2013 H1B Visa Supply Nearly Exhausted
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The xenophobia also seems a little over the top on this issue. With the rather broken American education system, is it so unbelievable to people that there may actually be quite a few non-Americans that are simply better qualified for these jobs?
Unless you have a crazy budget, you will spend a loooong time interviewing and going through one shitty candidate after another. We've interviewed close to 60 people, hired 3 (NYC). One of the 3 turned out to be a rat who delegated all the work to other developers, and had to be let go.
In cities like NYC or SF, you need a very high salary to attract true talent.
Actually, there's no upper limit. We've seen some crazy examples:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/11/google-offers-staff-enginee...
If companies actually paid "$150-200K" there'd be an applicant line visible from space.
Worth pointing out that one of the big problems the industry has right now is the assumption that those are the only two places to put a tech company.
If you have a GC petition under processing, and switch jobs by transferring the H-1B, at the new job you will have to start the GC processing all over again. Nonetheless, you can transfer the "priority date" (PD) from the first (abandoned) GC petition to the new one.
This piece of misinformation cost me many years, so please don't spread it. I waited too long for the "right job" to come by and wasted many years. I could have started the GC petition at the first opportunity and transfered the PD as I switched jobs.
Your last two sentences are spot on... I am guilty of it too.
As mentioned by another poster, you can switch jobs if the EB category stays the same. In that sense, you do have to wait for the "right-enough" job, where they employer is willing to agree to you categorize you in EB2 or EB1 if you have a PHd.
In addition, companies/lawyers take their sweet time preparing paperwork. Which means:
PERM application in process? Can't switch jobs from 3 months to a year or more. My PERM took > 1 year to be approved. Others I know took more time.
A H1 transfer or PERM can also be autited for no good reason, and waste time for people. An audit will discourage people from switching.
I140 in process? Should I switch and waste time invested in PERM?
You can technically switch, but there is plenty of FUD to give people second thoughts.
In my own experience, my employer is struggling to find qualified people. We are a fast-growing startup in LA and simply cannot scale as fast as we would like (mail me if you want more info). There is no shortage of foreign applicants but, afaik, I am one of only two sponsored H1B employees.
If the American education system is so broken, why do so many Canadians travel south to attend American colleges and universities? My wife certainly did, to get her law degree.
> is it so unbelievable to people that there may actually be quite a few non-Americans that are simply better qualified for these jobs?
That isn't unbelievable at all. However, our immigration system, as broken as it is, serves a different purpose. The H-1B visa is meant to fill jobs that cannot be filled with domestic talent. Not jobs that can be filled with superior talent. A fine difference, but still a difference.
Personally, I'm for eliminating all this visa nonsense and allowing anybody who wants to come here to do so. Then again, nobody asked me.
It is not until college level that the US performs better than other countries. And then (for the majority of people) you would need a scholarship to be able to go.
K12 education has poor results and above that it is economically broken.
e: I don't mean this as an attack, I just want to say I can see where the grandparent is coming from.
Yes. You actually believing that statistic. Seriously?
> It is not until college level that the US performs better than other countries.
That depends on how you define performance. If you define it by creative endeavors and behavior, I would say that's patently false.
How is it that such a poorly educated populace produces the most vibrant culture and economy on the plant? Must be a miracle.
> And then (for the majority of people) you would need a scholarship to be able to go.
The overwhelming majority take out loans or work their way through. At times, parents help out. Occasionally scholarships pay some of the way. Very rarely does a scholarship cover the entire tuition.
You could make some arguments about culture vs education but I doubt those individuals are very educated, so it's an uphill battle for you.
If someone says that the earth is 5,000 years old, you should take him at his word that he believes it.
I do believe it. We have governors that publicly don't accept global warming as well.
> Re: Education
It's not the education but the market that creates "the most vibrant culture and economy". That's why some of those contributing to our culture and economy came to do so from abroad.
> Re: Tuition
My point is still that it is quite a large burden, whether or not one manages to delay or share the burden.
If you want to hire from Australia, there is a VISA that is roughly equivalent called the E-3. It has a cap of 10K, of which less than 3K are filled yearly. This is the VISA I have.
Not saying you will necessarily find the people you need down under (if you cannot find them in the US), but it is possible :)
General rules: Be friendly, polite and sell the positives of being state-side (larger tech community, more user groups, conferences, etc)
That's why I'm here. I don't plan on returning to Melbourne until I've lived in San Francisco and New York either. It's a hell of an opportunity once you're over here.
