Your 2024 Presidential Election Thread

ThunderHorse said:
I remember it was like the mid-2010s, Barack and his Ds had the power and they were going to raise the minimum salary for H1Bs to 150k...and then the tech bros descended and said "push for STEM in universities" but don't do that, you'll cripple us. Ok, now our high schools have changed and more and more computer engineers are being produced. But these computer engineers have the wrong level melanin in their skin. So let us continue to suppress wages. Yeah!

People keep talking about how H1B is indentured servitude, the whole point is that these workers are temporary. But these companies abuses this to the nth degree so that they don't hire a single American. Also, this has nothing to do with race. There are thousands of hispanics and blacks that can code, but are they given opportunity? No. Why? Because tech bros are racist MFs. Especially the Indian ones.
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Working in IT for 30 years I have had the "fun" of watching this evolve. I agree that we should actively recruit the top STEM talent from around the world to come to the US. The debate is all a problem of definitions. IT is NOT STEM. The value of bringing a web designer, system admin or programmer into the US is negligible with very few exceptions. Yes, we should have actively recruited Linus Torvald to come to the US under H1B. No, we should not recruit a 30ish system admin with 5 years of experience to come and force a new computer science grad to compete with them for jobs at the same salary.

Where the issue lies is that in the 90's when technology started to really take off with the internet, the definitions in the H1B program were too ambiguous. The visas were given out to web page designers, exactly the same as a rocket scientist. The wording was "persons having high level technical skills"(paraphrased). And so we didn't have enough authorized H1Bs to actually give to rocket scientists. The visas were dominated by people with internet skills. So they expanded the number of visas available... and more Indian companies made it through the process. So they expanded it again and again to make room for legitimate experts. An industry was born as primarily Indian, but some other folks as well, took advantage of the wording and began to import labor into the US. Companies run by Indian immigrants (US Citizens) would sponsor the H1B visa and contract the workers to companies. This avoided the problem for the workers of having to get a new visa when they went to a new job. It made the temporary visa permanent through proxy. The workers would be crammed into the smallest possible housing, given a shared vehicle and then contracted at rates that US citizens couldn't match. It was literally half the cost to hire these contractors versus employ a citizen. After the dot com crash in 2000, a large number of citizens in the US transitioned out of IT and into other fields as job availability in the field dropped to virtually nothing. We couldn't compete with the pricing and the job market was over filled with people causing major competition in the job application process. As a result, salaries in IT were stagnant. And then the offshoring started as the technology for remote access became broadly available...

I could write a whole book on the second and third order effects over time and how we got here. At the end of the day, this is a terminology problem and ambiguity in the definitions in the H1B program. Elon and Vivek are right, we should be actively recruiting the best and brightest from around the world and incentivizing them to work in US companies. Elon and Vivek are wrong, we should not use the H1B program to do it as it currently stands. The program has been corrupted and exploited forcing unfair competition in the IT industry to the detriment of the US' own population.

The H1B program needs to be rewritten to return to the original intent. Until we do, the job market for technology workers will continue to be biased against our own citizens. All because we've never updated the definition of "high level technical skills".
 
One "racist" thing to mention about the vast number of Indian IT folks I've run across: they have "paper certs."

What are those? Go to a brain dump website and memorize the test answers. Yes, the entire tests are online. Memorize the answers, take the test, you've learned nothing but have the cert. Another method I've seen is to go to places where people take the test for you. This is all over the place in India and the Middle East, way to easy for this to happen. Pony up the bucks and let another do the work. You have the cert but learned nothing.

I also saw a lot of people of all nationalities and groups do the same, including US contractors when I was overseas.

The bottom line though, is not only will they work for less, they also look better on paper because of the certs. That gives the hiring company some legitimacy if questioned because the certs make the incumbent "less qualified" if they aren't stacking Microsoft, Cisco, CompTIA, etc. on their resume like the H1B holder.
 
Cookie_ said:
Putting this here since this is sort of our "politics catch all" thread and I feel it fits.

Jimmy Carter dies at 100.

Carter might not have been a great (or even good) President in most people's opinions, but he was an outstanding Humanitarian.
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Very nice decent human being. Should’ve been a pastor, not a president.

“Nice” without “strength” is not a good quality for a President. It means the rest of the world fucks you in the ass.
 
AWP said:
One "racist" thing to mention about the vast number of Indian IT folks I've run across: they have "paper certs."

What are those? Go to a brain dump website and memorize the test answers. Yes, the entire tests are online. Memorize the answers, take the test, you've learned nothing but have the cert. Another method I've seen is to go to places where people take the test for you. This is all over the place in India and the Middle East, way to easy for this to happen. Pony up the bucks and let another do the work. You have the cert but learned nothing.

I also saw a lot of people of all nationalities and groups do the same, including US contractors when I was overseas.

The bottom line though, is not only will they work for less, they also look better on paper because of the certs. That gives the hiring company some legitimacy if questioned because the certs make the incumbent "less qualified" if they aren't stacking Microsoft, Cisco, CompTIA, etc. on their resume like the H1B holder.
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That happens on the US side as well. We had someone apply for a position in J-6 that had 3 certs as current on their resume that no longer existed. I called it out, but they still hired the guy.

The test memorization has been going on for as long as certs have existed. Transcender ( Transcender ) was the big one in the 90's.

BTW, I don't think it's a racist thing. The Indian population has a large number of those available H1B's tied up permanently. Other cultures that are trying to break into the game are fighting for limited availability. For example, Latin America has a large number of qualified people but because they can't get the visa, they are focused on offshoring from the US. The only reason we are talking about India as the main provider is because they are dominating the current process.

I should also mention the other part of the India problem. The companies over there for offshoring have their own code bases that they share among companies and redeploy across their client base, further reducing development costs. I've seen line for line identical code, including code comments, presented by different companies in India to different clients for which the client was charged for "custom development". If an Indian company wants to use their "framework", you're probably paying for something that was developed by a company and then licensed to the company that is selling you the service.
 
compforce said:
BTW, I don't think it's a racist thing. The Indian population has a large number of those available H1B's tied up permanently. Other cultures that are trying to break into the game are fighting for limited availability. For example, Latin America has a large number of qualified people but because they can't get the visa, they are focused on offshoring from the US. The only reason we are talking about India as the main provider is because they are dominating the current process.
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I put racist in quotes because it seems like calling out a specific group, however true, makes you racist in America these days. My tongue-in-cheek sarcasm at play.

Shared code is a little wild; I'd never thought of that before. We aren't talking about Intro to COBOL or something, apps and everything is nuts.
 
This idea that saying "AMERICAN"s who are qualified should have first crack ahead of a person who doesn't even have work authorization is not racist. But it happens that a lot of "White" Americans were the people in those positions when they were offshored or dumped for an H1B employee/consultant.

This reminds me a bit of how things do work at a lot FAANG companies. At both Apple and Alphabet, you literally cannot hire new people. They won't authorize new headcounts, but when they need new bodies they do float a lot of contract positions which of course get filled by contract companies with H1Bs and this is all a part of the scam.

In India especially, the wealthy pay people to go to school for them and take their exams...that's just the ones that aren't fake. Most of the transcripts and diplomas that get sent in the visa package are fake. Nevermind that a connected enough family could just pay for a real diploma and transcript without even paying that person to get a degree for their kid.

How do I know about all this corruption, well my boss is Indian and he jokes about it all the time :ROFLMAO: :ninja:

Also, American Citizens who are Indian like a Vivek are currently being discriminated against because they are American...whoda thunk.
 

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