Legislation would restrict H-1B visas
latimes.com
latimes.com
Let's make it an auction. Let the bids tell us which skills are in highest demand and use the proceeds for scholarships and training of citizens in those jobs. Think H1B fees funding computer science scholarships. And at least with an auction we'll bring in higher quality workers that will contribute more to our economy (relative to a random selection).
Second, the catch-22 on why brown people hating politicians can't solve the problem: To make companies prefer foreign workers less we have to protect those workers better. Make it easier for them to change jobs and harder to force them into long hours without pay.
I'm pretty sure the H1B lottery is evenly distributed. Are you thinking of the green card lottery?
Is it? You may be confusing it with the diversity visa lottery, which is weighted by country of origin.
This is the most important of all. Also let them be free agents and even work for themselves if they choose to. That is how it is in other countries like Canada, Australia etc.
>Wages for H-1B workers in computer programming occupations are overwhelmingly concentrated at the bottom of the U.S. pay scale. Wages on LCAs for 85 percent of H-1B workers were for less than the median U.S. wage in the same occupations and state.
http://cis.org/PayScale-H1BWages
The top H-1B recipients: http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2015-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx
Make the H-1B 'lottery' into an auction. Instead of accepting 65,000 H-1Bs at random--accept the 65,000 H-1Bs with the highest wages. That way we are getting the immigrants with the highest valued skills and stopping companies like Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCL, and Cognizant that game the immigration system by applying for the cheapest H-1Bs possible.
Wow, I wasn't aware the bar was so low. Given the recent brazen misuse of the program I hope this goes through
Big businesses in the macro sense, seem willing to do anything to cheat the system to drive down costs and subsequently wages.
I do think raising the cap will help.
Of course, I also don't think forcing higher costs on everyone in the name of favoring certain groups of people over others is a particularly laudable goal.
Of course, I also don't agree with the use of "artificial" as a synonym for bad (or good).
Isn't that the point of sovereignty though? To favor the locals over foreigners? It's why we have governments and borders.
It's ethical too: Because the locals are your (long-term) tax base. It's better to pay locals a higher wage than to import temporary cheap labor in most situations because the gains from the cheap labor wouldn't necessarily make their way (i.e. "trickle down") back to the locality. Especially not in a global economy and especially not with virtual goods like software and IT services.
Any other skilled migrant visa system I know of has a very explicit and fairly high wage minimum to prevent such abuse.
As a result, the stereotypical underpaid Indian engineer is a rarity in Europe. Indian engineers that do end up here are usually amongst the higher skilled and better paid workers.
Hell, it's even common for skilled migrants from outside the EU to get a higher starting salary than their local counterparts (especially those from poorer EU countries) just to meet the wage threshold.
Edit: I guess I might misunderstand the word suppress actually. If it means keep wages constant then I guess expanding the worker pool at the median salary level would probably do that, and the effect of not having any restriction would depress them!?
There might well be a salary limit, but it's obviously not very high, at least not by the standards of engineers. These guys are getting decent salaries by the standards of oridnary working Germans. I suspect it is a similar story for H1B in Aemrica.
The US State Department (who initially adjudicates the visa requests) works with the US Department of Labor to determine a range of compensation that is "standard" for a given job description. Unfortunately, that range is national, with the result that you see a lot of people hired in the Bay Area at wages that would be generous in West Garbut, AR.
> they are simply being used by corporations to lower wages
That's bit conspiratorial. I think of it more as they need more engineers to get more work done. This lowers the wages of the native engineer population, but raises them for the imported workers. The net result is a bigger population of highly productive high income earners, that is quite good for the overall American economy.
No, believing otherwise is naive. Zuckerberg isn't lobbying for more H1Bs out of the goodness of his heart and a profound belief that labor arbitrage will make the world a better place. Labor is Silicon Valley's biggest expense, you had better bet they're trying to reduce that cost.
If we're going to allow foreign workers, they shouldn't be shackled to employers like H1B workers are.
That's a silly caricature of what I said.
> If we're going to allow foreign workers, they shouldn't be shackled to employers like H1B workers are.
