We spent a ton of time and effort trying to find anyone to our standards, never able to find enough. H1B (and other work visas) were generally better and more Sr compared to locals we found. They got paid as much or more than everyone else.
When we had great people we could not get here we would instead build a team overseas, taking a bunch of other jobs with them.
I think that both you and the grandparent comment are correct at the same time. It feels like there is a strong dichotomy between how H1B visa is treated across different realms of tech.
I have been working in big tech for a decade, and have a few friends working in the more technical financial firms (think more TwoSigma/HRT/Citadel, not JPM/GS), and my experience matches yours. Every H1B I knew at the companies I worked at was absolutely not hired as a cost-cutting measure. It was just simply difficult to find people who could qualify. And god knows we tried, I remember my team interviewing roughly 50 people just to fill a position of just a baseline decent dev (not a rockstar math olympics winner with multiple groundbreaking publications; though that would've been nice). And absolutely none of them were underpaid either, they were on the exact same comp range for the level, with plenty of them topping out the range. In fact, they actually ended up costing more to the employer than a local would, due to having to deal with immigration lawyers/filing fees/etc. (all while being paid the same as everyone else).
Meanwhile, I have a lot of acquaintances from undergrad working as devs at tech consultancy firms and more "general/traditional finance" companies. The stories I hear from them about H1B at their workplaces are pretty much exactly what the grandparent comment describes, and even worse.
> In fact, they actually ended up costing more to the employer than a local would, due to having to deal with immigration lawyers/filing fees/etc. (all while being paid the same as everyone else).
I mean, you were actually underpaying the local workers if this was the case? If you offered the fully loaded salary to the local workers they might have accepted.
Or the local going rate for qualified personel were higher than you were willing to pay (which per def is true, if you had to bring in foreign work?).
> Or the local going rate for qualified personel were higher than you were willing to pay (which per def is true, if you had to bring in foreign work?).
Yeah, by definition this is pretty much always true, no? No matter how scarce local workers are, if you were willing to offer double the market rate you could probably find someone. Scarcity and price are two sides of the same coin, that's how markets work. Bringing in labor from another country when local talent is scarce both reduces costs/wages and reduces scarcity.
Workers on an H1B are more abusable though - if they lose the job they have something like 30 days to find another one or they have to leave the country entirely.
So you talk a good game about work life balance and then after you hire an H1B worker and bring them to the country you can spring 60 hour weeks doing tedius things and many won't be in a position to say no.
The salary might also seem higher to somebody who doesn't understand the cost of living in the US (and how many things are not paid for via taxes like healthcare).
Yep, and that is also an explicit requirement for interviewers at every company I worked at.
I had to do interview training myself at one of them, and the guidelines were fairly specific and clear about this. We neither knew about the immigration status of the candidate nor were we allowed to ask/note/talk about it at all. Same as with age/marital status/etc.
> Or the local going rate for qualified personel were higher than you were willing to pay
Whenever someone says "But then the locals making $400k would make $500k" I have to ask: where are all these qualified locals for whom $400k isn't enough money already? Shouldn't all the laid-off people be champing at the bit for these jobs?
At some price point you genuinely do run out of local talent. At that point it's just a question of whether the work goes abroad or foreign workers come in.
> Or the local going rate for qualified personel were higher than you were willing to pay (which per def is true, if you had to bring in foreign work?).
Nope, immigration fees/lawyer expenses are simply just a negligible cost in the grand scheme of things.
When you hire someone earning $350k+ in annual TC, an extra $10-20k one-time cost of immigration-related expenses is a nothingburger for big tech companies.
Along the same line of reasoning: relocation expenses for candidates within the US. Big tech companies don't stress over a one-time $10k relocation package cost (for a candidate that passed the interviews and accepted the offer, but just happened to be from another state).
I can't speak to your particular situation, but in my experience this has been two factors; one is location -- it is sometimes hard in some locations to find senior talent whereas H1Bs are (naturally) more amenable to moving. The other is pricing, which is echoing the GP's point. Senior talent is expensive and you can get it at (apparently) considerably lower cost by looking for H1B applicants.
How many H1-B or non-H1-B jobs are “high 6 figures”?
That’s a tiny, tiny minority of the tech employment market and one which would readily shrug off a one-time $100K expense. (That would be less than 2 months’ salary for a high-6-figure position.)
