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H-1Bs Reduced Computer Programmer Employment By Up To 11%, Study Finds (marketwatch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MarketWatch: There would have been up to 11% more computer science jobs at wages up to 5% higher were it not for the immigration program that brings in foreign high-skilled employees, a new study finds. The paper -- by John Bound and Nicolas Morales of the University of Michigan and Gaurav Khanna of the University of California, San Diego -- was conducted by studying the economy between 1994 and 2001, during the internet boom. It was also a period where the recruitment of so-called H-1B labor was at or close to the cap and largely before the onset of the vibrant IT sector in India. In 2001, the number of U.S. computer scientists was between 6.1%-10.8% lower and wages were between 2.6% and 5.1% lower. Of course, there also were beneficiaries -- namely consumers and employers. Immigration lowered prices by between 1.9% and 2.4%, and profits increased as did the total number of IT firms.
No comments and this is over 5 seconds old? Are people reading the article? Am I in the Twilight Zone?
If H1Bs are bad, why are illegal immigrants from Mexico good?
Not surprising at all. The open borders crowd would like to sell you that no restrictions on trade and immigration helps you, but clearly not.
So they can immigrate and compete for jobs along with everyone else. That's much different than H-1B contracting.
The only way to equalize the marketplace is not to have artificial salary standards. It's to make them permanent alien residents. They don't compete just on salaries. They compete on work place conditions, too. They are willing tolerate more hostile work environments and more abusive management in general. The only way to make them not compete is to put them on the same legal footing as the US citizens and others who are not afraid that losing a job would mean a possible deportation. If there is a shortage of workers, then nothing is lost by giving them green cards on the 1st day. This is not a security threat because they are physically present in the country regardless of the visa. By importing workers on work visa the employers do much more than suppress wages. They import people who are willing to tolerate abuse. The employers suppress work place standards by doing this.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Sounds like free market competition to me.
That's why its abused so much by companies.
So for every 100 Americans employed in America, there would've been another 11 if companies like Microsoft and Facebook weren't bringing in foreigners and essentially holding them hostage? That's pretty damning, in my opinion.
I know some of you are globalists, but wages being 5% higher sounds pretty good to this guy.
Let's hope Trump "forces" these Soros puppets to hire Americans in America.
This is basic supply and demand.
Undoing mod action.
"No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session." -- Judge Gideon J. Tucker
>> there also were beneficiaries -- namely consumers and employers
Er...have you have had to deal with H1B code? Most of the "security vulnerabilities" and other showstopping bugs I've seen over the last ten years could be traced to a "consultant" working as an indentured servant for one of the interchangeable Indian body shops.
Immigration is good. Indentured servants who fail to work long hours for little pay get sent back home...H-1Bs are bad.
This seems to back up the idea that there's a shortage of qualified domestic labor. The unemployment rate among CS grads is like 3.5%. If all those folks replaced H1B workers they would only make up 1/3 of the total jobs filled by H1Bs.
One of those makes it stronger, the other make it weaker.
The thing I really don't like about the H-1B program is the abuse. There's nothing wrong with keeping a few visa slots open for truly exceptional people. I've seen the program used for this purpose and it mostly works. The problem is the companies that use it to directly replace older workers in routine, run of the mill IT and dev jobs. Companies are totally aware of what they're doing when they hire Tata, Infosys or Cognizant -- it's a "Pontias Pilate" move that lets them wash their hands of the IT department. That's what has been happening with the big stories making the news (Disney, Southern California Edison, etc.) The outsourcer comes in, has to make a profit on the deal, and so they offshore everything they can and slowly replace domestic workers with H-1Bs for things they can't. These are not the best and brightest -- its mostly DBA and dev work that requires just enough on site interaction to make offshoring ineffective. I've worked in outsourced IT environments -- everything takes twice as long and nothing new will ever be attempted in a company that has someone else running their iT, partially because change orders cost so much.
Allowing the abuses is essentially a brake on IT workers' careers and an artificial salary cap. I've been lucky enough to become the senior guy in our engineering group over years of experience, and feel very strongly that we oldies (I'm 41 :-) ) have to develop the next generation. I don't want the pipeline of newbies to dry up because they're worried there's no future in technology. Young students are going to make rational choices and we're going to be stuck the same way the mainframers are now...no one will take the leap to learn enough to replace the retirees.
Also, I totally don't buy the argument that there's no domestic talent. No one is a drop-in replacement for the last guy, and especially today it's impossible to be an expert at everything. That narrative that paints offshore consulting firms as world-class experts on technology has to change. I would love to hear accounts of domestic hires that had zero talent -- I just haven't experienced it!
If you increase the supply of something and demand remains fixed - the cost of that something will go down.
Econ 101
The US does not need to import low to mid-skill labor. We have plenty of that here. We definitely want to import brilliant PhDs - but that's not how H1B is being used.
H1B is a cheap guest worker program - it is enriching companies at the expense of the US worker.
