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H-1B Exposed: Banking sector visa sponsorship investigation

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Re: H-1B Exposed: Banking sector visa sponsorship investigation

#101

Post by mvc »

Dig1t wrote: post #100
mvc wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why _should_ Apple employ only Americans (whether in America or elsewhere)? They generate revenue all over the world. Seems only right that their costs should be distributed around the world too.

Because they are an American company which benefits from all of the advantages of this country, and indeed would not exist at all without this country's people. They rely on the tax incentives, stable society, culture, cities, infrastructure, and PEOPLE of this country. It's a company founded by Americans in the USA, they have reaped the benefits of everything that comes from this country. Do you think that Apple cou…

I think Apple benefits from the tax incentives, "stable" society, and freedoms in my country too. And it employs many people here and elsewhere around the world and there is no chance it could sell as many units as it does without those people

https://share.google/aimode/k9blzn3HX1PvqOTFO

Maybe Apple wouldn't be founded anywhere else but it wouldnt be what it is without immigrants.

Even Steve Jobs was an immigrant.

Re: H-1B Exposed: Banking sector visa sponsorship investigation

#103

Post by gymbeaux »

ecshafer wrote: post #52
gymbeaux wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with many systemic issues in the U.S., it boils down to "publicly traded company must have highest profit possible so line on chart goes up". As much as I dislike FAANG companies in general for all their anti-worker efforts, I can't honestly blame them for making decisions that look good on the balance sheet. If I am a company, and I can choose to hire 10 U.S. engineers for $200k a pop, or 10 H-1B engineers for $1…

You mudt have gotten lucky with your coworkers. Ive worked with people who claimed to be “experts” in a domain that didnt have basic skills. I would say 5% were excellent, 5% good. 90% worthless. Coupled with weird insular cultural dynamics, poor english and communication skills, poor throw it over the wall mentality. Its overalll a huge net negative for a company. Perhaps its different in FAANG. But in enterprise co…

If there is a correlation to company size or company popularity (e.g., FAANG) I would have actually thought it would be large companies/FAANG are hiring the low-quality H-1Bs. I usually work at medium sized companies (50-200 engineers company-wide is my definition) where maybe 2-4% of the engineers are H-1B or green card. They've all been great. Even the one at Allstate (Allstate was also hugely reliant on India-based Infosys "developers" who I will yell from the mountaintops were straight garbage and very much net-negative).

Re: H-1B Exposed: Banking sector visa sponsorship investigation

#104

Post by gymbeaux »

goobert wrote: post #97
ecshafer wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mudt have gotten lucky with your coworkers. Ive worked with people who claimed to be “experts” in a domain that didnt have basic skills. I would say 5% were excellent, 5% good. 90% worthless. Coupled with weird insular cultural dynamics, poor english and communication skills, poor throw it over the wall mentality. Its overalll a huge net negative for a company. Perhaps its different in FAANG. But in enterprise co…

The h1bs at Amazon were some of the most abysmal software developers I've seen in my life

As time goes on I'm finding AWS on a resume less and less impressive, regardless of citizenship status. Lots of resumes where they were at AWS for 1 or 2 years, I guess they got stack-ranked out. It makes sense. Everyone knows AWS is a revolving door.

Re: H-1B Exposed: Banking sector visa sponsorship investigation

#105

Post by gymbeaux »

bdangubic wrote: post #79
georgeburdell wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

H1B was created in the 90s. The industry had been around for nearly 50 years at that point.

how many people were in the industry/needed 50 years prior? compared to 40 years later? any growth?

I would challenge that by saying SO MANY "software engineers" are net-negative producers, be it offshore teams in Asia or Eastern Europe or U.S. citizens. Partially a result of coding bootcamps. The recent tech layoffs in ~2022 that we are still reeling from is further evidence that maybe we don't need H-1B for software engineering roles. Medical? Absolutely.

Re: H-1B Exposed: Banking sector visa sponsorship investigation

#106

Post by gymbeaux »

hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #94
gymbeaux wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect this has happened to me at least once. I was a shoe-in, checked all of the boxes, recruiter was saying they really wanted me, and then for the final interview they brought in a mid level guy who asked me questions unrelated to the role (purely a Data Engineer role but he was asking me about the intricacies of ML models). All interviewers were Indian. I would wager they ended up hiring another Indian guy for…

So just looking at your story, you’re saying all your interviewers were Indian, and all of them but 1 mid level guy really wanted you. And that to you is evidence that they only wanted to hire Indians? Despite the fact that everyone but this 1 mid level guy clearly wanted to hire a non Indian?

We'll never know what actually happened, but I suspect they had to choose between me and an Indian guy and by throwing me ridiculous questions in the final interview, they had evidence to whoever (their boss, HR, me, the recruiter representing me) that they passed on me because I didn't know enough about a subject area and therefore I wasn't a good fit for the role. I can't capture the full interview experience in a Hacker News comment but I realize the information presented isn't a dead-giveaway case of racism.

