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.
I'm a software engineer and green card holder from Brazil and there is nothing I want more than to see many of my friends who work in Brazil have the opportunity to come here to work in a great industry. That being said, both you and the anon person you replied to are right about the situation.
The position you came to fill is a relatively rare skill here in the US and it helps the US to bring in talent from abroad, but the person you replied to isn't wrong. It's not like compiler engineers don't exist in the US. They most certainly do and they most certainly would make more money if you couldn't get compiler people from abroad.
Personally, I would love it if we were far more liberal with giving out H1-B visas, but also required companies to pay those H1-B visa holders a premium over local talent. i.e. if the market rate is foo, then you need to pay 1.5x foo salary to bring that person from abroad. This would ensure that companies actually can get access to all the talent they need irrespective of origin, but that the talent that comes from abroad doesn't depress salaries.
1.5x foo is friggin' cheap if the alternatively is not having the talent at all. It also forces you to always consider domestic labor first if it exists instead of abusing the H1-B visa program to get cheap labor like many companies do.
Such a system would also serve to help salaries rise to the levels enjoyed by doctors and lawyers (which is really where salaries should be for any solid engineer). If this means certain business models are no longer viable, then c'est la vie. There's nothing that says that you have a right to a business model that wouldn't exist if salaries were not depressed.
Alternatively, I would be okay with eliminating the lottery and giving visas out on the basis of the premium companies are willing to pay over the salary a domestic worker would be paid. If your company is willing to pay 2.0x foo for a position, then you will get the H1-B visa ahead of a company only willing to pay 1.5x foo. The floor would be set at something like 1.1x foo.
Thus, when I hear people complain of companies who hire H1Bs only because they want to pay them less, I always want to ask, "why haven't you reported them?"
Either they don't actually know that the companies are exclusively paying H1Bs less, or they don't believe that the government will enforce the salary floor. Either way, raising the salary floor from 1x to 1.5x probably won't address their concerns.
I don't know the salaries of any of the H1-B visa holders at my company. Do you?
Maybe we can make it a policy that companies make such information public when they employ more than N number of H1-B holders. With mean, median, standard deviation and error bars, you should be able to get an idea of whether or not this is happening.
Besides these numbers for salary, it would also be interesting to see the same statistics for years of experience programming of domestic labor versus imported labor. I would expect to see a significantly greater mean and median years of experience among H1-B holders versus domestically sourced talent.
That data is extremely skimpy. Where is the comparative data? All I saw was one figure, "prevailing wage". What is the sample size? Is the sample based on workers operating in the same region (for example a company with multiple locations could very well cite a domestic salary relative to all locations (bringing the average down) or cite numbers from the cheapest region. etc. etc. etc. There are a many ways to lie with statistics and the number of ways you can lie with them is inversely proportional to the quantity of statistics released.
When I was working at apple IS&T 6 months ago, I saw paystubs of people working for TCS and Cognizant Technology solutions. Cognizant is paying $65K per annum in the bay area; TCS is paying $85K per annum in the bay area.
Think of rents in Sunnyvale: $2K per 1b/1b. Still people save, even on $65K salary, because one lives with 4 other roomies.
When I hear people retort that "companies aren't allowed to do that", I always want to say: "Did you try a simple web-search to find out how they do it anyway?"
For example, there are loopholes in both salary-calculation and also in terms of crafting hideously specific (and not entirely honest) requirements and then claiming nobody local can fill them.
Yeah. The first example I cited in this comment[0] looks like one of those "hideously specific (and not entirely honest) requirements" that no one is going to be able to fill or even consider filling.
If you cite a job with high requirements and a relatively low associated wage, you're essentially describing a job that only foreign talent is going to be able and willing to fill. I don't know a single person that meets the criteria for that position and isn't earning way more already. What self-respecting domestic candidate with the freedom to change jobs freely and that knows his worth would ever apply for such a position?
High requirements? The only experience requirement is "Two (2) years of experience in providing technical service support." Even with a master's degree, $92,000 seems reasonable to me for someone with only 2 years of support experience.
I had this boss in Brazil that also own some business in Florida - when he wants to hire some H1B from Brazil he just adds "fluent in Portuguese" to the job description.
> Alternatively, I would be okay with eliminating the lottery and giving visas out on the basis of the premium companies are willing to pay over the salary a domestic worker would be paid. If your company is willing to pay 2.0x foo for a position, then you will get the H1-B visa ahead of a company only willing to pay 1.5x foo. The floor would be set at something like 1.1x foo.
That would only help the largest companies, and would put the relatively new and smaller companies at a disadvantage...
This. You need to make money to be able to pay for the workers you need for your business to function. To argue against this reality is akin to saying: "I want there to be H1-B visa holders so wages remain low", which is the exact what the top most comment is saying H1-B visas do.
Developers are valuable. We should be paid accordingly. Many of us are employees now. A fraction of us will become founders one day. This approach simply allows companies to actually get the talent they urgently need to succeed. Paying a premium should absolutely not be a problem if you in fact do have a genuine need for talent that doesn't exist in the US at any price (which is the argument being made in this blog post).
I want to be paid a fair wage. I also plan on being a founder (again. failed once). If engineer wages rise making some business models inviable, c'est la vie. I will just have to make sure to start a business that can actually earn money and pay the bills to hire the talent I will need. When I do found my own company, I am more interested in being able to get the talent than paying a premium.
