[kstrauser]

I agree with all of that. I've seen employers treat workers with H1B visas as slaves, basically. Local employees had a pretty decent work-life balance, but H1B employees got calls at 8PM on a Friday night to add a feature. And why not? What were they going to do quit (and have, what is it, something like 48 hours to get out of the country)?

I felt enormous sympathy for my coworkers here with that visa. Their lives sucked because there was little downside for sociopathic managers to make them suck.

Most frustrating was when they were doing the same kind of work I was doing, like writing Python web services and whatnot. We absolutely could hire local employees to do those things. They weren't building quantum computers or something. Crappy employers gamed the system to get below-market-rate-salary employees and work them like rented mules. It was infuriating.

[lokar]

It sucks that people are treated that way.

While working at Google I worked with many many amazing H1B (and other kinds) visa holders. I did 3 interviews a week, sat on hiring committees (reading 10-15 packets a week) and had a pretty good gauge of what we could find.

There was just no way I could see that we could replace these people with Americans. And they got paid top dollar and had the same wlb as everyone else (you could not generally tell what someone’s status was).

[kstrauser]

I fully, completely support the idea of visa programs running like that. If you want to pay top dollar for someone with unique skills to move here and help build our economy, I am fully behind this.

But wanna use it as a way to undercut American jobs with 80-hour-a-week laborers, as I've personally witnessed? Nah.

My criticisms against the H1B program are completely against the companies who abuse it. By all means, please do use it to bring in world-class scientists, researchers, and engineers!

[c0redump]

This was true up until pretty recently. CS has come to be seen as a “prestigious” degree, and SWE as a “prestigious” career. Lots of kids who, 10 years ago, would have studied law, medicine, finance, or hard sciences, are studying CS. At my alma mater, CS is the largest major by a huge margin. The result of all this is there is a massive supply of smart and capable American citizens with formal training trying to break in to the job market, with limited success, due in no small part to the labor oversupply caused by immigration.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jamesfobrien_tech-jobs-have-d...

[guestbest]

If the foreign candidates were so much superior than locally born candidates as you explained, why not just open a campus in that country and thus save the best employees from having to uproot from their native culture?

[lokar]

Good question. In many cases they did. The Zurich office has people from all over Europe.

But, for existing teams they wanted (reasonably) to avoid splitting between locations. So you need someone local.

[disgruntledphd2]

I think the real reason for hiring locally is both that communication works better, and that the higher ups don't want to give the impression that their jobs could also be outsourced.

[ajmurmann]

Time zones can be a real issue even with remote work. There are of course also arguments for in-person collaboration.