When I was a new grad, I interviewed at Qualcomm for an embedded software job. I studied hardware, and was very up-front with the hiring manager in the phone screen, and he responded “not to worry about it”. I was flown out to do an on-site interview, and the first thing that struck me, sitting in the lobby for 20 minutes while my first interviewer arrived, was that 100% of the employees who walked through the front door were Indian. The interviewers were all Indian (except HR, who was white) and several of them mentioned they were H1B’s. Anyway, I apparently failed the interview, mostly theoretical CS, so horribly that they cut the day short and dismissed me after lunch.
I wonder sometimes if the hiring manager was incompetent or was just using me as justification that no Americans could do the job
H1B engineers are the coal that powers Qualcomm's furnace, and they're treated like coal as well.
They're underpaid for their positions, tremendously overworked, and when they don't win the H1B lottery for their renewal, they're simply swapped out with people who did. Tying one's ability to legally reside in a country to their employment is cruel at best, and damaging to the broader economy at worst. This doesn't benefit ANY workers - if these workers had some basic rights, or an actual decent pathway to legal residency (not tied to their employer), they'd be better able to demand market wages, and wouldn't depress the wages of their American peers.
The only people benefiting from this nonsensical immigration scheme are the shareholders of the companies who exploit it.
Qualcomm has more Indians than any other company in America. It is also one of the greatest H1B abusers with roughly 20% of workforce being H-1B. I know I worked there and I counted the people on the H-1B mailing list.
I've been told by a handful of colleagues in tech that lot of them come to the US on a student visa via a US Master's program and that gives them time to settle in and build their network and intern at US companies and transition to an H1B position rather than applying with just their bachelor's degree abroad. That's why you'll see so many Indian folks with Masters and they are the most well adjusted, intelligent, and respected peers in my experience. This is in stark opposition to the ones that come through companies like Tata and Infosys and struggle to assimilate and keep to themselves (in my experience at various companies)
Anyone else care to share their understanding on the Indian H1B US Master's degree route to coming to the US, am I missing something here?
If employment was a representative percentage of the US, then you’d expect 1.3% of the employees to be Indian. He’s identifying that Indians are over represented by almost 76x. Let’s say that the company is made up of 100 engineers. In order to get 100 Indian engineers randomly, the odds are much worse than 3720 to 1. It implies immense discrimination by the employers which is systemic.
Ok, let’s say qualified candidates are 50% Indian. If 100 of the employees are Indian, what is the probability of that being a random coincidence? (.5)^100?
I see this throughout industry. Even if the qualified candidates are 75% Indian, and a team of 10 is 100% Indian, what’s the probability that’s a coincidence?
I don't think that's an equivalent substitution. Indian Americans are by a huge margin the richest demographic group in the country, and black Americans are by a significant margin the poorest.
Dinged? The implication is that they brought him in for an interview even though he was unqualified so that they could say they tried, not that he didn't get the job because he wasn't Indian.
You don't have to bring anyone in if they're unqualified, that is not required by any law I'm aware of. This whole thing smells fishy, both the company and/or this incident.
To hire an H1B worker, you're required to prove that you've tried (and failed) to find a domestic worker to do the job.
I have a friends who work for Qualcomm, and it's widely acknowledged both inside and outside the company that they rely on a steady stream of underpaid H1B engineers.
I wonder sometimes if the hiring manager was incompetent or was just using me as justification that no Americans could do the job