"...fears that immigrants are going to eat away local jobs. This is SO wrong." I am not sure you successfully explained why you think they are wrong. I'm an immigrant from Europe and in my opinion it is easy math. There is 1 job and if you fill it it's gone. So you can either fill it with Americans or an immigrant (like me). It's kinda foolish to think all you have to do is open the gates and expect all these foreigners to come in and build companies that hire more Americans. But maybe I'm missing something?!
> It's kinda foolish to think all you have to do is open the gates and expect all these foreigners to come in and build companies that hire more Americans.
According to a paper titled "Silicon Valley's New Immigrant
Enterpreneurs)"[1], Indian and Chinese enterpreneurs were responsible
for 24% of the technology businesses started between 1980 and 1988. So the idea is definitely backed by statistical evidence.
Besides, if there are qualified Americans who can fill these jobs
already, why exactly do we have a talent shortage in tech?
Your 24% number is grossly misleading. Quoting your source:
[...] Estimate of ethnic
entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley was obtained by identifying all businesses with CEOs having Chinese and Indian surnames in a Dun & Bradstreet database of technology firms started since 1980. According to this count, close to one-quarter (24 percent) of Silicon Valley’s
technology firms in 1998 had Chinese or Indian executives.
Technology company executives are salaried employees - even at C-level, they do not create tech jobs any more than the HR department. Moreover, it's a well-known fact that C-level executives rarely come from founders (example: http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/29/why-startup-fou...). Not to mention that an ethnically Indian/Chinese person is not the same as an immigrant from India/China.
If there are qualified Americans who can fill these jobs already, why exactly do we have a talent shortage in tech?
Because "we" don't pay enough? Because "we" won't look at anyone over 35? Because "we" demand a statistically improbable combination of skills plus open-source experience plus hobby projects? Because "we" equate talent with blogging? The list goes on and on.
Jobs aren't a scarce resource, and people aren't cogs. Jobs are an opportunity to create value within a web of relationships. You want the most productive people in jobs that best fit them to maximize the amount of wealth being created; and the increased production of wealth creates further opportunities for more people.
That's not to say that a free-for-all immigration policy is best for any country. Too many people moving around too quickly can be destabilizing. But it's not like there's a fixed pile of jobs and a larger pile of people, and it's like a game of musical chairs or something.
Well, for a start, there's one more person in the country. That person will consume goods and services. That means more demand. Which means more jobs are created.
Economies are driven by demand (consumption drives production), and economic policy is really about creating circumstances in which that demand can flourish and result in economic activity.
The point is network effects and total wealth. Imagine we could import every programmer in the world and put them all in Silicon valley. Hard to imagine that being a bad position for the US.
A good analogy would be the financial systems of London and New York. Just because all the financial people congregate there doesn't mean they are taking jobs from the local talent.
The point of H-1bs is to depress the prices of labor for any given job. (Econ 101: Increase supply, reduce cost.)
So, no, I'm not really interested in increasing the supply of skilled labor any further and driving prices for my labor any lower. The "talent war" is good for everyone with skills that works in the Valley. Feature, not a bug.
You presume there is an undercurrent of malevolence to this when there isn't.
If we decreased the supply of programmers to 1 said programmer would be making a shitload of money - but that is not good for the general population, nor the economy.
Similarly, the restriction of the oil supply will drive up cost, drive down usage, and force the economy to grind to an ugly halt.
Wage depression, especially in an environment where wages are already remarkably elevated, enables further economic activity (i.e., software businesses with cost structures that prevent paying $250K+ an engineer can now exist and create wealth).
And let's be honest, as a single programmer making 4.5x the median household American income, our wages are plenty elevated.
4.5 the median would be somewhere around $225,000. That would be a very high salary for a developer, far above the median.
I also don't think that comparing to the median US household makes much sense. It would make more sense to compare salaries with other highly skilled and educated workers in very high cost areas.
It's sobering to enter the "elevated" salaries of software developers into a housing affordability calculator and search San Francisco or the peninsula for what you could buy at that price. Most households are dual income now, which does get you in the range of that 4.5x household income you mentioned earlier. At this point, you're into pleasant, middle class areas.
At this point, I guess it's just a matter of opinion. I think that when it's a stretch for two highly educated workers to afford a fairly ordinary house in a decent if unfashionable part of town, salaries aren't elevated to the point where I find claims of a crucial shortage credible. If that's what employers want to pay, that's fine, but I see no reason for special government programs designed to increase the size of this workforce - it would seem to me that it is responding rationally to market signals.
> Similarly, the restriction of the oil supply will drive up cost, drive down usage, and force the economy to grind to an ugly halt.
