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These are all great tips. It is a really well-written article with great advice. I just come away from this with a crushing sense of depression driven by the fo

These are all great tips. It is a really well-written article with great advice. I just come away from this with a crushing sense of depression driven by the following thoughts: I can't believe this is how the country I live in treats people who bring their high-demand skills here. 60 days or get out. This absolutely effects every engineer. Even the most racist ones: that there is a bedrock of people they are allowed to treat this way puts a hard ceiling on your own compensation. My grandparents were labor leaders and I'm pretty certain they'd be ashamed I can't or haven't done more to rectify this. I can't believe this is how interviewing works in this field. Everyone in every other respectable field (and ones that pay as well or better, and have worse consequences for hiring a "bad fit") seems entitled to some baseline level of respect and recognition for their experience and work. Having some smarmy piece of shit ask questions from Jr.-year computer science should be justifiable grounds for a broken nose.

kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
> "My grandparents were labor leaders and I'm pretty certain they'd be ashamed I can't or haven't done more to rectify this. Unfortunately tech unions are typically the ones railing against H1Bs entirely. The mere presence of H1B workers fundamentally increases worker supply (by definition). In fact it was the "US Tech Workers Union" that championed recent actions against H1B workers. And let's be honest they were not fighting to make our lives easier (by making H1B less draconion), only theirs, by reducing the supply of workers. And while some of them will sugar coat this by pretending to care about H1B worker's conditions and all that, the truth is that as long as the US continues to be a more desirable place to live compared to many other countries, and as long as you need a job to live here, foreign workers will always tilt the equilibrium a bit towards lower wages compared to a domestic worker supply. The true solution would be if you made the path to permanent residence easy for skilled individuals so that they don't need to take these employment decision under duress.
- Lammy 6y ago
  It isn't about worker supply or wages. It's about workers' relative abilities to stand up for something (anything) versus having to keep one's head down and build whatever evil thing management wants built. As long as the "risk of having to leave the country" for speaking up about anything is greater than 0% the obviously-wisest thing to do is keep your mouth shut.
  - kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
    It's no single thing because people's decisions are affected by the sum total of their life's balance sheet. The labor market is something that emerges from the equilibrium of several opposing forces. We as a society decide which causal factors are 'reasonable' and which are 'unfair'. As a simple example, you could argue that 'the wages for married individuals with kids are depressed due to the massive labor pool of single people in their 20s who can be employed for far less as long as you offer them free food and some cutesy perks like happy hours and pool tables'. Ceteris paribus, and as a pure fact of economics, this is true. Of course if you have a bigger supply of labor and hold other things constant, wages will depress, but as a matter of practical policy, we don't consider it 'unfair' that there exist single people who are competing for jobs that married people are also competing for. But many people do consider it unfair that there exist Indians who are competing for jobs that Americans are also competing for. This is a matter of policy and your personal sense of what is fair and what is not, not economics.
    - monksy 6y ago
      Should you have to compete for your wage in comparison to individuals from a foreign country with a much lower cost of living? For the most part you can't change your cost of living. (Yes, you can move else where but the delta between how you you keep/earn is pretty much relative around the country) Single people tend to be younger and less experienced. They tend to be represented in entry level positions, and get paid as such.
      - mikem170 6y ago
        >Should you have to compete for your wage in comparison to individuals from a foreign country with a much lower cost of living? That appears to be the reality we've been living in for a couple/few decades. Airplanes, container ships, and the internet have made the world a much smaller place.
        monksy 6y ago
        Not really. The borders still exist and the export controls still exist as well. It's just been tolerated in the last few decades.
- nbm 6y ago
  The “US Tech Workers Union” doesn’t appear to be a union at all. It appears to be a subsidiary of the “Progressives For Immigration Reform” non-profit aimed fairly exclusively at the H-1b issue, and the only spokesperson I can see for it is the executive director of PFIR. So, I wouldn’t take the “US Tech Workers” as being representative of tech workers or tech workers unions without further research.
