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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

#331

Post by serge2k »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #31
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…

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. Joel Spolsky explains why this does not imply what you think it implies. http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070501/column-guest.html tl;dr; Imagine 1 low quality developer who applies to 9 places and gets rejected. There's also 1 high quality developer who appl…

I'll accept that argument when google recruiters aren't talking constantly about their absurd false negative rates.

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

#332

Post by yummyfajitas »

Apocryphon wrote: post #284
yummyfajitas wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Congrats - you've discovered that compensation has shifted from taxable wages to untaxed benefits.

If you want to solve this then ban employer sponsored health care, matched 401k contributions, and all that.

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

#333

Post by garyfirestorm »

t1o5 wrote: post #241
garyfirestorm wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not entirely true. Companies like Infosys, cognizant, Accenture spams the visa applications with huge amounts, causing the H1B visas go into lottery process (if applications exceed the 85k visa availability). And for this spamming they deserve to be blamed. These companies alone file more than 100k LCAs each year. LCA is the first step before applying for H1B. This is a major issue for students who pursue Masters in…

The Masters in US is gamed too. Many of those students are the ones who could not clear the campus interviews of Infosys, Cognizant or Accenture when they were in the college for Bachelors. So they come to "study" MS in the US so that they can get into the H1B system easily. As far as I know, the MS hires do not posses any special skills. Most of them fake their experiences to get into the companies. There are specif…

you are partially right about the 'gamed' system and contractors gaming the process. However,'the MS hires do not posses any special skills. Most of them fake their experiences to get into the companies.' this is not entirely true.

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

#335

Post by Apocryphon »

CodeSheikh wrote: post #73
d--b wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really think there is not enough jobs for American software developers?

If you are a decent software developer there is a guaranteed job for you, unless you code in COBOL or FORTRAN. Heck, people are jumping ships and we hire people from English or Humanities background who go and do 6 months intensive coding boot camps. Wake up and go find opportunities for yourself. Jobs don't come to you. Get yourself out there and be known. Put your hobby projects on Github. Attend Meetups and networ…

I thought that COBOL devs have guaranteed jobs, given the startlingly number of legacy systems out there that urgently need people to maintain them and prevent our nation's aged banking databases from collapsing.

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

#336

Post by Apocryphon »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #332
Apocryphon wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Congrats - you've discovered that compensation has shifted from taxable wages to untaxed benefits. If you want to solve this then ban employer sponsored health care, matched 401k contributions, and all that.

The WWII-era holdover of making American employers be responsible for their employee healthcare is definitely something that should be gradually reformed out of existence. It used to be an incentive, not a necessity.

And as for 401(k)s, well that's another can of worms that needs to be dealt with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13304027

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

#337

Post by verst »

nostrademons wrote: post #319

It's worth putting in a shout-out to Lofgren's H1B bill: https://lofgren.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentI... Far from "emasculating" it like the article suggests, the "bucketing" system in Lofgren's bill is designed to put upward pressure on all wages, including those of American citizens. The way that it works is that positions paying in the top 2/3 of the average wage for their geographical area will ge…

I'm a big fan of her bill for the above (market-based) approach and other reasons:

- F-1 student visa becomes dual-intent. This is huge! Essentially an employer could now sponsor permanent residency directly out of a PhD program (or even college assuming sufficient work experience for employment-based immigration). No need to first get a H-1B.

- It appears that switching employers while on the H-1B becomes easier (the new employer must only submit the Labor Condition Application). This will provide mobility to H-1B workers and therefore not suppress wages.

- 20% of H-1B visas are set aside for startups and small businesses, and to prevent these from becoming subsidiaries of outsourcing firms the H-1B holder may not be working at a 3rd party worksite for more than 30 days.

- H-1B dependent companies (8 H-1Bs if Note: I'm a former Math & Comp Sci (double major) international student (F-1 visa) from a top tier school, then H-1B, permanent resident, and this week (!) will become a citizen.

Bill Summary: https://lofgren.house.gov/uploadedfiles/high_skilled_bill_sx...

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

#338

Post by darioush »

Another category of immigrants who'd benefit from such a situation is the "grad student visa" students.

The US academic system (in STEM) has for too long relied on "free labor" of hard working, poorly treated grad students from countries like India, China, and Iran (paid minimum wage, often not adjusted for high living costs of cities like LA or Seattle). US students often don't go to grad school because as engineers they'd earn a lot of money and are less susceptible to being poorly treated by their boss. The visa is technically non-immigrant, but students often then get H1B jobs (yay for more abuse).

The whole thing is a travesty. This is pretty much exploiting other countries for natural resources, except instead of resources we exploit them for talent.

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

#339

Post by droopyEyelids »

mseebach wrote: post #310

Every time the topic comes up, I wonder how many of the HN'ers who are cross at H-1B workers because they are depressing wages are intellectually consistent (and honest) enough to accept that this position is part and parcel of the same system of nationalist thought that leads to a wall to Mexico and steeply increased tariffs on chinese import; of "America First"? If you find yourself reconciling the idea of protecti…

The wall equivalence makes sense to me, but you're stretching the analogy to include tariffs on foreign made goods.

With illegal immigration (wall) and H1B, you're describing the creation of a second class of workers within a country that depress wages within that country by having a separate, unequal workforce.

With foreign made goods you're describing a situation where workers from different countries have different protections, but those protections are consistent within the country.

Thats a big distinction to obliterate.

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

#340

Post by Bartweiss »

anjc wrote: post #297
Bartweiss wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I'm agreeing with that? There are a bunch of negations in the quote, so: I think there is a talent shortage in some domains. My point was that the major sources of the "no shortage" or particularly "surplus" claims are doing shoddy math that over-represents the labor pool and under-represents demand. Also, more importantly, they're conflating all types of programming. There are certainly skillsets/inter…

You're probably right there. And there's presumably shortages and surpluses in different regions of the US. A telling statistic is the amount of people who graduate with IT or STEM degrees, have intentions of working in their respective industries, but have to leave due to an inability to get work, or...unemployment rates for graduates with certain degrees. It was about 7-12% a couple of years ago for grads from CS,…

Wow. That's a decently narrow standard, and I had no idea it was so high.

I object to some specifics - IS without programming education is quite different from CS/programming - but it's still a potent statistic. More narrowly, my (cynical) take is that CS degrees are decidedly unequal. Having seen multiple companies say they only bother with top-seven job fairs, and some genuinely talented friends struggle to land interviews with third-string universities on their resumes, I get the sense that the "shortage" and "surplus" are capable of existing side-by-side.

I completely agree with your conclusion, since it holds regardless of whether I'm right about segmentation within CS degrees: a lot of people are being unhelpfully pushed into "employable" STEM degrees by people who want to look science-friendly, and they're going to be left holding the (unemployment) bag when that doesn't work out.

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