Earlier this year I interviewed for a research/engineering position at Apple. I was offered the job, took it, and went into the H1B lottery. It took the USCIS four months to let me know that my application was not selected, even though it was filed under 'premium processing', and the draw had been done using a computer in the first week after submissions closed. Since the job required me to be in Cupertino, the deal simply fell through.
Now imagine this, you worked your ass for for a total of nine years to get your masters and PhD, and you spent countless hours honing your skills and finally you get a dream job that merges awesome research, top-level engineering, and working on a product that millions of people use every day. And then it all goes tits up because of a lottery.
A. Fucking. Lottery.
The problem for people like me is that, if I want to work in the US, I have to go through a lottery that will keep me in uncertainty for months. Then, _maybe_, if I'm lucky enough, I can relocate only to have the same thing looming a few years down the line. I cannot build a life around such uncertainty. I cannot built a future like that.
So, I'm staying in Europe. Not having been born in the US means that a lot of jobs are just not open to me, not because it's impossible to get them, but simply because the hassle is just not worth it anymore.
You know why you lost the lottery? Because Indian outsourcing firms like Infosys, Wipro flooded it with applications to bring in cheap labor! There's no talent or extraordinary ability among the people they bring in. IMO, outsourcing companies should be banned from h1-b/greencard, period. Banning them, I doubt the H1-B quota will even fill-up
EDIT: In response to the downvoters, Im Indian myself and I know the quality of candidates these bodyshopper/outsourcing companies bring in. They are pretty much the bottom rung if the Indian education system. Most of them barely even speak/write English legibly. They also bring an incredibly bad name to the rest of the Indian developer community.
All the people I know in Infosys/Wipro speaking English perfectly fine. While for some position they don't get the cream of the crop they are still companies that server a worldwide customer base. You are exaggerating or thinking of other outsourcing firms (there are bad ones for sure with mediocre talent)
The quality of Indian programmers tends to vary wildly. I currently work with some guys who are really good, and one guy who is simply incredible, while in the past I've worked with people who literally had never since a command line interface before. This was for a position where we deployed to Linux.
I have interviewed a few candidates from companies like this, with Masters in Computer Science/IT/whatever. They were perfectly adept at coding C#, using the Entity Framework, etc... writing SQL? No. A few literally had no idea how it was structured.
One of a few reasons I'm glad to not be in the .NET world any more.
Blame the offshore firms like Cognizant then. They are the ones scooping up 50%+ of the H-1B quota:
>IT service firms use H-1B workers in offshore outsourcing contracts. IT workers affected by offshoring decision will typically train their replacements as a condition of severance. This has been the situation, for instance, at Northeast Utilities in Connecticut, which late last year announced plans to outsource some its IT work to Infosys and TCS and cut around 200 IT workers.
>"The offshore outsourcing firms are once again getting the majority of the visas," said Ron Hira, a public policy professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. "The program continues to promote the offshoring of high-wage American jobs."
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9247241/Offshore_firm...
I have a friend in a similar situation (eerily similar). Apple moved him to Vancouver to reside until they can get a visa for the US, but in the meantime more & more employees are being 'stationed' in Canada, which opens up the opportunity to simply setup a facility there instead of hustling the US system.
Canada has been a regular "holding pattern" location for Europeans trying to get to the US. It's about time Canadian authorities realised they could exploit this for their own economic gain.
Is that really ideal for someone who is at the top of their craft to be put into purgatory in Canada when they really want to immigrate to the US and settle down?
If it were me I'd rather be king of the hill in my home country over putting my life on hold like that.
I know a surprising amount of immigrants who moved to Vancouver because it was 'as close as' they could get to SV (since they couldn't get US visas). I huge proportion of them are glad they came here and never intend to leave (and some might, but not for a long time).
Not many people consider Vancouver as a first choice, but a lot of people who come here are happy with it and realize that it's a pretty good place to be. Outside of the SV echo chamber you can often get a better picture of what the world actually wants, vs. just what people in SV (though appealing to the SV echo chamber is what gets you the VC funding and buyouts).
Besides that, the weather is nice, the people are friendly, the cost of living is affordable for people in tech (especially compared to SV), nature is just outside the door, etc.
On top of that, it's easier to get talent; partly because people can get visas, but also partly because not every single startup and tech company is competing for the same pool of people. You won't earn a six-figure salary quite so easily, but you also won't have your employees poached away the instant it looks like a buyout isn't just over the horizon.
Thinking of it as some sort of holding pattern purgatory where people are cooling their heels staring through the bars at the Promised Land on the other side of the US border is a huge mischaracterization. SV may be the theoretical ideal, but the lifestyle is much better out here.
If it were me I'd rather be king of the hill in my home country over putting my life on hold like that.
King of the hillock you mean?
Seriously, why do so many people go through the utter shit that is the US system, rather than go/stay back home?
There is only one Apple, and it is in California. So say all their products. Comparing it to any other company in the world is like, well, comparing apples to oranges! You may have made your peace with eating oranges, not everyone is willing/can/ready to give up that easily.