$600K+ is around 1% of the US tech market and tends to run in clusters (so your circle is more likely to have people near you in comp than a random selection).
I'm not doubting your first statement. For your second statement, I think people probably estimate it reasonably accurately as "rare, but not extraordinarily rare nor unheard of".
IMO the “tech market” is uselessly broad. Why include Google fellows with desktop IT at a regional insurance brokerage in the same group? I don’t think it helps set policy well for either group.
Looks like there is need for 2 separate visa categories:
- One to bring top 0.1% talent from across the globe to the US
- Another to bring in temporary talent as needed
Current version of H1B had become a big basket to hold both, and abused too for just finding cheaper labor. It may be time to segment these out.
Also, given that US has ~400 million local citizens, there should be less need for either.
H1b was officially intended to be the former category, and a $100k visa fee puts in back squarely in that category. For a company that wants 0.1% talent paying an extra $100k one-time fee is expensive but not a show-stopper
Now the question is whether the US wants another visa category for finding cheap labor. I am not sure that is either needed or desired (by voters). Maybe with the exception of agriculture
There is no need for "temporary talent" from foreign countries. US is graduating plenty of CS grads from our schools. There is a need for wage suppression and exploitation (for anyone not aware, if you get fired from your H1B job you have 2 weeks to leave the county). That's why they have a reputation for being "better", another word for it is indentured servitude.
There are already categories like this if you jump away from tech.
Our friendly neighborhood Ski resort oligarchies leverage the J-1 Visa program to bring in international students to work at the resorts over paying more to hire local workers for example. They also leverage the company store model by putting them in dorms and charging them accordingly for housing.
> Looks like there is need for 2 separate visa categories: - One to bring top 0.1% talent from across the globe to the US - Another to bring in temporary talent as needed
O-1 is for exceptional talent ("extraordinary ability"). Bring exceptional talent, eliminate the H-1B visa. It's that simple.
I think I would reframe the OP less about cost cutting and more that the company has an unrealistic cap on salary. Would be interesting to see where geographically your experience was. Having worked in the Midwest the problem I have found is that the population wanting to live in the Midwest is small and then when you are trying to recruit top talent it is even harder. You would need to pay more but then most companies do this analysis where they say the median level 1 junior tech salary is x for this region. Which on face value is maybe ok but then you look at the job market and there is low to no real tech jobs. To hire smart people you are asking them to move to a place that has less to do and no interchangeable market for their talent.
In software, groups of people (teams) have value far more than individuals. You need a large pool of talent to reliably build good teams. This includes some amount of the very best people world wide.
These people gravitate towards big cities where they can earn more, access more amenities and work with other top talent.
Remote could have changed that, but it seems to have fizzled for now.
While I’m more open to this kind of H1B use, you all should be investing in training local talent as well. Ideally using those H1Bs to train local talent.
We put people on the moon. I find it hard to believe the people here lack the raw ability. I find it much more likely businesses don’t want to give back to the country that they’re residing in.
I learned a tremendous amount (and was very successful as a result) from foreign born colleagues (some of whom went on to be ACM fellows, and other major awards).
Having a disproportionate share of the best people world wide to work with is a great privilege and advantage.
And it’s a hard problem to fully specify. A lot of people here seem to think that CS style analytical thinking can solve every real world problem precisely. That’s just not true.
Comparing getting an American to uproot themselves from their entire community to move to the Bay Area for a job vs. someone on the other side of the world who is looking to get into America just aren't the same. Ultimately, H1Bs are used to lower the working standards of Americans and enrich tiny pockets of existing regional capital holders.
Regional wealth inequality in America has not gotten better as Silicon Valley has gotten richer and brought in more foreign labor. At some point, the people making money hand over fist need to show how they're improving the situation for Americans instead of just saying "trust us, bro."
The AI discussion hasn't helped Silicon Valley seem more in touch with "flyover" states either. It's pretty clear there's a lot of disdain and hostility from Silicon Valley towards the "average" American.
Were they on H1Bs? Most I knew from similar countries in the Bay Area wouldn’t have been.
But these visas aren’t about best, btw. They’re about none available. The goalpost has moved to “none available for my price in the most expensive place on earth.” In my experience, the overall effect of these policies was hiring foreign masters students who were more exploitable over American undergraduates who would require the same training. The graduate pipeline, where domestic students were being warned off during the early 2000s already due to poor working conditions, became a credentialism excuse which was also exploited by researchers.
