Indian technology talent is flocking to Canada
economist.com
economist.com
Question: If there will supposedly be 200,000 tech vacancies in Canada by 2020, why are tech salaries in Canada so low compared to the US?
Another question: If the Canadian government is serious about developing the high tech sector, why doesn't it reform the absurdly overpriced telecoms oligopoly? See e.g. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/low-cost-data-crtc-1.494942... that reports on the imminent introduction of $30/month for 1 GB of wireless data as "low-cost" with a straight face. That's literally 10X what I pay here in Australia (https://www.optus.com.au/shop/broadband/mobile-broadband/dat...) never mind what it costs in Europe!
I think the primary reason Canadian policymakers want to juice immigration to Canada is to delay the real estate bubble from popping on their watch...
Since Canada is relatively easy to immigrate to, newcomers have to stay within the country to compete for scarce and low pay jobs, while citizens of Canada can pursue high salaries abroad.
And unemployment is at its lowest point in year in Canada.
Easy, allow in foreign competitors like we have here in Australia such as Vodafone (UK) and Optus (Singapore) that compete fiercely w/ the former domestic monopoly Telstra.
> There could be multiple plausible explanations for their high prices...
The industry justification for high prices is that Canada is a large, sparsely populated country. But that's also true of Australia and Russia which have much lower telecoms pricing (and the US to some extent). Personally I believe the real reason prices are so high in Canada is that the CRTC (the Canadian regulator) has been captured by the industry. Which is a polite way of saying plain old corruption.
So that companies can push for more immigration and keep salaries deflated.
I want to start my own company, I thought H4EAD would work out for me to do my startup. But for the last 2 years I could not risk move into H4EAD because the administration keeps saying they will cancel it "soon".
I am looking to move to Canada in 2019 (scheduled my IELTS and getting educational credentials evaluated for applying for Canadian PR). I love living in the bay area, but unfortunately things are not working out for us.
Thanks to the economic boom, the money I saved up over these years should help our family settle down in Canada when we move.
Lived in US for 6 years. Had my i140 approved a few months ago and got H1B approved for 3 more years. Was finally in the middle of getting a promotion to an architect role after 6-7 years working for the team. Literally threw away all of it and came back to India 2 months ago. Haven't even started looking for a job.
They gave me RFE for my H1B extension. I saw the RFE document and it was just a copy paste from some template. They didn't even have my employer name correct. And since I was in a state where they give driving license based on h1b, I couldn't drive for 3 months because of the RFE delay.
I am finally at peace after spending the last 6 years on the h1b leash, always living in uncertainty. There is no way I would have lasted while I wait for the green card. On some days, I used to cry while driving to work. I used to feel really strong emotional pain on most of the days. I haven't experienced any of that since I came back.
I think quality of life is not just a higher salary or a clean environment or better job opportunities. Part of my brain must have been seeing all this uncertainty as life threatening and pushed me away. I don't know how else to explain it. Sometimes I wonder if this is one way US is filtering out people because they want only the most mentally strong to be part of their society.
Please feel free to ask me anything else though I am not sure I can answer. I don't really know the internals of the visa process. Everything is handled by the immigration team of my employer and their attorney, and we rarely have any idea or control over what's going on. I got to to see the RFE only because the delivery head of my unit escalated my case.
Do I regret coming back?
Yes, I do on some days, especially when I go to Indian stores similar to BestBuy. I see all the big screen TVs and see them priced at 150k, 200k and above, and I suddenly feel poor. When I was in US, I couldn't buy them because of the uncertainty of being in US. Now, I cannot buy because I don't have a job. That makes me wish I shouldn't have come back. May be, my thinking would be different if I had a job in India.
Another issue is place of stay. I am staying at my in laws house, and I have to "act" to keep them happy. If they ask me to leave, I would be jobless and homeless also.
So, if all these RFEs are making you want to come back, I would say keep going. Things will most likely get better. If they deny your visa, come back. Otherwise stay. Save some money and retire early.
All the best.
As for money, I have a good savings in bank thanks to the 6 years in US. And my wife has a government job. We were in a dilemma on whether she should give up her job and come to US. All these talks about revoking h4 ead made that decision easier. Wife and I are staying at her parents house (they gave part of their house for us to stay). So, I dont have any immediate financial constraints. We don't have any kids either.
Other than driving in Indian traffic and the oocassional family drama involving my parents and in laws, things are going smooth so far.
They gave me RFE for my H1B extension
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/25/h-1b-visa-rfe-trump-admini...
Can I ask what was the RFE about? I mean there must have been a reason for them to question your extension?
Q1: H1B is for speciality occupation, for which a bachelors degree is a minimum requirement. Justify how your current position require a bachelors degree.
My comment: I asked the end customer manager. Bachelors degree was the minimum requirement for my position.
Q2. List out your daily roles at work. Justify how a bachelors degree is needed for each.
My comment: How many of us are actually doing anything that we learned in college?
Q3. The project duration is only for 1 year. Why did you ask for a 3 year extension?
My comment: We have been working with this customer for more than 8 years. They issue yearly project orders for that financial year. They don't issue PO for more than a year.
There were 2 more questions that were similar in nature to Q2. Even though my employer had a team of attorneys, they asked me prepare a response to these questions. I sent it to my employer, not sure if they modified it.
Got my visa approved 2 days after the RFE response reached USCIS (according to USCIS case status website).
Almost all my colleagues (I worked for an Indian company) received the same set of questions during their extension.
