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Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

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Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#231

Post by eatbitseveryday »

tinyhouse wrote: post #182
lukeschlather wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All H1B salaries are public: https://h1bdata.info/ It's possible (maybe even likely) that title deflation is happening, but based on my experience the salaries are definitely in line with the pay ranges for each job title (I worked at Amazon for 3 and a half years, so I have some first and second hand information on pay.) If nothing else it's a great resource to see the unfiltered payscale at SV companies.

It's pretty useless since it only contains base salary.

Not quite... for most companies, your income is almost entirely your salary. The world is not FAANG :)

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#232

Post by tridentlead »

kthxbye123 wrote: post #36
awillen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just silly... even if you're a nationalist, isn't the prospect of bringing over talented people from foreign countries to work in America and help our companies profit plus deprive their home countries of their skills a really, really good thing?

Not if your conception of the nation only includes white people...

There it is

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#233

Post by austincheney »

My common sense frustration here is how can the US possibly have a critical shortage of developers on languages that are 20 to 50 years old? We have the third highest population in the world and claim to have excellent education, and these are high paying jobs at 2x-3x the national average yearly income.

So what qualifies the shortage? Is it like agriculture where Americans are too entitled for the work? Are Americans viewed as generally too low quality?

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#234

Post by SomeoneFromCA »

gorbachev15 wrote: post #53
awillen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just silly... even if you're a nationalist, isn't the prospect of bringing over talented people from foreign countries to work in America and help our companies profit plus deprive their home countries of their skills a really, really good thing?

As a nationalist, I think it would be better for those other countries to keep their skilled workers and so benefit. I think every nation has a right to its own existence, space, and policies. And they also get to decide what's right for them 'as a people'. Always optimizing for performance of 'the economy' is not in the best interest of the actual citizens of this country.

I totally agree. I live in Central Asia, and the consequences of brain drain very noticeable.

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#235

Post by noobermin »

GhostVII wrote: post #206
noobermin wrote: post #75

Some of these make no real sense, like L1 and J1 visas, which are so few and uncommon and are often granted to individuals. J1's for example are for researchers coming abroad to collaborate with scientists here, there isn't a real argument that J1's are taking jobs from anyone else that I can tell. Not that anyone should be travelling at all this year but one would have to see if they get extended after covid dies do…

J1 visas are what all the tech companies use for interns from Canada. Technically you aren't allowed to work under a J1 visa, but everyone seems to be doing that anyways - tech companies will always say that you are going to be treated just like a full-time employee during the interview, and then say you are only in the US for training when applying for the visa.

So may be I'm showing my ass here but I'm an academic. Our group was planning on collaborating with a French group who regularly performs nature-tier scientific work and we were planning on exchanging a graduate student and having them get their degree here, but if this holds it looks like they won't be able to do that. I don't doubt there are abuses (look up the thread, I see some iffyness around H1B's but the program itself being corrupt I don't think is true) but they're going to hurt everyone to score political hits for right wing xenophobes.

Look, my honest opinion is the abuses are generally bad, especially for immigrants who are being put in bad situations which because yet another thing the companies have as leverage over them, but then the people who should be targeted are the companies who are abusing the system, not the programs themselves which hurts everyone, especially the immigrants.

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#236

Post by fredfoobar »

retortio wrote: post #183
fredfoobar wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's an astro-turf campaign, it feels like it. Because no one thinking logically is gonna push an agenda that hard without actually thinking through it.

Not astroturfing. Technically underpaying is illegal but there are ways around paying an H1-B worker what a US citizen might receive. Title reduction, etc. Even if the total paid is the same, consulting companies that help sponsor workers get a huge cut of the salary so ultimately we have workers being paid less.

> Technically underpaying is illegal but there are ways around paying an H1-B worker what a US citizen might receive. Title reduction, etc. Even if the total paid is the same, consulting companies that help sponsor workers get a huge cut of the salary so ultimately we have workers being paid less.

Shut them down. Enforce the law.

