We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23615984.
A lot of non-H1Bs feel that they are getting shafted by the H1B program as well. How can those frustrations be articulated without it being considered "racial flamebait"?
No matter how you phrase it, if you as a non-H1B articulate frustrations with H1Bs and/or the H1B program, someone replying is going to mention the country/race that comprises 3/4ths of all H1Bs.
These Indians, Chinese, Russians, Brazilian developers are more willing to grind Leetcode and study until insanity (solving 300 Leetcode problems is not uncommon) and will kill majority of interviews out there.
They came here to study hard, from 3rd world countries, and they did it.
Study hard, work hard, be smart, and we welcome you to the arena.
Oh and by the way, this is not about race, because I've found plenty US born Chinese devs that suck and lazy.
Somehow, private companies have convinced a large share of the US public that a person who opposes corporate control over the immigration system (and an immigrant's life)is somehow "anti-immigrant". It is one of the great PR coups of our era - though, like many campaigns of disinformation and slander, it did get an assist from a number of genuinely anti-immigrant jackasses who vocally criticized the program.
It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
But even if not. Solution is simple: you reapply.
Then apply again then again and again. One of those days you’ll hit non broken English interviewer, and you’ll realize whether you are actually good enough or you still need to work and study harder.
- jealous American student
Also note that most interviews are known to be more extreme than the actual job needs: e.g. leetcode is the interview; random CSS manipulation is the actual job. I wonder how hard would it be to teach a top 15% high schooler in America to do that stuff.
NB I'm pro-mid/low skill immigration. But these H1B conversations are intractable without first pointing out that, if the goal is low/mid skill immigration, then we need to fight for a new visa class aside from the H1B.
> the real origins of the Immigration Act of 1990s and the H1-B visa classification [...] American industry and Big Science convinced official Washington to put in place a series of policies that had little to do with any demographic concerns. Their aims instead were to keep American scientific employers from having to pay the full US market price of high skilled labor. They hoped to keep the US research system staffed with employees classified as “trainees,” “students,” and “post-docs” for the benefit of employers. The result would be to render the US scientific workforce more docile and pliable to authority and senior researchers by attempting to ensure this labor market sector is always flooded largely by employer-friendly visa holders who lack full rights to respond to wage signals in the US labor market.
> The correlate of these objectives were shifts in orientation toward building bridges to Asia and especially China, so that senior scientists, technologists, and educators could capitalize on technological, employment, and business opportunities from Asian (and particularly Chinese) expansion. This, in turn, would give US scientific employers and researchers access to the products of Asian educational systems which stress drill, rote learning, obedience, and test driven competition while giving them relief from US models which comparatively stress greater creativity, questioning,independence, and irreverence for authority.
Unless there's an effort that's made to ensure there's a more diverse representation, groups tend to hire people similar to themselves. Unchecked, that can lead to some teams all having the same national origin.
That's an appropriate use of was. The US hasn't been a Capitalist nation in nearly a century.
It's a heavily regulated mixed economic system. That transition largely occurred from roughly 1930 to 1980, and the tsunami of unnecessary regulations have continued to rapidly pile up by the thousands ever since.
Free market? Ha. Sweden is more of a free market than the US. The US has a very large market with some free market remnants; the big economic outcomes that enables is what confuses people into thinking the US is still a bastion of Capitalism (while it rapidly speeds toward the French model of economic stagnation with persistently falling growth rates).
It can be frustrating/demoralizing to American software developers as well, when they go to interview for a job, to see they are competing with an absolute flood of Indian and Chinese H1Bs. Then, when all of your interviewers are Chinese and Indian as well and you don't get the job, you sort of feel like the victim of favoritism and that you've been pushed out of your own country's industry by foreign nationals.