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Comment by jmpman | Hacker News Reader

H1B compete with the newly graduated college students. Before people say that there’s no problem with STEM graduates finding a job, I’ll counter that many of my coworkers 20 years ago didn’t have STEM degrees, and were previously English majors, business majors, etc. They were people with technical aptitude who realized they had picked a field of study that didn’t quite suit their financial aspirations. They were able to get an entry level IT job and move up. Now those jobs are filled by H1B.

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It's probably worthwhile to think about scale in this context: There are only 85000 H-1B visas issued each year by the US; 20k of those are reserved for people with advanced degrees [1]. Given that there are an estimated 3.87 million software developers working in the USA [2], this seems unlikely to be the root cause of the inability of some graduates to find entry level software jobs.

1. https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/temporary-worker... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demograph...

How is it possible that 2.5% of the workforce is a programmer? One out of every 40 people?

It's a good question: you can see a fairly granular breakdown of the workforce by industry [here](https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11b.htm). There are about 5.1 million people working in "Computer and mathematical occupations", the majority of whom are developers.

I created a tree map out of it: https://void4.github.io/allgermans/americans.html

Previously, one with all Germans: https://void4.github.io/allgermans/Germany.html

man a first look at that tree map made it seem strangely mis-represented... like there is no way there are that many dental assistants. Pro tip for viewers: zoom all the way out

But how long are those visas good for? If it's multiple years, then we really need to count how many active H1Bs there are, not the number issued yearly.

I just Googled and found this article: https://qz.com/949589/the-h-1b-visa-cap-tells-you-very-littl...

... which indicates that about 500,000 H1B visas are currently valid. If those were to all go to tech workers, that would be about 1/7 of all software developers, which is definitely enough to move the needle on compensation, access to entry level jobs, and so on.

You assume everyone is maxing it out.

My H1B extension still has ~2 years left on it, but I moved back last year..

But, sure -- it's not nothing. But go look at the stats.

There are a lot more technical jobs that require a degree than 3m software developers. There are dozens of different types of engineering and scientific domains apart from software development.

Even if we assume only half of H1Bs are in software developer roles, 1/14 of all software developers is still enough by my estimation to move the needle. Especially because, even just by random chance, there are likely to be concentrations of H1B visa holders in certain geographic areas.

Honestly I think even the quoted 85,000 number would be enough to move the needle, but 250,000 certainly would be.

Just a couple of "thought experiments"... if there are 3M software developers with on average a 20 year career, about 150,000 would be entering the workforce at any given time. If it's true that H1Bs compete with entry level workers for jobs, 85,000 visas would certainly have a felt impact.

Also, about why I think even 85,000 would affect the entire market... even a relatively small amount of additional workforce can shift the balance of market forces significantly. Again, as a thought experiment, let's say there are 100,000 jobs for software engineers and those software engineers are worth $200,000 to the companies that employ them. For simplicity, let's say additional software engineers beyond 100,000 are absolutely worthless to the company. Assuming we have 95,000 software engineers looking for jobs, they find themselves highly in demand and able to negotiate from a strong position for high salary, benefits, and so on. If we add another 10,000 engineers somehow, from any source (including increases in the local training of engineers), suddenly there are more engineers than the market demands, and a race to the bottom could begin (assuming all engineers were equal). Obviously there is also a skill distribution so the most highly skilled engineers would be less affected than those less skilled, but as you get closer to the bottom of the distribution, you'd be more affected by the changes to negotiating power even if you're more skilled than some of the new entrants.

Obviously the above is not a rigorous analysis, which could and should be done, but is just a thought experiment to show that it's POSSIBLE that a small number of new entrants could affect the market.

If anyone knows of good resources for estimating the supply/demand curves for software engineers, I'd be interested in reading them.

The vast majority of applicants were in IT, mainly developers, according to a quick search:

https://www.investopedia.com/news/h1b-visa-issue-explained-m...

Why would you compare a yearly number to a total number? A better comparison would be the yearly net change in H-1B holders vs. growth in the number US software developers.

That number may even be better for your argument, because 65K/yr entry level programmers entering a 4000K programming market seems huge.

