5 ms·

Misuse must definitely stop. But wouldn't this force businesses to outsource to offshore offices... Losing talent, losing jobs to other country and losing out o

Misuse must definitely stop. But wouldn't this force businesses to outsource to offshore offices... Losing talent, losing jobs to other country and losing out on taxes. And the jobs that cannot be offshored would require higher/complex skillset

dredmorbius 10y ago
The H1-B program allows employers to hire foreign employees, at below-market rates, by limiting those employees' options to compete freely on the US domestic labour markets. Employment is an area in which employers already have a natural advantage, a point noted (and explained in detail) 240 years ago by Adam Smith. Offshoring introduces additional challenges to management -- it's simply easier to manage a workforce who rolls into the office and is locally present, though yes, remote (or occasional from-home) management is possible. If a company wants to pay offshore-wages, then it can employ offshore talent, offshore, and incur the offshore management and logistics hassles. If it wants to hire domestic labour, it should do so at local labour rates. If foreign workers are brought to domestic markets, allow them full mobility between employers. Otherwise, the only effect of the H1-B program is to use one class of restricted-rights workers (the visa holders) to depress domestic wages through threat of a cheaper, effectively indentured workforce. This has been clearly evident for years, and eloquently argued by Norman Matloff of UC Davis: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html
- guitarbill 10y ago
  > The H1-B program allows employers to hire foreign employees, at below-market rates However, it's also by far the most attractive visa type for people from many countries. If I'm an e.g. German dev, what other options do I have if I wanted to work in the US long term? L-1? > Otherwise, the only effect of the H1-B program Obviously misuse isn't okay, but I'm sure they'd be chilling effects worth thinking about. I've always wondered why there aren't visa swap programs, i.e. if a Dutch and an American citizen wanted to live in the US/Netherlands respectively, why not swap (as long as some basic criteria are met)?
  - socmag 10y ago
    Interesting you picked Dutch/American. Did you know about the DAFT? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT I don't know about using it to go to the US, but for a Dutch Visa it wasn't so painful.
    - guitarbill 10y ago
      haha, I had no idea. oops. I was picking countries where I know people have complained in the past - British myself
  - int_19h 10y ago
    If you're a German dev, I doubt you'll come to US to work at Tata. Wouldn't be worthwhile. You might come to work at Google and such, but they wouldn't be affected by raising the bar as this law does, since they already comply with it in practice.
    - guitarbill 10y ago
      sure, but it's still the same visa class, right?
      - int_19h 10y ago
        Yep. But not all legislation that pertains to it affects all companies that use it equally.
- fennecfoxen 10y ago
  It's funny. Here we have a bunch of people worried about the effects of systematic abuse of a legal framework by companies who skirt or break the law to pay darker-skinned people less money (in part because those people's job mobility is seriously depressed; they can't legally get an arbitrary job of their choosing). Here is legislation which is proposed to fix that by keeping those people out of the US to begin with. Cut the salaries involved to 20% of what they are now, change the legal framework from "H1-B" to "no visa at all," and you've just described a stereotypical Donald Trump voter. AND YET I cannot help but imagine that those who would support this proposed legislation would be shocked at the comparison to those horrible terrible racist people.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    You're right. The dynamics aren't unrelated. But paying full costs for labour is long-term necessary. Again, Smith, in one of his less-frequently cited passages.
- pipio21 10y ago