Agreed.
They can easily get more engineers by simply increasing salaries.
Let's say I'm a bright student deciding whether to study software engineering or plumbing. When I graduate, my salary will be driven by supply and demand. As a software engineer, I will be competing for jobs with other software engineers, many on H1B visas coming from countries where education is less expensive than in the US. So those software engineers can comfortably accept a lower salary. No such problem with plumbing, so it is rational for me to chose plumbing.
Now Zuckerberg and co can justifiably say "look, there is a shortage of software engineers, let's lift H1B cap".
I love how imply that foreign engineers have some sort of advantage over you because schools are cheaper where they come from, ignoring how much poorer those folks are. But actually that's nonsense - if you really wanted to pay low prices for foreign schools (out of yours/your parent's American income), you would have. Plenty of foreigners do attend Indian colleges, it's pretty straightforward to do.
It's quite popular among Africans. From what I'm told, African colleges are terrible, UK/US colleges are expensive, so India is a great middle ground.
There is no labor scarcity issue. I switched fields away from software engineering but if you pay me enough, can switch back just as easily. It's not rocket science.
Again, you ignore the fact that if an Americans wants a cheap foreign education, they can buy one. The difference between $0 in loans and $5000 in loans is negligible.
Scarcity = not everyone who wants something can have it. This means that some sort of rationing mechanism must be used (e.g. price) to distribute that thing.
Shortage = the price of a good is $X but not everyone willing to pay $X will receive the good.
Shortage is a market condition, usually a symptom of a broken market. Scarcity is just a fundamental fact of counting. It is not fair to say there is a shortage of Mercedes, but it is fair to say that Mercedes are a scarce resource.
That's how the market works. If you are Google or Facebook and you need 10000 more engineers, just pay enough to attract them. You'll get them from lower paying companies, which in turn will raise their salaries as well (but not as much), and so on. At the end of the chain, the companies which are the lowest paying and cannot hire anyone anymore will simply remove those positions. In time, more and more people will train to be software engineers, and salaries will shrink.
I understand that your primary goal is avoiding economic competition with people vastly poorer than you, but lets not lose sight of the fact that the economy as a whole suffers when valuable work doesn't get done.
Actually, I am Romanian, I was in the US for 6 months on a J1 visa at a top company, and now I'm looking for a job in Europe since it's so difficult to emigrate to the US.
I just disagree with the principle that if you study philosophy, it's your fault that you can't get a job, whereas if you're a company and want to hire a software engineer for $70k and you can't find any, it's the government's fault, not your own. I would prefer to let the market do its thing.
Also, I think that if suddenly there would be only 100 visas per year allowed, companies would learn to deal with that, either by opening remote offices or being more remote-friendly.
In contrast, no one wants to hire the philosophy major. There is no one else to blame because no third party is preventing him from behind hired.
You aren't wrong. But one does wonder why technical professions must be maximally subjected to "competition with people poorer than them" while lawyers, doctors, teachers and government workers seem to exempt from such competition.
Don't forget: they will also whine incessently about how there's a "shortage of engineers".
So if the median salary for skill X in locale Y is 150 and foreign labor is willing to accept 120, apply a 30 tax to the company to neutralize any difference, someone accepting 100 the company pays the 50 difference, etc.
I wish that every single individual who on this site rants against H1B, understood one thing about H1B (or any law in general):
The intent of a policy isn't always the real usage of a policy.
Or in more general, the art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.
I can clearly see how you approach this problem. You see these economics and incentive problems as some sort of equation, where you notice that foreign labor undercuts local labor in terms of wages. So your solution is: "Lets make it expensive for companies to hire foreign labor", but that's incredibly naive.
The elements of the equation you're missing is:
* H1B is a path to immigration, not just some mechanism (as stated by the policy) to acquire labor. The stated reason is how it might have been sold to the American people, but at the end of the day, it's how high skilled immigrants come to America.
* The foreign labor is much larger, and (economically) diverse than you think. If you put a 30 tax on a foreign labor who is willing to accept 120, then some other foreign labor who is willing to take 110 would find himself in demand.
