Summary
Tesla replaced many laid-off U.S. workers with foreign H-1B visa holders after a 2024 wave of layoffs affecting 15,000 employees.
These visas, tied to employer sponsorship, often lower compensation and give employers significant leverage over workers.
Critics argue this displaces U.S. employees, as senior engineers were replaced by lower-paid junior engineers.
CEO Elon Musk, while advocating for expanding H-1B visa caps, faces backlash, especially from conservatives, for “job-stealing” concerns.
Musk contends there’s a U.S. skill shortage, but critics highlight potential exploitation tied to Tesla’s demanding work culture and visa dependence.
Yeah, I’ve seen incredibly wide ranges of talent both in seeking out dirt-cheap labor in places like India or Pakistan via offshoring engagements - most of that range being on the very, very low-quality range. I was not convinced it was even the same people working on it from week to week. For one of the projects, the “design”, such as it was, was so bad that it was something that required a rewrite by skilled citizens. So they saved no money at all on that one.
A few - very few - of the people I’ve worked with that were H-1B were good enough, and like one or two that were pretty good. Nothing that needed to be sourced outside of the pool of citizens, though. Most of them struck me as people kind of still halfway through an undergrad program or maybe a boot camp in skill level and general knowledge of IT.
I’d welcome killing H-1B completely and taxing services for offshoring to a high enough extent to discourage it. People were told to get educated, get a degree, go to boot camp, and have a job with semblance of dignity. And the broligarchs and government work hand-in-glove to fuck over Americans that did the right thing while fucking over foreigners? To hell with that.
On the other hand, I think we should be pushing for more enterprising and smart people to come here, permanently. It’s good for those that want to come here, and it’s good for America, too, since they are likely to make things better here, both by contributing to the taxes. I think foreigners tend to start more businesses than natives, too. I think it’s exceedingly stupid and short-sighted to bring people here, exploit them, but also give them lots of on the job experience, then send them home afterwards? How is that the American dream?
I still think the brain drain donvict 1.0 started by scaring off foreign students is going to hurt us long term. We might not have felt the effects just yet, and now he’s going to have another chance to make it even worse. But abusing H-1Bs and screwing citizens is not going to address the brain drain problem.
Wouldn’t you fix this with some basic safeguards for those in h1-b programs though? Like require six months of seperation or something. Ive worked 18 years in the industry and met a lot of great engineers on that program but I always found it to be very exploitative. I’ve also meet a lot of US born engineers that are complete idiots just chasing the money so I don’t find it to be a where you were born kind of thing.
Oh, of course. There are very stupid people in every nation, and very bright people in every nation. It’s not like Americans (or Indians) have some kind of innate talent related to software that no other people have, though I’ve often heard people opine for both positions, and man, is that stupid.
Also, I think I mentioned on this thread that I’ve worked with some people that just had no affinity for the field, many of them were definitely citizens. But maybe it was another thread.
As for the safeguards - I am unsure. I think a lot of things would have to be put in place to protect against exploitation of both citizens and foreign labor. I think the best option would be just to scrap the program entirely and instead make sure expedited immigration is easier. If companies want to help someone through that process, fine, but the individual is under no obligations to that company in the end state - they have permanent citizenship if they wish. No more driving down wages and no more throwing away workers at the end of 3 or 6 years like they are used tissues…
Yea that’s fair. Just decouple the two things I suppose. But knowing us we’d just get rid of it and not fix actual legal immigration.