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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   17471 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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If Indian workers are so bad, why do tech companies keep hiring them? I'm not buying that it's because of nepotism. Different groups of Indians don't even seem to like each other much, and these companies have shareholder meetings and boards of directors. They face competition in the marketplace. And in my experience, when programmers have one common belief that seems to be contradicted by the market, the market is always right. Two examples: 1) you used to hear from programmers that they were massively underpaid relative to their value to their employers and 2) more recently, they claim to be more productive working from home, which doesn't appear to be true for most people. Why should I believe these anecdotes about Indian nepotism? Many other industries have the phenomenon of hiring only Indians. Maybe it's just comparative advantage.

Tech Companies, and, in fact, a lot of companies don't actually face competition. What they face is nonsense. What is bizarre is Elon being on team H1B when he just fired 80% of his people and service got better. The fact is, tech has been bloated for decades, we could eliminate almost all H1Bs, replace them with directional state U grads, and then fill in those direction state U grads with HS seniors and do fine.

...If labor laws allowed that. H1Bs are largely cause by credentialism and lawsuits. If the lawsuit pressure ever turned against H1Bs (aka a Soros level operation cracking back on claims that no American could do the job) there would be like 1000 H1Bs issued a year.

What's a directional state U grad? Even if there is bloat (I'm not sure I agree. Twitter has been extremely buggy and full of bots since Elon Musk took over.), it still helps companies to give them more people to choose from.

What's a directional state U grad?

A directional state school is typically a non-premier public institution within a state. They often have a cardinal direction in their name such a as "Eastern Michigan" or "Southern Illinois University" they also may be indicated by a city such as University of Virginia Arlington or University of North Carolina Asheville. These tend to have less competitive admissions than the flagship campus, but still generally screen for competent 18 year olds and have decent enough instruction that grads from their tech programs can do the kind of monkey grunt work the bottom 80% of H1bs appear to be doing.

Twitter has been extremely buggy and full of bots since Elon Musk took over.

You have rose tinted glasses, it was much worse before he took over. Particularly the bots. Perhaps you enjoyed the BlueAnon bots?

It was explained to me by a Brazilian H1B after he told a story about being offended by corporate DEI efforts thinking he needed help- Indian devs mostly suck, but they're so so so much cheaper that just fixing mistakes is more cost effective.

Indian developers are a lot cheaper and most jobs don't require a genius. There are plenty of boring repetitive tasks in tech and often the really talented people aren't good at these tasks because the best developers tend to get bored.

The model that works is two high skill developers in the west managing 8 lower skilled devs in another country. The two high skilled devs will complain endlessly about having to manage "low status" people and review code instead of writing their own but the truth is that Indians are often far more cost effective. The all Indians are awfull trope is exaggerated. There are plenty of awfull Indian devs but there are also high skilled Indian devs.

The argument is not “Indians aren’t capable of doing technical work” since that is obviously wrong. It isn’t even “there are no high skilled Indians”, since that is also obviously wrong. It’s that India is not uniquely predisposed to producing technical geniuses in a way that would justify the number of allegedly “high skill” Indian men who come to the United States and Canada.

It’s that India is not uniquely predisposed to producing technical geniuses in a way that would justify the number of allegedly “high skill” Indian men who come to the United States and Canada.

The second part of the argument is that Indians, being from a poor and less developed country, are obviously more willing to move to the US than people from Europe, China, Japan and elsewhere.

If Indian workers are so bad, why do tech companies keep hiring them?

I've heard it alleged that they are paid substantially less than American born workers, even guys on the same team in adjacent cubicles. Does anyone know if this is true?

At least in my $BIGTECH company, there are internal equity guidelines within roles. If you wanted to pay them substantially less, they would have to be systematically be promoted less.

Does that apply to contractors?

Employees only.

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