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How to Fix Tech’s H-1B Problem
- dominotw 11y agoclickbait tldr; " try to select the most valuable people?" ( instead of lottery) apparently, free market is going to determine who is most valuable.
- microcolonel 11y agoI would never have guessed.
- pj_mukh 11y agoYour options are a) Government bureaucrat b) Free market c) Lottery Which do you choose?
- ryanmarsh 11y agoI don't know what you call the opposite of "right to work" but that's basically the employment situation H1B's find themselves in. My Fortune 500 clients have office building upon office building of H1B developers. These folks will do practically whatever it takes to keep their employer happy. They are afraid to rock the boat and have their family sent back to India. This means bad decisions go unquestioned. You can guess what the result is.
- spiralpolitik 11y agoThis is true for H-1B's employed by outsourcing companies. It is generally not true for most other H-1B workers who are treated identically to other workers.
- Zigurd 11y agoYou have put your finger on a key pathology of software development in general, not just H1-B: Mediocrities with terrible ideas about software love to have their bad ideas implemented without question. This explains why companies can easily end up paying more for H1-B labor. Egos get stroked. Nobody is asked WTF. Bad software is piled on top of bad software. Not only is this a source of wage depression and age discrimination, it results in the kind of horrible-but-expensive IT that runs banking, health care, government, etc. and makes it much harder than necessary to apply technology to reforming those sectors.
- protomyth 11y ago"That’s right. Facebook and Google brought in 900 and 2,800 H-1B employees, respectively, with salaries of $140,000 and $127,000. Cognizant? 3,300 at $72,000. Tata? A whopping 16,435 for a (relatively) paltry $70,000 – literally less than half what Facebook paid." I still think a good first step is to require a salary for H-1B workers at 10x single person poverty guidelines for the local area[1]. Another measure of base salary would probably work, but something that requires a salary that discourages the body shops[2]. According to the legislation and goals of the program, the people we accept have the talent to be worth this salary[3]. 1) https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2016-01-25/html/2016-01450.htm https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2016-01-25/html/2016-01450.... 2) http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2016-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2016-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx - the top 10 has a lot of consulting / body shop firms 3) http://www.dol.gov/whd/immigration/h1b.htm http://www.dol.gov/whd/immigration/h1b.htm "The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States."
- ardit33 11y agoSorting the visas by salary will work just as well. Right now there is a random lottery choosing who gets the visas, where the Indian body shops are known to "oversubscribe" to it. Also, after a verification that the Visa recipient is working at the given salary for at least two years, then the they can apply for green card irrelevant to who their current employer is (as long as they are employed and earning at least similar salaries to what they did when they got the visa). Switching jobs (as long as it is the similar profession/pay), should not reset the Green Card process. This will remove the current defacto "Indentured servitude" state that most H-1B visa holders find themselves in. There are many ways to improve the current system (without changing the quotas), to benefit the country itself, and not large corporations, but right now there is no direct personal incentive for lawmakers to do that.
- vowelless 11y ago> Sorting the visas by salary will work just as well. And it makes sense for the federal government too. Higher salary = higher taxes.
- lordnacho 11y agoI hope one day in the future the idea of a work permit will be considered just as crazy as the idea that only men should be allowed to vote. It strikes me as ridiculous that it could be illegal for someone to work simply because they were not born near where their employer is based.
- petter_byoa 11y agoYou think labour migration has absolutely no downsides at all? No impact on the stability on society at all?
- erispoe 11y agoWe have no scientific evidence of the contrary. There are some studies pointing to mass migration being (slightly) detrimental to the wages of low-income natives, but that's pretty much it. You will find a lot of opinions though.
- petter_byoa 11y agoIf you could literally sign an order right now to completely remove any control on who could come and work in your state (setting aside criminal records, diseases etc), would you do that? I think you would probably not, because you know it would be a war zone within weeks, with the poorest and most desperate people from all around the world swarming to your small part of the world, bringing with them huge social issues.
- jgh 11y agoDoes that happen now? There are plenty of poor, desperate people all over America, do they "swarm" the more affluent areas? Do we have poor people from rural Pennsylvania coming to Los Angeles and undercutting hard-working Californians?
- erispoe 11y agoI would. With background checks for criminal records. People who have the wherewithal to move across the globe are not "the poorest and most desperate people from all around the world", they are the ones with the means to pay thousands of dollars to mafias because we have no better system to bring them in.
