[esalman]

I hear this argument all the time. There's an excess of this, there's an excess of that. Seems it only comes from people who are not directly involved in hiring of such roles. We hired for an analyst role few months ago in the bay area and there was no qualified American applicants. My wife is in pavement consultancy and they hardly ever find qualified Americans for pavement design jobs.

[dmix]

People can’t seem to separate the issue of exploitation of H1B by (mostly Indian) consultancy mills to lower wages and bypass normal immigration vs the legitimate value of specialized skilled visas. You can fix one without killing the other.

It’s plausible Education might be one of the industries that gets exploited as they have no caps in the lottery like other H1 visas categories such as tech or doctors. But I don’t know enough about education visas personally.

[aprilthird2021]

Yep, H1B visa abuse exists and should be clamped down on, but it's also extremely vital to our sustained economic growth and frankly our biggest growth industry: tech

[adjejmxbdjdn]

No, it’s clear that H1Bs have destroyed the American software industry as evidenced by the fact that the American software industry saw the largest growth in wages relative to any other field in the U.S. over the past 2 decades while also seeing a massive growth in the numbers of employees over the same period, also outpacing every other industry here as well.

Clearly the H1B has been devastating to American workers unlike all those other industries which haven’t seen an influx of a capped number of H1B workers every year.

And that’s even before we get to how the U.S. software industry remains one of a handful of industries where the U.S. is the leader in the world and has generated trillions in wealth, and is largely responsible for the US’s continuing dominance in the world today.

[jsemrau]

> there was no qualified American applicants

I have been hiring for 20 years and find this increasingly impossible to believe. Please expand why that would be the case.

[realitysballs]

In order to find a qualified candidate :

(A) individual must be interested in job/benefits/comp. and decide to apply. This makes them a ‘candidate’ (B) candidate must be qualified per minimum requirements

It’s entirely possible to not have candidates if no one is interested in the position at the stated comp/benefit rate.

[esalman]

The original article is about a federal judge blocking H1B fee because there is a teacher shortage in Alaska. Can you believe that?

[cgag]

Every post I see from young people trying to get tech jobs is about applying to 500 places to get one interview. It’s a lie.

[duxup]

That quote isn’t about a tech job.

[dpark]

He posted on another comment. They were offering way under market. Shocking, really.

[esalman]

150k-200k base offered to a fresh grad for some python and low-level, data intensive work. Really shocking.

[dpark]

You ended up getting a fresh grad because you asked for 4+ years of experience both broad and deep.

150-200k is probably reasonable for a new grad in the bay (not certain what starting salaries there are now) but not for what you actually asked for.

I’m not hating on you. Your budget is what it is. But you’re well under market and that’s why you didn’t get the applicants you wanted.

[fc417fc802]

> there was no qualified American applicants.

But are there qualified Americans who could easily switch to that job for one reason or another? Is the issue a lack of qualified professionals or is it a lack of interest by qualified professionals in the listed position?

It's very easy to receive no applications from qualified professionals that do in fact exist by simply not offering to pay them enough (among many other things). That shouldn't mean you get to undercut the domestic labor market; rather you should be forced to rethink the business plan.

[Grombobulous]

One of the problems is that geography and demographic movement trends within that geography is a very real thing.

Let’s say a rural town has lost population in the last 20 years, and most of the population that left is educated.

Now they need a teacher, which requires a bachelors or even masters degree.

The rural town’s unemployment rate is 10% but there are no qualified teachers who are unemployed.

So now we want to move someone in from a nearby urban center that has a big market of educated people. But the unemployment rate in that big urban area is 3%, and the area is wealthier with a higher salary rate for jobs across the income spectrum.

Let’s say my local teacher salary is $50,000, the big city teacher salary is $90,000, and the big city high school diploma career salary is $50,000.

I have to find someone who is a qualified teacher who isn’t already a teacher and isn’t already working someone where else that’s still paying better than my local area. Plus, that person has family, friends, and prefers the big city with all its amenities and infrastructure. I can tell you right now that you would have to pay me far above market rate to get me to move because I’m already employed and happy.

In contrast, someone in a foreign country is potentially getting a huge upgrade to move to the US or another developed wealthy country and is way more motivated to make that leap.

I imagine these programs exist because the cost benefit just makes sense. Not only do you solve the imbalance faster, easier, cheaper, but now the wider country has gained educated population which is generally an economic benefit.

Certainly there are flaws in the system that need to be fixed. I don’t mean to advocate for it necessarily, just explain why I think it exists.

I would also point out that it’s not necessarily the case that the local labor market is being undercut (see the geographic example I gave above), it’s being expanded, and that includes adding someone who is paying taxes, buying stuff from local businesses, etc, which they do even before they become citizens.

