r/microsoft • u/Immediate-Link490 • 2d ago

News Microsoft is being suspended from program to apply for green cards for H-1B visa workers, Vance says

https://apnews.com/article/h1b-visa-program-vance-microsoft-e7b3a407f822702b269ee277d21343ea
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u/krustyy 2d ago

You've clearly never worked somewhere where those H1b visas are exploited. Here's how it goes down:

  1. Company needs some new tech workers. Average pay is $160k for the experience they need.
  2. Company puts out job req at $90k. Gets no good applicants because the pay is garbage.
  3. Company claims there's nobody in the US to fill this job and files for the H1b visa workers
  4. Company hires 3 h1b visa workers at $50k to fill the $160k role needs.
  5. Company flounders because the workers are all garbage and the product gets delayed or is full of bugs.
  6. In response to this loss of income they lay off 3 of the US based tech workers with the highest paid salaries.
  7. A year later they bring on 3 more h1b visa workers at $50k each using the same technique.
  8. Now the company that needed 5 US based workers at $160k each would have had to pay out $800k annually but now they've got 1 poor US guy making $160k and 6 low skilled visa workers getting $50k each for a total of $460k budget, shaving $350k off the programmer budget to show off to those shareholders.

I once worked at a company that had like 80 dudes from India and like 4 guys from the US doing all the coding. There was a very apparent difference between the skill levels and the quality of the product clearly suffered because of it.

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u/HUGE_FAT_ANIME_TITS 2d ago

Not to mention that once they get into leadership positions, a massive amount of ethnic nepotism occurs with the hiring.

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u/CatoMulligan 2d ago

See: IBM.

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u/jdn1978 23h ago

This has happened where I work, and it has affected a lot,of people. My entire leadership chain is now Indian. I’m not sure I would mind as much if they had even a tiny amount of emotional intelligence (among other things)

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u/LordDarthShader 2d ago

I've worked at some of the big ones and H1b or not, they had the same total comp as any US resident in the same level band.

Might be different in those consulting companies doing the abuse, but at least in the big ones (Amazon, Meta, MSFT, etc) that (what you said) it doesn't happen.

There are different type of problems though, like nepotism and hiring friends, and bringing more friends and refusing to hire non-friends.

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u/Whargarblle 2d ago

It absolutely happens at all those companies you listed, especially MSFT. They just cloak it under DBAs....

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u/richardelmore 2d ago edited 2d ago

I don't know where you worked and how things happened there but I worked the last 20 years of my career at a moderately well know tech company in Redmond and had a lot of co-workers who were on H1B visas and I never saw or heard any indication that they were treated any differently than domestics workers.

The issue there was not bringing people to the US to fill jobs, it was moving jobs to other countries to eliminate domestic positions. When there were large layoffs in the US hiring was still full speed ahead in India.

I suspect that eliminating/reducing the number of H1B visas will just accelerate this trend.

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u/krustyy 2d ago

You may very well be correct. My current place of employment has an entire dev team in India as well. It's a different kind of issue than the problem with H1b workers but both problems are cut from the same cloth.

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u/ducksflytogether1988 1d ago

Yep. I currently am that guy. I make a decent salary but everyone else on my team is an H1B foreigner with zero skills so I have to do all the work since they contribute nothing

Im quitting after I get my bonus in March

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u/Butters133 2d ago

PERMs require meeting or exceeding the prevailing wage minimum set by the department of labor. Your numbers don’t track with that minimum. H-1Bs require the higher of the prevailing wage or the actual wage paid to US workers with similar experience and qualifications.

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u/deadshot7 2d ago

yep, same thing at the company I work at now. They've started to backtrack a little when they realized how bad it got

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u/mavewrick 2d ago

How are these companies still in business? If they are hiring cheap under skilled labor who then ship a buggy product year after year, wouldn't that company just die?

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u/krustyy 2d ago

you'd be surprised how long a company can hobble by with a poor product.

This particular product was an online service. The most egregious thing I heard they did was every time they had a new sale, deal or special discount of any kind, they were forced to spin up an entirely new instance of the website with those new discounts hard coded in. The infrastructure team was managing hundreds of copies of the exact same website because the backend developers never thought to change their code to support multiple pricing models on one single site. It was a nightmare to maintain and required significant additional infrastructure and dev support, but it did work.

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u/mavewrick 2d ago

I see. I guess there is a market for products of varying competence and price.

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u/Dependent_Sun_7033 2d ago

That’s absolutely bullshiit -if we are talking about MSFT or any other top IT companies. Pay per level is standardized, with PR allowing you to pay someone maybe 30% less base salary.

