Hacker News Reader

Comment by gozur88 | Hacker News Reader

No. That may be true for a tiny handful of experts, but most of them are paid less.

The parent comment is specifically about cap-exempt institutions though, which typically pay everyone following rigid pay scales. In this case, an H-1B (or often J-1 actually) always costs more.

Now you can argue that postdoc and research positions don't pay well enough to attract local talent[1], but I don't think you should conflate this issue with the typical Indian consultancy companies working their way around H-1B constraints.

[1] Which seems true from what I've seen. I know people at the Berkeley Lawrence Lab who would triple their salaries working in the industry.

Less than who?

To hire somebody via H1B route, you need to: a) pay at least average salary for this position; b) prove that there are no local candidates available for your opening, c) prove that it is not because of your low pay rates, but because of genuine shortage of specialists with these particular skills, d) pay processing fees and wait for at least 6 months, perhaps more.

If you really believe H1B holders are paid at least the prevailing rates and are hired only because of genuine shortages, then I got beach-front property in Arizona for sale.

Common sense says if someone cannot freely move between jobs, who faces immanent deportation if fired, who will have much better prospects of living well in US than their home country, then this person has much less leverage and would be paid less. It is easy to test this hypothesis: do H1B holders have a much higher rate of changing jobs after obtaining visa than their peers.

Do you know the process of hiring for H1B? You have to _prove_ you can't hire a local, AND that the salary you are offering is fair. Yes, most of H1B jobs are menial and boring, and employees don't hold much leverage, but they are "underpaid" because of the nature of most such jobs (supporting ageing JEE / mainframe systems with lots of legacy code no one else want to look into), but it isn't that there a lot of competition for these kind of jobs, worth of TheDailyWTF front page. I started my career in software engineering with something like this: supporting a ton of spaghetti code coming from a large investment bank. If I had chosen a H1B route back then, of course I'd change this job immediately after getting a green card. But somebody had to do it, right?

It's a scam. Meet some h1bs. I have that did my same job. They made 20-50% less than maket rate.

I was on receiving end (cancelled my application, though). 135k looked like quite normal salary for me (Boston).

>Do you know the process of hiring for H1B? You have to _prove_ you can't hire a local, AND that the salary you are offering is fair.

Come on now. You can't actually believe this is how it works in real life.

http://www.cringely.com/2013/07/18/so-thats-how-h-1b-visa-fr...

a) The official averages are low due to collective collusion. b) They only have to advertise somewhere in the dusty corner of a newspaper nobody reads. c) They've successfully conned Congress into believing that there is a labor shortage without any real evidence such as rising salaries. d) That's what Infosys and Wipro are for. H1Bs on demand.

To hire H1B you have to go through a legally defined process which is a proxy for 'proving' that there are not local candidates available at the rate. There are ways to manipulate that process by adjusting the scope of the specialty skill set such that the protection of the 'proof' process does not fulfill it's stated purpose.

Where is your statistics on that?

Here are some interesting statistics:

>> The EPI study, written by University of California-Davis computer science professor Norman Matloff, compared American-born college graduates holding degrees in computer science and electrical engineering to their foreign-born counterparts.

>> There are, of course, reasons for this that have nothing to do with intelligence. More than 80 percent of H-1B visa holders are approved to be hired at wages below those paid to American workers for comparable positions, according to EPI. And because H-1B workers and green card applicants are locked into jobs with whatever employer sponsors their visa, they have less less leverage to push for raises and promotions. As Matloff puts it, "the worker becomes a de facto indentured servant."

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/02/h1b-visa-bloomberg-f...

Also:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/03/microsoft-stem-e...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com