"It would make sense that an employer would try to offer a lower salary to an employee it helped move to the United States since that employee also gains the benefit of getting sponsored, but the analysis found the opposite."
This makes me want to punch the screen. It is ILLEGAL to pay an engineer on an H-1B less than the median salary for that position, precisely because people were worried that foreign labour would be used to undercut wages.
By 'that position' do you mean the position being replaced, or the new position created in order to hire the H1B? And are you taking account of the market price of the additional skills that employee brings, or is that not relevant?
So here's just one loophole: companies find a lower-paid title, and base the 'prevailing wage' on beginning level employees. Now that the 'prevailing wage' is set, try to hire young people with advanced education, special skills, etc. Congratulations, you now have a legal way of paying about half of what a comparably experienced citizen would cost. Bonus: sponsorship does provide good leverage.
Consider H1B employees getting paid the prevailing wage. Is this how you compensate the best talent during a talent shortage? No. It implies you'd pay less if you were confident you could get away with it.
You can't honestly dispute that the program is being used to undercut wages. Legally.
I arrived in this country on an H-1B, and then I co-founded a company where I repeatedly examined the option of hiring employees on H-1Bs. It never, ever made sense to hire a foreign employee if there was a local one available, even though I have absolutely no bias towards hiring American citizens.
The only reason you'd hire an H-1B is if you were out of qualified American engineers, because it is somuchharder to hire foreigners.
The chief users of H-1Bs are big, boring companies that can't attract local talent at any price. And then they can't hang on to them, thanks to the American Competitiveness in the 21st Century act, which lets H-1B holders switch companies if they get a better offer. The purpose of the law was to prevent companies using immigration status to "trap" employees at lower wage. Because the immigration system thought of that problem.
The argument that for the same price, you get a more-qualified applicant for a given lower-skilled position doesn't fly, because
a) the cost of an H-1B is far more than their salary; the legal fees run into tens of thousands of dollars before you even consider relocation. Foreign workers are much more expensive.
b) the pool of people willing to up and relocate from a foreign country to the US just isn't that big; the same market that applies to American engineers applies to foreign ones, and they are just as demanding.
c) once in America, the H-1B holders don't need to stick around if their salary is crappy, and they don't. See above.
The fundamental misunderstanding that a lot of people have about talent immigration is that they think there are hordes of unwashed foreigners beating down the doors to get in. They're not. Most people stay where they are. That's why you have to make it easier for them to get in, because we need them more than they need us.
One of the concerns I've seen mentioned is that while it is illegal to pay less than the median, that median can be shifted by changing the job title.
In the CNN article, it is mentioned that the most requested position is for "computer systems analyst" which "is also a lower-paying job compared to jobs like software engineer and requires only a two-year degree." It is quite possible that some of those analysts are over-qualified for their jobs and should be making software engineer or senior engineer money.
The Government Acountability Office wrote up a report about 2.5 years ago [1] that does mention limited oversight (page 3). The text:
"Elements of the H-1B program that could serve as worker protections
such as the requirement to pay prevailing wages, the visa’s
temporary status, and the cap itself are weakened by
several factors."
Just because it is illegal, doesn't mean it isn't happening.
Keep in mind that preventing a wage increase is, over time, no different from undercutting wages.
Typically, a shortage would spur an increase in wages - so allowing people to pay only the "prevailing" wage could still end up suppressing wage growth.
One way around this would be to set a higher pay standard for H1B hires (perhaps requiring pay at the 90ile%+ level for the position, or creating a "prevailing wage + 25%").
Employers have to pay the industry prevailing wage or the wage actually paid to comparable US national employees. So the law already does what you are suggesting.
I don't understand how this could be the case. If a company pays its employees the prevailing wage, why would it be obligated to pay an H1B hire at the 90%ile?
Unfortunately, I still don't understand your argument.
If a company currently pays 100K for a senior software engineer, the median for the position is 100K, and the 90%ile for the industy is 180, is the company obligated to pay 180K to an H1B for this role?
My understanding is that it is not, that 100K would meet the prevailing wage requirements.
I'm sorry, I guess I misunderstood your point. No, 100k would work. But if the industry median were 100k and but the company in question paid US workers in that title 150k, they'd have to pay 150k.
There's a very easy work around. Tell the USCIS that you're bringing 'HTML guy' for $80K/year, but in reality it's a software engineer that would otherwise make $120K+ in the US.
There probably should be some sort of requirement where the H1-B visa holder's peers are required to anonymously rate the abilities of the H1-B visa holder relative to themselves after something like 6 months of employment. This wouldn't prevent the hiring of workers at a lower rate but would provide a quick enough correction to such fraud. It would also make sure that H1-B visa holders are paid a fair wage relative to the value they bring.
