but there is a MASSIVE number of execs -> hiring managers that are Indian and focus primarily on hiring only other Indians. It's extremely racist.
nostrademons · 2h ago
I've noticed this as well, but see it mostly as "A players hire other A players, B players hire C players". The top tier of Indian execs/management that I've met will hire diverse teams, just like the top tier of every other ethnicity will as well. There's simply not enough people at the top to put a racial/ethnic/caste filter on it. But then once you get down to the second tier, people will happily hire people like themselves, because at that level you're hiring on vibes rather than data and similar people give you fuzzy comfortable vibes.
Unfortunately most Fortune 500 companies are in the hands of B players now, and it goes all the way up, with the government (multiple governments, really) being in the hands of B/C players. The A players are happily retired and pulling strings in the background with their 501(c)4s.
silentsea90 · 1h ago
There are also Indians who loathe being on such teams and actively seek diverse meritocratic teams, as one of those Indians.
teachrdan · 2h ago
Out of curiosity, do they favor hiring Indians in general, or Hindu Indians in particular. (To the exclusion of Muslim Indians)
zdragnar · 2h ago
It's been awhile since I've seen it, but there was a very brief and small wave of articles perhaps a few years back claiming a lot of Indians in the US were still facing caste-based discrimination (by skin color, name or something else, I'm not sure) by other Indian managers and execs.
JumpCrisscross · 2h ago
Newsom vetoed the ban [1]. A pair of professors are having a bad time trying to got CSU’s ban on caste-based discrimination thrown out on the grounds of being religiously discriminatory [2].
In a statement explaining his veto decision, Newsom said the measure was “unnecessary” because discrimination based on caste is already prohibited in the state.
(Just adding context that I would have missed if not for another commenter pointing it out further down)
crooked-v · 1h ago
For whatever it's worth, that's been a consistent trend with other things Newsom has vetoed with statements that he considers the vetoed item to be already covered by other laws, including some purely technical legislative things. I think it's likely that he sees himself as trying to keep California bureaucracy from growing indefinitely, especially with his push for things like CEQA process reduction/simplification.
notmyjob · 1h ago
It’s capital, political and financial. Everything costs, got to pay for gerrymandering somehow.
ivewonyoung · 2h ago
> but there was a very brief and small wave of articles perhaps a few years back claiming a lot of Indians in the US were still facing caste-based discrimination
Those articles based on a lawsuit were very heavily promoted on HN, however the complaint was by a single disgruntled employee who just happened to invoke the caste card and the suit was thrown out by the court.
The California DoJ failed to do basic due diligence before filing the lawsuit to the extent that the defendants filed a civil suit saying they were being discriminated against because of their race by the CA DoJ. Of course, these followups never got any traction on HN, because they didn't fit the narrative.
And now there are so many people, especially on HN and other developer forums that are utterly convinced caste based discrimination is very prevalent.
fragmede · 1h ago
What do you think the intersection between HN and Blind is?
ivewonyoung · 7m ago
I honestly don't know, you tell me? If you're trying to get at something, just say it instead of playing 20 questions.
polotics · 2h ago
funny question, I believe we're more precisely talking about Brahmin "upper" caste hiring only from their caste. Muslims don't even come into the picture...
srameshc · 2h ago
I don't think so. I feel Indian managers have a tendency to hire anyone else but Indians. If they have to favor Hindu, Brahmin, Muslim is very subjective, depending on that person's background, but I would say very rare. If they really have a prefrence, it will be "the connect", like if they both can connect based on region (ex: Delhi or that region) but very few Indians of current generation would care about caste or religion.
JumpCrisscross · 2h ago
> I feel Indian managers have a tendency to hire anyone else but Indians
I'd guess this varies massively depending on whether the hiring manager and the people they're hiring are H1-Bs.
throwmeaway222 · 2h ago
that is definitely part of it
mystraline · 2h ago
Yep. And caste based discrimination is legal in the USA. Its not a protected EEOC class, as much as that doesn't matter in our legal environment.