It's actually a nice place. Many friends of mine are doing the "holding pattern" thing and quite a few decided they'd just stay.
> If it were me I'd rather be king of the hill in my home country
It all depends on the size of your hill and the company you keep. Also, the hill gets lonely after a time. I like to surround myself with people smarter than myself and that becomes increasingly harder with a fixed size hill.
when they really want to immigrate to the US and settle down
I'm not sure that's actually true. They want to work for Apple/Google/Facebook/Tech Giant Inc. - they must live in the US to do so. If Canada is smart it'll give companies incentives to build permanent bases in the country - then people won't always be waiting to move south.
meh...if you could do an experiment by dropping a foreigner - that has never been to North America - right into a Canadian city and then asked what country they are in... I would suspect a high percentage would say the U.S. The differences between the countries are more noticeable to Americans/Canadians.
Of course.. the U.S. has far more cultural influence worldwide so most foreigners hear and see more about it than Canada.
The H-1B system should at least be an auction, not a lottery. The companies that use the system to source cheaper replacements for current workers would get priced out of the market and the individuals who contribute the most to the company (and the economy) would get in. Bonus: more revenue would be raised by the government.
An auction based on the salary of the employee. i.e. the money doesn't go to the government, it goes to the person being hired. This also removes the criticism that the H1B is being used to bring in "cheap labour".
This could potentially increase the 'cost-to-company' for each employee. Also, it could well be that an employee is worth a lot to Infosys, Cognizant, or other off-shoring companies who make up a bulk of the H1B applications, and they may be willing to spend enough to be the highest bidder.
Yes, that's the point of the H-1B visa? It's supposed to be used for people with rare and unusual skillsets, the kind of people who command very high salaries; not for offshoring.
The H-1B is a non-immigrant visa in the United States... [that]
allows U.S. employers to temporarily employ foreign workers in
specialty occupations.
The regulations define a "specialty occupation" as requiring
theoretical and practical application of a body of highly
specialized knowledge in a field of human endeavor including
but not limited to biotechnology, chemistry, architecture, engineering[...]
American citizens are not entitled to work in the EU. If an American wants to plan their long-term life around working in the EU, that is far from a sure thing. Even with a masters and PhD. So why should the US be singled out for this?
Countries in the EU (and elsewhere) have more sane immigration systems. As a Canadian having immigrated to both Germany and the US, I can say that the US system is at least two orders of magnitude more difficult, costly, needlessly complicated, and in the end a lot of it comes down to luck (most of it bad). Germany has no lottery system, and renewal is very straightforward. I applied for my visa while in Germany as a tourist, I was issued a "temporary visa" while the final decision was made, and after I was accepted, the renewal processes every couple of years was essentially a formality. There is also a straight-forward path to permanent residency after X years working in the country. Contrast that with how things work in the US (which I don't have time to get into in an HN comment), and you'll see why it deserves to be singled out for this.
This. For comparison, when I had to renew my H1B for another 3 years, I had to leave the country and fly to Berlin for my "visa interview". But first I had to send them my passport, which of course I needed to get into Germany first. So after a lot of expense, several days of wasted time, and anxiety if the courier would deliver my passport on time, the "interview" took all of one minute (handing me my passport back with the Visa stamp). Well, two hours, actually, with going through security and waiting in line. Kafka comes to mind.
This type of thing has been my experience dealing with many US agencies from federal/immigration related to the local/state level. Recently I went to California's DMV to renew my driver's license. I wanted to do this 8 months before it expires, because at the time it looked like I will be outside the country for a couple of months for work.
To my utter surprise, I was forced to take a new written test because you can only 'renew a driver's license within 6 months of it's expiry date' without taking a new test. How this makes sense AT ALL boggles my mind. I could understand having to take a test if you lapse your expiry date and try to renew, say, two months too late. But renewing EARLY? Why? How?
They also couldn't tell me what would happen to my (still valid) license, if I happen to fail the test. Thankfully I didn't.
European countries immigration systems are not equal. Just getting a job in Switzerland if you are foreigner is considerably harder. The employer has to demonstrate that no native would be able to your job. The government will send him unemployed locals and employer has to write what exactly disqualified that local. It is considerable hustle, so most of them do not bother.
Plus, as a foreigner in Switzerland, you will always be looked down upon. It is hard to get accepted as equal.
Right. But for some reason people think the US should be an open playground for all of the world, and that it should never actively defend and protect its own citizens.
One reason why non-American countries have "easier" immigration systems is often demand related. Your example "H1-B lottery" is precisely demand related.
Trust me, EU countries have their own immigration demand problems. Especially a place like Germany which has one of the few functioning economies in the block lately. People flock there looking for work. Other countries with huge immigration demand include England and Spain. There are simply better ways of dealing with high immigration demand than "dump everyone into a pot regardless of education/experience/viability/urgency and randomly select a few".
> Other countries with huge immigration demand include England and Spain
Spain is just wanted due to the proximity to Africa and a lot of African immigrants/refugees using this vector.
