A supposed shortage of qualified US applicants for tech jobs, especially software developers, doesn't jibe with the huge numbers of US developers currently looking for work, including highly experienced older workers suffering from age discrimination.
I'd be surprised if more than 5-10% of H-1B positions are ones where the hiring company has even looked for US applicants.
You must be a US citizen to work for my company. No "US Persons" (visa holders) or foreigners allowed.
You have to be eligible for a Secret security clearance. You don't have to get one if you don't want to as there is usually plenty of uncleared work to go around, but you have to be eligible in case that goes away and we need to put you in for a clearance.
We cannot find qualified applicants.
I've had this conversation many times on HN so here are some preemptive responses:
No, we don't make weapons for the military. Well, we do but not my part of the company. The most harmful thing the products I build do is quantify in precise detail how climate change is dooming us all.
No, our positions aren't ghost positions.
Yes, we are willing to train someone who is motivated. We won't re-teach linear algebra to a developer applicant but we will pay a tech writer to go to school nights/weekends to get a degree in engineering (me, I did that).
Yes, we have extensive high school and college work-study/internships and participants make $72k/yr. with full benefits for the duration of the program. That pipeline is actually successful.
No, you can't work remotely. You (even programmers!) have to touch the things we build in order to build them and nobody has an ISO certified clean room in their house.
Yes, we pay well.
No, we don't pay as much as Meta. We build components for satellites that have been sold to space agencies and purchased by various departments/ministries of the environment, not your personal information to advertisers-- one party has more money to spend than the other.
We have shortages in mech/EE/Aero, shortages in software, and critical shortages in engineering technicians.
One issue is that we expect programmers to remember linear algebra and have more than the ability to shovel frameworks on top of each other until a phone app comes out the other side.
Since more skilled immigration can't solve the requirement, what is it you think would help?
> You (even programmers!) have to touch the things we build in order to build them
This sounds like an excuse. You think it's completely impossible to write code for some embedded device, robot, whatever remotely? Hire some cheaper remote hands, set up some telework equipment, voila now you can hire from all over the country.
I did development for a scanning optical microscope, was only once even in the same room with one, and even then never got to touch it.
Of course once that issue is eliminated, the security theater one will be raised next. People might be working from their bed next to a Russian honeypot or whatever. National security types tend to have vivid imaginations in that respect, and have to justify all their rules to themselves.
Your company is incompetent. I've applied to hundreds of companies like yours within Huntsville, AL in the past year, rejected or ghosted all the time.
Defense morons will talk about how hard their work is and how they can't find anyone to do it. Completely skip over how prevalent affirmative action is in their hiring process; who were you guys interviewing in 2020? Why is the defense small business base completely dominated by veterans who stack 10% disability ratings and minorities with a preferred SBA sticker on their website?
They want top tier talent to work on crappy quality products/code
Meaning people who can unravel all the crap they have to maintain but with no agency to enact any sort of long term fix.
Plenty of this kind of work going around, the older the codebase is the less willing people are to work on it. Soon good engineers don't want to anymore and mid engineers are not good enough to even tweak it. Leaving the only lever these companies can pull being salary and they can't compete with FAANG on that.
Reminds me of those anecdotes you hear from Oracle and ASML engineers. The difference there is that they can still use the salary lever.
I'm not going to let industry off the hook by blaming the victim.
It's not the defense industry, but I know a very qualified person who's been having a lot of trouble being hired for what must be stupid, industry-dysfunction reasons.
I work in video games, if I didn’t I would have no pool of candidates to choose from.
However if you read what I wrote:
1) Current attitude is not necessarily prior attitude
2) A histrionic tirade is not indicative of an outwardly perceptible attitude, in fact, its more common that these kinds of outburts are from a person who is not outwardly bitter enough day-to-day and is forced to be positive. (thus it boils inside them and becomes venomous)
3) Bitterness is usually the combination of a (often still) motivated person who feels let down. Your companies most negative voices are very often the ones who are passionate but sad about things. Its the “checked-outs” who you really don’t want if you’re building something you want to be good.
It's very unlikely that people just start by being bitter against an industry, but extremely likely that an industry gave people reason to become bitter in time. People tend to start their careers fresh and free of preconceptions, while industries keep carrying their "blemishes" through decades and many generations of people.
You're applying the circular reasoning of "of course I treat you like crap because you have a bad attitude (because I treat you like crap)", while ignoring the part in the bracket.
Defense morons should be a more common term. These guys have been given free money for generations in VA and can barely do anything other than suck cash from the government. I’m an American it’s disgraceful they are children compared to my Asian colleagues.
if they're getting free money, they're not morons!
humans think we're the most intelligent because we built New York while the dolphins have just been hanging around having a good time. the dolphins think they're the most intelligent for the same reason.
Not commenting on the rest of their assumptions, but to be clear, auto-rejecting candidates that could reasonably fill roles in your company isn’t a defense against incompetence accusations— it supports them.
My "discrimination rant" is informed by my ex-girlfriend being hired for an M&S/OpenCL job as a non-programming mech-e. Why? Because all the work was already done and it would look better to the government client to have a female, black engineer sit around in a SCIF doing nothing all day. Stuff like this is absolutely rampant.
This is absolutely true. Government contractors have what is effectively diversity quotas. People will get hired to fill the quota regardless of what they actually do. It’s absolutely not true that diversity hires are all useless, but there are significant incentives to create diversity numbers in order to gain a government contract. Hiring 100 people to do nothing and get the lucrative contract is better than hiring based on need and not getting the contract.
No, this is what I was told verbatim by her. Her next stop had marketing soliciting her to write BLM articles for the corporate blog! Please keep trying to gaslight me and all my fellow colleagues who have to commit fraud and claim their wives own 51% of their business entity that we're the racists though.
Veering off topic a bit, but I wonder what would happen if a company required that for any new hiring filter for Role X, it must pass everyone currently in Role X or above.
Does it make sense, in general, to prevent the hiring process from becoming more selective in the future? If so, why? But if not then a rule like that wouldn't make sense.
It makes sense to sort candidates with the more niche requirement to the top of the pile, but to require it? When you need to fill this role?
There's also hiring because "wow, this candidate is great, we should find a place to fit them", and there it makes sense to become more selective going forwards... but when a company is saying "we need people and can't find them", that doesn't seem like the time to be more selective.
I don't think it makes sense to prevent it becoming more selective, but I do think it makes sense to avoid passing over candidates who can do the job. And your best (only?) data on who can actually do the job is who is currently doing the job.
If you really need everyone in Role X to have a PhD in Psychoergonomics, then what's up with Jane over there and her MD?
Have you considered that it might be your attitude costing you job opportunities? Anti-woke baby raging isn’t exactly exactly an attractive quality in a potential candidate
This idiotic positivity culture is so toxic. It seems to have crept up the 101 to Silicon Valley from Hollywood where, as Mel Gibson notes, the one rule is "you can't get mad". Silicon valley was built on getting mad enough to see something wrong with the world and want to change it.
Look, by "won't reteach" you give it away. Those who are not rusty in linear algebra will tend to be recent grads, younger people who are probably not looking for a boring defense job with no remote somewhere in Alabama. Those jobs appeal to people who may have had enough time to forget how to implement a SVD without googling.
Defense contractors are usually located in out of the way places. If you work for the USAF Lab in Rome, NY, you make less than a Facebook intern, but the only guy richer than you in town is the state trooper with overtime. They are also stable gigs with good benefits.
Yeah, but you also have to live in Rome, NY. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to live in a major city; but being _near_ one is pretty handy. And if the job doesn't pan out, then being in Rome, NY means your options for the next job are extremely limited. Unless your family is ok with uprooting and moving (probably _again_), the pay to move to Rome for a job would need to be catastrophically large to lure me there.
I moved from a string of coastal metropolises to a much smaller city in Alabama, voluntarily. Pay was not a factor, since I kept the same remote job; but obviously my purchasing power is higher here, especially for housing. There are certain aspects of living in or near a "world-class" city that are lacking here, but for my lifestyle, that has no impact on my day-to-day.
I'm not specifically trying to change your mind about Alabama (since as you said, everyone has a different lifestyle), but I would wager that perhaps some of what you think about these Deep South states are contrary to reality.
One of my biggest concerns of doing something like this is being too far away from specialist healthcare in my old age. I see my 70 year old mother struggling to find specialist doctors without going to the big city (which is 2 hours away). She is not even _that_ far away from the big city.
Meaning around one time per month she has to devote a whole day for a doctor trip. I am afraid when she grows older and can't do that by herself anymore. Most of her doctors are still local though, but specialists are hard to find.
When my dad had cancer he had to take similar trips for his treatment. Except it was weekly with occasional multiple times per week. It was brutal for him and my mother.
I think he is saying that they’ll hire folks as technical writers (so you do technical writer stuff) and then help out with engineering classes if things seem to be going well.
This is pretty different from somebody who wants to go in as an engineer but doesn’t remember their intro classes.
> Looks like your managers don't know who they need to hire or don't want to really hire.
It's prevalent in government-adjacent companies. It's all a completely opaque byzantine system to mask the nepotism and the fact that a lot of those people just siphon money from the government like it's a jobs programs.
Not to mention that their application systems are usually complete garbage like Workday or Taleo.
The defense industry _is_ a jobs program, I thought this was clear to everyone. It's cheaper than keeping all the vets on the payroll directly and also cheaper than letting them become another homeless crisis on top of the existing one.
Prove it. What city are you in, and what is total comp for software engineer & hardware engineer with 20 years of experience?
I worked in national defense. It was a pain in the ass: shit pay, worst politics, massive tolerance for incompetence & mediocrity, meeting hell, and secrecy (necessary, but "need to know" gatekeeping wasnt at times).
Why would I work in person for less money when I can work remote? For in person work on critical applications like satellites, I'd expect (spitballing here) a staff eng to be making 300k base with substantial bonus/espp on top. Consider that most midsize tech companies are going to pay staff level 200k or above and ask how the company in question compares, before pricing in the crushing inflexibility of in person work.
That's the line they gave all my peers who went into public interest and non-profits. Most of them left from burnout or because the low pay and high demands were exploitative.
Here's the trick these mission-oriented employers don't want you to know: you can use the freedom that money affords in order to build meaningful and fulfilling aspects into your life outside of work.
That’s what they want you to believe so they can pay you less than Google. Meanwhile the googlers got rich and are doing fulfilling and meaningful work on their own pace once they quit.
Your statement is trivially true in terms of market mechanics, but considering that $400k/yr for an individual puts him in the 99th percentile of all income earners in the US, the argument gets a little harder to make.
Not to pile on, but if linear algebra is really a part of the day-to-day job and not some manager’s mistaken idea of a proxy for more general talent, then you’re hiring specialists and the pool will not be that large. People who remember all their math and enjoy it and can also code, are also very employable at all the AI companies and departments, including at Meta.
And how do you know if someone’s eligible for security clearance without applying for it? (Other than the obvious “be a US citizen, don’t be a spy” part.)
> if linear algebra is really a part of the day-to-day job [...] then you’re hiring specialists
It kind of bothers me that the parent and other readers here are passing off knowing linear algebra as some kind of esoteric skill. Linear algebra is a year 2 course in a undergraduate eduation. There are polished libraries to make it fast.
Unless you mean enough knowledge to be writing linear algebra libraries, there is no need to consider this skill a high hurdle.
It's not so much that it's esoteric, it's that it's not something most people use every day, and skills decay over time. I mean, Differential Equations (Diff-e-screw) was a year 2 class for me, and I assume I'd fail it if I took it today.
But most people that have any exposure to it can pick it back up fairly rapidly. And most people that have a reasonable exposure to math in general could probably come up to speed (a little less) rapidly.
I don't think it's esoteric, I just don't think it's used much in real-life, day-to-day software engineering as practiced by most professionals. I didn't mean to imply it's a high hurdle, just that IMO a minority of actual SWE's are going to bust out the proverbial slide rule, and anecdotally it seems like they have a lot of options.
That it's a year-2 undergraduate course for some people argues more for forgetting than remembering it, if you're not using it regularly.
> Linear algebra is a year 2 course in a undergraduate eduation.
From what I’ve seen, the year 2 course is great for graphics programming, game development, that sort of thing. It’s not enough for the tasks that require more serious linear algebra, when you’re working with systems of linear equations, large matrices, etc. These “big” linear algebra problems come up a lot in fields like physics simulation, finance, and machine learning / AI.
I’ve done some hobby work in graphics and game development, and I’ve done some professional work in physics simulation. The kind of linear algebra you use in physics simulation is a different beast.
I would expect the type you are talking about to be described as something more like scientific computing or HPC or something, right? Numerical methods.
Linear algebra may well be year 2 in a math B.S. program, and you’ll encounter it in physics and quite a few engineering fields, too. Maybe a bit of linear algebra in CS. And a lot of graduates who go do something else for a while will not remember too much linear algebra.
I can easily imagine that an overly aggressive linear algebra requirement will eliminate many excellent candidates.
I got a CS degree from a fairly high ranked state university.
Linear algebra wasn't a requirement. I took it as an elective just for my own curiosity. I have a feeling loads of programmers really don't know anything about linear algebra, and probably a large number are like me and learned it due to interest in game development.
The upstream comment mentioned Linear Algebra as a base requirement for applied programmers in their domain; satellites, remote sensing, communications, navigation, etc.
You can assume they're interested in esoterics like those who can grasp the spherical harmonic equations used to model the daily magnetic flux epoch models to control sats via mag torque, those who can do a multivariate 512 dimensional SVD reduction against pipelined multi spectral data to create sharpened images, create fuel optimal paths in constrained resource starved environments while dodging projected debris paths, .. you know, all that jazz.
In Australia Linear Algebra was straight out of high school first year university basic STEM common core math course work for Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Medical, Biology, etc. streams.
I’ve seen it put after calculus for whatever reason, usually. Surprisingly, even for engineering students, calculus often takes up the first year of classes in the US.
In Australia, and a number of European countries, Calculus takes up the last two years of high school in the advanced stream (for anybody intending to go to university and take Law, Engineering, Medicine, Physics, Chem, etc).
Interestingly in serious university mathematics when looking at the foundations of mathematics, Linear Algebra is a functional prerequisite of multivariate calculus and anything higher dimensional as LA provides a literal basis for abstract spaces and local approximations to continuous functions, etc.
I generally think it should be taught along calc 3 (advanced integration and differential equations), as there's decent conceptual overlap and basic calculus helps weed out those who might not be ready for a more rigorous course.
Also to clarify wrt calculus, it is very common for university-track students to take AP calculus in high school, which allows them to take an examination that most universities accept to prove mastery of the equivalent to calc 1 or calc 1+2 depending on the examination.
At my university, the quickest you would be able to take it was the second year because Calc 1 and Calc 2 were considered pre-reqs. Assuming you're a normal student doing only Fall/Spring semester, you can't take Calc 1 and 2 simultaneously.
Unless you had AP Calc in high school and managed to get the university to accept it. I think quiet a few ABET schools don't accept AP Calc as a full replacement for Calc 1 if your an engineering major.
Here in the US I was: calc 2 (year 1), calc 3, linear methods (year 2), discrete math, theory of computation (year 3). The downside being that the math and comp. sci courses had no overlap, so I've basically forgotten the first 1.5 years. Might have been better off at a state college.
And wow, coming in from the other end of the scale to even the bias...
Did an internship in biotech then spent the next ten years working the only 2-3 blue collar jobs I could land while applying to thousands of jobs per year and writing hundreds of cover letters per year: retail, call centers, IT, software development, comp sci, secretarial, and other random fields I have certifications in. All told, zero interviews. Spent my spare time working on open-source projects and tutoring programming and data science.
Suffered a horrible work-related injury near the end of the decade and had to quit, but just as my savings were about to expire I managed to find a government contracting job for 80K/year, which is nearly 3x my previous salary. I suffer incredible pain at work due to my injury, and spend all my spare time recuperating and exercising, and spend all my money on healthcare and moonshots to no avail. I've wound down all my hobbies. I thought I'd start socializing once I could afford it, but I'm in too much pain.
Competence in government really doesn't reflect my experience in landing a job. What a silver lining. When I can barely walk I can just not show up and nobody would even notice. So career-wise I don't think I'm going anywhere. Life-wise I'm limping on, I guess.
How many years do you expect most working professionals to remember the content of each of their undergrad courses - unless they use it on a regular basis?
Agreed - If you got a Computer Science degree from an engineering school, you probably had to take Linear Algebra as one of your required classes. Also, Linear Algebra is not that hard to learn.
And you’re going to remember that at a job interview 10 years later after never dealing with it after class? Uh, no.
I took through calc 3 + discrete math, but didn’t have to take the full linear algebra course for the BS in CS. I’m sure I could refresh myself on calculus, but almost no one is regularly maintaining their more advanced math knowledge in this field.
The bigger risk I think is that most engineers took it in the first couple years, didn’t realize they were applying it in all their other classes, and forgot about it.
Why is this down-voted? I was going to add most people have already seen some sort of linear algebra even in high school. Determinants, Gaussian elimination, etc.
It's unclear what "linear algebra" means to GP, though. I agree writing linear algebra libraries is next level, since that involves numerical code and knowing FP math well.
Isn’t linear algebra heavily used in machine learning and computer graphics (not just know it, but be able to wield it proficiently)? So ya, the talent probably exists, but they hit the “these engineers are making half a million a year to do something else” problem.
There is a lot of published research work in ML that had huge impact without explicitly touching linear algebra.
Given that is the case, to answer your question: yes, linear algebra is the foundation of ML. No, a lot of impactful day-to-day ML engineering can be done without touching linear algebra.
This is how assembly is the basis of compilation and programming. But you probably are going to get a whole lot of work done without ever using it.
It's generally a nice flex when applicants can code assembly, and usually a yellow-flag when the company suggests they require knowledge of assembly.
To me, my eyebrows raise when an industry person mentions linear algebra. I'm just saying the odds are really low that you actually use it.
Yes, exactly, I would (naïvely) assume it's common among e.g. ML specialists, who are in high demand and thus hard to recruit. I'm sure there are a lot, but if I had to extrapolate from experience ("OK, who's good at math, hands up?") I would say it's less than 20% of coder genpop.
> People who remember all their math and enjoy it and can also code, are also very employable at all the AI companies and departments, including at Meta.
That's either a wishful thinking or a stretch of definitions, IMHO.
What about the opposite? My math is getting super rusty but it doesn't matter because all I do is push protos around. Yet I seem to be pretty employable.
> And how do you know if someone’s eligible for security clearance without applying for it?
The short answer is "You can't, not with 100% certainty.".
Based on my experience from decades ago, the long answer is "Anyone who's a US citizen and doesn't lie about their drug use and debts can get a Secret clearance.". Things MIGHT have significantly changed since my clearance lapsed way back when, but I doubt it.
Actually, after engaging my brain a bit more fully, I realize that one can be eligible for a security clearance but fail to actually be granted one.
That is, eligibility concerns whether or not the State Department will consider your application, not whether or not they will grant the clearance after performing their background and lifestyle investigation.
You didn't name your employer for someone who might be interested. Perhaps visibility is one reason you can't find anyone?
I applied to a similar position locally this year. I far exceed their requirements and experience and I got rejected at the application stage.
And the same goes for nearly all of other places I applied to. Hiring has most definitely changed over the years. They are not just looking for "qualified applicants". There is something else going on.
>I applied to a similar position locally this year. I far exceed their requirements and experience and I got rejected at the application stage.
Could be "This one is overqualified, we can't pay that much" or "He doesn't have experience in the exact thing we need." Or just that they want a qualified applicant but they've got lots of options.
So, essentially, you are seeking special treatment from US citizens. I’m not saying this is always unreasonable, but you’re in the territory of a centrally planned economic decision, and in the US philosophy that is supposed to be done minimally.
Maybe the right thing is for your company to shut down or change their line of business, freeing up the labor for Meta.
Yes, because obviously we as a country should prioritize creepy VR avatars over understanding climate change.
By this reasoning no charities should exist (they pay less than commercial orgs) and even people who are willing to work for less in order to feel good about their contribution should not be allowed to.
> Yes, because obviously we as a country should prioritize creepy VR avatars over understanding climate change.
As a country we have decided to let the market decide what to prioritize. Who are we to judge "creepy VR avatars" are less important if people are willing to fair and square pay for them? If they are creepy, don't pay for them.
> No charities should exist.
No that is not the appropriate conclusion. People are of course free to work for less and balance their circumstances. If they want to volunteer for a charity by choice, more power to them. But no, using taxpayer money to fund "charities" is by-and-large corruption in my book.
> It’s a very cynical, even nihilistic view.
If we are doing labels, yours is a very communistic, statist, view.
--
P.S. regardless of your PoV, I like that you acknowledge my core point: that the OP is seeking special treatment in the form of cheap labor from the US. You are simply arguing for that special treatment being justified, not denying that's the core demand.
Profit is not and shouldn't be the primary driver for whats useful economic activity. There is a lot of good work to be done that can't or won't be sustained by the market. Basic scientific research for example.
Who ends up paying for the decision to pay a meta engineer x, but the climate change engineer x/5?
It’s the engineer who picks the climate change job instead.
Essentially what you’re saying is that due to society not being willing to pay competitively, engineers should take the kick to the nuts and be paid peanuts to make up for societies bad decisions.
I mean sure you could argue that, as communists and others perhaps do, for instance, but we are chiefly talking about the US, where individual profit is decided, IMHO correctly, as the primary metric. Sure, you may want to choose to minimally do certain things for national security or other legitimate reasons as the people vote for (as I mentioned in three posts above), but that is supposed to be a deliberate choice of the people and their representatives, driven by their desires, not as an automatic subsidy to any pre-established business, in the form of lax immigration policy which can have second-order effects.
Someone that wants to do some good in the world can have a bigger and better impact by getting paid much more and donating half the difference to charity.
Working for a company that launches satellites that examine climate change is far less impactful. It's not worth a big pay cut even when you're focusing on altruistic motives.
> Someone that wants to do some good in the world can have a bigger and better impact by getting paid much more and donating half the difference to charity. [Citation needed]
Working for a company that launches satellites that examine climate change is far less impactful. [Citation needed] It's not worth a big pay cut even when you're focusing on altruistic motives. [Citation unavailable as its purely subjective]
Working for a company that sometimes makes satellites that make measurements of climate change is so indirect at helping people if at all. Donating to that company (by being paid less) is not a good use of money, in terms of charitable benefit. I don't think any of this is wild enough to need citation in a discussion where the median comment is not expected to have citations.
How many people honestly think it's a good idea to donate to a for-profit company?
> It's not worth a big pay cut even when you're focusing on altruistic motives. [Citation unavailable as its purely subjective]
I'm talking about level of benefit, which is not subjective.
Edit: Also I just reread the original comment and realized the climate change measurement was listed as a negative, so for the two citation neededs I point back at the original post about the company. Donating a single dollar beats a negative.
They seem pretty happy to try to guilt trip people into taking the pay hit ‘for the good of the country’ while someone in the middle pockets the difference though.
> Defense margins aren’t going to beat social media margins
Really? It's the first time I am hearing US is procuring defense for cheap!
If there is a margin issue, that's an efficiency problem, i.e. the company is being an idiot or deliberately wasteful/stealing (perhaps due to structural problems like overreliance on cost-plus contracts).
This isnt the first time you are hearing that social media margins are better than defense margins.
That is a misrepresentation of what was said, and an unkindness to the conversation being had.
Tech scales, in a way that manufacturing and physical products dont. I would assume that on HN, this is common knowledge, and that you also are aware of it.
There are 4.8 million developers in the US most of them are not making Meta salaries and I would say that 80% will never see 200K inflation adjusted in thier lives.
Instead of going to levels.fyi go to salary.com and choose any major city in the US that is not on the west coast.
No most developers don’t get RSUs or anything else aside from their salaries and maybe a bonus.
And before someone replies that I’m “bitter”. No I’m good, I’m 50. I did my stint at BigTech and I don’t have the shit tolerance level to deal with the politics of any large company.
You are actually proving my point. If there are 4.8 million developers who are not commanding Meta salaries, and they "pay well" it should be fairly straightforward to get labor.
It's simple: the more picky you are the more you will have to pay. The GP admitted the upper bound of Meta, which is a company that is sustainably operating in the same country. If you cannot compete in a labor market, either raise your product pricing or be more efficient. If not, you will make less profit and/or go out of business, which is an appropriate outcome most of the time.
I can’t believe that his work is so complicated that he can’t take a good older developer in thier 30s, who would be more than willing to move to a lower cost of living area where they can raise a family affordability and design an internal training program to get them up to speed.
Offer things that we care about like free health insurance, “unlimited PTO”, a generous 401K match with immediate vesting, etc.
I personally wouldn’t move to Alabama. But many would.
At 50, I need to work. But I don’t need to chase after FAANG salaries. I optimize for my other priorities. As I said in my previous post, I’m not “disdaining what I can’t have”. I’ve been there done that.
> The estimated total pay for a Principal Software Engineer is $329,957 per year in the Remote area, with an average salary of $196,928 per year. These numbers represent the median, which is the midpoint of the ranges from our proprietary Total Pay Estimate model and based on salaries collected from our users. The estimated additional pay is $133,029 per year. Additional pay could include cash bonus, commission, tips, and profit sharing.
Sounds like the right ballpark. If you're in a location that doesn't pay as well, remote can pay much better.
Exactly how many “remote principal software developer” jobs do you think there are available and that’s a self selected sample and even then they for some reason separate “senior software developer”.
Look at salary.com where you can see by cities.
None of the BigTech companies have many remote jobs. Google is even requiring their customer facing professional services department to be in certain cities. That was a bridge too far even for AWS.
I understand your struggle. I have worked with US and non-US orgs that are in similar boat.
In my experience this is often and at least in part a self-inflicted wound. As you describe your side of the business, it should not restricted, but it is. Maybe? Not enough detail to be certain.
What I see time and time again is business not willing to implement proper DLP, labeling and isolation of restricted things. Instead, they just throw everything into a single bucket, because it is quicker, faster, some of the risk and compliance is shifted to third party, and initially cheaper.
In short, a US, UK, Aus company that does government contracts will just force everyone into NOFORN, on-prem requirements (because DFARS, CMMC, CE+, Essential 8, or whatever). It is way quicker to do this for entire company than actually label data, isolate environment and resources, and so on.
I'm a U.S. citizen and I've applied to plenty of these types of jobs. Had an offer at Palantir previously but would not take that now due to ethical concerns.
I'm an older worker in management. Willing to be hands on. Not looking to get paid as much as Meta (I've worked there too) but also don't want something that pays peanuts. Willing to relocate to many places.
In my experience roles at companies like this in the southeast US pay around $120k for senior engineers, probably a bit more for management. Not sure if you consider that peanuts, but it’s significantly less than Meta.
Some employers will pay the cost to get a security clearance. Others will not. IME, employers will tell you in the job description which kind of employer they are.
"Must have a currently active $TYPE clearance." and "Must be eligible for a $TYPE clearance; position contingent on acquiring a $TYPE clearance." are the sorts of phrases to look for.
The pool of Americans that can qualify for a clearance is very small. You'd be surprised how many people have poor credit, bad debt, foreclosures, foreign connections, drug use and/or arrest history. It's not a fair comparison to the applicant pool available to your typical industry business. When I got my TS out of college, the OPM agent went to my old frat house and interviewed people at random, then went to my girlfriend's sorority house and interviewed random people there. It can be brutal.
If you are a citizen but your spouse is not a US citizen, does that count as an out? I hard a while ago that having a spouse from China could ruin your chances of getting security clearance, but I’m not sure if naturalizing solves that problem or not.
Yes, it will make a huge impact during the investigation and adjudication process. For TS and TS/SCI, even with naturalization the chances for approval will be slim and naturalization likely won't help, especially if they have family in China. For the government, it's all about calculating risk of someones loyalty, character and having things that can be exploited by financial issues (debt is the biggest disqualifier), foreign contacts or family, and anything they'd want to keep secret that could be used for blackmail.
If they have a good candidate and the only problem is debt, they should offer to pay it off. They have no qualms printing billions to save some broken banks.
Someone with lots of debt likely has some aspirations of foreign travel to risky locales, regardless of what they say… so it makes sense why that would be a disqualifier.
I didn’t say anything about pot. I said drug. That’s any illicit drug or controlled substance including prescription misuse. The look back for declaration is 7 years, not 2, and generally you are auto denied if use was within the last 12 months, college or not.
I feel like that range is a on the high side, at least for jobs outside the Bay Area. Unless aerospace pays a lot better than software jobs at government contractors. When I was laid off less than 2 years ago and applying to a wide variety of places, the gov contractors were only offering in the $120-$140 ballpark for senior sw engineering positions. They tended to play up gold plated benefits, high 401k match, etc as well but there’s no way that would get it up to $263k.
That is outrageous that two seemingly developed countries could have such a huge compensation gap. A senior aerospace engineer in the UK can make as little as 45k GBP, or 56k USD? One fifth as much as the lowest-paid American??
The take-home on that is £35k. The median rent in London is £26k. I suppose the person making £45k doesn't likely live in London, but still pretty grim.
Americans are often blown away and kind of ignorant of how, relative to the rest of the world, they are really wealthy and well paid. Like, people have way less disposable incomes in other parts of the world, even developed countries. The purchase power of the USD and the power of the US economy is absolutely insane.
The U.S. engineer can be fired on a whim immediately and lose their health care (COBRA) and the company that fires them can even contest their unemployment benefits (that the employee paid into) if they feel motivated enough. That's one of the reasons they get paid much more.
The UK is poor because they decided to financialize the economy in the 90s and stop making things. It's like canada where the GDP per capita goes down every year. I'm amazed there hasn't been a revolution.
I don't think the average migrant salary is much different from the average UK citizen salary. Then again, I also don't find the "financialisation" argument very compelling. Plus, the GDP per capita visibly does not go down every year.
"another respected data journalist, John Burn-Murdoch, calculated that without London, the UK would be poorer, in terms of GDP per capita, than even the poorest US state, Mississippi."
Yes, it's true that the UK economy is very London-centric, but the original poster was talking about the UK as a whole vs the US as a whole. (The flip side of this is that the figures would look better if you compared London to a major US city.)
None of this changes the fact that US software engineering salaries are a poor comparison to use to illustrate wealth disparities between the US and other countries, as they are an outlier.
Quite! A top 10% earner in Finland, a supposedly very developed country, by saving all of their net-income spending zero on food and letting their SO pay the bills, could in 2-3 years afford a new Skoda.
Yes, Aerospace Engineers don't live in London because there are very little (if any) aerospace jobs in London. Biggest aerospace employers in the UK are BAE Systems and Airbus, and both have factories in much cheaper locations (Wales, Northwest of England).
You're basically comparing "super specialised job in the middle of nowhere with very low cost of living" vs a "super specialised but much more needed job in multiple high cost of living locations" (Seattle metro area, LA metro area to name a few).
I don’t know if you’re making a joke or not, but getting NHS isn’t worth $200,000 USD per year.
Most Americans get employer-provided health insurance, which costs money (the amount specified in the DD section of the W2), and its often in the $1500/month range. That DD amount isn’t part of your income or the salary Glassdoor mentions. It’s an added benefit of top of that.
In the UK and elsewhere, around $500/month/person in taxes pays for your healthcare. That’s essentially subtracted from your income. So the uk income is even lower when you subtract the taxes the NHS costs.
> I don’t know if you’re making a joke or not, but getting NHS isn’t worth $200,000 USD per year.
Nope, but NHS + no/less student loans + no car dependency + cheaper childcare + time off + a ton of other things shave quite a bit off that $200k. Not equal, and not in every personal case, but a lot.
Canadian and not UKian, but our public healthcare is definitely not worth 50% of my take home cash, I get much better access to care in the US right now. it still says Canada on my passport so I can get healthcare if I get fired or chronically ill
You say this ironically, but someone who’s been working hard 15 hours 7 days a week in a niche, 50 weeks a year, from age 15 to age 29 has clearly a much higher potential than a 45 year old following the normal path in life.
And almost certainly a higher employable value too unless they have catastrophically bad social skills…
Realistically, there are plenty of competent people they could hire for any low six figures amount (unless they are directly in the DC area, in which case add 20-30k for cost of living). 500-600k or half of that is a unicorn salary that doesn't apply to those industries or areas and is irrelevant to the discussion. Even if they offered you that salary you wouldn't take it because the work environment would be radically different from working at a bloated web tech firm, or working at a silicon valley startup.
Totally different markets. You wouldn't be interested in that job, and they wouldn't want to hire you even if you were interested. Even the tone of your post makes that obvious.
We should be discussing early to mid career folks from somewhere other than silicon valley startup or big web tech land. Aka "meat and potatoes" tech jobs. That is what's being discussed.
I don't know what their problem is with hiring either and I agree with you that it could be partially compensation related. But not being able to compete with Silicon Valley on compensation is not where I would be going with that argument....I think it's more likely to be related to environment and interview style and notions of what "experience" means. In other words...bad hiring practices...not necessarily raw compensation issues. The compensation for non "big tech" firms can sometimes be quite good in comparison to other career paths especially when located outside of the valley, so being unable to hire talent makes me suspicious of hiring practices more than compensation (assuming they are reasonably large and hit market rate for the area and are in a reasonably large metro).
Do you offer to sponsor people to get their security clearance? many jobs I see in the sysadmin space want someone who already has clearance, and are not willing to do the process of getting someone their clearance.
Came here to say this. I have a friend who is a manager for a defense contractor. He says that competition is fierce for people that already have clearance and they can't really hire someone to sponsor them because of how long it takes. There is a 2-3 year wait for obtaining security clearance because of a backlog caused by COVID.
The people that have it can write their own ticket and do very little work apparently.
> You must be a US citizen to work for my company. No "US Persons" (visa holders) or foreigners allowed.
This is illegal under IRCA unless another law or government contract mandates it. [1] If every single role at your company requires a Secret clearance, then I question how separate “your part of the company” really is from the part that makes weapons.
Recent green card holders, asylees, and refugees get federal protection, except when a law requires or permits otherwise. The other commenter’s company has a blanket rule of allowing none of these categories. Approximately this got SpaceX into trouble with the DOJ recently.
Some state or local laws offer additional protections beyond federal law, including NYC for all immigration statuses, except as required or allowed by other applicable laws. (So, for example, NYC doesn’t pretend that companies have to hire people who don’t already have employment authorization.)
I remember visiting a family member’s work (similar industry) and the front office did a screening of me as a visitor to make sure I met those same requirements before I could enter.
I’m guessing the contracts that make paper clips don’t need those stringent requirements, but the ones that make sensitive comms equipment do.
Large companies (think FAANG) can and do have non cleared, non citizen, non us persons (permanent residents, refugees and asylees) working on such projects with the proper separation of scopes, data access restrictions and so on.
To be fair, he never said "every single role at your company requires a secret clearance." He has specifically mentioned that you can get by even without them. You have misquoted.
True, but they aren’t allowing recently admitted permanent residents, asylees, and refugees, all of whom have federal protections against immigration status discrimination in employment.
Some places like NYC offer legal protections in this area to all categories of immigration status, of course within what applicable federal and state law requires and allows. Federal law allows preferring citizens over equally equalities noncitizens, requiring employment authorization to already exist, and complying with any specific legal requirements for restricting certain jobs to citizens. NYC law respects all of this. But overall NYC is totally allowed to, and does, add protections beyond federal law.
It is required by law. Most likely through prohibitions for "exporting" defense technology, which can be very broad. "Exporting" can consist of having a casual conversation with a non-"US Person" or having a document visible on your desk.
"Secret" classification is really mild, about 5 million people have one.
>The law prohibits employers from hiring only U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents unless required to do so by law, regulation or government contract.
At these workplaces it will be a combination of all 3 of law, regulation, and government contract.
You are referring to ITAR. Under ITAR, permanent residents are considered US Persons and not subject to export controls. Clearance is a totally different thing that people often confuse with ITAR, which is only granted to US citizens, and though it is possible to grant something somewhat like clearance to non us citizens, it is almost never done.
Edit: Ah I see you are not disagreeing with what I said at all. Apologies, I cannot count the number of times I have seen in reddit and here, where people confuse ITAR with clearance.
If someone is a software developer who has done non-trivial things and linear algebra but not recently and needs to be refreshed, do you provide time/training to refresh on the math skills?
> No, you can't work remotely. You (even programmers!) have to touch the things we build in order to build them and nobody has an ISO certified clean room in their house.
They talked about manufacturing satellites, some of this aerospace stuff is in Alabama because a senator back in the 60s got some space contracts for the Huntsville area - good luck finding people who want to move to AL. Not saying that the poster is necessarily in AL, but if they are then that could be a reason they're not finding people.
What’s your company? What exactly do you pay? I haven’t done linear algebra in a while but certainly remember enough from graphics programming (and of course physics and linear algebra proper) in undergrad. Feel free to check out and contact me via any of the routes available on my GitHub: https://github.com/JonLatane
I used to build fantastic little things the likes of which no human being had ever seen before that have killed many, many, people including (if reports from that side of the company are right, and they are) thousands and thousands of Russians and their tanks.
Now I design radar panel assemblies for weather satellites.
What’s your companies general location? Do you have an office where tech talent wants to work? Location is an important part of a competitive employment offer.
And I highly doubt linear algebra is a day to day requirement for a typical worker. Sounds like a case of expecting chauffeurs to know how to build a drive train from scratch.
You're asking too-obvious questions. GP wants you to work for them, for less money, in a less attractive area, doing work that is likely related to killing people.
And you think they're asking the kind of question you asked? lol
I’ve applied to a variety of your positions each cycle for the past 3 years. New grad, clearance-eligible US citizen from a mid-range state school with a historically strong defense/gov. connection. I have multiple internships, a math minor, and my standout project is a rendering engine with a physics/collision system. I’ve never had or expected a remote option, and 70k (outside of the extreme-COL areas) sounds fantastic.
Your company has never offered me a phone screening. Seeing claims that Northrop is in sort of qualified candidate crisis when myself and many applicants I know of similar profiles are lucky to get so much as a rejection email is borderline infuriating.
Defense contractors have loads of entry level jobs, but most require you already have a clearance (e.g. wanting US Army 17c or IC vets) or certifications which cost $500+ plus. Many don't sponsor a clearance, because it takes a long time, high chance of the application not passing and because they may just use you to get a clearance and job hop to a higher paying job.
Defense contractor jobs are the only ones I've seen that haven't been outsourced overseas yet, but good luck getting a CJO for one that will sponsor a clearance and actually getting cleared.
A top tier three letter agency sponsored me for TS SCI FSP and it took 9 months after the conditional job offer (CJO) after 10+ offers of personal interviews with me not counting my old jobs, college and friends/acquaintances just for them to cancel my app for "other traits, conduct or behaviour" and to reapply after a year.
I heard other applicants on the free bus ride that it was their 3rd or 4th try at the polygraph or that the agency forgot about them so they had to a Congressional inquiry after 2 attempts prior etc.
It's a lot of BS and I've tried for a few years now to work for the federal government and military, but they just don't want me. I've given way more effort than normal folks, so honestly screw them.
Amen, good to see it wasnt just me. My last job search was this summer and I hit this all over.
I'm fine with working for a defense contractor or the feds. I'm fine with taking a pay haircut relative to FAANG to do something meaningful. I'm even fine with commuting, and the agencies poking into my life to assess a clearance. But I need to move from one job to another without a gap.
Private sector employers won't touch me without a clearance, and in my part of the world there are lots of people who already have one, so I'm not worth their time.
The US government would put me through a clearance, but their hiring practices are so slow and arcane that they're just not viable for someone who needs to find a job starting say in the next 30 days.
I wish it wasn't that way, but it is. So, I stay in the uncleared commercial sector.
> We won't re-teach linear algebra to a developer applicant but we will pay a tech writer to go to school nights/weekends to get a degree in engineering (me, I did that).
Why? Linear Algebra is certainly something that can be learned faster than a degree in engineering. I expect the average software developer (someone that can understand algorithms) can achieve competency in less than a semester's worth of time. If someone is a good developer, learning specific skills sets for the domain is pretty normal.
similarly i am in this ridiculous position. I am a security engineer, wanting to work in vulnerability research. Got an EB2-NIW green card due to my skills being valuable for the national interest. Can't even get an interview because all vulnerability researcher positions require TS clearance... I guess i will just have to wait 4 more years for the citizenship, but it's a pity.
> We won't re-teach linear algebra to a developer applicant
Why not? Isn’t this just part of your ramp-up if it’s a niche qualification? We re-teach networking to developers who probably forgot it—that’s a semester course, easily. If you’re not willing to invest in candidates that are 90% of the way there, then you’re perpetually going to have difficulty hiring.
> You must be a US citizen to work for my company. No "US Persons" (visa holders) or foreigners allowed.
Just to clarify, being a dual U.S. citizen (e.g., U.S.-Canadian, U.S.-Irish) doesn't necessarily prevent a person from obtaining a U.S. "SECRET" security clearance.
It's not just that you're restricted to US Citizens.
You point out all the issues in your post:
> You have to be eligible for a Secret security clearance
So, even though I'm adult and it's legal in my state, I can't smoke weed now and then? Oh and depending on the project may be subject to a polygraph... sounds fun!
> No, we don't make weapons for the military.
Every.. government... defense... contractor has this speech. Why even pretend that you're not in the war business, which ultimately means killing people? Honestly I would be more comfortable working for an org that wasn't afraid to admit what they do. Making moral compromises is not uncommon in tech, and I don't judge people that choose to do so, but I do judge those that pretend that they're not.
> No, you can't work remotely.
I've worked remotely virtually my entire career, including for the Federal government. You may have a good reason for this requirement, but it absolutely shrinks your pool. You don't even mention location, but I'm guessing it's not in a top city like NYC or SF.
> Yes, we pay well.
And yet you never give a range. Last time I worked for a DARPA contractor, Google (this was the earlier days) basically hired every elite member of the R&D team in a weekend (exaggerating here, but not much) since both the pay and work was drastically better.
> One issue is that we expect programmers to remember linear algebra
Ah great, unjustified ego to boot! I'm sold!
I'm a US Citizen, work in a remote small company doing opensource work largely for the good of the world, likely paid roughly the same, it's nobody's business if I want to smoke weed, and most of the team has a quantitative PhDs (but would blush to mention it) and those that don't could easily teach a course on linear algebra.
I'm just one engineer, but I can't imagine applying at company like you describe. You might have better success hiring qualified applicants if you at least admitted how unattractive such a place is to the many engineers I've work ed with who use linear algebra everyday and tried to find some compromise.
What you’re saying just doesn’t jive with the experience devs have when applying for jobs. You hear horror stories about juniors applying for hundreds of jobs. They are absolutely qualified for entry level work - they have CS degrees.
I have experienced applying for dozens, including those posted to HN: most won’t respond at all. Maybe months later you’ll get an auto-reject message. Or you’ll go through several interviews not to be selected, even while passing technical assessments. My colleagues and friends have similar experiences.
By definition a US Person would not have a visa, since that qualifier only applies to US nationals, permanent residents (which do not need nor have a visa, permanent residents do not apply for admission after status is granted), refugees or asylees.
Do you drug test? Sounds like a place that might. A fairly significant proportion (though definitely not all) of the best developers I've ever worked with would simply pass over places that seem like they would.
Plenty of people can pass a drug test. That's not the issue I guarantee it. It might slightly help their hiring but it's not the root cause of difficulties, and I seriously doubt compensation is a root cause either.
I don't do drugs; I barely even drink alcohol. But, I think drug testing is a violation of privacy and none of a company's business. This isn't 1950, nobody cares if you're doing drugs on your personal time as long as you're sober for work.
Yes, you need to drug test for clearance. But I'm saying that's a job I'm not applying to unless I have no other choice. It goes straight to the bottom of the pile for me.
My understand is that it comes down how likely it is that the employee could be bought/blackmailed/corrupted. A person with a drug (or gambling) habit could be blackmailed or might need more money to fuel their addiction, making them susceptible to a foreign power buying their support.
Same reason for homosexuality in the past when it was illegal/scandalous.
I'd quibble though that this overlooks that quite a lot (possibly even most) drug users are able to lead productive lives without having to resort to illegal activity to fund their drug use.
The other thing this doesn't cover is that there are many alcoholics that fall into the same trap. Though there again, most alcoholics are able to lead productive lives despite their addiction.
And through personal experience, I unfortunately know quite a few alcoholics that work in defense with various levels of clearance.
Are you saying you pay well as comparing to the local McDonalds? That being said, my guess you can't find "qualified applicants" is because you are putting too many restrictions and paying too little. So you end up with students who will take anything and then you come here to complain about the lack of talent.
I'm not USAian, but everything you described to me makes the job sound miserable, especially compared to the competition.
The clearance I won't comment on, as I have no clue what it involves. Presumably though, this means randomized drug tests which is IMO a complete violation of privacy. Also, I'm probably wrong but it gives me the impression that despite your reassurance that you aren't building weapons systems, ya kinda are.
And as you said, a part of your company makes weapons. That will automatically cause many people to be disinterested, for better or worse.
> Ghost positions
In my experience, gov't jobs are the worst when it comes to fake job postings that only exist as a cover for internal promos. Might be different in the states, but I doubt it.
> Yes, we are willing to train someone who is motivated. We won't re-teach linear algebra...
Wait, so will you train them or not? You won't refresh someone on linear algebra which most people haven't touched since their uni days, but you'll put a technical writer through university to become an engineer? Which one is it? Then later on you say the algebra thing is a hard requirement. How do these statements make sense together?
> Can't work remotely
This is an automatic disqualifier for many people, for many reasons. I get that you're working with space hardware in clean rooms, but if this means people have to move to the middle of nowhere (or just move, period) and commute for 2 hours each way, then you're disqualifying tons of people, when their alternative is a job where they can work remotely with all the benefits that entails. I'd personally rather be dead than be forced to commute ever again.
> We pay well
Define well? Especially with everything else I commented on, is it really "well", if they can join a much less frustrating job and get paid more? Also you sound quite snarky about working at Meta. I'm no fan of FAANG, but if we're talking compensation, I think the snark is unwarranted given the situation.
> We expect programmers to remember linear algebra and have more than the ability to shovel frameworks on top of each other...
Again, snarkiness and derision. A bit of a dumb position to take when you're admitting that the easier job not only pays (dramatically) more, but has better conditions (remote work, no clearance-related BS) as well.
No wonder you can't find qualified individuals, your comment alone makes it sound like a miserable job where you're working for bean counters that want to inspect the cloudiness of your piss while forcing you to waste half your life driving to the office and back without extra compensation, while they get to see other, less skilled engineers "glue frameworks together" for double the pay and quadruple the happiness. And I find it rich to comment on advertisers when your company makes weapons that literally kill people. Something about reaper missiles and glass houses comes to mind here.
Later on GP talks about radar, so I'd guess probably at least the basics, convolution, matrix multiplication, and some inverse methods (evd, svd, cholesky...). Not just implementing but understanding what it does, a bit ?
I once worked in defense as well and it could be that the pay is insultingly low with immense hassle and responsibility (do this thing wrong and you goto jail). I'll only consider going back if a new major conflict starts.
> You have to be eligible for a Secret security clearance. You don't have to get one if you don't want to as there is usually plenty of uncleared work to go around, but you have to be eligible in case that goes away and we need to put you in for a clearance.
Y'all should probably make that clear. Usually, the moment I see something like that as a job requirement, I move on. Not because I may or may not qualify, but because I honestly don't remember a lot of the information required and because it's not clear that I can work in a non-weapon-building role. Probably should offer refresher courses in linear algebra - I've been a developer for 25+ years and have never knowingly used it.
It can be inferred that they’re making satellites, or at least satellite components. It’s pretty likely that vector math will be involved in some of the software being written in that context. In particular, if anything they write involves navigation (which is a lot of things when it comes to satellites, from actually maneuvering to observation correction) you need to have a pretty good understanding of linear algebra to write good software. And aerospace isn’t an industry where you want someone relying on google for mission-critical logic.
Sure, but there's a huge spectrum between "mild competence" and "can recite strang's verbatim". My experience is that companies emphasizing specific math skills beyond normal professional baselines typically expect the latter despite usually offering the same (or lower) salaries than the former.
I would argue that, if the sole differentiating requirement is “must be proficient at linear algebra” (at an undergraduate level), the pay requirements shouldn’t be that different from most other similar jobs. Almost every engineering job will have some domain specific requirements; would you say a job asking for applicants to be “proficient in undergraduate-level fluid dynamics” would require higher pay than any other chemical engineering job? Or, back to SWE, if there’s a requirement to have experience working with microcontrollers, should that job pay more than any other C developer position?
If an SWE job posting has a narrow set of requirements, none of which require particularly high-level education, that means the ideal candidate is a “regular” SWE with experience or knowledge in the field being hired for. It’s not like this aerospace company wants someone who is an expert at linear algebra while also being a full stack dev with intimate understanding of a few major cloud platforms’ offerings and knows how to write windows drivers and does silicon design in their spare time. They’re just looking for a particular type of developer for which there simply may not be any candidates. Yeah, technically you could triple the salary and steal employees from other companies who weren’t looking for jobs, but the economics of that aren’t feasible. If there are n positions and n-a total eligible developers (for some positive a), it doesn’t matter how much you increase pay, there still aren’t going to be enough people to fill the roles. And you’re eventually going to run out of money, because you usually can’t just triple the price of your products.
strang's would be something that is entry level in terms of linear algebra.
I think they should clarify whether they want somebody that has passed a linear algebra class with high marks based on something like strangs' entry level book before...or are on the cutting edge of graduate level linear algebra research. It's not clear from the post and I suspect that might be an issue.
Give me a couple months and I could recite strangs entry level textbook. I passed that class with an A+. But I could not become a PhD level maths student with a linear algebra research focus in that amount of time.
There are multiple very different ways to interpret a requirement for being competent in linear algebra.
Knowing everything covered in strangs introduction to linear algebra is actually quite low on the potential list of requirements and could be self studied.
> Give me a couple months and I could recite strangs
Yes, most people had LA classes during college. But would you take a couple of months to relearn something that would be used only to interview for one job that you have no idea you'll get? That's certainly a reason why few people want to interview there.
If you need a specific specialist degree (like a PhD in linear algebra), then that's just the professional baseline knowledge I already mentioned.
When I last read Strang's, my course included a lot of spectral theory that was decidedly not introductory regardless of what the title says. Either way, the point is that most non-specialist practitioners don't need that. How often have you truly run into determinants mod N or stochastic matrices in real life?
It sounds like our linear algebra classes were somewhat different though. No one received an A in mine. I had one of 3-4 B's.
Never ran into modular determinants IRL but stochastic matrices are pretty common in many jobs - that said honestly anyone that's actually good at linear algebra and dev work has some pretty good options in many fields so considering it as a baseline unremarkable requirement is uncalled for, I agree.
I've looked at jobs at places like this (some requiring quite high clearance) and the pay is hilariously bad, and I don't make anywhere near peak FAANG rates (or work in FAANG)
50% pay cut for a DevOps/SRE role requiring a Q clearance (DoE version of Top Secret I think)
You can't find employees because the job isn't exciting (you're probably not NASA) and the pay is bad. Maybe your recruiters are bad too.
They're probably located way out in the sticks too. Who wants to pack up all their stuff and sell their house and move to the rural deep South for a job that may or may not work out long-term? And if it doesn't work out, they now have to sell the house they bought there (because there's nothing decent in that area on the rental market) and move cross-country yet again?
>You have to be eligible for a Secret security clearance
Nope. Not doing it. Not going to argue politics, but this is a huge RED FLAG for a lot of people. And I feel I don't need to submit to mandatory drug testing as well.
>The most harmful thing the products I build do is quantify in precise detail how climate change is dooming us all
Then why is it classified? How separate is your branch from the weapons branch, that you acknowledge exists?
If you doubled the pay you’d probably have more applicants than you could ever hope for. And why don’t you pay as much as Meta? The defense industrial complex can pay retired generals massive salaries to sit on boards, they can hire the most expensive lobbyists on the Hill. The defense department specifically can’t even pass an audit. They have so much money going out that they can’t even count it. And let’s take Raytheon for example, have you seen the operating margins? They’re huge. So even with these “critical shortages,” somehow they are immensely profitable. If shortages are affecting those margins, then there should be plenty of money to pay “critical” people more. Revenue per employee at Raytheon for example is almost $420,000. For typical manufacturing companies, a “good” number is $300,000. So a “critical” employee is worth a lot more than they’re being paid and there are probably a lot of employees that are dead weight and keeping them around means less money to pay the shortage areas.
I once applied to work a government project for a subcontractor and they were adding “headcount” simply because the terms of the subcontract required a specific number of people regardless of the amount of work required. They were essentially hiring people to do almost nothing. I spent over 3 months waiting for a response. Apparently their critical shortage wasn’t that critical because the hiring process was so long and convoluted and subject to “contract renewals,” that I simply gave up and went to work for someone else.
I could go on for days about the extreme waste and oftentimes outright fraud that happens in government contracting, subcontracting, and sub-sub contracting. And despite formerly having a TS/SCI clearance, any job in the “McLean Area,” pays less than most startups. And jobs in places like Huntsville pay even less. Even overseas work in “austere” environments pays less than a junior developer at Stripe. And you don’t get potentially shot at at Stripe — And I don’t have to work 100 levels deep for contractors or contractors of contractors on site using often circa 1996 development practices and lowest-bidder equipment managed by IT departments that seem to be led by dinosaurs and it can take weeks or months to simply requisition a dev server even within an unclassified cloud environment.
Why to do that for salaries/benefits that are lower than I could get as a janitor at Netflix?
Make the workplace/work environment and benefits compelling and you’ll get more applicants. Small startups literally have better benefits. You also don’t have to endure a Tier 5 investigation — the outcome of which entitles you to a job that pays so little comparatively.
I'm a programmer, I know linear algebra (I actually have a master's degree in maths). I grew up in Houston, lived there from 1998 to 2010, but never got a citizenship owing to some of my father's medical issues disqualifying us from a green card.
If you're willing to sponsor me for a green card and wait five years, and you're located in a city I'd actually like to live, I might come work for you :)
So do you discriminate against people that consume substances, on their own unpaid time, legal in the location they live at?
> You have to be eligible for a Secret security clearance. You don't have to get one if you don't want to as there is usually plenty of uncleared work to go around, but you have to be eligible in case that goes away and we need to put you in for a clearance.
Well, tech companies claim that they cannot find good enough workers to fill their positions. But "good enough" is a subjetive classification. I can always create a test for which you are not good enough, it doesn't matter how much knowledge you have. And that's what tech companies have done for years. They'll aways craft a contrived interview process that will classify most people as not "good enough" and use this as evidence that there are not enough workers available, so they will get the opportunity to expand the pool of workers as much as they want.
Every dev interview process I've been a part of has not included consideration of the applicant's citizenship status. The interview process has many flaws, but it is not contrived to tailor itself towards H1Bs at the expense of citizens. At least, not at the companies I've worked at, which are household names. At TCL or Wipro? Sure, those are blatant offenders of the H1B visa.
You said it yourself, those offenders supply talent to other companies. Many roles simply won’t be available to citizens because they’re filled by H1B abusers.
Yeah, I think the abusive companies like TCS and Wipro should be shut down. But the other companies generally pay pretty fair and use this visa system pretty normally, and they do see a shortage of qualified talent. I saw it myself as an interviewer. TCS and Wipro have a completely different quality standard (if you can call it that) and everyone knows it, plus they are cheating
Companies don't need to favor one group against another, they just need to make the process artificially hard, so they'll have the excuse that there are not enough workers ready to fill those positions.
The process is not artificially hard, imo. It's just testing you on things a college CS curriculum goes over. Sadly many many colleges in the US have a very substandard bar for teaching this subject.
There is a shortage of applicants willing to work at what companies want to pay. If it is taking more than 30-60 days for workers to find a role, there are enough workers domestically.
This is why H1-B visas should have a minimum salary requirement equal to 20% over whichever is greater, median salary for the role in the industry, or median salary for the role in the company (and whichever is greater, US-wide, or local pay scale).
This way, a company is always incentivized to find local talent, but when they are actually unable to, they have a path to find the expertise they need. The U.S. could relax restrictions on H1-B, lowering red tape, and removing a lot of churn that comes with the H1-B program
In general, H1B visas do have such provisions. At least in CA most jobs must provide a salary range. Even if every H1B is the lowest of the range in those postings, that alone means there are many many jobs which fit your criteria.
Sort by salary ascending and you will see what I mean.
These are blatant violations. We know how much software engineers should make. Do the immigrants know they are moving to one of the most expensive cities in the US?
Someone should put together a package for the new administration with advertisements to target for H1B violations. I’m sure Stephen Miller would want to see it.
Almost all H1Bs have already been in the US for years on their student visas, so of course they know COL and where they are moving to.
Those you are posting look like they could be violations. But if you just visit your link, you quickly see that most jobs are in line with median salaries in the bay area.
Require employers of each H1-B to submit (along with the hire's w-4 that they send to Uncle Sam that already includes the job's wages and benefits), the position description in the job ad, the candidate's resume, and the matching wage band the job purportedly falls into and exceeds by 20% (or whatever the required margin is). It should be trivial to automate the validation process. Then do random checks to confirm those purported facts, especially of employers who hire large numbers of H1-Bs and have past violations.
No. Because it still floods the job market with off short talent that is willing to work for 30% less. Construction workers arent tied to a single employer (usually) and that drops the price of labour across the board even in union dominated markets.
A lot of things "flood the job market". In 2021, >104k degrees CIS degrees were awarded by US colleges [1]. There's a flood of young people entering the market every year, and they're willing to work for >30% less than experienced engineers because it's their first proper job.
IMO as with all things money, it's all about negotiation. Of course a lot of negotiating power simply has to do with the market supply/demand, but a whole lot has to do with policy and rules. Giving more negotiating power to H1Bs would definitely put upwards pressure on salaries.
Re: construction workers. Same problem, worker's rights. A lot of construction workers are undocumented: an estimated 20 percent [2][3]. Undocumented immigrants have virtually no negotiating power. Allowing this solid 1/5th of the workforce to confront their employer without fear of deportation would go a long way increasing compensation for the industry as a whole.
"Allowing this solid 1/5th of the workforce to confront their employer without fear of deportation would go a long way increasing compensation for the industry as a whole."
It is strange to read this all typed out in earnest like that. Housing costs triple over night for the win? We'll all be homeless but those of us in construction will get a boost (or decreased competition from low cost imported labor).
> A problem solved if visas are not associated to employers, because then an employer couldn’t hold onto the employee like this.
