"And this has given rise to a cottage industry of chronically-online types — in other words, typical tech workers — seeking to expose them."
> How many 20-something software engineers even know how to use a post office in 2025?
What like... any... other... store or building where you walk in, perform an action, and leave?
I think Trump’s position of forcing companies to pay a substantial fee in exchange for a fast tracked green card is really the most sensible position instead of H1B. It should be less than $5 million, but I think if a company had to pay $300k not have any or limited protection against that person quickly finding a job in the. united states, then companies would generally prefer american workers in a way that makes economic sense, because talented workers can be acquired for a price, but not be kept for peanuts in exchange for less than an American worker, because they are stuck with the employer for 20 years if they come from a quota country.
Plus, there seems to be some indicator tha the job you are applying is an H1B position and they are posting them on sites for Americans to apply too. So it’s not hard to imagine a bunch of highly qualified idealogue’s applying to jobs they never wanted in the first place and reporting them to the government when they get rejected.
It doesn’t seem like a good idea to try and manipulate the system with the current government’s willingness to go after companies.
If they’ll go after a US ally like Hyundai for using ESTA under the VWP illegally, when Hyundai could probably have easily applied for and been granted B-1 visas. Can you imagine what they would do to a company illegally sponsoring H1B visas?
A zinger of a concluding line if ever there was one.
but there is a MASSIVE number of execs -> hiring managers that are Indian and focus primarily on hiring only other Indians. It's extremely racist.
So yeah, you can discriminate against Dalits, and hire predominantly Brahmins.
Quite a lot of tech companies hire in either Seattle, California, or both.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/09/us/california-caste-discrimin...
[2] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/23...
From that article:
In a statement explaining his veto decision, Newsom said the measure was “unnecessary” because discrimination based on caste is already prohibited in the state.
(Just adding context that I would have missed if not for another commenter pointing it out further down)
It can win you a few friends but you lose more.
Those articles based on a lawsuit were very heavily promoted on HN, however the complaint was by a single disgruntled employee who just happened to invoke the caste card and the suit was thrown out by the court.
The California DoJ failed to do basic due diligence before filing the lawsuit to the extent that the defendants filed a civil suit saying they were being discriminated against because of their race by the CA DoJ. Of course, these followups never got any traction on HN, because they didn't fit the narrative.
And now there are so many people, especially on HN and other developer forums that are utterly convinced caste based discrimination is very prevalent.
I'd guess this varies massively depending on whether the hiring manager and the people they're hiring are H1-Bs.
The word has lost meaning due to semantic overinclusivity.
By the Civil Rights era definitions, the process is racist. The people may not be. The process explicitly favours Indians. This isn’t some statistical mumbo-jumbo anti-racism construct, it’s the clear intent of the people involved and a clear effect of their actions.
What we can’t conclude from this is if the people involved think Indians are superior (versus just familiar).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_w...
The three words themselves are nice and generally good things to believe in, but the packaging philosophy it is wrapped up in is poisonous.
Can we just stop? This is a meme, it's clearly never been true. It's extrapolating from a bunch of intemperate stuff said by oddball losers (yes, often in academic environments which encourage out-of-the-box thinking and speech[1]) to tar a bunch of extremely bland policies enacted by HR and hiring managers (to ensure that their masters don't get sued) with an ideological brush.
We people with "white skin" are very clearly doing just fine in the job market.
[1] Something that in other contexts we at HN think is a good thing!
And no, I don't think it is a threat to society. You don't need to invent fake arguments to put in my mouth.
All I said was that the packaging DEI is wrapped up in is toxic (actually, I said poison).
And I’m not the only one.
In fact, consent decrees with the DOL and at least one major fortune 50 (Google) explicitly required them to do so, to maintain ‘proportional representation with the population’ because of ‘over representation’. Meanwhile, Indian men got a free pass (for one example).
Trump is mostly bullshit, but he’s in power because of bullshit like this pissing people off. That is a threat to society.
Mostly because none of the things he’s doing are going to actually solve the problem but just get people angrier and angrier at each other. But the problem, at least at one point, was very real.
i.e. you're in the top 20% of white people hiring from the top 1% of black people.
Coarse grained attributes like race, gender, sex, religion, etc. are not useful predictors of individual behavior or background.
Unfortunately most Fortune 500 companies are in the hands of B players now, and it goes all the way up, with the government (multiple governments, really) being in the hands of B/C players. The A players are happily retired and pulling strings in the background with their 501(c)4s.