I am well aware that it could've just been that A) their requirements for the role changed mid-interview process, B) they didn't like my personality or I came off as an asshole, C) the mid level guy didn't want me as their "superior" for a non-racial reason or D) Other. But I think it's dangerous to just write off any suspected racism and blame something like personality or soft-skills. Racism is disproportionately detrimental to people of color, but it's still wrong when it's directed towards a white person.

Re: H-1B Exposed: Banking sector visa sponsorship investigation

#107

Post by gymbeaux »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #63
ecshafer wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mudt have gotten lucky with your coworkers. Ive worked with people who claimed to be “experts” in a domain that didnt have basic skills. I would say 5% were excellent, 5% good. 90% worthless. Coupled with weird insular cultural dynamics, poor english and communication skills, poor throw it over the wall mentality. Its overalll a huge net negative for a company. Perhaps its different in FAANG. But in enterprise co…

>poor throw it over the wall mentality And that's exactly why managers keep hiring them. If you're a defensive manager who just wants to keep your head down and grind out the years before moving getting a "senior" or "principal" manager job somewhere else then a bunch of compliant workers who'll punt anything messy onto some other team is exactly what you want.

I've heard anecdotally that Stryker is really bad about this (throw it over the wall mentality) and I remember thinking when I heard that, how the fuck are employees of a company getting away with being assigned work and just reassigning it to someone else? But then I think about my Allstate days and I can see it. I think you're being downvoted because people reading your comment haven't witnessed that sort of dysfunction in a company, but to anyone reading this- it is how some companies operate. The execs at these companies will deadass hire garbage people (usually offshore) and then brag about how much money they saved the company vs hiring U.S. citizens. Either the bill comes due years down the road when prod goes down due to a bullshit bug from the offshore team and it ends up costing the company millions, or U.S. employees are picking up the slack.

At Allstate (circa 2016), we were required to use offshore teams from Infosys. There was one U.S. software engineer for every 6 or so offshore "engineers". We weren't allowed to say "no they actually cause more problems than they fix, you can keep paying them but we'll be paying them to do nothing". Ha. You would have gotten fired for that level of "insubordination" because the higher ups legitimately didn't understand that software development is a skill - it's not like an assembly line where anyone can put an item into a box over and over again.

Re: H-1B Exposed: Banking sector visa sponsorship investigation

#108

Post by kjellsbells »

Dig1t wrote: post #98
kjellsbells wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not disputing this, but working thru this, lets say H-1Bs suddenly become really hard for companies to get. I dont think it follows that a ton of IT jobs suddenly open up for Americans. Isnt it more likely that all those H-1B jobs are replaced by workers in offshore locations? Or, that those jobs disappear and are not replaced at all. Or, that the jobs go and the work is expected to happen (somehow) with AI tools ope…

Many of these roles, such as the ones where people just push buttons and send emails, could be done by Americans with just a little bit of training. But there is no incentive for Apple to train Americans or invest in their existing employees when they can just claim “labor shortage” and hire someone from India instead. We know this works already because this is how the country worked until 1990, when they created the…

My point is that even if H-1B were eliminated and all the people that hold them today returned to their home countries, employers' response is less likely to be "we need to hire and train more Americans, asap" but more like "let's expand our overseas operations, so we can get work done without paying Americans".

In other words eliminating immigration like this is only half the solution of you don't also have a way to stop offshoring.

Re: H-1B Exposed: Banking sector visa sponsorship investigation

#109

Post by goobert »

gymbeaux wrote: post #104
goobert wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The h1bs at Amazon were some of the most abysmal software developers I've seen in my life

As time goes on I'm finding AWS on a resume less and less impressive, regardless of citizenship status. Lots of resumes where they were at AWS for 1 or 2 years, I guess they got stack-ranked out. It makes sense. Everyone knows AWS is a revolving door.

I heard the average tenure for an SDE at amazon is something like 9 months. The culture is so repulsive that if you're good you leave soon and convert that big name on your CV to something better. I know a few really good ex AWS engineers and the thing in common is they hate Amazon and will rant about how dumb the culture is.

Re: H-1B Exposed: Banking sector visa sponsorship investigation

#110

Post by xnx »

alexb_ wrote: post #33

The H-1B system is obviously flawed. For some reason, we've decided to tie the ability to live where you want and take advantage of your pursuit of happiness to having an employer. This creates massive power imbalances that are avoided by not engaging in national segregation policies. We don't demand that anyone born on this side of the border do anything like what people born somewhere else have to - how can a law a…

> how can a law applied differently based on how you were born be just?

US laws aren't meant to solve the lottery of birth.

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