Comment by petcat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by petcat | Hacker News Reader

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The economics don’t make any more sense for Canada or the EU than they do for the US. The the new $100k H1B fee was imposed because companies have a huge financial incentive to import semi-skilled workers from lower-wage markets rather than hire domestically. Canada and the EU face the same problem. In tech, it's about the kinds of work inexperienced/cheap developers are often doing: assembly line, JIRA-ticket-taker type development.

This is especially impacting Indian tech workers in the US [1] since these are often the types of roles that InfoSys and other foreign tech consulting firms are staffing. The new $100,000 fee to sponsor an H1B visa has made it difficult to justify hiring foreign tech workers when most of the time they are just going to be using American LLMs to do their work anyway.

The foreign tech workers that are worth the $100,000 fee are still easily getting their visa sponsored.

[1] https://thefederal.com/category/news/h1b-visa-indian-tech-wo...

> semi-skilled workers

fwiw the h1-b workers I encountered in bigtech were totally on-par with their US citizen equivalents in both coding and english communication. many teams were about 50/50 in my office (SF, non-HQ).

my current talent/placement company works mostly with AI startups who are usually too early to support visa requirements [0]. being able to support the lead-time and planning for international applicants is a huge advantage later stage companies have in terms of being able to scoop up talent at reasonable prices. big loss for the local ecosystems if these jobs move across the border imo.

[0]: https://www.hedgy.works

Yeah, it is not much worth because issue is not that top talent on H1 matches local talent but how average is the rest but get brought to US in name of high skill immigration.

The debate by supporters is set like: Look at these 5 top guys they are best in class in every aspect so why shouldn't they be here. And now don't look over there 500 guys which are business analyst, basic enterprise coders, testers application support engineers lest question maybe asked how come they are considered highly skilled.

Remember H1B is a lottery. So yes, some of them will have the qualifications to get hired at places like FAANG. But many (most?) are pretty mediocre. There's also an extra allocation for people who get "advanced degrees" from a U.S. university. That's also a lottery, so most of the spots go to graduates of diploma-mill Master's programs. These programs are very lucrative for third-tier schools.

I've often wondered what the best way to do this, if the goal was to bring over only top tier talent. I've heard it floated it could be a bidding system instead of a lottery (countered with the fact that only the biggest firms would be able to bid high enough to bring people in), but I'm not an economist so I don't know how that would all shake out.

I think I'm more just speaking out loud here: what is the optimal way to do this that allows a capped influx of talented outside workers, that doesn't allow "degree mills"?

I don't have an answer, but I honestly wonder. Some of the green card folks I've worked with (I know that is different, or at least I think it is in the grand scheme of things?) have been some of the smartest people I've worked with.

H1B's goal is not to bring top tier talent, to qualify for one you need a bachelor's degree (or "equivalent experience") and a job that claims only people with a degree can do, that's all, that is the requirement (there is also a "fashion model" subcategory, which does not even require a degree). There are other visa categories for top talent, e.g. O-1, which has more requirements, which align better with top talent.

They are not supposed to be "on par" with average employees, the visa is supposed to be for exceptional talent that cannot be hired in America. There is no shortage of domestic average devs, so these average h1b devs ought to be leaving.

these were not average employees - top decile engineers i've worked with, shipping quickly and rigorously to millions of global users

Ironically, if it's true that the jobs are being off-shored, rather than on-shored and filled by locals, this would be beneficial for the countries who currently find themselves in a brain-drain spiral (be it India, Ukraine, etc.). It would result in a more tech and economically balanced world rather than having two lobes (USA and China). People would say that it's a detriment to the US's future --but those are often the most critical of US hegemony.

The Indian offshore firms are scrambling because of the opposite happening. If all this work was just flooding to India then the panic that’s happening there over the industry imploding wouldn’t be occurring.

The sort of work traditionally handled by cheap offshore labor is now the sort of work most ripe for replacement by AI. So it’s burning the candle from both ends. The low value stuff is getting replaced by AI and not sent there and the high value stuff struggles to get delivered by cheap labor because the play was always cost of and not the quality of the talent.

US has shipped all manufacturing jobs to Asia, including China and got the Rust Belt in exchange (and huge corporate profits). and China is now a manufacturing powerhouse.

Partly that push was created by the labor unions, who pushed the cost of doing manufacturing business far above what was profitable and feasible.

When the environment becomes hostile to conducting business, then jobs will leave and local industries atrophy.

How was the environment that enabled businesses to lower their cost by admitting China in WTO hostile to conducting business?

BTW - with or without unions manufacturing was profitable in the US before NAFTA and China entering WTO. So your narrative that manufacturing was dying because of labor unions does not hold much water.

the offshoring of manufacturing started in the 50s and 60s and accelerated in the 80s. the reason is that US wanted to do specialized high value manufacturing, and was offshoring everything low value and low margin, because of increasing cost of environment and labor regulations and unions.

My fear is that if US becomes hostile to foreign tech workers, they will simply create alternatives to US Big Tech in other countries and US economy will suffer.

Current US domination of global tech is partly because of foreign tech talent.

"the offshoring of manufacturing started in the 50s and 60s and accelerated in the 80s. " - not true.

Manufacturing offshoring started in late 90s in small part due to NAFTA and then accelerated when China entered WTO in early 2000s (thank you President Clinton for this one).

The manufacturing employment trend shows this quite clearly I think: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/manemp

> Manufacturing offshoring started in late 90s

Speaking as an Irish person who grew up in the 80's, this isn't true as there were loads of US companies manufacturing in Ireland back then. There were even clothes manufacturers until the mid 90s.

So I'd probably agree more with the OP here, perhaps the Asian outsourcing happened in the 90s (but even then, loads of my toys as a kid were made in Taiwan), but this has been happening for a while.

It's potentially related to the relaxation of capital controls that happened in the 70s.

Patently false narrative, equivalent to saying all americans are fat - both are extremely cheap uneducated arguments.

Every single H1B I worked with was brilliant in their field - and paid extremely well often in excess of $400K. I know several that are earning well past $500K. If you claim these are generic Jira pushers, well you are showing ignorance.

The $100K fees isn’t material to them but the whole vitriolic nonsense poured around what they do and just rolling their work in mud - well that’s where they just move and take their 50 ppl organization with them.

This is pure nonsense.

The H1B coworkers I work with really go the entire spectrum. The laziest programmers I met are H1B. And there are also some pretty smart ones that I learned a lot from and I continue to learn from.

To say that the H1B are all brilliant is hyperbole.

Well, if this small fee can help brilliant folks to explore their horizons outside US, it would be all worth in end.

I don't doubt your experience is true. But consider the fact that your experience can be true in parallel with the other scenarios people are highlighting.

> Every single H1B I worked with was brilliant in their field - and paid extremely well often in excess of $400K. I know several that are earning well past $500K. If you claim these are generic Jira pushers, well you are showing ignorance.

It's a lottery system. Yes, by random chance, some of the visas will go to people who can otherwise get a job at FAANG. But most of the industry is "JIRA pushers," and that's where most of the visas go.

That just means you worked with brilliant people paid in excess of $400K. It probably has more to do with where you worked than with the talent or compensation of H1Bs across the spectrum.

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