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by bastawhiz 813 days ago
I'm genuinely curious why a company would go out of their way to fire Americans in America...to hire folks on temporary visas. If you're going to do the first part, why not just hire people in the countries they are from? I understand the article says the folks on the visas are able to be paid less, but isn't the H1-B process long, complicated, expensive, and somewhat unpredictable? Surely it's cheaper to just outsource the work. Hell, it's probably cheaper to outsource the work and fly the folks to America for a few days every now and then to meet with clients.

I don't have strong feelings about what they should do, it just seems like what they're doing isn't really in anyone's interest. What am I missing?
5 comments
throwaway1o24 813 days ago
You've a lot less negotiation power as your visa is tied to your job, so you get paid less. You have to leave the country after 30 days if you loose your job and don't get another one.

So if you're keen to move up the US, H1B sounds amazing but then you are in quite a vulnerable position.

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basicallybones 813 days ago
It is about control. I worked with India-based engineers writing IoT C++ on deadline (alongside a US team) at 5 PM ET. They had already put in 8 hours by the time I woke up. Total madness and abuse, in my opinion.

I left because the management team clearly valued control over competence. Every person in management either was a (white) connected executive salesperson or a member of the CEO's family.

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pandaman 813 days ago
H1B is pretty straightforward and cheap: it's about $5K, most of which are lawyer fees, if you have a law firm signed up for mass processing you get wholesale discount. And it's only unpredictable for an individual, for an employer who submits thousands of applications the laws of statistics make it pretty reliable, if the approval rate is 34.5% then out of 1000 applications you will get 345 +/- few approvals.

And outsourcing does not work for these companies as their business is putting bodies into chairs on their customer's site.

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bluedino 813 days ago
Saves money. Why pay someone $130k when you can pay an H1B half? Plus if you're hiring them as a contractor you can get rid of them whenever you want.

Where I work about half of our contractors come in through TCS.

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rqtwteye 813 days ago
Outsourcing especially to different timezones is hard to manage. It's easier to have people in house.
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