I would challenge that by saying SO MANY "software engineers" are net-negative producers, be it offshore teams in Asia or Eastern Europe or U.S. citizens. Partially a result of coding bootcamps. The recent tech layoffs in ~2022 that we are still reeling from is further evidence that maybe we don't need H-1B for software engineering roles. Medical? Absolutely.
I have a few app ideas that I've been sitting on for years and they would all be things that would help me, things that I would actually use.. But they're also things that I think others would find useful. I had Claude Code create two of them so far, and yeah the code isn't what I would write, but the apps generally work and are useful to me. The idea of trying to monetize these apps that I didn't even write is strange to me, especially considering anyone else can just tell their Claude Code to "create an app that's a clone of appwebsite.com" and within an hour they will probably have a virtually identical clone of my app that I'm trying to charge money for.
In this way, AI coding is a bummer. I also sincerely miss writing code. Merely reading it (or being a QA and telling Claude about bugs I find) is a shell of what software engineering used to be.
I know with apps especially, all that really matters is how large your user base is, but to spend all that time and money getting the user base, only for them to jump ship next month for an even better vibe-coded solution... eh. I don't have any answers, I just agree that everyone has the same ideas and it's just going to be another form of enshittification. "My AI slop is better than your AI slop".
As with many systemic issues in the U.S., it boils down to "publicly traded company must have highest profit possible so line on chart goes up". As much as I dislike FAANG companies in general for all their anti-worker efforts, I can't honestly blame them for making decisions that look good on the balance sheet. If I am a company, and I can choose to hire 10 U.S. engineers for $200k a pop, or 10 H-1B engineers for $100k a pop, I'm going to pick the H-1B engineers. Every H-1B or green card engineer I've worked with in-office has been extremely skilled, so I wouldn't even feel like I was "getting what I paid for" hiring them over U.S. citizens.
You mudt have gotten lucky with your coworkers. Ive worked with people who claimed to be “experts” in a domain that didnt have basic skills. I would say 5% were excellent, 5% good. 90% worthless. Coupled with weird insular cultural dynamics, poor english and communication skills, poor throw it over the wall mentality. Its overalll a huge net negative for a company. Perhaps its different in FAANG. But in enterprise companies its very bad.
As time goes on I'm finding AWS on a resume less and less impressive, regardless of citizenship status. Lots of resumes where they were at AWS for 1 or 2 years, I guess they got stack-ranked out. It makes sense. Everyone knows AWS is a revolving door.
I heard the average tenure for an SDE at amazon is something like 9 months. The culture is so repulsive that if you're good you leave soon and convert that big name on your CV to something better. I know a few really good ex AWS engineers and the thing in common is they hate Amazon and will rant about how dumb the culture is.
If there is a correlation to company size or company popularity (e.g., FAANG) I would have actually thought it would be large companies/FAANG are hiring the low-quality H-1Bs. I usually work at medium sized companies (50-200 engineers company-wide is my definition) where maybe 2-4% of the engineers are H-1B or green card. They've all been great. Even the one at Allstate (Allstate was also hugely reliant on India-based Infosys "developers" who I will yell from the mountaintops were straight garbage and very much net-negative).
And that's exactly why managers keep hiring them. If you're a defensive manager who just wants to keep your head down and grind out the years before moving getting a "senior" or "principal" manager job somewhere else then a bunch of compliant workers who'll punt anything messy onto some other team is exactly what you want.
I've heard anecdotally that Stryker is really bad about this (throw it over the wall mentality) and I remember thinking when I heard that, how the fuck are employees of a company getting away with being assigned work and just reassigning it to someone else? But then I think about my Allstate days and I can see it. I think you're being downvoted because people reading your comment haven't witnessed that sort of dysfunction in a company, but to anyone reading this- it is how some companies operate. The execs at these companies will deadass hire garbage people (usually offshore) and then brag about how much money they saved the company vs hiring U.S. citizens. Either the bill comes due years down the road when prod goes down due to a bullshit bug from the offshore team and it ends up costing the company millions, or U.S. employees are picking up the slack.
At Allstate (circa 2016), we were required to use offshore teams from Infosys. There was one U.S. software engineer for every 6 or so offshore "engineers". We weren't allowed to say "no they actually cause more problems than they fix, you can keep paying them but we'll be paying them to do nothing". Ha. You would have gotten fired for that level of "insubordination" because the higher ups legitimately didn't understand that software development is a skill - it's not like an assembly line where anyone can put an item into a box over and over again.
Actually it can and almost certainly is multiple things - not just that Indians prefer to work with other Indians (by the way this phenomenon isn't exclusive to Indians).
