No doubt h1b is abused. Corporations use it to structurally underpay tech labor. Shame to anyone defending this abuse as some sort of pro immigration policy - it hurts both domestic workers and underpays migrant labor. The question is - what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported?
> shame to anyone defending this abuse as some sort of pro immigration policy.
In what way is it not pro-immigration? Perhaps you mean "pro-immigrant"? In that case, your view is cogent, but I guess this just exposes that pro-immigration policy isn't necessarily good for the immigrants that it welcomes.
Immigration benefits capital. For example, as Federal Reserve Vice Chair Bowman indicated [0], immigration creates housing inflation.
> what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported?
None of it? The way I see it is every top tier programmer in America is already employed.
I think the inevitable outcome would just be the big multi-nationals (FAANG in particular) would just hire more in their international offices and spread out their engineering org more instead of remaining so American heavy and using immigration to centralise staffing.
There probably isn't a world where these huge companies decide to simply not take advantage of the global talent pool, if they don't exploit it someone else will and they can't have that.
Apple employees thousands of H1Bs, many of them literally push buttons and file bug reports all day and don’t know how to code or barely know how. I know this because I’ve worked with teams of them for a decade at Apple.
These are not top tier talent type people, this is work that my mom could do, but Apple can pay much less by bringing people over from India, Pakistan, China to do this work instead of finding Americans to do it.
Many of the top tier companies (meta, Amazon, google, microsoft etc) have had massive layoffs in the 10's of thousands range. Those workers were top tier programmers. So you need to be quite delusional or uninformed to have your view point on the work force.
They are rewarded for cutting the budget, and undercutting domestic workers. Until that changes, this problem will continue. Or workers could unionize.
As with many systemic issues in the U.S., it boils down to "publicly traded company must have highest profit possible so line on chart goes up". As much as I dislike FAANG companies in general for all their anti-worker efforts, I can't honestly blame them for making decisions that look good on the balance sheet. If I am a company, and I can choose to hire 10 U.S. engineers for $200k a pop, or 10 H-1B engineers for $100k a pop, I'm going to pick the H-1B engineers. Every H-1B or green card engineer I've worked with in-office has been extremely skilled, so I wouldn't even feel like I was "getting what I paid for" hiring them over U.S. citizens.
You mudt have gotten lucky with your coworkers. Ive worked with people who claimed to be “experts” in a domain that didnt have basic skills. I would say 5% were excellent, 5% good. 90% worthless. Coupled with weird insular cultural dynamics, poor english and communication skills, poor throw it over the wall mentality. Its overalll a huge net negative for a company. Perhaps its different in FAANG. But in enterprise companies its very bad.
And that's exactly why managers keep hiring them. If you're a defensive manager who just wants to keep your head down and grind out the years before moving getting a "senior" or "principal" manager job somewhere else then a bunch of compliant workers who'll punt anything messy onto some other team is exactly what you want.
> The question is - what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported?
I mean, the other question is: how many US jobs exist because of folks who came to the country on H1B? Clearly none of the big tech companies would exist in the scale they are without us.
You are being downvoted but you are totally correct. The tech industry existed before the H1B and was growing rapidly. There’s no evidence at all that the industry would have stopped growing without the H1B or that any company started by an H1B wouldn’t have been started by an American.
Employees get options at common stock prices. The valuations you see, like $12bn, are for preferred stock. So no employees got stock priced at $12bn, but all of them get paid at a $5.15bn valuation.
Not saying they did well, but depending on the 409a valuations, they still might have made money.
Edit: friends, if you’re going to downvote please leave a comment as to why. It’s okay to disagree! There’s a lot of misleading FUD in these discussions about equity. It’s helpful for everyone to hear those sides.
Their options should be priced lower, but the common stock isn't valued according to the $5.15B. They raised $300M at $12B and $425M at $7.4B, which are both under water, so those shareholders will use their liquidation preference to get paid at least 1x. Assuming those rounds owned 7% of the company, there is at most $4.4B left for the remaining 93% of shareholders. That's about 8% less. If they deducted fees, legal services, or retention packages or had worse liquidation preferences or more underwater rounds, then it gets even lower.
More specifically, when employees are granted options contracts the strike price of those contracts is based on the last valuation of the company prior to the grant. If all is going well and the valuation is increasing those options are also increasing in value. Here we have a sale which values the company lower than the prior valuation. Recent option grants will likely be underwater, earlier grants would still be profitable.
> The valuations you see, like $12bn, are for preferred stock.
No, the valuation is for the whole company, all of its shares, preferred and common. How this value is distributed among shareholders depends on the deal, but generally there is a “seniority”, roughly: creditors (debt holders) are paid first, preferred shares next, then common shareholders last. This order can be negotiated as part of the sale.
> So no employees got stock priced at $12bn, but all of them get paid at a $5.15bn valuation.
It’s just not possible to know what each individual employee’s outcome is. We don’t know how much of that 5.5 billion will be left over for common shareholders including the employees. Note that employees have received salaries so their overall outcome is greater than zero dollars, but perhaps their total compensation outcome is lower than they hoped for the time they put in.
> Not saying they did well, but depending on the 409a valuations, they still might have made money.
Yes, some might have and some might have not. We just don’t know without more details.
Edit: singron’s answer (sibling comment) attempts to model the employee outcome in a rough but reasonable way.
The way they get to $12.5bn is multiplying the preferred share price by the total outstanding shares. But the common shares, while still included in that calculation, are not worth the same amount of money.
They have a different strike price for options that is set via a 409a.
It’s possible that employees got, at the peak, grants with strike prices at a $2bn 409a valuation. We don’t know. What we do know is that no employee ever got grants with a strike price of a $12.5bn valuation. That’s just not how this works.
wow.. this is cool. what's the endgame? I built a site that logs my lifetime in person attendance along with statcast tracking for homeruns, launch angle and more. wonder if theres some crossover
https://baseball.willbaxter.info/
The endgame is to become the ultimate source of truth regarding the quality of a sports game.
Dreaming big with hopes of becoming a household name similar to imdb or letterboxd.
Looking at your site I think you would like to hear that when rating games you can mark a game as 'attended', 'watched' or other categories to show others how you experienced the game or just for your own personal log.
Other than that we are light on classic sports stats and our stats are more focused on the user ratings of the games rather than the game stats.
Nice. I've played around with this idea a bit. How do you handle the data and what do story+comment section prompts look like? Do you take the source material in for story generation?
Perhaps there is a lot of money you could get in short term. Enough to pay the costs and generate some profit.
Also, most people are not computer experts; if you show them something can be done using your website, they will continue to do it using your website long after others have added the same functionality.
reply