These H1Bs might be for renewal of 3 yr extensions, transfer from another employer or a first time H1B selected through lottery. The article doesn't mention the spread. Usually you have to dig deeper into USCIS data to differentiate. Since Indians have to be on H1B forever, it will look like a company is filing more H1Bs every year while in reality they are just maintaining visa status for their existing employees.
There are staffing and consulting service companies out there that exploit H1Bs for profit but I don't believe uber is one of them or the type that uses H1 to save money.
This is an unfortunate reality of journalism today. I've even seen bigger news outlets operate in a similar manner. They just look for data that fits a narrative without bothering to actually dig deeper and find out why.
This case is especially egregious since the data is available from USCIS in a CSV file and they still didn't bother.
1. An international student graduates at the top of their class in Stanford in CS, and goes to work for a tech company. What visa do they use?
The correct answer is F1 (OPT) for one year, with OPT STEM extension for 2 extra years, while they apply for H-1B. If they weren't a STEM major, regardless of their actual role, they have a single year to apply for H-1B, with a ~30% chance of success, before being asked to leave the country. Regardless of their qualifications.
2. Instead of going to a tech company, they work for a year in a tech firm, then go to MIT for CS grad school. They perform excellently, having many publications under their name, doing several industry internships at Microsoft/Google labs. They then get accepted to a tenure track Assistant Professor position at Columbia. What visa do they apply for?
Still H-1B.
I say this because I think most Americans don't have a good idea of how widely H-1B applies. To repeat the caricature of "H-1Bs" being majority underpaid indentured slaves whose employers manipulate salary paperwork while hanging the threat of revoking their visa sponsorship every other week is laughable, if not downright insulting.
The reality is both highly skilled professionals and the run-of-the-mill IT contractor jobs end up in the same H1B bucket. This leads to skewed perceptions since the latter seems to be massively exploited by certain companies.
Exactly. I have no doubt that H-1B has been and continues to be abuse. But it's also literally the only viable work visa in the majority of cases, so painting with a broad paintbrush about the exploitation of H-1Bs is a bad idea.
It is the primary path for most people to get a work visa. No, there isn't some other work visa that is available and viable that people are likely to obtain. Only people in very specific and special situations get something else.
That's the point of my post. Just about EVERYONE has to get a H-1B visa.
Still, the ACIWA fees aren’t enough to make US Citizens cheaper than H1Bs. Another side effect is that housing prices would fall dramatically as the H1Bs would no longer be able to afford expensive Bay Area rentals. They would live 4 to an apartment, freeing up housing stock.
Let’s say that an H1B cost $150k today. If a large enough tax was imposed, the companies are still paying $150k, but $75k of that is a tax, and infosys is getting the other $75k, paying the H1B just $50k. Now, a US citizen would have $150K to pay his/her yearly expenses, while the H1B would only have $50k. The H1B wouldn’t be able to afford a $3000 apartment in the bay and would be forced to share a room. That would then drive down demand, reducing housing costs.
I am very confused about your post. Are you saying that an engineer receiving $150k in base pay today, will suddenly work for $75k tomorrow? Are you also suggesting that there will be two class of engineers, one getting paid 75k and another 150k in the same location ?
That would be quite literally horrible for everyone involved.
The price would skyrocket and the market would be completely out of balance... this would then have at least two horrible effects:
1. The top 500 corporations become gatekeepers to citizenship, as they outbid _everyone_ else for the H1-Bs, they then use their stash of H1-Bs to drive the price of wages down for US citizens...
E.g. "A doctor wants YOUR job, brah. Are you a doctor? NO. I only pay doctors the TOP SALARY. Take your $[shit wage] or leave it"
2. It would force highly-skilled people who have immigrated here, learned from our best systems, integrated into our communities and live, to be completely, mind-boggling enslaved by their corporate overlords... OR give up the lives and loves they've built, take all the knowledge they've gotten, and GTFO.
E.g. "Well if you don't show up 7 days a week for a menial job, FRIEND, it'll effect your review and you could lose citizenship if you lose your job. NO ONE ELSE WILL HIRE YOU."
If the H1Bs are bid up by the Fortune 500 companies, then the US citizens will be cheaper in comparison. It will ensure that the BEST from around the world are given a chance in the US, not entry level IT workers.
As for the indentured slave mentality, I’ve seen that today, even in companies where it’s against policy for the H1B to work more than 40 hours a week.
As a US Citizen, I can’t imagine a better system. Our underprivileged citizens will be provided a subsidized education and when they graduate, they will be cheaper to employ than the H1Bs.
From earlier in the thread, someone pointed out that graduates from elite colleges are also ultimately competing for H1B slots against Infosys type body shop IT people. There’s no reason American citizens can’t perform the body shop type IT work.
