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Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

thehill.com

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Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#241

Post by alephnerd »

tomhow wrote: post #234
alephnerd wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Please don't post in an inflammatory style or make swipes at the HN community. We don't know what "a large portion of HNers" think about any topic. Controversial topics bring out the people who feel the strongest about that topic, but the people commenting are only a tiny share of the whole community. Your point about the different reactions people have to different kinds of immigration controversies is valid, but to…

I understand, but why is similar moderation not extended when "H1Bs" come up on HN?

To be brutally honesty, why is it acceptable to bash H1B abuse but not B1/2 or VWP abuse on HN. In both cases, it is employers mislabeling and potentially breaking immigration and labor laws, yet it is acceptable to talk derogatorily about those on H1Bs and not on other visas, even though rates of visa misuse are consistent across most large nationalities.

I am of South Asian origin, but I have lived in North America for almost my entire life (aside from 6 months in the old country), but the persistent utilization of "H1B" as a code word for South Asian (primarily Indian) origin tech employees is tiring.

I understand that a lot of ICs are dealing with a significant amount of stress due to the downturn in the tech industry, but there is a nativist current on HN that is starting to morph into anti-South Asian sentiment.

This style of thread comes up almost daily on HN, and is something I have previously brought up to @Dang as well.

It is tiring and demeaning to those of us who are immigrants or the children of immigrants - a number of us who make up a major portion of the tech industry, and have leadership positions in YC as well.

South Asian Americans make up around 2-3% of the US, but almost every post on HN about the job market turns into "H1B"-bashing, which often devolves into bashing people on the visa instead of the companies themselves.

Almost never do I see conversations extending sympathy to those on work visas and also stuck with abusive employers - only nativist bashing that "they took our jobs".

I hope you can moderate these kinds of conversations or update the engagement rules of HN, because HN and the tech industry of 2025 is not HN or the tech industry of 2008.

It is legitimately demoralizing. I worked on the Hill for several years, have advised administrations on how to bring back manufacturing and "American dynamism" (to use the A16Z term), and have built, launched, and funded software products and companies that are used by backbone infra in the US, and even advised a number of YC startups that have exited.

I have done my part for the country, yet to a large portion of HN and the tech industry I and other South Asian Americans will continue to be termed as "H1Bs" until they hear our accent, or if we can pass as some other race or ethnicity.

I would love to have a good faith discussion with you about this, because I do heavily leverage HN and have found it to be a great resource to find technical discussions and have my portfolio companies show share their features, so the toxicity around H1B and work visas in the tech industry is heavily demoralizing.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#243

Post by BenFranklin100 »

willmadden wrote: post #216
kccqzy wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lure of H-1B is not really the money savings. Go look at the graduating class of computer science students at large universities. A large fraction are international students. Universities thrive on them since they pay the most tuition and are generally not allowed any financial aid. Companies want to hire them in addition to U.S. citizens. That's it. No Silicon Valley company that I know of pays H-1B and citizens…

Econ 101: increased supply lowers prices (wages).

A healthy labor pool increase business growth that in turn can push average industry wages higher however.

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.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#244

Post by pandaman »

yunyu wrote: post #236
pandaman wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand how exactly this particular problem (advertising jobs for PERM to comply with the law yet making sure that no applications will be received) can be fixed with a different order of issuing H-1B visas? 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 p…

Prevents infosys/wipro slop from overwhelming the system, and filters down the incoming roles to only those that can't be filled by a US citizen (i.e. specialist technical jobs, top engineers commanding $500k/yr)

It's not just Infosys doing PERM fraud, around 2020 Meta had been barred from filing PERM due to overwhelming fraud. And are there really 85K unique and impossible to find in the US individuals every year? If these exist they will take a small fraction of H-1B allocation and the rest will go to the fresh grads, as it's now.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#246

Post by zer00eyz »

willmadden wrote: post #216
kccqzy wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lure of H-1B is not really the money savings. Go look at the graduating class of computer science students at large universities. A large fraction are international students. Universities thrive on them since they pay the most tuition and are generally not allowed any financial aid. Companies want to hire them in addition to U.S. citizens. That's it. No Silicon Valley company that I know of pays H-1B and citizens…

Econ 101: increased supply lowers prices (wages).

Thats some Wealth of Nations every worker can move the same number of bricks reductive thinking.

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.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#247

Post by _DeadFred_ »

epolanski wrote: post #192
back2dafucha wrote: post #112

Old news. This has been going on for decades. If you even look badly on youtube you will find corporate videos from "HR Consultants" teaching companies how to bury job listings so noone will be likely to find them. Your country sold you down the river 30 years ago.

> Your country sold you down the river 30 years ago. Jm2c but I think the harsh truth is that US while having a decently sized population of good software engineers, it is still nowhere near the required amount. Thus, many companies would rather give 150/200k to someone who's actually good at it and will be impressed by that money rather than some half assed US graduate who only went into SE because he wanted a cushy…

How dare that loser want a cushy, well paying job. This is America, that's not allowed for them. We like our workers desperate.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#248

Post by mpyne »

nyolfen wrote: post #214
kccqzy wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lure of H-1B is not really the money savings. Go look at the graduating class of computer science students at large universities. A large fraction are international students. Universities thrive on them since they pay the most tuition and are generally not allowed any financial aid. Companies want to hire them in addition to U.S. citizens. That's it. No Silicon Valley company that I know of pays H-1B and citizens…

> No Silicon Valley company that I know of pays H-1B and citizens different wages on that basis. 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.

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. Just as the Luddites tried to stop the rise of industrialization that threatened to bring the skills they used to employ to the wider public at lower costs.

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.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#249

Post by toomuchtodo »

epolanski wrote: post #195
toomuchtodo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of H1Bs who received better grades, I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs. Citizens make the rules via governance, not corporations. You can hire someone good enough domestically vs the best globally to import. US corporations simply want the cheapest labor possible at the best possible price, which is where policy steps in. If it impairs your p…

> I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs Why not? Also friendly reminder 99.999% of US population is made of immigrants.

As of January 2025, the U.S. has an immigrant population of 53.3 million people, making up 15.8% of the total population.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...

https://usafacts.org/immigration/

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#250

Post by Taek »

thephyber wrote: post #240
1024core wrote: post #202

A lot of these problems could be solved if H1-B's were given out in order of salary (I think there's such a proposal going around recently). And by that I mean: something like a Dutch auction. Give H1-Bs to the top 85K paying jobs (maybe normalized to SoL in the region, I'm sure the BLS has some idea on how to do it). The lure of H1-Bs is the money savings, and the fact that if you're on an H1-B, you're practically a…

This conflates high education specialists with high earnings. It’s probably not completely uncorrelated, but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates. 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 pre…

That seems like a fair way for the free market to address things, no? If you need special carve outs, create a new type of Visa for those special cases.

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.

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