OT: Working Visas are on the chopping block

[FlyerInHi]

[quote=spdrun]Our fertility rate is below or at replacement, so population increases are mainly by immigration.

1 million per year is 0.3% per annum. Hardly unsustainable.

BTW – I’m close with someone whose parents were from a “southern neighbor” that isn’t Mexico, but has a similar per-capita income. Her father was a taxi and later a truck driver, her mom became a teacher. They went back and forth, she spent about 2/3 of her childhood outside the US.

The siblings and cousins that I’ve met generally have at least a master’s — quite a few lawyers, doctors, and engineers. Don’t assume that people from a humble background won’t educate themselves.

Let’s grant MORE visas. Even manual work needs doing. Better to satisfy the demand for immigration from all social strata vs allowing criminal gangs to control it.[/quote]

I’m with you spdrun. If we want modernity and cosmopolitanism, we need more immigrants.

Plus there are opportunities all over the world. Plenty of cities around the world provide high standard of living.
I had a Japanese dentist in Kearny Mesa. Around 2000 he left for Shanghai where his patients are Japanese expats. He’s doing very well over there because he went right when the Japanese were building up capacity in China.

People should be able to easily move around the world to better themselves. Maybe Americans should move to China do teach English rather than work low wages at home. They can upgrade their skills then move back, having gained world experience.

Graduating HS, learning a trade, starting a family is very parochial and last century.

[livinincali]

Interesting enough a Silicon Valley CA Democract representative (Zoe Lofgren) has written up a bill to modify H1-B visas.

https://lofgren.house.gov/uploadedfiles/high_skilled_bill_text.pdf

[FlyerInHi]

There is a labor shortage of doctors. Rural communities increasingly rely on foreign doctors. Maybe that’s why the rural folks are unhappy with healh care. Better some health care than none.

[outtamojo]

[quote=CA renter][quote=no_such_reality]I’m cynic, there’s very few labor shortages that higher wages won’t resolve.

Trump, like many of the technical consulting houses, can’t hire them, because, IMHO, they don’t want to hire them.[/quote]

Bingo. There is no labor shortage. If the supply of labor isn’t keeping up with demand, then the price (wage) needs to be increased. People are willing and able to admit this regarding nearly every other market; but when it comes to labor, people act as though pricing mechanisms aren’t applicable.[/quote]

Agree about pricing mechanism. We have not been able to fill positions in the past year and have had to resort to temps.
Here’s me: are we offering enough $$$ ?
Management: we already pay top 5% in state.
Me: we’ve had 4 applicants turn us down now, is the
pay ENOUGH?
Management: ..but we already pay top 5% in state…
Me: BUT IS IT ENOUGH?

[an]

Data doesn’t lie. Here’s what QCOM is paying their Sr. Software Engineer H1B (most if not all have a Master): http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=QUALCOMM&job=SENIOR+SOFTWARE+ENGINEER&city=SAN+DIEGO&year=2016

Here’s what their salary looks like for all Sr. Software Engineer: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Qualcomm-Senior-Software-Engineer-San-Diego-Salaries-EJI_IE640.0,8_KO9,33_IL.34,43_IM758.htm

I’m pretty sure this salary discrepancy exist at other companies too.

[Coronita]

[quote=AN]Data doesn’t lie. Here’s what QCOM is paying their Sr. Software Engineer H1B (most if not all have a Master): http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=QUALCOMM&job=SENIOR+SOFTWARE+ENGINEER&city=SAN+DIEGO&year=2016

Here’s what their salary looks like for all Sr. Software Engineer: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Qualcomm-Senior-Software-Engineer-San-Diego-Salaries-EJI_IE640.0,8_KO9,33_IL.34,43_IM758.htm

I’m pretty sure this salary discrepancy exist at other companies too.[/quote]

I think the data from Glassdoor is much different from the data from the h1bdata website.

1. The h1bdata website is verified data. The Glassdoor data is user contributed, and who knows if the user generated content is true.

2. Glassdoor data encompasses all Senior Software Engineers, across all levels and number of years of service. The h1bdata website, on the other hand, shows the starting salary of people that were hired.

