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CoronitaParticipant[quote=deadzone]
What lifisgood is pointing out, correctly in my opinion, is that it is bullshit to believe the U.S. does not pump out enough engineering grads who are US citizens. There is no evidence to support this. So then how do you explain rampant hiring of H1bs and pro-HIB propaganda by the tech industry? Obviously they do this to save money so overall they are being paid less. This is obvious on the larger scale, regardless of the tiny sample size from flu’s work place.
By the way, of course these immigrants are coming to work here for their own benefit, not for any “love” of US. That is the same for low wage workers from Mexico. They are coming here for the mighty dollar and so they can experience the joy of our consumerism based society. The vast majority would prefer to live in their own country and their own culture, speaking their native language. But, people are greedy and like money.[/quote]
(Faceplant) Deadzone. Back when times were good, Qualcomm Staff Engineers were bringing in around $200k/year (H1-B or not). If you consider that low pay, please let me know how much you make for equivalent skillset. Also, if you think that is a lot, why didn’t you apply if you felt you could have been hired?
Also, what was the most “patriotic” thing that you have done the past month? (taking a vacation on July 4th doesn’t count)…
CoronitaParticipant[quote=lifeisgood]
Thanks! That’s really all I’m saying is I hope it’s not effecting job security. And yes I do believe that the vast majority of this country that grew up here care a lot about the U.S.! I’m very patriotic and most Americans are. Remember what happened on 9/11? You saw a great country come together. I really just want American born citizens to truly have first dibs on the jobs that are here. Not brought in on an interview just so a company can say that they gave everyone a fair chance before hiring outside the country. I also believe that there is no way that a company can’t find enough qualified citizens to feel it’s needs. It benefits the company to hire these immigrants otherwise they wouldn’t do it. It’s always about the money.
Lastly, If I had to choose between a company saving a buck to hire outside or leaving the country all together, I would choose that the company stay here.[/quote]
It probably is affecting job security in some cases for some type of work and some places where abuse is rampant.
But I think in this particular case, for Qualcomm, H1-B isn’t the main problem. It’s Qualcomm’s core business is slowing down, they don’t have new ideas, and they are heavily dependent (51% business) on China, where you have a lot of other players that can offer similar products at significant cheaper price without that much difference in quality and feature….So Q is making business decisions to (rather than focus on R&D on next generation things), focus on saving on cost, by shifting as much work abroad as possible.
Unfortunately, what appears to be driving a lot of public tech company decisions these days is “unlocking shareholder value”. The alarming thing about qualcomm, if you look at their restructuring plan is that all about improving shareholder value (buybacks, curbing compensation, cost reduction)… Not much mention about what they are doing to further grow.
When I started at Q, Dr. Jacobs was all about engineering and pushing growth, even if it meant failure in certain investments. And as such, for the longest time, Q stock was “stuck”, as it found ways to grow. Seems like hedge funds/”active investors” these days are driving too much of the business decisions of tech companies , and a lot of larger tech companies aren’t willing to invest seriously in growth anymore. Which unfortunately, is what I think is happening to the Q.
I wonder if it would be better if they did break off QCT and take it private and employee owned.
CoronitaParticipant[quote=lifeisgood]Bottom line, if what you’re saying is true, then the qualified U.S. workers have nothing to worry about. They don’t have to worry about taking less pay or losing out on a job or being let go from a job because they’ve been replaced. You know people are generally self sustaining. I know that laws and rules exist to be broken. People are interviewed for positions just so companies can meet the law requirements with no intention of hiring these people. I just hope this is the exception and not the rule. Thanks for your insight. I really mean that. You all have brought up good points and have really made me think.[/quote]
No, what I am saying is the US workers need to worry more about companies moving the entire division to China or India, no one having a job in the U.S. (either H1B or PR) because the company is no longer growing anymore and doesn’t need to expand in the U.S. Because that is the main problem most of these big companies are facing these days.
