Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Trump Is Right: Silicon Valley Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants

huffingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 490 posts

Re: Trump Is Right: Silicon Valley Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants

#121

Post by mavelikara »

CodeSheikh wrote: post #76
mavelikara wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Should there be some sort of collateral such as one year contract? It would be a fair deal if employers also agree to let go of employee only with many months of severance payment. Also, startups using vesting schedules to incentivize people to stay.

Agree. It should be a two way street.

My point is that we got where we are today when employers started violating their end of the contract and employees slowly got wiser of the shift. To unsettle the status quo, the employers have to do some disproportionate show of good faith and win the trust of the employees.

Re: Trump Is Right: Silicon Valley Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants

#122

Post by RestlessMind »

pkaye wrote: post #92
t1o5 wrote: post #29

ex H1B here. Yes Trump is right.(though I do not like him personally, he is right in this matter) Most of the corporate America is exploiting H1B workers. I have worked in one of those firms and I have friends in many other firms. These are not Indian body shops, these are American companies. Everyone's topic of discussion when we hangout is how our H1B visas were being exploited and there is nothing we could do abou…

Interesting that age figures so heavily into this scoring system...

But pretty logical, no? You don't want someone to migrate to your country in his late 50's / early 60's, contribute to your economy for a few token years and then piggyback on your medical welfare system for rest of 15-20 years. Whats the incentive for local citizens to welcome immigrants in that case? (And no, I don't want to consider rare examples of superstars in their 60's. I am just talking about average Joe's).

Re: Trump Is Right: Silicon Valley Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants

#123

Post by omouse »

shas3 wrote: post #99
garyfirestorm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is amazing! However I would like to point out, H1B is not only for Silicon Valley. There are many automotive companies which require foreign talent in specialized fields. Very smart people with multi-disciplinary knowledge are nowhere to be found in auto sector. Signal Processing and vibrations and programming and control systems understanding etc. is required to deal with things like active noise control which…

Yeah this fixation on Silicon Valley is dumb. The worst affected will really be other industries. Small wonder that Lofgren who is a Bay-Area Representative is the one sponsoring the auction system. Many Si valley jobs for which H1Bs are hired are generalist in nature. And it is for generic programmer jobs that you have potential for wage abuse. But outside Si valley, for much lesser wages, companies rely on highly s…

The fixation on Silicon Valley isn't dumb when wages were deliberately suppressed by Google, Apple, Adobe and others. The big tech companies really do want to keep salaries low and H1Bs can help them with that, along with paying for the really smart people that they can bring in too.

Re: Trump Is Right: Silicon Valley Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants

#124

Post by dleslie »

t1o5 wrote: post #29

ex H1B here. Yes Trump is right.(though I do not like him personally, he is right in this matter) Most of the corporate America is exploiting H1B workers. I have worked in one of those firms and I have friends in many other firms. These are not Indian body shops, these are American companies. Everyone's topic of discussion when we hangout is how our H1B visas were being exploited and there is nothing we could do abou…

As a Canadian, it is my pleasure to welcome you into our community!

Re: Trump Is Right: Silicon Valley Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants

#125

Post by pscsbs »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #22

I'll just suggest that it's probably a great time for tech companies to open a Bangalore or Gurgaon office. Bangalore in particular is a good choice - the people are smart, the infrastructure is good, and it's a very pleasant place to visit. Perfect weather all year and the best breakfast in India. Also a very strong tech culture; second in the world to SF, in my view, and without many of the social pathologies [1] t…

You must be joking about the infrastructure. Moving even a few kilometers can take hours due to all the traffic and lack of public transportation.

Re: Trump Is Right: Silicon Valley Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants

#126

Post by [deleted] »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #22

I'll just suggest that it's probably a great time for tech companies to open a Bangalore or Gurgaon office. Bangalore in particular is a good choice - the people are smart, the infrastructure is good, and it's a very pleasant place to visit. Perfect weather all year and the best breakfast in India. Also a very strong tech culture; second in the world to SF, in my view, and without many of the social pathologies [1] t…

[deleted]

Re: Trump Is Right: Silicon Valley Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants

#127

Post by morgante »

throwawaydbfif wrote: post #24
zzleeper wrote: post #12

> Their lobbyists claim there is a “talent shortage” among Americans and thus that the industry needs more of such work visas. This is patently false There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years. Not sure why this point is still controversial. > most Silicon Valley firms sponsor their H-1B workers, who hold a temporary visa, for U.S…

The endless talent shortage is a farce. Every tech company I've worked at rejects well over 90% of their applicants and has an interview process that would be considered insane in almost any other field. I would say the opposite is true based solely on hiring practices. Look at Google for example, who hire around 1/5000 people that apply. The shortage is artificially maintained because it works in companies favor. It…

If there's not a shortage of skilled engineers, then why is Google paying people hundreds of thousands of dollars a year? While it's true that the industry has a bit of myopia and tends to focus on a specific subset of engineers as "skilled," there is absolutely a huge shortage of them and massive competition to hire them.

Re: Trump Is Right: Silicon Valley Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants

#129

Post by mdorazio »

d--b wrote: post #60
program_whiz wrote: post #34

Ok what's the suprise here? If you give companies a chance to get cheaper "mostly the same" labor without a downside, or maybe with the upside they can't leave, they're going to take it. That's why I do believe globalization and the availability of huge amounts of cheap unregulated labor does hurt American jobs and industry. Its not xenophobia, its just common sense. I think if you look past any ideas of racism, xeno…

It's not obvious at all. Shipping lower skilled jobs to other countries mean higher margins for US companies. Which is good in itself for the US economy. Buying manufacturing from other countries means it's easier to sell stuff to them as well, which is also good to US economy. The fact is that the US has a very good overall economy, so maybe one has to look at the issue of redistribution of wealth for instance. Econ…

I think you're missing two key points here - 1) what are corporations doing with their increased profits as a result of tactics like abuse of the H1B system?, and 2) what portion of H1B salaries ends up back in the US economy vs. abroad?

The net effect for the overall economy is only going to be better under the current H1B system if companies reinvest their profits into productive uses, which they haven't been [1]. And if H1B workers spend their earnings in the US instead of sending that money back home. I don't have solid data on this last point, but having worked with many H1Bs over the years I can at least anecdotally confirm it.

You can also look at our trade deficit with India as another data point here [2]. We are not, in fact, selling more stuff into India than they sell us. There's a pretty strong argument to be made that the current system is more harmful than helpful to the economy as a whole.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/magazine/why-are-corporat... [2] https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/south-central-asia/india

Re: Trump Is Right: Silicon Valley Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants

#130

Post by robjan »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #22

I'll just suggest that it's probably a great time for tech companies to open a Bangalore or Gurgaon office. Bangalore in particular is a good choice - the people are smart, the infrastructure is good, and it's a very pleasant place to visit. Perfect weather all year and the best breakfast in India. Also a very strong tech culture; second in the world to SF, in my view, and without many of the social pathologies [1] t…

We outsourced most jobs to Bangalore and productivity dropped to around about 10% while costs increased. We have experienced death by committee and hierarchy in all of our outsourced projects so far and are now starting to solve this by in-housing everything again.
Post reply on HN