OK, here goes my mega-thread on H1B. This is my experience not only as a tech worker, but as a leader of large engineering teams. I work in at a large and well-known Silicon Valley tech company, and have been here for over 10 years. I’m tagging a bunch of people in hopes that people read and understand the magnitude and cause of the problem.
First of all, the scale of this problem. When I go to work, in Silicon Valley, it’s rare I see any Americans at all. Everyone, literally, is Indian, with a smattering of Chinese. Just recently I was at a meeting of all director and above leaders for my product, and I was the only one (of about 25) who was not Indian male. Picking a random senior director of engineering at random from our corporate directory, who is Indian, he has 36 US-based employees. Of them 2 are American, 2 are Chinese, the rest Indian. All of his bosses up to the CEO are Indian. This is not an outlier. This is a typical director and I could pick virtually any in our engineering org and see the same thing. If you walk into our San Jose cafeteria at lunch time, you’d think you’d been magically transported to Bangalore. You would see almost nobody but Indians. This stands in stark opposition to Elon’s absurd claim that it is “insanely hard” to migrate here. 1/9
We do have a large number of contractors from the body shops. However, my own team and the teams I work with are all full-time employees (FTEs.) These FTEs are not paid less than Americans. Their pay is based on title, grade, and location. A grade 5 H1B software engineer in San Jose is on a pay scale which is identical to a grade 5 American software engineer in San Jose. In fact, these H1Bs are paid more. They received relocation costs of around $25k to come to the US. They get thousands of dollars a year in visa expedite feeds, and legal fees paid by our company to Fragomen, the evil immigration law firm. They get a minimum one month of undocumented PTO to “work from India” each year. While they are “working from India” they are off-line and not working, thus it is PTO. I don’t get that month. They are also given huge bonuses compared to Americans. When we assign bonuses each year, we assign a percentage of their target bonus to give. A high performer can get more than his contracted bonus if I assign, say, 120%. (This is common, and we usually get extra budget.) I have assigned mediocre employees low bonuses only to see my Indian bosses override and assign much higher bonuses. One of my mediocre employees got 200% from the Indian execs, double his contracted bonus. I’ve never, ever (ever!) in 10 years seen an American assigned 200%. And yet it’s happened with multiple Indian employees, and it’s generally dictated by execs for their favorites. 2/9
Why are these people employed by the company when they are more expensive? There are a couple reasons. First, whenever we lose an employee in America we are told to backfill in India, because it is a fraction of the cost. Then, when the Indian employee is trained up on our products and processes, he asks to be moved to the US. I have never approved a relocation, but my Indian bosses insist on it. These relos happen on either L1 or just an H1B. Because we refuse to backfill Americans with Americans, we have created a pipeline of Indians into America. This also means there is a large cadre of foreign workers in the US trained on our products, and it is becoming hard to find non-foreign workers who are. The other reason is that the Indian mafia that runs our company practices invidious discrimination against Americans. The Indians favor their own. As a hiring manager, I’ve been sent resumes many times by Indian colleagues of friends, always, in 10 years, ALWAYS for other Indians. When I tried to source a diverse candidate pool for a recent requisition, and was about to hire a diverse (i.e., non-Indian) candidate, my Indian exec pulled the budget from me. Meanwhile, another Indian leader in my organization had a req at the same grade level and closed it immediately by hiring an Indian buddy. As is always the case, the buddy had no expertise in the product or technology domain. They will hire Indians with no expertise and train them up, but never Americans. 3/9
Hallway conversations are always in Hindi. I have raised this to the executive level twice in director-and-above meetings. In both cases the execs (Indian) asked the team to speak in English. Literally the next day, my colleagues were speaking Hindi in front of me. Indians tend to only invite other Indians to meetings. They exclude those of us who are not Indian. (This is not just my personal experience, I’ve confirmed it with many other Americans). Then, when it comes time for performance reviews, your Indian boss will tell you that you are not “participating”. Indians are hyper-aggressive and rude, and if you come from a culture that values politeness, they will run all over you and then tell your boss you are not aggressive enough. Meanwhile, meetings run by Indians are catastrophic shouting matches which demonstrate the worst decision-making I’ve ever seen. I had stellar performance reviews working under the handful of American bosses we have. I had a variety of company awards and recognitions. When I was finally transferred to an Indian boss, everything was taken away. My team was divided up and re-assigned to Indian managers, and I was given negative reviews for the first time in my life. 4/9
