Immigration is about talent, not costs
aerofs.com
aerofs.com
But it's worse than that. An Indian coworker once shared an unsubstantiated story about how an unscrupulous recruiter brought over a bunch of IT workers from India and forced them to work for essentially nothing. One call to immigration from their employer and they are sent back. It's hard for me to imagine the vulnerability of being in a place distant from my home with minimal language skills and no knowledge of my rights. Neither your boss nor US immigration is your friend.
Another thing I see from Indian workers is a strange ability to be experts in extremely specific and obscure technologies. If in an interview if I am asked about my proficiency in unfamiliar piece of software, I might respond "It looks similar to other tools I have used. I am sure I could pick it up quickly."
This is NOT what pointy-haired HR suit-monkeys want to hear.
I don't know if Indians are more comfortable lying about this, or if they take a crash course to prepare for the interview, or if they are graduates of some school in India called "The Institute of Suspiciously Obscure Technologies" but this may be a large part of the justification behind the "talent" excuse for more H1-Bs.
There is plenty of talent domestically - they real business need is simply being buzzword-compliant and an unwillingness to train.
If that came across a little racist, Let me say that with rare exception the Indian people I have known are competent and pleasant coworkers. I have no personal issues there.
> an unscrupulous recruiter brought over a bunch of IT workers from India and forced them to work for essentially nothing. One call to immigration from their employer and they are sent back
One call to immigration and the company would be quite fucked with horrible fees and probably an audit / prosecution for fraud and human rights abuses. One does NOT mess with this. They'd never dare. What would happen is that they'd just not renew the person's visa, screwing them over that way.
> with minimal language skills and no knowledge of my rights
Let's be honest here, a TON of Indians (especially those in the higher economic strata that afforded a good education and picked up IT skills) have great english, and are perfectly capable of reading their rights, which if you've ever gone through the process, you'll know in minute detail.
That's not to say that abuse doesn't happen, but I think your view of how it happens is very skewed, and you're quite misinformed. It's much more banal and sinister than that. Then again, it's the exception rather than the norm among the more "modern" companies. The abusers, I think, would tend to be the large IT sweatshops and "consulting" firms.
No one apart from the US has figured out how to build billion dollar companies like popcorn.
It's understandable seeing this kind of stuff on reddit from 13 year-olds. But I don't understand what vantage makes you make such sweeping generalizations about a supposedly monolithic chunk of 1 billion human beings.
Haven't you heard the joke about how pretty much everything that requires a caveat "not trying to be racist here" is actually racist?
That's not what I got out of reading that same snippet
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"What author seems to be saying is - status-quo is not a solution. Is there a shortage of good engineering talent(I am not talking about bottom 50%), but top 20%? I think answer is emphatically yes - worldwide.
Has US benefited from those top 20% who have managed to migrate to US? It would be foolish to say no.
Lastly, this is on official company blog. It is not politically correct to publicly lambast companies which are abusing visa system. But that does not make Author's argument weaker.
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2489146/technology-law-...
Top 5:
* INFOSYS
* TATA
* COGNIZANT
* ACCENTURE
* WIPROBut, thankfully, my experience in the "big corporate enterprisey space" is minimal.
Or take HP: I have an Internet acquaintance who got laid off along with a number of other older workers at the same time (around age 50 for him). He later noticed an explicit (yes, we all know that's against the law) attempt to hire someone through the H-1B program for quite a bit less than he had been earning. Again, "real" technology work on their more serious printers.
In fact, the way you can tell this is bs and it is entirely about price is AeroFS opened a canadian subsidiary! I wonder how much that cost. At a guess, $30k? So apparently $30k is less than the premium required to pry engineers out of dropbox or box.
Or god forbid, train someone.
Excuse me, he is just a guy with a company, not some demi-God who has access to a list of all qualified people out there.
When people say: "Hey, there's talent in the US! Look hard and you will find it!", you are kinda missing the circumstances under which he is operating.
First, the cost. Are you suggesting he offer $1 million for a job that used to go for $200,000 just because he can't find anyone? That is flawed economics and a blind faith in the market. The market is not perfectly elastic. We're talking about people, and not mass-produced goods or primary, replaceable material (Iron, Coal etc.). He probably can't operate profitably at those prices.
Second, people are super diverse, and from personal experience, its very very hard to find the right kind of people for any job. If he's found someone who works well for the company, he's very lucky and realizes that. All he wants to do is to bring him to his main office so that he can possibly be more efficient and productive, and the current US labor laws are not letting him do so.
>In fact, the way you can tell this is bs and it is entirely about price is AeroFS opened a canadian subsidiary! I wonder how much that cost. At a guess, $30k? So apparently $30k is less than the premium required to pry engineers out of dropbox or box.
What if engineers working at dropbox are perfectly happy where they are? How do you know that he hasn't tried that? Does he even have time to court all the employees of dropbox; he probably has much better things to do with his time.
>Or god forbid, train someone.
Anecdotally, this is false. I admit I've worked only for 2 American companies so far, but both of them have been incredibly involved with the local community; hiring many entry-level engineers, giving internships to students from community colleges and organizing learn-to-code events on premises.
Of course it is about cost. Because if he kept upping his offer, he would get someone (if the office is a normal place). He simply does not want to pay the going rate for the skill set he needs. I'd like to hire lots of people on HN for minimum wage as well - I know that's not reasonable though and I don't whine about it.
This is a flawed assumption. The US has nearly unlimited room to accept immigration, and on average every single immigrant we accept would increase the size of our economy. Immigrants are not a "drain on the system" that must be limited. Human brains are the single most valuable resource in the universe, and we should take as many as we can. Not only that, but the people who self-select to move their families across the world are the most motivated, entrepreneurial, and risk-seeking brains in the world.
Our default assumption should be that the walls are down and the gates are open; only in extraordinary cases should we be sending anyone (regardless of skills) away at the border.
The unstated assumption underlying the assertion that "the U.S. has nearly unlimited room to accept immigration" is that culture, and institutions arising out of that culture, doesn't matter. That's false. Culture and institutions are what make the U.S. worth immigrating to in the first place.
And I say this as an immigrant. My parents didn't leave their lives half a world away to come here for the weather.
If 100% of immigrants are neurosurgeons, that simultaneously gluts the domestic labor market for neurosurgery and creates shortages in all the other jobs that typically support neurosurgeons, down to the cafe baristas and hairdressers.
What you want is to import the right immigrants at the right time. If you get an unbalanced mix, the economy will be disrupted as surely as a washing machine with socks on one side and jeans on the other.
Limiting the absolute number per year allows the economy to adjust as the new participants come in. Being a little smarter about the different skill sets that come in would allow greater absolute numbers to immigrate and assimilate.
But I don't particularly trust the bureaucracy to calculate the numbers that would provide the greatest overall economic benefits, either, so perhaps a stupider and simpler system that largely eliminates the need for bureaucratic decision-making would be best.
Average human brains are not a scarce resource as seen by all practical evidence - globally, they're being manufactured at near-record numbers, they're a sustainable resource that we can make more in the future, they're not fully used (9 million of them unemployed) and we're okay with deliberately throwing away many of them (e.g. incarcerating 2 million).
In addition, there is significant unequality between the regions of the world. Simply equalizing the global wealth per capita would be a very unwanted change for most of the first world, simply being pushed down to the average would be a catastrophic decrease. Equal opportunities for everyone worldwide would also hurt current first world citizens, who right now do have significantly above average opportunities. You can charge an order of magnitude more for the same job or service simply because you are here and "they" are not. It is rather obvious that there are some practical reasons why they would vote to preserve the status quo.
Your answer MUST be expressed a NUMBER, not some vapid BS platitude.
But this is all politics, and as such it should probably be flagged.
No, we don't have unlimited room, unless you're planning to not feed or provide water to these people long term.
Yeah, bull. Not even.
No, the actual assumption is that the US wants to bias its flow of immigrants towards high-skilled, high-value people working in high-value-add positions. If human brains are a valuable resource, he is proposing that the government should issue visas to the best and brightest resources it can get.
When I came to the US on H1B I made up 25% of the company, at the time the cost was already significant enough to prevent any "abuse".
However, this would also mean that startups would likely find it impossible to earn H1-B's in competitive fields, as a fair amount of the compensation is future-loaded.
Or, to put it another way: who's going to win a bidding war for Employee X, Microsoft or {Startup Working to Become Microsoft}?
BTW there are few visa's (if any) for "limited" or occasional visits to the US.
Over time, yes, engineers are engineers, and those perking will be a continuous opportunity for startups to hire. However, it doesn't help at all if you want to hire the world's top talent in {insert new technology that didn't exist 2 years ago}. And isn't that ideally what this is about?
Almost all of the money 'startups' are raising is destined for employee compensation. This would just be another form of it.
Summary: Open work permits that segue into GC's are my preferred approach.
[1] Verified via IRS filings. The applicant gives permission to DHS to check the IRS filings.
It's completely doable. The only downside is that processing the visa transfer takes time. Nowhere near the amount of time it takes to get a new visa, of course, but it's still longer than a two week notice.
For instance, registered nurses and dental hygienists in the bay area earn a bit more and a bit less than application developers, respectively. Under the H1B terms, it would be difficult for a programmer to become a physician, lawyer, nurse, dental hygienist, mortgage broker, or many other jobs. As a result a salary and prospects gap can emerge between programming and these fields - increasing the probability that those people with freedom and choice will avoid programming (and ensuring that the "shortage" continues decade after decade).
Truth is, visa programs that are designed to target specific jobs or industries by allowing workers only to work for a specific employer or in a specific field are likely to end up badly distorting labor markets.
But on the other side every good dev I know from my uni in Aus is sucked up by MS, GOOG or FB. They had offers before they even graduated. The most they could get in Aus was 50-80k AUD. In US 120k+ is easy.
From the Australian side they legitimately have a talent issue as talent gets sucked to US. From the US side, I see a huge income gap. Tech pays so well the guys are buying big cars and being lavish with their inflated egos. The average american is still on 50k. They can't keep up with the rent rises.
Careful what you wish for. I wish other parts of the world could achieve the size of tech the US west coast has.
Sounds like a great way to skew immigration in favour of big business and completely screw over start ups and SMBs.
Citation needed!
For reference, here's a toy model where pricing a scarce resource screws someone over:
- There are two people in the model, Alice and Bob.
- Alice is very rich, Bob is very poor.
- Each of them needs a loaf of bread per day to survive (100 utility), and would also enjoy eating a second loaf (1 utility).
- Initially, each of them gets a loaf from the government for free. There are only two loaves available per day.
- Now let's price the scarce resource, and have the government sell the loaves instead! Alice buys both loaves and enjoys life. Bob doesn't get anything and dies.
Right?
