"I don't understand. If they decide to hire more in India they won't need H-1Bs any more."
That's exactly the point I was trying to make, that the former H-1B individuals will be hired to work at these new facilities in their homeland instead of bringing them to the bay area, as they no longer have physical working spaces here due to Covid-19 office closures and remote WFH for the foreseeable future.
Tech companies can then divest their expensive bay area real estate and shrink their HQ footprints to be a more global workforce and at the same time establish themselves in India and create custom hardware fabs away from Shenzhen and China, with lower cost savings of labor in India.
This will lower their H-1B hiring and talent acquisition costs drastically and the best and most talented H-1B's can instead work from the comfort of their home countries (e.g. India).
That doesn't seem likely to be true. What makes you think it's cheaper to shepherd an employee from, say, India through an H1B process and then pay them in the Bay Area versus setting up shop in India and employing Indians there?
There'd be a one-time cost to creating a campus in India, but honestly, it would be more than compensated for by the fact that they could almost certainly pay Indians in India a considerably lower wage than Indians in the Bay Area.
The reason they don't make their major campuses in other countries versus the US is because they feel that they have talent that is determined to stay in the US and which will not cross-pollinate well with physically remote offices, not because they think that it is cheaper to employ foreigners in the US than it would be in their home countries.
> In my experience at many tech companies in the Bay Area, H1B Visas exist for one reason, and one reason only - to get skilled engineering/STEM labor -- and to exploit connections (primarily Indian/Pakistani) among these workers to continue to get cheap labor.
Good to hear your experience, but this response imply that you either think the author is dishonest or that you don't care about their experience because it's not yours (your emphasis "one reason, and one reason only").
I won't be ignoring your response, because I think it's based on truth and it got so many up-votes, but as many have already pointed out, it does indeed goes into unnecessary details to make your point, giving it a xenophobic feel as a whole.
Now to get to the actual subject I believe there are two distincts type of actors (company sponsors) competing for H1-B creating a bit of a dialogue of the deaf every time the subject comes up:
(1) consulting companies, commonly called "body shops" that swift around H1-B workers and scale profits on workers/margins. Such companies as Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro and to a much lesser extend Western IT companies such as Accenture, Microsoft (let's not forget Microsoft make nearly $700k of revenue per employee [1]), etc. [2]
(2) startups and small groups who do product development or research and thus are not looking for cost savings, nor can they scale human costs very well. For these groups (like the authors's), hiring the right candidate has a significant cost and importance and making a mistake can be even more costly. The burden of processing H1-B visas is very high, but the importance of being able to access a global pool of talent is big enough that they still go through the trouble. This is especially evident by the fact that such startups usually do not usually have oversea offices yet but are competing globally.
The problem is that (1) has a very well refined process that has scaled with the bureaucratic obstacles and eats the majority of H1-B visa numbers without much impact for them when some of their petitions get dropped when the lottery gets "drawn". (2) loses however loses greatly at this game.
A very simple solution to this problem is to award the top 65,000 petitions with the highest salaries, and award them monthly instead of yearly, as timing is also a major issues for small companies. If we talks about quotas after making such change, we'll be talking about a very different kind of H1-B and the road will be much more open for a positive debate.
Also, am I the only one bothered by the use of the term labor? High-tech jobs are not usually factory jobs, but more generally creative-type of jobs. This may be how it's viewed in (1), but for (2), people are not necessarily replaceable entities, if a startup want to hire a candidate because they have worked with her in the past or have had a very promising interview, it is their business and their choice, they are not hiring "labor".
Also, just to give a bit of scale context of the H1-B issue in the grand scheme of the immigration debate, the 4 million work permits granted recently through executive orders are roughly equivalent to combining 65 years H1-Bs at current quota levels, not justifying one or the other, just trying to give scale and expose how much legal work visa venues are completely squeezed in the US.
