I'd be surprised if more than 5-10% of H-1B positions are ones where the hiring company has even looked for US applicants.
You must be a US citizen to work for my company. No "US Persons" (visa holders) or foreigners allowed.
You have to be eligible for a Secret security clearance. You don't have to get one if you don't want to as there is usually plenty of uncleared work to go around, but you have to be eligible in case that goes away and we need to put you in for a clearance.
We cannot find qualified applicants.
I've had this conversation many times on HN so here are some preemptive responses:
No, we don't make weapons for the military. Well, we do but not my part of the company. The most harmful thing the products I build do is quantify in precise detail how climate change is dooming us all.
No, our positions aren't ghost positions.
Yes, we are willing to train someone who is motivated. We won't re-teach linear algebra to a developer applicant but we will pay a tech writer to go to school nights/weekends to get a degree in engineering (me, I did that).
Yes, we have extensive high school and college work-study/internships and participants make $72k/yr. with full benefits for the duration of the program. That pipeline is actually successful.
No, you can't work remotely. You (even programmers!) have to touch the things we build in order to build them and nobody has an ISO certified clean room in their house.
Yes, we pay well.
No, we don't pay as much as Meta. We build components for satellites that have been sold to space agencies and purchased by various departments/ministries of the environment, not your personal information to advertisers-- one party has more money to spend than the other.
We have shortages in mech/EE/Aero, shortages in software, and critical shortages in engineering technicians.
One issue is that we expect programmers to remember linear algebra and have more than the ability to shovel frameworks on top of each other until a phone app comes out the other side.
Your company is incompetent. I've applied to hundreds of companies like yours within Huntsville, AL in the past year, rejected or ghosted all the time.
Defense morons will talk about how hard their work is and how they can't find anyone to do it. Completely skip over how prevalent affirmative action is in their hiring process; who were you guys interviewing in 2020? Why is the defense small business base completely dominated by veterans who stack 10% disability ratings and minorities with a preferred SBA sticker on their website?
Complete joke of an industry.
You pay well, but not so much.
You search for qualified applicants but can hire a student.
You require linear algebra but ok with technical writer.
Looks like your managers don't know who they need to hire or don't want to really hire.
And how do you know if someone’s eligible for security clearance without applying for it? (Other than the obvious “be a US citizen, don’t be a spy” part.)
Prove it. What city are you in, and what is total comp for software engineer & hardware engineer with 20 years of experience?
I worked in national defense. It was a pain in the ass: shit pay, worst politics, massive tolerance for incompetence & mediocrity, meeting hell, and secrecy (necessary, but "need to know" gatekeeping wasnt at times).
I applied to a similar position locally this year. I far exceed their requirements and experience and I got rejected at the application stage. And the same goes for nearly all of other places I applied to. Hiring has most definitely changed over the years. They are not just looking for "qualified applicants". There is something else going on.
> No, we don’t pay as much as Meta.
So, essentially, you are seeking special treatment from US citizens. I’m not saying this is always unreasonable, but you’re in the territory of a centrally planned economic decision, and in the US philosophy that is supposed to be done minimally.
Maybe the right thing is for your company to shut down or change their line of business, freeing up the labor for Meta.
In my experience this is often and at least in part a self-inflicted wound. As you describe your side of the business, it should not restricted, but it is. Maybe? Not enough detail to be certain.
What I see time and time again is business not willing to implement proper DLP, labeling and isolation of restricted things. Instead, they just throw everything into a single bucket, because it is quicker, faster, some of the risk and compliance is shifted to third party, and initially cheaper.
In short, a US, UK, Aus company that does government contracts will just force everyone into NOFORN, on-prem requirements (because DFARS, CMMC, CE+, Essential 8, or whatever). It is way quicker to do this for entire company than actually label data, isolate environment and resources, and so on.
I'm an older worker in management. Willing to be hands on. Not looking to get paid as much as Meta (I've worked there too) but also don't want something that pays peanuts. Willing to relocate to many places.
Genuinely curious where I can find such jobs.
The shortage on $5000 ferarris continues as well.
How well do you pay? If I were at Meta, my total comp would be 500-600k. I make half that at a small startup. Can you afford me?
Y'all should probably make that clear. Usually, the moment I see something like that as a job requirement, I move on. Not because I may or may not qualify, but because I honestly don't remember a lot of the information required and because it's not clear that I can work in a non-weapon-building role. Probably should offer refresher courses in linear algebra - I've been a developer for 25+ years and have never knowingly used it.
This is illegal under IRCA unless another law or government contract mandates it. [1] If every single role at your company requires a Secret clearance, then I question how separate “your part of the company” really is from the part that makes weapons.
What part of the country are you in?
Defense contractor jobs are the only ones I've seen that haven't been outsourced overseas yet, but good luck getting a CJO for one that will sponsor a clearance and actually getting cleared.
A top tier three letter agency sponsored me for TS SCI FSP and it took 9 months after the conditional job offer (CJO) after 10+ offers of personal interviews with me not counting my old jobs, college and friends/acquaintances just for them to cancel my app for "other traits, conduct or behaviour" and to reapply after a year.
I heard other applicants on the free bus ride that it was their 3rd or 4th try at the polygraph or that the agency forgot about them so they had to a Congressional inquiry after 2 attempts prior etc.
It's a lot of BS and I've tried for a few years now to work for the federal government and military, but they just don't want me. I've given way more effort than normal folks, so honestly screw them.
50% pay cut for a DevOps/SRE role requiring a Q clearance (DoE version of Top Secret I think)
You can't find employees because the job isn't exciting (you're probably not NASA) and the pay is bad. Maybe your recruiters are bad too.
You're building satellite components, which I'm quite certain are dual use.
I have experienced applying for dozens, including those posted to HN: most won’t respond at all. Maybe months later you’ll get an auto-reject message. Or you’ll go through several interviews not to be selected, even while passing technical assessments. My colleagues and friends have similar experiences.
Why not? Isn’t this just part of your ramp-up if it’s a niche qualification? We re-teach networking to developers who probably forgot it—that’s a semester course, easily. If you’re not willing to invest in candidates that are 90% of the way there, then you’re perpetually going to have difficulty hiring.
