6 ms·

The best part about the auction model is that you could have it monthly, and then the winning bid would be fairly well known in advance. Say it's 80k for a sof

The best part about the auction model is that you could have it monthly, and then the winning bid would be fairly well known in advance. Say it's 80k for a software developer, you know that you need to pay the guy 81k or don't bother. This also massively reduces the power of the wipros of the world that employ thousands of people and apply for all of them every year, filling up the quota for people that don't already work for an outsourcing company.

bduerst 11y ago
Again, why not just remove the cap? If you're rearranging the application process to solve problems created with the bidding, which is to solve problems from created from cap, why not just solve the original problem? The review process and due diligence for H1B takes months, so signals are still only available in large intervals, which creates volatility that favors high quantity employers like H1B shops.
- jacalata 11y ago
  Because the cap is a response to the US desire to not allow in an unlimited number of foreigners.
  - bduerst 11y ago
    An unlimited amount of foreigners can't qualify for the H1B visa. The H1B is specifically for educated & highly skilled immigrants, who has a sponsoring employer and is paid more than the average U.S. citizen for the same job in the same area.
    - JPKab 11y ago
      Except that the outsourcing firms game this system so that this isn't at all true. Take a look at the publicly disclosed H1B data. Walmart hired people under a lower paid category with the job title 'Data Scientist' for $70K a year. Let's talk about India, since that's where over half of H1Bs come from: Educated: Yes, if you want to call a degree from an institution that most likely taught rote learning instead of critical thinking, with massive numbers of students cheating because the culture favors cheating if you can get away with it. Highly Skilled: This is where the rote learning comes in. Shops which simply pirate some particular enterprise software product, train people how to use it (SAP anything, Business Objects, Microstrategy, Informatica, you name it) and then profit. You then end up with a resource who comes to America knowing Informatica and/or datastage, but suddenly you find out they don't know SQL. Yes, this happened.
      - bduerst 11y ago
        What are you talking about? The median Wal-Mart data scientist H1B salary in 2015 was $140,000 [1]. There are lot of Indian H1B immigrants who are educated and highly skilled - are you sure you just don't have a passive racial bias? [1] http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=WAL-MART+ASSOCIATES+INC&job=DATA+SCIENTIST&city=&year=All http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=WAL-MART+ASSOCIATES+INC&job...
        JPKab 11y ago
        I looked at the raw H1B data, rather than relying on this aggregator website you are using. Littered throughout the data are jobs which are advertised as "Data Scientist", but the official name for the job is something quite different, like "Programmer Analyst". However, the job description involves building predictive models, working with Apache Spark, Python, and R. The website doesn't even have a working search function, but let me go ahead and provide a link which supports my point: http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=ORACLE+AMERICA+INC&job=DATA+SCIENTIST&city=&year=ALL http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=ORACLE+AMERICA+INC&job=DATA... Do you really think that $46,000 is a reasonable salary to pay a DATA SCIENTIST??? Please, by all means, explain this to me. And fuck you for trying to call out a racial bias. My anger at the H1B scammers is strictly based on the fact that I have good friends from India, Malaysia, and Russia who had absolutely bad-ass skills that are incredibly hard to find. They all were turned down for H1B courtesy of the nitwits like Tata bringing in talentless hacks. Talentless hacks are a universal phenomenon in all cultures: they go where the easy, reliable money is. It just so happens that the Indian outsourcing firms have a business model that works very well for talentless hacks. Not unlike the bond trading boom in the US in the 80's.
