17 ms·
Is this a case of there not being enough qualified US citizens or immigrants being willing to work for less?
by lunchladydoris 9y ago
Is this a case of there not being enough qualified US citizens or immigrants being willing to work for less?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sabujp 9y agocombination of all of the above + cost of living in CA
- neo4sure 9y agoI think California did become the 6th largest economy in the world by just getting workers for less.
- ssalazar 9y agoSilicon Valley wages are the highest in the country for comparable work, so, no.
- neo4sure 9y agoSory I meant to say didn't
- Veelox 9y agoI just took it as sarcasm
- 43gg43g32g 9y agoJust because they have some of the highest wages doesn't mean they don't have some of the lowest too and it doesn't mean that they aren't hiring foreign workers so they can pay them 150k instead of 300k.
- maccard 9y agoAnd even being paid 150k isn't exactly a low quality of life. After tax, and rent at $4000 a month, your leftover wage from 150k is higher than my gross salary.
- rtx 9y agoAnd due to Big companies being HQ there.
- hkarthik 9y agoQoL in California is pretty poor, considering the cost required as compared to the rest of the US. Only immigrants are willing to pay the price since for many of them, it's still an upgrade from what they can get back home.
- gumby 9y ago> QoL in California is pretty poor, considering the cost required as compared to the rest of the US. After 30 years, on and off, in the valley I agree the QoL here isn't great (when compared to Germany, France, Australia...) but way way better than anywhere else in the US.
- strictnein 9y ago> After 30 years, on and off, in the valley I agree the QoL here isn't great (when compared to Germany, France, Australia...) but way way better than anywhere else in the US. No, it simply isn't. By any stretch of the imagination.
- 0xffff2 9y agoBy what definition? I've lived most of my life in California (split between the bay area and LA). I can't even begin to imagine being happier outside of California. Aside from rent, I see nothing at all that is better in other states I visit.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sbov 9y agoProbably similar to yours: mostly subjective ones. I was born and raised in California and love it here. My older brother was born and raised in California, hated it, and loves it in North Carolina.
- pc86 9y agoThis is just wrong. You may prefer the Bay Area, and I don't think anyone here is going to argue you shouldn't, but to say that the quality of life is better is just wrong. San Francisco is more than 3x more expensive than the metro I live in now. I'd need to earn $350k a year just to break even financially before taxes. I'd pay a lot more in federal income tax, and my state income tax is flat and in the low single digits. Call it $375k to break even on take home pay after paying for everything (rent, retirement, etc). How likely am I to make almost $400k a year? That's top 1% income nationally. That's IB money, not writing a CRUD app in JavaScript. Not to mention I go home for lunch and I have a 10-minute, 4-mile commute. And speaking of home, a constant pain point I hear from Bay Area programmers on HN is that they'll never be able to buy a home. San Francisco housing is over 1,200% (percent) more expensive than my area. My home cost a few thousand dollars more than I earn in a year. No thank you.
- jorgen123 9y agoPerhaps it is a case of a number without context. I have been here for nearly 18 years now and have become a citizen. I just wanted to get out of the rain of my homeland and into the California sunshine. I guess I am part of the 42% but I was never one of the “poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. I just consider myself a proud American. 42% says nothing about how long people have been here and whether they are just a next wave building up the country like waves of immigrants from the past.
- winter_blue 9y agoI don't know why you're being downvated. The very fact that you are being downvoted shows how many folks with xenophobia are lurking around on Hacker News.
- tomc1985 9y agoOr perhaps it's tech barons bellyaching about engineer wages made manifest
- stale2002 9y agoThose are the same thing. There is NEVER a time when there are not enough qualified US Citizens. Why? Because if I am a company, I will 100% always be able to hire enough engineers, if I just do this 1 weird trick. And that trick is "pay every engineer 1 million dollars". The question is always about price. In the same way that a food shortage has basically never existed in history. Sure, there were places where the price of bread was 1 thousand dollars, and people were starving to death because they couldn't have enough food. But thats not a shortage, thats just people complaining about price! Now, the real question you have to ask yourself, is "is bread costing 1 thousand dollars a good thing?" And when you can answer that questions, you will also be able to answer "is a software engineer costing 1 million dollars a good thing"? Edit: my post doesn't seem to be clear. My point that I was making is that "bread costing 1 thousand dollars is a bad thing". And that there is nothing wrong with driving down the price of devs. My definition of shortage is "prices are too high"
- cbr 9y agoIs there any situation that you would consider a "shortage"?
