For "real" technology companies like AeroFS, that use a small fraction of the H-1B quota, it's about talent. For body shops like Infosys, WiPro, Tata, etc that use up the vast majority of the H-1B visas it's absolutely about cost.
From where I am sitting, it looks like more than just cost, it's about control. If a smart mouth prima donna like myself lost his job, it would suck, yes, but if I were an H1-B I could be deported. If I were in that position I would think twice about telling my boss something he didn't want to hear.
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.
When someone is paying you 10X to what you can possibly learn in India, you're willing to absorb shit. Yes in US terms it could be peanuts but in Indian terms its quite a bit. Work 2-3 years in US and save well, the guy could buy a nice house and India and live decently.
No one apart from the US has figured out how to build billion dollar companies like popcorn.
I am surprised each time I see this kind of casual bigotry on HN. Seriously, "school in India called, Institute of Suspiciously Obscure Technologies"? I don't think there's any other way of reading your comment other than "most Indians lie on resumes and in interviews."
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?
Not to mention the fact that a sizeable number of Indians on H1Bs actually went to great grad schools... Not everyone from India came here to work for a bodyshop.
Agreed. It's strange to read these kinds of articles. The author doesn't seem to realize that he is describing his own personal preferences, and not anything about society at large. All you need to do is look at the top recipients of visas and you will understand what the game is.
This brings up an interesting question. The reasoning for bringing talent over from abroad, does it make sense ethically? I'm greatly irked by the idea of a young and ambitious Indian/Nigerian/Chinese/Russian guy or girl coming here to... optimize ad targeting at Facebook, he/she should stay in India or Nigeria, because by golly Nigeria NEEDS that person much more than us. We can do fine with Facebook advertising algos working a little less efficiently, but Nigeria and India need these young men and women to actually create important, infrastructural changes. It seems highly unethical to be just siphoning the world's talent like that. India's culture of valuing education produced those competent engineers, India should get its fruits, India should use those young men and women to make India better. We're sitting here ignoring our recent graduates, they're burdened with massive debts... and we just ignore them. How about the companies that are sitting on billions spend a few dollars to train them, if they're not up to snuff? I've mentioned this elsewhere -- this is not the spirit of America that Emma envisioned, this isn't something to be proud of.
"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!"
I get where you're coming from, but are you really going to base policy on that? That would be bizarrely condescending: "Sorry, it would be advantageous for our economy and for your personal well-being for you to enter our country, but we've decided you owe it to your homeland to stay." Not to mention that it wouldn't be effectual if other first-world countries didn't play along.
The genius who comes from Nigeria to the States to write some code is going to pick up skills and connections that will prepare them to go back and have a tremendous impact back in their home country. Maybe many won't; maybe many will stay here, optimize some small metric for Facebook, and be fat and happy. And that's a shame compared to the outcome where they go fix up their homeland. But hey: any one of us could go spend our lives living in and trying to improve a third world country, regardless of where we're born. Why should the folks who happen to be born there be forced into it?
> The genius who comes from Nigeria to the States to write some code is going to pick up skills and connections that will prepare them to go back and have a tremendous impact back in their home country.
But that's not going to happen. More than 95% of Indians who come here (and can stay here) will not go back to India. And that makes sense on the individual level, they're not going to find back home the safety and the quality of life they can get here so obviously they'll make the decision to stay here. But I'm not sure if we should base the policy on the liberties and considerations from the scope of the individual, we should ideally base the policy on what widely makes for a stable, safe, healthy world. I understand that a nation's job is to look after its own constituents, and nothing more, but I argue in this day and age we should recognize how interconnected the world is, and what magnificently deleterious ramifications our seemingly-benign actions can have.
> But hey: any one of us could go spend our lives living in and trying to improve a third world country.
That's going from, what is in my view, an active-bad action (siphoning talent from abroad, much to the detriment of the nations that are giving up these individuals), to a passive-okay action (letting Nigeria have its smart Nigerians) to an active-good action (we Americans going to Nigeria to make some good changes), aka philanthropy. As a nation responsible for its own constituents, we are not strictly obliged to do that, but we do -- and it's great that we do, we should continue doing it more.
Those underdeveloped countries need you too! You should move there and help them.
As someone who left one of those countries for greener pastures (Canada) your argument sounds very rude and insensitive. Why should I have to suffer for my entire life in a country that violates my rights, with a crappy economy, with poor life outcomes, with a bad educational system, with a crappy health system that will shorten my life, where my kids will grow up to have much worse lives? All because I happen to have been born there?
You got lucky and were born into privilege. It's all too easy to say that we should all just deal with our lots in life when you happen to be in the top 1% of all humans on the planet.
The counter argument is that once that Indian/Nigerian/Chinese/Russian guy or girl has been at Facebook for a few years they'll have gained experience and expertise they'd never be able to get at home. Thus they'll be a lot better at solving the hard problems that exist in their country. Also some of the money they get paid often makes it back to their home country and helps the local economy.
J-1 visas can come with a requirement to spend time away from the US after they expire. One of the motivations is to avoid keeping specialty workers away from their home country if their work is in demand. (How a {country,occupation} pair gets classified as in-demand is an entirely different question.)
That's not the actual motivation. This only applies to J-1 visa holders that are, in part, funded by their original country and that country requests that they return.
Those J-1 holders make an informed deal with their country, money in exchange for time. The US is just enforcing it.
Nothing to do with the sentiments being put forward by the previous post.
An argument to make that it should be the "young and ambitious Indian/Nigerian/Chinese/Russian" choice whether they want to leave their country or not. It's up to America to decide whether they're welcome in America or not, but telling people that they can't move to America because, according to America, their home country needs them more is way too patronizing.
Unfortunately, the individual perspective on that is that opportunities for "talent" to choose their own destiny are eradicated.
Yes, brain drain is terrible (though I can't see how it's unexpected given a global economy). However, you were born Indian/Nigerian/Chinese/Russian/American, therefore you must always work in India/Nigeria/China/Russia/US is equally terrible.
I think by and large most engineers understand what the game is and where most H1Bs are going.
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.
I think by and large most engineers understand what the game is and where most H1Bs are going.
Do they? Every discussion of this issue I've seen has had loads of engineers who don't work in body shops saying that they've never seen an H1B worker in a body shop and that body shops must therefore not be the ones using the visa program. (Of course, anecdotes are not data, so neither is this)
There is no shortage of talent; there's a shortage of talent that wants to earn $100 - $130k (plus 0.2% of an A-round company! Golden paper handcuffs! Whoo!) to live in sf, an area probably more expensive than Manhattan. Without being Manhattan, or having decent public services.
Do we have a shortage of talent of the type I just described? Emphatically yes. Does that mean there is in any way a shortage? Emphatically no.
So the only sense in which there is a shortage is the same sense in which those jerks at bwm don't wish to sell me an m3 coupe for $15k. ie no shortage at all.
In my view, anyone who tries to argue that there is a "shortage" of tech should disclose the compensation package they are offering for the tech positions they are trying to fill.
There was somebody complaining about a shortage of software workers on the Buffalo subreddit recently. When prodded he admitted he was offering $35K a year.
I was contacted by a recruiter. They wanted a Phd in machine learning from a top school, 3+ years experience in adtech, hadoop experience. $110k. In Palo Alto.
Aerofs -- and they've raised $5.7mm btw [1] -- is hiring engineers at an average of $98k [2]. System software engineers, presumably with more experience, get an average of $108k. In Palo Alto. Gee, I wonder why he has problems hiring?
It is interesting that one mainly hears this loud whining for more imported skilled labor from the web publishing industry. The mining, drilling, and rail industries don't make any noise that I've heard. They have high wage earners. They are higher "tech" than 95% of IT and web publishing outfits. Why is all this visa agitation coming from Silicon Valley and not from Houston?
tech is full of useful idiots stoked by the idea of cutting their wages, who haven't fully absorbed how duplicitous and exploitative the industry really is. See google, apple, linkedin wage fixing agreements. And a lack of unions.
if that took digging, you have not worked in the big corporate enterprisey space. These are the go-to bodyshop guys all the major players outsource to. These bodyshops hire talented H1Bs (from their own network) to get folks on-shore to handle knowledge acquisition, then "knowledge transfer" to the offshore folks for peanuts.
AeroFS is inside ValleyBubble, so they see it from that perspective. But yeah the rest of the industry just wants cheap code grinders to pump out CRUD.
I agree that what's happening with Infosys/Tata/WiPro requires a serious look. I also think that today demand for high skilled workers far outstrips the 65,000 quota that Infosys/Tata/WiPro abuse. We should be addressing both, and fixing both. I don't know how to address the Infosys/Tata/WiPro problem, but I do believe that not increasing the H-1B quota is not doing anyone else any favors, either.
I'm all for allowing more skilled workers to immigrate, but not on the terms of the H-1B visa. The H-1B visa gives too much power to the employer. Workers should be able to move to a different company without going through a bureaucratic process and without their green card application resetting, and they should not have to leave the country if they are out of work for a few months.
Based on my experience in 2001 at Lucent, there are "real" technology companies that also playing the cost game. One of my coworkers was a very smart Jamaican and arguably a better match for the job than me despite my much greater general experience and age. His salary, posted per the law, was 48K, mine was 80K.
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.
Yuri is wrong. h1b is absolutely about costs -- unless they claim (a somewhat fantastical claim) there is nobody in the US at all who could fit their needs. A claim which is trivially untrue. Those people exist and could be hired. Why isn't Yuri hiring them? Because of the price they demand.
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.
>Yuri is wrong. h1b is absolutely about costs -- unless they claim (a somewhat fantastical claim) there is nobody in the US at all who could fit their needs. A claim which is trivially untrue. Those people exist and could be hired. Why isn't Yuri hiring them? Because of the price they demand.
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.
Weird, it's almost like yuri was the one peddling errant bullshit that h1bs were not about cost. So I see you saying that they are, well, exactly about cost. Glad we cleared that up. Whining that he can't operate profitably at market wages reinforces my point: h1bs are entirely about cost.
So perhaps he needs to offer a million dollars, if that's what it takes to get his perfect unicorn (minimum job requirements: 23 years experience with python. Cue whining that we have a talent shortage when Guido declines job offer.) But I'd bet he'd get a hell of a lot of interest at even 10% or 15% over the going wage.
All he wants is to sidestep US immigration law to undercut wages of domestic employees. There, was that so hard to admit?
Yes, he's too busy to recruit! Why aren't those uppity employees lining up begging to work for him? I mean, looking at employees on linkedin is, like, so much work!
> yuri was the one peddling errant bullshit ... Whining ... his perfect unicorn ... Cue whining ... All he wants is to sidestep US immigration law
Whoa, this is not ok.
Most of your 15+ comments in this thread have combined grand unsubstantiated claims with lashing out at those you disagree with. That's bad enough, but here you've crossed into personal attack. Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News.
The level of discourse you're practicing here makes me ashamed of this site: lacking in either civility or substance and whipping up indignant froth. In the future, please optimize for quality rather than quantity. One high-quality comment is a greater contribution than a dozen rude ones.
People legitimately have divergent views of this complex matter: companies use the immigration process for different reasons, there are different levels of talent being sought, employers and employees have different vantage points, and so on. Turning it into a polarized nastiness match, as you and a few others have done, destroys the capacity of this site for exploratory conversation.
Yes. US economists believe supply and demand meet at price, but he does not seem to. I would love to hire lots of people here on HN for minimum wage. I know though if I want talent, I have to pay.
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.
FYI, I am the employee mentioned in that post and your statement is just hilarious.
Obviously, a young French guy with disposable income, no dependents and earthly possessions that fit in a large backpack and a suitcase is not representative of the majority of H1B workers but the specter of deportation is not very scary to me. The last two times were just opportunities to travel.
It starts to become more relevant when you start to make more ties, and realize you might suddenly be yanked away from your new friends (and possibly SO).
I'm certainly not saying it's the motivation in every case - doubtless it is often about costs and sometimes genuinely about talent.
Don't get me wrong, the terms of the H1B are pretty terrible but that should not detract from Yuri's point that quotas and other immigration restrictions have a serious impact on smaller companies' ability to hire the best employees.
Similarly a lot of people talking about salary are missing the point. Sure, there might be more candidates if the salary offered were higher but even if they had the right skills (and that's a big if) they might not be a good fit for the team.
I know mentioning "culture fit" may attract a lot of flak but consider this: if a candidate cares more about the salary than the product and the team then even if they're incredibly skilled they risk being detrimental to the company as a whole. I've seen what the world of finance looks like through some friends and it's not pretty.
Sure, I don't think I disagree with any of that. And don't misunderstand me, either - I think the power dynamic of the H1B can be damaging; I'm not opposed to immigration generally.
dude, it's just a job. You're not making the world a better place. You're building slightly better corporate file sharing. That's it. It's a dropbox or box or btsync competitor tuned for corporate clients.
And it's just a job. Not a mission.
People jump out of bed to go skiing, or cure cancer, or research fundamental physics, or to practice medicine, or to help the needy, or to help animals, or to put a human on mars, or for 1000 other reasons.
Not to steal a point of marketshare from office 365.
But I do think I see why aerofs has trouble hiring.
I don't recall claiming to make the world a better place. We've changed our focus since I joined and to be honest I was more excited about the original vision but I'll take corporate file sharing over online advertising any day.
Then again, I'd take life as an itinerant purveyor of french toast and fine liquors over online advertising so I'm hardly representative of the average person in this "industry".
I value coworkers whose company I enjoy and who genuinely care about making customers happy. There's a wide spectrum between detached paycheck collector and over-invested lifer that fails to notice anything outside of work. I have nothing against people on either end, it's just not the kind of work environment I'm looking for.
I don't think culture has been a major issue for us when hiring. I merely brought it up as a counterpoint to the "just raise the salary" argument which strikes me as disingenuous.
Seems like the sensible solution would be to auction off the immigration quota slots. Decide on some number of business/talent based visas to be issued each year. Then do a rolling auction of the visas. If a person gets a visa, comes to America, but then does not like their job and goes home, the company gets a prorated refund. If the person stays more than five years, they get a green card automatically and are free to work wherever they please or start their own company. If a Facebook or YC want the talent, they can bid up the price and pay for the talent. The government doesn't have to worry about in which professions there is a "scarcity" or a talent shortage. If there is a real shortage of valued workers, businesses will bid for visas for those types of workers. It will work itself out. But this system will prevent the body shops from racing to the bottom by using H1-B's as disposable indentured servants.
The unstated premise behind your comment, and indeed this entire debate, is that there is only so much "room" for immigration in the US. This leads us to arguments about how large the quota should be, how it should be divided, etc.
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 U.S. has a fixed capacity to absorb immigrants while integrating them into our culture. In many places in the country, immigration is already too much, resulting in insular immigrant communities and tensions between immigrants and everyone else. Those are bad things.
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.
The U.S. has a fixed capacity to absorb immigrants while integrating them into our culture
I've heard this said before but never seen any data on it, though similar rationale was used in the Immigration Act of 1924: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924 , which helped condemn millions to death in Europe.
Bryan Caplan makes the case for open borders here: http://openborders.info/bryan-caplan/ . Separately, his books, The Myth of the Rational Voter and Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, are both great, and full of brilliantly contrarian thinking.
Bryan Caplan makes strange arguments sometimes. In this pdf [1], he says if you don't want immigrants to vote or receive benefits, then why not just prohibit them from voting or receiving benefits? That would still be more humane than keeping them out of the country altogether, right? He doesn't even mention that it would create an underclass, which is one of the biggest reasons for crime and other social ills.
I don't see why the opponents of open immigration would believe, for an instant, that those people that are let in without benefits would stay in that situation. You paint exactly the arguments ("permanent underclass!") that, after bargaining to get them here without benefits, would be used to get them benefits.
"My parents didn't leave their lives half a world away to come here for the weather."
Agreed. They probably came here for a better life and opportunity just like most immigrants. What is your point though ? Your parents immigrated here and now you think " immigration is already too much". I am not attacking you personally but trying to understand your point.
What is this culture and institution that you talk about ?
My parents came here for various reasons, but one of the straws that broke the camel's back, so to speak, was my dad giving in to paying a bribe just to get telephone service installed at his house. Where I come from, Bangladesh, that is just how you do things. And the institutions you have to deal with were created by people who think that's okay. I think non-immigrants take for granted how amazing, and fragile, it is to have a society where you don't assume you'll have to pay a bribe to get your phone service installed. Or to be able to rely on institutions created by people who don't assume you'll have to pay a bribe to get your phone service installed.
I'm not against immigration. I'm for preserving the virtues of American culture that you don't see in a lot of other places (even among the wealthier and more educated folks in other places): attitudes towards corruption, women, racism, homosexuality, the environment, entrepreneurship, risk, personal happiness, family relationships and hierarchy, etc.
"But I don't want to have so many immigrants that we can't turn them all into Americans. I want immigrants who respect womens' rights, consider racists to be social pariahs, find corruption to be intolerable, embrace gays, etc"
If I understand you correctly, you are making the assumption that things like respecting women's rights etc. are primarily an American virtue and not as much with other cultures ? I would agree with you generally that America is probably the most open country even with its challenges but I am not sure if your point is relevant in the context of immigration. Here is why. Immigrants come to America for many reasons. Your dad's was not wanting to bribe for every little thing and probably many other factors like that. But in my experience, most immigrants are just looking for better opportunity and america provides that. It is hard to objectively quantify their virtues, beliefs etc.
