Amazon HDQ2---if DFW, then where? (Dallas, Garland: maintenance, cost of, licenses)

[BigDGeek]

Originally Posted by biafra4life

You really think that Amazon would not hire any locals for the 25K jobs?
While I don't dispute that there WILL be a healthy contingent brought in from India/China, I don't think it would be the majority. Even if you want to say that the IT portion would be all Indian (which understandably you are most concerned about), I don't think that would be the case in all other parts of the company. Amazon is not an IT company ala Microsoft so I don't think IT would be the dominant portion of this company. I've yet to hear of a major company's finance or legal or supply chain departments being dominated by Indian H1bs. But there is a first time for everything I suppose.


By the way, I stumbled across this article and immediately thought of you. If you haven't already, I think you need to run out and purchase several MAGA hats now lol


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/worker-visas-doubt-trump-immigration-150219937.html


I don't want to derail the thread so I'll leave that aspect of the discussion there.


As for Seattle, I'll defer to your friends/family since I don't live there. However I will say that I've always heard that the biggest reason for the runup in house prices in Washington/Oregon was the flood of fleeing Californians...hmmm sounds familiar.

I know people who work for Amazon. They say the tech teams are significantly majority south Asian. Either those workers are still on H1Bs or they came here on one. Either way you cut it, they're current/former guest workers occupying jobs that could be filled by Americans. I'm not concerned with Indians because of their nationality; if they were all from Belarus I'd be saying the exact same thing. (None of the people I know who work at Amazon are really anti-H1B or pro-Trump; they're just sharing what they see at work.)


I've worked in IT for over 20 years; I've seen the changing face of the industry. I've seen highly skilled people I've worked with over the years be pushed to the margins while younger, cheaper, less-skilled workers have taken their places. I know that the "skills gap" is BS. It's fiction.


As for your MAGA hats, I wouldn't spend my hard-earned money on one. I didn't vote for Trump in 2016 and I'm not voting for him in 2020. If I found a pile of MAGA hats on my front porch, I'd burn them in my fire pit.

[ea0337]

Originally Posted by BigDGeek

I know people who work for Amazon. They say the tech teams are significantly majority south Asian. Either those workers are still on H1Bs or they came here on one. Either way you cut it, they're current/former guest workers occupying jobs that could be filled by Americans. I'm not concerned with Indians because of their nationality; if they were all from Belarus I'd be saying the exact same thing. (None of the people I know who work at Amazon are really anti-H1B or pro-Trump; they're just sharing what they see at work.)

Came across this data recently from USCIS.

https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/...-employers.pdf

[Pilsn3r]

Originally Posted by ea0337

Came across this data recently from USCIS.

https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/...-employers.pdf

So Amazon has over 600,000 employees and they are rampant in giving cheap jobs to Indians? Racism knows no politics. Bring over more immigrants please, it pisses the racists off!

[walker1962]

Originally Posted by BigDGeek

Wrong. I've been an Amazon customer for 20+ years (even says so on my Amazon customer profile) and I buy from them periodically.


What I hate is forking over billions in subsidies to one of the world's largest companies headed by the richest man on Earth so they can import meek substandard workers chained to a visa instead of hiring locally. I have no desire to pay extra in or for anything so that Amazon can fly workers in from Bangalore or Hyderabad. Nope. If I thought for one second that they'd actually hire locals, then I'd change my mind. But you and I both know that's not going to happen.


Duh, Amazon isn't the only company doing this. And duh, Amazon isn't the only company headquartered in the Seattle area. But the subject of this thread is (you guessed it) Amazon. We can talk about Microsoft, Boeing, and Nordstrom's in another thread...AFAIK, none of them are talking about opening a second HQ anywhere else in the US with the "creation" of 25k jobs for the low low price of billions in subsidies...so not sure what the discussion would be about.


(BTW, Boeing may have a long, rich history in Seattle and large manufacturing/testing operations still based there...but its corporate HQ is now located in Chicago.)


I have family and friends in the Seattle area and if you ask them "what made Seattle unlivable," they'll all give you the same one-word response: "Amazon." Not that Seattle kicked ass before...it was an ugly city in an ugly climate with terrible traffic and awful urban planning. Now it's an EXPENSIVE, GRIDLOCKED ugly city in an ugly climate with awful urban planning.

I agree with all you said EXCEPT Seattle being an ugly city. Queen Anne, UW neighborhoods, Bellevue, West Seattle, are all very attractive. Now Tacoma, that's been a rough area.

[DFWUser1]

Originally Posted by Pilsn3r

So Amazon has over 600,000 employees and they are rampant in giving cheap jobs to Indians? Racism knows no politics. Bring over more immigrants please, it pisses the racists off!

Yeah, bring over more immigrants/Indians and if you lose your job because of them (read not because of talent, but purely because of other things that happen), then you will know who will get pissed off.

[biafra4life]

Originally Posted by BigDGeek

I know people who work for Amazon. They say the tech teams are significantly majority south Asian. Either those workers are still on H1Bs or they came here on one. Either way you cut it, they're current/former guest workers occupying jobs that could be filled by Americans. I'm not concerned with Indians because of their nationality; if they were all from Belarus I'd be saying the exact same thing. (None of the people I know who work at Amazon are really anti-H1B or pro-Trump; they're just sharing what they see at work.)


