
U.S. Senator blasts Microsoft's H-1B push as it lays off 18,000 workers - Element_
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9249837/U.S._Senator_blasts_Microsoft_s_H_1B_push_as_it_lays_off_18_000_workers
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lgleason
Raising the H1B cap has everything to do with creating downward pressure on
wages. There are plenty of tech workers, but not enough cheap ones. Lots of
companies also want experts in specific technologies instead of getting a good
generalist who can learn quickly.

If you are in tech in the US and don't mind making less money for what you do
keep supporting legislation for more H1B's. Just don't complain when you
become a commodity, are required to dress "business casual" and cannot work
remotely. The reason it is good to work in tech is because companies have
incentives to make it a good place for you to work.

If your skills are something that is easy to find those benefits will go away.
Most companies are not going to give you these benefits out of the goodness of
their heart in today's environment. If they did then the average Wal-Mart
worker would be making a lot more and have much better benefits.

~~~
mavelikara
There are good reasons to believe that raising the number of H-1Bs create a
downward pressure on wages. Yet, as cynicalkane mentions here, there are good
reasons to believe that letting more smart people work on tech is beneficial
for almost everyone involved.

The solution, IMO, is to try remove causes of wage depreciation due to H-1Bs.
Right now, tying the petition (and GC) to the employer is the primary cause
for this. Opposing this, instead of a blanket disapproval of H-1B program as a
whole, looks to be a more tactically sounder approach. The employers who are
asking for H-1Bs as a form of cheap labour will oppose this, showing their
true colors. But those employers who are genuinely seeking smart employees
should have no problems with it.

~~~
krschultz
Adding a bunch of smart, hardworking, educated, ambition people to society is
always going to be a net-win, even if it puts a little downward pressure on
wages.

However, I don't equate H-1Bs with permanent immigration. There are
limitations on duration of stay, what happens with your spouse/family,
switching employers, etc etc. That really doesn't lend itself to people moving
their whole family to the US and buying into becoming permanent residents. If
all we get out of the H-1B program is downward pressure and wages and people
that will come for 5 years, make a bunch of money, go home and not come back,
then I am against the H-1B program.

Note that I 100% put the blame for this situation on the US immigration policy
and not the people that are H-1B holders. I am sure most of them would love to
get a green card or even become a US citizen, but for some reason we've gone
from 'Give me your tired poor huddled masses' to 'Oh you have a masters degree
in an engineering degree and want to move here to start a business? Too bad!'.

~~~
codexon
> Adding a bunch of smart, hardworking, educated, ambition people to society
> is always going to be a net-win

It is a net win for the country but not for the individuals who make up the
country. You are probably able to compete with outsourcing now, but do you
think this will last forever, or for your descendants?

Having h-1bs, as they are implemented now, comes with more problems than
benefits.

It is extremely likely that companies such as Google still would have been
created without h-1bs. See China for example. They are doing fine with
Tencent, Baidu and the other host of late coming clones.

The economic dominance of the US is mostly caused by not being demolished in
WW2 and many natural resources as it was only populated for a few centuries.
It is not really because the US has the smartest and most hardworking people
(not saying they don't help though).

~~~
krschultz
Outsourcing and immigration are two different things. H-1Bs encourage the
equivalent of outsourcing, except with the people being physically located in
the US. Immigration just increases the number of people.

If you are worried about competing with more citizens, then you should also be
arguing to make our schools worse and make college more expensive.