Prior to getting an H1-B employee the employer would be required to register a minimum number of employees that will be a peer of the new employee (no bosses or anyone else that may be in cahoots). After 6 months, the government agency responsible for such visas would send a survey to those peers asking them for their title and salary and stating the title and salary of the H1-B employee. They are then asked to rank the title and salary of the employee against their own as well as the skills of the employee relative to their own.
I posted this in response to a comment the last time this came up. That article was killed, so I'm reposting:
Whereas the reason there are open positions for programmers at high tech companies is that these companies want star programmers
Maybe they should try paying like stars. What percentage of engineers that aren't founders or within the first five employees make over $300,000 a year? The money is in Silicon Valley, Google's 2011 net income was $299,874/employee [1], but the vast majority of engineers aren't going to be the ones to get it.
How about paying a market wage, instead of offering a "free lunch" to people that cannot negotiate. I am not interested in playing video games at work, I have a house for that. Last I looked at it, the difference in pay between finance and stem jobs is enough to hire a personal chef to deliver lunch to you at work every day, and cook for you at home, and buy all the games you want, with a bunch of money left over. Apple and Google are both posting ~25% net profits because engineers are willing to work for peanuts, and a free lunch. On top of that, cost of living in the bay area is outrageous, we're talking $35,000/year for housing, unless you want to live like a college student.
An average (median) engineer should be making $200,000 a year, and the "rockstar" (>80th percentile) engineers that everybody is trying to hire for $85,000 and 0.5% of equity, should be making $350,000+. These are hard jobs that few people can do at all, and fewer can do well. Great engineers can create millions of dollars of value a year.
It seems that the industry has shifted focus, now that the collusion agreements have been squashed, toward importing cheap labor. This problem has been solved in other industries through partnerships and professional societies (e.g. in the legal industry, with large partnership firms and bar associations). In the interim, it seems like the best way to capture value is to build companies to flip in talent acquisitions, while planning to leave to do it again as soon as you're vested.
[1] Goldman Sachs 2011 net income was $162,913 per employee. Average pay was $367,057. It's harder to get data on Google, but it looks like the mid-career median salary is $141,000.
Google's Gross Profit (Total Revenue less Cost of Revenue) was $24.7B in 2011, and GS's was $24.5B. At the same time, Google had 32,467 employees to GS's 35,700. Yet, the Google net income was $9.7B compared to $4.4B on the GS side. The difference seems to be made up entirely by the difference in employee compensation.
Yep. This is how backwards our industry is. It wants to pay peanuts for rockstar coders, but doesn't realize that no one is both dumb enough to work for snack food Tuesdays and smart enough to have a PhD in CS.
The problem is exasperated by these companies treating engineers like children. "Toss them another Mt. Dew, and they'll work another all-nighter."
With all the VC and buyout money out there, a true rockstar is going to be a founder or have serious equity in their company. They'd be an idiot for anything less.
So what are these Ph.D. engineers doing, then? Sitting at home with their degrees waiting for a big enough offer? I think not. They are employed somewhere, which means that actually they are not counterproof of a shortage.
Raising salary always comes up as the "answer" to the talent shortage, but it's a highly localized answer. Sure a company can fill all their openings by raising their salaries--they'll do it by recruiting currently-employed engineers from another company.
That doesn't "fill a hole" industry-wide. It just moves it to another company. If there are more holes than qualified engineers, there's a shortage.
To make the case that talent shortages are caused by low salaries, you'd need to show me a lot of people who are qualifed but currently willfully unemployed, waiting for the right offer. I'm not aware of many engineers who fit that description.
Well, don't work for those companies. There's plenty of companies around that actively discourage hero coding by anybody (aside from exceptional circumstances) because it illustrates a deeper flaw in their system.
That's not a solution. That's the issue. Smart people don't work for those companies. Then, said companies turn around and complain that there is a shortage of talent*
It is actually difficult to find talent, though. The fact that idiots are claiming this for the wrong reasons doesn't mean that smart people can't also think so for the right reasons.
At Goldman/JPM/MS, the going rate (inclusive of bonus) right now seems to be:
100-150k for analysts (1-3 years out of undergraduate);
200-300k for associates (3-5 years out);
300-500k for VPs (6-8 years out);
500k+ for MDs (8+ years out)
And we're not talking about the guys bringing in a billion dollars as traders. This is for the rank-and-file.
There is no way an associate in operations makes 200k and frankly that seems a bit high for engineers as well. Are you speaking in general and is your source anecdotal?
Also _most_ people do not ever make MD, let alone in 9 years.
The salaries are for investment banking and sales & trading. Not the same sort of job, obviously, but when Facebook and Google head to Stanford to do recruiting, these are the other options those kids are considering.
