4 ms·

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 - i

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
    You mudt have gotten lucky with your coworkers. Ive worked with people who claimed to be “experts” in a domain that didnt have basic skills. I would say 5% were excellent, 5% good. 90% worthless. Coupled with weird insular cultural dynamics, poor english and communication skills, poor throw it over the wall mentality. Its overalll a huge net negative for a company. Perhaps its different in FAANG. But in enterprise companies its very bad.
    - cucumber3732842 8mo ago
      >poor throw it over the wall mentality And that's exactly why managers keep hiring them. If you're a defensive manager who just wants to keep your head down and grind out the years before moving getting a "senior" or "principal" manager job somewhere else then a bunch of compliant workers who'll punt anything messy onto some other team is exactly what you want.
      - gymbeaux 7mo ago
        I've heard anecdotally that Stryker is really bad about this (throw it over the wall mentality) and I remember thinking when I heard that, how the fuck are employees of a company getting away with being assigned work and just reassigning it to someone else? But then I think about my Allstate days and I can see it. I think you're being downvoted because people reading your comment haven't witnessed that sort of dysfunction in a company, but to anyone reading this- it is how some companies operate. The execs at these companies will deadass hire garbage people (usually offshore) and then brag about how much money they saved the company vs hiring U.S. citizens. Either the bill comes due years down the road when prod goes down due to a bullshit bug from the offshore team and it ends up costing the company millions, or U.S. employees are picking up the slack. At Allstate (circa 2016), we were required to use offshore teams from Infosys. There was one U.S. software engineer for every 6 or so offshore "engineers". We weren't allowed to say "no they actually cause more problems than they fix, you can keep paying them but we'll be paying them to do nothing". Ha. You would have gotten fired for that level of "insubordination" because the higher ups legitimately didn't understand that software development is a skill - it's not like an assembly line where anyone can put an item into a box over and over again.
thatfrenchguy 8mo ago
> The question is - what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported? I mean, the other question is: how many US jobs exist because of folks who came to the country on H1B? Clearly none of the big tech companies would exist in the scale they are without us.
- georgeburdell 8mo ago
  H1B was created in the 90s. The industry had been around for nearly 50 years at that point.
  - bdangubic 8mo ago
    how many people were in the industry/needed 50 years prior? compared to 40 years later? any growth?
    - gymbeaux 7mo ago
      I would challenge that by saying SO MANY "software engineers" are net-negative producers, be it offshore teams in Asia or Eastern Europe or U.S. citizens. Partially a result of coding bootcamps. The recent tech layoffs in ~2022 that we are still reeling from is further evidence that maybe we don't need H-1B for software engineering roles. Medical? Absolutely.
  - Dig1t 8mo ago
    You are being downvoted but you are totally correct. The tech industry existed before the H1B and was growing rapidly. There’s no evidence at all that the industry would have stopped growing without the H1B or that any company started by an H1B wouldn’t have been started by an American.
    - hshdhdhj4444 8mo ago
      44% of unicorns founders between 1997 and 2019 were foreign born. 20% of those were specifically from India. It seems like if Americans were just so much more dominant, they’d form a much higher percentage of unicorn founders given that the percentage of foreign born people in the US was about 15% at the highest. Looks like foreign born immigrants are punching about 3 times their weight as startup founders. https://gfmag.com/capital-raising-corporate-finance/us-unicorns-immigrant-founders/ https://gfmag.com/capital-raising-corporate-finance/us-unico...
jollyllama 8mo ago
> shame to anyone defending this abuse as some sort of pro immigration policy. In what way is it not pro-immigration? Perhaps you mean "pro-immigrant"? In that case, your view is cogent, but I guess this just exposes that pro-immigration policy isn't necessarily good for the immigrants that it welcomes. Immigration benefits capital. For example, as Federal Reserve Vice Chair Bowman indicated [0], immigration creates housing inflation. [0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bowman20260116a.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bowman20260...
- junofan 8mo ago
  It’s a non-immigrant visa. I believe E* are the immigrant employment visas.
  - hshdhdhj4444 8mo ago
    It’s a dual intent visa. The visa itself provides no immigration benefits but it’s explicitly designed to then allow for a permanent residency and then citizenship application.
jpgvm 8mo ago
> what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported? None of it? The way I see it is every top tier programmer in America is already employed. I think the inevitable outcome would just be the big multi-nationals (FAANG in particular) would just hire more in their international offices and spread out their engineering org more instead of remaining so American heavy and using immigration to centralise staffing. There probably isn't a world where these huge companies decide to simply not take advantage of the global talent pool, if they don't exploit it someone else will and they can't have that.
- weirdmantis69 8mo ago
  Many of the top tier companies (meta, Amazon, google, microsoft etc) have had massive layoffs in the 10's of thousands range. Those workers were top tier programmers. So you need to be quite delusional or uninformed to have your view point on the work force.
  - jpgvm 8mo ago
    Bar was lowered massively during the COVID employment boom (with the exception of Apple really). Unfortunately resetting the bar has massive collateral damage but it will sort itself out pretty quickly. All the good ones will be re-employed within short order. The ones that the layoffs were trying to flush out with said layoffs will transition out of FAANG into lower-tier employers.
- Dig1t 8mo ago
  “Top tier programmer” Apple employees thousands of H1Bs, many of them literally push buttons and file bug reports all day and don’t know how to code or barely know how. I know this because I’ve worked with teams of them for a decade at Apple. These are not top tier talent type people, this is work that my mom could do, but Apple can pay much less by bringing people over from India, Pakistan, China to do this work instead of finding Americans to do it.
  - kjellsbells 8mo ago

