Wonder if this is a coincidence that the other major discussion item on the front page is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45305845 (Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says) with the large majority seemingly disagreeing with the policy and sort encouraging ramping up H-1Bs and such since it's generally great for the country. But then I see a lot of young grads and unemployed laid off folks and am trying to figure out if and how the two issues are related.

Are people who look for jobs asking for too much money? They are not qualified enough and US just has no other way but to go for H-1B workers? It's hard to believe that.

Are companies playing various shenanigans with legal loopholes? I heard recently there was a database someone created of "hidden" jobs these companies post, where nobody would be likely to see them so they can turn around to Uncle Sam and say "oh well, looks like nobody wants to work here, we'll just have to go for H-1Bs".

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Wurdan 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The thing is pitching your salary lower doesn’t always make you more attractive as a candidate. If you’re going in lower than market rate then many recruiters start wondering about your past performance, confidence, etc.

As a hiring manager in a big company, salary isn’t really much of a consideration for me. The company has salary bands per role that I have very little control over. If a candidate is above that band and unwilling to come down, then I probably won’t even hear from our recruiters that that person applied. So in our process, somebody wouldn’t accidentally price themselves out of an opportunity.

So it’s possible that job seekers are making themselves uncompetitive via high salary demands, but I have my doubts whether its a major factor.

	▲	stego-tech 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I’d like to jump onto this real quick because of your last bit: > So it’s possible that job seekers are making themselves uncompetitive via high salary demands, but I have my doubts whether its a major factor. Generally, you’re hitting the nail on the head in the immediate. The only reason I landed on my feet after this Big Tech layoff cycle is because I ate a $25k/yr pay cut so I wouldn’t lose the remaining $150k/yr in salary at a new firm. That being said, the job market is irreparably broken at the moment, because of what you just mentioned about high salary demands. The high demands are due to higher costs, which employers aren’t willing to compensate for in salary. As the cost of everything goes up and labor gets let go, there’s this expectation for salaries to go down due to oversupply. This was correct in the era of the Great Recession, but people in all demographics other than the tippy top are out of breathing room. Everything is too expensive to survive on the subsistence wages being offered, and employers have responded by using AI tooling to automate what should really be a fully-human process (hiring), leading to clogs in the gears of the job cycle. Ultimately something must give, if the ruling powers don’t want to have riots. Either wages have to go up to meet the increased costs of housing, transport, food, healthcare, education, etc - the basic necessities of life - or those costs have to plummet by orders of magnitude that it’d be market-obliterating. It’s an easier pill to swallow to pay people more, but the pressure isn’t there to do so yet. For recruiters like yourself, I’m hoping you’re taking hard looks at the market fundamentals and cost of living, and applying pressure to compensation-makers to raise it upward now while the market is broken, rather than trying to catch up to their wiser competition when something snaps. It's cheaper to pay $20k more today, than $35k + recruiting fees tomorrow.