8 ms·

I vaguely recall that the "indentured" h1b workers (as oppose to the "proper" h1b like I had) owe money back to home, and that debt becomes instantly due if the

by DenisM 6y ago

I vaguely recall that the "indentured" h1b workers (as oppose to the "proper" h1b like I had) owe money back to home, and that debt becomes instantly due if they bail out. If they were super-stars they would be able to cover it from the Amazon signup bonus (and become indentured to Amazon - your signup bonus is due back if you bail out early). However superstars rarely end up in those jobs. We're looking at people with kinda average engineering skills, poor understanding of the American culture, no connections, and grim determination to grind their way out of their old life. Liberating the indentured h1b workers is not just flipping a legal switch, it's a cultural integration project.

chrisseaton 6y ago
> We're looking at people with kinda average engineering skills, poor understanding of the American culture, no connections, and grim determination to grind their way out of their old life. I don't think these are the kind of people getting an H1B visa, though. It's usually the super-talented people they hire on H1B.
- madeofpalk 6y ago
  Usually?
- yowlingcat 6y ago
  What makes you say that? From what I've seen, there's an entire cottage industry of cheap, expendably treated labor which forms the WITCH acronym which exists to abuse the H1B visa. I believe that is who they target.
  - howlgarnish 6y ago
    Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell? Weak Interaction Trap for Charged Particles? https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/WITCH https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/WITCH
    - ralph84 6y ago
      Wipro Infosys Tata Cognizant HCL
    - swrj 6y ago
      Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, HCL - a bunch of consulting companies.
      - joj123 6y ago
        Wow. That's a mean acronym (whoever came up with it). FWIW - these companies add tremendous value to enterprises in the US and yes, they do that by paying lower wages to folks flying in from India (compared to American counterparts), but it's still a upgrade for these engineers (plus a chance to experience America). I understand the whole "but they are circumventing the spirit of the Visa" angle, but they are operating in an environment where FAANGs spend a lot of money lobbying for favorable regulations. I don't see a big ethical difference between 'I will pay millions to lobby and get laws written in my favor' and 'I will exploit loopholes in the system to better my business'
        yowlingcat 6y ago
        > FWIW - these companies add tremendous value to enterprises in the US The 1619 project made waves domestically for questioning and highlighting the speciousness of such arguments. It is because these companies are able to pay labor below market rate (by restricting mobility and creating indentured servitude conditions) that they are able to add "tremendous value" to enterprises in the first place. But of course, I question even that. To those who have ever been in the unfortunate position of the counterparty in either inheriting a codebase or making the argument against them internally, the code produced by these kinds of body shops is frequently ROI negative -- they're the "high interest credit card" of engineering orgs. That is baked into the profit structure internally of these consulting companies. Your loss is their gain. They will promise whatever they need to secure the contract upfront, and fail to deliver results. They are incentivized to do so, because they are incentivized to think short term rather than long term as owners. You pay less upfront, but the hidden risks and maintenance burdens continue to stack over time. And so from a discounted cash flow analysis, there is a strong argument to be made that they contribute negative enterprise value and serve only to extract cashflow through a sleight of hand. Of course, on a quarter to quarter basis, they provide an easy way for an enterprising management consultant (or corporate financier) to cut costs and increase apparent profit to expenses. But if it was so easy to achieve technical outcomes this way, why wouldn't everyone do it? > they are operating in an environment where FAANGs spend a lot of money lobbying for favorable regulations There are certainly myriad issues with how FAANGs operate. One only needs to look at their previous settlements with the DoJ for wage collusion to see they are no angels; far from it, they often behave in an anticompetitive manner reminiscent of Gilded Age robber barons. With that said, they are still able to create some kind of a long term incentive alignment by generally setting the market price for top talent quite high -- we need look no further than levels.fyi to see evidence of that. And the proof is in the pudding -- FAANGs have continued to capture a larger and larger percentage of the SP500, managing to create growth in market cap at scales that are scarcely possible in other sectors. Their P/E ratios reflect this, and it derives from their ability to turn technology into leverage over the market and a sustainable competitive advantage with network effects. That is a far cry from consulting body shops where technology is viewed as a cost center to be minimized rather than profit center to be fully exploited.
  - vivekf 6y ago
    I think the list of top H1B sponsor companies are a more than just these firms https://www.immihelp.com/employer/h1b-top-sponsor-2020/overall https://www.immihelp.com/employer/h1b-top-sponsor-2020/overa...
    - yowlingcat 6y ago
