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> if large corporations couldn't import H1B workers, they'd have to do other things to get their work done, and those things would probably involve raising wage
by mavelikara 10y ago
> if large corporations couldn't import H1B workers, they'd have to do other things to get their work done, and those things would probably involve raising wages for especially skilled engineers. Or perhaps by investing in other productivity measures
Or perhaps, move the job to another country which has a larger supply of workers.
- humanrebar 10y agoSure, but I suspect they are already doing that to the extent it makes sense.
- Arizhel 10y agoNope. It's simple: if this were an option, they'd have already done it. Microsoft could easily just pack up and move all their dev work to India. There's a large supply of workers there, and they can pay them a fraction of what they have to pay here. Why aren't they doing this? The big companies threaten this, but they never do it. Simple: if it were really this easy, they'd have already done it. There's obviously some good reasons why they're not, and why instead they choose to import people under H1-B, pay them roughly similar salaries to US workers, and pay for lots of immigration/paperwork-related costs on top of this. They might be (and I think they are) helping keep salaries down this way overall, but that's nothing compared to just dumping everyone and moving operations to India and paying 1/5 of US labor rates. So why aren't they doing that?
- wan23 10y agoGoogle runs large engineering offices in a number of foreign countries. If there's talent out there that can't be imported the next best thing is to go where the talent is.
- Arizhel 10y agoOk, then tell me why they haven't done that already. They could save huge amounts of money by just laying off everyone in the US and hiring new people in India (or relocating everyone to India). The salaries in India are easily 1/5 or less than those in Silicon Valley. So what's stopping them?
- mavelikara 10y ago> So what's stopping them? The highly skilled American employees in their US-workforce?
- Arizhel 10y agoAccording to other people, there's plenty of highly-skilled people in India. And they cost 1/5 as much. So why bother with the Americans?
- mavelikara 10y agoProbably because they need the highly-skilled people both in India and US - to put together fruitful collaborations like these [1] (which, incidentally, created a sub-field which employs hundreds of thousands of engineers, Americans included). At the moment, it might be more economically sensible to convince the Indian to move to US than to convince the American to move to India. But if you make it too hard or impossible to do that, Google will re-evaluate options at their disposal and decide accordingly. [1]: https://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce.html https://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce.html
- Arizhel 10y agoIf they "need" the highly-skilled people in the US, who cost 5-6x the ones in India, then there's something clearly lacking with the people in India. Otherwise, why not just dump the US workers altogether and move all new operations to India? They can even move their American workers there and offer them a salary that's 1.5x-2x the standard salary in India and still save a bundle over Silicon Valley salary levels. Seriously: these companies keep threatening this, I wish they'd just do it and see how it works out for them. It just sounds like an idle threat to me to try to get their way in the US. I'm really sick and tired of their threats.