Both lawyers and doctors have powerful associations that control and regulate the labor supply via a certification process. Technology doesn't have this. In fact, technology has the opposite: a H1B program that brings in more and more labor supply to keep wages low.
Doctors, lawyers, nurses, and the majority of other professions have very powerful guilds which ban the practice of their trade without a specific license only obtainable within the country of practice.
You don't see local hospitals posting H1B openings for physicians, because the American Medical Association would eradiate them off the face of the planet.
Want to practice in the US as a foreign trained MD? You have to apply to retrain here, with very specific restrictions, and compete against thousands of other expats. You will never be competing directly against American MDs.
This is in direct contrast to the tech industry, which has exactly zero licensing bodies with the ability to dictate who can practice within the profession. Hence, H1Bs galore.
People always make the mistake of comparing highly regulated industries to tech. They couldn't be further apart. A commenter on the Pao case raised this exact point: maybe women are too smart to get into a dog-eat-dog industry like tech! Women sure as heck have no qualms about law, medicine or nursing! Three professions with excellent guild protections and career stability once an initial licensing hurdle is passed.
For better or worse, tech is the wild west of professions. All things considered it's absurdly risky to get into, but for the few superstar talents, it's very lucrative because there are no barriers to entry. For the above average vet with 40 years of experience though, it can be a nightmare, as an eager H1B will sign up for indentured servitude any day to escape third world poverty.
I wouldn't recommend the tech industry to my kids. Too much volatility and risk. You're better off having a steady profession, and pursuing bootstrapped startups on the side. If your idea gets traction, you can always stop practising your profession and return at a later date. That's the beauty of guilds like the AMA, you'll never be thrown under the bus for a quick buck, because the status of an MD cannot be devalued.
There's growing evidence [1] that even when used by american tech companies H1Bs are largely being used to suppress wages of technical laborers (us). From a purely economic perspective, if you could pay someone on an h1b $80k when it would cost you $120k to hire an american, why would you hire the american? Tech CEOs calling for more H1Bs has very little to do with their politics and morality and much more to do with reducing one of their largest costs (labor).
The entire H1B situation is bad for everyone in tech. Because it's significantly harder for H1B holders to change jobs, they have a harder negotiation position and thus reducer upward pressure for comp.
I mean it is economics 101 that H1B's depress wages. I'd say especially since the demand for technology is relatively more inelastic that the increases on labor supply. There is a lot of money involved in masking this fact, but let's agree on something. There is always a tension between what part of economic surplus workers get and what part capital (shareholders) get. The sky high returns on capital in tech are possible in no big part due to the relative ease of bringing in new people. Successful companies will still make money but the actual return on the invesment will depend more on how high of a salary they have to pay. Take for instance FB, they make about 18Bn in net income, have 52K employees. About 350K per employee, imagine suddenly they were facing hiring engineers, they could easily spend a lot more on keeping them, but there's no need. Thanks to their lobbying through FWD.us among others, they can always import more people.
I mean they have desperately tried to get more people into CS, but even that has had little results. Biggest bang for the buck is lobbying and marketing for more H1Bs. What's a couple hundred million here and there
There is no shortage of technical talent. This is a tale used by tech companies to increase the H1B CAP and get access to more "supply" to keep tech wages under control.
Do you have any empirical evidence that H1B is an effective "weapon against high tech salaries" in the income range that Google pays?
I think that whatever is going on in the lower end of the market, there is still a substantial shortage of labor in the higher jobs that cannot be made up domestically anytime soon. Higher end jobs tend to have a much less elastic labor pool because fewer people can do the work.
Whatever the impact is for tech workers, for the general public it is definitely a bad outcome to have perpetual labor shortages at tech companies; it just means that they get their products/features/bug fixes/other improvements more slowly.
Its not the tech companies lobbying. Its the companies like verizon and disney. Tech companies are feeling the pain of h1-b being oversubscribed. If you need a very specific skill that has a very small talent pool, you're competing against these companies who are doing it just to get cheaper labor. When we look at machine learning with advanced degrees, that pool is probably at 100% employment in the US. Thats what h1b is designed to address. Not filling out an oracle DBA position for under market rates.
Seems like an open secret that tech cos like H1-Bs because they can pay them less and they’ll work hard because the alternative is getting fired and being kicked out of the country.
It’s a really backwards system with messed up incentives that probably needs to be reformed.
There are no labor shortages. It’s a way for large tech companies to control salaries of the skilled workers.
It allows to lobby the notions of need for workers’ visas to bring in cheap labor. This cheap labor is then much more easily controlled (visa conditions, e.g. H1B - cannot easily leave workplace, several years to transition to next immigration status, yet more years to citizenship).
I think this is among the reasons H1Bs are typically not supported by the tech community, usually on the grounds the worker is beholden to the employer and are in an unfair bargaining position, but it could also be that most just don't want downward pressure on their compensation. Doctors, lawyers, technicians, programmers, etc.
Still, it's not cut and dried, at some point too many people will make an too much pressure on resources. Ie north Americans Europeans and east Asians consume per capita much more than people emerging economies.
Want to see this journalist change their mind, allow any journalist to settle in the us, anon and begin working legally.
So, when the blue collar worker sees a threat from unskilled immigrants, it's not surprising. Ask them if they would feel the same dislike for Mexican and Brazilian a d Indian doctors, probably not.
Most companies I see using H1-Bs are startups looking for people to get technical work done as cheaply as possible. These are the same people who give employees 0.1% of a series A company and whine about how there's a "skill shortage".
When in truth, there is no "shortage" -- it's just that software engineering is one of the only (somewhat) high-end careers subject to absolutely no credentialing whatsoever, meaning, if you can get someone here (to the US) and they can do the work, great, they're hired.
Contrast this to the absurd coddling present in other professions. Doctors, dentists, lawyers, architects, etc. have massive barriers keeping people out, competition down, and in the end, prices of their services up.
It blows my mind what middling lawyers can charge: $300/hr or more for mediocre law work for my California HOA. These people have zero side projects, don't study a minute out of work, and work strict 8-hour days, with the expectation of earning $250k/yr or more mid-career. This is what the cream of the crop in our field earns (Google SWEs making 350k or so). The cream of the crop for layers make millions/year at places like Cravath or Orrick billing $1000/hr or more. Even my wife, an architect, is now billing out at $250/hr.
It blows my mind how underpaid software developers are, given how difficult the work, and the working conditions are, compared to other similarly demanding fields in terms of professional education, and raw intellectual horsepower required to do the job. A typical H1-B can be productive a few months after a good software education anywhere in the world, assuming they speak passable English. My best friend's sister-in-law, an Indian dentist, had to retake the last year of dental school before she could touch a single tooth in the US.
The biggest winners from the H1-B regime are high-skilled professionals in the US. Low-end labor doesn't care about any of this. They work for cash, and still pay sales and property tax (through rent) just like the rest of us, and all for absolutely zero government benefits.
But THERE ARE trade barriers for other professions.
How many H1B CEOs are in the US? How many lawyers or doctors are on H1B visas here (or their work outsourced off-shore?)
Software development appears to be the one the most exposed to cheap competition.
It is supply and demand that eventually dominates the bargaining power of employees, right? Less supply yet increasing demand of tech talent actually drove up the package. Just look at the the crazy packages doted out by companies in the last few years. I'd venture to guess that many of them, if not most, were given to H1B holders.
H1B's in Big tech are about as far from indentured servants as you can imagine, they're in high demand and switch jobs for better pay constantly. American kids with access to generational wealth aren't as interested in difficult technical subjects.
reply