Expect further downward pressure on US tech salaries.
They pay extremely competitive rates. They are the reason for and a source of complaints regarding gentrification in my area.
edit: as an example the starting rate for high school work-study and college interns is the hourly equivalent of $78k/yr plus the same benefits as full-time employees from the second they show up.
The work environment is spectacular. There is no work from home because that is a practical impossibility so the work-life balance is carefully considered and benefits are outstanding. There are no after-hours tasks (there can't be, really).
You show up, work 9-5 in a relaxed environment, go home, cash your fat check, and enjoy travel and hobbies.
From IPC soldering-certified technicians to senior RF scientists and everything in between we cannot find enough workers for the amount of work we have.
For sexy startups trying to use sexy AI to steal user data in order to serve them sexy ads yes, maybe the market is saturated.
For hard-STEM fields my experience has been that there are too few people who take their linear algebra classes seriously.
Hard-STEM seems to have lots of jobs where you can grind your ass off for the better part of a decade or two and hope to make $100-120k/yr by then if you're lucky. At least on the coding side you'll get to that level within a handful of years if you're willing to job switch often and optimize for that salary. Glad to hear there's at least one hard-STEM place where the grind isn't as bad.
The "hard-stem" places rely on a bit of gaslighting and the "holier than thou" self-image of the "hard-stem" people to pay them less and to overwork them
As much as the IT world has issues, it is night and day compared to the hard-stem world where a lot of times they won't even look at you if you don't have a MSc or PhD. Learn on the job, what is that?
My point is for the past several years staff has been clearing 1M W2 or more per year and the nominal offers are high 6 figures. L7 and L8 offers are nominally 1M.
If I could make that money working on cool science and aerospace I would. When I graduated, Boeing, Lockheed etc wouldn’t give me the time of day but adtech welcomed me and paid me more in 1 year than Boeing would have in 10.
If you have:
* Received an alert on your phone saying that it's going to rain in your local area in the next 10 minutes,
* Been alarmed by a paper containing synthetic aperture radar data showing high-resolution plots of coastal erosion and sea level rise, or
* Used a map or route planning application that has satellite imagery textured onto high-resolution terrain and 3d models of buildings and landmarks,
You've PROBABLY used our products.
The military just the sugar daddy who pays for the other stuff.
I mean, I don't do any of that stuff.
I just stare at error-ridden digikey product listings all day, argue with PMs about the reality of their schedules, and sit through endless design reviews. But somehow, someone somewhere in the company does that stuff.
(side note: for the first 5 months of 2023 I did 1.5 hours a day of real analysis. I'll probably get back to doing that after getting through most of Lang.)
Can you give me a hint of the types of employers I should be looking for who would value this? How should I go about finding them?
If this is a contractor that requires security clearances, that’s a significant barrier to recruiting even US citizens. Most of your best applicants will be snapped up by someone else prior to completing the months long clearance process (which requires telling their current employer they’re looking to move elsewhere at the start).
But let's be honest, it's pretty standard practice to require US citizenship.
This is most likely an intelligence/defense agency or contractor, working in secure environments where you can't take work stuff in or out.
There are several companies in my area that can only hire US Citizens, and they all pay lower than the company I interned at.
This kind of issue cannot be analyzed anecdotally.
The US created literally all relevant consumer technology in the last 30 or so years and demand for tech talent has exploded ever since.
Having a competitve sector/ economy which regularly pushes the edge of innovation and hence expands demand (both on sell and supply side) is actually what keeps salaries up.
This logic is as deeply flawed as often as it comes up.
This narrative is purely a lobbying effort.
Where, exactly?
Unemployment rate among STEM graduates is half of that of the general population [0]. Salaries are also substantially higher [1], and keep getting higher [2].
[0] https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23315/report/stem-unemployment...).
[1] https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23315/report/stem-median-wage-....
[2] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25433814-000-most-ste...
So the unemployment rate in your first article is not relevant, missing labor participation rates etc.
The second article is about median wages of people who are already in jobs categorized as stem. Same with the third, which is also only about the derivative.
