H1-B: A Tech Bro Perspective

Musings on the Way of the Pajeet

So, I was actually working on something else this weekend, but I figured I should probably follow the meta and throw my two cents in on this whole “H1-B Visa” debate. If you are somehow not familiar, Elon Musk tweeted (x’d?) out earlier this week his support for importing in hordes of cheap tech workers from the Indian subcontinent. Many on the right are, obviously, upset by this. As a tech worker myself, I actually have some experience in this domain, so let me ramble my thoughts a bit.

The Job Market

The first thing to understand is that, when these tech companies complain that they “can’t find qualified STEM applicants” in the US, this is complete bullshit. For the past six to eight months especially, the job market in tech has actually been shitty. There has been a slowdown in tech, with companies laying off workers. AMD fired 1,000 people in November, Salesforce another 1,000 (after a previous 10% employee reduction in 2023), Microsoft laid off 1,500 employees in the Azure department alone (Azure is garbage though so that was probably a good call), Xerox over 3,000 (15% of the workforce), Cisco almost 10,000 employees, Intel over 15,000. Here is a complete list from TechCrunch.

Now, I’m a Capitalist. I’m not saying these companies are required to keep the plebs gainfully employed at the expense of their profit margins. But, don’t piss on my face and then tell me it’s raining. There are plenty of unemployed tech workers to go around. The real reason they want to import low-wage Pajeets is because they can pay them less.

I measure the health of the tech job market by the amount of recruiter spam I receive from my LinkedIn profile. For the past eight months it has been pretty dead, but it’s starting to pick back up. I believe this is due to the election being over, the political uncertainty clearing up, and the hope amongst many investors that a Republican administration will be more business-friendly. But, the job recs I get are like “Hey, come make $120k at this Hybrid office job.” I politely, but firmly, tell these people to fuck off.

If $120k and three days in the office seems pretty good to you, and it sounds like I’m being spoiled and entitled - yes I am. But, you may want to consider how much money it takes to actually be middle class these days in America. I understand my value in the labor market, and I’m not going to take a job for $120k. (Actually, I have taken jobs for $120k, but I stack them so it’s more like $240k / $360k depending on how many I’m doing - but more on that later). It’s not that these companies can’t find US talent, it’s that they aren’t willing to pay US wages. I’m not the one that inflated our currency into the stratosphere, don’t blame me.

The Value of H1B Workers

I’m just going to put the thesis up front on this one: H1B’s are uniformly terrible software developers. I know that sounds like I am generalizing about an entire ethnic group. I’m sure there is some exception out there that proves the rule, some genius Indian at the Google R&D department who is actually brilliant, even though nobody can understand him because of his accent. But, every Pajeet that I have worked with has been bad at programming. So, like a police officer who has spent decades patrolling a black neighborhood, I have developed certain mental heuristics. When I hear that telltale Indian accent, I immediately assume the worst.

The irony of Elon’s support for H1Bs is that, the workers he claims are necessary to lead innovation in America, are the least likely to do anything actually innovative. They maintain legacy codebases at IBM. They make UI updates to the Walgreens website. When I worked in the start-up world, I never ran into any H1B workers. Sure, I met some Indian-Americans, guys who (like Vivek Ramaswamy) grew up here, didn’t have accents, and had assimilated into the American culture. And by the way, that’s why I’m not opposed to having a small amount of immigration. People move around. It’s perfectly fine for a few people from other parts of the world to move to your country. Just like there are a few Americans every year that move to, say, France. It’s the mass importation of hordes of people, who are not given time to assimilate, that creates problems.

It wasn’t until I began raiding corporate America that I truly encountered the Pajeets in their natural element. Pajeets love sclerotic, overly-bureaucratized legacy institutions. It allows them to hide behind processes and procedures in order to do as little actual work as possible. They infest these organizations like a plague of bloodsucking parasites. In fact, a lot of the mindset that I brought to the Tortuga Society, I gleaned from my experience working with Pajeets.

The Way of the Pajeet

Pajeets are unscrupulous, nepotistic, and lazy.

The first time I encountered the unscrupulousness of the common Pajeet was actually in college. I didn’t get a Masters degree (do we call them Main degrees now?) because to me, a Masters in Computer Science codes as low status. All the kids who could actually program were able to get jobs right after undergraduate. It was the dumb-dumbs who only scraped by via the coddling embrace of TA office hours that were unable to find gainful employment. Unable to conceive of a world outside of credentialism, these big brains would then pursue a Masters in the hope that this would increase their value in the labor market.

Nevertheless, being a smarty-pants, I did take some Masters-level classes my senior year (by the way, some of the 500 level classes were actually less challenging than their 400 level counterparts, thus proving once again the university system is a scam). But, I remember very distinctly a large group of Indians on student visas getting busted for cheating in my Algorithms class. They weren’t even particularly sly about it, they were leaving to use the restroom during the exam, and consulting with a guy in the hall who had an answer sheet. They got caught, but imagine how many slightly more discreet Pajeets get away with cheating every year. You might say, but Bingo that’s anecdotal, and, fair enough. But, ask any Comp Sci student you know and I bet they will confirm: Indians cheat.

