Fired Americans Say Indian Firm Gave Their Jobs to H-1B Visa Holders

Re:Fired Americans Say Indian Firm Gave Their Jobs to H-1B V... by bastawhiz on Sunday March 31, 2024 @05:35PM (#39888255)

I'm genuinely curious why a company would go out of their way to fire Americans in America...to hire folks on temporary visas. If you're going to do the first part, why not just hire people in the countries they are from? I understand the article says the folks on the visas are able to be paid less, but isn't the H1-B process long, complicated, expensive, and somewhat unpredictable? Surely it's cheaper to just outsource the work. Hell, it's probably cheaper to outsource the work and fly the folks to America for a few days every now and then to meet with clients.

I don't have strong feelings about what they should do, it just seems like what they're doing isn't really in anyone's interest. What am I missing?

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Re:Fired Americans Say Indian Firm Gave Their Jobs to H-1B V... by throwaway1o24 on Sunday March 31, 2024 @05:42PM (#39888309)

You've a lot less negotiation power as your visa is tied to your job, so you get paid less. You have to leave the country after 30 days if you loose your job and don't get another one.

So if you're keen to move up the US, H1B sounds amazing but then you are in quite a vulnerable position.

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Re:Fired Americans Say Indian Firm Gave Their Jobs to H-1B V... by bluedino on Sunday March 31, 2024 @06:10PM (#39888530)

Saves money. Why pay someone $130k when you can pay an H1B half? Plus if you're hiring them as a contractor you can get rid of them whenever you want.

Where I work about half of our contractors come in through TCS.

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Re:Fired Americans Say Indian Firm Gave Their Jobs to H-1B V... by basicallybones on Sunday March 31, 2024 @05:58PM (#39888439)

It is about control. I worked with India-based engineers writing IoT C++ on deadline (alongside a US team) at 5 PM ET. They had already put in 8 hours by the time I woke up. Total madness and abuse, in my opinion.

I left because the management team clearly valued control over competence. Every person in management either was a (white) connected executive salesperson or a member of the CEO's family.

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Re:Fired Americans Say Indian Firm Gave Their Jobs to H-1B V... by rqtwteye on Sunday March 31, 2024 @05:44PM (#39888326)

Outsourcing especially to different timezones is hard to manage. It's easier to have people in house.

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Re:Fired Americans Say Indian Firm Gave Their Jobs to H-1B V... by pandaman on Sunday March 31, 2024 @08:42PM (#39889688)

H1B is pretty straightforward and cheap: it's about $5K, most of which are lawyer fees, if you have a law firm signed up for mass processing you get wholesale discount. And it's only unpredictable for an individual, for an employer who submits thousands of applications the laws of statistics make it pretty reliable, if the approval rate is 34.5% then out of 1000 applications you will get 345 +/- few approvals.

And outsourcing does not work for these companies as their business is putting bodies into chairs on their customer's site.

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