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I wonder how this is also related to the attacks on the H1B visa.
by yodsanklai 9mo ago
I wonder how this is also related to the attacks on the H1B visa.
- rat9988 9mo agoI'm not american, but it seems to me there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B. I'm not sure anyway what is the relationship between the potential difficulty of hiring new folks, and firing current folks in USA to offshore roles, are relates.
- adamsb6 9mo agoThere's not a surplus of American developers that can pass interview loops at top tech employers.
- varjag 9mo agoQuality outcomes of top tech employers are still somehow lacklustre despite all that.
- Xirdus 9mo agoThey are creating this very surplus by firing 16,000 people who already did. And that's on top of all the mass firings last year.
- Sevii 9mo agoFAANG has been engaged in mass layoffs for two years now. How can you possibly make the claim that there is a surplus of people who can pass the interview loops? Obviously, there isn't because they are firing people who passed those loops.
- drecked 9mo agoYou’re ignoring the part where FAANG massively overhired in the years preceding. Meta and Amazon doubled their headcount in the 2-3 years of the pandemic. Others like Google increased by 60+%. You’re also forgetting about this little thing popularly called AI that happened in the intervening years. There may be an argument that H1B isn’t fit to purpose in a post AI world (although that argument is also false if we think software engineering will remain a viable job going forward, but that’s a different topic). But it’s much harder to argue that H1B hurt US employers when thr industry they hired the majority of H1B employees in the first 2 decades of the 2000s, also saw some of the highest growth in jobs while simultaneously posting the highest growth in salaries (there may have been certain minor industries hiring a few thousand people, like Oceanographer that had a slightly higher increase, but even that was likely not true because BLS data doesn’t factor compensation in the form of stock options which disproportionally provided wealth for SW engineers relative to other workers).
- johnnyanmac 9mo ago>You’re ignoring the part where FAANG massively overhired in the years preceding. Yes, because overhiring is a lie generated to justify layoffs. I'd hope by year 3 that we'd see through this. If they "overhired", why is hiring still up globally while down in the US? >You’re also forgetting about this little thing popularly called AI that happened in the intervening years. What about it? Hiring numbers are still up. Its clearly not replacing workers as of now.
- eli_gottlieb 9mo agoThen why all the layoffs? You don't fire people you've got a shortage of.
- VirusNewbie 9mo agoOk, then hire them on an O-1 visa. H1B is the problem as it creates a indentured servitude class that is going to work for less.
- SilverElfin 9mo agoH1B workers cost more on average than permanent residents. That’s just based on salary. Once you account for the fees and legal costs and risks of the immigration process, H1B workers are way more expensive. Also, these visas can be transferred between companies. There’s no such thing as an indentured servitude class here - this is just part of the giant racist misinformation machine of the right, to make it seem like shutting it down would somehow be doing those employees a favor. In reality it’ll hurt the entire country.
- jujube3 9mo agoNone of what you're saying is related to what the parent post is saying at all. He's saying, if the immigrants are exceptional, they should be on an O-1 visa, which is specifically designed for exceptional people. If they're not exceptional, then why not hire an unemployed American worker instead? H1B supposedly is designed to address "shortages", but there are no actual shortages.
- toomuchtodo 9mo agohttps://layoffs.fyi/ https://layoffs.fyi/ The domestic talent exists, and companies can leverage it or be punished financially for attempting to “contain labor costs” through leveraging visa workers.
- ProllyInfamous 9mo agoThe "problem" is that you have to compensate natives better / treatment.
- yodsanklai 9mo ago> there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B. As an interviewer in a big tech company, it seems all candidates I interview are foreigners who often graduated in the US. Either the company discriminates (which I really doubt it does), or there aren't enough qualified Americans for some jobs. And even if there are, the largest pool of candidates, the better.
- pickleRick243 9mo agoBetter for whom?
- mattnewton 9mo agoBusinesses, the consumers who buy their products, and the global workforce.
- eli_gottlieb 9mo agoThe global workforce benefits from higher salaries and higher demand for labor, not from zero- or negative-sum moves of jobs from one place to another.
- snerbles 9mo agoThe company itself might not discriminate as a policy, but some hiring managers certainly have their preferences. Or exclusively pull talent from their overseas cousin's brother's spouse's college roommate's consulting firm that is most certainly not a grift.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- zdragnar 9mo agoBig tech companies are biased to sourcing from big name universities that have a lot of foreign students, and big tech companies were much more likely to go through the effort of H1B than smaller companies. As such your candidate pool is more heavily skewed than elsewhere.
- waynesonfire 9mo agoJust look at the open roles for these companies, all India. They're not hiding it. Don't even need H1B.
- weaksauce 9mo agoyou see the reason h1b is so popular with the c-suite in a lot of cases is that you get absolute loyalty to a company that holds all the power of your being allowed to stay in the us. you lose the h1b job and you have limited time to find a new valid employer to sponsor you or else you go back to your country. it's one of the reasons musk loves it for twitter.
- square_usual 9mo agoH1B transfers are easy. You aren't beholden to an employer.
- liveoneggs 9mo agoYou have 60 days to find a new job or get deported. It's a pretty strong lever.
- square_usual 9mo agoHow is that related to a transfer? If you have a job on an H1b, you can get another job and switch to it any time with a transfer.
