Comment by lrvick
7 hours ago
"But my boss told me to increase engagement at all costs, including substantially increased rates of teen suicides, so shrug guess I have to since my visa will be revoked otherwise and I need this cash to send home to my family."
Even when you cannot get highly employable US engineers to agree to do unethical work, you can always import some indentured servants who are too vulnerable to feel like they can say no.
I know someone that took a job at meta short term to get cash for a family member with cancer.
Go after the people giving the orders, not the workers trying to survive a deeply fucked up system.
I will never understand the framing of visa-sponsored workers at Facebook as indentured servants. These are incredibly highly-paid jobs, easily in the top 5% of earners in the United States even for fairly junior roles. Even in California, these folks are in the top quintile of earners. These are people who could earn a third as much in India, Canada, or the Netherlands, and still be living exceptionally well. They have exercised more agency than the vast majority of Americans or even Bay Area residents.
That said, expecting individual engineers to understand the greater context of building an online addiction machine is probably too much. The product managers and data scientists surface concerns and executives decide. And executives should be held criminally responsible in the event of gross negligence.
All of the accolades you bestowed upon visa-sponsored workers could be true. But the framing of indentured servitude comes from the visa sponsorship itself. These workers do not feel they have the right to free expression or to speak out against unethical business practices (not just data privacy but even 9/9/6 work schedules), for fear of losing their sponsorship. That’s why “indentured” is used: they’re contracted to a specific employer. They don’t have freedom of movement in the labor market. This also creates labor price arbitrage, which employers use to pay visa workers less than permanent residents and citizens. This labor arbitrage inevitably lowers the wages of non-sponsored workers.
This is more or less an uninformed vibes-based response.
1. Few workers report a 996 work schedule at Meta or other Mag7 companies. This work schedule is reported by smaller AI startups and Chinese and Indian tech firms.
2. H1B and many other sponsored visas are transferrable. I have had several colleagues get laid off or interview for other jobs and get hired elsewhere. The L visa is non-transferable, though it represents a minority of visa sponsorships in the US.
3. You directly ignored my data about workers at Meta out-earning other workers in the Bay Area. My foreign colleagues earned the same as I did at virtually every stage of my career.
In general macroeconomics, yes, the introduction of foreign workers results in wages getting pulled down. This "lump of labor" only has temporary impacts. The overall outcome is an increase in the market for engineers, as immigrants go on to found companies. NVIDIA, the world's most valuable company, is one of these.
It's disgusting and a downplay of atrocity of slavery. It's why we should stop allowing tech companies to import so many foreign workers if this is what they are okay with: openly destroying our society for money.
Expect the GOP to move in this direction as the democratic party starts going after big tech as well.