42% of California’s STEM Workforce Hails from Outside the U.S
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Also see: https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2016/03/17/study-immigrants-fou...
I was recently speaking with Demis Hassabis and he recommended looking for startup funding in California but continuing to work out of London. More and more companies are gravitating towards this general template (not London specifically). Would you rather have some low level Stack Developer working at Airbnb on an H1B build the next Billion dollar startup in the Bay Area or out of Bangalore?
Yes, hiring someone with an H1B might cost a company 10k less per annum. But what would it cost America to not have these foreign workers want to work in California altogether? Besides, it isn't fair to build such an impressive hotbed of thought and progress and then try and wall others out of it.
I've watched those foreign people get hired even though they walked into the interview without even Googling the product or development environment specified in the ad. Not that this is new or exclusive, mind you.
Nevermind that nobody thought about onboarding these people, there's no documentation, and the resulting product takes a sharp nosedive as work is handed over. These foreign people were promised cheap, and that keeps the investors happy.
This is no slightly against those workers. I've taught these workers and one guy had his head in his hands saying, "Oh my God, the legal liability we're being exposed to here" upon learning of deep design flaws that cheaper labor was somehow going to magically fix.
More workers is not necessarily better- in any sense. It's just more workers. In a capitalist system, that's not necessarily good for anybody except management.
Note: This post is in no way, shape, or form arguing against immigration. Immigration is great. I'm more saying that we should try and spread around the SV effect, so that more places can prosper, and one place isn't strained so much.
Well I want to see the entire world become prosperous instead of wealth continuing to concentrate and stratify at a global scale, so yes.
>>Would you rather have some low level Stack Developer working at Airbnb on an H1B build the next Billion dollar startup in the Bay Area or out of Bangalore?
As somebody who stays in Bangalore, I can tell you this is already the case and has been for a few years now.
Back then when I started my career there was a mad rush to move to US in most young people. Today coupled with a impossibly long green card wait, and uncertainties associated with a job on a Visa for most smart people moving to US isn't even an option. I know a lot of smart people for whom moving to US isn't even in their list of priorities.
In the past decade start up ecosystem here has become very good. Starting companies is no longer social or economic taboo in India/Bangalore today.
US people think outsourcing was bad for them? Imagine competing with start ups and their funding, which are operating at 1/10th the budget of any city in US.
1. It makes a clear appeal back to the original intent of the law.
2. It would most likely end most of the perceived abuse/misuse of the law, which occurs at lower salary ranges.
3. It will not prevent tech companies that actually do cool stuff like Google & co from hiring, since most of their hires probably start over 110K now.
I also think that the impact on American workers in this salary range from H1B is pretty low. Many companies with salaries in this range are always hiring provided you have the skills.
Actually most companies that you are referring to want tech salaries to decline. One of the best weapons against high tech salaries are H1B visas and offshoring.
I think that whatever is going on in the lower end of the market, there is still a substantial shortage of labor in the higher jobs that cannot be made up domestically anytime soon. Higher end jobs tend to have a much less elastic labor pool because fewer people can do the work.
Whatever the impact is for tech workers, for the general public it is definitely a bad outcome to have perpetual labor shortages at tech companies; it just means that they get their products/features/bug fixes/other improvements more slowly.
A great side effect of this is that it pretty much makes H1B not viable in the Midwest or other areas where we probably ought to be trying to develop more talent
At any rate, I would like to see some empirical backing for those who want to raise H1B salaries higher than inflation adjustment.
The side effect you think is great, is actually really bad. It's not a question of developing more talent, it's the fact that people move to the coasts for jobs. All this really does is disadvantage companies not in NYC and SF, and make it more likely that they will have a labor shortage they can't make up, and pack up. This isn't reflective of anything though, except basically regional inflation (it's not simply that salaries in NYC and SF are so much higher because the companies there are the most productive and therefore deserve the H1B slots more, the salaries are partly inflated because cost of living is also super high, i.e. a dollar is worth less).
I would be very surprised if the "H1B prevailing wage" for any meaningful technical role in the SF bay area is less than $100k.
[1] http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?code=15-11...
