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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

This article is framed as a scare-story about visas/immigrants, but what does it really have to do with visas or immigrants? Imagine the workers stayed in India, were trained using videoconferencing and worked remotely. It would be exactly the same situation for the US employees.

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Mmh, did you read the article? It clearly has to do with visas, as the Disney workers would likely still be employed if those H1Bs hadn't been granted.

It's absolutely not the same as outsourcing - if Disney could have outsourced the jobs, it would have by now. But these positions likely require physical proximity to the Disney theme park.

This is the ugly side of H1Bs - while Facebook, Google, et al. are using them in a way that (plausibly) doesn't hurt American employment, and are legitimately in need of more slots, that's not the case for the main H1B players (Infosys, HCL, etc), who are just gaming the system to maximize revenues.

Yes, I read the article. My point is that cracking down on visas or immigration won't make any difference long term. The internet makes physical proximity not so important, and it will only get less and less important over time.

Based on your optimism, I suspect that you've never worked on or managed a project of significance using outsourced employees.

Just a few of the realities that you will face if and when you do so:

1) A 12+ hour time difference. I recall nightly conference calls that started at 10pm. If you are somebody who values your time, you will find this untenable. Just use Slack or Basecamp to touch base? See #2:

2) Complete inconsistency in skill and communication ability. It was almost the norm to wake up in the morning and check for the changes we expected to be in place while the outsourced team worked overnight only to be shocked at the lack of progress. One question about a particular detail of the assigned task would bring the work to a screeching halt and we wouldn't find out about it until the next day. We would answer the question (usually inconsequential) and the progress would resume (far behind schedule). In many other cases, work was just done incorrectly and we had to spend the day course-correcting.

3) Lack of talent. After all, the workers who qualify for H1-B's are a self-selecting group who are, by definition, identified as the most talented employees. There is no guarantee that their counterparts who stayed home are able to do the job properly. In my experience most employees were sub-par, as one would expect when they are willing to work for pennies on the dollar compared to a U.S. citizen or somebody on an H1-B.

While I don't work with outsourced employees, I do work in a completely remote team, and we use only email, IRC and video conferencing. In fact I had a meeting at 11pm just last night (not too bad for me, but for my colleagues in Israel and Australia who were also on the call it was some unearthly hour of the morning).

I think many of your points could be summarized as "we hired a bunch of idiots and they couldn't do their job very well". Timezones made some difference in that you weren't able to closely supervise them, but the fundamental problem was that your management shouldn't have outsourced the work to people not capable of doing the job.

You might be OK with an 11pm conference call, but I'm not.

Working with a remote team on a SaaS application != outsourcing enterprise-level work to overseas employees.

With a small remote team you have the luxury of carefully choosing remote candidates and interviewing them individually. Enterprise-level work (read, bringing on teams of 10-50 developers in a short time frame) does not afford you that opportunity.

I'm not sure how large your company is, but it's pretty apparent you haven't worked with outsourced employees on an enterprise-level (7-8 figure) project before.

>>> After all, the workers who qualify for H1-B's are a self-selecting group who are, by definition, identified as the most talented employees. There is no guarantee that their counterparts who stayed home are able to do the job properly

This is false. Many (at least 50% of H1B Indian workers) do not fall under this category.

To give you an example (in software): a company like Infosys would send you average or below average consultants who are good at communicating in English. And then Infosys would charge you higher than the premium developers located in the US, while paying the worker just about average (or even minimum pay by market standards). Over a longer period of time, there are quality issues, reworks, extensions and dependability created. Now, even if a client decided to leave Infosys and hire a premium developer - it is hard and costly. Who wants to take responsibility of a bad quality thing without being given time to improve quality.

The rest of the 50% who are talented, they get paid well, they contribute positively to the US economy and indirectly hurt the Indian economy.

It might be less likely to happen that way, though. Here are two possible reasons why.

First, there may be benefits to locating your workforce in the US. They may be closer to the location of core business activities, and the employer may enjoy some benefits of the US legal system and infrastructure. Opinions on this may differ, some people think location is unimportant, others think it is highly important. I'm just suggesting that it certainly may be a factor.

Second, a path to US citizenship or a green card remains very valuable. If an employer can sponsor a visa and green card application, they may get a higher caliber of applicant than they would overseas. There is also a lower possibility of turnover. While it is certainly possible to leave a job as an H1B holder for another, mobility does remain considerably more limited than it would be for a citizen who can freely participate in the labor market (including leaving the field entirely for better opportunities).

