This chart is entirely misleading. In any given year, there are only 85k new H1B visas. That's it, it has not grown nor shrunk.
Reason for increase in population shown here is H1B renewals. Normally the way this works is H1Bs convert to permanent residents, but due to the country caps, Indian/Chinese H1B holders keep renewing their visas contributing to this increase. Again these are people who are already here and got their approval sometime in the past, so its not like in 2022, companies collectively hired 685,117 (which is also why you see the decrease in 2023 since due to covid, a very little bit of backlog for residency cleared).
(Not to mention the sentiment of comments here is entirely disappointing, but I guess that's the vibe these days)
I think every time the topic of H1B comes on HN, a lot of people have a lot of opinions, but don’t fully understand the immigration system. Like you correctly pointed out, the increase in H1Bs in the country is mostly contributed by the fact that country caps force some nationalities to permanently stay on H1B while others can naturalize faster. There are hundreds of thousands of people who come into the country every year through other visas (and also on H1B from other countries) and naturalize and take up jobs in the country. But that doesn’t matter because they are now US citizens.
If people from India/China were allowed to naturalize as fast as other countries, you’d not have the chart of number of H1Bs grow in the country.
if people from India and China were allowed to naturalize as fast things would spiral out of control. I know it's not a popular thing to say on this forum, but H1B visas are absolutely a wage control mechanism for US corporations even if that's not the spirit of the law. Note that I'm also an immigrant.
There’s a lot to be said about “spiraling out of control”. You could argue it’s fair for everyone. But you could also argue that a country like China which is as big as Europe gets the same amount of green cards as Luxembourg. You could argue there will be less diversity, but then you’d be arguing that the French and the Italian cultures are very different from each other, but people from NorthEast India are the same as people from South of India culturally and ethnically.
Anyway, if we are so concerned about “not letting things go out of control”. A simple solution is also to set those country caps on the H1B program. There can be other solutions and the conversation can be a lot more nuanced but HN is not the forum for it when it comes to the topic of H1B.
The problem would disappear, but they would disappear to India or one of the other offshoring countries. I however agree that the pay needs to be AT LEAST the median salary for the position to avoid abuse.
Tax the American companies that focus their hiring efforts abroad. Just another tariff. They will generate the people they need in this country by lunch time.
For companies like Google, H1B isn’t about bringing into US, it is just an expensive way to satisfy their US hiring hunger.
That difference can be understood by imagining that H1B isn’t foreign devs, instead it is devs grown in a jar by the State Department - Google would buy them the same.
Exactly. In liberal cities I have lived in, it is almost always the earlier immigrants that resent and denigrate the later immigrants. It's pure gatekeeping. Like "I suffered during the immigration process and therefore you have to suffer at least as much as I have, or it isn't fair." Or like "the recent immigrants aren't as hardworking as older ones and they don't deserve immigration."
I get that there are probably loopholes in the law. But then the solution is to fix the loopholes and tighten enforcement. Give DoL access to IRS data. Improve the definition of prevailing wages. A lot of things can be done to fix H1B so that it behaves like how it's intended.
DOL does have the data to determine prevailing wages. In fact the wages reported in the application for H1B is often lower than what the immigrant is getting paid because DOL does not accept bonuses and RSUs and other options as guaranTeed wage. So you could have an H1B petition with $200k but in reality they could be earning $300k+ with bonuses and RSUs.
Paying prevailing wage doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the salary a company would have paid/are paying to American workers in the same role. Three-fifths of h-1b jobs are certified at the two lowest prevailing wage levels and the median age of an h-1b beneficiary is 33 years old.
I feel like the situation for US citizens would improve if they were allowed to naturalize. Their wages would go up and companies wouldn’t have the relatively cheaper labor pool to constantly draw from.
This is another mistake what people make when describing H1Bs. Yes there are abuses where bad actors abuse the system and undercut the local wages. But a huge portion of the annual H1B allocation goes to people who are not the “cheaper labor pool”. They get paid the same wages AND the companies spend additional money to the order of thousands of dollars to sponsor the visa. Google is not hiring H1Bs on a cheaper rate. They still get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.
But I do agree with the theory that allowing a lot of these H1Bs would be a net benefit for the economy. A lot of people who naturalize end up leaving jobs and starting businesses that employ more people. We should be encouraging that, but instead the system actively discourages that.
it's not a mistake because it's what ends up happening. There's serious research on it that everyone seems to want to ignore: https://www.nber.org/papers/w23153
If they’re not a cheaper labor pool then the only reason companies wouldn’t hire them over citizens is because they are tied to the company. This would also be solved by naturalization.
Any iteration of this turns out to be better for US citizens if they’re are naturalized.
