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H-1B Tech Workers May Be Severely Underpaid
DocBones sent a link to a provocative story in The Business Journal of San Jose about how foreign high-tech workers in the U.S. on H-1B visas often earn far less than they are worth, perhaps because the terms of their visas make switching jobs so hard that they can't bid out their services effectively. Industry spokespeople deny any wage differences. Trade groups keep on lobbying to raise the current 115,000/year cap on H-1B visas to 200,000/year. The whole issue is a mass of claims and counter-claims, each one "supported" by statistics and surveys. Is there a "right" side or a "wrong" side here? Does anyone with first-hand experience as an H-1B worker care to comment?
West Roxbury is fairly nice. I live in the student slums of Allston/Brighton, and my rent is $550/m. I'd suggest Quincy - Altus used to live there, and it's on the Red Line and still very cheap.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
How do you get a H-1B? What is it? I already have a visa, but it's nearly maxed. Does that matter?
Maybe they still earn much, much more than they did in their home country?
On the other hand, they'd have to pay at least twice of what I earn here in Europe to make me move to the US. Kind of like an extra for hazardous duty...
H-1B classification applies to persons in a specialty occupation which requires the theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge requiring completion of a specific course of higher education. This classification requires a labor attestation issued by the Secretary of Labor (65,000). This classification also applies to Government-to-Government research and development, or coproduction projects administered by the Department of Defense (100);
Shri
Basically, what a H1-B means is that you're indentured to your employer for about five years. The usual procedure (and the way it worked for me and my friends) is that you get here through a contracting firm. The contracting firm makes heaps of money using you as a hired gun (taking about %25 of your salary, in most cases). You, on the other hand, want to get a job with a big company (not a startup, because if it goes belly up where will you be), where you can stay for a while, and which will apply for a green card for you. This is what happened in my case, I joined a major firm here in the valley. (BTW, you usually get less than your white counterparts because Indians, and most Asian cultures, are not initially used to hard-nosed negotiating/confrontation).
You pretty much as bonded to the employer after this. In my case, I hate my current job, and my current boss. But what can I do? I had better shut up and play the game if I want to get the green card in a few years, so I'll play the game.
Otherwise my H1-B will run out after three years, and I have to go back to India, and wait for some time before I can get another H1-B. And I recently got married, so I'm not about to make waves.
This formula is varied in a few cases (you can get your green card quicker if you're a Ph.D, etc.), but basically, I'll agree with the premise that we're (Indians, Chinese, etc.) are making far less and are bonded to our employers until we get our green cards. In my specific case, my boss, who is Indian (and who has his green card), has made an explicit threat in many cases to Indian workers who are working under him that he will slow down their green card process, etc, if they don't meet his expectations. Management knows of this, but why should they care? If he's caught on this, they can just say they didn't know.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more the situation is screwed up. My boss, for instance, only hires H1-B workers on his team (4/5 people are H1-Bs). There's supposed to be some requirement that he is supposed to search for American workers, but what he does is find an Indian, find some experience that the Indian has that is uncommon, and make that a requirement of the hiring process. That way, he can make a cursory search of the job listings, and say that there isn't a qualifed American worker.
And this works for him. We're all running scared, we'll do whatever he wants, and work like dogs. If someone finds a better job (which happened to a colleague of mine), all my boss has to do is fire him immediately. That way, that person has to get his H1-B transferred to his new company, and with the time the INS takes to do that, the visa might have expired, and you might have to go back. In fact, this is what happened to my colleague, he is in Delhi right now, and my boss uses him as an example to us all the time.
So, OK, it'll be three years for my green card, and then I can get away from this.
So, to conclude my post, I agree that America is getting cheapers, more compliant workers as H1-Bs. And, in all honesty, we are taking jobs from American workers here. But look on the other side. None of my American colleagues work 80 hour weeks - they don't have the reason to. And I know whatever success my company has had is due to a great amount to people like me - so when I see people complaining about H1-Bs on one hand, and crowing about their stock gains on the other, I think it's hypocritical.
And a final note to all the xenophones here - judge me on skills as a technologist, not my country of origin or my skin color. Slashdot (and Americans as a whole), are tolerent, wonderful people, but it's the bigots who stand out. Before you tell me to "Go back to my own country", ask yourself this - why do you think I came to yours? True, I came here to support my family, and myself, but I also truly came here searching for a better way of life. I truly believe that I have something to contribute to America - and remember, and one time or another, your parents or grandparents came here with the same belief! So give us a chance............goodbye...
