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I'm apologetically opposed to foreign workers. The US has PLENTY of tech workers, ranging from help desk to the nerdiest graph theory scientists. This is nothin

I'm apologetically opposed to foreign workers. The US has PLENTY of tech workers, ranging from help desk to the nerdiest graph theory scientists. This is nothing more than companies getting cheaper labor. Full stop. I find all the excuses just that. Years ago, I worked for a rather well known security/dev company in Northern Virginia. We had two arms to the company: the gov contractor side, which required security clearances and the dev side. The dev side hired a few H-1B visas and within a year, the boss, a former H-1B visa holder himself, now a citizen, slowly, but surely purged the Americans from the dev team in favor of people from his country. We all complained, but to no avail. Six months later, the place had two Americans: the good looking admin assistants. That was it. This happens all the time. I have friends in Northern Virginia that I still keep in touch with and they say nothing has changed. The IT payscale has been run down because of this. Same thing is happening with a certain large HW vendor here in Houston. Filled to the brim with H-1B visa holders while native sons and daughters are given the brush off.

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chasingthewind 8y ago
This really doesn't match my experience. As a tech lead / team lead over the last five years in a small East Coast market I've experienced real difficulty finding competent Software Engineers at any level. I changed jobs a year ago and got lots of interest from a wide variety of employers from a big enterprisey place to a small local startup, two smallish local fintech firms, and a SV software company's regional dev center where I landed. I'm in my mid forties. I can't really explain the difference in your experience vs mine other that perhaps the location.
- jacobyoder 8y ago
  > As a tech lead / team lead over the last five years in a small East Coast market I've experienced real difficulty finding competent Software Engineers at any level Amen. I've been in a few US markets (non CA/NY) over the past 20+ years. Finding a decent number of available/skilled software engineers is always a challenge. If they're skilled (beyond competent), they're employed or doing their own thing. I've recently taken a 6 month contract, and have been amazed at the quality of the team, but... they're really having trouble finding people - people that wouldn't be a net negative on the team (there's both cultural fit as well as skill fit). And yes, they're hiring junior folks from area bootcamps and training them up. Doing real training - reviews, handholding, explaining, testing - is a real investment, and takes a lot of time. This has been one of the few teams I've worked in where I've been pleasantly surprised at the level of quality of everyone in the company (10 in the group I'm in, around 65 in the company altogether I think). I'm watching how they interview/hire/expand, and... it's tough. They could easily bring on more people quickly who would be a net negative, and cause more problems (I've seen that many times - I was the net negative problem at least once!)
- ThePawnBreak 8y ago
  > As a tech lead / team lead over the last five years in a small East Coast market I've experienced real difficulty finding competent Software Engineers at any level. Pay more. Google and Facebook use ridiculous interviews because so many people want to work there. They still hire thousands of people every year. Why? Mostly because they pay mid-level engineers over $200k. Can't afford that? Then we're not talking about "not finding people" anymore, just about not affording them.
  - southphillyman 8y ago
    Doesn't this assume that the interviews even get to the offer stage? How does paying more remedy 80% of your applicants failing fizzbuzz on the phone interview? If you don't have the name recognition of the FAANG you're probably getting subpar applicants regardless.
    - ThePawnBreak 8y ago
      > Doesn't this assume that the interviews get to the salary negotiation stage? If you don't have the name recognition of the FAANG you're probably getting subpar applicants regardless. People talk about salaries, they know who the top hitters are. Here in London there are many hedge funds you never heard of that have 20 engineers fighting for one spot, because they pay 100k GBP, whereas most startups complaining about lack of people pay 40k.
    - a_c_s 8y ago
      Paying more attracts more applicants.
      - souprock 8y ago
        It does not attract more applicants because they won't know about it unless you advertise a specific amount, which then creates other problems. You'd get a flood of useless people if the number is high. Some other people, underestimating themselves, would not apply. You remove the flexibility to hire both junior and senior people because one single pay number can't fit both. Even if you provide a range, you have the problem of pessimists and optimists assuming very different things about where in the range they might fall.
- pteredactyl 8y ago
  Fair. Are you offering competitive wages that appeal to local workers?
  - chasingthewind 8y ago
    My impression was that both organizations were offering reasonable salaries for the market but I wasn't directly involved in the compensation talks.
- bpyne 8y ago
