Me and many other people commented here when the whole thing started that layoffs in a time of record profits and cashflows were basically a strategy to keep salaries low. At this point I honestly don't know how innocent one has to be to think that everything is an organic coincidence and not an orchestrated move.

Companies colluding to make the life of workers worse and boost their profits, that has never happened before in the history of humanity.

This is the only part of the article that matters, and even it is a stretch:

> Just a month after Sundar Pichai announced Google’s plan to cut 12,000 jobs around the world in January, the company filed applications for H1B visas to hire software engineers, analytical consultants, user experience researchers and other roles from outside the United States, with several requests aimed for new Google employees to join in August, the report states. Google parent Alphabet owned Waymo too has reportedly filed similar H1B applications to hire engineers.

The article fails to mention and actual H1B requests by the others, just lumps them in with the layoffs.

Generally not supposed to say this out loud, but being the only American on an all H1B team at these companies can be absolutely brutal. Very alienating, always missing out on back channel communications, no sympathy for missteps

If only there were labor protection laws that prevent companies from firing and hiring at the same time(for same/similar roles) in the US.

This is madness.

I mean, no kidding. Half the people I work with are H-1B.

The program takes jobs away from Americans and should be illegal.

I want to work with people from my town, not people from halfway across the world.

I abhor any system that results in second hand citizens, such as the H1B program. It suppresses the general welfare, in service of capital. If I were able to, I'd give everyone in the program an immediate option for citizenship, and then cancel it.

We clearly need to reform our immigration system.

There's nothing really new in this article. These companies hire H1B's all the time. There is no evidence that they are low paid. I was an H1B at [FAANG] and I had a bigger salary and more stock options than most of my teammates (not sure why, but I think I was more aggressive in asking for raises). I also received help to get my green card quickly.

For H1B don't they have to show that they are paying at least market rate? And isn't it a factor in awarding the visa?

I’m not familiar with the US visa rules, but aren’t companies supposed to demonstrate that they can’t source talent domestically before bringing people in on visas? This seems odd and damaging to the US economy. And I say this as a non-US person

I don’t suspect this is as nefarious as just stupid bureaucracy. My company has kept hiring interns immediately after laying off 10% of their staff, “to keep the funnel open”. H1Bs seem to be organized similarly; it’s a different “system” to companies and tends to be not that aligned with general hiring.

Of course, at my job I’m now surrounded by junior engineers on a very old legacy product. These juniors are very much not equipped, and struggle. I mention this will take months of training and mentoring, challenging the teams ability to execute on product in any case. It appears protecting a head count matters more than real results.

It’s saddening to watch these silly management trends take over in the industry, but, it just looks like the big companies are due for being challenged.

“Low paid”?

I’m an immigrant myself and know how the visa application process works. There are a few mechanisms in place to prevent H-1B holders to receive lower wages than their colleagues, first and foremost the PERM, which guarantees similar wages in the same occupation and area of employment.

If Google or anyone else are hiring H-1B visa holders directly, they have to pay them accordingly to their own standards.

Also, visa salaries have to be publicly available. It’s not like they could lie about it.

When people speak of visa holders as “cheap” labour, they probably think of IT consultants hired by Indian companies, which regularly are the worst offenders.

As a once H1B holder I can confirm this is actually a common practice not only a FAANGs but pretty much any large and medium size tech corporation in America.

The visa is not the actual problem but the green card promise and process.

It took me 6 years to be "free" and that's considered pretty fast compared to my Indian colleagues many who are still waiting more than a decade later.

One of the teams I work with today is about 90% Indian, most from great schools like CMU, many overqualified for the job they do, all trapped in the green card promise making 1/3 of what they could be making somewhere else.

The trends I’ve seen in the industry are to hire lots of H1b’s who just churn out questionable code, then hire sharp people to fix that code. Rinse and repeat. Soon the H1b’s will be replaced by AI, this might be the last batch, probably using them to fine tune the AI. Unfortunate.

