9 ms·

Plan to restrict highly skilled foreign workers could be a boon for India

92 points by stablemap 10y ago

piratebroadcast 10y ago
Ive been concerned about Zuckerberg and Theil using Trump to get their FWD.us thing passed and start importing cheap developers here.
deleted 10y ago
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adventured 10y ago
This premise is a fantasy. The same exact article previously popped up about China. I'm getting the impression it's meant more to be propaganda to preemptively discourage bad policy by pushing the notion that America's tech golden egg could be swiped by competitors. The most likely outcome is the H-1B program is modestly increased when it's revamped, to placate the silicon valley power base that does in fact still have extremely broad, extremely influential reach in DC (the tech industry is now by far the largest lobby group overall, surpassing telecom & defense).
- kevbin 10y ago
  > extremely influential reach in DC Including the Washington Post, aka Jeff's Blog.
- oautholaf 10y ago
  I'd like to believe you, but 'the most likely' outcome has not consistently happened recently. Regardless of lobbying, the incoming administration ran a campaign that was built on anti-immigrant sentiment. Their base wants that. They have to throw their base something. No one in Silicon Valley voted for them or fundraised for them. This could totally happen, and it bothers me as a citizen because a lot of my co workers are on H1-Bs.
  - devnonymous 10y ago
    > No one in Silicon Valley voted for them or fundraised for them. cough Thiel cough
  - ixacto 10y ago
    No one other than Peter thiel. The USA is much more purple than you might imagine. The solution to the H1B fiasco is to let individual companies straight up bid on the 100,000 visas, irreguardless of nationality or occupation and be done with it. Then we could put the money from this into a scholarship fund to pay for US citizens only.
  - kevbin 10y ago
    > No one in Silicon Valley voted for them or fundraised for them. 20% of Santa Clara County voted for Trump. 20% of funds raised in Santa Clara County went to Trump. That's a small fraction by two-party system standards, but it's not no one.
    - DrScump 10y ago
      20% of funds raised in Santa Clara County went to Trump Can you provide your source for this? (Not being snarky -- I have trouble finding that level of detail in terms of residence vs. company HQ)
      - kevbin 10y ago
        From memory. I'm wrong. 20% went to Republicans, not Trump: https://www.opensecrets.org/states/geog.php?cycle=2016&state=CA https://www.opensecrets.org/states/geog.php?cycle=2016&state... Vote % is from the registrar of voters: http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/CA/Santa_Clara/64404/184379/Web01/en/summary.html http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/CA/Santa_Clara/64404... (from https://www.sccgov.org/sites/rov/Pages/Registrar-of-Voters.aspx https://www.sccgov.org/sites/rov/Pages/Registrar-of-Voters.a...)
        DrScump 10y ago
        20% went to Republicans I think that source has issues. The percentages total up to 135% for Santa Clara County. I'm 112% sure that has an error.
- deleted 10y ago
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- guelo 10y ago
  I think people are underestimating how radical the incoming unified Republican government will be. They are very ideological not pragmatic, and they will have almost unrestricted power.
mberning 10y ago
I love the characterization that most if not all of these people are highly skilled and highly prized talents. My experience working with many over the years is quite the opposite. That is not to say that there are not a few good talents here and there, but to say that most of them are good or above average developers would be innacurate. I recently started working on a codebase that was developed by 200 on shore and off shore Indian contractors over the course of a few years. What a disaster. And no engineering disipline whatsoever to mitigate it.
- headcanon 10y ago
  If you had a codebase that was developed over a few years by 200 different remote contractors, thats a recipe for disaster regardless of their nationality.
  - nsgi 10y ago
    Why should it be any more of a disaster than an open source project?
    - devnonymous 10y ago
      I suggest that you (re)read Cathedral and the Bazaar if you really are curious about the difference between a project worked on by 200 odd developers in a company and an open source project. The more we learn the less we know.
    - mistermann 10y ago
      I would wager that open source projects are most likely some of the best run projects in the world.
    - zeroxfe 10y ago
      For one thing, an open source project typically has a stable set of one or more core contributors, who really care about the project.
    - mehwoot 10y ago
Daishiman 10y ago
This is really funny. 15 years ago there were so many engineers and PhD students and candidates who wanted to get a higher education or a work visa to the US, with the mantra of getting the "best and brightest". Nowadays the more sober people that I know shy away from the opportunity, preferring European research institutions and Nordic or Germanic engineering companies, or just staying home in Latin America or Asia given that the wage gap has tightened considerably and the cost of living in desirable American locations has gone up astronomically. It's the sort of thing that panders to the short-term nationalistic tendencies, but the impact will be felt a decade or two from now. Building up and maintaining intellectual prestige takes much more effort than it does to destroy it. Not to mention that there's more eagerness to set up engineering shops outside of the US than ever before.
- branchless 10y ago
  And the thing that destroys the drive to work hard to learn is the part that you allude to in your second paragraph: rentier activity. > the cost of living in desirable American locations has gone up astronomically They financialised housing. It's killing the west. It's creating nothing, it's appropriating wealth. Sad to see that other thread on what people would do if they could afford it. So many cited their mortgage as the blocker. In the same thread some guy cited his 400k annual bonus for high frequency trading.
  - Hondor 10y ago
    Without high prices, how would you keep people out of the most desirable cities? Birthrights? Lottery? Application essays? Immigration restrictions at the city level? Or not keep people out but let them become shanty towns? Rent is a way to select residents according to how much value they can produce by living there. Even though it's wasted money, it's also as very good selection filter.
