, at low labour costs no Americans willing to take. The OPT students is a result of both aggressive revenue generation for the US education industry, as well as the "American dream" ideal - which I think is a result of US culture influence (mostly movies and drama shows) rather than reality. I now realized that US is far more backwards than I thought. The US justice system, medical system and general racial discrimination. Digressions aside, US general population should far more outnumber the H1Bs but it baffles me that when we get qualified resumes, usually it's as much as 80% to 90% foreigners. (for junior positions. For seniors, many of these people already got green cards) There seems to be just huge shortage from US local people to study Computer Science.

Re: Andrew Ng: The suspension of H1B is bad for the US and bad for innovation

#229

Post by systemBuilder »

georgeburdell wrote: post #163
gbronner wrote: post #5

H1B is terrible for the employees, and for those who work alongside them. Companies try to slow down green cards, and use H1Bs as virtual indentured servants. They also fake looking for Americans- in practice, many of the jobs are earmarked for a specific person, and you are wasting your time applying for it. Losing your job as an h1b requires you to leave almost immediately, which isn't great for anyone. Hopefully t…

When I was a new grad, I interviewed at Qualcomm for an embedded software job. I studied hardware, and was very up-front with the hiring manager in the phone screen, and he responded “not to worry about it”. I was flown out to do an on-site interview, and the first thing that struck me, sitting in the lobby for 20 minutes while my first interviewer arrived, was that 100% of the employees who walked through the front…

Qualcomm has more Indians than any other company in America. It is also one of the greatest H1B abusers with roughly 20% of workforce being H-1B. I know I worked there and I counted the people on the H-1B mailing list.

Re: Andrew Ng: The suspension of H1B is bad for the US and bad for innovation

#230

Post by foota »

rukittenme wrote: post #183
foota wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I don't think it matters much. So what if we allow more software engineers from other countries? We haven't done anything special to deserve a job more than they have. My only concerns with it are about their well-being and freedom under the current system.

> We haven't done anything special to deserve a job more than they have. By being born to an area you have done something special. You have received the special benefit of local education and infrastructure, you have familial and social connections to the people of that local area. You may even have a shared sense of local obligation to uplift the people you live near. The problem with importing foreign labor isn't t…

Yes, I don't think the current implementation is great. Hence my last sentence. That said, it may be better for the people coming in than not having it at all. Although the net harm maybe be greater than without it or a similar program (corporations benefit, locals hurt some, immigrants benefit). It's not clear to me what the magnitude of the harm to locals is though.
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