H-1B abuse: Bay Area tech workers from India paid a pittance, feds say

Shocker. Here’s what happens in Melbourne, Australia. I used to work for one of the “big 4” banks.

1. Bank outsources to vendor. Typically IBM. “It’ll be cheaper!”

2. IBM is, initially, cheaper - because all of their staff are in India of course.

3. But they can’t do the job from India because they need to be here talking to their colleagues at the bank.

4. So they get flown to Melbourne, but still on Indian wages, where the poor souls live ten to an apartment because they can’t afford anything else.

5. The bank has now saved money by “offshoring” despite the workers actually being here in Australia.

It’s a disgrace and I have no idea why it isn’t in the news.

This is one thing I don't entirely understand in terms of political alignment. The one side that is supposed to be about the little guy seems to support this system of immigration which leads quite directly to depressed wages and exploitation of this sort. Even in cases where the 'guest workers' are not so ridiculously underpaid, companies still exploit the fact that these workers generally have to have this job or they may be forced to leave the nation losing any hopes of gaining permanent residency or citizenship. In other words when the company tells them to jump, their only question is going to be how high - compared to an increasingly 'mobile' domestic workforce.

If I was living in India I’d probably take that deal.

I've been told some of the H1Bs at the goog SJC offices mostly do make work work. Which, if true, raises the question, why do they even have them if they putt around most of the day trying to figure out what else they can do on projects in limbo.

As an American citizen formerly at Google - no, not really.

The supply of engineers that can pass Google's slightly ridiculous hiring bar is still fairly small, and Google tends to take whoever meets it regardless of how many people it has already hired. It's not like they're short on cash, after all, and there was plenty of work to go around while I was there.

Anti-poaching agreements, proprietary tech stacks that are useless outside of Google, a broad prohibition on moonlighting, standardized salary bands (which actually blunt the impact of immigration on wages), and a tendency to offer non-monetary perks like free food and private Cirque du Soleil shows over more cash - those depress wages. Immigrant coworkers are not a significant concern.