    - merpnderp 10y ago
      How is it wasted money? The exact thing you're speaking of is the good being bought with that money. It is worth X amount of money to stay in a residence for a month. That is a good which is being sold to the highest bidder. And people buying it are freely trading their money for that good. If we were as a society to take those goods and just give them away, that'd work about as well as toilet paper nationalization in Venezuela.
dirkdk 10y ago
having tougher restrictions for H1B visa's wouldn't be a bad thing. Last few years about 3x as many applications were filed than visas available, with a lottery deciding who would get the H1b visa. I would argue that foreigners that work at a high tech company like Google or Microsoft or Silicon Valley startups add more value than one working at an outsourcing firm that replace americans
- spaceflunky 10y ago
  My problem with whole US H1B system is that there's no shared "opportunity creation." In other words, someone in India has the opportunity to go to school, get a good degree, and then apply to jobs in the US and India. Whereas a US citizen really only has jobs in the US to apply to. An American citizen isn't going to look at jobs in India for many reasons. How is it fair that everyone in the world gets to compete for US jobs, but US citizens only get to compete for US jobs? H1B visas should be limited to the number of reciprocal visas to US citizens.
politician 10y ago
> The visas bring nearly 100,000 “highly skilled” contract workers, mostly in tech and mostly from India, to the United States every year. > The H-1B program provides American companies with cheap, temporary contractors who often work longer hours than Americans and take on the monotonous programming jobs Americans scorn. I don't even know where to start. It's the same paradoxical position that journalists have always taken on the H1-B program: that those granted visas are better, faster, and cheaper than American labor while simultaneously relieving the (implicitly higher-skilled) native workforce of "monotonous" (i.e. low-skill and repetitive) work. So, they're higher skilled yet are put to work on low-skill tasks? This is a fantastical proposition.
- notahacker 10y ago
  It's not exactly a fantastical proposition to argue that joining a large team churning out boilerplate Java for a bigcorp's clunky proprietary payroll system has both a skill requirement and the appearance of being a monotonous gig for the vast majority of Americans actually capable of doing it. I mean, it's probably not wildly exciting for migrant developers either, but they at least get the opportunity to live overseas and an order-of-magnitude payrise.
- deleted 10y ago
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- sean_patel 10y ago
  > So, they're higher skilled yet are put to work on low-skill tasks? This is a fantastical proposition. Correct. And your snarkiness aside, it's true. I have several (Indian) cousins and a couple of uncles / aunties (came as Mainframe / COBOL programmers) who have attested to the same. Even in the Financial Services companies I interned at ( Goldman) and worked at in the past, I've noticed by way of water cooler discussions and whispers that Indian and Chinese H1B works get significantly lower pay -- I'm talking a 30% to 40% lower pay -- than their (mostly white) American counterpart. Many in the exact same Job Title, Role / Grade and Job Description. We also used to offload our Unit Testing and documentation work to these H1B and they did it without complaining. Most of them dream of getting their Green Card and freedom when they can charge Market rate and not be bound to their H1B sponsor / employer.
merpnderp 10y ago
I had a buddy who came up with the perfect solution for h1b visas. Instead of a lottery have the highest paid salaries go first and cap the visas at somewhere around the current average pay for that industry. Fair compromise to both opposing arguments.
- smb06 10y ago
  This would mean no H1B visas for those graduating straight out of college because they would have the least salary. The prepared restriction of $100,000 will do the same because undergrads aren't going to get $100k straight out of college. That in turn is going to mean fewer international students in US universities. If they can't get jobs after spending 4 years and racking up college debt then they aren't going to come. If the best and brightest aren't going to come to the US educational system then the US educational system is going to hurt.
  - merpnderp 10y ago
    Giving that isn't the desired outcome of th h1b program that is fine. It's to bring in labor that isn't being supplied by Americans at a reasonable rate. If we want to rob other countries of their brightest and most talented minds we should create another program just for that. [edit] My personal example of how students are abused under h1b was an old friend contacted me to do some contract dev work. I quoted him the old Buddy price of $50/hour since it was academic stat work and was intellectually stimulating. He balked and said he had only paid his phd post grad student from Vietnam $25/hour to work on it full time. This is a phd holder in computer science making $15/hour while working on additional coursework. Not slavery but not far from it.
    - smb06 10y ago
      So, you support the US education system shutting itself to the best talent from around the world? Because you can rest assured someone with a 4yr college degree isn't getting a $100k job outside California and they won't be coming to the US in that case. Unless you have sat in a classroom and learnt in a multi-cultural environment, you won't appreciate why learning with people from different backgrounds is good for you.
devoply 10y ago
At the end of the day let's think about how highly skilled foreign workers are used. They are brought to the US, given around 40% less, to work jobs that could easily be worked by Americans. This helps the company's bottom line, and that's about it. But if you go and look at the tech companies, they don't really need help with that, many of those hiring the H1Bs have billions of dollars that they are sitting on. They could easily pay for American workers, they just don't want to. In a country of over 300 million people, you don't need more mediocre talent from India to work at 40% below average wage. And India needs its talent as well. It's a backwater country that needs a lot of development. If those developers stay at home, maybe they can help develop the country. It badly needs it. So to sum it up, America does not need more talent, it has plenty of its own in a population of 300 million people. The companies employing these workers are not employing them for their talent, they are employing them for price savings. They could afford to pay more. And Americans need more jobs, as the unemployment rate currently is astronomically high. Indians should stay in India, the country needs it. If these people are so above average, then the companies should be willing to compensate them 40% more for their work. And so create a separate program for that. Which makes companies pay more for highly sought after talent, as compared to the locals. Let's see how they respond then.