Suppose we make your exact scenario about a rare/endangered species of caviar. Bob can still buy bread for one credit but you're arguing that the government should ensure the equitable distribution of caviar because the market price isn't fair to Bob who can't afford it. Bob is not getting screwed, Bob just can't afford caviar.
Now that doesn't mean it shouldn't have restraints. But it does mean there are winners and losers and it is perfectly fair and reasonable to call them out.
(Edit: Who the hell is downvoting the artificial scarcity comments? That's absurd. Care to have an actual discussion?)
Tata can rake the auction price up because even though their worker doesn't have a great salary, they're being billed a lot. 10k, 20k for a H1B? NO PROBLEM!
You're just shutting the small players out.
As an example, Red Hat hires a lot of H1Bs, now, since they know how to work remotely this is not such a big issue, still.
"Fuck you, pay me."
I find it applicable here as well.
If programmers were paid like doctors, more talented people would start considering programming over med school or finance as a career. And then you would have more "talent". That's economics, that's capitalism. (Yes, laws hindering immigration are a trade barrier, and hiring immigrants is "more efficient" and therefore "better for consumers". But free trade advocates tend to only favor free trade for them. See, e.g. farming subsidies.)
So the question is, who deserves the money more, the developers or the CEOs and shareholders? Well, in our system today, the money goes to whoever has more power and fights harder for it. So, as a developer, I'm inclined to fight for my side, just as OP is fighting for his.
That is a kind of a bullshit argument though isn't it, that "hey look, the interns (supposedly half-able, incompetent newbies) are getting paid so high!! We have such wonderful salaries in tech!"
It's a lie, a total misrepresentation of the facts. The interns are usually super programmers themselves. I mean, for instance, when Alex Gaynor was "interning" at Quora he ported Quora to run on PyPy. He's a really big contributor to projects like Django and PyPy. When he's "interning" at your company he's probably more able than a lot of other folk you could find, and he should be getting very big bucks. So this argument is really just complete hogwash. A good amount of times I see the interns training employees rather than the other way around (as it should be).
Secondly, they're interning in the valley, where "boarding" costs are about equal to costs of getting a mansion in a midwestern city in a reasonably safe and fun neighborhood. When you're "making 90k" in the valley you have the quality of life worth ~60k in a midwestern city. If anything, they are underpaid.
edit: minor revision on figures for clarity of argument; though I do agree with moc down below when he says "If you're comparing suburbs (Silicon Valley) to suburbs, the discrepancy is much greater and I'd say that $90k/CA ~= $40k/Midwest"
Not true at all, yet this is constantly repeated like it's fact.
Look up indifference curves and consumption bundles. You're ignoring microeconomics. For anyone that doesn't assign excessively high utility towards housing size, 90k in the valley is a much better quality of life than 30k in a midwestern city.
This is where cost of living calculators fail as well. You can't compare the same basket of goods everywhere you go. People will adjust their basket of goods depending on relative prices; it doesn't mean that their utility has dropped. It's income effect vs substitution effect.
Edit: The number above has been changed to 60k~. I'd say this is probably a more reasonable argument. As for the suburban argument, I don't really know the numbers and I can't argue there. As a person in my 20s who grew up in San Jose, the suburbs are like a bad dream that continuously haunts me.
When I look at the numbers for that basket of goods that I currently consume, and price it out for San Francisco, I find that it is completely unattainable for anything less than 3 times what I currently pay, and could be difficult to reliably source for less than a multiple of 4. That's the fact.
It does not matter that I would in reality have to substitute down to inferior goods. It would still be objectively worse than what I have now. The value of my willingness to substitute counterbalances the savings I make by substituting. If I move back to the cheaper area, I won't keep the SV basket; I will substitute right back to the best goods that I can afford.
Imagine that every day, for every meal, you eat spaghetti carbonara. You'd be almost as happy eating linguine with pesto, but you happen to have a slight preference for spaghetti carbonara. Now you move somewhere else where, for whatever reason, spaghetti is 100x the price and every other ingredient is only 2x the price. Are you suddenly 100x poorer? No, much nearer 2x, because you'll just switch from spaghetti to linguine. You'll be slightly worse off than 2x because, darn it, you preferred spaghetti, but only slightly.
Moving to San Francisco from (say) Minnesota is a bit like that. Housing is a bajillion times more expensive, so you'll have to make do with a lot less of it, but unless housing is the only thing you care about that doesn't mean you're a bajillion times worse off. You do need some housing, and many other things are also more expensive, so there's no argument that you're worse off in SF for any given level of income. But not by the factor the price of housing would suggest.
(A couple of other remarks about this sort of comparison. 1. The richer you are, the less these things matter -- if you're putting a substantial fraction of your income into investments, those don't change in price at all just because you move to San Francisco. 2. Relatedly, if you are able to buy a house rather than renting, you're not as much worse off as the eyewatering price of the house would suggest -- because later on you can move out of San Francisco, sell that house, and get the money back again.)
Thus, you can't really tell me how much I'd have to earn to be equally happy in SV as I am elsewhere, but you can easily tell me how much I'd need to maintain equal consumption there.
You can get some of your money back when reselling the house, possibly even within six months of listing it. I would not blithely make assumptions about any market when a bubble appears to be growing nearby.
You obviously didn't own a house in the US about 5-6 years ago...
(As it happens, I indeed didn't own a house in the US 5-6 years ago, but I'm well aware of what happened.)
That's because it is true...
I moved from the Midwest to the peninsula 3 years ago (for my wife's work). I made roughly those numbers there and here and the standard of living was roughly the same, maybe even dropped a little. Living in Silicon Valley is easily 2-3X more expensive than living in a place like Indianapolis or Columbus, OH.
You honestly don't feel these pressures as much until you're older and have a family. At least, the differences between the regions are much more apparent with a family. For example, we need a certain amount of living space, and there are a set of fixed expenses. We lived in about the same size homes here and there, and just the cost for that alone more than tripled.
Your idea of a consumption bundle is appealing, but not very practical... you are assuming that there are things that can be adjusted, but for many, that just isn't the case. If you don't have a family, you might be able to get away with living in a smaller place. But if you do have one, for any given standard of living, there is a certain minimum size that you need. And the increase in costs in housing severely limit the flexibility that you might have in other areas.
I was mainly replying to your assertion that it isn't 2-3X more expensive to live in the Bay Area than the Midwest. I'm sorry to tell you that it is.
There is no certain minimum size that you need; you simply place a lot of utility of living space as opposed to other goods up to a certain point, at which diminishing returns kick in. The amount of utility you place clearly increases as you have more family members to take care of. In the case of an intern, this is generally not an issue.
There are also other purchases besides food and transportation that do not increase; the cost of travel and vacationing, for instance. Technology generally remains the same cost throughout the US. Clothing, I'd imagine, doesn't increase too much.
> I was mainly replying to your assertion that it isn't 2-3X more expensive to live in the Bay Area than the Midwest. I'm sorry to tell you that it is.
It can be. It depends on the utility you place on sq ft as opposed to all other goods. However, it is not an axiom that one needs 3x the money to live in the Bay in order to remain at the same indifference curve level as they previously did in the Midwest.
Our take home $ into bank accounts tells an entirely different story. The raise more than made up for any increased cost of living.
It kind of makes sense too, if it didn't make sense, people wouldn't be doing it, there wouldn't be so much demand, and prices would fall.
Here's a copy paste of my explanation on reddit though (where this topic also constantly comes up):
Living in the Bay Area results in a higher wage, which increases consumption (income effect), but at the same time the price of housing is much higher as well (to a greater degree than the increase in income). You substitute sq ft with other goods. If you place relatively heavy utility on housing by sq ft in comparison to all other goods, then I guess it's a bad idea to come out here, because you're going to be on a lower indifference curve. Otherwise (and I think most people fall under 'otherwise', which is why they come out here ) its not that bad of an idea, and you'll probably end up on a higher indifference curve.
Your living area is probably No.1 contributor to quality of life.
That might be true for you. Everyone has different indifference curves determined by the utility they place on different goods.
As for sq. feet minimums, at lower levels of sq ft. you will place higher utility on marginal sq. feet, sure, and diminishing returns will probably not have kicked in.
If you're comparing suburbs (Silicon Valley) to suburbs, the discrepancy is much greater and I'd say that $90k/CA ~= $40k/Midwest. That's because Silicon Valley has so much less in the way of urban amenity, but still charges an urban premium that you wouldn't see 20 miles out of Minneapolis. When you adjust for commute, suburban California ("the Valley") looks even worse.
Is this just a convenient fiction?
Those 1% are worth every penny, but you simply don't know who they are until you give the entire intern class the opportunity to demonstrate their abilities.
They are almost never worthless. Small startups who are not experienced with interviewing may get a few bad apples, but companies like Quora (and the others on the list in submission article) don't make those mistakes. Sure, they may not all be Alex "Im-a-core-dev-for-Pypy" Gaynor's, but generally they'll be worth every penny of that 90k and another 90k more.
http://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-Google-Interns-get-f...
I really doubt this number. Rehire rates are an important consideration for college students, and they talk. An offer rate below 50% would be damaging.
That said, a lot of people find better offers elsewhere, but no tech company is going to no-offer 90% of its interns and keep its reputation intact.
Nothing in the article disputes the basic economics of #2. Sure there is competition for talent, there is competition in every facet of business. The trick is to find the ratio between how much value a business extracts from a resource and how much value the business provides to the resource; that ratio needs to stay above 1.
Every decision is a cost/benefit analysis. If costs aren't a factor in your hiring, then raise your salary offers. How hard will it be to attract great engineers if you start offering $5M/year?
That said, this post is crafted marketing nonsense.
For example, a statement like this from a company founder is ridiculous: "In fact, the restrictions on H-1B visas make that entire topic moot since highly skilled talent must meet strict wage requirements set by the US government based on prevailing wages in the county you're hiring the person into, in the skill-level and profession of that person."
Let's be real here. Every big bank and insurance company has battalions of "Senior Programmer/Analysts" churning out J2EE for $35k/year or less. "Prevailing wage" is a term of art that doesn't mean what it sounds like it ought to.
Source: http://cis.org/2012-profile-of-americas-foreign-born-populat...
"We estimate that 28 percent of all immigrants are in the country illegally. Roughly half of Mexican and Central American and one-third of South American immigrants are here illegally."
Per the population figures in the link... Approximately 6 million people from Mexico and Central America alone don't have legal status. Those people are more vulnerable to all sorts of employer abuses, usually don't have healthcare, can't legally drive in many cases and face all sorts of other challenges.
Doesn't US have a green card lottery?
We literally have 5 million Mexicans living in the US as second class people without access to worker protections and other institutional things. It's a situation that shouldn't exist.
