151–160 of 353 posts
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Does Canada not already have an issue with not enough jobs available?
My uncle is a skilled immigrant to Canada (electrical engineer) and was never able to find an engineering job. They live in an immigrant-heavy subsidized housing neighborhood full of people in the same situation.
Good, H1B is just modern servitude. But there should be an incentive to hire local workers instead of just hiring foreigners in their own country.
Not 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.
yep. I see the same thing. Trump isn't wrong to hike fees for H1-B. For companies that shift development overseas they should face tariffs as well.
If H1Bs are dropped or Indian workers are tariffed I believe you will start seeing a reciprocal tariffs, fines or calls for domestication.
H1B started off with the right idea, but has essentially become gamed to hell. It has created a new white collar slave class that companies exploit.
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H1B also includes things like high school foreign language teachers. https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=french+language+immer... A stack rank by salary would mean "H1B is big tech employees" rather than "these are professionals who have skills."
The H1B was intended for highly specialized skills that where there is no local talent available.
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This isn't a MAGA thing. H1-B is a bad program. I have no problem with someone getting a green card, citizenship, TPS, etc in the US. I think there should be a lot faster routes for that. Let the software devs come in and become citizens or permanent residents, I don't care about that. What I do care about is the fact that H1-B locks immigrants to a company and tie their residence in the us to their employment. That…
If you look at it in a vacuum sure. When the same administration is actually floating the idea of making the program more coercive by making it so you can be deported immediately after losing your job I think it’s pretty reasonable to recognize the coercive nature of the program isn’t their concern.
There's a bunch of levers you could pull to stop it from being such a huge negative, faster paths to citizenship, looser requirements for switching jobs, higher minimum salaries. All these things would improve conditions for the H1-B applicant.
That's why I call it a bad program.
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Does Canada not already have an issue with not enough jobs available?
Economics is generally not a zero sum game. At least according to what they taught me in Econ 101, on a macroeconomic scale skilled workers tend to increase job availability. They spend a larger portion of their income on services, which has a positive multiplier effect.
Who'd imagine squeezing the middle class would backfire epically? Compensation hasn't reflected the GDP per capital increases for the majority of the workforce. I don't think even the productivity increases from personal computers in the end of the 1970's have trickled down.
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I can't speak to your particular situation, but in my experience this has been two factors; one is location -- it is sometimes hard in some locations to find senior talent whereas H1Bs are (naturally) more amenable to moving. The other is pricing, which is echoing the GP's point. Senior talent is expensive and you can get it at (apparently) considerably lower cost by looking for H1B applicants.
I found that once you are paying mid to high 6 figures the company is not trying to save by hiring a foreigner.
It'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.
Absolute peak "lost in the political sauce". Most people aren't aware that Bernie Sanders has historically been very anti-immigration, before just becoming an old guy who echos whatever the current young people vibe is.
Canada is jumping on this opportunity to invite the US tech workers who are frustrated with US H1B visa restrictions and GC backlog by offering an express permanent residency in 10 days https://canadabychoice.com/services/move-to-canada/usa/occup... Canada also floating idea of alliance with Europe for travel and job opportunities https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-european-union-eu-me...
This is especially impacting Indian tech workers in the US [1] since these are often the types of roles that InfoSys and other foreign tech consulting firms are staffing. The new $100,000 fee to sponsor an H1B visa has made it difficult to justify hiring foreign tech workers when most of the time they are just going to be using American LLMs to do their work anyway.
The foreign tech workers that are worth the $100,000 fee are still easily getting their visa sponsored.
[1] https://thefederal.com/category/news/h1b-visa-indian-tech-wo...
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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 wo…
I mean, you were actually underpaying the local workers if this was the case? If you offered the fully loaded salary to the local workers they might have accepted.
Or the local going rate for qualified personel were higher than you were willing to pay (which per def is true, if you had to bring in foreign work?).