Sorry Katie but you got this one wrong. My daughter is autistic and she has very powerful telepathic abilities. She's heading to prom next week, I hope nothing bad happens!
My child is also very autistic and very telepathic. Anyway, me and the family are headed off to oversee a hotel that’s been closed down for the winter season. Should be fun.
Not sure if my child is autistic but he claims to see dead people, says some of them don’t even know they’re dead. The weird thing is he told me I can ask his psychologist all about it, but he doesn’t actually have a psychologist.
The Holocaust was the end of a millenia of European antisemitism.
The USA banned Jewish immigration in like 1927. The USA took very few holocaust survivors (but still more than most other countries). The vast majority of Jews in the USA are from families that migrated here prior to the 1927 ban.
Most Jews in America descend from Eastern European Jews fleeing pogroms or Russian Jews fleeing either the Czar or the USSR which betrayed them (long story). They most definitely were survivors albeit not Holocaust survivors.
We act as though the holocaust was a singular event rather than the culmination of centuries of bigotry. I believe this is distroting and harmful as it confuses the ideas for people. we look at Hitler and avoid looking at the antisemitism that preceeded him.
All very true. I was teaching about US Immigration just yesterday and establish the point that "violence against Jews" did not BEGIN with the Holocaust. I mention the pogroms, etc. This is the likely result of people raised on this idea of only knowing about Hitler when it comes to "bad stuff" and nothing else.
I consider myself to be pretty well versed in historical atrocities against Jews, but I was really surprised to read about the Khmelnytsky Uprising and its affect on the Jews of the area a couple of months ago, and was completely shocked that I hadn't learned about it at all.
I consider myself well-educated and well-read overall but I didn’t learn the full extent of pogroms in European history until like five years ago. I didn’t get that in high school or college.
Well, neither did I. There's only so much we can teach. I don't go into too much depth because in the grand scheme of things but I do communicate that Jews were subject to violence throughout most of human history.
There were many bans throughout the years targeting different groups. Chinese Exclusion Act is a pretty obvious one, but there was also the oddly named "Gentleman's Agreement" that affected Japanese immigrants.
Also, despite it's name, no one was deported under the Alien and Sedition Acts, though the latter part of that law is still on the books in some form.
This is such an important point - my grandparents were survivors and ended up in Australia because they couldn’t get into the US. (One great uncle did make it, although the poor sod thought the New York he was headed to was NYC. It was Buffalo.)
My hometown - Melbourne - had the highest number of Holocaust survivors in any city outside of Tel Aviv. A lot also ended up in South America, so you have these thriving pockets of Yiddish culture in places like Argentina. It’s also shaped us as communities, and as Jews. The highest numbers of Jewish day school attendance, lowest rates of intermarriage. Part of my PhD research compared Australian, American and British Jewish identities and the timings of the largest migrations of Jews have had a huge impact on people’s day-to-day lives (a more material version of ‘lived experience’!), even generations later.
Interesting postscript: My Great Uncle Sam, who ended up in Buffalo, moved there with his wife, his wife’s sister and her husband in 1948. Not long before the move, his sister-in-law gave birth to a little boy in Augsburg, Germany.
This is interesting to me because my man was just telling me that as a kid in Brooklyn he didn’t know anyone else with a parent who was a Holocaust survivor. I found that quite surprising.
The telepathy/FC stuff makes me very sad. I understand why parents want to believe, especially in cases where their children are non-verbal. I am troubled because inevitably the first sentence is “I LOVE YOU MOMMY, YOU ARE THE LIGHT OF MY LIFE AND I APPRECIATE ALL YOUR MANY SACRIFICES.” The mom connections here weren’t surprising.
However, I think in a strange way it actually diminishes the capacity that people with profound disabilities DO have. It’s like anthropomorphizing animals— making the subject “more like us” to justify our affection for them.
One of my aunts was born with a moderate intellectual disability and has lived in care homes her whole life. She doesn’t write sentences and can’t do lots of things, but she’s funny and she’s a big personality. I could BS and say she’s secretly a genius but the truth is, she loves cats and Strictly Come Dancing and hates when anything in her room is moved even the SMALLEST amount. She is herself.
In a social services context I have worked with quite a few severely intellectually disabled children, including non-verbal ones. With limited exceptions (a child whose brain hemispheres didn’t divide in utero, for example), the kids do have personalities, preferences, and surely some sense of thought and ideas. They deserve care and compassion and love and our best attempts to understand them. But they aren’t magic. Saying they are magic is somehow… disrespectful. They are just people, and this is enough.
Re: Immigration and H1Bs. I'm in the employment biz, so I know a fair amount about this.
1) We would always prefer to hire in-country with citizens. It's easier, they have fewer cultural gaps, obviously (?) speak our language, and everyone wants to support their neighbor before supporting someone thousands of miles away.
2) H1Bs are subject to rigorous pay rules--we have to pay the "prevailing wage" for such immigrant workers. And yes, it's subject to audit and must be justified.
3)There are real, significant costs (monetary, cultural, time, logistical and paperwork costs) that come with hiring an H1B. It's not cheap, and it takes resources. There are real expenses, not savings, when hiring people on a work visa.
So why the hell would we do it? Because we can't find the workers here in our neighborhood. It's true. Canyabelieveit!?! We need our work to get done, and can't find the people to hire here. So we actually are forced to consider these extra expenses, risks, timelines, etc. to get the frikkin' work done.
And if we don't do it this way, you're going to really complain when we outsource again to foreign countries for labor (which WILL be a cost savings, for damn sure). We did that in the early oughts--and there were problems with that, too--but those are the actual practical choices to get the frikkin' work done.
Where I don't like the H1B program is in "consulting." "Consulting" companies bring in skilled labor under H1Bs to work for their clients--and that system is actually abused in a pretty significant way. But you and I are "demanding" this when we want things good, fast and cheap. This is the cost of our demand.
Fascinating. I couldn't find work for over a year. A variety of reasons of course but one was ghost jobs - companies publish it for posterity but then hire an H1B worker for cheaper or outsource I was told. I was contacted by at least 200 recruiters, 190 of them Indian and landed ONE interview with Amtrak with an entirely Indian team. I wasn't hired. I don't know what is true or not - I only know of my experience and what I got is that I'm not needed in the American market despite my extensive skills, culture fit, and experience.
If it makes you feel any better, I'm in the hiring business, and I also was out of work for a year. Like you I fielded hundreds of calls from recruiters (they never told me their nationality, but they didn't speak like I do!)--and not a single one of them went anywhere either. That's because they're outsourced recruiters at the lowest rung of recruiting, with hyper competition for the positions they're recruiting for. It's literally a million-to-one shot with them.
And honestly, even though you read about it in the news, ghost jobs aren't a real thing to worry about. It happens--but you'll have to trust me that we don't have the time to waste time on posting jobs that we can't fill--we're too busy trying to fill the real jobs we do have! (The company I work for does post multiple job postings of the same vacancy--but that's a function of Indeed's limitations on us that we have to get around to attract the most/best people--so we have to post multiple postings for the one job. Is that a "ghost job?" No--it's a duplicate posting so we can actually reach YOU!)
Networking with your friends (Indian, included!) is the way to get a job--and just ignore the recruiters who call you but can't give any level of detail to your screening interview, or any level of detail behind the job or employer. They're a time-suck.
I also know this topic well and I don't find your argument persuasive.
Amazon is the top h1b hiring company. They can't find anyone in Seattle to do Ops? I agree the contracting agencies are an especially bad problem.
It's also very common to remotely hire. You are starting with the presumption that you need someone in your locale at a certain rate or you'll outsource.
The reason people don't outsource is it's a headache. Timezones usually don't match and local laws can require weird corporate structures. So they go through foreign contracting agencies whose quality is often subpar and it raises costs.
H1bs are a good thing as a concept, but the program is abused and we end up with companies using it to hire mid-skill dbas whose willing to work weekends instead of someone with a cutting edge technology background thats difficult to hire for.
My fix is the company has to show that all h1b workers are paid a median wage (not prevailing) for employees in that role, and companies over a certain size can't have over x% of h1b employees in that role.
If a company is in Boise and feels like it can't get enough employees to RTO, it should move. Just like I would move if I can't find a job in my small town.
First, it's not that they can't find *any*one. It's that we're always looking for what we think it the BEST. 99% of us (you and me) aren't the best, and when you're looking for the best you look everywhere. "Everywhere" happens to include people from around the world. [If you were among the best physicians, you can bet China and Italy and... would be seeking you out, too, right?]
Outsourcing served its purpose... but you're entirely right to point out the many problems--obviously many more than you listed, too!
Abuse of the system is a problem--that's why we on the right aren't opposed to "immigration," just making immigration work better.
I don't think your proposal of capping the % of work visas per company is a great solution--eliminating whatever you can I call "abuse" of the system is a better approach.
Relocating a company to upset all the other existing employees who reside there is not entirely tenable. Moving the IT division (for example) might be more practical though.
“So why the hell would we do it? Because we can't find the workers here in our neighborhood. It's true. Canyabelieveit!?! We need our work to get done, and can't find the people to hire here. So we actually are forced to consider these extra expenses, risks, timelines, etc. to get the frikkin' work done.”
How do you reconcile your original post, particularly the portion I’ve quoted above, with this reply? This looks like the motte (we need to hire top talent) and bailey (can’t find workers) that Elon fell back on.
Just as workers aren’t entitled to jobs, companies aren’t entitled to the best talent. They have to compete for it. If you can’t offer a good enough package to entice THE BEST, that’s on you. Don’t go around saying you can’t find anyone when really you set your standards too high or offer workers a shit deal.
Using the h1b system to hire the top decile of talent is what I would expect from the program. So your use case sounds exactly what it's designed for. I don't think it's fair to defend the h1b still given the three largest h1b companies are clearly not using it correctly.
That's why I believe there shouldn't ever be a case an h1b is cheaper than the median salary for that role. We want those spots for geniuses, because selfishly the brain drain from other countries makes the US better overall.
My observation/experience (also referenced in the Journal of Business Ethics regarding Delloite in a separate thread) is that companies often hire into the mid-level. I'm sure you've interviewed h1bs too and know what I mean. There are also a surprising number of poor candidates. I've interviewed several h1bs for Sr Engineering roles only to learn they don't really know how to program. As for the geniuses, we do need to make getting residency easier for those people.
People in America aren’t the best because we can’t ever get any training! A lot of jobs use hyper specific tools that there’s no proper easy training for that translates to on the job experience.
I think we can reasonably adjust the program that would make everyone happy. You can increase the cap but the workers need to be paid the same wage as US workers and they should be allowed mobility between companies or even different fields if necessary. If the lack of workers is really the issue then this would cause no problem.
Here's my guess about what is happening with the layoffs and then the H1 hiring.
The companies' current labor is experienced, and high-priced. People working on a visa (or pursuing one) are likely less experienced, and therefore lower-priced. We have no insight from the articles about what the pay rates actually were, nor whether these 'layoffs' were for contract workers or direct employees. (At least, not in my cursory once-over of the links.)
The immigrant can transfer their H1B visa to another employer--and that's the ONLY way I would hire people on a work visa. Sponsoring a new visa, from scratch, will literally take years (though many of the outsourcing companies do this, for us--and then we transfer the visa to us!) If an immigrant worker is terminated by their employer they do still have some time to find work and transfer that visa to another employer. If they're unable to do that, then they get to/have to go home to their home country.
You'll be happy to know that "prevailing wage" is a real (and enforceable) thing--and it's set by the government based on the local labor market. Just like we've all convinced ourselves that the gender wage gap is because employers are scamming women, we've convinced ourselves that H1B are just cheap labor.
Right so if companies are getting rid of existing workers for cheaper workers that's the issue at hand. It's not that they are just struggling to find people although I'm sure that's the case in certain instances.
I know about the prevailing wage, but there are levels to that and what they are doing is replacing workers they can pay at the lowest tiers. The program is meant to fill shortages not serve as pool of cheap labor.
As for going between jobs, you're only allowed a 60 day grace period which isn't that much and I don't think you can work at Starbucks or whatever. This is a significant handicap. Not to mention you can't really bargain with your employeer as well as citizen since they have you by the balls.
I think the word "cheaper" is getting me hung up. They're seeking a better value (cost/output) than what they have.
An interesting side effect of the work visa being tied to the employer is that a kind, sensitive, caring employer might choose to lay off citizens before work immigrants--since it'd be more "humane" to keep those with fewer options in the labor market.
You're right that 60 days isn't much--but these work visas (for IT, esp) are really meant for people with rare skills that are in demand. Those people should have an easier time getting work. And remember--these work visas aren't for the benefit of the worker (though they do benefit)--they're for the US's national benefit, and the employer's. It's not a charity. When my work is done/over/completed in a foreign country I have no expectation of grace to remain in that country--and neither should other immigrants.
Maybe better vetting for that component (being more selective with who we're issuing the visas to) is what needs fixing. (Not that I necessarily think the govm't is really great at doing that!)
I understand the hang up about calling it cheap labor. I do.
I have been let go for exactly this reason although not in the same industry. I was told explicitly by my employer that I hadn’t done anything wrong, but that the company was moving in a different direction. Turns out that different direction had a much lower labor cost. The person who replaced me was much less experienced, and much less expensive to employ. It was cheaper labor to help their bottom line. The size of the business doesn’t change the reality of what’s happening.
It’s a good thing to give the employers the benefit of the doubt when we consider them letting go an American rather than the h1-b hire. You also have to recognize that it is in the interest of the company to keep the h1-b hire. Aside from the relatively lower wage, you said it yourself, it’s expensive to hire them up front. For this reason. It would be foolish for the company to let them go until they get back to at least a break even point on the initial cost of hire. It makes even more sense to keep them after reaching that point, because that’s when the company gets to benefit from the 20-30% savings on labor cost. This relationship can be troublesome in many more ways than one.
The easy example everyone can think of is the new hire that everyone knows will get fired after the company’s mandatory 3-6 month trial period. In the case of a bad h1-b, that employee comes with the extra problem of the initial cost of filing the paperwork and also saturating the lower end of the market with a person who is now pretty desperate for a job and will likely accept a lower wage than they would otherwise.
Yeah, a friend of mine is here on an H1B visa, teaching computer science at a very uncool college in a region that many Americans consider unappealing. (He got a computer-science degree in the States because it was the easiest way for him and his family to flee his home country, where his life was in danger. So he's very highly motivated to be employable here!)
My friend is very congenial and a big networker, so in time he's let many of his friends from his home country know about other tech openings at his college, and thanks to him there's now a sizeable community of H1B immigrants from that country at this semirural college.
It's a classic case of supply meeting market demand. Computer-science profs are hard to attract and retain, because computer scientists--unlike us dumb humanities PhDs--can make plenty of money in industry and don't need to stick with college teaching in uncool areas if they don't feel like it. But, thanks to a college willing to sponsor H1B visas and good networking, my friend has made his weird little college into a great opportunity for hardworking immigrants who are willing to overlook the uncool location because they and their families can speak their native language and celebrate religious festivals together. Win-win for profs and students, as far as I'm concerned.
They are not hard to attract and retain if the expectations, e.g., teaching and service load, and pay are set appropriately. Colleges expect too much for too little pay.
The problem* with H1Bs is not Microsoft hiring a programmer from Mumbai or random company #100 in the middle of nowhere using it for their IT staff. Its the “body shop” consulting firms that spam the H1B visa lottery, abuse their workers, and undercut IT wages.
They are why I support turning the lottery into an auction based on the salary of the worker. It would put the body shops out of business while ensuring that the most productive foreign talent makes it into the country.
I like it. My concern with an auction system is that I think h1bs can be a huge benefit to startups. If you need a specialized skill for your startup you won't be competitive with Google hoovering up all the ml engineers. I'd prefer a system that makes it easier for a small company to find top foreign talent. It will likely lead to more innovation.