  - tdeck 6y ago
    Funny to see this pop up because I happen to know who is behind this cluster of sites (i.e. https://ustechworkers.com/ https://ustechworkers.com/ https://www.cfpup.org/ https://www.cfpup.org/) and it's basically one super right-wing guy and some wealthy donors. None of these is a real union or even a real community group. It's wealthy lobbyists who want to oppose immigration. I always thought it was really shady.
    - notxnphbk 6y ago
      > It's wealthy lobbyists who want to oppose immigration That is funny, I would have never thought that wealthy lobbyists would ever be against easy and mass immigration policies to dilute the labor supply. Much better for corporations to hire people who are willing to work either more cheaply or out of a sense of desperation because job demand is lower than the available/willing worker pool. Do you have a sound logical reason for why wealthy lobbyists would go out of their way to spend money on opposing immigration?
      - tdeck 6y ago
        To be clear the person I'm thinking of is not a professional lobbyist, he's a PE investor. I don't know/understand his motivation and have never met him personally, this is a "friend of a friend" scenario.
      - danans 6y ago
        > Do you have a sound logical reason for why wealthy lobbyists would go out of their way to spend money on opposing immigration? Xenophobia.
- damnyou 6y ago
  The "US Tech Workers" "union" is actually a front for the John Tanton white nationalist network. It is not an actual union. It is true that some other unions like the AFL-CIO have historically opposed immigration on these grounds, though.
- dccoolgai 6y ago
  Politically, it seems to be a big crappy case of playing the ends against the middle... The ends being: 1. All the shitty racists lobbying _against H1bs_ because "took er jerbs" on one side. 2. All the shitty FAANG capitalists lobbying _for_ it on the other because they want to keep engineering salaries controlled. My quick bandaid bill would: 1) Any H1b holder can switch to any job as long as it comes with at least ten percent pay increase. 2) Any H1b holder gets an automatic green card after x years or paid y in federal+state taxes, whichever comes first. 3) Hiring company pays 80pct salary for the extent of the Visa, come hell or high water. You _really_ need that visa? Fine, prove it by taking on more of the risk instead of foisting it on the poor visa holder who came to help you.
titanomachy 6y ago
It wouldn't be so bad if Indians and Chinese could actually immigrate. They have to stay in this precarious H1B state indefinitely, since getting a green card is effectively impossible for people from those countries.
- stack_underflow 6y ago
  Hell, I'm Canadian and I also bucket into the India group since I was born there. Doesn't seem to matter that I was less than a year old when my parents immigrated to Canada either. I don't have high hopes for ever receiving a green card: https://medium.com/@happy_sushi_roll/the-endless-wait-for-a-green-card-e37ac038095a https://medium.com/@happy_sushi_roll/the-endless-wait-for-a-...
  - distant_hat 6y ago
    yea, its more of a quirk of where you were born rather than nationality though both are almost often the same. I have an Indian friend who was born in Iran because his dad was working there when he was born. He lived in Iran less than a year but got his green card in less than 3 months.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    Also because you are a citizen of India no? I mean, it wouldn't be fair if folks could simply skip the line by going to a third country.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
toadi 6y ago
On that last part a Jr. CS question that you maybe not even use in real life for some CS jobs. People forget that not everyone is writing awesome ML things or other awesome things you read about in newspapers. Most of the people are writing CRUD code, do some data transformation , automate so simple office process, etc. Never had much use there of Big-O knowledge.... Does not mean I never used much of this knowledge I have needed at some points. But by that tine I had to refresh the knowledge again...
vmception 6y ago
> I can't believe this is how interviewing works in this field. These pressures are why I can barely bother landing a software role anymore. I'm competing with people that have real pressure to study these algorithm brainteasers, switch into system architecture mode, and then switch into behavioral mode. "Oh thats cute you spent 45 minutes a few times a week doing a brainteaser? I just did 600 of those in a month, and rehearsed what my quirky but culturally similar hobby is." the what now? This is out of control. Yes, I am competing with H1B's that have 60 days to figure it out, no, that doesn't make "immigrants" the problem, this is a symptom of a system broken in several ways, from public policy to tech private sector norms.
- mostlyghostly 6y ago