Not to mention that 50% of all unicorns in the US are started by immigrants, like 60% of those by specifically Indians.
mariel boatlift study found that even with a 7% short-term supply shock to labor concentrated in only miami in only low wage work led to no disruption in either employment or wages: https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/mariel-impact.pdf
lump of labor simply never happens. I know it's fashionable to say 'wage suppression' but wages mostly reflect productivity in competitive AND deregulated markets!
>There are hundreds of thousands of people who come into the country every year through other visas (and also on H1B from other countries) and naturalize and take up jobs in the country. But that doesn’t matter because they are now US citizens.
What you seem to be saying is that the problem is worse than we think for natives because of these immigrants dropping off of stats after they become citizens. Of course I think this myself. It doesn't matter if you make these people citizens so much, the point is that their effect on the job market is independent of citizenship.
Raising awareness of issues is the main way democracy (and probably all functional forms of government) works. Talking about it does that, even though it might seem to do nothing. Everything else costs money.
> In any given year, there are only 85k new H1B visas.
Minor nitpick, but if you get an H-1 visa to work at a university, it's not part of that 85K limit.
But yes, your point is valid. And the headline is editorialized - they cherry picked the year 2011, because it's the lowest. It was the lowest because we were knee deep in the financial crisis, and many companies suspended/reduced their reliance on foreign labor precisely because they'd have a hard time convincing the government that they couldn't find a qualified local.
What about cap-exempt H1Bs? There are tons of new companies which streamlined the process and which are offering "nearly-guaranteed H1B with no lottery"
A cap-exempt H-1B doesn't let you work for a "company".
Only universities, university-affiliated nonprofits, nonprofit research organizations, and government research organizations can sponsor one. Furthermore, even after you obtain a cap-exempt H-1B, you would be required to go through the lottery like anyone else if you want to work at an employer subject to the H-1B cap.
I understand there are some exceptions made for academic institutions so these companies employ people into a "participating university" for a token number of hours per month, person comes in and once they are in the country they can pursue different opportunities to get employed and change their status.
This cap-exempt H1B bypasses lottery, can be obtained in about 3 months any time during the year.
No, it's not. The limit of new is universally capped at 85k. They can request as many applications as they want. The lottery still only picks a total of 85k
They were not because in a layoff you cannot prefer a specific protected category like race, gender, age AND nationality.
The 9000 number is also a global number which includes layoffs in countries all over the world.
The argument “9000 US workers were fired and X visa applications were applied for” is also very reductive. The layoffs were in gaming, sales and other divisions, meanwhile the visa applications were for people who either already are on visas in other divisions like engineering and are continuing their status or for people in newer positions that have nothing to do with sales or gaming.
No, you're wrong too. The 20k is the Master's cap, only applicable to students who did a Master's or above in the US. Cap exempt refers to H1bs granted to US/State employers, who can get H1bs for employees without any cap whatsoever, and at any time of the year.
It's misleading because it says "The H-1B program grew...", which to many implies that it was doing more immigration. It wasn't. There was less naturalization.
The chart says "H-1B Population Estimate". The chart is not at all misleading.
The first line of the tweet might be misleading. Although I also disagree that it is, because it's accompanied by a well-labeled chart, so you don't have to infer a meaning; it's spelled out right there!
I think the argument was that it has nothing to do with it, companies don't sit and follow a rule that prioritizes hiring H1Bs (talking about companies like Facebook here). In fact there are quite possibly a ridiculous number of steps in hiring an employee on visa.
What is alleged in the lawsuit seems purely self preservation, if FB doesn't jump through the hoops of getting PERM certified for the employee, they are going to leave and go to another company which does that. (Saying this without making a larger comment on immigration policies of USA)
I don’t know why but your assumption that others are skating by with what they know rubbed me the wrong way (maybe because I have been on other side of this). There are likely many other valid reasons here - project deadlines (sometimes it is not the right time to pick a new language), consistency of code (having a mix of languages is going to raise hell in code reviews with opinions on some code that could be done better in one language vs other), hiring (does your hiring/onboarding get more complex?), writing idiomatic code (learning a new programming language is easy but writing good code is hard), extreme swing in brevity (people abusing new languages to write concise code using obscure language features, which makes it hard for someone new to jump in).
I am sorry I don’t have any suggestions to fix your problem but I just wanted to provide a bit of perspective. Maybe try thinking from your peers perspective to see what benefits adopting this new language would give and be prepared to answer why Kotlin among a whole class of JVM languages - Scala, Kotlin, Groovy, Clojure.
It’s a very small company and I’m the lead developer. I know exactly what is being worked on and what timelines are involved. The replies I got when I suggested all of this was something akin to “Why now and not before? Why this project and not the others?” Even though the majority of what we work on was originally developed prior to Kotlin going 1.0 and I had already laid out my reasoning. It felt like excuses due to simply not wanting to learn and maintain something new simply because they didn’t see any benefit, even though I also explained the benefits in my original suggestion.
