Big Tech Resumed Hiring Foreign Workers Just Weeks After Layoffs
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1. Layoffs happened regardless of visa status, so visa workers were part of the layoffs.
2. The visa applications for H1B could be for workers already working in the company under a different visa like TN or F1
3. The positions affected by layoffs and positions filing for H1B could be different. For example, a front end position may be affected by layoffs, but the visa application could be for an ML eng.
4. Visa could also be for more tenured staff. Plenty of companies are now only hiring staff+ roles after the layoffs
5. Because of the lottery system and how it works, you could have filed for a visa before a certain date but then before the visa was picked, the worker was laid off. i.e. you filed for a visa in Feb for the April lottery but laid off the person in March, giving the illusion that you filed for a visa after laying people off.
Refutes at least two points you made if not three..
It’s a perfectly logical (if not humane given current immigration law) position to hold that companies should be required to lay off visa holders first and for there to be a “cooling off” period between layoffs and hiring of visa holders.
My personal opinion is that liberalization of the visa process does more to protect local workers than our current system, but it’s perfectly reasonable to conclude big tech is currently using the visa system to blunt the tech labor market.
Only from a particular nationalist sentiment that isn't aligned with capitalism and free-markets.
It is fairly reasonable to believe that tech layoffs were used to blunt worker power. It's much harder to make that argument around h1bs, given the relatively small number of h1b employees, relative ease of employing foreign nationals, and (within the set of companies we're focused on) relative equality of visa holders (in terms of salary and growth opportunities).
Given these folks could be 10+ year long-term Indian residents of the US with approved I-140s waiting for their priority dates to come up, I'd say this would be incredibly inhumane. Generally sending people back where they came from because the company they work at made poor decisions feels like a bad idea, actually. Especially for a country as dependent on immigration as the US is to even come close to maintaining its population.
Uprooting people's lives, including that of US nationals (10 years is long enough to meet someone and have kids, even people that do not have a US citizenship or permanent residence either) is not humane. Visa holders have since 2017 a 60 days "grace period" in which H1B Visa holders have to find a new job, while L1 visa holders have that time to pack up and leave.
source: current resident alien
Edit: Quick googling to double check myself and it seems you're right in that USCIS indeed doesn't use that wording, which I must be getting confused with some other term they use in some form, or some other agency, or I'm just plain wrong and got the IRS wording internalized with something else.
Resident alien is synonymous with lawful permanent resident or green card holder, however nonresident alien is a tax term.
More seriously, while this particular discussion centers around US visas, obviously the analogous arguments apply to other countries as well.
Essentially you are stating everyone who loses a job in the U.S. should leave the US.
Or alternatively you want to draw a line when the good immigrants are allowed to enter after which are the bad immigrants. And I’m sure that conveniently that line will ensure your family becomes part of the good immigrants.
First-generation immigrants are folks who are born outside the US and naturalize. "In the United States, among demographers and other social scientists, 'second generation [immigrants]' refers to the U.S.-born children of foreign-born parents."
Not in the strictest sense, but it's not the bright line you're making it out to be either.
My mom was talking about how her siblings were selling their inherited property in Bangladesh (where land prices are skyrocketing) and buying property in the US, Canada, and Australia. And I’m like—you realize this is helping to keep Bangladesh is poor, right? All that capital flowing out to developed countries. (Not to mention the brain drain.) Meanwhile they’re voting to turn America into Bangladesh. -_-
"Just invest your talents in India" is asking him to leave his friends, his long term partner, his job, his home, and everything he has known for most of his adult life. It is also asking him to move to a place that is oppressive to his sexuality and denies him his deserved human rights. It is inhumane.
I also have no idea how H1Bs are voting to turn American into Bangladesh. They aren't allowed to vote.
India is his country. There’s nothing “inhumane” about ending a residency situation that is—according to the words on the paper, “temporary.”
I agree it’s enormously disruptive for Indians who think H1B is anything other than a temporary work visa. I agree it’s wrong that US employers and many politicians give people a false impression of the H1B program. That’s all the more reason for people to stay in India instead of dealing with this stupid system.
> I also have no idea how H1Bs are voting to turn American into Bangladesh. They aren't allowed to vote.