So yeah, you can discriminate against Dalits, and hire predominantly Brahmins.
jkaplowitz · 2h ago
Except in Seattle, which explicitly bans caste discrimination as of 2023, and in California, which interprets its own state anti-discrimination laws to already include caste discrimination in other broader categories (which was the reason Governor Newsom gave when he vetoed a bill in 2023 to explicitly ban caste discrimination).
Quite a lot of tech companies hire in either Seattle, California, or both.
silverquiet · 2h ago
Most people (regardless of race) prefer to hire from within their network. It makes sense that Indians' networks would consist of other Indians.
ajross · 2h ago
Yeah, "racist" seems to fail the Occam test here. But at the same time that makes it clear that the now-suddenly-unpopular opinion is also wrong. Diversity takes work, and companies need to guard against this kind of decisionmaking. "DEI" protects the native-born too!
JumpCrisscross · 2h ago
> ”racist" seems to fail the Occam test here
The word has lost meaning due to semantic overinclusivity.
By the Civil Rights era definitions, the process is racist. The people may not be. The process explicitly favours Indians. This isn’t some statistical mumbo-jumbo anti-racism construct, it’s the clear intent of the people involved and a clear effect of their actions.
What we can’t conclude from this is if the people involved think Indians are superior (versus just familiar).
zdragnar · 2h ago
DEI arose to public consciousness around the same time that "whiteness" was often used as a synonym for bigotry and privilege. So long as academic circles (and those who come from them, such as the people now in HR departments) believe that having white skin is a sin, DEI will never be D, E or I.
The three words themselves are nice and generally good things to believe in, but the packaging philosophy it is wrapped up in is poisonous.
ludicrousdispla · 2h ago
I've never met a single HR person that could be characterized as coming from, or even brushing up against, an academic circle.
ajross · 42m ago
> HR departments [...] believe that having white skin is a sin
Can we just stop? This is a meme, it's clearly never been true. It's extrapolating from a bunch of intemperate stuff said by oddball losers (yes, often in academic environments which encourage out-of-the-box thinking and speech[1]) to tar a bunch of extremely bland policies enacted by HR and hiring managers (to ensure that their masters don't get sued) with an ideological brush.
We people with "white skin" are very clearly doing just fine in the job market.
[1] Something that in other contexts we at HN think is a good thing!
deadbabe · 2h ago
Do you see them selectively picking based on the caste of the Indian?
sciencesama · 2h ago
All the h1bs constitute less than 1% of the jobs in us. They just want to divert the focus ! This is propaganda!
bitshiftfaced · 1h ago
That's not the only way you can work in the US. "In 2023 17.9% of employed workers were immigrants"
(if you email Pew Research, I've found their research team to be receptive to inquiries when they have the data but did not include it in a publication)
2OEH8eoCRo0 · 30m ago
> About 400,000 H-1B applications for high-skilled foreign workers were approved in 2024
>Should the system rely so heavily on asking out-of-work Americans to act as goalies — if or when they happen to have the time?
A zinger of a concluding line if ever there was one.
ortusdux · 2h ago
Reminds me of the shenanigans you see when a govt job is required to be posted for open bid, but the dept already has an internal hire lined up.
klipklop · 1h ago
To anybody playing attention it's very clear SV tech vastly prefers to import foreign labor rather than hire local. It has been this way for multiple decades now (and gets worse every year.) I don't see this changing any time soon. Sure they get the occasional slap on the wrist, but the wage suppression saves them way more money over time.
antisthenes · 1h ago
It's just outsourcing training/education (again, the first wave already happened circa 2009-2013).
notmyjob · 53m ago
It’s not just that. It is also that people will do unsafe and unethical things to avoid being sent (back) to India. If it were only outsourcing it wouldn’t be dominated by Indians.
franktankbank · 32m ago
Bingo.
add-sub-mul-div · 2h ago
If Apple and Meta have had to pay $38 million for engaging in these practices I don't understand why they used the subtle "chronically-online" dig against people trying to expose it:
"And this has given rise to a cottage industry of chronically-online types — in other words, typical tech workers — seeking to expose them."
kstrauser · 2h ago
What the… Yeah, I’m with you on that one. “We would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling chronically onlines seeing if we’re obeying federal law!”
pavel_lishin · 2h ago
The whole thing seems to oddly disdainful of the people being impacted:
> How many 20-something software engineers even know how to use a post office in 2025?
codyb · 2h ago
To "use" a post office?