What’s worse is that when the recession hits, the H1B will still be employed while US citizens will be looking for jobs. The H1B system doesn’t get rid of H1Bs fast enough when the economy tanks. Maybe the bid price should include a multiple that is reindexed each year based upon the US Citizen unemployment in that field. Example - Initial bid is $50k/year. The H1B is hired, and for two years, the employer pays $50k, until in the third year, when the recession hit, and software developer unemployment rises to 8%, then the tax increases to 75k, causing the employer to get rid of their H1B and to hire a US citizen.
No company will hire a person, even a Nobel laureate if they have to pay 50k in taxes for that person. Do you understand global mobility? That person will simply be hired in Canada or Europe. Then there will be a ripple effect as there will be no labor market for immigrants, naturally there won’t be a higher education market for international students, and the US won’t have a thriving labor market. Which means companies have to expand in countries with an accessible labor market
A company would pay $50k in a heartbeat for a Nobel laureate. Companies are already regularly paying $75k for an H1B with a questionable degree straight from India. Currently, does the H1B get all $75k? Not if hired through a body shop like Infosys/TCS. You can think of those body shops as a tax. Why would companies care if the tax is going to the US Government or Infosys/TCS?
$50k is just an example. This tax would be bid on. If a software engineer is really needed, then their employee could bid a large amount, say $50K, and likely be certain to obtain an H1B. If another engineer’s skill is less in demand, maybe the company bids $5k.
Is a tax going to shift the mobility? How much are engineers making in India? (US salary - Indians Salary) = Tax opportunity. Or (US Salary - Canadian Salary) = Tax opportunity. In either of those cases, that Tax opportunity is quite large.
By having a bidding process for the H1B, there’s a quantifiable signal for US Citizens to see and for politicians to act upon. It’s no longer just Zuckerberg and Satya endlessly pushing for greater H1B quotas, as the politicians would be trying to maximize tax revenue to pay for their “free” college.
Additionally, the US will no longer be getting new engineers with questionable skills to tackle a SQL migration project, we will he getting all the MIT graduates who are currently leaving for Canada and Europe. We will be getting all the graduates from all the elite schools. And those software quality jobs currently being filled by the least skilled new engineers? Within 4 years, there will be a flood of domestic STEM graduates to fill those jobs.
The top 500 corporations become gatekeepers to citizenship, as they outbid _everyone_ else for the H1-Bs, they then use their stash of H1-Bs to drive the price of wages down for US citizens
This makes literally no sense. How would a company simultaneously pay a million dollars for an H1B and underpay them?
Something that is bugging me about my company - we have a hard time hiring people, because we’re almost but not quite competitive on pay. And we see H1B notices go up in the boardroom. I can’t help but think if we were better competitive on pay we would not have a problem hiring - were not doing the most complicated thing in the world.
My previous company had this triple threat of compensation problems going on: (1) Didn't offer high enough pay, (2) Got burned badly when they did try to offer higher pay to get senior engineers because they weren't good at identifying top talent anyway (I repeatedly complained and tried to fix this but no one cared), and (3) Was not in an amazingly profitable industry anyway, so they were never going to be able to come close to FANG salaries regardless.
It was sad to see the slow/inevitable march of good engineer being hired essentially by accident (the hiring process didn't recognize them as such and didn't tend to offer them more) and then leaving to greener pastures when they weren't being rewarded properly. When I left, they offered me a near 50% raise as retention offer (why weren't they paying me that already since I was clearly worth it?!), but despite that being a director title, it still couldn't touch the SWE offer at Google ... so here I am.
The biggest overarching problem I would say with most businesses like that is they aren't profitable enough, and engineers can't produce enough value in those companies, to justify really top-tier compensation like what would be necessary to get and retain top talent engineers long-term.
"FANG" isn't exactly an acronym. Broadly speaking, it's a stand-in for the handful of very best, largest, desired (employment-wise), and high-paying tech companies.
"Big 4" or "Big N" is an equivalent term that's a little less confusing, because it doesn't have the pretense of letters to stand for anything at all.
That’s not correct. It actually has nothing to do with that. It is an acronym (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google), and it was a group of high growth tech stocks about 5 years ago, coined by Jim Cramer. It’s not even relevant anymore. It has nothing to do with who pays the most or who is most desirable for employees.
The meaning clearly has changed if it's widely being used in a different way. How do you think all those different definitions of words get into dictionaries?
You're being prescriptivist, whereas language usage is descriptivist.
Jim Cramer invented the FANG acronym to refer to fast growing Internet stocks. He later added Apple. Tech workers now associate that acronym with high paying big tech employers, but Amazon and Apple don't fit that definition.