In a way though, this is smart. As much as Librarian of Celaeno might decry this mercantile approach to education (I consider the good Librarian to be like my Substack conscience, whom I generally agree with but never listen to), the reality is that the value of a degree is the access to employment opportunities that it conveys. If you can get the degree without learning the algorithms, why learn the algorithms? It’s not like you will be asked to recreate Dijkstra’s at your code monkey bug job.

Indians are notoriously shady in their business dealings as well. I can’t tell you how many horror stories I’ve heard from sub-contractors and staffing firms regarding their shenanigans. It’s gotten to the point that many companies no longer even do C2C arrangements (corp to corp) because the Pajeets have poisoned the well for the rest of us. They will belligerently lie about an applicants work experience, you will often have Pajeets showing up and obviously having no experience in the tech stack whatsoever. They will claim a contractor has 10 years of professional experience, and then you find out he’s 23. They will have one guy show up to the tech screening, and then once he passes, send an entirely different guy to the job site. At Tortuga, we realized that if we were just slightly less retarded than the Pajeets, we could corner the Contractor Grift Market. And thus, Experience Fabrication Services was born.

Pajeets are also incredibly nepotistic. There was a hilarious tweet that I saw when Vivek was first making waves in the Republican primaries last year, and actually, I saved it! Hooray!

Aged like fine wine

Indians only hire Indians, if they can possibly help it. If you get one Indian in a hiring position in your IT department, Rest In Peace. In fact, the most recent contract I got, I’m convinced it’s only because the guy who was supposed to be doing the tech screen was out that day, so I interviewed with a white guy instead. The guy was one of these oldheads who knows how everything works. I couldn’t see his feet, because it was a Zoom call, but I’m 100% confident he was wearing New Balance sneakers. We had a great conversation, he knew his shit, and since I also know my shit, we were able to converse about technical topics freely and easily.

When I first met the grimy Indian who was supposed to have interviewed me, I got the vibes right away that he didn’t like me. I’m sure it was because he would have preferred to screen me himself so that he could pick a fellow curry enjoyer instead. As a side note, I have yet to see this Pajeet do any actual work in the two months I’ve been on the project, although he attends every meeting, and made sure to be the only guy with AWS admin, so you need him to get your developer roles set up. (Very Smart)

Honestly, this is another place where whites could learn a lesson from the Indians. Hiring in-group is the natural inclination of all humans. Koreans do this. Hispanics do this. Blacks definitely do this. It’s only upper-class WASPs that will purposefully throw their own kind under the bus to win brownie points with other races. The other races don’t actually respect them for this, by the way. But they have learned to exploit it. Why do you think Blacks cry Muh Racism! all the time? Because they've learned that it works.

For your consideration, this chart:

This is the effects of DEI initiatives in the workforce, the representation of whites in lower, entry-level positions is way below their percentage in the general population. This is because most companies get the bulk of their DEI numbers at the entry-level. It’s much harder to find a Black lesbian with 5+ years of engineering experience than it is to find a Black lesbian with zero years of engineering experience, so as a result, new grads take the brunt of the anti-White discrimination. This is why it’s so important, for those of us who are in a position to do so, to hire white guys.

And finally, Pajeets are lazy. I’ve alluded to it above, but H1B workers love to find bloated, inefficient bureaucracies, and bury themselves deep in the inner realms of the IT department, where they can fly under the radar and do little to no actual work. And, honestly, bully for them. As I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with corporate America, I have begun to adopt the Way of the Pajeet in this regard. Don’t fucking work hard. Get a job (hell, get two), do the absolute bare minimum, and then spend your copious free time in worthwhile pursuits. Spend time with your family. Read the Classics. Shitpoast on Substack. Whatever brings you joy. Give me a lazy Pajeet any day over one of these insufferable corporate sycophants, status-posting on LinkedIn all day about synergy. Fuck off with that.

The great irony in all this, of course, is that this is exactly the opposite mindset from what Elon Musk would hope to cultivate in the tech workforce. Musk wants everyone back in the office, he wants us working 80 hour weeks. He is not out there promoting work-life balance.

Ultimately though, what Musk, and the tech companies in general, want, is lower wages. Consider the average salary in Canada vs the average salary in the US. It’s almost double (I’m not sure if Glassdoor is converting the Canada salaries to USD, if not, its even worse). And it’s not like Canada has a lower cost of living, either. Check out home prices in Toronto, it’s retarded. This is due almost entirely to Canada’s immigration policies. Somehow, Canada isn’t “out-innovating” us, though. Curious.

And look, I’m a Capitalist, I don’t hate Elon for wanting to maximize his own profit margins. But, recognize that when Musk says H1B visas are good for “America,” what he means is that H1B visas are good for him and his friends. I would suggest that you ask yourself what’s good for you and your friends. I don’t know what’s going to end up happening with the H1B stuff, I have heard that Trump has distanced himself from Musk’s statements, but it remains to be seen. Trump never said he was going to cut H1B’s off entirely, by the way, but I was hoping to see them restricted, the way they were during his first Presidency. But, if not, then all is not lost. Just get yourself a good crew and a marketable skill set, and approach your interactions with corporate America in a shrewd and frankly transactional manner.

Did I already shill Tortuga? Yes. Ok good, end rant then.