I have a couple problems with that idea that I've never been able to figure out even though the idea is good.
First, how do we ensure it doesn't become a slave program: that is you get hired for X, and they are paying you that, but you want to find a new job because you don't like your boss. Or perhaps they hire you for X, and you are doing Y (again, nothing illegal)
Second, you hire someone to do a job, and they realize you have to pay them and so they decide to do nothing (or get a second job that they are working instead).
I can find answers to all of the above, but they all fail to: somebody is aware of your solution - how are they going to abuse it. I haven't solved this secondary abuse issue.
Medical field is under a green program. But following your point. If nursing paid more and had better conditions, it would encourage more domestic talent. H1B should be used for to get the worlds top talent otherwise it will be used by businesses to save money and depress wages.
top talent is different visa (O-1). H1B is merely specialized worker, not top tier global talent.
Nursing does pay a lot and conditions havent changed much over the years. Certified anesthesiology nurses get paid like $132/hr, and still there is shortage.
> It should be a stack rank by salary to deal with the over subscription
Considering salary based on country of origin, adjusted for position, would probably be the best way to ensure little abuse (apart from the indentured servitude-like features). If you want to hire the best, they'll be overpaid in their origin markets.
Google doesn’t underpay H-1B holders. In my experience any difference in actual pay is more likely caused by the H-1B people having worse salary negotiation skills than native born people.
We spent a ton of time and effort trying to find anyone to our standards, never able to find enough. H1B (and other work visas) were generally better and more Sr compared to locals we found. They got paid as much or more than everyone else.
When we had great people we could not get here we would instead build a team overseas, taking a bunch of other jobs with them.
I think I would reframe the OP less about cost cutting and more that the company has an unrealistic cap on salary. Would be interesting to see where geographically your experience was. Having worked in a he Midwest the problem I have found is that the population wanting to living in the Midwest is small and then when you are trying to recruit top talent it is even harder.
In software, groups of people (teams) have value far more than individuals. You need a large pool of talent to reliably build good teams. This includes some amount of the very best people world wide.
These people gravitate towards big cities where they can earn more, access more amenities and work with other top talent.
Remote could have changed that, but it seems to have fizzled for now.
Looks like there is need for 2 separate visa categories:
- One to bring top 0.1% talent from across the globe to the US
- Another to bring in temporary talent as needed
Current version of H1B had become a big basket to hold both, and abused too for just finding cheaper labor. It may be time to segment these out.
Also, given that US has ~400 million local citizens, there should be less need for either.
There are already categories like this if you jump away from tech.
Our friendly neighborhood Ski resort oligarchies leverage the J-1 Visa program to bring in international students to work at the resorts over paying more to hire local workers for example. They also leverage the company store model by putting them in dorms and charging them accordingly for housing.
Comparing getting an American to uproot themselves from their entire community to move to the Bay Area for a job vs. someone on the other side of the world who is looking to get into America just aren't the same. Ultimately, H1Bs are used to lower the working standards of Americans and enrich tiny pockets of existing regional capital holders.
Regional wealth inequality in America has not gotten better as Silicon Valley has gotten richer and brought in more foreign labor. At some point, the people making money hand over fist need to show how they're improving the situation for Americans instead of just saying "trust us, bro."
The AI discussion hasn't helped Silicon Valley seem more in touch with "flyover" states either. It's pretty clear there's a lot of disdain and hostility from Silicon Valley towards the "average" American.
I think that both you and the grandparent comment are correct at the same time. It feels like there is a strong dichotomy between how H1B visa is treated across different realms of tech.
I have been working in big tech for a decade, and have a few friends working in the more technical financial firms (think more TwoSigma/HRT/Citadel, not JPM/GS), and my experience matches yours. Every H1B I knew at the companies I worked at was absolutely not hired as a cost-cutting measure. It was just simply difficult to find people who could qualify. And god knows we tried, I remember my team interviewing roughly 50 people just to fill a position of just a baseline decent dev (not a rockstar math olympics winner with multiple groundbreaking publications; though that would've been nice). And absolutely none of them were underpaid either, they were on the exact same comp range for the level, with plenty of them topping out the range. In fact, they actually ended up costing more to the employer than a local would, due to having to deal with immigration lawyers/filing fees/etc. (all while being paid the same as everyone else).
Meanwhile, I have a lot of acquaintances from undergrad working as devs at tech consultancy firms and more "general/traditional finance" companies. The stories I hear from them about H1B at their workplaces are pretty much exactly what the grandparent comment describes, and even worse.
> In fact, they actually ended up costing more to the employer than a local would, due to having to deal with immigration lawyers/filing fees/etc. (all while being paid the same as everyone else).
I mean, you were actually underpaying the local workers if this was the case? If you offered the fully loaded salary to the local workers they might have accepted.
