It’s plausible Education might be one of the industries that gets exploited as they have no caps in the lottery like other H1 visas categories such as tech or doctors. But I don’t know enough about education visas personally.
Clearly the H1B has been devastating to American workers unlike all those other industries which haven’t seen an influx of a capped number of H1B workers every year.
And that’s even before we get to how the U.S. software industry remains one of a handful of industries where the U.S. is the leader in the world and has generated trillions in wealth, and is largely responsible for the US’s continuing dominance in the world today.
I have been hiring for 20 years and find this increasingly impossible to believe. Please expand why that would be the case.
(A) individual must be interested in job/benefits/comp. and decide to apply. This makes them a ‘candidate’ (B) candidate must be qualified per minimum requirements
It’s entirely possible to not have candidates if no one is interested in the position at the stated comp/benefit rate.
150-200k is probably reasonable for a new grad in the bay (not certain what starting salaries there are now) but not for what you actually asked for.
I’m not hating on you. Your budget is what it is. But you’re well under market and that’s why you didn’t get the applicants you wanted.
But are there qualified Americans who could easily switch to that job for one reason or another? Is the issue a lack of qualified professionals or is it a lack of interest by qualified professionals in the listed position?
It's very easy to receive no applications from qualified professionals that do in fact exist by simply not offering to pay them enough (among many other things). That shouldn't mean you get to undercut the domestic labor market; rather you should be forced to rethink the business plan.
Let’s say a rural town has lost population in the last 20 years, and most of the population that left is educated.
Now they need a teacher, which requires a bachelors or even masters degree.
The rural town’s unemployment rate is 10% but there are no qualified teachers who are unemployed.
So now we want to move someone in from a nearby urban center that has a big market of educated people. But the unemployment rate in that big urban area is 3%, and the area is wealthier with a higher salary rate for jobs across the income spectrum.
Let’s say my local teacher salary is $50,000, the big city teacher salary is $90,000, and the big city high school diploma career salary is $50,000.
I have to find someone who is a qualified teacher who isn’t already a teacher and isn’t already working someone where else that’s still paying better than my local area. Plus, that person has family, friends, and prefers the big city with all its amenities and infrastructure. I can tell you right now that you would have to pay me far above market rate to get me to move because I’m already employed and happy.
In contrast, someone in a foreign country is potentially getting a huge upgrade to move to the US or another developed wealthy country and is way more motivated to make that leap.
I imagine these programs exist because the cost benefit just makes sense. Not only do you solve the imbalance faster, easier, cheaper, but now the wider country has gained educated population which is generally an economic benefit.
Certainly there are flaws in the system that need to be fixed. I don’t mean to advocate for it necessarily, just explain why I think it exists.
I would also point out that it’s not necessarily the case that the local labor market is being undercut (see the geographic example I gave above), it’s being expanded, and that includes adding someone who is paying taxes, buying stuff from local businesses, etc, which they do even before they become citizens.
If everyone feels that way, then it's not an above-market rate, it's by definition the market rate. The market rate for a job might be different at different locations.
(Note that I'm not taking a position on whether or not using the H1B program to reduce the market rate here is a good idea)
What requirements did the role have and what’s the salary range?
From what little I gather from online job listings, most foreign labor dependent positions are trying to pay 90K for a masters degree, maybe 120-140K Bay Area. Additionally, many of these job listings want extremely specific degrees or certifications that frankly are of little interest to US citizens - but F1 students will take any masters program despite the program having little salary benefit - the degree is a requirement for the visa.
I have a hard time believing you can’t find a US civil engineer who could learn the subject matter right out of college. Although saying that I know first hand low starting salaries have pushed students towards mechanical engineering or CS if inclined.
4+ years in product development. Python/R + a low-level language. Terabyte-scale data stream and batch processing. HPC knowledge (vectorization, memory access, distributed computing) to build efficient algorithms. Degree in a quantitative field (Math, Stats, Physics, CS, or Engineering).
Upper limit on compensation was 200k.
