I’m charactering it that way, although it’s less blatant. Ask any amazon director and they’ll go in and on about hiring being next to impossible in the US. Entire legions of Amazon are either entirely in India or H1B or OPT Indian nationals. It’s no secret their visa situation keeps their hands tied.
> Ask any amazon director and they’ll go in and on about hiring being next to impossible in the US
Everyone I've ever heard talk about working at Amazon has complained about it, one wonders if their reputation as an awful place to work has something to do with why hiring is hard
I don't believe any of that "hiring is impossible in the US" BS. What these companies are really saying is they don't want to reduce the workload that results in needing so many extra hires. And of course, once you introduce foreign workers who now make a majority of the workforce, you also break down the ability for workers to collectively bargain.
Its not about the visa power imbalance, its that a person who graduates a bootcamp today will need about 4 - 5 years of highly focused coding to become as productive as the Indian L4/L5 engineer that they would be compared to in this real comparison. It's easy to hire inexperienced devs in the US, but inexperienced devs are not productive.
> who graduates a bootcamp today will need about 4 - 5 years of highly focused coding to become as productive as the Indian L4/L5 engineer that they would be compared to in this real comparison
First of all, I think it’s disingenuous to compare a boot camp hire with any L5 engineer, regardless of what country they’re from. A boot camp hire should be compared to a new hire/L4. Doing an L5 comparison is moving the goal post, which I assume wasn’t intended on your part.
A boot camp engineer absolutely can be as productive as any other L4 hire, Indian or not Indian. I think the L4 Indian hires in particular come better prepped for the leet style coding interviews. But in terms of quickly ramping up and becoming productive engineers, there’s absolutely nothing unique about a hire from India in many, if not majority of cases.
There are other stronger incentives for indexing on non resident hires. I could pay you market rate at $200K/year + equity that vests over four years. Or, I can bring a person from India and pay them $140K a year, reduced equity grant, and for the most part, I know that person isn’t going to quit. Especially with certain cultures that are more risk averse, they’re going to think twice, even if another employer is willing to offer sponsorship.
[Levels are confusing, I was using the non amazon leveling where l3 is entry, l4 intermediate, l5 is senior, for this post I'll use amazon leveling, l4 = entry, l5 = intermediate].
> First of all, I think it’s disingenuous to compare a boot camp hire with any L5 engineer, regardless of what country they’re from. A boot camp hire should be compared to a new hire/L4. Doing an L5 comparison is moving the goal post, which I assume wasn’t intended on your part.
Lets look at this from the perspective of the Director/VP, you're looking at filling headcount in your org, 25 seats. Its May, and you're behind the targets that were given to you in January. You have easy to source from talent pools (intermediate level or fresh masters degree graduate L5 H1Bs from India) and bootcamp graduates (3 months of coding experience). Your budget can pay up to 200k/person, which is much higher than the going rate for either of these profiles, so comp isn't a problem. Your boss (VP/SVP) is largely evaluating you on your ability to staff your org and complete projects. Do you fill these 25 seats using L5 Indian immigrants, or fresh bootcamp grads?
At Amazon, a director would either bring the Indian immigrants. Hell - he will bring them from his own city in India.
But if you’re asking me what I would do - I’d probably look for anyone who is a competent hire, without favoring H1Bs, and try to evaluate them a bit more than a leetcode style interview.
As I was saying, Amazon has entire organizations that are H1Bs. These are stable businesses that I don’t believe are really growth focused in 2022z
If we want to focus on costs, I think there are better options to deprecate and sunset entire services. There’s also significant opportunity at Amazon to trim the fat. Not necessarily firing people but moving off places that aren’t as valuable and moving them onto initiatives with a meaningful ROI.
Could you kindly elaborate on the latter? Are you suggesting Amazon could outsource more of their SDE jobs to India, a huge fear of mine as an engineer in the west
Talent is global now, but culture and time zones still matter. For the top 15% of companies and talent offshoring is less about “pay people less” and it’s more about “hire a team of 80 people in a year”. It’s extremely difficult to hire a team of 80 US based engineers in 12 months, even with top of market pay, even with fancy stock and remote work. It’s much easier to do this in Latam for example because there is more slack in the labor market.