Business is much worse at the same scale.
Infact, you probably cant find any org at large scale that functions in rational, logic driven capacity.
So theres just a bogeyman, not a useful critique of government.
I'm not sure if the motive behind such behavior is racism. Instead, I think it's more likely the power play. That is, they would pick the population that is the easiest to command and to push them up the corporate ladder.
Please think a little bit harder before claiming something isn't racism because it might somewhat counteract the structural privilege enjoyed by white people. Yes, white privilege is a thing, and if the claim was that Indian hiring managers were giving preference to non-white people, your comment would at least be worth discussing in the context of a society which overall still privileges white people. But that wasn't even the claim.
If you genuinely believe that the "single axis" approach is valid, please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality.
Yeah that’s never considered an acceptable argument whenever the ratio of white people in a company gets “too high”, don’t see why it should be any different with Indians.
I briefly worked for one such CEO in a major tech city. Core of Indian H1-B staff coders and about same amount of US white staff in both coding, customer-facing, and administrative roles. A lot of hiring was done rapidly. After less than six months the staff discovered the product being sold was basically a fraud (think summarization & classification of emails that could be handled by ChatGPT today, but back in early 2000s, the work was actually secretly being transmitted to staff in India every night, not the "AI" claimed). Of course, that was just one of the many layers of fractal dishonesty about that CEO and company.
So, within a few weeks the entire white staff quit. During the process of organizing to quit, we also found out we were at least the third wave of [all the white staff quitting]. Of course, through all of these waves of quitting all the H1-Bs stayed, because they had no choice.
Ironically, if it had been packaged honestly, it could have been a valuable and profitable service, but that wouldn't have been sellable to VCs (who were also being scammed).
So yes, cheaper, fully compliant with fraudulent practices, and racist to boot. A toxic brew.
fmajid in another thread had a similar paraphrase
> H1-B holders have to find a new employer within 2 weeks or lose their visa, the threat of firing is the same thing as deportation, making for a form of indentured servitude.
It's probably greater difficultly to lateral also, since then there's another company talking with the government about sponsorship on somebody you're already sponsoring. A lot of banks and financials already have standing threats to fire anybody they even find looking around.
On one hand, H1B holders can be paid below market rates because it is very hard for them to switch jobs. For this reason, they create resentment from American citizens.
On the other hand, it would be extremely detrimental to the US to kill the golden goose of our tech industry by turning it into some kind of forced welfare for citizens. Another country which is able to hire the best from around the world will take our place.
And then of course, the entire program is structured in an extremely bureaucratic way, with all this nonsense about publishing job ads in secret newspapers.
It seems that these issues could be addressed very simply by tweaking Trump's proposed "gold card" system: anyone can get a work visa, by paying $100,000 per year. This is not tied to a specific employer. The high payment ensures that the only people coming over are doing so to earn a high salary in a highly skilled field. There is no tying the employee to a specific company, so it is fairer for citizens to compete against them.
But not all of the H1B folks are the best from around the world; they're simply significantly cheaper, and the reality of the H1B Visa also means that they're very unlikely to quit their jobs for greener pastures.
Though, it isn't like the US actually wants to fix its immigration system. It benefits from the resulting submissive population and takes great sadistic joy in having a group of people they can harass and blame for everything, while those outsiders pay into the system, often arriving in the US through an educational visa, thus helping to prop up universities.
The H1B system has been a wreck for decades, the lottery system encourages abuse and doesn't make any sense if your goal is for immigration to be for skilled people (compared to most other places, which just directly look at your skills compared to what they need). Politicians talk a lot about how if elected, they will fix it, only to never actually do so.
This directly lowers the wage an American can earn. This is one way corporations pin the market to a wage they want rather than what is reasonable and fair for the worker. "That's the market rate" Is some serious bullshit, they manipulate it at every turn.
Ok, come on, this is just an insulting "kids these days" throw-away line that is absolutely not necessary.
That this is expressed in a whimsical way (personally I liked the turn of phrase, but that's an issue of taste) might personally offend you but doesn't change the substance of the article.
https://www.eeoc.gov/how-file-charge-employment-discriminati...
Where did you hear this?
> use ChatGPT to draft calm, non-threatening Slack messages that note discriminatory incidents and keep doing that consistently
This is terrible advice. It not only makes those messages inadmissible, it casts reasonable doubt on everything else you say.