Or the local going rate for qualified personel were higher than you were willing to pay (which per def is true, if you had to bring in foreign work?).
> Or the local going rate for qualified personel were higher than you were willing to pay (which per def is true, if you had to bring in foreign work?).
Yeah, by definition this is pretty much always true, no? No matter how scarce local workers are, if you were willing to offer double the market rate you could probably find someone. Scarcity and price are two sides of the same coin, that's how markets work. Bringing in labor from another country when local talent is scarce both reduces costs/wages and reduces scarcity.
Workers on an H1B are more abusable though - if they lose the job they have something like 30 days to find another one or they have to leave the country entirely.
So you talk a good game about work life balance and then after you hire an H1B worker and bring them to the country you can spring 60 hour weeks doing tedius things and many won't be in a position to say no.
The salary might also seem higher to somebody who doesn't understand the cost of living in the US (and how many things are not paid for via taxes like healthcare).
> Or the local going rate for qualified personel were higher than you were willing to pay
Whenever someone says "But then the locals making $400k would make $500k" I have to ask: where are all these qualified locals for whom $400k isn't enough money already? Shouldn't all the laid-off people be champing at the bit for these jobs?
At some price point you genuinely do run out of local talent. At that point it's just a question of whether the work goes abroad or foreign workers come in.
While I’m more open to this kind of H1B use, you all should be investing in training local talent as well. Ideally using those H1Bs to train local talent.
We put people on the moon. I find it hard to believe the people here lack the raw ability. I find it much more likely businesses don’t want to give back to the country that they’re residing in.
I learned a tremendous amount (and was very successful as a result) from foreign born colleagues (some of whom went on to be ACM fellows, and other major awards).
Having a disproportionate share of the best people world wide to work with is a great privilege and advantage.
I have definitely seen job postings that were so detailed and narrow that they couldn't possibly find anyone "qualified". They were clearly making it so that it would be easier to claim that nobody in the country was qualified.
But I will say that the only people I have met that are here on H1-B have been uniquely qualified for their position. Such as, they invented a way to scale a given chemical manufacturing process, and they were developing it further.
But I got the impression that they were not particularly well paid like I would expect an American in the same position to be.
I've observed more that H1B's keep employee mobility lower, so employees on H1Bs tended to be paid less due to the natural bumps that come out of switching jobs every few years, especially going from an associate to senior/staff level where often the company throws a small raise with promotions that don't keep up with market rates.
One other factor that I experienced is when I was in senior leadership we absolutely tracked 'flight risk' that factored in to retention programs for top talent, and H1Bs were by the nature of it viewed as lower flight risks so less likely to fall into these programs.
Yeah, fine. Honestly I think most of us have been overpaid our entire career. But I'm not sure I see it necessarily.
Take these stats, which can cut either way on this topic:
In USA there are more software engineers than all other engineers combined.
There are 10x more software engineers than the next highest engineering discipline.
If you could subdivide s/w engs into 10 equal categories ("I'm not just a run of the mill s/w eng"), each of those would be the top engineering employment category.
The top 10% of software engineers outnumber the next highest engineer class.
At 10% unemployment, there are more unemployed software engineers than the next highest employed engineer category.
I don't think you'll find this community welcoming the idea of lower pay (and hence a more volatile employment).
Overall if in the next 12 months I fully expect compensation on average to be down 30-50%. It's impossible for it not to, given the sudden exodus of talent from US to open up remote consultancies that can offer same skill at 1/4th the price.
I don't think this is surprising given that the US has also lost so much manufacturing due to cost cutting. A service economy is going to need a lot of software engineering. A nice big factory takes a lot of mechanical and electrical engineers.
Hard disagree about being overpaid. These are some of the most profitable companies in the world, what else should they do if not pay their workers well?
The H1B problem could be fixed overnight if the government handed them out by a simple test of ability rather than an idiotic lottery. Having world class researchers and engineers who command million dollar salaries enter the same line as a $60K worker at a slop factory like Infosys or TCS is beyond idiotic. And a high visa fee ultimately hurts more than it helps because it drives away both groups, and US tech needs the top talent from across the world to continue to remain dominant.
Cap the number, sort by salaries (perhaps by coarse domains of skills and not very narrow . Nurses vs Doctors. But s/w engineers are s/w engineers).
Testing abilities is a gamable proxy.
How much a company is willing to spend on the person is the best barometer, if we stay true to the intent of the visa (scarce talent)
I’m not super familiar with the options, but isn’t there O-1 for anyone who’s world class commanding a million dollar salary? The impression I have (mostly from online discussion) is that H-1B is basically only for (comparatively) low skill workers to come work for lower salaries. Are there cases where globally competitive people would come on a H-1B?