Thanks for the clarification, I'm still curious as to what your source is. In light of the current regulatory environment, do you think there is still sizable demand for quantitative professionals on Wall St?
I have family/friends who are in the industry. Re: demand, it's size-able, and quantitative skills are becoming more, not less, important. To paint with very broad brushes, the recruiting emphasis on Wall Street has shifted towards math/science majors at the top of their class at top schools. There are less opportunities out there to make money, so the value of precise analysis has really gone up. Also, given the current regulatory environment, the value of risk management, which is intensely quantitative, has gone up.
This is really a tough sell as a policy issue. I'm supposed to be all upset that wages are being depressed from $200,000 to $100,000 for people who happened to have fallen out of their mothers on one side of an invisible line even though it means opportunities for people to make $100,000 who would otherwise be making $25,000 but happened to be born on the other side of the world?
Sorry, far from being upset, that sounds to me like a great trade-off. Sure the companies aren't doing it out of altruism, but the net result is quite positive. All those 'underpaid' American born engineers working in silicon valley can comfort themselves knowing that they will still be among the 1% richest people in the entire world.
N.B. Look up PPP before objecting based on how much an apartment in SF costs.
So how much of your income would you like to part with in order to give the children of rural Indian farmers access to the same education as European children get?
Well I'm not European, but I'd be willing to pay the same amount as I'm willing to pay for the children of rural Arkansas farmers. Which is to say nothing at all. But I'd gladly hire either one if they could do the job.
They might well have been a community before your glorious war dead who "established and preserved a nation" slaughtered them.
How exactly is that justification for continuing to treat people born on one side of a line as valuable human beings and those on the other worthless? Is it a moral sunk cost theory -- as long as we've committed all these atrocities in the name of nationalism might as well keep going?
They are certainly communities, and it is the obligation of the governing bodies of their communities to maximize the prosperity of the people in those communities just as it is the obligation of the governing bodies of our community to maximize the prosperity of the people in our community.
Inside versus outside isn't theoretical. People in other communities will not come to your defense when you need help, they will not perpetuate your culture and values, and they are not part of the body politic that animates your democracy.
Are you really trying to justify genocide on the basis that people who live in a community have no moral obligations to anyone outside their community?
I would have thought that reasoning went out of fashion circa September 30, 1946.
I don't think you're required to be upset about it. In fact, your honesty is very refreshing. No CEO lobbying for this bill would ever openly state that this program dramatically reduces wages for US citizens, but that they don't care because they view US citizenship as a meaningless invisible line.
The idea that representatives should care about the prosperity of people who aren't their constituents strikes at the very heart of republican democracy.
How about paying a market wage, instead of offering a "free lunch" to people that cannot negotiate.
Who can't negotiate? It's your fault if you can't/won't negotiate.
I'd posit that the reason finance pays more for engineers than STEM is because most of us think that the atmosphere at a finance company will suck and as a result they have a smaller labor pool (I've literally never responded to a single financial recruiting email).
Who can't negotiate? It's your fault if you can't/won't negotiate.
If there is a pool of labor willing to accept a free lunch and campus-like atmosphere, coupled with cheap imported labor, in lieu of perhaps $100,000 in pay, it depresses wages across the entire industry.
I'd posit that the reason finance pays more for engineers than STEM is because most of us think that the atmosphere at a finance company will suck and as a result they have a smaller labor pool (I've literally never responded to a single financial recruiting email).
And this is the funny part. Do you really believe working somewhere like EA is different than working somewhere like Goldman Sachs?
I'd never work at EA, either. Although they're the other side of the same economics, because young nerds who don't know any better and like video games will work there for less than an average tech firm, and less still than it would take to get them into finance.
As far as people who take low salaries screwing up your salary: If they're willing to do the job for that and they're not appreciably worse than you at that particular job, maybe that's what you're worth for that role, too? Almost every industry out there has it much worse than software when it comes to the 'race to the bottom'.
If they're willing to do the job for that and they're not appreciably worse than you at that particular job, maybe that's what you're worth for that role, too?
Or there could be a collection of people that decide to enter different industries because of this, causing a labor shortage?
The data doesn't support the conclusion that they pay more for engineers, just that they pay more per employee. I've been an engineer in financial services in NYC for 3.5 years, and I can fairly confidently say that those large salaries are going to the senior salespeople and traders who pull in hundreds of thousands or millions per year in commission. Maybe I've just been at the wrong places (I don't think so), but unless you're some kind of phenom quant engineer or you are in a very profitable and very small hedge fund, the offers are better at the Googles, Microsofts, and Amazons of the world than the Goldmans, JPMorgans, and Citigroups.
