Compared to FTE the difference was even larger including benefits and vacation time.

The biggest issue though, is not the local people. The issue is that the local people are there to bridge the timezone and communication gaps so you can have three off-shore people for each on-shore. Offshore people were paid less than a third of on-shore. So the number of American jobs they are displacing, and the wages they were being replaced at, is absolutely staggering.

Maybe in real tech companies its a different story. The one time I did a direct H1-B sponsorship (later, in a much smaller company), we did pay them an equal wage.

I will also add a data point for big tech. I have managed people on h1b, on o1, with green cards, and citizens. I have never even sniffed any sort of disparate treatment across these groups once hired. During hiring the bias was against h1b since it was a huge pain in the ass to arrange everything and their start date could be delayed.

It's much cheaper to setup shop outside US, which almost all companies do, but still they bring in foreign employees on visa just to keep the entire local market salaries to the minimum

I don't think the solution is just getting rid of them all -- actually a longer grace period (say, a year?) would make it easier to leave abusive employers. But it should include more scrutiny on whether employers really can't find local hires in the first place, or just aren't willing to train them or work with people that have even slightly more bargaining power.

Abuse of the H1-B program is broader than just hiring people for less money right now. It's also about hiring people who won't ask for more money over a longer timeline. It's about having a whole class of workers that is uniquely vulnerable to terrorist bosses, which then gives those employers more leverage over everyone else. And it's about the large-scale market manipulation that comes with having this easily accessible.

I think you hit the nail on the head here. The job switching process for foreigners should be easier.

This is exactly the problem. That reasoning alone is what allows companies to outsource to save money if you think on a larger scale. If systematically every company just says, oh we can't get American talent, but doesn't increase wages to incentivize for more local talent and simply hires abroad it stagnates wages for all. There is no incentive to raise effective wages if we can just continue bringing in more people for the same wage.

Let alone the fact that I am not convinced that we don't have enough talent for a good portion of the roles as advertised.

Research grade PhD level candidates doing novel work I can believe, but getting another person who writes more REST API's and dashboards or ETL jobs I refuse to believe.

Are wages too low to incentivize local talent? Tech companies already pay high six figures. What is this "local talent" doing that pays more?

Instead they just throw their hands up and call it quits, hiring elsewhere instead.

(This is not outsourcing. The foreign workers are still on the company's payroll, just in an office where they don't need a visa to work).

Quite honestly I am in amazed at this ingenuity. Art vs artist type of awe

it's been true 100% of the places I've worked. I can't name names on the internet.

Laughs in ESG. Companies stopped reporting this in 2024, but go look at prior year results compared to US demographics.

My $0.02 here is that AAPI and African applicants have crowded out ADOS and Hispanics when you look at corporate demographics.

You're so close to getting it... keep going...

That’d be a dumb way to run an economy.

At Big Tech almost everyone is normalized into salary bands by level and regardless of what you or your manager does, any discrepancy will eventually decay to level unless you get the formal promotion. They do this very deliberately, because they don't particularly trust their managers and don't want the organization to devolve into sucking up to get a raise. There isn't room for discrimination, and in many cases managers don't know your immigration status anyway (at the one I was at, we weren't supposed to ask, although it often became apparent because employees on visas would have to go home to renew, or they'd have questions about navigating company policies).

Idk if people don't realize you can look this up? Pay doesn't look suppressed to me....

The only reason I think is because they want the local market dev prices to keep down,so they bring in visa restricted foreigners