I am open-minded about H-1B and defer my judgment to the balancing of employment+wage concerns for US citizens and the effect on entrepreneurship, market growth, and American tech market share going forward. Bound, Morales, and Khanna's paper studied the effects of H-1B during a relatively distant era in tech (1994-2001); since that time, our industry has expanded in all directions, new market segments (e.g. smartphones, streaming, etc.) have taken hold, and the labor market has swelled to accommodate all of these changes. It might helpful to compare the impact of H-1Bs during the pre-Internet-bubble era and subsequent eras wrt. impact on American employment/salary, but making conclusions about this impact without the added context would be hasty at best.
I don't need my government spending a lot of money to make my salary lower and provide cheap alternative employees to bigass corporations. Make them pay more for H1B. They will stop needing outside talent they "cant get here".
There's a difference between immigrants and indentured servants who have to return to their country at then end of their contract.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
cheap employees. It's nearly impossible to get a job interview there with an American-sounding name. When I used my middle name and mother's maiden name (she's from Nigeria), I got a call back the same week I applied.
The bigger problem I see here is that teams tend to hire based on the same native language and others are driven-out. That means that while H1-B or green card holders might not represent a huge portion of the employees, that is why Trump's immigration ban could be so devastating. For example, all four guys in the build team I work with are from Libya and all eight QA people are from the same area of China. Teams tend to get divided by language so while some articles I read talked about the small percentage of employees affected, the problem is actually much, much worse since it could be majorities of several teams that would be devastated.
It's not a free market it is captured labor. Both for the company using the H1Bs, who cannot quit, and the Indian companies where emplyees have to give 90 days notice.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Sounds like free market competition to me.
H1Bs are not "free market", since it is difficult (although not impossible) for the visa holder to change employers. There should be several reforms to the H1B program:
1. The workers should be able to change employers at will.
2. Instead of a lottery, there should be an auction. That way the quotas go to the companies that need/value them the most, and it is doubtful they could be used for "cheap labor".
Government interference is not free markets.
Your post has to be trolling? NO ONE has a right to come to this country. You may apply for immigrant status, but you have no right to enter this country. Also, the H1B crap is causing the lowering of wages. It needs to be stopped. How many times just in the past couple years have we heard, an employer outsources their I.T. or support jobs to H1B visa holders, and FORCE the current employees to train their replacements.
This study is racist and xenophobic and slashdot is also for posting it. America is a country of immigrants and Indians have just as much right to a programming job as anyone who was born here.
Racism is usually usually defined as prejudice or antagonism based on race, and xenophobia has something to do with fear.
The problem with your argument is that there is no actual racism or xenophobia involved. No one is "afraid" of people from India, no one "fears" the Indian programmer, and from the looks of things in this country no one tries to keep "the Indian savage" down or prevents them from doing anything a regular citizen could do.
They drink at the same water fountains as anyone else, and no one cares.
This is the typical argument of the left. It's OK to hit a racist, so you start by labelling everything you don't like as racist.
Then when you're caught breaking windows or giving someone a beat-down, you sayl "yeah, but he's a racist!".
In fact, you don't even need to apply the label yourself. So long as someone else calls it racism, you're free to riot and beat people all you want.
That's really the reason the left uses all these silly labels, it's to justify virtuous acts of violence.
It's OK to hit a racist.
... test school walls to hand their child test results, and for that, it makes it all worth it. Plus, we don't have to pay as much for labor. That, too.
Hahahahah that's a good one. I have met maybe 1 in 5 H1Bs who weren't clueless and unmotivated ("severity 1 for our biggest client? I'll fix it Monday").
And most of the ones with a clue were the women. The men were a waste of oxygen.
India! Send us your women!
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Fuck Apple.
Fuck Microsoft
Butt Fuck Google twice.
Kill the H-1B.
If a US university cant produce the workers needed, no students would bother to attend any US university for any advanced degree..
So its not a skills issue. The US education system is still offering the education people can use.
No rush to other advanced nations for a better, more useful education.
So US workers out of the better US university settings or in the work force are still smart enough globally.
Can a brand tell the entire USA about a job on offer? Thanks to the internet that distance or very local job market issue is not the problem it once was.
Are the jobs on offer needing set state or federal security clearances, permits or exams? If any very average, random person outside the US can still get that job then its not a problem for any qualified US worker.
The only reason to not hire good US workers is to keep wages down by using low cost workers from outside the USA long term due to bureaucracy that still thinks in terms of local newspaper ads not been able to find skilled workers from all over the USA.
If you need an expert from some other really advanced nation, pay them a full US wage. Remove the wage incentives to hire workers from outside the USA.
Tell the educators in the US about the pool of expert workers that the US needed per year. What skill, what ability that not one other person in the US had. Whats on that list that no US university could offer or no US worker could find any further education in?
That no community in the USA could teach or had?
When that list is made, fund some US university or other educators to close that huge education gap in a few years.
