6 ms·

Thing is that the whole of US isn't Silicon Valley or Seattle. Startups in upcoming hubs like Portland and Boulder will suffer(sic) because the salary requireme

by pkd 10y ago

Thing is that the whole of US isn't Silicon Valley or Seattle. Startups in upcoming hubs like Portland and Boulder will suffer(sic) because the salary requirements are too high for them to satisfy given the living costs. It basically means that the only companies who are gonna be able to hire through H1Bs are the big cos or unicorns.

scarface74 10y ago
Companies may have to do something unimaginable and invest in their employees who may not have the exact skill set they need and offer them training or give them time to ramp up....
- angry_octet 10y ago
  And yet that delay is antithetical to starting to work in a new area, innovating rapidly, etc. The ability to attract and retain employees from anywhere around the world is a massive advantage, and this sounds like a disincentive program. I agree with you that training is part of the solution, but for niche applications that can be pretty hard, you're talking people who have studied for years. So if you are doing work like that, why wouldn't you set up in a country without such restrictions? E.g. Vancouver. How about caps on the percentage of H1Bs/L1s in any company (e.g. 15%), and the ability for H1B workers to transfer employers?
  - scarface74 10y ago
    "but for niche applications that can be pretty hard, you're talking people who have studied for years." How many people that have studied for years to become experts at niche applications are being paid only $60,000 a year - the current minimum for H1B Visas? I would think that getting such an expert is well worth $130,000 a year.
    - angry_octet 10y ago
      Agree that 60k is too low. But 130k is too high. Consider someone who has just finished their PhD in a relevant area. You want to employ them in your startup in e.g. Orlando, where the cost of living is much lower than SF. Maybe 80k is reasonable. But you'll have to pay a 50k premium. Or you could set up an office in Montreal. And then your tech team will come to Florida for a 3 month code camp every December anyway...
      - frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
        >Consider someone who has just finished their PhD in a relevant area. If they're hiring fresh grads, it should be an American. There's plenty of them.
        angry_octet 10y ago
        No, not a generic PhD to go be sausage meat at some consultancy factory. Someone with specific skills. Who happens not to be American. There's probably one of them.
        readhn 10y ago
        There are not. By the time you graduate with a masters or PhD you often accomplish a body of research work in a SPECIFIC field, have publications, patents. So yes you are a "fresh" grad but with 5-10 published scientific papers to your name. High tech scientific companies often don't have a luxury of choosing between multiple qualified candidates. Often you have 1-2 qualified applicants ( which takes a long time to find) who are a good fit and often they have foreign backgrounds. Why? I don't know, may be it has something to do with poor American education system? Which noone is interested in fixing it seems.
        frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
        If they're this incredibly rare then I don't see why paying them 130k is a big deal.
      - stonemetal 10y ago
- solatic 10y ago
  Only works if you have enforceable non-compete contracts to prevent your workers from leaving after you trained them, since most employers will pay a premium to get workers who are already trained and the original employer will pretty much never give salary bumps that high year-over-year since it would quickly bankrupt them. Non-compete clauses are unenforceable in California exactly because it's desirable in a macroeconomic sense for employees to spread their skills throughout all the businesses in the economic cluster by osmosis. Bringing back non-competes to deal with a lack of talent (especially when that talent exists, it's just abroad) is regressive. Companies are just going to focus on remote-only work cultures until Trump forbids outsourcing work overseas altogether.
  - scarface74 10y ago
    <blockquote> Only works if you have enforceable non-compete contracts to prevent your workers from leaving after you trained them, since most employers will pay a premium to get workers who are already trained and the original employer will pretty much never give salary bumps that high year-over-year since it would quickly bankrupt them. </blockquote> If an employer won't pay an employee based on market rates, when that employee leaves, they are going to have to pay the next employee they get to replace them at least market rate anyway and on top of that probably 30% more for a recruiters fee, plus the loss productivity while they are looking for a replacement, plus they are losing a person with knowledge of the company. I read something somewhere. A software dev manager asked his manager for a training budget for his employees. His manager asked him, what if we spend the money on training and they leave? The software dev manager asked his manager, what if we don't train them and they stay?
