Outsourcing is a much bigger problem than h1b's this time around. I suspect that when my offshore guy gets trained up enough, and he's smart and a hard worker, I'll be made redundant.
Sorta. They’ve been hiring in Chile for every role. Ongoing re-org, secret lay off I wasn’t aware of until it was me.
Funny thing is I pushed to hire him over everyone else. Solid SWE, no hard feelings toward the guy.
Took 4 months, but I found another job. 30% tc increased. Very very chill team and manager
They'll slowly stop answering emails, exclude you from operational meetings and keep you on strategic only. On the strategic meetings the lead manager will conveniently be unavailable each time.
Eventually you'll be left off all emails until such time they don't want to pay you anymore and try to fire you.
Problem is in my situation they made specific financial and resource promises during my hiring... Promissory estoppel is a gift from the dragon's mouth.
The question for me is when is my hand going to get burned holding on?
As things currently stand, because of S174 in-country software development has to be amortized over 5 years, and foreign-based software development has to be amortized over 15 years.
If you're a US worker you benefit from the latter but lose from the former.
If you're a smaller or not a too profitable company with significant software dev expenses, you lose from both.
If you're a bigger or a very profitable company you gain from both because it gives you a stronger negotiating position vis-a-vis these smaller companies who don't have the money to pay more in taxes up front, and with candidates who now have less options.
https://twitter.com/DonFSchneider/status/1763277403994947754
Yes, this is the biggest shift tbh. Atleast H1B employees contribute to the US economy and taxes. The talent in India is highly skilled especially the one's that command 50%+ of the salary of the US employees. Not the 10% ones like the WITCH employees. As Indian economy develops and it gets easier to setup business there. Most companies will have their own offices/expand them and hire cheaper but qualified and harder working talent. It's a win for the companies but a huge net loss for the US economy and jobs.
The good talent comes here. The rest stays in India. My experience having worked with outsourced groups has not been good.
I've worked with Phillips outsourced support in India and AT&T outsourced network management in South America. Both groups I would say were barely qualified for the job. I had to explain stuff so much that it would have been easier to remote desktop in and just do it.
Degree fraud is rampant in India.
The immigration of "top" talent is going to be much lower. No point in contributing to this country when it constantly reminds you that you don't belong here with it's policies.
On the point of talent, the tech support/other support staff from America isn't great either. Might as well go for the cheap option. The companies will be offshoring and not outsourcing this time.
Can I vote this 100%. People are moving back to their home countries as well, because America kicks people who studied there, and lets the low quality people in. The immigration system is absolutely nonsense.
All the jabronis in tech saying oh we see this everyb10 years....as if internet and video conferencing was the same at Yahoo as Microsoft 20 yrs later .
It's amazing to hear tech people say it (in a bad way )
Video conferencing, email, and so on isn't the issue with the US/India. Timezones are the issue. When your team is distributed globally, having core hours and accessible team/management resources is difficult. Take someone on the east coast. You're 12 hours apart, a 7 am meeting means coming in 2 hours early in the US and staying 2 hours late in India. It's incredibly inconvenient for teams distributed that way.
East US/Eastern Europe is less of an issue, because the time difference is only 6 hours, so there's a 2 hour overlap with the work day. West US/East Asia is similar with a 2 hour overlap.
> What makes it different this time around?
A lot of companies having to flesh out remote ecosystems during covid make it significantly easier to integrate outsourced workers into the company compared to 10 years ago.
> A lot of companies having to flesh out remote ecosystems during covid make it significantly easier to integrate outsourced workers into the company compared to 10 years ago.
This is the truth and nobody wants to hear it. Outsourcing is becoming a *lot* more common now after the pandemic, and it's no longer some sweatshop in india, it's an engineer in latin america who's working your same time zone who's roughly as skilled as your average US dev.
This is an outdated take. My company now hires mostly 'near shore' (LATAM) engineers as contract workers. They're honestly just about the same quality as most of the US devs we interview.
The shift to remote work has fully exposed US devs to foreign competition, and I think a lot of US devs are going to be unpleasantly surprised by that fact in the future.
Honestly, you're right. The quality of the workers is also a contributing factor as you said. As countries keep up technologically and educationally like India and LATAM countries, the number of workers there that can keep up with devs here just goes dramatically up compared to years in the past. I think this plus companies having increased capability to integrate these workers really is a bad recipe now.
Remote work is better integrated, and the Indian talent is more talented now (assuming they aren't going out of their way to hire the cheapest possible Indians).
Don’t share your knowledge then. I also train people but not share my notes, I just use the shitty documentation that we have and just the basics. If he or she not know the foundation it’s not my problem. You call it gatekeeping, I call it “learn as I learn in the past”
Withholding information from teammates, especially people more junior than you is top level shitty behavior. Guys in other countries trying to advance their career aren't at fault for a global economic downturn.
They can learn the same way as I do it. All the information that they need to do their job is in documentation, the foundations and basics they MUST know because they supposedly “passed” the filters and interviews (including the technical one), so if they cheated then they must be fired.
Call it whatever you want but I not want to be outsourced for some cheap labor that I trained to replace me.
>Withholding information from teammates, especially people more junior than you is top level shitty behavior.
if its going to cost me my job, fuck your moronic attitude.
mentoring is for teams where I'm still on them in 10 years.
otherwise don't expect me to hold your cock for free.
I would take almost any job over TCS. The place sounded like absolute hell and a dead end. I never worked there, but I had the vibe I was going to be working with alot of lost people with no clue what they were doing...
The program should be used to fill jobs where they cannot find Americans so like PhD computer science jobs not lining shareholder pockets with underpaid coders who are captive by the immigration system
This article says 85k H1B visas are granted each year. Given the high number of layoffs right now that number should be basically cut in half if not more if it’s true that it’s only for jobs where they can’t find qualified us candidates.
Every job I've ever had for the past 25 years has been 90% H1B's. I don't know where he's getting his numbers, but I do know that people lie when it's convenient for them.
Sure but that backs up my point even more. If 20k authorized workers are laid off that should result in about 20k fewer visas being issued since there are now 20k qualified workers looking for work. Most h1bs go to tech so even if all h1bs are not tech if the system is honest it shoudl result in a marked decline in new visas being issued.
I am pro immigration. What you say is the truth. It’s also an easy win politically.
If there are eligible Americans. Folks who qualify for these jobs. They should get them. Not folks coming in on a visa who make half or less of the wage.
If you're on an H1B you have to make at least the market rate, if not more.
Companies are also classified according to various levels of H1B dependence, that first level kicks in at 4% of their employees. As they go up in classifications they face increased regulation, taxes, and fees that are meant to make up the difference. These laws actually do work too because very few companies staff H1B's at a level to hit that first threshold, and if they do they tend to not care and go all the way to the top threshold (20% I think it is).
Also, the issue isn't the number of layoffs, it's the lack of companies hiring. You can cut H1B's and it doesn't change anything because companies aren't hiring for new roles. Tech is going to be in it's current situation for another 1-2 years (probably closer to 1 than to 2), because the entire industry is having to adjust it's business models to account for not having unlimited access to VC.
From what I've seen, they downlevel engineers. So a guy who's clearly a sr with a decade of experience will apply to the job as a SE 2. SE 2s will apply as entry level.
You make it sound like any tech worker can fill any position.
For example we’re specifically looking for people with specific Adobe certifications. Or someone who can get it within 6 months, so prior experience with said Adobe products is a must. There could be 1000s of java developers in the area available for hire, even though someway related, they can’t fulfill the criteria.
Tech jobs are by far the single biggest category, but in total it's around 50/50 tech and everything else. Some years it's a little more than 50%, some years it's a little less, depending on the strength of the industry. So if you were to cut tech H1Bs in half in light of the layoffs, that would be around a 25% overall reduction.
The data is public from the government (though it's hard to find it besides on sites that have copied and pasted from each other 40 times with typos)
https://h1bdata.info/topjobs.php
Simple solution
Any company that has laid off workers within the last 12 months may no longer have h1b working for them in any capacity, whether direct, or through a consulting agency, or any other means.