I’m talking about people who are naturalized citizens. There is a saying “I’d rather be governed by the first 100 people listed in the Boston food directory than the faculty of Harvard University.” This is a common sentiment among Americans. But it’s completely incomprehensible to people from the subcontinent. There is a deeply held belief in Credentialism and elite bureaucratic governance. When these people become citizens, they vote, according to these deeply, held cultural beliefs.
But I'll ask you: do you think that naturalized citizens of south asian descent should leave the country? You and I disagree politically, why can't I demand that you expatriate?
They are closely related. American law sees the H1B as a temporary worker visa, which in theory won’t lead to lots of new naturalized citizens changing the country and the workforce. Indians see the H1B as the first step to permanent immigration and naturalization. The ridiculousness of the H1B process arises from that fundamental conflict.
> But I'll ask you: do you think that naturalized citizens of south asian descent should leave the country?
No—citizenship is citizenship. But citizens get to decide immigration policy in their own self interest. That’s democracy. On a going forward basis, it’s entirely valid to ask how H1Bs are changing the country, and whether the American body politic believes those changes are good or bad. My family came to northern Virginia in an immigration wave that rendered the place unrecognizable. The place where I grew up doesn’t exist anymore. Had you polled Virginians back in 1989 and given them a glimpse of how importing a bunch of foreign elites would change their state, they quite reasonably could think those changes were for the worse.
By the way—this is not a Democrat versus Republican thing. Asians (who used to vote Republican until 2000) played a major role in reshaping the Democratic Party due to their concentrated populations in key states like Virginia. The immigrants who strive to send their kids to work on Wall Street and Silicon Valley are mostly not interested in solidarity with working class people.
Not exactly. It's considered a dual-intent visa by USCIS which means that the USCIS also sees it as the first step to permanent immigration and naturalization.
The common dual-intent visas are: H-1B, H-4, L-1A, L-1B, O-1, O-3, K-1 to K-4 and V.
The alternative is a non-intent visa (B-1/B-2, TN, H-2A, H-2B, E-1 to E-3, F-1, J-1, M-1) which becomes invalid as soon as you demonstrate immigrant intent (for instance by filing an I-485 adjustment of status petition).
> The ridiculousness of the H1B process arises from that fundamental conflict.
From a conflict, yes, but not from this conflict. The conflict is that neither US party is pro-immigration but USCIS is still mandated by law to offer immigrant visas. So they make it as difficult as humanly, legally possible.
The way the “dual intent” thing works is not by making it a non-temporary, or immigrant visa. It is still a temporary, non-immigrant visa, and the law still says that having immigration intent still is grounds for refusing entry. The only thing the “dual entry” legislation did was to create the legal fiction, where the USCIS/CBP are not allowed to use the application for a green card as evidence of immigration intent.
Before 1990 or so, as soon as you applied for a green card while on H1B, your visa (though not status) became effectively invalid. You couldn’t leave the country, because you’d be denied entry, given your immigration intent. You couldn’t also apply for extension of H1B visa for the same reason.
Today, according to law, you are still not allowed to have immigration intent while on H1B, it’s just now applying for a green card does not constitute evidence of immigration intent (which is, of course, entirely a legal fiction).
The US immigration law and practice is completely insane. We have non-immigrant visas that, through legal fiction, are used to facilitate immigrations. At the same time, we have millions of people illegally crossing the border and making bogus asylum claims, which everyone understands to just be an immigration back door, created not through legislation, but rather discretion in enforcement. Instead of reforming the law to make it sane, and enforcing it (similar to eg. what Canada or Australia have), we have insane law, and strictly enforce it only against people who would be most valuable to have here.
An immigrant visa to the US is a green card.
Having immigrant intent is not a barrier to admission on a dual-intent visa. H-1s do not have to demonstrate that they have a "residence in a foreign country which he has no intention of abandoning" and "the H category is specifically excluded from the I.N.A. § 214(b)'s presumption of immigrant intent;" [1]
> Before 1990 or so, as soon as you applied for a green card while on H1B, your visa (though not status) became effectively invalid. You couldn’t leave the country, because you’d be denied entry, given your immigration intent. You couldn’t also apply for extension of H1B visa for the same reason.
This is exactly what happens today if you file I-485 on a non-intent status like a TN. It doesn't happen on a dual-intent status.