> Where, exactly?
The most prominent segment can be found by dropping the engineering and tech. Biology, math, physics, chemistry, etc. However even in engineering we find that the top grads move into software or finance.
I would appreciate it if you were to provide some hard numbers to back your conjecture that immigration is the reason for these cases of "underemployment", like you call it.
> However even in engineering we find that the top grads move into software or finance.
Software engineering is notorious for being one of the markets with the most H-1B visa holders, yet you are saying that most "top grads" move into it for better wages?
Here is some data that tries to at least look at this question: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/06/does-majoring...
The gross number is only 1/3 of stem degree lead to stem jobs. But that includes quite a bit of soft degree's, still in the ballpark of half of all graduates not working in their field.
> software jobs
Yes there is higher demand for software which is met with higher wages and drawing underemployed people with other degrees as well as immigration. The immigration restriction argument is that increasing that part of the equation will lower wages and increase corporate control of their workforce.
So an alternative way to meet that demand is to hire us citizens who have those qualifications or a related degree that could be trained.
Another good one. We hired a person with a MechE degree with experience working at JPL into our customer support because they are so in love with the area because of easy access to winter activities (snow shoing, skiing, etc).
Imo your narrative amounts is simply not grounded in reality.
It’s favoritism, it’s cronyism, it’s a nation putting its own struggling people last and it most certainly is zero sum.
No offense, but maybe your resume didn't reflect that you had the skills required.
The companies I worked at and now portfolio companies of mine pay Bay Area market rate to both citizens and non-citizens.
We hire noncitizens because we didn't find the right talent we need.
You can't "command economy" human capital. It just doesn't work.
Upskilling has a 5-10 year long lag time.
Immigration is the only reason America hasn't stumbled like Europe, Japan, or Korea demographically.
So what? Again, this is a pipeline problem, that can be influenced and addressed via policy. I'm not trying to "command economy" anything. It's a problem that companies, and increasingly universities, don't think that it's a huge issue there not being enough home-grown citizens to fill these roles (a claim I find to be dubious at best). That is definitely something that policy can be used to fix.
>Immigration is the only reason America hasn't stumbled like Europe, Japan, or Korea demographically.
I don't know what this is supposed to mean. You want some demographic growth target to be hit? Europe has many countries in it, but mentioning Japan and Korea implies you have noticed the birth rates there. Well, I think the wrong question is being asked in that situation as well. If people aren't having babies, why? What changed? What policy options are there to fix that problem?
Thinking that "just import a new workforce" fixes that is extremely weird to me, especially when they are coming from places that are not exactly culturally proximate to the places they are going, to say the least.
Companies should train employees, simple as.
I bet most people working in it learned on the job. The certainly dont teach every single specific detail of the entire tech industry in universities.
This is just gaslighting.
Maybe.
We didn't have the time to risk on hiring a dud in an industry as competitive as Cybersecurity.
When competing with Israeli and Indian companies who are able to tap the Israeli, Eastern European, and Indian talent scene where such skills are much more common, we don't have the time to risk timelines falling behind.
With an decent background shouldnt take someone too long to get up to speed and that time isnt going to break the company.
Its what they do in other countries. lol
You clearly have with an agenda.
That was what we were offering, but we were also demanding on quality and skill required.
We ended up getting some top performers in Israel and India for a fraction, despite being ready to pay the above.
Kinda telling that the so called smart people who have trouble getting hired have no clue that that's not a requirement for H1B.
The midwest is not sending their best.
Assuming that the issue is that these positions weren't remote then if they decided that they're better served by workers that live locally then they're either right and you're asking them to harm their own interests for yours or they're wrong and they're just leaving money on the table for a competitor. If they aren't harmed for giving up a competitive edge then that monopoly power to just ignore the market is the actual problem.
Either way, work visas isn't even close to the most salient problem. Restrict them and who's to say how startups will find loopholes to avoid hiring who we want them to hire. Let's just cut out all the messiness and cut them checks directly. Call it reparations for the coasts ignoring the good honest midwest American talent all these years.
