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Comment by bottlepalm | Hacker News Reader

No, mention of OPT in this thread so here it goes. I’m directly observing OPT candidates crowding out American workers from getting jobs.

Foreign students pay large sums of money for advanced American STEM degrees and then flood the market for the same jobs American tech workers are trying to get. Americans in debt from undergrad degrees that foreign nationals were able to obtain a lot cheaper.

The ratios I’m seeing are insane, like 90% OPT candidates. You can’t discriminate against them, have advanced degrees and accept lower salaries and out number domestic applicants - so we reluctantly hire them. Even though their technical communication and English skills are abysmal.

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Generally verbal fluency in a language goes up quickly if you are able to read and write well in that language.

I don’t think you’re making a very strong argument.

Full disclosure, I read a lot in English but almost never spoke it. 6 years ago I started working internationally and my spoken English has improved enormously.

I have observed the same with my colleagues. The man who recruited me, an older German, could barely make himself understood in English.

A couple of years later, he sounds American.

He sounds American to you, but does he sound American to an American?

His English has gone from terrible to fantastic which was my point.

He’s spent a lot of time in English speaking countries(years), including Australia and the US… very minor accent. I doubt many would be able to place him, unless they saw how he looked first.

If someone's communication skills are bad, it's legal to not hire them. That's a job-relevant characteristic. Of course you have to apply that job requirement to all candidates, not just OPT candidates.

I think their conversation skills are fine talking with recruiters and HR, simple stuff. But in the tech interview it takes 5x longer to communicate and even then it’s still not very good. Going back to interviewing a native English speaker feels like a turbo boost. Unfortunately trying to explain this to HR opens you up to being accused of racism, so it’s not worth it.

Also you got to think HR has incentive to let it slide to get those cheap workers. It’s sad hearing them talk salary expectations of terrible candidates knowing they’re going to be hired because they want 20k less or whatever.

I’m just sorry for the people the candidate will be working with and the company itself because it’s a net negative for them.

It sounds like the problem is your company, not the law.

It's my company's problem that the market is flooded with foreign nationals with advanced degrees, who work for less money and have poor English skills?

It's your company's problem that your legally valid hiring opinions are being overridden by other departments to cut costs. Especially when there are tons of American citizen CS grads from non-target schools that would probably take the $20k hit (or even more) to get their foot in the door. Your company is acting absolutely stupid.

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