Ask HN: Why do you hire H1-B workers instead of natives? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do you hire H1-B workers instead of natives?

13 pointsKnowNothings30 comments

Why do you companies not exercise your duty to your own country and hire foreign nationals for American jobs?

There is no such duty to hire non-foreign-nationals. I do however have duty to my company to make the best hiring decisions, so I'm not going to pass on a perfectly qualified candidate with an H1B and cross my fingers that I'll find a similarly qualified candidate who also happens to be a citizen soon. The opportunity cost can be quite dramatic. We pay H1Bs the same as anyone else, so technically they end up costing more - sometimes this offsets said opportunity cost, often it does not.

I also don't hire for "American" jobs. They are just jobs and if you can do it, I don't care about your race, ethnicity, origin, preference of Star Trek to Star Wars, etc. On a macro level, I believe there's more value to the US with the foreign nationals bringing their labor and keeping its products here rather than competing with US companies from overseas. Let's not forget that these foreign nationals pay taxes and spend money in the US as well.

Hear hear! I want to work with really good people that I like, communicated well with, and are excited about what they're doing (among other attributes as well). It's fairly rare that I come across someone with all of those qualities, but when I do, I don't care about nationality, etc.

H1Bs (and O-visas, etc.) tend to be more expensive than otherwise just hiring someone local. I'm not looking for someone cheap, as other commenters have infuriatingly speculated. In fact, I actually think that's a very dangerous path to go down, as you'll either find

1. Someone who isn't very good (or else they wouldn't work for sub-market rates) 2. Someone who is very good, but doesn't know their value - in which case, you'll lose out on your investment once they find you've been screwing them over.

I also don't understand why - if I like someone enough - I can't just hire them to come work in the US, regardless of national origin, assuming I pay enough. I suppose there's a danger of pay-for-play there, but I can't believe the trouble I've had working with amazingly talented people because they didn't have a recognized masters degree.

Finally, `exercise your duty to your own country` is an inherently suspect phrase that makes me suspicious about the thought process behind that lead up to it.

If you are an American based company you should only be hiring American Citizens.

Stop trolling. You have ignored the arguments provided in this thread and have produced zero arguments of your own. This could have been an interesting discussion, but instead the thread has been rightfully flagged.

All because I don't circle jerk the H1B program and support leftist logic does not mean I'm trolling.

So I'm curious here cause I'm not quite certain. What is lefist logic in this instance? Also, are there any objective metrics that align with the idea that American companies should only hire American citizens? For example, are such companies more profitable, efficient, or politically powerful?

Also it's important to point out many american companies have significant portions of their revenues ex-US. e.g. GE/GM/Cisco etc have 60-70% of revenues from outside the US.

Cheaper, duh. As a corporation, you want all of your corporate inputs to have multiple suppliers and heavy competition to supply you. That gives you low prices for your inputs. You want your outgoing product to be a monopoly, or nearly so - that gives you high prices for your outputs.

It has long been understood in the U.S. that pulling workers from remote areas strongly depresses local wages. You don't want any tightness in labor supply. You also don't want your workers to organize, since again, this causes tightness in labor supply. The transcontinental railroads brought in Chinese workers, not because they were superlative workers or in any way superior at driving track spikes than the Irish were, but only to drive down the wages demanded by the Irish. Today farms prefer Mexican workers, not because locals can't pick apples, but only because it drives down the wages demanded. This cycle repeats throughout history.

And this is why wages for programmers, etc., haven't gone up at all in the last 15 years (and probably never will again). The supply of programmer labor is being managed to always exceed the local demand, keeping wages flat.

Why do fruit farmers hire foreign labour rather than American labour? I suspect the reasons are similar even if the paperwork at the border is different.

You're obviously trolling but here is something you could learn:

H1-B = 62'000 Visa allocated per years

Last Oct about 160'000 new jobs where created in the US (270'000 during the month of June for example).

Under Obama (8 years) 9 million jobs were created total, which is above 1 million jobs per year. So, 8 x 62'000 = 496'000 H1-B under Obama. Versus 9 million new jobs in the US...

I'm fairly certain people qualifying for H1-B's that are 'requiring theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge in a field of human endeavor' are competing for the glut of those 9 million jobs. Come on.

While OP's post isn't a very good one, you can't throw numbers like that at it. How many of those 9 million jobs are fulfilling, full time, well paying , etc. Isn't underemployment a big problem in the US?