So what I am getting at is that your point seems ok in theory but very difficult to implement in reality. If you want to restrict immigration, it certainly cannot be done based on perceived virtues. Plenty of immigrants assimilate in the local culture while plenty preserve their own at the same time. Nothing wrong with both as long you are not hurting anyone. In fact, what makes America special is you could look different, speak different, eat different but at the end of day, you are American as long as you have some common core beliefs including hard work, take nothing for granted, the drive to succeed and the perception of self independence.
I think you'd be surprised how much "respecting women's rights", given a broad interpretation of that notion, is localized the US and a few other countries. Surprisingly big swaths of Europe have issues with it.
(A fair critique of what I just said might take into account the attitudes of, say, rural Missouri; however: immigrants don't as a general rule come here from Bangladesh to settle into the Ozarks).
The core problem is bribery is both a way of life for more than 1/2 the worlds population and a huge economic drain. If you mix say 200 million people from China and 200 million from India you would quickly end up with yet another society where bribery is the norm.
Granted the cap on immigration is probably well below the cultural assimilation rate, but just because we could accept say 2 million people a year does not mean 20 would not be a huge problem.
On top of that the US has a huge investment in infrastructure roads, bridges, railroads, water, sewage, schools, etc which needs to be expanded when increasing the population. So, while allowing lot's of doctors to emigrate is probably a net gain, adding migrant workers is probably a net loss to the economy on average.
Feel free to look up the crime rates 100 years ago and say that again. Immigration is extremely valuable, but scaling things up tends to create significant issues.
> In fact, what makes America special is you could look different, speak different, eat different but at the end of day, you are American as long as you have some common core beliefs including hard work, take nothing for granted, the drive to succeed and the perception of self independence.
Why are those the core values? I can think of several off the top of my head that are more important. What makes America a better place to live than Bangladesh is not that we believe in hard work and independence while people in Bangladesh do not. Beliefs are a part of it, but not those specific beliefs.
I think this is a very short-sighted view. The US has a long history of immigration, and of having insular cultures slowly integrate into some vague "mainstream" culture. Philadelphia had widely circulated German language newspapers well into the 20th century.
Arguably, what has kept the US culture so vibrant is the very aggressive assimilation and acceptance of foreign cultures.
I think the very notion of some sort of "American culture" that needs to be "protected" to be a fantasy; at best just a rose-tinted glasses view of the past, and at worst shorthand for "I want immigrants who agree with my views so that the candidates I support win more elections".
> In many places in the country, immigration is already too much
This makes me wonder if there is anything we could do to better spread out immigrants to improve the pace of assimilation and hence increase our total capacity to accept immigrants without negative cultural impact.
No idea how this might be accomplished but it's got me thinking.
> the U.S. has nearly unlimited room to accept immigration
Says who? The permanent ecologically sustainable population of the U.S. is under 200 million. Supporting the current population at the current standard of living involves running down aquifers and top soil and fisheries. We could certainly cram in 600 million at a far lower standard of living. Why should the people favor a reduced lifestyle?
Where exactly are the added millions going to live? There aren't really viable sites for new cities. No, with continued high immigration we're really talking about adding massively to both sprawl and overcrowding in existing cities. Citizens rightly regard both these developments negatively.
The demographic trends in America were set in the 1960s and 70s to level off the population at a pretty comfortable figure around 200 million. With the massively increased immigration of recent decades we're going to hit somewhere well over double that. To what advantage? The parallel America with a much lower population would be a much nicer place to live for the vast majority of people.
Are you deliberately missing the point? The ecological impacts of sustaining human settlements go far beyond housing sites. The American west is overstretched for water. Much of the land west of the Mississippi is effectively already overpopulated.
Beyond ecological concerns, you can't add people without compromising the lifestyle of people already here. Go ahead and ask people in most cities if they want their town to be a lot more like Los Angeles. The answer 90% of the time will be No. But that's what's happening anyway.
This idea that there is a ton of land for new urbanization is obviously wrong. The good land is all in use. What's left is semi-arid, flood plain, or unsuitable in other ways. You can't just stick people out in a prairie or desert or on an Appalachian hill top. You have to ship in food and pipe out the sewage. That's not economically viable most places.
The one area of the country that could actually support a higher population density is the great lakes region, but it's in fact slowly depopulating at the moment. Immigrants are not moving to Erie, PA. They are moving to places like NYC and cities in California. So this point that there is available land is a pointless academic discussion unless you want to impose soviet style internal passports.
The U.S. only has unlimited capacity for immigration if the composition of the immigrants already closely resembles the overall U.S economy and culture.
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.
Yes, that is the premise. In my comment, I take the assumption of restricted immigration as a given, and then propose how the quota can be most sensibly allocated. There is a completely separate debate over how high or low that quota should be, or if there should be a quota at all. But that would deserve its own long thread.
A rather obvious premise is that there is some limit of immigration that is in the best interest of current US citizens.
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.
While there is an income discrepancy, western countries and companies are hungry for developing markets.
You can't have entry into those markets while putting up barriers of your own. Go to any street corner in India or Mexico and you will see US and other western brands everywhere.
Trade protectionism is a completely different issue from immigration and I don't see how it's relevant here.
That being said, you definitely can have entry into those markets while putting up barriers of your own, there are many historical examples when this was successfully done, e.g. 19th century was probably a peak of such practices. The only question is if you should, and if it's worthwhile right now - you can go to any place in USA and you'll see lots of things that are manufactured in Mexico.
And the relationship is exactly the opposite of what is implied by your comment - a large wage disparity means that the developing markets aren't as "useful" as is their cheap labor; if wages would become more equal, then this change would generally reduce the outsourcing of labor to the third world and increase the export of goods made in USA to India or Mexico.
>Trade protectionism is a completely different issue from immigration and I don't see how it's relevant here.
This has gone into both immigration and outsourcing, so it does become relevant.
>there are many historical examples when this was successfully done
This was to the detriment of those who were blocked from trade. The power balance between the west and the rest of the world isn't as skewed today so such would not be possible.
>a large wage disparity means that the developing markets aren't as "useful" as is their cheap labor;
This is a fundamental flaw in your logic and most in this thread. A person is both a worker and consumer. The same person that is working for money is going to consume with that money.
When an immigrant arrives to the US, they become both worker and consumer. Their consumption drives the creation of more products, including software products.
Arguably the incarcerated, and more tenuously then unemployed, are not "average human brains". I'm not sure I'd actually argue that but it seems worth addressing.
Incarceration is much more highly correlated to your parents income level than their genetics. Unemployment is primarily a skillset mismatch problem. Becoming a newspaper pressman looked like a solid career choice in 1995, not so much twenty years later when those 18 year olds are 38 and unemployed. Not foreseeing the rise of the internet is hardly strong evidence that their brains are defective.
Presented with an individual, it actually doesn't matter whether the problem was nature or nurture. What matters is what you can do about it now.
Bear in mind that I brought this up as a possible objection that needed addressing, to the argument "we don't need more average minds - look at all the average minds we're not using".
> Presented with an individual, it actually doesn't matter whether the problem was nature or nurture. What matters is what you can do about it now.
But that's the problem. Doing something with the late 30s unskilled laborer with no job is something we might be able to just break even on, or at least not lose too much in retraining for humanitarian reasons, and doing that is arguably better than abandoning those people to a life of crime and prison. But importing a significant number of new people who are already in that situation is not an economically positive proposition.
Letting people take the jobs that best fit them, the world over, means more jobs are better done sooner, which means more resources available to do things like retrain.
None of this has much to do, anymore, with the question of whether there is "demand for average human brains", incidentally.
> Letting people take the jobs that best fit them, the world over, means more jobs are better done sooner, which means more resources available to do things like retrain.
But we're not talking about the world over. Allowing unlimited immigration is good for the immigrants but bad for the existing citizens.
And you're running straight into equality fallacy. Equality is not an unambiguous good. When most people are poor, making everyone equal just makes everyone poor. There is a threshold past which people can stop worrying about where their next meal is coming from and instead make investments in the future of the world. The ideal eventual outcome is for everyone to be above that level, but if you flatten the world-wide income graph today then nobody is and the people who are are the only ones who can drag everyone else up. In the meantime the distinction between who gets to be a citizen of a first world country and who doesn't is inherently arbitrary and unfair, but it's still a choice that has to be made.
The reasoning you quoted has nothing to do with equality. Don't make things up just because you find them easier to argue against.
The reasoning was: If you force jobs to be filled by people who are not as good at them, we collectively get less work done. Assuming that work tends to be useful, that means we collectively have fewer resources available.
> The reasoning was: If you force jobs to be filled by people who are not as good at them, we collectively get less work done. Assuming that work tends to be useful, that means we collectively have fewer resources available.
Now you're changing your argument. The people who are the "best fit" for a job aren't necessarily better at it. They may be worse at it but willing to work for less money. Which is where equality enters into it: You're making the assumption that it's better to transfer that money from the workers to producers or customers. But for something that done at scale leads to the destruction of the middle class, that assumption is false.
The current US population is 7 billion, US population is 300 million. How many of the 6.5 billion non-Americans do you think could be rapidly absorbed, both terms of infrastructure (roads, water, sewers) as well as housing, culture, and government subsidies?
Your answer MUST be expressed a NUMBER, not some vapid BS platitude.
Increasing the size of the economy isn't the best choice, though. We have too many people in the US as it is. More people, more money, more stuff isn't always better. (Using a throwaway since it seems most people think more people and skyscrapers and traffic and higher taxes to compensate for the dwindling resources is wonderful.)
No, we don't have unlimited room, unless you're planning to not feed or provide water to these people long term.
> (Using a throwaway since it seems most people think more people and skyscrapers and traffic and higher taxes to compensate for the dwindling resources is wonderful.)
Are you sure that's a throwaway? Take a look at my username. That's a throwaway!
> The unstated premise behind your comment, and indeed this entire debate, is that there is only so much "room" for immigration in the US. This leads us to arguments about how large the quota should be, how it should be divided, etc.
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.
Along similar lines, the cost of sponsoring H-1Bs should grow exponentially with the fraction of the company's workforce that is on H-1B, beyond a small threshold.
It is an interesting idea for changing how H1Bs are limited, although it doesn't take much thinking to come up with some ways to game such a system. It would get complex, and fast.
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}?
Maybe there is something I'm missing due to having little knowledge about all the legal subtitles. It seems like startups could come out ahead by realizing that in the modern world, there is no reason for a talented developer to be on-site 365 days of the year. They could save money by not getting on getting an H1B by having the developer work remotely and only need to obtain more limited visas for occasional on-site visits?
Im afraid that is a different debate on remote v/s local. There are both advantages and disadvantages to either. In this specific case, it is quite clear they really wanted their team to be together (i.e. on site) and went to extraordinary length to do that.
BTW there are few visa's (if any) for "limited" or occasional visits to the US.
"Meeting" is different from "working". You can, of course, get a tourist Visa and meet and talk about stuff, and maybe even work out of a US office for a couple of weeks. But I think that working for a couple of months would not be permitted...
Actually, I'm not sure of the law here. As long as you're not employed by the US division, are not paid by them and are just using the US as a place to work for their overseas subsidiary....I'm not sure how that pans out, legality wise.
Smaller companies benefit later, after the initial five years, when an employee brought in by Microsoft is free to join a startup. And also indirectly due to generally increased supply.
Personally, if I were Microsoft, I'd kill for the opportunity to limit foreign startup talent hires to a five year perked timetable.
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?
Startups already lose a lot of bidding wars to bigger companies for domestic employees. This wouldn't be any different. Big companies pay more money in salary & bonus, generally have better benefits, more stability, and these days many of the side perks that startups have.
Almost all of the money 'startups' are raising is destined for employee compensation. This would just be another form of it.
I would prefer a system where the candidate can leave the job immediately, or worst case, after 3-6 months of arriving in the US. The company that does the sponsoring should not have the power to hold on to the employee. If the candidate can stay employed in his/her field and average[1] the salary filled on the non immigrant application sheet for 4 out of the 5 year period, then, regardless of company, the green card should be reachable. It is certainly a risk for the sponsoring company but that is known ahead of time and not unlike the risk of hiring a local candidate. There certainly should be no compensation for losing an employee (local or via H1). Employee mobility should not be different just because of your visa status.
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.
Once you're on an H1-B visa, transferring it to another company is quite a bit easier, and NOT subject to the quotas.
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.
You are also very limited in the kind of jobs you can take. I think that part of the appeal of the H1B is that it creates a pool of programmers who are only allowed to be programmers. Keep in mind, the biggest competition for programmers may come from outside the field. In my opinion, being a programmer is actually very difficult. Even the much derided "crud" apps require a substantial amount of reading of dense material, tremendous persistence in the face of strange and obscure bugs and errors, the ability to communicate with (and negotiate with) non-technical stakeholders under deadline pressure… really, people who can do this are able to take jobs that often pay better with more stability in other fields, provided that they are free to do so.
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.
Why do people assume the H1-B's are always cheap. MS pays their H1B's incredibly well. Yes its true H1B makes the employee loyal to the company for a long time until greencard. Working crazy long hours are the very norm.
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.
> Pricing a scarce resource doesn't "screw over" anyone.
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.
Not being able to afford the market price of a resource is not "getting screwed" and you're just being inflammatory by making it a matter of life and death. H1B visas are not a matter of life and death; we're talking about people who want to make more money, not people seeking political asylum.
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.
Sure it does. At least when that scarce resource is artificially constrained.
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?)
It's not artificial scarcity. The US doesn't have an unlimited capacity for immigration. We can argue around the edges of what the correct number is, but whatever number we pick, there are still going to be more people than that who want to be US citizens and we still need to choose between them somehow.
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.
Its going to be a scare resource regardless of bidding. At least bidding will allocate to some correlation to real need since people pay more for critical skills.
There was an article submitted here a long time ago, it's title was:
"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.
The phrase originated from the movie Goodfellas (1990), and then was brought back into the memesphere when Mike Monteiro (co-founder of Mule Design Studio) used that phrase in a fun yet forceful presentation[1].
> Just a few hours later, Vox published an article titled These tech interns are probably making more than you are where they shared a tweet showcasing candid salaries at various tech companies, some larger, some smaller:
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"
> When you're "making 90k" in the valley you have the quality of life worth 30k in a midwestern city.
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.
If you want your comparison to be equally valid wherever you make it, you have to use the same basket of goods everywhere you go. Otherwise, I can't tell whether you are comparing apples to oranges or pears to grapefruit.
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.
I agree that there's a big transparency benefit to using the same basket everywhere, but I don't think that actually gives the most realistic answer.
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.)
Realism takes a back seat to practicality here. A CoL calculator takes two cities and a dollar amount as inputs. A QoL calculator would need a lengthy list of preferences with reasonably accurate price estimates, and a complex network of likely substitutions. That seems like an academic project for a graduate student in economics, whereas CoL calculators are just a simple HTML form with a tiny bit of script and a database of scale factors for each city.
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.
I obviously felt my comment was already too long and wouldn't on balance benefit from a cautious parenthesis to the effect that you might actually get a lot more money back than you put in, or a lot less, depending on exactly what the housing market does, and that it also depends a lot on how much of the house you own (the limiting case of a 100% mortgage is, at least to begin with, almost indistinguishable from renting), but that to first order, assuming a reasonable amount of equity and no catastrophic shocks to the housing market, what you get out is at least a fair fraction of what you put in ... but as two people have commented on that omission, perhaps I was mistaken.
(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.)
Yes, but using the same basket of goods is fundamentally flawed because people shift their consumption choices dependent on relative prices. People do not pick the same consumption bundles wherever they go. Your substitution to an inferior good (actually, just less consumption of a normal good, housing space) is compensated with a larger consumption of 'other goods', which have also rose in price but not nearly to the extent your salary went up (tripled, in his previous example). Again, income effect vs substitution effect.
> Not true at all, yet this is constantly repeated like it's fact.
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.
Housing might very well be 2-3x (or more) expensive, but not all goods have gone up 2-3x more. This allows for an adjustment of your consumption bundle; your housing is not going to be as large, but you might have access to a greater amount of other goods. Of course, you can choose to easily make it 2-3x more expensive if you desire. Family makes this difficult because your personal indifference curve places higher utility towards space, but the parent was discussing intern salaries, who generally don't have to support families.
You have the same access to goods almost anywhere in the US. The basic problem is that certain basic needs (energy, housing, child care) cost 2-3X more in the Bay Area than the Midwest. The only things that isn't the case for are food and transportation, which are slightly more expensive, but not as nearly as much. Transportation may be slightly cheaper out here, but not by a significant margin.
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.
The idea of a consumption bundle is a microeconomic theory that has a lot of evidence behind it and is generally accepted in the community. It's not really my idea.
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.
Exactly. When I lived in the suburbs I had a 3 bedroom condo, and my wife and I owned two cars. I moved to the city and we now have a 1 bedroom apartment and no cars. Total cost of living is roughly the same. My happiness in my living arrangements is about the same. A cost of living calculator would make it look like we are getting absolutely hosed.
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.
You can always adjust your consumption bundle. If I'm living in a high rent city, I'm more likely to find a friend to share an apartment with or settle for something not that great. This is a drop in utility (though I'd argue living with a friend is a positive for myself), but I also have a lot more money to use on other things, which increases my utility. Spending most of your money on rent when you're pulling something like 5,000 after tax a month is a choice, not a given, and is reflective on how much utility you perceive a better apartment to give you. In reality, we're probably terrible at accurately estimating utility of a good, but I personally have lived in a variety of places, and I was most happiest living in my tiny dorm room, so I personally don't care much about having a big place.