Quant engineers are exactly the people that all this clamoring is about. They are the star programmers that don't exist. Tech pay could go up a bit, and start attracting them with better working conditions, which would solve this bullshit crisis which is largely an excuse to import a bunch of cheap labor.
That is an excellent question, and I wish I knew the answer. I have tried finding data on that before, but was unable to. My inclination is that GS has a much higher standard deviation than Google, with the data skewed right.
And is GS average pay skewed by a 1% of employees who make globs of money into the 10s of millions in total comp? Do the majority of staffers make normalish wages? Admin assistants, IT, operations, etc?
"Bright.com, a California-based company that uses big data analysis to pair jobseekers with employers, released a report last month that showed that the supposed dearth of high-skilled engineers in the United States may be fiction after all."
Which would presumably be a useful result for Bright's business, if it is true, as it would mean that companies simply are not looking hard enough, which is Bright's business.
"In fact, Bright's analysis reveals that for the top 10 jobs where H-1B visas are requested, only three do not currently have enough qualified American jobseekers to satisfy demand."
Ahh, so it isn't a fiction then. Hang on, just a minute ago they said it may be a fiction according to a report and now they say that nearly a third of those roles do not have enough people in the USA to fill them, according to the same report.
Hmmm. Could this possibly be an advert posing as an article? Is water wet? These and other exciting questions will be answered in a forthcoming study; "Look here's some numbers so give me all your money, you pitiful fools." Available soon for only $666.66. Reserve your copy now while stocks last.
In the place of analysis you have put a lot of snark which seems to be analysis.
If another company with a different business had posted - one with an incentive to say there is a shortage of high-skilled engineers, like most big companies hiring engineers - would you be implying their claims are false too? If not, you are being partial; if so, your method is just to say that whatever anyone says must be wrong because it was in their interest.
3 out of the top 10 jobs where H-1B requested does not equal a third of employees, and it isn't clear that those 3 do see a shortage.
Also, in case of a shortage in a specialized area, why do we assume that companies cannot ever do anything to train employees in that specialization themselves? If you need piles of Java programmers who know SOAP, get some Java programmers and let them train on SOAP.
If you are in the business of producing (say) cars, you have to make capital investments, including investments in human capital - why should software be a special snowflake?
> If you are in the business of producing (say) cars, you have to make capital investments, including investments in human capital - why should software be a special snowflake?
It's perfectly legal for a car company to import sub-assemblies from abroad. Why should we have free movement of capital and goods, but not labor?
I used to have dreams of moving out to the valley after I finished school, but after checking, rechecking, and then rechecking again the cost of living out there, I pretty much scrapped the idea. The Bay Area may be a cool place to live, but it's not a 250% housing-cost-increase cool to me. Moreover, the pay doesn't match that housing increase. Forget it. For that price I'll wait for somebody to offer a telecommuting position, move out to me (it's not SO BAD in Missouri), or move someplace less psycho crazy on the housing.
This story drives me crazy because the market is essentially in the favor of the engineers, but it feels to me like the big tech influencers are trying to tilt it back in their favor by shaping policy and changing the game.
Pro tip: If you bring in foreign engineers and pay them peanuts, they're not going to be able to live in the Bay Area much less want to.
You will be renting, not buying. This means that they monthly housing cost differential will be more than made up for in the salary differential. The sad fact is that if you are not in the top slice of a particular subfield you are not going to be getting telecommuting options unless you get very lucky: by being in Missouri you both limit your opportunity to find the lucky break and limit your ability to get into the social/work networks that serve to bestow the "this guy rocks" credential. Your only option is probably to be a major contributor on a well-known open source project; this is not a bad thing to do in general, but you are limiting your options significantly. If you deign to lower your standard of living slightly for a short period of time you will be able to take a real chance at getting the opportunities you are looking for. You can always leave after doing a few years in the bay area.
You can't win if you don't play. If you are waiting on the sidelines for some magic opportunity to fall into your lap you are going to be waiting a very long time.
Exactly why the OP won't choose to move there. Why should he have to pay someone the privilege of living, and get none of that money back when/if they decide to leave? At least when you buy you get some equity.
If you lose your job in a crisis, you also won't be able to pay your rent and you'll move/sublet your apartment. Losing your job pretty much screws you however you decide to live.
"Qualified applicants" takes on a different meaning if you're looking for someone to crank out a CRUD app or write operating system kernels.
For example, we've been looking for an entry-level web developer for almost a year. They actually put "computer science degree" and "2 years experience" on the job ad. We found a pretty smart kid with an associates that blew the interview by mentioning he kept up with industry trends on Reddit - so our boss is afraid he's going to screw around online all day.
The sad part is, 3 of the other 4 developers in the department came from other areas in the same company, one in shipping and one in billing, and have almost no formal computer training and don't even know how to upgrade Firefox.
