I'd be surprised if more than 5-10% of H-1B positions are ones where the hiring company has even looked for US applicants.
You must be a US citizen to work for my company. No "US Persons" (visa holders) or foreigners allowed.
You have to be eligible for a Secret security clearance. You don't have to get one if you don't want to as there is usually plenty of uncleared work to go around, but you have to be eligible in case that goes away and we need to put you in for a clearance.
We cannot find qualified applicants.
I've had this conversation many times on HN so here are some preemptive responses:
No, we don't make weapons for the military. Well, we do but not my part of the company. The most harmful thing the products I build do is quantify in precise detail how climate change is dooming us all.
No, our positions aren't ghost positions.
Yes, we are willing to train someone who is motivated. We won't re-teach linear algebra to a developer applicant but we will pay a tech writer to go to school nights/weekends to get a degree in engineering (me, I did that).
Yes, we have extensive high school and college work-study/internships and participants make $72k/yr. with full benefits for the duration of the program. That pipeline is actually successful.
No, you can't work remotely. You (even programmers!) have to touch the things we build in order to build them and nobody has an ISO certified clean room in their house.
Yes, we pay well.
No, we don't pay as much as Meta. We build components for satellites that have been sold to space agencies and purchased by various departments/ministries of the environment, not your personal information to advertisers-- one party has more money to spend than the other.
We have shortages in mech/EE/Aero, shortages in software, and critical shortages in engineering technicians.
One issue is that we expect programmers to remember linear algebra and have more than the ability to shovel frameworks on top of each other until a phone app comes out the other side.
What part of the country are you in?
Granted, it is still a red state.
Normally that kind of requirement leads to _higher_ compensation
I'd rather spend my time focusing on applying at other positions that will pay just as much if not more without being required to spend nights and weekends relearning a skill that is just not used very much elsewhere and not requiring security clearances, and why would I waste my time applying there when other jobs that do require these skills compensate more for the effort.
On the other hand if this company did pay closer to Meta salaries (the comparison they used) then it gives all candidates, including US citizens who fit more of their eligibility criteria, that much more incentive to actually relearn these skills and makes the expected return on investment potentially worth it.
In my experience this is often and at least in part a self-inflicted wound. As you describe your side of the business, it should not restricted, but it is. Maybe? Not enough detail to be certain.
What I see time and time again is business not willing to implement proper DLP, labeling and isolation of restricted things. Instead, they just throw everything into a single bucket, because it is quicker, faster, some of the risk and compliance is shifted to third party, and initially cheaper.
In short, a US, UK, Aus company that does government contracts will just force everyone into NOFORN, on-prem requirements (because DFARS, CMMC, CE+, Essential 8, or whatever). It is way quicker to do this for entire company than actually label data, isolate environment and resources, and so on.
I think they should clarify whether they want somebody that has passed a linear algebra class with high marks based on something like strangs' entry level book before...or are on the cutting edge of graduate level linear algebra research. It's not clear from the post and I suspect that might be an issue.
Give me a couple months and I could recite strangs entry level textbook. I passed that class with an A+. But I could not become a PhD level maths student with a linear algebra research focus in that amount of time.
There are multiple very different ways to interpret a requirement for being competent in linear algebra.
Knowing everything covered in strangs introduction to linear algebra is actually quite low on the potential list of requirements and could be self studied.
When I last read Strang's, my course included a lot of spectral theory that was decidedly not introductory regardless of what the title says. Either way, the point is that most non-specialist practitioners don't need that. How often have you truly run into determinants mod N or stochastic matrices in real life?
It sounds like our linear algebra classes were somewhat different though. No one received an A in mine. I had one of 3-4 B's.
Yes, most people had LA classes during college. But would you take a couple of months to relearn something that would be used only to interview for one job that you have no idea you'll get? That's certainly a reason why few people want to interview there.
If an SWE job posting has a narrow set of requirements, none of which require particularly high-level education, that means the ideal candidate is a “regular” SWE with experience or knowledge in the field being hired for. It’s not like this aerospace company wants someone who is an expert at linear algebra while also being a full stack dev with intimate understanding of a few major cloud platforms’ offerings and knows how to write windows drivers and does silicon design in their spare time. They’re just looking for a particular type of developer for which there simply may not be any candidates. Yeah, technically you could triple the salary and steal employees from other companies who weren’t looking for jobs, but the economics of that aren’t feasible. If there are n positions and n-a total eligible developers (for some positive a), it doesn’t matter how much you increase pay, there still aren’t going to be enough people to fill the roles. And you’re eventually going to run out of money, because you usually can’t just triple the price of your products.
You're building satellite components, which I'm quite certain are dual use.
Maybe try admitting what you're building and justify it as necessary instead.
Insulting people's ability to reason is a certain way to repel anybody with a brain.
Now I design radar panel assemblies for weather satellites.
They're both a good living.
Only someone who has never seen war first-hand can make a statement like that. You've never been in the kill zone.
I used the GI Bill and Army College Fund to pay for my bachelors.
I deployed to "tHe KiLl ZoNe" twice with C Co 1/503rd infantry and A Co 1/23rd infantry.
How well do you pay? If I were at Meta, my total comp would be 500-600k. I make half that at a small startup. Can you afford me?
And almost certainly a higher employable value too unless they have catastrophically bad social skills…
They can develop it while lying in bed and daydreaming for all the difference it makes.
Plus any 29 year old who can actually land a genuine 500k-600k USD compensation job at a big company is a literal genius, at the very least.
>… been working hard 15 hours 7 days a week in a niche, 50 weeks a year, from age 15 to age 29…
Developed the same level of social skills as the average individual who lived a more normal schedule?
I have to ask before you even answer that. Do you believe that social skills are something to be practiced and built upon, are they some waste of time they only hormones bother with, or some other option I haven’t considered?
And develop to a comparable level given a much shorter period of time.
That’s pretty much by definition for literal geniuses.
Because this reply doesn’t make sense in relation to the previous comment.
They are very much outliers, so they are by definition a very small fraction of society.
Secondly you started off this chain with talking about how someone working hard for 15 hours a day for decades is going to be more valuable and they’ll just be able to pick up every skill a human could have or need because they’re “geniuses”.
If they’re really geniuses why do they need to grind?
If you’re implying that they are only part of the set of geniuses that grind that long and there is another set of geniuses that didn’t, then how does that track with geniuses being a very small fraction of society?
Clearly some fraction do have critically bad social skills which do materially affect their prospects to a significant degree.
But the majority of them do exceed that very low bar, so it’s simply not that critical of a hinderance most of the time.
You appear to be reading absolute implications into my comments, and/or inserting your own conjectures which aren’t there on a plain reading.
Describing not having catastrophically bad social skills as a “very low” bar is not a valid take when it comes to the world of computer science. I remember when visiting Carnegie Mellon as a senior in high school and evaluating their comp sci program, how the guides suddenly got very serious when they informed our parents(not the prospective students) that a course on hygiene was required freshman year and could not be waived. I’ve also worked with near limitless number of engineers who think they have the social skills down and then don’t understand why no one wants to work with them when they will do shit like call someone else’s project they’ve worked on for months pointless or useless in a group setting without even trying to approach said coworker with even a modicum of social awareness.
Those kinds of behaviors don’t show up in a population where having non catastrophically bad social skills is a “very low bar”
> You appear to be reading absolute implications into my comments, and/or inserting your own conjectures which aren’t there on a plain reading.
I think we’re coming at this with different axioms. You seem to believe that social skills are trivial and don’t matter next to the hard sciences that people grind away on. I am coming from one where I have to constantly make excuses or apologies for various people in software engineering or comp sci because they appear to be literally incapable of empathy or understanding that other people might have a different viewpoint than theirs.
Given my axiom I think your are handwaving away a lot, and that’s where you see my statements as inserted conjectures.
Someone who works for 15 out of 18 of their waking hours, leaving 3 hours to eat, exercise, and have any semblance of social interactions or secondary interests, for FOURTEEN YEARS is not a genius. They are actually an idiot, wasting their life.
I fall almost exactly on the low end of this range: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/senior-aerospace-engineer...
With 15 years of experience.
I'm at the low end of my peers.
Like I said, auctioning off access to your users to advertisers pays better than the European space agency.
The take-home on that is £35k. The median rent in London is £26k. I suppose the person making £45k doesn't likely live in London, but still pretty grim.
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2024/10/14/the-amer...
Most Americans get employer-provided health insurance, which costs money (the amount specified in the DD section of the W2), and its often in the $1500/month range. That DD amount isn’t part of your income or the salary Glassdoor mentions. It’s an added benefit of top of that.
In the UK and elsewhere, around $500/month/person in taxes pays for your healthcare. That’s essentially subtracted from your income. So the uk income is even lower when you subtract the taxes the NHS costs.
Nope, but NHS + no/less student loans + no car dependency + cheaper childcare + time off + a ton of other things shave quite a bit off that $200k. Not equal, and not in every personal case, but a lot.
Americans are often blown away and kind of ignorant of how, relative to the rest of the world, they are really wealthy and well paid. Like, people have way less disposable incomes in other parts of the world, even developed countries. The purchase power of the USD and the power of the US economy is absolutely insane.
Couldn't this largely be explained by their importing huge amounts of low-income people?
It does in Canada, I think that’s what he meant
https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/gdp-per-capita#:~:text=T...
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-per-capita
(Click the button to check the 25 year view.)
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/36-28-0001/2024004/artic...
"another respected data journalist, John Burn-Murdoch, calculated that without London, the UK would be poorer, in terms of GDP per capita, than even the poorest US state, Mississippi."
None of this changes the fact that US software engineering salaries are a poor comparison to use to illustrate wealth disparities between the US and other countries, as they are an outlier.
Quite! A top 10% earner in Finland, a supposedly very developed country, by saving all of their net-income spending zero on food and letting their SO pay the bills, could in 2-3 years afford a new Skoda.
The US is not a developed country, rather it is a particularly rich third world country.
You're basically comparing "super specialised job in the middle of nowhere with very low cost of living" vs a "super specialised but much more needed job in multiple high cost of living locations" (Seattle metro area, LA metro area to name a few).
I realize this story sounds absurd to anyone who hasn’t experienced it, but my understanding is that this form of firing (“managing out”) is basically the norm for low performers at top-tier tech companies.
To get actually fired, you usually have to fuck up big time, like sexually harassing a coworker, stealing trade secrets, or trying to start a union. (That last one is a joke, sort of)
Tried again with a U.S. VPN and I'm gob-smacked by how different that range is.
For anyone curious, the Canadian pay range is:
Base pay $66K - $95K/yr
$79K/yr Average base pay
The low end of that base pay ($66k CAD) converts to $45k USD.
While the U.S. pay range is:
Total pay range: $266K - $463K/yr
$346K/yr Median total pay
Pay breakdown $137K - $223K/yr Base pay $129K - $240K/yr Additional pay
Totally different markets. You wouldn't be interested in that job, and they wouldn't want to hire you even if you were interested. Even the tone of your post makes that obvious.
We should be discussing early to mid career folks from somewhere other than silicon valley startup or big web tech land. Aka "meat and potatoes" tech jobs. That is what's being discussed.
I don't know what their problem is with hiring either and I agree with you that it could be partially compensation related. But not being able to compete with Silicon Valley on compensation is not where I would be going with that argument....I think it's more likely to be related to environment and interview style and notions of what "experience" means. In other words...bad hiring practices...not necessarily raw compensation issues. The compensation for non "big tech" firms can sometimes be quite good in comparison to other career paths especially when located outside of the valley, so being unable to hire talent makes me suspicious of hiring practices more than compensation (assuming they are reasonably large and hit market rate for the area and are in a reasonably large metro).
Just my two cents.
The people that have it can write their own ticket and do very little work apparently.
I applied to a similar position locally this year. I far exceed their requirements and experience and I got rejected at the application stage. And the same goes for nearly all of other places I applied to. Hiring has most definitely changed over the years. They are not just looking for "qualified applicants". There is something else going on.
Could be "This one is overqualified, we can't pay that much" or "He doesn't have experience in the exact thing we need." Or just that they want a qualified applicant but they've got lots of options.
