[dentemple]

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.

[roarcher]

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.

[Balinares]

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

[pessimizer]

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

[_DeadFred_]

This. The problem for H1B advocates is most of us here reached our conclusions AFTER exposure to outsourcing/consulting and what H1-Bs got us/the new people we had to manage. Lots of us were also privy to managements' reasoning (cutting costs/your team is the most expensive and we don't want to pay that) which don't align with 'H1Bs are paid the same'.

[trhway]

> 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.

[franktankbank]

Ahh, so its as simple has having a well managed situation. Easy enough to outsource then. LETS GOOOO!

[lucyjojo]

> 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...

[d_sem]

My equally anecdotal professional experience has been the exact opposite and certainly influences my view on this topic.

[thatfrenchguy]

> 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.