Think back to the vast public and private education efforts from the 1920's-1990's that saw the US out pace every other nation.
Then export the products and services globally. Low skilled workers from other nations that lower wages in the US is not really doing much for the USA.
Wages are lowered, US workers don't get jobs and multinationals move the profits out of the USA.
The only winner is the law firm that got past the US bureaucracy to get the low cost worker into the USA.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
arrest for treason any politician who allows or facilitaties work visa, try them, and if convicted, hang them in accordance with law and tradition
This. Teams here tend to become mini-culture. It's great at Christmas when the few whites remaining can take time off, but it does create too much churn when someone from a different culture gets power over hiring or firing.
And stack ranking that is still unofficially practiced means that you have to get rid of competent people in order to make sure your friends aren't fired makes thing much worse.
For a few years now I've seen posts on Slashdot saying that H1B visa workers work for lower salaries or longer hours than other workers. What geographic location is this? What field? Because that doesn't jive with my experience at all.
I have been writing software for almost 20 years. For 17 of those years, I have worked in Maryland and Washington DC along side H1B visa workers. They work the same hours as everyone else on the team, with the same expectations, for the same salary range. They are subject to the same labor protection laws as everyone else. What idiotic manager would hire a less qualified software engineer for 10% less? Everybody I know takes the most qualified person possible within the salary range.
The real salary question is: Are H1B salaries significantly lower comparable green-card holders? Foreigners typically make less than their native counterparts because they have poorer communication skills since they were born overseas, and because there is a significant risk that they will up and leave for their home country. In the case of H1B workers, the company has to pay for sponsorship and probably can only bring them on as a contractor through a third-party. So all that will affect their salary. But these stories of H1Bs working 80 hours for 20% less money doesn't jive.
YOU BIGOTED PROLES NEED TO LEARN YOUR PLACE
LAWYERS, PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY ADD VALUE TO SOCIETY (UNLIKE YOU SMELLY PROGRAMMERS) ARE EXPENSIVE - HOW ARE LEADING TECH LUMINARIES LIKE ZUCKERBERG GOING TO BE ABLE TO AFFORD TO SUE YOU FILTHY PEASANTS OFF THEIR MASSIVE ESTATES IF THEY HAVE TO ACTUALLY PAY YOU DUMB NERDS FAIR WAGES?
Seriously, how are we going to be able to drive down the wages of tech workers any further? Wage-fixing, anti-competitive agreements - we've tried them all. The fact that you people voted for literal orange hitler is preventing us from flooding the labor market to an obscene degree and driving your wages down to where they belong (ideally you'll all work for a bed and a daily soylent ration). Why do you people insist on forcing your betters to have to give you money for all your 'hard work'?
"And no kicking out the H1s will not mean the jobs will be filled by American citizens- they will go offshore"
I've got news for you - almost every job that can reasonably be off-shored has been. Companies going back a few years have been bringing work back on-shore:
http://upstatebusinessjournal....
Lots of companies got burned by off-shoring work and getting higher cost and lower quality work than was expected. Managing "blended rate" teams half a world away turned out to be a much more difficult challenge than many expected.
H1B as it stands now is being abused and not used for its intended purpose - and there is an administration in place that is committed to fixing that problem. The only losers here will be the H1B body shops.
My team went for all white to nine guys from Pakistan and me. That happened in less than a year after we hired a Pakistani director. A travel ban with Pakistan, since they are a supporter of terrorism including hiding Osama Bin Laden, will kill us. That is the problem with the Microsoft culture.
Your localized analysis of labor markets is like trying to judge global climate by the weather in your backyard.
Immigration policy is a national policy and it must be evaluated on a national level.
"If the cost goes down, why would the demand remain fixed?"
Do you have evidence that demand for these people is increasing? The author of the article doesn't seem to think so. Slashdot has been filled with stories over the last couple of years of firms laying off tech workers and forcing those workers to train their replacements.
If demand for this talent was increasing, salaries would be rising across the industry and very few firms would be laying off workers. Why would you layoff anyone if you can't meet your demand for employees?
H1B is a cost saving measure at the expense of the American worker. Anyone who thinks otherwise is being willfully ignorant of the situation.
What is to stop a programmer with a chip on his shoulder from holding back the better ideas on the product. Finish his work at the company. And repackaging and selling it as a greater "different" product?
So at any given time there are a number of "independent" (read paid for) studies to fit some agendas.
I smell this is no different... we know Bannon is after anything that can be used in the next campaigns as saving the American jobs.
They are subject to the same labor protection laws as everyone else.
Oh? I had no idea that all programmers face deportation within 6 months if they get fired.
What idiotic manager would hire a less qualified software engineer for 10% less?
What idiotic manager would not hire an employee of equal skill, but who can be pressed to work longer hours without compensation, over a citizen who can simply change profession if gets tired of this type of environment?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
There is a employer lock-in with H1B visas. This is especially true when the employer is sponsoring the employee's green card. Employer's love it when they know an employee can't leave. You might not realize that your fellow employee is taking shit and grinning because they are just waiting for the greed card to come through.