"""At a dinner for Silicon Valley executives in early 2011, President Barack Obama asked Apple CEO Steve Jobs what it would take to bring iPhone manufacturing back to America. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” the typically blunt Apple cofounder told the president. Examining Jobs’s claim, the New York Times looked at Apple’s vast Chinese operations and found that workers there not only worked for less than Americans did; more of them were skilled. To oversee production and guide some 200,000 assembly-line workers, Apple, for instance, needed 8,700 industrial engineers—positions that required more than a high school diploma but less than a full college degree. While abundant in China, these kinds of employees are harder to find in the United States. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need,” an unnamed Apple executive told the Times.""" https://www.city-journal.org/html/vocational-ed-reborn-15253...
I don't agree. I think we have far more average talent than we have companies willing to hire only average talent, particularly if said average talent does not already live within 20 miles of them.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't be proud of yourself, but if you were being intellectually honest you would realize that this is not a rational well researched stance.
This topic has been researched to death already so we're not going to break any real ground but I would ask you two things specifically:
1. When you studied hard, were you supported to study hard? Were your basic necessities covered (food, shelter) so you could focus? A lot of kids don't even have this basic level of stability in their lives, and maybe you didn't either.
2. How did you get into computer science? When I was growing up I didn't know anyone who was a programmer of any kind and wouldn't have even known to consider it had I not gotten lucky and took a programming class in highschool partly because it allowed me to drive to the community college to do it and get out of school almost half of the day. If I hadn't had transportation and money for gas it would have never happened and who knows where I would be now.
I worked a fulltime job during ungrad and grad school (and did programming jobs on the side for about $75 per hour). I worked my way through.
> How did you get into computer science?
John Carmack mostly. I saw some guy play quake online and it blew me away. I saved money to buy a computer and pay for internet. Which lead into writing scripts and websites. Then into computer science.
How did you write those scripts and websites, did you have a computer growing up? Internet access (what little internet there was to be had then that is)?
I'm not trying to take away your achievements, but I think this kind of thinking is a big part of what is wrong with how we make public policy. We see things in a very narrow way (just human nature) and we generally have a hard time empathizing with other people and their experiences. I think if we could get over that and stop romanticizing the exceptions and start understanding better the average experiences of people in our societies, maybe we can make better decisions that allow more people to succeed.
By the way working full time through undergrad and grad school would have been tough, I ended up taking out loans myself (partly so I could enjoy the experience a little more and not work all the time, only most of the time) so kudos to you for pulling that off. I'm not sure I want everyone to have to go through that (if even they could have done that, not too many people can make $75/hr even as professionals let alone students), but there is nothing wrong with taking pride in having done it yourself.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/sunday-review/push-dont-c...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/education/edlife/overachi...
Then I'm not so sure.
That story is how high-schoolers in Silicon Valley are committing suicide at an alarming rate. Reading between the lines some, it tells you that Silicon Valley parents (who are probably some of the most driven people in the country) are expecting their kids to be just as driven/high achieving as them. The kids cannot cope with it and take the only way out they know of.
I think this is very different from what ronnier is suggesting when he says "life is too good, too easy, for the average american." Children in SV are not average americans.
But the bit where this falls down is your use of "our own" in a context where it either has no meaning or has, let's just say "accidentally discriminatory" meaning. The idea that we should invest to "prevent" this situation is kinda distasteful.
These people are americans now. No, they aren't all citizens (though many are), but their kids are and their descendants will be. This is their home as much as it is yours or mine. This country built itself on the backs of imported talent, there's no valid reason for that to stop now.
[1] No idea if that's a median data point, but it's probably close. When people talk about STEM immigrants they mean very long term residents who will realistically be here with their families for the rest of their lives. You want to imagine a job-jacking horde of foreign-educated people who don't speak English. The truth is rather different.
Why? It's not like Americans were a much bigger share of the world population in the past.
There is first the network effect, uneven distribution of financial resources, uneven availability of educational resources, the high number of societies that don't value individuality nor deviation from tradition and the norm.
(1) those who have already made it here and intend to stay, are Americans now. That's what America has always been about. Anyone who disagrees is a despicable nativist who should be deported back to Germany, England, or wherever their great grandparents came from and sign their house deed over to the descendants of whichever native americans lived there before being violently and unlawfully removed.
(2) those who have not yet made it here, we owe nothing to yet, and we certainly ought to invest in ourselves. The education system in this country is so bad it's a joke, and it's not great if we end up relying on other countries educating people and sending them here just because our own education is so awful. That is a very precarious position to be in.
It's a reasonable, defensible, globalist stance.