I personally think what is best for society as a whole is best for me. The
more economic growth there is, the more opportunity there is for me to get a
raise/promotion, or find a company that really needs a person with my set of
skills.

~~~
codexon
It is essentially the same thing in terms of competition for labor.

In one case you are sending the work to the workers, in the other, you are
bringing the workers to the work.

Competition within the country is fair. Companies exploiting the ability to
outsource/h1-b their work is not fair. Workers that were grown and educated
here cannot go back in time and move to a different country with cheaper
living costs and education.

If society is being replaced by people that aren't you, society can benefit
while leaving you in the dust. It is not a win-win situation. It is easy to
feel that you or your descendants will never be marginalized when you are
making 100k+ in silicon valley.

------
DanielBMarkham
I've been thinking about this subject for a few years now. Like many HN'ers, I
work deep inside the tech industry. I'm also fortunate enough to have watched
the operations of dozens of different companies.

I think the real problem here is that the tech industry does not know how to
manage their workers. I'm not talking about managing projects, or how to coach
or train. I mean the whole thing. The technology sector of the economy has no
idea of exactly how many workers, in what configuration, it needs for
accomplishing any job.

Weird situation, I know. But where that leaves us is a lot of "open" job
positions that are little more than unfulfilled wishes. Sure would be nice to
have another 40 guys on the helpdesk. Would that be as nice as 10 more
developers? Who knows? Or -- we've got that big government project coming up,
so we'll need at least 500 IT workers. Why do we need it? Who knows? It's a
big project. It should have a lot of people on it, right?

The implications of this is that there's a huge downward pressure on wages.
People want a certain number of tech workers, but there's no market pressure
to hire them or even to lay them off if they've hired too many. They just want
a certain number. So what they really want is really cheap, disposable workers
that they can easily swap in and out as the political winds inside a company
changes. The U.S. labor market isn't really geared for that.

~~~
ntakasaki
>I think the real problem here is that the tech industry does not know how to
manage their workers

It's not just the tech industry, almost all companies struggle to measure
productivity, especially as a comparative measure. People like salesmen do
have defined metrics like sales, but it's harder to do that for people in HR
and Accounting, for example.

~~~
cpher
That's usually because sales, engineering, etc are "profit" centers, while
HR/Accounting/Reception are "cost" centers. One group produces while the other
consumes. So, it's really comparing apples to oranges.

------
bavcyc
Along those lines, the census agency says most STEM graduates do not work in
STEM fields:
[http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/07/10/cens...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/07/10/census-
stem-graduates/12492079/)

~~~
waps
Anyone who is smart enough to calculate the differential of equations is smart
enough to see there's little money in those jobs.

You see this in practice. STEM graduates do 3 things, in my experience. Work
in management, work in IT, and work in academia. I wouldn't count on any of
having up-to-date science knowledge except the academic ones.

~~~
hga
Plenty of them with serious math chops, such as MIT EECS graduates, become
quants in Wall Street and the like, at least for a while.

~~~
freyr
_> Plenty of them_

Wall Street does draw some students from the math/physics/EECS departments of
the very top ranked schools, but this represents a _tiny_ percentage of
students graduating nationwide with STEM degrees.

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icebraining
"U.S. Senator accuses Microsoft of not treating workers as the generic cogs
they are"

"'When I go down to the market to get some workers, I always check the label',
says the Senator, 'it's our patriotic duty to acquire locally produced
workers'"

~~~
drdeadringer
The locally-produced workers also must be fresh.

Organic might be nice for a few more decades, but let's not discriminate
against our upcoming robot overlords too much.

------
htormey
As someone working in the US on a H1B I am against raising the cap. Instead I
think this visa should be replaced with one that can not be used by consulting
companies and offers a short clear path to a green card.

The main problem is that the majority of people on this visa are being used as
tools to drive down US wages. These are the people working for consulting
shops in the middle of no where making below market wages while being forced
to do mind numbing work.

It is very hard for someone in a situation like this to switch jobs. Their is
also no incentive for their employers to sponsor them for a green card until
they absolutely have to. It's not uncommon to find people spending close to a
decade being one step away from being deported.

I want immigration reform not the perpetuation of a half baked visa that
favors big companies and allows immigrants to be easily exploited. In summary
I think talented people should be encouraged to work in the US but on an equal
footing to everyone else. Raising the H1B cap is not immigration reform.

------
eyeareque
Why hire local talent when you can get a foreigner who will work for cheaper?
(Not to mention the foriegner will also work under the shadow of having to go
back to their country if they get fired..)

While there might be a good argument for this, I've never seen proof that it
was not being abused.

~~~
lgleason
very very true.

------
mountbob
1) If it was the same in OTHER PROFESSIONS then I'd be ok - but it's not.
Professionals licensed to practice in their country cannot immigrate and
practice here - they end up resorting to things like becoming cab drivers etc
(not that there's anything wrong with being a cab driver - but if you went to
university for a solid profession then it's not a good result). Allow
accountants, doctors, lawyers accredited in their countries to come and be
able to become licensed here and push down their wages for the rest of us,
then we can talk. This keeps supply in their field down and their wages up.