What like... any... other... store or building where you walk in, perform an action, and leave?
supjeff · 1h ago
I feel like there was a lot of nonsense ideas for what is such a short, and supposedly journalistically rigorous article
woah · 2h ago
I'm certainly not an expert in immigration law but this whole system seems pretty stupid.
On one hand, H1B holders can be paid below market rates because it is very hard for them to switch jobs. For this reason, they create resentment from American citizens.
On the other hand, it would be extremely detrimental to the US to kill the golden goose of our tech industry by turning it into some kind of forced welfare for citizens. Another country which is able to hire the best from around the world will take our place.
And then of course, the entire program is structured in an extremely bureaucratic way, with all this nonsense about publishing job ads in secret newspapers.
It seems that these issues could be addressed very simply by tweaking Trump's proposed "gold card" system: anyone can get a work visa, by paying $100,000 per year. This is not tied to a specific employer. The high payment ensures that the only people coming over are doing so to earn a high salary in a highly skilled field. There is no tying the employee to a specific company, so it is fairer for citizens to compete against them.
pavel_lishin · 2h ago
> Another country which is able to hire the best from around the world will take our place.
But not all of the H1B folks are the best from around the world; they're simply significantly cheaper, and the reality of the H1B Visa also means that they're very unlikely to quit their jobs for greener pastures.
woah · 2h ago
Yea that's exactly the point I'm making. If they came and paid a high visa payment, then they would not be significantly cheaper.
dotnet00 · 15m ago
This would crush fields that can't afford to pay so much, but also have a very small global pool of highly skilled talent to pull from. Certain areas of academia for example.
kevin_thibedeau · 2h ago
This will incentivize foreign intelligence services to fund their own market of conveniently cash flush moles.
woah · 2h ago
Ah yes, any foreigner must be a secret agent
franktankbank · 1h ago
I'm beginning to see the tech industry as 1 part golden goose 10 parts shit to prop up an ailing stock market (aka boomer retirement funds). Theres going to be a weird deflationary/inflationary reckoning (depending on the market).
pavel_lishin · 2h ago
> How many 20-something software engineers even know how to use a post office in 2025?
Ok, come on, this is just an insulting "kids these days" throw-away line that is absolutely not necessary.
nancyminusone · 2h ago
Doubley stupid because the task is about mailing a letter, which does not require a post office.
ajross · 2h ago
That's an editorial point, not a substantial one. Obviously requiring an application be submitted by an inconvenient and antiquated method that isn't used by the demographic in question is going to create friction and reduce the number of applications.
That this is expressed in a whimsical way (personally I liked the turn of phrase, but that's an issue of taste) might personally offend you but doesn't change the substance of the article.
BobbyJo · 2h ago
It also has the effect of making the job posting seem fake, or like a scam, because who in their right mind would believe META, who has their own, in-house operated, online job application portal, would require a job application to be mailed in.
pavel_lishin · 1h ago
I'm not complaining about the substance, but the tone feels weirdly disdainful of the people impacted across the whole thing. It almost feels like the author was assigned this topic & overall goal, but hates the people she's writing about.
2OEH8eoCRo0 · 2h ago
Didn't Apple used to post job openings in small local newspapers in the Midwest?
daft_pink · 2h ago
Essentially, they want to hire a specific person, while the law requires that they post the job and prefer American citizens, so they don’t want American citizens to apply not that they prefer foreign workers in general they just have a specific candidate in mind.
I think Trump’s position of forcing companies to pay a substantial fee in exchange for a fast tracked green card is really the most sensible position instead of H1B. It should be less than $5 million, but I think if a company had to pay $300k not have any or limited protection against that person quickly finding a job in the. united states, then companies would generally prefer american workers in a way that makes economic sense, because talented workers can be acquired for a price, but not be kept for peanuts in exchange for less than an American worker, because they are stuck with the employer for 20 years if they come from a quota country.
kjkjadksj · 2h ago
If they had someone specific in mind the usual method is to have their resume next to you when you write up the job app. Make the requirements perfectly match their skills. Now you can say when you picked them that they were the best candidate all along.
prasadjoglekar · 29m ago
That's one of several tactics. But if someone did apply and was close enough, you still have to do the interview and reject song and dance. Better to deter applications in the first place.
