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India's tech industry panics over U.S. plans to change high-skilled visas

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Re: India's tech industry panics over U.S. plans to change high-skilled visas

#81

Post by bruceb »

VLM wrote: post #57
Lord_Yoda wrote: post #34

Trying to play a devil's advocate, I might be downvoted here right away. Disclosure: I am not going to be affected by this, but I do work in tech industry. 1. With the decline of low-wage tech workers, where do you think the mundane/non-value added work they do will go? Not everything will/can be outsourced, and you don't want to your USD 130K employee to do that. There is a real scarcity of tech skilled workers in t…

"There is a real scarcity of tech skilled workers in the US." That is a blatant falsehood it only exists due to "culture fit" where you can only hire a skilled tech worker if they're also a 20-something white male Stanford grad living in SV or maybe NYC. Try just considering hiring a person of color or a woman. There's a hell of a lot of them, they're not much worse at their jobs than the young white boys, but on the…

http://www.mercurynews.com/2012/11/29/asian-workers-now-domi... (admittedly from 2012)

Re: India's tech industry panics over U.S. plans to change high-skilled visas

#82

Post by jawilson2 »

mhurron wrote: post #61
VLM wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There is a real scarcity of tech skilled workers in the US." That is a blatant falsehood it only exists due to "culture fit" where you can only hire a skilled tech worker if they're also a 20-something white male Stanford grad living in SV or maybe NYC. Try just considering hiring a person of color or a woman. There's a hell of a lot of them, they're not much worse at their jobs than the young white boys, but on the…

> Try just considering hiring a person of color or a woman. There's a hell of a lot of them, they're not much worse at their jobs than the young white boys Why do you believe women and minorities are worse workers than whites?

I'm assuming this was dripping with sarcasm.

Re: India's tech industry panics over U.S. plans to change high-skilled visas

#83

Post by eklavya »

sudhirj wrote: post #8

Heh. Depends on which part of India you're referring to. The younger me would have found it more difficult to get foreign assignments that form the foundation for a lot of the house buying and marriage making here, but I think the slightly more experienced folks like present me welcome the change - that is the low end of the salary range I'd expect if I was going to jump countries with a family, and now I don't have…

Just how big do you think the Indian IT outsourcing industry is in the big Indian picture? I wouldn't be so sure to predict wholesale social and economic changes :D

Re: India's tech industry panics over U.S. plans to change high-skilled visas

#84

Post by ChrisBland »

I'm not sure I understand the outrage from India. If you look at their standards to receive a visa to work there:

The applicant should be a highly skilled and/or qualified professional being engaged or appointed by a company or organization or industry or undertaking in India on contract or an employment basis at a senior level, skilled position such as technical expert, senior executive, or in a managerial position, etc.

There should not be a qualified Indian available to do the job that the visa holder would be performing.

The employee's salary must be in excess of U.S. $25,000 per year (seems small until you put it in perspective: $3,168 is the average household income in India.)

Meaning it is almost 8x avg household income for a salary requirement in India. If you equate that to the us average household income of $51,939, the H1B should be at $402,000 here

Re: India's tech industry panics over U.S. plans to change high-skilled visas

#85

Post by bruceb »

sandGorgon wrote: post #11

nobody is freaking out. Infosys and TCS are NOT India's representative companies anymore. They are the Flipkarts and the Olacabs and Paytms now. Or even Freshdesk, Zoho and Helpshift. I think most people welcome the move - we have lost many good potential employees who were headhunted by outsourcing companies by showing them the American dream and then chained to the yoke in some dreadful job. The services business i…

Infosys has market cap 34b, Flipkart valuation is tumbling and now at 5b.

While not as cool as startups, Infosys and TCS are still much bigger and more stable companies.

Re: India's tech industry panics over U.S. plans to change high-skilled visas

#86

Post by coredog64 »

nulldevz wrote: post #77
beachstartup wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this culture of abusing your workers spills out into the US workforce as well. i've known people (us citizens) who have had to send lawyer letters to get their invoices paid by these consultancy firms, who aren't used to getting pushback from their servants. sometimes in the tens of thousands of dollars for high end work. of course the bad behavior stops immediately when they get a nice little letter with an american…

Yeah ... these measures don't really address the underlying issue of scumbag executives. They're just going to find another way to pay for cheap labor, e.g., shifting revenue to countries with cheap labor. This move may actually expedite a major shift of software engineering to other countries. In turn, it could help improve other countries' infrastructure creating a positive feedback loop for outsourcing. Unintended…

Actual offshoring is a lot more difficult to manage than H1B candidates who sit in your office.

