AnAnonyCowherd

This need to bend the argument back to the initial English colonization of America is stupid. These mediocre Indian IT drones are not putting everything they own in a boat and washing up here hoping to find a better life. They're the rich B students that could afford the process which become part of an idealized system that American corporations are now bending and exploiting to hire what are essentially indentured servants from a population of people who couldn't get the best jobs in their native country, so they settled on this backup plan.

And they DO have families of their own here (and bring over their in-laws), and a lot of them don't integrate well, for a variety of reasons. At least a third of my neighborhood is Indian. They glare at me on the sidewalk when I wave. And most of them remain inured in their caste system, and are difficult and unpleasant to work with.

Again, all the same arguments about developing our own chips domestically -- which I doubt many people have a problem with -- apply to developing our own, better education pipeline to fully develop domestic software engineers.

> Does the US have the required people, in terms of numbers and skills?

For 30 years, IT managers at blue chip US corporations have exploited the H1-B visa program by saying, "No," and then hiring a never-ending stream of barely-capable Java coders from programmer mills in India, take 5 times longer to make an app than it should have taken, get promoted, and leave everyone holding the bag with shitty web app that we all hate because it's too slow, too bloated, and doesn't work like it needs to. And the companies who can't get enough of that bullshit in-house just hire it out to sub-sub-contractors that do the same thing. Can we not invest in our native population and education systems this time around? I'm so tired of the fact that 90% of the IT staff in my Fortune 250 is Indian, and I know people who would be better at their jobs living in my home town. It hurts our community and our country, in the long run, and by the VERY same logic as re-homing our chip production.

> If you have that kind of team, budget or problem that deserves those, then more power to you.

This is the operative issue, and it drives me crazy. Companies that can afford to deploy thousands of services in the cloud definitely have the resources to develop in-house talent for hosting all of that on-prem, and saving millions per year. However, middle management in the Fortune 500 has been indoctrinated by the religion that you take your advice from consultants and push everything to third parties so that 1) you build your "kingdom" with terribly wasteful budget, and 2) you can never be blamed if something goes wrong.

As a perfect example, in my Fortune 250, we have created a whole new department to figure out what we can do with AI. Rather than spend any effort to develop in-house expertise with a new technology that MANY of us recognize could revolutionize our engineering workflow... we're buying Palatir's GenAI product, and using it to... optimize plant safety. Whatever you know about AI, it's fundamentally based on statistics, and I simply can't imagine a worse application than trying to find patterns in data that BY DEFINITION is all outliers. I literally can't even.

You smack your forehead, and wonder why the people at the top, making millions in TC, can't understand such basic things, but after years of seeing these kinds of short-sighted, wasteful, foolish decisions, you begin to understand that improving the company's abilities, and making it competitive for the future is not the point. What is the point "is an exercise left to the reader."

I work for a Fortune 250 that is literally withering on the vine because they chose to focus on DEI before it was even a publicly-recognized thing. A VP of HR once told a former boss -- who had a resume of a good, local choice for a role he needed to fill -- that he was not allowed to hire his guy because "that's not our focus," and was forced to fill the spot with a random H1-B with the right keywords on his CV.

As a company, we're not making the turn on a critical changes that need to happen in order to remain competitive. I expect that the product lines will falter within a few years, because of our inability to meet customer requirements and a complete miss in engaging with emerging technology in the space. As our stock takes hit after hit, the remains of the company will be subsumed by an even larger company within 10 years, and all the execs will make out like bandits.

I posit that the natural state of any corporation over 1000 employees is a giant game of politics, where the only thing that REALLY matters in hiring is getting more warm bodies, because that means budget, and budget means "power" amongst managerial peers. Fighting THIS driver towards mediocrity is the key to standout success.

> This is what happens when you hire the same kinds of people to write the software for your car that you've hired for 25 years to write the terrible internal applications inside the company that everyone hates, and in the same terrible way.