Just to clarify, being a dual U.S. citizen (e.g., U.S.-Canadian, U.S.-Irish) doesn't necessarily prevent a person from obtaining a U.S. "SECRET" security clearance.
Y'all should probably make that clear. Usually, the moment I see something like that as a job requirement, I move on. Not because I may or may not qualify, but because I honestly don't remember a lot of the information required and because it's not clear that I can work in a non-weapon-building role. Probably should offer refresher courses in linear algebra - I've been a developer for 25+ years and have never knowingly used it.
This is illegal under IRCA unless another law or government contract mandates it. [1] If every single role at your company requires a Secret clearance, then I question how separate “your part of the company” really is from the part that makes weapons.
I’m guessing the contracts that make paper clips don’t need those stringent requirements, but the ones that make sensitive comms equipment do.
Probably just lawyers being lawyers, but still pretty funny.
Some places like NYC offer legal protections in this area to all categories of immigration status, of course within what applicable federal and state law requires and allows. Federal law allows preferring citizens over equally equalities noncitizens, requiring employment authorization to already exist, and complying with any specific legal requirements for restricting certain jobs to citizens. NYC law respects all of this. But overall NYC is totally allowed to, and does, add protections beyond federal law.
I believe there is some protection against discriminating against greencards, but not visas
Some state or local laws offer additional protections beyond federal law, including NYC for all immigration statuses, except as required or allowed by other applicable laws. (So, for example, NYC doesn’t pretend that companies have to hire people who don’t already have employment authorization.)
"Secret" classification is really mild, about 5 million people have one.
>The law prohibits employers from hiring only U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents unless required to do so by law, regulation or government contract.
At these workplaces it will be a combination of all 3 of law, regulation, and government contract.
Edit: Ah I see you are not disagreeing with what I said at all. Apologies, I cannot count the number of times I have seen in reddit and here, where people confuse ITAR with clearance.
Yes, you need to drug test for clearance. But I'm saying that's a job I'm not applying to unless I have no other choice. It goes straight to the bottom of the pile for me.
Same reason for homosexuality in the past when it was illegal/scandalous.
"We'll fire you if you smoke pot"
"But why?"
"Someone might blackmail you, by threatening to reveal that you smoke pot"
"How is that a threat?"
"Because we'll fire you if you smoke pot."
This makes a lot more sense to me than blackmail.
I'd quibble though that this overlooks that quite a lot (possibly even most) drug users are able to lead productive lives without having to resort to illegal activity to fund their drug use.
The other thing this doesn't cover is that there are many alcoholics that fall into the same trap. Though there again, most alcoholics are able to lead productive lives despite their addiction.
And through personal experience, I unfortunately know quite a few alcoholics that work in defense with various levels of clearance.
Nope. Not doing it. Not going to argue politics, but this is a huge RED FLAG for a lot of people. And I feel I don't need to submit to mandatory drug testing as well.
>The most harmful thing the products I build do is quantify in precise detail how climate change is dooming us all
Then why is it classified? How separate is your branch from the weapons branch, that you acknowledge exists?
There's a lot of dual-use stuff that's not used for military applications but could be by another actor. Dual-use means that it could be used for civilian and military applications, not that it actually is.
So if I build a revolutionary weather radar that could be used for military reconnaissance by Iran if the technology came out, but the US military isn't interested because they already have something better, it would be completely civilian but classified.
This brings forward some cognitive dissonance in me. I love the open source ethics, especially the "ANYONE CAN USE THIS FOR ANY PURPOSE" tagline. But, personally, I do not want any military (especially the US military) to find any usefulness out of my projects. I'm not sure on the legal aspects of it, but if there was an SPDX-License-Identifier for GPL-3.0-NO-MILITARY (or something similar, you get the point), I'd use it on everything.
It's funny, and it's nice, but it's not quite the ironclad level of "NO MILITARIES" as I'd like. Plus, enforceability becomes a question with classified military stuff, not even going into the actual legal discovery process. A common license would suffice for me, as I'm not going to modify the GPL as they did.
Thanks for sharing though, it made me laugh.
You pay well, but not so much.
You search for qualified applicants but can hire a student.
You require linear algebra but ok with technical writer.
Looks like your managers don't know who they need to hire or don't want to really hire.
It's prevalent in government-adjacent companies. It's all a completely opaque byzantine system to mask the nepotism and the fact that a lot of those people just siphon money from the government like it's a jobs programs.
Not to mention that their application systems are usually complete garbage like Workday or Taleo.
On the other hand, when in Rome...
Alabama, ditto. There is no amount of money that would compel me to live there. But for the right person, it’s paradise.
I'm not specifically trying to change your mind about Alabama (since as you said, everyone has a different lifestyle), but I would wager that perhaps some of what you think about these Deep South states are contrary to reality.
Meaning around one time per month she has to devote a whole day for a doctor trip. I am afraid when she grows older and can't do that by herself anymore. Most of her doctors are still local though, but specialists are hard to find.
When my dad had cancer he had to take similar trips for his treatment. Except it was weekly with occasional multiple times per week. It was brutal for him and my mother.
It's not just the specialists either. My pcp at a local health clinic is a MD/PhD from a top 5 med school. Most of the best in any field don't want to live in Podunk either.
The redneck stuff is fine with me, I lived in a small town and it has a certain charm. Good place to raise kids, etc. But I like winter… I live in a small northeast city and enjoy it.
Or, you know, any tech worker with a remote job. The point is if you have technical skills and want to live in Rome, NY you can do that and still have a better job.
> They are also stable gigs with good benefits.
Maybe 30 years ago. Today the benefits don't compare to what you get in a large tech company and I think everyone one I know with a career in a DAPRA/Defense contractor job has eventually been laid off and struggled to find new work since it's generally challenging to transition out of that industry involuntarily.
This is pretty different from somebody who wants to go in as an engineer but doesn’t remember their intro classes.
It's totally possible. There's an defense contractor in my area where all the work at the local office is on non-defense government projects.
It's currently the only thing preventing a liberal democracy from being overrun and genocided because a tinpot dictator with nuclear weapons woke up on the wrong side of the bed back in 2022 and said "I want, I take."
Don't really see much of a contradiction. A good salary is not necessarily the highest salary.
> You require linear algebra but ok with technical writer.
I'm a tech writer but went to engineering school. While I assume it's not a fairly common situation, it's also not unheard of. The original comment seems to imply that they'll frown upon a candidate that will expect to be taught linear algebra at the workplace but will be ok with one that has only a basic grasp and it's willing to attend engineering school to improve.
Defense contractor jobs are the only ones I've seen that haven't been outsourced overseas yet, but good luck getting a CJO for one that will sponsor a clearance and actually getting cleared.
A top tier three letter agency sponsored me for TS SCI FSP and it took 9 months after the conditional job offer (CJO) after 10+ offers of personal interviews with me not counting my old jobs, college and friends/acquaintances just for them to cancel my app for "other traits, conduct or behaviour" and to reapply after a year.
I heard other applicants on the free bus ride that it was their 3rd or 4th try at the polygraph or that the agency forgot about them so they had to a Congressional inquiry after 2 attempts prior etc.
It's a lot of BS and I've tried for a few years now to work for the federal government and military, but they just don't want me. I've given way more effort than normal folks, so honestly screw them.
I'm fine with working for a defense contractor or the feds. I'm fine with taking a pay haircut relative to FAANG to do something meaningful. I'm even fine with commuting, and the agencies poking into my life to assess a clearance. But I need to move from one job to another without a gap.
Private sector employers won't touch me without a clearance, and in my part of the world there are lots of people who already have one, so I'm not worth their time.
The US government would put me through a clearance, but their hiring practices are so slow and arcane that they're just not viable for someone who needs to find a job starting say in the next 30 days.
I wish it wasn't that way, but it is. So, I stay in the uncleared commercial sector.
Your company is incompetent. I've applied to hundreds of companies like yours within Huntsville, AL in the past year, rejected or ghosted all the time.
Defense morons will talk about how hard their work is and how they can't find anyone to do it. Completely skip over how prevalent affirmative action is in their hiring process; who were you guys interviewing in 2020? Why is the defense small business base completely dominated by veterans who stack 10% disability ratings and minorities with a preferred SBA sticker on their website?
Complete joke of an industry.
its just as likely that their process is auto-rejecting candidates and nobody has looked yet
"After his HR department hadn't found a single candidate for a job, the manager submitted his own resume. It was auto-rejected."
syndicated here
https://www.yourtango.com/self/manager-proves-hr-system-auto...
and the associated reddit comment that the articles are based off here
https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/comments/1f8x5ma/comment/l...
this is likely the more common practice
even candidates that might fit a poorly implemented affirmative action program are likely getting auto-rejected
nobody knows if its helpful to mention their race or disability, or whether its hurtful
“assumption” doesn’t imply a lack of truth, it points out your inability to know that out of all possibilities, which possibility applies
it means there is no point in doubling down on your data point of 1 in 1 niche industry when there is this other industry wide practice occurring as well
an industry wide practice that would affect minorities applying as well as existing employees alike
it could just as easily be any other reason, like the one I identified
its an assumption to know what's being applied to you.
its obvious that the frustrated guy just wants to be heard, it is still an assumption. that doesn't mean its not happening. it means its an assumption about what exactly applied to you.
unless they specifically said that and you won an employment discrimination case then you literally dont know.
I had a team of 14 with 2 women and 1 non-white male. I had a team of 10 with 0 women and 0 non-white male. I had a team of 20 with 1 women and 0 non-white male.
Looking at it another way, thats 40 successful white male hires, and 4 successful non-white male hires.
if only having access to 91% of jobs instead of 100% is the reason you can't get hired....
edit: To clarify, as a software developer of 10+ years both in defense and faang, I have never once had a team where there was less than 50% white men.
If you really need everyone in Role X to have a PhD in Psychoergonomics, then what's up with Jane over there and her MD?
It makes sense to sort candidates with the more niche requirement to the top of the pile, but to require it? When you need to fill this role?
There's also hiring because "wow, this candidate is great, we should find a place to fit them", and there it makes sense to become more selective going forwards... but when a company is saying "we need people and can't find them", that doesn't seem like the time to be more selective.
humans think we're the most intelligent because we built New York while the dolphins have just been hanging around having a good time. the dolphins think they're the most intelligent for the same reason.
It doesn’t necessarily speak to the parent’s attitude before becoming bitter. Hard to draw such a direct conclusion for me.
Both of my dads (father and FIL) got cancer this year. My mom almost did.
You don’t have to become deeply bitter, no matter what your situation. Many people do anyway, and that is by no means a moral failing of any kind, but it has very little to do with the individual events that precipitated it.
I will try anyway.
Let's take something that we have more information about: burnout. Since burnout is a hot button topic, we're all somewhat aware about it.
Many people misconstrue burnout to mean "overworked" - which it's not, it's a type of depression where your emotional investment is not getting adequate emotional returns: and that's what's happening with your depiction of "bitter".
You had objectively worse situations happening to you, yes! However- the conditions in which they happened were:
* Not artificial. There was no concerted effort by the universe to conspire to give your fathers cancer.
* You were given sympathy
* You were given the opportunity to actually air grievances about it before it boiled up- likely you were told that it's healthy to feel bad or to express yourself.
Likewise, bitterness is the culmination of being treated in a way you perceive as unfair, and it starts small. It gets worse when not treated. Treatment is as easy as letting people be a little angry sometimes or to let them talk about their issues and be met with something other than condescension.
You had a worse situation, yes, but you're talking about people getting moody as a moral failing.
It would be like me telling a woman not to be moody on her period because some men have their arms blown off on oil rigs. They're not comparable at all.
It is completely reasonable to be bitter. But long-term, it is still a choice.
I don’t disagree that being bitter, at the onset, is not a choice. And often requires treatment.
Burnout is a great example because I agree with everything you said about it. Becoming bitter when burnt out isn’t a choice. Staying bitter is.
For short periods, it is almost always even necessary; treatment requires feeling.
