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H-1B Visa Most Used for 'Software Engineer,' 'Software Developer' Roles

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Re: H-1B Visa Most Used for 'Software Engineer,' 'Software Developer' Roles

#61

Post by LordFast »

geebee wrote: post #52

I'm generally suspicious of the H1-B program, mainly because I don't like programs that empower corporations to decide who is or isn't allowed to enter and work in the United States. That's bad. And I despise programs that allow corporations to determine the circumstances under which would be immigrants are allowed to remain in the US. This highly coercive relationship undermines almost everything that needs to work…

Agreed. Letting companies bind workers' abilities to remain in the country they'd like to live in is painfully similar to letting dictatorships bind people into indentured servitude.

Re: H-1B Visa Most Used for 'Software Engineer,' 'Software Developer' Roles

#62

Post by cha77a »

henvic wrote: post #29
bumby wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What other artificial employment barriers do you advocate removing? They may not all be just or implemented particularly well, but I think there are some (e.g., child labour, work-health standards, etc.) that make sure the economy is serving society and not the other way around.

What about if we move this discussion to focus on how you fear people from poor countries might have the competency to be your competitor in the job market? I used to make just USD 5-10 an hour as a senior software engineer before joining a company in another country. I have no sympathy for people who were born in a developed country and feels entitled to get a job I could possibly get just because I wasn't born ther…

I agree with the above comment, people who are complaining against h1b driving wages down, should know that the companies that hire h1bs or any one else at lower salary in general are meant for profit right?. In a country based on capitalism, how could someone force the corporations to spend more than they need to?.

Having said that I strongly think that people usually exaggerate the effects of h1b on wages and employment for natives in general.

Re: H-1B Visa Most Used for 'Software Engineer,' 'Software Developer' Roles

#63

Post by cptskippy »

klipt wrote: post #45
petilon wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice if they can't or decided not to apply for a green card they leave after 6 years.

Well if you're from India you can apply but the green card backlog for India is ~80 years so you're still going to be on H1-B for a long time.

I didn't realize it was that long, it really is indentured servitude at this point.

Re: H-1B Visa Most Used for 'Software Engineer,' 'Software Developer' Roles

#64

Post by bumby »

henvic wrote: post #56
bumby wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of reaction doesn't reflect on you very well and doesn't generally fit with the HN guidelines to provide substantive discussion while assuming good faith. I'm sorry you were paid poorly. The unfortunate reality is that we are often paid commensurate with our ability to negotiate and not necessarily based on our skill. With that said, you made an awful lot of assumptions based on a single comment. I am hones…

You say my comment doesn't reflect on me very well. Very well, except my comment was exactly trying to make you see you were doing exactly this: you suggested I'd be for using child labor for something [preposterously dangerous like mining arsenic, I guess]. I don't favor a merit-based migration policy. I favor free markets. Free trade or free migration should be the norm. I don't believe in the central government. T…

My comment was not suggesting you were in favor of child labour. It was merely enumerating a couple examples of labour regulations that, in general, society has been in favor of enforcing, just as some are in favor of enforcing certain immigration policies. I was asking which, if any, you were in favor of; I was asking because, unlike you, I was not bold enough to presume I knew where you stand.

I can tell this discussion is very personal to you but it doesn't help discourse to jump to such conclusions.

The staunchly libertarian stance ironically seems to have some of the same shortfalls as those holding the communist perspective that you railed against. Namely, they only seem to work well in theory rather than practice. There appears to be some pushback in countries where constituents feel they have too loose of an immigration policy. In those cases, many have not felt liberated by the influx of immigration like your comment predicted. So I was curious if you had a nuanced perspective on where the appropriate balance lies.

For those without a nuanced vantage point (to quote HL Mecken), "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." Unfortunately, it seems like there are people on both sides of the debate lacking that understanding.

Re: H-1B Visa Most Used for 'Software Engineer,' 'Software Developer' Roles

#65

Post by whenanother »

this whole program requires that the h1b visa worker is at the level or above the level of their US counterpart. this creates a very disturbing incentive with regards to the US educational system. the decline of the us public educational system coincides with the advent of this whole program. plus I don't believe there's a limit on student visas which are being abused in the same way to fill academia with cheap foreign labor.

the other thing the program incentivize is over inflating unemployment numbers and other economic indicators. you can't justify the hiring of h1b or the expansion of the program if the unemployment numbers are high. of course the recent low unemployment numbers turned out to be a sham considering how the fed fund rates were lowered and inversion of the yield curve.

Re: H-1B Visa Most Used for 'Software Engineer,' 'Software Developer' Roles

#66

Post by geebee »

LordFast wrote: post #61
geebee wrote: post #52

I'm generally suspicious of the H1-B program, mainly because I don't like programs that empower corporations to decide who is or isn't allowed to enter and work in the United States. That's bad. And I despise programs that allow corporations to determine the circumstances under which would be immigrants are allowed to remain in the US. This highly coercive relationship undermines almost everything that needs to work…

Agreed. Letting companies bind workers' abilities to remain in the country they'd like to live in is painfully similar to letting dictatorships bind people into indentured servitude.

