[mikert89]

Two big tech FAANG jobs, org is 95% h1b engineers from china/india. Tons of resumes from american grads somehow never hit my desk, continue to interview random candidates from india with some low quality USA masters from missisipi state. Candidate has spent the last year locked in a room memorizing algorithm interview questions

[throwaway422432]

I think the issue could also be this:

- Tech or engineering company hires foreign resident engineer.

- That engineer works their way up in the company to a position where they are in control of hiring.

- They hire more people like them.

We used to accuse start-ups for hiring for cultural fit (people like them) which looked like sexism and ageism. Same thing, different group.

[pojzon]

One rabin says “preference” another says “discrimination”.

At this point everyone should know “cultural fit” is synonymous to “preference”/“discrimination”.

[seanmcdirmid]

I’ve seen two interns through to FTE jobs at a FAANG, both were at least second generation immigrants (so citizens I guess, though I never asked). So kids are still getting jobs, they come from reasonable universities, I haven’t seen UW resumes yet (my Alma mater), for some reasons those kids are all scooped up before I can take a look (I work at an office in Seattle so I find it weird that we can hire from the local university).

[mikert89]

the weird thing is seeing american kids from a top 20 american school (duke, carnegie melon, etc) mixed with a much larger majority of h1bs from absolute no name schools. its almost like the bar for americans is higher

[seanmcdirmid]

I guess it’s different since I mostly deal with interns. But I haven’t noticed a lot of H1s being hire at my FAANG, at least ones that are obviously F1?

We aren’t an AI tech group or anything like that. I was on a Z (working) visa in China for 9 years though.

I knew an H1 in another group from an obviously second rate school in China and a masters from a no name in America. He was pretty successful in his career so I guess school brand doesn’t mean that much. Likewise when I was in China some of the PhDs from second rate Chinese universities also did very well.

[y0eswddl]

Americans are more expensive. More pressure to justify yourself these days.

[mikert89]

no they get paid the same

[tennisflyi]

100% is

[Madmallard]

Why are we letting tech companies in the USA do this?

[lateforwork]

Because if we didn't we wouldn't have a tech industry?

The main problem with immigrant talent in computer field is that legislators don't understand the difference between IT and Tech product development jobs. IT jobs don't need immigrant talent, so companies like Accenture, Infosys etc. should not be given H-1B visas. But tech companies like Google, Meta, Apple, OpenAI etc. absolutely need immigrant talent, or they will lose to Chinese competitors.

[woeirua]

That is absolutely not true. There are plenty of Americans who can do these jobs.

[lateforwork]

> There are plenty of Americans who can do these jobs.

This thinking is wrong. For IT jobs, the work is pre-defined and you go find people who can do the job. For product development this is sometimes the case, but for truly innovative products, such as AI models, this is not the case. You have to hire the best in the world and give them the resources they need, as opposed to defining the project upfront and hiring people "who can do the job".

[yabutlivnWoods]

"Truly innovative".

I wrote my first neural net in the late 90s. Based on nothing but an old geocities post some rando put up about training a model to only unlock a pet door for their cat.

I implemented the same and it worked.

Where you see true innovation I see run of the mill. OpenAI, Google, etc are propping up data center rental business they came to rely on to titillate biology with whatever spaghetti that sticks. That's it.

The interesting science isn't happening anywhere close to big tech.

The mathematics of LLMs exists in textbooks from 1950s. Your entire comment chain here is little more than reciting propaganda.

[lateforwork]

> I wrote my first neural net in the late 90s

Why aren't we using it, if that's all the world needs?

[acdha]

How many “best in the world” people are we talking about, though? Based on what I’ve seen that’s a very small percentage (maybe 5%) while the rest were being hired by companies who valued having workers with limited negotiating power.

(I’m not opposed to immigration at all but it was transparent how for decades the industry resisted any change which would make it easier for a skilled H1-B worker to take a better job)

[lateforwork]

> having workers with limited negotiating power

Sorry, this is 100% false. Companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta etc. do not hire H-1Bs in order to depress wages. That does happen, but not at these companies. It typically happens when hiring IT workers.