* H1B regulations make it difficult for the foreign labor to easily change jobs, this results in them being more 'loyal' (that is, they work for a company for longer than their local counterparts), which means it's worth investing the training time on foreign labor (which means they would hire a 100K foreign labor for a job which needs a 150K local talent, pay 30K and train him).
* The reason why local talent can't be paid what they are asking for, is because not every product has the same 'gross profit margin'. People are willing to pay $600 for a smartphone which can be produced for $300(gross profit margin 100%), but they are not willing to pay $300 for a smart watch which is being produced for $150. However smartwatches could be sold if they were available for $250(that is if they carried a gross profit margin of 60%). Lower profit margin means that the local talent who demands $150K may not be available for hire.
I think this claim is BS. I've worked in enterprises large and small for about 18 years and I've never seen any company invest in training H1Bs, specifically. If a company offers training (which most don't these days) it is offered to all employees. Not just H1Bs.
Also, why invest in training H1Bs when by definition they're "temporary"? Most H1Bs are employed by the likes of consultancies (e.g. Tata, Wipro) and are brought into companies for terms of six months to two years (sometimes three) and I'm sure the majority of the contracts are at the shorter end of the scale (six months to a year). It doesn't make sense to spend three to six months training someone only to kick them out the door six months later.
Training is an investment. Why would you spend money on that if you didn't expect that investment to stick around for very long? It explains a lot of what's going on in IT these days where employees are treated as expendable and interchangeable.
There have been many incidences where American employees had to train their H1B replacements. [1]
There are many other ways this 'training' is implemented, When I say training, I mean the task of converting a less skilled employee into a higher skilled employee. One way of doing it is, a third party sponsors H1B, does the whole headache of hiring a foreign worker, and then they send those people to client location. The third party often exaggerates the experience of their employee, and most of the time there is a quick and fast training program in place (this training program is a proper training program).
Many times these H1Bs are blatently lying about what they know or for how long they know, and most clients have a rough idea of how this works, they also know that these noobies are really under pressure to learn according to what they're claiming and that they are cheap.
Consider it to be this way, imagine if you have a bunch of friends who currently work as a waiter, bus boy, chef, and dishwashers. You get them to join your company, you make them go through code academy style bootcamp, train them into knowing every crazy thing about Jenkins CI tool, and then send them to clients by claiming that you have a guy who is a Jenkins expert.
Great business plan right? Maybe not, but this is exactly what Indian IT companies do, except the people they pick all have engineering degrees and decent Mathematical training in high school (otherwise they'd have never gone to Engineering school).
> Most H1Bs are employed by the likes of consultancies (e.g. Tata, Wipro) and are brought into companies for terms of six months to two years (sometimes three) <
The main job of Tata and Wipro is to train these people to be good enough so that they can work at a client location. If an employee fails, then they just send him to more training.
1. https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/02/disney...
If this is really the intention, then changing the format to an auction (based on salary) instead of a lottery would help.
1) Companies that are doing well and growing in a low-cost area tend to suck up all of the available talent in that area, and they need to relocate or increase salaries to incentivize people to move there.
2) Low-cost areas generally have fewer jobs for highly educated and highly skilled people, so as an employee I'm taking a huge risk by moving there. If the job doesn't pan out or the company takes a dive, then I may need to move to a different area to find another job in my field.
Also, they are the most abused on the green card process since they have to wait years because of the huge backlog.
Edit: Seems like my argument is being misunderstood. The HB1 program should bring talent from many different countries not only India. It should bring different talent for different occupations not only IT.
My problem with the H1B is that it allows employers to coerce employees into these jobs, under the notion that there is a shortage. Well, maybe there's a "shortage" because these are unpleasant jobs, or because the people who are capable of doing these jobs are also capable of doing other, better paid jobs with better working conditions. As long as employers can coerce people into these jobs by controlling their right to live and work int he US, they will remain unpleasant and/or underpaid jobs, because the market mechanisms that would improve them are subverted through corporate control of the immigration system.