Using an LLM to take the emotion out of your breadcrumbs is fine. Having it draft generic stuff, or worse, potentially hallucinate, may actually flip liability onto you, particularly if you weren't authorised to disclose the contents of those messages to an outside LLM.
Most employees don’t know what data matters or how to collect it. ChatGPT Pro (GPT-5 Pro) can walk someone through exactly what to track and how to frame it: drafting precise, non-threatening documentation, escalating via well-written emails, and organizing evidence. I first saw this when a seed-stage startup I know lost a wage claim after an employee used ChatGPT to craft highly effective legal emails.
This is the shift: people won’t hire a lawyer to explore “maybe” claims on a $100K tech job—but they will ask an AI to outline relevant doctrines, show how their facts map to prior cases, and suggest the right records to pull. On its own, ChatGPT isn’t a lawyer. In the hands of a thoughtful user, though, it’s close to lawyer-level support for spotting issues, building a record, and pushing for a fair outcome. The legal system will feel that impact.
This is correct usage. Letting it draft notes and letters is not. (Procedural emails, why not.) Essentially, ChatGPT Pro lets one do e-discovery and preliminary drafting to a degree that’s good enough for anything less than a few million dollars.
I’ve worked with startups in San Francisco, where lawyers readily take cases on contingency because they’re so easy to win. The only times I’ve urged companies fight back have been recently, because the emails and notes the employee sent were clearly LLM generated and materially false in one instance. That let, in the one case that they insisted on pursuing, the entire corpus of claims be put under doubt and dismissed. Again, in San Francisco, a notoriously employee-friendly jurisdiction.
I’ve invested in legal AI efforts. I’d be thrilled if their current crop of AIs were my adversary in any case. (I’d also take the bet on ignoring an LLM-drafted complaint more than a written one, lawyer or not.)
It is in effect not a legal system, but a system to keep lawyers and judges in business with intentionally vaguely worded laws and variable interpretations.
Totally agree again. LLMs are great at collating and helping you decide if you have a case and, if so, convincing either a lawyer to take it or your adversary to settle.
Where they backfire is when people use them to send chats or demand letters. You suggested this, and this is the part where I’m pointing out that I am personally familiar with multiple cases where this took a case the person could have won, on contingency, and turned it into one where they couldn’t irrespective of which lawyers they retained.
It’s good at initiating them. I’ve started to see folks using LLM output directly in legal complaints and it’s frankly a godsend to the other side since blatantly making shit up is usually enough to swing a regulator, judge or arbitrator to dismiss with prejudice.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/04/what-we-k...
https://www.epi.org/blog/tech-and-outsourcing-companies-cont...
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/U...
https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...
(if you email Pew Research, I've found their research team to be receptive to inquiries when they have the data but did not include it in a publication)
That's more than I thought!
https://usafacts.org/answers/what-percent-of-jobs-in-the-us-...
Immigrants are defined as foreign-born residents, including those who became US citizens
That said, it almost certainly has an outsized impact on the tech sector, which only accounts for about 7% of the FTE positions nationally.
What percentage are they of the top (preferable) quintile of jobs? Are they just 0.5% of those, or are they more like 4% of those? Is it higher still?
Do immigrants earn less than locals?
My impression is that the salary is similar. I am not in the US, but I rejected job offers from across the pond in the past and the salary seemed to be on the level with what I know is paid in the US for that position.
My guess is that what they like in H1B workers is that they are sort of stuck with that employer, as changing jobs under such a Visa can be tricky no?
I could afford to spend the next six months out of work looking for a replacement job. No one on an H1B can because they would be in violation of their visa. They will tolerate far more nonsense than I will.
Fundamentally how prices are set is someone sets a price, and if there are no takers they change the price. If a company offers a salary, and they bring in an H1-B to fill the role, they don't have to raise the salary. Over time it suppresses the wage.
The thing is that all these mega-corporations have offices across the world, but currently want to hire in the US. You and I want our personal jobs to be expensive, but we don't want the prospect of hiring us where we live to be too expensive. And even aside from cost, you also don't want them to say "there's not enough employees there, it's not worth hiring."[0]
[0] I'm technically no longer living in the US, but I was until recently.
Employee works for a company under an H1B, company likes their work, wants them to stay longer (H1B has a max of 6 years unless you sponsor the employee for permanent residence). Employee doesn't want to be in this weird temporary worker status forever (and again, after 6 years they'll need to), so the company has two choices: either hire a new employee, hope they've as good as the one you already have under the H1B, train them up to be as familiar with the job and its work as the H1B, and then forget about getting the existing employee permanent residence, OR, just sponsor them for the PERM process, put out a job ad with a really low likelihood of anyone applying, and move on with their lives.