Your average friend is likely to want a close to market price for that room. Relying on friends is not a way to plan an economy. A lot of people won't have friends willing to let them stay.
That's not what I was saying at all, but alright. If you're interested in the topic, look up utility curves, income effect, and substitution effect in a microeconomics textbook. It'll probably have a much better explanation than I can communicate through text (unless I start making graphs, which would be a bit time consuming).
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 cities to cities (e.g. Chicago vs. SF, Minneapolis vs. Seattle) then I'd say that it's closer to 65k than 30k to get an equivalent lifestyle to $90k on the West Coast. There are (contrary to coastal stereotype) great places to live in the Midwest, and they are cheaper than SF, but they aren't super-cheap either. The 2500 SF houses for $300k aren't in downtown Chicago. They're in suburbs where most 25-year-olds would be pretty bored because walking or biking to work is very rare and you can't go out without a designated driver (i.e. cab service and public transportation aren't options).
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.
Most of them are worthless; of any given intern class at a first tier technology company (e.g., Apple), only ~1-5% will actually be offered a full time job.
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.
In my experience at Google, far, far more than 1-5% were offered full time jobs. Maybe my group just had above-average interns? But I don't think so. The intern hiring bar was fairly high.
Yeah, this is silly. The point of having interns is like 90% finding and vetting new employees. Certainly, not everyone will be offered a job, but if less than 5% of a company's interns are receiving offers, there is something seriously wrong with the company's intern selection process.
Do you have some sort of source for that figure? Every company I've worked at, including both Google and obscure outfits you've never heard of, has made an offer to far more than 1-5% of its interns. This random Quora answer says 70% at Google get offers, which seems high to me, but less off than 5%.
Most of them are worthless; of any given intern class at a first tier technology company (e.g., Apple), only ~1-5% will actually be offered a full time job.
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.
actually, I am not claiming at all that interns are half-able, incompetent newbies. Some of our best work has been done by people interning with us, and I think our past interns will vouch for that. That being said, it is true that intern salaries are generally lower than full time salaries (although the gap is shrinking, IMO), and intern salaries are good indicators of full time salaries in tech.
The thing is that a highly paid intern in no way refutes the argument that immigration is about cheap labor. The argument is that 1) because domestic labor is expensive companies want to increase H1B's as a way to decrease cost 2) if you didn't mind paying more you could find domestic labor. The highly paid intern is an point in favor of #1.
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.
> Over the history of the company, zero of our hiring decisions have been made on a cost-savings basis.
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?
My grandparents were all immigrants who didn't need to jump through hoops to come in. IMO, this should still be possible. I think we should have a open lottery that meets 95% of immigration demand, and have some sort of competitive/fast-track process for skilled workers that would weed out the bodyshops.
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.
Immigration is not only still possible, but booming.
The number of immigrants living in the US is 12.9% - which is close to an all-time high from about a hundred years ago (14% or so).
"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.
>My grandparents were all immigrants who didn't need to jump through hoops to come in. IMO, this should still be possible. I think we should have a open lottery that meets 95% of immigration demand, and have some sort of competitive/fast-track process for skilled workers that would weed out the bodyshops.
Yes but it's very difficult to win. There are two 'rounds'. You have about a 1% chance of winning round one and then a 50% chance of an interview (which you must pass). It's a route I've tried 6 times now with no luck (and it's an annual event).
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.
If this guy is starved for talent couldn't he just increase what he's willing to pay and steal people from other tech companies? (There are a number of people who would be willing to jump ship for the right #s I'm sure.) This seems to be where BusinessWeek is correct. At the end of the day engineers should be getting paid more.
There are only a handful of Yann LeCuns in the world. You can't just duplicate certain technical expertise.
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.
So have said companies fund research fellowships/projects producing PhDs with the skillsets they want. Then pay enough to entice them to join the company. The US DoE does this specifically because it cannot hire non-citizens.
And Indian H1B workers who match those skills for the high-skill / high-paying jobs will settle for less than industry average?
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.)
A lot of the comments assume that there are only two choices: hire a local American worker or hire an immigrant. But, as the article shows, there is a third choice: hire outside of the US.
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].
[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.
Have a friend- early 20s, speaks 5 languages, graduated from one of her country's top law schools, worked in corporate law, received a full scholarship to do a decent LLM program in the USA- she finished the program with a 4.0. She won a green card, but when it came time for her to interview for the green card she was told- "we filled the Eastern Europe quota." So now she's getting kicked out of the US, shouldn't the goal of an immigration system be to attract and retain the best and the brightest?
True, but lawyers have the American bar associations, unlike programmers, that keep competition low. Doctors have the similar American Medical Association.
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.
Right now, getting a GC through L1/H1 path is extremely painful (again, H1B lottery + huge delay in actually getting a GC + painful employment-based GC process). You can try EB1, but good luck proving "extraordinary abilities" in the tech sector.
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.
I get it. They make immigration way to hard considering how much immigration has done for America in the last 200 years. I wish it was an instant jackpot though. I've tried for 6 years. It's 5 minute application in October - wait until May for the result - try again in October. And if you do win in May you likely won't get to America for another 18 months or so.
Time and time again, this type of article pops up.
Time and time again, it's about economics, and the solution has ALWAYS been about economics. It's just that the companies that the political machines don't want to talk about it.
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.
The author of the article areas with you! He says that hiring an H1-B is MORE expensive -- not only do you have to pay what the DOJ considers the prevailing wage for the area and the job but you have to pay legal bills, relocation, interview costs, a lot of personnel time plus you have to wait frigging forever to be able to finally employ the person.
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).
If he really did agree with me, then why did he point out how X and Y INTERN costs SOOO much money?
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.
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.
Reform can come in many forms, not the least of which is increasing the visa cap. I do think taking a look at companies that are abusing the system is very important, as is taking a look at what we classify as "highly skilled labor". Looking online, many of the companies that fall into the top-100 visa sponsors are respectable technology companies. In 2014, Microsoft was #8, Google was #12, Intel #15, Oracle #15, Amazon #20, Apple #23. At the same time, of course, Infosys looks to be #1 by a wide margin. That's likely a problem.
From a simple, static economic perspective cost and availability the number of qualified candidates available to you are inversely correlated. Any influx of candidates brings down salaries. Theoretically, there is no such thing as a shortage. It is always true that you can find more programmers by paying more. Beat all those internship offers and you will get plenty of quality interns. Both of these positions are true but dishonest.
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.
As an H1B person, who has incredibly talented (french, actually) friends who did not get the lottery, I can back up the veracity of this article 100%.
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.
Last year I had pending offers from a couple big SV companies, all of them at around $200k/year. Same goes for many of my friends (I have just graduated). Did not get any job due to H1B shortage. I will stay in Europe for now, as I am not interested in being humiliated by such an absurd system. America, fix your immigration.
Let's go further. This country was founded on immigrants. This country is powerful because of the wonderful hard-working immigrants who have come to this country and seen opportunity and seized it with both hands and their teeth. It's not the lazy, entitled, molly-coddled, citizens who would rather watch endless episodes of real-world who made this country great (and yes, I, sadly, fall in that category). It is the people who came here with nothing and worked as hard as they could for themselves and their families who keep reinventing this country. We should welcome as many hard-working immigrants into this country as we can.
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!
I don't like the logic or lack thereof in this article. There are lots of claims made on the backhand that never get followed up with any sort of quantification or citation.
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.
There are a lot of flawed zero-sum arguments going on in this thread.
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 understand the true benefits of hiring true talents for a true companies. Companies like Infosys, WiPro, Tata are sucking up resources and literally providing modern day pseudo-slave labor. Govt just need to either stop giving H1-Bs to these companies or give them a small percentage. These companies are killing the talent based immigration for everyone else.
A blanket statement like that simply isn't true. I can look in several tech offices and draw conclusions. Are there exceptions, sure. Therefore, H1B should be reserved for the talent you speak of. Why are we bringing QA engineers on H1B? We can train a large portion of these jobs here through programs like Hack Reactor. But we aren't, we are looking for simple fixes.
Last month I was ridding in an Uber and the driver told me he was a Math Teacher. He said that all his students wanted to do was code all day long. He asked me if I wanted to come into class and just tell the kids about my job etc., they would "love that".
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?
> Given the dire problem that they claim there is, they should be out there getting kids interested in these jobs.
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.
You don't have to be a compilers expert. Yes the supply of experts in ML/CV/compilers may be small worldwide. But I believe the current situation is a symptom as well of negligence on the part of these large tech companies. It's much cheaper to train locally and hire. Microsoft, apple, google et al should join forces to establish a vocational school in the bay area. Make it a 2 year program. I bet you'd get great engineers if Hack reactor, general assembly et al are any indicator.
The problem with H1-B is that it's not even a speed bump for those it is supposedly trying to stop, while it's a total road block for everyone else.
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.
The discussion about H1B's is becoming so polarized. As an Engineer, I want to work with other good engineers <period>. You can really good talent from abroad - or you can get really bad talent that costs less. So it's not black-and-white.
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.
I applaud your efforts for hiring for talent, but you aren't making a fair discussion of the issue. Of course you can select for talent when you're a small company and you are doing all the hiring yourself. But as others have pointed out, the debate about a shortage of tech workers vs. H1-B workers isn't about you, it's about companies like Accenture and IBM that have 200-300k workers and _are_ looking at it from a cost perspective.
What you're looking at with those offers is likely a PhD in computer science or engineering who specialized in something those companies want. Those aren't what you think of as internships done by Sophomores or Juniors in college. They're an extended interview of a highly sought after expert in their field. Both of the candidate by the company and vice versa.
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".
Haha they are definitely sophomores and juniors in college. CS undergrads from top 20 CS programs are getting offered that much for summers, I've witnessed these offers from a lot of my friends.
Same here mate (I'm in England though). On the plus side I live figuratively in my mother's basement so my costs are practically nothing. And I'm not exactly hot talent material either, but I have been in the same job for 6 years (my initial salary was about 1/3rd of these, excluding the housing allowances).
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.
What if the H1B visas were not for foreigners, but for US people from other states? Would people still be making the same arguments? California companies hiring cheap midwest talent and disadvantaging the rightful locals of their jobs and high salaries.
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".
These businesses benefit greatly from our strong economy/infrastructure/judicial system, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect them to favor American workers over foreigners. There's nothing racist about that.
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%.
This is a false dichotomy, because cost and talent are related - either this is about minimizing the cost of talent at a fixed level of talent, maximizing the talent at a fixed level of cost, or something in between.
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.
I suspect that the majority of the cases where H-1B workers are paid less than the prevailing wages are at body shops like Wipro, TCS and yes, IBM. IMHO one potential fix for the situation could be to disallow (or at least make it sufficiently expensive) for a company to hire an H-1B worker for any third party work -- that is, if company A hires a worker, then the worker would have to work on company A's premises only and that any such work cannot be sold to third parties on a time and material basis. Yes, enforcement will be difficult and there will be clever ways of circumventing the regulations, but I honestly see no other solution except to cut out H-1B altogether. Which, IMHO would be cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. Having been in a position of trying to hire engineers in this market, the AeroFS experience is spot on.
And yes, we should completely get rid of L-1. I agree that it is one channel that is exploited by the body shops.
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.
> Why are interns making more in salary than the H1-B's?
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.
I read somewhere a few years ago about the statistics, India took about 47% of the H1Bs, China took about 17%.
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.
Unfortunately, this post discusses the expenses and difficulty of hiring, but doesn't provide any information about the compensation offered, nor do I have any real sense of what the position requires. Are they offering 200k for an entry level crud developer? Are they offering 100k for someone with a PhD in Math, an extensive 10+ background in high scale software development at a large silicon valley company, and intricate knowledge of cutting edge data science algorithms?
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.
Not sure why it is not mentioned enough in media coverage, but one big reason of the H1B visa shortage is the mass applications from consultancy companies (all I know are Indian based, but there might be more). There was a report that these consultancies have about 25% - 33% H1Bs quota each year. They are the ones who get large margin by paying employees cheap, even though on paper these employees could get much higher from "customer companies". And you know how they work? My friend spent 2 weeks at a consultancy, and they gave her some projects to MEMORIZE while they were polishing her resume. They have bunch of customers, so one memorizing can be used for many interviews! True story. The government should fix this first!
The experience for getting a working visa in the US is absolutely atrocious, and let me preface this with the fact I am Australian and Australia offers an E3 visa which allows you to work in the US indefinitely for the sponsoring company. It doesn't have the same issues as a H1-B visa (lottery, restrictions on when you can apply), but offers just as much flexibility and power.
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.
At face value, I can see why you think that. Supply and demand, as supply dwindles and demand increases, the price increases as well, right? Simple economics. I understand it and I get it, but I don't think the instance of developers that it is fair that bigger companies with larger profits and reach should be able to take all of the talent in the area by offering above average salaries to get them to sign. Smaller companies with half the profits and budgets shouldn't have to compete or die, it just is not fair.
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.
Going off of what another poster said: I'd agree to that $125k salary if I could work remotely. I'm in the Chicago area, and it's significantly more difficult to find jobs that are willing to pay that much out here (most jobs that advertise their ranges are more in the $80-100k area), whereas it's trivial to get a job offer as low as $125k if I were to move to the west coast (I was interviewing for jobs advertising $140k+).
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.
>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.
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?
>Proper average market salary and inflated market salary are two different things
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. :)
Only if you define the market rate as "That paid by those with the deepest pockets", in which case, you may find the price of a gallon of milk to be somewhat different than what you expect.
Really it just sounds like they should extend your remote position to full-time employee status. The modern workforce extends beyond a single office with warm bodies in seats.
If you faked a degree, you would definitely be caught. If you are caught defrauding the Government in such a way, you might escape jail time (if it is your first offense) but also face the possibility of a ban from the US itself (permanently or for a very long time). This means you would not possibly even be able to travel to the US as a tourist because you tried to deceptively defraud.
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.
> 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.
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.
I went through IT trade school and no one was interested in how well I could program a router, switch, or how well I could manage an exchange server, GPO, or any of that bullshit. They want senior everything, when I was a junior. Can't find senior in the USA? Go to another country for it and lobby hard for it.
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.
Certainly Yuri simplified his argument - he may have hired for talent first, then maybe "fit", but he also had to consider costs. After all, he probably couldn't justify paying a hire 1 billion USD per year. So cost is a constraint, even if in Yuri's mind it's somewhat trivial.
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 have interviewed & screened a lot of developers both H1B (looking to transfer), greencard holders and US citizens. I can't say that I noticed any correlation between immigration status and mediocrity. I suppose if H1B was organized in a way to prefer highly skilled individuals then I should have seen a higher percentage of skilled H1B applicants.
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.
There is another visa you can use to work legally in the US for 18 months, it's the J visa. It's suppose to be a "training/internship" visa, and is a good way to wait for other chances at an H1B, or a GC lottery (you never know). The US has a 2 year clause that prevent some countries from staying in the US at the end of their 18 months, but I was lucky it didn't apply to me.
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 Silicon Valley privilege bubble is on farcical display here.
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.
Yeah, try being a hard-working, competent, solidly middle class 45-year old software developer who has been laid off from his job at BigCorp in SmallCity, Midwest, probably because BigCorp is bringing in a wave of L1 employees who "understand the technology" better.
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.
When I was struggling with the H1B lottery and was considering the options with my Lawyer, she told me that an the company could apply for EB2 directly. You don't need to be working here to enter the process.
Of course EB delays depends on the skill (EB1, EB2, EB3...) and the country of origin. But for a European, it can be done quite quickly. Especially, the company does not need a candidate to do the first part (labor certification) if I understood correctly, so assuming that this part is done a French candidate (as mention in the article) could be hired in a matter of months.
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.
Regardless of the content (which is interesting), the "discuss on HN" link at the end of the article prompts you to submit the article to HN, thereby giving it free upvotes. This is a dark pattern and not a practice we should encourage. Flagged, and I encourage other people to do the same.
As a Canadian, I'm all for a better immigration system. I think it makes the US stronger, but going on AngelList I see a lot of talented engineers. I have difficulty believing that Google, Facebook, and Amazon are struggling to find talent. Immigration would help startups though.
That's great that AeroFS is hiring worldwide based solely on talent, but I can tell you from experience working at Ford, that is not the case among massive corporations. They are purely trying to exploit the wage differential between the US and India, Pakistan and others.
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.
The more highly skilled labor enter a free economy, the greater the demand for lower skilled labor.
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.
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.
If H1-B holders could freely change employers then I'm pretty sure that Amazon for one would be a better place to work. As far as I could tell they could only get away with treating engineers like they did because the latter had nowhere else to go (the vast majority are H1-B holders, not because of any local shortage, I suspect, but because they are so exploitable).
If we accept that maximum utility (that is, the jargon economists use for maximum human fulfilment) is not only about maximum output, then the idea that we should open all our borders to the lowest bidder, becomes invalid.
What is in the interests of corporations is not what is in the interests of our society.
Automate agriculture using robots. Move in to the post-economic era as fast as possible. That's the only solution. What can computer programmers do to achieve this. Spend time daily on machine learning and contribute to ML projects.
H1B visas create indentured servants with no guarantees of the payoff of citizenship. If you're an advocate of this, then you're one of the villains who exploits your fellow man in an uncommon harsh way.