[ryani]

> I can tell you right now that you would have to pay me far above market rate to get me to move

If everyone feels that way, then it's not an above-market rate, it's by definition the market rate. The market rate for a job might be different at different locations.

(Note that I'm not taking a position on whether or not using the H1B program to reduce the market rate here is a good idea)

[fc417fc802]

Yeah I agree with all that but notice that the comment I responded to was either about an analyst in the bay area or a stream of pavement design jobs in unspecified locations. I wouldn't necessarily object to the metric of "do qualified americans exist" being limited to a certain geographic area as long as the resulting criteria was sufficiently difficult to abuse.

[aprilthird2021]

The bay area's existing talent pool is hugely immigrant in nature. It's totally within expectations to put a job post for an analyst of some kind there and only get immigrant visa holders applying. They also make a lot more than many Americans who wouldn't be qualified but still live in the area.

[icepush]

What salary range were you offering ?

[dani__german]

"We were unable to attract highly experienced data analysts, and we REFUSE to ever train anyone for any role, so we should be allowed to use scab labor to undercut American wages"

[esalman]

I have replied to another comment - we ended up hiring a fresh graduate with relevant research experience who is being trained for the role.

[KingMachiavelli]

Isn’t it a self-fulfilling issue? Dependence on H1B and other visa dependent workers leads to lower salaries which discourages local talent from that specialty.

What requirements did the role have and what’s the salary range?

From what little I gather from online job listings, most foreign labor dependent positions are trying to pay 90K for a masters degree, maybe 120-140K Bay Area. Additionally, many of these job listings want extremely specific degrees or certifications that frankly are of little interest to US citizens - but F1 students will take any masters program despite the program having little salary benefit - the degree is a requirement for the visa.

I have a hard time believing you can’t find a US civil engineer who could learn the subject matter right out of college. Although saying that I know first hand low starting salaries have pushed students towards mechanical engineering or CS if inclined.

[esalman]

> What requirements did the role have and what’s the salary range?

4+ years in product development. Python/R + a low-level language. Terabyte-scale data stream and batch processing. HPC knowledge (vectorization, memory access, distributed computing) to build efficient algorithms. Degree in a quantitative field (Math, Stats, Physics, CS, or Engineering).

Upper limit on compensation was 200k.

> Although saying that I know first hand low starting salaries have pushed students towards mechanical engineering or CS if inclined.

You answered your own question. The American engineering pool consists mostly of high school diplomas who can't pass PE exam at multiple trials.

Edit: coincidentally, my wife was offered a state civil engineering job in Bay area. Didn't take up because the salary offered was below 100k, even with 5 years of experience.

[zdragnar]

There are a ton of jobs that pay as well or better with lower requirements, even outside the bay area. Anyone with that level of experience, Python and a low level language isn't going to take you up.

I'm not normally in agreement with the "you're not paying enough, there's plenty of people" crowd, because I've been on the hiring side too and know what a crapshoot it can be... But you're definitely offering too little for those requirements.

[esalman]

I responded to the point someone made- there's an excess of workers in America. Firstly, when there's an excess, wages are supposed to lower, even for Americans. Secondly, even if there is an excess, there was no evidence of that in my experience. In addition to the full time role we also interviewed interns in fall, and in my experience they were all either immigrant or children of immigrants.

[dpark]

You don’t see an excess of workers because the compensation was too low. Your requirements were such that you were realistically competing with Meta and Google offers for $400k+ and $200k was your max possible compensation.

[esalman]

I did not post the full job description word for word to not doxx myself. But the job description explicitly mentioned that anyone with the right aptitude should apply, don't have to qualify for every requirement. We hired a recent graduate with relevant research experience.

[aprilthird2021]

I'm sorry you think $200k/yr to sling Python for a 26 year old is too low?

Come on man be real right now

[zdragnar]

$200k is very middle of the pack for a salary offer in the bay area, and most places will push total comp up with stock and such, whereas OP mentioned that 200 was the UPPER bound, meaning they wouldn't be offering it to a junior developer.

I may have also misread the degree requirement as being higher than it was, but I think my point (prior to the edit) stands- for the posted requirements, the offered salary is low compared to other available jobs.

[aprilthird2021]

I'm sorry you all have lost your minds. I live and work in the bay area. $200k for someone who is 26 is far more than enough and should absolutely be able to get you a qualified person for the job description given above.

It's a middle of the pack/low salary offer in FAANG but the vast minority of developers here work at a company like that. It's hard to remember that sometimes.

[DrJokepu]

I mean I don’t have a horse in this race, but I don’t think this is a good example.

If this is a senior enough position to justify expecting this level of specialization, that compensation is not nearly high enough, so issuing this H-1B would add downwards pressure on the compensation of American worker.

If this is not a very senior role, the American worker’s interest is that you find someone with a less specific background, compatible enough so that they can be trained.

[esalman]

Yes we hired a fresh graduate with relevant research experience who is being trained.