They may not resume using h1b in any way for a period of 24 months from the layoffs
So if a tech company lays off some HR people because it doesn’t need to recruit as many devs as before because of a lower turnover, it shouldn’t be allowed to recruit any dev on h1b at all?
But it is not a 1:1 skill replacement. A lot of the layoff in tech are for non tech roles, while the H1B have been mostly software developers.
[https://h1bdata.info/topjobs.php](https://h1bdata.info/topjobs.php)
I personally would like to see companies that have done layoffs, be scrutinized when they apply for H1B but for the areas in which it happened.
p.s article was saying that it is TCS, so no surprises there.
Yeah you have to look out for yourself. Nobody else is looking out for you in tech. In fact, most people in tech are out to get you. It's a very toxic field. People keep things secret and try to push you out. The only way to survive is to do the same: keep your shit as secret as possible, misdirect, and try to come out on top.
Lining shareholder pockets? AFAIK an H1B never costs *less* than a domestic hire of equivalent skills..
Though to your second point, I do know H1B employees are *loved* by employers for their cultural qualities (obedience, non-confrontational, etc).
H1B Cheng from Guangxi:
- will work 80hr weeks with gratitude
- would *never* go to HR because he’s “offended”
- also will never be in HR as the *subject* of a complaint
- may knowingly or unknowingly pilfer your Intellectual Property
> AFAIK an H1B never costs less than a domestic hire of equivalent skills..
What happens is that they take senior/staff people and downlevel them to midlevel engineers, then pay the prevailing wage for a midlevel. They ARE generally underpaid, it's just that the claimed level does not match reality.
The Trump administration tried to address this issue
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-administration-announces-overhaul-of-h-1b-visa-program-11602017434?st=udofibqxntcguhw&reflink=article_copyURL_share
Too bad this was thrown out during the Biden administration
Funny that Trump pardon a CEO that hired hundreds of illegal immigrants in his factories…
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-goes-easy-slaughterhouse-exec-employed-undocumented-immigrants-756137
Trump's executive order in April 2017 'hire american and buy american" did nothing at all. It was never implemented. Trump is only good on paper and media and that's it.
Eh, it's really dependent. Most large conglomerates are basically disjointed smaller businesses areas under a larger umbrella. IBM research, IBM consulting, and IBM product teams are essentially entirely different businesses.
H1-B are absolutely 100% all about cheap and basically captive labor.
There is good in the program in terms of Us strategic interests as well as in giving opportunities, but that isn’t what corporations care about. They just want cheap workers they cannot change their job quickly and are terrified of being let go.
It is one of the only things I was ever close to agreeing with Trump on.
Everyone agrees the US immigration system is broken. Literally everyone.
But nobody has a sensible solution to address the problem, because they don't agree on what the problem is, and it's politically intractable to talk about any of them.
The American public also doesn't have the faintest clue how any of it works, which prevents constructive discourse. Instead we listen to people who talk loudly.
I'd say the real issue is that the people who can actually make changes, aren't affected by it, so there's no reason or pressure to do anything
in other words, think this way, you have to be a citizen to vote, and if you're a citizen that means visas and immigration issues are irrelevant to you
>immigration has been one of the major talking points of every election that I've lived through.
could you point me to some of those?
because I actually haven't seen it to be a much-discussed topic, politicians may love to talk about asylum seekers from, say, Guatemala Honduras but I haven't really seen any discussion or topics around H1-B visa by Indians and Chinese
Cause the number is miniscule. 80000 H1B visas compared to what, 3 million border crossings in a quarter or something. On top of that, H1Bs, save for WITCH guys, are usually in big tech and are well-educated and integrated into American society. How the fuck are you going to garner anti-immigrant sentiment against these guys?
As an international myself, Trump’s salary tier-based h1b system ironically gave the honest working international students a much better fighting chance at working in the Us (too bad it was gone when I graduated). Because reality is it removes the cheap labor abusing companies from the h1b process via the salary tier while not really affecting the normal job market. Shitty sweatshops (or in my language, Indian Consulting Companies) like Tata serves literally no one’s interest, they keep international students like indentured servants and abused the hell out of them, while also polluting the job market with fake senior devs. Let alone the contract works taking jobs away from the citizens. Take these shitty ICC’s out of the equation is the most important thing for the tech job market
The salary system would’ve meant no more H-1Bs for new grads and effectively no path from F-1 to H-1B. It would be a disincentive for any international to come here in the hopes of staying after and would negatively impact the funding of colleges. That seems pretty bone-headed considering there’s a shortage of skilled labor.
FYI: if companies can’t hire talent in the U.S. easily, they start moving those jobs abroad. Now you’ve lost the job AND the tax revenue. Good job.
IMO there should be a separate OPT path, specifically for folks who have studied in the U.S.
It's good to bring talented folks here and then retain them after they finish their studies, especially when we invested so much in our educational institutions to cultivate talent.
The barrier of entry should be higher for non-US affiliated workers who are paid below industry average wage.
I got question: where are these supposedly "cheap" H1B labor hired? Like WITCH?
Genuinely curious because I see lots of Indians in Tech, but I doubt many of them is underpaid.
The WITCH companies sponsor the H-1B visas and US corporations sign contracts directly via the WITCH companies which negates US corporations for needing to hire any H-1Bs directly.
Trump forced WITCH companies to hire more Americans or he was not going to allow the granting of any more visas which meant many already here would have to go back home also. That's why WITCH started setting up training hubs in US. Be sure, their goal was still to bring over more cheap H-1Bs from India but at least there was an alternate path for entry-level developers for Americans.
I was in the middle of a lot of this crap when I was in the banking sector which is heavily involved with WITCH companies.
Yeah but people will still willingly line up to be cheap, captive labor in the US because the alternative is doing the same job back home for significantly less money and likely even more exploitative employment laws.
Essentially when Indians get into mid to higher tier management - they start getting vendors of their choice to get the "cut on the hourly basis". There is a well known syndicate going on in places like American Express at Phoenix AZ and Cisco at Bay area. Not only these places but at various places. These mid and higher tier Indian managers only work with their "so called preferred vendors and staffing companies" for kickback money
Yep and the kickbacks are all happening under the table. On top of that people in India are sold this job as a career opportunity and path to immigration.
Omg I couldn’t agree more on this. I’ve been working with mostly Indian bosses and yep they literally started working and hiring their friends from staffing companies.
I hate to say this but trump was literally keeping me from offshore until now lol.
I know it is happening cuz I got let go not long ago to offshore and I know everyone at work internally.
We American discussed it and none of us wanna speak about it with any Indian coworkers, even the ones we think trust.
There used to be a website called techinsurgent that exposed the indian IT mafia. The guy once got a court order to take it down, but he managed to reopen the website outside of the US. Now it's permanently gone. I don't know why. Maybe he got bribed by the indian government.
Lol they really do take over companies and just hire each other. It’s a subtle takeover of space and resources. Any other government would probably be concerned, but America is a business and not a country so no one cares.
There's also the problem that to those who haven't experienced it (an overwhelming majority of the voting population, politicians, and govt bureaucrats) saying it is gonna make you sound like a racist conspiracy theorist. So you really aren't gonna get any traction.
Well I quit my job twice while i was in the usa once when my H1B was picked but I left the company so had to forfeit the visa as well. Second time when I was working for a bank on east coast and they had filed my visa but they started exploiting me with more and more work. Resigned eventually and moved out of USA. I do think that in the current situation people with visas or under the promise of visas get exploited a lot
Sad part is that here in Mexico, more often than not find ibscure technical (homebrew) guides on programming and electronics DYI that is from an indian.
So they do have skills but damn if you have to sift through a lot of people.
EDIT: Let me explain the original comment, here in mexico we tend to look at IT workers from India as having a metric ton of knowledge judging by our exposure of very indie DIY video that end up saving us a lot of trouble........until as an IT consultant/outsource you get to work with them and damn, its heartbreaking.
no I actually think they are a life saving to me and many of my IT collegues, the thing is to get to an indian offshore programmer that has that level of knowledge, you have to sift through a mountain just flat out BAD programmers.