  The problem has multiple parts: pay, benefits, and definition of "skills". Two years ago I did a search for software engineering jobs within 30 miles of my geographic area, which covered Boston. I had a steady stream of opportunities. After three months of disappointment, I called off the search. I received an offer from an organization I loved: the industry, mission, people I met, everything was perfect. My interviewers halted the interview after 30 minutes, saying that they were going to start the hiring process. The salary became the stickler. The job was mine if I wanted to take a $10-15K decrease in salary. Unfortunately, I had to let it pass by. (In retrospect, I should have taken it. I would have caught up in pay within a few years. Oh well.) Another organization seemed pretty inline with my goals and personality. The tech was interesting and I mostly aligned with it. The stickler became the vacation time. I have 4 weeks of vacation. They needed me to start again at 2 weeks. (2 weeks, seriously?) Doing so would have screwed up family life as my wife has 5 weeks. Honestly, I can trade salary sooner than I can trade vacation time. Employers seem to have strayed into Crazy Land with the requirements for "skills". A skill, to me, isn't the knowledge of the Python ecosystem or Java ecosystem for building applications. Python vs. Java is just a knowledge of tool sets: Stanley vs. DeWitt. It's easy to learn one if you know the other. Skill is choosing the right trade-offs in design for the particular organization and industrial sector you're working in. It's knowing when transaction throughput is more important than rock-solid error handling. When extensibility is worth the extra abstractions. When readability trumps everything for a particular organization due to the skill level of the other development teams. Yet, employers have gotten to the point of not just requiring particular tools, but particular versions of them. So, I'm not convinced the problem is a lack of available software engineers, at least not completely. Much of the problem in hiring is outrageous demands from employers.
  - stirfrykitty 8y ago
    You, sir, said the above beautifully and truthfully. I recently (last year) suffered through the same thing. Ever notice the faults in some of the job postings? 5-7 years experience with a tool that has been out for 3 years? Funny. Or my favorites: DevOps... what a joke. Any good sysadmin, especially *nix, should be able to write shell scripts well, at least using Bash, maybe some Perl and Python. But no. I recently saw a posting for a sysadmin job in Houston where no one would have qualified. They wanted the candidate to have 10+ years of C# systems programming experience! For a sysadmin job. Not many sysadmins with those skills are still sysadmins. In addition, they wanted nginx, Apache, IIS, MySQL, MS SQL, Docker, Kubernetes, and many others. Very few people know all of that in one go. From the job description, one can surmise they wanted a developer for the price of a sysadmin. No thanks.
oarsinsync 8y ago
> This is nothing more than companies getting cheaper labor. Full stop. From the opening lines of the article: > In 1975, immigrants accounted for one in 12 inventors in America. Today it’s one in 3.5. It seems unlikely that if this was purely cheap labour, that this would result in more inventors (assuming they're not using some alternate definition of inventor that I'm unaware of)
- hinkley 8y ago
  I think you should pay more attention to complaints about patent farming. Generating a patent isn't a matter of being exceedingly clever, here. It's being a little clever, having bosses that are obsessed with patent applications, and either not caring about it or not having enough power to say no.
  - oarsinsync 8y ago
    That's a good point. Having a patent in your name technically qualifies you as an inventor, and as you've correctly noted, patent farms are a thing.
    - hinkley 8y ago
      Most large American corporations with a software development division appear to be patent farmers. Sooner or later the attorneys and the accountants take over.
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atonse 8y ago
This is the first time I've seen anybody say "The US has plenty of tech workers" – every single IT company I know is desperately trying to hire people, all the time. And this is at multiple tiers: innovative consumer companies, government contractors, small web design shops, large companies looking to bolster their teams. And regarding your H1b comment, I have posted about 10 jobs in my career. In every single one, 95% of applicants were "foreigners" (work visa holders, new college grads) – the sufficient talent pool just isn't there locally, we have to fill it with more immigrants coming to our shores. And we weren't at all looking at cost at that point. The only class of people I constantly hear are starting to feel the pain of being less in demand in IT, are older people.
- wnevets 8y ago
  > every single IT company I know is desperately trying to hire people, all the time. have they tried increasing the pay?
  - skybrian 8y ago
    Um, yes? At least some of them. Perhaps you may have noticed the effect of tech workers' high salaries on the price of housing in some cities?
  - snarf21 8y ago
    or hiring junior people and training them (and paying them increases as they improve so they don't leave)?
- itronitron 8y ago
  >> every single IT company I know is desperately trying to hire people Encourage them to list their open positions on the monthly Who's Hiring thread.
