> Does the US have the required people, in terms of numbers and skills?
For 30 years, IT managers at blue chip US corporations have exploited the H1-B visa program by saying, "No," and then hiring a never-ending stream of barely-capable Java coders from programmer mills in India, take 5 times longer to make an app than it should have taken, get promoted, and leave everyone holding the bag with shitty web app that we all hate because it's too slow, too bloated, and doesn't work like it needs to. And the companies who can't get enough of that bullshit in-house just hire it out to sub-sub-contractors that do the same thing. Can we not invest in our native population and education systems this time around? I'm so tired of the fact that 90% of the IT staff in my Fortune 250 is Indian, and I know people who would be better at their jobs living in my home town. It hurts our community and our country, in the long run, and by the VERY same logic as re-homing our chip production.
It sounds like you should be directing more of your anger to the C-suite than the people they’re hiring. If they couldn’t get even cheaper Indian immigrants you’d be complaining about code boot camp hires instead - what you need is a tech union which would give you the ability to push back against short-sighted decisions which make your life worse cleaning up messes.
Well, those Indians living in the US will have families of their own, and over time become part of the community you claim to be a part of. Very much like your ancestors did, except they likely didn't face the arbitrary constraints on immigration that Indians (and any other nationality) face today.
The same thing that happened in the UK will happen in America.
People in the UK who are against immigration are often talking about Poles who moved to the UK after the EU and not Indian families who have lived in those neighborhoods for generations.
The crazy thing is, it's not that long ago that Irish and Italian immigrants were not discriminated against. They didn't even consider Italian immigrants to be white.
This need to bend the argument back to the initial English colonization of America is stupid. These mediocre Indian IT drones are not putting everything they own in a boat and washing up here hoping to find a better life. They're the rich B students that could afford the process which become part of an idealized system that American corporations are now bending and exploiting to hire what are essentially indentured servants from a population of people who couldn't get the best jobs in their native country, so they settled on this backup plan.
And they DO have families of their own here (and bring over their in-laws), and a lot of them don't integrate well, for a variety of reasons. At least a third of my neighborhood is Indian. They glare at me on the sidewalk when I wave. And most of them remain inured in their caste system, and are difficult and unpleasant to work with.
Again, all the same arguments about developing our own chips domestically -- which I doubt many people have a problem with -- apply to developing our own, better education pipeline to fully develop domestic software engineers.
> If you have that kind of team, budget or problem that deserves those, then more power to you.
This is the operative issue, and it drives me crazy. Companies that can afford to deploy thousands of services in the cloud definitely have the resources to develop in-house talent for hosting all of that on-prem, and saving millions per year. However, middle management in the Fortune 500 has been indoctrinated by the religion that you take your advice from consultants and push everything to third parties so that 1) you build your "kingdom" with terribly wasteful budget, and 2) you can never be blamed if something goes wrong.
As a perfect example, in my Fortune 250, we have created a whole new department to figure out what we can do with AI. Rather than spend any effort to develop in-house expertise with a new technology that MANY of us recognize could revolutionize our engineering workflow... we're buying Palatir's GenAI product, and using it to... optimize plant safety. Whatever you know about AI, it's fundamentally based on statistics, and I simply can't imagine a worse application than trying to find patterns in data that BY DEFINITION is all outliers. I literally can't even.
You smack your forehead, and wonder why the people at the top, making millions in TC, can't understand such basic things, but after years of seeing these kinds of short-sighted, wasteful, foolish decisions, you begin to understand that improving the company's abilities, and making it competitive for the future is not the point. What is the point "is an exercise left to the reader."
I work for a Fortune 250 that is literally withering on the vine because they chose to focus on DEI before it was even a publicly-recognized thing. A VP of HR once told a former boss -- who had a resume of a good, local choice for a role he needed to fill -- that he was not allowed to hire his guy because "that's not our focus," and was forced to fill the spot with a random H1-B with the right keywords on his CV.
As a company, we're not making the turn on a critical changes that need to happen in order to remain competitive. I expect that the product lines will falter within a few years, because of our inability to meet customer requirements and a complete miss in engaging with emerging technology in the space. As our stock takes hit after hit, the remains of the company will be subsumed by an even larger company within 10 years, and all the execs will make out like bandits.
I posit that the natural state of any corporation over 1000 employees is a giant game of politics, where the only thing that REALLY matters in hiring is getting more warm bodies, because that means budget, and budget means "power" amongst managerial peers. Fighting THIS driver towards mediocrity is the key to standout success.
> This is what happens when you hire the same kinds of people to write the software for your car that you've hired for 25 years to write the terrible internal applications inside the company that everyone hates, and in the same terrible way.
