For "real" technology companies like AeroFS, that use a small fraction of the H-1B quota, it's about talent. For body shops like Infosys, WiPro, Tata, etc that use up the vast majority of the H-1B visas it's absolutely about cost.
But it's worse than that. An Indian coworker once shared an unsubstantiated story about how an unscrupulous recruiter brought over a bunch of IT workers from India and forced them to work for essentially nothing. One call to immigration from their employer and they are sent back. It's hard for me to imagine the vulnerability of being in a place distant from my home with minimal language skills and no knowledge of my rights. Neither your boss nor US immigration is your friend.
Another thing I see from Indian workers is a strange ability to be experts in extremely specific and obscure technologies. If in an interview if I am asked about my proficiency in unfamiliar piece of software, I might respond "It looks similar to other tools I have used. I am sure I could pick it up quickly."
This is NOT what pointy-haired HR suit-monkeys want to hear.
I don't know if Indians are more comfortable lying about this, or if they take a crash course to prepare for the interview, or if they are graduates of some school in India called "The Institute of Suspiciously Obscure Technologies" but this may be a large part of the justification behind the "talent" excuse for more H1-Bs.
There is plenty of talent domestically - they real business need is simply being buzzword-compliant and an unwillingness to train.
If that came across a little racist, Let me say that with rare exception the Indian people I have known are competent and pleasant coworkers. I have no personal issues there.
> an unscrupulous recruiter brought over a bunch of IT workers from India and forced them to work for essentially nothing. One call to immigration from their employer and they are sent back
One call to immigration and the company would be quite fucked with horrible fees and probably an audit / prosecution for fraud and human rights abuses. One does NOT mess with this. They'd never dare. What would happen is that they'd just not renew the person's visa, screwing them over that way.
> with minimal language skills and no knowledge of my rights
Let's be honest here, a TON of Indians (especially those in the higher economic strata that afforded a good education and picked up IT skills) have great english, and are perfectly capable of reading their rights, which if you've ever gone through the process, you'll know in minute detail.
That's not to say that abuse doesn't happen, but I think your view of how it happens is very skewed, and you're quite misinformed. It's much more banal and sinister than that. Then again, it's the exception rather than the norm among the more "modern" companies. The abusers, I think, would tend to be the large IT sweatshops and "consulting" firms.
No one apart from the US has figured out how to build billion dollar companies like popcorn.
It's understandable seeing this kind of stuff on reddit from 13 year-olds. But I don't understand what vantage makes you make such sweeping generalizations about a supposedly monolithic chunk of 1 billion human beings.
Haven't you heard the joke about how pretty much everything that requires a caveat "not trying to be racist here" is actually racist?
That's not what I got out of reading that same snippet
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"The genius who comes from Nigeria to the States to write some code is going to pick up skills and connections that will prepare them to go back and have a tremendous impact back in their home country. Maybe many won't; maybe many will stay here, optimize some small metric for Facebook, and be fat and happy. And that's a shame compared to the outcome where they go fix up their homeland. But hey: any one of us could go spend our lives living in and trying to improve a third world country, regardless of where we're born. Why should the folks who happen to be born there be forced into it?
But that's not going to happen. More than 95% of Indians who come here (and can stay here) will not go back to India. And that makes sense on the individual level, they're not going to find back home the safety and the quality of life they can get here so obviously they'll make the decision to stay here. But I'm not sure if we should base the policy on the liberties and considerations from the scope of the individual, we should ideally base the policy on what widely makes for a stable, safe, healthy world. I understand that a nation's job is to look after its own constituents, and nothing more, but I argue in this day and age we should recognize how interconnected the world is, and what magnificently deleterious ramifications our seemingly-benign actions can have.
> But hey: any one of us could go spend our lives living in and trying to improve a third world country.
That's going from, what is in my view, an active-bad action (siphoning talent from abroad, much to the detriment of the nations that are giving up these individuals), to a passive-okay action (letting Nigeria have its smart Nigerians) to an active-good action (we Americans going to Nigeria to make some good changes), aka philanthropy. As a nation responsible for its own constituents, we are not strictly obliged to do that, but we do -- and it's great that we do, we should continue doing it more.
Yes, brain drain is terrible (though I can't see how it's unexpected given a global economy). However, you were born Indian/Nigerian/Chinese/Russian/American, therefore you must always work in India/Nigeria/China/Russia/US is equally terrible.
http://www.yale.edu/oiss/immigration/common/j1scholars/home....
Those J-1 holders make an informed deal with their country, money in exchange for time. The US is just enforcing it.
Nothing to do with the sentiments being put forward by the previous post.
As someone who left one of those countries for greener pastures (Canada) your argument sounds very rude and insensitive. Why should I have to suffer for my entire life in a country that violates my rights, with a crappy economy, with poor life outcomes, with a bad educational system, with a crappy health system that will shorten my life, where my kids will grow up to have much worse lives? All because I happen to have been born there?
You got lucky and were born into privilege. It's all too easy to say that we should all just deal with our lots in life when you happen to be in the top 1% of all humans on the planet.
What author seems to be saying is - status-quo is not a solution. Is there a shortage of good engineering talent(I am not talking about bottom 50%), but top 20%? I think answer is emphatically yes - worldwide.
Has US benefited from those top 20% who have managed to migrate to US? It would be foolish to say no.
Lastly, this is on official company blog. It is not politically correct to publicly lambast companies which are abusing visa system. But that does not make Author's argument weaker.
Do we have a shortage of talent of the type I just described? Emphatically yes. Does that mean there is in any way a shortage? Emphatically no.
So the only sense in which there is a shortage is the same sense in which those jerks at bwm don't wish to sell me an m3 coupe for $15k. ie no shortage at all.