Why? Linear Algebra is certainly something that can be learned faster than a degree in engineering. I expect the average software developer (someone that can understand algorithms) can achieve competency in less than a semester's worth of time. If someone is a good developer, learning specific skills sets for the domain is pretty normal.
Your company has never offered me a phone screening. Seeing claims that Northrop is in sort of qualified candidate crisis when myself and many applicants I know of similar profiles are lucky to get so much as a rejection email is borderline infuriating.
And I highly doubt linear algebra is a day to day requirement for a typical worker. Sounds like a case of expecting chauffeurs to know how to build a drive train from scratch.
I once applied to work a government project for a subcontractor and they were adding “headcount” simply because the terms of the subcontract required a specific number of people regardless of the amount of work required. They were essentially hiring people to do almost nothing. I spent over 3 months waiting for a response. Apparently their critical shortage wasn’t that critical because the hiring process was so long and convoluted and subject to “contract renewals,” that I simply gave up and went to work for someone else.
I could go on for days about the extreme waste and oftentimes outright fraud that happens in government contracting, subcontracting, and sub-sub contracting. And despite formerly having a TS/SCI clearance, any job in the “McLean Area,” pays less than most startups. And jobs in places like Huntsville pay even less. Even overseas work in “austere” environments pays less than a junior developer at Stripe. And you don’t get potentially shot at at Stripe — And I don’t have to work 100 levels deep for contractors or contractors of contractors on site using often circa 1996 development practices and lowest-bidder equipment managed by IT departments that seem to be led by dinosaurs and it can take weeks or months to simply requisition a dev server even within an unclassified cloud environment.
Why to do that for salaries/benefits that are lower than I could get as a janitor at Netflix?
Make the workplace/work environment and benefits compelling and you’ll get more applicants. Small startups literally have better benefits. You also don’t have to endure a Tier 5 investigation — the outcome of which entitles you to a job that pays so little comparatively.
If you're willing to sponsor me for a green card and wait five years, and you're located in a city I'd actually like to live, I might come work for you :)
Not enough, apparently.
> No, you can't work remotely.
You'll have to pay even more for this.
> No, we don't pay as much as Meta.
So again, not enough.
> No, we don't pay as much as Meta.
Are you saying you pay well as comparing to the local McDonalds? That being said, my guess you can't find "qualified applicants" is because you are putting too many restrictions and paying too little. So you end up with students who will take anything and then you come here to complain about the lack of talent.
Let's hear some numbers for junior, mid and senior. I bet they are not great.
I get that this is a legitimate requirement here, but in many companies it just isn't. And this is a huge limiting factor. The way housing is nowdays, no way I'm moving for a job without a relo package.
This isn't necessarily "we can't find qualified applicants", but rather "...that we will pay enough to make this switch"
Google, Microsoft and Meta definitely look for (and hire!) US applicants. One can reasonably have a gripe with the consulting companies on there (Infosys, Tata, Cognizant, etc.) but they don't represent 90-95% of H-1B issued.
[0] https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/indian-corporation-pays-re...
If the road from H-1B to permanent residency was shorter and more reliable, the advantages of the consulting companies would shrink.
The same as if we didn't end up having to rely on lotteries. Hiring a candidate and hoping for an H-1B is quite annoying if you don't have them on staff in another country, or they are working for you in the US from an F-1. Those consulting companies that have large offices in India can happily submit large amounts of applications of people they already have in India, and be OK with 2/3rds of them not winning said lottery. A smaller company just can't play that numbers' game
The bodyshops flood USCIS with Indian-born applicants because they don't really care who gets approved and who doesn't. Those that get approved get a US job. The system is designed to stop employers abusing the power this gives them over employees. They fail in a number of ways.
First, part of the process is a Prevailing Wage Determination to make sure the employee isn't underpaid for that job in that geographical area. There is abuse here at the bodyshops where (IIRC) employees are paid less or not at all if they aren't currently farmed out to a third-party. This should be policed but I don't think it is, at least not effectively.
Second, the real abuse comes from the H1B -> Green card pipeline. H1B visas don't have per-country quotas. Green cards do (max 7% per country as determined by the country you were born in, not your actual citizenship). Because so many H1B holders are Indian-born, the backlog for Green cards for Indian-born applicants is decades long.
Now you can stay with an employer beyond your 6 years (the usual limit of 3+3 for H1B visas) if you have a pending PERM application. The employee can't really leave. If they do they have to file their whole PERM case again (but they retain their priority date at least) so this becomes like indentured servitude almost.
Nobody has really addressed this H1B abuse nor dealt with the huge backlog. A few years ago there was a bill that sought to address some of the issues by essentially removing the per-country quota but the net effect would be that for many years, nobody but Indian-born applicants would get green cards (because they have earlier priority dates). And that bill died in Congress.
But back to Big Tech: they abuse this system too but not so egregiously.
If you wander around any Big Tech office you will find likely a cork board in some obscure corner of some floor with little traffic. It will have a bunch of job postings on it. If you look in the physical newspaper for your area, you will also find them.
Why are these here? To "prove" that the employer could not find a US permanent resident or citizen to fill that particular position. You have to advertize that position through a number of channels and those channels are chosen to receive the fewest applicants because who in 2024 applies for a SWE job from a physical newspaper? If you do apply, there is a whole process to exclude you from the position. You'll be too qualified or under-qualified or your salary expectations won't match the advertisement. Or they'll find some other reason to strike you.
All of this theater is so someone else's PERM application with USCIS can go through.
To me this is also abuse.
This way, a company is always incentivized to find local talent, but when they are actually unable to, they have a path to find the expertise they need. The U.S. could relax restrictions on H1-B, lowering red tape, and removing a lot of churn that comes with the H1-B program
Translation: companies would rather have underpaid immigrants as indentured servants to exploit than Americans who can demand higher wages
That and companies are just hilariously bad at finding workers they want to hire for nebulous reasons. I have no doubt even if my company hired 95% of the workers it had marked down as "no hire" they'd be able to squeeze a salary's of value worth out of each of them (well, if management is competent, which it tends to not be). I'm sure those of us who've been around long enough can all attest to some side of seeing form of this dysfunction. I'm more than happy to reject them for selfish reasons, of course, like "I don't want this person on my team" or "this person seems like an asshole" or "I don't want to teach this person their third language after java and typescript". Etc.