20 years ago was a special time. Anyone who could spell HTML could get a job. Things are different now and the bar is a bit higher. Today’s equivalent of the English and business majors are boot camp grads.

The bar is higher because there's free (or near free) specialized education overseas and not domestically. Why pay to train entry level employers when the tax payers of X country will do it for you for free? Take away the subsidized labor pool and watch that bar fall back to the floor.

There was free and low cost education available overseas 20 years ago. I don’t buy your argument.

20 years ago, I'm willing to bet the number of IT degrees overseas was a small fraction compared to today. Over the last 20 years the market has reacted to the conditions available and lead to the situation we have now.

You may be "willing to bet," but this is just you asserting that your premise is true. Do you have any data? My claim that free and low cost university-level education was available outside the US is easily verifiable with a 10 second Google search.

> there's free (or near free) specialized education overseas and not domestically.

There's free specialized education available on the internet for anyone who is an autodidact.

> The bar is higher because there's free (or near free) specialized education overseas and not domestically.

Uh not really.

I've been a front-end developer for almost ten years. When I first started out, yeah, you could teach a monkey to build a static site. Most of the jQuery I knew was copy and paste, easy stuff.

Now? You need to be an expert in Javascript, Object Oriented programming, CSS preprocessors, NPM and various build tools, template languages, responsive frameworks and at least another dozen or so technologies people are using to create dynamic websites. This doesn't even scratch the surface of what you need to know if you're interested in developing mobile apps.

Web designers don't have it much easier. You need to be completely fluent with every Adobe tool and Apple Sketch or any collection of wireframing software. Toss in deep knowledge of font pairings, color theory and you need to have expert level knowledge of CSS. You're not a "web designer" anymore either. You're now a UI/UX developer.

And did I mention that every single one of these technologies come and go faster than mumble rappers on Soundcloud? So once you've taken a year or so to learn BackboneJS, poof then Angular and ReactJS comes out, and now you have to pivot to those languages. Oh, you're company loved Angular but the new guys like ReactJS? Oh too bad, now we're going to use React instead. Oh you just interviewed for a new role, but they're in love with VueJS, do you know that too?

The bar is higher because development in general has become exponentially more complex and continues to get more complex every month. Specialized Education overseas really has nothing to do with it. At the rate technology is changing on the front-end side, there's just no way education can keep up.

Plenty of H1B holders create jobs as well. The economy isn't a pie of fixed size with everyone fighting over a limited number of slices.

Overall, immigration has been a net boon to the US's economy, including the creation of many jobs.

Net boon to the economy in terms of GDP, but it does have some negative effects on wages and employment.

Not necessarily. A lot of immigrants are job creators. Think of how many startup founders are foreign, and have created a lot of money and jobs for a lot of people. Hell, look at how well represented foreigners are in the upper echelons of the FAANGs. Even Sergey Brin was born in Moscow.

> A lot of immigrants are job creators.

And a lot aren't. There's a reason you throw away outliers in statistics.

If every job creator is an outlier, and you throw away all outliers, then there should be zero jobs in existence. Clearly your methodology is flawed.

Why can't a 28 American with an English major do a coding bootcamp and find an entry level job? I'm sure if he's reasonable intelligent and ambitious he can. There aren't that many h1b's around competing with him, most American jobs aren't h1b jobs.

Why is "do a coding bootcamp" the common refrain from tech workers trying to help non-tech people?

Because it's a way into tech for non-tech people? This wasn't, as far as I understood, a general suggestion for all English majors, but for those that allegedly used to be able to simply start in tech jobs 20 years ago. Now they may need a bit of prior knowledge, which boot camps can help with.

Because tech work is magical and plentiful regardless of where you are and everyone can become a programmer /s

I do believe that if you can learn to read and write, you can learn to program.

The drive into getting more people to code is to increase the supply and lower pay.

Because the barrier to entry is still quite low. While maybe not "Anyone who could spell HTML could get a job" low, as said in another comment here, it's still so low that I'd wager a decently clever person with a good 3 month bootcamp can get a _entry-level_ job.

I would say the entry level market for devs is very saturated.

