For reference, I was an H-1B holder. My starting salary (straight out of college after finishing my master's) in one of the big tech companies was $95k base pay, this was 13 years ago. From my perspective, the visa program worked as intended.
13 years ago you should have been ineligible by both base salary and scarcity, until you were a senior architect in some specific niche and commanded a greater base salary
Or on a different work visa
Exhibit a b and c
I’m not saying you aren’t supposed to be here, I’m saying fix that program. The US shouldn’t be training talent and kicking them out. We should be training and keeping talent.
If I recall correctly, just my base was 20-30% higher than the prevailing wage that the government publishes (big tech bubble people forget how wages look like outside of big tech). In exchange, my employer hired someone with a graduate degree that knew C/C++ well enough to contribute immediately (I also did an internship with them a year prior).
> 13 years ago you should have been ineligible by both base salary and scarcity
I disagree. I don't believe my wage was lower than what a US candidate would get (from what I've seen at big tech, HR dictates wage brackets so same position translates to roughly same wage) and it is more expensive for a company to hire internationally. To me this means that they were unable to fill the position domestically. Later in my career I was involved in interviewing and the candidates were barely able to code (small sample size though) so either I was unlucky (after all, a lot of people apply even when they maybe shouldn't; some may have had a bad day), or the talent pool is indeed pretty small. I guess systems programming is a specific enough niche?
> I’m not saying you aren’t supposed to be here, I’m saying fix that program. The US shouldn’t be training talent and kicking them out. We should be training and keeping talent.
H1B was the only option available to me that allowed me to kick off the naturalization process so no issues there for me as well.
yieldcrv|1 month ago
13 years ago you should have been ineligible by both base salary and scarcity, until you were a senior architect in some specific niche and commanded a greater base salary
Or on a different work visa
Exhibit a b and c
I’m not saying you aren’t supposed to be here, I’m saying fix that program. The US shouldn’t be training talent and kicking them out. We should be training and keeping talent.
H1B doesn’t do that well either.
bialpio|1 month ago
If I recall correctly, just my base was 20-30% higher than the prevailing wage that the government publishes (big tech bubble people forget how wages look like outside of big tech). In exchange, my employer hired someone with a graduate degree that knew C/C++ well enough to contribute immediately (I also did an internship with them a year prior).
> 13 years ago you should have been ineligible by both base salary and scarcity
I disagree. I don't believe my wage was lower than what a US candidate would get (from what I've seen at big tech, HR dictates wage brackets so same position translates to roughly same wage) and it is more expensive for a company to hire internationally. To me this means that they were unable to fill the position domestically. Later in my career I was involved in interviewing and the candidates were barely able to code (small sample size though) so either I was unlucky (after all, a lot of people apply even when they maybe shouldn't; some may have had a bad day), or the talent pool is indeed pretty small. I guess systems programming is a specific enough niche?
> I’m not saying you aren’t supposed to be here, I’m saying fix that program. The US shouldn’t be training talent and kicking them out. We should be training and keeping talent.
H1B was the only option available to me that allowed me to kick off the naturalization process so no issues there for me as well.
pandaman|1 month ago