India's tech industry panics over U.S. plans to change high-skilled visas
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
There are those, employed by the likes of AmaGooFaceSoft / Unicorns or graduating from mid-top tier universities, who will benefit by the proposed changes and who were indeed the "target audience" in mind when H1-B was linked to "getting high skilled immigrants in the US".
Then there are those who are transferred here in bulk by TCS/Wipro/Infosys/TechMahindra, who are paid the minimum H1-B wage possible, who jump from client to client across different states every now and then (true first hand accounts of my close friends) - these people are still mostly happy (cannot generalize though) to have the opportunity to work in the US for a few years and save, considering Indian salaries back home. While the individuals in this category might be getting a better deal, overall they become a pawn in "gaming of H1-B system" by Indian outsourcing companies.
Auctioning H1-B visas based on salary is a step in generally right direction. It may hurt low-paying industries relying on H1-B, but we can assess the impact on them and implement targeted fixes later if needed.
Pray, educate us how modifying a XML or Json while working directly for AmaGooFaceSoft automatically makes you a 'highly skilled immigrant' and working through a outsourcing firm and doing the very exact same work doesn't.
The worst thing I have seen among Indians which often comes and bite us is to actively treat other people's work as beneath us.
By the way there are tons on projects in the outsourcing firms you mentioned which demand far higher quality and productivity than your ordinary project at AmaGooFaceSoft will ever ask. This is about work, not which company you work for. But I don't expect our fellow Indians to understand this any better given how we treat the social conditions we are born into as permanent positions for life. I can absolutely understand how some one with a job in AmaGooFaceSoft might think of people from outsourcing firms as lesser children of god, and they being masters of the universe, despite in many cases the former doing far better quality of work. In India workplaces are treated as status symbols for life and displayed on house nameplates and marriage invitations. So I realize the obviousness of 'they' vs 'us' context here.
If you don't speak up now, or take a stance just because it helps you, please note it well, you are next.
Also, I won't be surprised if there are interesting challenges at outsourcing firms. But based on my own experience at one of these firms, I also know that folks working on these are pretty well paid, much above the level of H1B minimum wage. So they will still meet the elevated salary requirements.
Say what you will about Trump's other policies, but it's high time someone took an ax to the H-1B program. The level of abuse I've witnessed from it over the years is heinous; foreign workers essentially working as indentured servants, with the only beneficiaries being corporations using their cheap labor and the foreign consultancy firms that farm them out.
I'll be interested to see what changes get made to the program to move it back towards its intended purpose.
He's just getting started. I'm sure we'll see some doozies; hopefully nothing tragic. But let's not pretend that everything Trump does or will do is stupid or evil, and give him credit when appropriate.
of course the bad behavior stops immediately when they get a nice little letter with an american law firm's name at the top of it.
they're scumbags.
Unintended consequences caused by government regulation.
For the former, the big names are well versed in churning out billable hours regardless of actual work performed. The 11-12 hour time difference can sometimes be a boon, but more often than not leads to both your remote and local employees being unhappy. Local employees because they're asked to stay late or come in early, and remote employees because access to transit is more difficult if only US business hours are an option.
The bills were or will be introduced by the following (from [1]):
1) Republican from Iowa, Democrat from Illinois
2) Republican from California
3) Democrat from California
I believe the parent may have cherry-picked, but is not completely incorrect.
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/21/technology/h1b-reform-bill-g...
I doubt Trump can use executive order to change the H1B system like he did for his immigration order. If he does, he can expect a constitutional crisis soon.
The bodyshops like TCS, CTS and Infy will suffer, though. Their exorbitant margins on shipping obedient and freshfaced barely-post-teenagers off to projects where they're mostly expected to punch the clock and do bits and pieces of what the Architect says / tech support are over. They'll survive, though - the Leads, Pricipals and Architects will just have to travel up and down a bit more. I expect they'll lay off a lot of people, though. And the long tail of salaries here will likely go down. But if there is an increase in off-site outsourcing, it'll balance things out. They'll just staff more people at the home base and freeze salary hikes citing this.
Dowries will also likely go down. There's going to be a sudden dearth of grooms with the cachet of foreign work experience and a cache of saved dollars. It's also possible that if this sticks a lot of the shady engineering colleges that have sprung up here like weeds will see reduced demand. Entry fees at medical colleges will probably spike.