To me, what you're describing would be more akin to creating a random lottery and allowing in an extra 65,000 citizens, without a corporation telling them what educational path they are allowed to take, what whiteboard interview questions they are required to answer, what projects they are allowed to work on, or what city they are allowed to live in. You know, free citizens.
That, I don't really have any problem with either. But personal freedom for immigrants is the opposite of the H1B.
I am 100%, in theory, for this legislation, even though I haven't read it and fear what will be added to it or changed in it.
Only... I believe the disconnect occurs before this point. There are U.S. candidates. Companies -- for reasons of cost, control, lack of reciprocity and commitment, ageism, etc. -- simply don't want to hire them.
I've watched very competent U.S. staff replaced by inferior foreign staff. This is often NOT a matter of "the most qualified candidate".
Increasing minimum wage does not help it creates a bigger problem. A lot of smaller companies will happily show $100,000 salary to their employee while paying only $30,000. This is technically a fraud but the companies do it all the time. Google or Facebook wont be able to do it but those consulting companies could.
Here are my suggestions:
1. Do not allow consulting companies to file H1B at all. If the person is specialized then let some company hire him/her full time. Create a separate visa category for consulting work for foreign companies trying to send their staff to USA.
2. Scrap H4 and give EAD to the H1B spouse. Most of the illegal things about H1B is because of the desperate attempts by H1Bs to get the well educated spouse be productive. Also given that most H1B are male this is also a very anti-women thing to do by putting women out of work. My wife enrolled for F1 in a small university just to get an OPT EAD. Wasting $20K and 2 years for a completely useless masters degree.
3. Have a clear and simple path to green-card for H1Bs.
If the H1B company isn't offering a good salary, the person should be able to change jobs to another in the US without paperwork. This would remove most incentives for a person to take a below-market wage, removing the downward pressure (that I think is theoretical but...)
Plus it stops treating people like indentured servants. +1 for humanity.
For companies whining about people leaving fast: don't offer shitty jobs! Signing bonuses exist for americans, figure out how to keep people without the threat of deportation.
My wife had h4 and she could not work. I was sponsored a green card and she got her EAD while I am still waiting for my PR.
There also needs to be shorter waits for green cards for some nationalities. The 15 year wait for people from China or India is just ridiculous.
There is really no big difference from what physical location one is accessing project's resources (repos, tracking, etc). Big and sophisticated projects like GHC (leave alone Linux kernel) are being successfully developed by remote teams.
The only downside is that pointy-haired managers cannot easily bully and abuse (with unpaid hours) migrant employees and there is no easy and accessible personal payment solution (Paypal sucks for non-us citizens) due to "anti-terrorism" money-control cretinism.
Actually, there is no technical problems at all, only organizational.
What's wrong with bank transfers?
Offshoring introduces additional challenges to management -- it's simply easier to manage a workforce who rolls into the office and is locally present, though yes, remote (or occasional from-home) management is possible.
If a company wants to pay offshore-wages, then it can employ offshore talent, offshore, and incur the offshore management and logistics hassles. If it wants to hire domestic labour, it should do so at local labour rates.
If foreign workers are brought to domestic markets, allow them full mobility between employers.
Otherwise, the only effect of the H1-B program is to use one class of restricted-rights workers (the visa holders) to depress domestic wages through threat of a cheaper, effectively indentured workforce.
This has been clearly evident for years, and eloquently argued by Norman Matloff of UC Davis:
However, it's also by far the most attractive visa type for people from many countries. If I'm an e.g. German dev, what other options do I have if I wanted to work in the US long term? L-1?
> Otherwise, the only effect of the H1-B program
Obviously misuse isn't okay, but I'm sure they'd be chilling effects worth thinking about. I've always wondered why there aren't visa swap programs, i.e. if a Dutch and an American citizen wanted to live in the US/Netherlands respectively, why not swap (as long as some basic criteria are met)?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT
I don't know about using it to go to the US, but for a Dutch Visa it wasn't so painful.
