1. Layoffs happened regardless of visa status, so visa workers were part of the layoffs.
2. The visa applications for H1B could be for workers already working in the company under a different visa like TN or F1
3. The positions affected by layoffs and positions filing for H1B could be different. For example, a front end position may be affected by layoffs, but the visa application could be for an ML eng.
4. Visa could also be for more tenured staff. Plenty of companies are now only hiring staff+ roles after the layoffs
5. Because of the lottery system and how it works, you could have filed for a visa before a certain date but then before the visa was picked, the worker was laid off. i.e. you filed for a visa in Feb for the April lottery but laid off the person in March, giving the illusion that you filed for a visa after laying people off.
I don’t necessarily believe this position but not a single one of your points argues against the theory that H1b visas are bad for green card/citizen holders during times of layoffs.
It’s a perfectly logical (if not humane given current immigration law) position to hold that companies should be required to lay off visa holders first and for there to be a “cooling off” period between layoffs and hiring of visa holders.
My personal opinion is that liberalization of the visa process does more to protect local workers than our current system, but it’s perfectly reasonable to conclude big tech is currently using the visa system to blunt the tech labor market.
> It’s a perfectly logical (if not humane given current immigration law) position to hold that companies should be required to lay off visa holders first and for there to be a “cooling off” period between layoffs and hiring of visa holders.
This is really suboptimal though, what if you have a H1B worker that's a high performer in a key position that would make your company collapse if they left but say, they were born in India, and you're laying off folks in projects that failed / folks that are low-performing.
It's pretty easy to fix the perverse incentives of H1B hiring: give folks a green card after being here for 3 years, that's basically how long it takes for ROW folks to get green-cards in good years.
> It’s a perfectly logical (if not humane given current immigration law) position to hold that companies should be required to lay off visa holders first and for there to be a “cooling off” period between layoffs and hiring of visa holders.
Given these folks could be 10+ year long-term Indian residents of the US with approved I-140s waiting for their priority dates to come up, I'd say this would be incredibly inhumane. Generally sending people back where they came from because the company they work at made poor decisions feels like a bad idea, actually. Especially for a country as dependent on immigration as the US is to even come close to maintaining its population.
> It’s a perfectly logical (if not humane given current immigration law) position to hold that companies should be required to lay off visa holders first and for there to be a “cooling off” period between layoffs and hiring of visa holders.
Depends what you mean by "logical". Blindly preferring citizens over visa holders is bad for the company, bad for the visa holders, and bad for the economy in the long term, but it's good for the citizen workers in the short term. I guess logic is defined by your priorities.
> It’s a perfectly logical (if not humane given current immigration law) position to hold that companies should be required to lay off visa holders first and for there to be a “cooling off”
Only from a particular nationalist sentiment that isn't aligned with capitalism and free-markets.
It is fairly reasonable to believe that tech layoffs were used to blunt worker power. It's much harder to make that argument around h1bs, given the relatively small number of h1b employees, relative ease of employing foreign nationals, and (within the set of companies we're focused on) relative equality of visa holders (in terms of salary and growth opportunities).
> It’s a perfectly logical (if not humane given current immigration law) position to hold that companies should be required to lay off visa holders first
Elon Musk didn't get laid off in the 2000-01 tech bubble presumably because he was good? But maybe it should be perfectly "logical" to send him home.
Incredibly short sighted take, the US have doubled the population in the past 60 years, are we running a 50% unemployment rate? The selective immigration have hugely benefited the US and its native population.
Not sure how the article knows "new" employees, but something doesn't click for me. H1B visas kick in on October 1st of each year. August 17th can only be for H1B transfers. Might still be a new employee, but definitely not someone coming from overseas.
Maybe it's been too long and things have changed, but that's not how H1B visas work. I have a smallish S-corp and brought in some a long time ago.
We filed, got the paperwork submitted, it got approved, they eventually came to work for me stateside. This took 14 months from filing to arrival. No one filing for a visa in February is having someone come over in March. No company is firing someone and filling that spot with an H1B the next day, unless that H1B is a contractor, and another company he already works for holds his visa.
So the major missing thing here is (unless the process radically changed), is the article is blatantly lying.
Points 2-5 all contain the words could be. Sure, the reason for submitting applications for H1-B could be any of the reasons you listed, or the applications could be for the obvious economic incentives.