- stale2002 10y ago
  OK, fine, how about this. We get rid of ALL limits on visas, as long as they go to people making 100k+ and the company pays a 25k tax to the government. Win-win for the US, right? The problem with the H1B visa is that it is a freaking lottery. We should NOT be assigning these visas randomly. We should be auctioning them to the highest bidder. That would ensure that Americans don't get undercut, and the US gains a shit ton of tax revenue.
  - smb06 10y ago
    This would mean no visas for the international students graduating out of US colleges. Someone with a bachelor degree isn't going to get $100k straight off the bat. That in turn will drive the best and brightest to stay home and not come to the US educational system.
harry8 10y ago
The combined lobbying muscle and money of Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Twitter etc etc will now sing from one song sheet with the goal of making damn, damn sure that there isn't a bidding war for engineers the way there is for investment bankers, lawyers and "senior managers" with MBAs. The Washington Post will support this drive fully, as it always has, the campaign isn't new after all. But now there is a palpable threat the vigour and determination will be increased dramatically. Where are the engineers being paid multi-millions for inventing and building stuff? Never heard of one unless they owned the company. Where are the senior managers, loads of them in every fortune 500 company and beyond.
- DrScump 10y ago
  The Washington Post will support this drive fully, as it always has Even more so from here on, given that Jeff Bezos himself owns it.
- harry8 10y ago
  Y-Combinator is obviously also on that list. From top story to second page in an hour. I do hope that move was organic and not manipulated with privilege...
  - davidw 10y ago
    Probably got flagged by people as politics. Which it is. This topic comes up regularly, and no one convinces anyone. Some people are convinced that they took uuurrr jawwbs, and others are convinced that even immigrants are human beings who ought to have a shot at life in the US if they are willing to work hard.
    - harry8 10y ago
      And most probably have a more nuanced and sophisticated view of the issue beyond such finger painted sketches. It if really is flagged as "politics" that would be a shame and would certainly reflect badly on y-combniator given the founders broadcast of their views on the matter. The whole concept of "flagged as politics" is actually absurd in this forum. I wonder if what you say is true and how one would find out.
elastic_church 10y ago
The US has so many work visa programs, that focusing on the "H1B" variant will be the biggest red herring party pandering possible. They're all ripe for abuse. Now there might be a redeeming quality in creating some kind of patch so that applicants from a signal country can't all apply by January 2nd.
- aub3bhat 10y ago
  Yeah just like the "Chinese Exclusion Act". But maybe not with as overtly racist name this time.
  - mavelikara 10y ago
    If all of EU got counted as a single country for Green Card issuance purposes, the per-country backlogs would have disappeared long ago :-/
davidw 10y ago
On the optimal number of immigrants: http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number-of-immigrants.html http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number...
sremani 10y ago
India has to create 12 million jobs every year. Now, let that sink in first. Offshoring/Outsourcing is basically exporting software services to US and H1-B and L1 play a complementary role at Infosys, TCS, Wipro et al. India not getting US contracts both corporate and government IT would be unmitigated disaster. Yes, the country it self can use some of the Software Engineering talent for creating services both in its government and corporations, but unless there is massive investments in localization of software into indic languages, those services will remain "Colonial" in their character. The lottery system of H1-B has already ensured the ones getting it are just lottery winners with a degree in their hand, nothing more and nothing less. If US can actually ensure the best and bright get H1-B instead of sweatshops like Infosys/TCS/Wipro, that is beneficial. The argument that the current regime of Lottery H1-B is actually bringing the best and brightest from India to US is highly debatable.
dorianm 10y ago
So what is an "highly skilled worker"? How to define someone who adds a lot of value to the country? Personnaly I would rather make this a free market visa where whose who qualify have to have the higher bid to enter the US. As most of the time, high value correlates with high salary.
- yxhuvud 10y ago
  Now that is a weird claim of something being a free market if I ever saw one. Want to make it a free market? Remove the need for a visa. It is as simple as that. Auctioning visas may make it into a market, but don't delude yourself that it would be free.
  - davidw 10y ago
    > Auctioning visas may make it into a market, but don't delude yourself that it would be free. Exactly, because auctioning visas presumes some kind of artificial limit to the number of them, that some politicians pull out of their asses. See elsewhere for my 'optimal number of immigrants' link, which explains this in further detail.
stale2002 10y ago
The problem with the h1b is that it is a lottery. If it was instead auctioned to the highest bidder, then we wouldnt get companies undercutting American jobs. Don't just give the visa to someone randomly. Give it to the company who is willing to pay a 50k tax bill. If the employee is worth it, then they will have no problem paying the bill.
- matt_wulfeck 10y ago
  If it was auctioned to the highest bidder, then only software engineers predominately in Silicon Valley would make up 99% of all visas.
  - stale2002 10y ago
    You are right. That is what would happen. If other companies don't like it, then they should make their salaries competitive.