I don't think anyone really understands until they have to build a team of engineers and churn through 100's of applicants.
There are just some really, really shitty engineering candidates. I've had head count out for months before and seriously cannot find someone skilled enough for the job.
When you find someone that needs an H1B (but is qualified), you're not thinking about minimizing pay or getting cheap labor or any of that crap.
You're just thinking "Thank the gods, someone that can get the work done. What can I do to get this person on my team."
Perfection is impossible. In any system, there will be abusers.
We do have regulation and laws that prohibit that abuse. And companies are held accountable as is clear from a search of companies sued for such abuse.
Can you explain how this works when tech has just had massive layoffs and employee purges? I have heard from friends that the tech job market is now horrible for employees. Hundreds of applicants for each job etc. People are advising college students to avoid going into tech now as it looks not likely to improve anytime soon.
Can you help me understand how this can be true and also it’s not possible to find domestic tech workers such that H1Bs are needed?
In a company with 10's or 100's of thousands of tech worker employees, downturns are often taken advantage of to purge under performers, trim entire departments, etc.
In many states, like California, if your layoff is over a certain amount they are required to be structural. Meaning they can't target individuals, only whole departments or organizations.
So the tech company will drop entire chunks of people due to an underperforming product (amongst other reasons). Some of the engineers will get invitations to reapply and fast tracked for rehire.
They will also take this opportunity to hire up in areas that could use more resources, but weren't getting them due to financial constraints. After a restructure, there are assets available for redistribution to key areas of the business.
So that is why you often see a hiring phase right after a large layoff.
There are also requirements in how long you must give employees notice of termination for. . . . I think like 3 months. Most companies prefer not to keep terminated employees working with access to their systems for security reasons. So they comp them...basically giving paid PTO for the 3 months with full benefits and compensation in a severance package.
So..do not cry for tech worker layoffs. It's the softest landing an employee could ever hope for with ample time to transition to a new job. What I'm hearing is a good candidate might take 3 months or so if they're picky to find the right job. Compared to having a job lined up within a fe weeks before.
It's true the tech scene is relatively rough the last year or so...though picking up. Still....if you're making 250k+ as a 20 something or 400k+ as a senior engineer per year, you really ought to be capable of weathering the storm if you were even remotely responsible with your money.
A little empathy is always good, but really....this demographic is going to be just fine.
*edit*
Oh, also. Please note a lot of these households are dual income tech families. So household incomes of 500k-1m/year with two individuals earning 250k/500k each.
I don't think there's a world in which compensation > 250k/yr (which is the typical tech salary for large tech companies) is considered a "low salary" regardless of how high cost the area is.
Also, H1B's are not on a different compensation band than other employees. Both in practice and by law.
I can personally attest to that fact by virtue of managing many us citizens and H1Bs at large tech companies and seeing their compensation packages. It simply untrue that there's a systematic, conscious effort to pay H1Bs less in these companies.
The average salary for H1Bs is much less than $250k so clearly you aren’t really talking about “typical” companies. You say “large tech company” but I think you just mean “developers at FAANGs”.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that there's a huge dearth of qualified engineers, programmers, etc. stateside. Why do you suppose that's the case? I know America ranks poorly among industrialized nations on math testing statistics, but it seems unlikely that our citizens are so awful that they're being outnumbered in the industry by almost 3-to-1, especially when H1B people are purportedly more troublesome to hire. There have to be other factors at play.
A big part of the “shortage” is that everybody only wants to hire senior engineers, and if they can’t get that, they only want people with CS degrees, which really aren’t necessary to become a productive software engineer. There’s a lot of potential talent that can’t break into the industry because no one will give them a chance.
I highly doubt that 75% of all “top talent that absolutely can’t be found in the US” is in India and wants to work for companies that almost exclusively hire Indian H1Bs for IT work. So why is that the reality of H1B hiring?
A few main thoughts about H1Bs/immigration generally:
1) A guy I know well who works in a robotics lab as Phd. student at an R1 says there are only two American citizens out of a couple dozen people in his program. IDK this seems like a bad use of our educational resources? Yes I know the foreigners often pay full freight, but they also take a spot.
2) Another guy I know well is on the advisory board for a different engineering Phd. program (same school) and has worked at a big US firm himself for two decades. He says that his employer couldn't function without H1Bs etc. He also said that last Trump Presidency the engineering program he advises saw enrollment fall in half due to the departure of foreign students (I am guessing that is more COVID than Trump, but am not sure the details), he seems to think that this will happen again under Trump.
3) Another guy I know sightly less well is an immigration lawyer for a big national bank, and certainly a lot of the people he brings in are in no way special. Just end up being random personal bankers at branches and stuff. Definitely slotted right into jobs that would in the past have gone into Americans but now go to Nigerians and South Africans and Indians because their English is "good enough" and they are willing to work for $10k-20k less for the same quality employee. Especially since the jobs comes with immigration status. In these type of cases I think there is a crystal clear case this is just straight out harming Americans pretty seriously.
4) Personally I work closely with a tech firm staffed with Indians (and a couple Latinos) that is based in DC, and FWIW their output is hot garbage. Not sure why exactly, but never met a non-Indian or non-Latino working there. I am sure some of them are citizens by now because they have been in the states working for this firm (and/or a couple of its subsidiaries) for over a decade.
But they certainly are not some tiger-children Übermenschen. I mean maybe their employer would be just as much of a mess with more "American" staff, but in this case I am pretty sure it hasn't been a magic ticket to competency. Probably just cheaper. Plus with government contracting you get points for being brown and having brown staff.
It seems to me that people are talking past each other because there are actually some very different types of H1B hires.
On the one hand, you’ve got the people who are genuinely hiring highly skilled/educated specialists (often American educated) that for one reason or another are hard to find and it’s worth the effort to sponsor an immigrant for the role. This is what the program is *supposed to* be for, and it’s the stuff Musk is (or at least claims to be) talking about when he’s referencing himself and people like him to advocate for the program.
On the other hand, you’ve got “body shops” specializing in importing a large quantity of almost exclusively Indian tech workers educated in India who are (sometimes) reasonably competent but not generally anything special, whose main selling point is they are willing to work crap jobs for comparatively cheap and on a temporary basis. The people against expanding the H1B program are mostly reacting to this crowd.
The thing is I’m pretty sure the second category is quite a bit larger than the first one.
`1) A guy I know well who works in a robotics lab as Phd. student'
A quick glance over my department's graduate application pool shows that there simply aren't as many domestic students applying for PhDs. Grants have a limited duration and we (professors) need people to do the work. I work in a field where hiring domestic students is beneficial and I can't find them---and I'm very willing to recruit a domestic student with lower GRE scores!
A major reason for this, I'd speculate, is that being a PhD does not pay well for the amount of work required. In the DMV, where I am, you will be living with roommates into your late 20s/early 30s unless you can find a partner with a decent income.
I'd certainly like to pay graduate students more but funding amounts on grants haven't changed in years and cost-of-living isn't considered when deciding award amounts, anyhow. Oh, also the F&A at my university only goes up. And despite what graduate students may tell you, professors don't tend to draw much income from grants ($2,500 per grant per year is typical for me).
So if we want more domestic PhDs, increase funding to agencies like the NSF and force down administrative costs at universities.
Do we need more PhDs? It sounds like what we really need are skilled lab workers to perform research activities. Traditionally that work has been done by grad students pursuing PhDs, but if there is no good job market for them (or at least, not a market that justifies the opportunity cost and extra crap about teaching and attending classes vs going into industry with your BS or MS) then of course you aren’t going to get many applicants.
`what we really need are skilled lab workers to perform research activities'
So far as I am aware the process of obtaining a PhD---attending classes, possibly teaching, etc.---is the only good way we know of producing such workers...but then I am a professor with several PhDs under supervision!
Then why are there so many excellent laboratories (Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Bell Labs, every company’s R&D department, CERN, etc. etc.) that are not degree granting institutions, that mostly employ professionals, not students or professors?
By definition, a grad student is just some kid with a bachelor’s degree you train up to run your research. Why does all the class-teaching and dissertation writing and defending necessarily attach? Why not have professional researchers as a career track unattached to the ivory tower and tenure and writing shitty papers and delivering boring lectures? It mostly seems like an excuse to overwork and underpay 20-somethings while hanging out the carrot of a tenure track job that’s really a lottery ticket with crummy odds?
Those places employ a great many PhDs, which is why they're quite excellent at producing new knowledge. The career path for a typical PhD is basically academia (not likely) or industry/government labs. Lots of other options, too.
`By definition, a grad student is just some kid with a bachelor’s degree you train up to run your research.'
That's not a definition of a graduate student I'd recognize, and even if it were I couldn't train them to do research without them attending class, etc.
What you call `shitty' papers 1) come from all of the places you mention at the top of your post, too, and 2) require a student to understand not only their work, and how it fits into the overall research community, but also the work of others. Graduate students also do not just do what their advisors tell them: we're mentors, not dictators directing automatons. We teach students how to think and provide them the tools and experience to make discoveries. Research is a tremendously creative process and researchers almost always benefit from learning about related and not-so-related fields to make breakthroughs. Classes are really great for this.
Like say students in my lab need to learn a specific concept but also students in other labs need to learn that concept, too. Rather than two professors spending time to individually teach their students the concepts, we send them to a class where one professor teaches them. Also, I may be better at teaching some concepts than others but my students need the other concepts to perform their research, so I send them to a class with a professor who is better at teaching those concepts than me.
I agree with everything you said, however, I’d argue from an employee retention standpoint, H1Bs are really advantageous. If your company wants employees who will not be quitting even if you push them extremely hard to work long hours, H1Bs are great.
The larger threat to American tech jobs is definitely just companies opening operations centers in India altogether since the cost of labor there is so low yet there is a large talent pool.
Some of our best employees at my company were on an H1 work visa. We were selective when we hired, and in some cases they'd simply be more qualified than citizens... and we'd hire the most qualified person.
Once on board we treated them just like every other employee--and they were great. Dedicated. Hard working. Smart. Some cultural oddities, of course--but we even got to learn about their cultures while we were working.
We in the US don't have a corner on "great employees," and it's obvious that if you're looking for great employees you should at least consider everyone. If you want our companies to make the best products then you'll need to hire the best you can find. Don't kneecap them.
I agree - we don’t have a unique source of great employees, but we currently have a lot of unemployed tech workers. Employ them first. Then hire immigrants. You aren’t kneecapping yourself, you’re doing the bare minimum to make sure the economy keeps cooking because those American tech workers have money to spend instead of being a burden on social services.
Why do companies spend all this money on “paperwork” that’s so hard in addition to the “prevailing wage” which is a VERY loose definition.
Either you’re lying or your company is lying to you. Also, your company once they bring them over now has an employee with almost no bargaining power who is totally dependent on them so less turnover and more compliant.
Further they require less money because white middle class kids have higher expectations culturally. Imagine being a man and living in the same shitty apartment an Indian does. It won’t affect the Indian’s dating life but might affect the white guys dating life.
I'm curious to get your response to the "H1Bs are indentured servitude for the tech industry" argument. Not knowing anything about this stuff I figured it's rhetorically overblown, but the argument that it gives employers a degree of control over their H1B employees that creates labor market distortions (not to mention ethical distortions) sounds at least superficially plausible.
I'm also curious how much wiggle room exists in the "prevailing wage" analysis. I can imagine a strict version (independent entity without a financial stake in the outcome performs the analysis and tells the employer what to pay) and a lenient version (employer-side analogue to tipped employees filling in their wages on a W2)
I'm not a recruiter or contractor, I've done a lot of hiring in tech. H1B and otherwise.
There's a kernel of truth. The H1B process is a shit show. Changing employers can set back the timelines for your Green Card. So there's a huge built in incentive to not make waves and grind it out.
I've seen that translate into employees sticking around longer than they would accepting terms that others would push on.
I don't think employers are actively exploiting this system on a large scale. The bigger the company, the more of a rounding error it is. And H1B's tend to cost MORE over all due to the team of lawyers and time it takes to move them through the process.
Overall those effects put a downward pressure over time on their comp. e.g. you don't get a raise if you don't ask for one. You don't get big comp bumps if you don't change employers.
Again, big companies just don't work that way. You look at the total resource cost. Doesn't matter why they cost that much. Base, bonus, benefits, h1b processing. At the end of the day, you get X skilled resources of a certain experience for a certain amount of dollars.
The people actually doing the hiring couldn't care less if the candidate is H1B or not from a technical or cost point of view (they don't even negotiate salary, it's a different department/process). If anything there's a bit of bias against H1B on the front lines of hiring because the hiring manager incurs a higher cost of management for H1Bs (they take more time, they often take longer and less convenient vacations, sometimes there's a slight communication challenge, and so on).
It works like this: I the hiring manager says "We want this candidate". The recruiter takes over and negotiates terms. Comes back and either says they've signed or they're not wanting to sign. If I really want them, say they're a great candidate, I advocate for more comp for them or more equity. If they were middling or we're not as pressed, I might just let them go. That's it.
No cigar smoking discussions of immigrant exploitation. No talks of "they're H1B, squeeze them". Nothing even remotely like it.
It's not indentured servitude but the program provides so little mobility it becomes accept the work we give you or give up this high paying job and move home.
It's one of these things I don't know how to reason well. It's basically a form of light exploitation with how the program is currently designed. But the pay for many of these jobs is still so good you should probably feel more sorry for the guy who has to stock shelves at Walmart the rest of his life due to poor life circumstances as a teenager.
Yeah. Everyone I've known has their eyes wide open. They'll straight up tell you they know they can make more if they changed employers. They'll tell you they're heads down, get the work done, grind it out.
And they're also thankful the company is sponsoring them and extremely hopeful they'll close in on a green card. And they'll tell you they're earning enough. . . and now their kid's are U.S. citizens.
They also bounce for a huge pay increases as soon as the 10 years are up and the sponsor knows that's going to happen.
Like everything, there are abuses and abusers. Let's make it more real for us Americans.
You love France. Crepes, the language, the culture, cafes, and french-kissing, accordion music. You want to work in France, with all your heart. You get a job in France, and get to work there on their version of a work visa. Wooo hoooo!
Once there, you work your heart out, don't you? You're in the country/culture you've dreamed of, surrounded by your hopes for a French future, unlimited Coq au vin, and since your visa is tied to the fact that you're working... you make darn sure you work darn well.
You'd love to share this with your family, too, right? Since you're in France and contributing to French society and their economy they let you work toward getting a Green Card for permanent residency, and you can also bring over your wife and kids as you put in your time toward that.
Now you've REALLY got a stake in doing well for the Frenchmen, right? You've got a whole new motivation (and implicit threat) to do better than your fellow French colleagues. And your French boss knows that. And they see you working harder than Pierre over there. (This is what I think is being said when we say our immigrants have a better work ethic--it's mostly that they have this carrot/stick that you and I don't have to countenance.)
Pierre doesn't like you showing him up--so Pierre hates the immigrant worker.
Are you an "indentured servant" of them, as a result? Meh. You could frame it that way--but if at any moment you wanted to come back to the old U S of A you could. But you don't want that, right? So you continue to show up Pierre, and he blames the immigration system.
This is just inane rambling. The workers are paid less because they can be paid less. They have no standing to leave for a better paying position or argue for higher pay because they will be deported if they quit or are fired. They are tied to that company. This is a legalized way to exploit cheap labor instead of paying citizens a proper wage.
I work in tech in a city where tech is a major industry and I used to work in a tech job in a non-tech industry. We had a hard time getting qualified applicants because the company wasn't particularly prestigious and you weren't going to work on any particularly interesting projects. The pay was fine but ti wasn't great. There weren't any nice job perks and the company did not offer any type of equity.
