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> Their lobbyists claim there is a “talent shortage” among Americans and thus that the industry needs more of such work visas. This is patently false There is

> Their lobbyists claim there is a “talent shortage” among Americans and thus that the industry needs more of such work visas. This is patently false There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years. Not sure why this point is still controversial. > most Silicon Valley firms sponsor their H-1B workers, who hold a temporary visa, for U.S. permanent residency (green card) [...] sponsorship renders the workers de facto indentured servants; though they have the right to move to another employer, they do not dare do so, as it would mean starting the lengthy green card process all over again. Then the problem might be with how long the gov takes to process these things, and not with the H1B visas? > the H-1B program is an enabler of rampant age discrimination in the tech industry [...] Almost all the H-1Bs are young Younger people are more willing to move to another country. Also, many students apply for an H1b after their F1 runs out, so of course you get younger people. And this is just from the first page. I feel like the author is just throwing every possible argument against the H1B, instead of making one good coherent point. =/

ones_and_zeros 10y ago
> There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years. Not sure why this point is still controversial. Is this a fact or a feeling? Economics allows us to directly measure these things and the price of labor hasn't gone up in the last 30 years at rates indicating a shortage with executive pay and corporate profits at all time highs. > Then the problem might be with how long the gov takes to process these things, and not with the H1B visas? I think his point was the visa system is designed to take advantage of the inefficiencies in the bureaucracy to the benefit of the employer. > Younger people are more willing to move to another country. Also, many students apply for an H1b after their F1 runs out, so of course you get younger people. If the H1B visa didn't exist there wouldn't be as many foreign students. You should read his blog, he makes repeated coherent arguments against the H1B visa system and its detrimental effects on the employment outlook for older citizens. He is a CS professor at a respected US university and has an interesting perspective.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Economics allows us to directly measure these things and the price of labor hasn't gone up in the last 30 years... Real compensation per hour (for workers as a whole) has gone up 40% since 1987. This number is adjusted for inflation. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB Pay in software has been rising more rapidly than pay for the country as a whole. Is this even remotely in doubt? http://insights.dice.com/2013/01/22/tech-professionals-enjoy-biggest-raise-in-a-decade/ http://insights.dice.com/2013/01/22/tech-professionals-enjoy...
  - anjc 10y ago
    There are studies performed on this stuff by actual economists out there, to save you using self-reporting surveys from online recruitment companies. http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-i... http://www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages-microsoft-report-distorts/ http://www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages-mi... >The average hourly wage for college-educated workers in computer and math occupations rose 5.3 percent over 11 years, from $37.27 in 2000 to $39.24 in 2011 (in 2012 dollars), which translates to an average wage increase of less than half a percent per year. If a labor shortage existed in these occupations, one would expect wages to rise sharply as employers try to lure scarce workers to their firms.
    - arjie 10y ago
      2000? At the peak of the dot-com boom?
      - crusso 10y ago
        Yeah, that's the part that had me scratching my head. Any study that makes no attempt to smooth out dramatic outlier time periods is highly suspect.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      If your study is claiming that software engineer compensation rose no more rapidly than the population at as a whole (they also saw a 5% increase), then something is deeply wrong with your study. Note that "Computer and math occupations" is a broad catch-all term which includes all sorts of professions, such as: Computer User Support Specialist: Provide technical assistance to computer users. Answer questions or resolve computer problems for clients in person, or via telephone or electronically. May provide assistance concerning the use of computer hardware and software, including printing, installation, word processing, electronic mail, and operating systems. Excludes "Network and Computer Systems Administrators" (15-1142). https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes150000.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes150000.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151151.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151151.htm No one claimed that the guy who fixes your printer or helps you change the font in word experienced large pay increases.
vonmoltke 10y ago
> There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years. Not sure why this point is still controversial. It's controversial because a number of people, like me, think many companies in SB have arbitrarily high hiring bars, and that a company who claims to tailor their hiring process to minimize false positives at the expense of false negatives has no moral standing to crow about "talent shortages". The shortage is largely irrational and self-inflicted.
