The cold truth is some companies simply like H1Bs since it’s a form of indentured servitude. There are plenty of US tech workers to fill most roles. Probably only ~10% of roles with an H1B would meet the bar for being unable to find a qualified US worker.
It’s no coincidence that Amazon has more than double the number of H1Bs in corporate tech roles than the next biggest user. They’re not exactly broadly known for being a great place to work in tech. However, with H1Bs Amazon has a lot more power over making tech workers tolerate stupid stuff that makes these jobs much less attractive to top-tier US tech talent with more mobility.
Yes, and for software, remote work actually... works. Have a few in-person meetups in a year, but most of the day-to-day is git, Slack, and Zoom (or equivalent).
If I can hire someone remotely in San Antonio, why can't I hire someone remotely in São Paulo as a result?
This is why the offshoring boom happened since COVID - remote-first proved that async works well enough, which made offshoring more enticing.
Now that sponsoring 10 H1B visas is guaranteed to cost $1M, I may as well spend that much to open an office abroad, get 7 figure tax credits per employee, and pay a lower salary.
No, mention of OPT in this thread so here it goes. I’m directly observing OPT candidates crowding out American workers from getting jobs.
Foreign students pay large sums of money for advanced American STEM degrees and then flood the market for the same jobs American tech workers are trying to get. Americans in debt from undergrad degrees that foreign nationals were able to obtain a lot cheaper.
The ratios I’m seeing are insane, like 90% OPT candidates. You can’t discriminate against them, have advanced degrees and accept lower salaries and out number domestic applicants - so we reluctantly hire them. Even though their technical communication and English skills are abysmal.
Generally verbal fluency in a language goes up quickly if you are able to read and write well in that language.
I don’t think you’re making a very strong argument.
Full disclosure, I read a lot in English but almost never spoke it. 6 years ago I started working internationally and my spoken English has improved enormously.
I have observed the same with my colleagues. The man who recruited me, an older German, could barely make himself understood in English.
If someone's communication skills are bad, it's legal to not hire them. That's a job-relevant characteristic. Of course you have to apply that job requirement to all candidates, not just OPT candidates.
I think their conversation skills are fine talking with recruiters and HR, simple stuff. But in the tech interview it takes 5x longer to communicate and even then it’s still not very good. Going back to interviewing a native English speaker feels like a turbo boost. Unfortunately trying to explain this to HR opens you up to being accused of racism, so it’s not worth it.
Also you got to think HR has incentive to let it slide to get those cheap workers. It’s sad hearing them talk salary expectations of terrible candidates knowing they’re going to be hired because they want 20k less or whatever.
I’m just sorry for the people the candidate will be working with and the company itself because it’s a net negative for them.
The H-1B program was already broken by the lottery. This new fee just solidifies the L-1 visa as the real high-skilled pipeline. More L-1 visas are already approved annually than new H-1Bs, and this policy only widens that gap.
In addition to L1, O1 is also often gamed. $100K for H1B is mostly "posturing" at this point, as voters don't know about other options.
L-1 has been broken for decades as well. The same problems that impact an H1B impact an L1 as well.
The only way abuse of both visas can stop is if they are not tied to an employer, allowing free movement of labor. Thus, if someone is talented and at TCS then they can either demand a salary equal to their skill or go to an employer who can offer that salary.
Additonally, federal, state, and local governments need to start playing the subsidy game that Poland, Romania, Czechia, India, Israel, and other companies play to attract offshore offices.
> H1B is mostly "posturing" at this point, as voters don't know about other options
I disagree. This was clearly timed to distract and overshadow the Gold and Platinum card announcement.
> the subsidy game that Poland, Romania, Czechia, India, Israel, and other companies play to attract offshore offices.
Do you mean US government must dramatically reduce cost of living by offering subsidized housing, investing in education, healthcare etc? When I hire, I never consider USA and nobody pays me to find skilled labor in Eastern or Central Europe. You can pay one half of American salary there and people will be put in upper middle class with such income, being able to afford a lot and living comfortable life.
