1. Genuine candidates: I'm going to quote the extreme, people like Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Vinod Khosla etc. came to the US on H1B and there are a lot of other "superstars" on H1B or naturalized citizens. More practically, there are thousands of other talented people from all countries who work on H1B. So the argument that H1B should be done away with is absurd, unless the US doesn't care about staying atop of the technology sector.
Also, H1B workers get paid the same as local workers; there is a minimum wage requirement that has to be satisfied by the company applying for the H1B. So if you buy the allegation that wages are being depressed by H1B workers, why don't you take a peek at the bulletin board of your break room (which have H1B applications with salaries posted) or online and lodge a complaint with the state department of labor rather than posting bigoted comments?
2. Candidates hired by "staffing" companies: Blanket applications made by these "staffing" companies which may or may not have actual jobs. These are the applications that need to be stopped/scrutinized by USCIS (they have tightened this during the recession 2008-2010). It's arguable there is a genuine requirement for staffing companies, but these need to be scrutinized thoroughly.
Also, H1B workers get paid the same as local workers... So if you buy the allegation that wages are being depressed by H1B workers, why don't you take a peek at the bulletin board of your break room
The idea usually is that the presence of an H1B means that someone local does not exist to do the job, which means that a company would otherwise have to pay more than the going rate to poach someone else from another company. Then the company losing the employee has to pay more to poach from somewhere else, and so on, until eventually everyone who is suitable for such a position is making more.
The fact that H1Bs are paid what the locals are paid is exactly the issue people have when they talk about wage suppression. It is in much the same vein as when Apple/Google/et al. agreed to not steal each others employees. It is not like those employees were exactly hurting for compensation, but they theoretically could have made more without that treaty between companies.
The company leash is by far the biggest wage suppressor. Remove that, and of course the visa holders will get paid the "right" amount, because if they're not they should be able to switch jobs easily.
For reference, this is how it works in Japan, for example. A company can sponsor your visa (which is basically some paperwork). But you get a fixed period in which you can work, and you can change companies without having to do anything except signal a company change to the immigration office. Very low friction
I switched jobs on H1B recently and I don't see what you think the leash is. The process takes about two weeks and as far as I can tell there is no realistic risk of losing the H1B even if your (about to be) former employer fires you and the new company butchers the transfer [1].
As a side-note, me changing jobs fairly dramatically increased my salary. I could presumably (I did not negotiate with old employer but a colleague did when he was about to leave) have gotten the same salary at my old place just by showing the new offer. I don't really see where the difference to a citizen is in this whole exercise.
([1] this is so because even if in the worst case you were kicked out of the country you could still reclaim the remaining time on the H1B so the worst case is still limited and I know of zero such cases.)
My understanding is that the real leash is the H1B to green card process. The process is slow and complicated and switching companies often requires you to start over (not to mention opening doors for other problems).
Yeah, the green card process is hopelessly bureaucratic. Even an employee moving within the same company from San Francisco to Silicon Valley requires restarting the process from scratch.
> The idea usually is that the presence of an H1B means that someone local does not exist to do the job
The way it works with large bodyshops is, let's say, HP runs a software team of 20 paying everybody $100k. Infosys or other "consulting" company then shows up and offers to run the same project at the cost of $1.6 mil. Immense savings, so HP signs the deal.
Infosys then runs the H1 posting advertising 20 position paying $45,000 each. Their US operations are headquartered somewhere in NJ, so it passes the US Department of Labor snuff test of adequate standard wage. It's also understood that a consulting company might have its consultants deployed on premises, all depends on the client.
As very few locals apply for $45k jobs in NJ, Infosys staffs the project with its own H1 applicants who are then immediately to start work at client's location in Cupertino or Seattle.
* Usage of names like HP, Infosys and New Jersey is illustrative, not factual. It just helps to understand how margins are made in bodyshop industry.
>then immediately to start work at client's location in Cupertino or Seattle
Yep. They seem to favor cramming them into the nearest apartments (if possible in walking distance). It's probably optional, but your options are limited when you're getting paid dick, looking for housing in an area with higher cost of living and you're trying to send money home. I'm not saying it's not a comparatively good opportunity for them but they could be paid more fairly.
> The idea usually is that the presence of an H1B means that someone local does not exist to do the job, which means that a company would otherwise have to pay more than the going rate to poach someone else from another company. Then the company losing the employee has to pay more to poach from somewhere else, and so on, until eventually everyone who is suitable for such a position is making more.
In simple economic terms, yes, supply and demand exist, and if you reduce the supply of software engineers their salary will go up. However, canning the H1-B program is only one way to reduce supply. One could also limit the number of computer science degrees granted by US universities, and that would increase software engineer wages too. Is such protectionism justified? Probably not. But a lot of people seem to take an "ends justifies the means" approach when arguing against immigration.
I still believe it's a wage suppression strategy. Here's why: I used to work for a major multinational based in Europe, but I lived here in the US. Many of the people I worked with were not US citizens, but lived and worked here on an E-1 (the European version of the H-1b Visa). They were essentially captive workers who were at the mercy of the whims of management; management that was largely absent from the day-to-day realities of how things worked in the US. I couldn't prove it completely but based on the compensation rates of a few I knew, I also felt certain they were almost categorically paid below market.
> "who were at the mercy of the whims of management"
With H1B you are not tied to the same employer, you are free to leave the sponsoring employer and go elsewhere. I don't know about the E-1 visa.
Again, if you feel they were being paid below the market rate, you can check up the bulletin board to make sure.
My understanding (from H1B coworkers and HR managers in previous jobs) was that the H1B is transferable to another company IF the other company agrees to sponsor it, and there's a fair amount of paperwork, hassle, and uncertainty to effect the transfer. That has to translate into at least a small salary discrepancy between H1B holders and permanent-resident employees.
> That has to translate into at least a small salary discrepancy between H1B holders and permanent-resident employees.
or it just gets accepted as cost of doing business with this person. Which is entirely reasonable (you spend a couple thousand to get everything transferred, not that much long run).
isn't the problem that if an h1-b worker gets fired they are screwed (have to leave)? I know with a TN that's the case and it sucks.
There is still an element of captivity above what a citizen or resident faces--staying in country is contingent on quickly finding another employer who will sponsor you.
