12 ms·

There seems to be some sort imputation that, just because someone is on an H-1b, that they are not a good engineer. I used to be on an H-1b and gladly came bac

There seems to be some sort imputation that, just because someone is on an H-1b, that they are not a good engineer. I used to be on an H-1b and gladly came back home to India. I run my own business now. And yes. I'm ex-Anazon. It was a tough place to work, but circa mid-nineties, the stock options made it worth working for them. I'm willing to bet I'll outcode a significant fraction of the audience on this site. And I'm not even close to the best developer around. Some of the smartest people I've met have been on an H-1b visa. Please consider not letting prejudice affect your view. You'll do yourself a disservice by underestimating your competition.

Eric_WVGG 1y ago
I believe his point is that, even if you expand the available pool of developers outside of the US, that pool is still exhaustible.
president_zippy 1y ago
I never implied that, let alone said it. The only thing I implied is that workers with fewer rights that a U.S. citizen are easier to exploit and abuse. If I refuse to take a work-related call at 3am, the worst that can happen is that I get fired, and spend months looking for a new job. If you refuse to take a work-related call at 3am, you get fired and lose your ability to stay in a place you have lived for 5+ years and made your home. That's BS, and I hate it almost as much as you do. You can be blackmailed with deportation, and I can be replaced with someone who can be blackmailed with deportation. We're both getting screwed in this current arrangement.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- FrustratedMonky 1y ago
  Nice exchange. Both points are valid.
- 1718627440 1y ago
  Requesting work-related calls at 3am should be illegal and is in a lot of places.
  - marcosdumay 1y ago
    I doubt it's illegal in many places. What is common is that being available counts as work.
    - 1718627440 1y ago
      Your work hours are specified in your work contract. Demanding service without compensation and contract sounds highly illegal.
  - cryptonector 1y ago
    We have on-call duty for this. It should perhaps be compensated differently, and certainly one person should not always be on-call (though I have been at times on-call for months at a time, but for a thing that normally does not page at night). But what are we do to, have staff around the world so that someone can be on-call during their local business hours so we can have 24/7 support?
hopelite 1y ago
I think you’re not considering the other side of that perspective. I am sure you are very happy for your fortune to have been plucked out of India and been given the opportunity to work at Amazon and presumably live in America, which put you in the place you described that seems to be in a really good position today. The issue is that not only was the H1-B meant for highly specialized people that cannot be found in the USA, it has very long been absolutely abused by American corporations and politicians that have been betraying their own people for several decades now by engaging and ignoring this abuse that was really just about undermining salaries of Americans by giving the opportunity to you rather than Americans, while it was really mostly about enriching the rich. You were essentially just a method for the rich to get richer. I am sure you are a wonderful person, but it’s simply an unjust treatment of Americans, even if you personally had nothing directly or reasonably to do with it. The betrayal and abuse was perpetrated by the “Americans” that led the corporations and paid off the politicians, and also the American citizens that were distracted and careless about their own politics and government and future for their own children. I doubt you would be ok with your own ruling class and rich to betray your children and the future of India, would you? It’s crazy, but America’s people largely and for a long time absolutely betrayed their own people. I would not wish it on any society, even though it has been pervasive all over the “West”, where the rich, corporate captains, and politicians betray their own people. Imagine if your Indian politicians were to sell out India to the West or maybe import Africans or something similar, I would hope that the Indian people would make it absolutely clear to the politicians and rich that they are staring down a loaded gun and it’s not their finger on the trigger. So do I also wish it for the people of all of the western countries that they retake their sovereignty and self determination away from the rather parasitic oligarchy that has unconscionably been betraying its own people out of undeterred greed and crime against the very people that allowed making them rich and powerful in the first place. It is not a personal thing, I think it’s just that people are recently getting a lot more angry about things because the American empire is hitting a rough patch that it has not experienced in anyone’s living memory and as it is said, (adapted) the naked people start getting angry when the tide goes out and there aren’t enough jobs to also be super generous by giving them away to Indians benefiting from the abusive systems of the parasitic cabal of the ruling class. What you may also not be totally aware of, is that H1-B is only one of many different systems and programs that have been abused and quite literally benefit and profit foreigners overt Americans. Imagine if that existed in India; where I go to India, make 2-3x what the average Indian makes, the government gives me free housing, my children get free education and free healthcare, and I get extremely beneficial government secured loan terms on business loans and get grants to start a business and free consulting and services, and I get to bring dozens of my friends and family into India to work in my business, and I also get beneficial home loans to buy up houses and drive up prices, and my foreign children get preferential treatment in Indian universities (…while local Indians don’t get those things) and I run for office while all the foreigners I and my advantaged community brought over to India start getting our people into the government and we start taking over Indian institutions and government offices. I combine and crossed things a bit because is a bit more complicated and nuances of course, and many Americans aren’t even aware of just how many programs and states are in place that advantage foreigners and disadvantage native Americans, who could even very well be the descendants of the founders of America. That’s why things have gotten rather tense and as it looks, unfortunately, it will likely only get worse from here; especially as BRICS builds out more of their alternative fiscal, monetary, economic, geopolitical structures; and the same traitors that control the USA will/are starting to get very nervous and borderline panicky. It seems Thucydides Trap is in full effect.
phatfish 1y ago
But why not be a superstar engineer in India to start with? Why the round trip to another country to disrupt their society?
- tiagod 1y ago
  For one reason or another, big tech salaries are highly clustered in the US.
  - cudgy 1y ago
    … At a few small companies clustered in a small area of a single province called California.
    - TheCoelacanth 1y ago
      The very highest salaries are to an extent, but almost any major metro area in the US has plenty of engineering jobs that are very high paying compared to almost anywhere outside of the US.
- Hammershaft 1y ago
  How is he disrupting our society? He's working & building things in our country, and paying taxes that don't benefit him as much as pay for our entitlements.
RobRivera 1y ago
>There seems to be some sort imputation that, just because someone is on an H-1b, that they are not a good engineer. I fail to reach this interpretation in this thread.
cudgy 1y ago
Well at least you’re a humble outcoder.
rirze 1y ago
> circa mid-nineties I'm interpreting this as mid-1990s, in which case I very much believe in your technical ability. My dad came over late-1990s and he worked at mid-sized companies ever since. Even then, he and his H1B peers were decently intelligent. I would caution your defense of today's H1B/L1s/OPT workers; I'd say the quality of Indian engineers in the US has halved every 10 years. Today's Indian engineers come to the US because they can't enroll in a decent college in India and/or obtain a upper-middle class salary from a job. It is an entirely different mechanism for which people are migrating over. It used to be brain drain, now it is sewage drain. The H1Bs in the big tech companies are maybe 50/50 technically decent, but everywhere else, they are just taking contracting spots. It is a very corrupt and bloated system that has to go because they are not providing valuable work.