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b

FYI for the rest: the user-ids in green means that they created their account recently.

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#237

Post by dennis_jeeves »

jusonchan81 wrote: post #137
dx87 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If H-1B visas were being used how they were intended, they would be a good thing, but we often see them used as a way to get cheap labor, or even directly replace American workers. The company I work at has H-1B junior web developers, hardly "very niche, hard to fill" positions that they can't find any qualified Americans to do.

I guess this is indeed an issue. I’m a manager and I am trying to hire. 100% I’d rather find a person who can start in a couple of weeks than several months for a candidate who needs immigration. But there are rarely any local applicants and even when there are they don’t make in the interview. We pay in excess of 300k for all roles so it’s not like we are trying to find cheap talent.

> But there are rarely any local applicants and even when there are they don’t make in the interview

What exactly does the work involve, if it is so difficult to either find candidates or give a candidate with some missing skills a few weeks to learn something new?

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#238

Post by vbtemp »

on_and_off wrote: post #169
retortio wrote: post #59

H1-B was intended for highly skilled workers that the US had a real shortage of. But now it's just being abused to bring in captive workers that are willing to accept lower wages and worse working conditions than otherwise while crowding out US workers. What if, instead of bowing to corporate greed which cares not a bit for our country or our people, we actually invested in our own population and trained them to do t…

I came to the USA on an H1B visa 2 years ago. On a high salary and with the promise of being sponsored for a green card. I got my green card just before covid impacted the USA and still have a pretty high salary (in the same range of my US born colleagues). I already had a great job in my home country, I was not going to come to the USA to be paid a pittance. Yeah, there is abuse of the green card system but it is in…

Couple important points:

1. SV/FAANGs, like elite colleges, only hire some very small percentage of people who apply. Many people who are perfectly well qualified and have successful careers otherwise get denied employment.

2. The market cap of these FAANGs is in the trillions. Between talent and capital, there's literally no problem they can't solve (they can solve problems about cyber bullying, trolling, etc but their business relies on it.. so it's not really a "problem" per se).

3. There are SO MANY underprivileged and/or poor kids in SV, LA, Pittsburgh, all the places where tech companies reside. Saying there aren't enough skilled workers in the US is kind of dishonestly true, as they have tons of applications from many qualified people.. many of whom with some training and support may very well become highly qualified....

4. ...They could literally invest some of those trillions to build a pipeline from these areas, develop talent locally - or at least domestically.

So much of tech is about solving problems with the resources you have. Opening up broadly to a global labor supply removes the constraint on that resource, and therefore don't need to innovate or find clever ways to make it work. Now, they are companies that have only one duty - deliver profit to shareholders - and that's fine and how companies should be run. But public policy needs to exist to serve the interest of the people, and for the most part - not entirely - H1B has been to serve the interest of executives in Big Tech.

Also, finally, Trump is absolutely awful, horrid, all that. A broken clock is right twice a day though, and this is one of the few possibly accidental things he's done that isn't a complete self-shot to the head.

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#239

Post by School-Cotton »

noobermin wrote: post #84
samfisher83 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can look at the data, SV companies aren't paying H1B people low wages. Unless you think 200-300k is low wages.

Is this true? The argument I've seen is that H1B's are liked by SV because they can be paid less.

That argument is wrong. H1Bs are liked by Silicon Valley because they want to be able to hire the best people from anywhere, and not restrict their talent pool to 5% of the world population.

All reputable Silicon Valley companies pay people exactly the same whether they are on a visa, have a green card, or are a US citizen.

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#240

Post by OzzyB »

curuinor wrote: post #96
OzzyB wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you take some of the Bay Area homeless as well, or is it only acceptable to place economic externalities Stateside?

Parent commenter's never been to the skid row of Vancouver. Land prices is the fucked thing, and they're plenty fucked in Canada, too.

> Parent commenter's

Is that my post or my parent's post? Fwiw I'm well aware of Canada's property bubble but I'm sure that has more to do with foreign capital outflows than local talent being pushed out the market.

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