
H-1B Visa Most Used for 'Software Engineer,' 'Software Developer' Roles - SunTzu9087
https://insights.dice.com/2019/08/19/h-1b-job-titles-software-engineer/
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tomschlick
IMO, H1Bs should be given out via action style based on salary where the
highest bidders (companies that need to fill the positions) get them. That's
the only simple way to make sure they are not trying to replace higher cost US
workers with lower cost H1B workers who are beholden to their employers every
whim over threat of being kicked out.

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thatfrenchguy
But how do you fix the fact that large consulting companies could be paying
more than say, a startup ?

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tomschlick
You don't. If startups want H1B workers they compete on the same level as
everyone else. Special treatment is what creates loopholes and leads us down
our current path.

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cletus
Average salary? Yawn. Now go and break it down by Indian IT oursourcing
companies vs everyone else, with and without visa, and then get back to me.

The inability or unwillingness to see H1B visa abuse by these companies in
particular is mind-boggling at this point.

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jimbob45
I might previously have argued that H-1Bs were causing a domino effect on the
rest of US employment - their complete inability to negotiate higher salaries
spilled over into the rest of the industry.

However, I see now that such an argument is shortsighted. There is no evidence
outside of my own conjecture to support such a thing and my frustration with
my own experiences in the industry is causing me to scapegoat H-1Bs instead of
taking an objective look at the problems in our industry. While I still may
not agree with H-1Bs, it is because I believe that there are qualified
Americans that could take those jobs, not because they're harming our industry
as a whole.

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whatshisface
> _There is no evidence outside of my own conjecture to support such a thing_

Every economist believes in supply and demand curves. If there are any H1Bs
being awarded to replaceable programmers (as opposed to specialized
programmers with no American counterparts, as was the intended use of the
system), then wages are being depressed. It's practically a law of physics.

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noego
Economists also believe in the lump of labor fallacy, which your comment
perfectly exemplifies

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy)

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whatshisface
The lump of labor fallacy is equivalent to believing in inelastic demand.
However the supply and demand model doesn't depend on inflexibility: its basic
highschool formulation involves supply that increases with price and demand
that decreases with price. So, no, I don't think the suppply and demand model
requires a fixed demand.

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noego
The lump-of-labor fallacy arises when people don't realize that increases in
the labor, also cause a increase in labor demand. Hence why wages have been
rising constantly, and unemployment being steady, despite America's population
growing exponentially in the past 300 years.

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rollingdeep
Please don’t post misinformation. Exponential growth (population or otherwise)
is a tired economic trope. The frontier days are over, please update your
views to modern times like the past 70 years or so where growth is much more
limited than the frontier days and is fairly linear—probably due to the fact
that the economy (especially the USA) is a mature system and you can’t so
easily apply unnuanced econ101 generalizations (from the previous century)
about the lump of labour fallacy to today’s system.

You incorrectly imply that tech jobs will expand organically in a frontier-
like or exponential fashion as happened in the past. That doesn’t actually
happen in the tech sector. Tech companies seek to exclude alternative hire
options from other STEM fields (engineering, science, etc.) because those
alternatives would not be as cost efficient. Instead the tech jobs grow
linearly (like most mature industries and systems) and only by the annual cap
on visas being granted.

How you can tell that there is no absolute shortage of tech labor is that the
number tech jobs never grows beyond the visa cap. If there were a shortage,
companies would find more creative ways to exceed the cap limits like the
above mentioned alternatives or creating training factories to increase the
supply to meet organic needs/demand.

So while this mature system is not necessarily a fixed lump of labour, the
mature constraints that apply seem to limit any organic growth to the current
regime we find ourselves in. That is to say that companies constrain the tech
labour system to their very skewed preferences instead of organic growth, and
as a result the economic pie is growing less and less, and there is more and
more competition over slice distribution. Incumbents are absolutely in direct
competition with foreign labour and there is less overall growth to share
equitably. Again, not a fixed lump of labour, but increasingly competitive to
the point of very limited growth from within.

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codeddesign
The unfortunate part is that these visas are being used for cheap labor rather
than not being able to fund talent.

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crb002
If I were a VC I would invest huge in Mexico City talent development. Far more
under-trained talent there and same time zone so remote from MC is temporally
seamless.