  And most of these tests are basically bullshit, in terms of real world impact. What's the contest here? Who's most desperate, most willing to sacrifice their life and health for pennies on the dollar? Seriously. I'm a middle aged guy with kids and parents to take care of. I'm not in a position to spend 30 hours / week doing bullshit puzzles & memorizing an algo book for crap that is basically irrelevant to my job. You know what I'm good at? - Spotting the bug before it happens, by watching how the team interacts and who is checking their work... - Parsing client requirements and finding what matters - Duct tape engineering so we can hit a go-live date when everything else is a smoking pile of delayed dog-shit... - Talking the client into dropping a feature that we can't deliver and pivoting into something we already have... Generally of far higher value than some brain teasers...
  - vmception 6y ago
    I'm good at that too, have none of the obligations you do and am just as put off by it. The market values my skills, but I have to do this stuff on my own now. You can make more than big tech will pay you by building in the crypto assets sector by yourself. In the recent past it was just side-gig consulting at an hourly rate or trying to do bug bounties. Now you can just hang out on Telegram or Wechat and learn what people need, get paid completely in Tether from people all around the world. Invest in that ecosystem, or get dollars, whatever you want. No, wait times for anything.
notxnphbk 6y ago
> I can't believe this is how the country I live in treats people who bring their high-demand skills here. Well, I highly doubt American companies are pushing for this treatment. They benefit the most from getting whoever they want to hire however they want to hire them. So, you must be implying that this "treatment" is coming from a non-corporate entity? > that there is a bedrock of people they are allowed to treat this way puts a hard ceiling on your own compensation. This argument is strange, because you are implying that it is the corporations that are kicking people out. But, I am not sure that aligns with their incentives. So, if the corporations are not the ones kicking the desirable people out then why would losing that person force them to put a hard ceiling on others potential compensation? I am not sure I follow the logic. > I can't believe this is how interviewing works in this field. I 100% agre. It is broken. But, I also think we are not being honest as to why. If we think logically (and game-theoretically) then it is easy to assume that these corporations have a huge incentive to engage in this behavior. Could it be that they have a sea of choice beyond anything the tech industry has ever had before?
- singron 6y ago
  The H1B makes it more difficult to change jobs or negotiate salary. Any interruption to employment is a huge risk to staying in the country. Thus those employees are more likely to accept lower offers and stay in those jobs longer. E.g. a citizen can decline an offer in order to negotiate it up, but if the clock is ticking on your h1b, then you wouldn't want to get called on that bluff. The limitations don't seem to dissuade H1b applicants, so companies like that they have more control over those employees without decreasing total supply.
ctvo 6y ago
> I can't believe this is how interviewing works in this field. Everyone in every other respectable field (and ones that pay as well or better, and have worse consequences for hiring a "bad fit") seems entitled to some baseline level of respect and recognition for their experience and work. Having some smarmy piece of shit ask questions from Jr.-year computer science should be justifiable grounds for a broken nose. This is a little myopic. Those other fields you don't mention? They use things like education (did you graduate from an Ivy?), connections (do you know these people in your niche field?), certification (do you have the blessing of a known body / board?) or even insurance (you're covered for malpractice if anything goes wrong) as alternatives. I value software development not requiring those things, and I understand the trade-offs. Yes, I'll have to do a 5-8 hour single day interview that I may need to prep for once every 3-5 years. For 300k+ a year? I'll find a way to deal with it.
- epmaybe 6y ago
  Is that really what the field is paying right now? Is that after 5-10yrs or right out of school?
  - balabaster 6y ago
    That's for a 10 year veteran in the UK. Programmers are treated like commodity. So much so that I left the UK 20 years ago and haven't managed to find anything comparable to contract rates in North America - certainly nothing comparable to SV or Toronto.
  - greyhair 6y ago
    $300K would be a contract rate for someone with 10 years of experience, with your own LLC and insurance. It is pretty easy to find contract positions for $120 per hour, and higher responsibility/skill positions for $150 per hour. And the LLC and related insurance costs per year are trivial. On the east coast, skilled software engineers (not programmers, necessarily) with 10+ years can expect at least $140K plus benefits as a full time employee, and it is pretty typical to see $160K.
  - ctvo 6y ago

kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago

> "My grandparents were labor leaders and I'm pretty certain they'd be ashamed I can't or haven't done more to rectify this. Unfortunately tech unions are typically the ones railing against H1Bs entirely. The mere presence of H1B workers fundamentally increases worker supply (by definition). In fact it was the "US Tech Workers Union" that championed recent actions against H1B workers. And let's be honest they were not fighting to make our lives easier (by making H1B less draconion), only theirs, by reducing the supply of workers. And while some of them will sugar coat this by pretending to care about H1B worker's conditions and all that, the truth is that as long as the US continues to be a more desirable place to live compared to many other countries, and as long as you need a job to live here, foreign workers will always tilt the equilibrium a bit towards lower wages compared to a domestic worker supply. The true solution would be if you made the path to permanent residence easy for skilled individuals so that they don't need to take these employment decision under duress.

Lammy 6y ago
It isn't about worker supply or wages. It's about workers' relative abilities to stand up for something (anything) versus having to keep one's head down and build whatever evil thing management wants built. As long as the "risk of having to leave the country" for speaking up about anything is greater than 0% the obviously-wisest thing to do is keep your mouth shut.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
  It's no single thing because people's decisions are affected by the sum total of their life's balance sheet. The labor market is something that emerges from the equilibrium of several opposing forces. We as a society decide which causal factors are 'reasonable' and which are 'unfair'. As a simple example, you could argue that 'the wages for married individuals with kids are depressed due to the massive labor pool of single people in their 20s who can be employed for far less as long as you offer them free food and some cutesy perks like happy hours and pool tables'. Ceteris paribus, and as a pure fact of economics, this is true. Of course if you have a bigger supply of labor and hold other things constant, wages will depress, but as a matter of practical policy, we don't consider it 'unfair' that there exist single people who are competing for jobs that married people are also competing for. But many people do consider it unfair that there exist Indians who are competing for jobs that Americans are also competing for. This is a matter of policy and your personal sense of what is fair and what is not, not economics.
  - monksy 6y ago
    Should you have to compete for your wage in comparison to individuals from a foreign country with a much lower cost of living? For the most part you can't change your cost of living. (Yes, you can move else where but the delta between how you you keep/earn is pretty much relative around the country) Single people tend to be younger and less experienced. They tend to be represented in entry level positions, and get paid as such.
    - mikem170 6y ago
      >Should you have to compete for your wage in comparison to individuals from a foreign country with a much lower cost of living? That appears to be the reality we've been living in for a couple/few decades. Airplanes, container ships, and the internet have made the world a much smaller place.
      - monksy 6y ago
        Not really. The borders still exist and the export controls still exist as well. It's just been tolerated in the last few decades.
nbm 6y ago
The “US Tech Workers Union” doesn’t appear to be a union at all. It appears to be a subsidiary of the “Progressives For Immigration Reform” non-profit aimed fairly exclusively at the H-1b issue, and the only spokesperson I can see for it is the executive director of PFIR. So, I wouldn’t take the “US Tech Workers” as being representative of tech workers or tech workers unions without further research.
- tdeck 6y ago
  Funny to see this pop up because I happen to know who is behind this cluster of sites (i.e. https://ustechworkers.com/ https://ustechworkers.com/ https://www.cfpup.org/ https://www.cfpup.org/) and it's basically one super right-wing guy and some wealthy donors. None of these is a real union or even a real community group. It's wealthy lobbyists who want to oppose immigration. I always thought it was really shady.
  - notxnphbk 6y ago
    > It's wealthy lobbyists who want to oppose immigration That is funny, I would have never thought that wealthy lobbyists would ever be against easy and mass immigration policies to dilute the labor supply. Much better for corporations to hire people who are willing to work either more cheaply or out of a sense of desperation because job demand is lower than the available/willing worker pool. Do you have a sound logical reason for why wealthy lobbyists would go out of their way to spend money on opposing immigration?
    - tdeck 6y ago
      To be clear the person I'm thinking of is not a professional lobbyist, he's a PE investor. I don't know/understand his motivation and have never met him personally, this is a "friend of a friend" scenario.
    - danans 6y ago
      > Do you have a sound logical reason for why wealthy lobbyists would go out of their way to spend money on opposing immigration? Xenophobia.
damnyou 6y ago
The "US Tech Workers" "union" is actually a front for the John Tanton white nationalist network. It is not an actual union. It is true that some other unions like the AFL-CIO have historically opposed immigration on these grounds, though.
dccoolgai 6y ago
Politically, it seems to be a big crappy case of playing the ends against the middle... The ends being: 1. All the shitty racists lobbying _against H1bs_ because "took er jerbs" on one side. 2. All the shitty FAANG capitalists lobbying _for_ it on the other because they want to keep engineering salaries controlled. My quick bandaid bill would: 1) Any H1b holder can switch to any job as long as it comes with at least ten percent pay increase. 2) Any H1b holder gets an automatic green card after x years or paid y in federal+state taxes, whichever comes first. 3) Hiring company pays 80pct salary for the extent of the Visa, come hell or high water. You _really_ need that visa? Fine, prove it by taking on more of the risk instead of foisting it on the poor visa holder who came to help you.