To be fair, from the tech workers' point of view, it doesn't much matter whether the employer is technically a tech company (Google), a hardware manufacturer (Apple), or a retailer/cloud provider (Amazon). So long as you're getting paid top-bucks in the industry for doing software engineering, which is possible at all of them, then you're golden.
Facebook, Google, and Netflix are known to make better offers than Apple and Amazon (although those two are capable of great offers and have both employed thousands of engineers who became millionaires after stock appreciation).
Amazon entry level software engineer in Seattle starts at over 100k and senior goes way up from there. Particularly with the stock gains of AMZN, engineers are highly compensated.
Not compared to FNG. A big reason for this discrepancy is enforceable noncompetes in Washington. In California, poaching is always fair game, so employers that compete on compensation have to pay accordingly.
If you come from Amazon, Facebook will make an offer accordingly. If you have competing offers from NG, you will get a significant bump during salary negotiation. My sources are offers from these companies for multiple engineers.
Same thing where I work. The last H1B notice I saw was for a junior web developer. It's pretty simple work, but the pay wasn't any better than what you'd get taking a government job that requires similar experience. The work is remote as well, so there's no excuse for not being able to find a junior web developer in the entire country.
The best, and perhaps the original, use of this concept: in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"[0] as Arthur complains about the surprise demolition of his home:
"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard!'"
H1Bs have no (EDIT: limited) mobility. They are indentured servants to their sponsor. If you hired citizens, they’d bounce for better pay sooner rather than later. Your company possibly does this because the power imbalance is useful.
This is wrong. I am a consultant for a major consulting firm and I have worked at three different client locations this year. I don't know where this idea of limited mobility comes from. Sure there are some restriction but they aren't as bad you have made them sound like.
There is no difference between working for one company and providing services to three different clients and working for three different companies. The paperwork is the same. Every time they have to file an amendment.
I have changed jobs on this visa as well. It works the same way.
This is categorically incorrect and you should probably spend 5 mins researching before labeling others as indentured servants. H1B holders have 100% mobility, as it takes <15 days to transfer your visa via premium processing.
Only to someone else willing to sponsor them, and timelines can be tight. I might have over exaggerated with “no mobility” but it is frequently shown that their employment status is used to control.
100% of SV companies sponsor H1 visas. And there are no tight timelines or anything. Sometimes you can run into an RFE that can delay your approval. But RFEs for software engineering are fairly rare
If you cannot find another job, and quit your current job, is your visa terminated and you’re possibly deported if on an H1B? And your employer possibly requires you reimburse them for all sponsorship fees?
If you lose your job for any reason, you're accruing unlawful stay from the next day.
Obama admin during their lame duck days introduced a one time grace period(within 3 years) of 60 days. If you lose that new job, you're supposed to leave immediately. However, immigration officers usually waive minor periods of unlawful stay before filing for a transfer, how many days is a matter of your luck.
>And your employer possibly requires you reimburse them for all sponsorship fees
This is pretty illegal and even the shady body shops never do this.
Also the law states that that company has to reimburse the employee for the return tickets.
What does have got to do with mobility ? In fact, it makes you more mobile. As you need to keep improving your skills and not being beholden to a single employer who can lay you off.
As a citizen I’m not getting deported if I can’t find another job in 60 days, and I can walk from my current employer at any time consequence free. Those on a visa are not afforded the same, and that is my point.
This is the case with virtually every immigration system in a developed country. If you don't have the right or some sort of indefinite leave (e.g. PR, green card) to live and work in a place, then your visa affords you the right to stay temporarily for a specific purpose: working, studying, traveling, etc.
The real problem with the H1B system IMO is the uncertainty and inconsistency of everything which leaves those affected in a constant state of concern.
Have you noticed that immigration laws are more strictly enforced than in the past? As a citizen, I would hesitate to ever encourage any immigrant to violate any law or rule regarding immigration. You never know what might happen in the far future.
While it's true that people rarely get forcefully deported for overstaying visa, how is being in the country illegally going to be an option for a programmer? The whole 60 days "grace period" is about transferring visa without leaving the country, other laws still apply. E.g. INA 212(a)(9)(B), which makes one inadmissible for 3 and 10 years after 180 days and and 1 year of being out of status. Since H1B "transfer" is actually a new visa (that's why, in general, you'd have to leave the country, get a new visa stamped and return in a new status but USCIS kindly shortcuts it for people who are just switching jobs), you will be automatically denied it as soon as you have accumulated 180 days out of status and became inadmissible. What's next? Nobody is deporting you, sure, but how do you live? You cannot work legally. You cannot re-enter country if you leave. You probably do not have skills to work jobs usually done by illegals. What do you do?
We have a similar thing here ('skilled worker visa') and I've seen families kicked out of the country because they couldn't find a new sponsor quick enough.