I mean there are terrible interview candidates out there, but the people who literally can't code at all tend to be easy to filter out.
I'm curious if there's any way to observe the salary margins that separate the top of the labor market from the bottom. Surely there are. That would probably give a big signal as to how much undue attention is given to, e.g., Senior vs Junior developers and American workers vs H1Bs. I'd put money that some of this complaining about lack of labor is actually not wanting to hire fresh grads and eat the cost of training when they'd be just fine. (Also the H1B thing, but that's already discussed to death)
If you want the best candidates, it makes sense to have a wider pool of recruitment.
This makes no sense, even if I agree with your first statement.
Not every company is willing to completely retrain a worker for something outside of their core competency. Lots of candidates simply aren’t competent, or even reliable employees. Lots of companies would rather a position go unfilled than make a bad hire that is very expensive to fix.
I've worked directly with probably 50 or so H1B folks in my career. I can only think of a few I'd call exceptional. Just like Americans, most were a mixed bag from good to terrible.
So the idea and argument of best of the best is sound, but it's definitely not being used solely that way.
It's the same with the "fast food shortage," I bet the shortage would dry up real fast at $50/hr so all we're really doing is haggling over price. If in order to hire a H1-B at a salary of x you had to offer US workers 2x with say a $100k floor on x then I bet Americans would show up.
The same goes for offshoring for jobs. Lovely for shareholders and the CEO's bonus, but not so great for US residents having to compete with them who are paying US cost of living, not Indian/etc overseas cost of living.
It'd be nice if the US government would pass laws benefiting its own citizens/residents rather than corporations.
Instead prices go up or down until supply and demand meet.
So talking about "shortages" in this context doesn't really make sense to me. Yet that's the terminology in this field, and the resulting confusion is unavoidable.
It could be solved by realising that letting immigrants in, especially highly skilled ones, is good for the country (and for the immigrants!), independent of anything like a 'skills shortage'.
We do not lack candidates, but we lack qualified candidates. Most people that I interview have no clue how software actually works. Most are leetcode monkeys or just really awful.
We mostly hire seniors because of the industry we're in, but we've started hiring interns and juniors due to the lack of decent candidates.
We'd love to hire US candidates, but there's just a huge lack.
At this point I feel like I’m relying entirely on luck and hoping for someone to pay it forward by “taking a chance” on me even though I feel perfectly capable. Surely there’s a single company that I could work out for despite not having 5 years of experience.
I've worked at a company where >90% of the technical interviews I conducted were H1-B hires. It makes perfect sense for a tech company to bias the applicant deck in this way for a few reasons. They're willing to accept a lower comp package. Once they're onboard, they will generally keep their head down, do whatever they're asked to do, and accept whatever working conditions they get without complaining. That said, I've known several brilliant H1-B workers. However I've noticed that they rarely stick their neck out and challenge the status quo, which can lead to bad ideas receiving unquestioning and persistent efforts to implement in spite of the writing being on the wall about that project's inevitable demise.
I've worked at companies that hire primarily non-H1-B workers, and I can tell you that the amount of complaining about working conditions in particular at those companies was a couple of orders of magnitude more raucous. The end result of a complacent workforce was a soulless office with ubiquitous infrared sensors, no available meeting spaces, a microkitchen stocked with a pittance of moldy food, and with floating workstations where the equipment was chronically broken or missing.
While I tend to agree, this is a bit of a straw man.
You can have tons of people looking for work who aren't qualified for the job - which is (I think) the FAANG argument.
It's not like FAANG is paying less than what most unemployed techies are looking to make.
If we really valued this foreign labor, we’d make permanent residency a requirement of the visa rather than block it. Of course, if we offered immigrants permanent residency status then companies would have to pay them substantially more, which is the whole point of the H1B.
Now, was I essential to the US? Probably not. They probably could have found someone else.
I'm not sure if that's good enough to say I should not have been accepted here.
It's hard for even Canadians and Mexicans to find jobs in the US and we have access to the supposedly easy to obtain TN visa. Australians too with E3.
I'm more inclined to believe that H1B workers have other benefits to employers such as longer tenure due to the restrictions of moving jobs.
Which in itself should be an argument for further liberalization say by giving I140 approved petitioners access to EADs.
That is a financial motive. Companies don't want to pay the kind of compensation which would induce employees to be loyal to the company, and so they use H1B quasi-indentured servitude as a cheaper alternative.
In a post-remote world these jobs aren’t competing with on-shore labor. This is a populist pitch in the mould of iron work to Pennsylvania.
Big Tech, for example, treats SWEs as largely interchangeable. Make a SWE redundant and you can't hire another SWE--anywhere in the country--who is a visa holder for 24 months.
You can buy your way out of this by paying any redundant SWE 3 years of salary and benefits.
Let's see how necessary layoffs really are.
The trap with the older worker is a guy wants $250k, but will perform at the level of a $75/hr body shop guy. Skills don’t align - that’s always the risk of engineering.
we abolish the program and boom, 65k people out of this apparently HUGE number of US developers looking for work won't make a dent... so this argument holds absolutely no water ...
> Finally, the rule strengthens program integrity by codifying USCIS’ authority to conduct inspections and impose penalties for failure to comply; requiring that the employer must establish that it has a bona fide position in a specialty occupation available for the worker as of the requested start date; clarifies that the Labor Condition Application must support and properly correspond with the H-1B petition; and requires that the petitioner have a legal presence and be subject to legal processes in court in the United States.
U.S. citizens (and perhaps some dual-citizens) might want to look into such places (Navy warfare centers, NRL, ARL, etc.)
TL;DR:
The top starting pay is about $150k IIRC, which I'm told is somewhat below what a well-funded defense contractor will pay for really good people.
But I worked with some great people, the work was interesting, and it was located in a medium-cost-of-living area.
I left because of the siren call of the startup scene, and frustration with some bureaucratic stuff. But in retrospect I actually liked working there the best.
I come from an extremely wealthy Northern European country integral to founding the United States and English is my first language. I was not compelled to emigrate for a “better life”. I gave up a lot to be in the US.