I believe for H1B they have to post the jobs and demonstrate no qualified American could be found. I've seen companies do this quickly and quietly to satisfy the requirement. I wonder if there a way to identify these opportunities and take advantage of the low applicant pool.

Not surprising at all. They want to go back to the pre-crypto craze era and they all have a common plan for it.

Yeah it's cartelization and it's illegal but we all know they do it.

So basically FAANG has finally discovered what the entire rest of the IT industry discovered 20 years ago.

Unless something has changed. My h1b salary has always been close to if not more than my peers.. not saying it doesn’t happen, just never did for me.

I get it. High income antiwork congregates on blind and low income antiwork congregates on HN.

H-1B hiring has dates that matter that you're lined up to do.

Go read "Important Dates" here https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...

Ultimately, the Silicon Valley job market is bimodal. If you don't make $500k+ here, it's not because a H-1B worker is taking your job. It's because you're not good enough at interviewing. Because people are hiring even now.

Most of these cuts haven’t targeted tech talent, so this isn’t really contradictory in any way.

Meta-question, but what in the world is going on with that website URL? It has another URL for the same domain specified as a query parameter? I feel my sanity slipping...

Daydream: American companies are allowed to replace well-paid American workers with ill-treated, ill-paid H1B workers all they want...with the small caveat that the highest replacement rates and worst ill-treat/-pay rates must occur the C suite.

This article is a nothingburger.

These companies laid off a bunch of people. Some of whom were H1Bs. And they’re hiring a bunch of people. Some of whom are H1Bs.

That’s simply a commentary on large companies hiring even after doing layoffs which is pretty standard.

I’m curious about the role of fresh out of college hires in this issue. Hired on an OPT for two years and then converting to H1b. Any inside info on the fraction of applications in this scenario?

High flying tech jobs bonanza is over. Check back in a couple of years

Has Google given up on hiring the best engineers? I remember a time when the interview process was very tough (and erred on the side of caution) but they paid top money / benefits.

Where in the article does it justify "low paid"?? Given that H1B salaries and job titles are public, and so is levels.fyi, its trivially easy for the authors to be able to fact check this. Unless it's just a scare piece designed to feed into a narrative.

And then they managed to put the two indian FAANG CEOs in the picture, without even mentioning one of their companies? This is really junk journalism...

This is a direct link to the article: https://www.leefang.com/p/big-tech-resumed-hiring-foreign-wo...

The moneycontrol.com link is merely a summary of that.

Not surprising attitude from these companies, at this point H1B are more "warm bodies" hired for low wages than hiring for talent (with all respect to the recipients of those visas)

But why does this site looks like an intranet site "best viewed with IE6"?

Of course. Money Hoovering megacorps gonna megacorp. I had an H-1B boss at Meta before layoffs. They didn't lay off the non-engineer workers who sat around the office and socialized all day... hot seat rto bullshit.

The main way out is worker-owned co-ops.

Are there any political candidates on the Presidential ballot for 2024 who might be willing to hold corporations accountable for these types of practices with stricter enforcement or perhaps changing immigration policy?

I don't mind H1B visas but I do worry about the amount of power it gives the employer over the workers who are under it. It just seems ripe for abuse.

This topic is a lightning rod and it seems we're conflating a bunch of things. All these things can be separately true.

1) H1B's are abused 2) Immigrants, like any other people, can form cliques at work 3) Companies do layoffs while simultaneously hiring 4) H1B semi-indenture the hired immigrant