Eric_WVGG 1y ago

I believe his point is that, even if you expand the available pool of developers outside of the US, that pool is still exhaustible.

president_zippy 1y ago

I never implied that, let alone said it. The only thing I implied is that workers with fewer rights that a U.S. citizen are easier to exploit and abuse. If I refuse to take a work-related call at 3am, the worst that can happen is that I get fired, and spend months looking for a new job. If you refuse to take a work-related call at 3am, you get fired and lose your ability to stay in a place you have lived for 5+ years and made your home. That's BS, and I hate it almost as much as you do. You can be blackmailed with deportation, and I can be replaced with someone who can be blackmailed with deportation. We're both getting screwed in this current arrangement.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
FrustratedMonky 1y ago
Nice exchange. Both points are valid.
1718627440 1y ago
Requesting work-related calls at 3am should be illegal and is in a lot of places.
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  I doubt it's illegal in many places. What is common is that being available counts as work.
  - 1718627440 1y ago
    Your work hours are specified in your work contract. Demanding service without compensation and contract sounds highly illegal.
- cryptonector 1y ago
  We have on-call duty for this. It should perhaps be compensated differently, and certainly one person should not always be on-call (though I have been at times on-call for months at a time, but for a thing that normally does not page at night). But what are we do to, have staff around the world so that someone can be on-call during their local business hours so we can have 24/7 support?