My grandparents came here in the 1930's and 1940's. In those days, entry was pretty trivial. No reason why it shouldn't be that way again.
They complain about a lack of talent, but really they're complaining about the high price of talent and the difficulty of enticing strong talent.
If they're not willing to pay enough to entice someone reputable to switch, they figure that a political solution is cheaper.
This isn't about developer X using framework Y; this is about research level PhDs (and equivalent) that cannot continue work for a US-based company because of visa issues.
Also, in the current system, even if he wants to steal people from other tech companies, there is a good chance those people are on H1B, and that it will be exceedingly hard to steal them without immigration problems (particularly if they are, as is likely, to have a green card application in process.)
Would you buy a hamburger for 100$? You cannot "just increase" what you are willing to pay. You are limited by market economics.
Giving this third choice, I don't think that restricting H1B visas in some fashion (either through cost or availability) will necessarily have the effect of increasing domestic wages. It may have the opposite effect and drive companies to open up shop outside of the US - Microsoft opened up a development shop in Canada for just this reason [1] and my understanding is that Microsoft would strongly prefer that all of its employees be in one location.
The biggest risk would be that American companies start choosing non-US locations as their engineering center-of-gravities because they want to avoid the coordination costs of distributed development without losing the ability to hire non-American workers [2].
[1] http://thetyee.ca/News/2007/11/07/MSWord/
[2] This already happens at a small scale already. I know of a SF-based startup that moved their engineering organization to Europe because they couldn't get visas for key team members.
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21576101-start-ups-fo...
I'm guessing this was through the DV Lottery program? If so I agree that the goal of immigration should be to attract the best and the brightest but there are plenty of ways to do that. The DV program is the only avenue for people who haven't had a chance in life to become the best and brightest yet - it's their only way in. Your friend could presumably get in on a work visa which, considering her qualifications, shouldn't be difficult. The DV program is a lottery and the only way for people who don't meet the strict requirements of the other visas to get in. Even when you win your chance at acceptance is 50/50 as they issue 2x the number of winning entries as they have visas available to account for people who win and change their mind or get in via a spouse.
DV is a nice 'instant jackpot' option. Some people I know were playing DV even when they had EB GC pending. Small percentage of those won the GC, and opted for DV (paid out of pocket) instead of waiting for company-sponsored EB.
Like I've said in the past, and it is a simple solution that would make people like AeroFS happy is to have an economic one: Your H1-B employee must be paid in the >95% (or more) percentile in the field, or in your company, no which ever is greater. All salaries must be compared to that of senior engineers or higher.
That's when the real "need" shows up and that will weed out the bogus H1-B gamers and get real value from it. Now, if we are still capping out on H1-Bs even with this rule, then we can then agree that there is a "tech workers shortage".
Before then, we all know it's either using improper induction (one brown cow) or examples to try and prove a contradiction (has always been invalid), or they are flat out lying.
His experience is exactly my experience too: I have hired a lot of H1-Bs (perhaps 5-10% of all the hires I've done over the years) and they were always a last resort because at the end of the day they cost so damned much.
I don't see anything wrong with this. Hire a local if you can, just like shopping locally if you can.
(I suppose if you're a commodity contractor shop hiring people to write Java code as the front end of a billing system, the situation might be different -- that's the programming equivalent of hiring a gardener and I assume in most cases skills aren't considered that important).
It is orthogonal to the conversation, and yet he brought it up. It is there for a reason, and that reason is to point out that it is costly to hire an engineer. Why would he bring up that point?
So what exactly where the salaries of those on H1-Bs? If you put on your job posting, that the salary range would be 250-300K, do you think you'd be digging through the bottom of the barrel for the resumes?
Lastly, what is the difference in costs to you? In house lawyer (if the company is large enough, can handle the docs). Paperwork for them is a few K. Relocation and interview process is nearly a wash for out of state candidates. Again, a few K delta.
That then is the excuse of a lower salary for the employee (by a significant amount).
So "expensive" in terms of processing seems like not a whole lot in the grand scheme of things.
The cost to hire that h1B person is going to be much higher and hence the lower wage.
But I'd like to make a point that addresses an underlying assumption from the blog post.
Most people who would like to see the H1-B system reformed or limited do not also want to limit the immigration of highly technical people. Full stop.
The H1-B system is gamed and unfortunately the OP lost out because of it. I'd really like to see the OP advocating for reform instead of mindless expansion so that companies who really need the technical talent can get it and not become losers of the system and take the easy way out of advocating for expansion.
That's a static and simple perspective though. In the real world ceterus is not parabus. Widening your search net to include people educated and experienced elsewhere has value. "Production" is not limited by a simple demand-price function, but by ideas and execution. There are also a lot of "impossible to measure but undeniably there" effects brought on by trade in goods, migration of people and such. Hubs have a vibrancy to them that have been obvious to observers since ancient times. People are not commodities like coal or lead. Price dynamics are real, but the don't capture everything. There is a rising tide element that is almost certainly substantial. The industry's success, creates opportunities for employees.
I'm not American, so I don't have a dog in this. But, it seems to me that the US got to where it has gotten to by being a dynamic hub sucking up the vibrant and ambitious of the world.
And it is very upsetting to me that this lottery even takes place. How does it even make sense? This system was designed for the world of 20 years ago, when people barely ever travelled outside of their country.
From an economic perspective it makes sense, too. My wife came with her family from Vietnam in 1991. They were given 1 year of public assitance of $1100 per month. There were 11 people living in a rented house that didn't speak a word of English. Since that time they have grown up, gone to college (and paid for it through working side-jobs), become nurses, optometrists, and doctors. The return the US is getting on their pitiful $13K investment 20 years ago is an annuity worth $Millions in taxes alone! Sign me up for that kind of investment!
Maybe this company hires for talent and not costs, but every place I've been hires for both, so to pretend costs aren't factored in seems to be an oversight.
My personal experience is that it is generally true that H-1B is used by companies to get the same level of expertise with reduced cost, and to me the issue still stands that for every immigrant that gets hired, an American is potentially out of job. The worst I saw this was at a genetics lab, and while we would fly people in from all over the country, we had a sizable percentage of H-1B's.
Perhaps there is some other math that I haven't seen that shows a H-1B worker ends up contributing to the local economy by a factor, but the primary offset I see with that is most of the time they are sending large portions of their money to their home country, because they may be able to get their wife here but the rest of the family is still OCONUS.
What it all boils down to is a disruption in the standard accepted economic model in this globalized world. Companies aren't forced to be "patriotic", and will seek to optimize profit (and if that means hiring better talent from elsewhere at a cheaper price, so be it). This outlook though, conflicts with what I understand of the history and purpose of corporations. In the days of the British East India company (on of the first "Company's"), the monarchy retained the right to revoke letters patent or royal charter, because the corporation was designed to profit the country and not just the corporation.
This idea seems to have been lost and we live in an age where neo-tech globalized fuedalism seems to be around the corner because it has been lost.
Do the people that are so vocally against the H1B program really believe that the US tech industry would be where it is without H1B workers?
Simply put, giving US companies access to the best and the brightest from around the world has made the US the global hub for technology. Any wage suppressive influences should be weighed against the overall growth of the industry as a whole. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook. ALL of them have been hugely impacted by foreign workers. Our industry would be much much smaller than what it is without the H1B program. As a tech worker, your take is of a MUCH MUCH larger pie because of the ability to hire the best in the world in one place.
To the extent that there are companies out there that exploit the H1B program to hire indentured "slave" labor. We should be directing our criticism at those bad apples. Discuss ways to crack down on that, instead of channeling pseudo racist, xenophobia at non-american workers.
Also... the entire premise of "us versus them" seems ridiculous to me. Why not make the "them" be "us". You have highly educated, skilled people wanting to become tax paying and productive citizens. H1B is a road to a green card, and eventually naturalization. It's better for America to increase the population of motivated, skilled, and intelligent people. This drives the economy!
I was thinking to myself. Here is a math teacher in the middle of Silicon Valley asking me (no one special by any means) to come in and talk to the kids. Why don't other companies and CEO's currently do the same? Given the dire problem that they claim there is, they should be out there getting kids interested in these jobs. Some of these kids could be working in 2 years (probably before any legislation would actually go through). Bring them to the Facebook or Google offices and get them interested and motivated. Finally, ensure that they can actually have at least a median paying job in the field.
I think we should look at coding like vocational schools. You see all those programs about getting a degree to repair cars. What about getting degrees to do QA and code? It works in Germany very well, especially for kids who don't go to college. According to the math teacher, the demand and interest is there. So why don't we do something for the future generations rather than look for a short term fix?
They are. Not directly, in person, perhaps, but that's why they many tech companies (and the capital funds that back them) are back efforts like Code for America. Increasing the supply of tech labor to drive down costs and increase profits isn't just something driving their position on H-1B levels.
If all you care about is rotating in another 19000 warm, cheap bodies every year then you have no worries: just submit 40000 applications every year and roll with whatever comes out of the lottery.
If, on the other hand, you are like the author and want to hire one particular person with a specific skill set, you have a roughly 50% chance of being able to do that in between 6 and 18 months from any given point in time. (Note that there's no way to do it in less than 6 months.)
The system works well only for the very companies that are exploiting it. I know that the US missed out on 2.5 years of tax revenue that it could have had from me had I not moved to another country that made getting a work visa trivial because of this issue. That worked out great for me, but I still struggle to see how it made America better off.
I think whatever systems are in-place are undermining talent, in a field where it's so hard to see how good a worker is before they come aboard. So it's not even about external vs. domestic talent; it's the hiring that is fucked.
Fuck me, I'm getting paid half that per month. WTF.
That's why the offers look more like salaries. Also, those "housing" offers are ridiculous. A 1 bedroom here can cost you 2k/mth easy. A flat, $1,500. I wouldn't be surprised if they're staying in corporate housing and those are just estimates of the value in the internship "package".
More seriously--there's a lot of talent outside that place, and if companies were willing to pay those same wages (or even 80%) elsewhere in the country, this "talent shortage" would disappear as soon as the first paycheck cleared.
And some of the big companies (Amazon, Google, HP, Microsoft) recruit across the country, offering full relocation.
People are still people, no matter what country they're from. To restrict immigration for work means you're saying some people, through no fault of their own, deserve to earn less money by working in their own country.
Any time you say "I'd hire a local over a foreigner", you're effectively being racist. It might not be their race specifically, but their nationality, the identity of their parents, their wealth (to do their own immigration), etc. This is still discriminating based on something the person has no control over. It's still saying "people similar to me deserve more good things in life than people I can't relate to" or "people in my in-group deserve to be treated better than members of out-groups".
I don't have a problem with a company hiring foreign labor, but I do think there should be strict limitations as long as our unemployment rate is >2-3%.
