9 ms·

H-1B Exposed: Banking sector visa sponsorship investigation

184 points by joshcsimmons 8mo ago

srameshc 8mo ago
Exposed what ? It has brought some great talent to the country and helped with talent immigration for sure, everyone knows it. There is a phase when there is a sacrifice for the candidate but then people change jobs even when green card processing is throught the stages.
- sumedh 8mo ago
  > then people change jobs even when green card processing is throught the stages. Finding employers who will sponsor is not easy so the employees are essentially locked to the sponsoring company, dont complain too much.
650 8mo ago
With all the discourse around H1Bs recently, I ask what the alternative is? Offshoring and workers paying taxes in their own countries? The common argument of X number of CS grads unemployed fails to hold as CS has been a monkey degree over the past few years due to the rush for money. Some investigation will show many graduates are not able to perform software engineering duties up to par, and sub par graduates compared to pre 2015. Of course its nuanced between training that companies used to offer etc.
- whatwhaaaaat 8mo ago
  No the solution is hiring American workers and implementing strict on soil laws for pii just like other countries are doing (India for example). I have learned a great deal and been enriched by my friendships with foreign born workers, but to act like h1b workers come “ready to perform software engineering duties” at any higher rate than new grad higher is funny.
  - Suppafly 8mo ago
    >No the solution is hiring American workers This, I don't understand how we have tons of un- and underemployed American workers and yet somehow businesses have convinced the government that they need to import workers.
    - sumedh 8mo ago
      Its the same in Australia. Australian universities make billions and lobby the government to import students from developing countries, the agents of these universities tell the students that getting jobs and a permanent resident visa is easy, just pay the huge fees and you will get the chance to live your dreams in a developed country.
    - silisili 8mo ago
      The answer isn't one a lot of people are willing to talk about, but personally, I don't care. The problem isn't "businesses", it's other Indians. They take entire tech orgs over, then only hire each other. They make up bizarre reasons why US workers won't fit while spamming H1B applications. Before you grab your pitchforks, or try to dox me for racism one, please understand it's not all Indian people, obviously. There are so many in the US, and the majority are good people. But there's an extremely clear pattern that's emerged that you'd have to be blind not to see.
      - greenavocado 8mo ago
        [flagged]
        aa-jv 8mo ago
        In other less racially charged terms, we can see the West also as having a serious addiction to dignity culture. Take Australia, for example. You will easily get into fisticuffs with your average Australian whose dignity you affront, through any means.
      - bigfatkitten 8mo ago
- orangecoffee 8mo ago
  The solution is simple, but unpalatable to us. With AI, SWE-1 becomes a minimum wage job, with SWE2 (1.5X), SWE3 (2X) and SWE4 (3x). With such a rationalization we will retain more of the work here, or this will move. Government policies cannot control this as it will mean losing tech hegemony. Is it worth taking a hit on higher compensation for longer term peace of mind?
  - lou1306 8mo ago
    Then why companies aren't offering minimum-wage SWE-1 jobs already? Could it be that the output of an AI tool still needs a modicum of skill and craft to evaluate?
    - orangecoffee 8mo ago
      Internships are these, and are getting longer. I'm also thinking this is what will stop the transfer of roles to another part of the world. Of course using AI is a skill. But the effort needed to get there is becoming lower and lower.
      - brainwad 8mo ago
        Internships at my employer pay 6 figures. I've never seen a minimum wage SWE internship.
        raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
        Hell I had an internship in 1995 and they paid $10 an hour then and provided housing. For context, my take home was $650 every two weeks - my total quarterly tuition at school and the next year the cost to rent a one bedroom in the northern burbs of Atlanta.
        deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
      - lou1306 8mo ago
        Well not exactly. An internship is a temporary position, which people mostly just take to improve a CV at an early career stage, or as a fallback after being laid off. A "minimum wage job" is... A job.
- ReptileMan 8mo ago
  Sending CIA assassins to ceos that have offshoring plans?
- stego-tech 8mo ago
  I’ve been chewing on this for fifteen years, now. There is no pretty or simple or even palatable answer, just a bunch of proposals with tradeoffs. 1) Eliminate the H-1B visa entirely. If a company wants to hire an immigrant, they can just sponsor the Green Card up front, knowing the worker can fuck off once they have it. The net result would be decreased immigration and increased offshoring, which brings me to… 2) Data Sovereignty Schemes. American’s data can only be processed inside American borders by American (or Green Card) workers. It’s absolute protectionism, which means you just shift the negative trends (“credential” mills in particular) onto domestic shores. Rural states and colonies become the new Indias and Philippines for outsourcing companies, depressing labor costs. 