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

Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

thehill.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 571 posts

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#551

Post by tekknik »

Seattle3503 wrote: post #411
DaSHacka wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, I cannot believe how all the most pro-workers rights people I know also support "open borders"-like philosophies. What do you think is going to happen to your bargaining power as an employee when your employer has an infinite workforce to draw from?

> What do you think is going to happen to your bargaining power as an employee when your employer has an infinite workforce to draw from? To assumption that there is a finite amount of work in the economy is called "lump of labour fallacy" in economics. It's not useful to ask "What if X were infinite and we held everything else constant?"

this relates to the economy as a whole, individual industries expand and contract their demand and given the advent of AI we’re in a contraction moment. I vote until the economy stabilizes we terminate H1Bs

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#552

Post by tekknik »

almostgotcaught wrote: post #360
DaSHacka wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, I cannot believe how all the most pro-workers rights people I know also support "open borders"-like philosophies. What do you think is going to happen to your bargaining power as an employee when your employer has an infinite workforce to draw from?

> This, I cannot believe how all the most pro-workers rights people I know also support "open borders"-like philosophies. You ever consider that it's because those people are pro-workers everywhere and not just workers nearby? So yes enabling foreign workers to improve their lives by coming here makes perfect sense. > What do you think is going to happen to your bargaining power as an employee when your employer has…

> You ever consider that it's because those people are pro-workers everywhere and not just workers nearby? So yes enabling foreign workers to improve their lives by coming here makes perfect sense.

so then by doing this they hurt the worker here in favor of a worker in some other country?

> I mean that's like saying "what do you think is gonna happen to your rights once all the slaves are free".

when the word slave wasn’t mention at all by the parent, how did you conclude anything about slavery?

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#553

Post by qwezxcrty »

sarchertech wrote: post #492
qwezxcrty wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case some technical aspects needs rework... Currently O1 visa being a nonimmigrant visa have no path to PR/citizenship (unlike H1Bs) and need annual renewal. This make it unattractive to "who possess extraordinary ability".

You can apply for an EB-1A greencard or a national interest waiver green card while on an O1 visa. You can also get an employer sponsored green card similarly to what you’d do if you were on an H-1B.

Yes, but even for people eligible for EB1A (it usually has a higher bar in practice, EB2/NIW is easier but way worse backlog), filing a (or according to some lesser stringent interpretation, having an approved) I-140, will make you have immigration intent and thus illegible for extension of any nonimmigration visa.

So you apply for green card and if you don't immediately get it (particularly because of the backlog for some countries), you have to leave the US.

(I'm not an immigration lawyer and these are only my personal interpretation).

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#554

Post by franktankbank »

int_19h wrote: post #367
franktankbank wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visas coming from India are semi-non-consensual and kickback heavy, I'm not sure the incentives work out the way you expect. Fuck H-1B into the ground and fuck green cards while we're at it.

What is the problem with green cards?

I think we should not give them when there is a backdrop of fraud on the visas they came on.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#555

Post by rkomorn »

me-vs-cat wrote: post #537
cm2187 wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's not like if the employee gets nothing out of this bargain. The company in exchange sponsors the visa. It's not unreasonable that they get a minimum number of years of work from the employee in exchange.

Are you describing H-1B or indentured servitude?

As someone who's had 3 different H-1Bs, I'd say that the employer that treated me the worst treated their other employees the worst as well. I got a green card, and eventually citizenship, and the treatment I got wasn't remarkably different either.

I think the "H-1B is indentured servitude" thing is a bit of a red herring, tbh. Many US employers are generally crappy.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#556

Post by franktankbank »

tomhow wrote: post #395
franktankbank wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The guidelines apply equally to everyone. It makes all the difference whether a comment is worded in a way that promotes curious conversation vs rage.

They are quite subjective. IMO it's not very controversial to say they often exclude interesting corners of discussion. The nitty gritty of employee/employer dynamics for one.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#557

Post by me-vs-cat »

rkomorn wrote: post #555
me-vs-cat wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you describing H-1B or indentured servitude?

As someone who's had 3 different H-1Bs, I'd say that the employer that treated me the worst treated their other employees the worst as well. I got a green card, and eventually citizenship, and the treatment I got wasn't remarkably different either. I think the "H-1B is indentured servitude" thing is a bit of a red herring, tbh. Many US employers are generally crappy.

Thank you for sharing your experience.

I cannot see how to justify H-1B as a benefit the employer provides for the worker, because it just sounds exploitive, like the comment above.

