At one of the companies I’ve worked for the H1b and associated limits was getting significant enough that there were tons off meeting about what to do and so on. At one point a guy was getting pretty heated about it so I asked why we didn’t just hire in Poland, south and Central America and so on? At least the americas time zone would be a major improvement.
The guy who I was responding to reacted like I was crazy. His reaction made no sense. We weren’t a body shop and high tech isn’t somehow exclusive to India.
After the meeting, basically, a few of the other participants pointed out the flaw in my argument: the problem was that I was crazy, obviously, as there aren’t Indians in those places to hire.
The point here isn’t india bad or whatever it’s that there is more going on at the hiring manager level than simply filling area under the curve with solid talent. Personal preferences, clannishness and racism of all varieties distorts the outcome and that by and large H1b has been hijacked to serve other goals.
> Personal preferences, clannishness and racism of all varieties distorts the outcome and that by and large H1b has been hijacked to serve other goals.
It isn't lost on casual observers either. It's not just that there's an expectation that these roles will be filled with Indians, but Indians of a particular caste from a particular region of India.
It seems largely, in my opinion, to be the result of promoting Indians to executive leadership roles in engineering departments. When that happens, there becomes a clear driving factor towards growing the number of Indians from their origin region in that engineering department completely divorced from other goals. It's normal executive empire-building behavior, but recast through the lens of national and regional origin and ethnicity/caste.
One thing I like about the BU I work in is that we have a lot of staff around the world from many different places and have helped people immigrate to the US from many different places, but when I look around my company more broadly it's very heavily dominated by Indians in engineering, beyond any reasonable expectations. There are many talented people in Central and Eastern Europe, in Central America, and in South America that are completely ignored in favor of trying to hire more Indians particularly in many companies, including mine.
I've even been told before it's due to "cultural fit", which used to be a phrase used to discriminate against anyone that wasn't a straight white bro, and is now being used to discriminate against anyone that isn't an Indian from the same ethnic, caste, and regional origin as the rest of the team/hiring manager. It seems absurd to me that we're in a situation where someone can say that with a straight face for a team that's based in an office in a major US city, and truly expect that the only possible answer is to hire more Indians without considering anyone else.
For a specific example of this happening, Oracle got hit by the US DOJ for "racist" hiring practices because they preferred Indian applicants over "white" applicants.
> I had absolutely no idea this was even a thing in the US before reading about it.
Yeah, it's absurd, but it's highly impactful because of the prevalence of Indians in high-paying careers in the US. Indians make up nearly 2% of the US population, and the Indian diaspora is heavily concentrated in just a few coastal tech hub cities, so they make up a sizeable proportion of both the population and the workforce in the tech industry. Caste-based discrimination is therefore highly impactful, and it makes sense that it's now getting the attention from US authorities.
or they could just hire people in the US, there's plenty of good US labor to go around.
The point of these programs was to augment labor markets in times of shortage (H1B isn't just used by tech FWIW), IE, the internal US labor pool wasn't big enough to sustain hiring in the US for N job(s) due to requirements and you could demonstrate that some form of training would be sufficiently work in a timely manner
Its been pretty clear this isn't really true for decades yet H1B hasn't been curtailed meaningfully to uphold its intended goals
Exactly. H1B hires don't have the same freedom to look for another job, because a new employer has to hire a lawyer to transfer the H1B, and not many companies have the resources or are willing to do that. Even if a company offers market wages when hiring a H1B, it's arguably a better investment because they have far lower mobility. That isn't good for anyone except the big tech firms.
2 people, same age, but one from USA and one from a country without student dept...
And this person from another country WANTS to come to the USA. They will be able to live on a lower wage. And even if they're done with the low wage, the process or changing jobs is arduous. So you're stuck. This gets exacerbated by the fact that it's really hard to gauge the cost of living from abroad.
The H1B program might have started out as a way to attract highly skilled workers, and that might still happen in some cases today, but by and large it's not resulting in the US pulling in top talent and it is used as a way to suppress wages in the US across the board.
We need immigration policies that allow highly skilled workers to come to the US with no strings attached so these workers have the same job mobility as US citizens and permanent residents. The H1B program today resembles something closer to indentured servitude.
So yes, the US should attract highly skilled workers, but no, the H1B program is not working that way.
It was never meant as a way to attract highly skilled workers as a goal. Its entire premise was to attract skilled workers when there was a shortage of workers or inability to augment the national labor pool to meet requirements. I want to clarify this on purpose.