Der_Einzige · 2h ago
While I don't support the general intention of what MAGA and this movement to get H1bs out via the tactics described in this article, it's total bullshit to try to silence them in the legal tactic that instacart is using. I really hope that it fails on freedom of expression grounds.
A lot of WASPs got very mad when Vivek wrote that tweet calling them out for being behind a lot of H1bs in quality but he's right on the mark. Sorry Peter and Paul, but you really did get B+'s when the H1b who takes your job got A+++ in everything for 4 years.
toomuchtodo · 2h ago
Regardless of H1Bs who received better grades, I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs. Citizens make the rules via governance, not corporations. You can hire someone good enough domestically vs the best globally to import. US corporations simply want the cheapest labor possible at the best possible price, which is where policy steps in. If it impairs your profits or perhaps even makes the business untenable, them the breaks.
At current US unemployment rates, no new H1B visas should be issued and existing visas should not be renewed based on criteria. If you're exceptional, prove it on an O-1 visa.
The US has been there, done that, and got the t-shirt. The result of trying to wall out competition is not going to be jobs for Americans. The result will be what happened to the American automotive industry, the American electronics industry, etc. They could not deliver competitive products at competitive prices and the various "Buy American" advertising campaigns were ignored by American consumers. Your Nintendo Switch, your Samsung SSDs and smartphones, your Hynix RAM, your Toyota cars, etc. are all proof of that. And it's much, much easier to for a competitor to create a new developer job opening overseas than construct a physical factory.
sagarm · 2h ago
The best jobs are with large corporations with offices all over the world. Workers from all over the world are competing with each other, regardless of the Kafkaesque state of American immigrant policy.
(if you're a company with no US nexus or presence, and no access to the market, your hiring practices are up to your local jurisdiction; if you want access to the US market, you can hire in the US, I find this to be very reasonable)
JumpCrisscross · 2h ago
This bill is a hunk of Swiss cheese. Great for lawyers and bankers and possibly global tech companies, depending on how it parses out in court.
toomuchtodo · 2h ago
I'm willing to walk before running. Have to start somewhere.
JumpCrisscross · 1h ago
> willing to walk before running. Have to start somewhere
It doesn’t walk anywhere. It’s another handout to finance and law. The B2B carve-out and lack of border adjustments makes this a regressive tax on consumers and manufacturers to fund tech, law and finance. (The only jobs this would materially cover are those in call centres for consumers. Which in practice, means voice LLMs.)
Like, I made money from tariffs. I will do well from the OBBA. I will do well from this bill. But American consumers and workers will keep getting screwed, and I’m not sure how this playbook keeps working.
narrator · 2h ago
The Instacart thing is just bluster. If they tried to file any lawsuit against these guys it's be an easy SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) defense, which is a way to quickly throw out lawsuits in most states where corporations or others are trying to quell free speech.
derf_ · 1h ago
I assume they would try to venue-shop for somewhere Anti-SLAPP protections are much weaker. Maryland and Virginia look particularly bad, for example (but IANAL).
NoMoreNicksLeft · 2h ago
>I really hope that it fails on freedom of expression grounds.
I really hope Congress acts to make Instacart's tactics felonious with harsh penalties that ruin the company so thoroughly that it terrifies the stock market to stop investing in companies with similar HR policies. Furthermore, if the HR employees who are responsible or even in the loop could be prosecuted and ruined, this would be good too.
The government has the power to allow corporations to incorporate and to continue to operate, but if these same corporations are harmful to our country's citizens then government also has both the power and responsibility to make it impossible for these corporations to continue to exist. There is no fundamental human right involved. Corporations exist at the sufferance of people, not the other way around.
happytoexplain · 2h ago
This misses the point bigly. We can go ahead and use low-friction global best-candidate techniques as soon as we are all incorporeal ghosts in the digital world who don't physically live in any one country. Until then, we must protect our citizens (where "we" means everybody, not just the US).