For the former, the big names are well versed in churning out billable hours regardless of actual work performed. The 11-12 hour time difference can sometimes be a boon, but more often than not leads to both your remote and local employees being unhappy. Local employees because they're asked to stay late or come in early, and remote employees because access to transit is more difficult if only US business hours are an option.

Re: India's tech industry panics over U.S. plans to change high-skilled visas

#87

Post by horshod »

geebee wrote: post #76
horshod wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's the most important issue here I think. This might be appropriate, at the most, for SFO and possibly NYC. But what about the rest of the country where the cost of living is much lower? I (an Indian H1B holder) worked in WI, where I made 73K as a fresher and was able to have a nice apartment and a good life in general and save half of my salary. I think, while the current 60K minimum pay may be too low, 130K…

I'm not as convinced about these cost of living arguments. One could argue that pay is higher in SF and NY because developers create more value in these locations, not because these locations are more expensive. In short, why should someone in Wisconsin get to pay only 100k when someone in NY or SF would pay $130k, or $200k? In fact, why should an employer get to hire anyone at all, even at "market rate"? Normally, w…

Yes, I agree with the latter part of your response if the assumption that there are Americans available to do this job, just not at such a low salary, is true.

I don't see how developers in SF or NY create more value just by virtue of being geographically located there. The cost of living argument IS about the free market at work, isn't it? Forget about the immigrants vs citizens aspect of it for a minute. Company A in WI could hire a resident for 90K because the resident spends only about $1000 on rent, but if the same person were to go to SFO a company B would have to pay them way more so they can afford to pay $2000 on rent. Isn't this the reason salary calculators exist? Am I missing something? I don't think this has anything to do with immigration specifically.

Re: India's tech industry panics over U.S. plans to change high-skilled visas

#88

Post by VLM »

mhurron wrote: post #61
VLM wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There is a real scarcity of tech skilled workers in the US." That is a blatant falsehood it only exists due to "culture fit" where you can only hire a skilled tech worker if they're also a 20-something white male Stanford grad living in SV or maybe NYC. Try just considering hiring a person of color or a woman. There's a hell of a lot of them, they're not much worse at their jobs than the young white boys, but on the…

> Try just considering hiring a person of color or a woman. There's a hell of a lot of them, they're not much worse at their jobs than the young white boys Why do you believe women and minorities are worse workers than whites?

That was sarcasm. If read with an emphasis on the 'much' not the 'worse', even if you give the coastal tech employers the benefit of the doubt WRT the direction of the greater or less than symbol, the absolute value of the difference in performance observed has been unmeasurably small over the last couple decades.

The coasties seem to claim its just a cost of doing business that companies will fall apart if a woman is hired or a black is hired, but my personal experience far from the coasts is they do just fine.

I just find the whole situation comparing coastal culture and midwest development culture frustrating.

Endless coastal complaining about how there's a shortage of skilled employees, because they only hire 22 yr old white boys. The heartland away from the coasts is not experiencing that crippling lack of talent, because we don't have crippling levels of racism and sexism.

Endless self congratulatory crowing from the coasts about having outreach programs to get women and PoC into coding, not that it matters, because coastal tech companies only hire white men. Meanwhile they denigrate the heartland away from the coasts for not being liberal enough and not having enough "programs" to get women and PoC into coding, yet we have the only employers who actually hire women and PoC so we don't need the programs to being with!

There should be a bot on HN where any time someone complains about lack of skilled employees it replies with "STFU and hire some PoC and women instead of white frat boys"

Re: India's tech industry panics over U.S. plans to change high-skilled visas

#89

Post by gmarx »

RestlessMind wrote: post #25

As an Indian who spent a lot of years on H1-B visa, I welcome this move. Though while talking about this subject, one should bear in mind that "Indians on H1-B" are not a homogeneous group. There are those, employed by the likes of AmaGooFaceSoft / Unicorns or graduating from mid-top tier universities, who will benefit by the proposed changes and who were indeed the "target audience" in mind when H1-B was linked to "…

I've never understood why it is okay for outsourcing companies to "own" HIB visa people. A colleague told me long ago that it was like indentured servitude unless/until you could escape to a regular company that was willing to sponsor.

Re: India's tech industry panics over U.S. plans to change high-skilled visas

#90

Post by vkat »

neil1023 wrote: post #65

130K is far too high in my opinion. Maybe that would be reasonable in Silicon Valley but nowhere else. This policy should account for the cost of living of where the businesses are located. A large amount of businesses will not be able to afford employees at that proposed salary - even the if the potential employees are highly skilled.

I used to work in mid-west tech and 130k was something a development manager would get which was was 4 levels above an entry level engineer.
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