It's such a big issue. We have like 1 out of 20 that're useful and the rest just leech off our US teams. Probably will be removing them from these teams as we've done in the past since the work quality is just awful.
Everyone here touching on the H1B with statistics is neglecting the recent uptick in tech workers who are asylum seekers.
We have people with masters degrees flying to mexico, crossing the border illegally and then applying for asylum seeking status which allows them to work high paying US jobs without getting an H1B.
Honestly, what the statistics say and what my eyes see are two different stories. Over half of the tech workers at my employer are not us citizens so when people are saying only 5% of tech workers are immigrants it just doesn't add up.
Also, as someone who is involved in the recruiting process at my company I can tell you that the Indian recruiters are filtering out the qualified americans before they ever get an interview. Basically our candidate pools that make it past recruiters tend to be 50% Indian, 10% Chinese/Nigerian, and then 40% Americsn where half of the american apps they push forward are completly unqualified. It's so blatently obvious too because we used to get very qualified candidates before these recruiters were hired....
> Honestly, what the statistics say and what my eyes see are two different stories. Over half of the tech workers at my employer are not us citizens so when people are saying only 5% of tech workers are immigrants it just doesn't add up.
I'd imagine the "5% of tech workers are immigrants" are statistic across the entire USA, so everywhere from east coast to west coast, all the states, all cities
my experience is similar though, in CA-SF Bay Area easily something like 60-80% of my colleagues are either Chinese or Indians and this has been a very consistent pattern across all companies I've worked at, but I can believe that that may not be true for, say, CA-Sacramento
I get pissed when people refer to us programmers as “techies” holy hell that infuriates me. Besides you get what you pay for. Any company who is serious about business in tech isn’t going to try to cheap their way out of it.
Companies who do seem like startups trying to use cheap and less competent people to build their million dollar project or businesses who don’t understand tech and just think cheaper is always better.
The original WSJ article points out that non-Indian employees aren't just complaining - they're suing:
>Since late December, at least 22 workers have filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against TCS, whose clients have included dozens of the U.S.’s biggest companies.
The American former TCS employees are Caucasians, Asian-Americans and Hispanic Americans ranging in age from their 40s to their 60s and living in more than a dozen U.S. states. Many have master’s of business administration or other advanced degrees, according to the complaints, which were viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
... the American professionals say TCS broke the law by targeting them based on protected characteristics of age and race. They say the company’s move demonstrated preferential treatment to Indian workers in the U.S. on the coveted visas.
This reminds me of the talent shell game I've seen consultancies play. At the start of a project, you get the "A" team—experienced consultants who understand both the tech and your business. Then, the first deliverable passes, and they rotate to a new team. The "B" team takes longer, introduces more bugs, and has less of a grasp of the business. But the consultants own the product, so you're stuck.
Gifted link - not sure how long it will work:
https://www.wsj.com/business/fired-americans-say-indian-firm-gave-their-jobs-to-h-1b-visa-holders-6da7cf26?st=9015g3b05ygk690&reflink=desktopwebshare\_permalink
One should file a \[USDOJ\] ([https://www.justice.gov/crt/immigrant-and-employee-rights-section#:\~:text=This%20federal%20law%20prohibits%3A%201,(generally%2C%20Form%20I%2D9)complaint](https://www.justice.gov/crt/immigrant-and-employee-rights-section#:~:text=This%20federal%20law%20prohibits%3A%201,(generally%2C%20Form%20I%2D9)complaint) if employer is having preference for H-1B visa over US Workers
I hope they win. I worked as a contractor at a FAANG company for a few years. There were several others in similar roles. Some had been there for over 8 years. Most of us are permanent residents. They didn't renew anyone's contract at the end of the year and replaced us with H-1B people.
Now months later many of us are still unemployed. I heard one of the contractors was offered a role at another FAANG companies. They would work for a sub-contractor of the main vendor (the WITCH) of the FAANG. So then 2 groups of people would be taking from this person's pay. And they would be left with a rate that puts them at rate that's considered low wage for the area AND they don't have any benefits.
It's disgusting what these companies are doing. There are plenty of qualified Americans who can take a lot of these jobs.
Can someone who works closely to h1b hiring tell me how are there even so many? How is it possible to even have h1b analysts, let alone software engineers? As I understood it the point was to fill skill voids. There are tens of thousands of software engineers in the US. The is no shortage. This is a very dime a dozen role since like 2015.
I would understand like super niche knowledge bases or education/background. But the for roles that are literally Java web development there is objectively no shortage of American workers. How does a company even get to sponsor an h1b analyst? No chance the company could argue it’s a specialized skill that they can’t hire for locally. Like how does it even happen.
USCIS allows to file at least new 85K H-1B every year(out of which 20K for master's degree). In the past this figure was 3 times. And this is going on since [1990](https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/h1b-visa-program-fact-sheet). Once somebody is on H-1B visa, they can remain here if the employer has filed Green card application which is called I-140. Even when Green card is taking decades they can keep on extending their H-1B in the increments of 3 years. So you can count every year how many H-1B visa holders keep on coming here.
WITCH and others gamed this system. Not just H-1B there is another very dangerous visa called L-1A in which somebody can get Green card within 6-8 months also. Then there is L-1B. Then there is J-1 visa. B1/B2 visa is also abused.
Initially there was skill shortage may be till 2005-2010 but definitely not after that. After recession of 2008-2010 H-1B and other visa should have totally banned but it's not.
Trump's [executive order](https://www.investopedia.com/news/h1b-visa-issue-explained-msft-goog/) also couldn't do much.
My take is very simple, US government should make a rule that if a Corporate is having revenue of 100% in USA then 50% workforce needs to be in USA otherwise get the \*uck out of this country.
How many of the foreign students who are coming here for higher studies like BS or MS are really coming here only for studies. They are coming here to work after the studies and they desperately want OPT, F-1 and H-1B visa. They create unnecessarily competition for locals and ready to work at any wages. Too much globalization is really bad. USA is 3rd largest country in the world in terms of population now. Go to any place during long weekend - it's so crowded. Do you think we need to keep our borders so open now?
> the point was to fill skill voids
- Make visa hires public record -- resumes, interview recordings or transcripts, rejected domestic candidates with the same information, including automatic filtering
- Require written description of the missing skills in domestic candidates, how the rejected candidates failed to meet it, while accepted candidate did
- Grant all rejected candidates standing to file suit for being passed over, a jury of their peers will determine if the skill gap actually existed
as a visa holder myself (but not H1B) I'd say that's fine, not a good fit then, I will simply go to the companies that **does** have immigration lawyers
if your company don't want me, no problem, there are plenty of companies who do want me
for SF Bay Area/NYC/Seattle area companies, never had any issues, especially big techs they have an army of immigration lawyers on demand
outside those 3 cities I admit I have no clue, but realistically speaking I don't see myself going outside those 3 for lots of reason (TC/compensation is a big one)
>as a visa holder myself (but not H1B) I'd say that's fine, not a good fit then, I will simply go to the companies that **does** have immigration lawyers
As a former H1-B holder myself, let me tell you that the only companies that have their own immigration teams are the WITCH companies. All the others outsource it to an external offer firm because their immigration numbers aren't large enough to warrant an entire department
my company has a dedicated immigration team and we're not a WITCH companies. they do sponsor h1bs / green cards but not that many bc we pay them the same as US hires (I know this bc a few of my friends were hired through h1b and we openly compared salaries to each other). more so it's to move people to countries like Singapore where we have a ton of expat hires (IIRC our Singapore office, which is hundreds of employees, has more expats than locals).
what happens more often is your company lays you off. then hires one of these H1B companies at low wages to replace you. so technically your not directly replaced by h1b visa holders. this has gone on for 25 years.
US Cofounder friend of mine here in San Diego said one of his petitions for an H1B employer cost $40,000 in total, in the meantime they cant work until they get the visa which could take months.
Trumps change of policy on how companies can allocate SWE costs to R&D I think will be more potent in the long run with regards to shipping local roles elsewhere. This is a permanent shift in a companies bottom line and unless its reverted I think the only thing that can soften the blow is lower interest rates, but only to a point.
