Tech companies will post incoherent ads for open positions in tiny local papers
twitter.com
twitter.com
This is normally called Malicious Compliance - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance - where someone meets the requirements, not the intent. Maybe both the intent and the requirements should be spelled out more specifically but the players involved - large tech companies and legislators - don't have an interest in that.
I'd say the way google et al manage taxes is also malicious compliance. Technically everything is fine, but this level of taxation is clearly not the intention.
edit: are to our
In any case, their act lacks the malicious component of malicious compliance. I.e. they aren't impeding some other process by the act of posting these job ads. It's not the same thing.
One, these ads are mandated by law. Even if you are hiring people through normal modern channels like online ads, you must legally show that you placed a newspaper ad because the law is old and expects old-fashioned ads. Obviously they don't want candidates through this pipeline but that hardly means they don't want candidates!
Two, this legal requirement is for green cards / permanent residency, for a candidate already hired via H-1B or equivalent - and a green card allows immigrants to move jobs and otherwise demand a genuine market rate just as if they had generations of American blood.
I don't think this tweet was intended to be nativist propaganda - replies make it sound like he was just ill-informed - but it's still nativist propaganda.
My intent is opposite of nativist propaganda. I think the regulations are silly and companies are minimally complying with them.
Not very easily these days. There's a yearly limit on H1-B visas, and more applications than visas, so they're assigned by lottery. For 2019 there was only a 32% chance of selection: https://www.immi-usa.com/h1b-lottery-2016-results-chances-pr...
If the intent was truly to fill positions with H1 then they should be laying off H1 employees every 3-5 years and rotate them with a fresh crop of H1 so that they never have to set their employees free.
>If the intent was truly to fill positions with H1 then they should be laying off H1 employees every 3-5 years and rotate them with a fresh crop of H1 so that they never have to set their employees free.
There are only 85000 H1B visas available per year (65K regular and additional 20K for people with masters degree from an American institution). That's not nearly enough to do what you propose.
It's hard to trust a non-governmental data source since there is no penalty or fines for misreporting.
I'm looking at the data, I'll reply once I remember how to `import xlsxreader`.
The historical definition of a "nation" (note the nat- Latin root, of "birth") is in fact a race. Many countries (as in the political entities) offer easier paths to citizenship to people of a certain ethnic background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_sanguinis#Leges_sanguinis_...
https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/search?location=united-states-U...
The process isn't cheap and isn't easy. All things equal regarding the employee and candidate, why would they be afraid of finding a suitable replacement?
They aren't afraid of finding someone qualified. They are afraid of finding someone who is not. They are not allowed to over-specify the job posting, and are not allowed to require something like years of proprietary knowledge. The employee and the candidate both have to be treated like fresh hires.
Edit: for example, in the Jony Ive green card process, a fresh University graduate would be able to displace him as a candidate. All of his experience was proprietary (gained while working at Apple) and therefore ineligible for consideration.
If they can’t hire enough at market rate, then that’s the narkets answer. I see no reason to create a shadow immigration system run through apple’s HR department to help them escape the realities of the market.
At minimum wage I’m sure there’s be lots of demand for talented engineers but vert lie supply. At a mil a year demand would fall considerably but supply would sure rise.
So again. At what salary?
I call it a shadow system because it is deeply dishonest, corrupt, and manipulative, and makes decisions about residency and path to citizenship under the cloak of corporate HR secrecy
The "realities of the market" are that part of why Apple engineering salaries are what they are is because of how national borders got drawn. Had California been an independent country without an open border with the rest of the US, salaries in Silicon Valley would be significantly higher, and people would be saying that "the market" set this rate. If we got rid of immigration restrictions entirely, which are certainly government interference in the free market, we'd get closer to seeing the actual market rate.
For now I think the guiding principle should be that immigrants should be free to participate freely in the labor market as free and full members of society, not restricted by corporations in what fields to study, what jobs to work, what salaries to accept, or what locations to live in, as a condition of living and working in the US. Interestingly I think people can have very different opinions about the general level of immigration while agreeing strongly on this principle.
Apple is sitting on 56 Billion in cash, if they want the talent open the checkbook.
There is no good reason they need to “import” talent and limit that talent to 100K.
They could also improve their talent development processes and start looking for talent in other areas, Money-ball style.
I don’t understand people’s unwillingness to appreciate that these are cost cutting moves and reducing employee freedom of movement (H1-B’s are essentially handcuffed)
Let Apple participate in the market for labor, why do we need to bend over backwards for Apple? Let a competitor compete with them, we don’t need to lobby the government to change the rules for an organization sitting on billions of dollars.
The median salary of an H1-B is $80,000. To be having this discussion without acknowledging that labor costs is a factor is laughable.
