Microsoft: 'To fill 6,000 jobs, we'll pay $10K per visa'
theregister.co.ukIt's utterly fucked how restrictive and exploitative the US immigration system really is.
It cost me about $5000 of my own money and a year and a half of my own time to become a permanent resident of Australia, with no advanced degree and no cash reserve needed. That route is literally impossible for potential U.S. immigrants. You either have to marry your way in, play the greencard lottery, have a PhD, or buy your way in via an investor-class visa.
The alternative, if you can get one, is an H1-B visa that ties you to a single employer who's free to take full advantage of your situation for half a decade. And this is what Microsoft wants more of.
5 years is unrealistic unless you have a graduate degree and do not come from India or China.
The H1-B is not tied to a single employer. But it only allows one month in case of lay off.
There is no 'grace' period of 1 month, it is technically 0 days after job loss or H1B expiry. However, when you enter the US, the Immigration officer at the airport may choose to give you a few days in addition to your H1B expiry date. That said, it is unlikely they will prosecute a H1B holder, if he overstays for a month or so.
IMHO the H1-B visa should have a scheme like allowing 3 months for every every year worked. Since many tech jobs are filled for 2-4 years, that would give people 6-12 months to find something new.
Out of curiosity, how much does it cost a company to takeover an existing visa?
Aren't there restrictions on switching companies once your GC application has been filed?
> If a foreign worker in H-1B status quits or is dismissed from the sponsoring employer, the worker must either apply for and be granted a change of status to another non-immigrant status, find another employer (subject to application for adjustment of status and/or change of visa), or leave the US.
this is total bs. MS has a massive work force of contract workers who are paid poorly and get treated worse and i am pretty certain that other companies do the same. If they took that 10k ($60m usd total)bounty and applied it to legit training in the US they would have a better, cheaper, and more loyal workforce and the money would stay local.
This notion that we have to hire over-seas is not correct at all and while I am all in favor or the immigration of foreign skill/knowledge/work ethic into the US, to call it a 'crisis' is nothing more than a publicity stunt to pull attention away from the fact that they are outsourcing jobs when they could be paying that money into the local economies.
I worked at a bank. We needed a team of six people with advanced and specific skills. We could only find four. We tried to import two more. Computer at immigration said no. So we cancelled the offer to the four and hired six in Singapore. That unit has now grown to twenty-five of which five had to be pulled in from India. That's how reality works.
The reality is, if they are low-pay contractors, they are probably not in possession of skills that would make them worth the cost and risk of hiring full time. Labor laws protecting less in-demand workers is another issue all together.
A one-off $10K fee per hire is chump change, compared to the alternative: if your H1-B costs 50K per year + 10K one-off, he's still much cheaper than a US-based developer who wants 60K per-year -- and that's not exactly the top going rate.
Corporations understand Marx much better than workers ever did.
Microsoft doesn't pay that low. Here's[1] some data from 2 years back. Friend of mine got over 100k last year, they treat H1-B holders well.
And what's the cost of a developer leaving after 6 months for better opportunities? Periodic raises are part of overall costs, and again a locked-in visa-holder is cheaper to "maintain" in that regard.
You're neglecting the salary of the employee that you hired in that, aren't you? The 60k are on top of the salary you're paying, which would typically be comparable to the US-based developer's.
Companies don't hire people on H1B to save money, but because they are starving for talent.
EDIT: Sorry, didn't understand that you referred to the employee's salary with the 50K. Are you assuming that H1B employees are payed less in general?
What? - US developer salary: 60k per year (cheap areas etc etc). Over three years: 180k. - Foreign visa: 50k per year + 10k one off. Over three years: 160k.
And of course, the foreigner is locked into the company for X years, whereas a local can piss off after three months.
Note: I say that as an Italian-born UK resident who looked into the US visa system and found it, er, suboptimal for everyone involved except corporations.
Oh, so you've looked into the H1-B system
But do you know anyone that's actually employed like that?