Any time you say "I'd hire a local over a foreigner", you're effectively being racist.
It's completely implausible that for a small company, the amount of talent they need cannot be had at any cost without immigration.
I'm extremely sympathetic to the economic argument that there is no such thing as shortage and companies simply need to pay up to get the talent they need.
What does exist, on the other hand, is the cost of labor gap between other countries and the US, which can in the long term make American companies less competitive and cause companies to move projects overseas at the margin, whether by outsourcing or through foreign subsidiaries. What's in the the best interests of the US is a careful balancing act that ensures neither the flooding of the labor market with cheaper labor, nor erosion of American competitiveness through extreme cost differences.
And yes, we should completely get rid of L-1. I agree that it is one channel that is exploited by the body shops.
http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2014-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx
Could that be maybe the H1-B's are not going to the right companies?
Why are interns making more in salary than the H1-B's?
The issue I have is not with Immigration, it is with the H1-B System. Because of the limited supply of H1-B's and the nature of them to tie the visa holder to an employer with the carrot of a green card (some day), is ripe for abuse by suppressing wages, which appears to be exactly what is happening. The supply of H1-B's is not necessarily the problem, it is the nature that they tie them to a particular employer. The offer of a "green card" some day, has value or acts as a bonus that citizens cannot compete with, so H1-B's salaries can be lower because the promise of a green card has value.
Much of intern salary is de facto recruiting budget. It's probably the best way to identify desirable employees and get a chance to sell your company to them.
India's IT agencies or staffing companies somehow get a lot of the H1Bs then offload some works to India, or fly in H1Bs from Inda to CA, don't know how that exactly works, but it does offer a lower H1B wage, maybe that's one reason they have so many H1Bs, I don't really know.
For most other countries, H1Bs are hard to get, and those individuals are normally hired by USA companies directly(not via a staffing agency or something like India's huge IT companies' branch office), these guys are paid decently and low-wage is not an option.
I'm trying to say the H1b-low-cost does exist for some cases, people abuse the system whenever they can. Meanwhile, many other H1B hires are paid the same as citizens, if not better, especially when they're hired by a local company directly.
I understand that this information is difficult to release for all kinds of reasons. But without it, it's essentially impossible to evaluate why this company is having trouble filling the position, or whether the added costs for dealing with the visa process are considerably less than the higher salary it might cost to hire someone already authorized to work in the US.
I am currently a remote worker for a US company. The company have expressed they would like for me to come over and work full-time and permanently with their company as an actual employee. The kicker is: I have no degree and I don't quite have the 12 years needed experience to qualify for the visa either. This puts me in a difficult position.
I have about 8 years experience in web development, my title is actually "front-end developer" and there is no degree in front-end development or even web development herein lies an issue with how eligibility for visas are determined, the H1-B included. You basically are expected to have a degree in something even if it doesn't relate to your job exactly. If I had a degree in arts or something, I would be able to get an E3 visa just like that because all they see is the paper and go: here you are.
In the instance of this particular company, it is not that they are looking for "cheap labour" they are offering quite a decent relocation bonus, monthly expenditure for housing and other benefits, the issue is competition for them.
The company is based in Seattle and they are facing increasing competition from Microsoft and Amazon mostly who are sucking up all of the talent in the area, whilst other smaller startups and companies struggle to hire people because the bigger companies are offering more money. Apparently Facebook also are in that list, but you really only hear of Microsoft and Amazon mostly taking the talent.
The particular skill-set they are looking for is another thing. They needed someone with Java experience, AngularJS, React.js and the basics of web down-pat. There are other people out there with similar skills, but if you know Java especially, Amazon who are big users of the language, will scoop you up before the for sale sign has even been put up.
It is at the point where it works out cheaper for the company to offer a decent salary, relocation costs, monthly housing costs and pay for my flights from Australia than it is for them to match the salaries being offered by the other heavyweights in the area. That is how crazy things have become. Not to mention the salary being offered is twice that of what I would get from any employer here in Australia for my skill-set and experience.
I am sure that a few companies are taking advantage of working visas, but it isn't fair to lump all companies into the same bucket. Some companies legitimately need to hire outside country hires to compete.
I think there definitely needs to be reform. Companies who want to hire candidates like me face challenges because of strict and archaic requirements for obtaining a visa. Even visas that make it easier like the E3 still have the same eligibility criteria which for people like me who are self-taught puts us into a tricky spot.
Then you have Canada. They make it so incredibly easy to come over and work as an Australian. Provided you have enough funds and a clean criminal history you can get a working holiday visa for up-to 24 months. No degree required, no archaic process, an actual visa that lets you work and gives you rights. While this isn't permanent, it goes to show, how fundamentally different the US and other countries are when it comes to visas.
it is not that they are looking for "cheap labour"
Then you said:
The company is based in Seattle and they are facing increasing competition from Microsoft and Amazon mostly who are sucking up all of the talent in the area, whilst other smaller startups and companies struggle to hire people because the bigger companies are offering more money.
Your second statement contradicts your first statement. What you're saying is that there are people to hire but your company isn't willing to pay them the market rate, so they are turning to foreign workers.
While I agree that companies should not see it as an excuse to hire cheap talent elsewhere, when there is nobody to pick from in the pool (nobody decent) then where do you go? When the likes of Google are actually offering students jobs before they've even graduated and entered the job market, how does little ACME Corp or Joe Startup compete when workers are being plucked before they even enter the workforce?
Forget the money for a moment, when there is nobody to pick from or you are constantly entering into a bidding war with Application A who has received an offer from Google for $250k per year and all you can offer is $125k and perhaps some other perks, is that fair? Google aren't paying $250k because they think the applicant is worth it or that is the going market rate, they are paying this much because they know the application nine times out of ten will say yes to a ridiculous sum of money, because they need a developer and the cost is irrelevant to them and because they can.
Proper average market salary and inflated market salary are two different things, wouldn't you agree? And people ask if we are in a tech bubble? When graduate developers fresh out of college are being offered the kind of salaries close to what the prime minister of Australia earns (about $500k AUD for reference) you have to ask yourself, is it fair for smaller companies to compete or die because some big companies have set the bar way above average market rate?
But like I said, I know there are companies that take advantage of overseas workers. I have heard stories of people being forced to work ridiculous hours because they are on a H1-B and know that if they fire the employee, everything they have just packed up and moved thousands of miles will have to be packed up and transported again back home. But not all companies are like that, just like not everyone is a racist. It's always a handful of people that ruin it for everyone else.
But I've been trying to stay in the Chicago area because that's where my social network and family are, and I actually want to consider buying a house someday, instead of it being a silly pipe dream out there.
I'm sure I'm not the only person like this. Hiring managers don't immediately have to go "hey there's no one local, let's go overseas!". If you're willing to open yourself up to having employees that work remotely (and programming jobs require people to be left alone by themselves 90% of the time anyway), then you may find it easier to find candidates.
How is this not fair? If Google can offer more money to hire a skilled developer, they will. To get top talent you have to pay for it.
>Smaller companies with half the profits and budgets shouldn't have to compete or die, it just is not fair.
Yes it is. Compete or die is the entire basis of the US economy, isn't it?
I don't think you can have "inflated market salary." Instead what you have is the true market salary (for an experienced engineer that's good, that's a minimum of $200k at this point), and then you have the amount that most companies are willing to pay (which typically caps at $125-150k).
In the US, until the 1970s, average income (in constant dollars) rose at a pretty compelling rate. After the 1970s, a number of factors have combined such that we've not seen the same rise in real income -- despite the fact that productivity, as in, the amount of value we're adding to companies' bottom lines, has been rising.
This is why the gap between the rich and the rest has been growing so quickly. The added productivity is enriching the few at the expense of the many, except for a very few exceptions; one of those is exceptional software developers, who can take advantage (at the moment) of their rarity to actually negotiate salaries commensurate with their productivity.
I'm one of those who was able to secure a $250k+ offer from a big company, which is awesome, and I'm really lucky to be in this position. But the reality is that I know a lot of developers who are really good and who should be making over $200k/year, at a minimum, but who make $125k or less.
Importing H1-B workers in large quantities keeps those salaries lower than they should be. Instead companies need to raise compensation to keep up with demand. Maybe it means they can only afford half as many developers, but they're likely better off with fewer good developers anyway. :)
This is exactly what market rate means. That's why apartments are so expensive in SF or NY.
But for this guy's sake you'll make an exception? Is that because he won't form an ethnic ghetto?
Not really an avenue I am looking to explore, thanks. I am going to speak with an immigration lawyer and see what my options are, perhaps for other visas, equivalency for education experience to substitute and an exception on an application. I will probably write up a little blog post detailing how I go, for anyone else who finds themselves in a similar situation.
And that is the "crux" of the problem. There will always be a shortage of great engineers/programmers/anything ... isn't that why we call them "great"?
I'm more concerned with pipeline. Companies continually push for these changes with reckless regard for grooming local talent. We're experiencing an artificial shortage because the global pool of "great talent" isn't getting bigger fast enough and it never will ... such a joke.
Companies no longer need to invest in the local population, like they use to, they do enough spending billions in Washington DC. Why not bitch and moan about not enough H1-B or any other green card crap?
Here is proof that the tech industry doesn't give a flying rats ass about the USA and why I want out. Lobbying figures per company.
2014 ------- Google Inc $13,050,000 Facebook Inc $7,350,000 Microsoft Corp $6,080,000 Oracle Corp $4,860,000 Hewlett-Packard $3,939,000 Entertainment Software Assn $3,821,138 IBM Corp $3,800,000 Amazon.com $3,190,000 Apple Inc $2,920,000 Intel Corp $2,822,000
2013 ------- Google Inc $14,060,000 Microsoft Corp $10,490,000 Oracle Corp $7,190,000 Hewlett-Packard $6,921,692 Facebook Inc $6,430,000 IBM Corp $5,950,000 Entertainment Software Assn $5,210,000 Intel Corp $4,393,750 Amazon.com $3,456,831
Apparently they make too much money and trying to buy Washington like every other industry. But people in the USA are too dumb to want to shake the system.
And while Yuri's story is well-told and has a happy - if not completely triumphant - ending, it's not that instructive regarding immigration policy. Doubling H1s probably wouldn't have helped, maybe something like 5x would have. How would THAT affect salaries? You don't need a Nobel in economics to figure it out.
But let's talk about Yuri's solution - is it really that bad a deal for Yuri, AeroFS, or the US? Not really.
Yuri might wish for his hire to be closer - we are social animals, always looking for butts to sniff - but we live in the 2010s, not the 1950s.
AeroFS has a new office, congrats! It's now an international company!
