H-1B Reform

Jeesh that's terrible journalism. It's a bill in congress (There are tons of silly bills.) and the picture is of Trump signing something. Gives me the wrong impression.

George H.

So instead of displacing 1 american worker, they'll displace 2?

Cheers

There are always unintended consequences when governments meddle.

--sp

That is very well said. And now more and more US high tech companies will try to outsource as many of their jobs as possible to off-shore sites.

Huh? How can a single engineer do the work of two on a consistent basis? The day has only 24h.

They'll do that anyhow and that's got nothing to do with H1B. Running a software outfit overseas is cheaper than paying for travel and housing of someone temporarily moved over here. The pay will also be much lower because the cost of daily life is much lower in many countries overseas. Also, there can't be import tariffs on it because their work results will flow across the borders on "singing wires".

Raising and most of all enforcing the required wage is the perfect way to fix H1B and I've always said that. Finally we have an administration that understand it. H1B is meant to haul in talent where we truly can't find an engineer for, not to obtain work results cheaper. The companies I worked for used H1B for exactly that intended purpose and they paid beaucoup bucks for those folks in salary.

We will need many very beautiful and very highly profitable hotels where top men (men who are builders and have the best words and know how to get things done very quickly and at very low cost) from US companies can meet other top men from other countries to make the very best deals.

Then, after the best deals have been made, these men (the very best, and most highly skilled people for the job) can play golf at very beautiful, and very exclusive, golf resorts where many wealthy celebrities congregate.

America will become great again.

I sense you begrudge these highly efficient professionals. You're a communist at heart then.

Jeroen Belleman

It may seem so but it's not true. We have hundreds of H1B software engineers, mostly here in the US but, sure, some in India. Having them here is more efficient than "out of sight - out of mind".

It's not all about wages. It really is impossible to find hundreds of contractors, quickly, in the US. H1B contractors fill the crests in workload so the employee base is more stable (we have a number of contract EEs, too, but they're not H1Bs).

Commie-fascist, I believe. It's hard to keep up as definitions are created and recreated more rapidly than I can follow.

The required wage for H-1B workers has always been the prevailing wage. But I seem to recall that most of the jobs being filled by this workers have not been higher paying engineering jobs. Still, enforcement has been the hard and ineffective part.

Outsourcing has been tried for design work and it has often proved ineffective. The examples I have been witness to failed because of a lack of communication where written requirements didn't fully capture what was needed in a design and there were no design reviews involving the US company. The result was a product that met spec, but didn't provide what was really needed.

I know when I have worked in companies producing products for a competitive marketplace, there was *lots* of interaction between all the departments involved. It would have been very hard to produce a product other than what was intended by the marketing group.

My memories of such situations tended to involve the marketing group claimi ng that they could not expect to sell anything if it didn't deliver twice t he performance of the existing product at half the price in half the volume , and with half the power consumption.

Trying to get them to tell us which one of those desiderata might be more i mportant was a lost cause.

Julian Barnes is our only poster who seems to use "communist" as if he thinks there are any still around. Jeroen Belleman was probably being satirical.

Our regular right-wingers use "socialist" as if it meant Soviet-era communist, but they don't bother trying to resolve the left-wing end of the political spectrum at the best of times.

You would need good team leaders in India but yes, for many projects that doesn't work well or results in more problems than if they were local.

If managed right a remote relationship can work very well. 100% of my client relationships are now remote. Zoom and GoToMeeting make this very efficient.

It is.

It's perfectly ok to use H1B contractors. However, they need to be paid prevailing wage or higher and that must be _verified_ which is super easy to do. I have suggested that all the time but it wasn't done. Now it will be because the new administration seems to understand some stuff that previous ones didn't.

Correct, because the bureaucrats who could have monitored this with ease were asleep at the wheel. That is now likely going to change and it should.

We need H1B and the law is already quite good as it is, always has been. The problem is a de-facto non-enforcement of the rules in this law. I have personally met people who were let go and then replaced by an H1B worker. This is wrong. So we need to get back to applying H1B the way it was always intended, obtaining talent which we truly cannot find in America or simply do not have enough of.

True, and it can lead to the whole project being outsourced because then there are less disconnects. Or is can result in failure.

Marketing-driven businesses can be a problem though. I have seen some. Mostly because marketing folks often think too short term and most of all in a reaction-mode. "Oh, we just saw the competition has an XYZ wombombulator function so we absolutely need that by this coming trade show". I am quite glad to not be exposed to this all that much anymore. My current clients operate in true visionary mode.

I don't disagree with that, but companies have lawyers that are adept at obeying the letter of the law while flouting the spirit of it.

And obvious technique would be to pay someone $150k and then "suggest" they lived in luxurious accommodation costing $100k. It would be shocking, /shocking/, if that accommodation was also owned by an affiliate company :(

there has been several cases of something similar here, not with visas but with usually eastern European workers that on paper is being paid the union agreement rate but then charged an obscene rent for an apartment owned by the company

Why am I not surprised!

In the late 19th century the UK introduced laws that prevented employers forcing employees to purchase everything in their shops.

So we need to get back to applying H1B the way it

at the going pay rate?

maybe that means the "going rate" needs to be raised?

Ultimately it IS all about salary.

Mark

Yup. Ideally higher because if a company really needs certain talent they should be willing to pay a premium. If they don't then the need obviously isn't that great.

That seems to be what the new administration is doing.

Yup.