> There's absolutely no talent shortage in the Bay Area, provided you can pay (and your ideas are interesting)
There actually is a talent shortage in the Bay Area. If there was no talent shortage, prices for local labor would be lower. If there wasn't a talent shortage, it wouldn't be possible for me to hire a developer from India, pay to fly him out here, put him up in a hotel in Mountain View for 6 months - all for significantly less than it would cost to hire a local developer.
H1Bs are just the tip of the iceberg. The companies that are pros at this use L1 visas. H1Bs require you to pay a similar wage to the local wage, but L1s have no such requirement. So you can take a developer working in India for $20k/yr and ship him to the US. The consulting company charges them out at the local market rate and pockets the difference. I've seen projects with margins approaching 80% due to this.
The visa system is completely broken, this much is true. But it's really a symptom of the fact that the labor market in the US is not training the types of workers it needs. We train a lot of developers and many of them think they're rock stars. But the reality is that we need a deep bench of competent developers willing to work for substantially less than $100k a year. Those developers exist in other countries, and so the work is going there.
It's what I don't get about the whole outsourcing, tech sector debate; if bay area tech employees are so expensive, why not hire people that are equally or at least sufficiently as qualified in other parts of the USA, where you could get away with paying them less even though it would provide them with wildly higher quality of life than they would get anywhere in the Bay area from most perspectives. Essentially the question is why the heck outsource to places like India, where people don't speak proper English and the technical skills are lower in many ways, which is only compounded by communication issues, let alone why hire H1B visas from, e.g., India at Silicon Valley rates; when you could have hired net far better Americans in the long run. Western and American society suffers from a shortsightedness that will end up destroying not just the USA, but the advancement of all of the rest of humanity through that kind of mentality. You can only live on the inertia of others for so long before momentum ceases.
First of all, I don't care about the bay area, I care about the country at large. Secondly, software companies shouldn't be headquartered in the bay area when there are better states. Thirdly, you are wrongfully assuming that they all would leave the US if H-1Bs were curtailed. Fourthly, you don't specify where they would move to and how they could do without access to the labor pool here.
> fixing the H1-B visa issue fewer H1-B immigrants will be working in the US and more Americans will be doing the work
That's if you assume this work can only be performed in the US. For the difference in costs I'm guessing the companies will find a way to offshore it.
> Many US firms have tried to offshore computer programming and in many cases found that it does not work. Penny wise, pound foolish.
That's anecdotal. Majority of the firms that did outsource work quite well. IBMs largest staff contingent is in India. It's not just programming, analytics, tech consulting, pre-sales, some marketing, architectural work, etc.
I got a H-1B visa. I was living in Ireland at the time. But, as it turned out, I never moved to the US.
It was for a compiler position at Borland. I ended up working remotely for the next 6 years or so, first for a year as a contractor at a 6 figure Euro rate, then later as a salaried employee after I moved to London. They flew me over two to four times a year to keep up to date with the team. I collectively lived over 6 months in Scotts Valley, albeit in hotels. All this wasn't cheap.
You're generalizing from a stereotype you've seen. But don't think it represents all situations. The mentality you've got is the same one at work with racism and sexism. It's reductive and will mislead you.
There's a certain amount of tech talent at any given technical ability level available worldwide, and only a fraction of it is in the US. The opportunities to leverage tech talent are, however, larger in northern CA than most other places. And some things can only be implemented by people with the right level of ability. When you artificially limit the supply of qualified labour, all you can do is shuffle your existing resources - paying more won't increase the supply quickly enough. Limiting supply of able labour will reduce the speed of innovation and economic growth - including for locals.
Maybe these "body shops" are a problem. I don't know for sure - I don't have enough information. The way they are talked about, it doesn't sound like the quality of people brought in is terribly high, so it seems to me you don't have much to worry about re competition, unless you're not very capable. On the other hand, it sounds like it could be upskilling India as these people get rotated out, which to my mind is a good thing - beggar-thy-neighbour policies don't pay off in the long run, and besides are morally questionable when the disparity in wealth is very large.
