I was once brought in to a Fortune500 company to teach basic ENTRY LEVEL web development to a room full of supposedly "highly educated" H-1B Software Engineers.

Much of my presentation included things that most of my unemployed American colleagues, all of whom were actively looking for work, already knew how to do implicitly. Because it literally was just basic, "This is how flexbox works"-type of stuff.

Maybe the H-1B program is a great program for hospitals. For tech, it is 100% being used to import cheap, disposable labor in a way that harms U.S. citizens economically.

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roarcher 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

H1B workers are supposed to be people with qualifications that are in short supply in the United States. The unspoken part is that the "qualification" employers are so desperately searching for is usually the willingness to work for peanuts.

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Balinares 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Isn't H-1B contingent on compensation in line with the local median for the role?

	▲	redserk 10 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		After graduating college I joined a company that paid generally below-market for everyone and had a significant number of H-1B employees and contractors. The benefits were legendary but the pay was 20-30% lower than what was around. I don’t have evidence of wrongdoing but I’ve occasionally wondered if it was some kind of scheme.
	▲	_rm 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It is contingent on you documenting your going through the motions of pretending to keep compensation in line with "the local median".

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pessimizer 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This has been "proven wrong" by geniuses pointing out that Americans who work in the same jobs as the H1Bs are also making peanuts.

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Saline9515 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Then restricting the supply of workers ready to work for peanuts will force companies to raise their salaries to hire.

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TechnicalVault 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Or if the job is an outsourceable one that can be provided as a service then they will outsource it to a company overseas and still pay peanuts. The only reason they'll raise wages is if they have to, aka the service cannot be done elsewhere or automated.

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Saline9515 2 hours ago | parent [-]

A lot of jobs require or are better done on-premises, which is why they hire H1-Bs. Outsourcing is already cheaper, by far, especially if you want to go to the third-world.

	▲	fancyfredbot an hour ago \| parent [-]
		A lot of people really hate RTO and love WFH

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thatfrenchguy an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Maybe the H-1B program is a great program for hospitals. For tech, it is 100% being used to import cheap, disposable labor in a way that harms U.S. citizens economically

And yet, Apple, Google, Nvidia, Meta and Amazon would never be where they are without folks who are or who started on H-1B. A ton of their senior staff were once 20-something hired on H1B

Crackdown on the abuse of outsourcing companies, let actual tech workers who are (or will be) good at their jobs come here, it’s obvious policy. The US has benefited immensely from that brain drain.

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trhway 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> For tech, it is 100% being used to import cheap, disposable labor in a way that harms U.S. citizens economically.

I'd argue with the 100% - we all know the companies that do it. They get about half of H1B visas. So 50% :)

The blanket $100K (instead of say tiering it like raising fee $50K for each next 20K tier of visas with the $250K fee visas no subject to the cap - if only Tramp knew anything about business and specifically price differentiation :) would definitely revive interest for outsourcing to offshore.

Managing AI agents have some similarity to managing offshore teams. This time the offshore teams will be using AI agents. May probably lead to much higher performance/output.

Being rate limited, i'll answer to the commenter below here: The offshore teams are naturally assigned a well defined chunks of work, at least in a well managed situations. AI agents are also very suitable for that.

	▲	lucyjojo 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> This time the offshore teams will be using AI agents. May probably lead to much higher performance. What do you mean exactly by that. I do not follow...
	▲	franktankbank 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Ahh, so its as simple has having a well managed situation. Easy enough to outsource then. LETS GOOOO!