Changing or Leaving Your H-1B Employer
Q. What is “porting”?
A. There are two kinds of job portability, or “porting,” available based on two different kinds of employer petitions:
H-1B petition portability: Eligible H-1B nonimmigrants may begin working for a new employer as soon as the employer properly files a new H-1B petition (Form I-129) requesting to amend or extend H-1B status with USCIS, without waiting for the petition to be approved. More information about H-1B portability can be found on our H-1B Specialty Occupations page.
...
Q. How do I leave my current employer to start working for a new employer while remaining in H-1B status?
A. Under H-1B portability provisions, you may begin working for a new employer as soon as they properly file a non-frivolous H-1B petition on your behalf, or as of the requested start date on the petition, whichever is later. You are not required to wait for the new employer’s H-1B petition to be approved before beginning to work for the new employer, assuming certain conditions are met. For more details about H-1B portability, see our H-1B Specialty Occupations page, under “Changing Employers or Employment Terms with the Same Employer (Portability).”
---
Someone on a H-1B visa can change jobs as soon as the other employer files a form I-129 to hire them.
> The visa previously cost employers only a few thousand dollars. But the new $100,000 fee would flip the equation, making hiring talent in countries like India - where wages are lower and Big Tech now builds innovation hubs instead of back offices - more attractive, experts and executives told Reuters.
> "We probably have to reduce the number of H-1B visa workers we can hire," said Sam Liang, co-founder and CEO of popular artificial intelligence transcription start-up Otter. "Some companies may have to outsource some of their workforce. Hire maybe in India or other countries just to walk around this H-1B problem."
The roles sent to India are those that will soon be replaced by AI. For years US companies have treated India like an API to do menial tasks that we’re hard to automate. It made no sense for that do be done by American workers. Now probably 80% of that work can be replaced by AI in the next few years.
For a while the US outsourced a lot of call centers India, but that quickly became a stereotype for terrible cost cutting measures. The customer experience was horrible. Most of these have now been onshored or placed in locations with better performance for the American market, like Ireland, Canada, Costa Rica, or a lot of WFH folks in the US.
There is still a fairly large Indian American 1st and 1.5 gen diaspora with GCs and citizenship.
In most cases, we have those people manage relations with offshore teams in India.
So, just like how Chinese Americans became overrepresented in hardware and supply chain management roles in order to help manage a company's "China" story, the same thing is happening for "white collar" industries.
The first HN thread on the H1-B $100k fee pointed out that the $100k fee can be waived by the secretary (not sure which department). Most likely, H1-Bs won’t go away, they will just be bribe bait for the administration. Smaller companies who can’t lobby the admin or who aren’t in the good graces of the administration will have to do without H1-Bs, but all those tech titans who donated to the Trump Inauguration will magically get waivers for the fee.
It won’t be a matter of “outsource to India or hire locally”, it will be “what is the ROI of the bribe compared to having to hire locally when the labor market gets tighter?”
I can't imagine that any company executive thinks the solution to the new H1-B visa is going to be outsource more employees (if they are a US Based company). That would be the antithesis of this administration and I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't stiffer penalties for companies that tried to do this.
Well, this is the end result. $100K per filing has now given every company a metric with which to benchmark whether they should open a GCC (an offshore office with P/L and Product Roadmap responsibilities) or continue to hire a mix of citizens and foreigners domestically.
If having to file for 10 H1B visas now costs the same as the amount of FDI needed to get $10-20k per head of tax subsidies and credits across CEE and India, the math to open an office abroad just became justified for every business.
The issue is the O1A is oversubscribed because it includes "Sciences, education, business, or athletics" and in reality, the only thing needed to get an O1 through the door is a good lawyer and around $50k-60k in legal fees.
As such, an O-1 is now being used the way an L-1 should have been, an L-1 is being used the way an H1B should have been, and an H1B is used the way an OPT should have been.
Most academics, nurses, PhD students turned ML Researchers, etc will be filed on an H1B or (in the latter case OPT to H1B).
The next step will be to impose tariffs on code developed abroad.
Not that I agree with tariffs, but there are import taxes on physical goods and parts and so on, even when they are produced by the same company, so why not on services?