If they're making more than any other job you can get with 3-6 mos. of training, the market is not saturated.

That's a fallacious argument though, because at the lower end tech jobs pay more than other careers but result in you being exploited by corporations looking to drive wages down.

When I graduated, there were companies offering me 30-40k a year in cities like Seattle. I have friends that could tell you the same story, some who took the opportunity because of the entry level market being saturated.

Bootcamp graduates are often placed in incredibly exploitative contracting environments (often in companies that also underpay, abuse and threaten H1Bs) which are farmed out to larger companies looking to get work done cheap. Though this has just been my personal experience and that of my friends. They leverage desperation.

There are no entry-level jobs.

It's really become rather saturated at the entry level. It's a market for lemons situations, where there may be a lot of opening, but there's tons of unqualified candidates.

It's the commodification of the profession.

Because the truth is that the technical work is not the barrier, but rather the grit to grind through the hundreds of little problems that you'll encounter on the way to getting a working piece of code. So "do a coding bootcamp" functions as a rapid weeding process where someone can find out quickly if they're up to the career or not. Then if they're not, they didn't waste a ton of time finding out that it doesn't work out for them, and if they are, then the bootcamp will provide further vectors to progress.

Besides "get a CS degree", what are the other alternatives? Telling people to learn how to program themselves isn't very successful; if they were the kind of person who'd do that, they'd have already done it; it's not like they were just waiting for someone to tell them to do it.

I never understood this either, it's not practical advice for most people. You might as well say "become a plumber", "do electrician school", or even "go be a doctor".

There are a variety of high demand and well paying jobs, but not everyone is interested in them, or even cut out for them.

Because tech workers like devaluing their skills.

Because the number of openings for entry tech workers is essentially infinite. (Wait, what?)

Because non-technical work is regarded as completely worthless and there is more merit in being a minimally-competent HTML-slinger.

No idea. I think it is somewhat suicidal to want to commodify your own profession.

For starters, H1Bs are cheaper to hire. Also, they're more desperate to stay in the US, so they won't demand too much and won't walk away from poor conditions.

That also fixes with the population issue since middle class Americans can't really afford to have kids.

> For starters, H1Bs are cheaper to hire.

As an H1B, I am paid squarely in the middle of the pay band of my co-workers that share my performance rating and ladder level. If you combine that with all the immigration-related legal expenses my employer is racking up, I cost more then the average employee, here.

I ask - just because there's some shitty headshops that illegally employ H1Bs at below-market rate, don't generalize that to the entire population of visa-holders.

> For starters, H1Bs are cheaper to hire

Citation needed, because this is a sweepingly broad statement. To hire an H1B you need to pay the prevailing wage, usually at least $60k, which is more than an entry-level non-STEM college grad is going to be paid outside the Bay Area (it should still be increased to something like $90-95k IMO but that's a different issue).

In addition to that, there are thousands of dollars in legal fees. And of course the application has to win the lottery (which happens in April) and then be approved for the visa (which starts in October). Which means you have to wait at least 7 months after extending an offer for the employee to start.

Yeah, in theory. In practice H1B abuse is rife. You can look at HN's previous discussion on this.

It is hard to afford to raise kids in the bay area.

It is not so hard to afford to raise kids somewhere else, say Salt Lake City or Syracuse, NY.

This is the "comparative advantage" that Adam Smith told you about. India can export kids to the bay area, but so can other parts of the U.S.

In my anecdotal experience, the business axes a position and downgrades responsibilities to a lower title. So what a Sr. DBA did before would go to a regular DBA or even a Jr. DBA. It doesn't matter what the prevailing wage for a title is when responsibilities are loosely coupled.

I think the best way to counter the abuse is to increase the premium ($100k+) and allow H1Bs to move between companies.

> So what a Sr. DBA did before would go to a regular DBA or even a Jr. DBA.

GP was asserting that it is cheaper to hire H1Bs than entry-level grads, which isn't the same thing as what you're describing.

> I think the best way to counter the abuse is to increase the premium ($100k+) and allow H1Bs to move between companies.