New article title suggestion: Slashdot writes extremely misleading headline to push a political agenda. Reasons:
1) Study hasn't been peer reviewed so all their data is irrelevant.
2) Study is attempting to correlate 2001 data to today
3) The headline is written to try and convey some data and science to the very recent and implied contextual circumstances of the immigration ban. It does neither. Stop wasting my time and talk about advances in tech again.
I've only known a few, but your experience matches mine fwiw. I also worked fr a large company with offices all around the world and we'd fairly regularly have exchange programs where someone from Germany, Scotland, Japan or Brazil would come work at our office for a few months. I'm sure they got out a lot more than we did, but it was interesting seeing other cultural perspectives on work, eg., Europeans (at least the germans and french) seemed to work harder while at work and socialize less.
H-1Bs computer programmers spend their wages in the US economy, which drivis up salaries in the rest of the economy. There are also H-1Bs that are NOT computer programmers who spend their wages the same way, which drives up salaries in IT sector.
The more people that work in an economy the better.
Look at Luxembourg, which has many workers from neighbouring countries, they have a GDP/capita which is almost twice that of US.
http://www.immihelp.com/nri/indiavisa/employment-visa-india.html
One of the conditions is: There should not be a qualified Indian available to do the job that the visa holder would be performing
This study is racist and xenophobic and slashdot is also for posting it. America is a country of immigrants and Indians have just as much right to a programming job as anyone who was born here.
And you are a knee-jerk politically correct pussyboy who doesn't have the balls to
do anything about it it in the real world, so you post on the internet and pretend you
matter.
Also, what's the quality/pay for those tertiary local jobs? If they're just cheap/junior/part-time...
Dot fucking bomb?!!
Of course there were fewer programmers working in 2001 compared to 1994-2000. Many went from a $100k "web developer" position to baristas at Starbucks. It took until 2004 or so for employment to really recover, for the top half of people that were working in the field before the dot bomb.
H1Bs have plenty of issues, but it is important to focus on goals. Stealing the best and brightest from other countries is good. Replacing the bottom 25% of Americans is a different discussion, and is also tied into globalization and MBA-speak about "core competencies". If you want to make more jobs for Americans, you need to decide if your exports associated with globalization outweigh your additional imports. Theoretically, creating a few billion additional middle class consumers is better for everyone, but at least critique that point first...
since the supply of programmers is high in Silicon Valley, the cost there will be low. ...which completely ignores the "Demand" side of the equation. The supply of programmers in Silicon Valley is in fact not at all high compared to what it could be, primarily because of the cost of living in that area. It keeps many potential programmers away...
Meanwhile the demand in that area from companies is astronomical which is why the programmers that are there earn so much. That at the fact that you have to pay programmers a lot there just so they can live!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Europe talking. Without rtfa according to ./ traditions.
Do you guys whine over more efficient programming tools too that allow fewer people do more work in the same time?
Isn't this the same? With H1B visa holders the same amount of work can apparently be done with just 89% of the manpower?
I have always viewed every discussion about H-1B on Slashdot with the assumption that the only reason people complained about them is because they're salty about the competition
There is plenty of work to go around. No-one cares about that at all.
the truth is that I thought it was an alternative path for immigration
it is but it is a TERRIBLE path. I have a number of good friends who came in as H1-B and eventually became citizens. That is great, I'm happy they made it in. But the H1-B program allowed for basically years and years of legal abuse for these guys. They really could not think of looking for another job and during layoffs they were way more fearful of being laid off than most workers. Similarly if there was a problem in the workplace they simply could not speak up because of potential consequences if they lost their job.
That's my problem with the program, is that it is abusing people in the system, all while claiming to be a benefit... primarily it helps companies get cheaper programmers who cannot complain.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I agree that Germans have an amazing work ethic. I can't speak for French. Having worked in England, I can tell you that they work 9am to 5pm, and 5:01 they hit the pubs. American's tend to work longer hours in general.
Silicon Valley does not have a monopoly on writing software. If not for our carefully cultivated brain drain, these graduates from world's top universities would have started companies where they live. Look where most of world's smartphone makers are. Federal government, please do not mess with our tech OR agricultural immigration that you simply do not understand. It's as idiotic as Republicans talking about female reproductive system or Democrats talking about guns.
That is how they get rid of competent white people. They will never end it for that reason.
The problem is with a few IT body shops that specialize in outsourcing. Not off-shoring. See: http://www.epi.org/blog/new-da...
The idea is for places to simply close down their internal IT shop and send the work out to one of these hives. Often with the soon-to-be laid off current IT workers having to do a knowledge transfer for their foreign replacements. The use case of a few developers hired into a team to work along side them as equals is still not great, but it is not the source of most of the abuse either.
The solution is an accelerated permanent residency for foreigners with skills needed here. If we really need the skills, why futz around with temporary visas and indentured servitude?