I work in "automotive," and my company created an internal textbook on waterfall development 25 years ago. I know, because I was part of an external consultancy to review it. And it was great! At waterfall! And they're still using it! Now we're getting into alternate power, and we've lifted the same software process we've been using since we had to break our firmware into 8 pieces BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT FIT ON A FLOPPY to send to the plant to upload into the ECM, and started using it with completely new build systems and processes. We've hobbled what could be a completely fresh start with 25-40 years of technical debt before even getting started. I would posit that heading off this train wreck was the place of the CIO or CTO, but they just made the CIO the CEO, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Bologna. I've seen monstrous tech debt all over my Fortune 250, and it's pushing us further and further away from competitiveness and profitability. And it's not just the approach to software. They're also sabotaging long-term strategic viability by only hiring product engineers who are fresh grads from overseas, who never stay in one position long enough to develop or pass on institutional knowledge. Unfortunately/fortunately, it's a business that is ultimately doomed in the face of newer technologies that WILL, eventually, take over our market, so I guess it won't matter. However, I still think we could turn the corner of renewable tech if we hadn't sacrificed properly investing in people and tools. But that would have required serious leadership from several C-levels, and, well, that's just not how the world works.

"Well, who could have seen this coming?"

"Uh, me. 20 years ago."

> At the same time, if a program

There's no "if" here.

I work for a company that's about 30th in terms of H1B's. All around me, I see degreed engineers -- many with their Masters -- doing clerical work that a sharp high-school graduate could do. I'm not talking about a few. I'm talking about dozens. There's nothing about what they're doing that requires specific engineering knowledge. They only have to be conversant about what the actual engineers are doing. So the effect is 2-fold: the fact that his arrangement exists puts downward pressure on wages for the skilled jobs, but it also takes great opportunities away from people who would have gotten those jobs a few decades ago.

> They also come with a minimum salary requirement, which for most tech companies would start at $150,000.

While I understand that my company is cheating the system, this particular requirement is news to me. I personally work with dozens who are probably taking home something in the $70-80K range. I'm guessing this particular cheat is that most are working through Tata and Infosys (and others, but they're local, and would give away who I work for). The company is probably paying the placement firm that kind of money, and the visa holders are getting shafted. The direct H-1B's are higher-level, and, given what I know of the company's salary schedules, may well be getting paid at the bottom of the requirement.

A lot of people are bemoaning this move from the viewpoint in the Valley. I work for an old-school Fortune 250 which is a top-30 H-1B holder. They strategically employ thousands of visa holders for jobs that hardly require a high school education. It seems to be a calculated move to get over-qualified workers at a discount, who have very limited mobility in the job market. From my view here, it's a system that's working against the long-term interests of the country, denying those jobs to local people for whom they would be a huge leg up.

> The problem is people design these things without any sort of actual testing in actual conditions where the software is supposed to be used.

I’ll do YOU one better. </Drax>

I work in an industry where software is still created by good, old-fashioned, by-the-book waterfall process, by outsourced developers. You know: the industry-proven, rock-solid, 20-year-out-of-date, slowest-and-least-agile methodology. Not only do the people who write the software never use it anger, they have no clue what the software is supposed to actually be doing. They don't understand our product, don't understand HOW these KINDS of products work, don't understand what engineers are doing TO the products, and don't understand what would be useful to have from software to help DO that. How many steps removed from actually USING the software is that? Well, you can imagine the frustration that end users experience on a DAILY basis, with ALL the tools they're supposed to be using, both home-grown, and customized commercial.

Gee… I wonder why there are so many shared Excel workbooks functioning as ad-hoc database applications on the network drives…

The most damning part of this is that there were some studies done on our engineering processes in relation to our competitors, and the numbers were bad. Really bad. You would think that senior management would sit up, take notice, and connect the dots. But they don’t seem to be doing that, which leads to one of two conclusions, and neither are encouraging.