I can't help wondering, how does being in IT and travelling to USA affect female Indians' marriage prospects? There's definitely quite a few Indian women in american IT, expecially project management.
I more or less understand how for a male this is very desirable, can you fill me in what's in it for females?
This is a welcome change in my opinion. H1B workers were exploited by the Indian body shops as well as American employers. Raising the minimum wages will prune the bad apples and make H1B a visa system for the truly skilled candidates.
Quirks:
1. Find & shutdown fake employers running fake payrolls to match the increased wages. A search for *consulting.com will bring up many 'one-room' body shops in the US.
2. Stop the lottery process and award visa to truly skilled candidates who can provide proofs for their skills.
3. H1B LCA process should be changed and made similar to the PERM process, so that it will be a true test of the market.
4. Giving preference to Master degree holders is not a good idea, having a Masters degree from an American University is not an indicator for "highly skilled". Most of the students from India obtain these Masters degree just for the purpose of getting an OPT visa to improve their chances of getting selected in the lottery for H1B.
Many of these 'master' degree holders show fake experiences & do 'proxy' interviews to get into companies. These fake experiences are backed up by experience letters from bogus companies setup for this purpose from India. Many of them also provide 'bonus' services like proxy candidate interview services on Skype.
5. Stop 'future GC'. Many body shops in US do this by taking a huge deposit from the candidates for their 'future GC services'.
Once the above happens, I actually think it will have a net negative effect for the US tech sector. Yes you can still find the best engineers to come to the US, however once salaries start rising in the developing countries, people will not want to flock to the US.
A clear example is the aviation sector. Pilots from the developed countries flock to fly for the airlines in the Middle east and Asia. Look at Emirates, Etihad, Air Asia etc. Many of them are expat pilots.
I would think the same thing will happen to the tech sector in the longer term where the demand and growth will go to Asia.
1. With the decline of low-wage tech workers, where do you think the mundane/non-value added work they do will go? Not everything will/can be outsourced, and you don't want to your USD 130K employee to do that. There is a real scarcity of tech skilled workers in the US. This may be filled gradually in the future, but in the short-term, there will be some consequences.
2. This will affect small companies, non-SF/NYC/Seattle area start-ups, and companies, non-tech companies. Not everyone can pay this salary. These businesses are not going out of their way to pay for H1Bs.
I may be wrong, and that's why I have a genuine question. Is there a credible research about the loss of jobs due to H1B and it is not just an availability heuristic? I agree that outsourcing causes loss of local jobs, but that is not what this is trying to solve.
If a company can't operate by paying market rates, that's a business model problem.
Yes. Look there: http://h1bdata.info/topcompanies.php
You'll see that the vast majority of VISAs are taken by miserable cheap indian consulting firms.
That is a blatant falsehood it only exists due to "culture fit" where you can only hire a skilled tech worker if they're also a 20-something white male Stanford grad living in SV or maybe NYC.
Try just considering hiring a person of color or a woman. There's a hell of a lot of them, they're not much worse at their jobs than the young white boys, but on the coasts they are not allowed in the industry at this time.
No matter how far left wing tech people socially signal, that kind of person will never ever hire a woman or PoC. Yet here in the TrumpenReich rural heartland far from the coasts I've worked with a cool (South AFAIK) Korean dude and a Jamaican and I know some awesome female IT professionals.
If you want to hear about how great women and PoC are, you have to move to the coasts, but if you want to actually get a job with women and PoC you need to go right wing heartland, which sounds weird but is so true.
I live in one of the most segregated metro areas in the country far from the coasts, yet my neighborhood has a higher percentage of blacks than Google employees has a percentage of blacks. Huh. Klan-land is more diverse than coastal tech, you wouldn't guess that from how far left they talk.
I know I sound harsh but PoC and women are wasting their time trying to get jobs on the coasts; tech industry is far too racist and sexist to hire them. They can get jobs away from the coasts and in my experience they do really well.
My experience with decades of corporate speak indicates that corporations always talk the opposite of what they do. In the heartland we don't have "womens coding classes" and PoC outreach because we don't need them, instead of providing lip service we actually hire them instead.