Some of our jobs were required field-specific knowledge and lower level technical skills. We often hired new grads who had massively overestimated their technical skills and our management just wasn't equipped to assess their technical skills. They often really struggled with troubleshooting, using documentation, acquiring new skills, remembering what they did last time and general independent work. We did much better hiring internal candidates in non tech jobs who'd started learning technical skills on their own and wanted to move into a technical job.
When we were hiring for a department head, we interviewed a candidate who had less than two years of work experience (all entry level) who had decided they were ready for management. They also said they could do some of the coding work because their last job had used the same language we were working in and they'd run scripts a couple of times. I assume they got an interview because we were desperate and they'd been active in her masters program's DEI initiative and the company was really into DEI. Plus, our management at the time was mostly people with very little actual technical or subject knowledge who tended to be really good bullshitters and this applicant would have fit right in.
When we needed more advanced technical skills, the options were internal hires, hiring someone in a different time zone, hoping we got lucky and hiring a search firm. Even then, it was tough to find qualified people. We ended up hiring a lot of new grads who were a mixed bag -- lots of "I'm going to apply all the stuff I learned in school and the people in the company must not know what they're doing if they do it differently" with predictably disastrous results. We also got some good hires, but understandably they would leave for better offers.
I'm ranting and rambling, but the reason for my ranting and rambling is that some of our best hires were H1-B holders. A decent paying tech job at a boring non-tech company was a good job and they were better off there than in their home country. Sometimes our H1-B visa holders would jump to other companies but everyone still benefitted. In the case of that company, the extra expense for an H1-B was worth it because the company's lack of appeal had to do with the fact that it wasn't cool, was frustratingly bureaucratic and generally nobody's top tier of potential employers.
Also in the industry, and popular narratives just don't pass the smell test.
As an interviewer I don't see your visa status, nor do I see your expected comp. Even at final interview stage we expect that more than a supemajority of candidates aren't going to do well enough to get offers. And at that stage we've already done a ton of filtering.
The hiring committee that makes the final decision based on all feedback also doesn't see your visa status or expected comp. Compensation is negotiated between you and the compensation team after we decide to extend an offer.
You might ask why we'd bother interviewing those people who have such a low chance of success. It's because we're desperate! We're going to burn about ten hours of highly compensated engineer time on a roughly 20% chance that the person will be good enough to extend an offer to. At typical compensation at top tech companies it's about $20,000 in engineer compensation at just the final interview stage to get one qualified candidate.
But we're not desperate enough to lower our standards, because bringing a C player into an A team is going to drag everyone else down. If we couldn't hire H1B candidates to work at top tech companies, we wouldn't substitute them with less qualified local candidates. There's little more we could do to tap that talent pool.
We'd just either make do with fewer people, or expand our remote offices abroad and get those candidates to work from other countries, contributing to those economies instead of ours.
Sorry and I have not finished but I am *beyond* baffled listening to this. The clip of the psychic child Houston, how on Earth would anybody find that compelling? Yes, they are lying, or there was a camera in the garage. Is this podcast hypnotising people?
I am honestly gobsmacked. I feel like maybe there was something missing in the editing because it just blows my mind. I would put "dudes just lying" at number 1, he has a huge incentive to lie and there is basically no downside.
This is why I've been losing my mind in the OT (and it only gets much worse after Houston is introduced). I cannot for the life of me understand how people are falling for this.
Ii am genuinely baffled by Katie's response about how inexplicable it is. How is this more compelling than all those god awful haunted house shows? What am I missing?
I don't get why J&K are so reluctant to assert that people are probably lying. I get the whole "pervert for nuance" thing, but if we can't call even the telepathy people liars, we're really depriving ourselves of a vital tool of discussion. Not every false claim is the product of misunderstanding, there are tons of people out there telling obvious lies for obvious reasons.
Probably because accusing people of lying is a convenient way of not engaging with their ideas, and J+K would have some experience on being on the other end of that tactic.
Given that (1) most people aren't comfortable outright lying and (2) there are plenty of mechanisms by which people can deceive themselves without intentional lying, misunderstanding is at least as likely as lying.
Here's what I don't understand about the people who believe in the non-ESP variety of facilitated communication or "spelling": How do they explain the fact that a nonverbal, profoundly autistic child, who has never learned to read, suddenly knows how words are spelled? It seems that even those proponents who don't believe in telepathy would have to believe there's some psychic phenomenon causing this ability. Or do they think that the child has secretly learned to read? Wouldn't a parent have caught the child reading a book or newspaper at some point?
Exactly. Reading is not “intuitive” like spoken language is. It has to be taught rigorously and as we’ve seen with the Whole Langage Learning fiasco, if not done right, you’ll end up with kids that cannot read at all. Psychic or no, you can’t read or write unless taught.
In the insane novel Happiness Falls by Angie Kim, a profoundly autistic child has learned to read from the captions on the ipad his family uses to keep him occupied. (The premise of the book is that this kid despises his family because they assume he's developmentally disabled. As far as I can tell, its reviewers took FC seriously).
That was one of the big red flags in the Anna Stubblefield case, IIRC. The disabled young man, out of nowhere, was “writing” with the vocabulary of a graduate student. This was someone who had never demonstrated a grasp of grammar or syntax, but as soon as FC began, he went from zero to one hundred instantly? Sure…
He also had opinions, views, and interests which were in line with those of an upper middle class liberal woman in academia, like Anna Stubblefield. What are the odds? Wouldn’t a truly autistic child, suddenly finding a way to communicate, have more stereotypical autistic interests, like trains, computers, or something else? Or normal interests for their age, at least - girls (if male), sports, video games?
These stories always remind me of stories of child prophets, which exist in many religious. “…and a child will lead them.” Their innocence (and ignorance) somehow makes them more pure. I saw something similar at play with Greta Thunberg during her climate phase.
There is a lot of very understandable wish fulfillment on the part of the parents and family, who are in an often impossible situation, and are given a way out - your child just has a communication problem that can be dealt with via technology. The people in the FC and ESP community may be true believers, but what they are doing is harmful - providing false hope to desperate people and wasting time and resources. Telepathy, though, might be Freddie De Boer’s gentrification of mental illness on fentanyl. Your kid is not merely special - your kid has magic powers!
Much like Katie, I have no time for woo. What I do find interesting is its appeal among supposedly secular people (like Sam Harris and Buddhism).
To play devil's advocate, it wouldn't actually be necessary to know how to read in order to write out the words. Say the telepathy were real, and the child saw it in their mind's eye somehow, they wouldn't have to know what the letters spelled or what the word meant in order to copy them out from their mental image. Preschool kids copy out words all the time without having a clue what they're writing. For the record I don't think autistic kids have ESP though
I have a lot of thoughts about the H1B situation. I live near an engineering university that’s quite well known, my boyfriend is Indian and goes to said university, and I have a lot of Indian friends.
For one thing, we don’t want to have a work culture like India or China. People leave those countries because they’re miserable to live and work in. My boyfriend absolutely does not want to go back because of this. His dad had a 2 hour commute to work (one way I believe) as well as being required to work Saturdays. Imagine what that does to a family? I admire that he sacrificed to put food on the table for his family, but was that truly entirely necessary? I absolutely do not want this work culture here, and there are Indians who come here precisely because we don’t have this work culture. My boyfriend specifically doesn’t want to work in Indian majority groups where they revert to certain cultural norms.
Valorizing hours put in for the sake of hours put in is a terrible way to work. Are there tasks that require some degree of grinding away and just putting the time in? Sure, but that isn’t every task. It’s a mindset that’s using a hammer for everything because that’s the only tool you have.
I find the argument that Americans are lazy to be incredibly offensive. Maybe we work less, but we also have a country where one’s entire future isn’t decided based on a fucking last name or what family they’re born into. Google is already fighting issues with casteism. We don’t want more of that kind of attitude here.
Also, Korea has one of the highest youth suicide rates because of how cut throat their education system is. Do we want dead young people or slightly less productive/educated ones?
Or the example of presenteeism in Japan. Working long hours just to show you are working. And then burning out and going to drink and party after work. And now Japan is worried about such low population …
Thanks for this. It's important to remember, every now and again, that we all die at the end. Is working really hard for the sake of working really hard a virtue? For many it may be a necessity. But what if it isn't, what then? The distinction between laziness and making the most of our limited time here isn't always so clear.
I dated an Indian man for 6 years. He was an MBA, not a software coder, and he was very frank about his opinions about the H1B program and off-shoring. Also he was Christian and not Hindu, so he was really annoyed with the caste-based hiring and housing preferences that are so common in the heavily-Indian suburbs here.
I worked in IT for a non-IT fortune 500 company on a team of 20 people. My employer laid off 16 of the team and kept 4 of us to work as subject matter experts. They shipped most of the jobs over to India and brought over a couple of people from India (using H1-B visas) to help manage the offshore team. They were all paid much lower than our salaries.
It was a huge shock to lose the whole team this way and I had lots of survivors guilt. Even worse, I think our employer got a state tax credit for us keeping our jobs. One of the people brought over had his spouse join him. She eventually got hired for a six figure job she was not qualified for (no tech degree) by other Indians at the company. I worked well with the people brought over but it did feel like we were making it impossible for Americans to compete for these jobs.
The 16 people laid off included all of our minorities. The four they kept were all white. There is a lot more to this story than the typical narrative covers.
I posted this earlier, but it is hard to understand just how desperate parents of autistic kids are for some positive emotional feedback from their kids. You pour in so much love, care, attention and money into them and hope for a crumb of love.
My 30 year old son is autistic and we know many, many families who have invested their lives in FC or its modern variants. Many of these parents have waited for years for their child to say "I love you," and then this therapy comes along and not only does the child say "I love you," but he turns out to be exactly the kind of person they always dreamed he could be. Once you get sucked into this world, it's impossible to escape because it means that the child you've fallen in love with doesn't really exist.
One of the tragedies is that families spend their lives in a fantasy world. Instead of learning independent and self care living skills, the child spends his or her life tied to a facilitator who speaks and thinks for the child. Parents, particularly of older children, need to think in terms of "How will my child manage when I am no longer here?"
Also parents of autistic kids can be bad parents, they can be abusive and self centred and fame hungry. They are not saints beyond criticism, I appreciate J and K not wanting to go into that and that's true to form. What I cannot understand is their utter credulity when it comes to the "professionals" involved in this.
For Christs sake, some producer in this podcast says that the kid guessed the word he wrote and Katie is utterly baffled at how this could be, she reluctantly raises that he could be lying (the absolute correct and most obvious answer) and Jesse jumps in to reassure her that he doesn't think the guy is lying as if this is beyond the pale. What the actual fuck? Of course they are lying, are you fucking kidding me?
He could be lying. Or he could just be reacting to the incentives and engaging in motivated reasoning. I suspect Jesse favours the latter explanation over the former, which was the reason for his response.
Initially I was going to argue but you're right. For example he could have started typing foot or even frog and the guy interuppted with his word assuming he was seeing something he wasn't and then edited the truth afterwards accidentally.
A gang of friends who I used to work with went to a medium once. One of the girls came back with a very long story about how her Nan had spoken to her. Her story was that the psychic came over to her part of the crowd and said "I have a message for somebody here, it's an older lady" then zoomed in on my friend and said "it's your Nan, her name is Linda" (which was correct). My other friend who attended later told me what actually happened was just the first part but she had also said "I am getting a name with L in it" at which point my friend interuppted to say "that's my Nan Linda". I am sure Linda's granddaughter wasn't intentionally lying.
This is a very instructive anecdote. This is the process by which many seemingly incredible stories emerge. Memory and perception are both fickle and easily influenced by associated emotions and beliefs.
It could be outright lying, but without more evidence, it could be motivated reasoning and self deception. In the case of Clever Hans, the researchers believed the cues from his owner were unconscious.
This rings true through the documented modern history of kids we can guess would have been labeled as autistic. Stella O’Malley highly recommend the book, Neurotribes. Published in 2015. I found it helpful to understand some of the intense confusion and frustration of the early 2000’s tech geniuses in Silicon Valley whose kids seemed to have an unusually high rate of autism. The author tries to analyze cases from the 1700’s and 1800’s of kids from wealthy families that had some unusual cures tried on them. One case, after trying all sorts of discipline and cures, the family ended up sending the kid to live with a farming family who recognized that the boy really loved to count. They sent him out to hoe the fields and count the rows. Kid ended up working at a bank. The author seems to make the point over several hundred pages that autistic kids tend to be very delayed developmentally, and the non verbal and severely disabled kids tend to have rare chromosomal syndromes like Angelmans. It all got labeled as Autism. It’s been a while since I read the book, so I might be misremembering a few things.
The hardest part of the book to read was the experiments done in sanitariums in the 1950’s until 1970’s. Kids injected with LSD, all kinds of antipsychotics, worse. Sounds too familiar with the kids I know who were remarkably “weird” and then all got lured into gender medicine and antidepressants.
Indeed, I suppose its easier to be a bad parent to a child who needs more, that's just maths. I was more thinking of outright manipulation. I have no doubt that some of these parents are desperate believers but I also have no doubt that some of them are liars.
I have to admit that the idea of there being a cultural difference with young Indian and "native born" workers is pretty stark. I'm an elder millennial and have some colleagues and employees in their mid to late 20's who are awesome workers. What's a bit worrying now is some of the interviews I've been doing with recent college grads for engineering positions. They rely on chat GTP to solve basic engineering problems we pose to them as a part of the vetting process. The reason we practice these exercises isn't to simply find the answer, it's how we train our minds to think analytically and to find a problem by understanding how it is that we get there. Maybe these kids would be fine engineers, but this shows me that they lack the ability to think around corners (or at least suggests so), which is the single most important characteristic that I look for in an engineer. It really comes as no surprise, though. Not if you spend any time on Reddit these days. The attitude to work makes one wonder what the country might look like in 30 to 40 years time.
I teach college students, and the things I've seen them use ChatGPT for over the past year terrify me. Turns out that the same person can recite "ChatGPT is unreliable and isn't really thinking or understanding or reasoning" and then use it as though it's totally reliable and actually thinking and understanding and reasoning.
This semester I'm bringing back the in-class written essay.
DO IT! For as long as I have taught high school I have warned students that "you will get 2 exams and a blue book" even though I am not sure if this is still the case. I mean, not like they will come back and say "Mistuhh you lied!"
This is encouraging, thank you! High school teachers and college teachers should talk to each other more. Sometimes it feels like co-parenting without proper communication; dad doesn't know what mom is telling the kids and vice versa.
I'm honestly excited about this. My class is "inferential reasoning in data analysis", kind of a philosophy class crossed with a statistics class, aimed at data science and stats and CS majors. So my students are not used to "real" writing, and prior to teaching this class I wasn't used to grading it. I've assigned "take-home" writing assignments every time I teach it because that's just what we all do, right? But the more I think about it, the more I like the idea of in-class writing. The temptation to plagarise goes away, the pressure to put in a bunch of fluff in order to meet a length requirement (explicit or implied) goes away, the kids who procrastinate everything don't have to deal with the "oh shit it's midnight and my paper is due tomorrow" stress, and I don't have to read four pages of text that really should have just been one page.
Wonder how I'll feel about it after the semester is over :)
I think there will be a few years when in class essays will be a good way to get ahead of ChatGPT, then AI enabled glasses will make even that challenging.
I find that ChatGPT makes it much easier to write a good essay. It's helpful as a research assistant, as a conversation partner to brainstorm ideas, and as a proofreader. It's currently a crap writer, and you have to double check its research results in the original sources, but I estimate that it about doubles the amount of pages I can write in a given amount of time, substantially increases the breadth of supporting materials I can find to back up my work, and increases the quality of my writing slightly.