And it's perfectly reasonable to disagree with such a stance and make the national well-being a priority over the comparatively greater struggles and sufferings of people outside our borders. But unfortunately I think we always use smoke and mirrors and avoid facing the issue head on.
I appreciate that you have a clear and we'll articulated position for your preferences for how your tax dollars should be spent. I hope that we as a society can have open discussions and debates that welcome and encourage opposing worldviews to our own, and that we can hold a default mindset to first understand our compatriot's views, rather than first defend our own positions.
Completely agree with (1).
If so, the below two points will cure you of this silly idea and any similar ones:
(A) if our money-making machine (our economy) is not well taken care of, such as by assuring its supply of skilled labor, it may deteriorate, leaving less money left over to donate to the worthy causes you want it donated to. If you don't take care of yourself first, you will be to weak to help others.
(B) The education system in the US is not lacking for money, it simply uses the given money poorly. It can be improved without spending more money.
Education is a capital investment, not a luxury consumable good.
IMO either position is perfectly defensible. Helping those who are "your neighbors" (those who are more proximal to you) first is defensible, and so is helping those around the world catch up to the living standards of the developed West.
What is not good is that we continue to mask pragmatic or moral decision making with irrational, illogical, emotionally charged positions, on both the left and the right. That, I wish would change.
Wouldn't "our own" as used earlier also include "these people"?
I think you are injecting context which was never there in the first place.
I don't...look. All I want to say is: I hope you're aware that you're making enemies with statements like this.
Luckily most people are able to read a comment from a random person on the Internet, classify it as a different opinion from theirs and go on with their lives.
In other words, I think I can understand the views I'm criticizing.
I do not get the sense that the same is true of the comment to which I replied. It seems to carry a level of tone-deafness that would be mystified by any pushback.
No, you've missed the very simplest critique of the US immigration system: that it takes years to decades of effort and incredible, Kafkaesque arbitrary hoop-jumping to get an actual Green Card, let alone an American citizenship. The system is legible neither to its owners (Congress) nor to its users (immigrants and visitors).
We can talk about sending "temporary" immigrants home when we've stopped making "permanent" immigrants (those on immigrant-track visas) go through hell just to turn their visa into citizenship. Let's naturalize the people we already have living and working in the country, and then talk about reforming our system for granting further visas into a nice sensible points system.
That said, we should find a balance where we both attract highly skilled foreign talent and develop our own in-house talent.
In order of preference I would see them treated equally and made citizens, kept out of the labor pool, or left as they are.
As a citizen the current situation seems be the least preferable option and I see no reason things ought to stay as they are.
In fact basically destroying the H1B system as it stands is probably the best first step. The bigots that make up 40% of America would probably support it and our idiot in chief would probably sign it.
Then we could replace it with a system whereby these valuable people have a sane opportunity to come here permanently and compete on even footing with natives when the wind changes with at least lukewarm support from the business community eager for more employees.
No we didn't. We built our country on the exploitation of poor european factory workers, chinese "slave" labor and african slaves.
This country wasn't built on "talent". It was built on exploitation of CHEAP or free labor.
> there's no valid reason for that to stop now.
We stopped it many times in history to protect AMERICANS. Go read about immigration history rather than propaganda we are forcefed. European immigration was stalled to protect american labor. Chinese immigration was stopped to protect american labor. And if you think about it, even american slavery was stopped to protect american labor.
Immigration wasn't all great. Throughout US history, it led to lots of turmoil, displacement and heartache.
Nothing is all great or all evil like people with agenda like to believe. There are pros and cons to everything. The skewed "pro-immigration" policy the past 50 years has gutted american labor and american society. We need a more rational policy.
And the fact that america/american government shouldn't favor AMERICANS over immigrants is pure rubbish. It's neoliberal fantasy. As a nation we have gone too "left". We need to correct our trajectory lest america fall off the tracks entirely.
In other words, the aversion to STEM among elite US students is rational.
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/issue_papers/2005...
https://qz.com/1032183/no-wonder-young-americans-feel-so-imp...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/07/17/easy-a-nearly...
https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/sei/edTool/data/highschool-08.html FYI - It may not look like much on the graph but the US is 2 years behind the top rankers.
I'd also like to see China and India and Russia on that list.
USA is big enough to be an above average nation and a below average nation combined.
Israel, that ranks significantly below the US on that chart, has perhaps the largest technology industry per capita in the world.
Which runs largely on olim hadashim (new immigrants) from Western countries and the former Soviet Union.
