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Comment by lokar | Hacker News Reader

I worked at Google for years. We simply hired as many people as we could find who could get through the process.

If they were outside the US we would try to get them here. If not, we would find a spot for them outside. We would never hire a less qualified person simply because they could work in the US. We were always behind, to the point that having open “headcount” in an org was worth little, what you needed was priority to get a new hire.

At one point we were “parking” Australians in Dublin, having them work there for a year or two until they could get a visa for the US.

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This was the old Google, new Google lays off teams and moves them to India. New grad hiring is all but paused, hiring just enough to Seniors to backfill attrition and trying to slot them in at n-1 or n-2 levels.

I've been told by completely different friends, at unrelated companies spanning countries and different US states that if I was only Indian they're sure HR would have called me back. I applied at each of these companies over the years. There's no shortage of talent in the US, there's an uptick in hiring discrimination.

End of the day, given roughly equivalent talent availability, cheaper is where companies go. Maybe some will call it "cost discrimination" or something just as strange, but the many will know it as "sound business strategy".

That doesn't explain away all the H-1B hires though, who move to places where the pay must be drastically higher than my asking rate. Edit: Turns out if you hire an H-1B you must pay them a higher rate, it cannot be lower just because they're H-1B, so they're definitely making way more than I would have asked for. If cost is the factor, then either HR departments are stupid, or some other shenanigans is going on.

I've also been told for a company I will not name that had I been asian they would have called me, I just assume there's an overwhelming number of asian employees, not that there's anything wrong with that, but if they're discriminating against everyone else from being hired, that's not ethical or legal in the US.

I agree that there are many companies that hire H-1B (and other non-immigrant visa holders) over equally qualified US citizens and permanent residents in order to pay less, work them harder, etc.

But, I often see this presented as all or nearly all that is going on. There are lots of non-immigrant visa holders who get hired who are better qualified then 90+% of others, and are getting the same pay and conditions and their American teammates. These people are improving the employment prospects for Americans, not hurting them.

Old Google was run by engineers. New Google is run by finance.

Like Boeing. And look how well that's worked out.

Sounds like Microsoft too.

That may have been how Google did it back in the day, but in the modern McKinsey approved enterprise noticing that you can pay someone in the UK, or Croatia, or India a fraction of what you have to pay an American is impossible to miss.

Yeah, that’s part of why I left.

In the old days that approach would have obviously worked poorly (it was tried, and it went poorly).

IMO, as the company grew various issues inevitably reduced Eng effectiveness to the point where now outsourcing is no worse.

Now even if you could hire the best from around the world and get them all to MTV, it would not really matter.

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