at-fates-hands 10y ago
>> There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years. Not sure why this point is still controversial. Mainly because we have over 7 million people unemployed. The controversy is why are we bringing in so many foreign workers when we have so many people out of work here? The argument basically comes down to what would we need to do to get some of these unemployed people here trained to be able to take some of these jobs? and if so, what's that cost compared to these H1-B's were bringing in? Also, at the end of the day, how motivated are those unemployed people to go through the rigorous training in order to be able to take these jobs? If you've spent 20 years putting hubcaps on cars in a factory, are you going to want to take six months to learn basic .Net or Javascript? I don't have any of the answers, these are just some of the rumblings I've heard from executives I know at various large corporations.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Realistically, most of our 7 million unemployed are unemployed by choice. They are unwilling to do many jobs they perceive as being "below their station" and they are unwilling to move to places where the jobs are. We need to import a better working class to pay for our leisure class since pushing our leisure class into work is considered socially unacceptable. Here's a great first person account of this: http://www.vox.com/first-person/2016/12/19/13956666/unemployment-men-prime-working-age http://www.vox.com/first-person/2016/12/19/13956666/unemploy... "There have been times where I’ve wondered if I should just get a temporary service or manual labor...I would be too humiliated...a neighbor or friend [might]...see me working the cash register or pumping gas. " See also NPR's expose on disability fraud: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
  - whoiskevin 10y ago
    Again a few examples that are often used to justify calling 7 million people lazy. If the visas are being used for for cash register and pumping gas jobs (how many states pump gas for you?) then this might make some sense but these are just isolated events and fit a narrative convenient to corporations to justify many practices that are mainly beneficial to the corporation.
throwawaydbfif 10y ago
The endless talent shortage is a farce. Every tech company I've worked at rejects well over 90% of their applicants and has an interview process that would be considered insane in almost any other field. I would say the opposite is true based solely on hiring practices. Look at Google for example, who hire around 1/5000 people that apply. The shortage is artificially maintained because it works in companies favor. It makes engineers more willing to work for low salaries since they have to work so hard to get an offer, and makes it possible for them to import "talent" which is 95% of the time an excuse to import cheap foreign labor. Look at what these H1B's are mostly used for. Yeah sometimes it's specialized jobs but usually just generic "developer" or "consultant". Is it really true that you need to hire an H1B because you can't find a "developer"?. The visa process is meant to be used for skills you can't find in the US, and with this in mind it's clearly failed its purpose
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Every tech company I've worked at rejects well over 90% of their applicants and has an interview process that would be considered insane in almost any other field. Joel Spolsky explains why this does not imply what you think it implies. http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070501/column-guest.html http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070501/column-guest.html tl;dr; Imagine 1 low quality developer who applies to 9 places and gets rejected. There's also 1 high quality developer who applies to 1 place and gets accepted. Look, 90% of applications have been rejected!
  - throwawaydbfif 10y ago
    Inc.com is a really bad source for such information... As if they would be expected to be neutral in such a situation. If this was true you would see it across professions and at every level of position, yet it's something fairly unique to software development.
    - garyfirestorm 10y ago
      I can attest that this is true for mechanical/automotive industry.
Bartweiss 10y ago
> there is a “talent shortage” among Americans I see a bait and switch conducted here all the time, where thinkpiece writers will count up the number of annual graduates in Computer Science (or sometimes Information Technology in general), subtract the number of new software jobs per year, and conclude that we have massive overproduction of programmers. This is obviously stupid, but I keep seeing it. It ignores CS graduates who stay in academia or take nonprogramming jobs (e.g. in finance). Often it counts "new software engineering positions", a metric which ranges from insufficient (by excluding Sysadmins and similar) to idiotic (by excluding "programmers" and other job titles the author couldn't be bothered to search for). Shockingly often, it counts new positions but doesn't account for positions vacated by people leaving programming (e.g. to management or retirement). And, of course, it ignores employability, pushing an implication that any CS graduate can fill any software job regardless of specialization, experience, or interest. It is a relentlessly stupid 'statistic', but I think one reason for this ongoing perception of surplus talent is that people keep rewriting the same silly article.
