4 ms·

I think the point of this graph is to demonstrate that there is a large jumper of temporary workers and high unemployment. The program was to address labor sho

by itake 1y ago

I think the point of this graph is to demonstrate that there is a large jumper of temporary workers and high unemployment. The program was to address labor shortages, and if we don’t have a labor shortage, then we should be reducing our temporary worker pool, not US citizen pool.

Ar-Curunir 1y ago
You seriously think that in the period of 2011 to, say 2021, there wasn't a massive labour shortage in tech hiring?
- mushroomba 1y ago
  Yes. As a US citizen, I, and many of my college cohort, spent many years unemployed during that time period, despite applying to thousands of positions. The reality is that businesses hire attorneys to create a legal fiction that I and my peers are unqualified so that businesses that desire it can hire H-1B employees. Shortages are, always and everywhere, a pricing phenomenon.
  - roadside_picnic 1y ago
    Do you think it's possible you were overestimating the skills in your particular cohort? Being more senior, my world of coworker and colleagues has been a mix of highly skilled people, largely in the AI/ML space. There are many H1Bs among them, but there has been no difference in the ability of the US citizen subset and the H1B subset in getting jobs. Even closer to the entry level, the H1B pool all came from very competitive and elite universities, and all of them also had advanced degrees. I do believe the market for fresh out of college software engineers without much specialization is tight, but I also don't see many H1Bs in that category either (but again, that could just be because of my own cohort I'm surrounded by). A PhD from NYU/Harvard/MIT with an undergrad at a place like IIT or Tsinghua is not in the same talent pool as newly graduated undergrad students from a standard US university.
    - Zacharias030 1y ago
      This is also what I suspect. It is very different how many CS majors in the US enter the job market with just a bachelor’s degree.
    - itake 1y ago
      I think you're conflating visas. The PhD would use the OTP and O-1 visas, not the h1b. The h1b candidate pool would be mostly undergrad and masters students.
      - Ar-Curunir 1y ago
        It is not that easy. OPT only works for a few years, and you are not immediately eligible for an O-1
    - lisbbb 1y ago
      So you're saying all a CS grad has to do is go back in time and get a degree from MIT and they're golden, right? Let me explain something: When I graduated from High School in Upstate NY in 1991, 3 of my fellow grads got accepted into MIT that year. From that one school! The odds of such an event taking place in the 2020s has to be vanishingly small to impossible. The high-end schools like MIT have not scaled up to match the enormously scaled up demand for education, not to mention how expensive the tuition has become. So it is simply impossible for everyone who wants to be engineers or computer scientists to attend some elite school nowadays. The competition for seats must have increased 100 fold since the early 1990s!
  - lisbbb 1y ago
    I agree with the above comment. During that time period was the height of my tech career. The remarkable number of open positions didn't lead to the kinds of wage increases one might expect, perhaps some, but what I mostly encountered was a lot of highly specialized roles that I wasn't qualified for because everything has to be "just so" in order to be hired on because companies refuse to train or allot time for training, just brief "ramp up" periods that are do or die. Nowadays, since I'm in my 50s, I'm disqualified from being able to work in tech completely. Mind you, the age discrimination is hidden behind me not being perfectly qualified for whatever role due to not checking some technical skillset. Never mind that I am still sharp, have a great deal of experience, and can do whatever is asked given a decent target to aim for. None of it seems to matter, it's purely ageism eliminating me from getting interviews now. I do think we here in the US passed some kind of inflection point where the damage done by H1B labor finally killed the tech career path in the sense that all of a sudden, entry level jobs simply vanished, never to return. I'm sure that H1Bs reached some critical mass that triggered that extinction event. The job market in tech in the US has been absolutely brutal since at least 2023.
    - dietr1ch 1y ago
      > I do think we here in the US passed some kind of inflection point where the damage done by H1B labor finally killed the tech career path in the sense that all of a sudden, entry level jobs simply vanished, never to return. I'm sure that H1Bs reached some critical mass that triggered that extinction event. > > The job market in tech in the US has been absolutely brutal since at least 2023. Why do you think H1-Bs are to blame over AI hype coupled with Section 174 tax changes[^1]? H1-Bs have been around for a long time, so I doubt it's the culprit for layoffs and lower hiring since 2023. ^1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226145 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226145
- itake 1y ago
  During this period, many job opportunities went to h1b candidates, resulting in teams at FANGA companies with all 1 nationality. It would be fair to say that they couldn't find any american talent and thus needed to hire h1b workers, but that wouldn't explain how they got monoculture teams.
mattnewton 1y ago
There is an argument that the purpose of the program is to provide skilled labor which is beneficial to the economy, beyond just, but including the domestic employment rate. I’m not sure that’s what the H-1B program is doing in practice here, it probably is replacing many skilled American born workers. But at least in theory it can both be true that domestic worker unemployment has gone up, but that contracting the program risks the global competitiveness of major US companies that net employ US workers. More analysis is probably warranted.
- michaelteter 1y ago
  The purpose of this program has always been to provide cheaper labor for companies. We have never had a legitimate shortage of qualified software engineers.
  - itake 1y ago
    We definitely did have a shortage until about 2021. Code camps wouldn't exist if companies couldn't hire from a more qualified candidate pool.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  I worked at BigTech, I don’t think I met a single coworker on H1B that was a “specialized top talent” whose job couldn’t go to an American citizen. I’m not saying any of my H1B visa coworkers were worse than American citizens, they weren’t better. Now I also spent a long career in regular old enterprise dev before 2020. Definitely any halfway decent framework developer could have done the job as well as the ones who were here on H1B. I can easily hold multiple thoughts at once. 1. As long as their unemployed qualified Americans for roles, we should reduce the new H1B visa applications dramatically. 2. I don’t begrudge anyone here on H1B and don’t support discriminating against them or cancelling their visa 3. I don’t agree with how once you get let go from a job, the clock starts ticking no matter how much money you have saved. When I was at Amazon and Amazon started Amazoning with me. I didn’t break a sweat when I was on “focus”. I played the game long enough to get through my next vest and then sat around and waited on my “get $40K+ severance offer and leave immediately or prostrate myself for a couple of more months and still be let go with 1/3 the severance amount”. Of course I took the severance. My coworkers here on H1B were scared shitless and overworked themselves. Then again, it was my 8th job out of now 10 and I was already 49 at the time. I might have acted differently if I were younger.
roadside_picnic 1y ago
> and high unemployment. I didn't see where that was shown in the chart. All I see is an assertion that "often at the expense of recent American CS grads.", and while I do believe I saw reporting that new grads are facing higher unemployment, I didn't see anything related specifically to CS grads, and, further, I haven't seen any data pointing out that H1Bs are taking entry level jobs. At least my experience has been that H1B are often in more senior roles and entry level jobs that require advanced degrees. I'm not saying that it's not the case that there is a misalignment with the number of H1Bs and the current employment situation, but there doesn't seem to be enough data here to fully flesh out this argument without some fairly major assumptions being applied.
- itake 1y ago
  > For computer science and computer engineering, the unemployment rate in those fields was 6.1% and 7.5%, respectively — notably higher than the national average. > By comparison, the unemployment rate for art history majors was 3%, and for nutritional sciences, the unemployment rate was just 0.4%, the New York Fed found. The New York Fed’s report was based on Census data from 2023 and unemployment rates of recent college graduates. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/16/college-majors-with-the-best-and-worst-employment-prospects.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/16/college-majors-with-the-best... > I haven't seen any data pointing out that H1Bs are taking entry level jobs Foreign new grads start their career on the OTP visa, which allows them to work for 2 years after they graduate. So you are correct, foreign students use OTP, not h1b to apply for entry level jobs.