3) Unionize the technical trades. This lets the professionals set skill and comp floors, potentially offload benefits burdens to the Union itself rather than the fickleness of the employer, and even undermines the “contractor class” of companies deflating labor through precarious contracts by setting floors industry-wide. The downside is that Unions, like any power structure, can and will corrupt with time and incentive, leading to jams in the marketplace - less an issue in the age of AI, but still one worth noting. 4) Taxation. Companies that do 90% of their business in America but whose workforce (contractors, consultants, and FTEs) aren’t 90% American? No tax breaks for you, pay up. This is a very bad idea on its face, because companies will just shift the transaction offshore to dodge that rule and gum up everything else in the process, but some form of punitive tax scheme for exploiting social safety nets in lieu of fairly compensating workers is sorely needed to stop, if not begin reversing, the current wealth pumps. For-profit business models predicated on shunting workers onto every possible social welfare program as a means of depressing their pay has robbed taxpayers of billions, increased the national debt, and robbed workers of the fruits of their labor. It must be fixed, somehow. There’s a number of other policies to get into, but that’s the “highlight reel” as it were. The important thing to keep in mind is that the status quo only works for the monied interests, and neither the H-1B workers coming in nor the Americans being shoved onto welfare programs for corporate greed. If a program or system enriches the rich while harming everyone else, it’s a bad system, and needs to be replaced rather than overhauled. Will it be painful? Yes. Will it piss people off? Of course. Will it feel like nobody really won? Ideally, because that means it’s balanced compromise rather than a gift package.
  - hallole 8mo ago
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- TitaRusell 8mo ago
  Most people want to stay in their own country with their own culture and close to their friends and family. In my own country we are actually seeing people GO BACK to Asia because places like Vietnam now have a viable middle class lifestyle.
  - foogazi 8mo ago
    > Most people want to stay in their own country with their own culture and close to their friends and family. But not all people otherwise we would all live in one giant city. Some are willing to greave the frontier in search of better outcomes: the early American Colonists, those that expanded west-ward into California, even the early Silicon Valley workers were all willing to move H1Bs and international workers are not most people
- dzonga 8mo ago
  it's an own goal end of day - led by myopic thinking about foreigners stealing the jobs a foreigner worker pays taxes, rent & other bills thereby contributing and circulating money in the economy now if that foreign worker stays in their home country - yes - they might get paid less - but who losses overall ? the country that would've imported labor or the worker ? - it's always the country - hence why brain drain is devastating. remember the foreign worker only gets a better life - but losses social connections, culture etc the countries & companies wouldn't be sponsoring these things if ultimately it didn't benefit them & them only
- dr-detroit 8mo ago
  [dead]
- hshdhdhj4444 8mo ago
  Clearly the real problem in America is the industry with the fastest growing number of jobs, along with the fastest growing salaries coming off a base where it was already one of the highest paid jobs, all numbers which don’t even include equity payments, despite this being an industry which pays far more in equity relative to any other industry. Maybe AI changes everything, but there is no evidence that immigration has hurt Americans working in software over the past few decades given that software salaries have been growing faster than any other job in the U.S., but also (and this is critical), it’s been rising faster than salaries in any other comparable country as well, including countries with strong tech industries but limited immigration in the industry such as France (the other country with almost as high growth as the U.S. in software dev salary is the UK, which also has high immigration).
CaliforniaKarl 8mo ago
See also "I Was a Director at Amex When They Started Replacing Us with $30K Workers [video]", posted twice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47038665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47038665
billsunshine 8mo ago
No doubt h1b is abused. Corporations use it to structurally underpay tech labor. Shame to anyone defending this abuse as some sort of pro immigration policy - it hurts both domestic workers and underpays migrant labor. The question is - what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported?
- throwaway2056 8mo ago
  You should try to communicate to managers (that are US citizens or greencard holders) that decide on H1B/outsourcing.
  - wildrhythms 8mo ago
    They are rewarded for cutting the budget, and undercutting domestic workers. Until that changes, this problem will continue. Or workers could unionize.
    - trueismywork 8mo ago
      If the same work can be done abroad with less money, then it's time to place sanctions on govts that allows their workers to be underpaid.
  - gymbeaux 8mo ago
    As with many systemic issues in the U.S., it boils down to "publicly traded company must have highest profit possible so line on chart goes up". As much as I dislike FAANG companies in general for all their anti-worker efforts, I can't honestly blame them for making decisions that look good on the balance sheet. If I am a company, and I can choose to hire 10 U.S. engineers for $200k a pop, or 10 H-1B engineers for $100k a pop, I'm going to pick the H-1B engineers. Every H-1B or green card engineer I've worked with in-office has been extremely skilled, so I wouldn't even feel like I was "getting what I paid for" hiring them over U.S. citizens.
    - ecshafer 8mo ago
