I personally witnessed someone that submit multiple applications that this person won the H1B lottery. This person even had fake office, fake business address, etc for the fake entities.

I already reported it, but no action has been taken. This person is now happily employed in the US using H1B.

Unethical life pro tips but work: for those of you trying to get H1B, just submit multiple applications to multiple "companies". There are services like this out there, just need to find out where.

Good luck. This nation is for plunder.

Perhaps geographic restrictions on H-1Bs would spread the wealth: force these companies to prove they can't find engineers in the US by looking outside the wealthiest enclaves in the country, where even FAANG engineers complain about cost of living. We'd ease the Bay Area housing crisis, lift up other regions of the country, and provide more domestic-born citizens a path to good jobs while maintaining their own communities.

They are claiming to start mass deportations next month, and profiling based on skin color is absolutely the only way that can be possible. Moreover, just like the Nazis discovered, both deporting people and indefinite detainment are impossibly expensive- leaving only one option. This political movement is already based on the idea that people different than them don't deserve to be treated like human beings, and will not be.

REAL ID is plausible but I don't really trust it, given that illegal immigrants can get identity cards in my state.

EDIT: I encourage people to read two stories

Qian Xuesen - what happens when you deport skilled laborers

https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/mariel-impact.pdf - one of the first studies on immigration econ effects on wages. A good starting point

Why does everyone think the cure to the worlds ills is to have more doctors and not more toilet cleaners? People can die from dirty hands on doorknobs faster than from smoking: Basic sanitation work, food work is important. If current US residents won't do this stuff, pick food, clean up, then isn't the answer to bring them in or do we really prefer to have them live in a twilight, semi-illegal world? Really?

But as an American the “bonafide job requirement” makes me nervous. We have a massive ghost job problem that really needs to be a federal crime. Will this make that worse?

Oh no, the 50% rule won't be exploited sir.

“Prevailing wage condition”

It’s a requirement that’s part of the Labor Condition Application wherein based on the location you’ll work (the “Metropolitan Service Area” or MSA) to be granted a visa your employer must prove they’ll pay you above publicly available and published minimum wages for each job title.

These wages are public. If you have a problem with what they’re permitted to pay H-1B workers, the published prevailing wages are what you have a problem with. Spoiler though: they’re actually pretty accurate.

Here is one example of how hard it is to underpay workers on visas: during the pandemic, workers on visas were not legally allowed to be furloughed, because they would run the risk of not meeting the prevailing wage that year, putting the employer out of compliance with the LCA and subject to fines in the event of an audit. So what happened in practice was negotiated unpaid leave or in most cases the US gov covered wages via programs like PPP.

Now this is all out the window if the published prevailing wage for a given occupation is too low or the employer somehow sneaks one by the consular officials approving petitions - by selecting a title too junior for the applicant’s years of experience, for example. There will always be anecdata that makes this seem like a huge problem so be wary because one story does not a trend make. As mentioned above, by and large the prevailing wages are pretty on point with what American citizens are paid.

The reality of the way this system works is it’s WAY more technical than fearmongerers would have you believe. Visa holders are very much NOT undercutting anyone and the H-1B is not a completely broken system - even though the lottery and the fraudulent applications cause hell for applicants and employers it does basically do what it’s intended to do. So besides the exploitative situation these changes seem to proactively address, it mostly works and alongside the O-1 and a few other visa categories, has played a key role in the US’ ongoing supremacy in AI and many other industries.

Source: Australian citizen spent over 6 years working in SF on an E-3 visa which is very similar to H-1B.

I suppose 2025 is starting early.

edit: case in point, downvoted for simply saying I’m noticing a lot of racism from the (you know who) crowd - as all the comments against this are often followed with “trump will fix this” or “your country needs birth control” or “india shouldn’t be allowed to get visas”

I agree it is very disappointing that even labeling hate speech for what it obviously is wouldn't be acceptable. I'm curious what peoples reasoning could possibly be for why your comment shouldn't be allowed.