You might not realize that your fellow employee is taking shit and grinning because they are just waiting for the greed card to come through.
So let me get this straight: I ask for evidence that H1B visa workers are abused, and the best I get is that even though I work with them, party with them, and go to church with them, secretly my boss is being an asshole to them and I don't know it. And this has been going on for 17 years without my knowledge. But an AC on the internet knows the real truth about my coworkers and my friends secret lives.
I'm looking for someone to tell me who and where H1B visas are being approved. Because I don't see it. I'm not looking for speculation, I want examples, anecdotes, SOMETHING other than anonymous cowards on the internet making unsupported claims.
Here is the list of H1B companies. Notice which ones pay a lot, which don't pay much. Chances are you aren't working at the companies that pay so little, because they're miserable places to work. Chances are, the people who work with you will still be able to get visas.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I've heard about Tata. Is Cap Gemini that same way?
I know a local company that just outsourced most of their IT department to Cap Gemini. I know much of Cap Gemini's workforce is overseas. I've been politely listening, but so far no one has mentioned any H1B visa workers involved. Slashdot has had a few articles on the topic, but I have yet to see any real evidence that H1B was involved in these cases.
I agree about permanent residency. I work with some H1Bs who would love citizenship, and are absolutely frieking smart. We want those people! That's why I want to hear some of these H1B abuse stories. It is frustrating to need smart people, and at the same time have people decrying the H1B program that is providing us those smart people. We don't need to get rid of the program, we need to quickly find those talented ones and give an efficient path to citizenship. I want to know who is abusing these H1B visa workers. I'm pretty sure it isn't engineers, which is why I'm not seeing it.
For me, it was eight white guys that had all been here for over seven years to just me with a bunch of Muslims from Montenegro. We went from a very effective team to just a disaster since none of my coworkers know English. They're still not even trying to learn.
Thanks for the link. That's a good start. We can try to guess what the fields are from the job titles. Hmmm... This link shows it by occupation. That's interesting.
Okay, so this is painting a picture for me. There are two kinds of H1Bs. One kind is hired by a company that does actual work and makes an actual product: Apple, Microsoft, Intel. Those H1B visa workers are probably not being abused, and they probably aren't displacing American workers. Those are the kind I know. The other kind is the IT outsourcing companies like WiPro, Tata, and IGate. They are replacing American jobs with a combination of H1B visa jobs and outsourcing. I notice that the "Software developer" occupation makes >100k, and they work at places like Intel, IBM, Motorola, Apple. And the "Computer programmers" make 67k and work at Tata, InfoSys, IBM, and WiPro. IBM is in both lists, interestingly.
I wonder what those "Computer programmer" H1B visa workers are really doing? Looking at Tata's business model, how can H1B visa be justified here? That company's job is to basically put IT workers in other companies out a job by outsourcing. But if they have that many H1B visa workers, aren't they just displacing an American worker with an H1B worker?
I'm sure the turd-world guys were cheaper. That is what Microsoft is all about. Cheap rather than quality.
I've been writing software for almost 20 years.
Every experience I have witnessed with a H1B visa worker has been so that the company or client I was working for could pay 'extra help' 15-25$/hr equivalent to do what I was (reasonably) charging in the 45-65 range to do.
The CTO at the last company I worked for snobbishly laughed when I presented to him that at least one of the guys was at least as qualified as I was and deserved more than 15/hr. He pretty much straight up just told me that the only reason we even keep the guy on was because he was only getting paid 15$/hr.
Ironically the logic that was explained to me as to why he would be let go before being paid a comparable and competitive salary was that because he was remote 'it would not work out'.
They would never let me work remotely either even though it was a part of the original agreement when I hired on (I have since resigned and now work remote again, for other clients).
So yeah that's a clear example of the H1B being used to suppress wages (probably mine too indirectly), because if the gentleman in fact moved here he would not (possibly could not) live in the place we were located on the cheap wage.
They were not shy about it either.
And the last company I contracted for? Same thing.
The one before it? Same thing.
We ended up giving the guy what was approximately a third of my wage to do the same task as me, and he did work the 80 hour shifts because that wage was a 'good' one according to himself.
If you have been in software for 20 years and haven't witnessed this perhaps you need to leave your cube or office and peel off a layer of that dinosaur skin. This is happening all over.
I had no idea that all programmers face deportation within 6 months if they get fired
Nope, just H1Bs. Also: it's 60-days, not 6 months.
What idiotic manager would not hire an employee of equal skill
Interviewing doesn't work that way. There's no such thing as equal skill. Everyone has advantages and disadvantages. Companies that are large enough to sponsor H1B visa workers aren't splitting hairs over 10% salary differences.
but who can be pressed to work longer hours without compensation
Who? Where? What field? You are just repeating the claim. I am trying to figure out who this is happening to. I know it isn't Software engineers. So who is it? Do you know any?