H1-Bs are designed for abuse. There is no shortage of skilled workers. It’s just that immigrants are cheap.
I was hired in my country from a pool of over 500 for one of two jobs. Once accepted it took close to a year to do the legal paperwork. My sponsoring company was paying lawyers $600 an hour twenty years ago to get the work done. Despite being absolutely squeaky clean they easily invested 25k per applicant then.
When I arrived my pay tripled. I was earning 50-60k in the US and had been under 20 before. That was very low in my home country but it was a starting position and wages are lower outside the Us for myriad reasons even though living standards on low wages are higher.
The kicker was that similarly skilled Americans to myself were all earning 6 figures then. The industry I was in had a strong base in NY and the company that hired me was in LA. Their options were to pay 100k plus and relocate Americans from NY, or pay half that and relocate Europeans.
Better yet we were more qualified than the average American (as they got to pick the very best) and we were tied to them by the legal work and thus “indentured”. If we wanted to leave them we had to go home or find more sponsorship.
On arrival my colleague and I immediately realized we were both overqualified and under paid (pre internet this was much harder to discover). We ran rings round the locals. When our visas needed renewal the company “advertised” our jobs by placing printed sheet behind notice boards and claimed that was sufficient. It was a complete con.
Ironically I didn’t last very long. Given my skills and experience I found companies willing to sponsor my ViSAs and green card (which my first company sponsored for me also). So I was able to move around and establish myself.
In short the system has always been abused. The idea is good but as long as companies can choose to pay non competitive rates to immigrants they will do so and lie about the true state of the market. That’s what the system does and the purpose of a system IS what it does. It’s just lowering wages by importing skilled foreigners.
It's the old 'the foreigners are taking our jobs' routine.
I guess it will be interesting times ahead. I recommend everyone to keep their skills sharp!
> I'd be surprised if more than 5-10% of H-1B positions are ones where the hiring company has even looked for US applicants.
You really think a business would do that? Just go to the government and tell lies?
Not lies, strictly, but I see plenty of evidence pointing to the 'fake job' phonemena that seems to be discounted, like this example: https://www.teamblind.com/post/Intuit-firing-up-ads-in-local...
Filtering out real information from data and anecdata is a challenge at the best of times, but I am ill convinced of the honesty of most of the recruitment market.
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/indian-corporation-pays-re...
So, it's not just a plain numbers game, it's more about innovation, productivity, talent pools and of course, capitalism.
Re: the concerns over "immigrants taking our jobs!". As a native-born American working in a large tech company today - the threat is very clearly not from H1B's and other visas. The threat to American tech jobs is when US tech companies choose to build out offices in lower cost of living countries (and I'm very much including Europe in that, I think that's even a bigger problem).
It's much much better for America if tech companies hire workers in the US, regardless of whether they are citizens. Americans are eligible for those jobs, and that money stays within our economy. Versus employing workers elsewhere, where American's can't easily be hired, and those resources leave the US.
If we want to keep opportunities here - that's the issue we should be focus on fixing. What regulatory steps could we advocate for that would address this risk? Immigration is the wrong problem, and the focus on that in certain populist circles really demonstrates they are rather out of touch from what's actually happening in the industries that are driving the US economy today.
I want to pick on this point, because it's the general refrain about this topic. If there is some thing that American workers can't do in an in-demand field, and the government sets up a system to allow non-citizens to do those jobs, most people will say that this "helps" America. But does it? If the education pipeline is inadequately preparing Americans for being competitive in this in-demand field then perhaps that is the problem that should be addressed. Right now it feels like we have a (highly suspect) "labor shortage" that is addressed via immigration, which doesn't send a signal back to the educational/training infrastructure that they're doing something wrong.
If thousands of the smartest people from the rest of the world want to move to the US and fill these gaps, doesn't that make America better off overall?
But the effect is bigger than that, by allowing skilled immigration, it makes US universities and tech companies the best in the world, at the very least seen as such, which has tremendous larger effects.
It’s not a coincidence that we have the largest tech industry, and it’s not because we magically have smarter people.
It seems unlikely we’ll do either of those things moving forward. At least China’s investing in green tech, I guess.
Canada does not have that and it is going very poorly. Lots of people are calling for the implementation of the same policy.
> It's much much better for America if tech companies hire workers in the US, regardless of whether they are citizens. Americans are eligible for those jobs, and that money stays within our economy. Versus employing workers elsewhere, where American's can't easily be hired, and those resources leave the US.
Makes me wonder how many people gladly support this while at the same time clamoring against the EU's DMA and other regulations and fines it imposes on SV companies.
What you're saying is of course absolutely true! I like how plainly you've stated it, because the directness makes clear to people just how awful of a deal it is for the EU and other countries where US tech companies make enormous profits without hiring any significant number of locals.
I've lived in both the EU which suffers from the above, as well as a place where protectionism and barriers helped strongly restrain US tech and "artificially" give opportunity to local players. The latter has worked out so much better for every party involved except US tech.
I used the same argument in Brazil to support a strong free software preference in all government functions. Support from voters in Redmond wouldn’t get anyone re-elected in Brazil.
I always took it as a means of proving they still could return somewhere if necessary. Which is a reasonable thing to assure on a visa.
Ultimately it just wasted time and money, and causes lots of stress, for no useful purpose.
If you hire US-based engineers working on R&D (most software engineers) then you amortize their pay over 5 years. Foreign-based engineers working on R&D get amortized over 15 years.
You get to expense 3x as much for domestic engineers compared to foreign engineers. This means you need to pay more taxes upfront for having a foreign R&D team, which is bad for cashflow. Your company could be losing money (unprofitable) but still owe corp income taxes because of Section 174.
If the gov charged "tariffs" on foreign labor or services provided, especially for certain countries that labor is typically outsourced to, or certain types of labor/services (e.g. support, engineering, etc), that'd probably be an effective way to discourage offshoring.
Canada suffered because a lack of caps.
It leads to a concentration that can be overwhelming.
FWIW every country requires you leave and come back to change or renew visa status. The computers and processes are all setup at points of entry and just aren’t designed for people that don’t physically leave/enter.