- conjectures 10y ago
  Yup. If we had mature education systems our governments would hire economists to get proper estimates of labour market requirements for different skill sets.
- anjc 10y ago
  It seems like you're agreeing with the line you quoted? That there isn't a talent shortage? Anyway having said that, good studies check for shortages and overproductions in more complicated ways than just totting up numbers blindly.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    I don't think I'm agreeing with that? There are a bunch of negations in the quote, so: I think there is a talent shortage in some domains. My point was that the major sources of the "no shortage" or particularly "surplus" claims are doing shoddy math that over-represents the labor pool and under-represents demand. Also, more importantly, they're conflating all types of programming. There are certainly skillsets/interests where there's no shortage, and there are certainly spaces where there is a shortage. People who don't differentiate 'programming' any further aren't saying something useful, and people who do only disagree on the details. (I realize good studies check for those things, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about people saying "but aren't there lots of spare programmers we don't need?" because some hack with an infographic subtracted two numbers and found a surplus. I've seen this error pattern in respectable news on a bunch of occasions.)
jasonlotito 10y ago
> There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years. These two statements are not linked. One can agree that without foreign talent, SV would not have grown to what it is. On the flip side, this doesn't mean their is a shortage of talent. Simply that their is a shortage of talent that is willing to sell that talent for lower wages and less perks. I can't see how raising the minimum salary will hurt. If you are correct, and the value of this talent is amazing enough, even $130,000 is a paltry sum considering what they should be capable of doing. If raising the minimum salary on all of H1-B visas to $130,000 is too much, one could easily make the assertion that the talent is simply not there. In the end, if there is a talent shortage, salaries should be rising, and they aren't. > Younger people are more willing to move to another country. And they are willing to work for less, too.
gadders 10y ago
>> There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years. I think the key thing is that there is a shortage of talent at a price they are willing to pay.
- seppin 10y ago
  > I think the key thing is that there is a shortage of talent at a price they are willing to pay. Exactly. I know several SV companies that refuse to pay software engineers over 80-100k, and they complain about not being able to hire.
ryandrake 10y ago
The "Shortage of Engineers" myth that just won't die. If you're going to claim there's a shortage of a good, you need to mention the price you're willing to pay. I want a new BMW for $10K, but can't find one. Therefore there's a shortage of BMWs.
ch4s3 10y ago
> There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years I don't think you can prove this point, because you're arguing a counterfactual without proving the base claim that foreign talent was in fact necessary or that similar development wouldn't have otherwise happened. You're also confusing what is meant be a labour shortage, which isn't about the absolute number of qualified candidates per se, but the number available at a given price. That is to say that there may be a sufficient pool of workers, but they demand a higher wage than firms would like to pay. As a result firms choose H-1Bs to suppress wages.
- valuearb 10y ago
  I've been at a startup where a few key hires (one an h1B) led to 140 jobs. And H1B holders can work anywhere. Why do we want them to work overseas for our competitors?
  - ch4s3 10y ago
    > Why do we want them to work overseas for our competitors? We don't necessarily. As with many aspects of economic policy, it's a bit of a balancing act. You need enough immigration to satisfy demand for talent, but not so much that your drive down wages, and diminish taxable income while also upsetting constituents. You also don't want visa policies that encourage skilled workers to come, stay long enough to learn how to copy American businesses, and leave (sort of IP/business process remittance). Generally I'm pro skilled immigration but H-1B as implemented is too easy to use for wage suppression vis-a-vis contracting through outsourcing consultancies like TCS or Infosys.
middle334 10y ago
There is a big difference between foreign workers who are great and add value, and foreign workers who are brought over, are subsequently exploited, and who are also used to depress the income of the local workforce. Seen it happen. Then there are the "Indian Mafias" in places like Microsoft, where over 50% of an organization is Indian because they got into a cultural hiring spiral. And the products from those groups are generally pretty awful, because everyone seems to want to be a manager or see how high the next re-org will take them, and not do good designs or write good code. H1Bs shouldn't be used for job shops, and they shouldn't be used to bring in cheap labor, but that's largely what they're used for now. A lot of really good Indian engineers are going to get hurt, and that will suck.

