[clumsysmurf]

I worked at a company owned by some large banks. When the immigration lawyer came for a meetings roughly once per year, the place got super quiet. Everyone I worked with did basic stuff ... docker, Spring Boot, and I didn't understand how such basic positions needed visas in such a large metro like Phoenix. Yet, the pay was comparable ... there must be some angle I don't understand.

[supportengineer]

"You will obey your manager or you will be deported" is very powerful.

[kemayo]

That's a factor, but I think the H1-B lock-in is more important. Assuming no mistreatment at all is occurring, an employee who you can be fairly confident won't quit still has extra value to you. The H1-B requiring that the employee either goes back to their original country or lines up another company to take over the visa means that they're much more likely to stick around.

[ergocoder]

Some H1Bs don't even want to be promoted past senior due to higher risk at staff.

Perfect workers.

[astrange]

They can also get married to a citizen if they find one.

[JAlexoid]

Yeah.... Except that this is not true. There's not enough talent in US, so we have to seek elsewhere.

American graduates have these starry eyes and want to work mostly in two types of companies FAANG or early stage startups... Who's going to go to work at pharma companies, banks, electric companies?

[idrios]

I don't even think this was true when people were saying it 5 years ago, but it's definitely not true now. Literally yesterday I met a kid doing sales at Microcenter with a CS degree who couldn't find a dev job after 1.5 years of searching. Go to any programmers meetup in your city and there will be dozens of people trying to network into a dev job. Look up any video online of "I applied to 500 jobs" from people trying to break into a software role. Look at the reddit page for any bootcamp to see all the CS grads asking if it'll get them a job. American CS graduates aren't starry eyed for FAANG jobs, they're starving for any jobs

[JAlexoid]

You're right, there are two tiers of people in the field - people who know how to write software and the others.

Bootcamp is literally not a CS grad situation. And I have worked with bootcampers just over a year ago - I can only say that it's just a sea of trash. Most bootcampers are just not trained enough to think more than a minute into the future.

As for "they aren't starry eyed", you're literally proving that they are. You should know that starry-eyed doesn't mean only people who are picky, but people who think that learning the bare minimum and just treating engineering like they treated English class at school is going to land them a nice job.

The number of CS graduates that can just about write SQL that I interviewed in the last 2 years is... astounding.

In short - American CS graduates thought that they would get to do the jobs, that we don't need people for. We don't need an American employee that just about writes tests for something a code analysis tool can generate, for the price of someone who can actually deliver a product.

And let's not kid ourselves, CS graduates aren't competing against H1B hires. They're competing against other CS graduates in the US. No one is looking at an experienced engineer in Brazil and a CS graduate for the same position.

[idrios]

I know nothing about your company or interview process, but I'm speaking as someone just coming out of a long and painful job hunt.

I'll agree only that there are a lot of bad candidates who come out of bootcamps. There are a lot of good ones too. A lot of bootcamps run on the model that they train the bare minimum for a student to get a job, so they can take a cut of the paycheck. What you get is socialites learning just enough how to code to pass an interview, and good developers being aggressively trained in how to pass interviews. Some people love bootcamps because it's what got them a job, or got them a cheap candidate, I personally dislike them.

But I did hackathons, game jams, and went to meetups enough while job searching to say that there are a lot of incredibly talented people who are just not getting hired. If anyone is having trouble hiring a quality candidate, it's their hiring process that's broken. Job applications have become so gamified that it's impossible to filter signal for noise. Recruiters post insane expectations like "must know Javascript, React, Postgres, API's, C#, Python, and <obscure technology nobody has ever heard of that is specific to that company>" for a software engineer role. A competent CS fresh graduate won't apply to that position because they might only know Python from that list, even if they've written their own compiler, written ML algorithms from first principles, and have a deep understanding of what the computer's doing under the hood. That student is smart and would be so easily trainable, but they don't apply because the requirements are so high. So the people who do apply are those courageous enough to apply to a role they meet 30% criteria for, those shameless enough to flat out lie on an application, and bootcamp grads who have spent 2 weeks learning all of those technologies at surface level; and then if you quiz them on anything in any amount of depth they flounder.

But those bootcamps advertise themselves as entry-level roles, and so the fresh CS grads apply to those instead of to the companies that have 900 "sea of trash" applicants, which wants an expert in every technology ever invented. The bootcamps often just turn around and have the applicant rewrite their resume into something that's nearly a lie, and then aggressively apply to jobs. Result is companies keep seeing fantastic resumes with not fantastic candidates, and ignoring modest resumes with trainable candidates, and company concludes that the requirements were not high enough to filter out the trash so they add yet another job requirement.

