Summary
Elon Musk faced backlash from his followers on X after advocating for importing “super talented engineers” to address a shortage in the U.S. tech industry.
Musk likened hiring top foreign talent to building a championship sports team and argues that there is a shortage of talented and motivated American engineers.
Critics argued there’s sufficient U.S. talent being overlooked or underpaid, with some pointing to widespread tech layoffs.
Musk dismissed claims of low wages or training gaps, maintaining a need for exceptional engineering talent to advance innovation.
Musk doesn’t want a championship sports team, he wants a cheap, desperate, obedient source of labour.
Ah yes, the American dream.
“That’s why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it! -George Carlin
The American Dream has long since been corrupted by the wealthy into a pipe dream for the masses that funnels more money to the rich.
All the way since the first company arrived here—the Virginia Company, that is. A handful of OG tech bros who found themselves a land of unrestricted resources and no boss around. They just needed some customers. And thus began immigration.
Yeah, he just wants more pliant and subservient H1B visa holders that he can pay less than he’d have to offer to an American, who will be deported after 2 months if they don’t work hard enough to satisfy him.
Oh. Right.
By ‘deported’, I guess we’re now talking about ‘rounded up into mass concentration camps.’
I had a friend back a few years ago who was an H1B and it’s fucking exploitive. They made him work off his visa. And since his visa is tied to his job he couldn’t leave it. The place was toxic af.
The company was very much abusing H1B visas but unless someone at the company spoke up, it’s just business.
What I’ve seen at such places is that they will often put some Indian into a management position and they will squeeze blood from a stone like you wouldn’t believe, flogging H1Bs (all Indian in many cases), and hiring no citizens if they can help it, other than just a token or two.
But the tokens will quickly learn their job is under constant threat if they get any notions of being uppity - the Indian H1Bs being there as a lesson that doesn’t have to really be explained…
And yeah, it’s toxic as anything.
Even worse when the company exploits the caste system. Since most Indian migrants still believe in that shit.
I used to contract at MSFT back during the 360 3RR era, me and my boss were reworking the support phone tree process flow, because it was wholly inadequate and had many infinite loops that a caller and support agent would end up in…
But yeah, during that, I routinely saw Indian H1B contractors being viciously abused by their higher ups in the caste system who were full time employees.
I tried to call out some of this, and HR’s line was literally that it was not politically correct of me to criticize this, because well thats just normal in their culture.
Its fucking disgusting.
MSFT has an entire company culture of its own caste system of various kind of contractors who are basically all lied to by recruiters telling them if they work really hard they’ll become full time employees with much better pay and benefits… in reality, that almost never happens, because project managers are all full time, and will routinely sabotage their own projects if the alternative is to actually keep a team on long enough that they’d become full time.
As a recent example of what I mean by this:
Halo Infinite.
MSFT hired a whole team of temp contractors to overhaul the engine that Halo ran on, to massively upgrade it.
By the time significant Halo Infinite production began, basically all of these people who rewrote the engine now were on to some new contract, some other company.
So… nobody in the actual main game dev team can figure out how the overhauled engine (now called SlipSpace) works, they can’t ask any of its actual devs for help, they spend a few years trying to develop the game on it, game is buggy as fuck and difficult to work on… and eventually give up and start redoing everything on UE5.
This all happened because MSFT higher ups wanted to penny pinch the development of the foundation of their biggest IPs next game, by using contractors instead of higher paid FTs, and in the end, it cost them enormous amounts of time an money on something they ended up abandoning anyway.
(I mean, there’s much more to the story of why Halo Infinite’s development was fucked, such as totally rewriting the story of the game midway through development, but the dumpster fire with the engine development is almost entirely due to MSFTs temp vs FT caste system and short term cost avoidant, thus long term cost maximizing management culture.)
Surely it’s that the ones in the minority believing that promote each other and make everyone else’s life hell.
https://insideevs.com/news/718815/production-teams-will-be-overburdened-tesla-employee/
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/politics/twitter-layoffs-visas-h1b/index.html
We’ve seen Musk use this before, after all.