> There are simply better ways of dealing with high immigration demand than "dump everyone into a pot regardless of education/experience/viability/urgency and randomly select a few".
We Germans deal with asylum seekers by putting > 2.500 people in camps designed for 1.500 MAXIMUM occupants (Munich, "Bayernkaserne" camp), blocking them from work and giving them free food and 140€ per month as pocket money.
Needlessly to say, that ain't fucking enough for non-food expenses in bigger cities, and what happens if the only thing they do is drink, smoke and fight (as asylum seekers you must not travel around the country, you have to stay in your processing city!) is basically a fucking violation of human dignity.
Of course it also leads to vast criminality - not just the fighting between asylum seekers themselves, but also massive amounts of theft, pot dealing (hello Berlin Görlitzer Park) and other criminality. In order, Nazi-parties and other right-wing extremists gain excellent popularity with "Kick em out" messages.
> Spain is just wanted due to the proximity to Africa and a lot of African immigrants/refugees using this vector.
I hear this from time to time, but data paints a radically different picture. What you describe is only the case for sub-Saharan immigrants who are just a tiny, tiny minority of the inmigrants coming to Spain. Most inmigrants come from:
1-Romania (for which Spain is obviously not in the path to any other country)
2-Morocco (the vast majority of whom arrive legally since the late 90s)
3-UK (and contrary to popular belief, only 21% of them are over 65 years old)
Then, the largest component of immigration is from the former colonies, due to the shared language (so, again, not being used as a vector)
All of this data is available online on the INE (national institute of statistics)
Ah, y'see that's why we, in Australia, stick our asylum seekers in camps in different countries like Nauru and Papua New Guinea, where whatever problems they cause are safely out of sight.
My opinion is that the world seriously needs a new refugee convention to prevent economic migrants from abusing the refugee system. The governing idea should be that you can't use refugee status to move from a poorer country to a significantly richer one. If you're a genuine refugee then moving to a safer country with similar per-capita-GDP is something you should be happy with.
Great idea but hard to enforce, unless the country is Israel or an island. It's amazing how many migrants are trying to get illegally across the English Channel from France to the UK because of better benefits and jobs.
Meanwhile, Yazidi and Syrian refugees will have to pay thousands to smugglers or scale barbed wire fences to enter a safe country.
To say non-American countries have easier immigration systems on the basis that it is demand related is in my opinion, absurd. Australia, New Zealand, UK, Canada and many European countries have massive demand.
However you'll find most of these countries have opted to sell residency, albeit through business and job investments. Generally skilled workers have to be sought for locally before they get someone over.
Using a "lottery" system just sounds crazy. It's still possible to buy citizenship, yet everyone else has to sit on the side-lines and take a number. Sounds like a weird plan created on a whim..
A recent gallup survey says 150M people would move to the US if they could, the UK was a distant second at 45M [1].
As for the lottery, how else could it be done? There is a cap on H1-B visa each year. The USCIS receives more applications than spots the first day you can apply.
> A recent gallup survey says 150M people would move to the US if they could, the UK was a distant second at 45M
Now adjust those numbers to the population of those countries... oh look, the UK all of a sudden came out ahead.
All of these studies comparing numbers usually just boils down to "The US is big". It has been brought up elsewhere that Canada, for example, has more immigrants as a percentage of population. But of course when comparing absolute numbers to the US, it will look like peanuts.
Only if immigrants are merely settling empty land. As long as they want to start out as part of society, they'll need jobs, housing and regular infrastructure. My own region is growing nearly as fast as housing can be built. More than 50% of everyone in some cities like Toronto have been in the country for less than 5 years, at any given moment. (Often starting out there, and moving to other parts of Canada later. Still limited by the population capacity of Toronto)
Uh, I guess? It looks like you're making fun of your own original argument at this point. In this case, if you use these numbers as an indicator of demand the UK clearly has greater demand per capita. And per capita is a much better measure since a country with a bigger population can assimilate and/or integrate a larger number of immigrants, thus it can comfortably have a larger immigration demand than a smaller country.
Because a large country is able to absorb more immigrants than a small country. 150M is 2x the population of the UK, but less than 50% of the US. So it would make sense that the US would have a higher quota than the UK.
Because it is a better proxy for how it will affect society in terms of ability to absorb more people, ranging from tax payer base to things like cost of infrastructure projects to handle the population growth.
I'm not sure about the "demand" angle here. Demand is sorted out at the interview stage on a company-level. Once the position has been filled up, it shouldn't be counted towards demand. Hence it should not be subject to lottery. The fact that US has more job opportunities for foreigners compared to, say, Germany in high-tech only means that industry is more thriving in the former. I doubt jobs are created BECAUSE more people wanna move to the US. And by the way, the job search process itself is partly a lottery - it's never 100% about merits.
What's your definition of sane? None of those countries have the scale, frequency and volume of demand that resembles anything like the US.[1]
> Contrast that with how things work in the US (which I don't have time to get into in an HN comment), and you'll see why it deserves to be singled out for this.
I don't think anyone is questioning that other countries have much more lax policies. The question is what is your solution?