It’s so common the guys at the us/Canada land border call it “flagpoleing” because you literally drive a u turn around the flagpole and go back. I’ve done it a dozen times, even driving 4 hours each way in a gnarley winter storm into Alaska and back to Canada at -45.
Not really. This is really Customs and Border Patrol/Immigration way of saying, you can always do the default/what everyone else does. You can leave and return six months of the year. The key is leave (which they do), they are already declared non-immigrant, and are self-sufficient.
Also, if you leave for six months, how are you even working in the US? Which is the point of the visa.
It’s a clever little maneuver. When the inevitable reversal happens, they can show up at fundraising galas telling donors, “We tried! We were so close! It’s just those baddies who always come along and pull the rug.”
- Launched rockets from Ukraine - remote work contracts extended to 2029 after Elon + Vivek wants people to RTO - TikTok ban
And the classic answer is always the same here: ,,it was all planned for years'' (sure, but the decision is made after the elections on purpose)
That’s not to excuse the slowness, but I imagine this stuff was in process for a while.
They might have spent the last four years negotiating what exactly the changes would ideally be. Government doesn’t work well with the “let’s see what sticks approach”.
This is an executive power. USCIS - the President can modify regulations, such as how H-1B applications are processed or the criteria used in selection lotteries.
The USG has to go through a very length period of coming up with a proposed rule. Allowing comments to be made about it, adjusting (or not) the rule based on those comments, and then finally submitting the final rule.
Nobody at USCIS wrote this document yesterday and published this today. This is the result of years of work. Do you seriously expect the USG to shut down anything they don't think they can finish under the current administration?
Doesn't the bottom of this announcement describe a previous rule that was announced in January 2024 and then implemented in March 2024? Interesting that rules process was far more rapid than this one.
No, the classic people not understanding how the government works.
These are changes that were done through the rule-making process, not legislation. The rule-making process is (by design!) VERY SLOW to give the stakeholders a chance to voice their opinion.
Typical rules take about 2 years to be implemented. And I guess Biden hoped to get a real immigration reform that would have made these changes unnecessary.
The tweet is a super brief summary, reproduced below.
Founders can self petition (& spouses can work)
- Own >50% of the entity, or have majority voting rights
- Organizations where fundamental research is a key activity now qualify
- Startups can hire researchers (AI, health, hardware) year-round
- Cap-gap work authorization extended to April 1
- Prevents employment gaps for F-1 OPT to H-1B switch
- Flexibility to start working immediately upon petition filing
- Less strict on the direct link between degree/job responsibilities
- Recognizes that AI may require multiple academic background
- Stricter compliance rules
- Employers must demonstrate a bona fide job exists
- Site visit codified: refusal to comply = petition denial> - Organizations where fundamental research is a key activity now qualify
> - Startups can hire researchers (AI, health, hardware) year-round
That’s a good change. I’ve seen ML researchers (PhDs) who led DARPA funded projects as principal investigator while working for a for-profit company not being selected for H-1B (lottery and cap) and having to leave the US.
Wait, so I can just open LLC and get H1B visa for it? There have to be conditions and limitations, otherwise it will be misused.
Now, misuse could come if you are independently wealthy and can self fund, but at the end of the day if you are doing that in the US, the economy still benefits.
No, you have to first post a job posting at a low salary, preferably with an in-office requirement in a HCOL city. If you get applicants, give them Leetcode Hard and no one will pass.
Then, when no one applies or passes the interview, you claim there is a shortage.
Viola!
I run a one-man consulting business from the EU. I sometimes hire freelancers. I work with US clients anyway. Does that mean I can open a US llc and move?
Wonder how this works for remote-only positions/companies.
That is, for each position a company wants to fill with a non-citizen they also have to bid on the visa fee they're willing to pay. The highest ~7,000 bids that month are accepted and paid to the government in exchange for a visa.
We could debate things like sealed-bid versus open auction and uniform-price versus paying your bid but whatever details we pick I suspect this would allow us to discover which companies are actually desperate for skills and which primarily use it as a cost-savings measure.
(I'm also curious how much H-1B visas would cost if there was a market: thousands of dollars? tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands? more?)
An mid level engineer at Google averages $280k/yr according to levels. A principal mechanical engineer at Boeing averages $170k/yr according to levels. If Google can pay an H1-B engineer 70% of what a non H1-B employee would get ($196k), they can bid up to 80k and still save money.
Since Boeing is going for a high level employee who actually highly skilled, it's less likely that they would be able to underpay their candidate, but even if they could pay their H1-B employee 70% of the market rate ($117k), they only have ~$50k to before they hit the break even point.
Obviously if the person is highly skilled and Boeing actually needs them it would make sense to bid beyond the break even point, but Boeing needs to be more choosy than Google. In that scenario, Google should put every single L4 candidate up for and H1-B because if even one gets their bid accepted it saves them money. Boeing actually has to decide which candidates they're willing to overpay for which will result in a smaller pool of mechanical engineers being put up for H1-B visas.
This would prevent abuse of foreigners who are underpaid. It would also allow most of the applicants to go to good jobs (FAANG) which can pay premiums salaries.
Reverse auction is the best way to go. Good for foreigners, good for top companies, economically the best option.
The biologist, geologist, physicists and the likes.
Currently the lottery gets spammed by IT outsourcing firms: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-staffing-firms-game-...
The American People built this country into the economic powerhouse it is today; we should reap the benefits of all this economic activity not random outsourcing firms.
It also has the benefit of giving the government an incentive to increase the quota to get more revenue.
The USA benefits enormously from skilled immigration: "doubling the size of the US H1B visa program increases US and EU growth by 4% in the long-run"
From a recent paper here: https://academic.oup.com/qje/advance-article-abstract/doi/10...
Disclaimer: I don’t live in the states, but I can understand the frustration.
But as soon as it's their own market that introduces additional competition, they will advocate "just pay people more, the job seekers exist, just not at the wages employers are offering, this extra competition only depresses American wages".
Which one is it? Is it "competition for other classes, no competition for my class please"?
People don't like the fact that they actually need to be competitive in skills to get a job. Had there been no H-1Bs, they could submit a resume and immediately get a job offer!
No joke. I look around in my company, Indians and Chinese (among others) are good at their jobs and do amazing work.