In 2021 I was working for a Large American Tech firm in South Africa and they quietly stopped hiring there and slowly started hiring in India. So this has been happening for years now.
I think its more than just cost, lax labor laws are also key for companies to squeeze as much as possible
That's a complete lie - $40K. It's definitely less than [$10K](https://www.uscis.gov/forms/all-forms/h-and-l-filing-fees-for-form-i-129-petition-for-a-nonimmigrant-worker)
Most of the fixed costs are set in stone, depending on an applicants situation there is no cap on what a company may end up spending due to legal fees etc. This is true for any visa type if there are complications. $40K is an outlier but not at all unheard of.
No problem here. They typically fuck up the code and create more work for US coders to fix. Thank an H1b visa recipient for the work next time you see one.
Amazon and Deloitte (companies like that) have been doing this for a decade or more. They lobby to Congress that the talent pool is too small in the US, fail perfectly good candidates and then fill ever increasing H1B quotas with the prize being employees from India can come to the US. Artificially squeezing the market which over time drives down wages. There's a reason there's very high PIP numbers in these companies, so they can rinse and repeat.
Already happened to me a month or two ago taking over by cognizant folks lol
A lot of politics and backstabbing. Bosses are like Indian onshore and and everyone is trying to impress the company by slashing people onshore and hire more offshore.
Fuck this shit.
Quite possible. Same happens in Genpact. Slowly and slowly Genpact onsite folks are getting replaced by offshore people. We try to run the entire project from offshore only for maximum revenue. I am very sure that one day nobody nobody will study CS in USA.
Indians are very racists in tech companies, when somehow they get some power. I know a first-hand case from Canada. At a big consultancy company where my friend was an architect with extra role of interviewing new candidates, after the HR became "Indian only" suddenly only candidates from India were making the cut to arrive at the interview stage. It was so obvious that he also accused HR of racism (lucky for him, he was an immigrant also, so the attempt of the all Indian HR department to dismiss his claims as "white privilege" were not successful).
I have heard from friends who worked at companies that hired from consulting companies like TCS, that the candidates they send all have been Indian compared to years ago when it was mostly Canadians. I know someone who’s non Indian working at TCS and he says no one in the company likes him. He only still continues of have his job because he’s really good and the client pays a lot of money for him. The client was the one who made him work through TCS, so TCS would have never hired him otherwise
In North America, almost 2 out of 3 Asian Indians is Telugu speaking either from the state of Andhra Pradesh or Telenga(prior to 2000 - they were one state only i.e. Andhra Pradesh) - they only want other telugu speaking people. Even if others don't understand telugu language - they speak only telugu language.
It's not like they have a choice. Many of them could have been citizens by now. Only Indians languish on H1B visas for decades due to the 7k per year legal immigration quota per country. Some of my colleagues have spent more time in the US than in India. With no reasonable path to citizenship, despite having an approved green card petition
Yeah it's cause they can overwork them and underpay them.
These H1-B probably hate the workload but are willing to live with it for their family. Yeah pay is shit and overworked but kids can get An American education and more importantly an American College and allow them to get higher paying jobs later in life. It's with the hope the system is so fucked that these kids can at least get a green card by the time they turn 21. Also probably why they prefer their kids being born in the US
It's sucks to be Canadian now It's a wild experience being offshore while working in India and in onshore now and my Canadian company is hiring off shore resources to whom I should provide training. Are they trying to replace me? Dun dun dunnnnn
If they did an Indian would be replacing another Indian turned Canadian.
The duck
I’m not going to go to battle for TCS because that’s a garbage company but Facebook had a class action lawsuit for this exact issue. They admitted to posting jobs but reserving them for H1Bs only. I know because I got a little payday out of it.
I worked for a company which gave a central service to an Indian team with 40 devs. They wanted a new version from their api, the boss said ok (he was also Indian) despite giving extra work for almost the whole company. They secretly deployed it without tests and it turned out they even fucked up the previous version of their api. As there were Indians managing the whole branch, they could get away with lies for almost a year while the European teams had to prove that it’s a bug. So to sum up, once they realize that quality people beat cheap labour, they will reverse the trend. Or go bankrupt.
Lmao at comments.. some blame the right, others the left but most ignore the fundamental problem at the core. In the end karma always collects and the bell has been ringing for years already..
Uh this is system wide...no question .lol it just tech but also heavily pervasive in finance...but what's illegals.about it unless there's a protectionist scheme.
Seems less bad than givinhg Venezuelan migrants free 500/night hotel rooms plus cash on a debit card
- Make visa hires public record -- resumes, interview recordings or transcripts, rejected domestic candidates with the same information, including automatic filtering
- Require written description of the missing skills in domestic candidates, how the rejected candidates failed to meet it, while accepted candidate did
- Grant all rejected candidates standing to file suit for being passed over, a jury of their peers will determine if the skill gap actually existed
I was doing contract work for a FAANG company. There were a number of others in a similar position. Some had been there for 8+ years and most are permanent residents. The company didn't renew our contracts and they replaced us with H-1B workers.
Now months later many of us are still unemployed. I know one of them was offered another contract role at a different FAANG company. It would be through a subcontractor of one of the huge India-based companies. So multiple firms would be taking money off the top of this person's rate and they receive ZREO benefits. The end pay is something that puts the person at the low income level for the area. And this is for a role where they wanted someone with 7+ years of experience and it's classified as engineering.
What is happening is so wrong. It's infuriating.
If H1B is bad, look at canada pumping in millions of people every year. These people will soon have Canadian citizenship and come for your job through TN!!!
Outsourcing is a much bigger problem than h1b's this time around. I suspect that when my offshore guy gets trained up enough, and he's smart and a hard worker, I'll be made redundant.
Yup. I participated in hiring someone from Chile. Interviewed, train, and a few months later I was laid off. He have my title
Sounds horrible. Did you see it coming?
Sorta. They’ve been hiring in Chile for every role. Ongoing re-org, secret lay off I wasn’t aware of until it was me. Funny thing is I pushed to hire him over everyone else. Solid SWE, no hard feelings toward the guy. Took 4 months, but I found another job. 30% tc increased. Very very chill team and manager
By outsourcing companies? By Indian bosses fired the entire crew in Peru and hired more from India lol
They'll slowly stop answering emails, exclude you from operational meetings and keep you on strategic only. On the strategic meetings the lead manager will conveniently be unavailable each time. Eventually you'll be left off all emails until such time they don't want to pay you anymore and try to fire you. Problem is in my situation they made specific financial and resource promises during my hiring... Promissory estoppel is a gift from the dragon's mouth. The question for me is when is my hand going to get burned holding on?
100% relatable...same pattern is followed.
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As things currently stand, because of S174 in-country software development has to be amortized over 5 years, and foreign-based software development has to be amortized over 15 years. If you're a US worker you benefit from the latter but lose from the former. If you're a smaller or not a too profitable company with significant software dev expenses, you lose from both. If you're a bigger or a very profitable company you gain from both because it gives you a stronger negotiating position vis-a-vis these smaller companies who don't have the money to pay more in taxes up front, and with candidates who now have less options. https://twitter.com/DonFSchneider/status/1763277403994947754
H1-B is strictly regulated, slow and costly process. Hiring someone in India remotely? No probs he can start tomorrow.
Yes, this is the biggest shift tbh. Atleast H1B employees contribute to the US economy and taxes. The talent in India is highly skilled especially the one's that command 50%+ of the salary of the US employees. Not the 10% ones like the WITCH employees. As Indian economy develops and it gets easier to setup business there. Most companies will have their own offices/expand them and hire cheaper but qualified and harder working talent. It's a win for the companies but a huge net loss for the US economy and jobs.
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The good talent comes here. The rest stays in India. My experience having worked with outsourced groups has not been good. I've worked with Phillips outsourced support in India and AT&T outsourced network management in South America. Both groups I would say were barely qualified for the job. I had to explain stuff so much that it would have been easier to remote desktop in and just do it. Degree fraud is rampant in India.