There are also a number of US universities that are participating in the scam. Our own company established a program to train people up in our technologies at a state university in the middle of nowhere in the midwest. Hey, we’re training Americans, that’s a good thing, right? In actuality, the professor running the program was Indian and used the program as a vehicle to bring in Indians on F1 visas. I’ve met dozens of graduates of his program, and every single one, without exception, was from India. 5/9
The idea that we are recruiting the top talent from other countries is absurd. We’ve seen product quality deteriorate rapidly. The foreign-born workers are incapable of writing clear or consistent documentation. Our release product contains spelling and grammatical errors in the user interface consistent with those Indians make. Our American customers are constantly complaining, our market share is plummeting, and yet we continue to hire more of this “top .1%”. The Indians certainly have enough education to code and do other technical tasks, but do so in a slipshod manner. They do only their own job, and don’t coordinate well with other teams. When we point out problems, they revert to the default mode of those reared in India—defensiveness. They refuse to admit there is any problem, and the more they are challenged and their shoddy work pointed out, the more they yell and scream. There is no introspection, no ability to learn from one’s faults. 6/9
In the time I have worked here I have met with the FBI, the CIA (although they use another name), the Army, the Navy, and many other major US government agencies. They all use our products in their critical infrastructure, and they select our company because we are “American”. We may be headquartered here, but virtually nobody building these products is actually American. I would point out that while Indians are by far the largest group of foreigners—and I would rank India as an economic enemy—China is the runner up. Chinese nationals are a significant portion of the H1B workforce. I also happen to notice that the Chinese I work with spend a lot of time “searching” internal web sites and are very useful for having documentation on all sorts of projects within the company. If I need confidential documentation on a product I’m not working on, I always ask a Chinese co-worker and they will have it. My previous company found an advanced persistent threat in its code. That is, the Chinese who were building our infrastructure product had infected it with hidden code that could be triggered by China. If we were to go to war with China, they would pull the plug on our computer systems and networks immediately, since they built much of them. Recent attacks like Salt Typhoon show this weakness, yet nobody every talks about the issue of H1Bs and foreigners building the products of companies that were explicitly called out as compromised. 7/9
Meanwhile, my white working class suburb is rapidly being taken over by foreigners, primarily Indians. In a just a few years, we went from 80% white to 40%, the difference being made up of Indians. Every house sells to Indians now. They have banned beef at neighborhood parties, and cricket is now taught at neighborhood schools. When I moved here, 10 years ago, I was surrounded by American neighbors. Now, when I walk outside, all I see is women in saris and men with third-eyes. They are not friendly at all, despite what Scott Adams says. They have moved in and rapidly displaced customs and culture that has been built here for decades, with their own. The whole neighborhood now reeks of curry. Other towns face similar fates. Growing up in the Bay Area, I knew many people from Fremont. They had names like Doug and Dave and Mike. Now, you’d be out of place in Fremont without a name like Ashish or Kumar. The city is entirely Indian. The new film “Didi” showcases the fact that Fremont has been taken over—the cast is non-American. The people who built these places have been displaced from their own homes, and are no longer treated as welcome here. 8/9
The Wall Street Journal editors probably don’t know any of this, as they sit in their nice homes in rich parts of Virginia or the Hamptons or wherever they live writing editorials in support of H1B. Elon Musk certainly knows better. Elon’s HQ was until recently in Fremont. Driving around he would have seen this. He knows the tech industry and what these companies look like. That makes Elon a bald-faced liar when he says it is “insanely hard” to migrate here. He knows that’s patently false. The complete displacement of one people by another has many names. Colonization is a good one. Invasion is another. The H1B program is turning large swaths of America into suburbs of Uttar Pradesh. These people who are coming over do not care about you, about America, or about our history or customs. They just want to take over. They want your kids replaced by their kids. They want your culture replaced by their eight-armed gods. If we don’t do something drastic now, it will be too late. This means: ending birthright citizenship, cancelling H1B, rolling back green cards for Indian citizens, and sending people back to their home country. Go make India great again. That’s your home. This is mine. 9/9