The upper $125k+ range show on Glassdoor probably reflect people who have been a Senior Software Engineer for some time, those that are closer to Staff Engineer who haven’t been promoted yet.

At least when I was hired by Qualcomm, the salaries that H1-Bs were offered were without +-$3000 from non H1-B hires like me. In fact, I was paid lower than the H1-Bs. I think that had to do with my then lack of negotiating ability than anything else, as I was just out of school and was naive to believe when people said “non-negotiable”….while as some of my peers with H1-Bs had competing offers from Nortel, so they got QC to match the comp packages.

Also, across departments and roles, Senior Software Engineer pay varies quite differently. A Senior Software Engineer in the test group weren’t paid the same as a Senior Software Engineer in Corp R&D, etc… This was a disparity among the job role itself, not H1-B versus non-H1-B… When a lot of us talked amongst each other , we didn’t see the H1-B pay versus the non-H1-B pay drastically differ within the same role/department. What we did see was Corp R&D Senior Software Engineers were paid a heck of a lot better than QCT Senior Software Engineers, despite title being the same, and despite the folks in QCT working longer hours than Corp R&D.

Lastly, I think many of us have been through the Qualcomm interview process. And all of us know what goes on in the process. Even before you get to the point of negotiating salary/comp packages, you have to go through the ridiculous number of technical questions and on a whiteboard problem solving, where many of us flunk out an never get a call back for a specific position. And if you recall, during that grueling day long interview process with 6-8 different engineers, sometimes interview with an entire panel, at no point did your salary requirements even come up. And then it was up to you after your got your package to see if you could negotiate something better.

So maybe the issue is that people on H1-B’s tend not to renegotiate their package? If so, is this really that much different from any pay disparity in general, like between men and women? And if so, how would you fix that? Do we need to regulate companies to make all salaries “non-negotiable” and the same? Seriously, it’s a tradeoff. Personally, I like the flexibility to be able to negotiate comp packages, but maybe for others, they just aren’t good at this and that’s why there’s a huge discrepancy.

I’m not saying H1-B abuse doesn’t happen. It does, particularly in IT chopshops and IT contracting shops. But imho it probably happens a lot less than people think it does in tech, especially at a large company where all this is much more visible. The bigger “job killer” is offshoring the entire operation to a remote office location. for a company like QC, it make much more sense for a company to move an entire development team to a remote office location, and pay those people 1/10 the salary as someone here….versus hiring an H1-B, going through the legal/immigration trouble, and still having to pay that person by US wage standards, if cost was the only concern.

[Coronita]

The other thing is regarding the argument that “if you simply raise pay” more people would be doing it, since there is no labor shortage.

I’m not sure I agree with that. Whether people want to admit it or not, there are certain jobs with skillsets that people will not do even if pay is raised, simply because they can’t do it. Whether they lack the skill, or lack the ability or lack both, “spoon fed training” won’t close that gap, even if pay is good.

If that were the case, everyone would end up being a doctor or lawyer, and we would have even fewer engineers 🙂 I mean, here we have two cases when the pay is REALLY REALLY good. These two professions don’t have any sort of H1-B “problem”…Why aren’t more people flocking to be a doctor or lawyer if they are so discontent with being an IT worker?

Same could be said about engineering. Again, i think it’s one of the things that frankly not many people can do (or can do well, at least). If Qualcomm right now paid embedded software architects/engineers $300k, how many people really would have the skillset and ability to do that job right now? Not many. A few of us have the ability to self -retrain and retool. But many people, simply don’t have the aptitude for this kind of work of flipping bits and bytes… In as much as some other people don’t have the aptitude to do other kinds of work like for example a lot of the trade jobs too. And those people won’t have the aptitude simply to pick up and self-training and catch up with people with that aptitude. In as much as I couldn’t simply pick up a textbook on human anatomy and be trained to be a doctor within the next few years. It just doesn’t work that way. This isn’t simply a job in which you need to turn a bolt, or fasten a trim where you can be easily taught. There’s an entire aspect of mental capacity (whether it’s nature ability or trained through decades of education) that I think people are way over simplifying and glossing over.

