Hacker News Reader

Comment by huhtenberg | Hacker News Reader

This really needs the second half of the story before we all get our trusty pitchforks and start making a shish-kebab from this Khan person.

View on HN

The problem with this story is that it's more about an abusive boss at Amazon than Amazon.

Any large company is going to have abusive individuals in it. I think the real issue this story illustrates is that when people are brought over on work visas they have no leverage with their employer.

As an American citizen software engineer my boss knows that if I'm unhappy I will just leave. But the boss of someone on a work visa knows they can do pretty much whatever they want to them and the employee is just stuck.

So we need to change the work visa system so those employees aren't in such a vulnerable position. How exactly? I don't know..

Allow H1B holders to incorporate their own companies in the US, so that they could work on their own thing in parallel. It's often better for talented persons to live in e.g. Canada close to US borders working for US corps (Vancouver, Toronto) and run multiple LLCs in the US, than to work for those same corps in the US and enjoy slave lifestyle.

But isn't that why companies hire employees on visas to begin with? I would venture to guess for every 1 truly pioneering mind that is working in the US on a H1-B visa there are 100 people working on CRUD software at Amazon or Microsoft.

They hire employees on visas to build CRUD apps, because it's a seller's market for employees that can pass <arbitrarily high whiteboard interview standards>, and if you're having trouble filling headcount, there's no reason to exclude 7.2 billion people from your hiring pool.

Depends on the company. Companies like Tata and Infosys (which, until recent changes, had something like 80% of H1B quota), sure. Companies like Amazon and Microsoft do not do this as a matter of policy (which is why they sponsor most of their H1B employees for green card); but individual managers are still aware of the kind of leverage this gives them, and some of them try to use it.

> The problem with this story is that it's more about an abusive boss at Amazon than Amazon.

That, and Amazon's processes to prevent engineers from this abuse from their managers.

> The problem with this story is that it's more about an abusive boss at Amazon than Amazon.

No, the author lists a whole bunch of names from HR. That's not just an abusive boss, that's an abusive boss protected by HR, which makes it a story about Amazon.

I worked at Amazon and never had any issues like that. In fact, my experience was completely opposite and I had several wonderful bosses, great co-workers, awesome environment and fun things to work on.

I'm certain there are many stories like mine. That doesn't matter at all, as long as there's one case like Oleg's.

I disagree. A company's feedback system and HR should not be so ripe for retaliation or abuse.

I saw a suggestion a while ago that the H1B1 visas should only be granted to the highest paid employees. The idea being that that they would be more likely to be essential to whatever business brought them in, so less likely to be the subject of abuse, and less likely to be abusing the h1b1 program to hire cheaper labor.

It sounds like “brown uncle” syndrome to me. I hear south-east Asian women complain about it all the time, as a male I don’t have to deal with it much, but fits the description.

What the hell is "brown uncle" syndrome?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com