Re:USCIS is challenging an unusually large number of H-1B ap...
by mywittyname on Tuesday November 07, 2017 @04:44PM
(#15647945)
> I have a hard time believing it does much more than depress the wages of American white collar workers.
It makes it viable to keep white collar jobs in the midwest.
The company I work for announced they are no longer using these "IT body shops," as you put it. The local pool of workers is totally exhausted, so they can't find enough people to hire, and have decided to close up shop in the midwest and will be moving development to an ultra-high COL tech hub.
Officially, only developers are getting the ax. But I have to assume the rest of the staff are in line. The developers managers should probably be co-located, and if all the dev and managers are co-located, then so should the product managers and their teams. PMs and sales work pretty closely, so it's not hard to imagine those positions will move, etc, etc.
People love to throw out econ 101 supply/demand stuff here, and claim that obviously more tech workers = lower tech worker salaries. But that does not appear to be the case. Regions with more tech workers also pay higher salaries; there's a clear inverse relationship going on.
So, in my interpretation of the empirical evidence we have, suggests that more H1-Bs would raise developer/engineer wages, not suppress them.
P.S. It's clear that IT staff do face downward wage pressure from offshoring. But they also face the same from automation of their jobs (cloud services, SaaS, etc).
It makes it viable to keep white collar jobs in the midwest.
The company I work for announced they are no longer using these "IT body shops," as you put it. The local pool of workers is totally exhausted, so they can't find enough people to hire, and have decided to close up shop in the midwest and will be moving development to an ultra-high COL tech hub.
Officially, only developers are getting the ax. But I have to assume the rest of the staff are in line. The developers managers should probably be co-located, and if all the dev and managers are co-located, then so should the product managers and their teams. PMs and sales work pretty closely, so it's not hard to imagine those positions will move, etc, etc.
People love to throw out econ 101 supply/demand stuff here, and claim that obviously more tech workers = lower tech worker salaries. But that does not appear to be the case. Regions with more tech workers also pay higher salaries; there's a clear inverse relationship going on.
So, in my interpretation of the empirical evidence we have, suggests that more H1-Bs would raise developer/engineer wages, not suppress them.
P.S. It's clear that IT staff do face downward wage pressure from offshoring. But they also face the same from automation of their jobs (cloud services, SaaS, etc).