> Today, according to law, you are still not allowed to have immigration intent while on H1B, it’s just now applying for a green card does not constitute evidence of immigration intent (which is, of course, entirely a legal fiction).
Regulation 8 C.F.R. § 214.2(h)(16)(i) states: "The alien may legitimately come to the United States for a temporary period as an H-1C or H-1B nonimmigrant and depart voluntarily at the end of his or her authorized stay and, at the same time, lawfully seek to become a permanent resident of the United States." [1]
Also you can possess immigrant intent and even petition from non-intent status like TN, so long as you developed said intent after arrival, and once you take steps (I-485 for instance) you can’t renew. A lot of folks apply for a green card from TN status, it’s just risky since you can’t leave until advance parole and if denied you may be deported.
Applying for a green card through adjustment of status absolutely 100% counts as demonstration of immigrant intent. That is filing for I-485. Having your employer file I-140 doesn't because you didn't file it, your employer did.
This is basically all wrong.
Except for the part where you say that the US immigration system is silly - it is - and the part where you say that a system more like Canada and Australia would help - it would.
[1] https://isss.temple.edu/international/h-1b-temporary-employe...
The reason for all this is that the 1952 INA promised the American people that it would not change America’s demographic makeup. Nobody can get the votes to change that in Congress. But the executive branch can change the regulations unilaterally.
You are missing the point. Yes, H1Bs are excluded from presumption of immigrant intent. This doesn't mean that they can have immigrant intent. Instead, the law says (reiterating what I said in my previous comment) that "the fact that an alien is the beneficiary of an application for a preference status filed under section 1154 of this title or has otherwise sought permanent residence in the United States shall not constitute evidence of an intention to abandon a foreign residence for purposes of obtaining a visa as a nonimmigrant described in subparagraph (H)(i)(b) or (c), (L), or (V) of section 1101(a)(15) of this title or otherwise obtaining or maintaining the status of a nonimmigrant described in such subparagraph". Of course, in practice, since the government has few other means of proving immigrant intent, and since they cannot presume immigrant intent, this means that the obvious immigrant intent exhibited by applying for permanent residence must be ignored. This is why the CFR says that, because this is true in practical application of the law. My point is that it is true thanks to legal fiction, where the government is obligated to ignore the obvious evidence of immigrant intent, notwithstanding legislation otherwise demanding lack of immigrant intent.
> Also you can possess immigrant intent and even petition from non-intent status like TN, so long as you developed said intent after arrival, and once you take steps (I-485 for instance) you can’t renew.
Yes, I talk about this in my comment, let me helpfully quote it, in case you missed it:
> Before 1990 or so, as soon as you applied for a green card while on H1B, your visa (though not status) became effectively invalid. You couldn’t leave the country, because you’d be denied entry, given your immigration intent. You couldn’t also apply for extension of H1B visa for the same reason.
Observe that I explicitly say that this doesn't invalidate your status, only (effectively) your visa.
> Having your employer file I-140 doesn't because you didn't file it, your employer did.
This is incorrect, otherwise the legislation wouldn't need to say that "the fact that an alien is the beneficiary of an application for a preference status filed under section 1154 (...) shall not constitute evidence of an intention to abandon a foreign residence".
> This is basically all wrong.
Nothing I said is wrong, and nothing what you said has contradicted what I said (except where you were wrong). You are just talking past me: I acknowledge the practical reality of the consequences of the legislation and the ensuing CFR regulations (indeed, I am myself a beneficiary of the process, starting from a dual-intent L-1 visa). Instead, my point is that the law, instead of saying that "yes, it's totally kosher for for H1B holders to come here with immigrant intent", it schizophrenically says something like "no, you cannot have immigration intent on H1B, but unlike on, say, B1, you don't have to prove that you don't, and we will just pretend that your immigrant petition does not in any way show that you have an immigration intent (which, to reiterate, you shall not have)".
This is just bigotry. Clear as day.
I was living in Virginia in 1989. You don’t get to tell me what I value.
It seems from your post that you weren’t even living in VA at the time. Are you somehow bigoted against both south asians and Virginians? You betting that a large portion of Virginians are just racists who don’t want brown people around (excuse me, “people who vote for elites”) is just fucking awful. I don’t even understand what you are trying to achieve.
