341–350 of 644 posts
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Why would you expect them to be paid the same. Should something that ships from Alaska cost the same as something shipped from your next door neighbor?
Can anyone explain the downvotes? or does the Upton Sinclair quote hold "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
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Oh my, I would be curious to know what kind of company offers you such a high living standard in Easter Europe for you to throw any opportunity under the insane amount of 250k... If I agree that you need more in the SV to live comfortable than probably anywhere else in the world, 250k$/year is an insane amount of money.
A decent home in a good school district is around $2.5m in the Bay Area, so $250k before taxes might get you qualified for a mortgage (provided you saved $500k for a down payment). $100k, while above U.S. median household income, would not go very far in the Bay Area. Even in Eastern Europe, there are places with very high standards of living for talented developers, such as Prague or Warsaw. With the EU, Berlin, Vie…
Reference please? I've looked for homes in good school districts and found your number not even close (its much less). See Zillow
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Yuri is wrong. h1b is absolutely about costs -- unless they claim (a somewhat fantastical claim) there is nobody in the US at all who could fit their needs. A claim which is trivially untrue. Those people exist and could be hired. Why isn't Yuri hiring them? Because of the price they demand. In fact, the way you can tell this is bs and it is entirely about price is AeroFS opened a canadian subsidiary! I wonder how mu…
>Yuri is wrong. h1b is absolutely about costs -- unless they claim (a somewhat fantastical claim) there is nobody in the US at all who could fit their needs. A claim which is trivially untrue. Those people exist and could be hired. Why isn't Yuri hiring them? Because of the price they demand. Excuse me, he is just a guy with a company, not some demi-God who has access to a list of all qualified people out there. When…
So perhaps he needs to offer a million dollars, if that's what it takes to get his perfect unicorn (minimum job requirements: 23 years experience with python. Cue whining that we have a talent shortage when Guido declines job offer.) But I'd bet he'd get a hell of a lot of interest at even 10% or 15% over the going wage.
All he wants is to sidestep US immigration law to undercut wages of domestic employees. There, was that so hard to admit?
Yes, he's too busy to recruit! Why aren't those uppity employees lining up begging to work for him? I mean, looking at employees on linkedin is, like, so much work!
Look HNers, let's be honest with each other. There's a lot of H1B's on here. You have friends overseas who you want to see succeed in the Bay Area. In my experience at many tech companies in the Bay Area, H1B Visas exist for one reason, and one reason only - to get skilled engineering/STEM labor -- and to exploit connections (primarily Indian/Pakistani) among these workers to continue to get cheap labor. It absolutel…
"ethic-neuveau-ghettos .. insulating themselves rather than assimilating" Usually the kids assimilate pretty well, and thats mostly how it works, has always worked with non-europeans. You can't expect these people to wake up one morning, and do a running jump while yelling 'muricaaa!!' and assimilate in a flash. From my experience, most of them want their kids to assimilate while setting up personal thresholds for th…
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My parents came here for various reasons, but one of the straws that broke the camel's back, so to speak, was my dad giving in to paying a bribe just to get telephone service installed at his house. Where I come from, Bangladesh, that is just how you do things. And the institutions you have to deal with were created by people who think that's okay. I think non-immigrants take for granted how amazing, and fragile, it…
"But I don't want to have so many immigrants that we can't turn them all into Americans. I want immigrants who respect womens' rights, consider racists to be social pariahs, find corruption to be intolerable, embrace gays, etc" If I understand you correctly, you are making the assumption that things like respecting women's rights etc. are primarily an American virtue and not as much with other cultures ? I would agre…
Why are those the core values? I can think of several off the top of my head that are more important. What makes America a better place to live than Bangladesh is not that we believe in hard work and independence while people in Bangladesh do not. Beliefs are a part of it, but not those specific beliefs.
> Just a few hours later, Vox published an article titled These tech interns are probably making more than you are where they shared a tweet showcasing candid salaries at various tech companies, some larger, some smaller: That is a kind of a bullshit argument though isn't it, that "hey look, the interns (supposedly half-able, incompetent newbies) are getting paid so high!! We have such wonderful salaries in tech!" It…
> When you're "making 90k" in the valley you have the quality of life worth 30k in a midwestern city. Not true at all, yet this is constantly repeated like it's fact. Look up indifference curves and consumption bundles. You're ignoring microeconomics. For anyone that doesn't assign excessively high utility towards housing size, 90k in the valley is a much better quality of life than 30k in a midwestern city. This is…
That's because it is true...