mekekdkxkxkx 8mo ago
[flagged]
jetskii 8mo ago
$196k average at Capital One? Even with HCOL, that's a very good salary. I feel like they could certainly find competent citizens willing to work for that wage...
- hshdhdhj4444 8mo ago
  Or, Capital One could hire the exact same people they’re paying $196k to for a quarter of the cost once they’ve been sent back to their own countries.
  - coredog64 8mo ago
    There are huge advantages to co-location within the same time zone (plus or minus 2 hours). India is practically half a day away from the US, meaning you only get overlap for an hour or two at the end of their working day.
whatever1 8mo ago
[flagged]
citrin_ru 8mo ago
This site explain that H-1B is abused, which is rarely disputed and there are ways to make it less prone to abuse. It doesn't tell that there is no shortage of skilled workers.
Madmallard 8mo ago
greed blast should be pretty obvious our corporations have been systematically ruining things for the average American for quite a while now
alexb_ 8mo ago
The H-1B system is obviously flawed. For some reason, we've decided to tie the ability to live where you want and take advantage of your pursuit of happiness to having an employer. This creates massive power imbalances that are avoided by not engaging in national segregation policies. We don't demand that anyone born on this side of the border do anything like what people born somewhere else have to - how can a law applied differently based on how you were born be just?
- xnx 8mo ago
  > how can a law applied differently based on how you were born be just? US laws aren't meant to solve the lottery of birth.
gymbeaux 8mo ago
This is a cool website and it highlights just how little data is out there regarding H-1B visas. There's some data on a government website but it's usually several years out of date if memory serves. It's basically impossible to prove that companies are abusing the H-1B program without hacking into their servers or someone whistleblowing. Here are a couple of common misconceptions about H-1B visas: - "H-1B workers must be paid the same as U.S. citizens" - The issue is companies can hire, say, staff engineers from India as SWE IIs or whatever. As we all know, tech hiring is a mess and it's trivial to place a candidate higher or lower than they really are. - "Companies cannot hire from the H-1B program if there are U.S. citizens able to fill the role." - There are some asterisks to this statement. Companies can favor H-1B workers over U.S. workers so long as H-1B workers make up less than 15% of their total headcount. And again, it's trivial to build an interview pipeline that tends to filter out U.S. candidates. Heck, leetcode style interviewing has done a phenomenal job of keeping U.S. citizens out of FAANG. It's actually quite clever - design an interview process so difficult and irrelevant to the actual job requirements that most qualified individuals wouldn't bother applying. Anyone who's left probably has special circumstances motivating them to push through and grind leetcode for months, et al. (like not having to go back to their home country). I think the spirit of the H-1B program is great. Makes total sense. But as is tradition, there are loopholes that allow abuse... and frankly, companies like Meta and Amex and JP Morgan have an obligation to minimize expenses and maximize profits. It's the same with the tax code - loopholes out the ass, but can we really blame companies for exploiting them? It's legal.
jpgvm 8mo ago
No. The talent shortage is not a myth. The unemployed/underemployed American programmer that can actually keep up is a myth. Everyone good (without additional baggage) is either a) employed or b) could be employed whenever they feel like it. If you aren't good enough then don't be surprised the companies prefer an immigrant. You don't get an automatic American free pass for having less skills, experience, interviewing poorly, etc. i.e skill issue. Ending immigration for tech would simply mean far more global workers/offshoring in order to access the top tier talent via different means as that is the real reason all along. Wage suppression was the old (and now largely incorrect) story. The visa is still exploitive, it should be amended to be a 10 year visa that is independent of employment so immigrants aren't screwed by layoffs.
- mythrwy 8mo ago
  You may be correct about many US programmers not keeping up, but the H1Bs I've seen in action, other than being more compliant, didn't seem to be much better and often worse. "Top Talent". Ya, no not generally. Not from H1B. May get OK talent from time to time.
- bradlys 8mo ago
  Work at faang/etc. I don’t see any notable difference between immigrant and non-immigrant. Arguably, one could say the Americans are better because they typically have less education and still manage to do the same job. Somehow managing to do the same job but with less training? That sounds like someone who is “better” to me.
  - jpgvm 8mo ago
    You are proving my point - FAANG hires the top tier talent, and makes extensive use of both the global talent pool and sponsoring immigration in order to meet their needs. The Americans you work with (along with your other co-workers) meet the bar. If there were more Americans that met the bar they would employ them before taking on all the extra work and cost of immigration. I'm not talking about Americans you work with. I'm talking about the mythical ones you don't work with that are somehow disadvantaged by H1B and thus unemployed/underemployed. You don't work with these people because they don't exist.
iberator 8mo ago
Migration for good technical jobs should be banned forever. Immigration = lower wages, and visa slavery. Impossible to compete. (I'm not from USA)
karakoram 8mo ago
I should seriously look into getting in the outsourcing business.

