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Comment by burnerburnson | Hacker News Reader

I'm a manager of a team that's mostly H1Bs at Google. It's mostly fine but a few of them just refuse improve their English, and it's frustrating spending hours every day just being an English teacher to an engineer who writes at a 5th grade level. The problem with hiring too many H1Bs is they speak to each other in Chinese and thus take forever to become proficient at communicating with the rest of the company.

Also, I'd call into question the credibility of this article. Google pays H1Bs the same as Americans as far as I know. What Google is doing is hiring a large number of engineers in India. These people I assume are paid much less than American engineers.

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As someone with some exposure to Chinese characters as a Japanese speaker, I’ve had the please to casually glance a WeChat group and realize some of the back channel Chinese from my teammates was joking about trying to get me fired.

(Edit: my also Chinese manager dealt with it very well and that person left the company after some time)

I have a completely different experience. My (Indian) manager told me I couldn't be let go because it would make the team entirely Indian :) Apart from that, I found it much easier to work with H1B colleagues than with entitled and full of ego "native" Americans.

Yeah, the ego and entitlement of people living in their native country who can’t be sent back at a moment’s notice.

I don't think the risk of being sent back (or lack thereof) is important for how to treat other people. To put it crudely, assholes will be assholes no matter where they come from.

more like "everyone gets a prize" mentality.

I can't speak for other countries, but I'm not too surprised that you can run into certain cultures of Americans who seemingly have zero regards for the sentiment of others. Maybe it is ego and entitlement, but it's not because they can't be deported.

It's called acreaging. https://www.quora.com/How-do-Americans-live-in-the-worlds-la....

Interesting, isn't it considered impolite to speak in a language that someone in the group doesn't understand?

When I was in Germany, Germans even texted their SO in English in case I glance over their phones. Maybe the group I was in was exceptionally welcoming but everywhere in Europe where I lived(EU, non-EU, UK etc.) it was always considered rude to speak a language that others don't understand and everyone always tried their best to speak in English as a lingua franca.

If I happen to be in a working group that speaks multiple languages, I would definitely raise the question of speaking a common language in a work environment because you can't all be on the same page when your communications are patchy.

Yes, but many Chinese engineers have such a low level of proficiency that they genuinely struggle to communicate in spoken English. Pronunciation/accent can also be a major barrier to comprehension.

how can they write code ? real question

Do you seriously believe nobody in the non English speaking world can write code?

for example, if they need to create a class or a function, how do they name it ? I live in the non English speaking world, I had to learn a minimum of English to be able understand, reason about and write code.

Tell them to use chatgpt to translate their broken English

I don't know where in germany you worked at but most offices here are not nearly as english friendly, in my experience it's quite rare and more than half the IT jobs still expect you to know some German otherwise it's a non starter.

>I don't know where in germany

Frankfurt, non-IT job. I guess the mileage varies.

hope you enjoyed your stay, I've been meaning to visit that part of the country for a while, never got the chance to see Saalburg north of Frankfurt.

Frankfurt is the finance capital, so IME it'll tend more English-speaking than the average.

Yes, many German and French multi-national companies have English as the official language.

If there is at least one non-local participant in a meeting, or on an email list, then the discourse has to be popped up to English.

This often happens when none of them are native English speakers, e.g. German & Spanish.

There are specific English proficiency tests bound to levels of management - bad English, no promotion.

I’m European, Dutchman specifically, and I find it mentally difficult, almost impossible sometimes, to not converse in English with a person I know does speak English. I used to work at a Dutch company with ~35 nationalities and me and my Dutch colleagues where often reminded by our non Dutch coworkers that they prefer us to continue water cooler conversation in Dutch and not switched to English when they joined in. For them this was a great way to learn more Dutch. Right now there is also a parent at my kids school who is Welsh, and even though he understands Dutch very well and prefers to speak it, everytime I approach him for a conversation the first sentence in my head is formed in English. I have to consciously switch to Dutch before starting the conversation. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s some genetic heritage from when our country was a big international trading nation?

I find it interesting that H1B implies Indian or Chinese workers. As a South African I don't know why you don't hire more English speakers that would be H1Bs. I myself have tried to get an H1B and so far the door has been closed.

It's been easier for me to move to a European country where I had to learn another language.

I agree with this but I’ve found that the people making the decisions of who to hire usually have some incentive to hire from a certain country.

Those reasons could be kickbacks, family stake in the company, etc.

Edit: This is completely anecdotal. Grain of salt and all that.

It's not common. I was on a call with a group of Indian contractors and one of them announced they were relocating to the USA. The cheers on the call were insane.