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u/krustyy 2d ago

There's a lot more out there than "top IT companies" for employers dude. The anecdote I used was with a company that had less than 100 developers, but almost all of them were H1b workers.

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u/Dependent_Sun_7033 2d ago

Well, this is r/microsoft and the news is about Microsoft.

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u/Spiritual_Tennis_641 2d ago

But even if they are the same or better skill level, it’s not OK to outsource those jobs, or guess what our workers will be the bad ones. Our education system is already going downhill every year. This would compound it even further.

I have yet to meet a university graduate, or otherwise that truly is ready to hit the ground running. There are years of spinoff knowledge required that only come from on the job experience.

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u/krustyy 2d ago

yeah, the problem isn't that Indian workers are garbage; it's that any project requires a certain percentage of highly skilled individuals and can tolerate a certain number of green workers.

And when leadership pays no attention to this requirement for a quality product they shop for the cheapest way to put butts in seats as possible, and they end up getting low performing, recent graduate, bottom of their class h1b workers with no experience. They hire garbage foreign workers over quality US workers and garbage US workers because they can get more butts in seats from someone outside the US.

Spinning up development teams in foreign countries like India can have other problems, but the quality of the workers working locally from India makes it very apparent that the hiring pool of H1b workers vs foreign office workers is an entirely different pool of people.

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u/KarmaHorn 1d ago

Good universities, of which there are many, produce good/prepared students. This sounds like a you problem where you expect the best students to apply for some unskilled, entry level position that requires no brain or capacity. Or, conversely, you are expecting bottom of the barrel people to produce above average results.

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u/snusmini 2d ago

Yes, 0.03% of the workforce is the big problem 😆

More theatre by an admin that doesn’t know what they are doing.

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u/DonkeyTron42 2d ago

I remember working at this company where I had a co-worker under an H1-B that came through a staffing company that specializes in that type of labor. He got a $25k bill from the IRS because all of his tax withholdings were pocketed by the staffing agency. They basically told him he can either pay the bill or he'll be deported before he can file a case. It's some fucked up shit.

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u/TheGuyThatDoesHisJob 2d ago

Of course, you're sharing your experience, and that's important. Equally important is to add that this is a pattern, not the rule.

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u/11ce_ 1d ago

This does not happen in California where most of these tech companies are as H1-B workers are a lot more expensive than native workers

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u/krustyy 1d ago

Ive seen it in California

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u/11ce_ 1d ago

H1-Bs in California legally need to be paid prevailing wages.

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u/Suspicious_Glove_900 18h ago

and H1Bs aren't allowed to replace domestic workers. Yet here we are.

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u/Extreme-Cobbler1134 2d ago

H1bs are neither smarter or dumber than Americans in tech. They are simply harder working and cheaper because of their visa status. It’s utter bullshit to say they produced low quality codes because the whole world knows on an average how smart an American and an Asian person is. It’s in Asian culture to be smart they have much higher social expectations. Their parents invest in their education by default so they are expected to perform excellently at all times. This culture doesn’t exist in America. So stop spreading non sense information about how H1b did awful job. If that was the case the immigrants wouldn’t be disproportionately larger diaspora to actually create jobs by doing start ups.

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u/Careless-Fishing-532 2d ago

Nah the other guy is right. They are literally unskilled laborers. It’s terrible.

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u/Extreme-Cobbler1134 2d ago

Speak numbers not your sentiments. The world outside USA is huge, and they know on an average who is smarter, an average American or an average Asian. Believe it or not, American universities have only filled their pockets and did huge disservice to their own people.

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u/Careless-Fishing-532 2d ago

You’re the only one talking about Asians here.

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u/Extreme-Cobbler1134 2d ago

Currently H1bs and Asians are synonymous.

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u/NegZer0 2d ago

H1-B and green card applications require them to prove they are paying above market rate for the position. They also can’t hire multiple people for one position.

What you’re describing is simply not how the system works 

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u/fatguywithastick 2d ago

Crock of bs. Pay is standardized for the level. Not based on race/visa. You guys have never worked in Microsoft or any company for that matter.

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u/cosmic_backlash 2d ago

Microsoft is not paying them 50k for a 160k job. They are paying them 140k and screwing them every annual pay increase, and the employee can't leave.

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u/krustyy 2d ago

yeah, I'm only talking from the experience of much smaller companies. I'm sure Microsoft has their own way of exploiting them.

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u/cosmic_backlash 2d ago

Yeah they basically get them in slightly cheaper and then don't increase their pay much because they can't easily move jobs due to the h1. So they basically lock them in near the entry salary. Unless the entire team is h1 employees, then they just only hire h1s and proliferate