184 points by joshcsimmons 8mo ago

Exposed what ? It has brought some great talent to the country and helped with talent immigration for sure, everyone knows it. There is a phase when there is a sacrifice for the candidate but then people change jobs even when green card processing is throught the stages.

sumedh 8mo ago
> then people change jobs even when green card processing is throught the stages. Finding employers who will sponsor is not easy so the employees are essentially locked to the sponsoring company, dont complain too much.

650 8mo ago

With all the discourse around H1Bs recently, I ask what the alternative is? Offshoring and workers paying taxes in their own countries? The common argument of X number of CS grads unemployed fails to hold as CS has been a monkey degree over the past few years due to the rush for money. Some investigation will show many graduates are not able to perform software engineering duties up to par, and sub par graduates compared to pre 2015. Of course its nuanced between training that companies used to offer etc.

whatwhaaaaat 8mo ago
No the solution is hiring American workers and implementing strict on soil laws for pii just like other countries are doing (India for example). I have learned a great deal and been enriched by my friendships with foreign born workers, but to act like h1b workers come “ready to perform software engineering duties” at any higher rate than new grad higher is funny.
- Suppafly 8mo ago
  >No the solution is hiring American workers This, I don't understand how we have tons of un- and underemployed American workers and yet somehow businesses have convinced the government that they need to import workers.
  - sumedh 8mo ago
    Its the same in Australia. Australian universities make billions and lobby the government to import students from developing countries, the agents of these universities tell the students that getting jobs and a permanent resident visa is easy, just pay the huge fees and you will get the chance to live your dreams in a developed country.
  - silisili 8mo ago
    The answer isn't one a lot of people are willing to talk about, but personally, I don't care. The problem isn't "businesses", it's other Indians. They take entire tech orgs over, then only hire each other. They make up bizarre reasons why US workers won't fit while spamming H1B applications. Before you grab your pitchforks, or try to dox me for racism one, please understand it's not all Indian people, obviously. There are so many in the US, and the majority are good people. But there's an extremely clear pattern that's emerged that you'd have to be blind not to see.
    - greenavocado 8mo ago
      [flagged]
      - aa-jv 8mo ago
        In other less racially charged terms, we can see the West also as having a serious addiction to dignity culture. Take Australia, for example. You will easily get into fisticuffs with your average Australian whose dignity you affront, through any means.
    - bigfatkitten 8mo ago
orangecoffee 8mo ago
The solution is simple, but unpalatable to us. With AI, SWE-1 becomes a minimum wage job, with SWE2 (1.5X), SWE3 (2X) and SWE4 (3x). With such a rationalization we will retain more of the work here, or this will move. Government policies cannot control this as it will mean losing tech hegemony. Is it worth taking a hit on higher compensation for longer term peace of mind?
- lou1306 8mo ago
  Then why companies aren't offering minimum-wage SWE-1 jobs already? Could it be that the output of an AI tool still needs a modicum of skill and craft to evaluate?
  - orangecoffee 8mo ago
    Internships are these, and are getting longer. I'm also thinking this is what will stop the transfer of roles to another part of the world. Of course using AI is a skill. But the effort needed to get there is becoming lower and lower.
    - brainwad 8mo ago
      Internships at my employer pay 6 figures. I've never seen a minimum wage SWE internship.
      - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
        Hell I had an internship in 1995 and they paid $10 an hour then and provided housing. For context, my take home was $650 every two weeks - my total quarterly tuition at school and the next year the cost to rent a one bedroom in the northern burbs of Atlanta.
      - deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
    - lou1306 8mo ago
      Well not exactly. An internship is a temporary position, which people mostly just take to improve a CV at an early career stage, or as a fallback after being laid off. A "minimum wage job" is... A job.
ReptileMan 8mo ago
Sending CIA assassins to ceos that have offshoring plans?
stego-tech 8mo ago