hocuspocus 10y ago
You're absolutely right, and I've said it myself in the past, this heavily favors one kind of companies in a few high CoL areas. You're better off selling ads than trying to cure cancer or solve the energy crisis, and sadly that's not only true when hiring foreign talent.
- pc86 10y ago
  Nobody is solving the energy crisis by writing a React CRUD app.
  - Gigablah 10y ago
    Well, I'm fairly sure even Tesla needs CRUD apps.
mnglkhn2 10y ago
Your assumption is that the startup will have a chance of growing only if it has access to H1B. Why would local talent not be enough for that startup?
- pkd 10y ago
  That is not my assumption at all. It is about casting a wider net. In an ideal world, the talent a company needs is available instantly and locally. But the world isn't ideal. Sometimes the talent is available instantly but not locally. Startups can't afford to train and develop developers as much as big companies can. It is in the interest of the startups to hire quickly and to hire as close to the profile they want to hire. Not being able to do that might stall progress at the desired pace.
  - BuckRogers 10y ago
    That applies to any industry. Might need a specific lawyer today, why not get one from India? Might need another specific doctor, again, why not China? There's a wide enough net in the USA, which is not a small country. It just costs money in wages or time in training. If we did what you're suggesting with everything, we'd have more buoys of the American middle class collapsing other than just tech.
  - HeroOfAges 10y ago
    I've been working for big companies (Fortune 100) exclusively as a contractor for the last four years. The unspoken expectation has been for me to be able to do the job well enough to produce production quality code without training.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    >In an ideal world, the talent a company needs is available instantly and locally. But the world isn't ideal. Sometimes the talent is available instantly but not locally. That's a utopia for employers, but it's a dystopia for workers.
LordKano 10y ago
It basically means that the only companies who are gonna be able to hire through H1Bs are the big cos or unicorns. It also means that there is an economic incentive at all levels to consider hiring Americans first. Which is the point.
- readhn 10y ago
  Have you seen the article where Siemens tried hiring people for the new factory...and the majority of American people who showed up to apply couldn't even pass school level tests...? Educational system in usa is broken. THAT should be number one item to address for this administration. Instead they are playing smoke and mirrors game worth us diverting our attention from the real issues. P.s. it is convenient to have poorly educated constituents - they are much easier to brain wash and control. So chances are education system will not be fixed any time soon.
  - LordKano 10y ago
    Yes I saw that. I also saw the part where more people passed the basic test than there were available positions. No matter how good our educational system is, there will be people in the left tail of the Bell curve.
  - cobookman 10y ago
    > Have you seen the article where Siemens tried hiring people for the new factory...and the majority of American people who showed up to apply couldn't even pass school level tests...? Could of have also been Siemens trying to game the system. Oh look nobody local passed this test we gotta hire foreign workers who work for less money and avoid unions....then they fail to give the test to their foreign workers who might also fail the test.
  - owenmarshall 10y ago
    > Have you seen the article where Siemens tried hiring people for the new factory...and the majority of American people who showed up to apply couldn't even pass school level tests...? So Siemens was forced to hire H1-B workers, but if this bill passed they couldn't because of a $130K premium? Oh, I see, you're conflating manual labor with highly skilled technical work and hoping no one will notice because you wave your hands and shout "the educational system, man, it's broken!"
mustacheemperor 10y ago
Started a company in a college town on the east coast with far lower cost of living than the valley. The existing financial H1B requirements and recently the promises of the new administration made it financially unfeasible to even be able to consider hiring the international students working with us after they graduated. Really unfortunate because they were extremely talented employees and not easily replaced here.
Eridrus 10y ago
Startups in Portland, etc, are trying to arbitrage their low cost of living, which is great, but the fact that the companies in SF, etc can pay more shows that they're providing a greater economic benefit and should probably get the.immigrants that can justify such a salary.
ksherlock 10y ago
For some reason, people like to ignore the 25,000 infosys H1Bs to talk about a hypothetical startup H1B. Can you please name one of those Boulder or Portland startups? Maybe point me to the "who is hiring" post where they are trying to pay the required wage but nobody wants to work for them?