      That may be true, but the ratio of salary to petitions is lowest for those firms and others like it -- consulting body shops which do not in and of themselves innovate.
- Frost1x 6y ago
  Oh boy I know a lot of H1B holders. They're far from "super talented" but boy were they cheaper than their competitors. They're not bad people but they're not "super talented" nor were their particular skills that difficult to acquire.
- not2b 6y ago
  It depends. There are lots of brilliant engineers and programmers on H1B visas, but there are also job shops, like Infosys, that grabs lots of H1B's for contract jobs. They aren't going for stars, they are going for competent people that they can underpay.
- briandear 6y ago
  If they are “super talented,” then why not the O-1 visa?
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    I think that's for internationally recognised level people rather than just super talented at what you do?
    - Swizec 6y ago
      Am on O-1 visa, would consider myself closer to super talented than internationally recognised. It’s very achievable if you put the right kind of work in. Some blogs for the curious: https://swizec.com/blog/how-i-got-a-visa-normally-reserved-for-nobel-laureates/ https://swizec.com/blog/how-i-got-a-visa-normally-reserved-f... https://swizec.com/blog/how-i-sponsored-my-own-genius-visa/ https://swizec.com/blog/how-i-sponsored-my-own-genius-visa/
      - IncRnd 6y ago
        Sometimes the forceful and imaginative implementation is more valuable than the idea. Do you think that might be why you got an O-1?
- opportune 6y ago
  I don’t think it’s fair to say H1B holders are super-talented. For example most WITCH consultants are on H1-b and... not super-talented. I’ve worked with some brilliant people on H1-b too but the H1-b system as is does not filter for “super-talented”
- blahblahblogger 6y ago
  I work at a Bay Area tech company with a lot of H1Bs. I consider myself to be an average coder, no formal education, and yet it behooves me why I'm sitting next to Stanford and Harvard grads at work doing the same grunt-work coding that I'm doing. Not anything original, not anything H1B worthy, just building front-end UIs and basic BE stuff. There's of course H1Bs working on the more complex things too like machine learning (complex to me) but I'm just astounded by the number of "brilliant" H1Bs that I have to stand shoulder to shoulder with when doing my average (at best?) coding.
  - kamaal 6y ago
    >>why I'm sitting next to Stanford and Harvard grads at work doing the same grunt-work coding that I'm doing. As some one who has had the same experience. One of the things I note is many of these people undervalue themselves and their training doing that kind of work for ad companies. They could be writing code for the robotic arm that could mine asteroids, but they write code to show ads to people. Well people have their own priorities. But the lesson I learn is just because they work with us it doesn't mean the definition of smart gets blurred. It just means they downgraded their aim and are likely hitting it more easily compared to us. The question one must ask is. How can we learn from these smart people?
  - squidfish 6y ago
    "behooves" That word, I don't think it means what you think it means.
biztos 6y ago
Liberating them is probably pretty complicated, and I would love to see that happen, but preventing more becoming indentured (at a cost to the local labor market) probably is a legal switch. We've had other forms of indentured servitude that were summarily abolished, sometimes with difficulty. Certainly the government should not be incentivizing this, which seems to have been the case for a while.
- rickdangerous1 6y ago
  "We've had other forms of indentured servitude that were summarily abolished, sometimes with difficulty" Can I nominate you for understatement of the week? The American civil war was indeed some "difficulty".
ThrustVectoring 6y ago
Protection against exploitative debt collection practices extends to non-citizen residents with US bank accounts and employers. Granted, it's effective coercion if the visa-holders think it's effective, so there's definitely some cultural integration and teaching stuff there, but it can definitely be done. Granted, if family in the mother country are effectively held hostage to the debt payments, that's a different story, but there can be enough protection for US law to protect h1b workers against exploitation by law-abiding employers and creditors.
mypalmike 6y ago
*Edit : Apparently I misinterpreted the parent post. Please disregard. Are you saying that Amazon's H1B workers are hired specifically for to their "kinda average" skills, lack of connections, etc.? Having been involved with hiring at Amazon, using these criteria would have to be part of a secret hiring system that parallels the one I was trained on which focused on raising the talent bar and avoiding bias.
- csa 6y ago
  My read was that OP was saying “kinda average” are typically in “indentured servitude” jobs. Superstars can pay back money owed back home from an Amazon bonus... not sure if OP meant “from the start” or “if they bailed from indentured servitude job”.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
aoetalks 6y ago
What is "indentured" h1b vs "proper" h1b - is there somewhere I can read more about this?
magtux 6y ago
This is just pure xenophobic drivel. There are people of different levels of talent in a large population set. Your characterization speaks more to your attitude than the millions of people that you malign.
- DenisM 6y ago
  You're arguing with something I didn't say.

