Not only does this assume everyone in the thread is American, but also completely disregards the sovereignty and historic significance of many Eastern European countries.

My own country only exists because India wanted to get back at Pakistan and helped us in our independence war. If they hadn’t, we’d still be part of Pakistan—which would be what it would be.

I've personally found a lot of success with:

  - Deliberate relaxation - I found the muscle relaxation technique incredibly valuable ( https://www.healthline.com/health/healthy-sleep/fall-asleep-fast )
  - Sleep in a cold, dark room 
  - Limited phone time - mindless scrolling is fine if it helps me relax, but not if it amps me up

  - Strenuous exercise - I've found that training late at night (I compete in powerlifting) and going to bed immediately after leads to very deep, restful sleep
  - Caffeine timing - to an extent timing matters, but daily amount is by far the biggest driver for sleep quality
  - Meditation - it affected sleep adversely and even though very calm and level, I felt substantially more awake after meditation

I've worked at and interviewed people at FAANGs for the past 5 years and the bar for hiring is the same.

In my particular office, upwards of 60% of the people working there were either H1B or contractors managed by Wipro. There were plenty of job listings that looked appropriate for new graduates / people with less than 5 years of experience but these were rarely filled by non-temp/non-contractor/non-H1B folks. HR never went out of their way to recruit local talent and did the bare minimum to "post" the job. I sensed they made the jobs hard to find, but also wrote the postings in such a way that being unable to find an American willing to do the work was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The more Machiavellian managers realized they could overwork the H1B's because of how dependent they were on sponsorship.

If both incoming and outgoing positions are in the same geography and have the same responsibilities (e.g. a software engineer moving between Bay Area companies), the positions are considered equivalent.

> prevailing wage determination

You need to do this for H1 positions as well. You also need to file an LCA to prove the occupation is a "specialty" occupation. The process is in general quite similar.

The lawsuit refers to the Permanent Labor Certification process - the process of certifying that a position cannot be filled by a US citizen. This is one of the first early steps of an employer sponsoring an employee for a Green Card (so called immigrant visas, not H1-B). In the overwhelming majority of cases this affects people already employed by the company often on non-immigrant visas (such as the H1-B) which it would like to retain. They have already gone through the much demonized H1 visa process.

Onto the process - the "newspaper" reference which some commenters have been hung up on is a DoL requirement. It's literally Facebook going by the book and filling all requirements. Where the lawsuit comes in is that Facebook only followed the DoL requirements and did not advertise positions how they would beyond that.

Additionally the article itself states

> When U.S. workers did apply, the suit said, Facebook hired them into different jobs, reserving the open position for the H-1B worker.

Is this discrimination? Yes. Is there a better pathway to retain foreign employees? Not currently. I'm not a fan of Facebook at all, but they do what they need to to keep talent in a competitive environment.

For what it's worth, as an ex-FB engineering manager, this isn't how Facebook works at all. 99% of software engineers are not hired into an "open position". Facebook hires all software engineers that pass the hiring process without regard to whether they are US citizens or not. Then, after starting work for Facebook, there is a trial period where software engineers figure out what team they are going to work for, usually working a bit on a few different teams.

Unfortunately, immigration law seems to be written by people who had no familiarity with how modern large software engineering companies operate. Tech companies are essentially forced to make up "positions" for the purposes of immigration law. This makes the law pointless, except for the occasional fine for not obeying the meaningless rules precisely enough, which is just the cost of doing business.

There is just no way to make a company "first consider US citizens for every open job" when you don't hire one person at a time for separate jobs. What does that even mean when you are trying to hire 100 people a week, and you just want to hire the 100 best people you can find every week? This law fundamentally has an incoherent goal.

Not really sure with how requiring "modern large software engineering companies" to hire qualified US citizens before hiring foreigners is somehow a burden to said companies. How is it harder to skip the H-1B process than to hire one of the US citizens?

> Tech companies are essentially forced to make up "positions" for the purposes of immigration law.

If you don't have positions, why are you hiring? They aren't sitting around twiddling their thumbs just collecting a paycheck, are they? If you don't know where the H-1Bs are going to be, how do you know a US citizen is not qualified for the position the H-1B ends up in?

> There is just no way to make a company "first consider US citizens for every open job" when you don't hire one person at a time for separate jobs. What does that even mean when you are trying to hire 100 people a week, and you just want to hire the 100 best people you can find every week?

Um, you hire the best 100 US citizens and forget the H-1B process? Is it really that difficult? If you have a specific position which you can't seem to fill, train someone? Still can't fill it, then go through H-1B? How/why is hiring via H-1B the default? That is the baffling thing.

> This law fundamentally has an incoherent goal.

Really? It seems pretty clear the intention is to force companies to hire US citizens when there is someone which can fill the position. When the position is "best people you can find", how can you argue a US citizen does not fulfill the requirements?

In the current environment, if you work in tech, and don't have a job at Facebook/FAANG, there is a reason. There are tons of possible reasons. An immigrant "taking your job" is definitely not that reason.