Cut the salaries involved to 20% of what they are now, change the legal framework from "H1-B" to "no visa at all," and you've just described a stereotypical Donald Trump voter. AND YET I cannot help but imagine that those who would support this proposed legislation would be shocked at the comparison to those horrible terrible racist people.
But paying full costs for labour is long-term necessary. Again, Smith, in one of his less-frequently cited passages.
As an employee with years of experience working remotely and employer myself now I disagree.
In my opinion it is easier to manage people remotely now, at least in the areas I work(IT). You can focus on the output someone produces without the interference of distractions.
As an example if someone goes and checks early in the morning in the Office, goes home late, it can distract employer opinion on this person being a great value to the company, while in reality her productivity is low.
Another example is having someone that talks a lot(extroverts)(high profile people). People that talk little externally look as they do not exist, but on jobs like programming they can run circles around the extroverts.
While you do remote work you don't care someone spends all day having sex in her house(good for them) if it provides great value for the company, value that is very easy to measure, as the only thing you get is the output work you get from your workers.
Do you like to work at 3 o'clock in the morning? I don't care. You are in pajamas in your house? I don't care. You like tattoos? I don't care. Do you have children? I don't care.
Are you productive? I care.
The main problem with remote working is that is it rare and we don't have all the experience of recent century of factories and offices history to learn from. But if you go even farther in time you will realize working from home was the normal thing to do before industrialization.
That may not necessarily be true. People may find other jobs; and the profits from outsourcing would be spent possibly resulting in job creation.
I work with customers every day that decided to axe their internal IT staffs and outsource it to the big consulting and services firms. It may have made Bill Lumbergh's stock go up a quarter of a point in the short term, but the reduced efficiency, red tape and typically less-than-stellar competence drags on the whole organization.
There are success stories, but those success stories of H1B aren't the ones that pay bare minimum. Companies who pay top dollar for H1B get the great ones. The companies who pay bottom dollar get shut down in 5 years.
You'd figure after 20+ years of this, executives would learn, but they don't care to. They are incentivized for precisely what they do.
This exists because not every product carries same gross profit margin.
Apple launched iWatch, but it fails miserably, so Apple in an attempt to recuperate some costs, wants to produce the watch cheaply. Enter the people who can produce it cheaply. Of course the quality won't be the same, but apparently there isn't a market for high quality steel smart watches, but for lower quality plasticky smart watches.
When Blue Apron built their product, they had to spend on the development time for it. If people are willing to subscribe to Blue Apron for $175 per week, then Blue Apron can build the product by hiring the best individuals, in the shortest amount of time.
But if Blue Apron's customers are only willing to use a service like that for $60 per month, then BA must hire and deliver accordingly.
The issue is really two fold:
1. Execs think that programmers are cogs and one is just as good as the other. 2. Many companies can't keep good developers because they are hell holes and the culture doesn't even know how to promote creativity.
Actually from what I've seen a lot of the bodyshops use H1B to facilitate outsourcing. They bring in smaller numbers of people on H1Bs to act as go-betweens for the much larger team offshore.
100k still seems a bit low. I think Ted Cruz suggested 110k. That's still below the average salary for an applications developer in SF or San Jose. I'd go higher, though I do think that 110k would do some good - it would have no effect whatsoever on the use of the H1b to bring in the truly talented, and it would probably deter some of Disney/Edison style abuses.
In contrast, an H1-B from a country where homes are typically smaller, might think the kind of home that he/she can afford in Silicon Valley is perfectly fine!
The salary in my own country for a mid level software engineer is 600 dollars a month !
Think about that for a moment . . . .
Now imagine if you are a company, you can hire a developer with 10-20 years of experience at the cost below your junior developer.
Why won't you do it ?
The other part of the equation is the fact that if you do not do it you are a strong competitive disadvantage compared to companies.
Now many people on HN might want to crack down on this Donald Trump Style.
But actually cracking down on it will make matters worse.
Software, IP is really global these days.
So as soon as wages are pushed up in america, the flow of FDI ( which is growing at 5x every year in India ! ) will shoot even higher.
Someone made this argument that I find the best explanation for what is going on.