There is another aspect in how interesting the thing you are doing is, or how much it will improve people's careers to work on the things your company is working on and so on.
Well depends on who you are targeting. The messaging from most companies is that they want the best of the best even from those who aren't doing the most complicated things in the world. If you target that population of developers, be prepared to also pay at the same level. Otherwise, lower the bar and be willing to accept that the only people you'll be able to hire and retain are those that aren't at the very top of your candidate list. It's that level of self-reflection and nuance that is often missing from management at these companies.
The assumption that they are hiring H1B employees to save money does not hold the water. It is a condition of H1B visa approval for the company to offer a competitive wage. The company must advertise a similar position and offer an H1B employee a salary in the market range.
As someone who was on H1B once myself, I find articles like this as a disturbing example of anti-immigration hysteria which is quite common in current political climate in the US. "Indians/Mexicans are coming for your jobs!" For people who really think this is the case, I suggest comparing size of the US job market and H1B visa cap. The amount of H1B holder is relatively small.
As someone who lives in the Bay Area, I know the demand for qualified engineers and I am pretty sure all the good engineers of 300 people they laid of will be snatched by other companies immediately.
Oh please. They game competitive wages, make the position ridiculous in terms of requirements, or give it abusive attributes nobody with self respect and freedom would accept, write descriptions to match specific people, compare to lowest common denominator, and "advertise" the positions in places nobody will look, etc.
Let me give you an example: A university near me hires postdocs on H1B despite there being an absolute glut of postdoctoral researchers available. They count some of the University benefits as contributing to the salary despite not being part of pay, and make the job requirements list items impossible to fulfill unless you've already done work with whichever researcher is hiring by making "experience" with their one off research projects or very narrow (but not hard to understand) areas of expertise a requirement.
The whole thing is an absolute joke and is used to import workers by the bucket load.
Often times entire labs will be from the same country as a researcher despite them mostly doing lab grunt work undergrads could be trained to do in a semester or less.
Mind you I'm not against foreign workers, but the H1B program is an indentured servant sham.
It's easy to fix, though. Accept H1 apps based on compensation: high pay to low, no lottery, and grant green cards after 18 months work.
>They count some of the University benefits as contributing to the salary
This is not true and simply can't happen. Every single H1B filing data is online and public so if you want to refute me you are free to post the exact filing.
>make the job requirements list items impossible to fulfill unless you've already done work with whichever researcher is hiring by making "experience" with their one off research projects or very narrow (but not hard to understand) areas of expertise a requirement.
Also not true since there is no job posting requirement for H1Bs. Only for EB2/3 green cards. Universities generally don't sponsor green cards unless it's EB1B so this can't happen either.
Advertising the position for certain time periods is typically a requirement related to using federal funding obtained through grants for paying personnel from certain agencies or a general university policy.
The process OP described is extremely common when groups already decided who they want to hire, but have to appear above board. Your resume essentially becomes the job posting making it nearly impossible for someone to compete (assuming you have niche skills/experience which is likely).
I worked in academic research for over a decade and have received a raise using the exact process OP described (I was/always have been a full citizen). I've also seen it used by other collaborating groups.
Another poster has a picture of a posting for an H1 job that pays $13/hr for someone with a doctorate in a category for which a) the wage is a joke (even a few years ago postdoc average would be $35k+, I think, currently I think it's low 40s), and b) there's no shortage of Americans (well known glut of available postdocs).
To be fair I legit don't know the details of the fine print. I just know that I see things that don't really make sense to me and seem abusive of the system.
It is absolutely not a condition of the visa approval process that H-1B receive competitive wages. The language specifies recipients must be paid "prevailing wage" and that is defined and determined in a variety of ambiguous ways that allow lots of ambiguity for wage suppression
I personally know at least 8 H-1Bs that are not being paid competitive wages as specialists in the medical industry who in many cases earn 50% or less than their actual peers.
The current person I've been dating for four years is one of the people whose wage jumped 200% once they obtained their green card and had leverage to ask for a raise or switch employers at will as part of that negotiation process. I know those wages are not competitive because there were several friends working in the same area in a small community as full citizens who disclosed their salaries. In addition, others who went through the immigration process in that community frequently explain the process to H-1Bs that their salaries will jump significantly.
Underpaid H-1B is most certainly not a myth, it's a very real abuse of the system. Now, I'm sure there are plenty of legitimate competitively paid workers on H-1B, but my sampling of exposure to that world leans towards continual employer abuse of the system, at least for the healthcare industry.
I don't hold this abuse against people going through the immigration process, but I do find it highly unethical where many employers use the system akin to past forms of indentured servitude when the individuals are highly capable but make the sacrifice to gain more opportunity. These folks should be getting paid what their peers do (less some of the legal overhead required to manage the H1B aspect which is less significant for large companies than smaller businesses).