Some people just don't like that. They blame not being able to get a good job offer on Indians taking away the opportunity, not themselves being good developers.
This post is the place where they can vent.
If CS degrees from non-top-4 schools are not valuable, best to get that out so US students are not studying useless degrees.
Who actually benefits?
All this hype about the "smartest, brightest, etc." is nonsense. I've worked with hundreds of engineers in SV who are all on H1B. They are no better than anyone else. My main complaint with them is that their work is fine but the culture they bring is insanely toxic and does not allow for any psychological safety at all. I know enough people in industry for a long period of time to know that it wasn't always this way. There were always problems but it has hit a level that is insane. The fact that an American is a minority nationality when in almost any US tech company is bonkers.
The reality is that in most of those fields, few Americans get an MS/PhD. Go to a typical engineering department and you'll often see the majority of advanced degree students are foreigners.
So it's a question of: Do we want to continue to train foreigners, only to not have them contribute to the US economy?
If you move out to the pure sciences, you pretty much need a PhD to get a good career. Once again, a big chunk, if not the majority, are foreigners.
Look around at the highly skilled folks you see who are not of US origin, and you'll find most of them are in the US due to the H1-B program (only a tiny percentage come via other programs like the O visa).
Yes, H1-B is often abused, but this is the reason it exists. It's a lot harder to get an H1B visa and then permanent residency if your degree is in the humanities, for example.
Debt means most Americans go "I need to enter into the job market so I can pay off these debts".
Also, alot of foreign students are willing to work/study insane hours because visa hanging over their head. I have a friend who got MS in Engineering but didn't want to continue because he looked at what's required and started talking with his mentor about his PhD. His mentor said it's 996 schedule and if you don't want to, I can likely find a student visa student who will.
I don't see many people getting employed straight out of undergrad from India or China and moving to the US directly. They get their advanced degree here first to get into the country then they get employed...
If you want to make that siphon bigger — and more competitive — how would you do it? By limiting the people that can work in tech to whoever companies can hire locally, or by bringing in the smartest people from around the world?
Read more: https://mckoder.medium.com/does-america-need-immigration-781...
The major benefit of reducing or eliminating the H1B visa program is that those companies can continue to do well, and Americans can do well along with them.
Phrased differently, the goal is to help industry, not hurt workers. Hurting some workers is an acceptable cost, not the goal.
One idea is that having a thriving industrial ecosystem helps those same workers more than the downward pressure.
The phrase "help industry" has many dimensions. The simplest of course is that by increasing labor supply and suppressing wages it increases profit margins, rewarding shareholders.
Another important function is that by having more workers overall in the US, it increases the productivity of the domestic industry itself, due to increased competition for jobs driving up the productivity of the average worker. This in turn makes the industry more competitive vs its equivalents in other countries.
The average worker (whether permanent resident or temporary/H1B) who doesn't have significant investments likely doesn't receive much of those productivity gains, since they mostly go to capital owners.
Long term, it boosts returns to capital while capping returns to labor, the same trend noted by Thomas Piketty some years back.
What is the downward price shock you're talking about? What do you think the salary would or should be, assuming all H1B worker are magically gone the next day?
You don't see the need but perhaps the users do.
As Asimov pointed out, "[t]here is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been." American culture is profoundly anti-intellectual. Every Dunning-Kruger rando thinks they have something valuable to contribute to every discussion.
Then why are US tech companies the most successful?
It's not needed.
It's used to game the system.
It's not supposed to be a backdoor to a green card.
So...what's the front door to the green card ? How does one arrive legally to the nation with the highest [1] historic immigration rate of any nation in the world ?
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/net...
Thoughtful discourse is predicated first on basic respect.
We shouldn’t feel bad about protecting ourselves.
Instead of telling everyone else to check their privilege, maybe check your expectations. The world doesn't owe anyone anything. Claiming your desires are everyone else's problem is a deeply self-centered way to view the world.
You can ditch the US, get permanent resident status in Canada, become Canadian citizenship, get TN visa to work in the US if you want to and someone who thinks that h1b is a backdoor to a green card will be just starting on green card paperwork. And that's if there are no issues with application.
This is all after participating in h1b lottery for years. Trust me, it's an extremely slow and painful way of getting a green card. If h1b is your way to a green card, it means either: you're already married, you have no idea what are you doing.
It's no a backdoor in any way, person move to the US for work and builds a life here, accumulate assets, I think it's pretty reasonable to give those people a way to settle in the US permanently in these cases.
The program needs to be revamped because it's not working in the way it's sold to voters.
To:
We need to make sure we only allow valuable immigrants that add to the economy
To:
Cancel this program. They are gaming the system.
You can choose the game to play but you can't choose the rules of the game.
Well you of course can. These rules are set by government and they have power to change as they see appropriate.
There's nothing wrong with brain draining other countries and incentivizing legal immigration for work visas and H1B style programs. We should want to be the best place in the world to work. This shouldn't come as a detriment to the citizens of the US. Legal immigration and jobs programs need to be better. The H1B program suppresses legal citizen wages as well as immigrant wages because companies are able to use the threat of deportation as an effective negotiation tactic. Companies use immigrants for cheap professional labor, and if the immigrant pipes up, they get let go. With everything in tech life being designed around pushing people into paycheck to paycheck lifestyles, this can wreck someone's life through no fault of their own if they do something like ask for a raise, or better health insurance.
In turn, if citizen employees try to negotiate, the company can replace them with more immigrant workers unless or until they can hire local replacements at the company's preferred rate of pay.
We need a cleaner, easier path to citizenship, without the endless bureaucratic nightmare that is the current system. We need better work visa programs, so that people who legitimately make the world a better place aren't penalized for arbitrary technicalities, while at the same time recognizing the sovereignty of the US and reasonably protecting borders.
Sometimes countries need to be overthrown, and the US shouldn't act like a pressure release valve for dictators. We also shouldn't be in the business of regime management or perpetuating political nightmares that causes a lot of illegal immigration, as well.