[SilverElfin]

> Dependence on H1B and other visa dependent workers leads to lower salaries

It does not generally. H1B employees are more expensive usually. In most companies - like any notable tech company - they are paid exactly the same due to fixed compensation plans, but cost more to the company once you include legal fees, processing fees, and especially the time delays and risks. It’s not even close in terms of a cost comparison. This isn’t a controversy among people who are actually involved in hiring and compensation - it’s well known. But this perception persists.

[fc417fc802]

They don't have to undercut their coworkers on an individual level. When a position that could otherwise reasonably be filled by an American is gated for any unnecessary reason, be it undesirable pay or excessively specific requirements or whatever else, that effectively removes that position from the domestic job market. When that is repeated many times the end result is the same number of domestic applicants competing for fewer positions. That results in downward pressure due to basic supply and demand.

That's fine if there's a genuine need for a specific sort of specialist and the US simply isn't producing enough of them. But when it's silly hyper specific requirements it becomes detrimental.

[bijowo1676]

tech salaries have only increased and never decreased. Not in 2000, not in 2008, not in 2020.

Your narrative runs against the facts on the ground.

Not only foreign workers were part of the reason US tech dominates the world, they also greatly contributed to every single major invention in tech, including the Attention paper which led to Transformer based LLMs.

All of these stupid anti-immigrant narratives are exploiting either ignorance (foreigners undercut wages, while wages have tripled and more) or motte-and-bailey tactics (WITCH bad and H1B fraud bad, lets abolish all immigration)

[fc417fc802]

That's highly deceptive. To start with, salaries have to increase just to tread water given inflation. Beyond that, there's nothing wrong with a position that produces a large amount of value being compensated in accordance. If a particular sector does well we should expect salaries to rise relative to the economy as a whole.

The question is simply whether a policy would depress wages relative to not having that policy, and it's merely one of many factors that should be carefully considered when weighing the costs and benefits.

> All of these stupid anti-immigrant narratives

You reveal your own biases. Personally I'm originally from academia. I'm accustomed to a workplace where citizens are only barely a majority and of those many are naturalized immigrants. I have no qualms with importing labor that's significantly more skilled than the average american in cases where doing so benefits our society on the whole. Neither do I have qualms with filling jobs that are legitimately unwanted or that we truly don't have sufficient local talent to support. However I'll note that the last one there is exceedingly rare.

[bijowo1676]

you know what would depress wages even more?

not having H1B foreigners like Elon Musk or Satya Nadella create/grow companies that employed tens of thousands Americans and created trillions of value for investors.

Remember it was White American Steven Ballmer who almost ruined Microsoft (he took MSFT at $620 bln and left at $280 bln valuation), and it took a foreigner like Satya to bring it to $4 trillion.

not having foreigners who could discover Attention mechanism or Transformer based models that led to AI boom.

US would literally be indistiguishable from Europe's lackluster development and growth, would you want US look more like EU ?

All of the wignats who complain and bitch about immigration completely forget or take for granted all the tech progress made in the US by foreign workers, and all the non-tech jobs that get created thanks to tech work being done by foreigners.

Just visit any graduate program in the top tier US university lab, visit any leading scientific conference, or lookup nationalities of top cited research papers, and imagine USA without all those talented people with foreign sounding last names.

That will be proper comparison

[winrid]

Were you actually involved in the hiring? What is qualified? College degree and $30/hr?

I know people who are actively looking for data analyst roles. Email me

[anon-3988]

Does your wife's consultancy business have a growing number of clients to handle? It might also be an issue of distribution.

[esalman]

No such issues. It's actually not a solo business, it's a civil/geological engineering consultancy firm with a mix of state/local government and private clients.

[corndoge]

We need to incentivize more kids to get pavement design degrees to increase the supply

[esalman]

The reason US is in this mess is because in the 50s and 60s there was a liberal arts education boom in the US, and STEM education boom in India/China.

[hdgvhicv]

Anyone educated in the 50s and 60s has retired

And in China they were far more occupied with a cultural revolution than any form of advanced education. At best you could argue that they were teaching basic literacy to more people.

[aprilthird2021]

We had a STEM education boom in the last decade in the US

[bsder]

Capitalism has an answer for that ... it's called "higher salary."

Everybody loves capitalism--until they are on the other side of the arrow.

[jlarocco]

Pay more.

[wesleywt]

But you Americans hate taxes. You spend like a European country and tax like an African one.

[esalman]

I have added compensation information in another reply.

[hvb2]

And you pay for this, how? Because typically that would mean taxing something more.

I've seen those kind of proposals as ballot measures that get voted down.

[fc417fc802]

Tough. The undesirable consequences needs to be forced to occur so that the voters have no choice but to deal with it. You shouldn't get to just rip the bottom out of the market and proclaim to have fixed the problem.