You are inventing facts out of thin air to fit your preconceived prejudices. The engineers at Apple, both immigrant and local, make far more than 100k/year.
America is only 5% of the global population. If you want to hire the best people, some of them will be American and some of them will not. No matter how much you are willing to pay, you have to be willing to hire all nationalities if you truly want the best talent.
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=apple&job=software+Enginee...
Also don't forget that these numbers only include base salary and not RSUs/bonuses. At tech firms base salary is only a fraction of total comp. Someone who makes 150k base might make e.g. 250k+ TC.
The point I am making, that you are repeatedly refusing to acknowledge, is that the H-1B program covers almost ALL skilled immigrants, not just the ones that are hired because they are cheap. There is no alternate immigration program for people making 500k/year.
You seem to be making 2 different arguments at the same time, that
1. The H-1B program sucks (because employees are handcuffed to their employers)
2. Therefore companies should not use the H-1B program and only hire Americans.
I agree with you on the first point but the second does not follow from the first. Since there is no gentler, kinder, alternative to the H-1B program, companies have no choice but to go through it to hire the people they want to hire, even if their goal is not just to acquire cheap labor. Expanding your hiring pool beyond 5% of the world population is necessary if you want to build a company as successful as Apple. Do you think it's possible to build another Apple by hiring only people whose names start with M? If not, why do you think they can hamstring themselves by hiring only people of a single nationality.
What you are failing to grasp is the very existence of an H1-B program causes the labir rates to go down for other jobs.
They do have a choice, they can bid up the price of the engineers or whatever in an effort to lure engineers away.
Instead, they collude and try not to compete with each other.
Charles Crocker didnt import chinease immigrants to build railroads because they were the bestest railroad builders in the world.
If you’re going that the large number of immigrants (and transplants) in the Bay Area is a result, and not a cause of the high wages then you are only half-correct. High paying jobs are created there because that’s where all the best talent is, and the best talent moves there because that’s where the highest paying jobs are. It’s a virtuous cycle. Can you think of any other possible reason why the Bay Area pays as much as it is? The valley is no different from any other lame suburb in the country, literally the only differentiating factor is the people. Many of whom are not local.
If there were fewer tech immigrants, then there would be fewer companies founded here, fewer offices opened here, and the companies that were founded here would be much less successful and pay less due to limited access to talent.
No matter how much you are willing to pay, you can never acquire the talent you want if you artificially restrict your hiring pool. Why does Barcelona employ Messi? Is it because they are too cheap to hire a Spanish striker and are not willing to bid up the wages of one? Of course not.
When Messi and other star talent come to America, are they piped through intermediaries like Infosys, Cognizant and Tata and given roles such as QA Analyst and Data Analyst? Of course not. He could freely negotiate with any club teams he so deserves because his level of skill and accomplishment commanded such attention.
You seem to be conflating my argument that I am anti-immigrant or I am naive to assume that immigrants don't grow the area. That is not what I am arguing and that is not what the H1-B Visa is designed to do. I'm sure you believe that is the intent of the program but that is not what it IS doing and that is reflected by the volume of workers and median salaries. You can even see this spread in the salaries s of just Software Engineers. Some area as high as 220,000, others are 109,000.
Do you're own homework though, research: "Why Are Wages Not Rising Despite the Labor Shortage?" It is textbook economics but people associate it with racism or xenophobia and nationalism and corporations are all too ready to profit from this sentiment because of course they are. Why would they invest in employee development, Training, interviewing, blah blah when the answer is to just increase the pool via programs like the H1-B especially when so many arrogant engineers believe that being a software engineer is somehow an innate talent that just needs to be discovered and unlocked in special people.
Yes, companies like Infosys exist, but the companies that pay their engineers 300k+ also have to use the same program to recruit immigrants because that’s just the unfortunate nature of how the US immigration system works.
This is a spot where the libertarians are right. There's a space for protectionist regulation like this to preserve employment in industries that are being rapidly displaced or disrupted. But a mid-six-figure developer job at Apple Computer? Seriously? What human hardship is being salved by this policy? At best it's misguided government interference in a vibrant and very efficient market. At worst is just plain blind nationalism.
But if that persons needs anything else created by other people in similar conditions (hired based on blood, not merits), that citizen also gets a bad deal: they paid more for something of a lesser quality.
But hey, warm fuzzy feelings.
I'm sure now that you're aware of these results, you'll update your beliefs accordingly - either that in-group favoritism is advantageous, or at the very least that we can't yet be sure getting rid of it is.