We'll just open offices in Israel, Eastern Europe, and India instead and pay 70% of a US salary. It already started happening in 2019, and avalanched during the pandemic.
When the US banned Israeli companies from selling military IP to China, they began selling to India.
Drone tech saw a similar impact, hence why Chinese and Turkish Drone companies are outcompeting American ones in both commercial and defense applications.
(the right talent at the shit-level wage we want to pay) is more often than not the rest of that sentence.
We needed people who understood stuff like XDP and worked on it for years.
The talent pool for low level development, OS Dev, cybersecurity, networking, and some parts of ML is sparse in the US compared to Israel, Eastern Europe, China, and India.
Companies would collapse and fail, unless the government gave a massive corporate stimulus package (probably 4-5x the size of PPE).
> none of the skills you need, but I could easily be trained
It would take at least 1-2 years. At that point, an Israeli or Indian startup has taken market share and won. Welcome to cybersecurity and networking.
Even National Labs don't do that.
In my area (not cybersecurity) I’m still seeing very serious and brand-new-to-me problems come up even after many years.
The solution for this is good testing and QA not fear mongering Americans into hiring immigrants.
On the other hand, if your attitude is that you now know your stuff and you’re done learning, that isn’t going to produce the best outcomes for you.
> Testing and QA
Business processes can’t take the place of experienced judgement.
This is utterly incorrect..
Testing and QA are techical processes run by engineers.
Where did you get your degree ? Your knowledge of tech seems extraordinarily limited. Theres solutions to your problems you're not even aware of.
One observation I've made throughout the years of reviewing tech resumes - if I get a resume from a U.S. citizen, I (and anybody else) immediately know the difference between MIT/Stanford vs. "The University of Wisconsin" without even researching it. OTOH, I have no idea what the difference between the University of Hyderabad vs. the University of New Delhi, and there's not really a good way for me to tell. Foreign applicants actually have an _advantage_ over U.S. citizens in that the person reviewing their resume will almost certainly bin all of the resumes into the same "ok, has a degree" vs. a potentially unconscious "ah, ok, couldn't get into an ivy league".
Edit: More relevant is comparing Ivy undergrads (64.5k) to all US undergrads (20.3 million) [2], meaning only the top 0.3% make the cut.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League - total number of undergrads (64.5k), divided by 4, assuming a 4-year college course.
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/235406/undergraduate-enr...
We didn't discriminate based on educational program.
But we didn't have the time to train someone in eBPF or OS Internals from scratch over months when there are competitors in Israel or India able to release the same thing in the same time period with a fraction of the cost.
For certain specialities of tech, there simply isn't the skill set anymore in the US. OS Internals and Computer Networking is a great example of that.
With most tech jobs if a person has a computer science background they have the skills.
The company is just lying to justify outsourcing.
Until you do it, you don’t know how to do it. In other words, juniors fumble around and make lots of mistakes - that’s how they get good.
I took networking, os, data structures, etc. in my degree.
It taught me a lot more than "how to learn".
Interestingly, the meat ag and farming employs (no pun intended) similar tactics with undocumented people working in near-or-de facto slavery conditions that are very dangerous. The major meat processing plants in the US advertise salaries in Mexican and Central American newspapers to encourage migration. And, the US immigration system is a Kafkaesque, Byzantine, understaffed nightmare purposefully to keep official immigration meeting socio-political objectives of appearing selective. In truth, it facilitates megacorps importing large numbers of foreign knowledge workers through official channels while criminalizing and marginalizing undocumented people to be under the thumbs of other megacorps monetizing unpleasant work society inconveniently needs to function.
It is so obviously not zero sum. From Google to Yahoo to eBay to Palantir. None of those hundreds of thousands of jobs would exist without immigrants. Or they would be overseas.
I'm sorry for your friends who cannot get tech jobs. It's time to level up their skills. No competent developer can't find a job in this economy.
Stop blaming immigrants for your own shortcomings.
Globalization is a two way street. If you want the best of what the world has to offer, the best of what the world has to offer will arrive at your doorstep. That includes human resources.