In general HN is supposed to encourage civil, not provocative, and non inflammatory discussion based around good faith arguments. However, there is no way to sugarcoat or steel man hate speech that isn't fundamentally dishonest- hate speech itself would seem to violate HN guidelines, and pointing it out should not.

This is a terrifying time to be in the USA for anyone with the "wrong" skin color, accent, culture, religion, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.- and many of the people I know in those groups are actively preparing and planning for the worst imaginable outcomes. People in those "wrong groups" are terrified right now, and people not in them - which includes much of HN - are in a bubble and not aware of what is happening.

You can illustrate this by doing the other direction: if we killed half of the workforce, would real wages double. Unlikely! You'd probably just see broad-based inflation for a while until wages equalized again.

For a first-take study on this, see https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/mariel-impact.pdf

Employers outsource all those works to overseas.

This is below COL in many areas. If you increase this to 125k like Bucees then you should be able to draw in more candidates.

The clearance I won't comment on, as I have no clue what it involves. Presumably though, this means randomized drug tests which is IMO a complete violation of privacy. Also, I'm probably wrong but it gives me the impression that despite your reassurance that you aren't building weapons systems, ya kinda are.

And as you said, a part of your company makes weapons. That will automatically cause many people to be disinterested, for better or worse.

> Ghost positions

In my experience, gov't jobs are the worst when it comes to fake job postings that only exist as a cover for internal promos. Might be different in the states, but I doubt it.

> Yes, we are willing to train someone who is motivated. We won't re-teach linear algebra...

Wait, so will you train them or not? You won't refresh someone on linear algebra which most people haven't touched since their uni days, but you'll put a technical writer through university to become an engineer? Which one is it? Then later on you say the algebra thing is a hard requirement. How do these statements make sense together?

> Can't work remotely

This is an automatic disqualifier for many people, for many reasons. I get that you're working with space hardware in clean rooms, but if this means people have to move to the middle of nowhere (or just move, period) and commute for 2 hours each way, then you're disqualifying tons of people, when their alternative is a job where they can work remotely with all the benefits that entails. I'd personally rather be dead than be forced to commute ever again.

> We pay well

Define well? Especially with everything else I commented on, is it really "well", if they can join a much less frustrating job and get paid more? Also you sound quite snarky about working at Meta. I'm no fan of FAANG, but if we're talking compensation, I think the snark is unwarranted given the situation.

> We expect programmers to remember linear algebra and have more than the ability to shovel frameworks on top of each other...

Again, snarkiness and derision. A bit of a dumb position to take when you're admitting that the easier job not only pays (dramatically) more, but has better conditions (remote work, no clearance-related BS) as well.

No wonder you can't find qualified individuals, your comment alone makes it sound like a miserable job where you're working for bean counters that want to inspect the cloudiness of your piss while forcing you to waste half your life driving to the office and back without extra compensation, while they get to see other, less skilled engineers "glue frameworks together" for double the pay and quadruple the happiness. And I find it rich to comment on advertisers when your company makes weapons that literally kill people. Something about reaper missiles and glass houses comes to mind here.

> You (even programmers!) have to touch the things we build in order to build them

This sounds like an excuse. You think it's completely impossible to write code for some embedded device, robot, whatever remotely? Hire some cheaper remote hands, set up some telework equipment, voila now you can hire from all over the country.

I did development for a scanning optical microscope, was only once even in the same room with one, and even then never got to touch it.

Of course once that issue is eliminated, the security theater one will be raised next. People might be working from their bed next to a Russian honeypot or whatever. National security types tend to have vivid imaginations in that respect, and have to justify all their rules to themselves. The end result? "We can't find qualified applicants."

Btw I'm technically qualified, and in no way a security risk to the US, but you wouldn't be allowed to hire me. Perhaps the feds should figure out a way of doing security screening for foreign nationals. "Must be a citizen" seems like lazy bureaucratic BS. As if citizens can't be security risks?!

