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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

I also have to wonder what percentage of GitHub’s employees _are_ non-US citizens. Every programming job I’ve ever had in the U.S. was for a company that was staffed by at least 90% foreigners; if they see U.S. immigration as an adversary, they may be opposing any contract on personal grounds.

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Every non-citizen I know keeps their head down and doesn't express their personal opinions on political matters (particularly relating to ICE) because they don't want to jeopardize their visa. It would be strange and kinda stupid for a foreign programmer on an H1B to oppose a contract with ICE because they do eventually want to get that Green Card and eventually citizenship, and they know who holds the power in that relationship.

(It's also amusing to see that sometimes shift when they get their citizenship; I had a Japanese classmate in college who was on first a student visa, then an H1B, then a green card for about 15 years. He had zero political opinions for the whole time I knew him. As soon as he got his citizenship, he's active in local politics. It's more about urban planning, transit, and YIMBY efforts than immigration, though.)

You are correct. As someone who used to be on very restrictive visas for a while - your job is not “just a job” anymore. It was very much a source of constant stress for me knowing that political shifts at work or a terrible boss could very well send you packing in a matter of days.

This will be less likely to shift in the coming years, since the US government is openly investigating the ability to revoke citizenship. It's depressing to see, but I guess it shouldn't be surprising because the US approach to citizenship - birthright and/or naturalization - is not universally the case in other countries.

> Every programming job I’ve ever had in the U.S. was for a company that was staffed by at least 90% foreigners.

Where the hell are you working? I'm going to call bullshit, because it's really not that easy to get a work visa in the US. You're saying 90% of your colleagues weren't US citizens?

At every large company where I have worked (Intel, Qualcomm, Google, Facebook) the majority of my colleagues have been non-citizens. In some cases (Qualcomm SD, Google) 100% of the people on my team were non-citizens.

It's heavily team-dependent. I was on a team at Google where I was the only American citizen, with teammates from Iceland, England, Vietnam, India (4), Taiwan (2), and China (2). I was also on a team where there were basically zero non-citizens, and most of my teammates were from places like Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, etc.

Is that sort of distribution typical? Do teams tend to self-segregate?

Teams do self-segregate. What often happens is that the team manager ends up recruiting people they are comfortable with, which in practice means recruiting people who are culturally similar. If the team grows, the same dynamic works on the next level of managers, and so on. So immigrant managers tend to recruit other immigrants, native-born managers tend to recruit other native-born Americans, and so on. The manager of the first team was an Icelandic immigrant; the manager of the second was an American-born person of Indian descent.

A similar dynamic works on sex, as well. About half of the teams I worked at were roughly 40% women; the other half of them had zero women. Women are generally reluctant to join a team where they will be the only woman, and also word gets around about who the female-friendly managers are. So those female-friendly managers get teams that are close to 50% female, while other managers get teams of zero women. (Statistically, Google Engineering was about 10% female and IIRC 50-60% foreign-born, which means that I encountered about twice as many women that I would've been predicted to and about half as many foreigners. I wonder what that says about my personality.)

I suspect they’re saying anyone who looks/sounds different must be foreign.

There is a rule about inferring the most charitable interpretation IIRC.

Pretty much true for most large tech companies, at least in the SF Bay Area. I've worked at 2 large and 1 small tech co and it was only the small company that had mostly US citizens (mostly because of the cost of dealing with immigration lawyers etc)

It feels like closer to 50% noncitizen where I work, but could be closer to 90% if you include naturalized citizens.

It's absolutely not bullshit. I've worked places where this is true and places where it isn't. In my experience, the former is more common.

This is true in a lot of places. In my PhD program (in a US university), the vast majority of us are not US citizens.

> I'm going to call bullshit,

Will people please consider a moment's thought before using this adolescent phrase? People throwing it around are probably not using it with its most precise and defensible meaning (a la Harry Frankfurt). So the most charitable alternative gloss is that it's used carelessly to mean someone is just wrong. It's a very poor (because ambiguous) word choice for that. I suspect it's usually deployed to suggest someone is lying, for which you need specific evidence beyond believing a statement to be incorrect. That evidence is very rarely available in an HN comment.

It's hard to be thoughtful about using language, and I'm no exemplar. But a good start is just avoiding reflexively spitting out some rarely useful prefabricated phrases. This is one.

My current team is at least 80% foreign-born-and-rasied, myself included, but I don't know everyone's immigration status. But this is the "whitest", most American team I've worked with in the last 8 years in Silicon Valley. Prior to that I was in the mid-west and I was the only foreign engineer.

One of my first SW jobs (mid-scale startup in Palo Alto) I had multiple canadians on my team and we had some chinese and indian immigrants on other teams. I wouldn't say 90%, but a sizable percentage.

At other companies like Google and Microsoft I've had plenty of immigrant colleagues along with colleagues at offices overseas. Some eventually choose to return to their home country, some migrate here after starting at the employer.

The main game studio I worked for also had lots of chinese and korean immigrants on staff, but I suspect that was influenced by the parent company being korean.

And I don't think one should restrict that reasoning to only the foreign-born employees. Native-born US citizens working side-by-side with employees who have regular contact with our immigration process get a second-row seat to how broken it is.

(Spoilers: personal observation, it's pretty broken.)

You're assuming that legal immigrants from around the world working high paid tech jobs have common cause with "illegal" immigrants coming across the southern border.

In my anecdotal experience it's not so simple.

There are massive logistical challenges with processing mass influxes of immigrants into a country, particularly people who are coming through outside of the legal process.

I would think a large contingent of GitHub employees want the people working at ICE to be using the best tools possible to achieve their mission. Many are probably quite proud of US government agencies using their tools, the same as if NASA or Executive Branch or Congress was using Github.

IMO it’s a very difficult situation when certain employees are arranging political protests against specific customers of the company, and making other employees uncomfortable to express their own potentially divergent viewpoints.

a lot of non citizens support ice because if they are working at a company like github they got here legally and don’t see it as fair that others just get to skip the line

A good portion of GitHub’s employees live in Europe. Of the employees who live in America, most are citizens.

How would you even know that? Assuming you weren't high up in HR?

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