Just hire people from Chile and Singapore using the much easier to get, and underutilized, H1B1.
The guy who I was responding to reacted like I was crazy. His reaction made no sense. We weren’t a body shop and high tech isn’t somehow exclusive to India.
After the meeting, basically, a few of the other participants pointed out the flaw in my argument: the problem was that I was crazy, obviously, as there aren’t Indians in those places to hire.
The point here isn’t india bad or whatever it’s that there is more going on at the hiring manager level than simply filling area under the curve with solid talent. Personal preferences, clannishness and racism of all varieties distorts the outcome and that by and large H1b has been hijacked to serve other goals.
It isn't lost on casual observers either. It's not just that there's an expectation that these roles will be filled with Indians, but Indians of a particular caste from a particular region of India.
It seems largely, in my opinion, to be the result of promoting Indians to executive leadership roles in engineering departments. When that happens, there becomes a clear driving factor towards growing the number of Indians from their origin region in that engineering department completely divorced from other goals. It's normal executive empire-building behavior, but recast through the lens of national and regional origin and ethnicity/caste.
One thing I like about the BU I work in is that we have a lot of staff around the world from many different places and have helped people immigrate to the US from many different places, but when I look around my company more broadly it's very heavily dominated by Indians in engineering, beyond any reasonable expectations. There are many talented people in Central and Eastern Europe, in Central America, and in South America that are completely ignored in favor of trying to hire more Indians particularly in many companies, including mine.
I've even been told before it's due to "cultural fit", which used to be a phrase used to discriminate against anyone that wasn't a straight white bro, and is now being used to discriminate against anyone that isn't an Indian from the same ethnic, caste, and regional origin as the rest of the team/hiring manager. It seems absurd to me that we're in a situation where someone can say that with a straight face for a team that's based in an office in a major US city, and truly expect that the only possible answer is to hire more Indians without considering anyone else.
It's not just that Indian applicants get preferred, it's that Indian applicants only from specific regions, caste, and ethnic groups get preferred.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/21/seattle-ban-...
I had absolutely no idea this was even a thing in the US before reading about it.
Yeah, it's absurd, but it's highly impactful because of the prevalence of Indians in high-paying careers in the US. Indians make up nearly 2% of the US population, and the Indian diaspora is heavily concentrated in just a few coastal tech hub cities, so they make up a sizeable proportion of both the population and the workforce in the tech industry. Caste-based discrimination is therefore highly impactful, and it makes sense that it's now getting the attention from US authorities.
The point of these programs was to augment labor markets in times of shortage (H1B isn't just used by tech FWIW), IE, the internal US labor pool wasn't big enough to sustain hiring in the US for N job(s) due to requirements and you could demonstrate that some form of training would be sufficiently work in a timely manner
Its been pretty clear this isn't really true for decades yet H1B hasn't been curtailed meaningfully to uphold its intended goals
Whether we should have better immigration policies is a separate discussion, and I think we most definitely should. Path to citizenship would be for the best. It historically has worked out in the favor the nation, after all.
The H1B program isn't this at all though
Whether we should prioritize local workers over foreign (and whether we have enough local workers) is a much broader political question.
H1B has been abused to hire workers of similar skillset for a lower salary.
And I say that as a non-US citizen, interested in H1B program.
We need immigration policies that allow highly skilled workers to come to the US with no strings attached so these workers have the same job mobility as US citizens and permanent residents. The H1B program today resembles something closer to indentured servitude.
So yes, the US should attract highly skilled workers, but no, the H1B program is not working that way.
Whether they want to work for your wages is the real issues.
If they pass the interview then we obviously gladly hire them. But competition is hard.
We do have quite competitive wages. But we need more people than the American-only portion of the market has to offer. Competent foreigners make up a sizeable part of the applicants, and those who don't already have visa or green card we just can't hire. It's as simple as that.
I wasn't aware that there is so strong US nationalism present in the participants of this forum. After this thread I'll need to seriously re-adjust my mental model.
> I have friends who are great programmers (entry level but better than most of the outsourced coders I’ve worked with) working in factories because companies would rather outsource the work than give them a chance.
I have many brilliant co-workers, from many countries of this planet, some are US citizens, some became US citizens recently, and many are from many other countries. They all work well together and if somebody shows up in an interview and clears the bar then they are welcomed. I've also personally witnessed hundreds of "great programmers" in interviews, some Americans some not, apparently thinking they are brilliant and then couldn't participate in a constructive discussion about fundamentals or about real-world program solving.
The generalizations in this thread as well as the assumptions being made about me and my background are quite shocking.
Do you guys have set foot in actual US companies recently? It's not about US citizens vs. outsourced work. The typical company has a broad mix of live stories. Something I value in our industry. Maybe I've just been blind to the bubbles of nationalism that seem to be brewing somewhere. I'm glad they stayed outside of my company (or else I would have).