Nope. Not doing it. Not going to argue politics, but this is a huge RED FLAG for a lot of people. And I feel I don't need to submit to mandatory drug testing as well.

>The most harmful thing the products I build do is quantify in precise detail how climate change is dooming us all

Then why is it classified? How separate is your branch from the weapons branch, that you acknowledge exists?

Never too late to learn etc. etc.

What’s the name of your employer?

Ah, well. Nevertheless...

Do you consider developer applicants who learned linear algebra on their own or through a product like Math Academy?

Google, MS and other large tech companies do.

Having had to go through one of those: yeah no shit. Not everyone enjoys a colonoscopy without anesthesia.

>You (even programmers!) have to touch the things we build in order to build them and nobody has an ISO certified clean room in their house.

I do, a keg at any rate, but given that I can't get a security clearance because of the people I hung out to build one - yeah.

What kind of understanding is needed? A basic understanding? It's a vast and unending subject.

And there are well known software apps that do linear algebra these days. Do you folks use a particular software to do it?

Engineering Technician: what does an hour in the life of such work look like?

Thanks.

You are not a US person as a visa holder. You are however a US person if you have permanent residency (green card).

By chance has your employer posted on HN who’s hiring?

If your pay is anywhere below minimum 75th but more realistically 90th percent market rate in your area your answer is obvious and you are just BSing or your employer is gaslighting you to keep pay down.

All the criteria (required security clearance, no opportunities for remote work, knowledge of skills not used very much outside of schooling without allowances for relearning on the job, only US citizens, etc) you listed automatically creates a hurdle to entry that isn't made up for without significantly higher pay than market rate.

> You have to be eligible for a Secret security clearance. You don't have to get one if you don't want to as there is usually plenty of uncleared work to go around, but you have to be eligible in case that goes away and we need to put you in for a clearance.

Google, Microsoft and Meta definitely look for (and hire!) US applicants. One can reasonably have a gripe with the consulting companies on there (Infosys, Tata, Cognizant, etc.) but they don't represent 90-95% of H-1B issued.

[0] https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...

It's the same with the "fast food shortage," I bet the shortage would dry up real fast at $50/hr so all we're really doing is haggling over price. If in order to hire a H1-B at a salary of x you had to offer US workers 2x with say a $100k floor on x then I bet Americans would show up.

We do not lack candidates, but we lack qualified candidates. Most people that I interview have no clue how software actually works. Most are leetcode monkeys or just really awful.

We mostly hire seniors because of the industry we're in, but we've started hiring interns and juniors due to the lack of decent candidates.

We'd love to hire US candidates, but there's just a huge lack.

At this point I feel like I’m relying entirely on luck and hoping for someone to pay it forward by “taking a chance” on me even though I feel perfectly capable. Surely there’s a single company that I could work out for despite not having 5 years of experience.

I've worked at a company where >90% of the technical interviews I conducted were H1-B hires. It makes perfect sense for a tech company to bias the applicant deck in this way for a few reasons. They're willing to accept a lower comp package. Once they're onboard, they will generally keep their head down, do whatever they're asked to do, and accept whatever working conditions they get without complaining. That said, I've known several brilliant H1-B workers. However I've noticed that they rarely stick their neck out and challenge the status quo, which can lead to bad ideas receiving unquestioning and persistent efforts to implement in spite of the writing being on the wall about that project's inevitable demise.

I've worked at companies that hire primarily non-H1-B workers, and I can tell you that the amount of complaining about working conditions in particular at those companies was a couple of orders of magnitude more raucous. The end result of a complacent workforce was a soulless office with ubiquitous infrared sensors, no available meeting spaces, a microkitchen stocked with a pittance of moldy food, and with floating workstations where the equipment was chronically broken or missing.

While I tend to agree, this is a bit of a straw man.

You can have tons of people looking for work who aren't qualified for the job - which is (I think) the FAANG argument.

It's not like FAANG is paying less than what most unemployed techies are looking to make.

