Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay • Hacker News Board

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#961

Post by renewiltord » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 8:10 PM UTC

Eratosthenes wrote: post #860

renewiltord wrote: post #560

Here we go with the protectionism. If we had SWE unions they would be making sure that all foreigners were evicted. You can read this thread to find out. That's my number one reason to oppose unions: they will be super protectionist. I derive that knowledge from the fact that lots of SWEs on forums like this are pro-union and simultaneously protectionist.

All I'm hearing are good reasons to support unions.

Glad to hear it! I oppose because I disagree but honest articulation of your position is an unalloyed good.

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#962

Post by timwaagh » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 8:32 PM UTC

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #475

People who oppose H1B fundamentally believe that foreign workers should not be allowed to enter the American labor pool thereby depressing the wages here. Fair enough. While on the margin, it is true that if a company can't hire a foreign worker, it _might_ be forced to hire a local worker in the short run. But in the long run, restricting labor this way only increases the chance of that job moving entirely abroad, e…

i think google would save themselves the 90k/engineer if they could so this doesnt hold up. Also, to a worker it might be about not having to code for minimum wage because expats might, but Trump doesnt care about workers. he never worked a day in his life. It's about something else, namely your nations future.

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#963

Post by jupp0r » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 8:39 PM UTC

dodobirdlord wrote: post #595

jupp0r wrote: post #562

Can somebody reconcile these points, they seem to be conflicting: - they set the new threshold for acceptable wages at 95% of the distribution for that position - they say that this will affect 1/3 of applicants - they say that h1b workers are underpaid Those can’t all be true at the same time can they? If 2/3 of applicants are in the upper 5%, they’d certainly be earning more and not depressing salaries.

The distribution is complex because visas are awarded by lottery. Many companies are treating the program as expected, and applying for a small number of high-skill high-wage specialists. Then there are a much smaller number of companies that flood the lottery with thousands and thousands of applications each year on the premise that their applicants are interchangeable and the more applications they submit the large…

I can see your point, but I think the effects of this regulation are misunderstood here. Prevailing wage is based on locality. H1Bs in California now have to be in the >95% bucket of prevailing wages for their county. Even FAANG engineers would have trouble reaching that threshold as it only takes base salary into account and not total comp.

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#964

Post by dodobirdlord » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 8:57 PM UTC

ChicagoDave wrote: post #695

dodobirdlord wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re missing something essential. There are only a limited number of H1B visas awarded each year, and they are awarded by lottery. Far, far more applications are submitted than slots are available, and most applications are rejected. After this change the number of H1B visas awarded isn’t likely to go down.

The new rules will work through the end of the year and the entire program is shut down (no new visas). My guess is that corporate America will hold its breath until the election. A Biden administration is likely to be much more H1-B friendly. But if Trump were to win, corporate America would turn to virtual offshore talent moreso than it has in the past. Labor cost is labor cost. If the rules make it expensive here,…

I think you’re still missing the point. “H1B friendly” or no, the same number of H1B visas are going to be awarded. The application pool is massively oversaturated. A bunch of large and high-paying companies have been lobbying for this change because it will increase the odds that they can bring in their own hires at the expense of hires by low-wage companies. This is going to shift the distribution of H1B workers from a mix of high and low wages to just high wages, but it’s a 1:1 replacement of low-wage workers with high-wage workers. Each slot that might have once gone to an Infosys employee who is now going to be offshored is going to be snapped up by Apple or Google or Microsoft to bring to the US a star foreign employee who is currently stuck working out of an office in their native country or in Canada or another company with more open immigration policy.

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#965

Post by tomcat27 » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 9:29 PM UTC

nwienert wrote: post #958

tomcat27 wrote: post #951

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the US subsidizes corn production so much it destabilized local corn markets everywhere else in the world. Suddenly, it's cheaper to import corn from the US than buy at a local farm house in other places. This alone doesn't mean bad news to those other countries. The likely response may not be to increase import tax on corn. You need to see where the net positive results are accumulating as a consequence. I don'…

So your claim is hiring locally somehow “influences” inflation... and does what? What is the cost of home grown IT? There’s no “cost”, it’s just a shift in market, the wage may go up a bit but business would also adapt, either by being more efficient or shifting budget, etc. I’m not really putting together where your questions are leading. They don’t feel like they have a coherent point, and they don’t seem to be poi…

The market's network effects will negatively effect this new tax.

There is cost-benefit analysis to everything one spends from their limited resources. The "just shift" in the market is painful like you said before.. to the weakest Americans the most.

the US companies and individuals are economically so fragile they do have enough operating expenses to absorb a month loss of revenue. When the consumption and stimulus doesn't rise as much as needed within the time, shops close because of inflation.

Lowering H1B only solves the problem when hiring local person does not increase budgets. And there is shortage of Americans applying to these jobs or studying for these jobs.

And US companies operate on lean culture. A food, insurance company does not want to maintain in-house technology team for every project. Again it has to do with complex net of financial entanglements..

So it really has to be a consulting partner, whether American or not, but definitely meeting their current budget constraints.

It is a worthy goal to aspire white collar jobs. Especially when the country specializes in production of high-technology. Something government should provide more to its people..

But I don't see a policy on the horizon in this direction.