I’ve been chewing on this for fifteen years, now. There is no pretty or simple or even palatable answer, just a bunch of proposals with tradeoffs. 1) Eliminate the H-1B visa entirely. If a company wants to hire an immigrant, they can just sponsor the Green Card up front, knowing the worker can fuck off once they have it. The net result would be decreased immigration and increased offshoring, which brings me to… 2) Data Sovereignty Schemes. American’s data can only be processed inside American borders by American (or Green Card) workers. It’s absolute protectionism, which means you just shift the negative trends (“credential” mills in particular) onto domestic shores. Rural states and colonies become the new Indias and Philippines for outsourcing companies, depressing labor costs. 3) Unionize the technical trades. This lets the professionals set skill and comp floors, potentially offload benefits burdens to the Union itself rather than the fickleness of the employer, and even undermines the “contractor class” of companies deflating labor through precarious contracts by setting floors industry-wide. The downside is that Unions, like any power structure, can and will corrupt with time and incentive, leading to jams in the marketplace - less an issue in the age of AI, but still one worth noting. 4) Taxation. Companies that do 90% of their business in America but whose workforce (contractors, consultants, and FTEs) aren’t 90% American? No tax breaks for you, pay up. This is a very bad idea on its face, because companies will just shift the transaction offshore to dodge that rule and gum up everything else in the process, but some form of punitive tax scheme for exploiting social safety nets in lieu of fairly compensating workers is sorely needed to stop, if not begin reversing, the current wealth pumps. For-profit business models predicated on shunting workers onto every possible social welfare program as a means of depressing their pay has robbed taxpayers of billions, increased the national debt, and robbed workers of the fruits of their labor. It must be fixed, somehow. There’s a number of other policies to get into, but that’s the “highlight reel” as it were. The important thing to keep in mind is that the status quo only works for the monied interests, and neither the H-1B workers coming in nor the Americans being shoved onto welfare programs for corporate greed. If a program or system enriches the rich while harming everyone else, it’s a bad system, and needs to be replaced rather than overhauled. Will it be painful? Yes. Will it piss people off? Of course. Will it feel like nobody really won? Ideally, because that means it’s balanced compromise rather than a gift package.
- hallole 8mo ago
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
TitaRusell 8mo ago
Most people want to stay in their own country with their own culture and close to their friends and family. In my own country we are actually seeing people GO BACK to Asia because places like Vietnam now have a viable middle class lifestyle.
- foogazi 8mo ago
  > Most people want to stay in their own country with their own culture and close to their friends and family. But not all people otherwise we would all live in one giant city. Some are willing to greave the frontier in search of better outcomes: the early American Colonists, those that expanded west-ward into California, even the early Silicon Valley workers were all willing to move H1Bs and international workers are not most people
dzonga 8mo ago
it's an own goal end of day - led by myopic thinking about foreigners stealing the jobs a foreigner worker pays taxes, rent & other bills thereby contributing and circulating money in the economy now if that foreign worker stays in their home country - yes - they might get paid less - but who losses overall ? the country that would've imported labor or the worker ? - it's always the country - hence why brain drain is devastating. remember the foreign worker only gets a better life - but losses social connections, culture etc the countries & companies wouldn't be sponsoring these things if ultimately it didn't benefit them & them only
dr-detroit 8mo ago
[dead]
hshdhdhj4444 8mo ago
Clearly the real problem in America is the industry with the fastest growing number of jobs, along with the fastest growing salaries coming off a base where it was already one of the highest paid jobs, all numbers which don’t even include equity payments, despite this being an industry which pays far more in equity relative to any other industry. Maybe AI changes everything, but there is no evidence that immigration has hurt Americans working in software over the past few decades given that software salaries have been growing faster than any other job in the U.S., but also (and this is critical), it’s been rising faster than salaries in any other comparable country as well, including countries with strong tech industries but limited immigration in the industry such as France (the other country with almost as high growth as the U.S. in software dev salary is the UK, which also has high immigration).