[woeirua]

I'm not opposed to hiring the cream of the crop using H1Bs, but that would only be a few thousand people a year. The vast majority of H1Bs though are people taking jobs that Americans can definitely do.

[Hawkenfall]

Not sure how you came to draw this conclusion, as there's lots of data out there showing droves of Computer Science graduates here in the states unable to land jobs.

[duped]

I think that data captures the fact that there are more people being handed degrees without an education than there are jobs. Especially when there are thousands of mid career people on the market right now.

[Yizahi]

Outside of the Default country what you call product development is a part of IT, along with QAs, SDETs, Devops and others. All of that is IT globally. And what USA calls IT is called system administration or something similar.

[thinkingtoilet]

We would absolutely have a tech industry. The richest people on the planet, however, would make slightly less money. It is not an exaggeration to say this is what the entirety of American society is based on right now.

[Madmallard]

Doesn't sound accurate. Please list some sources here that are credible that explain your point. Just sounds like dismissive bias.

[shimman]

We had a tech industry prior to H1Bs before the 90s. What we didn't have was Silicon Valley corporatism that doesn't value American labor nor American education. It's why SV is so gun-ho on charter schools and devaluing American labor.

Let's not act like we need to import 80k "high tech" workers that amount to writing react components and spring endpoints.

Hardly anything hard that we couldn't force companies to train workers to do, but they don't want to ever help people they just want to suck up all the money in the room while decimating entire populations.zzzzzzz

Also, as an American I don't really benefit if US corporations are doing "better." How does that help the person that can't pay for healthcare or afford to go to school, but they sure can get their serving of Zuckerberg slop? I'm supposed to care about these companies success? Really? I hope they go down in flames.

The problem is that the rich and elite have captured and dictated American tech policy for far too long.

[thesmtsolver2]

Do you share the same thoughts for blue collar immigrants?

[shimman]

No, because blue collar immigrants aren't working for cartels that hold deeply undemocratic views.

[munksbeer]

It is interesting to see the different views on immigration. Here in the UK, leading up to the brexit vote, everyone said blue collar workers were the problem, because they depressed wages for the poor and made the middle class richer because they could build cheaper houses, pick cheaper crops, etc.

In Singapore, the rage is mostly against higher earner immigrants, because they take all the good jobs, making the middle class in Singapore poorer.

I'm sensing a bit of a mix in your US centric argument.

All in all, a lot of people just hate immigration, always have, always will. It is a topic as old as time.

[lateforwork]

> How does that help the person that can't pay for healthcare or afford to go to school

How would you like to make t-shirts for rich Chinese, for $5 an hour? There is a reason Americans are not doing that. It is because we are smarter than the rest of the world. How do you think that happened? Were all the smart people born here? Nope. It is because smart people born around the world immigrated here. The prosperity they bring doesn't only help high tech workers, it feeds the economy, so everyone benefits.

[shimman]

I mean we aren't doing it because capitalists decided they would rather move the factories outside of the country because they don't care about workers.

Americans are absolutely willing to work in factors, but capitalists want chattel slave workers instead.

Your view of history is farcical, acting as if American workers had any real say in their countries industrial capacity rather than a few thousand people decided to inflict mass poverty to tens of millions of Americans.

[yabutlivnWoods]

> But tech companies like Google, Meta, Apple, OpenAI etc. absolutely need immigrant talent, or they will lose to Chinese competitors.

Let them lose.

Google and the rest do not prop up humanity. They prop up a financial engineering Ponzi scheme.

You're just parroting media and social tropes you grew up with.

We could assert in our children social truth about other forms of economics; for example, healthcare as a tent pole rather than stock valuations; still requires technology and jobs and we don't remain the last modern economy on the planet without universal healthcare. We're losing to Russia and China in healthcare.

But thankfully we win when the metric phallic rockets to nowhere and Google search uptime?

You should consider your economic benchmarks and their provenance; a bunch of self selecting biological organisms that we socially describe as billionaires have convinced you via their fear mongering that if we don't give them all the power giant foot will step on us

[layer8]

It’s arguably consistent with the past: https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/essays/histo...