I'm basically an anti-LLM religious fanatic, but I get it :) It can be a useful tool, I just think the tech companies and AI hypesters have been so brazenly deceitful and unethical in trying to convince everyone to anthropomorphize their statistical next-token selection models that I feel gross using them at all. The illusion that there's a mind on the other end is so powerful, and so many people who should know better fall for it (see, e.g. the breathless reporting about "AI deception" every time an alignment researcher gets ChatGPT to role-play being an evil robot, like it hasn't been fed Issac Asimov stories thousands of times over). Doesn't help there's a "maybe LLMs are like alien minds" movement out there, cranking out speculations and prognostications that belong on the scrap heap of a philosophy-of-mind reading list.
I'm also a statistician, and especially salty that the tech world has convinced everyone that statistics is magic. Because I always tell my students "statistics isn't magic", and this ain't helping!
Also, I admit I sometimes use ChatGPT to help me write code. Haha.
I have a reverse anthropomorphism experience, where observing ChatGPT causes me to downgrade my model of human reasoning.
I'm now leaning towards a model where we're sophisticated probability predictors coupled with some kind of apparatus that produces the sensations we describe as self-consciousness and free will.
(But it's not my area, so I'm probably still way off.)
After a major outbreak of cheating in my class (25% of students used google to answer a question when they were told they couldn't use their web browser during the exam, except to download and submit the exam), I moved to pen and paper exams.
Now I get marked down on teaching evaluations explicitly for not allowing them to use their computers to take the exam. Best of luck!
Do you think that Indian candidates would NOT rely on ChatGPT??
🤣
I hate to say this, but in my experience the outsourced and recently arrived Indian team members I have managed have been the most disappointing. Yes, they work hard - but they were not educated to think through things and make decisions. This may be a function of the hiring firm that provided them though. Conversely, I have worked with amazing teams in Costa Rica and Eastern Europe. Those countries do not have such easy H1b access to the US though. Why is that?
The whole bullshit line that no Americans can write code or work hard, is completely false and really fucking offensive.
My Dad got in a bit of trouble in an Irvine company he was CEO of for saying that they couldn't hire any more Asian software engineers because they were all too rigid in their thinking.
But chatgpt and similar tools are only getting better and better. Soon those synthetic intelligence tools will be far better engineers than any human. I'm sure you remember the canard from high school, "you have to learn to do the work, you won't be carrying a calculator in your pocket your whole life!" Well now the canard is, "you can't rely on AI, it gets stuff wrong all the time!" Sure, for now. But you might be surprised as to how soon we reach the point that it makes far fewer mistakes than humans do.
My point is that these tools aren't bad because they're making engineers worse. They're bad because they're going to make engineers redundant and we have absolutely no idea what to do with millions of unemployed people in a society that's thousands of times more productive than a society without these tools.
God I love asking the cheaters questions that they can't wriggle out of. What do they think they're going to do, ChatGPT through every minute of every day once they've got the job?
I have a colleague who was teaching a class on data visualization right around when ChatGPT got popular. He strongly suspected some students were using ChatGPT to write all their code for his homework assignments. There were strong indicators but no rock-solid proof. I gave him a fun suggestion: for the next quiz, just print out each student's code for their last homework assignment and have them annotate it by hand, right there in class. Explain what each line of their code does. If they can do this, then perhaps they used ChatGPT "responsibly"; they're allowed to search coding forums and take example code from documentation, after all. But if they can't explain their code line-by-line, then they may as well have copy/pasted a friend's solutions and passed them off as their own. (I don't know if he did this; it would have taken forever to grade)
I'm pretty cynical about ChatGPT. I think most people use it as a substitute for thinking, rather than as an "assistant". Someone above made the calculator argument, which I get, but calculators do real damage too. I have students who cannot do a lick of mental arithmetic; they whip out a calculator to divide by 10. ChatGPT is worse, because strongly encourages deception. When someone uses it to write an email, they don't disclose this to the recipient. Cos who wants to read an email written by a chatbot? Ugh.
I went to a Skeptic conference when James Randi was alive and was stunned by magicians who could actually read my mind! Except they couldn't. It's just that they knew better than anyone how easily our senses can be misled. Time and again magician/skeptics have caught things that "rigorous scientists" have not. Just ask Uri Geller, who convinced a lot of researchers that he could bend objects with his mind--all with tricks that a talented 12-year-old magician could spot. Without firm protocols, tests like this are meaningless. Not that--as you said--all these parents and autistic children were working elaborate scams. Some just wished it were so and helped the process along.
My Dad once bought a spoon off Uri Geller for £10,000 for charity. The only upside was that we got to go backstage and see my Dad, who thinks of himself as very suave, completely shut down when trying to talk to Miss World.
Weirdly, a friend of mine who I met a decade later at university had a video of my Dad buying that spoon. Magic?!
Very good point. But it is also possible that some of these people are working elaborate scams. Katie mentions that one person set up a "foundation" to collect donations. I think Katie might be a skeptic of supernatural stuff, but she's also a credulous person who seems to take people at their word even when when they have an incentive to lie/mislead. There was the whole time she treated pitbull breeders as objective observers.
A guy said he walked into the garage and wrote down a word, then they were spelling it when he got back. It's not like there aren't ways of seeing from one room to another. Katie's reaction: "I can't think of any other explanation..." So, it's more plausible that some random kid has magic than someone just made something up? I think a lot of this might be self-delusion on the part of the parents and they are subtly telling their child how to act, but I'm also willing to believe that some of these people might just be con artists.
I have a feeling that versions of this scam have been worked since the beginning of homo sapiens but here's to trying NOT to be cynical. However. I am grateful for the alliance between the skeptic movement and magicians, and you can have a lot of fun searching on YouTube for Randi's videos about exposing various hucksters. Jesse and Katie were struggling with an age-old question: What's the HARM? People who tell grieving parents that their dead kids are in heaven and want them to know it's beautiful up here could be said from a humanitarian perspective to be of great service. But apart from extracting obscene amounts of money for those services, they're softening everyone up for a world of fuzzy superstition and a faith that everything is God's will. As if.
The irony of "what if autistic people are secretly telepathic" is that one of the major challenges for verbal people on the spectrum is a difficulty with reading others. It tends to be pretty clear if someone who is verbal (autistic or not) struggles to understand what other people think, and they can verbally communicate those difficulties themselves. If someone can't speak and struggles to communicate through other means, people might be able to project on them more.
I think the trope of the autistic savant can play into this as well. If someone struggles in some areas, they must make up for it with superior ability in other areas. It's a compelling idea and some autistic people truly are especially skilled in some subjects. I think there also might be something to be said about the effect of collapsing of Aspergers, classic autism, CDD and PDD-NOS into the broad diagnosis of ASD. I could imagine how a parent of a non-verbal autistic child with high support needs could look at examples of highly accomplished level 1 autistic people and hope that there's some remarkable ability hidden within their child that just hasn't been able to come out. In fact perhaps because their challenges are so much greater, the skill which compensates for it might be particularly rare and exceptional, such as telepathy.
Yes, there is something to be said. I have several relatives who work with people with severe autism, and I think about this whenever I hear someone blithely mention their (usually) self-diagnosis. They are not the same.
Absolutely. There is an interesting case of a dance teacher whose kid is severely disabled and non verbal. He would bring his kid to the dance and theater classes he taught and eventually noticed the kid was trying to copy some of the movements. The dad had the bright idea to use some of the improv theater techniques to communicate with his son through movement.
They started a whole non profit school, and try to teach about friendship and keeping safe body boundaries (disabled kids get sexually assaulted as she Australian documentary showed).
I'm not finished listening so perhaps this was mentioned in the ep.
I have a feeling this belief that autistic kids have telepathy is rooted in the idea of "indigo children". I've not heard anyone speak of it in those terms in many years, but it could explain the popularity of the podcast.
The "indigo children" concept comes up occasionally in gender-critical conversations. I think a lot of us who witnessed the indigo children fad see a similar need for specialness in transhausen moms.
Yes! I also immediately made the connection to the indigo children. This is just a repackaging of the anxieties of having a child who is not developmentally typical.
It's just objectively the case that it's not a "skills" gap that is responsible for Cognizant and Infosys being in the top H1B hires. Whatever this supposed cultural difference is, it's belied by the fact that H1B visa holders don't have mobility and are paid less. It's not a fair wage game for US residents.
Look at the these three issues that suppress wages:
- LLM: AI taking the jobs of journalists and other knowledge work
- VOIP: Foreign call centers taking the jobs of customer service managers
- Shipping Container: Outsourcing taking the jobs of local factory workers
Technology advancement creates outsize benefits for capital holders while suppressing local wages. The especially weird thing about H1B is it's basically solving a problem we don't have a technology for; companies who outsource still pay a cost in the legal and logistical hurdles due to locality.
There is obviously a reason a company like Amazon would rather QA Engineers (a job that isn't at risk of too few workers) at their HQ than setting up in India. H1B isn't some technology innovation it's basically a program that's been created purely to suppress knowledge work wages.
Katie and Jesse are totally wrong about this being about racism or culture. For a group quick to dismiss accusations of racism, I don't see how they there there is solid evidence that people would feel differently if they were Europeans. Most Western Europeans won't come to the US and deal with the depressed wages of H1B and lack of mobility. Once H1B workers make the same amount and have the same mobility, then I think you can make that argument there is a racism component.
Yes they are. I get it. It's hard to imagine a business pushing the boundaries of the law.
A "prevailing wage" does not translate into the median wage for a company in that role[1]. Moreover, huge swaths of people working at contracting companies like infosys drive down the entire industry wages.
A total of 60% of all H-1B jobs are assigned wage levels that are well below the local median wage. [2]
Some H1B workers are paid less. Some are paid more. Using the company's median wage for that role is not a reliable measuring stick. "Prevailing wage" is a better metric of the labor market's pricing for labor, and does take into account job title as well as geographic demand for that labor.
If "A total of 60% of all H-1B jobs are assigned wage levels that are well below the local median wage" that is actually not a terrible stat. 50% are above the median and 50% below among US Citizens (because of math). 60% is worse, but you have to dig more into the stat to convince me. Also, how far "below" is dictated by the prevailing wage ranges (which will closely align with general labor-market pay ranges.
"Underpaid" immigrants under an H1B are easily recruited away (via visa transfers to a new employer who won't underpay them)--something I've done frequently. [But now people won't be happy that we're recruiting them and paying them well!]
I think you're looking for a bogeyman without considering a breadth of factors (you should also consider the legal costs of processing and maintaining an H1B and other factors transporting and housing some of these workers if you want to talk straight-dollars).
If we workers want to capture the labor market we'll need to do what our employers work every day to do: Do more and do it better, for less. Sorry--welcome to the most successful economy in the world.
I'm so confused by what you are arguing. Are H1Bs for high quality talent? Why would we not expect they trend to above the median? If they work harder, why would that also not mean they trend to being paid more?
At this point the lack of coherence in what H1B is about makes me think this is all ideological. Like some Libertarian thing.
My concern is it looks like corporate welfare and here you are telling people they are actually just lazy.
If you have a talented candidate who wants to work for less than you’re paying an equally talented candidate, why wouldn’t you hire the first one? I swear to god, you are all mostly innumerate on this side of the argument.
I can get my own, more recent cites that show this is wrong, but I think that if you find the EPI credible in this topic, you won’t bother reading them. They’re a pro-union, leftist think tank. Of course they would out a misleading white paper that “proves” H1B is wage slavery.
I don’t know why you think “prevailing wage” is supposed to match the median salary for that role at that company. That’s not even vaguely what it means.
It’s always very obvious in these conversations who has hired people on H1Bs and those who have never even had a tech job.
All you have to do is read any current news coverage instead of a leftist think tank. Anyone with actually curiosity on this topic could easily be informed.
You seem capable of expressing an opinion, but not putting forth an argument. I'm open to your perspective, but you'll have to stick your neck out to do that!
You can’t square the circle between tech layoffs and claiming a shortage of candidates. H1B is fraught with abuse at all levels. This discussion was painful to listen to .
What’s missing here is the culture of pattern matching in hiring . If you were to look at org charts in large tech companies you would see teams where everyone looks the same . There is a reason (wrong or right) California was adding “caste” protections. In my role I’ve hired H1B , green card , and citizens.
"You can’t square the circle between tech layoffs and claiming a shortage of candidates."
Sure you can, you just have to stop pretending all skilled workers are equivalent and fungible. Micro-niches are common in the tech world.
It can be reasonable to lay off a low performing team (or even a high performing team that has delivered a product and is shifting to maintenance mode) and replace them with an offshore team, with a few H1Bs to manage them. The skills (and cultural background) required for the H1B workers are different from those of the original team.
I'm not a big fan of this practice, and I think it's been a net drain on the tech world, but it is not an unreasonable practice given constraints and goals of a particular organization.
A company laying off workers with similar skill set shouldn’t be able to sponsor H1Bs for the same skill set. Kinda defeats the argument that there aren’t any local workers.
With regard to “niche” there are other visas available for people with demonstrated special skill sets.
My issue with the H1B program is the way large companies take advantage and handle market testing for skills. There is just so much abuse from the consultancies to the FANG companies.
To just repeat the other comment, if you have a shitty US-based IT team, and you can hire a better team in India for less money, it is entirely rational do that. There may be other downsides, but you are completely ignoring the skill issue.
If you can’t fire people who suck, you end up like France. Do you want to end up like France?
It sounds like the H1B skill is to be the US based manager of the offshore team, so you need someone who can speak to and manage people from that region who also understands the tech piece.
Sorry Katie but you got this one wrong. My daughter is autistic and she has very powerful telepathic abilities. She's heading to prom next week, I hope nothing bad happens!
My child is also very autistic and very telepathic. Anyway, me and the family are headed off to oversee a hotel that’s been closed down for the winter season. Should be fun.
Not sure if my child is autistic but he claims to see dead people, says some of them don’t even know they’re dead. The weird thing is he told me I can ask his psychologist all about it, but he doesn’t actually have a psychologist.
My autistic daughter communicates with a spirit called Captain Howdy. Captain Howdy has helped her love Jesus in a very real, almost physical way.
I need to watch Carrie again. Last time I saw it, I was a child. I’m sure I didn’t fully appreciate it.
This thread is making me realize that basically every child horror movie protagonist of the past could self-diagnose as autistic today.
Omg 😆 🩸
Asking a Jew what they’re anxious about is a bold start to an episode.
Katie,
The Holocaust was the end of a millenia of European antisemitism.
The USA banned Jewish immigration in like 1927. The USA took very few holocaust survivors (but still more than most other countries). The vast majority of Jews in the USA are from families that migrated here prior to the 1927 ban.
Most Jews in America descend from Eastern European Jews fleeing pogroms or Russian Jews fleeing either the Czar or the USSR which betrayed them (long story). They most definitely were survivors albeit not Holocaust survivors.
We act as though the holocaust was a singular event rather than the culmination of centuries of bigotry. I believe this is distroting and harmful as it confuses the ideas for people. we look at Hitler and avoid looking at the antisemitism that preceeded him.
All very true. I was teaching about US Immigration just yesterday and establish the point that "violence against Jews" did not BEGIN with the Holocaust. I mention the pogroms, etc. This is the likely result of people raised on this idea of only knowing about Hitler when it comes to "bad stuff" and nothing else.
I consider myself to be pretty well versed in historical atrocities against Jews, but I was really surprised to read about the Khmelnytsky Uprising and its affect on the Jews of the area a couple of months ago, and was completely shocked that I hadn't learned about it at all.
I consider myself well-educated and well-read overall but I didn’t learn the full extent of pogroms in European history until like five years ago. I didn’t get that in high school or college.
Well, neither did I. There's only so much we can teach. I don't go into too much depth because in the grand scheme of things but I do communicate that Jews were subject to violence throughout most of human history.
Wow, I didn’t know there was a ban in 1927. My family went from Munkacs to Mexico City to San Antonio, TX, in the twenties.