They have to worry about taking a lesser job/role because their engineering counterpart in Bangalore or Beijing claim that they can do the same quality work for $30,000 USD while an engineer here making $150,000 USD would normally do (regardless if they have a greencard or not)… And that whether that is really true or not, bean counters think it is and actually try it.
I have never had any issues hiring US citizens over H1-Bs. But I have had many issues just getting ANY headcount in the U.S., because when it came to the bean counting, people felt it would be money better spent by hiring “6-8” engineers overseas versus hiring 1 person in the U.S. (H1-B or not)
CoronitaParticipant[quote=lifeisgood]
Again I never said that H1-B’s didn’t want to stay here and keep an American job. Where are you reading this? I’m starting to get confused with where you’re coming from. I know companies leave the states to hire lower waged workers, but that is a separate issue. I’m speaking about companies who are here now and abusing the system. Please don’t bend my words. Thanks. I think you make a lot of good points. I don’t disagree with anything that you’ve said. I’m really just stating the obvious when I say that they’re coming here for personal success. You don’t see H1-B’s picking up an American flag and waiving it around when they get off the plane.[/quote]I’m not trying to bend your words. And honestly, I’m not following what you are trying to say. If you are saying that some companies are abusing the H1-B system, yes I agree with that.
If you are saying that it happens most of the time, I would disagree with you on that.
And if you think that somehow H1-B immigrants need to be more patriotic that most people that were born here with U.S. citizenship, that’s where I have we have a disagreement, because I’m interpretting this to mean that you think H1-B’s care less about America than people that were born here care about America. I would argue that many americans don’t really care any more about America than H1-B’s care about America, and the only reason why they really care about being American now is because their job security is under attack (which is an understandable feeling)
For the record, I do feel like when it comes to these layoffs/RIFs, U.S. companies should give preference to U.S. citizens and PR employees, with skillset being equal. And the reason why I strongly feel about this is simply because if you go overseas to companies in Japan and Korea and India, that’s what those companies do or would do… Chinese companies are a little different, because in those companies, they’ll screw over chinese people first, before screwing over americans and foreigners… I’ll never understand Chinese businesses…)
CoronitaParticipant[quote=lifeisgood]By the way, I didn’t intend to start a debate about if legal workers pay their taxes. I’m not an idiot. Of course I know that legal workers pay taxes.[/quote]
I didn’t say you were an idiot. But I see a lot of misplaced anger directed at the H1-B program and the people on H1-B. Out of all the H1-B people that I have had the opportunity to work with, I have never encountered one that wasn’t sharp and that didn’t deserve that position, nor did we ever short change them by paying them less than other people. That’s not to say that abuses don’t happen, and it probably can happen more readily in job roles which has considerable less specialization and things that have reached maturity (like in a lot of parts of IT)….
The bigger problem is the decisions corporations make in trying to move tier 1 programs abroad thinking that it’s really going to work. I’m not even against offshoring if it makes sense. But when a management team makes uses that as a default solution to all the business’s problem, you know the company is headed in the wrong direction, because in the end you know it’s doomed to fail for everyone involved, both the employees, the company, and ultimately the shareholders, if you don’t have the best people working on the projects that’s suppose to drive growth and care more about cost savings than investing in growth…
A lot of these new bean counters don’t understand you simply cannot offshore/outsource ingenuity and creativity, and americans tend to be the ones that are creative. If you’re company is faced with dismal growth prospects, you’re just asking for trouble if you focus on cost reduction and running the business.
That’s why I think all this push into IOT is definitely going to happen. We’re going to see innovation definitely. It’s just not going to happen at Qualcomm or any of the other U.S. chip companies. Because none of them are serious in investing good money into the creative “people” that can actually think of something useful.
That’s why you see this IOT ingenuity all happening at these small startups like Fitbit.
CoronitaParticipant[quote=lifeisgood]
Please read the first two sentences again and again until you understand it. I don’t disagree with you. I don’t feel entitled just because my ancestors have been here for hundreds of years. We were all immigrants at one point.
