[luisdaniel12]

Why this is important:

Because if a tech company wants to hire a foreigner, the visa process (regardless of skill^1) is basically worse than a coin toss. Which means companies have a much more limited pool of applicants. And let's be real, this country doesn't have nearly enough STEM professionals to meet demand.

1)Exceptions: Master's degree (another lottery), extraordinary ability (pretty tough).

[jedmeyers]

My guess is that so called 'Indian consultancies' are filing 2-3 times more H1B applications than they would reasonably need in order to receive as much actual visas as they can.

[fernandotakai]

is there any cap on how many visas one single company can apply to?

[jedmeyers]

No. And here, as an example, is the breakdown of visas issued per company for 2013:

  Rank  H1B Visa Sponsor           Number of LCA     Average Salary
  1     Infosys                    16,397            $75,154
  2     Wipro                      7,178             $76,920
  3     Tata Consultancy Services  6,732             $64,350
  4     IBM                        6,502             $83,883
  5     Deloitte Consulting        4,727             $98,264
  6     Microsoft                  4,075             $109,546
  7     Larsen & Toubro Infotech   3,793             $59,408
  8     Accenture                  2,653             $72,704
  9     Ernst & Young              2,353             $86,380
  10    Satyam Computer Services   2,310             $70,495

http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2013-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx

*updated table formatting

[x0x0]

   Rank  H1B Visa Sponsor           Number of LCA *   Average Salary
   1     Infosys                    16,397            $75,154
   2     Wipro                      7,178             $76,920
   3     Tata Consultancy Services  6,732             $64,350
   4     IBM                        6,502             $83,883
   5     Deloitte Consulting        4,727             $98,264
   6     Microsoft                  4,075             $109,546
   7     Larsen & Toubro Infotech   3,793             $59,408
   8     Accenture                  2,653             $72,704
   9     Ernst & Young              2,353             $86,380
   10    Satyam Computer Services   2,310             $70,495

[trhway]

it seems that 9 out of 10 are obvious "body shops" (i.e. except the MS).

And speaking about "lazy government" - how one gets an LCA certified under 60K or even 70K in hi-tech?

When we talk about positive case for H1B we talk about MS-like situation while it actually happens to be less than 10% of the total, with the rest of 90% looking like a "cheap labor" situation that H1B opponents talk about.

[fernandotakai]

that's just... dumb? i mean, if a small startup asked for a visa, it should have bigger priority than Infosys asking for a ton of them. also, why aren't visas prioritised by salary?

h1b needs a reform asap :(

[qdpb]

> let's be real, this country doesn't have nearly enough STEM professionals to meet demand

... at current salaries.

[trhway]

what in your opinion the current salaries are and what they must be in order to attract enough professionals? I mean do you see a lot of people who aren't STEM professionals because they feel the salaries are too low? If they aren't STEM professionals than where they are?

[x0x0]

I see a continued loss of excellent, experienced -- 10-15 years into their careers -- engineers from sf to Seattle, Chicago, Colorado, Boston, and Austin driven by an admixture of the poor wages in sf/peninsula compared to housing costs, poor transport plus long commute times, very high education costs for children, high daycare costs, and family unfriendly work policies. Three friends and at least nine acquaintances over the last 24 months.

Compare the housing prices of what a three bedroom condo in sf (what a 2 child family wants) vs the other cities, plus the ability for mothers to take a couple years off work. Losing 15 to 20% of your salary to save 50% or more of housing costs is often a great deal.

[klipt]

The Bay Area is fundamentally broken in that cities refuse to build new housing and schools. Supply is limited, demand exceeds supply, and engineers are competing against each other for that very limited supply.

So if all us engineers' salaries went up, it wouldn't help. We'd just end up spending even more to out compete each other. (Well, I guess it would help push non-engineers out of the Bay Area, but is that really what we want?)

[qdpb]

Perhaps an interesting way to interpret what you're saying is that SF is bad enough that people no longer want to move there since all their surplus income will be consumed by housing costs (valid concern!).

But new immigrant salaries are as good as american salaries in terms of how much they can push prices up; so hiring H1-B is essentially similar to a pay cut for people (same $$, higher housing costs); following this pay cut some existing engineers will leave.

In the end you just end up with replacing some old engineers with new ones through a costly lengthy process.

This is the kind of absurd logical games one has to play in order to not acknowledge basic economics of supply and demand.

[jtzhou]

The natural solution to this would be more rail to allow people to have reasonable commutes into the city. But some critics think rail encourages sprawl and the only answer is more skyscrapers and density.

And on the other side, NIMBY's in low-density areas like Menlo Park and Atherton killed the restoration of the Dumbarton Bridge Rail (also victim of a mysterious arson recently) and are delaying electrification of the Caltrain. The Dumbarton Bridge, for example, would allow people to live on the East Bay and take direct rail into Palo Alto, Redwood City or Menlo Park, and up and down the corridor.

[qdpb]

If there is nowhere to house new engineers, why do companies apply for H1-B?

[klipt]

That's mostly orthogonal to the H1-B question - why do they hire anyone? (Most of the hires are not H1-Bs.)

I'd guess the answer is, marginally, hiring people is still good for companies. But combined with the lack of housing development, it's slowly but steadily making life worse for everyone in the Bay Area who doesn't yet own a house.

If it continues this way, eventually people won't move here without ridiculously high salary offers, and companies will be forced to expand in cheaper cities instead.

[luisdaniel12]

not sure what you mean. Elaborate?

[x0x0]

First, you simply asserted -- without any evidence whatsoever -- that the US lacks sufficient stem professionals.

Two points:

1 - plenty of stem surveys (lumping all of stem together, as you did) show plenty of available candidates as calculated by the percentage of domestic stem graduates working in stem post graduation. see, eg,

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2014/09/15/stem-gradu...

2 - if you wish to limit the discussion to sf/valley type jobs, a honest claim is there aren't sufficient already trained engineers who wish to live in sf/valley at the prices employers wish to offer who already have the desired skills. There are lots of ways to address it: pay enough so that living here isn't a financial disaster (compare housing prices in sf/nyc (much cheaper than sf!), seattle, chicago, boston, etc), solve transport problems making san jose and sf essentially separate cities, figure out remote employees, hire women (and even retain them!), train engineers, etc.

2b - even a smidge of economics will tell you it's very hard for an actual shortage to exist; there's a clear lack of evidence of wage increases (over cost of living increases) that would accompany an actual tightening of the labor market

[prostoalex]

> pay enough so that living here isn't a financial disaster

Higher salaries and higher employment levels seem to correlate with higher, not lower, housing prices.

> solve transport problems making san jose and sf essentially separate cities

How would you even address that? It's run by public agencies controlled by three counties (San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara). You need to get financial commitments from all three counties, railroad unions, state agencies like CalTRANS, etc. They're bringing BART to San Jose, so maybe things are already slowly progressing in that regard.