BobbyJo · 2h ago
Yeah, I think people mistake country and geographic area. The US is the 300+ million people that build and apply systems and institutions within an area, not the area itself. Coming to the conclusion that people here are interchangeable with people anywhere else and should constantly have to earn their place is fundamentally divorced from reality.
NoMoreNicksLeft · 2h ago
This is hilarious.
mikert89 · 2h ago
There's another thing happening which people haven't really heard much about, which is basically ChatGPT Pro is really good at making legal arguments. And so people that previously would never have filed something like a discrimination lawsuit can now use ChatGPT to understand how to respond to managers' emails and proactively send emails that point out discrimination in non-threatening manner, and so in ways that create legal entrapment. I think people are drastically underestimating what's going to happen over the next 10 years and how bad the discrimination is in a lot of workplaces.
JumpCrisscross · 2h ago
> ChatGPT Pro is really good at making legal arguments
It’s good at initiating them. I’ve started to see folks using LLM output directly in legal complaints and it’s frankly a godsend to the other side since blatantly making shit up is usually enough to swing a regulator, judge or arbitrator to dismiss with prejudice.
mikert89 · 1h ago
Posted my response below, you have no idea how impactful this is going to be
OutOfHere · 2h ago
That's all well and good, but anyone who does this will likely just be terminated asap without cause, possibly as a part of a multi-person layoff that makes it appear innocuous.
toomuchtodo · 2h ago
First call should be to an employment attorney and the EEOC, no matter what, before you sign anything.
That’s not quite right. To win a discrimination case, you typically need to document a pattern of behavior over time—often a year. Most people can’t afford a lawyer to manage that. But if you’re a regular employee, you can use ChatGPT to draft calm, non-threatening Slack messages that note discriminatory incidents and keep doing that consistently. With diligent, organized evidence, you absolutely can build a case; the hard part is proving it, and ChatGPT is great at helping you gather and frame the proof.
JumpCrisscross · 2h ago
> To win a discrimination case, you typically need to document a pattern of behavior over time—often a year
Where did you hear this?
> use ChatGPT to draft calm, non-threatening Slack messages that note discriminatory incidents and keep doing that consistently
This is terrible advice. It not only makes those messages inadmissible, it casts reasonable doubt on everything else you say.
Using an LLM to take the emotion out of your breadcrumbs is fine. Having it draft generic stuff, or worse, potentially hallucinate, may actually flip liability onto you, particularly if you weren't authorised to disclose the contents of those messages to an outside LLM.
mikert89 · 1h ago
With respect, it seems you haven’t kept up with how people actually use ChatGPT. In discrimination cases—especially disparate treatment—the key is comparing your performance, opportunities, and outcomes against peers: projects assigned, promotions, credit for work, meeting invites, inclusion, and so on. For engineers, that often means concrete signals like PR assignments, review comments, approval times, who gets merges fast, and who’s blocked.
Most employees don’t know what data matters or how to collect it. ChatGPT Pro (GPT-5 Pro) can walk someone through exactly what to track and how to frame it: drafting precise, non-threatening documentation, escalating via well-written emails, and organizing evidence. I first saw this when a seed-stage startup I know lost a wage claim after an employee used ChatGPT to craft highly effective legal emails.
This is the shift: people won’t hire a lawyer to explore “maybe” claims on a $100K tech job—but they will ask an AI to outline relevant doctrines, show how their facts map to prior cases, and suggest the right records to pull. On its own, ChatGPT isn’t a lawyer. In the hands of a thoughtful user, though, it’s close to lawyer-level support for spotting issues, building a record, and pushing for a fair outcome. The legal system will feel that impact.
JumpCrisscross · 1h ago
> they will ask an AI to outline relevant doctrines, show how their facts map to prior cases, and suggest the right records to pull
This is correct usage. Letting it draft notes and letters is not. (Procedural emails, why not.) Essentially, ChatGPT Pro lets one do e-discovery and preliminary drafting to a degree that’s good enough for anything less than a few million dollars.