But too many people get stuck in it, do not seek treatment (or are afraid to / taught not to, even amongst friends), and do not move forward. Even that is still not a moral failing; but it does make me sad.
No it isn't. Most people only become bitter when they feel they have been treated unfairly and badly for a very long period of time.
I am not implying bitterness is bad. But you can absolutely be bitter for almost any reason.
And thanks, but I am quite aware of my mental faculties, and have seen psychiatrists and therapists plenty; I have ADHD, after all, and recurring depressive episodes (though not true clinical depression).
Perhaps don’t assume that people who are different from you are… mentally ill? Seems a bit of an arrogant stretch. :/
Meaning people who can unravel all the crap they have to maintain but with no agency to enact any sort of long term fix.
Plenty of this kind of work going around, the older the codebase is the less willing people are to work on it. Soon good engineers don't want to anymore and mid engineers are not good enough to even tweak it. Leaving the only lever these companies can pull being salary and they can't compete with FAANG on that.
Reminds me of those anecdotes you hear from Oracle and ASML engineers. The difference there is that they can still use the salary lever.
What I think you're saying is, if a developer is forced to be in an office/at a desk when/where no "real work" can be accomplished (that's to management gates/bottlenecks) then they will be miserable. Is that correct?
I'm an older worker in management. Willing to be hands on. Not looking to get paid as much as Meta (I've worked there too) but also don't want something that pays peanuts. Willing to relocate to many places.
Genuinely curious where I can find such jobs.
Results would probably come out empty anyway.
"Must have a currently active $TYPE clearance." and "Must be eligible for a $TYPE clearance; position contingent on acquiring a $TYPE clearance." are the sorts of phrases to look for.
Your paragraph at the end sounds like maybe your company culture is also a problem.
> No, we don’t pay as much as Meta.
So, essentially, you are seeking special treatment from US citizens. I’m not saying this is always unreasonable, but you’re in the territory of a centrally planned economic decision, and in the US philosophy that is supposed to be done minimally.
Maybe the right thing is for your company to shut down or change their line of business, freeing up the labor for Meta.
Instead of going to levels.fyi go to salary.com and choose any major city in the US that is not on the west coast.
No most developers don’t get RSUs or anything else aside from their salaries and maybe a bonus.
And before someone replies that I’m “bitter”. No I’m good, I’m 50. I did my stint at BigTech and I don’t have the shit tolerance level to deal with the politics of any large company.
It's simple: the more picky you are the more you will have to pay. The GP admitted the upper bound of Meta, which is a company that is sustainably operating in the same country. If you cannot compete in a labor market, either raise your product pricing or be more efficient. If not, you will make less profit and/or go out of business, which is an appropriate outcome most of the time.
No one is entitled to their business model.
There are numerous reasons why AL sucks.
To be clear, I’m not saying all conservatives are evil. I have nothing against the Kemp’s (GA’s governor) and traditional conservatives.
But compared to a lot of the rest of Alabama and other stereotypes of the South, it's really a decent place. Definitely not the anti-science, anti-intellectual backwater many might assume. There's a lot of bright people there with interest in aerospace and engineering at all levels. And it's also a college town.
Offer things that we care about like free health insurance, “unlimited PTO”, a generous 401K match with immediate vesting, etc.
I personally wouldn’t move to Alabama. But many would.
At 50, I need to work. But I don’t need to chase after FAANG salaries. I optimize for my other priorities. As I said in my previous post, I’m not “disdaining what I can’t have”. I’ve been there done that.
Or google? In 2023 they had a net elimination of 6576 US jobs, but added 5479 H1B.
This isn't a simple market issue, these companies are abusing worker visas to replace Americans from their own companies.
Senior: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/remote-senior-software-en...
> $178K - $262K/yr
Principal: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/remote-principal-software...
> $269K - $415K/yr
> The estimated total pay for a Principal Software Engineer is $329,957 per year in the Remote area, with an average salary of $196,928 per year. These numbers represent the median, which is the midpoint of the ranges from our proprietary Total Pay Estimate model and based on salaries collected from our users. The estimated additional pay is $133,029 per year. Additional pay could include cash bonus, commission, tips, and profit sharing.
Sounds like the right ballpark. If you're in a location that doesn't pay as well, remote can pay much better.
Look at salary.com where you can see by cities.
None of the BigTech companies have many remote jobs. Google is even requiring their customer facing professional services department to be in certain cities. That was a bridge too far even for AWS.
By this reasoning no charities should exist (they pay less than commercial orgs) and even people who are willing to work for less in order to feel good about their contribution should not be allowed to.
It’s a very cynical, even nihilistic view.
As a country we have decided to let the market decide what to prioritize. Who are we to judge "creepy VR avatars" are less important if people are willing to fair and square pay for them? If they are creepy, don't pay for them.
> No charities should exist.
No that is not the appropriate conclusion. People are of course free to work for less and balance their circumstances. If they want to volunteer for a charity by choice, more power to them. But no, using taxpayer money to fund "charities" is by-and-large corruption in my book.
> It’s a very cynical, even nihilistic view.
If we are doing labels, yours is a very communistic, statist, view.
--
P.S. regardless of your PoV, I like that you acknowledge my core point: that the OP is seeking special treatment in the form of cheap labor from the US. You are simply arguing for that special treatment being justified, not denying that's the core demand.
It’s the engineer who picks the climate change job instead.
Essentially what you’re saying is that due to society not being willing to pay competitively, engineers should take the kick to the nuts and be paid peanuts to make up for societies bad decisions.
Sounds like a pretty stupid decision, frankly.
ARPANET was not the only network in existence, even then. Networks existed in various forms. Later, BBSes existed. My guess is sooner or later there would have been something (probably more than one, even) our current internet, but we would never know. Would it look worse or balkanized or proprietary, my guess would be yes, I give you that, but we'll never know that either.
(I originally noted in my topmost post minimal, surgical, involvement is the aspiration, not necessarily zero, but I digress.)
Working for a company that launches satellites that examine climate change is far less impactful. It's not worth a big pay cut even when you're focusing on altruistic motives.
How many people honestly think it's a good idea to donate to a for-profit company?
> It's not worth a big pay cut even when you're focusing on altruistic motives. [Citation unavailable as its purely subjective]
I'm talking about level of benefit, which is not subjective.
Edit: Also I just reread the original comment and realized the climate change measurement was listed as a negative, so for the two citation neededs I point back at the original post about the company. Donating a single dollar beats a negative.
For the broader analysis, the people that can easily get huge salaries should prioritize donation, and the people that can't should prioritize actually working at a charity.
There are far more people who need code, than just the people at FAANG companies.
Are you saying that these firms are economically uncompetitive, with META, and should shut shop?
A company with same requirements but not the funding? Absolutely
>There are far more people who need code, than just the people at FAANG companies.
With different requirements you can find way more people.
Ideally, the industry would relocate outside of the US, to a place where they can be competitive.
However, since this defense, they can’t, and will never be competitive.
So defense will languish.
I guess that’s all I have. I can’t see a way out of the situation if we accept your premise.
Defense margins aren’t going to beat social media margins, that too of something like meta.
Requirements are requirements. If you need a hammer, scalpels won’t help.
Really? It's the first time I am hearing US is procuring defense for cheap!
If there is a margin issue, that's an efficiency problem, i.e. the company is being an idiot or deliberately wasteful/stealing (perhaps due to structural problems like overreliance on cost-plus contracts).
That is a misrepresentation of what was said, and an unkindness to the conversation being had.
Tech scales, in a way that manufacturing and physical products dont. I would assume that on HN, this is common knowledge, and that you also are aware of it.
The US defence budget is ~20x Meta revenues. They can be competitive, but they don't choose to allocate their resources that way.
> You have to be eligible for a Secret security clearance. You don't have to get one if you don't want to as there is usually plenty of uncleared work to go around, but you have to be eligible in case that goes away and we need to put you in for a clearance.
50% pay cut for a DevOps/SRE role requiring a Q clearance (DoE version of Top Secret I think)
You can't find employees because the job isn't exciting (you're probably not NASA) and the pay is bad. Maybe your recruiters are bad too.
Not enough, apparently.
> No, you can't work remotely.
You'll have to pay even more for this.
> No, we don't pay as much as Meta.
So again, not enough.
And how do you know if someone’s eligible for security clearance without applying for it? (Other than the obvious “be a US citizen, don’t be a spy” part.)
Given that is the case, to answer your question: yes, linear algebra is the foundation of ML. No, a lot of impactful day-to-day ML engineering can be done without touching linear algebra.
This is how assembly is the basis of compilation and programming. But you probably are going to get a whole lot of work done without ever using it.
It's generally a nice flex when applicants can code assembly, and usually a yellow-flag when the company suggests they require knowledge of assembly.
To me, my eyebrows raise when an industry person mentions linear algebra. I'm just saying the odds are really low that you actually use it.
That's either a wishful thinking or a stretch of definitions, IMHO.
It kind of bothers me that the parent and other readers here are passing off knowing linear algebra as some kind of esoteric skill. Linear algebra is a year 2 course in a undergraduate eduation. There are polished libraries to make it fast.
Unless you mean enough knowledge to be writing linear algebra libraries, there is no need to consider this skill a high hurdle.
It's unclear what "linear algebra" means to GP, though. I agree writing linear algebra libraries is next level, since that involves numerical code and knowing FP math well.
Umm, not in Pennsylvania government high schools, not typically. Not by a long shot.
That it's a year-2 undergraduate course for some people argues more for forgetting than remembering it, if you're not using it regularly.
From what I’ve seen, the year 2 course is great for graphics programming, game development, that sort of thing. It’s not enough for the tasks that require more serious linear algebra, when you’re working with systems of linear equations, large matrices, etc. These “big” linear algebra problems come up a lot in fields like physics simulation, finance, and machine learning / AI.
I’ve done some hobby work in graphics and game development, and I’ve done some professional work in physics simulation. The kind of linear algebra you use in physics simulation is a different beast.
“Intro to linear algebra.” 200-level. Vectors are (x,y,z), more or less. Class includes math, engineering, science, and business majors. 200-level makes it nominally a second-year course but lots of first-year students will take it. Required course for many different majors.
“Applied linear algebra.” 300-level. Vectors are finite. Eigenvalues, linear transformations, determinants, matrix algebra, factorization. Touches on numerical methods but doesn’t spend much time on them. Students were mostly math, with some physics and electrical engineers mixed in.
“Advanced linear algebra.” Series of two 400-level / 500-level courses. Almost exclusively math majors and math grad students. Algebraic topology, tensor spaces, exterior algebra, spectral theory, differential forms.
There were also numerical methods courses—one in the math department and one in the CS department.
I can easily imagine that an overly aggressive linear algebra requirement will eliminate many excellent candidates.
Unless you had AP Calc in high school and managed to get the university to accept it. I think quiet a few ABET schools don't accept AP Calc as a full replacement for Calc 1 if your an engineering major.
And wow, coming in from the other end of the scale to even the bias...
Did an internship in biotech then spent the next ten years working the only 2-3 blue collar jobs I could land while applying to thousands of jobs per year and writing hundreds of cover letters per year: retail, call centers, IT, software development, comp sci, secretarial, and other random fields I have certifications in. All told, zero interviews. Spent my spare time working on open-source projects and tutoring programming and data science.
Suffered a horrible work-related injury near the end of the decade and had to quit, but just as my savings were about to expire I managed to find a government contracting job for 80K/year, which is nearly 3x my previous salary. I suffer incredible pain at work due to my injury, and spend all my spare time recuperating and exercising, and spend all my money on healthcare and moonshots to no avail. I've wound down all my hobbies. I thought I'd start socializing once I could afford it, but I'm in too much pain.
Competence in government really doesn't reflect my experience in landing a job. What a silver lining. When I can barely walk I can just not show up and nobody would even notice. So career-wise I don't think I'm going anywhere. Life-wise I'm limping on, I guess.
Interestingly in serious university mathematics when looking at the foundations of mathematics, Linear Algebra is a functional prerequisite of multivariate calculus and anything higher dimensional as LA provides a literal basis for abstract spaces and local approximations to continuous functions, etc.