The H1B debate has a lot of factions, but one thing is clear: AI is going to be replacing some to a lot of entry level knowledge jobs. Even if it doesn't get any better than what we have now, it'll create a pipeline problem where senior engineers are more valuable than ever and we'll have to figure out how to make room for junior engineers so that eventually they can become senior engineers. Given that, it seems prudent to pump the brakes on H1B--which has become a way to get bodies for entry level work (while top talent has shifted to O visas and the like).
Almost like if the $100k fee is the sticking point, then maybe the talent being brought in isn’t world class talent we can’t find domestically so much as easily exploitable manpower that can be replaced with another H-1B if they start asking for reasonable treatment or higher wages.
Sorry IEEE, but offshoring happens regardless of the H-1B fee. I’m a pretty flexible dinosaur but you’re never going to get me to feel sympathy for employers leveraging a visa that’s tantamount to employment slavery in its onerous restrictions and lack of direct pathway to citizenship.
It's funny how quickly tech employees turn MAGA when it comes to qualified immigration. Bad zero-sum intuitions about work abound across all strata of society, it seems.
Its time to have a politics which puts the workers needs at its center. I can confidently say that the current system harms both workers and immigrants.
"Middle America hates immigrants because they are racists. I don't want H1-Bs because companies use them as cheaper labor, undercutting my value."
Absolute peak "lost in the political sauce". Most people aren't aware that Bernie Sanders has historically been very anti-immigration, before just becoming an old guy who echos whatever the current young people vibe is.
The other half of "cost" is "return on investment".
If I had a plan to e.g. copy-paste specific success stories from any rich country to any poor country, something that might e.g. raise the per-capita income of the poor country to that of the rich country over 30 years, I'd be glad to have the chance to make that investment in India.
The per-capita GDP difference between the USA (94k) and India (2.8k) would imply 3300% growth over 30 years, which is about 12.5%/year compounding average annual growth for the whole period.
This feels small enough to be plausible, and big enough to be massively tempting. Extremely fast growth, but not quite pushing absurd.
On the whole, this is a good thing. There are policy responses that can be enacted as needed, in an easier and more humane way. The goal of the US government should be to protect the interests of the American citizen, as much as the goals of India or China should be to protect their own interests.
Its goal to protect the American citizen is fulfilled by economic security. If you let your industries leave, you have done a disservice to your citizens. That’s how trump got elected in the first place, and ironically it’ll only get worse because it’s the wrong solution.
I think it lessens the damage -- offshore workers do not consume finite resources in their host countries (e.g. housing, medical care) leaving those to the native citizens. Eventually AI will replace the "need" for these visa holders -- cancelling a contract with an offshore firm is more tenable than remigrating thousands of families.
I'm a former H1B visa holder and I feel very conflicted. My experience was a great one: I was hired by a startup on an H1B, successfully transferred to a different startup, then eventually went to work for a bigger company that sponsored my green card. I wasn't underpaid by those startups and I know this $100k fee means a similar company will never hire someone like me again.
But over the years I got to know many people on H1Bs who were indentured servants to their employers: once their green card application was in they were stuck. And if you're from a country like India that can take a decade or more. The whole thing feels like a scam and the $100k fee isn't going to deter those companies from doing it, it's still well worth the money to them. I wish we saw sensible, well thought out reform here. Instead we get the Trump administration.
I worked at a company that depended heavily on one of the major 4 Indian suppliers. Their employees were treated like garbage. they would bring them here for months at a time. It was like indentured servitude. they lived in a bunk house and worked all day and slept and a bus picked them up and they worked. 6 days a week. If they fucked up, they were gone the next day. All for the chance to make it here.
Once we added a resource and had a sham hiring process in which the supplier supplied an expert with no less than 10 pages of experience in our niche project. To his credit, he did not lie to me, and told me he could try to figure it out but had not worked on the product, but that he needed to do well. We were forced to hire him
Later our team slated to replaced by that firm to maintain a major product while we went to green field stuff. I resigned and my team flew the coup over the next year or
Disgusting
we should have a tax or tariff on "W2" employees or firms outsourcing labor. Minimally a tax that helps pay for our social safety net. We depend on new employed young people and sending that work afar does not help us.
Canada is jumping on this opportunity to invite the US tech workers who are frustrated with US H1B visa restrictions and GC backlog by offering an express permanent residency in 10 days
The economics don’t make any more sense for Canada or the EU than they do for the US. The the new $100k H1B fee was imposed because companies have a huge financial incentive to import semi-skilled workers from lower-wage markets rather than hire domestically. Canada and the EU face the same problem. In tech, it's about the kinds of work inexperienced/cheap developers are often doing: assembly line, JIRA-ticket-taker type development.
