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As a H1-B myself, I think I'm pretty much a modern-day slave without the physical shackles. I hate going back to my home country and I love the intellectual, rational environment here. But I'm stuck with my current company until I get a green card which isn't bound to happen in the foreseeable future. I read his book on this and I agree with one of Matloff's points that H1-B should be solely for talent and I also agree with the reforms he suggests that there should be laws against exploiting them (ex: don't imprison them with the whole green card ruse which could take 6-8 yrs for some countries).

However, I disagree with his generalization that H1-Bs are talentless compared to Americans (Just look at Goog). And that somehow they're paid lower wages. All big companies (MSFT, FB, GOOG) pay H1-B candidates the same salaries as their American counterparts. And they all go through the same interview process. Personally, I went to a top 20 uni here and paid $100k in tuition alone. It is true that bringing more talented H1-Bs will drive down wages, but isn't that a competitive advantage ?(None of the European companies have this advantage really and I think it's one of the main reasons for the valley's growth.)

What we need to rectify is fraud of H1-Bs. Come up with a white list of companies that can use H1-Bs and make sure there's no cheap, talent less labor. Don't let body-shopping, consulting and outsourcing companies like Infosys, Wipro be issued H1-Bs. Most people in the operations group running our service for instance are on H1-B and frankly, the work they do can be done by any average American working at a BK/McDonalds. The pie that outsourcing companies are eating into is really a gold mine that should be used to expand the American middle class. But the outsourcing companies themselves seem to have powerful lobbying in place (NASSCOM). So it is a hard problem.

It's not that H1-B's get paid less than other workers, it is that by having more people available to do the same job it decreases the pay for all people doing said job. That's how the logic would appear to work, supply and demand, etc.

The thing with and H1-B is if they lose their job they have to leave the country the same day. That is a big incentive to work very hard and accept low compensation.

Is it actually the same day? That would be quite harsh. E3 Visa holders get 2 weeks IIRC.

Yes, right, 2 weeks and that makes it so less harsh!

Indeed, some time is better than being on a plane that night.

Yep, its same day. As crazy as it may sound, there is no respite period in H1, legally.

That's what I was alluding to in the second paragraph.

> I hate going back to my home country and I love the intellectual, rational environment here.

The US is an intellectual, rational environment? What are you from Borat's country?

I could have written this. You are my friend :)

> Most people in the operations group running our service for instance are on H1-B and frankly, the work they do can be done by any average American working at a BK/McDonalds.

That doesn't make sense. If they can be easily replaced, then why aren't they? Wouldn't it directly benefit the company hiring them to not hire them?

Also, I don't like your characterization of people based on where they work. A person may choose to work in BK/McDonalds but that doesn't imply anything (positive or negative) about their capability.

Hmm, why don't manager replace H1-B's with skill-less people at fast food wages? Managers do not necessarily do things that benefit the company. Managers need to maintain the appearance that their project is important and relevant. Their goal is having as many people as possible to manage. Actually accomplishing important work is not important. Yes, other people should notice that nothing is getting done and all these people are sitting around doing work that could be done by a fast food worker. What are you going to do, go tell the guy that approved the project that his project sucks and he and the entire management chain are failures?

> That doesn't make sense. If they can be easily replaced, then why aren't they? Wouldn't it directly benefit the company hiring them to not hire them?

In our cloud service, these guys are the first-line of defense in troubleshooting customer issues. They're the guys customers talk to and they follow a standard troubleshooting guide before pinging one of the on-call engineers. So it can't exactly be automated. And trust me, if that were possible, it would've been done. In a way, that's also one of the reasons this stuff is outsourced, companies don't want to go through the trouble of doing the hiring themselves for these roles.

> Also, I don't like your characterization of people based on where they work. A person may choose to work in BK/McDonalds but that doesn't imply anything (positive or negative) about their capability.

Sorry, I probably wasn't clear. That absolutely wasn't the message I was trying to get across. I understand working there doesn't mean anything about their capability and often it is a stepping stone to something greater (ex: college/high-school students). What I meant to say was the skill level here is the same. In effect, they just need to know their way around a machine and speak good English. Heck, they'd do a better job at it considering how poor the outsourced folks are at it. They'd even have more fun because there's still room for the occasional intellectual stimulation and creativity within these roles. And they'd be better pay too. Overall, it will be a better use of their time and they'd have more job satisfaction.