(Often the two are formally taught in parallel)
If you don’t take the AP class to test out of it, you’d have to take it first in college though.
I imagine many people strong enough in math to pursue sciences will go the AP route and test out of it, but not everybody takes the same path.
I dunno. The vibe in high school’s hardest math class and college’s easiest math class is kinda different. Might be worth doing both, haha. Easy A, too.
Also to clarify wrt calculus, it is very common for university-track students to take AP calculus in high school, which allows them to take an examination that most universities accept to prove mastery of the equivalent to calc 1 or calc 1+2 depending on the examination.
I took through calc 3 + discrete math, but didn’t have to take the full linear algebra course for the BS in CS. I’m sure I could refresh myself on calculus, but almost no one is regularly maintaining their more advanced math knowledge in this field.
Linear algebra wasn't a requirement. I took it as an elective just for my own curiosity. I have a feeling loads of programmers really don't know anything about linear algebra, and probably a large number are like me and learned it due to interest in game development.
You can assume they're interested in esoterics like those who can grasp the spherical harmonic equations used to model the daily magnetic flux epoch models to control sats via mag torque, those who can do a multivariate 512 dimensional SVD reduction against pipelined multi spectral data to create sharpened images, create fuel optimal paths in constrained resource starved environments while dodging projected debris paths, .. you know, all that jazz.
But most people that have any exposure to it can pick it back up fairly rapidly. And most people that have a reasonable exposure to math in general could probably come up to speed (a little less) rapidly.
The short answer is "You can't, not with 100% certainty.".
Based on my experience from decades ago, the long answer is "Anyone who's a US citizen and doesn't lie about their drug use and debts can get a Secret clearance.". Things MIGHT have significantly changed since my clearance lapsed way back when, but I doubt it.
That is, eligibility concerns whether or not the State Department will consider your application, not whether or not they will grant the clearance after performing their background and lifestyle investigation.
Your company has never offered me a phone screening. Seeing claims that Northrop is in sort of qualified candidate crisis when myself and many applicants I know of similar profiles are lucky to get so much as a rejection email is borderline infuriating.
Never too late to learn etc. etc.
Pot is still illegal at the federal level where a clearance would be taking place.
If they have a good candidate and the only problem is debt, they should offer to pay it off. They have no qualms printing billions to save some broken banks.
Plenty of people get into debt just doing normal shit at their homes
That’s the only way you’re going to get people with self control and willing to live the life of ascetic monks for the duration of time to both learn how to build these systems and then actually build them
Even if both of those were false in the past, you could still pass.
And I highly doubt linear algebra is a day to day requirement for a typical worker. Sounds like a case of expecting chauffeurs to know how to build a drive train from scratch.
Let's hear some numbers for junior, mid and senior. I bet they are not great.
The clearance I won't comment on, as I have no clue what it involves. Presumably though, this means randomized drug tests which is IMO a complete violation of privacy. Also, I'm probably wrong but it gives me the impression that despite your reassurance that you aren't building weapons systems, ya kinda are.
And as you said, a part of your company makes weapons. That will automatically cause many people to be disinterested, for better or worse.
> Ghost positions
In my experience, gov't jobs are the worst when it comes to fake job postings that only exist as a cover for internal promos. Might be different in the states, but I doubt it.
> Yes, we are willing to train someone who is motivated. We won't re-teach linear algebra...
Wait, so will you train them or not? You won't refresh someone on linear algebra which most people haven't touched since their uni days, but you'll put a technical writer through university to become an engineer? Which one is it? Then later on you say the algebra thing is a hard requirement. How do these statements make sense together?
> Can't work remotely
This is an automatic disqualifier for many people, for many reasons. I get that you're working with space hardware in clean rooms, but if this means people have to move to the middle of nowhere (or just move, period) and commute for 2 hours each way, then you're disqualifying tons of people, when their alternative is a job where they can work remotely with all the benefits that entails. I'd personally rather be dead than be forced to commute ever again.
> We pay well
Define well? Especially with everything else I commented on, is it really "well", if they can join a much less frustrating job and get paid more? Also you sound quite snarky about working at Meta. I'm no fan of FAANG, but if we're talking compensation, I think the snark is unwarranted given the situation.
> We expect programmers to remember linear algebra and have more than the ability to shovel frameworks on top of each other...
Again, snarkiness and derision. A bit of a dumb position to take when you're admitting that the easier job not only pays (dramatically) more, but has better conditions (remote work, no clearance-related BS) as well.
No wonder you can't find qualified individuals, your comment alone makes it sound like a miserable job where you're working for bean counters that want to inspect the cloudiness of your piss while forcing you to waste half your life driving to the office and back without extra compensation, while they get to see other, less skilled engineers "glue frameworks together" for double the pay and quadruple the happiness. And I find it rich to comment on advertisers when your company makes weapons that literally kill people. Something about reaper missiles and glass houses comes to mind here.
Prove it. What city are you in, and what is total comp for software engineer & hardware engineer with 20 years of experience?
I worked in national defense. It was a pain in the ass: shit pay, worst politics, massive tolerance for incompetence & mediocrity, meeting hell, and secrecy (necessary, but "need to know" gatekeeping wasnt at times).
This is a fairytale in DoD work and while I think there's room for us to improve our compensation I'm not sure this is a reasonable number at the moment. Please don't flame me for this, just sharing my opinion. I work on a critical DoD new-work project.
The only way to achieve that number in this sector would be private consulting with a very strong network. I will say that it's a very easy world to network in, at least in my experience. I also find the work and location I'm in very meaningful and interesting compared to most of the private sector work accessible to me at this point in my career.
I don't think as many people love remote work as HN suggests. We have an extremely flexible hybrid and PTO policy here, and we're in a great midsize city that people love living in.
This is just a random jumble of thoughts in response. Cheers
$400k is base + bonus
It's also fintech, so there is no room for error.
What do you mean "no room for error"? Every networked application has errors. Do you mean that the application should never throw an error? Or that errors should always be retried an infinite number of times? Or that requests should not get dropped and should be guaranteed to me handled? And how do you guarantee that? It is quite impossible to have an application that serves 100M requests a day from real users and have 0 errors or dropped packets.
What kind of understanding is needed? A basic understanding? It's a vast and unending subject.
And there are well known software apps that do linear algebra these days. Do you folks use a particular software to do it?
Engineering Technician: what does an hour in the life of such work look like?
Thanks.
I knew it was too good to be true.
Why not? Isn’t this just part of your ramp-up if it’s a niche qualification? We re-teach networking to developers who probably forgot it—that’s a semester course, easily. If you’re not willing to invest in candidates that are 90% of the way there, then you’re perpetually going to have difficulty hiring.
It's not just that you're restricted to US Citizens.
You point out all the issues in your post:
> You have to be eligible for a Secret security clearance
So, even though I'm adult and it's legal in my state, I can't smoke weed now and then? Oh and depending on the project may be subject to a polygraph... sounds fun!
> No, we don't make weapons for the military.
Every.. government... defense... contractor has this speech. Why even pretend that you're not in the war business, which ultimately means killing people? Honestly I would be more comfortable working for an org that wasn't afraid to admit what they do. Making moral compromises is not uncommon in tech, and I don't judge people that choose to do so, but I do judge those that pretend that they're not.
> No, you can't work remotely.
I've worked remotely virtually my entire career, including for the Federal government. You may have a good reason for this requirement, but it absolutely shrinks your pool. You don't even mention location, but I'm guessing it's not in a top city like NYC or SF.
> Yes, we pay well.
And yet you never give a range. Last time I worked for a DARPA contractor, Google (this was the earlier days) basically hired every elite member of the R&D team in a weekend (exaggerating here, but not much) since both the pay and work was drastically better.
> One issue is that we expect programmers to remember linear algebra
Ah great, unjustified ego to boot! I'm sold!
I'm a US Citizen, work in a remote small company doing opensource work largely for the good of the world, likely paid roughly the same, it's nobody's business if I want to smoke weed, and most of the team has a quantitative PhDs (but would blush to mention it) and those that don't could easily teach a course on linear algebra.
I'm just one engineer, but I can't imagine applying at company like you describe. You might have better success hiring qualified applicants if you at least admitted how unattractive such a place is to the many engineers I've work ed with who use linear algebra everyday and tried to find some compromise.
> No, we don't pay as much as Meta.
Are you saying you pay well as comparing to the local McDonalds? That being said, my guess you can't find "qualified applicants" is because you are putting too many restrictions and paying too little. So you end up with students who will take anything and then you come here to complain about the lack of talent.
>> Are you saying you pay well as comparing to the local McDonalds?
That's just disgusting.
By chance has your employer posted on HN who’s hiring?
Ah, well. Nevertheless...
What’s the name of your employer?
Why? Linear Algebra is certainly something that can be learned faster than a degree in engineering. I expect the average software developer (someone that can understand algorithms) can achieve competency in less than a semester's worth of time. If someone is a good developer, learning specific skills sets for the domain is pretty normal.
Having had to go through one of those: yeah no shit. Not everyone enjoys a colonoscopy without anesthesia.
>You (even programmers!) have to touch the things we build in order to build them and nobody has an ISO certified clean room in their house.
I do, a keg at any rate, but given that I can't get a security clearance because of the people I hung out to build one - yeah.
If you're willing to sponsor me for a green card and wait five years, and you're located in a city I'd actually like to live, I might come work for you :)
Programmers who know linear algebra probably also know basic calculus & stats, so now you’re competing with companies hiring ML engineers.
I once applied to work a government project for a subcontractor and they were adding “headcount” simply because the terms of the subcontract required a specific number of people regardless of the amount of work required. They were essentially hiring people to do almost nothing. I spent over 3 months waiting for a response. Apparently their critical shortage wasn’t that critical because the hiring process was so long and convoluted and subject to “contract renewals,” that I simply gave up and went to work for someone else.
I could go on for days about the extreme waste and oftentimes outright fraud that happens in government contracting, subcontracting, and sub-sub contracting. And despite formerly having a TS/SCI clearance, any job in the “McLean Area,” pays less than most startups. And jobs in places like Huntsville pay even less. Even overseas work in “austere” environments pays less than a junior developer at Stripe. And you don’t get potentially shot at at Stripe — And I don’t have to work 100 levels deep for contractors or contractors of contractors on site using often circa 1996 development practices and lowest-bidder equipment managed by IT departments that seem to be led by dinosaurs and it can take weeks or months to simply requisition a dev server even within an unclassified cloud environment.
Why to do that for salaries/benefits that are lower than I could get as a janitor at Netflix?
Make the workplace/work environment and benefits compelling and you’ll get more applicants. Small startups literally have better benefits. You also don’t have to endure a Tier 5 investigation — the outcome of which entitles you to a job that pays so little comparatively.
FYI, a "US person" means a US citizen or a Permanent Resident.
You’ve repeatedly mentioned being unwilling to train linear algebra skills, but will train other things, so go recruit math nerds.
I have experienced applying for dozens, including those posted to HN: most won’t respond at all. Maybe months later you’ll get an auto-reject message. Or you’ll go through several interviews not to be selected, even while passing technical assessments. My colleagues and friends have similar experiences.
Well it's not ISO certified, and its more of a box than a room. But yes I do actually have access to a sterile (not sanitised) environment at home.
I can't work for you on account of my SA citizenship though. It looks like my only option to get that kind of clearance is to start my own company.
The simple answer is always they simply don't pay enough to attract the people with this skillset. If they paid as much as Meta (who they used as an example) they would certainly have way less issues with hiring.
The shortage on $5000 ferarris continues as well.
It takes forever and you're subjected to very intrusive scrutiny as well as potentially psychological tomfoolery like polygraphs.
Why would a qualified individual subject themselves to that unless they have no other option.
There's a reason clearance jobs have a reputation as make-work for ex service members.
I find this hard to believe. I'd totally get a security clearance, but no company seemingly offers it, they only want people who have a pre-existing clearance.
I don't understand what point you're trying to make. You're saying that a security clearance is a big problem or inconvenience that makes hiring more difficult so salary alone is not comparable... right, but the organization with that big problem is paying less. That's the problem.