Doesn't remote working make this less of an issue now? Unless you're dealing with hardware, there is very little empirical evidence to detract from the effectiveness of a remote workforce.
In my experience H1B visas generally fall into one of two pools:
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.
Can someone tell me how the author managed to start a company with a H1B? I thought this is not possible without the founder relinquishing ownership of the company. Did I miss something?
The issues tech companies have with immigration are about costs. The argument that is about "talent" that the AeroFS blog post makes is not about talent distinct from cost, its about AeroFS's preference to not bear the cost (including time, financial cost, and risk) of developing talent to a particular experience level and their preference to have that done for them, and the fact that they found someone for whom that was done in a way they liked and that -- except inconveniently situated with regard to immigration.
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.
I've worked for tech companies and a law firm that was in the top 4 in global immigration. The worker shortage is a myth. It doesn't exist. When a company claims they can't find a US worker they are lying and going through 'recruitment efforts' for Green Card and I-140 applications.
HR uses a 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. By claiming they can't find a US worker they can bring in their wage slave who will be an indentured servant. They will use that person's visa and green card as a carrot to wave in front of their face to make them go along with violating labor laws. "Someday you'll be a US citizen if you just put up with this for a little bit more!" They string this out into a decade long process often. Oracle and Yahoo were the worst offenders. Anyone who is 'pro-immigration' is just an unknowing tool for multi-billion dollar conglomerates. Immigration has been turned into a public subsidy for the richest corporations.
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.
This is a great response. The economics of this aren't really that hard to puzzle out. Why did Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe, and others collude to artificially lower worker wages?[1] The answer is simple, they were too damn high and they wanted to use cutting costs as a means to grow profits and deliver shareholder value. As a worker you simply have to realize this is DIRECTLY AGAINST your best interests, regardless of the rhetoric about some future where it's ultimately better for everyone. The H1B schemes debated here as well as the push to expand computer science education online and make it cheaper produce exist to produce a new pool of less skilled and therefore cheaper laborers as part of a pretty simple longterm economic strategy - programmers as the factory workers of the information economy. If you're a business owner this is good, if you're a high-paid software engineer this is bad.
I think chanting "talent shortage" as many Silicon Valley tech companies do is hurting the immigration reform cause rather than helping. Also lobbying to increase the size of the pool makes no sense - it's just going to get fill the insatiable desire of body shops like Wipro, Infosys, TCS etc that are the main cause for tech salary undercuts -- by mass importing workers who jump ship asap willing to take low pay.
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.
I got a H-1B visa. I was living in Ireland at the time. But, as it turned out, I never moved to the US.
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'm a software engineer and green card holder from Brazil and there is nothing I want more than to see many of my friends who work in Brazil have the opportunity to come here to work in a great industry. That being said, both you and the anon person you replied to are right about the situation.
The position you came to fill is a relatively rare skill here in the US and it helps the US to bring in talent from abroad, but the person you replied to isn't wrong. It's not like compiler engineers don't exist in the US. They most certainly do and they most certainly would make more money if you couldn't get compiler people from abroad.
Personally, I would love it if we were far more liberal with giving out H1-B visas, but also required companies to pay those H1-B visa holders a premium over local talent. i.e. if the market rate is foo, then you need to pay 1.5x foo salary to bring that person from abroad. This would ensure that companies actually can get access to all the talent they need irrespective of origin, but that the talent that comes from abroad doesn't depress salaries.
1.5x foo is friggin' cheap if the alternatively is not having the talent at all. It also forces you to always consider domestic labor first if it exists instead of abusing the H1-B visa program to get cheap labor like many companies do.
Such a system would also serve to help salaries rise to the levels enjoyed by doctors and lawyers (which is really where salaries should be for any solid engineer). If this means certain business models are no longer viable, then c'est la vie. There's nothing that says that you have a right to a business model that wouldn't exist if salaries were not depressed.
Alternatively, I would be okay with eliminating the lottery and giving visas out on the basis of the premium companies are willing to pay over the salary a domestic worker would be paid. If your company is willing to pay 2.0x foo for a position, then you will get the H1-B visa ahead of a company only willing to pay 1.5x foo. The floor would be set at something like 1.1x foo.
Thus, when I hear people complain of companies who hire H1Bs only because they want to pay them less, I always want to ask, "why haven't you reported them?"
Either they don't actually know that the companies are exclusively paying H1Bs less, or they don't believe that the government will enforce the salary floor. Either way, raising the salary floor from 1x to 1.5x probably won't address their concerns.
I don't know the salaries of any of the H1-B visa holders at my company. Do you?
Maybe we can make it a policy that companies make such information public when they employ more than N number of H1-B holders. With mean, median, standard deviation and error bars, you should be able to get an idea of whether or not this is happening.
Besides these numbers for salary, it would also be interesting to see the same statistics for years of experience programming of domestic labor versus imported labor. I would expect to see a significantly greater mean and median years of experience among H1-B holders versus domestically sourced talent.
That data is extremely skimpy. Where is the comparative data? All I saw was one figure, "prevailing wage". What is the sample size? Is the sample based on workers operating in the same region (for example a company with multiple locations could very well cite a domestic salary relative to all locations (bringing the average down) or cite numbers from the cheapest region. etc. etc. etc. There are a many ways to lie with statistics and the number of ways you can lie with them is inversely proportional to the quantity of statistics released.
When I was working at apple IS&T 6 months ago, I saw paystubs of people working for TCS and Cognizant Technology solutions. Cognizant is paying $65K per annum in the bay area; TCS is paying $85K per annum in the bay area.
Think of rents in Sunnyvale: $2K per 1b/1b. Still people save, even on $65K salary, because one lives with 4 other roomies.
When I hear people retort that "companies aren't allowed to do that", I always want to say: "Did you try a simple web-search to find out how they do it anyway?"
For example, there are loopholes in both salary-calculation and also in terms of crafting hideously specific (and not entirely honest) requirements and then claiming nobody local can fill them.
Yeah. The first example I cited in this comment[0] looks like one of those "hideously specific (and not entirely honest) requirements" that no one is going to be able to fill or even consider filling.
If you cite a job with high requirements and a relatively low associated wage, you're essentially describing a job that only foreign talent is going to be able and willing to fill. I don't know a single person that meets the criteria for that position and isn't earning way more already. What self-respecting domestic candidate with the freedom to change jobs freely and that knows his worth would ever apply for such a position?
High requirements? The only experience requirement is "Two (2) years of experience in providing technical service support." Even with a master's degree, $92,000 seems reasonable to me for someone with only 2 years of support experience.
I had this boss in Brazil that also own some business in Florida - when he wants to hire some H1B from Brazil he just adds "fluent in Portuguese" to the job description.
> Alternatively, I would be okay with eliminating the lottery and giving visas out on the basis of the premium companies are willing to pay over the salary a domestic worker would be paid. If your company is willing to pay 2.0x foo for a position, then you will get the H1-B visa ahead of a company only willing to pay 1.5x foo. The floor would be set at something like 1.1x foo.
That would only help the largest companies, and would put the relatively new and smaller companies at a disadvantage...
This. You need to make money to be able to pay for the workers you need for your business to function. To argue against this reality is akin to saying: "I want there to be H1-B visa holders so wages remain low", which is the exact what the top most comment is saying H1-B visas do.
Developers are valuable. We should be paid accordingly. Many of us are employees now. A fraction of us will become founders one day. This approach simply allows companies to actually get the talent they urgently need to succeed. Paying a premium should absolutely not be a problem if you in fact do have a genuine need for talent that doesn't exist in the US at any price (which is the argument being made in this blog post).
I want to be paid a fair wage. I also plan on being a founder (again. failed once). If engineer wages rise making some business models inviable, c'est la vie. I will just have to make sure to start a business that can actually earn money and pay the bills to hire the talent I will need. When I do found my own company, I am more interested in being able to get the talent than paying a premium.
The way things are now, the benefit basically already goes to the Google's and Apple's of the World. How many startups actually go through the whole process of trying to get H1-B visas to get talent. Every startup I know doesn't consider the process viable because it's not expedient. If I need an engineer within 6 months and I have a candidate willing to work for my business from another country, it would be amazing to pay a 1.5x premium to actually be able to have them over here in the US and helping me and my colleagues build a business together ASAP. The H1-B visa process is so drawn out right now that by the time you get your H1-B visa candidate you're already at the end of your runway.
I would love to see AeroFS write a blog post considering the solution I proposed (which many agree with judging by the number of upvotes thus far).
Tons of the so-called engineering shortage complaints can be condensed to not paying as well as google/fb/linkedin/netflix, offering at best the same environment and working conditions (though often much worse), then bitching that skilled engineers aren't jumping at the chance to work for you.
When hiring managers are asked to consider some subset of {more money, more vacation, true flex time, remote work, 4 day work weeks} in lieu of the cash, benefits, and environment the top tier employers pay, they refuse. And continue the bitching.
Also, the stunning discovery that, post incorporating in sf, people from the peninsula and south bay are unfathomably not as excited about a 50-60+ minute one-way commute as you thought they'd be.
Maybe, but the problem is that the larger a company is, the harder time they have recognizing talent, so it seems like a wash to me.
There is a reason why successful startups tend to be friends who closely know eachother and recognize the talent in eachother. Recognizing talent takes time and knowledge and it isn't something you can foist onto an HR department or recruiter.
> salaries rise to the levels enjoyed by doctors and lawyers
The BLS says the median salary for a lawyer is $112k. Median salary for a software developer is $93k.
The $19k difference is not that big when you consider that lawyers have a higher startup cost and higher ongoing cost - wardrobe, dry cleaning, law school tuition + 3 years' opportunity cost. Plus law firms can be a grind, far more than soft eng gigs.
Those are national salaries - the numbers change when you compare programmers in high cost regions to other professions in the same region.
For instance, the national average for software developers is quite a bit higher than for registered nurses, but when you consider bay area salaries, registered nurses earn at the median slightly more than software developers (in San Jose, it is 122k vs 116k, check US News Best Jobs for data).
As for law - the average salary for a lawyer working in San Jose is $183,000 a year (http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/lawyer/salary). It's true that lawyers have to go to three years of law school, but people don't fail out of typical pre-law majors like history or political science and major in CS or engineering because they;re easier, and plenty of programmers have grad degrees.
Also, attrition rates in elite graduate engineering schools are vastly higher than they are at elite law or med schools. The attrition rate for many science PhD programs is 50%. Engineering is a little better at 35% or so. Attrition rates for elite law and medical schools tend to be below 0.5%.
It's a tough comparison, because technically, you don't need any degree at all to be a programmer (you don't even need to know how to program, there's no licensing). But to graduate from an ABET accredited program and get a grad degree, even just an MS rather than a PhD? I'd say it's a much tougher program than history major followed by law school.
Like I said in a different post, the "shortage" of engineers appears to be a rational response to salary and career prospects. Engineering and programming are difficult jogs, and they pays less than people with this sort of academic inclination and propensity for hard, focused work can earn elsewhere. There is absolutely no need for government intervention to solve a "shortage" of programmers or engineers.
> when you consider that lawyers have a higher startup cost and higher ongoing cost - wardrobe, dry cleaning, law school tuition + 3 years' opportunity cost. Plus law firms can be a grind, far more than soft eng gigs.
How much you should earn is about supply versus demand, the latter of which is dependent on value created. The cost structure underneath merely sets the minimum price at which a profession is viable.
The BLS has been thoroughly discredited. $93K isn't that impressive not when a cop or fireman starts off at $100K in Silicon Valley WITHOUT going to college.
That's why I'd support allocating H1Bs by highest-salary-first, instead of via the current first-come-first-served system with a difficult to enforce "prevailing rate" requirement tacked on. Doing so would also tend to allocate the slots to areas where they're most in demand: if a company is offering $140k salary and wants an H1B to bring the person in, I'm more willing to believe this job has a shortage than if another company is offering only $60k for a job that supposedly has a shortage.
This is elegantly simple, puts the right market incentives in place for all the affected parties, and makes so much sense I'm sure it will never happen.
(For the reason cited in your parenthetical comment.)
At the same time, I think it would be awesome to start a petition to draw attention to such an idea so that it does become part of the agenda somehow. If such an idea did become part of the national discussion regarding H1-B visas, it would be extremely difficult for those trying to get these visas to depress wages to argue against this.
I for one would sign such a petition and I know a lot of people who would (American workers and existing H1-B holders). It's important that the opinion of both groups is represented in the debate. Is there a PAC or other organization that would lobby on behalf of such a solution?
Given that the White House gave information that they are asking the USCIS to streamline processing of visa through these kinds of tweaks (the law doesn't say how the quotas should be distributed AFAIK), I believe the correct venue would be a whitehouse.gov petition.
> There's a certain amount of tech talent at any given technical ability level available worldwide
Surely then wages would be skyrocketing for that limited number of qualified workers, rather than remaining static, which they have. This is what has happened in the past in the tech industry, and it's what happens in other industries. Supply and demand, as you said.
> paying more won't increase the supply quickly enough
So individual companies wont pay more because the national supply wont increase as a result? This doesn't make sense
> 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.
Yes, but that is all that needs to happen actually. The problem is not a shortage of talent-- the problem is the proliferation of meaningless projects drowning out the signal in the noise. What we need is a system to get the best engineers working on the most important projects and to let the rest sort itself out. We don't need multitudes of mediocrity-- we need rather the most talented producing moderate amounts of highest quality work toward the right ends.
>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.
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.
I agree... (was on H1). The core problem is that the sponsoring company is in control. Control needs to be moved to the candidate (worker). The H1 should not be tied to the employer, but to the candidate, and they should be able to switch employers by registering their new employer with the DHS (HR of the new company and employee act on signing day). H1'ers should be free to move at will and immediately after entering the country (or at most, a 3-4 month wait).
Most of the time the consultancies put H1'ers on the bench waiting for a job... i.e., they over subscribe H1-B's every year. There needs to be an exponential charge to avoid over subscribing tactics... perhaps the app fees double (and keep doubling) for each additional candidate past 2.
Allowing H1Bs to bounce around (unless each job they take can't be filled by the domestic workforce) would violate the intent of the law.
"The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States."
H1Bs need to be allowed to bounce around because this is the core of the problem! Everyone seems to love to skirt around the real issue. The real issue is that people are brought here and they can't go anywhere regardless of how bad the system sucks except back home. In most cases the places they are coming from are in an even worst state so we stay here instead. At least other things aren't so bad. I came to the united states on an H1B and yes I was paid significantly less than what I thought I was worth and also well below what US citizens and GC holders were paid for a number of years. It was a tough time for me and I had 2 choices then, either go back home to a non-existent economy and get paid even less doing some menial job or wait it out with my crappy paycheck until I get a green card. If I moved to any other company my green card process would restart so guess what I was stuck. If H1Bs were allowed to move around, body shops would disappear overnight. Bigger companies that I worked at paid through their teeth for H1Bs but they were usually hired as consultants. I work at a really big company now (won't say the name) and there is no way we will hire someone full-time who can't pass our interview loop regardless of how much we are saving. It's too costly in other areas and almost impossible to fire them for non-performance. But we'll take a chance on hiring an H1B contractor that a body shop supplies. We pay the body shop exorbitant sums of money, body shop pays employees a pittance.
Companies are supposed to pay an H1-B workers the prevailing wage. But the fact is that real wages are a very wide range that would depend on your exact skills and competence. So companies can get away with paying an H1-B worker less than his real market value and the worker cannot easily switch jobs. If the worker could easily switch jobs, then there is no real incentive for the company to hire a worker and pay him lower wages (). Because, very soon he will switch to another company that pays him his real wage. The problem with the H1-B system is that the law is based on the assumption that fare wages can be enforced by statute as opposed to by ensuring competition.
() One can argue that large companies might have incentives to bring in more H1-Bs to increase the overall labor pool, which in turn will reduce wages for everyone. This can partially be offset by having high fees for H1-B workers.
An O-1 requires "extraordinary ability by sustained national or international acclaim and must be coming temporarily to the United States to continue work in the area of extraordinary ability."
>Extraordinary ability in the fields of science, education, business or athletics means a level of expertise indicating that the person is one of the small percentage who has risen to the very top of the field of endeavor.
I am confident I can get one for a truly talented hacker or computer scientist.
There's lots of evidence out there. Probably the most obvious signal for you should be that companies are complaining about a lack of workers, but wages are stagnant. Or another signal might be the fact that 50% of STEM grads have to work in unrelated industries because of an inability to find work in tech. If you want more proof of funniness:
Do you have a citation for "50% of STEM grads have to work in unrelated industries because of an inability to find work in tech"?
Many STEM graduates choose not to work in tech, for example math majors who go into finance, or chem majors who go into consulting. And, many STEM grads are not actually qualified to work in tech. A BS in biology is certainly a STEM degree but that person is not likely to help scale your Rails application.
"Purported labor market shortages for scientists and engineers are anecdotal and also not supported by the available evidence"
"the education system produces qualified graduates far in excess of demand: S&E occupations make up only about one-twentieth of all workers, and each year there are more than three times as many S&E four-year college graduates as S&E job openings"
"The departure of STEM graduates to other fields starts early. In 2008, the NSF surveyed STEM graduates who’d earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 2006 and 2007. It found that 2 out of 10 were already working in non-STEM fields. And 10 years after receiving a STEM degree, 58 percent of STEM graduates had left the field"
Of the 50% of engineering graduates not working in engineering, 40% of CS grads not in CS, (35% total are working in totally unrelated fields), ~50% are not working in their fields because of pay and conditions, 37% are not working in their fields because they can't find work, and 10% are not working in the field for another reason. The 37% probably aren't the people who moved into management consulting.
