[sumanthvepa]

There seems to be some sort imputation that, just because someone is on an H-1b, that they are not a good engineer.

I used to be on an H-1b and gladly came back home to India. I run my own business now. And yes. I'm ex-Anazon. It was a tough place to work, but circa mid-nineties, the stock options made it worth working for them.

I'm willing to bet I'll outcode a significant fraction of the audience on this site. And I'm not even close to the best developer around. Some of the smartest people I've met have been on an H-1b visa. Please consider not letting prejudice affect your view. You'll do yourself a disservice by underestimating your competition.

[president_zippy]

I never implied that, let alone said it.

The only thing I implied is that workers with fewer rights that a U.S. citizen are easier to exploit and abuse.

If I refuse to take a work-related call at 3am, the worst that can happen is that I get fired, and spend months looking for a new job.

If you refuse to take a work-related call at 3am, you get fired and lose your ability to stay in a place you have lived for 5+ years and made your home.

That's BS, and I hate it almost as much as you do. You can be blackmailed with deportation, and I can be replaced with someone who can be blackmailed with deportation. We're both getting screwed in this current arrangement.

[1718627440]

Requesting work-related calls at 3am should be illegal and is in a lot of places.

[marcosdumay]

I doubt it's illegal in many places.

What is common is that being available counts as work.

[1718627440]

Your work hours are specified in your work contract. Demanding service without compensation and contract sounds highly illegal.

[cryptonector]

We have on-call duty for this. It should perhaps be compensated differently, and certainly one person should not always be on-call (though I have been at times on-call for months at a time, but for a thing that normally does not page at night). But what are we do to, have staff around the world so that someone can be on-call during their local business hours so we can have 24/7 support?

[FrustratedMonky]

Nice exchange. Both points are valid.

[rirze]

> circa mid-nineties

I'm interpreting this as mid-1990s, in which case I very much believe in your technical ability. My dad came over late-1990s and he worked at mid-sized companies ever since. Even then, he and his H1B peers were decently intelligent.

I would caution your defense of today's H1B/L1s/OPT workers; I'd say the quality of Indian engineers in the US has halved every 10 years.

Today's Indian engineers come to the US because they can't enroll in a decent college in India and/or obtain a upper-middle class salary from a job. It is an entirely different mechanism for which people are migrating over. It used to be brain drain, now it is sewage drain.

The H1Bs in the big tech companies are maybe 50/50 technically decent, but everywhere else, they are just taking contracting spots. It is a very corrupt and bloated system that has to go because they are not providing valuable work.

[Eric_WVGG]

I believe his point is that, even if you expand the available pool of developers outside of the US, that pool is still exhaustible.

[cudgy]

Well at least you’re a humble outcoder.

[RobRivera]

>There seems to be some sort imputation that, just because someone is on an H-1b, that they are not a good engineer.

I fail to reach this interpretation in this thread.

[hopelite]

I think you’re not considering the other side of that perspective. I am sure you are very happy for your fortune to have been plucked out of India and been given the opportunity to work at Amazon and presumably live in America, which put you in the place you described that seems to be in a really good position today. The issue is that not only was the H1-B meant for highly specialized people that cannot be found in the USA, it has very long been absolutely abused by American corporations and politicians that have been betraying their own people for several decades now by engaging and ignoring this abuse that was really just about undermining salaries of Americans by giving the opportunity to you rather than Americans, while it was really mostly about enriching the rich. You were essentially just a method for the rich to get richer.

I am sure you are a wonderful person, but it’s simply an unjust treatment of Americans, even if you personally had nothing directly or reasonably to do with it. The betrayal and abuse was perpetrated by the “Americans” that led the corporations and paid off the politicians, and also the American citizens that were distracted and careless about their own politics and government and future for their own children. I doubt you would be ok with your own ruling class and rich to betray your children and the future of India, would you? It’s crazy, but America’s people largely and for a long time absolutely betrayed their own people.