This is really suboptimal though, what if you have a H1B worker that's a high performer in a key position that would make your company collapse if they left but say, they were born in India, and you're laying off folks in projects that failed / folks that are low-performing.
It's pretty easy to fix the perverse incentives of H1B hiring: give folks a green card after being here for 3 years, that's basically how long it takes for ROW folks to get green-cards in good years.
Maybe at the service/entry level but certainly not for tech jobs. Tech visas have nothing to do with filling the millions of service jobs; they're about filling the corporations' pockets with millions.
You can offer them a different visa? H1B isn't the ONLY option. It's only being used because it's not a "key" position.
OR
2 - the high performer is writing the best code that ever existed, which is why you can't replace them. However this is so rare. Most of those people have already migrated to FAANG where you better believe no one is that necessary.
Provide an option for a company to submit some paperwork and pay some non-trivial fee (to avoid gaming) that allows them to exempt such an employee from the visa-first layoff requirement. Additionally, fast track the green card process for whom said exemption is granted.
Yes, this. Or alternatively, in an economy where everyone is getting laid, the 60 day deadline should be extended indefinitely until the economy recovers and similar jobs start becoming available and plentiful, at which point they can consider reinstating the employment requirements.
This could easily be done by not having a per-country quota for green cards that seriously sanctions H1B holders from India and China. As in:
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/migrate/democrats-i...
Republicans probably won't let it happen, however.
"The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce"
disclosure: have worked for large h1b heavy shops my entire career, and while there has been the very occasional exception, the bulk of the h1bs are hired entirely for cost reasons.
I don't think this is what OP meant. OP said "what if you have a H1B worker that's a high performer". This has nothing to do with the average performance of any group. The point is that a blanket mandate that a group should be fired over others first may hurt the livelihood of a company. Note whether this is right or wrong is definitely up to debate, and different countries implement different policies for either side. I'm just clarifying the underlying logic of the OP.
There should be consequences to violating these rules. Not being allowed to hire workers JUST because they're cheap (99% of H1B visa workers) is something that should always be enforced.
That is, hiring someone from outside the country SHOULD cost more so it isn't gamed.
It is always good to be labor in a labor constrained market, and the lower supply, the better.
I don't see how any liberalization could help local workers in the short term (I assume liberalization means expansion in this context).
I guess if all you have to go by is your own personal anecdote, one can understand why you might feel immigration is a net negative for the country you’ve immigrated to.
Except that is obviously ridiculous, because people on visas induce their own demand in the local economy, growing the pie for everyone. They are also pre-trained, commit crime at a level vastly below the citizen population, don't get any sort of welfare, and pay enormous amounts of taxes.
As a minor note to babies comment, a baby isn't going to reduce the salary of the delivering nurse the day it comes out of the womb. If you let a million trained nurses enter the country, that would be a different story.
Look at what’s happening to the UK after Brexit. While in the EU, non UK EU citizens essentially had super visas that allowed them to work in the UK as long as they could get a job. This changed almost entirely after Brexit.
The result? Hundreds if not thousands of businesses such as farms, fisheries, bakeries, butchers, have shut down because they can’t find employees. This has resulted in a massive net loss of jobs among UK workers themselves (workers are not fungible…to switch to a new job they require training, skill, expertise, and desire). In addition, this is helping drive up inflation in the UK so that it’s higher than nearly every country in the EU even though the UK is more protected from Russian natural gas than say Germany.
Further, its national services, such as the NHS, which is unable to find doctors and nurses where it did so far more easily before Brexit, are consequently collapsing.
So it’s very disputable that visa holders almost certainly negatively impact the local working population.
There was far lower supply of software engineers in the 1980s. But that market was much worse for software engineers in the US.
Elon Musk didn't get laid off in the 2000-01 tech bubble presumably because he was good? But maybe it should be perfectly "logical" to send him home.
Incredibly short sighted take, the US have doubled the population in the past 60 years, are we running a 50% unemployment rate? The selective immigration have hugely benefited the US and its native population.
Depends what you mean by "logical". Blindly preferring citizens over visa holders is bad for the company, bad for the visa holders, and bad for the economy in the long term, but it's good for the citizen workers in the short term. I guess logic is defined by your priorities.
It is the perception that matters.