Entry level with two years of experience?? I'd hope that isn't very strict or basically no one would be able to apply for the job meeting the requirements unless internships count, and even then you usually get like 1.5 years of experience that way.
I made about 2/3 of the money in my Coop as I do now as a full time employee but then again my university required that we have a certain amount of paid internship time to get our degree so my experience may be atypical.
Perhaps your company's issue is that it's hiring practices are so convoluted and absurd that they are driving away most of the prospective hires that possess brains?
I'm sorry...what? He blew an interview by mentioning he follows industry trends on reddit?
Okay, I can understand being disappointed in hearing that because you don't like reddit and would wish for a better source (opinion), but even then I can't imagine acting on something so...trivial.
That's like me mentioning to a company I'm interviewing with that I like to browse my smartphone to keep up with feeds. Whoops, no job for me, I might dick around on my phone instead of helping clients.
I mean seriously? Is that the real reason why he screwed up the interview? Holy hell...
>To be sure, using data to argue about contentious policy issues should always prompt skepticism.
Death of journalism right there. Data be damned!
On a more serious note:
>"There is, indeed, a shortage of tech workers in the Bay Area."
That's because it's so darn expensive to live in the Bay Area, and almost impossible at the wages that tech companies generally want to pay for talent. They're knotting their own noose and standing on the chair, screaming that they'll kick it out from under them, really, for serial this time guys!, if they can't have cheap, underpaid talent to exploit.
You took that sentence out of context. This is the full paragraph:
> To be sure, using data to argue about contentious policy issues should always prompt skepticism. It's too easy to focus on particular aspects of any data analysis to prove one's point and overlook those items that may raise more questions.
It's a very valid point if you are not doing research but instead doing viewpoint validation.
Research is gathering all of the data you can in as much of an unbiased manner as you can and then asking what conclusions you can draw from that data. Viewpoint validation is starting from your conclusion and cherry picking data to support that conclusion. There is no evidence that viewpoint validation is what went on here, and in fact the article mentions later the rest of the data that was gathered and analysis of the points in the data that may contradict this conclusion.
However, the writer also spends most of his time saying, "Welp, there's all of this data, but can a brother get a programmer? Nope? INVALID CONCLUSION DOES NOT COMPUTE," which is a pretty shitty way to do journalism.
I really think you are misunderstanding that sentence. The author didn't mean what you think it means. His point was that it's not very difficult to come up with just the right data and statistics to support whatever idea you're trying to promote.
Data is basically worthless if you can't trust the methodology behind it.
That sentence was poorly written. What they mean, of course, is that you can't just blindly accept data, especially in a highly contentious debate.
The way they wrote it, yeah, it almost sounds like they think it's "bad" to rely on data in a policy issue. Kind of funny, but based on the rest of the paragraph, clearly not what they mean.
Kind of an aside here, but it drives me nuts when people quote "lies, damn lies, and statistics" or talk about "lying with statistics" as a way of dismissing data out of hand. Yes, anything that can be used to communicate can be used to lie. You can lie with words, that doesn't mean you should disregard any argument made with words! It just means you have to be careful - or, as this article put it, skeptical.
It is important to take a very careful look at data in a contentious argument. So I agree with them... sheesh, though, very badly phrased.
As someone occasionally involved in hiring, the important question isn't whether we have "enough" software engineers.
It's easy to fill seats.
The question is whether we have "good enough" software engineers. And, as long as we're trying to improve as a company, we'll always want better engineers.
The problem is that you have no way of letting in just the "really smart people" and end up letting in a whole bunch of people who aren't better than the ones you already have, who will have trouble finding work when the next tech bubble pops. Tech is a highly cyclical industry, and it's shortsighted to start letting a bunch of people immigrate on every bubble cycle.
The article claimed that the logical reason for the company's actions [since they can't underpay] is that they are recruiting for junior / lower paying [e.g. system analyst instead of software engineer] positions when in reality they are getting something like a senior dev with 5-10 years experience.
Personally, I think anyone with a 4 year degree should be allowed to get a green card if they can show they have the $$ to live in the US for a year and agree to look for work. Because the way it works now, even if the article is bullshit, it is comically vulnerable to arbitrage [LOL yes, why we do indeed need a 'junior web developer' that knows C so he can understand how our api works...oh, well, we realized after he arrived we needed him to work on this C project that was critical to our infrastructure and is responsible for 100k+/day in revenue while we pay him half of that of the guy that quit] if you can pay a lawyer for an hour.
"For higher paying jobs, like computer programmer, software developer, and electronics engineer, Bright found more than one domestic job candidate for every H-1B application."