I suppose someone would say that I could have been more diplomatic, but someone needed to voice a differing opinion. Unfortunately, there was just no way -- diplomatically or otherwise -- I was going to be allowed to influence the culture or the process. Too many other people had built their careers on the back of a 30-year-old process. It was, as they say, entrenched. Sometimes, you just get dealt a bad hand, and you can't draw into a winner.

I got hired at a Fortune 250 to rewrite a system, from the ground up, that had been running for 5 years. I rewrote it in about a year and a half. Huge success; 1000 happy users.

What I learned over time was that "the" person responsible for the group that was _supposed_ to be writing this sort of software in the company had been trying, for 10 years, to make something like it, with a whole team of contractors. In fact, it was his initial failure that caused my boss to write the first version of the program. When they saw that my boss had hired me, they doubled their efforts.

Their version of the idea was total garbage. Nobody would use it. It was terribly slow, clunky, and had a fatal flaw that would have caused people MORE work than just not using their program.

The boss of their group managed to get one of his underlings moved above my boss. He told us to stop working on my program. We did. They brought it Microsoft consultants to try to make their version suck less. It didn't work.

I suggested many things to work together. Rebrand. Code features they needed. Use some of their software. Whatever. All rejected out of hand.

We BEGGED our boss to IMPLORE the other manager to AT LEAST fix the "fatal flaw" of the other version. He agreed to, but we knew he wouldn't.

We released a bug fix for production. The other manager lost his mind, and got our manager to force us to hand over the code to his group. It took them TWO YEARS to make a single change. My program happily ran like a clock during the interim.

They finally gave up on their version.

My boss was put on a PIP. I was put on the tiniest project possible (which was completely doomed anyway), and forced to write what should have been a quick and dirty web app as a corporate, Java monstrosity. (But I repeat myself.)

In my first meeting, the other manager's toady told me to my face that he was going to kill the project I was hired for. In 4.5 years, I never even met the other manager, though he sat 50 feet away from my last cube.

There was no winning. My boss was very politically savvy, and just plain nice. There was nothing he could do. I stayed completely out of it. I did the job I was hired to do, and embarrassed the wrong people. He was written up. I was put out to pasture.

You can say that I should have done things differently. Maybe. Maybe not. What it tells me is that I was in the wrong company. Which sucks, because I could have written LOB tools like this for the rest of my career there. But this sort of dimness of vision is rampant throughout the company concerning anything related to IT. According to them, the only way to write software is to follow a strict waterfall methodology, in Java, with overseas contractors.

Making the company suck to work at, and the act of wasting millions of dollars, because it helps you build a political fiefdom, is an idea that needs to be rooted out and eliminated by the C levels. Why does this not happen? Instead, one of the C's just did a "post-mortem" on this whole fiasco, and the result was that IT needs to be "more aligned" with the business, and have better "communication."

Really? That's the level of acumen of our C-levels? They can't smell the metric buttload of BS that was shoveled in that meeting? OK, then. Good luck in the future!

I start a new job on Monday. Crossing my fingers that they will be open minded. I wonder if my old company will still be viable in 10 years.

I wish it were as simple as "incompetence."

There's a director-level IT manager where I work which has made my personal job a hassle for years.

There's a follow-on business process to our main process, which was a terrible mess. I wrote a program in a year and a half which vastly simplified the process. The director is mad, because his team of 10 contractors has been unable to write a successful version for 4 years now. (Hundreds of people use my software every day. There are still no production programs using his.) I even told his team's manager how to fix what's broken about their program, and they wouldn't listen. (And then the director fired that manager.)

He wants to own the process because it's important. He needs it to line his nest. So he finally got moves made to put a sympathetic middle manager in place to force me (and my direct boss) to hand over the program to his team to maintain. As they say, if you can't code it, take it over and act like you wrote it. (And charge internal groups $1000/user/year for the privilege of using it.)

Now my job involves improving another follow-on process that's also horribly broken, even worse than the first. And I just found out at lunch today that the director MADE HIS BONES, fifteen years ago, by IMPLEMENTING the horrible process that makes all these other follow-on processes both necessary and nightmarish.