Whoever wrote this doesn't understand how the H-1B system works. Most of these applications are for existing employees of the company who are on some other kind of work authorization (like EAD or OPT). Because of the lottery they have to reapply every year for 3-4 years until their authorization expires. The layoffs have nothing to do with anything.
With mass layoffs of this scale, it seems like H1B roles should be the on the top of chopping block if we're keeping in the spirit of the actual purpose of the program. That means those H1B roles should have been so unique and world class talented that they were considered irreplaceable by the other thousands laid off. It seems they should be required to show justification this holds. It seems this should be pretty easy to provide evidence for if your holders are say Google Fellows (picking Google as an example) or the Peter Norvigs of the world.
I have nothing against H1B holders, I do however have a lot against businesses who often abuse these programs to suppress labor costs and dangle green cards as a piece of leverage. To be fair, big tech companies tend to be better about this and pay competitively for these roles though not always.
> this should be pretty easy to provide evidence for if your holders are say Google Fellows (picking Google as an example) or the Peter Norvigs of the world.
Google Fellows wouldn't be on H-1B but on O-1.
The H-1B visa is a good fit for foreign nationals in the early to mid-stages of their careers hoping to expand their experience by working in the U.S. The O-1 visa is generally suited for established professionals and researchers.
>I have nothing against H1B holders, I do however have a lot against businesses who often abuse these programs to suppress labor costs and dangle green cards as a piece of leverage.
One would be called a Right Wing nutcase for saying this :
"I have nothing against immigration.
But I am against businesses employing illegal immigrants to lower labor costs while taking away jobs from poor Americans."
But on HN it's fine for Tech workers to protest for 'fairness' when it comes to H1B and Tech jobs.
Most people entering Legally on H1B will not get a Green Card for next 15-20 years.
That's not exactly 'dangling' green cards.
A lot of them will return to their home countries after paying a ton of Taxes in the USA.
As they can't be sure if and when they will get a Green Card.
But the same American Tech workers are all for 'Immigration'.
I guess, immigration is good when it suits them.
Cheap Janitors, Plumbers, Mechanics and more Blue Collar workers.
Lowers living costs.
Good Immigration.
That's not the requirement. It's frustrating to see otherwise smart people on every single tech board ever since decades to not understand work visa and employment green card requirements and the difference between them.
No other domestic worker could do that job for the same price. You see, we just went through layoffs for cost saving purposes, and have nearly no money in the bank (just $100B), so we can only hire these H-1B visa holders or our business will go under.
And there was no one capable for these roles in those 12,000 people? I find that hard to believe. If the answer is “no”, prove it (I have been the sponsor of H1Bs, and am familiar with the paperwork and the process).
Edit:
> Normalizing reneging on job offers is a bad path to go down.
Google has already done this previously during economic uncertainty.
That’s not really how it works. It’s hard to be fine-grained when firing 12k people. It’s operational much easier to do the layoff and then fix the gaps.
The dumbest thing Americans have decided to complain about is the H1B visa. This is a visa that requires employees to be paid as much or more than equivalent American workers in the region. In addition the company is required to pay the significant legal fees involved in getting and maintaining this visa. It is obviously about workers living and working in the US paying taxes in the US. And it’s primarily used for an industry where working remotely is super easy. And the number of visas are capped so there’s only so many that can be hired.
So if these people aren’t hired in the US, the same company could hire them outside the US in their home countries where they can pay them far less and yet get the same people working for them.
Literally dangling the prospect of American citizenship is all it takes to get tens of billions of dollars in taxes and hundreds of billions of dollars in company development to stay within the U.S. as opposed to being dispersed to other countries.
If you really want to fight something fight companies that send jobs and dollars to the same people who don’t live in the US.
It’s also ironic that the H1B visa gets so much attention when over the past 2 decades the kinds of jobs that H1B visas work in have increased employee pay far more than nearly every other industry in the US, completely undermining the idea that the H1B visa reduces pay.
You know what did reduce pay? Apple and Google colluding to reduce pay. And yet that gets a fraction of the vitriol the H1B visa which has been an obvious good for America does.
If there’s anything to complain about the H1B visa it’s that it prevents the workers from unleashing their entrepreneurial talents within the US even more. So maybe Americans should push for improving the visa to allow the H1B workers more freedom as a opposed to trying to send them and their jobs abroad with them.
> If you really want to fight something fight companies that send jobs and dollars to the same people who don’t live in the US.