- gnarcoregrizz 8y ago
  Whatever, I'm a citizen, 29yo, and have been rejected from enough tech jobs that I don't bother applying or looking anymore because I'm not going through the ridiculous interview processes. The last one I applied to (Amazon), I had to study a bunch of leetcrap, fly out on-site to get rejected by some dudes who were checked out the whole time. Other companies pay is so low that it's not worth it, simply because it's really expensive to own a home here. If tech workers were really in demand, all of the above wouldn't be the case. The only way to win the game is to not play it. I'm staying put.
rhacker 8y ago
Our team right now is about 3 developers (1 part time consultant). This is about a year into a recommendation by me to can the old team. The old team was about 9-12 developers located in Pakistan. The new team is pretty much Americans (all their lives). We are all remote. The 3 of us have: * Migrated significant portions of the PK team's Angular 1 app to React * Introduced GraphQL * Fixed migraine sized security holes (no priv. checks in about 30% of the app) * Migrated from some system that was SUPPOSED to be docker swarm to kubernetes * Introduced 4 major feature releases * Building systems and configuration formats designed for code reuse rather than building brittle shit code * Actually implemented elastic search in a useful way (the old team installed a shitty unreliable version and used it for a non-essential purpose) * Migrated the 90% of the JS codebase fraught with patches to typescript. I get that none of the above is stuff that can be "fully" grok'd from an outsider, but basically I'm saying the team is doing the code right (instead of poor, not up to spec) releasing features waay faster, fewer bugs, in less time with 1/3 the people. The price? It's actually cheaper by about 20% (maybe about 10k less per month). I'm not a writer, and am definitely poor at story telling, but there's a major problem in my eyes when we say we have to hire people out of the country or are H1B holders first.
- matwood 8y ago
  I experienced something similar at a prior job. But, IMO it's not about foreign workers, but about cheap workers. A cheap worker is a cheap worker no matter where you find them. A very capable person on the other side of the world is not going to be working in a cheap sweatshop. They will be moving on as quickly as possible to better paying jobs.
AmazingAtalanta 8y ago
I have to agree that I think this has to do with hiring cheaper labor. I'm not sure whether they are immigrants or not has very much to do with it. I think that immigration probably helps to increase the labor pool seeking jobs in the US in the tech industry. I would imagine the more seasoned foreign engineers/devs/etc. probably would be less inclined to uproot their lives and move to the US. While immigration might be an issue, I think it's really just a problem with a desire to hire younger and cheaper labor regardless of whether they are US citizens or not. There is still tech on the east coast, but it's nothing like the allure or salaries that are offered out in Silicon Valley. Actually, I feel like most of the really talented individuals from the east coast make their way out west unless they have some other non-job things keeping them rooted out here or they happen to land a pretty decent job at a fintech, adtech, etc. company out on the east coast. But I see a lot of companies thinning their IT staff and the people who are most likely to go tend to be the >40 crowd. Probably because they are more expensive, management doesn't perceive them as being as "up-to-date," and there's less runway in their career. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if some of it is that they want less experienced individuals who will just do what their told and might be less opinionated about things. To me this causes a huge problem with system and application architecture, because you lose all of that expertise of years spent developing and dealing with different situations that I believe can give you a lot of insight into how things should be architected.
- stirfrykitty 8y ago
  I'm 50. Been in IT across three decades. There is very little in my wheelhouse that I cannot do or learn within a very short amount of time. Yet... I fight to find decent work that I am more than capable of doing. IT salaries in Texas suck horribly. I've fought this since leaving the East Coast. Being that my wife is from here and my own parents are long gone, I agreed to let my wife be near her own family. At 50, I can: - Admin anything *nix or Windows under the sun. I used to run Sun E10Ks for Network Solutions and more than 100 FreeBSD/Linux servers at one time. - Can write Python, Perl, Ruby, PowerShell, C#, Bash, awk, and am learning Go as I write this. - I can build any web server or database server under the sun, can write programs to do basically whatever a server or sysadmin might need, usually in a matter of hours, not days. - I can perform security assessments, as I used to be a pen tester. I have the experience and the certs (required from a previous employer). Yet... I struggle to find work in my own damn country! IT for older workers does indeed suck. I now work for a non-profit coding and some other IT work. Not a bad fit, but the money could be a lot better. On the East Coast, I was a six-figure guy. Here? Good luck, even if you're 30 and have a masters in whatever and 10 years of experience. Am I bitter? A little. American IT workers, unless they are current darlings in a hot area or arena, struggle. I'm actually working on starting my own MSP IT firm with a suitable partner almost my own age whose experience rivals my own. Good MSPs in this area can do very well.