    - HarryHirsch 10y ago
      But the other salaries are competitive when scaled by cost of living, it's that SV and NYC salaries are so high because there's a housing shortage going on. Also: quality of life, who wants to live in a shoebox in Oakland? People will trade a lower salary for a less insane commute. One theory is that software is concentrated in SV because employee turnover is so fast in that line of work, it's quickest to find a new job in SV as opposed to anywhere else. The dominance of SV is people taking a salary hit to insure against catastrophic outcomes, i.e. running out of savings/unemployment and health insurance. Why not have a commission decide on how big the shortage is and then issue green cards depending on occupation? Whoever wins one can work for whomever is pleases him, instead of being tied to the employer for years and years. Yes, I know it's possible to change jobs, but it's not for those with weak stomachs or dependents.
      - xiaoma 10y ago
        Ebay auctions aren't scaled by cost of living adjustments either. The highest bidder wins. I agree that work permission should be either open or open after the first year, though. It's a huge artificial inefficiency to have talented people stuck in a sub optimal place for years just due to fear of losing residency if they change jobs.
edem 10y ago
I am not representative because I had only 3-4 experiences with developers from India but my two cents include a dev who was not aware how a checkbox works, an app which was written by devs from India and they used a "secret" key for authentication which was part of the application distribution (you could basically use it as-is and bypass authentication), and a PL/SQL backend which contained 3000 liner stored procedures without documentation. Most companies think that programming is like manual labor: you can buy a metric ton of cheap workforce who will get the job done but the reality is much more grim.
1024core 10y ago
A simple solution is to auction off H1-B visas: sort the applications in decreasing order of salary and take the top 65,000. This'll force companies to view H1-Bs as hard-to-find talent, instead of cheap talent as it is currently.
jedberg 10y ago
It seems like it would be so easy to fix the H1B problem. The problem is that the "body shops" just file a ton of applications and then get the number they need because they don't actually care who they get, they just need warm bodies. And then there are the companies that actually need skilled engineers who pay really high salaries, but only apply for the people who they actually want. So make it an auction instead of a lottery. 10,000 visas available this year? Great, the 10,000 highest paid workers get in. Edit: It was pointed out below that this wouldn't be fair to recent college grads, so perhaps it could be split on age or years of experience or something like that. Another solution would be to automatically convert student visas to H1B after they graduate from an accredited institution. You can see how this will help. Check out the data[0]. Wipro, a standard Indian body shop, is paying their H1Bs a median of 69K. Netflix is paying a median of 169K, with about 100 jobs over 200K (and a few above 500K). Google and Microsoft are a little lower than Netflix. [0] http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=wipro&job=&city=&year=All+Years http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=wipro&job=&city=&year=All+Y...
santoriv 10y ago
My brother-in-law (who is from Delhi) had a friend from who went to Brown and had troubles with his H1-B after he graduated. He went back to India and created a healthcare startup which now has nearly 100 employees. If the US was operating in its best interest, it would try to keep the people it trains in the country. No country has a monopoly on intelligence and eventually many countries will catch up to the US. It seems to me that a good way to accelerate the process would be to kick all of the H1-B folks out.
- vinay427 10y ago
  Assuming the student did not receive notable government scholarships to study in the US, it wasn't exactly the US training him but his spending his own money to be trained. This is not the case, of course, for funded PhD graduates, etc.
uiri 10y ago
The text of the bill presented in the previous session of congress may be found here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/5801/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/5801... The actual text of the bill only effects employers whose workforce is at least 15% H-1Bs (higher thresholds exist for employers with 50 or less employees). The Attorney General can prevent an employer from petitioning for any alien (H-1B, L-1, nonimmigrant, immigrant, etc.) for a period of 1, 2 or 3 years (depending on willfulness and similar criteria) if it is found that a non-exempt H-1B displaced an American worker. The current definition of exempt H-1B is: $60k salary OR a Masters degree. The new definition of exempt H-1B will be: $100k salary. The relevant statutes are here: http://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=%28title:8%20section:1182%20edition:prelim%29 http://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=%28title:8%20section:... The bill modifies (n)(3)(B). The 15% and other thresholds are in (n)(3)(A). The sanctions the Attorney General may impose are described in (n)(2)(E). Random inspections by the Secretary of Labor are described in (n)(2)(F). The 1-3 years are defined in (n)(2)(C)(i)(III), (n)(2)(C)(ii)(II), and (n)(2)(C)(iii)(II) which (n)(2)(E) refers to.
jstewartmobile 10y ago
I'm suspicious of anything coming from the WP given that Bezos owns it. For people who really are the best and brightest, wouldn't they already be eligible for an O-1 or EB-1? Primary use of H1-B I see here in Central time is for people without leverage who can be pushed around. I've known smart guys and dumb guys working here on that visa, and they both have some asshole dangling that visa over their heads. If we really need these people, we should be giving them citizenship.
- mavelikara 10y ago
  > For people who really are the best and brightest, wouldn't they already be eligible for an O-1 or EB-1? No, many of the best and brightest programmers won't qualify for EB-1 or O-1 visas. To understand why, please look up the requirements for these visas and judge how many of the best and brightest of American programmers you know "in Central time" would qualify. > If we really need these people, we should be giving them citizenship. Or at least a green card.
cylinder 10y ago
There's no requirement that H1B beneficiaries be "highly skilled."