CaliforniaKarl 8mo ago

See also "I Was a Director at Amex When They Started Replacing Us with $30K Workers [video]", posted twice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47038665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47038665

billsunshine 8mo ago

No doubt h1b is abused. Corporations use it to structurally underpay tech labor. Shame to anyone defending this abuse as some sort of pro immigration policy - it hurts both domestic workers and underpays migrant labor. The question is - what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported?

throwaway2056 8mo ago
You should try to communicate to managers (that are US citizens or greencard holders) that decide on H1B/outsourcing.
- wildrhythms 8mo ago
  They are rewarded for cutting the budget, and undercutting domestic workers. Until that changes, this problem will continue. Or workers could unionize.
  - trueismywork 8mo ago
    If the same work can be done abroad with less money, then it's time to place sanctions on govts that allows their workers to be underpaid.
- gymbeaux 8mo ago
  As with many systemic issues in the U.S., it boils down to "publicly traded company must have highest profit possible so line on chart goes up". As much as I dislike FAANG companies in general for all their anti-worker efforts, I can't honestly blame them for making decisions that look good on the balance sheet. If I am a company, and I can choose to hire 10 U.S. engineers for $200k a pop, or 10 H-1B engineers for $100k a pop, I'm going to pick the H-1B engineers. Every H-1B or green card engineer I've worked with in-office has been extremely skilled, so I wouldn't even feel like I was "getting what I paid for" hiring them over U.S. citizens.
  - ecshafer 8mo ago

mekekdkxkxkx 8mo ago

[flagged]

jetskii 8mo ago

$196k average at Capital One? Even with HCOL, that's a very good salary. I feel like they could certainly find competent citizens willing to work for that wage...

hshdhdhj4444 8mo ago
Or, Capital One could hire the exact same people they’re paying $196k to for a quarter of the cost once they’ve been sent back to their own countries.
- coredog64 8mo ago
  There are huge advantages to co-location within the same time zone (plus or minus 2 hours). India is practically half a day away from the US, meaning you only get overlap for an hour or two at the end of their working day.

whatever1 8mo ago

[flagged]

citrin_ru 8mo ago

This site explain that H-1B is abused, which is rarely disputed and there are ways to make it less prone to abuse. It doesn't tell that there is no shortage of skilled workers.

