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Comment by ebbv | Hacker News Reader

> while the Googles and Microsofts of the world support a program that allows them to hire top engineers from all over the globe.

Yes, and exploit those workers with lower salary than they deserve because those workers only have a small sliver of the job market available to them that their US Citizen competitors do.

The H-1B program is terrible for all employees and only benefits employers, which is why you see big corporations like Microsoft and Facebook pushing to remove caps on it. Not because they generous but because they would love to have more engineers who are underpaid and have a very hard time leaving the company for years until they can one day become citizens (and from what I understand the path to citizenship for an H-1B worker is not easy despite them being extremely productive and high contributing members of society.)

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The H-1B program is terrible for all employees and only benefits employers

This is patently untrue when it comes to companies like Google or Microsoft.

I came to the US on an H1-B. As I'm sure you can imagine, people talk about their salaries. I compared mine to my colleagues who were US citizens. We were all paid about the same.

I'm pretty sure these companies would get busted if managers were informed by HR that "this person is going to get a smaller raise since they are on an H1-B".

I'm glad genuinely glad you came to the U.S. and found gainful employment. I have many friends, some very close, that likewise have come to the U.S. and the U.S. is better for it.

That being said, even if the salaries are all the same, it doesn't mean that wages are not suppressed. If you import supply and demand stays consistent, prices drop. I think the burden of proof is on the people saying otherwise to prove that importing tens of thousands of engineers doesn't suppress wages.

In other words, if large corporations couldn't import H1B workers, they'd have to do other things to get their work done, and those things would probably involve raising wages for especially skilled engineers. Or perhaps by investing in other productivity measures (better dev tools, better hardware, more administrative assistants, etc.).

At this point I just don't understand your argument. You seem to imply that there is some "correct" supply of engineers, and anything that increases the supply above that is "suppressing wages." That would mean that scholarships for engineering schools, programs for encouraging engineering careers, all forms of immigration, and even internal population growth, would all be things that can "suppress wages."

It seems to me that H1B supporters are the ones saying there is a correct supply of engineers and that the U.S. is below that threshold.

I'm arguing that the supply is more fungible than that, especially in the long run and especially given a floating price point, and that changing the laws and regulations to solve challenges in particular business models is basically an indirect form of lobbying for special interests.

Actually, all those things are things that suppress wages.

Think about it: WHY do we need programs to encourage engineering careers? Do we have programs to encourage people to go into law or medicine? Why not? Well those professions don't seem to have a shortage of people willing to work hard to get into those schools. So why does engineering have such a shortage?

These programs assume that there's something wrong with young people, or with the culture, causing them to avoid these careers.

Maybe, instead, there's something wrong with the careers themselves, and the employers, which cause people to avoid them. So why are we, as a society, subsidizing these rich companies to help them get more workers? If these companies really need these workers so badly, maybe they should foot the bill to recruit people into the profession and then train them (I mean their entire college costs here). If an employer isn't willing to pay $100k for a kid to go through college, who otherwise isn't willing to take that risk himself, then why should the rest of us try to brainwash that kid to do it, or help fund a scholarship for him?

> if large corporations couldn't import H1B workers, they'd have to do other things to get their work done, and those things would probably involve raising wages for especially skilled engineers. Or perhaps by investing in other productivity measures

Or perhaps, move the job to another country which has a larger supply of workers.

Sure, but I suspect they are already doing that to the extent it makes sense.

Nope. It's simple: if this were an option, they'd have already done it.

Microsoft could easily just pack up and move all their dev work to India. There's a large supply of workers there, and they can pay them a fraction of what they have to pay here.

Why aren't they doing this? The big companies threaten this, but they never do it.

Simple: if it were really this easy, they'd have already done it. There's obviously some good reasons why they're not, and why instead they choose to import people under H1-B, pay them roughly similar salaries to US workers, and pay for lots of immigration/paperwork-related costs on top of this. They might be (and I think they are) helping keep salaries down this way overall, but that's nothing compared to just dumping everyone and moving operations to India and paying 1/5 of US labor rates. So why aren't they doing that?

Google runs large engineering offices in a number of foreign countries. If there's talent out there that can't be imported the next best thing is to go where the talent is.

Ok, then tell me why they haven't done that already. They could save huge amounts of money by just laying off everyone in the US and hiring new people in India (or relocating everyone to India). The salaries in India are easily 1/5 or less than those in Silicon Valley.

So what's stopping them?

> So what's stopping them?

The highly skilled American employees in their US-workforce?

According to other people, there's plenty of highly-skilled people in India. And they cost 1/5 as much. So why bother with the Americans?

Probably because they need the highly-skilled people both in India and US - to put together fruitful collaborations like these [1] (which, incidentally, created a sub-field which employs hundreds of thousands of engineers, Americans included).

At the moment, it might be more economically sensible to convince the Indian to move to US than to convince the American to move to India. But if you make it too hard or impossible to do that, Google will re-evaluate options at their disposal and decide accordingly.

[1]: https://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce.html

If they "need" the highly-skilled people in the US, who cost 5-6x the ones in India, then there's something clearly lacking with the people in India. Otherwise, why not just dump the US workers altogether and move all new operations to India? They can even move their American workers there and offer them a salary that's 1.5x-2x the standard salary in India and still save a bundle over Silicon Valley salary levels.

Seriously: these companies keep threatening this, I wish they'd just do it and see how it works out for them. It just sounds like an idle threat to me to try to get their way in the US. I'm really sick and tired of their threats.

Companies would need to invest in continuing professional development, as lawyers, doctors, PEs and so on need to. Not just hire someone with the latest buzzwords then discard them when the fashion changes.

Even with equal compensation, having an employee who is not only worried about their job, but also their immigration status, could be of benefit to the company. Theoretically they might cause less trouble, demand less from management, and are less likely to leave, saving the company all sorts of turnover costs.

Agree on this. My peers at BigCo who were citizens made a bit more than I did and usually got promoted quicker. Managers had the pressure of retaining them otherwise they would leave. Immigrants don't get that option.

H1Bs sponsored by Microsoft / Google are the lucky ones. When I started back in 2008, in the east coast, they gave me 50K and I had 10+ yrs IT exp, with previous Wall St company experience too. When my contract expired, they were so shocked why I quit so fast ;P. The small desi company in NJ who sponsored my didnt know they were shit.

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