u/AlastairMac1964

I'm not trying to sound racist, but something about the hiring on this team has been really really weird.

I'm on a 12-person engineering team, and I've been here for almost five years. During that time, every new engineer we've hired has come from the same country as my manager, and they've all required H-1B sponsorship. As far as I know, we've had good local candidates apply as well, but none of them have been hired.

If this had only happened once or twice, I probably wouldn't think much of it. But after seeing the same thing over several years, it's hard not to question it.

Also, this country most of my coworkers are from is known for having a demanding work culture so they all work ten-hour days and some people frequently come to work on Sundays. I try doing the same to fit in but my girlfriend thinks it’s super weird and even has accused me of cheating.

What should I do ?

I tried to move internally in Amazon US as a PM. I wanted to move to a managerial role to get EB1C as H1B lottery is evasive. I spent 5 years at Amazon in another country.

However, my next hiring manager (new to Amazon) told that he would collect feedback from current manager and I thought that he will only ask if I was on some focus plan (which makes me ineligible to switch). But my current manager gave negative feedback and the hiring manager decided not to take me.

After all this, my current manager decided to FOCUS me due to 'poor performance'(in his words). Later I came to know that every manager has a fixed firing quota/stack ranking and they generally fire employees who are unable to hide their plan about switching team.

Nobody shared these hidden processes with me. I had spent 5 years at Amazon in another country, but nobody told me about this.

Suppose if my flatmate was from Amazon, would he have told me about this?

First of all I am not against H1B as long as it is meritocratic and does not come with the expense of other eligible candidates. I intend to start a conversation here but please share your anecdotes respectfully.

Over the last 10 years, I’ve had the opportunity to work for Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle as a software engineer. I was laid off from my latest role at Oracle in March, and since then I still haven’t managed to land a new role. From my observations working on more than a dozen teams across three big-tech companies, I think the disproportionate bias toward H-1B talent in big tech has less to do with cost-saving than with ethnic nepotism. Cost-cutting might be a motivation at smaller consultancy shops, but definitely not at Fortune 500 companies. Earlier in my career, I used to dismiss this phenomenon or give it the benefit of the doubt, but lately it’s been impossible to ignore the blatant nepotism.

What I and many of my colleagues and friends have noticed is that Indian managers disproportionately prefer hiring Indian engineers. When I was at Amazon, our team had an opening for an L5 SDE (a mid-career role). My manager rejected half a dozen good candidates from here and ended up hiring someone directly from India. That person transferred to the US on an L-1 visa, and the whole process took about two months. I don’t believe that—Seattle being the second-biggest tech hub in the country, one of the biggest hubs for cloud talent in the world, and home to one of the best schools in the world—my manager could not find a single eligible mid-career software engineer who could do simple full-stack development, or that the Indian candidate was so extraordinary that it was worth waiting two months and spending five figures to sponsor his L-1 visa to bring him in. In the same org, our charter grew with a re-org, and a manager from Bangalore transferred to the US to build a new team. Since his transfer, all—literally all—of the engineers he has hired have been Indian. Our entire management chain was Indian, and very soon most of the ICs were too.

On another team I worked on at AWS, an ex-Microsoft VP joined, and soon after, almost a dozen principal engineers, general managers, and engineering managers joined over the course of one year. All of them were that VP’s former colleagues at Microsoft, and it just so happened that all of them were not only from India, but literally from the same state in India. What are the chances all of them got an offer at AWS, at the same time, at the same team, under the same VP under a fair interview process? Soon after the VP joined, our org announced that they were going to increase the headcount in Bangalore—but gradually, several newly hired managers and many of that headcount transferred to the US.

These ethnic cliques usually have a strong support network and back each other, often in ethically questionable ways. One of my friends was repeatedly called a “kid” by her manager. When she complained to HR and her skip-level manager (who happened to be from the same state in India), the skip assured her he’d look into the matter. But the next quarter she was put on a performance improvement plan (PIP) in retaliation. It later turned out that the manager had several such micro-aggression allegations against him but skip turned a blind eye to it. Ethnic bias also plays a huge role in promotions and performance reviews. All of that VP’s close aides who came from Microsoft got high-priority projects and fast-track promotions. All of this discrimination is very subtle and extremely hard to prove. The perpetrators clearly know what they’re doing, so they make sure nothing is blatantly illegal.

The ecosystem is such that Indian executives have an obvious bias for Indian managers, and Indian managers extend that bias to Indian ICs who just happen to be on H-1B. So the bias isn’t toward H-1B per se; it’s almost always toward H-1B holders of the right country and ethnicity. Hence, across all of big tech—Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, or Google—you’ll find a disproportionately high percentage of Indian employees on H-1B if the leader of that org or team is Indian. Everybody in big tech sees this and feels this, but obviously nobody will speak up, because everybody has bills to pay and finding a job that pays them is incredibly hard in this market. Besides, the whole H-1B issue has become so sensitive that the line between racism and legitimate grievance has grown blurry. Who wants to be called a bigot?

There have been several pro-H-1B arguments used to shrug off this ethnic nepotism. First, there is absolutely no shortage of local talent in the tech industry at this moment. This might have been true 10 years ago, but it’s definitely not true anymore. Second, Indian software engineers aren’t inherently more talented or more hardworking. If anything, all—literally all—of my best colleagues were Americans educated at American colleges. By contrast, our offshore teams in Bangalore routinely produced sloppy code and multi-region outages. And even if you claim I’m biased, you have to agree that saying Indian engineers are better than American engineers is problematic, to say the least. Third, the $100K H-1B fee won’t stop the abuse. A vast majority of H-1Bs are awarded to people who transferred to the US on an L-1 visa or who were international students on F-1 visas.

There is definitely more mainstream attention to this nepotism problem in white-collar jobs now. That said, more often than not there’s more blatant racism than constructive criticism in that conversation. But I’d still say the mainstream attention is, on balance, a force for good. Too many of us have been directly or indirectly impacted by this ethnic bias and nepotism.

This regulation, identified as RIN: 1653-AA95, reached its final review stage at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in early May 2026.

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