Again, we keep coming to these tertiary arguments which don’t deal with the issue: domestic born Americans are unhappy with their outcomes. Immigration is about the dumbest solution to Americans not being able to afford kids I can imagine. If that’s Silicon Valley’s best solution to a biological imperative, I expect things to only get worse. No, dorm-style housing that requires two tech incomes is not the American Dream. Please look at housing costs in San Jose before asking for more exploitable labor.
I don't believe it is (someone who knows two languages isn't remarkable, someone who can teach others isn't remarkable), but there should probably be a visa for that if we need it. I personally don't believe even a lot of the software/IT industry jobs merit H1Bs.
They work abroad under the respective country's work visa. H1B is US specific, specific visa. The US has plenty of other work visas.
Foreign language teachers is the one category where it's easy to believe it's hard to find local talent. I've seen them in small towns across the country. Sure, you may have a Vietnamese speaking US citizen in New York, but they don't want to move to a small town in the Midwest.
Increased scrutiny of H-1B-dependent employers could well be in order. There is already that classification in place and restrictions... though I suspect that underfunding of the Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division may be contributing to that lack of scrutiny.
Putting additional restrictions and requirements for reporting would likely be a good thing. I am hesitant to say "H-1B needs to go" when it does serve other non-technical positions.
It might be appropriate to separate H-1T (I'm sure its not up to section T yet, using that as a placeholder) for tech workers and have some sort of proctored test to ensure that the skills represented aren't "I know how to use Claude" along with filing fees sufficient to cover the administration of the test.
This would move tech workers out of the H-1B category allowing it to return to its original intent of skilled workers (teachers, medical technicians, private sector researchers...).
These companies have a demonstrated track record for having no qualms about bald-face lying. Suddenly we'll have an influx of "private sector researchers" to cover those tech jobs.
The employee's primary duty must consist of:
The application of systems analysis techniques and procedures, including consulting with users, to determine hardware, software or system functional specifications;
The design, development, documentation, analysis, creation, testing or modification of computer systems or programs, including prototypes, based on and related to user or system design specifications;
The design, documentation, testing, creation or modification of computer programs related to machine operating systems; or
A combination of the aforementioned duties, the performance of which requires the same level of skills.
If the job definition is covered in that, then it would be classified that way.
That would make sense if the purpose of the program was to get the most valuable top talent. How do we decide who is the most valuable? We let the market decide. But that would cause upward wage pressure, which would undermine the real purpose of the program.
Medical field is under a green program. But following your point. If nursing paid more and had better conditions, it would encourage more domestic talent. H1B should be used for to get the worlds top talent otherwise it will be used by businesses to save money and depress wages.
top talent is different visa (O-1). H1B is merely specialized worker, not top tier global talent.
Nursing does pay a lot and conditions havent changed much over the years. Certified anesthesiology nurses get paid like $132/hr, and still there is shortage.
> It should be a stack rank by salary to deal with the over subscription
Considering salary based on country of origin, adjusted for position, would probably be the best way to ensure little abuse (apart from the indentured servitude-like features). If you want to hire the best, they'll be overpaid in their origin markets.
Oh that's a really good way to handle it that would actually follow the intent of the program.
You can't find someone to do a job? Then you need to compete on wage with other companies to bring someone in. Or, you know, raise your salary for local employees.
A simple stack rank and cut has the problem of where to draw the line.
Also, how to value pre-ipo stock
There are other good options as well (an auction, etc). They all have problems, but there are mitigations. It could be vastly improved even if it’s not perfect.
Another problem: different industries and roles natohace different pay ranges.
If you decide on a single pay cutoff software engineers will starve everyone else out. And there are of course great, well paid people in other hard to hire industries.
Something about those industries would change. They might charge their customers more or train up more people or get more creative with technology. Or the market might decide it can do without that additional productivity from those companies.
I have a couple problems with that idea that I've never been able to figure out even though the idea is good.
First, how do we ensure it doesn't become a slave program: that is you get hired for X, and they are paying you that, but you want to find a new job because you don't like your boss. Or perhaps they hire you for X, and you are doing Y (again, nothing illegal)
Second, you hire someone to do a job, and they realize you have to pay them and so they decide to do nothing (or get a second job that they are working instead).