titanomachy 6y ago

It wouldn't be so bad if Indians and Chinese could actually immigrate. They have to stay in this precarious H1B state indefinitely, since getting a green card is effectively impossible for people from those countries.

stack_underflow 6y ago
Hell, I'm Canadian and I also bucket into the India group since I was born there. Doesn't seem to matter that I was less than a year old when my parents immigrated to Canada either. I don't have high hopes for ever receiving a green card: https://medium.com/@happy_sushi_roll/the-endless-wait-for-a-green-card-e37ac038095a https://medium.com/@happy_sushi_roll/the-endless-wait-for-a-...
- distant_hat 6y ago
  yea, its more of a quirk of where you were born rather than nationality though both are almost often the same. I have an Indian friend who was born in Iran because his dad was working there when he was born. He lived in Iran less than a year but got his green card in less than 3 months.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  Also because you are a citizen of India no? I mean, it wouldn't be fair if folks could simply skip the line by going to a third country.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

toadi 6y ago

On that last part a Jr. CS question that you maybe not even use in real life for some CS jobs. People forget that not everyone is writing awesome ML things or other awesome things you read about in newspapers. Most of the people are writing CRUD code, do some data transformation , automate so simple office process, etc. Never had much use there of Big-O knowledge.... Does not mean I never used much of this knowledge I have needed at some points. But by that tine I had to refresh the knowledge again...

vmception 6y ago

> I can't believe this is how interviewing works in this field. These pressures are why I can barely bother landing a software role anymore. I'm competing with people that have real pressure to study these algorithm brainteasers, switch into system architecture mode, and then switch into behavioral mode. "Oh thats cute you spent 45 minutes a few times a week doing a brainteaser? I just did 600 of those in a month, and rehearsed what my quirky but culturally similar hobby is." the what now? This is out of control. Yes, I am competing with H1B's that have 60 days to figure it out, no, that doesn't make "immigrants" the problem, this is a symptom of a system broken in several ways, from public policy to tech private sector norms.