Why do you believe women and minorities are worse workers than whites?
The coasties seem to claim its just a cost of doing business that companies will fall apart if a woman is hired or a black is hired, but my personal experience far from the coasts is they do just fine.
I just find the whole situation comparing coastal culture and midwest development culture frustrating.
Endless coastal complaining about how there's a shortage of skilled employees, because they only hire 22 yr old white boys. The heartland away from the coasts is not experiencing that crippling lack of talent, because we don't have crippling levels of racism and sexism.
Endless self congratulatory crowing from the coasts about having outreach programs to get women and PoC into coding, not that it matters, because coastal tech companies only hire white men. Meanwhile they denigrate the heartland away from the coasts for not being liberal enough and not having enough "programs" to get women and PoC into coding, yet we have the only employers who actually hire women and PoC so we don't need the programs to being with!
There should be a bot on HN where any time someone complains about lack of skilled employees it replies with "STFU and hire some PoC and women instead of white frat boys"
Unfortunately I have seen some solid 40+ year-old engineers turned away by other team members due to "culture fit." Fortunately my current company has been great about this.
This. Many companies i know strive to hire them to maitain diversity, but again you find very few of them. This question goes back to STEM education in US.
Sounds like a win for workers all around.
H1B comes with their wives who are on H4. Despite having a great career in India these women can not work. Eventually the stress breaks them and they approach consultancies who charge $8k per filing. To improve chances they even pay multiples of $8k to file multiple petitions.
Once petition is approved they work for $30K year without any benefits, no paid leave, no insurance etc. while the payroll is run of $60K. Taxes are paid on $60K. These H4 women are very thankful for this exploitation because other option is to be a housewife. (thanks for standing up for women's right murica)
Also, the hatred that Indian outsourcing cos get is totally unfair because eventually these companies are paid to do all this by American cos. Almost every large co out there in bay area is employing these people through outsourcing giants.
I applied for few good colleges (UCSD, UT Austin, Carnige Mellon, GATech, Arizona state) to specialize in Machine Learning in US.
Should I change my plans (I have to spend anywhere from 40-90 lakh RS to get MS in these colleges), is 130,000 $ too high for guy with my profile to work in a good product based or research oriented companies in US after graduating?
Why don't you get MS from good universities in Canada and enter the express entry immigration system which values your skills unlike H1B system which depends on luck ?
Trump just now barred from entry (effectively deported) all visa holders (including H1-Bs) from 7 Muslim countries who happened to be outside the US for vacation when his Executive Order hit. He also tried to do the same to green card holders (but the courts stood up to him so he backpedaled).
I am at a point where I can pick up new languages/frameworks in a breeze (Yet to learn how to do non trivial functional programming though).
Yeah I know key is depth, but I am interested in too many things :(.But industrial application of AI is my final goal, that is why I applied for MS in machine learning.
In the long run I think ML will explode, whereas strictly web technologies is either a race to the bottom that's highly competitive, or a never ending hamster wheel where you're chasing the latest framework.
The applicant should be a highly skilled and/or qualified professional being engaged or appointed by a company or organization or industry or undertaking in India on contract or an employment basis at a senior level, skilled position such as technical expert, senior executive, or in a managerial position, etc.
There should not be a qualified Indian available to do the job that the visa holder would be performing.
The employee's salary must be in excess of U.S. $25,000 per year (seems small until you put it in perspective: $3,168 is the average household income in India.)
Meaning it is almost 8x avg household income for a salary requirement in India. If you equate that to the us average household income of $51,939, the H1B should be at $402,000 here
I think most people welcome the move - we have lost many good potential employees who were headhunted by outsourcing companies by showing them the American dream and then chained to the yoke in some dreadful job.
The services business is not going to be affected that much - most of the work was happening onshore in India anyway. This is a delta of a billion dollars at worst. In the long run, this is going to be much better for both economies.
While not as cool as startups, Infosys and TCS are still much bigger and more stable companies.
I'm talking about aspirational reach - a H1B+TCS is not aspirational anymore.
More executives in the US and Europe probably know the big firms than the startups. Clearly they are representative. Do younger engineers aspire to join Flipkart more than Infy, probably but that doesn't make it representative to others.