        bduerst 11y ago
        The website is built off the publicly available, raw OFLC disclosure data for LCA applications. I'm sure you're just not remembering correctly about WalMart. >Do you really think that $46,000 is a reasonable salary to pay a DATA SCIENTIST??? Please, by all means, explain this to me. Chill dude. For a lower level data scientist in Westminster, CO, that's appropriate. Notice they have a higher level data scientist getting $76k. Not accusing of cherry picking, but really, this is the second time you've done it.
- ElysianEagle 11y ago
  Removing the cap would be a boon for employers but would seriously undermine wages for software devs here, I imagine. India and China each graduate many times more software engineers each year than does the US. Many, perhaps even most, would love to work and stay in the US. With a massive influx of engineers in a short span of time, I can't see how wages would remain where they are now in areas like NYC and SF. This is probably exactly what the Facebooks et al want, I guess.
  - bduerst 11y ago
    >seriously undermine wages for software devs here, I imagine. How? They can only be approved if they're getting paid the same or more than existing software devs.
    - dj_axl 11y ago
      > they're getting paid the same or more than existing software devs. Ha. Look at some writeups of the SoCal Edison outsourcing, for example. U.S. citizens making $95K were replaced with H1-B workers earning $60-65K, and that's generously estimating the lower salaries. Tata and Infosys might pay their workers closer to $40-50K. https://www.google.com/search?q=socal+edison+h1b+wages https://www.google.com/search?q=socal+edison+h1b+wages
      - bduerst 11y ago
        That's a non-issue. They're currently under investigation for violating the immigration labor laws surrounding the H1B [1]. It's a different problem than the cap or the problem in the article. You're always going to have agencies trying to abuse a system regardless of whether there is a cap or not, and they will be investigated and penalized accordingly. http://www.natlawreview.com/article/commentary-tata-consultancy-services-and-infosys-h1-b-visa-probe http://www.natlawreview.com/article/commentary-tata-consulta...
        s73v3r 11y ago
        How can you say it's a non-issue when it's the exact thing that we've brought up as concerns? Especially when there's plenty of evidence that, not only does this happen, but it would happen more if the cap was removed?
- riskable 11y ago
  > Again, why not just remove the cap? Because flooding the market with indentured $60,000 technical workers isn't good for American workers or America?
  - GauntletWizard 11y ago
    Or, in the interests of compassion, the indentured workers.
  - bduerst 11y ago
    As I've said before, H1B approval requires that employers pay more than the average wage of U.S. citizens working the same job in the same area.
    - xyzzyz 11y ago
      In theory, yes. In practice, this is worked-around pretty easily. Why do you think outsourcing companies even bother to hire lots of foreigners, if they could have just as well hired locals for less?
      - bduerst 11y ago
        Because there isn't enough local talent to fill demand, which is what the H1B system addresses.
        genericresponse 11y ago
        While that might be true in a few cases, in most it flatly isn't.
        tn13 11y ago
        Correction: Local talent willing to work at lower wage rates.
    - riskable 11y ago
      The "prevailing wage" of an IT worker at these outsourcing firms (Tata, Infosys, etc) is precisely $60k. These $60k workers will replace salaried employees at many firms making twice that much. So a company doesn't need to hire H1Bs directly. They can just setup a contract with one of these outsourcing firms to supply workers. That's precisely what Disney did when they replaced a huge number of IT employees with H1Bs. The cap on the number of H1Bs prevents Disney from setting up their own little H1B shell corporation to perform the same function which is why they (along with many other big corporations) complain to Congress about the cap. If the cap weren't there they wouldn't need to outsource to Tata et al in order to completely screw over American workers.