92 points by stablemap 10y ago

Ive been concerned about Zuckerberg and Theil using Trump to get their FWD.us thing passed and start importing cheap developers here.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

adventured 10y ago

This premise is a fantasy. The same exact article previously popped up about China. I'm getting the impression it's meant more to be propaganda to preemptively discourage bad policy by pushing the notion that America's tech golden egg could be swiped by competitors. The most likely outcome is the H-1B program is modestly increased when it's revamped, to placate the silicon valley power base that does in fact still have extremely broad, extremely influential reach in DC (the tech industry is now by far the largest lobby group overall, surpassing telecom & defense).

kevbin 10y ago
> extremely influential reach in DC Including the Washington Post, aka Jeff's Blog.
oautholaf 10y ago
I'd like to believe you, but 'the most likely' outcome has not consistently happened recently. Regardless of lobbying, the incoming administration ran a campaign that was built on anti-immigrant sentiment. Their base wants that. They have to throw their base something. No one in Silicon Valley voted for them or fundraised for them. This could totally happen, and it bothers me as a citizen because a lot of my co workers are on H1-Bs.
- devnonymous 10y ago
  > No one in Silicon Valley voted for them or fundraised for them. cough Thiel cough
- ixacto 10y ago
  No one other than Peter thiel. The USA is much more purple than you might imagine. The solution to the H1B fiasco is to let individual companies straight up bid on the 100,000 visas, irreguardless of nationality or occupation and be done with it. Then we could put the money from this into a scholarship fund to pay for US citizens only.
- kevbin 10y ago
  > No one in Silicon Valley voted for them or fundraised for them. 20% of Santa Clara County voted for Trump. 20% of funds raised in Santa Clara County went to Trump. That's a small fraction by two-party system standards, but it's not no one.
  - DrScump 10y ago
    20% of funds raised in Santa Clara County went to Trump Can you provide your source for this? (Not being snarky -- I have trouble finding that level of detail in terms of residence vs. company HQ)
    - kevbin 10y ago
      From memory. I'm wrong. 20% went to Republicans, not Trump: https://www.opensecrets.org/states/geog.php?cycle=2016&state=CA https://www.opensecrets.org/states/geog.php?cycle=2016&state... Vote % is from the registrar of voters: http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/CA/Santa_Clara/64404/184379/Web01/en/summary.html http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/CA/Santa_Clara/64404... (from https://www.sccgov.org/sites/rov/Pages/Registrar-of-Voters.aspx https://www.sccgov.org/sites/rov/Pages/Registrar-of-Voters.a...)
      - DrScump 10y ago
        20% went to Republicans I think that source has issues. The percentages total up to 135% for Santa Clara County. I'm 112% sure that has an error.
deleted 10y ago
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guelo 10y ago
I think people are underestimating how radical the incoming unified Republican government will be. They are very ideological not pragmatic, and they will have almost unrestricted power.

mberning 10y ago

I love the characterization that most if not all of these people are highly skilled and highly prized talents. My experience working with many over the years is quite the opposite. That is not to say that there are not a few good talents here and there, but to say that most of them are good or above average developers would be innacurate. I recently started working on a codebase that was developed by 200 on shore and off shore Indian contractors over the course of a few years. What a disaster. And no engineering disipline whatsoever to mitigate it.

headcanon 10y ago
If you had a codebase that was developed over a few years by 200 different remote contractors, thats a recipe for disaster regardless of their nationality.
- nsgi 10y ago
  Why should it be any more of a disaster than an open source project?
  - devnonymous 10y ago
    I suggest that you (re)read Cathedral and the Bazaar if you really are curious about the difference between a project worked on by 200 odd developers in a company and an open source project. The more we learn the less we know.
  - mistermann 10y ago
    I would wager that open source projects are most likely some of the best run projects in the world.
  - zeroxfe 10y ago
    For one thing, an open source project typically has a stable set of one or more core contributors, who really care about the project.
  - mehwoot 10y ago

Daishiman 10y ago

This is really funny. 15 years ago there were so many engineers and PhD students and candidates who wanted to get a higher education or a work visa to the US, with the mantra of getting the "best and brightest". Nowadays the more sober people that I know shy away from the opportunity, preferring European research institutions and Nordic or Germanic engineering companies, or just staying home in Latin America or Asia given that the wage gap has tightened considerably and the cost of living in desirable American locations has gone up astronomically. It's the sort of thing that panders to the short-term nationalistic tendencies, but the impact will be felt a decade or two from now. Building up and maintaining intellectual prestige takes much more effort than it does to destroy it. Not to mention that there's more eagerness to set up engineering shops outside of the US than ever before.

branchless 10y ago
And the thing that destroys the drive to work hard to learn is the part that you allude to in your second paragraph: rentier activity. > the cost of living in desirable American locations has gone up astronomically They financialised housing. It's killing the west. It's creating nothing, it's appropriating wealth. Sad to see that other thread on what people would do if they could afford it. So many cited their mortgage as the blocker. In the same thread some guy cited his 400k annual bonus for high frequency trading.
- Hondor 10y ago
  Without high prices, how would you keep people out of the most desirable cities? Birthrights? Lottery? Application essays? Immigration restrictions at the city level? Or not keep people out but let them become shanty towns? Rent is a way to select residents according to how much value they can produce by living there. Even though it's wasted money, it's also as very good selection filter.
  - merpnderp 10y ago
    How is it wasted money? The exact thing you're speaking of is the good being bought with that money. It is worth X amount of money to stay in a residence for a month. That is a good which is being sold to the highest bidder. And people buying it are freely trading their money for that good. If we were as a society to take those goods and just give them away, that'd work about as well as toilet paper nationalization in Venezuela.