by pkd 10y ago

scarface74 10y ago

Companies may have to do something unimaginable and invest in their employees who may not have the exact skill set they need and offer them training or give them time to ramp up....

angry_octet 10y ago
And yet that delay is antithetical to starting to work in a new area, innovating rapidly, etc. The ability to attract and retain employees from anywhere around the world is a massive advantage, and this sounds like a disincentive program. I agree with you that training is part of the solution, but for niche applications that can be pretty hard, you're talking people who have studied for years. So if you are doing work like that, why wouldn't you set up in a country without such restrictions? E.g. Vancouver. How about caps on the percentage of H1Bs/L1s in any company (e.g. 15%), and the ability for H1B workers to transfer employers?
- scarface74 10y ago
  "but for niche applications that can be pretty hard, you're talking people who have studied for years." How many people that have studied for years to become experts at niche applications are being paid only $60,000 a year - the current minimum for H1B Visas? I would think that getting such an expert is well worth $130,000 a year.
  - angry_octet 10y ago
    Agree that 60k is too low. But 130k is too high. Consider someone who has just finished their PhD in a relevant area. You want to employ them in your startup in e.g. Orlando, where the cost of living is much lower than SF. Maybe 80k is reasonable. But you'll have to pay a 50k premium. Or you could set up an office in Montreal. And then your tech team will come to Florida for a 3 month code camp every December anyway...
    - frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
      >Consider someone who has just finished their PhD in a relevant area. If they're hiring fresh grads, it should be an American. There's plenty of them.
      - angry_octet 10y ago
        No, not a generic PhD to go be sausage meat at some consultancy factory. Someone with specific skills. Who happens not to be American. There's probably one of them.
      - readhn 10y ago
        There are not. By the time you graduate with a masters or PhD you often accomplish a body of research work in a SPECIFIC field, have publications, patents. So yes you are a "fresh" grad but with 5-10 published scientific papers to your name. High tech scientific companies often don't have a luxury of choosing between multiple qualified candidates. Often you have 1-2 qualified applicants ( which takes a long time to find) who are a good fit and often they have foreign backgrounds. Why? I don't know, may be it has something to do with poor American education system? Which noone is interested in fixing it seems.
        frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
        If they're this incredibly rare then I don't see why paying them 130k is a big deal.
    - stonemetal 10y ago
solatic 10y ago
Only works if you have enforceable non-compete contracts to prevent your workers from leaving after you trained them, since most employers will pay a premium to get workers who are already trained and the original employer will pretty much never give salary bumps that high year-over-year since it would quickly bankrupt them. Non-compete clauses are unenforceable in California exactly because it's desirable in a macroeconomic sense for employees to spread their skills throughout all the businesses in the economic cluster by osmosis. Bringing back non-competes to deal with a lack of talent (especially when that talent exists, it's just abroad) is regressive. Companies are just going to focus on remote-only work cultures until Trump forbids outsourcing work overseas altogether.
- scarface74 10y ago
  <blockquote> Only works if you have enforceable non-compete contracts to prevent your workers from leaving after you trained them, since most employers will pay a premium to get workers who are already trained and the original employer will pretty much never give salary bumps that high year-over-year since it would quickly bankrupt them. </blockquote> If an employer won't pay an employee based on market rates, when that employee leaves, they are going to have to pay the next employee they get to replace them at least market rate anyway and on top of that probably 30% more for a recruiters fee, plus the loss productivity while they are looking for a replacement, plus they are losing a person with knowledge of the company. I read something somewhere. A software dev manager asked his manager for a training budget for his employees. His manager asked him, what if we spend the money on training and they leave? The software dev manager asked his manager, what if we don't train them and they stay?