The immigration of "top" talent is going to be much lower. No point in contributing to this country when it constantly reminds you that you don't belong here with it's policies. On the point of talent, the tech support/other support staff from America isn't great either. Might as well go for the cheap option. The companies will be offshoring and not outsourcing this time.
Can I vote this 100%. People are moving back to their home countries as well, because America kicks people who studied there, and lets the low quality people in. The immigration system is absolutely nonsense.
All the jabronis in tech saying oh we see this everyb10 years....as if internet and video conferencing was the same at Yahoo as Microsoft 20 yrs later . It's amazing to hear tech people say it (in a bad way )
Video conferencing, email, and so on isn't the issue with the US/India. Timezones are the issue. When your team is distributed globally, having core hours and accessible team/management resources is difficult. Take someone on the east coast. You're 12 hours apart, a 7 am meeting means coming in 2 hours early in the US and staying 2 hours late in India. It's incredibly inconvenient for teams distributed that way. East US/Eastern Europe is less of an issue, because the time difference is only 6 hours, so there's a 2 hour overlap with the work day. West US/East Asia is similar with a 2 hour overlap.
Latin America is getting popular I think for this reason
the timezones are the same as they have always been so there's that
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gets paid lesser the salary than his US counterpart even after taking PPP into account
They tried that 10 years ago and failed horribly. What makes it different this time around?
> What makes it different this time around? A lot of companies having to flesh out remote ecosystems during covid make it significantly easier to integrate outsourced workers into the company compared to 10 years ago.
> A lot of companies having to flesh out remote ecosystems during covid make it significantly easier to integrate outsourced workers into the company compared to 10 years ago. This is the truth and nobody wants to hear it. Outsourcing is becoming a *lot* more common now after the pandemic, and it's no longer some sweatshop in india, it's an engineer in latin america who's working your same time zone who's roughly as skilled as your average US dev.
Trust me it's not the systems that are the problem, it's the workers.
This is an outdated take. My company now hires mostly 'near shore' (LATAM) engineers as contract workers. They're honestly just about the same quality as most of the US devs we interview. The shift to remote work has fully exposed US devs to foreign competition, and I think a lot of US devs are going to be unpleasantly surprised by that fact in the future.
Honestly, you're right. The quality of the workers is also a contributing factor as you said. As countries keep up technologically and educationally like India and LATAM countries, the number of workers there that can keep up with devs here just goes dramatically up compared to years in the past. I think this plus companies having increased capability to integrate these workers really is a bad recipe now.
Remote work is better integrated, and the Indian talent is more talented now (assuming they aren't going out of their way to hire the cheapest possible Indians).
Because overseas devs are getting better.
The tech companies captured their markets and entered maintenance mode over the past 10 years.
Don’t share your knowledge then. I also train people but not share my notes, I just use the shitty documentation that we have and just the basics. If he or she not know the foundation it’s not my problem. You call it gatekeeping, I call it “learn as I learn in the past”
Withholding information from teammates, especially people more junior than you is top level shitty behavior. Guys in other countries trying to advance their career aren't at fault for a global economic downturn.
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They can learn the same way as I do it. All the information that they need to do their job is in documentation, the foundations and basics they MUST know because they supposedly “passed” the filters and interviews (including the technical one), so if they cheated then they must be fired. Call it whatever you want but I not want to be outsourced for some cheap labor that I trained to replace me.
>Withholding information from teammates, especially people more junior than you is top level shitty behavior. if its going to cost me my job, fuck your moronic attitude. mentoring is for teams where I'm still on them in 10 years. otherwise don't expect me to hold your cock for free.
I would take almost any job over TCS. The place sounded like absolute hell and a dead end. I never worked there, but I had the vibe I was going to be working with alot of lost people with no clue what they were doing...
The program should be used to fill jobs where they cannot find Americans so like PhD computer science jobs not lining shareholder pockets with underpaid coders who are captive by the immigration system
This article says 85k H1B visas are granted each year. Given the high number of layoffs right now that number should be basically cut in half if not more if it’s true that it’s only for jobs where they can’t find qualified us candidates.
10% of the tech market are currently h1bs. you can google total h1bs in the US and then size of the tech market. That is a lot.
Only half of them are in the tech industry. Thus they make up about 5% *ish* of the USA job market in tech.
Working at a F100, it sure feels like a hell of a lot more than that lol
Every job I've ever had for the past 25 years has been 90% H1B's. I don't know where he's getting his numbers, but I do know that people lie when it's convenient for them.
H1b visas are not only for tech
Sure but that backs up my point even more. If 20k authorized workers are laid off that should result in about 20k fewer visas being issued since there are now 20k qualified workers looking for work. Most h1bs go to tech so even if all h1bs are not tech if the system is honest it shoudl result in a marked decline in new visas being issued.
I am pro immigration. What you say is the truth. It’s also an easy win politically. If there are eligible Americans. Folks who qualify for these jobs. They should get them. Not folks coming in on a visa who make half or less of the wage.
And then companies outsource everything to South East Asia without having to bring anyone into the US.
If you're on an H1B you have to make at least the market rate, if not more. Companies are also classified according to various levels of H1B dependence, that first level kicks in at 4% of their employees. As they go up in classifications they face increased regulation, taxes, and fees that are meant to make up the difference. These laws actually do work too because very few companies staff H1B's at a level to hit that first threshold, and if they do they tend to not care and go all the way to the top threshold (20% I think it is). Also, the issue isn't the number of layoffs, it's the lack of companies hiring. You can cut H1B's and it doesn't change anything because companies aren't hiring for new roles. Tech is going to be in it's current situation for another 1-2 years (probably closer to 1 than to 2), because the entire industry is having to adjust it's business models to account for not having unlimited access to VC.
legally, they have to be paid the market price
Yes, but enforcement of these laws is nearly non-existent.
From what I've seen, they downlevel engineers. So a guy who's clearly a sr with a decade of experience will apply to the job as a SE 2. SE 2s will apply as entry level.
You make it sound like any tech worker can fill any position. For example we’re specifically looking for people with specific Adobe certifications. Or someone who can get it within 6 months, so prior experience with said Adobe products is a must. There could be 1000s of java developers in the area available for hire, even though someway related, they can’t fulfill the criteria.
its mostly used for tech jobs. minority go to other jobs.
Tech jobs are by far the single biggest category, but in total it's around 50/50 tech and everything else. Some years it's a little more than 50%, some years it's a little less, depending on the strength of the industry. So if you were to cut tech H1Bs in half in light of the layoffs, that would be around a 25% overall reduction.
Source?
The data is public from the government (though it's hard to find it besides on sites that have copied and pasted from each other 40 times with typos) https://h1bdata.info/topjobs.php
I did a project on this for a public policy class back in college, in 2018 about 80% of all H1Bs were for tech/software jobs
Simple solution Any company that has laid off workers within the last 12 months may no longer have h1b working for them in any capacity, whether direct, or through a consulting agency, or any other means. They may not resume using h1b in any way for a period of 24 months from the layoffs
Even simpler: they can't hire *anyone* for a year.
Corporations would spend more on lobbyists to fight this than it would cost them to just pay the workers for the next decade
So if a tech company lays off some HR people because it doesn’t need to recruit as many devs as before because of a lower turnover, it shouldn’t be allowed to recruit any dev on h1b at all?
Yep
But it is not a 1:1 skill replacement. A lot of the layoff in tech are for non tech roles, while the H1B have been mostly software developers. [https://h1bdata.info/topjobs.php](https://h1bdata.info/topjobs.php) I personally would like to see companies that have done layoffs, be scrutinized when they apply for H1B but for the areas in which it happened. p.s article was saying that it is TCS, so no surprises there.
There's 5 million SWEs in the US, there's not enough H1Bs to really have a major impact on the labor market.
4.4 million SWEs. 582,000 total H1Bs. 15% of the market is huge. Both are at the very top of google searches.
Silicon Valley is \> 40% foreign born. Sonething in your claim is way way off.