TLDR; There's no shortage of US tech talent. The problem is that we've painted ourselves into a regulatory corner - in order to be competitive, companies have to shortchange payroll by abusing migrant salaries. To fix it, we must strengthen migrant rights so companies can't hang the threat of deportation over employee's heads, and reduce the financial burden of hiring citizens, so you get the same bang for your buck regardless of the immigration status of the employee.
Microsoft and Lumen and FAANG and all the tech industry titans shouldn't have penny pinching strategies designed to bump stock prices using methods that are fueled by human suffering. Get rid of those options and stop blindly implementing systems where the incentives are so obviously awful.
Otherwise, one could immigrate through a different visa; there are some employment visas that are explicitly intended for those with intent to immigrate. Or like a family or lottery visa, I guess.
I think it's possible to have a permanent residency application sponsored by an employer from abroad, but especially if the candidate is from China, India, Mexico or the Philipines, the timelines make even less sense than H1-B timelines (submit your application in a two week window near the beginning of March, for the chance to start in October). I don't know too many places that want to commit to a hire that can't start for 7 months, although it's not unreasonable for those on post graduate visas with work eligibility.
Clarification of specialty role
- Less strict on the direct link between degree/job responsibilities
- Recognizes that AI may require multiple academic background
There’s a big difference between “we can’t find any talent” and “we can’t find any talent at our price point”. The former should be granted an H1B. The latter is abusing the system.
Where does one get a cursory look at H1B salaries? If you're referring to various websites that publish H1B petition data, then you might be interested to know that they don't show actual salaries, only the minimum amounts that the company is required to pay by law. The actual salary can and often is higher, based on the specific employee negotation/performance/etc, same as any regular non-H1B job.
“Raise more money” is not an acceptable or reasonable answer.
However, this final rule doesn't magically solve the deeper structural issues. For example, the per-country caps on green cards still leave many H-1B workers stuck in decades-long queues if they're from certain countries. That reality discourages risk-taking, entrepreneurship, and long-term roots,something that runs counter to the very idea of welcoming skilled people. While allowing spouses to work and making it easier to switch roles will improve day-to-day life for some, the broader immigration pipeline remains complicated and slow.
The real test will be in implementation and enforcement. Will the new definitions and stricter oversight actually reduce abuse by staffing firms who've flooded the lottery with dubious registrations? Will the simplified criteria for specialty occupations translate to smoother hiring and fewer headaches for workers and employers alike?
In short: good steps, but we're still a long way from a truly balanced system that reliably identifies, welcomes, and retains global talent without leaving them in extended legal limbo. It's progress, but the ultimate success depends on how these rules play out in the real world,and whether future administrations build on these changes instead of rolling them back.
You can’t make a rule that says “hey don’t break the rules”.
That seems logically fallacious.
A lot of my batch (all H1b masters) when to Meta and Amazon. All of them were paid 200k+ right out of masters, one was even paid 430k. So is the claim that if these H1bs did not exist, companies would pay 250k+ to those out of masters? And 500k+ to exceptional candidates? If OpenAI was legally allowed to hire anyone from India, China etc, would they stop providing 800k+ salaries? In fact, we know from experience that this is not true because if you go to OpenAI’a website they explicitly mention apply from wherever you want and they will handle immigration. And you also see that they did successfully hire some folks from remote countries with exorbitant salaries.
A much simpler explanation, is that in tech companies employees are not a cost center but a profit generation center. And so tech companies are not looking to save costs by paying H1bs less, but are simply looking to hire the best and pay whatever is needed to keep them. Market competition tends to determine salaries far more than employee labour pool, especially when talent is always in short supply.
This theory also seems more correct to me, in that it predicts places where H1b labor would shortchange existing tech workers. It would be wherever employees are a cost center, legacy businesses that need software but would like to just get it done as cheaply as possible. By definition most of these companies would not be FAANG adjacent, but would instead be companies like say Target that needs simple software that works reasonably well at a low cost. An equitable solution then would be to put a flat minimum salary on H1b’s, say 200k, that would remove most of the cases where H1bs are hired to short change Americans, and not affect much of the talent hiring that big tech does. It’s only negative affect would be on startups, which generally pay low salaries, but would now have to pay high salaries for immigrants.
And in comes a flood of "Research Software Engineer" roles
It was a big problem for our family.
I could save our customer, a huge US entity, a lot of money by moving to the states for the duration of the project. I don't have a college degree though, which seems to be a requirement for the H1-B.
What a bummer.
At least the H-1B lets us keep some tax revenue.
Seems the lobby was strong to allow consultancies like Tata and wipes to continue what they are doing to get most of cap.
> 2. Bar on Multiple Registrations Submitted by Related Entities
DHS will not finalize the proposed change at 8 CFR 214.2(h)(2)(i)(G) to expressly state in the regulations that related entities are prohibited from submitting multiple H-1B registrations for the same individual. On February 2, 2024, DHS published a final rule, “Improving the H-1B Registration Selection Process and Program Integrity,” 89 FR 7456 (Feb. 2, 2024), creating a beneficiary-centric selection process for registrations by employers and adding additional integrity measures related to the registration process to reduce the potential for fraud in the H-1B registration process. In that final rule, DHS states that it “intends to address and may finalize this proposed provision [expressly stating in the regulations that related entities are prohibited from submitting multiple registrations for the same individual] in a subsequent final rule,” but that “[m]ore time and data will help inform the utility of this proposed provision.” 89 FR 7456, 7469 (Feb. 2, 2024). Initial data from the FY 2025 H-1B registration process show a significant decrease in the total number of registrations submitted compared to FY 2024, including a decrease in the number of registrations submitted on behalf of beneficiaries with multiple registrations.[1]
This initial data indicate that there were far fewer attempts to gain an unfair advantage than in prior years owing, in large measure, to the implementation of the beneficiary-centric selection process.[2]
Under the beneficiary-centric selection process, individual beneficiaries do not benefit from an increased chance of selection if related entities each submit a registration on their behalf. As such, DHS has decided not to finalize the proposed change pertaining to multiple registrations submitted by related entities.
> C. Summary of Costs and Benefits
DHS analyzed two baselines for this final rule, the no action baselines and the without-policy baseline. The primary baseline for this final rule is the no action baseline. For the 10-year period of analysis of the final rule, DHS estimates the annualized net cost savings of this rulemaking will be $333,835 annualized at a 2 percent discount rate. DHS also estimates that there will be annualized monetized transfers of $1.4 million from newly cap-exempt petitioners to USCIS and $38.8 million from employers to F-1 workers, both annualized at a 2 percent discount rate.