For instance, before our current system (which was lobbied for to add loopholes around what qualifies for talent shortage in the late 80s / early 90s) the H1B program was used for truly unique situations, like hiring Medical Doctors, where you could demonstrate that the US national labor pool couldn't fulfill the demand and additional training would not work either.
In 1990 they changed the criteria for what constitutes a "shortage of talent" allowing broad definitions and weak justifications, and thats when the explosion by the tech industry hiring H1Bs took hold in earnest
> We need immigration policies that allow highly skilled workers to come to the US with no strings attached so these workers have the same job mobility as US citizens and permanent residents.
FWIW I know an exceptionally talented hacker who applied for an EB and then gave up after... a year? a while, anyway. And moved to Canada. The process was just too kafkaesque.
I mean, I've had the gamut. TN, H1-B, EB-3, Green Card, and now Passport. And Canadian citzenship before that after immigrating there.
No immigration process is quick. They're probably intentionally designed to not be quick. The Canadian process might be quicker, but it still takes plenty of time, has requirements, etc.
"Other states are unreasonable about immigration too" partially explains this problem but doesn't justify it. (I'm not saying some kind of filter is necessarily bad. But a kafkaesque one is. And this isn't a small problem -- it's made us collectively a lot poorer. (Bryan Caplan, Open Borders, for that argument.))
Engineers are getting paid 200k p/y out of school and you think there's some magical downward pressure on wages?
Even now companies are giving up on the legal immigration system and hiring outside the US. Canada has a much saner system. Gigantic engineering offices in India and China.
The US treats it as some zero sum game between citizens / immigrants and is losing out on taxes, economic spending (every HC outside the US is less spend in the US local economies).
Most graduates, especially engineers, are not seeing $200k out of school. HN is skewed highly towards people in FAANG and SF where salaries are out of the norm for most positions.
I know a few fresh out of school lawyers and they are right below $200k. I could imagine doctors in certain specialties are the only grads getting paid an average of $200k+.
Canadians who grew up in metros like Toronto and Vancouver are getting priced out of housing in large part because we've been getting ~600k immigrants per year (~300k direct immigrants + ~300k international students and TFWs who end up staying) while only building ~200k homes per year for the past 10 or so years.
Seems like a home building problem then. Even if you're right (big if given out of country investment from rich Chinese ancestors was the cause of the Canadian housing bubble in the first place), you're ignoring the tax receipts and spending generated from high income techies who are only there because US immigration is shit.
Most engineers aren't getting paid 200k out of school.
If you want to focus on the top of the top, which 200k out of school would be, then H1B1 should be a pure auction system: take the top X salaries offered, and let them in.
My company struggles to find the right people. Many that we find we can't hire because the risk is too high that they won't make the lottery, so positions keep unfilled. This is a serious problem limiting our growth.
"Many that we find we can't hire because the risk is too high that they won't make the lottery"
Well you lost me right there, because there would be no such risk if you hired a US worker. I highly doubt there isn't a US worker who has the skillset for what you are looking for, but rather there isn't a US worker who wants to do the job for the compensation your company is offering.
I'm not against H1B's/attracting top foreign talent, but unless its a highly specialized role I can guarantee there are people with the skillset right here in the US. You're just not willing to pay what they're looking for, or ironically the risk is too high for a US worker to work for you vs what they're comfortable with (i.e. job security, risk of the company going under, etc).
Why not hire Americans? I went to a no name state school with a large CS class. Sure we're not MIT/Stanford quality (well many where) but plenty of talent to go around.
Whether they want to work for your wages is the real issues.
If they pass the interview then we obviously gladly hire them. But competition is hard.
We do have quite competitive wages. But we need more people than the American-only portion of the market has to offer. Competent foreigners make up a sizeable part of the applicants, and those who don't already have visa or green card we just can't hire. It's as simple as that.
you've made multiple comments in this thread about being unable to find American workers. I'm currently looking for work but looking at your profile I can't find your company. Where can I apply to whatever job openings you have?
So hire US citizens like a US company should. I have friends who are great programmers (entry level but better than most of the outsourced coders I’ve worked with) working in factories because companies would rather outsource the work than give them a chance.
I wasn't aware that there is so strong US nationalism present in the participants of this forum. After this thread I'll need to seriously re-adjust my mental model.
> I have friends who are great programmers (entry level but better than most of the outsourced coders I’ve worked with) working in factories because companies would rather outsource the work than give them a chance.