The economy wouldn't necessarily grind to an ugly hault - there is a sweetspot in the middle, which you are ignoring here. It could also be that people/businesses adjust to a _moderate_ supply restriction in some way (travel less, purchase locally, etc), new technologies arrive, and things change for the better.
> If we decreased the supply of programmers to 1 said programmer would be making a shitload of money - but that is not good for the general population, nor the economy.
I also don't buy into the 'good for general population' argument necessarily - it is fair for employees (in this case, programmers) to also want what is best for themselves. Corporations generally want what is best for their shareholders (or executives) and not their employees OR the general population, which is part of the reason they ask for higher caps.
> And let's be honest, as a single programmer making 4.5x the median household American income, our wages are plenty elevated.
Why do you think wages are elevated? Many programmers I work with are very smart folks, and I personally feel that they are underpaid relative to the value they are creating within the organizations they work for. Furthermore, why is 4.5x the median household income randomly the bar here? Should every profession be capped in your view (doctors, lawyers, etc)?
The median numbers I am finding are nowhere near 4.5x. I am seeing roughly $50k median household income ($70k dual earner households) vs. $55k median programmer salary. Where do you get your numbers?
It basically states, the employee must be paid the prevailing wage or higher. There are probably employers who flout this rule, but it isn't legal. When used legitimately, H1-B does increase the supply of talent in the valley.
The prevailing wage rule is a joke, for several reasons:
1. The ostensible reason for the H-1B program is a shortage of technical know-how, yet most H-1Bs are under 30 and most unemployed Americans are over 35. Wages comparison is moot when you pit junior jobs against senior jobs - again, in view of experience being the supposed goal of the program.
2. Wages do not account for working hours. If you work 12-hour days, your salary is effectively significantly lower than if you work 8-hour days.
3. Wages do not account for the downward pressure on market competition. If you are handcuffed into your job per your visa conditions, you can't shop for better offers elsewhere.
PERM regulations are also quite lax in MANY ways, and companies abuse this in order to be able to hire at a lower wage.
For example, labor certification (to determine that there is a labor shortage that requires outside talent) is very easy to game: they can run 2 Sunday newspaper ads in the local newspaper to satisfy the primary labor cert requirement:
http://tinyurl.com/czhop2f
How many people have newspaper subscriptions anymore, and how many tech workers look for jobs in the newspaper?
It's also easy to game prevailing wage requirements by conducting surveys yourself or playing with the subjective terms of the law regarding 'comparable skillsets' etc
Its certainly good proximatly, and the wages of people like us would go up in the short term. But I worry that because network effects are so strong and less skilled labor would hurt tech companies enough that we'd start to see tech hubs in other countries start to succeed, and a general shrinking of the pie available to us US engineers and programmers if that happened.
And from a "what's good for my country/the world/people less well off than I am" perspective easier immigration is an obvious win.
One strategy most startups miss is the NAFTA TN-1 "visa" for Canadian and Mexican citizens (I use quotes because it's not really a visa apparently).
We hired a Canadian employee using this status and there really is very little paperwork. He needed a letter describing his work (which must put him in an acceptable bucket) which he presented at the US/Canada border and an hour or so later he was in. It has to be renewed every three years, but can be renewed indefinitely.
Waterloo puts out great engineers -- engineers with fewer options with the implosion of RIM. So, look north!
Are you sure about that? I'm a Canuck and have worked in the US under a TN-1 a few times, and I had to renew it every year, and initially my sponsoring company had to prove they had been looking to fill the position locally for a certain amount of time without any luck (fairly easy to do with a classified ad, etc.).
Also, only certain occupations qualify at any given time.
This just in: you can be a quality programmer even if you don't live in the Valley.
That said, I imagine H-1b paperwork is dreadful to deal with. A lot of smaller companies may choose to ignore international candidates simply because they don't want to deal with the paperwork
It is awful, but that's why you get a lawyer. It costs a few thousand dollars, which is not a huge expenditure (your laptop probably costs around the same). More difficulties often emerge in 'prevailing wage'- H1B workers have to be paid a salary the government has decided is sensible. That doesn't factor in things like equity, so a lot of startups can be burnt on that.
I wonder why more companies don't open development offices in other areas of the country (or even the state!), if they are having such a hard time hiring in the valley.
I've never understood this so called 'talent war' There's millions of people unemployed in this country, why not find which ones of them know basic skills like math and science and train them in house to write python or java or whatever? Or if your companies to lazy to train people then pay high enough salaries so these people go train themselves. I think its fine to bring in a few extra smart immigrants to provide a different perspective but lets be reasonable, ordinary Americans built this country and they're the reason Silicon Valley exists in this country and not someplace else. If there's a lack of talent then I think CEOs should reinvest in ordinary Americans and not take these shortcuts. You could easily teach someone to code by October 2013 if you started now.