You don't like numbers and facts, then let's take it to the next level.

Majority of the Dev community in the San Francisco Bay Area (for example) is of Asian/Indian descent. We're not even talking about foreigners here. Children of immigrants (immigrants who probably came through H1-B) - the second generation, American citizens.

So, bringing people via H1-B actually helps fulfilling "high-level" jobs with American citizens. Does it make sense?

>H1-B = 62'000 Visa allocated per years

While your overall argument is sound, I must point out that it is actually 85000, which includes the special category of MS and above in a STEM field.

This quota also does not include the academic H-1 - there is no quota for that (but numbers are probably low anyway).

Your number also doesn't include the L-1 visa.

Not to mention TN status, nor EB-2.

EB-2 is not a visa status (most of the 20000 MS+ in STEM are EB-2, so they are included in my count). Not sure what TN is.

TN is for NAFTA professionals, and has similar qualification requirements as an H1-B. The biggest difference is the employer doesn't have to sponsor, and it's a non-immigrant status. (I'm in the US on a TN status.)

That doesn't seem to match the numbers here:

1) http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employed-perso...

2) http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/full-time-empl...

3) http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/part-time-empl...

Obama did create jobs (given how many trillions of dollars he spent, one should hope so), but not nearly the amount you're reporting. The only way to get your numbers is to count every job anyone did for even a single day as a newly created job, and totally discount all layoffs.

If I were you I'd look for the government data rather than the media:

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001?output_view=net...

For the same reasons as why (for example) more women and minorities should be hired: a diversified team is more successful in the long run.

https://www.thebalance.com/cultural-diversity-3306201 https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/diversity/m...

Those countries have a duty to their own people. American jobs for American citizens.

Define an "american job"

This is not true in all cases, but H1B workers show up to work hard, show strong understanding that they are being paid to do a job as opposed to being entitled for some lifestyle, and have more respect for the hierarchy of the org. They will tend to stick around for a while too, and not be job hoppers. It is saddening to see them exploited as basically indentured servants.

On the flip side, they do not challenge authority when they know a better way to do something, their educational foundation is not as solid because of too much focus on rote memorization, and tend to let interpersonal problems fester instead of escalating because they cannot imagine speaking out of their place in the hierarchy.

The top tier of Home country employees are great, but once you get to the lower part of tier 2 and tier 3, they tend to have an attitude of "what can the company do for me?" , Instead of "What can I do for the company?" And they start feeling like dead weight.

Of course these are all generalizations and there are exceptions everywhere to what I have said.

In the gaming industry, there is recently a large pool of low-skill workers graduating from game specialty schools. But, that wasn't the case ten years ago. We had to hire whoever we could find with skills and (not just with) interest in working in gaming.

There has never been a large enough talent pool of highly skilled people working in gaming. We still need to find them all over the world. Europe and Russia have a lot of very smart, underpayed devs. Every visa worker I've worked with has been very skilled, loved living and working in the US, and most were trying to become highly skilled, highly paid, highly-tax-paying citizens of the US.

Before the inevitable "you'd find more people if you paid more", I've seen the numbers of many, many games. 90% of the non-marketing budget goes to non-management devs already. Games are notorious for being difficult to be profitable already. Customer awareness is the biggest challenge of profitability. So... if you have any suggestions on where to get more money to pay devs, I'd love to hear them.

Its cheap indentured labor as simple as that. H1B is supposed to be speciality based positions for skills which are not available locally. Tell me why all the junior developers are H1b. Don't you feel if americans are given the same opportunity for these positions they will not do well. Things are getting so bad out there these days that most jobs are never advertised but they pickup H1B by default so no US citizen ever gets a chance to apply or even compete for these jobs.

You should be asking Tata and other IT service providers this question (and maybe Disney)

Now ask Microsoft, RedHat, Google, Intel (and others) why are they hiring H1Bs and you might have a surprise

I worked for one of the big names mentioned above(not IT services) and I am a H1B myself with a masters from a US university. And most of the H1Bs I know are on par or more qualified than their peers, most of them educated here at top tier universities and paid equally or more than American counterparts. So, why then should you not hire H1B workers when they add equal or more value?

http://www.firstpost.com/world/immigrants-we-get-the-job-don...

if you answer why there are american companies milking till the last drop of our natural resources I can answer why we get your jobs.

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