- liveoneggs 9mo agore-read OOP, not your own jump to "transfer"
- square_usual 9mo agoMy logic is if you can transfer you don't have absolute loyalty. Your logic is... what exactly?
- SilverElfin 9mo agoIt is unbelievable the kind of misinformation that is spread about immigrants. Thanks for pointing that out
- _f78k 9mo ago> it seems to me there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B. Anecdotal so hold on to your salt but in my social circle here in the US natural-born US citizens vs visa-holders self-select for types of jobs. For example, if my the starting pay is < $80k most of my natural-born American friends don't bother applying. Whereas, my visa-holding friends routinely go well below $50k when searching for jobs or "2 year internships". So, when a company posts a certain type of a job they have a certain demographic in mind already. Not saying my US friends are uppity as much as visa holders are desperate.
- x0x0 9mo ago> as visa holders are desperate That is the point of most of these programs. If we (as a country) do h1b, those people should be on an automatic path to a green card.
- profdevloper 9mo agoWhy? They are obviously being weaponized to suppress wages for native Americans in an environment where tech leaders were saying "learn to code". I think the H1B needs to be cancelled and companies should incur financial penalties for using foreign labor to undercut American workers.
- BobaFloutist 9mo ago>native Americans I know you don't mean indigenous people, so what's the cutoff? Is it birthright citizenship? But then what about naturalized citizens? And if they count, thennare they screwing over "natives" up and until their swearing in when they instantly join the screwed, or is it more of a continuous spectrum of screwer/screwed? Or, in the other direction, does your family need to have been here a couple of generations for you to count?
- fragmede 9mo agoHowever many generations it takes for your skin tone to be white. See also: the President's wife.
- dheera 9mo ago> there are enough american job seekers in CS To be blunt: Not enough qualified ones. Look at the names of all the top AI papers of the past 3 years, not too many are American. When you get bullied in American public schools for being a "nerd" and liking science and math, your country doesn't exactly produce a lot of state-of-the-art STEM professionals. You get a small handful of exceptional people who overcame the adversity but that's it. The top 0.1% are perhaps mostly American-educated. The top 10% on the other hand are mostly not American. And you need the top 10% to code for the top 0.1%.
- cultofmetatron 9mo ago> When you get bullied in American public schools for being a "nerd" and liking science and math, your country doesn't exactly produce a lot of state-of-the-art STEM professionals. Its worse than that. when I lived in america, I found that being a software engineer was a dealbreaker when it came to dating most women. Imagine my surprise going to other countries and finding that my chosen profession made me high value proposition to most women.
- rune-dev 9mo agoAs an American this does not match my experience at all. What profession were those women looking for?
- johntarter 9mo agoBartenders, starving artists, musicians, and athletes?
- linksnapzz 9mo agoThose are the ones they fool around with; not the ones they marry.
- irishcoffee 9mo ago
- pdntspa 9mo agobUt wE wAnT tHe BeSt oF tHe BeSt!!!11
- oytis 9mo agoVery related IMO. Even before Trump US workforce was expensive, now limit the influx of new workforce and hiring abroad looks like a logical decision
- nerdponx 9mo agoImagine that! It's almost like it's coordinated. Surely the US government would never do something like that on purpose.
- hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 9mo agoNothing to do with it, just following a trend before the attacks: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-nadella-pledges-3-billion-085719653.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-nadella-pledges-3-b...
- hajile 9mo agoThere haven't been any meaningful attacks on H1b visa. When running for office, Trump said very clearly that H1b was good for his companies (saving money), but bad for the American people. Today, he's claiming that we need H1b because we don't know how to build computer chips (~75% come from India with zero advanced production and another ~12% come from China which is also far behind). His "massive" $100k increase over 7 years is just a bit over $14k/yr. I had a former H1b programmer (now legal immigrant) I worked with tell me about his experience. Getting paid less than $40k to live in Austin, TX and living with a half-dozen other H1b indenured servants/slaves in a tiny shared apartment just so they could survive the 7 years and get on the path to citizenship. Do you think those companies would bat an eye about increasing their expenses from $40k to $54k per year when median dev salary back then (2015) was around $92k/yr? After a decade of inflation, that $14k is even less important. Over-immigration with H2b and illegal immigration suppresses blue-collar wages (Bernie Sanders famously called open borders a "Koch brothers proposal"). H1b and outsourcing to India centers suppresses white-collar wages. Do you see prices dropping as they cut worker salaries and outsource? Can you even buy things when you don't have a job? Trump (and the rest of the uniparty) has enabled corporate theft on a scale that's never been seen before and the chickens are going to be coming home to roost really soon.
- pram 9mo agoSorry but making around $40k in 2015 would not, under any circumstance, require you to live with 6 roommates in Austin. That is EXTREME hyperbole lol My first IT job in Austin in 2010 paid $18 an hour and I had my own apartment and car.
- hajile 9mo agoMaybe they wanted to live together to save money (remember, the rest of their family isn't in the US), but that is irrelevant to the fact that they were paid way less than half the going rate in that city (I remember his stated salary being a little over $30k, so I errored on the high side). We were pretty close and when he told me the story, there wasn't any reason for him to lie. Who am I to say his experience isn't real?
- 9mo ago