The way the PERM process is set up, there's really no reason not to do the hidden job ad, it's not really regulated against, there's not much financial harm in doing it, and they already have an employee they like and who wants to stay, so for those two parties (and presumably anyone who likes working with this person, and any friends they have in America and so on), there's no reason not to just put out the hidden job ad.
Wouldn't say it's necessarily easy to do so, but it's not an automatic deported from the country kind of deal.
Salaries are extremely high in SV, why would they bother hiring foreigners if they can find good candidates locally?
I work in a big US tech company, and I do interview lots of candidates. Most of them graduated outside of the US. I can't believe that leadership would go to such great lengths to avoid local candidate. I think there are just not enough qualified applicants.
This. It's getting to a boiling point now with so many people out of work who are more than qualified for these jobs being shunned from them, and now they are fighting back. I'm sure there are many here who work in tech that can relate who have gone through hundreds, possibly thousands, of applications and not hearing anything back.
To your point, the sense is that diploma mills exist and the corporations mostly want bodies to work 20 hours a day and indentured servitude is what they want most. That 25% tax on international workers is nothing. It will be gamed like the tax code.
If we want to fix things, the Double Dutch/Irish/ Shell companies need to be eliminated. Stock buy backs also need to be eliminated. There is no reason for it to be allowed, it is direct manipulation.
When Corps have to pay their fair share, they'll invest in people as a expense and write it off. Which is what they were doing before tax evasion, outsourcing, and the shell game.
Eliminate the tax evasion and punish corps with fines until they are above board.
There’s two ends to this market, the super smart people and the super dumb jobs. The volume is in people slinging COBOL, J2EE or whatever for awful wages.
The reality is the H1B in the dumb categories are keeping jobs onshore. Nobody is paying 2x for the work… the alternative is shipping everything, including the “better IT” and administrative jobs offshore.
Your country sold you down the river 30 years ago.
But a large portion of HNers are fine when a Hyundai and LG do the exact same thing [0][1][2], but to construction and manufacturing workers.
If it's acceptable to complain about H1B abuse, we should also be able to complain about B1/2 and VWP abuse as well.
Edit: look at the persistent downvotes - almost every minute it is oscillating between positive and negative karma
B1/2 and VWP visas are not meant for construction or manufacturing work. On top of that, every single commentator is purposely ignoring both FT and Guardian reporting on this fact (both of which are commonly viewed as reliable sources on HN).
At this point it's pure hypocrisy, or maybe even a mix of classism and racism (H1Bs are overwhelmingly Indian working in white collar industries like tech, but B1/2 and VWP abuse by Korean employees is Korean blue collar workers in construction and manufacturing).
I have no sympathy for a company that has had a persistent and ongoing undocumented child labor problem in Alabama for decades [3]
There are MASSIVE cultural problems with Hyundai America.
[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/c677b9aa-2e89-4feb-a56f-f3c8452b3...
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/12/immigration-...
[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45226076
[3] - https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-immi...
Jm2c but I think the harsh truth is that US while having a decently sized population of good software engineers, it is still nowhere near the required amount.
Thus, many companies would rather give 150/200k to someone who's actually good at it and will be impressed by that money rather than some half assed US graduate who only went into SE because he wanted a cushy well paying job.
This solves many, many problems, including where should laborers live, fairness in interviews, etc.
This is what my old employer did to sponsor the visa for the company’s CTO.
Newspapers are used for a surprising number of various public announcements. E.g. in New York you must publish a notice in a newspaper for 6 weeks (or something like that) when establishing a LLC.
There’s something to be said for reading the paper even in 2025! Although I suppose the notices are probably also online..
I always wondered how they made sure no one applied to the position they wanted the H1B to fill
That's why I keep saying and repeating: the tech industry and especially the engineering one should be further regulated and restricted just like other professions out there, otherwise, you are only allowing anyone to scam and game the system with any potential bubble currently happening.
It was usually related to them recruiting a certain specialist or acquiring a team at another company. But the only way to get these people visas was to post the jobs publicly and hide them as much as possible. They did this by the hundreds, and it wasn't really a cost saving measure - if you are trying to get anybody in particular from Microsoft or Amazon and they are already here on a Visa, you have to go through the process all over again to sponsor them.