This would be easily fixed if H-1Bs were not tied to the employer.
This is fatal design flaw in the program, and if fixed, any worker who is underpaid could easily jump to another job that actually paid market rate without having to worry about any visa issues.
In fact, many employment issues in the US are rooted in the poor decision to tie things to an employer. Healthcare being the worst offender, but also shitty high-fee 401k plans, etc.
Yes, companies applying for H1B visas are not doing so in an attempt to save money, they are paying a premium to acquire desirable talent. However regarding your comment about "anti-immigration hysteria" US tech companies use foreign contractors to save on headcount costs. These are not H1B visas, these are contractors that are paid a very small fraction of the salaries of software engineers. These contractors are working along side US engineers and doing the same job for much lower pay. That is a concern to me as I cannot compete with the salary of someone living in Eastern Europe, Macedonia, India or Argentina. If you want to label my concern hysteria, you may do so, but it's still something I'm concerned about.
The ironic thing is that extra restrictions on H1Bs and the insane green card wait times will lead to accelerating offshoring and use of foreign contractors. In fact, it's already happening. Not only does it badly hurt the US economy and tax collection, when whole new teams are hired offshore, and the company is used to working with offshore teams, they will tend to hire new people in those places.
Exactly, there was a cost to figuring how to offshore the job. Now that it's harder to retain the international talent in the US, if you want to remain competitive, you have to setup overseas. Once you overcome the barrier, expansion overseas is easier.
Six years ago, you could apply for a work permit as you crossed the border. It took fifteen minutes and you just needed a few pages of documentation from your employer. The waiting time has shot up to months (on one-year contracts) and the whole process feels a lot more degrading.
The person you're replying to was not speaking of all foreign contractors, they were speaking of H1Bs in particular. So it sure doesn't seem that your particular concern was labeled hysteria, because it's a different one.
This has been my experience as well. The company I worked at never promoted h1bs and all of them worked around 60 hour weeks. Not surprisingly the turnover of citizens was extremely high and the turnover of h1bs was virtually none.
No raises because many cannot afford to quit and lose the visa and be extradited. Can't refuse to work late or they can be fired and lose the visa and be extradited.
Completely incorrect. H1 employees in SV have a lot of mobility as there are hundreds of thousands of jobs available that sponsor your visa. And your visa can be transferred under 15 days. You don’t even have to quit your previous employer before your approval in place. SV companies have 20-40% attrition rate and a large portion of that is H1 employees moving around
Of course not. But my experience is a counterexample to the claim "People on visas cannot get raises", which is worded so absolutely as to imply that it is not allowed under the visa program to give someone a raise.
That's all that is needed to disprove OP's statement. Maybe it isn't as common to get a raise on a visa, but that doesn't justify an incorrect statement (or at best a crucial oversimplification).
It's difficult to have an interpretation of a claim as straightforward and direct as the one I was referring to which flatly uses the word "cannot." The statement is just wrong whichever way you look at it given even a single counterexample. Meanwhile, you seem to have taken the worst interpretation of the comment providing their anecdotal experience, inferring for some reason that they meant it as a general statement that applies to everyone, even after they clarified otherwise in a followup reply. Your interpretation seemed so obscene to me that I felt the need to reply in the first place.
Are you suggesting that the massive wage inflation that happened in SV over the last 10 years , combined with the massive increase in real estate prices, in a place where H1 are probably 50% of eng workforce is an example of not getting raises ?
They gonna find a new job and transfer their H1B there. It is difficult to get the first H1B as you must fit the limited annual cap. But once you got it, you can relatively easily transfer to new employer. Speaking from experience...
Not on short notice. Need to find an employer willing to sponsor and pray H1B application gets approved. Takes months. I agree it's much easier if you're in tech though.
In the context of SV, 100% of employers sponsor H1 visa. So you can literally walk to the next building, interview and have an offer by the next day. And get an approval in 15 days, and start working. I am exaggerating a little, but there are hundreds of thousands of H1 eligible software eng jobs available in SF and SV.
From my experience, people are upset about "Mexicans are coming for your jobs!" because of employers hiring illegal immigrants to do labor work at a discount.
They offer one likely non-sinister explanation right in the article:
“The software engineer market, it’s so saturated with H-1Bs that some of the people who are laid off are almost inevitably H-1Bs and some of the people that are being hired are inevitably H-1Bs,” Bier said. “I don’t read into it anything like this is obviously job displacement.”
That whole "it doesn't look like job replacement" is completely ludicrous, because math.
H-1B exists solely because industry says they can't find needed talent. If you've just had a huge number of layoffs of said talent, you should be getting 0 H-1Bs.
I agree that this looks fishy, but they could be replacing different skillsets or firing people who they thought had a skillset but didn't demonstrate it after a year.
