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Comment by ericseppanen | Hacker News Reader

It's unfortunate that most of the people writing about the problems with H-1B visas can't distinguish between companies that hire the best they can get (and paying competitive salaries), and outsourcing companies that file a ton of applications (and pay their employees much less).

This approach seems deliberately lazy, as though it's some kind of head-scratcher that the displaced IT support guy hates his outsourced replacement; while the Googles and Microsofts of the world support a program that allows them to hire top engineers from all over the globe.

I find it especially galling that this NYT writer can't make the distinction, given their paper did a great article about H-1B abuse by outsourcing firms: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/06/us/outsourcing...

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More pretty graphs here about the big outsourcing firms' H1B salary distributions: https://www.axios.com/h1-b-salaries-2228205505.html

Also those are cash salaries, tech companies also give generous share-based compensation. While share count is guaranteed (offer/contract) their $ value is not so they cannot be counted.

For most employees, that's not compensation, but speculation.

I get your point but I was talking about public companies since they were mostly mentioned in the article for which shares are convertible to cash right away.

> while the Googles and Microsofts of the world support a program that allows them to hire top engineers from all over the globe.

Yes, and exploit those workers with lower salary than they deserve because those workers only have a small sliver of the job market available to them that their US Citizen competitors do.

The H-1B program is terrible for all employees and only benefits employers, which is why you see big corporations like Microsoft and Facebook pushing to remove caps on it. Not because they generous but because they would love to have more engineers who are underpaid and have a very hard time leaving the company for years until they can one day become citizens (and from what I understand the path to citizenship for an H-1B worker is not easy despite them being extremely productive and high contributing members of society.)

The H-1B program is terrible for all employees and only benefits employers

This is patently untrue when it comes to companies like Google or Microsoft.

I came to the US on an H1-B. As I'm sure you can imagine, people talk about their salaries. I compared mine to my colleagues who were US citizens. We were all paid about the same.

I'm pretty sure these companies would get busted if managers were informed by HR that "this person is going to get a smaller raise since they are on an H1-B".

I'm glad genuinely glad you came to the U.S. and found gainful employment. I have many friends, some very close, that likewise have come to the U.S. and the U.S. is better for it.

That being said, even if the salaries are all the same, it doesn't mean that wages are not suppressed. If you import supply and demand stays consistent, prices drop. I think the burden of proof is on the people saying otherwise to prove that importing tens of thousands of engineers doesn't suppress wages.

In other words, if large corporations couldn't import H1B workers, they'd have to do other things to get their work done, and those things would probably involve raising wages for especially skilled engineers. Or perhaps by investing in other productivity measures (better dev tools, better hardware, more administrative assistants, etc.).

At this point I just don't understand your argument. You seem to imply that there is some "correct" supply of engineers, and anything that increases the supply above that is "suppressing wages." That would mean that scholarships for engineering schools, programs for encouraging engineering careers, all forms of immigration, and even internal population growth, would all be things that can "suppress wages."

It seems to me that H1B supporters are the ones saying there is a correct supply of engineers and that the U.S. is below that threshold.

I'm arguing that the supply is more fungible than that, especially in the long run and especially given a floating price point, and that changing the laws and regulations to solve challenges in particular business models is basically an indirect form of lobbying for special interests.

Actually, all those things are things that suppress wages.

Think about it: WHY do we need programs to encourage engineering careers? Do we have programs to encourage people to go into law or medicine? Why not? Well those professions don't seem to have a shortage of people willing to work hard to get into those schools. So why does engineering have such a shortage?

These programs assume that there's something wrong with young people, or with the culture, causing them to avoid these careers.

Maybe, instead, there's something wrong with the careers themselves, and the employers, which cause people to avoid them. So why are we, as a society, subsidizing these rich companies to help them get more workers? If these companies really need these workers so badly, maybe they should foot the bill to recruit people into the profession and then train them (I mean their entire college costs here). If an employer isn't willing to pay $100k for a kid to go through college, who otherwise isn't willing to take that risk himself, then why should the rest of us try to brainwash that kid to do it, or help fund a scholarship for him?

> if large corporations couldn't import H1B workers, they'd have to do other things to get their work done, and those things would probably involve raising wages for especially skilled engineers. Or perhaps by investing in other productivity measures

Or perhaps, move the job to another country which has a larger supply of workers.

Sure, but I suspect they are already doing that to the extent it makes sense.

Nope. It's simple: if this were an option, they'd have already done it.

Microsoft could easily just pack up and move all their dev work to India. There's a large supply of workers there, and they can pay them a fraction of what they have to pay here.

Why aren't they doing this? The big companies threaten this, but they never do it.

Simple: if it were really this easy, they'd have already done it. There's obviously some good reasons why they're not, and why instead they choose to import people under H1-B, pay them roughly similar salaries to US workers, and pay for lots of immigration/paperwork-related costs on top of this. They might be (and I think they are) helping keep salaries down this way overall, but that's nothing compared to just dumping everyone and moving operations to India and paying 1/5 of US labor rates. So why aren't they doing that?