There is no way to "fight" corporate power structures though outside of unionization, the barons and lords of the investor class get to do whatever they want to do and have different sets of laws.
Incidentally I used https://h1bdata.info/ to lookup the pay my company was advertising for my exact role and spoke with my manager to get a near 20% raise.
Company was just small enough to not have accurate data elsewhere but large enough to have a handful of h1b postings up.
Americans like to think they have a monopoly on skilled programmers. But the reality is that most countries have them and they will do the same work for a fraction of the price. Everything is done over the internet these days so it doesn't matter that much where you are located.
We still have a monopoly on good language practices for American english and/or AFAIK how to actually build something that solves business needs rather than requirements.
We saw similar between 2005ish-2015ish. Lots of offshoring where you could get whatever you 'wanted' built, but it was exactly what you 'wanted' and not what actually made sense.
By this I am referring to contract houses that weren't quite 'code genies' but still would deliver products that were barely workable upon delivery. More than one shop I worked at over the last decade actually -suffered- from this.
Magically, most orgs who could figure out how to deliver even semi passable/realistic functional requirements could get the same done in house for a LOT less money.
> and they will do the same work for a fraction of the price.
For a while. I worked with some excellent remote developers in other countries, but it always felt like a revolving door as the pivoted from one remote job to the next so they could get a $5K increase here and a $5K increase there. Eventually we had applicants demanding salaries equivalent to MCOL United States salaries, so we just went back to hiring local for a lot of the roles. Hiring and managing remote workers comes with a lot of financial and managerial overhead.
Once companies catch on, it's just to easy to go in and snipe entire teams from one company by giving them nominal raises.
> Americans like to think they have a monopoly on skilled programmers.
Almost no American in the tech industry thinks that, given how many of our co-workers aren't (or at least weren't born as) American.
> But the reality is that most countries have them and they will do the same work for a fraction of the price.
At the high end of the tech labor market, it is actually a world market for talent, meaning the talent goes where they can make the most money, and bargains are hard to find because people are not so immobile (e.g. due to H1Bs).
> Everything is done over the internet these days so it doesn't matter that much where you are located.
This is true, but top talent is still going to demand top dollar, even if you let them live in a LCOL region, since they can just move to a HCOL region otherwise.
To my knowledge, the main barriers are managing the payroll: how do you deal with each countries' laws and obligations for each of your remote employees ?
The traditional way to do that at scale is to go through a local proxy company that abstracts the complexity and is the legal entity responsible for the workers in that country. Except you have to pay that middle-men, maintain an ongoing relationship, and if for instance a tenth of your engineers are managed by them, their bargaining power will be pretty high and the cost will rise.
If as a company you deal with each individual employee instead, you have to also directly manage all the legal aspects. Hiring freelance workers only can partially alleviate that, but this comes with its own can of worm, and the complexity stays the same in case of conflict (imagine getting sued by the worker in their own country)
You don't have to. Your foreign workers can be independent consultants receiving money from you, paying their own taxes. You just need their W-8BEN every year.
COVID-19 forced businesses to cope with remote work and a work force that insists they'll never go back to the office, so it might just start panning out this time.
> Once you switch to full remote, why not hire from Central and South America at maybe 1/4 the price of a Californian.
Because interview process in bigtech has been subverted by people benefiting from it and who are already skilled in it. I bet absolute majority of people that I worked with and considered them very good couldn't solve knapsack problem on whiteboards in 15 minutes, don't know Z algorithm by heart and won't be able to correctly project Amazon leadership principles with (made up bullshit) examples from their previous jobs.
It would be great if the cost of living in the US was 1/4 what it is, just like another country. Best gig for a US programmer is remote work from Bali or another beautiful place with reasonable prices.
That being said, these companies don't really provide much as far as stable US jobs go so it would be better to encourage entrepreneurial activity for US programmers.
Another word of advice for programmers. Do what you can to own the IP of your work. Whether it's open source or your own proprietary IP. Work for hire where the company owns the IP if your work is a dead end job.
I hired a team in Colombia and they've been nothing but great. Till the recent tech burst, demand there also was going through the roof and some US companies reportedly started paying in USD to give extra stability to workers there who deal with high inflation. I hope for them that demand there keeps rising and their comp gets closer to US. Great devs and excellent time zone!