1. This is not a zero-sum game. The incremental value gained by a large company defrauding their employees may be the same dollar amount, but to the employees it makes a much larger subjective difference. Also the company that gets caught colluding once will have a much harder time regaining its good name.

A tech employee gets offered $300k/year + options? He jumps.

Google's "double irish" has $3 billion more in revenue? Ho hum, just another day.

2. Since it is not a zero-sum game, it makes sense to avoid the corrupt, lazy actions that Jobs, Schmidt, et al. have embraced. Hackers don't need to "band together" – all that means is appointing some PHB and blindly following him. Society's behavior just serves to convince us that the hacker ethos was right after all.

Each of us will make our own decisions.

Each of us will weigh the costs, benefits, and ethics.

Feel free to start a union or just go straight to a political party.

We are decentralized. No thank you to all forms of government.

> Society's behavior just serves to convince us that the hacker ethos was right after all. … We are decentralized. No thank you to all forms of government.

Well, I'm certainly convinced that pure optimism will trump powerful interests with huge financial reserves and far more influence with lawmakers and the media. How could this not succeed?

What exactly are you proposing? An alternative credo for hackers to ascribe to? Please specifically mention whether you are pro- or anti-union and whether you live and work in the US or not.

Edit: I see you're using Windows, so would you mind also listing your tech experience?

> I see you're using Windows, so would you mind also listing your tech experience?

WTF? Please explain your comment. If I take it literally it sounds like sheer unadulterated bigotry.

I am hoping that I completely misunderstood you. If that's the case, I very sincerely apologize and owe you a beer or two.

My responses should lead to more discussion, less flamewar.

I have strong feelings against Windows. I should have restrained myself.

I think you pegged me, but to my credit I'm no bigot, I just have a personal bias against Windows.

Fair enough, I have strong feelings against Windows and a personal bias against it too, and I use it every day!

I think what triggered my hot button there was the feeling that other tech people have looked down on me because I use Windows. I don't like Windows either, I just dislike it a bit less than the other operating systems. :-)

Sincere apologies if I overreacted, and if you're in the Bay Area feel free to take me up on that beer!

> What exactly are you proposing? An alternative credo for hackers to ascribe to?

I'm proposing a basic understanding of how markets work, specifically in this case how they can be distorted by a power disparity. Huge companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, etc. have an incentive and the means to do so, which means there needs to be some form of collective pressure to prevent that. This could be government regulation (i.e. what happened here), unions or something else but no ideological cult is going to make the problem magically disappear.

> Edit: I see you're using Windows, so would you mind also listing your tech experience?

I wasn't aware that pointing out the logical flaws in someone's argument required passing a shibboleth. I would also note that your observation could both be trivially answered if you put any effort into it so perhaps you should not be in the business of challenging the expertise of others.

Everyone held the anti union position because of the now proven illusion of meritocracy. You may well get your wish, all aspects of unions included.

> As if one person has any chance negotiating against a Fortune 500 company's HR department, legal department etc.

Of course, you do. Just vote with your feet.

The point that I think your comment is missing is that if the vast majority of employers are colluding to drive down prices your feet will invariably lead you to a less profitable place overall.

Also this response seems to indicate that an individual's actions will hold any meaning against the concerted and united effort of employers. Unless a multitude of others act in concert we, the developers, will be at a disadvantage.

The world is bigger than a few companies in Silicon Valley. Go work for a bank, in the worst case.

You believe that this ends at Silicon Valley. This most likely is common practice across a multitude of companies and industries.

There's just no way that every (or even most) companies in, say, the US, are all collectively colluding to do much of anything, much less fix wages. There's a reason that cartels don't really work, and that's because somebody always has an incentive to cheat. Same deal here... even IF you got every single company to agree to fix programmer salaries, it would never hold up, because some member of the group would either find a way to pay more and disguise it somehow, or they'd flat out openly rebel and take their chances.

Does this happen on a small scale among handfuls of companies? Almost certainly, as we've seen. But how much impact it has at a more macro level is certainly questionable.

It doesn't take every company, it realistically takes less then 30%.

I have never seen companies trying to pay more then the bare minimum to get someone to fill the role. Being generous, sadly, isn't in the DNA of the majority of organizations. They always attempt to pay as little as needed.