This is especially impacting Indian tech workers in the US [1] since these are often the types of roles that InfoSys and other foreign tech consulting firms are staffing. The new $100,000 fee to sponsor an H1B visa has made it difficult to justify hiring foreign tech workers when most of the time they are just going to be using American LLMs to do their work anyway.
The foreign tech workers that are worth the $100,000 fee are still easily getting their visa sponsored.
Patently false narrative, equivalent to saying all americans are fat - both are extremely cheap uneducated arguments.
Every single H1B I worked with was brilliant in their field - and paid extremely well often in excess of $400K. I know several that are earning well past $500K. If you claim these are generic Jira pushers, well you are showing ignorance.
The $100K fees isn’t material to them but the whole vitriolic nonsense poured around what they do and just rolling their work in mud - well that’s where they just move and take their 50 ppl organization with them.
The H1B coworkers I work with really go the entire spectrum. The laziest programmers I met are H1B. And there are also some pretty smart ones that I learned a lot from and I continue to learn from.
To say that the H1B are all brilliant is hyperbole.
Yeah, it is not much worth because issue is not that top talent on H1 matches local talent but how average is the rest but get brought to US in name of high skill immigration.
The debate by supporters is set like: Look at these 5 top guys they are best in class in every aspect so why shouldn't they be here. And now don't look over there 500 guys which are business analyst, basic enterprise coders, testers application support engineers lest question maybe asked how come they are considered highly skilled.
Ironically, if it's true that the jobs are being off-shored, rather than on-shored and filled by locals, this would be beneficial for the countries who currently find themselves in a brain-drain spiral. It would result in a more tech and economically balanced world rather than having two lobes (USA and China). People would say that it's a detriment to the US's future --but those are often the most critical of US hegemony.
The Indian offshore firms are scrambling because of the opposite happening. If all this work was just flooding to India then the panic that’s happening there over the industry imploding wouldn’t be occurring.
The sort of work traditionally handled by cheap offshore labor is now the sort of work most ripe for replacement by AI. So it’s burning the candle from both ends. The low value stuff is getting replaced by AI and not sent there and the high value stuff struggles to get delivered by cheap labor because the play was always cost of and not the quality of the talent.
US has shipped all manufacturing jobs to Asia, including China and got the Rust Belt in exchange (and huge corporate profits). and China is now a manufacturing powerhouse.
Partly that push was created by the labor unions, who pushed the cost of doing manufacturing business far above what was profitable and feasible.
When the environment becomes hostile to conducting business, then jobs will leave and local industries atrophy.
How was the environment that enabled businesses to lower their cost by admitting China in WTO hostile to conducting business?
BTW - with or without unions manufacturing was profitable in the US before NAFTA and China entering WTO. So your narrative that manufacturing was dying because of labor unions does not hold much water.
the offshoring of manufacturing started in the 50s and 60s and accelerated in the 80s. the reason is that US wanted to do specialized high value manufacturing, and was offshoring everything low value and low margin, because of increasing cost of environment and labor regulations and unions.
My fear is that if US becomes hostile to foreign tech workers, they will simply create alternatives to US Big Tech in other countries and US economy will suffer.
Current US domination of global tech is partly because of foreign tech talent.
I mean Canada has jumped so many times in last 8-10 years with these express residencies, hiring H1B laid off workers, grabbing people who are stuck with travel restrictions to US I'd have thought they be half way to the moon.
In any case I wish well to people in Canada and Europe and people who are looking to move there. More spreaded opportunities lead to better outcome for everyone including US even if it does not look like one.
Canada was already much cheaper than the US for tech. I was shocked to find out how little colleagues in Canada in the same role are paid relative to peers in the US.
If the issue was cost the jobs would already be in Canada. If the issue was cost the jobs would also have already been offshored.
The issue is on attracting the best talent and here, despite doomsday predictions to the contrary, the US continues to lead. The $100k fee is nothing to bring in top talent. Top talent was competing against Indian offshore companies scooping up thousands of visas for iffy-at-best talent.
The cold reality is many folks in tech on this visa were mediocre talent at best coming out of degree mills or body shops, in roles that could easily be filled domestically if there wasn’t inexpensive overseas labor willing to work for less.
Folks casually leave out the bit that all that iffy talent was crowding out far better talent looking to come to the US but couldn’t because they didn’t get picked in the lottery. This raising of the entry bar is freeing up space so the best folks have a better chance.
Agree with it or not that’s what these changes are aiming to fix, and there’s little evidence this will just send all the jobs to Canada.
While the U.S. capricious immigration policy gives an opportunity for Canada, it only gives it one particular opportunity: that of hiring educated, high-potential, but inexperienced immigrant workers.
