I've managed a team at one of the big tech companies for a bunch of years. I've managed a couple people on h1b, all with graduate degrees from premier US institutions.

Never once have I heard anything even resembling "work your h1bs harder because they won't leave." They all joined on the same pay scale as legal permanent residents and were all evaluated through a process where nobody else in the room knew who was a legal permanent resident or not (I only knew because I needed to sign off on forms describing their job responsibilities to the government).

At most this is some aggregate effect of "people changing employers less is good for employers generally."

This doesn't really vibe as abuse of the program to me. I'd vastly prefer it if the policies gave people on h1bs significantly more confidence in changing roles and more time to find a new job should they lose their job, but is this really a decision of the tech companies rather than an output of the immigration policies?

So for Big Tech it's never as egregious as "work your H1Bs harder" or "pay them less". That just opens you up to a future lawsuit.

In a hot market, your best chance of career progression and maximizing your compensation is to swap jobs every 2 years or so. Visa holders have a much harder time doing this.

Additionally, there are additional burdens on the employer to hire visa holders. For a large company, this process is solved. You have lawyers on retainer. You have a pipeline for the paperwork. It's a non-issue. But an early stage startup? That's a lot less likely. So visa holders are, by definition, more limited in their job opportunities.

Even if you can job hop, if your ultimate goal is to get a green card, you have a problem. Will your new employer sponsor your green card? How long will it take? Or are you better off waiting for your current process to go through? Best case, this whole thing takes just under a year. But it can take years completely randomly and there's nothing you can do about it (eg you get randomly audited).

And if you were born in one of the four high-demand countries (India, China, Mexico, the Phillipines) you have an even longer wait.

Also, after you get to 6 years on your H1B you really can't swap jobs anymore. You just have to wait for your green card at that point.

Now that's not strictly true. There are self-sponsor options for both visas and green cards but the bar for these is much higher and you'll need to hire your own lawyer for this.

So there's no directive on treating visa holders differently but bias creeps into the process. Why push someone for higher bonuses, more RSUs or promotions when they can't leave but another one of your "stars" can leave? This may not be conscious either. And it may happen on a level above you, as a manager, because your director is ultimately responsible for balancing out ratings and promotions across their org.

> Why push someone for higher bonuses, more RSUs or promotions when they can't leave but another one of your "stars" can leave?

This would have to be extremely unconscious for me, I suppose. I've never considered immigration status when doing comp planning. Comp planning is mostly algorithmic based on performance reviews, which again are done through a group of people who don't actually know somebody's immigration status. Discretionary comp pretty much entirely comes from rewarding people who are in the high end of some ratings bucket, which again is derived from the panel discussion. I've also managed to promote all of the h1bs I've had on my team.

> And it may happen on a level above you, as a manager, because your director is ultimately responsible for balancing out ratings and promotions across their org.

I've actually been pretty fortunate here (I guess) and have never had a rating adjusted by a higher up. I suppose this could happen, but I've also been in the rollup meetings where a director is trying to fit ratings to some expected distribution and there'd have to have been a secret meeting ahead of time for immigration status to come up.

> In a hot market, your best chance of career progression and maximizing your compensation is to swap jobs every 2 years or so. Visa holders have a much harder time doing this.

This is true. People on h1bs being less able to change roles can depress their wages over time and this can be a benefit to corporations. I don't know if I'd really call this "abuse" by the companies, more like a shitty outcome of the policy. It could be the case that the big tech companies lobby to make it more difficult for people on h1bs to change jobs, I suppose.

I would expect to see the thumbs on the scale at the director level, not at the direct report level. At those heights, employees are costs to be managed, and they shave a little off here and there to keep their budget low.

I guess you could expect this.

I've never seen anything that smelled of this even a little bit.

> an H-1B holder is legally bound to the hiring company and can't seek work elsewhere

That's not really the case. An H-1B visa holder is not strictly bound to their employer, and is allowed to transfer to a new employer. Unlike visas such as the L-1, which are employer-tied, the H-1B allows for this flexibility. Transferring does require the new employer to file a new H-1B petition, but that process is straightforward and any big tech company will gladly complete that as part of the hiring process.

The main exception arises only when the H-1B holder has just started pursuing a green card. The first step of the green card process, known as PERM, typically takes 1–2 years to complete. During this time, the worker may feel more committed to their current employer because switching jobs would restart the PERM process, potentially delaying their green card timeline.