The implied “problem” is that these companies are loopholing the H1-B process to hire for positions that American workers were laid off from. Of course, lawyers know how to make things work.
> The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States.
> for positions that American workers were laid off from
Is this true? My observation at Google has been that very few teams had layoffs and now have open headcount. The teams that are hiring aren't the ones that had people fired.
I was on a two-person team that was, due to recent client poaching, pretty severely overstaffed. Our manager had just been promoted and we got a new one hired in.
He viewed our lack of work to do as temporary and started recruiting. He eventually hired a third member and we started training her. After the first day of training, I was fired with no notice and no severance. The manager remarked, in the surprise exit interview, that he had taken a look at staffing recently and we had too much.
There are a couple interesting things to consider here:
1. We had been severely overstaffed (as advertised!) for several months before he even started hiring. He was well aware of it.
2. My team's original manager had offered to me that I was free to live anywhere in the world, as long as it had an internet connection. He left the team so soon after I joined that this didn't happen. But the new manager gave many indications of being acutely uncomfortable with the idea that I had made a request that he wasn't willing to grant immediately.
My question to you is, was I fired because we were overstaffed, or was that mentioned in the exit interview for no particular reason?
And my followup question is, did the companies discussed here do layoffs because they were overstaffed, or because they felt they had the right amount of staff, but they wanted to pay them less?
I dont know, but companies need to keep hiring because of both staff turn over and switch of priorities. Presumably, the people getting hired are for positions that are perceived more valuable by management than the work people being let go are doing.
And of course, companies also have practical right to make mistakes, from overstaffing to understaffing, or to place bets that do well or do not.
The point is that these things would happen even if things were being run perfectly, so they are not indicative of nefarious practices or abuses.
Everyone wants a open market, till it's hits the job market.
H1B workers come from countries where the wages are about a fourth of the average wage here. Of course they would settle for lesser salaries. Most privileged American software developers would rather gatekeep than level up their skills.
> Just one month later, Pichai’s firm filed applications for low-paid foreign workers to come to America and take highly specialized tech jobs.
It is important to note that LCA filings (which are public) have a wage that is typically lower than the actual wage paid, because companies do not want to disclose publicly how much they're actually paying.
Readit News
1. Layoffs happened regardless of visa status, so visa workers were part of the layoffs.
2. The visa applications for H1B could be for workers already working in the company under a different visa like TN or F1
3. The positions affected by layoffs and positions filing for H1B could be different. For example, a front end position may be affected by layoffs, but the visa application could be for an ML eng.
4. Visa could also be for more tenured staff. Plenty of companies are now only hiring staff+ roles after the layoffs
5. Because of the lottery system and how it works, you could have filed for a visa before a certain date but then before the visa was picked, the worker was laid off. i.e. you filed for a visa in Feb for the April lottery but laid off the person in March, giving the illusion that you filed for a visa after laying people off.
It’s a perfectly logical (if not humane given current immigration law) position to hold that companies should be required to lay off visa holders first and for there to be a “cooling off” period between layoffs and hiring of visa holders.
My personal opinion is that liberalization of the visa process does more to protect local workers than our current system, but it’s perfectly reasonable to conclude big tech is currently using the visa system to blunt the tech labor market.
This is really suboptimal though, what if you have a H1B worker that's a high performer in a key position that would make your company collapse if they left but say, they were born in India, and you're laying off folks in projects that failed / folks that are low-performing.
It's pretty easy to fix the perverse incentives of H1B hiring: give folks a green card after being here for 3 years, that's basically how long it takes for ROW folks to get green-cards in good years.
Given these folks could be 10+ year long-term Indian residents of the US with approved I-140s waiting for their priority dates to come up, I'd say this would be incredibly inhumane. Generally sending people back where they came from because the company they work at made poor decisions feels like a bad idea, actually. Especially for a country as dependent on immigration as the US is to even come close to maintaining its population.
Depends what you mean by "logical". Blindly preferring citizens over visa holders is bad for the company, bad for the visa holders, and bad for the economy in the long term, but it's good for the citizen workers in the short term. I guess logic is defined by your priorities.
It is always good to be labor in a labor constrained market, and the lower supply, the better.
I don't see how any liberalization could help local workers in the short term (I assume liberalization means expansion in this context).
Only from a particular nationalist sentiment that isn't aligned with capitalism and free-markets.