As someone who is a US citizen, held visas in Germany/UK, and has a Belgian technical co-founder trying to get the US, I understand this situation very well. But I simply can't sympathize with people who simply say "Why can't they just let me! It works elsewhere!" and offer no real solution that takes into consideration anything other than a "why not me" attitude.
In terms of immigrants as a percentage of population the US is nothing special. Canada has a lot more (closer to 19% instead of 14%). Many European countries have statistics similar to that of the US (Sweden has a bit more, the UK a bit less, etc).
But I digress. The problem with the existing system is that it is insane and a waste of resources. One has to get a lawyer and wait for a long time with no certainty in the outcome while dealing with an extremely opaque bureaucracy where anything can go wrong at any time.
This has nothing at all to do with volume. Indeed, a simpler more streamlined and less opaque system would help with volume.
Say a system like the Canadian or the UK one. There's a point scale. You can compute the number of points you get ahead of time, now there's a simple web form actually. If you cross the threshold you will get in. There are known wait times, you can just call the embassy. There are points for things the country needs (particular jobs), for certain qualifications (degrees, etc), for language proficiency, some regional tweaks, family, and having an employment offer.
And extremely importantly. You get permanent resident status (green card), not an H1B. What Americans don't realize is that you want to hand out green cards. H1B lower both your salaries and ours. The H1B restricts immigrant mobility, can't move to a better job and raise the average salary, and encourages people to go home with all of their newly gained knowledge and money.
I'll give you a personal example of the difference between a sane and an insane system:
As an 11 year old I filled out all of our Canadian immigration paperwork (my parents checked it but it was correct and they didn't change it). We knew we would get in based on our points. The embassy told us the timeframe in which we should expect our paperwork to go through. It went through a bit early. We moved to Canada.
Now for the US. As a near-30-year old with a US PhD working at a top research institution I have to pay a specialized law firm several thousand dollars, spend weeks getting paperwork, bugging people in several countries to write absurd letters, building a case, etc. All of this to basically the same thing. And in the end, who knows what will happen because there are no standards, no appeal, no one to discuss anything with. Oh, and I have no idea what the processing time is.
So no. It is not an issue of "why can't they just let me in". It's a system that hurts your salary by restricting my mobility, hurts me by making me pay lawyers needlessly, hurts the image of the US by creating disgruntled people, and hurts the economy by routing business and increasingly prestigious conferences elsewhere. It just makes no sense.
It's interesting, actually. In some ways the US is actually the small-government low-regulation country that it likes to pretend to be, but in other areas it's just a labyrinth of aggresive mollases-paced bureaucracy. Examples:
Example: the DMV. In both Australia and the US the procedure for getting my licence renewed is the same. I go into an office, I fill out a form, they take a picture, and I get a licence. The difference is that when I did this in Australia I waited about five minutes and they printed my licence on the spot, whereas in the US it for some reason takes one or two hours and they print the licence in six to eight weeks. It's not that the California DMV appears to have fewer staff per customer or anything, it's just for some reason their procedures make no sense and nobody is able or willing to fix it.
Other examples: immigration and the TSA, but let's not even go there.
> It's interesting, actually. In some ways the US is actually the small-government low-regulation country that it likes to pretend to be, but in other areas it's just a labyrinth of aggresive mollases-paced bureaucracy. Examples:
Exactly this. There's a myth that the US is less bureaucratic than Europe, for example, and while in Europe you have the things like Italy which are horrible (in Bureaucracy terms) a lot of things are simpler.
To be fair, that's a US state problem and not a US problem.
I have had driver licenses from multiple US states. My experiences on the matter vary in extreme measures from one state to the next. This is mostly based on local laws, resources, and demand.
One time, it took hours but I had license in hand before leaving the building. In another case it took around twenty minutes and I had license in hand before leaving the building. Things are different in different places.
Then again, I've never had a license from California so that's a pain I haven't endured.
Now, I'm not saying this is right or wrong; it's a complex issue, and I am personally undecided. But you seem to be missing a major argument against the "points system" you describe.
The Canadian system explicitly biases the system in favor of the wealthy and well-educated. That's exactly what the "points" system is meant to do. Now, many people think this is a good thing; their argument is that wealthy and well educated people bring good things in to the country. I'm not saying they are wrong, I'm just saying that you should understand how some people feel that is unfair.
The US system does this to some extent, too, for instance the H1B visa is biased in just that way, and even for the lottery, we set minimum "you can likely support yourself" levels, And we have special ways for really wealthy people to jump the queue, and of course, the way the lottery is set up, one could argue, is quite racist. But you can also make the argument that the US lottery system is a lot more fair to people that have the ability to support themselves, but maybe weren't wealthy enough to get an advanced degree.
>Of course, in many countries the ability to get an advanced degree is not very dependent on being wealthy
I... find your assertion to be unlikely. Of course, I could be wrong. Do you have statistics? Is there a country where there is not a very strong correlation between high parental income and advanced degrees?