by itake 1y ago

Ar-Curunir 1y ago

You seriously think that in the period of 2011 to, say 2021, there wasn't a massive labour shortage in tech hiring?

mushroomba 1y ago
Yes. As a US citizen, I, and many of my college cohort, spent many years unemployed during that time period, despite applying to thousands of positions. The reality is that businesses hire attorneys to create a legal fiction that I and my peers are unqualified so that businesses that desire it can hire H-1B employees. Shortages are, always and everywhere, a pricing phenomenon.
- roadside_picnic 1y ago
  Do you think it's possible you were overestimating the skills in your particular cohort? Being more senior, my world of coworker and colleagues has been a mix of highly skilled people, largely in the AI/ML space. There are many H1Bs among them, but there has been no difference in the ability of the US citizen subset and the H1B subset in getting jobs. Even closer to the entry level, the H1B pool all came from very competitive and elite universities, and all of them also had advanced degrees. I do believe the market for fresh out of college software engineers without much specialization is tight, but I also don't see many H1Bs in that category either (but again, that could just be because of my own cohort I'm surrounded by). A PhD from NYU/Harvard/MIT with an undergrad at a place like IIT or Tsinghua is not in the same talent pool as newly graduated undergrad students from a standard US university.
  - Zacharias030 1y ago
    This is also what I suspect. It is very different how many CS majors in the US enter the job market with just a bachelor’s degree.
  - itake 1y ago
    I think you're conflating visas. The PhD would use the OTP and O-1 visas, not the h1b. The h1b candidate pool would be mostly undergrad and masters students.
    - Ar-Curunir 1y ago
      It is not that easy. OPT only works for a few years, and you are not immediately eligible for an O-1
  - lisbbb 1y ago
    So you're saying all a CS grad has to do is go back in time and get a degree from MIT and they're golden, right? Let me explain something: When I graduated from High School in Upstate NY in 1991, 3 of my fellow grads got accepted into MIT that year. From that one school! The odds of such an event taking place in the 2020s has to be vanishingly small to impossible. The high-end schools like MIT have not scaled up to match the enormously scaled up demand for education, not to mention how expensive the tuition has become. So it is simply impossible for everyone who wants to be engineers or computer scientists to attend some elite school nowadays. The competition for seats must have increased 100 fold since the early 1990s!
- lisbbb 1y ago
  I agree with the above comment. During that time period was the height of my tech career. The remarkable number of open positions didn't lead to the kinds of wage increases one might expect, perhaps some, but what I mostly encountered was a lot of highly specialized roles that I wasn't qualified for because everything has to be "just so" in order to be hired on because companies refuse to train or allot time for training, just brief "ramp up" periods that are do or die. Nowadays, since I'm in my 50s, I'm disqualified from being able to work in tech completely. Mind you, the age discrimination is hidden behind me not being perfectly qualified for whatever role due to not checking some technical skillset. Never mind that I am still sharp, have a great deal of experience, and can do whatever is asked given a decent target to aim for. None of it seems to matter, it's purely ageism eliminating me from getting interviews now. I do think we here in the US passed some kind of inflection point where the damage done by H1B labor finally killed the tech career path in the sense that all of a sudden, entry level jobs simply vanished, never to return. I'm sure that H1Bs reached some critical mass that triggered that extinction event. The job market in tech in the US has been absolutely brutal since at least 2023.
  - dietr1ch 1y ago
    > I do think we here in the US passed some kind of inflection point where the damage done by H1B labor finally killed the tech career path in the sense that all of a sudden, entry level jobs simply vanished, never to return. I'm sure that H1Bs reached some critical mass that triggered that extinction event. > > The job market in tech in the US has been absolutely brutal since at least 2023. Why do you think H1-Bs are to blame over AI hype coupled with Section 174 tax changes[^1]? H1-Bs have been around for a long time, so I doubt it's the culprit for layoffs and lower hiring since 2023. ^1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226145 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226145
itake 1y ago
During this period, many job opportunities went to h1b candidates, resulting in teams at FANGA companies with all 1 nationality. It would be fair to say that they couldn't find any american talent and thus needed to hire h1b workers, but that wouldn't explain how they got monoculture teams.