Of course they do. The secret ingredients are competition and bidding wars.

Exactly. I can't think of a more inane comment to an article on how companies are colluding together to prevent their workers from getting better opportunities than "vote with your feet". How exactly do you "vote with your feet" when company management's are colluding together to prevent just that?

Management and ownership has not only been organizing to protect their interests, they've even crossed the line into breaking the law, as they did here. They seem to have done well for themselves by organizing together for their collective interests, I think it would be a good idea for tech workers to take a page from their play book and do the same.

The thing that turns me off to unions are the work rules. Could you imagine if you couldn't use git because that work was reserved for source-code engineers? Work rules are the reason that you've never heard of an intellectually stimulating union job.

Tech engineers get pushed around by upper management and have failed to professionalize like doctors because too many of them lack social and political savvy. It's a clear personality trait in the profession. Look at the way so many programmers choose to dress and groom. Can you imagine a top lawyer looking like that? The importance of projecting a serious professional image to the broader society doesn't seem to even occur to most software people.

Exactly, but it's worse.

There are programmers who love calling themselves "geeks", "nerds", "code monkeys" and promote boot camp style schools as well as myths such as "anybody can code" such that people think any homeless person off the street is a coder.

You don't get doctors and lawyers talking down their own skills or saying it's easy.

Doctors and lawyers use the legal system to limit the number of people they compete with. I will not model my profession on those.

I agree. People here are acting as if our collective unwillingness to lobby for rent-seeking legislation, is a personality flaw.

This is the unfortunate truth.

So much for being smart and logical, most will never apply this to anything outside of a computer.

And most will turn their noses up at the ethics which would have them converting their technical ability and wealth into long-term power. (To see how this could be done, look at the relationships and rent-seeking behaviour around startup incubators. Others are deftly stealing your lunch.)

The affordance which a software engineer now has will not last forever; power left on the table is power lost. As engineering becomes more commoditised (through education and simpler tools) the pay check will drastically decrease but the less-than positive terms will remain.

It's a personal choice that anybody can make to raise their opinion of themselves, to learn how an executive (and other professions) behave and to not accept less than they are worth. There's so much opportunity to be had. Nobody should be acting like a cog! You should all be playing greater games and constantly redefining what you believe you can do.

A hustler is just a social hacker; a hacker is just a technical hustler. But a human being, they are neither: they are whatever they wish to be.

Nailed it right there "A hustler is just a social hacker; a hacker is just a technical hustler. But a human being, they are neither: they are whatever they wish to be."

I think there are two different "programmer archetypes" that help prevent unions from forming. The first you identified: programmers who have conflated, mistakenly, "doing what you love is more important than compensation" with "compensation is unimportant if the work you're doing is something you're passionate about."

The second is the cadre of elitist programmers who think they are more intelligent than anybody else, and that therefore if a programmer isn't swimming in money shoved at him by an employer it's because he's not good enough. The egos in the software world dwarf those in the academic world I come from (and that is, believe me, an impressive achievement). Hilariously, it seems to me at least that far more programmers fancy themselves a sort of Programming John Galt (or, perhaps, being a citizen of some Programmer's Lake Woebegon, where all the programmers are above average). They relish competition because they believe, erroneously, that they're working in a meritocracy and that their own skills are so exceptional they will definitely rise to the top anyway.

The problem is the opposite is just as bad, if not worse: programmers can't go around saying "I make tons of money because I have a rare skill/high IQ", because that sounds elitist (which is a very bad word these days). If programmers advertise themselves as a caste that you can only get into by luck/genetics, that only makes things worse.

> Look at the way so many programmers choose to dress and groom.

Doctors/lawyers interact with clients/patients a lot, so they dress to impress; whereas programmers only interact with other programmers or managers, who don't really care. If you're a programmer, the code you write matters much more than the human interaction around it (arguably the same can be said about doctors and lawyers, but a lot of people wouldn't hire a lawyer dressed in jeans and a t-shirt).

Also, there are external dress requirements. For example, a lawyer might get thrown out of court if he/she shows up in casual clothes.

> programmers only interact with other programmers or managers

This is the problem half the time. Nerds in childish t-shirts want to sit around pecking out code in isolation instead of taking full responsibility for their work by putting on a jacket and working the organization. This is why IT projects are consistently such disasters and why executives have the idea to get cheap grunts to do this stuff under a layer of middle managers.

