Salaries are only better for certain fields in the US though. If you are working in a grocery store in the US vs EU, you would be better off in EU. And you wouldn't have to worry about falling ill and skyrocketing healthcare costs.
In certain areas of the US maybe. I believe the average wage in the EU is actually higher than in the US. Need to look up the Source, which is hard because I'm on mobile right now.
To be fair, this is a company in the U.S and the people are working in the U.S so it is in fact - U.S working conditions, if you imported the company to the EU it would not be EU working conditions because those working. conditions would be illegal.
To be fair, EU working conditions are pretty bad compared to Canada. Sure, Chinese conditions might be worse, but EU conditions aren't good to begin with.
To me, that is an absurd statement. Speaking as someone who has work in EU countries, the US, UK, and Australia, the EU was by far the best for “working conditions” (holiday, flexibility, benefits, overall working environment). I’ve never worked in Canada, I admit, but know people who have.
I worked in both EU and Canada.. and no, lol, Canada does not have better working conditions. Less vacation, longer working hours, less ‘protection’ for employees vs employers.
This is how millions of Americans already work. Millions have no paid sick time at all (and even unpaid sick leave can be iffy) and millions more get less generous PTO than this.
The only remarkable thing is that this policy is bad for a tech company. Tech is special because demand for specialized workers is high and supply is low. But in most other industries, this would be standard behavior.
Workers in other industries deserve better, but it’s also important to remember that the HN bubble isn’t the norm.
Cool, let's just accelerate to the inevitable lawsuits when the government questions why so many Americans can't get work but we're importing more people than ever.
Give Trump's whole narrative, that will be an interesting show to watch.
This is an oversimplification. One should of course take great care not to use generalizations to promote group-based hatred, but this is in addition to the fact that it would be naive (and impossibly restrictive) to declare nationality generalization forbidden. Nationalities, cultures, and many other set-formings of humans have salient features, on average, for better or worse.
Acknowledging the nuance on this issue is hard, because a lot of people will call you a literal nazi for doing so. But that is a position which, ultimately, entirely denies the existence of culture as a concept.
You’re ignoring the context of my comment. They’re implying that Indians are second-rate engineers, not that they have a cuisine that uses lots of spices.
I don’t understand why people on this forum, who are 90+% in favor of remote work and don’t believe physical presence in an office matters at all, believe they companies will choose to replace H1-B employees with different people when they can simply hire those exact same H1-B employees at a quarter of the cost when they are forced to return to their home countries?
The H1-B logically displaces offshoring, not citizens. Otherwise it’s a massive coincidence that the H1-B visa happens to be used overwhelmingly by the industry that has seen the highest increase in salaries by far for Americans over the past 2 decades.
So you do bring up a very common line of thinking (and, I think, a common one that isn't expressed often in such topics).
Firstly, you seem to be conflating H1-B with obtaining a foreign contractor. That's an accounting burden, often comes with time zone issues, and does damage to a company's return-to-office agenda unless they are hired for something completely divorced from other teams. This puts the contractor in a considerable position as they can maneuver with effectively zero oversight. Great for the contractor, bad for the employer (at least the first time; after a rapport is established it could be fine).
If that's not what you meant, then the engineer(s) being hired are from a staffing agency or similar. But now you are at the behest of who the staffing agency pulls for local talent and their ability to retain said talent. Often, while incoming engineers can be vetted the employer doesn't have the latitude of choosing any engineer from the region and plucking them like they would s contractor or H1-B.
An H1-B gives the employer the best of all worlds at the cost of sponsorship. The employee works for them and has considerably less options as many companies do not sponsor H1-B visas, so they have less opportunities. Between the value of the US dollar and engineers being salaried much lower elsewhere you could likely pull an H1-B for half the price of a US engineer and in many cases they would still come out very well ahead. As well, by bringing them to the US you fix any time zone issues and RTO questions.
FWIW, I think a lot of US engineers tend to have a negative view on both being in-office AND having compensation reduced; I think most would be fine with a reduction in comp if it meant remote work - but most companies seem much more interested in maximum control AND minimal investment.
I more or less agree with you, but there’s a third path that you left out: expanding their footprint in other countries. For example, pretty much all major tech cos have offices in Hyderabad, India.
Oh, definitely, and that does resolve a large class of the problems that people have with H1-B visas! However, it's often a non-trivial choice to go that route so it excludes the majority of companies that still want access to talent. As well, even if a company does have such a footprint there are still compelling reasons they could make for wanting to bring that talent stateside long-term (i.e. a particular team is only located in the US).
This is the (very common) fallacy that disagreeing with something, or considering it immoral, is equivalent to not believing that it will happen (if not prevented somehow).
Time zones are still a thing to workaround. It's easier to import them or to nearshoe. Tech in south America is there but not super plentiful.
But you're missing the real reason. It's not about salaries by itself. It's control. People like musk would even pay H1b's more than an American when they lack the leverage to easily hop to another job or can threaten to end their visa if they get uppity. Even under American soil, he can coerce them to work to the bone easier than a citizen.
This compulsive need for data is such a mental crutch. Reason from first principles. Use logic. You don’t need to be spoon-fed data from a scientifically rigorous study in order to deduce basic cause-and-effect relationships.
There are sub-$60K H1B jobs. That's below my $55K starting salary as a fresh grad which, after adjustment, is $100K today. That was in an era when CS grads were pulling $100K with no experience so by no means extravagant for the time.
We've had decades of STEM hype but somehow can't produce college grads to do entry level tech work?
As a small amount of data, my asking salary has never been less than the highest paid H1B at a company plus another $30k/yr, and I've always been offered more than I've asked, despite the H1B position being more senior. That doesn't prove wages being dragged down by itself, but it's evidence of H1B workers being paid less than the legally mandated "actual wage", and ECON 101 can take care of the rest in terms of the expected effects on the market.
Bad working conditions / the American working condition can be bad.
Having said that bad stories get attention, others don't.
I've worked at a places where we don't even track PTO, you take what you need, we all just work it out. It's not Amazon pay... but it's a better lifestyle.