I don't really see this as a scare story, because it's pretty indisputable that these visas are sometimes abused. That doesn't mean they always are. How often and how much is another subject of considerable disagreement.

Overall, I will say one thing, they system is horrendously broken when a company that pays over 200k for H1B applicants is in the same lottery as outsourcing companies where people are training their replacements.

If you "imagine" the workers stayed in India, then the article wouldn't be about visas. But since the "reality" is that the workers are here on H1B, then the article mentions visa.

Disclaimer: I am an immigrant in the US on a L visa.

So the real story is something like Indians are prepared to work for less money whether they are in the US or in India. Abolishing H1B visas or cracking down on immigration won't make any difference to that.

the H1-B visa gives American businesses the best of both worlds, cheap labor and asses in the seats. You only get one of those with outsourcing.

The point is there are people all over the world who are willing to work for less money than Americans doing the same job.

If the goal of the H1B visa program was 'import enough migrants to bring down the standard US salary' it probably wouldn't be legal because no politician would get behind it publicly.

So this is really about calling a spade a spade...

Videoconferencing, especially with people you've never met from a foreign culture whom by the way you've just made unemployed, is just not the same. Those meetings would go on and on, and nothing would get accomplished.

I work remotely, and everything is conducted using email, IRC and video conferencing, and I certainly don't agree with you about that.

If you don't feel that videoconferencing and email work better with people one knows, with whom one has a working relationship, and who don't actively dislike one for "stealing their jobs", then we simply have a different experience of videoconferencing and email. I concede that text chats are a pretty effective way to work, but I suspect that the challenges I mentioned would still impede progress.

I'm a consultant working remotely and all the work I do with clients is done remotely and I can tell you: it works for some companies and doesn't for others. It works for some groups and not for others. It doesn't matter the company size or structure. Smaller companies or bigger companies, top down or bottom up, it doesn't matter. It's the culture. Some companies do it better, some do it worse. I've seen companies of 300,000+ remote employees, and companies where remote working for their 50 employees is forbidden because it's a disaster.

One thing I've never seen work, however, is differing time zones working well together. There's always some kind of schedule conflict that could be resolved if everyone was taking lunch at the same time or getting off work at the same time.

I agree that US - India is quite harsh. I work from the UK with many coworkers from China, which is kind of similar. It is hard for them -- they mainly work evenings so they have some overlapping time with folks in the US and Europe.

But you're not training people who are the direct reason you're going to be unemployed in two months.

That's hard, but again that has nothing to do with visas or immigration. Suppose Disney had sacked all their expensive workers and hired juniors (from the US) and asked the experienced workers to train them up. Same situation for those employees.

In this case, it does.

"...but what does it really have to do with visas or immigrants."

Everything, actually.

“The program has created a highly lucrative business model of bringing in cheaper H-1B workers to substitute for Americans...”

"Because of legal loopholes, however, in practice companies do not have to recruit American workers first or guarantee that Americans will not be displaced."

If such a loophole exists it puts American tech workers in a vulnerable position.

American knowledge workers are already in a vulnerable position, provided there's someone anywhere in the world willing to work for less money.

When they are brought on a visa, they cannot job hop like they can in India. They are usually stuck in their position for 5 years until they can get green cards.

I would be willing to bet if they gave these workers Green Cards instead of H1-B's, this practice wouldn't be as popular because the worker would be able to compete freely in the market.

"I just couldn’t believe they could fly people in to sit at our desks and take over our jobs exactly."

Doesn't sound like remote work to me.

Same situation in Canada, except we call them "temporary foreign workers."

These programs are supposed to fill a shortage, but in practice they just provide cheaper labour.

I'm inclined to agree. I'm seeing fuzzy words like "several" and "many", but no actual numbers to quantify or estimate how many U.S. workers were replaced with immigrants. It also doesn't begin to discuss how many of the laid-off workers were immigrants, or how many new workers were citizens. This just sounds like a general off-loading of highly-salaried individuals, which I suspect would have been done independent of companies like Infosys.

Also, just a general off-topic thought. The article talks about how H1-B's tend to have lower salaries than U.S. tech workers. I'm under the impression that many of these H1-B candidates are individuals just finishing a degree and will later in their career move on to obtaining a green card after a few years. If this is the case, then of course their salaries are lower; they're earlier in their career. I'd love to see some data exploring this more.

Because you cannot deny that the situation was entirely an abuse of the H1-B visa system.

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