dirkdk 10y ago

having tougher restrictions for H1B visa's wouldn't be a bad thing. Last few years about 3x as many applications were filed than visas available, with a lottery deciding who would get the H1b visa. I would argue that foreigners that work at a high tech company like Google or Microsoft or Silicon Valley startups add more value than one working at an outsourcing firm that replace americans

spaceflunky 10y ago
My problem with whole US H1B system is that there's no shared "opportunity creation." In other words, someone in India has the opportunity to go to school, get a good degree, and then apply to jobs in the US and India. Whereas a US citizen really only has jobs in the US to apply to. An American citizen isn't going to look at jobs in India for many reasons. How is it fair that everyone in the world gets to compete for US jobs, but US citizens only get to compete for US jobs? H1B visas should be limited to the number of reciprocal visas to US citizens.

politician 10y ago

> The visas bring nearly 100,000 “highly skilled” contract workers, mostly in tech and mostly from India, to the United States every year. > The H-1B program provides American companies with cheap, temporary contractors who often work longer hours than Americans and take on the monotonous programming jobs Americans scorn. I don't even know where to start. It's the same paradoxical position that journalists have always taken on the H1-B program: that those granted visas are better, faster, and cheaper than American labor while simultaneously relieving the (implicitly higher-skilled) native workforce of "monotonous" (i.e. low-skill and repetitive) work. So, they're higher skilled yet are put to work on low-skill tasks? This is a fantastical proposition.

notahacker 10y ago
It's not exactly a fantastical proposition to argue that joining a large team churning out boilerplate Java for a bigcorp's clunky proprietary payroll system has both a skill requirement and the appearance of being a monotonous gig for the vast majority of Americans actually capable of doing it. I mean, it's probably not wildly exciting for migrant developers either, but they at least get the opportunity to live overseas and an order-of-magnitude payrise.
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sean_patel 10y ago
> So, they're higher skilled yet are put to work on low-skill tasks? This is a fantastical proposition. Correct. And your snarkiness aside, it's true. I have several (Indian) cousins and a couple of uncles / aunties (came as Mainframe / COBOL programmers) who have attested to the same. Even in the Financial Services companies I interned at ( Goldman) and worked at in the past, I've noticed by way of water cooler discussions and whispers that Indian and Chinese H1B works get significantly lower pay -- I'm talking a 30% to 40% lower pay -- than their (mostly white) American counterpart. Many in the exact same Job Title, Role / Grade and Job Description. We also used to offload our Unit Testing and documentation work to these H1B and they did it without complaining. Most of them dream of getting their Green Card and freedom when they can charge Market rate and not be bound to their H1B sponsor / employer.

merpnderp 10y ago

I had a buddy who came up with the perfect solution for h1b visas. Instead of a lottery have the highest paid salaries go first and cap the visas at somewhere around the current average pay for that industry. Fair compromise to both opposing arguments.

smb06 10y ago
This would mean no H1B visas for those graduating straight out of college because they would have the least salary. The prepared restriction of $100,000 will do the same because undergrads aren't going to get $100k straight out of college. That in turn is going to mean fewer international students in US universities. If they can't get jobs after spending 4 years and racking up college debt then they aren't going to come. If the best and brightest aren't going to come to the US educational system then the US educational system is going to hurt.
- merpnderp 10y ago
  Giving that isn't the desired outcome of th h1b program that is fine. It's to bring in labor that isn't being supplied by Americans at a reasonable rate. If we want to rob other countries of their brightest and most talented minds we should create another program just for that. [edit] My personal example of how students are abused under h1b was an old friend contacted me to do some contract dev work. I quoted him the old Buddy price of $50/hour since it was academic stat work and was intellectually stimulating. He balked and said he had only paid his phd post grad student from Vietnam $25/hour to work on it full time. This is a phd holder in computer science making $15/hour while working on additional coursework. Not slavery but not far from it.
  - smb06 10y ago
    So, you support the US education system shutting itself to the best talent from around the world? Because you can rest assured someone with a 4yr college degree isn't getting a $100k job outside California and they won't be coming to the US in that case. Unless you have sat in a classroom and learnt in a multi-cultural environment, you won't appreciate why learning with people from different backgrounds is good for you.

devoply 10y ago

At the end of the day let's think about how highly skilled foreign workers are used. They are brought to the US, given around 40% less, to work jobs that could easily be worked by Americans. This helps the company's bottom line, and that's about it. But if you go and look at the tech companies, they don't really need help with that, many of those hiring the H1Bs have billions of dollars that they are sitting on. They could easily pay for American workers, they just don't want to. In a country of over 300 million people, you don't need more mediocre talent from India to work at 40% below average wage. And India needs its talent as well. It's a backwater country that needs a lot of development. If those developers stay at home, maybe they can help develop the country. It badly needs it. So to sum it up, America does not need more talent, it has plenty of its own in a population of 300 million people. The companies employing these workers are not employing them for their talent, they are employing them for price savings. They could afford to pay more. And Americans need more jobs, as the unemployment rate currently is astronomically high. Indians should stay in India, the country needs it. If these people are so above average, then the companies should be willing to compensate them 40% more for their work. And so create a separate program for that. Which makes companies pay more for highly sought after talent, as compared to the locals. Let's see how they respond then.

