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Comment by mwattsun | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't until I retired from the tech industry and drove Uber and delivered Uber Eats for something to do that I realized how many Indian and Chinese engineers are in Silicon Valley. Huge 6 story apartment buildings covering a city block filled with engineers, often doubling and tripling up in small apartments. Some of the Indian engineers would tell to me (they were always friendly, the Chinese would often just go to sleep in the back of the car) that their agency was making most of their money. My hats are off to you guys and gals for working hard in America. I know the death marches and conditions you have to put up with. Caste concerns in America shouldn't be one of them.

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I've long felt there needs to be some sort of dramatization of the lives of Asian, specifically South Asian(*), engineers and their contributions to modern technology. I feel like the average westerner just doesn't appreciate the sacrifices and hard work that have gone into the technology they base their modern lives on.

* No offense to non-South Asians, it's just those are the folks I worked side by side with in the 00's and saw working multiple jobs and working themselves to death in a foreign land. Certainly this is nothing new in the history of the world, but I feel like the particular angle of their contributions to cell phones and the internet is worthy of a movie or something.

I agree. Maybe I'll be the one to write it. It'd be easy. Just start driving Uber again and delivering food and start collecting stories.

Check out “The Tiger Hunter.” I watched it on Netflix a while back. It’s a comedy but it fits some of what you’re looking for. And it’s a great movie.

Dinesh in Silicon Valley was a pretty compelling character. Given that it's a satire, was it accurate or far from the mark in this respect?

>>Caste concerns in America shouldn't be one of them.

It is a concern.

As much as struggle stories you hear there in the US, they are on top of some next level cheating, privilege and machiavellian play involved in trampling people back home in India and arriving there in US and then acting all fair and merit.

Multiply this with discrimination at every level in office places. This is at many levels religious, class, caste and even linguistic basis.

I've seen the absolute worst of humanity(from Indians to Indians) during my stay there as an Indian immigrant until I returned, its literally dog eat dog.

Prior discussions here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24552047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24952698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26435117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24555492 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17531795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23798922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24933169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24065132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23703325

All of these seem like anecdotal examples, and frankly these stories reek of an anti-Indian bias because they involve an amplification of a few lone samples. I’ll also point out that it is easy for people who aren’t happy with their station in life or particular outcomes to find an external thing to lay blame on, like discrimination. But I find some of these stories suspicious, simply because we don’t know the other side of the story and we don’t know why they didn’t get [a promotion or a job or whatever]. Maybe they were just bad at their job.

> I've seen the absolute worst of humanity(from Indians to Indians) during my stay there as an Indian immigrant until I returned, its literally dog eat dog.

I’m not sure what you mean here. You say “its literally dog eat dog”, but the word ‘literally’ has a certain meaning. Are you saying…that your coworkers are dogs and are eating each other? This type of emotional statement makes me view your prior claims with skepticism.

>>I’m not sure what you mean here.

It's a phrase in the english language.

>>Are you saying…that your coworkers are dogs and are eating each other?

Google Search "define dog eat dog"

    dog eat dog
    phrase of dog
    used to refer to a situation of fierce competition in which people are willing to harm each other in order to succeed.

The above commenter likely is familiar with the expression, but they are being an obnoxious pedant about your use of the word "literally", which usually means "without metaphor" or exaggeration.

An Indian guy talking about how he's treated by other Indian guys "reeks of anti-Indian bias"? Ok buddy.

Well, "self-hating" can happen to Indians too...

If they are an engineer in America, they are practically guaranteed to be Brahmins or at least upper caste, so castes are not only less of a concern but literally why they were able to get an education and move to the US in the first place.

the article mentions at least 1 lawsuit by a low caste engineer against upper caste managers in sv

Odd, did you never rent in sv? Most apartment complexes have at least on unit that is tripled like you mentioned.

I'm talking about 3 ppl in a 1 bdrm apt, not 3 bdrm apts

Yup, with bunk bed setups in each bedroom. It's fairly common, seems to be tolerated by apartment complexes.

> their agency was making most of their money

Allowing body shops to sponsor H1B visas is ridiculous and directly leads to this kind of exploitation. Requiring the place where the person actually works to sponsor instead would make so much more sense.

Of course simple reforms like this can never happen because the current debate on immigration in the US is 100% closed borders vs. 100% open borders so the broken status quo continues on.

Yeah us immigration supporters really believe in 100% open borders.

Yeah, right lmao

Won’t stop it. I was paid $11.75/hr as a Masters holder while on OPT. Should CPT/OPT be killed?

OPT is basically an internship. Internships are often at/near minimum wage, regardless of degree level or immigration status.

OPT can be 2-3 years as far as I'm aware. I think a little longer than a lot of internships.

"Often" is key here, many I know (including myself) made 350k or higher on OPT.

Of course that’s by design. Big company development centers in out of the way US cities are really offshoring operations in the US.

The governments make money (guest workers pay taxes and send remittances home), the companies make money and don’t get grief for offshoring, the wages for low/moderate tech skills are suppressed, and the worker gets screwed.

> the worker gets screwed

Are you referring to the guest worker here, or the general labor class in the host country? I'd imagine the former gets a substantial net benefit too, relative to the counterfactual in which he's making domestic country wages that are a tiny fraction of his remittance + consumption.

Yeah, man, the one thing I was really hopeful about with Trump was some serious h1b reform. If a president who hates both tech companies and immigrants didn't do it, I don't think anyone will.. (for the record, I'd prefer to just hand out green cards rather than exploitative work visas..)

exactly. What kind of country wouldn't want capable engineers to come in?

They want even more to have capable engineers and not having to pay top dollar for their skills.

Of course what Trump actually did was make people’s lives more miserable, uncertain, and gave the body shop like companies even more agency and power over their workers. Unlike the Obama administration which changed rules to the extent they could (Congress hasn’t passed changes to immigration law in nearly 3 decades now and the executive is necessarily constrained) to reduce the percentage of visas that went to body shops and also prosecuted many of them for their exploitation.

Of course, Trump’s utter indifference, actually attempts to make immigration worse both for immigrants and citizens, was completely predictable.

Any kind of reform is misrepresented as "100% open borders".

I also don't know of anybody seriously advocating 100% closed borders in the US.

Don’t most IT consulting firms “make most of the money”?

When I was consulting (not IT), my billable rate was $250/hr and I made $65/hr.

These IT consulting firms should be paying the prevailing wage set out in the H1-B application. If they aren’t they should be prosecuted.

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