511–520 of 644 posts
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The article linked to was an opinion piece against immigrants, hence the context. I also eluded to there needing to be evidence, which the op piece didn't really provide.
There's plenty of evidence, and governments in western countries are lowering the "prevailing wage" requirements to far below market rates.
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It's two different markets - professional services firms have far greater negotiating power and sales forces than individuals.
If under the proposed system (h1bs granted in descending sort order of salary), product firms were losing out to professional services firms, then the product firms are free to pay their employees more. If they don't create enough value to justify paying more, well, then the system works as designed.
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Your remarks about "divisive ethic-neuveau-ghettos" with "communities insulating themselves rather than assimilating" just makes it worst. Part of the "social contract" when you immigrate to the US is to at least make an effort to join your new country. We aren't the Borg, but we would like to see you learn at least a little English, accept your new country, and generally participate. You are already most of the way…
Since when? The first three generations of my family in America spoke German. My home town was basically a group of people from a German town who up and moved to start a new town in the Midwest and went on living there as if nothing changed. Hundreds of Midwest towns and cities started the exact same way. Why is it different now?
I don't believe these feelings are necessarily entirely rooted in racism, as I've heard plenty of people in Chicago complain about Polish immigrants unwillingness to speak English. I think it's more likely the feelings are a mix of racism, classism and additionally a sense of pride in American culture.
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Any evidence? Otherwise I don't believe you.
There's lots of evidence out there. Probably the most obvious signal for you should be that companies are complaining about a lack of workers, but wages are stagnant. Or another signal might be the fact that 50% of STEM grads have to work in unrelated industries because of an inability to find work in tech. If you want more proof of funniness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU Or if you want proof of major…
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I got a H-1B visa. I was living in Ireland at the time. But, as it turned out, I never moved to the US. It was for a compiler position at Borland. I ended up working remotely for the next 6 years or so, first for a year as a contractor at a 6 figure Euro rate, then later as a salaried employee after I moved to London. They flew me over two to four times a year to keep up to date with the team. I collectively lived ov…
I'm a software engineer and green card holder from Brazil and there is nothing I want more than to see many of my friends who work in Brazil have the opportunity to come here to work in a great industry. That being said, both you and the anon person you replied to are right about the situation. The position you came to fill is a relatively rare skill here in the US and it helps the US to bring in talent from abroad,…
The BLS says the median salary for a lawyer is $112k. Median salary for a software developer is $93k.
The $19k difference is not that big when you consider that lawyers have a higher startup cost and higher ongoing cost - wardrobe, dry cleaning, law school tuition + 3 years' opportunity cost. Plus law firms can be a grind, far more than soft eng gigs.
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It is already illegal to pay H1B visa holders less than "the actual or prevailing wage for your occupation, whichever is higher." http://www.uscis.gov/eir/visa-guide/h-1b-specialty-occupatio... Thus, when I hear people complain of companies who hire H1Bs only because they want to pay them less, I always want to ask, "why haven't you reported them?" Either they don't actually know that the companies are exclusively pa…
I don't know the salaries of any of the H1-B visa holders at my company. Do you? Maybe we can make it a policy that companies make such information public when they employ more than N number of H1-B holders. With mean, median, standard deviation and error bars, you should be able to get an idea of whether or not this is happening. Besides these numbers for salary, it would also be interesting to see the same statisti…
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It absolutely, positively hurts local labor - naturalized citizens - etc. Without a doubt. I disagree with this statement. I am on an H1 and know several other people who are on H1s and can testify that this is a generalization. There are many ways to end up on an H1, overseas body shops is one avenue and American grad schools are another. Most H1s I know, myself included, graduated from good schools, have worked har…
I don't think the point you take issue with is really debatable. The only way it could not be true if there is actually no one in the local labor market who can do the job, and that's a very difficult argument to make. Outside of that, every H1 is a job a citizen isn't getting. You didn't touch on this at all, so I'm not really sure what your point is. I think you're debating a strawman.