I would not wish it on any society, even though it has been pervasive all over the “West”, where the rich, corporate captains, and politicians betray their own people. Imagine if your Indian politicians were to sell out India to the West or maybe import Africans or something similar, I would hope that the Indian people would make it absolutely clear to the politicians and rich that they are staring down a loaded gun and it’s not their finger on the trigger. So do I also wish it for the people of all of the western countries that they retake their sovereignty and self determination away from the rather parasitic oligarchy that has unconscionably been betraying its own people out of undeterred greed and crime against the very people that allowed making them rich and powerful in the first place.

It is not a personal thing, I think it’s just that people are recently getting a lot more angry about things because the American empire is hitting a rough patch that it has not experienced in anyone’s living memory and as it is said, (adapted) the naked people start getting angry when the tide goes out and there aren’t enough jobs to also be super generous by giving them away to Indians benefiting from the abusive systems of the parasitic cabal of the ruling class.

What you may also not be totally aware of, is that H1-B is only one of many different systems and programs that have been abused and quite literally benefit and profit foreigners overt Americans. Imagine if that existed in India; where I go to India, make 2-3x what the average Indian makes, the government gives me free housing, my children get free education and free healthcare, and I get extremely beneficial government secured loan terms on business loans and get grants to start a business and free consulting and services, and I get to bring dozens of my friends and family into India to work in my business, and I also get beneficial home loans to buy up houses and drive up prices, and my foreign children get preferential treatment in Indian universities (…while local Indians don’t get those things) and I run for office while all the foreigners I and my advantaged community brought over to India start getting our people into the government and we start taking over Indian institutions and government offices.

I combine and crossed things a bit because is a bit more complicated and nuances of course, and many Americans aren’t even aware of just how many programs and states are in place that advantage foreigners and disadvantage native Americans, who could even very well be the descendants of the founders of America. That’s why things have gotten rather tense and as it looks, unfortunately, it will likely only get worse from here; especially as BRICS builds out more of their alternative fiscal, monetary, economic, geopolitical structures; and the same traitors that control the USA will/are starting to get very nervous and borderline panicky. It seems Thucydides Trap is in full effect.

[JumpCrisscross]

> the government gives me free housing, my children get free education and free healthcare

None of these are H-1B perks. (Note: H-1B, not H1-B. It comes from ¶ H(1) of the INA of 1952; H-1A for nurses and H-1B for non-nursing specialty occupations [1].)

Immigrants pay for housing in homes that pay property taxes that fund public education. Their employer pays for their healthcare that costs multiples what most of the same treatments and drugs cost in India. (Only once they become a resident alien do they qualify for marketplace subsidies.)

> native Americans, who could even very well be the descendants of the founders of America

You've got to be shitting me. (Try native born next time.)

> my foreign children get preferential treatment in Indian universities

The students of H-1Bs (from India, no less) do not get preferential treatment in American university admissions. If anything, it's the opposite. It's why Indian Americans join lawsuits by Asian and White Americans around removing race considerations from college admissions.

> Thucydides Trap

"Research by Graham Allison," the guy who coined the term in 2011 after a career in the Reagan administration and, before that, at the RAND Corporation, "supporting the Thucydides trap has been criticized" [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#History

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thucydides_Trap#Methodological...

[brookst]

But you have to admit “native Americans who could be descendants of the founding fathers” is rich with humor on several layers.

[JumpCrisscross]

> “native Americans who could be descendants of the founding fathers” is rich with humor

Yes.

Though I did consider, until noting the context, that they might be referring to descendants of both the founding fathers and Native Americans. Chilling, actually. To think that a good number of one branch of our founding fathers' descendants may have been exterminated by another.

[FrustratedMonky]

Jefferson owned slaves and slept with slaves? So owned descendants?

[bluecheese452]

Slept with is really whitewashing it. Not much choice for a slave.