If a native employee is fired, they lose their job and probably go on unemployment while the look for another one.
If an H-1B employee is fired, they get deported.
Employers know this, and they treat H-1B employees accordingly.
Well, yes, but then you're just benefitting from lax de facto enforcement, not any de jure certainty. And anything de facto which operates below the standard demanded by de jure can change at a moment's notice, subject to politics, audits, or someone waking up on the wrong side of the bed.
There's a bit more safety than that. When you enter the country on an H1b, you get an I94 that is valid until your visa expires. If you then lose your visa (because you've left the company or got fired), you can still legally stay in the country until your I94 expires. The caveat is, an immigration officer can take away your I94 at any time, at which point you would be forced to leave. However, as long as you avoid immigration officers, you are not breaking any laws by staying and looking for another job.
There are lot of illegal things that happen with H1B that prevent the above. For example H4 spouse can not work but then some company agrees to sponsor H1B under the condition that no payslips will be given and hence you can not transfer the visa. This is same as slavery except that the choice otherwise is to be on H4 which does not let you earn a penny but be a burden.
> "then some company agrees to sponsor H1B under the condition that no payslips will be given and hence you can not transfer the visa"
"Some company"?
No law abiding company can do what you're saying, let's get real. This is illegal.
This is the reason that these fraudulent "staffing" companies exist in the first place since they know the employee will never be a whistle blower and for the love of god I don't understand why?
It is illegal but most large companies encourage these small illegal companies that take the legal liability while providing cheap labor. If the small company shuts down does not matter it will come up again with a different name. It does not matter how hard government hits them, there is a legit need they are serving and hence will continue to exist irrespective of law.
>With H1B you are not tied to the same employer, you are free to leave the sponsoring employer and go elsewhere.
The solution is never that simple. Unfortunately for many of them they're butts to fill seats for signed contracts. They go out on 6+ month on-sites and live with several roommates working for the same company. They can't pick up and leave because they're not qualified enough or experienced enough.
There is a separate "superstar" visa. The O-1 visa is available to "individuals with an extraordinary ability in the sciences, education, business, or athletics".
The claimed point of H1B is to benefit Americans and the American economy by filling positions which have a temporary shortage, in a way that does not drive down wages. Of course that's not even close to how it works in practice.
The O-1 visa is extremely difficult to obtain especially in countries which do not have R&D capacity comparable to the US to facilitate the process of obtaining this visa. What about people who develop these "superstar" skills later in life?
It's a moot point on whether H1B helps or hurts the US economy. It's up to the US govt. and eventually the voters to decide what strategies should be adopted in keeping the US at the top the technology sector.
O-1 is for people with a demonstrated extraordinary ability. When they came over, Nadella, Pichai, Khosla, etc. were just students fresh out of college.
Most superstars become superstars after coming to USA. O1 is for those who are already superstars in other countries. Countries like India do not offer the same freedom that US does and hence a lot many potential superstars can not enter USA.
The fact that H1B holders are paid the same as American workers doesn't negate the fact that there is a depressing wage effect. The reality is that this program exists so that companies like Google and Microsoft don't have to face the natural law of supply and demand in the job industry. If salaries get too high, they just lobby the congress to increase the number of H1Bs with the excuse that there are not enough "talented" workers (a subjetive term that makes little sense).
In a country that valued their citizens, these companies would have to pay higher salaries as the demand increased, and as a result more people would chose this career path, thereby reaching a market equilibrium. If these companies moved jobs overseas, they would be liable for more taxes to offset the job losses, so they would be discouraged to do so. The fact that nobody talks about these simple strategies just shows that companies have done a great job to preach their message to the US government and workers.
> The reality is that this program exists so that companies like Google and Microsoft don't have to face the natural law of supply and demand in the job industry.
The "natural law of supply and demand", specifically, the supply side doesn't magically stop at the border of a country. If anything, protectionism is against the free market ideal. Labor is just another resources like any other, and the extreme version of free market would include free immigration.
Yes, a libertarian free market only society might not be in anyone benefits, and any regulation to limit them might have some merit. But we should really call a spade a spade.
That's BS, because this is not a free trade world. The US invests billions of dollars in technology that directly benefits American companies, not French companies, for example. American companies and entire industries (such as agriculture) receive tax breaks that are not available in other parts of the world. Then why only workers have to carry the burden of increased job competition from free trade?
Free trade laws don't appear out of thin ether either, it is companies that lobby politicians to create such laws -- while at the same time claiming to the public that they are inevitable. This is a distorted ideology that needs to be opposed, not just observed as if it were good or inevitable.
>The "natural law of supply and demand", specifically, the supply side doesn't magically stop at the border of a country. If anything, protectionism is against the free market ideal. Labor is just another resources like any other, and the extreme version of free market would include free immigration.
It seems like you're implying that supply and demand cannot exist without the libertarian free market. Supply and demand can exist in any system even ones constrained by managed economics or artificial restrictions.
How are companies liable for more taxes if they move jobs overseas? Are you imagining a punishment tax to companies that operate in the US and develop overseas as well? Any such tax would only exacerbate the loss of jobs.
A better strategy is to ensure US domination of technology development through any means possible.
Besides, it isn't like wages for tech workers are low in the US.
US domination of technology development doesn't mean exporting jobs or importing foreign labor. The US has 300 million people, many of them college educated. There is nothing preventing the US from dominating technology even if it doesn't have an H1B program. Such arguments are so easy disprove, you just need to look how silly they are.
Big fallacy here... The Japanese built a world-class technology industry with local labor. German companies are still best in class using local labor. Israel has a thriving technology industry based on local labor. Why would the US companies be any different from what they are right now? 90%+ of Google/FB/Apple software development is US based. The only real difference is that they would have to pay higher salaries, which doesn't seem to be a big burden, since their owners are multibillionaires -- that is, these companies are clearly not counting pennies to survive.
I'm not who you are addressing exactly, but it is not "bigoted" to make the claim that bringing more workers into a workforce will drive salaries down.
I am replying to those who make claims that H1B workers are being paid below market rate, hence driving down salaries. There is a minimum wage requirement as I mentioned which is approved by the state department of labor.
