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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

I didn’t believe it until I saw it, but look at the classified section of the San Francisco newspaper where big tech companies post job listing knowing that Americans won’t see them so they can say they tried to get domestic talent.

My neighbor is on a visa from mumbai working at Chase who was brought in as the lead frontend engineer (def can’t find Javascript devs in the US). Even he admitted it’s weird that his whole team is from India on visas. They just aren’t hiring citizens.

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As a senior software engineer who was unemployed for over a year, I can confirm almost nobody is hiring USA Javascript and Python devs with 10+ years of experience with some big accomplishments. I got lucky with a backfill.

And once a team reaches that point, less citizens will want to work on a team where they're the outsider anyways.

I find that diversity extremely rewarding. I learn new things, learn about other people’s traditions and learn different ways of thinking and organising. Approach the challenge with an open mind.

These are the fun, but token advantages of diversity in this specific context. There are lots of advantages and disadvantages to diversity - because it is an extremely generic term. I have first hand experience of teams completely losing all the original members, who were extremely talented and all born in the US, because they hired such a huge number of people who were from a different culture (India, in this case). It had nothing to do with racism - they just had nothing in common. It was fun to talk about their different religious celebrations and so on, but they were emotionally aliens. They were reasonably smart, yet there was zero intellectual spark in conversations between the two groups. They were just too different to thrive with each other. Different culturally, ideologically, intellectually, emotionally. Different in methods of communication, in treatment of the business hierarchy, in assumptions and expectations. We can blame the business for making an incompatible team, but the compatibility parameters were too tied to culture and race. It's hard to account for that without essentially being racist.

> We can blame the business for making an incompatible team

In my past few jobs I had many colleagues from India, and learning the cultural differences is extremely important. Teambuilding exercises are also a must - bring your cuisine to work is a stellar example: I brought both pão de queijo (a Brazilian thing) and sajtos pogácza (its Hungarian counterpart), and they brought some the best sweets I ever tasted. To our Turkish colleague's dismay, we all agreed Turkish Delight is not really a delight (but the Turkish colleagues recognized my Hungarian pogácza as some cross-cultural artifact coming from the Ottoman empire days).

What would you bring to this table?

Diversity can be rewarding when it's actually diverse.

Being the only American citizen on a team of people constantly speaking Hindi or Tamil often isn't "rewarding."

You can always take interest in learning their language. You are the host and they are your guests, and, besides, their communication in their native language will be more efficient than if they translated to English for your benefit.

Different culture, but back when I was working on a project with Sony, when they introduced their internet enabled TVs in Brazil, just adding the "san" suffix to my contact's name made him instantly more open to negotiate.

If I piss on your head and tell you it's raining, will you find some silver lining in that activity?

> You are the host and they are your guests

What? This logic doesn't track. If I were a guest in their country, then I might take interest in learning their local language. That's respectful.

Coming here on an H-1B and demanding people speak your niche language is more akin to invasion. (Here comes the "but.. but.. the United States has no official language!" tripe.)

I'm glad you've had good experiences - so have I. But I'm not sure where you're going. You can't advise everybody into happiness when they are stuck in a social group that makes them unhappy. There are immutable forces at work. We're humans. Learning a language is an enormous task, and it feels horrible to imply somebody should do it who is just trying to be comfortable in their own country. You should make that attempt when you visit other countries. Not to mention, it wouldn't solve this multi-dimensional social problem.

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