Madmallard 8mo ago

greed blast should be pretty obvious our corporations have been systematically ruining things for the average American for quite a while now

alexb_ 8mo ago

The H-1B system is obviously flawed. For some reason, we've decided to tie the ability to live where you want and take advantage of your pursuit of happiness to having an employer. This creates massive power imbalances that are avoided by not engaging in national segregation policies. We don't demand that anyone born on this side of the border do anything like what people born somewhere else have to - how can a law applied differently based on how you were born be just?

xnx 8mo ago
> how can a law applied differently based on how you were born be just? US laws aren't meant to solve the lottery of birth.

gymbeaux 8mo ago

This is a cool website and it highlights just how little data is out there regarding H-1B visas. There's some data on a government website but it's usually several years out of date if memory serves. It's basically impossible to prove that companies are abusing the H-1B program without hacking into their servers or someone whistleblowing. Here are a couple of common misconceptions about H-1B visas: - "H-1B workers must be paid the same as U.S. citizens" - The issue is companies can hire, say, staff engineers from India as SWE IIs or whatever. As we all know, tech hiring is a mess and it's trivial to place a candidate higher or lower than they really are. - "Companies cannot hire from the H-1B program if there are U.S. citizens able to fill the role." - There are some asterisks to this statement. Companies can favor H-1B workers over U.S. workers so long as H-1B workers make up less than 15% of their total headcount. And again, it's trivial to build an interview pipeline that tends to filter out U.S. candidates. Heck, leetcode style interviewing has done a phenomenal job of keeping U.S. citizens out of FAANG. It's actually quite clever - design an interview process so difficult and irrelevant to the actual job requirements that most qualified individuals wouldn't bother applying. Anyone who's left probably has special circumstances motivating them to push through and grind leetcode for months, et al. (like not having to go back to their home country). I think the spirit of the H-1B program is great. Makes total sense. But as is tradition, there are loopholes that allow abuse... and frankly, companies like Meta and Amex and JP Morgan have an obligation to minimize expenses and maximize profits. It's the same with the tax code - loopholes out the ass, but can we really blame companies for exploiting them? It's legal.

jpgvm 8mo ago

No. The talent shortage is not a myth. The unemployed/underemployed American programmer that can actually keep up is a myth. Everyone good (without additional baggage) is either a) employed or b) could be employed whenever they feel like it. If you aren't good enough then don't be surprised the companies prefer an immigrant. You don't get an automatic American free pass for having less skills, experience, interviewing poorly, etc. i.e skill issue. Ending immigration for tech would simply mean far more global workers/offshoring in order to access the top tier talent via different means as that is the real reason all along. Wage suppression was the old (and now largely incorrect) story. The visa is still exploitive, it should be amended to be a 10 year visa that is independent of employment so immigrants aren't screwed by layoffs.

mythrwy 8mo ago
You may be correct about many US programmers not keeping up, but the H1Bs I've seen in action, other than being more compliant, didn't seem to be much better and often worse. "Top Talent". Ya, no not generally. Not from H1B. May get OK talent from time to time.
bradlys 8mo ago
Work at faang/etc. I don’t see any notable difference between immigrant and non-immigrant. Arguably, one could say the Americans are better because they typically have less education and still manage to do the same job. Somehow managing to do the same job but with less training? That sounds like someone who is “better” to me.
- jpgvm 8mo ago
  You are proving my point - FAANG hires the top tier talent, and makes extensive use of both the global talent pool and sponsoring immigration in order to meet their needs. The Americans you work with (along with your other co-workers) meet the bar. If there were more Americans that met the bar they would employ them before taking on all the extra work and cost of immigration. I'm not talking about Americans you work with. I'm talking about the mythical ones you don't work with that are somehow disadvantaged by H1B and thus unemployed/underemployed. You don't work with these people because they don't exist.

iberator 8mo ago

Migration for good technical jobs should be banned forever. Immigration = lower wages, and visa slavery. Impossible to compete. (I'm not from USA)

karakoram 8mo ago

I should seriously look into getting in the outsourcing business.