Again, these "driving down wages" doesn't hold water when the H1B salaries are public information.
Ok, we've heard your proposition. Now make some arguments. Now show some evidence.
For example, mean pay for a software developer in state of California is $119,970 according to Bureau of Labor Statistics [1]. What is the minimum wage required for a H1B software developer in California [2]? What is the actual mean pay?
My instinct is that you are correct and H1B visas are not driving down salaries- but thats just a guess, I have no idea. But your arguments so far are "dont be a bigot" and "its all public information".
If its public information, have you seen it? If so, share it with us. If not, how are you sure you are correct?
If you are just venting, then vent away my friend.
Otherwise, it is ineffective to fight bigotry by telling people they are bigots. Share data from a trusted source, give sound analysis, and hope for the best.
2. I would have dug this up myself but its actually a bit of work to compile as a meaningful look at this issue requires looking at many geographical areas and professions.
To sidestep the argument, why is it bad to push wages down? American born babies push wages down too, so do local university graduates. Should those things be restricted too?
If all American workers earn less, then cost of living drops too and it's not much of a problem.
> "What is the minimum wage required for a H1B software developer in California [2]? What is the actual mean pay?"
How many years of experience (0,5,10,15,20?)? What is the education level required (PhD vs bachelors/masters)? It's not as simple as "H1B software developer in California" nor are the salaries. They vary between companies (eg., Netflix pays more than Google)
In any case, here you go: http://h1bdata.info/
You can check what your H1B colleagues make based on their job title.
Edit: To x0x0, I'm not going to parse out data for each and every company, I have a day job you see :)
I've worked for four companies (public and private), and I see that the wages are comparable to local workers (of those who chose to share their wages) and the established market rate by the state dept. of labor for the said job title. Somewhat anecdotal? Yes. It is definitely better than a blanket "H1B drives down wages".
The reality is that these numbers don't prove anything. If H1B visas are constraining wages (and they most certainly are), everybody's wages will be constrained. The line of reasoning is so silly that basic supply-demand argument will prove it wrong: if there are more workers, there will certainly be a downward pressure in salaries, it doesn't matter the origin of the work force. Saying otherwise is just unreasonable without proof.
See my EDIT above. I am no economist to parse all this information, but in my experience and people I know the wage argument for "genuine" H1B applicants is hyperbole.
You admit you arent an expert and you dont have time to understand the data. Yet you have already drawn a conclusion.
I am not an expert. I also do not have time to understand the data. That is why all I am comfortable saying is, my gut instinct is that H1B visa's dont drive down salaries (more than adding more workers affects salaries) but I dont know for certain.
The next best thing we can do is look in the literature for someone who has done this analysis. I like scholar.google.com.
If we dont even have time for that, I guess its just not that important and we just go through life not knowing, hopeful that the day will come when we will see a reddit link to a blog post about a behind-paywall news article summarizing an academic analysis.
So you claim, absent any supporting data, that adding 500k skilled employees (85k times 6 years), not even including other types of visas doesn't affect labor markets? That requires either solid proof or, well, motivated reasoning.
3.6m software engineers in the US; if even half of h1b holders are devs that's a sizeable increase. Even under modest demand elasticity assumptions you can back of napkin estimate a large influence
Wait a minute, I re-read my initial statement, this is what I said:
> "I am replying to those who make claims that H1B workers are being paid below market rate, hence driving down salaries."
I mention specifically about H1B workers are not being paid below market rate. So the salaries of H1B workers is not the cause of the driving down the wages.
To your argument, will an abundant supply of labor cause the salaries to go down or stagnate? Yes.
comparison of the salaries and numbers of h1b visas of the 'genuine' vs 'staffing'. Last year the top 2 staffing cos - Infosys and TCS got 40,000 visas (2/3rds of the quota) at an average salary between $60-80K. The top 2 R&D cos- Microsoft and Google got 9,000 visas (14% of quota) at an average salary of $125K. Pretty easy to tell what is genuine. http://www.oncontracting.com/article/how-the-us-can-reduce-h...
Please This is a false dichotomy and typically parroted by upper middle class indians who had enough resources to pay for graduate school in USA. The system could use tweaks and points to grade applications but you are presentin a very naive a class based view of the situation.
You might feel that you could convince immigration hardliners by this argument but in reality most are motivated by ideology rather than rationality. At the same time you will alienate other indians.
With lotteries, 7+ year racist country based quotas and 12 Million undocumented immigrants it's a system which long due for a comprehensive reform don't waste time defending it.
Sorry? How is scrutinizing applications for employment a naive view of the situation? Isn't it obvious that if an application is not genuine it should be cancelled (eg., working for a "client", where the "client" is a shell company)?
I'm not trying to convince anyone and I personally don't care what other Indians (as I'm Indian) think about my opinion. I only represent my opinion not theirs (and they are free to have their own and disagree with mine).
On your immigration comment, if you are an American citizen you have the right to claim what you say about the immigration situation in the US. As far as I am concerned, I have no say in the immigration debate as an H1B worker. All I am concerned about is to work on challenging problems and advance my career, that's it. I am not using the so called H1B "restrictions" as an excuse for all ills as a potential immigrant.
Do I get extra points regarding my opinion if I am native American, what if my ancestors were aboard Mayflower or were grudgingly accepted as Irish or if they were slaves. United States has a complex racial history which includes laws such the Chinese Exclusion act (something that lead Supreme Court to affirm birthright citizenship). To claim that by virtue of not being an American Citizen I have no right to offer an informed opinion based on moral analysis is ridiculous. What next according to your logic then any black man should not have considered himself to be an equal or should have offered an opinion until civil rights were changed. Or no one should have complained about Hitler. Do you realize how ridiculous you sound. United States is a unique country of immigrants with a chequeed past.
With an argument like this no doubt you are parroting stupidity. Wake up Ashwin, life is not just about advancin career.
Yes of course, how could I forget that an H1B worker is going through the same plight as a colored person pre-civil rights time and what Jews faced during Hitler's reign :)
Wow! Hyperbole at it's best.
> "To claim that by virtue of not being an American Citizen I have no right to offer an informed opinion based on moral analysis"
Again, I never said you can't have an opinion. You have your opinion and I have mine. We agree to disagree and I like to live in reality rather than hyperbole.
