The visa says who you’re allowed to work for. Leave the company (or get fired or laid off) and you have 10 days to leave the country or find another job that will sponsor your visa. As you can imagine few people choose to leave the company under these conditions.
Best part is that companies can also appeal to the employee’s sense of fairness: “We paid $10,000 for your visa. You value that favor from us don’t you? Imagine if you had to pay that yourself”
(I know that many Americans think that the sky is falling on them, too - and they may even be correct, but they have a very different baseline.)
FWIW, I am a former H1B immigrant, myself.
It's not like the only options are "the US, or a poverty-stricken third-world country".
My point was simply that the poster I originally replied to seemed to be taking the angle that the US is pretty much the only game in town if you want "social and political stability, less crime, and generally fewer risks in life" (their words). That's demonstrably untrue! Many countries other than the US provide those things, and many of them treat potential immigrants (especially those with in-demand professional qualifications) a lot better than the US government does. I can certainly understand someone wanting to move to the US, specifically, for whatever reason, but if the goal is just to move from somewhere socially/politically unstable, with lots of crime and risks to life, to somewhere that is... not that... then there are many great choices that are not the US.
The reason I bring that up is because I have quite a few close friends who are in various stages of US immigration, some on H-1Bs for over a decade now, and I wouldn't wish that level of life uncertainty on anyone. They've chosen to stick it out over time until they get their green cards, but if someone is considering getting an H-1B today, especially if they are from a country with a huge green card line, I would probably try to dissuade them, as there are many other options with a great quality of life, where they wouldn't have to feel like their held hostage to the US immigration system -- and, by extension, the employer sponsoring their visa.
Like at Amazon I earnt about $75k in Western Europe, the same job in the USA would be $165k (you can see the bands).
And that's before even considering the tax differences. The USA is the land of opportunity where you can really work your way up to a great lifestyle whereas Europe pays peanuts and then punishes you with extortionate income tax (but often no property or inheritance taxes).
It is, but that's if you don't mind the less fortunate folks starving. Not starving, but ending up as homeless drug addicts. And the large number of working poor.
The US is a land of extremes among developed countries.
There are homeless drug addicts and alcoholics everywhere.
> And the large number of working poor.
Yep, the working poor are better off in Europe, esp. in places like Denmark or Norway. They can actually have somewhat non-shitty life, even when working minimum wage jobs.
The question is how many, of course. There are no homeless villages in my country, neither is there a massive-scale opiate abuse problem.
In general, people care about homelessness, because it affects and offends them - so their solutions are to give some place to live to the homeless. It doesn't solve the problem though, as the homeless will still either be mentally ill or will engage in self-destructive behaviour - so they're quite likely to demolish the place, set it on fire, turn it into a crack den etc. But, the society does not ultimately care about that that much, but mostly wants to not have their moods ruined by seeing homeless on the streets - so warehousing them somewhere is seen as a good solution.
People who "live self-destructive lives" have not always done so; at some point something has gone wrong in their lives. It is not an identity or (usually) an inborn personality trait, and "othering" people with addictions like that is simply an example of the correspondence bias and a part of the meme complex that maintains the status quo of homelessness.
In a representative democracy, we elect representatives in the hopes that they have a decisionmaking and problem-solving ability more holistic and less short-sighted than just "out of sight, out of mind". At least, that's what the ideal is. The process can be abused by populists good at appealing to people's intuitions and emotions while having few real solutions, but that doesn't mean we should just give up!
What? It's toxic to expect someone to be self-sufficient? I guess all our civilization was built on toxic grounds - it's amazing what all that toxicity accomplished though.
> People who "live self-destructive lives" have not always done so; at some point something has gone wrong in their lives. It is not an identity or (usually) an inborn personality trait, and "othering" people with addictions like that is simply an example of the correspondence bias and a part of the meme complex that maintains the status quo of homelessness.
I don't think I'm "othering" them (I'm not sure though, because I'm not sure what it means). I'm just describing their current situation. I'm not claiming there were born as petty thieves or alcoholics or will remain petty thieves or alcoholics for the rest of their lives.
The homeless alcoholics I personally know usually took a decade or more of gradually increasing selfish and antisocial behaviour to eventually end up on streets (as they've eventually used up the good will of everyone in their lives and no one was there to support them any more). What made them go down that path while people, who have as shitty lives as them or worse, stood on their feet - who knows? We don't understand human psychology to the degree to be able to answer that question.