There is a big difference though in that H1B workers do have a right of exit from the US. They can seek employment in their home country or other places with skilled immigration programs.

I’m fairly confident people who read my above comment will see the context for this qualification and know that I see this program as abusive. It does mean a workers right to leave an employer is very limited. It is possible to find a new sponsor and remain the us (though frankly that kind of talk makes me a little ill, the notion that to leave a job a worker needs a new corporation’s permission to remain, and choose from a restricted range of employers and job titles).

But that right of exit does help avoid some of the really horrifying violations of basic human rights that accompanied earlier incarnations of suppression of free labor mobility.

Re: H-1B Visa Most Used for 'Software Engineer,' 'Software Developer' Roles

#67

Post by bryanlarsen »

whatshisface wrote: post #22
jimbob45 wrote: post #8

I might previously have argued that H-1Bs were causing a domino effect on the rest of US employment - their complete inability to negotiate higher salaries spilled over into the rest of the industry. However, I see now that such an argument is shortsighted. There is no evidence outside of my own conjecture to support such a thing and my frustration with my own experiences in the industry is causing me to scapegoat H-…

> There is no evidence outside of my own conjecture to support such a thing Every economist believes in supply and demand curves. If there are any H1Bs being awarded to replaceable programmers (as opposed to specialized programmers with no American counterparts, as was the intended use of the system), then wages are being depressed. It's practically a law of physics.

Supply and demand for labour is spectacularly difficult to model accurately.

Re: H-1B Visa Most Used for 'Software Engineer,' 'Software Developer' Roles

#68

Post by noego »

whatshisface wrote: post #37
noego wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economists also believe in the lump of labor fallacy, which your comment perfectly exemplifies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

The lump of labor fallacy is equivalent to believing in inelastic demand. However the supply and demand model doesn't depend on inflexibility: its basic highschool formulation involves supply that increases with price and demand that decreases with price. So, no, I don't think the suppply and demand model requires a fixed demand.

The lump-of-labor fallacy arises when people don't realize that increases in the labor, also cause a increase in labor demand. Hence why wages have been rising constantly, and unemployment being steady, despite America's population growing exponentially in the past 300 years.

Re: H-1B Visa Most Used for 'Software Engineer,' 'Software Developer' Roles

#69

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

uasm wrote: post #59
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that the "highly skilled" part has been systematically ignored for a couple decades now?

> "You do realize that the "highly skilled" part has been systematically ignored for a couple decades now?" Is that a fact? "Ignored" by whom, and how exactly? Applicants must prove they are indeed exceptionally skilled. Sponsoring employers must prove the candidates are skilled. The petitions involve CVs, references from colleagues, diplomas, supporting evidence, interviews, all kinds of proof. Are you saying it's a…

The applicants aren't the problem. It's the employers bending and breaking the rules and regulators not enforcing them.

Re: H-1B Visa Most Used for 'Software Engineer,' 'Software Developer' Roles

#70

Post by rollingdeep »

noego wrote: post #68
whatshisface wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lump of labor fallacy is equivalent to believing in inelastic demand. However the supply and demand model doesn't depend on inflexibility: its basic highschool formulation involves supply that increases with price and demand that decreases with price. So, no, I don't think the suppply and demand model requires a fixed demand.

The lump-of-labor fallacy arises when people don't realize that increases in the labor, also cause a increase in labor demand. Hence why wages have been rising constantly, and unemployment being steady, despite America's population growing exponentially in the past 300 years.

Please don’t post misinformation. Exponential growth (population or otherwise) is a tired economic trope. The frontier days are over, please update your views to modern times like the past 70 years or so where growth is much more limited than the frontier days and is fairly linear—probably due to the fact that the economy (especially the USA) is a mature system and you can’t so easily apply unnuanced econ101 generalizations (from the previous century) about the lump of labour fallacy to today’s system.

You incorrectly imply that tech jobs will expand organically in a frontier-like or exponential fashion as happened in the past. That doesn’t actually happen in the tech sector. Tech companies seek to exclude alternative hire options from other STEM fields (engineering, science, etc.) because those alternatives would not be as cost efficient. Instead the tech jobs grow linearly (like most mature industries and systems) and only by the annual cap on visas being granted.

How you can tell that there is no absolute shortage of tech labor is that the number tech jobs never grows beyond the visa cap. If there were a shortage, companies would find more creative ways to exceed the cap limits like the above mentioned alternatives or creating training factories to increase the supply to meet organic needs/demand.

So while this mature system is not necessarily a fixed lump of labour, the mature constraints that apply seem to limit any organic growth to the current regime we find ourselves in. That is to say that companies constrain the tech labour system to their very skewed preferences instead of organic growth, and as a result the economic pie is growing less and less, and there is more and more competition over slice distribution. Incumbents are absolutely in direct competition with foreign labour and there is less overall growth to share equitably. Again, not a fixed lump of labour, but increasingly competitive to the point of very limited growth from within.

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