We export more services than we import, so if we start tariffing them, we are very vulnerable to reciprocal services tariffs.
But also, it’s logistically difficult to tax services because they don’t enter into the same ports of entry (eg. airports, seaports), but rather over phone or the internet. There’s no CBP agent listening in on every international phone call, identifying which type of service is being performed across the international phone system.
Poe's law....? I honestly can't tell if you're joking.
US Customs interdiction on those ssh/https-transported "git clone" sessions you use as an importer, then. "Please first fill out CBP Form 5106 to identify yourself as an Importer and get in that line over there to get your git license."
it some way you already have with that - section 174 requires amortization of foreign software salaries for 15 years. I'm ok with that as long americans will stop crying about EU trying to tax tech companies. Trump administration completely was not taking into account service sector when applying tariffs to everyone when in fact we buying a lot of such services.
This is a win for common sense. At first the H1Bs were justifiable, but over time the hack became a staple for squeezing out local hires for bottom dollar contenders. Of course it was executed extremely poorly and with confusion. That's standard procedure for this administration.
If there's any truth in the "phd level AI", let alone AGI narrative going on since a few years this must be no problem at all, just use AI.
If that narrative isn't true then in not-so-distant future SV must run out of money to hire people for other stuff anyway as all the resources seem to be in the AI basket.
The AI thing aside, I wonder why people are not demanding actual fix on the issues, i.e. right to change employer. Sure, companies wouldn't want that but aren't the SV engineers highly paid individuals? Wouldn't they be able to collect considerable resources to lobby the politicians into it?
> I wonder why people are not demanding actual fix on the issues
It’s yet another case of what economists call “concentrated benefits, diffuse costs”.
The companies that use H1-Bs have strong lobbying power. The average US citizen doesn’t know much about H1-B or the common criticisms. Some grievance-based US voters want to cut most/all work visas, especially H1-B. Crucially, H1-B recipients don’t vote in US elections, so the people most affected have no influence in fixing it.
The underlying problem is that Congress is defective. It used to fix problems that helped America. Now it’s only useful for launching influencer careers.
They can pay people who are trying to make other people vote for their candidate though. Chip in a 10K per, and you a major power in US politics. Apparently there are 730K H1B holders, that's enormous demographic considering that all of them are employed people. Even at 1K per person would generate 730M budget.
There aren't enough of them to rate that level of attention from politicians. Especially when pitted against the lobbying might of Silicon Valley, which very much wants to keep its totally-not-indentured workers.
Readit News
It’s no coincidence that Amazon has more than double the number of H1Bs in corporate tech roles than the next biggest user. They’re not exactly broadly known for being a great place to work in tech. However, with H1Bs Amazon has a lot more power over making tech workers tolerate stupid stuff that makes these jobs much less attractive to top-tier US tech talent with more mobility.
This is why the offshoring boom happened since COVID - remote-first proved that async works well enough, which made offshoring more enticing.
Now that sponsoring 10 H1B visas is guaranteed to cost $1M, I may as well spend that much to open an office abroad, get 7 figure tax credits per employee, and pay a lower salary.
Dead Comment
Foreign students pay large sums of money for advanced American STEM degrees and then flood the market for the same jobs American tech workers are trying to get. Americans in debt from undergrad degrees that foreign nationals were able to obtain a lot cheaper.
The ratios I’m seeing are insane, like 90% OPT candidates. You can’t discriminate against them, have advanced degrees and accept lower salaries and out number domestic applicants - so we reluctantly hire them. Even though their technical communication and English skills are abysmal.
I don’t think you’re making a very strong argument.
Full disclosure, I read a lot in English but almost never spoke it. 6 years ago I started working internationally and my spoken English has improved enormously.
I have observed the same with my colleagues. The man who recruited me, an older German, could barely make himself understood in English.
A couple of years later, he sounds American.
Also you got to think HR has incentive to let it slide to get those cheap workers. It’s sad hearing them talk salary expectations of terrible candidates knowing they’re going to be hired because they want 20k less or whatever.
I’m just sorry for the people the candidate will be working with and the company itself because it’s a net negative for them.