esoterica 8y ago
If hiring foreigners is only about getting cheaper labor, why do all the best paying tech employers (FAANGs, unicorns, quant trading firms etc.) have so many foreign born workers on staff? America is only 5% of the world’s population, if you want to hire the most talented people possible, you will inevitably see substantial foreign representation. I work with plenty of non-citizens who get paid millions of dollars a year. I don’t think they were hired because they were cheap.
- CodeMage 8y ago
  It's not only about getting cheaper labor -- that's what many people get wrong. It's also about dodging the rules of the free market: an H-1B holder can't just get up and leave the company if they don't like how they're being treated. Sure, it's theoretically possible, but it's a hell of a lot harder for an H-1B holder than for a citizen or a permanent resident.
- sjg007 8y ago
  It's a dichotomy. There are well qualified tech workers who get H1Bs and high paying jobs and there are body shops. There are companies that have tech components who want to outsource for example. One of the reasons to enforce higher pay is to enforce the former. There's supposed to be gov't monitoring of salaries etc... to check for abuse and also public transparency so that authorized workers can see their value. These offers are supposed to be publicly posted in the office and you can also see official H1B public filings to see how your salary matches official offers (although the online data will have a job title and not necessarily the job specific role/criteria that the public posting in the workplace would have).
pteredactyl 8y ago
To add, it's strange to me foreigners are anywhere close to work which requires a security clearance. Or for that matter at places where privacy (take: selling out rights and data of Americans) has recently become an issue.
- sjg007 8y ago
  It's not unusual to have a gov't business line. There are large construction firms for instance that build govt buildings and all of the employees require clearance. Salaries are higher in cleared jobs generally.
- souprock 8y ago
  Apparently the law is completely backwards from what is required for national security. Most places are prohibited from discriminating against people who have foreign connections. This dramatically increases the risk of spying. A more reasonable law would go the other way: if there could be exposure to trade secrets or bulk personal data, even via an unused ethernet port under the table, then those with foreign connections ought to require a security-aware escort.
NearAP 8y ago
H1-B covers both folks who are based outside the US when they were recruited and students who graduated from US schools and transitioned from F1 (student visa) to H1-B. If you go to computer science/STEM departments (at least for the top schools), you will notice that a significant portion of them are foreign students. It is thus not surprising to see a lot of being hired. Also, foreign students being hired after graduating from US schools are very much less likely to be cheated upon when it comes to pay.
d1zzy 8y ago
> I'm apologetically opposed to foreign workers. The US has PLENTY of tech workers, ranging from help desk to the nerdiest graph theory scientists. This is nothing more than companies getting cheaper labor. Full stop. I find all the excuses just that. If the world was that easy... let's see, please find the flaw in the following: - I'm apologetically opposed to universities creating more CS classes. The US has PLENTY of tech workers, ranging from help desk to the nerdiest graph theory scientists. This is nothing more than companies getting cheaper labor. Full stop. I find all the excuses just that. - I'm apologetically opposed to hiring remote workers. <insert current location> has PLENTY of tech workers, ranging from help desk to the nerdiest graph theory scientists. This is nothing more than companies getting cheaper labor. Full stop. I find all the excuses just that. - I'm apologetically opposed to replacing local IT services with cloud. The US has PLENTY of tech workers, ranging from help desk to the nerdiest graph theory scientists. This is nothing more than companies getting cheaper labor. Full stop. I find all the excuses just that. The issue is complex. Yes, there's likely lots of companies for which one of the main short term reasons to hire foreign talent is to reduce employment costs for the local employers they would replace. But companies and economies aren't zero-sum systems. Hiring bright (and cheap) talent means you can do more things cheaper which would allow your company (and economy to grow), which allows hiring more and producing more (or extending provided services). My opinion is that the main reason IT payscale has suffered was that the services they provided can be easily replaced with cheaper alternatives (immigrant workers, remote workers, cloud services). People that manage to get to the US have already undergone a very strong selection (even if the H1B process through which they were brought was abused), they are some of the best people their country has to offer which means the country that gains them has an advantage over the one that loses them.

