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> Why would Apple, with all their money, need to hire H-1B generalist Software Engineers and Project Managers when they can out-compete literally any other company on earth?

Honestly?

Someone at a FAANG I won’t name explained it to me: They don’t check for employment eligibility/citizenship status before interviewing. If they like the person, legal is given the task of getting them a work visa. If they can’t, they’ll park the foreign worker at a satellite office until they can secure one. H1s and O1 are rather cheap in terms of legal fees. Especially when you operate at scale.

> They don’t check for employment eligibility/citizenship status before interviewing.

Believe it or not, that's actually a good thing. It means they're looking only at skills and qualifications, not passports or "driving down wages with foreign labor", when making hiring decisions.

Also it's not completely true. Recruiters will make a note of your employment eligibility for planning purposes (a new hire needing a visa transfer will take longer to start, the company has to allocate budget to legal etc). In large companies the people making the hiring decision most likely have no idea, and definitely do not care, about the candidate's work permit status. It's a thing for HR to take care of as a part of closing the deal.

That's how it works at most tech companies that run this scam, which is most tech companies. The point is that FAANG companies should have a tiny number of H-1Bs if they were following the law. Instead, they have the most H-1Bs.

And instead of getting in legal trouble for fraud like this company, they're protected by their size, legal teams, lobbyists, and money. It's only H-1B fraud if you're doing it at a relatively small scale.

> They don’t check for employment eligibility/citizenship status before interviewing

As far as I remember, the vast majority, if not all, of recruiters I spoke with in the past few years asked me about my work eligibility in the US.

> In reality, it's a cost-cutting measure designed to suppress US wages

There may be some firms who are abusing the system. The example of Disney comes to mind... they hired H-1B workers, then laid off US citizen employees, then had the laid off employees train their cheaper replacements.

But just because some people are abusing the system doesn't mean the system is inherently bad. The reason the US is a technology superpower is not merely because of the programmers who were born in the US, but also because of the programmers who immigrated to the US.

Adjusted for inflation, wages for top talent has gone up about 20% in the last 30 years. In 1990, if you got a job in a top company such as Sun Microsystems you got paid about $45K (average then was $40K). If you adjust for inflation that would be around $98K. But today's fresh graduates make about $115 to $120K if you get into a company like Microsoft, and Microsoft isn't even one of the top employers in terms of pay. Facebook and Google pay much more.

> just because some people are abusing the system doesn't mean the system is inherently bad

How many American workers would have to be abused by this law before it becomes "inherently bad"? (as a number between 0 and 300 million)

>The reason the US is a technology superpower is not merely because of the programmers who were born in the US, but also because of the programmers who immigrated to the US.

The reason they moved to the US was to work with the programmers who were born here, so yes it literally because of our accomplishments that people strongly desire to immigrate here, and that doesn't diminish their contributions.

>wages for top talent has gone up about 20% in the last 30 years

Assuming that is true, we have been screwed out of a lot more than I realized. The United States has spent the past 30 years enjoying the greatest era of peace and prosperity the human race has ever seen and the most talented American engineers who made that possible only got a 20% raise in that time. That's shameful.

> The reason they moved to the US was to work with the programmers who were born here

Not necessarily. The US is a gathering place for top talent, and that's not necessarily because of the talent that was born here.

> American engineers who made that possible only got a 20% raise in that time

No. The starting pay has gone up 20%, adjusted for inflation. That's not the same as raises over the lifetime of a single engineer.

The contribution of engineers to capital creation massively exceeds 20% over the past 30 years. Relative pay increase is such a scam.

Having seen it up close, the even greater issue for society is this program & how it’s used has created an engineering culture of order takers.

That’s the least valuable configuration of engineering teams.

> The reason they moved to the US was to work with the programmers who were born here, so yes it literally because of our accomplishments that people strongly desire to immigrate here, and that doesn't diminish their contributions.

People moved to the US to work with the capitalists. There is plenty of talent around the world, while capital is far more scarce. The key US advantage is that it first won WW2 without suffering massive destruction, and then it used its economic advantage to win the Cold War. American share of private wealth has long been far more impressive than its share of technological talent.

I, a US Citizen by birth - born and raised in the US, owe my career to the H1B visa program.

I’m self taught and got my first “in” when a local employer wanted to hire lots of H1B visa folks.

I was less qualified, but hired because they needed to prove they were willing to hire non-H1B visa folks in order to hire H1B visa folks.

More broadly, I suspect the program I worked at wouldn’t exist without H1B labor. At least not in the US - they might have run it overseas.

I’ve been offered insane sums of money at places that mostly hire H1B visa workers - far more than made sense.

They wanted to hire me as evidence they were hiring people like me. And they paid me accordingly.

The H1B people I worked with have became friends and mentors. OK, the ones who weren’t faking it.

> in the interest of the countries being brain-drained

Countries where the government is happier to see smart, educated people go to secure its own leechy position? Where there is little industry in the first place, what there is is owned by a few oligarchs, and mostly focused on “national security” projects like blocking Google Maps and cloning it.

Competition is the only thing that can stop exploitation. These countries don’t lack for “brains,” they just have too many parasites.