I can find answers to all of the above, but they all fail to: somebody is aware of your solution - how are they going to abuse it. I haven't solved this secondary abuse issue.
I have definitely seen job postings that were so detailed and narrow that they couldn't possibly find anyone "qualified". They were clearly making it so that it would be easier to claim that nobody in the country was qualified.
But I will say that the only people I have met that are here on H1-B have been uniquely qualified for their position. Such as, they invented a way to scale a given chemical manufacturing process, and they were developing it further.
But I got the impression that they were not particularly well paid like I would expect an American in the same position to be.
I've observed more that H1B's keep employee mobility lower, so employees on H1Bs tended to be paid less due to the natural bumps that come out of switching jobs every few years, especially going from an associate to senior/staff level where often the company throws a small raise with promotions that don't keep up with market rates.
One other factor that I experienced is when I was in senior leadership we absolutely tracked 'flight risk' that factored in to retention programs for top talent, and H1Bs were by the nature of it viewed as lower flight risks so less likely to fall into these programs.
Yeah, I'm generally pretty pro-immigration and I'm very anti-H1B.
It's very abusive to the workers hired as H1-B and it's designed for wage suppression. You can stay an H1-B for years. If you lose your job, you'll face deportation. It gives your employer a VERY large amount of leverage over your life.
It's supposed to be about bringing expertise when local expertise isn't available, but in practice it's companies saying "Oh, we can't find someone who will work for $50k as a software dev so we need to hire H1-Bs."
Either the program needs to end or the minimum salary needs to be raised to something like $300k to compensate for the leverage the employer has.
I don't think raising the fee fixes the abuse problems. Unless maybe most of the fee goes into eacrow and is paid back to the employee if the employer terminates employment (maybe without a good, documented cause?). But that could produce its own misaligned incentives. I think the best way to solve it is to remove or reduce the restrictions on staying in the country after they have worked here for some number of years.
> I don't think raising the fee fixes the abuse problems.
It doesn't totally fix them, but it does make it so the applicant is more fairly compensated for accepting a more abusive work environment. It also stops companies from using H1-Bs as a mechanism to reduce overhead.
> I think the best way to solve it is to remove or reduce the restrictions on staying in the country after they have worked here for some number of years.
I'd be for that as well. If someone comes in on a work visa I want them to either have full access to the labor market with all the freedoms any american citizen has, or I want their compensation to be high enough to justify locking them to a company and out of the general labor market.
> but it does make it so the applicant is more fairly compensated for accepting a more abusive work environment
How so? It increases the cost to the employer to hire an H1B employee, so they might hire less of them. But it could also mean they pay the employee less to compensate for the higher cost of bringing them in to the country.
It's not just that. There are many sources coming out of the woodwork of massive H1B fraud rings. Basically from the top (CEO level) down a F500 company starts replacing its hiring loops to mostly focus on H1B and remove all American workers. And some of them just sit idle once hired.
They’re doing the opposite and floating the idea of making the program more coercive by ending the grace period to find a new job, so that essentially ICE could wait outside an office after layoffs and start cuffing people. This is because “protecting workers” is a pretext and not their actual goal.
No. The fees definitely slow down the companies from trying to hire cheap replacements. Yes, the end of a grace period does make things tougher for people in a bad job, but I think the goal is really to end these bad jobs.
Well then it’s not working; they’re just hiring people abroad. That outcome would be a disaster if your goal is helping American workers but a success if your goal is just reducing the number of foreigners in the country without regard for American workers. Between the results of the policies they’ve chosen and the types of rants they go on television or social media to make that interpretation suggests itself.
How do you determine the "correct" location of a job?
My employer sells software internationally - are you claiming any international job should be subject to some sort of fine simply because the company is HQed in the US?
I suppose we could try slicing revenue or profit by sales region and comparing against headcount expense per region? But with salaries abroad being a fraction of in the US, that math might still work out in favor of keeping international employees.
EDIT - I dislike the H1B system overall. Just not sure "fine companies that operate overseas" is something we should consider as a replacement.
Local SMEs (regulatory requirements), sales, local implementation teams, HR / legal (to support the previous employees). And engineers.
Sales and implementation could maybe be US-based, but then we're flying them around the globe. Not sure that makes sense vs hiring locals.
SMEs, similar story - not always available in the US.
The engineers are the only ones that could realistically be co-located in the US. But, a good chunk of those were acqui-hired, so now you're asking them all to relocate to the US? Not sure that's viable in the best of times, and definitely not in today's ass-backwards political climate.