I know several
- None of them get payed less than their colleagues
- They are usually already at the "top of the chain", it's difficult for new/better job opportunities to show up. Inside the US it may be more difficult, surely, but they have no problem leaving the job and going elsewhere (and H1-B is a little less restrictive in swapping jobs than some work permits in Europe)
One of the main issues today is the time it takes to apply for a Green Card, some of them are in their nth H1-B renewal now with little perspective of getting a Green Card
I worked on a H1B for 9 years before getting my Green Card and I saw two types of people working on H1B - people that were adequate for their jobs for which the company did not find enough people (qualified ones not the under/overqualified) and extraordinary people with specific skills in high demand. Both class were paid reasonably well, above average salaries.
If we are using anecdotal evidence, I knew several paid less than their colleagues at my last job. And they were hired, because of that very reason, cheaper restricted labor. Its not hard for me to imagine in a country where labor force has been at odds with employers the last 30 years that employers would want to import in cheaper labor. India has been exporting cheap labor for the past 200 years, in fact its part of the Tata and Infosys business model here. Using the guise of an engineering shortage goes over a lot better than saying lets suppress wages by importing talent.
Well, if they go to work for Tata or other similar SW sweatshops, that's an issue they should have investigated before taking that job.
Today there's Glassdoor (and others) and not knowing if your salary is competitive or not should be a factor in accepting a job overseas.
Especially in SW engineering good labour != cheap labour.
So we are going to ignore the 800lb gorilla? We will ignore the fact these firms which are the largest applicants for visas are being investigated by the FBI. And conversely think that Microsoft is doing this not for cheap labor, and there is no PR spin whatsoever around the 'Engineering Shortage' topic. I couldn't buy that.
No, it's not to be ignored, if the FBI is investigating that's a start
But just don't throw away the H1-B system altogether
It is not legal to underpay H1Bs. They literally should not be able to fill those positions with Americans if they are complaining about this.
I'm curious to know which sort of rocket science Microsoft does that is not taught at US universities.
Of course they are unable to fill positions at a given salary level. It's quite hard to find tomato-pickers at slave-like wages.
I don't think you're fully informed. Sometimes it's difficult to get qualified applicants at all, at any salary level. A lot of developers are more interested in the specifics of the job, product, company etc. than the salary (once it meets a certain minimum floor); and for other jobs, the specific knowledge and experience needed is very scarce. If there are 20 people qualified for a job and 21 open positions, no salary level is going to fill all the positions.
I had a H-1B visa once upon a time, but I never moved to the US. The company wanted me to, but I preferred London to Santa Cruz. Didn't stop me working for the company remotely, paid out of their UK sales office. Now I don't know what proportion of H-1Bs are like that - a global search to fill a local position - but it's definitely non-zero.
(The reason I'm pushing back on this is because I don't want HN to be a happy home for the same sad sack of devs Slashdot hosted when I last frequented there some years ago; "dey took our jerbs" was a constant refrain any time H-1B came up.)
Oh, I dunno. American software hiring is blatantly broken. I've been there, I've seen it, submitting my resume half a dozen times to the same companies to finally get an interview and, yes, eventually, a job offer.
But the first five times being told that the company has no matches for me.
Meanwhile, the company complains it can't find engineers.
How many Comp Sci or related discipline students do the US universities graduate every year? How much is the demand? How many of those graduates are from other countries and need VISA to work?
How do you know what skills Microsoft needs and why do you assume they pay slave wages?
I could not agree with you more. It's literally part of the business model for consulting firms here.
It might not be legal, but it's easy to do.
marx is not synonymous with arithmetic (or even basic bookkeeping).
Nothing to do with that; it's about harnessing the reserve army of labour, which is practically unlimited at global scale.
Why do work visas even have to cost this much? I understand US is going through a job crisis, but I fear it's getting too protectionist. Protectionism never has good results in the long term.
So, what's being proposed here is a tax on fairly rich people who can't vote. For "should", it shouldn't cost anything, or, at least, not more than a turist visa (I think ETSA is something like $14).