>Why would Apple, with all their money, need to hire H-1B generalist Software Engineers and Project Managers when they can out-compete literally any other company on earth

Because they can't put the real job title on the application where that site got data from. It has to be within these generic ones by regulation:

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_stru.htm

Sure the specific titles might be slightly unique to any given company. "Software Engineer for iCloud" or whatever. But these really are generalist software engineering roles.

There are hundreds of thousands of US workers that can fill these generalist roles. It's not as if Apple is trying to hire US workers, failing, and then resorting to the H-1B program as they're supposed to. They use the H-1B to increase their labor pool and lower costs. That's the scam.

> It's not as if Apple is trying to hire US workers, failing, and then resorting to the H-1B program as they're supposed to.

They don't have to try and fail to hire US workers in order to use the H-1B program. That's for employment-based green cards. The H-1B only requires specialized skills - software engineering is a specialized skill.

> They use the H-1B to increase their labor pool and lower costs

Go check out levels.fyi to see what Apple pays "generalist software engineers". It's well-known that the younger generation of American workers is financially struggling. So it's not like they're turning down software roles at Apple because it's not enough money.

> They don't have to try and fail to hire US workers in order to use the H-1B program.

The US Department of Labor disagrees with your assertion:

"The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States."

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b

There are requirements for companies to attempt to hire US workers first. None of them actually make a good faith effort to do this, they just pretend to. And that's why it's fraud.

> There are requirements for companies to attempt to hire US workers first

You should read your own link again. It doesn't say that anywhere. Here's what it does say:

"Employers must attest to the Department of Labor that they will pay wages to the H-1B nonimmigrant workers that are at least equal to the actual wage paid by the employer to other workers with similar experience and qualifications for the job in question, or the prevailing wage for the occupation in the area of intended employment – whichever is greater."

Heck, another source from the US Department of Labor explicitly answers this question[1]:

"The H-1B employer is not required to recruit U.S. workers, unless it is H-1B-dependent, a previous willful violator of H-1B requirements, or an employer receiving funding described in the Employ American Workers Act (EAWA) which hires a new H-1B worker during the period Feb. 17, 2009 through Feb. 16, 2011. Such employers must take good faith steps to recruit U.S. workers for any job for which they seek H-1B workers."

1. https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WHD/legacy/files/whdf...

Okay, you're right, at least in 2022. I believe it was relaxed in this regard (well placed political "donations" at work) because I'm fairly certain there used to be requirements to recruit U.S. workers first.

Today, it seems that only "willful violators" are legally required to recruit U.S. workers. So FAANG are merely violating the intent of the law, which is stated extremely clearly by the BOL:

"The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce"

There's nothing debatable or ambiguous about this direct statement of intent.

So these corporations have successfully bribed the right people to make it legal to violate the intent of the law. Which shouldn't surprise anyone but changes nothing about the ethics of the situation. It's still a massive abuse and entirely used for the purpose of increasing corporate profits.

> I believe it was relaxed in this regard

Source?

> So FAANG are merely violating the intent of the law

If someone can't hire enough domestic workers when offering $300k/year, I think it's safe to say there aren't enough domestic workers. At that salary level there are unlikely to be loads of people uninterested in the job. It's not hard, dangerous manual labor.

> Source?

I don't have the interest in doing the legal research. I could be just wrong about the requirement. Or it could be that in practice HR lawyers advise companies to make a token effort of recruiting U.S. workers as a precaution. It doesn't change my fundamental point in any way. Either way, the loophole is absolutely massive and exploited at great scale.

The intent of the law is extremely clear and it is being violated. Just read the statement of intent and then work for any U.S. tech company in a hiring role, and you'll soon know for yourself.

> If someone can't hire enough domestic workers when offering $300k/year, I think it's safe to say there aren't enough domestic workers.

Or is it more likely that they'd have to increase the offering to an even higher number? In other words, it's a de facto subsidy for tech companies, to prevent them from having to increase wages. Text book wage suppression.

It just doesn't make any logical sense why FAANG would have to use H-1Bs at all, except for a few roles where their may truly be a lack of candidates. How do the other thousands of U.S. tech startups have any U.S. workers at all then, if FAANG is in good faith trying to recruit U.S. workers?

I think I've explained the situation clearly, and don't believe any reasonable judge could disagree with the main point that the program is not being used as intended.

I'm done with this thread now. Have a nice day.

> It doesn't change my fundamental point in any way

Yeah it does. The letter of the law isn't being violated at all. The spirit isn't being violated either at FAANG companies. The wages are in the top 5% nationally - they should have no difficulty attracting domestic workers, if they existed. The visa burden is so onerous. Why would any company go through that willingly?

> How do the other thousands of U.S. tech startups have any U.S. workers at all

Usually by underpaying workers by promising equity that will be worth way more later, recruiting through a sense of mission, giving out higher titles, or simply hiring lower-caliber talent or less-experienced people who don't know their worth. I've experienced all of the above.

> Or is it more likely that they'd have to increase the offering to an even higher number?

How does that increase supply? Where are the large numbers of people who are otherwise interested in and capable of doing software engineering but $300k just isn't enough money?

> don't believe any reasonable judge could disagree with the main point that the program is not being used as intended.

I don't know what a "reasonable" judge is - I assume it's whoever agrees with you - so that's meaningless. However, no judge so far has agreed with your opinion, as far as it relates to the FAANG companies.