Comment by rat9988 4 days ago
I'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.
> I suppose that is "in the tech field" too, as non-tech people would be happy with an $80K job where a lot are under $50K
Indeed. The median salary in America for full time employment is a little over $63K.
Edit: if the message from H1B folk earning $300k+ to voters who earn $63k on average[1] is "You need our superior intellects, you uneducated rubes", then its unlikely to be well-received, especially at a time when blaming foreigners is in vogue.
1. Or a laid-off American tech worker
Why? 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.
Hiring American workers at current market wages avoids this problem entirely.
>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?
you 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.
H1B transfers are easy. You aren't beholden to an employer.
Great, yes, but you sure as hell don't have "absolute loyalty" to a company.
Its all relative. A burned out American can drop out tomorrow with no short term plan. H1Bs cannot fo that unless they are ready to go back to their previous country.
You have 60 days to find a new job or get deported. It's a pretty strong lever.
How 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.
It is unbelievable the kind of misinformation that is spread about immigrants. Thanks for pointing that out
The "problem" is that you have to compensate natives better / treatment.
Just look at the open roles for these companies, all India. They're not hiding it. Don't even need H1B.
There's not a surplus of American developers that can pass interview loops at top tech employers.
You’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).
>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.
The domestic talent exists, and companies can leverage it or be punished financially for attempting to “contain labor costs” through leveraging visa workers.
Then why all the layoffs? You don't fire people you've got a shortage of.
Ok, 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.
H1B 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.
None 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.
> 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%.
Producing AI papers isn't the job requirement for 99.9% of STEM jobs.
I won't talk about other fields, but American devs (regardless of race) tend to be much more passionate about computer science and (perhaps as a result) tend to be much better at their job than those from the big-name outsourcing countries.
I was tasked with finding an Indian hire a while ago. I lost count of exactly how many people I had to interview. (I spent a huge portion of my time for over a year doing interviews). We were looking for a senior developer, but settled for at most an intermediate developer. We swapped between multiple top-rated Indian recruiting firms, gave automated tests, had their interviewers ask pre-screening questions, but nothing helped improve candidate quality in any real way. I caught more people than I could count cheating answers on technical interviews (probably how they got past the screeners). We didn't even look at anyone without at least 10 years of "experience", but less than 10% of candidates could write basic fizzbuzz (and some of them accidentally showed that they were using GPT to try to code what we wanted because they didn't have a clue).
It may be an anecdote, but the sample size was quite large and we are a F500 company with the ability to attract talent, so I think its likely that we were attracting better-than-average candidates too.
EDIT: I'd add that it's not just my team. I've sat as an observer for a lot of other hiring interviews and they had the same problem. Across our company, we've had massive turnover in our outsourced India centers because the people they hired did such poor work.
> I won't talk about other fields, but American devs (regardless of race) tend to be much more passionate about computer science and (perhaps as a result) tend to be much better at their job than those from the big-name outsourcing countries.
Then why are half the websites I use broken? Why is my hospital's billing estimate system broken? Why did my FSA provider send a request of documentation to the wrong e-mail address? Why is my bank's website always broken? Why did Equifax leak data? Why did Doordash mis-charge me?
> Indian recruiting firms
There's your problem. Most top talent doesn't find jobs via recruiting firms.
> Then why are half the websites I use broken? Why is my hospital's billing estimate system broken? Why did my FSA provider send a request of documentation to the wrong e-mail address? Why is my bank's website always broken? Why did Equifax leak data? Why did Doordash mis-charge me?
Well… you may be answering your own question if you think about it really, really hard.
> Then why are half the websites I use broken? Why is my hospital's billing estimate system broken? Why did my FSA provider send a request of documentation to the wrong e-mail address? Why is my bank's website always broken? Why did Equifax leak data? Why did Doordash mis-charge me?
I can't speak to all of those, but Doordash has extensively outsourced its software teams to India. I also know that lots of hospital software companies also outsource to India. Your FSA provider probably had someone in a call center transcribe an email incorrectly and we all know most call centers aren't in the US either...
> There's your problem. Most top talent doesn't find jobs via recruiting firms.
You'd need to prove this statement. F500 companies have more money than most companies and pretty much exclusively hire through recruiters. If you were top talent and wanted to work for a top overseas company, it seems like working with a recruitment agency would be a no-brainer.
In any case, I had zero say in who to use. I was handed some contacts and told to make it work.
Why is everything broken? American MBA culture. PE wealth extraction. A bought and paid for political class.
Zero situational awareness, DGAF as long as number go up.
We used to have contractors/employees from a bunch of different countries (India, EU, Eastern Europe, South America, etc). Our (largely Indian) tech management pushed very hard for us to offshore to India exclusively.