  "it's simply easier to manage a workforce who rolls into the office and is locally present, though yes, remote (or occasional from-home) management is possible." As an employee with years of experience working remotely and employer myself now I disagree. In my opinion it is easier to manage people remotely now, at least in the areas I work(IT). You can focus on the output someone produces without the interference of distractions. As an example if someone goes and checks early in the morning in the Office, goes home late, it can distract employer opinion on this person being a great value to the company, while in reality her productivity is low. Another example is having someone that talks a lot(extroverts)(high profile people). People that talk little externally look as they do not exist, but on jobs like programming they can run circles around the extroverts. While you do remote work you don't care someone spends all day having sex in her house(good for them) if it provides great value for the company, value that is very easy to measure, as the only thing you get is the output work you get from your workers. Do you like to work at 3 o'clock in the morning? I don't care. You are in pajamas in your house? I don't care. You like tattoos? I don't care. Do you have children? I don't care. Are you productive? I care. The main problem with remote working is that is it rare and we don't have all the experience of recent century of factories and offices history to learn from. But if you go even farther in time you will realize working from home was the normal thing to do before industrialization.
witty_username 10y ago
> losing jobs to other country That may not necessarily be true. People may find other jobs; and the profits from outsourcing would be spent possibly resulting in job creation.
douche 10y ago
I think people might finally be wising up to to the fact that outsourcing knowledge work to the cheapest foreign country doesn't often produce great results. Communication overheard, time-shifting, mismatch of cultural expectations and norms, it introduces a lot of complexity. And sometimes, you just get what you pay for. I work with customers every day that decided to axe their internal IT staffs and outsource it to the big consulting and services firms. It may have made Bill Lumbergh's stock go up a quarter of a point in the short term, but the reduced efficiency, red tape and typically less-than-stellar competence drags on the whole organization.
- Clubber 10y ago
  You are absolutely right. The people who make those decisions aren't paid for quality, they are paid to cut costs. They will offshore their entire departments, get a huge bonus, then cut and run to do it to the next company before it all comes crashing down. There are success stories, but those success stories of H1B aren't the ones that pay bare minimum. Companies who pay top dollar for H1B get the great ones. The companies who pay bottom dollar get shut down in 5 years. You'd figure after 20+ years of this, executives would learn, but they don't care to. They are incentivized for precisely what they do.
  - splintercell 10y ago
    > The people who make those decisions aren't paid for quality, they are paid to cut costs. This exists because not every product carries same gross profit margin. Apple launched iWatch, but it fails miserably, so Apple in an attempt to recuperate some costs, wants to produce the watch cheaply. Enter the people who can produce it cheaply. Of course the quality won't be the same, but apparently there isn't a market for high quality steel smart watches, but for lower quality plasticky smart watches.
    - Clubber 10y ago
      We're talking about labor, specifically programming, not cost of materials.
jordanb 10y ago
Offshoring is currently way cheaper than bringing people onsite, so as it stands now anything that can be offshored is being offshored. If work is being done in America either by a citizen or by a foreign worker it's because the company hasn't figured out how to offshore the work. Actually from what I've seen a lot of the bodyshops use H1B to facilitate outsourcing. They bring in smaller numbers of people on H1Bs to act as go-betweens for the much larger team offshore.