Let the tide die. These companies aren't even a shred of dust compared to operational, financial and execution discipline of outsourcing firms.
My guess is round about the next US recession most of that start up people will do anything for a job in outsourcing firms just to keep them fed and pay their bills.
Many other industries rely on foreign talent, and many cannot pay 130k, but 100k would be fine IMHO.
Keep in mind, a family of 4 in San Francisco that earns 130k a year (family income) qualifies for direct housing subsidies. Many of these visas will be allocated to SF/valley based companies.
Yeah, most middle class families are two income now, but keep in mind, we're talking about a worker that is supposedly so valuable and in such critical shortage that we need to do an end run around the normal immigration system and empower employers to directly hire someone from overseas. We're talking about someone who can't be found among the 300 million existing US citizens or the 1.2 million new immigrants who come here annually outside of work visa programs.
Seriously, you can't afford to pay that worker $130k a year, in the most expensive city in the United States? Sounds like this position isn't quite as critical, or as hard to fill, as you're claiming.
In short, why should someone in Wisconsin get to pay only 100k when someone in NY or SF would pay $130k, or $200k? In fact, why should an employer get to hire anyone at all, even at "market rate"? Normally, we let labor markets work freely - if you can't hire a lawyer or financial analyst to work for 100k, we don't normally say there's a shortage, we say the employer needs o increase salary and work conditions to compete properly for skilled and educated workers who have the freedom to choose where they will work. We don't say, normally "oh, ok, we'll allow you to determine the circumstances under which someone is allowed to come to the US, which you can use to get them to accept less money than they'd earn if they were free to choose a different profession or employer." That goes for most immigrants to the US as well, who arrive with the right to freely choose their profession in response to personal interests and market signals.
I'm not strictly opposed to these visas, but to me, this needs to be a slam dunk case. It should be very obvious that this is a highly skilled worker. 73k, even in a low cost place, doesn't come close to this threshold. At 73k, I think employers can go ahead and compete for the people who are free to choose their employment and career (including, of course the 1.2 million immigrants who come here every year as free and full members of the work force).
If you can't convince people to write code for you for 73k a year, I'd say it's pretty clear you need to increase the salary. You aren't anywhere close to "critical employee in severe shortage" pay and work conditions. People smart enough to write complicated code have all kinds of options to earn more than 73k a year, provided they are free to do so.
I don't see how developers in SF or NY create more value just by virtue of being geographically located there. The cost of living argument IS about the free market at work, isn't it? Forget about the immigrants vs citizens aspect of it for a minute. Company A in WI could hire a resident for 90K because the resident spends only about $1000 on rent, but if the same person were to go to SFO a company B would have to pay them way more so they can afford to pay $2000 on rent. Isn't this the reason salary calculators exist? Am I missing something? I don't think this has anything to do with immigration specifically.
For instance, christmas tree light manufacturers don't locate their assembly plants in downtown san francisco. If they did, they would certainly have to pay the workers more. You just can't generate enough value this way to justify that kind of pay for christmas tree light assemblers, so the work is done elsewhere.
And if it turns out assembling christmas tree lights doesn't pay enough, and the workers who are capable of assembling christmas tree lights find higher paid work, that's not a shortage, that just means people have found higher value things to do. If the price of christmas tree lights doesn't rise to a point where it is worth hiring people, that just means people don't really value christmas tree lights as much as the other things they an spend their money on. I see no problem here.
Same with code. If you can't pay enough to convince the people capable of writing code to do this instead of something else, I have trouble believing the code you want written is all that important. Certainly not so important that you should have the power to force people to write it for you as a condition of living and working in the US!
does my emacs suddenly start producing bitcoin if i move to NYC or SF?
They can hire local talent then. All the American brogrammers that are about to face real competition now will be most likely willing to take those 100K after they lose the jobs they got thank's to "cultural fit".
We seem to have gotten things all around ass backwards these days. We get high-end candidates from Asia and low-end candidates from Mexico, so Americans are being squeezed on both ends.
In other words US will get less talent and less benefit of talented engineers from India, China. More and more work go outside the more loss of US.
They also implied it's more commonly found among females. Again, only a comment on what they perceive; there's nothing illegal or unexpected with a 17 year old saying "like, omg, freaks out".