Then you wrote:
> No. Because it still floods the job market with off short talent that is willing to work for 30% less.
In many highly developed countries in the world, visas are not associated with an employer. We don't see people clamouring to post about it on HN. Why? Because the number of visas offered to skilled migrants is relatively limited.
Second, you wrote:
> Construction workers arent tied to a single employer (usually) and that drops the price of labour across the board even in union dominated markets.
How can you be sure that this is true? Do you have a "natural" experiment where two similar areas in the US have construction workers where area A has workers tied to a single employers and area B not? Else, how can you say this with such confidence?
Source: I managed projects bigger than you can imagine as a very young person. I traveled between the United States, China, the Middle East and the Caribbean.You have to take my word for it, as I can't and wont dox myself. I might as well have a PhD on this subject. I don't care if you believe me or not, but what I say is true.
Yeah it's fair to say that if suddenly a huge influx of people show up causing downwards pressure on wages then that can happen. Though I feel like construction work is a place where there is legitimately more limits to how many people who are willing to work in that industry (even if you paid me double a SWE salary, I'm not working in scaffolding all day) locally.
I do think that if you don't tie the visa to the employer, then it's _less interesting_ for an employer to recruit people from abroad. Especially for companies whose entire business model is "get cheaper IT labor, locked into mandatory service, in exchange for being an entryway to the country".
Like if you despise those shops, then you really should be lobbying to get rid of the employer lock-in.
The simple solution is for the government to put a tax on the visa. For each H1-B the company does, they pay the government an additional $200,000 per year (or some other large, arbitrary sum). If they really need them that badly, they'll pay up. What I think happens is that they discover they don't need them quite so much.
It's one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard on this site frankly. For how "meritocratic" HN claims to be, they are totally fine with basically eliminating all competition in their own job sphere.
Imagine how quickly business trust in the government would go down if the government mandated a $200k head tax on H1Bs. It's absurd and only here would anyone hear it and think it makes sense
Having to compete with people in the third world who have no expectations isn’t meritocracy. My dad grew up in a literal village and I remember sleeping under mosquito nets. Americans shouldn’t have to put up with the things I’m willing to put up with.
You don't have to compete with people with no expectations. You have to compete with people who: often have an advanced degree (much more common for H1Bs than citizen devs), often have financial resources at home backing their ability to move up to a more expensive economy for work without security of a job, and are often just as good if not better than you.
H1Bs are often scapegoated by these forums as being hungry to not live in poverty, but they are often the top of their respective countries by most metrics.
And most of you all do not think that we should level the playing field between, say people who went to good schools vs people who went to bad ones, or people who can barely code vs people who can code really well. Only when it's foreigners do you not want meritocracy
It’s not comparable. Both my parents have advanced degrees back in old country. But the standard of living for someone in the top 5% back home is comparable to someone in public housing in the US. If people’s alternatives back home were so good they wouldn’t abandon all their family—my family was never from anywhere besides Bangladesh going back thousands of years—to come to the U.S.
H1Bs at a lot of companies (excluding the actual criminals TCS, Wipro, etc.) are not always willing to do your job for less. Many of them make more than most US devs.
Many make what you would consider laughable wages. I worked for a university in their IS department years ago, and since the university had an office that dealt with visas, they'd bring in people for what was truly a mediocre job. Salary probably $45-50k back in the mid-2010s.
But since HN is San Francisco-centric, it can pretend otherwise I guess. Some very tiny fraction earn above what US developers earn.
I mean, I can think of a lot of things businesses could greatly benefit and grow from, but would have to do without if it came with $200,000/yr price tag.
IMO this is not about wether a business can do without X. Most businesses can do without a lot of things, just more poorly. IMO this is about finding the right balance between the benefits and drawbacks of hiring foreign specialized workers.
> There is a shortage of applicants willing to work at what companies want to pay.
That and companies are just hilariously bad at finding workers they want to hire for nebulous reasons. I have no doubt even if my company hired 95% of the workers it had marked down as "no hire" they'd be able to squeeze a salary's of value worth out of each of them (well, if management is competent, which it tends to not be). I'm sure those of us who've been around long enough can all attest to some side of seeing form of this dysfunction. I'm more than happy to reject them for selfish reasons, of course, like "I don't want this person on my team" or "this person seems like an asshole" or "I don't want to teach this person their third language after java and typescript". Etc.
I mean there are terrible interview candidates out there, but the people who literally can't code at all tend to be easy to filter out.
I'm curious if there's any way to observe the salary margins that separate the top of the labor market from the bottom. Surely there are. That would probably give a big signal as to how much undue attention is given to, e.g., Senior vs Junior developers and American workers vs H1Bs. I'd put money that some of this complaining about lack of labor is actually not wanting to hire fresh grads and eat the cost of training when they'd be just fine. (Also the H1B thing, but that's already discussed to death)
Okay, I have interviewed hundreds of people in the last decade, and I can tell you that most are not good enough. There are companies that are downright abusing H1B for wage suppression, but as a startup founder, I will try my hardest to avoid hiring people who I have to squeeze their salary's worth and still get mediocre results (nothing to do with citizen or not - I had this experience with a Canadian contractor - just not worth it).
I have been successful in liberating money from VCs and create jobs, and I want the best people that money can buy. Turns out, there are great American and non-american candidates who are willing to work for the money I can offer. Also in my experience, I hardly even get resumes from Americans for backend jobs. Frontend is different and I get a LOT of American resumes. Our frontend engineering, PS, CX, Sales and Marketing is all-american, and backend is a mix of american, greencard, H1b - because thats all I get in the resume pipeline.
If I have to cut costs, I will have to cut the team in US and move the jobs to a low cost region regardless of their citizenship status.
> Okay, I have interviewed hundreds of people in the last decade, and I can tell you that most are not good enough.
Me, too. I straight-up disagree; I think interviewing is just so broken it gives a false impression of quality issues in the labor pool. Realistically if you have a handful of core skills you can ramp up to basically any problem with enough time. That's time on the order of months, maybe, not years. Companies just don't want to bother training anyone anymore. Why bother when you can just complain endlessly and hope some politicians throw cheap labor your way? In that sense you're absolutely right, but the whole "quality" thing is completely unrelated.
> I have been successful in liberating money from VCs and create jobs, and I want the best people that money can buy.
I think people seriously overestimate the difference engineer quality makes. Most products can be built with mediocre talent. I'm sorry, that's the truth. We all love to have strong opinions on who we should hire and I say "almost anyone, just throw meat at the problem". Most problems are solved with time and not cleverness.
Startups are definitely more sensitive to quality, but startups don't make up much of the labor pool, and they don't pay competitively with much larger companies that don't need the quality.
I'm being a little hyperbolic here—you do need people with experience and ability to see red flags to lead the flock—but not by much.
>I think interviewing is just so broken it gives a false impression of quality issues in the labor pool.
I've been in a team where hiring requirements have emerged through the filter of HR almost unrecognisable. Naturally, they're still objective requirements, so qualified candidates are filtered out before ever meeting someone who could judge if they're qualified. It gets noticed, but nothing happens. Of course it doesn't: you're stepping on important toes.
That's how it tends to work. Candidates are filtered out by non-technical staff, including openly using programs that filter out CVs missing keywords. In smaller companies, this even gets farmed out to third-party recruiters that have poorly aligned incentives.
How can we know if candidates are qualified? We never see most of them.
It's hard to imagine many things worse for productivity than bad hiring processes. But it's all just accepted.
> I think people seriously overestimate the difference engineer quality makes. Most products can be built with mediocre talent. I'm sorry, that's the truth. We all love to have strong opinions on who we should hire and I say "almost anyone, just throw meat at the problem". Most problems are solved with time and not cleverness.
I'm surprised that your experience here is so different from mine. The best engineers I've had are capable of things that the average to below average ones could likely have never achieved, even with an order of magnitude more time.
I don't think it comes down to cleverness as it does inventiveness. There are dots that great engineers can connect that often nobody else could spot. They also need less process, and a large number of people with all of the coordination overhead does not linearly scale.
> Most problems are solved with time and not cleverness.
Yes, because given time someone clever would have came in and fixed it.
It's like doing push up in the elevator and believing that arriving at the 100th floor is due to doing push ups.
The GE, IBM, Intel, Boeing are few examples that didn't believe in quality - and not just people apparently, and their problems aren't getting solved with time.
Eh, I just don't see it. GE and IBM and Boeing are solving the problems they want to solve. Management dysfunction can't be blamed on low-quality workers. Anyway, I'm a little reluctant to draw the parallel with Boeing because I simply don't know what kind of work goes into that sort of engineering. Maybe cleverness is a big part!
> Yes, because given time someone clever would have came in and fixed it.
I can't emphasize enough how much software engineers overestimate the value of their own cleverness. Bugs are fixed with persistence, in my experience—I've used "cleverness" to find only a handful of bugs across my entire nearly two-decade career. I don't want to say I'm "the best engineer on the team" or anything like that, but I dependably fix the bugs that are put on my plate regardless of how frustrating they are to crack, regardless of what tools I need to bust out to get the job done. Debuggers, printf, valgrind, core dumps, packet captures, profilers, repls, disassembly, whatever's necessary. But all of these take persistence to reach for and use to crack the case. Experience is a short cut, but that's a very different thing than cleverness, and you very directly pay for that experience.
Not to mention if I see "cleverness" in a code review you're gonna bet I'm gonna comment and ask you to make it less clever unless that cleverness seems to neatly solve a problem. Even then, commenting is absolutely critical.
Time, not cleverness, is the key.
Hell, the joke used to be that being a software engineer is 80% googling. Now that barrier's been lowered even further with chatbots: you can literally ask it to find the bug, explain behavior, fix the bug, etc. It doesn't take much competence to correct the output. All it takes is not giving up when you see problems.
I am confused why you included GE. Do you think their aerospace products (jet engines and such) or medical products (MRI machines) are low quality? They are pretty much top three globally in those areas, and very innovative. And how about the Boeing 787? What issues do you have with that?
I worked at GE. A lot of thier software dealing with the transportation industry back then wasn’t technically complicated. There were just a lot of business rules and regulations they had to check for.
It's not at all about doing hard things. It's simply the number of things to be done and how they interact with each other. You are absolutely right that these are technically not hard problems, but they're still hard design problems that keep changing very frequently
Most products can be built with mediocre talent. But no one actively goes after mediocre talent. And yes, startups are more sensitive to this, I really had to let go mediocre people because it affects everything. Throwing meat at the problem for long enough time really screws up the product. Even at a very large company that I worked for, innovation ground to halt after a decade of this thinking, because systems that started simple enough, got complex over time in part because of market and primarily because of mediocrity. Adding things became a nightmare, because we threw meat at problems for a long time.
Maybe what you say has worked for your situations, but it really never worked for me over my experience, and it just was a downward spiral over time every single time.
If workers are mediocre, management needs to be top notch to deliver great products.
If management is mediocre, workers need to be top notch to deliver great products.
The odds you'll land at a place that have both are vanishingly low. It also takes a lot of work, money and interest to turn a big ball of mud around and no one gets a prize for that, people get a prize for churning out features and bugfixes, so this is what you get, specially because most large scale rewrite projects are utter and complete failures.
Each can compensate for the other only to an extent. We don't need top notch, we need good. Most large scale projects may fail, but we ended up assembling good people for all the rewrites. Five of the six projects were successful (in production with objectively better metrics). One failed due to underestimating the operational complexity of a piece of technology.
Add in that in the search for the perfect candidate that has all 16 bullet point requirements you'll come across folks who have, say, a solid 13 of them, but they'll get passed over waiting for the perfect candidate to come around. Which can take many months... years even. In the meantime you could have been bringing up one of those 13-point candidates getting them up to speed on those 3 missing bullet points. And you'd likely have gotten to a desired level of productivity faster than by waiting for that perfect candidate while wringing your hands that there just aren't enough qualified people out there.
I don't think anyone is saying wait for the perfect candidate. No one is perfect and no one checks all the boxes. That would be a fool's errand. But most good engineers can differentiate between a good (not superstar) engineer and a mediocre/bad engineer in a couple of conversations. I really have not seen anyone optimize for a mediocre candidate, nor for a superstar. Superstars come by with luck or with tons of incentives (money, stock, tech or whatever is their itch).
Screw the company -- sure, maybe they can build a product with mediocre talent. But I don't want to work with mediocre devs, because they make my life harder.
I'd much rather wait for someone I want to work with, than hire the first person that is "good enough".
"Not good enough" or not good enough to pass your leet code gauntlet that has nothing to do with the day-to-day role?
Because those aren't the same thing. Also don't discount interview stress - I read that psychologically the most difficult thing to do is be on stage in front of people and do complex math problems... which is basically what live coding tests are.
Math problems usually have one right/wrong answer. Many interview 'challenges' have multiple ways of doing something correctly. Without necessarily knowing any more about the context of a problem beyond a few sentences, you work with what you've been given. You can deliver a working solution but if it's not the way they were expecting... you're out of the running.
I hate leet code and it's ilk, and I don't want anyone to go through that useless stuff. But I believe a good engineer can suss out another good engineer in a conversation or two. At least that has been my experience with people I have hired and people those people have hired.
When you hire anyone, there is always some bar of "good enough". It is different for different orgs and even people, but it is there. Otherwise you'd end up hiring the first candidate you encounter, no?
I hate leet code gauntlets too but I don't see what it has to do with hiring immigrant workers. No matter your status you are equally vulnerable to failing a code gauntlet test.
>> If I have to cut costs, I will have to cut the team in US and move the jobs to a low cost region regardless of their citizenship status.
Read that sentence again. If you're hiring an American team in the Us, and cutting in the US, it's not regardless of citizenship - unless you're abusing the H-1B program
I wonder what your investors would think if they found out you can't manage and need to 'hope you find suitable talent' and that you are incapable of growing it?
They know how I work, because I'm on the board and constantly update them. I built this company from slides to 5M ARR in 4 years. Granted, I have made hiring mistakes - good engineer, bad attitude that affected the team, good engineer not bought into what we do, one or two mediocre engineers that I couldn't suss out. But I've rectified them and have found good engineers in reasonable time.
Unfortunately you have to take my word for it. Not sure how you assumed I cannot manage with no context.
Every company talks about finding talent. VCs are very familiar with this because many startups don’t have familiarity with this stuff. It’s not surprising to have a VC help hire for roles the startup is unfamiliar with hiring for. An investor is not someone’s boss. Once they’ve handed over the capital, they’re very invested in making sure that there aren’t any blockers to the company’s success.
> I wonder what your investors would think if they found out you can't manage and need to 'hope you find suitable talent' and that you are incapable of growing it?
Not hiring mediocre talent is a key part of management.
That is a sweeping statement. They (or should I say "We") are no worse than anybody else. If your point is that "worse" people should not come in to the country on H1B because H1b is meant for "better" people, I will probably agree.
> That and companies are just hilariously bad at finding workers they want to hire for nebulous reasons. I have no doubt even if my company hired 95% of the workers it had marked down as "no hire" they'd be able to squeeze a salary's of value worth out of each of them (well, if management is competent, which it tends to not be).
Isn't it ironic that a comment making fun of companies for not hiring workers who can barely contribute above their salary's value, in the very same sentence blames management for incompetence. Well, guess what, managers are hired workers too, so if you apply the same principle to them, this is what you get.
What you suggest makes sense from the "homo economicus" point of view, but the result will be a barely functional hellhole riddled with incompetence (at least this is what it will feel like from within.) Can we blame people for being "selfish" and not wanting to work in this kind of environment?
> Well, guess what, managers are hired workers too,
I didn't comment on hiring "managers", did I?
> Can we blame people for being "selfish" and not wanting to work in this kind of environment?
I did cop to this behavior, right? I do agree. It makes my life easier rejecting candidates. I'm just saying this complaining over lack of quality talent seems like the corporate equivalent of feigned helplessness rather than an actual problem.
> If it is taking more than 30-60 days for workers to find a role, there are enough workers domestically.
This makes no sense, even if I agree with your first statement.
Not every company is willing to completely retrain a worker for something outside of their core competency. Lots of candidates simply aren’t competent, or even reliable employees. Lots of companies would rather a position go unfilled than make a bad hire that is very expensive to fix.
I don't mean to point a finger at you, but this term is basically a weasel term at this point... because the "core competency" grows as large as necessary for these companies to complain that they cannot find qualified candidates. In truth, they are not willing to train people missing some skills at the fringe. The original post from someone who works on satellite tech (surely dual-purpose to create killer robots, or whatever) decided to throw into the "core competency" mix that good/solid linear algebra was required. What a farce. I am sure that less than 1% of their work requires it. You can just have one PhD on the wider team that writes all that codes... well, sketches it out, then everyone else integrates it or refines it.
This is not what the data shows [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. Also, the efforts of many US firms recently to grow their India and LATAM presence [6] demonstrates this is for cost reasons, not a lack of qualified workforce. Companies will hire contractors from IT outsourcers and similar to launder the labor cost cramdown operation. IT unemployment is ~6% [7], why are we issuing any H1Bs beyond exceptional, highly compensated talent (~$300k-$500k/year and up)?
I mean, If I have an India or LATAM presence, why would I hire in the US at all, even H1Bs? Unemployment rates mean nothing if its a skills job. Eng #1 is not the same as Eng #2. You can see this plainly in interviews. Our hit rate for engineering is roughly 1 in 20 - purely based on the skill match. So 6-7% unemployment might as well mean they are not good enough?
Even if you have an India/LATAM presence, the higher end of workers from those countries are still mostly migrating to other countries for higher salaries. So you still need H1Bs because you aren’t getting that person in their home country.
Up the skill tree, companies often really get what they pay for, so the saving on offshore work is that they were overpaying for some lower skilled tasks, but not the higher skilled tasks (it’s a world market for top talent).
Indeed, it's why policy will be an important component, just as tariffs can be used to stoke domestic production (to bring outsourcing costs to domestic cost parity). I.R.C. §174 touches on this with an amortization delta between US and non-US based development and R&D cost accounting, for example.
> Beginning in 2022, all costs related to R&D must now be amortized over five years for US-based companies or 15 years for non-US companies.
With regards to "not good enough", maybe expectations (as a hiring manager or org) are unrealistic? Very subjective, so I find this topic to be difficult to argue effectively. I am not unsympathetic to the fact that hiring is hard, but the evidence of bad faith behavior at scale is undeniable and requires accounting for. If we're going to live in a socioeconomic system where people are forced to work to survive and there are little, if any, social safety nets, domestic employment must take priority over potential profits and economic gains of owners and similar controlling interests arbitraging labor cross border (or importing cheap labor) imho. As a founder/business owner, I can appreciate you're optimizing within your local minima.
It is indeed subjective. But since I have hired both good american and non-american engineers consistently over long periods, I tend to think it is not unrealistic.
I completely agree large scale abuse of the program must be stopped. No country can afford to have large influx of new population that hinder their own(however "own" is defined in a country) progress. Borders are a thing (for better or worse) and invoke extreme emotions within society, and that must be accommodated and not ignored. I say this as an H1B employee and I see this play out a lot more radically in my home country
Good news: the USCIS makes this data available! [0]
Google, Microsoft and Meta definitely look for (and hire!) US applicants. One can reasonably have a gripe with the consulting companies on there (Infosys, Tata, Cognizant, etc.) but they don't represent 90-95% of H-1B issued.
One might have more than just a gripe with Infosys given they recently admitted to defrauding the visa system over decades and paid a record $34m fine. How many Americans lost out on jobs as a result? We'll never know.
It’s worth saying though that this fine is for lying and abusing the B-1 visas (to circumvent H-1b limitations). That being said I still believe there are a lot of issues with these companies regarding their H-1bs in the first place.
A non-trivial part of the issue with consulting companies is the long wait for many to turn an H-1B into a green card. If you are going to need many years of continuous employment without ever getting hit by a layoff (which risks a gap in employment), the immigrant might be better of with the consulting company, as they might end up the bench, or just count as employed but not getting any hours.
If the road from H-1B to permanent residency was shorter and more reliable, the advantages of the consulting companies would shrink.
The same as if we didn't end up having to rely on lotteries. Hiring a candidate and hoping for an H-1B is quite annoying if you don't have them on staff in another country, or they are working for you in the US from an F-1. Those consulting companies that have large offices in India can happily submit large amounts of applications of people they already have in India, and be OK with 2/3rds of them not winning said lottery. A smaller company just can't play that numbers' game
If you filter out Information only ( which i am being conservative because this does not include healthcare and other sectors ) that is about 20K high paying IT Jobs. This def smells funny that they cannot find "quality" candidates in US that can build APIs and do FE work. Maybe out of that 20K workers, 500 might be actually be doing something special but rest are doing the work that does not need any specialization.
My point was that those companies are indeed in the top 10, and those companies also look at and hire US applicants. This was in response to the commenter’s point that they’d be surprised if 5-10% of H1Bs listing even considered US applicants.
Not sure if this is only fresh visas or includes visa renewals. Because of the country caps in the naturalization process, you have people from some countries have to renew visas again and again while they wait for naturalization. Given that H1b is only 3 years, for companies like Google and Facebook, you could have a situation where they are just trying to retain employees who have been with the company for a while.
You can only renew an H-1b once (as there is a 6 years limit for H-1b). However, if you have an approved I-140 with a priority date in the future (as is often the case with people from India or China) you can keep on extending your H-1b (which doesn't count against the cap).
H-1B abuse is a real problem but not by Big Tech. The offenders are the bodyshops like Tata and Infosys.
The bodyshops flood USCIS with Indian-born applicants because they don't really care who gets approved and who doesn't. Those that get approved get a US job. The system is designed to stop employers abusing the power this gives them over employees. They fail in a number of ways.
First, part of the process is a Prevailing Wage Determination to make sure the employee isn't underpaid for that job in that geographical area. There is abuse here at the bodyshops where (IIRC) employees are paid less or not at all if they aren't currently farmed out to a third-party. This should be policed but I don't think it is, at least not effectively.
Second, the real abuse comes from the H1B -> Green card pipeline. H1B visas don't have per-country quotas. Green cards do (max 7% per country as determined by the country you were born in, not your actual citizenship). Because so many H1B holders are Indian-born, the backlog for Green cards for Indian-born applicants is decades long.
Now you can stay with an employer beyond your 6 years (the usual limit of 3+3 for H1B visas) if you have a pending PERM application. The employee can't really leave. If they do they have to file their whole PERM case again (but they retain their priority date at least) so this becomes like indentured servitude almost.
Nobody has really addressed this H1B abuse nor dealt with the huge backlog. A few years ago there was a bill that sought to address some of the issues by essentially removing the per-country quota but the net effect would be that for many years, nobody but Indian-born applicants would get green cards (because they have earlier priority dates). And that bill died in Congress.
But back to Big Tech: they abuse this system too but not so egregiously.
If you wander around any Big Tech office you will find likely a cork board in some obscure corner of some floor with little traffic. It will have a bunch of job postings on it. If you look in the physical newspaper for your area, you will also find them.
Why are these here? To "prove" that the employer could not find a US permanent resident or citizen to fill that particular position. You have to advertize that position through a number of channels and those channels are chosen to receive the fewest applicants because who in 2024 applies for a SWE job from a physical newspaper? If you do apply, there is a whole process to exclude you from the position. You'll be too qualified or under-qualified or your salary expectations won't match the advertisement. Or they'll find some other reason to strike you.
All of this theater is so someone else's PERM application with USCIS can go through.
> If you do apply, there is a whole process to exclude you from the position. You'll be too qualified or under-qualified or your salary expectations won't match the advertisement. Or they'll find some other reason to strike you.
Why would companies want to do that? Big tech has wage scales and pretty rigorous processes to ensure even pay at level, so what is the incentive to be biased against US born employees there?
For one, because an H-1B holder is legally bound to the hiring company and can't seek work elsewhere. It is much higher level of employer leverage, particularly in a hot market.
I've managed a team at one of the big tech companies for a bunch of years. I've managed a couple people on h1b, all with graduate degrees from premier US institutions.
Never once have I heard anything even resembling "work your h1bs harder because they won't leave." They all joined on the same pay scale as legal permanent residents and were all evaluated through a process where nobody else in the room knew who was a legal permanent resident or not (I only knew because I needed to sign off on forms describing their job responsibilities to the government).
At most this is some aggregate effect of "people changing employers less is good for employers generally."
This doesn't really vibe as abuse of the program to me. I'd vastly prefer it if the policies gave people on h1bs significantly more confidence in changing roles and more time to find a new job should they lose their job, but is this really a decision of the tech companies rather than an output of the immigration policies?
So for Big Tech it's never as egregious as "work your H1Bs harder" or "pay them less". That just opens you up to a future lawsuit.
In a hot market, your best chance of career progression and maximizing your compensation is to swap jobs every 2 years or so. Visa holders have a much harder time doing this.
Additionally, there are additional burdens on the employer to hire visa holders. For a large company, this process is solved. You have lawyers on retainer. You have a pipeline for the paperwork. It's a non-issue. But an early stage startup? That's a lot less likely. So visa holders are, by definition, more limited in their job opportunities.
Even if you can job hop, if your ultimate goal is to get a green card, you have a problem. Will your new employer sponsor your green card? How long will it take? Or are you better off waiting for your current process to go through? Best case, this whole thing takes just under a year. But it can take years completely randomly and there's nothing you can do about it (eg you get randomly audited).
And if you were born in one of the four high-demand countries (India, China, Mexico, the Phillipines) you have an even longer wait.
Also, after you get to 6 years on your H1B you really can't swap jobs anymore. You just have to wait for your green card at that point.
Now that's not strictly true. There are self-sponsor options for both visas and green cards but the bar for these is much higher and you'll need to hire your own lawyer for this.
So there's no directive on treating visa holders differently but bias creeps into the process. Why push someone for higher bonuses, more RSUs or promotions when they can't leave but another one of your "stars" can leave? This may not be conscious either. And it may happen on a level above you, as a manager, because your director is ultimately responsible for balancing out ratings and promotions across their org.
Only in the context of H1B does anyone conceive of tech workers as having a binary condition called "qualified." In white-collar jobs worth having, impact scales essentially infinitely with skill. You aren't looking for people who are merely capable of some baseline, you are looking for the best. The world is much bigger than America, so even if Americans are very good, many of the best are still foreigners.
I've worked directly with probably 50 or so H1B folks in my career. I can only think of a few I'd call exceptional. Just like Americans, most were a mixed bag from good to terrible.
So the idea and argument of best of the best is sound, but it's definitely not being used solely that way.
Most people are missing the fact that there’s a whole immigration economy on the other end, it’s not a passive storefront (that was banned in the 19th century). People want to immigrate, but the people who are best at immigrating aren’t necessarily best at their job.
I mean, this is basic VC logic: because the returns are power law distributed, and it's very hard to know in advance which ones are going to hit, you should probably invest at least a little bit in anyone who seems basically plausible. Imagine having denied a visa to Sergey Brin!
My understanding is Sergey was just along for the ride and Larry was the one with the unique insights (pagerank) and led Google through the early years as CEO.
Money is measurable, engineer quality is not. Sure with a smaller startup you could average amongst the engineers but it's an imprecise value. The million threads on leetcode and interview are proof positive engineer valuation is hard.
It's all well and good to gamble when someone else, the public, is picking up the tab.
Housing is unaffordable because tech brings high-paying jobs into regions that don't want housing growth. Whether the people coming to fill those jobs and throw those salaries around in the housing market are from India or from Wisconsin hardly matters, except that it's more comfortable for local governments to be overtly hostile to the Wisconsinites.
Accepting that premise for a moment, why would the land around Bay Area offices scale any better for Americans than for H1Bs? If the opportunities simply go to Americans, you have exactly the same geometry problem. If the Americans who refill those roles do so at higher wages, the supply-and-demand imbalance gets even worse.
So then the h1b hires will go to jobs outside the bay area, reducing pressure on housing prices in the bay area.
Tech companies have N openings in the bay area. They will fill these openings. Whether they fill the openings with people moving from India or Mississippi has zero effect on the pressure on the bay area housing market.
How have you only worked with 50 or so H1B in your career? It's either not been long, or you didn't work at any large tech companies (the ones who use this visa the most)
I don't jump much, I've worked for 3 companies in 20 years.
They were smallish companies, 1000ish employees. Only one had H1B, and there were more than 50, but never worked with most enough to pass judgment one way or another.
I think very many people are confusing H1B and straight outsourcing of talent. While there is some overlap, they are not nearly the same.
Ive worked with both, and very few of the H1bs were below average. Otherwise they aren't worth sponsoring.
There was a time in the mid 2000s when the Infosys/TCS/wiPros of the world were gaming the H1B to bring offshore bodies onshore.. but most of that died off as far as I see.
The size of company you work in doesn't matter beyond a certain fairly small size. The only way anybody could work with hundreds of people at all (and have a justified informed opinion about them) is to have a long career in a place or places with very high turnover.
Professors might hit those numbers because having informed opinions about their students is a large part of their job and they see large turnover by definition. Directors could have a chance, but even there I'd say hundreds is actually unusual, unless your standards for quality of opinion are low.
And then that's all people, not just H1-B holders.
I do coding interviews 2-3x/week for a private, but large company.
We do not lack candidates, but we lack qualified candidates. Most people that I interview have no clue how software actually works. Most are leetcode monkeys or just really awful.
We mostly hire seniors because of the industry we're in, but we've started hiring interns and juniors due to the lack of decent candidates.
We'd love to hire US candidates, but there's just a huge lack.
If this true, why doesn't FAANG have the same problems? I noticed that your post did not discuss any of the negatives about your company or its offers. When I have struggled in the past to hire, it is always because my company or its offers were pathetic. Pretty simple. If your company or offers are weak, then your candidate pipeline will (likely) be weak.
> A supposed shortage of qualified US applicants for tech jobs, especially software developers, doesn't jibe with the huge numbers of US developers currently looking for work, including highly experienced older workers suffering from age discrimination.
While I tend to agree, this is a bit of a straw man.
You can have tons of people looking for work who aren't qualified for the job - which is (I think) the FAANG argument.
It's not like FAANG is paying less than what most unemployed techies are looking to make.
FAANG companies have been laying people off at the moment, so it doesn't seem they are exactly suffering from a lack of workers. Until a year or so ago some of these companies were hiring people without any real work for them, just to deprive their competitors of talent.
> FAANG will argue that they are laying off people with skills they don't need, and there's a lack of people with skills they do need.
They are laying off workers (permanent residents and H1Bs alike) mostly to cut costs while all their competitors are doing it, thereby saving face.
Additionally they are signalling to investors that they are focused on cash generation and only investing in areas they think will serve that end in the near term.
Finally, they are preparing for a future where they need fewer workers per unit of revenue and profit growth, but in the short term, that just means a higher workload for those workers that remain.
They are required to by law but I saw something odd once. My company published the job they wanted an immigrant to fill in some weird printed newspaper that I doubt had much readership if any so obviously they got no offers. Then they take that and say they couldn't find a citizen for the role so they had to get an immigrant. I still question if maybe I missed something because if what I saw is true, it really breaks the spirit of the law. Obviously HR and managers handled it all and they don't tell me details like that but I found out about it later when I witnessed a form sent to the Dept. of Labor for someone I knew.
What you are talking about is PERM. That's a requirement that the department of labor has established. When you want to hire an immigrant permanently, DOL requires that you take out an ad in a Sunday newspaper. It benefits the lawyers and the government greatly as this is a good source of revenue for both of them. As far as the actual job goes, that job was never open. The person is already working for the company on a visa. DOL just makes them do this dog and pony show before they can hire them permanently. These regulations are a few decades old and were never updated.
That’s pretty common and not actually limited to H1-Bs
I know universities will do this with certain open positions where they already have a candidate in mind but are required to advertise an opening, can’t remember the specifics why though. Same with RFPs.
My sentiments exactly. The visa is highly exploitative by design, so it selects cheap labor from abroad at the expense of workers at home. Any posturing by employers claiming they can’t find qualified domestic applicants or governments claiming they’re protecting workers is hogwash.
If we really valued this foreign labor, we’d make permanent residency a requirement of the visa rather than block it. Of course, if we offered immigrants permanent residency status then companies would have to pay them substantially more, which is the whole point of the H1B.
Yes. I got my internship in Chicago (J1), later failed the H-1B because of the lottery (twice) so had to leave, spent a year and half in England and managed to get back on a Greencard. Now I have citizenship. I created a startup also.
Now, was I essential to the US? Probably not. They probably could have found someone else.
I'm not sure if that's good enough to say I should not have been accepted here.
As a non-immigrant to the United States, I don't really buy into the idea that companies prefer H1B candidates purely for financial reasons. The H1B process is frankly a rigid, unreliable and time-consuming process.
It's hard for even Canadians and Mexicans to find jobs in the US and we have access to the supposedly easy to obtain TN visa. Australians too with E3.
I'm more inclined to believe that H1B workers have other benefits to employers such as longer tenure due to the restrictions of moving jobs.
Which in itself should be an argument for further liberalization say by giving I140 approved petitioners access to EADs.
> I'm more inclined to believe that H1B workers have other benefits to employers such as longer tenure due to the restrictions of moving jobs.
That is a financial motive. Companies don't want to pay the kind of compensation which would induce employees to be loyal to the company, and so they use H1B quasi-indentured servitude as a cheaper alternative.
I’ve been on an H1B before, a long time back. Most companies do not want to deal with your immigration issues. Bigger enterprises have the resources. But the moment you get smaller, there isn’t a whole lot of patience or energy for that.
As an H1B I May have made marginally less than my peers who were not immigrationally challenged. But as promotions picked up I think that wasn’t an issue anymore.
The one thing I still have though is I’m never the squeaky wheel. Getting laid off on an H1B is brutal. So your tolerance for corporate bs and workplace toxicity is quite high.
I don’t buy this and you should not be selling it :) if H1Bs worked 6/10+ while other employees did 45 all it would take is ONE of H1B’s to reach out to ONE hungry lawyer and the lawsuit will be plastered all over the MSM/Social Media/… the H1B gal/guy would go home to their country with a bag full of money :)
people here on HN (without any merit) make H1B program sound like farming jobs in Texas… too funny
Crazy to think the people who come to US universities to obtain post-bachelor degrees are more qualified than those who didn't...
This is purely anecdotal, but my experience at a top institution is that the majority of CS/ECE of MS and PhD programs are foreign students, and the H1B folks I worked with had these advanced degrees.
> H-1B employees need to have above average compensation or their field.
In the past decade or so, I have personally worked with an H-1B in the SF Bay Area who was working a full-time software position advertised as requiring a Master's degree, but was making something like $120k/year.
"Must be making above the median pay for the position" might be the way it's SUPPOSED to work, but it's clear that it doesn't ALWAYS work that way.
> I think you're assuming that everyone has a price
Nope. They don't need it to work for every worker, they can't get every worker as a H1B either. It working for some workers makes it worth doing for businesses.
Yep. We pay a lot. We are a company you've heard of and we're doing well. For our systems engineering roles, we've had a hell of a time finding good people. Plenty of interviews with folks who turn out not to know basic C programming or systems level algorithms.
It seems like systems level programmers are either firmly employed somewhere else or have switch roles to an easier domain. I know I've considered going back to Python programming where I can make the same money with a lot less work.
Where "turn out not to know basic C programming or systems level algorithms" is failing some leetcode puzzle they have not touched in the last 20 years while they have been full time writing C and C++? So hell of a time not finding your definition of 'good people' would be kinda expected.
Not snarking, but you either have a needlessly arbitrary bar, or you've left the applicant pool up to people unqualified to gather applicants (non technical young HR, etc)
It’s LinkedIn jobs board + HN who is hiring. Everyone who applies tends to have some development experience. We interviewed maybe 30 best resumes out of the 3k applicants. Lots of people fail relatively basic python or typescript coding challenge, a few fail basic “designs an api” round. We did filter a few people in culture match but thats rare, most fail the technical rounds.
During the actual job I've never once had issues of any kind, but my brain just shuts down in interview environments. I'll forget the simplest of things that I do literally daily, and it all just ends up spiraling out of control from there. It's like there's 2 people in my brain, the regular, competent me, and then interview me who's a bumbling buffoon that I myself wouldn't hire. It's not even a pressure thing, I do fine in high stress environments, it's just specifically during interviews where things go wrong.
Sorry, on what planet are we onshoring H-1B work? What company can manage the H-1B process but can’t remote to Ukraine or Colombia? Or capitalise their dev expense, inefficiently, granted, with AI?
In a post-remote world these jobs aren’t competing with on-shore labor. This is a populist pitch in the mould of iron work to Pennsylvania.
> What company can manage the H-1B process but can’t remote to Ukraine or Colombia? Or capitalise their dev expense, inefficiently, granted, with AI?
All of those are also happening, plus H1-B competition. Offshoring to low-cost countries is more common for maintenance work, or work that is not core to the business or its product innovation.
H1-B workers are often very good at what they do, every bit as good as permanent resident workers, which is precisely why they are competition for permanent resident workers, whether in office or remote.
there is limited number of H1B visas that are issued each year (as if I have to even say this)... so they won't make a dent if you are correct with "the huge numbers of US developers currently looking for work."
we abolish the program and boom, 65k people out of this apparently HUGE number of US developers looking for work won't make a dent... so this argument holds absolutely no water ...
Well, if there aren't such programs people like Elon or Satya and Pichai might have never started out. You look at them as being successful and exceptional today (regardless of some of the more questionable antics and decisions), when they just started, it's hard to argue that you can't find similar, exceptional talent in the US.
But if you shut off that valve, they would not be here 25 years later.
Developers aren’t fungible, and are hard to hire. Try getting a bunch of people to sling some boring Java or mainframe code. They don’t exist.
The trap with the older worker is a guy wants $250k, but will perform at the level of a $75/hr body shop guy. Skills don’t align - that’s always the risk of engineering.
It's not a matter of age itself, but variance and experience. You can find the issue already at 5 years: Some people have grown and have used those years wisely, while others still are going to get experience raises, while they don't bring the improved performance.
Haha, you're so wrong, Spooky23. Older workers love doing "boring" work that younger workers do not enjoy. What's more, a 1337 definition of "senior level" that I used back in the day was the ability to walk into a project and not have the urge to begin rewriting everything, something virtually every non-senior level worker (and many senior idiots) may have the urge to do. Here in the (dystopian) future (from my perspective), you can go on YouTube to watch a video about "How to write the clean code, by Uncle Bob" (cringe) and "My life as a Senior level Dev" (uber cringe). Please make a note of it.
While here, adding that we need Executive action to ban H1B workers and tariff BPOs at 250% from countries that have not ratified the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. I speculate that even Elon Musk Actual will approve of this restriction.
Lastly, to avoid posting a response to another comment, going to mention that there is nothing quite like having a head-hunter with an accent that sounds roughly like he is talking with a rotary egg-beater jammed into his mouth call you up and ask you a series of disqualification questions for a position that he already has sourced from offshores labor pool (so as to check the box that he personally certifies there are no American workers qualified for the work). Their customer doesn't want to know how the sausage is made, they just want cheap bodies for unimportant low-level work and this is what it takes under the current Law. I actually have a friend who was paid very well to let an H1B follow him around for several months learning his job before he was let go and lost his home, wife and wound up moving in with his parents. He went to the US Government to complain and ended up at Google for a while before moving on to a Unicorn.
If the H1B have side-hustles like starting Zoom, doing what Satya did, or their spouses create incredible non-tech businesses, that's really great..but what about all the American peeps (AND THEIR KIDS) that were jipped out of that opportunity by lax enforcement of America's laws, only to ultimately hear "See, we need to keep letting so many H1B people and their criminal recruiters warehouse them in apartments and work for dog food because so many of them have gone on to create such tremendous economic activity for America" (ie, a self-fulfilling prophecy).
> Finally, the rule strengthens program integrity by codifying USCIS’ authority to conduct inspections and impose penalties for failure to comply; requiring that the employer must establish that it has a bona fide position in a specialty occupation available for the worker as of the requested start date; clarifies that the Labor Condition Application must support and properly correspond with the H-1B petition; and requires that the petitioner have a legal presence and be subject to legal processes in court in the United States.
There are plenty of software engineers but many of them may not be qualified for the currently open jobs. So, yes, there are open jobs and there are unhired americans but programs like H1-b make even more highly talented pool of people available which in turn increases innovation and productivity in economy.
So, it's not just a plain numbers game, it's more about innovation, productivity, talent pools and of course, capitalism.
Yes, I don’t understand this either. Nowadays you have to be a senior just to get an entry level position in the USA. There are plenty of mid level developers that are struggling to find a job.
I guess it will be interesting times ahead. I recommend everyone to keep their skills sharp!
I used to work for the U.S. Naval Undersea Warfare Centers, and it was a pretty good experience.
U.S. citizens (and perhaps some dual-citizens) might want to look into such places (Navy warfare centers, NRL, ARL, etc.)
TL;DR:
The top starting pay is about $150k IIRC, which I'm told is somewhat below what a well-funded defense contractor will pay for really good people.
But I worked with some great people, the work was interesting, and it was located in a medium-cost-of-living area.
I left because of the siren call of the startup scene, and frustration with some bureaucratic stuff. But in retrospect I actually liked working there the best.
Friend of mine worked for a Fortune 500 company that was playing an interesting game: They would open a job req with a narrow set of qualifications. If a US citizen showed up and matched the qualifications, they would hire them, then eliminate their position 6 months later. But then they'd slightly change the job qualifications to exclude that person, and try again. (It seemed like it was part of some lobbying effort to say "Look how many job openings we can't fill!")
I feel like this whole issue could be solved short order if we agreed that not being able to find qualified applicants at a given fixed price does not a shortage make.
It's the same with the "fast food shortage," I bet the shortage would dry up real fast
at $50/hr so all we're really doing is haggling over price. If in order to hire a H1-B at a salary of x you had to offer US workers 2x with say a $100k floor on x then I bet Americans would show up.
So then call the H1-B program what it is - a way for US tech companies to depress wages to the point that you can't afford to live the US, unless it's a bunch of H-1B holders living together in a house share.
The same goes for offshoring for jobs. Lovely for shareholders and the CEO's bonus, but not so great for US residents having to compete with them who are paying US cost of living, not Indian/etc overseas cost of living.
It'd be nice if the US government would pass laws benefiting its own citizens/residents rather than corporations.
House sharing is a problem with the numbers of people that FAANG wants to employ in West Coast communities that aren't having it, not with their identities. When people making $300-500k can't have their own houses, the problem is not money.
If the H1B is paid $400k, is it really depressing salaries? It's more about having employees that are 10-15% better than the competition if you can, which makes you much more likely to beat them.
Yes, even at 400k it's still salary depression. The whole thing is, essentially, regulatory capture that is being used to do a sort of "arbitrage" over people.
Big corporations in the West are cannibalizing society because governments are failing at defending the interests of the majority due to the lobbying power of a minority.
Mind you I am not talking about an uprising or some bullshit like that, but, for example, the situation around medical service/insurance in the US is appalling.
Governments exist to take care of their own citizens—that’s their main job. Citizens pay taxes, follow the laws, and contribute to the country, so it makes sense for a government to prioritize their needs. That’s not racist; it’s just how countries work.
If a government tried to treat everyone in the world the same, it wouldn’t be able to meet the needs of its own people. Things like healthcare, schools, and public services are paid for by citizens, so they have to come first.
Also, preferring citizens isn’t about race. Citizenship is something anyone can earn, no matter where they’re from. Calling it racist mixes up two very different things.
It's hard not to break the rules in replying to something like this.
> Governments exist to take care of their own citizens—that’s their main job. Citizens pay taxes, follow the laws, and contribute to the country, so it makes sense for a government to prioritize their needs. That’s not racist; it’s just how countries work.
Are you trying to tell us immigrants to the US do not pay taxes? They don't follow laws? And they don't contribute to the country?
Obviously, given the context, I am not trying to say immigrants don't pay taxes or follow the law. I am saying the the job of a government is to look after its own. If you have some better term for "its own people" go for it.
I'd also say, immigrants are only temporary non-citizens. If they are immigrating to stay, then it's the government's job to take care of them. Countries like the US and Australia were founded on immigrants.
If their loyalty is not to the country they are immigrating to, and is to their previous country's government, I am not sure why it would be a priority to support them.
I'm not being sarcastic this time. You seem to have missed the zeitgeist, especially among younger generations. For them, it's very much true that the government shouldn't look out for the interests of its citizens over the interests of people in general, and they do think it's racist if the government does this. It's impossible to explain to them the very simple game theory implications of such policy, and it's difficult to argue that the government isn't already doing it (in the United States, in other countries it's impossible to argue that).
>If their loyalty is not to the country they are immigrating to
This goes against human nature. Loyalty would come later, not before or even immediately.
not sure if your comment was an attempt at sarcasm and I just missed it. In case it wasn't - it's not racist for country to look after its own economic interest or the interest of its own citizens.
Huh? There are US citizens of all sorts of ethnic/racial backgrounds.
Preferring US citizens over outsourcing is patriotic, not racist. It's also being a good corporate citizen - supporting the country/people you are gaining your profits from.
On a market with free pricing there are, pretty much by definition, no shortages or surpluses.
Instead prices go up or down until supply and demand meet.
So talking about "shortages" in this context doesn't really make sense to me. Yet that's the terminology in this field, and the resulting confusion is unavoidable.
> On a market with free pricing there are, pretty much by definition, no shortages or surpluses.
Remember the "chip shortage" all throughout the pandemic? It's not like the whole world switched to a Soviet style command economy between 2020 and 2022 yet we still had it.
ChatGPT mentions some factors for why suppliers didn't just raise prices until the demand met the supply:
1. The industry often has long term contracts that fixes prices months or years in advance.
2. Even without such contracts, the value of stable, long-term relationships with major customers made suppliers keep prices stable.
3. Governments intervened to prevent "price gouging" for favored industries, and even without such intervention, perceived price gouging can be more damaging long term than is made up for by near term profits.
So you're right that there was a real shortage for a time.
But note my original caveat: "On a market with free pricing". Unfree pricing (contracts/regulation) was one factor.
But PR considerations, which I admit I didn't think of, was also a factor. So I learned something here!
A shortage is a situation, where the market cannot bring high prices down by increasing the supply. For example, if software engineers earn more than equally demanding roles in other engineering fields and the situation persists long enough, there is a shortage of software engineers.
Who decides if the price is high or low? That should be the market. High salaries -> more people decide to pursue it as a career -> more competition -> lower salaries. They are trying to force salaries down quicker
> I feel like this whole issue could be solved short order if we agreed that not being able to find qualified applicants at a given fixed price does not a shortage make.
It could be solved by realising that letting immigrants in, especially highly skilled ones, is good for the country (and for the immigrants!), independent of anything like a 'skills shortage'.
No, what needs to happen is to give workers mobility. H1B workers are preferentially hired at some firms because of their lack of mobility — they're easier to abuse than other workers. Addressing that would let everyone be on an equal footing and share the benefits of agglomeration (immigration increases supply and demand!) It would also be far more just and equitable.
Well, what is a company supposed to do if local candidates do not want RTO? It seems logical to hire workers who are OK with RTO, especially if they are outside of the country and clearly willing to relocate for RTO.
Perhaps while also noticing both the record profits made over the past four years, as well as the fact that many of those working from their home office have had nothing but glowing performance reviews over those past four years...
It just takes the negotiation power from the employees though. The question is, whether it’s more important to make the employees happy or the businesses. Both have valid cases.
> I'd be surprised if more than 5-10% of H-1B positions are ones where the hiring company has even looked for US applicants.
But H1B employers are required to certify that they took good faith steps to recruit U.S. workers for these positions and were unable to find qualified candidates to hire.
You really think a business would do that? Just go to the government and tell lies?
"Good faith" by the letter of the law is often established by chichanery like posting job ads with nebulous requirements in print newspapers, requiring mail in resumes, and slowrolling a process.
Filtering out real information from data and anecdata is a challenge at the best of times, but I am ill convinced of the honesty of most of the recruitment market.
Yes - it seems this is routinely done for H-1B positions. You meet the requirement for having advertised the job by running an ad for 1 day in the back of the fisherman's chronicle. You tailor the job description so closely to the H-1B candidate you've already decided to hire, that it'd be easy to defend why you rejected other candidates (should they inconvenience you by seeing the ad and applying).
The number of people in the labour force has change quite a lot over the centuries, and the number of people gainfully employed has tracked that quite closely. Ie unemployment has been relatively low and stable. (Despite eg women joining the labour force en mass over the course of the 20th century, or all the baby boomers, etc.)
That suggest the null hypothesis that to a first approximation the number of jobs is determined by the number of workers available. More workers seem to somehow lead to more jobs. (Immigration changes the number of workers, yes. But that's about it.)
What kinds of jobs are growing? Are any groups underemployed?
Are standards of living increasing? For who?
> More workers seem to somehow lead to more jobs.
Imagine the US merged with Canada and Mexico. The number of jobs would probably go up until we reached a similar level of unemployment. Would everyone be better off? Is that what economic growth looks like?
There may be many Indians, but when I was on h1b me and my colleagues were from Germany, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, Brazil, India. All of those moved on to other companies, even multiple times and/or went through the green card process.
The salary I got was ok for bay area standards, certainly not rockstar level but would make jaws drop in Germany. For me it was an amazing opportunity and I would recommend it to anyone to do for a while.
I’m just an outside observer but I would say it’s probably not all a scam. Most of it absolutely is though.
Generally I just see a lot of unfocused writing in this thread. Even the reply to your post is an attempt to muddy the waters with some ambiguous statement. I guess this is a community of developers and we tend to have difficulty with politics and the real world :-)
Here's a reform I'd like to see: if you've had layoffs in the last 24 months, you as an employer are ineligible to apply for or sponsor or hire an H-1B visa holder for any similar position and "similar" here is broad.
Big Tech, for example, treats SWEs as largely interchangeable. Make a SWE redundant and you can't hire another SWE--anywhere in the country--who is a visa holder for 24 months.
You can buy your way out of this by paying any redundant SWE 3 years of salary and benefits.
This sounds good in theory, but I suspect it would cause companies to mostly switch from layoffs to aggressive performance management (i.e. firing for “poor performance”, stack ranking, etc.)
It's definitely more than 5-10% if you just include FAANG who pay far higher than most average US citizen devs make in salary to both H1Bs and citizen devs.
It’s really simple test. Dig into unemployment numbers for skill shortages. If your industry only has an acceptable level of unemployment filings, then it qualifies as an industry eligible for H1B. Within the industry, each company would interview you on SV style data structures and algorithms. If you don’t make the interview, you are not qualified. The foreigner who could pass such a qualifying test would then get the job and visa is an accessory here.
Ah, classic regulatory theater. The administration, after 4 years of not introducing these changes, is now suddenly scrambling to roll them out. They’re dropping them right before a major transition, with an implementation timeline conveniently set for after the transition.
It’s a clever little maneuver. When the inevitable reversal happens, they can show up at fundraising galas telling donors, “We tried! We were so close! It’s just those baddies who always come along and pull the rug.”
We all know how a distant deadline can make us slack off. Then suddenly the deadline is in three months instead of four years, you’ll discover a bunch of things you could do faster.
That’s not to excuse the slowness, but I imagine this stuff was in process for a while.
> The administration, after 4 years of not introducing these changes
They might have spent the last four years negotiating what exactly the changes would ideally be. Government doesn’t work well with the “let’s see what sticks approach”.
This is an executive power. USCIS - the President can modify regulations, such as how H-1B applications are processed or the criteria used in selection lotteries.
There is rulemaking process that takes time. It has to go through notice and comment period, withstand lawsuits, etc. I agree with your overall point though, that this admin was utterly spineless and useless.
those were then times, now billionaires shelled out a whole lot of money to put him in power and payback time is coming. h1b may double/triple/… in the coming years. policy will be to keep “bad people out” (southern border) while taking in a bunch of “smart people, best people” from other countries
The USG has to go through a very length period of coming up with a proposed rule. Allowing comments to be made about it, adjusting (or not) the rule based on those comments, and then finally submitting the final rule.
Nobody at USCIS wrote this document yesterday and published this today. This is the result of years of work. Do you seriously expect the USG to shut down anything they don't think they can finish under the current administration?
Doesn't the bottom of this announcement describe a previous rule that was announced in January 2024 and then implemented in March 2024? Interesting that rules process was far more rapid than this one.
So a different related rule started its process awhile back and a second rule was in the works concurrently. Is the USG only allowed to do one thing at a time?
The comment period for this rule ended last year to give you an idea of how long this has at least been in the works. All of this information is rapidly found via the submitted url at the top of the page.
It's the same question. What decides when a long process and comment period is required and when it isn't? Why does this agency have such variable performance when it comes to similar rulings?
Maybe it's a total coincidence that this final rule takes effect the Friday, January 17 and Trump's inauguration is Monday, January 20th. But I sort of wonder.
No, the classic people not understanding how the government works.
These are changes that were done through the rule-making process, not legislation. The rule-making process is (by design!) VERY SLOW to give the stakeholders a chance to voice their opinion.
Typical rules take about 2 years to be implemented. And I guess Biden hoped to get a real immigration reform that would have made these changes unnecessary.
Seem like sensible changes, though more is still needed. Requiring H1B holders to leave the country to renew paperwork is an insane anachronism. The per-country caps also seem like a throwback to the early 1900's era immigration exclusion policies.
Re: the concerns over "immigrants taking our jobs!". As a native-born American working in a large tech company today - the threat is very clearly not from H1B's and other visas. The threat to American tech jobs is when US tech companies choose to build out offices in lower cost of living countries (and I'm very much including Europe in that, I think that's even a bigger problem).
It's much much better for America if tech companies hire workers in the US, regardless of whether they are citizens. Americans are eligible for those jobs, and that money stays within our economy. Versus employing workers elsewhere, where American's can't easily be hired, and those resources leave the US.
If we want to keep opportunities here - that's the issue we should be focus on fixing. What regulatory steps could we advocate for that would address this risk? Immigration is the wrong problem, and the focus on that in certain populist circles really demonstrates they are rather out of touch from what's actually happening in the industries that are driving the US economy today.
>It's much much better for America if tech companies hire workers in the US, regardless of whether they are citizens. Americans are eligible for those jobs, and that money stays within our economy. Versus employing workers elsewhere, where American's can't easily be hired, and those resources leave the US.
I want to pick on this point, because it's the general refrain about this topic. If there is some thing that American workers can't do in an in-demand field, and the government sets up a system to allow non-citizens to do those jobs, most people will say that this "helps" America. But does it? If the education pipeline is inadequately preparing Americans for being competitive in this in-demand field then perhaps that is the problem that should be addressed. Right now it feels like we have a (highly suspect) "labor shortage" that is addressed via immigration, which doesn't send a signal back to the educational/training infrastructure that they're doing something wrong.
The US is only 4% of the world's population, so there's an enormous number of extremely smart people who live outside its present borders. I don't think anyone believes that even the world's greatest educational system can bring all of its students up to an extremely high level of general intelligence. We should be letting very smart people born outside the US emigrate here, which is a win-win for everyone involved
Sure. But the government of the United States is, allegedly, there for the benefit of its citizens. I'm not really following where this "should" comes from. "Should" in what volume? "Should" over what time frame?
If you don't think that having Linus Torvalds as a US citizen tremendously benefits the US public as a whole, enough to offset any imagined downsides of a great many merely average immigrating tech workers, there's nothing more to be said. And that's just him alone but he is merely one example of many other famous examples.
The benefit to the US if he is a citizen is that then his taxes flow to the US and if he's resident his local spending flows to the US economy and that of any geo immediate coworkers there for the face time.
Letting in a lot of smart people benefits the citizens of the United States, that's why I said it's a win-win. Do you think we'd be better off if we excluded Musk to hire a native-born American instead in our aerospace industry?
Just going back in time, do you think the US would be better off if we'd excluded Irish immigrants? Italians? Germans? If blocking immigration somehow benefits native-born citizens, you'd logically have to think our population should have stayed the same as it was when we broke away from Britain. We'd be about the size of say Colombia, maybe with a bit higher GPD
The current immigration regime is still relatively new, it is not as if it has existed for the entirety of the existence of the United States. It's an artifact of the late 20th century, and only just now accelerated in the early 21st. That's barely a single generation. So, no, I don't take it as a given that essentially limitless immigration - even if loosely constrained on "high skill" - is somehow axiomatically good for the United States.
I'm a little confused. It's possible to be very pedantic and say that the current immigration law only dates back to the 60s, but the population of the United States is 97.9% not from this continent. There was a wave of British, Spanish, and French immigration in the 17th & 18th centuries, followed by Germans, Italians, and Irish in the 19th & 20th. In the 19th century the legal regime about immigration was literally 'open borders', there were hardly any legal controls at all. The vast vast majority of us are the descendants of immigrants (my apologies if you personally are 100% Native American, didn't mean to lump you in)
I think you're the one being overly pedantic if you only qualify 100% Native American as "American". This country isn't just some economic zone that people come to and from for the purposes of commercial or business activity. If that's all it was, then a much more lax or liberal immigration regime would make perfect sense.
>but the population of the United States is 97.9% not from this continent.
This would be a surprise to the 85% of us who were actually born here. In its most simplified form, what those of us who are skeptical of the current immigration regime are wondering out loud is if these processes do actually make "people born in America" better off. "Immigration is always good" has been the mantra since, as you speculate, the 1960s. Probably worth evaluating that idea from first principles from time to time.
But we're all descended from immigrants. Do you think it was wrong when the British & Italian & Irish & German all moved here en masse? Assuming no, what would be different about the latest wave of immigrants?
I honestly view this point - that there were prior waves of immigration from various European nations, and before that concurrent waves of forced migration from Africa and elsewhere (though this is left unsaid) - as a bit of a non-sequitur, bordering on bait, largely because it happened over a very long timescale into an essentially empty nation. Suppose I answered in the negative (that I don't think there was anything wrong with it). That wouldn't change anything at all about the current debate. It isn't some kind of gotcha, that if I don't have a problem with British/Italian/Irish/German/French/whoever coming during various migration waves it somehow neuters any particular point about how any immigration regime should, in my view, be structured such that there are clear and defined benefits to the people already living in the country. Enumerated elsewhere in the thread, but the H-1B system in particular is for the benefit of industry (POSIWID etc etc). Not people already here.
It is worth noting, though, that after the peak of immigration in the late 19th century and ending in the 1910s, the United States very intentionally shut off immigration to allow time for assimilation to do its work.
I think the main point that I want to make is that attracting all of the world's smartest people to our country, and staying the world's superpower in technology & science, does have extremely 'clear and defined benefits to the people already living in the country'
> Do you think we'd be better off if we excluded Musk to hire a native-born American instead in our aerospace industry?