And the US - we can cry about losing another taxpayer, but the additional contribution of one or even thousands of decent-earning workers doesn't really add much to the economy, especially when they require the services of a government that has been in serious fiscal trouble for as long as I can remember.
I often wonder whether H1B should be restricted to full time employee relationships rather than also allowing sub-contracts (with provided evidence of a pending contract). If someone is top talent it should be in the interest of final party to offer a full time position.
Either way I firmly believe it is important that if the US is to maintain its lead in tech that there should be as few barriers as possible to getting top talent into the country. The problem is that it is hard to introduce a bureaucratic process that is free of fraud and yet filters out those who aren't "highly skilled". I find educational requirements for visas fairly meaningless (I hired one top developer who skipped college entirely), I find academic requirements for things like Extraordinary Ability category (e.g. published in journals, named on a patent etc) as uncommon in software.
Frankly software companies themselves make mistakes during hiring so I don't know how we can expect the government to do better; It's comparable to the patent office.
I'm surprised to hear that some software engineers working in the Bay Area think that wages are depressed. Look at the mean salary of households in the bay area compared with the rest of the state.
side note: unless green card process is started H1B is only renewable once for a total stay of 6 years.
I was lucky to get my H1B last year right at the end of my J1 visa, my application arrived on April 1st, and considering the number of applications they received, they flipped a coin to see if I was going to be considered... luckily I won the toss!
There's definitely a need for a change somewhere, increased quota, new immigration laws...
I also agree that it's about talent, every company is looking to hire talent, unless they're cheaping out (fortunately I haven't met any of these companies). Most companies I know (mostly startups) are actually looking at the local markets first, but are willing to consider foreigners if they are worth it. They don't mind the cost.
The immigration that bothers the vast majority of Americans (and, indeed, the native populations in all countries) is low-skilled immigration that swamps lower-income communities and drives down wages for the middle and lower classes.
At this point I cannot help but think that the conflation of these two different types of immigration is intentional.
SmallCity sees an average of 1-2 software jobs posted on Monster a month, some of which aren't even real jobs.
His only options are to uproot his family, and take the risk of moving out to SV where he has no friends, family, or support system, and try to learn Javascript so he can fit in at some ping-pong playing start-up, or watch his family slowly descend into semi-poverty on his wife's 20,000/year secretary/policewoman/teacher salary (if the family is lucky enough to have a working mother).
I know it's hard to believe, but in much of the country, software engineering (and even "real" engineering) jobs are always not jobs that carry extravagant upper-middle class salaries. Outside of SV and large cities, most software developers, even very competent ones, are solidly middle class, making considerably less than doctors, lawyers, bankers, and other members of the "professional" upper middle classes.
If this become like the film VFX industry we as programmers are doom. Life of Pi, made millions and the VFX company behind it bankrupt.
If they keep on pushing for the immigration HB Visa stuff. We should all form a Union.
VFX is screwed cause they didn't have a union from the beginning and now it's much harder.
My lawyer just told me that companies does not go this way because it is a little bit more costly, but also because if they get someone on H1B first, they can lock him inside for years while processing the EB, limiting his leverage to ask for raise or changing jobs.
It's not possible but the only way to be sure is to "clone" the US into a NON H1B from 1988 and let that evolve to 2014.
The probable result would have been an increase in wages (in real terms) along with a LOT less population growth in Silicon Valley.
No one wants to come out and say it (but I will and do so) but we are changing on an almost DAILY basis the racial composition (O.K. I am going to get flamed as a racist but so be it) the US IT (which includes software engineering workforce) from mostly caucasian Americans to Indians.
WORSE
Is that the apartment rents are at $3K+ per month because 10+ Indians (not being sarcastic) are stuffed into 1BR apartments.
Of course, the opposite is also true.
That's because there is a demand for both from the other. An economy with an abundance of workers with no skills presents opportunities to the skilled. And vice versa.
I think it makes more sense to attract the highly skilled. Competition and wars are won with technology and the more people we have comfortable with technology, the faster we'll be able to adapt to the inevitable innovations that are coming.
H1B visas increases the supply of programmers. You don't exactly need a CS degree to be a programmer, so there are a lot of programmers.
If people are complaining that H1B visas depress wages, then the correct solution is unionization/collective bargaining.
I'm sorry, but programmers are a dime a dozen nowadays. Talent ALWAYS commands a higher pay - H1B or not. Everything seems completely fair to me.
Let's assume for arguments sake that these H1Bs are truly the "best and brightest"
WELL
Then they SHOULD be paid like the best and brightest.
Using approximate numbers, let's say that the average salary for a software engineer is $100K.
O.K.
Have the employer pay a MINIMUM of 125% of that to an H1B. The H1B gets $125K a year which only seams reasonable as the H1B "obviously" is SO BRIGHT to command a HIGHER salary.
WAIT, WAIT
That WILL NOT happen because this is all ABOUT COST.
What is in the interests of corporations is not what is in the interests of our society.
Just calling it the way I see it.
I know of some companies reporting a fair wage to IRS/Labor Department but actually paying the employees a lot less.
The modal H1B visa goes to a pure body shop, for a salary that is not at all above average.
1. Getting skilled talent from overseas. You simply can't get enough of these people locally. These go to Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc;
2. Cheap labour for bodyshops.
The problem here isn't (1) but (2). IMHO the problem has two primary causes:
1. Prevailing wage determinations are a joke; and
2. Lack of mobility, particularly the essentially indentured servitude system that is employer sponsored permanent residency.
The last is particularly important. The queue for green cards is based on country of birth and some countries have deep queues, particularly China, India, the Phillipines and Mexico.
The way it works is you can have a 3 year H1B twice for a total of 6 years. If your employer starts the green card sponsorship at least a year before your (final) H1B expires you can stay indefinitely. You cannot then move employers or, to some degree, have significant changes in job responsibilities. You can't move (geographically) either.
Green card sponsorship works in essentially two phases.
The first is LC (labor certification). This is where the queue and per-country quotas exist. Depending on category, if you're from India you might be waiting 5-7+ years for this.
The second phase is essentially automatic and takes 6-12 months.
Now the LC phase has some huge variables. You can get randomly audited (DOL estimates 30% of LC applications will be audited and they randomly audit some so employers don't game the system, so they claim). Those audits can lead to further questions. This cycle can (and does) continue for years in some cases.
All this time the employee simply cannot move and has absolutely no bargaining power with their employer.
The solution here is to give employees mobility and make green cards essentially automatic after a given period of employment, combined with no limits on H1B renewal. If you still want a per-country quota (and that sounds like something the US would continue to want), then after, say, 3-5 years on work visa you automatically enter the queue for permanent residency and when your number comes up, you just get it.
Fact is, many foreigners are willing to work for essentially slave wages in the hopes of a better life for them and their children. The current system isn't slavery in the classic sense but I'd certainly call it indentured servitude.
As for the idea that "they're stealing our jobs" [tm], let me just add my personal perspective as someone who's interviewed:
There are many people out there masquerading as programmers/engineers who have utterly no business drawing a paycheck for such. I'd even go so far as to say the majority. People who can actually program are in high demand, regardless of country of origin and they're simply aren't enough of them. Employing them from overseas does not (IMHO) hurt local talent. Demand exceeds supply.
Even bodyshops are a symptom. Many companies, particularly Fortune 500 companies and governments at every level, are willing to accept high-priced inccompetence-to-mediocrity that is the norm for "consultants" and vendors.
This isn't a zero sum games.
The real long term danger is that the US, as a whole, seems to take their preeminence in technology as a given. At some point you'll reach a tipping point where it just makes sense to invest in technology elsewhere. We're not there yet. Far from it. But it could happen.
In 1800 the US had a population of ~2M. In 1900 it was ~50M. In those 100 years the US transformed from an agrarian backwater to an industrial superpower largely on the back of immigration.
I understand the desire to shut the doors. This is pervasive at every level from immigration to the ridiculous NIMBYism that is rampant in the Bay Area. It's ultimately short-sighted however.
Let's see how many H1-B's are handed out then.
If we were honest that the issues in immigration (on both sides) are about costs (except for those that are about outright racism), then we could address them more effectively.
There is a fairly direct value to immigrants and to certain others (e.g., in the case of those with pre-arranged employment, as would have been the case for the worker AeroFS write about, to their employers) of admitting specific immigrants. There are also social costs and benefits of admitting immigrants. (This also applies to non-immigrant visas, includingthe H-1B, which are, in a sense, peripheral to the issue of immigration, though its mostly what the tech industry is focussing on when discussing "immigration", which is one of many disconnects between the tech industry and the wider society.)
The basic structure of our immigration system -- in terms of the various immigration major categories and the decisions about which of them are unlimited and which are limited by quotas -- represents a judgement about the balancing of the social costs and benefits. Without challenging that basic judgement, there are sensible reforms that could be made which make the system better for everyone. The simplest that I see is to eliminate all the hard quotas in the family-based immigrant visa categories, and simply decide, in each category, on a fee to be assessed for supernumerary (above the now-soft quota) immigrants. (Generally, this should follow the structure of the family preference categories, with the more distant relation categories having higher fees.)
Instead of changing the structure of employer-sponsored immigrant visa categories, and to address some of the non-immigrant economic visa categories (particularly H-1B), what I'd strongly suggest is creating a separate no-quota (that is, all fee-based) individual immigrant visa category for candidates who are neither barred from immigrating to the US nor qualified in any of the existing family preference categories, with the highest fees, and allow economic entrants for work that is neither seasonal nor short-term to use that (and eliminate the non-treaty based non-immigrant visa classifications that this provision replaces, particularly the H-1B), while keeping the existing quota-restricted employer-sponsored immigrant visa categories.
If a company wants to give an employee an payment (up-front or in arrears) to cover the fee as a supernumerary immigrant (in either a family preference class or the new open class), they could through a relationship governed under contract law, but they'd get no special position with respect to the employee under immigration law.
This would address any "talent" issue that isn't about cost that the tech industry has with H-1B limits (or that industry in general has with the limits in employer-sponsored immigrant visa categories), address those issues that are about costs by providing a direct mechanism by which the social cost of the cost savings to industry are internalized in the transaction, address the problems with hard quotas that cause real problems in the family preference categories which are both drivers of illegal immigration and undermine the entire purpose of family-centered immigration policy, and provide funds to address the social costs associated with the overall level of immigration.
Then you have outsourcing companies like Cognizant regularly scooping up 50% of the H-1b lottery: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2489146/technology-law-...
It's pretty disingenuous to claim there isn't a US worker, the companies have no intent to hire an American. Their entire business model is built around outsourcing the work. Now if you want to talk to me about legalizing farm workers I have no problem with that. I think it's pretty disgusting we have this shadow economy built on third class workers that we all benefit from and know exists. Unfortunately they don't have the tech industry lobbying for them like the H-1B holders do. There's a reason Silicon Valley lobbies for more H-1bs but not Greencards: http://online.wsj.com/articles/michael-s-malone-the-self-inf...