Google runs large engineering offices in a number of foreign countries. If there's talent out there that can't be imported the next best thing is to go where the talent is.

Ok, then tell me why they haven't done that already. They could save huge amounts of money by just laying off everyone in the US and hiring new people in India (or relocating everyone to India). The salaries in India are easily 1/5 or less than those in Silicon Valley.

So what's stopping them?

> So what's stopping them?

The highly skilled American employees in their US-workforce?

According to other people, there's plenty of highly-skilled people in India. And they cost 1/5 as much. So why bother with the Americans?

Probably because they need the highly-skilled people both in India and US - to put together fruitful collaborations like these [1] (which, incidentally, created a sub-field which employs hundreds of thousands of engineers, Americans included).

At the moment, it might be more economically sensible to convince the Indian to move to US than to convince the American to move to India. But if you make it too hard or impossible to do that, Google will re-evaluate options at their disposal and decide accordingly.

[1]: https://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce.html

If they "need" the highly-skilled people in the US, who cost 5-6x the ones in India, then there's something clearly lacking with the people in India. Otherwise, why not just dump the US workers altogether and move all new operations to India? They can even move their American workers there and offer them a salary that's 1.5x-2x the standard salary in India and still save a bundle over Silicon Valley salary levels.

Seriously: these companies keep threatening this, I wish they'd just do it and see how it works out for them. It just sounds like an idle threat to me to try to get their way in the US. I'm really sick and tired of their threats.

Companies would need to invest in continuing professional development, as lawyers, doctors, PEs and so on need to. Not just hire someone with the latest buzzwords then discard them when the fashion changes.

Even with equal compensation, having an employee who is not only worried about their job, but also their immigration status, could be of benefit to the company. Theoretically they might cause less trouble, demand less from management, and are less likely to leave, saving the company all sorts of turnover costs.

Agree on this. My peers at BigCo who were citizens made a bit more than I did and usually got promoted quicker. Managers had the pressure of retaining them otherwise they would leave. Immigrants don't get that option.

H1Bs sponsored by Microsoft / Google are the lucky ones. When I started back in 2008, in the east coast, they gave me 50K and I had 10+ yrs IT exp, with previous Wall St company experience too. When my contract expired, they were so shocked why I quit so fast ;P. The small desi company in NJ who sponsored my didnt know they were shit.

I've been toying around with the idea that some sort of auction might be a good way to distinguish between efforts to find the best and efforts to undercut the local market. That seems borne out by the salary graph in the article you cited, outsourcing companies offering lower pay than the tech companies themselves.

Did you read the article? That was brought up in there.

Sorry, where? I'm not seeing it.

>most of the people writing about the problems with H-1B visas can't distinguish

My response assumes you're saying the journalist of the NYT piece is among "most of the people" not able to make a distinction between the 2 categories you laid out.

category 1: >between companies that hire the best they can get (and paying competitive salaries),

NYT article: "Proponents of the H-1B system argue that it is an important vehicle to attract top talent to America. After coming to the United States, these visa holders may apply their skills to start new companies or create new, innovative products"

category 2: >and outsourcing companies that file a ton of applications (and pay their employees much less).

NYT article: "The H-1B program’s critics say the system provides a way for American companies to turn over technology departments to outsourcing companies. These are gaming the system to snap up the visas so they can replace American workers with less expensive, temporary staff members."

It seems the NYT journalist has correctly distinguished both categories. (There are more paragraphs in that article that add more details about both categories but I only copypasted 1 example of each.)

(I didn't read the article yet, but):

There is a difference between proponents and critics describing the same activity in different terms and noting that different companies treat the system differently and that it is roughly bimodal: "Google's" use and "Infosys'" abuse.

I interpreted the two quotes you pulled as the former.

>There is a difference between proponents and critics describing the same activity

The 2 quotes I pulled for 2 different categories are not describing the same activity:

"top talent to America" != "less expensive, temporary staff members"

The "top talent innovative products" is intended to describe Google or Tesla hiring a rare PhD scientist from Germany to work on deep machine learning or automated driving algorithms.

The "less expensive, temp staff" is meant to describe loophole abuses like Infosys.

> (I didn't read the article yet, but)

reddit.com is that way --->

I have to agree with @ericseppanen here.

It is true that the NYT article mentions the proponents and the critics, but they conflate the companies themselves. In other words, it sounds like the proponents and critics are talking about the same phenomenon.

Farther along it becomes even clearer when they say suppressing wages is good for the economy but at what cost.

"In other words, it’s true that cheaper labor helps employers increase profits and grow, and having more skilled workers in the United States contributes to economic innovation. But at the same time, individual American employees do face more salary pressure from newcomers who will work for less. And in some cases, they risk losing their jobs entirely, especially older employees who earn higher salaries."