I’ve worked with startups in San Francisco, where lawyers readily take cases on contingency because they’re so easy to win. The only times I’ve urged companies fight back have been recently, because the emails and notes the employee sent were clearly LLM generated and materially false in one instance. That let, in the one case that they insisted on pursuing, the entire corpus of claims be put under doubt and dismissed. Again, in San Francisco, a notoriously employee-friendly jurisdiction.
I’ve invested in legal AI efforts. I’d be thrilled if their current crop of AIs were my adversary in any case. (I’d also take the bet on ignoring an LLM-drafted complaint more than a written one, lawyer or not.)
mikert89 · 1h ago
No I think the big unlock is a bunch of people that would never file lawsuits can at least approach it. You obviously can’t copy paste its email output, but you can definitely verify what are legal terms, and how to position certain phrases.
JumpCrisscross · 5m ago
> the big unlock is a bunch of people that would never file lawsuits can at least approach it
Totally agree again. LLMs are great at collating and helping you decide if you have a case and, if so, convincing either a lawyer to take it or your adversary to settle.
Where they backfire is when people use them to send chats or demand letters. You suggested this, and this is the part where I’m pointing out that I am personally familiar with multiple cases where this took a case the person could have won, on contingency, and turned it into one where they couldn’t irrespective of which lawyers they retained.
OutOfHere · 1h ago
The legal system is extremely biased in favor of those who can afford an attorney. Moreover, the more expensive the attorney, the more biased it is in their favor.
It is in effect not a legal system, but a system to keep lawyers and judges in business with intentionally vaguely worded laws and variable interpretations.
mikert89 · 34m ago
Exactly. And it’s comical that the person I was debating with doesn’t understand this. Proclaimed investor in legal tech misses the biggest use case of ai in legal - providing access to people that can’t afford it or otherwise wouldn’t know to work with a lawyer
joshcsimmons · 1h ago
So grateful to see this being picked up by mainstream news outlets. Anecdotally I know quite a few engineers with experience ranging from small startup to long FAANG tenures that cannot even get an interview. It makes no sense to source outside of the US when qualified American workers cannot get jobs. At some point that became a radical stance and I'm sure I'll be flamed for it here.
franktankbank · 1h ago
I have no problem with giving the job to someone overseas but they can do that on their home turf.
robotnikman · 49m ago
>It makes no sense to source outside of the US when qualified American workers cannot get jobs.
This. It's getting to a boiling point now with so many people out of work who are more than qualified for these jobs being shunned from them, and now they are fighting back. I'm sure there are many here who work in tech that can relate who have gone through hundreds, possibly thousands, of applications and not hearing anything back.
but there is a MASSIVE number of execs -> hiring managers that are Indian and focus primarily on hiring only other Indians. It's extremely racist.
Unfortunately most Fortune 500 companies are in the hands of B players now, and it goes all the way up, with the government (multiple governments, really) being in the hands of B/C players. The A players are happily retired and pulling strings in the background with their 501(c)4s.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/09/us/california-caste-discrimin...
[2] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/23...
From that article:
In a statement explaining his veto decision, Newsom said the measure was “unnecessary” because discrimination based on caste is already prohibited in the state.
(Just adding context that I would have missed if not for another commenter pointing it out further down)
Those articles based on a lawsuit were very heavily promoted on HN, however the complaint was by a single disgruntled employee who just happened to invoke the caste card and the suit was thrown out by the court.
The California DoJ failed to do basic due diligence before filing the lawsuit to the extent that the defendants filed a civil suit saying they were being discriminated against because of their race by the CA DoJ. Of course, these followups never got any traction on HN, because they didn't fit the narrative.
And now there are so many people, especially on HN and other developer forums that are utterly convinced caste based discrimination is very prevalent.
I'd guess this varies massively depending on whether the hiring manager and the people they're hiring are H1-Bs.
So yeah, you can discriminate against Dalits, and hire predominantly Brahmins.
Quite a lot of tech companies hire in either Seattle, California, or both.
The word has lost meaning due to semantic overinclusivity.