It is fairly reasonable to believe that tech layoffs were used to blunt worker power. It's much harder to make that argument around h1bs, given the relatively small number of h1b employees, relative ease of employing foreign nationals, and (within the set of companies we're focused on) relative equality of visa holders (in terms of salary and growth opportunities).
Elon Musk didn't get laid off in the 2000-01 tech bubble presumably because he was good? But maybe it should be perfectly "logical" to send him home.
Incredibly short sighted take, the US have doubled the population in the past 60 years, are we running a 50% unemployment rate? The selective immigration have hugely benefited the US and its native population.
Refutes at least two points you made if not three..
We filed, got the paperwork submitted, it got approved, they eventually came to work for me stateside. This took 14 months from filing to arrival. No one filing for a visa in February is having someone come over in March. No company is firing someone and filling that spot with an H1B the next day, unless that H1B is a contractor, and another company he already works for holds his visa.
So the major missing thing here is (unless the process radically changed), is the article is blatantly lying.
Dead Comment
It is the perception that matters.
They probably should though, at least I think so.
With mass layoffs of this scale, it seems like H1B roles should be the on the top of chopping block if we're keeping in the spirit of the actual purpose of the program. That means those H1B roles should have been so unique and world class talented that they were considered irreplaceable by the other thousands laid off. It seems they should be required to show justification this holds. It seems this should be pretty easy to provide evidence for if your holders are say Google Fellows (picking Google as an example) or the Peter Norvigs of the world.
I have nothing against H1B holders, I do however have a lot against businesses who often abuse these programs to suppress labor costs and dangle green cards as a piece of leverage. To be fair, big tech companies tend to be better about this and pay competitively for these roles though not always.
Google Fellows wouldn't be on H-1B but on O-1.
The H-1B visa is a good fit for foreign nationals in the early to mid-stages of their careers hoping to expand their experience by working in the U.S. The O-1 visa is generally suited for established professionals and researchers.
One would be called a Right Wing nutcase for saying this : "I have nothing against immigration. But I am against businesses employing illegal immigrants to lower labor costs while taking away jobs from poor Americans."
But on HN it's fine for Tech workers to protest for 'fairness' when it comes to H1B and Tech jobs. Most people entering Legally on H1B will not get a Green Card for next 15-20 years. That's not exactly 'dangling' green cards.
A lot of them will return to their home countries after paying a ton of Taxes in the USA. As they can't be sure if and when they will get a Green Card.
But the same American Tech workers are all for 'Immigration'.
I guess, immigration is good when it suits them. Cheap Janitors, Plumbers, Mechanics and more Blue Collar workers. Lowers living costs. Good Immigration.
That is not an H-1B requirement.
For comparison, Google laid off 12,000 employees this cycle.
Edit:
> Normalizing reneging on job offers is a bad path to go down.
Google has already done this previously during economic uncertainty.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/29/google-said-to-rescind-job-o...
Normalizing reneging on job offers is a bad path to go down.
Deleted Comment
But you can imagine that a lot of the people who were laid off would be justifiably pissed and uninterested in that sort of thing.
So if these people aren’t hired in the US, the same company could hire them outside the US in their home countries where they can pay them far less and yet get the same people working for them.
Literally dangling the prospect of American citizenship is all it takes to get tens of billions of dollars in taxes and hundreds of billions of dollars in company development to stay within the U.S. as opposed to being dispersed to other countries.
If you really want to fight something fight companies that send jobs and dollars to the same people who don’t live in the US.
It’s also ironic that the H1B visa gets so much attention when over the past 2 decades the kinds of jobs that H1B visas work in have increased employee pay far more than nearly every other industry in the US, completely undermining the idea that the H1B visa reduces pay.
You know what did reduce pay? Apple and Google colluding to reduce pay. And yet that gets a fraction of the vitriol the H1B visa which has been an obvious good for America does.
If there’s anything to complain about the H1B visa it’s that it prevents the workers from unleashing their entrepreneurial talents within the US even more. So maybe Americans should push for improving the visa to allow the H1B workers more freedom as a opposed to trying to send them and their jobs abroad with them.
There is no way to "fight" corporate power structures though outside of unionization, the barons and lords of the investor class get to do whatever they want to do and have different sets of laws.
Company was just small enough to not have accurate data elsewhere but large enough to have a handful of h1b postings up.