Certainly some STEM grads may not be qualified to work in tech, but i'd argue that a biology major would easily adapt to working in the average web development shop. And certainly a mathematician or engineer would (obviously).
MBA summer interns from elite schools can equal or exceed this as well.
We don't talk about a "shortage" of lawyers or MBAs, though because we know that this isn't typical. Also, for some reason, there seems to be a stronger cultural objection to engineers getting paid as well as lawyers, MBAs, or physicians. I think it's partly because when you say "lawyer" or "physician", people think of a serious, middle aged person with grey hair. When you say "programmer", people think of a young socially inept person. I don't agree with the stereotype at all, but I think it's part of why people would be so quick to conclude that an unobjectionable salary for a lawyer is "astronomical" for a developer.
I'd also say that comparing software development intern salaries at well paying companies probably represents developer pay in its best light. I'm not saying it's misleading or inaccurate - it's a perfectly valid snapshot. But software developers draw higher salaries out of the gate, but may fade in the stretch. Comparing what career developers earn at age 50 with their lawyer or doctor friends would probably give you a different picture that should also be considered. Ultimately, look at the general data - in San Francisco, the median salary for a software developer is just a little more than it is for a dental hygienist and a little lower than for a registered nurse. Yet many people feel that this indicates a severe shortage - I agree something doesn't add up here, but to me, the evidence suggests no particular shortage of developers.
> "H1B Visas exist for one reason, and one reason only" ; "it's simple reality" ; "Without a doubt" ; "It happens all-the-fucking-time" ; "There's absolutely no talent shortage in the Bay Area"
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.
>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.
No, the system just needs to be reformed. And I've seen the right reform proposal often enough to be circulating it myself:
* The government can give out N visas in an auction. Firms bid via legally-binding salary offers. The N highest salaries bid get the visas, and the government takes a small additional payroll tax as the only fee.
* The visas adhere to the workers, not the companies.
That will greatly improve the current system for the workers while enabling everyone genuinely in need of high-skilled labor to get it.
Of course, it's worth noting that some degree of so-called "nativism" is just part of the social contract. It's the price we pay for having a society that enforces cooperative coordination among citizens instead of letting everything be run by uncoordinated, law-of-the-jungle free-for-alls.
> * The government can give out N visas in an auction. Firms bid via legally-binding salary offers. The N highest salaries bid get the visas, and the government takes a small additional payroll tax as the only fee.
This would be doomed to fail. Professional services firms can outbid basically everyone because they can turn around and bill that person out at 5x their salary.
The visas will never adhere to the workers for one simple reason: the visa process exists to benefit the companies, not the workers. The workers are not US citizens and have no leverage with the US government. The visa programs only exist because the US-based companies want them - and those companies DO have leverage with the US government.
> This would be doomed to fail. Professional services firms can outbid basically everyone because they can turn around and bill that person out at 5x their salary.
So what? Shouldn't the companies that can create the most value from the employee be the ones that get to hire them?
I wouldn't say that professional services firms really create the most value - far from it actually. They're just able to pay more because there's relatively little risk involved for them.
Well said! You'll never outbid a body shop. They'll essentially spend whatever it takes to get the workers here and bill them out for 3x whatever they paid. If you as the product company don't like it tough luck. This is because the people is the product for these companies, product companies have other things to concentrate on.
If they're charging 3x whatever they paid, that pushes up prices for the companies hiring the body shops, which incentivizes finding cheaper competitors to body shops in the labor market -- like hiring domestic workers, for example. The pricing mechanisms of the market will optimize out a balance.
Just a random, unhelpful ping into this conversation to point out that the economics of billing out a programmer for "3x" (I assume you mean "3x the fully-loaded cost of the programmer as an FTE for the consultancy, broken out by hour") is a lot more complicated than this thread makes it sound.
Companies aren't simply using those "3x" contractors as a shortcut to avoid finding and hiring full-timers. A big chunk of that "x" is business value created by the consultancy and sold to the client; the biggest chunk of that involves risk management.
Sure, great. Honestly, I don't mind what companies want to do with contractors and contracting. I've been a contractor for a short time. If a big chunk of the 3x is business value created, great, go ahead.
My only actual point here is that rather than trying to tailor a visa just for the special needs of Silicon Valley start-ups, we should be tailoring high-skilled work-visa programs for letting the market decide what constitutes high-value work, viz: work that people will pay a lot for.
If under the proposed system (h1bs granted in descending sort order of salary), product firms were losing out to professional services firms, then the product firms are free to pay their employees more. If they don't create enough value to justify paying more, well, then the system works as designed.
>This would be doomed to fail. Professional services firms can outbid basically everyone because they can turn around and bill that person out at 5x their salary.
So what? The purpose of skilled-worker immigration in public policy is to maximize productivity, not to cater to the industry to which people on Hacker News happen to belong.
I wouldn't say that professional services firms maximize productivity; they just have good relationships and are more effective at selling their services than an individual developer can ever be.
How do you reconcile 'legally binding salary offers' to adhering the visa to the worker? How long is the company obliged to pay the visa bid rate? What if the company becomes financially incapable of paying the visa bid rate? (yes, demonstrating financial solvency of the employer is part of the visa sponsorship process, but circumstances change). If the worker moves to another company, is that company required to pay the bid rate? I can imagine a 'simple' scheme like that leading to all kinds of shell-game shenanigans where high bids are used to win the visas to bring workers in, then through sleight of hand the worker is transferred to a different job at a lower wage...
>Of course, it's worth noting that some degree of so-called "nativism" is just part of the social contract. It's the price we pay for having a society that enforces cooperative coordination among citizens instead of letting everything be run by uncoordinated, law-of-the-jungle free-for-alls.
You realize that skilled immigrants are going to be the most likely to assimilate into American culture. They will not form ghettos or enclaves(unless there is of course white flight).
Well yes, of course. This is why the proposal is designed to make absolutely sure we bring in skilled, high-value immigrants. It's a filter, not a fence.
Come to Toronto. Amazon is here, and growing. Lots of other start ups and mid-sized companies. Canada is way less insane about visa hoops to jump through. We're pretty friendly, and the crime rate is low (our new Mayor doesn't do crack or hang out with gangsters).
Most importantly, we're a country and city that likes immigration of smart people who want to earn high salaries, and pay our slightly-higher-than-America taxes.
Well, I have actually been considering a move, not just because of Immigration, but because of all of Canada's natural beauty. I also kinda like snow and cold weather and maple syrup.
Here is one important question though: is it a city that you would recommend for young people (in their twenties)? Or is it nicer once you have a family and are looking to settle down etc.? And besides Amazon, is there any demand for tech workers over there?
Toronto is the biggest city in Canada and the industrial center, lots of different sectors and jobs, thriving start-up scene, and all the things other major cities would offer.
Biggest problem you'll face is that we mix-use metric and imperial units, i.e. pounds for weight, feet for height, celsius for temperature, meter for distance.
In Canada currently. The salaries just suck compared to states. Yes the visa hoops are less but living expenses in cities like Vancouver will suck everything out of your pocket.
Software developer salaries are usually about 30% higher in the Bay area than they are in Vancouver.
Renting an apartment will cost you at least twice as much in San Francisco though - so most people are still financially better off with the smaller salary in Vancouver. There are non-financial reasons to move to the Bay Area (more interesting work being the big one), but don't expect your salary to go farther
You're entire post is based on a strawman argument. OP didn't say that companies shouldn't hire non-American talent. He said companies should hire non-American talent through traditional immigration proceedings, and that the H1B program lends itself to an exploitative employer-laborer relationship, that ultimately serves to unfairly lower industry pay rates.
So... An H1-B. Because that is essentially your only choice for temporary residency while waiting the many years it takes for an EB-3 (and months/years for 1/2) to go through. Unless the applicant is from Canada, where you can choose to go the TN route but have to be careful because EB is intent to immigrate, or an L-1 if they're an international transfer.
The H1-B is a decent visa for the purpose its intended to serve, as a way to get immigrants here who would otherwise have to wait years to start working while a permanent residency application goes through. It has its shortcomings, but it's a whole lot better than other routes you could go through.
Traditional immigration proceedings? You mean the system where if you're from China or India, you have to wait 3-5X as long for a green card as people from western europe?
Yeah, that system sounds great. Dunno why people in software engineering of all industries would have a problem with that system.
So why not just fix that system. Its simple to do -- for instance, keep in-total quotas but eliminate per-country quotas and the misfeature you point to is eliminated instantly.
Per country quotas are a mechanism which forces per-origin-country supply to be misaligned with per-origin-country demand.
Your remarks about "divisive ethic-neuveau-ghettos" with "communities insulating themselves rather than assimilating" just makes it worst.
Part of the "social contract" when you immigrate to the US is to at least make an effort to join your new country. We aren't the Borg, but we would like to see you learn at least a little English, accept your new country, and generally participate.
You are already most of the way there- you speak English. Your parent is reacting to communities of people who immigrate to the US, learn not one word of English, turn inwards and attempt to create Little Elbonia, including attempting to completely reshape government in Elbonia's image.
How many tech companies apply for H1-B visas for developers who are unable to speak any English at all?
Your post has such an overwhelming air of nationalistic, racist sentiment. "These foreigners come over here, they don't even speak english, and they take all our jobs".
The reality is that most of the foreign developers I've met speak english and communicate at least as well as other developers we've hired here, and oftentimes speak even better english.
Remember, not all H1-B visa holders are dirt-farming Indians who read Ruby on Rails for Dummies in their native language and got tired of farming themselves out on glance for $10/hr. A lot of them are from well-educated western countries - the Ireland, Britain, Canada, Mexico, Germany, etc.
You're generalizing all immigrants into this offensively racist image you've got in your head, and it doesn't make any sense at all. Perhaps there are people like that where you live, but by and large the H1-B visa holders are well-educated, skilled, and speak English as well as people who have been American citizens for decades.
Good lord, I'm not generalizing anything. I was explaining further the specific phenomenon (which does occur sometimes) that manticore_alpha was talking about. I didn't apply this phenomenon to anyone, nor make any statements about policy nor how it ought to impact policy... Or does the simple description of a phenomenon which sometimes happens, now mean I'm a jingoistic, nationalistic, racist dirtbag? I am in complete agreement that this phenomenon is very unlikely to happen with H1B workers, and I am completely familiar with the fact that many immigrants are well-educated, speak excellent English, and fully integrate into American society.
The reason is because it's typically ignorant xenophobic racists who complain the loudest about x or y group not assimilating.
Now I don't think this is you, but that's just the way the argument smells.
Let's step back a minute: what is the big deal with people attempting to preserve their culture when they come to the US? Isn't it a free country? And materially I don't see how it harms anything because the American culture, derided thought it may be by some, is actually extremely alluring and powerful, so even if the parents are nostalgic for the old country the kids are going to gravitate towards assimilation. Where is the harm?
This is a really great example of how powerful the dog whistle techniques used by racists can actually be.
Your instincts picked up on something from silverstorm's comment, but a lack of concrete evidence made it very difficult to say out loud what you were actually thinking. You were forced to go from:
this offensively racist image you've got in your head
All the way back to:
Now I don't think this is you, but that's just the way the argument smells.
I went into silverstorm's use of dog whistle techniques a little deeper in my comment above, but the evolution of your exchange with him really demonstrates how effective it can be as a tool for perpetuating racist views with immunity from criticism. It is a strategy based on controlling the conversation and playing off of several deeply ingrained societal tendencies, and it works.
Saying "You" when not addressing anyone in particular is a classic dog whistle technique. Everyone in the audience knows exactly who you're talking about, and plausible deniability is preserved for future accusations of racism/bigotry.
Of course, silverstorm did not actually explain anything at all. All he did was repeat a few standard dog whistle arguments used by racists with a couple of geek culture references thrown in to pander to the audience.
Let's take a look.
1. Appeal to imaginary "social contract" -- an attempt to establish a criteria for who should be accepted into society based on some vague, unspecific standard. Used in various forms by dominant demographic to argue against immigration.
2. "Learn to speak English" -- Good to see this is still being used. Incredibly high reliability as an indicator of racism, almost to the point where I expect it to soon fall out of favor among racists. [0]
3. Warnings of radical change to society ("attempt to create Little Elbonia", "completely reshape government") -- A common, highly effective technique based on natural human fear of the unknown and preference to status quo.
And of course, silverstorm's response to being challenged was equally standard -- repeated reference to "phenomenon" to avoid potential challenges to assertions, it's only a few bad apples ("a phenomenon which sometimes happens", "many immigrants are well-educated"), preemptive dismissal of direct accusation as self-evidently absurd ("I'm a jingoistic, nationalistic, racist dirtbag?").
If I'm arguing, what am I arguing for? Because it isn't less immigration. If I could have my way, we'd abolish H1B's and Visas and instead simply grant citizenship to basically anyone who wanted it (excepting, I don't know, internationally wanted criminals?).
Well, maybe there is still a place for visas if the person only wants to work in the US for a while and their birth country does not allow dual citizenship. But that's beside the point.
As for integrating, even people who completely refuse to integrate can be here- that's fine. Personally, I just (selfishly) want them to integrate, so I can meet them and talk with them. It's no different from the way that I want to be friends with my neighbors. I'm not pissed if they don't want to be friendly- just sad.
I was just trying to acknowledge that complete and total refusal to integrate does happen (some of my friends growing up had parents like that). That doesn't inform my opinions on policy- they are still welcome to be here.
In my previous post I just explained I am 100% for immigration. All immigration. I welcome any and all peoples. Is that still too vague for you? Too much dog whistle? Too much covert racism? How can I be sufficiently clear?
I brought up H1B's because they were part of the original conversation, before you joined.
you are accusing someone else of racism but at the same you make this comment "not all H1-B visa holders are dirt-farming Indians who read Ruby on Rails for Dummies in their native language and got tired of farming themselves out on glance for $10/hr. A lot of them are from well-educated western countries" . So only western countries engineers are well educated but Indian developers are dirt-farmers ?
That doesn't actually have to mean that all Indian developers are dirt-farmers, which is hyperbole itself, it's just playing to a stereotype to make his point which was the opposite. I'm not sure you should really cling on to the racism card.
From the same vien I'm from the UK but have been approached a couple of times by US companies wanting me to relocate. Typically they tell me money is of no concern, they just deperatly need good people. I'm not convinced they'll save money or get better results by shipping me over from London but I suspect this has more to do with ignorance of the recruiters than malice or conspiracy.
The first three generations of my family in America spoke German. My home town was basically a group of people from a German town who up and moved to start a new town in the Midwest and went on living there as if nothing changed. Hundreds of Midwest towns and cities started the exact same way.
Neither is more 'right' than the other, only that it's pointless to criticize people who are long-dead. It's important for people to realize that European immigrants did (and do) largely the same thing as other immigrants that people often criticize for not learning English, but we can't change the past.
I don't believe these feelings are necessarily entirely rooted in racism, as I've heard plenty of people in Chicago complain about Polish immigrants unwillingness to speak English. I think it's more likely the feelings are a mix of racism, classism and additionally a sense of pride in American culture.
This is really a contract that some Americans would like to impose on other Americans.
The U.S. is a free country; that's the social contract. People are free to live where they want, associate with whom they want, and speak whatever language they want. Other people are free to accomodate them to the degree they wish, or not.
But the idea that you're not "really" American unless you fit some predefined set of characteristics is just a nasty attempt to impose one set of values on everyone.
You are right. In America we deplore things like bribery, oppression of women, caste systems, rule of law, human trafficking, honor killings, etc. We will impose that social contract on anyone who migrates here. Even if you are Sir Elton John, you are just Elton John here. If you bring slave servants to the US and enslave them here, as has happened, you'll be thrown in prison. It's not about language.
> Part of the "social contract" when you immigrate to the US is to at least make an effort to join your new country
Huh? What social contract are you talking about? Don't use quotes as a goto escape. If there was actually a social contract, then in the valley we'd all be speaking Chumash, Mojave or something like that.
> "communities of people who immigrate to the US, learn not one word of English, turn inwards and attempt to create Little Elbonia"
TBH, it's also not so uncommon for Americans in Europe to make no effort to learn the local language, and to seek mostly the company of other Americans.
Exactly. We've already seen Islamists try to enforce sharia in England; if we had wanted a theocracy, we would have let the Christofascists take over long ago. And before anyone goes claiming oppression of differing cultures, the secular culture that is America is precisely the root cause of why many people want to to move there. Others in this thread have already mentioned things like misogyny, homophobia, etc, that while it's not a solved problem in America, isn't nearly as bad as it is in some other countries.
From where I sit (Europe) America does not look like having a secular culture at all. Sure, you have the separation of church and state enshrined in your constitution, but in practice the country seems way too religious.
The commentator was not discussing immigration wholly; they are discussing H1B. There are some good reasons to suspect why H1B is an unfair tool. For example, H1B immigrants cannot easily switch employers, and do so with some appreciably elevated risk or cost. Or the fact that H1B wages are enforced by law, rather than competition, and that it's very difficult to bring legal action. If H1B immigrants could switch around without consequence to their immigration or employment prospects, then this wouldn't happen, but I suspect that companies wouldn't support something like that.
I think that employers already have the edge on workers in general because they have more information, and because many Americans feel that specific talk of income is invasive or rude, and thus American workers don't really cooperate with each other for strategy; or at least it seems tech workers don't.
