I think it comes down to what Stephen Colbert (well, one of his writers) called "truthiness."
I came out of the tech-adjacent world of Internet service providers. When I started back in the 1990s it was a white men's club with a few blacks and women. By the time I left I'd say the odds of a network engineer on a conference call being from India were better than 50%. Almost all of the support techs for our hardware vendors were Indian. I can't really speak to the quality of the H1B employee other than I usually had to spend a lot of time explaining problems and my proposed solution to them. They had a very superficial/textbook understanding of networking and almost no knowledge of common physical layer troubleshooting. If it didn't fit on the troubleshooting flowchart it wasn't a solution. But that can be fairly common when hiring large numbers of people at a time. And we had communications issues due to heavy accents and poor phone skills.
Is/was there a secret cabal of Indian hiring managers and recruiting firms pushing low wage H1Bs on the market? Don't know. But fact is, no one who might have first hand knowledge of the hiring practices of tech companies is going to speak up. Why should they?
Is this a problem? Well, again no one knows. Where there's smoke, there's often fire. I'm sure plenty of less-than stellar H1B candidates get though the system too. There's calls made to embassies, human networking, and arranged marriages. It happens. But how much of a problem is it really? Well, until someone bothers to investigate we won't know. We'll just have to deal with the truthiness of the situation.
But the bigger picture is that TV is not reality. No one older than 10 actually believed that living like The Fonz was admirable. No one with half a brain in their heads thought that the prom queen or star football player were going on to greatness. Sure, there were always the supermodels and my hometown in western PA did produce a number of NFL pros, but they were the exception, and everyone knew it. I'd say the more realistic version is that America pays former prom queens and football stars to sell houses and pharmaceuticals, while engineers are always getting shafted by their employers because they're lousy negotiators. How did Ramaswamy make his fortune? Oh yea, he bought a drug and sold it for a high markup. Just like that pretty girl on Big Bang Theory, he sold pharmaceuticals.
And there's the whole corporate (and national) culture issue, something that economists and libertarians rarely touch on because it cannot be measured and is a slippery slope to nationalism. But there is a distinct culture to most nations, otherwise why would there be borders at all? Heck, even states and cities have distinct cultures, which is why we're so good at being divided. Does that matter? Should it matter? Again, truthiness muddies the water.
I think it comes down to what Stephen Colbert (well, one of his writers) called "truthiness."
I came out of the tech-adjacent world of Internet service providers. When I started back in the 1990s it was a white men's club with a few blacks and women. By the time I left I'd say the odds of a network engineer on a conference call being from India were better than 50%. Almost all of the support techs for our hardware vendors were Indian. I can't really speak to the quality of the H1B employee other than I usually had to spend a lot of time explaining problems and my proposed solution to them. They had a very superficial/textbook understanding of networking and almost no knowledge of common physical layer troubleshooting. If it didn't fit on the troubleshooting flowchart it wasn't a solution. But that can be fairly common when hiring large numbers of people at a time. And we had communications issues due to heavy accents and poor phone skills.
Is/was there a secret cabal of Indian hiring managers and recruiting firms pushing low wage H1Bs on the market? Don't know. But fact is, no one who might have first hand knowledge of the hiring practices of tech companies is going to speak up. Why should they?
Is this a problem? Well, again no one knows. Where there's smoke, there's often fire. I'm sure plenty of less-than stellar H1B candidates get though the system too. There's calls made to embassies, human networking, and arranged marriages. It happens. But how much of a problem is it really? Well, until someone bothers to investigate we won't know. We'll just have to deal with the truthiness of the situation.
But the bigger picture is that TV is not reality. No one older than 10 actually believed that living like The Fonz was admirable. No one with half a brain in their heads thought that the prom queen or star football player were going on to greatness. Sure, there were always the supermodels and my hometown in western PA did produce a number of NFL pros, but they were the exception, and everyone knew it. I'd say the more realistic version is that America pays former prom queens and football stars to sell houses and pharmaceuticals, while engineers are always getting shafted by their employers because they're lousy negotiators. How did Ramaswamy make his fortune? Oh yea, he bought a drug and sold it for a high markup. Just like that pretty girl on Big Bang Theory, he sold pharmaceuticals.
And there's the whole corporate (and national) culture issue, something that economists and libertarians rarely touch on because it cannot be measured and is a slippery slope to nationalism. But there is a distinct culture to most nations, otherwise why would there be borders at all? Heck, even states and cities have distinct cultures, which is why we're so good at being divided. Does that matter? Should it matter? Again, truthiness muddies the water.
Well said.
Great episode, best breakdown I've seen yet on the H-1B controversy
Thank you!