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Nick, you are outnumbered by H-1B foreign workers in Silicon Valley and yet you deny the obvious. I remember once back in 2007 I was making a pre-sales call to Apple in Cupertino and I was suffering an attack of redeye so I rolled off the 880 and stopped at a large grocery store to buy Visine and could not find one employee who was willing to speak English, all Asians and Indian. I have visited ongoing implementation projects at major insurance companies and banks in the LA metro area and seen with my own damned eyes floors staffed with nothing but hundreds of Indians working on the project. I did a year-long sales/consulting stint at Microsoft in Redmond and Issaquah in 2005 where I had MS directors and VP’s tell me how great H1B visa workers were for the bottom line and I told them one day they’d be laughing out of the other side of their mouth. Now they all work for a CEO who is a former H-1B employee.

You lie like a dog.

[I did a year-long sales/consulting stint at Microsoft in Redmond and Issaquah in 2005 where I had MS directors and VP’s tell me how great H1B visa workers were for the bottom line and I told them one day they’d be laughing out of the other side of their mouth. Now they all work for a CEO who is a former H-1B employee.]

How is that different from anyone else who gets overtaken by what was once a junior employee? CEO’s aren’t hired by H-1B employees. They are appointed by the BOD. Microsoft’s BOD:

https://news.microsoft.com/leadership/
[John W. Thompson
Board Chair

Reid Hoffman
Partner, Greylock Partners

Hugh Johnston
Vice Chairman and Chief Financial Officer, PepsiCo

Teri List-Stoll
Former Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Gap Inc.

Satya Nadella
Chief Executive Officer

Sandra E. Peterson
Operating Partner, Clayton, Dubilier & Rice

Penny Pritzker
Founder and Chairman, PSP Partners

Charles W. Scharf
CEO and President, Wells Fargo & Company

Arne Sorenson
President and CEO, Marriott International Inc.

John W. Stanton
Chairman, Trilogy Partnerships

Emma Walmsley
CEO, GlaxoSmithKline

Padmasree Warrior
Founder, CEO and President, Fable Group Inc.]

I’m sure Steve Ballmer was a nice enough guy, but the stock did very little during his time there. Whereas it took off like a rocket after Nadella took over. If this is what H-1B’s are like, it’s hard to fault corporate boards for hiring them. Nadella became honcho at a fat and happy company and took it to the next level.

https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/from-sundar-pichai-to-satya-nadella-how-h-1bs-helped-indian-americans-find-work-set-up-family/story-C0Xd70L9z2Z9ktmDtGINpN.html
[Satya Nadella used the visa programme also, but for an entirely different reason. Not to further his career, but his personal life. He gave up his Green Card — yes, he did — and went on H-1B so his wife could join in in the United States. Immigration rules then, as now, make it very difficult for foreigners to join Green Card spouses, without going through a long and uncertain process.

So Nadella gave up his permanent residency and switched to H-1B in 1994, a year after he got married and four years after the new visa programme was introduced for high skilled workers in 1990.

“What I didn’t expect was the instant notoriety around campus,” Nadella wrote in his 2017 memoir “Hit Refresh, “‘’Hey, there goes the guy who gave up his Green card’.”]

The company I work for now won't hire H1-Bs because it's too expensive. They do have a some employees who are on H1-B, that they hired as existing H-1Bs from other companies. The first startup I ever worked for as a recruiter banned hiring H1-Bs, because they got burned. A company has to pay $20k in legal fees up front to hire an H1-B. They hired two employees on H1-B, and both of them left within three months, which meant they paid $20k+ for nothing.

The big FANG companies can definitely afford H-1Bs, but a lot of the high tech startups just can't afford it. (For comparison, about 9% of Google's ca. 100k employees are H-1B; Apple has about 3,100 H-1Bs out of 127k employees) Now, do you know anything about L1 Visas? L1 Visas are much better for the company, because it is harder for that employee to jump to another company. (They'd need to get that company to sponsor an entirely new H-1B Visa) L1s are more likely to be paid a lower rate. L1s need to work at the same company overseas for a year, then they can get an L1 Visa to work in the U.S. I have personally come across Microsoft using L1s, but I don't know how many.

large grocery store to buy Visine and could not find one employee who was willing to speak English, all Asians and Indian.

Can you tell me which grocery store, because I live here and I've never seen that. I've been to a specialty Japanese grocery store, but most of the people spoke English. I also have been so specialty Indian, Persian, Chinese, and European grocery stores. I found people who spoke English, but I suppose it's possible you might not. I supposed you might find a Mexican grocery store too. But I've never seen a non-specialty grocery store that didn't have English speakers. Santa Clara County is about 33% non-Hispanic white, 33% Hispanic, and 33% Asian, with a small amount of other races.