The specific economic impairments placed upon H1B immigrants, even if written by sincere and well-meaning hearts, unfortunately means that these people are ripe for exploitation without much serious legitimate recourse. I think that assets and opportunities which may be profitably and predictably exploited (and well known in our case), will probably be exploited up to the border where it's no longer profitable to exploit.
As a hiring manager, I can promise you that your generalizations are sweeping and full of misplaced emotional verbiage. Since it is my job to hire the best candidate and even though my company gives me access to a world of engineers, I will still try to find the best with the least amount of friction. That means, someone who already lives here and can start as soon as possible with the least amount of demands.
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.
Increasing the quantity supplied at the "prevailing wage" by way of H-1B depresses the prevailing wage from rising to what it would be in the absence of the H-1B for the positions for which H-1B has increased the supply (and has knock-on effects for other areas of work, because the Americans that don't get employed in the positions covered by H-1Bs then are competing in fields they otherwise wouldn't be, increasing the quantity supplied at any given price point in those fields.)
Its not only basic economics, but if it didn't work that way, there'd be no benefit to employers from the H-1B existing to justify the compliance costs.
The point was that companies are underpaying H1-B workers. My argument is that there are floor wages they can't pay below.
You're making another point about the impact of immigration. I don't disagree and it extends beyond immigration. If you open a new medical school you're depressing the wages of doctors. Just take a look at what happened to the legal profession.
>> The Department of Labor has wage floors for H1-Bs (prevailing wage). Company's can legally pay below that.
Companies play games with the experience levels and titles to force wages lower. An "architect" or "developer" gets replaced with an "analyst" or "engineer" making 2/3rds as much.
and H1-B body shops force their workers to work umpteen hours of overtime, bill the clients for it, and H1-B workers get no compensation for all the overtime.
and H1-B body shops do shady things like delay payments, take 'fees' out of payments, pay in rupees, etc.
Yep. The HN community is not at all representative of the market -- people here tend to be both more experienced and working in better positions than most -- and I can confirm that for non-tech companies the prevailing wage for entry level tech jobs (do-it-all programmer, web dev, etc) in the SJ/Milpitas/Fremont area is in the 70s, going up to ~100 after 10+ years experience.
I got to be friends with a few of the H1-Bs when I was working at a large company that hired a lot of H1-Bs (mostly Indian, always knew the best places to eat, and since I'd studied Sanskrit in grad. school, knew a bit about Indian culture, and read some Devanagari I always liked getting to hang out). At a point when I was ready to move to another job we talked about salaries. They were generally getting paid 40% less than I was, the best case was one guy (a really scary sharp guy who was a complete workaholic who worked through most weekends) getting 20% less, and they didn't know of anyone getting paid more. Just an anecdote, but it's something to keep in mind. Laws are only relevant if they're enforced.
Dont be crass. If there is evidence of violation, it means the immigration enforcement needs a bigger budget to go after employers. It does not mean we need to cut back on immigration because some citizens have a problem following the law.
I dunno where you're getting these claims, and by the way it's the companies not citizens, but let's read the previous comments.
> LordHumungous : h1bs often get paid less
> bduerst: no they don't, because that would be against the law
> me: mocks foolishness
it's like you're deliberately unaware of companies' very successful efforts to modify the law in self-dealing ways, and even when that fails, to route around the law by stopping enforcement. Or the various well known and widespread h1b abuses that googling for seconds would find for you. Or even seen the list of posted salaries in your office, and noted they were way below market.
The article linked to was an opinion piece against immigrants, hence the context. I also eluded to there needing to be evidence, which the op piece didn't really provide.
if you don't have evidence that h1bs are widely abused, and used to drive down wages, it's for no other reason than you're too lazy to google.
It's also telling that you tar a neutral reporting piece discussing the impact of h1b visas as anti-immigrant, I guess because how else could you discredit it. I mean, right there in the very article you seem to have read is this:
ComputerWorld revealed last week that the top 10 users of H-1B visas last
year were all offshore outsourcing firms such as Tata and Infosys.
and this
More than 80 percent of H-1B visa holders are approved to be hired at wages
below those paid to American-born workers for comparable positions,
according to EPI.
as the saying goes, if you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.
Why would you expect them to be paid the same. Should something that ships from Alaska cost the same as something shipped from your next door neighbor?
Companies can take advantage of situations for profit, and that's their right, but the argument needs to be qualified so that we aren't speaking past one another.
Are we talking about "should be able to" or "it's the right (for whatever definition of right) thing to do"? I'm going to go with the latter since I have little opinion on the law.
For example, a company has the right to ask its programmers to work 80 hours. It's their right to squeeze as much out of their employees as they can. Should they?
Should companies be taking advantage of low wages in other countries instead of paying market value? They certainly can chase the profit, but we're talking about people, not goods. At the end of the day, they're paying a person less simply because they know that they have little bargaining room.
"Should companies be taking advantage of low wages in other countries instead of paying market value?"
If someone leaves a programming job in India to take a programming job in the USA, they're implicitly saying, This is a better deal for me. The only unethical/anticompetative practice was that someone created an artificial barrier (often pushed through legislation because of xenophobia) to keep "others" out. If you don't think we should the USA should be hiring talented people from India, do you think California should prevent people from Seattle from working in California?
I don't want to draw the line simply because I think it's too much a matter of opinion.
To me, it's not about widely applicable ethics. I think companies should have the right to hire people from other countries and pay them low(er) wages. Or at least, they should have the right until there's some agreeable line that can be drawn (unlikely). I simply would lose respect for that company because I think the decent thing is to pay wages based on merit.
I believe paying wages based on where someone is from is on the same level as squeezing as many hours as possible out of your workforce. In my eyes, it's irresponsible and not respectable.
Can anyone explain the downvotes? or does the Upton Sinclair quote hold "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
Then that makes you an exceptional case, and implies that you work for a good company. But neither of those points represent how this program is more widely (ab)used.
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.
> 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?
Well said!
This is what always makes me quite sad and angry every time there's a discussion about immigration. Shouldn't we as a society be past this entitled way of thinking? Why does anyone deserve a job more just because he already was lucky enough to be born in a rich country like the US? Sure, allowing in people from other, often poorer countries might reduce the local wage slightly, maybe even take a job opportunity from some local developer, but so what? That developer is still very well of and the possible wage reduction that US workers might have to live with is minimal, but the gain for the immigrant from the poor country is huge! How about a bit of social conscience and empathy for your fellow humans?
The H1B is already heavily restricted to 65k per year, which is a ridiculously low number for the US so I don't see this being able to do much harm in the first place (Switzerland, a way smaller country has roughly that immigration per year), but it will allow at least some people the chance at a great opportunity. Admitably, the way the H1B currently gives to much power to the employer, but many people here seem to strongly argue against immigration in general which I just cannot understand.
One could make the argument that Americans deserve American jobs more than foreigners because the vast majority of Americans have been contributing to American society their entire lives through their work and taxes and will most likely continue to until their death.
Foreigners come to the US having never been part of the society that made the job possible.
> It absolutely, positively hurts local labor - naturalized citizens - etc. Without a doubt.
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.
> 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.
Maybe it's selfish for you, but what about the ~50% of STEM grads who can't find a job in their industry? And wages are stagnant for STEM workers, and lowering for CS workers. Hundreds of thousands have been laid off in the last 5 years, particularly faced with globalisation and outsourcing.
It sounds like you're being selfish in your own way here by saying people shouldn't judge policy decisions based on the effects on their salary, because a lot of people in your country aren't as comfortable as you are in terms of pay.
Women have been allowed into the industry for a century+ :S If you mean attracting more women into the industry, supposedly the demand is so high that it wont affect any wages. Wages should continue to increase because of a lack of supply! Oh wait...stagnant for a decade...
> what about the ~50% of STEM grads who can't find a job in their industry?
According to the Census bureau, 74% of STEM grads don't work in STEM [1]. I was pretty surprised to read this, until I looked up what the Census bureau considers to be STEM [2].
You can see from this graphic that CS, math, statistics, and engineering majors all end up working in STEM in relatively high proportions. It's the psychology, social sciences, biology, and (to a lesser degree) physical sciences majors who are dragging this statistic down.
This isn't as surprising to me; indeed, if you hover over the labels in the graphic, you'll see that a lot of bio majors go into health care and education -- not surprising -- and that psych and social science majors go into a wide variety of fields -- again, not surprising or particularly relevant to this debate, I think.
Coming back to people with CS/math/engineering degrees, you're right that about 50% are not employed in STEM-related fields [3]. However, we have zero reason to believe all of these people "can't find a job in their industry". Surely some of them voluntarily work outside STEM.
Note that CS/math/engineering majors have significantly lower unemployment than college grads as a whole [4]. Note also that this 50% fraction is significantly higher for CS/math/engineering than it is for any other group of STEM majors; the next highest is physical sciences majors, of whom only a quarter work in STEM.
In fact, the only groups of people I can find who work "in their fields" in a greater proportion than CS/math/engineering majors is non-STEM "science- and engineering-related" majors working in health care (presumably these are human biology majors and the like), and education majors working in education.
Looking at this data, it's really hard for me to believe there's a problem here. Lots of people don't work in the field that they majored in. This is true for CS/math/engeineering majors, but not as much as most other majors.
One more thing:
> a lot of people in your country aren't as comfortable as you are in terms of pay.
This is exactly my point, actually. Any time you make a decision like this, some people will be hurt, and others helped. But rather than judging this policy decision based on its effect on a particular group of people (almost always, it's "people like me"), we should consider its effect on the country as a whole. As I said, highly-skilled immigration is free economic growth, and a fantastic deal for the country as a whole.
Of that group of STEM majors not in STEM, how many do you think could work in a STEM field after going through a professional masters program? Clearly, some do, but it takes a lot of money and valuable time. If under greater pressure, I'd imagine a lot more established tech companies would recruit with a masters program in exchange for a several year commitment. Some places do, but if it were harder to recruit, it is a fair guess more places would.
I'm not really sure what to think about those sorts of arrangements. If I were an employer, I'd greatly prefer skill-based immigration, excluding questions of exploitation, and that's the point, particularly when referring to STEM as a whole.
Of the 50% of engineering graduates not working in engineering, 40% of CS grads not in CS, (35% of these two groups, total, are working in totally unrelated fields), ~50% are not working in their fields because of pay and conditions, 37% are not working in their fields because they can't find work, and 10% are not working in the field for another reason. The 37% probably aren't the people who moved into management consulting."
You don't feel that there's a problem, based on the data you found. And you might be right, if you don't look at it at a macro-level. The big picture is confusing, however. Companies and government are crying out for more tech workers. They're all lobbying for an easier way to bring workers to the US (my country, Ireland, are also doing this). But wages for computer scientists, across the US, are flat. They've been stagnant for a decade. If some proportion of CS grads do not go into CS, typical market dynamics would suggest that the lack of supply will drive up wages, and entice them into the field. This isn't happening. In fact, some sizeable proportion can't find their first job, out of college, and don't work in the field again.
Something is amiss.
Another copy/pasted this from another reply of mine:
> It absolutely, positively hurts local labor - naturalized citizens - etc. Without a doubt.
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.
>The global flow of goods is good, but the flow of labor is bad?
But that's just it: this is an attempt to slow the flow and distribution of capital (wages) by importing cheap labor. It allows even more economic power and resources to be concentrated in even fewer hands. It should be pretty self-evident why that's undesirable.
1) It may be depressing wages in the US, but tech wages in India are skyrocketing. The best are leaving for better lives in the US and local companies are realizing they need to compete globally for talent.
2) Capitalism concentrates wealth in general but I don't think it's black and white that it's bad. 60% of India's population is small farmers and there's a lot of protection against scale farming with land ceiling laws, subsidies, etc. I don't think we're doing them any great favour by protecting them. The US by contrast has only 3% of it's population employed in agriculture. I'm sure there was a lot of pain in going from 60% to 3% there as well, but it's probably a better outcome even weighing the concentration of wealth that resulted. It isn't perfect, but it's sort of the best available system. And treating labour different to goods makes no sense. By the same argument, importing cheap Chinese manufactured goods are bad. Any automation that removes jobs is bad. Any consolidation for economies of scale is bad.
Is that not true when Pepsi goes to India and sells its product there. The profit is distributed only to share holders of Pepsi, and the Indian beverage companies stand to lose. If Pepsi had not been so "greedy", Indian beverage companies would make some money and probably cause a more better distribution of wealth?
Is Amazon guilty of using drones/machines for its 70 Billion$ business where as Target employs 5 times as many people for an equivalent revenue?
> 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 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.
>There's standard, normalized ways immigrants have come to the US for a long time now.
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.
There is no such thing as "general immigration" to the US.
Honest discussion can only happen if people come right out and say lets stop all immigration( I am not saying this would be wrong, I am just saying that it would be honest and productive).
It absolutely, positively hurts local labor - naturalized citizens - etc. Without a doubt.
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.
I don't think the point you take issue with is really debatable. The only way it could not be true if there is actually no one in the local labor market who can do the job, and that's a very difficult argument to make. Outside of that, every H1 is a job a citizen isn't getting.
You didn't touch on this at all, so I'm not really sure what your point is. I think you're debating a strawman.
> The only way it could not be true if there is actually no one in the local labor market who can do the job, and that's a very difficult argument to make. Outside of that, every H1 is a job a citizen isn't getting.
Does that mean being a citizen entitles one to a job regardless of qualification? Also, does that mean 100% of the US should be employed before bringing in foreign workers? I think such generalizations are far fetched. The conspiracy theory that claims that H1s are all low paid workers falls flat when examined closely.
> Does that mean being a citizen entitles one to a job regardless of qualification? Also, does that mean 100% of the US should be employed before bringing in foreign workers?
You're making up arguments and arguing with yourself here. Nobody said that being a citizen entitles a person to a job. But the law states that a H1B visa can be extended only IF a citizen can't be found that fulfils the requirements. Companies have been caught flouting this law, and purposely not finding citizens. You seem to have a problem with "every H1 is a job a citizen isn't getting", but, that's the point of a H1B.
> The conspiracy theory that claims that H1s are all low paid workers falls flat when examined closely.
They are not conspiracy theories, and they do not fall flat. The information is all open and available.
Note that there's no value judgment being made here. Nor am I claiming that H1s are low paid. You're still arguing against the same strawman.
To reword: if an H1 gets a job, a qualified citizen is not getting that job. Except in very exceptional circumstances, this hurts said citizen, and by extension the labor pool of people who could be substituted in for said citizen.
You didn't specify 'qualified' in the original post. If it was implied and I didn't get it, I'm sorry. I agree that if there is a qualified local, they should get these jobs before bringing in foreign labor. Although, my argument isn't a straw man.
I thought that "local labor market" implicitly only contained people who were local and could do the requisite labor, but that might not be the agreed-upon meaning. Sorry for the confusion.
Strawman-ness is contextual. You were arguing against an argument that is, in fact, used. However, you did so after quoting something that was not making that argument, but instead a weaker one, and one which your response didn't really respond to.
By this logic, we should not allow people to have more than two children, or else the surplus children will grow up and take the jobs. Because there are only a fixed number of jobs to go around, right? I read last week that the bureau of labor statistics determined the number: 309,219,419.
I don't know what logic you're using, but it didn't come from my post. As I pointed out elsewhere, I didn't make any value judgments. I claimed, essentially, that someone taking a job hurts others who may have competed for that job. I did not claim that there's any need to protect them, with legislation or otherwise.
Removing a specific job from the market is not necessarily hurting local labor; that depends on the overall effects of immigration. Take a person who comes here on a visa, manages to stay and starts a company which employs other engineers - is s/he hurting the local labor market? What about the person who simply is a great worker and allows the company to grow and hire faster?
In any case, software engineers complaining about having less jobs just strikes me as hypocritical. Our whole professions are essentially centered about eliminating the need for human labor. At least in this case, someone is still getting paid to do the job, even if it's not someone who happened to be born with the right citizenship.
Okay, fine. I may have sounded as if I was trying to be precise, when in fact I'm just trying to point in the right direction.
Let's try "every H1 is a positive percentage of a job a citizen isn't getting". This doesn't require that the job market be entirely inelastic; just that the response not go in the opposite of the expected direction. The same conclusion results; said H1 hurts citizens who are also qualified for said job.
Most studies find that you are wrong though. I am sure that you and the people you know are very skilled, and worked hard to get to your current position for that reason. But overall, H1 employees are paid significantly less, and many, many firms specifically refuse to hire local talent in order to fill positions through this program.
If the visa was given to the employee, not the company, then it would be a good program. But your paragraph about how difficult / chancy it can be to switch companies is exactly why it is a failed, exploitative program.
Could you paste a link to those studies (unbiased or bipartisan) to support my wrongness. I've read opinions and emotional outbursts but am yet to find concrete evidence to support it. Until then I go by my own experience.
Yes, there are firms that get blanket visas. Yes, there are some people who deliberately abuse this sytem. But that is a generalization of few examples.Yes, giving visas to the employee rather than employer is better (Canadian, Australian systems is are an example). DOL's PERM process is what makes it more exploitative than not and is rampant with abuse. That needs to change, the H1 on its own is not indentured servitude.
As a critic oh H1B's, I should be careful to point out that I have nothing against the holders of H1B's, many of whom are outstanding people. My problem has to do with a system that artificially limits the bargaining ability of one sector of labor. The solution is better treatment of H1B immigrants, not xenophobic responses.