I work in "automotive," and my company created an internal textbook on waterfall development 25 years ago. I know, because I was part of an external consultancy to review it. And it was great! At waterfall! And they're still using it! Now we're getting into alternate power, and we've lifted the same software process we've been using since we had to break our firmware into 8 pieces BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT FIT ON A FLOPPY to send to the plant to upload into the ECM, and started using it with completely new build systems and processes. We've hobbled what could be a completely fresh start with 25-40 years of technical debt before even getting started. I would posit that heading off this train wreck was the place of the CIO or CTO, but they just made the CIO the CEO, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Bologna. I've seen monstrous tech debt all over my Fortune 250, and it's pushing us further and further away from competitiveness and profitability. And it's not just the approach to software. They're also sabotaging long-term strategic viability by only hiring product engineers who are fresh grads from overseas, who never stay in one position long enough to develop or pass on institutional knowledge. Unfortunately/fortunately, it's a business that is ultimately doomed in the face of newer technologies that WILL, eventually, take over our market, so I guess it won't matter. However, I still think we could turn the corner of renewable tech if we hadn't sacrificed properly investing in people and tools. But that would have required serious leadership from several C-levels, and, well, that's just not how the world works.
I work for a company that's about 30th in terms of H1B's. All around me, I see degreed engineers -- many with their Masters -- doing clerical work that a sharp high-school graduate could do. I'm not talking about a few. I'm talking about dozens. There's nothing about what they're doing that requires specific engineering knowledge. They only have to be conversant about what the actual engineers are doing. So the effect is 2-fold: the fact that his arrangement exists puts downward pressure on wages for the skilled jobs, but it also takes great opportunities away from people who would have gotten those jobs a few decades ago.
A lot of people are bemoaning this move from the viewpoint in the Valley. I work for an old-school Fortune 250 which is a top-30 H-1B holder. They strategically employ thousands of visa holders for jobs that hardly require a high school education. It seems to be a calculated move to get over-qualified workers at a discount, who have very limited mobility in the job market. From my view here, it's a system that's working against the long-term interests of the country, denying those jobs to local people for whom they would be a huge leg up.
> A lot of people are bemoaning this move from the viewpoint in the Valley.
Even from the Valley perspective, the picture is more nuanced.
Business leaders from the Valley are fully aware of H-1B restrictions on job mobility and take plenty of advantage of it. Particularly the fact that the huge GC backlogs for employees from India and China allows a version of indentured servitude they can take advantage of.
After the 2014 State of the Union address there were plans[1] to provide EAD[2] to people on Greencard backlogs, allowing them to switch jobs with less friction. This was torpedoed by Tech business leaders. Also, notice how little attention Tech leadership puts on Greencard backlogs (and the H4 kids who will age out) and contrast that against the crocodile tears they shed for DACA, Muslim ban etc.
> who have very limited mobility in the job market
The solution to that problem is to relax immigration restrictions to make it easier for immigrant workers to switch jobs so they have more leverage. Not go the other direction and further torture immigrants by making their lives harder.
H1-B visas are for highly skilled workers, either holding higher education diplomas or similar qualifications. They also come with a minimum salary requirement, which for most tech companies would start at $150,000.
Any company paying their visa holders less than the required minimum salary cap, is indeed committing a crime.
Also, this move is obviously directed against tech companies. It does not make any distinction between large IT providers such as TATA, well known for their dumping tactics, and Microsoft, Google, or Apple.
I would even go further to say that, given the lack of interest in banning the entry of seasonal workers, who focus mostly on blue collar jobs, and given that the highest contribution to the rising unemployment numbers come from lower paid service and manual jobs, this is just another move to appeal to the rural, hard right wing Trump base.
As it will not impact them in any significant manner, yet it would create more uncertainty in wealthier, highly educated, urban areas.
> They also come with a minimum salary requirement, which for most tech companies would start at $150,000.
While I understand that my company is cheating the system, this particular requirement is news to me. I personally work with dozens who are probably taking home something in the $70-80K range. I'm guessing this particular cheat is that most are working through Tata and Infosys (and others, but they're local, and would give away who I work for). The company is probably paying the placement firm that kind of money, and the visa holders are getting shafted. The direct H-1B's are higher-level, and, given what I know of the company's salary schedules, may well be getting paid at the bottom of the requirement.
This is what Google has to say about "H1B minimum salary":
"The H 1B also requires that the H-1B employer pay the H-1B employee the prevailing wage or the actual wage, whichever is higher. The prevailing wage is the salary paid to workers in similar occupations in the geographic area of the intended employment. The actual wage is the wage that the employer pays employees in similar occupations at the location of the intended employment.. Since the procedures and record keeping required for the H-1B are complex, an attorney or other trained person will be necessary to complete the paperwork."
Any tech company, and I'm excluding consultancy companies like Tata or Deloitte here, would have their foreign workers coming to cities where other talent is already available, e.g. Boston, New York, San Francisco.
Given that H1-B visa holders are required to be paid a prevailing wage, hiring companies should not be able to undercut local workers' demanded salary.
Now, consultancy companies aren't following the spirit of the law here, obviously, and thus should be punished. Instead, we have got an order that hurts thousands of legitimate visa holders and prospects.
I work for a large tech company (not FAANG), am a visa holder myself. If the Trump administration wanted to go against the actual issue, they would take on the obvious abusers, i.e. consultancy companies. Instead, they chose to leave thousands of high skilled workers on the limbo.
