
Tech companies will post incoherent ads for open positions in tiny local papers - davidgerard
https://twitter.com/sweis/status/1208253229617709056
======
caseysoftware
Yes, placing a newspaper ad is a requirement. I think the primary criticisms
are the incomprehensible ad and the selection of newspapers itself.

This is normally called Malicious Compliance -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance)
\- where someone meets the requirements, not the intent. Maybe both the intent
and the requirements should be spelled out more specifically but the players
involved - large tech companies and legislators - don't have an interest in
that.

~~~
fhennig
Oh what a nice concept, "malicious compliance". It's nice that it takes into
account the intent as well.

I'd say the way google et al manage taxes is also malicious compliance.
Technically everything is fine, but this level of taxation is clearly not the
intention.

~~~
fountainofage
... well, it is, though, otherwise it wouldn't be possible. I think it's
fairly obvious our tax system is designed to heavily reward those who have the
means to pay experts to find the correct combination of steps to report
revenue.

edit: are to our

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geofft
This post is inaccurate in two ways.

One, these ads are _mandated by law_. Even if you are hiring people through
normal modern channels like online ads, you must legally show that you placed
a newspaper ad because the law is old and expects old-fashioned ads. Obviously
they don't want candidates _through this pipeline_ but that hardly means they
don't want candidates!

Two, this legal requirement is for green cards / permanent residency, for a
candidate _already_ hired via H-1B or equivalent - and a green card allows
immigrants to move jobs and otherwise demand a genuine market rate just as if
they had generations of American blood.

I don't think this tweet was intended to be nativist propaganda - replies make
it sound like he was just ill-informed - but it's still nativist propaganda.

~~~
sweis
You are right. I was ill-informed. This is for green cards.

My intent is opposite of nativist propaganda. I think the regulations are
silly and companies are minimally complying with them.

------
lotsofpulp
Is this accurate? According to this person, it's not for faking lack of
candidates in order to secure an H1B, but rather for the green card process:

[https://twitter.com/sanaerosen/status/1208389683132030978](https://twitter.com/sanaerosen/status/1208389683132030978)

~~~
volfied
They are right. H1B is a temporary visa that you can get with a company
sponsor pretty easily. You get a H1B for 3 years, and you can renew it once
for another 3. Within those 6 years, if the company wants to retain you and
get you a green card, they need to prove that "they looked, but couldn't find
an eligible American" to replace you. Hence these ads with overly specialized
position descriptions.

~~~
klipt
> you can get with a company sponsor pretty easily

Not very easily these days. There's a yearly limit on H1-B visas, and more
applications than visas, so they're assigned by lottery. For 2019 there was
only a 32% chance of selection: [https://www.immi-
usa.com/h1b-lottery-2016-results-chances-pr...](https://www.immi-
usa.com/h1b-lottery-2016-results-chances-process/)

------
downvoteme1
Well what do people suggest that companies like Apple and google do in such a
position. They have hired somebody on a work visa and want them to stay after
their six years of visa are up. The only option is to file for a green card
and one of the requirements of the green card labor process is to show an ad
in a local newspaper. So they do what the law tells them to do.

~~~
supercanuck
Hire an American.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
As mentioned downthread, the problem is that's not how big tech hiring
pipelines work today. On the margin, Apple hires every qualified software
developer it can find. If one of their engineers can't get a green card and is
forced to leave, that doesn't mean they'll hire anyone they would have
otherwise rejected.

~~~
commandlinefan
Then why place the cryptic ad in the newspaper rather than actually post the
job offering where it might be read and applied for by a US citizen? The only
reason this makes sense is because they’re _afraid_ somebody qualified will
actually apply.

~~~
shadowgovt
Does "the company website" count?