Either the best here will compete with the best there, or the best there will come here (or vice versa)
I went to a top liberal arts college, and majored in physics for most of my time there. Within the physics major, every single student was either 1.) An immigrant 2.) The child of an immigrant or 3.) Jewish. It was similar - though a little less pronounced - in the CS and math majors. Most of my friends there were from comfortable middle-class American backgrounds, and most of them majored in English, music, history, or psychology. Many of them are struggling financially or still dependent upon financial support from parents, 12 years after graduation.
The American educational system is such that you can largely make your own choices from college onwards (and to a limited degree, in high school too). This is a great strength of America, but it also means that sometimes people make choices that don't work out for them. The native-born citizens I know that invested heavily in learning math & computers when they were teenagers are doing great, even if they came from dirt-poor backgrounds. The ones I know who figured there would always be a job waiting for them, even if they came from very comfortable upper-middle-class backgrounds, are barely scraping by.
So much this - I know of this from my own life.
I got a state funded CS education for around 500$ a year (if my family had been poorer, they'd have paid me to study) - it was a good one, because I keep going back to my annotated Sedgewick.
Graduated with zero debt, with an open source project I was working on for years which meant that I spent the first few years of my work life knowing I could take risks (not that I did take too many).
In the Bay area now and seeing clearly the impact of an expensive education on people's choices - not everyone needs to be a college graduate, however putting an expensive price tag on it means that only people who are sure they can get a financial return on their education will take up that risk.
There is a chilling effect on women, who are expecting to be discriminated in the industry, driving them to other vocations where they don't expect to incur similar challenges with financial gains or professional advancements.
In fact, purely from a state investment point of view, CA is getting my tax dollars to spend while my college barely gets anything back from me.
I really wish my kids would get a similar springboard to start their life off without an albatross around their neck, but they are probably entering a system which is probably going to maximize immediate financial returns from them instead of expecting them to be late bloomers becoming productive over time.
It's 1% Americans importing the %1 from other counties. It's the most powerful and well off united in screwing the least powerful.
You don't have to dislike immigrants to dislike corporations and politicians destroying opportunity for millions of the families that literally built America.
You're right, total missed opportunity for them.
The US needs to overhaul, hell, even nationalize, its higher education system. Don't expect corporations to educate people for you.
Kids care too much about fitting in rather than making it in life with hard skills. You will have thousands working service jobs in LA with hopes of making it in entertainment. You don't see that emphasis in STEM in the US.
With the internet everyone has had the ability to learn programming for ages, and it really hasn't dramatically changed much. People are just not interested in it at some point.
After 30 years, on and off, in the valley I agree the QoL here isn't great (when compared to Germany, France, Australia...) but way way better than anywhere else in the US.
No, it simply isn't. By any stretch of the imagination.
San Francisco is more than 3x more expensive than the metro I live in now. I'd need to earn $350k a year just to break even financially before taxes. I'd pay a lot more in federal income tax, and my state income tax is flat and in the low single digits. Call it $375k to break even on take home pay after paying for everything (rent, retirement, etc). How likely am I to make almost $400k a year? That's top 1% income nationally. That's IB money, not writing a CRUD app in JavaScript.
Not to mention I go home for lunch and I have a 10-minute, 4-mile commute. And speaking of home, a constant pain point I hear from Bay Area programmers on HN is that they'll never be able to buy a home. San Francisco housing is over 1,200% (percent) more expensive than my area. My home cost a few thousand dollars more than I earn in a year.
No thank you.
Assuming you find a modest home in SF for $1mil your 30 year mortgage would be ~$57k a year. Property tax is ~$7k. Insurance will be <$5k. So to have a home you only need <70k. Assuming no deductions filing as a single you will pay ~$140k in taxes on $350k. This leaves you with (350-140-70) $140k a year in disposable income.
So I repeat, what are you spending money on that you need to make $140k in disposable income to break even?
https://www.redfin.com/city/17151/CA/San-Francisco/filter/ma...
Don't try to spin San Francisco being the most expensive place to live in the country into me being bad with my money - I'm not. But when you make a high income in a low COL area, it means moving to any high COL area means you either take an effective pay cut in standard of living, or you need to earn an amount that is very unlikely.
That's certainly true for people outside of high-paying jobs (California has the highest, CoL-adjusted poverty rate in the nation), but less clearly so for those with high-paying work, who often are better off (even given local CoL) than they would be elsewhere because wages in elite fields are often higher here even compared to CoL.
