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by acquiremoney 1320 days ago
How is being on h1 relevant here? Visa or no visa people will act according to incentives designed by company.

P.S I am on H1 visa. For sure I am offended.

5 comments

> How is being on h1 relevant here? Visa or no visa people will act according to incentives designed by company.

> P.S I am on H1 visa. For sure I am offended.

Most of these PMs are Indians on H1Bs. The incentive designed by the company is extracting a certain output, under specific work conditions, and it requires bringing employees to the US, at scale, and having their visa situation hanging over their head.

If you’re offended that Amazon is able to do that, at scale - I don’t fault you.

If you’re offended that I’m openly discussing this, then I would say I don’t agree with censoring what’s in fact reality.

So many questionable decisions were made, at least during my time at Amazon, because of a cut throat environment of fear. I had 1:1s where Indian employees would cry about the situation they find themselves in, where they often have to agree or do things they don’t want to do, out of fear of losing their job and having to relocate back to India.

You're right to be offended but it honestly wouldn't surprise me if sponsoring tech companies rely on the implicit threat of deportation to extract performance just as non-sponsoring yet immigrant-reliant industries like food production do.
Whether this is offensive or not, I have definitely seen worker visas used to exploit employees. And visa employees dealing with much more insanity than nationals. Sometimes it's overt, sometimes it happens in a proverbial boiling frog kind of way by the visa holding employee having to satisfy more and more inane manager expectations. But not being able to easily walk away from a company is not good.
I'd act differently if the worst that could happen from failing to deliver/someone thinking I had was being kicked out of the country rather than just unemployment, it's about sticks not carrots
Remember this when people ask for a software engineer union. The people standing to your right and left will be like this.

Put them all together to advocate together and think of what they will want done with you.

They've already got the angle to exploit you on lined up. And secretly, this is what they think. So what happens when you give them the power?