We filed, got the paperwork submitted, it got approved, they eventually came to work for me stateside. This took 14 months from filing to arrival. No one filing for a visa in February is having someone come over in March. No company is firing someone and filling that spot with an H1B the next day, unless that H1B is a contractor, and another company he already works for holds his visa.
So the major missing thing here is (unless the process radically changed), is the article is blatantly lying.
[1] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62g-h1b-require...
If visa holders are that important to the company, then the company will figure out how to not do a layoff, no?
Of course, I'm also someone who believes that visa holders should be granted green card status within 24 months tops--none of this 7 years of indentured servitude bullshit. Green cards like this would shut down 90+% of the companies abusing the visa process in the US.
The program has defacto evolved to one in which the US can tap into a skilled global labor market to increase competition for roles, without paying too much attention to the actual legal requirements.
Sources:
(Like many here, I've written a few H1-B role requisition documents - which are often designed to be so ludicrously specific that it would be almost impossible to find anyone to fill that role, save for the one person applying for the visa)
[0] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b
[1] https://www.boundless.com/immigration-resources/the-h-1b-vis...
> Like many here, I've written a few H1-B role requisition documents - which are often designed to be so ludicrously specific that it would be almost impossible to find anyone to fill that role, save for the one person applying for the visa
Both of these things have absolutely nothing to do with H1B visa requirements. You're just proving my point in the comment you're replying to. Please read it again.
Also read your own references to see where they require ads in newspapers or needing to tailor H1B "requisition documents". Spoiler, there's none.
If you respond to incorrect information with correct information and show us how it is correct, your comments will be more persuasive as well as more in the intended spirit of the site (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
It can be easy to take this for granted when you already have the correct information mapped out in your head many times over—but the rest of us don't have access to that!
For a while I did not engage with such stories because it feels like a losing battle swimming against the current even though tech forums are generally filled with smart folks.
As another sibling comment said, the requirements for placing ads etc. are for the first step of the green card process, aka PERM, and are not required for a H1B visa.
Maybe I should write a blog post or something explaining it and link it every time :)
Writing one definitive explanation and then linking to it sounds like a good solution in this case. Even if just you wrote it up as an HN comment and then linked to that in the future.
That is not an H-1B requirement.
They probably should though, at least I think so.
With mass layoffs of this scale, it seems like H1B roles should be the on the top of chopping block if we're keeping in the spirit of the actual purpose of the program. That means those H1B roles should have been so unique and world class talented that they were considered irreplaceable by the other thousands laid off. It seems they should be required to show justification this holds. It seems this should be pretty easy to provide evidence for if your holders are say Google Fellows (picking Google as an example) or the Peter Norvigs of the world.
I have nothing against H1B holders, I do however have a lot against businesses who often abuse these programs to suppress labor costs and dangle green cards as a piece of leverage. To be fair, big tech companies tend to be better about this and pay competitively for these roles though not always.
Google Fellows wouldn't be on H-1B but on O-1.
The H-1B visa is a good fit for foreign nationals in the early to mid-stages of their careers hoping to expand their experience by working in the U.S. The O-1 visa is generally suited for established professionals and researchers.
From the DOL (https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b), emphasis mine:
The H-1B program applies to employers seeking to hire nonimmigrant aliens as workers in specialty occupations or as fashion models of distinguished merit and ability. A specialty occupation is one that requires the application of a body of highly specialized knowledge and the attainment of at least a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent. The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States.
People born in India will be under this "temporary employment" for decades before they get a green card due to the country cap. With recent backlogs it looks like the process will take up to 50 years for someone with a currently approved green card petition.
One would be called a Right Wing nutcase for saying this : "I have nothing against immigration. But I am against businesses employing illegal immigrants to lower labor costs while taking away jobs from poor Americans."
But on HN it's fine for Tech workers to protest for 'fairness' when it comes to H1B and Tech jobs. Most people entering Legally on H1B will not get a Green Card for next 15-20 years. That's not exactly 'dangling' green cards.
A lot of them will return to their home countries after paying a ton of Taxes in the USA. As they can't be sure if and when they will get a Green Card.
But the same American Tech workers are all for 'Immigration'.
I guess, immigration is good when it suits them. Cheap Janitors, Plumbers, Mechanics and more Blue Collar workers. Lowers living costs. Good Immigration.
