I am not insulting you. That is just the way it works and vendors are usually appalled by the demands until we flash the cash. I have to be the nice one. I am a senior managing consultant for a company that has more money than God (no I can’t tell you which one due to confidentiality agreements but things in the multi-million dollar range are considered trivial).
My work is with life-saving medical devices that we can never fail to get it to the patients and doctors anywhere in the U.S. within 12 - 24 hours. We also sell pharmaceuticals and famous cosmetic products coming from other regions. I can’t tell you who it is but I am sure you can figure out on your own. They indeed do many tens of billions of of dollars in business a year and my job is to keep everything running and plan for the future.
I worked with people in India and I could never figure out when they slept. They routinely were working at 2 AM their local time and were back at 8 AM . Maybe they slept just a few hours a night. That’s not a schedule to produce quality work.
Say that the H1B program just ends tomorrow and those people disappear. How long does it take to replace those folks with American Americans? I’m curious how this would work because reading this discussion, it seems the consensus is “it sucks/they can suck” to “we suck and don’t have the people we need”. Sorry to over generalize but I feel like I need to know more about things I know little of.
Oh and something else. Would Warner Von Bron be a H1B visa recipient today? I watched The Right Stufff the other day and was remembering the line “our Germans are better than their Germans”
H1B program, used properly, is a very good program. We very much want to have talented, creative, productive people from all over the world flocking to the US. It’s very good for us (it’s bad for countries they come from but that’s the way the cookie crumbles).
We want them to come here, we want them to work here and we want them to stay here. Such people make America great (again?).
What this post is about is the abuse of H1B. When the program is used, instead, to bring mediocre-to-horrible employees in just because the employers can underpay them and make them work more, in the process lowering the quality of the product, frustrating the people who have to work with these foreign workers, and denying jobs to home-grown talent - that’s not what H1B program should be.
So the question is how to modify the program’s terms to make it have the positive effect and avoid the negatives. I don’t know if across-the-board salary minimum would do it, but it’s something to consider.
The problem in the tech industry is the WWW (version 2.5.1).
We have transformed almost everything into a bit stream.
We can’t get the cheap labor into the country?
Darn - I guess that we’ll have to leave them where they are and have them work there.
Dang it, we really wanted to find office space and parking here in Silicon Valley…
For another example: around 2000-2002, Blue Shield (or Cross) re-write their systems to run on server farms.
They had two shops doing this - their own and one in India.
Mervyns showed why it was shut down by hiring Indian programmers but having them come to Hayward CA to work.
The cost of providing housing and food (and cars and…).
The H1-B’s ended up costing them almost as much as the US workers not hired would have cost.
It doesn’t have to be a high percentage. In the overall economy, if 8% of workers are unemployed, wages stagnate. If 4% of workers are unemployed, wages tend to rise due to labor market tightness.
The IT market is supposedly VERY tight, yet salaries are only rising 2%? Either the market is not actually very tight for IT employees, or the H-1B program is doing a VERY good job of making sure the market doesn’t ever get tight so that IT workers can benefit.
8% is a significant number. Do H-1B visa holders represent even 1% of the entire tech workforce. If you want me to be concerned about this, you’ll need to show me that those visa holders DO represent a significant part of the workforce.
As I said, they don’t have to represent a large portion to hold salaries down. Currently, 85,000 visas are issued a year:
That’s more than enough. Flood the auto industry with 85,000 workers who can be paid lower wages and see how long it takes for GM and Ford to stop bothering to hire and train Americans.
That is factually incorrect. H-1B employees are able to port to a new job provided they have reached a particular point in the green card process, and even if they have not yet reached that point in the green card process, they can change employers quite easily.
People in H-1B status change employers all the time.
What is factually correct can be hard to determine when the law says one thing and actual practice says something else. It also depends on whether the H-1B employees know their rights. I’m sure the companies that hire them are sure to let them know they can switch employers for more money.
I’ve seen it done. and I’ve seen it done well. Since a lot of the BAs I’ve worked with are Indian, and a lot of the BA work can get done in two weeks on site in interviews, its done all the time.
I’ve also seen cases where we’ve sent the U.S. business side to India for a week. Its somewhat cheaper to put the U.S. side up in Indian hotels than to put the Indian side in U.S. hotels - and the Visas (at that point in time) were easier to get.
I’ve seen it done poorly as well - but I’ve also seen crap requirements come out of U.S. based white B.A.s
Oh, I’ve also seen cases where the business team isn’t in the U.S. any longer anyway. Customer Service and Inside Sales have been outsourced, so having your Indian developers and B.A.s work with your Indian claims processors and customer service reps (it was Health Insurance), actually made it a lot easier.
One of the other companies I used to work for only has its execs and U.S. sales teams in the U.S. any more. Everyone else is in the Far East. Engineers, managers, finance, manufacturing, administration, IT. Its just way cheaper - and it isn’t JUST salaries - you don’t provide health insurance in a country where its socialized.
Do you really think they don’t talk to one another? THEY all know that, they aren’t stupid. They don’t sit around waiting for their employer to tell them what is next - if they don’t know the system, and learn how to work it, they learn fast. In fact, most H1-B people I’ve worked with are on a constant scramble to make sure that when their Visa is up, they’ll be employed. So they are always looking for the next job - just in case this one goes through RIFs just as their visa needs renewing.
H-1B holders, as a group, are not dumb people. They are quite sophisticated about legal matters that affect their livelihood. I’ve done hundreds, if not thousands, of H-1B port petitions in my career. H-1B holders typically have other friends who are H-1B holders and they share information with each other.
I don’t think anyone is saying that Indian tech professionals are categorically terrible. What we’re saying is that when a company chooses an Indian offshoring firm due to cost considerations, you often get what you pay for, and you’re not paying much at all.
What I will say is that often the India-only workers are hard to deal with, while the ones who have spent some time stateside or in Europe are much better, as they are less pedantic about having exact, super-detailed specifications to write their code from, and they also realize that suggesting a bug or unintended functionality doesn’t mean a loss of face or insult and therefore a reason to circle the wagons and not admit fault.
And… supposedly there are 6.5 million tech workers in the us, so 85,000 is closer to 1.3% than 1%. If 1% is enough to make a difference in terms of the market tightness, then we have more than necessary.
That was my stance, that you get what you pay for and it was dismissed.
That said “tech workers” includes everyone from printer repair techs to computer scientists. It is hard to attract suitable talent even in the more desirable industries, it is almost impossible to get qualified talent in the less desirable areas (like medical devices etc).
People fail interviews for our more senior or creative jobs because they lack troubleshooting and critical thinking skills. If you know why things work you can adapt, if you know how to learn how things work you can learn. If you can only read man pages or cargo cult ideas from stack-exchange, without a filter for what is appropriate you will cost the company more than you can offer.
But this still doesn’t change the fact that no one can offer proof that H1B’s are purely a cost saving method (not including increased efficiency and productivity) and this increase will not raise Americans pay level, it will move industry to other parts of the globe.
+several. My experience as a former H-1B holder was that I knew the requirements better than the HR people at my employer; the same holds true for most of my H-1B coworkers. There are exceptions, but the norm is to be very keen to know exactly what your situation is.
Moving to another country for work is one of the biggest decisions any person can make, we don’t take it lightly.
That happens every time that the sole consideration is monetary cost. Witness my grandmother’s flimsy furniture, translations by “professional firms” who copy-paste into Google translate, or simply compare a trailer to a brick house.