Most H1-Bs are filling jobs that pay $200k+. Most Americans don’t know but tech jobs pay between $200k-$1m, and almost all of those jobs are taken by folks on H1-B visas. Rather than sourcing and training Americans for the best paying jobs in the country, the tech industry has lobbied Congress to flood the market with labor from India and China. We can only imagine these wages would be higher without the influx of these workers. But, the wages are still high, and they would love to flood the market with even more cheap labor if they could uncap H1-Bs to further drive down wages. There are people willing to work for $60k/year just for the promise of an American visa.
Additionally, H1-B workers are easier to control. They all fear layoffs or firings because losing your job means losing your visa, if you can’t find another job within 2 months. So, there is incentive to neglect work-life balance and change the culture of a company into “996,” which means working from 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week.
And, there is widespread fraud and discrimination against American workers too. When entire departments come to be filled with people from a certain country, they tend to keep hiring people from that country. One reason for this is tech companies tend to hire from contracting agencies like WiPro, InfoSys, TCS, Cognizant, and HCL (WITCH), all of which originated in India and source from India, so they don’t focus on diversity at all (there have been lawsuits). Many of those contractors are doing jobs that should actually be filled by full time employees, but companies flagrantly ignore labor laws. When they do need to hire full time employees, they often convert these contractors. Also, many of these workers don’t have the actual qualifications for the job, so they falsify their resumes. I’ve interviewed candidates claiming 15 years of experience with a language, that cannot write a single line of code in that language when prompted. Those that can write code, don’t always follow best practices and can churn out cheap, hacky solutions that ultimately just need to be redone.
This is all an open secret in the tech industry. It isn’t more widely talked about because there are few Americans to actual witness what is going on. And, those criticizing the system risk being painted as xenophobic. It is good to see Bernie coming out against these practices because people on the right and left should be critical of it.
Most Americans don’t know but tech jobs pay between $200k-$1m
No, they do not. More like $50k-200k. But the rest of your comment is pretty much right.
Most common is $80-160k, the companies formerly known as FANNG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) are more likely $160-340k. A large part of that is their geographic area. Basically they primarily want workers who are already vetted by the other FAANG companies, so they’re all in the same geographic location, and competing over the workers willing to live there.
Basically they’re idiots creating their own problems that Elon wants to solve with H1-Bs.
Legally, the H1-Bs need to get paid roughly the same as American workers. We all know that’s a bit slippery, but it does help keep the wages up.
The real benefit is that they either do what Elon says or they get kicked out of the country. Guess who’s willing to put up with the most shit.
Levels.fyi is a good source of salary data. Above 200k is easy in the right geographic location.
Like the other commenter suggested, check levels.fyi. If you’re in a major tech hub like Silicon Valley, $300k is average, and many people are pushing $500k. Some who are in highly specialized roles, or who hit the jackpot on the timing of their equity grants can get over $1m.
The app Blind has a lot of people sharing info on this.
Musk is wrong about pretty much everything so there is that.
Calling them “low-wage indentured servants” will sell it to the corpos that run this country.
I have a somewhat hot take.
The racists want to destroy H1-B visas, the rich (slavers) like H1-B as is, and neither is willing to help fix H1-B visas.
Slavery is easily the worst outcome. It might be worth siding with the racists to defeat the slavers and drive a wedge in their coalition.
Can we just replace all headlines about this fuckhead with “Moral person with clue says Elon Musk is wrong, again”
Someone got all het up yesterday because I called H-1B holders indentured servants. This should be interesting.
Definitely not low wage. There are requirements that they have to be paid market rates. Despite that, I recall Banerjee and Duflo finding a depression of upper middle income wages from things like the H1B program.
