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Cisco Said to Be Cited for Bias Against U.S. Workers

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Re: Cisco Said to Be Cited for Bias Against U.S. Workers

#261

Post by ghein »

cc-d wrote: post #87
jeremyjh wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no need for an artificial cap, just make it a bidding system. The companies bid for how many workers at salary $X. Highest bids are awarded the visas. Problem solved.

This may work for tech, but I'm guessing there are quite a few other industries with low volumes of h1b applicants/workers which could utilize a "bidding system" to hire well below market rate due to decreased demand when compared to tech. $150k cap across the board ensures that all industries are kept honest. A bidding system can be added on top of that, if needed, but this extremely simple fix would ensure that the…

No controls for any other industry - if you want an H1b, bid.

So anyone who desperately needs someone on a visa can get them. Low-end body shops go away and a bunch of industries that are being cheap don't get their visas. This is called a good thing.

There are many sectors where hiring managers want degrees and other certifications and pay minimum wage or damn close. Then they complain about worker shortages.

This is all solved by higher pay and better conditions, but people want to bring in indentured servants as it's easier. As someone who has run businesses and bootstrapped, that's utter BS.

Re: Cisco Said to Be Cited for Bias Against U.S. Workers

#262

Post by amaccuish »

refurb wrote: post #142
amaccuish wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So are you fine if Cisco relocates most of their operations in India for example That is almost always threatened and almost always never happens. As toomuchtodo suggests, this lassez-faire culture with business needs to stop. Every year it's a different scandal, we need to stop tip-toeing around business. They rely on a nation's education system, transport, internet infrastructure etc, they didn't come from nothing…

That is almost always threatened and almost always never happens. What? There has been a huge amount of offshoring in the past few decades. Not sure you can say it never happens.

Ye that's been parts like customer service as the famous example. I was talking about a firm's entire operations, including head office.

Re: Cisco Said to Be Cited for Bias Against U.S. Workers

#263

Post by conanbatt »

rmrfrmrf wrote: post #253
conanbatt wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what ethics tell you that you should have the right to bar other people from working with other people?

For Americans, reducing income disparity, which in turn would allow more money to flow within the US. For foreign employees, ending a program of indentured servitude that dangles the prospect of citizenship in front of them while providing substandard pay and limited mobility. For foreign governments, bringing talent back to their countries rather than cash, enabling the development of their own businesses and growth…

> For Americans, reducing income disparity, which in turn would allow more money to flow within the US.

You mean increase income disparity. More foreign software engineers would lower the median salary of a software engineer in the us, which is in the top bracket of earners. Increasing the salary of software engineers increases income disparity between those and the median.

Also, i thought the point was to make an ethical one, not a money one.

> For foreign employees, ending a program of indentured servitude that dangles the prospect of citizenship in front of them while providing substandard pay and limited mobility.

Oh why thank you. Did you ask foreign employees if they like your idea of banning them from the US for their own benefit?

> For foreign governments, bringing talent back to their countries rather than cash, enabling the development of their own businesses and growth of their own economy.

If you have a concern for the well-being of foreign governments over the interests in the US, you can advocate or better measures than punishing foreign people.

Re: Cisco Said to Be Cited for Bias Against U.S. Workers

#264

Post by conanbatt »

candiodari wrote: post #235
conanbatt wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh god, how many burritos have you ate that were made by an ILLEGAL!

... who was underpaid, to a level where properly living is out of the question. Who was abused and threatened into unpaid overtime. Just saying there's other considerations too. I get that these practices mean that it's likely a better burrito, but it's wrong.

You are not doing that person any favor by banning them from the US.

Re: Cisco Said to Be Cited for Bias Against U.S. Workers

#265

Post by conanbatt »

briandear wrote: post #89
ekianjo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is irrelevant. They get paid more compared to what immigrants would get in their home countries. And if you had to pay them as much then they would lose the edge during hiring - it is part of why they are also chosen.

However wage arbitrage is specifically against the intent and the letter of visa programs. It’s to fill actual shortages. If you can’t find a Python dev at $70k per year but you could find one at $100k per year, that isn’t a “shortage” — yet such “shortages” are what gets used to rationalize H1-B expansion.

By that definition there is never a shortage of any labor of any kind.

Re: Cisco Said to Be Cited for Bias Against U.S. Workers

#266

Post by akavi »

seventhtiger wrote: post #244
stale2002 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then don't adjust it based on location. Highest salary wins. No low level people would get it, as it would be bidding accross the board. If you aren't willing to pay that scientist 150K, then you lose the bid to the software engineer hired in the Bay area.

I heard this proposal a lot, and I think it's very SF/tech centered. Big tech and finance would buy every visa and suck all the talent from the world. But sometimes the best value for the host country is to get an immigrant doctor that's willing to go to a rural area for less pay than the big tech engineers.

