Forget about pay and benefits: one enormous advantage of having a worker with an H1-B is that this type of Visa is linked to a specific job in a specific company. If a worker with an H1-B wants to change jobs, he needs to change Visas and/or alter the conditions of the current one (depending on whether they change employers or only positions). Even if the process isn’t actually that much more difficult than for someone in a different status, the mental obstacle is enormous from both the point of view of the worker and of HR.
So it sounds like an H1B person is just another contract employee which companies have lots of. These people are easy to let go since they work on say a 2-3 year contract. Hence they dont have to pay retirement and other long term benefits.
I have a cousin who had this great job. However as soon as the job ended he was let go.
A coworker once was offered this great job when a major employer came to Kansas City. They really offered him the moon in terms of pay and benefits but he stayed where he was, earning maybe 1/4 of what he was offered because they refused a 5 year contract.
And that is where the jobs are. Science jobs - not really so much. Lots of people with a B.S. in Biology having a career as a barista. It isn’t that much different than an English Lit degree. Math - you teach. I know there is lots of math research going on - but not so much that the jobs fall from the sky. But Technology and Engineering - you see the jobs.
Its the practical applications for those fields where the jobs are - Science becomes engineering in the real world for most people - and math becomes financial modeling - just as English Lit becomes marketing or technical writing.
And all that goes back to we teach students to think in terms of subject - not career. They like Science. They are good at English. Few even know they can take their math skills and do financial modeling until late in college. And by then, we’ve taught many of them to be academic snobs - you didn’t learn to deconstruct Jane Austen so you could read Jane Austen - you learned to deconstruct Jane Austen because someone is going to describe a business problem to you and you’ll need to deconstruct the business problem - and it will be a boring business problem like “why do we get so many returns on large appliances?”
My B.S is in applied biology. I have no idea how much the curriculum I experienced differs from someone who got their degree in just plain biology. Probably not that much. But I went to an engineering school. I imagine the insertion of “applied” was to make the science majors seem like pseudo-engineers.
It depends on the company. In many cases this is true, but the H1Bs I’ve hired have usually worked in the same place the same average length of time as some with permanent residence or citizenship. But we hire talent, not bodies.
There is no more flexible STEM degree, possibly ANY undergrad degree STEM or otherwise, than electrical engineering. A BSEE will open doors into so many different areas of employment that it’s almost the tech-job catch all. I challenge anyone to prove another choice of STEM path would be more flexible.
My experience as well. Also, definitely not cheaper - we’d exhaust all other options before opening up a job H1B - to hire someone H1B meant an initial $30k legal bill to the department for all the filings and documentation - and we didn’t pay them less, the job was graded, the grade had a payscale associated with it, and to pay them less than what was in the band would have created legal issues… Plus the risk that they wouldn’t get their visa renewed after we invested in them or that they’ll decide not to stay in the U.S.
Its a horrible thing to say…but hiring a foreign national inside the U.S. is a little like hiring a young woman - there is the perception that you’ll invest in them then they’ll decide to go home - or stay home with kids.
Holy crap, you guys were overpaying.
Look, all I know is my entire job revolves around interfacing with my clients in Illinois and North Carolina from my office in New York so that my offshore developers in Eastern Europe can transition with the client’s consulting firm’s offshore technical resources in India.
Honestly, I don’t even go into the office anymore, unless I’m bored. My boss is in Japan, my direct reports are scattered all over. Not that they directly report to me for anything related to what they actually work on. My clients all work from home or are in the Midwest or suburban NJ or wherever. The people who actually do the work on my projects are based all over the world.
I have people I’ve been working with for the better part of a year and I have no idea what they look like.
Another distortion of the STEM numbers are the pre-med students, including those who don’t make the grades to get into med school and wind up with some generic science degree.
But really, the issue is that the job market in technology is extremely granular, with many sub-specialties and required levels of capability. So it’s entirely possible to have more STEM graduates than the total number of available STEM jobs, while certain sub-specialties can face severe shortage.