@ericseppanen's point is that the two groups are not the same.

(A lot of the other critics in the HN comment section also seem to argue that the innovative tech companies are doing the same thing as the outsourcers.)

>@ericseppanen's point is that the two groups are not the same.

The NYT journalists are aware of that. The commenter ericseppanen with his incorrect interpretation of the text has done a disservice to the HN readers trusting it as accurate and upvoting his comment to the top.

One of writer's profiles is of Mr. Jeff Tan and how he's harmed by HCL Technologies which is an Indian tech firm (similar to bodyshops abusing H1B like Infosys.) The critics' commentary about H1B is talking about this bucket of people.

The other profile is talking about "professionals with college degrees and specialized skills to fill jobs when qualified Americans cannot be found" and the examples of that in the article include Microsoft and Google. The proponents commentary about H1B is talking about this bucket.

The authors of the article have interwoven both groups together throughout the narrative which may be confusing for some readers -- but that doesn't mean that the writers are so clueless that they completely don't understand the distinction between the two. They clearly do. Interweaving the text for stylistic purposes does not mean they have mistakenly conflated the 2 groups.

To summarize the 2 different groups being profiled:

"HCL Technologies" example != "Google/Microsoft" example

"HCL staff in India replacing Mr. Tan at UCSF" != "professionals with college degrees and specialized skills to fill jobs when qualified Americans cannot be found"

>the proponents and the critics, but they conflate the companies themselves. In other words, it sounds like the proponents and critics are talking about the same phenomenon.

No, not the same phenomenon:

critics("outsourcing companies with less expensive, temporary staff members") != proponents("top talent to create new innovative products")

I know you are asserting this, but even on rereading it, I find that the authors do not make the distinction that you claim they make.

In the article cited, the authors only mention Google and Microsoft once:

"... Technology giants like Microsoft and Google have pressed for increases in the annual quotas, saying there are not enough Americans with the skills they need.

But for tech workers like Mr. Tan, the program has had very negative consequences."

If you don't see that as conflation, I don't know how we will agree on this.

>, the authors only mention Google and Microsoft once:

It's the not quantity of times Google & Microsoft is mentioned. The point is that they are mentioned in the same paragraph as the preceding sentence, "professionals with college degrees and specialized skills to fill jobs when qualified Americans cannot be found."

The specific text you pasted has a line break to signify 2 separate paragraphs and the 2nd paragraph starts with a "But..." Those two spatial organization cues in the text is telling the reader to parse them as 2 separate groups instead of conflating them.

The Mr. Tan anecdote is for the other group harmed by H1B abusers such as outsourcers replacing his UCSF job with cheap labor.

NYT's 2 groups:

group 1: "professionals with college degrees and specialized skills" (Google, MS)

group 2: "outsourcers cheap labor" (HCL, Infosys)

ericseppanen's 2 groups in his parent comment:

group 1: companies that hire the best they can get (and paying competitive salaries),

group 2: and outsourcing companies that file a ton of applications (and pay their employees much less).

ericseppanen's original complaint was that the writers didn't understand there are 2 different types of companies. Yes, the writers did understand that and they provided dual anecdotes for both types. The writers actually made the same distinction that ericseppanen wanted them to make!

>If you don't see that as conflation,

I will offer up a theory as to why some readers think the NYT writers mistakenly conflate them: the article only has "humanizing" profiles of real people hurt by the negative H1B abusers. The writers didn't bother to add human stories for the positive H1B "top talent innovators" such as quoting a rare PhD scientist from Germany helping them invent flying cars or whatever. (The examples of Google + Microsoft + proponents espousing benefits are "abstract" citations not "human" ones.) Because the story is one-sided in quantity of anecdotes emphasizing the negative H1B, readers may think the writers conflate the categories.

Although the authors may be biased for emphasizing the abuses of H1B by outsourcers, that doesn't mean they are not aware of the other type of H1B companies that attracting the best talent in the world.

Not the OP, but it was brought up several times, though it wasn't the focus of the article. I'd quote each area, but I'm on mobile, and considering the number of different areas I'd have to quote, it would be annoying. Suffice it to say, it's in there and your criticism is unwarranted.

FYI: 'Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."'

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

But he didn't read the article in full, and made an uninformed opinion that is now at the top of the comment section... Bad comments need to be put on blast. Save your rule book for something more inane.

"The article mentions that." would still be appropriate then. Rulebook still good.

A better way, in this case, would be "It seems that you might have not read the article properly, as ... "

Why? It's just closer to antagonism, which is what the guidelines seem to seek to prevent.

> It's unfortunate that most of the people writing about the problems with H-1B visas can't distinguish between companies that hire the best they can get (and paying competitive salaries), and outsourcing companies that file a ton of applications (and pay their employees much less).

That's an eloquent way of saying, "This is why we can't have nice things.".

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