Finland should have no correlation here, as all the schools are free and you get an allowance from the government for the duration of your studies. Unfortunately it turns out a high income correlates well with having an advanced degree, and a parent with an advanced degree correlates well with a child who has one.
Which results in a situation where the higher socio-economical status of your parents makes you much more likely to have an advanced degree, even though there should be no correlation.
Most of the people in my PhD lab were paid to be there, fees waived and 50% from what would be described as low income backgrounds - anecdotal I know, but in the UK you don't need to be wealthy to get an advanced degree ... although getting the first degree got a bit more expensive a couple of years ago.
The correlation in Europe tend to be between parental education level and child education level. The correlation between parental income and education level of the child is weaker.
This is true in the United States (there is a very strong correlation between wealth and education level, but the correlation between parent's education level and child's education level is stronger than the correlation between parent's wealth and child's education level; IIRC, there still some evidence that the wealth plays some role independent of parent's education level in determining child's education level, but its a smaller role.)
This is the first post by 0xab after 1992 days of being a registered HN user. Imagine (a) the determination needed to not yield to temptation and post something over 5.5 years, and (b) how upsetting immigration is to someone as determined as this PhD for his first comment to be on immigration.
> What's your definition of sane? None of those countries have the scale, frequency and volume of demand that resembles anything like the US.[1]
The most relevant statistic in the link you reference is "Pct of population" with the US at 14.3% and Germany at 11.9%. Two and a half percentage points does not seem like such a big difference in scale.
My attitude isn't "why not me" but "why is this so absurd"? I got in to both countries, but one was a total clusterfuck and one wasn't. Obviously one of them is doing something better than the other. I'm positing that the ultimate solution to demand (if one exists), is more in the direction of the German system than the random lottery of the US.
In the UK they at least aim to give you a decision on your visa in ~3 weeks at least 90% of the time, and there isn't just one window during which you're allowed to apply. https://www.gov.uk/tier-2-general/overview
(Coincidentally, I'm trying to relocate to the UK -- or an English-language friendly part of the EU, like the Netherlands or maybe Berlin -- so that I can be with a lovely girl. Haven't even gotten to visas yet, but I am really really glad that I'm not trying to go the other way...)
Depending on where exactly you are from, the Dutch process will impose an exam on you and an income requirement for your partner, and can take anywhere from 3 to 6 months.
Easier process than in the US, but not exactly an easy one.
Not sure about that. If you are in Tech (or IT as they like to call it here), you can probably qualify for the Knowledge Migrant permit ance chances are the process is a lot faster. Took me about 10 days to get a work permit in the Netherlands but I did have an employer willing to sponsor me. Another friend of mine (also in IT) took him about 1 week also.
True. The parent mentioned a girl so that made me forget about the Knowledge migrant path. It is by far a better solution. However, for people that are 30 or over, the salary requirement is on a high side.
Not job related, but family related: if you're married, here in Italy, you can stay, end of story. Effective immediately.
In the US, the process is something like 6 months, although apparently there was/is a backlog, and they were taking something like a year to process applications for spouses.
It gives you an idea of how screwed up the system is.
I'm an American have been trying to live in the US with my spouse for over a year so I can go back to school. I'm still waiting and unsure if we can even get in. Kafka-esque and nightmare can hardly describe the feeling.
K1/IR1/CR1 processing times are still around 6-8 months. A nightmare if a couple just got married or is going to and need to live apart during this time. Additionally the process is not straight forward and a lot of people will need help from a lawyer which makes it expensive.
(Semi-related) I'm an L-1A spouse. It took my work application 10 months to get processed, when the USCIS' own regulation stated that the it should have been closed in 90 days.
You call them, ask them, plead with them. Nothing. "Your application is in the system and is getting processed."
Nine months into it, it turned out that they lost my digital picture taken at a USCIS facility. How in this day and age one loses digital pictures is beyond me.
You don't need to be a jerk. He complained about a lottery - that hardly makes him sound feeling entitled about the job. A lottery, to him and to me, sounds like a joke in the grand scheme of things. To put all your formative years into the grinding regime of grad school only to see the next step taken away by a lottery sounds unfair and he has a right to complain about it.
Because the USA's system is incredibly byzantine and Kafkaesque compared to the EU's. I mean, a lottery for christ's sake... In my experience, getting visas for most other comparable countries are fairly straightforward.
Entitled? No, you have to demonstrate you can get a job (to get to work in Sweden. Other countries may have other rules). Either by actually getting a job or by showing you have required skills.
Try to raise children on one salary living in a high-cost city like San Francisco/Bay Area when the spouse can't work for six years. Then try to find a job after six years out of work. I have friends whose marriage broke because of similar situations.
To be fair, that one salary is likely $100-150K/year. The median household income in SF is $72K, so you're probably going to be OK.
Plus, the partner who's not working has some very real imputed salary value. In fact, the economic value of a non-working partner is much higher in a high cost of living area than a low cost of living area. If they save you from paying for professional childcare, the expense saved may be $4K/month rather than $500/month. Ditto for other services, especially meals at home.