ones_and_zeros 10y ago

> There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years. Not sure why this point is still controversial. Is this a fact or a feeling? Economics allows us to directly measure these things and the price of labor hasn't gone up in the last 30 years at rates indicating a shortage with executive pay and corporate profits at all time highs. > Then the problem might be with how long the gov takes to process these things, and not with the H1B visas? I think his point was the visa system is designed to take advantage of the inefficiencies in the bureaucracy to the benefit of the employer. > Younger people are more willing to move to another country. Also, many students apply for an H1b after their F1 runs out, so of course you get younger people. If the H1B visa didn't exist there wouldn't be as many foreign students. You should read his blog, he makes repeated coherent arguments against the H1B visa system and its detrimental effects on the employment outlook for older citizens. He is a CS professor at a respected US university and has an interesting perspective.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
Economics allows us to directly measure these things and the price of labor hasn't gone up in the last 30 years... Real compensation per hour (for workers as a whole) has gone up 40% since 1987. This number is adjusted for inflation. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB Pay in software has been rising more rapidly than pay for the country as a whole. Is this even remotely in doubt? http://insights.dice.com/2013/01/22/tech-professionals-enjoy-biggest-raise-in-a-decade/ http://insights.dice.com/2013/01/22/tech-professionals-enjoy...
- anjc 10y ago
  There are studies performed on this stuff by actual economists out there, to save you using self-reporting surveys from online recruitment companies. http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-i... http://www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages-microsoft-report-distorts/ http://www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages-mi... >The average hourly wage for college-educated workers in computer and math occupations rose 5.3 percent over 11 years, from $37.27 in 2000 to $39.24 in 2011 (in 2012 dollars), which translates to an average wage increase of less than half a percent per year. If a labor shortage existed in these occupations, one would expect wages to rise sharply as employers try to lure scarce workers to their firms.
  - arjie 10y ago
    2000? At the peak of the dot-com boom?
    - crusso 10y ago
      Yeah, that's the part that had me scratching my head. Any study that makes no attempt to smooth out dramatic outlier time periods is highly suspect.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    If your study is claiming that software engineer compensation rose no more rapidly than the population at as a whole (they also saw a 5% increase), then something is deeply wrong with your study. Note that "Computer and math occupations" is a broad catch-all term which includes all sorts of professions, such as: Computer User Support Specialist: Provide technical assistance to computer users. Answer questions or resolve computer problems for clients in person, or via telephone or electronically. May provide assistance concerning the use of computer hardware and software, including printing, installation, word processing, electronic mail, and operating systems. Excludes "Network and Computer Systems Administrators" (15-1142). https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes150000.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes150000.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151151.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151151.htm No one claimed that the guy who fixes your printer or helps you change the font in word experienced large pay increases.

vonmoltke 10y ago

> There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years. Not sure why this point is still controversial. It's controversial because a number of people, like me, think many companies in SB have arbitrarily high hiring bars, and that a company who claims to tailor their hiring process to minimize false positives at the expense of false negatives has no moral standing to crow about "talent shortages". The shortage is largely irrational and self-inflicted.

