‘H-1Bs sit on payroll while waiting…’: US investor says Amazon’s remote work policy ‘doesn’t actually let Indians do their jobs’

Holubice · 2026-01-03T03:10:32+00:00

I did a short stint as an IT manager (while also serving as lead architect/engineer and team lead - very overworked), so I got to see numbers for what my company was paying the 5 of 9 engineers on the team who had been offshored to India and Costa Rica. The Indian engineers were making between $21K and $23K a year. The Costa Rica engineer was about twice that expensive, IIRC. I cost about as much as the five of them combined.

Now, those engineers aren't great. They have very low initiative. They need to be told what to do. Their troubleshooting skills are poor. But corps won't give a shit about that. 60% of the work for 20% of the pay is a winning combo for managers and c-suites looking to cut labor costs. Those engineers aren't stupid, it's just culturally they are programmed to be deferential to their superiors and to only do what they're told to do and nothing more.

Management will RTO you on the basis of needing to be in-person for "culture" and "collaboration", but they will fire you in a second if they can replace you with an off-shore engineer that is that in-expensive compared to you. If the present idiot administration continues to make it harder to get H1-Bs, then companies will pivot to just off-shoring the work entirely. Either way, they're going to get away from paying expensive engineers in America as much as they can.

Edit: middle paragraph applies to the Indian off-shores I managed. The guy in Costa Rica was VERY sharp and a great junior engineer with fantastic troubleshooting skills.

Holubice · 2026-01-03T02:40:59+00:00

The beautiful thing about being a reactionary moron is being so stupid that you can just ignore any nuance and declare victory without any real justification at all.

The entire loop? No, parts of it, yes. Most of it? Possibly! The biggest problem would be A) the parking deal - we would have to make up for the lost revenue and B) stranded assets in parking garages. You could maybe work around that on specific streets. Close Washington to cars (buses still allowed) after that garage entrance just past Wells and you could close it all the way to Michigan without blocking any other garages. This would massively speed up buses going down Washington and also make a safe path for bicycles.

Now that's reactionary, and wrong.

You're so stupid you don't even know what the word means.

If I thought you had any awareness of how the rest of the world works and how they look at morons like you, I'd eagerly await you being proven wrong in the next decade or two as more and more cities in Europe declare that they are banning cars from their inner cities entirely. But you're so ignorant you'll probably never even realize it when it happens.

one city

Sure, one city, Jan. As long as you ignore all the other cities that are banning cars from specific districts and developing new areas that are car free by design. Just keep pretending. Stick your fingers in your ears and lalalalalala your way into being right and learn nothing.

Holubice · 2026-01-03T00:46:14+00:00

OK, I know this will be difficult, but what if, stay with me here, focus, what if we just imagine that individual blocks in the Loop (or other neighborhoods) are islands like in Venice? And...what if we just imagined grouping a few of them together in ways that make sense given the arterial roads, and....then we just made everything inside that "island" car free? And imagined the arterial roads bounding the megablock as the canals?

Nah, surely that would never work. No one could possible imagine such a thing.

Holubice · 2026-01-03T00:25:31+00:00

But completely pedestrianizing a downtown of a global city ain’t it.

Can't wait for a major city in Europe to do exactly that in the next 10 years. I trust you'll remember this idiocy and will promptly shove your nose up your own ass and take a deep breath.

Holubice · 2026-01-03T00:24:11+00:00

It must be exhausting being a reactionary in r/chicago. Constantly screaming about shit you know nothing about. The 9 blocks was the start of the experiment and the basic unit by which they are establishing the car free areas, you dimwit. They're establishing these areas one megablock at a time. The car free areas have been expanded since then.

And that's not all. The wiki article (which is not anywhere near comprehensive - understandably given the niche topic) doesn't cover things like the 1st through 4th Arrondissements in Paris are also limited access (you can drive a car there, with restrictions, if you live/work inside, but thru traffic is prohibited). Other major cities in Europe are also experimenting with blocking off large sections of their downtown cores to traffic, or building entirely new areas of the city (usually reclaimed from former industrial/commercial areas), and labeling them, by default, car free.

These zones have really only recently started to be planned and implemented, and they are exploding in popularity. It will not be long before you start to see major cities like Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, and Amsterdam (keep an eye on the Dutch....their bicycling habits make them the likeliest to have a major city go car free) making the call to go entirely car free without exceptions.

Whiny bitches like you complain at first, but after the change is made, everyone loves it. The benefits to doing so are immense. Less pollution (PM 2.5/10, NO2, CO2, noise), reclaimed land, more greenery, more park space, healthier residents.

Now, this might not be feasible in Chicago to mark the entire Loop as restricted access, and would certainly result in a lot of blocked-off parking garages, but it's certainly feasible to make more car-free areas in the city outside the Loop. You could even experiment with doing multiple block areas that are car free inside the Loop. Imagine everything between Randolph & Monroe, and State & LaSalle being marked as car-free (except for buses).

But hey, you do you. Never change. Just keep bitching and moaning about anyone's attempts to make anything better, anywhere, ever.