Given where he ended up, probably.
Cheap rockets are nice, but speed-running a complete destruction of public trust, culture, and of any illusion that the country is one with rule of law for the benefit of a few insecure billionaire narcissists is a juice that wasn't worth the squeeze.
Telling me that Musk is incredibly popular in Texas or Alabama is like me telling you that Putin is incredibly popular in Moscow. 'Strongmen' authoritarians peddling revanchist fantasies that'll make their country great again are often popular.
Just because something is popular doesn't mean it's a net good.
The man himself is an insecure narcissist who can't let any slight, real or imagined go unanswered. It would be sad and funny if he didn't own a speech platform, or hitch himself to an absolutely insane political movement.
Allegedly...by and large the US Government operates, however, for the benefit of corporations and rich folk (with some exceptions). If they want to hire foreign labor, the US Government is going to make it happen.
I mean the US thinks of its place in the world as much more than the domestic insular affairs of its citizens. If you look at it from that angle it’s obvious that vacuuming up smart people and becoming “more powerful” intellectually is what the US clearly wants.
The median American is not smart enough to do complex software engineering, just like they're not smart enough to be a doctor or college professor. All cognitively demanding jobs compete for the same (probably single-digit) percent of the workforce. Better education could certainly prepare more people to do these jobs, but it's not a given that there are enough smart people in the domestic workforce to do all the cognitively-demanding jobs.
If thousands of the smartest people from the rest of the world want to move to the US and fill these gaps, doesn't that make America better off overall?
This is just brain-draining the rest of the world for the short-term boosting of some myopic statistics. This isn't going to improve the employability of median-intelligence people, and in the long run, it's going to exacerbate the same problem, but now globally.
>The median American is not smart enough to do complex software engineering,
This point, assuming for a moment that it's actually true, would matter if "complex software engineering" was all that this was being used for. Complex for whom?
I think a lot of these comments don’t properly capture the benefit. The more skilled workers, the more startups/companies, not to mention smarter people.
But the effect is bigger than that, by allowing skilled immigration, it makes US universities and tech companies the best in the world, at the very least seen as such, which has tremendous larger effects.
It’s not a coincidence that we have the largest tech industry, and it’s not because we magically have smarter people.
I don't have statistics, but given the student visa -> H-1B pipeline changes, it would seem there are a number of H-1B holders who are educated in US colleges (either at the undergrad or graduate level). This indicates that the problem is not entirely a training gap.
Honestly, the US needs to (and used to) do both. We should have a world-class public education system, and we should aggressively get the best and the brightest people to move here.
It seems unlikely we’ll do either of those things moving forward. At least China’s investing in green tech, I guess.
How would have the same policy had any effect in Canada? Country caps in the US don't change anything about who can enter the country, they only affect who gets permanent residency.
Is this bad due to the hypothetical loss of diversity? ie, it'd be better if there were a mix of Indian, Chinese, Brazilian, Mexican, etc immigrants, vs only immigrants from a single state in India?
What happens in a lot of cases like this is nepotism and lack of need, or even desire, to assimilate to the host country. Things like this are always dismissed the first 20 years, but it always leads to racial and ethnic tensions as time passes. Saying "ummm, like, don't be racist" has never worked.
But when immigrants all come from one small region, they tend to only hire people they know or are vetted by someone they know, they only rent properties to people they know or are vetted by people they know, they start to see the locals of the country they're living in as below them, and it just keeps spiraling out of control.
And notice that I specified no race. I specified no country. I specified no religion or ethnic background. It's simply a universal thing that happens in every country. It always leads to far right swings when not quickly addressed. If what I've said in any way comes across as "racist", that's due to the reader inserting their own racial biases and thus their own racism into this statement, because I'm not in any way implying this is confined to one group. It's something that's been a problem for millennia and governments keep making the same mistakes.
> But when immigrants all come from one small region, they tend to only hire people they know or are vetted by someone they know, they only rent properties to people they know or are vetted by people they know, they start to see the locals of the country they're living in as below them, and it just keeps spiraling out of control.
This happens with some races more than others. When you import Indians you are importing caste thinking.
It’d be interesting to understand why immigrants to Canada are disproportionately coming from a small number of locations. Unless there’s a good reason behind it I think it’s reasonable to find a better balance.
The reason why there's so many Indians is because THERE'S SO MANY INDIANS! You don't need to be a rocket surgeon to figure that one out =)
The "problem" with having that many Indians isn't that they're not adapting to Canadian culture it's that they're bringing along some of the bad things from India like the caste system. It's not as bad as many other cultural problems because it's strictly Indians causing problems for other Indians but it's still a problem.
There is a good reason behind it, although that's not what you are asking. You have framed this under the garb of curiosity and civility, whereas what you are really asking is no different from, "Why are Jews running the banks/Hollywood ?" The real reason, if you really want to know, is that there are strong markets, incentives, pipelines, and networks for certain trades that develop over time. Every trade or craft has these. In case of Canada (and the US to an extent), the international students are the ones subsidizing the universities by paying the sticker price. The universities get the money, and the students get an opportunity to study and work. The students will be mainly from India and China. Those are two large countries with rapid economic growth, ambition, and the ability to pay the price. And language works in favour of Indians. So that's how you get Silicon Valley and perhaps a lot of what you see in Canada too.
Literally can’t think of a single conspiracy theory about why Canada specifically brought people from that region. Seriously unhinged to bring up anti-semitism.
Brampton is a suburb of Toronto with a large Indian immigrant population. This is leading to tensions within Brampton as different Indian political factions attempt to influence Indian politics from Canada[1][2][3].
> Re: the concerns over "immigrants taking our jobs!". As a native-born American working in a large tech company today - the threat is very clearly not from H1B's and other visas. The threat to American tech jobs is when US tech companies choose to build out offices in lower cost of living countries (and I'm very much including Europe in that, I think that's even a bigger problem).
> It's much much better for America if tech companies hire workers in the US, regardless of whether they are citizens. Americans are eligible for those jobs, and that money stays within our economy. Versus employing workers elsewhere, where American's can't easily be hired, and those resources leave the US.
Makes me wonder how many people gladly support this while at the same time clamoring against the EU's DMA and other regulations and fines it imposes on SV companies.
What you're saying is of course absolutely true! I like how plainly you've stated it, because the directness makes clear to people just how awful of a deal it is for the EU and other countries where US tech companies make enormous profits without hiring any significant number of locals.
I've lived in both the EU which suffers from the above, as well as a place where protectionism and barriers helped strongly restrain US tech and "artificially" give opportunity to local players. The latter has worked out so much better for every party involved except US tech.
> It's much much better for America if tech companies hire workers in the US
I used the same argument in Brazil to support a strong free software preference in all government functions. Support from voters in Redmond wouldn’t get anyone re-elected in Brazil.
They had a huge office in São Paulo back then. For all I know, it's bigger now. A good friend of mine spent so much time in airplanes between São Paulo and Brasilia that his skin was dry as a turtle's.
If you hire US-based engineers working on R&D (most software engineers) then you amortize their pay over 5 years. Foreign-based engineers working on R&D get amortized over 15 years.
You get to expense 3x as much for domestic engineers compared to foreign engineers. This means you need to pay more taxes upfront for having a foreign R&D team, which is bad for cashflow. Your company could be losing money (unprofitable) but still owe corp income taxes because of Section 174.
If the gov charged "tariffs" on foreign labor or services provided, especially for certain countries that labor is typically outsourced to, or certain types of labor/services (e.g. support, engineering, etc), that'd probably be an effective way to discourage offshoring.
It's a visa. The whole point is that it's not permanent and you are ultimately expected to return home permanently. You may also be asked to leave at any time. It's reasonable for the host nation to want to ensure that outcome is still available and that someone hasn't actually fully emigrated here with no options for return.
Ultimately it's known to anyone who applies for a visa that this will be the requirement, and so, if they don't want the economic opportunity of working in the US, they're free to avoid the stress and just stay in their home nation.
> It's a visa. The whole point is that it's not permanent and you are ultimately expected to return home permanently
probably do not have to tell you this but not all visas are created equal... this one is particular is a dual-intent visa so what you are saying applies to SOME visas, just not this one :)
No, this was post 9/11. It has nothing to do with immigration policy. The collective jerking after 9/11 led to many bad policies, including this one. Biden half assedly tried to go back to the pre 9/11 state of "stateside renewal" but it went nowhere.
It's a policy based on unsound reasoning. Why is India treated as a monolith when it is more diverse than the EU in terms of linguistic and cultural diversity? If tomorrow India magically broke off into 30 separate states, all the same people who have been waiting for decades would be immediately eligible for green cards. How does it make any sense?
Per-country caps remains an absolutely good idea. The goal of immigrants should be to integrate into the society they are joining. Without per country caps you can start creating strange enclaves and you get some of the issues Canada is having.
Having people who have been living in the country for decades, but have the threat of leaving anytime they get fired from job or due to visa issues doesn't encourage them to "integrate into the society they are joining".
If anything, the way the country caps work in the US right now make integration harder, because no matter how much they try to integrate and be part of the local community, they could be kicked out at any time. That just encourages people to have one foot out the door at all times.
You don't have to leave the country to renew your H-1B status. As long as you stay in the US and have a legitimate reason, you can keep renewing the status. Some have done that for 20+ years while waiting for their green card priority date.
But if you leave the country for any reason and your entry visa has expired, you have to apply for a new visa to be allowed to return. And you often have to return to your home country to do that. Which can be inconvenient, as it can turn a short vacation or conference trip to a month-long stay in another country. And for citizens of some countries, there is a high risk of denial. Visiting your family can then leave you stranded in a country that's no longer your home, while being locked out of your actual home and life in the US.
This is a peculiar feature of the US system. In most countries, when you renew your temporary work permit (whatever it's called), you also renew you entry permit.
Another complication - H1Bs are valid for 6 years. However, the physical paper stamp given on passports is only valid for 3 years at a time. So if I chose to stay in the US (and not travel internationally) I'd be fine to continue working without renewing my physical visa paper stamp. But to get a new physical stamp, I have to re-enter the country every 3 years. How does that make sense?
> But to get a new physical stamp, I have to re-enter the country every 3 years. How does that make sense?
Why do you need a new physical stamp at all if you are not re-entering? I think your argument is backwards here. What I think you’re asking is “why can I stay in the country without taking this step, but I have to take this step to re-enter.”
Well, because when you leave the country you are subject to certain laws. Even a permanent resident cannot just leave and expect to come back whenever without consequence. Even a person eligible to apply for citizenship must meet a minimum threshold of presence.
Now, your question becomes “why are the laws the way they are” and/or “why doesn’t the law make sense”. I conjecture that these situations are particularly fringe for our legislators so they don’t get a ton of attention, and they make just enough sense to remain as is.
Visa is valid for 6y, entry visa for 3. You decide to visit Europe in year 4, you have to travel to southeast Asia or South America to renew your entry visa before you can get back to work? Sounds stupid.
Another incredibly stupid thing of the American system is the fact that your spouse cannot work while you're subject to it.
When I was in the US with visas for my four-person family, we FedExed our passports to Finland where my parents put them in a different envelope and mailed them to the US embassy. Ten days later the embassy mailed back the passports with the new visas attached, and my parents FedExed them back to us in New York.
Yeah, seems like this re-approval concept makes a ton of sense. FedEx at least got some business.
This doesn’t sound remotely legal, but I’m not a lawyer. How were you expecting to comply with reasonable requests for your family’s passports and visas by the US while they were in transit? What if they were lost in transit or stolen? If your intent was to circumvent the process, that could constitute mail fraud and other violations that could result in loss of residency or in extreme cases loss of citizenship. Why would you or anyone ever do this?
What reasonable requests? There isn’t (yet) a task force that goes door to door in Manhattan knocking on doors and checking immigrants’ papers.
We are Finnish citizens and if the passports really had been lost, we could always get new ones at the Finnish consulate in New York to return home.
I’ve held several types of visas, L-1 and O-1, and I also applied for a PERM whatever that I eventually abandoned because I didn’t want to stay in the country and with that employer. The American immigration system is incredibly poorly designed and frustrating for all parties. It drives honest legal immigrants like us to an “I don’t give a shit” mindset where we just did the minimum to get the paperwork while waiting to leave the country.
Now I still get paid by an American company at the same rates as before, but I pay taxes to Finland instead. The immigrant-hostile system isn’t the success you imagine.
I’m crying about that in my beer tonight, getting paid a Silicon Valley salary by an American company while living in my home country.
You have made it so complicated and unattractive to stay in the country that you don’t care about losing people who wanted to stay and pay taxes, and instead are enabling these jobs to be exported.
The static “papers please” mindset killed the Soviet Union and many other empires before it. Americans somehow managed to avoid it for over two centuries. I know you don’t want my opinion, but you probably shouldn’t give up on that achievement so easily. It’s not just about immigrants — the mindset infects the entire society. This was the fundamental edge you had over Europe and you’re throwing it away.
Please don’t interpret my disagreement with you about the immigration process as a desire to not know you and interact with you as a person. I appreciate your insights into the process as you experienced it and your contributions to HN community.
Thank you for the gracious reply, it’s very much appreciated.
The reason I have strong feelings about this topic is that I want America to continue succeeding, and I wanted to be part of it but it didn’t make practical sense for me.
When I was a child in the 1980s living next door to the Soviet Union, the USA was a beacon of hope to us. It sounds corny but it’s true. (Reagan and Clinton were politicians who seemed to intuitively understand this global mood and were able to leverage it. I disagree with them on many specifics, but they excelled at this.)
I know Americans always feel like there’s too much going on at home to care about the rest of the world. But often in history the solutions at home have appeared by opening up, not closing in.
Your earnest desire to be part of America is admirable, and the pitfalls of the system are that much more tragic in light of this. The system failed you, and your attempts to lessen the burden imposed on you and your family are not my own to second-guess, though I would have preferred a better solution for you all that would have allowed you to remain in the country legally without requiring leaving only to return. It would be supremely unfair if you would be denied residency or citizenship due to your actions, as I don’t believe you had any intent to deceive or violate the law, and you very well may not have done either, and I will not besmirch your honor by implying you did. I understand that your first responsibility is to yourself and your family, and I hope you are able to enjoy the holidays with you and yours.
> The reason you have to leave the country is because it is not a “renewal” it is a “re-approval” and if you are denied they don’t have to deport you if you’re already out.
No. You only have to leave the country to have the visa stamp on your passport. That has no bearing on you being authorized to stay or work in the country.
That’s the simple truth. They do that for all types of visas. My mother had to do it, until she finally (reluctantly) became a US citizen, and she lived here, most of her life.
I think she had long-term visas, though. I only remember her doing it a couple of times. I think I went with her, on one of the trips.
This is more complicated than that. H1B is a visa and a status.
As long as you have a valid H1b status, you can stay in the US indefinitely. Having a physical visa in your passport is optional, you only need it when you want to cross back into the US.
Follow the sun is great for on-call rotations, but I'm my experience, for regular project work, the need for a handoff each day ends up being too much overhead. The teams in vastly different time zones wind up working mostly independently on completely different projects.
> leave the country to renew paperwork is an insane anachronism
Not really. This is really Customs and Border Patrol/Immigration way of saying, you can always do the default/what everyone else does. You can leave and return six months of the year. The key is leave (which they do), they are already declared non-immigrant, and are self-sufficient.
> - Organizations where fundamental research is a key activity now qualify
> - Startups can hire researchers (AI, health, hardware) year-round
That’s a good change. I’ve seen ML researchers (PhDs) who led DARPA funded projects as principal investigator while working for a for-profit company not being selected for H-1B (lottery and cap) and having to leave the US.
You'd still have to comply with the H1-B rules for the job you are petitioning for, like the duties you are performing, the salary requirements etc. And the legal costs of doing the petition.
Now, misuse could come if you are independently wealthy and can self fund, but at the end of the day if you are doing that in the US, the economy still benefits.
EB-5 is a onetime payment for a green card (permanent residence). Prevailing wage must be paid every year and you have 60 days to leave when you the company stops paying you.
Yes, but the prevailing wage threshold would be lower than the investor visa, as will the commitments. The investor visa you have to show a plan, hire people etc.
> In addition, for those individuals who obtained treaty country nationality through a financial investment, USCIS may require additional documentation to show that the applicant has been domiciled in the treaty country indicated in the application for a continuous period of at least 3 years at any point before applying for E-1 or E-2 classification.
Plus E-2 visa is a non-immigrant visa, so it doesn't give you any kind of special pathway to green card. Might as well apply for an EBx at the outset instead of fiddling with an E-2 visa.
You're missing several. Montenegro and Macedonia are definitely available, and I think also Panama.
> Might as well apply for an EBx at the outset instead of fiddling with an E-2 visa.
EB-5 has pre-country quotas, and for some countries the wait can be quite long (for China it's around 10 years). It also is veeerrrryyyyyy slow, even with the initial form processing taking _years_.
** Wait, so I can just open LLC and get H1B visa for it? There have to be conditions and limitations, otherwise it will be misused.
No, you have to first post a job posting at a low salary, preferably with an in-office requirement in a HCOL city. If you get applicants, give them Leetcode Hard and no one will pass.
Then, when no one applies or passes the interview, you claim there is a shortage.
I run a one-man consulting business from the EU. I sometimes hire freelancers. I work with US clients anyway. Does that mean I can open a US llc and move?
I wonder if it is possible to found a US company and open a bank account for it while being a resident of Russian Federation, and then self-petition yourself for a visa....
What's the reason for cap-gap extension to April 1? I thought that the government fiscal year starts on October 1, so H-1B statuses take effect on that date and therefore the extension is only needed until October 1. What is the motivation here?
I wonder if switching from a lottery to an auction would help curtail some of the abuse?
That is, for each position a company wants to fill with a non-citizen they also have to bid on the visa fee they're willing to pay. The highest ~7,000 bids that month are accepted and paid to the government in exchange for a visa.
We could debate things like sealed-bid versus open auction and uniform-price versus paying your bid but whatever details we pick I suspect this would allow us to discover which companies are actually desperate for skills and which primarily use it as a cost-savings measure.
(I'm also curious how much H-1B visas would cost if there was a market: thousands of dollars? tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands? more?)
Remember, H1B isn’t always about tech, even if we’d all like to pretend it is. You’ll have to have separate bidding process for different occupations, otherwise you’ll end up with a system where Facebook will get all the visas, while in some cases, doctors would not be sponsored.
I'm curious what makes you think tech workers would monopolize the top spots? I would expect that companies desperate for experts in medicine, research, engineering, law, business (which, like tech, already pay high salaries) would be similarly willing to pay a premium to be able to hire the best from other countries.
I actually think that could end up having the opposite effect in lower paying fields.
An mid level engineer at Google averages $280k/yr according to levels. A principal mechanical engineer at Boeing averages $170k/yr according to levels. If Google can pay an H1-B engineer 70% of what a non H1-B employee would get ($196k), they can bid up to 80k and still save money.
Since Boeing is going for a high level employee who actually highly skilled, it's less likely that they would be able to underpay their candidate, but even if they could pay their H1-B employee 70% of the market rate ($117k), they only have ~$50k to before they hit the break even point.
Obviously if the person is highly skilled and Boeing actually needs them it would make sense to bid beyond the break even point, but Boeing needs to be more choosy than Google. In that scenario, Google should put every single L4 candidate up for and H1-B because if even one gets their bid accepted it saves them money. Boeing actually has to decide which candidates they're willing to overpay for which will result in a smaller pool of mechanical engineers being put up for H1-B visas.
The implication that companies use visa is to find candidates willing to work for less (e.g. 70%) of a qualified domestic candidate seems like the underlying problem we should be resolving, not just the "fairness" of choosing which field should be allowed to exploit this loophole.
But your post raises a good point that money is an imperfect proxy for "value" -- a company with high profit margins can outbid leaner companies (or nonprofits) for a visa, even if the relative value of that visa to the rich company is not as high as it would have been to the other companies.
Three thoughts in response:
First, this "unfairness" doesn't seem unique to a visa auction. Isn't it already "unfair" that Google can afford to pay mediocre developers more than Boeing pays expert mechanical engineers in the first place? Do you think we should incorporate lotteries in domestic hiring as well to balance that out a bit?
Second, assuming we accept the argument that H1-B visas lower average salaries in the fields where they're used, then preventing this program from lowering any but the highest salaries seems like it would be a net benefit.
Third, I wonder which scheme (lottery or auction) Boeing and their hypothetical H1-B candidate would prefer themselves. Tech companies already game the system and let other companies fight for scraps so having a more predictable (if expensive) pathway may end up being preferable.
Only the base salary counts, not the total comp. That 280k/yr sounds like total comp - includes base+bonus+RSUs. The average base would be more along the lines of 150k-190k.
Uniquely skilled is probably a better word to use. H1-Bs are meant to be used when American worker's can't be found to fill a role. I think there are more people qualified to be a mid level software engineer (even at the FAANG level) than principal mechanical engineers at Boeing.
I doubt that many mechanical engineers can become a principal level engineer at a Fortune 500 company in 3-5 years, but I know plenty of software engineers who've gotten to L4 at FAANG companies in that timeframe.
I don't think that's what they were implying, but with the way google has been going this past decade, I don't think anyone is still under the impression that google employees are highly skilled. They're the butt of tech jokes for a reason.
Lottery only applies for initial employment, not for renewals.
Most physicists and biologists and geologists work in universities or labs or other institutions, which are cap-exempt anyway and don't go through the lottery.
This would prevent abuse of foreigners who are underpaid. It would also allow most of the applicants to go to good jobs (FAANG) which can pay premiums salaries.
Reverse auction is the best way to go. Good for foreigners, good for top companies, economically the best option.
The simplest way to improve the H-1B system is to abolish it.
The better but slightly less simple way is to abolish it (and a bunch of other employment-related visa categories), but also allow individuals who aren’t personally barred from entry because of past misconduct, etc., but who are not eligible (or wish to bypass wait times) for admission under other existing visa categories to pay an fee (which others, including employers, can subsidize if they wish, but gain no special power over future status by so doing) for a limited term, renewable employment-eligible status that becomes eligible to transition to permanent residency automatically after a set time in status. (This also fixes a number of other problems in the immigration system beyond the H-1B.)
Probably hundreds of thousands. A big reason master programs can command such a massive price tag is that they are tickets to enter the US labor market.
It also has the benefit of giving the government an incentive to increase the quota to get more revenue.
It’s a slowdown in tech recruitment, so it is fair for citizens to think for themselves first. There are quite a lot of candidates that can fulfill most of the roles, and it has bad optics when the government tries to prioritize others.
Disclaimer: I don’t live in the states, but I can understand the frustration.
Tech isn't a zero sum game, it's a growth market. If some H-1B talent helps grow a company faster, then they can increase their own citizen employee count faster.
That tracks only when it’s not taking 6+ months to find a stable job. It’s not really a growth market right now, and anyone who is on the hiring end/looking for a job can attest.
Doesn’t really matter. People won’t care about long term consequences if they’re experiencing hardships right now. It’s easy to say this when we have jobs, but if I didn’t have one, I would never want my government to prioritize others.
This is the bit that I've always found confusing. When it comes to blue collar jobs, people in the upper echelons will gladly advocate the wonders of millions of people entering the job market to compete with Americans.
But as soon as it's their own market that introduces additional competition, they will advocate "just pay people more, the job seekers exist, just not at the wages employers are offering, this extra competition only depresses American wages".
Which one is it? Is it "competition for other classes, no competition for my class please"?
Again, why is the answer in agriculture to simply not increase wages? Someone’s willing to pick berries for $100/h I’m sure. Does it make berries unsustainable as a business? Likely, but isn’t that an argument for moving away from industries that can only survive on exploitation of undocumented third world labor?
Ah, the argument is following it: the berries will still be picked in other countries for substantially lower wages and worse conditions than the wages or conditions (partially) of undocumented workers here. Even our worst jobs are substantially better (usually ~3x) than the average job of many countries, to say nothing about the huge gulf in security and institutions you get form living here.
That's also the argument that Bryan Caplan has been making for years in favor of open borders. I genuinely don't know what to make of it, I get the moral argument within it.
There were >100000 layoffs at tech companies in the last 4 years because companies “overhired”. The government is finally taking action to address a “labor shortage” in this sector, because these same companies cannot find anyone to hire? Something doesn’t add up here but a lot of people who have been given a pretty raw deal.
People don't like the fact that they actually need to be competitive in skills to get a job. Had there been no H-1Bs, they could submit a resume and immediately get a job offer!
No joke. I look around in my company, Indians and Chinese (among others) are good at their jobs and do amazing work.
Some people just don't like that. They blame not being able to get a good job offer on Indians taking away the opportunity, not themselves being good developers.
As an academic scientist in the USA, it is an amazing opportunity to work with bright people from all over the world. I feel lucky that I am from the place where this happens, and I don't personally have to travel overseas for it- but certainly would if I hadn't been from here. The scientists that come here from all over the world make discoveries that help everyone, but the companies that spin out of them usually end up US based and are a major driver of the economy. When we do hiring, it is only about 1/4 of the time or so I would say that we get a highly qualified applicant that is a US citizen.
Yes, people at Meta and Google are highly paid and highly skilled. Some more or less than others, in relation to the average, just like anywhere else. What is your example demonstrating?
>That says more about your company, and perhaps yourself, than anything else.
Why? You're simply sure the parent and the companies they work for are bad at hiring, or racist, or what? You've offered nothing but a spit in the face.
No, it means that if you find yourself surrounded by mediocre/incompetent people, it means that you aren't working at a good place and that you may be mediocre too.
It couldn't possibly be that the H1-B's that his company is hiring are bad, because his company is trying to save a buck by abusing the system, because that never happens.
It's also missing the point. The verbiage around H1B is "to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities", not artificially inflate competition for jobs. This issue was contentious even during the good times and I'm not surprised that it's flaring up during the bad times.
There are plenty of smart and excellent workers who come mainland China and India for sure but there are plenty of people who don't or come through the abuse of the program.
As person who is not currently trying to immigrate to the US I have mixed feelings. One one hand I wish all best to people who do want to move to the US, on other hand a non-broken H-1B could accelerate brain drain from the country I'm living in (which will be one more blow to already struggling economy).
You have to first answer why few locals outside Stanford-Berkeley-MIT-CMU are hired out of school. Is it because all non-top-4 schools under prepare students? Is it before foreign workers are that much better? Or is it because companies are looking for underpaid workers they can abuse and keep in a state of limbo?
If CS degrees from non-top-4 schools are not valuable, best to get that out so US students are not studying useless degrees.
At the moment, at least in the trillion-dollar web companies, it seems not many people are being hired straight out of school at all. A new grad would have to really stand out to get hired in a field of experienced candidates. The potential cost savings of hiring a new grad doesn't seem to matter much to these companies.
In the past, I've seen a lot of new-grad hires from the top 30 or so schools, but not so many from the top 5. More likely Michigan, Maryland, or Washington than Stanford or MIT (I'm on the West Coast). Pandemic-era Stripe was an exception, they seemed to hire only top 5, but they were also offering outrageous pay at that time.
Someone graduating from a school not in the top 30 probably needs to adjust their expectations away from Google or Meta, at least for a first job, unless they have good connections and interview very well.
Back to your original point though, I think it's plausible that most schools not in the top 30 (charitably, top 50) are actually incapable of some combination of (1) attracting sufficiently smart and motivated students and (2) educating them adequately.
I find it hard to believe you are surprised. In disagreement, sure. Surprised? This is an enormous, dramatic issue. People on both sides rightfully perceive it as borderline existential.
Really? You're surprised? You're surprised that a country and industry continuing to suffer from ongoing layoffs after layoffs, both stealth and honest, could possibly be negative about their government saying "yeah, let's bring in _more_ foreign workers while our own citizens can't find or keep their jobs"? The audacity!
Yeah. Do people really think that Silicon Valley would be such a huge economy (and a huge job creator for US citizens) if the US had never allowed immigrants to work there?
Founders of the original valley companies were US born (except Shockley) but by the early 70s many of the key participants were foreigners (Grove, Faggin, ...).
Yeah I would say very little about our current immigration situation resembles anything like 1970. So I’m not sure what the magic key to success is, that was alluded to other than “some people who were key were also not born in America”.
It's encouraging to see DHS attempting to update the H-1B program in ways that address longstanding pain points like the unpredictability of transferring jobs, the complexity around defining a "specialty occupation," and the painfully slow application processes. The US economy benefits when companies can more easily hire and retain the talent they genuinely need, rather than having the system incentivise questionable staffing practices or endless guesswork over whether a given degree is "close enough" to the job description.
However, this final rule doesn't magically solve the deeper structural issues. For example, the per-country caps on green cards still leave many H-1B workers stuck in decades-long queues if they're from certain countries. That reality discourages risk-taking, entrepreneurship, and long-term roots,something that runs counter to the very idea of welcoming skilled people. While allowing spouses to work and making it easier to switch roles will improve day-to-day life for some, the broader immigration pipeline remains complicated and slow.
The real test will be in implementation and enforcement. Will the new definitions and stricter oversight actually reduce abuse by staffing firms who've flooded the lottery with dubious registrations? Will the simplified criteria for specialty occupations translate to smoother hiring and fewer headaches for workers and employers alike?
In short: good steps, but we're still a long way from a truly balanced system that reliably identifies, welcomes, and retains global talent without leaving them in extended legal limbo. It's progress, but the ultimate success depends on how these rules play out in the real world,and whether future administrations build on these changes instead of rolling them back.
Software is one of the few STEM fields where one can get a fantastic job with just a Bachelor's. In most other engineering fields, a MS gives you a significant boost, and a PhD may do so as well.
The reality is that in most of those fields, few Americans get an MS/PhD. Go to a typical engineering department and you'll often see the majority of advanced degree students are foreigners.
So it's a question of: Do we want to continue to train foreigners, only to not have them contribute to the US economy?
If you move out to the pure sciences, you pretty much need a PhD to get a good career. Once again, a big chunk, if not the majority, are foreigners.
Look around at the highly skilled folks you see who are not of US origin, and you'll find most of them are in the US due to the H1-B program (only a tiny percentage come via other programs like the O visa).
Yes, H1-B is often abused, but this is the reason it exists. It's a lot harder to get an H1B visa and then permanent residency if your degree is in the humanities, for example.
I think vast majority of Americans not going on to higher education is because system is so screwed up due to debt and unlimited student visas.
Debt means most Americans go "I need to enter into the job market so I can pay off these debts".
Also, alot of foreign students are willing to work/study insane hours because visa hanging over their head. I have a friend who got MS in Engineering but didn't want to continue because he looked at what's required and started talking with his mentor about his PhD. His mentor said it's 996 schedule and if you don't want to, I can likely find a student visa student who will.
> I think vast majority of Americans not going on to higher education is because system is so screwed up due to debt and unlimited student visas.
International students percentage is about 6% of total high education population [1]. We can say that their percentage in higher in some fields/degrees. But overall they are not significant reason High Education is not affordable. Actually for undergraduate (majority of international students) they will pay more tuition and many colleges wants to admit more to subsidize domestic students.
> Debt means most Americans go "I need to enter into the job market so I can pay off these debts".
Study abroad is expensive and you still need to enter the job market to earn your living and probably pay your dept (some will take loans to study in the US). This applies quite well to international students too.
> I think vast majority of Americans not going on to higher education is because system is so screwed up due to debt and unlimited student visas.
For undergrad, I understand the frustration, although student visas have almost nothing to do with it. As an example, when I was in my undergrad (for engineering), there was only one foreign student in my engineering classes. Almost all the foreign students were at the MS/PhD level. The number of foreign students in the undergrad population was easily under 5%, if not under 1%.
Probably true in most no-name state schools.
> Debt means most Americans go "I need to enter into the job market so I can pay off these debts".
An MS is only 2 years, and you should go only if it's fully paid for (quite often the case in engineering). And you typically don't accrue interest on undergrad debts for those 2 years - so it's only delaying paying off debts by 2 years.
No - most Americans don't do MS in engineering, simply because they don't want to and don't value it.
> Also, alot of foreign students are willing to work/study insane hours because visa hanging over their head. I have a friend who got MS in Engineering but didn't want to continue because he looked at what's required and started talking with his mentor about his PhD. His mentor said it's 996 schedule and if you don't want to, I can likely find a student visa student who will.
Entirely dependent on the advisor, although I do suspect your anecdote is becoming more common. Also, likely more common at top tier universities and less so in no name state universities.
The reason why foreigners get those degrees is because it's a way for them to stay in the USA longer. I have a friend who didn't win a renewal for their H1B and they signed up for a master's program and applied for a different VISA. So yeah, some foreigners get them because their hands are forced.
Isn't it well known that the main reason that most foreigners have advanced degrees is because that's how they get into the country legally in the first place?
I don't see many people getting employed straight out of undergrad from India or China and moving to the US directly. They get their advanced degree here first to get into the country then they get employed...
> Isn't it well known that the main reason that most foreigners have advanced degrees is because that's how they get into the country legally in the first place?
Yes, and ...?
I mean, if it were a requirement to start a business and employ 10 Americans gainfully, would you go and say "Yeah, but the reason so many foreign born people do that is so they can get in legally."
So?
As long as they have higher level training than most Americans, and as long as we spend money training them (via research/teaching grants), isn't it a good idea to keep them?
You're assuming people are really learning anything in those programs that they wouldn't have had in their undergrad. I've never met an American with an undergrad who is underperforming compared to their foreign MS counterparts. The MS is merely a cheaper tool to get into the country than other investment visas plus you get credentialed. I think it's also a bit of a validation tool that the person actually has studied at the same level as US counterparts. I have met some people from India who were surprised at how difficult college was when they came to the US compared to back in India.
Ooh yes, let's address next how US top universities are all profit machines incentivized to take as many foreigners as possible, driving up the tuition they can charge so US citizens can't afford to get degrees. Let's do talk about how if you get a part time job to be able to pay for college then they yank your financial aid.
While foreigners definitely are a cash cow, I think you'll find in STEM fields most foreign PhD students are not paying tuition, but are instead funded by US grants.
As for the cost of tuition, there are many, many reasons, and I suspect if you did a PCA, you'll find "raising tuition to milk foreigners" to be of minimal impact.
In my state, for example, a local university publicized their finances going back decades, and the increase in tuition has been mirrored by a drop in state support per student. Overall the university is not making more money per student than they were 30 years ago - the only thing that changed is the entity making the payments.
US tech exports in 2018 was $338 billion. Tech is our biggest export by far. Think of the US tech industry as a siphon that sucks in wealth from foreign countries. Would you want to make that siphon bigger or smaller?
If you want to make that siphon bigger — and more competitive — how would you do it? By limiting the people that can work in tech to whoever companies can hire locally, or by bringing in the smartest people from around the world?
Does "The US" siphon that money off? Or Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. siphon that money off? And where and to whom does it go from there?
The major benefit of reducing or eliminating the H1B visa program is that those companies can continue to do well, and Americans can do well along with them.
The money this siphon brings in is benefiting not just tech workers and tech shareholders. When the money is spent it turns the wheels of our economy, which leads to prosperity for all Americans, not just the 8% or so that work in tech.
The tech industry vacuums up money from foreign countries and pumps it into the economy of our country. The beneficiaries include all Americans, including those who work in restaurants, retail, healthcare, insurance, education, housing, transportation, entertainment and so on.
Limiting tech industry to whoever companies can hire locally will hurt its global competitiveness. Such a move will not just hurt the few would-be tech immigrants that are prevented from immigrating, but American prosperity in general.
When is that prosperity coming to the US? It seems that it's been leaving the US for the past decades and life is harder and harder and the American Dream is hardest to attain in decades.
Restricting or eliminating the H1B visas will cause these companies to hire more in oversea offices. Consulting companies however are a whole other deal.
Because the talent is already here or will be here (on h1b/o1). It's common complaint I hear from people doing offshore consultancies type of businesses that their best workers leave for US $$$ paycheck.
As somebody who does not live and work in the US, it seems plausible to me that the H1B system helps prevent other countries from obtaining similar talent hubs as Sillicon Valley. A lot of the talent is in the US, which attracts more companies, which attracts more talent, which means it's easier to go to the US and work there and start companies there than to do it anywhere else.
There’s also the easier financing, but yes - I’m sure the outcome is dominated by the network effect of having denser talent. That’s one of the reasons Silicon Valley is so hard to replicate elsewhere.
> phrased differently, the goal is to help industry, not hurt workers. hurting some workers is an acceptable cost, not the goal.
The phrase "help industry" has many dimensions. The simplest of course is that by increasing labor supply and suppressing wages it increases profit margins, rewarding shareholders.
Another important function is that by having more workers overall in the US, it increases the productivity of the domestic industry itself, due to increased competition for jobs driving up the productivity of the average worker. This in turn makes the industry more competitive vs its equivalents in other countries.
The average worker (whether permanent resident or temporary/H1B) who doesn't have significant investments likely doesn't receive much of those productivity gains, since they mostly go to capital owners.
Long term, it boosts returns to capital while capping returns to labor, the same trend noted by Thomas Piketty some years back.
I dont think there long term impacts are so clear or cynical. the question is less about productivity, but network effect, number of jobs, and quality of jobs.
> I dont think there long term impacts are so clear or cynical
The economic impacts I described are looking backwards, not forward, and the data is pretty clear that long term returns on capital swamp the returns on labor (especially since the 1970s). STEM workers have been somewhat insulated from that due to the industries they work in growing in the past few decades faster than the labor supply. It's anyone's guess whether or not either trend will continue into the future.
> the question is less about productivity, but network effect, number of jobs, and quality of jobs.
I'd argue productivity and returns to capital are almost everything when it comes to what informs immigration policy from an economic lens. "Network effect" is a mechanism, not an outcome, and outcome metrics like "quality of job" or even "quality of life afforded by a job" are not a concern of such policies. On average, they might improve, or they might get worse, but productivity and returns on capital will always go up, whether they require workers or not.
I understand that you are trying to make a point about return on capital, but I dont understand how you are connecting it to the question of H1-B visas and if local benefits to industrial expertise outweigh the downward pressure from labor competition.
> I dont understand how you are connecting it to the question of H1-B visas and if local benefits to industrial expertise outweigh the downward pressure from labor competition.
Because what you are calling "local benefits to industrial expertise" is ultimately realized in the form of returns on capital.
Whether these benefits outweigh the costs is an open question.
When the tech industry's growth was very talent constrained as it was in the last few decades, arguably opening labor competition had the effect of increasing overall growth (mainly through new production invention). The list of immigrant technologists who have created new technologies and products - and jobs as a result - could probably fill an encyclopedia.
It's unknown whether that type of growth - the kind that creates more and better jobs - will continue, especially given recent developments in AI.
If the benefits going forward are largely going to be based on massive increases in labor efficiency, then it's not as clear that the benefits (mostly to capital) outweigh the costs (mostly to labor). Most business models in AI are predicated on replacing people, who are expensive, not making more or better goods. Sure, we'll get some neat robots along the way that actually make stuff, but that will likely be a small fraction of the money to be made.
Or perhaps we are at the dawn of a new era of technology which will make more and better jobs. We'll see.
OK, so you were changing the topic to something else you wanted to talk about. That was not clear to me. I thought you were making a rebuttal to what I was saying.
Correct, if you look at my comment I was unpacking what the phrase "to help industry" could mean, not rebutting your comment.
It's relevant to the original context because what helps industry (in terms of immigration regulation) might or might not help workers in that industry.
The interesting thing about the return to labor vs capital line of argument is that generally speaking, capital doesnt consume the types of product that labor is interested in.
When productivity goes up, that doesnt mean workers are making 10X as many houses or hamburgers, which capitalist are eating.
For me, this begs the questions of what exactly is being produced when we say worker productivity has increased, and where is it going? If it is "stuff" being produced, surely it should be evident somewhere, like massive exports hoarded stockpiles. Alternatively, the productivity is an illusion because there is a corresponding inefficiency or deadweight loss, like paying some service workers to create problems and paying others to fix them.
> If harm was the goal, something like a STEM worker tax or cutting R&D tax incentives would be easier
These would affect all STEM workers equivalently. The H1-B program, whatever one thinks of its merits, hurts domestic STEM workers and helps immigrant STEM workers.
Perhaps the result is that the overall opportunities are greater because the larger talent pool results in more companies being formed. That depends a lot on how mature the industry is, and whether technological trends like generative AI will replace large swaths or STEM workers altogether.
Hypothetically it exists to allow companies to hire singular overseas experts like von Braun or Einstein that don't have domestic equivalents. It has become totally accepted to lie on the application though and now it is used to hire Java developers.
That is incorrect. People with exceptional abilities are covered under EB-1 green cards (and O-1 visas). H-1B was created to bring people in specialty occupations requiring a bachelor's degree or equivalent experience. A Java developer definitely meets the bar (with the right degree or experience).
True, but at the same time immigrants have nothing to lose and everything to gain, thus in many cases they will work harder/longer and as result often be more skilled than an average developer.
And in general skilled immigration has many times over been proven to only benefit the country and that java developer you mention.
That's a sign of how accepted it has become to say that you can't find any local workers that know Python when filling out the H1-B forms. The requirement is there but it's normally overlooked.
"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 [...]"
This piece of misinformation seems to be trotted out every time H-1B is discussed. H-1B is not for "extraordinary ability", the O-1 is. The H-1B is just designed for regular workers in a "specialty occupation". This is how Congress designed it in the Immigration and Nationality Act.
The reality is US is a tech powerhouse, many successful companies have been started by former h1b holders and US tech workers are highest paid in the world (even PPP adjusted). What you're hearing is not the reality - it's just vibes.
Not really, O-1 is essentially a visa to bring a specific person to the US. While H1B is a wide net (yes, visa given to a specific person, not what I'm saying).
o-1 is to bring Albert Einstein and h1b is to bring some physicist that matches criteria.
As in, O-1 is person-focused, while H1B is role-focused.
>h1b is to bring some physicist that matches criteria.
those are exceptional cases. The majority of the 65K year h1b visas granted every year are for filling IT related positions. Mostly dev related positions.
Global competition exists. If US companies can't hire the best, others will. I hope you don't assume that all the best workers/researchers are born within US borders.
I don't think countries should hire the best. Pretty good should do. They should foster a greater sense of community within their borders. Now, I'm not against immigration. I myself am an immigrant. But I think there's too much global fluidity and not enough attention paid to taking care of one's own.
That's exactly the reason. I don't remember working with any H-1B visa people in the 90s then the dotcom boom happened and demand soared. A couple years later I started working with H-1B engineers and my salary flatlined for over decade since.
Put simply: It is in the national interest to have the world's most talented technologists here. It is yet more in the national interest that they work here, for us, and not for our enemies. One of the best ways we can compete with China is to attract their best and brightest with our free society and high wages.
You're not missing anything. Other than that, seemingly, STEM roles are the only industry where the laws of supply and demand do not apply, and a positive supply shock of something does not, for some reason, drive down the price.
If a supply shock doesn't drive down the price then it suggests that the supply constraint was larger than than the shock and that the market was being artificially constrained to prevent the prices from rising to meet demand.
It's also possible that the supply itself is what creates more demand. People who move to the US are probably less risk-averse than the average person, and more likely to start new companies, creating more jobs.
STEM roles already pay incredibly well in this country, and even more so if you compare it globally.
What is the downward price shock you're talking about? What do you think the salary would or should be, assuming all H1B worker are magically gone the next day?
Have you engaged with the Card vs Borjas literature at all? We learn about the world by studying it, not by simply thinking about it from one's armchair.
I'm not saying it's good or bad at brain drain, I'm just saying without knowing how many people overseas are worth "draining" that's not an argument.
The program might have been designed for this, sold as this, but it's definitely not used for that anymore.
H1B was created in 1990, that's when Russia (and ex-USSR in general) had a lot of idle brains that wouldn't mind moving to the US. Today isn't 1990 tho.
my apologies, I was just being sarcastic in my initial comment… the brain draining other countries by taking in 65k or whatever yearly is … funny for the lack of worse but respectable word :)
You are missing that it is used a lot in spite of that process (1) being a major administrative headache for the users, both employees and employers, (2) costly compared to hiring "locals" although that's moderated by perhaps lower salary with not a huge amount of evidence, and (3) rather unpredictable and risky for both employees and employers.
Tech exists in a globally competitive market: the companies will exist where the skilled workers are, and the tax benefits will occur there. The US's large immigration rate is a precondition for maintaining its tech dominance and all of the benefits thereof.
you can grow the sector. there's not a fixed supply of jobs. getting more talented people into your economy will likely just lead to more companies, more agglomeration effects etc. it's good.
The US owes much of its success to its ability to poach talent from other countries. By letting all the people who would start competing firms move to the US instead international competition is reduced and the products built in the US are better.
I think you should ask why any feature of our immigration system exists. Each way is cruel, byzantine and expensive for no discernible benefit to anyone except the directors of those programs.
The program exists to get skilled workers into the US. It has done this well. There are few other programs to get them in and onto a pathway to permanent residence and citizenship. STEM wages don't exist in a vacuum. Increased utility to the US economy is more important than them. The US government rightfully determined that having people like Elon Musk here makes this nation more competitive. Likely the effect was also to increase software engineering compensation but that's harder to tell.
As Asimov pointed out, "[t]here is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been." American culture is profoundly anti-intellectual. Every Dunning-Kruger rando thinks they have something valuable to contribute to every discussion.
So...what's the front door to the green card ? How does one arrive legally to the nation with the highest [1] historic immigration rate of any nation in the world ?
Great comeback, except you completely ignore the point (its purpose is not meant to be a backdoor) and attack him for... being an American?
Instead of telling everyone else to check their privilege, maybe check your expectations. The world doesn't owe anyone anything. Claiming your desires are everyone else's problem is a deeply self-centered way to view the world.
> Great comeback, except you completely ignore the point (its purpose is not meant to be a backdoor)
Ironically there is no point in talking about much of this stuff (immigration requirements, priority dates, dual intent visas etc.) with most Americans because they do not understand it.
There is no point in engaging with someone who thinks H1B is a backdoor because they don’t know what they’re talking about. Other Americans can’t recognize this in the original comment because it’s not something they spend any time reading about (because it doesn’t actually matter to them).
The real backdoor visas would be something like a TN.
H-1B is dual intent by definition, so it is not a backdoor. Any sane person who knows how green card application works understands that it is objectively hard, if not the hardest in the whole world.
> Instead of telling everyone else to check their privilege, maybe check your expectations.
Without such an expectation, who would pay tens of thousands a year to enroll in a random U.S. college, only to be told that there is absolutely no way they can work legally there?
Yeah, you have no idea of the process of getting green card via h1b works.
You can ditch the US, get permanent resident status in Canada, become Canadian citizenship, get TN visa to work in the US if you want to and someone who thinks that h1b is a backdoor to a green card will be just starting on green card paperwork. And that's if there are no issues with application.
This is all after participating in h1b lottery for years. Trust me, it's an extremely slow and painful way of getting a green card. If h1b is your way to a green card, it means either: you're already married, you have no idea what are you doing.
It's no a backdoor in any way, person move to the US for work and builds a life here, accumulate assets, I think it's pretty reasonable to give those people a way to settle in the US permanently in these cases.
The program needs to be revamped because it's not working in the way it's sold to voters.
Love how all your arguments boil down to 'I got mine.'.
We don't want illegal immigrants, get legal work authorization. No, don't use work authorized visas use other legal means. No, family based chain immigration should be illegal too. Oh wait there are no other ways to come here ?....good. We never wanted you anyway. This country is full, all 4 million sq miles. Always has always been.
It's not constructive to frame citizenship as "I got mine". People will fight - really fight - to preserve their homes and lifestyles, if they feel those are being threatened. It's obviously not impossible to welcome as many immigrants as we do without this extreme level of conflict, but our system demonstrably does not accomplish that. We simply aren't making use of our space, so why don't we focus on that problem? A tone like yours invites chaos.
I disagree. Better to be direct, than frame it in soft 'feel good' terms. It's a matter of people's livelihoods. My tone invites confrontation as a sincere reflection of the stakes. I don't make value judgements. Citizens are entitled to hypocrisy, cognitive-dissonance and selfishness. It being bad is a social judgement made by the observer.
Let's be clear. We're talking about the US here. Arguments based in nativism, isolation and crowdedness have thin ground to stand on. By percentage population, legal-immigration to the US is below the historic average. Yet threads on H1b quickly devolve into vapid arguments. The accusers are happy to sling unsubstantiated stereotypes towards immigrants, but hide behind soft language like 'we aren't used to making space' when immigrant commenters retaliate in kind.
Racists aren't irrational actors or evil people. They simply have higher affinity for their tribe, and that's okay. Sometimes it takes for self-interests to be threatened, for bigoted & tribal behaviors to manifest in a loud manner. Again, that's okay. Americans are the ones who gave a negative connotation to to words like bigot and racists. In the rest of world, tribal & bigoted behaviors are an accepted norm. We're all racists sometimes. But, American tech workers are definitely at their racist-est on h1b threads.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either you are the land of free, that practices extreme meritocracy and thrives as a result of it. You're a nation built by migrant groups over the last 4 centuries, and the door is always open to the ambitious and hard working. A benevolent super-power for all. Or, you're just as tyrannical as any selfish group. You're a white majority people that found a pre-inhabited land of the greatest resources and size. You claimed it all for yourself. Killed the natives. You give lip serve to globalism and meritocracy as long as it gives you access to all markets of the world. Your relationship with the rest of the world is transactional, and you will continue to be a world superpower through military strong-arming and thinly veiled globally-egalitarian propaganda.
The reality ofc, is that neither extremes are true. But, it is a slider between the tribal-nativist and internationalist-meritocratic impulse. There are no right or wrong answers for what a nation's choice will be. But, if your slider is near the former while you claim to be the latter, then the hypocrisy is grating for the rest of us. For the lack of a better insult, it's Trudeau-esque.
Personally, I am a big fan of out-right selfish people. There is genuine honesty there. I also love the US (warts and all). Say what people might, it is the least racist nation of any out there. Lastly, I have a vested interest as someone who is on an H1b myself. (although I'd like to think I'm senior enough to be insulated from negative outcomes for h1b)
As I write this, I recognize that most people don't like harsh phrasing. I don't think our politicians or public speakers should adopt this language. But, a mostly civil pseudo anonymous forum of tech nerds is IMO, just right for this kind of directness.
Does America want smart people to come here and advance science/technology/economy or would she rather close the doors and watch other countries get ahead?
By offering wages appropriate for the economy your fellow citizens are accustomed to, as opposed to the economy citizens of other nations are accustomed to.
Saw a university (like 7 years ago) H1B'ing postdocs for like $30k, maybe $35k a year, by valuing the benefits at like $20k. It was kind of a joke IMO.
That is the prevailing wage for postdocs, domestic or foreign.
The abuse of postdocs and grad students exists, but is entirely unrelated to H1B and foreigners. They paid them poorly even before the country was flooded with foreign students.
Right, the desperate need for talent is the reason these programs are used so heavily. It's not discounted salary and cost savings in benefits, insurance, and other areas for non-permanent employees, or having leverage over immigrant employees in negotiations. Corporations only ever use these programs to get the absolute best of the best and they absolutely aren't abused to bypass the stricter regulations and requirements for citizen employees. /s
There's nothing wrong with brain draining other countries and incentivizing legal immigration for work visas and H1B style programs. We should want to be the best place in the world to work. This shouldn't come as a detriment to the citizens of the US. Legal immigration and jobs programs need to be better. The H1B program suppresses legal citizen wages as well as immigrant wages because companies are able to use the threat of deportation as an effective negotiation tactic. Companies use immigrants for cheap professional labor, and if the immigrant pipes up, they get let go. With everything in tech life being designed around pushing people into paycheck to paycheck lifestyles, this can wreck someone's life through no fault of their own if they do something like ask for a raise, or better health insurance.
In turn, if citizen employees try to negotiate, the company can replace them with more immigrant workers unless or until they can hire local replacements at the company's preferred rate of pay.
We need a cleaner, easier path to citizenship, without the endless bureaucratic nightmare that is the current system. We need better work visa programs, so that people who legitimately make the world a better place aren't penalized for arbitrary technicalities, while at the same time recognizing the sovereignty of the US and reasonably protecting borders.
Sometimes countries need to be overthrown, and the US shouldn't act like a pressure release valve for dictators. We also shouldn't be in the business of regime management or perpetuating political nightmares that causes a lot of illegal immigration, as well.
TLDR;
There's no shortage of US tech talent. The problem is that we've painted ourselves into a regulatory corner - in order to be competitive, companies have to shortchange payroll by abusing migrant salaries. To fix it, we must strengthen migrant rights so companies can't hang the threat of deportation over employee's heads, and reduce the financial burden of hiring citizens, so you get the same bang for your buck regardless of the immigration status of the employee.
Microsoft and Lumen and FAANG and all the tech industry titans shouldn't have penny pinching strategies designed to bump stock prices using methods that are fueled by human suffering. Get rid of those options and stop blindly implementing systems where the incentives are so obviously awful.
I didn’t believe it until I saw it, but look at the classified section of the San Francisco newspaper where big tech companies post job listing knowing that Americans won’t see them so they can say they tried to get domestic talent.
My neighbor is on a visa from mumbai working at Chase who was brought in as the lead frontend engineer (def can’t find Javascript devs in the US). Even he admitted it’s weird that his whole team is from India on visas. They just aren’t hiring citizens.
As a senior software engineer who was unemployed for over a year, I can confirm almost nobody is hiring USA Javascript and Python devs with 10+ years of experience with some big accomplishments. I got lucky with a backfill.
I find that diversity extremely rewarding. I learn new things, learn about other people’s traditions and learn different ways of thinking and organising. Approach the challenge with an open mind.
These are the fun, but token advantages of diversity in this specific context. There are lots of advantages and disadvantages to diversity - because it is an extremely generic term. I have first hand experience of teams completely losing all the original members, who were extremely talented and all born in the US, because they hired such a huge number of people who were from a different culture (India, in this case). It had nothing to do with racism - they just had nothing in common. It was fun to talk about their different religious celebrations and so on, but they were emotionally aliens. They were reasonably smart, yet there was zero intellectual spark in conversations between the two groups. They were just too different to thrive with each other. Different culturally, ideologically, intellectually, emotionally. Different in methods of communication, in treatment of the business hierarchy, in assumptions and expectations. We can blame the business for making an incompatible team, but the compatibility parameters were too tied to culture and race. It's hard to account for that without essentially being racist.
> We can blame the business for making an incompatible team
In my past few jobs I had many colleagues from India, and learning the cultural differences is extremely important. Teambuilding exercises are also a must - bring your cuisine to work is a stellar example: I brought both pão de queijo (a Brazilian thing) and sajtos pogácza (its Hungarian counterpart), and they brought some the best sweets I ever tasted. To our Turkish colleague's dismay, we all agreed Turkish Delight is not really a delight (but the Turkish colleagues recognized my Hungarian pogácza as some cross-cultural artifact coming from the Ottoman empire days).
You can always take interest in learning their language. You are the host and they are your guests, and, besides, their communication in their native language will be more efficient than if they translated to English for your benefit.
Different culture, but back when I was working on a project with Sony, when they introduced their internet enabled TVs in Brazil, just adding the "san" suffix to my contact's name made him instantly more open to negotiate.
I'm glad you've had good experiences - so have I. But I'm not sure where you're going. You can't advise everybody into happiness when they are stuck in a social group that makes them unhappy. There are immutable forces at work. We're humans. Learning a language is an enormous task, and it feels horrible to imply somebody should do it who is just trying to be comfortable in their own country. You should make that attempt when you visit other countries. Not to mention, it wouldn't solve this multi-dimensional social problem.
If I piss on your head and tell you it's raining, will you find some silver lining in that activity?
> You are the host and they are your guests
What? This logic doesn't track. If I were a guest in their country, then I might take interest in learning their local language. That's respectful.
Coming here on an H-1B and demanding people speak your niche language is more akin to invasion. (Here comes the "but.. but.. the United States has no official language!" tripe.)
Ah yes the classic "huwhite people and muh racism" gambit.
It's tired. H1Bs are gamed to the point of uselessness. Most companies internally post H1B job offerings so people are aware. I've yet to see one with a competitive salary. They are used to source cheaper labor and avoid paying actual Americans the fair wage they deserve. The last 15-20 years of tech has slowly seen the InfoSys-ization of the tech economy. I work with more contractors from Mexico, India, and Eastern Europe, and more H1Bs from India than literally anyone else. On my team I can count the number of Americans on one hand.
The program should be extremely limited. I am a fan of charging 2-3x the normal tax rate for H1Bs so companies have to actually justify hiring "talent you can't find in America". There are 300,000 unemployed tech workers. I find it hard to believe none fit the bill. Just that most won't take a 60% haircut for more work.
I have been on H1B forever now, and my salaries have been more or on par with the role. I tend to agree there is a lot of H1B misuse, especially by large Indian consulting firms. This needs to be curtailed.
But, there may be 300,000 unemployed tech workers. While I also find it hard to believe none fit the bill, I believe most don't. So many are out of random bootcamps, self proclaimed programmers who can't solve fizzbuzz. I also have not seen any H1B in my career that is good and willing to take a 60% haircut. In my own company, they are the highest paid and are grumpy we are not paying more. They are all really good engineers too. Heck, when I was looking to move to the US, I refused tons of low paying jobs. When we opened up backend programming jobs, only a handful American citizens even applied. We hired one of them, while we needed 4. The rest didn't make it through the interview process. We also rejected tons of H1bs because they didnt make it through the process. Same salary range offered to H1Bs. And we are a fully remote. So I wonder where are these 300,000 unemployed tech workers.
Cut the fraud and it automatically becomes a decent program. Now, if one is entirely against the program of attracting foreign talent, thats a different discussion.
Well, the way program exists now, it's utilized by two kinds of companies:
1) Someone like Verizon that uses it for cheap labor
2) Someone like Netflix that wants to hire good engineers
The way the program works now (before those changes?), it's much easier for group 1 to fill its positions via staffing agencies overseas. That's true even if a company from group 2 already know who they want to hire, since it's a lottery system.
Would be easier if this were two different visas (or program got revamped in a way that it actually works as it's sold to public), but we can't have "Cheap Human Labor Visa" for various reasons.
every problem has a solution except in America where what we THINK is a problem (and discuss ad naseum on HM) is there by design. Group 1’s lobbyist are paying A LOT more than Group 2 - hence they get the most benefit out of the program. it’ll be interesting to see next four years, I suspect the program will at minimum triple
I have a hard time hiring an American too, especially for backend jobs. But thats because they simply don't apply to the open positions we have. We don't disclose salary upfront, so the argument that "you pay less thats why" doesn't hold. We just don't get those resumes - through recruiters, direct channels, LinkedIn - even when we said we prefer citizens (due to legal costs).