There is no legal requirement like that. H1 has a simple rule - that you should have a degree and work on a field that USCIS considers specialized. Comp engineering is one of them
I'm not talking about any legal requirement. Two things:
1. I'm simply refuting the ludicrous-on-its-face idea that if you just laid off hundreds of highly paid technical employees, that then hiring double the amount of H-1B's the following year, claiming you are not "displacing any American workers" is total BS.
2. Regardless of the letter of the law, certainly the political justification of why the US should have the H-1B program at all, which is argued by all the SV lobbying groups, is that the US needs workers in specialized fields because there aren't enough US workers.
Also, FWIW, I believe H-1B is a horrible program because it really only benefits the companies while basically allowing the visa holders to be treated like slaves. I'd be much more in favor of a simple "skilled occupations" global lottery that wasn't tied to any specific employer, with stronger protections to ensure visa holders aren't underpaid.
First of all, we need to get facts correct. They didn't lay off one year and increase H1b the next year. They had a total approval of 299 visas in 2019. Which means, some of them were approved in Jan and others may have been approved in October. The article deliberately obfuscates that to generate clicks.
Second, let's take a hypothetical situation. Let's Uber has a US citizen who is a poor performer, and a H1 employee who is a rock star. Let's say both make $300K. Are you suggesting that Uber should layoff the rockstar first simply based on national origin ?
Actually, there is a legal requirement like that. Businesses that hire h1b visa recipients must file an LCA with the USDOL, that essentially states it has looked and cannot find an equally qualified US Citizen for the position that is seeking the visa. The original 'ruse' the H1B visa was to address was the supposed shortage of qualified engineers in technical professions. The only shortage that ever existed was of low-paid professionals. One simply has to look on one of the online job boards to see how the system is gamed. Many positions require quite a mix of programming languages, frameworks and knowledge up and down the stack.
They also have a simple rule that you can't hire a guest worker without considering domestic applicants. These companies shouldn't be allowed to dispense inconvenient citizens who can be retrained for these jobs while bumping up their visa pool. Lack of any enforcement or penalties makes that a meaningless requirement but the current administration claimed it was going to do something about this kind of abuse. They don't even have to wrestle with Congress to make meaningful improvements on how the program is run.
That's the law as written, but it is commonly sold to the public as the parent post's "filling competitive positions with talent that can't be found domestically."
The thing that doesn't make sense to me here is that layoffs are supposed to be about having too many employees rather than about having low-quality employees. Why are they hiring at all? Shouldn't they have just laid off fewer people if they need more than they have now?
That assumes employees are fungible. Which they are not, especially in tech roles. They may have too many employees in some departments and not enough in others. They may also need to replace people who quit of their own volition.
> Immigration policy analyst David Bier of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, [who] didn’t see evidence of H-1B abuse by Uber in its increased visa approvals and efforts to obtain more.
Sorry, but Cato is definitely a libertarian leaning think tank (one of their few redeeming qualities, in my mind):
- Penn and Teller, the original small l libertarians, are in the board at Cato. That pair wouldn't be caught dead associating with some neocon or populist outfit.
- Cato created and maintain libertarianism.org
- first sentence in Wikipedia's description of Cato: "The Cato Institute is an American libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C."
We can quibble about the exact political slant of Cato, but it definitely takes policy positions that are more libertarian than mainstream Republican positions. See, for example, the drug war.
Dumbest headline ever. I sincerely wish people would stop voting this clickbait rag Mercury News in Hacker News. It says Uber received 299 approvals for the year. First, this is a miniscule number. Second, H1b approval is rolling. So I assume they would have gotten these approvals throughout the year. But the article, with its ignorance goes on to claim that it is unclear when they will start. That makes no sense. Finally, they don’t make any mention of comp.Pretty sure these are at least >$200k per position
> Uber received 299 approvals for the year. First, this is a miniscule number.
That is NOT a small number. They obviously won't be able to fill all of them, but 300 people is larger than the entire IT departments of some relatively large tech companies I've worked for. I realize Uber is global and there is a lot of infrastructure there, but I still don't see how this is a small number at all.
It also counts extensions. Some of those could be someone who got their first visa in 2009 when Uber started and is still going through extensions because of the country based limits on green cards that disadvantage people born in large countries.
You could argue that it's a smallish number for a growing company, but it's a ridiculously large number for a company that is shedding hundreds of employees in the same job category.
These are base salaries. Now filter your list by software engineer and San Francisco. Median base salary is close $150k. Now add yearly bonus and Uber's RSUs and see how many have total comp >200k. Cheap labor narrative violated.