For comparison, Google laid off 12,000 employees this cycle.
Edit:
> Normalizing reneging on job offers is a bad path to go down.
Google has already done this previously during economic uncertainty.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/29/google-said-to-rescind-job-o...
“Too hard” to sorting hat a subset of 12k employees into other roles and slash and burn instead? You shouldn’t get H1B quota.
We are coming up on an election cycle after all.
> but there is no logical or legal reason to do so.
Edit: throttled, can’t reply @bubblethink that is what the law and legislation is for, helping corporations along when their actions are too efficient for society’s liking. I expect regulation to catch up to their labor practices.
For all but highly specialized sub-fields, it is really hard to convince me H1B's are necessary - other than to artificially suppress wages for citizens.
This is not an ok way to think about it and certainly not something we should accept, let alone justify as a viable business practice
Doing a lot of the wrong thing doesn’t absolve you from responsibility that you have to each individual.
Its a good thing that Google is a AI first company. It can use AI to do such fine grained search.
Normalizing reneging on job offers is a bad path to go down.
But you can imagine that a lot of the people who were laid off would be justifiably pissed and uninterested in that sort of thing.
So if these people aren’t hired in the US, the same company could hire them outside the US in their home countries where they can pay them far less and yet get the same people working for them.
Literally dangling the prospect of American citizenship is all it takes to get tens of billions of dollars in taxes and hundreds of billions of dollars in company development to stay within the U.S. as opposed to being dispersed to other countries.
If you really want to fight something fight companies that send jobs and dollars to the same people who don’t live in the US.
It’s also ironic that the H1B visa gets so much attention when over the past 2 decades the kinds of jobs that H1B visas work in have increased employee pay far more than nearly every other industry in the US, completely undermining the idea that the H1B visa reduces pay.
You know what did reduce pay? Apple and Google colluding to reduce pay. And yet that gets a fraction of the vitriol the H1B visa which has been an obvious good for America does.
If there’s anything to complain about the H1B visa it’s that it prevents the workers from unleashing their entrepreneurial talents within the US even more. So maybe Americans should push for improving the visa to allow the H1B workers more freedom as a opposed to trying to send them and their jobs abroad with them.
There is no way to "fight" corporate power structures though outside of unionization, the barons and lords of the investor class get to do whatever they want to do and have different sets of laws.
Company was just small enough to not have accurate data elsewhere but large enough to have a handful of h1b postings up.
We saw similar between 2005ish-2015ish. Lots of offshoring where you could get whatever you 'wanted' built, but it was exactly what you 'wanted' and not what actually made sense.
By this I am referring to contract houses that weren't quite 'code genies' but still would deliver products that were barely workable upon delivery. More than one shop I worked at over the last decade actually -suffered- from this.
Magically, most orgs who could figure out how to deliver even semi passable/realistic functional requirements could get the same done in house for a LOT less money.
That said, yes a lot of counties can provide very competent software development and houses.. but the communication time gap is often still present.
Another shop I worked at had EU devs that were competent, but that communication gap was still a big hurdle.
It’s just that you’re hiring a million Indian developers for every 1000 UK developers, so is it surprising that the average Indian developer doesn’t seem as good?
A'int gonna end up being authors or technical writers for sure but it doesn't get in the way of actually communicating.
Especially since American developers are unlikely to speak any other language, while their Asian counterparts can communicate extremely well in their primary language and do a more than decent job in communicating in English as well.
For a while. I worked with some excellent remote developers in other countries, but it always felt like a revolving door as the pivoted from one remote job to the next so they could get a $5K increase here and a $5K increase there. Eventually we had applicants demanding salaries equivalent to MCOL United States salaries, so we just went back to hiring local for a lot of the roles. Hiring and managing remote workers comes with a lot of financial and managerial overhead.
Once companies catch on, it's just to easy to go in and snipe entire teams from one company by giving them nominal raises.
Almost no American in the tech industry thinks that, given how many of our co-workers aren't (or at least weren't born as) American.
> But the reality is that most countries have them and they will do the same work for a fraction of the price.
At the high end of the tech labor market, it is actually a world market for talent, meaning the talent goes where they can make the most money, and bargains are hard to find because people are not so immobile (e.g. due to H1Bs).
