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U.S. immigration policy has been a boon for the tech industry in Canada

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Re: U.S. immigration policy has been a boon for the tech industry in Canada

#381

Post by closeparen »

angry_octet wrote: post #367
closeparen wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

H1B salaries are public. For my employer anyway, the salaries paid to H1Bs are about the same as for anyone else at those levels.

Another way to look at it is that the salaries of other workers are pegged to the salaries of H1B workers. There is a way to improve this situation -- allow H1B workers to easily change employers. Alternatively, employing an H1B requires paying into a tuition scholarship fund. $50k/year sounds reasonable to me.

I dunno, from the 98th percentile I’m not too anxious to move to 99th. I’m much more worried about losing my Chinese friends and colleagues.

And no amount of tuition assistance is going to make more than a handful of the kids I grew up with capable of this work.

Re: U.S. immigration policy has been a boon for the tech industry in Canada

#382

Post by tgflynn »

Retric wrote: post #338
tgflynn wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the cost of transporting the energy from where it's generated (say Nevada) to where it's needed (say New York) ? EDIT: I think for that use case you'll find that a reasonable technology doesn't exist for transporting electrons over that distance (I don't think there are any superconducting transmission lines in actual use) but pipelines have been around for a long time.

“A 1,100 kV link in China was completed in 2019 over a distance of 3,300 km with a power of 12 GW.” Which is rather close to your example. By comparison a major gas pipeline runs around 8 Million dollars a mile or ~16 Billion over that distance meanwhile that link cost under 6 billion USD. Granted our construction costs would be higher, but it’s not the kind of massive savings that changes the equation much.

In that case how far are we from being able to supply all US electric needs with solar ?

I think I've heard that with current solar cells you could produce that much power with a 100 mile x 100 mile installation in a sunny location.

If battery storage and power transmission are solved problems, are the obstacles now only economic ?

Re: U.S. immigration policy has been a boon for the tech industry in Canada

#383

Post by msie »

jbarham wrote: post #97
Phanyxx wrote: post #24

Vancouverite here. When major tech companies started setting up satellite offices here, I assumed it'd be a temporary situation, and that we'd be at the mercy of any change in the U.S. immigration process. The longer there's an immigration bottleneck though, the more entrenched these companies become here. There are more senior roles opening up here all the time, and salaries are increasing in this competitive market…

I've also lived in Toronto and Vancouver. Did the obligatory move to work as a software dev in California and now live in Australia. The fact is that tech salaries in Canada are still much lower than the US while the cost of living, especially housing, is still very high, for Vancouver and Toronto in particular. Not to mention the lousy winters. Spend any time browsing /r/vancouver or /r/toronto and you'll quickly re…

Saying that money laundering solely affected the Vancouver housing market is simplistic and the press is successful in pushing this narrative. How about other factors like lots of people want to move to Vancouver (only major Canadian city on the west coast) and the effect of major tech companies setting up shop here? Also the greed of condo developers and landlords?

Re: U.S. immigration policy has been a boon for the tech industry in Canada

#384

Post by angry_octet »

closeparen wrote: post #381
angry_octet wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another way to look at it is that the salaries of other workers are pegged to the salaries of H1B workers. There is a way to improve this situation -- allow H1B workers to easily change employers. Alternatively, employing an H1B requires paying into a tuition scholarship fund. $50k/year sounds reasonable to me.

I dunno, from the 98th percentile I’m not too anxious to move to 99th. I’m much more worried about losing my Chinese friends and colleagues. And no amount of tuition assistance is going to make more than a handful of the kids I grew up with capable of this work.

I think it is quite likely that there are many people in the US who are smart enough but lack the $100k to go to university for 4 years. Not saying that immigration is bad, but there are many US citizens who could participate if they had education.

The US skims some of the best students and programmers from around the world, but also people who are equivalent but cheaper, and also indentured.

Re: U.S. immigration policy has been a boon for the tech industry in Canada

#385

Post by jandrese »

unishark wrote: post #363
what_ever wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an employment based GC not diversity based. The primary criteria should be how good the person is as an employee and not where they were born.

You mean if the govt could somehow assess quality? That would be nice if you have a good idea how to do that. But companies have two priorities: one is a high skill level and the other is lower pay. If we simply removed country caps from the current system then it would be dominated by certain countries with the highest pay difference. The smartest scientist in Germany would be waiting in line behind hundreds of thou…

Today the smartest scientist in India could be waiting behind hundreds of thousands of far-less-skilled programmers.

Re: U.S. immigration policy has been a boon for the tech industry in Canada

#386

Post by fzeroracer »

frockington1 wrote: post #328
fzeroracer wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source for salary and total comp spiking over the past four years? Because as a software engineer with a lot of software engineer friends, none of us have seen that.

https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-develope... If you are not seeing growth you may need to gain more marketable skills. Whenever hiring people, more in demand skill sets definitely command a higher salary

You specifically said in the past four years salary and comp has spiked as a result of the stock market and unemployment.