I guess I am part of the 42% but I was never one of the “poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. I just consider myself a proud American. 42% says nothing about how long people have been here and whether they are just a next wave building up the country like waves of immigrants from the past.
There is NEVER a time when there are not enough qualified US Citizens.
Why? Because if I am a company, I will 100% always be able to hire enough engineers, if I just do this 1 weird trick.
And that trick is "pay every engineer 1 million dollars".
The question is always about price.
In the same way that a food shortage has basically never existed in history. Sure, there were places where the price of bread was 1 thousand dollars, and people were starving to death because they couldn't have enough food. But thats not a shortage, thats just people complaining about price!
Now, the real question you have to ask yourself, is "is bread costing 1 thousand dollars a good thing?" And when you can answer that questions, you will also be able to answer "is a software engineer costing 1 million dollars a good thing"?
Edit: my post doesn't seem to be clear.
My point that I was making is that "bread costing 1 thousand dollars is a bad thing". And that there is nothing wrong with driving down the price of devs.
My definition of shortage is "prices are too high"
There are also situations where the supply of employees is kept artificially low (security clearance, taxi medallions, etc.).
Obviously common use just means "an insufficient amount under these circumstances", but if we wanted to be very strict we could say "a situation where not all the players can simultaneously satisfy their demand at any price". A shortage is a situation where supply is inelastic and below demand.
Everyone hiring programmers could fill their roster simultaneously if they could pay enough - if not today then certainly soon. In a lot of famines, there are X people sharing food for <X people - price is no longer a reflection of desire, because no one voluntarily leaves the auction.
I do think it's important to distinguish insufficient demand from a simple lack of supply, but the latter definitely exists.
My definition of shortage is "prices are to high". And I think that it is always a good thing to drive prices down.
Obviously bread costing a thousand dollars is bad. That's why I used it as an example.
Similarly there is nothing wrong with trying to solve the dev shortage (meaning prices are too high), by importing more devs.
The United States has well less than 5% of the worlds population. We are extremely lucky to attract the top talent from the other 95% and we need to defend that pipeline.
I don't see anyone arguing that exceptional talent shouldn't be welcomed into the U.S.
And I think the U.S. tech workforce is more elastic than you give credit for, especially for software skills. It's just most organizations want employees they don't have to train for their stacks, which I don't think is particularly reasonable.
Seems like a feature not a bug to me.
Obviously it is ridiculous to pay people 1 million dollars. In the same way that it is ridiculous to pay a thousand dollars for bread.
Now, another point to make would be about possible output versus labor costs. Ie SV will employ labor in close relationship to the output of that labor and the cost of it. Once those two values equate there is no more (efficient) demand for labor available.
That's Econ theory land though. I think this is much more about profit margins and market inefficiencies.
I'm all for the wage argument.... yes if you raise wages high enough they will come... but why take it to such extremes?
SV has done this to itself. It clusters around tiny, restricted geographic locations, which push out the locals, gentrify entire cities, and then these companies have the gall to complain about the cost of labor, which they helped to define the high prices of. More consideration is placed on proximity than prurient economic interests, because Business Interests Always Come First.
I once interviewed for a company who was opening a new Nashville office because they had tapped out the talent pool around Ft. Campbell, Kentucky. It turned out they were still trying to pay Ft. Campbell salaries there. They forgot that bigger talent pools have more competition.
You can either throw small bait into a thousand small talent pools, or invest in some serious tackle to fish in the ocean. You either spend money on sending recruiters out to the dark, untapped reserves, or you spend enough to compete with the entire rest of the world on salary. If you really need the talent, and you can't afford the price tag, you have to settle into a niche that is just big enough for your company, and not worth the effort for someone bigger than you.
If you need cheap engineers, you can get them from any town or city that doesn't already have an 800-lb gorilla employer in it. But you have to go to them. If you move them to you, they stop being cheap, because your competition can snap them up as easily as anyone else.
That's the something that can be done about it. If you can't compete in California, stop trying. Go somewhere else with weaker competition. People follow the jobs. If you don't believe that California needs more people, they need to start exporting those job opportunities to places with less severe population pressures. Otherwise, the people will keep coming.
It's just expensive. It means that some low-value projects aren't profitable and all projects are higher risk than we are currently expecting them to be.
> SV has done this to itself.