The American people get to decide who they want to allow in and under what conditions. If the American people decide that they should get compensated more than non-American citizens for a role falling under American jurisdiction, they can do that. And other nationalities can retaliate or pound sand, but that's it.
You may characterize it that way, and invite some pretty reasonable animosity; but if you do, then want!=deserve regarding the salary of foreigners, either.
Other countries are free to compete, nobody is arguing otherwise, but it is explicitly the right of any country to determine who is allowed to compete within their nation.
What people want or deserve is irrelevant. If you live elsewhere and feel you deserve more, then that's not America's problem.
I was paid between 400 and 600k a year while on an H1B.
> I am a fan of charging 2-3x the normal tax rate for H1Bs so companies have to actually justify hiring "talent you can't find in America".
This is extraordinarily racist if you spend more than 5 seconds thinking about it, and honestly you should question every one of your choices that have led to this point. It is time for you to re-examine your entire worldview.
Why write like this? It's antagonistic and pompous. I really don't like making light of racism by leaning on the "stop calling everything racist" trope response, but this is pretty extreme. I have no idea what's in the parent's heart, but you only need to give them an ounce of benefit-of-the-doubt to believe that the quoted sentence comes from a place of simple favor for one's own fellow citizens, and not petty racism. And on HN, you're supposed to be giving even more than one ounce of benefit-of-the-doubt.
To be clear, the actual proposal being made is "I am a fan of charging 2-3x the normal tax rate for H1Bs".
One interpretation is that workers should pay 2-3x the income tax, massively depressing net wages for people on visas.
Another interpretation is that employers should pay 2-3x the payroll tax (I guess Social Security and Medicare in the US?) which again means that (not immediately due to nominal wage rigidity, but over time) visa worker wages will be depressed. In any case, visa workers pay into social security, but will not be able to claim benefits unless they become green card holders.
There are already substantial fees employers have to pay, which already depress wages. The proposals suggest making it worse. There is no real thought behind them, no research, no data. Just pure naked nativism: workers must be punished even more than they are right now for daring to immigrate.
It is, in other words, extraordinarily racist. And if someone, through whatever life experiences, has come to believe that this is the way forward, then they absolutely should revisit their worldviews.
---
Neither of these come anywhere close to addressing the actual problem, which is that it isn't the case that workers on visas have the same labor rights as everyone else. Workers on visas are preferentially hired by some firms because they will silently deal with abusive bosses, long work hours and sexual harassment. Giving everyone full labor rights addresses this issue completely.
Do you want H1B worker wages to be depressed, or do you not? Do you care about your fellow workers being sexually harassed, or do you not?
> I have no idea what's in the parent's heart
I don't, either, but structural racism is a million times worse than some rando shouting a slur at me.
Some people get upset that someone on a 'non-immigrant' 'temporary employment' visa can apply for permanent residency, although that is allowed by the H1-B program.
Otherwise, one could immigrate through a different visa; there are some employment visas that are explicitly intended for those with intent to immigrate. Or like a family or lottery visa, I guess.
I think it's possible to have a permanent residency application sponsored by an employer from abroad, but especially if the candidate is from China, India, Mexico or the Philipines, the timelines make even less sense than H1-B timelines (submit your application in a two week window near the beginning of March, for the chance to start in October). I don't know too many places that want to commit to a hire that can't start for 7 months, although it's not unreasonable for those on post graduate visas with work eligibility.
> Some people get upset that someone on a 'non-immigrant' 'temporary employment' visa can apply for permanent residency, although that is allowed by the H1-B program.
Becoming a permanent resident is explicitly allowed under the H1B visa. By contrast, if an immigration officer even had a suspicion that you intended to immigrate on any other visa, that would be sufficient grounds for them to disallow you from entering the country.
Further, the dual intent nature of the H1B visa means H1B employees pay social security and Medicare, even though they themselves are not eligible for it. Something you don’t have to do if you earn money on a non dual intent visa.
The H1B visa is indeed temporary. It lasts only 6 years. But it allows you, or your employer, to apply for your permanent residency on the basis of other categories while you’re in the U.S. on an H1B visa. IOW, the only real use of the H1B is that it lets an employer get to know an employee well enough that they’re willing to sponsor their permanent residency.
Also, the other reason the H1B appears overused and not “temporary” is because in a moment of brilliance Congress wrote laws so that there were an equal number of green cards handed out to people from Jamaica as those from China. As a result, when Indians and Chinese apply and get approved for a green card, they need to wait decades to actually get those green cards, whereas someone from Greece would get it instantly.
Since Congress hasn’t been able to write new immigration laws in 3 decades, extending thenH1B visa is the only way to allow folks who have essentially approved green cards to remain in the U.S., because they’re discriminated by their country of birth.
> The H1B visa is explicitly a dual intent visa. ... Becoming a permanent resident is explicitly allowed under the H1B visa.
I am aware that this is allowed. However, the DOL describes the program like this: [1]
> The H-1B program applies to employers seeking to hire nonimmigrant aliens as workers in specialty occupations or as fashion models of distinguished merit and ability. A specialty occupation is one that requires the application of a body of highly specialized knowledge and the attainment of at least a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent. 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.
So I understand why people would be confused or upset when nonimmigrant aliens with temporary employment authorization end up immigrating.
I also agree that allocating a limited number of residencies by country of birth is pretty bizarre. There are some countries where the whole population could get a green card in a single year (if they were all eligible), but people born in Mexico and India have a 20 year backlog in some categories. Some sort of population or land area factor should apply. The impacted countries may want to consider strategic division to improve their US immigration backlogs ;P and they could gain more votes in the UN General Assembly, too.
They should just get rid of the green card limit altogether.
There is already a limit on people who can get H1Bs and move into the country. Once they are actually living here on a semi-permanent basis, converting to actually permanent should be based on the person themself, not based on how many other people decided to become permanent residents.
> in a moment of brilliance Congress wrote laws so that there were an equal number of green cards handed out to people from Jamaica as those from China
It is largely by design and serves to preserve cultural diversity. Without immigration caps, half of the U.S. would be Indians and Chinese.
It takes around 20+ years to go from H1b to permanent visa/green card. In the meantime your kids born in US have grown up, graduated, you have a house and everything could be yanked at the border when you are travelling.
Meanwhile vast majority of them pay into taxes and social security and leave the US and never see a dime of that money.
Immigrants are the easiest group to exploit by everyone because they have no voice and are vilified by vast majority of the people include the so called intellectuals in here.
The byzantine US immigration system absolutely is an impediment to people coming and staying here, and in my (admittedly anecdotal) estimation is a major competitive disadvantage, and a big part of the reason the UK, EU, Canada and China are making progress towards becoming tech hubs.
Those particular cases have benefited by the shortcomings of the USA actually. I know some big tech companies send workers who weren't able to secure US immigration specifically to offices in Canada, the UK or the EU. For example Meta and Google [1][2].
One can expect the company then grows an interest in developing full engineering teams in these sites. One can also expect some people might simply decide to not come back to the USA.
With the general rise of China's tech scene, recently there's been a trend by which the USA doesn't retain Chinese international students and they instead opt to return home. One has to imagine the very, very long immigration process they have to go to has to do with this [4].
Outcomes aren't binary. For any marginal increase in immigration difficulty for skilled tech workers, there is a marginal decrease in US tech competitiveness relative to other countries.
20 years only if you're born in India married to someone born in India. Not great either way though, but it's really affecting the Indian community because of their particular norms.
If your spouse is a US citizen or permanent resident on their own, great. But if you're on H1-B and your spouse is on H-4, I don't think their country of birth makes a difference?
If you're both on H1-B, then sure, having a different country of birth can help.
It does make a difference. When filing for adjustment of status, you can request USCIS to consider both you and your spouse as chargable to your spouse's country of birth, and therefore be placed in a more favourable GC queue. This is called cross-chargeability [1].
Because of this, the "100-year green card queue" problem only really applies for a couple who are both born in India/China, with kids who are not born in the US. If even one child was born in the US, they would be able to sponsor both parents for an immediate green card when they turn 21 years old. In the meantime, the H1-B beneficiary can extend their visa indefinitely and port their approved I-140 whenever they switch jobs, with a 6-month grace period. The spouse also has full working rights.
21 years is a long time, but while working, both parents will accumulate social security credits and will be eligible to recieve benefits upon retirement (if they've secured a green card by then).
I’m sure this is no consolation, but as a born-and-raised citizen who has paid into social security for 15 years now, I have serious doubts about seeing a positive return on those taxes myself.
If only they just used the current 'investors' money to pay the retirees. They actually use the social security taxes to pay for "whatever" and hope they can come up with the rest when they need it.
>I’m sure this is no consolation, but as a born-and-raised citizen who has paid into social security for 15 years now, I have serious doubts about seeing a positive return on those taxes myself.
Look at the bright side though: You get a chance to get conscripted for a war against Iran/Russia/China and also get to blow up windowless mudhouses in the desert to protect democracy and freedom back in the states.
That's not how social security works. You're not supposed to get a positive return. You directly pay a basic income to retired people (minus administration costs). When you retire, workers pay a basic income to you.
Asking for a positive return on social security is like asking for a positive return on welfare. The positive return comes from not having so many homeless old people all over the country. It's not a personal investment vehicle.
It could be that OP expects Social Security to be kaput by the time he gets to be old.
Looking at the population graph, that’s a valid concern. There’s a ton of boomers and a ton of millenials, but very few babies to pay for our retirement.
(This phenomenon could invalidate even individual stock investment retirement plans as well. We need a future generation of workers, investors, entrepreneurs, consumers).
The issue is that, for me and anyone else who reaches retirement age after 2034, only about 80% of that basic income will be available. For reasons I'm not super clear on, this idea tends to get coded as a conspiracy theory in many circles, despite being uncontroversially true and widely reported on.
That's a perennial Boogeyman. Policymakers have a wide array of tweaks they could make (from adjusting the cap to adjusting retirement age) at any time that could push that out by another century. https://www.epi.org/blog/a-record-share-of-earnings-was-not-...
The number one issue software engineers should care about is using foreign talent to undercut wages. A cursory look at H1B salaries shows this is rampant.
There’s a big difference between “we can’t find any talent” and “we can’t find any talent at our price point”.
The former should be granted an H1B. The latter is abusing the system.
> A cursory look at H1B salaries shows this is rampant.
Where does one get a cursory look at H1B salaries? If you're referring to various websites that publish H1B petition data, then you might be interested to know that they don't show actual salaries, only the minimum amounts that the company is required to pay by law. The actual salary can and often is higher, based on the specific employee negotation/performance/etc, same as any regular non-H1B job.
I'm a highly specialized software developer with 30 years of experience.
I could save our customer, a huge US entity, a lot of money by moving to the states for the duration of the project. I don't have a college degree though, which seems to be a requirement for the H1-B.
Great, as if we needed more outsourcing, I cannot even get a single interview despite being an ex FAANG software developer, unemployed for more than a year. Not even for entry level jobs. The final nail in the coffin.
I always see a lot of people arguing that H1bs are taking away jobs from qualified Americans by willing to work long hours and work cheaper. That may be true, but in my brief exposure to the tech industry it does not feel true because the salaries and perks are so high, it doesn’t seem like tech companies are exploiting workers and hiring “cheap H1b labour”.
A lot of my batch (all H1b masters) when to Meta and Amazon. All of them were paid 200k+ right out of masters, one was even paid 430k. So is the claim that if these H1bs did not exist, companies would pay 250k+ to those out of masters? And 500k+ to exceptional candidates? If OpenAI was legally allowed to hire anyone from India, China etc, would they stop providing 800k+ salaries? In fact, we know from experience that this is not true because if you go to OpenAI’a website they explicitly mention apply from wherever you want and they will handle immigration. And you also see that they did successfully hire some folks from remote countries with exorbitant salaries.
A much simpler explanation, is that in tech companies employees are not a cost center but a profit generation center. And so tech companies are not looking to save costs by paying H1bs less, but are simply looking to hire the best and pay whatever is needed to keep them. Market competition tends to determine salaries far more than employee labour pool, especially when talent is always in short supply.
This theory also seems more correct to me, in that it predicts places where H1b labor would shortchange existing tech workers. It would be wherever employees are a cost center, legacy businesses that need software but would like to just get it done as cheaply as possible. By definition most of these companies would not be FAANG adjacent, but would instead be companies like say Target that needs simple software that works reasonably well at a low cost. An equitable solution then would be to put a flat minimum salary on H1b’s, say 200k, that would remove most of the cases where H1bs are hired to short change Americans, and not affect much of the talent hiring that big tech does. It’s only negative affect would be on startups, which generally pay low salaries, but would now have to pay high salaries for immigrants.
this is a well-studied tradeoff with immigration. high-skilled immigration helps US economy and innovation but low-skilled immigration depresses wages for citizens. you are making this distinction for a narrow case i.e. tech.
H-1B is a terrible visa. I went through it with a few of my peers. Working in the US is great, but it’s not the only option. I moved out after two years and settled somewhere that values stability over the churn-and-burn culture. Couldn’t be happier.
Can't read the full article due to paywall but ostensibly it's due to bias rules on race and not visa rules? Sounds like visas being abused and then backstopped by unrelated rules does not mean the visa rules shouldn't be fixed.
Yeah, I wonder what that is going to ground out to. With the AI race, basically anything tangential is research, at least in the definition of "doing something scientific-looking that's not been done before". That could include a _lot_ of companies from massive to tiny.
I'd rather have H1-B visas be a 5 year unrestricted work permit.
America needs to keep attracting the world's best and brightest, but linking it to a specific employer is problematic. Opens up employees to mistreatment.
I'd say charge a straight up fee, 500k upon approval. That gets you 5 years, if your wiz making 400k a year it's a great deal.
Are we actually doing that though? I managed H1-B employees at Verizon and honestly it felt like a scam. They weren't the best and brightest despite being awesome people in general, and they were also getting exploited by the company in terms of compensation. The only one benefitting seemed to be Verizon.
I would have preferred for a multi-billion dollar company to use the H1-B program as intended and to pay an American wage to someone living and working in America.
I'm just responding to the portion where you said the only one that benefits is amazon. Surely at the very least, the immigrants themselves benefit if the alternative was no ability to work in the US?
There is already a work visa for that called EB5 even though the requirement is $1M (800K for rural areas) and you will need to hire 10 American workers. Plenty of rich people from other countries are using that already.
I hate that it is time restricted at all. Just make it a green card program with a path to citizenship outright. Brain drain the rest of the world. Instead we are providing work experience to our future competitors.
I worked many years under H1B, but moved out of the USA. Unsure if I'll come back, technically I still have time on my H1b, but man, it's just so stressful to lay roots knowing they're conditional on all sorts of ticking clocks and hoops to jump.
I like working at early stage startups— works pretty well with H1B but it makes the process of getting a green card via work complicated. Some people can deal with all that stress, I just rather not.
800k in investment gets you a green card. And you may even make a return on that investment. Why would anyone pay 500k for participating in a pageant ?
If you need to already set up the business that can generate 500k in your home country before coming here, you do the opposite of bringing value and innovation to the US. You have already given most of that to the home country.
> 2. Bar on Multiple Registrations Submitted by Related Entities
DHS will not finalize the proposed change at 8 CFR 214.2(h)(2)(i)(G) to expressly state in the regulations that related entities are prohibited from submitting multiple H-1B registrations for the same individual. On February 2, 2024, DHS published a final rule, “Improving the H-1B Registration Selection Process and Program Integrity,” 89 FR 7456 (Feb. 2, 2024), creating a beneficiary-centric selection process for registrations by employers and adding additional integrity measures related to the registration process to reduce the potential for fraud in the H-1B registration process. In that final rule, DHS states that it “intends to address and may finalize this proposed provision [expressly stating in the regulations that related entities are prohibited from submitting multiple registrations for the same individual] in a subsequent final rule,” but that “[m]ore time and data will help inform the utility of this proposed provision.” 89 FR 7456, 7469 (Feb. 2, 2024). Initial data from the FY 2025 H-1B registration process show a significant decrease in the total number of registrations submitted compared to FY 2024, including a decrease in the number of registrations submitted on behalf of beneficiaries with multiple registrations.[1]
This initial data indicate that there were far fewer attempts to gain an unfair advantage than in prior years owing, in large measure, to the implementation of the beneficiary-centric selection process.[2]
Under the beneficiary-centric selection process, individual beneficiaries do not benefit from an increased chance of selection if related entities each submit a registration on their behalf. As such, DHS has decided not to finalize the proposed change pertaining to multiple registrations submitted by related entities.
> C. Summary of Costs and Benefits
DHS analyzed two baselines for this final rule, the no action baselines and the without-policy baseline. The primary baseline for this final rule is the no action baseline. For the 10-year period of analysis of the final rule, DHS estimates the annualized net cost savings of this rulemaking will be $333,835 annualized at a 2 percent discount rate. DHS also estimates that there will be annualized monetized transfers of $1.4 million from newly cap-exempt petitioners to USCIS and $38.8 million from employers to F-1 workers, both annualized at a 2 percent discount rate.
The biggest loop hole for not being allowed to hire non citizens or permanent residents is not the H-1B. It's actually B2B contracts that have absolutely no restrictions what so ever.
- Less strict on the direct link between degree/job responsibilities
- Recognizes that AI may require multiple academic background
You really won't need to clarify whether the role is a specialty one or not if you just increase the minimum wage for H1Bs. I really don't know why we don't have some rule that pins H1B wages to like the 90th percentile wage.
It would be exceptionally easy to solve the "H1B problem" by making sure that H1Bs are more expensive than local talent; then they really only would be used when local talent doesn't exist.
The working conditions for Americans suck due to this fucking program. People come here to live subservient lives and bring along a toxic culture of submission. The level of ass licking that I see on the regular is akin to a well known Korean airline going into the side of a mountain. It is insane the level of deference you will find.
All this hype about the "smartest, brightest, etc." is nonsense. I've worked with hundreds of engineers in SV who are all on H1B. They are no better than anyone else. My main complaint with them is that their work is fine but the culture they bring is insanely toxic and does not allow for any psychological safety at all. I know enough people in industry for a long period of time to know that it wasn't always this way. There were always problems but it has hit a level that is insane. The fact that an American is a minority nationality when in almost any US tech company is bonkers.
I'm in favor of immigration generally, but I actually agree with the cultural argument here. The toxic culture really shows up in interviewing. Recently I've repeatedly had to deal with interviewees obviously cheating with AI tools. Also, while I agree that folks on H-1 visas are around the same qualification-wise as citizens, I also agree that their primary interest is always their visa, not doing a good job as an employee.
I don't know what the solution is but I don't feel like making it easier is going to be helping either. I'm not entirely sure if this toxic culture would go away as soon as people have green cards. After all, this culture is alive and well in the countries these people are from.
The bad culture isn't just due to being locked into a job or it being hard to get a new job. It is a core component of their belief system. I see this as soon as people from these places get promoted to a manager - they literally turn into the thing they hated the most on the first day! It seems to me to be completely cultural.
Sure, but you have selection effects at the end of a really brutal pipeline from their perspective, so the culture of people conditioned on going through this process is always going to be kinda an asshole.
People go into banking and have shitty hours and culture because there's a nice rewarding story at the end of it (money, prestige, whatever) - similar to what would be at the end of moving somewhere prosperous. The problem with banking culture isn't an inherent problem with American culture, it's merely a product of a system where you have such a hiring system.
Unlike in banking, however, the toxic culture isn't a product of a company or market forces, but the outcome of such a restrictive visa regime. Change the visa regime, and the culture (eventually, you have to give it a generation) also changes.
From what I understand you also need to be able to pay yourself a $60,000 salary minimum, from that LLC. If people can do that, then power to them and let them stay!
If you're worried about people shortcutting a line to get a visa by injecting money into the US economy, again by somehow getting 60K into the LLC to pay the salary of the recipient, this is also a win.
The new administration will likely reform USCIS around eligibility criteria rather than speed of processing and these reforms will be undone as quickly as Mayorkas is gone.
No offense to the very hardworking H1B guys I've worked with, but I'm not a fan because they'll do anything the company says. They are used as scabs to undermine developers leverage. This was especially clear during RTO. It's the same issue of manufacturing stuff in china. Of course an H1B will be a good puppet, if you threaten to fire them you're sending them back home to another country!
Maybe it's just me, but the vast amount of illegal and semi legal migrant workers being exploited suggests what the US needs is a visa system for unskilled labour, not for skilled.
Why does everyone think the cure to the worlds ills is to have more doctors and not more toilet cleaners? People can die from dirty hands on doorknobs faster than from smoking: Basic sanitation work, food work is important. If current US residents won't do this stuff, pick food, clean up, then isn't the answer to bring them in or do we really prefer to have them live in a twilight, semi-illegal world? Really?
I’m very happy for everybody on H1-B whose live this improves! Does this include renewal in USA?
But as an American the “bonafide job requirement” makes me nervous. We have a massive ghost job problem that really needs to be a federal crime. Will this make that worse?
they mean "bonafide job offer". What is happening right now is staffing agencies (mainly in India) mass file H1B applications for all their staff, and then once they get picked in the lottery, they find assignments in the US and file the entire petition after. This heavily disadvantages non-staffing companies who file H1Bs for their staff outside the country or those in the US on F1 visas for actual jobs.
This change is meant to close that loophole. This used to not be a problem, because you had to file the entire petition BEFORE you enter the lottery, but now you just pay some nominal fee and get your name in, leading to a highly profitable situation for staffing companies.
Near as I can tell, it’s similar to ‘don’t talk about salary at work’ stuff - technically maybe if you can prove it and complain to the right person, but it’s everywhere.
It's supply and demand economics: if there is a low supply of workers and a high demand for them, then employers are supposed to compete for them with more pay, more benefits, training/education, etc. When the supply of workers is artificially increased, then companies have less incentive to compete. It becomes a buyer's market for employers.
General equilibrium exists though, if the supply of workers increases you usually see businesses which were previously non-viable appear to take advantage of them at similar rates.
You can illustrate this by doing the other direction: if we killed half of the workforce, would real wages double. Unlikely! You'd probably just see broad-based inflation for a while until wages equalized again.
It can't be due to fundamental skill, though! That same engineer's earnings statistically triple upon moving to the US, which is why we should allow more of them in: people are more productive in the US, and we all benefit from their productivity (most obviously fiscally, but less obviously through products that wouldn't exist in the counterfactual).
For everyone who thinks H-1B and its ilk make it possible to hire foreign workers at below what citizens are paid - have a look on your favorite search engine for:
“Prevailing wage condition”
It’s a requirement that’s part of the Labor Condition Application wherein based on the location you’ll work (the “Metropolitan Service Area” or MSA) to be granted a visa your employer must prove they’ll pay you above publicly available and published minimum wages for each job title.
These wages are public. If you have a problem with what they’re permitted to pay H-1B workers, the published prevailing wages are what you have a problem with. Spoiler though: they’re actually pretty accurate.
Here is one example of how hard it is to underpay workers on visas: during the pandemic, workers on visas were not legally allowed to be furloughed, because they would run the risk of not meeting the prevailing wage that year, putting the employer out of compliance with the LCA and subject to fines in the event of an audit. So what happened in practice was negotiated unpaid leave or in most cases the US gov covered wages via programs like PPP.
Now this is all out the window if the published prevailing wage for a given occupation is too low or the employer somehow sneaks one by the consular officials approving petitions - by selecting a title too junior for the applicant’s years of experience, for example. There will always be anecdata that makes this seem like a huge problem so be wary because one story does not a trend make. As mentioned above, by and large the prevailing wages are pretty on point with what American citizens are paid.
The reality of the way this system works is it’s WAY more technical than fearmongerers would have you believe. Visa holders are very much NOT undercutting anyone and the H-1B is not a completely broken system - even though the lottery and the fraudulent applications cause hell for applicants and employers it does basically do what it’s intended to do. So besides the exploitative situation these changes seem to proactively address, it mostly works and alongside the O-1 and a few other visa categories, has played a key role in the US’ ongoing supremacy in AI and many other industries.
Source: Australian citizen spent over 6 years working in SF on an E-3 visa which is very similar to H-1B.
Hire junior aerospace engineer with senior aerospace experience. Subject engineer to working conditions and long hours that domestic labor wouldn't tolerate. Get 1.5 - 3 senior aerospace engineers for the price of 1 junior.
I read through it and even asked chatgpt for summary and it looks like "passport is now required" and "one beneficiary one draw" that is if you put in multiple petitions it will only consider you once.
I thought Elon was talking nonsense when he mentions frivolous government rules but reading these h1b changes makes me question my own sanity about the government "rules" which they aptly named it as "Final rule" (wtf?).
I wish USCIS was very strict about those guys who is coming in H1b from India incapable of doing anything and hire guy from india to do all their work.
Biden (or whoever actually runs the country, since it's most definitely not Biden) is trying to undermine Trump's plan to turn H1-B into an auction, which is how it should be run, IMO. That's all there is to it. This will be canceled next year.
Unlikely. Elon heavily favors more H1-Bs. If they roll it back, they'll introduce their own version that is even more favorable to those that gain by suppressing tech worker salaries.
Unclear. They're not going to be consistent or competent, and the intent of everything they do will be to either part out the government to their friends, weaponize the US government against perceived enemies. And they might reward people who kiss the ring by granting exceptions.
Really, given the premise, anyone sane should kill H-1B entirely for tech:
"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"
There is no shortage of qualified US software engineers. CS schools are full. The very concept is ridiculous. Kill this law, liberalize immigration instead.
The undergrads at my university were mostly US-born. I believe that's the case most places, even elite universities. The more expensive universities are incentivized to take more international students for the money though -- and obviously there's enough wealthy people globally to fill whatever slots they offer. There are plenty of good engineers from the US who simply weren't lucky enough to be born to rich parents in CA. It turns out moving 2000 miles from home for a worse quality of life isn't super attractive to people born in the US when your whole family still lives in the same region. Of course, if you're born in India or China, the value proposition is a bit different.
Perhaps geographic restrictions on H-1Bs would spread the wealth: force these companies to prove they can't find engineers in the US by looking outside the wealthiest enclaves in the country, where even FAANG engineers complain about cost of living. We'd ease the Bay Area housing crisis, lift up other regions of the country, and provide more domestic-born citizens a path to good jobs while maintaining their own communities.
Also, there are going to be endless, endless lawsuits on everything, because everything they do is going to violate either the Constitution or existing US law. I'm not sure how much that will slow them down.
I think you are excessively credulous and that’s the most polite I can be.
I’m a natural born citizen that’s the wrong skin color and I’m planning on carrying my passport everywhere come Jan 21 - I’m not going to chance being thrown into the back of a BORTAC van.
I have a mixed race family, and am scrambling to get passports in time for people in my family with darker skin, and we will 100% be at least carrying good quality copies of them at all times.
They are claiming to start mass deportations next month, and profiling based on skin color is absolutely the only way that can be possible. Moreover, just like the Nazis discovered, both deporting people and indefinite detainment are impossibly expensive- leaving only one option. This political movement is already based on the idea that people different than them don't deserve to be treated like human beings, and will not be.
I don’t think you’ve thought through the downside risk. A coworker - himself of my ethnicity - assumed I was foreign born, I’m not going to leave it to chance when the promised deportation dragnet starts up.
Your concern is reasonable, and I've thought about it myself. The Wikipedia article linked downthread by int_19h notes: "Up to one percent of all those detained in immigration detention centers are nationals of the United States according to research by Jacqueline Stevens, a professor of political science at Northwestern University." There are specific cases mentioned in the article, and the case of Mark Daniel Lyttle was pretty alarming. It was written up in: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/29/the-deportatio...
On the other hand, you can't be detained without probable cause, and race/ethnicity alone isn't enough. For instance, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Brignoni-Ponce (https://case.law/caselaw/?reporter=us&volume=422&case=0873-0...): "In this case the officers relied on a single factor to justify stopping respondent’s car: the apparent Mexican ancestry of the occupants. We cannot conclude that this furnished reasonable grounds to believe that the three occupants were aliens. At best the officers had only a fleeting glimpse of the persons in the moving car, illuminated by headlights. Even if they saw enough to think that the occupants were of Mexican descent, this factor alone would justify neither a reasonable belief that they were aliens, nor a reasonable belief that the car concealed other aliens who were illegally in the country. Large numbers of native-born and naturalized citizens have the physical characteristics identified with Mexican ancestry, and even in the border area a relatively small proportion of them are aliens. The likelihood that any given person of Mexican ancestry is an alien is high enough to make Mexican appearance a relevant factor, but standing alone it does not justify stopping all Mexican-Americans to ask if they are aliens."
I second the recommendation to get a RealID. You're going to need one eventually for domestic flights, among other things. When I got mine at the DMV renewing my driver's license, they asked for a birth certificate, social security card, driver's license, and proof of (local) residency (e.g. utility bill). So why not get one and carry that as additional proof?
If it's the same process as getting a passport in the first place, you have to give them the documentation proving that you're a citizen, and they sit in it for a while before eventually mailing it back to you.
I wasn't talking specifically about you... there are campaign promises "we are going to deport _____ people" that you should know by now are just shit politicians say so that they get the votes in South Dakota, Alabama and shithole places like that. We heard in 2016 "build the wall, repeal ACA, lock her up..." and whatever BS was spewing at that time. the only policy that you know for sure will be in place for the next 2 to 4 years will be there to make sure that richer get richer - hence my statement that we'll see more people become billionaires than people that we will actually deport :)
Do you know how insane that sounds in this context? I absolutely despise Trump, make no mistake; but if you think Trump is rounding up any of the 40+% of the USA's non-white citizens and deporting them, you have been deluded by widespread FUD.
The "deportation dragnet" might apply to illegals, sure. Will any meaningful amount of US citizens get scooped up in that, if any? Highly, highly unlikely. You're probably more likely to be murdered.
All evidence points to first week being dedicated to flashy arrests in blue states with Tom Homan previously bragging that they would deport both illegals and their citizen family members with no regard for the obvious illegality of the concept.
This is a movement based on extreme hatred and dehumanization of anyone different from them, and most of the time such movements have taken control anywhere historically, it has resulted in mass murder/genocide. We underestimate what atrocities they are capable of at our own peril. I am hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst.
I feel like I - and a lot of people I know - have been in denial of what is happening for a while. It is terrifying, and I don't want it to be true, but it is undeniable. I don't want to be one of those people that says "Davon haben wir nichts gewusst" - "We knew nothing about that."
Funny I see this kind of misguided comments all the time.
Their immigration policy is never only about illegal immigration. Do you actually think it is possible to tighten immigration policy without affecting H1B?
If you need evidence, just look at what happened between 2017-2021. H1B denial & RFE rates were way up, and the administration tried multiple times to roll out policy that significantly restrict the eligibility of H1B visas. They even used coronavirus as an excuse to issue travel bans on H1B. How is that making legal immigration easier?
Trump has said he’d like to “staple green cards to diplomas”. Despite what the media portrays, he’s not pro American, pro white, pro nazi, whatever.
He’s owned by a different slice of the parasitic ruling class that, while opposed to some of the goals the Biden admin was for, still share a common theme of not caring about the average American at all. He has probably the most pro Israel cabinet we’ve ever seen and appears to be cozying up with big tech (thiel, musk, zuckerberg, etc).
If he was truly pro American H1-B would be thrown out and we’d require these companies that are wildly profitable to invest in educating American workers. H1-B is used to exploit both foreign and domestic labor to the benefit of a tiny population of capital holders.
Wouldn't attaching green cards - or at least temporary work permits - to US university degrees be a positive change compared to employment agencies / contractor firms trying to sneak in piles of people without such degrees and screening? That would be a good response to the issue of training (ideally) highly qualified smart people and then kicking them out.
Didn't Trump try to prevent even greencard holders from returning if they were from overseas from the wrong religious area of the world, after promising a Muslim ban? And was then only stopped by courts? Or am I misremembering that?
> Despite what the media portrays, he’s not pro American, pro white, pro nazi, whatever.
Going after a religious/ethnic minority legally holding United States greencard status... Even if he tried to hide it in regions and not a DNA or religious test, he did it immediately after campaigning on a Muslim ban in those words. Sounds quite in line with those terms except it is actually anti-American if we take a huge part of 'pro American' to mean valuing the First Amendment.
> If he was truly pro American H1-B would be thrown out and we’d require these companies that are wildly profitable to invest in educating American workers. H1-B is used to exploit both foreign and domestic labor to the benefit of a tiny population of capital holders.
This is exactly right and exactly why Trump won't do anything about it... when you surround yourself will billionaires you'll want to make this that this tiny population of capital holders prospers even further :)
What's grown up about people who say they don't care if their candidate murders someone on the white house steps, they'd still vote for him? Insanity needs to be derided.
Trump can’t speak about anyone he opposes without giving them a childish nickname, seems fair to reciprocate. Going further, it appears that the leader of the nation modeling this behavior also normalizes it.
This H1B program is gamed so hard its a joke at this point.
I personally witnessed someone that submit multiple applications that this person won the H1B lottery. This person even had fake office, fake business address, etc for the fake entities.
I already reported it, but no action has been taken. This person is now happily employed in the US using H1B.
Unethical life pro tips but work: for those of you trying to get H1B, just submit multiple applications to multiple "companies". There are services like this out there, just need to find out where.
Dude that's just not true. You need to submit almost every single detail about yourself before the lottery, including information on your passport. In fact this has dramatically decreased the duplicate entries to H1B lottery.
I am slowly coming to grips with the fact that this is a genuine widespread hate movement, and the average person that supports it deeply feels this hatred, and personally blames their problems on anyone from another country, culture, or skin color- and doesn't believe those people deserve to be treated as human. I couldn't be more disappointed, angry, and terrified about what comes next.
A supposed shortage of qualified US applicants for tech jobs, especially software developers, doesn't jibe with the huge numbers of US developers currently looking for work, including highly experienced older workers suffering from age discrimination.
I'd be surprised if more than 5-10% of H-1B positions are ones where the hiring company has even looked for US applicants.
My employer cannot hire H-1Bs.
You must be a US citizen to work for my company. No "US Persons" (visa holders) or foreigners allowed.
You have to be eligible for a Secret security clearance. You don't have to get one if you don't want to as there is usually plenty of uncleared work to go around, but you have to be eligible in case that goes away and we need to put you in for a clearance.
We cannot find qualified applicants.
I've had this conversation many times on HN so here are some preemptive responses:
No, we don't make weapons for the military. Well, we do but not my part of the company. The most harmful thing the products I build do is quantify in precise detail how climate change is dooming us all.
No, our positions aren't ghost positions.
Yes, we are willing to train someone who is motivated. We won't re-teach linear algebra to a developer applicant but we will pay a tech writer to go to school nights/weekends to get a degree in engineering (me, I did that).
Yes, we have extensive high school and college work-study/internships and participants make $72k/yr. with full benefits for the duration of the program. That pipeline is actually successful.
No, you can't work remotely. You (even programmers!) have to touch the things we build in order to build them and nobody has an ISO certified clean room in their house.
Yes, we pay well.
No, we don't pay as much as Meta. We build components for satellites that have been sold to space agencies and purchased by various departments/ministries of the environment, not your personal information to advertisers-- one party has more money to spend than the other.
We have shortages in mech/EE/Aero, shortages in software, and critical shortages in engineering technicians.
One issue is that we expect programmers to remember linear algebra and have more than the ability to shovel frameworks on top of each other until a phone app comes out the other side.
Since more skilled immigration can't solve the requirement, what is it you think would help?
> You (even programmers!) have to touch the things we build in order to build them
This sounds like an excuse. You think it's completely impossible to write code for some embedded device, robot, whatever remotely? Hire some cheaper remote hands, set up some telework equipment, voila now you can hire from all over the country.
I did development for a scanning optical microscope, was only once even in the same room with one, and even then never got to touch it.
Of course once that issue is eliminated, the security theater one will be raised next. People might be working from their bed next to a Russian honeypot or whatever. National security types tend to have vivid imaginations in that respect, and have to justify all their rules to themselves.
> We cannot find qualified applicants.
Your company is incompetent. I've applied to hundreds of companies like yours within Huntsville, AL in the past year, rejected or ghosted all the time.
Defense morons will talk about how hard their work is and how they can't find anyone to do it. Completely skip over how prevalent affirmative action is in their hiring process; who were you guys interviewing in 2020? Why is the defense small business base completely dominated by veterans who stack 10% disability ratings and minorities with a preferred SBA sticker on their website?
Complete joke of an industry.
They want top tier talent to work on crappy quality products/code
Meaning people who can unravel all the crap they have to maintain but with no agency to enact any sort of long term fix.
Plenty of this kind of work going around, the older the codebase is the less willing people are to work on it. Soon good engineers don't want to anymore and mid engineers are not good enough to even tweak it. Leaving the only lever these companies can pull being salary and they can't compete with FAANG on that.
Reminds me of those anecdotes you hear from Oracle and ASML engineers. The difference there is that they can still use the salary lever.
Wow, I can't imagine why companies don't want to hire you
Becoming deeply bitter is a very normal outcome of dealing with US company hiring processes in 2024
maybe he's not as competent as he thinks he is
> maybe he's not as competent as he thinks he is
I'm not going to let industry off the hook by blaming the victim.
It's not the defense industry, but I know a very qualified person who's been having a lot of trouble being hired for what must be stupid, industry-dysfunction reasons.
its perfectly acceptable to be bitter and express it sometimes when you have the perception that life has been unfair to you for half a decade.
It doesn’t necessarily speak to the parent’s attitude before becoming bitter. Hard to draw such a direct conclusion for me.
Would you hire someone who is actively being bitter toward your industry?
I work in video games, if I didn’t I would have no pool of candidates to choose from.
However if you read what I wrote:
1) Current attitude is not necessarily prior attitude
2) A histrionic tirade is not indicative of an outwardly perceptible attitude, in fact, its more common that these kinds of outburts are from a person who is not outwardly bitter enough day-to-day and is forced to be positive. (thus it boils inside them and becomes venomous)
3) Bitterness is usually the combination of a (often still) motivated person who feels let down. Your companies most negative voices are very often the ones who are passionate but sad about things. Its the “checked-outs” who you really don’t want if you’re building something you want to be good.
It's very unlikely that people just start by being bitter against an industry, but extremely likely that an industry gave people reason to become bitter in time. People tend to start their careers fresh and free of preconceptions, while industries keep carrying their "blemishes" through decades and many generations of people.
You're applying the circular reasoning of "of course I treat you like crap because you have a bad attitude (because I treat you like crap)", while ignoring the part in the bracket.
Defense morons should be a more common term. These guys have been given free money for generations in VA and can barely do anything other than suck cash from the government. I’m an American it’s disgraceful they are children compared to my Asian colleagues.
What a weird last sentence.
Maybe, when you interview, they sense your anger and that you feel as you say, they are morons, so they move onto more desirable candidates?
if they're getting free money, they're not morons!
humans think we're the most intelligent because we built New York while the dolphins have just been hanging around having a good time. the dolphins think they're the most intelligent for the same reason.
I've found that people who reach for DEI or affirmative action to explain their lack of success are generally just not very good.
All of these hundreds of rejections were due to affirmative action huh? In Huntsville? Ok.
that's an assumption
its just as likely that their process is auto-rejecting candidates and nobody has looked yet
"After his HR department hadn't found a single candidate for a job, the manager submitted his own resume. It was auto-rejected."
syndicated here
https://www.yourtango.com/self/manager-proves-hr-system-auto...
and the associated reddit comment that the articles are based off here
https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/comments/1f8x5ma/comment/l...
this is likely the more common practice
Not commenting on the rest of their assumptions, but to be clear, auto-rejecting candidates that could reasonably fill roles in your company isn’t a defense against incompetence accusations— it supports them.
I was referring to the discrimination rant
even candidates that might fit a poorly implemented affirmative action program are likely getting auto-rejected
nobody knows if its helpful to mention their race or disability, or whether its hurtful
My "discrimination rant" is informed by my ex-girlfriend being hired for an M&S/OpenCL job as a non-programming mech-e. Why? Because all the work was already done and it would look better to the government client to have a female, black engineer sit around in a SCIF doing nothing all day. Stuff like this is absolutely rampant.
This is absolutely true. Government contractors have what is effectively diversity quotas. People will get hired to fill the quota regardless of what they actually do. It’s absolutely not true that diversity hires are all useless, but there are significant incentives to create diversity numbers in order to gain a government contract. Hiring 100 people to do nothing and get the lucrative contract is better than hiring based on need and not getting the contract.
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No, this is what I was told verbatim by her. Her next stop had marketing soliciting her to write BLM articles for the corporate blog! Please keep trying to gaslight me and all my fellow colleagues who have to commit fraud and claim their wives own 51% of their business entity that we're the racists though.
>wives own 51% of their business entity that we're the racists though.
Hush, don't tell people of our sacred text.
I don't see anyone in this thread accusing you of being racist. Please don't flamebait.
Utterly shocked she’s an ex-girlfriend, really.
It's not an assumption, Affirmative Action along with many other requirements is mandated for the contractors working with the US. You can start from here https://www.dol.gov/agencies/odep/program-areas/employers/fe...
Veering off topic a bit, but I wonder what would happen if a company required that for any new hiring filter for Role X, it must pass everyone currently in Role X or above.
For some reason I fancy buying myself a new watch.
Does it make sense, in general, to prevent the hiring process from becoming more selective in the future? If so, why? But if not then a rule like that wouldn't make sense.
If you're hiring because you need someone? Yes?
It makes sense to sort candidates with the more niche requirement to the top of the pile, but to require it? When you need to fill this role?
There's also hiring because "wow, this candidate is great, we should find a place to fit them", and there it makes sense to become more selective going forwards... but when a company is saying "we need people and can't find them", that doesn't seem like the time to be more selective.
I don't think it makes sense to prevent it becoming more selective, but I do think it makes sense to avoid passing over candidates who can do the job. And your best (only?) data on who can actually do the job is who is currently doing the job.
If you really need everyone in Role X to have a PhD in Psychoergonomics, then what's up with Jane over there and her MD?
Have you considered that it might be your attitude costing you job opportunities? Anti-woke baby raging isn’t exactly exactly an attractive quality in a potential candidate
This idiotic positivity culture is so toxic. It seems to have crept up the 101 to Silicon Valley from Hollywood where, as Mel Gibson notes, the one rule is "you can't get mad". Silicon valley was built on getting mad enough to see something wrong with the world and want to change it.
Look, by "won't reteach" you give it away. Those who are not rusty in linear algebra will tend to be recent grads, younger people who are probably not looking for a boring defense job with no remote somewhere in Alabama. Those jobs appeal to people who may have had enough time to forget how to implement a SVD without googling.
We cannot find qualified applicants. ... [a bunch of requirements] ... No, we don't pay as much as Meta. ... [some more requirements]
The shortage on $5000 ferarris continues as well.
So many contradictions!
You pay well, but not so much.
You search for qualified applicants but can hire a student.
You require linear algebra but ok with technical writer.
Looks like your managers don't know who they need to hire or don't want to really hire.
Don’t forget “we don’t build weapons…well the company does but my team doesn’t.”
> Don’t forget “we don’t build weapons…well the company does but my team doesn’t.”
It's totally possible. There's an defense contractor in my area where all the work at the local office is on non-defense government projects.
Defense contractors are usually located in out of the way places. If you work for the USAF Lab in Rome, NY, you make less than a Facebook intern, but the only guy richer than you in town is the state trooper with overtime. They are also stable gigs with good benefits.
Yeah, but you also have to live in Rome, NY. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to live in a major city; but being _near_ one is pretty handy. And if the job doesn't pan out, then being in Rome, NY means your options for the next job are extremely limited. Unless your family is ok with uprooting and moving (probably _again_), the pay to move to Rome for a job would need to be catastrophically large to lure me there.
Exactly. The fit for an employee is challenging, but for the right person it’s the ideal job.
Alabama, ditto. There is no amount of money that would compel me to live there. But for the right person, it’s paradise.
I moved from a string of coastal metropolises to a much smaller city in Alabama, voluntarily. Pay was not a factor, since I kept the same remote job; but obviously my purchasing power is higher here, especially for housing. There are certain aspects of living in or near a "world-class" city that are lacking here, but for my lifestyle, that has no impact on my day-to-day.
I'm not specifically trying to change your mind about Alabama (since as you said, everyone has a different lifestyle), but I would wager that perhaps some of what you think about these Deep South states are contrary to reality.
One of my biggest concerns of doing something like this is being too far away from specialist healthcare in my old age. I see my 70 year old mother struggling to find specialist doctors without going to the big city (which is 2 hours away). She is not even _that_ far away from the big city.
Meaning around one time per month she has to devote a whole day for a doctor trip. I am afraid when she grows older and can't do that by herself anymore. Most of her doctors are still local though, but specialists are hard to find.
When my dad had cancer he had to take similar trips for his treatment. Except it was weekly with occasional multiple times per week. It was brutal for him and my mother.
> the pay to move to Rome for a job would need to be catastrophically large to lure me there
On the other hand, when in Rome...
I think he is saying that they’ll hire folks as technical writers (so you do technical writer stuff) and then help out with engineering classes if things seem to be going well.
This is pretty different from somebody who wants to go in as an engineer but doesn’t remember their intro classes.
> Looks like your managers don't know who they need to hire or don't want to really hire.
It's prevalent in government-adjacent companies. It's all a completely opaque byzantine system to mask the nepotism and the fact that a lot of those people just siphon money from the government like it's a jobs programs.
Not to mention that their application systems are usually complete garbage like Workday or Taleo.
The defense industry _is_ a jobs program, I thought this was clear to everyone. It's cheaper than keeping all the vets on the payroll directly and also cheaper than letting them become another homeless crisis on top of the existing one.
> Yes, we pay well.
Prove it. What city are you in, and what is total comp for software engineer & hardware engineer with 20 years of experience?
I worked in national defense. It was a pain in the ass: shit pay, worst politics, massive tolerance for incompetence & mediocrity, meeting hell, and secrecy (necessary, but "need to know" gatekeeping wasnt at times).
Why would I work in person for less money when I can work remote? For in person work on critical applications like satellites, I'd expect (spitballing here) a staff eng to be making 300k base with substantial bonus/espp on top. Consider that most midsize tech companies are going to pay staff level 200k or above and ask how the company in question compares, before pricing in the crushing inflexibility of in person work.
Because the work is fulfilling and meaningful?
That's the line they gave all my peers who went into public interest and non-profits. Most of them left from burnout or because the low pay and high demands were exploitative.
Here's the trick these mission-oriented employers don't want you to know: you can use the freedom that money affords in order to build meaningful and fulfilling aspects into your life outside of work.
That’s what they want you to believe so they can pay you less than Google. Meanwhile the googlers got rich and are doing fulfilling and meaningful work on their own pace once they quit.
If you think the gov’t work is actually more meaningful and fulfilling than what anyone at Google has been doing, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
Shame my mortgagor doesn't accept fulfillment and meaningfulness as payment options.
the average defense job is the exact opposite of fulfilling and meaningful
Not if you like showing roughly the same set of slides 5x per week in meetings with roughly the same set of people in each one
My mortgage is meaningful too
That’s a good reason to pay more sense you want the best and brightest to work on fulfilling and meaningful problems
this is what church is for
Defense contractors don’t give the government a discount for “fulfilling and meaningful” projects. It’s “f-you, pay me.”
Why should employees of that industry give the employer a discount?
Yeah, it just sounds like the ole "no one wants to work anymore" line when really it's you're not paying enough.
We pay $400-700k for L4-L6 and we have a hard time finding qualified candidates.
Define "qualified".
Then it’s not enough. This isn’t hard.
Your statement is trivially true in terms of market mechanics, but considering that $400k/yr for an individual puts him in the 99th percentile of all income earners in the US, the argument gets a little harder to make.
I reckon a L4-L6 engineer should be in the 99th percentile of talent and value for US workers so I don’t see the problem.
Not to pile on, but if linear algebra is really a part of the day-to-day job and not some manager’s mistaken idea of a proxy for more general talent, then you’re hiring specialists and the pool will not be that large. People who remember all their math and enjoy it and can also code, are also very employable at all the AI companies and departments, including at Meta.
And how do you know if someone’s eligible for security clearance without applying for it? (Other than the obvious “be a US citizen, don’t be a spy” part.)
> if linear algebra is really a part of the day-to-day job [...] then you’re hiring specialists
It kind of bothers me that the parent and other readers here are passing off knowing linear algebra as some kind of esoteric skill. Linear algebra is a year 2 course in a undergraduate eduation. There are polished libraries to make it fast.
Unless you mean enough knowledge to be writing linear algebra libraries, there is no need to consider this skill a high hurdle.
It's not so much that it's esoteric, it's that it's not something most people use every day, and skills decay over time. I mean, Differential Equations (Diff-e-screw) was a year 2 class for me, and I assume I'd fail it if I took it today.
But most people that have any exposure to it can pick it back up fairly rapidly. And most people that have a reasonable exposure to math in general could probably come up to speed (a little less) rapidly.
I don't think it's esoteric, I just don't think it's used much in real-life, day-to-day software engineering as practiced by most professionals. I didn't mean to imply it's a high hurdle, just that IMO a minority of actual SWE's are going to bust out the proverbial slide rule, and anecdotally it seems like they have a lot of options.
That it's a year-2 undergraduate course for some people argues more for forgetting than remembering it, if you're not using it regularly.
> Linear algebra is a year 2 course in a undergraduate eduation.
From what I’ve seen, the year 2 course is great for graphics programming, game development, that sort of thing. It’s not enough for the tasks that require more serious linear algebra, when you’re working with systems of linear equations, large matrices, etc. These “big” linear algebra problems come up a lot in fields like physics simulation, finance, and machine learning / AI.
I’ve done some hobby work in graphics and game development, and I’ve done some professional work in physics simulation. The kind of linear algebra you use in physics simulation is a different beast.
Can't take graphics until you have finished linear algebra, otherwise how would you deal with all the rotation and projection matrices?
I would expect the type you are talking about to be described as something more like scientific computing or HPC or something, right? Numerical methods.
Linear algebra may well be year 2 in a math B.S. program, and you’ll encounter it in physics and quite a few engineering fields, too. Maybe a bit of linear algebra in CS. And a lot of graduates who go do something else for a while will not remember too much linear algebra.
I can easily imagine that an overly aggressive linear algebra requirement will eliminate many excellent candidates.
I got a CS degree from a fairly high ranked state university.
Linear algebra wasn't a requirement. I took it as an elective just for my own curiosity. I have a feeling loads of programmers really don't know anything about linear algebra, and probably a large number are like me and learned it due to interest in game development.
The upstream comment mentioned Linear Algebra as a base requirement for applied programmers in their domain; satellites, remote sensing, communications, navigation, etc.
You can assume they're interested in esoterics like those who can grasp the spherical harmonic equations used to model the daily magnetic flux epoch models to control sats via mag torque, those who can do a multivariate 512 dimensional SVD reduction against pipelined multi spectral data to create sharpened images, create fuel optimal paths in constrained resource starved environments while dodging projected debris paths, .. you know, all that jazz.
In Australia Linear Algebra was straight out of high school first year university basic STEM common core math course work for Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Medical, Biology, etc. streams.
I’ve seen it put after calculus for whatever reason, usually. Surprisingly, even for engineering students, calculus often takes up the first year of classes in the US.
In Australia, and a number of European countries, Calculus takes up the last two years of high school in the advanced stream (for anybody intending to go to university and take Law, Engineering, Medicine, Physics, Chem, etc).
Interestingly in serious university mathematics when looking at the foundations of mathematics, Linear Algebra is a functional prerequisite of multivariate calculus and anything higher dimensional as LA provides a literal basis for abstract spaces and local approximations to continuous functions, etc.
(Often the two are formally taught in parallel)
It’s the same in the US. My son is in 10th grade doing Pre-Calculus now and should be in AP Calculus next year.
If you don’t take the AP class to test out of it, you’d have to take it first in college though.
I imagine many people strong enough in math to pursue sciences will go the AP route and test out of it, but not everybody takes the same path.
I generally think it should be taught along calc 3 (advanced integration and differential equations), as there's decent conceptual overlap and basic calculus helps weed out those who might not be ready for a more rigorous course.
Also to clarify wrt calculus, it is very common for university-track students to take AP calculus in high school, which allows them to take an examination that most universities accept to prove mastery of the equivalent to calc 1 or calc 1+2 depending on the examination.
Also true in the US; I don't know what the "year 2" people are thinking.
At my university, the quickest you would be able to take it was the second year because Calc 1 and Calc 2 were considered pre-reqs. Assuming you're a normal student doing only Fall/Spring semester, you can't take Calc 1 and 2 simultaneously.
Unless you had AP Calc in high school and managed to get the university to accept it. I think quiet a few ABET schools don't accept AP Calc as a full replacement for Calc 1 if your an engineering major.
Here in the US I was: calc 2 (year 1), calc 3, linear methods (year 2), discrete math, theory of computation (year 3). The downside being that the math and comp. sci courses had no overlap, so I've basically forgotten the first 1.5 years. Might have been better off at a state college.
And wow, coming in from the other end of the scale to even the bias...
Did an internship in biotech then spent the next ten years working the only 2-3 blue collar jobs I could land while applying to thousands of jobs per year and writing hundreds of cover letters per year: retail, call centers, IT, software development, comp sci, secretarial, and other random fields I have certifications in. All told, zero interviews. Spent my spare time working on open-source projects and tutoring programming and data science.
Suffered a horrible work-related injury near the end of the decade and had to quit, but just as my savings were about to expire I managed to find a government contracting job for 80K/year, which is nearly 3x my previous salary. I suffer incredible pain at work due to my injury, and spend all my spare time recuperating and exercising, and spend all my money on healthcare and moonshots to no avail. I've wound down all my hobbies. I thought I'd start socializing once I could afford it, but I'm in too much pain.
Competence in government really doesn't reflect my experience in landing a job. What a silver lining. When I can barely walk I can just not show up and nobody would even notice. So career-wise I don't think I'm going anywhere. Life-wise I'm limping on, I guess.
How many years do you expect most working professionals to remember the content of each of their undergrad courses - unless they use it on a regular basis?
I got an A in linear as a sophomore… a long time ago. If it’s needed for a job, I got some studying to do.
Agreed - If you got a Computer Science degree from an engineering school, you probably had to take Linear Algebra as one of your required classes. Also, Linear Algebra is not that hard to learn.
And you’re going to remember that at a job interview 10 years later after never dealing with it after class? Uh, no.
I took through calc 3 + discrete math, but didn’t have to take the full linear algebra course for the BS in CS. I’m sure I could refresh myself on calculus, but almost no one is regularly maintaining their more advanced math knowledge in this field.
Linear algebra is not a universal requirement for CS and EE.
The bigger risk I think is that most engineers took it in the first couple years, didn’t realize they were applying it in all their other classes, and forgot about it.
Why is this down-voted? I was going to add most people have already seen some sort of linear algebra even in high school. Determinants, Gaussian elimination, etc.
It's unclear what "linear algebra" means to GP, though. I agree writing linear algebra libraries is next level, since that involves numerical code and knowing FP math well.
This is a real life version of this comic
https://xkcd.com/2501/
> Determinants, Gaussian elimination, etc.
Umm, not in Pennsylvania government high schools, not typically. Not by a long shot.
Isn’t linear algebra heavily used in machine learning and computer graphics (not just know it, but be able to wield it proficiently)? So ya, the talent probably exists, but they hit the “these engineers are making half a million a year to do something else” problem.
There is a lot of published research work in ML that had huge impact without explicitly touching linear algebra.
Given that is the case, to answer your question: yes, linear algebra is the foundation of ML. No, a lot of impactful day-to-day ML engineering can be done without touching linear algebra.
This is how assembly is the basis of compilation and programming. But you probably are going to get a whole lot of work done without ever using it.
It's generally a nice flex when applicants can code assembly, and usually a yellow-flag when the company suggests they require knowledge of assembly.
To me, my eyebrows raise when an industry person mentions linear algebra. I'm just saying the odds are really low that you actually use it.
Yes, exactly, I would (naïvely) assume it's common among e.g. ML specialists, who are in high demand and thus hard to recruit. I'm sure there are a lot, but if I had to extrapolate from experience ("OK, who's good at math, hands up?") I would say it's less than 20% of coder genpop.
> People who remember all their math and enjoy it and can also code, are also very employable at all the AI companies and departments, including at Meta.
That's either a wishful thinking or a stretch of definitions, IMHO.
What about the opposite? My math is getting super rusty but it doesn't matter because all I do is push protos around. Yet I seem to be pretty employable.
> And how do you know if someone’s eligible for security clearance without applying for it?
The short answer is "You can't, not with 100% certainty.".
Based on my experience from decades ago, the long answer is "Anyone who's a US citizen and doesn't lie about their drug use and debts can get a Secret clearance.". Things MIGHT have significantly changed since my clearance lapsed way back when, but I doubt it.
Actually, after engaging my brain a bit more fully, I realize that one can be eligible for a security clearance but fail to actually be granted one.
That is, eligibility concerns whether or not the State Department will consider your application, not whether or not they will grant the clearance after performing their background and lifestyle investigation.
You didn't name your employer for someone who might be interested. Perhaps visibility is one reason you can't find anyone?
I applied to a similar position locally this year. I far exceed their requirements and experience and I got rejected at the application stage. And the same goes for nearly all of other places I applied to. Hiring has most definitely changed over the years. They are not just looking for "qualified applicants". There is something else going on.
>I applied to a similar position locally this year. I far exceed their requirements and experience and I got rejected at the application stage.
Could be "This one is overqualified, we can't pay that much" or "He doesn't have experience in the exact thing we need." Or just that they want a qualified applicant but they've got lots of options.
But then the narrative of "there aren't enough qualified people" collapses, and H1-Bs unjustified.
Then they’d also have to pay more and not have someone they could put under their thumb.
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> We cannot find qualified applicants
> No, we don’t pay as much as Meta.
So, essentially, you are seeking special treatment from US citizens. I’m not saying this is always unreasonable, but you’re in the territory of a centrally planned economic decision, and in the US philosophy that is supposed to be done minimally.
Maybe the right thing is for your company to shut down or change their line of business, freeing up the labor for Meta.
Yes, because obviously we as a country should prioritize creepy VR avatars over understanding climate change.
By this reasoning no charities should exist (they pay less than commercial orgs) and even people who are willing to work for less in order to feel good about their contribution should not be allowed to.
It’s a very cynical, even nihilistic view.