The thing about potential is that it needs to right environment to be realized. Canada still has two hurdles to create that environment:
- Access to capital, either in the form of risk-tolerant VC funding or established companies willing to invest significantly in R&D. Those are not quick to move over the border.
- A critical mass of _experienced_ talent. Entrepreneurs and high-agency ICs who've seen what it looks like to build a successful startup and capable of replicating it. Those don't have much incentive to move over the border either.
The U.S. has hundreds of startups that later became unicorns. The employees of those startups are typically the key members that drive the success of new ones. For Canada, the only name that easily comes to mind is Shopify.
Nobody is willing to state this but it’s pretty clear if you look at the way officials behind the policy talk: they’re OK with this. They don’t mind economic harm. The purpose has nothing to do with protecting workers and everything to do with creating a more ethnically homogenous country.
May I give a more balanced perspective here while acknowledging that there are bad actors with malign incentives on both sides of this debate?
I think we should all be able to agree that in the limit both sides of this debate are wrong, and therefore what we are arguing here is where the balance is whether this fee helps strike the right balance.
A nation cannot simply open its labour market up to the most qualified workers in the world and not have most of the best job openings going to foreigners. This is simply just a matter of numbers and probability. If you're very skilled already, then you may not see this as a problem, but if you're just coming out of education looking for a skilled job and must compete with the the entire world for a decent job in your own country, you might feel this isn't a great deal.
Similarly, a nation which does not accept any foreign talent, regardless of what those individuals can provide clearly harms that nation's own economic growth potential, and ultimately longer-term that costs everyone.
Maybe some people disagree, but it seems obvious to me that a nation somewhat owes its best jobs to its own citizens, and it should seek to have labour markets which are tight enough that employees will be occasionally incentivised to hire someone fresh out of education and train them up to be able to work high-skilled and well-paid jobs, rather than simply taking the easy option of hiring someone from abroad.
However, sometimes training someone isn't feasible. From time to time a company may really need talent and is simply unable to reasonably train or source that domestically regardless of the salary they might offer. If this is the case then they should of course be welcome to hire foreign workers, but there should be a financial disincentive to this so that companies are always incentivised to first look for workers domestically.
So I must admit I struggle a bit to understand the opposition to this $100k fee. If this causes talent to be lost then the assumption that they are extremely valuable surely must be wrong?
Well, I’m not making a claim about people showing up to argue on Hacker News so much as the people making the policy. But anyway I anticipate the result of this policy will be economic harm to everyone including people anticipating it will help them.
There’s not much you can do about jobs just moving abroad unless you start some kind of tariffs or import bans on software, which is a self-defeating choice for a massive net exporter of tech services and software.
The $100k fee is such a bad idea. I would be fine for there being a minimum salary to get rid of the undercutting of available American labor. But there are certain niche jobs that there just isn't any local talent for that will just result in contracting with them overseas which is a lose-lose.
The point of the these visas is to hire outside talent which cannot be found in the US and qualifies as the "best and brightest" and specialized "talent" that is beyond outstanding. Everyone knows this has been heavily abused for years.
Now the word "talent" has lost its meaning or most commonly means "anyone" for cheap even though the employer knows that they are unqualified and hires them anyway for cheap labor to reduce their operating costs (expensive US employees).
You can't say "we are hiring the best and brightest" and then decide to then go for those who are unqualified. Now this $100K fee is pointless when AI agents, and data centers (homes for the AI agents) are getting hired over both US employees and off-shored employees.
One more thing. The big question is who would you rather trust to hire to not create a disaster like in [0][1] (Human or AI agent, hint one of them cannot be held accountable.)
I remember when this was announced here on HN. So many right-wingers were on board with this because it would bring jobs back and make companies pay. A win-win as they said.
Is this just posturing (I won't speculate on the intended audience), or does the admin believe this will actually net more jobs for US citizens?
TFA doesn't go into great detail about how this actually pushes offshoring - the variety that I'm familiar with at least (X/Y% blend of US/"near-shore" aka anywhere-but-west-asia roles). I have no doubt however that Y is just going to get larger while X stays the same or decreases (not even factoring aipocalypse).
What constraint specifically makes them believe this is going to net in the way they want us to believe?
108 comments
[ 33.6 ms ] story [ 739 ms ] threadEvery time we had a layoff some portion would be replaced with H1B.
Every H1B that shared their salary with me has been underpaid.
I know its anecdotal but sharing to see if anyone has seen similar.
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=french+language+immer...
A stack rank by salary would mean "H1B is big tech employees" rather than "these are professionals who have skills."
First, how do we ensure it doesn't become a slave program: that is you get hired for X, and they are paying you that, but you want to find a new job because you don't like your boss. Or perhaps they hire you for X, and you are doing Y (again, nothing illegal)
Second, you hire someone to do a job, and they realize you have to pay them and so they decide to do nothing (or get a second job that they are working instead).