> And let's not kid ourselves, CS graduates aren't competing against H1B hires.

Yes they are. I have great respect for all of the foreigners on H1B that I know, but almost all of them obtained their H1B fresh out of grad school, not after a long career overseas.

[JAlexoid]

> I'm speaking as someone just coming out of a long and painful job hunt.

Sounds like you're speaking like someone that feels slighted by bad hiring, lashing out at groups that have nothing to do with you. I switched jobs twice in the last 3 years, it's not an easy process and I have 18 years of professional experience.

> There are a lot of good ones too.

Not nearly as many as we would like.

> Recruiters post insane expectations

That is changing fast and most of the jobs that I have seen have sane requirements now.

> H1B fresh out of grad school

Grad school - they're advanced degree holders(MS or PHD), that's already above a fresh CS BSc graduate.

H1b has not been a source of cheap engineering talent for years now. The salaries of H1b are legally above median, which squarely puts them out of the CS graduate category. It cost a company $20k for my L1b in 2016, H1b was about half with 30% chance of success and 6-12 month wait.

Saying that CS graduates compete with fresh H1b is ignorant at best.

Advanced degree holders do not compete with CS graduates, that are BSc... let alone bootcampers.

[pc2slow4webpack]

yeah -_-. graduating in april and just hoping I can get something in the field

[gymbeaux]

I dunno man I’ve been rejected by a lot of companies over the last ~8 years, seems like they can find talent just fine.

[landemva]

> There's not enough talent in US

The hiring pool could be larger, but HR and hiring managers don't want men over 50.

[fallingknife]

There is no hidden pool of SWE talent over 50. The number of engineers that are over 50 now is going to be roughly equivalent to the number software engineers there were 30 years ago, which is maybe 5% of the number today.

[umeshunni]

Yeah, I'm sure there are a ton of programmers over 50.

[bobsmooth]

I can't tell if that's sarcasm but C is over 50 years old.

[selimthegrim]

Have you seen what pharma companies that aren’t Genentech pay their tech staff? Also they love hiring postdocs to keep the wages down.

[JAlexoid]

Phrama companies pay their engineering staff, within the reasonable market rates.

[jen20]

The market solution to this is for those companies to pay more until they attract people to work there.

[astrange]

There's plenty of reasons a job market wouldn't clear even if you raised the pay. You can't get blood from a stone, sort of thing.

For instance, American citizens are not going to become farmworkers even if you paid them FAANG engineer wages. They just aren't.

I think to attract people to certain careers, anytime after they're born is too late. You have to have started with their parents. Good chess players are good because they started at age 5, not because they went to school for it.

[fallingknife]

Guess those companies can start paying more. There is no labor shortage, only a wage shortage.

[JAlexoid]

So why are companies willing to pay drastically more in salary on H1B in addition to spending thousands of dollars of relocation costs and legal fees?

There's a massive shortage of qualified labor. Over the last three years so many people got to go from junior to senior positions, simply in an effort to retain them.

[mixmastamyk]

Maybe they could sell a downtown skyscraper so they can afford competitive salaries.

[tigen]

So what you're saying is banks don't want to pay well.

[deaddodo]

Except, of all nations in the world, the US is still by far the largest foreign skilled talent hirer.

Brain drain is something they bought into during the cold war and this idea that "they don't have talent" is ridiculous. They have a shit ton of homegrown talent and are also more than willing to hire your talent to further monopolize and supplement it.

[rexpop]

Frankly, it's too powerful. We need much stronger protections for workers if we're going to continue down this route. Deportation threats undermine labor's bargaining power, driving down wages and working conditions.

How can we expect to operate a democracy when workers have this gun to their head?

[alphanullmeric]

What gun? I see only the one you’re asking to be pointed at others.

[rexpop]

Deportation orders in the United States are executed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a division of the Department of Homeland Security. ICE agents are authorized to carry firearms such as handguns, rifles, and shotguns.

[alphanullmeric]

ok. Say we didn't have ICE. How will you now justify holding others at gunpoint to violate a contract you voluntarily signed while having the part that benefits you still enforced? Or is immigration the only thing you were thinking of when you asked for more laws?

[rexpop]

This isn’t about more laws, but about fair enforcement of existing ones. Workers, regardless of their immigration status, should have the right to decent working conditions and fair wages. When any worker is exploited, it affects the labor market as a whole. The goal should be to create systems that uphold human rights and labor standards for everyone.

[nojvek]

It doesn’t need to be said. At big tech companies it is implicit. You see coworkers being let go and the difference between easily switching to another job because you are a citizen vs having to wrap everything in US and go back to home country.

[thewileyone]

Look at composition of the HR recruitment team from all angles ... that's usually a clue.