As a Canadian who did three years of immigration horseshit in the US with a non-working spouse, the real issue is that your spouse is making a huge sacrifice of their freedom. Being a kept person can chip away at your sense of self-sufficiency and self-worth. The people I met in my situation all left the country (the majority) or had kids (one couple).
What if the spouse does not want to raise children but rather would prefer to work. What if the partners would prefer to both raise the children and both work less? "Just go raise some children" just promotes the gender inequality that people have been trying to fix for ages.
I'm not assuming anything: It's the same response both ways round. It should be the couples decision on how to organize their life and their child-rearing duties.
I agree with your general sentiment, but either you were assuming that the husband was working and the wife staying home, or your statement "just promotes the gender inequality" makes no sense.
No, gender equality is if both sides can choose to pursue a career. Just flipping that around and defaulting to "male partner cannot work because he has to raise some kids" is inequal as well. In any case, that already assumes it's a male-female couple.
You know what does not involve any gender stereotypes? One partner working and the other staying home with the kids. You don't need to flip it around and default to the male staying home. Many couples choose this for perfectly good reasons.
Like I said before, I agree with you general sentiment that the couple should be able to make that decision.
Just curious, what would you have done to fix the root issue -- handling a large number of H1B requests?
One answer is well why should there be a cap. Well there is a cap and one reason is probably because opening the gates wide open will skew the job market in US. For better or for worse it is hard to say but if you ask those in US they might say for worse.
So there is a cap. (And obviously it is being pushed against, there is demand, you wanted to work for Apple, others want to work for other companies and so on). So how to you fix the problem?
I can see these things as possible solutions:
1) First come first serve. That would be interesting, each year on a midnight of a particular date. Some server or some office in DC will will swamped with thousands of instantaneous requests. In less than 1 second it will all be over. Those with servers closer to the facility or those that have better synchronized clocks will win. Or put everyone in a long queue maybe and just wait year to year. Watch the queue extend for decades.
2) Make it an auction. So now each spot initially costs some processing fee to handle. Then well do first come first serve but increase the fee according to the demand. Maybe it takes $2k for initial spot. And $200k for last available.
> Since the job required me to be in Cupertino, the deal simply fell through.
Shouldn't you also blame Apple here too, at least just a bit. Presumably if there is this huge talent pool abroad they would at least consider opening an office in EU or let you work remotely in some capacity. Tech sector is interesting because that becomes possible (and has been done). I don't quite understand their position either. Here is a global company that they found a top person they want to join their team but well, they can't win some stupid lottery. Well fuck it, maybe they can do something more than just drop the deal? Wondering, what are you thoughts on Apple's position?
An auction is the obvious solution. Submit bids with your application for the fee to be paid yearly to the USA and the highest bidders get the H1-B visas.
There's no need to raise the cap and all the Apples and Googles get all the applicants they want. Today the majority of H1-B visas go to Wipro and Infosys and the like for low paid tech grunts; Apple won't have any trouble outbidding them. And those tech grunt companies aren't doing anything valuable for the USA so it won't be any loss to have them struggle.
In fact, we should be able to drop the cap to a more reasonable 30-40,000 instead of the recent 85,000.
And we should be able to eliminate almost all the paperwork. In the current system, a US government bureaucrat tries to determine if you're qualified when you apply. Applicants hire lawyers to fake, translate, fabricate, apostille, and make up education and work experience that USCIS expects. If applicants are paying cash, we can presume they're qualified and reduce the application paperwork to one page.
The more I think about it, the more I like the auction system.
The big companies that need highly skilled employees can afford to pay en masse.
Now if you are a US based small business and you found a dream employee in say Australia. Either this employee is so valuable that you would be willing to shell out something like 50-100k to bring him/her over, or what is more likely you become flexible and let him/her work remotely.
I do not foresee many small businesses who would actually need to bring a foreign employee in for a constant presence in US. Does a barbershop really need to bring a foreign born barber. If it does then that barber would probably qualify as an alien of extraordinary ability...
My views is biased as a European who programs for a medium sized US business and sees no need to visit US more than once every year.
It hurts startups - the small businesses that are specifically designed to grow quickly, in fast-changing markets.
A small business that's small because it's a niche can afford to have a dream employee work remotely. A small business that's small because it's not-yet-large in a fast-changing market will be slowed down dramatically by the timezone differences, and probably lose out to competitors that colocate all their people.
Not necessarily. A small company that generates say $1 million per engineer would be in a better position to outbid an Infosys type shop that might be bigger, but generate a lot less revenue per engineer. And indeed, that's the beauty of the auction: it would ensure that the people getting visas are the ones whose positions will generate the most net value to the economy.
Theoretically you could design a tiered system with a separate quota allocated for companies with <10 employees to bid for (or some other easily enforceable definition of start-up or small business).
But that's part of the labour budget. It's like saying that small companies can't compete with big companies for employees, because they can't afford to pay them as much.
If your small company wants to employ someone then you have to be willing to pay as much as a big company will for the same employee. And that goes whether you're just paying salary or paying salary plus visa price.