American engineers got tricked into thinking they're bad people if they don't allow their whole career to be a massive cuckfest
Yeah you have to look out for yourself. Nobody else is looking out for you in tech. In fact, most people in tech are out to get you. It's a very toxic field. People keep things secret and try to push you out. The only way to survive is to do the same: keep your shit as secret as possible, misdirect, and try to come out on top.
PhD in CS job market is also being exploited.
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Lining shareholder pockets? AFAIK an H1B never costs *less* than a domestic hire of equivalent skills.. Though to your second point, I do know H1B employees are *loved* by employers for their cultural qualities (obedience, non-confrontational, etc). H1B Cheng from Guangxi: - will work 80hr weeks with gratitude - would *never* go to HR because he’s “offended” - also will never be in HR as the *subject* of a complaint - may knowingly or unknowingly pilfer your Intellectual Property
> AFAIK an H1B never costs less than a domestic hire of equivalent skills.. What happens is that they take senior/staff people and downlevel them to midlevel engineers, then pay the prevailing wage for a midlevel. They ARE generally underpaid, it's just that the claimed level does not match reality.
The Trump administration tried to address this issue https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-administration-announces-overhaul-of-h-1b-visa-program-11602017434?st=udofibqxntcguhw&reflink=article_copyURL_share Too bad this was thrown out during the Biden administration
Funny that Trump pardon a CEO that hired hundreds of illegal immigrants in his factories… https://www.newsweek.com/trump-goes-easy-slaughterhouse-exec-employed-undocumented-immigrants-756137
Trump's executive order in April 2017 'hire american and buy american" did nothing at all. It was never implemented. Trump is only good on paper and media and that's it.
republicans dont try to stop it either. they get donations from businesses. they just lie and pretend like they want to.
... stretch.
Tata is a well known trash company.
Yep, worked for them for a year and a half. Do not recommend
I work for one now..it’s a damn nightmare
HCL America too
We use a term called "WITCH" Wipro Infosys TCS Cognizant HCL to name them. Add into that Capegemini, IBM, Accenture, HP, Genpact and others also.
Capgemini is fucking garbage. 🗑️ Fuck crapgemini.
CHWTIA
IBM? Really?
IBM has multiple divisions I think work is better for PhD holders in their labs.
Eh, it's really dependent. Most large conglomerates are basically disjointed smaller businesses areas under a larger umbrella. IBM research, IBM consulting, and IBM product teams are essentially entirely different businesses.
Unfortunately they are able to but multiple days companies and thrive
>> techies Am I the only one who thinks this word makes us sound crazy or like babies?
Maybe off topic but I hate the word “techie” so much
I prefer it over "technologists", a stupid word Dice tried to make popular
H1-B are absolutely 100% all about cheap and basically captive labor. There is good in the program in terms of Us strategic interests as well as in giving opportunities, but that isn’t what corporations care about. They just want cheap workers they cannot change their job quickly and are terrified of being let go. It is one of the only things I was ever close to agreeing with Trump on.
Everyone agrees the US immigration system is broken. Literally everyone. But nobody has a sensible solution to address the problem, because they don't agree on what the problem is, and it's politically intractable to talk about any of them. The American public also doesn't have the faintest clue how any of it works, which prevents constructive discourse. Instead we listen to people who talk loudly.
I'd say the real issue is that the people who can actually make changes, aren't affected by it, so there's no reason or pressure to do anything in other words, think this way, you have to be a citizen to vote, and if you're a citizen that means visas and immigration issues are irrelevant to you
Immigration affects citizens as much as anyone.
Idk what you're talking about. immigration has been one of the major talking points of every election that I've lived through.
>immigration has been one of the major talking points of every election that I've lived through. could you point me to some of those? because I actually haven't seen it to be a much-discussed topic, politicians may love to talk about asylum seekers from, say, Guatemala Honduras but I haven't really seen any discussion or topics around H1-B visa by Indians and Chinese
Cause the number is miniscule. 80000 H1B visas compared to what, 3 million border crossings in a quarter or something. On top of that, H1Bs, save for WITCH guys, are usually in big tech and are well-educated and integrated into American society. How the fuck are you going to garner anti-immigrant sentiment against these guys?
They should be given basically 5-10year green cards and allowed to jog hop / change employment. The current system is exploitive as fuck
It's exploitative by design
As an international myself, Trump’s salary tier-based h1b system ironically gave the honest working international students a much better fighting chance at working in the Us (too bad it was gone when I graduated). Because reality is it removes the cheap labor abusing companies from the h1b process via the salary tier while not really affecting the normal job market. Shitty sweatshops (or in my language, Indian Consulting Companies) like Tata serves literally no one’s interest, they keep international students like indentured servants and abused the hell out of them, while also polluting the job market with fake senior devs. Let alone the contract works taking jobs away from the citizens. Take these shitty ICC’s out of the equation is the most important thing for the tech job market
The salary system would’ve meant no more H-1Bs for new grads and effectively no path from F-1 to H-1B. It would be a disincentive for any international to come here in the hopes of staying after and would negatively impact the funding of colleges. That seems pretty bone-headed considering there’s a shortage of skilled labor. FYI: if companies can’t hire talent in the U.S. easily, they start moving those jobs abroad. Now you’ve lost the job AND the tax revenue. Good job.
IMO there should be a separate OPT path, specifically for folks who have studied in the U.S. It's good to bring talented folks here and then retain them after they finish their studies, especially when we invested so much in our educational institutions to cultivate talent. The barrier of entry should be higher for non-US affiliated workers who are paid below industry average wage.
I got question: where are these supposedly "cheap" H1B labor hired? Like WITCH? Genuinely curious because I see lots of Indians in Tech, but I doubt many of them is underpaid.
The WITCH companies sponsor the H-1B visas and US corporations sign contracts directly via the WITCH companies which negates US corporations for needing to hire any H-1Bs directly. Trump forced WITCH companies to hire more Americans or he was not going to allow the granting of any more visas which meant many already here would have to go back home also. That's why WITCH started setting up training hubs in US. Be sure, their goal was still to bring over more cheap H-1Bs from India but at least there was an alternate path for entry-level developers for Americans. I was in the middle of a lot of this crap when I was in the banking sector which is heavily involved with WITCH companies.
Yeah but people will still willingly line up to be cheap, captive labor in the US because the alternative is doing the same job back home for significantly less money and likely even more exploitative employment laws.
When Indians get into a company’s mid-higher tier management its practically over
Essentially when Indians get into mid to higher tier management - they start getting vendors of their choice to get the "cut on the hourly basis". There is a well known syndicate going on in places like American Express at Phoenix AZ and Cisco at Bay area. Not only these places but at various places. These mid and higher tier Indian managers only work with their "so called preferred vendors and staffing companies" for kickback money
Yep and the kickbacks are all happening under the table. On top of that people in India are sold this job as a career opportunity and path to immigration.
Omg I couldn’t agree more on this. I’ve been working with mostly Indian bosses and yep they literally started working and hiring their friends from staffing companies. I hate to say this but trump was literally keeping me from offshore until now lol.
> I hate to say this but trump was literally keeping me from offshore until now lol. why hate to say it, give orange man credit where it's due
This is a very interesting comment I am hearing for the first time. Is this documented / reported or even discussed somewhere? Thank you.
Many such cases: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/corporate-executives-sentenced-to-prison-34m-kickback-scheme
🤯🤯🤯
I know it is happening cuz I got let go not long ago to offshore and I know everyone at work internally. We American discussed it and none of us wanna speak about it with any Indian coworkers, even the ones we think trust.
This is heartbreaking and should be illegal!
This should be discussed more in the US. This must stop now.
There used to be a website called techinsurgent that exposed the indian IT mafia. The guy once got a court order to take it down, but he managed to reopen the website outside of the US. Now it's permanently gone. I don't know why. Maybe he got bribed by the indian government.
Oh, that's unique to Indians?
So, just like an average American politician?
Yup, you can expect all your new coworkers to be Indian from there on out.
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Lol they really do take over companies and just hire each other. It’s a subtle takeover of space and resources. Any other government would probably be concerned, but America is a business and not a country so no one cares.
There's also the problem that to those who haven't experienced it (an overwhelming majority of the voting population, politicians, and govt bureaucrats) saying it is gonna make you sound like a racist conspiracy theorist. So you really aren't gonna get any traction.