I moved from the Midwest to the peninsula 3 years ago (for my wife's work). I made roughly those numbers there and here and the standard of living was roughly the same, maybe even dropped a little. Living in Silicon Valley is easily 2-3X more expensive than living in a place like Indianapolis or Columbus, OH.
You honestly don't feel these pressures as much until you're older and have a family. At least, the differences between the regions are much more apparent with a family. For example, we need a certain amount of living space, and there are a set of fixed expenses. We lived in about the same size homes here and there, and just the cost for that alone more than tripled.
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> This would be doomed to fail. Professional services firms can outbid basically everyone because they can turn around and bill that person out at 5x their salary. So what? Shouldn't the companies that can create the most value from the employee be the ones that get to hire them?
I wouldn't say that professional services firms really create the most value - far from it actually. They're just able to pay more because there's relatively little risk involved for them.
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Your anecdotal experience doesn't change the fact that H1B workers are paid less than American workers for comparable positions. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/silicon-valley-h...
This is patently false, and a common misunderstanding of immigrantion laws by U.S. citizens. >Requirement 4 - You must be paid at least the actual or prevailing wage for your occupation, whichever is higher. http://www.uscis.gov/eir/visa-guide/h-1b-specialty-occupatio...
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Ha, funny guy. The US immigration system is shit. Explain to me how someone can become a permanent resident or a US citizen who is current a citizen & resident of Canada, India or the Philippines. H1-B visas are the most straightforward way for someone with an education to get a job and permanent residency in the US. O and L visas are not universally applicable. Family sponsorship isn't always possible. Not everyone…
Try immigrating to the EU as an American; not quite so easy there either. If you are a refugee from Africa you have an easier time getting permanent residence in France than a moderately skilled workers would. My Mexican (now American) wife went through the US immigration process (she had a green card already when I met her, so I didn't 'help') You CAN immigrate to the U.S., there is a process. Funny since we're talk…
Because it sucks and treats people badly.
My wife, and mother of my dual-citizen children is Italian: I get to stay in Italy, end of story.
To have her go to the US (where I'm from) is, by comparison, a huge, expensive bunch of work even if we've been married for nearly 10 years and have children together.
If your bureaucracy manages to be worse, and slower than Italy's - which it is, in the US - you're doing something wrong.
Look HNers, let's be honest with each other. There's a lot of H1B's on here. You have friends overseas who you want to see succeed in the Bay Area. In my experience at many tech companies in the Bay Area, H1B Visas exist for one reason, and one reason only - to get skilled engineering/STEM labor -- and to exploit connections (primarily Indian/Pakistani) among these workers to continue to get cheap labor. It absolutel…
Many foreign nationals who choose to be educated in the US (often at a major premium as most scholarships or subsidized loans are unavailable) aspire to stay in the US to work post-graduation. There are temporary programs that allow this: F-1 Optional Practical Training (OPT) for 12 months. This can be renewed by another 17 months for a STEM degree holder. The 17 month extension was introduced in 2008 to allow the candidate to have two chances at the H-1B lottery [1].
I'm a German citizen who went to college in the US on a F-1 student visa. I worked on an OPT post-graduation before my employer sponsored me for a H-1B. I can guarantee you that I was one of their most expensive employees of comparable education and experience: Preparing a H-1B application (and the associated filing fees) is costly, especially if the government sends a request for further evidence. Just 3 months after I had started (before the H-1B application was filed) I managed to get a 50% raise because I had made myself indispensable and started looking for other opportunities as I felt significantly underpaid. They generally did not give raises to anyone, and as far as I know all of my citizen coworkers continued to be vastly underpaid for years.
If it weren't for the H-1B program, I wouldn't have had an opportunity to stay and work in the country after having already spent some 6 years here.
As an aside: Nobody ever suspects me of being foreign. I'm a white guy with flawless English. However, many of my friends who were born here (to foreign parents or grandparents) are treated with racism. That's simply not ok.
[1]: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2008-04-08/html/E8-7427.htm