Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but there’s a balance that employers have to maintain to get some in-state advantages from local or state governments for job creation True! The issue is local, state, and federal governments gives limited benefits compared to CEE countries, Israel, India, and others who roll the red carpet with multi-year tax holidays, subsidizes, and targeted hiring pipelines. > makes more sense for America to get trainers or pro…
> such a stupid approach What do you think of this alternate one? Don't make H1-B employer-specific. That way, they automatically have to pay market rates to the guy since otherwise you would sponsor his entry and he'd switch to a market rate employer immediately. This removes the "unfair" aspect of h1bs being cheaper to hire.
Exactly.
That solves the problem of consultancies and firms trying to abuse the H1B program as indentured servitude, and makes it easier for those in that kind of a situation to demand a higher salary.
In product companies, someone on a work visa is paid comparable to an American, and bringing a foreign nation on site is already a bit of a wash savings wise.
That said, with this announcement the ship has sailed, because having to spend $100k per year per H1B filing on top of the salary premium of hiring in the US just made opening a GCC/offshoring even more cost effective. For the top 20% of talent in CEE and India, you're already seeing TC break that $100k mark. The issue is there just aren't enough people in the US in certain subdomains with the right skills.
I blame CS programs over the last 10 years for that by trying to overleverage "Leetcode" and "Fullstack" style courses and increasingly reducing specialized courses.
A CSE major at a decent program in India or the CEE will have studied algorithms, digital signals processing, OS internals, and computer architecture along with the option to take further electives in a specialization of their choice (ML, Security, Systems, HCI, etc). They are much more "well-rounded" for technical roles because they will have dipped their toes in 2-3 technical subfields and did their "data structures" equivalent.
In my subfield (cybersecurity) it's been almost impossible to find the right talent at scale of OS internals, systems programming, CompArch, and CUDA+Infiniband experience in the US for the past 5-7 years. As such, there is a generational skill gap, because there is a gap of people who should be mid-career now but don't exist domestically.
And it's not something a "bootcamp" can solve either. The reality is, if we need to spend 2-3 years retraining people domestically with table stake skills like algos, OS internals, and other courses that are expected in a CS major, we should also dramatically reduce salaries for those employees, becuase I can't justify paying $150k for a bootcamp grad. At $50k-80k the math works out to only hire domestically with that level of skill while also offering training like the ASU BSCS program.