I can see justification only as a benefit to the employer (and the society allowing the immigration) when there are truly not enough acceptable candidates. I'm left wondering how that can be true when so many employers routinely hide postings.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#558

Post by casey2 »

1024core wrote: post #202

A lot of these problems could be solved if H1-B's were given out in order of salary (I think there's such a proposal going around recently). And by that I mean: something like a Dutch auction. Give H1-Bs to the top 85K paying jobs (maybe normalized to SoL in the region, I'm sure the BLS has some idea on how to do it). The lure of H1-Bs is the money savings, and the fact that if you're on an H1-B, you're practically a…

You could also "solve" these problems by cutting every social service. That's the only reason H1-Bs are willing to work for less, because their country doesn't invest nearly as much into them.

People seem to have a moral problem with cutting social services, I wonder why this doesn't go both ways when hiring foreign nationals who can only work because their country doesn't.

They don't even have to be foreign red states have been supplying silicon valley with cheap labor for decades. If you want the pure solution you would have to block hiring from these states too, not just H1B. Do you really want to exploit someone who was taught that the earth is 6000 years old and will also have to uproot their live when they are fired?

You can try to classify underprivileged workers and scale compensation based on their class, but any mistakes would lead to unfair wages. The real solution is to increase the standard of living in developing countries and decrease the standard of living in advanced countries starting with relatively wealthy people. Your solution is just a weird soft ban that implicitly buys into the propaganda that there are genius H1B workers when we all know why companies hire them.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#559

Post by thephyber »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #355
thephyber wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean “fair”? What happens in the years/decades between when this hypothetical system is enacted and when the US can train up sufficient workers to substitute the labor force we currently have with H1-B? Your proposal will mean 99% of all of the H1-B allocation will go to hedge fund quants and 1% maybe go to an AI researcher, but all of the materials science (eg. Cutting edge battery tech), semiconductor f…

exactly wrong. Americans are dissuaded from going into these highly skilled fields because anyone talented enough to do those things realizes they can make much more building SAASes or working on wall street. the Boeingization of the economy is mbas and bean counter middle management realizing that an H1-B is much cheaper than a citizen and opting to buy that labor, even if it's worse quality. as management, you put…

Your comment has a thin veneer of truth, but actually has very little to do with H1-B system.

Boeing is full of bean counters now, but they are optimizing things like opening factories in poor non-unions states (the South Carolina factory has had lots of whistleblowers screaming about lack of training and pressure to build faster than is safe), convincing the FAA to let Boeing employees do regulatory review on their own company, etc. few or none of Boeing’s problems are solved by eliminating/reducing H1-Bs for that company/industry, which is why I chose them as the example.

“Americans are dissuaded…”

This has an emotional appeal to intuition, but I don’t think it’s what’s causing Americans not to compete for jobs/industries that heavily use H1-B. If it was, there would simply be a market competition and those programmer salaries would drop. Instead, I think Americans have been convinced by Theil types to avoid US universities (either for cultural reasons or ROI reasons). You seem to be making an argument that the ROI would be better if H1-Bs were scarce, but that wouldn’t change the fact that tuition in elite US institutions is expensive and seats are scarce+competitive. Without also changing either the university system to seat more students or companies to hire from different signals (instead of highly prizing the bland name of the university), American job applicants won’t be dissuaded from getting those degrees.

Arguably H1-Bs have done the most damage to US programmers, but there are several other structural problems regarding programmer hiring in the US. The big tech collusion to reduce employee poaching (not current, but recent past), application process (“resume firewall”, ghost jobs, deluge of automated applications), the interview process (we seem to have optimized for gotcha questions and LeetCoding tests, rather than real world requirements), high interest rates (higher than the recent past) have squeezed VC funding and closed the wallets of employers, and the race to replace/augment salary employees with AI agents. All of these are structural problems that arguably do more dissuading than the visa system.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#560

Post by BeFlatXIII »

like_any_other wrote: post #421
legitster wrote: post #172

So I was at a company that did this a lot - it was much less nefarious than on the surface. It was usually related to them recruiting a certain specialist or acquiring a team at another company. But the only way to get these people visas was to post the jobs publicly and hide them as much as possible. They did this by the hundreds, and it wasn't really a cost saving measure - if you are trying to get anybody in parti…

> Is it unfair? Maybe. But in my opinion anything is fairer than our country's evil immigration requirements. For some reason those stupid racist citizens don't want to compete with the whole world in a borderless economic zone. Thankfully we have wise corporations to subvert democracy for the better.

Some call it subverting the tyrrany of the majority.
Post reply on HN