- mjevans 11y agoRequire that the job they were /brought/ here for: * last at least a year * pay at least 150% of median market rate * have been open and unfulfilled with at least 10 who are interviewed AND report on their desired compensation for the role * Eliminated non-hourly work* ('Salaried' would be a contract to buy between X and Y hours of work per year, with limits of hours per day/week etc.)
- pkaye 11y agoEnforcement would be the bigger issue.
- dominotw 11y agoYea, lets cripple thriving american tech industry with bureaucratic/nonsensical rules that you spent 10 mins coming up with.
- product50 11y agoReport on desired compensation? Are you serious? What if 2 folks come in and say they want $300k based on their current salaries? What will you do then? You may argue that it is the market salary then but if I were an employer, I wouldn't even invite Google/FB folks for the interview but only inexperienced folks - to game the desired salary requirement. This is why this requires a more thoughtful approach..
- mjevans 11y agoMonetary compensation data, of course, would be for the /field/ and collected via the tax infrastructure. Median for /that type of work/ not based on those interviewed. The reason for having the interviewees report back is to check on if the expectations for the job match the description for the job.
- cjensen 11y agoThe solution is easy: convert all H-1B Visas to Green Cards. If an H-1B employee is underpaid, they can jump ship. If we really have a shortage of engineers, then what harm is done? When H-1B expansion was first proposed, this is exactly what the IEEE advocated. Too many companies, as evidenced in the linked article, claim there is an engineering "shortage" but who really mean that there is a shortage of engineers willing to be underpaid and badly treated.
- starving_coder 11y agoThis is my 10th year of employment in Bay area and by any reasonable estimates, I am not laying eyes on my Green Card for another half a decade. And no, i am not in the "slow lane". Makes me wonder if employers are lobbying Washington hard for things to be this complicated.
- dominotw 11y ago>employers are lobbying Washington hard for things to be this complicated. There is nothing complicated about the process itself. You just happen to be from India/China.
- hebdo 11y agoI'm quite sure that by writing "I'm not in the slow lane" he/she meant exactly that he/she is not from India or China.
- dominotw 11y agowrong. There are many "lanes" ( eb1, eb2,..) with different speeds even for people from India/China.
- hebdo 11y agoDidn't know that, thanks for the information. I was rejected in the H1B random lottery step (sigh) after getting an offer from a grown startup in SF, and did not investigate the green card process deep enough.
- joesmo 11y agoThey could just put a cap on the number of H-1B workers that can go to any one particular company. Say 1k. You can hire whomever you want right now, but after your 1k, you get no more. It'd force companies to prioritize the most important workers they need and limit the damage companies like Tata can do. It's such a simple, elegant solution, no wonder it wasn't implemented by the idiots who wrote these laws.
- nopinsight 11y agoIt seems like auctioning the visas to the highest bidders is a win-win solution and good for American workers. Why don't they do anything about it? The following is one reason. Look at who benefits from the system. On the surface, outsourcing companies who can hire cheaper IT labor. Who are their customers which gain from lower IT service costs? Large corporations with influential ties to the powers that be.
- kwisatzh 11y agoThe US should staple a Greencard to all PhDs and Masters students in the STEM fields. Most grad students have some support of funding (NSF/NIH etc) and it makes sense for these students to work here and pay off the funding instead of letting them leave the country or have them be stuck in a sub-optimal situation, being tethered to one employee.
- dominotw 11y ago>The US should staple a Greencard to all PhDs and Masters students in the STEM fields. No thats horrible. There are tons of "universities" in USA which will give you a masters degree for a given amount of money. I can only imagine how much worse the education scam will get with stuff like greenCards attached to degrees.
- yetanotheracc 11y agoJust restrict the scheme to the top n (n <= 50) schools according to, say, ARWU.
- dominotw 11y agowhat about the brilliant self taught programmers? Not all PHD's have skills/talent that employers are looking for. There are already enough unemployed theoretical math/astronomy pdhs.
- jldugger 11y agoYou can already buy your way into the US with an HB-5.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- sofaofthedamned 11y agoWe have the same problem here in the UK. For clarity i've had to give my job over 3 times in my career to Indian outsourced employees, including for Cisco (my last employer before the current one) The rules are not being applied, but for me it's quite simple. If you want to bring a foreign worker in, you need to advertise it on a government website for a month. These details will include salary, role, skills, the sponsoring company as well as the one they will be ultimately working for. I spent the last 5 months unemployed, but i'm normally a devops/sysadmin. I know my job went to India. I don't mind if they're better, but most of the time they're not. I didn't claim unemployment benefits as I didn't want the shame and the hassle, including having to spend 20 hours a week looking for work on the governments website. If this website included the details of the jobs that allegedly couldn't be filled by a UK guy i'd be far better equipped to get a job I am good at where a company is trying to cheap it out. Note - I am not trying to get at Indian employees here - the RF guys at my last place were superb and better than anybody in the UK as we don't train enough of them here - but I am very annoyed where a company can twist the system to avoid paying UK wages for a UK job.