By the Civil Rights era definitions, the process is racist. The people may not be. The process explicitly favours Indians. This isn’t some statistical mumbo-jumbo anti-racism construct, it’s the clear intent of the people involved and a clear effect of their actions.
What we can’t conclude from this is if the people involved think Indians are superior (versus just familiar).
The three words themselves are nice and generally good things to believe in, but the packaging philosophy it is wrapped up in is poisonous.
Can we just stop? This is a meme, it's clearly never been true. It's extrapolating from a bunch of intemperate stuff said by oddball losers (yes, often in academic environments which encourage out-of-the-box thinking and speech[1]) to tar a bunch of extremely bland policies enacted by HR and hiring managers (to ensure that their masters don't get sued) with an ideological brush.
We people with "white skin" are very clearly doing just fine in the job market.
[1] Something that in other contexts we at HN think is a good thing!
https://usafacts.org/answers/what-percent-of-jobs-in-the-us-...
That said, it almost certainly has an outsized impact on the tech sector, which only accounts for about 7% of the FTE positions nationally.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/04/what-we-k...
https://www.epi.org/blog/tech-and-outsourcing-companies-cont...
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/U...
https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...
(if you email Pew Research, I've found their research team to be receptive to inquiries when they have the data but did not include it in a publication)
That's more than I thought!
A zinger of a concluding line if ever there was one.
"And this has given rise to a cottage industry of chronically-online types — in other words, typical tech workers — seeking to expose them."
> How many 20-something software engineers even know how to use a post office in 2025?
What like... any... other... store or building where you walk in, perform an action, and leave?
On one hand, H1B holders can be paid below market rates because it is very hard for them to switch jobs. For this reason, they create resentment from American citizens.
On the other hand, it would be extremely detrimental to the US to kill the golden goose of our tech industry by turning it into some kind of forced welfare for citizens. Another country which is able to hire the best from around the world will take our place.
And then of course, the entire program is structured in an extremely bureaucratic way, with all this nonsense about publishing job ads in secret newspapers.
It seems that these issues could be addressed very simply by tweaking Trump's proposed "gold card" system: anyone can get a work visa, by paying $100,000 per year. This is not tied to a specific employer. The high payment ensures that the only people coming over are doing so to earn a high salary in a highly skilled field. There is no tying the employee to a specific company, so it is fairer for citizens to compete against them.
But not all of the H1B folks are the best from around the world; they're simply significantly cheaper, and the reality of the H1B Visa also means that they're very unlikely to quit their jobs for greener pastures.
Ok, come on, this is just an insulting "kids these days" throw-away line that is absolutely not necessary.
That this is expressed in a whimsical way (personally I liked the turn of phrase, but that's an issue of taste) might personally offend you but doesn't change the substance of the article.
I think Trump’s position of forcing companies to pay a substantial fee in exchange for a fast tracked green card is really the most sensible position instead of H1B. It should be less than $5 million, but I think if a company had to pay $300k not have any or limited protection against that person quickly finding a job in the. united states, then companies would generally prefer american workers in a way that makes economic sense, because talented workers can be acquired for a price, but not be kept for peanuts in exchange for less than an American worker, because they are stuck with the employer for 20 years if they come from a quota country.
A lot of WASPs got very mad when Vivek wrote that tweet calling them out for being behind a lot of H1bs in quality but he's right on the mark. Sorry Peter and Paul, but you really did get B+'s when the H1b who takes your job got A+++ in everything for 4 years.
At current US unemployment rates, no new H1B visas should be issued and existing visas should not be renewed based on criteria. If you're exceptional, prove it on an O-1 visa.
H-1B Middlemen Bring Cheap Labor to Citi, Capital One - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-h1b-visa-middlemen-c... | https://archive.today/7JX9A - June 27th, 2025
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454509 (citations)
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
HN Search: h1b - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://h1bdata.info/
https://www.h1bsalaries.fyi/
https://www.moreno.senate.gov/press-releases/new-moreno-bill...
https://www.moreno.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/The...
