Comment by exabrial

I've been a tech manager for 21 years, much of that at a large Fortune 100 that had tens of thousands of employees from Infosys and TCS. The hourly rates we were charged for local workers on H1-B visas were $15-$30 less than we'd pay American contractors from body shops like Teksystems, and that is just what we were paying Infosys. The employee didn't see anywhere near that.

Compared to FTE the difference was even larger including benefits and vacation time.

The biggest issue though, is not the local people. The issue is that the local people are there to bridge the timezone and communication gaps so you can have three off-shore people for each on-shore. Offshore people were paid less than a third of on-shore. So the number of American jobs they are displacing, and the wages they were being replaced at, is absolutely staggering.

Maybe in real tech companies its a different story. The one time I did a direct H1-B sponsorship (later, in a much smaller company), we did pay them an equal wage.

The problem isn't just whether they're hiring below market. It's that market rates themselves are impacted by there being a whole underclass of workers who can't just freely move between jobs, and has to speedrun getting a new one if they ever lose their existing ones. The precarious nature of it makes an H1-B worker less likely to speak up about most things related to working conditions due to the precarious nature of the job. And that impacts everyone else -- because the fastest way to get a big raise is by getting a new job, so there's less incentive to pay people better if fewer workers can actually move around and you can threaten the ones that can purely through the existence of ones that can't.

I don't think the solution is just getting rid of them all -- actually a longer grace period (say, a year?) would make it easier to leave abusive employers. But it should include more scrutiny on whether employers really can't find local hires in the first place, or just aren't willing to train them or work with people that have even slightly more bargaining power.

Abuse of the H1-B program is broader than just hiring people for less money right now. It's also about hiring people who won't ask for more money over a longer timeline. It's about having a whole class of workers that is uniquely vulnerable to terrorist bosses, which then gives those employers more leverage over everyone else. And it's about the large-scale market manipulation that comes with having this easily accessible.

> Every single H1b employee I’ve seen comp for was comparable anyone else on the team at their same level.

This is exactly the problem. That reasoning alone is what allows companies to outsource to save money if you think on a larger scale. If systematically every company just says, oh we can't get American talent, but doesn't increase wages to incentivize for more local talent and simply hires abroad it stagnates wages for all. There is no incentive to raise effective wages if we can just continue bringing in more people for the same wage.

Let alone the fact that I am not convinced that we don't have enough talent for a good portion of the roles as advertised.

Research grade PhD level candidates doing novel work I can believe, but getting another person who writes more REST API's and dashboards or ETL jobs I refuse to believe.

> You’ll take these low wages and be happy about it or I’ll import a foreign worker who will be happy about it. And if they complain, I’ll have them deported.

>but I’ve never seen it to be true.

it's been true 100% of the places I've worked. I can't name names on the internet.

> the way budgeting for new hires and the hiring process works, the people actually deciding who to hire aren’t really incentivized to do that anyway.

Laughs in ESG. Companies stopped reporting this in 2024, but go look at prior year results compared to US demographics.

My $0.02 here is that AAPI and African applicants have crowded out ADOS and Hispanics when you look at corporate demographics.

> comp for was comparable anyone else on the team at their same level

You're so close to getting it... keep going...

I think the H1B process gets abused by body shops. Salaries are pretty demonstrably lower there than at many other tech companies.

At Big Tech almost everyone is normalized into salary bands by level and regardless of what you or your manager does, any discrepancy will eventually decay to level unless you get the formal promotion. They do this very deliberately, because they don't particularly trust their managers and don't want the organization to devolve into sucking up to get a raise. There isn't room for discrimination, and in many cases managers don't know your immigration status anyway (at the one I was at, we weren't supposed to ask, although it often became apparent because employees on visas would have to go home to renew, or they'd have questions about navigating company policies).

https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=microsoft+corporation&job=...

Idk if people don't realize you can look this up? Pay doesn't look suppressed to me....

If your "household name" company is more susceptible to scrutiny, they may not have as much of a pay gap and strictly rely on a the possibility of getting the employee sent back home if they don't contribute enough being the motivating factor. But odds are there are many sub-contractors that are through agencies that are significantly underpaying and you may have not been privy to the contracts through these parasite vendors.

sure, but there's the obvious counterfactual: if those engineers were scarcer, that level would likely be paid more

How about the contractors working for Microsoft?

and how much pressure do they feel to raise the band over time when theres a constant stream of people coming in form another country who accept anything presented because its still higher than back home

The problem with H1B and some of the other employment visas is its really difficult or impossible for the worker to change jobs. JD Vance calls them indentured servants. I suspect the situation for actual indentured servants is a bit worse but in any case the workers dont have a lot of options at their disposal. They cant just leave without losing their visa. So their “choice” to work for less money isn’t really a choice at all.

Now is the answer to make things worse, as they’ve been doing (removing the 60 day grace period after losing a job)? Or is it to liberalize the program. Maybe increase standards but make it easier for workers to move jobs?

H1B visa's are a modern form of indentured servitude. The employer knows you can't quit, and if they fire you, you have 6 weeks to somehow find a new job (which is already hard if you are a US citizen or green card holder) or you have to leave the country.

Because of this, H1B workers have no choice but to accept bad pay and working conditions.

Lower wages with the same quality is an MBA fantasy. The old saying "you get what you pay for" applies to tech as well as any other topic.

Paying people less because they came from somewhere else and can get away with it, sounds a bit exploitative to me.

The employer knows full well that they can pay workers on a visa for less and they have them on a metaphorical leash (in the UK it was 5 years before they could apply for permanent residency).

I've seen this happen personally, I've seen an English engineering manager keep the Indian employees behind by telling them they couldn't leave and he wouldn't have dared said the same thing to me and didn't.

One of the Indians (who I think lived in the UK for a while) said to me in the morning after the incident while we were grabbing a morning coffee "You can see now why the British had India for so long", I took that to mean that he thought that Indians are more placid. I have no idea if that is the case generally, but he certainly thought so.

Congratulations. Your trolling level is out of this world.

The most racist part of the program is the per country quotas. Right now they are granting EB3 for Indians who applied in 2014 while EB3 visa for the French from 2024. So that's an extra 10 years Indians are stuck in limbo. And, no, this is not just because there's more Indian's immigrating.

Let them and it is better that way anyway.

Huh, there are other Indian IT vendors in list like Tata, Wipro, Cognizant and Infosys. MS is not alone in this. It'd be payback if it was about Microsoft's business/contracting with government.

> I don't even really need protection from Infosys, but I do think that if Trump were serious about protecting me he would start with large companies where the median H1B salary is under six figures. Not making an example of a company that may objectively not even be a bad actor when you look at their salary ranges.

Enforcing existing regulations and supplying the resources for the agency to effectively audit the already existing category of H-1B-dependent employers (https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62c-h1b-depende... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B-dependent_employer ) could be an approach taken.