Hacker News Reader

Comment by KingMachiavelli | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t it a self-fulfilling issue? Dependence on H1B and other visa dependent workers leads to lower salaries which discourages local talent from that specialty.

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.

View on HN

> What requirements did the role have and what’s the salary range?

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.

There are a ton of jobs that pay as well or better with lower requirements, even outside the bay area. Anyone with that level of experience, Python and a low level language isn't going to take you up.

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.

I responded to the point someone made- there's an excess of workers in America. Firstly, when there's an excess, wages are supposed to lower, even for Americans. Secondly, even if there is an excess, there was no evidence of that in my experience. In addition to the full time role we also interviewed interns in fall, and in my experience they were all either immigrant or children of immigrants.

You don’t see an excess of workers because the compensation was too low. Your requirements were such that you were realistically competing with Meta and Google offers for $400k+ and $200k was your max possible compensation.

I did not post the full job description word for word to not doxx myself. But the job description explicitly mentioned that anyone with the right aptitude should apply, don't have to qualify for every requirement. We hired a recent graduate with relevant research experience.

I'm sorry you think $200k/yr to sling Python for a 26 year old is too low?

Come on man be real right now

$200k is very middle of the pack for a salary offer in the bay area, and most places will push total comp up with stock and such, whereas OP mentioned that 200 was the UPPER bound, meaning they wouldn't be offering it to a junior developer.

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.

I'm sorry you all have lost your minds. I live and work in the bay area. $200k for someone who is 26 is far more than enough and should absolutely be able to get you a qualified person for the job description given above.

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.

I mean I don’t have a horse in this race, but I don’t think this is a good example.

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.

Yes we hired a fresh graduate with relevant research experience who is being trained.

> Dependence on H1B and other visa dependent workers leads to lower salaries

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.

They don't have to undercut their coworkers on an individual level. When a position that could otherwise reasonably be filled by an American is gated for any unnecessary reason, be it undesirable pay or excessively specific requirements or whatever else, that effectively removes that position from the domestic job market. When that is repeated many times the end result is the same number of domestic applicants competing for fewer positions. That results in downward pressure due to basic supply and demand.

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.

tech salaries have only increased and never decreased. Not in 2000, not in 2008, not in 2020.

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)

That's highly deceptive. To start with, salaries have to increase just to tread water given inflation. Beyond that, there's nothing wrong with a position that produces a large amount of value being compensated in accordance. If a particular sector does well we should expect salaries to rise relative to the economy as a whole.

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.

you know what would depress wages even more?

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

It appears you didn't bother to comprehend what I wrote before replying. I don't think this is the right venue for political grandstanding.

quite the opposite, all of H1B opponents imagine current wealth and state of tech will preserve the moment immigration stops and their loud temper tantrums are satisfied.

that American capitalists are stupid enough to overpay underskilled Americans, the moment H1Bs are banned or limited, instead of opening satellite offices outside US

Elon Musk is causing way more harm then benefit to America itself and its economy. I dont think he is a good example of a positive effect of immigration.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com