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chasingthewind 8y ago

This really doesn't match my experience. As a tech lead / team lead over the last five years in a small East Coast market I've experienced real difficulty finding competent Software Engineers at any level. I changed jobs a year ago and got lots of interest from a wide variety of employers from a big enterprisey place to a small local startup, two smallish local fintech firms, and a SV software company's regional dev center where I landed. I'm in my mid forties. I can't really explain the difference in your experience vs mine other that perhaps the location.

jacobyoder 8y ago
> As a tech lead / team lead over the last five years in a small East Coast market I've experienced real difficulty finding competent Software Engineers at any level Amen. I've been in a few US markets (non CA/NY) over the past 20+ years. Finding a decent number of available/skilled software engineers is always a challenge. If they're skilled (beyond competent), they're employed or doing their own thing. I've recently taken a 6 month contract, and have been amazed at the quality of the team, but... they're really having trouble finding people - people that wouldn't be a net negative on the team (there's both cultural fit as well as skill fit). And yes, they're hiring junior folks from area bootcamps and training them up. Doing real training - reviews, handholding, explaining, testing - is a real investment, and takes a lot of time. This has been one of the few teams I've worked in where I've been pleasantly surprised at the level of quality of everyone in the company (10 in the group I'm in, around 65 in the company altogether I think). I'm watching how they interview/hire/expand, and... it's tough. They could easily bring on more people quickly who would be a net negative, and cause more problems (I've seen that many times - I was the net negative problem at least once!)
ThePawnBreak 8y ago
> As a tech lead / team lead over the last five years in a small East Coast market I've experienced real difficulty finding competent Software Engineers at any level. Pay more. Google and Facebook use ridiculous interviews because so many people want to work there. They still hire thousands of people every year. Why? Mostly because they pay mid-level engineers over $200k. Can't afford that? Then we're not talking about "not finding people" anymore, just about not affording them.
- southphillyman 8y ago
  Doesn't this assume that the interviews even get to the offer stage? How does paying more remedy 80% of your applicants failing fizzbuzz on the phone interview? If you don't have the name recognition of the FAANG you're probably getting subpar applicants regardless.
  - ThePawnBreak 8y ago
    > Doesn't this assume that the interviews get to the salary negotiation stage? If you don't have the name recognition of the FAANG you're probably getting subpar applicants regardless. People talk about salaries, they know who the top hitters are. Here in London there are many hedge funds you never heard of that have 20 engineers fighting for one spot, because they pay 100k GBP, whereas most startups complaining about lack of people pay 40k.
  - a_c_s 8y ago
    Paying more attracts more applicants.
    - souprock 8y ago
      It does not attract more applicants because they won't know about it unless you advertise a specific amount, which then creates other problems. You'd get a flood of useless people if the number is high. Some other people, underestimating themselves, would not apply. You remove the flexibility to hire both junior and senior people because one single pay number can't fit both. Even if you provide a range, you have the problem of pessimists and optimists assuming very different things about where in the range they might fall.
pteredactyl 8y ago
Fair. Are you offering competitive wages that appeal to local workers?
- chasingthewind 8y ago
  My impression was that both organizations were offering reasonable salaries for the market but I wasn't directly involved in the compensation talks.
bpyne 8y ago
The problem has multiple parts: pay, benefits, and definition of "skills". Two years ago I did a search for software engineering jobs within 30 miles of my geographic area, which covered Boston. I had a steady stream of opportunities. After three months of disappointment, I called off the search. I received an offer from an organization I loved: the industry, mission, people I met, everything was perfect. My interviewers halted the interview after 30 minutes, saying that they were going to start the hiring process. The salary became the stickler. The job was mine if I wanted to take a $10-15K decrease in salary. Unfortunately, I had to let it pass by. (In retrospect, I should have taken it. I would have caught up in pay within a few years. Oh well.) Another organization seemed pretty inline with my goals and personality. The tech was interesting and I mostly aligned with it. The stickler became the vacation time. I have 4 weeks of vacation. They needed me to start again at 2 weeks. (2 weeks, seriously?) Doing so would have screwed up family life as my wife has 5 weeks. Honestly, I can trade salary sooner than I can trade vacation time. Employers seem to have strayed into Crazy Land with the requirements for "skills". A skill, to me, isn't the knowledge of the Python ecosystem or Java ecosystem for building applications. Python vs. Java is just a knowledge of tool sets: Stanley vs. DeWitt. It's easy to learn one if you know the other. Skill is choosing the right trade-offs in design for the particular organization and industrial sector you're working in. It's knowing when transaction throughput is more important than rock-solid error handling. When extensibility is worth the extra abstractions. When readability trumps everything for a particular organization due to the skill level of the other development teams. Yet, employers have gotten to the point of not just requiring particular tools, but particular versions of them. So, I'm not convinced the problem is a lack of available software engineers, at least not completely. Much of the problem in hiring is outrageous demands from employers.
- stirfrykitty 8y ago
  You, sir, said the above beautifully and truthfully. I recently (last year) suffered through the same thing. Ever notice the faults in some of the job postings? 5-7 years experience with a tool that has been out for 3 years? Funny. Or my favorites: DevOps... what a joke. Any good sysadmin, especially *nix, should be able to write shell scripts well, at least using Bash, maybe some Perl and Python. But no. I recently saw a posting for a sysadmin job in Houston where no one would have qualified. They wanted the candidate to have 10+ years of C# systems programming experience! For a sysadmin job. Not many sysadmins with those skills are still sysadmins. In addition, they wanted nginx, Apache, IIS, MySQL, MS SQL, Docker, Kubernetes, and many others. Very few people know all of that in one go. From the job description, one can surmise they wanted a developer for the price of a sysadmin. No thanks.