The problem with freedom of labor and open borders is that it's usually just one way. How many Americans are going to work abroad in India? How many Canadians are going to work in China? It's feel-good rhetoric but ultimately it's just an excuse to flood richer nations with workers from poorer nations. I'd be all for this system if there was some kind of tit-for-tat program where India gets as many visas given to them as they give to us proportionally--but it will never happen. If STEM and engineers are so in demand why have their wages stagnated? Why has the average income actually dropped in Silicon Valley? There's a disconnect in what they claim is happening and what is really happening.
[1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/03/30/apple-goo...
Many Africans go to India for work. India is better than many African countries. Similarly many Indians go to US.
One of the things we really need is for a skilled graduate or immigrant to be allowed freedom of employment. This stops driving salaries down, because employees then aren't bound to an employer to get their green card or maintain their legal status (giving the employer freedom to put the salary where they want because of desperation). Yes, the H1B portability exists in theory, but in practice they're unusable - with only 60 days of legal unemployed time between jobs, having to secure a new offer before initiating the transfer process, and having any active green card application processes (which can take more than 5 years usually) killed if you transfer, we might as well pretend the portability option doesn't exist.
I would also like to note this reformed H1B shouldn't be awarded to the body-shop-type employers (basically anyone employing over 40% immigrants and over 100 people). Technically this clause exists today, but these body shop companies have a lot of phantom "US Citizen" employees to bloat their total employee numbers and then all the actual staff is imported. Those practices need to be audited more closely at least for the larger companies and curbed.
At the very least, I think it makes sense for someone who has spent 4 or more years in US in the capacity of a student to be given freedom of employability a little more easily, without restricting them to having to go to one of very few employees that can secure them a H1B visa now and commit the first 5-10 years of their career at that one place (or leave the country) to stop being treated worse than illegal immigrants.
More importantly, I think the process needs to recognize the fact that there is no room for company founders, other than the atrocious O1 process which is expensive and time consuming and subjective. I personally believe anyone who can demonstrate basic intent to create a job and shows qualifications for it (maybe after operation of the company for some period of time) should be given a visa with weird restrictions on salary and job title and whatnot, with an audit clause for every 2 years or something. All the existing visa programs are extremely constrained for most founder circumstances (which are quite varied, because founders are supposed to be about finding creative ad hoc solutions).
Disclaimer: Cofounder of a silicon valley startup gone digital nomad because of 2 failed H1B attempts and not being able to justify 2-4 months company-wide paychecks to apply for an O1+lawyer.
There's a lot of H1B's on here. You have friends overseas who you want to see succeed in the Bay Area.
In my experience at many tech companies in the Bay Area, H1B Visas exist for one reason, and one reason only - to get skilled engineering/STEM labor -- and to exploit connections (primarily Indian/Pakistani) among these workers to continue to get cheap labor.
It absolutely, positively hurts local labor - naturalized citizens - etc. Without a doubt.
This is not a Xenophobic reaction, it's simply reality.
I've worked at multiple companies (managed their websites) -- where we would temporarily post a job description to appear that it was a fair playing field for local workers -- when in reality that position was definitely, absolutely going to be filled by a cheaper, exploitable H1B visa position.
It happens all-the-fucking-time.
There's standard, normalized ways immigrants have come to the US for a long time now. There's absolutely no talent shortage in the Bay Area, provided you can pay (and your ideas are interesting)
We also don't need any more of the divisive ethic-neuveau-ghettos we're seeing in the south bay, cupertino and east bay with communities insulating themselves rather than assimilating.
It was for a compiler position at Borland. I ended up working remotely for the next 6 years or so, first for a year as a contractor at a 6 figure Euro rate, then later as a salaried employee after I moved to London. They flew me over two to four times a year to keep up to date with the team. I collectively lived over 6 months in Scotts Valley, albeit in hotels. All this wasn't cheap.
You're generalizing from a stereotype you've seen. But don't think it represents all situations. The mentality you've got is the same one at work with racism and sexism. It's reductive and will mislead you.
There's a certain amount of tech talent at any given technical ability level available worldwide, and only a fraction of it is in the US. The opportunities to leverage tech talent are, however, larger in northern CA than most other places. And some things can only be implemented by people with the right level of ability. When you artificially limit the supply of qualified labour, all you can do is shuffle your existing resources - paying more won't increase the supply quickly enough. Limiting supply of able labour will reduce the speed of innovation and economic growth - including for locals.
Maybe these "body shops" are a problem. I don't know for sure - I don't have enough information. The way they are talked about, it doesn't sound like the quality of people brought in is terribly high, so it seems to me you don't have much to worry about re competition, unless you're not very capable. On the other hand, it sounds like it could be upskilling India as these people get rotated out, which to my mind is a good thing - beggar-thy-neighbour policies don't pay off in the long run, and besides are morally questionable when the disparity in wealth is very large.
I worked as a contract developer for over 10 years and this was absolutely the norm for the companies I worked at. It was so egregious at some places that HR would go as far as to get the exact list of skills from the H1B they wanted to hire and then tailor a job posting to that exact list of skills in order to disqualify local applicants.
The H1B system is broken. It is easily gamed and the burden of proof of wrongdoing so high that it is impossible to prevent companies from doing this.
Edit: I want to add that I'm sure that there are companies whose management doesn't abuse the H1B system. My position that the H1B system is broken remains unchanged as it is the bad actors that are causing the problems yet there is no remedy short of congressional action that can properly address the issue.
Presenting something as a fact doesn't make it one.
You're basically saying that American tech companies should only hire Americans. That the facebook, Google, Mozilla, ... shouldn't hire smart people from other countries.
As someone who doesn't live in the US but would like to work in this industry, I will probably have to relocate to the US (either in the Bay Area or New York). Do you mean that offers I've got in the past were because I'm "cheap labor"? (as in "Let's fly you from the other side of the world, pay for the crazy high VISA fees, pay for relocation, ... and then pay you the same as those that already live in the Bay Area")
Your remarks about "divisive ethic-neuveau-ghettos" with "communities insulating themselves rather than assimilating" just makes it worst. I'm not even going to guess who the "We" in your message refers to.
Talent may be plentiful in the Bay Area, but just like dating, both parties have to actually want to work together and believe in each other. Plus, no engineer I've interviewed was desperate for a job. Nor would I want to hire someone who was desperate.
That being said, regardless of someone's H1B status, we would pay exactly the same base salary to them. Additionally, the H1B person even comes out ahead since we also pay the crazy high government fees for the application or transfer.
What are you so afraid of? Have you ever been to a nice Indian restaurant in Sunnyvale? I'm glad those ethnic conclaves exist.
Also, from a strictly moral perspective, the attitude that you deserve special treatment based on the fact that you were born within an imaginary closed cell on a map just isn't justified.
What makes you so special versus someone from Asia with better skills? I'm supposed to hire you because ... what? We share the same passport and so I owe you some special heightened loyalty beyond what I owe any human being born on our common planet?
Your comment is full of implicit prejudice. Some redneck told you that you deserve to be treated as a special person because you saluted the flag when you were a little kid in class, and without thinking very critically about the concept, you just swallowed it whole. Now you are regurgitating the same concept here as though this audience is as paranoid as the one on MSNBC.com. This is a totally different audience, that isn't afraid to compete against other workers on a skills versus skills basis. I don't think most people here think they need special protection from Uncle Sam against programmers from abroad.
You are probably afraid of some Indian and Chinese programmers. I have zero fear. In fact I welcome the competition and hope that some of the best can be my co-workers. You are welcome to form an exclusive zone with the country's coddled also-rans. Just don't try to form that zone in the Bay Area. I don't know if you are watching Google or Facebook, or Twitter, but former H1Bs are working on the most complex projects at those companies ... and not because those companies can't afford to hire the best students. But because those H1Bs ARE the best students.
I think there's little question that increasing the supply of engineers reduces their price -- our salaries. We can argue about whether it's a small or a large effect, and whether it goes away in the long run due to macroeconomic effects, but it's certainly there. So you're arguing against a straw man here.
But more to the point, it's short-sighted and selfish to judge policy decisions solely based on their effects on your salary. Especially since those of us in tech are, by and large, ridiculously well-compensated.
Setting aside the benefits to the immigrants themselves, highly-skilled workers who emigrate to the US are a /fantastic deal/. We paid nothing to educate them, yet they come here and grow the economy and pay taxes. All of these new people have to buy housing, food, medical care, and so on. It's literally free economic growth.
> We also don't need any more of the divisive ethic-neuveau-ghettos we're seeing > in the south bay, cupertino and east bay with communities insulating themselves > rather than assimilating.
This is borderline racist. "/We/ don't need any more of /them/, especially if they choose to live apart, rather than become Real Americans." If the alternative is living near people like you, it's no wonder they tend to stick together.
This may be unpopular, but so what if it hurts local labor? The global flow of goods is good, but the flow of labor is bad? Twenty years ago Pepsi and Coke entered the Indian market and destroyed/replaced the local beverage industry. Uber and Amazon have launched their own price wars more recently. A lot of people want Indian companies to win, but I don't see words like 'unfair' being used in regard to the American companies with deeper pockets that hurt local businesses. I get that immigration hurts American wages, but that's just kinda how the world works. What does it matter if your job is outsourced to India or if an Indian comes to America to take it? The latter is probably better for the US if anything.
This just smacks of exclusionary racism. Like, 'us white people don't need folk from other countries coming over here and associating with each other, eating their own food and speaking their own language'.
You might be surprised to learn that if you're moving from another country, it's highly beneficial to your adjustment to be around other people from your area; in fact, it can accelerate assimilation because they have a source they can turn to for all kinds of cultural, bureaucratic, or social questions, so they don't have to re-learn everything from scratch.
Admittedly, that still doesn't change your original claim of 'we don't need cheap foreigners coming over here and taking American jobs', or the inherent racism there.
And what are those?
If you are being honest why not just say "We don't want any more immigrants". Because H1B is the only way to immigrate to US. Its great that your parents got a shot a new life and now you want the door to closed.
PS: I am a naturalized US citizen, if it matters.
I disagree with this statement. I am on an H1 and know several other people who are on H1s and can testify that this is a generalization. There are many ways to end up on an H1, overseas body shops is one avenue and American grad schools are another. Most H1s I know, myself included, graduated from good schools, have worked hard within the framework of their visas, have absorbed local culture and have invested almost 100% of what they made back into the local economy, not to mention the out-of-state fees they paid their institutions. From what I see and understand, they are pretty well paid, in some cases better than the local populace and have succeeded solely because they are talented. The hardships that their spouses on H4s go through is an entirely different matter!