For such a small effect (5-10%) I'm wondering why it is so much discussed. I think it's just because immigration is neatly divided in "us" vs "them", but other causes are much harder to discern.
So one in ten jobs were shipped overseas.
It's probably more complicated, in the sense that the jobs were going away anyhow many times, and companies like Intel just outsource for the end of a lifecycle of whatever system. I can definitely see companies and analysts responding with something like that.
At the same time, for all we know this 11% figure is low. Look at what data they used.
There's no denying that outsourcing has been abused and that the rules are tipped in favor of large company profits over needs of US workers.
Thank you Dave Raggett
A few questions: Do you know their title? Do you know where they were working from? Or why could they not find a job locally?
Since you say you were writing software, I assume the other person was also writing software. The government should have turned down the H1B application if the person was not being paid a market rate since that is a requirement of the program. I wonder if the CTO was actually lying to you about the salary. Could it be that the remote employee was making more than you, and the CTO didn't want to tell you that? Usually, they don't talk salaries anyway. Another possibility is that he was committing fraud, and put a higher salary on the H1B application and was pocketing the difference. Fraud would be an interesting twist here.
peel off a layer of that dinosaur skin. This is happening all over.
I ask a legit question, provide examples, and it ends with ACs posting ad-hominem attacks and making unsubstantiated claims. Ugh, it's not like I'm new here, I should be used to this by now. But I just keep on trying anyway.
Closed boarders for capital
Providing foreign students with the world's best education, and then sending them back to their country to compete with us is asinine. I think that for skills in demand, we should staple green-cards to their diplomas.
I don't have to read the study to know it is full of crap. Without the talent we imported from the whole world, Silicon Valley would not have been nearly as successful. They created more startup companies, employing more white American-born programmers like me, than could have happened otherwise. I know there are counter-examples of companies expoiting foreign workers, but on the whole, we owe the talent we've imported thanks. They've increased our salarys... duh.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
But not enough. It will be nice when 90% of compyootah weenies are out of a job and destitute. No other marketable skills, no social skills, no friends... So, weren't you supposed to be "our bosses" by now, compyootah losers? :)
I need about 20%-50% of my staff as programmers who are mediocre at their job and can make it look like we're taking customer projects seriously. While at the same time reserving my top talent (5-15%) on the projects that are going to help long term business strategy. Basically we need a lot of grunts that can hold the line and keep the emergencies at a low simmer, but not necessarily design anything new or solve any difficult problems.
Most programmers are bad, why would we want to pay them 5% more to continue to do shitty work? We mainly hire local software developers when their skill set, productivity and raw hours worked are likely to exceed what we can get from an outsourcing contracting or H1-B worker. The local developers who aren't good enough to be above average talent and aren't willing to put up with low pay and a lot of boring ugly work moved on to other careers in 2001.
Most bugs in software are self-inflicted. Bad requirements, bad designs, and bad process. Most of the time it's the same stupid shit over and over, and I don't really need anyone particularly good to solve the mountains of minor bugs we keep getting.
... you only need a high school degree to the lottery.
In the process they also destroyed as many as they started up by importing cheap temporary labor. The abuse of the visa system allowed them to take over whole IT departments in many major companies that were previously held by US IT people. And because you do not read it you do not know if it is crap or not. That is called ignorant. As for the thanks for taking our livelihood, WTF have you been smoking.
This is what the true discussion about H1B abuse that is going on.
If we limited H1-Bs to genuine need, we would be importing very highly skilled IT workers who need no education nor even experience. They would either work out the visa and return home, yes, with invaluable experience, but they brought their education with them. If they were educated in the U.S., well, then the revolving door is working well.
When I read postings that describe apparent mainstream programming skills that only an H1-B can provide, I flash back to the many postings and interviews I had back in the day, when they were advertising for a system administrator with internetwork, ADS, SQL DBA, and desktop support experience, oh, and do you 'happen' to do any website maintenance, I knew the plan. Take in a web guy that has had to fill in all the other roles, manage with their limitations, pay them half what a web guy should get, and laugh. And why do I say 'web guy'? Because all the women I've known in IT, and my limited experience having sheltered me from much mediocrity, were exceptional workers. They seemed to find employment easily, and stayed in their jobs longer. Something about 'caring' or some such bs according to one employer. Who knew...
You do realize that the majority pf H1B Visas holders are not foreign students educated in the United States. The majority are from India.
Give it up Potsy. The H1B Visa program is being abused. The majority of H1B Visas go to off-shoring firms like Tata and InfoSys. They do not go to business trying to find hard to find skills. The H1B Visa program is meant to supplement NOT replace US workers.
The only way the GP's remote alternative could have worked for $15/hr is if he worked in another country, where the currency conversion would account for a lot. Like for India, where it is ~Rs65, that would be just under Rs1000/hr. That translates to (assuming 60 hrs/wk) to something like Rs250k/month, which is a fantastic salary for India.
So when you hear numbers like that, it's obvious that they're not being paid that either in the US nor Western Europe. It would probably be Eastern Europe or India.