[newyankee]

It is even funnier when this argument comes from Canadians, Australians and some New Zealanders as these are some of the more open and shut cases while other countries can be argued to be on some spectrum of foreign vs native depending on the time scales considered.

Generally it is framed to meant that we are the people who captured and built these countries and they belong to our 'culture'

[hopelite]

I can tell you are irrational and angry brainwashed person, but that still does not change reality, or the fact that your reading comprehension is poor. I will not bother addressing what you erroneously wasted time on arguing with yourself about. But safe to say you ignored that I even tried to preempt dumb responses as yours. I know for a fact that all those and many more programs exist that are provided to foreigners while native Americans are barred. I literally am looking at several people right now who I know have profited from them.

Fact of the matter is that the tribes that were in what Europeans called America were objectively, factually not Americans, on obvious account that America didn’t exist prior to Europeans creating it, and they did not and would not have considered themselves Americans at all, let alone native Americans.

How would you be a “native” of something you are not a part of and don’t want to be a part of, just because some kid in 2025 is brainwashed about you?? And that’s without mentioning that they not only didn’t like the noting of America for understandable reasons, even if they understood what it meant at all, which most didn’t as they were, for better or worse, literally Stone Age people at the founding, with no reasonable expectation of understanding what a Constitution was since they didn’t even have a written language.

And that’s without even going into the fact that the tribes largely considered themselves antithetical to this European created America and wanted to remain their own identity and not let fools as yourself mash them into America.

They were literally sovereign nations up until recently, literally not part of America for the prior 200 years. Do you even understand any of that?

But you want them to be native Americans by creating them into your propaganda riddled conception of what America is? Why not leave them be their own America, not just another destroyed identity that this perversion called America has devoured and destroyed.

[zaptheimpaler]

Arguing with people who believe in alternative facts is usually futile. Can you provide any trustworthy evidence of even one government program that provides free housing, education or medical care to H1Bs but not to citizens as you claimed before? Because i don’t think there are any such programs. Those sound like things refugees might get, not people on work visas.

[JAlexoid]

> H1-B meant for highly specialized people that cannot be found in the USA

No. H1b isn't for highly specialized people at all. EB is for that.

Not to mention, that H1b has explicit rules to pay the prevailing wage in the market.

The rest of your comment is so out of touch with reality it's painful to read.

[intended]

> Imagine if your Indian politicians were to sell out India to the West or maybe import Africans or something similar,

…

Firstly, this is so wildly tone deaf, that I don’t know what to say.

Secondly - India (and most developing nations I will bet) have had violent protests at some point in their history about people from other parts of the same country coming in to take jobs.

Most of the world understands why America feels the way it does. Hell I personally have better articulations of America’s problems than many Americans do.

But for the love of all that is holy, please don’t end up betraying your ignorance of the rest of the world and reminding us of some of the worst features of American stereotypes. It may be meant as an effort to find common ground, but only succeeds in irritating and potentially alienating.

Believe it or not, compared to the vast majority of humanity, your problems are better than what they will face.

I do not ask you to take an interest in the world. It would be nice if you did.

I do ask that you serve your own purpose, your own argument, better.

[tiagod]

This is one of the most painfully ignorant things I've read in hacker news. I don't even have anything constructive I can reply to, other than a recommendation to come out of your bubble a little bit.

You have no idea how nice you have it over there.

[phatfish]

But why not be a superstar engineer in India to start with? Why the round trip to another country to disrupt their society?

[Hammershaft]

How is he disrupting our society? He's working & building things in our country, and paying taxes that don't benefit him as much as pay for our entitlements.

[tiagod]

For one reason or another, big tech salaries are highly clustered in the US.

[cudgy]

… At a few small companies clustered in a small area of a single province called California.

[TheCoelacanth]

The very highest salaries are to an extent, but almost any major metro area in the US has plenty of engineering jobs that are very high paying compared to almost anywhere outside of the US.