I said they could care less about America other than the U.S. being a conduit to a better life. If they had the same opportunities in their own country, they wouldn’t move here.
[/quote]
I hate to break the news to you, but I think H1-B workers here facing getting laidoff seem to care more about america and american jobs than U.S. citizen CEOs, managers, management, hedge funds, that seem more interested in turning a buck at the cost of screwing over everyone else.
Also, if what you say is true about H1-B immigrants carrying more about the job than about staying in America, then how come we haven’t seen a mass exodus of H1-B’s back to their home countries, considering how the opportunities in China and India, in many cases, are better than here in the U.S.? Their pay/salary might be lower, but not *that* much lower (for good people, it’s definitely not 1:8 as people say it is), and their cost of living is definitely significantly lower than it is here. And yet, you don’t see a mass exodus, do you? If you did, this probably would have already been self correcting because you wouldn’t have an H1-B glut problem as you claim we have.
And I didn’t say there is no abuse at bigger companies. But again, it’s not the primary way big companies use to save on labor costs. The H1-B “threat”, is nothing compared to moving the entire team abroad and hiring locally there…
People are focusing on the wrong “problem”…H1-B or non H1-B, isn’t the issue. It’s the issue that that entire group is being moved abroad because it’s reached a point of “maturity” (run the business) so it no longer needs the “best” talent to maintain it. (at least that’s why the the management team think).
If this is really of concern, then work at companies where it’s much harder to offshore the work…IE the defense industry, and things related to national security that requires a security clearance. I would if I wasn’t so concerned about being a scapegoat in the future if chinese/american political relations going sour in the future, despite not being from mainland china.
CoronitaParticipant[quote=lifeisgood]I never said that H1-B’s didn’t want to come here. I said they could care less about America other than the U.S. being a conduit to a better life. If they had the same opportunities in their own country, they wouldn’t move here. I just read an article that Disney hired 200 H1-B’s and had their employees that are being replaced, train them. To say that big companies aren’t abusing the system is naïve. “Google” H1-B abuse and you will find MANY articles of BIG companies abusing the system. My ONLY problem with the H1-B system is that I truly believe that immigrants are being hired over Americans who have the same level of skill but won’t take less pay for the position. It’s common sense to hire immigrants who in the long run will deliver the same product at less long term cost to the company. I do believe that a lot of companies out there don’t abuse it, but there are a crap ton that do.
I’m also willing to admit that people who come from sub par countries most likely work harder than our entitled society. So some of this problem is on the U.S.[/quote]Again, this is where you are wrong. H1-B’s come here because they want to stay here in as much your parents came here and wanted to stay here and immigrant here. (unless your parents are american indian or your parents were african american slaves that were forced to come here)….
Just like your parents, H1-Bs pay their federal, state taxes, and they also pay social security taxes, despite not being able to collect on them in case they get sent back. They pay SDI to CA and they pay for just about every other tax, just like everyone else. I hardly see how a $100k+ H1-B paying their W2 taxes (which is the most tax inefficient way to earn money in the U.S.) isn’t contributing their fair share of taxes when I’m sure you have plenty of small businesses in the mall that shut off their cashier registers mid-day to not pay their fair share of taxes….
If you are going to “blame” someone, blame the company, blame american consumers that no longer can afford to buy more smartphones and tablets….Because Qualcomm derives more than 51% of it’s business in China where it has to compete with other chinese players, more so on cost. True, Qualcomm could just leave the chinese market. But then what? Instead of laying off 15% of QCT, shut down QCT completely and lay everyone off except for those that work for QTL (royalty/licensing aka: lawyer group)?
CoronitaParticipant[quote=FlyerInHi]The abusers did get caught. So the process worked.
H1-B is hardly slave labor, not by a long shot.
You’re right, flu. Most H1-Bs are highly qualified and we should be lucky to have them here, improving our technological advantages.
One of the advantages that America has is that we attract the best and the brightest (Germany reformed since the 1990s and is doing the same thing, even providing free university education for foreign students).