at-fates-hands 10y ago

>> There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years. Not sure why this point is still controversial. Mainly because we have over 7 million people unemployed. The controversy is why are we bringing in so many foreign workers when we have so many people out of work here? The argument basically comes down to what would we need to do to get some of these unemployed people here trained to be able to take some of these jobs? and if so, what's that cost compared to these H1-B's were bringing in? Also, at the end of the day, how motivated are those unemployed people to go through the rigorous training in order to be able to take these jobs? If you've spent 20 years putting hubcaps on cars in a factory, are you going to want to take six months to learn basic .Net or Javascript? I don't have any of the answers, these are just some of the rumblings I've heard from executives I know at various large corporations.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
Realistically, most of our 7 million unemployed are unemployed by choice. They are unwilling to do many jobs they perceive as being "below their station" and they are unwilling to move to places where the jobs are. We need to import a better working class to pay for our leisure class since pushing our leisure class into work is considered socially unacceptable. Here's a great first person account of this: http://www.vox.com/first-person/2016/12/19/13956666/unemployment-men-prime-working-age http://www.vox.com/first-person/2016/12/19/13956666/unemploy... "There have been times where I’ve wondered if I should just get a temporary service or manual labor...I would be too humiliated...a neighbor or friend [might]...see me working the cash register or pumping gas. " See also NPR's expose on disability fraud: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
- whoiskevin 10y ago
  Again a few examples that are often used to justify calling 7 million people lazy. If the visas are being used for for cash register and pumping gas jobs (how many states pump gas for you?) then this might make some sense but these are just isolated events and fit a narrative convenient to corporations to justify many practices that are mainly beneficial to the corporation.

throwawaydbfif 10y ago

The endless talent shortage is a farce. Every tech company I've worked at rejects well over 90% of their applicants and has an interview process that would be considered insane in almost any other field. I would say the opposite is true based solely on hiring practices. Look at Google for example, who hire around 1/5000 people that apply. The shortage is artificially maintained because it works in companies favor. It makes engineers more willing to work for low salaries since they have to work so hard to get an offer, and makes it possible for them to import "talent" which is 95% of the time an excuse to import cheap foreign labor. Look at what these H1B's are mostly used for. Yeah sometimes it's specialized jobs but usually just generic "developer" or "consultant". Is it really true that you need to hire an H1B because you can't find a "developer"?. The visa process is meant to be used for skills you can't find in the US, and with this in mind it's clearly failed its purpose

yummyfajitas 10y ago
Every tech company I've worked at rejects well over 90% of their applicants and has an interview process that would be considered insane in almost any other field. Joel Spolsky explains why this does not imply what you think it implies. http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070501/column-guest.html http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070501/column-guest.html tl;dr; Imagine 1 low quality developer who applies to 9 places and gets rejected. There's also 1 high quality developer who applies to 1 place and gets accepted. Look, 90% of applications have been rejected!
- throwawaydbfif 10y ago
  Inc.com is a really bad source for such information... As if they would be expected to be neutral in such a situation. If this was true you would see it across professions and at every level of position, yet it's something fairly unique to software development.
  - garyfirestorm 10y ago
    I can attest that this is true for mechanical/automotive industry.

Bartweiss 10y ago

> there is a “talent shortage” among Americans I see a bait and switch conducted here all the time, where thinkpiece writers will count up the number of annual graduates in Computer Science (or sometimes Information Technology in general), subtract the number of new software jobs per year, and conclude that we have massive overproduction of programmers. This is obviously stupid, but I keep seeing it. It ignores CS graduates who stay in academia or take nonprogramming jobs (e.g. in finance). Often it counts "new software engineering positions", a metric which ranges from insufficient (by excluding Sysadmins and similar) to idiotic (by excluding "programmers" and other job titles the author couldn't be bothered to search for). Shockingly often, it counts new positions but doesn't account for positions vacated by people leaving programming (e.g. to management or retirement). And, of course, it ignores employability, pushing an implication that any CS graduate can fill any software job regardless of specialization, experience, or interest. It is a relentlessly stupid 'statistic', but I think one reason for this ongoing perception of surplus talent is that people keep rewriting the same silly article.

