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New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore

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Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore

#311

Post by swat535 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #149
infecto wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada historically is also one of the worst places to work in tech. Maybe it’s changed but I remember a decade ago tech jobs were paying a 1/4th of what they were in NYC/SF.

If pay and money is the only thing you care about then yeah. But for the rest of us, none of the places are "the worst place to work in tech" as long as you're in the northern hemisphere. Take a look at what the pay is in Chile if it's so scary to you.

> pay and money is the only thing you care about then yeah

Yes, pay and money matter. It's why people go to US rather than Canada.

If you can only afford rent on a Canadian salary as a tech worker without much profit, why come here?

Canada has bad weather, expensive large cities and an overworked health care sector.

At least Europe has better weather and social services.

Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore

#312

Post by bigmadshoe »

cvhc wrote: post #300
bigmadshoe wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just isn't true. Yes, ratio of salary to cost of living is better in the US, setting aside the precarious immigration process, political instability, high rates of gun crime, lack of healthcare, etc. I left this reply to someone else claiming the same thing: You can easily look up the cost of living for e.g. Vancouver: > Cost of Living Including Rent in San Francisco, CA is 57.8% higher than in Vancouver > Rent…

I was just transferred from the silicon valley to Vancouver so I have to comment...: 1. Vancouver is well regarded as one of the least affordable cities. 2. I stay in the same role but got a 40%+ pay cut so that offsets the "Cost of Living Including Rent". 3. If you compare other bay area cities (Sunnyvale, San Mateo, Fremont...) where tech workers live to Vancouver, it's not as dramatic. 4. While I support universal…

Yes, I agree on all points. I have researched this a lot as I'm also planning a move to Vancouver for life reasons. I was just replying to the plainly false claim that cost of living in NYC/SF is the same as that in the most expensive cities in Canada.

Side note: if you're willing for me to ask you some questions about your move I would be really grateful.

Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore

#313

Post by toomuchtodo »

vidarh wrote: post #302
toomuchtodo wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Good luck cloning services whose endpoints are unavailable and documentation non-existent and that there would be no customers for, as they're built as a means of working around taxation of outsourcing. What services can only be procured from offshore businesses and service providers that aren't for cutting costs? Honestly, what can be provided by someone in the UK, Europe, or LATAM that cannot be done by one of 10…

You're entirely missing the point, which was to propose this as a workaround for taxes trying to make outsourcing non-competitive. The point is not that they couldn't, but that a company moving proprietary "services" offshore as a means to cut costs aren't interested in whether the services can be provided locally, but whether they can cut costs by moving them offshore. If you tax renting labour, then companies seeki…

I encourage them to try.

Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore

#314

Post by WarmWash »

LastTrain wrote: post #306
WarmWash wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Middle America hates immigrants because they are racists. I don't want H1-Bs because companies use them as cheaper labor, undercutting my value." 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.

Was he “let’s put some limits on the number of H1Bs” anti immigration or was he “let’s deport 100 million people and shoot some innocent citizens in the face while doing it” anti immigration?

We won't ever know.

I know this sounds like a cop out, but Bernie isn't Ghandi just because he thinks socialism is cool. The immigrants who got shot were "fascist riot inciters" and it all just vanishes into the news media abyss.

Same thing how the left media does full lifetime bios on deported immigrants while the right media only reports on the gangsters and rapists who get deported.

Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore

#315

Post by xnx »

lokar wrote: post #286
infecto wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I would reframe the OP less about cost cutting and more that the company has an unrealistic cap on salary. Would be interesting to see where geographically your experience was. Having worked in the Midwest the problem I have found is that the population wanting to live in the Midwest is small and then when you are trying to recruit top talent it is even harder. You would need to pay more but then most compani…

In software, groups of people (teams) have value far more than individuals. You need a large pool of talent to reliably build good teams. This includes some amount of the very best people world wide. These people gravitate towards big cities where they can earn more, access more amenities and work with other top talent. Remote could have changed that, but it seems to have fizzled for now.