bduerst 11y ago

Again, why not just remove the cap? If you're rearranging the application process to solve problems created with the bidding, which is to solve problems from created from cap, why not just solve the original problem? The review process and due diligence for H1B takes months, so signals are still only available in large intervals, which creates volatility that favors high quantity employers like H1B shops.

jacalata 11y ago
Because the cap is a response to the US desire to not allow in an unlimited number of foreigners.
- bduerst 11y ago
  An unlimited amount of foreigners can't qualify for the H1B visa. The H1B is specifically for educated & highly skilled immigrants, who has a sponsoring employer and is paid more than the average U.S. citizen for the same job in the same area.
  - JPKab 11y ago
    Except that the outsourcing firms game this system so that this isn't at all true. Take a look at the publicly disclosed H1B data. Walmart hired people under a lower paid category with the job title 'Data Scientist' for $70K a year. Let's talk about India, since that's where over half of H1Bs come from: Educated: Yes, if you want to call a degree from an institution that most likely taught rote learning instead of critical thinking, with massive numbers of students cheating because the culture favors cheating if you can get away with it. Highly Skilled: This is where the rote learning comes in. Shops which simply pirate some particular enterprise software product, train people how to use it (SAP anything, Business Objects, Microstrategy, Informatica, you name it) and then profit. You then end up with a resource who comes to America knowing Informatica and/or datastage, but suddenly you find out they don't know SQL. Yes, this happened.
    - bduerst 11y ago
      What are you talking about? The median Wal-Mart data scientist H1B salary in 2015 was $140,000 [1]. There are lot of Indian H1B immigrants who are educated and highly skilled - are you sure you just don't have a passive racial bias? [1] http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=WAL-MART+ASSOCIATES+INC&job=DATA+SCIENTIST&city=&year=All http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=WAL-MART+ASSOCIATES+INC&job...
      - JPKab 11y ago
        I looked at the raw H1B data, rather than relying on this aggregator website you are using. Littered throughout the data are jobs which are advertised as "Data Scientist", but the official name for the job is something quite different, like "Programmer Analyst". However, the job description involves building predictive models, working with Apache Spark, Python, and R. The website doesn't even have a working search function, but let me go ahead and provide a link which supports my point: http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=ORACLE+AMERICA+INC&job=DATA+SCIENTIST&city=&year=ALL http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=ORACLE+AMERICA+INC&job=DATA... Do you really think that $46,000 is a reasonable salary to pay a DATA SCIENTIST??? Please, by all means, explain this to me. And fuck you for trying to call out a racial bias. My anger at the H1B scammers is strictly based on the fact that I have good friends from India, Malaysia, and Russia who had absolutely bad-ass skills that are incredibly hard to find. They all were turned down for H1B courtesy of the nitwits like Tata bringing in talentless hacks. Talentless hacks are a universal phenomenon in all cultures: they go where the easy, reliable money is. It just so happens that the Indian outsourcing firms have a business model that works very well for talentless hacks. Not unlike the bond trading boom in the US in the 80's.
        bduerst 11y ago
        The website is built off the publicly available, raw OFLC disclosure data for LCA applications. I'm sure you're just not remembering correctly about WalMart. >Do you really think that $46,000 is a reasonable salary to pay a DATA SCIENTIST??? Please, by all means, explain this to me. Chill dude. For a lower level data scientist in Westminster, CO, that's appropriate. Notice they have a higher level data scientist getting $76k. Not accusing of cherry picking, but really, this is the second time you've done it.
ElysianEagle 11y ago
Removing the cap would be a boon for employers but would seriously undermine wages for software devs here, I imagine. India and China each graduate many times more software engineers each year than does the US. Many, perhaps even most, would love to work and stay in the US. With a massive influx of engineers in a short span of time, I can't see how wages would remain where they are now in areas like NYC and SF. This is probably exactly what the Facebooks et al want, I guess.
- bduerst 11y ago
  >seriously undermine wages for software devs here, I imagine. How? They can only be approved if they're getting paid the same or more than existing software devs.
  - dj_axl 11y ago
    > they're getting paid the same or more than existing software devs. Ha. Look at some writeups of the SoCal Edison outsourcing, for example. U.S. citizens making $95K were replaced with H1-B workers earning $60-65K, and that's generously estimating the lower salaries. Tata and Infosys might pay their workers closer to $40-50K. https://www.google.com/search?q=socal+edison+h1b+wages https://www.google.com/search?q=socal+edison+h1b+wages
    - bduerst 11y ago
      That's a non-issue. They're currently under investigation for violating the immigration labor laws surrounding the H1B [1]. It's a different problem than the cap or the problem in the article. You're always going to have agencies trying to abuse a system regardless of whether there is a cap or not, and they will be investigated and penalized accordingly. http://www.natlawreview.com/article/commentary-tata-consultancy-services-and-infosys-h1-b-visa-probe http://www.natlawreview.com/article/commentary-tata-consulta...
      - s73v3r 11y ago
        How can you say it's a non-issue when it's the exact thing that we've brought up as concerns? Especially when there's plenty of evidence that, not only does this happen, but it would happen more if the cap was removed?
riskable 11y ago
> Again, why not just remove the cap? Because flooding the market with indentured $60,000 technical workers isn't good for American workers or America?
- GauntletWizard 11y ago
  Or, in the interests of compassion, the indentured workers.
- bduerst 11y ago
  As I've said before, H1B approval requires that employers pay more than the average wage of U.S. citizens working the same job in the same area.
  - xyzzyz 11y ago
    In theory, yes. In practice, this is worked-around pretty easily. Why do you think outsourcing companies even bother to hire lots of foreigners, if they could have just as well hired locals for less?
    - bduerst 11y ago
      Because there isn't enough local talent to fill demand, which is what the H1B system addresses.
      - genericresponse 11y ago
        While that might be true in a few cases, in most it flatly isn't.
      - tn13 11y ago
        Correction: Local talent willing to work at lower wage rates.
  - riskable 11y ago
    The "prevailing wage" of an IT worker at these outsourcing firms (Tata, Infosys, etc) is precisely $60k. These $60k workers will replace salaried employees at many firms making twice that much. So a company doesn't need to hire H1Bs directly. They can just setup a contract with one of these outsourcing firms to supply workers. That's precisely what Disney did when they replaced a huge number of IT employees with H1Bs. The cap on the number of H1Bs prevents Disney from setting up their own little H1B shell corporation to perform the same function which is why they (along with many other big corporations) complain to Congress about the cap. If the cap weren't there they wouldn't need to outsource to Tata et al in order to completely screw over American workers.