The trick is that it's a non-resident-intent visa, which is to say, while it's indefinitely renewable on paper, at some point USCIS is going to point out that you've been here for an awfully long time and you risk the renewal not going through.
Not sure if the same applies to E-3.
I do know of an E-3 holder who had their residency fast tracked, but there have been so few of them issued that it's probably a bit hard to tell the lay of the land.
You should definitely have a decent amount of savings when you move over though, to offset the lack of credit.
E3 is a nice idea but dealing with some of life's basics can be grueling in the US if you're off the system. It's not difficult to imagine how people on the street here can't get out of the hole.
Credit Unions are the way to go, no doubt, but took a while to figure that out.
US govt. has kinda caught up to this and is rejecting many H1Bs that were sponsored by consulting companies now. So make of that what you will.
Go after the abuses of the program, yes, but it's not fair to many good, valuable people in the USA on visas like this to imply (and you may not be trying to imply this, but it's the impression many people come away with) that it's all abuse.
I'd be the last to argue, though, that the US immigration system is a good one. It seems to tolerate any number of unskilled illegal migrants on one end, but pretty effectively bar educated, skill migration on the other. I'm no economist, but that intuitively seems to be the wrongly skewed to me.
On the other extreme, you have extremely abusive "body shops" where employers think nothing of threatening to revoke a visa to manipulate a worker. I think that many people who work for the first universe were a little shocked to discover that the biggest recipients of the H1B visa are generally overseas outsourcing companies.
http://www.businessweek.com/table/08/0305_h1b.htm
If you're interested in reading more about serious abuses of the system, I'd recommend reading some of Ron Hira's work (a public policy professor at Rochester) - he did an interview on NPR a while back where he discussed some of the really outrageous cases (some H1B recipients were paid less than $9/hr and met the "prevailing wage" requirement... how on earth can this be happening with a visa designed to remedy shortages of "critical, highly skilled and educated workers"? And how is it that google is running out of visas when we're allocating them to companies paying such low wages!)
It's fubar. The US badly needs a solution, but there are so many competing interests that it's difficult to find a common ground. There is some outright xenophobia. There are people who don't really like immigration, and want to limit it wherever they can. There are companies that want to lay off their entire IT department and replace it with non-citizen workers who can't negotiate their wages. There are engineers who feel positive about immigration in general but resent a specific program specifically brings in more engineer, on the grounds that there is no greater a "shortage" in engineering than any other field, at least when you consider wage growth. There are people who support very liberal immigration policies and figure more is better. There are people who think it's crazy to tell graduates of top STEM programs that they aren't allowed to stay. Some people say that we should staple a green card to every graduate degree in a STEM field (but interesting, not to every law degree or MBA, degrees that are more popular with Americans...)
Unfortunately, the result is stalemate and a program that nobody likes, but everyone uses, because how else are you going to do this You work with the system you have.
My own opinion is that we should make every effort to keep and attract top talent to the US in all fields, but we also need to be aware that the market distortions of visas targeting specific types of workers can, if we're not careful, end up deterring Americans from entering specific fields (creating a self-enforcing cycle of "shortages"). I think we can balance this with good legislation (and the countries that "solve" it will have a big competitive advantage over everyone else), but it's a tall order considering the many angry and conflicting interests around this issue.
I have some amount of sympathy for the consulting companies as well. I've seen cases where my friends got CS degrees from University of Pennsylvania, who I know are very good, but can't find a job right out of college. (The day your degree is done, the US policy is to kick you out unless you get an intern with some company or a H1B sponsorship. No grace period.). At this point, you're forced to go to the consultancies, get trained in whatever enterprisey tech stack, fake your resume and then accept whatever ridiculous terms the companies throw at you, work for them for a couple of years and move on once you have your foot in the door.
So.. all I'm saying is the policy needs some change .. I'm just agreeing with my parent that it needs to be easier for grads from US universities.
Many H1B holders start with shady companies but eventually move to better places. Not sure if that's always a good thing.
My point was H1B candidates of the former type have self-selected themselves into a pool of skilled risk takers and could perhaps be an asset for a start-up. But your mileage will vary.
As for the latter category, you are not really hiring an employee ; you are merely hiring a vendor . Buyer beware !
Bodyshoppers - Faux consulting companies that recruit H1B workers from overseas with promises of a life in the US and a Green Card and place the "consultants" at US corporations to fill developer positions. Usually while they are paid the "market" rate as per DOL guidelines the companies sometimes deduct "fees" from the salary for the first year or so giving the candidate not much to live on. The green card never materializes and the candidate is usually threatened with having to pay back all the fees if they leave. Some are really good candidates who come into the US this way and usually jump ship as soon as they can if they can find a US company to sponsor the H1B. There has been a crack down on this over the last several years so body shopping isn't as common as it used to be.
