I suspect that country of origin would fall under the various anti-discrimination laws.

If you buy online, sure. In brick & mortar stores, the vast majority of laptops that I see on display have touchscreens.

H1B applications (both granted and denied) are public record, actually. Here is one source for the most recent numbers - you can drill into any specific company for more details.

(There's probably some govt run website somewhere that has all that info, too. Haven't really looked.)

Try to buy a non-touchscreen laptop these days.

Satya is the right guy. He's an engineer, not a salesman. He knows how things actually work, and not just inside the little (in modern realities) Microsoft bubble.

(case in point: he knows what node.js is - not as a buzzword, but the actual tech details)

There's one more thing. Not many people seem to have been paying attention to what other changes there have been under Satya, but one noticeable change is the skyrocketing rise of Scott Guthrie. Why this matters? Well, Scott is the guy who, for the last 7 years or so, has been heavily pushing for F/OSS inside Microsoft. In particular, open sourcing ASP.NET MVC was his testbed project, and all the other .NET bits that went F/OSS after that were also under his guidance. Oh, and jQuery.

And now this guy is being rapidly promoted - first stepping in to take Satya's place as the latter goes CEO, then becoming an executive VP of Cloud+Enterprise. Now this is the division that's basically responsible for the entire MS server-side stack - SQL, Exchange, Azure etc - but also all the developer tools. I'll let you draw the conclusions from that.

Oh, and one other telling thing was the recent renaming of Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure, with the justification of "we do more than just Windows there, and don't want Linux users to feel unwelcome". This sort of casual dismissal of the Windows brand was unthinkable mere months ago.

Why do you believe that MS under Satya will retain the lock-in? One very noticeable thing that came up shortly after he came to the helm was a renewed talk about F/OSS, both using it and shipping it. Heck, I didn't think I'd ever live to see the time when a Microsoft lawyer would use the words "copyleft" and "cool" next to each other in a single sentence, and yet it happened a week ago.

Things change.

The whole thing was not a bad idea for tablets. And having tablet-centric touch UI side by side with desktop UI makes sense for all those convertibles.

The problem was that Metro was shoved onto desktop/mouse users. Now that it's being fixed, this makes sense. What makes even more sense is Metro apps being able to run in regular floating, resizable windows - this means that you can write an app with a single codebase that runs on any Windows device in any form factor, including ARM varieties and phones (and yes, it is possible to dynamically adapt UI to the platform). Which means that people will now actually write those apps, because they will have the entire market of existing Windows desktop users to target.

Well, I'm a full-time salaried employee, not a contractor, and so are all the other guys that I know who got hired on H1B. I'm Russian, not Indian, but I know a few H1Bs from India, too, and it's the same story for them. But this is all anecdotal, of course.

Regarding the overall numbers, here is something from 2012. It's curious that neither Google nor Facebook nor MS are in the top 10. Looking at the table further, I see these hire counts:

MS - 2700
Amazon - 2200
Apple - 1200
Intel - 800
Google - 600

Not too shabby, but smaller than I expected, to be honest. However, where I was wrong is the total scale of operation. The top 3 - which all seem to be "contractor outsource" sweatshops just as you've described - between themselves, account for almost 70k hires. I don't recognize other names in top 10, but I assume that at least some of them are similar, especially all the companies with "consulting" in their names.

So yes, your "under 5%" is estimate is quite accurate. I apologize.

As a side note, Facebook is not on that list at all, so I assume that they do all of their H1B hiring through other companies. Now this doesn't necessarily translate to abuse, but when others don't do this kind of thing, it makes one wonder...

I know full well about these - I even mentioned Tata in my reply! But somehow people don't usually talk about Tata. They talk about Facebook, Google, Microsoft etc - precisely the places where it doesn't happen.

I also seriously doubt that I'm in 1-5%. Between all of the companies I've listed above, I'm sure there's at least 10k of H1Bs working in them, probably more.

Threats or abuse do happen (in places like Tata). And yes, green card is a carrot in practice, but here at least it's not used to negotiate a lower wage. That's as it should be.

Basically, like I said, I agree that 1) the way H1B program is set up is rife for abuse, 2) it actually is abused by some companies, and 3) it therefore needs to be replaced by something much different that does not allow for such abuse. The point that I'm trying to get across is that many H1Bs do not work for sweatshops or get paid low wages.

As an H1B, I'd sign up for that in a heartbeat, but it's simply not an available option. One can apply for a green card while on H1B (and I did), but this takes years. Then there's the diversity lottery (and I participate in that, too), but that one is, well, a lottery.

FWIW, and this is purely anecdotal, but every single H1B that I know, myself included, has applied for a green card as soon as they could. Granted, all of H1Bs that I know are in major tech companies like MS, Google and Amazon.

While H1B is a "non-immigrant visa" in theory, it's dual intent - meaning that you can apply for green card while on it (which is much easier when your employer sponsors you for that), and not get immediately booted out of the country. So for a lot of people, H1B is, indeed, their immigration track.

The fact that Tata is still issued any H1B quotas is, frankly, preposterous. They are the worst abusers by far, with a long track record of that.

As someone who is working on an H1B visa in Seattle, I didn't see anything like what you describe. I get paid as much as my American colleagues - more on average, in fact. My employer has sponsored my green card application, which I'm patiently waiting on (and why'd they do that if they just want an "indentured servant"?) No-one has ever directly threatened or even hinted at abusing their ability to complicate life for me as an H1B. I'm also not aware of anyone else being similarly abused.

Note, I'm not saying that I don't believe your story. I totally do, but the key part of it is:

So yes, if you worked for some place like Tata, my sincere condolences. But it's not like that for all of us.

I would also add that I do think that H1B is a deeply flawed program, and should be remade into something more sensible, and probably geared specifically towards fast(er)-track immigration rather than true temporary work (which is how most other countries handle this).

Sure, so why not ask the actual H1Bs?

I, for one, can tell you that, looking at GlassDoor, I earn more than the average in my area for my position, for 5 years now.

The irony is actually that the present H1B system results in more lock-in if people try to immigrate. Let me explain.

If I'm an H1B with no intent of obtaining green card / citizenship, then my only obstacle to switching employees is finding another company that is willing to sponsor my H1B application. And even if I get laid off, I have some time (IIRC, it was about a month - not exactly much, but there's some wiggle room here) to find a new employer. So I can shop around for better wages etc.

On the other hand, if I'm H1B, and the company that hired me sponsors my green card application (which is the usual skilled immigration track for US), then, should I switch my employees, my green card filing is no longer valid. Basically, I have to start from scratch with the new employer sponsoring it. Given that a green card application queue today is literally several years long, and you basically get pushed back to the end of the queue if you have to re-file, this can be a major setback - the later in the game it happens, the bigger it is.