In USA there are more software engineers than all other engineers combined.
There are 10x more software engineers than the next highest engineering discipline.
If you could subdivide s/w engs into 10 equal categories ("I'm not just a run of the mill s/w eng"), each of those would be the top engineering employment category.
The top 10% of software engineers outnumber the next highest engineer class.
At 10% unemployment, there are more unemployed software engineers than the next highest employed engineer category.
I know so many IT folks who are unemployed. And compounding that is unmitigated slop machines for both generating resumes and filtering them.
Its fraud all the way down every where I look.
I guess Europe is then part of these "developing countries"
If you really want to make $90k seem as bad to the rest of us as it feels to you, you need to get the exchange rates changed, have USD devalued compared to other currencies until they're at purchasing power parity.
Of course, doing this would mean forcing yourselves to accept that China's got the biggest economy and the USA is only a little ahead of the EU, instead of thinking China and the EU are about the same as each other and significantly behind the USA.
How many of the talent from frontier labs is immigrant?
as other commenter pointing out, those visas is for high skill job that lacks candidate on US soil
but company uses that for hiring Immigrant so they can underpaid them effectively reduce US born origin competitiveness
Under the proposed rule, the additional fee would not apply to H-1B petitions that are not subject to the cap, such as petitions filed by certain nonprofit research organizations, governmental research organizations, and institutions of higher education. https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/dhs-proposes-ad...
I do believe it’s going to push a lot of jobs offshore though. I have already seen it at my job.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49540700 (citations)
(was always about cost, the US produces ~2M more college graduates per year than it needs, the system wants a labor surplus to contain labor costs)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49378010 (citations)
Does it though? It seems like it would drive away the $60k worker, and the companies hiring the million dollar worker would pay it without second thought.
Testing abilities is a gamable proxy. How much a company is willing to spend on the person is the best barometer, if we stay true to the intent of the visa (scarce talent)
Sorry IEEE, but offshoring happens regardless of the H-1B fee. I’m a pretty flexible dinosaur but you’re never going to get me to feel sympathy for employers leveraging a visa that’s tantamount to employment slavery in its onerous restrictions and lack of direct pathway to citizenship.
Not one single tech person I know in person has ever been "pro immigration" or "anti immigration". They all want reasonable immigration, and part of that has always meant not harming the livelihoods of existing citizens. That's the subjective part.
If I had a plan to e.g. copy-paste specific success stories from any rich country to any poor country, something that might e.g. raise the per-capita income of the poor country to that of the rich country over 30 years, I'd be glad to have the chance to make that investment in India.
The per-capita GDP difference between the USA (94k) and India (2.8k) would imply 3300% growth over 30 years, which is about 12.5%/year compounding average annual growth for the whole period.
This feels small enough to be plausible, and big enough to be massively tempting. Extremely fast growth, but not quite pushing absurd.
But over the years I got to know many people on H1Bs who were indentured servants to their employers: once their green card application was in they were stuck. And if you're from a country like India that can take a decade or more. The whole thing feels like a scam and the $100k fee isn't going to deter those companies from doing it, it's still well worth the money to them. I wish we saw sensible, well thought out reform here. Instead we get the Trump administration.
Once we added a resource and had a sham hiring process in which the supplier supplied an expert with no less than 10 pages of experience in our niche project. To his credit, he did not lie to me, and told me he could try to figure it out but had not worked on the product, but that he needed to do well. We were forced to hire him
Later our team slated to replaced by that firm to maintain a major product while we went to green field stuff. I resigned and my team flew the coup over the next year or
Disgusting
we should have a tax or tariff on "W2" employees or firms outsourcing labor. Minimally a tax that helps pay for our social safety net. We depend on new employed young people and sending that work afar does not help us.
https://canadabychoice.com/services/move-to-canada/usa/occup...
Canada also floating idea of alliance with Europe for travel and job opportunities
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-european-union-eu-me...
Why should US employers be forced to pay $100k to Donny or compromise for substandard smaller labor pool in the US and bear increased costs?
Now the word "talent" has lost its meaning or most commonly means "anyone" for cheap even though the employer knows that they are unqualified and hires them anyway for cheap labor to reduce their operating costs (expensive US employees).
You can't say "we are hiring the best and brightest" and then decide to then go for those who are unqualified. Now this $100K fee is pointless when AI agents, and data centers (homes for the AI agents) are getting hired over US employees.
One more thing. The big question is who would you rather trust to hire to not create a disaster like in [0][1] (Human or AI agent, hint one of them cannot be held accountable.)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061682
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-investigating-tata...
