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

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

#281

Post by bdavisx »

tdkl wrote: post #254
valuearb wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Globalization has made the US massively wealthy since the American Revolution. We rely on the ability to sell our goods and services across the world, cut off the world and we get poorer. Look up Smoot Hawley. These engineers will be working for our foreign competitors if Trump has his way, how is it good for our economy if more apps are sold by foreign firms, that Samsung sells more phones, etc, etc?

It's made the wealthy US 1% wealthier.

In reality, it's made more than just the 1% wealthier, but the balance is that it's made a whole lot more people poorer. I don't have references, but I remember reading them at some point, in terms of numbers there have been more losers than winners when you look at inflation adjusted wages.

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

#282

Post by yummyfajitas »

throwawaydbfif wrote: post #275
yummyfajitas wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You bring up another reason why 90% of applications might be rejected: false negatives. Consider a hiring filter which rejects 90% of good applicants and 99% of bad applicants. In such a world, consider a population of 10 good applicants. These 10 applicants will go on 100 interviews, be rejected on 90 of them and each will find a job. So in this world where every applicant finds a job , you still get 9/10 applicatio…

This is exactly what happens. The hiring bar is so arbitrarily high that companies can say there's a shortage when they reject 5-10 good applicants for every position. In a true labor shortage this would be completely unsustainable. Trying to justify rejecting 90% of your good applicants to avoid "false negatives" and extending that logic to say that there's a shortage... Obviously retarded if you think about it.

Hardly. If the cost of 10 interviews exceeds the cost of 1 bad hire, then my 90/99 filter is probably worth it.

If you think it's retarded, try and work out the arithmetic yourself.

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

#283

Post by kmonsen »

t1o5 wrote: post #104
orcdork wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lottery based skilled visa means that there's many more skilled people on the other side, and less spots for them. Unless you have a way of quantifying extremely small differences in skill (and keeping the process balanced), I don't see how you feel a lottery is unfair.

Points based system is the right way of quantifying skills & it seems to be working well for Canada. for ex: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/express-entry/grid-crs.asp

Anything else than pure salary can be gamed. We are for better or worse a capitalist society so lets use the one currency we have to determine who is most needed instead of making up new currencies.

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

#284

Post by Apocryphon »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #27
ones_and_zeros wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Is this a fact or a feeling? Economics allows us to directly measure these things and the price of labor hasn't gone up in the last 30 years at rates indicating a shortage with executive pay and corporate profits at all time highs. > Then…

Economics allows us to directly measure these things and the price of labor hasn't gone up in the last 30 years... Real compensation per hour (for workers as a whole) has gone up 40% since 1987. This number is adjusted for inflation. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB Pay in software has been rising more rapidly than pay for the country as a whole. Is this even remotely in doubt? http://insights.dice.com/201…

For American workers as a whole, the average hourly wage has about the same purchasing power as it did in 1979.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-wor...

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

#285

Post by throwawaydbfif »

jeandejean wrote: post #102
throwawaydbfif wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Tech companies also reject applicants because they are "software engineers wannabe" that are just a bunch of phonies coveting the high salaries. Tying up visas effects only to wage diminution is just a big mistake. But I can't wait to witness the effect of being a lot more selective on visas. We'll see!

Visas are currently the "easy way out" to get decent developers for cheap. The problem, that's not what they were designed for. Their purpose is to find specialized skills that cannot be sourced otherwise.

The most immediate effects of fixing the visa system will be employers suddenly offering "on the job training" to fill these lowly skilled jobs. It's hard to see this as anything but a net positive for US workers

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

#286

Post by anjc »

valuearb wrote: post #242
anjc wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last major study I saw on this showed that a large proportion of IT and STEM graduates had to move into unrelated industries due to an inability to find employment. This meme that there are hordes of people who would choose poverty because of an unwillingness to work is disgusting.

A large proportion of IT and STEM grads aren't qualified to do engineering tech jobs.

Surely most aren't. I know in my graduating class in the late 2000s, maybe only 10% had any experience upon graduating. My point here is that the H1B policy has put these grads into an impossible situation, whereby they're competing against people from emerging economies who do have the skills for these entry level jobs, where 10 years ago grads would be hired and get up to speed on the job.

So there isn't an undersupply of willing workers, there's an unwillingness for companies to accept that entry level workers aren't commodities that you buy, ready-packaged to go.

There is no other industry in the world where lobbyists can say "grads don't have the proprietary skills that we need, so give us more visas to issue to Indians!" and keep a straight face. Training is a normal part of every industry.

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

#287

Post by duskwuff »

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...

It makes some sense as a way to weight for "promise". Many of the other factors (level of education, language ability, work experience) are measuring things that an older candidate will be more likely to have already, but which a younger candidate may be more easily able to acquire after immigrating.

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

#288

Post by unprepare »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #279
unprepare wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever met an illegal immigrant? been to their home? asked them about their experience coming to the US? Its interesting to see you assume so much about illegal immigrants, when you clearly dont have even a foundational understanding of their lives here or in mexico.

Do you have a substantive argument, or merely the vague supposition that somewhere out there there must be some personal anecdote that invalidates what I said? Could you clarify what "assume so much" refers to? I'm pretty sure that the only assumption I made is that most illegal immigrants are not non-workers collecting benefits.

Do you have a substantive argument, or is assuming that all illegal immigrants come here with 0 cash your argument?

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

#289

Post by rarec »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #262

I can't count how many colleagues I've talked to that are in a stuck-employer situation. Some are happy, but some are miserable. I'm also aware that some of the people with H1-B's are family members that actually don't know anything about technology and don't belong in any job anywhere in technology. I'm also aware (being 53) that my livelihood is directly tied to the number and type of H1-B visas in the U.S. I can't…

When you've got a few bad actors abusing the system, all pay for it. There's a reason we can't have nice things.

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

#290

Post by anjc »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #165
anjc wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last major study I saw on this showed that a large proportion of IT and STEM graduates had to move into unrelated industries due to an inability to find employment. This meme that there are hordes of people who would choose poverty because of an unwillingness to work is disgusting.

60% of poor adults choose not to work. I'm sorry you consider reality to be "disgusting". http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publication... Table 3 Page 21 My uncited study says that your uncited study is wrong and the authors of your study are Nazis.

Where are you getting 60%? Are you adding up the two years?

And I presume you're in the US, but from an external observer's perspective, 'poverty' in the US is extreme and is almost incomprehensible to people the rest of the Western world. These are not people "choosing" to not work, they're the most decrepit, uncared-for group in the developed world.

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