Is it the slack? Or is it the fact that US-based companies have much more to offer this pool than they can offer the comparable group in the US. In particular, much higher pay than locally available and the prestige of working for a US firm.
This is a very accurate hypothesis. I live and work in LatAm and know several CTOs of startups over here. The last 2 years have been ruthless for Engineering leaders around here: lots of turnover of Devs that are being hired by US companies throwing loads of money at them. While the local tech companies cannot afford to get engineers as they are unable to compete on salary.
It's great for ICs but terrible for leaders, particularly of small/starting startups .
It's already happening. Amazon has it's biggest office in Hyderabad. They literally hire tens of thousands of Indian devs for 30-40k dollars per year. The talent pool in India is much bigger than US. A lot of SDE jobs are definitely moving in India. Indians are good at tech due to their STEM focussed education, work harder(due to economic instability), complain less and come cheaper. A perfect opportunity for corporate America to exploit. All American companies from Adobe to Goldman to Intuit have offices in India.
FAANG companies understand full well that that at their scale they cannot go into e.g. the hardware market like ordinary consumers, and demand something that perfectly meets their requirements at minimum cost in the quantities they require off the BestBuy shelf. They're going to have to do some custom R&D, partner with suppliers, grow products either internally or for which they are the first / primary customer, acquire relevant startups, make long term purchase contracts, etc.
I don't see why the same wouldn't be true of the labor market.
I get what you're saying but if you're comparing fresh grads I think that comparison is far too unfavorable. If you mean someone who already has years of experience, sure, but that's not just because of the boot camp.
The huge majority of H1Bs are given to L4+ (aka non entry level) engineers. These directors/VPs have headcount to fill and would prefer a productive L4 to a "needs a lot of training" L3 every day of the week. IMO the real issue here is that there is no rational incentive for any company to take on an L3 engineer now, regardless of H1B or bootcamp status. An L3 is going to join your company, receive 18 months of training where they are genuinely not worth what you are paying them AND they are a drag on your org, then leave in months 20-28 of their employment, usually shortly after a promotion to L4. So you put in 18 months and if you're lucky you get back 2 to 10 months of productivity.
The problem is that you ofent need to job jump to get increases when you get experience. I think companies shot themself in their foot by punnishing "loyalty" in general.
What I have never understood is why don't FANG companies hires local American Programmers/Engineers for trial periods.
Hire them for a few weeks, and fire if necessary. It doesn't take more than a few days to weed out the fakers, and identify the diamond.
I say local because it's cruel to hire a guy from across the country just to be let go.
We all know most degrees, and designations are dubious at best.
Why not try out a bunch of local Americans whom live near the worksite, and keep the best person? (I guess some companies do that with interns, but what I'm proposing is a bit different. The prospective hires will be tested throughly at what they claim they know.
It seems like most younger job applicants would jump at the chance to work for a good company?
I'm not saying don't test them throughly before a temporary hire. Make the test difficult. Testing doesn't cost much with Zoom, and this welcoming technology.
In every job I had the best employee was mainly self-taught, and didn't have a great resume.
It seemed like they worked harder because they didn't have all the spinish behind their name, especially in this relatively new industry.
What I think many here don't understand is from a big tech POV (certainly my experience) Jr swe hires (new grad, L3 at G) barely break even for you, not that much better then interns.
You really only want to hire people who will make it to Sr (L5) in a few years. That is the level where they are fully self sufficient and don't need constant support from someone more Sr.
The perception (that I share) is that most (not all!) boot camp grads that interview as well as new CS grads still have less long term potential to make it to L5. They have done great learning basic programming on their own. Few will go much past that (compared to CS grads).
>What I have never understood is why don't FANG companies hires local American Programmers/Engineers for trial periods.
While many companies, formally or otherwise, have some sort of probationary period, the general understanding is--unless you've really misrepresented your skills and the company probably screwed up the hiring process--you're not going to be let go after a few weeks. (Absent major organizational/financial changes.)
Even for a local job, I would be very unlikely to quit an existing job--or even put interviewing on hold--to take a job with an explicit trial period.
(Now, sure, if I had just graduated from a boot camp or other degree program and didn't have immediate alternatives, maybe.)
I'm not sure if "visa situation keeps their hands tied" is correct. Its certainly more paperwork sure, but given the current job market its quite easy to switch jobs on H1B or even OPT.