In any case, software engineers complaining about having less jobs just strikes me as hypocritical. Our whole professions are essentially centered about eliminating the need for human labor. At least in this case, someone is still getting paid to do the job, even if it's not someone who happened to be born with the right citizenship.
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I'm a software engineer and green card holder from Brazil and there is nothing I want more than to see many of my friends who work in Brazil have the opportunity to come here to work in a great industry. That being said, both you and the anon person you replied to are right about the situation. The position you came to fill is a relatively rare skill here in the US and it helps the US to bring in talent from abroad,…
> Alternatively, I would be okay with eliminating the lottery and giving visas out on the basis of the premium companies are willing to pay over the salary a domestic worker would be paid. If your company is willing to pay 2.0x foo for a position, then you will get the H1-B visa ahead of a company only willing to pay 1.5x foo. The floor would be set at something like 1.1x foo. That would only help the largest compani…
There is a reason why successful startups tend to be friends who closely know eachother and recognize the talent in eachother. Recognizing talent takes time and knowledge and it isn't something you can foist onto an HR department or recruiter.
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> It absolutely, positively hurts local labor - naturalized citizens - etc. Without a doubt. I think there's little question that increasing the supply of engineers reduces their price -- our salaries. We can argue about whether it's a small or a large effect, and whether it goes away in the long run due to macroeconomic effects, but it's certainly there. So you're arguing against a straw man here. But more to the po…
> But more to the point, it's short-sighted and selfish to judge policy decisions solely based on their effects on your salary. Especially since those of us in tech are, by and large, ridiculously well-compensated. Maybe it's selfish for you, but what about the ~50% of STEM grads who can't find a job in their industry? And wages are stagnant for STEM workers, and lowering for CS workers. Hundreds of thousands have be…
According to the Census bureau, 74% of STEM grads don't work in STEM [1]. I was pretty surprised to read this, until I looked up what the Census bureau considers to be STEM [2].
You can see from this graphic that CS, math, statistics, and engineering majors all end up working in STEM in relatively high proportions. It's the psychology, social sciences, biology, and (to a lesser degree) physical sciences majors who are dragging this statistic down.
This isn't as surprising to me; indeed, if you hover over the labels in the graphic, you'll see that a lot of bio majors go into health care and education -- not surprising -- and that psych and social science majors go into a wide variety of fields -- again, not surprising or particularly relevant to this debate, I think.
Coming back to people with CS/math/engineering degrees, you're right that about 50% are not employed in STEM-related fields [3]. However, we have zero reason to believe all of these people "can't find a job in their industry". Surely some of them voluntarily work outside STEM.
Note that CS/math/engineering majors have significantly lower unemployment than college grads as a whole [4]. Note also that this 50% fraction is significantly higher for CS/math/engineering than it is for any other group of STEM majors; the next highest is physical sciences majors, of whom only a quarter work in STEM.
In fact, the only groups of people I can find who work "in their fields" in a greater proportion than CS/math/engineering majors is non-STEM "science- and engineering-related" majors working in health care (presumably these are human biology majors and the like), and education majors working in education.
Looking at this data, it's really hard for me to believe there's a problem here. Lots of people don't work in the field that they majored in. This is true for CS/math/engeineering majors, but not as much as most other majors.
One more thing:
> a lot of people in your country aren't as comfortable as you are in terms of pay.
This is exactly my point, actually. Any time you make a decision like this, some people will be hurt, and others helped. But rather than judging this policy decision based on its effect on a particular group of people (almost always, it's "people like me"), we should consider its effect on the country as a whole. As I said, highly-skilled immigration is free economic growth, and a fantastic deal for the country as a whole.
[1] http://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2014/cb14-130....
[2] http://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/stem/stem-html/
[3] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iEhflMxiWCbQvFyVJiRL...
[4] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AcxdY__ls_F8P-rURtt_...
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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.