America needs to keep attracting the world's best and brightest, but linking it to a specific employer is problematic. Opens up employees to mistreatment.
I'd say charge a straight up fee, 500k upon approval. That gets you 5 years, if your wiz making 400k a year it's a great deal.
There is already a work visa for that called EB5 even though the requirement is $1M (800K for rural areas) and you will need to hire 10 American workers. Plenty of rich people from other countries are using that already.
I like working at early stage startups— works pretty well with H1B but it makes the process of getting a green card via work complicated. Some people can deal with all that stress, I just rather not.
Unless their business generates way more than $500k, in which case they'd probably be moving as businessmen, not as skilled workers.
Currently workers are often abused since the system puts intense pressure to keep a job and don't move around.
EDIT: I encourage people to read two stories
Qian Xuesen - what happens when you deport skilled laborers
https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/mariel-impact.pdf - one of the first studies on immigration econ effects on wages. A good starting point
If you're worried about people shortcutting a line to get a visa by injecting money into the US economy, again by somehow getting 60K into the LLC to pay the salary of the recipient, this is also a win.
So what is the problem here exactly?
I read through it and even asked chatgpt for summary and it looks like "passport is now required" and "one beneficiary one draw" that is if you put in multiple petitions it will only consider you once.
I thought Elon was talking nonsense when he mentions frivolous government rules but reading these h1b changes makes me question my own sanity about the government "rules" which they aptly named it as "Final rule" (wtf?).
Why does everyone think the cure to the worlds ills is to have more doctors and not more toilet cleaners? People can die from dirty hands on doorknobs faster than from smoking: Basic sanitation work, food work is important. If current US residents won't do this stuff, pick food, clean up, then isn't the answer to bring them in or do we really prefer to have them live in a twilight, semi-illegal world? Really?
But as an American the “bonafide job requirement” makes me nervous. We have a massive ghost job problem that really needs to be a federal crime. Will this make that worse?
This change is meant to close that loophole. This used to not be a problem, because you had to file the entire petition BEFORE you enter the lottery, but now you just pay some nominal fee and get your name in, leading to a highly profitable situation for staffing companies.
Oh no, the 50% rule won't be exploited sir.
“Prevailing wage condition”
It’s a requirement that’s part of the Labor Condition Application wherein based on the location you’ll work (the “Metropolitan Service Area” or MSA) to be granted a visa your employer must prove they’ll pay you above publicly available and published minimum wages for each job title.
These wages are public. If you have a problem with what they’re permitted to pay H-1B workers, the published prevailing wages are what you have a problem with. Spoiler though: they’re actually pretty accurate.
Here is one example of how hard it is to underpay workers on visas: during the pandemic, workers on visas were not legally allowed to be furloughed, because they would run the risk of not meeting the prevailing wage that year, putting the employer out of compliance with the LCA and subject to fines in the event of an audit. So what happened in practice was negotiated unpaid leave or in most cases the US gov covered wages via programs like PPP.
Now this is all out the window if the published prevailing wage for a given occupation is too low or the employer somehow sneaks one by the consular officials approving petitions - by selecting a title too junior for the applicant’s years of experience, for example. There will always be anecdata that makes this seem like a huge problem so be wary because one story does not a trend make. As mentioned above, by and large the prevailing wages are pretty on point with what American citizens are paid.
The reality of the way this system works is it’s WAY more technical than fearmongerers would have you believe. Visa holders are very much NOT undercutting anyone and the H-1B is not a completely broken system - even though the lottery and the fraudulent applications cause hell for applicants and employers it does basically do what it’s intended to do. So besides the exploitative situation these changes seem to proactively address, it mostly works and alongside the O-1 and a few other visa categories, has played a key role in the US’ ongoing supremacy in AI and many other industries.
Source: Australian citizen spent over 6 years working in SF on an E-3 visa which is very similar to H-1B.
I suppose 2025 is starting early.
edit: case in point, downvoted for simply saying I’m noticing a lot of racism from the (you know who) crowd - as all the comments against this are often followed with “trump will fix this” or “your country needs birth control” or “india shouldn’t be allowed to get visas”
Really, given the premise, anyone sane should kill H-1B entirely for tech:
"The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States"
There is no shortage of qualified US software engineers. CS schools are full. The very concept is ridiculous. Kill this law, liberalize immigration instead.
I guess you never paid any attention to the nationality of students enrolled in CS classes.
I’m a natural born citizen that’s the wrong skin color and I’m planning on carrying my passport everywhere come Jan 21 - I’m not going to chance being thrown into the back of a BORTAC van.
Their immigration policy is never only about illegal immigration. Do you actually think it is possible to tighten immigration policy without affecting H1B?
If you need evidence, just look at what happened between 2017-2021. H1B denial & RFE rates were way up, and the administration tried multiple times to roll out policy that significantly restrict the eligibility of H1B visas. They even used coronavirus as an excuse to issue travel bans on H1B. How is that making legal immigration easier?
He’s owned by a different slice of the parasitic ruling class that, while opposed to some of the goals the Biden admin was for, still share a common theme of not caring about the average American at all. He has probably the most pro Israel cabinet we’ve ever seen and appears to be cozying up with big tech (thiel, musk, zuckerberg, etc).
If he was truly pro American H1-B would be thrown out and we’d require these companies that are wildly profitable to invest in educating American workers. H1-B is used to exploit both foreign and domestic labor to the benefit of a tiny population of capital holders.
This is exactly right and exactly why Trump won't do anything about it... when you surround yourself will billionaires you'll want to make this that this tiny population of capital holders prospers even further :)
I personally witnessed someone that submit multiple applications that this person won the H1B lottery. This person even had fake office, fake business address, etc for the fake entities.
I already reported it, but no action has been taken. This person is now happily employed in the US using H1B.
Unethical life pro tips but work: for those of you trying to get H1B, just submit multiple applications to multiple "companies". There are services like this out there, just need to find out where.
Good luck. This nation is for plunder.