> Yes, because obviously we as a country should prioritize creepy VR avatars over understanding climate change.
As a country we have decided to let the market decide what to prioritize. Who are we to judge "creepy VR avatars" are less important if people are willing to fair and square pay for them? If they are creepy, don't pay for them.
> No charities should exist.
No that is not the appropriate conclusion. People are of course free to work for less and balance their circumstances. If they want to volunteer for a charity by choice, more power to them. But no, using taxpayer money to fund "charities" is by-and-large corruption in my book.
> It’s a very cynical, even nihilistic view.
If we are doing labels, yours is a very communistic, statist, view.
--
P.S. regardless of your PoV, I like that you acknowledge my core point: that the OP is seeking special treatment in the form of cheap labor from the US. You are simply arguing for that special treatment being justified, not denying that's the core demand.
Profit is not and shouldn't be the primary driver for whats useful economic activity. There is a lot of good work to be done that can't or won't be sustained by the market. Basic scientific research for example.
Who ends up paying for the decision to pay a meta engineer x, but the climate change engineer x/5?
It’s the engineer who picks the climate change job instead.
Essentially what you’re saying is that due to society not being willing to pay competitively, engineers should take the kick to the nuts and be paid peanuts to make up for societies bad decisions.
Sounds like a pretty stupid decision, frankly.
I mean sure you could argue that, as communists and others perhaps do, for instance, but we are chiefly talking about the US, where individual profit is decided, IMHO correctly, as the primary metric. Sure, you may want to choose to minimally do certain things for national security or other legitimate reasons as the people vote for (as I mentioned in three posts above), but that is supposed to be a deliberate choice of the people and their representatives, driven by their desires, not as an automatic subsidy to any pre-established business, in the form of lax immigration policy which can have second-order effects.
You are very confused about how the US works. Go find out where the Internet comes from, for example.
Ironic that you use it as an example, since Internet blew up exponentially the moment commercial activity was allowed.
It blew up with commercial activity, but it never would have existed in the first place if it hadn't been created in taxpayer-funded research labs.
Someone that wants to do some good in the world can have a bigger and better impact by getting paid much more and donating half the difference to charity.
Working for a company that launches satellites that examine climate change is far less impactful. It's not worth a big pay cut even when you're focusing on altruistic motives.
> Someone that wants to do some good in the world can have a bigger and better impact by getting paid much more and donating half the difference to charity. [Citation needed] Working for a company that launches satellites that examine climate change is far less impactful. [Citation needed] It's not worth a big pay cut even when you're focusing on altruistic motives. [Citation unavailable as its purely subjective]
Working for a company that sometimes makes satellites that make measurements of climate change is so indirect at helping people if at all. Donating to that company (by being paid less) is not a good use of money, in terms of charitable benefit. I don't think any of this is wild enough to need citation in a discussion where the median comment is not expected to have citations.
How many people honestly think it's a good idea to donate to a for-profit company?
> It's not worth a big pay cut even when you're focusing on altruistic motives. [Citation unavailable as its purely subjective]
I'm talking about level of benefit, which is not subjective.
Edit: Also I just reread the original comment and realized the climate change measurement was listed as a negative, so for the two citation neededs I point back at the original post about the company. Donating a single dollar beats a negative.
IF Meta is the benchmark for “good” pay, then this is nuts.
There are far more people who need code, than just the people at FAANG companies.
Are you saying that these firms are economically uncompetitive, with META, and should shut shop?
>Are you saying that these firms are economically uncompetitive, with META, and should shut shop?
A company with same requirements but not the funding? Absolutely
>There are far more people who need code, than just the people at FAANG companies.
With different requirements you can find way more people.
In that case, there is 100% going to be a move to offshoring.
Ideally, the industry would relocate outside of the US, to a place where they can be competitive.
However, since this defense, they can’t, and will never be competitive.
So defense will languish.
I guess that’s all I have. I can’t see a way out of the situation if we accept your premise.
Defense margins aren’t going to beat social media margins, that too of something like meta.
Requirements are requirements. If you need a hammer, scalpels won’t help.
> However, since this defense, they can’t, and will never be competitive.
The US defence budget is ~20x Meta revenues. They can be competitive, but they don't choose to allocate their resources that way.
They seem pretty happy to try to guilt trip people into taking the pay hit ‘for the good of the country’ while someone in the middle pockets the difference though.
> Defense margins aren’t going to beat social media margins
Really? It's the first time I am hearing US is procuring defense for cheap!
If there is a margin issue, that's an efficiency problem, i.e. the company is being an idiot or deliberately wasteful/stealing (perhaps due to structural problems like overreliance on cost-plus contracts).
This isnt the first time you are hearing that social media margins are better than defense margins.
That is a misrepresentation of what was said, and an unkindness to the conversation being had.
Tech scales, in a way that manufacturing and physical products dont. I would assume that on HN, this is common knowledge, and that you also are aware of it.
There are 4.8 million developers in the US most of them are not making Meta salaries and I would say that 80% will never see 200K inflation adjusted in thier lives.
Instead of going to levels.fyi go to salary.com and choose any major city in the US that is not on the west coast.
No most developers don’t get RSUs or anything else aside from their salaries and maybe a bonus.
And before someone replies that I’m “bitter”. No I’m good, I’m 50. I did my stint at BigTech and I don’t have the shit tolerance level to deal with the politics of any large company.
You are actually proving my point. If there are 4.8 million developers who are not commanding Meta salaries, and they "pay well" it should be fairly straightforward to get labor.
It's simple: the more picky you are the more you will have to pay. The GP admitted the upper bound of Meta, which is a company that is sustainably operating in the same country. If you cannot compete in a labor market, either raise your product pricing or be more efficient. If not, you will make less profit and/or go out of business, which is an appropriate outcome most of the time.
No one is entitled to their business model.
I think the other part of the problem is no one in software wants to work in Huntsville.
There are numerous reasons why AL sucks.
I can’t believe that his work is so complicated that he can’t take a good older developer in thier 30s, who would be more than willing to move to a lower cost of living area where they can raise a family affordability and design an internal training program to get them up to speed.
Offer things that we care about like free health insurance, “unlimited PTO”, a generous 401K match with immediate vesting, etc.
I personally wouldn’t move to Alabama. But many would.
At 50, I need to work. But I don’t need to chase after FAANG salaries. I optimize for my other priorities. As I said in my previous post, I’m not “disdaining what I can’t have”. I’ve been there done that.
While I'd normally use levels.fyi for more accurate data, since you don't want to rely on that, here's info from glassdoor.
Senior: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/remote-senior-software-en...
> $178K - $262K/yr
Principal: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/remote-principal-software...
> $269K - $415K/yr
> The estimated total pay for a Principal Software Engineer is $329,957 per year in the Remote area, with an average salary of $196,928 per year. These numbers represent the median, which is the midpoint of the ranges from our proprietary Total Pay Estimate model and based on salaries collected from our users. The estimated additional pay is $133,029 per year. Additional pay could include cash bonus, commission, tips, and profit sharing.
Sounds like the right ballpark. If you're in a location that doesn't pay as well, remote can pay much better.
Exactly how many “remote principal software developer” jobs do you think there are available and that’s a self selected sample and even then they for some reason separate “senior software developer”.
Look at salary.com where you can see by cities.
None of the BigTech companies have many remote jobs. Google is even requiring their customer facing professional services department to be in certain cities. That was a bridge too far even for AWS.
I understand your struggle. I have worked with US and non-US orgs that are in similar boat.
In my experience this is often and at least in part a self-inflicted wound. As you describe your side of the business, it should not restricted, but it is. Maybe? Not enough detail to be certain.
What I see time and time again is business not willing to implement proper DLP, labeling and isolation of restricted things. Instead, they just throw everything into a single bucket, because it is quicker, faster, some of the risk and compliance is shifted to third party, and initially cheaper.
In short, a US, UK, Aus company that does government contracts will just force everyone into NOFORN, on-prem requirements (because DFARS, CMMC, CE+, Essential 8, or whatever). It is way quicker to do this for entire company than actually label data, isolate environment and resources, and so on.
I'm a U.S. citizen and I've applied to plenty of these types of jobs. Had an offer at Palantir previously but would not take that now due to ethical concerns.
I'm an older worker in management. Willing to be hands on. Not looking to get paid as much as Meta (I've worked there too) but also don't want something that pays peanuts. Willing to relocate to many places.
Genuinely curious where I can find such jobs.
In my experience roles at companies like this in the southeast US pay around $120k for senior engineers, probably a bit more for management. Not sure if you consider that peanuts, but it’s significantly less than Meta.
For clearance specific kinds of jobs, I use
https://www.clearancejobs.com/
Don’t we first need security clearance before applying to these jobs? Or at the time of joining the company helps us to get clearance?
Some employers will pay the cost to get a security clearance. Others will not. IME, employers will tell you in the job description which kind of employer they are.
"Must have a currently active $TYPE clearance." and "Must be eligible for a $TYPE clearance; position contingent on acquiring a $TYPE clearance." are the sorts of phrases to look for.
It would be good to have a "no military" filter.
Results would probably come out empty anyway.
The pool of Americans that can qualify for a clearance is very small. You'd be surprised how many people have poor credit, bad debt, foreclosures, foreign connections, drug use and/or arrest history. It's not a fair comparison to the applicant pool available to your typical industry business. When I got my TS out of college, the OPM agent went to my old frat house and interviewed people at random, then went to my girlfriend's sorority house and interviewed random people there. It can be brutal.
If you are a citizen but your spouse is not a US citizen, does that count as an out? I hard a while ago that having a spouse from China could ruin your chances of getting security clearance, but I’m not sure if naturalizing solves that problem or not.
Yes, it will make a huge impact during the investigation and adjudication process. For TS and TS/SCI, even with naturalization the chances for approval will be slim and naturalization likely won't help, especially if they have family in China. For the government, it's all about calculating risk of someones loyalty, character and having things that can be exploited by financial issues (debt is the biggest disqualifier), foreign contacts or family, and anything they'd want to keep secret that could be used for blackmail.
> debt is the biggest disqualifier
If they have a good candidate and the only problem is debt, they should offer to pay it off. They have no qualms printing billions to save some broken banks.
Someone with lots of debt likely has some aspirations of foreign travel to risky locales, regardless of what they say… so it makes sense why that would be a disqualifier.
Why would having a lot of debt make that person have “… some aspirations of foreign travel to risky locales…”?
Plenty of people get into debt just doing normal shit at their homes
High risk behaviors correlate… It’s not a foolproof assumption, but it probably will be true more than half the time.
past drug use does not preclude a clearance (edited)
It absolutely can. Depends on the drug and when it was last used, if you had any drug-related incidents or court ordered rehabilitation.
That’s going beyond simple use. The two year lookback is real but nobody is going to fail a basic clearance over college pot use.
I didn’t say anything about pot. I said drug. That’s any illicit drug or controlled substance including prescription misuse. The look back for declaration is 7 years, not 2, and generally you are auto denied if use was within the last 12 months, college or not.
Yes, we pay well. No, we don't pay as much as Meta.
How well do you pay? If I were at Meta, my total comp would be 500-600k. I make half that at a small startup. Can you afford me?
How many years of experience?
I fall almost exactly on the low end of this range: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/senior-aerospace-engineer...
With 15 years of experience.
I'm at the low end of my peers.
Like I said, auctioning off access to your users to advertisers pays better than the European space agency.
Holy shit, that auto-redirects to the salary range in Canada for me (66K-95K CAD)
Tried again with a U.S. VPN and I'm gob-smacked by how different that range is.
Yup, I’m in Canada as well, and I was quite a bit thrown off by the redirected Canadian pay range.
For anyone curious, the Canadian pay range is:
Base pay $66K - $95K/yr
$79K/yr Average base pay
The low end of that base pay ($66k CAD) converts to $45k USD.
While the U.S. pay range is:
Total pay range: $266K - $463K/yr
$346K/yr Median total pay
Pay breakdown $137K - $223K/yr Base pay $129K - $240K/yr Additional pay
Wait the low range of that link is £45k but you say work study placement people get $75k a year?
There might be some regionality built in; viewed from the US the range is $265K - $463K/yr.
I feel like that range is a on the high side, at least for jobs outside the Bay Area. Unless aerospace pays a lot better than software jobs at government contractors. When I was laid off less than 2 years ago and applying to a wide variety of places, the gov contractors were only offering in the $120-$140 ballpark for senior sw engineering positions. They tended to play up gold plated benefits, high 401k match, etc as well but there’s no way that would get it up to $263k.
That is outrageous that two seemingly developed countries could have such a huge compensation gap. A senior aerospace engineer in the UK can make as little as 45k GBP, or 56k USD? One fifth as much as the lowest-paid American??
The take-home on that is £35k. The median rent in London is £26k. I suppose the person making £45k doesn't likely live in London, but still pretty grim.
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2024/10/14/the-amer...
> One fifth as much as the lowest-paid American??
Americans are often blown away and kind of ignorant of how, relative to the rest of the world, they are really wealthy and well paid. Like, people have way less disposable incomes in other parts of the world, even developed countries. The purchase power of the USD and the power of the US economy is absolutely insane.
The U.S. engineer can be fired on a whim immediately and lose their health care (COBRA) and the company that fires them can even contest their unemployment benefits (that the employee paid into) if they feel motivated enough. That's one of the reasons they get paid much more.
The UK is really, really poor compared to the US.
The UK is poor because they decided to financialize the economy in the 90s and stop making things. It's like canada where the GDP per capita goes down every year. I'm amazed there hasn't been a revolution.
GDP per capita has not gone down every year in Canada or in the UK:
https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/gdp-per-capita#:~:text=T...
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-per-capita
(Click the button to check the 25 year view.)
> canada where the GDP per capita goes down every year
Couldn't this largely be explained by their importing huge amounts of low-income people?
I don't think the average migrant salary is much different from the average UK citizen salary. Then again, I also don't find the "financialisation" argument very compelling. Plus, the GDP per capita visibly does not go down every year.
Of course. Canadians are still getting poorer every year and that's the salient point.
The UK is poorer than the US, but US software engineering salaries are an outlier. The difference is not as big as that comparison would suggest.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/03/britai...
"another respected data journalist, John Burn-Murdoch, calculated that without London, the UK would be poorer, in terms of GDP per capita, than even the poorest US state, Mississippi."
Yes, it's true that the UK economy is very London-centric, but the original poster was talking about the UK as a whole vs the US as a whole. (The flip side of this is that the figures would look better if you compared London to a major US city.)
None of this changes the fact that US software engineering salaries are a poor comparison to use to illustrate wealth disparities between the US and other countries, as they are an outlier.
>One fifth as much as the lowest-paid American??
Quite! A top 10% earner in Finland, a supposedly very developed country, by saving all of their net-income spending zero on food and letting their SO pay the bills, could in 2-3 years afford a new Skoda.
Ah I think I see where the confusion lies.
The US is not a developed country, rather it is a particularly rich third world country.
Yes, Aerospace Engineers don't live in London because there are very little (if any) aerospace jobs in London. Biggest aerospace employers in the UK are BAE Systems and Airbus, and both have factories in much cheaper locations (Wales, Northwest of England).
You're basically comparing "super specialised job in the middle of nowhere with very low cost of living" vs a "super specialised but much more needed job in multiple high cost of living locations" (Seattle metro area, LA metro area to name a few).
You guys get the NHS though.
I don’t know if you’re making a joke or not, but getting NHS isn’t worth $200,000 USD per year.
Most Americans get employer-provided health insurance, which costs money (the amount specified in the DD section of the W2), and its often in the $1500/month range. That DD amount isn’t part of your income or the salary Glassdoor mentions. It’s an added benefit of top of that.
In the UK and elsewhere, around $500/month/person in taxes pays for your healthcare. That’s essentially subtracted from your income. So the uk income is even lower when you subtract the taxes the NHS costs.
> I don’t know if you’re making a joke or not, but getting NHS isn’t worth $200,000 USD per year.
Nope, but NHS + no/less student loans + no car dependency + cheaper childcare + time off + a ton of other things shave quite a bit off that $200k. Not equal, and not in every personal case, but a lot.
Canadian and not UKian, but our public healthcare is definitely not worth 50% of my take home cash, I get much better access to care in the US right now. it still says Canada on my passport so I can get healthcare if I get fired or chronically ill
Yes but those numbers are pre-tax income.
They don’t call them europoors for nothing
No they cannot, unless maybe you have advanced degrees and a couple decades experience.
Yeah but then you're too old. Need to be in your 20s with a couple decades of experience.
Calling it now - a leetcode-based kindergarten programme is the next big a16z investment.
"Hit the ground running."
You say this ironically, but someone who’s been working hard 15 hours 7 days a week in a niche, 50 weeks a year, from age 15 to age 29 has clearly a much higher potential than a 45 year old following the normal path in life.
And almost certainly a higher employable value too unless they have catastrophically bad social skills…
Did they develop those social skills during the free time they had?
Why does this matter?
They can develop it while lying in bed and daydreaming for all the difference it makes.
Realistically, there are plenty of competent people they could hire for any low six figures amount (unless they are directly in the DC area, in which case add 20-30k for cost of living). 500-600k or half of that is a unicorn salary that doesn't apply to those industries or areas and is irrelevant to the discussion. Even if they offered you that salary you wouldn't take it because the work environment would be radically different from working at a bloated web tech firm, or working at a silicon valley startup.
Totally different markets. You wouldn't be interested in that job, and they wouldn't want to hire you even if you were interested. Even the tone of your post makes that obvious.
We should be discussing early to mid career folks from somewhere other than silicon valley startup or big web tech land. Aka "meat and potatoes" tech jobs. That is what's being discussed.
I don't know what their problem is with hiring either and I agree with you that it could be partially compensation related. But not being able to compete with Silicon Valley on compensation is not where I would be going with that argument....I think it's more likely to be related to environment and interview style and notions of what "experience" means. In other words...bad hiring practices...not necessarily raw compensation issues. The compensation for non "big tech" firms can sometimes be quite good in comparison to other career paths especially when located outside of the valley, so being unable to hire talent makes me suspicious of hiring practices more than compensation (assuming they are reasonably large and hit market rate for the area and are in a reasonably large metro).
Just my two cents.
Do you offer to sponsor people to get their security clearance? many jobs I see in the sysadmin space want someone who already has clearance, and are not willing to do the process of getting someone their clearance.
Came here to say this. I have a friend who is a manager for a defense contractor. He says that competition is fierce for people that already have clearance and they can't really hire someone to sponsor them because of how long it takes. There is a 2-3 year wait for obtaining security clearance because of a backlog caused by COVID.
The people that have it can write their own ticket and do very little work apparently.
> You must be a US citizen to work for my company. No "US Persons" (visa holders) or foreigners allowed.
This is illegal under IRCA unless another law or government contract mandates it. [1] If every single role at your company requires a Secret clearance, then I question how separate “your part of the company” really is from the part that makes weapons.
[1] https://www.eeoc.gov/national-origin-discrimination
That just means that if you’re going to hire someone on a VISA you can’t discriminate which country they’re from.
I believe there is some protection against discriminating against greencards, but not visas
Recent green card holders, asylees, and refugees get federal protection, except when a law requires or permits otherwise. The other commenter’s company has a blanket rule of allowing none of these categories. Approximately this got SpaceX into trouble with the DOJ recently.
Some state or local laws offer additional protections beyond federal law, including NYC for all immigration statuses, except as required or allowed by other applicable laws. (So, for example, NYC doesn’t pretend that companies have to hire people who don’t already have employment authorization.)
Obviously this company is a government contractor.
Not all government contracts require all employees working on the contract to have clearances or be US citizens.
But some do! And sounds like this is one of them.
I remember visiting a family member’s work (similar industry) and the front office did a screening of me as a visitor to make sure I met those same requirements before I could enter.
I’m guessing the contracts that make paper clips don’t need those stringent requirements, but the ones that make sensitive comms equipment do.
Large companies (think FAANG) can and do have non cleared, non citizen, non us persons (permanent residents, refugees and asylees) working on such projects with the proper separation of scopes, data access restrictions and so on.
To be fair, he never said "every single role at your company requires a secret clearance." He has specifically mentioned that you can get by even without them. You have misquoted.
Companies can chose to not sponsor visas. That’s not illegal.
True, but they aren’t allowing recently admitted permanent residents, asylees, and refugees, all of whom have federal protections against immigration status discrimination in employment.
Some places like NYC offer legal protections in this area to all categories of immigration status, of course within what applicable federal and state law requires and allows. Federal law allows preferring citizens over equally equalities noncitizens, requiring employment authorization to already exist, and complying with any specific legal requirements for restricting certain jobs to citizens. NYC law respects all of this. But overall NYC is totally allowed to, and does, add protections beyond federal law.
Late typo correction well beyond the edit window: “equally equalities” should have read “equally qualified”.
I think it probably is illegal as well. My company had to settle a lawsuit with the DOJ recently for this reason.
It is required by law. Most likely through prohibitions for "exporting" defense technology, which can be very broad. "Exporting" can consist of having a casual conversation with a non-"US Person" or having a document visible on your desk.
"Secret" classification is really mild, about 5 million people have one.
>The law prohibits employers from hiring only U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents unless required to do so by law, regulation or government contract.
At these workplaces it will be a combination of all 3 of law, regulation, and government contract.
You are referring to ITAR. Under ITAR, permanent residents are considered US Persons and not subject to export controls. Clearance is a totally different thing that people often confuse with ITAR, which is only granted to US citizens, and though it is possible to grant something somewhat like clearance to non us citizens, it is almost never done.
Edit: Ah I see you are not disagreeing with what I said at all. Apologies, I cannot count the number of times I have seen in reddit and here, where people confuse ITAR with clearance.
Presumably government contract does mandate in this case.
If someone is a software developer who has done non-trivial things and linear algebra but not recently and needs to be refreshed, do you provide time/training to refresh on the math skills?
I’d imagine that the rusty candidate could refresh themself on linear algebra in what, two three-hour evenings before the interview.
Who’s putting in the work to study for a niche skill set for a place that will pay you less than the market?
Normally that kind of requirement leads to _higher_ compensation
> ISO certified clean room in their house
Well it's not ISO certified, and its more of a box than a room. But yes I do actually have access to a sterile (not sanitised) environment at home.
I can't work for you on account of my SA citizenship though. It looks like my only option to get that kind of clearance is to start my own company.
> No, you can't work remotely. You (even programmers!) have to touch the things we build in order to build them and nobody has an ISO certified clean room in their house.
What part of the country are you in?
a lot of these fed or sec clearance type jobs in VA/Maryland area.
They talked about manufacturing satellites, some of this aerospace stuff is in Alabama because a senator back in the 60s got some space contracts for the Huntsville area - good luck finding people who want to move to AL. Not saying that the poster is necessarily in AL, but if they are then that could be a reason they're not finding people.
This. If you're not in or near a major urban center you're going to have to really be attractive to pull people in to work there.
And if you are near a major urban center pay needs to reflect the HCOL environment or the unpaid commute time.
What’s your company? What exactly do you pay? I haven’t done linear algebra in a while but certainly remember enough from graphics programming (and of course physics and linear algebra proper) in undergrad. Feel free to check out and contact me via any of the routes available on my GitHub: https://github.com/JonLatane
You might believe that you don't make weapons, but nobody else does.
You're building satellite components, which I'm quite certain are dual use.
The linux kernel is dual-use.
This is why you can't hire anybody competent.
Maybe try admitting what you're building and justify it as necessary instead.
Insulting people's ability to reason is a certain way to repel anybody with a brain.
I used to build fantastic little things the likes of which no human being had ever seen before that have killed many, many, people including (if reports from that side of the company are right, and they are) thousands and thousands of Russians and their tanks.
Now I design radar panel assemblies for weather satellites.
They're both a good living.
> They're both a good living.
Only someone who has never seen war first-hand can make a statement like that. You've never been in the kill zone.
[flagged]
Russians are brown now?
The East is a delicate matter.
I guess even if he knew he was making weapons, he wouldn't be able to say it... And that's another reason why these companies cannot find workers.
What’s your companies general location? Do you have an office where tech talent wants to work? Location is an important part of a competitive employment offer.
And I highly doubt linear algebra is a day to day requirement for a typical worker. Sounds like a case of expecting chauffeurs to know how to build a drive train from scratch.
Security clearances are a giant hassle. Why go through all that for less than FAANG pay?
You're asking too-obvious questions. GP wants you to work for them, for less money, in a less attractive area, doing work that is likely related to killing people.
And you think they're asking the kind of question you asked? lol
sorry, what's GP here?
Grandparent comment.
I’ve applied to a variety of your positions each cycle for the past 3 years. New grad, clearance-eligible US citizen from a mid-range state school with a historically strong defense/gov. connection. I have multiple internships, a math minor, and my standout project is a rendering engine with a physics/collision system. I’ve never had or expected a remote option, and 70k (outside of the extreme-COL areas) sounds fantastic.
Your company has never offered me a phone screening. Seeing claims that Northrop is in sort of qualified candidate crisis when myself and many applicants I know of similar profiles are lucky to get so much as a rejection email is borderline infuriating.
Defense contractors have loads of entry level jobs, but most require you already have a clearance (e.g. wanting US Army 17c or IC vets) or certifications which cost $500+ plus. Many don't sponsor a clearance, because it takes a long time, high chance of the application not passing and because they may just use you to get a clearance and job hop to a higher paying job.
Defense contractor jobs are the only ones I've seen that haven't been outsourced overseas yet, but good luck getting a CJO for one that will sponsor a clearance and actually getting cleared.
A top tier three letter agency sponsored me for TS SCI FSP and it took 9 months after the conditional job offer (CJO) after 10+ offers of personal interviews with me not counting my old jobs, college and friends/acquaintances just for them to cancel my app for "other traits, conduct or behaviour" and to reapply after a year.
I heard other applicants on the free bus ride that it was their 3rd or 4th try at the polygraph or that the agency forgot about them so they had to a Congressional inquiry after 2 attempts prior etc.
It's a lot of BS and I've tried for a few years now to work for the federal government and military, but they just don't want me. I've given way more effort than normal folks, so honestly screw them.
Amen, good to see it wasnt just me. My last job search was this summer and I hit this all over.
I'm fine with working for a defense contractor or the feds. I'm fine with taking a pay haircut relative to FAANG to do something meaningful. I'm even fine with commuting, and the agencies poking into my life to assess a clearance. But I need to move from one job to another without a gap.
Private sector employers won't touch me without a clearance, and in my part of the world there are lots of people who already have one, so I'm not worth their time.
The US government would put me through a clearance, but their hiring practices are so slow and arcane that they're just not viable for someone who needs to find a job starting say in the next 30 days.
I wish it wasn't that way, but it is. So, I stay in the uncleared commercial sector.
> We won't re-teach linear algebra to a developer applicant but we will pay a tech writer to go to school nights/weekends to get a degree in engineering (me, I did that).
Why? Linear Algebra is certainly something that can be learned faster than a degree in engineering. I expect the average software developer (someone that can understand algorithms) can achieve competency in less than a semester's worth of time. If someone is a good developer, learning specific skills sets for the domain is pretty normal.
In other words you are looking for people who are willing to get paid less what they are worth
A lot of people don't want to have to get a security clearance for a mediocre pay job.
> No "US Persons" (visa holders) or foreigners allowed.
FYI, a "US person" means a US citizen or a Permanent Resident.
> programmers to remember linear algebra
Programmers who know linear algebra probably also know basic calculus & stats, so now you’re competing with companies hiring ML engineers.
similarly i am in this ridiculous position. I am a security engineer, wanting to work in vulnerability research. Got an EB2-NIW green card due to my skills being valuable for the national interest. Can't even get an interview because all vulnerability researcher positions require TS clearance... I guess i will just have to wait 4 more years for the citizenship, but it's a pity.
> Yes, we pay well.
Not enough, apparently.
> No, you can't work remotely.
You'll have to pay even more for this.
> No, we don't pay as much as Meta.
So again, not enough.
> We won't re-teach linear algebra to a developer applicant
Why not? Isn’t this just part of your ramp-up if it’s a niche qualification? We re-teach networking to developers who probably forgot it—that’s a semester course, easily. If you’re not willing to invest in candidates that are 90% of the way there, then you’re perpetually going to have difficulty hiring.
Wow, I was all ready to look you up in your profile ... until I read all of the follow-up responses.
I knew it was too good to be true.
Define competence. What fraction of graduates in EE and CS from top 50 schools would you regard as competent?
> Yes, we pay well.
Let's hear some numbers for junior, mid and senior. I bet they are not great.
> You must be a US citizen to work for my company. No "US Persons" (visa holders) or foreigners allowed.
Just to clarify, being a dual U.S. citizen (e.g., U.S.-Canadian, U.S.-Irish) doesn't necessarily prevent a person from obtaining a U.S. "SECRET" security clearance.
> We cannot find qualified applicants.
It's not just that you're restricted to US Citizens.
You point out all the issues in your post:
> You have to be eligible for a Secret security clearance
So, even though I'm adult and it's legal in my state, I can't smoke weed now and then? Oh and depending on the project may be subject to a polygraph... sounds fun!
> No, we don't make weapons for the military.
Every.. government... defense... contractor has this speech. Why even pretend that you're not in the war business, which ultimately means killing people? Honestly I would be more comfortable working for an org that wasn't afraid to admit what they do. Making moral compromises is not uncommon in tech, and I don't judge people that choose to do so, but I do judge those that pretend that they're not.
> No, you can't work remotely.
I've worked remotely virtually my entire career, including for the Federal government. You may have a good reason for this requirement, but it absolutely shrinks your pool. You don't even mention location, but I'm guessing it's not in a top city like NYC or SF.
> Yes, we pay well.
And yet you never give a range. Last time I worked for a DARPA contractor, Google (this was the earlier days) basically hired every elite member of the R&D team in a weekend (exaggerating here, but not much) since both the pay and work was drastically better.
> One issue is that we expect programmers to remember linear algebra
Ah great, unjustified ego to boot! I'm sold!
I'm a US Citizen, work in a remote small company doing opensource work largely for the good of the world, likely paid roughly the same, it's nobody's business if I want to smoke weed, and most of the team has a quantitative PhDs (but would blush to mention it) and those that don't could easily teach a course on linear algebra.
I'm just one engineer, but I can't imagine applying at company like you describe. You might have better success hiring qualified applicants if you at least admitted how unattractive such a place is to the many engineers I've work ed with who use linear algebra everyday and tried to find some compromise.
What you’re saying just doesn’t jive with the experience devs have when applying for jobs. You hear horror stories about juniors applying for hundreds of jobs. They are absolutely qualified for entry level work - they have CS degrees.
I have experienced applying for dozens, including those posted to HN: most won’t respond at all. Maybe months later you’ll get an auto-reject message. Or you’ll go through several interviews not to be selected, even while passing technical assessments. My colleagues and friends have similar experiences.
What is your definition of qualified.
By definition a US Person would not have a visa, since that qualifier only applies to US nationals, permanent residents (which do not need nor have a visa, permanent residents do not apply for admission after status is granted), refugees or asylees.
Do you drug test? Sounds like a place that might. A fairly significant proportion (though definitely not all) of the best developers I've ever worked with would simply pass over places that seem like they would.
You aren't getting a clearance if you can't pass a drug test.
Plenty of people can pass a drug test. That's not the issue I guarantee it. It might slightly help their hiring but it's not the root cause of difficulties, and I seriously doubt compensation is a root cause either.
Having eligibility is not the same as passing unannounced random drug tests.
I don't do drugs; I barely even drink alcohol. But, I think drug testing is a violation of privacy and none of a company's business. This isn't 1950, nobody cares if you're doing drugs on your personal time as long as you're sober for work.
Yes, you need to drug test for clearance. But I'm saying that's a job I'm not applying to unless I have no other choice. It goes straight to the bottom of the pile for me.
My understand is that it comes down how likely it is that the employee could be bought/blackmailed/corrupted. A person with a drug (or gambling) habit could be blackmailed or might need more money to fuel their addiction, making them susceptible to a foreign power buying their support.
Same reason for homosexuality in the past when it was illegal/scandalous.
> might need more money to fuel their addiction
This makes a lot more sense to me than blackmail.
I'd quibble though that this overlooks that quite a lot (possibly even most) drug users are able to lead productive lives without having to resort to illegal activity to fund their drug use.
The other thing this doesn't cover is that there are many alcoholics that fall into the same trap. Though there again, most alcoholics are able to lead productive lives despite their addiction.
And through personal experience, I unfortunately know quite a few alcoholics that work in defense with various levels of clearance.
The blackmail thing always seemed a bit circular to me.
"We'll fire you if you smoke pot"
"But why?"
"Someone might blackmail you, by threatening to reveal that you smoke pot"
"How is that a threat?"
"Because we'll fire you if you smoke pot."
A drug test is not a requirement for a security clearance.
> Yes, we pay well.
> No, we don't pay as much as Meta.
Are you saying you pay well as comparing to the local McDonalds? That being said, my guess you can't find "qualified applicants" is because you are putting too many restrictions and paying too little. So you end up with students who will take anything and then you come here to complain about the lack of talent.
The hard truth is that too many people can’t pass the drug test required for security clearance, and that does narrow your applicant pool.
I'm not USAian, but everything you described to me makes the job sound miserable, especially compared to the competition.
The clearance I won't comment on, as I have no clue what it involves. Presumably though, this means randomized drug tests which is IMO a complete violation of privacy. Also, I'm probably wrong but it gives me the impression that despite your reassurance that you aren't building weapons systems, ya kinda are.
And as you said, a part of your company makes weapons. That will automatically cause many people to be disinterested, for better or worse.
> Ghost positions
In my experience, gov't jobs are the worst when it comes to fake job postings that only exist as a cover for internal promos. Might be different in the states, but I doubt it.
> Yes, we are willing to train someone who is motivated. We won't re-teach linear algebra...
Wait, so will you train them or not? You won't refresh someone on linear algebra which most people haven't touched since their uni days, but you'll put a technical writer through university to become an engineer? Which one is it? Then later on you say the algebra thing is a hard requirement. How do these statements make sense together?
> Can't work remotely
This is an automatic disqualifier for many people, for many reasons. I get that you're working with space hardware in clean rooms, but if this means people have to move to the middle of nowhere (or just move, period) and commute for 2 hours each way, then you're disqualifying tons of people, when their alternative is a job where they can work remotely with all the benefits that entails. I'd personally rather be dead than be forced to commute ever again.
> We pay well
Define well? Especially with everything else I commented on, is it really "well", if they can join a much less frustrating job and get paid more? Also you sound quite snarky about working at Meta. I'm no fan of FAANG, but if we're talking compensation, I think the snark is unwarranted given the situation.
> We expect programmers to remember linear algebra and have more than the ability to shovel frameworks on top of each other...
Again, snarkiness and derision. A bit of a dumb position to take when you're admitting that the easier job not only pays (dramatically) more, but has better conditions (remote work, no clearance-related BS) as well.
No wonder you can't find qualified individuals, your comment alone makes it sound like a miserable job where you're working for bean counters that want to inspect the cloudiness of your piss while forcing you to waste half your life driving to the office and back without extra compensation, while they get to see other, less skilled engineers "glue frameworks together" for double the pay and quadruple the happiness. And I find it rich to comment on advertisers when your company makes weapons that literally kill people. Something about reaper missiles and glass houses comes to mind here.
Curious re: "linear algebra".
What kind of understanding is needed? A basic understanding? It's a vast and unending subject.
And there are well known software apps that do linear algebra these days. Do you folks use a particular software to do it?
Engineering Technician: what does an hour in the life of such work look like?
Thanks.
Later on GP talks about radar, so I'd guess probably at least the basics, convolution, matrix multiplication, and some inverse methods (evd, svd, cholesky...). Not just implementing but understanding what it does, a bit ?
> We cannot find qualified applicants.
What’s the name of your employer?
I once worked in defense as well and it could be that the pay is insultingly low with immense hassle and responsibility (do this thing wrong and you goto jail). I'll only consider going back if a new major conflict starts.
>No, we don't pay as much as Meta.
Ah, well. Nevertheless...
> You have to be eligible for a Secret security clearance. You don't have to get one if you don't want to as there is usually plenty of uncleared work to go around, but you have to be eligible in case that goes away and we need to put you in for a clearance.
Y'all should probably make that clear. Usually, the moment I see something like that as a job requirement, I move on. Not because I may or may not qualify, but because I honestly don't remember a lot of the information required and because it's not clear that I can work in a non-weapon-building role. Probably should offer refresher courses in linear algebra - I've been a developer for 25+ years and have never knowingly used it.
>You have to be eligible for a Secret security clearance.
Having had to go through one of those: yeah no shit. Not everyone enjoys a colonoscopy without anesthesia.
>You (even programmers!) have to touch the things we build in order to build them and nobody has an ISO certified clean room in their house.
I do, a keg at any rate, but given that I can't get a security clearance because of the people I hung out to build one - yeah.
Why linear algebra? Honest question, i have not seen this as a specific requirement before.
It can be inferred that they’re making satellites, or at least satellite components. It’s pretty likely that vector math will be involved in some of the software being written in that context. In particular, if anything they write involves navigation (which is a lot of things when it comes to satellites, from actually maneuvering to observation correction) you need to have a pretty good understanding of linear algebra to write good software. And aerospace isn’t an industry where you want someone relying on google for mission-critical logic.
Sure, but there's a huge spectrum between "mild competence" and "can recite strang's verbatim". My experience is that companies emphasizing specific math skills beyond normal professional baselines typically expect the latter despite usually offering the same (or lower) salaries than the former.
I would argue that, if the sole differentiating requirement is “must be proficient at linear algebra” (at an undergraduate level), the pay requirements shouldn’t be that different from most other similar jobs. Almost every engineering job will have some domain specific requirements; would you say a job asking for applicants to be “proficient in undergraduate-level fluid dynamics” would require higher pay than any other chemical engineering job? Or, back to SWE, if there’s a requirement to have experience working with microcontrollers, should that job pay more than any other C developer position?
If an SWE job posting has a narrow set of requirements, none of which require particularly high-level education, that means the ideal candidate is a “regular” SWE with experience or knowledge in the field being hired for. It’s not like this aerospace company wants someone who is an expert at linear algebra while also being a full stack dev with intimate understanding of a few major cloud platforms’ offerings and knows how to write windows drivers and does silicon design in their spare time. They’re just looking for a particular type of developer for which there simply may not be any candidates. Yeah, technically you could triple the salary and steal employees from other companies who weren’t looking for jobs, but the economics of that aren’t feasible. If there are n positions and n-a total eligible developers (for some positive a), it doesn’t matter how much you increase pay, there still aren’t going to be enough people to fill the roles. And you’re eventually going to run out of money, because you usually can’t just triple the price of your products.
strang's would be something that is entry level in terms of linear algebra.
I think they should clarify whether they want somebody that has passed a linear algebra class with high marks based on something like strangs' entry level book before...or are on the cutting edge of graduate level linear algebra research. It's not clear from the post and I suspect that might be an issue.
Give me a couple months and I could recite strangs entry level textbook. I passed that class with an A+. But I could not become a PhD level maths student with a linear algebra research focus in that amount of time.
There are multiple very different ways to interpret a requirement for being competent in linear algebra.
Knowing everything covered in strangs introduction to linear algebra is actually quite low on the potential list of requirements and could be self studied.
> Give me a couple months and I could recite strangs
Yes, most people had LA classes during college. But would you take a couple of months to relearn something that would be used only to interview for one job that you have no idea you'll get? That's certainly a reason why few people want to interview there.
If you need a specific specialist degree (like a PhD in linear algebra), then that's just the professional baseline knowledge I already mentioned.
When I last read Strang's, my course included a lot of spectral theory that was decidedly not introductory regardless of what the title says. Either way, the point is that most non-specialist practitioners don't need that. How often have you truly run into determinants mod N or stochastic matrices in real life?
It sounds like our linear algebra classes were somewhat different though. No one received an A in mine. I had one of 3-4 B's.
Never ran into modular determinants IRL but stochastic matrices are pretty common in many jobs - that said honestly anyone that's actually good at linear algebra and dev work has some pretty good options in many fields so considering it as a baseline unremarkable requirement is uncalled for, I agree.
Satellites go in circles and need to point at things.
I've looked at jobs at places like this (some requiring quite high clearance) and the pay is hilariously bad, and I don't make anywhere near peak FAANG rates (or work in FAANG)
50% pay cut for a DevOps/SRE role requiring a Q clearance (DoE version of Top Secret I think)
You can't find employees because the job isn't exciting (you're probably not NASA) and the pay is bad. Maybe your recruiters are bad too.
They're probably located way out in the sticks too. Who wants to pack up all their stuff and sell their house and move to the rural deep South for a job that may or may not work out long-term? And if it doesn't work out, they now have to sell the house they bought there (because there's nothing decent in that area on the rental market) and move cross-country yet again?
:/ Never got into embedded programming or engineering, maybe I should though. Invested too many of my math skills in theoretical computer science
Never too late to learn etc. etc.
Hi, How can I get in touch with your hiring department?
>You have to be eligible for a Secret security clearance
Nope. Not doing it. Not going to argue politics, but this is a huge RED FLAG for a lot of people. And I feel I don't need to submit to mandatory drug testing as well.
>The most harmful thing the products I build do is quantify in precise detail how climate change is dooming us all
Then why is it classified? How separate is your branch from the weapons branch, that you acknowledge exists?
A security clearance doesn't necessarily mean you have to take drug tests. You do fill out paperwork about your previous drug usage though.
If you admit to past drug use they're going to drug test you.
I passed on a bunch of jobs that required clearance, because getting it sounded like a nightmare.
Your paragraph at the end sounds like maybe your company culture is also a problem.
If you doubled the pay you’d probably have more applicants than you could ever hope for. And why don’t you pay as much as Meta? The defense industrial complex can pay retired generals massive salaries to sit on boards, they can hire the most expensive lobbyists on the Hill. The defense department specifically can’t even pass an audit. They have so much money going out that they can’t even count it. And let’s take Raytheon for example, have you seen the operating margins? They’re huge. So even with these “critical shortages,” somehow they are immensely profitable. If shortages are affecting those margins, then there should be plenty of money to pay “critical” people more. Revenue per employee at Raytheon for example is almost $420,000. For typical manufacturing companies, a “good” number is $300,000. So a “critical” employee is worth a lot more than they’re being paid and there are probably a lot of employees that are dead weight and keeping them around means less money to pay the shortage areas.
I once applied to work a government project for a subcontractor and they were adding “headcount” simply because the terms of the subcontract required a specific number of people regardless of the amount of work required. They were essentially hiring people to do almost nothing. I spent over 3 months waiting for a response. Apparently their critical shortage wasn’t that critical because the hiring process was so long and convoluted and subject to “contract renewals,” that I simply gave up and went to work for someone else.
I could go on for days about the extreme waste and oftentimes outright fraud that happens in government contracting, subcontracting, and sub-sub contracting. And despite formerly having a TS/SCI clearance, any job in the “McLean Area,” pays less than most startups. And jobs in places like Huntsville pay even less. Even overseas work in “austere” environments pays less than a junior developer at Stripe. And you don’t get potentially shot at at Stripe — And I don’t have to work 100 levels deep for contractors or contractors of contractors on site using often circa 1996 development practices and lowest-bidder equipment managed by IT departments that seem to be led by dinosaurs and it can take weeks or months to simply requisition a dev server even within an unclassified cloud environment.
Why to do that for salaries/benefits that are lower than I could get as a janitor at Netflix?
Make the workplace/work environment and benefits compelling and you’ll get more applicants. Small startups literally have better benefits. You also don’t have to endure a Tier 5 investigation — the outcome of which entitles you to a job that pays so little comparatively.
I'm a programmer, I know linear algebra (I actually have a master's degree in maths). I grew up in Houston, lived there from 1998 to 2010, but never got a citizenship owing to some of my father's medical issues disqualifying us from a green card.
If you're willing to sponsor me for a green card and wait five years, and you're located in a city I'd actually like to live, I might come work for you :)
Have you tried recruiting people in school in mathematics programs?
You’ve repeatedly mentioned being unwilling to train linear algebra skills, but will train other things, so go recruit math nerds.
What city or state?
> We cannot find qualified applicants.
By chance has your employer posted on HN who’s hiring?
Ball?
Where is your workplace located? Perhaps it's in a crappy place that no one wants to live in, and you should look at relocating.
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So do you discriminate against people that consume substances, on their own unpaid time, legal in the location they live at?
> You have to be eligible for a Secret security clearance. You don't have to get one if you don't want to as there is usually plenty of uncleared work to go around, but you have to be eligible in case that goes away and we need to put you in for a clearance.
Well, tech companies claim that they cannot find good enough workers to fill their positions. But "good enough" is a subjetive classification. I can always create a test for which you are not good enough, it doesn't matter how much knowledge you have. And that's what tech companies have done for years. They'll aways craft a contrived interview process that will classify most people as not "good enough" and use this as evidence that there are not enough workers available, so they will get the opportunity to expand the pool of workers as much as they want.
When company says they cannot find good enough people to hire it really means they cannot find cheap enough people.
Every dev interview process I've been a part of has not included consideration of the applicant's citizenship status. The interview process has many flaws, but it is not contrived to tailor itself towards H1Bs at the expense of citizens. At least, not at the companies I've worked at, which are household names. At TCL or Wipro? Sure, those are blatant offenders of the H1B visa.
You said it yourself, those offenders supply talent to other companies. Many roles simply won’t be available to citizens because they’re filled by H1B abusers.
Yeah, I think the abusive companies like TCS and Wipro should be shut down. But the other companies generally pay pretty fair and use this visa system pretty normally, and they do see a shortage of qualified talent. I saw it myself as an interviewer. TCS and Wipro have a completely different quality standard (if you can call it that) and everyone knows it, plus they are cheating
Companies don't need to favor one group against another, they just need to make the process artificially hard, so they'll have the excuse that there are not enough workers ready to fill those positions.
The process is not artificially hard, imo. It's just testing you on things a college CS curriculum goes over. Sadly many many colleges in the US have a very substandard bar for teaching this subject.
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There is a shortage of applicants willing to work at what companies want to pay. If it is taking more than 30-60 days for workers to find a role, there are enough workers domestically.
This is why H1-B visas should have a minimum salary requirement equal to 20% over whichever is greater, median salary for the role in the industry, or median salary for the role in the company (and whichever is greater, US-wide, or local pay scale).
This way, a company is always incentivized to find local talent, but when they are actually unable to, they have a path to find the expertise they need. The U.S. could relax restrictions on H1-B, lowering red tape, and removing a lot of churn that comes with the H1-B program
> This is why H1-B visas should have a minimum salary requirement equal to 20% over [median]
The requirement should be at least 2x top of band.
A mere 1.2x of the median is absolutely absurd.
That's ridiculous. 20% is already enough from top of band.
In general, H1B visas do have such provisions. At least in CA most jobs must provide a salary range. Even if every H1B is the lowest of the range in those postings, that alone means there are many many jobs which fit your criteria.
The ranges are way too low then. I checked H1B salaries and I found the following in San Jose (median rent approx $2200 for 1BR):
FLEXON TECHNOLOGIES INC Database analyst: $60k
DATA TRACE INFORMATION SERVICES LLC Software engineer: $65k
PRIMARIUS TECHNOLOGIES US LLC DATA ANALYST $72k
ZOOM VIDEO COMMUNICATIONS INC AI SCIENTIST $74k
HBI SOLUTIONS INC DATABASE ADMINISTRATOR $75k
BEACONFIRE STAFFING SOLUTIONS INC COMPUTER SYSTEMS ENGINEER $88k
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=&city=san+jose&year=2...
Sort by salary ascending and you will see what I mean.
These are blatant violations. We know how much software engineers should make. Do the immigrants know they are moving to one of the most expensive cities in the US?
Someone should put together a package for the new administration with advertisements to target for H1B violations. I’m sure Stephen Miller would want to see it.
The good ones do and use this as a way to get through the door.
Almost all H1Bs have already been in the US for years on their student visas, so of course they know COL and where they are moving to.
Those you are posting look like they could be violations. But if you just visit your link, you quickly see that most jobs are in line with median salaries in the bay area.
For example:
https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries/San...
And then:
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=zoom+video+communications+...
Those are pretty close to the median in aggregate.
> Those are pretty close to the median in aggregate.
Pretty close to the median?
Aren't these H1-B visas supposed to be for specialists? To bring in the best and brightest?
Taking advantage of the system !!
And how you going to enforce this?
Require employers of each H1-B to submit (along with the hire's w-4 that they send to Uncle Sam that already includes the job's wages and benefits), the position description in the job ad, the candidate's resume, and the matching wage band the job purportedly falls into and exceeds by 20% (or whatever the required margin is). It should be trivial to automate the validation process. Then do random checks to confirm those purported facts, especially of employers who hire large numbers of H1-Bs and have past violations.
Random audits, like the IRS does.
That is absolutely what these kinds of Visas are NOT supposed to be addressing.
> There is a shortage of applicants willing to work at what companies want to pay
If you want the best candidates, it makes sense to have a wider pool of recruitment.
They're not hiring "the best". They want compliant serfs who are trapped with the promise of a greencard sponsorship someday.
> There is a shortage of applicants willing to work at what companies want to pay
Translation: companies would rather have underpaid immigrants as indentured servants to exploit than Americans who can demand higher wages
A problem solved if visas are not associated to employers, because then an employer couldn’t hold onto the employee like this.
No. Because it still floods the job market with off short talent that is willing to work for 30% less. Construction workers arent tied to a single employer (usually) and that drops the price of labour across the board even in union dominated markets.
A lot of things "flood the job market". In 2021, >104k degrees CIS degrees were awarded by US colleges [1]. There's a flood of young people entering the market every year, and they're willing to work for >30% less than experienced engineers because it's their first proper job.
IMO as with all things money, it's all about negotiation. Of course a lot of negotiating power simply has to do with the market supply/demand, but a whole lot has to do with policy and rules. Giving more negotiating power to H1Bs would definitely put upwards pressure on salaries.
Re: construction workers. Same problem, worker's rights. A lot of construction workers are undocumented: an estimated 20 percent [2][3]. Undocumented immigrants have virtually no negotiating power. Allowing this solid 1/5th of the workforce to confront their employer without fear of deportation would go a long way increasing compensation for the industry as a whole.
[1]: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_322.10.a...
[3]: https://limos.engin.umich.edu/deitabase/2024/05/28/undocumen...
"Allowing this solid 1/5th of the workforce to confront their employer without fear of deportation would go a long way increasing compensation for the industry as a whole."
It is strange to read this all typed out in earnest like that. Housing costs triple over night for the win? We'll all be homeless but those of us in construction will get a boost (or decreased competition from low cost imported labor).
First, GP wrote:
Then you wrote: In many highly developed countries in the world, visas are not associated with an employer. We don't see people clamouring to post about it on HN. Why? Because the number of visas offered to skilled migrants is relatively limited.Second, you wrote:
How can you be sure that this is true? Do you have a "natural" experiment where two similar areas in the US have construction workers where area A has workers tied to a single employers and area B not? Else, how can you say this with such confidence?Source: I managed projects bigger than you can imagine as a very young person. I traveled between the United States, China, the Middle East and the Caribbean.You have to take my word for it, as I can't and wont dox myself. I might as well have a PhD on this subject. I don't care if you believe me or not, but what I say is true.
Yeah it's fair to say that if suddenly a huge influx of people show up causing downwards pressure on wages then that can happen. Though I feel like construction work is a place where there is legitimately more limits to how many people who are willing to work in that industry (even if you paid me double a SWE salary, I'm not working in scaffolding all day) locally.
I do think that if you don't tie the visa to the employer, then it's _less interesting_ for an employer to recruit people from abroad. Especially for companies whose entire business model is "get cheaper IT labor, locked into mandatory service, in exchange for being an entryway to the country".
Like if you despise those shops, then you really should be lobbying to get rid of the employer lock-in.
The simple solution is for the government to put a tax on the visa. For each H1-B the company does, they pay the government an additional $200,000 per year (or some other large, arbitrary sum). If they really need them that badly, they'll pay up. What I think happens is that they discover they don't need them quite so much.
Great idea
It's one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard on this site frankly. For how "meritocratic" HN claims to be, they are totally fine with basically eliminating all competition in their own job sphere.
Imagine how quickly business trust in the government would go down if the government mandated a $200k head tax on H1Bs. It's absurd and only here would anyone hear it and think it makes sense
Having to compete with people in the third world who have no expectations isn’t meritocracy. My dad grew up in a literal village and I remember sleeping under mosquito nets. Americans shouldn’t have to put up with the things I’m willing to put up with.
You don't have to compete with people with no expectations. You have to compete with people who: often have an advanced degree (much more common for H1Bs than citizen devs), often have financial resources at home backing their ability to move up to a more expensive economy for work without security of a job, and are often just as good if not better than you.
H1Bs are often scapegoated by these forums as being hungry to not live in poverty, but they are often the top of their respective countries by most metrics.
And most of you all do not think that we should level the playing field between, say people who went to good schools vs people who went to bad ones, or people who can barely code vs people who can code really well. Only when it's foreigners do you not want meritocracy
It’s not comparable. Both my parents have advanced degrees back in old country. But the standard of living for someone in the top 5% back home is comparable to someone in public housing in the US. If people’s alternatives back home were so good they wouldn’t abandon all their family—my family was never from anywhere besides Bangladesh going back thousands of years—to come to the U.S.
Why is this post so heavily downvoted? Oh wait, I guess this really hit a nerve:
There is always someone willing to do your job for less. Protection against that isn't anti-meritocratic, it's anti-exploitation.
H1Bs at a lot of companies (excluding the actual criminals TCS, Wipro, etc.) are not always willing to do your job for less. Many of them make more than most US devs.
Many make what you would consider laughable wages. I worked for a university in their IS department years ago, and since the university had an office that dealt with visas, they'd bring in people for what was truly a mediocre job. Salary probably $45-50k back in the mid-2010s.
But since HN is San Francisco-centric, it can pretend otherwise I guess. Some very tiny fraction earn above what US developers earn.
Most people are self interested.
I mean, I can think of a lot of things businesses could greatly benefit and grow from, but would have to do without if it came with $200,000/yr price tag.
IMO this is not about wether a business can do without X. Most businesses can do without a lot of things, just more poorly. IMO this is about finding the right balance between the benefits and drawbacks of hiring foreign specialized workers.
Tariffs on visas?
Ranked by salary is an alternative I've heard.
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> There is a shortage of applicants willing to work at what companies want to pay.
That and companies are just hilariously bad at finding workers they want to hire for nebulous reasons. I have no doubt even if my company hired 95% of the workers it had marked down as "no hire" they'd be able to squeeze a salary's of value worth out of each of them (well, if management is competent, which it tends to not be). I'm sure those of us who've been around long enough can all attest to some side of seeing form of this dysfunction. I'm more than happy to reject them for selfish reasons, of course, like "I don't want this person on my team" or "this person seems like an asshole" or "I don't want to teach this person their third language after java and typescript". Etc.
I mean there are terrible interview candidates out there, but the people who literally can't code at all tend to be easy to filter out.
I'm curious if there's any way to observe the salary margins that separate the top of the labor market from the bottom. Surely there are. That would probably give a big signal as to how much undue attention is given to, e.g., Senior vs Junior developers and American workers vs H1Bs. I'd put money that some of this complaining about lack of labor is actually not wanting to hire fresh grads and eat the cost of training when they'd be just fine. (Also the H1B thing, but that's already discussed to death)
Okay, I have interviewed hundreds of people in the last decade, and I can tell you that most are not good enough. There are companies that are downright abusing H1B for wage suppression, but as a startup founder, I will try my hardest to avoid hiring people who I have to squeeze their salary's worth and still get mediocre results (nothing to do with citizen or not - I had this experience with a Canadian contractor - just not worth it).
I have been successful in liberating money from VCs and create jobs, and I want the best people that money can buy. Turns out, there are great American and non-american candidates who are willing to work for the money I can offer. Also in my experience, I hardly even get resumes from Americans for backend jobs. Frontend is different and I get a LOT of American resumes. Our frontend engineering, PS, CX, Sales and Marketing is all-american, and backend is a mix of american, greencard, H1b - because thats all I get in the resume pipeline.
If I have to cut costs, I will have to cut the team in US and move the jobs to a low cost region regardless of their citizenship status.
> Okay, I have interviewed hundreds of people in the last decade, and I can tell you that most are not good enough.
Me, too. I straight-up disagree; I think interviewing is just so broken it gives a false impression of quality issues in the labor pool. Realistically if you have a handful of core skills you can ramp up to basically any problem with enough time. That's time on the order of months, maybe, not years. Companies just don't want to bother training anyone anymore. Why bother when you can just complain endlessly and hope some politicians throw cheap labor your way? In that sense you're absolutely right, but the whole "quality" thing is completely unrelated.
> I have been successful in liberating money from VCs and create jobs, and I want the best people that money can buy.
I think people seriously overestimate the difference engineer quality makes. Most products can be built with mediocre talent. I'm sorry, that's the truth. We all love to have strong opinions on who we should hire and I say "almost anyone, just throw meat at the problem". Most problems are solved with time and not cleverness.
Startups are definitely more sensitive to quality, but startups don't make up much of the labor pool, and they don't pay competitively with much larger companies that don't need the quality.
I'm being a little hyperbolic here—you do need people with experience and ability to see red flags to lead the flock—but not by much.
>I think interviewing is just so broken it gives a false impression of quality issues in the labor pool.
I've been in a team where hiring requirements have emerged through the filter of HR almost unrecognisable. Naturally, they're still objective requirements, so qualified candidates are filtered out before ever meeting someone who could judge if they're qualified. It gets noticed, but nothing happens. Of course it doesn't: you're stepping on important toes.
That's how it tends to work. Candidates are filtered out by non-technical staff, including openly using programs that filter out CVs missing keywords. In smaller companies, this even gets farmed out to third-party recruiters that have poorly aligned incentives.
How can we know if candidates are qualified? We never see most of them.
It's hard to imagine many things worse for productivity than bad hiring processes. But it's all just accepted.
> I think people seriously overestimate the difference engineer quality makes. Most products can be built with mediocre talent. I'm sorry, that's the truth. We all love to have strong opinions on who we should hire and I say "almost anyone, just throw meat at the problem". Most problems are solved with time and not cleverness.
I'm surprised that your experience here is so different from mine. The best engineers I've had are capable of things that the average to below average ones could likely have never achieved, even with an order of magnitude more time.
I don't think it comes down to cleverness as it does inventiveness. There are dots that great engineers can connect that often nobody else could spot. They also need less process, and a large number of people with all of the coordination overhead does not linearly scale.