I'm sympathetic here. But if we let wages in urban centers rise, companies will be more willing to set up offices in other parts of the U.S. Or virtual offices even.
The definition of a shortage is "prices are to high".
My post was countering the dumb meme that I always see which is "there isn't a shortage of devs, companies just don't want to pay high salaries".
What? Many brilliant engineers were born outside the US, including one of the founders of Google, Sergey Brin.
This can't be overstated enough.
I think the immigration that is critical to the US is the high end immigration, not the low end stuff like H1B.
I'm just afraid that the chanting mobs will want to throw the baby out with the bath water. We NEED the NIW-types, we don't really need most of the H1B-types. So if the political environment is such that we need to cut loose some H1B-types to save the NIW-types... we should do so without hesitation.
there really is just no comparison.
That's why it's called a (N)ational (I)nterests (W)aiver. Because everyone from the commerce department, to the congress, to the military and intelligence people all agree that we need that guy's brainpower.
Or more precisely... they all agree that we need to deny that guy's brainpower to every other nation on earth if possible.
To me, since these workers tend to have grad degrees and are very talented, I'd peg it to a fairly high level law, medical, business, or finance worker. In short, anything less than $250k a year would get you laughed out of the building, and we're probably looking at $400k ore more.
I'm not sure what the percentages are here, but yeah, like you'd I'd guess that the percentage of H1Bs at these salary levels is very low. In short, if the H1B visa were limited to these sorts of workers, my guess is there would be no real discussion or controversy about the program.
Kind of astonishing that we award these by lottery. The whole system is really bad. Then again, it is used cynically by people who defend the program (they trot out the small percentage of very highly paid people and say "what you don't want this guy working in the US?", as if that is the issue or is in any way representative of 97% of the use of the program).
All the really qualified people are in the bay area working for tech startups, etc...
So a company outside of the bay area would have to bring in H1B workers who are willing to live in the area.
I am not sure if there are costs concerns for the company in making that decision, but I figure if they were willing to hire me, they probably don't have a problem hiring local candidates if possible.
Edit: Since people want more details, I'll elaborate on the VERY LITTLE that I know. Right now consulting agencies in Sacramento, CA need Senior Ruby Devs and they can't find any. I am not 100% sure on what salary is being offered, but I am guessing around 100K. A junior dev fresh out of college can make about 40K (remember its Sacramento!). (I want to make it clear this is all hearsay, don't quote me on this)
I was told an agency that hires out H1B workers can get paid as much as $50/hr. I have no way to verify this, but this is what I heard.
Another thing is, these are short term, project based, positions --- not very attractive to people seeking a career.
They also have a constant need for .NET and Java devs.
That being said. I am very much against outsourcing jobs that could be hired locally. But Sacramento has a very small developer community, so I don't blame them for using H1B to fill the gap. But who knows... maybe it's all a ruse.
Are there really no qualified local candidates, or are there no qualified local candidates who can also solve theoretical CS problems on the spot while pretending they're not doing it from memory?
Or qualified local candidates who refuse to lie and say they only took 3 hours on the take-home exercise?
For every 100 candidates a CS job gets, probably 80 are truly unqualified, 20 are truly qualified, but only 2 were both qualified and could pass an arbitrary list of brainteasers.
And that lie lets managers run around saying "see, we can't hire enough talent! Skills shortage!" (where "skills" means "brainteaser skills", not software development skills)
Then they hire H1B people who look good on paper.
This to me is a huge problem. And it upsets me greatly because its unfair and counter-productive.
Have you actually done hiring? The truth is that there really is a shortage of qualified applicants (at least, at existing prices). I've literally never met a fellow hiring manager who thought there was a surplus of good engineers.
I've also been a person applying to jobs, where I know I'm fully qualified (usually because I already do the same thing in the same way for a competitor) and where I'm told "we think your a good culture fit, but we're worried about your technical abilities". I can't know exactly why they said that, but when I've showed working code they say their happy with, but I know I struggled on their brainteaser questions, it feels safe to infer.
So, I've seen qualified candidates turned away because they were "unqualified" (but they really weren't), from both sides of the table. I'm not claiming there is a huge surplus of engineering out there, but there is no real shortage either. There are enough engineers, just not enough employers willing to hire them.
People always push it to the extreme and mention some very difficult algo question they were asked, and say how it's irrelevant. And if you have been asked a question like that, I agree it's irrelevant and that sucks.