oarsinsync 8y ago

> This is nothing more than companies getting cheaper labor. Full stop. From the opening lines of the article: > In 1975, immigrants accounted for one in 12 inventors in America. Today it’s one in 3.5. It seems unlikely that if this was purely cheap labour, that this would result in more inventors (assuming they're not using some alternate definition of inventor that I'm unaware of)

hinkley 8y ago
I think you should pay more attention to complaints about patent farming. Generating a patent isn't a matter of being exceedingly clever, here. It's being a little clever, having bosses that are obsessed with patent applications, and either not caring about it or not having enough power to say no.
- oarsinsync 8y ago
  That's a good point. Having a patent in your name technically qualifies you as an inventor, and as you've correctly noted, patent farms are a thing.
  - hinkley 8y ago
    Most large American corporations with a software development division appear to be patent farmers. Sooner or later the attorneys and the accountants take over.

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atonse 8y ago

This is the first time I've seen anybody say "The US has plenty of tech workers" – every single IT company I know is desperately trying to hire people, all the time. And this is at multiple tiers: innovative consumer companies, government contractors, small web design shops, large companies looking to bolster their teams. And regarding your H1b comment, I have posted about 10 jobs in my career. In every single one, 95% of applicants were "foreigners" (work visa holders, new college grads) – the sufficient talent pool just isn't there locally, we have to fill it with more immigrants coming to our shores. And we weren't at all looking at cost at that point. The only class of people I constantly hear are starting to feel the pain of being less in demand in IT, are older people.

wnevets 8y ago
> every single IT company I know is desperately trying to hire people, all the time. have they tried increasing the pay?
- skybrian 8y ago
  Um, yes? At least some of them. Perhaps you may have noticed the effect of tech workers' high salaries on the price of housing in some cities?
- snarf21 8y ago
  or hiring junior people and training them (and paying them increases as they improve so they don't leave)?
itronitron 8y ago
>> every single IT company I know is desperately trying to hire people Encourage them to list their open positions on the monthly Who's Hiring thread.
gnarcoregrizz 8y ago
Whatever, I'm a citizen, 29yo, and have been rejected from enough tech jobs that I don't bother applying or looking anymore because I'm not going through the ridiculous interview processes. The last one I applied to (Amazon), I had to study a bunch of leetcrap, fly out on-site to get rejected by some dudes who were checked out the whole time. Other companies pay is so low that it's not worth it, simply because it's really expensive to own a home here. If tech workers were really in demand, all of the above wouldn't be the case. The only way to win the game is to not play it. I'm staying put.