There were many bans throughout the years targeting different groups. Chinese Exclusion Act is a pretty obvious one, but there was also the oddly named "Gentleman's Agreement" that affected Japanese immigrants.
Also, despite it's name, no one was deported under the Alien and Sedition Acts, though the latter part of that law is still on the books in some form.
This is such an important point - my grandparents were survivors and ended up in Australia because they couldn’t get into the US. (One great uncle did make it, although the poor sod thought the New York he was headed to was NYC. It was Buffalo.)
My hometown - Melbourne - had the highest number of Holocaust survivors in any city outside of Tel Aviv. A lot also ended up in South America, so you have these thriving pockets of Yiddish culture in places like Argentina. It’s also shaped us as communities, and as Jews. The highest numbers of Jewish day school attendance, lowest rates of intermarriage. Part of my PhD research compared Australian, American and British Jewish identities and the timings of the largest migrations of Jews have had a huge impact on people’s day-to-day lives (a more material version of ‘lived experience’!), even generations later.
Interesting postscript: My Great Uncle Sam, who ended up in Buffalo, moved there with his wife, his wife’s sister and her husband in 1948. Not long before the move, his sister-in-law gave birth to a little boy in Augsburg, Germany.
The baby’s name? Wolf Blitzer.
This is interesting to me because my man was just telling me that as a kid in Brooklyn he didn’t know anyone else with a parent who was a Holocaust survivor. I found that quite surprising.
The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 clamped down on immigration from Eastern Europe.
Absolutely true.
The telepathy/FC stuff makes me very sad. I understand why parents want to believe, especially in cases where their children are non-verbal. I am troubled because inevitably the first sentence is “I LOVE YOU MOMMY, YOU ARE THE LIGHT OF MY LIFE AND I APPRECIATE ALL YOUR MANY SACRIFICES.” The mom connections here weren’t surprising.
However, I think in a strange way it actually diminishes the capacity that people with profound disabilities DO have. It’s like anthropomorphizing animals— making the subject “more like us” to justify our affection for them.
One of my aunts was born with a moderate intellectual disability and has lived in care homes her whole life. She doesn’t write sentences and can’t do lots of things, but she’s funny and she’s a big personality. I could BS and say she’s secretly a genius but the truth is, she loves cats and Strictly Come Dancing and hates when anything in her room is moved even the SMALLEST amount. She is herself.
In a social services context I have worked with quite a few severely intellectually disabled children, including non-verbal ones. With limited exceptions (a child whose brain hemispheres didn’t divide in utero, for example), the kids do have personalities, preferences, and surely some sense of thought and ideas. They deserve care and compassion and love and our best attempts to understand them. But they aren’t magic. Saying they are magic is somehow… disrespectful. They are just people, and this is enough.
Agreed. Putting a group of people on a pedestal can be just as dehumanizing as placing them in the dirt beneath your feet.
Re: Immigration and H1Bs. I'm in the employment biz, so I know a fair amount about this.
1) We would always prefer to hire in-country with citizens. It's easier, they have fewer cultural gaps, obviously (?) speak our language, and everyone wants to support their neighbor before supporting someone thousands of miles away.
2) H1Bs are subject to rigorous pay rules--we have to pay the "prevailing wage" for such immigrant workers. And yes, it's subject to audit and must be justified.
3)There are real, significant costs (monetary, cultural, time, logistical and paperwork costs) that come with hiring an H1B. It's not cheap, and it takes resources. There are real expenses, not savings, when hiring people on a work visa.
So why the hell would we do it? Because we can't find the workers here in our neighborhood. It's true. Canyabelieveit!?! We need our work to get done, and can't find the people to hire here. So we actually are forced to consider these extra expenses, risks, timelines, etc. to get the frikkin' work done.
And if we don't do it this way, you're going to really complain when we outsource again to foreign countries for labor (which WILL be a cost savings, for damn sure). We did that in the early oughts--and there were problems with that, too--but those are the actual practical choices to get the frikkin' work done.
Where I don't like the H1B program is in "consulting." "Consulting" companies bring in skilled labor under H1Bs to work for their clients--and that system is actually abused in a pretty significant way. But you and I are "demanding" this when we want things good, fast and cheap. This is the cost of our demand.
Fascinating. I couldn't find work for over a year. A variety of reasons of course but one was ghost jobs - companies publish it for posterity but then hire an H1B worker for cheaper or outsource I was told. I was contacted by at least 200 recruiters, 190 of them Indian and landed ONE interview with Amtrak with an entirely Indian team. I wasn't hired. I don't know what is true or not - I only know of my experience and what I got is that I'm not needed in the American market despite my extensive skills, culture fit, and experience.
If it makes you feel any better, I'm in the hiring business, and I also was out of work for a year. Like you I fielded hundreds of calls from recruiters (they never told me their nationality, but they didn't speak like I do!)--and not a single one of them went anywhere either. That's because they're outsourced recruiters at the lowest rung of recruiting, with hyper competition for the positions they're recruiting for. It's literally a million-to-one shot with them.
And honestly, even though you read about it in the news, ghost jobs aren't a real thing to worry about. It happens--but you'll have to trust me that we don't have the time to waste time on posting jobs that we can't fill--we're too busy trying to fill the real jobs we do have! (The company I work for does post multiple job postings of the same vacancy--but that's a function of Indeed's limitations on us that we have to get around to attract the most/best people--so we have to post multiple postings for the one job. Is that a "ghost job?" No--it's a duplicate posting so we can actually reach YOU!)
Networking with your friends (Indian, included!) is the way to get a job--and just ignore the recruiters who call you but can't give any level of detail to your screening interview, or any level of detail behind the job or employer. They're a time-suck.
Thanks for your perspective. Super fascinating.
A large team composed all of one race should be a red-flag regardless of the race.
Riiiiighht. There are not enough well -qualified engineers in the Greater Seattle area, you absolutely MUST import them from India. Mmm hmmm.
I also know this topic well and I don't find your argument persuasive.
Amazon is the top h1b hiring company. They can't find anyone in Seattle to do Ops? I agree the contracting agencies are an especially bad problem.
It's also very common to remotely hire. You are starting with the presumption that you need someone in your locale at a certain rate or you'll outsource.
The reason people don't outsource is it's a headache. Timezones usually don't match and local laws can require weird corporate structures. So they go through foreign contracting agencies whose quality is often subpar and it raises costs.
H1bs are a good thing as a concept, but the program is abused and we end up with companies using it to hire mid-skill dbas whose willing to work weekends instead of someone with a cutting edge technology background thats difficult to hire for.
My fix is the company has to show that all h1b workers are paid a median wage (not prevailing) for employees in that role, and companies over a certain size can't have over x% of h1b employees in that role.
If a company is in Boise and feels like it can't get enough employees to RTO, it should move. Just like I would move if I can't find a job in my small town.
First, it's not that they can't find *any*one. It's that we're always looking for what we think it the BEST. 99% of us (you and me) aren't the best, and when you're looking for the best you look everywhere. "Everywhere" happens to include people from around the world. [If you were among the best physicians, you can bet China and Italy and... would be seeking you out, too, right?]
Outsourcing served its purpose... but you're entirely right to point out the many problems--obviously many more than you listed, too!
Abuse of the system is a problem--that's why we on the right aren't opposed to "immigration," just making immigration work better.
I don't think your proposal of capping the % of work visas per company is a great solution--eliminating whatever you can I call "abuse" of the system is a better approach.
Relocating a company to upset all the other existing employees who reside there is not entirely tenable. Moving the IT division (for example) might be more practical though.
“So why the hell would we do it? Because we can't find the workers here in our neighborhood. It's true. Canyabelieveit!?! We need our work to get done, and can't find the people to hire here. So we actually are forced to consider these extra expenses, risks, timelines, etc. to get the frikkin' work done.”
How do you reconcile your original post, particularly the portion I’ve quoted above, with this reply? This looks like the motte (we need to hire top talent) and bailey (can’t find workers) that Elon fell back on.
Just as workers aren’t entitled to jobs, companies aren’t entitled to the best talent. They have to compete for it. If you can’t offer a good enough package to entice THE BEST, that’s on you. Don’t go around saying you can’t find anyone when really you set your standards too high or offer workers a shit deal.
Using the h1b system to hire the top decile of talent is what I would expect from the program. So your use case sounds exactly what it's designed for. I don't think it's fair to defend the h1b still given the three largest h1b companies are clearly not using it correctly.
That's why I believe there shouldn't ever be a case an h1b is cheaper than the median salary for that role. We want those spots for geniuses, because selfishly the brain drain from other countries makes the US better overall.
My observation/experience (also referenced in the Journal of Business Ethics regarding Delloite in a separate thread) is that companies often hire into the mid-level. I'm sure you've interviewed h1bs too and know what I mean. There are also a surprising number of poor candidates. I've interviewed several h1bs for Sr Engineering roles only to learn they don't really know how to program. As for the geniuses, we do need to make getting residency easier for those people.
People in America aren’t the best because we can’t ever get any training! A lot of jobs use hyper specific tools that there’s no proper easy training for that translates to on the job experience.
What about the times when companies fire their own workers to hire H1B1's? If you're struggling to find people why would you fire people first?
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff-at-disney-train-foreign-replacements.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
https://insider.govtech.com/california/news/jury-finds-discrimination-in-h-1b-visa-tech-worker-case
https://www.epi.org/blog/tech-and-outsourcing-companies-continue-to-exploit-the-h-1b-visa-program-at-a-time-of-mass-layoffs-the-top-30-h-1b-employers-hired-34000-new-h-1b-workers-in-2022-and-laid-off-at-least-85000-workers/
I think we can reasonably adjust the program that would make everyone happy. You can increase the cap but the workers need to be paid the same wage as US workers and they should be allowed mobility between companies or even different fields if necessary. If the lack of workers is really the issue then this would cause no problem.
Here's my guess about what is happening with the layoffs and then the H1 hiring.
The companies' current labor is experienced, and high-priced. People working on a visa (or pursuing one) are likely less experienced, and therefore lower-priced. We have no insight from the articles about what the pay rates actually were, nor whether these 'layoffs' were for contract workers or direct employees. (At least, not in my cursory once-over of the links.)
The immigrant can transfer their H1B visa to another employer--and that's the ONLY way I would hire people on a work visa. Sponsoring a new visa, from scratch, will literally take years (though many of the outsourcing companies do this, for us--and then we transfer the visa to us!) If an immigrant worker is terminated by their employer they do still have some time to find work and transfer that visa to another employer. If they're unable to do that, then they get to/have to go home to their home country.
You'll be happy to know that "prevailing wage" is a real (and enforceable) thing--and it's set by the government based on the local labor market. Just like we've all convinced ourselves that the gender wage gap is because employers are scamming women, we've convinced ourselves that H1B are just cheap labor.
I'm here to tell you neither one is true.
Right so if companies are getting rid of existing workers for cheaper workers that's the issue at hand. It's not that they are just struggling to find people although I'm sure that's the case in certain instances.
I know about the prevailing wage, but there are levels to that and what they are doing is replacing workers they can pay at the lowest tiers. The program is meant to fill shortages not serve as pool of cheap labor.
https://www.epi.org/publication/h-1b-visas-and-prevailing-wage-levels/
As for going between jobs, you're only allowed a 60 day grace period which isn't that much and I don't think you can work at Starbucks or whatever. This is a significant handicap. Not to mention you can't really bargain with your employeer as well as citizen since they have you by the balls.
I think the word "cheaper" is getting me hung up. They're seeking a better value (cost/output) than what they have.
An interesting side effect of the work visa being tied to the employer is that a kind, sensitive, caring employer might choose to lay off citizens before work immigrants--since it'd be more "humane" to keep those with fewer options in the labor market.
You're right that 60 days isn't much--but these work visas (for IT, esp) are really meant for people with rare skills that are in demand. Those people should have an easier time getting work. And remember--these work visas aren't for the benefit of the worker (though they do benefit)--they're for the US's national benefit, and the employer's. It's not a charity. When my work is done/over/completed in a foreign country I have no expectation of grace to remain in that country--and neither should other immigrants.
Maybe better vetting for that component (being more selective with who we're issuing the visas to) is what needs fixing. (Not that I necessarily think the govm't is really great at doing that!)
I understand the hang up about calling it cheap labor. I do.
I have been let go for exactly this reason although not in the same industry. I was told explicitly by my employer that I hadn’t done anything wrong, but that the company was moving in a different direction. Turns out that different direction had a much lower labor cost. The person who replaced me was much less experienced, and much less expensive to employ. It was cheaper labor to help their bottom line. The size of the business doesn’t change the reality of what’s happening.
It’s a good thing to give the employers the benefit of the doubt when we consider them letting go an American rather than the h1-b hire. You also have to recognize that it is in the interest of the company to keep the h1-b hire. Aside from the relatively lower wage, you said it yourself, it’s expensive to hire them up front. For this reason. It would be foolish for the company to let them go until they get back to at least a break even point on the initial cost of hire. It makes even more sense to keep them after reaching that point, because that’s when the company gets to benefit from the 20-30% savings on labor cost. This relationship can be troublesome in many more ways than one.
The easy example everyone can think of is the new hire that everyone knows will get fired after the company’s mandatory 3-6 month trial period. In the case of a bad h1-b, that employee comes with the extra problem of the initial cost of filing the paperwork and also saturating the lower end of the market with a person who is now pretty desperate for a job and will likely accept a lower wage than they would otherwise.
Yeah, a friend of mine is here on an H1B visa, teaching computer science at a very uncool college in a region that many Americans consider unappealing. (He got a computer-science degree in the States because it was the easiest way for him and his family to flee his home country, where his life was in danger. So he's very highly motivated to be employable here!)
My friend is very congenial and a big networker, so in time he's let many of his friends from his home country know about other tech openings at his college, and thanks to him there's now a sizeable community of H1B immigrants from that country at this semirural college.
It's a classic case of supply meeting market demand. Computer-science profs are hard to attract and retain, because computer scientists--unlike us dumb humanities PhDs--can make plenty of money in industry and don't need to stick with college teaching in uncool areas if they don't feel like it. But, thanks to a college willing to sponsor H1B visas and good networking, my friend has made his weird little college into a great opportunity for hardworking immigrants who are willing to overlook the uncool location because they and their families can speak their native language and celebrate religious festivals together. Win-win for profs and students, as far as I'm concerned.
They are not hard to attract and retain if the expectations, e.g., teaching and service load, and pay are set appropriately. Colleges expect too much for too little pay.
I was coming here to say basically this!
The problem* with H1Bs is not Microsoft hiring a programmer from Mumbai or random company #100 in the middle of nowhere using it for their IT staff. Its the “body shop” consulting firms that spam the H1B visa lottery, abuse their workers, and undercut IT wages.
They are why I support turning the lottery into an auction based on the salary of the worker. It would put the body shops out of business while ensuring that the most productive foreign talent makes it into the country.
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/silicon-valleys-body-shop-secret/78781/?amp=1
*I am generally supportive of the program but its not perfect.
I totally agree.
The salary-based auction idea is one that I haven't heard of, and is really interesting.
I like it. My concern with an auction system is that I think h1bs can be a huge benefit to startups. If you need a specialized skill for your startup you won't be competitive with Google hoovering up all the ml engineers. I'd prefer a system that makes it easier for a small company to find top foreign talent. It will likely lead to more innovation.
Fuck startups.
I don't think anyone really understands until they have to build a team of engineers and churn through 100's of applicants.
There are just some really, really shitty engineering candidates. I've had head count out for months before and seriously cannot find someone skilled enough for the job.
When you find someone that needs an H1B (but is qualified), you're not thinking about minimizing pay or getting cheap labor or any of that crap.
You're just thinking "Thank the gods, someone that can get the work done. What can I do to get this person on my team."
You're 100% right.
I think if that was the only way it was being used there would be no problem.
Perfection is impossible. In any system, there will be abusers.