> Most problems are solved with time and not cleverness.
Yes, because given time someone clever would have came in and fixed it.
It's like doing push up in the elevator and believing that arriving at the 100th floor is due to doing push ups.
The GE, IBM, Intel, Boeing are few examples that didn't believe in quality - and not just people apparently, and their problems aren't getting solved with time.
Eh, I just don't see it. GE and IBM and Boeing are solving the problems they want to solve. Management dysfunction can't be blamed on low-quality workers. Anyway, I'm a little reluctant to draw the parallel with Boeing because I simply don't know what kind of work goes into that sort of engineering. Maybe cleverness is a big part!
> Yes, because given time someone clever would have came in and fixed it.
I can't emphasize enough how much software engineers overestimate the value of their own cleverness. Bugs are fixed with persistence, in my experience—I've used "cleverness" to find only a handful of bugs across my entire nearly two-decade career. I don't want to say I'm "the best engineer on the team" or anything like that, but I dependably fix the bugs that are put on my plate regardless of how frustrating they are to crack, regardless of what tools I need to bust out to get the job done. Debuggers, printf, valgrind, core dumps, packet captures, profilers, repls, disassembly, whatever's necessary. But all of these take persistence to reach for and use to crack the case. Experience is a short cut, but that's a very different thing than cleverness, and you very directly pay for that experience.
Not to mention if I see "cleverness" in a code review you're gonna bet I'm gonna comment and ask you to make it less clever unless that cleverness seems to neatly solve a problem. Even then, commenting is absolutely critical.
Time, not cleverness, is the key.
Hell, the joke used to be that being a software engineer is 80% googling. Now that barrier's been lowered even further with chatbots: you can literally ask it to find the bug, explain behavior, fix the bug, etc. It doesn't take much competence to correct the output. All it takes is not giving up when you see problems.
Well everything you've written suggest to me that you're clever, or maybe that shouldn't be the word, but somewhere between smart and wise.
And a lot of people aren't that.
Your examples didn't fail due to quality - they failed due to horrible management practices and worshipping at the altar of the MBA philosophy.
They definitely failed due to quality - problems caused by their horrible highly-paid managers and directors.
I am confused why you included GE. Do you think their aerospace products (jet engines and such) or medical products (MRI machines) are low quality? They are pretty much top three globally in those areas, and very innovative. And how about the Boeing 787? What issues do you have with that?
I worked at GE. A lot of thier software dealing with the transportation industry back then wasn’t technically complicated. There were just a lot of business rules and regulations they had to check for.
My vertical was railroad car repairs
https://public.railinc.com/sites/default/files/documents/CRB...
Most developers aren’t doing “hard things”. Not even at BigTech
It's not at all about doing hard things. It's simply the number of things to be done and how they interact with each other. You are absolutely right that these are technically not hard problems, but they're still hard design problems that keep changing very frequently
Most products can be built with mediocre talent. But no one actively goes after mediocre talent. And yes, startups are more sensitive to this, I really had to let go mediocre people because it affects everything. Throwing meat at the problem for long enough time really screws up the product. Even at a very large company that I worked for, innovation ground to halt after a decade of this thinking, because systems that started simple enough, got complex over time in part because of market and primarily because of mediocrity. Adding things became a nightmare, because we threw meat at problems for a long time.
Maybe what you say has worked for your situations, but it really never worked for me over my experience, and it just was a downward spiral over time every single time.
If workers are mediocre, management needs to be top notch to deliver great products.
If management is mediocre, workers need to be top notch to deliver great products.
The odds you'll land at a place that have both are vanishingly low. It also takes a lot of work, money and interest to turn a big ball of mud around and no one gets a prize for that, people get a prize for churning out features and bugfixes, so this is what you get, specially because most large scale rewrite projects are utter and complete failures.
Each can compensate for the other only to an extent. We don't need top notch, we need good. Most large scale projects may fail, but we ended up assembling good people for all the rewrites. Five of the six projects were successful (in production with objectively better metrics). One failed due to underestimating the operational complexity of a piece of technology.
Add in that in the search for the perfect candidate that has all 16 bullet point requirements you'll come across folks who have, say, a solid 13 of them, but they'll get passed over waiting for the perfect candidate to come around. Which can take many months... years even. In the meantime you could have been bringing up one of those 13-point candidates getting them up to speed on those 3 missing bullet points. And you'd likely have gotten to a desired level of productivity faster than by waiting for that perfect candidate while wringing your hands that there just aren't enough qualified people out there.
I don't think anyone is saying wait for the perfect candidate. No one is perfect and no one checks all the boxes. That would be a fool's errand. But most good engineers can differentiate between a good (not superstar) engineer and a mediocre/bad engineer in a couple of conversations. I really have not seen anyone optimize for a mediocre candidate, nor for a superstar. Superstars come by with luck or with tons of incentives (money, stock, tech or whatever is their itch).
This is the truth that peoples egos can't seem to handle.
Screw the company -- sure, maybe they can build a product with mediocre talent. But I don't want to work with mediocre devs, because they make my life harder.
I'd much rather wait for someone I want to work with, than hire the first person that is "good enough".
"Not good enough" or not good enough to pass your leet code gauntlet that has nothing to do with the day-to-day role?
Because those aren't the same thing. Also don't discount interview stress - I read that psychologically the most difficult thing to do is be on stage in front of people and do complex math problems... which is basically what live coding tests are.
Math problems usually have one right/wrong answer. Many interview 'challenges' have multiple ways of doing something correctly. Without necessarily knowing any more about the context of a problem beyond a few sentences, you work with what you've been given. You can deliver a working solution but if it's not the way they were expecting... you're out of the running.
You really haven’t done much math, have you. Even 2+2 can be solved multiple ways.
I hate leet code and it's ilk, and I don't want anyone to go through that useless stuff. But I believe a good engineer can suss out another good engineer in a conversation or two. At least that has been my experience with people I have hired and people those people have hired.
When you hire anyone, there is always some bar of "good enough". It is different for different orgs and even people, but it is there. Otherwise you'd end up hiring the first candidate you encounter, no?
I hate leet code gauntlets too but I don't see what it has to do with hiring immigrant workers. No matter your status you are equally vulnerable to failing a code gauntlet test.
>> If I have to cut costs, I will have to cut the team in US and move the jobs to a low cost region regardless of their citizenship status.
Read that sentence again. If you're hiring an American team in the Us, and cutting in the US, it's not regardless of citizenship - unless you're abusing the H-1B program
I wonder what your investors would think if they found out you can't manage and need to 'hope you find suitable talent' and that you are incapable of growing it?
They know how I work, because I'm on the board and constantly update them. I built this company from slides to 5M ARR in 4 years. Granted, I have made hiring mistakes - good engineer, bad attitude that affected the team, good engineer not bought into what we do, one or two mediocre engineers that I couldn't suss out. But I've rectified them and have found good engineers in reasonable time.
Unfortunately you have to take my word for it. Not sure how you assumed I cannot manage with no context.
Every company talks about finding talent. VCs are very familiar with this because many startups don’t have familiarity with this stuff. It’s not surprising to have a VC help hire for roles the startup is unfamiliar with hiring for. An investor is not someone’s boss. Once they’ve handed over the capital, they’re very invested in making sure that there aren’t any blockers to the company’s success.
> I wonder what your investors would think if they found out you can't manage and need to 'hope you find suitable talent' and that you are incapable of growing it?
Not hiring mediocre talent is a key part of management.
You’re right, most people are not good enough, and the H1-Bs are worse.
That is a sweeping statement. They (or should I say "We") are no worse than anybody else. If your point is that "worse" people should not come in to the country on H1B because H1b is meant for "better" people, I will probably agree.
> That and companies are just hilariously bad at finding workers they want to hire for nebulous reasons. I have no doubt even if my company hired 95% of the workers it had marked down as "no hire" they'd be able to squeeze a salary's of value worth out of each of them (well, if management is competent, which it tends to not be).
Isn't it ironic that a comment making fun of companies for not hiring workers who can barely contribute above their salary's value, in the very same sentence blames management for incompetence. Well, guess what, managers are hired workers too, so if you apply the same principle to them, this is what you get.
What you suggest makes sense from the "homo economicus" point of view, but the result will be a barely functional hellhole riddled with incompetence (at least this is what it will feel like from within.) Can we blame people for being "selfish" and not wanting to work in this kind of environment?
> Well, guess what, managers are hired workers too,
I didn't comment on hiring "managers", did I?
> Can we blame people for being "selfish" and not wanting to work in this kind of environment?
I did cop to this behavior, right? I do agree. It makes my life easier rejecting candidates. I'm just saying this complaining over lack of quality talent seems like the corporate equivalent of feigned helplessness rather than an actual problem.
> If it is taking more than 30-60 days for workers to find a role, there are enough workers domestically.
This makes no sense, even if I agree with your first statement.
Not every company is willing to completely retrain a worker for something outside of their core competency. Lots of candidates simply aren’t competent, or even reliable employees. Lots of companies would rather a position go unfilled than make a bad hire that is very expensive to fix.
Your entire comment could have been “that phrase is subjective”.
Every company makes lots of subjective decisions during hiring, I agree.
There's a shortage of applicants with the skills that companies need. Engineers, like most qualified workforce, aren't interchangeable.
This is not what the data shows [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. Also, the efforts of many US firms recently to grow their India and LATAM presence [6] demonstrates this is for cost reasons, not a lack of qualified workforce. Companies will hire contractors from IT outsourcers and similar to launder the labor cost cramdown operation. IT unemployment is ~6% [7], why are we issuing any H1Bs beyond exceptional, highly compensated talent (~$300k-$500k/year and up)?
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-cognizant-h1b-visas-... | https://archive.today/jaXNo
[2] https://www.epi.org/publication/new-evidence-widespread-wage...
[3] https://cis.org/North/Unlikely-Sources-Confirm-Wage-Suppress...
[4] http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2015/05/economists-h-1b-vi...
[5] https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/h1b.pd...
[6] https://stig.net/latam-outsourcing-destination-us-companies/
[7] https://www.wsj.com/articles/it-unemployment-hits-6-amid-ove...
I mean, If I have an India or LATAM presence, why would I hire in the US at all, even H1Bs? Unemployment rates mean nothing if its a skills job. Eng #1 is not the same as Eng #2. You can see this plainly in interviews. Our hit rate for engineering is roughly 1 in 20 - purely based on the skill match. So 6-7% unemployment might as well mean they are not good enough?
Even if you have an India/LATAM presence, the higher end of workers from those countries are still mostly migrating to other countries for higher salaries. So you still need H1Bs because you aren’t getting that person in their home country.
Up the skill tree, companies often really get what they pay for, so the saving on offshore work is that they were overpaying for some lower skilled tasks, but not the higher skilled tasks (it’s a world market for top talent).
Indeed, it's why policy will be an important component, just as tariffs can be used to stoke domestic production (to bring outsourcing costs to domestic cost parity). I.R.C. §174 touches on this with an amortization delta between US and non-US based development and R&D cost accounting, for example.
https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/tax-and-accountin...
> Beginning in 2022, all costs related to R&D must now be amortized over five years for US-based companies or 15 years for non-US companies.
With regards to "not good enough", maybe expectations (as a hiring manager or org) are unrealistic? Very subjective, so I find this topic to be difficult to argue effectively. I am not unsympathetic to the fact that hiring is hard, but the evidence of bad faith behavior at scale is undeniable and requires accounting for. If we're going to live in a socioeconomic system where people are forced to work to survive and there are little, if any, social safety nets, domestic employment must take priority over potential profits and economic gains of owners and similar controlling interests arbitraging labor cross border (or importing cheap labor) imho. As a founder/business owner, I can appreciate you're optimizing within your local minima.
It is indeed subjective. But since I have hired both good american and non-american engineers consistently over long periods, I tend to think it is not unrealistic.
I completely agree large scale abuse of the program must be stopped. No country can afford to have large influx of new population that hinder their own(however "own" is defined in a country) progress. Borders are a thing (for better or worse) and invoke extreme emotions within society, and that must be accommodated and not ignored. I say this as an H1B employee and I see this play out a lot more radically in my home country
Good news: the USCIS makes this data available! [0]
Google, Microsoft and Meta definitely look for (and hire!) US applicants. One can reasonably have a gripe with the consulting companies on there (Infosys, Tata, Cognizant, etc.) but they don't represent 90-95% of H-1B issued.
[0] https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...
One might have more than just a gripe with Infosys given they recently admitted to defrauding the visa system over decades and paid a record $34m fine. How many Americans lost out on jobs as a result? We'll never know.
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/indian-corporation-pays-re...
It’s worth saying though that this fine is for lying and abusing the B-1 visas (to circumvent H-1b limitations). That being said I still believe there are a lot of issues with these companies regarding their H-1bs in the first place.
A non-trivial part of the issue with consulting companies is the long wait for many to turn an H-1B into a green card. If you are going to need many years of continuous employment without ever getting hit by a layoff (which risks a gap in employment), the immigrant might be better of with the consulting company, as they might end up the bench, or just count as employed but not getting any hours.
If the road from H-1B to permanent residency was shorter and more reliable, the advantages of the consulting companies would shrink.
The same as if we didn't end up having to rely on lotteries. Hiring a candidate and hoping for an H-1B is quite annoying if you don't have them on staff in another country, or they are working for you in the US from an F-1. Those consulting companies that have large offices in India can happily submit large amounts of applications of people they already have in India, and be OK with 2/3rds of them not winning said lottery. A smaller company just can't play that numbers' game
If you filter out Information only ( which i am being conservative because this does not include healthcare and other sectors ) that is about 20K high paying IT Jobs. This def smells funny that they cannot find "quality" candidates in US that can build APIs and do FE work. Maybe out of that 20K workers, 500 might be actually be doing something special but rest are doing the work that does not need any specialization.
Actually, looking at your link, Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon are all in the top 10... on the link you shared, am I missing something?
My point was that those companies are indeed in the top 10, and those companies also look at and hire US applicants. This was in response to the commenter’s point that they’d be surprised if 5-10% of H1Bs listing even considered US applicants.
Not sure if this is only fresh visas or includes visa renewals. Because of the country caps in the naturalization process, you have people from some countries have to renew visas again and again while they wait for naturalization. Given that H1b is only 3 years, for companies like Google and Facebook, you could have a situation where they are just trying to retain employees who have been with the company for a while.
You can only renew an H-1b once (as there is a 6 years limit for H-1b). However, if you have an approved I-140 with a priority date in the future (as is often the case with people from India or China) you can keep on extending your H-1b (which doesn't count against the cap).
Yes, which is why I was checking whether the data includes the renewals (including for approved I140s).
I have also met teams at FAANG where a foreign born boss’s team is 90% or more H1-Bs from their origin country. Kind of suspicious.
H-1B abuse is a real problem but not by Big Tech. The offenders are the bodyshops like Tata and Infosys.
The bodyshops flood USCIS with Indian-born applicants because they don't really care who gets approved and who doesn't. Those that get approved get a US job. The system is designed to stop employers abusing the power this gives them over employees. They fail in a number of ways.
First, part of the process is a Prevailing Wage Determination to make sure the employee isn't underpaid for that job in that geographical area. There is abuse here at the bodyshops where (IIRC) employees are paid less or not at all if they aren't currently farmed out to a third-party. This should be policed but I don't think it is, at least not effectively.
Second, the real abuse comes from the H1B -> Green card pipeline. H1B visas don't have per-country quotas. Green cards do (max 7% per country as determined by the country you were born in, not your actual citizenship). Because so many H1B holders are Indian-born, the backlog for Green cards for Indian-born applicants is decades long.
Now you can stay with an employer beyond your 6 years (the usual limit of 3+3 for H1B visas) if you have a pending PERM application. The employee can't really leave. If they do they have to file their whole PERM case again (but they retain their priority date at least) so this becomes like indentured servitude almost.
Nobody has really addressed this H1B abuse nor dealt with the huge backlog. A few years ago there was a bill that sought to address some of the issues by essentially removing the per-country quota but the net effect would be that for many years, nobody but Indian-born applicants would get green cards (because they have earlier priority dates). And that bill died in Congress.
But back to Big Tech: they abuse this system too but not so egregiously.
If you wander around any Big Tech office you will find likely a cork board in some obscure corner of some floor with little traffic. It will have a bunch of job postings on it. If you look in the physical newspaper for your area, you will also find them.
Why are these here? To "prove" that the employer could not find a US permanent resident or citizen to fill that particular position. You have to advertize that position through a number of channels and those channels are chosen to receive the fewest applicants because who in 2024 applies for a SWE job from a physical newspaper? If you do apply, there is a whole process to exclude you from the position. You'll be too qualified or under-qualified or your salary expectations won't match the advertisement. Or they'll find some other reason to strike you.
All of this theater is so someone else's PERM application with USCIS can go through.
To me this is also abuse.
> If you do apply, there is a whole process to exclude you from the position. You'll be too qualified or under-qualified or your salary expectations won't match the advertisement. Or they'll find some other reason to strike you.
Why would companies want to do that? Big tech has wage scales and pretty rigorous processes to ensure even pay at level, so what is the incentive to be biased against US born employees there?
For one, because an H-1B holder is legally bound to the hiring company and can't seek work elsewhere. It is much higher level of employer leverage, particularly in a hot market.
I've managed a team at one of the big tech companies for a bunch of years. I've managed a couple people on h1b, all with graduate degrees from premier US institutions.
Never once have I heard anything even resembling "work your h1bs harder because they won't leave." They all joined on the same pay scale as legal permanent residents and were all evaluated through a process where nobody else in the room knew who was a legal permanent resident or not (I only knew because I needed to sign off on forms describing their job responsibilities to the government).
At most this is some aggregate effect of "people changing employers less is good for employers generally."
This doesn't really vibe as abuse of the program to me. I'd vastly prefer it if the policies gave people on h1bs significantly more confidence in changing roles and more time to find a new job should they lose their job, but is this really a decision of the tech companies rather than an output of the immigration policies?
So for Big Tech it's never as egregious as "work your H1Bs harder" or "pay them less". That just opens you up to a future lawsuit.
In a hot market, your best chance of career progression and maximizing your compensation is to swap jobs every 2 years or so. Visa holders have a much harder time doing this.
Additionally, there are additional burdens on the employer to hire visa holders. For a large company, this process is solved. You have lawyers on retainer. You have a pipeline for the paperwork. It's a non-issue. But an early stage startup? That's a lot less likely. So visa holders are, by definition, more limited in their job opportunities.
Even if you can job hop, if your ultimate goal is to get a green card, you have a problem. Will your new employer sponsor your green card? How long will it take? Or are you better off waiting for your current process to go through? Best case, this whole thing takes just under a year. But it can take years completely randomly and there's nothing you can do about it (eg you get randomly audited).
And if you were born in one of the four high-demand countries (India, China, Mexico, the Phillipines) you have an even longer wait.
Also, after you get to 6 years on your H1B you really can't swap jobs anymore. You just have to wait for your green card at that point.
Now that's not strictly true. There are self-sponsor options for both visas and green cards but the bar for these is much higher and you'll need to hire your own lawyer for this.
So there's no directive on treating visa holders differently but bias creeps into the process. Why push someone for higher bonuses, more RSUs or promotions when they can't leave but another one of your "stars" can leave? This may not be conscious either. And it may happen on a level above you, as a manager, because your director is ultimately responsible for balancing out ratings and promotions across their org.
Only in the context of H1B does anyone conceive of tech workers as having a binary condition called "qualified." In white-collar jobs worth having, impact scales essentially infinitely with skill. You aren't looking for people who are merely capable of some baseline, you are looking for the best. The world is much bigger than America, so even if Americans are very good, many of the best are still foreigners.
I agree with this in theory, but in practice...
I've worked directly with probably 50 or so H1B folks in my career. I can only think of a few I'd call exceptional. Just like Americans, most were a mixed bag from good to terrible.
So the idea and argument of best of the best is sound, but it's definitely not being used solely that way.
Most people are missing the fact that there’s a whole immigration economy on the other end, it’s not a passive storefront (that was banned in the 19th century). People want to immigrate, but the people who are best at immigrating aren’t necessarily best at their job.
The idea of 'best of the best' relies on the assumption that it is measurable which history has shown that it is not.
I mean, this is basic VC logic: because the returns are power law distributed, and it's very hard to know in advance which ones are going to hit, you should probably invest at least a little bit in anyone who seems basically plausible. Imagine having denied a visa to Sergey Brin!
My understanding is Sergey was just along for the ride and Larry was the one with the unique insights (pagerank) and led Google through the early years as CEO.
Money is measurable, engineer quality is not. Sure with a smaller startup you could average amongst the engineers but it's an imprecise value. The million threads on leetcode and interview are proof positive engineer valuation is hard.
It's all well and good to gamble when someone else, the public, is picking up the tab.
What tab? H1B engineers are definitionally employed, usually in the upper tax brackets.
Unpriced externalities. Housing is unaffordable in no small part due to immigration. Opportunity cost for Americans workers.
Generally the government manages the economy to make things 'easy' but not necessarily reflecting the true cost of any behavior.
Housing is unaffordable because tech brings high-paying jobs into regions that don't want housing growth. Whether the people coming to fill those jobs and throw those salaries around in the housing market are from India or from Wisconsin hardly matters, except that it's more comfortable for local governments to be overtly hostile to the Wisconsinites.
Housing requires land which inherently does not scale.
Accepting that premise for a moment, why would the land around Bay Area offices scale any better for Americans than for H1Bs? If the opportunities simply go to Americans, you have exactly the same geometry problem. If the Americans who refill those roles do so at higher wages, the supply-and-demand imbalance gets even worse.
Ultimately there exists more foreigners than Americans. American employees are more willing to create jobs outside the bay area.
So then the h1b hires will go to jobs outside the bay area, reducing pressure on housing prices in the bay area.
Tech companies have N openings in the bay area. They will fill these openings. Whether they fill the openings with people moving from India or Mississippi has zero effect on the pressure on the bay area housing market.
How have you only worked with 50 or so H1B in your career? It's either not been long, or you didn't work at any large tech companies (the ones who use this visa the most)
I don't jump much, I've worked for 3 companies in 20 years.
They were smallish companies, 1000ish employees. Only one had H1B, and there were more than 50, but never worked with most enough to pass judgment one way or another.
H1B doesn't test for skill. It is a lottery. And judging from the skill of hundreds of H1Bs I've worked with, it is a failure of a system.
where the F do you work when you are surrounded by “hundreds of H1Bs” - at the airport’s baggage claim when they arrive?
I think very many people are confusing H1B and straight outsourcing of talent. While there is some overlap, they are not nearly the same.
Ive worked with both, and very few of the H1bs were below average. Otherwise they aren't worth sponsoring.
There was a time in the mid 2000s when the Infosys/TCS/wiPros of the world were gaming the H1B to bring offshore bodies onshore.. but most of that died off as far as I see.
The H1B fraud from places like Infosys is alive, well, and bigger than ever.
Alive and well. https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/09/h1b_visa_fraud/
Companies caught cheating the lottery https://archive.ph/Ey3e8
Outsourcers rampant abuse https://www.infoworld.com/article/2241196/proof-that-h-1b-vi...
SV companies discriminating against Americans https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/10/07/h-1b-visa-company-sup...
You are forgetting the dimension called "time" Mr. Angry But Dense.
you’ve been working since 1776? other than immigration attorney no F’ing person has worked with “hundreds of H1Bs” so you can cut the crap
You've clearly never worked in a large tech company.
The size of company you work in doesn't matter beyond a certain fairly small size. The only way anybody could work with hundreds of people at all (and have a justified informed opinion about them) is to have a long career in a place or places with very high turnover.
Professors might hit those numbers because having informed opinions about their students is a large part of their job and they see large turnover by definition. Directors could have a chance, but even there I'd say hundreds is actually unusual, unless your standards for quality of opinion are low.
And then that's all people, not just H1-B holders.
I do coding interviews 2-3x/week for a private, but large company.
We do not lack candidates, but we lack qualified candidates. Most people that I interview have no clue how software actually works. Most are leetcode monkeys or just really awful.
We mostly hire seniors because of the industry we're in, but we've started hiring interns and juniors due to the lack of decent candidates.
We'd love to hire US candidates, but there's just a huge lack.
Decent candidates have more opportunities. Decent candidates have already a decent job. Why should they apply to your company?
If this true, why doesn't FAANG have the same problems? I noticed that your post did not discuss any of the negatives about your company or its offers. When I have struggled in the past to hire, it is always because my company or its offers were pathetic. Pretty simple. If your company or offers are weak, then your candidate pipeline will (likely) be weak.
> A supposed shortage of qualified US applicants for tech jobs, especially software developers, doesn't jibe with the huge numbers of US developers currently looking for work, including highly experienced older workers suffering from age discrimination.
While I tend to agree, this is a bit of a straw man.
You can have tons of people looking for work who aren't qualified for the job - which is (I think) the FAANG argument.
It's not like FAANG is paying less than what most unemployed techies are looking to make.
FAANG companies have been laying people off at the moment, so it doesn't seem they are exactly suffering from a lack of workers. Until a year or so ago some of these companies were hiring people without any real work for them, just to deprive their competitors of talent.
I tend to agree, but this is another straw man.
FAANG will argue that they are laying off people with skills they don't need, and there's a lack of people with skills they do need.
Call them out and make a convincing argument that this is BS.
Don't cry out: BUT SOME AMERICAN WAS FIRED AND THEY'RE STILL HIRING!
This isn't a sound argument.
> FAANG will argue that they are laying off people with skills they don't need, and there's a lack of people with skills they do need.
They are laying off workers (permanent residents and H1Bs alike) mostly to cut costs while all their competitors are doing it, thereby saving face.
Additionally they are signalling to investors that they are focused on cash generation and only investing in areas they think will serve that end in the near term.
Finally, they are preparing for a future where they need fewer workers per unit of revenue and profit growth, but in the short term, that just means a higher workload for those workers that remain.
They are required to by law but I saw something odd once. My company published the job they wanted an immigrant to fill in some weird printed newspaper that I doubt had much readership if any so obviously they got no offers. Then they take that and say they couldn't find a citizen for the role so they had to get an immigrant. I still question if maybe I missed something because if what I saw is true, it really breaks the spirit of the law. Obviously HR and managers handled it all and they don't tell me details like that but I found out about it later when I witnessed a form sent to the Dept. of Labor for someone I knew.
What you are talking about is PERM. That's a requirement that the department of labor has established. When you want to hire an immigrant permanently, DOL requires that you take out an ad in a Sunday newspaper. It benefits the lawyers and the government greatly as this is a good source of revenue for both of them. As far as the actual job goes, that job was never open. The person is already working for the company on a visa. DOL just makes them do this dog and pony show before they can hire them permanently. These regulations are a few decades old and were never updated.
I wonder why US citizens aren't regularly exploiting this. Subscribe to the newspaper, apply to the job, and sue the company when they ignore you.
That’s pretty common and not actually limited to H1-Bs
I know universities will do this with certain open positions where they already have a candidate in mind but are required to advertise an opening, can’t remember the specifics why though. Same with RFPs.
Really easy system to defeat.
My sentiments exactly. The visa is highly exploitative by design, so it selects cheap labor from abroad at the expense of workers at home. Any posturing by employers claiming they can’t find qualified domestic applicants or governments claiming they’re protecting workers is hogwash.
If we really valued this foreign labor, we’d make permanent residency a requirement of the visa rather than block it. Of course, if we offered immigrants permanent residency status then companies would have to pay them substantially more, which is the whole point of the H1B.
Yes. I got my internship in Chicago (J1), later failed the H-1B because of the lottery (twice) so had to leave, spent a year and half in England and managed to get back on a Greencard. Now I have citizenship. I created a startup also.
Now, was I essential to the US? Probably not. They probably could have found someone else.
I'm not sure if that's good enough to say I should not have been accepted here.
As a non-immigrant to the United States, I don't really buy into the idea that companies prefer H1B candidates purely for financial reasons. The H1B process is frankly a rigid, unreliable and time-consuming process.
It's hard for even Canadians and Mexicans to find jobs in the US and we have access to the supposedly easy to obtain TN visa. Australians too with E3.
I'm more inclined to believe that H1B workers have other benefits to employers such as longer tenure due to the restrictions of moving jobs.
Which in itself should be an argument for further liberalization say by giving I140 approved petitioners access to EADs.
> I'm more inclined to believe that H1B workers have other benefits to employers such as longer tenure due to the restrictions of moving jobs.
That is a financial motive. Companies don't want to pay the kind of compensation which would induce employees to be loyal to the company, and so they use H1B quasi-indentured servitude as a cheaper alternative.
I’ve been on an H1B before, a long time back. Most companies do not want to deal with your immigration issues. Bigger enterprises have the resources. But the moment you get smaller, there isn’t a whole lot of patience or energy for that.
As an H1B I May have made marginally less than my peers who were not immigrationally challenged. But as promotions picked up I think that wasn’t an issue anymore.
The one thing I still have though is I’m never the squeaky wheel. Getting laid off on an H1B is brutal. So your tolerance for corporate bs and workplace toxicity is quite high.
This last point is a big one.
I've seen more than one shop that would use contract houses as a way to 'paper over' their internal turnover issues.
After all, even if the internal resource at the body shop asks for and gets a transfer, they've got another body in to finish the contract.
Plus the fringe benefits. That h1b is a sword of damocles, contractor will work 6/10+ even if the main shop is doing 45 on average for engineers.
Which, doesn't get you better code typically, but it let's suits say people are working long hours to get the task done.
I don’t buy this and you should not be selling it :) if H1Bs worked 6/10+ while other employees did 45 all it would take is ONE of H1B’s to reach out to ONE hungry lawyer and the lawsuit will be plastered all over the MSM/Social Media/… the H1B gal/guy would go home to their country with a bag full of money :)
people here on HN (without any merit) make H1B program sound like farming jobs in Texas… too funny
Crazy to think the people who come to US universities to obtain post-bachelor degrees are more qualified than those who didn't... This is purely anecdotal, but my experience at a top institution is that the majority of CS/ECE of MS and PhD programs are foreign students, and the H1B folks I worked with had these advanced degrees.
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It doesn't quite work that way. H-1B employees need to have above average compensation or their field. This is part of the application process.
> H-1B employees need to have above average compensation or their field.
In the past decade or so, I have personally worked with an H-1B in the SF Bay Area who was working a full-time software position advertised as requiring a Master's degree, but was making something like $120k/year.
"Must be making above the median pay for the position" might be the way it's SUPPOSED to work, but it's clear that it doesn't ALWAYS work that way.
I think you're assuming that everyone has a price.
Also H1Bs can't also start their own businesses (at least before this rule). So that was another restriction.
> I think you're assuming that everyone has a price
Nope. They don't need it to work for every worker, they can't get every worker as a H1B either. It working for some workers makes it worth doing for businesses.
We don’t support h1b, of the last 3000 applicants we had only 1 was qualified. It’s super hard to hire strong swe.
Yep. We pay a lot. We are a company you've heard of and we're doing well. For our systems engineering roles, we've had a hell of a time finding good people. Plenty of interviews with folks who turn out not to know basic C programming or systems level algorithms.
It seems like systems level programmers are either firmly employed somewhere else or have switch roles to an easier domain. I know I've considered going back to Python programming where I can make the same money with a lot less work.
Where "turn out not to know basic C programming or systems level algorithms" is failing some leetcode puzzle they have not touched in the last 20 years while they have been full time writing C and C++? So hell of a time not finding your definition of 'good people' would be kinda expected.
3000 applicants we had only 1 was qualified
Not snarking, but you either have a needlessly arbitrary bar, or you've left the applicant pool up to people unqualified to gather applicants (non technical young HR, etc)
It’s LinkedIn jobs board + HN who is hiring. Everyone who applies tends to have some development experience. We interviewed maybe 30 best resumes out of the 3k applicants. Lots of people fail relatively basic python or typescript coding challenge, a few fail basic “designs an api” round. We did filter a few people in culture match but thats rare, most fail the technical rounds.
Many competent developers are horrible at these live coding challenges. I suspect at least some people just "failed" out of anxiousness.
That said, it's certainly true there's lots of spam in job applications.
This will be my eternal curse :(
During the actual job I've never once had issues of any kind, but my brain just shuts down in interview environments. I'll forget the simplest of things that I do literally daily, and it all just ends up spiraling out of control from there. It's like there's 2 people in my brain, the regular, competent me, and then interview me who's a bumbling buffoon that I myself wouldn't hire. It's not even a pressure thing, I do fine in high stress environments, it's just specifically during interviews where things go wrong.
Na, the 3000 sounds the like normal flood of LinkedIn type apply now button presses.
The real number for them is probably the next few parts of the hiring pipeline after those resumes are scanned and filtered.
What kind of salaries are you offering though...
We are seed stage startup, we post salary range 130-180k + competitive equity for mid to senior level fully remote.
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Sorry, on what planet are we onshoring H-1B work? What company can manage the H-1B process but can’t remote to Ukraine or Colombia? Or capitalise their dev expense, inefficiently, granted, with AI?
In a post-remote world these jobs aren’t competing with on-shore labor. This is a populist pitch in the mould of iron work to Pennsylvania.
> What company can manage the H-1B process but can’t remote to Ukraine or Colombia? Or capitalise their dev expense, inefficiently, granted, with AI?
All of those are also happening, plus H1-B competition. Offshoring to low-cost countries is more common for maintenance work, or work that is not core to the business or its product innovation.
H1-B workers are often very good at what they do, every bit as good as permanent resident workers, which is precisely why they are competition for permanent resident workers, whether in office or remote.
The companies that do RTO. Logically, you are right but this is not how those CEOs operate.
there is limited number of H1B visas that are issued each year (as if I have to even say this)... so they won't make a dent if you are correct with "the huge numbers of US developers currently looking for work."
we abolish the program and boom, 65k people out of this apparently HUGE number of US developers looking for work won't make a dent... so this argument holds absolutely no water ...
...other than... you know... the entire point of the H1B visa program... is to get talent the US DOESN'T already have ...
Well, if there aren't such programs people like Elon or Satya and Pichai might have never started out. You look at them as being successful and exceptional today (regardless of some of the more questionable antics and decisions), when they just started, it's hard to argue that you can't find similar, exceptional talent in the US.
But if you shut off that valve, they would not be here 25 years later.
Elon, Satya and Pichai didn't arrive on H1B visa.
Interestingly, Staya Nadella did use the H1B program, in an unconventional way.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-o...
I am not arguing the merits/purpose of the program. just the silly that this program is affecting US population tech (un)employment
Developers aren’t fungible, and are hard to hire. Try getting a bunch of people to sling some boring Java or mainframe code. They don’t exist.
The trap with the older worker is a guy wants $250k, but will perform at the level of a $75/hr body shop guy. Skills don’t align - that’s always the risk of engineering.
> The trap with the older worker is a guy wants $250k, but will perform at the level of a $75/hr body shop guy.
Casual ageism as if it won’t be you one day
It's not a matter of age itself, but variance and experience. You can find the issue already at 5 years: Some people have grown and have used those years wisely, while others still are going to get experience raises, while they don't bring the improved performance.
Haha, you're so wrong, Spooky23. Older workers love doing "boring" work that younger workers do not enjoy. What's more, a 1337 definition of "senior level" that I used back in the day was the ability to walk into a project and not have the urge to begin rewriting everything, something virtually every non-senior level worker (and many senior idiots) may have the urge to do. Here in the (dystopian) future (from my perspective), you can go on YouTube to watch a video about "How to write the clean code, by Uncle Bob" (cringe) and "My life as a Senior level Dev" (uber cringe). Please make a note of it.
While here, adding that we need Executive action to ban H1B workers and tariff BPOs at 250% from countries that have not ratified the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. I speculate that even Elon Musk Actual will approve of this restriction.
Lastly, to avoid posting a response to another comment, going to mention that there is nothing quite like having a head-hunter with an accent that sounds roughly like he is talking with a rotary egg-beater jammed into his mouth call you up and ask you a series of disqualification questions for a position that he already has sourced from offshores labor pool (so as to check the box that he personally certifies there are no American workers qualified for the work). Their customer doesn't want to know how the sausage is made, they just want cheap bodies for unimportant low-level work and this is what it takes under the current Law. I actually have a friend who was paid very well to let an H1B follow him around for several months learning his job before he was let go and lost his home, wife and wound up moving in with his parents. He went to the US Government to complain and ended up at Google for a while before moving on to a Unicorn.
If the H1B have side-hustles like starting Zoom, doing what Satya did, or their spouses create incredible non-tech businesses, that's really great..but what about all the American peeps (AND THEIR KIDS) that were jipped out of that opportunity by lax enforcement of America's laws, only to ultimately hear "See, we need to keep letting so many H1B people and their criminal recruiters warehouse them in apartments and work for dog food because so many of them have gone on to create such tremendous economic activity for America" (ie, a self-fulfilling prophecy).
Then you should support this rule change:
> Finally, the rule strengthens program integrity by codifying USCIS’ authority to conduct inspections and impose penalties for failure to comply; requiring that the employer must establish that it has a bona fide position in a specialty occupation available for the worker as of the requested start date; clarifies that the Labor Condition Application must support and properly correspond with the H-1B petition; and requires that the petitioner have a legal presence and be subject to legal processes in court in the United States.
There are plenty of software engineers but many of them may not be qualified for the currently open jobs. So, yes, there are open jobs and there are unhired americans but programs like H1-b make even more highly talented pool of people available which in turn increases innovation and productivity in economy.
So, it's not just a plain numbers game, it's more about innovation, productivity, talent pools and of course, capitalism.
Yes, I don’t understand this either. Nowadays you have to be a senior just to get an entry level position in the USA. There are plenty of mid level developers that are struggling to find a job.
I guess it will be interesting times ahead. I recommend everyone to keep their skills sharp!
I used to work for the U.S. Naval Undersea Warfare Centers, and it was a pretty good experience.
U.S. citizens (and perhaps some dual-citizens) might want to look into such places (Navy warfare centers, NRL, ARL, etc.)
TL;DR:
The top starting pay is about $150k IIRC, which I'm told is somewhat below what a well-funded defense contractor will pay for really good people.
But I worked with some great people, the work was interesting, and it was located in a medium-cost-of-living area.
I left because of the siren call of the startup scene, and frustration with some bureaucratic stuff. But in retrospect I actually liked working there the best.
Friend of mine worked for a Fortune 500 company that was playing an interesting game: They would open a job req with a narrow set of qualifications. If a US citizen showed up and matched the qualifications, they would hire them, then eliminate their position 6 months later. But then they'd slightly change the job qualifications to exclude that person, and try again. (It seemed like it was part of some lobbying effort to say "Look how many job openings we can't fill!")
I feel like this whole issue could be solved short order if we agreed that not being able to find qualified applicants at a given fixed price does not a shortage make.
It's the same with the "fast food shortage," I bet the shortage would dry up real fast at $50/hr so all we're really doing is haggling over price. If in order to hire a H1-B at a salary of x you had to offer US workers 2x with say a $100k floor on x then I bet Americans would show up.
So then call the H1-B program what it is - a way for US tech companies to depress wages to the point that you can't afford to live the US, unless it's a bunch of H-1B holders living together in a house share.
The same goes for offshoring for jobs. Lovely for shareholders and the CEO's bonus, but not so great for US residents having to compete with them who are paying US cost of living, not Indian/etc overseas cost of living.
It'd be nice if the US government would pass laws benefiting its own citizens/residents rather than corporations.
House sharing is a problem with the numbers of people that FAANG wants to employ in West Coast communities that aren't having it, not with their identities. When people making $300-500k can't have their own houses, the problem is not money.
If the H1B is paid $400k, is it really depressing salaries? It's more about having employees that are 10-15% better than the competition if you can, which makes you much more likely to beat them.
Yes, even at 400k it's still salary depression. The whole thing is, essentially, regulatory capture that is being used to do a sort of "arbitrage" over people. Big corporations in the West are cannibalizing society because governments are failing at defending the interests of the majority due to the lobbying power of a minority. Mind you I am not talking about an uprising or some bullshit like that, but, for example, the situation around medical service/insurance in the US is appalling.
It's racist to prefer citizens over non-citizens though. The US government should pass laws benefiting all people of the world equally.
Governments exist to take care of their own citizens—that’s their main job. Citizens pay taxes, follow the laws, and contribute to the country, so it makes sense for a government to prioritize their needs. That’s not racist; it’s just how countries work.
If a government tried to treat everyone in the world the same, it wouldn’t be able to meet the needs of its own people. Things like healthcare, schools, and public services are paid for by citizens, so they have to come first.
Also, preferring citizens isn’t about race. Citizenship is something anyone can earn, no matter where they’re from. Calling it racist mixes up two very different things.
It's hard not to break the rules in replying to something like this.
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> Governments exist to take care of their own citizens—that’s their main job. Citizens pay taxes, follow the laws, and contribute to the country, so it makes sense for a government to prioritize their needs. That’s not racist; it’s just how countries work.
Are you trying to tell us immigrants to the US do not pay taxes? They don't follow laws? And they don't contribute to the country?
Obviously, given the context, I am not trying to say immigrants don't pay taxes or follow the law. I am saying the the job of a government is to look after its own. If you have some better term for "its own people" go for it.
I'd also say, immigrants are only temporary non-citizens. If they are immigrating to stay, then it's the government's job to take care of them. Countries like the US and Australia were founded on immigrants.
If their loyalty is not to the country they are immigrating to, and is to their previous country's government, I am not sure why it would be a priority to support them.
I'm not being sarcastic this time. You seem to have missed the zeitgeist, especially among younger generations. For them, it's very much true that the government shouldn't look out for the interests of its citizens over the interests of people in general, and they do think it's racist if the government does this. It's impossible to explain to them the very simple game theory implications of such policy, and it's difficult to argue that the government isn't already doing it (in the United States, in other countries it's impossible to argue that).
>If their loyalty is not to the country they are immigrating to
This goes against human nature. Loyalty would come later, not before or even immediately.
It's nationalist, not racist. Passports and border controls are the practical foundation of all nationalism.
not sure if your comment was an attempt at sarcasm and I just missed it. In case it wasn't - it's not racist for country to look after its own economic interest or the interest of its own citizens.
Huh? There are US citizens of all sorts of ethnic/racial backgrounds.
Preferring US citizens over outsourcing is patriotic, not racist. It's also being a good corporate citizen - supporting the country/people you are gaining your profits from.
On a market with free pricing there are, pretty much by definition, no shortages or surpluses.
Instead prices go up or down until supply and demand meet.
So talking about "shortages" in this context doesn't really make sense to me. Yet that's the terminology in this field, and the resulting confusion is unavoidable.
> On a market with free pricing there are, pretty much by definition, no shortages or surpluses.
Remember the "chip shortage" all throughout the pandemic? It's not like the whole world switched to a Soviet style command economy between 2020 and 2022 yet we still had it.
"Free market" folks tend to ignore the ladder-pulls and existing regulations that make it a non-free market.
This example proves OP's point. It was only a "shortage" in name.
If you were willing to pay more than the market rate, there was no problem in finding chips.
That's an interesting case!
ChatGPT mentions some factors for why suppliers didn't just raise prices until the demand met the supply:
1. The industry often has long term contracts that fixes prices months or years in advance.
2. Even without such contracts, the value of stable, long-term relationships with major customers made suppliers keep prices stable.
3. Governments intervened to prevent "price gouging" for favored industries, and even without such intervention, perceived price gouging can be more damaging long term than is made up for by near term profits.
So you're right that there was a real shortage for a time.
But note my original caveat: "On a market with free pricing". Unfree pricing (contracts/regulation) was one factor.
But PR considerations, which I admit I didn't think of, was also a factor. So I learned something here!
A shortage is a situation, where the market cannot bring high prices down by increasing the supply. For example, if software engineers earn more than equally demanding roles in other engineering fields and the situation persists long enough, there is a shortage of software engineers.
Who decides if the price is high or low? That should be the market. High salaries -> more people decide to pursue it as a career -> more competition -> lower salaries. They are trying to force salaries down quicker
> I feel like this whole issue could be solved short order if we agreed that not being able to find qualified applicants at a given fixed price does not a shortage make.
It could be solved by realising that letting immigrants in, especially highly skilled ones, is good for the country (and for the immigrants!), independent of anything like a 'skills shortage'.
So you want to depress wages of vulnerable people on visas even more? What is wrong with you?
It seems to me that there is a dichotomy between that or allowing companies to continue to snub US workers for vulnerable foreign labor.
Maybe you could escape the dichotomy by requiring H1-B workers to be in the 5% paid employees at a company or something.
No, what needs to happen is to give workers mobility. H1B workers are preferentially hired at some firms because of their lack of mobility — they're easier to abuse than other workers. Addressing that would let everyone be on an equal footing and share the benefits of agglomeration (immigration increases supply and demand!) It would also be far more just and equitable.
Parents idea is better.
I wonder if this shortage has to do with the recent strong swing back to in-office work
Well, what is a company supposed to do if local candidates do not want RTO? It seems logical to hire workers who are OK with RTO, especially if they are outside of the country and clearly willing to relocate for RTO.
>Well, what is a company supposed to do if local candidates do not want RTO?
Well one option, of course, would be not forcing staff to return to office.
Perhaps while also noticing both the record profits made over the past four years, as well as the fact that many of those working from their home office have had nothing but glowing performance reviews over those past four years...
It just takes the negotiation power from the employees though. The question is, whether it’s more important to make the employees happy or the businesses. Both have valid cases.
But it also doesn't jibe with the reported difficulty US tech companies experience trying to hire US developers.
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Well they charge you more ! Us is famous for not hiring programmers aged above 50 cuz they are expensive !!
https://www.reddit.com/r/economicCollapse/comments/1hgghdb/f...
You really think a business would do that? Just go to the government and tell lies?
"Good faith" by the letter of the law is often established by chichanery like posting job ads with nebulous requirements in print newspapers, requiring mail in resumes, and slowrolling a process.
Not lies, strictly, but I see plenty of evidence pointing to the 'fake job' phonemena that seems to be discounted, like this example: https://www.teamblind.com/post/Intuit-firing-up-ads-in-local...
Filtering out real information from data and anecdata is a challenge at the best of times, but I am ill convinced of the honesty of most of the recruitment market.
Yes - it seems this is routinely done for H-1B positions. You meet the requirement for having advertised the job by running an ad for 1 day in the back of the fisherman's chronicle. You tailor the job description so closely to the H-1B candidate you've already decided to hire, that it'd be easy to defend why you rejected other candidates (should they inconvenience you by seeing the ad and applying).
When you get a chance please look up the difference between H-1B and PERM.
Yes, some of them have been doing it for decades.
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/indian-corporation-pays-re...
It’s a scam. It’s the same thing as “we’d pay $8 for avocados if it wasn’t for illegal immigrants” with flowery language.
Talking about a shortage of local applicants is really irrelevant and at most a distraction.
It's the old 'the foreigners are taking our jobs' routine.
So is it true or false?
The number of people in the labour force has change quite a lot over the centuries, and the number of people gainfully employed has tracked that quite closely. Ie unemployment has been relatively low and stable. (Despite eg women joining the labour force en mass over the course of the 20th century, or all the baby boomers, etc.)
That suggest the null hypothesis that to a first approximation the number of jobs is determined by the number of workers available. More workers seem to somehow lead to more jobs. (Immigration changes the number of workers, yes. But that's about it.)
what about the particulars?
What kinds of jobs are growing? Are any groups underemployed? Are standards of living increasing? For who?
> More workers seem to somehow lead to more jobs.
Imagine the US merged with Canada and Mexico. The number of jobs would probably go up until we reached a similar level of unemployment. Would everyone be better off? Is that what economic growth looks like?
H-1B is a scam for hiring Indian developers who then become beholden to the companies they work for. That's it.
There may be many Indians, but when I was on h1b me and my colleagues were from Germany, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, Brazil, India. All of those moved on to other companies, even multiple times and/or went through the green card process.
The salary I got was ok for bay area standards, certainly not rockstar level but would make jaws drop in Germany. For me it was an amazing opportunity and I would recommend it to anyone to do for a while.
I’m just an outside observer but I would say it’s probably not all a scam. Most of it absolutely is though.
Generally I just see a lot of unfocused writing in this thread. Even the reply to your post is an attempt to muddy the waters with some ambiguous statement. I guess this is a community of developers and we tend to have difficulty with politics and the real world :-)
ah yes, like the CEOs of Google and Microsoft
Here's a reform I'd like to see: if you've had layoffs in the last 24 months, you as an employer are ineligible to apply for or sponsor or hire an H-1B visa holder for any similar position and "similar" here is broad.
Big Tech, for example, treats SWEs as largely interchangeable. Make a SWE redundant and you can't hire another SWE--anywhere in the country--who is a visa holder for 24 months.
You can buy your way out of this by paying any redundant SWE 3 years of salary and benefits.
Let's see how necessary layoffs really are.
This sounds good in theory, but I suspect it would cause companies to mostly switch from layoffs to aggressive performance management (i.e. firing for “poor performance”, stack ranking, etc.)
It's definitely more than 5-10% if you just include FAANG who pay far higher than most average US citizen devs make in salary to both H1Bs and citizen devs.
It’s really simple test. Dig into unemployment numbers for skill shortages. If your industry only has an acceptable level of unemployment filings, then it qualifies as an industry eligible for H1B. Within the industry, each company would interview you on SV style data structures and algorithms. If you don’t make the interview, you are not qualified. The foreigner who could pass such a qualifying test would then get the job and visa is an accessory here.
Ah, classic regulatory theater. The administration, after 4 years of not introducing these changes, is now suddenly scrambling to roll them out. They’re dropping them right before a major transition, with an implementation timeline conveniently set for after the transition.
It’s a clever little maneuver. When the inevitable reversal happens, they can show up at fundraising galas telling donors, “We tried! We were so close! It’s just those baddies who always come along and pull the rug.”
It's not the only last minute thing the administration does that it could have done before:
- Launched rockets from Ukraine - remote work contracts extended to 2029 after Elon + Vivek wants people to RTO - TikTok ban
And the classic answer is always the same here: ,,it was all planned for years'' (sure, but the decision is made after the elections on purpose)
We all know how a distant deadline can make us slack off. Then suddenly the deadline is in three months instead of four years, you’ll discover a bunch of things you could do faster.
That’s not to excuse the slowness, but I imagine this stuff was in process for a while.
Parkinson's law: "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."
The decision regarding TikTok was not made after the election and the law was passed with strong bi-partisan support.
I'm surprised to see somebody presumably on the Republican side complaining about norm violations.
It’s fascinating how many government policies take 3 years and 11 months to implement.
> The administration, after 4 years of not introducing these changes
They might have spent the last four years negotiating what exactly the changes would ideally be. Government doesn’t work well with the “let’s see what sticks approach”.
Negotiating with who?
This is an executive power. USCIS - the President can modify regulations, such as how H-1B applications are processed or the criteria used in selection lotteries.
There is rulemaking process that takes time. It has to go through notice and comment period, withstand lawsuits, etc. I agree with your overall point though, that this admin was utterly spineless and useless.
Regardless, these are good changes, I hope they stick around.
Unlikely to be reversed. The incoming president's largest donor strongly favors a larger and more dynamic H1-B work force.
Anything to keep wages down.
The same president used coronavirus as an excuse to ban all H1B entries.
those were then times, now billionaires shelled out a whole lot of money to put him in power and payback time is coming. h1b may double/triple/… in the coming years. policy will be to keep “bad people out” (southern border) while taking in a bunch of “smart people, best people” from other countries
Eh downvote.
The USG has to go through a very length period of coming up with a proposed rule. Allowing comments to be made about it, adjusting (or not) the rule based on those comments, and then finally submitting the final rule.
Nobody at USCIS wrote this document yesterday and published this today. This is the result of years of work. Do you seriously expect the USG to shut down anything they don't think they can finish under the current administration?
> has to go through a very length period
Doesn't the bottom of this announcement describe a previous rule that was announced in January 2024 and then implemented in March 2024? Interesting that rules process was far more rapid than this one.
And?
So a different related rule started its process awhile back and a second rule was in the works concurrently. Is the USG only allowed to do one thing at a time?
The comment period for this rule ended last year to give you an idea of how long this has at least been in the works. All of this information is rapidly found via the submitted url at the top of the page.
https://www.regulations.gov/docket/USCIS-2023-0005/document
It's the same question. What decides when a long process and comment period is required and when it isn't? Why does this agency have such variable performance when it comes to similar rulings?
Maybe it's a total coincidence that this final rule takes effect the Friday, January 17 and Trump's inauguration is Monday, January 20th. But I sort of wonder.
> Ah, classic regulatory theater.
No, the classic people not understanding how the government works.
These are changes that were done through the rule-making process, not legislation. The rule-making process is (by design!) VERY SLOW to give the stakeholders a chance to voice their opinion.
Typical rules take about 2 years to be implemented. And I guess Biden hoped to get a real immigration reform that would have made these changes unnecessary.
It will make Trump look great reversing a policy that steals good paying jobs from Americans.
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Seem like sensible changes, though more is still needed. Requiring H1B holders to leave the country to renew paperwork is an insane anachronism. The per-country caps also seem like a throwback to the early 1900's era immigration exclusion policies.
Re: the concerns over "immigrants taking our jobs!". As a native-born American working in a large tech company today - the threat is very clearly not from H1B's and other visas. The threat to American tech jobs is when US tech companies choose to build out offices in lower cost of living countries (and I'm very much including Europe in that, I think that's even a bigger problem).
It's much much better for America if tech companies hire workers in the US, regardless of whether they are citizens. Americans are eligible for those jobs, and that money stays within our economy. Versus employing workers elsewhere, where American's can't easily be hired, and those resources leave the US.
If we want to keep opportunities here - that's the issue we should be focus on fixing. What regulatory steps could we advocate for that would address this risk? Immigration is the wrong problem, and the focus on that in certain populist circles really demonstrates they are rather out of touch from what's actually happening in the industries that are driving the US economy today.
>It's much much better for America if tech companies hire workers in the US, regardless of whether they are citizens. Americans are eligible for those jobs, and that money stays within our economy. Versus employing workers elsewhere, where American's can't easily be hired, and those resources leave the US.
I want to pick on this point, because it's the general refrain about this topic. If there is some thing that American workers can't do in an in-demand field, and the government sets up a system to allow non-citizens to do those jobs, most people will say that this "helps" America. But does it? If the education pipeline is inadequately preparing Americans for being competitive in this in-demand field then perhaps that is the problem that should be addressed. Right now it feels like we have a (highly suspect) "labor shortage" that is addressed via immigration, which doesn't send a signal back to the educational/training infrastructure that they're doing something wrong.
The US is only 4% of the world's population, so there's an enormous number of extremely smart people who live outside its present borders. I don't think anyone believes that even the world's greatest educational system can bring all of its students up to an extremely high level of general intelligence. We should be letting very smart people born outside the US emigrate here, which is a win-win for everyone involved
Sure. But the government of the United States is, allegedly, there for the benefit of its citizens. I'm not really following where this "should" comes from. "Should" in what volume? "Should" over what time frame?
If you don't think that having Linus Torvalds as a US citizen tremendously benefits the US public as a whole, enough to offset any imagined downsides of a great many merely average immigrating tech workers, there's nothing more to be said. And that's just him alone but he is merely one example of many other famous examples.
If you're gonna name famous people, there's already an O-1 visa program for that.
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
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Linus works from home, he could do that from anywhere.
Indeed.
The benefit to the US if he is a citizen is that then his taxes flow to the US and if he's resident his local spending flows to the US economy and that of any geo immediate coworkers there for the face time.
There is only one linus, and his personal economic impact is trivial compared to that of the linux project.
What would it give US if they had Linus as an citizen?
Letting in a lot of smart people benefits the citizens of the United States, that's why I said it's a win-win. Do you think we'd be better off if we excluded Musk to hire a native-born American instead in our aerospace industry?
Just going back in time, do you think the US would be better off if we'd excluded Irish immigrants? Italians? Germans? If blocking immigration somehow benefits native-born citizens, you'd logically have to think our population should have stayed the same as it was when we broke away from Britain. We'd be about the size of say Colombia, maybe with a bit higher GPD
The current immigration regime is still relatively new, it is not as if it has existed for the entirety of the existence of the United States. It's an artifact of the late 20th century, and only just now accelerated in the early 21st. That's barely a single generation. So, no, I don't take it as a given that essentially limitless immigration - even if loosely constrained on "high skill" - is somehow axiomatically good for the United States.
I'm a little confused. It's possible to be very pedantic and say that the current immigration law only dates back to the 60s, but the population of the United States is 97.9% not from this continent. There was a wave of British, Spanish, and French immigration in the 17th & 18th centuries, followed by Germans, Italians, and Irish in the 19th & 20th. In the 19th century the legal regime about immigration was literally 'open borders', there were hardly any legal controls at all. The vast vast majority of us are the descendants of immigrants (my apologies if you personally are 100% Native American, didn't mean to lump you in)
I think you're the one being overly pedantic if you only qualify 100% Native American as "American". This country isn't just some economic zone that people come to and from for the purposes of commercial or business activity. If that's all it was, then a much more lax or liberal immigration regime would make perfect sense.
>but the population of the United States is 97.9% not from this continent.
This would be a surprise to the 85% of us who were actually born here. In its most simplified form, what those of us who are skeptical of the current immigration regime are wondering out loud is if these processes do actually make "people born in America" better off. "Immigration is always good" has been the mantra since, as you speculate, the 1960s. Probably worth evaluating that idea from first principles from time to time.
But we're all descended from immigrants. Do you think it was wrong when the British & Italian & Irish & German all moved here en masse? Assuming no, what would be different about the latest wave of immigrants?
I honestly view this point - that there were prior waves of immigration from various European nations, and before that concurrent waves of forced migration from Africa and elsewhere (though this is left unsaid) - as a bit of a non-sequitur, bordering on bait, largely because it happened over a very long timescale into an essentially empty nation. Suppose I answered in the negative (that I don't think there was anything wrong with it). That wouldn't change anything at all about the current debate. It isn't some kind of gotcha, that if I don't have a problem with British/Italian/Irish/German/French/whoever coming during various migration waves it somehow neuters any particular point about how any immigration regime should, in my view, be structured such that there are clear and defined benefits to the people already living in the country. Enumerated elsewhere in the thread, but the H-1B system in particular is for the benefit of industry (POSIWID etc etc). Not people already here.
It is worth noting, though, that after the peak of immigration in the late 19th century and ending in the 1910s, the United States very intentionally shut off immigration to allow time for assimilation to do its work.
