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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

There's a recession, and massive layoffs in tech... why are we bringing in more foreign workers when even US citizens are unable to find work?

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Skills and willingness to work for shitty companies. And they don't leave after 6 months even under abuse.

>>> willingness to work for shitty companies

Don't agree with that part. When the market is tough, anyone is willing to work for shitty companies.

You missed out the main point that people on h1b have hard time leaving companies generally because not everyone sponsors h1bs, and the general process around applying for PERM and GC forces candidates to stick around for >1 year at least.It is a resource-protection mechanism for employers.

Adding to that the general incompetence by USCIS in handling h1b applications - where they take even 6 months to approve a h1b transfer.

[flagged]

Breaking news: HN is a forum, not a person.

That's disingenuous. You could still map the general opinion and value system of the forum majority and hold them to what they purport to care about. As someone who's just beginning to form their judgement of the forum populace, your tone immediately comes across as defensive and deflecting.

>There is a recession

Outside of tech, nothing has really changed. Consumer spending is going up.

> Massive layoffs in tech

Business be booking everywhere else. Outside the giants who overhired and VC hyped overfunded startups, pretty much every other company has open positions and is hiring. The hiring bar is high, but they are hiring.

Fed wants to slow down inflation, that requires massive layoffs to rip off the bandaid.

That’s one school of thought, but it’s not the only. Raising taxes on corporations and high income earners (ie the people that actually have money) is certainly another solution, though obviously unpalatable to those current in charge of policy. It’s telling that the Fed frames layoffs of the people most impacted by high inflation, the lower and middle classes, as required.

Exactly: monetary and fiscal policy need to work together to bring down inflation. It's depressing that we're so defeated by seemingly endless congressional dysfunction that the idea that fiscal policy is even an option is beyond our comprehension.

It's unfortunate, too, because fiscal policy can be surgically precise, unlike monetary policy. If you were trying to assassinate inflation, monetary policy would be like carpet bombing the city where inflation lives, instead of fiscal policy sending in Seal Team 6 to inflation's home address.

To be fair, the Fed has fairly blunt monetary policy tools; distributional impacts like that are the realm of Congress and fiscal policy. (Which fairly consistently drops the ball, but blaming the Fed for the inaction of the entity which both sets the Feds toolset and mission and then doesn’t deal with the problems inherent in the Fed executing that mission with the toolset it has is kind of badly missing the point.)

Additionally it's hard to blame the Fed for overreacting to the COVID crisis because they had to act quickly and previously they haven't been able to rely on sensible fiscal policy.

Fed deployed the tools they had then and they are doing the same now, thankfully taming inflation is something they have more experience with vs pandemics.

The Fed can't raise taxes.

Not directly, but they can influence other policy makers to do so.

1. Thats not their job.

2. Curious, did you call for lower taxes on the rich (which usually ends up being the middle class) when inflation was low?

1. I’m not sure why you think it’s not their job. If we did a responsibility matrix for the Fed, they wouldn’t be responsible or accountable for tax policy but they would be consulted. Obviously we want monetary and fiscal policy to work together for the most impactful outcomes. Government agencies and bodies advise each other all the time, and that’s a good thing. It’s call effective governance.

2. I’m not sure why that’s relevant to this conversation and I also reject your premise that tax cuts on the wealthy help the middle class. The last round of cuts made the corporate tax rate lower permanently and the individual and family tax cuts expire soon. Of course if you live in an expensive place like California or New York, you received a tax increase, not a cut.

Recession? We've had positive real GDP growth for the past three quarters.

And yet.. unemployment at 3.4%. Do you know any unemployed engineers?

Raising my hand! Here I am! I have a friend who’s an unemployed engineer as well.

I mean.. sure. There are still more job openings for SWEs than there are SWEs. The inflated comps from the last few years are an outlier, as long as you don't expect that you should find a job pretty quickly.

Most of the recently laid off engineers that want jobs are finding them, just not necessarily at software companies, and not necessarily at the same ridiculously inflated salaries.

The engineers that I know that were recently laid off and are unemployed have huge savings cushions and are being tremendously picky.

It might not be sexy to take a job building software for an insurance company, and it might be quite painful to take a 30% pay cut, but jobs are there for those that want them. In an actual nation-wide recession, they are not.

I do! Do you know someone who's hiring?

There’s a post every 1st of the month on here with job openings. Better question are there jobs that pay fang salaries out there? That’s what’s getting affected.

Why do major companies layoff workers and replace them with foreign contract workers? It's cheaper.

When stock price triumphs everything else and management is stuffed with political hacks as opposed to value creators the only way is to keep cutting cost until the whole show runs into the ground. The focus is on the current set of people to make bank before the thing falls apart.

I remember times when shutting down a US-based factory and outsourcing the production to China looked like a damn smart move, because it's cheaper.

Is that true? I have pretty good insights from working with many of such people, close friends with many, and working at big tech companies. At big tech anyways, people on work visas are making a lot of money.

They might make a lot of money but they also are incredibly prone to being abused and gave to put up with whatever their boss tells them to do. It's a lot easier to force someone to work 65-80 hours for crunch time when they can't leave without being kicked out of the country.

It very much depends on the company and the bosses. I've seen visa status used to keep wages low and to lock people into shitty jobs and positions. These companies also use visa holders as a tool to keep citizen wages down.

In both cases they will remind you of how easy it is to get someone else in who can do your job.

Yeah thats just plainly false. You can't pay below market for H1B.

https://redbus2us.com/h1b-minimum-wage-or-lca-prevailing-wag...

The reason is that of all the methods of immigration, getting high skilled tech workers is the method that makes the most amount of tax dollars for our country.

One of the main reasons for permissive immigration policies is economic growth. More people -> more consumption and possibly more production.

To keep wages low for citizens.

To grow companies and start new companies, which creates more jobs.

Believe it or not, some companies are still hiring

Because there is still a shortage of engineers. And we still have the lowest unemployment in modern history.

nope there's just a shortage of pay from non-Silicon-Valley companies

That sounds awfully entitled.

Yes the companies are the ones entitled. In a free market wages would rise for citizens, instead we have these huge body shops artificially running down wages for any company outside of the FAANG.

Software engineers make well above median wages just about anywhere in the US working for just about any industry.

So there’s a shortage until we are all making the same as a Starbucks barista, or whatever is the national median, despite long hours and investment in our education?

What’s with the strawman arguments?

The median software engineer in the US makes an 86th percentile wage.

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