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commandlinefan
Harder to find English speakers there, though. Plus, Mexico's government is a
lot more uncertain than India's.

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bumby
Investing in border towns in the U.S. could help solve the language issue.
There's a large population of bilingual talent there

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ocardoso
Border town developer here. Indeed, there's a ton of talent in Mexico's border
towns (specially in Mexicali and Tijuana), highly qualified and with decent
bilingual skills.

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petilon
This article is comparing the average salary of junior engineers (because H-1B
employees tend to be junior, they move off of H-1B into green cards after a
few years) with the average salary of software engineers as a whole.

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cptskippy
> they move off of H-1B into green cards after a few years

In theory, not in practice.

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petilon
In practice if they can't or decided not to apply for a green card they leave
after 6 years.

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klipt
Well if you're from India you can _apply_ but the green card backlog for India
is ~80 years so you're still going to be on H1-B for a long time.

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cptskippy
I didn't realize it was that long, it really is indentured servitude at this
point.

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ahmadss
H1-B is a form of servitude. As a product manager who lead a team of primarily
H1-B engineers at a large bank in DC area, the most challenging thing I saw
from my H1-B colleagues was how the H1-B visa essentially forces really
talented and amazing engineers from venturing off to more interesting
opportunities at smaller companies who do not have the money or legal team to
support H1-B employees.

My former colleagues are all limited by their employment opportunities and
could really only go to a handful of very very large firms that would sponsor
their visa's. It limits their employment opportunities and it limits their
mobility.

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ivl
> And when we compare the job titles to earnings, it appears companies really
> are simply using the visa program to save a bit of money on contracted tech
> professionals.

This seems like the lump of labour fallacy being applied here. It's not like
there are many devs really struggling to find work in the US. Rather, the
opposite program exists: there are almost no software shops that _aren 't_
hiring.

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rollingdeep
Not sure how you jump to “lump of labour fallacy” here when the article was
discussing wage suppression. This trope is beyond tired and misused. Please
stop spreading misinformation.

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whenanother
one common and huge mistake people make when talking about salary is that
people assume these are typical pre-tax US based salaries. in reality the
salaries that you see here and those that are posted all over the news are
probably the pay given to a contracting firm. sometimes they provide the pay
given to the contractors. nobody is making it clear what salary is being
referred to. it's most likely the money being paid to a contracting firm. this
means that you need divide the number by 1/2 to get the money paid to the
contractor. then you need to factor out health insurance, pension, and other
expenses related to being a contractor before you can even start comparing it
to the salary of a US citizen.

These contractors typically comes from a country that have social programs
that will provide them with a pension and medical coverage if they ever get
sick or retire. so they can severely undercut their US counterpart who needs
to earn more to cover up for the lack of public social programs in the US.

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whenanother
this whole program requires that the h1b visa worker is at the level or above
the level of their US counterpart. this creates a very disturbing incentive
with regards to the US educational system. the decline of the us public
educational system coincides with the advent of this whole program. plus I
don't believe there's a limit on student visas which are being abused in the
same way to fill academia with cheap foreign labor.

the other thing the program incentivize is over inflating unemployment numbers
and other economic indicators. you can't justify the hiring of h1b or the
expansion of the program if the unemployment numbers are high. of course the
recent low unemployment numbers turned out to be a sham considering how the
fed fund rates were lowered and inversion of the yield curve.

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sys_64738
H1B visas have their place but all software and IT related positions should
not be specialty occupations that are allowed to apply for H1Bs. That would
hopefully reduce the abuse.

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geebee
I'm generally suspicious of the H1-B program, mainly because I don't like
programs that empower corporations to decide who is or isn't allowed to enter
and work in the United States. That's bad. And I despise programs that allow
corporations to determine the circumstances under which would be immigrants
are allowed to remain in the US. This highly coercive relationship undermines
almost everything that needs to work about a free market economy.

