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New Data On H-1B Visas Prove That IT Outsourcers Hire a Lot But Pay Very Little (qz.com)
New submitter FerociousFerret shares a report from Quartz: Hard numbers have been released by the U.S. government agency that screens visas for high-skilled foreign workers, and they are not pretty. Data made available by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) for the first time show that the widely made complaint about the visa program is true: a small number of IT outsourcing companies get a disproportionately high number of H-1B visas and pay below-average wages to their workers. The new data also gives a more accurate picture of salaries of H-1B workers by employer. The top IT outsourcing companies on average paid much lower salaries to their workers. The wage divide is largely a result of different education requirements of H-1B positions. H-1B visas are issued to workers with specialized skills which generally requires a Bachelor's degree or higher. More than 98% of approved H-1B visa positions were awarded to workers with either a Bachelor's or a Master's degree in fiscal year 2016. A closer look at the educations held by H-1B workers at companies like Google, Amazon and Intel -- places with in-house tech staffs -- show that more than 60% had Masters degrees. For most IT outsourcing companies, the majority of H-1B visa holders only had a Bachelor's.
beauty is in the eye of the employer
This is news? Companies wouldn't bother to even do H-1B visas unless they paid less than homegrown employees.
Water is wet. News at 11.
That corporations would do the most economically sensible thing, given the conditions at hand.
In other words: Duh. Now that we have the evidence, can we PLEASE do something about this?
I have serious problems with a visa that's designed for the worker to have to go home again later (I know that a fair number of H1B holders do convert to green card holders, but that's deliberately NOT the point of an H1B).
H1B should be a fairly rare thing - if the US is so short of workers that you have to go oversees, then we should be giving out green cards and encouraging citizenship, not paying crap wages, depressing pay scales for US workers, and then sending them home.
Take the number of H1B visas issued, and put that number into the green card program instead. I want people who are going to stay and be my neighbor, not temps from oversees!
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
Positiviely shocked. Hilary says that outsourcing is good for the economy.
The IT outsourcing companies make a ton of other money in the process.
From a percentage of the pay their H-1B contracts receive, to the flop houses they store their programmers in while they're not at work, it's all pure profit.
The H1B issue is easily fixed but politicians on either side do not really want to fix it. The simple fix is just a max applicants of 1000 per organization per year. This ensures IT outsourcers cannot game the lottery by submitting a ton of applicants each year which they do, and that legitimate companies like Google, Facebook, MicroSoft, Amazon etc. have enough to fill their needs.
Data here
Is it any wonder that middle class wages have stagnated and young workers are under employed?
And some people still can't figure out why Hillary lost....
Too bad they can't outsource management and CEO's. Let's see how they like it.
New data, you say? It's common fucking sense that clients and the Pimps: Wipro, Syntel, IBM Export Blue, Cognizant, Infosys ... they all take advantage of H1-Bs. The quality of work is typically subpar, the majority of Indians can follow a script but rarely think outside the box or solve problems. Of course there are exceptions to this but generalizations are generally true ...
Warren Buffet has been kicking around changing American Express to Indian Express.
Why is it not a requirement to pay above average wages for H1-B holders? The only reason they have the visa is because there is no local worker with the required skill, right?
1. Naively capping H-1Bs at 1,000 per organization would only result in more organizations. The outsourcers would simply lean on shell companies. Depending on the elasticities, workers would get paid even less in order to fund the extra overhead. That won't work.
2. There is an easy fix, actually: set minimum H-1B salaries to $10,000 per month (2017 dollars, inflation indexed) nationwide, up to $2,000/month more (2017 dollars) in high cost of living areas (e.g. Silicon Valley), plus require that the employer post a 12 month bond. That'll have zero impact on Apple and several other legitimate H-1B employers. Closely monitor compliance (e.g. compare to tax records), deport any employee paying kickbacks, throw anybody accepting kickbacks in prison, and keep the bond if there are any rule violations.
3. A variation on #2 is to hold monthly or quarterly H-1B auctions. The bid price is the employee's salary, and the highest salaries win, subject to a $10,000/month (2017 dollars) floor.