I think you have a certain narrative about how the world works that you'd like the facts to fit into, but the facts - at least in Silicon Valley - don't actually fit into them. I doubt I'll be able to change your mind, but for bystanders' benefit:

The reason that programmers don't dress to impress is that their work product - the value that they add to other people - has nothing to do with their appearance. A programmer is paid for the software she creates; the user of that software has no idea what the programmer who wrote it looks like, and they judge the quality of it by what it does. So programmers have developed other metrics that they use to form a status hierarchy, notably the quality and difficulty of programs that you've written, but also things that are somewhat fuzzier like the technologies and tools you use.

Contrast this with a lawyer or salesman, where your buying decisions are directly influenced by how they present themselves and you often cannot directly determine the quality of their product. People in these professions have a strong incentive to present themselves well because customers have no other information to base their purchasing decisions on.

Certainly in the one metric shared across all professions - money - engineers at top tech companies are not being taken advantage of by management, nor are they "cheap grunts". A senior Google engineer makes more than all than about 2 of the salaries listed on the first page of a GlassDoor CEO search [1].

[1] http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/ceo-salary-SRCH_KO0,3.htm

In particular, coders do dress to impress-- they dress up the software to make it look fancier, bigger, more important, more substantial.

> Certainly in the one metric shared across all professions - money - engineers at top tech companies are not being taken advantage of by management, nor are they "cheap grunts". A senior Google engineer makes more than all than about 2 of the salaries listed on the first page of a GlassDoor CEO search

That's completely irrelevant. The point is not whether Google engineers make enough money to be comfortable, or an amount that other people would consider "a lot", or anything like that. The point is that "all" the relevant big tech companies in SV colluded, prisoner's dilemma style, to pay them less than they would have if there were no collusion.

I'm responding only to the parent poster, not to original article. The view put forth in this particular comment thread is that programmers are underpaid because they don't dress well, which I find ridiculous. The article has a more reasonable explanation that programmers are underpaid because their employers collude, but plenty of others have already responded to that.

Amen. It is the Jobs-Wozniak syndrome re-played again and again. We focus on technical issues and (mostly) ignore the business value we produce (aesthetics included). Guess what, the money is being made not because of code quality only, but from the business value it produces. So whoever presents him/herself neatly and can accentuate the awesomeness of the product (taking credit for your work), becomes the rainmaker and assumes power.

"Working the organization" is generally a low value activity as far as the organization is concerned.

What good does it do anyone aside from the schmoozer and the schmoozee that some middle manager at Apple is good as schmoozing?

True, techs are often nerds, but not always. Look at someone like Larry Ellison, or a lot of startup founders, etc. Also, look at how FOSS was created - by nerds. So, nerds can organize socially.

There are unions for cinematographers and editors in the media. Those are two terribly "nerdy" jobs, and the people who do them are, honestly, huge nerds.

Musicians have a union, and a pension system, and generally do pickup work rather than working for companies. And the musicians in that union are quite a mix of people ranging from "alternative" people (aka, cool nerds) and classical musicians.

Dressing is not important. Business casual is good enough unless you're working in an orchestra. You can be professional in jeans and short sleeved shirts. Most physicians in the ER dress casual.

I have no doubt that professionalization is highly related to social and political savvy. The ability to form an "in-group" and commit to doing what is in the interests of this group (thus solving the free-rider problem) is an essential social skill.

However, when groups professionalize in the sense of restricting the supply of people to that job, they are benefiting their own in-group at the expense of society as a whole (customers, employees and shareholders, people excluded from the profession, and indirectly, everyone else). Tech workers intuitively recognize this, and professionalization is the antithesis of hacker culture. In fact, I would say that professionalization wouldn't actually help the nerdy people you are referring to. It would just bring in different people (of course the social justice movement is already working hard to eliminate hacker/nerd culture from the tech industry).

As this article shows, tech workers are fighting this issue through the legal system. Maybe a union will be needed just to deal with this issue. I suspect that the rivalry between Google and Facebook, and the fear of further lawsuits, will keep competition rigorous in the short term.

Maybe if there were a tech workers union, we could finally organize politically for some pro-tech policy. Is there a better paid group of people who can't get anything done politically?