I can find answers to all of the above, but they all fail to: somebody is aware of your solution - how are they going to abuse it. I haven't solved this secondary abuse issue.
Stack rank would just give all the visas to big tech and starve US hospitals and every other industry
Nursing does pay a lot and conditions havent changed much over the years. Certified anesthesiology nurses get paid like $132/hr, and still there is shortage.
Considering salary based on country of origin, adjusted for position, would probably be the best way to ensure little abuse (apart from the indentured servitude-like features). If you want to hire the best, they'll be overpaid in their origin markets.
We spent a ton of time and effort trying to find anyone to our standards, never able to find enough. H1B (and other work visas) were generally better and more Sr compared to locals we found. They got paid as much or more than everyone else.
When we had great people we could not get here we would instead build a team overseas, taking a bunch of other jobs with them.
These people gravitate towards big cities where they can earn more, access more amenities and work with other top talent.
Remote could have changed that, but it seems to have fizzled for now.
Current version of H1B had become a big basket to hold both, and abused too for just finding cheaper labor. It may be time to segment these out.
Also, given that US has ~400 million local citizens, there should be less need for either.
Our friendly neighborhood Ski resort oligarchies leverage the J-1 Visa program to bring in international students to work at the resorts over paying more to hire local workers for example. They also leverage the company store model by putting them in dorms and charging them accordingly for housing.
Regional wealth inequality in America has not gotten better as Silicon Valley has gotten richer and brought in more foreign labor. At some point, the people making money hand over fist need to show how they're improving the situation for Americans instead of just saying "trust us, bro."
The AI discussion hasn't helped Silicon Valley seem more in touch with "flyover" states either. It's pretty clear there's a lot of disdain and hostility from Silicon Valley towards the "average" American.
I have been working in big tech for a decade, and have a few friends working in the more technical financial firms (think more TwoSigma/HRT/Citadel, not JPM/GS), and my experience matches yours. Every H1B I knew at the companies I worked at was absolutely not hired as a cost-cutting measure. It was just simply difficult to find people who could qualify. And god knows we tried, I remember my team interviewing roughly 50 people just to fill a position of just a baseline decent dev (not a rockstar math olympics winner with multiple groundbreaking publications; though that would've been nice). And absolutely none of them were underpaid either, they were on the exact same comp range for the level, with plenty of them topping out the range. In fact, they actually ended up costing more to the employer than a local would, due to having to deal with immigration lawyers/filing fees/etc. (all while being paid the same as everyone else).
Meanwhile, I have a lot of acquaintances from undergrad working as devs at tech consultancy firms and more "general/traditional finance" companies. The stories I hear from them about H1B at their workplaces are pretty much exactly what the grandparent comment describes, and even worse.
I mean, you were actually underpaying the local workers if this was the case? If you offered the fully loaded salary to the local workers they might have accepted.
Or the local going rate for qualified personel were higher than you were willing to pay (which per def is true, if you had to bring in foreign work?).
Yeah, by definition this is pretty much always true, no? No matter how scarce local workers are, if you were willing to offer double the market rate you could probably find someone. Scarcity and price are two sides of the same coin, that's how markets work. Bringing in labor from another country when local talent is scarce both reduces costs/wages and reduces scarcity.
So you talk a good game about work life balance and then after you hire an H1B worker and bring them to the country you can spring 60 hour weeks doing tedius things and many won't be in a position to say no.
The salary might also seem higher to somebody who doesn't understand the cost of living in the US (and how many things are not paid for via taxes like healthcare).
Whenever someone says "But then the locals making $400k would make $500k" I have to ask: where are all these qualified locals for whom $400k isn't enough money already? Shouldn't all the laid-off people be champing at the bit for these jobs?
At some price point you genuinely do run out of local talent. At that point it's just a question of whether the work goes abroad or foreign workers come in.
It’s hard to get people to even interview, or find them in the first place.
We put people on the moon. I find it hard to believe the people here lack the raw ability. I find it much more likely businesses don’t want to give back to the country that they’re residing in.
Having a disproportionate share of the best people world wide to work with is a great privilege and advantage.
H1B were no less skilled (and no less paid) than their US-based counterparts.
> Every H1B that shared their salary with me has been underpaid.
Yes.
But I will say that the only people I have met that are here on H1-B have been uniquely qualified for their position. Such as, they invented a way to scale a given chemical manufacturing process, and they were developing it further.
But I got the impression that they were not particularly well paid like I would expect an American in the same position to be.
I've observed more that H1B's keep employee mobility lower, so employees on H1Bs tended to be paid less due to the natural bumps that come out of switching jobs every few years, especially going from an associate to senior/staff level where often the company throws a small raise with promotions that don't keep up with market rates.
