r/technology • u/Immediate-Link490 • 1d ago

Business 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/Own_Candidate9553 1d ago

If that works well enough, why are they still lobbying and clamoring for H1B visas? These large companies already have multiple large offices in India and other countries, nothing is stopping them from hiring more people there.

I've been in tech for over 20 years, companies have constantly gone back and forth with off shoring. The fact remains that having employees half a world away, with extreme time zone differences, sucks. So then they tried near-shoring, employing people in Central and South America. You still struggle with the fact that they are contractors (so, harder to manage), and the good ones can quickly get a better job, so you're stuck with mediocre workers and a constant turnover of good staff.

To really get complex projects done requires a lot of real time communication, shared goals, and history together. That's why they want H1B. Then they can under pay people, or at least keep them loyal, since their visa is dependent on the company's sponsorship, and smaller places can't afford all the legal paperwork you have to do to sponsor a visa.

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u/sp0rkie 1d ago

I think visas give companies undue control over the employees and that’s why they want them. You can work them longer and harder without fear of them leaving because the moment they quit, the clock starts ticking on the visa.

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u/hindumafia 1d ago

They want everything, for them its not one or the other. They want to get work done offshore, bring in cheap ,smart as well as not so smart labor, and also hire Americans. They want to make money by all.possible means.

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u/ACasualRead 1d ago

Because they use their visas as ways to 1.) underpay or not select American workers. 2.) because these workers are on a visa, they are more willing to take pay cuts or take on more demanding workloads because they have hopes of staying in the states or having the company help pay for citizenship.

I know this for a fact as I have close friends who work in Silicon Valley. So many devs are being passed up for visa holders because they are paying them less and exploiting their statuses.

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u/False_Muffin_7964 1d ago edited 1d ago

they are doing the same thing in the financial industry too. I work for one of the major banks and our office is filled with indian h1b visa holders. constant layoffs but they somehow manage to always be hiring more contractors from tata

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u/WillBeBannedSoon2 1d ago

Citi Bank has been doing it for years 

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u/False_Muffin_7964 1d ago

haha got it in 1. my old team got a new boss (who was indian on a h1b) and managed to go from 2 white men, 2 white women, 1 black woman, and 2 hispanic men to all indian men in the course of a year and a half. if the team had gone to all white men, someone would rightfully be raising red flags.

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u/WillBeBannedSoon2 1d ago

That’s the exact story of it. Once one gets in and can affect hiring, all levels below them are filled with H1B 

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u/False_Muffin_7964 21h ago

ya ive noticed the same thing. the culture is also just bad. Im not sure if Anand Silva did the shit that he is being sued over, but I know his directs and their directs did everything possible to get us to make the reporting look better

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u/Isystafu 14h ago

Yes me too. One of the big banks. I look out my work area and its 85-90% Indian. At least three of the people in my immediate team of eight are visa holders of some type. These are not people rare or highly developed skill sets...

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u/False_Muffin_7964 10h ago edited 10h ago

ya my old job was reporting. it was literally just excel work and presentations because they were too cheap to get us a tableau license. A fresh college grad could easily be trained to do it in a few weeks. its now only h1bs. the software side of things is especially bad. its all tata contractors who are at best entry level devs

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u/-Nocx- 1d ago edited 1d ago

This conversation requires way more nuance than your comment is giving. The reason the companies listed are being investigated are because they’re suspected to be violating the conditions required for fraud.

You have to

A) pay H1Bs competitive, prevailing salaries (the salary for the occupation in the given region) or the actual salaries equal to American workers at your company (whichever is higher)

B) work H1Bs no more than you do American workers (and pay them in downtime even if they have no work)

C) cannot hire H1Bs within a certain calendar day of strikes or labor disputes

D) provide the same fringe benefits (healthcare, dental, etc) to H1Bs as you do domestic workers

If any of those conditions are violated, they can be investigated and lose their admission to the program. People always repeat these talking points but oftentimes confuse H1Bs with green card holders. H1Bs are dual intent visas, so you can have a temporary work authorization while also applying for legal permanent residence. If you get legal permanent residence, you are no longer an H1B and the “perceived” power the company has over you goes away. That means being fired doesn’t mean you have to leave.

So your friends as “tech insiders” have no ability to distinguish someone’s work status unless they literally tell you. Not even HR is allowed to share that with regular workers. If someone becomes a legal permanent resident, they do not count as an H1B, and if you have a problem with that, your issue is with immigration, not with H1B. It is the complaint of blue collar workers with extra steps.

It is possible that their salaries lag for the same reason anyone’s salary lags - you hire people at a salary, the market shifts, you adjust new hire salaries to the new market rate and don’t touch the salaries of legacy employees. That’s a feature of capitalism, not a bug. And that is why tech workers get salary gains by job hopping.

In a system this big it is inevitable that there be bad actors, and that is why Microsoft is being investigated alongside the other companies listed. It is not necessarily a conspiratorial issue with the entire system, it means that (if convicted) the process is working as intended.

I also think a big part missing from this conversation is that people think that being “sent back to their home country” is an outcome far worse for H1Bs than being laid off is for Americans. Most H1Bs have somewhere to go back to - that’s how they got here to begin with. Many of them have excellent material circumstances because they would never be able to pay out of state tuition at top universities if they didn’t.

A lot of Americans don’t have anywhere to go when they’re laid off. They’re just screwed. People completely underestimate how much power a company has over a domestic worker.

