HN user
You're 100% right - and it's just semantics.
It's just that I feel the R-word carries so much more weight on how we're judging something. When I hear people talk down on other people like that I have the same physical reaction of unease in my stomach that I have with the classic "brown people are bad" American racism that I was taught to fight.
I know a h1b guy whose company got bought out and they fired all the H1B's, the guy sent out like 300 resumes before finally getting 1 interview.
Yeah that's by design. Companies like the ones I've worked/contracted for want the H1B visa holders is because it's incredibly risky/etc. for them to find work if they're laid off, fired, need to find another position, etc. I think the max time they even get to search is 6 months (I've also heard 3!) - would need to fact check this.
Simply put - the organic parts of the US job market literally just don't work for H1Bs. It's wrong, and I hate how they pay these guys approx. 60% (less if outsourced!) of what I make only to require more hours from them.
If you're a citizen/greenie then the US job market magically works for you hah. It's as simple as that.
First the new group manager was not shaking hands with him, not communicating with him properly etc.
Yeah - and for an American this is just the weirdest thing ever. I struggle with this a lot and have been told to not equate it with racism - but what the hell is it otherwise?
"I can personally vouch that your average Indian IT engineer is very ethnocentric, clannish, and completely unamerican in every sense of the word"
Honestly I can attest to this from big tech. It's anecdotal but my experience is that Indian engineers will self-organize into their own teams, start bringing LOTS of people on both remote and in-sourced, and effectively push anyone out who's not Indian by implementing super authoritarian leadership structures where everyone's vague on their standing in the company.
Those leadership structures often push non-H1B visa holders out because the quality of work plummets, and they don't want to put up with VERY terse management (ie: the type that will call you at 10:30pm screaming at you because your overseas Indian counterpart can't read the English documentation you wrote and now it's your problem).
I've now seen this at one old-school Midwest aeronautical corp, one startup trying to save costs, and one "big-tech" bay area company most people would recognize. This article very much speaks to me on something I have seen in my life.
Just left big tech after seeing an entire branch of the company go this direction. Zero management skills, either you didn't hear from them for weeks at a time or they'd be on you aggressively... nothing in-between. Also, zero training when being on-boarded.
The problem was everyone on an H1B visa would work any hours, pick their phone up 24/7 etc. Effectively they were always on-call and for a lot of the local/US engineering talent we disagreed with the "always-on" culture they brought. They also contributed to that "always-on" culture by never finishing work, pushing deliverables out the door with zero security review, no documentation etc. It's also worth mentioning these budget teams of H1B "engineers" come in and create their own cyclical work by constantly fixing problems they caused. This is what happens when you treat engineering and management as a "cost center" :(
Mostly though, it was insane to hear how blatant they were with bigoted comments, like "we don't hire _those_ kind of Indians", and "if it wasn't for foreign talent we'd have none at all." I felt the need to speak up on this one but when you're a middle-aged white male you're not afforded the right to speak up on any of this without being IMMEDIATELY labeled a racist (hence the throwaway!).