If I don't like a company's technical test, they can decide I won't become an
employee. The should not decide that I won't get to live and work in the US.
If I don't like a company's mandatory implicit bias training program of, they
can decide I will no longer be an employee. I They should not decide that I
will no longer be allowed to live in the US and must leave within a few weeks
or jeopardize my future right to return. If I don't like my company's
donations to the trump administration or position against same sex marriage, I
should be able to leave the company without jeopardizing my right to remain in
the US. The same goes for raises, telecommuting, open offices. I actually
think that some of this gets rammed down our throats because a substantial
percentage of software developers are negotiating with an employer who control
their application for green cards and can have them deported if they get too
uppity.

Ideally, we would have an immigration system that is independent of employer
control. All citizens or residents are free and full members of the workforce,
free to choose their career and life path according to their own interests and
abilities. If someone decides becoming a developer in the Valley isn't a good
deal, they can become a plumber in Duluth. You know, like, freedom.

Some people argue that we should award green cards directly. This would solve
some of the problems, but it would still allow employers to demand a high sunk
cost prior to immigrating. Someone might prefer to be a lawyer, journalist, or
scented candle boutique owner, but if we attach immigration rights to studying
STEM and perhaps getting a grad degree, the sunk costs do limit life freedom
choices. So better would be to simply determine a level of immigration (I'm ok
with a high one, I am not shocked by the concept of limits, and I think this
issue is orthogonal to whether corporate HR departments or investors control
the choice of who is allowed to enter).

Now, on a practical level... I get it. We're all in competition for the
world's skilled workers, some types of immigrants do place a burden on
government services (elderly people coming from poverty may place costs on the
health care system and never pay a dime in). Canada, a country lauded by
progressives, clearly favors younger, skilled, educated people fluent in
French or English (I'm 48, I'd get zero points for age on their migration
skills assessment).

So, as a practical matter, I do think that the US should have a skilled
immigration preference, and I do think that this will please corporations and
investors and universities. Ok. But watch out. Anyone who has watched the way
universities treat grad students in STEM, anyone who has watched how companies
abused the H1-B, anyone who has paid attention must know that you absolutely
can not trust these organizations to do the right thing.

As a practical matter, there will be limits on people who are at risk of
becoming a burden on the state, and preferences for the kind of people
Zuckerburg wants to hire and feels he's paying too much for (and a bias
against the sort of people who would compete with lawmakers - i.e., foreign
lawyers). For example, Obama is a lawyer, and when he came on out to Silicon
Valley, he met with CEOs. They're going to work out something nice for
everyone at the table. Let's not be naive, an element of this is is what we're
going to get.

But whatever the plan is, it is absolutely essential to preserve the personal
freedom that underlies all properly functioning labor markets. For now, the
H1-B fails that test miserably, absolutely miserably.

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LordFast
Agreed. Letting companies bind workers' abilities to remain in the country
they'd like to live in is painfully similar to letting dictatorships bind
people into indentured servitude.

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geebee
There is a big difference though in that H1B workers do have a right of exit
from the US. They can seek employment in their home country or other places
with skilled immigration programs.

I’m fairly confident people who read my above comment will see the context for
this qualification and know that I see this program as abusive. It does mean a
workers right to leave an employer is very limited. It is possible to find a
new sponsor and remain the us (though frankly that kind of talk makes me a
little ill, the notion that to leave a job a worker needs a new corporation’s
permission to remain, and choose from a restricted range of employers and job
titles).

But that right of exit does help avoid some of the really horrifying
violations of basic human rights that accompanied earlier incarnations of
suppression of free labor mobility.

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crb002
Limited resource maximizing the price by the market selecting higher paying
jobs to use it on.

IMHO we need Federalism. The States should be given an allotment of work
visas. Let them decide how many and who to give them out to.

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merpnderp
Federalism would solve a lot of the country's problems.

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henvic
No. Federalism creates most of the problems in the US: drug wars, invasions
overseas, absurd military expending, reduced comparative advantages between
states, the evil patents system, expensive medical care, etc.

The more concentrated the state apparatus, the more powerful the government
and the less free and poor the people are.

\-- correction: I meant centralized power, not federalism.

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hguant
I think you're misunderstanding what Federalism is.

FEDERALISM is the decentralization of the state apparatus - the idea that
instead of one massive central government, you reserve certain powers to for
the individual local or regional governments (States, in the US
parlance)...which is what I believe the comment you're replying to is calling
for.

The FEDERAL government is, in the US system, the massive central government,
which is what I believe you're railing against.