Edit: I also filtered your list by "Senior Software Engineer" in SF and the results are mind blowing with cheap H1 pulling 150-200k base salaries. I will not be surprised if some of these are TC $400k, as FAANG typically pays as much in base salaries
Sincerely hoping I was able to help you as a "friend" giving you better information
So which letter in FAANG stands for Uber? From what I understand FAANG manages to give a lot of compensation through RSU because their stock is ridiculously expensive. Is the same true for Uber? Any links to support your point? Also, from what I understand, the ongoing layoffs are to cut costs, why would they offer additional compensation to the new hires?
I am sure that if you filter for salaries >200K then, indeed, all the results will be >200K. However, they have positions like this one https://www.h1bdata.info/index.php?em=UBER+TECHNOLOGIES+INC&...
which does not look anywhere close to 200K and is an engineer in SF. Is not 125K what a fresh grad is getting there? Or a whole bunch of 109K SW engineers (https://www.h1bdata.info/index.php?em=UBER+TECHNOLOGIES+INC&... ) in Palo Alto, is not it in the so-called Silicon Valley where it's below an entry-level SW engineer job salary? If they are looking for fresh grads then why do they need an H1B for that?
Do look at the data, do not try to re-interpret it to match your imaginary reality.
Why by 2, why not by 10? What is the basis of your claim? You make an evidence-free claim against a solid number. Here is another, less solid number which does not look good for your claim's validity:
glassdoor's average base salary for an Uber's software engineer in San Jose area is $148750 and average additional pay (bonuses, RSUs etc) is 12011. From the same data, the minimum base is 118K. Now, I don't think it's very reliable, but I would think it's extremely improbable that it both inflated the base salary and greatly underestimated additional pay (by the factor of 10 vs your claim). From this I can safely conclude that 109K Uber's H1Bs in Palo Alto make much less than the average there, even without knowing how much they get in additional pay (if anything at all).
Are you suggesting a $125k base salary (which is most likely for a fresh grad), with addition of bonus, and equal RSUs, which is very likely a TC of $180k, cheap labor ?
With the number of CS degrees produced from China and India alone each year, the evolution of slave labor is going to make the H-1B horror stories from the 90's to the present sound like fairy tales.
At what point does it make better economical sense to send a well paid project manager to oversee dozens or hundreds of engineers being paid artificially deflated local rates?
Looking at the STEM numbers, there will definitely be a glut of engineers. At least with an H-1B visa, they got a ticket to Disneyland.
It seems like the issue is that this is just a systemic abuse, so it's easy to say "everyone else is doing it".
I have a feeling the reason it is tolerated is because some people are genuinely uncertain about what the right thing to do is. In other words, there are business people in government who are saying to themselves, "well, if foreign workers are willing to do the same jobs for less money in exchange for being able to move to a wealthy country, who are we to stop them?"
So I think that side of it needs to be out in the open because I have a feeling a lot of people feel very strongly the other way. And just leaving it as a sort of lax policy without discussion is probably not going to be ideal for anyone.
I recently worked at a major retailer who has offices in the Bay Area.
Part of the role involved migrating the ERP and ATS system, which had employees, salary, details etc.
In the building I was in, which had incredible developers btw some of the best I’ve ever seen (and despite working on a legacy system!)...209 out of 209 were H1-B’s. Our consulting team at the time was about 20, and 19/20 of the team were H1-B’s.
The really sad part about it was as we were leaving, they were establishing a training program for junior H1-B’s with liberal arts degrees to learn programming. I have no idea how they got the visa licenses for those folks.
At the same time, they were the best people I ever worked with. But it’s not a sustainable way to run an economy.
They could be "older" H-1Bs , folks from India are waiting for a GreenCard since 2010, they can renew their H-1Bs in 3-year increments (perpetually) if they have a pending application for permanent residency.
Well, the article mentions how many visas were approved, not how many were requested. Maybe there were many more that were requested, so that even with the lottery they got a huge number of accepted requests.
Right, and here’s the dirty part of this process... some applications are under hiring agencies that later push those approved to the likes of Uber who might have maxed out their own allocations.
This is extraordinarily wrong. There are no allocations. Lottery only happens for first time H1 workers. But the number represented here includes first times, renewals, transfers. etc. There is no concept of allocations
Not lottery. There are allocations (or were) per country to give it a more even spread. I know greencard applications still work like that based on origin of birth.
Also the H1B process has always felt like who can create the most compelling application. Remember this is a specialization visa and you are basically demonstrating why (a) you cannot find such talent locally and (b) the value it will add to the US economy. So large companies with creative legal counsel do have an advantage over small shops.
> The really sad part about it was as we were leaving, they were establishing a training program for junior H1-B’s with liberal arts degrees to learn programming. I have no idea how they got the visa licenses for those folks
H1b places no requirement on the degree you have, only that you have one.