Options #2 and #3 would help boost government revenues since high salaries (for both the H-1Bs and resident workers) mean higher tax payments.
because it's not an issue that brings anyone to the polls. You've got guns, abortion, Obamacare and coal jobs (mostly because it's a swing state issue). But H1-Bs? Nope. Nobody votes on it. If you wanna end H1-B abuses you need to start voting in your primaries and tossing the incumbents out when then vote against it. But good luck, I doubt you could get the herd of cats that is IT people to vote as a block. Besides, we're all convinced we're the irreplaceable guy...
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in the swing states. Arrogance and bad data cost her the election, not a lack of lip service to tech workers. We don't vote in blocks and we've got a host of other issues (gun rights, gay rights, abortion, taxes) that motivate us, so we never stand a chance. If you want to end H1-b abuse you need to make it a central issue for a large block of voters; particularly in swing states. Until then you'll get lip service from the parties and nothing more. I'll remind you Trump has done nothing of consequence to reign the program in...
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Seriously, rather than doing H1Bs, it should be green cards and should based on corporate needs.
Also, the hire should be required to ONLY work INSIDE of that company. IOW, they can not be contracted out.
Finally, the green card holder should not be allowed to contract for the first 5 years that they are here.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Have faith, ye of little faith. There will be orgiastic prosperity for ALL!
Here in Sweden, we have had an outsourcing problem for many years too, this isn't unique to the U.S. in any way, shape or form - it's just got more attention because "USA".
People want a big salary, they've become accustomed to high salaries and do not want to change their lifestyle. What about electronics? We're living in times were you can purchase a huge 50 inch flat screen TV for 300 bucks or less, electronics gadgets are almost ludicrously cheap - and salaries at an all time high. Our standard of living has never in history been any better than it is now, and we got a new form of 1st world disease called "comfort issues".
Heh, Europe is no better. There's a so called "poverty" standard, that says that if you earn less than roughly 700$ per month, then you're below the poverty limit. I've seen people beg on the street corners for money, rags for clothes - and they don't even have an income, what do we call those then?
In Sweden - people are used to a certain income, anything less than 120 SEK an hour - is pure poverty according to them (that's around 15$ for you Americans). I saw a program series on TV we have here called "Lyxfallan" roughly translated as The Luxury trap/money trap. It's about singles or couples that have overspent, and are now trapped in debt they "can't" get out of by themselves. I saw this woman that was on TV crying her mascara off - "I don't know what to do, no one can live below 2000$ a month, I'm so poor - this is hopeless". Wow - just wow.
I live in a freaking HOUSE of my own, and I sometimes worked hard as a substitute teacher and sometimes I had to live on my savings, sometimes I only get 500$ a month to live on - but I survive - without ANY debt. How? I save, I don't need the latest "border-less" big-screen TV, I'm fine with my 9 year old 47" tv which is still pretty darn good and big. I purchase second hand furniture, I purchase food in bulk, and watch out for coupon sales. Am I poor? According to some authorities I'm supposed to be dirt-poor in their eyes, but I feel crazy rich since I got my entire house, property and all the food I can eat.
And that's the problem with our society today, no one is willing to compromise on their living standards, daughter gotta have the latest iPhone, right? Otherwise she'll be the laughing stock of the entire school, right? Wrong! No one NEEDS the latest and greatest, what we do need though - is to get our stuff together, realize that if we WANT jobs to STAY in our country, we need to adjust to the times we live in.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
The way it works is the company sponsors your H1-B in exchange you have to work 1 year for them and they off course set the terms.
I was there, the solution was to create my own company and sponsor it myself.
If you were earning $500/mo in the States, you would NOT have a house of your own and plenty of food. You would be living in a cardboard box under a bridge and eating out of dumpsters. Get real, broham.
> And that's the problem with our society today, no one is willing to compromise on their living standards,
It's not no one. It's the women. Single moms, expecting the income and benefits that used to be tied to a full-time salaried man with a *wife at home*, expecting society to provide all the benefits for them that the stay at home dad used to pay for, and "we don't need men" translating to "men don't need you, either, if they can just evaporate at whim".