That said, I can understand where you are coming from and know that there is abuse within the system. Truly, fake resumes are rampant among H1 consultancies. And although the visa itself is severely constrained, these people thrive due to lack of enforcement. That should change.
Edit: For people who say H1 is indentured servitude.
H1 is not quite indentured servitude, and you can switch employers. Although there is quite a bit of uncertainity associated with it, its still not the worst part. What bothers me, is the DOLs PERM process which is the first step to obtain a green card. This one step in itself is what can be said to make H1s bonded laborers. First, the company makes you sign a statment saying you can't leave until after 2 years upon getting your Green Card - else you'll be billed for it (approx 25K). Second, the DOL takes its own sweet time adjudicating these applications - currently 6 months (or 1.5-2 years if your application is audited, which 30-40% chance). And while you are free to switch employers, this process takes a hard reset and you've to go back to the end of the line. Unless, you stick with the shitty job, and wait out the approval and file your I-140. At this point, the H1 can be renewed indefinitely in terms of 3 years as long as each new company goes through the above process or you get your Green Card. Hopefully, the recent executive order will make this better, but only time can tell. Personally, the reset button has been hit twice for me.
But this is precisely what defines an economic shortage. There's no shortage of anything, if the price offered is right.
I wonder if the discrepancy between supply and demand for labour in the Valley has to do with the fact that, unlike most other industries[1], so many companies aren't making money, and hence can't pay, but still demand much labour? It seems like labour shortages are built into the system.
[1] Speculation. What are some examples of companies with billion-dollar valuations and no-profits, outside SV?
1) Of all the companies I know and have worked for I don't know a single company that got H1B for cheap indian labour. They got H1B because thats what they could get for people they wanted. You will find plenty on H1B/O1(my visa) etc. from Europe.
It has nothing to do with exploitation although that of course happens but with these are the easiest (and hardest) visas to get
2) The irony of the tech world is that for the right talent there is always work but finding that right talent is actually pretty hard as it's a multitude of factors that are involved in the right hire.
3) The process of getting H1B is trivial but cumbersome and I have yet to meet any organisation that take people in on H1Bs just because it's cheap labour.
Of course it hurts local labour but not because of the wages, because talent is hard to find.
Having said that, H1Bs are indentured servitude.
However, I have met a lot of L1 visa holders (primarily from India) who come here from companies like Wipro, TCS, Cognizant, IBM, Microsoft etc. who are paid lower wages because there is no such scrutiny with L1 visas. Lumping both visas in the same category is a huge mistake.
Many foreign nationals who choose to be educated in the US (often at a major premium as most scholarships or subsidized loans are unavailable) aspire to stay in the US to work post-graduation. There are temporary programs that allow this: F-1 Optional Practical Training (OPT) for 12 months. This can be renewed by another 17 months for a STEM degree holder. The 17 month extension was introduced in 2008 to allow the candidate to have two chances at the H-1B lottery [1].
I'm a German citizen who went to college in the US on a F-1 student visa. I worked on an OPT post-graduation before my employer sponsored me for a H-1B. I can guarantee you that I was one of their most expensive employees of comparable education and experience: Preparing a H-1B application (and the associated filing fees) is costly, especially if the government sends a request for further evidence. Just 3 months after I had started (before the H-1B application was filed) I managed to get a 50% raise because I had made myself indispensable and started looking for other opportunities as I felt significantly underpaid. They generally did not give raises to anyone, and as far as I know all of my citizen coworkers continued to be vastly underpaid for years.
If it weren't for the H-1B program, I wouldn't have had an opportunity to stay and work in the country after having already spent some 6 years here.
As an aside: Nobody ever suspects me of being foreign. I'm a white guy with flawless English. However, many of my friends who were born here (to foreign parents or grandparents) are treated with racism. That's simply not ok.
[1]: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2008-04-08/html/E8-7427.htm
I live in Mexico and there's plenty of companies here that do work for US companies, it's great for both sides, on the US business side they're getting what they want for cheaper, and often by some really talented people. On the Mexican side, the company is getting paid in USD and through exchange rates and what not this turns out to be better for them than doing consulting for local business.
So why would they bother opening the borders even more? When they can get the same people to make it for cheaper from this side?
http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/06/this-map-reveals-exactly-w...
> let's be honest
> one reason only
> absolutely, positively
> without a doubt
> simple reality
> definitely, absolutely
> all-the-fucking-time
> absolutely no
Technically speaking, to be approved on an LCA (H1B) application, the prevailing wage has to be at or above the mean payable wage for the citizens in the same SOC job classification for the region. Long story short, if there is any exploitation or hurting the local labor, it's because the employers are getting away with illegally hiring talented labor for the wrong, often underpaid positions.
More resources are needed to enforce the restrictions against immigration exploitation on employers, not the immigrants.
I'm in the computer vision and pattern recognition field and as you can guess from its popularity there's definitely a shortage - not just in the US but all over the world.
I'm in France and in my company we are trying aggressively to hire new people in the field but everybody good is already working somewhere or they're working on their own ideas. About 80% of our research/engineering team is from abroad: 2 Swiss, 2 Italian, 3 Turkish, 3 American, 1 Israeli, 2 Russian, 2 Canadian, 2 Spaniard, 1 Iranian - and only 5 French. finding talent in this day and age is a world-wide problem. there's not enough experienced people around for cutting edge companies and there's no way you can hire someone good in the field cheap local or away. that's a very absurd notion...
As I said, I'm currently not located in US and I'm not a US citizen. So, if I decide to work again there I'll need an H1B but as I'm already making quite well where I'm now, I wouldn't consider uprooting my life and returning back to US for no less than $200-250k. if this is considered cheap work, then so be it. exploiting imperialist bastards...
So yes, there is a shortage of talent who are willing to work for cheap.
So does buying hardware that's made overseas. Interesting that this argument is made now, but how many local programmers ever bought anything electronic which was a little more expensive but made in the US instead of overseas?
Why do software jobs deserve protection but hardware jobs do not? The amount of hypocrisy here is nauseating.
The good H1Bs will get extremely high salaries and the shitty H1Bs will take all the jobs that pay shit.
There is no exploitation, it's just how the world works. If you're good there's nothing to fear from competition, and if fact it helps you.
On the other hand, I just don't feel to strongly that US jobs are solely for US people. This is a global economy and bringing in (hopefully bright and talented) people into the states does increase our national economic prospects. I do feel strongly, however, that the laws governing the process should be enforced completely, not in just the letter but in spirit. There are also some very complicated factors involved such as the cost of education in the US versus many other countries that substantially subsidize it, the potential use of unskilled works simply being used to drive the labor market down.
There actually is a talent shortage in the Bay Area. If there was no talent shortage, prices for local labor would be lower. If there wasn't a talent shortage, it wouldn't be possible for me to hire a developer from India, pay to fly him out here, put him up in a hotel in Mountain View for 6 months - all for significantly less than it would cost to hire a local developer.
H1Bs are just the tip of the iceberg. The companies that are pros at this use L1 visas. H1Bs require you to pay a similar wage to the local wage, but L1s have no such requirement. So you can take a developer working in India for $20k/yr and ship him to the US. The consulting company charges them out at the local market rate and pockets the difference. I've seen projects with margins approaching 80% due to this.
The visa system is completely broken, this much is true. But it's really a symptom of the fact that the labor market in the US is not training the types of workers it needs. We train a lot of developers and many of them think they're rock stars. But the reality is that we need a deep bench of competent developers willing to work for substantially less than $100k a year. Those developers exist in other countries, and so the work is going there.
And as the original post points out, it is not always about low cost, its also about quality. Would you consider Satya Nadella or Sundar Pichai to be cheap labor?
There is another matter. Why don't you look up the phrase "indentured servant" on wikipedia? It refers to (quote from wikipedia) " a labor system where by young people paid for their passage to the New World by working for an employer for a certain number of years. It was widely employed in the 18th century in the British colonies in North America and elsewhere. It was especially used as a way for poor youth in Britain and the German states to get passage to the American colonies. They would work for a fixed number of years, then be free to work on their own. The employer purchased the indenture from the sea captain who brought the youths over; he did so because he needed labour (sic). Some worked as farmers or helpers for farm wives, some were apprenticed to craftsmen." Basically, this system which brought in the ancestors of most Americans is very similar to the H1B system in place, right down to the duration of indenture: 7 years, while the H1B has a 6 year time limit.
Been happening all-the-time, my friend. (No, I won't use expletives, and neither should you. Surprised this is the top post, despite HN policies.)
I'm not sure where I land on the H1B question; it's hard to see how there can simultaneously be a labor shortage and that immigration is going to be helpful to tech workers already here.
But if you want to help make the case against them, probably leave out the appeals to "ethnic ghettos".
That is not true at all. If engineers get cheaper the result of their labor too gets cheaper and hence the entire American society benefits. American government's job is not to protect interest of Engineers but of everyone. American Medical Council for example has made it illegal for Indian doctors to practice in America and we can see the results. Doctors earn a lot but at the cost of average American.
But there is another important aspect that even the intelligent minds of HN seem to ignore. In highly skilled professions, jobs opportunities are not Zero sum games. Mr. Kumar got a job in US does not mean some Mr. John Smith lost one. On the contrary more engineers you have faster you can solve problems.
Key questions to ask is if US government completely bans H1B throws all Indian H1Bs out will that serve the interest of the American people ?
Does the H1B system need to be reformed? Yes I completely agree. But your reaction is xenophobic. America is a country of immigrants, get over it maybe?
I agree. But that's not a bad thing. That's the market operating more efficiently. The flipside is that it absolutely, positively helps foreign labor. Or alternatively, the overabundance of US citizens absolutely, positively hurts each other's labor.
What makes naturalized citizens so privileged? Surely they themselves are 2nd class citizens to native born Americans, who are in turn less deserving than descendants of actual American Indians. Drawing the line between "naturalized citizen" and "H1B visa holder" is quite arbitrary. It's still discrimination akin to racism or sexism.
Relevant quotes from recently posted article on Pavel Durov:
"Me myself, I’m not a big fan of the idea of countries"
"I consider myself a legal citizen of the world."
Just out of curiosity, what are the "standard, normalized ways " that people immigrate to the US ? If i were to go to the American Embassy in New Delhi and apply for immigration and i don't have close, immediate family in the United States i don't see a way other than becoming a Fiance of a US citizen
( http://newdelhi.usembassy.gov/immigrant_visas.html )
Wikipedia also fails to provide anything other than family based immigration.
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_laws_concerning_immi... )
Yes, there is a group of local engineers that is hurt by companies importing cheaper, better labor from overseas. But everyone else benefits.
It's pretty simple IMO. The programmer shortage would evaporate if programmers were paid according to the value they create.
