Comment by siren2026
8 hours ago
Cisco especially is absolutely full of H1Bs.
As someone that has worked for them a decade ago, some of their division are >90% Indian. Those are all good engineers and not dunking on them at all but it should be unacceptable to bring over competing workers on a visa while also laying off so many people.
we were acquired and part of our org moved into cisco HQ.
the entire floor were Indian other than our org, and over time our org was filled out with incoming transfers and new hires.
i'll never forget some irony in that one of the engineering leaders brought us together for a mini townhall once and praised our "diversity" but by then the percentage of people in the room were basically the same as you described, including said leader. even our twice a week catered lunches were almost always indian.
just an interesting experience being part of cisco for a couple of years.
Shocking. I had an interview for an Australian job with JP Morgan recently and even the interviewers were based in India. Super rude, could barely understand him due the strong accent, he couldn’t ask a single intelligent question and it was kinda clear that the org basically just hires other Indians. They always end up talking a lot while doing almost nothing and only hiring their friends and family while Chinese engineers just get stuff done. I’m sure there are exceptions but in my 15 years in tech I can count with two hands how many good Indian engineers I worked with.
The reason is basically that you are "required" to hire other "Indians".
If you get a job at a good company on your own merit, you immediately start getting calls to "refer" your college friends, family, people from your region/state.
Refer here means refer it to HR and make some "setting" that you are guranteed to be hired based on your "reference". Naturally reference would mean that considering you are an employee you would know about open positions and may refer the position to your friend, who would later on get the job on his own merit considering that he is skilled for the position along with required experience.
But the case for Indian employees is that a reference entails to scam the company itself, by letting a less skilled person into the company by making a "setting" with HR etc, who may themselves be from the same region/state.
And if you try to be morally upright person to deny such a scammy "reference", you would then get to listen verbal abuses from your friends and even from your own family members. To deny such a reference leads to straight up "banishment".
Tip:- Among 100 Indians if you see, only 1 or 2 are actually good at their job (or by morality).
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Or maybe you just aren't that good of an engineer (or whatever profession you are into) and find the easiest group to blame on your failures. I found that people who often are quick to judge and group of people in one bucket based on their color/ethnicity/gender/... are often not that bright people and like to focus on directing it on others. Somewhat like MAGA.
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Polydactyly can be treated surgically! /s
Jokes aside, if in 15 years you have worked with only few good Indian engineers, you probably have not yet worked at places with high talent density. I could understand if you had said you have (a) worked with many low quality engineers from India, or (b) worked with far more low quality engineers from India than high quality ones. But if, in absolute numbers, you haven't come across many good engineers from India, I can only infer than you probably haven't worked with very good engineers across the board.
Gotta love the covert racism here.
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Diversity is the term to disguise cheaper labor. Call it women, ethnic minorities, trans, neuro divergent, on wheelchair, or those having criminal records.
It's a brilliant slogan, not just because virtue signalling, but because it spawns cross cultural factions, all selfishly united to defend it. At no further brainwashing cost to you.
You dare to attack it? You are out. Pack your stuff, and your shame.
Consolation? It would at least provide opportunities to those who always suffered injustice. Yet many who claim their right to a seat don't bother with competence.
It works, because the goal isn't more talents, we never lacked them: it's to pressure the overall labor cost.
I can think of at least one fairly large “cultural faction” in the US that doesn’t like DEI
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Maybe America should export US labour and safety standards.
Outsourcers don’t just compete on price, they compete on hours worked, and support given.
You do it in outsourcing contracts to a degree, just go further - holidays available, work hours, firing procedures, support and health services.
I do know that FDA inspectors travel to factories around the world to ensure they are compliant.
You’d remove the incentive to undercharge based on sweat shop practices, and then it’s only a cost of living arbitrage.
At that point you could set up in a lower CoL region in America over outsourcing.
I’m probably missing some incentives but I think this would work, and it’s an easy political sell.
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This is so obvious now that you point it out I'm embarrassed not to have noticed it.
By the way, I was wondering if learning Hindi would be the winning strategy here. Be the only white guy speaking Hindi, instant hire.
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The way you can phrase it: you may jsut get people that are happy to do a good job for the pay they get. In many areas your typical white/cis/hetero/neurotypical male is not present, because you cannot get the maximum reward for their well-trained ego. I think diversity/pay is pretty munch confounded for plausible reasons.
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I was a contractor at Cisco as the only non-indian in my group. But, I think the entire floor (100+ people) was Indian except for me. I'd always heard of "toxic work environments" but was pretty dismissive, until working at Cisco. I never knew people could bring high school bullying, manipulation into a supposed professional workplace.
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What percent of laid of employees do you think are H1Bs?
0
Do you have anything but prejudice to support that, or..?
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If a company is set on hiring foreign workers who will work for less than Americans and we don't let them bring them over here, won't they just offshore instead? I don't ask this to be contrarian but more to wonder how to combat it.
By penalizing offshoring. I don't say this as a particularly nationalistic person either. All companies in all countries should be heavily incentivized to hire local labor and sell to the local market. Globalization is extremely beneficial of course but the various side effects need to be managed.
An offshored worker is already much cheaper than an H1B worker, I would expect any easy substitutions along those lines to already be performed. Probably some effect on the margins, but I would doubt it outweighs the primary effect.
(Of course, it would be a problem if you think H1Bs are for hiring people who cannot be found domestically, but it does not seem like many people think that these days.)
Do you think there was ethnic favoritism going on?