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Comment by shas3 | Hacker News Reader

Why is there an implicit assumption that the H1B visa program engenders fraud? A lot of H1B discussions on HN focus on fraud and avoid talking about legitimate talented foreigners because that stuff is not as interesting. H1B discussions on HN are like the crime beat in newspapers. Further, 'H1B' seems like a catchall term for hating on immigrant labor in the software industry. Here are some examples on HN that demonstrate bigoted generalizations and ill-informed hate on H1B-workers [1,2,3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8687804 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8651850 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8637756

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Because we have major unemployment inside of the US. We also have the highest ever rate of Computer Science graduates.[1]

Those two combined make the 'need' for foreign tech workers seem very suspicious.

On top of questionable need, there are other facets of the program that are obvious areas of potential abuse (employer reported prevailing wages, employer sponsorship forcing employees to stay out of the competitive job market, etc)

There may be some absolute need for the most talented people other countries have to offer, but there is little evidence that generic 'programmers' or 'analysts' need to be imported into this country when we have 4-5% of college graduates unemployed[2] (thats ~2 million people at least[3])

Or maybe everyone here is a xenophobe

[1] http://www.geekwire.com/2014/analysis-examining-computer-sci... [2]http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_501.80.as... [3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_U...

It is a hard problem, but there isn't enough evidence to link legal immigration to the shortages and unemployment that you have cited. It is as easy to say "there is some unemployment, so we should make life difficult for non-immigrant aliens, that'll fix it" as it is to say "the sun goes around the earth because we see it go across the sky." It is not clear if you can draw a causation between restrictive (or unfair policies, as it currently stands) immigration and improved employment rates. The debate will be better informed if you can cite studies that say fixing alien-worker policies fixes employment (to any extent). Here's a (partisan) starting point: https://www.uschamber.com/blog/guest-post-economic-impact-hi...

The problem as I see it is that H1B isn't really immigration; it's even classified as a "non-immigrant" visa, created so that companies can temporarily employ foreign workers.

H1B holders are effectively tied to their employers. Sure, they can in theory find other jobs, but the timeframes and restrictions are very different to those of an actual immigrant.

Immigration of talented people would be fine. I would love to see a merit-based system. But the H1B system is hardly immigration.

Keep in mind that many companies start sponsoring an H-1B employee's Green Card as soon as they start working at the company. When considering those companies, H-1B is about immigration.

Do the huge consulting firms that hire 80% of H-1Bs start sponsoring green cards? Because I believe that 80% of companies could sponsor their H-1Bs, while still sponsoring a tiny minority of visa holders.

I don't mean to imply that restricting H1Bvisas would solve our unemployment by any means.

I was just trying to explain why a lot of people here seem suspicious of the motives behind companies hiring H1Bs.

This is a huge surprise to me. When I went back to college, I graduated in 2006 and IS/CS/CE rates were at all-time lows. I guess it's been awhile now, but the numbers probably rebounded so recently that the only glut of talent (if there is one) is in very recent grads.

We do not have major unemployment in the Valley. It's very very very hard to find good people.

> It's very very very hard to find good people.

Any time somebody says this, I always mentally add "...at the wage I want to pay."

It is not hard to find good people if you offered a million dollar salary. If there were a legitimate labor shortage, wages would be skyrocketing. Instead, we get employers whining and agitating for increasing the H1B quota.

Of course, a company can only reasonably offer a million dollar salary if that hire will increase their revenue by over a million. I'm guessing that's a pretty rare hire.

He's being hyperbolic, but his point stands. Fact is, there is no talent shortage, there's simply a shortage of startups who understand that you can't nickel and dime engineers or refuse to pay market rates. Whining about it does nothing to solve the problem. David "Pardo" Keppel said it best:

"There's no shortage of smart, hardworking engineers. There's a shortage of smart, hardworking engineers willing to work for very little money."

If you're having trouble hiring, it's probably because you're not paying enough. It turns out that talented people are worth paying a lot for.

> increase their revenue

OR decrease their expenses.

Even offering a 7-figure salary, you still have the massive filtering problem (because the median programmer is fairly poor, IMO).

The filtering problem might even get worse if you offer such an out-sized salary in the marketing of that open position...