Wow, so the author thinks you only have to interview 1 person for each job. That's a Polyanna view; reject that statistic and the entire article falls apart.
My company (which, according to Glassdoor, is paying above-average tech salaries) recently started offering ~$100 per lead for software engineering referrals. If the person ends up being hired, their referrer also gets a ~$2000 bonus. A recruiting firm that can truly locate these missing engineers would be making a killing in the marketplace right now.
Plenty of companies I know pay $5-10k or more for a successful hire referral. Good engineers are in demand, foreign or not. It's way easier to get the interview and be hired if you're local, though -- can't beat skill + convenience.
Considering you pay 25-30% or more of first year salary for a hire by a recruiter and $10k is a complete bargain.
Please state the salary range you offer, your metro area, and whether you pay all interviewing expenses for the candidate (economy airfare and accommodation in your city), and full relocation expenses. Only then can we begin the process of evaluating whether your inability to hire is due to lack of talent availability, or if it is due to other factors.
Part of the problem is that the salaries are just too damn low right now. If you offer a competitive or even above-average salary that's _livable_ in the Bay Area then talent will beat a path to your door. Try to lowball or meet other offers and you'll be stuck without candidates.
I'm really interested in this. As a New Yorker, I don't find this principle. Is it superbly difficult to commute to the Bay Area from a less urban surrounding? In New York City, if you don't have the money to pay for an urban apartment you can live in the Bronx or Westchester and easily commute to the city.
If you expect talent to work crunch hours and give mind, body, and soul unquestionably then do you really think, at the end of the day, they should have to schlep out the suburbs because your stingy ass doesn't want to pay a living wage for the Bay Area? Even if that were the case, in order to qualify for the H-1B there have to be no qualified candidates in the US which means either you are doing something nobody is doing (unlikely) our your wage is too low for your market, even in the suburbs.
No, I don't think it's fair (to answer your central point), merely that it's doable. But I'm not trying to be difficult - I was actually asking if a commute is possible, not being rhetorical for a point. In New York City it is possible to commute, but I wouldn't want to work there and commute to the city from a suburb.
Transportation infrastructure in the bay area sucks. As a New Yorker, you're used to efficiently run subways and trains. In the bay area, Google busses exist for a reason.
Same here. Data notwithstanding, I've done a lot of job interviews for candidates with the right resume and most are not hirable. Software engineering is a field where quality is hugely important.
We share this experience, or as I put it, a majority who "can't program their way out of a paper bag".
But that doesn't tell if there are enough candidates out there if the salaries and conditions of work were better. The latter is very possibly a big issue with H-1B employees, seeing as how they've a modern version of indentured servants.
Do you have any insight into why so many "can't program their way out of a paper bag"? Does this go beyond the observation of a bimodal distribution of programming ability and the discouraging results of the McCracken Group research (from the early 2000s on the international inability of CS1 and CS2 students to implement an RPN calculator)? I am seriously curious about this question. If anyone has some insight, please contact me.
I can reframe the issue by pointing out that programming is hard, and it's something we've only recently been seriously doing. I analogize it to reading and writing as "we haven't even found the phonetic alphabet" (or at least agreed that Lisp is that :-).
Going further, that means a lot of aspiring programmers have no chance whatsoever of being good programmers, and a lot just fake it. Going back to the writing analogy, perhaps they write prose good enough for an online comment, but they'll never write a competent novel or serious nonfiction book that a publisher might accept.
But still, they view themselves as programmers, and too many outfits don't check to see if they can really program before making a job offer, and often for some time afterwords. Or they otherwise manage to hold onto positions, at least for a while.
A successful technical consultant who makes double what any company could reasonably offer him save the largest. True, this isn't technically "unemployed" but they're practically the same thing - not owned by a competitor, and hirable if you can seduce them.
SaaS and tech consulting are really trendy right now because there are a lot of successful role models for these things. That said, a lot of magnificent failures and wannabes...but that comes with anything.
Add to this the fact that the companies who really understand how valuable good, skilled engineers are will make generous offers with benefits and vacations and conferences and food and luxury and and and...and you see why it becomes difficult to find the really sexy workers.
That's a thing already. Related: It's really annoying. Nobody does it just to genuinely help you - you get spammed halfway to hell. Oh, and maybe a connection or two.
It's always an eye opener to look up companies at http://www.h1bwage.com/ and compare their salaries. Plenty of SF companies hire 'senior software engineers' in the range of 78K.
Base salary is almost meaningless, you have to consider total comp. You'll see the same seemingly low wages at finance firms that have h1b visa's, but in reality those people are making significantly more.
We're talking about software engineers here. Base salary is almost meaningless in most finance and some legal firms, but not at a 30-person software consulting firm.