If we really valued this foreign labor, we’d make permanent residency a requirement of the visa rather than block it. Of course, if we offered immigrants permanent residency status then companies would have to pay them substantially more, which is the whole point of the H1B.

Now, was I essential to the US? Probably not. They probably could have found someone else.

I'm not sure if that's good enough to say I should not have been accepted here.

It's hard for even Canadians and Mexicans to find jobs in the US and we have access to the supposedly easy to obtain TN visa. Australians too with E3.

I'm more inclined to believe that H1B workers have other benefits to employers such as longer tenure due to the restrictions of moving jobs.

Which in itself should be an argument for further liberalization say by giving I140 approved petitioners access to EADs.

In a post-remote world these jobs aren’t competing with on-shore labor. This is a populist pitch in the mould of iron work to Pennsylvania.

Big Tech, for example, treats SWEs as largely interchangeable. Make a SWE redundant and you can't hire another SWE--anywhere in the country--who is a visa holder for 24 months.

You can buy your way out of this by paying any redundant SWE 3 years of salary and benefits.

Let's see how necessary layoffs really are.

The trap with the older worker is a guy wants $250k, but will perform at the level of a $75/hr body shop guy. Skills don’t align - that’s always the risk of engineering.

we abolish the program and boom, 65k people out of this apparently HUGE number of US developers looking for work won't make a dent... so this argument holds absolutely no water ...

> Finally, the rule strengthens program integrity by codifying USCIS’ authority to conduct inspections and impose penalties for failure to comply; requiring that the employer must establish that it has a bona fide position in a specialty occupation available for the worker as of the requested start date; clarifies that the Labor Condition Application must support and properly correspond with the H-1B petition; and requires that the petitioner have a legal presence and be subject to legal processes in court in the United States.

U.S. citizens (and perhaps some dual-citizens) might want to look into such places (Navy warfare centers, NRL, ARL, etc.)

TL;DR:

The top starting pay is about $150k IIRC, which I'm told is somewhat below what a well-funded defense contractor will pay for really good people.

But I worked with some great people, the work was interesting, and it was located in a medium-cost-of-living area.

I left because of the siren call of the startup scene, and frustration with some bureaucratic stuff. But in retrospect I actually liked working there the best.

I come from an extremely wealthy Northern European country integral to founding the United States and English is my first language. I was not compelled to emigrate for a “better life”. I gave up a lot to be in the US.

H1-Bs are designed for abuse. There is no shortage of skilled workers. It’s just that immigrants are cheap.

I was hired in my country from a pool of over 500 for one of two jobs. Once accepted it took close to a year to do the legal paperwork. My sponsoring company was paying lawyers $600 an hour twenty years ago to get the work done. Despite being absolutely squeaky clean they easily invested 25k per applicant then.

When I arrived my pay tripled. I was earning 50-60k in the US and had been under 20 before. That was very low in my home country but it was a starting position and wages are lower outside the Us for myriad reasons even though living standards on low wages are higher.

The kicker was that similarly skilled Americans to myself were all earning 6 figures then. The industry I was in had a strong base in NY and the company that hired me was in LA. Their options were to pay 100k plus and relocate Americans from NY, or pay half that and relocate Europeans.

Better yet we were more qualified than the average American (as they got to pick the very best) and we were tied to them by the legal work and thus “indentured”. If we wanted to leave them we had to go home or find more sponsorship.

On arrival my colleague and I immediately realized we were both overqualified and under paid (pre internet this was much harder to discover). We ran rings round the locals. When our visas needed renewal the company “advertised” our jobs by placing printed sheet behind notice boards and claimed that was sufficient. It was a complete con.

Ironically I didn’t last very long. Given my skills and experience I found companies willing to sponsor my ViSAs and green card (which my first company sponsored for me also). So I was able to move around and establish myself.

