If H-1B visas were being used how they were intended, they would be a good thing, but we often see them used as a way to get cheap labor, or even directly replace American workers. The company I work at has H-1B junior web developers, hardly "very niche, hard to fill" positions that they can't find any qualified Americans to do.

For a while I wasn't sure if this was just some "talking point." Then one day, on a hiking meetup, I met a guy who was ranting about his job that was to write "oddly hyper-specific job descriptions that might seem to make no sense" to bring in cheaper h1b candidates.

So yeah, it's a problem.

Years back I had a college friend who was hired on an OPT visa. When they wanted to convert his visa to H1B (I think) they kept getting suitable candidates so had to rewrite the requirements so its only suited to him. He confided this to me as he felt bad but really needed that job.

Let’s rephrase this story a bit.

A company hires someone out of college, trains them and has them working and integrating into the company for about a year and a half, but then the government, because of a literal lottery, requires them to randomly replace them with someone else.

And you’re surprised a company that has spent all that money and resources on hiring someone and with the known hit or miss nature of hiring wouldn’t want to replace them with a random new candidate?

Edit: And it gets better. They don’t need to replace the person if someone else accepts the job. They need to get rid of that employee who they are happy enough to be spending tens of thousands of dollars on that they wouldn’t need to on their citizen counterpart, even if their possible replacement didn’t accept the job. Merely if the possible replacement’s resume fit the minimum requirements of the job.

That’s why companies rewrite the position to be hyper specific. Because if there is anyone else available eho can meet the bare minimum who applies for the job, even if they aren’t interested in it and will never accept an offer, they are required to get rid of their existing multi year employee who they are happy with.

There is no “opt” visa it’s “optional Practical training”. It’s for a limited duration after he graduates also the rules are sketchy if he Would be let back into the country if wants to travel home to see family . If the employer wants to continue his employment he has no choice but to go on H1b. And then H1b has its own requirements and problems with it. Try to understand a lot of people “abusing” the system have not other legal recourse to keep their lives going.

> Try to understand a lot of people “abusing” the system have not other legal recourse to keep their lives going.

That is probably because other countries make it even harder for people to immigrate.

The job description stuff doesn't have much to do with H-1B's - it has to do with green cards.

My previous boss would openly brag about doing this, while he was doing it.

For those who encounter this in their travels and want to do something about it:

https://www.uscis.gov/report-fraud

https://www.uscis.gov/report-fraud/uscis-tip-form

I guess this is indeed an issue. I’m a manager and I am trying to hire. 100% I’d rather find a person who can start in a couple of weeks than several months for a candidate who needs immigration. But there are rarely any local applicants and even when there are they don’t make in the interview. We pay in excess of 300k for all roles so it’s not like we are trying to find cheap talent.

Something isn't adding up here, even in areas with high COL people are clamoring for jobs like that. I'm not saying it never happens, something just doesn't sound right.

Also, the vast majority of people on H1-Bs that I've worked with are quite... average. It's nothing against them, but I doubt they were blowing people away in the interview. Many of them do have better attitudes, though.

That's not to say that there aren't exceptional examples, or a given candidate was bad, but we absolutely could of hired some kid from university, or a mid-senior level from a US company. They just tend to have more demands.

It's not exactly a secret the main reason for the program, is to lower wages here. ie. keep the wages of nationals in check. Of course, you also get access to a better deal on labor, and people that want the job very badly.

I could be off base, but many of the people I've worked with on H1-Bs simply cause less political problems. It's not necessarily a cultural thing, as I'm including many different countries. They have the threat of deportation hanging over their head.

Off-topic, but just a tip. "could of" is never correct (nor is "would of" or "should of").

Or could-have, which I think is more applicable in the sentence you're correcting. Or am I missing some obscure grammar rule?

No you aren't missing anything. "could of" (and its cousins "would of" and "should of") are common mistakes made (interestingly) almost exclusively by English-as-first-language speakers (my observation, so don't ask for citations I don't have any), since they sound similar to "could have", "would have" and "should have" particularly in "native" English accents (I'm thinking North American and UK especially).

I've never seen "could-have" (hyphenated) though. I don't think that's right either.

It's the contraction of could have. "I could've been a contender Charlie!"

It's just misspelled. 'Could've' is a standard contraction.

I did misspell it in my comment. It definitely should have (should've? :) ) been written as "could have".

"Could-have" is misspelled? Or "could of"?

It's "could have" or "could've".

