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Speaking as someone who has hired H1-B's in the past, there really do seem to be two tiers. There's the companies/organizations that are truly abusing the syste
by sulam 10y ago
Speaking as someone who has hired H1-B's in the past, there really do seem to be two tiers. There's the companies/organizations that are truly abusing the system and then there are the traditional tech companies who are happy to hire anyone qualified, no matter where they are from, and pay and promote them the same as other employees. They also sponsor green cards. Competition between these employers has gotten to the point where they mostly all do the sponsorship immediately, too, reducing the time the person is "stuck" in the job to around a year (not great, but not horrible -- most people are "stuck" in their job that long so that they will at least vest some of their stock-based compensation).
One example: I hired an engineer who I'm going to anonymously name Bob. Bob was at Yahoo and on an H1-B. Yahoo was his first employer in SV, he had gone to CMU. He interviewed reasonably well, not amazingly, but had experience and interest in a specialty that many people aren't interested in. At the time we were trying to take a team of these people from 2 or 3 engineers to 20, so we were pretty excited. Bob also got an offer from Netflix. Netflix, if you don't know, gives offers that are basically "all-in" -- you can take the entire offer as cash, or you can parse it out and use some of it for health care, stock, etc -- your choice. The end result is that matching Netflix offers is very expensive. We mostly matched the Netflix offer (we felt our stock was going to have more upside -- which ended up being very true). I had to do extra work for this person to get them hired above and beyond what I'd have to do for an American. Then I had to do even more work to get the employer part of the green card process started. I had to help them navigate getting required documentation from Yahoo. Bob got promoted on a similar schedule to other people and as far as I know is still happily employed, now with a green card application that will transfer with them to any other employer they move to.
I would have _happily_ hired locally, and in fact most of the people I hired for that team were US citizens, Bob was one of 3 H1-Bs. He was from India, another was from Singapore, and the third was from France. They were all very talented engineers and any company would hire them in their specialty in a heartbeat.
I find it hard to say the workers in either of the two camps are particularly exploited (at least once they're in the country -- I've read ugly things about how they go into debt to be able to get these positions in the first placed). They are being paid fair market value for the work they are doing. The money they're making is far in excess of what they earn elsewhere -- that's why they go through the lengths they go through to get these jobs in the first place. If they have the ability to get hired at a more traditional tech company, that company will take over sponsorship of their H1-B with very little complication -- demand is effectively infinite for good engineers who are happy to work.
- coulix 10y ago+1
- joshbert 10y agoThere's an arrow next to the username that will help you express this sentiment without the need to comment.
- lowbloodsugar 10y agoThey are only being paid fair market value because the H-1Bs are suppressing the fair market value. Without the H-1Bs you would have had to pay more, and that "more" would have been the fair market value. You say "matching Netflix offers is very expensive": again, no, matching Netflix offers is the fair market rate, and without H-1Bs, the rate would be higher. Indeed, unless you are a well known company, you should expect to have to pay more than Netflix, since Netflix's offer also prices in the stability and prestige of working at Netflix. Which is to say, the "expensive" Netflix wage is actually less than fair market value.
- valuearb 10y agoThe market rate is a mix of factors. Including the cost of shipping the work overseas. Would you rather have the same engineer work in Bangalore or California? I'm an engineer and don't think my wages should be artificially increased by keeping smart immigrants that would benefit this country out.
- lowbloodsugar 10y agoIts not that your wages are artificially increased, its that an H1B worker's wages are artificially decreased because they are trapped in the job and are unable to negotiate at market rate. They can't leave their job, so they can't negotiate a fair salary. The green-card costs the company $5k, but gives them a worker who can't leave for years.
- sulam 10y agoArguing with strangers on the Internet is not something I enjoy, so I'll just point out some details of this that I either didn't cover or that were apparently overlooked. 1) We actually did match Netflix's offer in total comp, by offering Bob a mix of base salary and stock that exceeded the total value of their Netflix offer significantly. The difference is that Netflix's offer was all cash. It is very hard to compare a Netflix offer to a pre-IPO Twitter offer except in hindsight. Bob, a market participant, ended up picking the better offer. 2) I truly question whether H1-B's are lowering the fair market value at the tech companies I've worked at, have had offers from, or have had to counter offers from. Via these three means I've gotten a good handle on what people pay at the top tech companies in SV, and as far as I have been able to determine the supply of H1-Bs who can get through an interview process is so greatly outstripped by the demand for such engineers, there is effectively no impact to salaries. H1-Bs are a very small proportion of SV hiring, and are probably even smaller outside SV, _except_ for the companies that I called out in my initial post on this thread who I agree are abusing the system. Engineers working at those firms aren't showing up in my recruiting pipeline, much less getting offers, so they have zero impact on the market for top engineering talent. If you're trying to say that the addition of even a single qualified candidate into the hiring pool lowers what we pay a developer, you don't understand how engineering hiring works at tech companies.