The way things are now, the benefit basically already goes to the Google's and Apple's of the World. How many startups actually go through the whole process of trying to get H1-B visas to get talent. Every startup I know doesn't consider the process viable because it's not expedient. If I need an engineer within 6 months and I have a candidate willing to work for my business from another country, it would be amazing to pay a 1.5x premium to actually be able to have them over here in the US and helping me and my colleagues build a business together ASAP. The H1-B visa process is so drawn out right now that by the time you get your H1-B visa candidate you're already at the end of your runway.
I would love to see AeroFS write a blog post considering the solution I proposed (which many agree with judging by the number of upvotes thus far).
Tons of the so-called engineering shortage complaints can be condensed to not paying as well as google/fb/linkedin/netflix, offering at best the same environment and working conditions (though often much worse), then bitching that skilled engineers aren't jumping at the chance to work for you.
When hiring managers are asked to consider some subset of {more money, more vacation, true flex time, remote work, 4 day work weeks} in lieu of the cash, benefits, and environment the top tier employers pay, they refuse. And continue the bitching.
Also, the stunning discovery that, post incorporating in sf, people from the peninsula and south bay are unfathomably not as excited about a 50-60+ minute one-way commute as you thought they'd be.
Maybe, but the problem is that the larger a company is, the harder time they have recognizing talent, so it seems like a wash to me.
There is a reason why successful startups tend to be friends who closely know eachother and recognize the talent in eachother. Recognizing talent takes time and knowledge and it isn't something you can foist onto an HR department or recruiter.
> salaries rise to the levels enjoyed by doctors and lawyers
The BLS says the median salary for a lawyer is $112k. Median salary for a software developer is $93k.
The $19k difference is not that big when you consider that lawyers have a higher startup cost and higher ongoing cost - wardrobe, dry cleaning, law school tuition + 3 years' opportunity cost. Plus law firms can be a grind, far more than soft eng gigs.
Those are national salaries - the numbers change when you compare programmers in high cost regions to other professions in the same region.
For instance, the national average for software developers is quite a bit higher than for registered nurses, but when you consider bay area salaries, registered nurses earn at the median slightly more than software developers (in San Jose, it is 122k vs 116k, check US News Best Jobs for data).
As for law - the average salary for a lawyer working in San Jose is $183,000 a year (http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/lawyer/salary). It's true that lawyers have to go to three years of law school, but people don't fail out of typical pre-law majors like history or political science and major in CS or engineering because they;re easier, and plenty of programmers have grad degrees.
Also, attrition rates in elite graduate engineering schools are vastly higher than they are at elite law or med schools. The attrition rate for many science PhD programs is 50%. Engineering is a little better at 35% or so. Attrition rates for elite law and medical schools tend to be below 0.5%.
It's a tough comparison, because technically, you don't need any degree at all to be a programmer (you don't even need to know how to program, there's no licensing). But to graduate from an ABET accredited program and get a grad degree, even just an MS rather than a PhD? I'd say it's a much tougher program than history major followed by law school.
Like I said in a different post, the "shortage" of engineers appears to be a rational response to salary and career prospects. Engineering and programming are difficult jogs, and they pays less than people with this sort of academic inclination and propensity for hard, focused work can earn elsewhere. There is absolutely no need for government intervention to solve a "shortage" of programmers or engineers.
> when you consider that lawyers have a higher startup cost and higher ongoing cost - wardrobe, dry cleaning, law school tuition + 3 years' opportunity cost. Plus law firms can be a grind, far more than soft eng gigs.
How much you should earn is about supply versus demand, the latter of which is dependent on value created. The cost structure underneath merely sets the minimum price at which a profession is viable.
The BLS has been thoroughly discredited. $93K isn't that impressive not when a cop or fireman starts off at $100K in Silicon Valley WITHOUT going to college.
That's why I'd support allocating H1Bs by highest-salary-first, instead of via the current first-come-first-served system with a difficult to enforce "prevailing rate" requirement tacked on. Doing so would also tend to allocate the slots to areas where they're most in demand: if a company is offering $140k salary and wants an H1B to bring the person in, I'm more willing to believe this job has a shortage than if another company is offering only $60k for a job that supposedly has a shortage.
This is elegantly simple, puts the right market incentives in place for all the affected parties, and makes so much sense I'm sure it will never happen.
(For the reason cited in your parenthetical comment.)
At the same time, I think it would be awesome to start a petition to draw attention to such an idea so that it does become part of the agenda somehow. If such an idea did become part of the national discussion regarding H1-B visas, it would be extremely difficult for those trying to get these visas to depress wages to argue against this.
I for one would sign such a petition and I know a lot of people who would (American workers and existing H1-B holders). It's important that the opinion of both groups is represented in the debate. Is there a PAC or other organization that would lobby on behalf of such a solution?
Given that the White House gave information that they are asking the USCIS to streamline processing of visa through these kinds of tweaks (the law doesn't say how the quotas should be distributed AFAIK), I believe the correct venue would be a whitehouse.gov petition.
> There's a certain amount of tech talent at any given technical ability level available worldwide
Surely then wages would be skyrocketing for that limited number of qualified workers, rather than remaining static, which they have. This is what has happened in the past in the tech industry, and it's what happens in other industries. Supply and demand, as you said.
> paying more won't increase the supply quickly enough
So individual companies wont pay more because the national supply wont increase as a result? This doesn't make sense
> 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.
Yes, but that is all that needs to happen actually. The problem is not a shortage of talent-- the problem is the proliferation of meaningless projects drowning out the signal in the noise. What we need is a system to get the best engineers working on the most important projects and to let the rest sort itself out. We don't need multitudes of mediocrity-- we need rather the most talented producing moderate amounts of highest quality work toward the right ends.
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.