The only disadvantage I can see to small companies is that a big company could afford to buy visas in bulk at the start of the year and figure out what to do with them later, while a small company wouldn't buy visas until it had a specific employee in mind. So I'd make the auction monthly, not annual.
But that's the thing. Labour budgets ARE smaller at smaller companies. Hence your salary at a startup will most of the time be lower than what you could make at a similar position at a big corp. They make up for it by handing out more equity.
Whereas a large company can make a better case for paying say $100K on a visa for a $200K/year job, this is much harder for a startup paying e.g. $100K+1% equity for said job. If I have only $1MM or so in funding as a startup I am limited to what I can pay and couldn't reasonably waste a year's worth of salary on a visa, whereas a $50,000MM revenue company might have more leeway. No?
I'm sure that was proposed as ridiculous, but you have to keep in mind that there's only a programming labor shortage in two, maybe three cities on the coasts.
For a national program like this lottery, every non-citizen the .gov lets thru will result in many social program costs not only for the one citizen who won't be employed and at a higher pay rate, plus all the downstream effects of lower salaries and less jobs for citizens leading to lower economic activity leading to lower tax revenue.
A $100K cost per immigrant is below the low side of what it costs .gov to take care of the local citizens.
What I'm claiming is the program is a stereotypical crony capitalist "socialize the losses and privatize the gains" scam. Screwing the program up or limiting it or making it very expensive to participate in is a net economic gain to the country. "Fixing" the program would be a net economic loss to the country. Furthermore the program is literally inhumane, a real wage for a human with real working conditions is X, but as a psuedo-slave psuedo-indentured servant you are less human than a real human so we'll only offer you 50% of X and treat you like dirt because thats highly profitable and helps rich guys get richer at the expense of everyone else. Its disgusting that the program exists on several levels.
Besides Canada has better medical system, better crime stats, arguably better recreational opportunities... I wouldn't necessarily describe being "stuck" in Canada as much of a punishment. Its not exactly like being trapped in Somalia.
> every non-citizen the .gov lets thru will result in many social program costs not only for the one citizen who won't be employed
I don't think F1/H1B visa holders are entitled to ANY social programs. They HAVE to pay medicare/social security, but they cannot avail any of the benefits.
I'm referring to the local STEM workers who operate at a class based disadvantage.
Its fundamentally a zero sum game, actually its a declining sum game for anyone middle class or below. So a guy from Canada or India or whatever gets a job, that means the local who would have gotten it is unemployed, mom and kids on welfare, etc.
Also there's a local utility who advertises for a $60K CCIE as part of their H1B program and aside from the $100K+ local who now has to work at walmart or pull cable or something, there are secondary effects on the local marketplace such that the $60K H1B can't participate in the local economy from retail to home construction quite like the now unemployed formerly $100K local. So that's $40K/yr not going to walmart / real estate developers / whatever. True, every penny of that $40K goes to the execs bonuses, but they might not live in that area (or even in that country) and there is a declining economic effect as fewer people have money (A poor dude with his first $100 bill contributes toward more economic activity (velocity of money, etc) than a rich dude with his millionth $100 bill)
> An auction is the obvious solution. Submit bids with your application for the fee to be paid yearly to the USA and the highest bidders get the H1-B visas.
Nah. They can bid with salaries rather than fees. Better to just collect the income and payroll taxes while giving the visas to the most valuable guest workers possible.
Yeah I suggested it because it seemed like a rather obvious solution. Now not sure if government is just incapable running an auction or there is an obvious flaw in it that I just couldn't see.
>there is a cap and one reason is probably because opening the gates wide open will skew the job market in US.
Maybe.
One of the factors evaluated for h1b approval is whether or not the immigrant's salary is higher than the mean wages for U.S. citizens working in the same SOC category in the same area.
"Opening the floodgates" would only serve to skew the average salary upwards for citizens, which is good for skilled labor.
>One of the factors evaluated for h1b approval is whether or not the immigrant's salary is higher than the mean wages for U.S. citizens working in the same SOC category in the same area.
You can make many valid arguments for loosening the American immigration laws; but driving up the average wage because that's what the government mandate assumes that companies are irrational. A profit-maximizing company is only going to hire a H1B if they are cheaper than a US citizen per unit work.
(You could make an argument that increased immigration drives up wages by generally increasing economic activity in the destination country, sure... but that's a rather different argument.)
> A profit-maximizing company is only going to hire a H1B if they are cheaper than a US citizen per unit work.
Not true. What if the company can't find a qualified candidate? Then what they pay will likely be higher than the average worker in that industry. That's how salaries go up.
All right, they are only going to hire a H1B if they are cheaper than an available US citizen per unit work.
And you can't say "there are no US citizens available". Of course there are... for the right price.
Now you've got a question. Is the price excessive because there are too few US citizen workers available in that field? Or are the companies just being cheap and trying to drive down the price of skilled workers? In an environment of heavy lobbying, with very persuasive people trying to make their case, how can the government objectively tell which is going on?
Sure, if you attract them away from their current job. Then what happens to the company that had their employee taken away?