Take a good look at the number of US workers overseas are divorced men skipping alimony, and vice versa.
Don't tie the visa to a specific company. Make it easy for the workers to switch jobs. H1B workers are damn near indentured servants because it's so damn hard to switch jobs. The result is they have to put up with crap that a regular worker wouldn't tolerate, e.g. longer hours (at a fixed salary), no bonuses, shorter or no vacations, etc. It's not just about the salary. It's the ability to completely control the workers.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Slaves were paid too. From what I understand, they tended to DIE if you didn't feed and house them.
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In other words, we are no longer suppressing / hiding / ignoring or deliberately failing to collect the data which surely already existed.
Younger workers are have been under employed since I was a kid -- long before H1B visas were an issue (30 years). Many workers in any field are just not worth employing -- especially in the tech industry where productivity of the top worker is often a rather high multiple of the lowest worker.
Protectionism that blocks foreign skilled talent will only hurt American businesses which will have a further knock on when it comes to secondary employment, taxation etc. If the foreign worker is in demand and yet cannot be employed in the US because of protectionism -- it will only encourage the company to setup offices in places where they can employ the people they need (whether it be offshore or just to the north).
I am not saying there isn't abuse in the H1B visa category -- there obviously is... protectionism for the sake of protectionism is not the answer.
Does a CCIE require a Masters degree?
Can I sit for the MCSE exam with a high-school diploma?
Does Oracle require a Bachelors degree to become a DBA?
We need to drop this bullshit argument within the IT sector. 98% of the time, you're paying for the specialized skills.A perfect example of this is the utter lack of a degree requirement when hiring a technical consultant or contractor. Not everyone in IT is going to become a CxO, and most don't want to. Obtaining and keeping specialized skills honed is far more valuable for organizations needing it.
How to drive programmer salary to nought.
the maximum number of H1-B visas was awarded this year as always. There's no sign of a drop for next year either. Putting a few hoops up doesn't change anything. The program needs to end.
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Duh.
Slashdot has now been obsessed with what I gather is a specific type of visa in the United States for several years, with very frequent posts, sometimes several times a week. It's not interesting and it's not relevant to the overwhelming majority of people. It is time to end the H-1B visa obsession. There are more interesting things in the world.
If they had to pay the going rate they wouldn't bother in the first place.
what about looking up commands for cmd / cli stuff?
the exact name of some tech?
make the H1B min wage 80-150K+ based on COL.
In some areas 80K is good others it's not so much.
In the bay area they want 60K 50-60 hour a week workers and have a hard time finding USC at the rate so they have H1B's hired to be any where from code monkeys to higher level jobs.
In some cases they have ways to pay them less then the now 60K min.
I would not really want to take an job in bay area or NY NY for only 50K-60K
what about looking up commands for cmd / cli stuff?
It displays a lack of understanding. I don't want someone who needs to look up the man page for chown to figure out what the -h flag does. If he doesn't know it, it's fairly implausible that he has an inherent understanding of symlinks and challenges they may pose. I want someone who can look at a script or a program and see problems with it, not someone who can paint by number.
the exact name of some tech?
Ask the interviewer. An ability to ask meaningful questions scores a plus.
time to unlike healthcare from jobs like the rest of the world
H1B is an abuse of the system and needs to be stopped. I have no problem with legal immigration and let everyone pay there taxes and compete in the marketplace, but H1B is destroying jobs.
My father always told me "don't get good at something you don't like to do" --- years later I'd learn that it was true, and B) don't ever get good at something that isn't valued (or can be automated).
The low wages for these IT jobs is simply the Value That Companies Put on the Work. They need a semi-skilled laborer to write 'em some dumb code. Or push buttons for a manual testing effort. The cost of "now" vs "automate it" -- usually "now" wins. Regardless of how bad you may feel about somebody doing the same job for less -- realize this -- it's all the employer is willing to pay to get the job done.
Don't get good at those jobs.
greater contributions from companies that rely on H1Bs
A company wants to hire cheaper labour, they have two main choices with foreigners; Outsourced to another country, or bring them on HB1.