But what you linked does not clearly indicate that at all considering growth has been consistent over the past 8 years. In fact it seems that salary outlook has even slowed slightly over the past four years.

This does not match your claim at all.

Re: U.S. immigration policy has been a boon for the tech industry in Canada

#387

Post by thorwasdfasdf »

0xffff2 wrote: post #347
wiglaf1979 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No joke. My team has three branches: * Sunnyvale, CA * Bentonville, AR * Bangalore, India We regularly will gossip about best/worst aspects of each of them. My mind is blown at how much they have to pay to live in the greater SF area. 3-4k for rent on an apartment for a small family. My mortgage is 800 a month. A mortgage with a yard big enough for gardens, a bee hive, compost, a couple of trees, basketball goal, fen…

Did you "gossip" about pay? Despite my sky-high rent (although 1-bedroom apartments can certainly be had for much less than $3k) I'm financially better off in the bay area than I would be with any outside the bay area job offer I've gotten. My net-after-housing pay is higher here than any offer or salary range I've seen in places I'd want to move to like Oregon or Reno.

are you gonna have kids? if so that equation is going to change a huge amount. Just see what it does to your spreadsheet once you factor in 3k/month child care, and the cost of living in a place big enough for a small family, etc. did you look at the massive difference cost in eating out and groceries? housing and taxes?

Re: U.S. immigration policy has been a boon for the tech industry in Canada

#388

Post by sg47 »

coolplants wrote: post #376
sg47 wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not illegal. It's just a different way to obtain a green card faster. By the way, I'm one of those people that's NOT gaming the system if there was any confusion. I've been waiting patiently for 9 years now. I'll have to wait for the foreseeable future or do something about this. Moving to Canada or back to India seems to be the only two options if I don't like waiting.

Stop gaming our system, stop recommending others game our system.

I'm doing neither.

Re: U.S. immigration policy has been a boon for the tech industry in Canada

#389

Post by 0xffff2 »

thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #387
0xffff2 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you "gossip" about pay? Despite my sky-high rent (although 1-bedroom apartments can certainly be had for much less than $3k) I'm financially better off in the bay area than I would be with any outside the bay area job offer I've gotten. My net-after-housing pay is higher here than any offer or salary range I've seen in places I'd want to move to like Oregon or Reno.

are you gonna have kids? if so that equation is going to change a huge amount. Just see what it does to your spreadsheet once you factor in 3k/month child care, and the cost of living in a place big enough for a small family, etc. did you look at the massive difference cost in eating out and groceries? housing and taxes?

Yes, I budget down to the penny every month so I am factoring in all of it. I don't have any interest in having kids, so that's an angle I hadn't considered.

Re: U.S. immigration policy has been a boon for the tech industry in Canada

#390

Post by geebee »

It's remarkable that the United States can have the highest number of immigrants for any country by a wide margin and still be in this position.

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/interactives/internationa...

Over 44 million residents of the US were not born in the US, as opposed to 8 million in Canada. As a percentage of the population, that's lower than Canada, but by weight of sheer numbers, the US shouldn't have any problem with this.

The US takes over 1.2 million immigrants into the country every year, we just don't have much of a skilled immigration system - ours is largely based on family reunification. Canada and Australia, on the other hand, have a points based system that favors immigrants with education and skills.

I actually do blame the high tech industry for some of this. I just don't think it's a "bug" that the US system was largely based on a very indentured approach, where high tech companies got to decide who is allowed into the US and the circumstances under which they are allowed to remain, with long, grueling waits for a green card, where a would-be immigrant was beholden to an employer (called a "sponsor") and could be fired and deported at the employer's pleasure.

Facebook, Google, Apple, all the big companies - you see, what they wanted was a freer, more open system where skilled immigrants got to choose what they'd study, where they'd work, what companies they'd work for, and even whether they'd work in tech in the first place, in accordance with their own personal values and interests and market signals such as salary, cost of living, and work conditions.

That's what google and Facebook wanted. Unfortunately, all they could get was an visa that they bestow and control, putting them in a position to determine micro aspects of a would-be immigrants life.

Right. This utterly corporate self serving H1B guest worker visa system that undermines markets and is an affront to freedom did terrible damage to the public perception of skilled immigration.

Want to be clear, I don't blame anyone for working on an H1B, this wasn't your choice, and it was your only option. Don't blame you for going to Canada, either. But I just don't buy it from the corporate lobbyists. This was hardly a bug, to the companies that make heavy use of the H1B, the control over the worker's right to live int the US is a feature, and they lobbied hard for it.

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