You do realize that Jews were actually forbidden to enter and as a result millions died. Or that as early as 1965 when immigration and nationality act was enacted lifting country based caps to certain extent. Several US Congressman reassurred the public that the country won't be overrun by "dirty hindoos" (No kidding) if you are naive enough to thing that the current immigration and H1B logjam is not result of those past laws and you ought to not argue or even offer an opinon. Well then good luck with your career with this attitude one day you will wake up with your boss screwing you and you would be a nice sheep docile and ready for sacrifice.
I am fully aware of these historical facts and I'm also aware of racist people (I used to live in Texas for 7 years). But how are these related to a US govt. issued legal immigrant visa i.e. H1B?
Did you arrive in the US in a clunky boat fearing for your life and running away from a despot on an H1B?
Please don't compare the challenges of H1B workers to events in which people were actually murdered or lived in fear of their death. It's ridiculous.
If your premonition of being sacrificed is true, oh my, what would I do if I lose my job? I would be so lost...lol!
I have the confidence (not arrogance) in my abilities to find another one :)
And BTW, I was laid off my first job in late 2008 (during the recession) and I found another job. And this confidence comes from the fact that I take my career goals seriously and don't hide behind the veil of a fake victim.
> I am fully aware of these historical facts and I'm also aware of racist people (I used to live in Texas for 7 years).
It comments like these that make me believe you like to stereotype people. That does not help your arguments. The most absolute racist people I have ever met were from Washington DC and it would be wrong to assume everyone there was a racist.
I did not arrive fearing for my life but so did not the guy from Germany or Singapore. Why should birthplace of a person be allowed as a criteria for discrimination.
Are you serious, you never heard of families under strain because 6 years into their Green Card application they had to suddenly leave, while at the same time other countries citizen could get a job. Or where someone on OPT couldn't leave to visit their dying parents since his attorney warned him that he might not be given entry. Not everyone is born with silverspoon. Or families torn apart. All that means nothing?
Your extensive use of "I" indicates general inability to empathize. with such a narcissistic frame of reference no doubt everything is "fake" according to you.
Asking for just, fair and equal treatment regardless of the nationality and place of birth is not being a "fake victim". It's a cause worth fighting for.
Haha..I love debating with you. Your hyperbole gets even better.
>"Why should birthplace of a person be allowed as a criteria for discrimination."
Because that is the law of the land and it is fair since the number of green cards are allotted EQUALLY to all countries [1]. We just happen to be from a country where there are more number of applicants than green cards available. If it were discriminatory, why did the EB priority dates of China move up multiple years? It's because the EB applications from Chinese nationals have dropped considerably, not because the US is suddenly schmoozing to Chinese nationals.
> "you never heard of families under strain because 6 years into their Green Card application they had to suddenly leave"
Life events happen (do you expect your life to be smooth sailing?) and you have to take decisions based on it. Let me tell you something, H1B is way way more permissive than work visas in most of Europe and Middle East. Chew on that for a minute.
> "Or where someone on OPT couldn't leave to visit their dying parents"
This cannot be a regular occurrence. Again, this is hyperbole.
> "Or families torn apart. All that means nothing?"
Were you kidnapped from your family and brought to the US in a shipping container with 100's of other people? All of us "left our families" and came here with our own FREE WILL. No one brought you here against your free will.
I use "I" because these are my opinions and I don't speak for anyone else. I definitely do not empathize with hyperbole, I can tell you that :)
Please read the link below before passing judgments on hearsay.
Dude you are seriously retarded if you don't realize the discrimination.
Here is the article by The Hill that lays out the case and how it affects Indians , Chinese and people from Philippines.
If I'm retarded, please explain to me how a 7% cap per year on all countries is discriminatory and not fair?
Would you propose 50% or 100% going to India?
That would be discriminatory to other countries.
Stop being emotional and falling for arguments that favor your point of view.
"In 2011, it passed overwhelmingly in the House by 389 to 15."
"Per-country quotas restrict individuals from any single country seeking to come to the U.S. to no more than 7 percent of the green cards available in any category in any year. This restriction favors those from small countries at the expense of those from larger ones. By treating nationality as the relevant factor, India is treated equally with Luxembourg, but Indian immigrants are massively disadvantaged.
Equality in theory, inequality in practice. It is a system of expedited processing for people from less populous countries; it is arbitrary and unfair. The large countries that are most disadvantaged — the Philippines, India, China and Mexico — are all non-European nations that, until recently, had little ethnic representation in the U.S.
While the issue is ignored, the lines for visas have stretched to absurd lengths. Adult children of U.S. citizens from Mexico, Philippines, India and China can expect seven- to 21-year waiting periods. Workers from China, India and the Philippines with a college degree or less will have to wait between two and 10 years.
There are no legitimate reasons for this discrimination for any immigrants, but the system is particularly perverse for employment-based immigrants. Arbitrarily delaying hires punishes the American economy, costing us productivity, innovation and competitiveness.
"
An argument that was accepted by a significant majority of congressmen but is simply pending due to refusal by immigration hardliners to reach any kind of compromise on undocumented immigration.
> Because that is the law of the land and it is fair since...
By the argument, any legal discrimination that blankets entire groups of people with the same random chance is right and fair. Slavery - OK as long as blacks kidnapped from any African country were treated equally. Segregation - OK as long as blacks anywhere in America got the same treatment. It sounds like a wind-up, but really immigration discrimination is just like race or gender discrimination. It's not fair. The difference is that popular culture hasn't graced it with its wand of disapproval so most people can't recognize it.
Please explain to me how a 7% cap per year on all countries is discriminatory and not fair?
As I've mentioned earlier to secondtimeuse, please don't compare the challenges of H1B workers to events in which people were actually murdered or lived in fear of their death. It's ridiculous.
The bill proposed in the last paragraph would take a pretty big hammer to #2. I doubt it will actually pass (or even be voted on), but I think I will watch it to see what actually happens and who does what.
I have a simple solution. Let H1Bs enter based on the salary their employee is paying them than anything else. Forget about degree, job description etc. Also this is how the bidding system would work.
