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Updates to H-1B

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Re: Updates to H-1B

#271

Post by pdntspa »

Threadbare wrote: post #123
kqgnkqgn wrote: post #120

Seem like sensible changes, though more is still needed. Requiring H1B holders to leave the country to renew paperwork is an insane anachronism. The per-country caps also seem like a throwback to the early 1900's era immigration exclusion policies. Re: the concerns over "immigrants taking our jobs!". As a native-born American working in a large tech company today - the threat is very clearly not from H1B's and other…

Following the sun is a win, faster project delivery and lowered cost of development

That's for stuff that requires 24/7 support, not some harebrained project management technique that will make all your teams hate you

Re: Updates to H-1B

#272

Post by vetrom »

semiquaver wrote: post #241
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #161

A supposed shortage of qualified US applicants for tech jobs, especially software developers, doesn't jibe with the huge numbers of US developers currently looking for work, including highly experienced older workers suffering from age discrimination. I'd be surprised if more than 5-10% of H-1B positions are ones where the hiring company has even looked for US applicants.

> I'd be surprised if more than 5-10% of H-1B positions are ones where the hiring company has even looked for US applicants. But H1B employers are required to certify that they took good faith steps to recruit U.S. workers for these positions and were unable to find qualified candidates to hire. You really think a business would do that? Just go to the government and tell lies?

"Good faith" by the letter of the law is often established by chichanery like posting job ads with nebulous requirements in print newspapers, requiring mail in resumes, and slowrolling a process.

Not lies, strictly, but I see plenty of evidence pointing to the 'fake job' phonemena that seems to be discounted, like this example: https://www.teamblind.com/post/Intuit-firing-up-ads-in-local...

Filtering out real information from data and anecdata is a challenge at the best of times, but I am ill convinced of the honesty of most of the recruitment market.

Re: Updates to H-1B

#273

Post by pavlov »

aspenmayer wrote: post #259
pavlov wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in the US with visas for my four-person family, we FedExed our passports to Finland where my parents put them in a different envelope and mailed them to the US embassy. Ten days later the embassy mailed back the passports with the new visas attached, and my parents FedExed them back to us in New York. Yeah, seems like this re-approval concept makes a ton of sense. FedEx at least got some business.

This doesn’t sound remotely legal, but I’m not a lawyer. How were you expecting to comply with reasonable requests for your family’s passports and visas by the US while they were in transit? What if they were lost in transit or stolen? If your intent was to circumvent the process, that could constitute mail fraud and other violations that could result in loss of residency or in extreme cases loss of citizenship. Why…

What reasonable requests? There isn’t (yet) a task force that goes door to door in Manhattan knocking on doors and checking immigrants’ papers.

We are Finnish citizens and if the passports really had been lost, we could always get new ones at the Finnish consulate in New York to return home.

I’ve held several types of visas, L-1 and O-1, and I also applied for a PERM whatever that I eventually abandoned because I didn’t want to stay in the country and with that employer. The American immigration system is incredibly poorly designed and frustrating for all parties. It drives honest legal immigrants like us to an “I don’t give a shit” mindset where we just did the minimum to get the paperwork while waiting to leave the country.

Now I still get paid by an American company at the same rates as before, but I pay taxes to Finland instead. The immigrant-hostile system isn’t the success you imagine.

Re: Updates to H-1B

#274

Post by danans »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #221
danans wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> phrased differently, the goal is to help industry, not hurt workers. hurting some workers is an acceptable cost, not the goal. The phrase "help industry" has many dimensions. The simplest of course is that by increasing labor supply and suppressing wages it increases profit margins, rewarding shareholders. Another important function is that by having more workers overall in the US, it increases the productivity of…

I dont think there long term impacts are so clear or cynical. the question is less about productivity, but network effect, number of jobs, and quality of jobs.

> I dont think there long term impacts are so clear or cynical

The economic impacts I described are looking backwards, not forward, and the data is pretty clear that long term returns on capital swamp the returns on labor (especially since the 1970s). STEM workers have been somewhat insulated from that due to the industries they work in growing in the past few decades faster than the labor supply. It's anyone's guess whether or not either trend will continue into the future.

> the question is less about productivity, but network effect, number of jobs, and quality of jobs.

I'd argue productivity and returns to capital are almost everything when it comes to what informs immigration policy from an economic lens. "Network effect" is a mechanism, not an outcome, and outcome metrics like "quality of job" or even "quality of life afforded by a job" are not a concern of such policies. On average, they might improve, or they might get worse, but productivity and returns on capital will always go up, whether they require workers or not.

Re: Updates to H-1B

#275

Post by aylmao »

jandrese wrote: post #93
999900000999 wrote: post #82

I'd rather have H1-B visas be a 5 year unrestricted work permit. America needs to keep attracting the world's best and brightest, but linking it to a specific employer is problematic. Opens up employees to mistreatment. I'd say charge a straight up fee, 500k upon approval. That gets you 5 years, if your wiz making 400k a year it's a great deal.

I hate that it is time restricted at all. Just make it a green card program with a path to citizenship outright. Brain drain the rest of the world. Instead we are providing work experience to our future competitors.