> You (even programmers!) have to touch the things we build in order to build them
This sounds like an excuse. You think it's completely impossible to write code for some embedded device, robot, whatever remotely? Hire some cheaper remote hands, set up some telework equipment, voila now you can hire from all over the country.
I did development for a scanning optical microscope, was only once even in the same room with one, and even then never got to touch it.
Of course once that issue is eliminated, the security theater one will be raised next. People might be working from their bed next to a Russian honeypot or whatever. National security types tend to have vivid imaginations in that respect, and have to justify all their rules to themselves. The end result? "We can't find qualified applicants."
Btw I'm technically qualified, and in no way a security risk to the US, but you wouldn't be allowed to hire me. Perhaps the feds should figure out a way of doing security screening for foreign nationals. "Must be a citizen" seems like lazy bureaucratic BS. As if citizens can't be security risks?!
This is below COL in many areas. If you increase this to 125k like Bucees then you should be able to draw in more candidates.
If your pay is anywhere below minimum 75th but more realistically 90th percent market rate in your area your answer is obvious and you are just BSing or your employer is gaslighting you to keep pay down.
All the criteria (required security clearance, no opportunities for remote work, knowledge of skills not used very much outside of schooling without allowances for relearning on the job, only US citizens, etc) you listed automatically creates a hurdle to entry that isn't made up for without significantly higher pay than market rate.
You are not a US person as a visa holder. You are however a US person if you have permanent residency (green card).
This is just plain wrong. I'm wrapping up on a project where I wrote significant chunks of the flight software for a moon rover while being 99% remote. If you're requiring software engineers to be onsite regularly for non-cleared work, your process sucks, no exceptions.
ETA: By the way, I personally only went fully remote due to covid (although I moved away from the office and have no plans to return), but some of my coworkers have been remote for well over a decade, and this is a government agency. I've seen way better setups in private industry.
It's impossible to say for sure from the outside but a few factors that might be making it difficult for you to hire:
- A lot of tech workers value remote work these days.
- You aren't based in a location with a large enough talent pool for the work you do.
- Your company doesn't pay as well as you think, or has other details that turn off some potential applicants.
- It could be variance. There's a lot of randomness in the job market.
Do you consider developer applicants who learned linear algebra on their own or through a product like Math Academy?
Google, MS and other large tech companies do.
I get that this is a legitimate requirement here, but in many companies it just isn't. And this is a huge limiting factor. The way housing is nowdays, no way I'm moving for a job without a relo package.
This isn't necessarily "we can't find qualified applicants", but rather "...that we will pay enough to make this switch"
I don’t know why Brits, Canadians, kiwis and Aussies can’t get cleared for you guys. They are getting cleared at every level all the time. NSA, CIA, etc.
They pay at top of market. They would save a ton on comp if they gave up on h1 candidates and hired the best they could find locally.
I know popular sentiment here is often that there is no real difference between these candidates, and the standards are arbitrary. That is simply it true. There are vast differences in engineering talent. Some people are truly amazing compared to the median candidate.
Google, Microsoft and Meta definitely look for (and hire!) US applicants. One can reasonably have a gripe with the consulting companies on there (Infosys, Tata, Cognizant, etc.) but they don't represent 90-95% of H-1B issued.
[0] https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/indian-corporation-pays-re...
> The H-1B Employer Data Hub has data on the first decisions USCIS makes on petitions for initial *and continuing* employment
The bodyshops flood USCIS with Indian-born applicants because they don't really care who gets approved and who doesn't. Those that get approved get a US job. The system is designed to stop employers abusing the power this gives them over employees. They fail in a number of ways.
First, part of the process is a Prevailing Wage Determination to make sure the employee isn't underpaid for that job in that geographical area. There is abuse here at the bodyshops where (IIRC) employees are paid less or not at all if they aren't currently farmed out to a third-party. This should be policed but I don't think it is, at least not effectively.
Second, the real abuse comes from the H1B -> Green card pipeline. H1B visas don't have per-country quotas. Green cards do (max 7% per country as determined by the country you were born in, not your actual citizenship). Because so many H1B holders are Indian-born, the backlog for Green cards for Indian-born applicants is decades long.
Now you can stay with an employer beyond your 6 years (the usual limit of 3+3 for H1B visas) if you have a pending PERM application. The employee can't really leave. If they do they have to file their whole PERM case again (but they retain their priority date at least) so this becomes like indentured servitude almost.
Nobody has really addressed this H1B abuse nor dealt with the huge backlog. A few years ago there was a bill that sought to address some of the issues by essentially removing the per-country quota but the net effect would be that for many years, nobody but Indian-born applicants would get green cards (because they have earlier priority dates). And that bill died in Congress.
But back to Big Tech: they abuse this system too but not so egregiously.
If you wander around any Big Tech office you will find likely a cork board in some obscure corner of some floor with little traffic. It will have a bunch of job postings on it. If you look in the physical newspaper for your area, you will also find them.
Why are these here? To "prove" that the employer could not find a US permanent resident or citizen to fill that particular position. You have to advertize that position through a number of channels and those channels are chosen to receive the fewest applicants because who in 2024 applies for a SWE job from a physical newspaper? If you do apply, there is a whole process to exclude you from the position. You'll be too qualified or under-qualified or your salary expectations won't match the advertisement. Or they'll find some other reason to strike you.
All of this theater is so someone else's PERM application with USCIS can go through.
To me this is also abuse.
Why would companies want to do that? Big tech has wage scales and pretty rigorous processes to ensure even pay at level, so what is the incentive to be biased against US born employees there?
Never once have I heard anything even resembling "work your h1bs harder because they won't leave." They all joined on the same pay scale as legal permanent residents and were all evaluated through a process where nobody else in the room knew who was a legal permanent resident or not (I only knew because I needed to sign off on forms describing their job responsibilities to the government).
At most this is some aggregate effect of "people changing employers less is good for employers generally."
This doesn't really vibe as abuse of the program to me. I'd vastly prefer it if the policies gave people on h1bs significantly more confidence in changing roles and more time to find a new job should they lose their job, but is this really a decision of the tech companies rather than an output of the immigration policies?
In a hot market, your best chance of career progression and maximizing your compensation is to swap jobs every 2 years or so. Visa holders have a much harder time doing this.
Additionally, there are additional burdens on the employer to hire visa holders. For a large company, this process is solved. You have lawyers on retainer. You have a pipeline for the paperwork. It's a non-issue. But an early stage startup? That's a lot less likely. So visa holders are, by definition, more limited in their job opportunities.
Even if you can job hop, if your ultimate goal is to get a green card, you have a problem. Will your new employer sponsor your green card? How long will it take? Or are you better off waiting for your current process to go through? Best case, this whole thing takes just under a year. But it can take years completely randomly and there's nothing you can do about it (eg you get randomly audited).
And if you were born in one of the four high-demand countries (India, China, Mexico, the Phillipines) you have an even longer wait.
Also, after you get to 6 years on your H1B you really can't swap jobs anymore. You just have to wait for your green card at that point.
Now that's not strictly true. There are self-sponsor options for both visas and green cards but the bar for these is much higher and you'll need to hire your own lawyer for this.
So there's no directive on treating visa holders differently but bias creeps into the process. Why push someone for higher bonuses, more RSUs or promotions when they can't leave but another one of your "stars" can leave? This may not be conscious either. And it may happen on a level above you, as a manager, because your director is ultimately responsible for balancing out ratings and promotions across their org.
This would have to be extremely unconscious for me, I suppose. I've never considered immigration status when doing comp planning. Comp planning is mostly algorithmic based on performance reviews, which again are done through a group of people who don't actually know somebody's immigration status. Discretionary comp pretty much entirely comes from rewarding people who are in the high end of some ratings bucket, which again is derived from the panel discussion. I've also managed to promote all of the h1bs I've had on my team.
> And it may happen on a level above you, as a manager, because your director is ultimately responsible for balancing out ratings and promotions across their org.
I've actually been pretty fortunate here (I guess) and have never had a rating adjusted by a higher up. I suppose this could happen, but I've also been in the rollup meetings where a director is trying to fit ratings to some expected distribution and there'd have to have been a secret meeting ahead of time for immigration status to come up.
> In a hot market, your best chance of career progression and maximizing your compensation is to swap jobs every 2 years or so. Visa holders have a much harder time doing this.
This is true. People on h1bs being less able to change roles can depress their wages over time and this can be a benefit to corporations. I don't know if I'd really call this "abuse" by the companies, more like a shitty outcome of the policy. It could be the case that the big tech companies lobby to make it more difficult for people on h1bs to change jobs, I suppose.
I've never seen anything that smelled of this even a little bit.
That's not really the case. An H-1B visa holder is not strictly bound to their employer, and is allowed to transfer to a new employer. Unlike visas such as the L-1, which are employer-tied, the H-1B allows for this flexibility. Transferring does require the new employer to file a new H-1B petition, but that process is straightforward and any big tech company will gladly complete that as part of the hiring process.
The main exception arises only when the H-1B holder has just started pursuing a green card. The first step of the green card process, known as PERM, typically takes 1–2 years to complete. During this time, the worker may feel more committed to their current employer because switching jobs would restart the PERM process, potentially delaying their green card timeline.
If the road from H-1B to permanent residency was shorter and more reliable, the advantages of the consulting companies would shrink.
The same as if we didn't end up having to rely on lotteries. Hiring a candidate and hoping for an H-1B is quite annoying if you don't have them on staff in another country, or they are working for you in the US from an F-1. Those consulting companies that have large offices in India can happily submit large amounts of applications of people they already have in India, and be OK with 2/3rds of them not winning said lottery. A smaller company just can't play that numbers' game
That and companies are just hilariously bad at finding workers they want to hire for nebulous reasons. I have no doubt even if my company hired 95% of the workers it had marked down as "no hire" they'd be able to squeeze a salary's of value worth out of each of them (well, if management is competent, which it tends to not be). I'm sure those of us who've been around long enough can all attest to some side of seeing form of this dysfunction. I'm more than happy to reject them for selfish reasons, of course, like "I don't want this person on my team" or "this person seems like an asshole" or "I don't want to teach this person their third language after java and typescript". Etc.
I mean there are terrible interview candidates out there, but the people who literally can't code at all tend to be easy to filter out.
I'm curious if there's any way to observe the salary margins that separate the top of the labor market from the bottom. Surely there are. That would probably give a big signal as to how much undue attention is given to, e.g., Senior vs Junior developers and American workers vs H1Bs. I'd put money that some of this complaining about lack of labor is actually not wanting to hire fresh grads and eat the cost of training when they'd be just fine. (Also the H1B thing, but that's already discussed to death)
I have been successful in liberating money from VCs and create jobs, and I want the best people that money can buy. Turns out, there are great American and non-american candidates who are willing to work for the money I can offer. Also in my experience, I hardly even get resumes from Americans for backend jobs. Frontend is different and I get a LOT of American resumes. Our frontend engineering, PS, CX, Sales and Marketing is all-american, and backend is a mix of american, greencard, H1b - because thats all I get in the resume pipeline.
If I have to cut costs, I will have to cut the team in US and move the jobs to a low cost region regardless of their citizenship status.
Read that sentence again. If you're hiring an American team in the Us, and cutting in the US, it's not regardless of citizenship - unless you're abusing the H-1B program
Because those aren't the same thing. Also don't discount interview stress - I read that psychologically the most difficult thing to do is be on stage in front of people and do complex math problems... which is basically what live coding tests are.
When you hire anyone, there is always some bar of "good enough". It is different for different orgs and even people, but it is there. Otherwise you'd end up hiring the first candidate you encounter, no?
Not hiring mediocre talent is a key part of management.
Unfortunately you have to take my word for it. Not sure how you assumed I cannot manage with no context.
Me, too. I straight-up disagree; I think interviewing is just so broken it gives a false impression of quality issues in the labor pool. Realistically if you have a handful of core skills you can ramp up to basically any problem with enough time. That's time on the order of months, maybe, not years. Companies just don't want to bother training anyone anymore. Why bother when you can just complain endlessly and hope some politicians throw cheap labor your way? In that sense you're absolutely right, but the whole "quality" thing is completely unrelated.