There is some sense in the idea that the native population should be protected against unfair competition, but there is no evidence that this is the issue - Microsoft (and many other tech companies) legitimately can't fill these jobs, so there's literally no downside to opening the floodgates [of eligible H1-Bs].
i don't know how they can't fill these jobs. There are 12 million people out of work, you telling me MS can't figure out a win-win solution?
Let's see. At 6000 positions and 12 million out of work, you only need to skim off the top 0.05% of the workless to fill these position. Since Microsoft is willing to pay $10k for the visa alone, that is, not including other recruitment expenses, surely you can charge a fee of $10,000 for each referral, and make a total killing as a recruitment agent for Microsoft.
In other words: basic economics disagrees with your assertion.
how did you arrive at that? are you implying that if it was feasible it would be done already?
Microsoft could invest 40-50k a year into people who qualify for retraining either in house or at local universities and still come out ahead.
This implies it would be profitable for you to loan these people $40 to $50k to get this training and then (a) profit off the loans and (b) turn around and sell the finished product (the upgraded workforce) to Microsoft. It's the logic of subprime houses for subprime people (or, more sensitively, the diamond in the rough mindset).
> are you implying that if it was feasible it would be done already?
You brought up the fact that there are 12 million workless, as a counter to Microsoft's desire to hire H1-B labor. If that's not to suggest they could fill those positions, what's the relevancy?
> Microsoft could invest 40-50k a year into people who qualify for retraining either in house or at local universities and still come out ahead.
Uhm, 40-50k a year is more expensive than full-time Harvard tuition. That does change the argument a little bit.
cool, so MS can send 6000 people to harvard for a CS degree while having them work on some menial code/internship in the mean time.
Yes, that's at least 12 times more expensive then the $10k.
but its half as much as the yearly cost of a hiring a new dev.
There's a number missing from your calculations: the cash value to an unscrupulous employer of having an employee who is utterly beholden to them in the way an H1B is but a citizen/resident alien is not.
You've nailed it. As a highly skilled foreigner who's looking to emigrate, most employment visas in the countries I've looked at effectively force you to become a slave to the company sponsoring you for at least 5 years before you can even begin claiming residence status; the H-1B visa is one such visa [1].
Whilst that may be okay if you're in your early 20s or from a country with very limited options, for an older person with greater skills living a relatively good life (e.g. a high-level contractor in South Africa) it's not particularly appealing as the cost-benefit analysis isn't very positive.
Ironically, these are probably precisely the people you want emigrating to your country - people with a proven track record who are ready to settle down and want to create a future for their immediate family, spending and investing everything they earned in the same country -- not young people who have nothing to lose and will probably send the bulk of their earnings back out of the country to their families in poorer nations, and who will potentially bring the rest of their (non-skilled) family in on family visa arrangements. (Of course this is somewhat a generalization, but I think on average it holds true.)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Criticisms_of_the_pro...
From the link:
Historically, H-1B holders have sometimes been described as indentured servants, and while the comparison is no longer as compelling, it had more validity prior to the passage of American Competitiveness in the Twenty-First Century Act of 2000.
And in the section on American Competitiveness in the Twenty-First Century Act of 2000:
Because of AC21, the H-1B employee is free to change jobs if they have an I-485 application pending for six months and an approved I-140, if the position they are moving to is substantially comparable to their current position. In some cases, if those labor certifications are withdrawn and replaced with PERM applications, processing times will improve, but the person will also lose their favorable priority date. In those cases, employers' incentive to attempt to lock in H-1B employees to a job by offering a green card is reduced, because the employer bears the high legal costs and fees associated with labor certification and I-140 processing, but the H-1B employee is still free to change jobs.
An I-485 is "Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status". You can only apply for an I-485 after 5 years of residency. That means after 5.5 years you may freely change jobs - to a similar position. For those 5.5 years you're still vulnerable to discriminatory treatment. I'm not sure if "similar position" means you could form your own company.
If I were 21 again - no brainer. Unfortunately I'm nearly 30 and would be setting myself backwards if I did it now. It makes more sense to spend time establishing myself locally and using that to put myself into a more favourable negotiating position with a sponsor in the future with respect to emigration. Alternatively I may choose a country with more sensible emigration policies (e.g. Australia, UK if they reinstate their highly skilled migrant quota) and then the US loses out.