In short the system has always been abused. The idea is good but as long as companies can choose to pay non competitive rates to immigrants they will do so and lie about the true state of the market. That’s what the system does and the purpose of a system IS what it does. It’s just lowering wages by importing skilled foreigners.

It's the old 'the foreigners are taking our jobs' routine.

I guess it will be interesting times ahead. I recommend everyone to keep their skills sharp!

  > I'd be surprised if more than 5-10% of H-1B positions are ones where the hiring company has even looked for US applicants.

You really think a business would do that? Just go to the government and tell lies?

So, it's not just a plain numbers game, it's more about innovation, productivity, talent pools and of course, capitalism.

The people that have it can write their own ticket and do very little work apparently.

I'm fine with working for a defense contractor or the feds. I'm fine with taking a pay haircut relative to FAANG to do something meaningful. I'm even fine with commuting, and the agencies poking into my life to assess a clearance. But I need to move from one job to another without a gap.

Private sector employers won't touch me without a clearance, and in my part of the world there are lots of people who already have one, so I'm not worth their time.

The US government would put me through a clearance, but their hiring practices are so slow and arcane that they're just not viable for someone who needs to find a job starting say in the next 30 days.

I wish it wasn't that way, but it is. So, I stay in the uncleared commercial sector.

>> Are you saying you pay well as comparing to the local McDonalds?

That's just disgusting.

They pay at top of market. They would save a ton on comp if they gave up on h1 candidates and hired the best they could find locally.

I know popular sentiment here is often that there is no real difference between these candidates, and the standards are arbitrary. That is simply it true. There are vast differences in engineering talent. Some people are truly amazing compared to the median candidate.

> The H-1B Employer Data Hub has data on the first decisions USCIS makes on petitions for initial *and continuing* employment

Could be "This one is overqualified, we can't pay that much" or "He doesn't have experience in the exact thing we need." Or just that they want a qualified applicant but they've got lots of options.

https://www.clearancejobs.com/

We're fintech, so it's boring. We don't do AI and we don't move fast and break things because that would cost us more than we'd make. We just move faster than the competition. Similar companies would be Stripe/SoFi.

Engineering is traditionally boom/bust. The baller tech dudes in 1973 were designing parts for F-15’s and making bank. By 1993 the movie “Falling Down” had come out and thousands of those folks were discarded. A big feel good stories were a bunch of aerospace engineers who applied their skills to designing low flow toilets.

It happens today in tech. How many high dollar Storage Administrators are deployed in your company? The highest paid contractors in many companies were the high priests of the SAN.

The vicious cycle in tech is you get trapped in a bad specialty or pulled up into middle management and purged. It mostly timing and luck. Nobody gives a shit that you were the man with some old semiconductor process. Likewise, nobody is going to pay a premium for some dude whose been a manager for a decade to sling Java.

Where I’ve worked in the past, the preference was to get students and grow them into the company. Longer term contractors were for work nobody wanted… it’s hard to attract anyone interested into churning out J2EE and COBOL.

It’s pretty hard to transition senior people purged from big companies into these roles. Your purged assistant director from a fortune 50 is unlikely to take to being an IC in legacy tech. They transition well into pre-sales and program management roles, especially if they have domain expertise in a vertical.

Newspaper ad is required for PERM, which is part of the green card process.

How many jobs require complex SW engineering rather than basic SW engineering?

This point, assuming for a moment that it's actually true, would matter if "complex software engineering" was all that this was being used for. Complex for whom?

I'm not sure you understand how this works.

I doubt that many mechanical engineers can become a principal level engineer at a Fortune 500 company in 3-5 years, but I know plenty of software engineers who've gotten to L4 at FAANG companies in that timeframe.

The simple answer is always they simply don't pay enough to attract the people with this skillset. If they paid as much as Meta (who they used as an example) they would certainly have way less issues with hiring.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-cognizant-h1b-visas-... | https://archive.today/jaXNo

[2] https://www.epi.org/publication/new-evidence-widespread-wage...

[3] https://cis.org/North/Unlikely-Sources-Confirm-Wage-Suppress...

