Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WSJ: H-1B Visas Keep Down U.S. Tech Wages, Study Shows

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 57 posts

Re: WSJ: H-1B Visas Keep Down U.S. Tech Wages, Study Shows

#31

Post by Eridrus »

dragonwriter wrote: post #20
Eridrus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like an argument that can be used to argue that shortages cannot exist for anything you can buy. The same rough argument could be used to argue that food shortages cannot exist. I'm pretty sure the word shortage already implies that there is a shortage at the market price, not at an arbitrary price.

> I'm pretty sure the word shortage already implies that there is a shortage at the market price "Shortage at the market price" seems to be a somewhat incoherent concept. The market price is the price point at which the supply and demand curves intersect. Other than a discontinuity in either supply or demand such that the curves pass without intersecting (which makes the market price ill-defined), demand equals suppl…

I agree that it's poorly defined, but I would argue that a shortage at the market price implies that buyers would buy more at the market price if more of it was available.

We're pretty comfortable talking about shortages in consumer markets when we would buy things at the stated price, but can't because it is sold out (eg Pixel phone shortages), so I'm not sure why we can't say a similar thing about labour.

Re: WSJ: H-1B Visas Keep Down U.S. Tech Wages, Study Shows

#32

Post by xiaoma »

dgudkov wrote: post #29
scott00 wrote: post #13

Public service announcement: There is no such thing as a labor shortage. Having trouble hiring developers? Offer a salary of $1 million per year. Your new problem will be job applicant crowd-control. Whenever an employer reports a labor shortage they mean they can't find enough people to take jobs AT THE WAGE THEY ARE WILLING TO PAY. Lest you brand me a red shirt-wearing Das Kapital-waving pinko commie, let me lay an…

Higher wage won't necessarily increase number of qualified candidates. To illustrate the point: you could offer piles of gold for a decent C++ programmer in the ancient Roman Empire and get no one simply because they didn't exist.

Higher wages definitely influence graduating STEM students who are choosing between SV and finance. They also cause bootcamps to pop up all over the country and bring people from other industries into tech. In general the market will follow the money.

It is a good point that the market can't achieve the impossible. C++ bootcamps probably wouldn't spring up in your hypothetical ancient Rome and offering millions of dollars today for employees with skillsets that modern humans can't achieve wouldn't work either.

The question is whether you or not the current bar of a "qualified candidate" is impossible. I would say no. Given the right financial incentives, the candidates will exist.

Re: WSJ: H-1B Visas Keep Down U.S. Tech Wages, Study Shows

#33

Post by duskwuff »

xiaoma wrote: post #30
guitarbill wrote: post #28

What I don't get is why they don't just raise the minimum pay for H1-B visas. It might not fix all issues for this type of visa in the long run. But the fact that the minimum pay was set in 1989 seems like an obvious issue to me. This would seem to be corroborated by the numbers. The lottery system is arguably the worst part of it, it punishes companies who carefully and rigorously select candidates and rewards compa…

> "What I don't get is why they don't just raise the minimum pay for H1-B visas." That was a key part of Trump's proposed bill. IRRC, the proposal is to increase the minimum from $60k to $130k. Interestingly $60k in 1989 was worth what $117k is in 2017. In other words, given current inflation rates, it's very likely that the new minimum will be the 2020 or 2021 equivalent of the original minimum. That would suck for…

Startups have never really benefited from the H-1B system anyways -- they rarely have the resources to discover and interview candidates from outside the country, nor are they willing to wait 6+ months for a visa application to be reviewed, especially when there's a good chance that it may be randomly rejected.

Re: WSJ: H-1B Visas Keep Down U.S. Tech Wages, Study Shows

#35

Post by camelspade »

duskwuff wrote: post #33
xiaoma wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "What I don't get is why they don't just raise the minimum pay for H1-B visas." That was a key part of Trump's proposed bill. IRRC, the proposal is to increase the minimum from $60k to $130k. Interestingly $60k in 1989 was worth what $117k is in 2017. In other words, given current inflation rates, it's very likely that the new minimum will be the 2020 or 2021 equivalent of the original minimum. That would suck for…

Startups have never really benefited from the H-1B system anyways -- they rarely have the resources to discover and interview candidates from outside the country, nor are they willing to wait 6+ months for a visa application to be reviewed, especially when there's a good chance that it may be randomly rejected.

I think you might be ignoring the international students who graduate from US universities? They also need to go through the H1-B process.

Re: WSJ: H-1B Visas Keep Down U.S. Tech Wages, Study Shows

#36

Post by scott00 »

Eridrus wrote: post #19
scott00 wrote: post #13

Public service announcement: There is no such thing as a labor shortage. Having trouble hiring developers? Offer a salary of $1 million per year. Your new problem will be job applicant crowd-control. Whenever an employer reports a labor shortage they mean they can't find enough people to take jobs AT THE WAGE THEY ARE WILLING TO PAY. Lest you brand me a red shirt-wearing Das Kapital-waving pinko commie, let me lay an…

This seems like an argument that can be used to argue that shortages cannot exist for anything you can buy. The same rough argument could be used to argue that food shortages cannot exist. I'm pretty sure the word shortage already implies that there is a shortage at the market price, not at an arbitrary price.