I have many brilliant co-workers, from many countries of this planet, some are US citizens, some became US citizens recently, and many are from many other countries. They all work well together and if somebody shows up in an interview and clears the bar then they are welcomed. I've also personally witnessed hundreds of "great programmers" in interviews, some Americans some not, apparently thinking they are brilliant and then couldn't participate in a constructive discussion about fundamentals or about real-world program solving.
The generalizations in this thread as well as the assumptions being made about me and my background are quite shocking.
Do you guys have set foot in actual US companies recently? It's not about US citizens vs. outsourced work. The typical company has a broad mix of live stories. Something I value in our industry. Maybe I've just been blind to the bubbles of nationalism that seem to be brewing somewhere. I'm glad they stayed outside of my company (or else I would have).
Not really the question here. The H1B visa is intended to specifically target industries with a shortage of workers. Even as someone who arrived in the country on an H1B myself I question whether software engineering is experiencing a shortage these days given the mass layoffs we’ve seen lately.
Whether we should prioritize local workers over foreign (and whether we have enough local workers) is a much broader political question.
Nation state policy should be aggressively seeking and rolling the carpet out for exceptional talent, not cheap talent to depress internal wages. This is pretty standard policy across developed nations (as someone who has looked into skilled worker visas outside the US from within and is not exceptional talent).
I distinctively didn't say the US shouldn't. I said the H1B program is not working as intended and pointed out its faltering its mission, and has been for decades.
Whether we should have better immigration policies is a separate discussion, and I think we most definitely should. Path to citizenship would be for the best. It historically has worked out in the favor the nation, after all.
I'm sure there are many H1B visa holders who are actually highly skilled in something that's actually nearly impossible to find anywhere else. I know from experience that a lot of H1B visa holders are about the same as what you can find domestically (but they're a lot less likely to agitate for better working conditions).
Where are these candidates? I’ve only ever been given barely-entry level Junior h1bs I’ve been expected to train from 0.
One person I was forced to work with legitimately did not understand how to connect to wifi or know when he was connected to wifi. He kept calling me saying his computer was broken.
We should. That's what the E1/E2 categories are for; H1B was designed to address labor shortages, not necessarily/specifically for attracting highly skilled workers.
They need to update the minimum salary for H1B. There is no reason to bring in a QA engineer making 50k per year who tolerates poor working conditions due to lack of better options. I think that 100k would make more sense, and it arguably should be higher if the country wants to keep fulfilling the original goals of H1B.
> or they could just hire people in the US, there's plenty of good US labor to go around
At 50k USD per year? Doubt it.
50k is nothing to americans but it's a shitload of money to a lot of people, including south americans like me. Very few people here make more than that. In fact the value of such a salary will probably increase even further as our nations descend ever deeper into economy-destroying communism.
Sure, but you don't need an H1B visa to get hired in your own country. Yet suspiciously, companies don't just open international arms of a company to do business (its alot easier than it used to be and its only initial overhead anyway). I'm suspicious of anyone wanting to hire H1B workers for 50K, that sounds like undercutting the labor market with foreign labor which is not the actual stated goal of the H1B system and the legislation that created it
Then they should either setup an international arm abroad, which is perfectly legal[0] or raise your wages. If you can afford the overhead of the H1B system (there's a bunch of ongoing legal costs to doing this) then setting up an international arm of the company isn't that much different.
The H1B program is not and its stated goal is not, to be able to undercut the US labor market with foreign labor
[0]: though as someone in the labor market, it does have negative consequences on me potentially
I had to research this for my greencard a while back. Here’s a fun stat for ya:
USA opens about 500,000 new software development positions per year.
USA creates about 50,000 new comp sci graduates per year.
There are an order of magnitude too few Americans every year for the jobs available. Whatever you think of the H1B (and it has many problems), I doubt it’s coming even close to bridging that gap.
> There are an order of magnitude too few Americans
Go to /r/cscareerquestions. Every single post is about a recent comp sci graduate who's applied to _hundreds_ of jobs in the past year without a single offer. There aren't too _few_ qualified Americans looking for work.
I agree OP's estimate for job growth is off by an order of magnitude, but I don't know if r/cscareerquestions is strong evidence of an oversupply of qualified workers in general.
First, it's not a random sample of CS graduates--there's a lot of selection bias there. People who face a lot of rejection are going to want someplace to vent.