>There's absolutely no talent shortage in the Bay Area, provided you can pay
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?
Any position paying more than minimum wage is a position with an economic shortage.
I'm for easy immigration, but let's not pretend that this isn't going to reduce tech worker wages in the area. (In the long run though, it could help, since you tend to get more specialization and scale when large numbers of a certain type of profession are congregated around a certain area).
I get that there's plenty of demand for highly skilled engineers that want to work for $80k and a tiny handful of lottery tickets. It doesn't mean we need to further help the valley avoid the consequences of a lack of investment in domestic education, or their wild irresponsibility with respect to housing and transport issues in the bay.
> It doesn't mean we need to further help the valley avoid the consequences of a lack of investment in domestic education, or their wild irresponsibility with respect to housing and transport issues in the bay.
The shortage of talent in the bay area probably has more to do with the ridiculous concentration of startups there. Maybe if people chose not to live in one of the most expensive areas in the country, with the most competitive labor markets, they wouldn't need to leave. There are oodles upon oodles of skilled CS graduates (yes, in the US!) that aren't moving to the bay area....
A shortage is a lack of supply, a company unwilling to pay above $X is not a shortage of supply, it is a shortage of demand.
If we have a shortage of carrots, we dont have enough carrots at ANY price.
If people are unwilling to pay 5$/LB for carrots but thats what they cost in the store, that is not a shortage.
What this discussion is about is substitute goods[1] replacing standard goods. In this case US workers are the standard goods, and they are being replaced by foreign workers, or substitute goods at lower cost.
No, a shortage is the discrepancy between the quantity supplied and quantity demanded at a given price.
When wages offered are too low, there is a shortage of labour supply. Increase those wages and that shortage disappears.
>If we have a shortage of carrots, we dont have enough carrots at ANY price.
This is simply not true.
>If people are unwilling to pay 5$/LB for carrots but thats what they cost in the store, that is not a shortage.
The shortage of carrot occurs at every price below $5/lb. You cannot talk about shortages in the economic sense without prices. Period.
I'm not sure why people are insistent on arguing the semantics of the word "shortage", rather than the far more interesting supply/demand dynamics underpinning the markets being discussed.
I did some looking around and you're absolutely correct about economic shortages.
From wikipedia:
"In most cases, a shortage will compel firms to increase the price of a product until it reaches market equilibrium. Sometimes, however, external forces cause more permanent shortages—in other words, there is something preventing prices from rising or otherwise keeping supply and demand balanced."
In this case, the H1-B visas are the external force, and are preventing supply and demand from being balanced. Basically because of the availability of cheaper labor, companies are willing to pay less for ALL labor which creates the shortage.
My completely misremembered thinking was that simply because they don't WANT to pay a higher wage, does not create a lack of labor - but i see know that it does in fact create an economic shortage of labor AT THAT PRICE. I was thinking of 'labor shortage' meaning that there is not enough actual people qualified to perform a job; when really in this case it is much more reflecting employers unwillingness to increase wages to the level that qualified people would be willing to compete.
Many companies are unable to obtain programmers in sufficient amounts precisely because they cannot afford to pay market rates.
If we had a bread shortage, some would be unable to afford the high market price of bread, while it would still be available to those who could afford it.
> It is unlikely a robot will ever be able to do the job of entrepreneur.
Sounds like a market opportunity. DoucheBot 6000 can hook right in to algorithmic trading platforms to acquire VC without human intervention at any step! It'll disrupt the startup game!
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.
"We" don't need anything in this. Immigrants don't assimilate the moment they get here. They never have. The old saying is, "The parents don't speak English, the children are bilingual, the grandchildren speak English". There have always been ethnic neighborhoods, as long as there's been immigration.
Being lived as an H1-B for about 5 years of life then on EAD and then on GC. The initial couple of years on H1-B is exploitation (not even close to any kind of servitude), but since 2006, I was fairly compensated. May be there are horror stories out there, but you have to understand most of the H1-Bs are educated enough and have contextual nuance with regard to jobs and salary matters, very few have to be indentured servants. The talented H1-Bs that come on body-shop boats, switch their employer to a more easy to work for company. Yes, H1B means being tied to hip of a company, but there are enough firms out there that really work. The problem with smaller companies is the HR and Legal are too ignorant about the whole process and needs baby sitting from the H1B holder himself.
I am not denying exploitation of H1B but certain companies but I think you have a skewed view, it does not apply to majority of the situations.
As someone who came from Europe to the U.S. on an H1B and then won a GC through the lottery: it never felts at all as indentured servitude.
At some point I managed a group of 10 people and had insight in the salaries of 40 engineers. There was no correlation between H1B status and salary, and we weren't given instructions either about giving less to H1Bs.
Increases were purely determined by employee performance.
I understand that it can be frustrating for local STEM candidates to compete against foreigners, but let's not forget that those locals include the full spectrum, from best in class to worse, whereas those H1B candidates have a much higher chance of already being top talent. You can't fault companies for choosing the best.
Unlike a TN visa for Canadians or an Australian E-3 visa, the H-1B is an immigrant visa that is one of the few paths to a green card.
So they're actually the opposite of indentured servitude where there's a path to permanent residency and citizenship. Unlike many other visas that people use to work in the US.
YMMV but I know at least one E-3 holder that ended up with a green card.
The E-3 isn't explicitly a dual intent visa but my understanding is that you can't be denied an E-3 specifically for having applied for a green card. If you're on an E-3 and are seeking a green card talk to an immigration lawyer.
I have said this before here and I will do that again. What hurts the market is L1 visa. H1 visa holders are almost in the same boat as local talent. Why? Because there is a government dictated minimum prevailaing wage that companies have to adhere to. I am yet to meet an H1B who is earning less than his/her peers (within an area, experience, skillset and education).
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.
This is very, very true. L1 seems like a good deal since your spouse can work, but ends up being really bad since you have no negotiating power at salary adjustment time.
The L1A is better than the L1B because of the faster permanent residence processing times, mainly due to the fact that the L1A holders can file under the EB1C category[1] and avoid the long Labor Certification from the Department of Labor[2].
I think H1-B's should entitle someone to work in the US at any company. Personally as a US citizen I think we're really lucky to get the worlds best and brightest to move here. Even if you feel different giving workers the ability to shop around for salaries would be a very effective way of ensuring that immigration is really about talent and not ensnaring workers at artificially low wages (which I've certainly seen personally).
"ethic-neuveau-ghettos .. insulating themselves rather than assimilating" Usually the kids assimilate pretty well, and thats mostly how it works, has always worked with non-europeans. You can't expect these people to wake up one morning, and do a running jump while yelling 'muricaaa!!' and assimilate in a flash. From my experience, most of them want their kids to assimilate while setting up personal thresholds for themselves as to how much they can/want to buy in. You'd be surprised, the country can learn a thing or two from these peoples, for eg. many of these folks come from places where evolution is common sense, and high-schools don't give people life long depressions from which people never recover.
One only need look at San Francisco's "little Italy", which is not in any sense an Italian neighborhood any more, except sort of for tourist purposes. And yet people were really worried about Italians coming and taking jobs and being Catholic and all those other nasty immigrant things. It takes time, but the advantages to integrating far outweigh consigning your children to a ghetto.
Explain to me how someone can become a permanent resident or a US citizen who is current a citizen & resident of Canada, India or the Philippines.
H1-B visas are the most straightforward way for someone with an education to get a job and permanent residency in the US. O and L visas are not universally applicable. Family sponsorship isn't always possible. Not everyone wants to marry an American.
It's not like the UK, Canada or Australia which have point-based immigration systems. The US has very few ways for a competent, educated immigrant to enter the country.
Try immigrating to the EU as an American; not quite so easy there either. If you are a refugee from Africa you have an easier time getting permanent residence in France than a moderately skilled workers would. My Mexican (now American) wife went through the US immigration process (she had a green card already when I met her, so I didn't 'help') You CAN immigrate to the U.S., there is a process. Funny since we're talking about India a lot on this thread, have you ever been through their immigration process? For even tourists you can only visit the country once during a six month period. Mexico's immigration system is rather difficult as well. The U.S. isn't alone in the difficulty of their immigration process. Getting residency in China is very difficult. I don't see why America gets special status with the animosity people feel towards immigration. Places like Canada are exceptions -- immigration is generally a long bureaucrat process in any country.
> I don't see why America gets special status with the animosity people feel towards immigration.
Because it sucks and treats people badly.
My wife, and mother of my dual-citizen children is Italian: I get to stay in Italy, end of story.
To have her go to the US (where I'm from) is, by comparison, a huge, expensive bunch of work even if we've been married for nearly 10 years and have children together.
If your bureaucracy manages to be worse, and slower than Italy's - which it is, in the US - you're doing something wrong.
Sorry but there is no comparaison, Europe has 25 countries with different immigration laws from which you can pretty much choose from depending on what options you are open to.
Take Germany specifically, they have a "Blue Card" (which I believe is available in other EU countries as well) which you can get automatically if you have a degree and a job offer. It converts automatically to residency and eventually citizenship over times depending on the country.
That is a very, very far cry from what H1-B are, and even TN visas.
For H1-B you need a sponsor waiting for you, you need to wait up to ~11 months to know if you are lucky to get through the quota and be allowed to work, an H1-B application is typically 100 pages thick and cost $3 to $8k of lawyer fees and $2k of gov fees (your application gets sent back to you if quotas are reached).
TN/H1-B don't convert to green cards by themselves, your employer need to be willing to go through a lengthly, costly process that takes 2 or more years to get you a green card (that is once you have gone trough all the trouble of getting a H1-B), which many employers will be unwilling to do if you have time left on your 6 years H1-B limit, and you have to stay with the same employer during all that time.
The US does take about 1.2 million immigrants into the country every year.
We mainly do this on family reunification, with a few other limited paths. I do agree that it is a terrible system. I'd love to see a points system like Australia.
That said, I don't think the evidence supports the notion of a shortage of programmers, so I don't think the goal of an immigration system should be to provide silicon valley with more programmers than they are currently getting at market rate.
The problem with the point system is that someone can qualify to immigrate but not be able to find a job. That happened in Canada a while back. A ton of foreign trained doctors were working manual labor jobs because they couldn't work as a doctor.
This could be considered a failure of the medical training system rather than a failure of the immigration system. Canada has lots of need for doctors, there's a lack of residency spots to qualify as a Canadian-approved doctor.
If US citizens who go to med school are heavily protected by licensing laws from competition, whereas US citizens who go to grad school in engineering experience the opposite, you should expect more US Citizens to go into medicine, and more international students hoping to gain entry to the US to train as engineers.
This, rather than deficiencies in the US educational system or problems with making programming "cool", goes a long way toward explaining why US citizens tend to avoid certain fields. It would also explain why the "shortage" of US citizens going into certain fields is actually a highly rational response to a market distortion created by government policy.
It's not like the UK, Canada or Australia which have point-based immigration systems. The US has very few ways for a competent, educated immigrant to enter the country.
The US and Canada both have immigration caps for different resident visas. And they are very similar between the two countries.
A more appropriate way to describe the current situation is that demand for entry into the US is far below available supply.
I don't necessary disagree with you on this: if there is a will, there is a way. Regardless of how the immigration law is, even if you make it "No immigration at all", someone will find a way to get in.
But that's far and far away from "standard and normalized", which implies something is accessible to standard and more average people. The top .5 or 1% (as in aptitude and willpower) will always find ways to get things done, but do you want to get the next 9% too?
The Nobel winner, the Elon Musk won't ever have to care much about those laws, but the discussion has never been about them either.
I'm not so sure about this. I'm a British citizen who's been living in the US for most of the past 7 years (as a student or doing academic jobs), but I can't see any easy way for me to get a job in the tech industry in the US. Perhaps a big company might be willing to sponsor me for an H1B. Apart from that there is just no realistic option that I'm aware of. What other visa could I realistically apply for?
I'm working for a startup that's willing to sponsor me for H1B, EB-1 and even O1 (I'm employee #1, so if we're doing any good, we might try to wiggle an O1 somehow, although that's unlikely).
But yes, you'd need a cooperative employer to get a visa of any sort. Most of the big company in tech (ie Google, FB etc..) are all willing to sponsor for H1B, and a lot of startups are too. But as for the questions of "how to get a job there", that's out of my ability to answer.
One thing about immigration law is that just like tax law, it's too convoluted and specific that it almost depend on your exact situation. You might just qualify for some visas just because of the area you're working on (there is something for academic for H1b that's exempt from the cap). You will need to take a very close look at the law, preferably with an experience lawyer that have done this before, and see if anything that can apply to you by the wording of the law (see the O1? It's not just Nobel winner that can get it).
The whole process will takes something like 10-15 years though ... so don't be discouraged. I've been in the US for 4-5 years, and just like you, I can say that I've no idea if I will still be here in 3 years. And I wouldn't expect for things to "settle down" (immigration-wise) for me for another 10 years-ish either.
A university-educated electrical engineer doesn't want to be an illegal immigrant and the employers that need his skills won't hire illegal immigrants either.
So this is only really true for people willing to work illegally, like migrant farm workers. Presumably the US wants a wider mix of immigrants beyond that.
So far I haven't seen anyone mention the H-1B applicants already in the country. FWIW that's a large number of people. I don't have any stats on that, but assume that it's at least 50% of applicants.
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.
From the other side, I see a lot of over paid "local" workers that spend a lot of time talking and doing no work. Why don't you take your honesty to your bosses and tell them that they are abusing the H1B system to save money? This is my biggest problem with honesty that comes with anonymity. Look, I am not saying there is no abuse of H1B. That is not the government's problem nor it is the problem of the immigrants. It is the American corporates that you work for that abuse the system. You are diverting all your anger towards people who want the experience to live elsewhere. Regarding us not assimilating into your culture, I have no idea what that means. On one hand, I see a lot of people moving to SF just for the variety in ethnicity so you can all be pseudo liberal and then start complaining about ethnic divide.
If the market is willing to pay you $X (at most) then that is your market value. Not more, not less. If you see someone getting paid $X, you need to try and figure out how he/she got there. Why put your efforts/thoughts into how you can drive down that persons salary?
There is no such thing as over paid. Just what you are willing to accept given your constraints. With the current H-1B system there are constraints. In particular, job mobility, that restricts you from easily taking a higher offer (the legal hoops that you and the future employer have to go through is a burden).
Personally, I never had a problem with my salary because I am good at what I do and I project my skills honestly. Salary negotiations involve negotiation skills that a lot of fellow immigrants don't have or don't care about. But when I see their work outperform local workers who are paid more but actually complain a lot about salary, I really get pissed. I have worked with really smart local workers who have all told me they don't feel threatened by immigrant workers. Likewise, I never have felt that someone can exploit me because I am on H1B. But honestly I have far less flexibility in moving jobs which unfortunately seems the only way to get more money in America. So long term I lose. Unlike you, I do think there is a thing called over paid. It is when your value/dollar ratio is exorbitantly high.
If it was about costs, why wouldn't they simply off shore it? I made another post on a similar thread here a few days ago.
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?
> let's be honest
> one reason only
> absolutely, positively
> without a doubt
> simple reality
> definitely, absolutely
> all-the-fucking-time
> absolutely no
If we're being honest, then we need to start slapping the wrists of the employers.
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.
Also, the author of this post is running an early-stage business, where cost-cutting doesn't make any sense. It strikes me as a bit naive to extrapolate from what his business is trying to do, to Amazon or whoever. It strikes me as rather likely that businesses more mature than his absolutely are interested in cutting costs, even if he isn't.
what you say may be true for web-development but afaik there is not too much PhD requirements for web-dev work.
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...
How much of the CV/pattern recognition talent shortage you're describing is because of an unwillingness to consider candidates who don'match exactly. That is, do you have a condition where something like only "PhD in Machine Learning with extensive CV experience" resumes are considered when it is arguably the case that, e.g., "MS/PhD in math/engineering/physics with programming experience" would be equally able to do the work with a (very) modest learning curve to adapt to the specific jargon/processes?
I think there is absolutely a tech hiring culture that discards people who don't have the exact right experience. And it's awful. A good coder with lots of general experience can adapt. An awful, useless hack can sit in a sector and look valuable to a prospective employer while actually being a huge net drain.
I myself have electronics engineering background (telecommunications sub-specialty), 5 others are similarly with ee backgrounds and 3 or 4 people are from applied maths departments. I believe we have only 2 mechanical eng people and the rest is CS guys.
It's not resume or education background bias. However, if you're going to pay in the 150k-200k euro range to somebody, you naturally want them to have relevant experience. After ee undergrad, I majored in signal processing and then got a phd in cv. Hiring people in the hopes that they'll become useful is being done but not excessively in a way that it is counter-productive ( eg. we're not hiring number theorists but accept applied maths guys - one new hire (one of our immigrant workers) has a very cool phd thesis on probability and the data he worked with came from CERN experiments - so it's not CV or PR at all - pure math applied on physics experiments... but he's smart and experienced enough that after only 3 months he's already doing substantial contributions )
cv/pr is not a field where you have a 'modest learning curve' if you hire people to do research - you really need at least a few years of research experience for working on state-of-the-art problems... otherwise, you're paying people to develop their research skills at a very high premium. that should be done at a university...
maybe I'm biased - I always consider this H1B problem in terms of research work - not regular stuff where what you need to do is 95% engineering and 5% research.. this is my bias. but it is also a valid example for H1B discussion in contrast to dismissing all H1B immigrant workers as 'cheap labor' for doing engineering tasks with low requirements.
