My observations:
1. USA has plenty of talent and they don't need generic engineers from other countries.
2. H1B workers are not underpaid
3. Only reason tech companies praising H1B is because their hiring process is broken. They select arbitrary interview questions and determine competency based on them. This is total bs and they end up passing on super intelligent US citizens then make bs claim that there are not enough tech talent in the USA.
4. USA does need specialists but they would come on O-1 visa anyways so H1B is not in picture here.
If they hire from the best in the world, is it better for America if those hires are in the US paying US taxes, or overseas paying taxes to some other country?
If you don't want your teams to be segregated by nationality then you will want people working in same place.
The US has a big list of priorities: increasing GDP, protecting the environment, protecting laborers, providing medical care, protecting civil rights, enhancing tax revenue, taking care of the elderly, fighting wars, stopping disease outbreaks, curing cancer, exploring the solar system, patrolling the border, educating children, feeding everyone -- the list goes on and on.
All these arguments are about rebalancing and reordering these priorities.
Google has an office in freaking Paris. It's not like international hires choose Silicon Valley over Paris because they're enamored with overpriced suburban living. It's just because they need to be at the HQ for better career advancement.
Did quality of life go up in China because it "attracted better people" or were there other reasons?
One of the things your comment made me think about is the US citizens I know who have relocated to other "less developed" countries in order to make their quality of life go _up_.
Does the quality of life for people in Japan go down because Google is headquartered in the US?
As a US resident, would my quality of life go down if Microsoft were headquartered in India, Facebook in Singapore, Google in Denmark, and Apple in Japan?
It all seems rather complicated and murky.
Willing to work at the salary that employers want to ideally pay? No.
American software engineers with American degrees are expensive.
Employers see engineering as a cost sink and want to do everything possible to reduce budgetary pressures.
While some visa workers are incredibly talented (see: most of google's visa hires) most are just cheaper. Look at Cognizant, Tata, Infosys etc.
Just look at who is getting all of the visas from the program and it's clear what it's actually being used for. Importing cheap overseas labor and/or outsourcing, usually in tandem.
They either
1. Left tech due to low salaries from immgration. I don't think this is true because tech still pays higher than almost any other field.
2. Working in tech for low(er) salary, which contradicts the orignal claim that only reason for importing tech workers is for lowering salaries.
I think there are these different kinds of tech workers. For lack of a better term lets call them IT staff and software engineers.
IT staff builds some new systems but mostly puts pieces together to solve problems. This kind of job is easier to replace with moderately skilled foreign tech workers, maybe even working remotely, there's more supply here for this kind of worker. Then there is the harder to find software engineers who can work on new software from scratch, perhaps with more experience in this kind of worker. There's an incredible demand for this kind of person, that's unquenchable at least today (perhaps it used to be infinite for it staff but no longer). We really do need more of the second category of workers. Certainly a little smaller supply of workers means higher salaries, but when you need double the supply, you can restrain growth of the industry.
Are we being paid low? No.
Are we being paid lower than what we should be paid? I could see that argument being made.
Is it possible that we may get paid higher? Maybe
Do we deserve to get paid much higher than those equally talented people working elsewhere in the world? Or those who are super smart and hard working but not making much money just because they don’t work in tech? I don’t think so
I am not quite so sure my immigrant coworkers make noticeably less than I do, although I cannot really validate this claim either as I don't ask people who much they are paid.
> Employers see engineering as a cost sink and want to do everything possible to reduce budgetary pressures.
Yes and no. Employers see developers as a debt pool, because they are a cost factor unlike people in sales who actually generate revenue, but typically they see hiring, recruiting, and retention as even more expensive and riskier endeavors.
That drives all kinds of counter-intuitive behaviors regarding expenses and developers. Companies are typically willing to hire more developers than they need, because hiring is expensive and isn't always quick. Companies are also willing to prioritize slower more expensive technologies that require more developers so long as it means a reduction in recruitment and hiring risks.
I find that process horribly broken. Why is it so hard and deceptively untrustworthy to hire people generally in software? I don't believe it is the hiring process that is to blame, but rather the candidate pool in consideration for the required skills or experience.
You should start. The only people who don't like you talking about compensation is your employer.
Well, that and a society full of people taught by years of public school that talking about finances is taboo.
It's not. The only person that gains anything from your inability to talk about compensation is your employer.
You lose a tonne of leverage while negotiating a raise / new job offer.
I believe the starting compensation is part of the application and is public info. See http://h1bdata.info for example. You should be able to check your assumption.
The vast majority of foreign applicants to H1-B jobs get rejected, and stay in their home countries.
The education seems focus heavily on making students happy/comfortable with themselves, and congratulate them on ever tiny achievements. Thus hard stuff like STEM is now avoided, because not good at them is definitely not the problem of the students, but the subjects themselves. Also the culture seems to discriminate against people who do have an interests in those topics, and punish them by isolation.
This deceptive system isn't really doing a good job that prepares students with self-confidence. Instead it cultivates an unique entitlement to blame the system for any personal issues. Which is the exact opposite of east asian system.
I think education needs to be repurposed as means to obtain knowledge through learning and a lot of practices. And as a selective system, the competitiveness of education shouldn't be avoided, where some people will achieve higher and access better resources and there is nothing wrong with it.
US's universities still have much of that perspective of education intact, but the high school education and below is just bad, and leave a lot of people unprepared.
Americans, by this theory, aren't putting the effort into this difficult field because other grad degrees offer shorter completion times, lower attrition rates, higher pay, and better career stability.
Part of the purpose of the H1b is to create a pool of workers who don't have that freedom of choice, whose right to live and work in the US is controlled by tech corporations.
This is why I, along with a lot of others who would describe themselves as pro-immigration, don't support the H1B program. We're more than ok with talented people coming into the US, but see no reason why we should specifically use our immigration system to increase the number or STEM graduates above. Let people make their decisions according to their interests and market signals. If that means they don't become software developers in Silicon Valley in the numbers tech CEOs think they should, that's the market's answer.
I do concede that the software industry can improve on attrition rates and career stability.
But on a simple time value of money front, I'm yet to come across a field of study in the American education system that pays more with lower debt than a STEM degree does.
Skimming the linked paper, it seems to be exclusively discussing PhD programs. Not sure how relevant that is.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3089314/it-careers/cli...
This isn't the entire issue, I'd agree with that. But it is definitely a relevant piece. And it is notable that tech ceos and politicians are calling this a "shortage" when organizations like RAND are simply seeing a rational, market-based aversion to certain fields.
I'm in the odd position of completely agreeing that the US should have a skills based immigration system like many other countries, but opposing a particular focus on STEM, as I don't like the idea of coercing would-be immigrants into studying this particular field as a condition of coming to the US, and I don't agree that there is any "shortage" that can't be explained as the product of rational decision making about careers.
That being said if you honestly believe there is wage suppression then I recommend programming outside of office hours and getting as much practice as possible so that you can rise to a senior position where such problems are absent.
I didn't say it had anything to do with immigration. But it does have to do with suppressing wages, which is what they comment you were replying to was suggesting as a motive. My point being that tech companies have a history of this.
This begs the question: Are Americans workers too incompetent at technology development? If so what is the cause of that problem?