Macroeconomics deals with aggregates out of necessity, but sometimes you really can’t analyze the labor market that way. The details matter too much to be abstracted away.
The rise of contractor hiring has made this problem worse, because contractors are supposed to come in pretty much trained in the specialty you are hiring them for. With permanent employees there is always the ability to train people to take on new tasks, and we do that all the time. With a 6 month contract, not so much.
Internal chargebacks. Legal department as profit center. 
Welcome to corporate America where cutting a purchase order is $500 for $24 in pencils.
You’re overpaying. Massively. We have more than 100 H-1 B and green card applications processed each year. Our total regulatory and employment law department spends less than $1m per year, including in-house staff and outside legal fees. And that includes hundreds of employment issues related to thousands of employees and hundreds of non-employee related issues. I doubt if an H-1b application costs more than a couple grand. It’s mostly handled by one paralegal.
And I do work for a company where IT charged our department $77k to STOP running a dozen reports, and save a couple grand a year. So we know bureaucracy and inefficiency as well as anyone else.
I used to be the in-house immigration paralegal in corporate America, for a Fortune 100 company. Upper management constantly bitched about how they couldn’t afford to increase our budget to hire another paralegal, never mind that by bringing more work in-house the 3 paralegals, 1 secretary, and one lawyer saved a couple million in outside legal fees every year. The workloads are probably double that now, with no increase in staff. Sometimes I hate corporate America.
Hi Eva, you might remember me as Bob from the Budget department!
The computer field has become very specialized, and very competitive. Employers are often open in stating that they are looking for “the perfect candidate” who will “hit the ground running.”
Employers would not be that selective if there was a shortage of high tech workers.
It is becoming more difficult to get a permanent job as a computer programmer, one with job security, a career path, and health and retirement benefits. Employers like to hire contract tech workers. These are hired for as briefly as three months. They are paid as little as $25 an hour, with no benefits.
When a contract is over the tech worker has to send out hundreds of resumes. He or she may have to move hundreds of miles to get another contract position. If he of she cannot find another high tech job in six months his or her career as a computer programmer may be over.
$25/hr for contracts? Man, I am glad I got out when I did. When I was contracting in the 90s, the rates were around $90-$100, hitting $120s for shorter term (like 3-months) and rarer skills contracts.
Took me four minutes, and I have no formal training. May I have a job please? 
(Of course, I also had to make up the language from scratch, since I don’t know any languages. Surely that’s bonus points. 
:D)
There is nothing remotely computer science related in that problem. All it does is test you to see if you thought it through - and do the test for divisible by five and three both first. It took me under fifteen seconds to write the code for this in my head, but I’ve seen this kind of problem many times before.
When you screw something like this up, you never do it again - which is why experienced programmers are useful.
The complaints I’ve read from CIOs are about new grads not knowing specific packages, not that they don’t know how to program. Though perhaps the CIOs would have no clue about this.
Hi Voyager, I was cracking a joke based on the idea that I had misunderstood a necessary condition for a sufficient condition, thanks have a nice day…
Employers can be both selective and there be a shortage if you understand a few things about the tech industry.
First of all, talent appears to be distributed something closer to a power law than linear or a bell curve. In my very rough estimation, for every 10x you increase in selectivity, you get a doubling of productivity/talent. ie: the top 10% of programmers will be twice as productive as average, the top 1% will be 4x as productive, the top 0.1% will be 8x and the top 0.01% will be 16x as productive as average.
Second, productivity is not additive, instead, it’s highly non-linear. Adding someone who is below average to a team can often decrease overall productivity and velocity is maximized in small teams that work well together.
Thus, taking both of these factors together can help explain why, even during a shortage, it might be rational to be ultra-picky vs lowering your standards.
That’s not to say there are numerous dysfunctions around tech hiring that probably contribute far more in the real world towards this situation such as box ticking HR, non-programmers trying to hire programmers, poorly designed interviews, rampant sexism and ageism, voodoo magic rituals around hiring, the talent industry being broken and a thousand other idiotic things.