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Comment by ziszis | Hacker News Reader

H1b visas have primarily been used by consulting companies to bring in less expensive junior engineers (<$100k) [1]. If new directives make it harder to sponsor junior engineers, it will shift the mix to more senior engineers. This will shift the supply/demand curves, so that US salaries will come down for senior engineers and go up for junior engineers.

[1] http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx

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H1b abusing consulting companies tend to pick the job title with the lowest average compensation no matter what, since the official job title governs allowed salary limits in H1b.

This is why the average salary for a "software consultant" is so much lower than most other titles. These companies all pile on the same lightly used job title to synergistically lower the average salary.

I don't think it has anything to do with seniority levels, it's money. The fact that most of these devs are brought in as junior engineers shows that these companies don't really need employees with specialized knowledge, which is the whole point of the program.

They also invented some new job titles: http://www.jobsintech.io/immigration_companies/infosys-limit...

89k for Cupertino, CA. That's hilarious.

Median salary may go down for senior engineers, that's okay with me if more will have permanent jobs.

It's not fair to software engineers at the tail ends of their careers that they are so often relegated to contract positions. Many of them very competent (even if slightly dated in current practices).

More demand for senior engineers will decrease their salaries?

Yeah, I don't really see the logic in that post. You will most likely see a slight rise in salaries across the board. In addition a larger effort to recruit for junior positions from universities and job listings.

The only real change is that recruiters will have to change there talent pools. There reliance on H1B is mostly because no one stopped them not because there is a lack of us talent.

Most of the consulting companies like Infosys, CTS etc work as such: They hire tons of people fresh out of college. Some of those have contractual obligations called "bonds" which force them to stay with company for 2 years or so. That is the stick. Later comes the carrot in form of H1 sponsorship a year or two down the line. So the median work ex for H1 tends to be 3-4 years. Then there are those who change jobs simply to get the promise of being sponsored. I know couple of people, one with Amazon, with over 8 years of work-ex joining as software analyst because it helps companies pay them least of salaries. If senior dev is the new norm they will shape the supply accordingly and try to suppress salaries in that direction. The only way out was(is?) to provide salary directions too but vague wording allowing companies to include non monetary benefits will again be suspectible to manipulation. But not doing so means startups will not be able to afford engineers with only monetary benefits. It is a very difficult problem to get around.

More supply of senior engineers will decrease salaries. The visas used to be taken primarily by junior devs preventing (some) senior devs from getting one. Senior devs may no longer be blocked which increases supply. Demand is unchanged, at least in the short-term.

In my experience of hiring engineers across several companies over the past decade, the pool of senior SDEs who are both not already in the US and willing to move to the US is so small that I'd be surprised if it even registered in the overall H1B flow. Virtually all the non-resident senior SDEs I saw getting hired in my orgs ended up being H1B transfers who got hired straight out of college into the US and grew into seniority while here.

The economics aren't so black & white. The incentives to hire an H1B change when companies are paying senior engineer wages for the position.

I doubt it. The number H1Bs for people with the equivalent of a Masters degree or Phd is something like one percent of all H1B visas.

I seriously doubt that a shortage of H1B visas would be an issue for a company that decides to hire someone into a senior position. Senior positions are handled with more care then junior positions.

I am not sure about the salaries going down.

Senior engineers = a little older = probably have family = harder to make the move to another country

I've been on H1B since about the time I graduated and it was no brainer to start new life in US. Had I stayed and started my family and career in Canada, it would've been much harder move to US and it probably wouldn't be worth it because my wife wouldn't be able to work etc etc

You are right. For the 85K visas, there were ~240K applications. If 30% of them were for senior engineers, then with these new stricter directives all 85K visas go to them, thereby increasing the supply of senior engineers.

Otherwise there would have been 30K senior engineers and 55K junior engineers.

That assumes that the pool of senior engineers is large enough to fill that quota every year. Or that the demand for foreign seniors is that high

Junior engineers filling up the quota is actually preventing senior engineers from getting through. There is always demand for high quality senior engineers, and companies like more choice.

Only if laws of economics in such a complex system were easy to guess.

The more likely scenario in my opinion is American companies more aggressively moving their jobs to India and even other related business to more visa friendly countries like Mexico. My employer has already moved his QA department to India full fledge putting freeze on all QA hiring in USA. Easily 10-15 jobs lost.

Company I'm at (and building up a team at) is currently ramping up our QA/SDET efforts here in the US, as my belief is that we want the Quality Engineers to be as close as possible to the regular engineers (to the extent possible) - for maximum benefit (rapid iterations, faster to fail, higher velocity).

Been interviewing a ton of QA/SDET candidates over the last few weeks, and a challenge is that so few (regardless of immigration/legal status) seem to be open to working with many different languages/tech in any given day - meanwhile switching between areas that historically may be perceived to be within coding, product management, ops.

It's a challenge finding people that fluently can navigate between all those areas. I strongly believe the future of QA is in filling out this void that is - usually - left behind when you have Product/Dev/Ops working together; nothing encompasses all disciplines but good QA folks.

It sounds like you are looking for a unicorn that is already familiar with your stack. Just pick someone who has the desire to work hard and learn new things. The rest comes with time.

On the one hand you warn about trying to guess the outcomes of complex economic systems, while on the other you go ahead and put forward a wild guess yourself.

It's just as likely that although some jobs may be sent back to India, if all wages increase, then it's a net benefit to your average American.

> if all wages increase, then it's a net benefit to your average American

If all wages increase it leads to inflation making it ineffective.

No sir. I am not making any guess, I am only stating the fact.

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