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Trump Is Right: Silicon Valley Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants
91–100 of 490 posts
Re: Trump Is Right: Silicon Valley Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants
#92ex H1B here. Yes Trump is right.(though I do not like him personally, he is right in this matter) Most of the corporate America is exploiting H1B workers. I have worked in one of those firms and I have friends in many other firms. These are not Indian body shops, these are American companies. Everyone's topic of discussion when we hangout is how our H1B visas were being exploited and there is nothing we could do abou…
Interesting that age figures so heavily into this scoring system...
Re: Trump Is Right: Silicon Valley Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants
#93> EB sponsorship renders the workers de facto indentured servants; though they have the right to move to another employer, they do not dare do so, as it would mean starting the lengthy green card process all over again.
Increasing H-1B pay would be a step in the right direction but I think the green card policy is the biggest thing that needs to be fixed. H-1B workers should be fast tracked for green cards instead of having road blocks put in front of them. By definition they are skilled workers that the US doesn't have enough of so why would we ever want them to leave?
Re: Trump Is Right: Silicon Valley Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every tech company I've worked at rejects well over 90% of their applicants and has an interview process that would be considered insane in almost any other field. Joel Spolsky explains why this does not imply what you think it implies. http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070501/column-guest.html tl;dr; Imagine 1 low quality developer who applies to 9 places and gets rejected. There's also 1 high quality developer who appl…
Total BS. I have seen this first hand both as a hiring manager and as an applicant. I have been rejected from jobs based on totally insane interview questions that have nothing to do with the job. In one case I interviewed at 2 competitors. One gave me nothing but trick whiteboard questions, the other emphasized my experience and gave me a real world interview. I was rejected by the whiteboard company and hired by th…
There's a lot wrong with that article, you're right. Another way the article is BS is that Joel assumes that it is only possible to get good candidates by being the employee's first employer, since "they already have jobs. Stimulating jobs. Jobs where their employers pay them lots of money and do whatever it takes to keep them happy." It's impossible! Here's a pro-tip for all you hopeless employers trying to hire these inscrutable "top engineers", who are unfairly entrenched in their existing jobs. Ready to be blown away? Write it down, who knows when this post will go away!
Offer them a stimulating job, and pay them lots of money, more stimulating than their current employer, and more money than their current employer.
There you go, glad I could help.
If there is this "floating population of applicants in your industry that apply for nearly every opening posted online" as Joel puts it, then I'll offer that the software job market is also flooded with a floating population of "dog jobs" that are uninteresting, low pay, crappy company/work conditions, etc. that never get filled without paid recruiters spamming thousands of people daily. When you search job boards, nearly 100% of the jobs are such. When you get another LinkedIn message, it's more than likely a dog job. Don't get me wrong, I like hearing from recruiters, and I appreciate the opportunity of getting a heads up about the kinds of jobs that are out there, but the pickins of GOOD JOBS, jobs that I would leave my employer for, are pretty slim.
Improve job quality and you'll improve your candidate pool. Pay bananas, get monkeys.
Re: Trump Is Right: Silicon Valley Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants
#95Ok what's the suprise here? If you give companies a chance to get cheaper "mostly the same" labor without a downside, or maybe with the upside they can't leave, they're going to take it. That's why I do believe globalization and the availability of huge amounts of cheap unregulated labor does hurt American jobs and industry. Its not xenophobia, its just common sense. I think if you look past any ideas of racism, xeno…
It's not obvious at all. Shipping lower skilled jobs to other countries mean higher margins for US companies. Which is good in itself for the US economy. Buying manufacturing from other countries means it's easier to sell stuff to them as well, which is also good to US economy. The fact is that the US has a very good overall economy, so maybe one has to look at the issue of redistribution of wealth for instance. Econ…
> Shipping lower skilled jobs to other countries mean higher margins for US companies. Which is good in itself for the US economy.
US companies and the collection of US voters are different. Their interests do not always coincide.
One might say that higher margins are "good for the US economy", but that doesn't mean they're good for every person participating in the US economy -- which is what the US voter cares more about.
It's important to recognize that US Companies, to a great degree, are owned by shareholders. It is the shareholders who receive the profit.
The fact that Walmart sells goods manufactured overseas, giving it higher margins, has allowed various members of the Walton family to become billionaires. But someone working as a Walmart greeter probably sees very little benefit.
And, of course, the now unemployed US manufacturing workers/voters do benefit a little from Walmart's lower prices as customers. But, it's reasonable to question whether such workers are better off unemployed, even if they are able to buy cheap products from Walmart.