So it was less about racism and more about hoops to jump through to hire someone that you have already basically hired. If you've ever had experience with how a government RFP works, maybe don't throw rocks from glass houses.
Is it unfair? Maybe. But in my opinion anything is fairer than our country's evil immigration requirements.
I mean, you know, if you already have an employee working on H1B, why would you take the risk to hire someone else to replace them? The perm process is pretty broken in that way.
The lure of H1-Bs is the money savings, and the fact that if you're on an H1-B, you're practically an indentured servant (Yes, things have changed recently and it is easier on paper to switch jobs while on H1-B). It used to be that if you lost your job as an H1-B, you had 30 days to uproot your life and get out of the US otherwise you'd be in violation of immigration laws.
The difficulty of switching jobs on H1-B has always been a myth. Voluntary job switches are just as easy as U.S. citizens. You just line up things well without the possibility of taking a long break in between jobs. Dealing with unexpected job terminations (fired or laid off) is the problem.
As opposed to the rest of the graduating class that is already considered a legal citizen?
Your logic doesn’t make sense. “In addition to every option available that doesn’t have additional legal framework attached, these specific people are also desirable.”
Why?
In Savannah, the local unions got the Koreans deported from the Hyundai factory.
Der_Einzige•6h ago
A lot of WASPs got very mad when Vivek wrote that tweet calling them out for being behind a lot of H1bs in quality but he's right on the mark. Sorry Peter and Paul, but you really did get B+'s when the H1b who takes your job got A+++ in everything for 4 years.
toomuchtodo•6h ago
At current US unemployment rates, no new H1B visas should be issued and existing visas should not be renewed based on criteria. If you're exceptional, prove it on an O-1 visa.
H-1B Middlemen Bring Cheap Labor to Citi, Capital One - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-h1b-visa-middlemen-c... | https://archive.today/7JX9A - June 27th, 2025
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454509 (citations)
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
HN Search: h1b - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://h1bdata.info/
https://www.h1bsalaries.fyi/
sagarm•6h ago
toomuchtodo•6h ago
https://www.moreno.senate.gov/press-releases/new-moreno-bill...
https://www.moreno.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/The...
(if you're a company with no US nexus or presence, and no access to the market, your hiring practices are up to your local jurisdiction; if you want access to the US market, you can hire in the US, I find this to be very reasonable)
JumpCrisscross•6h ago
toomuchtodo•6h ago
JumpCrisscross•6h ago
It doesn’t walk anywhere. It’s another handout to finance and law. The B2B carve-out and lack of border adjustments makes this a regressive tax on consumers and manufacturers to fund tech, law and finance. (The only jobs this would materially cover are those in call centres for consumers. Which in practice, means voice LLMs.)
Like, I made money from tariffs. I will do well from the OBBA. I will do well from this bill. But American consumers and workers will keep getting screwed, and I’m not sure how this playbook keeps working.
lovich•2h ago
Just toss 170 billion to one of your various police forces so you’ve got the manpower to tamp down any tantrums from the people. It’s a pretty well worn tactic
epolanski•22m ago
I find this very reasonable.
ThrowawayR2•5h ago
_DeadFred_•3h ago
ux266478•3h ago
slt2021•1h ago
not geopolitical, but economical. US corporations ran labor arbitrage by shipping $20/hr jobs to China that was paid ~$0.20/hr and pocketed profits (you can lookup S&P 500 chart)
USA got S&P500 chart going up
China got industrialization
SilverElfin•1h ago
They already do though. Do you own any items made in other countries? If so, you’re competing with other workers already. It seems weird to focus on immigrants workers in America versus citizens in America while importation is allowed at all. I find all of this also very much in conflict with HN’s anti tariff attitude.
epolanski•24m ago
Why not?
Also friendly reminder 99.999% of US population is made of immigrants.
NoMoreNicksLeft•6h ago
I really hope Congress acts to make Instacart's tactics felonious with harsh penalties that ruin the company so thoroughly that it terrifies the stock market to stop investing in companies with similar HR policies. Furthermore, if the HR employees who are responsible or even in the loop could be prosecuted and ruined, this would be good too.
The government has the power to allow corporations to incorporate and to continue to operate, but if these same corporations are harmful to our country's citizens then government also has both the power and responsibility to make it impossible for these corporations to continue to exist. There is no fundamental human right involved. Corporations exist at the sufferance of people, not the other way around.
narrator•6h ago
derf_•5h ago
happytoexplain•6h ago
BobbyJo•6h ago