OK, here goes my mega-thread on H1B. This is my experience not only as a tech worker, but as a leader of large engineering teams. I work in at a large and well-known Silicon Valley tech company, and have been here for over 10 years. I’m tagging a bunch of people in hopes that people read and understand the magnitude and cause of the problem. @loganclarkhall @NeilMunroDC @elonmusk @anntensity @RyanGirdusky @amandalouise416 @njhochman @johnddavidson @schuttsm @truthteller_x1 @UnfiltdTruth @MrsDoubtFireSF @Aethelleas @AuronMacintyre @JackPosobiec @AnnCoulter @NumbersUSA @MarkSKrikorian

First of all, the scale of this problem. When I go to work, in Silicon Valley, it’s rare I see any Americans at all. Everyone, literally, is Indian, with a smattering of Chinese. Just recently I was at a meeting of all director and above leaders for my product, and I was the only one (of about 25) who was not Indian male. Picking a random senior director of engineering at random from our corporate directory, who is Indian, he has 36 US-based employees. Of them 2 are American, 2 are Chinese, the rest Indian. All of his bosses up to the CEO are Indian. This is not an outlier. This is a typical director and I could pick virtually any in our engineering org and see the same thing. If you walk into our San Jose cafeteria at lunch time, you’d think you’d been magically transported to Bangalore. You would see almost nobody but Indians. This stands in stark opposition to Elon’s absurd claim that it is “insanely hard” to migrate here. 1/9 We do have a large number of contractors from the body shops. However, my own team and the teams I work with are all full-time employees (FTEs.) These FTEs are not paid less than Americans. Their pay is based on title, grade, and location. A grade 5 H1B software engineer in San Jose is on a pay scale which is identical to a grade 5 American software engineer in San Jose. In fact, these H1Bs are paid more. They received relocation costs of around $25k to come to the US. They get thousands of dollars a year in visa expedite feeds, and legal fees paid by our company to Fragomen, the evil immigration law firm. They get a minimum one month of undocumented PTO to “work from India” each year. While they are “working from India” they are off-line and not working, thus it is PTO. I don’t get that month. They are also given huge bonuses compared to Americans. When we assign bonuses each year, we assign a percentage of their target bonus to give. A high performer can get more than his contracted bonus if I assign, say, 120%. (This is common, and we usually get extra budget.) I have assigned mediocre employees low bonuses only to see my Indian bosses override and assign much higher bonuses. One of my mediocre employees got 200% from the Indian execs, double his contracted bonus. I’ve never, ever (ever!) in 10 years seen an American assigned 200%. And yet it’s happened with multiple Indian employees, and it’s generally dictated by execs for their favorites. 2/9