I suspect this has happened to me at least once. I was a shoe-in, checked all of the boxes, recruiter was saying they really wanted me, and then for the final interview they brought in a mid level guy who asked me questions unrelated to the role (purely a Data Engineer role but he was asking me about the intricacies of ML models). All interviewers were Indian. I would wager they ended up hiring another Indian guy for the role. I would imagine this happens to people of color all the time so I don't "mind" in that sense. The bigger issue to me is U.S. citizens unemployed because roles are filled by H-1B people (which is difficult to prove, but the evidence seems to indicate).
We'll never know what actually happened, but I suspect they had to choose between me and an Indian guy and by throwing me ridiculous questions in the final interview, they had evidence to whoever (their boss, HR, me, the recruiter representing me) that they passed on me because I didn't know enough about a subject area and therefore I wasn't a good fit for the role. I can't capture the full interview experience in a Hacker News comment but I realize the information presented isn't a dead-giveaway case of racism.
I am well aware that it could've just been that A) their requirements for the role changed mid-interview process, B) they didn't like my personality or I came off as an asshole, C) the mid level guy didn't want me as their "superior" for a non-racial reason or D) Other. But I think it's dangerous to just write off any suspected racism and blame something like personality or soft-skills. Racism is disproportionately detrimental to people of color, but it's still wrong when it's directed towards a white person.
This is a cool website and it highlights just how little data is out there regarding H-1B visas. There's some data on a government website but it's usually several years out of date if memory serves. It's basically impossible to prove that companies are abusing the H-1B program without hacking into their servers or someone whistleblowing.
Here are a couple of common misconceptions about H-1B visas:
- "H-1B workers must be paid the same as U.S. citizens" - The issue is companies can hire, say, staff engineers from India as SWE IIs or whatever. As we all know, tech hiring is a mess and it's trivial to place a candidate higher or lower than they really are.
- "Companies cannot hire from the H-1B program if there are U.S. citizens able to fill the role." - There are some asterisks to this statement. Companies can favor H-1B workers over U.S. workers so long as H-1B workers make up less than 15% of their total headcount. And again, it's trivial to build an interview pipeline that tends to filter out U.S. candidates. Heck, leetcode style interviewing has done a phenomenal job of keeping U.S. citizens out of FAANG. It's actually quite clever - design an interview process so difficult and irrelevant to the actual job requirements that most qualified individuals wouldn't bother applying. Anyone who's left probably has special circumstances motivating them to push through and grind leetcode for months, et al. (like not having to go back to their home country).
I think the spirit of the H-1B program is great. Makes total sense. But as is tradition, there are loopholes that allow abuse... and frankly, companies like Meta and Amex and JP Morgan have an obligation to minimize expenses and maximize profits. It's the same with the tax code - loopholes out the ass, but can we really blame companies for exploiting them? It's legal.
The only consolation to computer parts skyrocketing in price is that when the house of cards comes tumbling down, I’ll be able to pick up a lot of 100 secondhand H100 GPUs for $100 and 64TB of DDR5 ECC RAM for $64.
Both WD and Seagate “refurbish” and resell used hard drives, and that process involves wiping the SMART data, basically resetting the odometer to 0. I bought a couple of refurbished Exos drives from eBay a year ago and they still work. But there’s no telling how much use they got before they were refurbished. Maybe only 10TB written, maybe 100PB. Complete crapshoot. They shouldn’t be allowed to wipe SMART data to make it look like a brand new drive to the unsuspecting consumer.
I’ll be surprised if I’m still doing this shit in 20 years. Assuming I can handle the job physically and mentally, I expect AI will soon enable third-world talent (Infosys and friends) to be virtually indistinguishable from domestic talent- all for 1/5 the cost or whatever. When it comes to web app development, I write virtually no code. What’s more, my employer wants it that way. True craftsmen used to be involved in home construction, now it’s day laborers who get things “mostly plumb”, “probably waterproofed”, and “good enough to pass the second inspection”. Anyone who says it won’t happen because “code quality will go down” doesn’t get it. Last time offshoring was in vogue, C Suite was put in its place as production became a dumpster fire and the code base became unrecognizable. Now, AI can just about guarantee code quality- what I struggle with most is sometimes it misunderstands what I’m asking it to do, and that’s totally expected because of how vague we can often be with these prompts.
I think the C Suite at large generally recognizes they don’t need junior devs anymore. How long before they realize they don’t need seniors?
I’m seeing more and more (re)CAPTCHAs as time goes on. It’s a shame because programmatic access to web content is very nice to have. There must have been a point, many moons ago now, when the internet had as much freely accessible data as it’s probably ever going to have. Probably the day before Zillow blocked all web scraping and API access without forking up $$$. Reddit is a more recent example of how arbitrarily restricting data that was once freely available purely for $$$ has made the world and the internet worse.