- humanrebar 9y agoThere are certainly short and medium term shortages as prices adjust to supply and demand realities. Salaries don't tend to swing wildly. There are also situations where the supply of employees is kept artificially low (security clearance, taxi medallions, etc.).
- Bartweiss 9y agoThe above claim that there aren't food shortages seems simply false for any normal definition. Obviously common use just means "an insufficient amount under these circumstances", but if we wanted to be very strict we could say "a situation where not all the players can simultaneously satisfy their demand at any price". A shortage is a situation where supply is inelastic and below demand. Everyone hiring programmers could fill their roster simultaneously if they could pay enough - if not today then certainly soon. In a lot of famines, there are X people sharing food for <X people - price is no longer a reflection of desire, because no one voluntarily leaves the auction. I do think it's important to distinguish insufficient demand from a simple lack of supply, but the latter definitely exists.
- qq66 9y agoAt the high end, there are no substitute US citizens. Imagine trying to find an American-born replacement for Yann LeCun. At the low end, the H1B abuse train definitely imports a lot of people with close to zero skills.
- marcell 9y ago> At the high end, there are no substitute US citizens. What? Many brilliant engineers were born outside the US, including one of the founders of Google, Sergey Brin.
- outworlder 9y ago"No substitute US citizens" not "No substitute FOR US citizens"
- gumby 9y agoI misread that at first too, writer means: there is no US citizen who can replace certain people.
- Melanie_ 9y agoI'm making $86 an hour working from home. I was shocked when my neighbour told me she was averaging $95 but I see how it works now. I feel so much freedom now that I'm my own boss. This is what I do, ========http://www.smartfinancemedia.com/?682 http://www.smartfinancemedia.com/?682
- bilbo0s 9y ago"....At the high end, there are no substitute US citizens....." This can't be overstated enough. I think the immigration that is critical to the US is the high end immigration, not the low end stuff like H1B. I'm just afraid that the chanting mobs will want to throw the baby out with the bath water. We NEED the NIW-types, we don't really need most of the H1B-types. So if the political environment is such that we need to cut loose some H1B-types to save the NIW-types... we should do so without hesitation.
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- vinhboy 9y agoIn my very limited experience with companies that hires H1B to fill programming jobs, it's because they can't find qualified local candidates. All the really qualified people are in the bay area working for tech startups, etc... So a company outside of the bay area would have to bring in H1B workers who are willing to live in the area. I am not sure if there are costs concerns for the company in making that decision, but I figure if they were willing to hire me, they probably don't have a problem hiring local candidates if possible. Edit: Since people want more details, I'll elaborate on the VERY LITTLE that I know. Right now consulting agencies in Sacramento, CA need Senior Ruby Devs and they can't find any. I am not 100% sure on what salary is being offered, but I am guessing around 100K. A junior dev fresh out of college can make about 40K (remember its Sacramento!). (I want to make it clear this is all hearsay, don't quote me on this) I was told an agency that hires out H1B workers can get paid as much as $50/hr. I have no way to verify this, but this is what I heard. Another thing is, these are short term, project based, positions --- not very attractive to people seeking a career. They also have a constant need for .NET and Java devs. That being said. I am very much against outsourcing jobs that could be hired locally. But Sacramento has a very small developer community, so I don't blame them for using H1B to fill the gap. But who knows... maybe it's all a ruse.
- SilasX 9y agoAt risk of opening that whole debate again... Are there really no qualified local candidates, or are there no qualified local candidates who can also solve theoretical CS problems on the spot while pretending they're not doing it from memory? Or qualified local candidates who refuse to lie and say they only took 3 hours on the take-home exercise?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- maxsilver 9y agoI personally think this is the real problem. Companies dismissing qualified candidates as "unqualified" because they are too lazy to evaluate candidates based on their skills, and would rather throw brainteasers at them instead. For every 100 candidates a CS job gets, probably 80 are truly unqualified, 20 are truly qualified, but only 2 were both qualified and could pass an arbitrary list of brainteasers. And that lie lets managers run around saying "see, we can't hire enough talent! Skills shortage!" (where "skills" means "brainteaser skills", not software development skills)
- morgante 9y agoYes. If engineers were routinely paid $500k+ annually, I'm sure more US citizens would be interested in becoming qualified.
- ssambros 9y agoSo apparently $100k+ is not enough money to interest the citizens. I wonder why that's the case. By they way, the next step after not being able to hire a 60k H1B worker is usually to hire a 60k outsourced remote worker, not to hire a 150k "citizen".