Smaller companies just can't afford it. Also, a developer will keep other people employed at the company. If our company had no developers, all the sales/accountexecs/marketing/etc people would be out of a job.

If your company had no salespeople, would the developers still have a job?

It's a classic chicken and egg question. In software development, do you need the engineer first, to build the product, that can then be sold even further.

I think it's just that the wrong metaphor is being used. Don't think "as the fundamental basis of the company, the developers are keeping everyone else employed"... think "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts". You can start with either, but you won't get anywhere without both.

> Those two combined make the 'need' for foreign tech workers seem very suspicious.

Anecdotally speaking, it's hard find and hire good engineers in Seattle.

Depends on pay. For 75k - yeah, hard.

> Depends on pay. For 75k - yeah, hard.

Most positions don't list salary.

From my experience, it's not a problem getting candidates to accept offers, but instead get qualified candidates to extend offers to.

If there aren't enough engineers with skill X, and Y years experience, willing to work for pay Z, we need to adjust one of those 4 levers.

Expect to pay a premium that is commensurate to real estate prices, then advertise that premium. You'll find people.

If you refuse to pay that premium, nobody will move from other cities, so you're fighting for local talent.

If you refuse to even post your salary range, nobody who knows Seattle real estate prices and has wasted time interviewing for Seattle positions before, will even bother applying. That is the case with me.

I have personally turned down offers in Seattle for being too low, as have other engineers I know. These days I would have to be very excited about a position to bother responding if it didn't list salary, because my assumption is that it's too low to list - so "we don't list the salary" is not necessarily the same as "we know that our salary isn't what's limiting our applicant pool".

Interesting experience.

I assume if no salary is listed, they are paying "market rate."

For me, I've learned how to negotiate effectively, and as such, can get the compensation that I want.

It's not a skill that a lot of people have, so having a salary listing makes it easier.

"willing to work for pay Z"

Is 'Z' a low number compared to the average employee? If that is, maybe that's the problem?

Indeed, if 'Z' is not lower than average, then they shouldn't be having so much trouble. And if it is lower, then that is exactly the H1B fraud people are complaining about in this thread - paying below the prevailing wage.

Z isn't a low number.

When I do basic salary surveys, companies in Seattle appear to be paying market rate. Early stage, and pre-funded startups typically don't, but most other companies do.

The salaries don't compare to Bay Area salaries (but they are up there), but that is because our housing options are much more affordable.

The feeling I get is: Bay Area engineers don't want to move to Seattle, and Seattle engineers don't want to move to Bay Area, unless the comp is significantly above market.

So, would you have to go to India to find good engineers? And if you do, what is the interview process like?

We have an office in India that is staffed by a number of exceptionally talented engineers.

Locally the talent pool is shallow, as most if not all the good engineers are well taken care of by their employers (as they should be).

If you're lucky you'll contact one at the right time who is looking for new opportunities.

If you're a Google, Amazon, or MSFT with deep pockets then you can pay to acquire talent. For others, it's not easy.

Just curious, is there a larger pool of good engineers in India than available locally? If there is, that sounds like an opportunity to fulfill the promise of the H1B program. From what I understand, the body shops that import most of the H1B workers don't source the high quality employees that employers are demanding here.

> From what I understand, the body shops that import most of the H1B workers don't source the high quality employees that employers are demanding here.

Have data to back up that statement?

Just my friends who are engineering managers. They manage teams here and overseas in China and India. Their views are, overall, the engineers from overseas are of lower quality than the engineers here. But they cost less especially overseas, they can hire 2-3 times as many engineers as over here.

> Their views are, overall, the engineers from overseas are of lower quality than the engineers here.

That is the perception.

The reality is that there are a number of top engineers from overseas, and they are compensated very well. What India and China are able to do is produce a lot more average quality engineers. Indian and Chinese average engineers are on par with average engineers in the US.

There just happens to be a lot more average quality engineers from overseas then there are in the US. US companies have figured out ways to work with overseas shops that employ average engineers because the cost basis is worth it (1/6 the cost).

With programs like Code Fellows and other coding bootcamps, you're going to see an increase of mediocre American engineers, but at a much higher cost.