mostlyghostly 6y ago
And most of these tests are basically bullshit, in terms of real world impact. What's the contest here? Who's most desperate, most willing to sacrifice their life and health for pennies on the dollar? Seriously. I'm a middle aged guy with kids and parents to take care of. I'm not in a position to spend 30 hours / week doing bullshit puzzles & memorizing an algo book for crap that is basically irrelevant to my job. You know what I'm good at? - Spotting the bug before it happens, by watching how the team interacts and who is checking their work... - Parsing client requirements and finding what matters - Duct tape engineering so we can hit a go-live date when everything else is a smoking pile of delayed dog-shit... - Talking the client into dropping a feature that we can't deliver and pivoting into something we already have... Generally of far higher value than some brain teasers...
- vmception 6y ago
  I'm good at that too, have none of the obligations you do and am just as put off by it. The market values my skills, but I have to do this stuff on my own now. You can make more than big tech will pay you by building in the crypto assets sector by yourself. In the recent past it was just side-gig consulting at an hourly rate or trying to do bug bounties. Now you can just hang out on Telegram or Wechat and learn what people need, get paid completely in Tether from people all around the world. Invest in that ecosystem, or get dollars, whatever you want. No, wait times for anything.

notxnphbk 6y ago

> I can't believe this is how the country I live in treats people who bring their high-demand skills here. Well, I highly doubt American companies are pushing for this treatment. They benefit the most from getting whoever they want to hire however they want to hire them. So, you must be implying that this "treatment" is coming from a non-corporate entity? > that there is a bedrock of people they are allowed to treat this way puts a hard ceiling on your own compensation. This argument is strange, because you are implying that it is the corporations that are kicking people out. But, I am not sure that aligns with their incentives. So, if the corporations are not the ones kicking the desirable people out then why would losing that person force them to put a hard ceiling on others potential compensation? I am not sure I follow the logic. > I can't believe this is how interviewing works in this field. I 100% agre. It is broken. But, I also think we are not being honest as to why. If we think logically (and game-theoretically) then it is easy to assume that these corporations have a huge incentive to engage in this behavior. Could it be that they have a sea of choice beyond anything the tech industry has ever had before?

singron 6y ago
The H1B makes it more difficult to change jobs or negotiate salary. Any interruption to employment is a huge risk to staying in the country. Thus those employees are more likely to accept lower offers and stay in those jobs longer. E.g. a citizen can decline an offer in order to negotiate it up, but if the clock is ticking on your h1b, then you wouldn't want to get called on that bluff. The limitations don't seem to dissuade H1b applicants, so companies like that they have more control over those employees without decreasing total supply.

ctvo 6y ago

> I can't believe this is how interviewing works in this field. Everyone in every other respectable field (and ones that pay as well or better, and have worse consequences for hiring a "bad fit") seems entitled to some baseline level of respect and recognition for their experience and work. Having some smarmy piece of shit ask questions from Jr.-year computer science should be justifiable grounds for a broken nose. This is a little myopic. Those other fields you don't mention? They use things like education (did you graduate from an Ivy?), connections (do you know these people in your niche field?), certification (do you have the blessing of a known body / board?) or even insurance (you're covered for malpractice if anything goes wrong) as alternatives. I value software development not requiring those things, and I understand the trade-offs. Yes, I'll have to do a 5-8 hour single day interview that I may need to prep for once every 3-5 years. For 300k+ a year? I'll find a way to deal with it.

epmaybe 6y ago
Is that really what the field is paying right now? Is that after 5-10yrs or right out of school?
- balabaster 6y ago
  That's for a 10 year veteran in the UK. Programmers are treated like commodity. So much so that I left the UK 20 years ago and haven't managed to find anything comparable to contract rates in North America - certainly nothing comparable to SV or Toronto.
- greyhair 6y ago
  $300K would be a contract rate for someone with 10 years of experience, with your own LLC and insurance. It is pretty easy to find contract positions for $120 per hour, and higher responsibility/skill positions for $150 per hour. And the LLC and related insurance costs per year are trivial. On the east coast, skilled software engineers (not programmers, necessarily) with 10+ years can expect at least $140K plus benefits as a full time employee, and it is pretty typical to see $160K.
- ctvo 6y ago