Thanks for your thoughts, though, I’ll take them into account.
I wouldn't recommend this website for visa information. For example, I put in "United States" -> "Peru" - it says visa is required and when clicked on more information it takes me to a page where it lists which countries require visa for traveling to Peru. In that list among the visa required countries, it shows "united states" and in no visa required section it has "united statesa"
I found "Designing Data-Intensive Application" book to be really helpful introduction to learning more interesting details about distributed systems. The book provides a gentle introduction to build intuition around these systems and contains a plethora of links to go further down the rabbit hole.
It's about 1000x better than "Designing Distributed Systems" which is basically just a book about Kubernetes. (Should have known, since its written by Brendan Burns).
Just to provide an alternate perspective here, this seems to tilt the incentives towards people that are not working already. I wonder how many folks have time to take a week or more off from their current job to participate in this exercise. I understand this is paid but its still a huge risk that candidates would be taking.
This is embarrassing: if they are too afraid to actually re-style it for a day (with all potential losses), then they shouldn't bother with a static image. Sometimes you get too big to be cool.
I completely disagree. They run a system that is arguably very complex. I would not want to restyle my entire app (for a day) (so people like you would approve of it). They took something that was low risk, made it happen across the board, reliably. Site still works. It drums up chatter around offices. Makes people visit. Enjoy your misery.
"Russian-speaking users can choose between the standard Russian version and two extras: a Soviet version and a Pre-Revolutionary version. Other than language tweaks (e.g. telegrams for messages and comrades for friends) these versions contain other easter eggs. For example, all private messages in the Soviet version have a stamp saying 'passed server censorship'. The pre-revolutionary version uses old-style Russian orthography. Both extra versions are also ad-free."
Amazon is naturally much bigger, but VK is not a small fry either.
Hey, I actually thought it was an April Fools joke as well, but then realized that we've gotten to the point where it is crucial to have 1 day delivery for toilet paper...Honestly, it's cool, but from a sense of self-pride...no. This is how civilizations collapse...let's be honest.
> This is how civilizations collapse...let's be honest.
You're right, it's a little known fact that the cause for downfall of the Roman empire was the ability to order personal hygiene products using a button placed in people's home!
> Note: You may need to increase your iPhone volume, since Dash Button uses ultrasonic tones to sync with your iPhone during setup. If prompted, drag the volume slider to the recommended level, at or above where it says Best.
I actually wrote a library that does this, FSK to WAV and back is just a few lines of code, and fairly reliable. There are even Javascript libraries that can do it.
I think it probably is real, it just shouldn't be. :-/
No reason it shouldn't be. Brilliant idea: put a "reorder consumable product" right where you will be the moment you realize you need to reorder a particular consumable product. Running low on laundry detergent? TP? fabric softener? trash bags? push button. You walk away from that location, you'll immediately forget you needed to order (which means drive to store or fiddle with browser). Devices can be built dirt cheap now: button, minimal wifi, ease setup via (yes) nigh-unto-free microphone. App gathers requests, confirms them (my first thought was "great, kids sit there pushing button and order 137 bottles of Tide"), done, product arrives in 24/48 hours.
The be vendors that offer the buttons for their products are probably financing the whole thing. They'll also be the ones paying for the buttons, as opposed to customers. Imagine how great it would be for a paper towel company to make buying its towels a single button press (with high coolness factor) whereas any other brand would require a trip to the store, or at least 2 minutes to order on amazon.
They could just automatically include the device in some shipments.
Possibly overrating the green field Amazon has left. I can't imagine any less than a savage disregard for Amazon's half-assed retro April fool's joke around my office. YMMV.
Precisely what I was thinking, I wonder what's all the discussion about, the MOM will be inserted into a highly elliptical orbit around Mars, with a planned periapsis of 365 km (227 mi) and apoapsis of 80,000 km (50,000 mi) [1]. It will not even come close Mars's atmosphere. Wouldn't that take contamination out of the question completely?
You keep moving the goal post. ISRO delivered some fantastic stuff on a very low budget, this is not about whether ISRO will be able to compete in future or not. Infact going by the current prices posted on SpaceX website and the amount it took for this orbiter mission, it is indeed very competitive
Reason for increase in population shown here is H1B renewals. Normally the way this works is H1Bs convert to permanent residents, but due to the country caps, Indian/Chinese H1B holders keep renewing their visas contributing to this increase. Again these are people who are already here and got their approval sometime in the past, so its not like in 2022, companies collectively hired 685,117 (which is also why you see the decrease in 2023 since due to covid, a very little bit of backlog for residency cleared).
(Not to mention the sentiment of comments here is entirely disappointing, but I guess that's the vibe these days)