[1] The Evolutionary Dominance of Ethnocentric Cooperation: http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/16/3/7.html
[2] Evolution of in-group favoritism: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3380441/
[3] The Evolution of Ethnocentrism: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~axe/research/Hammond%20and%20... (journal version: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022002706293470) - key quote: "When cooperation is especially costly to individuals, the authors show how ethnocentrism itself can be necessary to sustain cooperation."
I don't think so they, benefit from the efficiencies of being in the United States. The issue is cost of labor. Always is, always will be.
Corporations are not moving jobs offshore because there is more talent there, it is because the cost is cheaper.
Also, neither H-1Bs nor green cards are about moving jobs offshore, they are about moving people onshore.
https://www.deccanherald.com/international/this-bengaluru-it...
https://qz.com/india/1010965/a-former-executive-is-accusing-...
https://www.ustechworkers.com/lawsuit-intels-indian-managers...
https://medium.com/@satyajit/indians-only-hire-indians-i-did...
When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.
In a survey, a third of liberal professors admitted they'd discriminate against conservatives. "Generally speaking, the more liberal the respondent, the more willingness to discriminate and, paradoxically, the higher the assumption that conservatives do not face a hostile climate in the academy.": https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/1/liberal-majo...
The University of California requires job applicants to submit a statement on how they helped advance diversity: https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/201911/rnoti-p1778.pdf
Cool, then we agree that it's fine for Apple to hire immigrants. Have a nice day.
I mean maybe it puts me in a better negotiating position if you artificially cap supply, but if my team fails to ship a product and meet our OKRs, that seems like a much bigger effect on my salary.
Most of the us citizens quit, but the h1b holders, many of whom were still in the green card queue, stuck it out. I absolutely do not fault them for this. It was during the 2008 banking crisis and losing a job could be a severe setback from an immigration perspective in that market.
However it did mean that the company got away with bullying their workforce in a way that would not fly if workers were free members of the society they live in, rather than people who are allowed here only if they remain in the good graces of their employer.
I could go on about why this isn’t good for the tech workforce in general, but I hope it’s pretty clear. I hope it’s also clear that you can support immigration without thinking this is a good arrangement for workers. In fact I’m bewildered that people think it’s pro immigrant to put corporations in control of the system like this
The application process being discussed here is about green cards, which remove those handcuffs from the workers. Those companies which do sponsor green cards are basically giving up their ability to pressure workers in these ways.
Still, it seems clear to me that the employees are happier staying (and having joined knowing this risk) than going back to their original country, even despite the downsides. I'd say the underlying problem here isn't "Hire American" but "Don't create a class of workers that are stuck at their employer's company." American workers are better off when their H-1B coworkers can credibly threaten to quit.
To me, it’s s sign off a profoundly broken process that we’re even taking about “sponsors” like this.
Lastly even if you awarded the green card immediately to the worker, it still gives a corporation the right to deny it grant us residency rights to an applicant which will profoundly affect negotiations and so much else. For example once I got into it with an interviewer who was clearly trying to get to say “always write tests first” and it was irritating me so we went at it. No hire.
Totally fair but should this jackass bee Ed choosing who gets to have a green card based on their acquiescence to his views on software development in an interview?
Nobody is arguing not to allow “foreigners”, the argument is, if they are as skilled as you claim, they ought to be brought in an open market system and their salaries should commesurate.
The government seems smarter than you and realizes that H1-B’s are not a method to bring talent into the US, but a means to bring in cheaper talent into the US and we see that reflected in their salaries, If they were the LeBron James of software Engineering, you would see that show up, e.g. Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
But you seem more interested in arguing some Libertarian pipe dream that doesn't exist. There isn't a free market for labor snd their never will be because that would cause salaries to rise.
The H-1B is essentially the only way to bring skilled workers into the US, besides a few other small niche categories. Almost ALL foreign skilled workers, not just the cheap ones, come in on that visa category. You have many fundamental factual misunderstandings about the reality of the program but that doesn’t seem to stop you from forming very strong opinions about it.
I know many H-1Bs who make >1m/year, so it’s categorically not just for cheap talent.
How is this even a debate as to the purpose of an H1-B? It is literally to increase supply of talent for the purpose of reducing labor cost.
You would expect an isolationist dictatorship like North Korea to have the best wages.
The H-1B program represents almost the entirety of the American skilled immigration program. To ask what the H1-B program is for is to ask what skilled immigration is for. And skilled immigration is necessary for any company to become world beaters. Why do all the top European soccer teams have so many foreign players? Do you think it’s because they are too cheap to hire locals? You can’t conquer the world the way the valley has by tapping only 5% of the talent pool.
Of course the program has many flaws (such as restricting the ability for immigrants to change jobs), but more protectionism and bigotry is not the answer to these flaws.
Because of the factors that make it favorable to high-tech industry.