by DenisM 6y ago

chrisseaton 6y ago

> We're looking at people with kinda average engineering skills, poor understanding of the American culture, no connections, and grim determination to grind their way out of their old life. I don't think these are the kind of people getting an H1B visa, though. It's usually the super-talented people they hire on H1B.

madeofpalk 6y ago
Usually?
yowlingcat 6y ago
What makes you say that? From what I've seen, there's an entire cottage industry of cheap, expendably treated labor which forms the WITCH acronym which exists to abuse the H1B visa. I believe that is who they target.
- howlgarnish 6y ago
  Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell? Weak Interaction Trap for Charged Particles? https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/WITCH https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/WITCH
  - ralph84 6y ago
    Wipro Infosys Tata Cognizant HCL
  - swrj 6y ago
    Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, HCL - a bunch of consulting companies.
    - joj123 6y ago
      Wow. That's a mean acronym (whoever came up with it). FWIW - these companies add tremendous value to enterprises in the US and yes, they do that by paying lower wages to folks flying in from India (compared to American counterparts), but it's still a upgrade for these engineers (plus a chance to experience America). I understand the whole "but they are circumventing the spirit of the Visa" angle, but they are operating in an environment where FAANGs spend a lot of money lobbying for favorable regulations. I don't see a big ethical difference between 'I will pay millions to lobby and get laws written in my favor' and 'I will exploit loopholes in the system to better my business'
      - yowlingcat 6y ago
        > FWIW - these companies add tremendous value to enterprises in the US The 1619 project made waves domestically for questioning and highlighting the speciousness of such arguments. It is because these companies are able to pay labor below market rate (by restricting mobility and creating indentured servitude conditions) that they are able to add "tremendous value" to enterprises in the first place. But of course, I question even that. To those who have ever been in the unfortunate position of the counterparty in either inheriting a codebase or making the argument against them internally, the code produced by these kinds of body shops is frequently ROI negative -- they're the "high interest credit card" of engineering orgs. That is baked into the profit structure internally of these consulting companies. Your loss is their gain. They will promise whatever they need to secure the contract upfront, and fail to deliver results. They are incentivized to do so, because they are incentivized to think short term rather than long term as owners. You pay less upfront, but the hidden risks and maintenance burdens continue to stack over time. And so from a discounted cash flow analysis, there is a strong argument to be made that they contribute negative enterprise value and serve only to extract cashflow through a sleight of hand. Of course, on a quarter to quarter basis, they provide an easy way for an enterprising management consultant (or corporate financier) to cut costs and increase apparent profit to expenses. But if it was so easy to achieve technical outcomes this way, why wouldn't everyone do it? > they are operating in an environment where FAANGs spend a lot of money lobbying for favorable regulations There are certainly myriad issues with how FAANGs operate. One only needs to look at their previous settlements with the DoJ for wage collusion to see they are no angels; far from it, they often behave in an anticompetitive manner reminiscent of Gilded Age robber barons. With that said, they are still able to create some kind of a long term incentive alignment by generally setting the market price for top talent quite high -- we need look no further than levels.fyi to see evidence of that. And the proof is in the pudding -- FAANGs have continued to capture a larger and larger percentage of the SP500, managing to create growth in market cap at scales that are scarcely possible in other sectors. Their P/E ratios reflect this, and it derives from their ability to turn technology into leverage over the market and a sustainable competitive advantage with network effects. That is a far cry from consulting body shops where technology is viewed as a cost center to be minimized rather than profit center to be fully exploited.
- vivekf 6y ago
  I think the list of top H1B sponsor companies are a more than just these firms https://www.immihelp.com/employer/h1b-top-sponsor-2020/overall https://www.immihelp.com/employer/h1b-top-sponsor-2020/overa...
  - yowlingcat 6y ago
    That may be true, but the ratio of salary to petitions is lowest for those firms and others like it -- consulting body shops which do not in and of themselves innovate.
Frost1x 6y ago
Oh boy I know a lot of H1B holders. They're far from "super talented" but boy were they cheaper than their competitors. They're not bad people but they're not "super talented" nor were their particular skills that difficult to acquire.
not2b 6y ago
It depends. There are lots of brilliant engineers and programmers on H1B visas, but there are also job shops, like Infosys, that grabs lots of H1B's for contract jobs. They aren't going for stars, they are going for competent people that they can underpay.
briandear 6y ago
If they are “super talented,” then why not the O-1 visa?
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  I think that's for internationally recognised level people rather than just super talented at what you do?
  - Swizec 6y ago
    Am on O-1 visa, would consider myself closer to super talented than internationally recognised. It’s very achievable if you put the right kind of work in. Some blogs for the curious: https://swizec.com/blog/how-i-got-a-visa-normally-reserved-for-nobel-laureates/ https://swizec.com/blog/how-i-got-a-visa-normally-reserved-f... https://swizec.com/blog/how-i-sponsored-my-own-genius-visa/ https://swizec.com/blog/how-i-sponsored-my-own-genius-visa/
    - IncRnd 6y ago
      Sometimes the forceful and imaginative implementation is more valuable than the idea. Do you think that might be why you got an O-1?
opportune 6y ago
I don’t think it’s fair to say H1B holders are super-talented. For example most WITCH consultants are on H1-b and... not super-talented. I’ve worked with some brilliant people on H1-b too but the H1-b system as is does not filter for “super-talented”
blahblahblogger 6y ago
I work at a Bay Area tech company with a lot of H1Bs. I consider myself to be an average coder, no formal education, and yet it behooves me why I'm sitting next to Stanford and Harvard grads at work doing the same grunt-work coding that I'm doing. Not anything original, not anything H1B worthy, just building front-end UIs and basic BE stuff. There's of course H1Bs working on the more complex things too like machine learning (complex to me) but I'm just astounded by the number of "brilliant" H1Bs that I have to stand shoulder to shoulder with when doing my average (at best?) coding.
- kamaal 6y ago
  >>why I'm sitting next to Stanford and Harvard grads at work doing the same grunt-work coding that I'm doing. As some one who has had the same experience. One of the things I note is many of these people undervalue themselves and their training doing that kind of work for ad companies. They could be writing code for the robotic arm that could mine asteroids, but they write code to show ads to people. Well people have their own priorities. But the lesson I learn is just because they work with us it doesn't mean the definition of smart gets blurred. It just means they downgraded their aim and are likely hitting it more easily compared to us. The question one must ask is. How can we learn from these smart people?
- squidfish 6y ago
  "behooves" That word, I don't think it means what you think it means.