We do have regulation and laws that prohibit that abuse. And companies are held accountable as is clear from a search of companies sued for such abuse.
Can you explain how this works when tech has just had massive layoffs and employee purges? I have heard from friends that the tech job market is now horrible for employees. Hundreds of applicants for each job etc. People are advising college students to avoid going into tech now as it looks not likely to improve anytime soon.
Can you help me understand how this can be true and also it’s not possible to find domestic tech workers such that H1Bs are needed?
In a company with 10's or 100's of thousands of tech worker employees, downturns are often taken advantage of to purge under performers, trim entire departments, etc.
In many states, like California, if your layoff is over a certain amount they are required to be structural. Meaning they can't target individuals, only whole departments or organizations.
So the tech company will drop entire chunks of people due to an underperforming product (amongst other reasons). Some of the engineers will get invitations to reapply and fast tracked for rehire.
They will also take this opportunity to hire up in areas that could use more resources, but weren't getting them due to financial constraints. After a restructure, there are assets available for redistribution to key areas of the business.
So that is why you often see a hiring phase right after a large layoff.
There are also requirements in how long you must give employees notice of termination for. . . . I think like 3 months. Most companies prefer not to keep terminated employees working with access to their systems for security reasons. So they comp them...basically giving paid PTO for the 3 months with full benefits and compensation in a severance package.
So..do not cry for tech worker layoffs. It's the softest landing an employee could ever hope for with ample time to transition to a new job. What I'm hearing is a good candidate might take 3 months or so if they're picky to find the right job. Compared to having a job lined up within a fe weeks before.
It's true the tech scene is relatively rough the last year or so...though picking up. Still....if you're making 250k+ as a 20 something or 400k+ as a senior engineer per year, you really ought to be capable of weathering the storm if you were even remotely responsible with your money.
A little empathy is always good, but really....this demographic is going to be just fine.
*edit*
Oh, also. Please note a lot of these households are dual income tech families. So household incomes of 500k-1m/year with two individuals earning 250k/500k each.
Not possible at the *low* wages they want to pay is my 90% of the time guess.
I don't think there's a world in which compensation > 250k/yr (which is the typical tech salary for large tech companies) is considered a "low salary" regardless of how high cost the area is.
Also, H1B's are not on a different compensation band than other employees. Both in practice and by law.
I can personally attest to that fact by virtue of managing many us citizens and H1Bs at large tech companies and seeing their compensation packages. It simply untrue that there's a systematic, conscious effort to pay H1Bs less in these companies.
The average salary for H1Bs is much less than $250k so clearly you aren’t really talking about “typical” companies. You say “large tech company” but I think you just mean “developers at FAANGs”.
Meanwhile a fifth of all H1Bs go to a handful of Indian based firms that specialize in contract labor: https://m.economictimes.com/nri/work/tcs-infosys-other-indian-origin-tech-firms-corner-1/5th-of-h-1b-visas-issued-by-us/amp_articleshow/116959388.cms
That’s where the (relatively) low paid seat fillers are at.
Ron Swanson gif. I don't believe you.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that there's a huge dearth of qualified engineers, programmers, etc. stateside. Why do you suppose that's the case? I know America ranks poorly among industrialized nations on math testing statistics, but it seems unlikely that our citizens are so awful that they're being outnumbered in the industry by almost 3-to-1, especially when H1B people are purportedly more troublesome to hire. There have to be other factors at play.
A big part of the “shortage” is that everybody only wants to hire senior engineers, and if they can’t get that, they only want people with CS degrees, which really aren’t necessary to become a productive software engineer. There’s a lot of potential talent that can’t break into the industry because no one will give them a chance.
I highly doubt that 75% of all “top talent that absolutely can’t be found in the US” is in India and wants to work for companies that almost exclusively hire Indian H1Bs for IT work. So why is that the reality of H1B hiring?
A few main thoughts about H1Bs/immigration generally:
1) A guy I know well who works in a robotics lab as Phd. student at an R1 says there are only two American citizens out of a couple dozen people in his program. IDK this seems like a bad use of our educational resources? Yes I know the foreigners often pay full freight, but they also take a spot.
2) Another guy I know well is on the advisory board for a different engineering Phd. program (same school) and has worked at a big US firm himself for two decades. He says that his employer couldn't function without H1Bs etc. He also said that last Trump Presidency the engineering program he advises saw enrollment fall in half due to the departure of foreign students (I am guessing that is more COVID than Trump, but am not sure the details), he seems to think that this will happen again under Trump.
3) Another guy I know sightly less well is an immigration lawyer for a big national bank, and certainly a lot of the people he brings in are in no way special. Just end up being random personal bankers at branches and stuff. Definitely slotted right into jobs that would in the past have gone into Americans but now go to Nigerians and South Africans and Indians because their English is "good enough" and they are willing to work for $10k-20k less for the same quality employee. Especially since the jobs comes with immigration status. In these type of cases I think there is a crystal clear case this is just straight out harming Americans pretty seriously.
4) Personally I work closely with a tech firm staffed with Indians (and a couple Latinos) that is based in DC, and FWIW their output is hot garbage. Not sure why exactly, but never met a non-Indian or non-Latino working there. I am sure some of them are citizens by now because they have been in the states working for this firm (and/or a couple of its subsidiaries) for over a decade.
But they certainly are not some tiger-children Übermenschen. I mean maybe their employer would be just as much of a mess with more "American" staff, but in this case I am pretty sure it hasn't been a magic ticket to competency. Probably just cheaper. Plus with government contracting you get points for being brown and having brown staff.
It seems to me that people are talking past each other because there are actually some very different types of H1B hires.
On the one hand, you’ve got the people who are genuinely hiring highly skilled/educated specialists (often American educated) that for one reason or another are hard to find and it’s worth the effort to sponsor an immigrant for the role. This is what the program is *supposed to* be for, and it’s the stuff Musk is (or at least claims to be) talking about when he’s referencing himself and people like him to advocate for the program.
On the other hand, you’ve got “body shops” specializing in importing a large quantity of almost exclusively Indian tech workers educated in India who are (sometimes) reasonably competent but not generally anything special, whose main selling point is they are willing to work crap jobs for comparatively cheap and on a temporary basis. The people against expanding the H1B program are mostly reacting to this crowd.
The thing is I’m pretty sure the second category is quite a bit larger than the first one.
`1) A guy I know well who works in a robotics lab as Phd. student'
A quick glance over my department's graduate application pool shows that there simply aren't as many domestic students applying for PhDs. Grants have a limited duration and we (professors) need people to do the work. I work in a field where hiring domestic students is beneficial and I can't find them---and I'm very willing to recruit a domestic student with lower GRE scores!
A major reason for this, I'd speculate, is that being a PhD does not pay well for the amount of work required. In the DMV, where I am, you will be living with roommates into your late 20s/early 30s unless you can find a partner with a decent income.
I'd certainly like to pay graduate students more but funding amounts on grants haven't changed in years and cost-of-living isn't considered when deciding award amounts, anyhow. Oh, also the F&A at my university only goes up. And despite what graduate students may tell you, professors don't tend to draw much income from grants ($2,500 per grant per year is typical for me).
So if we want more domestic PhDs, increase funding to agencies like the NSF and force down administrative costs at universities.
Do we need more PhDs? It sounds like what we really need are skilled lab workers to perform research activities. Traditionally that work has been done by grad students pursuing PhDs, but if there is no good job market for them (or at least, not a market that justifies the opportunity cost and extra crap about teaching and attending classes vs going into industry with your BS or MS) then of course you aren’t going to get many applicants.
`what we really need are skilled lab workers to perform research activities'
So far as I am aware the process of obtaining a PhD---attending classes, possibly teaching, etc.---is the only good way we know of producing such workers...but then I am a professor with several PhDs under supervision!
Then why are there so many excellent laboratories (Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Bell Labs, every company’s R&D department, CERN, etc. etc.) that are not degree granting institutions, that mostly employ professionals, not students or professors?
By definition, a grad student is just some kid with a bachelor’s degree you train up to run your research. Why does all the class-teaching and dissertation writing and defending necessarily attach? Why not have professional researchers as a career track unattached to the ivory tower and tenure and writing shitty papers and delivering boring lectures? It mostly seems like an excuse to overwork and underpay 20-somethings while hanging out the carrot of a tenure track job that’s really a lottery ticket with crummy odds?
Those places employ a great many PhDs, which is why they're quite excellent at producing new knowledge. The career path for a typical PhD is basically academia (not likely) or industry/government labs. Lots of other options, too.
`By definition, a grad student is just some kid with a bachelor’s degree you train up to run your research.'
That's not a definition of a graduate student I'd recognize, and even if it were I couldn't train them to do research without them attending class, etc.
What you call `shitty' papers 1) come from all of the places you mention at the top of your post, too, and 2) require a student to understand not only their work, and how it fits into the overall research community, but also the work of others. Graduate students also do not just do what their advisors tell them: we're mentors, not dictators directing automatons. We teach students how to think and provide them the tools and experience to make discoveries. Research is a tremendously creative process and researchers almost always benefit from learning about related and not-so-related fields to make breakthroughs. Classes are really great for this.
Like say students in my lab need to learn a specific concept but also students in other labs need to learn that concept, too. Rather than two professors spending time to individually teach their students the concepts, we send them to a class where one professor teaches them. Also, I may be better at teaching some concepts than others but my students need the other concepts to perform their research, so I send them to a class with a professor who is better at teaching those concepts than me.
I agree with everything you said, however, I’d argue from an employee retention standpoint, H1Bs are really advantageous. If your company wants employees who will not be quitting even if you push them extremely hard to work long hours, H1Bs are great.
The larger threat to American tech jobs is definitely just companies opening operations centers in India altogether since the cost of labor there is so low yet there is a large talent pool.
Some of our best employees at my company were on an H1 work visa. We were selective when we hired, and in some cases they'd simply be more qualified than citizens... and we'd hire the most qualified person.
Once on board we treated them just like every other employee--and they were great. Dedicated. Hard working. Smart. Some cultural oddities, of course--but we even got to learn about their cultures while we were working.
We in the US don't have a corner on "great employees," and it's obvious that if you're looking for great employees you should at least consider everyone. If you want our companies to make the best products then you'll need to hire the best you can find. Don't kneecap them.
What about fucking training!
I agree - we don’t have a unique source of great employees, but we currently have a lot of unemployed tech workers. Employ them first. Then hire immigrants. You aren’t kneecapping yourself, you’re doing the bare minimum to make sure the economy keeps cooking because those American tech workers have money to spend instead of being a burden on social services.
Why do companies spend all this money on “paperwork” that’s so hard in addition to the “prevailing wage” which is a VERY loose definition.
Either you’re lying or your company is lying to you. Also, your company once they bring them over now has an employee with almost no bargaining power who is totally dependent on them so less turnover and more compliant.
Further they require less money because white middle class kids have higher expectations culturally. Imagine being a man and living in the same shitty apartment an Indian does. It won’t affect the Indian’s dating life but might affect the white guys dating life.
I'm curious to get your response to the "H1Bs are indentured servitude for the tech industry" argument. Not knowing anything about this stuff I figured it's rhetorically overblown, but the argument that it gives employers a degree of control over their H1B employees that creates labor market distortions (not to mention ethical distortions) sounds at least superficially plausible.
I'm also curious how much wiggle room exists in the "prevailing wage" analysis. I can imagine a strict version (independent entity without a financial stake in the outcome performs the analysis and tells the employer what to pay) and a lenient version (employer-side analogue to tipped employees filling in their wages on a W2)
I'm not a recruiter or contractor, I've done a lot of hiring in tech. H1B and otherwise.
There's a kernel of truth. The H1B process is a shit show. Changing employers can set back the timelines for your Green Card. So there's a huge built in incentive to not make waves and grind it out.
I've seen that translate into employees sticking around longer than they would accepting terms that others would push on.
I don't think employers are actively exploiting this system on a large scale. The bigger the company, the more of a rounding error it is. And H1B's tend to cost MORE over all due to the team of lawyers and time it takes to move them through the process.
Overall those effects put a downward pressure over time on their comp. e.g. you don't get a raise if you don't ask for one. You don't get big comp bumps if you don't change employers.
Again, big companies just don't work that way. You look at the total resource cost. Doesn't matter why they cost that much. Base, bonus, benefits, h1b processing. At the end of the day, you get X skilled resources of a certain experience for a certain amount of dollars.
The people actually doing the hiring couldn't care less if the candidate is H1B or not from a technical or cost point of view (they don't even negotiate salary, it's a different department/process). If anything there's a bit of bias against H1B on the front lines of hiring because the hiring manager incurs a higher cost of management for H1Bs (they take more time, they often take longer and less convenient vacations, sometimes there's a slight communication challenge, and so on).
It works like this: I the hiring manager says "We want this candidate". The recruiter takes over and negotiates terms. Comes back and either says they've signed or they're not wanting to sign. If I really want them, say they're a great candidate, I advocate for more comp for them or more equity. If they were middling or we're not as pressed, I might just let them go. That's it.
No cigar smoking discussions of immigrant exploitation. No talks of "they're H1B, squeeze them". Nothing even remotely like it.
Your take tracks mine.
It's not indentured servitude but the program provides so little mobility it becomes accept the work we give you or give up this high paying job and move home.
It's one of these things I don't know how to reason well. It's basically a form of light exploitation with how the program is currently designed. But the pay for many of these jobs is still so good you should probably feel more sorry for the guy who has to stock shelves at Walmart the rest of his life due to poor life circumstances as a teenager.
Yeah. Everyone I've known has their eyes wide open. They'll straight up tell you they know they can make more if they changed employers. They'll tell you they're heads down, get the work done, grind it out.
And they're also thankful the company is sponsoring them and extremely hopeful they'll close in on a green card. And they'll tell you they're earning enough. . . and now their kid's are U.S. citizens.
They also bounce for a huge pay increases as soon as the 10 years are up and the sponsor knows that's going to happen.
Like everything, there are abuses and abusers. Let's make it more real for us Americans.
You love France. Crepes, the language, the culture, cafes, and french-kissing, accordion music. You want to work in France, with all your heart. You get a job in France, and get to work there on their version of a work visa. Wooo hoooo!
Once there, you work your heart out, don't you? You're in the country/culture you've dreamed of, surrounded by your hopes for a French future, unlimited Coq au vin, and since your visa is tied to the fact that you're working... you make darn sure you work darn well.
You'd love to share this with your family, too, right? Since you're in France and contributing to French society and their economy they let you work toward getting a Green Card for permanent residency, and you can also bring over your wife and kids as you put in your time toward that.
Now you've REALLY got a stake in doing well for the Frenchmen, right? You've got a whole new motivation (and implicit threat) to do better than your fellow French colleagues. And your French boss knows that. And they see you working harder than Pierre over there. (This is what I think is being said when we say our immigrants have a better work ethic--it's mostly that they have this carrot/stick that you and I don't have to countenance.)
Pierre doesn't like you showing him up--so Pierre hates the immigrant worker.
Are you an "indentured servant" of them, as a result? Meh. You could frame it that way--but if at any moment you wanted to come back to the old U S of A you could. But you don't want that, right? So you continue to show up Pierre, and he blames the immigration system.
This is just inane rambling. The workers are paid less because they can be paid less. They have no standing to leave for a better paying position or argue for higher pay because they will be deported if they quit or are fired. They are tied to that company. This is a legalized way to exploit cheap labor instead of paying citizens a proper wage.
I work in tech in a city where tech is a major industry and I used to work in a tech job in a non-tech industry. We had a hard time getting qualified applicants because the company wasn't particularly prestigious and you weren't going to work on any particularly interesting projects. The pay was fine but ti wasn't great. There weren't any nice job perks and the company did not offer any type of equity.