I see your point, and thinking about it helped clarify my thinking, so first, thank you for that. I think another way of phrasing my opinion is that the US labor market is a large, reasonably efficient market; that it's reasonably well modeled by a simple supply and demand model; and that discussing it in other terms obscures the important issues. The notion of a shortage is fundamentally incompatible with a simple supply and demand model of a market. The market price in such a model is, by definition, the price at which supply and demand are balanced. So if you're talking about a shortage in the US labor market, you're either claiming that supply and demand is a poor model of the labor market, or you're talking nonsense. I think either is misleading or at best confusing. So to an extent I really am saying that shortages can't exist for anything you can buy on a large efficient market.

Of course not every market is a large efficient market. If you're talking about a price-regulated market, by all means, discuss shortages. Another good situation where discussing a shortage would be appropriate is markets that have very or perfectly inelastic supply over a relevant time period. Say, a vaccine that costs $1 but that takes 6 months to produce due to the biology involved, combined with a major epidemic in the relevant disease. It's fair to call that a shortage.

Re: WSJ: H-1B Visas Keep Down U.S. Tech Wages, Study Shows

#37

Post by crdoconnor »

splintercell wrote: post #23
scott00 wrote: post #13

Public service announcement: There is no such thing as a labor shortage. Having trouble hiring developers? Offer a salary of $1 million per year. Your new problem will be job applicant crowd-control. Whenever an employer reports a labor shortage they mean they can't find enough people to take jobs AT THE WAGE THEY ARE WILLING TO PAY. Lest you brand me a red shirt-wearing Das Kapital-waving pinko commie, let me lay an…

Labor shortage does not mean what you think it does. If we use the logic you presented, then we can say "There is no such thing as a shortage of Cabs, try offering $100 for a cab ride and there will be people pulling their personal cars next to you to take you where you want to go". Well Duh. A shortage of a good means that there if there can be pending buy and sell orders in a market book, then there are a lot of pe…

What SV magnates are saying by "labor shortage" or "skills shortage" is that they want higher profits. What SV workers are saying by "no skills shortage" is that they want the same or higher wages.

If Netflix magically halved their wage bill they would likely keep their price the same since how much a Netflix devops engineer gets paid doesn't change how much a family in Peoria is prepared to pay for a Netflix subscription.

Re: WSJ: H-1B Visas Keep Down U.S. Tech Wages, Study Shows

#38

Post by Zigurd »

davidf18 wrote: post #15
Zigurd wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's the baby, which is highly talented people educated at elite universities overseas. Then there is the dirty bathwater, which is seat warmers hired at the lowest possible wages by "body shops" that bill them out to government and corporate customers. The first does create prosperity. The second, not so much. There are several possible fixes: Auction visas with a high minimum. Disallow contracting-out workers on…

Or would could enforce the law. The H1-B Visa program was intended to fill jobs for which there were no Americans with those skills desired. There should be some sort of approval process from an institution or firm that does not have a conflict of interest with the firms applying for H1-B Visas.

The problem is that the law as written, while it sounds like it should not allow body shops to hire phalanxes of seat warmers, has been lawyered-around (and by that I mean there are lawyers specializing in fitting your favored candidate to an H1-B visa): Post a job description that's impossible to fill, and then arbitrarily accept that the H1-B applicant meets the job criteria. Short of litigating every case, how do you stop that?

Re: WSJ: H-1B Visas Keep Down U.S. Tech Wages, Study Shows

#40

Post by dragonwriter »

Eridrus wrote: post #31
dragonwriter wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm pretty sure the word shortage already implies that there is a shortage at the market price "Shortage at the market price" seems to be a somewhat incoherent concept. The market price is the price point at which the supply and demand curves intersect. Other than a discontinuity in either supply or demand such that the curves pass without intersecting (which makes the market price ill-defined), demand equals suppl…

I agree that it's poorly defined, but I would argue that a shortage at the market price implies that buyers would buy more at the market price if more of it was available. We're pretty comfortable talking about shortages in consumer markets when we would buy things at the stated price, but can't because it is sold out (eg Pixel phone shortages), so I'm not sure why we can't say a similar thing about labour.

> I would argue that a shortage at the market price implies that buyers would buy more at the market price if more of it was available.

That can just be a current price below the equilibrium market price; I'd argue that a shortage is a specialized instance of that resulting from a transitory decrease from long-term supply (or increase from long-term demand) that is expected to revert to normal.

But if you need annual supplements of labor for the same field over a period of decades, that's not a labor shortage, its price being artificially suppressed (and inhibiting market signals that would develop domestic supply faster.)

Post reply on HN