We had to let people go who had been great contributors. Some of them were actually CHEAPER than the Indians who replaced them. I tried very hard to keep one of these people and after much politics up and down the management chain ultimately got "yes, he's a proven coder who does great work and costs less than all our recent Indian hires, but you have to let him go anyway because he's not based in India". I've never encountered something like that and it tells me that money wasn't the primary driving factor at all.
I have also observed strong racial preference in american companies just as you describe -- indian, chinese, and korean management building almost exclusively same-race teams or outsourcing work to their home country, etc.
It's really gross but I'd never been in the position to be told explicitly to find a $whatever. That's illegal in the US but appears to be unenforced.
> 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.
As an American this does not match my experience at all.
What profession were those women looking for?
Vets, climate change scientists, doctors, environmental lawyers and athletics. Bonus points for trustfunds and influencers. Women want to make as much as men but also want their partner to make more than them.
Ever see a female doctor marrying a plumber or construction worker? No they marry Male doctors or lawyer of higher status.
Tech industry has no problems working with state police forces to imprison woman that get abortions or just generally profit off of making teenage girls depressed.
We should applaud those women for not willing to date people that inflict misery and death upon them.
Maybe the kids are alright after all?
What industry has put actual resistance to these in these times? Plenty of Hollywood has wool over their eyes (though a few are starting to speak out), Sports bent the knee for a full year (especially FIFA), law firms capitulated, hospitals aren't gonna lose their massive profit margins over the health care stuff.
No industry is coming out of this with a clean bill of health. You as an individual can only choose to not work with the most evil ones.
I mean, I'm a woman and a software dev.. I suppose I'm not most women though.
Anecdotally men in tech jobs tend to either be the best I've ever met or the worst I've ever met (loosely related to why they're in the field to begin with)
> Look at the names of all the top AI papers of the past 3 years, not too many are American.
There are plenty of Americans who don’t have a European names.
> 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.
Is bullying nerds still happening? It was commonplace when I was young in the 1980s. (In fact, it was so common that it was the basis of the 1984 movie Revenge of the Nerds.) But I had thought the social status of nerds and geeks had leveled up a few times since then. Did the level-ups not happen?
Yes and no. Generally, you don't necessarily get bullied but you lose opportunities to interact with people. Most students in the US do not care about academics more than they need to, and the kind of "nerd" to care about math and science likely doesn't have much to talk about with these people or even is able to have a meaningful conversation without being told something along the lines of "it's not that deep" or "I'm not reading allat"
Sorry man, American raised autists beat chinese 996 every day of the week. shrug.
I mean that in the cultural sense, not racially. ABC autists are S tier too.
I’m not sure why you’re getting downvoted. The most important paper in the AI era was written by a team of immigrants.
Because it's an attack on 'american culture', I'm not even sure if nerds get bullied that much in school anymore.
Often "nerds" are the ones bullying, i say "nerds" because the people getting good grades and into great universities, the ones getting into tech, are often just strivers instead of nerds.
"Real nerds" are a tiny minority of people in any country and I doubt they account for most immigrants in the US, it's mostly just upper middle class strivers I've noticed.
> 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.
Big 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.
All the conspiracies theories can be put to bed by walking into any engineering department (maybe outside of biomedical engineering…which makes me think this may be related to how Americans demonize math) and observing that the majority of students are foreign or maybe second generation immigrants.
This ratio gets worse because American students are disproportionately more likely to follow up their engineering undergrad with law or business school, so even if they may be engineers they’ll get into business and/or something like patent attorney going forward.
There wasn't any demonization of math when I was in school, but no shortage of "you can grow up to be anything" and "do what you love" rather than "get a job that will pay for doing all the things you love".
There's nothing wrong with being a librarian or getting an MA in Museum Studies, aside from the price of getting the degree and the low odds of getting a job without waiting for someone to die so another position opens up.
There's a reason you won't find a lot of foreign students pursuing them, though.
The conspiracy here is that somehow US spending on primary/secondary education ranks among the top, yet we are unable to produce competitive college students. And we mask this very serious problem from directly rippling into our economy by... importing students and workers.
1) There's a very reasonable chance the company discriminates. Sorry, but once bitten, twice shy. One company gets caught at it and the whole industry develops a reputation.
2) If you've got a problem finding candidates, there's 16,000 more on the market now. Congratulations!
3) If you think there must be something wrong with those 16,000, well, that would explain where your pipeline is going wrong.
> There's a very reasonable chance the company discriminates
I don't see how this is even possible. There would be a memo from the CEO to 1000s of recruiters asking them to favor foreigners? that would leak immediately.
It's really easy to see that big tech is interviewing only people who passed an initial filter which at this point is AI based. They're clearly filtering for some characteristics they want in a candidate, and most probably the filter is giving you the people you mentioned.
Businesses, the consumers who buy their products, and the global workforce.
The 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.
"foreigners who often graduated in the US"
This is still the case in US Comp Sci programs. There are some Americans in these programs but it's mostly Indian and Chinese. The American kids gravitate to the business schools.
The 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.
> 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.