--

When the forest is on the fire, arial firefighting does not stop it, rain doesn't stop it...

Solutions designed for small-scale problems do not work when those problems become large-scale.

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#966

Post by cmrdporcupine » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 10:01 PM UTC

908B64B197 wrote: post #41

arcticbull wrote: post #10

It's pretty amazing to me how anti-immigrant America is, for a country built on immigration, but I suppose it's always been that way. Benjamin Franklin hated the Germans in the 1750s [1]. For perspective, Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 30,000 refugees each year. The US brings in 18,000. This means Canada brings in 25X the number of refugees per capita than the US does. Canada, a country 1/10th…

The immigration quotas in Canada are simply out of control. Almost every week on this forum I see Canadians whining about low wages in Software.... in a market that's more or less flooded with cheap labor!

I think you'll find the "low" wages in software here are lowish in comparison to wages in the Bay Area but are comparable to other professional salaries.

But also, the cost of living in the GTA has gotten completely out of control so that's part of it.

My wife and I bought a house in a "bad" neighbourhood of Toronto back in 2005. It was $280,000 CAD and that was the cheapest we could find in the GTA for a 3 bedroom detached home still on decent public transit.

At the time both of us were both employed in tech, and we still had to struggle a bit to scrape together a down payment. We didn't perceive $280,000 as a trivial or cheap amount. And even back then we wondered how families that didn't have our (pretty decent) income level could possibly be buying homes.

That same home would be now be worth over a million. I just can't grasp how that's conceivable at all. I make really good money as a Google employee, but I'd still find it frustrating to scrape together money for that. I don't understand how my kids will ever own a home.

So I think it's less that people are under-compensated in our industry as much as costs of living have just become stupid due to housing price inflation.

EDIT: wife went to go check the mailbox and it was stuffed full of real estate flyers only, including one from an agent who will give you a free lottery ticket if you come to his open house. I smell doom on the horizon, but I've been saying that for a decade, so don't listen to me.

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#967

Post by 908B64B197 » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 10:12 PM UTC

thecleaner wrote: post #819

908B64B197 wrote: post #25

This is a great move. The current H1B program made no sense at all. If I wanted to hire: A smart graduate from EPFL, Polytechnique or ETH Zurich who interned at CERN and has contributed to the Linux kernel for a software engineering job at a unicorn startup or A grad from a second tier "technical college" in India with a visa refusal rate of ~90% for a job doing manual UI testing and QA for a body shop my only path f…

Its weird that people always link the "low skilled" worker to India and the highly skilled one is always someone from US or EU. Lets keep in mind that some of the most skilled engineers in the tech industry are also Indians and it might just be that the one comitting code to the Linux kernel ks also a skilled graduate from one of the top institutes in India and doesnt get a visa because of the H1B rules. Just because…

Truth is, a lot of the current spots in the quotas are awarded to outsourcing firms from a single country. I didn't want to specifically name the firms. Naming countries in my comment was insensitive.

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#968

Post by 908B64B197 » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 10:14 PM UTC

asadlionpk wrote: post #906

sjm wrote: post #873

Earlier quoted context omitted.

O-1 visas are an incredible pain to apply for, and you need to prove at extension requests how you've "remained extraordinary" during the time you've actually been working. As far as I'm aware, no graduate would be eligible unless they've produced some kind of world renowned thesis. Let's say you join Google as a SWE on an O-1. If you just perform your duties for the duration of the visa, you won't be able to extend.…

O1 is not as painful as people think. I just got my 2nd O1. Didn't do much "above and beyond" in last 3 years. Or maybe I just got lucky.

Would you care to give context? I see O1 mentioned rather frequently but I never saw it used in recruiting.

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#969

Post by 908B64B197 » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 10:16 PM UTC

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #621

908B64B197 wrote: post #25

This is a great move. The current H1B program made no sense at all. If I wanted to hire: A smart graduate from EPFL, Polytechnique or ETH Zurich who interned at CERN and has contributed to the Linux kernel for a software engineering job at a unicorn startup or A grad from a second tier "technical college" in India with a visa refusal rate of ~90% for a job doing manual UI testing and QA for a body shop my only path f…

All that will happen now is the manual UI testing position that would have been hired in the US will now be done back in India as companies scramble to deal with this situation. They'll probably do the work for even less, companies and teams and infrastructure will expand in India to do the work, and taxes and spin-off benefits to the US economy will be lost. Or alternatively (and quite likely) we'll just hire that p…

> Or alternatively (and quite likely) we'll just hire that potential candidate up here in Canada; growing our tech industry further and competing with American workers in the same time zones

Positioning the country as a cheap offshoring destination for lower-skilled dev doesn't sound like a good long term bet for the local population.

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#970

Post by mavelikara » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 10:18 PM UTC

carlmr wrote: post #703

epicureanideal wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pay level still isn’t high enough. Minimum pay of about 170k in San Jose for a software engineer? That’s not a specialist, that’s average for a small startup.

It should be location based. 170k is an expert in many areas of the country. Maybe something like upper 2% of salaries in the county. A fixed number will never be appropriate for all the areas in the US, and a fixed number will always need to be adapted.

The high-paying locations are the ones where the experts congregate.