Well you lost me right there, because there would be no such risk if you hired a US worker. I highly doubt there isn't a US worker who has the skillset for what you are looking for, but rather there isn't a US worker who wants to do the job for the compensation your company is offering.
I'm not against H1B's/attracting top foreign talent, but unless its a highly specialized role I can guarantee there are people with the skillset right here in the US. You're just not willing to pay what they're looking for, or ironically the risk is too high for a US worker to work for you vs what they're comfortable with (i.e. job security, risk of the company going under, etc).
So… The EB visas?
No immigration process is quick. They're probably intentionally designed to not be quick. The Canadian process might be quicker, but it still takes plenty of time, has requirements, etc.
For instance, before our current system (which was lobbied for to add loopholes around what qualifies for talent shortage in the late 80s / early 90s) the H1B program was used for truly unique situations, like hiring Medical Doctors, where you could demonstrate that the US national labor pool couldn't fulfill the demand and additional training would not work either.
In 1990 they changed the criteria for what constitutes a "shortage of talent" allowing broad definitions and weak justifications, and thats when the explosion by the tech industry hiring H1Bs took hold in earnest
Even now companies are giving up on the legal immigration system and hiring outside the US. Canada has a much saner system. Gigantic engineering offices in India and China.
The US treats it as some zero sum game between citizens / immigrants and is losing out on taxes, economic spending (every HC outside the US is less spend in the US local economies).
canadian tech wages are absolutely pennies compared to US wages, i'd hardly consider it an example to follow
Oh wait...
You need to adjust for cost of living, universities, hospitals, non profits don't pay as much etc.
There is a prevailing wage determination check for granting a H1. That rule was revised a few times, that's the right lever to pull.
You could make the prevailing wage requirements == median wage for a given experience in an area. Right now it's the 35th percentile.
If you want to focus on the top of the top, which 200k out of school would be, then H1B1 should be a pure auction system: take the top X salaries offered, and let them in.
I know a few fresh out of school lawyers and they are right below $200k. I could imagine doctors in certain specialties are the only grads getting paid an average of $200k+.
Yes, workers should get a larger slice of the pie. Too much goes to the top.
I'm sure there are many H1B visa holders who are actually highly skilled in something that's actually nearly impossible to find anywhere else. I know from experience that a lot of H1B visa holders are about the same as what you can find domestically (but they're a lot less likely to agitate for better working conditions).
One person I was forced to work with legitimately did not understand how to connect to wifi or know when he was connected to wifi. He kept calling me saying his computer was broken.
USA opens about 500,000 new software development positions per year.
USA creates about 50,000 new comp sci graduates per year.
There are an order of magnitude too few Americans every year for the jobs available. Whatever you think of the H1B (and it has many problems), I doubt it’s coming even close to bridging that gap.
source with links to sources: https://swizec.com/blog/software-engineering-best-job/
There's lots of reasons software developers in India and China would remain in India and China, but one big one is obtaining a visa and permanent residency to live and work in the US is hard in general, and more so for people in populous countries with many emigrants destined for the US; I think it's India, China, and Mexico that have the three longest queues for green cards where there's a limit per country of birth.
There's certainly a path to immigration through a computer science degree. Especially advanced degrees, which give preferences to visa applications. If you can afford it, get a bachelor's in your country of origin, come to the US for a Masters, work on OPT visa after graduation, hope it converts to H1B, work on H1B until you get a green card, is a well worn path, but there are others.
you're also discounting the fact that there are layoffs, businesses closing etc. There may be 500K new positions per year, and say 250K layoffs / closures etc that isn't accounted for in this. Now I don't have the numbers on total layoffs but this should be adjusted.
I would heavily dispute this problem on the whole. Look at how hard it is to get hired as experienced engineers right now, that tells me there is less slack in the system than this leads on.
H1B is also suppose to have a unable to train element, which needs to also be addressed
EDIT: and as others pointed out, that is taking the stats on their face value, which is questionable in and of itself, as the source is a bit dubious
I think that’s just what happens when you flood the market with 200,000 qualified people in a short amount of time (and those people have extremely narrow definitions for what counts as a good enough job). The overall trend, measured in decades, remains that there just aren’t enough software engineers.
Yes even including all the software engineers that didn’t study comp sci. Even outside USA it’s rough. When I was in college the average completion time for a comp sci degree was 7 to 8 years because people kept getting jobs and forgot to graduate. All our professors complained about the sky-high 3rd/4th year dropout rates.
I absolutely do not buy that number. The citation you've given is "GoRemotely" who a) only cite that for one year, 2017 and b) are obviously biased towards inflating numbers.
Both sources refer to it as the "number of job openings" that year (2017). Obviously this isn't new demand for software engineers, most job openings are vacancies caused by people moving in the industry and will be filled by other people moving. If there are around 1.5 million SEs in the USA and average tenure in a job is 3 years then this explains all the job openings right there.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the number is more like 400k over the next 8 years.