But having a basic understanding of algorithms and data structures is important to writing decent software. Can we please stop pretending like expecting people to roughly know and understand the content of the freshman data structures course is some kind of unreasonable expectation?
(That was me a few months ago.)
What positions were you trying to fill, and what pay and working conditions were you offering?
Supply and demand are not suspended just because it's tech. There's a huge amount of demand, but not much supply for highly skilled software developers at $75k a year in San Francisco. There's a huge supply at $500k a year, but considerably less demand.
From what I can see, for San Francisco, the brunt of H1Bs (which is not the totality of foreign nationals, doesn't include L1s and T1s) in San Francisco in 2016 earned a salary in the 100K-150K range[1] (without accounting for extra perks like food, health and stock grants). Is that low? High? I don't know, but it seems in line with what I would have expected. Keep in mind that that's the salary, you have to add the cost of actually bringing that person to the US (lawyers, relocation, temp housing, etc.).
As for the BMW, you can get a 10 year old one for that price[2].
[1]: http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=Software+Engineer&city...
[2]: https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sfc/sss?sort=pricedsc&ma...
"Is it too low?" That isn't really for me to say. Generally speaking, it isn't for the government to say either. In a market economy, the market determines this. I see no reason to put corporations in control of the immigration system, with the power to decide who is allowed to come here and what jobs they're allowed to work, just because they don't like the market's answer.
There are plenty of qualified candidates out there. But as you mentioned, they are mostly already working somewhere else, for someone else. In order to hire them, you need to offer more or better than they already get. That isn't all just a salary number, but almost everything has a conversion rate.
Guest workers on a non-immigrant visa are simply cheaper to employ. As are young, unmarried, childless, and inexperienced workers.
It's fundamental economics. Supply is not a single fixed quantity, but a function of price. Likewise for demand. Where they cross, the market clears. Everyone willing to pay more than the clearing price gets an employee, and everyone willing to work for less than the clearing price gets hired. If you can't find a job, you are asking for too much money, and if you can't find an employee, you are offering too little.
Companies deliberately set criteria that guarantee a local search for candidates will fail, in order to save money on labor costs by hiring an imported candidate more cheaply. That is the heart of the unease surrounding H1B laborers. If the company truly cannot find suitable local candidates, the person they do find is in a great position to ask for more pay. If they need you that much, they should be paying more than any local would even dream of asking for, right?
Does that happen? Are H1B workers paid more than their local equivalents?
> All the really qualified people are in the bay area working for tech startups, etc...
> So a company outside of the bay area would have to bring in H1B workers who are willing to live in the area.
So the answer to a lack of local candidates is to start reaching across oceans? How about elsewhere in the massive expanse of North America, where many people don't even need a visa or can get one much more easily?
If you want to see how stark the difference is, look at the compensation calculator gitlab developed: https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/
By they way, the next step after not being able to hire a 60k H1B worker is usually to hire a 60k outsourced remote worker, not to hire a 150k "citizen".
Anecdotally, I had lots of classmates who aggressively pursued careers in finance not because they had any intrinsic interest in the field but because they heard it can pay exceptionally well. If technology had the same reputation (it's beginning to acquire it, but is somewhat behind), more of them would have pursued it instead.
Note: I'm not saying this should necessarily be the goal. Personally, I think it's fine if we import additional tech labor from around the world, and even prefer that to using wages as a carrot for more citizens.
> By they way, the next step after not being able to hire a 60k H1B worker is usually to hire a 60k outsourced remote worker, not to hire a 150k "citizen".
This article is not about H1Bs. Many of the foreign-born tech employees are permanent residents who compete directly in the same market as American-born employees.
Hiring in tech is something of a bifurcated market and there is H1B hiring both in the abusive lower-wage sector and higher-pay direct employment sector.
Lots of other career fields which offer more money and/or prestige? Anecdata: many of my friends with the aptitude for software dev are in med school now.
Whenever the salary question comes up, people are always quick to compare it to the country at large. But that's not a valid comparison; someone who would be a qualified software engineer isn't deciding between that and being a retail clerk. They're deciding between going into that or something like finance, where they can make many multiples of what they could as a software developer.
Seriously though, are we really arguing why cannot everyone just get over themselves and work for Wall Street now? Only that level of vanity is worthy of an incentive, otherwise it is not worth it?
500K+ is enough to survive comfortably after you work for a moderate stint. Or to afford a significant capital investment like a small property, or to work for yourself on your pipe dream for awhile.