I agree re: increasing the minimum to ~$90-100k. Maybe apply a CoL based multiplier so it's $85k in, for instance, Tulsa but $135-145k in the Bay Area.

H1Bs are already allowed to move between companies. But the new company has to apply for a fresh visa, without going through the lottery, and it takes a few weeks, which is a hassle. Plus there's a risk of being denied or going into RFE. I think that rule could be tweaked to allow movement without approval if the offered salary in the new role is higher by a certain minimum percentage (like say 10% increase).

Middle class Americans can absolutely afford to have kids. People in certain metros maybe can't afford it, but living there is often a choice they explicitly make, or at the very least talk themselves into. Sure you make half as much working somewhere else, but the cost of living is also a quarter as much.

Yep. That.

Every time I read something about the cost of having kids I'm looking for some idea of where these people live.

The single largest expense for kids is day care and that's only necessary if you have 2 working parents...and if one of those parents income doesn't more than justify the cost of daycare it's usually a better idea to have a stay at home.

People seriously take for granted the financial value that a stay at home parent brings to a home in overall cost savings. Expenses go up based on lack of time, more so than anything else. It affects your shopping, cooking, home maintenance, yard maintenance, eating out, fuel costs and long term child care costs (after school activities, day care, summer day camps, etc) that you have to worry about when you keep needing to free up time so that you can get to work.

And all of those expenses are higher in densely populate areas where there's more demand for all of the "good" activities.

But it often comes down to a matter of pride to have a stay at home parent.

Current income justifying day care is a short term and fallacious comparison. You need to look at long term potential. Leaving the labor force does more than just set you back the years you were gone.

Also really depends what you are chasing, both as an individual and a family unit. It's an optimization problem where there are more variables than income.

Edit:

Personally, I think the whole financial independence movement is pretty interesting, and sometimes I get myself through the day by viewing it as my wife being financially independent. Which is halfway there as far as things go.

You do of course...but you also have to determine long term cost potential of all of the other expenses and savings besides day care.

It compounds in both directions and gets amplified by the continued lack of time due to balancing home and work commitments. Usually it takes a couple of years of exhaustion before people come face to face with the realization that things would be much easier of one person was a stay at home.

The formula is trickiest in the middle. At the higher end, a lot of couples will hire a nanny that can provide many of the same benefits as a stay at home. At the lower end, the decision is fairly easy.

It's in the middle where it's toughest to come to grips with it.

A quarter? Dream on. We're living in the Midwest with an East coast salary (remote).

I have no idea how other ppl here afford kids and manage to save. We spend $30k on day care and another $12k on health premiums alone.

Living in the Midwest on a Midwest salary ($85k/yr), currently 30 years old, have 3 kids, a stay at home wife, and a net worth that just peeked over $250k.

Also, our work health insurance is shit, so $200 gets taken out of my paycheck each week for that, which puts it right around the $12k you mentioned.

Daycare is stupid expensive. Healthcare is stupid expensive. We handle the former by having my wife stay home. The latter is just an unfortunate fact of life.

I really don't know how much it costs to live on the coasts, but on a developer salary you can live very comfortably in the Midwest (Ames, Iowa here).

A single-income family with children and a stay-at-home parent isn't an unfortunate fact of life, it's a stable economic and social arrangement that promotes health and welfare of children, giving them a strong prospect for future success.

war1025 said that the healthcare being stupid expensive is an unfortunate fact of life, not the single-income family.

So you are saying if you have a non-fatal health incident then you are in serious financial trouble?

My wife and I are in the same position. We pay $209 a month for “healthcare” coverage that has a $700 yearly deductible. If either of us got sick or injuries we would be totally screwed. The US system is broken. We have massive wealth inequality, an educational system in crisis, and a toxic political system.

I assume by $700 you mean $7000? Also wondering if your $209 / month figure was accurate. What your comment currently describes is 1/4 the premium and 1/10th the deductible that my family has.

I agree that healthcare in the US is completely broken. It is in fact one of my favorite things to gripe about to anyone who will listen or who happens to be in my vicinity at the wrong moment.

