It is good thing overall. If a resource becomes more scarce (programmers in this case) companies learn to use it in more effective ways.
- Quality gets cut before features.
- Engineers are yanked and shuffled from one urgent priority to another with no sense of ownership and no time for craftsmanship, leading to garbage codebases.
- Mentorship and development fall by the wayside, making it even more important to get senior talent from outside, yet we still don't.
- Management eventually spins up a team in a more favorable country, which leads to a lot of annoying off-hours videoconferencing at best, possibly even loss of status as the "center of gravity" for your area.
- They company starts looking downmarket for labor, giving you less competent coworkers.
- Higher pay is directly offset by higher likelihood of a layoff; you shuffle all the excess into your emergency fund just to maintain the same level of security.
Just like a scarcity of doctors is good for doctors, but bad for patients.
If the USA had only one doctor, we would't magically be able to treat everyone by using the one doctor "more efficiently", rather only the super rich would get treatment.
So not all bad.
The value of the programmers is equal to all the people their programs replace, but yet, they are paid less than a single one of the individuals they replace.
Our society doesn't properly value programmers. If it did, there wouldn't be an H1-B issue. There are more Americans who want to be doctors than America will legally allow to exist. There's no cap on how many programmers there can be, yet America throws its hands up in the air wondering why.
The answer is obvious: America doesn't value programmers appropriately.
You can't say, "We can't afford to pay what programmers are worth." How about pay sales people less. Why do sales people get 30% commissions? Why do CEO's get millions?
The only real solution to the problem is to properly value the work and pay for it.
This is known as 'teleradiology' ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleradiology )
The H1-B abuse is based on corporate lies. It's hard to claim that you need H1-B workers when you're replacing existing workers and even having the fired workers train their replacements.
In many cases they move people who have lost their work visa extensions after working for 5 to 10 years, yet haven't received their greencards because of country quotas.
Example:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/12/microsoft-might-be-forced-to...
FWIW, I'd love to get a decent sized property with internet, away from the city and traffic and pollution, and be able to work full time remotely.