I'm in the US on an H1B visa from Canada. From what I've seen I'm not underpayed. It's fairly easy to figure out during performance reviews what your position in the grand scheme of pay scales is. It's pointed to you on a bar graph. I also live in the midwest, not the left coast or the right coast. With the existing salary cap I would and have refused to work in California.
I'm sure there are unscrupulous companies or managers who do lure foreigners (ok, I'm not really a foreigner, I had a pretty good clue as to what prevailing wages were) with promises of peace, prosperity and good old American apple pie if you only indenture yourself to us for say five years.
This exists in any business. Most people only see the typical designer clothes sweatshops because 20/20 runs an editorial or expose on them. There are also the equivalent to sweat shops in the technical field, adult entertainment, farming and so on. Raising the maximum amount on the H1B won't stop these sweat shops as they're obviously already shelling out well under the maximum H1B amount. Raising the H1B amount will however allow companies to get more talented people which is really what the country and industry should want.
I'm not sure how to fight sweat shops unless you made it illegal to underpay somebody, but who's to define underpayed? An electrical engineer with a MASc and 8 years of experience shall not be payed less than this: XXX. If that engineer is in California then the amount shall be 2*XXX.
Eventually you've got to rely on the integrity of companies and the pride of workers unfortunately.
Attach it to the next H1-B ceiling increase. If Silicon Valley businesses don't much care, then they're sincere about needing more tech workers. If they whine, then they've been lying, and all current H1-Bs should be converted to unrestricted long-term visas with an option of citizenship. It's that simple.
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/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Whoa. I obviously failed to make my point. My bad.
... In this respect software systems differ profoundly from computers, buildings, or automobiles, where repeated elements abound.
:o) Whatever.
It's the BIG projects that DO require efficient, accurate communication. And, as I think more about my experience in this particular area, the more I believe that there is really a communication problem with foreign workers.
Software is not assembly line work, regardless of how many clueless managers out there treat it as such. You can't show some Chinese or Indian person "here's how you assemble this widget, watch me" then turn him/her loose to crank em out by the bushel.
Let me quote what I consider to be a brilliant passage from Fred Brooks:
"Software entities are more complex for their size than perhaps any other human construct, because no two parts are alike
... scaling-up of a software entity is not merely a repetition of the same elements in larger size; it is necessarily an increase in the number of different elements. In most cases, the elements interact with each other in some nonlinear fashion, and the complexity of the whole increases much more than linearly."
When you say "churning out function after function" you're describing a state of development antithetical to Brooks' depiction. Which is not to say there aren't plenty of clueless shops out there doing exactly that, producing seriously gnarly software.
In order to AVOID the assembly line mentality, we need good communication between team members. Good communication does not reside purely in language skills either, like I suggested in my original post. A plethora of subtle, non-verbal communication cues are continuously being exchanged during conversation, and cultural context has enormous impact on the transmission and reception of these cues. Let me quote from Negroponte "Spoken words carry a vast amount of information beyond the words themselves. While talking, one can convey passion, carcasm, exasperation, equivocation, subservience, and exhaustion--all with the exact same words."
I'm thinking of a specific instance from experience where I had major trouble communicating with one of my contractors (we'll give him the fictitious name Alvin.) Alvin was literally FOB -- fresh off the boat. Now, from a certain standpoint you could say that Alvin was reasonably fluent in English, in the sense that he understood the factual content and literal meaning of most of my speech. But the real problem was that *I* could never tell if he was really following what I was saying because Alvin continuously transmitted confusing non-verbal body cues to me. He would bobble his head a certain way, he would make weird hand gestures, etc. which were completely alien to me, and as it turns out, my non-verbal cues were probably alien to him as well.
Now in our biz where we have ENOUGH trouble already making sure that everybody understands (to his or her technical limits) what's going on, where we're going, and how we're going to get there, this type of relationship was TOTALLY FRUSTRATING for me, and ultimately a complete failure because Alvin never accomplished much. Whether the fault was his or mine (probably both culpable), the fact of the matter was that we were NOT good at communicating with each other.
So let's tie this diatribe back into the main point: are these guys UNDERPAID? Well the whole concept of whether someone is underpaid or overpaid derives directly from the value the individual contributes to the organization.
The empirical evidence that I've seen suggests that foreign workers make LESS. But I think that's partly a function of the fact that integrating such a worker into an existing team is a tougher proposition.