stale2002 10y ago
OK, fine, how about this. We get rid of ALL limits on visas, as long as they go to people making 100k+ and the company pays a 25k tax to the government. Win-win for the US, right? The problem with the H1B visa is that it is a freaking lottery. We should NOT be assigning these visas randomly. We should be auctioning them to the highest bidder. That would ensure that Americans don't get undercut, and the US gains a shit ton of tax revenue.
- smb06 10y ago
  This would mean no visas for the international students graduating out of US colleges. Someone with a bachelor degree isn't going to get $100k straight off the bat. That in turn will drive the best and brightest to stay home and not come to the US educational system.

harry8 10y ago

The combined lobbying muscle and money of Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Twitter etc etc will now sing from one song sheet with the goal of making damn, damn sure that there isn't a bidding war for engineers the way there is for investment bankers, lawyers and "senior managers" with MBAs. The Washington Post will support this drive fully, as it always has, the campaign isn't new after all. But now there is a palpable threat the vigour and determination will be increased dramatically. Where are the engineers being paid multi-millions for inventing and building stuff? Never heard of one unless they owned the company. Where are the senior managers, loads of them in every fortune 500 company and beyond.

DrScump 10y ago
The Washington Post will support this drive fully, as it always has Even more so from here on, given that Jeff Bezos himself owns it.
harry8 10y ago
Y-Combinator is obviously also on that list. From top story to second page in an hour. I do hope that move was organic and not manipulated with privilege...
- davidw 10y ago
  Probably got flagged by people as politics. Which it is. This topic comes up regularly, and no one convinces anyone. Some people are convinced that they took uuurrr jawwbs, and others are convinced that even immigrants are human beings who ought to have a shot at life in the US if they are willing to work hard.
  - harry8 10y ago
    And most probably have a more nuanced and sophisticated view of the issue beyond such finger painted sketches. It if really is flagged as "politics" that would be a shame and would certainly reflect badly on y-combniator given the founders broadcast of their views on the matter. The whole concept of "flagged as politics" is actually absurd in this forum. I wonder if what you say is true and how one would find out.

elastic_church 10y ago

The US has so many work visa programs, that focusing on the "H1B" variant will be the biggest red herring party pandering possible. They're all ripe for abuse. Now there might be a redeeming quality in creating some kind of patch so that applicants from a signal country can't all apply by January 2nd.

aub3bhat 10y ago
Yeah just like the "Chinese Exclusion Act". But maybe not with as overtly racist name this time.
- mavelikara 10y ago
  If all of EU got counted as a single country for Green Card issuance purposes, the per-country backlogs would have disappeared long ago :-/

davidw 10y ago

On the optimal number of immigrants: http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number-of-immigrants.html http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number...

sremani 10y ago

India has to create 12 million jobs every year. Now, let that sink in first. Offshoring/Outsourcing is basically exporting software services to US and H1-B and L1 play a complementary role at Infosys, TCS, Wipro et al. India not getting US contracts both corporate and government IT would be unmitigated disaster. Yes, the country it self can use some of the Software Engineering talent for creating services both in its government and corporations, but unless there is massive investments in localization of software into indic languages, those services will remain "Colonial" in their character. The lottery system of H1-B has already ensured the ones getting it are just lottery winners with a degree in their hand, nothing more and nothing less. If US can actually ensure the best and bright get H1-B instead of sweatshops like Infosys/TCS/Wipro, that is beneficial. The argument that the current regime of Lottery H1-B is actually bringing the best and brightest from India to US is highly debatable.

dorianm 10y ago

So what is an "highly skilled worker"? How to define someone who adds a lot of value to the country? Personnaly I would rather make this a free market visa where whose who qualify have to have the higher bid to enter the US. As most of the time, high value correlates with high salary.

yxhuvud 10y ago
Now that is a weird claim of something being a free market if I ever saw one. Want to make it a free market? Remove the need for a visa. It is as simple as that. Auctioning visas may make it into a market, but don't delude yourself that it would be free.
- davidw 10y ago
  > Auctioning visas may make it into a market, but don't delude yourself that it would be free. Exactly, because auctioning visas presumes some kind of artificial limit to the number of them, that some politicians pull out of their asses. See elsewhere for my 'optimal number of immigrants' link, which explains this in further detail.

stale2002 10y ago

The problem with the h1b is that it is a lottery. If it was instead auctioned to the highest bidder, then we wouldnt get companies undercutting American jobs. Don't just give the visa to someone randomly. Give it to the company who is willing to pay a 50k tax bill. If the employee is worth it, then they will have no problem paying the bill.

