Abolish the H1B. Now.
Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs
341–350 of 350 posts
Re: Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trump's EO is crafted to hurt only Indian IT companies like Infosys, Wipro etc. American companies are more or less excluded from the EO.
False. Trump's EO, if anything, helps Infosys since the new systems (level lottery) are very easy to game
Trump’s EO - 100K H1B applies only to applicants from India, which is what Indian IT companies mainly focus on.
Those who are in US or students on F1 visa are exempted and American companies like Amazon or FB or Google hire students or existing H1Bs.
Re: Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs
#343H1B is used to hire the best talent that gets paid big bucks as well as cheap talent that is paid less. Both are true. It depends on the company. I haven't seen Google or FB or Amazon or other top tech companies pay H1B any less. They get paid pretty well. But firing people (some might be on H1B too) and hiring H1B at the same time is meaningless. Btw, if you want to stop people from getting fired, J Powell needs to…
I've worked at Google and Amazon. Both paid H-1B less than their american counterparts. In particular because the H-1B workers didn't jump companies as frequent.
All H1B salaries are posted online. First of thats the law.
Google , Facebook etc all post salaries of every H1B application. The salaries are always in top 5% of Software engineering salaries.
You are making stuff up or ignorant of H1B process.
Re: Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs
#344H1B is used to hire the best talent that gets paid big bucks as well as cheap talent that is paid less. Both are true. It depends on the company. I haven't seen Google or FB or Amazon or other top tech companies pay H1B any less. They get paid pretty well. But firing people (some might be on H1B too) and hiring H1B at the same time is meaningless. Btw, if you want to stop people from getting fired, J Powell needs to…
Lowering interest rates to juice the economy is done when unemployment rises … which hasn’t happened yet in the wider economy. Juiced economy and free cash is what led to massive inflation. Powell is trying to save hay until winter - when we get a recession the interest rates cuts are the only knob he has to turn to soften the blow.
He inflated the market on purpose for longer than needed. Every economist was screaming to stop and he also played games during elections by lowering interest rate when it was not needed. This only resulted in rates being higher for longer.
Re: Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs
#345[dead]
Re: Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prime age employment is near all time highs: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060 20-24 age employment has been about the same for last 16 years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300036
It’s not at all time highs. Your chart combines the data for both genders, which causes the decline in employment to be masked by the separate trend of women working outside the home. Male prime age employment is down 10 percentage points from 1955: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRAC25MAUSM156S Male 20-24 employment rate is down 14 percentage points since 1960: https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_labor_force_parti…
A higher percentage of prime age adults are working outside the house than almost any time in recent US history. I don’t understand why an analysis of the state of US employment should exclude women, can you please expand on your reasoning?
Re: Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not at all time highs. Your chart combines the data for both genders, which causes the decline in employment to be masked by the separate trend of women working outside the home. Male prime age employment is down 10 percentage points from 1955: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRAC25MAUSM156S Male 20-24 employment rate is down 14 percentage points since 1960: https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_labor_force_parti…
A higher percentage of prime age adults are working outside the house than almost any time in recent US history. I don’t understand why an analysis of the state of US employment should exclude women, can you please expand on your reasoning?
The analysis has to compare apples to apples. Raising families and homemaking is also work. Women going to work outside the home reflects a change in the type of work, not the employment level. But your analysis artificially treats them as having been out of work before and now employed.
Re: Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the kind words! To clarify, I certainly agree it's possible for a business to succeed without using H1B visas, especially for something small at the the scale of TinyPilot (7 people when I sold). I just mean on a large scale, the companies that use H1B visas will generally outcompete the ones that don't. What's the cost difference between a US citizen and an H1B? I'd guess it's something around 20% less ex…
> Thanks for the kind words! You deserve and earned them! > There's so much frictional cost to hiring someone on an H1B visa (legal fees, admin overhead) that it's not practical if you're only hiring 1-2 employees Very true but as you saw in my email, I have extremely experienced friends back in India who I have been able to hire as contractors without issue. No H1B - just plain old Slack, email and Forgejo. The play…
>> the government designed it to be employer-agnostic
> The other interpretation of being employer-agnostic is that the H1B isn't tied to a "sponsoring company" and doesn't require any of the transfer shenanigans.
Right, this is what I was talking about.
I think the current system gives H1B employers way too much leverage over H1B employees and degrades the job market for everyone. Employers can tell H1Bs that they have to work evenings and weekends or be fired and leave the country. And then the same employer can turn around and tell US citizen employees that they also have to work evenings and weekends because the H1B employees are doing it. They have less leverage over the citizens because the citizens can get another job more easily, but forcing H1Bs to establish precedent definitely does pressure other employees, and I've seen this happen directly.
> So for it to be employer-agnostic, we need to remove the "dual intention" - the very carrot employers use (if you tough it out through all those JIRA tickets, you'll get to be a citizen!)
I think you could design it without such an obvious loophole, but I agree that there are probably loopholes no matter how you design it.