Because the 100 best people you can find aren't all US citizens, when their citizenship isn't relevant to the job. This law (and common sense) permits companies to hire for a highly paid job and to make the requirements so demanding that you have to look outside the US to hire enough people. That's exactly what is happening at the large "good" tech companies like Facebook or Google, and the same is true down to the mid size "good" tech companies like Airbnb or Stripe.

The real abusers of the immigration system are companies that are not bringing the best and brightest to the US, they are just trying to recruit immigrants so that they can offer lower wages.

This specific regulation was finalized in December 2004, so yes, it obviously could not have taken Facebook's specific hiring practices into consideration given Facebook hadn't even existed for a full year yet and I think had 6 employees at the time.

You can certainly argue the law needs to change, but man, good luck. There are a lot of other aspects of immigration law that need to change with higher priority than this, but it's a political minefield that candidates love to campaign on but Congress won't actually touch with a 50 foot pole. Until then, I don't think the Department of Labor has much choice but to enforce the law as it exists today. It isn't up to them to change it.

That if over 100 Americans apply, “the 100 best people” needs to come from that group — not immigrants on visas which require a lack of American applicants.

> This law fundamentally has an incoherent goal.

I think you don’t like the goal.

I was at a company that abused it, and we were hiring DBAs whose entire job was to administer MS SQL server. There were plenty of people locally who could do this, but none who were willing to work 70 hours a week for the very average salary.

The US government wasn't even sharing any data on the visas publicly until the Trump administration forced them. Once the data was public, it was blatantly obvious as to why they hadn't shared the data before. Wipro, Cognizant, etc were hogging the H1Bs for labor arbitrage purposes, making it hard for people looking for actual rare talent to get anyone in country. I had a friend from Pune who was stuck waiting in India for 2 years (an amazingly talented ML engineer) due to us not being able to get him a visa while Wipro was stealing them all in the same region for their labor arbitrage business.

> Is this discrimination? Yes.

It's fairly common practice to hire for the expertise and fit for the position. How is this different in that regard?

As someone who works at a big corp with regular OSS contributions, this doesn't surprise me at all. Recently a "Look at how amazing we are" e-mail was sent out to my team touting the number of PRs submitted to a widely-used OSS project.

If your management incentivizes it, you'll try to game the system.

This isn't a case where a highly uncommon name can lead to a high degree of certainty in association.

I can probably post all sorts of horrific crap on the internet without anyone ever being able to trace it back to me.

I went to grad school with someone who later lived in NYC. He shared a name with someone who basically was the cause of George Steinbrenner (NY Yankees owner) getting banned from baseball for a few years during the same period. Obviously not a popular NYC figure.

This was pre-web etc., but my friend ended up with death threats left on his answering machine.

Fortunately, none of us are too notorious, though one alternate "me" has pretty poor credit and another has been sued a couple of times recently.

While I understand the sentiment, but I think we need to speak of skill vs physical factors. The division of weightlifters in weight classes is to deal with the latter rather than the former.

Similarly - WADA does this already by banning doping. PEDs don't make you a high-skill athlete, they enhance physical capabilities (stronger, faster recovery etc).

Laurel Hubbard is in an unfortunately unique position, where she's at a natural advantage due to higher testosterone levels earlier in life.

It might be impossible to end up with a fair division, but I don't think "no division" is a good answer.

1. Country-wide doping systems that currently exist in weightlifting. Punishing an individual lifter does little to disincentivize doping at a larger scope. A country's sports organization can just take on the next Olympic hopeful (or buy another country's). Alternatively whole countries' participation can be banned, punishing clean athletes.

2. WADA testing is largely inconsistent across the world. You can take a look at the doping reports [here](https://www.iwf.net/anti-doping/statistics/) and compare e.g. Iranian athletes to others.

3. "Steroids" is a big bucket. Weightlifting even now has devolved into a race to design the best undetectable compound.

The IWF is already in trouble with the IOC for so many positive tests - I'm really curious to see how things develop and whether weightlifting ends up splitting into tested/untested federations like powerlifting.

I'll read up on your resources - and yes, different rules across regions would be a big one.

Personally I just take Creatine and WPI, but I'm only training for functional fitness as a desk bound software engineer. Still, it's a very interesting topic; I do know someone who competes at a national level, and the routines and regimes are punishing.

> Personally I just take Creatine and WPI All you need! Similarly I'm an engineer, I compete in a tested powerlifting fed, laying off the "extra supplements" for now.

What I have anecdotally observed is that regularly lifting closely to your maximum (particularly at higher levels) will inevitably lead to accumulated fatigue. Whatever the root cause of that fatigue is (whether muscoskeletal, endocrine or nervous) is a factor that does lead to degraded performance over time.

The literature is lacking in longer-term studies, so I'm curious to see whether my anecdotal experience is pure confirmation bias or there is a mechanism behind it.