They are rewarded for cutting the budget, and undercutting domestic workers. Until that changes, this problem will continue. Or workers could unionize.
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.
True. But the common man on the street wants things to be cheap. This is not sustainable unless on imports cheap h1b (or other overworked foreigners).
Edit: This is not meant to support h1b.
Ideal case - people that are not on H1B and work in these companies - contact your CEO/managers. People don't do that. Instead are happy to argue (or downvote) here.
> 'm not claiming that this is a step in the direction of fixing academia; I'm claiming that, because academia is currently broken, we shouldn't assume that the
Why?
If you go that far then
- senate
- scotus
- violence
- SV
- tech bros
- lies about AI
What is not broken.
The idea of academia is it is an investment. Look at internet, DoE, Genome, vaccines - a lot from academia. Companies barely do that.
Indeed. You're far more likely to get sensible policy opinions from a STEM PhD who knows what science is than from sleazy opportunist politicians, investors, and PR people.
You might even say that the opportunists dislike STEM because it gets in the way of their opportunism.
> I tried turning off Smart Features and oh my, that's not usable.
Why? What did it do?
This is the problem. Overload. It is not a google problem. If you get 200 emails - even without AI - just by using Thunderbird or k9mail (android) it will be a problem.
I had Smart Features enabled for years. Years! They worked okay. They put good accurate stuff on my calendar and so there was useful work being done by the AI in background.
Unfortunately, in the past few months, Gemini AI really started shoving its way in. And there were some features that were really unpalatable, that were basically dealbreakers for this. Yeah, I believe the "AI Summaries" had a lot to do with it. They were bad, misleading, and I did not want them crowding up my app.
I couldn't disable those features without disabling Smart Features entirely. So that's what I did.
So now I sort of suffer without the automatic email event-calendar integrations, and the other cool stuff that AI had provided, but it's totally usable. I have no trouble using it as an email service with that AI disabled. It works fine.
Anyway, it is no secret that Google has always used the text of our emails for their own marketing and analysis purposes. Always has. Why did you think Gmail was a free service? Obviously, you were paying for it! We all paid for it with our email content!
I've been a gmail user without smart features for years. I'm guessing the 'not usable' was too much junk drowning out important messages. The answer usually is spending 5 minutes clicking 'unsubscribe' on the stuff you are not bothered about.
I know some webhosting provider that used one VM for every user. Now they moved to using this. Firstly low resource usage. If one uses ZFS or btrfs then one can save storage as in common bits are not duplicated across system containers. Note this is a system container - not traditional container. This one can be rebooted to get the previous state. It is not ephemeral.
I would assume apps that are non-geek oriented will do quicker adoption. In my experience, many people are looking at passkey like a
- Password manager that is automatically working fine on their phone
- Apple or Google takes care of everything. And users think of it like 'Sign in with Google/Apple equivalent'. Press fingerprint/face-ID and all just works.
Only PITA I expect is that banks type dinosaurs will screw up this (like they did with 2FA - with custom apps and non-standard implementations). I wish W3C would some way ban these but banks are somehow escaping standards.