I think our current "out of pocket max" is somewhere around $6k/year. The bill for having twins blew through that pretty well. When we had our first child, our deductible was roughly twice as much and I think we maybe just scratched the out of pocket max. Those insurance premiums were only a third of what we pay now though, which was a better trade off in my opinion.

Would we be financially ruined by running into something like that again? No. Would we be majorly inconvenienced? Yes.

A lot of American's grew up middle class but aren't anymore, they still think of themselves as such but truly aren't. This is how most Millenials live, they are too broke to have kids, think of themselves as middle class because they grew up that way, even if in reality they aren't.

What do you consider middle class? That term is notoriously ill-defined.

- $50-$99 is lower middle

- $100-$199 is middle

- $200-$499 is upper middle

- $500-$999 is lower upper

Etc.

That’s the scale I’ve always used (household income).

Most millennials fall in the lower middle or middle bucket.

On that scale, pretty much everyone I know / grew up around is lower middle class. Not a bad life.

This is probably accurate given how our society really is structured. But following your thresholds:

- 61% of incomes are below lower middle

- 26% of incomes are lower middle (median being $61,822)

- 10% of incomes are middle

- 3% (nearly) of incomes are upper-middle

- <1% is remaining…

Data from https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/

Caveat, this is individual income, and you're talking about household income, so not quite the same for couples where both work.

The real median household income was $61,372 in 2017. I think your scale may be incorrect.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

Your lower-upper class is a subset of the top 1% of incomes.

https://dqydj.com/united-states-household-income-brackets-pe...

Being able to support yourself and a family with a (single) full time job. That includes owning a home, a car, being able to afford to see a doctor when you have to, going to the occasional movie and taking a vacation once in a while. It includes being able to do all these things without being one illness or one unexpected expense away from being homeless or destitute. It includes the prospect of being able to be able to retire no later than your mid 60s with enough money to maintain a similar (if not the same) standard of living.

~40 years ago this "middle class" standard of living was readily attainable for anyone who diligent, reasonable intelligent, and willing to work hard. Not only that, it was standard for such a lifestyle to be achievable with only one household member working. Now the much more common circumstance is that both adults work, many of the above living conditions are barely achievable, if at all, and many families are one financial hiccup away from disaster.

We can debate over the various reasons for this change in the economic landscape for working people, but there is no debate to be had over the reality of it. The change has been substantive. Its much, much harder for the average working person today to live comfortably and raise a family than it was just a few decades ago.

That all seems pretty true. People have spent that past decade telling me that I'm going to be less well off than my parents, though. So I guess my opinion is that it's best to just accept it and adjust your lifestyle accordingly. We still live like kings compared to most of human history.

Also, the social safety net in the US isn't great, but it definitely exists. You can be a pretty big screw up and still have a roof over your head. You just won't have much else.

>People have spent that past decade telling me that I'm going to be less well off than my parents, though. So I guess my opinion is that it's best to just accept it and adjust your lifestyle accordingly.

If I told you I was going to beat you up and steal your money every night, it doesn't mean you should just smile and accept it as inevitable, even if that's really my plan.

>We still live like kings compared to most of human history.

We have more collective wealth than any time in human history, and more collective wealth than we did ~40 years ago when working people had the living conditions I described above. As far as I'm concerned, there's no "good" or "acceptable" reason that the artificial system ("the economy") that we designed and continue to maintain, that has resulted in far worse living conditions for the average American, should not be changed so that our collective wealth is more evenly distributed among those who participate in our system. Especially dishonest and (more frequently) ignorant people will blame the, "free market" for the massive (and growing) disparity in wealth, but there is nothing about our economic system that is "free". From our central bank to our byzantine "regulatory" structure to our legal system to our tax code to currency control and beyond, we have a financial system that is tightly controlled, regulated, and guided by powerful, entrenched interests at the upper echelon of the financial world. It isn't even useful to draw a distinction between governmental and non-governmental entities at this level, because they are the same. Our economy has been guided and controlled by a rotating door of corporatists (or whatever other adjective you choose to describe our economic oligarchs) to ensure wealth consolidation.

We can either recognize the problem - that our whole system has been off the rails for some time and is horribly broken - or we can continue down the same path of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer until we reach a breaking point. Hopefully we choose the former path but unfortunately the latter seems more likely.