I looked up companies that I once worked for on h1bwage and I know for a fact that my H1B co-workers were not enjoying large bonuses.
A visa application listing a bay area senior s/w engineer prevailing wage of 78K should be outright rejected. Yet, it was accepted.
An argument I've never seen made regarding H1B software engineer hiring: is better for the entire county in the long term for the US to import as many good software engineers as it can, or is it better to restrict supply?
If any good software engineer were allowed carte blanche emigration to the US, the US would have more of the world's top engineering talent, which may be a good thing overall even if it depresses wages. On the other hand, high wages may encourage more young US citizens to go into computer science--assuming they can hack it.
I wonder if this is just another nature vs nurture debate. If you presume that the world's supply of "smart people" is fixed, you want to import all of them and get them to procreate in the US. If you assume intelligence is growable, you want to focus on growing it domestically.
I think wrong question is being asked. I think there are enough engineers, it is the quality of product people that is suffering. That often leads to balooning of engineering teams to crush the code run and make the product. So lack of engineers is a symptom not a problem. Speaking from my varied experience , YMMV.
What I am saying is that few product people have the vision of what is needed - and have the right vision of the end result. Most product people more of iterative meandering tourists with vague idea of the end result rather than captains that have exact understanding where they ought to be in a week - as per having a useful and usable progress that moves everyone measurably closer to successful product.
Maybe I ask too much of my product people, but that's the reality - there are only so many steve jobses out there. People like to believe they have the traits but often lack similar "from the early years" experience of being in the whole basics of production to managing part that jobs had.
So to sum it up, too much of Wrong kind of technical debt. Sort of buying a ferrari when you need a house - because your wife will have a child soon ;)
I think that engineers need to control enforcement of these policies and what the policies are automatically. Until law becomes an information technology you are not going to make any headway on everyone gaming the system and taking advantage of loopholes like hiring foreign workers because they are cheaper.
So we really need that but another aspect of this is just massive global inequality which to me is an amazing civil/humanitarian rights issue. Its amazing that everyone just accepts it.
I think when it comes down to it we should be bringing more brilliant people out of crappy oppressed resource starved countries into our wealth hogging country. But we shouldn't have to lie about the reasons for doing it or pay them less just because we can get away with it.
I always ask myself if the unemployed engineers are indeed employable. If so, then there is no shortage. If they just appear unemployable, then maybe. If they are not, then there is a shortage regardless of the simple numbers.
Given that in this field of "engineering" you become unemployable for conventional salaried positions at around age 35-40, it's a less debatable point than you're positing, I think.
Several years ago I was at a company and we were hiring for a position. One guy came in, who was maybe in his mid-50s. His technical skills were excellent, he could answer any question thrown at him in detail. Aside from that he was a normal, genial guy with a solid resume - we has passed on another guy with good tech knowledge but who did not act normal. I was desperate to have the position filled as people had quit and I was handling a large load.
Two managers said they didn't want to hire him. I really protested this - we had interviewed so many people and had finally found someone decent. I said he was perfect, what more could they want, what was wrong with him? I asked that last question repeatedly. Finally one said, "I think if we called him up in the middle of the night to fix a problem, he would be unhappy with that". Months later we hired a guy in his 20s, who had less technical talent.
That's the position companies are in. They pass over perfect candidates like this guy in his 50s, and then bemoan they can't find candidates.
These companies fund think tanks who have economists who tell us that value is determined by supply and demand, that if there is enough demand for something, the price for it will rise until a supply comes about. This is their philosophy, yet now they're saying there is a shortage of engineers. It is total BS. Engineers are being overworked and underpaid. People talk about high engineer salaries, they don't talk about how engineers have to pay for their own college degrees, do all that studying, then go to work, make a starting salary, then have death marches on projects etc.
Engineers are usually undercompensated for the work they do. The only exceptions to this are during tech bubbles (say 1999), but those only last for a short while. They're also made up for on the other side by tech slumps, where IT workers employable during normal times, but perhaps without a college degree, are out of work.
I don't believe in the "labor shortage should result in higher wages" argument. Usually we are talking about a baseline. If companies believed, they could make more profit by doubling the salary and thus maybe attracting more talent, they would do so.
Supply/demand is all the economics most people understand. But it's not just about the labor market, but what the company is doing with the labor.
I can not imagine anyone that's able to find a pinned shortcut to Visual Studio and double click it being without a job in the United States if I'm honest. It's hard for me to visualize what kind of total retards would get rejected on a regular basis. Could somebody find one of them for me? I would like to speak to somebody like that.
The only people I can imagine are PDP-11 assembly specialists nearing their 60s. And still I have a feeling there could just as well be even a screaming shortage for them.
