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DOJ Cautions Employers Seeking H-1B Visas Not to Discriminate Against US Workers

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Re: DOJ Cautions Employers Seeking H-1B Visas Not to Discriminate Against US Workers

#111

Post by PeterisP »

gambiting wrote: post #90
lovich wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that a market based solution though? Nothing against your friend but if a company is willing to spend more on a senior than your friends company is going to pay him, that indicates that the senior is more valuable to economy

Sure, but it will lead to a solution where only top programmers at highest positions get visas? I mean, I can see the logic why some people would want it that way, but surely, there's value to be provided in hiring someone at a junior position and growing them from there?

The whole point of why H1B exists is that yes, only specialists with expertise you cannot buy locally (because of unavailability, not price) should get H1B visas, and that's generally at the highest positions, since you definitely can get local entry-level specialists or generic good programmers.

There's value to be provided in hiring someone at a junior position and growing them from there, but H1B is explicitly not for that - unless the position literally has zero candidates locally, it doesn't/shouldn't qualify for H1B.

Re: DOJ Cautions Employers Seeking H-1B Visas Not to Discriminate Against US Workers

#112

Post by techk »

tangocom wrote: post #38
techk wrote: post #19

No matter how you frame the issue, call it an abuse, or try to solve it, I don't think anything will change other than some minor adjustments. Jobs are not going to magically appear or wages rise. India/China has a huge supply of engineers across the board (good, bad, senior, junior etc.,). And US companies always want to maximize their profits. So increasing the bar on H-1B visas will increase the quality of H-1B's…

Protectionism does work. Just ask the Lawyers and the Airline pilots. The reason software engineers are not paid as well now is because we don't have a Bar association or Labor union to keep out the low rate foreign competition.

You are partly right. Protectionism may work for jobs which need physical presence or security clearance. (lawyers, doctors, teachers, government/defense/aviation employees). But I am not so sure it will work for Tech jobs, which can be moved anywhere in the world. IaaS platforms make it even trivial.

Re: DOJ Cautions Employers Seeking H-1B Visas Not to Discriminate Against US Workers

#113

Post by techk »

lovich wrote: post #83
techk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right. For the 85K visas, there were ~240K applications. If 30% of them were for senior engineers, then with these new stricter directives all 85K visas go to them, thereby increasing the supply of senior engineers. Otherwise there would have been 30K senior engineers and 55K junior engineers.

That assumes that the pool of senior engineers is large enough to fill that quota every year. Or that the demand for foreign seniors is that high

Junior engineers filling up the quota is actually preventing senior engineers from getting through. There is always demand for high quality senior engineers, and companies like more choice.

Re: DOJ Cautions Employers Seeking H-1B Visas Not to Discriminate Against US Workers

#114

Post by techk »

ern wrote: post #62
techk wrote: post #19

No matter how you frame the issue, call it an abuse, or try to solve it, I don't think anything will change other than some minor adjustments. Jobs are not going to magically appear or wages rise. India/China has a huge supply of engineers across the board (good, bad, senior, junior etc.,). And US companies always want to maximize their profits. So increasing the bar on H-1B visas will increase the quality of H-1B's…

This is a big win for consulting firms as their offshore profitability per employee is 3 times higher than onsite. Given a choice, they would want all their employees offshore, and the only reason they had to bring in some % of H-1B's was on the US client companies request, which they may do away with The clients probably have a reason for wanting consultants onsite. Many modern software development processes ("agile…

I agree that clients prefer/want their consultants onsite and many of the companies won't compromise on this. But for the ones where cost is the primary factor, they would just keep the critical people onsite. (Onsite coordinator, architect guy etc.,). Regarding timezone, consulting firms already run several projects matching US time. The whole thing is so complex and has so many facets that there is no straight forward solution to it.

Re: DOJ Cautions Employers Seeking H-1B Visas Not to Discriminate Against US Workers

#115

Post by dukeluke »

throwaway201414 wrote: post #49
tn135 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if laws of economics in such a complex system were easy to guess. The more likely scenario in my opinion is American companies more aggressively moving their jobs to India and even other related business to more visa friendly countries like Mexico. My employer has already moved his QA department to India full fledge putting freeze on all QA hiring in USA. Easily 10-15 jobs lost.