Time after time again, we’ve seen a few IT workers here on piggington ask “what’s the hottest job, that pays the most”… because they are disgruntled with their current job/career ….to which some of us have said Mobile Software and/or SAP and/or something else”….And a few months later, the same people ask the same question, re-echoing that they are still doing what they were doing, perhaps still unhappy with their current job/profession/lone of work and not retrained after any of the new opportunities…If this was so easy to do in practice (higher pay, more people flock to those jobs), we wouldn’t have situations like this.

High pay in a profession wouldn’t immediately solve this problem because I don’t think you can’t fix a skills gap that requires decades of education/mental training that some people simply opted out of all this time. All the people that decided not to take STEM education seriously ever since grade school and/or have no interest in STEM. What it would do is influence parents and kids to perhaps revisit whether they should take a STEM career path more seriously. This would take, imho, one generation to fix. It would benefit a few of us that are already in the business, we would get paid for essentially doing the same work without any more need to do more….Personally, I wouldn’t mind…But that would also probably mean consumers would be paying a lot more for things. Afterall, someone would have to be paying for it so that I could then be maintaining a new porsche instead of a miata….lol….But the number of people that never have done this work and simply self-train and suddenly can do this work? Not many..

[ltsddd]

[quote=FlyerInHi]Flu, some people will benefit, but like you said on the other thread “they will go somewhere else”, talented immigrants that is.[/quote]

Wrong. The more talented they are the more desire they have coming here. This is the one country that they can maximize their earning potential. There’s a reason why there aren’t a lot of successful startups & IPOs coming out of those countries. A typical programmer with less than 10 years of experience earning the equivalent of about $6000/year in india. With that same experience they could make 15x more here. It’s still better even after you factor in the cost of living. Moreover, here you get better infrastructure, sanitation. Less traffic congestion (yes), less air pollution, etc…

[Anonymous]

[quote=ltsdd]There’s a reason why there aren’t a lot of successful startups & IPOs coming out of those countries[/quote]

There are many reasons. One of the most important is that we encourage the best and brightest to come here. It’s win win.

If they aren’t allowed to come here, they will have no choice but apply their entrepreneurial energy somewhere else. Maybe Europe, maybe China, maybe their own country. And as a result the US becomes less competitive.

Remember these people have talent, ambition, and drive. They are willing to leave their homes, their families, and live on the other side of the world. These are the type of people that build a growing economy.

On the other side of the argument we have those that want their employers to train them and take care of them with benefits and “job security.”

How many startups have been founded by people who sit comfortably in their existing job, demanding that their employer foot the bill so that they can just maintain the skills needed stay employed?

[FlyerInHi]

[quote=ltsdd][quote=FlyerInHi]Flu, some people will benefit, but like you said on the other thread “they will go somewhere else”, talented immigrants that is.[/quote]

Wrong. The more talented they are the more desire they have coming here. This is the one country that they can maximize their earning potential. There’s a reason why there aren’t a lot of successful startups & IPOs coming out of those countries. A typical programmer with less than 10 years of experience earning the equivalent of about $6000/year in india. With that same experience they could make 15x more here. It’s still better even after you factor in the cost of living. Moreover, here you get better infrastructure, sanitation. Less traffic congestion (yes), less air pollution, etc…[/quote]

We will see. The long game is that people who don’t come to America will do better by staying put.

I lived abroad and I have foreign friends and classmates. Mostly the highly educated people who stayed in their countries are doing better than they had come to USA.

Yes people in poorer countries can do immediately better by coming here. But look at it some years down the road.

Let me ask you, the Chinese who are paying cash for houses all over the world didn’t make their money here. They worked hard as entrepreneurs.

One of my college friend from Hong Kong. He is a CPA who could have stayed here, but he didn’t get an h1b sponsor. He went back and worked in China first as corporate employee and actually lived in factory housing. I went and saw the conditions, yeah poor guy. Well, over years, he built connections and bought condos in all the high rise towers in Shanghai, schenzen and Hong Kong — no corruption, just business savvy. They never had a real estate crash. His net worth now allows him to do whatever he wants. Better than living boring middle class American life working for Procter Gamble in cinninati.