1. Let salaries be classified in tiers. 100K 110K 120K etc. These tiers are classified and published only after an year.
2. Let companies bid for every employee based on how valuable the employee is. say a company bids for X at $120K p.a.
2. Sort the bids in descending level. Each company will then have to pay their employee a salary that is at least as much as the lowest salary in that tier.
You seem to think that everyone hired by a company rather than a staffing agency under H1B is in category 1, but it isn't so. I won't bother to name names
To pre-empt anticipated comments
Job Outlook "Growth" is change in number of people employed:
From the source here are the numbers for other disciplines.
Yet the article conveniently uses cherry picked data for arguing against H1B. The majority of the H1B are being awarded for above categories and not for electrical engineering.
The simple explanation is that it's cheaper to manufacture components in Taiwan, Korea and China. H1B is not causing electrical engineers to lose jobs, it's the fundamental economics of production that are stacked against the occupation.
According to these reports, starting salaries for CS graduates are about 4% lower in 2015[0] than in 2014[1].
The recent OPT moves by DHS is proof enough the government is all too willing to help employers in any way possible and isn't interested in actually helping citizens and green card holders fill these jobs.
I'm pretty sure starting salaries at big companies are strictly increasing. There is just a larger increase in the number of lower paying jobs. Which may simply mean more CS job opportunities in more cities that have a lower cost of living then the previous average.
For CS graduates, I see the 2014 Salary as $62,103 and the 2015 Salary as $65,004. Which is actually a 6% increase. The 2014 was a 6% increase over 2013. So more than 10% increase in two years. What are you seeing?
I'm comparing computer science majors, which is the majority (80% in 2015) of those in the computer science category. I think this removes outliers like someone getting a bachelors in computer science with a major in financial engineering at Cornell making 200k on Wall Street after graduation.
2014 67,500. 2015 65,004. Down about 3.7%, which adds up over time.
Either way, from my point of view, the software "profession" is dead in the water unless real change in the industry and our government happens.
Well, even in that case, the 2014 salary was a 6.4% raise over 2013. Unusually large increase. So, it certainly "didn't add up over time". Also, strange to read about software profession being dead in water. Pretty much all estimates from BLS show it to be the fastest growing job segment. Which fields (apart from healthcare) are doing better that software?
Software is the fastest growing field, but when you factor in 1.5% and 1.6% inflation in 2013 and 2014 (and use the salary numbers discussed in this thread), you get a real decrease of 1% between 2013 and 2015. So you're getting a salary decrease for the fastest growing profession in the US - a terrible sign. Why shouldn't salary be allowed to increase, especially when rents rose 27% in San Francisco?
> Why shouldn't salary be allowed to naturally increase
Because cost of labor (including salaries) compete with returns on capital, and, well, people who favor "capitalism" rather than, say, "laborism" tend to hold political (as a consequence of economic) power.
In regard to DHS, the US court system found that DHS unlawfully created the rules for OPT in 2008 in backroom deals with industry lobbyists. When the court told them so, the DHS went in to "all hands on deck" mode to come up with a work around. (So far they've failed, putting ~130k OPT guest workers at risk of having to leave the country on Feb 12th 2016). Besides the question of what is DHS doing involving itself in student training programs and guest worker visas, but the other question is why wasn't what happened at Disney an "all hands on deck" situation? Where is the support for the citizens?
There are 62,000+ degrees in Computer Science alone awarded every year. With sample size 705 you are showing a decrease of 6% then p < 0.5. Further OPT program was established long before the "STEM Extension" came into effect during 2008. Finally in spite of STEM extension in place, the Software Developer jobs as well as salaries have recorded solid growth during 2008 - Now. Just because you became aware of the STEM program due to a judgement on a minor procedural issue, does not invalidates the robust job and salary growth over the last 7 years enjoyed by the profession. You are simply trying to map your flawed beliefs and sensational news reports to justify non existent decline.
Why should citizens be treated differently when H1Bs pay the same income and other taxes as citizens? H1Bs even pay into social security, even though they are on a temporary visa.
Anyone who pays the same tax as citizens should be treated the same as citizens.
If you think hon hai precision industry co. ltd (aka foxconn) is merely doing "soldering" in China you ought to catch up with the market reality. Almost everyone I know who is employed at Apple (in California) with electrical engineering degree, goes on multi-month annual visits to Chinese plants.
You still haven't clarified this. Are they going there to supervise the manufacturing process or to learn from their peers? Is Foxconn doing EE design for Apple?
Apple recently opened a new R&D center in Taiwan. Which shows that not only production but also research and development can move / will eventually move to other countries.
OP never mentioned cheap soldering - where did you get that from? The issue (as I understand it) is that the design and manufacture of most electrical components is happening offshore. The biggest fab in the world is in Taiwan. We aren't talking about cheap soldering, we are talking about the semiconductor work that drives most hardware.
We are starting to see a few hardware startups but most of the jobs created are still overseas as manufacturing happens abroad. Most of the EEs I know switched into CS fields because of reasons like this. I wonder where the future of EE lies.
Cheaper to manufacture means something completely different from soldering. That's a huge and nonsensical leap you make there. Soldering isn't even the largest cost associated with electronics and semiconductor manufacturing.
In response to a comment claiming outsourcing was the issue, I responded with this and thought it relevant to post here:
FWIW, the very cap on H-1Bs plus the decreasing attraction of coming to the US is the very reason ALL companies are going overseas.
I once did a research on outsourcing and the pivotal reason I found for outsourcing was not the "cheapness" of the foreign markets, but the decreasing flexibility and opportunity to continue development at home, and this decrease was dominated mainly by inability to find people to do the work. It may seem hard to believe but it isn't once you add up all the pieces. While factory workers may seem abundant and easy to find, finding upper-level factory operators across various disciplines from IT to Management to Operations was very difficult. Conversely, the two places where they were the easiest to find was China and India in that order. After all, who wants to work in a factory when they grow up anyways?
So what do companies do? They go above and beyond plus bend backwards to make overseas operations feasible. This problem is not just limited to factory workers, or electrical engineering, but any industry that has a hard time finding good quality workers. My industry of civil engineering is probably going to go next.
I could write an entire paper on this, but I will stop here.
