Is this a case of there not being enough qualified US citizens or immigrants being willing to work for less?
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.
> 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?
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?
If you want to see how stark the difference is, look at the compensation calculator gitlab developed: https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/
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.
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.
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).
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.
What? Many brilliant engineers were born outside the US, including one of the founders of Google, Sergey Brin.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
https://www.redfin.com/city/17151/CA/San-Francisco/filter/ma...
No, it simply isn't. By any stretch of the imagination.
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 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.
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.
But not everything has to scale rapidly. Many businesses scale slowly over decades, centuries or millenia.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
There are also situations where the supply of employees is kept artificially low (security clearance, taxi medallions, etc.).
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.
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.
Seems like a feature not a bug to me.
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.
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.