> Everything is done over the internet these days so it doesn't matter that much where you are located.
This is true, but top talent is still going to demand top dollar, even if you let them live in a LCOL region, since they can just move to a HCOL region otherwise.
And yet nearly every American is vehemently against the H1B visa which is the only way for 99% of non American tech workers to work in the U.S. and not do the same work outside the US.
That is a very broad generalization, considering 27% of Americans are foreign born. Yes, the MAGA crowd is largely against H1Bs (and even here you'll find lots of exceptions), but they didn't win the last election.
> which is the only way for 99% of non American tech workers to work in the U.S. and not do the same work outside the US.
And yet, America has a lot of H1Bs and greencard holders, unlike China or India themselves (I say this having worked on a Z work visa in China for 9 years).
To my knowledge, the main barriers are managing the payroll: how do you deal with each countries' laws and obligations for each of your remote employees ?
The traditional way to do that at scale is to go through a local proxy company that abstracts the complexity and is the legal entity responsible for the workers in that country. Except you have to pay that middle-men, maintain an ongoing relationship, and if for instance a tenth of your engineers are managed by them, their bargaining power will be pretty high and the cost will rise.
If as a company you deal with each individual employee instead, you have to also directly manage all the legal aspects. Hiring freelance workers only can partially alleviate that, but this comes with its own can of worm, and the complexity stays the same in case of conflict (imagine getting sued by the worker in their own country)
In this day and age though, I wonder how much it actually works . For instance if one of your contractor does something completely illegal in your country and you get media backlash for it, you're in a tight position if that thing was perfectly legal on their side, and wasn't covered by the contract as you had your own country's law in mind.
I'm not sure you could push your country's law on them, nor that it would help your situation as your company is still fronting the backlash.
And even in that setup, we all remember Nike and many other apparel makers stuck with the "child worker in a factory" image basically forever. Or Apple being questionned about FoxConn's working conditions, or the environmental impact.
When it comes to PR, pushing the responsibility to the foreign contractor doesn't looks like a good working strategy IMHO.
Does "contractor" mean something different to you than it does to everyone else? This would be like me buying an iPhone and then Apple suing me for not paying proper sick leave entitlements.
I can understand where your misunderstanding comes from, thinking they’re all just businesses providing services to other businesses. But this interpretation is very naive, and the legal reality is massively more complicated than you’re making it sound. Governments really don’t like independent contractors, they’re subject to far more restrictions than ordinary businesses, and companies employing their services are usually exposed to risks that they don’t have when dealing with ordinary businesses.
The nature of the relationship, and the work you are doing determines whether your employer is a regular employer and what taxes they have to pay. In Canada, for example, certain taxes (GST) are applied to the contractor relationship based on whether the product the company sells is available within the country, and the distinction between contractor and employee is much less fuzzy than it is in the US (if you have to ask, the person is almost certainly an employee).
It gets complicated quick
Or more interestingly, I'd assume an independant consulting contract could be void in many legislations if it happens that their work should be reclassified as employment under some specific rules (e.g. you dictate their working hours etc.)
Basically, is the contract valid under the worker's country laws is a question you won't be able to ignore I guess ?
Depending on treaties, not having a formal business entity in a country doesn’t make you immune to their laws and taxes (not a lawyer, but it is totally possible to collect foreign debts in the US for example), if you’re publicly traded, breaking foreign laws intentionally is a BAD idea. On top of all that most companies strive to stay on the right side of the law regardless of the ability to get away with it.
Not an exact parallel, but see the saga of the Huawei exec who was arrested in Canada on behalf of the US for a business deal made by a Chinese company with Iran.
Are you probably going to get away with it? Yes, if you aren’t a very big fish. But what if you don’t.
That being said, these companies don't really provide much as far as stable US jobs go so it would be better to encourage entrepreneurial activity for US programmers.
Another word of advice for programmers. Do what you can to own the IP of your work. Whether it's open source or your own proprietary IP. Work for hire where the company owns the IP if your work is a dead end job.
Because interview process in bigtech has been subverted by people benefiting from it and who are already skilled in it. I bet absolute majority of people that I worked with and considered them very good couldn't solve knapsack problem on whiteboards in 15 minutes, don't know Z algorithm by heart and won't be able to correctly project Amazon leadership principles with (made up bullshit) examples from their previous jobs.