This concentration of high paid tech jobs would not exist in the first place if it weren't for the foreigners. Look at the number of tech startups founded by immigrants. More broadly consider that if a different country became the global hub for top tech talent, capital would go there, and that country would become the home of high paid tech salaries.
The main input into a tech company is 'human capital' (hard working, highly intelligent, people) - Americans benefit from the spillover effects of having their country be the global nexus of human capital.
BTW, India is seeing significant upwards pressure on tech salaries and a boom in the number of domestic tech companies and jobs. This is at least partly spurred by restrictive American immigration policies forcing Indians to go back home. Purely economically speaking, I don't think America is the winner here.
That's simply not true. The alternative is often just not having this job at all. A tech startup without employees can just fail, without creating any jobs.
And the guy from the Midwest will be worse off in the end.
On the other hand, if all the foreign talent congregates elsewhere, the Midwest kid will need a visa to compete with them.
The non-zero sum is that having all the people in one place makes more opportunities than if they weren't together.
Let me preface my writing by saying that I am neither a US citizen nor a tech worker currently employed or aiming for employment with a US based firm.
I am a first generation immigrant in a continental European country who faced no barriers in charting my career in tech. I deeply believe in and have experienced meritocracy.
So let's go at it one by one.
> Every foreign employee getting that tech job is a US citizen from the Midwest not getting it.
That is simply not true as the distribution for demand and supply of tech talent within an economy is hardly ever matching perfectly temporally. Either there is more demand than supply or more supply than demand. Also upskilling everyone in the Midwest does not work just that quickly.
That is how the world works.
Your argument is not rooted at all in basic macroeconomics, rather, it seems to me, in wishful thinking.
No country other than the USA is better at playing that macroeconomics game through talent oriented immigration laws.
Has been for the past 200 years, will be for the next 200 years.
I'd bet on that.
> Fuck this dishonest talking point, I know people coding since high school working at Toyota plants while people from overseas with entry level skill sets have employers move them to the west coast and land jobs (for whatever reason.)
Said people you know must either not have the chops you claim they have, not know their market value or not have the required mobility for the purpose of securing said jobs (i.e. moving out of the Midwest to the economic hotspots of the US).
Giving you the benefit of the doubt that indeed subservient immigration is an economic niche of it's own, there is no chance that practice alone saturates the demand for tech talent.
How many SWE positions in every other HN thread alone require citizenship, timezone presence or offer no assistance with immigration?
> It’s favoritism, it’s cronyism, it’s a nation putting its own struggling people last and it most certainly is zero sum.
While a populist, assertive statement, I think it is lack of widespread education & upskilling initiatives (which literally everyone else outside of the tech sector has incentives for: what would Toyota, Walmart, literally everyone else stand to gain from more educated citizens leaving the Midwest for higher paying jobs?), greed and fiscal pressure (I've promised my VCs 200% growth YoY, so I need SWEs stat from literally anywhere NOW, can't wait for these folks from the Midwest to upskill within 2 years) and generational change (those HS friends chopping away at Toyota might not have applied in their early years when remote work was as prevalent as it is today. It will be a totally different game for a Midwest child growing up in a tech inspired household today).
Lack in speed of upskilling/ education, fiscal economic pressure and glacial pace of generational change is literally what every other nation is facing.
Time is always the scarcest and most critical factor. And that's why it's not zero sum.
In the long run, no economy is bound to employ more people in tech both domestic and foreign than the USA and that is a massive, massive achievement - and based in simple macroeconomic rules, not some emotional anecdotes.
Tech begets tech, tech jobs beget tech jobs. Personally, I think we are not remotely close to “peak software” in particular.
Our immigration system targets skilled workers from abroad, and brings in a lot of them. It's a far more "rational" and less confusing system than the US, but also explicitly geared around bringing in skilled workers as permanent residents and it brings in a lot of them.
The downward pressure on compensation rates is real. Apart from exceptions in FAANG type companies, salaries here are often 1/2 of the rates of US employers, and it isn't because we're a lower quality product.
