Wow. This will affect universities and negatively impact the US in the coming years. How many of the talent from frontier labs is immigrant?
50% of US unicorns are immigrant founded.
New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore
121–130 of 358 posts
Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore
#122Not surprising, H1B for my entire career was a cost cutting measure. Every time we had a layoff some portion would be replaced with H1B. Every H1B that shared their salary with me has been underpaid. I know its anecdotal but sharing to see if anyone has seen similar.
H1B should have never been a lottery. It should be a stack rank by salary to deal with the over subscription.
the problem is H1B is not only tech, there are nurses, some medical professionals, non-tech specialized workers.
Stack rank would just give all the visas to big tech and starve US hospitals and every other industry
Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore
#123On the whole, this is a good thing. There are policy responses that can be enacted as needed, in an easier and more humane way. The goal of the US government should be to protect the interests of the American citizen, as much as the goals of India or China should be to protect their own interests.
Its goal to protect the American citizen is fulfilled by economic security. If you let your industries leave, you have done a disservice to your citizens. That’s how trump got elected in the first place, and ironically it’ll only get worse because it’s the wrong solution.
Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore
#124Good, H1B is just modern servitude.
But there should be an incentive to hire local workers instead of just hiring foreigners in their own country.
Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore
#125Not surprising, H1B for my entire career was a cost cutting measure. Every time we had a layoff some portion would be replaced with H1B. Every H1B that shared their salary with me has been underpaid. I know its anecdotal but sharing to see if anyone has seen similar.
Not my experience in big tech and HFT. We spent a ton of time and effort trying to find anyone to our standards, never able to find enough. H1B (and other work visas) were generally better and more Sr compared to locals we found. They got paid as much or more than everyone else. When we had great people we could not get here we would instead build a team overseas, taking a bunch of other jobs with them.
I think that both you and the grandparent comment are correct at the same time. It feels like there is a strong dichotomy between how H1B visa is treated across different realms of tech.
I have been working in big tech for a decade, and have a few friends working in the more technical financial firms (think more TwoSigma/HRT/Citadel, not JPM/GS), and my experience matches yours. Every H1B I knew at the companies I worked at was absolutely not hired as a cost-cutting measure. It was just simply difficult to find people who could qualify. And god knows we tried, I remember my team interviewing roughly 50 people just to fill a position of just a baseline decent dev (not a rockstar math olympics winner with multiple groundbreaking publications; though that would've been nice). And absolutely none of them were underpaid either, they were on the exact same comp range for the level, with plenty of them topping out the range. In fact, they actually ended up costing more to the employer than a local would, due to having to deal with immigration lawyers/filing fees/etc. (all while being paid the same as everyone else).
Meanwhile, I have a lot of acquaintances from undergrad working as devs at tech consultancy firms and more "general/traditional finance" companies. The stories I hear from them about H1B at their workplaces are pretty much exactly what the grandparent comment describes, and even worse.
Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore
#126Not surprising, H1B for my entire career was a cost cutting measure. Every time we had a layoff some portion would be replaced with H1B. Every H1B that shared their salary with me has been underpaid. I know its anecdotal but sharing to see if anyone has seen similar.
H1B should have never been a lottery. It should be a stack rank by salary to deal with the over subscription.
Ranking by salary would basically mean ranking by industry, not just skill
Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not my experience in big tech and HFT. We spent a ton of time and effort trying to find anyone to our standards, never able to find enough. H1B (and other work visas) were generally better and more Sr compared to locals we found. They got paid as much or more than everyone else. When we had great people we could not get here we would instead build a team overseas, taking a bunch of other jobs with them.
Looks like there is need for 2 separate visa categories: - One to bring top 0.1% talent from across the globe to the US - Another to bring in temporary talent as needed Current version of H1B had become a big basket to hold both, and abused too for just finding cheaper labor. It may be time to segment these out. Also, given that US has ~400 million local citizens, there should be less need for either.
There is no need for "temporary talent" from foreign countries. US is graduating plenty of CS grads from our schools. There is a need for wage suppression and exploitation (for anyone not aware, if you get fired from your H1B job you have 2 weeks to leave the county). That's why they have a reputation for being "better", another word for it is indentured servitude.
Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore
#128It's funny how quickly tech employees turn MAGA when it comes to qualified immigration. Bad zero-sum intuitions about work abound across all strata of society, it seems.
It is pretty interesting to watch. "I'm pro immigration EXCEPT specifically the kind that directly affects me"
Or you know, you could take issue with specific concerns of specific implementations. Driven mostly by corporate greed and cynicism, over a great many decades. Also in an industry that you’re in and know something about.
You’re still allowed to have opinions, even if the situation does directly affect you. In fact, that sounds like exactly the situation you ought to weigh in on. Immigration or otherwise.
Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore
#129Nobody is willing to state this but it’s pretty clear if you look at the way officials behind the policy talk: they’re OK with this. They don’t mind economic harm. The purpose has nothing to do with protecting workers and everything to do with creating a more ethnically homogenous country.
People state this constantly. It's a very effective distraction (a distraction based on reality, to be clear - there are plenty of plain old racists out there, of course).
What do you mean it is a distraction? I don’t think the fact that people at the highest level of power go on TV and give racist lectures about how Haiti had problems because Haitians themselves are defective should be ignored when we look at the policy the same people are making and tell us it’s motivated by something else.
Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
devil's advocate - if they are HQ'd in the US, is hiring US citizens that big of an ask? why do they need cheap overseas labor?
IME it’s not cheaper, it’s the only way to find enough qualified people
IME at my org we have 3 contractors out of SE Asia to every 1 US FT role. They make less than a third of a FT US employee.