Since the bidding is a solution to a problem caused by the cap on # of H1B visas, why not just do away with the cap?
If you're rearranging the application process to solve problems created with the bidding, which is to solve problems from created from cap, why not just solve the original problem?
The review process and due diligence for H1B takes months, so signals are still only available in large intervals, which creates volatility that favors high quantity employers like H1B shops.
The H1B is specifically for educated & highly skilled immigrants, who has a sponsoring employer and is paid more than the average U.S. citizen for the same job in the same area.
Take a look at the publicly disclosed H1B data. Walmart hired people under a lower paid category with the job title 'Data Scientist' for $70K a year.
Let's talk about India, since that's where over half of H1Bs come from:
Educated: Yes, if you want to call a degree from an institution that most likely taught rote learning instead of critical thinking, with massive numbers of students cheating because the culture favors cheating if you can get away with it.
Highly Skilled: This is where the rote learning comes in. Shops which simply pirate some particular enterprise software product, train people how to use it (SAP anything, Business Objects, Microstrategy, Informatica, you name it) and then profit. You then end up with a resource who comes to America knowing Informatica and/or datastage, but suddenly you find out they don't know SQL. Yes, this happened.
The median Wal-Mart data scientist H1B salary in 2015 was $140,000 [1]. There are lot of Indian H1B immigrants who are educated and highly skilled - are you sure you just don't have a passive racial bias?
[1] http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=WAL-MART+ASSOCIATES+INC&job...
Littered throughout the data are jobs which are advertised as "Data Scientist", but the official name for the job is something quite different, like "Programmer Analyst".
However, the job description involves building predictive models, working with Apache Spark, Python, and R.
The website doesn't even have a working search function, but let me go ahead and provide a link which supports my point:
http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=ORACLE+AMERICA+INC&job=DATA...
Do you really think that $46,000 is a reasonable salary to pay a DATA SCIENTIST??? Please, by all means, explain this to me.
And fuck you for trying to call out a racial bias. My anger at the H1B scammers is strictly based on the fact that I have good friends from India, Malaysia, and Russia who had absolutely bad-ass skills that are incredibly hard to find. They all were turned down for H1B courtesy of the nitwits like Tata bringing in talentless hacks. Talentless hacks are a universal phenomenon in all cultures: they go where the easy, reliable money is. It just so happens that the Indian outsourcing firms have a business model that works very well for talentless hacks. Not unlike the bond trading boom in the US in the 80's.
>Do you really think that $46,000 is a reasonable salary to pay a DATA SCIENTIST??? Please, by all means, explain this to me.
Chill dude. For a lower level data scientist in Westminster, CO, that's appropriate. Notice they have a higher level data scientist getting $76k. Not accusing of cherry picking, but really, this is the second time you've done it.
India and China each graduate many times more software engineers each year than does the US. Many, perhaps even most, would love to work and stay in the US.
With a massive influx of engineers in a short span of time, I can't see how wages would remain where they are now in areas like NYC and SF. This is probably exactly what the Facebooks et al want, I guess.
How? They can only be approved if they're getting paid the same or more than existing software devs.
Ha. Look at some writeups of the SoCal Edison outsourcing, for example. U.S. citizens making $95K were replaced with H1-B workers earning $60-65K, and that's generously estimating the lower salaries. Tata and Infosys might pay their workers closer to $40-50K.
They're currently under investigation for violating the immigration labor laws surrounding the H1B [1].
It's a different problem than the cap or the problem in the article. You're always going to have agencies trying to abuse a system regardless of whether there is a cap or not, and they will be investigated and penalized accordingly.
http://www.natlawreview.com/article/commentary-tata-consulta...
Meaning if there was a cap (or no cap), there would still be enforcement making it a non-issue.
Not really.
Competent devs are not cheap anywhere. In order to noticeably lower wages in the US you need to bring a lot of software developers from other countries.
But the supply of software developers is quite limited.
Besides, as soon as wages start to move downwards, software development products start going down in cost (or go up in quality). That increases sales of software and increases demand for more software developers.
I have seen most of my fellow programmers change their career since having 15 years of experience is bad thing because we are not willing to work for 60K.
Is it to management of lower skilled developers?
Because flooding the market with indentured $60,000 technical workers isn't good for American workers or America?
So a company doesn't need to hire H1Bs directly. They can just setup a contract with one of these outsourcing firms to supply workers. That's precisely what Disney did when they replaced a huge number of IT employees with H1Bs.
The cap on the number of H1Bs prevents Disney from setting up their own little H1B shell corporation to perform the same function which is why they (along with many other big corporations) complain to Congress about the cap. If the cap weren't there they wouldn't need to outsource to Tata et al in order to completely screw over American workers.
You always have people trying to break rules, and the H1B is no different. H1B wage violators are a separate issue to the cap & lottery issue in the article, and being addressed accordingly.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/us/in-turnabout-disney-can...
[2] http://www.natlawreview.com/article/commentary-tata-consulta...
Cap (or no cap) doesn't influence a select group of employers from breaking the H1B visa rules and being disqualified.
I work at a company where we are trying to hire a data warehouse engineer in the same geographic region. We absolutely can't hire anyone that is remotely qualified for less than $80K a year. Typically we're talking about at least $90K.
It blows my mind that the government isn't able to properly track an average wage for a profession when they have tax data coming in annually from every working American.
Because there are far, far too many low wage foreign programmers driving down wages already.
Why not abolish the program entirely? That's far more palatable.