You have to come to an understanding that the reason a place is shit is because of this. Revolving doors are actually worse than just a morale problem. Someone quitting isn't just leaving your company, they're taking everything they know about the systems at your company.

My favorite move in tabletop strategy when doing disaster recovery is finding the most important person at the table and going 'Bang, you died driving to work, you can stay but you cannot help anyone'

>hard to find, hard to replace and hard to retain

You only get this line if you're a US citizen as justification as to why H1B visa quotas need to be increased. If you're here on an H1B visa, you get reminded daily that your replacement is waiting back in your home country, you can be replaced with a single phone call, and you better have a plan to get all of your things and family back to your home country quickly when you get bounced.

> You only get this line if you're a US citizen as justification as to why H1B visa quotas need to be increased. If you're here on an H1B visa, you get reminded daily that your replacement is waiting back in your home country, you can be replaced with a single phone call...

No offense, but that doesn't make any sense. Right now, there's a lot of paperwork and the H1B lottery that means it's non-trivial to get a new H1B worker into the country. Increasing the quota would make it easier for the employer to act like H1B would be replaced on a whim, and actually create the scenario you're complaining about.

> ...and you better have a plan to get all of your things and family back to your home country quickly when you get bounced.

Knowing a lot of H1Bs, this is the real reason H1Bs can be exploited and bullied. Their visa is tied to the employer, which gives that employer way more leverage over the employee than over a citizen or permanent resident.

The real way to fix these problem is to keep the quota, but remove the control the employer has over work visas (by making them easily portable). That way, the employer can get the talent they need if there's really a shortage, but they'll have to pay market salaries and provide reasonable working conditions to the immigrants.

Sounds like slavery.

Indentured servitude with a new name basically. My friend works in the health industry and I can confirm this. The second he got his greencard, everything changed as far as employer abuse. Now it's just the typical abuses we all deal with.

My question is how common this abuse is in software, vs. elsewhere.

If I had to guess based on my friends/family, first jobs are horribly abusive for 100% of med school graduates, 90% of law graduates, and 20% of software engineers. That 20% is common enough that we hear about it all the time, but it's still much less frequent than other high-paying jobs.

I’m not 13 years into my career (three under the table at a hometown co and ten professionally), I’ve had the mom and pop shop experience, the big corp experience, and currently the startup experience. I’ve found the same abuse everywhere, but it’s not always caused by top level executives. I think the abuse in software has a dynamic that other industries don’t have. A lot of product managers and IT managers don’t understand what we do (and I say that on behalf of devs, ops people, the whole works). They want to look good for their executives and they overpromise, or they start treating us like garbage because they are afraid not to have anything to show in their weekly updates with their boss.

When product managers and CIOs don’t have anything to show, we get tossed under the bus. I’ve never been a fan of the dev unionization movement, but I’m becoming more of a fan it by the day. I think of how I feel after having given my all to my career, and I can’t imagine how young H1B professionals feel when the abuse they put up with is far worse than what I’ve dealt with.

Unionization doesn't have to be inherently bad. It is possible for well disciplined unions to be an overall positive force for both sides of the coin. Sure, there are plenty of negative aspects to unions but there's also a lot of negative aspects to having limited bargaining power. I personally believe growing rampant abuses in this industry is starting to warrant it.

I can't quite sort it out either, but sometimes it feels like we are treated like favored pets.

We're expensive, sure. Difficult to replace, absolutely. But you know that sooner or later you will be, and in the meantime you only get limited privileges.

I don't think that analogy works at all. Pets are cheap and easy to replace, but a favored pet is unlikely to be replaced sooner or later.

Abuse happens and goes unchecked because people are willing to take it for large sums of money. Or in some cases keeping a job. Doesn't help that there is no punishment for treating people like sub-humans either.

One easy answers: We're suckers.