Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

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I'm increasingly agitated by these commentators on the topic, who have absolutely no idea what the ground reality is. Frequently, as in this case, they also seem to conflate two different problems: shortage of IT workers and shortage of software developers.

A software developer cannot be asked to manage a linux database; I mean she can, but that is not what she is good at. Conversely, an IT person cannot be asked to architect the backed of a payment gateway system. Of course there is some overlap (devops is what comes to mind). I'm guessing that most of FB/MS employees are probably developers, so when they mention IT workers in the same breath as shortage at FB/MS, they are exposing their ignorance.

Furthermore, the paper itself seems to be published as a "report" on the page of a dubious organizations. Come on journalists, please do some actual journalism! Ask more people than those who confirm what your story wants to show. Find and determine the truth of the story; that is what you are paid for!

edit: as I suspected, most of the funding for this "institute" comes from labor unions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Policy_Institute#Fundi...

That H1B is a mechanism for importing cheap labor is a fact, regardless of the messenger. Studies have been demonstrating this going back nearly a decade:

http://www.cis.org/sites/cis.org/files/articles/2005/back130...

I thought everyone in tech knew this as a fact already? I know most of my colleagues have experienced it. One of the last big teams I worked with in corporate years ago... after I left most of them were fired and about 1/2 the jobs were shipped overseas and the rest were H1B imports they brought into NYC making about 1/2 the salary.

Everyone in tech may know it, but it's still as tech companies as an argument for more visas.

Yes, but the labor imported is skilled and does not stay "cheap" for long.

That's why there are new H1B's each year, and its not a one time thing -- to have a continuous flow of additional supply to depress labor prices.

h1b makes switching jobs difficult.

In what way?

In a sense that your employer needs to file a Labor certification application, determine the prevailing wage and ultimately USCIS granting your petition. It takes a while to get it all done.

... like 2-3 weeks? That's how long mine took, just a short while ago.

H1B presents some friction in switching jobs, but to call it "difficult", especially in current market conditions, is vastly overselling it.

What if you wanted to work in a completely different field, go to law school, or quit your job and start a new business?

Transferring an H1b is really not that hard to do. We did it for less than $15k or so and a few weeks of back-and-forth at my last startup. Don't be put off by the process.

It's a bit hard to get a clear impression from this discussion about the amount of difficulty for transferring between employers on an h1b. Can anyone who has been through this process more than once (either as an employer or employee) shed more light on this please?

TLDR : lose your job or quit, and you lose your visa. Zero grace period (laid off/quit on Friday, illegal immigrant by Saturday).

Although the regulations do not provide a grace period for unemployment between H-1B employers, USCIS generally approves petitions to change from one employer to the next and considers you to have maintained status if the gap is 30 days or less. CAVEAT: your (new) employer is the one that has to request the change, so if your new employer isn't organized to do this, or doesn't want to, you're in the country illegally and won't get paid.

So there's a "the administration hates congress" grace period of 30 days. After that, you actually have to leave the country and cannot start work somewhere else.

I completely agree with your assessment that software engineers aren't exactly fungible, but I also don't think the authors of this paper are wrong. Salaries really should be much higher than they are.

If companies started paying 2x-3x current rates they would start attracting very senior people who would spend the time necessary to retrain for the positions paying a lot more.

Also, at 2x-3x the rates, some business models would cease to be viable, freeing up the developers working on those businesses to be available for hire by the companies rating in the dough.

We really haven't begun to scratch the surface of trying to fix this problem by being more competitive with salary.

Usage of the term STEM is quite opaque.

There's a list that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement provides http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STEM_fields#STEM-eligible_degre... and it covers "physics, actuarial science, chemistry, biology, mathematics, applied mathematics, statistics, computer science, computational science, psychology, biochemistry, robotics, computer engineering, electrical engineering, electronics, mechanical engineering, industrial engineering, information science, civil engineering, aerospace engineering, chemical engineering, astrophysics, astronomy, optics, nanotechnology, nuclear physics, mathematical biology, operations research, neurobiology, biomechanics, bioinformatics, acoustical engineering, geographic information systems, atmospheric sciences, educational/instructional technology, software engineering, and educational research".

If you wanted the research to sound dramatic, you could then require the S part of STEM to include all of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branches_of_science and quickly jump to a conclusion that just because somebody with a sociology or meteorology major had trouble finding good work, domestic tech companies should be barred from bringing in more STEM majors on H1-B.

If your primary point of "this is garbage" is because it's funded by labor unions, you've got bigger problems than your flawed logic.

Yup, invalidating by dint of the source is just classic ad hominem. That's especially problematic here since - in this case - the unions actually have a point.