As a result a large % of us just move south to the US on a TN visa, or take remote jobs from US employers. Because the disparity in compensation is very high. And it's in large part because the market here is flooded with talent from abroad.
Tech salaries there are lower than what a skilled employee can get in Israel, China, or India.
> According to this Joint Venture Silicon Valley report, 74% of Silicon Valley tech workers are foreign-born immigrants. A decade ago, 36% of Silicon Valley tech workers were born abroad. In 2000, only 29% were.
> Tech industry employment has increased from about 300,000 jobs in 2007 to 400,000 in 2016, so even though we created 100,000 engineering positions in the last decade, we’ve also displaced 88,000 domestic engineers.[1]
> American tech workers are getting pushed out, and they aren’t coming back
If the downward pressure on salary in American software jobs is so extreme that salaries frequently go all the way to zero, while there is a countervailing upward pressure on salary among Indian no-job-yets, why do we say it's "categorically false" that there is a downward pressure on American software salaries?
[1] Note that this is what you expect from a pricing shift, not an increase in the value created by the work. The quantity of software labor purchased has gone up and sellers are being forced out. If the driver of increased quantity-of-jobs were increased value created, you would see sellers entering the market, not leaving.
Yeah. A lot of people are leaving because of the housing insanity. That doesn't mean they're leaving teach and losing their jobs. There is zero evidence for that.
This isn't evidence for any impact on jobs. It's evidence for the mismanagement of the Bay Area and California as a whole.
Heck, workers with PR/citizenship are probably more likely to unionize for higher wages because they feel safer.
20 years ago, the Chinese backlog used to be in the decades range. Now it's 2 years.
The Indian backlog used to be multi-decade too, but is now 11.
Already, we've had engineers at portfolio companies decide to return to India to either earn a dollar salary or start their own startup.
At this point, we've decided to straight up outsource jobs to India, Israel, and Eastern Europe. The talent base we need doesn't exist in the US.
These guys could have become taxing paying members of American society. Now they'll make contributions to India, Eastern Europe, and Israel instead
Good! There’s a billion people in India and plenty of opportunities for growth. The net benefit for all of humanity is larger if they stay there.
Put another way, is it really all that great that the US drains the top talent out of India and Eastern Europe?
For example, the founder of Zoho (Sridhar Vembu - I actually lived in the same apartment complex in the Bay Area that he started Zoho at) has become a NatSec cabinet advisor to Narendra Modi's administration, and has a chip on his shoulder about his experience dealing with US immigration. It was a big reason he returned to India.
Wang Huning, the Chairman of the Chinese Politburo and Xi Jinping's right hand man - soured on the US after his experience dealing with the US as a student.
A good friend of mine from college in the ML space who's parents are pretty high up in the ruling party of a major SEA state has been constantly complaining to me and them about how they lost 2 chances at the F1 to H1B conversion, and every single time became more and more ambivalent about the US. They can end up returning to SEA and make a large company, but they will also have a chip on their shoulder about the US.
Another good friend of mine was an Indian national who specialized in EE and Condensed Matter Physics (semiconductors type work) - even did grad school in it at a Stanford type program. He left the US to work for a major Chinese company in SEA because immigration in the US was horrid.
Plenty of Israelis feel the same way now about the US due to similar experiences.
The US Immigration system exudes a sense of American exceptionalism because voters say "Love it or leave it". But the people who leave end up becoming successful, but still angry at how much effort and stress was expended for naught.
China is now a near peer in 2023. There's no reason to fuel anti-Americanism in India, SEA, LatAm, etc and push them to the other side.
China and India combined take in less than a tenth of the immigrants the US takes in yearly. There's really no reason anyone should take their opinions on immigration seriously.
The US's biggest strength is it's soft power at the elite level.
Because of bad experiences like immigration, the US has been losing influence as foreign decision makers soured on the US due to crap treatment.
So what?
Countries like India or Vietnam only began starting to warm to the US because of the diaspora. If the diaspora gets treated like shit, anti-Americanism begins to breed.
A similar thing happened in China in the 2010s.
