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Comment by thatfrenchguy | Hacker News Reader

There's a shortage of applicants with the skills that companies need. Engineers, like most qualified workforce, aren't interchangeable.

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This is not what the data shows [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. Also, the efforts of many US firms recently to grow their India and LATAM presence [6] demonstrates this is for cost reasons, not a lack of qualified workforce. Companies will hire contractors from IT outsourcers and similar to launder the labor cost cramdown operation. IT unemployment is ~6% [7], why are we issuing any H1Bs beyond exceptional, highly compensated talent (~$300k-$500k/year and up)?

[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...

I mean, If I have an India or LATAM presence, why would I hire in the US at all, even H1Bs? Unemployment rates mean nothing if its a skills job. Eng #1 is not the same as Eng #2. You can see this plainly in interviews. Our hit rate for engineering is roughly 1 in 20 - purely based on the skill match. So 6-7% unemployment might as well mean they are not good enough?

Indeed, it's why policy will be an important component, just as tariffs can be used to stoke domestic production (to bring outsourcing costs to domestic cost parity). I.R.C. §174 touches on this with an amortization delta between US and non-US based development and R&D cost accounting, for example.

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.

It is indeed subjective. But since I have hired both good american and non-american engineers consistently over long periods, I tend to think it is not unrealistic.

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

Even if you have an India/LATAM presence, the higher end of workers from those countries are still mostly migrating to other countries for higher salaries. So you still need H1Bs because you aren’t getting that person in their 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).

Not really. Countries like India are very large (population-wise) and have a very thriving domestic technology scene with a LOT of good talent. Not all of them want to migrate to other countries just for money. For the CoL in India, they are very well paid.

It is a level thing, even when I was working for Microsoft china, we could get lower level talent for cheap in India and China. But as the level rose, the costs became similar, and eventually the pay scale would flip (you could get a top level engineer in India, but they started costing the same or more than similar engineers in the Bay Area). So a $100k equiv engineer was cheaper, a $1 million equiv engineer was often more expensive. It really is a world market for talent at the high end, and the Bay Area has more of the top.

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