Indians dominate IT via lower costs and ethnic favoritism

Indians dominate IT via lower costs and ethnic favoritism. By Megan Barth at California Globe.

Two-thirds of Silicon Valley’s nearly 400,000 tech jobs are held by foreign-born workers. India-born employees account for 23 percent and China-born for 18 percent–together outnumbering U.S.-born workers at just 34 percent, according to a 2025 Joint Venture Silicon Valley report.

This transformation extends to the C-suites. Major companies are now led by foreign-born executives: Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen, IBM’s Arvind Krishna, Intel’s Lip-Bu Tan (Malaysian-born), YouTube’s Neal Mohan, and T-Mobile US’s Srinivas Gopalan — many from India.

 

Satya Nadella at Microsoft,  and Sundar Pichai at Alphabet (Google)

 

Silicon Valley, pioneered in American garages by Jobs, Hewlett, Packard, Noyce, and Moore, has gone global at the expense of domestic workers. …

Competition on price:

Foreign software developers … earn roughly 30 percent less than Americans.

This “redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants,” … fueling Big Tech profits and stock surges while sidelining mid-career American professionals.

Veteran Silicon Valley marketer “Mary” had the experience, the resume, and the skills, with stints at Google and Cisco. Yet after two years of relentless job hunting, she remains unemployed. Her story is emblematic of a broken system: she was ordered by her Indian-born CEO to train her lower-paid foreign replacement before being laid off.

“I had experience. I should have walked right into these corporate jobs, but I didn’t,” Mary told RealClearInvestigations. “Why? Because Silicon Valley is flooded with people who work for two-thirds of the price, or even half price.”

Ethnic tribalism:

Hiring has grown “tribal,” according to Kevin Lynn of the Institute for Sound Public Policy:

“Professionalism doesn’t exist in these IT departments anymore… when you look at the hiring, it becomes very tribal — India versus the rest of the world.”

Engineer Stephen Vivien described Indian H-1B workers at Google sharing interview questions to help each other. A New Jersey jury recently awarded $8.4 million against Cognizant Technology Solutions in a discrimination case involving bias against non-Indian workers. …

Losers:

The human cost is profound. Displaced Americans like Mary face not just unemployment but the erosion of the California dream they helped build.

Mid-career engineers, marketers, and developers, often with families, mortgages, and roots in the state, find themselves uncompetitive against a system that rewards lower wages and networked hiring over experience and loyalty. …

Winners — by Professor Richard Werner and Wall Street Apes:

It’s not that only Indians are IT geniuses. This has been explained here on X: The hiring Indian gets a %age of the salary of the new hired Indian. An Amway-style commission pyramid.

As this is routine in India everyone sticks to Indians: they know it, play ball & keep it secret.

New data shows once an Indian CEO gets hired at a major company, what follows is Americans getting pushed out of their jobs and replaced by Indians

Major Companies with an Indian CEO:

– Google – Sundar Pichai – Indian
– Microsoft – Satya Nadella – Indian
– YouTube – Neal Mohan – Indian
– Adobe – Shantanu Narayen – Indian
– IBM – Arvind Krishna – Indian
– Infosys – Salil Parekh Indian
– NetApp – George Kurian – Indian
– Arista Networks – Jayshree Ullal – Indian
– Novartis – Vasant Narasimhan – Indian
– Micron – Sanjay Mehrotra – Indian
– Honeywell – Vimal Kapur – Indian
– Flex – Revathi Advaithi – Indian
– Niyafair (Wayfair) – Niraj Shah – Indian
– Chanel – Leena Nair – Indian
– Shantanu Narayen (Adobe) – Indian
– Cognizant – Ravi Kumar S. – Indian
– Cognizant (variant/duplicate) – Indian
– Vertex – Reshma Kewalramani – Indian
– Escaler Indian
– Zscaler – Jay Chaudhry – Indian
– Microsoft Gaming – Indian
– FedEx – Indian

“There’s an observable correlation between the rise of Indian-born CEOs taking the helms at major U.S. companies and increased offshoring and outsourcing activity to India”

There is also a massive correlation to once an India CEO gets hired, H-1B visa applications skyrocket.

Ricardo Duchesne:

Indian migrants are particularly attractive because they are more compliant and geographically mobile than native Whites with comparable education. Lacking deep community roots or established family ties in the West, they accept irregular and intense schedules more readily. There are no entrenched mortgages, local schools, or unions associated with the importation of fresh Indian migrants. This entails less political or social pushback when companies adjust to new market signals or replace workers with AI.

The cost savings are substantial: firms can hire a senior Indian developer in the US or Canada on work visas for $30,000–$50,000 per year, in contrast to $150,000–$200,000 for a similarly qualified American worker.

Their narrow education, total focus on STEM degrees, compliance, and one-dimensional desire for money have made Indians quite useful as employees in limbic capitalist sectors such as social media, e-commerce, gaming, streaming, and AI-driven engagement. …

In the United States, according to data collected by the Pew Research Center (published 2025), the median income of Indian-headed households is about $145,000 – $156,000, which is significantly higher than the U.S. national median of $75,000–$83,000. The median income of Taiwanese Americans is $133,000 – $145,000, while that of Chinese Americans is $98,400 – $108,60. Chinese and Indian immigrants also show higher STEM educational attainment.

This should not surprise us: Indian and Chinese immigrants to the U.S. are heavily filtered through H-1B visas, leading to employment. They don’t “waste their time” with Liberal Arts, but focus on high-paying fields like computer science, medicine, engineering, and finance. In Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, second-generation Chinese and South Asians similarly demonstrate higher household median incomes and stronger representation in high-tech occupations.

 

 

Commenters:

Indians are NOT remotely IT geniuses. I have worked with 1000s of them and maybe 5 of those were above average. …

Actually very few of them are. While at Intel in the early 90’s I saw first hand the results of a team when there was an Indian made manager. The team grew to include only Indians. One of them worked closely with me and later confided they had to pay 10% of his pay to the manager for 1 year. That was back then. It is much higher now. After 35 years I’m out.

The flood of Indians was insane and the skill sets almost none existent by the time I left. Coincidentally, I was assigned to establish the Indian development and support center in India for my company. I spent years on this. They are just as non-qualified there as they are here.

The entire narrative surrounding the “skill” and “talent” of an Indian engineer was 100% bullshit. …

It’s the same process everywhere. Particularly in the English speaking world. I work in banking and we went from a few Indians 20 years ago, to them being everywhere now. The management hierarchy is dominated by Indians, teams are mostly Indian, and we are still offshoring.

hat-tip Peter S