You are buying a completely flawed argument. The reason there are fewer and fewer American factory workers is that nobody is going to pay for a degree for which there are no jobs. If you are in the US and you have to decide on a degree, would you go to do factory-related work, knowing that companies are moving oversees as soon as they can?
The only way to get workers for a particular field is to have investments in that field, especially in a country where citizens have free initiative. If the industry and the government continue to subsidize companies that open factories outside the US, it is not a big surprise that they will have trouble finding workers for this kind positions. This is the logical consequence, not the cause for this big shift. The cause is that big business want to take advantage of cheap labor and no regulation at third world countries, while at the same time slashing the taxes they need to pay in the US.
> [If] you have to decide on a degree, would you go to do factory-related work, knowing that companies are moving oversees as soon as they can
This is a case of which came first: the chicken or the egg? One industry that seems to have rebounded significantly is computer science. In 2003, after the bubble burst, few were pursuing CS. A huge insatiable demand followed afterwards mostly from the emergence of Google, and people started pursuing CS in hordes once again. And today, companies still have an insatiable appetite, and pursuit of employees has encouraged companies to go abroad once more.
In your argument of subsidization, cheap labor, laxed regulation being the culprits of job loss, you are ignoring the friction of traveling abroad and the loss of legal power that comes with outsourcing. There are many advantages and disadvantages to outsourcing. The end result once it all sums up is you get a different product, and a different business. These are not easy things to accept, no matter how much money you save.
And as for your suggestion of a solution, current events have thought me that you swing your strengths in ways where the enemy longs for what you and ignores the advantages they have. Industrial China makes us feel we are weak because our costs are high. And China feels weak because we have the knowledge and technicality to achieve more than what they have. Let's stick to what makes us unique and swing that strength in ways that others feel weak.
This is a great observation. I wonder when cooler heads will prevail and reform the worker visa program into one which is more flexible (and sane) than the one that exists currently. I understand that there are a lot of difficulties but the present situation just cannot continue unless more jobs are outsourced completely. With the difficulty in obtaining worker visas, US corporations might have to resort to outsourcing wholesale.
I have been an EE for 20 years. I think one of the things driving it is the increase in productivity. I can do a lot more with my RF/Microwave design software than 20 years ago, so I am now probably doing the work of two people.
There is also consolidation with complexity. How many 5G chipsets do you need when 95% of the phone market is held by two manufacturers? Hardware is expensive to develop and takes time. Investors/companies want cheap and fast, and are unwilling to fund R&D.
People with Engineering / Comp. Sci. Degrees are not in short supply. Exceptional engineers and programmers are. Its almost like the difference between kids who want to play football and the people with talent to make it.
While this is true, I have found that a developer who can do the following to be very rare:
1. Take a set of requirements, and first identify those reqs for any underspecified elements, or elements where the underlying tech would limit the functionality.
2. Implement the reqs according to the now agreed upon spec
3. Provide adequate documentation and tests for the new implementation.
4. Perhaps most importantly, and rarely, implement the reqs in a manner where the code is not brittle (some small req change doesn't require a huge overhaul) and where other developers can quickly get into and understand the code.
That is, even if you don't need a rock star programmer, if your code base is going to live on for more than the life of the person originally writing it you are going to find that people who can fulfill this role are quite rare.
All of these things could be easily overcome with better training. The way I see it, the software industry in the US invests close to nothing in training and expects to receive "talented" developers by just selecting a small proportion from a large pool of candidates. This is a lazy and irresponsible way to create a workforce. The time and effort they spend in interviewing could be very well spent on teaching best practices to new employees, so they would be much more productive, instead of just expecting that they somehow "grok" these concepts from the get go.
I think the implication is that you're supposed to learn all of that on your own. That's at the very minimum-you're supposed to eat, breathe, and shit hacker culture and programming in your spare time.
> All of these things could be easily overcome with better training.
I think 1, 2, and 4, requires lots of real world experience in addition to training.
> The time and effort they spend in interviewing could be very well spent on teaching best practices to new employees
Assuming that just teaching best practices is all that is required, which I strongly disagree with, a lot of companies (especially startups) don't have the time or the resources to burn on extensive training. The marketplace is fiercely competitive, and they typically need people on the ground right away.
> the software industry in the US invests closing to nothing in training
Many large tech organizations (Google, Microsoft, etc.) invest a huge amount in training. The time it takes for a new hire at Google to get productive is usually about 6 months to a year. All still, they have a high hiring bar that focuses on very strong fundamentals. (They also work very closely with universities and colleges on direction, curriculum, and funding.)
"The marketplace is fiercely competitive, and they typically need people on the ground right away."
" The time it takes for a new hire at Google to get productive is usually about 6 months to a year."
It cannot be both ways as you please. Either these companies are investing in training or not. If they are, then things like requirements gathering, creating specs, and providing tests should not be something difficult to do. This is a very important part of the job, but is not a part that requires super-intelligence.
Everything points to the fact that these companies do not invest in training and are just trying to select a small number of people out of a large pool.
These phrases came directly from the context of your arguments, so they are not out of context.
You first point proves what I'm saying. Your second point is doubtful, because large companies are the ones that spend the most time in useless interviewing. The training you're eluding to is tool training, which is essential in a place like Google where the programer has to spend most of his time working on closed technology.
Also, saying that companies filter for experience is not correct. Interviews at most tech companies (especially the large ones) is done to eliminate large numbers of people based on the solution of narrow-minded programming questions. These questions rarely correlate with experience, in fact most people that are just out of college can do so well or better in these questions than an experienced engineer.
I don't think this is difficult, but I agree that it is rare. There is very little pressure encouraging people to become one of these programmers. I'm one of them, but it's difficult to actually leverage this into a higher salary unless you got involved with a larger company straight out of college. The interview process doesn't expose this, and unless you write a hit open-source application there isn't any way to prove it.
Instead, employers - even technical people who interview you - play buzzword bingo, indicating that you would have been better off spewing new frameworks into your codebase unnecessarily. The personal incentives for a programmer are completely misaligned with the actual interests of the business.
The approach that would incentivize this behavior would involve giving raises to people who write the sort of code you want to see, but instead raises often come from dazzling strangers who don't know the long-term consequences of your code (ie, getting a higher offer and asking for a raise).