In addition to L1, O1 is also often gamed. $100K for H1B is mostly "posturing" at this point, as voters don't know about other options.
The only way abuse of both visas can stop is if they are not tied to an employer, allowing free movement of labor. Thus, if someone is talented and at TCS then they can either demand a salary equal to their skill or go to an employer who can offer that salary.
Additonally, federal, state, and local governments need to start playing the subsidy game that Poland, Romania, Czechia, India, Israel, and other companies play to attract offshore offices.
> H1B is mostly "posturing" at this point, as voters don't know about other options
I disagree. This was clearly timed to distract and overshadow the Gold and Platinum card announcement.
Do you mean US government must dramatically reduce cost of living by offering subsidized housing, investing in education, healthcare etc? When I hire, I never consider USA and nobody pays me to find skilled labor in Eastern or Central Europe. You can pay one half of American salary there and people will be put in upper middle class with such income, being able to afford a lot and living comfortable life.
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
---Someone on a H-1B visa can change jobs as soon as the other employer files a form I-129 to hire them.
Deleted Comment
> "We probably have to reduce the number of H-1B visa workers we can hire," said Sam Liang, co-founder and CEO of popular artificial intelligence transcription start-up Otter. "Some companies may have to outsource some of their workforce. Hire maybe in India or other countries just to walk around this H-1B problem."
For a while the US outsourced a lot of call centers India, but that quickly became a stereotype for terrible cost cutting measures. The customer experience was horrible. Most of these have now been onshored or placed in locations with better performance for the American market, like Ireland, Canada, Costa Rica, or a lot of WFH folks in the US.
Without the H1B hand cuffs, retention/productivity in India will be doubly chaotic.
As messy as this is, some US companies may consider to make the effort to attempt to hire more in the US.
EDIT: added retention
In most cases, we have those people manage relations with offshore teams in India.
So, just like how Chinese Americans became overrepresented in hardware and supply chain management roles in order to help manage a company's "China" story, the same thing is happening for "white collar" industries.
It won’t be a matter of “outsource to India or hire locally”, it will be “what is the ROI of the bribe compared to having to hire locally when the labor market gets tighter?”
If having to file for 10 H1B visas now costs the same as the amount of FDI needed to get $10-20k per head of tax subsidies and credits across CEE and India, the math to open an office abroad just became justified for every business.
As such, an O-1 is now being used the way an L-1 should have been, an L-1 is being used the way an H1B should have been, and an H1B is used the way an OPT should have been.
Most academics, nurses, PhD students turned ML Researchers, etc will be filed on an H1B or (in the latter case OPT to H1B).
Not that I agree with tariffs, but there are import taxes on physical goods and parts and so on, even when they are produced by the same company, so why not on services?
But also, it’s logistically difficult to tax services because they don’t enter into the same ports of entry (eg. airports, seaports), but rather over phone or the internet. There’s no CBP agent listening in on every international phone call, identifying which type of service is being performed across the international phone system.
Deleted Comment
Literal backbone cybersecurity software used by the Congress IT team is developed in Tel Aviv, let alone by every single F1000.
And we ourselves export services abroad. What's to stop the EU from passing a Digital Services Tax as a result?
Deleted Comment
US Customs interdiction on those ssh/https-transported "git clone" sessions you use as an importer, then. "Please first fill out CBP Form 5106 to identify yourself as an Importer and get in that line over there to get your git license."
The AI thing aside, I wonder why people are not demanding actual fix on the issues, i.e. right to change employer. Sure, companies wouldn't want that but aren't the SV engineers highly paid individuals? Wouldn't they be able to collect considerable resources to lobby the politicians into it?
It’s yet another case of what economists call “concentrated benefits, diffuse costs”.
The companies that use H1-Bs have strong lobbying power. The average US citizen doesn’t know much about H1-B or the common criticisms. Some grievance-based US voters want to cut most/all work visas, especially H1-B. Crucially, H1-B recipients don’t vote in US elections, so the people most affected have no influence in fixing it.
The underlying problem is that Congress is defective. It used to fix problems that helped America. Now it’s only useful for launching influencer careers.