> 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).
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.