[gogogosandiego]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/24/immigrants-science_n_866321.html

[an]

flu, here’s the data from glassdoor for Software Engineer with <1 year of experience. I.E. fresh grad: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Qualcomm-Software-Engineer-Salaries-E640_D_KO9,26.htm?filter.experienceLevel=LESS_THEN_ONE

So, a Sr. Software Engineer on H1B gets paid less than your average Software Engineer with < 1 year of experience at QCOM in SD.

[Coronita]

BTW… The times when QC wanted to save money and not pay prevailing wages usually resulted in no hiring at all, H1B or not.

It usually resulted in them contracting the work out to someone like WiPro where WiPro would do most of the work out of India and fly people.in and out of the US. That happened a lot in QCT and their connectivity subsidiary.

That’s a completely different problem, unrelated to QCs H1B hiring practice domestically.

That’s why if you go through resumes of people with connectivity experience, many of them say “worked on QC Atheros connectivity implementation” but their employer is WiPro.

Some contracting companies do tend to be shady..

[FlyerInHi]

What is happening around the world with the globalization of education is that smart world citizens are becoming increasingly smarter and more educated than average Americans. And corporations operate on a world wide basis.

Decades ago, the average American had access to schools and libraries. Kids in India had nothing. Now they have the Internet.

My dad used to fly around the world building infrastructure, paid for by western loans. Now, lots of people can do the same work and there are more sources of money.

Not just Silicon Valley… Caterpillar is moving from Peoria to Chicago because 2/3 of their business is overseas. They need access to major airports and they need to shuffle their executives from around the world. ConAgra also moved the Chicago which is becoming a big agribusiness town.

[Coronita]

[quote=AN]flu, here’s the data from glassdoor for Software Engineer with <1 year of experience. I.E. fresh grad: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Qualcomm-Software-Engineer-Salaries-E640_D_KO9,26.htm?filter.experienceLevel=LESS_THEN_ONE

So, a Sr. Software Engineer on H1B gets paid less than your average Software Engineer with < 1 year of experience at QCOM in SD.[/quote] We don't know who is posting on Glassdoor, or what dept they are in. On the other hand, the h1b website data is vetted. There's a huge variation among different departments at QC, even if the title is the same, and years of experience is the same....even within Corp R&D, depending on the group. There's even pay discrepancy among senior engineers with a bachelor, versus masters, etc. And there's variation due to negotiating abilities of the individuals wit the job in hand. Perhaps people who are really good have multiple offers like during the old Nortel days, and had a lot more leverage. Maybe some with lower comp packages didn't have as many options elsewhere. Perhaps foreigners tend to be more timid when it comes to pay negotiations, and while QC tries to undercut everyone, many of the foreigners culturally aren't accustomed to ask for more....There's so many variables at a large company, that I've seen during hiring, it's not a slam dunk QC intentionally trying to undercut all H1Bs, but all employee prospects (some in HR even have pitched to me the "sunshine tax" of San Diego versus the bay area... In addition, during the semi annual performance reviews, at least in most of Corp R&D, there were attempts to normalize comp packages within the dept for same title, performance rating, years experience, as managers would say, to account for market variations at the time of hiring, especially for older folks where their annual pay increases were lower than the prevailing new wages of new hires. And this applied to all employees, H1-B or not. So by the time of the 3rd or 4th performance review, huge variations if any (at least in Corp R&D) was minimized.. Does a large body of workers not willing or courageous enough to ask and negotiate better comp packages keep wages lower on average? Perhaps....But, unless companies really offer a non negotiable comp package across the board, you can't really prevent this..(Non-negotiable pay packages are pretty stupid imho...Top talent will just go elsewhere). At any instance of time during the prescreening process of a candidate, at what point does salary requirements come up as a condition of employment for a QC job in corporate R&D, in all the interviews we've done for candidates? Not many. That was done after a decision was already made to hire or reject a csndidate based on his or her technicsl merit. After engineering determined the candidate was a hire, it was then HR that gave out the comp packages. Do Hr Dept try to totally undercut candidates? Of course they do.. the more they can save the company money the bigger the company appreciates it! BUT, they do that to everyone, even some us non H1Bs... How many times have HR asked you if you currently have a job or not during com package negotiations? They want to know if they can undercut you or not based on how desperate you are for a job. The only difference is probably some of us feel we have to take shit a lot more than others, depending on our situation at that moment in time.

[Author]

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