Comment by qwertyuiop_

2 days ago

Yet there is no let up in diluting software engineering labor pool with thousands of H1Bs amidst the already distressed labor market from American job seeker perspective.

9 comments

qwertyuiop_

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addicted  2 days ago

This is so backwards it’s incredible.

If H1Bs were so destructive to the software industry, why would the software industry, which has the highest prevalence of H1Bs, be the industry with the highest growth in salaries for basically the past 2 decades?

Also, the idea that eliminating H1Bs will bring more jobs makes absolutely no sense.

If a company is asked to eliminate all their H1B positions, what do you think is more likely:

- they hire a completely new employee in the U.S. at a similar, or if the critics are right and H1B is suppressing salaries, higher salary, or

- they hire the exact same person but now with that person back in their home country and pay them a tiny fraction of what they were paying them in the U.S.?

There may be a handful of jobs where the employee needs to be in the U.S. where sure, a few more Americans will get jobs. But the overwhelming jobs will simply move abroad with the H1 employee, and along with that a whole bunch of dollars that were being spent within the U.S. and was paying US taxes will move abroad and be spent abroad and pay taxes abroad.

  • cudgy  1 day ago

    “why would the software industry, which has the highest prevalence of H1Bs, be the industry with the highest growth in salaries for basically the past 2 decades?”

    Maybe because that’s just not true? Salaries have generally been stagnant over the last 20 years in real terms for most in the industry.

    Most developers do not work at FAANG positions, and even those positions are only found in the extremely high cost of living areas like Silicon Valley.

    Companies are always free to hire people from wherever they want. However, it could be foreseeable that “American” companies that are largely overseas, maybe at a disadvantage when it comes to taxes or other benefits conferred by the US government. Such companies may find that their products are subject to tariffs when trying to sell those products back in the United States or other active measures to prevent offshore positions. There is a risk as section 147 changes already has shown.

  • qwertyuiop_  2 days ago

    I believe the American public’s appetite to disincentivize and tax the American companies that ship jobs overseas while simultaneously benefiting from the protection, infrastructure and US government contracts directly or indirectly will only increase in the coming years.

    • ben_w  2 days ago

      Easy to tax physical goods, hard to tax "underpaid" service work.

      Is DeepMind an American company? It's owned by Google, but it was founded in, and is still HQed in, the UK, but has offices worldwide. How much appetite do you recon Canada, France, Germany, and the UK have for America's trillion-dollar-club at this point?

      Now sure, you could demand any corporations selling in the US, even if not based there, hand over payroll etc. documents and then tax them at whatever the multiplier is to go from that country's salary to US salaries… if you don't mind that means some countries are banned by existing privacy laws from doing business with you, or that even this is easily gamed, or that American exceptionalism is increasingly overstaying its welcome.

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