Re: Trump Is Right: Silicon Valley Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants
#96The hubris and self-righteousness of SV billionaire bully-boys has reached the point where I'll favor practically anything that takes them down a peg. I'd love to see the Republican controlled federal government treat them the way the Democrats have treated, for example, the gun and coal industries. If a gun manufacturer should be held liable for the results of people misusing a gun, then why shouldn't Airbnb be held…
>If a gun manufacturer should be held liable for the results of people misusing a gun They aren't.
> They aren't.
But many say they should be. Simply because they want to drive the gun industry out of existence and outlaw private ownership of guns in the U.S.
And FTR, I normally would not favor regulating Airbnb out of existence. But I've had such a bellyful of Airbnb CEO Brian Chevsky's self-rightousness, that I would love to see him and his investors take a multi-billion dollar haircut.
The Democrats weaponized the federal government against their political enemies. I'd love to see them, and their supporters, get a taste of their own medicine.
Re: Trump Is Right: Silicon Valley Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants
#97Trump may be "right" about this topic but he's massively wrongheaded about the solution. Making America the place the worlds best and brightest used to want to go is not going to solve this problem - regulation to protect visa workers is. I have a number of friends I went to school with now working on H1B Visas who want to make a life here and worked very hard to get here and I hate to see them indentured to their sponsors. I don't know anyone I went to school with that was even remotely competent that couldn't get a job even in my home state, let alone nationwide (and this isn't even from a big or well known program).
Maybe the demand for H1B visas would go down if the playing field was leveled but who knows? This doesn't validate his actual ideas whatsoever, many people see this issue as a problem but I would like to see some actual reform instead of just pouring gasoline on the problem and lighting a match.
Re: Trump Is Right: Silicon Valley Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> H1B is transferable between employers Its not easy as it sounds. Being a single that time, I have transferred my H1B myself and it was a nightmare. I had sleepless nights and uncertainty. My GreenCard process was reset. Any H1Bs who knows about the system really well will not risk transferring because of the risks to their green card process. There is no honest company which pays a fair salary for H1Bs. If you see…
I agree with your general point here. > There is no honest company which pays a fair salary for H1Bs. .. > I have a huge circle of friends in many companies. We discuss our salaries and issues openly. Not one of them says that they are paid equal to their American colleagues. I am not your friend, just a random person on internet. But I am on H-1B, and if this offers any solace, I know that I am paid par with my Amer…
and you are one of those random H1B employee in the top percentile & we were not.
Re: Trump Is Right: Silicon Valley Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants
#99ex H1B here. Yes Trump is right.(though I do not like him personally, he is right in this matter) Most of the corporate America is exploiting H1B workers. I have worked in one of those firms and I have friends in many other firms. These are not Indian body shops, these are American companies. Everyone's topic of discussion when we hangout is how our H1B visas were being exploited and there is nothing we could do abou…
That is amazing! However I would like to point out, H1B is not only for Silicon Valley. There are many automotive companies which require foreign talent in specialized fields. Very smart people with multi-disciplinary knowledge are nowhere to be found in auto sector. Signal Processing and vibrations and programming and control systems understanding etc. is required to deal with things like active noise control which…
Yeah this fixation on Silicon Valley is dumb. The worst affected will really be other industries. Small wonder that Lofgren who is a Bay-Area Representative is the one sponsoring the auction system. Many Si valley jobs for which H1Bs are hired are generalist in nature. And it is for generic programmer jobs that you have potential for wage abuse. But outside Si valley, for much lesser wages, companies rely on highly specialized skills. So specialized that often these are jobs-for-life without much transferability. Think about skills in microbiology, materials science, etc. relevant to specific products in specific companies like P&G, Dow, etc. These employers and employees will be majorly shafted if legislation is made with just Silicon Valley in mind.
The whole notion of pay big $$s if the specialized skills are worth so much is wrong because these companies have smaller budgets for personnel than plant.
Re: Trump Is Right: Silicon Valley Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants
#100My experience has been that my H1-B coworkers don't get paid as well as US counterparts sand that there is significant friction for them to change companies or even get a big promotion if they are in process of applying for green card. Rather than adding more rules to an already difficult process though I think the best solution would be to allow people with H1-B to easily change jobs after some period of time at the original sponsoring company (e.g. 6-12 months). That way it would be harder to pay below market rates and would be much more dynamic than having the government trying to estimate what the prevailing wage should be.
I get really frustrated though with most articles on the H1-B visas which either seem to be bashing immigrants or imply that somehow more government regulation will help the situation. In my experience growing up in the US we are incredibly lucky to have such talented people coming here to work and they have contributed incredibly to the tech companies in the US which are really one of the few bright spots in the US economy. Some of the smartest and hardest working colleagues I have grew up in other countries and we are lucky that they have come here to build the US economy.