There doesn't seem to be a way for a company to evaluate the "goodness" of your code in a meaningful way. And even if they did, you will NOT get a raise without asking for it. OTOH, there are those, like you mention, who will leverage other job offers to get a raise and such...so the only solution seems to be for those who write the good code to engage in similar tactics, regardless of the disdain they might have for them.
4 4 and 4. With no requirements, if you have an implementation of what is actually needed and it is not brittle you are all good. People who actually know what they are doing and don't write brittle code are more valuable than rock stars. I have seen too much code by rock stars based on the latest coolest frameworks and it has all been thrown out. Same for people who don't actually have enough skill and 'just' get the job done. One change and it all dies, turns to a pile of steaming poo or gets thrown out, only to be developed again using this week's cool new js framework. Less brittle code is smaller, simpler and involves as much deleting as adding.
Thank you for posting this, and am reading it very closely. However, I can't quite follow what you're saying with the first point, which is probably my fault. Would you mind putting it in other words?
I agree with the literal sentence. I disagree that with its implied extreme. Most jobs don't require rock star programmers. Most jobs require people that can do more than cobble together a series of StackOverflow answers. This implies that most jobs need to have competent developers.
From my limited experience, competent is getting harder to find. I go into a JavaScript SPA almost daily. I'm not a big JavaScript guy, but I grok functional programming and the language. I constantly see things that make me go, "Huh?" This isn't that they're doing advanced JavaScript things. It's that they are doing it wrong (one person used a regular for loop to side-effect create a new array). These poor practices add up in general, and specifically in an AngularJS app where you've got to accept a layer of magic in the view binding.
Hopefully we get better at competent, especially in dynamic, mostly typeless languages such as JavaScript.
I really can't agree or disagree with what you're saying, you are talking about very specific things that I'm not sure say anything more than your biases and experiences.
Maybe they don't, but maybe they do. How many of those jobs wouldn't exist with access to a more talented team? As an analogy, I don't require a phone to communicate with my mother, but if I didn't have the faster method, I'd have to travel to see her.
That's not really true - with more and more tools and development philosophies coming available, we need more and more experienced programmers with the judgment to choose between them and apply them to the problem at hand.
That's not actually how high-functioning teams work. If you have one person make all the decisions and pick all the tools, you will have one highly-productive programmer and 9 disengaged programmers who go through the motions of writing code but usually end up creating more work that the one highly-productive programmer will have to undo. End result, he gets burned out, the product never ships, and the 9 disengaged programmers never actually learn how to program.
I've been on teams where everybody understands how a compiler is built & when you'd want to write one, why & when performance matters, how Lisp idioms can translate to C++, when you might want to machine-learn a model and why you might want to do it manually first, and many other basic CS concepts. The difference is night & day from teams that are filled with people who just follow a tutorial and copy/paste examples from StackOverflow. In general, I've found that a team moves at the pace of the slowest member of the team - fill a team with 1 smart guy and 9 folks who just follow their leads and you might as well have just hired the 1 smart guy.
You should understand that your logic can be used to prove that any profession is in short supply. Exceptional accountants are in short supply, so we should hire them in droves from India. Exceptional cab drivers are in short supply too, so we should have a visa waiver to bring them from Europe...
>Exceptional people in any profession are in short supply. Isn't that a true statement?
It equivocates on whether by "exceptional" and "short" we mean absolute standards or relative ones. If we use relative terms, "exceptional" (say, the top 1%) people are by definition in short (only 1% of the total) supply.
Of course, 1% of a large population can still be quite substantial.
Your statement is ridiculous. I'm not going to discuss the demand for accountants and cab drivers or the differences between engineering job and cab driver, but your assumption of there are plenty of exceptional accountants in India and exceptional cab drivers in Europe is unfounded.
Why would Indian accountants be experts with U.S. accounting practices and tax laws? Would they be amazing at dealing with customers and auditors? What makes you say they'd be more cost effective than American accountants?
Why would European cab drivers be more effective than American cab drivers? If you put one of those crazy taxi drivers from Eastern Europe here he'd get arrested within hours. Would they provide better customer service when they don't even speak English?
Where as for Engineers, good engineers from China and India are just as good at their subject as anyone and culture barrier is not really a big concern when you are dealing with pure technology, so of course it makes sense to hire top engineers from other countries.
If good engineers from China and India (or really anywhere) are just as good at their subject as anyone else then preference should be given to the citizen, but it's actually the reverse in practice, and that is by design.
If the foreign engineers are really that good then why do most of them do low level work with low status positions for 70k/year? Sounds like poor use of the "best and brightest" to me...
There is no preference when it comes to hiring Top Tier engineers. Here at Google we try to hire everyone that can pass the interviews, if you are a U.S. Citizen that doesn't require Visa sponsorship then it's all the much better. I've never ever heard of anyone losing their job to foreigners in top Silicon Valley companies.
I never said foreign engineers are better, I said top ones are just as good as top ones here. Most of them work in low level positions for 70k a year but that's true for most American engineers as well. Cost would obviously play a big role for jobs of those level.
But I was replying to the comment about exceptional talent, not the overall job market.
What makes you think they WOULDN'T be as good? I've casually worked with some top tier Engineers from Baidu and Alibaba before this job and I'd say they'd have no problem landing a good position at Google or Facebook any day.
When you start looking a the implications of the fallacies of "talent in short supply", all these crazy ideas start to crumble. A large number H1B visas in this country are used by temporary agencies that bring workers to do jobs for low pay. This doesn't seem to be the pool of bright programmers that their proponents have in mind.
A lot of foreign workers are willing to work for less money, in exchange for a H1-B visa.
Why are they willing to do that? Because H1-Bs are scarce.
Why is it scarce? Because a lot of Americans have decided that H1-Bs should be limited, because they fear foreign workers coming over and working for less money.
There is nothing ridiculous in this statement. You are talking about "exceptional" workers, not about normal or even bad workers. Exceptional workers are in short supply in any profession. According to the logic of software industry, the solution should be to import workers from other nations, because then we would have access to the best of the best.
Of course it is not like that. Software engineers from India or China are on average as good as the ones in the US. If something could make a difference is education. Now, if engineers in the US are not as good the ones coming from Asia, the country should do something to fix this issues first by paying more and educating them in a superior way.