hopelite 1y ago

I think you’re not considering the other side of that perspective. I am sure you are very happy for your fortune to have been plucked out of India and been given the opportunity to work at Amazon and presumably live in America, which put you in the place you described that seems to be in a really good position today. The issue is that not only was the H1-B meant for highly specialized people that cannot be found in the USA, it has very long been absolutely abused by American corporations and politicians that have been betraying their own people for several decades now by engaging and ignoring this abuse that was really just about undermining salaries of Americans by giving the opportunity to you rather than Americans, while it was really mostly about enriching the rich. You were essentially just a method for the rich to get richer. I am sure you are a wonderful person, but it’s simply an unjust treatment of Americans, even if you personally had nothing directly or reasonably to do with it. The betrayal and abuse was perpetrated by the “Americans” that led the corporations and paid off the politicians, and also the American citizens that were distracted and careless about their own politics and government and future for their own children. I doubt you would be ok with your own ruling class and rich to betray your children and the future of India, would you? It’s crazy, but America’s people largely and for a long time absolutely betrayed their own people. I would not wish it on any society, even though it has been pervasive all over the “West”, where the rich, corporate captains, and politicians betray their own people. Imagine if your Indian politicians were to sell out India to the West or maybe import Africans or something similar, I would hope that the Indian people would make it absolutely clear to the politicians and rich that they are staring down a loaded gun and it’s not their finger on the trigger. So do I also wish it for the people of all of the western countries that they retake their sovereignty and self determination away from the rather parasitic oligarchy that has unconscionably been betraying its own people out of undeterred greed and crime against the very people that allowed making them rich and powerful in the first place. It is not a personal thing, I think it’s just that people are recently getting a lot more angry about things because the American empire is hitting a rough patch that it has not experienced in anyone’s living memory and as it is said, (adapted) the naked people start getting angry when the tide goes out and there aren’t enough jobs to also be super generous by giving them away to Indians benefiting from the abusive systems of the parasitic cabal of the ruling class. What you may also not be totally aware of, is that H1-B is only one of many different systems and programs that have been abused and quite literally benefit and profit foreigners overt Americans. Imagine if that existed in India; where I go to India, make 2-3x what the average Indian makes, the government gives me free housing, my children get free education and free healthcare, and I get extremely beneficial government secured loan terms on business loans and get grants to start a business and free consulting and services, and I get to bring dozens of my friends and family into India to work in my business, and I also get beneficial home loans to buy up houses and drive up prices, and my foreign children get preferential treatment in Indian universities (…while local Indians don’t get those things) and I run for office while all the foreigners I and my advantaged community brought over to India start getting our people into the government and we start taking over Indian institutions and government offices. I combine and crossed things a bit because is a bit more complicated and nuances of course, and many Americans aren’t even aware of just how many programs and states are in place that advantage foreigners and disadvantage native Americans, who could even very well be the descendants of the founders of America. That’s why things have gotten rather tense and as it looks, unfortunately, it will likely only get worse from here; especially as BRICS builds out more of their alternative fiscal, monetary, economic, geopolitical structures; and the same traitors that control the USA will/are starting to get very nervous and borderline panicky. It seems Thucydides Trap is in full effect.

phatfish 1y ago

But why not be a superstar engineer in India to start with? Why the round trip to another country to disrupt their society?

tiagod 1y ago
For one reason or another, big tech salaries are highly clustered in the US.
- cudgy 1y ago
  … At a few small companies clustered in a small area of a single province called California.
  - TheCoelacanth 1y ago
    The very highest salaries are to an extent, but almost any major metro area in the US has plenty of engineering jobs that are very high paying compared to almost anywhere outside of the US.
Hammershaft 1y ago
How is he disrupting our society? He's working & building things in our country, and paying taxes that don't benefit him as much as pay for our entitlements.

RobRivera 1y ago

>There seems to be some sort imputation that, just because someone is on an H-1b, that they are not a good engineer. I fail to reach this interpretation in this thread.

cudgy 1y ago

Well at least you’re a humble outcoder.

rirze 1y ago

> circa mid-nineties I'm interpreting this as mid-1990s, in which case I very much believe in your technical ability. My dad came over late-1990s and he worked at mid-sized companies ever since. Even then, he and his H1B peers were decently intelligent. I would caution your defense of today's H1B/L1s/OPT workers; I'd say the quality of Indian engineers in the US has halved every 10 years. Today's Indian engineers come to the US because they can't enroll in a decent college in India and/or obtain a upper-middle class salary from a job. It is an entirely different mechanism for which people are migrating over. It used to be brain drain, now it is sewage drain. The H1Bs in the big tech companies are maybe 50/50 technically decent, but everywhere else, they are just taking contracting spots. It is a very corrupt and bloated system that has to go because they are not providing valuable work.