These are orthogonal issues.

It is in America's interest to suck up economically productive people from all over the world. This is solved by the wage lottery system

It is also in America's interest to increase the number of skilled service providers in rural areas. One policy to solve this might be solved by targeted wage subsidies that are tied to working in certain areas.

There's no need to couple these orthogonal issues together. It doesn't matter whether the rural doctors are native or immigrants. That said, the policies compose well: Wage subsidy + actual wage might win the visa auction, modulo the quantity of subsidy and the demand for medicine as a skill set.

Re: Cisco Said to Be Cited for Bias Against U.S. Workers

#267

Post by ashwinaj »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #138
uissna wrote: post #10

This is an open secret in tech. Visa holders have less job offers to negotiate with, less job mobility, and consequently get paid less. Companies preferentially hire them over Americans. Further, the recent actions making harder for "body shops" like Infosys are actually helping big tech companies win more visa lotteries. This means the recent action that was supposed to help American workers, is actually causing the…

> the immigration system disproportionately hurts American software engineers and American tech The immigration debate suffers from overgeneralisation. Illegal immigration is a different problem from legal immigration. And short-term skilled migrants are unlike long-term skilled immigrants. Short-term migrants, i.e. those with no intention of staying in the U.S. long-term, probably depress American wages. Skilled imm…

> Exhibit A of our system's self-destructiveness are international students at American universities being refused residency on graduation.

You cannot categorically say that all international students are "highly skilled" or even "skilled". Some are, some aren't; and I'm saying this as an Indian citizen on H1B in the United States. There has to be some kind of vetting period instead of handing off a green card right after graduation. I bet if the tables were turned you won't see anywhere close to this kind of generosity.

Regarding Cisco (downvote me if you want) not a lot of people do "skilled" work; Cisco is a sales machine and does not care about engineering. Fixing bugs (and passing them off as features) from companies which were acquired, doing busy work, attending 2-3 hour meetings, middle management malaise with paper pushers, maintaning status quo (it's 2018 and they still use gcc 3.3) etc. is not what I would define as "skilled" engineering work. It's mediocrity and that's what they want to maintain.

Re: Cisco Said to Be Cited for Bias Against U.S. Workers

#268

Post by Aloha »

bkor wrote: post #243
Aloha wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without illegal immigrants crops would literally rot in the fields. I don't like illegal immigration, I'd rather there be a easy legal program to allow temporary workers, but there isn't, and I like eating.

The Netherlands exports a huge amount of food and loads of the work is fully automated. For the work which isn't there's still a lot of seasonal work. For that they do employ people, often from lower paid countries such as e.g. Poland. Poland isn't far away from The Netherlands. From what I saw in a documentary the Dutch farmers heavily optimize pretty much everything they can, not only through automation.

Its very hard to automate the picking of fruit and certain vegetables. That's why its not done - for some of them, its currently impossible, and have an acceptable yield rate.

Re: Cisco Said to Be Cited for Bias Against U.S. Workers

#269

Post by Aloha »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #204
Aloha wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without illegal immigrants crops would literally rot in the fields. I don't like illegal immigration, I'd rather there be a easy legal program to allow temporary workers, but there isn't, and I like eating.

There is a legal guest worker program for unskilled agricultural labor: H-2A. It's not as cheap as hiring itinerant work crews with no visa, though.

Everything I have read implies that there is a significant paperwork burden with this visa, and the number of people you can get via the program are very limited.

Re: Cisco Said to Be Cited for Bias Against U.S. Workers

#270

Post by learc83 »

refurb wrote: post #256
learc83 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And take a massive pay cut? Even among rich countries and even for underpaid H-1B workers, tech salaries are generally much higher in the US, and most of them don't come from rich countries. Clearly you can see there is a difference between what a company needs to do to keep an H-1B employee from leaving the country, and what they need to do to keep a permanent resident employee from switching jobs?

Sure, but I’m not sure I buy that companies hire H1-B’s because they are more loyal. They spend far more money and time upfront getting the person the visa and in the end there is nothing preventing them from either going home or tranfering to a similar role at another company.

>They spend far more money and time upfront getting the person the visa and in the end there is nothing preventing them from either going home or tranfering to a similar role at another company.

So if there was a law that said they can't go home or change jobs, then you would accept that it might be worth it?

But if that were the case there's still nothing preventing them from dying right?

Hopefully from this example you can see that an employee who is much more likely to stay for x years, is more valuable despite the fact that they aren't guaranteed to stay for x years.

If you could pay $30k extra for an employee that is 50% more likely to stick around for 5 years, most companies would jump at that chance.

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