HB1 helps me and my country more:
1) As a HB1 has to pay US cost of living they get paid higher than outsourced employees; making paying my wages more reasonable because there isn't a bigger gap.
2) As a HB1 they pay US taxes, funding my government ( not somebody else's ), and giving me the benefits a well funded government can give me.
3) As a HB1 they spend their money in the US buying food and lodging, making the US economy larger.
4) The business stays in the US, and doesn't move to another country.
An outsourced employee does none of that.
that work needs to be an trade not 4+ years of CS that is a poor fit for MCSE / CCIE / IT / help desk work.
But I can't defend Silicon Valley, either. They are just as disengenuous and exploitative as anyone else. Why wouldn't they be? They are just the West Coast side of corporate America, after all, only slightly worse as they veil themselves in notions of moral rectitude and integrity. At least the other folks are honest, out in the open assholes. ;) Would love to see us regulate the poop out of all of them. I can dream.
All these H1-B workers are not as "skilled" as they claim!
Poor code, poor practice and just horribly poor methods. This is going to be our downfall!!!
Danger Will Robinson! Danger!!
The rent on my 2 bedroom apartment is $1500 a month.
Its one of the cheapest places in town to live that does not have a bug/drug/crime issue.
$2000 a month would be impossible to live on and feed the family, much less save for a house.
That doesn't make any sense.
If an employer is "willing" to pay a programmer $100,000 to do a job that they need done, but someone is available who will do it for $30,000, the choice is obvious. If the $30,000 offer wasn't available to the employer, they'd pay someone else more, up to $100,000.
The fact that an employer ends up paying a certain amount of money to get something done is entirely, completely, utterly unrelated to how much they 'value' the work.
If someone from another political demarcation who's social contract includes alot less service, safety, and opportunity can freely give offers to another place with much higher standards and the associated costs, with no intervening boundaries, that person's offer will always win. To quickly jump into politics: Without those intervening boundaries, there is essentially no national self-determination.
There is a big difference between looking up what something does and looking up what the damned switch is to get it do do something you want it to do.
Same with most other languages and utilities. Expecting people to keep the syntax diagrams and all the options in the heads is ridiculous. If they were at work and broke out the manual to look up function references, would that be acceptable?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
"ntirely, completely, utterly unrelated"
So I regretted that phrasing because it also makes no sense. Instead, this long paragraph: ... is alone not any indicator how much they 'value' the work. It provides some indication in that the work is valued at *least* that much, but still provides a poor measure. A stated value cannot be trusted. An offer could be $100,000 but the employer ends up paying $120,000 since that was the lowest taker. Value is a non-trivial combination of supplier and demander negotiating a value. Equal footing of he negotiators and all that will impact the actual result, not the valuation.
don't ever get good at something that isn't valued (or can be automated).
About that can be automated thing...
>>If you were earning $500/mo in the States, you would NOT have a house of your own and plenty of food. You would be living in a cardboard box under a bridge and eating out of dumpsters. Get real, broham.
That's an uneducated utterance, simply because you cannot dictate how I live, nor can you know it, all you can do is assume that what I inform you of is either untrue or true.
Here's an example. (the very truth, in my case): I own the house, my property taxes are roughly 300$ a year, thats less than 30 bucks a month. Food is roughly 100 bucks a month, can be 150 if I stretch it and eat really well. I pay utility bills like everyone else, one month I have to pay for garbage collection, that's roughly 100 bucks too, but it's only 4 times a year, so that comes down to 25$ a month. Then it's water and sewage costs - roughly the same. Insurance is the most expensive part, and cost me 450$ a year. So my total costs don't even exceed 500$ a month.
I don't pay a mortgage - because the house is already mine, no bank loans - and no debt.
This can be hard to understand (I live in Sweden btw, one of the highest taxed places on earth), but we do have some advantages, purchasing a house roughly 2 hours away from any major city is usually dirt cheap. I paid roughly 54K usd (yes fifty four thousand!) for my house 7 years ago, and it's a 3 story BRICK house! I bet you could get a decent trailer (mobile home) for that in certain places in the US, or a free fixer-upper in Detroit...what do I know? I just know my reality - the one I live every day.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
If they were at work and broke out the manual to look up function references, would that be acceptable?
