January of last year had more than twice as many layoffs as any other month of the year, and the first quarter of '23 had nearly twice as many layoffs as the rest of the year combined. Not sure if we'll see the same trend this year, but it does seem like there have been an uncharacteristic number of layoffs this month already.
And to add insult to injury, there will inevitably be lots of sound bites from CEOs whining about a lack of engineering talent, so can we please raise H1B limits???
But then I actually looked at the H1B process. It's insane. Not only is there a limited lottery but it only happens once per year. It's not like you can get a job and then apply for a visa.
Is H1B abuse real or are are American HN's commenters way overplaying it?
The abuse comes from companies built entirely on this: Imagine we are running a contracting company from some cheap country. We have 6000 consultants we'll be able to bill higher from the US. So we ask our US subsidiary to just file said 6000 applications. Only 2000 got accepted? Who cares! those 2000 people get moved to the US, and are now working for us, and then we contract them out to normal Enterprise companies at relatively low rates. It's not hard to claim this is abuse, as ultimately one wants to make applications for anyone with a pulse.
Some commentators are definitely overplaying it, but any way you look at it, the system is not necessarily working all that well, precisely because the cap is relatively low, the number of random Indian contractors that would like to move in is very high, and those intermediary companies are rarely great, but they have a big advantage in the system compared to a small company that just really wants to hire one guy, or wants to keep someone that came in with a student visa, and has been doing practical training.
Unfortunately there are so many competing interests that any kind of sensible immigration reform isn't going to happen, as getting the majority of the house and 2/3rds on the senate to agree on something this contentious is almost impossible, especially when one of the parties has people whose idea of the perfect number of immigrants is zero.
But if you look at the overall visa numbers from a few years ago, they are dominated not by FAANG, but by "consulting" companies like Infosys. Those are straight up sweatshops who squeeze everything they can out of their H1Bs while underpaying them (and thus also undermining the local market).
Yes and yes.
The long and short of it is that many companies don't want to pay market salaries, or have unreasonable expectations, and the H1B system basically lets a company hire at a lower salary than market salary.
The H1B system also impacts immigrants' job portability. An H1B employee is less likely to leave a bad job for a better job, thus H1B employees are more desirable because of the lock-in.
Edit: The other half is that a lot of people "age out" of tech for various reasons and like to point a finger. Working in tech at 40+ years old is very different in an industry that typically hires people in their 20s and 30s.
Or just make companies to pay to win a slot ;)
Which jurisdiction requires 5 months of salary?