It's also suspicious that there are significant numbers earning below or close to the poverty line. I find it hard to believe that these are skilled tech workers doing tasks that can't be done by domestic labor.

The facts 6 of the top 10 H1Bs sponsor are:

- Indian companies

- Using cheap labor

- Paying significantly less then other companies.

- Responsible for almost 50% of all H1B applications

Driving the salaries by immigration is an historical complaint worldwide. HackerNews or not.

If the goal really is to enable highly qualified people to come to the U.S. (separate from the usual immigration process) wouldn't a fairly simple tweak just be to take the wage into account in the allocation? There's currently a fixed quota, with two things that go into allocating it: 1) offers not paying the "prevailing wage" are disqualified; and 2) the remaining offers are allocated in first-come, first-serve fashion until the quota is reached, with no preference to good vs. bad offers.

Seems you could collapse those two issues by just saying: the 50,000 slots (or however many there will be) are auctioned off, or allocated in order of highest salary offer, or something similar. In theory the "invisible hand of the market" ought to then allocate the slots to where foreign talent is most needed, and the companies using it for cheap labor won't be able to outbid Google/etc. for the slots.

If that were the goal, the tweak would be simple -- give out more green cards to people with appropriate education. Let them come here and get jobs.

These programs suppress wages for low-end computer positions. If you were around in the 90s at a big company/government, you'd run into old guys who made big bucks tweaking COBOL and Operator types tweaking Batch jobs. The whole point of COBOL was that you could teach the average bean counter to write it, so the answer to the problem of these guys retiring was to import cheap workers and automate.

My grandparents all came to the U.S. from Ireland. No H-1 nonsense where you get tied to an employer, just plain immigration and a path to citizenship. It should be no different today.

The wage is already part of the criteria for application. USCIS only accept application if the salary of the visa beneficiary is comparable to a US citizen salary doing the same job.

I mentioned that part; that's the "prevailing wage" requirement in (1) in my comment above. I'm proposing prioritizing by wage beyond that, e.g. if there are 300,000 applications that meet the "prevailing wage" requirement, and 50,000 slots, instead of allocating the slots randomly or first-come-first-serve, allocate them highest-wage-first.

Then Facebook, Google, Apple & co could be the only one winning the hiring war.

Sponsoring someone would be too damn dangerous and expensive for smaller companies and startups.

Sure, markets are an imperfect way to allocate limited resources. But is a lottery really a better way? At least markets would allocate the slots in way that bears some relationship to where the maximum demand in the economy for those workers is.

For more info, see: http://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/pdf/H-1B_Selected_Sta...

Becuase it's a shady industry that exploits foreign labor and suppresses wages.

A former employer employed J2EE devs for $25/hr from an agency, meaning the workers literally make about $15, and are basically indentured to their employer for the visa period

> Why is there an implicit assumption that the H1B visa program engenders fraud

I can offer this from personal observations: - I work with many clearly talented foreigners such as Indians here on H1B

- But I've also seen entire floors of companies such as at Cisco and Ebay that are almost 100% Indian

- This appears to happen when management positions are attained by Indians who only hire more Indians and contract with Indian-based outsourcing companies

- The Indians in these companies are different than Indians who work at other companies that are not dominated by Indians, in that they tend to be of much more dubious ability. This leads me to believe that there is widespread fraud on the visa applications.

- I've heard of under the table dealings among the same people where positions at companies are sold for thousands of dollars.

All this leads me to be against the work visa program for spouses of H1B workers. I can easily imagine wives of Indians without skills creating fake resumes, and paying under the table to gain positions in Indian dominated departments. Almost guarantee this will be a widespread problem.

"A lot of H1B discussions on HN focus on fraud and avoid talking about legitimate talented foreigners"

Not just on HN, but the discussions on H1B are similar everywhere. And just in case you don't understand the controversy, a lot of people believe that the H1B program is being misused and abused, to the detriment of employees here. If you don't agree with that, you should make your case instead of whining about the arguments.

The links you cite don't point to any specific post, and I couldn't go through all of them to figure out which ones you consider bigoted. But if there are bigoted and hateful posts (which are wrong and I don't condone) I would disagree with you that most people here hate on immigrant labor.

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