- crdoconnor 11y agoA lot of the time it's not even cheaper, it's costlier. Management just prefers to have a docile, more easily controlled workforce. Management is also surreptitiously raising its own pay (by increasing coordination costs).
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago> A lot of the time it's not even cheaper, it's costlier. Management just prefers to have a docile, more easily controlled workforce. Reminds me of something David Graeber said: Given a choice between a course of action that would make capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and one that would transform capitalism into a viable, long-term economic system, neoliberalism chooses the former every time.
- dominotw 11y ago> I don't mind if they're better, but most of the time they're not. Your employer should make that decision and they seem to think otherwise. Not everyone wants to shop at whole foods.
- 0xcde4c3db 11y agoFrom what I've heard, the "consultancies" are using H-1B something like this: 1) File H-1B applications for every new hire in the country of origin. 2) Send the lucky winners over to the US for on-the-job training with clients. 3) Once they actually have the necessary skills to do the jobs, bring them back home and pay them the prevailing wage there, while still charging the clients the same amount. 4) Profit! Under this model (is this even accurate? I've seen several summaries along these lines, but have no direct experience), the bulk of the wage lowering doesn't even occur under an H-1B, so wouldn't they be able to realign things to absorb a higher US salary? Would a "value-based" system be an actual deterrent, or just friction?
- tomohawk 11y agoEasy solution: get rid of H1-B, whose main use is to offshore jobs, and change the preferences for getting a green card to prefer people with desired skills who want to become Americans.
- yadongwen 11y agoI was just turned down by Facebook probably because they are unable to sponsor H1B for me..alas.
- Manishearth 11y agoI doubt that. Facebook, like many large companies, hires first and worries about H1B later. If you don't make it through the lottery they will put you in one of their offices in some other country. (I don't know if they L1 you later).
- pbnjay 11y agoWhat if each H-1B simply cost the difference between a citizen's average salary and the foreign worker's average salary? e.g. if a US citizen working at Facebook makes 180k, and the foreign worker makes 150k, that H-1B should cost 30k. Then if there really is a tech shortage then costs are the same, but if there isn't it incentivizes businesses to hire locals. I'm sure the argument would be that then they'll just pay their US citizens less, but I'd think the competition for the native highly skilled talent would keep rates up.
- dominotw 11y ago> if a US citizen working at Facebook makes 180k, and the foreign worker makes 150k, that H-1B should cost 30k There are already prevailing wage restrictions, you can't pay h1b less than native employee .
- sratner 11y agoWell, more accurately, you can't pay a foreign worker less than some floor set by the DoL for the given job description and location. It is unrelated to how much a given company is paying to any one of their other workers.
- USANEEDSHELP 11y agoHow to fix it, eliminate it. Not only are the US firms abusing H1-B, the consulting firms from (for example) India are setting up a US footprint & using H1-B to get low cost folks into this country. The quality is not there, but the low cost & quantity is. There are many Americans that can fill these positions, but the US firms don't want to pay a living wage.
- EhicsOnImm 11y agoWidescale utilitarian logic would be a slippery slope to massacres of the homeless.
- EhicsOnImm 11y agoWidescale utilitarian logic would be create a slippery slope towards massacres of the homeless. All immigrants, regardless of their value, should be treated equal.
- Zigurd 11y agoH1-B is mostly about money, and the best and most robust solution, in terms of being difficult to subvert, is to use money as the measure: To limit H1-B to the talent that's unobtainable locally, to auction the visas to the highest bidder, and have a high reserve price, say $30k. To an R&D company creating enormous value per employee it would be just a speed bump. To a body shop depressing wages by renting out compliant mediocrities to mediocre managers who find it comforting to have their crappy ideas never questioned, it would make continuing that blight painfully expensive.
- mathattack 11y agoI very much like the idea of auctioning these off to companies, either explicitly (pay the government for each one) or implicitly (bid up the salaries you'll pay for them). Although I'm not a fan of large taxes, I think the former is slightly less distortionary.