Second, I've absolutely phone-screened people (not a lot, but some) with CS degrees who couldn't do something simple like fizz-buzz. I'm not taking about nit-picky "you forgot a semicolon" or style things. I'm talking about "fundamentally not getting for-loops". It wouldn't surprise me if the bottom 0.5% of CS graduates each year apply to hundreds of openings, and get rejected by every single one.
Finally, we're in the contraction part of the business cycle right now. I do believe that new grads today/this year are having a harder time finding jobs, but the total number of people employed at tech companies seems to be falling this year, too. Citing jobless American CS grads would be a more powerful argument if jobs were growing at the same time.
Comp Sci isn't the only way (nor the only major) that can satisfy the conditions of software development jobs. Thats a pretty narrow lens. You need to also look at adjacent majors like Software Engineering, Software Development etc. A lot of smaller regionally accredited universities in the US have diversified on this. The pool is much bigger than 50K.
you're also discounting the fact that there are layoffs, businesses closing etc. There may be 500K new positions per year, and say 250K layoffs / closures etc that isn't accounted for in this. Now I don't have the numbers on total layoffs but this should be adjusted.
I would heavily dispute this problem on the whole. Look at how hard it is to get hired as experienced engineers right now, that tells me there is less slack in the system than this leads on.
H1B is also suppose to have a unable to train element, which needs to also be addressed
EDIT: and as others pointed out, that is taking the stats on their face value, which is questionable in and of itself, as the source is a bit dubious
> Look at how hard it is to get hired as experienced engineers right now
I think that’s just what happens when you flood the market with 200,000 qualified people in a short amount of time (and those people have extremely narrow definitions for what counts as a good enough job). The overall trend, measured in decades, remains that there just aren’t enough software engineers.
Yes even including all the software engineers that didn’t study comp sci. Even outside USA it’s rough. When I was in college the average completion time for a comp sci degree was 7 to 8 years because people kept getting jobs and forgot to graduate. All our professors complained about the sky-high 3rd/4th year dropout rates.
> USA opens about 500,000 new software development positions per year.
I absolutely do not buy that number. The citation you've given is "GoRemotely" who a) only cite that for one year, 2017 and b) are obviously biased towards inflating numbers.
Even if true, it doesn't necessarily follow that there's a shortage of workers in a sector because the number of new grads is way under the number of job postings per year. Even if we assume only comp-sci grads are suitable for 100% of those positions (which is definitely not true) it still doesn't necessarily mean that there's an under-supply. We'd need a lot more info to figure that out.
> USA opens about 500,000 new software development positions per year.
Article doesn't say that. Its says that's global:
> Despite the pandemic, the number of software developers grew by 500,000 globally in 2020
Additionally earlier in the article, it shares numbers which supports a much smaller number:
> ...make this the most accessible 6-figure job in USA. At 1,400,000+ members and 22% projected growth, it is the biggest and among fastest growing high-paying jobs
The Bureau of Labor Statistics identifies that there will be 411k new software jobs between now and 2031, not per year:
Given the number of 50k grads per year, 400k employees for 411k jobs isn't a massive shortage. (Not to mention that many jobs opening aren't for grads, but for senior developers)
There's good and bad ways to count stuff and have a high degree of confidence in the result.
Counting the number of Computer Science graduates in a year seems like a fairly trivial problem where you could get an answer within ~1% of objective reality by simply counting public information and published figures.
But how do you count the number of jobs that are actually available? How does anybody distinguish between "real jobs" and companies just putting feelers out there to harvest resumes, manipulate the immigration system, and keep appearances up to investors in trying economic times? A lot of engineers that are looking for work right now strongly feel that a lot of job postings out there are just utter bullshit and many job posts are posted with no real intention of hiring anybody.
The best way to measure supply/demand trends might be to look at wages. That's one thing that's really hard to fake and get wrong.
Are Computer science graduate wages going up or down? If there actually was a massive shortage of computer workers near the level you describe, wages would be on a rocketship straight upwards right now. Are they? A lot of engineers are seeing that wages in tech seem to be plummeting right now.
This is a really questionable statistic. Your link cites a blog from a jobs site. They don't provide any citation for the 500,000 number.
Both sources refer to it as the "number of job openings" that year (2017). Obviously this isn't new demand for software engineers, most job openings are vacancies caused by people moving in the industry and will be filled by other people moving. If there are around 1.5 million SEs in the USA and average tenure in a job is 3 years then this explains all the job openings right there.
Iinm the article has two numbers: global software developer numbers growing by 500,000 per year. And 500,000 job openings in the United States in one given year.