As far as I can tell, you can submit the I-140 immediately after arrival, processing takes about 6 months if you don't apply for "premium processing". Then you can apply for I-485, which then needs to be pending for 6 months - ie. you're only stuck for a year. But I could be wrong?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Permanent_Residen...
Hmmm if that's the way it works that's a very positive change, although it's very different from other countries (where you can only apply for permanent residency after a number of years of actual residency) so I wonder if we're seeing the proper picture here. Finding simplified requirements is pretty difficult.
Your first link does indicate that the backlog for EB-3 category applications is 6-9 years. So in that time you presumably must be working and wouldn't e.g. be able to start your own company (which is something I'd want to do by age 35), and you'd still be at the mercy of companies who know you're an emigrant so they can pay you less. It doesn't look like you can apply for residency in the EB-2 category as a programmer unless a masters or above is a requirement for the job (i.e. Google is hiring you).
Overall the situation for older migrants is still not very good and while the US would be my first choice it still seems better to emigrate elsewhere or to wait until I'm more established and I qualify under a category with a much shorter backlog (after which it's another 5 years for naturalisation, whereas in other countries you're looking at 5-7 years TOTAL).
One serious potential problem: apparently the old employer can revoke your I-140 (if you change companies) and you lose your priority date if that happens. [1] Also all of this assume your sponsor is going to file the I-140 on your behalf. What if they promise to do it and then don't? You're still at their mercy.
[1] http://www.immigration.com/faq/us-green-card/form-i-140#t101...
Thats right, however on your second link you can see the dates for China, India, Mexico and Philippines are backlogged for many years, as these countries are the source of most immigrants.
You're the first one to hit on the real reason: these workers are stuck with Microsoft as an employer for years. If they quit, they have to leave the country.
This basically buys Microsoft six thousand wage slaves, in the very most literal sense of the term.
The H1B system is a textbook case study in regulatory capture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
Read my reply to lusr. Your use of the word "literal" isn't exactly warranted.
For certain values of "utterly". The willingness and ability to sponsor H1-Bs is the norm, rather than the exception, in larger tech companies.
All the political chestbeating -protecting America against foreign labor - seems pretty silly when discussing skilled jobs like software. Its like, you're in a lifeboat and trying to get to shore and 3 rowers short. People are clamoring to get into your boat - first thing, you ask them what country they're from? WTF?
Lets draw a new political circle containing everybody/anybody who can program. Lets call it New Abrainica. Let them all have free visas wherever they wish on the planet. How does this hurt anyone? Oh sure, temporarily some lame spot will have trouble getting someone to move there to work. But now they can also move the job to where the programmers are! Or get remote workers.
Hey, this already sort of happens. So what's the real issue? I'm not sure, but this conversation keeps coming up.
On the upside there are more visas, the side effect is it makes it harder for early startups to hire H1Bs due to the increased cost. 10K for the H1 plus 15K for the green card. Usually both are done together or really close since you need a green card application in place to extend an H1 past 6 years. That's 25K per employee only for processing vs ~ 2K today.
What do people think about making companies pay a significant premium salary (25%) to H1-B visa holders over US citizens? Seems like this would allay concerns over companies using H1-B visas to keep salaries down. Basically companies would use H1-B visas when an equivalent people cannot be hired domestically. If this approach works then maybe eliminating caps is possible, since it should be a somewhat self-correcting system.
How many years could pass, until they will figure out and develop a the same development process that brings Linux kernel and other wonders to us - a collaboration of engineers around the globe?
But wait, that means all you need is gcc, emacs, git sometimes ssh and internet connection and Paypall (sic.) account? How could they sell all that disconnected from reality, bloated crap they produce, spending billions per year?
The answer is quite easy - in order to get 200+k salaries and bonuses managers must maintain this bloated hierarchy and fabric-style sweatshops. Otherwise, who needs them?
But the real question is - why we still care about MS? Who cares about old Nokia phones or Delphi or Java or things like Novell Netware?))