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gymbeaux | 12 days ago

As with many systemic issues in the U.S., it boils down to "publicly traded company must have highest profit possible so line on chart goes up". As much as I dislike FAANG companies in general for all their anti-worker efforts, I can't honestly blame them for making decisions that look good on the balance sheet. If I am a company, and I can choose to hire 10 U.S. engineers for $200k a pop, or 10 H-1B engineers for $100k a pop, I'm going to pick the H-1B engineers. Every H-1B or green card engineer I've worked with in-office has been extremely skilled, so I wouldn't even feel like I was "getting what I paid for" hiring them over U.S. citizens.

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ecshafer|12 days ago

You mudt have gotten lucky with your coworkers. Ive worked with people who claimed to be “experts” in a domain that didnt have basic skills. I would say 5% were excellent, 5% good. 90% worthless. Coupled with weird insular cultural dynamics, poor english and communication skills, poor throw it over the wall mentality. Its overalll a huge net negative for a company. Perhaps its different in FAANG. But in enterprise companies its very bad.

goobert|11 days ago

The h1bs at Amazon were some of the most abysmal software developers I've seen in my life

gymbeaux|9 days ago

If there is a correlation to company size or company popularity (e.g., FAANG) I would have actually thought it would be large companies/FAANG are hiring the low-quality H-1Bs. I usually work at medium sized companies (50-200 engineers company-wide is my definition) where maybe 2-4% of the engineers are H-1B or green card. They've all been great. Even the one at Allstate (Allstate was also hugely reliant on India-based Infosys "developers" who I will yell from the mountaintops were straight garbage and very much net-negative).

cucumber3732842|12 days ago

>poor throw it over the wall mentality

And that's exactly why managers keep hiring them. If you're a defensive manager who just wants to keep your head down and grind out the years before moving getting a "senior" or "principal" manager job somewhere else then a bunch of compliant workers who'll punt anything messy onto some other team is exactly what you want.