rhacker 8y ago

Our team right now is about 3 developers (1 part time consultant). This is about a year into a recommendation by me to can the old team. The old team was about 9-12 developers located in Pakistan. The new team is pretty much Americans (all their lives). We are all remote. The 3 of us have: * Migrated significant portions of the PK team's Angular 1 app to React * Introduced GraphQL * Fixed migraine sized security holes (no priv. checks in about 30% of the app) * Migrated from some system that was SUPPOSED to be docker swarm to kubernetes * Introduced 4 major feature releases * Building systems and configuration formats designed for code reuse rather than building brittle shit code * Actually implemented elastic search in a useful way (the old team installed a shitty unreliable version and used it for a non-essential purpose) * Migrated the 90% of the JS codebase fraught with patches to typescript. I get that none of the above is stuff that can be "fully" grok'd from an outsider, but basically I'm saying the team is doing the code right (instead of poor, not up to spec) releasing features waay faster, fewer bugs, in less time with 1/3 the people. The price? It's actually cheaper by about 20% (maybe about 10k less per month). I'm not a writer, and am definitely poor at story telling, but there's a major problem in my eyes when we say we have to hire people out of the country or are H1B holders first.

matwood 8y ago
I experienced something similar at a prior job. But, IMO it's not about foreign workers, but about cheap workers. A cheap worker is a cheap worker no matter where you find them. A very capable person on the other side of the world is not going to be working in a cheap sweatshop. They will be moving on as quickly as possible to better paying jobs.

AmazingAtalanta 8y ago

I have to agree that I think this has to do with hiring cheaper labor. I'm not sure whether they are immigrants or not has very much to do with it. I think that immigration probably helps to increase the labor pool seeking jobs in the US in the tech industry. I would imagine the more seasoned foreign engineers/devs/etc. probably would be less inclined to uproot their lives and move to the US. While immigration might be an issue, I think it's really just a problem with a desire to hire younger and cheaper labor regardless of whether they are US citizens or not. There is still tech on the east coast, but it's nothing like the allure or salaries that are offered out in Silicon Valley. Actually, I feel like most of the really talented individuals from the east coast make their way out west unless they have some other non-job things keeping them rooted out here or they happen to land a pretty decent job at a fintech, adtech, etc. company out on the east coast. But I see a lot of companies thinning their IT staff and the people who are most likely to go tend to be the >40 crowd. Probably because they are more expensive, management doesn't perceive them as being as "up-to-date," and there's less runway in their career. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if some of it is that they want less experienced individuals who will just do what their told and might be less opinionated about things. To me this causes a huge problem with system and application architecture, because you lose all of that expertise of years spent developing and dealing with different situations that I believe can give you a lot of insight into how things should be architected.

stirfrykitty 8y ago
I'm 50. Been in IT across three decades. There is very little in my wheelhouse that I cannot do or learn within a very short amount of time. Yet... I fight to find decent work that I am more than capable of doing. IT salaries in Texas suck horribly. I've fought this since leaving the East Coast. Being that my wife is from here and my own parents are long gone, I agreed to let my wife be near her own family. At 50, I can: - Admin anything *nix or Windows under the sun. I used to run Sun E10Ks for Network Solutions and more than 100 FreeBSD/Linux servers at one time. - Can write Python, Perl, Ruby, PowerShell, C#, Bash, awk, and am learning Go as I write this. - I can build any web server or database server under the sun, can write programs to do basically whatever a server or sysadmin might need, usually in a matter of hours, not days. - I can perform security assessments, as I used to be a pen tester. I have the experience and the certs (required from a previous employer). Yet... I struggle to find work in my own damn country! IT for older workers does indeed suck. I now work for a non-profit coding and some other IT work. Not a bad fit, but the money could be a lot better. On the East Coast, I was a six-figure guy. Here? Good luck, even if you're 30 and have a masters in whatever and 10 years of experience. Am I bitter? A little. American IT workers, unless they are current darlings in a hot area or arena, struggle. I'm actually working on starting my own MSP IT firm with a suitable partner almost my own age whose experience rivals my own. Good MSPs in this area can do very well.

esoterica 8y ago

If hiring foreigners is only about getting cheaper labor, why do all the best paying tech employers (FAANGs, unicorns, quant trading firms etc.) have so many foreign born workers on staff? America is only 5% of the world’s population, if you want to hire the most talented people possible, you will inevitably see substantial foreign representation. I work with plenty of non-citizens who get paid millions of dollars a year. I don’t think they were hired because they were cheap.