> There are a lot of immigrants there, are there not?
Yes, many of them brought in specifically to mitigate upward wage pressure.
> You would expect an isolationist dictatorship like North Korea to have the best wages.
No, you wouldn't; you are confusing a ceteris paribus effect with a sole driver effect.
The main factor is the extremely high concentration of the best tech talent in the world, many of whom are immigrants. What else do you think is special about Mountain View and Menlo Park? The strip malls and shitty public transit?
Note how I sad their feelings- it doesn't benefit even the nationalist, as lower quality products costing more don't benefit anyone.
Who does this benefit? American Software Engineers. The United States. Tax Payers?
Or we could depress wages by bringing in outside labor and applying handcuffs (H1-B) which will depress wages further. The company wants all the benefits and efficiencies of being in America without paying into the system
If we already have a good engineer who's part of the team and lives locally, what specifically is the benefit to firing this engineer and replacing them with "local" talent? Why is making the job more favorable to "local talent" advantageous?
> American Software Engineers. The United States. Tax Payers?
Again, as an American software engineer who badly needs qualified engineers on my team - what is the specific benefit to me?
Why wouldn’t a qualified American candidate run interference then? One reason: most candidates for this kind of job are educated enough to be aware that the economy and the job market are not fixed-sum, so a foreigner being hired today doesn’t meaningfully change their own odds at being hired tomorrow. It’s kinda like saying that new graduates entering the workforce take jobs away from people in the workforce, when factually an economy grows with more people in it.
Those perpetually open spots should tell you that you aren't paying enough. Just look at Amazon's pay compared to competitors like Google and Facebook [0] who pay more and it should be obvious why you are struggling to hire people. Start offering higher wages than them and watch as all those positions magically fill up.
What Apple and Google etc are doing, there’s nothing to see here. This is basically click bait.
However what is more of note, is that while the supply of top end, skilled and speciality software engineers is ridiculously constrained in the US, if you’re not one of the big guys like Google and Apple, youre pretty screwed.
Either train more highly skilled software engineers, or allow more from over the borders and stop the stupid rhetoric about stealing jobs from Americans.
Yes, Apple is certainly saving a bundle on classified ads in the free community paper with circulation of 6,000.
These ads are just to go through the motions to get someone a visa.
They don’t actually want anyone to reply to the ad. That’s why they have mailing addresses in the ad instead of email addresses or URLs.
But if you actually are old enough to have looked for jobs or anything else in a physical newspaper, that kind of writing is typical of want ads in the classifieds. It's not some special thing Apple is doing to prevent people from understanding the ad. Almost every ad that size is written like that.
I wonder how things would change if America had essentially open borders for highly skilled workers.
Probably lower wages for programmers born in America, as highly skilled workers from an 8 billion pool of people abroad would flood the market.
I haven’t heard of a region complaining about an influx of educated people. I commonly hear about regions complaining about brain drains though.
There’s significant brain drain going on within the US, and stopping the free movement of people is a solution, but in the long run it’s not going to be sufficient.
Not what we usually see, though it's hidden through doctored statistics about how it's never been better.
Plus, that would still be to the detriment of other countries, losing those highly productive people.
Quite a lot of skilled people do not want to move to the US, and are happy living in other (better) countries.
My point rests on more (than now) skilled people coming into the US, not on all skilled people coming into the US. So your (true) observation that a number of them doesn't want, and wont come, even if it's totally allowed, doesn't really affect the argument.
I'm not sure if it's quite the same thing, but 6-7 years ago I saw an employment ad from a well-known tech company in the local Craigslist, with only a postal address listed and no phone or email. I sent a paper resume to the address. They got back to me after a long delay, when I'd already found other work.
In those days, you went in person to a drab office located inside a monumental Government building designed in Brutalist style. Besides making the application, you could also look for jobs: There was a physical job board with little cards posted on it.
I mentioned an ad I saw for a job in my field, and the civil servant helping me said, “Don’t bother. They already have someone they want to hire from overseas, and they’re required to post an advertisement here for 90 days.” (I may misremember the exact duration.)
The agent told me that anybody who applied would have a long delay before getting an interview, long delays trying to follow up or even get an answer about how the interview went, and in the end, they wouldn’t hire anybody local regardless of experience or expertise.
I complained that this was clearly gaming the system, and the agent shrugged: “If you can’t get another job just as good, come back and complain then.”
For me in my field, that was certainly a fine answer. But for other fields, maybe not.
The abbreviated print and post address makes sense if they're just complying with a law that's redundant to the job posting system they already offer on the website.
I will also say that usually the job adverts are not so badly written as the article suggests. Usually they even interview the candidates and then say none of them were suitable, even if the candidates were a good fit