Outsourcers - Companies who specialize in transferring work development overseas. "Consultants" come to the US on a H1B for year or so to learn the process and systems then head back overseas to setup the development team offshore. Was very in vogue a few years ago but seems to have slowed down as more companies realized it doesn't work as well as advertised.
The third category is companies who genually are seeking the best candidate for the position and cannot find anybody locally. Really these companies should be sponsoring the candidate for a EB1, EB2, or EB3 green card however the process takes too much time (1-2 years+) and doesn't give the company as much leverage over the candidate as bringing them in on a H1B. If you are coming in on a H1B these are the companies you want to work for, but make sure you get any promises for Green Card sponsorship in writing otherwise it probably won't happen.
If I can't hire good programmers in America I'll be tempted to open an office in India. Once I open an office in India, I have even less of an incentive to hire people in America. With less employees in America, my company is spending less on services in America. My employees are buying less things. The people I didn't hire in America don't need houses in America. Real estate prices suffer.
Silicon Valley is an amazing place. Immigration restrictions are unnecessary friction. They are protectionism for college graduates who should be able to compete on their own (if they can't, wtf were they learning in college?). If you gunk up Silicon Valley you are basically priming the ground for the emergence of rivals. That seems unthinkable now, but only because we are all sitting in Silicon Valley and we aren't watching what is happening abroad.
Programmers can grow up anywhere. They can learn anywhere and with AWS, App Engine, etc. they can deploy their services cheaply from anywhere. Soon kids won't need VCs to launch companies. The proximity to Silicon Valley for funding's sake will be irrelevant. It'll be the tech community that will be the draw. If the best people aren't in Silicon Valley because immigration rules stopped them at the border, then there will be competing communities in other nations. Where living costs might be cheaper. Where the weather might be better. Where the abundance of beautiful women (and men) might be higher.
What happens to Silicon Valley real estate when tech work moves to other locales?
One thing I'm hearing though is that companies are not that interested in hiring H1B candidates (at least for design) - I'm surprised that the increase in take-up is due to tech companies. Any Bay area companies able to comment on this?
Essentially if you aren't Intel/MSFT/IBM you don't stand a chance of getting an H1B application through
In fact the rules now are that they will include any petition received within the first five business days in the lottery. The rules are a little more complex than this, but it's essentially correct.
Any reasonably good lawyer knew they had to get things submitted on the first day due to cap uncertainties.
I'd quite happily pay the immigration fees myself to get into the states (currently in the UK also).
Also, employers cannot make you pay the immigration fees, it's illegal.
Stop complaining and sharpen up your skills folks, we're living in a global world with global competition on all levels. American companies can't afford to hire B talent just because they're "americans" (whatever that means, many americans I know are immigrants 1-4 generations back).
Once in the US, you can extend your H1B status for up to 6 years (and more if you have a pending 'green card' process)
Only reason is that the supply of jobs is abundant. Though there could be a huge number of american engineers, it simply doesn't match the demand at present. There is nothing terribly wrong in education system in the USA. The way you can solve this problem is by telling every freshman to major in Computer Science (However, many tech jobs don't require CS degree), which is not possible.
I don't think that'd fix it - we're not really short on CS grads, we're short on CS grads that can write software. That's part of the xenophobia and hostility against H1B's - you have a lot of CS graduates who are just plain not very good programmers, who feel slighted that they're being passed over in favor of an international who's actually competent.
One big problem I have with the H1B visa is that it was created in response to an alleged "shortage". I'm very enthusiastic about creating a general skilled immigration under a points program (like Australia or Canada), but I'm far less enthusiastic about specific visa programs designed to remedy shortages in a particular and narrow segment of the economy. As you can probably tell, I'm one of those people who doesn't really believe that "shortages" of workers exist in a properly functioning market. I wouldn't rule it out completely, as we don't have a true free market and there are externalities to consider, but in general, I think most companies talking about shortages are really just having trouble hiring at the rate they want to pay.
Double or triple that salary, and you'll get your engineers. If that's too expensive, then maybe the talent you seek has just found higher value things to work on. One extremely regrettable aspect of the H1B is that it restricts mobility. Yes, changing jobs in related fields is possible and common, but an H1B holder can't stay on that visa to go to med or law school, start a new company, or respond rationally to all kinds of market signals they way free people in a free economy would be able to... and the ugly truth is that this is part of the appeal of this visa to some companies - a captive engineering workforce with all the market distortions that brings.
it would have been 85k-95k for an entry level. In short, it was up to the standards in bay area for skills and experience.