We saw similar between 2005ish-2015ish. Lots of offshoring where you could get whatever you 'wanted' built, but it was exactly what you 'wanted' and not what actually made sense.
By this I am referring to contract houses that weren't quite 'code genies' but still would deliver products that were barely workable upon delivery. More than one shop I worked at over the last decade actually -suffered- from this.
Magically, most orgs who could figure out how to deliver even semi passable/realistic functional requirements could get the same done in house for a LOT less money.
For a while. I worked with some excellent remote developers in other countries, but it always felt like a revolving door as the pivoted from one remote job to the next so they could get a $5K increase here and a $5K increase there. Eventually we had applicants demanding salaries equivalent to MCOL United States salaries, so we just went back to hiring local for a lot of the roles. Hiring and managing remote workers comes with a lot of financial and managerial overhead.
Once companies catch on, it's just to easy to go in and snipe entire teams from one company by giving them nominal raises.
Almost no American in the tech industry thinks that, given how many of our co-workers aren't (or at least weren't born as) American.
> But the reality is that most countries have them and they will do the same work for a fraction of the price.
At the high end of the tech labor market, it is actually a world market for talent, meaning the talent goes where they can make the most money, and bargains are hard to find because people are not so immobile (e.g. due to H1Bs).
> Everything is done over the internet these days so it doesn't matter that much where you are located.
This is true, but top talent is still going to demand top dollar, even if you let them live in a LCOL region, since they can just move to a HCOL region otherwise.
To my knowledge, the main barriers are managing the payroll: how do you deal with each countries' laws and obligations for each of your remote employees ?
The traditional way to do that at scale is to go through a local proxy company that abstracts the complexity and is the legal entity responsible for the workers in that country. Except you have to pay that middle-men, maintain an ongoing relationship, and if for instance a tenth of your engineers are managed by them, their bargaining power will be pretty high and the cost will rise.
If as a company you deal with each individual employee instead, you have to also directly manage all the legal aspects. Hiring freelance workers only can partially alleviate that, but this comes with its own can of worm, and the complexity stays the same in case of conflict (imagine getting sued by the worker in their own country)
Deleted Comment
Because interview process in bigtech has been subverted by people benefiting from it and who are already skilled in it. I bet absolute majority of people that I worked with and considered them very good couldn't solve knapsack problem on whiteboards in 15 minutes, don't know Z algorithm by heart and won't be able to correctly project Amazon leadership principles with (made up bullshit) examples from their previous jobs.
That being said, these companies don't really provide much as far as stable US jobs go so it would be better to encourage entrepreneurial activity for US programmers.
Another word of advice for programmers. Do what you can to own the IP of your work. Whether it's open source or your own proprietary IP. Work for hire where the company owns the IP if your work is a dead end job.
> The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States.
Is this true? My observation at Google has been that very few teams had layoffs and now have open headcount. The teams that are hiring aren't the ones that had people fired.
I was on a two-person team that was, due to recent client poaching, pretty severely overstaffed. Our manager had just been promoted and we got a new one hired in.
He viewed our lack of work to do as temporary and started recruiting. He eventually hired a third member and we started training her. After the first day of training, I was fired with no notice and no severance. The manager remarked, in the surprise exit interview, that he had taken a look at staffing recently and we had too much.
There are a couple interesting things to consider here:
1. We had been severely overstaffed (as advertised!) for several months before he even started hiring. He was well aware of it.
2. My team's original manager had offered to me that I was free to live anywhere in the world, as long as it had an internet connection. He left the team so soon after I joined that this didn't happen. But the new manager gave many indications of being acutely uncomfortable with the idea that I had made a request that he wasn't willing to grant immediately.
My question to you is, was I fired because we were overstaffed, or was that mentioned in the exit interview for no particular reason?
And my followup question is, did the companies discussed here do layoffs because they were overstaffed, or because they felt they had the right amount of staff, but they wanted to pay them less?
And of course, companies also have practical right to make mistakes, from overstaffing to understaffing, or to place bets that do well or do not.
The point is that these things would happen even if things were being run perfectly, so they are not indicative of nefarious practices or abuses.
H1B workers come from countries where the wages are about a fourth of the average wage here. Of course they would settle for lesser salaries. Most privileged American software developers would rather gatekeep than level up their skills.
It is important to note that LCA filings (which are public) have a wage that is typically lower than the actual wage paid, because companies do not want to disclose publicly how much they're actually paying.