>>WO
P.S. The "linguistic style" of my earlier post seems to have provoked quite a response LOLOL. It was probably a result of having been on some Quake/HL boards immediately prior to writing it, so I waz in dat gamez mode, u know, d00d?
SlicedBread 2.0 -- the greatest thing since SlicedBread!
There's nothing "free market" about closed borders and the somewhat arbitrary criteria on who can cross them.
What usually happens (in my experience at least) is that H1-Bs are usually recruited out of grad school or, less often, over the Net (as I was). Now, most, if not all H-1Bs, either have no experience of life in the US (including cost of living, job market, work ethic) or very little --usually what you get in grad school; but most science and technology grad schools these days have, in the majority, foreigners anyway, meaning there aren't that many Americans around to pass on cultural/social/financial experience to us foreigners (what about a post about the F-1/GRA slaveshops run by most big research schools?)
Now, another factor that that the article left out: most companies don't want to go through the H-1B sponsorship routine, unless the candidate is a really good fit: immigration lawyers cost real money (and you're gonna need one) and most importantly it takes a long time. In my case it took 4 months after accepting the job offer; for some colleagues it took up to 6.
This is because what no H-1B article anywhere has mentioned: INS is forced to deal with double or triple the number of H-1Bs with NO increase in personnel or change in regulations. The usual time to get an H-1B (4-6 weeks) has effectively doubled and tripled after the quota changes and INS was NEVER that good in keeping up with the paperwork anyway. Now the delays have become so long that most big companies shy away from H-1Bs, unless, as I said, it's a really good fit.
Enter, the "slaveshops": contracting or consulting firms that need a lot of good, educated people, and work on slim profit margins anyway. You have all those F-1/J-1 (college students and exchange visitors or researchers for those not-in-the-know) graduates who see the burgeoning economy and most of the time get the door slammed to their faces. With all this opportunity around and the dearth of opportunity back home, sure, why not take a job that pays 30-40% lower than the national average, especially if you don't know that you're worth more? In one company I know there are still US-educated engineering PhDs (from big-name schools no less) on H-1Bs that make less than $45k/yr...
So, why don't they jump ship and switch jobs? For one thing, the H-1B "transfer" process is long and tricky --again, most companies don't wanna wait 2 months to get someone on board unless it's a good fit. Secondly, and IMHO more importantly, most H-1Bs don't have a grasp of the job market or the practices here in the US. In a lot of cultures, you just don't leave your employer after a few months or a year; most just wait until the first 3 yrs to apply for a Green Card or look for another H-1B (you can only get two 3-yr terms) which really doesn't change the situation.
I was more lucky than most, I came here as an undergrad, I understand the culture and all that, but I still had to win the damn Green Card Lottery to get out of the H-1B rut... Most people don't win the lottery, and actually most aren't even eligible to apply (e.g. Indians, Chinese, Koreans). And believe me, did my job options change when I put "Permanent Resident" (i.e. Green Card holder) on my resume... I am leaving my position for a job that pays about 50% more than what I am making now and I could probably have done better than that if I didn't want to stay here much longer.
My proposal for changing the situation: do with the quotas as you (the US Congress, the industry, American people) think you should, but:
Make the H-1B easier to get for qualified, educated workers (no more that inane "have to look for an American that can do the same job" bullshit --most shops will post an ad that precisely fits their fav candidate, down to "has to speak and write Chinese/Indian/whatever"). It makes a lot more sense to set some standards of education/work experience that can be changed according to the needs of the job market, rather than enslave the visa holder to one employer,
Make it easier to transfer between employers --if you aren't here because you fit a specific job but because you're good enough, it should be much easier for you to change sponsors,
Actually have the visa holder pay for the cost of the H-1B process (lawyers and crap) from his salary. Most "sweatshops" use these costs as an excuse for lower salaries anyways, and most big companies shy away from H-1B because of these costs. I, for one, would much rather have $4-5k deducted out of my salary than make $15-30k less than what I am worth.
/. is actually shining the light on this phenomenon...
And please, consider something else: for most of us, cost of living is actually higher than for Americans: most F-1/J-1/H-1Bs don't know the tricks and shortcuts and workarounds to lower costs (unless they stick with a community from their homecountry), most have spouses that have even a worse time finding a job, most have expenses that even for Americans are luxuries (plane tickets to halfway around the world, phone bills that run in the hundreds of dollars).
Something must be done... unfortunately, H-1Bs don't have money to spare to form PACs or vote for anyone to give a shit...
I apologize for the huge post... And thanks that