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Yeah this fixation on Silicon Valley is dumb. The worst affected will really be other industries. Small wonder that Lofgren who is a Bay-Area Representative is
by shas3 10y ago
Yeah this fixation on Silicon Valley is dumb. The worst affected will really be other industries. Small wonder that Lofgren who is a Bay-Area Representative is the one sponsoring the auction system. Many Si valley jobs for which H1Bs are hired are generalist in nature. And it is for generic programmer jobs that you have potential for wage abuse. But outside Si valley, for much lesser wages, companies rely on highly specialized skills. So specialized that often these are jobs-for-life without much transferability. Think about skills in microbiology, materials science, etc. relevant to specific products in specific companies like P&G, Dow, etc. These employers and employees will be majorly shafted if legislation is made with just Silicon Valley in mind.
The whole notion of pay big $$s if the specialized skills are worth so much is wrong because these companies have smaller budgets for personnel than plant.
- omouse 10y agoThe fixation on Silicon Valley isn't dumb when wages were deliberately suppressed by Google, Apple, Adobe and others. The big tech companies really do want to keep salaries low and H1Bs can help them with that, along with paying for the really smart people that they can bring in too.
- michel-slm 10y agoExcept that Google, Facebook, Cisco would gladly sponsor you for green card - if they're gaming the system they would surely try to string you along until you've used up your H1B renewal before doing that?
- mcguire 10y agoIf you start out making much less than other candidates, even after many years of CoL raises you will still be making less. Source: drastically underpaid for my experience because I was an idiot.
- nostrademons 10y agoAt one of the big Silicon Valley tech companies? Google at least has a policy that promotions & annual raises normalize to level-defined salary bands, i.e. if you have a higher salary coming in relative to your coworkers of equal skill, you will get smaller raises until your salaries equalize.
- Akkuma 10y agoGoogle also had artificially lower salary bands by colluding with other tech companies to not fight for talent.
- nostrademons 10y agoWell, true, and I'm not exactly happy about that...but that cartel was eventually broken when Facebook refused to play ball.
- solutionyogi 10y agoThe point is that Google purposefully tried to keep the wages low. If not for FB, they would have never changed the practice. I have zero trust in Google for doing the right thing regarding salaries.
- nostrademons 10y agoYou don't have to trust in Google, only in self-interest. The reason FB broke the cartel is because they felt they could pick up some talented people by paying more. The reason Google normalizes salaries is because it negatively affects morale (and hence productivity & retention) when you have people paid dramatically different amounts for equal work. The reason big tech companies sponsor green cards is so they don't have to use up their H1B quota on you, and can instead get new H1Bs. They may not be doing it for your benefit, but that doesn't mean that you don't benefit from it.
- yuhong 10y ago
- shas3 10y agoYes, everyone wants to keep their costs low. Especially software companies because most of their expenditure is on personnel. However, in meat-space companies like pharma, chemicals, etc. plant, hard goods, etc. cost more than personnel. A senior-level manager often cannot pay $30k extra just to match Si valley salaries in an auction because they don't have so much room on personnel. These norms are not set by individuals, but by a system of financial analysts, shareholders (think large pension funds, etc.), etc.
- dxhdr 10y ago> this fixation on Silicon Valley is dumb The tech industry accounts for the vast majority of H1B visas: http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Category.aspx?T=OC http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Category.asp...
- shas3 10y ago"vast majority" still excludes tens of thousands of people. These are real people with real families and real jobs in real companies, not just some statistical data points.
- throwawaydbfif 10y agoSo a fix for 90% of the problem is out because it's bad for a small percentage? Everything is a trade-off, a solutions for the vast majority of cases outweighs the inconvenience on a small minority
- shas3 10y agoUh ok. You can slice up 90% in many ways. But why choose to cut it such that you lose 100% of other industries? That sounds quite effed up.