At every large company where I have worked (Intel, Qualcomm, Google, Facebook) the majority of my colleagues have been non-citizens. In some cases (Qualcomm SD, Google) 100% of the people on my team were non-citizens.

It's heavily team-dependent. I was on a team at Google where I was the only American citizen, with teammates from Iceland, England, Vietnam, India (4), Taiwan (2), and China (2). I was also on a team where there were basically zero non-citizens, and most of my teammates were from places like Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, etc.

Is that sort of distribution typical? Do teams tend to self-segregate?

Teams do self-segregate. What often happens is that the team manager ends up recruiting people they are comfortable with, which in practice means recruiting people who are culturally similar. If the team grows, the same dynamic works on the next level of managers, and so on. So immigrant managers tend to recruit other immigrants, native-born managers tend to recruit other native-born Americans, and so on. The manager of the first team was an Icelandic immigrant; the manager of the second was an American-born person of Indian descent.

A similar dynamic works on sex, as well. About half of the teams I worked at were roughly 40% women; the other half of them had zero women. Women are generally reluctant to join a team where they will be the only woman, and also word gets around about who the female-friendly managers are. So those female-friendly managers get teams that are close to 50% female, while other managers get teams of zero women. (Statistically, Google Engineering was about 10% female and IIRC 50-60% foreign-born, which means that I encountered about twice as many women that I would've been predicted to and about half as many foreigners. I wonder what that says about my personality.)

It's absolutely not bullshit. I've worked places where this is true and places where it isn't. In my experience, the former is more common.

Pretty much true for most large tech companies, at least in the SF Bay Area. I've worked at 2 large and 1 small tech co and it was only the small company that had mostly US citizens (mostly because of the cost of dealing with immigration lawyers etc)

It feels like closer to 50% noncitizen where I work, but could be closer to 90% if you include naturalized citizens.

One of my first SW jobs (mid-scale startup in Palo Alto) I had multiple canadians on my team and we had some chinese and indian immigrants on other teams. I wouldn't say 90%, but a sizable percentage.

At other companies like Google and Microsoft I've had plenty of immigrant colleagues along with colleagues at offices overseas. Some eventually choose to return to their home country, some migrate here after starting at the employer.

The main game studio I worked for also had lots of chinese and korean immigrants on staff, but I suspect that was influenced by the parent company being korean.

My current team is at least 80% foreign-born-and-rasied, myself included, but I don't know everyone's immigration status. But this is the "whitest", most American team I've worked with in the last 8 years in Silicon Valley. Prior to that I was in the mid-west and I was the only foreign engineer.

> I'm going to call bullshit,

Will people please consider a moment's thought before using this adolescent phrase? People throwing it around are probably not using it with its most precise and defensible meaning (a la Harry Frankfurt). So the most charitable alternative gloss is that it's used carelessly to mean someone is just wrong. It's a very poor (because ambiguous) word choice for that. I suspect it's usually deployed to suggest someone is lying, for which you need specific evidence beyond believing a statement to be incorrect. That evidence is very rarely available in an HN comment.

It's hard to be thoughtful about using language, and I'm no exemplar. But a good start is just avoiding reflexively spitting out some rarely useful prefabricated phrases. This is one.

This is true in a lot of places. In my PhD program (in a US university), the vast majority of us are not US citizens.

I suspect they’re saying anyone who looks/sounds different must be foreign.

There is a rule about inferring the most charitable interpretation IIRC.