[4] http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2015/05/economists-h-1b-vi...

[5] https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/h1b.pd...

[6] https://stig.net/latam-outsourcing-destination-us-companies/

[7] https://www.wsj.com/articles/it-unemployment-hits-6-amid-ove...

Why would companies want to do that? Big tech has wage scales and pretty rigorous processes to ensure even pay at level, so what is the incentive to be biased against US born employees there?

The bad culture isn't just due to being locked into a job or it being hard to get a new job. It is a core component of their belief system. I see this as soon as people from these places get promoted to a manager - they literally turn into the thing they hated the most on the first day! It seems to me to be completely cultural.

There's a lot of dual-use stuff that's not used for military applications but could be by another actor. Dual-use means that it could be used for civilian and military applications, not that it actually is.

So if I build a revolutionary weather radar that could be used for military reconnaissance by Iran if the technology came out, but the US military isn't interested because they already have something better, it would be completely civilian but classified.

The requirement should be at least 2x top of band.

A mere 1.2x of the median is absolutely absurd.

FAANG will argue that they are laying off people with skills they don't need, and there's a lack of people with skills they do need.

Call them out and make a convincing argument that this is BS.

Don't cry out: BUT SOME AMERICAN WAS FIRED AND THEY'RE STILL HIRING!

This isn't a sound argument.

We pay $400k base + bonus for L6, but around $270k for L4

RSUs bump that to $400k on the low end for L4 and $700k for L6.

We don't pay FAANG level for sure, but the bar is lower.

Not when it's in fashion to perform large traditional layoffs and "stealth" layoffs via RTO mandates and other unpleasantness.

Maybe things will substantially change within a year or two, but I'm skeptical.

Because that's not profitable.

If I rock it explodes killing all of the astronauts, was that the purpose of the rocket and the mission?

If I crash my car on my way to the store, is that the purpose of leaving my house?

I completely agree large scale abuse of the program must be stopped. No country can afford to have large influx of new population that hinder their own(however "own" is defined in a country) progress. Borders are a thing (for better or worse) and invoke extreme emotions within society, and that must be accommodated and not ignored. I say this as an H1B employee and I see this play out a lot more radically in my home country

An odd claim, wish there was more evidence for it being true. As in, what is the "artificial constraint" for front end web developers?

> Instead of telling everyone else to check their privilege, maybe check your expectations.

Without such an expectation, who would pay tens of thousands a year to enroll in a random U.S. college, only to be told that there is absolutely no way they can work legally there?

    > outside of their core competency

I'm sure you think of your own citizenship as charity as well...

It's funny, and it's nice, but it's not quite the ironclad level of "NO MILITARIES" as I'd like. Plus, enforceability becomes a question with classified military stuff, not even going into the actual legal discovery process. A common license would suffice for me, as I'm not going to modify the GPL as they did.

Thanks for sharing though, it made me laugh.

This makes a lot more sense to me than blackmail.

I'd quibble though that this overlooks that quite a lot (possibly even most) drug users are able to lead productive lives without having to resort to illegal activity to fund their drug use.

The other thing this doesn't cover is that there are many alcoholics that fall into the same trap. Though there again, most alcoholics are able to lead productive lives despite their addiction.

And through personal experience, I unfortunately know quite a few alcoholics that work in defense with various levels of clearance.

"We'll fire you if you smoke pot"

"But why?"

"Someone might blackmail you, by threatening to reveal that you smoke pot"

"How is that a threat?"

"Because we'll fire you if you smoke pot."

Remember the "chip shortage" all throughout the pandemic? It's not like the whole world switched to a Soviet style command economy between 2020 and 2022 yet we still had it.

"The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce [...]"

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b

Specific to North America, most people actually like the idea of someone coming from halfway around the world to try to be a citizen of their nation. They do not exactly like the idea of being "carpetbagged" or being "flooded with people who do not integrate" and those perceptions exist not wholly out of imagination.