(if you're a company with no US nexus or presence, and no access to the market, your hiring practices are up to your local jurisdiction; if you want access to the US market, you can hire in the US, I find this to be very reasonable)
It doesn’t walk anywhere. It’s another handout to finance and law. The B2B carve-out and lack of border adjustments makes this a regressive tax on consumers and manufacturers to fund tech, law and finance. (The only jobs this would materially cover are those in call centres for consumers. Which in practice, means voice LLMs.)
Like, I made money from tariffs. I will do well from the OBBA. I will do well from this bill. But American consumers and workers will keep getting screwed, and I’m not sure how this playbook keeps working.
I really hope Congress acts to make Instacart's tactics felonious with harsh penalties that ruin the company so thoroughly that it terrifies the stock market to stop investing in companies with similar HR policies. Furthermore, if the HR employees who are responsible or even in the loop could be prosecuted and ruined, this would be good too.
The government has the power to allow corporations to incorporate and to continue to operate, but if these same corporations are harmful to our country's citizens then government also has both the power and responsibility to make it impossible for these corporations to continue to exist. There is no fundamental human right involved. Corporations exist at the sufferance of people, not the other way around.
It’s good at initiating them. I’ve started to see folks using LLM output directly in legal complaints and it’s frankly a godsend to the other side since blatantly making shit up is usually enough to swing a regulator, judge or arbitrator to dismiss with prejudice.
https://www.eeoc.gov/how-file-charge-employment-discriminati...
Where did you hear this?
> use ChatGPT to draft calm, non-threatening Slack messages that note discriminatory incidents and keep doing that consistently
This is terrible advice. It not only makes those messages inadmissible, it casts reasonable doubt on everything else you say.
Using an LLM to take the emotion out of your breadcrumbs is fine. Having it draft generic stuff, or worse, potentially hallucinate, may actually flip liability onto you, particularly if you weren't authorised to disclose the contents of those messages to an outside LLM.
Most employees don’t know what data matters or how to collect it. ChatGPT Pro (GPT-5 Pro) can walk someone through exactly what to track and how to frame it: drafting precise, non-threatening documentation, escalating via well-written emails, and organizing evidence. I first saw this when a seed-stage startup I know lost a wage claim after an employee used ChatGPT to craft highly effective legal emails.
This is the shift: people won’t hire a lawyer to explore “maybe” claims on a $100K tech job—but they will ask an AI to outline relevant doctrines, show how their facts map to prior cases, and suggest the right records to pull. On its own, ChatGPT isn’t a lawyer. In the hands of a thoughtful user, though, it’s close to lawyer-level support for spotting issues, building a record, and pushing for a fair outcome. The legal system will feel that impact.
This is correct usage. Letting it draft notes and letters is not. (Procedural emails, why not.) Essentially, ChatGPT Pro lets one do e-discovery and preliminary drafting to a degree that’s good enough for anything less than a few million dollars.
I’ve worked with startups in San Francisco, where lawyers readily take cases on contingency because they’re so easy to win. The only times I’ve urged companies fight back have been recently, because the emails and notes the employee sent were clearly LLM generated and materially false in one instance. That let, in the one case that they insisted on pursuing, the entire corpus of claims be put under doubt and dismissed. Again, in San Francisco, a notoriously employee-friendly jurisdiction.
I’ve invested in legal AI efforts. I’d be thrilled if their current crop of AIs were my adversary in any case. (I’d also take the bet on ignoring an LLM-drafted complaint more than a written one, lawyer or not.)
Totally agree again. LLMs are great at collating and helping you decide if you have a case and, if so, convincing either a lawyer to take it or your adversary to settle.
Where they backfire is when people use them to send chats or demand letters. You suggested this, and this is the part where I’m pointing out that I am personally familiar with multiple cases where this took a case the person could have won, on contingency, and turned it into one where they couldn’t irrespective of which lawyers they retained.
It is in effect not a legal system, but a system to keep lawyers and judges in business with intentionally vaguely worded laws and variable interpretations.
This. It's getting to a boiling point now with so many people out of work who are more than qualified for these jobs being shunned from them, and now they are fighting back. I'm sure there are many here who work in tech that can relate who have gone through hundreds, possibly thousands, of applications and not hearing anything back.