BTW, I've recently re-read some Bukowski, and I think he's giving a good description of an inner life of a person with some self-destructive personality traits. In his case they were fairly mild, so he still managed to hold a job and be off the street most of the time. The real homeless I know have even more anger, self-pity, narcissism and/or straight up psychopathy. At least one of them is a straight-up predator, who's homeless because he finally ran out of people to prey upon.
We're getting back there. With the added problem of cheap fentanyl easily available. The amount of young people I've seen on the streets has skyrocketed, not to mention refugees on the corners begging. This is Chicago. And lots of young people, especially those not lucky enough to be in the laptop class- are just a few paychecks from homelessness. It will be even worse this winter when cost of living goes up and you can't afford to live while working.
It doesn't seem like it's something the UK at least is immune to either: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jun/17/removal-of-h...
You mean like tents and sheds? Otherwise it is an oxymoron with a village of homeless people.
But also before you consider healthcare, transportation, higher cost of living in some desirable areas, lack of time off, lack of any employee protections, dismal social safety nets if you fall on bad times. And for people who need that, no maternity leave, expensive childcare, etc.
Any person in tech can work their way up to a great lifestyle in Western Europe, and many places in Eastern Europe too for that matter. The salary you get as a new grad/starter is often around the median for the country, so you get quite a comfortable lifestyle (made extra comfortable by the fact that in most cases you don't have to drive everywhere unless you really want to).
However, there are property and inheritance taxes in all EU countries i know of.
No, not really. In Eastern Europe yeah sure, because that's where the low-tax US remote hiring frenzy went (Poland, Romania, etc), but in most of Western Europe no, take-home tech wages here are depressing, no higher than most other professions unless you work for a rich company in a major tech hub like London, Zurich, Amsterdam, Berlin, etc.
The salaries may be no higher than for lots of other professionals, but those other professionals also make comfortable buck. Not enough to get into the actually rich category, but upper middle class is also pretty comfortable financially.
The money isn't enough (for most) to escape the treadmill or to otherwise escape reality, so it can be depressing if your life is otherwise depressing or if you compare it to something really lucrative. But IMO the pay level by itself isn't bad.
At least that's my impression of the current market living and working in a locally major city but definitely outside of those major hubs.
At 64k/year (2.8k/month take home pay) I can't call myself upper middle class here. Not when an apartment is 500k+ or a house 1MM+.
>living and working in a locally major city but definitely outside of those major hubs
Can I ask which major city?
And if the interest doesn't drag you down too much (as it might at the moment of course), that n*100k apartment is going to become your property of multiple hundreds of thousands over the years, so it's not like it's only an expense. I get the interest costs, up front payments and general debt amounts can be overwhelming, though.
> Can I ask which major city?
Helsinki, Finland, so backwater on the European scale, large locally. I'd guess we probably have slightly lower salary levels than some major Western European countries (I'm in the same ballpark as you but senior positions can pay more), and a more or less similar cost of living (except that housing isn't quite as expensive as in major metros).
Hummm
I'm not so big in discussing specific situations but I've seen better in Europe. And better take home even in high-tax countries
Calculating this yearly value for Germany would give 3.6k/month take home
If I had to pick one or the other to be born in, but knew that I would be born randomly within each of these societies, I'd certainly choose Western Europe because the risk of being born very poor in the US is just too high to take.
But! Of course, that isn't a real decision that one can make. The actual decision, for people on HN in particular, is the following: you know that you're a highly qualified person with in-demand skills, you also know whether you have a crippling disability and many other things about your life. Those things being known, the decision is much less of a gamble because you know which of the social categories you will slot into in the US.
It is also true that Western Europeans always retain the option of return to their countries of origin. If they become destitute and unable to work, they are able to access the downside protections they would have had at home at the cost of moving back. In practice their may be some transitional challenge because eligibility depends on both residency and citizenship but fundamentally a citizen of France or The Netherlands who becomes unable to work in the US and has exhausted their US resources and entitlements can hit the panic button and will not be allowed to starve once returned home.
Let me try to add some more concreteness to this. I work for a major US tech company in Western Europe in a "second class" tech hub (i.e., not London or Zurich, but with most of the major tech companies present). Total compensation is low six figures, which is over 1.5x what I was offered by large European companies.
On my payslip, my net is about 55% of the gross. I then pay 25% of the net as my half of the rent, and 20% for childcare (in theory you could get it much cheaper, but in practice there are no available spots). On average I've paid 10% of net out-of-pocket for extra healthcare costs not covered by the mandatory insurance (which costs 15% of gross).