Do you think you would have been more successful hiring a Jr dev at a much higher salary? Say, 120K? That would still low for a graduate of a top law school.
I know this will cause sticker shock, but that may be what it takes.
I see this as a function of supply and demand. I haven't studied economics formally (beyond the examples in my math classes), but I understand that economists talk of a demand curve and supply curve. At lower prices, consumers tends to demand more of a product or service but producers supply less. At higher prices, produces have an incentive to supply more but consumers tend to demand less. The point where the supply and demand curves meet is considered the market equilibrium.
Right now, it sounds like prices (salaries) for engineers haven't hit equilibrium. 80-90k may sound like a lot, but clearly the economy is demanding more engineers at this level than the market will supply. I don't know where that equilibrium point will be, but considering the number of very lucrative career paths smart people have available to them, I suspect it's going to be quite a bit higher.
Exactly, that was my original point.
You can always find a salary point at which any good or service will appear to be in "shortage". And you can always find a salary at which there will appear to be a glut. Sounds like there's a big shortage of 80k/yr engineers, but absolutely no shortage of 160k/yr engineers.
The IEEE had it right when H1Bs were first expanded: don't give H1Bs at all. Instead, give greencards so that if the wages are below market the employee can immediately jump to a company paying the actual prevailing wage.
After your 6 years of H1B are over, and if you decide to leave the country for 1 year, and then reapply, then you will have to go through the quota again. Unless laws change by then, of course.
There's no shortage of quality tech talent, never has been. Now go show me a quality company.
http://www.google.ca/publicdata/explore?ds=z1ebjpgk2654c1_&#...
What is most likely happening is that once the foreign workers get their H1-B visas, they are denied raises and bonuses. And since their staying in the US is contingent upon their employment, they don't have much negotiating power.
Welcome to global labor arbitrage, specially targeted at your profession. Big software wins. You lose!
The employer does not determine what the prevailing wage is. The US Department of Labor does. Prevailing wage = the mean wage for that position in that region.
You don't like it? You're fired - now you have 12hours to get out and to the airport before we call the INS
Welcome to global labor protectionism. American guy wins, you lose.
There are just about zero limits on capital mobility.
Here's the list of biggest H1B employers ...
http://www.businessweek.com/table/08/0305_h1b.htm
Read'n'weep.
Infosys, Wipro, Satyam, Cognizant, Microsoft,Patni ....
Overwhelmingly outsourcing firms and one owned by the richest convicted monopolist in the world.
There's no evidence that H1-B is necessary and it's a ripoff of American labor.
As an aside:
Bill Gates doesn't own Microsoft.
Bill Gates is not Microsoft therefore he isn't a monopolist.
You cannot be "convincted" of being a monopoly. Monopoly is a state of being, not a criminal act. Microsoft was found to violate Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. Which, of course, has no more bearing on the discussion of H1B visas than the fact that it provides gainful employment to 92 thousand of people, most americans (i.e. a good thing).
But that isn't what big migrations of guest labor has brought us ....
Median income is stagnant. It clearly lags GDP growth. http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2008/09/gdp...
The rich are getting richer on this deal and that includes Bill Gates (who may or may not be the multi-billionaire chariman of Microsoft and largest stockholder).
Regardless, if this hypothetical "person who could migrate" is so good, he'll earn big bucks and pay taxes and spend his income on services and goods ... some of which will come from America. If we need tax money so bad in order to "prop up the whole economy" then maybe we can have some modest import taxes like we did for the first 160 years of this country.
This "trickle down" theory using Guest Workers doesn't seem to be working for dedicated American Moms and Dads.
To put it in perspective: Grow the damn tomatoes in Mexico, no need to subsidize California agriculture. Pay the local pickers the market rate.
Those mean wages are way, way off base though. When I first arrived in New York three years ago the mean wage provided by the certification was $45,000. I do not know a single developer on a salary that low.
Companies want to recruit 'unicorns', people who are absolutely perfect for the job. People that they don't have to train and can be parachuted into a position and be 100% productive from day one. They want an XXX or YYY developer, not a good general purpose software engineer who can learn new things quickly.
Such 'unicorns' either don't exist or are rare enough that they can command a premium in salary that most companies don't want to pay.
So instead of recruiting someone who is competent but needs some training (say recruiting a good Java/C developer and sending them on a training course to learn Ruby), they would rather whine that there is a shortage of software developers and petition for more H1Bs.