From an employer's point of view it's easier to stick to X countries as the source of H1Bs as the process overall can differ between countries.

It's because statistically they are just almost entirely from India. There are a few Chinese ones but it's no where near the amount of Indian hires. Chinese H1b candidates are post graduates from PhD programs and are less common but make up the 2nd largest but still extremely small group.

For quite a while, H1B had been almost exclusively for foreign graduates from American schools so the distribution of H1B workers is as same as the distribution of foreign students.

In tech or IT, the ones who hires are mostly indians so mostly prefer to hire from there, I think even in Canada international students acceptance process, there were some complains that the majority of these students are from India.

I’m not American and don’t live in America (I presume by “America” you mean the United States?), but shouldn’t it be “… refuse to improve their English”?

It should be “refuse to…” yea. I’m going to hazard a guess that the author you’re responding to missed the to there in their comment. It’s a common thing. Sometimes for example when I’m replying on mobile I might miss a word or autocorrect from my web browser may do something strange and I don’t catch it.

> I presume by “America” you mean the United States?

Yea that’s almost for sure what they mean. Typically people from the United States of America are called Americans and people across the world refer to those people as “Americans” and they/we also refer to ourselves and our country as “America” as a shortened form. I’m a little surprised you weren’t aware of this given your clearly written English but yep that’s what that means!

Presumably the parent comment meant that their English was poor to the point where they couldn’t communicate effectively with the worker, not that the worker was getting their point across but lacking pristine grammar.

As an anecdote I’ve found that non-Americans from well off families tend to speak near grammatically perfect English because that’s how foreign languages are taught.

As an anecdote, an eternal rule for venting about insufficient language skills of damned foreigners on the Internet seems to be that it must be articulated by at least one demonstration of one's own inability to possess the very competence demanded (e.g., through absolutely careless spelling, grammatical error, etc.), which my contribution above was simply commenting on ironically— with a tangential spoof of U.S. exceptionalism of course.

My old boss in academia went through a “hire tons of Chinese chemists” phase and it got so bad he just had to eventually ban Chinese from being spoken in the lab. That seemed to work well and their English improved greatly and understanding in the lab went up. When they went back to China, hopefully they got more out of their experience here also. They learned new techniques instead of just doing things the same way they had always done them.

I don't know about google but at my fortune 500 company they are technically paid the same but clearly paid less in reality. A bunch of them are at lower levels then they should be based on experience and skills.

Things have changed in India. In these top companies, engineers get as much as 1/3rd of the pay here. That’s relatively much better given the cost of living in India.

Well market dictates that if I am providing similar output, I should expect to get paid same or equalize the two levels at some intermediate stage.

> I'm a manager of a team that's mostly H1Bs at Google. It's mostly fine but a few of them just refuse improve their English

I am wondering how did they manage to pass the Google's hiring committee?

You can’t hire a bunch of people without lowering the bar. This is a big part of the reason why big tech doesn’t appeal to me. “We’ve got tens of thousands of the best of the best” sounds like weird delusional fetishism and I’d like to think that we are mostly past that now thank God. I see communication skills as a core competency, end of story. When you hire like crazy, standards slip, or you might forego one standard in favour of “engineering” capability, or whatever.

Hiring committee never meets the candidate.

It's on the interviewer to mark communication difficulties. And I assume bad interviewers don't see English proficiency as important.

Here's something I don't understand. If google pays the same regardless, why bother to hire H1B at all?

If there are n tech jobs to be done, y people in group A who can do them, and z people in group B who can do them, opening hiring to all (y + z) people makes hiring easier than confining yourself to only y.

Easier could mean easier to hire, cheaper to hire (even if you pay them all the same as each other, the clearing wage is likely lower due to increased supply), easier to retain, etc.

Because they can serve them shit-sandwiches in other metrics and the H1B has no recourse.

"Work over the weekend or your employment will be terminated and you will have to be deported."

probably because of non-pay related practices? things like differences in healthcare laws, unionization, legal rights as a citizen (of a particular country) vs being a visitor who can be evicted/deported at will.

Because when minwage is established, the market naturally simply adjusts the other parts accordingly.

Sure you pay both $x, but the skill diff can be 10x. USD16$250 can get you a bootcamp coder w zero exp (but w profile/status of citizen cardholder) [1], or someone way beyond 10x that skill who simply can't afford to negotiate.

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/haseeb-qureshi-how-to-negoit...

Finally! These H1Bs in India are living the 100% remote future that 99% of HN wants!

If only we could have predicted that: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/26/remote-wo...

refuse improve their English

I had to read that a few times and chuckled at the irony

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