Specialization is crazy rampant these days. I can't, for example, afford most of our "cloud architect" or "security architect" candidates. Most of them are asking for bigger numbers than I make, two levels above. Maybe time to ask for a raise? :)
Can’t speak for cloud architect roles, but the roles I’ve been offered for security architect are $150k-$220k/year base comp with various levels of bonus and RSUs. That’s the market reality.
In the current labor market, you should be asking for a raise regardless.
> I can't, for example, afford most of our "cloud architect" or "security architect" candidates.
First, you can generally read "architect" as "waste of oxygen" on most software resumes. I have known 4 people who were actually good "architects", and none of them put it on their resume.
Second, perhaps you should grow those people in house, hmmmm?
Third, be prepared for those people to leave when they get better than the "architects" you are seeing.
> Maybe time to ask for a raise?
Probably. But if you're one of the principals in a startup, you understand silly things like "cashflow" and "bankruptcy".
I totally get your view, but stand by my team. "Architect" deserves the skeptisicm, but if you're doing the right thing, it does add a ton of value. I concede that there are "architecture orgs" that drain more value than they add. Basically, we are "city planners", which is needed, and useful if done the right way.
Of course, it is money saving and also visa people are "yes men" which is good for a corporation. My generous Amazon offer had 1 day notification if they fire me, 10 days to leave the country and i will have to pay back all their expenses (rellocation etc).
There are so many people graduating college in cs that are spending more than year without being able to job in the best economy in living memory. The idea that we need h1bs is ludicrous. They are brought in to suppress wages and for companies to able to get away with poor working conditions.
Just tax the employer 1x on H1b workers salary. If employee gets 100k then government gets a 100k. That will probably solve the h1b problem quickly. If employer truly believes this person is that valuable they will have no problem paying the tax.
Looking at the numbers they give, they're probably talking about base pay without RSUs. Uber, like most tech companies, pays senior engineers proportionally higher quantities of stock than junior engineers, so they can fire low performers before their vesting cliff without losing as much money. The total pay for L5s on visas and for L5s in general is 50/50 cash and RSUs, while L3s are more like 30/70.
It's surprising that Ron Hira is questioning why the pay packages are close together. If he's studying the use of tech H1Bs he should know that their actual income will be much higher than the number written on the LCA.
No...usually they fall in the bottom quartile as far as total compensation goes. That is exactly why companies like hiring them.
The "slave" part of it is that they are totally dependent on the company in the sense that they will be kicked out of the country if they don't follow orders, which usually means being overworked and underpaid.
I don't think you're listening. It's the law that companies hiring H1B workers must pay at least the average wage of the profession in the area. What are the sources on your claim that the companies are breaking that law?
There are two different things at play here. Uber firing people and Uber hiring people on H1b. Both are extremely common practices in all big companies. Unless Uber fired local employees and hired H1bs to replace them for lower pay, I don't see an issue here.
Clever & greedy strategy. H1Bs are often paid a lower salary with 0 stock options. H1Bs are brainwashed into thinking this is their breakout. Grass is greener nonsense. Locked in by H1B from jumping ship. Even if a company agrees to a Green Card they often tie the employee for few more years through payback of fees should they exit early. At will employment can’t exempt one from this. It’s a dirty process and most stay quiet in fear of having their visa terminated.
Uber’s stock compensation is with RSUs, not options. H1Bs receive RSUs just like other employees. There is no discrimination based on visa status at these companies. You can also transfer companies while on H1Bs and also transfer some of the green card process.
Globalized world. You can throw some visa restrictions in the path of that tornado but it won't stop it. Profit seeking companies will always gravitate towards optimizing quality per unit of cost.
The solution isn't more complex regulation...the solution is become more competitive globally. It's the only way to win - anything else...regulations, rules, red tape...people with incentive will find a way to circumvent.
Good luck retraining people from some arbitrary department to fill the role of a PhD researcher, for example, on very short notice. Workers have specific qualifications so they are not freely transferrable.
I was under the impression that your idea would more naturally fix the problem of some H1B holders being underpaid and preferred over citizens/PRs. It seems like you actually meant it to be punitive targeting any company that uses H1Bs.
Part of it is do you REALLY need that H1-B in preference to a domestic worker since any layoff you incur will block your access to that pipeline for the next (n) years. That is a calculation at hiring--aka frontend.
Then, once you have employed an H1-B, you're going to have some reticence to pull the layoff lever as that will now block your H1-B pipeline. That is a calculation at layoff--aka backend.
If your H1-B's are actually, genuinely valuable, the calculations are a business decision. If, however, you are using H1-B's to displace workers and then lay them off, that's going to grind to a halt really quickly.
There are staffing and consulting service companies out there that exploit H1Bs for profit but I don't believe uber is one of them or the type that uses H1 to save money.