If tech companies were less focused on H1-Bs in particular, and were simply advocating for more high skill workers to be given green cards, I'd have an easier time taking them at their word. But they're not. They only want people admitted under terms that strip them of negotiating power, and there's no publicly defensible reason for that.

I mean, the optics are just terrible. In the long run, I don't see how this doesn't come back to bite the companies involved.

And how does one get a green card in this country pray tell? One need to have an underlying immigration status in this country while you begin your decade long process for a gc.

You don't need to have an underlying immigration status in the US to start the application (according to a lawyer I asked this question). And it takes a decade only if you come from India (or other country that provided a large number of immigrant). For many countries it is a matter of months.

In all but the most special/uncommon cases it's likely to take more than months (unless you also consider 9-12 months to be a matter of months). I know many, many engineers who have gone through the US immigration process. Some had good experiences, some had bad ones, but I don't know anyone for whom the entire process took a matter of months - and their employers are the sort who would spend quite a bit of money to move things faster if they could.

For employment-based green cards you generally have to get PERM labor certification (where the sponsoring employer literally advertises your job and has to show that there aren't American citizens/green card holders who can do it). That takes a while on its own (weeks, generally months).

Then depending on your education/experience, you get a date which corresponds to your position in an immigrant visa queue. The more education/experience you have the higher the queue you can sit in, and it's done by birth country (not citizenship). There are separate queues for China, India, Mexico, Philippines, and "everywhere else." If you have a graduate degree, significant job experience directly related to the US position, or some skill the lawyers can pass off as highly rare/sought after, you might end up in the EB-1/EB-2 queues which are quite short (if you entered the queue today you'd already be at the front). In which case the processing time might only be a few weeks/months.

Or you could end up in the EB-3 queue (bachelor's or equivalent experience a.k.a. many software engineers). Right now people who entered the queue 2 years ago are at the front if they're not from China/India/Mexico/Philippines (http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/law-and-policy...), 4 years ago for China, and 11 years ago for India.

Once you get to the front of that queue, you need to "adjust status" which means a physical exam, fingerprinting, and other busy work none of which appear to be based on country of origin. You could end up here for a few months or over a year, it's hard to know until you find out what USCIS service center is processing your case and can look up historical data. Until you get to the end of this you're technically still bound to your employer though there are some loopholes. Adjustment of status can take sufficiently long that the government passed a law in 2000 allowing green card petitions in this state to be fully portable across employers after 180 days.

most employers typically don't start your greencard application until you've been working for them for 1-2 years.

That is not my primary point. The point I was trying to make is that the journalist has interviewed one author of a "paper" that is published as a "report" on a biased organizations website. In short, he is trying to feign an appearance of rigor and research where there is none.

The EPI is about as unbiased as the US Chamber of Commerce.

They also conflate STEM with IT in this article.

What, precisely, is a "linux database"?

Apologies, I meant a database running on a linux system.

Maybe I've just been lucky with the coworkers I've had, or maybe the problems I've been working on aren't as hard as they seem, but in all the jobs I've worked we have never needed someone specifically trained on how to (per your example) manage a MySQL database running on one or more Linux systems. I think I'd argue that any mid-to-senior-level developer who can't manage to figure it out in a few days is underexperienced or undereducated, where "database use" is within their domain.

> maybe the problems I've been working on aren't as hard as they seem.

Most likely this. When you have a horizontally sharded MySQL database that spans multiple datacenters - managing replication, failover and scaling out is not something you would expect most developers to be able to handle.

Let alone fine-tuning various kernel parameters, in depth monitoring and other performance tunings.

EDIT: Sure most experienced developers would have a high level and abstract idea about various things that may be outta whack - but it takes some one with expertise in the field to go beyond guesses.

It's not so much that the developer wouldn't eventually figure it out, but more that the sysop would already know how to do it, saving time (and errors).

Yes, you've been lucky.

Most of the software we use hasn't existed long enough for real specialization. Hell, there are still people who were alive before software existed.

If you ask me, the real problem was whatever legal technicalities allowed vendors to create certification programs for "experts" using their own software.

Why would you waste the time of mid-to-senior level developers on managing MySQL databases?

Managing databases is an operational overhead. You want to minimize expenditure on it. Developers create IP. You want to maximize investment into that.

There is no such thing as a shortage in a market economy.

That's only true in the long run.

This industry has been complaining about "shortages" for decades. We're well into the long run. Give me a break.

how many people does FB, Ms and Google need? Why not just start a scholarship program for high schoolers, boom more typists in four years. this h1b nonsense has been going on for at least the last twenty years.

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