hocuspocus 10y ago

You're absolutely right, and I've said it myself in the past, this heavily favors one kind of companies in a few high CoL areas. You're better off selling ads than trying to cure cancer or solve the energy crisis, and sadly that's not only true when hiring foreign talent.

pc86 10y ago
Nobody is solving the energy crisis by writing a React CRUD app.
- Gigablah 10y ago
  Well, I'm fairly sure even Tesla needs CRUD apps.

mnglkhn2 10y ago

Your assumption is that the startup will have a chance of growing only if it has access to H1B. Why would local talent not be enough for that startup?

pkd 10y ago
That is not my assumption at all. It is about casting a wider net. In an ideal world, the talent a company needs is available instantly and locally. But the world isn't ideal. Sometimes the talent is available instantly but not locally. Startups can't afford to train and develop developers as much as big companies can. It is in the interest of the startups to hire quickly and to hire as close to the profile they want to hire. Not being able to do that might stall progress at the desired pace.
- BuckRogers 10y ago
  That applies to any industry. Might need a specific lawyer today, why not get one from India? Might need another specific doctor, again, why not China? There's a wide enough net in the USA, which is not a small country. It just costs money in wages or time in training. If we did what you're suggesting with everything, we'd have more buoys of the American middle class collapsing other than just tech.
- HeroOfAges 10y ago
  I've been working for big companies (Fortune 100) exclusively as a contractor for the last four years. The unspoken expectation has been for me to be able to do the job well enough to produce production quality code without training.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  >In an ideal world, the talent a company needs is available instantly and locally. But the world isn't ideal. Sometimes the talent is available instantly but not locally. That's a utopia for employers, but it's a dystopia for workers.

LordKano 10y ago

It basically means that the only companies who are gonna be able to hire through H1Bs are the big cos or unicorns. It also means that there is an economic incentive at all levels to consider hiring Americans first. Which is the point.

readhn 10y ago
Have you seen the article where Siemens tried hiring people for the new factory...and the majority of American people who showed up to apply couldn't even pass school level tests...? Educational system in usa is broken. THAT should be number one item to address for this administration. Instead they are playing smoke and mirrors game worth us diverting our attention from the real issues. P.s. it is convenient to have poorly educated constituents - they are much easier to brain wash and control. So chances are education system will not be fixed any time soon.
- LordKano 10y ago
  Yes I saw that. I also saw the part where more people passed the basic test than there were available positions. No matter how good our educational system is, there will be people in the left tail of the Bell curve.
- cobookman 10y ago
  > Have you seen the article where Siemens tried hiring people for the new factory...and the majority of American people who showed up to apply couldn't even pass school level tests...? Could of have also been Siemens trying to game the system. Oh look nobody local passed this test we gotta hire foreign workers who work for less money and avoid unions....then they fail to give the test to their foreign workers who might also fail the test.
- owenmarshall 10y ago
  > Have you seen the article where Siemens tried hiring people for the new factory...and the majority of American people who showed up to apply couldn't even pass school level tests...? So Siemens was forced to hire H1-B workers, but if this bill passed they couldn't because of a $130K premium? Oh, I see, you're conflating manual labor with highly skilled technical work and hoping no one will notice because you wave your hands and shout "the educational system, man, it's broken!"

mustacheemperor 10y ago

Started a company in a college town on the east coast with far lower cost of living than the valley. The existing financial H1B requirements and recently the promises of the new administration made it financially unfeasible to even be able to consider hiring the international students working with us after they graduated. Really unfortunate because they were extremely talented employees and not easily replaced here.

Eridrus 10y ago

Startups in Portland, etc, are trying to arbitrage their low cost of living, which is great, but the fact that the companies in SF, etc can pay more shows that they're providing a greater economic benefit and should probably get the.immigrants that can justify such a salary.

ksherlock 10y ago

For some reason, people like to ignore the 25,000 infosys H1Bs to talk about a hypothetical startup H1B. Can you please name one of those Boulder or Portland startups? Maybe point me to the "who is hiring" post where they are trying to pay the required wage but nobody wants to work for them?