I think the main point that I want to make is that attracting all of the world's smartest people to our country, and staying the world's superpower in technology & science, does have extremely 'clear and defined benefits to the people already living in the country'
By your logic humans are migrant therefore no borders for all....
Not immigration - settlement. And not even exactly that in the cases of the French and Spanish. Would you count Hawaiians as 20th century immigrants?
if anything the previous regime was even more unconstrained. add to that generous blanket amnesty etc and today seems more gated than ever
> Do you think we'd be better off if we excluded Musk to hire a native-born American instead in our aerospace industry?
Given where he ended up, probably.
Cheap rockets are nice, but speed-running a complete destruction of public trust, culture, and of any illusion that the country is one with rule of law for the benefit of a few insecure billionaire narcissists is a juice that wasn't worth the squeeze.
Elon Musk is in fact incredibly popular, even if he is highly polarizing. His poll numbers are similar to Trumps and Trump won the national election.
Telling me that Musk is incredibly popular in Texas or Alabama is like me telling you that Putin is incredibly popular in Moscow. 'Strongmen' authoritarians peddling revanchist fantasies that'll make their country great again are often popular.
Just because something is popular doesn't mean it's a net good.
The man himself is an insecure narcissist who can't let any slight, real or imagined go unanswered. It would be sad and funny if he didn't own a speech platform, or hitch himself to an absolutely insane political movement.
Allegedly...by and large the US Government operates, however, for the benefit of corporations and rich folk (with some exceptions). If they want to hire foreign labor, the US Government is going to make it happen.
I mean the US thinks of its place in the world as much more than the domestic insular affairs of its citizens. If you look at it from that angle it’s obvious that vacuuming up smart people and becoming “more powerful” intellectually is what the US clearly wants.
A national government functions as a labor union on a national scale.
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> which is a win-win for everyone involved
Well... not for everyone involved. It's definitely a "lose" for the countries they are leaving from, that educated them.
The median American is not smart enough to do complex software engineering, just like they're not smart enough to be a doctor or college professor. All cognitively demanding jobs compete for the same (probably single-digit) percent of the workforce. Better education could certainly prepare more people to do these jobs, but it's not a given that there are enough smart people in the domestic workforce to do all the cognitively-demanding jobs.
If thousands of the smartest people from the rest of the world want to move to the US and fill these gaps, doesn't that make America better off overall?
This is just brain-draining the rest of the world for the short-term boosting of some myopic statistics. This isn't going to improve the employability of median-intelligence people, and in the long run, it's going to exacerbate the same problem, but now globally.
>The median American is not smart enough to do complex software engineering
How many jobs require complex SW engineering rather than basic SW engineering?
>The median American is not smart enough to do complex software engineering,
This point, assuming for a moment that it's actually true, would matter if "complex software engineering" was all that this was being used for. Complex for whom?
I think a lot of these comments don’t properly capture the benefit. The more skilled workers, the more startups/companies, not to mention smarter people.
But the effect is bigger than that, by allowing skilled immigration, it makes US universities and tech companies the best in the world, at the very least seen as such, which has tremendous larger effects.
It’s not a coincidence that we have the largest tech industry, and it’s not because we magically have smarter people.
I don't have statistics, but given the student visa -> H-1B pipeline changes, it would seem there are a number of H-1B holders who are educated in US colleges (either at the undergrad or graduate level). This indicates that the problem is not entirely a training gap.
Honestly, the US needs to (and used to) do both. We should have a world-class public education system, and we should aggressively get the best and the brightest people to move here.
It seems unlikely we’ll do either of those things moving forward. At least China’s investing in green tech, I guess.
> The per-country caps also seem like a throwback to the early 1900's era immigration exclusion policies.
Canada does not have that and it is going very poorly. Lots of people are calling for the implementation of the same policy.
How would have the same policy had any effect in Canada? Country caps in the US don't change anything about who can enter the country, they only affect who gets permanent residency.
How is not having a per-country cap going poorly in Canada?
Because there are an overwhelming number of immigrants from the same state (or two) in India.
Is this bad due to the hypothetical loss of diversity? ie, it'd be better if there were a mix of Indian, Chinese, Brazilian, Mexican, etc immigrants, vs only immigrants from a single state in India?
What happens in a lot of cases like this is nepotism and lack of need, or even desire, to assimilate to the host country. Things like this are always dismissed the first 20 years, but it always leads to racial and ethnic tensions as time passes. Saying "ummm, like, don't be racist" has never worked.
But when immigrants all come from one small region, they tend to only hire people they know or are vetted by someone they know, they only rent properties to people they know or are vetted by people they know, they start to see the locals of the country they're living in as below them, and it just keeps spiraling out of control.
And notice that I specified no race. I specified no country. I specified no religion or ethnic background. It's simply a universal thing that happens in every country. It always leads to far right swings when not quickly addressed. If what I've said in any way comes across as "racist", that's due to the reader inserting their own racial biases and thus their own racism into this statement, because I'm not in any way implying this is confined to one group. It's something that's been a problem for millennia and governments keep making the same mistakes.
> But when immigrants all come from one small region, they tend to only hire people they know or are vetted by someone they know, they only rent properties to people they know or are vetted by people they know, they start to see the locals of the country they're living in as below them, and it just keeps spiraling out of control.
This happens with some races more than others. When you import Indians you are importing caste thinking.
It’d be interesting to understand why immigrants to Canada are disproportionately coming from a small number of locations. Unless there’s a good reason behind it I think it’s reasonable to find a better balance.
The reason why there's so many Indians is because THERE'S SO MANY INDIANS! You don't need to be a rocket surgeon to figure that one out =)
The "problem" with having that many Indians isn't that they're not adapting to Canadian culture it's that they're bringing along some of the bad things from India like the caste system. It's not as bad as many other cultural problems because it's strictly Indians causing problems for other Indians but it's still a problem.
There is a good reason behind it, although that's not what you are asking. You have framed this under the garb of curiosity and civility, whereas what you are really asking is no different from, "Why are Jews running the banks/Hollywood ?" The real reason, if you really want to know, is that there are strong markets, incentives, pipelines, and networks for certain trades that develop over time. Every trade or craft has these. In case of Canada (and the US to an extent), the international students are the ones subsidizing the universities by paying the sticker price. The universities get the money, and the students get an opportunity to study and work. The students will be mainly from India and China. Those are two large countries with rapid economic growth, ambition, and the ability to pay the price. And language works in favour of Indians. So that's how you get Silicon Valley and perhaps a lot of what you see in Canada too.
Literally can’t think of a single conspiracy theory about why Canada specifically brought people from that region. Seriously unhinged to bring up anti-semitism.
Have you heard of Brampton?
Nope, what's that
Brampton is a suburb of Toronto with a large Indian immigrant population. This is leading to tensions within Brampton as different Indian political factions attempt to influence Indian politics from Canada[1][2][3].
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/india/canada-khalistan-re...
[2] https://www.thecanadianpressnews.ca/national/party-leaders-c...
[3] https://tnc.news/2024/11/04/arrests-brampton-surrey-khalista...
Canada's center of bad driving, fraud, and temporary worker abuse.
> Re: the concerns over "immigrants taking our jobs!". As a native-born American working in a large tech company today - the threat is very clearly not from H1B's and other visas. The threat to American tech jobs is when US tech companies choose to build out offices in lower cost of living countries (and I'm very much including Europe in that, I think that's even a bigger problem).
> It's much much better for America if tech companies hire workers in the US, regardless of whether they are citizens. Americans are eligible for those jobs, and that money stays within our economy. Versus employing workers elsewhere, where American's can't easily be hired, and those resources leave the US.
Makes me wonder how many people gladly support this while at the same time clamoring against the EU's DMA and other regulations and fines it imposes on SV companies.
What you're saying is of course absolutely true! I like how plainly you've stated it, because the directness makes clear to people just how awful of a deal it is for the EU and other countries where US tech companies make enormous profits without hiring any significant number of locals.
I've lived in both the EU which suffers from the above, as well as a place where protectionism and barriers helped strongly restrain US tech and "artificially" give opportunity to local players. The latter has worked out so much better for every party involved except US tech.
> It's much much better for America if tech companies hire workers in the US
I used the same argument in Brazil to support a strong free software preference in all government functions. Support from voters in Redmond wouldn’t get anyone re-elected in Brazil.
Then we got RedHat using the same strategy to sell support for the government :D
They had a huge office in São Paulo back then. For all I know, it's bigger now. A good friend of mine spent so much time in airplanes between São Paulo and Brasilia that his skin was dry as a turtle's.
To some extent this is what Section 174 is about.
If you hire US-based engineers working on R&D (most software engineers) then you amortize their pay over 5 years. Foreign-based engineers working on R&D get amortized over 15 years.
You get to expense 3x as much for domestic engineers compared to foreign engineers. This means you need to pay more taxes upfront for having a foreign R&D team, which is bad for cashflow. Your company could be losing money (unprofitable) but still owe corp income taxes because of Section 174.
If the gov charged "tariffs" on foreign labor or services provided, especially for certain countries that labor is typically outsourced to, or certain types of labor/services (e.g. support, engineering, etc), that'd probably be an effective way to discourage offshoring.
> to leave the country to renew paperwork is an insane anachronism.
I always took it as a means of proving they still could return somewhere if necessary. Which is a reasonable thing to assure on a visa.
That's pointless. They need to prove they have somewhere to return to while regretting their visa that lets them... not return there? Dumb.
Ultimately it just wasted time and money, and causes lots of stress, for no useful purpose.
It's a visa. The whole point is that it's not permanent and you are ultimately expected to return home permanently. You may also be asked to leave at any time. It's reasonable for the host nation to want to ensure that outcome is still available and that someone hasn't actually fully emigrated here with no options for return.
Ultimately it's known to anyone who applies for a visa that this will be the requirement, and so, if they don't want the economic opportunity of working in the US, they're free to avoid the stress and just stay in their home nation.
> It's a visa. The whole point is that it's not permanent and you are ultimately expected to return home permanently
probably do not have to tell you this but not all visas are created equal... this one is particular is a dual-intent visa so what you are saying applies to SOME visas, just not this one :)
> The whole point is that it's not permanent and you are ultimately expected to return home permanently.
No. H1b is a "dual intent" visa. It's expected that you will file for a permanent residence while on this visa.
No, this was post 9/11. It has nothing to do with immigration policy. The collective jerking after 9/11 led to many bad policies, including this one. Biden half assedly tried to go back to the pre 9/11 state of "stateside renewal" but it went nowhere.
The per-country caps is very important. Otherwise, you will see flood of same people which makes everything biased.
It's a policy based on unsound reasoning. Why is India treated as a monolith when it is more diverse than the EU in terms of linguistic and cultural diversity? If tomorrow India magically broke off into 30 separate states, all the same people who have been waiting for decades would be immediately eligible for green cards. How does it make any sense?
You might be right, but if u see the real situation Indian manager prefers Indian worker mostly. And it is mostly 2-3 states, not every states.
H1B program is also diversity program, much like green card lottery…
Diversity based on country of origin doesn't make much sense, though.
Per county caps are good protection for your culture.
Canada suffered because a lack of caps.
It leads to a concentration that can be overwhelming.
Per-country caps remains an absolutely good idea. The goal of immigrants should be to integrate into the society they are joining. Without per country caps you can start creating strange enclaves and you get some of the issues Canada is having.
Having people who have been living in the country for decades, but have the threat of leaving anytime they get fired from job or due to visa issues doesn't encourage them to "integrate into the society they are joining".
If anything, the way the country caps work in the US right now make integration harder, because no matter how much they try to integrate and be part of the local community, they could be kicked out at any time. That just encourages people to have one foot out the door at all times.
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You don't have to leave the country to renew your H-1B status. As long as you stay in the US and have a legitimate reason, you can keep renewing the status. Some have done that for 20+ years while waiting for their green card priority date.
But if you leave the country for any reason and your entry visa has expired, you have to apply for a new visa to be allowed to return. And you often have to return to your home country to do that. Which can be inconvenient, as it can turn a short vacation or conference trip to a month-long stay in another country. And for citizens of some countries, there is a high risk of denial. Visiting your family can then leave you stranded in a country that's no longer your home, while being locked out of your actual home and life in the US.
This is a peculiar feature of the US system. In most countries, when you renew your temporary work permit (whatever it's called), you also renew you entry permit.
Another complication - H1Bs are valid for 6 years. However, the physical paper stamp given on passports is only valid for 3 years at a time. So if I chose to stay in the US (and not travel internationally) I'd be fine to continue working without renewing my physical visa paper stamp. But to get a new physical stamp, I have to re-enter the country every 3 years. How does that make sense?
> But to get a new physical stamp, I have to re-enter the country every 3 years. How does that make sense?
Why do you need a new physical stamp at all if you are not re-entering? I think your argument is backwards here. What I think you’re asking is “why can I stay in the country without taking this step, but I have to take this step to re-enter.”
Well, because when you leave the country you are subject to certain laws. Even a permanent resident cannot just leave and expect to come back whenever without consequence. Even a person eligible to apply for citizenship must meet a minimum threshold of presence.
Now, your question becomes “why are the laws the way they are” and/or “why doesn’t the law make sense”. I conjecture that these situations are particularly fringe for our legislators so they don’t get a ton of attention, and they make just enough sense to remain as is.
Visa is valid for 6y, entry visa for 3. You decide to visit Europe in year 4, you have to travel to southeast Asia or South America to renew your entry visa before you can get back to work? Sounds stupid.
Another incredibly stupid thing of the American system is the fact that your spouse cannot work while you're subject to it.
No, you can get your new visa in any country US consular services are in, not just your home country.
When I was in the US with visas for my four-person family, we FedExed our passports to Finland where my parents put them in a different envelope and mailed them to the US embassy. Ten days later the embassy mailed back the passports with the new visas attached, and my parents FedExed them back to us in New York.
Yeah, seems like this re-approval concept makes a ton of sense. FedEx at least got some business.
This doesn’t sound remotely legal, but I’m not a lawyer. How were you expecting to comply with reasonable requests for your family’s passports and visas by the US while they were in transit? What if they were lost in transit or stolen? If your intent was to circumvent the process, that could constitute mail fraud and other violations that could result in loss of residency or in extreme cases loss of citizenship. Why would you or anyone ever do this?
What reasonable requests? There isn’t (yet) a task force that goes door to door in Manhattan knocking on doors and checking immigrants’ papers.
We are Finnish citizens and if the passports really had been lost, we could always get new ones at the Finnish consulate in New York to return home.
I’ve held several types of visas, L-1 and O-1, and I also applied for a PERM whatever that I eventually abandoned because I didn’t want to stay in the country and with that employer. The American immigration system is incredibly poorly designed and frustrating for all parties. It drives honest legal immigrants like us to an “I don’t give a shit” mindset where we just did the minimum to get the paperwork while waiting to leave the country.
Now I still get paid by an American company at the same rates as before, but I pay taxes to Finland instead. The immigrant-hostile system isn’t the success you imagine.
Once you circumvent the process, you cease being an “honest legal immigrant.”
I’m crying about that in my beer tonight, getting paid a Silicon Valley salary by an American company while living in my home country.
You have made it so complicated and unattractive to stay in the country that you don’t care about losing people who wanted to stay and pay taxes, and instead are enabling these jobs to be exported.
Yes, as an American citizen, I’d rather jobs be exported legally than people circumvent the legal immigration process.
The static “papers please” mindset killed the Soviet Union and many other empires before it. Americans somehow managed to avoid it for over two centuries. I know you don’t want my opinion, but you probably shouldn’t give up on that achievement so easily. It’s not just about immigrants — the mindset infects the entire society. This was the fundamental edge you had over Europe and you’re throwing it away.
Please don’t interpret my disagreement with you about the immigration process as a desire to not know you and interact with you as a person. I appreciate your insights into the process as you experienced it and your contributions to HN community.
Thank you for the gracious reply, it’s very much appreciated.
The reason I have strong feelings about this topic is that I want America to continue succeeding, and I wanted to be part of it but it didn’t make practical sense for me.
When I was a child in the 1980s living next door to the Soviet Union, the USA was a beacon of hope to us. It sounds corny but it’s true. (Reagan and Clinton were politicians who seemed to intuitively understand this global mood and were able to leverage it. I disagree with them on many specifics, but they excelled at this.)
I know Americans always feel like there’s too much going on at home to care about the rest of the world. But often in history the solutions at home have appeared by opening up, not closing in.
Your earnest desire to be part of America is admirable, and the pitfalls of the system are that much more tragic in light of this. The system failed you, and your attempts to lessen the burden imposed on you and your family are not my own to second-guess, though I would have preferred a better solution for you all that would have allowed you to remain in the country legally without requiring leaving only to return. It would be supremely unfair if you would be denied residency or citizenship due to your actions, as I don’t believe you had any intent to deceive or violate the law, and you very well may not have done either, and I will not besmirch your honor by implying you did. I understand that your first responsibility is to yourself and your family, and I hope you are able to enjoy the holidays with you and yours.
As someone else has said, this isn't legal. I hope you don't publicize the actions you took.
> The reason you have to leave the country is because it is not a “renewal” it is a “re-approval” and if you are denied they don’t have to deport you if you’re already out.
No. You only have to leave the country to have the visa stamp on your passport. That has no bearing on you being authorized to stay or work in the country.
The visa is not renewable, is what I meant.
Why would you get downvoted for that?
That’s the simple truth. They do that for all types of visas. My mother had to do it, until she finally (reluctantly) became a US citizen, and she lived here, most of her life.
I think she had long-term visas, though. I only remember her doing it a couple of times. I think I went with her, on one of the trips.
It’s pretty easy to predict which way votes will go when peering into an echo chamber. Just watch.
Edit: and, it's flagged and gone. Voila.
This is more complicated than that. H1B is a visa and a status.
As long as you have a valid H1b status, you can stay in the US indefinitely. Having a physical visa in your passport is optional, you only need it when you want to cross back into the US.
Correct.
Some DMVs like to pretend they are USCIS and they want to see the physical visa in your passport. Annoyed me to no end.
Following the sun is a win, faster project delivery and lowered cost of development
Follow the sun is great for on-call rotations, but I'm my experience, for regular project work, the need for a handoff each day ends up being too much overhead. The teams in vastly different time zones wind up working mostly independently on completely different projects.
It brings its own set of communication and cross-cultural challenges.
That's for stuff that requires 24/7 support, not some harebrained project management technique that will make all your teams hate you
> leave the country to renew paperwork is an insane anachronism
Not really. This is really Customs and Border Patrol/Immigration way of saying, you can always do the default/what everyone else does. You can leave and return six months of the year. The key is leave (which they do), they are already declared non-immigrant, and are self-sufficient.
Not sure what you are talking about. This is about H-1B, aka dual-intent visas. You can have immigrant intent.
Also, if you leave for six months, how are you even working in the US? Which is the point of the visa.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/12/18/2024-29...
The tweet is a super brief summary, reproduced below.
Founders can self petition (& spouses can work)
Roles tied to research institutions cap-exempt Students get seamless transition Faster H1-B transfers for job changes Clarification of specialty role Cracking down on fraud> Roles tied to research institutions cap-exempt
> - Organizations where fundamental research is a key activity now qualify
> - Startups can hire researchers (AI, health, hardware) year-round
That’s a good change. I’ve seen ML researchers (PhDs) who led DARPA funded projects as principal investigator while working for a for-profit company not being selected for H-1B (lottery and cap) and having to leave the US.
> Founders can self petition
Wait, so I can just open LLC and get H1B visa for it? There have to be conditions and limitations, otherwise it will be misused.
You'd still have to comply with the H1-B rules for the job you are petitioning for, like the duties you are performing, the salary requirements etc. And the legal costs of doing the petition.
Now, misuse could come if you are independently wealthy and can self fund, but at the end of the day if you are doing that in the US, the economy still benefits.
There are better visas and even green cards if you're wealthy.
Exactly. You can literally buy a green card with a ~$500K “investment”. No need to jump through H-1B hoops.
That's more than what you would need if you were hiring for a prevailing wage position.
EB-5 is a onetime payment for a green card (permanent residence). Prevailing wage must be paid every year and you have 60 days to leave when you the company stops paying you.
Yes, but the prevailing wage threshold would be lower than the investor visa, as will the commitments. The investor visa you have to show a plan, hire people etc.
If you're "wealthy", you can immigrate by officially starting a business with just an $80000 investment (E-2 visa).
Or you can just buy a green card for a $800000 investment (EB-5).
E-2 is not available to all countries.
You can first get an investor-based citizenship in one of the countries that have signed the tax treaty with the US.
It'll cost you about $50-100k extra.
Only CBI countries on that list are Grenada (200k+) & Turkey (400k), and USCIS put out a rule specifically for that situation, with additional requirements. From: https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
> In addition, for those individuals who obtained treaty country nationality through a financial investment, USCIS may require additional documentation to show that the applicant has been domiciled in the treaty country indicated in the application for a continuous period of at least 3 years at any point before applying for E-1 or E-2 classification.
Plus E-2 visa is a non-immigrant visa, so it doesn't give you any kind of special pathway to green card. Might as well apply for an EBx at the outset instead of fiddling with an E-2 visa.
You're missing several. Montenegro and Macedonia are definitely available, and I think also Panama.
> Might as well apply for an EBx at the outset instead of fiddling with an E-2 visa.
EB-5 has pre-country quotas, and for some countries the wait can be quite long (for China it's around 10 years). It also is veeerrrryyyyyy slow, even with the initial form processing taking _years_.
** Wait, so I can just open LLC and get H1B visa for it? There have to be conditions and limitations, otherwise it will be misused.
No, you have to first post a job posting at a low salary, preferably with an in-office requirement in a HCOL city. If you get applicants, give them Leetcode Hard and no one will pass.
Then, when no one applies or passes the interview, you claim there is a shortage.
Viola!
I'm legitimately interested in this.
I run a one-man consulting business from the EU. I sometimes hire freelancers. I work with US clients anyway. Does that mean I can open a US llc and move?
Yea thats what I also thought. Opening an LLC is pretty easy.
[dead]
So can I now go to SF, set up an LLC, and get the sweet SF dev rates?
Sure, as long LLC that you have set up generates enough revenue to pay your salary.
I'm not sure you understand how this works.
I wonder if it is possible to found a US company and open a bank account for it while being a resident of Russian Federation, and then self-petition yourself for a visa....
(This was originally posted in the other thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42451271, but it's useful here too)
What's the reason for cap-gap extension to April 1? I thought that the government fiscal year starts on October 1, so H-1B statuses take effect on that date and therefore the extension is only needed until October 1. What is the motivation here?
> - Site visit codified: refusal to comply = petition denial
Wonder how this works for remote-only positions/companies.
I’ll believe it when I see it. Until then, I look forward to teaching H1B recipients to turn on a computer.
I wonder if switching from a lottery to an auction would help curtail some of the abuse?
That is, for each position a company wants to fill with a non-citizen they also have to bid on the visa fee they're willing to pay. The highest ~7,000 bids that month are accepted and paid to the government in exchange for a visa.
We could debate things like sealed-bid versus open auction and uniform-price versus paying your bid but whatever details we pick I suspect this would allow us to discover which companies are actually desperate for skills and which primarily use it as a cost-savings measure.
(I'm also curious how much H-1B visas would cost if there was a market: thousands of dollars? tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands? more?)
Remember, H1B isn’t always about tech, even if we’d all like to pretend it is. You’ll have to have separate bidding process for different occupations, otherwise you’ll end up with a system where Facebook will get all the visas, while in some cases, doctors would not be sponsored.
I'm curious what makes you think tech workers would monopolize the top spots? I would expect that companies desperate for experts in medicine, research, engineering, law, business (which, like tech, already pay high salaries) would be similarly willing to pay a premium to be able to hire the best from other countries.
Good. There is no shortage of doctors except the one created by accreditation cartel.
How is that resolved now? Uniform probability sampling across all requests, regardless of occupation?
Yes and some occupations are cap exempt.
yes
I actually think that could end up having the opposite effect in lower paying fields.
An mid level engineer at Google averages $280k/yr according to levels. A principal mechanical engineer at Boeing averages $170k/yr according to levels. If Google can pay an H1-B engineer 70% of what a non H1-B employee would get ($196k), they can bid up to 80k and still save money.
Since Boeing is going for a high level employee who actually highly skilled, it's less likely that they would be able to underpay their candidate, but even if they could pay their H1-B employee 70% of the market rate ($117k), they only have ~$50k to before they hit the break even point.
Obviously if the person is highly skilled and Boeing actually needs them it would make sense to bid beyond the break even point, but Boeing needs to be more choosy than Google. In that scenario, Google should put every single L4 candidate up for and H1-B because if even one gets their bid accepted it saves them money. Boeing actually has to decide which candidates they're willing to overpay for which will result in a smaller pool of mechanical engineers being put up for H1-B visas.
The implication that companies use visa is to find candidates willing to work for less (e.g. 70%) of a qualified domestic candidate seems like the underlying problem we should be resolving, not just the "fairness" of choosing which field should be allowed to exploit this loophole.
But your post raises a good point that money is an imperfect proxy for "value" -- a company with high profit margins can outbid leaner companies (or nonprofits) for a visa, even if the relative value of that visa to the rich company is not as high as it would have been to the other companies.
Three thoughts in response:
First, this "unfairness" doesn't seem unique to a visa auction. Isn't it already "unfair" that Google can afford to pay mediocre developers more than Boeing pays expert mechanical engineers in the first place? Do you think we should incorporate lotteries in domestic hiring as well to balance that out a bit?
Second, assuming we accept the argument that H1-B visas lower average salaries in the fields where they're used, then preventing this program from lowering any but the highest salaries seems like it would be a net benefit.
Third, I wonder which scheme (lottery or auction) Boeing and their hypothetical H1-B candidate would prefer themselves. Tech companies already game the system and let other companies fight for scraps so having a more predictable (if expensive) pathway may end up being preferable.
Only the base salary counts, not the total comp. That 280k/yr sounds like total comp - includes base+bonus+RSUs. The average base would be more along the lines of 150k-190k.
Uniquely skilled is probably a better word to use. H1-Bs are meant to be used when American worker's can't be found to fill a role. I think there are more people qualified to be a mid level software engineer (even at the FAANG level) than principal mechanical engineers at Boeing.
I doubt that many mechanical engineers can become a principal level engineer at a Fortune 500 company in 3-5 years, but I know plenty of software engineers who've gotten to L4 at FAANG companies in that timeframe.
I don't think that's what they were implying, but with the way google has been going this past decade, I don't think anyone is still under the impression that google employees are highly skilled. They're the butt of tech jokes for a reason.
Leetcode mediums do not count as skill in this context.
Think you would also lose everyone that's not working in IT/finance in an instant (or until whenever their visa expires).
The biologist, geologist, physicists and the likes.
Lottery only applies for initial employment, not for renewals.
Most physicists and biologists and geologists work in universities or labs or other institutions, which are cap-exempt anyway and don't go through the lottery.
Yes it would.
This would prevent abuse of foreigners who are underpaid. It would also allow most of the applicants to go to good jobs (FAANG) which can pay premiums salaries.
Reverse auction is the best way to go. Good for foreigners, good for top companies, economically the best option.
This is the simplest way to improve the H1-B system!
The simplest way to improve the H-1B system is to abolish it.
The better but slightly less simple way is to abolish it (and a bunch of other employment-related visa categories), but also allow individuals who aren’t personally barred from entry because of past misconduct, etc., but who are not eligible (or wish to bypass wait times) for admission under other existing visa categories to pay an fee (which others, including employers, can subsidize if they wish, but gain no special power over future status by so doing) for a limited term, renewable employment-eligible status that becomes eligible to transition to permanent residency automatically after a set time in status. (This also fixes a number of other problems in the immigration system beyond the H-1B.)
Probably hundreds of thousands. A big reason master programs can command such a massive price tag is that they are tickets to enter the US labor market.
It also has the benefit of giving the government an incentive to increase the quota to get more revenue.
Why not just auction on the candidate's salary instead of paying a tax to the government who will burn your money anyway.
Surprised by all the negativity here.
The USA benefits enormously from skilled immigration: "doubling the size of the US H1B visa program increases US and EU growth by 4% in the long-run"
From a recent paper here: https://academic.oup.com/qje/advance-article-abstract/doi/10...
It’s a slowdown in tech recruitment, so it is fair for citizens to think for themselves first. There are quite a lot of candidates that can fulfill most of the roles, and it has bad optics when the government tries to prioritize others.
Disclaimer: I don’t live in the states, but I can understand the frustration.
Tech isn't a zero sum game, it's a growth market. If some H-1B talent helps grow a company faster, then they can increase their own citizen employee count faster.
That tracks only when it’s not taking 6+ months to find a stable job. It’s not really a growth market right now, and anyone who is on the hiring end/looking for a job can attest.
> ...it's a growth market.
Not when it's in fashion to perform large traditional layoffs and "stealth" layoffs via RTO mandates and other unpleasantness.
Maybe things will substantially change within a year or two, but I'm skeptical.
That would work in the short term. In the long term, jobs would leave the USA so companies won't have to deal with immigration uncertainties.
Doesn’t really matter. People won’t care about long term consequences if they’re experiencing hardships right now. It’s easy to say this when we have jobs, but if I didn’t have one, I would never want my government to prioritize others.
This is the bit that I've always found confusing. When it comes to blue collar jobs, people in the upper echelons will gladly advocate the wonders of millions of people entering the job market to compete with Americans.
But as soon as it's their own market that introduces additional competition, they will advocate "just pay people more, the job seekers exist, just not at the wages employers are offering, this extra competition only depresses American wages".
Which one is it? Is it "competition for other classes, no competition for my class please"?
There are many, many blue collar jobs which Americans don’t want to do at the prevailing wages (or at all). Agriculture is a prime example of this.
There are relatively few high skilled, high paying jobs which Americans don’t want to do.
Again, why is the answer in agriculture to simply not increase wages? Someone’s willing to pick berries for $100/h I’m sure. Does it make berries unsustainable as a business? Likely, but isn’t that an argument for moving away from industries that can only survive on exploitation of undocumented third world labor?
Ah, the argument is following it: the berries will still be picked in other countries for substantially lower wages and worse conditions than the wages or conditions (partially) of undocumented workers here. Even our worst jobs are substantially better (usually ~3x) than the average job of many countries, to say nothing about the huge gulf in security and institutions you get form living here.
That's also the argument that Bryan Caplan has been making for years in favor of open borders. I genuinely don't know what to make of it, I get the moral argument within it.
Yes! what's the part you have trouble with?
>at the prevailing wages...
...which are where they are in no small part due to decades of immigration policy.
There were >100000 layoffs at tech companies in the last 4 years because companies “overhired”. The government is finally taking action to address a “labor shortage” in this sector, because these same companies cannot find anyone to hire? Something doesn’t add up here but a lot of people who have been given a pretty raw deal.
How is it possible that the labour force suddenly produced all those tech workers domestically during a pandemic?
What's not adding up is the qualifications of those people that got overhired.
I am not surprised.
People don't like the fact that they actually need to be competitive in skills to get a job. Had there been no H-1Bs, they could submit a resume and immediately get a job offer!
No joke. I look around in my company, Indians and Chinese (among others) are good at their jobs and do amazing work.
Some people just don't like that. They blame not being able to get a good job offer on Indians taking away the opportunity, not themselves being good developers.
This post is the place where they can vent.
As an academic scientist in the USA, it is an amazing opportunity to work with bright people from all over the world. I feel lucky that I am from the place where this happens, and I don't personally have to travel overseas for it- but certainly would if I hadn't been from here. The scientists that come here from all over the world make discoveries that help everyone, but the companies that spin out of them usually end up US based and are a major driver of the economy. When we do hiring, it is only about 1/4 of the time or so I would say that we get a highly qualified applicant that is a US citizen.
You have had a very different experience with h1b workers then I have.
That says more about your company, and perhaps yourself, than anything else.
Companies like Google and Meta don't pay people on H1B 400k/yr just so that they walk around doing nothing.
Yes, people at Meta and Google are highly paid and highly skilled. Some more or less than others, in relation to the average, just like anywhere else. What is your example demonstrating?
>That says more about your company, and perhaps yourself, than anything else.
Why? You're simply sure the parent and the companies they work for are bad at hiring, or racist, or what? You've offered nothing but a spit in the face.
No, it means that if you find yourself surrounded by mediocre/incompetent people, it means that you aren't working at a good place and that you may be mediocre too.
It couldn't possibly be that the H1-B's that his company is hiring are bad, because his company is trying to save a buck by abusing the system, because that never happens.
It's also missing the point. The verbiage around H1B is "to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities", not artificially inflate competition for jobs. This issue was contentious even during the good times and I'm not surprised that it's flaring up during the bad times.
There are plenty of smart and excellent workers who come mainland China and India for sure but there are plenty of people who don't or come through the abuse of the program.
competition isn't artificially inflated, the competition is there all along, just arbitrary rules prevent them from seeking better life
As person who is not currently trying to immigrate to the US I have mixed feelings. One one hand I wish all best to people who do want to move to the US, on other hand a non-broken H-1B could accelerate brain drain from the country I'm living in (which will be one more blow to already struggling economy).
You have to first answer why few locals outside Stanford-Berkeley-MIT-CMU are hired out of school. Is it because all non-top-4 schools under prepare students? Is it before foreign workers are that much better? Or is it because companies are looking for underpaid workers they can abuse and keep in a state of limbo?
If CS degrees from non-top-4 schools are not valuable, best to get that out so US students are not studying useless degrees.
At the moment, at least in the trillion-dollar web companies, it seems not many people are being hired straight out of school at all. A new grad would have to really stand out to get hired in a field of experienced candidates. The potential cost savings of hiring a new grad doesn't seem to matter much to these companies.
In the past, I've seen a lot of new-grad hires from the top 30 or so schools, but not so many from the top 5. More likely Michigan, Maryland, or Washington than Stanford or MIT (I'm on the West Coast). Pandemic-era Stripe was an exception, they seemed to hire only top 5, but they were also offering outrageous pay at that time.
Someone graduating from a school not in the top 30 probably needs to adjust their expectations away from Google or Meta, at least for a first job, unless they have good connections and interview very well.
Back to your original point though, I think it's plausible that most schools not in the top 30 (charitably, top 50) are actually incapable of some combination of (1) attracting sufficiently smart and motivated students and (2) educating them adequately.
That's simply not true. You have no data to back that cynical view.
I find it hard to believe you are surprised. In disagreement, sure. Surprised? This is an enormous, dramatic issue. People on both sides rightfully perceive it as borderline existential.
Who benefits from that growth of the native population is unemployed or underemployed?
Really? You're surprised? You're surprised that a country and industry continuing to suffer from ongoing layoffs after layoffs, both stealth and honest, could possibly be negative about their government saying "yeah, let's bring in _more_ foreign workers while our own citizens can't find or keep their jobs"? The audacity!
Yeah. Do people really think that Silicon Valley would be such a huge economy (and a huge job creator for US citizens) if the US had never allowed immigrants to work there?
Which came first?
Founders of the original valley companies were US born (except Shockley) but by the early 70s many of the key participants were foreigners (Grove, Faggin, ...).
Yeah I would say very little about our current immigration situation resembles anything like 1970. So I’m not sure what the magic key to success is, that was alluded to other than “some people who were key were also not born in America”.
It's encouraging to see DHS attempting to update the H-1B program in ways that address longstanding pain points like the unpredictability of transferring jobs, the complexity around defining a "specialty occupation," and the painfully slow application processes. The US economy benefits when companies can more easily hire and retain the talent they genuinely need, rather than having the system incentivise questionable staffing practices or endless guesswork over whether a given degree is "close enough" to the job description.
However, this final rule doesn't magically solve the deeper structural issues. For example, the per-country caps on green cards still leave many H-1B workers stuck in decades-long queues if they're from certain countries. That reality discourages risk-taking, entrepreneurship, and long-term roots,something that runs counter to the very idea of welcoming skilled people. While allowing spouses to work and making it easier to switch roles will improve day-to-day life for some, the broader immigration pipeline remains complicated and slow.
The real test will be in implementation and enforcement. Will the new definitions and stricter oversight actually reduce abuse by staffing firms who've flooded the lottery with dubious registrations? Will the simplified criteria for specialty occupations translate to smoother hiring and fewer headaches for workers and employers alike?
In short: good steps, but we're still a long way from a truly balanced system that reliably identifies, welcomes, and retains global talent without leaving them in extended legal limbo. It's progress, but the ultimate success depends on how these rules play out in the real world,and whether future administrations build on these changes instead of rolling them back.
It’s never been clear to me why this program exists in the first place, other than to put downward pressure on US STEM wages. What am I missing?
Software is one of the few STEM fields where one can get a fantastic job with just a Bachelor's. In most other engineering fields, a MS gives you a significant boost, and a PhD may do so as well.
The reality is that in most of those fields, few Americans get an MS/PhD. Go to a typical engineering department and you'll often see the majority of advanced degree students are foreigners.
So it's a question of: Do we want to continue to train foreigners, only to not have them contribute to the US economy?
If you move out to the pure sciences, you pretty much need a PhD to get a good career. Once again, a big chunk, if not the majority, are foreigners.
Look around at the highly skilled folks you see who are not of US origin, and you'll find most of them are in the US due to the H1-B program (only a tiny percentage come via other programs like the O visa).
Yes, H1-B is often abused, but this is the reason it exists. It's a lot harder to get an H1B visa and then permanent residency if your degree is in the humanities, for example.
I think vast majority of Americans not going on to higher education is because system is so screwed up due to debt and unlimited student visas.
Debt means most Americans go "I need to enter into the job market so I can pay off these debts".
Also, alot of foreign students are willing to work/study insane hours because visa hanging over their head. I have a friend who got MS in Engineering but didn't want to continue because he looked at what's required and started talking with his mentor about his PhD. His mentor said it's 996 schedule and if you don't want to, I can likely find a student visa student who will.
> I think vast majority of Americans not going on to higher education is because system is so screwed up due to debt and unlimited student visas.
International students percentage is about 6% of total high education population [1]. We can say that their percentage in higher in some fields/degrees. But overall they are not significant reason High Education is not affordable. Actually for undergraduate (majority of international students) they will pay more tuition and many colleges wants to admit more to subsidize domestic students.
> Debt means most Americans go "I need to enter into the job market so I can pay off these debts".
Study abroad is expensive and you still need to enter the job market to earn your living and probably pay your dept (some will take loans to study in the US). This applies quite well to international students too.
[1] https://opendoorsdata.org/annual-release/international-stude...
> I think vast majority of Americans not going on to higher education is because system is so screwed up due to debt and unlimited student visas.
For undergrad, I understand the frustration, although student visas have almost nothing to do with it. As an example, when I was in my undergrad (for engineering), there was only one foreign student in my engineering classes. Almost all the foreign students were at the MS/PhD level. The number of foreign students in the undergrad population was easily under 5%, if not under 1%.
Probably true in most no-name state schools.
> Debt means most Americans go "I need to enter into the job market so I can pay off these debts".
An MS is only 2 years, and you should go only if it's fully paid for (quite often the case in engineering). And you typically don't accrue interest on undergrad debts for those 2 years - so it's only delaying paying off debts by 2 years.
No - most Americans don't do MS in engineering, simply because they don't want to and don't value it.
> Also, alot of foreign students are willing to work/study insane hours because visa hanging over their head. I have a friend who got MS in Engineering but didn't want to continue because he looked at what's required and started talking with his mentor about his PhD. His mentor said it's 996 schedule and if you don't want to, I can likely find a student visa student who will.
Entirely dependent on the advisor, although I do suspect your anecdote is becoming more common. Also, likely more common at top tier universities and less so in no name state universities.
foreign students actually subsidize higher education for most universities
The reason why foreigners get those degrees is because it's a way for them to stay in the USA longer. I have a friend who didn't win a renewal for their H1B and they signed up for a master's program and applied for a different VISA. So yeah, some foreigners get them because their hands are forced.
Isn't it well known that the main reason that most foreigners have advanced degrees is because that's how they get into the country legally in the first place?
I don't see many people getting employed straight out of undergrad from India or China and moving to the US directly. They get their advanced degree here first to get into the country then they get employed...
> Isn't it well known that the main reason that most foreigners have advanced degrees is because that's how they get into the country legally in the first place?
Yes, and ...?
I mean, if it were a requirement to start a business and employ 10 Americans gainfully, would you go and say "Yeah, but the reason so many foreign born people do that is so they can get in legally."
So?
As long as they have higher level training than most Americans, and as long as we spend money training them (via research/teaching grants), isn't it a good idea to keep them?
You're assuming people are really learning anything in those programs that they wouldn't have had in their undergrad. I've never met an American with an undergrad who is underperforming compared to their foreign MS counterparts. The MS is merely a cheaper tool to get into the country than other investment visas plus you get credentialed. I think it's also a bit of a validation tool that the person actually has studied at the same level as US counterparts. I have met some people from India who were surprised at how difficult college was when they came to the US compared to back in India.
> I've never met an American with an undergrad who is underperforming compared to their foreign MS counterparts.
Outside of SW, not many engineering jobs have a mix of undergrads and MS folks doing the same work, so your sample is extremely biased.
> I have met some people from India who were surprised at how difficult college was when they came to the US compared to back in India.
And I've met the opposite. Ask folks who went to the top IITs.
I was surprised at how easy college was in India when I saw the coursework.
Ooh yes, let's address next how US top universities are all profit machines incentivized to take as many foreigners as possible, driving up the tuition they can charge so US citizens can't afford to get degrees. Let's do talk about how if you get a part time job to be able to pay for college then they yank your financial aid.
While foreigners definitely are a cash cow, I think you'll find in STEM fields most foreign PhD students are not paying tuition, but are instead funded by US grants.
As for the cost of tuition, there are many, many reasons, and I suspect if you did a PCA, you'll find "raising tuition to milk foreigners" to be of minimal impact.
In my state, for example, a local university publicized their finances going back decades, and the increase in tuition has been mirrored by a drop in state support per student. Overall the university is not making more money per student than they were 30 years ago - the only thing that changed is the entity making the payments.
I am genuinely curious. Do you have a link to the publicized finances
Why taking in foreign students raises the cost of tuition? Aren’t they paying full price for it?
US tech exports in 2018 was $338 billion. Tech is our biggest export by far. Think of the US tech industry as a siphon that sucks in wealth from foreign countries. Would you want to make that siphon bigger or smaller?
If you want to make that siphon bigger — and more competitive — how would you do it? By limiting the people that can work in tech to whoever companies can hire locally, or by bringing in the smartest people from around the world?
Read more: https://mckoder.medium.com/does-america-need-immigration-781...
Does "The US" siphon that money off? Or Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. siphon that money off? And where and to whom does it go from there?
The major benefit of reducing or eliminating the H1B visa program is that those companies can continue to do well, and Americans can do well along with them.
The money this siphon brings in is benefiting not just tech workers and tech shareholders. When the money is spent it turns the wheels of our economy, which leads to prosperity for all Americans, not just the 8% or so that work in tech.
The tech industry vacuums up money from foreign countries and pumps it into the economy of our country. The beneficiaries include all Americans, including those who work in restaurants, retail, healthcare, insurance, education, housing, transportation, entertainment and so on.
Limiting tech industry to whoever companies can hire locally will hurt its global competitiveness. Such a move will not just hurt the few would-be tech immigrants that are prevented from immigrating, but American prosperity in general.
When is that prosperity coming to the US? It seems that it's been leaving the US for the past decades and life is harder and harder and the American Dream is hardest to attain in decades.
What you are referring to is the velocity of money. Compared to wage income the velocity of money from capital is quite low.
Thanks for adding this - I feel like people who can't understand why populism is at it's peak misunderstand this.
Walmart is a U.S. company that historically did well, but I don't see why anyone would care unless you buy their stock or live in Bentonville.
People don't care about macro indicators that lump the 1% and the 99% together.
Restricting or eliminating the H1B visas will cause these companies to hire more in oversea offices. Consulting companies however are a whole other deal.
Why aren't they doing that now though?
Because the talent is already here or will be here (on h1b/o1). It's common complaint I hear from people doing offshore consultancies type of businesses that their best workers leave for US $$$ paycheck.
They are to an extent.
You are mixing up purpose and effect. The purpose is to provide more and cheaper STEM workers. The effect is downward pressure on wages.
Phrased differently, the goal is to help industry, not hurt workers. Hurting some workers is an acceptable cost, not the goal.
One idea is that having a thriving industrial ecosystem helps those same workers more than the downward pressure.
As somebody who does not live and work in the US, it seems plausible to me that the H1B system helps prevent other countries from obtaining similar talent hubs as Sillicon Valley. A lot of the talent is in the US, which attracts more companies, which attracts more talent, which means it's easier to go to the US and work there and start companies there than to do it anywhere else.
it's not really the goal, but there are many cases of people denied visas going back and having huge success
There’s also the easier financing, but yes - I’m sure the outcome is dominated by the network effect of having denser talent. That’s one of the reasons Silicon Valley is so hard to replicate elsewhere.
> phrased differently, the goal is to help industry, not hurt workers. hurting some workers is an acceptable cost, not the goal.
The phrase "help industry" has many dimensions. The simplest of course is that by increasing labor supply and suppressing wages it increases profit margins, rewarding shareholders.
Another important function is that by having more workers overall in the US, it increases the productivity of the domestic industry itself, due to increased competition for jobs driving up the productivity of the average worker. This in turn makes the industry more competitive vs its equivalents in other countries.
The average worker (whether permanent resident or temporary/H1B) who doesn't have significant investments likely doesn't receive much of those productivity gains, since they mostly go to capital owners.
Long term, it boosts returns to capital while capping returns to labor, the same trend noted by Thomas Piketty some years back.
I dont think there long term impacts are so clear or cynical. the question is less about productivity, but network effect, number of jobs, and quality of jobs.
> I dont think there long term impacts are so clear or cynical
The economic impacts I described are looking backwards, not forward, and the data is pretty clear that long term returns on capital swamp the returns on labor (especially since the 1970s). STEM workers have been somewhat insulated from that due to the industries they work in growing in the past few decades faster than the labor supply. It's anyone's guess whether or not either trend will continue into the future.
> the question is less about productivity, but network effect, number of jobs, and quality of jobs.
I'd argue productivity and returns to capital are almost everything when it comes to what informs immigration policy from an economic lens. "Network effect" is a mechanism, not an outcome, and outcome metrics like "quality of job" or even "quality of life afforded by a job" are not a concern of such policies. On average, they might improve, or they might get worse, but productivity and returns on capital will always go up, whether they require workers or not.
> long term returns on capital swamp the returns on labor
That effect mostly comes from housing, non-housing capital has not had that big difference in returns. See https://www.brookings.edu/articles/deciphering-the-fall-and-...
I understand that you are trying to make a point about return on capital, but I dont understand how you are connecting it to the question of H1-B visas and if local benefits to industrial expertise outweigh the downward pressure from labor competition.
> I dont understand how you are connecting it to the question of H1-B visas and if local benefits to industrial expertise outweigh the downward pressure from labor competition.
Because what you are calling "local benefits to industrial expertise" is ultimately realized in the form of returns on capital.
Whether these benefits outweigh the costs is an open question.
When the tech industry's growth was very talent constrained as it was in the last few decades, arguably opening labor competition had the effect of increasing overall growth (mainly through new production invention). The list of immigrant technologists who have created new technologies and products - and jobs as a result - could probably fill an encyclopedia.
It's unknown whether that type of growth - the kind that creates more and better jobs - will continue, especially given recent developments in AI.
If the benefits going forward are largely going to be based on massive increases in labor efficiency, then it's not as clear that the benefits (mostly to capital) outweigh the costs (mostly to labor). Most business models in AI are predicated on replacing people, who are expensive, not making more or better goods. Sure, we'll get some neat robots along the way that actually make stuff, but that will likely be a small fraction of the money to be made.
Or perhaps we are at the dawn of a new era of technology which will make more and better jobs. We'll see.
OK, so you were changing the topic to something else you wanted to talk about. That was not clear to me. I thought you were making a rebuttal to what I was saying.
Correct, if you look at my comment I was unpacking what the phrase "to help industry" could mean, not rebutting your comment.
It's relevant to the original context because what helps industry (in terms of immigration regulation) might or might not help workers in that industry.
The interesting thing about the return to labor vs capital line of argument is that generally speaking, capital doesnt consume the types of product that labor is interested in.
When productivity goes up, that doesnt mean workers are making 10X as many houses or hamburgers, which capitalist are eating.
For me, this begs the questions of what exactly is being produced when we say worker productivity has increased, and where is it going? If it is "stuff" being produced, surely it should be evident somewhere, like massive exports hoarded stockpiles. Alternatively, the productivity is an illusion because there is a corresponding inefficiency or deadweight loss, like paying some service workers to create problems and paying others to fix them.
If the purpose is cheaper STEM workers than downward pressure on wages is a goal and not just an effect.
The goal isnt to hurt workers for its own sake. The goal is to help industry.
If harm was the goal, something like a STEM worker tax or cutting R&D tax incentives would be easier.
> If harm was the goal, something like a STEM worker tax or cutting R&D tax incentives would be easier
These would affect all STEM workers equivalently. The H1-B program, whatever one thinks of its merits, hurts domestic STEM workers and helps immigrant STEM workers.
Perhaps the result is that the overall opportunities are greater because the larger talent pool results in more companies being formed. That depends a lot on how mature the industry is, and whether technological trends like generative AI will replace large swaths or STEM workers altogether.
This argument is kind of “I’m going to extract all your blood, but it’s not to kill you, but to increase my profits”.
You can’t really separate the two sides of the same coin.
I think you can exactly separate them. One is the goal, and the other is the effect.
Im not extracting all your blood for the fun of it, or to kill you. profit is the motivation.
Saying the motivation is to kill you is simply not correct. It is a byproduct.
You can't achieve the goal without the unpleasant side effect, then you can't really separate them.
Can we honestly say these hires are paid exactly the same their American counterparts would be willing to accept?
The goal is to help industry in a specific manner. Lowering salary costs therefore suppressing wages is an integral part of the goal.
Hypothetically it exists to allow companies to hire singular overseas experts like von Braun or Einstein that don't have domestic equivalents. It has become totally accepted to lie on the application though and now it is used to hire Java developers.
That is incorrect. People with exceptional abilities are covered under EB-1 green cards (and O-1 visas). H-1B was created to bring people in specialty occupations requiring a bachelor's degree or equivalent experience. A Java developer definitely meets the bar (with the right degree or experience).
It's impossible to truthfully state on an H1-B form that the US labor market can't provide an experienced Java developer.
That is correct, but tangential to the original point of extraordinary abilities.
But it's also possible to say that one hasn't been able to find a skilled-enough Java developer.
The Java developers coming over on H-1Bs are often bottom of the barrel.
True, but at the same time immigrants have nothing to lose and everything to gain, thus in many cases they will work harder/longer and as result often be more skilled than an average developer.
And in general skilled immigration has many times over been proven to only benefit the country and that java developer you mention.
I believe that's the O-1 visa, not the H-1B.
That's a sign of how accepted it has become to say that you can't find any local workers that know Python when filling out the H1-B forms. The requirement is there but it's normally overlooked.
"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 [...]"
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b
At some point it becomes “couldn’t obtain the required talent at the prices the business was willing to pay”.
This piece of misinformation seems to be trotted out every time H-1B is discussed. H-1B is not for "extraordinary ability", the O-1 is. The H-1B is just designed for regular workers in a "specialty occupation". This is how Congress designed it in the Immigration and Nationality Act.
It's enabling companies to bring highly skilled individuals to work in the USA rather than having them open offices in other countries.
That's how it is marketed to the masses. From what I hear from many US citizens it actually looks quite different in reality.
The reality is US is a tech powerhouse, many successful companies have been started by former h1b holders and US tech workers are highest paid in the world (even PPP adjusted). What you're hearing is not the reality - it's just vibes.
For the “highly skilled” there’s the O-1 visa.
Not really, O-1 is essentially a visa to bring a specific person to the US. While H1B is a wide net (yes, visa given to a specific person, not what I'm saying).
o-1 is to bring Albert Einstein and h1b is to bring some physicist that matches criteria.
As in, O-1 is person-focused, while H1B is role-focused.
>h1b is to bring some physicist that matches criteria.
those are exceptional cases. The majority of the 65K year h1b visas granted every year are for filling IT related positions. Mostly dev related positions.
I only used physicist because I couldn't come up with a name for O-1 recipient that isn't already a US citizen from top of my head.
If it's about urgently needed skills, then anybody who has a H-1B visa is of course the highest paid worker in his or her company. Right?
Global competition exists. If US companies can't hire the best, others will. I hope you don't assume that all the best workers/researchers are born within US borders.
I don't think countries should hire the best. Pretty good should do. They should foster a greater sense of community within their borders. Now, I'm not against immigration. I myself am an immigrant. But I think there's too much global fluidity and not enough attention paid to taking care of one's own.
>not enough attention paid to taking care of one's own.
Because that's not profitable.
The best people are in no small part a product of their environment. You can have the best people but with no resources they won't be productive.
That's exactly the reason. I don't remember working with any H-1B visa people in the 90s then the dotcom boom happened and demand soared. A couple years later I started working with H-1B engineers and my salary flatlined for over decade since.
Put simply: It is in the national interest to have the world's most talented technologists here. It is yet more in the national interest that they work here, for us, and not for our enemies. One of the best ways we can compete with China is to attract their best and brightest with our free society and high wages.
It’s also designed to attract talent from other countries. You didn’t have to invest in their education, so that part comes for free.
You're not missing anything. Other than that, seemingly, STEM roles are the only industry where the laws of supply and demand do not apply, and a positive supply shock of something does not, for some reason, drive down the price.
If a supply shock doesn't drive down the price then it suggests that the supply constraint was larger than than the shock and that the market was being artificially constrained to prevent the prices from rising to meet demand.
So in other words, yes, for whatever reason tech is this special case that doesn't apply anywhere else and supply shocks don't matter.
An odd claim, wish there was more evidence for it being true. As in, what is the "artificial constraint" for front end web developers?
It's also possible that the supply itself is what creates more demand. People who move to the US are probably less risk-averse than the average person, and more likely to start new companies, creating more jobs.
STEM roles already pay incredibly well in this country, and even more so if you compare it globally.
What is the downward price shock you're talking about? What do you think the salary would or should be, assuming all H1B worker are magically gone the next day?
Have you engaged with the Card vs Borjas literature at all? We learn about the world by studying it, not by simply thinking about it from one's armchair.
No, and after that brief description I definitely won't.
You learn about the world by living in it, not by reading about it.
Indeed, you are part of the grand American tradition of reveling in ignorance.
It's more the grand American tradition of not listening to self-appointed experts.
The program exists to brain drain other countries of talent. It's very successful at that.
65k or 80k or say even 250k GLOBALLY per year is going to “brain drain” 8+ billion Global population? Yup, you got it, that’s what US is doing…
What make you think that majority of that 8 billion population is worth to drain?
nothing at all :)
I'm not saying it's good or bad at brain drain, I'm just saying without knowing how many people overseas are worth "draining" that's not an argument.
The program might have been designed for this, sold as this, but it's definitely not used for that anymore.
H1B was created in 1990, that's when Russia (and ex-USSR in general) had a lot of idle brains that wouldn't mind moving to the US. Today isn't 1990 tho.
my apologies, I was just being sarcastic in my initial comment… the brain draining other countries by taking in 65k or whatever yearly is … funny for the lack of worse but respectable word :)
Bringing over 10K java developers a year is going to brain drain other countries of java developers?
You are missing that it is used a lot in spite of that process (1) being a major administrative headache for the users, both employees and employers, (2) costly compared to hiring "locals" although that's moderated by perhaps lower salary with not a huge amount of evidence, and (3) rather unpredictable and risky for both employees and employers.
You don't see the need but perhaps the users do.
Tech exists in a globally competitive market: the companies will exist where the skilled workers are, and the tax benefits will occur there. The US's large immigration rate is a precondition for maintaining its tech dominance and all of the benefits thereof.
you can grow the sector. there's not a fixed supply of jobs. getting more talented people into your economy will likely just lead to more companies, more agglomeration effects etc. it's good.
The US owes much of its success to its ability to poach talent from other countries. By letting all the people who would start competing firms move to the US instead international competition is reduced and the products built in the US are better.
I think you should ask why any feature of our immigration system exists. Each way is cruel, byzantine and expensive for no discernible benefit to anyone except the directors of those programs.
Imagine developing the atomic bomb with just US born scientists.
The program exists to get skilled workers into the US. It has done this well. There are few other programs to get them in and onto a pathway to permanent residence and citizenship. STEM wages don't exist in a vacuum. Increased utility to the US economy is more important than them. The US government rightfully determined that having people like Elon Musk here makes this nation more competitive. Likely the effect was also to increase software engineering compensation but that's harder to tell.
Education. Learning. Expertise.
As Asimov pointed out, "[t]here is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been." American culture is profoundly anti-intellectual. Every Dunning-Kruger rando thinks they have something valuable to contribute to every discussion.
>American culture is profoundly anti-intellectual.
Then why are US tech companies the most successful?
Cancel the program.
It's not needed.
It's used to game the system.
It's not supposed to be a backdoor to a green card.
> not supposed to be a backdoor to a green card
So...what's the front door to the green card ? How does one arrive legally to the nation with the highest [1] historic immigration rate of any nation in the world ?
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/net...
Guy who born with natural citizenship is too privileged to imagine how hard it is to get a green card.
This is a hideous tone that will do nothing but antagonize proud citizens and sour voters on the idea of generosity.
Thoughtful discourse is predicated first on basic respect.
> generosity
I'm sure you think of your own citizenship as charity as well...
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Psst, the societal opinion on this has shifted.
We shouldn’t feel bad about protecting ourselves.
>how hard it is to get a green card
It should be hard.
Great comeback, except you completely ignore the point (its purpose is not meant to be a backdoor) and attack him for... being an American?
Instead of telling everyone else to check their privilege, maybe check your expectations. The world doesn't owe anyone anything. Claiming your desires are everyone else's problem is a deeply self-centered way to view the world.
> Great comeback, except you completely ignore the point (its purpose is not meant to be a backdoor)
Ironically there is no point in talking about much of this stuff (immigration requirements, priority dates, dual intent visas etc.) with most Americans because they do not understand it.
There is no point in engaging with someone who thinks H1B is a backdoor because they don’t know what they’re talking about. Other Americans can’t recognize this in the original comment because it’s not something they spend any time reading about (because it doesn’t actually matter to them).
The real backdoor visas would be something like a TN.
H-1B is dual intent by definition, so it is not a backdoor. Any sane person who knows how green card application works understands that it is objectively hard, if not the hardest in the whole world.