Countries like India have more untapped computational power compared to the US, just due to having 4x the population and not even 1:1 the wealth.
There is nothing immoral about what is going on.
Its capitalism working as intended - I also do not think americans are losers in this game, it just means they will not see any investment or improve in their standard of living while private money is busy improving the lives of everyone else.
Standard of living in the US is growing - but very slowly.
While standard of living is increasing rapidly in developing countries.
You can see the same issue in China, where standard of living has actually grown rapidly.
I am not arguing to make American standard of living regress at the expense of improving the standard of living for other developing nations.
Standard of Living would have risen regardless of FDI money moving into India and China - the only difference is that western capital is allowed to make money off that development.
The issue is that the amount of money that is required to bring any massive improvement in living standard in western countries is really large. Things like self driving cars are much harder to create - then just copying current technology and distributing it.
This is why it should have been upto western govt to channel a lot of public money and tax multinationals aggressively so that western countries can have accelerated rate of growth.
2. Move valuable products in the market = more money to reinvest into building valuable products.
3. More money invested into building products = more demand for engineers.
4. Goto 1.
Being pro-H1B is in your interest because it increases demands for your skill set.
Every time I ran the numbers about moving to the US, the minimum acceptable offer was well above that number.
This program has been around for decades and was created in an effort to bring in skills not found in the country. If in all of that time we haven't trained up enough people to meet "demand" then we are obviously doing something wrong and non immigration intent visas aren't going to fix it.
The problem was that her reports were all leaving her project or leaving the company. The company was responding to the staffing difficulty with outsourcing, moving her entire project to Israel. Directors were squabbling over the most capable employees and twice she was approached about switching departments.
She has a friend who nominally is an architect, but is instead doing the work of a frontline dev. He's about to jump. Recruiters have made the job market liquid enough that businesses can't meet their objectives with the coders they hired.
In some sectors, coders right out of school can command six-figure salaries, and they're only going higher. In the larger job markets, firms are moving en-masse to consulting companies to meet business needs. The developers are following suit. 5 months ago, I worked at a marketing company as an in-house dev. I now work for a consulting company, my old company hired a consulting company to do my old job. I am somebody whose natural tendency is towards loyalty. I want to find a nice position at a nice company and just stay there for years. The current job market makes that impossible. The siren's song of getting a 30% pay bump every year, sometimes twice in the same year, is impossible to resist.
Make no mistake about it, the US needs more developers. Immigration is an excellent solution to the problem. Protectionism is only going to make it worse. If businesses can't meet their objectives, then end result is going to be a recession. No one comes out better in one of those.
Curious what you mean by this?
I live in Atlanta and I wouldn't dream of doing anything else right now.
Many of the companies I have talked to have fairly large lists of requirements for positions and are serious about requiring them. They get really picky about specific languages, frameworks, and experiences. As I mentioned in another discussion here recently, there are tens of thousands of programming jobs controlled by companies who do not see a programmer shortage from their perspective.
When discussions on hiring methods come up, multiple people inevitably chime in that the companies in question are dealing with situations where they have more qualified applicants than slots. That is in direct conflict with what you said above.
I would love to be able to jump jobs for 30% pay raises. I can't. I started my career at $55,770. I'm up to $92,500 14 years later, which is only a 66% bump for my entire career. Even if we consider me underpaid for my area (Hi! I'm looking in Dallas!) I would likely only be looking at a 100% total career bump if I got that situation addressed. There are companies out there who refuse to give you more than X% above your current salary, regardless of how underpaid you are.
It's funny that you should mention AT&T, what with them being headquartered here and all. I see them as one of the companies I was referring to in my second paragraph. I have personally applied to them for multiple positions and heard bupkis.
It may well be that certain sectors in certain markets have these issues. I do not see it as widespread. What I do see as widespread are broken recruiting and sourcing practices, HR departments that work at cross purposes to the other departments they support, and a general desire to hit all the points on a wish list, no matter how long it takes.