> In software, groups of people (teams) have value far more than individuals.

Modern AI turns skilled individuals into teams.

Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore

#316

Post by happytoexplain »

davidw wrote: post #249
philipallstar wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A huge amount of housing demand comes from immigration. You can't call people who like their neighbourhoods "NIMBYs" for not wanting their nice area to triple in population to solve a problem. They aren't the problem. The demand is the problem.

Actually you can blame them because it was the done thing throughout US history to build more homes when people moved to an area. And there is nothing more American than moving to a place with better opportunities or amenities. "The pursuit of happiness" and all that. Actual immigration from outside the US is a vanishingly small part of our housing problems, just as immigrants do not actually "eat the cats and dogs".…

>immigrants do not actually "eat the cats and dogs"

This is a pretty stark straw man. It's very normal to be critical of immigration policy without believing that immigrants will eat your pets, and it's petty to try to implicitly cast the person you're talking to into that camp.

Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore

#317

Post by filoleg »

wegwerper wrote: post #160
filoleg wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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). 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…

> 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?).

Nope, immigration fees/lawyer expenses are simply just a negligible cost in the grand scheme of things.

When you hire someone earning $350k+ in annual TC, an extra $10-20k one-time cost of immigration-related expenses is a nothingburger for big tech companies.

Along the same line of reasoning: relocation expenses for candidates within the US. Big tech companies don't stress over a one-time $10k relocation package cost (for a candidate that passed the interviews and accepted the offer, but just happened to be from another state).

Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore

#318

Post by happytoexplain »

bunderbunder wrote: post #110
orangedog wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Economics is generally not a zero sum game

This is true in the literal sense in which you are using the phrase, but the context is not realistic. This sentiment is used a lot in defense of bad policy.

Economics is a zero sum game, just not a static one. People are variables in the equation, which makes it non-trivial (after all, people are the entities splitting the sum, which is normally not part of the system of a "zero sum game").

The point is that the implication that "more people === better" is an oversimplification, to be point of being meaningless. In some contexts, more people makes everything better for everybody. In some contexts, more people makes everything worse for everybody. In most contexts, it's somewhere in between. Where the sparks really fly is when more people makes things better for the new people and worse for the existing people.

Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore

#319

Post by infecto »

embedding-shape wrote: post #272
infecto wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. My point was historically Canada was pretty bad from a QOL perspective. Low salary and high cost of living. Not sure what you are trying to argue but have at it!

Trying to help you understand that Canada does not have "low salary" just because it's lower than NYC/SV, since apparently your software engineer buddies live an upper middle class life on software salaries, how "low" can it be then, especially if the cost of living is so high? Something doesn't make sense here.

Sorry I don’t understand why you need to be rude. Historically when I have looked, salaries were drastically lower while having materially similar costs of living. That may have changed though as I have not looked at it in the past years post covid and you have not provided any evidence that says otherwise other than simply being a jerk. Good luck!

Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore

#320

Post by happytoexplain »

davidw wrote: post #193
bunderbunder wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's really dismaying how many people on this site seem to think immigration and the job market are a zero sum game... and that hasn't changed 12 years after I wrote this: https://journal.dedasys.com/2014/12/29/people-places-and-job...

It's an oversimplification to portray the "other argument" as asserting that everything in society is strictly a zero-sum game. In some important ways, it is; and in some important ways, it isn't. People may be wrong about those details, but that's not the same thing as the common quip "it's not a zero-sum game", which essentially portrays the other side of the argument as dunderheads (a trap that well-meaning people who believe they are on the "right" or "moral" side of an argument very easily fall into).

I.e. no, it's not a zero sum game, but it is a complex system with inputs, outputs, some finite resources, and lots of human subjectivity and desires. Concrete harm easily comes from bad immigration policy (regardless of the "direction" of the policy's badness).

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