Comment by jeremyjh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeremyjh | Hacker News Reader

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I've been a tech manager for 21 years, much of that at a large Fortune 100 that had tens of thousands of employees from Infosys and TCS. The hourly rates we were charged for local workers on H1-B visas were $15-$30 less than we'd pay American contractors from body shops like Teksystems, and that is just what we were paying Infosys. The employee didn't see anywhere near that.

Compared to FTE the difference was even larger including benefits and vacation time.

The biggest issue though, is not the local people. The issue is that the local people are there to bridge the timezone and communication gaps so you can have three off-shore people for each on-shore. Offshore people were paid less than a third of on-shore. So the number of American jobs they are displacing, and the wages they were being replaced at, is absolutely staggering.

Maybe in real tech companies its a different story. The one time I did a direct H1-B sponsorship (later, in a much smaller company), we did pay them an equal wage.

Time gap is not a reason. The real reason is to keep the local market wages low. With free moving employees it's not possible to control. Companies bring foreign workers with restricted visa and then threaten local employees indirectly.

It's much cheaper to setup shop outside US, which almost all companies do, but still they bring in foreign employees on visa just to keep the entire local market salaries to the minimum

I don't know why you think this is a decision that Infosys can make. The hiring manager determines the sourcing strategy. We hired onsite resources so they would work with the rest of the team and know what is going on, like every other employee. Then after they work a full day, they get on a call with offshore for an hour or two every night at 10:00 PM. Otherwise we'd get nothing of value from offshore (which sometimes happened anyway).

Can you clarify? These workers were resident in the U.S. or abroad?

The local workers were resident in the US on H1-B visas. Those were the ones paid $15-$30 less. I edited my post to clarify, thanks!

Presumably Infosys also pays citizen workers shitty too. The issue here is Infosys, not h1b.

I will also add a data point for big tech. I have managed people on h1b, on o1, with green cards, and citizens. I have never even sniffed any sort of disparate treatment across these groups once hired. During hiring the bias was against h1b since it was a huge pain in the ass to arrange everything and their start date could be delayed.

Infosys has virtually no citizen workers, and the ones they have are managing entire programs - they aren't doing client work. The only reason they have any workers at all is they can't realistically change H1-B sponsors.

HR is not allowed to tell you to prefer an H1B. They can strongly hint that you need to hit your DEI quota though.

HR wasn't involved in sourcing strategy. Either I contacted HR to open a req for a full-time employee, or I contacted Infosys. For body shops there was a specific system that sent it to multiple firms, but I was usually already talking to my account managers. When doing budgets we'd submit headcount asks by type and there were some soft ratios we were expected to stay within but this was mostly the division exec and their finance partner related to keeping our ratios aligned with our charge-back rates. I never saw a number that had anything to do with diversity across contractors.

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