Meh, not sure I really buy that argument. I've never had a problem hiring in the US. And this is for a mid-tier, mid-size software company that most people have never heard of, not located in SV, and PE-owned (not much in the way of big bonuses and no stock options).
Given that a lot of the 'offshoring' comes here to Europe (due to our much lower salaries) if the US starts encouraging their firms to cut jobs here via tariffs then the EU should absolutely respond - if this is how the US treats it's allies then perhaps closer relations with China are warranted?
I don’t think people consider the negative ramifications for this on the other side. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have a ton of H1B. Take India, as an example, since that is where a majority of H1Bs come from. It has been pretty lenient in allowing American tech into the country. Everyone uses Google, YouTube, Windows,
WhatsApp and Amazon. All of those are profits that go to America.
If H1Bs are dropped or Indian workers are tariffed I believe you will start seeing a reciprocal tariffs, fines or calls for domestication.
H1B started off with the right idea, but has essentially become gamed to hell. It has created a new white collar slave class that companies exploit.
The US can tariff those out of country services if needed (through a combination of mandatory tax reporting and payment rails monitoring). An example of this today is SaaS taxes [1]. Please provide a non US service as an example and I'll propose how to rapidly replace it domestically. Out of country services can be cloned with LLMs if needed. The US government could sponsor tokens to US entities who employee US workers to clone these offshore or out of country businesses. Can overseas companies outrun the token dispenser and tax code disadvantages? You have to remember that outsourcing is primarily used by US businesses to arbitrage labor while having the US regulatory capture advantage. They want access to the US market without paying US labor costs.
This is what laws are for. "You can just do things."
> It's really hard to do this in a way that won't be trivial to work around, and often in ways where you're likely to like the work around even less.
So is collecting taxes, you just have a government funded entity grind tirelessly to keep closing the gaps. You make it economically burdensome to attempt to workaround. There will always be some leakage. "Work is hard." We know the labor exists in the US. We know offshoring is used to improve profit margins and to disempower workers to get more out of them. It is worth the effort, imho, if you want to keep the capital in the US versus sending it overseas and prioritize domestic workers over someone else's profits.
"SaaS taxes" are just sales taxes. They would apply if you create a SaaS for the stuff you want to outsource, sure. Except for it to be expensive enough to make outsourcing services unattractive you'd have to make them many times higher than they are today.
> Out of country services can be cloned with LLMs if needed.
Good luck cloning services whose endpoints are unavailable and documentation non-existent and that there would be no customers for, as they're built as a means of working around taxation of outsourcing.
> Good luck cloning services whose endpoints are unavailable and documentation non-existent and that there would be no customers for, as they're built as a means of working around taxation of outsourcing.
What services can only be procured from offshore businesses and service providers that aren't for cutting costs? Honestly, what can be provided by someone in the UK, Europe, or LATAM that cannot be done by one of 100M people in the US labor force? I am genuinely interested, both as a scholar and as market opportunity.
You're entirely missing the point, which was to propose this as a workaround for taxes trying to make outsourcing non-competitive.
The point is not that they couldn't, but that a company moving proprietary "services" offshore as a means to cut costs aren't interested in whether the services can be provided locally, but whether they can cut costs by moving them offshore.
If you tax renting labour, then companies seeking to do this will just enter into long enough service contracts to have the outsourcing agency custom-build a SaaS just for you instead.
The market opportunity here is simply to be an outsourced body shop.
If you open an office in another country and hire people there, is that outsourcing? If so, would big tech have to close their "international" offices if they don't want to pay the 25% tax? I ask that because I'm seeing these offices opening a lot in the last 3 years
I don't know. Have to implement to find out and iterate. The number can go up until the preferred amount of offshoring has been drained from the system.
Also curious about loopholes, could said company start another company out of state that was the outsourcing entity and then the parent company paid that company. You're theoretically hiring from within the US, because I assume said policy doesn't go all the way to sub-contractors etc?
Google doesn’t underpay H-1B holders. In my experience any difference in actual pay is more likely caused by the H-1B people having worse salary negotiation skills than native born people.
Every time we had a layoff some portion would be replaced with H1B.
Every H1B that shared their salary with me has been underpaid.
I know its anecdotal but sharing to see if anyone has seen similar.