It happens all over California. I worked at a Fortune 500 company on one project of around 100 consultants with at least half of those H1-B visa holders. Most of those H1-B guys were consulting and were working through companies that subcontracted to other companies. One guy was 4 levels deep...meaning he worked for a company that subcontracted through 3 other companies with the final one having the actual contract. For his job, the first client was billing $125/hr. and after all of the skimming, he was only getting $33/hr. Most of the Indian H1-Bs were working long hours and staying in the same hotel. There were a few good guys that knew their shit, but most were run of the mill bodies that were just billing. This was happening because some of the VPs in the company actually owned the first IT contracting company, so they wanted to use as many contractors as possible. 100 people at minimum of $125/hr rate = $12,500 an hour with the VPs making at least $25/hr or $2,500 an hour off of each hour billed. Ka-ching.
Sounds like free market competition to me.
H1Bs are not "free market", since it is difficult (although not impossible) for the visa holder to change employers. There should be several reforms to the H1B program:
1. The workers should be able to change employers at will.
2. Instead of a lottery, there should be an auction. That way the quotas go to the companies that need/value them the most, and it is doubtful they could be used for "cheap labor".
At the very least "Guest worker" programs should pay people 10% or 20% more than prevailing wages, let people change jobs "by right" without any additional paperwork and be capped well below demand and auctioned off according to the highest salary.
But much better to let people that actually want to come here and be Americans stay here as either green card holders and put them on a path to citizenship. There are already far too many people living here that are living in a society apart from the rest of us. Immigration has been the life blood of this country... not non-immigrant guest worker programs.
Students who come here for 4, 5 and 6 years for education should be a priority as they are usually already well socialized in American Society.
This study is racist and xenophobic and slashdot is also for posting it. America is a country of immigrants and Indians have just as much right to a programming job as anyone who was born here.
You are trolling. Did you even read the study? I guess not because of your comment. Stop playing a victim here.
Study Link
Overall, our results suggest that high-skill foreign workers contribute to the well-being of the typical US consumer, mainly through the assumption that these workers contribute to innovation at the same rate as US high-skill workers. Indeed, under our calibrations, accounting for foreign workers’ effect on innovation, the gains to consumers are an order of magnitude larger than gains excluding this effect. At some level, this is hardly surprising. While simple models of the impact of immigration on native welfare suggests the immigrant surplus is second order (Borjas, 1999), if the immigrants shift out the production possibility frontier, their effect will be first order.
Although our results suggest that the introduction and expansion of the H-1B program in the 1990s brought gains to both US consumers and IT sector entrepreneurs, we also found indications of losses for US computer scientists and potential computer scientists. Recent work (Peri and Sparber, 2009, 2011) has emphasized the importance of immigration affecting the occupational choice of US natives. Our results tend to support the importance of this view.
Indeed, our estimates suggest that high-skill immigration has had a significant effect on the choices made by US workers and students.
However, the study assumes that all H1B are high-skill foreign workers. I am not so sure about that assumption...
to compete with us
Uh, they are competing with us. That's kind of the point.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
The difference is that these worker are effectively indentured slaves.
Yes, I am sure the wages are the same.,
Let us say there is some problem with a manager who is sexually abusing workers.
Or a problem with job safety.
Or a problem with bullying.
These workers have no recourse.
If anything goes wrong, or of they complain, they go home.
They do not get hired again.
These people are completely sheltered from organized labour.
That is effectively career suicide.
cheap employees
Not just cheap, but willing to work 70-80 hours a week. Never taking time off to look after a sick kid or go watch their little league game.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
It is also software engineers - your personalized experience only represents a portion of experinces. It is obvious that you have never worked for a major outsourcing company. (Cognizant, et. al.)
Your co-workers may not be being abused. That's the bloody point. SOME of the workers get good gigs. Those are the workers we should want to use the program. MOST OF THE WORKERS are basically slaves. Those are the workers we should not want to use the program.
Your experience is restricted to YOUR experience and unless you have somehow become omnioptent it is impossible for that experience to be universal.
In other words for an IT professional your logic sucks.
Market rate checks only apply to wages below 60k.
Cognizant pays $60,500 to most H1B holders for this reason. This is also why the change to prefer higher paid H1B first instead of a random lottery and upping the market wage check to 130k is a good idea.
The MINIMUM they are discussing is not a minimum wage it is the 'No Check Needed' wage.
In other words it is designed to raise the average wage of the H1B worker in the US. It is good for the country to prefer the higher paid individuals as well since there are way more applications than there are visas.
If you REALLY need that person an easy way to get it approved would be to pay them more.
The H1-B visa, the large Indian consulting firms and the large Asian immigrants population have basically swamped the programming market. You see many jobs been advertised on the Job Boards for less than 80K a year which is at least 50% less than what it should be. The large Indian Consulting firms will underbid for projects and will refuse to pay anywhere near competitive salary. They would rather the project fail while they make their profit since there is no damage from a project failing.
companies forget that loyalty goes both ways. when management demonstrates zero loyalty to employees, employees felt compelled to reciprocate. the first lesson learn by their cheap guest worker replacement is the very same.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
This study is racist and xenophobic and slashdot is also for posting it.