> Firstly, yes, there are a lot of consulting firms
That's true, there are a lot of consulting firms like Tata/Infosys/Wipro that use up a large chunk of the available H-1B visas. They only pay their workers like $80,000 on average, and almost never sponsor a green card. The other thing is that a big chunk (like >50%) of the people at these firms are on visas. I'd like to see a solution that limits that sort of use, and instead provides visas to more legitimate companies, without making it impossible for immigrant students to stay in the country.
One possible solution might be to require higher wages if more than 20% of the employees are on visas. At most of the companies I worked, at least 80% of my coworkers were Americans. But at the same time, I've heard that a high percentage of developers Facebook and Google are on visas. Simply requiring that companies higher wages if more than like 20% of their workforce are on visas, would end the use by consulting firms that are heavily staffed by H-1B workers. It also would not completely shut the door on immigrant students looking for a job after they graduate.
> Tying someone's immigration status to the actions of a single employer makes even basic negotiations like "this work environment is terrible"
This is a misconception. I can change jobs to any employer that is willing to do an H-1B visa transfer. Of course, it reduces the set of companies I can work for, but in tech, most companies will transfer your visa. Another fact is that, before January 17, 2017, you couldn't have gaps in employment, and had to find a new job while working. But this has been fixed, and now H-1B visa holders can quit freely, and have 60 days to find a new H-1B employer. I've pointed it out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13452381
In addition, I have been in the exact situation you described -- i.e. "this work environment is terrible". This was before the 60-day rule came into effect, and I actually quit my job anyways. I lost my legal status in the country as a result, but it really wasn't that big of a deal. I just had to do find a new job, fly out of the country, and re-enter, to regain my legal status (and start my new job). I've explained what I did in detail, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13361827
Did you read the article? Many tech jobs can't be done effectively in India or overseas with low quality labor for any number of reasons. The 250 American workers for Disney had their jobs replaced in the US, not by overseas workers.
> "These engineers will still be part of the labor pool, they'll just be doing work for our foreign competitors"
Well, let them work for Samsung instead of Apple then.
> "One of my H!B hires had unduplicatable skills and created about 20 high paid jobs in our company."
The point of the H1-B visa is precisely for those cases where there are no Americans that can do the job, so your hire follows the law. But then if it such a hard to find job, then the scarcity implies the person should get a higher salary, especially if he/she created "20 high paid jobs for our company."
Evidently, having devs live in SV is important enough that companies pay enough so that their employees can afford the hyperinflated cost of living in the Bay Area. So I don't think it's the case that anyone would be making them hire more Americans; rather, by limiting the ability for companies to hire people from overseas who will work for less, the theory is that they will hire the people who already live in the US, presumably people who already have citizenship.
The interesting thing will be whether SV will be willing to absorb the (presumably) higher labor rates for these citizens. Their other options will be to outsource the jobs or to develop more infrastructure in less costly areas of the US.
This is the most plausible explanation of the theory, unless of course you believe the version where the motivation for H-1B hires isn't purely economic, but rather that there just aren't enough Americans available who can do the work.
>The largest H1-B visa sponsors are Cognizant, Tata, Wipro, Infosys, and Deloitte. None of those scream "innovation" to me.
of course. Those are the B2B ugliest enterprise software jobs that not many people really want to do, yet those are necessary jobs. Bad as it is, when/if those jobs move overseas due to the factors like those visa restrictions, i don't think it would make that software and its support for US customers better as overseas situation adds additional complexity and cost, and that in turn may get reflected in the performance of those US customers.
Note: i did almost 8 years on H1B in the previous decade (and before that few years as a remote in 199x), and i think the greatest threat to our cushy jobs here isn't small (85K/year) inflow of immigrants, it is full fledged remote work to which the companies have been pushed by factors like covid and now the work visa restrictions which can as well result in tech jobs leaving the country like manufacturing jobs left it in the past. The work visa program is like a safety pressure valve - shutting it off brings the risk of the thing blowing out, ie. the jobs just going away.
There isn't a Tech Worker shortage if you're willing to be outside the Bay Area or even outside the country. You're getting great developers in places around the world for reasonable prices.
Those places just aren't San Francisco. Getting a developer in a mega-priced city and then hoping to pay less, that is not going to work well. And frankly that is not what H1Bs should be for.