> Instead of telling everyone else to check their privilege, maybe check your expectations.
Without such an expectation, who would pay tens of thousands a year to enroll in a random U.S. college, only to be told that there is absolutely no way they can work legally there?
Everybody is born with natural citizenship.
Stephen Miller does not approve this.
You should take a moment to look up what “stateless” means
God forbid somebody says that every dog has four legs and a hacker hears it...
Yeah, you have no idea of the process of getting green card via h1b works.
You can ditch the US, get permanent resident status in Canada, become Canadian citizenship, get TN visa to work in the US if you want to and someone who thinks that h1b is a backdoor to a green card will be just starting on green card paperwork. And that's if there are no issues with application.
This is all after participating in h1b lottery for years. Trust me, it's an extremely slow and painful way of getting a green card. If h1b is your way to a green card, it means either: you're already married, you have no idea what are you doing.
It's no a backdoor in any way, person move to the US for work and builds a life here, accumulate assets, I think it's pretty reasonable to give those people a way to settle in the US permanently in these cases.
The program needs to be revamped because it's not working in the way it's sold to voters.
What is the correct pathway to green card for a worker immigrant?
America does not owe the world a green card.
That wasn't and has nothing to do with the question asked.
A path needn't exist.
The green card exists, so there must a priori be a valid path to get one. If it's not H1-B, then what is it?
Love how all your arguments boil down to 'I got mine.'.
We don't want illegal immigrants, get legal work authorization. No, don't use work authorized visas use other legal means. No, family based chain immigration should be illegal too. Oh wait there are no other ways to come here ?....good. We never wanted you anyway. This country is full, all 4 million sq miles. Always has always been.
It's not constructive to frame citizenship as "I got mine". People will fight - really fight - to preserve their homes and lifestyles, if they feel those are being threatened. It's obviously not impossible to welcome as many immigrants as we do without this extreme level of conflict, but our system demonstrably does not accomplish that. We simply aren't making use of our space, so why don't we focus on that problem? A tone like yours invites chaos.
I disagree. Better to be direct, than frame it in soft 'feel good' terms. It's a matter of people's livelihoods. My tone invites confrontation as a sincere reflection of the stakes. I don't make value judgements. Citizens are entitled to hypocrisy, cognitive-dissonance and selfishness. It being bad is a social judgement made by the observer.
Let's be clear. We're talking about the US here. Arguments based in nativism, isolation and crowdedness have thin ground to stand on. By percentage population, legal-immigration to the US is below the historic average. Yet threads on H1b quickly devolve into vapid arguments. The accusers are happy to sling unsubstantiated stereotypes towards immigrants, but hide behind soft language like 'we aren't used to making space' when immigrant commenters retaliate in kind.
Racists aren't irrational actors or evil people. They simply have higher affinity for their tribe, and that's okay. Sometimes it takes for self-interests to be threatened, for bigoted & tribal behaviors to manifest in a loud manner. Again, that's okay. Americans are the ones who gave a negative connotation to to words like bigot and racists. In the rest of world, tribal & bigoted behaviors are an accepted norm. We're all racists sometimes. But, American tech workers are definitely at their racist-est on h1b threads.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either you are the land of free, that practices extreme meritocracy and thrives as a result of it. You're a nation built by migrant groups over the last 4 centuries, and the door is always open to the ambitious and hard working. A benevolent super-power for all. Or, you're just as tyrannical as any selfish group. You're a white majority people that found a pre-inhabited land of the greatest resources and size. You claimed it all for yourself. Killed the natives. You give lip serve to globalism and meritocracy as long as it gives you access to all markets of the world. Your relationship with the rest of the world is transactional, and you will continue to be a world superpower through military strong-arming and thinly veiled globally-egalitarian propaganda.
The reality ofc, is that neither extremes are true. But, it is a slider between the tribal-nativist and internationalist-meritocratic impulse. There are no right or wrong answers for what a nation's choice will be. But, if your slider is near the former while you claim to be the latter, then the hypocrisy is grating for the rest of us. For the lack of a better insult, it's Trudeau-esque.
Personally, I am a big fan of out-right selfish people. There is genuine honesty there. I also love the US (warts and all). Say what people might, it is the least racist nation of any out there. Lastly, I have a vested interest as someone who is on an H1b myself. (although I'd like to think I'm senior enough to be insulated from negative outcomes for h1b)
As I write this, I recognize that most people don't like harsh phrasing. I don't think our politicians or public speakers should adopt this language. But, a mostly civil pseudo anonymous forum of tech nerds is IMO, just right for this kind of directness.
I am a citizen because my ancestors fought in the revolution.
Does America want smart people to come here and advance science/technology/economy or would she rather close the doors and watch other countries get ahead?
I think it’s more a question of do you want to enjoy the same benefits as your parents? Yes? Then protect those benefits.
Not protecting them is how you get behind. America produces smart people as well.
Ps. I’m Dutch. This same rhetoric is all in the West. It’s shifting.
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How do you propose hiring tech talent then
By offering wages appropriate for the economy your fellow citizens are accustomed to, as opposed to the economy citizens of other nations are accustomed to.
Already done.
I mean, you didn't provide details/data, so I don't know what you have in mind.
The rules require you pay prevalent wages for the geo you're in.
Saw a university (like 7 years ago) H1B'ing postdocs for like $30k, maybe $35k a year, by valuing the benefits at like $20k. It was kind of a joke IMO.
That is the prevailing wage for postdocs, domestic or foreign.
The abuse of postdocs and grad students exists, but is entirely unrelated to H1B and foreigners. They paid them poorly even before the country was flooded with foreign students.
They could try hiring one of the hundreds of thousands of citizens they laid off over the past 3 years.
Right, the desperate need for talent is the reason these programs are used so heavily. It's not discounted salary and cost savings in benefits, insurance, and other areas for non-permanent employees, or having leverage over immigrant employees in negotiations. Corporations only ever use these programs to get the absolute best of the best and they absolutely aren't abused to bypass the stricter regulations and requirements for citizen employees. /s
There's nothing wrong with brain draining other countries and incentivizing legal immigration for work visas and H1B style programs. We should want to be the best place in the world to work. This shouldn't come as a detriment to the citizens of the US. Legal immigration and jobs programs need to be better. The H1B program suppresses legal citizen wages as well as immigrant wages because companies are able to use the threat of deportation as an effective negotiation tactic. Companies use immigrants for cheap professional labor, and if the immigrant pipes up, they get let go. With everything in tech life being designed around pushing people into paycheck to paycheck lifestyles, this can wreck someone's life through no fault of their own if they do something like ask for a raise, or better health insurance.
In turn, if citizen employees try to negotiate, the company can replace them with more immigrant workers unless or until they can hire local replacements at the company's preferred rate of pay.
We need a cleaner, easier path to citizenship, without the endless bureaucratic nightmare that is the current system. We need better work visa programs, so that people who legitimately make the world a better place aren't penalized for arbitrary technicalities, while at the same time recognizing the sovereignty of the US and reasonably protecting borders.
Sometimes countries need to be overthrown, and the US shouldn't act like a pressure release valve for dictators. We also shouldn't be in the business of regime management or perpetuating political nightmares that causes a lot of illegal immigration, as well.
TLDR; There's no shortage of US tech talent. The problem is that we've painted ourselves into a regulatory corner - in order to be competitive, companies have to shortchange payroll by abusing migrant salaries. To fix it, we must strengthen migrant rights so companies can't hang the threat of deportation over employee's heads, and reduce the financial burden of hiring citizens, so you get the same bang for your buck regardless of the immigration status of the employee.
Microsoft and Lumen and FAANG and all the tech industry titans shouldn't have penny pinching strategies designed to bump stock prices using methods that are fueled by human suffering. Get rid of those options and stop blindly implementing systems where the incentives are so obviously awful.
I didn’t believe it until I saw it, but look at the classified section of the San Francisco newspaper where big tech companies post job listing knowing that Americans won’t see them so they can say they tried to get domestic talent.
My neighbor is on a visa from mumbai working at Chase who was brought in as the lead frontend engineer (def can’t find Javascript devs in the US). Even he admitted it’s weird that his whole team is from India on visas. They just aren’t hiring citizens.
As a senior software engineer who was unemployed for over a year, I can confirm almost nobody is hiring USA Javascript and Python devs with 10+ years of experience with some big accomplishments. I got lucky with a backfill.
And once a team reaches that point, less citizens will want to work on a team where they're the outsider anyways.
I find that diversity extremely rewarding. I learn new things, learn about other people’s traditions and learn different ways of thinking and organising. Approach the challenge with an open mind.
These are the fun, but token advantages of diversity in this specific context. There are lots of advantages and disadvantages to diversity - because it is an extremely generic term. I have first hand experience of teams completely losing all the original members, who were extremely talented and all born in the US, because they hired such a huge number of people who were from a different culture (India, in this case). It had nothing to do with racism - they just had nothing in common. It was fun to talk about their different religious celebrations and so on, but they were emotionally aliens. They were reasonably smart, yet there was zero intellectual spark in conversations between the two groups. They were just too different to thrive with each other. Different culturally, ideologically, intellectually, emotionally. Different in methods of communication, in treatment of the business hierarchy, in assumptions and expectations. We can blame the business for making an incompatible team, but the compatibility parameters were too tied to culture and race. It's hard to account for that without essentially being racist.
> We can blame the business for making an incompatible team
In my past few jobs I had many colleagues from India, and learning the cultural differences is extremely important. Teambuilding exercises are also a must - bring your cuisine to work is a stellar example: I brought both pão de queijo (a Brazilian thing) and sajtos pogácza (its Hungarian counterpart), and they brought some the best sweets I ever tasted. To our Turkish colleague's dismay, we all agreed Turkish Delight is not really a delight (but the Turkish colleagues recognized my Hungarian pogácza as some cross-cultural artifact coming from the Ottoman empire days).
What would you bring to this table?
Diversity can be rewarding when it's actually diverse.
Being the only American citizen on a team of people constantly speaking Hindi or Tamil often isn't "rewarding."
You can always take interest in learning their language. You are the host and they are your guests, and, besides, their communication in their native language will be more efficient than if they translated to English for your benefit.
Different culture, but back when I was working on a project with Sony, when they introduced their internet enabled TVs in Brazil, just adding the "san" suffix to my contact's name made him instantly more open to negotiate.
I'm glad you've had good experiences - so have I. But I'm not sure where you're going. You can't advise everybody into happiness when they are stuck in a social group that makes them unhappy. There are immutable forces at work. We're humans. Learning a language is an enormous task, and it feels horrible to imply somebody should do it who is just trying to be comfortable in their own country. You should make that attempt when you visit other countries. Not to mention, it wouldn't solve this multi-dimensional social problem.
If I piss on your head and tell you it's raining, will you find some silver lining in that activity?
> You are the host and they are your guests
What? This logic doesn't track. If I were a guest in their country, then I might take interest in learning their local language. That's respectful.
Coming here on an H-1B and demanding people speak your niche language is more akin to invasion. (Here comes the "but.. but.. the United States has no official language!" tripe.)
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no, just make it an auction system with compensation.
The rabid chants went from: we need to stop illegal immigration and make sure everyone enters legally
To:
We need to make sure we only allow valuable immigrants that add to the economy
To:
Cancel this program. They are gaming the system.
You can choose the game to play but you can't choose the rules of the game.
> but you can't choose the rules of the game.
Well you of course can. These rules are set by government and they have power to change as they see appropriate.
I think it's called democracy or something.
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Ah yes the classic "huwhite people and muh racism" gambit.
It's tired. H1Bs are gamed to the point of uselessness. Most companies internally post H1B job offerings so people are aware. I've yet to see one with a competitive salary. They are used to source cheaper labor and avoid paying actual Americans the fair wage they deserve. The last 15-20 years of tech has slowly seen the InfoSys-ization of the tech economy. I work with more contractors from Mexico, India, and Eastern Europe, and more H1Bs from India than literally anyone else. On my team I can count the number of Americans on one hand.
The program should be extremely limited. I am a fan of charging 2-3x the normal tax rate for H1Bs so companies have to actually justify hiring "talent you can't find in America". There are 300,000 unemployed tech workers. I find it hard to believe none fit the bill. Just that most won't take a 60% haircut for more work.
I have been on H1B forever now, and my salaries have been more or on par with the role. I tend to agree there is a lot of H1B misuse, especially by large Indian consulting firms. This needs to be curtailed.
But, there may be 300,000 unemployed tech workers. While I also find it hard to believe none fit the bill, I believe most don't. So many are out of random bootcamps, self proclaimed programmers who can't solve fizzbuzz. I also have not seen any H1B in my career that is good and willing to take a 60% haircut. In my own company, they are the highest paid and are grumpy we are not paying more. They are all really good engineers too. Heck, when I was looking to move to the US, I refused tons of low paying jobs. When we opened up backend programming jobs, only a handful American citizens even applied. We hired one of them, while we needed 4. The rest didn't make it through the interview process. We also rejected tons of H1bs because they didnt make it through the process. Same salary range offered to H1Bs. And we are a fully remote. So I wonder where are these 300,000 unemployed tech workers.
Cut the fraud and it automatically becomes a decent program. Now, if one is entirely against the program of attracting foreign talent, thats a different discussion.
How do you know they are on par for the role if you are part of the program intended (by the detractors) to push down wages for everybody?
Seems that there is no way you could possibly determine that given the circumstances besides speculating about supply and demand.
> How do you know they are on par for the role if you are part of the program intended (by the detractors) to push down wages for everybody?
Because they know their salary, and what is supposed to be for their role?
some people believe that mere presence of the program itself is driving the wages down which is… funny…
Well, the way program exists now, it's utilized by two kinds of companies:
1) Someone like Verizon that uses it for cheap labor
2) Someone like Netflix that wants to hire good engineers
The way the program works now (before those changes?), it's much easier for group 1 to fill its positions via staffing agencies overseas. That's true even if a company from group 2 already know who they want to hire, since it's a lottery system.
Would be easier if this were two different visas (or program got revamped in a way that it actually works as it's sold to public), but we can't have "Cheap Human Labor Visa" for various reasons.
every problem has a solution except in America where what we THINK is a problem (and discuss ad naseum on HM) is there by design. Group 1’s lobbyist are paying A LOT more than Group 2 - hence they get the most benefit out of the program. it’ll be interesting to see next four years, I suspect the program will at minimum triple
I haven’t hired an American in many years. It’s forbidden.
I have a hard time hiring an American too, especially for backend jobs. But thats because they simply don't apply to the open positions we have. We don't disclose salary upfront, so the argument that "you pay less thats why" doesn't hold. We just don't get those resumes - through recruiters, direct channels, LinkedIn - even when we said we prefer citizens (due to legal costs).
> We don't disclose salary upfront, so the argument that "you pay less thats why" doesn't hold.
Yeah, it does. I assume you don't post it because it's not competitive, and in every case I've personally encountered this was the case.
What are the specific job requirements? Have you posted on HN Who’s Hiring?
> I've yet to see one with a competitive salary.
Nonsense.
> the fair wage they deserve.
Why do american citizens deserve more than non american citizens for the same work?
The government of the people exists to benefit the people. Ideally.
That's what every non-American should ask their own government and their own companies.
The American people get to decide who they want to allow in and under what conditions. If the American people decide that they should get compensated more than non-American citizens for a role falling under American jurisdiction, they can do that. And other nationalities can retaliate or pound sand, but that's it.
Sure, there is nothing non-americans can do about it. But want!=deserve
You may characterize it that way, and invite some pretty reasonable animosity; but if you do, then want!=deserve regarding the salary of foreigners, either.
Other countries are free to compete, nobody is arguing otherwise, but it is explicitly the right of any country to determine who is allowed to compete within their nation.
What people want or deserve is irrelevant. If you live elsewhere and feel you deserve more, then that's not America's problem.
> The American people get to decide who they want to allow in and under what conditions.
I am an American, no one asked me to decide this. Who are these “American people” making these decisions…?
You can vote for politicians who make this decision. You can also work to get an amendment passed.
oh so fantasy stuff :)
I was paid between 400 and 600k a year while on an H1B.
> I am a fan of charging 2-3x the normal tax rate for H1Bs so companies have to actually justify hiring "talent you can't find in America".
This is extraordinarily racist if you spend more than 5 seconds thinking about it, and honestly you should question every one of your choices that have led to this point. It is time for you to re-examine your entire worldview.
Why write like this? It's antagonistic and pompous. I really don't like making light of racism by leaning on the "stop calling everything racist" trope response, but this is pretty extreme. I have no idea what's in the parent's heart, but you only need to give them an ounce of benefit-of-the-doubt to believe that the quoted sentence comes from a place of simple favor for one's own fellow citizens, and not petty racism. And on HN, you're supposed to be giving even more than one ounce of benefit-of-the-doubt.
To be clear, the actual proposal being made is "I am a fan of charging 2-3x the normal tax rate for H1Bs".
One interpretation is that workers should pay 2-3x the income tax, massively depressing net wages for people on visas.
Another interpretation is that employers should pay 2-3x the payroll tax (I guess Social Security and Medicare in the US?) which again means that (not immediately due to nominal wage rigidity, but over time) visa worker wages will be depressed. In any case, visa workers pay into social security, but will not be able to claim benefits unless they become green card holders.
There are already substantial fees employers have to pay, which already depress wages. The proposals suggest making it worse. There is no real thought behind them, no research, no data. Just pure naked nativism: workers must be punished even more than they are right now for daring to immigrate.
It is, in other words, extraordinarily racist. And if someone, through whatever life experiences, has come to believe that this is the way forward, then they absolutely should revisit their worldviews.
---
Neither of these come anywhere close to addressing the actual problem, which is that it isn't the case that workers on visas have the same labor rights as everyone else. Workers on visas are preferentially hired by some firms because they will silently deal with abusive bosses, long work hours and sexual harassment. Giving everyone full labor rights addresses this issue completely.
Do you want H1B worker wages to be depressed, or do you not? Do you care about your fellow workers being sexually harassed, or do you not?
> I have no idea what's in the parent's heart
I don't, either, but structural racism is a million times worse than some rando shouting a slur at me.
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lmao, what do you mean by backdoor? how else would someone legally immigrate?
Some people get upset that someone on a 'non-immigrant' 'temporary employment' visa can apply for permanent residency, although that is allowed by the H1-B program.
Otherwise, one could immigrate through a different visa; there are some employment visas that are explicitly intended for those with intent to immigrate. Or like a family or lottery visa, I guess.
I think it's possible to have a permanent residency application sponsored by an employer from abroad, but especially if the candidate is from China, India, Mexico or the Philipines, the timelines make even less sense than H1-B timelines (submit your application in a two week window near the beginning of March, for the chance to start in October). I don't know too many places that want to commit to a hire that can't start for 7 months, although it's not unreasonable for those on post graduate visas with work eligibility.
> Some people get upset that someone on a 'non-immigrant' 'temporary employment' visa can apply for permanent residency, although that is allowed by the H1-B program.
The H1B visa is explicitly a dual intent visa.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_intent
Becoming a permanent resident is explicitly allowed under the H1B visa. By contrast, if an immigration officer even had a suspicion that you intended to immigrate on any other visa, that would be sufficient grounds for them to disallow you from entering the country.
Further, the dual intent nature of the H1B visa means H1B employees pay social security and Medicare, even though they themselves are not eligible for it. Something you don’t have to do if you earn money on a non dual intent visa.
The H1B visa is indeed temporary. It lasts only 6 years. But it allows you, or your employer, to apply for your permanent residency on the basis of other categories while you’re in the U.S. on an H1B visa. IOW, the only real use of the H1B is that it lets an employer get to know an employee well enough that they’re willing to sponsor their permanent residency.
Also, the other reason the H1B appears overused and not “temporary” is because in a moment of brilliance Congress wrote laws so that there were an equal number of green cards handed out to people from Jamaica as those from China. As a result, when Indians and Chinese apply and get approved for a green card, they need to wait decades to actually get those green cards, whereas someone from Greece would get it instantly.
Since Congress hasn’t been able to write new immigration laws in 3 decades, extending thenH1B visa is the only way to allow folks who have essentially approved green cards to remain in the U.S., because they’re discriminated by their country of birth.
> The H1B visa is explicitly a dual intent visa. ... Becoming a permanent resident is explicitly allowed under the H1B visa.
I am aware that this is allowed. However, the DOL describes the program like this: [1]
> The H-1B program applies to employers seeking to hire nonimmigrant aliens as workers in specialty occupations or as fashion models of distinguished merit and ability. A specialty occupation is one that requires the application of a body of highly specialized knowledge and the attainment of at least a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent. 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.
So I understand why people would be confused or upset when nonimmigrant aliens with temporary employment authorization end up immigrating.
I also agree that allocating a limited number of residencies by country of birth is pretty bizarre. There are some countries where the whole population could get a green card in a single year (if they were all eligible), but people born in Mexico and India have a 20 year backlog in some categories. Some sort of population or land area factor should apply. The impacted countries may want to consider strategic division to improve their US immigration backlogs ;P and they could gain more votes in the UN General Assembly, too.
[1] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b
They should just get rid of the green card limit altogether.
There is already a limit on people who can get H1Bs and move into the country. Once they are actually living here on a semi-permanent basis, converting to actually permanent should be based on the person themself, not based on how many other people decided to become permanent residents.
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> in a moment of brilliance Congress wrote laws so that there were an equal number of green cards handed out to people from Jamaica as those from China
It is largely by design and serves to preserve cultural diversity. Without immigration caps, half of the U.S. would be Indians and Chinese.
It takes around 20+ years to go from H1b to permanent visa/green card. In the meantime your kids born in US have grown up, graduated, you have a house and everything could be yanked at the border when you are travelling.
Meanwhile vast majority of them pay into taxes and social security and leave the US and never see a dime of that money.
Immigrants are the easiest group to exploit by everyone because they have no voice and are vilified by vast majority of the people include the so called intellectuals in here.
So these highly skilled and smart immigrants coming on H1 to US without ever understanding what they are getting into?
They should absolutely be shunning this unfair system and helping India become vishwaguru of software.
The byzantine US immigration system absolutely is an impediment to people coming and staying here, and in my (admittedly anecdotal) estimation is a major competitive disadvantage, and a big part of the reason the UK, EU, Canada and China are making progress towards becoming tech hubs.
Well everyone is making progress. Relevant point is how far they have come and how long they've taken.
Those particular cases have benefited by the shortcomings of the USA actually. I know some big tech companies send workers who weren't able to secure US immigration specifically to offices in Canada, the UK or the EU. For example Meta and Google [1][2].
One can expect the company then grows an interest in developing full engineering teams in these sites. One can also expect some people might simply decide to not come back to the USA.
With the general rise of China's tech scene, recently there's been a trend by which the USA doesn't retain Chinese international students and they instead opt to return home. One has to imagine the very, very long immigration process they have to go to has to do with this [4].
[1]: https://www.teamblind.com/post/Does-Meta-relocate-you-to-Can...
[2]: https://www.quora.com/Is-it-difficult-to-relocate-from-the-G...
[3]: https://news.cgtn.com/news/2024-08-29/The-return-wave-Why-80...
[4]: https://www.statista.com/chart/16528/long-wait-times-for-gre...
Outcomes aren't binary. For any marginal increase in immigration difficulty for skilled tech workers, there is a marginal decrease in US tech competitiveness relative to other countries.
20 years only if you're born in India married to someone born in India. Not great either way though, but it's really affecting the Indian community because of their particular norms.
If your spouse is a US citizen or permanent resident on their own, great. But if you're on H1-B and your spouse is on H-4, I don't think their country of birth makes a difference?
If you're both on H1-B, then sure, having a different country of birth can help.
It does make a difference. When filing for adjustment of status, you can request USCIS to consider both you and your spouse as chargable to your spouse's country of birth, and therefore be placed in a more favourable GC queue. This is called cross-chargeability [1].
Because of this, the "100-year green card queue" problem only really applies for a couple who are both born in India/China, with kids who are not born in the US. If even one child was born in the US, they would be able to sponsor both parents for an immediate green card when they turn 21 years old. In the meantime, the H1-B beneficiary can extend their visa indefinitely and port their approved I-140 whenever they switch jobs, with a 6-month grace period. The spouse also has full working rights.
21 years is a long time, but while working, both parents will accumulate social security credits and will be eligible to recieve benefits upon retirement (if they've secured a green card by then).
[1] https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-7-part-a-chapter-...
Yup, left US after years of working and doubt will ever see social security for self.
I’m sure this is no consolation, but as a born-and-raised citizen who has paid into social security for 15 years now, I have serious doubts about seeing a positive return on those taxes myself.
Social security also kinda feels like a Ponzi scheme. Use current ‘investors’ money to pay for retired people.
If only they just used the current 'investors' money to pay the retirees. They actually use the social security taxes to pay for "whatever" and hope they can come up with the rest when they need it.
If you were paying retired people with investors money then why does SSA have a giant surplus of nearly 3 trillion [1]?
The surplus is because of all the people that have payed into the program and haven't retired yet ...
[1]: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/progdata/assets.html
>I’m sure this is no consolation, but as a born-and-raised citizen who has paid into social security for 15 years now, I have serious doubts about seeing a positive return on those taxes myself.
Look at the bright side though: You get a chance to get conscripted for a war against Iran/Russia/China and also get to blow up windowless mudhouses in the desert to protect democracy and freedom back in the states.
That's not how social security works. You're not supposed to get a positive return. You directly pay a basic income to retired people (minus administration costs). When you retire, workers pay a basic income to you.
This is how it works, but it is not how it was sold (and all the "work tracking" confuses people as to what it is doing).
I'm pretty sure they understand how social security works. You missed the point they were making.
Asking for a positive return on social security is like asking for a positive return on welfare. The positive return comes from not having so many homeless old people all over the country. It's not a personal investment vehicle.
It could be that OP expects Social Security to be kaput by the time he gets to be old.
Looking at the population graph, that’s a valid concern. There’s a ton of boomers and a ton of millenials, but very few babies to pay for our retirement.
(This phenomenon could invalidate even individual stock investment retirement plans as well. We need a future generation of workers, investors, entrepreneurs, consumers).
The issue is that, for me and anyone else who reaches retirement age after 2034, only about 80% of that basic income will be available. For reasons I'm not super clear on, this idea tends to get coded as a conspiracy theory in many circles, despite being uncontroversially true and widely reported on.
That's a perennial Boogeyman. Policymakers have a wide array of tweaks they could make (from adjusting the cap to adjusting retirement age) at any time that could push that out by another century. https://www.epi.org/blog/a-record-share-of-earnings-was-not-...
> It takes around 20+ years to go from H1b to permanent visa/green card.
Primarily only for Indians. For almost everyone else, it's much quicker. Most people I know get it in 2-3 years. Many in under 2 years.
(And yes, it's frankly immoral that they have a separate queue for Indians).
So don't get rid of H1B. Make it one queue.
> your kids born in US have grown up
And now even their citizenship is threatened.
If they were born here then they are citizens and nobody is advocating stripping them of citizenship.
Not if the next president gets away with it: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2024-12-16/trump-said...
It's unlikely he'll succeed, and he walked back on many campaign promises.
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The number one issue software engineers should care about is using foreign talent to undercut wages. A cursory look at H1B salaries shows this is rampant.
There’s a big difference between “we can’t find any talent” and “we can’t find any talent at our price point”. The former should be granted an H1B. The latter is abusing the system.
> A cursory look at H1B salaries shows this is rampant.
Where does one get a cursory look at H1B salaries? If you're referring to various websites that publish H1B petition data, then you might be interested to know that they don't show actual salaries, only the minimum amounts that the company is required to pay by law. The actual salary can and often is higher, based on the specific employee negotation/performance/etc, same as any regular non-H1B job.
Is a startup that has to make do with the funding it has abusing the system by hiring an H1B?
“Raise more money” is not an acceptable or reasonable answer.
I'm a highly specialized software developer with 30 years of experience.
I could save our customer, a huge US entity, a lot of money by moving to the states for the duration of the project. I don't have a college degree though, which seems to be a requirement for the H1-B.
What a bummer.
Great, as if we needed more outsourcing, I cannot even get a single interview despite being an ex FAANG software developer, unemployed for more than a year. Not even for entry level jobs. The final nail in the coffin.
I always see a lot of people arguing that H1bs are taking away jobs from qualified Americans by willing to work long hours and work cheaper. That may be true, but in my brief exposure to the tech industry it does not feel true because the salaries and perks are so high, it doesn’t seem like tech companies are exploiting workers and hiring “cheap H1b labour”.
A lot of my batch (all H1b masters) when to Meta and Amazon. All of them were paid 200k+ right out of masters, one was even paid 430k. So is the claim that if these H1bs did not exist, companies would pay 250k+ to those out of masters? And 500k+ to exceptional candidates? If OpenAI was legally allowed to hire anyone from India, China etc, would they stop providing 800k+ salaries? In fact, we know from experience that this is not true because if you go to OpenAI’a website they explicitly mention apply from wherever you want and they will handle immigration. And you also see that they did successfully hire some folks from remote countries with exorbitant salaries.
A much simpler explanation, is that in tech companies employees are not a cost center but a profit generation center. And so tech companies are not looking to save costs by paying H1bs less, but are simply looking to hire the best and pay whatever is needed to keep them. Market competition tends to determine salaries far more than employee labour pool, especially when talent is always in short supply.
This theory also seems more correct to me, in that it predicts places where H1b labor would shortchange existing tech workers. It would be wherever employees are a cost center, legacy businesses that need software but would like to just get it done as cheaply as possible. By definition most of these companies would not be FAANG adjacent, but would instead be companies like say Target that needs simple software that works reasonably well at a low cost. An equitable solution then would be to put a flat minimum salary on H1b’s, say 200k, that would remove most of the cases where H1bs are hired to short change Americans, and not affect much of the talent hiring that big tech does. It’s only negative affect would be on startups, which generally pay low salaries, but would now have to pay high salaries for immigrants.
this is a well-studied tradeoff with immigration. high-skilled immigration helps US economy and innovation but low-skilled immigration depresses wages for citizens. you are making this distinction for a narrow case i.e. tech.
show me the study for broad-spectrum lasting wage depression for low-skilled immigration? The mariel boatlift study shows basically no effect: https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/mariel-impact.pdf
H-1B is a terrible visa. I went through it with a few of my peers. Working in the US is great, but it’s not the only option. I moved out after two years and settled somewhere that values stability over the churn-and-burn culture. Couldn’t be happier.
If there are US Citizens available (even if not local), H1s should not be a consideration. Period.
Frictional unemployment exists, so this effectively bars H1s.
Yup, as expected. Not dealing with the effects of clustering. Great job GOV. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1fyx9hp/cognizant...
Looks like that’s going through the legal system so is already illegal?
You can’t make a rule that says “hey don’t break the rules”.
That seems logically fallacious.
Can't read the full article due to paywall but ostensibly it's due to bias rules on race and not visa rules? Sounds like visas being abused and then backstopped by unrelated rules does not mean the visa rules shouldn't be fixed.
Allowing spouses to work on a H4 visa is a HUGE change.
It was a big problem for our family.
Spouses on H4 cannot work unless the primary H1B has an approved I-140 immigrant petition. It's not automatic.
And obama made that happen in his last days in office in Dec 2015/Jan 2016
I thought that was specifically for when you were waiting for the residency permit, not a random H4.
> Roles tied to research institutions cap-exempt
And in comes a flood of "Research Software Engineer" roles
As a working scientist, this is a hugely underserved category in academic/industry science. This would be very welcome.
Yeah, I wonder what that is going to ground out to. With the AI race, basically anything tangential is research, at least in the definition of "doing something scientific-looking that's not been done before". That could include a _lot_ of companies from massive to tiny.
Will probably get undone in the first 10 minutes of the next administration.
I'd rather have H1-B visas be a 5 year unrestricted work permit.
America needs to keep attracting the world's best and brightest, but linking it to a specific employer is problematic. Opens up employees to mistreatment.
I'd say charge a straight up fee, 500k upon approval. That gets you 5 years, if your wiz making 400k a year it's a great deal.
Are we actually doing that though? I managed H1-B employees at Verizon and honestly it felt like a scam. They weren't the best and brightest despite being awesome people in general, and they were also getting exploited by the company in terms of compensation. The only one benefitting seemed to be Verizon.
would they have preferred not being able to live/work in the US at all?
I would have preferred for a multi-billion dollar company to use the H1-B program as intended and to pay an American wage to someone living and working in America.
I'm just responding to the portion where you said the only one that benefits is amazon. Surely at the very least, the immigrants themselves benefit if the alternative was no ability to work in the US?
"charge a straight up fee, 500k upon approval."
There is already a work visa for that called EB5 even though the requirement is $1M (800K for rural areas) and you will need to hire 10 American workers. Plenty of rich people from other countries are using that already.
If you're trying to get the best and brightest why would you charge 500 thousand dollars?! I don't care what kind of wiz you are, that's prohibitive.
You need to already have means otherwise your out competing the lower end of the tech sector.
I hate that it is time restricted at all. Just make it a green card program with a path to citizenship outright. Brain drain the rest of the world. Instead we are providing work experience to our future competitors.
I worked many years under H1B, but moved out of the USA. Unsure if I'll come back, technically I still have time on my H1b, but man, it's just so stressful to lay roots knowing they're conditional on all sorts of ticking clocks and hoops to jump.
I like working at early stage startups— works pretty well with H1B but it makes the process of getting a green card via work complicated. Some people can deal with all that stress, I just rather not.
800k in investment gets you a green card. And you may even make a return on that investment. Why would anyone pay 500k for participating in a pageant ?
If you need to already set up the business that can generate 500k in your home country before coming here, you do the opposite of bringing value and innovation to the US. You have already given most of that to the home country.
I suspect most people that have a business that can generate $500k in their home country probably wouldn't want to move to the USA at all.
Unless their business generates way more than $500k, in which case they'd probably be moving as businessmen, not as skilled workers.
Yes exactly. They would also be advanced in their career and by then probably have roots in their home country that they wouldn't leave.
I thought it is a terrible idea from first sentence. Last paragraph completely changed my mind.
let them all in! People can earn three times more just by being in the US and we benefit by lower inflation.
EDIT: I encourage people to read two stories
Qian Xuesen - what happens when you deport skilled laborers
https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/mariel-impact.pdf - one of the first studies on immigration econ effects on wages. A good starting point
Some highlights from the Federal Register:
> 2. Bar on Multiple Registrations Submitted by Related Entities
DHS will not finalize the proposed change at 8 CFR 214.2(h)(2)(i)(G) to expressly state in the regulations that related entities are prohibited from submitting multiple H-1B registrations for the same individual. On February 2, 2024, DHS published a final rule, “Improving the H-1B Registration Selection Process and Program Integrity,” 89 FR 7456 (Feb. 2, 2024), creating a beneficiary-centric selection process for registrations by employers and adding additional integrity measures related to the registration process to reduce the potential for fraud in the H-1B registration process. In that final rule, DHS states that it “intends to address and may finalize this proposed provision [expressly stating in the regulations that related entities are prohibited from submitting multiple registrations for the same individual] in a subsequent final rule,” but that “[m]ore time and data will help inform the utility of this proposed provision.” 89 FR 7456, 7469 (Feb. 2, 2024). Initial data from the FY 2025 H-1B registration process show a significant decrease in the total number of registrations submitted compared to FY 2024, including a decrease in the number of registrations submitted on behalf of beneficiaries with multiple registrations.[1]
This initial data indicate that there were far fewer attempts to gain an unfair advantage than in prior years owing, in large measure, to the implementation of the beneficiary-centric selection process.[2]
Under the beneficiary-centric selection process, individual beneficiaries do not benefit from an increased chance of selection if related entities each submit a registration on their behalf. As such, DHS has decided not to finalize the proposed change pertaining to multiple registrations submitted by related entities.
> C. Summary of Costs and Benefits
DHS analyzed two baselines for this final rule, the no action baselines and the without-policy baseline. The primary baseline for this final rule is the no action baseline. For the 10-year period of analysis of the final rule, DHS estimates the annualized net cost savings of this rulemaking will be $333,835 annualized at a 2 percent discount rate. DHS also estimates that there will be annualized monetized transfers of $1.4 million from newly cap-exempt petitioners to USCIS and $38.8 million from employers to F-1 workers, both annualized at a 2 percent discount rate.
This is just the result of lobbying by big business so they can import cheap labour to suppress wages.
The biggest loop hole for not being allowed to hire non citizens or permanent residents is not the H-1B. It's actually B2B contracts that have absolutely no restrictions what so ever.
At least the H-1B lets us keep some tax revenue.
Regarding this part:
Clarification of specialty role
You really won't need to clarify whether the role is a specialty one or not if you just increase the minimum wage for H1Bs. I really don't know why we don't have some rule that pins H1B wages to like the 90th percentile wage.It would be exceptionally easy to solve the "H1B problem" by making sure that H1Bs are more expensive than local talent; then they really only would be used when local talent doesn't exist.
Are they accepting them in descending order of total compensation yet?
This would be a great way to starve every industry outside of tech of H1B workers.
The working conditions for Americans suck due to this fucking program. People come here to live subservient lives and bring along a toxic culture of submission. The level of ass licking that I see on the regular is akin to a well known Korean airline going into the side of a mountain. It is insane the level of deference you will find.
All this hype about the "smartest, brightest, etc." is nonsense. I've worked with hundreds of engineers in SV who are all on H1B. They are no better than anyone else. My main complaint with them is that their work is fine but the culture they bring is insanely toxic and does not allow for any psychological safety at all. I know enough people in industry for a long period of time to know that it wasn't always this way. There were always problems but it has hit a level that is insane. The fact that an American is a minority nationality when in almost any US tech company is bonkers.
I'm in favor of immigration generally, but I actually agree with the cultural argument here. The toxic culture really shows up in interviewing. Recently I've repeatedly had to deal with interviewees obviously cheating with AI tools. Also, while I agree that folks on H-1 visas are around the same qualification-wise as citizens, I also agree that their primary interest is always their visa, not doing a good job as an employee.
Yeah, I think that the solution here is to make the visa easier though? If they don't worry about it then they won't be so focused on it.
I don't know what the solution is but I don't feel like making it easier is going to be helping either. I'm not entirely sure if this toxic culture would go away as soon as people have green cards. After all, this culture is alive and well in the countries these people are from.
The bad culture isn't just due to being locked into a job or it being hard to get a new job. It is a core component of their belief system. I see this as soon as people from these places get promoted to a manager - they literally turn into the thing they hated the most on the first day! It seems to me to be completely cultural.
Sure, but you have selection effects at the end of a really brutal pipeline from their perspective, so the culture of people conditioned on going through this process is always going to be kinda an asshole.
People go into banking and have shitty hours and culture because there's a nice rewarding story at the end of it (money, prestige, whatever) - similar to what would be at the end of moving somewhere prosperous. The problem with banking culture isn't an inherent problem with American culture, it's merely a product of a system where you have such a hiring system.
Unlike in banking, however, the toxic culture isn't a product of a company or market forces, but the outcome of such a restrictive visa regime. Change the visa regime, and the culture (eventually, you have to give it a generation) also changes.
I expect a lot of H1B applicants creating shell corporations.
Well, they’ve passed the “culture” part of the citizenship test, then
H1B isn't citizenship.
I’m aware.
From what I understand you also need to be able to pay yourself a $60,000 salary minimum, from that LLC. If people can do that, then power to them and let them stay!
If you're worried about people shortcutting a line to get a visa by injecting money into the US economy, again by somehow getting 60K into the LLC to pay the salary of the recipient, this is also a win.
So what is the problem here exactly?
The new administration will likely reform USCIS around eligibility criteria rather than speed of processing and these reforms will be undone as quickly as Mayorkas is gone.
What does this change, if anything, for software engineers at FAANG and similar companies?
This is key: "Flexibility to start working immediately upon petition filing"
Currently workers are often abused since the system puts intense pressure to keep a job and don't move around.
No offense to the very hardworking H1B guys I've worked with, but I'm not a fan because they'll do anything the company says. They are used as scabs to undermine developers leverage. This was especially clear during RTO. It's the same issue of manufacturing stuff in china. Of course an H1B will be a good puppet, if you threaten to fire them you're sending them back home to another country!
If you're interested in judging others' work in hackathons for your O1 or EB1a, email me at halloumee [at] proton [dot] me.
Well I'm never voting for a Democrat ever again. Doesn't matter what the GOP does.
how about an insurrection? Would the fake electors scheme do it for you?
Maybe it's just me, but the vast amount of illegal and semi legal migrant workers being exploited suggests what the US needs is a visa system for unskilled labour, not for skilled.
Why does everyone think the cure to the worlds ills is to have more doctors and not more toilet cleaners? People can die from dirty hands on doorknobs faster than from smoking: Basic sanitation work, food work is important. If current US residents won't do this stuff, pick food, clean up, then isn't the answer to bring them in or do we really prefer to have them live in a twilight, semi-illegal world? Really?
Several positive outcomes, including expanding cap-exemption to non-profit and other research institutions, and stronger enforcement mechanisms.
I’m very happy for everybody on H1-B whose live this improves! Does this include renewal in USA?
But as an American the “bonafide job requirement” makes me nervous. We have a massive ghost job problem that really needs to be a federal crime. Will this make that worse?
they mean "bonafide job offer". What is happening right now is staffing agencies (mainly in India) mass file H1B applications for all their staff, and then once they get picked in the lottery, they find assignments in the US and file the entire petition after. This heavily disadvantages non-staffing companies who file H1Bs for their staff outside the country or those in the US on F1 visas for actual jobs.
This change is meant to close that loophole. This used to not be a problem, because you had to file the entire petition BEFORE you enter the lottery, but now you just pay some nominal fee and get your name in, leading to a highly profitable situation for staffing companies.
Yeah, there really needs to be some worker protection legislation makes ghost jobs a crime.
It already is. It just isn’t enforced by the DOL/ICE. (Those offers need to actually be legitimate, or it’s fraud).
Is this actually enforced? There are still ghost jobs being posted.
The comment you're replying to already said it's unenforced.
Near as I can tell, it’s similar to ‘don’t talk about salary at work’ stuff - technically maybe if you can prove it and complain to the right person, but it’s everywhere.
Yet even more ways for corporations to underpay native, domestic workers.
How so?
It's supply and demand economics: if there is a low supply of workers and a high demand for them, then employers are supposed to compete for them with more pay, more benefits, training/education, etc. When the supply of workers is artificially increased, then companies have less incentive to compete. It becomes a buyer's market for employers.
General equilibrium exists though, if the supply of workers increases you usually see businesses which were previously non-viable appear to take advantage of them at similar rates.
You can illustrate this by doing the other direction: if we killed half of the workforce, would real wages double. Unlikely! You'd probably just see broad-based inflation for a while until wages equalized again.
For a first-take study on this, see https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/mariel-impact.pdf
> if there is a low supply of workers and a high demand for them
Employers outsource all those works to overseas.
They've said this for decades and SV engineers still pulling down $500k+/yr while someone in Hyderabad isn't making anywhere close to that.
It can't be due to fundamental skill, though! That same engineer's earnings statistically triple upon moving to the US, which is why we should allow more of them in: people are more productive in the US, and we all benefit from their productivity (most obviously fiscally, but less obviously through products that wouldn't exist in the counterfactual).
Then throw them in prison?
For what?
Why is this dropping the week before Christmas.
For everyone who thinks H-1B and its ilk make it possible to hire foreign workers at below what citizens are paid - have a look on your favorite search engine for:
“Prevailing wage condition”
It’s a requirement that’s part of the Labor Condition Application wherein based on the location you’ll work (the “Metropolitan Service Area” or MSA) to be granted a visa your employer must prove they’ll pay you above publicly available and published minimum wages for each job title.
These wages are public. If you have a problem with what they’re permitted to pay H-1B workers, the published prevailing wages are what you have a problem with. Spoiler though: they’re actually pretty accurate.
Here is one example of how hard it is to underpay workers on visas: during the pandemic, workers on visas were not legally allowed to be furloughed, because they would run the risk of not meeting the prevailing wage that year, putting the employer out of compliance with the LCA and subject to fines in the event of an audit. So what happened in practice was negotiated unpaid leave or in most cases the US gov covered wages via programs like PPP.
Now this is all out the window if the published prevailing wage for a given occupation is too low or the employer somehow sneaks one by the consular officials approving petitions - by selecting a title too junior for the applicant’s years of experience, for example. There will always be anecdata that makes this seem like a huge problem so be wary because one story does not a trend make. As mentioned above, by and large the prevailing wages are pretty on point with what American citizens are paid.
The reality of the way this system works is it’s WAY more technical than fearmongerers would have you believe. Visa holders are very much NOT undercutting anyone and the H-1B is not a completely broken system - even though the lottery and the fraudulent applications cause hell for applicants and employers it does basically do what it’s intended to do. So besides the exploitative situation these changes seem to proactively address, it mostly works and alongside the O-1 and a few other visa categories, has played a key role in the US’ ongoing supremacy in AI and many other industries.
Source: Australian citizen spent over 6 years working in SF on an E-3 visa which is very similar to H-1B.
Hire junior aerospace engineer with senior aerospace experience. Subject engineer to working conditions and long hours that domestic labor wouldn't tolerate. Get 1.5 - 3 senior aerospace engineers for the price of 1 junior.
Does anybody know what are the updates are in layman terms?
here it is https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/uscis-announces...
I read through it and even asked chatgpt for summary and it looks like "passport is now required" and "one beneficiary one draw" that is if you put in multiple petitions it will only consider you once.
I thought Elon was talking nonsense when he mentions frivolous government rules but reading these h1b changes makes me question my own sanity about the government "rules" which they aptly named it as "Final rule" (wtf?).
They still left the multiple applications for one person rule.
Seems the lobby was strong to allow consultancies like Tata and wipes to continue what they are doing to get most of cap.
I wish USCIS was very strict about those guys who is coming in H1b from India incapable of doing anything and hire guy from india to do all their work.
Shoe horn-y
Biden (or whoever actually runs the country, since it's most definitely not Biden) is trying to undermine Trump's plan to turn H1-B into an auction, which is how it should be run, IMO. That's all there is to it. This will be canceled next year.
Seems like the current admin trying to stuff all the laws right in time for the next admin to dismantle...
Oh no, the 50% rule won't be exploited sir.
I hope it says that they remain above 50%
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I wonder how many people will move from socialism & bureaucracy Europe to the US.
Vast majority of H1bs are from India, and China. Only a few hundred per year from EU countries.
Approximately none on top of the usual migration patterns.
Expect this to be rolled back fully on January 20
Unlikely. Elon heavily favors more H1-Bs. If they roll it back, they'll introduce their own version that is even more favorable to those that gain by suppressing tech worker salaries.
Unclear. They're not going to be consistent or competent, and the intent of everything they do will be to either part out the government to their friends, weaponize the US government against perceived enemies. And they might reward people who kiss the ring by granting exceptions.
Really, given the premise, anyone sane should kill H-1B entirely for tech:
"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"
There is no shortage of qualified US software engineers. CS schools are full. The very concept is ridiculous. Kill this law, liberalize immigration instead.
> CS schools are full
I guess you never paid any attention to the nationality of students enrolled in CS classes.
The undergrads at my university were mostly US-born. I believe that's the case most places, even elite universities. The more expensive universities are incentivized to take more international students for the money though -- and obviously there's enough wealthy people globally to fill whatever slots they offer. There are plenty of good engineers from the US who simply weren't lucky enough to be born to rich parents in CA. It turns out moving 2000 miles from home for a worse quality of life isn't super attractive to people born in the US when your whole family still lives in the same region. Of course, if you're born in India or China, the value proposition is a bit different.
Perhaps geographic restrictions on H-1Bs would spread the wealth: force these companies to prove they can't find engineers in the US by looking outside the wealthiest enclaves in the country, where even FAANG engineers complain about cost of living. We'd ease the Bay Area housing crisis, lift up other regions of the country, and provide more domestic-born citizens a path to good jobs while maintaining their own communities.
Also, there are going to be endless, endless lawsuits on everything, because everything they do is going to violate either the Constitution or existing US law. I'm not sure how much that will slow them down.
... not that it was _ever_ used that way, since its inception.
He ran on a platform of easier legal immigration.
I think you are excessively credulous and that’s the most polite I can be.
I’m a natural born citizen that’s the wrong skin color and I’m planning on carrying my passport everywhere come Jan 21 - I’m not going to chance being thrown into the back of a BORTAC van.
I have a mixed race family, and am scrambling to get passports in time for people in my family with darker skin, and we will 100% be at least carrying good quality copies of them at all times.
They are claiming to start mass deportations next month, and profiling based on skin color is absolutely the only way that can be possible. Moreover, just like the Nazis discovered, both deporting people and indefinite detainment are impossibly expensive- leaving only one option. This political movement is already based on the idea that people different than them don't deserve to be treated like human beings, and will not be.
I think a natural born citizen carrying their passport everywhere starting Jan 21 is even more credulous in the other direction.
I don’t think you’ve thought through the downside risk. A coworker - himself of my ethnicity - assumed I was foreign born, I’m not going to leave it to chance when the promised deportation dragnet starts up.
Your concern is reasonable, and I've thought about it myself. The Wikipedia article linked downthread by int_19h notes: "Up to one percent of all those detained in immigration detention centers are nationals of the United States according to research by Jacqueline Stevens, a professor of political science at Northwestern University." There are specific cases mentioned in the article, and the case of Mark Daniel Lyttle was pretty alarming. It was written up in: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/29/the-deportatio...
On the other hand, you can't be detained without probable cause, and race/ethnicity alone isn't enough. For instance, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Brignoni-Ponce (https://case.law/caselaw/?reporter=us&volume=422&case=0873-0...): "In this case the officers relied on a single factor to justify stopping respondent’s car: the apparent Mexican ancestry of the occupants. We cannot conclude that this furnished reasonable grounds to believe that the three occupants were aliens. At best the officers had only a fleeting glimpse of the persons in the moving car, illuminated by headlights. Even if they saw enough to think that the occupants were of Mexican descent, this factor alone would justify neither a reasonable belief that they were aliens, nor a reasonable belief that the car concealed other aliens who were illegally in the country. Large numbers of native-born and naturalized citizens have the physical characteristics identified with Mexican ancestry, and even in the border area a relatively small proportion of them are aliens. The likelihood that any given person of Mexican ancestry is an alien is high enough to make Mexican appearance a relevant factor, but standing alone it does not justify stopping all Mexican-Americans to ask if they are aliens."
I second the recommendation to get a RealID. You're going to need one eventually for domestic flights, among other things. When I got mine at the DMV renewing my driver's license, they asked for a birth certificate, social security card, driver's license, and proof of (local) residency (e.g. utility bill). So why not get one and carry that as additional proof?
I'd recommend carrying a passport card instead of the actual passport. A REAL ID would be helpful as well.
I don't think the chances of something that drastic are high, but it doesn't hurt to err on the side of caution.
Problem with the passport card is it requires me to send my existing passport for several weeks. In the event of a government shutdown I'd be SOL.
REAL ID is plausible but I don't really trust it, given that illegal immigrants can get identity cards in my state.
> I don't really trust it
REAL ID is a bare minimum. It shows that you at least have legal residency.
FWIW it's trusted by DHS so that's all that matters for your usecase or assumption.
If you are worried about the risk of being hauled by ICE, then you should get a REAL ID.
> it requires me to send my existing passport for several weeks
Last I remember, you can do it in person.
Here are the passport offices - https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports/get-fas...
> In the event of a government shutdown
The US Passport Office remains open during the commonly termed "government shutdowns"
If it's the same process as getting a passport in the first place, you have to give them the documentation proving that you're a citizen, and they sit in it for a while before eventually mailing it back to you.
more people will become billionaires in the next four years than get deported :)
A useless statement because I'm much closer to an legal-to-become-illegal than a multi-millionaire-to-become-billionaire
I wasn't talking specifically about you... there are campaign promises "we are going to deport _____ people" that you should know by now are just shit politicians say so that they get the votes in South Dakota, Alabama and shithole places like that. We heard in 2016 "build the wall, repeal ACA, lock her up..." and whatever BS was spewing at that time. the only policy that you know for sure will be in place for the next 2 to 4 years will be there to make sure that richer get richer - hence my statement that we'll see more people become billionaires than people that we will actually deport :)
> deportation dragnet
Do you know how insane that sounds in this context? I absolutely despise Trump, make no mistake; but if you think Trump is rounding up any of the 40+% of the USA's non-white citizens and deporting them, you have been deluded by widespread FUD.
The "deportation dragnet" might apply to illegals, sure. Will any meaningful amount of US citizens get scooped up in that, if any? Highly, highly unlikely. You're probably more likely to be murdered.
All evidence points to first week being dedicated to flashy arrests in blue states with Tom Homan previously bragging that they would deport both illegals and their citizen family members with no regard for the obvious illegality of the concept.
It is, but only the "Jan 21" part.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Americans_from_...
This is a movement based on extreme hatred and dehumanization of anyone different from them, and most of the time such movements have taken control anywhere historically, it has resulted in mass murder/genocide. We underestimate what atrocities they are capable of at our own peril. I am hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst.
I feel like I - and a lot of people I know - have been in denial of what is happening for a while. It is terrifying, and I don't want it to be true, but it is undeniable. I don't want to be one of those people that says "Davon haben wir nichts gewusst" - "We knew nothing about that."
Read the RAISE Act if you think that the incoming administration is going to be easier on legal migrants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAISE_Act
Funny I see this kind of misguided comments all the time.
Their immigration policy is never only about illegal immigration. Do you actually think it is possible to tighten immigration policy without affecting H1B?
If you need evidence, just look at what happened between 2017-2021. H1B denial & RFE rates were way up, and the administration tried multiple times to roll out policy that significantly restrict the eligibility of H1B visas. They even used coronavirus as an excuse to issue travel bans on H1B. How is that making legal immigration easier?
No he ran on an explicitly racist and ANTI Immigrant (yes including legal immigrants!) platform.
See https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c77l28myezko
Trump has said he’d like to “staple green cards to diplomas”. Despite what the media portrays, he’s not pro American, pro white, pro nazi, whatever.
He’s owned by a different slice of the parasitic ruling class that, while opposed to some of the goals the Biden admin was for, still share a common theme of not caring about the average American at all. He has probably the most pro Israel cabinet we’ve ever seen and appears to be cozying up with big tech (thiel, musk, zuckerberg, etc).
If he was truly pro American H1-B would be thrown out and we’d require these companies that are wildly profitable to invest in educating American workers. H1-B is used to exploit both foreign and domestic labor to the benefit of a tiny population of capital holders.
Wouldn't attaching green cards - or at least temporary work permits - to US university degrees be a positive change compared to employment agencies / contractor firms trying to sneak in piles of people without such degrees and screening? That would be a good response to the issue of training (ideally) highly qualified smart people and then kicking them out.
Except he was president for four years and did the opposite - remarkable that people want to forget 2017-2021
There is that. And the idea of trying to retain new grads would already have worked 30 years ago and yet here we are.
I mean, that's how you end up with Qian Xuesen and every high-tech chinese program succeeding
Didn't Trump try to prevent even greencard holders from returning if they were from overseas from the wrong religious area of the world, after promising a Muslim ban? And was then only stopped by courts? Or am I misremembering that?
Yes, he did, it affected greencard holders for a brief period because it was a poorly designed idea thought up by malicious and stupid people.
Thought so. From what OP said:
> Despite what the media portrays, he’s not pro American, pro white, pro nazi, whatever.
Going after a religious/ethnic minority legally holding United States greencard status... Even if he tried to hide it in regions and not a DNA or religious test, he did it immediately after campaigning on a Muslim ban in those words. Sounds quite in line with those terms except it is actually anti-American if we take a huge part of 'pro American' to mean valuing the First Amendment.
> If he was truly pro American H1-B would be thrown out and we’d require these companies that are wildly profitable to invest in educating American workers. H1-B is used to exploit both foreign and domestic labor to the benefit of a tiny population of capital holders.
This is exactly right and exactly why Trump won't do anything about it... when you surround yourself will billionaires you'll want to make this that this tiny population of capital holders prospers even further :)
Why?
Trump in term 1 was the most hostile to legal immigration President in decades and that was before he started slandering Haitians with legal status
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Silly name calling isn't how grownups should discuss politics. If anything, it makes it harder to agree with any point you're trying to make.
Edit: I had no idea it was controversial to say that name calling makes an argument less convincing.
What's grown up about people who say they don't care if their candidate murders someone on the white house steps, they'd still vote for him? Insanity needs to be derided.
What does this have to do with what I said?
Name calling is not a way to make a convincing point. That's the entirety of my comment.
The point is that making convincing points is the old way. We have a commander in chief that has elevated name calling to the new normal.
Trump can’t speak about anyone he opposes without giving them a childish nickname, seems fair to reciprocate. Going further, it appears that the leader of the nation modeling this behavior also normalizes it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nicknames_used_by_Dona...
Please do! Would make for some great merch. https://publicintegrity.org/politics/mitch-mcconnell-senate-...
While it might be fair, I'm saying that using childish nicknames does no favors if you're trying to make people agree with what your saying.
I don't think following Trump's footsteps with tit-for-tat name calling is beneficial to anyone.
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Can you explain this image and how it relates to my comment like I'm 5?
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This H1B program is gamed so hard its a joke at this point.
I personally witnessed someone that submit multiple applications that this person won the H1B lottery. This person even had fake office, fake business address, etc for the fake entities.
I already reported it, but no action has been taken. This person is now happily employed in the US using H1B.
Unethical life pro tips but work: for those of you trying to get H1B, just submit multiple applications to multiple "companies". There are services like this out there, just need to find out where.
Good luck. This nation is for plunder.
Didn’t the rule change last year where all applications by same person is considered as one?
Yup but they actually can't check.
Erm they can. They are looking at passport numbers now.
Dude that's just not true. You need to submit almost every single detail about yourself before the lottery, including information on your passport. In fact this has dramatically decreased the duplicate entries to H1B lottery.
You are free to believe what you want. I myself witnessed it. Fake address, fake office. Apply to "4" "companies".
You have no idea what good lawyer can do :)
It works.
Anti-immigration rhetoric always descends into fiction.
According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42451726, this is much less of a thing than before.
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is being employed for a salary considered plunder now?
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I never claimed the IT labor shortage, merely replying to the specific quote "this nation is for plunder" - do you retract that?
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I am slowly coming to grips with the fact that this is a genuine widespread hate movement, and the average person that supports it deeply feels this hatred, and personally blames their problems on anyone from another country, culture, or skin color- and doesn't believe those people deserve to be treated as human. I couldn't be more disappointed, angry, and terrified about what comes next.
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Sure.