<Queue the Obama WTF GIF>

So my new quote is: "Never attribute to incompetence what can be explained as ruthlessness driven by an inferiority complex."

I'm tired now, so I won't go into how I saw this behavior distort correct outcomes and delay business improvement for personal gain, a long time ago, at another Fortune 250.

> Let's be real, males using positions of power to obtain sex isn't exactly a US-only problem, it's fundamental hardwiring of virtually every primate species

I'm sorry, but did you just make a generalizing statement linking a difference in behavior to sex? Logically, you can invert your comment to say that females use sex to get power. Neither of these things can be said. Ever. Isn't this sort of thing precisely what got James Damore run out of town on a rail for, just a few months ago?

> Now, what happens if you kill the H1B?

Companies all start paying the premium for these most-sought-after and most-specialized technologists, as they should, which then causes more native-born people to pursue these jobs, knowing they won't be arbitrarily undercut by the lottery, and reaping the benefits of a top-dollar US-based education. To me, it's a national investment argument. Does a nation NOT want perfectly capable native citizens to get these lucrative types of jobs, and US-based academic institutions to get the tuition to educate them? No, it wouldn't happen overnight, but we don't have to cut it off all at once, either. The market can, and would, adjust.

My problem is that I see a lot of H1B's doing clerical jobs that don't require anything more than a 12th-grade education. Some even have MS degrees, but they're doing things that, at their most-technical, would take a trade school programming intern to do. I also know several under-employed people, who don't have college degrees, but who would be GREAT at those jobs, but can't get them because of the H1B system. None of this makes sense to me. You think only Ph.D.'s can deal with LIDAR systems? Fine. But dozens of H1B's working around me are doing their jobs without the need for even an Asscociates degree's worth of education. It seems like blatant abuse to get overqualified people on the cheap who can't leave.

Alright, my turn for anecdata, since I am having this... "discussion" right now. About 3 years ago, I was hired to write a program to partially automate an incredibly complicated engineering workflow. It was a total rewrite of a crufty program that had been running for about 5 years (written by my boss), but which couldn't keep up any more. It took me MONTHS just to truly understand the process, and about a year and a half (after a few experiments) to get to a stable, mostly-feature-complete version. Hundreds of people are now using it every day.

I am in engineering, not IT. The executive director in charge of engineering software for the company wants to own all data and processes. He HATES my project. My second week there, his underling told me, to my face, that it was his intention to kill the project I was hired to do. (Yeah, it's like THAT.) The ED convinced my boss' boss to stop me from working on my program, and hand it over to his team. That was 5 months ago.

When I was hired, this director restarted his THIRD attempt to write the same thing with contract, overseas labor. They've been at this attempt for as long as I have been here. Their program doesn't work very well. Literally every step (that they've managed to code) takes 3-5 times longer to do with their version. The engineers are refusing to use the tool.

My boss, through excruciating effort, has collected feedback on IT's tool, and made a list of things it must do in order to switch to it from mine. This "must-have" list is about 140 items long. The program manager of this competing tool finally "put pen to paper," and estimated that, using EIGHT people, he could code TWENTY-FIVE of the required items in THREE MORE YEARS.

Rough math says I'm a 100x+ programmer, and I feel pretty good about that, but I've worked with several people who are sharper.

I said all that to set this up: To the parent comment, yes, these people produce software, and use tools, and get paid, and all that. But at what cost? The other group has spent TENS OF MILLIONS of dollars for something that will take YEARS more effort to match something my boss did for a couple hundred grand. You're right, "they" don't know how to do a lot of stuff. The person assigned to pick up my project doesn't understand how work with Azure, doesn't understand the database schema (let alone the process that dictated it), and apparently can't even copy working code from the existing program to derive new features. If you want to give people credit for being able to log into a computer, and run Visual Studio, that's great, but there's quite a bit more to it than that. When these kinds of people are creating software, it'd be better to let the users continue to do everything in Excel themselves.