- notlisted 11y agoAs the numbers indicate, the H1B system is broken. It was broken by allowing the body-shops to apply for what are basically "temp workers". When I got mine, in 1994, such "temp work" (consulting) was explicitly forbidden. The employee had to work for and at the company that applied for you, not at the offices of a company's clients. When and why this changed I don't know. What I do know, as the founder of a European expat organization with 7k members in the USA, is that H1Bs for highly skilled Europeans have nearly come to a standstill. This is evidenced by the change in demographics of my target audience. Average ages have gone up significantly. Most newcomers now arrive on L1 (inter-company executive transferee) visas, are older, married, and have a family. The way to fix this is by going back to the old situation and put the body-shops out of business...
- phil21 11y ago> When and why this changed I don't know Nothing changed. The only thing that changed were companies pushing the limit as far as they could to what you see today. Regulators sat on their proverbial asses and watched it happen without lifting a finger, so companies lost the fear of the law.
- nish1500 11y agoI love the Bay Area, and would have loved to work there, but the draconian immigration laws and the 16-year wait for Green Cards are simply not worth it. I'll get paid half as much in Canada, but at least my future doesn't hang on a lottery, and I can start my own company without waiting to turn 40.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoIf its any consolation: I lived and worked there 10 years, and left. It was hot, crowded, full of envious avaricious people who turned over every couple of years. When we realized almost every person we knew had moved, we decided to leave as well. Settled in Iowa where I've worked at half a dozen Silicon Valley startups remotely since then. With reasonable cost of living, a decent stable group of friends, and a culture of helpfulness and inclusion.
- throwaway_7299 11y agoThe crazy, unfair visa process has saved a lot of software projects by keeping a lid on the flow of low-quality talent from China and India. It's too bad that well-qualified individuals are kept out by the same system. Ideally, I'm for open borders & against any immigration restrictions. In practice, as a software engineer, I dread working with H1B engineers from China and India because, overall, they're worse engineers than similarly-credentialed, similarly-experienced engineers from the US, Canada, or Europe.
- WalterBright 11y agoIf the entry requirement is to merely have an accredited degree, the foreign degree system will be promptly gamed. Bureaucratic rules are always gamed, and being bureaucratic, are very slow to adapt.
- hemantv 11y agoIf you start to give out visa based upon just the salary, indirectly you are saying that small business and town outside of high cost of living are not worthy of hiring people on visas. So only SF and NYC can employ immigration while Denver and Atlanta cannot.
- klipt 11y agoWell people in SF pay more taxes, so as far as the federal budget is concerned, people working there are worth more. If an immigrant doesn't want to stay in SF, they only have to work there long enough to get a green card, then they're free to move.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- ElComradio 11y agoI'm all for it. Let's have reciprocity though. I should be able to show my resume and get permanent residency complete with local healthcare benefits for any country with which we have the agreement.
- GreaterFool 11y agoTo me H-1B seems like a bad deal. It gives the employer a lot of leverage over the employee. How do you expect a system like that not to be abused? You can require higher salaries for H-1B employees but that's a half-assed solution. Besides there's no sensible path to permanent residence or citizenship. Personally I'd like to spend some time in the States and see the country, work for a year or two and see how it goes. But I have no intention in getting into H-1B mess.
- alanwatts 11y agoWhich is the greater problem, the H1-B process, or the fact that we have a global economy but still pretend like nationalism isn't completely counter productive?
- jeevand 11y agoH1B system is broken. It is especially hard if you are from India or China. Although you can change employers, you need to restart the green card process from scratch which introduces lots of uncertainties. Obama wanted to allow H1Bs to change employers easily by giving them better portability but USCIS came up with a bad rule which i believe is due to lobbying by employers. Australia & Canada have better immigration systems where they give PR quickly. It is bad for US as well. Immigrants are generally more risk taking than citizens & H1B does not allow them to take risks when they are young because they will be waiting in the line for PR (Green Card). By the time they get green card it will be decade or more and their risk appetite would have reduced due to having family/children. In general, I don't believe most of the high salaries in tech may not be sustainable. Lots of tech jobs will move to India & China (or any low cost country in future which has a good pool of educated people), that is just capital chasing good enough talent which is cheap. Moving up the value chain is the only option.
- jmspring 11y agoThe fix is to make things hard for the body shops (Tata, etc) and their like minded counterparts. I've posted before, but having worked with India, Korea, Japan, and China... There is only one culture that pushes to outsource things when it doesn't make sense... And usually the one doing the pushing is getting a cut or kick back... It's neither Korea, China, or Japan. I think the solution is to cut off all Indian body shops and visas in bulk and require strict individual vetting. There are great individuals stuck in the morass, but Tata etc are trying to bring in people less qualified than an automotive technician who could get 3-4 months of training... H1b and outsourcing is all about the bottom quarterly dollar.