> They also can’t apply for another job nor switch jobs because of it,
As someone who's switched jobs on an H1 twice, I can tell you it's simply not true. It's a common misconception because earlier you couldn't change jobs on an H1 but the law around that was changed almost 10 years ago. If you have in-demand skills in 2018 Silicon Valley (JS, Java, Python, anything ML, big data, distributed systems or data science will work a treat) you're going to have recruiters contacting you regardless of your visa status.
From my limited knowledge of consulting companies (spent 8 months at the beginning of my career at one), a lot of their employees get very job-specific training in older technologies, understandably because that's the stuff being outsourced. That may be why they felt unable to move - their skills weren't in-demand anywhere else.
> Those big tech companies already have international offices. Why wouldn't they have just expanded those offices?
Because they still want to hire lots of Americans. They just don't want to pay them market prices. So they bring in H1-Bs to lower wages. If they hired them overseas, there wouldn't be that effect:
From the article above:
"Research by Daniel Costa, of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, and Howard University political science professor Ron Hira, found that 60% of H-1B workers receive lower-than-average wages for their job and region. Google, Facebook and Apple “take advantage of program rules in order to legally pay many of their H-1B workers below the local median wage for the jobs they fill,” Costa and Hira said in an Economic Policy Institute paper."
I'd personally like to see the US adopt a systematic and generous immigration system like Canada's. But the H1-B system has mostly been a farce, used as a weapon against American workers. There are exceptions, but overall, it's most benefited the big tech company stockholders.
Silicon valley companies rarely bring in H-1Bs as a cheap replacement, the consultancies like Accenture, Tata, Disney, IBM, etc. do, but hey f*ck it, blame silicon valley....
Or tech companies (big ones at least) can just open development centers in countries with lower cost talent like India, China, and the Philippines. That is already happening; getting rid of H1Bs would just accelerate the process and the high-end workers that would otherwise come to the states would still be working, they would just no longer be paying American taxes.
It really isn’t hard to move those tech jobs abroad and then have Americans go to India or China instead on working visas (eg a Chinese Z visa I had for 9 years). The USA is maintaining some kind of balance with their H1 program: enough to encourage keeping those jobs in the USA, but not enough to be a free for all for immigration. It isn’t doing really good at that, but an overly punitive H1B program will simply cause those jobs to switch to other countries.
There's a lot of H1B's on here. You have friends overseas who you want to see succeed in the Bay Area.
In my experience at many tech companies in the Bay Area, H1B Visas exist for one reason, and one reason only - to get skilled engineering/STEM labor -- and to exploit connections (primarily Indian/Pakistani) among these workers to continue to get cheap labor.
It absolutely, positively hurts local labor - naturalized citizens - etc. Without a doubt.
This is not a Xenophobic reaction, it's simply reality.
I've worked at multiple companies (managed their websites) -- where we would temporarily post a job description to appear that it was a fair playing field for local workers -- when in reality that position was definitely, absolutely going to be filled by a cheaper, exploitable H1B visa position.
It happens all-the-fucking-time.
There's standard, normalized ways immigrants have come to the US for a long time now. There's absolutely no talent shortage in the Bay Area, provided you can pay (and your ideas are interesting)
We also don't need any more of the divisive ethic-neuveau-ghettos we're seeing in the south bay, cupertino and east bay with communities insulating themselves rather than assimilating.
That's exactly the point I was trying to make, that the former H-1B individuals will be hired to work at these new facilities in their homeland instead of bringing them to the bay area, as they no longer have physical working spaces here due to Covid-19 office closures and remote WFH for the foreseeable future.
Tech companies can then divest their expensive bay area real estate and shrink their HQ footprints to be a more global workforce and at the same time establish themselves in India and create custom hardware fabs away from Shenzhen and China, with lower cost savings of labor in India.
This will lower their H-1B hiring and talent acquisition costs drastically and the best and most talented H-1B's can instead work from the comfort of their home countries (e.g. India).
Thoughts?
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