> "There's millions of people unemployed in this country, why not find which ones of them know basic skills like math and science and train them in house to write python or java or whatever?"
Because the lead time to go from "has basic math and logic skills" to "competent programmer" is on the order of years, if not over a decade.
Do you want to put someone on your payroll for years before you see one tiny iota of productivity out of them? Or worse, have them be a negative drain on your productivity?
> "but lets be reasonable, ordinary Americans built this country and they're the reason Silicon Valley exists in this country and not someplace else"
This isn't true. The US has been extremely reliant on skilled immigration as its power base throughout the 20th century. Immigrants are over-represented in academia as well as all corners of basic research, they are also over-represented in the industries that spawned Silicon Valley (i.e., the defense and aerospace R&D that gave birth to both the funding, cultural, and educational foundation that birthed the semiconductor industry, followed by the software industry).
> "You could easily teach someone to code by October 2013 if you started now."
Then do it. I challenge you. Starting today, from someone with the proper high school level education but no relevant college education (i.e., no STEM degree), develop someone into a competent programmer capable of writing production-ready code by the end of October 2013.
I got my first programming job in high school after about a year of learning how to do the job. I certainly wasn't the world's best programmer, and have improved significantly over the years, but I still was able to get the job done.
The problem, as highlighted by your post, is that companies only want to hire the best of the best. I understand why, but it sets us up with a situation where even those who know how to program (poorly) cannot find work, exacerbating the talent shortages.
There isn't even a lack of talent that is already trained IMO - this is anecdotal, but I know of many unemployed coders who are capable and the education system is churning out thousands more every year. I find it hard to believe that corporations cannot hire them.
In actuality, there is a lack of folks who want to pay market price (which is going up) for programming talent even if their corporation is quite profitable. Requesting higher caps is a way to conveniently dodge the market forces at play.
I wonder if you have ever tried to hire a decent programmer or tried to train one.
On seconds thoughts it is actually true for every profession. Ever saw a waiter smearing the shit on a table rather than actually wiping it clean? How much time you think one needs to learn how to clean a frigging table?
Hiring a good professional or training any XYZ to become a good professional, is really not something I will bet my business on.
I think CEOs should reinvest in ordinary Americans and not take these shortcuts. You could easily teach someone to code by October 2013 if you started now.
What startup is going to wait over a year for their prospective coder to be able to do his job? This is something the education system should be doing. If it isn't, by all means fix it, but don't make startup CEOs spend over a year training employees.
I was referring more to the googles and facebooks of the world. This recent HN post made me think outside the country was the last place start-ups would look for employees: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4346351
As an Indian, I am actually pretty happy that not all of our best engineers can leave the country even if they wanted to.
What makes you think that America deserves/needs a good engineer more than India itself?
Disclaimer: I am not in India right now. But having been educated practically for free in a Govt. college, I hope I will be able to repay some of my dues soon. At the very least Govt of India, should be able to tax the runaways like me.
I think it's even better if someone comes to the US, gets some exposure, learn many soft skills and then go back to India, instead of not coming here at all.
I won't deny the value of exposure. But I think soft skills and a lot of other things are over hyped. Some of the best engineers I know can't put together a sentence in English.
I can't speak for how it is in US because I haven't been there. But I really can't think of anything that can be done only in valley but not in India. But yeah again, I can't be so sure, because I have seen the things only from one side.
How about networking?
e.g. meetup.com. I found very good speakers giving talks in my area of interest.
About soft skills, I felt considerable writing efforts are required here as part of the normal master's degree. I am doing my master's degree in CS here. Even if I am writing a simple report on some project I spend extra hours to think from the reader's perspective. That builds up writing skills. You get constructive feedback if you present something. That builds up the presentation skills. May be this is a personal experience.
I also felt that you start appreciating positive things about your country more but this experience may not be specific to US.
Fee is usually peanuts, at least in the govt. colleges. I paid a royal sum of 400$ of tuition fee for a 4 year degree that helps me make way more than that every day. Govt. spent close to 20k on educating me. I did pay taxes in India for 6 years before moving abroad but still that 20k made my life. And that's what I owe to my country. Paying 20k or even 2,3 times that would be an easy exit. The only way to truly pay it back is to make something better in India. But what exactly, is something I think about all day. But I am pretty sure I will have an answer soon.
It's really good that you're thinking of paying back India / helping the country. India definitely needs more of its best talent to go back there are start new companies and really improve the country. Most of the best minds leave the country for elsewhere, and it's understandable why. But perhaps you can change the environment and perhaps more people will stay there then. (maybe - this will probably take years)
The problem with H1-B is not the limit; the main problem is its abuse. Indian body shops like TCS, Infosys, and Wipro etc. continue to abuse H1-B visas. These companies work like a huge recruitment and immigration agency.