> Although saying that I know first hand low starting salaries have pushed students towards mechanical engineering or CS if inclined.
You answered your own question. The American engineering pool consists mostly of high school diplomas who can't pass PE exam at multiple trials.
Edit: coincidentally, my wife was offered a state civil engineering job in Bay area. Didn't take up because the salary offered was below 100k, even with 5 years of experience.
I'm not normally in agreement with the "you're not paying enough, there's plenty of people" crowd, because I've been on the hiring side too and know what a crapshoot it can be... But you're definitely offering too little for those requirements.
Come on man be real right now
I may have also misread the degree requirement as being higher than it was, but I think my point (prior to the edit) stands- for the posted requirements, the offered salary is low compared to other available jobs.
It's a middle of the pack/low salary offer in FAANG but the vast minority of developers here work at a company like that. It's hard to remember that sometimes.
If this is a senior enough position to justify expecting this level of specialization, that compensation is not nearly high enough, so issuing this H-1B would add downwards pressure on the compensation of American worker.
If this is not a very senior role, the American worker’s interest is that you find someone with a less specific background, compatible enough so that they can be trained.
It does not generally. H1B employees are more expensive usually. In most companies - like any notable tech company - they are paid exactly the same due to fixed compensation plans, but cost more to the company once you include legal fees, processing fees, and especially the time delays and risks. It’s not even close in terms of a cost comparison. This isn’t a controversy among people who are actually involved in hiring and compensation - it’s well known. But this perception persists.
That's fine if there's a genuine need for a specific sort of specialist and the US simply isn't producing enough of them. But when it's silly hyper specific requirements it becomes detrimental.
Your narrative runs against the facts on the ground.
Not only foreign workers were part of the reason US tech dominates the world, they also greatly contributed to every single major invention in tech, including the Attention paper which led to Transformer based LLMs.
All of these stupid anti-immigrant narratives are exploiting either ignorance (foreigners undercut wages, while wages have tripled and more) or motte-and-bailey tactics (WITCH bad and H1B fraud bad, lets abolish all immigration)
The question is simply whether a policy would depress wages relative to not having that policy, and it's merely one of many factors that should be carefully considered when weighing the costs and benefits.
> All of these stupid anti-immigrant narratives
You reveal your own biases. Personally I'm originally from academia. I'm accustomed to a workplace where citizens are only barely a majority and of those many are naturalized immigrants. I have no qualms with importing labor that's significantly more skilled than the average american in cases where doing so benefits our society on the whole. Neither do I have qualms with filling jobs that are legitimately unwanted or that we truly don't have sufficient local talent to support. However I'll note that the last one there is exceedingly rare.
not having H1B foreigners like Elon Musk or Satya Nadella create/grow companies that employed tens of thousands Americans and created trillions of value for investors.
Remember it was White American Steven Ballmer who almost ruined Microsoft (he took MSFT at $620 bln and left at $280 bln valuation), and it took a foreigner like Satya to bring it to $4 trillion.
not having foreigners who could discover Attention mechanism or Transformer based models that led to AI boom.
US would literally be indistiguishable from Europe's lackluster development and growth, would you want US look more like EU ?
All of the wignats who complain and bitch about immigration completely forget or take for granted all the tech progress made in the US by foreign workers, and all the non-tech jobs that get created thanks to tech work being done by foreigners.
Just visit any graduate program in the top tier US university lab, visit any leading scientific conference, or lookup nationalities of top cited research papers, and imagine USA without all those talented people with foreign sounding last names.
That will be proper comparison
that American capitalists are stupid enough to overpay underskilled Americans, the moment H1Bs are banned or limited, instead of opening satellite offices outside US
I know people who are actively looking for data analyst roles. Email me
And in China they were far more occupied with a cultural revolution than any form of advanced education. At best you could argue that they were teaching basic literacy to more people.
Everybody loves capitalism--until they are on the other side of the arrow.
I've seen those kind of proposals as ballot measures that get voted down.