This topic reminds of the reverse White-flight in Cupertino where White parents are moving out because the schools are too competitive for their kids. flu, did you read that article from years ago?
Hey, the world is a competitive place and the bar is always being raised.
BTW, H1-B tech workers are not all from Asia/India, but also from Europe/Eastern Europe where people value education. I have a neighbor from Slovakia.[/quote]
the abuses by a big firm will get caught. But unfortunately, the abuses by smaller firms probably go unnoticed, and when it comes to smaller firms, it’s the quantity of abuses
CoronitaParticipant[quote]Most of theses workers could care less about the United States and are here solely for personal gain. If you disagree with me, please let me know. I’m trying to get different points of view so that I can have a well rounded opinion. With the upcoming Presidential election, this will be a topic that will sway my vote. Thanks for your responses in advance.[/quote]
That would be incorrect. Most of the H1-B’s here put the time and effort into attending the best schools in their country so they can come here and study and emigrate here. Many of the H1-B’s come from the top rank schools overseas including IIT. Most of them get their greencards and plan on staying here, and eventually get US citizenship. Look at the engineering schools, particularly the masters program….More people abroad study engineering than people from this country.
In fact, as I mentioned on another thread, many of them are just as pissed off that U.S. companies are making bonehead decisions to move work abroad, when they themselves admit the “talent” abroad isn’t nearly as good as over here.
CoronitaParticipant[quote=FlyerInHi]A few points:
Labors laws in USA protect all workers equally. Employers cannot work H1-Bs and not pay them overtime, vacation, sick, etc… Employers also incur legal costs to bring in foreign workers. The process is not exactly cheap.
H1-Bs live in Rancho Bernardo, so they are paid fairly well to afford to live there. Rancho Bernardo is an upscale neighborhood of San Diego. My own anecdotal observation is that H1-Bs live in better that “average” housing and neighborhoods.
We live in a world economy. Employers need specific skills and should be able to bring workers who meet their requirements.
An open society grows our economy and enrich us all, economically and culturally. I personally support H1-Bs and immigration reform. In fact, I think that foreign graduates of accredited American universities should be offered green cards and encouraged to stay.[/quote]
There are cases in which contracting companies abuse the H1-B system. I think it was Infosys that did this for a long time, and they got caught and severely fine. What they would do is routinely fly people from bangalore over here, using a guest visa, and rotate the people coming here.
So, it definitely does happen. Does it happen all the time? no….
CoronitaParticipantIn my experience. there are two types of companies that use H1-Bs. There are companies that really do use H1-Bs as a means to hire people for positions they can’t find, and there are companies that exploit it bring people overseas over and pay them substandard wages.
I personally have not seen many companies exploiting the H1-B programs as a means of bring cheap labor and bring people with questionable talent, but that’s because I typically work at big companies that don’t use 3rd party consulting companies/contractors. Where I have been learning from others is this sort of abuse/exploitation occurs is in the consulting/contracting business, particularly for skills/technology that have already reached saturation. So, for example, I can see this happening for probably contracting positions in enterprise software for things like J2EE or database development, but have not particularly seen this for the wireless connectivity business I am in.
In the past, when we were on a hiring spree, we went to UCSD, San Diego State, and SDSU to recruit new hires, and we interviewed people equally both with H1-B and without. For the most part, we did try to hire people that didn’t have an H1-B because it was a pain in the ass to deal with all the logistics with sponsoring someone. BUT, what ended up happening was most of the masters students in CS/EE are H1-B. Out of the ones that weren’t H1-B, the really good ones weren’t interested in working for us because they had offers from Facebook, Google, Apple, etc, despite our compensation being competitive. And the ones that were interested really lacked basic fundamentals, and were the same oens that no one else wanted to hire too.
So we did end up picking up 3 people. 1 person had a bachelor’s degree and was a US citizen that was really good. And 2 people that were masters students that previously worked for 1 year at a wireless company before doing the masters, both needed H1-B sponsorship.