One other factor that I experienced is when I was in senior leadership we absolutely tracked 'flight risk' that factored in to retention programs for top talent, and H1Bs were by the nature of it viewed as lower flight risks so less likely to fall into these programs.
In USA there are more software engineers than all other engineers combined.
There are 10x more software engineers than the next highest engineering discipline.
If you could subdivide s/w engs into 10 equal categories ("I'm not just a run of the mill s/w eng"), each of those would be the top engineering employment category.
The top 10% of software engineers outnumber the next highest engineer class.
At 10% unemployment, there are more unemployed software engineers than the next highest employed engineer category.
Overall if in the next 12 months I fully expect compensation on average to be down 30-50%. It's impossible for it not to, given the sudden exodus of talent from US to open up remote consultancies that can offer same skill at 1/4th the price.
I know so many IT folks who are unemployed. And compounding that is unmitigated slop machines for both generating resumes and filtering them.
Its fraud all the way down every where I look.
How many of the talent from frontier labs is immigrant?
Testing abilities is a gamable proxy. How much a company is willing to spend on the person is the best barometer, if we stay true to the intent of the visa (scarce talent)
Sorry IEEE, but offshoring happens regardless of the H-1B fee. I’m a pretty flexible dinosaur but you’re never going to get me to feel sympathy for employers leveraging a visa that’s tantamount to employment slavery in its onerous restrictions and lack of direct pathway to citizenship.
Absolute peak "lost in the political sauce". Most people aren't aware that Bernie Sanders has historically been very anti-immigration, before just becoming an old guy who echos whatever the current young people vibe is.
If I had a plan to e.g. copy-paste specific success stories from any rich country to any poor country, something that might e.g. raise the per-capita income of the poor country to that of the rich country over 30 years, I'd be glad to have the chance to make that investment in India.
The per-capita GDP difference between the USA (94k) and India (2.8k) would imply 3300% growth over 30 years, which is about 12.5%/year compounding average annual growth for the whole period.
This feels small enough to be plausible, and big enough to be massively tempting. Extremely fast growth, but not quite pushing absurd.
Except this is doing the opposite. Pushing jobs offshore does not help American citizens.
But over the years I got to know many people on H1Bs who were indentured servants to their employers: once their green card application was in they were stuck. And if you're from a country like India that can take a decade or more. The whole thing feels like a scam and the $100k fee isn't going to deter those companies from doing it, it's still well worth the money to them. I wish we saw sensible, well thought out reform here. Instead we get the Trump administration.
Once we added a resource and had a sham hiring process in which the supplier supplied an expert with no less than 10 pages of experience in our niche project. To his credit, he did not lie to me, and told me he could try to figure it out but had not worked on the product, but that he needed to do well. We were forced to hire him
Later our team slated to replaced by that firm to maintain a major product while we went to green field stuff. I resigned and my team flew the coup over the next year or
Disgusting
we should have a tax or tariff on "W2" employees or firms outsourcing labor. Minimally a tax that helps pay for our social safety net. We depend on new employed young people and sending that work afar does not help us.
https://canadabychoice.com/services/move-to-canada/usa/occup...
Canada also floating idea of alliance with Europe for travel and job opportunities
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-european-union-eu-me...
This is especially impacting Indian tech workers in the US [1] since these are often the types of roles that InfoSys and other foreign tech consulting firms are staffing. The new $100,000 fee to sponsor an H1B visa has made it difficult to justify hiring foreign tech workers when most of the time they are just going to be using American LLMs to do their work anyway.
The foreign tech workers that are worth the $100,000 fee are still easily getting their visa sponsored.
[1] https://thefederal.com/category/news/h1b-visa-indian-tech-wo...
Every single H1B I worked with was brilliant in their field - and paid extremely well often in excess of $400K. I know several that are earning well past $500K. If you claim these are generic Jira pushers, well you are showing ignorance.
The $100K fees isn’t material to them but the whole vitriolic nonsense poured around what they do and just rolling their work in mud - well that’s where they just move and take their 50 ppl organization with them.
This is pure nonsense.
To say that the H1B are all brilliant is hyperbole.
The debate by supporters is set like: Look at these 5 top guys they are best in class in every aspect so why shouldn't they be here. And now don't look over there 500 guys which are business analyst, basic enterprise coders, testers application support engineers lest question maybe asked how come they are considered highly skilled.
The sort of work traditionally handled by cheap offshore labor is now the sort of work most ripe for replacement by AI. So it’s burning the candle from both ends. The low value stuff is getting replaced by AI and not sent there and the high value stuff struggles to get delivered by cheap labor because the play was always cost of and not the quality of the talent.