That said, I'm a bit confused about our disagreement at this point.
I think the H1B system is a net negative for the US economy, and it disproportionately hurts small businesses. I'd be in favor of a revised H1B system that allows companies to fill short-term labor shortages with foreign workers but with limits that prevent companies from abusing the system to depress wages and conditions for US workers, as they currently do with H1B today.
It sounds like your argument is that H1B doesn't matter because the companies using it aren't really innovating and so they'll naturally be outcompeted by smaller businesses who are too small to take advantage of the H1B system. Is that correct?
Also, I'm confused because you're saying you advocate free market solutions and that's why we shouldn't mess with the H1B system. The H1B system is the opposite of a free market solution. It's extra regulation that we'd be better off without.
Re: Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Thanks for the kind words! You deserve and earned them! > There's so much frictional cost to hiring someone on an H1B visa (legal fees, admin overhead) that it's not practical if you're only hiring 1-2 employees Very true but as you saw in my email, I have extremely experienced friends back in India who I have been able to hire as contractors without issue. No H1B - just plain old Slack, email and Forgejo. The play…
>> the government designed it to be employer-agnostic > The other interpretation of being employer-agnostic is that the H1B isn't tied to a "sponsoring company" and doesn't require any of the transfer shenanigans. Right, this is what I was talking about. I think the current system gives H1B employers way too much leverage over H1B employees and degrades the job market for everyone. Employers can tell H1Bs that they h…
Michael, Thank You for reading and responding back.
We disagree on the diagnosis and path forward, not the symptoms. Let me explain:
> I think the current system gives H1B employers way too much leverage over H1B employees and degrades the job market for everyone
Correct and it's by design. The overhead of H1B needs to be in the black when it hits the bottomline - the H1B isn't a charity auction to take brilliant engineers from developing countries and move them into the U.S. - it's to ensure the companies turn a profit on it.
> I think the H1B system is a net negative for the US economy, and it disproportionately hurts small businesses
Correct again on both accounts. While it is a brilliant solution 1% of the time, it's misused 99% of the time.
> It sounds like your argument is that H1B doesn't matter because the companies using it aren't really innovating and so they'll naturally be outcompeted by smaller businesses who are too small to take advantage of the H1B system. Is that correct?
Correct again
> you're saying you advocate free market solutions and that's why we shouldn't mess with the H1B system. The H1B system is the opposite of a free market solution. It's extra regulation that we'd be better off without
Correct again
Where I disagree with you is when you said we need to add more regulation to the existing H1B system. To me, and this is not something I'm hearing for the first time, it sounds like a band aid on top of a bunch of band aids 12 feet deep.
The H1B system was wonderful when it was initially implemented. The U.S. was undergoing massive technological shifts leading to tremendous supply shocks - just like how we are struggling to purchase GPUs, RAM and SSD today. As much as we disagree, history has proven repeatedly this shock will pass (unless the market is distorted by new regulation).
However the H1B has long since distorted into a geo-arbitrage, QoL and CoL hack. Even the current administration's $100k fee is a bandaid. Just the fully loaded cost of a 4-6 year domestic education is more than that, so the domestic supply is being destroyed.
Ideally what should happen is we should decommission the H1B completely, no ifs and buts, and have a "cool down" period where we notice what impact it actually has on the domestic demand. I do appreciate that this isn't accounting for the case where there are only a 1000 people worldwide who know how to train an LLM from scratch, or, 1000 toptier cardiologists worldwide that we would like to attract - I'm very sure we will figure something out for them but I argue we need to discover why our domestic supply is lacking in the first place instead of continuing to rely on band aids.
The U.S. today seems to rely on stents to save it from heart attacks. We should probably take a strong, hard look at the diet and lifestyle choices instead of continuing to rely on stents as a savior. It was necessary when we had an emergency, but a sustained reliance on emergency intervention points to underlying structural issues.
Re: Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the requirement is that the job is for a speciality occupation and that the H1B be paid the prevailing wage for that job, not that there was an attempt to hire locally first. For an I-140 PERM (employment based green card) however the requirement is that there was an effort made to hire locally first. Most people on HN are uninformed about this, well actually uninformed in general.
The jobs filled via H-1B are not “specialty” positions, everyone knows this. I know that’s what the visa is ostensibly supposed to be used for, but it’s a very silly thing to pretend at this stage. I agree that many are uninformed on this, and my friends who don’t work in tech think someone on an H-1B visa is like a “particle physics PhD” or something, and not “database administrator” or “backend engineer”.
Well, it doesn't matter what your friends think about what a "speciality occupation" is. What matters is what USCIS and DOL consider a speciality occupation - the "speciality" is that it requires specialized knowledge and training which jobs in software development and even database administration would most certainly qualify for. From https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/h-1b-spec...:
> The occupation requires:
> Theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge; and > Attainment of a bachelor's or higher degree in a directly related* specific specialty (or its equivalent) as a minimum for entry into the occupation in the United States.