I've just watched the She++ documentary, literally 15 minutes ago. They say the US only graduates 30% of the IT workers needed every year, and even if a university like Stanford graduted all their students in CS, it wouldn't be enough. What gives?
Important factor is how many of the "qualified" candidates clear the interviews?
The problem is not the lack of people to interview, it's the lack of people who clear interviews.
A lot of people assume that learning Java makes you qualify for the title of software engineer. Every time one of these articles pop up it gets flooded with comments from upset ITT tech graduates who are pissed that H1-bs are stealing their jobs.
If someone knows Java, and knows it well -- and all that that entails (good engineering practices like code organization, commenting, testing, optimizing if needed, security, corner cases) -- then why wouldn't they qualify for the title of software engineer?
Actually, my problem in this (non-Bay area) region of the country where I now live is that I don't have a ten-year Java history, and most managers here don't seem to believe that my background in C, Python, Lua, and JavaScript would allow me to pick it up in a very short period of time (and indeed, I've since picked it up for Android development, and it turned out that the Android API was harder for me to learn that Java itself).
Can you elaborate on this further? Are you implying that it is the quality of the candidates and not the number?
I can't say I disagree with that statement in and of itself. Yet I believe you are getting few qualified candidates because companies are asking for highly skilled people with a great deal of experience and then only, and my opinion is intentionally, offering well below market wages. This then allows them to scream "there are not enough developers". The whole shtick is just meant to repress wages..
From my experience most of the H1B candidates who might join a company with lower wage at first, can and will negotiate for higher pay when they change company.
I think the days of hiring H1B candidates at lower wages and thinking of _retaining_ them are gone and the companies do realize that.
Perhaps the tiny HR detective pictured should try searching for qualified workers around newer computers, ones without floppy drives perhaps? Or maybe just search online?
The trouble with this is that no centralized analysis can determine what "qualified" actually means; only an individual employer can determine that. So if they say there are no qualified engineers then that's the end of discussion.
Having more intelligent people in the US is a good thing.
So if they say there are no qualified engineers then that's the end of discussion.
You really believe that? You can't imagine that, hey maybe these companies gasp lie so they won't have to pay market wages? That some C?O somewhere cares more about the bottom line than hiring qualified local engineers that they can't threaten with deportation?
From experience, it's not "the companies" that are saying there's no qualified people. It's the engineers on the teams trying to hire people that interview those "qualified" people that send in their resume and then can't write FizzBuzz to save their life, have no idea how to even approach a design problem, knows all the buzzwords but can't explain what they mean, and have no idea how the Internet works at even the highest levels.
> So if they say there are no qualified engineers then that's the end of discussion.
Actually my company (which hires tons of foreign developers) does have applicants rejected. They then hire some lawyers to help reword the application. I'm not sure these are all H1-B, there are other hiring visa designations, but it definitely is the case that the government can reject applications. Frankly the government should reject even more of them, and then also reject some of the resubmitted ones, however the government is easily fooled by clever wording.
Not true in the eyes of our government. The whole premise of anti discrimination laws is based on the fact that there is something absolute that can be said about job eligibility. Unless you reject the validity of these laws as well.
A century and a half ago, Karl Marx said the only force outside of nature which could create value was labor. This was not a new concept, but in line with what economists before such as Adam Smith had thought.
A counter-argument arose from what he may have called the "capitalist hegemons" that value arose through supply and demand and marginal utility. That if there was enough demand for something, prices would rise and a supply would come into being.
Yet nowadays these hegemons seem to be saying something different. There is a demand for IT talent. There are billions of people in the world, so it seems obvious that if you set hours at 40 a week and then raise the salary enough, eventually the demand will be filled.
The bottom line is they don't want to raise the salary.
It is possible other factors are in the way. If, to take one example, Pell Grants were higher and easier to get, maybe there would be more CS graduates. The opposite is happening with Pell Grants - they have been cut back, and are covering less college costs than they have in history.
This means less CS graduates. This means you'll have to pay more for the ones who come out, because less are coming out.
It's a strange contradictory thinking. Employers preach supply and demand, yet think it does not apply to their desire for engineers. Set hours at 40 a week and pay for them. If you want people to work more, you'll have to pay more.
There is not a shortage of engineers. There's just a flood of people who want a very accomplished, knowledgeable engineer, and want them to work on boring, brain-dead projects for 60 hours a week, and to pay them nothing and treat them like junk.
I have 10,000 jobs open right now. I need experts in Java, Python etc. I'll pay you minimum wage. You need to work 12 hours a day. See, I just added 10,000 new job openings to the shortage. How come I can't find anyone to fill these jobs?
This makes me want to punch the screen. It is ILLEGAL to pay an engineer on an H-1B less than the median salary for that position, precisely because people were worried that foreign labour would be used to undercut wages.