CodeMage 8y ago
It's not only about getting cheaper labor -- that's what many people get wrong. It's also about dodging the rules of the free market: an H-1B holder can't just get up and leave the company if they don't like how they're being treated. Sure, it's theoretically possible, but it's a hell of a lot harder for an H-1B holder than for a citizen or a permanent resident.
sjg007 8y ago
It's a dichotomy. There are well qualified tech workers who get H1Bs and high paying jobs and there are body shops. There are companies that have tech components who want to outsource for example. One of the reasons to enforce higher pay is to enforce the former. There's supposed to be gov't monitoring of salaries etc... to check for abuse and also public transparency so that authorized workers can see their value. These offers are supposed to be publicly posted in the office and you can also see official H1B public filings to see how your salary matches official offers (although the online data will have a job title and not necessarily the job specific role/criteria that the public posting in the workplace would have).

pteredactyl 8y ago

To add, it's strange to me foreigners are anywhere close to work which requires a security clearance. Or for that matter at places where privacy (take: selling out rights and data of Americans) has recently become an issue.

sjg007 8y ago
It's not unusual to have a gov't business line. There are large construction firms for instance that build govt buildings and all of the employees require clearance. Salaries are higher in cleared jobs generally.
souprock 8y ago
Apparently the law is completely backwards from what is required for national security. Most places are prohibited from discriminating against people who have foreign connections. This dramatically increases the risk of spying. A more reasonable law would go the other way: if there could be exposure to trade secrets or bulk personal data, even via an unused ethernet port under the table, then those with foreign connections ought to require a security-aware escort.

NearAP 8y ago

H1-B covers both folks who are based outside the US when they were recruited and students who graduated from US schools and transitioned from F1 (student visa) to H1-B. If you go to computer science/STEM departments (at least for the top schools), you will notice that a significant portion of them are foreign students. It is thus not surprising to see a lot of being hired. Also, foreign students being hired after graduating from US schools are very much less likely to be cheated upon when it comes to pay.

d1zzy 8y ago

> I'm apologetically opposed to foreign workers. The US has PLENTY of tech workers, ranging from help desk to the nerdiest graph theory scientists. This is nothing more than companies getting cheaper labor. Full stop. I find all the excuses just that. If the world was that easy... let's see, please find the flaw in the following: - I'm apologetically opposed to universities creating more CS classes. The US has PLENTY of tech workers, ranging from help desk to the nerdiest graph theory scientists. This is nothing more than companies getting cheaper labor. Full stop. I find all the excuses just that. - I'm apologetically opposed to hiring remote workers. <insert current location> has PLENTY of tech workers, ranging from help desk to the nerdiest graph theory scientists. This is nothing more than companies getting cheaper labor. Full stop. I find all the excuses just that. - I'm apologetically opposed to replacing local IT services with cloud. The US has PLENTY of tech workers, ranging from help desk to the nerdiest graph theory scientists. This is nothing more than companies getting cheaper labor. Full stop. I find all the excuses just that. The issue is complex. Yes, there's likely lots of companies for which one of the main short term reasons to hire foreign talent is to reduce employment costs for the local employers they would replace. But companies and economies aren't zero-sum systems. Hiring bright (and cheap) talent means you can do more things cheaper which would allow your company (and economy to grow), which allows hiring more and producing more (or extending provided services). My opinion is that the main reason IT payscale has suffered was that the services they provided can be easily replaced with cheaper alternatives (immigrant workers, remote workers, cloud services). People that manage to get to the US have already undergone a very strong selection (even if the H1B process through which they were brought was abused), they are some of the best people their country has to offer which means the country that gains them has an advantage over the one that loses them.