[https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/search?location=united-
states-U...](https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/search?location=united-states-USA)

------
fileyfood500
As an engineer on an Amazon sw team, I will comment that teams frequently have
spots they struggle to fill (ie my team has 3 open spots on a 7 person team,
and this isn’t uncommon). Many many candidates will fail the interviews, so we
end up with perpetually open positions listed online. The idea that the print
ad is a legal requirement makes sense, given that I wouldn’t expect to find
candidates by printing the positions in the paper. American candidates have
great advantages like speaking English fluently, and it’s great that there are
so many initiatives to teach programming skills, but supply isn’t meeting
demand.

~~~
mrep
> I will comment that teams frequently have spots they struggle to fill (ie my
> team has 3 open spots on a 7 person team, and this isn’t uncommon).

Those perpetually open spots should tell you that you aren't paying enough.
Just look at Amazon's pay compared to competitors like Google and Facebook [0]
who pay more and it should be obvious why you are struggling to hire people.
Start offering higher wages than them and watch as all those positions
magically fill up.

[0]:
[https://www.levels.fyi/SE/Amazon/Google/Facebook](https://www.levels.fyi/SE/Amazon/Google/Facebook)

------
iamjono
I am from NZ and currently live in Canada. My US “employer” has tried for a
long time, years in fact, to find a senior engineer with the speciality I work
in. I’ve worked in this speciality around the world, and am well versed in
what it takes to get temporary and permanent work visas in several different
countries...

What Apple and Google etc are doing, there’s nothing to see here. This is
basically click bait.

However what is more of note, is that while the supply of top end, skilled and
speciality software engineers is ridiculously constrained in the US, if you’re
not one of the big guys like Google and Apple, youre pretty screwed.

Either train more highly skilled software engineers, or allow more from over
the borders and stop the stupid rhetoric about stealing jobs from Americans.

------
imgabe
Funny how abbreviating words by removing vowels - very common in newspaper ads
where you pay by the letter - is now considered "incoherent" and must be some
kind of sinister obfuscation.

~~~
sweis
OP here.

Yes, Apple is certainly saving a bundle on classified ads in the free
community paper with circulation of 6,000.

These ads are just to go through the motions to get someone a visa.

They don’t actually want anyone to reply to the ad. That’s why they have
mailing addresses in the ad instead of email addresses or URLs.

~~~
imgabe
Well, as some other people pointed out, it's for a green card, not a visa.
Posting an ad in the local paper is likely a legal requirement to go through
the process. So, yeah, why would they spend any more on doing it than
necessary?

But if you actually are old enough to have looked for jobs or anything else in
a physical newspaper, that kind of writing is typical of want ads in the
classifieds. It's not some special thing Apple is doing to prevent people from
understanding the ad. Almost every ad that size is written like that.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
I definitely do get the impression that a lot of people expect Apple to take
out a full page ad in the NYT or something.

------
mensetmanusman
Posting these is a legal requirement.

I wonder how things would change if America had essentially open borders for
highly skilled workers.

~~~
coldtea
> _I wonder how things would change if America had essentially open borders
> for highly skilled workers._

Probably lower wages for programmers born in America, as highly skilled
workers from an 8 billion pool of people abroad would flood the market.

~~~
lotsofpulp
Or the US would gain a population of highly productive people who can further
technological advances which would induce demand for high skilled labor at a
faster rate than supply would lower the price point.

I haven’t heard of a region complaining about an influx of educated people. I
commonly hear about regions complaining about brain drains though.

~~~
Mountain_Skies
And the rest of the world would experience brain drain, further widening the
global inequality gap. But hey, some corporations in the United States get
higher stock prices. The rest of the planet should be ok with that. The planet
exists to prop up the US tech industry.

~~~
lotsofpulp
That’s a greater philosophical question of who is entitled to what in this
world, and it always comes down to might makes right. Taken to the extremes,
the only “fair” solution is a one world country with redistribution taxes, but
that’s just now how people work.

There’s significant brain drain going on within the US, and stopping the free
movement of people is a solution, but in the long run it’s not going to be
sufficient.

------
hotsauceror
My dad was an IT manager back in the 1980s, for a Fortune 500 company. He said
it was a common end-run around certain compliance requirements. Like, if they
had a candidate that they knew they wanted to hire for a position, but that
required a public posting to ensure that hiring, in general, was fair to
everyone, they would post the opening in the classified section of the Wall
Street Journal, knowing that no one in their right mind would look there for
job postings.