[throwaway422432]

It's not just the USA, all Western countries are on a path of mass immigration: software, engineering and health services in particular.

A big factor has been diversity quotas to make organisations DSG numbers meet the requirements of institutional investors, political pressure and activists.

Problem is: pushing diversity into traditional male roles didn't result in boys diversifying into non-traditional roles such as nursing and teaching, and now you have those other roles being filled with immigrants to make up for the shortfall. And those immigrants don't care for diversity.

[raincole]

To do what, attract talents from the rest of the world?

[bigyabai]

Why would we stop them? Labor is a free market.

[mikert89]

honestly i have no idea, in some cases, they are working weekends/are hyper focused on extremely boring, somewhat manual work. some of the systems are complicated and break constantly, so they are almost just oncall fodder for manually fixing a constantly breaking high scale service

[Ifkaluva]

Will these kinds of jobs survive Claude code? It sounds like exactly the job that would be easiest to automate.

[foobarian]

And who gets paged when the Claude integration fails?

[ang_cire]

Because we live in a techno-oligarchy now? Because the leaders of the top tech companies (by revenue) literally sat behind the President at his inauguration?

Because they can afford to buy the 'right' to do what they want, and you can't, and what they want is cheaper labor who they have more control over, and H1B workers will never rock the boat because the visa is a sword hanging over their heads.

Downvote all you want, it's the truth.

[Spooky23]

It generates economic activity and taxes in the US and suppresses wages.

Most of the H1 candidates are in shitty roles that are well defined low/moderate skill jobs for giant companies. Hire people whom you can’t actively exploit and those are the kind of jobs where unions can organize.

The alternative is offshoring the work, not hiring Americans.

The smart thing would be to just let people immigrate. Instead we have a weird tiered system with a small number of highly skilled specialists and an army of serfs facing deportation if they piss off the bosses.

[Longlius]

Then offshore the work. Americans aren't getting the jobs anyway and the imported labor now competes for things like groceries, gas, housing, etc. which drives up prices.

[Spooky23]

.

[Longlius]

Keep up with that rhetoric. I'm sure it will go well for you come election season.

[ethanwillis]

"listless rednecks"

Yea, keep that same energy and see how it plays out.

[ethanwillis]

Just so people know since the user above wanted to edit their comment away to hide how they really see things. It was this:

"They also pay the social security and Medicare taxes so listless rednecks can collect SSDI for being unable to work."

[intended]

Look, I can make a solid economic argument against offshoring and how certain business practices hollow out local economies.

However immigrants are a net increase in investment and GDP. Yes - terms and conditions apply (its economics, when do they not)

Immigrants have to pay rent, buy clothes and groceries from wherever they live. This creates demand which depends the consumption economy. These are positive growth levers. This is despite whatever work they do in that region.

In contrast, asset prices like house prices rising, because they have become stores of wealth, are a different deal altogether. In that situation house owners benefit from just holding onto property, and not renting. The asset appreciates all the same.

The issue which can be brought up is wage depression, and paying immigrants under the table. This should depress wages for American labour.

One solution for this is to increase minimum wage, and to ensure that everyone is paid minimum wage.

This is a simplified model of the situation, but in general immigrants put more into the system than they take out.

[franktankbank]

> These are positive growth levers.

These are pointless growth levers.

[intended]

O_o? what are positive growth levers accord to you?

[thesmtsolver2]

FYI, these jobs pay the highest in the world. If these jobs are exploitative, then so are other non tech jobs that employ citizens and pay lower wages.

[Spooky23]

My former organization employed ~750 contractors developing software.

Their billable rates ranged from $44-76/hr in 2022. The people in the cafeteria probably made more. They get minimum viable salary like indentured workers in hopes of getting a green card and more opportunity.

[ethanwillis]

Offshoring isn't a given. It's simply permitted.

[clapthewind]

DSA itself may now not be as indicative, but grinding is absolutely a key trait in good hires. That type of person will put in very effort at work.

[tennisflyi]

Yup. ATS has always been a problem. Even worse with AI