Right

Maybe your recruiting to get interviewers into your pipeline and the interview process just isn't that good. Or perhaps nobody wants to work at your company. Bad management? Bad glassdoor reviews? Don't engage with the local tech scene?

> We pay in excess of 300k for all roles

If it's in excess of $300k for all roles it sounds like a Netflix type company or Netflix itself. I highly doubt nobody wants to work for that company.

Did u miss the part where he said “they don’t make it in the interview “?. It’s not about handing out a job because there is one ...there is a interview process and quite a rigorous one when it comes to FAANG companies. They don’t go out seeking cheap labor.

Without more context it's hard to know what the problem is there, but I strongly doubt it's that there is "no" talent locally available to start within a couple of weeks, whether it's a US citizen or foreign national with an existing work visa.

A small list of things that people may consider:

- competitive salary. 300k is one thing in (for example) Kansas City, but completely another in the Bay Area or New York City where it's not uncommon for senior roles to deliver at least a third again, if not more.

- the ethics of the company - does it engage in questionable behaviour? For example spying on users, building weapons, formenting unrest via algorithmic news feeds and so forth?

- the fundamental health of the company from a financial and existential perspective.

- does the company have a local reputation for being a poor place to work? For example, is it a bureaucracy where no-one can get anything done? Does it have a notoriously poor work-life balance, "face time" expectations, a culture where the loudest or most senior voice always prevails in decisions? What does Glassdoor (or levels.fyi) say about it?

- are the technologies you're hiring for overly specific? Are your job ads a buzzword bingo of "nice to have" frameworks, libraries or practices? Do the ads make it clear that experience in them is not required, provided you can learn them quickly thanks to experience of concepts or adjacent technologies?

Even in the Bay Area or NYC, $300K is a pretty nice salary unless the requirements are unusual (seniority, special skills, etc.)

Do you have any postings describing the roles you're hiring for? My email is in my profile if you don't want to share here.

I find it odd that you don't put any contact info in your profile, then. It's totally free advertising.

> But there are rarely any local applicants and even when there are they don’t make in the interview

What exactly does the work involve, if it is so difficult to either find candidates or give a candidate with some missing skills a few weeks to learn something new?

The answer here is to actually fix the system with compassion rather than suspend it and harm everyone using it.

I'm not unbiased: I'm a former H1B visa holder and wasn't underpaid at all. I promise you we exist! It's not a fun situation to be in... if you have a pending green card application (up to a certain point in the process) you can't change jobs easily. And if you come from some countries (India, in particular) you have a wait of ten years or more before receiving your green card.

It feels like a collision of a bunch of otherwise unrelated decisions that ultimately harms both immigrant and native workers and only benefits companies. It's all fixable, but like so many things in the US right now, not politically possible.

Not sure why you are downvoted . Can somebody who is downvoting this person, actually care to type what you found offensive or incorrect .

If you’re from India the current expected wait to get your green card, no exaggeration, is closer to 50 years.

Indeed, a friend offered to introduce me to a lawyer who would help me hire H-1Bs instead of similarly qualified residents. The gist was you have to figure out the unique qualities of the person you want to hire, and then construct interviews for the required X candidates such that these other candidates would not be as qualified across these trumped up unique qualifications / skills.

How much are companies expecting to save by going this route? Is it dramatic?

They don’t save.

The abuse happens through contractors.

Companies hiring full time H1B employees directly will not save money because there is no incentive to and they have to pay the government additional fees simply for the H1B visa, and they have to almost certainly have an immigration team, or at a bar minimum a lawyer on retainer to keep up with the immigration stuff.

My company applied for an employee I manager’s permanent residency (she is on an H1B visa which has a limit of 6 years unless you apply for a permanent residency). The application process costs the company 30k on a one time basis, including fees to the government, lawyer fees, and associated expenses.

They do save.

Its not in salary that you see the money. The savings are in training and legal costs.

The average tenure of an HB1 is much longer than a US citizen. Turnover is lower for obvious reasons.

Threats of litigation , etc are much lower too. I havent seen a single HB1 sue their employer. Similarly, i have seen multiple US citizens sue employers, and almost always without merit (often it was to stave off termination, retaliate, etc).

There is alson some risk in a US worker. There is a lot of entitlement even at the high end. I have seen many native engineers and even PMs hit bars every other afternoon...on a 3pm weekday. These were people close to 200k year.

The HB1 is a shield against that risk (or poor hiring), and thats savings too

There seems to be a mix. Which is part of the problem with the national debate / conversation.

There are companies who found the absolute best in the world that they have to have. So they need that H1-B to get the job done and hire the best person.