Well one option, of course, would be not forcing staff to return to office.

Ultimately it's known to anyone who applies for a visa that this will be the requirement, and so, if they don't want the economic opportunity of working in the US, they're free to avoid the stress and just stay in their home nation.

1. Fully agree, but I don't think we should use that as justification to implement another unfair system. My thinking is that the current H1-B system isn't perfect, but at least we understand its shortcomings. We shouldn't implement a new system that we know has flaws because we don't know what the effects of those flaws will be. It's a devil you know vs devil you don't know type thing. If the current system was a bidding system and people were advocating for a lottery system, I would likely be advocating for staying with the bidding system.

2. To some extent I do think it does affect salaries, but I think there just aren't enough H1-B visas available to have had a super noticeable effect. Also, the rise in companies using H1-Bs has coincided with a massive rise in tech salaries and we don't have a control group to compare against. If tech salaries are up 300% in the last 10 years, but they would have been up 400% without H1-B it's really hard to prove that and it's hard to gain a ton of sympathy from the general public when tech workers are already paid far above average. No one wants to spend their political capital defending the 28 year or making 300k who is upset about not making 400k, even if they are pointing out a legitimate issue.

3. I have a couple of H1-B employees on my team and they all hate the lottery system, so I'm sure they would say a bidding system. To be honest though, in a bidding system, I don't think my company would pay enough to win a visa for them and if I told them that, that would change their mind. My guess would be that a lottery system is actually better for most people currently in the H1-B process because my personal experience has been that most of the people aren't actually all that specialized.

When I last read Strang's, my course included a lot of spectral theory that was decidedly not introductory regardless of what the title says. Either way, the point is that most non-specialist practitioners don't need that. How often have you truly run into determinants mod N or stochastic matrices in real life?

It sounds like our linear algebra classes were somewhat different though. No one received an A in mine. I had one of 3-4 B's.

Yes, most people had LA classes during college. But would you take a couple of months to relearn something that would be used only to interview for one job that you have no idea you'll get? That's certainly a reason why few people want to interview there.

As for the cost of tuition, there are many, many reasons, and I suspect if you did a PCA, you'll find "raising tuition to milk foreigners" to be of minimal impact.

In my state, for example, a local university publicized their finances going back decades, and the increase in tuition has been mirrored by a drop in state support per student. Overall the university is not making more money per student than they were 30 years ago - the only thing that changed is the entity making the payments.

International students percentage is about 6% of total high education population [1]. We can say that their percentage in higher in some fields/degrees. But overall they are not significant reason High Education is not affordable. Actually for undergraduate (majority of international students) they will pay more tuition and many colleges wants to admit more to subsidize domestic students.

> Debt means most Americans go "I need to enter into the job market so I can pay off these debts".

Study abroad is expensive and you still need to enter the job market to earn your living and probably pay your dept (some will take loans to study in the US). This applies quite well to international students too.

[1] https://opendoorsdata.org/annual-release/international-stude...

For undergrad, I understand the frustration, although student visas have almost nothing to do with it. As an example, when I was in my undergrad (for engineering), there was only one foreign student in my engineering classes. Almost all the foreign students were at the MS/PhD level. The number of foreign students in the undergrad population was easily under 5%, if not under 1%.

Probably true in most no-name state schools.

> Debt means most Americans go "I need to enter into the job market so I can pay off these debts".

An MS is only 2 years, and you should go only if it's fully paid for (quite often the case in engineering). And you typically don't accrue interest on undergrad debts for those 2 years - so it's only delaying paying off debts by 2 years.

No - most Americans don't do MS in engineering, simply because they don't want to and don't value it.

> Also, alot of foreign students are willing to work/study insane hours because visa hanging over their head. I have a friend who got MS in Engineering but didn't want to continue because he looked at what's required and started talking with his mentor about his PhD. His mentor said it's 996 schedule and if you don't want to, I can likely find a student visa student who will.