> I have been successful in liberating money from VCs and create jobs, and I want the best people that money can buy.
I think people seriously overestimate the difference engineer quality makes. Most products can be built with mediocre talent. I'm sorry, that's the truth. We all love to have strong opinions on who we should hire and I say "almost anyone, just throw meat at the problem". Most problems are solved with time and not cleverness.
Startups are definitely more sensitive to quality, but startups don't make up much of the labor pool, and they don't pay competitively with much larger companies that don't need the quality.
I'm being a little hyperbolic here—you do need people with experience and ability to see red flags to lead the flock—but not by much.
Yes, because given time someone clever would have came in and fixed it.
It's like doing push up in the elevator and believing that arriving at the 100th floor is due to doing push ups.
The GE, IBM, Intel, Boeing are few examples that didn't believe in quality - and not just people apparently, and their problems aren't getting solved with time.
> Yes, because given time someone clever would have came in and fixed it.
I can't emphasize enough how much software engineers overestimate the value of their own cleverness. Bugs are fixed with persistence, in my experience—I've used "cleverness" to find only a handful of bugs across my entire nearly two-decade career. I don't want to say I'm "the best engineer on the team" or anything like that, but I dependably fix the bugs that are put on my plate regardless of how frustrating they are to crack, regardless of what tools I need to bust out to get the job done. Debuggers, printf, valgrind, core dumps, packet captures, profilers, repls, disassembly, whatever's necessary. But all of these take persistence to reach for and use to crack the case. Experience is a short cut, but that's a very different thing than cleverness, and you very directly pay for that experience.
Not to mention if I see "cleverness" in a code review you're gonna bet I'm gonna comment and ask you to make it less clever unless that cleverness seems to neatly solve a problem. Even then, commenting is absolutely critical.
Time, not cleverness, is the key.
Hell, the joke used to be that being a software engineer is 80% googling. Now that barrier's been lowered even further with chatbots: you can literally ask it to find the bug, explain behavior, fix the bug, etc. It doesn't take much competence to correct the output. All it takes is not giving up when you see problems.
And a lot of people aren't that.
My vertical was railroad car repairs
https://public.railinc.com/sites/default/files/documents/CRB...
Most developers aren’t doing “hard things”. Not even at BigTech
I've been in a team where hiring requirements have emerged through the filter of HR almost unrecognisable. Naturally, they're still objective requirements, so qualified candidates are filtered out before ever meeting someone who could judge if they're qualified. It gets noticed, but nothing happens. Of course it doesn't: you're stepping on important toes.
That's how it tends to work. Candidates are filtered out by non-technical staff, including openly using programs that filter out CVs missing keywords. In smaller companies, this even gets farmed out to third-party recruiters that have poorly aligned incentives.
How can we know if candidates are qualified? We never see most of them.
It's hard to imagine many things worse for productivity than bad hiring processes. But it's all just accepted.
I'd much rather wait for someone I want to work with, than hire the first person that is "good enough".
I'm surprised that your experience here is so different from mine. The best engineers I've had are capable of things that the average to below average ones could likely have never achieved, even with an order of magnitude more time.
I don't think it comes down to cleverness as it does inventiveness. There are dots that great engineers can connect that often nobody else could spot. They also need less process, and a large number of people with all of the coordination overhead does not linearly scale.
Maybe what you say has worked for your situations, but it really never worked for me over my experience, and it just was a downward spiral over time every single time.
If management is mediocre, workers need to be top notch to deliver great products.
The odds you'll land at a place that have both are vanishingly low. It also takes a lot of work, money and interest to turn a big ball of mud around and no one gets a prize for that, people get a prize for churning out features and bugfixes, so this is what you get, specially because most large scale rewrite projects are utter and complete failures.
What is the basis for your claim? Unless you've followed up with those you rejected in order to gauge their performance on comparable tasks, you're just talking about confirmation bias.
I've never heard of anyone actually producing objective measurements of hiring practices vs. actual worker performance. I've just heard a hundred different versions of confirmation bias. Maybe Google has some useful data. I know that they dropped GPA requirements when they looked at data and found that it had no impact on job performance...
Isn't it ironic that a comment making fun of companies for not hiring workers who can barely contribute above their salary's value, in the very same sentence blames management for incompetence. Well, guess what, managers are hired workers too, so if you apply the same principle to them, this is what you get.
What you suggest makes sense from the "homo economicus" point of view, but the result will be a barely functional hellhole riddled with incompetence (at least this is what it will feel like from within.) Can we blame people for being "selfish" and not wanting to work in this kind of environment?
I didn't comment on hiring "managers", did I?
> Can we blame people for being "selfish" and not wanting to work in this kind of environment?
I did cop to this behavior, right? I do agree. It makes my life easier rejecting candidates. I'm just saying this complaining over lack of quality talent seems like the corporate equivalent of feigned helplessness rather than an actual problem.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-cognizant-h1b-visas-... | https://archive.today/jaXNo
[2] https://www.epi.org/publication/new-evidence-widespread-wage...
[3] https://cis.org/North/Unlikely-Sources-Confirm-Wage-Suppress...
[4] http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2015/05/economists-h-1b-vi...
[5] https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/h1b.pd...
[6] https://stig.net/latam-outsourcing-destination-us-companies/
[7] https://www.wsj.com/articles/it-unemployment-hits-6-amid-ove...
https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/tax-and-accountin...
> Beginning in 2022, all costs related to R&D must now be amortized over five years for US-based companies or 15 years for non-US companies.
With regards to "not good enough", maybe expectations (as a hiring manager or org) are unrealistic? Very subjective, so I find this topic to be difficult to argue effectively. I am not unsympathetic to the fact that hiring is hard, but the evidence of bad faith behavior at scale is undeniable and requires accounting for. If we're going to live in a socioeconomic system where people are forced to work to survive and there are little, if any, social safety nets, domestic employment must take priority over potential profits and economic gains of owners and similar controlling interests arbitraging labor cross border (or importing cheap labor) imho. As a founder/business owner, I can appreciate you're optimizing within your local minima.
I completely agree large scale abuse of the program must be stopped. No country can afford to have large influx of new population that hinder their own(however "own" is defined in a country) progress. Borders are a thing (for better or worse) and invoke extreme emotions within society, and that must be accommodated and not ignored. I say this as an H1B employee and I see this play out a lot more radically in my home country
Up the skill tree, companies often really get what they pay for, so the saving on offshore work is that they were overpaying for some lower skilled tasks, but not the higher skilled tasks (it’s a world market for top talent).
Translation: companies would rather have underpaid immigrants as indentured servants to exploit than Americans who can demand higher wages
Imagine how quickly business trust in the government would go down if the government mandated a $200k head tax on H1Bs. It's absurd and only here would anyone hear it and think it makes sense
> For how "meritocratic" HN claims to be, they are totally fine with basically eliminating all competition in their own job sphere.But since HN is San Francisco-centric, it can pretend otherwise I guess. Some very tiny fraction earn above what US developers earn.
H1Bs are often scapegoated by these forums as being hungry to not live in poverty, but they are often the top of their respective countries by most metrics.
And most of you all do not think that we should level the playing field between, say people who went to good schools vs people who went to bad ones, or people who can barely code vs people who can code really well. Only when it's foreigners do you not want meritocracy
The country I’m from just had rioters overthrow its government. In terms of what I’m willing to put up with at work or school, I just have a mindset and motivations that native born Americans shouldn’t have to compete with.
You can’t build a more just, fair society by filling it with foreigners who perceive the minimum standard as being so much lower because of their background.
Yeah, sorry. I actually believe in meritocracy unlike whiny HN'ers. Whatever mindset is best should win. That's how business is. That's how academics are. That's how every serious global endeavor is.
> You can’t build a more just, fair society...
If that's all you're optimizing for, just have communism. Easy path to what you want. If you actually want people to earn according to merit, to succeed according to making big bets that pay off, or any of those cruel, unequal things, then don't have a huge blind spot when it comes to only your job and no one else's.
So for example, immigrants can come to the US and have the privilege of being able to pick where they want to live because they have no attachments. This gives them a huge advantage because they pick higher income locations but especially seem to prefer being near the limited number of good high schools. Most Americans do not go to a top rated high school and do not live near one. It's not even possible for all Americans to go to a top rated high school just by definition. People going to top rated high schools have a much higher chance of going on to top rated universities which are gateways to power. Universities and high schools are just not all the same product. A Harvard degree is not the same as a state university degree. Economics alone does not capture things like that. There are real advantages things like prestige ratings give to people. So H1-B immigrants fall into a professional class which goes on to disproportionately have power with more income and more roles available in government. I think there are implications here you can surmise. Lousy education in the US is a factor here and people bristle just as much at the thought of leveling playing fields in education, even pro education people. Everyone loves rankings and prestige. It hasn't escaped my notice that elite universities have massive numbers of international, first, second, and third gen immigrants leading to a new class.
Second, another reason I don't believe immigration is meritocratic is because of what you said earlier that often immigrants are the best from their own respective country and I think that is true. They are literally smarter, we are taking the top 1% from other countries but attributing a lot of their success to just hard work. Not everyone is mentally capable of being say a medical doctor.
Third, there isn't a general global open immigration plan. Most countries are closed to immigration and I think the thought of Americans en masse migrating to a foreign place like India or China is ridiculous and everyone knows they wouldn't allow it. But I doubt America is the only place on the earth Americans could ever work. Sure, there are expats yes but nothing like on the scale of people moving to the US. So in general it doesn't really seem like this system was designed to be a meritocracy, it was designed by people at the top for their goals (cut wages, import people they like, etc) and immigrants go because they profit, but I am not sure how that's a meritocracy. It just sounds like a conspiracy.
Good reason to oppose skilled immigration!
The continued growth and success of the dotcom and post dotcom era companies has been on the backs of H1Bs and you know it
IMO this is not about wether a business can do without X. Most businesses can do without a lot of things, just more poorly. IMO this is about finding the right balance between the benefits and drawbacks of hiring foreign specialized workers.
IMO as with all things money, it's all about negotiation. Of course a lot of negotiating power simply has to do with the market supply/demand, but a whole lot has to do with policy and rules. Giving more negotiating power to H1Bs would definitely put upwards pressure on salaries.
Re: construction workers. Same problem, worker's rights. A lot of construction workers are undocumented: an estimated 20 percent [2][3]. Undocumented immigrants have virtually no negotiating power. Allowing this solid 1/5th of the workforce to confront their employer without fear of deportation would go a long way increasing compensation for the industry as a whole.
[1]: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_322.10.a...
[3]: https://limos.engin.umich.edu/deitabase/2024/05/28/undocumen...
It is strange to read this all typed out in earnest like that. Housing costs triple over night for the win? We'll all be homeless but those of us in construction will get a boost (or decreased competition from low cost imported labor).
Your discourse is sensationalist and unnecessarily agitated. Paying workers a fair wage wouldn't triple housing costs, that figure is completely made up.
> We'll all be homeless
It also wouldn't lead to complete homelessness.
I do think that if you don't tie the visa to the employer, then it's _less interesting_ for an employer to recruit people from abroad. Especially for companies whose entire business model is "get cheaper IT labor, locked into mandatory service, in exchange for being an entryway to the country".
Like if you despise those shops, then you really should be lobbying to get rid of the employer lock-in.
> A problem solved if visas are not associated to employers, because then an employer couldn’t hold onto the employee like this.
> No. Because it still floods the job market with off short talent that is willing to work for 30% less.
Second, you wrote:
> Construction workers arent tied to a single employer (usually) and that drops the price of labour across the board even in union dominated markets.
If you want the best candidates, it makes sense to have a wider pool of recruitment.
This makes no sense, even if I agree with your first statement.
Not every company is willing to completely retrain a worker for something outside of their core competency. Lots of candidates simply aren’t competent, or even reliable employees. Lots of companies would rather a position go unfilled than make a bad hire that is very expensive to fix.
> outside of their core competency
Every company makes lots of subjective decisions during hiring, I agree.