And to make things clear - I am actually a H1B holder, working as a CTO for a US based company, been here for 3 years now. When looking for people for our engineering team, we get lots of resumes but very few actually promising ones. Out of the promising ones, almost none are actual people with tangible experience that could be hired as a senior person. If there is someone who could be senior, they ask for like 200k and up a year - and this is just to be a senior engineer, not even in a managerial position or anything (P.S and this is the NOVA area, not the bay area).
So yeah, I would say good people are always in high demand, and the lack of good engineers right now is troubling. Then again most of the H1B visas get abused by companies who hire second rate talent from abroad so...
I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you are not going to get the best of the best from any other country either, as they are in just as high of demand. What generally ends up happening is people make the argument you make, then go the H1B route and end up with mediocre engineers that are much cheaper than local counterparts, can be worked 60-80 hours per week and cannot easily leave. And this is no accident, it is exactly what they wanted in the first place.
I'm not saying this is your intention, I don't know you, but I have personally watched this exact scenario play out time and again.
Most of these resumes you are turning down are people who can be trained to provide exactly what you are looking for. If you do not want to invest in that training, then you need to pay for the time and energy that the rarer candidates have invested themselves.
I have considered that, but I would think I would be getting and failing more interviews if that was the case. I have a hard time getting interviews.
> When looking for people for our engineering team, we get lots of resumes but very few actually promising ones. Out of the promising ones, almost none are actual people with tangible experience that could be hired as a senior person.
What do you consider "promising" and "tangible experience"? I have been refused interviews because of who I have worked for, without anyone delving into whether I might still have the experience desired.
> If there is someone who could be senior, they ask for like 200k and up a year - and this is just to be a senior engineer, not even in a managerial position or anything (P.S and this is the NOVA area, not the bay area).
You realize that NoVa is not much cheaper than the Bay Area, right? I mean, $200k for no management responsibility in NoVa is ridiculous to ask for, but I would expect $150k - $160k.
> So yeah, I would say good people are always in high demand, and the lack of good engineers right now is troubling.
So what is "good"? I have been told before that maybe the problem is me. Nobody has ever told me I'm not "good", though. I have consistently been one of the best engineers (software and systems at least; I was a bit dicier at electrical) wherever I have worked. I am an order of magnitude more competent than the anecdotes that come up during these discussions. Yet I get refused interviews because my background is "too government" and similar bullshit. I would love for someone to tell me there is something objectively wrong that I can fix. Nobody has done that. Except for my resume; fecack did a good job with that. Doesn't help with the aforementioned bullshit rejections, though.
Consider taking those companies off your resume. I'd prefer a gap in the resume to a negative item. A gap can be explained any way you want in an interview, but a negative item will cause you to get rejected before you even begin.
Your resume isn't your permanent record. It's a marketing initiative. You should feel free to treat it as such.
...
What's wrong with working for Raytheon?
In any sales-type situation, expectations must be managed on both sides, it's the job of the salesman to see a deal through. Here that's recruiters. Some buyers are more rational than others.
> There are companies out there who refuse to give you more than X% above your current salary, regardless of how underpaid you are.
Simply refuse to disclose your current salary. I did that and managed a close to 50% bump. They'll ask, just say you aren't comfortable disclosing that. They'll make a half-hearted attempt to get you to, don't budge. Just name a figure that's 40% higher than the one you'll accept and let them talk you down to 30%.
> It's funny that you should mention AT&T, what with them being headquartered here and all. I see them as one of the companies I was referring to in my second paragraph.
I'd never work for AT&T or any large employer. Consulting is where the money is these days. You should start returning all those scammy-looking emails you get from recruiters. Could change your life.
I guess that is the crux of my disagreement with your original post. So many buyers are being irrational despite claims that they can't (or shouldn't) be able to get away with it. To adapt an old idiom, they are trying to be beggars and choosers. Since they aren't failing to get things done despite being irrational, I have to conclude that most of the shortage is self-imposed by that irrationality and that, were these companies to fix their talent acquisition practices, the shortage would go away.
You can't just tell everybody to fix their processes, that requires coordination across the entire industry, and that's just not happening anytime soon.