If people saw a path to long-term financial security which would enable them to drop the shackles of full-time employment before retirement age, of course they would flock to a profession. But they don't; they see a comfortable wage that could potentially evaporate if there is a bubble, or the field moves rapidly, or there will be a glut of people trying something similar by the time they finish retraining.
It's a risk:reward decision, and the risk is far from 0. So how much is that theoretical 100K really worth to someone looking at a very large investment to learn a new skill?
The shortage is not because you don't get paid enough, the shortage is because not enough people can afford the expensive college degree.
4 years of undergrad cost me < $1000 and the same thing costs >$50,000 in the US.
I was hiring for a small local company with no reputation, boring work, and mediocre benefits. This company was about 60 miles out from Chicago in a small town.
We got over 100 applicants for every software position. We didn't even pay for ads, just put stuff on the free sites.
We hardly hired anyone, but the deluge of applications allowed us to low-ball pay and be extremely selective.
The worst kept secret in tech hiring is that everyone knows it pays well and hundreds of thousands are clamoring for open positions. They are "unqualified" because nobody will train them.
How many of them passed FizzBuzz?
Chicago outskirts is also not California. Try a software position with low pay, crappy benefits at an unknown software company in California and report back. Bonus points if you try it in the Bay Area.
Is that so hard? Training on the job used to be common, and for entry level positions it should be possible at least.
EDIT: Okay, maybe not FizzBuzz, but the lots of "10 years experience with Angular 4" and co at least, and in general sometimes testing people more on actual tasks than on invented exercises. Even in Germany in the first few weeks you can terminate employees for any reason, so you don’t need to be too selective with hiring.
But yeah in general I agree with you.
But not everything has to scale rapidly. Many businesses scale slowly over decades, centuries or millenia.
I read some posts here by people who took a pay cut to become bootcamp instructors (for a season or two). A lot of them mentioned the satisfaction they got by being able to create real value in someone's life...
I guess only a certain demographic of people would even want to do an apprenticeship. Only apprenticeship programs I've heard of are for lower wage jobs. So, poor people may benefit from an apprenticeship. Mid-career changers might also benefit. CS degrees would be overqualified.
It would require significant time and effort. Not possible without company support. Still, to take a mind that can't see what we see to one that can and the amount of value created as a result, might be worth it.
I was surprised how little people in US value hard STEM education. I think think that one reason for that is that tech in peoples mind is some type programmer.
When young people ask why should I learn math because I know python, I ask them how many unemployed electrical engineers with signal processing background you know? Programmers for bean counting apps become unemployable when they get older because there is no shortage of code monkeys working for peanuts and knowing some framework from inside out is outdated 10 years from now.
For all the vilifying of H1B and related visas, it is still a big burden for companies. Even big companies will use third party, specialized lawyers to deal with the bureaucracy.
In the case of H1B, there's a significant hiring lag. You apply in April and, if you are lucky, get the visa in October. Companies who abuse the system en masse (there are about 3 or 4 that do it) don't care about that and will use a shotgun approach, but if you are trying to fill a position, it's a very bad proposition.
Still, that gives you access to brains from the whole world. And yes, these brains may be willing to work for less, initially, compared to what a US citizen would get. There doesn't have to be foul play involved: they have less leverage. A similarly qualified US citizen would just name their price and tell the company to take a hike if that was not met. Restarting the whole visa process would be way more painful.
I'll also note that I don't interview many foreigners and the reason I see mostly new grads is that I'm not senior myself, so it makes little sense for me to interview senior candidates.
At the high end, there's simply a larger supply overseas. The US has a population of 300M and between them, India and China have about 2.7B people and their countries pay far, far less.
I'm guessing most people working for IT consultancies and services companies are paid way below market wages. Sure, the company hiring them is billing more than that, but the employee still gets significantly lower than market wages.
I don't begrudge them recipients for taking the jobs. My issue is the corporations who are abusing a system to make themselves more money while simultaneously destroying local talent. It is a death spiral of greed, yet they seem to be oblivious to it.
the report only says foreign born - doesn't mention how long they've been in the U.S for or if they came just for the job they landed.
I had to hire most of the teams from Canada.
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/foreign-...
There's an interesting breakdown of a more narrow definition of STEM vs a broader one (that includes social sciences and health sciences). I personally would be more inclined to include health sciences than social sciences, but the data is granular enough to get at this distinction in some cases.