This way, a company is always incentivized to find local talent, but when they are actually unable to, they have a path to find the expertise they need. The U.S. could relax restrictions on H1-B, lowering red tape, and removing a lot of churn that comes with the H1-B program
FLEXON TECHNOLOGIES INC Database analyst: $60k
DATA TRACE INFORMATION SERVICES LLC Software engineer: $65k
PRIMARIUS TECHNOLOGIES US LLC DATA ANALYST $72k
ZOOM VIDEO COMMUNICATIONS INC AI SCIENTIST $74k
HBI SOLUTIONS INC DATABASE ADMINISTRATOR $75k
BEACONFIRE STAFFING SOLUTIONS INC COMPUTER SYSTEMS ENGINEER $88k
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=&city=san+jose&year=2...
Sort by salary ascending and you will see what I mean.
These are blatant violations. We know how much software engineers should make. Do the immigrants know they are moving to one of the most expensive cities in the US?
Those you are posting look like they could be violations. But if you just visit your link, you quickly see that most jobs are in line with median salaries in the bay area.
For example:
https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries/San...
And then:
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=zoom+video+communications+...
Those are pretty close to the median in aggregate.
Pretty close to the median?
Aren't these H1-B visas supposed to be for specialists? To bring in the best and brightest?
It doesn’t matter whether the median in aggregate is inside the range. If one person makes 60k, another makes 150k and another makes 155k you are still not paying someone enough. No American was going to take that job for 60k, that doesn’t mean you can use a visa to fill it.
The requirement should be at least 2x top of band.
A mere 1.2x of the median is absolutely absurd.
I've worked directly with probably 50 or so H1B folks in my career. I can only think of a few I'd call exceptional. Just like Americans, most were a mixed bag from good to terrible.
So the idea and argument of best of the best is sound, but it's definitely not being used solely that way.
It's all well and good to gamble when someone else, the public, is picking up the tab.
Generally the government manages the economy to make things 'easy' but not necessarily reflecting the true cost of any behavior.
Tech companies have N openings in the bay area. They will fill these openings. Whether they fill the openings with people moving from India or Mississippi has zero effect on the pressure on the bay area housing market.
They were smallish companies, 1000ish employees. Only one had H1B, and there were more than 50, but never worked with most enough to pass judgment one way or another.
Professors might hit those numbers because having informed opinions about their students is a large part of their job and they see large turnover by definition. Directors could have a chance, but even there I'd say hundreds is actually unusual, unless your standards for quality of opinion are low.
And then that's all people, not just H1-B holders.
Because large tech companies with a large cohort of H1B + tendency to frequently reorg + career level with impact with large reach means I have indeed worked with hundreds.
Sorry bro, you don't get to deny my actual experience.
even if you were the largest outliers on the planet you could not possibly collaborate with hundreds in a way where you get to know much about them. even if you said “tens of h1b’s” it would be a hard sell :)
Ive worked with both, and very few of the H1bs were below average. Otherwise they aren't worth sponsoring.
There was a time in the mid 2000s when the Infosys/TCS/wiPros of the world were gaming the H1B to bring offshore bodies onshore.. but most of that died off as far as I see.
Alive and well. https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/09/h1b_visa_fraud/
Companies caught cheating the lottery https://archive.ph/Ey3e8
Outsourcers rampant abuse https://www.infoworld.com/article/2241196/proof-that-h-1b-vi...
SV companies discriminating against Americans https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/10/07/h-1b-visa-company-sup...
It's the same with the "fast food shortage," I bet the shortage would dry up real fast at $50/hr so all we're really doing is haggling over price. If in order to hire a H1-B at a salary of x you had to offer US workers 2x with say a $100k floor on x then I bet Americans would show up.
Instead prices go up or down until supply and demand meet.
So talking about "shortages" in this context doesn't really make sense to me. Yet that's the terminology in this field, and the resulting confusion is unavoidable.
Remember the "chip shortage" all throughout the pandemic? It's not like the whole world switched to a Soviet style command economy between 2020 and 2022 yet we still had it.
ChatGPT mentions some factors for why suppliers didn't just raise prices until the demand met the supply:
1. The industry often has long term contracts that fixes prices months or years in advance.
2. Even without such contracts, the value of stable, long-term relationships with major customers made suppliers keep prices stable.
3. Governments intervened to prevent "price gouging" for favored industries, and even without such intervention, perceived price gouging can be more damaging long term than is made up for by near term profits.
So you're right that there was a real shortage for a time.
But note my original caveat: "On a market with free pricing". Unfree pricing (contracts/regulation) was one factor.
But PR considerations, which I admit I didn't think of, was also a factor. So I learned something here!
If you were willing to pay more than the market rate, there was no problem in finding chips.
It could be solved by realising that letting immigrants in, especially highly skilled ones, is good for the country (and for the immigrants!), independent of anything like a 'skills shortage'.
The same goes for offshoring for jobs. Lovely for shareholders and the CEO's bonus, but not so great for US residents having to compete with them who are paying US cost of living, not Indian/etc overseas cost of living.
It'd be nice if the US government would pass laws benefiting its own citizens/residents rather than corporations.
Preferring US citizens over outsourcing is patriotic, not racist. It's also being a good corporate citizen - supporting the country/people you are gaining your profits from.
If a government tried to treat everyone in the world the same, it wouldn’t be able to meet the needs of its own people. Things like healthcare, schools, and public services are paid for by citizens, so they have to come first.
Also, preferring citizens isn’t about race. Citizenship is something anyone can earn, no matter where they’re from. Calling it racist mixes up two very different things.
It's hard not to break the rules in replying to something like this.
Are you trying to tell us immigrants to the US do not pay taxes? They don't follow laws? And they don't contribute to the country?
I'd also say, immigrants are only temporary non-citizens. If they are immigrating to stay, then it's the government's job to take care of them. Countries like the US and Australia were founded on immigrants.
If their loyalty is not to the country they are immigrating to, and is to their previous country's government, I am not sure why it would be a priority to support them.
>If their loyalty is not to the country they are immigrating to
This goes against human nature. Loyalty would come later, not before or even immediately.
We do not lack candidates, but we lack qualified candidates. Most people that I interview have no clue how software actually works. Most are leetcode monkeys or just really awful.
We mostly hire seniors because of the industry we're in, but we've started hiring interns and juniors due to the lack of decent candidates.
We'd love to hire US candidates, but there's just a huge lack.
We're fintech, so it's boring. We don't do AI and we don't move fast and break things because that would cost us more than we'd make. We just move faster than the competition. Similar companies would be Stripe/SoFi.
Since your company is private what percent of that is liquid (cash or RSUs you can immediately sell for cash). Also, what locations are you hiring in?
Cause, if you are asking me to move to the outrageous housing market that is the bay area only to make half my money in shitty stock options that might not evaluate to anything, than I think I found your problem.
We pay $400k base + bonus for L6, but around $270k for L4
RSUs bump that to $400k on the low end for L4 and $700k for L6.
We don't pay FAANG level for sure, but the bar is lower.
At this point I feel like I’m relying entirely on luck and hoping for someone to pay it forward by “taking a chance” on me even though I feel perfectly capable. Surely there’s a single company that I could work out for despite not having 5 years of experience.
I know universities will do this with certain open positions where they already have a candidate in mind but are required to advertise an opening, can’t remember the specifics why though. Same with RFPs.
Really easy system to defeat.
I've worked at a company where >90% of the technical interviews I conducted were H1-B hires. It makes perfect sense for a tech company to bias the applicant deck in this way for a few reasons. They're willing to accept a lower comp package. Once they're onboard, they will generally keep their head down, do whatever they're asked to do, and accept whatever working conditions they get without complaining. That said, I've known several brilliant H1-B workers. However I've noticed that they rarely stick their neck out and challenge the status quo, which can lead to bad ideas receiving unquestioning and persistent efforts to implement in spite of the writing being on the wall about that project's inevitable demise.
I've worked at companies that hire primarily non-H1-B workers, and I can tell you that the amount of complaining about working conditions in particular at those companies was a couple of orders of magnitude more raucous. The end result of a complacent workforce was a soulless office with ubiquitous infrared sensors, no available meeting spaces, a microkitchen stocked with a pittance of moldy food, and with floating workstations where the equipment was chronically broken or missing.
While I tend to agree, this is a bit of a straw man.
You can have tons of people looking for work who aren't qualified for the job - which is (I think) the FAANG argument.
It's not like FAANG is paying less than what most unemployed techies are looking to make.
FAANG will argue that they are laying off people with skills they don't need, and there's a lack of people with skills they do need.
Call them out and make a convincing argument that this is BS.
Don't cry out: BUT SOME AMERICAN WAS FIRED AND THEY'RE STILL HIRING!
This isn't a sound argument.
They are laying off workers (permanent residents and H1Bs alike) mostly to cut costs while all their competitors are doing it, thereby saving face.
Additionally they are signalling to investors that they are focused on cash generation and only investing in areas they think will serve that end in the near term.
Finally, they are preparing for a future where they need fewer workers per unit of revenue and profit growth, but in the short term, that just means a higher workload for those workers that remain.
If we really valued this foreign labor, we’d make permanent residency a requirement of the visa rather than block it. Of course, if we offered immigrants permanent residency status then companies would have to pay them substantially more, which is the whole point of the H1B.
Now, was I essential to the US? Probably not. They probably could have found someone else.
I'm not sure if that's good enough to say I should not have been accepted here.
It's hard for even Canadians and Mexicans to find jobs in the US and we have access to the supposedly easy to obtain TN visa. Australians too with E3.
I'm more inclined to believe that H1B workers have other benefits to employers such as longer tenure due to the restrictions of moving jobs.
Which in itself should be an argument for further liberalization say by giving I140 approved petitioners access to EADs.
That is a financial motive. Companies don't want to pay the kind of compensation which would induce employees to be loyal to the company, and so they use H1B quasi-indentured servitude as a cheaper alternative.
In the past decade or so, I have personally worked with an H-1B in the SF Bay Area who was working a full-time software position advertised as requiring a Master's degree, but was making something like $120k/year.
"Must be making above the median pay for the position" might be the way it's SUPPOSED to work, but it's clear that it doesn't ALWAYS work that way.
120k was not enough.
If its the prior then if an H-1B employee stays at a company for more than a few years it actually would come out to being cheaper overall, on top of them being more incentivized to just go with the flow and deal with any BS since their stay in the country depends on it. They have significantly less leverage than a US citizen to stay through grueling work conditions or toxic work environments.
But as I understand it, this is checked during the visa application process. The visa expires after a few years and requires another application for an extension then. So at least every few years, the salary would have to be adjusted upwards to meet the visa requirements.
Also H1Bs can't also start their own businesses (at least before this rule). So that was another restriction.
Nope. They don't need it to work for every worker, they can't get every worker as a H1B either. It working for some workers makes it worth doing for businesses.
As an H1B I May have made marginally less than my peers who were not immigrationally challenged. But as promotions picked up I think that wasn’t an issue anymore.
The one thing I still have though is I’m never the squeaky wheel. Getting laid off on an H1B is brutal. So your tolerance for corporate bs and workplace toxicity is quite high.
I've seen more than one shop that would use contract houses as a way to 'paper over' their internal turnover issues.
After all, even if the internal resource at the body shop asks for and gets a transfer, they've got another body in to finish the contract.
Plus the fringe benefits. That h1b is a sword of damocles, contractor will work 6/10+ even if the main shop is doing 45 on average for engineers.
Which, doesn't get you better code typically, but it let's suits say people are working long hours to get the task done.
people here on HN (without any merit) make H1B program sound like farming jobs in Texas… too funny
If the program is there for "we can't find qualified people in the US to do X" and then you find one such person to sponsor for H1B - the direction in which this is going is that Company is looking for an Employee. If you as an employee than say "imma pack up my bags and go elsewhere" now this is changing direction, now Employee is looking for Company and that is really not what H1B is for.
There 1,000,000% should be like H1E program that works in this direction but I am sure whatever someone tries to come up with there will be hundreds of people here on HN and elsewhere "crying" about "we should first look in the US before we hire immigrants.'
