Reducing foreign visa tech workers (1 Viewer)

[Isaac]

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/trump-mulls-adding-new-100000-fee-h-1b-visas-bloomberg-news-reports-2025-09-19/

India was the largest beneficiary of H-1B visas last year, accounting for 71% of approved beneficiaries

Go Trump. We need American filling those positions, not India

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Now if only we could convince students to stop taking useless courses like Gender Studies or Pre-Renaissance French Literature.

 

[Mark_]

Now if only we could convince students to stop taking useless courses like Gender Studies or Pre-Renaissance French Literature.

You would need to get state legislators and academics to stop pushing them. I've a feeling it would be easier to push urine back up a urethra!

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I've a feeling it would be easier to push urine back up a urethra!

Yeesh! Some mental images, you just can't un-see.

 

[MarkK]

India was the largest beneficiary

When smart people leave India, India is not a beneficiary,
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/us-h1b-visa-canada-benefits-1.7640068
Trump's move is a gift, but not to America.

 

[Pat Hartman]

Trump's move is a gift, but not to America.

That's because you don't understand the corruption of the h1b visa system. I've been party to this corruption but it was long ago and given I was cheating for a specific known person I didn't think anything much of it at the time. My team just wanted Azzie back. So, I did what I needed to do to get his visa approved.

The general cheating simply undercuts US wages. The companies advertise for positions that have very specific requirements but pay less than Americans would accept for the job specs. since no Americans will apply, it is OK to hire an h1b visa holder for $20.00 per hour even though you would have to pay an American at least $50. Also, the Indian companies scarf up all the visas and they lie about the credentials of the bodies they supply. A second way is to hire a consulting company to take over your entire IT department. This way the American company gets to import busloads of Indians and assign them to their employees and tell the employees if they don't train their Indian sidekick, they will not get the severance package. And the third way is to actually have the work done in India. This is the cheapest solution. When this was first started, American high tech workers were earning at least $25 per hour plus benefits but the off shore Indians were earning only about $3.00. Their wages have escalated substantially in the past 40 years but they are still substantially cheaper than American workers.

I used to get a kick out of the line that was never said out loud as the tech leaders like Bill Gates testified before Congress. "We can't get the American workers we need to do the job." ("at the price we want to pay")

 

[Isaac]

And the issue of having pure Indians in tech creates and begets more problems. Nepotism. For example, and I've worked in quite a few major corporate environments and the same I see it everywhere: Indians hire more Indians. There is a hiring preference and it's anti-American. You could be the best qualified data architect in the world, but if your name is Joe Blow and another candidate's name is Raj Baba, Raj is getting the job. I can't prove it but I've seen it over and over and over. As soon as they see an Indian (etc) name on the resume, there is a starting-out assumption that this person must know tech, even if they're terrible at articulating it.

This thing where tech in the USA is run by India must stop

 

[Pat Hartman]

I can't prove it but I've seen it over and over and over.

I agree and Walmart is currently paying the price.

I took a job as a manager in an insurance company 25 years ago. The whole thing was a disaster but one of the issues was that one of my people was an Indian, which was fine, but he didn't speak a word of English and I couldn't get rid of him. So, I tried to use him using another Indian as an interpreter. That didn't work because the second Indian gave his "interpretation" of the task rather than a direct translation. Either that or the first guy was just useless. I found out later that the non English speaker was baby sitting for my boss who was the real jerk in the company. Not sure how that was working out but the twins were not speaking yet so maybe it didn't matter.

The bottom line - I was a DEI hire. IT had a definite propensity to hire male managers and were in big trouble with the personnel manager so my boss was forced to hire the first female that even came close to the job specs. I stuck it out for three months and moved on. The final straw was a discussion with one of my user department managers. He was 12, male, and an MBA which I think went to his head. OK, he was older than 12 but not by much. He asked for a graph from the old system (we were in the process of developing a new application) that showed membership growth. I explained to him why the data in the old system was invalid based on his specifics and offered a suggestion. His response - "I'm the one with the MBA". My resume went out the next day. For at least 6 months after I left the company, they thought I was covered by their insurance. It was about that time that the stock tanked by 75%. Guess why? It became public that the company had no clue how many "members" were covered by its plans. So I was right. The old system had a serious problem (and the new system wasn't even close but they had been running the conversion piece every single weekend for 9 months and it always failed) that I had discovered very early on in my tenure. Maybe if I'd had an MBA I wouldn't have cared After a few weeks there I used to get a chuckle every Monday morning at the management meeting when the Indian in charge of the conversion explained why the conversion didn't work yet again. And then there was the war between the Mac and Microsoft factions, and my lost email, and on and on and on. I was happy to get out alive.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

"I'm the one with the MBA".

That happened to me only once. My introduction to the person who did that was an informal one, just on a first-name basis. So in the middle of his discussion, I asked a question relating to an improper application of statistical principles. He said, "I'm the one with the MBA." I responded with "I'm the one with the Ph.D." Awkward silence, followed by one of the government guys asking me to explain my objection, which I did. But that is why I so rarely introduced myself with my title. I didn't want to be pretentious with my friends and co-workers. Ass-hats, on the other hand, deserved to be corrected publicly.

 

[Pat Hartman]

I didn't have a title I could use to trump his but watching the stock tank because of bad data that the MBA thought he could ignore made me smile.

 

[ColinEssex]

I didn't have a title I could use . . .

I'm sure there must be one.