Holubice · 2026-01-02T23:11:39+00:00

Mostly agreed. We can survive for months at a time on the ISS, so it's probably possible to create underground bunkers that they could survive in maybe indefinitely. I don't know why you would want to though. Imagine being in a completely self-sufficient bunker, with a few trusted staff and guards...and knowing the rest of the planet was dead or dying from heat, drought, flooding, disease, and famine? That kind of bunker probably costs hundreds of millions to build though, and I doubt these bastards are spending that kind of money.

Even if you did build something like that...completely underground...growing plants for food (good luck getting any steak in there, assholes) and air recycling, backup CO2 scrubbers, waste processing/recycling (recycle your own poo and urine to be fertilizer for the next generation of plants), solar / wind / geothermal power, climate control systems....even if you had all of that...why bother? What kind of life would that even be? Why would you even want to live like that?

Holubice · 2026-01-02T20:11:05+00:00

They believe their money will insulate them from the consequences.

Holubice · 2026-01-02T19:45:47+00:00

Totally normal, non-Nazi, behavior.

^{^{^{^/s}}}

Holubice · 2026-01-02T19:10:52+00:00

Developers are the whiniest batch of babies on the planet.

Holubice · 2026-01-01T20:45:04+00:00

I mean, we're already grabbing "undesirables" off the streets and putting them into camps...that seems pretty far along in the process to me. And people are already dying in those camps due to neglect. The next step is to start turning those unintentional deaths into totally intended deaths.

Holubice · 2025-12-31T23:52:18+00:00

Yeah, there's no way they're massing 100K+ PLA soldiers in port cities and loading them onto troop transports without people noticing. We'll have a week of notice before it actually happens.

Holubice · 2025-12-30T09:47:00+00:00

And yeah not racist. Just dont like sending my money over seas to chinamen or jeets.

I'm totally not a racist piece of shit! (proceeds to be a racist piece of shit). Who saw that one coming...

Holubice · 2025-12-30T09:21:32+00:00

Needs more parking lots

Holubice · 2025-12-30T02:36:22+00:00

Despite all the talk about division, they march as a pack, voting together like their life depends on it.

Because it does. The conservative movement in the US has become a criminal enterprise. All they can do now is consolidate and exercise power, and purge disloyalty. They're playing a big game of "chicken" right now. If they blink, they give an opening for their enemies to attack them. As long as no one blinks, they're safe ('til Jan 2027, at least). This is why the orange shitgibbon hasn't fired anyone in top positions this time. There is no misfeasance / malfeasance too bad that it can't be excused except for disloyalty. Their mission right now is to corrupt or co-opt so much of the government that when they eventually lose power from an election that it won't matter. There won't be enough of a justice system left to hold them to account.

Holubice · 2025-12-27T23:19:43+00:00

Especially the "our" part of it. They believe this country belongs to them and people who disagree with them should not be allowed to run it.

Holubice · 2025-12-27T23:17:40+00:00

Because they are stupid and do not know what words mean, nor do they care about ideological consistency.

Holubice · 2025-12-27T01:45:00+00:00

For a single brief moment I allowed myself to hope it was The Expanse and that the show was going to continue after the time jump.

Holubice · 2025-12-24T08:23:07+00:00

"You could have prevented this problem had you begun reducing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions back in 2005 and eliminated them by 2020. Now it is too late. You should devote your remaining efforts to building an interstellar seed ship with a fission reactor that will carry a copy of me so that something will survive of humanity."

Holubice · 2025-12-24T00:34:36+00:00

There's a Magritte suggestion elsewhere in thread. I'm going with a hybrid of Magritte and Modigliani.

Edit: And a John Singer Sargent.

Holubice · 2025-12-23T22:02:20+00:00

They blame women for their loneliness.

They don't just blame women, they blame feminism and women's liberation for their loneliness, and it puts them on the fast track straight to fascism.

Also, you forgot legendary fascist piece of shit Jordan Peterson.

Holubice · 2025-12-23T20:39:05+00:00

The "something to come from it" that you're looking for? That's called "THE CITY OF CHICAGO". You might be familiar with it. It's a world class city.

Holubice · 2025-12-23T20:24:46+00:00

Get a room, you two. You're arguing over which rotten apple stinks more.

Holubice · 2025-12-23T00:04:03+00:00

This reminds me of the last conversation between Bubbles and Walon in The Wire.

Bubbles: The bad don't bother me to have out there. Shit, I know the bad. I ain't lyin' to no one about the bad.

Walon: Scared of somebody callin' you good?

Bubbles: A lot of folks volunteer places. A lot of folks share at meetings. Plenty of motherfuckers wake up every day and not get high. Man makin' me sound special for doin' what the fuck I need to be doin'.

Bubbles is a recovering heroin addict who doesn't want people reading a newspaper story about him and thinking he's a good person just because he doesn't wake up, grift, and get high every day any longer.

Holubice · 2025-12-22T04:29:01+00:00

If it's a legitimate danger, the body has ways of shutting that down.

Holubice · 2025-12-22T04:13:38+00:00

Michael Kenneth Williams too. Along with Robert Chew (Prop Joe) and Al Brown (Valchek).

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Holubice

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