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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

#321

Post by fillskills »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #139
fillskills wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 O-1 is for exceptional talent ("extraordinary ability"). Bring exceptional talent, eliminate the H-1B visa. It's that simple.

O1 is also starting to get "gamed".

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

#322

Post by toomuchtodo »

fillskills wrote: post #321
toomuchtodo wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 O-1 is for exceptional talent ("extraordinary ability"). Bring exceptional talent, eliminate the H-1B visa. It's that simple.

O1 is also starting to get "gamed".

If you have citations, I can pass them along to policymakers.

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

#323

Post by filoleg »

lokar wrote: post #265
zimzam wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Workers on an H1B are more abusable though - if they lose the job they have something like 30 days to find another one or they have to leave the country entirely. So you talk a good game about work life balance and then after you hire an H1B worker and bring them to the country you can spring 60 hour weeks doing tedius things and many won't be in a position to say no. The salary might also seem higher to somebody who…

At all of my jobs everyone was treated the same.

Yep, and that is also an explicit requirement for interviewers at every company I worked at.

I had to do interview training myself at one of them, and the guidelines were fairly specific and clear about this. We neither knew about the immigration status of the candidate nor were we allowed to ask/note/talk about it at all. Same as with age/marital status/etc.

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

#324

Post by ieatcandlewax »

rbanffy wrote: post #177
kccqzy wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, people who didn’t make it in the H-1B lottery go to Canada, try the L-1 and come back to the United States. It’s good for Canada to offer a work permit so quickly, but I’m just not seeing people willing to obtain permanent residency in Canada. After all, for the same job, the pay in Canada is way worse. In fact I’m seeing Canadian citizens come to the U.S. to get a big salary bump while doing the sa…

> After all, for the same job, the pay in Canada is way worse. OTOH, you have free universal healthcare - and, the best part is that everyone in Canada gets it. You also have gun-free schools, abortions are considered healthcare, and, on top of all that, a sane government and a population that's considered pathologically nice to each other. Honestly, I'd take the pay cut (in fact, I did - but I live in Ireland instea…

https://x.com/eurofounder/status/2097258391122972776

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

#325

Post by happytoexplain »

bijowo1676 wrote: post #198
theodric wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put another way: why should American employers be forced to hire Americans? If the labor pool is indeed substandard, they arguably have a vested interest in improving the quality of that labor pool rather than simply giving up on it. The $100k (and its consequences) are putting a finger on the scale in a nationalist manner to prefer local products. It's tariffs for people. It comes down to whether you have a globalis…

Employers have only one job: to maximize profits, thats it. It is not employers' fault that US is unable to train tech workers, despite spending $30-40k per pupil in school system only to end up #27 in PISA ranking. The problem with all anti-H1B discourse is Lump Of Labor fallacy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy ). The loudest people are the least educated about the consequences of blocking high…

>Employers have only one job: to maximize profits, thats it.

This is wrong. In practice, we bias toward this rule because it happens to align with benefit to society moreso than other rules (most of the time), but it is not the end, it is the means. The responsibility of employers (and all people participating in society) is to jointly maintain, and ideally improve, society. That's part of why government exists - to control harm-doers.

Also, "the loudest people are the least educated" is probably true on most topics, but it's not a great way to make an argument. You should address the smartest people who disagree with you, not the dumbest (and that way, you also avoid being perceived as believing you are better than other people, which damns so much socially-bisected discourse at scale).

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

#326

Post by DragonStrength »

lokar wrote: post #269
DragonStrength wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing getting an American to uproot themselves from their entire community to move to the Bay Area for a job vs. someone on the other side of the world who is looking to get into America just aren't the same. Ultimately, H1Bs are used to lower the working standards of Americans and enrich tiny pockets of existing regional capital holders. Regional wealth inequality in America has not gotten better as Silicon Vall…

The best people I worked from (in the bay area) were from Switzerland, Germany, the UK, France , Israel, etc.

Were they on H1Bs? Most I knew from similar countries in the Bay Area wouldn’t have been.

But these visas aren’t about best, btw. They’re about none available. The goalpost has moved to “none available for my price in the most expensive place on earth.” In my experience, the overall effect of these policies was hiring foreign masters students who were more exploitable over American undergraduates who would require the same training. The graduate pipeline, where domestic students were being warned off during the early 2000s already due to poor working conditions, became a credentialism excuse which was also exploited by researchers.

Again, we keep coming to these tertiary arguments which don’t deal with the issue: domestic born Americans are unhappy with their outcomes. Immigration is about the dumbest solution to Americans not being able to afford kids I can imagine. If that’s Silicon Valley’s best solution to a biological imperative, I expect things to only get worse. No, dorm-style housing that requires two tech incomes is not the American Dream. Please look at housing costs in San Jose before asking for more exploitable labor.

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

#327

Post by chaostheory »

bigmadshoe wrote: post #310
chaostheory wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t a good comparison because a better comparison would be the SF Bay Area (the metro) instead of just SF. Also my point is that the Canadian cost of living is comparable to the US while simultaneously having salaries that are a fraction of the US. I believe your nurses are also going south for the same reason though a few places like Vancouver have started to subsidize their housing.

Then we should compare to the Vancouver metro area, which is also cheaper. I'm not denying that the cost of living to salary ratio is better in the US. But it is simply false to say that the cost of living in cities like Vancouver (widely considered the most expensive in Canada) is the same as SF or NYC. Rent in SF is roughly double that of Vancouver, which itself has the most expensive rent in Canada.

The Vancouver metro real estate and rent are roughly the same as the SF Bay Area while having a fraction of the pay

I only know this because we thought of relocating to Canada

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

#328

Post by gosub100 »

lokar wrote: post #161
gosub100 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And it’s well known all CS grads are equally good

yes, it's called ABET Accreditation

https://www.abet.org/accreditation/find-programs

Thats literally the point of getting a degree, to determine that all grads meet a set of minimum qualifications

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

#329

Post by happytoexplain »

OutOfHere wrote: post #82

There is indeed no need for office jobs to be done in the US, and that's the hard truth.

You're right, there is no need physically. Luckily governments exists to exert power over human behavior (ideally to the benefit of its citizens), and not over the behavior of physics.

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

#330

Post by infecto »

bigmadshoe wrote: post #263
infecto wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, cost of living is what matters and at least at the time major Canadian metros were as if not more expensive than SF/NYC and got you a 1/4th of the pay. I am sure that’s attractive to some but sounds pretty miserable. Chile I imagine has pretty good cost of living economics. Anecdotally most of my friends in Latin and South America live upper middle class on software salaries.

"major Canadian metros were as if not more expensive than SF/NYC" That just isn't true. 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 Prices in San Francisco, CA are 91.7% higher than in Vancouver https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

Too many strange datapoints in that comparison. I never paid that much for utilities in CA but who knows. It’s anecdotal but at the time which this link does not cover it was simple math of taking a 2x paycut (not counting RSUs) to have roughly similar expenses.

I don’t know if current SF prices are reflecting the boom in AI. Another anecdote I look at the areas I used to run in under a decade ago and they are all around 60% higher. Really hard to do exact apples for apples between geographies so at the time I just went off basic necessities and it was skewed heavily in favor of SF.

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