Also, I don't know if you noticed, but most of the rest of the US, and the entire world as a whole, pays significantly lower salaries for software engineering than Silicon Valley, even factoring in cost of living. Yet Silicon Valley salaries have continued to climb to amazing heights. This is not because you are any better at your job today than 10 years ago. It is because there is a crisis of supply. The industry needs far more programmers today than ever before, and the LOCAL supply is severely constrained. It is hard to even get people from other parts of the US to move to the bay area, let alone from other countries.
Is the H1B exploitable? Yes, but that's because of anti-worker government policies. If the US offered skilled workers a transferrable Visa valid for a fixed (extendable if you can prove you still have solid income in your field), workers would have the power to leave a bad job.
As for ghettos, I don't even know what to say to you. The housing market in the bay is so utterly broken, and there are so few real walkable neighborhoods with a sense of community, you would prefer that recent immigrants what, scatter themselves across the bay instead of striving to at least maintain some sense of continuity in their life? If you want to improve things, fight for local city governments to stop their idiotic policies against infill development and public services.
> I've worked at multiple companies (managed their websites) -- where we would temporarily post a job description to appear that it was a fair playing field for local workers -- when in reality that position was definitely, absolutely going to be filled by a cheaper, exploitable H1B visa position.
Alyandon below also says:
> I worked as a contract developer for over 10 years and this was absolutely the norm for the companies I worked at. It was so egregious at some places that HR would go as far as to get the exact list of skills from the H1B they wanted to hire and then tailor a job posting to that exact list of skills in order to disqualify local applicants.
Could you and others give us the names of these companies? I'd be very interested to know if such abuse is seemingly random or tends towards a certain kind of company, because I have my suspicions that it's the latter, and simple legislation could easily be passed to prevent that.
1. What do you do if your petition for H1B is rejected. I have 2 shots to apply with my time in OPT, but what if both fail? Is the only option to go back to your home country and start over? That seems freaking absurd!
2. Can you increase your chances of being selected for H1B? For example, I've heard that working at bigger companies like Google/FB/Amazon gives you a better shot. Is there any truth to this?
3. Is there any reasonable way to start a company on an OPT or H1B? AFAIK the rules state that you can either work for a company or own majority stake but not both. So its possible with a cofounder who is a resident, but he/she would own the company legally.
It is absolutely xenophobic; you are insinuating that somebody "we" get "hurt" when "they" come.
It's the most insidious brand of xenophobia there is.
> There's absolutely no talent shortage in the Bay Area, provided you can pay (and your ideas are interesting)
I can generalize that "there is no shortage of anything provided you can pay". You can get a BMW in Cuba, a skyscraper in NY and what ever you want where ever you want, it's just much more expensive.
Still, there are shortages and high prices are indicative of that.
Additionally, what the wealthy are doing in the USA (and other places) by supporting immigration (Pro tip: republicans only dislike immigrants and illegal immigrants when they lie to the faces of their voters) is undermining challenges and competition by the middle class and even the most modest improvement for the more challenged classes. What they are doing with immigration of any kind is sabotaging market factors that would require them to pay fair wages and appropriate costs.
Sure, some will make the argument that blather, blather global market blather captialism * blather* but the fact of the matter is that the wealthy only want everything to flow one direction. They don't want global or even domestic competition and transparency for CEOs, they don't want competition at all. What they want is to rig the game, they want to change the rules as it benefits them at every single step of the way. They are nothing different than the little shit you played with in childhood, who used to change the rules as he started losing at the game or wasn't totally dominating you. What the wealthy do ... what they are ... are the people who sabotage success, they snipe progress in order to keep anyone else from competing with them; because what the wealthy hate even more than the middle class is true competition. They love fake, rigged, and manipulated competition though that means they will win with as little effort as possible.
But for now it hurts local labor because it gives companies a pool of employees without rights (notably the right to walk away from a toxic environment without having to leave the country).
"Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage." -- Paul Graham
However, in long term brain drain helps Silicon Valley to maintain its software capital of the world status.
Nokia mainly depended on local workforce. From Poland it is much closer to Finland than to US. But it was Google US which hired my brightest school mates.
also to clarify, if you mean there isn't a shortage and that i just have to offer higher salaries to poach from other companies I would categorize that as a shortage since it will just results in the equivalent of music chairs for jobs.
i don't mind paying top dollar for the best engineers but if the permanent state is music chairs for engineers that to me implies a shortage. Irrespective of the salaries you have to pay, there should be enough engineers to fill all job openings otherwise I would say there is a shortage.
not advocating excessive numbers of workers to drop salaries, ideally it would (job openings -1) number of engineers.
Good to hear your experience, but this response imply that you either think the author is dishonest or that you don't care about their experience because it's not yours (your emphasis "one reason, and one reason only").
I won't be ignoring your response, because I think it's based on truth and it got so many up-votes, but as many have already pointed out, it does indeed goes into unnecessary details to make your point, giving it a xenophobic feel as a whole.
Now to get to the actual subject I believe there are two distincts type of actors (company sponsors) competing for H1-B creating a bit of a dialogue of the deaf every time the subject comes up:
(1) consulting companies, commonly called "body shops" that swift around H1-B workers and scale profits on workers/margins. Such companies as Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro and to a much lesser extend Western IT companies such as Accenture, Microsoft (let's not forget Microsoft make nearly $700k of revenue per employee [1]), etc. [2]
(2) startups and small groups who do product development or research and thus are not looking for cost savings, nor can they scale human costs very well. For these groups (like the authors's), hiring the right candidate has a significant cost and importance and making a mistake can be even more costly. The burden of processing H1-B visas is very high, but the importance of being able to access a global pool of talent is big enough that they still go through the trouble. This is especially evident by the fact that such startups usually do not usually have oversea offices yet but are competing globally.
The problem is that (1) has a very well refined process that has scaled with the bureaucratic obstacles and eats the majority of H1-B visa numbers without much impact for them when some of their petitions get dropped when the lottery gets "drawn". (2) loses however loses greatly at this game.
A very simple solution to this problem is to award the top 65,000 petitions with the highest salaries, and award them monthly instead of yearly, as timing is also a major issues for small companies. If we talks about quotas after making such change, we'll be talking about a very different kind of H1-B and the road will be much more open for a positive debate.
Also, am I the only one bothered by the use of the term labor? High-tech jobs are not usually factory jobs, but more generally creative-type of jobs. This may be how it's viewed in (1), but for (2), people are not necessarily replaceable entities, if a startup want to hire a candidate because they have worked with her in the past or have had a very promising interview, it is their business and their choice, they are not hiring "labor".
Also, just to give a bit of scale context of the H1-B issue in the grand scheme of the immigration debate, the 4 million work permits granted recently through executive orders are roughly equivalent to combining 65 years H1-Bs at current quota levels, not justifying one or the other, just trying to give scale and expose how much legal work visa venues are completely squeezed in the US.
[1] http://venturebeat.com/2014/11/30/why-eric-schmidt-doesnt-kn...
[2] http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/04/03/176134...
"Why, you're blessed to be here aren't you!?"
First of all, intern salaries are typically set at ~90-100 percent of full-time salary (but without bonus or equity). So these people who are freaking out about intern salaries are missing the point. They assume that if "even an intern" makes $8,000 per month, that every full-time employee makes $200k+. No, it's not like that. It's like this: we properly pay interns with an entry-level salary, unlike the soft industries (e.g. publishing, media) that have an oversupply of qualified but unimpressive hipsters who'll take the job for free, and we pay interns for their work because it's the right thing to do, and (for as much flak as I give the tech industry) that's one area where we do the right thing.
It annoyed me when Valleywag attacked intern salaries. There's so much to impeach the Valley for, but paying interns properly isn't one of them.
Second, we don't really know what software salaries would be without the H1-B program. The program may or may not be depressing wages, but we don't know right now.
Third, I'm all for high-talent immigration, and I'm sure that there are good companies who treat their H1-B workers well. Some don't, and it's the body shops that are getting the negative attention.
With the bad actors, more than it is about costs or talent at the bad-actor companies, it's about deference to authority (or, "disinclination to agitate"). The H1-B program keeps the worker captive, and that's more valuable to the company than any wage depression. Programmer salaries aren't high enough for anyone to care about shaving a few percentage points off entry-level figures, but a lot of these tech companies do want people who are captive-- or, better still, young (age discrimination is a part of this issue, as well) and perceived to be culturally disinclined to challenge managerial authority.
My problem, on this issue, isn't with the H1-B program, although it should be reformed. (A high-talent immigration program must, by definition, be unconditional on month-by-month employment status.) I certainly don't have a problem with a company like AeroFS that needs to hire a foreign worker to fill a niche. However, I take umbrage to the assholes who complain about a general "talent shortage" but won't look twice at a programmer over 35. They're being disingenuous to the point of being unethical. Instead of being honest about their economic interests ("good people cost more than we want to pay") they're attempting to play the Existential Risk Card ("talent shortage"). It's vile to make that claim.
Over 35 or off the coasts. It seems like companies would rather go across an ocean for talent than across the country.
Let's be serious a few minutes, no H1-B worker is held captive at all. I've been on H1-B for 4 years and still on it, and have changed employer twice with no issues.
The only case you can make is that if a H1-B is applying for a Green Card then he can have to wait a while before moving, but it's nothing to do with H1-B itself.
The upper market is about the supply-vs-demand of the best engineers/programmers/techies. The lower market is composed and driven by the supply-vs-demand for the cheapest people who can ostensibly fill those roles, however poorly, as long as they are (or appear to be, in near term) adequate for the need at hand.
Therefore speaking in broad strokes: yes, if you're a US citizen/resident whose skills/talents/accomplishment are effectively in that lower market, then globalization is likely to hurt you in terms of employment prospects in a tech field. However, if you're in the upper market supply-side, globalization is more likely to help, esp if you market yourself very publically and globally, and independently from any specific employer -- for example, get yourself some kind of top ranking on some forum or in search results on a given topic, or write a book on it, create/lead or contribute to a popular FOSS project, etc. You may not have full control of your destiny, we each have different mixes of strengths or handicaps, but to some extent you do have a choice as to whether to put yourself into that upper market's supply pool, or the lower. And there are lots of people world-wide desperate for money or to get their foot in the door, thus they flood that lower market, even if later some percentage of those same folks may transition into the upper one. And a new "sucker" is born every second, world-wide.
The OP's author is clearly writing from the POV of that upper market's demand side. He's correct for his segment. A different conclusion about the impact of H1B visas (and off-shoring) can also be correct, if about that lower market's supply-side.
All good. No conflict.
disclaimer/caveat: obviously speaking in broad strokes, and thinking at strategic level. (And I wish I never had to point that out on HN.)