- morgante 9y agoCertainly $100k+ is enough to interest some citizens. But there's always the marginal citizen who would be swayed for more money. Anecdotally, I had lots of classmates who aggressively pursued careers in finance not because they had any intrinsic interest in the field but because they heard it can pay exceptionally well. If technology had the same reputation (it's beginning to acquire it, but is somewhat behind), more of them would have pursued it instead. Note: I'm not saying this should necessarily be the goal. Personally, I think it's fine if we import additional tech labor from around the world, and even prefer that to using wages as a carrot for more citizens. > By they way, the next step after not being able to hire a 60k H1B worker is usually to hire a 60k outsourced remote worker, not to hire a 150k "citizen". This article is not about H1Bs. Many of the foreign-born tech employees are permanent residents who compete directly in the same market as American-born employees. Hiring in tech is something of a bifurcated market and there is H1B hiring both in the abusive lower-wage sector and higher-pay direct employment sector.
- smelterdemon 9y ago>So apparently $100k+ is not enough money to interest the citizens. I wonder why that's the case. Lots of other career fields which offer more money and/or prestige? Anecdata: many of my friends with the aptitude for software dev are in med school now.
- s73ver 9y agoBecause many of the people who could make $100k doing software could make several multiples of that doing something like finance, and be in a more respected profession to boot. Whenever the salary question comes up, people are always quick to compare it to the country at large. But that's not a valid comparison; someone who would be a qualified software engineer isn't deciding between that and being a retail clerk. They're deciding between going into that or something like finance, where they can make many multiples of what they could as a software developer.
- slackingoff2017 9y agoI've worked on the hiring side, worker shortages in tech are 100% bs. I was hiring for a small local company with no reputation, boring work, and mediocre benefits. This company was about 60 miles out from Chicago in a small town. We got over 100 applicants for every software position. We didn't even pay for ads, just put stuff on the free sites. We hardly hired anyone, but the deluge of applications allowed us to low-ball pay and be extremely selective. The worst kept secret in tech hiring is that everyone knows it pays well and hundreds of thousands are clamoring for open positions. They are "unqualified" because nobody will train them.
- outworlder 9y ago> We got over 100 applicants for every software position. How many of them passed FizzBuzz? Chicago outskirts is also not California. Try a software position with low pay, crappy benefits at an unknown software company in California and report back. Bonus points if you try it in the Bay Area.
- kuschku 9y agoIf they don’t pass FizzBuzz, you try to teach them for 6 months until they do fit into your company. Is that so hard? Training on the job used to be common, and for entry level positions it should be possible at least. EDIT: Okay, maybe not FizzBuzz, but the lots of "10 years experience with Angular 4" and co at least, and in general sometimes testing people more on actual tasks than on invented exercises. Even in Germany in the first few weeks you can terminate employees for any reason, so you don’t need to be too selective with hiring.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- outworlder 9y agoI don't think it's as simple as that. For all the vilifying of H1B and related visas, it is still a big burden for companies. Even big companies will use third party, specialized lawyers to deal with the bureaucracy. In the case of H1B, there's a significant hiring lag. You apply in April and, if you are lucky, get the visa in October. Companies who abuse the system en masse (there are about 3 or 4 that do it) don't care about that and will use a shotgun approach, but if you are trying to fill a position, it's a very bad proposition. Still, that gives you access to brains from the whole world. And yes, these brains may be willing to work for less, initially, compared to what a US citizen would get. There doesn't have to be foul play involved: they have less leverage. A similarly qualified US citizen would just name their price and tell the company to take a hike if that was not met. Restarting the whole visa process would be way more painful.
- mysterydip 9y agoTake a look at indeed, monster, or whatever your preferred job board is. Sample the tech jobs in an area, what they want in the position, and what they're willing to pay. When I was job hunting, many wanted a surgeon at nurse prices.
- mcrad 9y agoIf you are an unprofitable tech company, you are probably going to cry about worker shortage as a means to raise more money, and distribute that wealth as you see fit.
- neo4sure 9y agoWhy don't u open ur own company? And then run it without immigrant techies :)
- Veratyr 9y agoAs someone working and doing code interviews for a large company that pays well (even by bay area standards), I think it's a lack of qualified US citizens. The number of graduates I've interviewed that can't figure out a basic graph traversal is crazy. I don't ask (or expect) them to recite algorithms from memory but even if they haven't worked with graphs before, they should be able to figure out a BFS or DFS on their own and suggest some ways to improve on it. Many of them however, cannot. I'll also note that I don't interview many foreigners and the reason I see mostly new grads is that I'm not senior myself, so it makes little sense for me to interview senior candidates. At the high end, there's simply a larger supply overseas. The US has a population of 300M and between them, India and China have about 2.7B people and their countries pay far, far less.