The US is a country spanning a large continent - maybe that is the reason for many of the racist rants I've seen here on this discussion - it doesn't have many neighbouring countries ( and at odds with all of them except maybe Canada? ) and most US citizens don't leave the states to work in other parts of the world. If you have a whole continent for a country it's easier to find a job in a different part of it than moving to a completely different culture. And so this sort of causes people who don't travel much to have a conservative view of 'immigrant' labor. EU is definitely not perfect and has many problems to solve - but at least, in my opinion, opening the borders for quota-free worker exchanges lets people to hire from a richer pool of talent and helps reduce culture clashes and racist viewpoints in the long term. I'm feeling very lucky to get to know many different cultures from all around the world. I wish you could also have a taste of it too...
Fully agree. That's why H1B's should have a significant minimum requirement for the salary (depending on place). I'm in eastern Europe and I wouldn't even remotely consider Bay Area jobs with less than 250K annual income (base salary + bonuses). Even for other places, it shouldn't be far from that number for me to decide to relocate to US...
So yes, there is a shortage of talent who are willing to work for cheap.
Oh my, I would be curious to know what kind of company offers you such a high living standard in Easter Europe for you to throw any opportunity under the insane amount of 250k...
If I agree that you need more in the SV to live comfortable than probably anywhere else in the world, 250k$/year is an insane amount of money.
A decent home in a good school district is around $2.5m in the Bay Area, so $250k before taxes might get you qualified for a mortgage (provided you saved $500k for a down payment). $100k, while above U.S. median household income, would not go very far in the Bay Area.
Even in Eastern Europe, there are places with very high standards of living for talented developers, such as Prague or Warsaw. With the EU, Berlin, Vienna and Munich are now possible as well and have a very high standard of living.
You can buy a SFH for much less than $2.5m (more like $1m) in good school districts (the best districts are more like $1.5m+). Perhaps not in Mission San Jose, Los Altos Hills or in San Francisco proper, but many many places with a good commute to most of the valley.
For public high schools with a GreatSchools' score of 9 or 10, there are $1.5m 3BR home in places like in Fremont, Dublin or Campbell, but would be a bit of a commute to places like SF, Palo Alto or Mountain View where a high concentration of $250k+ per year jobs are.
>It absolutely, positively hurts local labor - naturalized citizens - etc. Without a doubt.
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.
Why do CEO jobs deserve protection and {...} do not?
Why do physician jobs deserve protection and {...} do not?
Either we make the US job market open for all types of jobs, or have the same rules applied to all professions. Right now, there are many jobs that are heavily protected (how many CEOs/Wall Street types are H1B?), while others are not.
This comment is guilty of the lump of labor fallacy. There is not a fixed quantity of jobs. The job market is dynamic and can generate jobs. One person getting a job does not mean another losing one.
I think you can criticize targeted visa programs without committing the lump of labor fallacy. The reason is that very targeted types of migration such as high tech visas can cause market distortions relative to other fields.
For instance, every new developer probably leads to employment for baristas, brick layers, dermatologists, mortgage brokers, real estate agents, and divorce lawyers. Because developers and engineers in general tend to generate wealth rather than redistribute it, this is especially true.
Here's the thing, if you create a visa program to allow easy migration for developers, but not for all those other professions (or you create a regulatory state that makes it very difficult for migrants to join those fields), what you create is a market distortion. Because new economic activities are available without the competition from the newly arrived migrants, those with existing work and residency rights will have an incentive to avoid engineering and go into other fields. Even if people aren't specifically displaced, even if pay rises a bit, better prospects in other fields may ensure that the existing workforce never goes into software development or engineering in the first place (i.e., someone who would have done so will now instead go into dentistry or tax law).
This, I think, is what we've seen - people who have the right to live and work in the US at the time when they are choosing a career path are shunning these fields. Now, if migration were more general, it wouldn't do as much harm to developers, because while there would be more competition, it would be spread evenly across all fields, not just software.
Think of it this way - suppose we allowed farmers to come to the US, but only if they grow lemons. If you switch your crop, you must leave, because there's a shortage of lemon growers. This would hurt likely harm existing lemon farmers, and you'd expect them to switch to a different crop (probably avocados, where they don't have to compete on price with the suddenly larger and captive population of lemon growers). There might seem to be a shortage of lemons, prices of lemons might still go up, but until they reflect the opportunity cost (what you could get growing avocados), people with the choice won't grow lemons. In this case, the "come here if you agree to grow lemons" visa program would be creating a market distortion that is preventing the lemon market from "clearing".
This is also why a lot of people who have no objection to general skilled immigration strongly oppose such specific tinkering with employment levels, and why a lot of people feel that there really is no evidence of a developer or engineer shortage when you consider the opportunity cost of becoming a developer for people who are free to choose a profession.
I agree with many points of your post, and I can absolutely say that the system does not work as it's advertised to: my wife is(was) an H1B for a prominent tech company, they pretty much insisted on her coming to the US and when they did it they advertised a position publicly (as is required by law) so specific as to completely rule anybody but her, and of would of course summary deny anybody that managed to get an interview(which they don't do any ways, they publicly post the position but than do not hold any interviews, and if they did for show they will never give a thumbs up). The decision to hire the non-U.S. candidate is made before the position is before the posted, which I do think is duplicitous and very much against the spirit of the law.
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's absolutely no talent shortage in the Bay Area, provided you can pay (and your ideas are interesting)
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.
> But the reality is that we need a deep bench of competent developers willing to work for substantially less than $100k a year.
And there we have it. You want developers to continue to be happy with less than $100K salaries while the costs of local housing skyrockets by 20% year over year.
Clearly that won't work for developers hitting their 30s and wanting to start a family or those with families already.
So you're left with hiring the young, highly educated, and unattached. Hence the move to hire H1Bs from overseas.
I work for a Bay Area based company, but I work remotely in Dallas, TX and I can assure you that this problem isn't unique to the Bay Area. It's just that the numbers skew lower.
Here in Dallas, many employers scoff at paying more than $80K/year for a senior developer when they can get an H1B for $50-60K. A lot of this relates to the total capital available, as well as the lower cost of living, but the trend is the same. Employers want more bodies for less money and they've figured out that the H1B is a clear path to achieve this goal.
Well, you get what you pay for (again, exempting professional services/staffing firms from this because they don't operate in the labor market under the same rules as individuals). If you offer $60-80k/yr, you're not going to get great developers. If the market rate is $80k and they're offering $60k for H1B developers, that's actually illegal (though unfortunately rarely enforced).
But many projects don't need great engineers: they just need people who can write code that implements business requirements. Someone with a technical certification may be fine for this (which is usually all these offshore developers have anyway). I would argue that it's insane to pay $100k/yr for this kind of work: from a macro perspective, other skilled labor fields such as accounting are equally challenging, but accounting salaries are much lower. If we trained developers like we do accountants, our economy would likely be more productive.
That's an interesting take. I agree that if programming became more common place (like learning how to use Excel), a number of low skill, high salaried programming jobs would quickly disappear.
However, if that were going to happen, I feel that it would have happened already. Maybe it's because technology moves so rapidly that it forces continual disruption. Any investments and downward pressure on wages due to an increased supply of skilled labor gets effectively reset during technology shifts (like moving from mainframes -> desktop -> web -> mobile).
Having come across a lot of "average engineers", I can tell you that most of the companies they work for survive mainly because they have some type of insulation from technical disruption. Sometimes its in the form of monopolies or regulatory capture, but over time even such companies become vulnerable to the major technology shifts (like mobile).
Look manticore_alpha, you should be honest with yourself here. The primary stakeholders in the H1B discussion are not only local labor, but also the consumers of the products and services produced by the companies that hired H1B's, and the investors in these companies. And consumers and investors have a right to obtain their products and services at a reasonable cost. This is not xenophilia, it's simply reality. This is the economic rationale behind Wal Mart sourcing globally.
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.)
This comment started out sympathetic, veered into an energetic deployment of anecdata, and ended up in a very creepy place.
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".
> It absolutely, positively hurts local labor - naturalized citizens - etc. Without a doubt.
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 ?
Communities tend to gravitate toward each other. Your attitude towards these neighborhoods is the same as the attitude expressed toward the european immigrants in the early 1900s.
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?
It absolutely, positively hurts local labor - naturalized citizens - etc. Without a doubt.
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"
>There's standard, normalized ways immigrants have come to the US for a long time now
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
You throw a lot of alleged experience behind your opinion, but, having had to hire MANY employees in the Bay Area, it sure as hell doesn't seem like anyone's getting cheap labor, and I sure as hell don't see anyone languishing on the market thanks to this influx of ferriners.
The other important and often overlooked missing piece of the equation is that programming is a brutally ageist profession and that the typical programming career is short. If you haven't made it into management by 30 you will find it increasingly hard to get rank & file coding jobs. So even if the typical programmer's salary is relatively high you mustn't forget that this career may only last 10-15 years in many cases.
It's pretty simple IMO. The programmer shortage would evaporate if programmers were paid according to the value they create.
You worked at some companies that had foreign workers, I get that. Since most companies forbid employees from discussing salary with your co-workers, exactly how do you know they were getting paid less than they were worth?
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.
Without commenting on your opinions, let me touch upon one point you make:
> 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.
To support his claim here's a video of a law firm advising companies on exactly how to craft employment ads to hire only foreign workers and not hire Americans even if they are qualified. In fact he even says it explicitly, the goal is to not hire a domestic worker, and getting a suitably experienced domestic worker applying for the job is considered a failure state of the process.
It tells you where to place your ads so that they are "publicly visible" but nobody sees them, and how to craft them to the exact skillset of the foreign worker you're already going to hire.
They say that they are complying with the letter of the law, but they are not because the law requires you to make a good faith effort to hire domestically and they are telling you how to reject those candidates even if they apply.
"our goal is clearly to not to find a qualified and interested US worker."
I understand the skepticism on HN because many people are working in places where real high-end work is being done. But I worked in the Midwest for over eight years and we had guys brought in to do Apache Struts work, and half the time I had to teach them how to do it. Maybe part of the reason some of you guys who really need qualified foreign workers are getting squeezed is because other companies are screwing you by fraudulently hiring. Why weren't the people in that video above ever prosecuted? They're on video admitting to crimes.
Not here to give any names, but I can third this observation. The job description ads are absolutely tailored and never intended to hire anyone local. But there is one good reason why that happens - OPT.
Foreign students graduate out of US schools and join companies here and work legally by enrolling in the OPT program that can last upto 28 months. During this time, the only way the company can hire them full-time is through the H1B program. The whole charade with creating these oddly specific ads and posting them where no one can see them is because there is no other way to continue employing the same people.
The same thing is repeated as part of PERM because the company is supposed to post an ad to hire someone for a job to make sure no one local is available, but that person has already been hired!
I can't name names. I can tell you one was the kind of company you're probably thinking about, and the other was a publicly-traded (now) supply chain company.
Or, he fears blacklisting in what is a closed market. The number of employees who have identical work histories is pretty slim; naming 2-3 of them would be very identifying.
I've seen this (job openings explicitly tailored for new or exisiting H1B employees) quite a bit myself, and I too am unwilling to "name names" for the same reason.
While we are on the topic, anyone care to illuminate me on the practicalities of H1Bs as a worker?
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.
Your experience seems rather limited. Because H1Bs by no stretch are cheap. You got to be kidding yourself if you think Indians buying up all those million+ dollar homes in Bay Area are earning low wages.
Fear based ethnic favoritism is xenophobic by definition. Abstracting that with immigration policy, visa types, foreign labor law, etc to influence the effect doesn't change that.
There is one thing in your post I must particularly disagree with:
> 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.
What people don't quite understand because it has been hammered into the minds of the minds of the middle class for decades now by the ruling elite is that immigration to the USA is bad for everyone involved all around, with exception of the ruling elite. Sure, on an individual basis someone immigrating from central Asia or Central America will be far better off coming to the USA, but fact of the matter is that not only are they sabotaging the local population but they are also being played and harming the source country they come from, which is the even greater damage. The brain, brawn, and bravado drain caused on source countries by the USA sucking up talent is the largest factor of mid to long term problems and failures in source countries, all while also sabotaging and manipulating the market in the destination (USA) country. I don't care what bleeding heart liberals whine and cry about, they are causing more damage than they appear to have the capacity to grasp. It's a process not unlike the damage cause by all the development "assistance" of the past century.
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.
It hurts because of how H1-B visas are structured. If there was free-flow movement of these high-skilled workers (and none of this indentured servitude to the company), then salaries would raise equivalently.
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).
The reason why companies like doing this is because the H1-B worker is bonded to the company for a long... long time. They can continue to keep underpaying the worker. They can even choose to not follow-through with sponsoring the H1-B worker's green-card application.
Lets be intelligent. Salaries for the H1Bs are low because the H1B visas are very exploitative. So, instead of forcing companies to hire local labour, force the government to remove the restrictions and salaries will rise.
>>> 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.
"Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage." -- Paul Graham
In short term immigrants definitely have negative impact on wages.
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.
if there isn't a talent shortage and there are workers in the bay area without jobs that work in engineering I would appreciate an intro to said workers.
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.
> 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.
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.
In correction to my previous comments, I missed the part about "at many tech companies", so I shouldn't have taken your statement as an absolute one, my bad on that.
Some additions however to your comments:
> 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.
All companies have to do that, often time a startup really want to hire a specific candidate, and they still have to play this game. If you are a co-founder and are sponsoring yourself (in the off chance that you think that might work), you have to post a CTO/etc. job offer for your position in your office, with skills matching yours to be able to work in your company. This feel like a relic of industrial jobs protectionism and won't be necessary if companies compete for quota numbers using highest salaries (although it would probably still have to be followed because no one changes immigration laws). It feels somewhat like a dishonest system, but it also dishonest as a factor or the law not evolving with it's time (e.g. just think of the job posting having to be posted on a wall).
> There's standard, normalized ways immigrants have come to the US for a long time now.
What exactly? I don't believe I am the only one asking this question in this thread, and you are not alone in expressing this statement, and it reflects one of the single most misunderstood by Americans realties of US Immigration. Namely that there is not a single straightforward immigration pathway for skilled and motivated immigrants (family, refugees, green card lottery winners however do have one).
> 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 the part that doesn't add anything to your comment.
Oh and don't get me started on the terrible "conditions" - relative to the tech-bro startups in SF - where H1Bs are expected to stay insane hours and work weekends.
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.
It seems like companies would rather go across an ocean for talent than across the country.
Yeah, there's that too. I know of one fairly prominent company that refuses to hire outside of New York. What do you think that idiocy is about? Ageism? Stinginess with respect to relocation?
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.
I agree that it's a bit of a myth that you "can't" change jobs on an H1B. You have pointed out that there are obstacles, such as a green card waiting list. While technically this isn't related to the H1B, I wouldn't say it has nothing to do with it if a very high number of H1B holders are counting on employer sponsorship for green cards.
To me, though, there is a bigger issue. How far from your original job title did you drift when you changed jobs? The H1B could be seen not so much as a way of forcing people to remain with one company as it is a way of forcing people to work the kind of jobs silicon valley employers want them to work. There are no restrictions on your employment - you can be a programmer here, there, or even over there!
The reason I think this matters is that I believe that programmers are actually underpaid relative to what highly educated and skilled people can make in other segments of the economy. Keep in mind, in SF, application developers only earn a bit more than dental hygienists. Suppose you decided, at age 25, that you'd prefer to do dental hygiene, since you were concerned about possible age related employment issues. Would you be allowed to do that as an H1B holder? Even if you are (my guess is that a dental hygienist would count as a skilled position worthy of the visa), what about going back to school? Could you find dentist to sponsor your visa?
To me, there's a reason for the "shortage" of programmers - the job isn't as great as employers claim it is, salaries and career prospects aren't good enough to lure these talented people away from other fields. To fix this, as a crutch, we've essentially created a system of immigration where people are allowed to come to the US provided they work as employee programmers for a period of time, after which many career paths may be closed to them or harder to pursue.
The Valley is a lot more open about H1-B transfers than the rest of the country is. I made the mistake of working the mid-west for a number of years where job hopping was not as rampant as the Valley and generally looked down upon. Also, every time you jump to a new employer keep in mind that your Green Card clock gets reset and your H1-B's 6-7 yr. limit stays the same. Having spent a significant portion of my youth here, my goal was to become a naturalized citizen. For most H1-Bs this is one of their major goals. The questions you'll have to deal with are always a bunch of What ifs.. What if I get laid off tomorrow? I've one month to find a job. What if my employer soft pedals on the Green Card application? What if my manager turns out to be an ass and my Green Card is only 2 years away? In that situation, I am pretty much a captive. It even took Alexandrescu (author of Modern C++ Design) about 16 years to become a citizen. Not acceptable.
Now Yahoo is closing it's India office and bringing a bunch of people to Sunnyvale. Not sure how they are going to do that with all the lottery bull going on.
Yes in the case of Green Card I agree you can become a captive if you're still waiting for your I-140. That being said, the DoL is currently reviewing the rules and should allow portability of the PERM in the near future as directed by Obama's announcement last Thursday, so when this finally happens there should be no longer talk of captivity even for Green Cards since PERM really doesn't take that long (unles syou get an audit...)
I'd argue that both the pro and con positions on this issue are correct. Because there are, roughly speaking, two sub-markets within the larger unified whole. Let's call them the upper market and the lower market.
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.)