conjectures 10y ago
Yup. If we had mature education systems our governments would hire economists to get proper estimates of labour market requirements for different skill sets.
anjc 10y ago
It seems like you're agreeing with the line you quoted? That there isn't a talent shortage? Anyway having said that, good studies check for shortages and overproductions in more complicated ways than just totting up numbers blindly.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  I don't think I'm agreeing with that? There are a bunch of negations in the quote, so: I think there is a talent shortage in some domains. My point was that the major sources of the "no shortage" or particularly "surplus" claims are doing shoddy math that over-represents the labor pool and under-represents demand. Also, more importantly, they're conflating all types of programming. There are certainly skillsets/interests where there's no shortage, and there are certainly spaces where there is a shortage. People who don't differentiate 'programming' any further aren't saying something useful, and people who do only disagree on the details. (I realize good studies check for those things, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about people saying "but aren't there lots of spare programmers we don't need?" because some hack with an infographic subtracted two numbers and found a surplus. I've seen this error pattern in respectable news on a bunch of occasions.)

jasonlotito 10y ago

> There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years. These two statements are not linked. One can agree that without foreign talent, SV would not have grown to what it is. On the flip side, this doesn't mean their is a shortage of talent. Simply that their is a shortage of talent that is willing to sell that talent for lower wages and less perks. I can't see how raising the minimum salary will hurt. If you are correct, and the value of this talent is amazing enough, even $130,000 is a paltry sum considering what they should be capable of doing. If raising the minimum salary on all of H1-B visas to $130,000 is too much, one could easily make the assertion that the talent is simply not there. In the end, if there is a talent shortage, salaries should be rising, and they aren't. > Younger people are more willing to move to another country. And they are willing to work for less, too.

gadders 10y ago

>> There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years. I think the key thing is that there is a shortage of talent at a price they are willing to pay.

seppin 10y ago
> I think the key thing is that there is a shortage of talent at a price they are willing to pay. Exactly. I know several SV companies that refuse to pay software engineers over 80-100k, and they complain about not being able to hire.

ryandrake 10y ago

The "Shortage of Engineers" myth that just won't die. If you're going to claim there's a shortage of a good, you need to mention the price you're willing to pay. I want a new BMW for $10K, but can't find one. Therefore there's a shortage of BMWs.

ch4s3 10y ago

> There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years I don't think you can prove this point, because you're arguing a counterfactual without proving the base claim that foreign talent was in fact necessary or that similar development wouldn't have otherwise happened. You're also confusing what is meant be a labour shortage, which isn't about the absolute number of qualified candidates per se, but the number available at a given price. That is to say that there may be a sufficient pool of workers, but they demand a higher wage than firms would like to pay. As a result firms choose H-1Bs to suppress wages.

valuearb 10y ago
I've been at a startup where a few key hires (one an h1B) led to 140 jobs. And H1B holders can work anywhere. Why do we want them to work overseas for our competitors?
- ch4s3 10y ago
  > Why do we want them to work overseas for our competitors? We don't necessarily. As with many aspects of economic policy, it's a bit of a balancing act. You need enough immigration to satisfy demand for talent, but not so much that your drive down wages, and diminish taxable income while also upsetting constituents. You also don't want visa policies that encourage skilled workers to come, stay long enough to learn how to copy American businesses, and leave (sort of IP/business process remittance). Generally I'm pro skilled immigration but H-1B as implemented is too easy to use for wage suppression vis-a-vis contracting through outsourcing consultancies like TCS or Infosys.

middle334 10y ago

There is a big difference between foreign workers who are great and add value, and foreign workers who are brought over, are subsequently exploited, and who are also used to depress the income of the local workforce. Seen it happen. Then there are the "Indian Mafias" in places like Microsoft, where over 50% of an organization is Indian because they got into a cultural hiring spiral. And the products from those groups are generally pretty awful, because everyone seems to want to be a manager or see how high the next re-org will take them, and not do good designs or write good code. H1Bs shouldn't be used for job shops, and they shouldn't be used to bring in cheap labor, but that's largely what they're used for now. A lot of really good Indian engineers are going to get hurt, and that will suck.