I don’t care about your politics, but if your take on ‘legal immigrants’ is ‘I am an experienced American software engineer and H1Bs are taking the jobs I should be having because they are low paid slaves’, you have bad politics
Billionaires suck etc but you are not listening to the immigrants who are saying that we are aware of the problems and this is still something we choose to do, don’t speak for us, ever
I keep saying, leftists’ concern-commenting about H-1Bs is going to give Stephen Miller bipartisan backing to do batshit horrible things with ‘legal immigration’
We don’t need your activism, or for you to save us, we need you to be aware of xenophobia no matter who is doing the xenophobia
It’s xenophobia because you’re still buying into the ‘H-1Bs are just ‘less than’ Americans narrative’.
Also if you genuinely believe the reason you don’t have a job is because employers would rather spend $25K on lawyers per person on a new H-1B employee who only has a 1 in 4 chance of getting a visa, just to fuck you over specifically, instead of fucking up everyone specifically and generally because they can, I don’t know what world you live in. I get that its an attractive idea to blame someone
@skinnylatte 100%. I'm team "open borders". (I'm also team "H-1Bs and the Canadian equivalents are exploitative and shitty", but the solution to that isn't "stop allowing immigration" or even "complain about H-1Bs specifically", it's "stop allowing employers to functionally indenture people under the guise of an immigration pathway".)
@skinnylatte Pretty much fully in agreement with you about all of this.
Also it could be that the US education system has been so hollowed out to suit the demonic schemes of the billionaire wanna be oligarchs that on average domestic engineering talent is pretty piss poor and comes with a grossly overinflated estimation of its worth. Dude, maybe they are just better than you.
@mastodonmigration I wouldn’t put too much stock into that us vs them idea, it is impossible to compare anyway. But many people do come from education systems which are very under-resourced as well.
But there is some stock in the idea that the people who end up in positions to move to the U.S. for school or work do tend to have an outsized amount of ambition and motivation, regardless of their resources, so it’s hard to compare the top % of each country with a general swathe of any population
Agreed. The "on average" part of the post is important. Certainly the highest performing engineers are in a league of their own, independent of where they come from, and share a high regard for each other based on ability. The comment has more to do with people of lower innate ability who feel cheated by H1B hires. Would stand by the contention that this rank is loaded up in the US with people who the education system has failed and yet have an outsized feeling of entitlement.
@mastodonmigration @skinnylatte Don’t fool yourself. I lived through the copied GE forced rankings model as a Director of Global Network Engineering. I was forced to rank staff and manage out the bottom target percent. While you can argue there are some less than average hangers-on in any role, and it’s good to refresh, that’s not the end goal.
After you’ve terminated the “low performer” they sweep the headcount, save budget, and collect fat bonuses.
It IS an attractive idea to blame someone and the rich ownership class are RIGHT THERE!
@skinnylatte having come here via TN status, I have to say, the problems being complained about are mostly real (not job shortages though), but they are all caused by the system and not the immigrants. I could not bargain my salary properly for years because of it, which totally drove wages down. A work visa not tied to one employer would immediately solve that. Then there was the PERM process which did not require bona fide recruitment, but did require we accept resumes by fax.
@falcon yep. All of it sucks. Unfortunately that’s not what the new critics are complaining about. They’re complaining about us taking up high paid jobs, how dare we. The only conceivable reason must be because we have no agency.
@skinnylatte yup because jobs, of all things, are famously a finite resource. More people in a country definitely just come and compete for the same number of jobs that would exist if the country had half the population, yup. It's absurd, but nobody understands the difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics anymore I guess.
@skinnylatte it's laughable to see the same people putting "us citizen" on their resume on purpose also claim that companies prefer to hire immigrants on temporary visas.
@skinnylatte if anyone has a bone to pick with the labour market in tech I suggest they look at the companies firing 20% of their team for absolutely no reason, or the people laying off entire departments and trying unsuccessfully to replace that labour with "AI", or more broadly, the investment community redirecting resources away from engineers building things and toward bidding up the price of hardware. It's been frustrating to watch less and less useful work get done because of investors.
@skinnylatte it’s spending $25,000 on lawyers and paying them $20,000 less per year than for qualified Americans. And most foreigners have lesser English skills and lesser educations, which means other more skilled people have to try to get the H1Bers up to par in order for them to be useful. Of course, managers (less qualified ex-programmers) like H1Bs for budgetary reasons.
And that’s not a visa the H1Bers desire, it’s a green card.
@skinnylatte And I doubt someone like that is good at his/her job, either.
@gglockner everyone suddenly has a ‘I’ve been in tech 40 years and I saw for myself how H-1Bs are just wage slaves with utterly no agency or ability’ story.
@skinnylatte Ageism is rampant in (US) tech firms. It’s xenophobia to use immigrants as a scapegoat.
@skinnylatte Anyone complaining about immigrants should ask themselves why they haven’t attempted to help those immigrants join their voices.
Although, I’m not hopeful about contents of the answers.
@skinnylatte I'm not going to blame the immigrants or oppose H1Bs over this special case, but one concrete harm of the system is that it allows filling tech jobs that wouldn't exist (and shouldn't exist) without holding employees' residence status hostage. Twitter would have ceased to exist 2 years ago if Elon hadn't held leverage over H1B employees.
@dalias in a better job market this is less of an issue as employees can simply get a new job and transfer their status. The problem is the bad job market. Not an ideal system, but it is the same in every country. Every country’s work visa for foreigners is exactly the same. Lose your job, get lost. Unless the US wants to innovate on this area, and we should.