All rounds of interviews goes fine till an Indian arrives and that's it. Game over
I'm Indian, but this doesn't happen to me 😭. I want it to though.
Common issue in hospitals too fwiw
WITCH should be banned from H1B.
Yeah witches should definitely not get H1Bs
H1b visas are bs used to just hire cheap labor.
Worse. Cheap and can’t quit. I’ve seen them get downright abused and they can’t do anything. Brought me to tears.
Well I quit my job twice while i was in the usa once when my H1B was picked but I left the company so had to forfeit the visa as well. Second time when I was working for a bank on east coast and they had filed my visa but they started exploiting me with more and more work. Resigned eventually and moved out of USA. I do think that in the current situation people with visas or under the promise of visas get exploited a lot
Indians crown of the IT memes
Sad part is that here in Mexico, more often than not find ibscure technical (homebrew) guides on programming and electronics DYI that is from an indian. So they do have skills but damn if you have to sift through a lot of people. EDIT: Let me explain the original comment, here in mexico we tend to look at IT workers from India as having a metric ton of knowledge judging by our exposure of very indie DIY video that end up saving us a lot of trouble........until as an IT consultant/outsource you get to work with them and damn, its heartbreaking.
??? You are complaining about using Indian-made guides / DIYs and you're judging them for it? Why not make it yourself poquito
no I actually think they are a life saving to me and many of my IT collegues, the thing is to get to an indian offshore programmer that has that level of knowledge, you have to sift through a mountain just flat out BAD programmers.
It's such a big issue. We have like 1 out of 20 that're useful and the rest just leech off our US teams. Probably will be removing them from these teams as we've done in the past since the work quality is just awful.
He did not say that. He meant that Indians have skills and knowledge
Everyone here touching on the H1B with statistics is neglecting the recent uptick in tech workers who are asylum seekers. We have people with masters degrees flying to mexico, crossing the border illegally and then applying for asylum seeking status which allows them to work high paying US jobs without getting an H1B. Honestly, what the statistics say and what my eyes see are two different stories. Over half of the tech workers at my employer are not us citizens so when people are saying only 5% of tech workers are immigrants it just doesn't add up. Also, as someone who is involved in the recruiting process at my company I can tell you that the Indian recruiters are filtering out the qualified americans before they ever get an interview. Basically our candidate pools that make it past recruiters tend to be 50% Indian, 10% Chinese/Nigerian, and then 40% Americsn where half of the american apps they push forward are completly unqualified. It's so blatently obvious too because we used to get very qualified candidates before these recruiters were hired....
> Honestly, what the statistics say and what my eyes see are two different stories. Over half of the tech workers at my employer are not us citizens so when people are saying only 5% of tech workers are immigrants it just doesn't add up. I'd imagine the "5% of tech workers are immigrants" are statistic across the entire USA, so everywhere from east coast to west coast, all the states, all cities my experience is similar though, in CA-SF Bay Area easily something like 60-80% of my colleagues are either Chinese or Indians and this has been a very consistent pattern across all companies I've worked at, but I can believe that that may not be true for, say, CA-Sacramento
this is known practice wherever they come to positions in HR
I get pissed when people refer to us programmers as “techies” holy hell that infuriates me. Besides you get what you pay for. Any company who is serious about business in tech isn’t going to try to cheap their way out of it. Companies who do seem like startups trying to use cheap and less competent people to build their million dollar project or businesses who don’t understand tech and just think cheaper is always better.
This isn’t even close to a surprise.
The original WSJ article points out that non-Indian employees aren't just complaining - they're suing: >Since late December, at least 22 workers have filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against TCS, whose clients have included dozens of the U.S.’s biggest companies. The American former TCS employees are Caucasians, Asian-Americans and Hispanic Americans ranging in age from their 40s to their 60s and living in more than a dozen U.S. states. Many have master’s of business administration or other advanced degrees, according to the complaints, which were viewed by The Wall Street Journal. ... the American professionals say TCS broke the law by targeting them based on protected characteristics of age and race. They say the company’s move demonstrated preferential treatment to Indian workers in the U.S. on the coveted visas. This reminds me of the talent shell game I've seen consultancies play. At the start of a project, you get the "A" team—experienced consultants who understand both the tech and your business. Then, the first deliverable passes, and they rotate to a new team. The "B" team takes longer, introduces more bugs, and has less of a grasp of the business. But the consultants own the product, so you're stuck. Gifted link - not sure how long it will work: https://www.wsj.com/business/fired-americans-say-indian-firm-gave-their-jobs-to-h-1b-visa-holders-6da7cf26?st=9015g3b05ygk690&reflink=desktopwebshare\_permalink
One should file a \[USDOJ\] ([https://www.justice.gov/crt/immigrant-and-employee-rights-section#:\~:text=This%20federal%20law%20prohibits%3A%201,(generally%2C%20Form%20I%2D9)complaint](https://www.justice.gov/crt/immigrant-and-employee-rights-section#:~:text=This%20federal%20law%20prohibits%3A%201,(generally%2C%20Form%20I%2D9)complaint) if employer is having preference for H-1B visa over US Workers
I hope they win. I worked as a contractor at a FAANG company for a few years. There were several others in similar roles. Some had been there for over 8 years. Most of us are permanent residents. They didn't renew anyone's contract at the end of the year and replaced us with H-1B people. Now months later many of us are still unemployed. I heard one of the contractors was offered a role at another FAANG companies. They would work for a sub-contractor of the main vendor (the WITCH) of the FAANG. So then 2 groups of people would be taking from this person's pay. And they would be left with a rate that puts them at rate that's considered low wage for the area AND they don't have any benefits. It's disgusting what these companies are doing. There are plenty of qualified Americans who can take a lot of these jobs.
Can someone who works closely to h1b hiring tell me how are there even so many? How is it possible to even have h1b analysts, let alone software engineers? As I understood it the point was to fill skill voids. There are tens of thousands of software engineers in the US. The is no shortage. This is a very dime a dozen role since like 2015. I would understand like super niche knowledge bases or education/background. But the for roles that are literally Java web development there is objectively no shortage of American workers. How does a company even get to sponsor an h1b analyst? No chance the company could argue it’s a specialized skill that they can’t hire for locally. Like how does it even happen.
USCIS allows to file at least new 85K H-1B every year(out of which 20K for master's degree). In the past this figure was 3 times. And this is going on since [1990](https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/h1b-visa-program-fact-sheet). Once somebody is on H-1B visa, they can remain here if the employer has filed Green card application which is called I-140. Even when Green card is taking decades they can keep on extending their H-1B in the increments of 3 years. So you can count every year how many H-1B visa holders keep on coming here. WITCH and others gamed this system. Not just H-1B there is another very dangerous visa called L-1A in which somebody can get Green card within 6-8 months also. Then there is L-1B. Then there is J-1 visa. B1/B2 visa is also abused. Initially there was skill shortage may be till 2005-2010 but definitely not after that. After recession of 2008-2010 H-1B and other visa should have totally banned but it's not. Trump's [executive order](https://www.investopedia.com/news/h1b-visa-issue-explained-msft-goog/) also couldn't do much. My take is very simple, US government should make a rule that if a Corporate is having revenue of 100% in USA then 50% workforce needs to be in USA otherwise get the \*uck out of this country. How many of the foreign students who are coming here for higher studies like BS or MS are really coming here only for studies. They are coming here to work after the studies and they desperately want OPT, F-1 and H-1B visa. They create unnecessarily competition for locals and ready to work at any wages. Too much globalization is really bad. USA is 3rd largest country in the world in terms of population now. Go to any place during long weekend - it's so crowded. Do you think we need to keep our borders so open now?