There are thousands of employees of these companies sitting idle in India with a H1-B visa in hand. They won’t go to work in US anytime soon because their Indian employer doesn’t need them move to US. These companies blindly apply for thousands of visas even when they don’t need it, just in case they get a new client.
These body shops waste most of the H1-B quota and create a block for genuine recruits by companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft.
The worst offenders are the downright fraudulent organizations like http://www.ebsolutionsinc.com . Does it look like a company who needs to import thousands of IT workers every year? This company alone accounts of thousands of H1-B visas every year, and there are thousands of shell companies like these. These companies are not only abusing the system, but what they are doing is downright illegal.
This is how they work:
They hold immigration seminars all over India and assure people a job in US and H1-B visa. They recruit thousands of candidates in India and charge them a fee of $8,000 to $20,000 upfront. These candidates are not only engineers; they are IT workers (who can’t code), teachers, accountants and nurses. Most of these candidates are not qualified enough, many have fake degrees and most can’t speak even speak English.
Their visas are sponsored by their shell recruitment agencies in US (supported with fake documents). These candidates do not even have a real job offer yet; the recruitment agency produces a fake job offer and keeps them on their own payroll.
Upon approval of H1-B visa, these candidates arrive in US with no clue about what comes next. Their recruiters throw them in dorms with miserable living conditions. The recruitment agency trains them some English and Interview 101 and arranges several interviews in US companies.
The American companies contract these workers from the recruitment agents, usually at 50% of the market salary. These workers start working for the American corporations, but they stay on the payroll of their recruiters. Their recruitment agents usually take a cut of 30%-50% from their salary every month.
[Edit]
One of my friend runs a body shop in US and imports around 400 workers every year.
I live in India, and I have been approached by these agents multiple times.
Some of my friends have taken this route to go to US. Yes, they can not code and can't even speak English. Fake resume and experience letters helped them get through.
If you can't speak English, these agents can even arrange someone else to do an IELTS test for you, and use it to represent your English skills.
Newspapers & streets in India (specially in Punjab) are full with ads like: "Get a Job and Visa in USA / Canada / Australia"
Wow! I didn't know that this was indeed the real situation. Sounds terrible. Is there a credible source that you can share? I'm wondering how someone can get away with fake documents all through.
Not exactly camps, probably dorms where 4 to 6 people live in a single room.
> If these workers don't know English and can't code, how are they able hold jobs at American corporations?
They are not exactly doing high-tech jobs, they just used a high-tech resume to get visa. Many of these H1-B candidates are working jobs like data entry, IT support or call center (if they can speak English).
These people can read and write English, but can't speak English well. The recruitment agency helps them to pick up some English speaking skills. They also receive a technical training relevant to their job either by the recruitment agency or by their employer.
I think immigration will not help - but I would like to make H1-B more liberal.
I have friends running startups in other parts of the world (India, Romania, ...), and it seems there is talent war everywhere. Yes there is a lot of mediocre programmers around but talent is very sparse.
Another way to look at it, skilled immigration gets the US educated workers subsidized by foreign tax payers. If they line up a job, they step foot on US soil being a tax payer, in both sales tax and income tax. A net benefit to the US.
Whats it going to do for the cost of living, though? The valley's housing is WAY too expensive - and having an influx of more engineers/talent is not going to make the cost or quality of life here any better.
The h-1b paperwork is dreadful. I asked Tom Campbell once if he would support pushing legislation to create an h1-ht (high tech) visa, which there are unlimited quantities of and restrict your residency and ability to work to Washington/Oregon/California (the west coast).
The half serious/half not comment came after he was describing the variety of anti-immigration lobbies in Washington with big contingents from the 'heartland' trying to keep foreigners out.
the variety of anti-immigration lobbies in Washington
The sad part is there's really only one, organized into about 20 different lobbying groups but (mostly) centrally funded from the estate of a dead multi-millionaire.
restrict your residency and ability to work to Washington/Oregon/California (the west coast)
Why on earth would anyone do that? There are tech communities all over the country, you know. Boston and New York are two main ones that come to mind but there's also Raleigh, Austin...
Let's say you're a group of 3 ex-facebookers; don't you think you can easily find a ton of companies in the valley that'll pick up for talent? Is it going to be worth $3M is debatable but surely there's a good chance that it'll be a pretty sweet deal.
Design is more about culture than engineering.
Design is a more hands on skill that requires contextual learning.
Design requires creativity better fostered by a Western education system than an Eastern one.
Design draws on a legacy of history and the history of the East is different from the history of the West.
Design requires a sense of humor and humor is different in every country.