What IBM Pays H-1B Software Engineers and Developers
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We have very few black people in engineering roles. I don’t know a single black engineer at this company to be honest and I’ve been here 7 years and interface with lots of other teams.
I don’t think the Indian or Chinese devs get paid less. The one data point I do have (anecdotal) is that every Indian dev I’ve met is generally on a spectrum between unhappy to extremely unhappy, and they’re only in their role because it’s very difficult to find another company that will sponsor you. So you either keep your mouth shut or risk getting let go and have to leave the country:
Amazons work culture is pretty shitty in many orgs - very cut throat. I’ve never seen the more horrific examples from the NYTimes article years ago about people crying at their desks, but I’ve been in enough contentious meetings and have seen people purposely set up to fail by their managers so they could be managed out because politics.
But can we stop kidding ourselves that H-1B holders seeking permanent status are innocent victims? They're exploiting a loophole (dual-intent) to immigrate where they otherwise would have a difficult time qualifying for an immigration visa. They've willingly accepted the trade-offs.
It's a loophole? That's news to me. Outside of family and extraordinary abilities (think Nobel prize winners), what other way is there for someone to immigrate?
If there are any immigrants to be attracted, it is this pool of people. Well educated, speak english, no crime and not moochers. What other alternative people do you want to support your social security system?
Well, call it what you want. Originally the H-1 program was for temporary non-immigrant workers. Intent matters when someone enters any country -- if someone is determined by the immigration authorities to have intent to immigrate, but only holds a non-immigrant visa or waiver, they'll be denied entry.
In the 90s the H-1 program was made dual-intent, as in, intent to immigrate would not disqualify someone from entry, setting the stage for the present mass exploitation of H-1B workers.
> what other way is there for someone to immigrate?
Like I said, US immigration is racist and broken. I don't know how we solve it, aside from obvious of creating other paths to legal immigration and phasing out H-1B's dual-intent status so that immigration doesn't turn into exploitation.
From the immigrants' perspective the obvious thing to do is vote with your feet -- go somewhere else or stay in their home country -- but so many people want to come to America that it's hard to imagine reaching a critical mass to effect policy change.
Do you know why this was done? Because the bureaucracy went out of whack and caused massive delays in the real immigration steps aka green cards.
If anything, H-1 is the only way right now because US govt can't function like a developed country. The H-1s are not to blame. They are just like you and I. And they are the kind of immigrants I want to sustain our population and economy.
One sad thing I see though is they consider Canada as Plan B. They will get their permanent residency visa but will still stay in US.
I would love to live there one day, but they really need more competitive salaries if they want to lure talent from the US tech hubs.
https://www.payscale.com/research/CA/Job=Software_Developer/...
But I think the salaries will go up as more US companies setup shops here as the talent pool rises because of economic immigration.
I consider the pay ok because I get healthcare for free, do not have to worry about my visa, childcare is cheaper, spouses can work, my Canadian equivalent of 401k will not be lost like when I was in US on H1B. If I ever want to work in US, I can work on TN visa too.
It also depends on what you want. I opted for certainty and a good family life over the money.
I have also observed in some places that in some ways, diverse management structure is worse for some workers. White managers tend to be ignorant of subdivisions of asian society and treat all contractors or sponsored employees with aloof and impersonal management styles.
End of the day, it was a situation that was demeaning and awful for my colleagues who dealt with it, and they all left the company. The company no longer exists, but it was an example of an organization that focuses on the letter of the law and fostered a culture that ultimately hurt it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...
H-1B is supposed to be for highly skilled employees. You don't pay highly skilled employees less than average.
The median for "Application Developer" is $77K with a low of $48.5K.
What? They are taxed the same. In fact, they are taxed more. They pay for Social Security and Medicare even if they never get to use them. They also have to pay state unemployment insurance but they cannot claim the benefits from it. Not to mention the food stamp program etc.