[2] http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/AeroFS-Salaries-E656975.htm
Do they? Every discussion of this issue I've seen has had loads of engineers who don't work in body shops saying that they've never seen an H1B worker in a body shop and that body shops must therefore not be the ones using the visa program. (Of course, anecdotes are not data, so neither is this)
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2489146/technology-law-...
Top 5:
* INFOSYS
* TATA
* COGNIZANT
* ACCENTURE
* WIPROBut, thankfully, my experience in the "big corporate enterprisey space" is minimal.
Or take HP: I have an Internet acquaintance who got laid off along with a number of other older workers at the same time (around age 50 for him). He later noticed an explicit (yes, we all know that's against the law) attempt to hire someone through the H-1B program for quite a bit less than he had been earning. Again, "real" technology work on their more serious printers.
In fact, the way you can tell this is bs and it is entirely about price is AeroFS opened a canadian subsidiary! I wonder how much that cost. At a guess, $30k? So apparently $30k is less than the premium required to pry engineers out of dropbox or box.
Or god forbid, train someone.
Obviously, a young French guy with disposable income, no dependents and earthly possessions that fit in a large backpack and a suitcase is not representative of the majority of H1B workers but the specter of deportation is not very scary to me. The last two times were just opportunities to travel.
I'm certainly not saying it's the motivation in every case - doubtless it is often about costs and sometimes genuinely about talent.
Similarly a lot of people talking about salary are missing the point. Sure, there might be more candidates if the salary offered were higher but even if they had the right skills (and that's a big if) they might not be a good fit for the team.
I know mentioning "culture fit" may attract a lot of flak but consider this: if a candidate cares more about the salary than the product and the team then even if they're incredibly skilled they risk being detrimental to the company as a whole. I've seen what the world of finance looks like through some friends and it's not pretty.
And it's just a job. Not a mission.
People jump out of bed to go skiing, or cure cancer, or research fundamental physics, or to practice medicine, or to help the needy, or to help animals, or to put a human on mars, or for 1000 other reasons.
Not to steal a point of marketshare from office 365.
But I do think I see why aerofs has trouble hiring.
I don't recall claiming to make the world a better place. We've changed our focus since I joined and to be honest I was more excited about the original vision but I'll take corporate file sharing over online advertising any day.
Then again, I'd take life as an itinerant purveyor of french toast and fine liquors over online advertising so I'm hardly representative of the average person in this "industry".
People going on about cultural fit and missions -- while, of course, having a problem hiring -- make me literally laugh out loud.
I'd rather be an itinerant snow bum, personally.
I don't think culture has been a major issue for us when hiring. I merely brought it up as a counterpoint to the "just raise the salary" argument which strikes me as disingenuous.
Of course it is about cost. Because if he kept upping his offer, he would get someone (if the office is a normal place). He simply does not want to pay the going rate for the skill set he needs. I'd like to hire lots of people on HN for minimum wage as well - I know that's not reasonable though and I don't whine about it.
Excuse me, he is just a guy with a company, not some demi-God who has access to a list of all qualified people out there.
When people say: "Hey, there's talent in the US! Look hard and you will find it!", you are kinda missing the circumstances under which he is operating.
First, the cost. Are you suggesting he offer $1 million for a job that used to go for $200,000 just because he can't find anyone? That is flawed economics and a blind faith in the market. The market is not perfectly elastic. We're talking about people, and not mass-produced goods or primary, replaceable material (Iron, Coal etc.). He probably can't operate profitably at those prices.
Second, people are super diverse, and from personal experience, its very very hard to find the right kind of people for any job. If he's found someone who works well for the company, he's very lucky and realizes that. All he wants to do is to bring him to his main office so that he can possibly be more efficient and productive, and the current US labor laws are not letting him do so.
>In fact, the way you can tell this is bs and it is entirely about price is AeroFS opened a canadian subsidiary! I wonder how much that cost. At a guess, $30k? So apparently $30k is less than the premium required to pry engineers out of dropbox or box.
What if engineers working at dropbox are perfectly happy where they are? How do you know that he hasn't tried that? Does he even have time to court all the employees of dropbox; he probably has much better things to do with his time.
>Or god forbid, train someone.
Anecdotally, this is false. I admit I've worked only for 2 American companies so far, but both of them have been incredibly involved with the local community; hiring many entry-level engineers, giving internships to students from community colleges and organizing learn-to-code events on premises.
So perhaps he needs to offer a million dollars, if that's what it takes to get his perfect unicorn (minimum job requirements: 23 years experience with python. Cue whining that we have a talent shortage when Guido declines job offer.) But I'd bet he'd get a hell of a lot of interest at even 10% or 15% over the going wage.
All he wants is to sidestep US immigration law to undercut wages of domestic employees. There, was that so hard to admit?
Yes, he's too busy to recruit! Why aren't those uppity employees lining up begging to work for him? I mean, looking at employees on linkedin is, like, so much work!
Whoa, this is not ok.
Most of your 15+ comments in this thread have combined grand unsubstantiated claims with lashing out at those you disagree with. That's bad enough, but here you've crossed into personal attack. Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News.
The level of discourse you're practicing here makes me ashamed of this site: lacking in either civility or substance and whipping up indignant froth. In the future, please optimize for quality rather than quantity. One high-quality comment is a greater contribution than a dozen rude ones.
People legitimately have divergent views of this complex matter: companies use the immigration process for different reasons, there are different levels of talent being sought, employers and employees have different vantage points, and so on. Turning it into a polarized nastiness match, as you and a few others have done, destroys the capacity of this site for exploratory conversation.