Then there are companies who just want to contract out super cheap labor, so they do thousands of H1-B applications hoping a few hundred make it through, then the they charge a local rate, but pay the employee a fraction and reap the profits.

So the second example I’m assuming is the operating model of companies like Accenture, Cognizant, etc.

I’m flooding this thread a bit, but I’ve always been a little confused by the consultancy firms. Is there a clear difference between off shoring and H1B? Or is it mostly the same thing for these companies, with different margins for each.

Truth be said the consultancy companies barely make any or in fact lose money with the H-1Bs and they make way more margin on offshoring. But customers want people near them for various reasons and the offshoring doesn’t generally work well without boots on the ground.

So the H-1Bs are loss leaders with actual money being made in offshoring instead.

Consultancy firms often have an offshore team in a lower cost country (India, Phillipines, Mexico). The consulting firm typically employs a few people in the US on H-1B visas, contracted to the client, for communication with the offshore team, onsite support for the client, and generally managing things.

But the client often has their own employees on H-1B visas as well. This is unrelated to either offshoring/consulting.

Eg. Take a company like Apple. Apple hires employees on H-1B visas and pays them well.

But also Apple uses consulting firms (both US-based and offshored) for specific projects/functions. These workers are not Apple employees. They are employees of the consulting company -- or in some cases, there is a chain of contracts where they are employed by one company, which contracts them out to a consulting firm, which then contracts them out to end client (Apple).

Just at first glance, that seems like a whole lot of middle men.

We have h1b employees at our company. If we were to lose them right now it would be a significant disruption.

Personally, I can't take time out of my job to train employees - which in our case could easily take three months. I can't even imagine us finding and hiring some at this time. These guys are an absolute asset to the company.

Does your company not already grow skills over time? One should already be training (or coaching) individuals regardless of their present skill levels.

We grow skills. That's one reason they are so valuable. And we cross train. Everyone is able to take over for another employee at any time. But now is not the time. I just can't stomach losing our H1B members or any dev right now.

We are in the health IT sector and you may not know this (because it surprises most everyone) but there is an absolute revolution happening in healthcare. We're approaching version 5 of FHIR. And I'd guess 99% of the devs on HN are like "what the heck is FHIR". It's a core standard for exchanging healthcare data. And it's literally the tip of an iceberg. And that's my personal dilemma as a lead developer.

Speaking of skill growth, devs attended FHIR Dev Days last week, CCDA Implementation-athon a few weeks before that, and the FHIR Connectathon a week before that.

None of us are in the office and since we have formed personal relationships over the last few years we know how to "get stuff done". AFAIK we treat every employee well enough they have few reasons to leave. Now is not the time for us to lose a dev. Any dev.

I just ask the government to stop being jerks and let us ride out this covid year without too much more upset...

That's a very uncharitable reading of what they said. They presumably spent time training these people. They can't afford to train up a bunch of new people because someone decided that they need to be kicked out of the country for no good reason.

I am saying that they should already have a "training time allocation" built into their role and that they could choose to use it for remedial skills. That is, individually having time for training should be a moot point.

Now, if the business can survive in the meantime is a different matter. But the business has no choice in the matter. And the business is not alone in the matter. Which probably makes that a moot point too.

I don't claim that it will be easy. "I can't train people" doesn't compel me as a broadly satisfactory counterargument for the above reasons. That sentiment itself is not charitable making it hard for me to read it charitably.

You can always do what companies like yours have already done to residents: Have the H1B visa holders train the residents, and leave the H1B visa holders out of a job. Does that sound unpleasant to you? Trust me, anyone on the shorter end of any stick isn't going to like it. My question is, why preference H1B holders over residents?

I'm not sure you're making an argument in good faith here.

Still feel free to see my response just below. That said I'm not management but our devs are smart and knowledgeable and I'm sure are getting offers from other companies. And I like to think they are treated well and I hope I get to work with them for a long time to come.

No, it's just a way to bring in cheap labor, and bring salaries down. That's it. It's very rarely the case that there's genuinely no one here that can do the jobs. It's widely know that companies are making no legitimate attempt to hire a citizen. I'm not saying this is a good move, and I'm not commenting on the morality of it (ie. who says someone from another country shouldn't be competing for your job)

I understand it must be comforting to issue a blanket statement like that, but I it's just simply not universally true. I was hired on an E3, next job transitioned to H1-B and now have a green card. My work has directly enabled the hiring of three Americans. Is the H1-B perfect? Of course not. But on both occasions there were no other candidates, and when I was hired on H1-B I got a mandated higher salary to meet expected pay rates.