Now, H1B's will put in longer hours and extra work without complaint and won't take things like EEO action, legal action, etc. against their employer. But it just comes with the territory that as a visitor in the US you do not want legal trouble and would like to preserve your legal status as seamlessly as possible.
To your first point - the H1B exists because they can't find technical (or other) talent in their work zone. So here's the thing - if one company can't find it, neither can others unless that one company is doing something super specialized. They could just provide the ability to move in zones where that expertise is needed and the minimum expected salary the employer must pay. There are solutions if congress gets off their rear-end and tries to find them.
My experience has been the same but we are just two people with such experience - there is definitely "corruption" associated with this program that you and I personally did not experience.
> Now, H1B's will put in longer hours and extra work without complaint and won't take things like EEO action, legal action, etc. against their employer. But it just comes with the territory that as a visitor in the US you do not want legal trouble and would like to preserve your legal status as seamlessly as possible.
Perhaps... but we do live in a VERY litigious society and I am personally questioning that this is rampant. There are A LOT of highly qualified people that are on the H1B program that won't take sh*t from the Employer. I know I personally 100% would not (I will work LOOOOOONG hours if my entire team is doing the same, I will find a hotshot attorney on Monday if I am the only one forced to work long hours just because I am an immigrant and I am 100% sure there are plenty of H1B's that think the same way. I think we sometimes make an assumption that all/majority/... H1B's come from shithole places and they will do EVERYTHING possible to stay in America (and H1B is probably the most legal way to do so). While that might be true for some, I do not believe it is true for enough people where this H1B wage/... discrimination can be rampant.
> They could just provide the ability to move in zones where that expertise is needed and the minimum expected salary the employer must pay. There are solutions if congress gets off their rear-end and tries to find them.
100% agree with the sentiment of your comment but I do think that this is harder than it appears - if we follow the spirit of H1B program. It can be re-designed into something else, like general "USA has low birthrates and needs immigration - lets create a program where highly qualified people can request to come to work/live/... in the United States..." but IMO this would have to be a different program in spirit to current H1B
In a post-remote world these jobs aren’t competing with on-shore labor. This is a populist pitch in the mould of iron work to Pennsylvania.
All of those are also happening, plus H1-B competition. Offshoring to low-cost countries is more common for maintenance work, or work that is not core to the business or its product innovation.
H1-B workers are often very good at what they do, every bit as good as permanent resident workers, which is precisely why they are competition for permanent resident workers, whether in office or remote.
Big Tech, for example, treats SWEs as largely interchangeable. Make a SWE redundant and you can't hire another SWE--anywhere in the country--who is a visa holder for 24 months.
You can buy your way out of this by paying any redundant SWE 3 years of salary and benefits.
Let's see how necessary layoffs really are.
Not snarking, but you either have a needlessly arbitrary bar, or you've left the applicant pool up to people unqualified to gather applicants (non technical young HR, etc)
The real number for them is probably the next few parts of the hiring pipeline after those resumes are scanned and filtered.
That said, it's certainly true there's lots of spam in job applications.
During the actual job I've never once had issues of any kind, but my brain just shuts down in interview environments. I'll forget the simplest of things that I do literally daily, and it all just ends up spiraling out of control from there. It's like there's 2 people in my brain, the regular, competent me, and then interview me who's a bumbling buffoon that I myself wouldn't hire. It's not even a pressure thing, I do fine in high stress environments, it's just specifically during interviews where things go wrong.
It seems like systems level programmers are either firmly employed somewhere else or have switch roles to an easier domain. I know I've considered going back to Python programming where I can make the same money with a lot less work.
Something is terribly wrong with your hiring practices. You just need to admit it's a "you" problem.
Generally I just see a lot of unfocused writing in this thread. Even the reply to your post is an attempt to muddy the waters with some ambiguous statement. I guess this is a community of developers and we tend to have difficulty with politics and the real world :-)
The salary I got was ok for bay area standards, certainly not rockstar level but would make jaws drop in Germany. For me it was an amazing opportunity and I would recommend it to anyone to do for a while.
The trap with the older worker is a guy wants $250k, but will perform at the level of a $75/hr body shop guy. Skills don’t align - that’s always the risk of engineering.
While here, adding that we need Executive action to ban H1B workers and tariff BPOs at 250% from countries that have not ratified the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. I speculate that even Elon Musk Actual will approve of this restriction.
Lastly, to avoid posting a response to another comment, going to mention that there is nothing quite like having a head-hunter with an accent that sounds roughly like he is talking with a rotary egg-beater jammed into his mouth call you up and ask you a series of disqualification questions for a position that he already has sourced from offshores labor pool (so as to check the box that he personally certifies there are no American workers qualified for the work). Their customer doesn't want to know how the sausage is made, they just want cheap bodies for unimportant low-level work and this is what it takes under the current Law. I actually have a friend who was paid very well to let an H1B follow him around for several months learning his job before he was let go and lost his home, wife and wound up moving in with his parents. He went to the US Government to complain and ended up at Google for a while before moving on to a Unicorn.
If the H1B have side-hustles like starting Zoom, doing what Satya did, or their spouses create incredible non-tech businesses, that's really great..but what about all the American peeps (AND THEIR KIDS) that were jipped out of that opportunity by lax enforcement of America's laws, only to ultimately hear "See, we need to keep letting so many H1B people and their criminal recruiters warehouse them in apartments and work for dog food because so many of them have gone on to create such tremendous economic activity for America" (ie, a self-fulfilling prophecy).
Casual ageism as if it won’t be you one day
Engineering is traditionally boom/bust. The baller tech dudes in 1973 were designing parts for F-15’s and making bank. By 1993 the movie “Falling Down” had come out and thousands of those folks were discarded. A big feel good stories were a bunch of aerospace engineers who applied their skills to designing low flow toilets.
It happens today in tech. How many high dollar Storage Administrators are deployed in your company? The highest paid contractors in many companies were the high priests of the SAN.
The vicious cycle in tech is you get trapped in a bad specialty or pulled up into middle management and purged. It mostly timing and luck. Nobody gives a shit that you were the man with some old semiconductor process. Likewise, nobody is going to pay a premium for some dude whose been a manager for a decade to sling Java.
So... literally what we've been saying about the H1B visa program for decades? That Americans _are_ available with the skillset you need, but not willing to work for the wages you're offering, so you bring somebody from overseas, which is actually illegal per the H1B rules that never get enforced?
Where I’ve worked in the past, the preference was to get students and grow them into the company. Longer term contractors were for work nobody wanted… it’s hard to attract anyone interested into churning out J2EE and COBOL.
It’s pretty hard to transition senior people purged from big companies into these roles. Your purged assistant director from a fortune 50 is unlikely to take to being an IC in legacy tech. They transition well into pre-sales and program management roles, especially if they have domain expertise in a vertical.
we abolish the program and boom, 65k people out of this apparently HUGE number of US developers looking for work won't make a dent... so this argument holds absolutely no water ...
But if you shut off that valve, they would not be here 25 years later.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-o...
> Finally, the rule strengthens program integrity by codifying USCIS’ authority to conduct inspections and impose penalties for failure to comply; requiring that the employer must establish that it has a bona fide position in a specialty occupation available for the worker as of the requested start date; clarifies that the Labor Condition Application must support and properly correspond with the H-1B petition; and requires that the petitioner have a legal presence and be subject to legal processes in court in the United States.
U.S. citizens (and perhaps some dual-citizens) might want to look into such places (Navy warfare centers, NRL, ARL, etc.)
TL;DR:
The top starting pay is about $150k IIRC, which I'm told is somewhat below what a well-funded defense contractor will pay for really good people.
But I worked with some great people, the work was interesting, and it was located in a medium-cost-of-living area.
I left because of the siren call of the startup scene, and frustration with some bureaucratic stuff. But in retrospect I actually liked working there the best.
I come from an extremely wealthy Northern European country integral to founding the United States and English is my first language. I was not compelled to emigrate for a “better life”. I gave up a lot to be in the US.
H1-Bs are designed for abuse. There is no shortage of skilled workers. It’s just that immigrants are cheap.
I was hired in my country from a pool of over 500 for one of two jobs. Once accepted it took close to a year to do the legal paperwork. My sponsoring company was paying lawyers $600 an hour twenty years ago to get the work done. Despite being absolutely squeaky clean they easily invested 25k per applicant then.
When I arrived my pay tripled. I was earning 50-60k in the US and had been under 20 before. That was very low in my home country but it was a starting position and wages are lower outside the Us for myriad reasons even though living standards on low wages are higher.
The kicker was that similarly skilled Americans to myself were all earning 6 figures then. The industry I was in had a strong base in NY and the company that hired me was in LA. Their options were to pay 100k plus and relocate Americans from NY, or pay half that and relocate Europeans.
Better yet we were more qualified than the average American (as they got to pick the very best) and we were tied to them by the legal work and thus “indentured”. If we wanted to leave them we had to go home or find more sponsorship.
On arrival my colleague and I immediately realized we were both overqualified and under paid (pre internet this was much harder to discover). We ran rings round the locals. When our visas needed renewal the company “advertised” our jobs by placing printed sheet behind notice boards and claimed that was sufficient. It was a complete con.
Ironically I didn’t last very long. Given my skills and experience I found companies willing to sponsor my ViSAs and green card (which my first company sponsored for me also). So I was able to move around and establish myself.
In short the system has always been abused. The idea is good but as long as companies can choose to pay non competitive rates to immigrants they will do so and lie about the true state of the market. That’s what the system does and the purpose of a system IS what it does. It’s just lowering wages by importing skilled foreigners.
Well one option, of course, would be not forcing staff to return to office.
It's the old 'the foreigners are taking our jobs' routine.
That suggest the null hypothesis that to a first approximation the number of jobs is determined by the number of workers available. More workers seem to somehow lead to more jobs. (Immigration changes the number of workers, yes. But that's about it.)
What kinds of jobs are growing? Are any groups underemployed? Are standards of living increasing? For who?
> More workers seem to somehow lead to more jobs.
Imagine the US merged with Canada and Mexico. The number of jobs would probably go up until we reached a similar level of unemployment. Would everyone be better off? Is that what economic growth looks like?
That's an interesting question. You can look up the statistics online. Eg I imagine we have a lot more baristas these days, but fewer people making buggy whips than 200 years ago.
> Are any groups underemployed?
What do you mean by underemployed? As long as the unemployment rate isn't 0%, mathematics will tell you that you'll find some people who are 'underemployed', yes.
> Are standards of living increasing? For who?
Yes, living standards are increasing at the moment for most people around the globe. (Basically for anyone who's not living in a failed state like Cuba or North Korea, or in an active war zone.)
> Imagine the US merged with Canada and Mexico. The number of jobs would probably go up until we reached a similar level of unemployment.
All three countries already have both people and jobs before the merger. Right away, the combined unemployment rate would be a (weighted) average of the previous unemployment rates in these three areas.
Over time things might change, depending on what exactly what gets merged. If there's free migration between all three territories, GDP would go up a lot.
Unemployment would probably mostly stay the same as before, but details depend on whether the new merge entity would take its labour laws from Canada, the US or Mexico, and a million other details.
> Would everyone be better off?
Virtually everybody, yes. Obviously, with hundreds of millions of people involved, you'll find a few here and there who will be worse off for almost any policy you can think of.
> Is that what economic growth looks like?
I'm not sure what you mean?
I guess it will be interesting times ahead. I recommend everyone to keep their skills sharp!
> I'd be surprised if more than 5-10% of H-1B positions are ones where the hiring company has even looked for US applicants.
You really think a business would do that? Just go to the government and tell lies?
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/indian-corporation-pays-re...
Newspaper ad is required for PERM, which is part of the green card process.
Not lies, strictly, but I see plenty of evidence pointing to the 'fake job' phonemena that seems to be discounted, like this example: https://www.teamblind.com/post/Intuit-firing-up-ads-in-local...
Filtering out real information from data and anecdata is a challenge at the best of times, but I am ill convinced of the honesty of most of the recruitment market.
So, it's not just a plain numbers game, it's more about innovation, productivity, talent pools and of course, capitalism.