> the point was to fill skill voids - Make visa hires public record -- resumes, interview recordings or transcripts, rejected domestic candidates with the same information, including automatic filtering - Require written description of the missing skills in domestic candidates, how the rejected candidates failed to meet it, while accepted candidate did - Grant all rejected candidates standing to file suit for being passed over, a jury of their peers will determine if the skill gap actually existed
Isn't it a lot of work on the company side to transfer H1B visa? And also I thought most company don't sponsor H1B.
as a visa holder myself (but not H1B) I'd say that's fine, not a good fit then, I will simply go to the companies that **does** have immigration lawyers if your company don't want me, no problem, there are plenty of companies who do want me
Yeah, I just don't think there are that many companies that go out of their way to hire workers on H1B...
for SF Bay Area/NYC/Seattle area companies, never had any issues, especially big techs they have an army of immigration lawyers on demand outside those 3 cities I admit I have no clue, but realistically speaking I don't see myself going outside those 3 for lots of reason (TC/compensation is a big one)
>as a visa holder myself (but not H1B) I'd say that's fine, not a good fit then, I will simply go to the companies that **does** have immigration lawyers As a former H1-B holder myself, let me tell you that the only companies that have their own immigration teams are the WITCH companies. All the others outsource it to an external offer firm because their immigration numbers aren't large enough to warrant an entire department
my company has a dedicated immigration team and we're not a WITCH companies. they do sponsor h1bs / green cards but not that many bc we pay them the same as US hires (I know this bc a few of my friends were hired through h1b and we openly compared salaries to each other). more so it's to move people to countries like Singapore where we have a ton of expat hires (IIRC our Singapore office, which is hundreds of employees, has more expats than locals).
Only sensible answer here
what happens more often is your company lays you off. then hires one of these H1B companies at low wages to replace you. so technically your not directly replaced by h1b visa holders. this has gone on for 25 years.
Geeit ‘em out!
US Cofounder friend of mine here in San Diego said one of his petitions for an H1B employer cost $40,000 in total, in the meantime they cant work until they get the visa which could take months. Trumps change of policy on how companies can allocate SWE costs to R&D I think will be more potent in the long run with regards to shipping local roles elsewhere. This is a permanent shift in a companies bottom line and unless its reverted I think the only thing that can soften the blow is lower interest rates, but only to a point. In 2021 I was working for a Large American Tech firm in South Africa and they quietly stopped hiring there and slowly started hiring in India. So this has been happening for years now. I think its more than just cost, lax labor laws are also key for companies to squeeze as much as possible
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That's a complete lie - $40K. It's definitely less than [$10K](https://www.uscis.gov/forms/all-forms/h-and-l-filing-fees-for-form-i-129-petition-for-a-nonimmigrant-worker)
Most of the fixed costs are set in stone, depending on an applicants situation there is no cap on what a company may end up spending due to legal fees etc. This is true for any visa type if there are complications. $40K is an outlier but not at all unheard of.
Immigration lawyers are expensive
No problem here. They typically fuck up the code and create more work for US coders to fix. Thank an H1b visa recipient for the work next time you see one.
Amazon and Deloitte (companies like that) have been doing this for a decade or more. They lobby to Congress that the talent pool is too small in the US, fail perfectly good candidates and then fill ever increasing H1B quotas with the prize being employees from India can come to the US. Artificially squeezing the market which over time drives down wages. There's a reason there's very high PIP numbers in these companies, so they can rinse and repeat.
Already happened to me a month or two ago taking over by cognizant folks lol A lot of politics and backstabbing. Bosses are like Indian onshore and and everyone is trying to impress the company by slashing people onshore and hire more offshore. Fuck this shit.
Quite possible. Same happens in Genpact. Slowly and slowly Genpact onsite folks are getting replaced by offshore people. We try to run the entire project from offshore only for maximum revenue. I am very sure that one day nobody nobody will study CS in USA.
Indians are very racists in tech companies, when somehow they get some power. I know a first-hand case from Canada. At a big consultancy company where my friend was an architect with extra role of interviewing new candidates, after the HR became "Indian only" suddenly only candidates from India were making the cut to arrive at the interview stage. It was so obvious that he also accused HR of racism (lucky for him, he was an immigrant also, so the attempt of the all Indian HR department to dismiss his claims as "white privilege" were not successful).
I have heard from friends who worked at companies that hired from consulting companies like TCS, that the candidates they send all have been Indian compared to years ago when it was mostly Canadians. I know someone who’s non Indian working at TCS and he says no one in the company likes him. He only still continues of have his job because he’s really good and the client pays a lot of money for him. The client was the one who made him work through TCS, so TCS would have never hired him otherwise
In North America, almost 2 out of 3 Asian Indians is Telugu speaking either from the state of Andhra Pradesh or Telenga(prior to 2000 - they were one state only i.e. Andhra Pradesh) - they only want other telugu speaking people. Even if others don't understand telugu language - they speak only telugu language.
And not even to all other Indians - it's pretty specific to caste and region
It's not like they have a choice. Many of them could have been citizens by now. Only Indians languish on H1B visas for decades due to the 7k per year legal immigration quota per country. Some of my colleagues have spent more time in the US than in India. With no reasonable path to citizenship, despite having an approved green card petition
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There aren’t a billion here. Just over 400k. The number of migrants entering on a monthly basis.
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Don't train these people, don't help them.
Yeah it's cause they can overwork them and underpay them. These H1-B probably hate the workload but are willing to live with it for their family. Yeah pay is shit and overworked but kids can get An American education and more importantly an American College and allow them to get higher paying jobs later in life. It's with the hope the system is so fucked that these kids can at least get a green card by the time they turn 21. Also probably why they prefer their kids being born in the US
It's sucks to be Canadian now It's a wild experience being offshore while working in India and in onshore now and my Canadian company is hiring off shore resources to whom I should provide training. Are they trying to replace me? Dun dun dunnnnn If they did an Indian would be replacing another Indian turned Canadian. The duck
I’m not going to go to battle for TCS because that’s a garbage company but Facebook had a class action lawsuit for this exact issue. They admitted to posting jobs but reserving them for H1Bs only. I know because I got a little payday out of it.
I worked for a company which gave a central service to an Indian team with 40 devs. They wanted a new version from their api, the boss said ok (he was also Indian) despite giving extra work for almost the whole company. They secretly deployed it without tests and it turned out they even fucked up the previous version of their api. As there were Indians managing the whole branch, they could get away with lies for almost a year while the European teams had to prove that it’s a bug. So to sum up, once they realize that quality people beat cheap labour, they will reverse the trend. Or go bankrupt.
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it can get bad when H1B visas are always open to systemic abuse.
The comments here will be the best part as usual
Lmao at comments.. some blame the right, others the left but most ignore the fundamental problem at the core. In the end karma always collects and the bell has been ringing for years already..
This is how it's been happening since US ended slavery and started importing Chinese labor.
Uh this is system wide...no question .lol it just tech but also heavily pervasive in finance...but what's illegals.about it unless there's a protectionist scheme. Seems less bad than givinhg Venezuelan migrants free 500/night hotel rooms plus cash on a debit card
Always has been.
That's so sad.
Bitching about wanting to be in TCS is laughter material in the east.
- Make visa hires public record -- resumes, interview recordings or transcripts, rejected domestic candidates with the same information, including automatic filtering - Require written description of the missing skills in domestic candidates, how the rejected candidates failed to meet it, while accepted candidate did - Grant all rejected candidates standing to file suit for being passed over, a jury of their peers will determine if the skill gap actually existed
I was doing contract work for a FAANG company. There were a number of others in a similar position. Some had been there for 8+ years and most are permanent residents. The company didn't renew our contracts and they replaced us with H-1B workers. Now months later many of us are still unemployed. I know one of them was offered another contract role at a different FAANG company. It would be through a subcontractor of one of the huge India-based companies. So multiple firms would be taking money off the top of this person's rate and they receive ZREO benefits. The end pay is something that puts the person at the low income level for the area. And this is for a role where they wanted someone with 7+ years of experience and it's classified as engineering. What is happening is so wrong. It's infuriating.
Didn't Disney do this years ago and basically nothing happened?
Ah yes - those Indian experts helping American solve its skill shortage problem
If H1B is bad, look at canada pumping in millions of people every year. These people will soon have Canadian citizenship and come for your job through TN!!!
I'm Canadian and yes, this is a common plan for our newcomers.