This is what laws are for. "You can just do things."
> It's really hard to do this in a way that won't be trivial to work around, and often in ways where you're likely to like the work around even less.
So is collecting taxes, you just have a government funded entity grind tirelessly to keep closing the gaps. You make it economically burdensome to attempt to workaround. There will always be some leakage.
“China” “National Security”
And with that, you’re argument is dead in the water.
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=french+language+immer...
A stack rank by salary would mean "H1B is big tech employees" rather than "these are professionals who have skills."
Current version of H1B had become a big basket to hold both, and abused too for just finding cheaper labor. It may be time to segment these out.
Also, given that US has ~400 million local citizens, there should be less need for either.
I have no problem with someone getting a green card, citizenship, TPS, etc in the US. I think there should be a lot faster routes for that. Let the software devs come in and become citizens or permanent residents, I don't care about that.
What I do care about is the fact that H1-B locks immigrants to a company and tie their residence in the us to their employment. That means they'll accept lower wages and worse working conditions as they can't simply quit and switch jobs. The entire thing is designed to suppress wages in general.
bearjaws•1h ago
Every time we had a layoff some portion would be replaced with H1B.
Every H1B that shared their salary with me has been underpaid.
I know its anecdotal but sharing to see if anyone has seen similar.
foxtrot8672•58m ago
toomuchtodo•32m ago
The HIRE Act: 25% tax on outsourcing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45161419 - September 2025
Ohio senator introduces 25% tax on companies that outsource jobs overseas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45146528 - September 2025
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/297...
throwawalien•25m ago
toomuchtodo•24m ago
techpression•17m ago
tuesdaynight•20m ago
vidarh•16m ago
It's really hard to do this in a way that won't be trivial to work around, and often in ways where you're likely to like the work around even less.
toomuchtodo•14m ago
cogman10•22m ago
It's very abusive to the workers hired as H1-B and it's designed for wage suppression. You can stay an H1-B for years. If you lose your job, you'll face deportation. It gives your employer a VERY large amount of leverage over your life.
It's supposed to be about bringing expertise when local expertise isn't available, but in practice it's companies saying "Oh, we can't find someone who will work for $50k as a software dev so we need to hire H1-Bs."
Either the program needs to end or the minimum salary needs to be raised to something like $300k to compensate for the leverage the employer has.
emodendroket•8m ago
ben_w•21m ago
Not to bring in jobs or money (tariffs don't do that); just to push us away from your companies.
alistairSH•18m ago
My employer sells software internationally - are you claiming any international job should be subject to some sort of fine simply because the company is HQed in the US?
I suppose we could try slicing revenue or profit by sales region and comparing against headcount expense per region? But with salaries abroad being a fraction of in the US, that math might still work out in favor of keeping international employees.
EDIT - I dislike the H1B system overall. Just not sure "fine companies that operate overseas" is something we should consider as a replacement.
throwawalien•8m ago
lokar•4m ago
schnitzelstoat•7m ago
lampeli•5m ago
adrr•22m ago
cogman10•19m ago
You can't find someone to do a job? Then you need to compete on wage with other companies to bring someone in. Or, you know, raise your salary for local employees.
lokar•16m ago
Also, how to value pre-ipo stock
There are other good options as well (an auction, etc). They all have problems, but there are mitigations. It could be vastly improved even if it’s not perfect.
It’s just the will to do it.
lokar•12m ago
If you decide on a single pay cutoff software engineers will starve everyone else out. And there are of course great, well paid people in other hard to hire industries.
triceratops•11m ago
lokar•9m ago
cromka•22m ago
heywintermute•21m ago
ransom1538•18m ago
kccqzy•11m ago
lokar•18m ago
We spent a ton of time and effort trying to find anyone to our standards, never able to find enough. H1B (and other work visas) were generally better and more Sr compared to locals we found. They got paid as much or more than everyone else.
When we had great people we could not get here we would instead build a team overseas, taking a bunch of other jobs with them.
andrewla•14m ago
lokar•7m ago
spicyusername•14m ago
jvanderbot•12m ago
Finding the top 1% gets better results if you have a wider net.
Finding the cheapest 20% does too...
lokar
paulddraper•12m ago
> Every H1B that shared their salary with me has been underpaid.
Yes.
da_chicken•4m ago
But I will say that the only people I have met that are here on H1-B have been uniquely qualified for their position. Such as, they invented a way to scale a given chemical manufacturing process, and they were developing it further.
But I got the impression that they were not particularly well paid like I would expect an American in the same position to be.