First off the bat, this is a clickbaity article. The literal implication is FANG laid off and FANG also hired H1Bs therefore FANG laid off Americans to employ lowly-skilled H1Bs. This is pure sleight of hand. Facebook's had ~20k layoffs and ~3k H1B hires. It'd be easy to claim a wholesale clean out/swap out if Facebook successfully hired ~10000 to 20k H1Bs. Secondly, H1B hires usually include a mix of net new hires (say a college grad joining facebook) and existing employee (I work at facebook and want to switch to an H1B visa). Thirdly, H1Bs are usually lodged independently of layoffs or better put, H1Bs are lodged several months in advance. A decent chunk of those H1B hires started their application process 16-18 months ago. You cannot just fire someone and immediately pick an H1B. The H1B process is independent and nondeterministic (or random because it takes several months to process an application & it all depends on the lottery). It's pretty blatant the article doesn't even mention the number of visas awarded. It also doesn't even bother backing up the 'low-salaried' claim (fun fact, all H1B salary info is public so you can actually do the math yourself and see if say Amazon's H1B salaries are 'low'/'deflated'. Spoiler, no such thing)

(I'll also add, the energy required to perform a conspiracy of multiple managers coordinating to mass replace american workers at FANG could boil the sun. I think labor collusion happens i.e. a do-not-poach from X company, but H1B would be practically infeasible at distributed semiautonomous Google/Facebook hiring teams. But hey, I guess it's doable but not worth the RoI)

Secondly, H1B abuse definitely happens and we literally know who the obvious culprits are. These are the standard offshoring culprits. I'm not going to mention them by name here but they are responsible for most of the horror stories you hear i.e. having an american train their literal replacement

Thirdly, I totally get it. Tech is a tough-to-hire industry and hiring is a zero sum game (if i were an economist, i'd argue the productivity gains from a diverse skilled workforce actually makes the pie bigger but that's for another day). If I were American I would be pissed off at the idea of a bunch of foreigners coming in and taking my jobs. But that's not what's happening in this article.

The last thing is the almost xenophobia which I don't think should be relevant to H1B hiring, but idk folks. If a PhD team is full of a bunch of folks from Bleurgh, of course the Bleurghians will clique up. It's naturally human tendency especially if you're a foreigner. I literally see Americans do this wherever they go :). But sometimes some people do experience stone-wall cliques where the Bleurghians refuse to even attempt to assimilate. That's a complicated issue, but I can see why it'd be frustrating. I once took a graduate CS class that was mostly full of Bloopians and I found it amusing when the instructor would sometimes conduct office hours in Bloopian

Honestly the best way to fix immigration is to be mad at your government and compel them to make common sense regulations. We literally know who perpetuates H1B abuse but the USCIS doesn't have the means to fully stamp it out. USCIS is woefully understaffed and inundated and like any government bureau, pretty slow. The government, because of partisanship, has been pretty much roadblocked on common-sense immigration for decades.

This is The Great Replacement, the systematic extermination of the white race by mass importing non-whites.

Now that I am retired and living on a fixed income. I like immigrant labor because it's cheap.

Non-American here.

Do H1B workers need to live in the US to work, or they can work remotely from their country?

Sounds like a great business plan. Join the layoff news cycle to avoid criticism and get rid of old or innificient employees. Maybe that's why zuck and Sundar are at the top.

Now that I am retired and living on a fixed income I like cheap immigrant labor.. But when I was still working, I disliked it. Funny how that works.

>low-paid

The minimum annual salary for an H1B worker is $60,000. That is higher than what tech workers get paid in most of Europe.

Big N companies are all evil

Non-unionized tech workers finally facing the music…

The smart ones know what to do, hopefully they will be a majority against the ones indoctrinated into right wing market fundamentalism.

In any case, the unionization issue will sort itself out eventually, when the spoiled assholes are no longer in the industry, but damn it’s probably gonna be painful for a while.

[dead]

Don't hesitate.

Let's have lively debate over this issue.

:(

What does this mean ? :(

So US corporations need H1b because they can't find enough workers that don't accept poor working condition s.

Why is this allowed? This is blatant corruption. Firstly the H1B was never intended to be used to hire cheap labour en-masse from abroad, in fact quite the opposite. Why is no politician cracking down on it? It’s madness and does not help the US or its citizens in any way, shape or form.

Good riddance - it is unethical to work for these companies unless you attempt to sabotage their operations from the inside.