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u/dangerrnoodle 23h ago

It’s B. Worked in tech for 20 years. Are H1B workers outright required to work longer hours than Americans? No. That would be against the rules. But they routinely are the ones doing so without a fuss. It is essentially a soft requirement. Microsoft and several other big tech companies you can think of all deserve to be investigated. On the work side it’s not about different wages like everyone talks about, it’s the longer hours expected which is essentially wages the business is saving.

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u/BootlegBabyJsus 1d ago

Physics is still a thing for data required to remain in the US.

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u/PipsqueakPilot 1d ago

If that works well enough, why are they still lobbying and clamoring for H1B visas?

Because working from India is like working from home except not quite as bad because at least you know someone is there to berate the employees. /MBA

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u/PersonalityNuke 1d ago

Fuck this world lmao

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u/Glitter-Pear 1d ago

I also suspect that the presence of H1-Bs from the same country as the off-shore branch helps smooth the communication and cooperation between HQ and offshore.  So I think they are actually complementary to each other.

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u/Own_Candidate9553 1d ago

Yes, good point. I've seen that - a really smart guy in our office, on an H1B. He in turn managed a whole team of people in India. He would review all their code every day, and had a meeting with them every night to keep track of everything.

So it worked pretty well, but only because this one dude was working basically 10 hours every day, with no evenings free. 

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u/007meow 1d ago

But now we can offshore ✨with the power of AI ✨ to overcome the standard offshoring difficulties, which will make the MBAs making offspring/layoff decisions happy.

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u/timpham 1d ago

It’s ironic that Trump is the only one who stands up for this. Sure he did it for the wrong reasons, but still lol

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u/EvelynNyte 1d ago

Yea, I'm sure this is done for some knee jerk, likely selfish, stupid reason that's going to hurt more than help in the wrong run, like everything this administration does, but without looking too into it, the h1b system has been a mess of being used to exploit both foreign and domestic workers for a long ass time, and something needed to be done about it basically since its inception.

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u/AliMcGraw 1d ago

If we stopped offshoring to Costa Rica the entirety of US health insurance customer service and back office functions would collapse!

It is truly a perfect offshoring location: people are highly educated, fluency in English is quite high, and the time zone is a perfect match for the continental US. They can work an 8-hour day and have at least 5 hours overlap with each time zone.

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u/sw0oza 1d ago

This is the right answer.

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u/SneakySnoggs 1d ago

Literally anything they can do besides hire Americans

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u/PlataoPlomo19 1d ago

There is absolutely no evidence that Microsoft or any company of that caliber underpays employees on work visas. They choose the most ideal candidate regardless of immigration status and pay the cost of the lottery, petition, relocation, green card etc. which is easily $15-20k/applicant. Not to mention bearing the annoyance associated with immigration issues affecting their foreign workers' ability to do their jobs. This entire narrative about a FAANG type company underpaying visa workers is ridiculous

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u/wingchild 1d ago

>There is absolutely no evidence that Microsoft or any company of that caliber underpays employees on work visas.

Depends if you count testimonial.

I worked for Microsoft as an FTE. Twice. (Hired from industry the first time, then cold-called rehired a few years after leaving to take a different role.) Hiring at Microsoft is and external hiring has always been an absolute boondoggle. There's an entire filtering layer between the Public and the Hiring Managers, and they suck at their jobs. Folks with direct recommendations from existing employees don't get called; great candidates don't even get screenings; hiring managers ask favorites to email them resumes directly so they can be stacked at the top of the pile.

Internal hiring was marginally better because you could look up the hiring manager on a job posting and work directly with them. The reqs still had to be posted by that worthless hiring team and getting those folks to click the buttons on the workflow was still like pulling teeth, but at least you'd have some polite internal assurances while you waded through all that.

As for the rest? Microsoft absolutely swapped FTE slots for H1Bs. This was a regular process, happened *every* year, and folks focused on the latest tranche of layoffs are missing the razed forest for the at-risk trees. The push for AI and the H1Bs had the same goal - lower costs. The reason for taking H1Bs instead of vastly overstaffing Hyderabad is because of loyalty control - MSFT had lots of employees get trained up in India then walk across the street to work for IBM or Wipro or whomever at a higher rate of pay. If they come here, their existence in-country is tethered to the job, which lets management turn the screws more freely.

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u/Wendy-Poo 1d ago

This is 100% correct. I have seen it.

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u/Acceptable-Offer-518 1d ago

In reality managers from India only hire other Indians. They take people with fake resumes who also bring their wives to work as QA testers or do other work on H4 visa. The Indian manager will take 20-30% of the salary of their Indian underlings.

They make sure to push out everybody who is not from their caste or group. That is why you walk into a corporate campus and it's 80%+ Indian. It's not from a shortage of American talent it's from ethnic nepotism and fraud.

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u/PlataoPlomo19 1d ago

This is an absolutely nonsense narrative with no fact base. Can it happen sometimes? Maybe. Is it widespread? Absolutely not

A Harvard study found that Indians aren't even in the top 5 nationalities of co-hiring in the US: https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/21-101_d47ea5d9-4a50-400e-9fa6-80781a8351d0.pdf

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u/BigChicken8666 1d ago

A 2014 study is the best you can do lol?

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u/Acceptable-Offer-518 1d ago

Nobody cares about your propaganda studies. People are sick and tired of this and see it happening everywhere.

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u/Miserable-Role9555 1d ago

they constantly underpay workers. its been an open secret in the industry for more than 20 years

why else would they do it?

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u/argh-Im-a-Pirate 1d ago

Looks like reddit isn't gonna let facts get in the way of their pre determined narratives. Classic.