That depends on how intrinsic it is to the work they are doing. Understanding based on wetware-retained knowledge means you're able to spot potential problems. Like when someone forgets that crucial dereferencing option.
And you won't spend 80 hours on a code review, looking up every little thing, while missing the big elephant because all you have is the ability to look up individual things, not the understanding of the big picture which can only be complete when you already know the parts.
time to unlike healthcare from jobs like the rest of the world
I think you meant "unlink". It could happen, now that the government was unable to change anything so far. People want certainty. Especially with health care. The majority do NOT trust the government any more with respect to health care - which is why this has a chance to catch on finally
Bernie Sanders pushes universal health plan in wake of Republican repeal failure
Bernie Sanders has spent the first months of the new Congress defending Barack Obama’s health reforms as Republicans vowed to repeal them. But after the GOP’s seven-year drive to eliminate the Affordable Care Act collapsed on the Senate floor last week, Sanders is ready to introduce his own solution - government-run universal healthcare for all Americans.
The Vermont senator will spend the next several weeks leading a campaign to build support for his plan before unveiling the bill next month. On Wednesday, he launched a six-figure digital advertising campaign on Facebook and Google that encourages supporters to become "citizen co-sponsors" of his plan, which he calls "Medicare for All", according to Sanders spokesman Josh Miller-Lewis, a reference to the public healthcare program for older Americans.
"Bottom line is: if other countries around the world are providing quality care to all their people, we can do the same," Sanders told NPR in an interview on Tuesday.
Surveys show people want this. And with the total failure of the current regime to get anything done, it will be a delicious irony if Trump's stupidity ultimately results in the US bringing health care supply into the second half of the 20th century.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
But you have to pay someone to clean up the shit in the parking lot.
Or just stop hiring people who shit in the parking lot in the first place. Or you can pay them to crap in toilets.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpg5CnagE9k
Lol I know how symlinks down to the fs level and how hardlinks work down to the inode and I can't tell you what the -h flag does for chown jesus christ.
I just looked it up.. like how fucking often does anyone need to chown a symlink? This is the sort of thing I might need to worry about dicking around at home maybe once in a blue moon.
You're actually a shitty interviewer.
See the comment's subject. No further comment needed.
Data released for the first time.... Trump's merit-based immigration announcement...MAGA.....
Maybe Obama, and all previous administrations, we're not really your friends. Sure, he's coarse and to the point the way New Yorkers of his generation were and Obama was a smooth rhetoritician but what do they DO?
This THIS is why we elected Trump. It's about old fashioned, basic fairness, frank truth telling and opportunity.
There is an artificial imbalance of power created by H1B where employers can pay less because should an H1B employee decide they're not getting paid enough they can't quit without having to leave the country. If we open the boarder and allow for a free market the wages may go down in some cases - but there will still be high demand for skilled employees and even if there aren't we're better off adapting to competition as we'll become more competitive and able to compete with other countries. Look at the alternative- companies leave the US. We don't have much of an industrial base today because of it.
In my experience, both working for Cognizant & working with other outsourcing company staff, the minions' degrees are no better than paper mill. This is my first hand experience with programmers, software admins & network engineers. It was a rarity to find one person in each category that actually knew the subject matter. The rest were just oxygen combustion units following knowledge trees and monkey manuals.
But how much do you normally get?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
http://www.petition2congress.c...
I think we're saying the same thing. Just because an employer has to pay $100k for a job doesn't mean they "want" to pay that much. It's worth $30k to them but they can't find anybody near by willing to do that.
So they go looking for somebody willing to take the job for less. Or realize that the work isn't something they want to do and that consolidation is necessary and the only way to achieve that is through outsourcing the service.
We had a skill that was semi-valued but not at a full-time level. So management kept asking the expert to do other tasks that he really wasn't trained in nor wanted to learn. He left the company seeing no growth and was never replaced. Years later in the midst of quality problems a senior manager asked "what does John's testing effort tell us?" -- "Oh, John quit a year ago, we haven't been doing his kind of testing since."