Article doesn't say that. Its says that's global:
> Despite the pandemic, the number of software developers grew by 500,000 globally in 2020
Additionally earlier in the article, it shares numbers which supports a much smaller number:
> ...make this the most accessible 6-figure job in USA. At 1,400,000+ members and 22% projected growth, it is the biggest and among fastest growing high-paying jobs
The Bureau of Labor Statistics identifies that there will be 411k new software jobs between now and 2031, not per year:
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
Given the number of 50k grads per year, 400k employees for 411k jobs isn't a massive shortage. (Not to mention that many jobs opening aren't for grads, but for senior developers)
Go to /r/cscareerquestions. Every single post is about a recent comp sci graduate who's applied to _hundreds_ of jobs in the past year without a single offer. There aren't too _few_ qualified Americans looking for work.
First, it's not a random sample of CS graduates--there's a lot of selection bias there. People who face a lot of rejection are going to want someplace to vent.
Second, I've absolutely phone-screened people (not a lot, but some) with CS degrees who couldn't do something simple like fizz-buzz. I'm not taking about nit-picky "you forgot a semicolon" or style things. I'm talking about "fundamentally not getting for-loops". It wouldn't surprise me if the bottom 0.5% of CS graduates each year apply to hundreds of openings, and get rejected by every single one.
Finally, we're in the contraction part of the business cycle right now. I do believe that new grads today/this year are having a harder time finding jobs, but the total number of people employed at tech companies seems to be falling this year, too. Citing jobless American CS grads would be a more powerful argument if jobs were growing at the same time.
Counting the number of Computer Science graduates in a year seems like a fairly trivial problem where you could get an answer within ~1% of objective reality by simply counting public information and published figures.
But how do you count the number of jobs that are actually available? How does anybody distinguish between "real jobs" and companies just putting feelers out there to harvest resumes, manipulate the immigration system, and keep appearances up to investors in trying economic times? A lot of engineers that are looking for work right now strongly feel that a lot of job postings out there are just utter bullshit and many job posts are posted with no real intention of hiring anybody.
The best way to measure supply/demand trends might be to look at wages. That's one thing that's really hard to fake and get wrong.
Are Computer science graduate wages going up or down? If there actually was a massive shortage of computer workers near the level you describe, wages would be on a rocketship straight upwards right now. Are they? A lot of engineers are seeing that wages in tech seem to be plummeting right now.
the business of those companies is to bring some person, pay him $50/h while charge client $300/h. Good US labor wouldn't agree to work for $50/h.
The H1B program is not and its stated goal is not, to be able to undercut the US labor market with foreign labor
[0]: though as someone in the labor market, it does have negative consequences on me potentially
they sell h1b employees as US on-site consultants.
> there's a bunch of ongoing legal costs to doing this
several thousands USD as to my knowledge.
It's a very fine balance to walk.
2 people, same age, but one from USA and one from a country without student dept...
And this person from another country WANTS to come to the USA. They will be able to live on a lower wage. And even if they're done with the low wage, the process or changing jobs is arduous. So you're stuck. This gets exacerbated by the fact that it's really hard to gauge the cost of living from abroad.
At 50k USD per year? Doubt it.
50k is nothing to americans but it's a shitload of money to a lot of people, including south americans like me. Very few people here make more than that. In fact the value of such a salary will probably increase even further as our nations descend ever deeper into economy-destroying communism.
US Immigration is ridiculous in how arbitrary it is. Where you are born matters more than who you are.
A simple process isn’t enough when most companies are terrified of dealing with immigration topics due to unknown (often non-existent) issues.
Or you could layer on another lie if you were feeling frisky - "I don't remember being asked that specific question, we briefly talked about it but I thought they understood the implication of the TN visa. Anyway, here's the process, it's super simple..."
If they're an organization with a competent HR department they should be able to manage - they'll be happy enough that they found a good candidate. As long as it's as simple as the person claims (sign letter, problem solved) it'll only be as much of a "problem" as finding out someone you offered an non-remote job to wanted to work 2 days out of each week from home because they have a kid.
Explain how these exceptions are not "some sort of classist system" that favours some nations over many others?
Define how this was the "will of a democratic people"? Who got asked for these special country exceptions? Do the American people even know about this?
American immigration is utterly broken. I stand by that.
There are also annual limits for H1B1 but they are less likely to be reached. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/programs/h-1b
Whomever you hire on H1B1 just note you will almost certainly lose them after their visa extension completes.
Once you're in, if you eventually (genuinely) change your mind, that's fine, you can adjust to LPR.
H1B1 can be extended for a long time and is cheap to get and renew.
What do you mean about loosing them?
I mean you want them to have freedom as well right?
For employees, it’s relatively easy to transfer to another employee given how cheap and easy it is to get the visa, especially once you’ve gotten it for the first time.