I think we paid the bachelor guy $80k/year base, while the two masters we paid at the time $105-110k/year. That didn’t include bonus and didn’t include stock grants, which probably would have brought the bachelor guy to about $110k/year, and the masters people about $130k/year…If they stayed….
The bachelor guy left after working for 8 months, and went to Apple. The masters guy with an H1-B left about 10 months and joined qualcomm, I’m guess with a better offer, because back then they were throwing a lot of money to anyone with connectivity experience. The remaining person decided she wanted to stay and since then has been promoted. She didn’t go to qualcomm, even after she got her greencard, because her husband I believe works there, and I think they wanted to spread the risk of not working at the same company (in hindsight, probably a good move).
We also had a bunch of lateral hires that were already greencard holders and H1-Bs that stayed maybe for 1-2 years, before they too jumped ship and went to Qualcomm, Apple, Google. And last year we lost a lot of people to Intel that I heard were paying people 40%+ more because they wanted to ramp up their mobile business (and no, we weren’t underpaying people).
————————————Senior Management got tired and fed up with all of this churn in San Diego, since we we having a tough time keeping employees, during a time when parts of our business was being challenged. So to minimize disruption, management started to experiment by leveraging some resources in our Bangalore office. Some people were good, some people weren’t good. But then with the cost factor being significant lower, and with our difficultly in filling positions and keeping people here, gradually hiring picked up abroad, and the team overseas ended up growing bigger than our team locally. And that’s when the bean counters figured out that rather than deal with hiring more here (H1-B or permanent resident employees), that it was just easier to grow the team in bangalore, for less, and simply by the raw number of people, felt that projects could be run better that way. Partly true, partly false, but that’s the perception of what happened.
And so, for the longest time, every additional perosn that quit here locally, we lost that headcount, and 6-7 headcounts were re-allocated to the bangalore office. No one really liked this. None of the line managers did, neither did any of the directors, and not some of the VP’s. But what can you do? We didn’t have a good track record of keeping people when we did hire here..
In the sort of ironic twist, these same people that bailed to Qualcomm are probably going to need a job now. And the sad part is, they won’t find one at our firm anymore. Because we weren’t able to fill those positions at the time locallly, now those positions are elsewhere and so are the projects. That’s the sad part because, that business is actually doing ok.
So in short, H1-B at least from what I have seen, aren’t the problem….The bigger issue is when a big company sets up a offshore office, and your local team can’t get it’s act together and differentiate what you do that is better or more creative than an offshore location.
In the short time that I did work at Qualcomm back in the mid 90ies, there were a lot of H1-Bs (and I wasn’t one of them), but we were all paid the same. Again, I think (at least back then), big companies that do direct hires didn’t abuse the H1-B system nearly as much as the contractor/consulting companies. A big company, if they really wanted to save on cost, won’t even bother to hire locally in the U.S., but move work overseas… Looks like Qualcomm is going to try this experiment in the next year or so, since they too are hitting saturation.
What does this mean for U.S. employees? Simple. You better work on something in a growth area that no one else is trying. Because the moment the market hits saturation, you can bet your cushy position isn’t going to last.
CoronitaParticipant[quote=all][quote=AN]No, their problem is not unique and I saw it coming. What’s unique is Steve Mollenkopf’s leadership. When he took over, I felt that this would happen, but wasn’t expecting it to happen this quick and this drastic.[/quote]
Good thing Q did not let M$ steal him.[/quote]
I’m not really sure if Steve is leading Qualcomm in the right direction. It seems like they are exclusively trying to focus on chip and patent….Exclusively on chip is going to be really tough because the edge that Qualcomm had is getting smaller by the day…And Q won’t win a battle against the asian companies when it comes to competing on cost alone. And with the way the industry is heading, the asian companies have caught up. MediaTek is getting really close, and Samsung’s Exynos is gaining much more weight. Samsung also has their own LTE modem in the ATT S6 phones shipped here, which is remarkable, considering how fast Samsung was able to get their LTE modem into a tier 1 customer for the U.S. And MediaTek is now in a a few phones in the U.S. now, specifcally the phones from Alcatel that Tmobile offers ($100 android smart phones)
Product differentiation is getting increasingly difficult for Q, and unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be something significant in the near term to drive growth moving forward. For example, not much going on wrto 5G
The problem is that Qualcomm has done such a great job destroying competition in the past, that there are no other significant employers here that can easily absorb some of the employees with specialized skillset. The choices are Intel (which is in lockdown/cost cutting mode too) and Broadcom (which just exited the LTE business, and just got acquired by a company).