Fuck off with that politically correct bullshit.
Now do the needful and expand that program!
I guess that whomever moderated this to -1 was unable to read the sarcasm between the lines...
The trick is to keep them.
Cronies get enriched by both. They get cheap labor.
That's why politicians say that both are good.
It happens a fucking lot in software engineering, especially in the DMV area. I haven't been in a shop using them heavily in the past year, but when I was most where a bit slow, I'd be the senior guy they'd ask for help which gave me some insight into how they operate. I'd say the averages I saw from them they'd cover any deficiencies by putting in an extra 3-4 unbilled hours working from home every day. That and absurdly large professional networks(they'll each have a crapton of cousins, inlaws, friends doing the same shit elsewhere that they ask) which isn't a knock on them, they just kind of hide it. The extra unbilled hours though, you have to set the tone early that is not an expectation if you want the real time estimates and don't want to accidentally create a sweat shop. A manager not noticing those things can create a toxic environment fast.
Speak for yourself asshole.
Many of us do care about the abusive and unfair competition and rigged labor market. Many of us have left the tech sector in great part because of the nasty employment conditions and contempt ladled out from all sides.
You yourself contradict your own post by pointing out the legal abuse and lower wages that H1-B illegals (and they are illegal - both they and the company skirting the law) suffer. Do you understand basic economics? This kind of market imbalance most definitely affects the entire labor sector in technology.
I understand these points will woosh right past your libertarian lizard brain. Posting for other readers.
Good info, thanks.
According to this: http://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa... Cap Gemini do seem to be part of the problem. I've worked with two really good H1-B people and one of them ended up sent back to India because the company decided not to sponsor his permanent residency. I'm not sure what happened with the other one, but I think she got married and stayed in the US via marriage to a citizen. It's ridiculous to say the US economy is in desperate need of talent and then have the companies go hog wild over a temporary visa program. Either we need them and they should stay or we don't and it's just a game to keep costs low.
The point of this program is to benefit the company who needs this employee. So your number 1 point is stupid.
Your point number 2 is stupid because you may get allocated a slot because you really do have the need, but then lose the employee to your point number 1.
You're not solving the right problems.
You yourself contradict your own post by pointing out the legal abuse and lower wages that H1-B illegals (and they are illegal - both they and the company skirting the law) suffer. Do you understand basic economics? This kind of market imbalance most definitely affects the entire labor sector in technology.
They affect the labor sector for a number of large companies.
Guess what? There are LOTS of smaller or mid-size companies to who this hardly applies. They cannot even generally afford outsourcing, much less H1-B. The benefits can be even higher than large companies in part because of the same downward forces on large company corporate IT labor....
My friends all went to smaller places and did better. I went the consulting route and am doing great. I appreciate that you are bitter but as you said you left the tech sector, so why do you think you know how things are?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In.addition, the H1B are typically paid a great deal less.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Give those who are ACTUALLY exceptional a green card immediately
Thus, Capitalism has all the labor it needs, it just won't be able to exploit because the workforce is protected by open competition
Some reason Capitalists don't want to face competition for labor?
Oh, that's right
PROFITS!
The Economist found that between 2012 and 2015 the three biggest Indian outsourcing firmsâ"TCS, Wipro and Infosysâ"submitted over 150,000 visa applications for positions that paid a median salary of $69,500. In contrast, Americaâ(TM)s five biggest tech firmsâ"Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoftâ"submitted just 31,000 applications, and proposed to pay their workers a median salary of $117,000 http://www.economist.com/news/... https://qz.com/889524/the-us-s...
Casteism
From the same article:
"As a working paper, it hasn’t been peer reviewed, and the authors allowed their model is too simple to allow for policy evaluations of alternatives."
You have described everything precisely. The only thing that I would add is that for the two different "castes" within the H1B system that you have identified, there's one other difference.
People who are working for Apple, Microsoft, Intel etc are using H1B as a gateway to a green card, and ultimately to citizenship - which they can do, because H1B is explicitly "dual intent", so you can apply for a green card without getting kicked out of the country; and because there's a specific process whereby employer sponsors the employee for a green card. This isn't to say that every single H1B working for these companies will do that - but the majority will. The companies in question are generally interested in retaining employees long-term, so they do sponsor any employee who asks for green card (in fact, they will proactively push you to apply if you don't do so yourself), and will provide lawyers to handle the application for you, pay various fees etc.
People who are working for Tata, Infosys etc are not there for citizenship. It's not that they wouldn't want to - it's that those companies will generally not sponsor them. So it's really just a gig to come work in US and earn a lot of money (comparatively to what they could earn at home), and then come back rich, and with a US job on your resume.