~~~
doublement
> ...no one in their right mind would look there for job postings

I'm not sure if it's quite the same thing, but 6-7 years ago I saw an
employment ad from a well-known tech company in the local Craigslist, with
only a postal address listed and no phone or email. I sent a paper resume to
the address. They got back to me after a long delay, when I'd already found
other work.

~~~
hotsauceror
I actually got my first IT job by responding to an ad on Craigslist. At the
time it seemed to me like the sort of “guerrilla marketing” that a company I’d
want to work for would do. This was in 2008.

------
dublinben
Non-javascript mirror:
[https://nitter.net/sweis/status/1208253229617709056#m](https://nitter.net/sweis/status/1208253229617709056#m)

------
gumby
Why is this a "Silicon Valley" thing? I first saw these green card ads 30
years ago.

------
braythwayt
A very long time ago, I applied to collect benefits for what is now called
“Employment insurance” in the Socialist Republic of Kanuckistan.

In those days, you went in person to a drab office located inside a monumental
Government building designed in Brutalist style. Besides making the
application, you could also look for jobs: There was a physical job board with
little cards posted on it.

I mentioned an ad I saw for a job in my field, and the civil servant helping
me said, “Don’t bother. They already have someone they want to hire from
overseas, and they’re required to post an advertisement here for 90 days.” (I
may misremember the exact duration.)

The agent told me that anybody who applied would have a long delay before
getting an interview, long delays trying to follow up or even get an answer
about how the interview went, and in the end, they wouldn’t hire anybody local
regardless of experience or expertise.

I complained that this was clearly gaming the system, and the agent shrugged:
“If you can’t get another job just as good, come back and complain then.”

For me in my field, that was certainly a fine answer. But for other fields,
maybe not.

------
geebee
A law firm came under fire a couple years ago for doing a presentation on how
to comply with the requirements for searching for a US citizen n a way that
ensures you don’t end up succeeding. Anyone remember the link?

------
shadowgovt
Are they doing this because the jobs are already advertised on the company
website and if a job can be filled by an H-1B applicant and an American they
still have to post the print ad?

The abbreviated print and post address makes sense if they're just complying
with a law that's redundant to the job posting system they already offer on
the website.

------
zenexer
The tweet has been deleted, but to preserve the context, here’s the original,
with a screenshot of the text as well:
[https://imgur.com/gallery/wbE6zF7](https://imgur.com/gallery/wbE6zF7)

------
rguzman
this is one of my favorite (bc it is pretty harmless) cases of regulations
failing spectacularly: the reason the companies do this is that it is a legal
requirement for H1B visas. the idea, IIUC, is that before giving the job to an
immigrant, the company should do a proper search to fill the position with an
american candidate. what happens instead is that the companies make no
additional effort to find american candidates after they've decided to sponsor
the H1B (largely because that's just not how the hiring pipelines work), and
instead everyone wastes time and effort "complying" with the requirements that
law has for a proper search.

~~~
belltaco
It isn't for H1B, it's for green cards.

------
jmccorm
Another trick (not seen in this example) is when you already have a specific
candidate you want to promote or hire, listing a job with the very specific
and unique set of products and skills that few candidates could hope to match
so exactly.

------
zubairq
I worked in tech recruitment for many years. This article is correct, as often
the candidate is already chosen but they still have to say they looked on the
open market. There is also another case though where sometimes they don’t
intend at all to find someone to fill a position so that they can say it is
really hard to find someone, which is for other poluitical or personal gain.

I will also say that usually the job adverts are not so badly written as the
article suggests. Usually they even interview the candidates and then say none
of them were suitable, even if the candidates were a good fit

~~~
zubairq
Good to see my previous comment downvoted. It shows that the truth of hiring
is so unbelievable that I needed to be downvoted

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aasasd
So, if I understand the ads pretty easily, then I'm apparently already a
better fit for the job than the tweet author?

------
Fodloot
Ah,a printed ad, that brings back some memories. The years have gone by...

------
peter_retief
They basically want to hire foreigners that will be more vulnerable and work
for less money, longer hours with no overtime, not unionised. Common practice
in the UK and Australia as well

~~~
jimbob45
This is my read on the situation too. The GOP stands to make a killing if they
can persuade the voting population of this after the left has put all their
eggs in the immigration basket.

~~~
lotsofpulp
The proper solution would be to untie green card and visas from employers, not
to dissuade and disallow educated, productive people from immigrating to your
country.