dredmorbius 10y ago

The H1-B program allows employers to hire foreign employees, at below-market rates, by limiting those employees' options to compete freely on the US domestic labour markets. Employment is an area in which employers already have a natural advantage, a point noted (and explained in detail) 240 years ago by Adam Smith. Offshoring introduces additional challenges to management -- it's simply easier to manage a workforce who rolls into the office and is locally present, though yes, remote (or occasional from-home) management is possible. If a company wants to pay offshore-wages, then it can employ offshore talent, offshore, and incur the offshore management and logistics hassles. If it wants to hire domestic labour, it should do so at local labour rates. If foreign workers are brought to domestic markets, allow them full mobility between employers. Otherwise, the only effect of the H1-B program is to use one class of restricted-rights workers (the visa holders) to depress domestic wages through threat of a cheaper, effectively indentured workforce. This has been clearly evident for years, and eloquently argued by Norman Matloff of UC Davis: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html

guitarbill 10y ago
> The H1-B program allows employers to hire foreign employees, at below-market rates However, it's also by far the most attractive visa type for people from many countries. If I'm an e.g. German dev, what other options do I have if I wanted to work in the US long term? L-1? > Otherwise, the only effect of the H1-B program Obviously misuse isn't okay, but I'm sure they'd be chilling effects worth thinking about. I've always wondered why there aren't visa swap programs, i.e. if a Dutch and an American citizen wanted to live in the US/Netherlands respectively, why not swap (as long as some basic criteria are met)?
- socmag 10y ago
  Interesting you picked Dutch/American. Did you know about the DAFT? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT I don't know about using it to go to the US, but for a Dutch Visa it wasn't so painful.
  - guitarbill 10y ago
    haha, I had no idea. oops. I was picking countries where I know people have complained in the past - British myself
- int_19h 10y ago
  If you're a German dev, I doubt you'll come to US to work at Tata. Wouldn't be worthwhile. You might come to work at Google and such, but they wouldn't be affected by raising the bar as this law does, since they already comply with it in practice.
  - guitarbill 10y ago
    sure, but it's still the same visa class, right?
    - int_19h 10y ago
      Yep. But not all legislation that pertains to it affects all companies that use it equally.
fennecfoxen 10y ago
It's funny. Here we have a bunch of people worried about the effects of systematic abuse of a legal framework by companies who skirt or break the law to pay darker-skinned people less money (in part because those people's job mobility is seriously depressed; they can't legally get an arbitrary job of their choosing). Here is legislation which is proposed to fix that by keeping those people out of the US to begin with. Cut the salaries involved to 20% of what they are now, change the legal framework from "H1-B" to "no visa at all," and you've just described a stereotypical Donald Trump voter. AND YET I cannot help but imagine that those who would support this proposed legislation would be shocked at the comparison to those horrible terrible racist people.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  You're right. The dynamics aren't unrelated. But paying full costs for labour is long-term necessary. Again, Smith, in one of his less-frequently cited passages.
pipio21 10y ago
"it's simply easier to manage a workforce who rolls into the office and is locally present, though yes, remote (or occasional from-home) management is possible." As an employee with years of experience working remotely and employer myself now I disagree. In my opinion it is easier to manage people remotely now, at least in the areas I work(IT). You can focus on the output someone produces without the interference of distractions. As an example if someone goes and checks early in the morning in the Office, goes home late, it can distract employer opinion on this person being a great value to the company, while in reality her productivity is low. Another example is having someone that talks a lot(extroverts)(high profile people). People that talk little externally look as they do not exist, but on jobs like programming they can run circles around the extroverts. While you do remote work you don't care someone spends all day having sex in her house(good for them) if it provides great value for the company, value that is very easy to measure, as the only thing you get is the output work you get from your workers. Do you like to work at 3 o'clock in the morning? I don't care. You are in pajamas in your house? I don't care. You like tattoos? I don't care. Do you have children? I don't care. Are you productive? I care. The main problem with remote working is that is it rare and we don't have all the experience of recent century of factories and offices history to learn from. But if you go even farther in time you will realize working from home was the normal thing to do before industrialization.

witty_username 10y ago

> losing jobs to other country That may not necessarily be true. People may find other jobs; and the profits from outsourcing would be spent possibly resulting in job creation.

douche 10y ago

I think people might finally be wising up to to the fact that outsourcing knowledge work to the cheapest foreign country doesn't often produce great results. Communication overheard, time-shifting, mismatch of cultural expectations and norms, it introduces a lot of complexity. And sometimes, you just get what you pay for. I work with customers every day that decided to axe their internal IT staffs and outsource it to the big consulting and services firms. It may have made Bill Lumbergh's stock go up a quarter of a point in the short term, but the reduced efficiency, red tape and typically less-than-stellar competence drags on the whole organization.

Clubber 10y ago
You are absolutely right. The people who make those decisions aren't paid for quality, they are paid to cut costs. They will offshore their entire departments, get a huge bonus, then cut and run to do it to the next company before it all comes crashing down. There are success stories, but those success stories of H1B aren't the ones that pay bare minimum. Companies who pay top dollar for H1B get the great ones. The companies who pay bottom dollar get shut down in 5 years. You'd figure after 20+ years of this, executives would learn, but they don't care to. They are incentivized for precisely what they do.
- splintercell 10y ago
  > The people who make those decisions aren't paid for quality, they are paid to cut costs. This exists because not every product carries same gross profit margin. Apple launched iWatch, but it fails miserably, so Apple in an attempt to recuperate some costs, wants to produce the watch cheaply. Enter the people who can produce it cheaply. Of course the quality won't be the same, but apparently there isn't a market for high quality steel smart watches, but for lower quality plasticky smart watches.
  - Clubber 10y ago
    We're talking about labor, specifically programming, not cost of materials.

jordanb 10y ago

Offshoring is currently way cheaper than bringing people onsite, so as it stands now anything that can be offshored is being offshored. If work is being done in America either by a citizen or by a foreign worker it's because the company hasn't figured out how to offshore the work. Actually from what I've seen a lot of the bodyshops use H1B to facilitate outsourcing. They bring in smaller numbers of people on H1Bs to act as go-betweens for the much larger team offshore.