@Nemtastic1 my reaction to this tweet is primarily "cognizant still exists when it should be nuked and every second it persists galls my soul"

its fairly amazing and to me highly concerning that h1b body shops have more influence than public sector unions

@Nemtastic1 i actually prefer offshoring to h1bs tbqh

@cojobrien i used to believe in fine tuning policy but i have no confidence whatsoever that such implementations will work nor persist

we're a shithole country now

It sounds like the workers aren't so much losing their jobs, as being taken off the government benefit teat. I'm not sure this is an H1B issue.

At any rate, A lot of H1B jobs in tech can just be offshored completely. Get rid of an H1B visa and the job doesn't necessarily go to a domestic citizen. If you waved a magic wand today and got rid of 100% of H1B visas, tomorrow the debate would just turn to preventing companies from offshoring remote work.

@GayBearRes

@eigenrobot It’s estimated to save half a billion. I’m a little stunned to see you defend rent seeking state employee union workers.

@eigenrobot There are well-developed solutions sitting on the shelf to fix this program. We have agency.

@eigenrobot You know what middle America needs?

A caste system.

@GayBearRes offshore fine

h1b absolutely not

clear abuse of the program

@Nemtastic1 i assume these jobs wont exist in ten years either way but the visas would persist

@eigenrobot In an honorable society our government would either employ actual local citizens or they wouldn’t have an IT dept at all

@eigenrobot The government is no longer made of Americans. Lovely.

I just became a "white hindu" again, didn't I

Yeah I think there's lots of room for an interesting debate there. It does isolate the economic effects from the cultural effects somewhat.

But it's also a slippery slope, because there are practical limitations on moving bodies around the globe, while there's almost no overhead to moving a job. If we increasingly normalize offshoring at the same time jobs are increasingly becoming remote-capable, that might be long-term worse than maintaining the narrative that the "important work" needs to be done domestically, even if we're importing people to do it.

@eigenrobot I’ve contracted work to them before (I think everyone has at some point?), as long as you keep the scope narrow they do perfectly fine work.

Is the issue having *any* managed service providers use offshore or H-1B? No body shops at all? Cause that creates new, worse problems.

@Nemtastic1 @eigenrobot Then offshore then.

Send the jobs to India.

Force them to fix their infrastructure.

Make their country a modern society.

Increase INR parity with the USD.

People talk like that's a bad thing.

@Yantrarora @eigenrobot Open to a fee (though $100k is nuts) but there are other ideas on the shelf that would nuke the outsourcer model overnight. Fixing the portability problem (the root of many problems in the program) is doable too.

@eigenrobot I really wish this weren’t true.

@eigenrobot We need to keep like a running ledger of companies that are doing this shit. Most people have no idea.