> The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States.
Is this true? My observation at Google has been that very few teams had layoffs and now have open headcount. The teams that are hiring aren't the ones that had people fired.
I was on a two-person team that was, due to recent client poaching, pretty severely overstaffed. Our manager had just been promoted and we got a new one hired in.
He viewed our lack of work to do as temporary and started recruiting. He eventually hired a third member and we started training her. After the first day of training, I was fired with no notice and no severance. The manager remarked, in the surprise exit interview, that he had taken a look at staffing recently and we had too much.
There are a couple interesting things to consider here:
1. We had been severely overstaffed (as advertised!) for several months before he even started hiring. He was well aware of it.
2. My team's original manager had offered to me that I was free to live anywhere in the world, as long as it had an internet connection. He left the team so soon after I joined that this didn't happen. But the new manager gave many indications of being acutely uncomfortable with the idea that I had made a request that he wasn't willing to grant immediately.
My question to you is, was I fired because we were overstaffed, or was that mentioned in the exit interview for no particular reason?
And my followup question is, did the companies discussed here do layoffs because they were overstaffed, or because they felt they had the right amount of staff, but they wanted to pay them less?
And of course, companies also have practical right to make mistakes, from overstaffing to understaffing, or to place bets that do well or do not.
The point is that these things would happen even if things were being run perfectly, so they are not indicative of nefarious practices or abuses.
H1B workers come from countries where the wages are about a fourth of the average wage here. Of course they would settle for lesser salaries. Most privileged American software developers would rather gatekeep than level up their skills.
It is important to note that LCA filings (which are public) have a wage that is typically lower than the actual wage paid, because companies do not want to disclose publicly how much they're actually paying.
But they aren't. You may have too many of one type of worker, and not enough of another, so it would make perfect sense to lay off the first ones, and hire foreign workers for the second one.
Which Google does by pushing every hire through the same hiring funnel.
I've also seen documents supporting a few H1B filings and know that most of the skills mentioned in their are fabricated.
So yes companies do this regularly to cut costs in the name of layoffs and talent shortage.
Anyone here from Google want to pose some interesting questions to Sundar at the next all hands?
1. Fire high-paid workers
2. Import low-paid ones
3. ...
4. Profit.
So it still may be "high wages" but that does not negate the GrandParent comment that they laid off higher paid workers in favor in importing lower paid workers
I’m quite sure they don’t. My friend makes over $1M total comp. Are you saying he would be paid $2M if he were a citizen?
We've recently started trying to re-hire folks we let go, most of whom make much bigger paychecks at other companies now. Productivity has plummeted. But we saved a lot on payroll for a few months.
Google salary bands are the same whatever visa you're (not) on, and they're certainly not low-paid. This "article" is ridiculous xenophobic garbage.
How one country can do it?
It is not one countries responsibility, it is every countries responsibility to retain their own talent and grow their own tech-sector.
You cannot force a country to do anything. They have to want to do it.
> If, for example, country don't have resources to do itself?
That's a difficult question without a simple answer. Ideally, countries would build themselves up, acquiring the resources to have their own industries.
I suspect you thought this was going against https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35968968
The title + "Just one month later, Pichai’s firm filed applications for low-paid foreign workers to come to America and take highly specialized tech jobs." almost suggest that the company is firing high-pay American citizens to bring in low-pay immigrants, and the post doesn't mention anywhere that most of the layoffs were probably immigrants to begin with anyway.
Google's 10k layoff was simply not justified by management's soulless explanation. The company is a technical and financial juggernaut. It is still hiring. The only problem they faced is they wanted to pivot their headcount investment on a grand scale and did not want to deal with the typical horse trading reorgs take.
Tldr Google's layoffs was just an example of leadership taking the easy way out and it also is a time in the macro economy where wall street will award a layoff.
You can achieve the same goal by redistributing the workforce / head counts across groups and wait for natural attritions, but it has some major downsides:
* Slow due to endless debates and deals across all levels
* Good people may leave before mediocre ones, since the latter may be difficult to leave.
I don't think layoffs are good. But I think once you've located the problem, solving it sooner may be better than leaving it for further development.
Have the companies stopped hiring domestically? As this seems like normal behavior.
Immigrants get shit done.