biztos 6y ago

Liberating them is probably pretty complicated, and I would love to see that happen, but preventing more becoming indentured (at a cost to the local labor market) probably is a legal switch. We've had other forms of indentured servitude that were summarily abolished, sometimes with difficulty. Certainly the government should not be incentivizing this, which seems to have been the case for a while.

rickdangerous1 6y ago
"We've had other forms of indentured servitude that were summarily abolished, sometimes with difficulty" Can I nominate you for understatement of the week? The American civil war was indeed some "difficulty".

ThrustVectoring 6y ago

Protection against exploitative debt collection practices extends to non-citizen residents with US bank accounts and employers. Granted, it's effective coercion if the visa-holders think it's effective, so there's definitely some cultural integration and teaching stuff there, but it can definitely be done. Granted, if family in the mother country are effectively held hostage to the debt payments, that's a different story, but there can be enough protection for US law to protect h1b workers against exploitation by law-abiding employers and creditors.

mypalmike 6y ago

*Edit : Apparently I misinterpreted the parent post. Please disregard. Are you saying that Amazon's H1B workers are hired specifically for to their "kinda average" skills, lack of connections, etc.? Having been involved with hiring at Amazon, using these criteria would have to be part of a secret hiring system that parallels the one I was trained on which focused on raising the talent bar and avoiding bias.

csa 6y ago
My read was that OP was saying “kinda average” are typically in “indentured servitude” jobs. Superstars can pay back money owed back home from an Amazon bonus... not sure if OP meant “from the start” or “if they bailed from indentured servitude job”.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

aoetalks 6y ago

What is "indentured" h1b vs "proper" h1b - is there somewhere I can read more about this?

magtux 6y ago

This is just pure xenophobic drivel. There are people of different levels of talent in a large population set. Your characterization speaks more to your attitude than the millions of people that you malign.

DenisM 6y ago
You're arguing with something I didn't say.