Some of our jobs were required field-specific knowledge and lower level technical skills. We often hired new grads who had massively overestimated their technical skills and our management just wasn't equipped to assess their technical skills. They often really struggled with troubleshooting, using documentation, acquiring new skills, remembering what they did last time and general independent work. We did much better hiring internal candidates in non tech jobs who'd started learning technical skills on their own and wanted to move into a technical job.
When we were hiring for a department head, we interviewed a candidate who had less than two years of work experience (all entry level) who had decided they were ready for management. They also said they could do some of the coding work because their last job had used the same language we were working in and they'd run scripts a couple of times. I assume they got an interview because we were desperate and they'd been active in her masters program's DEI initiative and the company was really into DEI. Plus, our management at the time was mostly people with very little actual technical or subject knowledge who tended to be really good bullshitters and this applicant would have fit right in.
When we needed more advanced technical skills, the options were internal hires, hiring someone in a different time zone, hoping we got lucky and hiring a search firm. Even then, it was tough to find qualified people. We ended up hiring a lot of new grads who were a mixed bag -- lots of "I'm going to apply all the stuff I learned in school and the people in the company must not know what they're doing if they do it differently" with predictably disastrous results. We also got some good hires, but understandably they would leave for better offers.
I'm ranting and rambling, but the reason for my ranting and rambling is that some of our best hires were H1-B holders. A decent paying tech job at a boring non-tech company was a good job and they were better off there than in their home country. Sometimes our H1-B visa holders would jump to other companies but everyone still benefitted. In the case of that company, the extra expense for an H1-B was worth it because the company's lack of appeal had to do with the fact that it wasn't cool, was frustratingly bureaucratic and generally nobody's top tier of potential employers.
Also in the industry, and popular narratives just don't pass the smell test.
As an interviewer I don't see your visa status, nor do I see your expected comp. Even at final interview stage we expect that more than a supemajority of candidates aren't going to do well enough to get offers. And at that stage we've already done a ton of filtering.
The hiring committee that makes the final decision based on all feedback also doesn't see your visa status or expected comp. Compensation is negotiated between you and the compensation team after we decide to extend an offer.
You might ask why we'd bother interviewing those people who have such a low chance of success. It's because we're desperate! We're going to burn about ten hours of highly compensated engineer time on a roughly 20% chance that the person will be good enough to extend an offer to. At typical compensation at top tech companies it's about $20,000 in engineer compensation at just the final interview stage to get one qualified candidate.
But we're not desperate enough to lower our standards, because bringing a C player into an A team is going to drag everyone else down. If we couldn't hire H1B candidates to work at top tech companies, we wouldn't substitute them with less qualified local candidates. There's little more we could do to tap that talent pool.
We'd just either make do with fewer people, or expand our remote offices abroad and get those candidates to work from other countries, contributing to those economies instead of ours.
Sorry and I have not finished but I am *beyond* baffled listening to this. The clip of the psychic child Houston, how on Earth would anybody find that compelling? Yes, they are lying, or there was a camera in the garage. Is this podcast hypnotising people?
I thought the same thing. Four possible explanations for how the kid wrote "friend" quickly come to mind, in descreasing order of plausibility:
1. Luck (possibly combined with undisclosed repeated attempts)
2. Dude's just lying
3. Camera in the garage
4. Psychic autism
But let's just jump to that last one.
I am honestly gobsmacked. I feel like maybe there was something missing in the editing because it just blows my mind. I would put "dudes just lying" at number 1, he has a huge incentive to lie and there is basically no downside.
People have a tough time believing someone would just lie to their faces.
Especially when a lot of us have been raised with the idea of honesty as a core value.
This is why I've been losing my mind in the OT (and it only gets much worse after Houston is introduced). I cannot for the life of me understand how people are falling for this.
Ii am genuinely baffled by Katie's response about how inexplicable it is. How is this more compelling than all those god awful haunted house shows? What am I missing?
I don't get why J&K are so reluctant to assert that people are probably lying. I get the whole "pervert for nuance" thing, but if we can't call even the telepathy people liars, we're really depriving ourselves of a vital tool of discussion. Not every false claim is the product of misunderstanding, there are tons of people out there telling obvious lies for obvious reasons.
Probably because accusing people of lying is a convenient way of not engaging with their ideas, and J+K would have some experience on being on the other end of that tactic.
Given that (1) most people aren't comfortable outright lying and (2) there are plenty of mechanisms by which people can deceive themselves without intentional lying, misunderstanding is at least as likely as lying.
Basically, it's a variation on Hanlon's Razor.
Here's what I don't understand about the people who believe in the non-ESP variety of facilitated communication or "spelling": How do they explain the fact that a nonverbal, profoundly autistic child, who has never learned to read, suddenly knows how words are spelled? It seems that even those proponents who don't believe in telepathy would have to believe there's some psychic phenomenon causing this ability. Or do they think that the child has secretly learned to read? Wouldn't a parent have caught the child reading a book or newspaper at some point?
Exactly. Reading is not “intuitive” like spoken language is. It has to be taught rigorously and as we’ve seen with the Whole Langage Learning fiasco, if not done right, you’ll end up with kids that cannot read at all. Psychic or no, you can’t read or write unless taught.
In the insane novel Happiness Falls by Angie Kim, a profoundly autistic child has learned to read from the captions on the ipad his family uses to keep him occupied. (The premise of the book is that this kid despises his family because they assume he's developmentally disabled. As far as I can tell, its reviewers took FC seriously).
Well, that explains it!
That was one of the big red flags in the Anna Stubblefield case, IIRC. The disabled young man, out of nowhere, was “writing” with the vocabulary of a graduate student. This was someone who had never demonstrated a grasp of grammar or syntax, but as soon as FC began, he went from zero to one hundred instantly? Sure…
He also had opinions, views, and interests which were in line with those of an upper middle class liberal woman in academia, like Anna Stubblefield. What are the odds? Wouldn’t a truly autistic child, suddenly finding a way to communicate, have more stereotypical autistic interests, like trains, computers, or something else? Or normal interests for their age, at least - girls (if male), sports, video games?
These stories always remind me of stories of child prophets, which exist in many religious. “…and a child will lead them.” Their innocence (and ignorance) somehow makes them more pure. I saw something similar at play with Greta Thunberg during her climate phase.
There is a lot of very understandable wish fulfillment on the part of the parents and family, who are in an often impossible situation, and are given a way out - your child just has a communication problem that can be dealt with via technology. The people in the FC and ESP community may be true believers, but what they are doing is harmful - providing false hope to desperate people and wasting time and resources. Telepathy, though, might be Freddie De Boer’s gentrification of mental illness on fentanyl. Your kid is not merely special - your kid has magic powers!
Much like Katie, I have no time for woo. What I do find interesting is its appeal among supposedly secular people (like Sam Harris and Buddhism).
Also, has anyone tried replicating for "spelling" the experiments that took down FC? Seems like you could run them identically.
To play devil's advocate, it wouldn't actually be necessary to know how to read in order to write out the words. Say the telepathy were real, and the child saw it in their mind's eye somehow, they wouldn't have to know what the letters spelled or what the word meant in order to copy them out from their mental image. Preschool kids copy out words all the time without having a clue what they're writing. For the record I don't think autistic kids have ESP though
That's why I specified that it's the ones who don't believe in ESP who should be questioning this ability.
I have a lot of thoughts about the H1B situation. I live near an engineering university that’s quite well known, my boyfriend is Indian and goes to said university, and I have a lot of Indian friends.
For one thing, we don’t want to have a work culture like India or China. People leave those countries because they’re miserable to live and work in. My boyfriend absolutely does not want to go back because of this. His dad had a 2 hour commute to work (one way I believe) as well as being required to work Saturdays. Imagine what that does to a family? I admire that he sacrificed to put food on the table for his family, but was that truly entirely necessary? I absolutely do not want this work culture here, and there are Indians who come here precisely because we don’t have this work culture. My boyfriend specifically doesn’t want to work in Indian majority groups where they revert to certain cultural norms.
Valorizing hours put in for the sake of hours put in is a terrible way to work. Are there tasks that require some degree of grinding away and just putting the time in? Sure, but that isn’t every task. It’s a mindset that’s using a hammer for everything because that’s the only tool you have.
I find the argument that Americans are lazy to be incredibly offensive. Maybe we work less, but we also have a country where one’s entire future isn’t decided based on a fucking last name or what family they’re born into. Google is already fighting issues with casteism. We don’t want more of that kind of attitude here.
Also, Korea has one of the highest youth suicide rates because of how cut throat their education system is. Do we want dead young people or slightly less productive/educated ones?
Or the example of presenteeism in Japan. Working long hours just to show you are working. And then burning out and going to drink and party after work. And now Japan is worried about such low population …
We want *some* dead young people, but not the good ones!
Perhaps a system of quotas…
Thanks for this. It's important to remember, every now and again, that we all die at the end. Is working really hard for the sake of working really hard a virtue? For many it may be a necessity. But what if it isn't, what then? The distinction between laziness and making the most of our limited time here isn't always so clear.
💯
Absolutely, 100%!!
I dated an Indian man for 6 years. He was an MBA, not a software coder, and he was very frank about his opinions about the H1B program and off-shoring. Also he was Christian and not Hindu, so he was really annoyed with the caste-based hiring and housing preferences that are so common in the heavily-Indian suburbs here.
I worked in IT for a non-IT fortune 500 company on a team of 20 people. My employer laid off 16 of the team and kept 4 of us to work as subject matter experts. They shipped most of the jobs over to India and brought over a couple of people from India (using H1-B visas) to help manage the offshore team. They were all paid much lower than our salaries.
It was a huge shock to lose the whole team this way and I had lots of survivors guilt. Even worse, I think our employer got a state tax credit for us keeping our jobs. One of the people brought over had his spouse join him. She eventually got hired for a six figure job she was not qualified for (no tech degree) by other Indians at the company. I worked well with the people brought over but it did feel like we were making it impossible for Americans to compete for these jobs.
The 16 people laid off included all of our minorities. The four they kept were all white. There is a lot more to this story than the typical narrative covers.
That sounds like an offshoring problem, not an h1b problem. Sans h1b, they’d just have an American manage the team.
This is not at all what the current controversy is about.
I posted this earlier, but it is hard to understand just how desperate parents of autistic kids are for some positive emotional feedback from their kids. You pour in so much love, care, attention and money into them and hope for a crumb of love.
My 30 year old son is autistic and we know many, many families who have invested their lives in FC or its modern variants. Many of these parents have waited for years for their child to say "I love you," and then this therapy comes along and not only does the child say "I love you," but he turns out to be exactly the kind of person they always dreamed he could be. Once you get sucked into this world, it's impossible to escape because it means that the child you've fallen in love with doesn't really exist.
One of the tragedies is that families spend their lives in a fantasy world. Instead of learning independent and self care living skills, the child spends his or her life tied to a facilitator who speaks and thinks for the child. Parents, particularly of older children, need to think in terms of "How will my child manage when I am no longer here?"
This is so true. At least my son has brothers who care, but I can't imagine if there was no one.
Also parents of autistic kids can be bad parents, they can be abusive and self centred and fame hungry. They are not saints beyond criticism, I appreciate J and K not wanting to go into that and that's true to form. What I cannot understand is their utter credulity when it comes to the "professionals" involved in this.
For Christs sake, some producer in this podcast says that the kid guessed the word he wrote and Katie is utterly baffled at how this could be, she reluctantly raises that he could be lying (the absolute correct and most obvious answer) and Jesse jumps in to reassure her that he doesn't think the guy is lying as if this is beyond the pale. What the actual fuck? Of course they are lying, are you fucking kidding me?
He could be lying. Or he could just be reacting to the incentives and engaging in motivated reasoning. I suspect Jesse favours the latter explanation over the former, which was the reason for his response.
Initially I was going to argue but you're right. For example he could have started typing foot or even frog and the guy interuppted with his word assuming he was seeing something he wasn't and then edited the truth afterwards accidentally.
A gang of friends who I used to work with went to a medium once. One of the girls came back with a very long story about how her Nan had spoken to her. Her story was that the psychic came over to her part of the crowd and said "I have a message for somebody here, it's an older lady" then zoomed in on my friend and said "it's your Nan, her name is Linda" (which was correct). My other friend who attended later told me what actually happened was just the first part but she had also said "I am getting a name with L in it" at which point my friend interuppted to say "that's my Nan Linda". I am sure Linda's granddaughter wasn't intentionally lying.
This is a very instructive anecdote. This is the process by which many seemingly incredible stories emerge. Memory and perception are both fickle and easily influenced by associated emotions and beliefs.
It could be outright lying, but without more evidence, it could be motivated reasoning and self deception. In the case of Clever Hans, the researchers believed the cues from his owner were unconscious.
This rings true through the documented modern history of kids we can guess would have been labeled as autistic. Stella O’Malley highly recommend the book, Neurotribes. Published in 2015. I found it helpful to understand some of the intense confusion and frustration of the early 2000’s tech geniuses in Silicon Valley whose kids seemed to have an unusually high rate of autism. The author tries to analyze cases from the 1700’s and 1800’s of kids from wealthy families that had some unusual cures tried on them. One case, after trying all sorts of discipline and cures, the family ended up sending the kid to live with a farming family who recognized that the boy really loved to count. They sent him out to hoe the fields and count the rows. Kid ended up working at a bank. The author seems to make the point over several hundred pages that autistic kids tend to be very delayed developmentally, and the non verbal and severely disabled kids tend to have rare chromosomal syndromes like Angelmans. It all got labeled as Autism. It’s been a while since I read the book, so I might be misremembering a few things.
The hardest part of the book to read was the experiments done in sanitariums in the 1950’s until 1970’s. Kids injected with LSD, all kinds of antipsychotics, worse. Sounds too familiar with the kids I know who were remarkably “weird” and then all got lured into gender medicine and antidepressants.
It’s true that parents of autistic kids can be bad parents, like parents of normie kids. I imagine the burnout rate is pretty high.
Indeed, I suppose its easier to be a bad parent to a child who needs more, that's just maths. I was more thinking of outright manipulation. I have no doubt that some of these parents are desperate believers but I also have no doubt that some of them are liars.
I have to admit that the idea of there being a cultural difference with young Indian and "native born" workers is pretty stark. I'm an elder millennial and have some colleagues and employees in their mid to late 20's who are awesome workers. What's a bit worrying now is some of the interviews I've been doing with recent college grads for engineering positions. They rely on chat GTP to solve basic engineering problems we pose to them as a part of the vetting process. The reason we practice these exercises isn't to simply find the answer, it's how we train our minds to think analytically and to find a problem by understanding how it is that we get there. Maybe these kids would be fine engineers, but this shows me that they lack the ability to think around corners (or at least suggests so), which is the single most important characteristic that I look for in an engineer. It really comes as no surprise, though. Not if you spend any time on Reddit these days. The attitude to work makes one wonder what the country might look like in 30 to 40 years time.
I teach college students, and the things I've seen them use ChatGPT for over the past year terrify me. Turns out that the same person can recite "ChatGPT is unreliable and isn't really thinking or understanding or reasoning" and then use it as though it's totally reliable and actually thinking and understanding and reasoning.
This semester I'm bringing back the in-class written essay.
All hail the Blue book! Make’em do it in cursive!
Haha. Every now and then a student fills out an exam in cursive and I have to run it by five other people to figure out what they wrote.
Ask ChatGPT to read it for you. :)
DO IT! For as long as I have taught high school I have warned students that "you will get 2 exams and a blue book" even though I am not sure if this is still the case. I mean, not like they will come back and say "Mistuhh you lied!"
This is encouraging, thank you! High school teachers and college teachers should talk to each other more. Sometimes it feels like co-parenting without proper communication; dad doesn't know what mom is telling the kids and vice versa.
