Re:H-1B abuse: Bay Area tech workers from India paid a pitta...
by nostrademons on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @01:32AM
(#16974315)
As an American citizen formerly at Google - no, not really.
The supply of engineers that can pass Google's slightly ridiculous hiring bar is still fairly small, and Google tends to take whoever meets it regardless of how many people it has already hired. It's not like they're short on cash, after all, and there was plenty of work to go around while I was there.
Anti-poaching agreements, proprietary tech stacks that are useless outside of Google, a broad prohibition on moonlighting, standardized salary bands (which actually blunt the impact of immigration on wages), and a tendency to offer non-monetary perks like free food and private Cirque du Soleil shows over more cash - those depress wages. Immigrant coworkers are not a significant concern.
The supply of engineers that can pass Google's slightly ridiculous hiring bar is still fairly small, and Google tends to take whoever meets it regardless of how many people it has already hired. It's not like they're short on cash, after all, and there was plenty of work to go around while I was there.
Anti-poaching agreements, proprietary tech stacks that are useless outside of Google, a broad prohibition on moonlighting, standardized salary bands (which actually blunt the impact of immigration on wages), and a tendency to offer non-monetary perks like free food and private Cirque du Soleil shows over more cash - those depress wages. Immigrant coworkers are not a significant concern.