Needless H1B Visas Destroy American Tech Salaries
Recently, I had a ‘discussion’ with a software development manager, affectionately known as an ‘SDM’ in industry lingo, on LinkedIn about a topic that is near and dear to my own heart and livelihood: needless H1B visas.
It’s hard not to hear the fevered cries of tech companies on how difficult it is for them to hire qualified engineers. They’ve searched everywhere; high and low! Looked through every resume for a qualified candidate and there just aren’t any qualified American workers to fill that $200k a year senior developer position anywhere to be found. It must be crisis! We’ll just explain to the government how bad it is and get special clearance (from Clarence!) to import ‘qualified’ workers from abroad and oh look! They will work for $125k a year! Wow. What a deal. And, as an added bonus, since I work for a big company with a giant budget and couldn’t care less about the proverbial ‘future’, I don’t have to care the least bit that the ‘qualified engineer’ I hired couldn’t quite bridge the communications gap between them and their American developer counterparts. In fact, he created so much technical debt that the company could have hired 10 American developers instead. Sabotage bonus! (disclaimer: there is nothing wrong with hiring non-American developers; but, trying to integrate two teams that have completely different understandings and practices around developing enterprise applications is a recipe for disaster. Using teams/team members with similar backgrounds and the ability to easily communicate will result in less technical debt overall, all other things being equal.)
I am an experienced senior technical leader at a large company that you’ve likely heard of. I build large digital contraptions that move astronomical amounts of information around to various disparate locations constantly. It’s like a very complex air traffic control system. It requires literally thousands of hours of education to understand how the pieces of the big picture fit together and the operations that make it function, and significantly more time to understand the atomic nature of the machine. After 25+ years of working in this industry, I am still but a spring chicken in the field of understanding the entire picture. Even if you can reach a significant level of understanding of the overall playing field, which is doubtful unless you have incredible self determination and sheer force of will, or you have access to big company resources, the nuanced and complex technical nature of communicating with others the necessary information with which to build and operate such a system is an enormous challenge even with the most optimal team members being able to communicate effectively. But I digress…
The truth is, we have a severe shortage of hiring managers that understand what they’re even looking for in an engineer, and that leads to the false conclusion that there aren’t enough qualified engineers. I think there aren’t nearly enough qualified interviewers. No developer can know every version of some arcane framework or some obscure Javascript feature, nor can people who aren’t fresh out of school remember what the hell Big O notation is and what it’s used for (true story.) Are they able to grasp and understand the problem space? Can they develop a mental solution to solve the problem? Are they life-long learners who love writing code to solve things? That’s an engineer! Hire them! They will figure out everything you want them to. They are smart. That’s what they do. It’s their thing. They will rise to the occasion as all smart people do.
Hiring managers talk about the significant investment it takes to hire someone and take a chance on an unproven entity so they try and weed out the unqualified with useless knowledge tests and projects designed to see if you can login to AWS and write an API call. How long would it take a smart person to figure that out, if they had a basic development background do you think? When you switch your cloud services to GCP from AWS, are you going to fire your engineers that know AWS and hire all-new engineers that know GCP? But again, I digress…
American tech companies should be required to pay market rates to all H1b visa holders. If tech companies legitimately can’t find qualified American workers, then they pay market rate plus the cost of the H1b. Then, let’s see how short we are of American engineers. Tech companies should stop killing the livelihood of American software engineers who work hard by taking advantage of the very system that props up your multi-billion dollar industry. Pay the engineers who build your company what they are worth so that they too can afford the American Dream. You can’t elevate the poor by tearing down the middle. Stop exploiting the American worker and start reinvesting in the new American Dream.