Company I'm at (and building up a team at) is currently ramping up our QA/SDET efforts here in the US, as my belief is that we want the Quality Engineers to be as close as possible to the regular engineers (to the extent possible) - for maximum benefit (rapid iterations, faster to fail, higher velocity). Been interviewing a ton of QA/SDET candidates over the last few weeks, and a challenge is that so few (regardless…

It sounds like you are looking for a unicorn that is already familiar with your stack. Just pick someone who has the desire to work hard and learn new things. The rest comes with time.

Re: DOJ Cautions Employers Seeking H-1B Visas Not to Discriminate Against US Workers

#116

Post by int_19h »

rfw wrote: post #57
int_19h wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what's the fastest way to curb H-1B fraud? Make it so that if an H-1B visa holder complains, and their complaint is found to be valid, they are entitled to apply for a green card immediately, and get EAD for the duration of their application.

Then you get H-1B fraud complaint fraud ;)

It would be pretty hard to defraud the government here. Either a complaint is valid, or it is not. If it's valid, then by definition it's not fraud, and the employer gets punished (fined, prohibited from hiring any further H1Bs etc). If it's not valid, then employee gets no green card, and their employer is likely pissed enough at them that they get fired. So collusion between employer and employee is basically impossible here, because either way, someone has to suffer the negative consequences.

Re: DOJ Cautions Employers Seeking H-1B Visas Not to Discriminate Against US Workers

#117

Post by ericd »

tangocom wrote: post #38
techk wrote: post #19

No matter how you frame the issue, call it an abuse, or try to solve it, I don't think anything will change other than some minor adjustments. Jobs are not going to magically appear or wages rise. India/China has a huge supply of engineers across the board (good, bad, senior, junior etc.,). And US companies always want to maximize their profits. So increasing the bar on H-1B visas will increase the quality of H-1B's…

Protectionism does work. Just ask the Lawyers and the Airline pilots. The reason software engineers are not paid as well now is because we don't have a Bar association or Labor union to keep out the low rate foreign competition.

It can help in the short term, but it can also kill the competitiveness of the companies they work for, leading to worse long term outcomes for everyone.

Re: DOJ Cautions Employers Seeking H-1B Visas Not to Discriminate Against US Workers

#118

Post by tangocom »

nova22033 wrote: post #88
tangocom wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protectionism does work. Just ask the Lawyers and the Airline pilots. The reason software engineers are not paid as well now is because we don't have a Bar association or Labor union to keep out the low rate foreign competition.

>The reason software engineers are not paid as well The annual mean wage for Software engineers is higher than that for lawyers and pilots. https://www.bls.gov/oes/2015/may/oes_nat.htm

Please double-check the link you posted on mean salaries:

Programmers $98K Lawyers $136K Airline pilots $136K (not including big retirement benefits)

The link you posted proves the point I was making.

Re: DOJ Cautions Employers Seeking H-1B Visas Not to Discriminate Against US Workers

#120

Post by tn135 »

doktrin wrote: post #70
tn135 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our entire company including founders are people on H1B. If USCIS harasses us we will move to Canada or some place else.

Being located in the US but staffed 100% from overseas sounds strange. Did you guys make a conscious decision to exclude US born workers? Moreover, please walk me through your "I'll take my ball and go to Canada" ultimatum : if you don't employ a single American, why should Americans care about this particular threat? Are your contributions to the local economy that significant?

There is no threat to anyone here.

We were 5 students from different countries who came here and started the company. Being almost bootstrapped company and pretty small one we had a hard time hiring people who would both pass our bar and willing to work for us. For all the low end work we would simply outsource it to India/Pakistan/Russia and other countries.

>why should Americans care about this particular threat ?

No one needs to care about anything. It is just that we will leave. It is upto Americans to wonder if are worth anything. May be Americans will be better off with it somehow I do not know. But the problem is more business, revenue and potential growth that would move out of the borders permanently.

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