I guess some people would pat the executive director on the back for creating such an empire out of this one project inside a vast Fortune 150 company, but the waste just leaves me shaking my head. And the worst part is watching how my boss, very deftly, and very respectfully, has worked to give engineers a tool that will help them do their job, and improve the process, and how the person actually in charge of such things has fought him for almost 10 years now, trying to force people to use an inadequate tool which doesn't match how they work, just to say he owns it, and there's apparently no one in the company who will or can do anything about the situation, because it would take the CEO to make IT and engineering play nice together, and he could not possibly care less what software thousands of his engineers use, or if they do it all by hand, as long as profits are increasing and the stock price is rising.

I know, I know. This is not uncommon in large manufacturing (i.e., non-"IT") companies, but this example is the worst I've seen.

In the words in Inigo, "No, there is too much. Let me sum up."

By reason of the First Amendment and the Equal Protection clause, all manner of discrimination has been made illegal. All except discrimination against conservative or Christian speech. I fear for my job if I so much am overheard to speak on these issues in a way that would imply that I think someone else is morally wrong.

I believe both of my comments make it evident that I'm perfectly clear on this. In fact, I don't see how it would be possible to argue what I WAS saying without understanding this. But, hey, I've been wrong before; I will be again.

I believe I specifically said that I understand my free speech has a cost. Now, I don't know if you'll get this, since my original comment seems hidden or shadowbanned from the main discussion now, which just goes to prove the point brilliantly.

What I had originally written on my personal web site was standard, old-fashioned Christian teaching about homosexuality, based on the Bible. Hate the sin; love the sinner. That sort of thing. (No, it wasn't incendiary calls to violence against people.)

If I'm not allowed to say what I want to say, by being fired by my employer and blackballed from further employment, or by being downvoted to oblivion or filtered or shadowbanned by Ycombinator or Facebook or Reddit, or having my account cancelled at the web host provider I use, what good are my Constitutional rights of freedom of speech and religion? You may find this situation wonderful because you hate what I have to say, but I think everyone should find the trend alarming.

Maybe you really are arguing that freedom of speech and religion only grants someone the right to not being jailed when all they have left is to stand, homeless, on the street corner with a sign, shouting at passerby -- and then they'll be jailed for not having a permit, or something -- but I would have thought that the Constitution meant the First Amendment for more protection than that.

And, furthermore, if it's only Christians that are being affected by these discriminations, then hasn't the government declared a side? All this talk on the left about how the US government is prejudiced against anything other than Christianity, and, yet, I have no doubt that my company would LOVE foreign nationals to preach their religion to people in the work place, when I would be fired for it, if overheard.

I'm saying the consequences are one-sided.

I know my personal views about sexuality and proclivity, expressed on my personal web site, cost me at least one possible job, and maybe a couple others as well, over the years. If my views on these issues were to be discovered on the internet, either on a personal site, or some social network, by someone in the HR department of the Fortune 150 I work for, I would probably be summarily dismissed. So, the "chilling effect" has already happened, and it's only working against one side of the ideological spectrum. Oh, sure, we still have "freedom of speech" in the US, but only if it's politically correct. Otherwise, you'll also be exercising your "freedom to be out of work."

Where I work, they're filling roles of what would have been called an engineering clerk, back in the old days. Jobs for which a BS is an over-qualification. The visa holders are vastly underpaid for their education level, while people who would be a better fit can't get their foot in the door, and get a huge boost to their income, because they don't have a degree.

I think the "as we all know" is that big corporations use the visa program to create, in essence, indentured servitude. People who work for far less than the market-clearing wage for the position, because are beholden to their corporate sponsor. I find it reprehensible, and particularly galling that it's all done in the name of "diversity."

Most visa holders are young and incredibly vulnerable. Combine this with my particular company's absolutely legendarily capricious hire-and-fire cycle (for 30+ years), and they can really stick it to immigrants working for them via subcontracting.