I worked many years under H1B, but moved out of the USA. Unsure if I'll come back, technically I still have time on my H1b, but man, it's just so stressful to lay roots knowing they're conditional on all sorts of ticking clocks and hoops to jump.

I like working at early stage startups— works pretty well with H1B but it makes the process of getting a green card via work complicated. Some people can deal with all that stress, I just rather not.

Re: Updates to H-1B

#276

Post by strongpigeon »

pnw wrote: post #253
strongpigeon wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good news: the USCIS makes this data available! [0] Google, Microsoft and Meta definitely look for (and hire!) US applicants. One can reasonably have a gripe with the consulting companies on there (Infosys, Tata, Cognizant, etc.) but they don't represent 90-95% of H-1B issued. [0] https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...

One might have more than just a gripe with Infosys given they recently admitted to defrauding the visa system over decades and paid a record $34m fine. How many Americans lost out on jobs as a result? We'll never know. https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/indian-corporation-pays-re...

It’s worth saying though that this fine is for lying and abusing the B-1 visas (to circumvent H-1b limitations). That being said I still believe there are a lot of issues with these companies regarding their H-1bs in the first place.

Re: Updates to H-1B

#277

Post by lupusreal »

ashconnor wrote: post #268
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #161

A supposed shortage of qualified US applicants for tech jobs, especially software developers, doesn't jibe with the huge numbers of US developers currently looking for work, including highly experienced older workers suffering from age discrimination. I'd be surprised if more than 5-10% of H-1B positions are ones where the hiring company has even looked for US applicants.

As a non-immigrant to the United States, I don't really buy into the idea that companies prefer H1B candidates purely for financial reasons. The H1B process is frankly a rigid, unreliable and time-consuming process. It's hard for even Canadians and Mexicans to find jobs in the US and we have access to the supposedly easy to obtain TN visa. Australians too with E3. I'm more inclined to believe that H1B workers have ot…

> I'm more inclined to believe that H1B workers have other benefits to employers such as longer tenure due to the restrictions of moving jobs.

That is a financial motive. Companies don't want to pay the kind of compensation which would induce employees to be loyal to the company, and so they use H1B quasi-indentured servitude as a cheaper alternative.

Re: Updates to H-1B

#278

Post by dowager_dan99 »

throwaway7783 wrote: post #239
PittleyDunkin wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a shortage of applicants willing to work at what companies want to pay. That and companies are just hilariously bad at finding workers they want to hire for nebulous reasons. I have no doubt even if my company hired 95% of the workers it had marked down as "no hire" they'd be able to squeeze a salary's of value worth out of each of them (well, if management is competent, which it tends to not be). I'm sure…

Okay, I have interviewed hundreds of people in the last decade, and I can tell you that most are not good enough. There are companies that are downright abusing H1B for wage suppression, but as a startup founder, I will try my hardest to avoid hiring people who I have to squeeze their salary's worth and still get mediocre results (nothing to do with citizen or not - I had this experience with a Canadian contractor -…

>> If I have to cut costs, I will have to cut the team in US and move the jobs to a low cost region regardless of their citizenship status.

Read that sentence again. If you're hiring an American team in the Us, and cutting in the US, it's not regardless of citizenship - unless you're abusing the H-1B program

Re: Updates to H-1B

#279

Post by lubujackson »

throwaway7783 wrote: post #239
PittleyDunkin wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a shortage of applicants willing to work at what companies want to pay. That and companies are just hilariously bad at finding workers they want to hire for nebulous reasons. I have no doubt even if my company hired 95% of the workers it had marked down as "no hire" they'd be able to squeeze a salary's of value worth out of each of them (well, if management is competent, which it tends to not be). I'm sure…

Okay, I have interviewed hundreds of people in the last decade, and I can tell you that most are not good enough. There are companies that are downright abusing H1B for wage suppression, but as a startup founder, I will try my hardest to avoid hiring people who I have to squeeze their salary's worth and still get mediocre results (nothing to do with citizen or not - I had this experience with a Canadian contractor -…

"Not good enough" or not good enough to pass your leet code gauntlet that has nothing to do with the day-to-day role?

Because those aren't the same thing. Also don't discount interview stress - I read that psychologically the most difficult thing to do is be on stage in front of people and do complex math problems... which is basically what live coding tests are.

Re: Updates to H-1B

#280

Post by aylmao »

remram wrote: post #110
999900000999 wrote: post #82

I'd rather have H1-B visas be a 5 year unrestricted work permit. America needs to keep attracting the world's best and brightest, but linking it to a specific employer is problematic. Opens up employees to mistreatment. I'd say charge a straight up fee, 500k upon approval. That gets you 5 years, if your wiz making 400k a year it's a great deal.

If you need to already set up the business that can generate 500k in your home country before coming here, you do the opposite of bringing value and innovation to the US. You have already given most of that to the home country.

I suspect most people that have a business that can generate $500k in their home country probably wouldn't want to move to the USA at all.

Unless their business generates way more than $500k, in which case they'd probably be moving as businessmen, not as skilled workers.

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