Entirely dependent on the advisor, although I do suspect your anecdote is becoming more common. Also, likely more common at top tier universities and less so in no name state universities.

It's also fintech, so there is no room for error.

Only someone who has never seen war first-hand can make a statement like that. You've never been in the kill zone.

Yes, and ...?

I mean, if it were a requirement to start a business and employ 10 Americans gainfully, would you go and say "Yeah, but the reason so many foreign born people do that is so they can get in legally."

So?

As long as they have higher level training than most Americans, and as long as we spend money training them (via research/teaching grants), isn't it a good idea to keep them?

o-1 is to bring Albert Einstein and h1b is to bring some physicist that matches criteria.

As in, O-1 is person-focused, while H1B is role-focused.

It is strange to read this all typed out in earnest like that. Housing costs triple over night for the win? We'll all be homeless but those of us in construction will get a boost (or decreased competition from low cost imported labor).

That suggest the null hypothesis that to a first approximation the number of jobs is determined by the number of workers available. More workers seem to somehow lead to more jobs. (Immigration changes the number of workers, yes. But that's about it.)

But if you shut off that valve, they would not be here 25 years later.

I mean, you didn't provide details/data, so I don't know what you have in mind.

The rules require you pay prevalent wages for the geo you're in.

You learn about the world by living in it, not by reading about it.

In a hot market, your best chance of career progression and maximizing your compensation is to swap jobs every 2 years or so. Visa holders have a much harder time doing this.

Additionally, there are additional burdens on the employer to hire visa holders. For a large company, this process is solved. You have lawyers on retainer. You have a pipeline for the paperwork. It's a non-issue. But an early stage startup? That's a lot less likely. So visa holders are, by definition, more limited in their job opportunities.

Even if you can job hop, if your ultimate goal is to get a green card, you have a problem. Will your new employer sponsor your green card? How long will it take? Or are you better off waiting for your current process to go through? Best case, this whole thing takes just under a year. But it can take years completely randomly and there's nothing you can do about it (eg you get randomly audited).

And if you were born in one of the four high-demand countries (India, China, Mexico, the Phillipines) you have an even longer wait.

Also, after you get to 6 years on your H1B you really can't swap jobs anymore. You just have to wait for your green card at that point.

Now that's not strictly true. There are self-sponsor options for both visas and green cards but the bar for these is much higher and you'll need to hire your own lawyer for this.

So there's no directive on treating visa holders differently but bias creeps into the process. Why push someone for higher bonuses, more RSUs or promotions when they can't leave but another one of your "stars" can leave? This may not be conscious either. And it may happen on a level above you, as a manager, because your director is ultimately responsible for balancing out ratings and promotions across their org.

Even if both of those were false in the past, you could still pass.

I fall almost exactly on the low end of this range: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/senior-aerospace-engineer...

With 15 years of experience.

I'm at the low end of my peers.

Like I said, auctioning off access to your users to advertisers pays better than the European space agency.

Totally different markets. You wouldn't be interested in that job, and they wouldn't want to hire you even if you were interested. Even the tone of your post makes that obvious.

We should be discussing early to mid career folks from somewhere other than silicon valley startup or big web tech land. Aka "meat and potatoes" tech jobs. That is what's being discussed.

I don't know what their problem is with hiring either and I agree with you that it could be partially compensation related. But not being able to compete with Silicon Valley on compensation is not where I would be going with that argument....I think it's more likely to be related to environment and interview style and notions of what "experience" means. In other words...bad hiring practices...not necessarily raw compensation issues. The compensation for non "big tech" firms can sometimes be quite good in comparison to other career paths especially when located outside of the valley, so being unable to hire talent makes me suspicious of hiring practices more than compensation (assuming they are reasonably large and hit market rate for the area and are in a reasonably large metro).

Just my two cents.

Companies like Google and Meta don't pay people on H1B 400k/yr just so that they walk around doing nothing.

If harm was the goal, something like a STEM worker tax or cutting R&D tax incentives would be easier.