I optimistic about such issue. I will say software is good occupation while everything is blooming, but you can be more secure during the down time if you are an EE. Furthermore, you can train yourself to be a good software developer if you next to a computer and have internet access(of course you need dedication), but you cannot be a good EE without knowing how to operate a very expensive equipment(i.e PNA, MOCVD, etc). Disclaimer: I am a software developer with a background in EE
Sheesh, I have a PNA in my basement lab. My wife can run all sorts of PVD/CVD vacuum processes, dicing, grinding, bonding, etc. We seem both stuck in dead end EE jobs.
I understand your feeling. But speaking about dead end, that is exactly what a concentration means while you pick a major in college, otherwise you can pick liber art. If you change the perspective and think like a you are a software developer without any other skill, you are in dead end too. I think the main problem is laid on whether you like to learn more about other skill sets and take risk to create something new from what you learned
I wonder if this is a side-effect of the current silicon-valley investment scene. There are lots of low-capital startup opportunities, so who wants to fund the high-capital startups in computer hardware? There have been very few computer hardware startups the past few years, and that might have an effect on overall innovation and growth.
H1Bs should have to be paid at least 20% more than the local market average for qualified workers. If people with their qualifications are truly THAT scarce, then businesses should have to pony up more than the going rate given their specializations.
IT/CS industry is the major consumer of H1B visas. IT/CS is also the industry that relies mostly on outsourcing. Guess how healthy this industry is, guess which computer major pays the most salary in USA today and so on and also the consumers are happiest with the laptops, iphones, apps and Uber.
Now compare it with the heavily regulated industry of Healthcare. No one likes paying hospital bills in USA, almost everyone works on wafer thin margins and a constant fear of law-suites. Only the doctors and that too only few of them manage to earn a fortune but everyone else is worse off. Far more importantly USA has very inefficient and expensive healthcare system.
I find it funny that we leave it to the economist to decide the fate of research.
I remember in uni I found EE topics much harder and boring then Software topics. Anything below C is a big nope. Verilog, VLSI, FPGA, anything to do with embedded IoT.
Yeah america wont survive if kids today stop valuing EE topic just due to some misguided economical models/interpretation.
The rockets that will land on mars wont be designed solely by software guys - it will require a lot of EE innovations - if america gives up then some other country will take its place.
Reminder that "STEM" was just a buzzword designed to flood the skill-intensive labor markets with a generation of idealistic youngsters, all with the intention of driving down wages.
There never was a labor shortage, or as it's occasionally framed, a "talent" shortage.
Wages are not being driven down by labor supply. Rather as this particular example clearly shows, they are being driven down by the underlying economics of production. Another example of this trend is Detroit. The United Auto Workers union succeeded in keeping the wages high, but the underlying economics of production destroyed the industry.
The lesson in this scenario, is counter-intuitive. You can regulate, unionize and force wages to stabilize. But that can only help you in short term. On a longer timeframe, innovation and foreign labor catches up and now instead of losing few jobs to talented foreigners you end up losing the entire supply chain. The Software Industry thankfully has been able to resist this trend. The same report shows solid growth across all software related professions.
STEM is misnomer. Ever met an unemployed or underemployed biologist, ultrasound tech, environmental engineer, or statistician?
The real sweet spot is PI - physics and informatics. These roles are unique in that they can be explosively productive and create more jobs than were there at the start. PI, or "STEM" is more than a buzzword.
I'm confused if there ever was a field at the intersection of Physics and Informatics, EE has got to be it. Shannon literally invented information theory....
Care to explain why this was modded down? I think the lack of resources for new graduate students is sad, and it blights the lives of many people in science. There are too few tenure track spots, so many PhDs have to wait until their 40s to have a normal job and salary. People are not willing to question authority or publish negative results because that would slow down the all-consuming struggle to outcompete the other 50 people applying for the same fellowship / grant / position / whatever.
A little competition is good, but most STEM careers are a ridiculous vow of poverty at this point. If we're not going to fund it more (and we should...) we should at least be honest to kids about what's waiting for them. The idea that there was ever a shortage of STEM graduates is really a very deceitful piece of propaganda, when the real shortage is funding.
Perhaps the issue isn't that a STEM career is a vow of poverty. I have met many people who are quite wealthy in STEM. I have personally done very well. In America we have become good at identifying talent, and promoting it. And we reward people higher up much more than people lower down the ladder.
I'm not going to say whether I think it's good or bad, but it's quite clear the the rich are getting richer, while the rest stay the same.
"STEM" isn't a single thing (another reason why it's a deceitful term.) The term encompasses a lot of different fields with a lot of different economic situations. For example, you might find it difficult to find a job in nuclear engineering, but easy to find a job in computer engineering. There isn't really a "shortage" of people in almost any math or science related field. Whenever you hear management talk about a personnel shortage, what they really mean is that "we have to pay people more than we think we ought to."
If people want to advance science faster, the way to do it is to divert some of those truckloads of money that are going to blowing up stuff in Iraq and putting it back together, or buying fighter planes that even the air force thinks we don't need. Paying scientists and engineers less (by having more of them competing for the same pool of resources) won't advance science and may even hold it back if it makes the best people go into other fields where they can earn a decent living (like finance of medicine).
1. Genuine candidates: I'm going to quote the extreme, people like Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Vinod Khosla etc. came to the US on H1B and there are a lot of other "superstars" on H1B or naturalized citizens. More practically, there are thousands of other talented people from all countries who work on H1B. So the argument that H1B should be done away with is absurd, unless the US doesn't care about staying atop of the technology sector. Also, H1B workers get paid the same as local workers; there is a minimum wage requirement that has to be satisfied by the company applying for the H1B. So if you buy the allegation that wages are being depressed by H1B workers, why don't you take a peek at the bulletin board of your break room (which have H1B applications with salaries posted) or online and lodge a complaint with the state department of labor rather than posting bigoted comments?
2. Candidates hired by "staffing" companies: Blanket applications made by these "staffing" companies which may or may not have actual jobs. These are the applications that need to be stopped/scrutinized by USCIS (they have tightened this during the recession 2008-2010). It's arguable there is a genuine requirement for staffing companies, but these need to be scrutinized thoroughly.