matt_wulfeck 10y ago
If it was auctioned to the highest bidder, then only software engineers predominately in Silicon Valley would make up 99% of all visas.
- stale2002 10y ago
  You are right. That is what would happen. If other companies don't like it, then they should make their salaries competitive.
  - HarryHirsch 10y ago
    But the other salaries are competitive when scaled by cost of living, it's that SV and NYC salaries are so high because there's a housing shortage going on. Also: quality of life, who wants to live in a shoebox in Oakland? People will trade a lower salary for a less insane commute. One theory is that software is concentrated in SV because employee turnover is so fast in that line of work, it's quickest to find a new job in SV as opposed to anywhere else. The dominance of SV is people taking a salary hit to insure against catastrophic outcomes, i.e. running out of savings/unemployment and health insurance. Why not have a commission decide on how big the shortage is and then issue green cards depending on occupation? Whoever wins one can work for whomever is pleases him, instead of being tied to the employer for years and years. Yes, I know it's possible to change jobs, but it's not for those with weak stomachs or dependents.
    - xiaoma 10y ago
      Ebay auctions aren't scaled by cost of living adjustments either. The highest bidder wins. I agree that work permission should be either open or open after the first year, though. It's a huge artificial inefficiency to have talented people stuck in a sub optimal place for years just due to fear of losing residency if they change jobs.

edem 10y ago

I am not representative because I had only 3-4 experiences with developers from India but my two cents include a dev who was not aware how a checkbox works, an app which was written by devs from India and they used a "secret" key for authentication which was part of the application distribution (you could basically use it as-is and bypass authentication), and a PL/SQL backend which contained 3000 liner stored procedures without documentation. Most companies think that programming is like manual labor: you can buy a metric ton of cheap workforce who will get the job done but the reality is much more grim.

1024core 10y ago

A simple solution is to auction off H1-B visas: sort the applications in decreasing order of salary and take the top 65,000. This'll force companies to view H1-Bs as hard-to-find talent, instead of cheap talent as it is currently.

jedberg 10y ago

It seems like it would be so easy to fix the H1B problem. The problem is that the "body shops" just file a ton of applications and then get the number they need because they don't actually care who they get, they just need warm bodies. And then there are the companies that actually need skilled engineers who pay really high salaries, but only apply for the people who they actually want. So make it an auction instead of a lottery. 10,000 visas available this year? Great, the 10,000 highest paid workers get in. Edit: It was pointed out below that this wouldn't be fair to recent college grads, so perhaps it could be split on age or years of experience or something like that. Another solution would be to automatically convert student visas to H1B after they graduate from an accredited institution. You can see how this will help. Check out the data[0]. Wipro, a standard Indian body shop, is paying their H1Bs a median of 69K. Netflix is paying a median of 169K, with about 100 jobs over 200K (and a few above 500K). Google and Microsoft are a little lower than Netflix. [0] http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=wipro&job=&city=&year=All+Years http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=wipro&job=&city=&year=All+Y...

santoriv 10y ago

My brother-in-law (who is from Delhi) had a friend from who went to Brown and had troubles with his H1-B after he graduated. He went back to India and created a healthcare startup which now has nearly 100 employees. If the US was operating in its best interest, it would try to keep the people it trains in the country. No country has a monopoly on intelligence and eventually many countries will catch up to the US. It seems to me that a good way to accelerate the process would be to kick all of the H1-B folks out.

vinay427 10y ago
Assuming the student did not receive notable government scholarships to study in the US, it wasn't exactly the US training him but his spending his own money to be trained. This is not the case, of course, for funded PhD graduates, etc.

uiri 10y ago

The text of the bill presented in the previous session of congress may be found here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/5801/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/5801... The actual text of the bill only effects employers whose workforce is at least 15% H-1Bs (higher thresholds exist for employers with 50 or less employees). The Attorney General can prevent an employer from petitioning for any alien (H-1B, L-1, nonimmigrant, immigrant, etc.) for a period of 1, 2 or 3 years (depending on willfulness and similar criteria) if it is found that a non-exempt H-1B displaced an American worker. The current definition of exempt H-1B is: $60k salary OR a Masters degree. The new definition of exempt H-1B will be: $100k salary. The relevant statutes are here: http://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=%28title:8%20section:1182%20edition:prelim%29 http://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=%28title:8%20section:... The bill modifies (n)(3)(B). The 15% and other thresholds are in (n)(3)(A). The sanctions the Attorney General may impose are described in (n)(2)(E). Random inspections by the Secretary of Labor are described in (n)(2)(F). The 1-3 years are defined in (n)(2)(C)(i)(III), (n)(2)(C)(ii)(II), and (n)(2)(C)(iii)(II) which (n)(2)(E) refers to.

jstewartmobile 10y ago

I'm suspicious of anything coming from the WP given that Bezos owns it. For people who really are the best and brightest, wouldn't they already be eligible for an O-1 or EB-1? Primary use of H1-B I see here in Central time is for people without leverage who can be pushed around. I've known smart guys and dumb guys working here on that visa, and they both have some asshole dangling that visa over their heads. If we really need these people, we should be giving them citizenship.

mavelikara 10y ago
> For people who really are the best and brightest, wouldn't they already be eligible for an O-1 or EB-1? No, many of the best and brightest programmers won't qualify for EB-1 or O-1 visas. To understand why, please look up the requirements for these visas and judge how many of the best and brightest of American programmers you know "in Central time" would qualify. > If we really need these people, we should be giving them citizenship. Or at least a green card.

cylinder 10y ago

There's no requirement that H1B beneficiaries be "highly skilled."