Compared to my previous job, my gross is now 2x but net 1.4x. My lifestyle is not meaningfully different than when I was making half the gross, I just accumulate some modest savings instead of breaking even. I still have no chance to own a home anywhere near the city I live in. I don't know how I could "work my way to a great lifestyle" here. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong.
Overall, my peers in the US have a significantly better lifestyle than me. What I do get that my peers in the US don't (AFAIK) is 30 days of paid holidays. Also my wife can get a year of maternity leave with reasonable benefits.
The worker benefits are pretty theoretical, since in practice I have to work well above the tracked hours to be competitive on the career track. I can also still be laid off on reasonably short notice if the company decides to cut costs. I would get 60% of my salary for a year from the state as unemployment, but I would typically not get any severance from the company.
While Americans tend to _believe_ this, and it may be true in some small parts of the economy, overall the US today has notably poor economic mobility as compared to other OECD countries: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/02/14/american...
Both are outcomes of globalization. Tech workers have it so good because the US exports its tech to the whole world, the market for US FAANG is billions of consumers strong and other countries offer limited competition. But other American workers have been replaced/outsourced/offshored in great numbers, entire industries have largely evacuated the US because it's so open to foreign products.
Eh. With the notable exception of Germany, most large developed economies are de-industrialising to some extent (and the UK, for instance, has done so to a much greater extent than the US), but even amongst rapidly de-industrialising countries the US's economic mobility story is not great, these days. As with most things, there is no single easy answer for why this is the case.
It misses the fact that the US has a much higher concentration of wealth at the top than most European economies.
So the social mobility might be lacking in terms of quintiles, in absolute terms (income in USD or EUR/standard of living), real social mobility might still be higher.
I think if you were looking at, say, the top 1%, this would be a more interesting argument, but the top quintile household income in the US starts at about 100k, so you’re not talking fabulously wealthy or anything.
I personally would prefer to see my dollar income increase, but don't care about my income percentile.
This is a nuanced point. To get a complete picture, you have to remember that economic inequality is greater in the US as well.
That means that you can see more gains with less mobility. On the other hand, there are some OECD countries with low inequality but high mobility. This also makes sense as the income difference is smaller between top and bottom earners.
If you take a country like Denmark, the top quintile (20%) take home about 1.8X of the average income. For the US, the top 20% takes home 3.8X the average.
The nordics have a Top to bottom quintile ratio (S80/S20) of <4. The US is >8 [1]
You should also consider that economic mobility is significantly higher for US immigrants that native born Americans.
Good luck with that if you get sick or injured even if it wasn't your fault...
The disadvantage of a Green Card from the employer's perspective is that the worker is then free to change employment, so not all companies pursue this this.
I don't think this is correct. There's a 60 day grace period if you leave (voluntarily or otherwise) before the visa expires. Still too tight in my opinion, but not 10 days which is insane.
Several bodyshops popped up that specialize in international recruitment, sponsor healthcare workers internationally who expect significantly lower comp, and work out the logistics of getting them licensed, sponsored, and moved where demand exists (note that I say logistics, the person often pays some or all of these fees). They offer a low rate to these international workers (which is high to them) by your typical position advertising gymnastics then rent them out to healthcare providers in set contracts. The worker signs a contract that typically includes a fee for breach of contract. For nurses and physical therapists, I've seen it at $20-$40k which doesn't seem significant until you consider the person likely has nothing of that magnitude in savings because they came from a poorer area.
You then may think, well healthcare workers can make $100+k so with strict savings one could limit their indentured servitude and breach before, then realize they're actually paying closer to $40-60k to their workers, benefiting of economies of scale to manage the logistics (like managing visas) and pocketing the rest of the margins. The workers are often locked into these areas for several years before they're financially stable enough to leave while bodyshops dangle greencard sponsorship over their heads which is a long process in and of itself but is even longer when it's a carrot held for 3-5 years of servitude first.
Once your workers have their greencards they have more leverage in negotiation and typically move on to make truly competitive salaries. Meanwhile, the bodyshops basically pocket high margins, manage a little bit of risk, and just leech off those in desperate situations (hospitals, their patients, and international workers looking to better themselves).
Some may say this is just the cost of admission to immigrate to the US. I think it's more a failure of neoliberal principles. I imagine IT isn't much different. The work visa program is largely used as just a leveraged global labor recruitment position for businesses to exploit. It wasn't designed this way and isn't always used this way, but it is done far far too often.
I guess you don't mean www.thebodyshop.com ???
'developers' would suggest not.