> If I told you I was going to beat you up and steal your money every night, it doesn't mean you should just smile and accept it as inevitable, even if that's really my plan

I didn't say smile and accept it. I said "adjust your lifestyle". The rules changed, so how you play needs to change with it.

If you tell me you're going to beat me up and take my money every time you see me, I'm going to make sure we don't cross paths.

My point is that there is no reason to be surprised at what is happening because people have been telling us that is what will happen.

The fact is, there are a bunch of people who are in effect living a life of "He told me he'd beat me up and take my money every day, and sure enough every time I see him, he beats me up and takes my money, but maybe tomorrow he won't!"

When someone shows you their cards, take advantage of it, is all I'm saying.

I should have clarified. Middle class Americans cannot afford to have kids if they want the type of lifestyle they grew up with. Someone who grew up in Boston will need to move further out; someone who grew up with a single mom in Austin can no longer afford to raise a kid there without a spouse.

Cheaper to hire by the design of people that agree with you: if you want them to be just as pricey as an american you have to eliminate all restrictions of negotiation.

You also have to eliminate all tax-benefits that americans receive that foreigners don't. And then you have to make public all wages of american citizens, to equal the information asymetry

Not many entry level jobs. Everyone is hiring experienced candidates because that's what H1B's are, experienced.

Would you rather hire an entry-level domestic worker for the same salary as an experienced foreign worker?

Not necessarily - they just need to have a degree.

Pretty sure saying "learn to code" will get you in trouble on Twitter. Not sure about here. Watch out, though.

Twitter is such a weird echo chamber of madness. People there will get themselves so twisted up about nonsense and just end up feeding the trolls. Unfortunately, it starts leaking out into regular society.

Not just 20, but all the way back from the beginning of programming until perhaps the mid 80s.

English majors, telephone company employees who were getting a bit old to climb poles, bright high schoolers who got trained in the military, science grad school dropouts, etc etc, and somehow code got written.

I'd look at our own problems rather than trying to blame immigrants, who have always been part and parcel of the US economy.

Indeed, many of those companies wouldn't be around were it not for immigrants, since they not only work for companies, but also found them and of course purchase their products and services.

H1Bs are not meant for immigration. Their purpose is to fulfill a void in the highly educated work force by employing a temporary, foreign worker.

I think his point has some validity since H1Bs can replace local workers with lower paying H1B substitutes. Yes, this isn't allowed but it happens all the time.

It's crucial to keep in mind that this is not a zero sum game.

There is not a fixed lump of labor to be divided up.

I don't agree that it's a major problem to underemployment- especially not the massive underemployment referenced in the article. But I still think it's a problem that should be corrected.

You have another option for people of your ideological inclination: ban any software product that is made outside of the us. Inevitable, consumers will have to turn to the domestic market which will inflate the salaries you are so interested in protecting.

Once that works, you can advance further and ban free open-source, including platforms like Github. Free labor is the enemy of high wages. You can increase salaries even more by regulating licenses and limiting how many people can be software engineers or write code at all.

And then you can keep going, and ban high use of computing power: you will need more labor to compensate the inefficiencies of wasteful, environment harming, computer processing.

Success is guaranteed!

>Now those jobs are filled by H1B

How do you know that? I doubt this claim. Plenty of people still teach themselves programming and get jobs.

Basically cross-train on private sector money and time. There should be a "don't follow your dreams" social campaign.

If a company is okay with employees "cross training" is that a problem? They're not forced to train employees, but the good ones will.

That's difficult when there is a motivation and purpose glut. Lot's of people/kids struggling to find connection and purpose. They hope they can achieve this through higher learning.

An alienation epidemic. Everyone wants a job that's at least one of: personally meaningful, or clearly helpful to others. Also it should pay the bills well enough to gain you housing somewhere with decent schools. Good friggin' luck.

> Everyone wants a job that's [..] clearly helpful to others.

I can imagine no better symptom to show how utterly sick the current economic system is, than that it takes luck to find a job where one is helpful to others and paid well. Helping others in exchange for money is supposed to be the basis of the free market!

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