Having just gone through the H-1B application with my company for myself, causing my small startup to pay pretty large sums of money to the USCIS and spend significant time and resources putting together the paperwork, I think they would definitely prefer to have avoided that if possible.

I'm not saying there aren't Americans who could do my job, but I have been on the hiring side since joining and there is clearly enough demand for labour in the market right now that it is hard for them to hire qualified people at all, let alone qualified Americans. Employees in this field just have so many options that companies have to go to pretty significant lengths to get who they want. And I know Americans coming from my background and working in the same field and I can tell you I am not being underpaid relative to them.

How is that possible, given that these people are paid above the prevailing wage?

That's literally one of the requirements for the Visa, the minimum has been repeatedly raised to address this problem.

So? Want to explain that to me?

If you classify someone as foo and have them do bar you can pay them above the prevailing rate for foo while actually being below the prevailing rate for bar.

It can also serve as a way for third party to earn a sizable chunk of that persons wages which would be a less likely scenario for someone hired stateside.

Why would they agree to be paid under when they are in tech where companies until at least a year ago were fighting for employees? They could literally cross the street in SF and land a better job at a better price. I mean, for a country that prides itself on free markets, it’s remarkable that you believe that free markets simply stop working.

And here’s the kicker. An H1B employee costs a company a lot more than a resident because of government fees and lawyer costs.

So if you have a citizen and an H1B holder drawing the same salary, it actually means the company values the H1B holder far more than they do the citizen.

H1B can't simply cross the street and change companies. If they find themselves between jobs they will shortly find themselves between countries and many companies have been found to have made agreements not to hire each others people.

So, as long as you're willing to commit fraud, you can commit fraud?

How is fraud a problem with the visa or the visa holder?

As a nationalist, I think it would be better for those other countries to keep their skilled workers and so benefit. I think every nation has a right to its own existence, space, and policies. And they also get to decide what's right for them 'as a people'. Always optimizing for performance of 'the economy' is not in the best interest of the actual citizens of this country.

I totally agree. I live in Central Asia, and the consequences of brain drain very noticeable.

Ironically given your username, your mentality would appear to have fit quite well in East Germany where exit visas were required.

There's a reason why Apple wasn't founded in Syria or Google wasn't founded in Russia.

Why are you a nationalist?

I think each nation[0] should be entitled to make decisions for themselves and have a right to run their state the way they see fit. I wouldn't presume to move to, say, Japan and then start telling them that they're doing things wrong.

[0]https://www.etymonline.com/word/nation

What if they moved to Japan because of an opportunity provided by a Japanese organisation that needed their skills, and then they spent enough time there that they had buy in to the community and were a recognised member in it and were valued by that community?

I don't think this is too hard to imagine applying to a person living long term in Japan and definitely not hard to imagine in the US, where there are no true "Americans" in the first place, apart from maybe the indigenous peoples.

If I lived there a long time, I still wouldn't be Japanese. Look, it's definitely an emotionally charged issue the longer someone has been in a place, but that doesn't change the basic facts. We can discuss the merits all day long but not the legitimacy of the government to decide who can and cannot stay.

For the purposes of this debate, "Americans" means citizens and those that can vote, the ones to whom the government answers.

> We can discuss the merits all day long but not the legitimacy of the government to decide who can and cannot stay.

Why can't we discuss the legitimacy of the government?

Geopolitics is inevitable: everything's interlinked--trade, laws, defense, research--everything. If a nation wants to persist and prosper, it needs to play the game; being an aloof loner or a blatant bully won't get you far.

It wont get you very far seems to ignore centuries of aloofness and often very bad behavior being rewarded with great success.

Conquest fell out of fashion with the bomb; it's all proxy wars, psyops, and deniable covert/cyber attacks now. Slamming the door on H-1B’s (while it might be nice for my own income) weakens American companies and sends world talent elsewhere, like China. Who's only too happy to fund infrastructure in Greenland/Africa/Europe to extend soft power across the globe while siezing harder power closer to home (Hong Kong, South Sea expansionism, etc). Sitting out the game isn't an option, and going at it alone ain't much better.

Are you linking to "a politically organized body of people under a single government" or "a race of people, large group of people with common ancestry and language"?

Doesn't that make you a nationist?

A nationalist is focused on 1 nation.

The type of nationalism that is currently a component of the Republican platform can better be described as xenophobic nativism. The nationalist counterargument is going to be that US companies have gotten away with not investing in employee training and instead ship trained workers from overseas to do jobs that could have been held by trained Americans.