I've worked in IT for over 20 years; I've seen the changing face of the industry. I've seen highly skilled people I've worked with over the years be pushed to the margins while younger, cheaper, less-skilled workers have taken their places. I know that the "skills gap" is BS. It's fiction.


As for your MAGA hats, I wouldn't spend my hard-earned money on one. I didn't vote for Trump in 2016 and I'm not voting for him in 2020. If I found a pile of MAGA hats on my front porch, I'd burn them in my fire pit.

First off I hope you realize I was joking about the MAGA hats.
Second though, you do realize that Trump is actually doing something that helps your case that you complain about constantly? If you saw the article I linked to, he is apparently taking aim at the H1B and the dependent visas that go along with it. Isnt that what you wanted?


Third, like I said before, yes, the IT department at Amazon and probably many other companies is going to be heavily H1B dependent, but most of the other departments like Legal, Accounting, Logistics, Marketing and Supply Chain are probably not. Since Amazon is not an IT company like say Microsoft then I would reckon that the vast majority of those 25,000 HQ jobs are not going to be filled by Indians, but rather Americans instead.


Lastly, I think there is a fairly easy way to please both the H1B critics and supporters. If I was president, I would keep the H1B visa, heck even increase the pool of available spots. but I would also require that the minimum salaries paid to these visa holders be no less than $200K per year. If Bill Gates is screaming that he desperately needs these people to fill jobs that no Americans will, then he shouldn't have any qualms about paying top dollar for them. And indeed, if this visa is for the cream of the crop like say the next Albert Einstein, then they are probably worth the money.


However, I suspect that faced with these increased costs, most American employers will all of a sudden magically find Americans who indeed CAN do the job.


This way, the H1Bs regain their initial purpose, bringing in only the best and brightest, and not run of the mill IT professionals. And at the same token, let Americans get back into fields that they have been under cut out off. Everyone wins.

[jiping]

Originally Posted by BigDGeek

I've worked in IT for over 20 years; I've seen the changing face of the industry. I've seen highly skilled people I've worked with over the years be pushed to the margins while younger, cheaper, less-skilled workers have taken their places. I know that the "skills gap" is BS. It's fiction.

No matter how many years you have worked, your IT skillets have nothing to do with SDE (software development engineer) that Amazon most needs.

You could pass Amazon's first few rounds of interview, if you can write bug-free code on whiteboard and solve these problems in a couple of minutes:
1. Find the nth largest element in an unsorted array.
2. Invert a binary tree
3. Merge and sort multiple sorted linked lists
It's entirely different than writing database query or configuring network system, and it's not cheap. Amazon pays at least $120-130K for new graduates with zero experience.

I do agree there should be some limitations for immigrants, but decent job positions should be saved for American new graduates with new skills, instead of becoming a handout for people without necessary skills.
For those people, I believe they really need to vote for Dem's green new deal because when they are out of work they will still be paid by government.

[BigDGeek]

Originally Posted by biafra4life

Lastly, I think there is a fairly easy way to please both the H1B critics and supporters. If I was president, I would keep the H1B visa, heck even increase the pool of available spots. but I would also require that the minimum salaries paid to these visa holders be no less than $200K per year. If Bill Gates is screaming that he desperately needs these people to fill jobs that no Americans will, then he shouldn't have any qualms about paying top dollar for them. And indeed, if this visa is for the cream of the crop like say the next Albert Einstein, then they are probably worth the money.


However, I suspect that faced with these increased costs, most American employers will all of a sudden magically find Americans who indeed CAN do the job.


This way, the H1Bs regain their initial purpose, bringing in only the best and brightest, and not run of the mill IT professionals. And at the same token, let Americans get back into fields that they have been under cut out off. Everyone wins.

I agree with you in principle, but it seems like H1B-dependent companies can always find and exploit loopholes in the law. Without vigorous enforcement, it'll never work.

[Pilsn3r]

Originally Posted by DFWUser1

Yeah, bring over more immigrants/Indians and if you lose your job because of them (read not because of talent, but purely because of other things that happen), then you will know who will get pissed off.

Not I. I'm in a growing field, and for every immigrant we hire, we hire 100 US citizens.

600,000 employees at Amazon, about 2000 immigrants hired last year. That's less than .5% of their total work force. Any proof that the 2000 hired were to replace us citizens?

[Peter5457]

Originally Posted by Pilsn3r

Not I. I'm in a growing field, and for every immigrant we hire, we hire 100 US citizens.

600,000 employees at Amazon, about 2000 immigrants hired last year. That's less than .5% of their total work force. Any proof that the 2000 hired were to replace us citizens?

LOL, 600K mostly Americans? You ever been to any of the Amazon distribution centers. they run overnight shifts too. But hey, at least they speak english. And they got people with foreign documents/licenses delivering with fake temporary tags in cars breaking down. You can see it at their huge center in Garland.

Some of them don't speak english, or read. I requested them to place my package inside my side fence.. but no, just left it there in front of my door. Sheesh.. I know them foreigners can read english, probably better than some americans..

but yeah, they do put lot of people to work.