I was __very__ lucky to get to the end of the immigration journey successfully (got a green card after many years of H1B, I’m not Indian so my wait time was slightly less brutal), but those long years of uncertainty gave me PTSD and still to this day I live in fear of my permanent resident status being revoked for some irrelevant reason, even if I obviously legally followed the entire process, handheld by skilled attorneys. I have weekly/monthly nightmares in my sleep where I am abruptly sent back to my home country without recourse, which after so many years of living in the US is anything but home.
In perspective, these are very much first world problems, I constantly remind myself of that.
Which visa route would you use?
Speaking to my immigrant colleagues it sounds like it's all fine unless you hit Home Office bureaucracy, in which case it can rapidly turn into an expensive nightmare.
Though I can see some data regarding race related crimes going up.
living in US for the last 8 years
Even in the teeth of the recession, the entire quota of new H1B visas was consumed every year.
I know people whose applications from the 2011 quota were made and approved well into 2012 - so 2011 almost certainly did not hit the 85k (65k + 20K Masters) quota either. I assume 2009 was similar.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#H-1B_applications_ap...
Even tho supply of local labor was high during recession, it should not have been possible for emmigrant to come to US during that time. There was no need to bring labor from outside, it demonstrates problem with this program.
Have you read any of the almost-weekly tech interview threads here? Or been in a high growth startup where you are interviewing a lot?
Just because there are lots of people in the internal labor pool, doesn't mean there are lots of qualified people. When you can reach out to the ROW for your highly skilled talent, why would you limit yourself to less qualified local talent?
As an employer, it's [rhetorically] my job to hire the best talent I can find at the best price I can get. (Assuming that is maximally efficient; in some cases less good labor for better prices may be a better calculus. But let's ignore that.) It's the government's job to strike the balance between native employment and immigrant employment. If the H1B pool is consumed each year, I'd say they are doing a reasonably good job at it. If it's consumed, that means there are plenty of folks denied, for lack of quota. Those are jobs that end up filled by less qualified native talent.
The end of that sentence would be "...at the same low price and leash that an immigrant subject to an extremely opaque and unpredictable government agency (USCIS) who you don't have to worry about jumping ship so you can treat them worse.
I'm absolutely positive you have that exactly backwards.
indian tech workers make up a huge part of startups to pre-IPO companies.
having said that glassdoor reviews show them to be awful places to work-shit pay, shit code, that turns to overtime.
I know one friend who was pretty much ousted by indian managers.
just don't expect new arrivals to respect or even be conscious of Canadian cultures or customs.
i hope they eventually learn and integrate here however.
not so great for tech workers already in canada.
Customs vary around the world, even within a nation, and we must all make an effort to communicate our expectations and boundaries.
Most of the smaller, newer tech co's are sweat shops. As companies grow and mature a lot of them get better at treating their employees.
I have no idea why we in tech allow companies to make us work more than "X" hours.
Having worked for a 99% Indian/Pakistani company in tech myself, I can confirm that 'it's really different'. We were treated well, but when we were not ... it was in odd ways. And can confirm salaries were generally lower as so many people were in visa-limbo or migration situations, the company used it to it's advantage. It was a slide on the deck to investors. Which is maybe not so nice, but the logic makes sense: company of largely newcomers, lead by newcomers, uses cultural aspect of migration sensitivity to their advantage.
Also, curiously, though the notion of Indians and Pakistanis coming together to form a successful enterprise is amazing and progressive ... a lot of the 'class based' issues were imported as well. The execs were all from elite Indian Subcontinent families.
Yes, large portions of tech immigrants are Indians, but not all immigrants are Indians. This is typical correlation doesn't imply causation mistake. Considering, a huge majority of Indians in tech it shouldn't be less common than otherwise. Doesn't mean Indians managers are mostly bad. The ones I had in US were great, and includes the best I've had.
I've seen this happen also in Silicon Valley, I've personally participated in conversations with startup founders quoting their ability to tap into cheap labor under the form of "talented, naive and visa-handcuffed immigrants" a major competitive advantage.
Not so much 'ethnicity' but 'visa leverage'.
Sun Microsystems and others faced scrutiny during layoffs for protecting H1Bs over American workers.
Given the leverage that companies have, they often pay less. Also - foreign workers will generally have a lower salary requirement if they come from poorer countries.
This is also the case in Alberta Oil fields where investors try to get temp permit visas for foreign workers (China, Philipines) because hiring Canadians is brutally expensive. It becomes de-facto ethnic because the workers tend to come from specific regions.
We really need to fix immigration laws to make recruiting foreign IT professionals easier. The H1B system and the years of waiting is a disgrace.
Here for example.
Most people associate it with IT workers, but many accountants, research scientists, engineers, and other professionals also hold H-1Bs. Where I work, it is the latter categories of professionals that dominate. Many of them have degrees from schools (e.g. MIT, CMU, etc.) much better than schools most of us went to.
And yes, some of them work at startups. They usually start out with an OPT after graduating and then convert to an H-1B.
IT worker and H-1B are not synonymous -- the former is a subset of the latter. It's unfortunate that the latter is used as shorthand for the former, and the two categories are conflated.
Explain to me how a degree from schools "much better than schools most of us went to" indicates the person is more competent or intelligent than anyone else? "better" should be subbed out for "prestigious".
Two engineers started this Monday - an iOS specialist, and an Operations engineer. One is a citizen, and one is on H-1B. We pay both engineers according to the firm's salary bands for those respective positions.
> Or because you dont have the budget to pay the required salary demanded by native workers with that skillset.
So what you insinuate is possible, but not always the case.
Believe me it’s an expensive last resort.
If you go to any startup event in the Bay Area, you will see plenty of engineers on H-1Bs. Or browse one of the "Who's Hiring" threads here to notice that many startups provide for H-1B transfers.
Can you expand on this thought?
For countries that need an H1-B, Canada's visas are much easier to obtain and live with.