Those people don't think foreigners are as skilled as their own. This is hard to unwind after decades of American Dream and USA #1 propaganda

haha, it's not propaganda. it is truth. USA is still #1 destination thus nobody is unwinding anything. the brain drain is real.

I had seen lots of H1B foreigners while myself worked in US, for couple of years. Most of them were brought not even H1B but on B1 Visa or J1, were employed illegally and produced bad code.

If that's what we were doing then it would be a good thing. But what companies are mostly doing is bringing over average people so that they can pay them less than Americans.

That's funny, because my visa had issues because I was "too highly paid for the job".

But then they decided they could add a machine learning tag to it, and it was fine.

Not if your conception of the nation only includes white people...

There it is

Companies profit but citizens lose out. Those two entities should not be conflated. This is akin to the outsourcing of many industries such as pharmaceuticals and medical supplies to countries that do not have the same worker or health regulations as the US.

The visa workers are second-class citizens and exploited by companies to keep cost low. It undermines all workers and in the long run undermines all nations involved. Take the US's relationship with China manufacturing where China has some of the worst pollution and is one of the largest world polluters as they do not adhere to any of the same regulations that nations of the west adhere to.

Currently there is the narrative that the US has a shortage of talented STEM. This is untrue. The shortage is due to a skewed labor market that suppresses opportunity for US citizens in the same way that a US manufacturer wouldn't be able to compete against a Chinese manufacturer not because we don't have the technology, demand, or resources, but that the difference in regulations makes it more costly.

No, the only party I feel exploited by is the US Government, who holds my ability to come and go, and change jobs easily hostage.

Oh, and I have to pay taxes to a government that actively torments me with ever changing requirements and absurdity.

And I don't get to vote or own property on my current Visa.

This is why I push for the opening of offices outside the US in every company I work in.

> companies profit plus deprive their home countries of their skills a really, really good thing?

These are the same people who claim that people should immigrate legally, but then close all legal avenues of immigrating.

Profit isn't the only important thing in life. If there are skills lacking in the market, they will eventually be learnt. Filling demand for CRUD app creation engineers instantly, is just another example of our instant-gratification culture manifest in business.

Is this being greyed down because folks just don’t want to consider the possibility that straight up racism might be just as much a part of this or did it touch a nerve for some parties who saw themselves getting called out?

It was probably downvoted because it was a reflexive flamewar style comment rather than a thoughtful, substantive one.

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Brevity does not need be dismissed as an immediate association or prelude to flame wars, nor does it reflect unsubstantive thinking. While I understand your desire to vanguard the guidelines, and aversion to the messy-nature of the ‘race debate’, dang, I disagree with your conclusion as applied in this case.

Assuming positive intent and being vulnerable enough to ask questions usually will do a lot more to mete out such flame wars than latching on to the first emotional misconstructions of the drafting of ideas.

I don't disagree that much with either you or solarkraft. Moderation is guesswork and not all of these guesses hit the target. FWIW, here is some explanation of the general approach we take.

Brevity is fine. The issue is the expected value of future subthreads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

We have to go by effects, not intent: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

When the topic is flamebait to begin with, the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

"When the topic is flamebait"

To be clear, which topic specifically are you alluding to because I think anyone with any cognizance on the issues of race and nationalism have a lot of overlapping features and a lot of cloudy, hard to define nuance, so can you please disambiguate in this instance?

I don't think I was thinking of a specific topic when I wrote that. The OP was about Trump and immigration, which is obviously an inflammatory and divisive topic. The arguments about racism, protests, police brutality are others. It's not hard to recognize these.

There's something to that, it's admittedly not hugely insightful. Is it "reflexive", "flamewar style"? I wouldn't classify it as such, since the option presented is an in my opinion a real possibility. It may be a bit harsh and inciting for a rational discussion however, so maybe vsareto's subtlety is more appropriate here.

Generally I'm happy this place is moderated strictly to keep the discussion civil. That there doesn't seem to be a will (there are no dead comments under mine, as far as I can see) to allow a direct discussion on american racism feels a little weird, but is over all understandable.

Racism in America and related offshoots of the George Floyd story (for example protests, police brutality) have surely been the most-discussed topics on HN in the last month. You're probably running into the paradox that every story, even the most well-represented, feels underrepresented on HN.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

There are likewise concerted efforts to get white nationalist taking points on the front page and painted as reasonable in the related threads. You see new accounts and sub-500 accounts that congeal around them almost every time.

lol! I'll never understand where these people's pessimism comes from.