It looks like the asian companies are now dishing out the pain to the Q.
What I found really frightening for engineering minds is that in that restructuring plan presented, if you look at the presentation, all it has are financial and wall street metrics that they want to hit. Almost no information/direction on technological innovation that they plan on doing… If this was a presentation done by Irwin Jacobs, it would have looked drastically different, with the presentation completely on innovation and next generation things. I think the business/wall street folks have finally settled in at Qualcomm, and it’s no longer going to be engineering focused as it once was… And that sucks for engineers.
CoronitaParticipant[quote=deadzone][quote=flu][quote]
Are you saying the average Qcom engineer makes 200K per year? Sounds a bit high to me, maybe I need to put in a resume.
Also, why are Indians not considered Asians, even though they come from the continent of Asia?[/quote]
I’m saying that including base+ RSU + bonus, $200k would be about average for someone probably Staff level or higher, which wouldn’t be out of line with what other companies are paying for someone with similar experience in years and work….which is probably also the same sort of extra benefits that QCOM is trying to cut that they just announced….But again, that was before all the cuts.
And I don’t know why Indians and Asians are classified differently, when you fill out the ethnicity bubbles, but it is what it is.[/quote]
I can see that for Staff level maybe, but certainly the vast majority of engineers would be making significantly less.
Of all the Qcom engineers what percentage do you think are H1B types? A significant amount or small minority?[/quote]
H1B’s and staff engineers are not mutually exclusive…Inf fact you would probably find more H1-B’s that are staff than non-H1-Bs. But I think an H1B senior engineer (1 level lower than staff) probably can pull in about $125-35k. with just a few years of experience. At least that’s what my tenants pulled in. But that was again with RSU and bonus.
Unlike a some shady contracting companies that exploit the H1B visas to bring in cheap labor, I know these bigger companies that do the direct employee hire do not really pay the H1B’s less than other people.
I know from experience when we hired H1-B’s, we paid them just as much as the non H1-B’s and in some cases, more, so they wouldn’t end up at our competitors. So they are just as likely to get the axe as anyone else when it comes to swinging the ax. Big companies have offshore offices, and whenever the bean counters start talking about cutting cost, that’s what they try to do: by moving/hiring more in the remote offices versus actually hiring H1-Bs and paying them US wages. In fact, in the sort of ironic twists, I have a lot of colleagues with H1-B that complain about why US companies continue to try to offshore stuff. It’s happening because growth is stale, and the company is entering “maintenance mode”.
CoronitaParticipant[quote=AN][quote=ltsdd]15% cut….sounds like Q is in self-preservation mode. In conference call, there’s not much substance as to how it plan to grow. It’s mostly about cost reduction. Doesn’t sound like a solid strategy to right the ship. The reduction in bonuses/RSU for a total of $300 mil is going to hurt.[/quote]
I called this a year and a half ago when Paul stepped down. Sad that I’m right but not surprising.[/quote]I don’t think Q’s problem though are unique to Q. Every chip company in the U.S. is getting squeezed. Q’s fall might just feel like it’s a bigger deal, because up until recent times, Q has been pretty much immune to the pricing pressure from increased competition, and so for the majority of the times that every other chip company was fighting for a piece of the pie, Q breezed through those rough waters. I guess it also has finally caught up Q as it already existed in every other semi company in the U.S.
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