> The problem is people design these things without any sort of actual testing in actual conditions where the software is supposed to be used.
I’ll do YOU one better. </Drax>
I work in an industry where software is still created by good, old-fashioned, by-the-book waterfall process, by outsourced developers. You know: the industry-proven, rock-solid, 20-year-out-of-date, slowest-and-least-agile methodology. Not only do the people who write the software never use it anger, they have no clue what the software is supposed to actually be doing. They don't understand our product, don't understand HOW these KINDS of products work, don't understand what engineers are doing TO the products, and don't understand what would be useful to have from software to help DO that. How many steps removed from actually USING the software is that? Well, you can imagine the frustration that end users experience on a DAILY basis, with ALL the tools they're supposed to be using, both home-grown, and customized commercial.
Gee… I wonder why there are so many shared Excel workbooks functioning as ad-hoc database applications on the network drives…
The most damning part of this is that there were some studies done on our engineering processes in relation to our competitors, and the numbers were bad. Really bad. You would think that senior management would sit up, take notice, and connect the dots. But they don’t seem to be doing that, which leads to one of two conclusions, and neither are encouraging.
I got hired at a Fortune 250 to rewrite a system, from the ground up, that had been running for 5 years. I rewrote it in about a year and a half. Huge success; 1000 happy users.
What I learned over time was that "the" person responsible for the group that was _supposed_ to be writing this sort of software in the company had been trying, for 10 years, to make something like it, with a whole team of contractors. In fact, it was his initial failure that caused my boss to write the first version of the program. When they saw that my boss had hired me, they doubled their efforts.
Their version of the idea was total garbage. Nobody would use it. It was terribly slow, clunky, and had a fatal flaw that would have caused people MORE work than just not using their program.
The boss of their group managed to get one of his underlings moved above my boss. He told us to stop working on my program. We did. They brought it Microsoft consultants to try to make their version suck less. It didn't work.
I suggested many things to work together. Rebrand. Code features they needed. Use some of their software. Whatever. All rejected out of hand.
We BEGGED our boss to IMPLORE the other manager to AT LEAST fix the "fatal flaw" of the other version. He agreed to, but we knew he wouldn't.
We released a bug fix for production. The other manager lost his mind, and got our manager to force us to hand over the code to his group. It took them TWO YEARS to make a single change. My program happily ran like a clock during the interim.
They finally gave up on their version.
My boss was put on a PIP. I was put on the tiniest project possible (which was completely doomed anyway), and forced to write what should have been a quick and dirty web app as a corporate, Java monstrosity. (But I repeat myself.)
In my first meeting, the other manager's toady told me to my face that he was going to kill the project I was hired for. In 4.5 years, I never even met the other manager, though he sat 50 feet away from my last cube.
There was no winning. My boss was very politically savvy, and just plain nice. There was nothing he could do. I stayed completely out of it. I did the job I was hired to do, and embarrassed the wrong people. He was written up. I was put out to pasture.
You can say that I should have done things differently. Maybe. Maybe not. What it tells me is that I was in the wrong company. Which sucks, because I could have written LOB tools like this for the rest of my career there. But this sort of dimness of vision is rampant throughout the company concerning anything related to IT. According to them, the only way to write software is to follow a strict waterfall methodology, in Java, with overseas contractors.
Making the company suck to work at, and the act of wasting millions of dollars, because it helps you build a political fiefdom, is an idea that needs to be rooted out and eliminated by the C levels. Why does this not happen? Instead, one of the C's just did a "post-mortem" on this whole fiasco, and the result was that IT needs to be "more aligned" with the business, and have better "communication."
Really? That's the level of acumen of our C-levels? They can't smell the metric buttload of BS that was shoveled in that meeting? OK, then. Good luck in the future!
I start a new job on Monday. Crossing my fingers that they will be open minded. I wonder if my old company will still be viable in 10 years.
I suppose someone would say that I could have been more diplomatic, but someone needed to voice a differing opinion. Unfortunately, there was just no way -- diplomatically or otherwise -- I was going to be allowed to influence the culture or the process. Too many other people had built their careers on the back of a 30-year-old process. It was, as they say, entrenched. Sometimes, you just get dealt a bad hand, and you can't draw into a winner.
For 30 years, IT managers at blue chip US corporations have exploited the H1-B visa program by saying, "No," and then hiring a never-ending stream of barely-capable Java coders from programmer mills in India, take 5 times longer to make an app than it should have taken, get promoted, and leave everyone holding the bag with shitty web app that we all hate because it's too slow, too bloated, and doesn't work like it needs to. And the companies who can't get enough of that bullshit in-house just hire it out to sub-sub-contractors that do the same thing. Can we not invest in our native population and education systems this time around? I'm so tired of the fact that 90% of the IT staff in my Fortune 250 is Indian, and I know people who would be better at their jobs living in my home town. It hurts our community and our country, in the long run, and by the VERY same logic as re-homing our chip production.