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Computer Programmers May No Longer Be Eligible For H-1B Visas [Update] (axios.com)
Two anonymous readers share a report: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services quietly over the weekend released new guidance that computer programmers are no longer presumed to be eligible for H-1B visas. This aligns with the administration's focus on reserving the temporary visas for very high-skilled (and higher-paid) professionals while encouraging low- and mid-level jobs to go to American workers instead. The new guidance affects applications for the lottery for 2018 fiscal year that opened Monday. Companies applying for H-1B visas for computer programming positions will have to submit additional evidence showing that the jobs are complex or specialized and require professional degrees. From a Bloomberg report, which has confirmation: The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services department issued a memorandum that makes it harder for companies to bring foreign technology workers to the U.S. using the H-1B visa process. The new guidelines, issued late Friday, require additional information for computer programmers applying for the work visa to prove the jobs are complicated and require more advanced knowledge and experience. The new policy is effective immediately, so it will change how companies apply for the visas in an annual lottery process that begins Monday. Indian outsourcing firms, which have faced the most amount of criticism, stand to lose the most. The changes don't explicitly prohibit any applications for a specific type of job. Instead, they bring more scrutiny to those for computer programmers doing the simplest jobs.
.. to meet the requirements?
"Companies applying for H-1B visas for computer programming positions will have to submit additional evidence showing that the jobs are complex or specialized and require professional degrees."
Making America great again by "encouraging low- and mid-level jobs to go to American workers"? How about "enabling American workers to fill highly qualified positions"?
Stephan
The purpose of H1-B visas is to fill positions that companies can not fill with American workers, regardless of price. Greed CEOs, of course, promptly abused the system to use it to pull down wages and increase unemployment for US workers, such as when Disney forced US workers to train their lower cost H1-B replacements (nytimes link).
Trump is doing the right thing here. The actual memo (PDF file) spells out the new policy: just because the position needs a computer programmer, we can automatically have an H1-B fill the position.
I am no supporter of Trump and voted for Hillary last November, but I am not blinded by partisan politics; he's doing the right thing here: Protecting hard working Americans.
How does somebody become a qualified expert?
Foundational knowledge + experience.
Acquiring the necessary foundational knowledge isn't the hard part. There are many colleges and other forms of training available to American students that can help provide that.
It's experience that takes somebody from merely having knowledge and helps make them a qualified expert.
Do you know how you get experience? You start off at an entry level position, do work, and over time you'll gain experience. Then such people can move on to mid-level positions with greater responsibility, and get additional experience. Finally, after a long time of doing this, at least some of those people will become qualified experts.
But that progression can't happen if Americans can't even get the entry level experience due to employment market distortions caused by broken government programs that essentially import unreasonably cheap third-world labor into America.
Starting at the bottom is the most sensible thing to do. Yes, it will take time, but by allowing Americans to again get entry level experience it will eventually allow them to become the experts that America so desperately needs.
The company I work for is a light user of H-1B visas, mainly as a way to get foriegn workers into the US to work on different projects. From what I've heard, there's already some sort of "Labor Certification" process that is basically a bunch of hoops to jump through. I'm not sure how this would be different -- the lawyers filing the requirements just make up the information on those requirements. This is the kind of stuff where you see companies posting jobs in some obscure newspaper classified section with absurd requirements, designed to show that they couldn't find any US citizen willing to do the job.
I can definitely see "computer programmer" applications changing to "IT Architect" or "DevOps Engineer" or "Systems Engineer" quickly -- which still leaves us IT folks out of any reform. I've said before that I think the program itself is OK as originally intended -- a safety valve to bring in someone with known skills. The problem is the body shops and large companies who use it to fill low-end positions cheaply. As someone who's "older" and enjoys teaching newbies how not to screw up in IT positions, I really don't want to see the end of low-level employment in IT. How do you ever get up to the level of experience you actually need to be a senior guy if you don't have a ladder of low-level jobs to start with? I've done help desk, desktop support, data center operator monkey, sysadmin and I'm finally in a good engineering spot. If we don't have a pipeline of newbies, no one is going to understand the nuts and bolts you need to know to progress.
Since when is software development NOT a complex, specialized job requiring a high level of skill?
Sort the applicants by salary offered, from high to low and award based on that list. That will at least weed out those TCS Cognizant Wipro Infosys crowd that offer 65K but apply for thousands of position to game the lottery system.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
when i worked at a major telecom all the Indian 'developers' had Master's degrees at the minimum. This would qualify them for 'highly skilled' technical jobs as the degrees themselves state as much.
Now they couldn't code worth a damn, the libraries they included in the code ballooned the code base, and god help you if you needed documentation. They were some of the worst 'developers' I've ever met and 1/10 was decent enough to not build code that didn't melt the servers down. The whole reason we had a team of 5 System Admins supporting 2 floors of developers was because of their shoddy coding skills. It was great job security.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
Gotta check the legal fine print on this one. Haven't most positions been retitled from "Programmer" to something else a while back? It's easy enough to talk around the skills and call the job something else.
Do you have any evidence that Google has been pulling in people to fill lower positions? Disney absolutely abused the system, but everything I have seen either personally or in statistics says that companies like Apple and Google have been using the system to pull in high-talent people, and they paying the accordingly. I know that Apple has off-shored a lot of low-level IT (to India), but that is not directly associated with the H1-B conversation, as those people are still living in India.
The real abusers are places like Tata Consulting, Infosys, and Wipro where they secure the H1-B slots for consulting, then go and find actual work for the people they bring in (so the opposite of what is supposed to be happening). The chart in this article nicely lays out the problem, where outsourcing firms dominate the top 20 users of H1-B (data is from 2014, but is unlikely to have materially changed):
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/06/us/outsourcing-companies-dominate-h1b-visas.html?_r=0
At a guess I would lump half of the IBM positions (remember they are mainly a consulting company), and all the Deloitte & Touche positions in with the mis-use category. And then treat the Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Intel, and Apple (plus half of IBM) positions as valid uses of H1-B (I am sure there are some exceptions even there, but... on the whole...). A quick addition of what I just said has 4,329 legitimate H1-B and 27,806 dodgy positions in the top 20 users of the system (those 20 account for a bit less than half of the use: ~32K out of 85K positions).
If you job requires physical presence here, it is difficult to outsource. Doctors are safe. Lawyers are safe too. They Indian lawyers cannot represent you in US court.
Computer programmers do not enjoy those protections and cannot. Unless govt mandates that businesses cannot outsource. That is not likely to happen. And if it did, the tech industry outside of US would rejoice. As that would bring an end to the near-monopoly US businesses have in this field.
Sergey Brin wasn't born here, Elon Musk wasn't born here, Steve Jobs' father wasn't born here. On and on and on. At some point you will realize that immigrants and their families make a huge contribution to making the US tech industry the best and the biggest in the world.
Don't be short-sighted and try to kill the chicken that is currently laying the golden eggs.
The tech industry in the US is quite healthy. If you are any good, you can easily find a job. In this economy, if anybody cannot find a job as a computer programmer, well, a blame on H1-B program is misplaced.
If you are required to train your replacement, then you don't need to be replaced and the H-1B should not be allowed in.
Same for outsourcing. If you require your people to train the outsource company's employees, then the laws should make outsourcing extraordinarily difficult.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Not really. It probably increases your chances of the entire software team getting outsourced overseas to cut costs, though.
You'll also still have those wonderful IT contracting firms who bring in people on temporary work visas six months at a time. They rotate them out and send the trained guy back home right when they get to the point when they start to understand how the system really works. That shit should be illegal.
Pretty much just like the American citizens I've worked with.