The Pakistani nuclear program was jumpstarted by PLA technology transfers in the 1970s [0][5], Pakistani Tank Technology like Al-Khalid are results of PLA tech transfers in the early 1990s [1], Pakistan began adopting Chinese fighter jet IP in the early 1990s [2], and the entire indigenous missles program in Pakistan began thanks to Chinese IP transfers in the 80s [3]
The US-Pakistan relationship was always transactional and surface level. Chinese SOEs would at least invest in Military affiliated companies like Heavy Industries Taxila, Pakistan Aeronautical Complex, Khan Research Laboratories, Global Industrial Defence Solutions, and National Defence Complex
The countries in the list abovr had a relationship with the US that was similar to that between China-Pakistan, but began pivoting away from the US in the 2010s.
[0] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/41394229
[1] - https://www.dawn.com/news/1217909
[2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20121021154725/http://www.flight...
[3] - https://web.archive.org/web/20081007232310/http://www.wiscon...
[4] - https://www.nytimes.com/1972/02/02/archives/bhutto-confers-w...
Though, even PINSTECH pivoted to China by the 70s [0].
The India-Pakistan rivalry forced Pakistan to try and reach parity with India via Chinese technology transfers.
And yea. American hubris will lose us the next war.
Or more accurately, the processes are obfuscated and full of inexplicable delays. Why would someone even consider hiring a lawyer for something as simple and common as employment-based immigration? And how can the green card process take longer than a few months?
That's funny. I guess every visa holder is some little genius doing particle physics work
You're going out of your way to give very specific anecdotes here, the average level of talent I've met on a visa is something very easily matched domestically. It's pretty hilarious actually, some of them can't actually program and have an SWE job title
And then begin lobbying against the United States.
Which is now having impact on hiring higher level positions because we broke the pipeline of Jr. -> Mid Level -> Sr.
Could you explain what you mean?
More generally, if another country became the global nexus for top tech talent, capital would eventually follow there, and the long term effect on US tech salaries would be negative.
And countries in Europe that have not seen as much Tech immigration have seen huge boosts in Tech salaries. Comparable Europeans earn almost 1/3 - 1/2 what their American counterparts do today!
Indeed, this balance between supply and demand is exactly what keeps US tech salaries high. Our dynamic economy creates a lot of tech roles while our restrictive immigration limits high skill immigrants from filling those roles, raising salaries.
Tech companies have been lobbying unsuccessfully for years to raise or eliminate the h-1b cap, which would absolutely cut salaries. That’s why they are lobbying for it, to reduce their labor costs.
Personally I think this is all going to be moot anyway. With software development becoming a mostly remote role after the pandemic, I’ve seen a lot less barrier over the past few years to hiring offshore teams. My own small division of 100 people has offshore teams in 3 countries.
AFAIK, my company has never considered outsourcing to remote Euro workers. Is there a perceived difference in engineer quality? Time difference?
- The hiring pool is much smaller than in the US, one reason is probably demographics and lack of skilled immigration. This makes it less attractive to hire/grow there.
- Labor regulation is much more strict. It's legally hard and expensive to lay off workers in Germany, for example.
- Taxes are much higher than in the US, so even if employers spend a lot of money on payroll, much less of it will end up in employees checking accounts.
- Demand is much lower. Tech industry in Europe is definitely there, but not booming to the same degree as in the US.
Is a few months notice [0] too much to ask? You can fire anyone you want, you're just going to wait a little bit or pay their remaining salary if you want them gone immediately. There is nothing legally hard about it. The hardest part is probably that you have to physically mail the layoff notice, but nothing prevents you from just directly giving it to them straight into their hands to be perfectly compliant with the law. Also, most of these laws only apply to companies with employee counts in the double digits. Not to small startups hiring their third employee.
Now imagine an entire country specialising in hardware like Germany.
Intuitively, yes. If you're both brilliant, care about money, and want to stay and live in the EU, you aren't going to be a software engineer.
In the US, it's a solid path to a lucrative career.
I'm not 100% sure, so I have to ask. Are you being sarcastic about immigration not exerting tremendous downward pressure on US tech salaries?