I’ve worked with comp-sci H-1Bs, nothing spectacular and certainly not the worst. There is, however, a cultural/language disparity where I noticed an unearned sense of eminence. US labor is not without its issues, but the context of the tasks & situations was much easier to discuss, dispute, & resolve. I never felt the H-1B overhead was worth it.
The biggest problem is that cheap foreigners displace American workers and they depress the wages.
Why should anybody take the hard STEM courses, when you end up working long hours for low wages?
It created Catch-22 vicious death spiral. American do not want to study these degrees, so foreigners are imported, so then even less Americans want to study these subjects.
Could India be paying Big Tech to take their engineers and programmers to America?
I haven’t heard this, but it makes sense in the long-term to invest billions to do this with the expectation to earn trillions down the road.
According to the 2011 Census of India, approximately 10.6% of the population reported speaking English as a first, second, or third language, totaling around 129 million individuals.
After speaking English with dozens of people in Eastern Europe where we traveled several months, I was surprised about how few people spoke English in Kerala, India, where we lived for several weeks. I think many people get that cultural fact backswords.
Can anybody name one H-1B Indian worker in technology whose talent is so exceptional that they are irreplaceable by any American?
Serious question...
The DEPLORABLES and CONTEMPTIBLE FOOLS who believe that the H1B program is contributing to the long term decay of America can F themselves in the face. Damn peasants!
/sarc but, sadly, for some this is being revealed as their true attitude. Sometimes the mask slips off.
“I graduated from @MaritimeCollege —what @stevenujifusa calls “the Harvard of Maritime.” Highest attrition rate in the country. 185 credits. Classes like spherical geometry. But it’s a state school in The Bronx.”
SUNY Maritime has one of the lowest attrition rates ler their website.
Their “spherical geometry” class in focused on navigation. Not a resume enhancer for work outside of that area.
In the non software field of aerospace design and manufacturing I came across many engineers from countries like India that were hired in at high level positions because of masters and PhD’s in engineering. Almost all the projects they ran failed. My guess is that you can just buy your advanced degree. On average they would have been likely to fail at changing the inner tube on the rear wheel of a ten speed. And they brought the caste system with them. One guy kept getting promoted and assigned to more complex systems, and failing. I asked one of the India guys, what’s up with him. Oh he’s a Jain,. WTF. I guess the British Raj still rules the sub continent.
it may sound racist but back in the day before i was retired, some of the worst interviews i’ve ever had as an applicant or as an interviewer were with se asian indians.
the biggest problem: the language barrier was impossible. often couldn’t make myself understood. technical questions were rife with misinterpretations or outright lies. persons took my answers and misinterpreted them on the otherside. or they couldn’t ask the question clearly enough in english.
i could have a great interview as an applicant with an english speaker for a company one day, and have a horrible one the next with an indian in the same company. culture and communication styles were a big problem. i’m sure many good people got turned down and many disasters were hired.
just a nightmare.
The solution is to either (a) terminate the H1-B visa program, or (b) impose a fee on employers for each H1-B they sponsor so the cost of these employees is higher than a US employee would be. It’s an easy fix - remove the financial incentive for companies to try to game H1-B and it can be restored to its stated purpose. If it’s not economical to hire an H1-B, companies will only apply for H1-B for special cases involving a few stars in their field.
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Bfl
I was a Boeing engineer. In Experimental flight test.
We were on the high end of Boeing engineers.
We had lots of Vietnamese, Iranians, and of course white
Americans. Our biggest problems occurred when we had some Indian managers. They just didn’t get it.
Our American managers weren’t much better.
We were like herding kittens. That much talent in that small of an area was out of their control.
We were given assignments and budgets and we got it done.
Best manager I ever had was a Lesbian that said just get it done, ask for help help when you need it.
My best and most productive years at Boeing.
After the merger I decided to leave as I could not stand the change.
Wonder why newer Boeing Planes are shit?
Us good good guys left.
About half my family worked for Boeing at one time or another.
And a good many of my friends.
None of us advise any of our family to work there now!
I’ve seen companies with an Indian CEO. Once in, layoffs of American workers. 90% moved to India. Then the senior leadership becomes Indian. You can almost smell ‘the club’...and you’re not in it. Even (Indian) strangers, when introduced, seem to have a warm welcome to each other that’s not present to others.
I hate their caste system. I hate their attitudes toward female babies. I hate their dowry culture.
I’ve met some wonderful Indians. I’ve also met the worst slimeballs I’ve ever met, all seem to be Indian. Why is it that all the ‘scam call centers’ seem to be in India? Entire teams of people knowing they’re ripping people off. Group theft. The have no morals.
Yes, our friend who used to pull down over $200,000 per year coding got sideways with his employer because of his ethics, political identity etc and they let him go and have actively black balled him in the industry. Being MAGA is a death sentence in tech world.
He just developed a new app for party boat navigation and there is a lot of interest til the prospective buyers hear from his old employer. He’s hoping when Trump takes office things will change.
The objection to cheaper workers was the primary reason why Northern laborers hated slavery. It was an economic argument for the vast majority of working people in the 1850s. They didn't want slaves taking their jobs. They saw them as an economic threat.
I used to not comprehend this. All my life I had been told that people hated slavery for "moral" reasons. As with all the best lies, it contains enough truth to make it believable.
There were indeed Northerners who hated slavery because they saw it as morally wrong. We are all taught to believe these people made up the vast majority of people in the North who opposed slavery. They were not the majority. They were in fact a tiny minority of the people who hated slavery.
When I started researching the runup to the civil war, I found out very curious things. I kept finding evidence that the Northern white people *HATED* black people. They hated them to an irrational degree. They passed laws to keep them out of their states. They passed laws to punish them for not having their papers. They passed laws that allowed any white men in the state to capture and sell them into slavery in the south. Lincoln himself wanted them all out of the country.
My first thought was "Wait! This doesn't make any sense! How can you hate black people so much, and then fight a war to give them their freedom?"
Took me a long time to realize they both hated black people, and hated "free labor", meaning labor that people didn't have to pay wages.
So with this thread about Hb-1 Visas, we have a similar situation. There are two aspects to this. People don't want the cheap labor competition, and a lot of people, though they won't say so, don't want brown people coming here who are very different culturally.
It is like the lead up to the Civil War all over again, and regarding the same issues.
Unfair labor practices coupled with a general disdain for members of another race with their practices that many Americans regard as abhorrent and disgusting.
I just want to point out to those willing to listen that history doesn't exactly repeat, but it often rhymes with previous history. And here we are again.
Same sh*t, different Century.
In my career as an engineering manager I must have at 4-5 Indians work for me who had already been through the H1-B process and got a green card or citizenship.
Hiring them was a mistake. Sure, credentials were there but the drive, ingenuity and innovation was just not there. Virtually all of the promised the world but delivered nothing.; They were only interested in seeing what other benefits they could get for themselves, IMO.
“But for foreign applicants? That’s a lot harder to verify, so they get a pass.”
“But the dirty secret? “Tech culture” also harbors disdain for: •“Dirty” industries like oil & gas. •Christian values or Republican politics. •Anything less than an Ivy League education.”
Chalk it up to the same anti-America preferential treatment and discrimination due to political bias that we, non-leftist white Americans, have already been experiencing at the hands of our globalist “masters”.
If ‘they’ want to call this a culture problem, then let’s change the culture. ‘They’ lost the election, so we need to force them to start acting (or reacting) like they lost, instead of their usual doubling down on their leftist policies at our expense.
And a lot of cultures really are comfortable with lying. So, great combination.