2) These visas do not incentivize corporations to RETRAIN their employees. Yes
the specific technology changes but the ability to understand how to interact,
program, maintain, etc do not (in relation).

3) Is AGEISM a management or a worker problem? Sure, it's up to the worker to
keep up to date, but I've seen plenty of examples where ageism is more a
problem of the industry. Somebody who is 40+, has a CompSci degree, worked in
the industry for 15-20 years, gained wisdom is somehow worthless because they
don't know the exact specific technology.

These visas are a bandaid to a problem that tech corporations themselves
created. They don't retrain their valuable workers with outdated skills and
instead look to foreign countries for a quick-fix out of their mess.

Keep up the high wages and you'll continue to see an increase in CompSci
enrollment. Then pay to retrain your (good) employees for the latest
technology and you'll keep them. Corporations have options, they're just more
motivated at the H1-B candy then something that benefits everyone.

------
srameshc
A large pool of H1B quota is being misused for sure. Instead of those mediocre
or low tech workers, if more highly skilled workers are let in, I guess it
would be better and we can manage with current allotted quotas.

~~~
_delirium
I've long wondered why they don't allocate the slots (however many are
politically palatable) via some kind of bidding system, e.g. highest-salary-
filled-first, instead of the current first-come-first-served system. There is
a "prevailing wage" requirement, intended to ensure that H1B is used to bring
in workers where there's a shortage, not merely to undercut wages. But that's
hard to police. And there is a more market-oriented way of allocating the
slots to where genuine shortages exist: look at revealed preferences in the
form of how much companies are willing to pay for a worker. If a company is
willing to offer $150k to an H1B worker, I'm willing to believe there is
actually a shortage of that person's skills. If they're only willing to offer
$60k, I'm less convinced this offer is filling a skill that suffers from a
major national shortage.

~~~
pooper
I really like this idea. It is a shame that H1B workers get 60k for a job that
I'd take at 85k and the company's justification is that it costs them 25k to
process the visa or what not. That cost should not be computed into someone's
compensation!

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mrsharpoblunto
As someone going through the US immigration process at the moment, the real
issue as far as immigration reform goes should not be raising the H-1B cap,
but rather fixing the insane greencard backlog. At the moment its pretty
common for people to have to spend over a decade waiting in a legal limbo with
an uncertain future.

In addition to this, requiring companies to sponsor greencards for all H1-B
workers would go a long way toward stopping those who are simply looking for
cheap captive labour and would leave the pool open to those companies who are
legitimately looking for skilled workers in good faith.

------
drpgq
I wonder if any H-1B workers would have been among those laid off by
Microsoft.

~~~
keithpeter
According to the minimicrosoft[1] blog comments, yes they have.

UK perspective: absolutely no chance of visas for people outwith EU if you are
in a redundancy situation locally. Endof. I'm surprised this could even be
happening.

Disclaimer: I live in a 50:50 city, in a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood
where the 'recent immigrants' are Polish.

[1] [http://minimsft.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/18000-microsoft-
jobs-...](http://minimsft.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/18000-microsoft-jobs-gone-
eventually.html)

~~~
walshemj
Not sure what you mean here. I think that Finish ex nokia workers could work
in the UK/EU if they have a job offer Finland is a member of the EEA area.

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kordless
Just wait till the guy's seat gets replaced by an app written by one of those
H1B holders he'd like to ban from the country at the ripe age of 23.

------
wfjackson
Aren't 12,000 of the 18,000 mostly overseas jobs at Nokia Devices in Finland?
And 6000 doesn't seem that high based on the churn at most big tech companies
between people leaving, layoffs and firings.

And it's kinda funny that Satya would've himself been on a work visa when he
worked at Sun or at Microsoft, perhaps the senator is implying that poor
Ballmer shouldn't have been laid off and replaced with a foreign worker? :)

Looks like a flamebait headline and article by the same guy at ComputerWorld
who seems to be on a crusade against H1B, as part of a personal crusade or for
page views (these articles seems to invariably make it to the Slashdot front
page).

[https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=computerworld+h...](https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=computerworld+h1b&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#q=site%3Acomputerworld.com+h1b+Patrick+Thibodeau+&safe=off)