I'm honestly excited about this. My class is "inferential reasoning in data analysis", kind of a philosophy class crossed with a statistics class, aimed at data science and stats and CS majors. So my students are not used to "real" writing, and prior to teaching this class I wasn't used to grading it. I've assigned "take-home" writing assignments every time I teach it because that's just what we all do, right? But the more I think about it, the more I like the idea of in-class writing. The temptation to plagarise goes away, the pressure to put in a bunch of fluff in order to meet a length requirement (explicit or implied) goes away, the kids who procrastinate everything don't have to deal with the "oh shit it's midnight and my paper is due tomorrow" stress, and I don't have to read four pages of text that really should have just been one page.
Wonder how I'll feel about it after the semester is over :)
I think there will be a few years when in class essays will be a good way to get ahead of ChatGPT, then AI enabled glasses will make even that challenging.
I find that ChatGPT makes it much easier to write a good essay. It's helpful as a research assistant, as a conversation partner to brainstorm ideas, and as a proofreader. It's currently a crap writer, and you have to double check its research results in the original sources, but I estimate that it about doubles the amount of pages I can write in a given amount of time, substantially increases the breadth of supporting materials I can find to back up my work, and increases the quality of my writing slightly.
I'm basically an anti-LLM religious fanatic, but I get it :) It can be a useful tool, I just think the tech companies and AI hypesters have been so brazenly deceitful and unethical in trying to convince everyone to anthropomorphize their statistical next-token selection models that I feel gross using them at all. The illusion that there's a mind on the other end is so powerful, and so many people who should know better fall for it (see, e.g. the breathless reporting about "AI deception" every time an alignment researcher gets ChatGPT to role-play being an evil robot, like it hasn't been fed Issac Asimov stories thousands of times over). Doesn't help there's a "maybe LLMs are like alien minds" movement out there, cranking out speculations and prognostications that belong on the scrap heap of a philosophy-of-mind reading list.
I'm also a statistician, and especially salty that the tech world has convinced everyone that statistics is magic. Because I always tell my students "statistics isn't magic", and this ain't helping!
Also, I admit I sometimes use ChatGPT to help me write code. Haha.
I have a reverse anthropomorphism experience, where observing ChatGPT causes me to downgrade my model of human reasoning.
I'm now leaning towards a model where we're sophisticated probability predictors coupled with some kind of apparatus that produces the sensations we describe as self-consciousness and free will.
(But it's not my area, so I'm probably still way off.)
After a major outbreak of cheating in my class (25% of students used google to answer a question when they were told they couldn't use their web browser during the exam, except to download and submit the exam), I moved to pen and paper exams.
Now I get marked down on teaching evaluations explicitly for not allowing them to use their computers to take the exam. Best of luck!
Do you think that Indian candidates would NOT rely on ChatGPT??
🤣
I hate to say this, but in my experience the outsourced and recently arrived Indian team members I have managed have been the most disappointing. Yes, they work hard - but they were not educated to think through things and make decisions. This may be a function of the hiring firm that provided them though. Conversely, I have worked with amazing teams in Costa Rica and Eastern Europe. Those countries do not have such easy H1b access to the US though. Why is that?
The whole bullshit line that no Americans can write code or work hard, is completely false and really fucking offensive.
My Dad got in a bit of trouble in an Irvine company he was CEO of for saying that they couldn't hire any more Asian software engineers because they were all too rigid in their thinking.
I apologize, I shouldn't have generalized like that about Indian engineers. It was true of my team but I do know some others who are different.
But chatgpt and similar tools are only getting better and better. Soon those synthetic intelligence tools will be far better engineers than any human. I'm sure you remember the canard from high school, "you have to learn to do the work, you won't be carrying a calculator in your pocket your whole life!" Well now the canard is, "you can't rely on AI, it gets stuff wrong all the time!" Sure, for now. But you might be surprised as to how soon we reach the point that it makes far fewer mistakes than humans do.
My point is that these tools aren't bad because they're making engineers worse. They're bad because they're going to make engineers redundant and we have absolutely no idea what to do with millions of unemployed people in a society that's thousands of times more productive than a society without these tools.
God I love asking the cheaters questions that they can't wriggle out of. What do they think they're going to do, ChatGPT through every minute of every day once they've got the job?
I have a colleague who was teaching a class on data visualization right around when ChatGPT got popular. He strongly suspected some students were using ChatGPT to write all their code for his homework assignments. There were strong indicators but no rock-solid proof. I gave him a fun suggestion: for the next quiz, just print out each student's code for their last homework assignment and have them annotate it by hand, right there in class. Explain what each line of their code does. If they can do this, then perhaps they used ChatGPT "responsibly"; they're allowed to search coding forums and take example code from documentation, after all. But if they can't explain their code line-by-line, then they may as well have copy/pasted a friend's solutions and passed them off as their own. (I don't know if he did this; it would have taken forever to grade)
I'm pretty cynical about ChatGPT. I think most people use it as a substitute for thinking, rather than as an "assistant". Someone above made the calculator argument, which I get, but calculators do real damage too. I have students who cannot do a lick of mental arithmetic; they whip out a calculator to divide by 10. ChatGPT is worse, because strongly encourages deception. When someone uses it to write an email, they don't disclose this to the recipient. Cos who wants to read an email written by a chatbot? Ugh.
I went to a Skeptic conference when James Randi was alive and was stunned by magicians who could actually read my mind! Except they couldn't. It's just that they knew better than anyone how easily our senses can be misled. Time and again magician/skeptics have caught things that "rigorous scientists" have not. Just ask Uri Geller, who convinced a lot of researchers that he could bend objects with his mind--all with tricks that a talented 12-year-old magician could spot. Without firm protocols, tests like this are meaningless. Not that--as you said--all these parents and autistic children were working elaborate scams. Some just wished it were so and helped the process along.
My Dad once bought a spoon off Uri Geller for £10,000 for charity. The only upside was that we got to go backstage and see my Dad, who thinks of himself as very suave, completely shut down when trying to talk to Miss World.
Weirdly, a friend of mine who I met a decade later at university had a video of my Dad buying that spoon. Magic?!
Very good point. But it is also possible that some of these people are working elaborate scams. Katie mentions that one person set up a "foundation" to collect donations. I think Katie might be a skeptic of supernatural stuff, but she's also a credulous person who seems to take people at their word even when when they have an incentive to lie/mislead. There was the whole time she treated pitbull breeders as objective observers.
A guy said he walked into the garage and wrote down a word, then they were spelling it when he got back. It's not like there aren't ways of seeing from one room to another. Katie's reaction: "I can't think of any other explanation..." So, it's more plausible that some random kid has magic than someone just made something up? I think a lot of this might be self-delusion on the part of the parents and they are subtly telling their child how to act, but I'm also willing to believe that some of these people might just be con artists.
I have a feeling that versions of this scam have been worked since the beginning of homo sapiens but here's to trying NOT to be cynical. However. I am grateful for the alliance between the skeptic movement and magicians, and you can have a lot of fun searching on YouTube for Randi's videos about exposing various hucksters. Jesse and Katie were struggling with an age-old question: What's the HARM? People who tell grieving parents that their dead kids are in heaven and want them to know it's beautiful up here could be said from a humanitarian perspective to be of great service. But apart from extracting obscene amounts of money for those services, they're softening everyone up for a world of fuzzy superstition and a faith that everything is God's will. As if.
Cold reading is a very old skill!
I was just thinking that I wouldn't believe in telepathy until Randi had tested it, and probably not even then.
Are there any current sceptics doing similar work?
The irony of "what if autistic people are secretly telepathic" is that one of the major challenges for verbal people on the spectrum is a difficulty with reading others. It tends to be pretty clear if someone who is verbal (autistic or not) struggles to understand what other people think, and they can verbally communicate those difficulties themselves. If someone can't speak and struggles to communicate through other means, people might be able to project on them more.
I think the trope of the autistic savant can play into this as well. If someone struggles in some areas, they must make up for it with superior ability in other areas. It's a compelling idea and some autistic people truly are especially skilled in some subjects. I think there also might be something to be said about the effect of collapsing of Aspergers, classic autism, CDD and PDD-NOS into the broad diagnosis of ASD. I could imagine how a parent of a non-verbal autistic child with high support needs could look at examples of highly accomplished level 1 autistic people and hope that there's some remarkable ability hidden within their child that just hasn't been able to come out. In fact perhaps because their challenges are so much greater, the skill which compensates for it might be particularly rare and exceptional, such as telepathy.
Yes, there is something to be said. I have several relatives who work with people with severe autism, and I think about this whenever I hear someone blithely mention their (usually) self-diagnosis. They are not the same.
Absolutely. There is an interesting case of a dance teacher whose kid is severely disabled and non verbal. He would bring his kid to the dance and theater classes he taught and eventually noticed the kid was trying to copy some of the movements. The dad had the bright idea to use some of the improv theater techniques to communicate with his son through movement.
They started a whole non profit school, and try to teach about friendship and keeping safe body boundaries (disabled kids get sexually assaulted as she Australian documentary showed).
I'm not finished listening so perhaps this was mentioned in the ep.
I have a feeling this belief that autistic kids have telepathy is rooted in the idea of "indigo children". I've not heard anyone speak of it in those terms in many years, but it could explain the popularity of the podcast.
The "indigo children" concept comes up occasionally in gender-critical conversations. I think a lot of us who witnessed the indigo children fad see a similar need for specialness in transhausen moms.
Yes! I also immediately made the connection to the indigo children. This is just a repackaging of the anxieties of having a child who is not developmentally typical.
100% It's also very New Age, which explains why Joe Rogan seems to like it
Maybe they can try augmenting these experiments with DMT! Rogan would love that.
Lol, season 2 maybe? 🤔
It's just objectively the case that it's not a "skills" gap that is responsible for Cognizant and Infosys being in the top H1B hires. Whatever this supposed cultural difference is, it's belied by the fact that H1B visa holders don't have mobility and are paid less. It's not a fair wage game for US residents.
Look at the these three issues that suppress wages:
- LLM: AI taking the jobs of journalists and other knowledge work
- VOIP: Foreign call centers taking the jobs of customer service managers
- Shipping Container: Outsourcing taking the jobs of local factory workers
Technology advancement creates outsize benefits for capital holders while suppressing local wages. The especially weird thing about H1B is it's basically solving a problem we don't have a technology for; companies who outsource still pay a cost in the legal and logistical hurdles due to locality.
There is obviously a reason a company like Amazon would rather QA Engineers (a job that isn't at risk of too few workers) at their HQ than setting up in India. H1B isn't some technology innovation it's basically a program that's been created purely to suppress knowledge work wages.
Katie and Jesse are totally wrong about this being about racism or culture. For a group quick to dismiss accusations of racism, I don't see how they there there is solid evidence that people would feel differently if they were Europeans. Most Western Europeans won't come to the US and deal with the depressed wages of H1B and lack of mobility. Once H1B workers make the same amount and have the same mobility, then I think you can make that argument there is a racism component.
H1B workers are not paid less. It is explicitly illegal to pay them less.
> H1B workers are not paid less.
Yes they are. I get it. It's hard to imagine a business pushing the boundaries of the law.
A "prevailing wage" does not translate into the median wage for a company in that role[1]. Moreover, huge swaths of people working at contracting companies like infosys drive down the entire industry wages.
A total of 60% of all H-1B jobs are assigned wage levels that are well below the local median wage. [2]
1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-024-05823-8
2. https://www.epi.org/press/a-majority-of-migrant-workers-employed-with-h-1b-visas-are-paid-below-median-wages-large-tech-firms-including-amazon-google-and-microsoft-use-visa-program-to-underpay-workers/
Some H1B workers are paid less. Some are paid more. Using the company's median wage for that role is not a reliable measuring stick. "Prevailing wage" is a better metric of the labor market's pricing for labor, and does take into account job title as well as geographic demand for that labor.
If "A total of 60% of all H-1B jobs are assigned wage levels that are well below the local median wage" that is actually not a terrible stat. 50% are above the median and 50% below among US Citizens (because of math). 60% is worse, but you have to dig more into the stat to convince me. Also, how far "below" is dictated by the prevailing wage ranges (which will closely align with general labor-market pay ranges.
"Underpaid" immigrants under an H1B are easily recruited away (via visa transfers to a new employer who won't underpay them)--something I've done frequently. [But now people won't be happy that we're recruiting them and paying them well!]
I think you're looking for a bogeyman without considering a breadth of factors (you should also consider the legal costs of processing and maintaining an H1B and other factors transporting and housing some of these workers if you want to talk straight-dollars).
If we workers want to capture the labor market we'll need to do what our employers work every day to do: Do more and do it better, for less. Sorry--welcome to the most successful economy in the world.
I'm so confused by what you are arguing. Are H1Bs for high quality talent? Why would we not expect they trend to above the median? If they work harder, why would that also not mean they trend to being paid more?
At this point the lack of coherence in what H1B is about makes me think this is all ideological. Like some Libertarian thing.
My concern is it looks like corporate welfare and here you are telling people they are actually just lazy.
If you have a talented candidate who wants to work for less than you’re paying an equally talented candidate, why wouldn’t you hire the first one? I swear to god, you are all mostly innumerate on this side of the argument.
Why would they have any reason to work for less?
You are such an HR bullshitter. How do you people go to sleep at night. You’re company cheerleaders and narcs. Your rats and syncophants.
I can get my own, more recent cites that show this is wrong, but I think that if you find the EPI credible in this topic, you won’t bother reading them. They’re a pro-union, leftist think tank. Of course they would out a misleading white paper that “proves” H1B is wage slavery.
I don’t know why you think “prevailing wage” is supposed to match the median salary for that role at that company. That’s not even vaguely what it means.
It’s always very obvious in these conversations who has hired people on H1Bs and those who have never even had a tech job.
That’s kind of copout. if you have better evidence, you should present it.
All you have to do is read any current news coverage instead of a leftist think tank. Anyone with actually curiosity on this topic could easily be informed.
Bulllllllshit.
You seem capable of expressing an opinion, but not putting forth an argument. I'm open to your perspective, but you'll have to stick your neck out to do that!
You can’t square the circle between tech layoffs and claiming a shortage of candidates. H1B is fraught with abuse at all levels. This discussion was painful to listen to .
What’s missing here is the culture of pattern matching in hiring . If you were to look at org charts in large tech companies you would see teams where everyone looks the same . There is a reason (wrong or right) California was adding “caste” protections. In my role I’ve hired H1B , green card , and citizens.
"You can’t square the circle between tech layoffs and claiming a shortage of candidates."
Sure you can, you just have to stop pretending all skilled workers are equivalent and fungible. Micro-niches are common in the tech world.
It can be reasonable to lay off a low performing team (or even a high performing team that has delivered a product and is shifting to maintenance mode) and replace them with an offshore team, with a few H1Bs to manage them. The skills (and cultural background) required for the H1B workers are different from those of the original team.
I'm not a big fan of this practice, and I think it's been a net drain on the tech world, but it is not an unreasonable practice given constraints and goals of a particular organization.
A company laying off workers with similar skill set shouldn’t be able to sponsor H1Bs for the same skill set. Kinda defeats the argument that there aren’t any local workers.
With regard to “niche” there are other visas available for people with demonstrated special skill sets.
My issue with the H1B program is the way large companies take advantage and handle market testing for skills. There is just so much abuse from the consultancies to the FANG companies.
To just repeat the other comment, if you have a shitty US-based IT team, and you can hire a better team in India for less money, it is entirely rational do that. There may be other downsides, but you are completely ignoring the skill issue.
If you can’t fire people who suck, you end up like France. Do you want to end up like France?
Hiring a team in India isn’t H1B
H1B is allegedly skill dependent not “qualitative “ no one says you can’t fire people , firing with cause and layoffs aren’t the same .
It sounds like the H1B skill is to be the US based manager of the offshore team, so you need someone who can speak to and manage people from that region who also understands the tech piece.
Its gross, its wrong and its a grift.