Partly that push was created by the labor unions, who pushed the cost of doing manufacturing business far above what was profitable and feasible.
When the environment becomes hostile to conducting business, then jobs will leave and local industries atrophy.
BTW - with or without unions manufacturing was profitable in the US before NAFTA and China entering WTO. So your narrative that manufacturing was dying because of labor unions does not hold much water.
My fear is that if US becomes hostile to foreign tech workers, they will simply create alternatives to US Big Tech in other countries and US economy will suffer.
Current US domination of global tech is partly because of foreign tech talent.
In any case I wish well to people in Canada and Europe and people who are looking to move there. More spreaded opportunities lead to better outcome for everyone including US even if it does not look like one.
This stuff doesn't actually help Canada at all, it's in a bit of a development trap.
If the issue was cost the jobs would already be in Canada. If the issue was cost the jobs would also have already been offshored.
The issue is on attracting the best talent and here, despite doomsday predictions to the contrary, the US continues to lead. The $100k fee is nothing to bring in top talent. Top talent was competing against Indian offshore companies scooping up thousands of visas for iffy-at-best talent.
The cold reality is many folks in tech on this visa were mediocre talent at best coming out of degree mills or body shops, in roles that could easily be filled domestically if there wasn’t inexpensive overseas labor willing to work for less.
Folks casually leave out the bit that all that iffy talent was crowding out far better talent looking to come to the US but couldn’t because they didn’t get picked in the lottery. This raising of the entry bar is freeing up space so the best folks have a better chance.
Agree with it or not that’s what these changes are aiming to fix, and there’s little evidence this will just send all the jobs to Canada.
The thing about potential is that it needs to right environment to be realized. Canada still has two hurdles to create that environment:
- Access to capital, either in the form of risk-tolerant VC funding or established companies willing to invest significantly in R&D. Those are not quick to move over the border.
- A critical mass of _experienced_ talent. Entrepreneurs and high-agency ICs who've seen what it looks like to build a successful startup and capable of replicating it. Those don't have much incentive to move over the border either.
The U.S. has hundreds of startups that later became unicorns. The employees of those startups are typically the key members that drive the success of new ones. For Canada, the only name that easily comes to mind is Shopify.
I think we should all be able to agree that in the limit both sides of this debate are wrong, and therefore what we are arguing here is where the balance is whether this fee helps strike the right balance.
A nation cannot simply open its labour market up to the most qualified workers in the world and not have most of the best job openings going to foreigners. This is simply just a matter of numbers and probability. If you're very skilled already, then you may not see this as a problem, but if you're just coming out of education looking for a skilled job and must compete with the the entire world for a decent job in your own country, you might feel this isn't a great deal.
Similarly, a nation which does not accept any foreign talent, regardless of what those individuals can provide clearly harms that nation's own economic growth potential, and ultimately longer-term that costs everyone.
Maybe some people disagree, but it seems obvious to me that a nation somewhat owes its best jobs to its own citizens, and it should seek to have labour markets which are tight enough that employees will be occasionally incentivised to hire someone fresh out of education and train them up to be able to work high-skilled and well-paid jobs, rather than simply taking the easy option of hiring someone from abroad.
However, sometimes training someone isn't feasible. From time to time a company may really need talent and is simply unable to reasonably train or source that domestically regardless of the salary they might offer. If this is the case then they should of course be welcome to hire foreign workers, but there should be a financial disincentive to this so that companies are always incentivised to first look for workers domestically.
So I must admit I struggle a bit to understand the opposition to this $100k fee. If this causes talent to be lost then the assumption that they are extremely valuable surely must be wrong?
There’s not much you can do about jobs just moving abroad unless you start some kind of tariffs or import bans on software, which is a self-defeating choice for a massive net exporter of tech services and software.
Now the word "talent" has lost its meaning or most commonly means "anyone" for cheap even though the employer knows that they are unqualified and hires them anyway for cheap labor to reduce their operating costs (expensive US employees).
You can't say "we are hiring the best and brightest" and then decide to then go for those who are unqualified. Now this $100K fee is pointless when AI agents, and data centers (homes for the AI agents) are getting hired over both US employees and off-shored employees.
One more thing. The big question is who would you rather trust to hire to not create a disaster like in [0][1] (Human or AI agent, hint one of them cannot be held accountable.)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061682
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-investigating-tata...
Every citizen should have the right to one vote. Large scale campaign financing distorts that.
TFA doesn't go into great detail about how this actually pushes offshoring - the variety that I'm familiar with at least (X/Y% blend of US/"near-shore" aka anywhere-but-west-asia roles). I have no doubt however that Y is just going to get larger while X stays the same or decreases (not even factoring aipocalypse).
What constraint specifically makes them believe this is going to net in the way they want us to believe?