You may have a point, but there at least a few degrees apart from Comp Sci that can lead to software development, nevermind mid-career direction changes and boot camps.
Is the USA the only country which has 10x more positions than freshly graduated students? If so, then America is the only country in the world which adequately compensates software developers which would mean it is unusual for another country like India and China to even have software developers if they would be better employed in the United States. Maybe the point of computer science programs is to serve as future American immigrants.
> which would mean it is unusual for another country like India and China to even have software developers if they would be better employed in the United States.
There's lots of reasons software developers in India and China would remain in India and China, but one big one is obtaining a visa and permanent residency to live and work in the US is hard in general, and more so for people in populous countries with many emigrants destined for the US; I think it's India, China, and Mexico that have the three longest queues for green cards where there's a limit per country of birth.
There's certainly a path to immigration through a computer science degree. Especially advanced degrees, which give preferences to visa applications. If you can afford it, get a bachelor's in your country of origin, come to the US for a Masters, work on OPT visa after graduation, hope it converts to H1B, work on H1B until you get a green card, is a well worn path, but there are others.
Cool option if you have found some candidates in Singapore or Chile but they’re two small-ish countries (relatively speaking - ~25 million combined, compared to the >7 billion in the rest of the world), that probably won’t move the needle much.
I’m on E3, and my wife is on a TN - the company has to do nothing for a TN visa beyond what they already do for US citizens. Even that was too much friction for many places she interviewed at. The conversation was, "Are you authorized to work in the USA today?" No, but give me an offer letter, and I will be tomorrow morning. "Sorry, bye-bye".
A simple process isn’t enough when most companies are terrified of dealing with immigration topics due to unknown (often non-existent) issues.
It is that simple, but the question comes up early from recruiters and first round interviewers, not the hiring manager. If you are honest, you get disqualified at the gate. If you say “yes” to these folks, and it works, the first thing you now have to say to your real manager will be “I lied about a legal matter and now need you to sign something to help me get out of it”. Helleva first impression.
I don't think you have to word it quite that way. You could be honest and lay it out plainly - "I know how the TN visa works but I know recruiters filter heaps of candidates out needlessly. Anyway here's the process, it's super simple..."
Or you could layer on another lie if you were feeling frisky - "I don't remember being asked that specific question, we briefly talked about it but I thought they understood the implication of the TN visa. Anyway, here's the process, it's super simple..."
If they're an organization with a competent HR department they should be able to manage - they'll be happy enough that they found a good candidate. As long as it's as simple as the person claims (sign letter, problem solved) it'll only be as much of a "problem" as finding out someone you offered an non-remote job to wanted to work 2 days out of each week from home because they have a kid.
It is not ridiculous. It is also the will of a democratic people. Maybe you aren't compatible with the American system as you seem to want some sort of classist system (let in more of the 'GOOD' people where you define who is 'GOOD'). We had that system before this one, and 'GOOD' was defined as western European. We decided we didn't like that system and decided that everyone should have a chance.
The US of A let Singaporeans in easily, but not South Africans or French. You let Chileans easily in but not Mongolians or Equadorians. You let Australians in easily but not New Zealanders or Albanians.
Explain how these exceptions are not "some sort of classist system" that favours some nations over many others?
Define how this was the "will of a democratic people"? Who got asked for these special country exceptions? Do the American people even know about this?
American immigration is utterly broken. I stand by that.
Nobody's here to argue that the system is fair or good. But I don’t think this particular carve out is classist. If it was like Monaco, Switzerland and Norway maybe you could argue that it’s favouring the wealthier upper class. Singapore and Chile are quite different nations economically though, they aren't really one individual distinct class.
My understanding is that H1B1 is not considered a dual intent visa, and so adjustment of status to lawful permanent resident isn't possible. Its history lies in a free trade agreement.
Being dual-intent just means when you arrive (ie, when you cross the border, the first time or anytime after), you can't have immigrant intent at that time.
Once you're in, if you eventually (genuinely) change your mind, that's fine, you can adjust to LPR.
I personally know many people that have transitioned from H1B1 to green card. Some even to citizenship afterwards. I’m sure there is a legal way to do it.
H1B1 can be extended for a long time and is cheap to get and renew.
What do you mean about loosing them?
I mean you want them to have freedom as well right?
For employees, it’s relatively easy to transfer to another employee given how cheap and easy it is to get the visa, especially once you’ve gotten it for the first time.