I am confused with your wording and the use of double negatives, are you saying they shouldn't be charged for things they won't use?
your statement about social welfare is reality for Indian h1bs. They will never be able to get a green card, and yet pay all the taxes for them. 8% of your salary is pretty steep for something you can't touch, ever.
An H-1B requires application of specialized knowledge and a bachelor's degree or the equivalent of work experience. So it's all a matter of perspective, but the highly skilled formulation talks about the skills required to do the job, not the competency within that specialization. Beyond that, I agree though, that visa status is a despicable reason to pay people less than what they're worth
The simplest way to solve the H1B problem is to scrap it and allow open immigration for skilled professionals from the top 20 most developed countries. The reality is that someone from India will accept much lower wages and poorer conditions than someone born in Australia, Sweden or Switzerland.
People on H1-B live in the US and maintain a good standard of living as per the city they are in and hence end up demanding for the same market salary as locals. This has been proven every-time people brought up cheap labor issue.
The likely issue (for American jobs) here is when whole IT/Software teams shift to India or China through outsourcing companies and American workers are laid off as cost measures. This happens a lot in non-tech companies very easily where they want to stay ahead in tech but not take the ownership of it.
Which 20 "developed" countries? Why would they come to US? If they could they already would as US pays much more than even "developed" countries. Australia has 23 million people (almost half of California) and almost zero IT. Sweden, Switzerland: Really?
Not everyone's ideal destination is US. It's funny how most Americans think the world is falling over their head to move to a country where gun nuts have the right to mow down people but you don't have the right to get medical for it.
Apple: $160,548
Microsoft: $155,775
Google: $188,086
IBM: $95,857
The IBM total compensation does not even have 6 digits! No wonder they have a hard time attracting talent.
It would have been interesting to see the numbers for Amazon, Facebook and Netflix too.
So yeah, I'd say that adding locations is required. I'm not sure where the majority of the IBM software engineer jobs are?
That $188k is total comp as well.
When I had IBM folks working for me in ye olden days (not subcontractors), they weren't working in the valley, and were perfectly good at what they did. They made about 30% more than the full time employees did, in exchange for living in Hilton.
Big tech is the way it is because right now they have access to unlimited money. The good times will roll until they don't! As things mature, the era of $160k college grads and $500k+bonus staff engineers will end.
The real reason IBM has trouble attracting talent is that they have no idea what they want to actually be doing, from a technical perspective. They are a sales organization, and that's all that they are to anyone in a position to make decisions about anything. I took a bit of a pay cut to go to IBM--I needed to get out of consulting because it was impossible to get a bank to verify income for a mortgage--but it wasn't drastic. Even setting that aside, though, IBM was the worst mistake of my career. I left in five months because the job was so stressfully do-nothing (if that makes sense?) that I could literally feel myself becoming a worse person, not in a "technologist" sense but that of a human being, by being ground down by that culture.
If you want to find actual abuse, look up all the "consulting" companies that file tens of thousands of applications every year at the tech equivalent of minimum wage - TCS, Cognizant, Wipro, Infosys, Deloitte, HCL, Accenture, Mahindra.
I've seen it first hand while working in Telco's who hire those types of companies.
How does that even qualify for H-1B?
The same applies to companies: there’s no better way to cut through the recruiter nonsense like checking out how treatment of H1-Bs compares to treatment of citizens and green card holders.
A personal anecdote: a friend of mine who is on an H1-B works for a bank. This bank talks a great game about culture and working conditions and liberal social programs and opportunity and whatnot. How do they treat my friend? She makes forty percent below market rate for our area, and their policy is she has to work for them for five years before they even start the green card process for her. Meanwhile complained like Google and friends typically start the green card process immediately upon hire.
Anyone who looks at their promotional material (who isn’t already disinclined to trust a bank) would come away with the impression that this institution is some sort of paradise of opportunity and career advancement. Meanwhile anyone who’s worked for them for any appreciable length of time knows that isn’t true.