mattnewton 1y ago

There is an argument that the purpose of the program is to provide skilled labor which is beneficial to the economy, beyond just, but including the domestic employment rate. I’m not sure that’s what the H-1B program is doing in practice here, it probably is replacing many skilled American born workers. But at least in theory it can both be true that domestic worker unemployment has gone up, but that contracting the program risks the global competitiveness of major US companies that net employ US workers. More analysis is probably warranted.

michaelteter 1y ago
The purpose of this program has always been to provide cheaper labor for companies. We have never had a legitimate shortage of qualified software engineers.
- itake 1y ago
  We definitely did have a shortage until about 2021. Code camps wouldn't exist if companies couldn't hire from a more qualified candidate pool.
scarface_74 1y ago
I worked at BigTech, I don’t think I met a single coworker on H1B that was a “specialized top talent” whose job couldn’t go to an American citizen. I’m not saying any of my H1B visa coworkers were worse than American citizens, they weren’t better. Now I also spent a long career in regular old enterprise dev before 2020. Definitely any halfway decent framework developer could have done the job as well as the ones who were here on H1B. I can easily hold multiple thoughts at once. 1. As long as their unemployed qualified Americans for roles, we should reduce the new H1B visa applications dramatically. 2. I don’t begrudge anyone here on H1B and don’t support discriminating against them or cancelling their visa 3. I don’t agree with how once you get let go from a job, the clock starts ticking no matter how much money you have saved. When I was at Amazon and Amazon started Amazoning with me. I didn’t break a sweat when I was on “focus”. I played the game long enough to get through my next vest and then sat around and waited on my “get $40K+ severance offer and leave immediately or prostrate myself for a couple of more months and still be let go with 1/3 the severance amount”. Of course I took the severance. My coworkers here on H1B were scared shitless and overworked themselves. Then again, it was my 8th job out of now 10 and I was already 49 at the time. I might have acted differently if I were younger.

roadside_picnic 1y ago

> and high unemployment. I didn't see where that was shown in the chart. All I see is an assertion that "often at the expense of recent American CS grads.", and while I do believe I saw reporting that new grads are facing higher unemployment, I didn't see anything related specifically to CS grads, and, further, I haven't seen any data pointing out that H1Bs are taking entry level jobs. At least my experience has been that H1B are often in more senior roles and entry level jobs that require advanced degrees. I'm not saying that it's not the case that there is a misalignment with the number of H1Bs and the current employment situation, but there doesn't seem to be enough data here to fully flesh out this argument without some fairly major assumptions being applied.

itake 1y ago
> For computer science and computer engineering, the unemployment rate in those fields was 6.1% and 7.5%, respectively — notably higher than the national average. > By comparison, the unemployment rate for art history majors was 3%, and for nutritional sciences, the unemployment rate was just 0.4%, the New York Fed found. The New York Fed’s report was based on Census data from 2023 and unemployment rates of recent college graduates. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/16/college-majors-with-the-best-and-worst-employment-prospects.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/16/college-majors-with-the-best... > I haven't seen any data pointing out that H1Bs are taking entry level jobs Foreign new grads start their career on the OTP visa, which allows them to work for 2 years after they graduate. So you are correct, foreign students use OTP, not h1b to apply for entry level jobs.