Wave of Bay Area tech layoffs may foreshadow something worse | Hacker News Reader

Wave of Bay Area tech layoffs may foreshadow something worse

sfgate.com

48 pointspg_123426 comments

I see H1Bs becoming more and more prominent in the big companies both as leadership and as ICs.

I was on a team (at a big famous SF company) that was all Indian people on visas and the entire leadership structure up to Satya Nadella was Indian.

If anything this seems ominous for Americans.

I'm looking at changing roles at my current job, positions are few and far between right now, especially for the area in which I want to live.

I've been scouring the internal job board, which is just a version of the external board with extra internal information attached, and all the promising jobs seem to have a notice plastered on them that says:

"THIS NOTICE IS BEING FILED AS A RESULT OF THE FILING OF AN APPLICATION FOR PERMANENT ALIEN LABOR CERTIFICATION. ANY PERSON MAY PROVIDE DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE BEARING ON THE APPLICATION TO THE REGIONAL CERTIFYING OFFICER OF THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF LABOR."

When I apply for them I never hear anything back.

I don't really know what that notice means, but I am a citizen and really want (and am more than qualified for) the jobs they are posted under.

Those job postings are part of the "labor market test" that is a pre-requisite for applying for an employment based greencard. The intent is to ensure there are no able and willing Americans able to do the job that the immigrant is applying for their green card based on. In practice, they are often set up by immigration lawyers to be mostly a formality, and there is little chance of being offered a job that is advertised as part of it.

In other words, this isn't a real job listing. If the employer wasn't sponsoring the intending immigrant for a green card, it wouldn't exist in the first place.

The employer already intends to hire the immigrant. In fact, the immigrant may already be working for them on an H1-B or other visa. So it's effectively a job listing that is already filled.

So isn't this a very easy lawsuit to prove?

Same in Australia. The jobs are advertised but I never hear anything back. For me it’s not a racial thing as I too am an naturalized immigrant, but it seems the preference for subcontinental “skilled” workers is prioritized.

You should report the company doing this here: https://www.uscis.gov/report-fraud/uscis-tip-form

It’s the same everywhere. In the Australian government most directors who hire developers are Indian and seem to have all Indian teams on worker visas. It’s impossible to get a government position now. Last year three government directors were found guilty of hiring subcontinent developers for a fee.

I suppose the Dutch language is good for one thing: nobody can learn it! I've seen Germans (oh it's just a dialect) break down into tears trying. And it has absolutely no use whatsoever abroad.

German here, can confirm. Dutch sounds like weird German, and as a German you can usually read it, but speaking Dutch is an entirely different thing.

Indians are hired because the wages they ask are much lower. Do you agree that this benefits citizens of Australia too? Australia has a small population, it can not develop a work force with specialised skills. If it could, then the wages asked by its citizens would be much higher, and these costs would be passed to the regular citizen.

Well it's only going to worse. Indians and some Middle Eastern communities are infamous globally for such nepotistic practices.

Not to mention, within the Indian community, there is caste-based and religion-based discrimination too. I'm sure the HN community is no stranger to that news.

Eric Weinstein spoke about H1Bs and how they screwed over American scientists. It devalued local scientists earning potential.

It’s not SF company. Microsoft is headquartered in Redmond, WA (Seattle area).

Github and Linkedin are both bay area companies

Neither of them have ever had Indian CEOs, so what they claim couldn't have been true.

The OP is probably referring to Sun Microsystems.

Sun and LinkedIn weren't in SF, and Nadella wasn't in leadership at Sun or GitHub, so GP's coy slip is bizarre and nonsensical.

Bingo my bad R.R. wasnt Indian person but he was out with ski accident for like a year...

So out of 10 people in the chain of command nine out of 10 were Indian people and when the non-Indian person was out with an injury he was replaced by an Indian person.

The primary justification seems to be a pizza delivery startup going under and a pets.com imploding due to payroll issues, as well as some random doom tweet.

I’ll put $5 on 2024 being one of the most frothy markets as materially relevant AI stuff hits production, the much predicted and prepared for recession never materializes, and inflations dips out of sight.

I agree. June tech layoffs are almost a 1 year low[0]. US unemployment is still record low, even with inflation mostly abating.

[0] https://www.trueup.io/layoffs

And nothing of value was lost.

I’ve been watching the market closely for the past two years and it’s just stunning to see the number of startups that have no obvious value add proposition.

It’s mostly dishonest swindling with no path to profitability.

https://youtu.be/BzAdXyPYKQo (audio nsfw)

"pre-profit" indeed...

what a mess

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