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
  You mudt have gotten lucky with your coworkers. Ive worked with people who claimed to be “experts” in a domain that didnt have basic skills. I would say 5% were excellent, 5% good. 90% worthless. Coupled with weird insular cultural dynamics, poor english and communication skills, poor throw it over the wall mentality. Its overalll a huge net negative for a company. Perhaps its different in FAANG. But in enterprise companies its very bad.
  - cucumber3732842 8mo ago
    >poor throw it over the wall mentality And that's exactly why managers keep hiring them. If you're a defensive manager who just wants to keep your head down and grind out the years before moving getting a "senior" or "principal" manager job somewhere else then a bunch of compliant workers who'll punt anything messy onto some other team is exactly what you want.
    - gymbeaux 7mo ago
      I've heard anecdotally that Stryker is really bad about this (throw it over the wall mentality) and I remember thinking when I heard that, how the fuck are employees of a company getting away with being assigned work and just reassigning it to someone else? But then I think about my Allstate days and I can see it. I think you're being downvoted because people reading your comment haven't witnessed that sort of dysfunction in a company, but to anyone reading this- it is how some companies operate. The execs at these companies will deadass hire garbage people (usually offshore) and then brag about how much money they saved the company vs hiring U.S. citizens. Either the bill comes due years down the road when prod goes down due to a bullshit bug from the offshore team and it ends up costing the company millions, or U.S. employees are picking up the slack. At Allstate (circa 2016), we were required to use offshore teams from Infosys. There was one U.S. software engineer for every 6 or so offshore "engineers". We weren't allowed to say "no they actually cause more problems than they fix, you can keep paying them but we'll be paying them to do nothing". Ha. You would have gotten fired for that level of "insubordination" because the higher ups legitimately didn't understand that software development is a skill - it's not like an assembly line where anyone can put an item into a box over and over again.

thatfrenchguy 8mo ago

> The question is - what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported? I mean, the other question is: how many US jobs exist because of folks who came to the country on H1B? Clearly none of the big tech companies would exist in the scale they are without us.

georgeburdell 8mo ago
H1B was created in the 90s. The industry had been around for nearly 50 years at that point.
- bdangubic 8mo ago
  how many people were in the industry/needed 50 years prior? compared to 40 years later? any growth?
  - gymbeaux 7mo ago
    I would challenge that by saying SO MANY "software engineers" are net-negative producers, be it offshore teams in Asia or Eastern Europe or U.S. citizens. Partially a result of coding bootcamps. The recent tech layoffs in ~2022 that we are still reeling from is further evidence that maybe we don't need H-1B for software engineering roles. Medical? Absolutely.
- Dig1t 8mo ago
  You are being downvoted but you are totally correct. The tech industry existed before the H1B and was growing rapidly. There’s no evidence at all that the industry would have stopped growing without the H1B or that any company started by an H1B wouldn’t have been started by an American.
  - hshdhdhj4444 8mo ago
    44% of unicorns founders between 1997 and 2019 were foreign born. 20% of those were specifically from India. It seems like if Americans were just so much more dominant, they’d form a much higher percentage of unicorn founders given that the percentage of foreign born people in the US was about 15% at the highest. Looks like foreign born immigrants are punching about 3 times their weight as startup founders. https://gfmag.com/capital-raising-corporate-finance/us-unicorns-immigrant-founders/ https://gfmag.com/capital-raising-corporate-finance/us-unico...

jollyllama 8mo ago

> shame to anyone defending this abuse as some sort of pro immigration policy. In what way is it not pro-immigration? Perhaps you mean "pro-immigrant"? In that case, your view is cogent, but I guess this just exposes that pro-immigration policy isn't necessarily good for the immigrants that it welcomes. Immigration benefits capital. For example, as Federal Reserve Vice Chair Bowman indicated [0], immigration creates housing inflation. [0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bowman20260116a.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bowman20260...

junofan 8mo ago
It’s a non-immigrant visa. I believe E* are the immigrant employment visas.
- hshdhdhj4444 8mo ago
  It’s a dual intent visa. The visa itself provides no immigration benefits but it’s explicitly designed to then allow for a permanent residency and then citizenship application.

jpgvm 8mo ago

> what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported? None of it? The way I see it is every top tier programmer in America is already employed. I think the inevitable outcome would just be the big multi-nationals (FAANG in particular) would just hire more in their international offices and spread out their engineering org more instead of remaining so American heavy and using immigration to centralise staffing. There probably isn't a world where these huge companies decide to simply not take advantage of the global talent pool, if they don't exploit it someone else will and they can't have that.

weirdmantis69 8mo ago
Many of the top tier companies (meta, Amazon, google, microsoft etc) have had massive layoffs in the 10's of thousands range. Those workers were top tier programmers. So you need to be quite delusional or uninformed to have your view point on the work force.
- jpgvm 8mo ago
  Bar was lowered massively during the COVID employment boom (with the exception of Apple really). Unfortunately resetting the bar has massive collateral damage but it will sort itself out pretty quickly. All the good ones will be re-employed within short order. The ones that the layoffs were trying to flush out with said layoffs will transition out of FAANG into lower-tier employers.
Dig1t 8mo ago
“Top tier programmer” Apple employees thousands of H1Bs, many of them literally push buttons and file bug reports all day and don’t know how to code or barely know how. I know this because I’ve worked with teams of them for a decade at Apple. These are not top tier talent type people, this is work that my mom could do, but Apple can pay much less by bringing people over from India, Pakistan, China to do this work instead of finding Americans to do it.
- kjellsbells 8mo ago