My point is that an immigrant isn't necessarily cheaper. I'm one of those immigrants on an H1B working in the US that isn't cheaper than an equivalent US worker.
>Sure, if you attract them away from their current job. Then what happens to the company that had their employee taken away?
As a hiring manager? that is not my concern. But from a societal perspective, there are a few things the company that is outbid can do.
1. they can raise their own wages.
Note, this does increase the availability of workers through several mechanisms. most obviously, more people will enter the field as wages go up, but that takes a while. More immediately? you have people that have the skills who can also do another job.
For example, my partner does embedded linux development, mostly on arm. But, my partner could also do my job (I'm a SysAdmin) - and usually do it rather better than I am. Right now, the embedded stuff pays about 10% more than the sort of sysadmin gigs I can get, reflecting the required skills. But if there were suddenly more demand for SysAdmins? if you paid enough, I'm sure you could get my partner to take a SysAdmin job.
This is an important part of how Capitalisim allocates labor efficiently. Yeah, I could work as an apprentice motorcycle mechanic. I'm probably pretty good, I mean, for an apprentice. I'm not at journeyman level yet. If being a motorcycle mechanic paid better than being a SysAdmin? I'd probably spend the time and effort to get my motorcycle repair skills up to snuff.
2. they can train.
This increases the pool of workers rather more quickly than increasing wages. This is what I do when I need to hire technical people, and I can't afford market rates. Find people that you think have the attributes to do the job, once they have some help and practice.
From a corporate perspective, both of these things are just a matter of money. And so is going through the work to get a H1B.
>My point is that an immigrant isn't necessarily cheaper. I'm one of those immigrants on an H1B working in the US that isn't cheaper than an equivalent US worker.
Yeah, this hasn't been my experience. My experience is that outside of the contracting houses[1] or teams where you have a bunch of H1B types from the same place - if the same people that hired the Americans hire a single H1B on to a team of Americans, either the H1B is technically better, or he or she is willing to work a lot harder under worse conditions, or he or she is willing to take less money. Otherwise putting up with the paperwork and language barrier is not worth it.
It makes sense that someone working under a H1B would be willing to work harder; My understanding is that if you are fired, you have 15 days to find a new job or leave the country. Regardless of your financial ability, that sounds like a real pain in the ass.
[1]The only rational explanation for the high price and low quality of contracting houses that I can see is that someone is getting pretty huge kickbacks.
That company that lost an employee should have been paying them more. Any company paying below market rates will have problems retaining their best employees.
Many skilled positions have scarcity, and employers are willing to pay more for an immigrant if their skillset is a better fit and/or can fill the position immediately.
>Most blue collar labor is fungible - meaning that just about any person who is not incapacitated can do it.
I think you underestimate the skill and training required for many blue-collar professions.
I probably have apprentice-level skills as a plumber, an electrician and as a mechanic. I know enough to say with some authority that it would take years for me to get to journeyman level. I don't think the average person could be a really good programmer, and I don't think the average person could be a really good master mechanic, either.
> if you ask those in US they might say for worse.
Rather than ask J Random Dude in the US, you should probably ask someone with a modicum of expertise in the matter, such as an economist, who will tell you that adding people is generally a net positive, rather than a negative.
I am a Random Dude, and my first assumption is that bringing a highly-skilled, highly-paid person into this country would result in more taxes being paid and more goods and services being purchased.
Right, however this is where the details start to muddy the conclusion.
The fact is the H1-B visa program is completely abused in order to bring in cheaper employees at the expense of the rest of the community. These H1-B employees have little recourse, limited career potential and supress wages. The uncertainty of their immigration status means they don't buy houses, start families, or participate in the community. The benefits economists suggest don't materialize.
Futher, the H1-B program has a negative effect on higher education. The H1-B program allows employers to avoid the H1-B dependent designation if they hire immigrants that possess a masters or higher degree from a US education institution. It is a well known backdoor into the US and drives up the cost of education and pushes the citizens of the US out of the classroom. The employers list a masters degree as a requisite which the citizen doesn't have because they couldn't afford it. Take a look at the UT Dallas enrollment numbers [0]. Nearly 90% of the CS masters students are international, and of the entire engineering school 84% of them are international.
I would say that US citizens have an easier time doing a masters or PhD because they are eligible for many scholarships and fellowships that international students do not qualify for. In addition, good universities usually offer research or teaching assistantships which result in a complete tuition waiver as well as a monthly stipend.
So, US citizens can definitely afford a masters or doctorate - but they are in so much debt from undergrad that they prefer to work than study further.
Do you have a source on h1B visa driving down wages?
Because for an employer to sponser an h1b immigrant, they need to be paid more than the prevailing wage for their job in the area, which is a combination of salary, benefits, and other factors.
And how is it ruining higher education? Isn't the point to have a better educated workforce?
If a public school accepts so many international students for their CS Masters program, isn't that a problem with the state school, not the immigration system?
I agree that H1B's are problematic, but think the solution is more liberty for those people, so that they're in a better bargaining position with the company, rather than lowering the number of people allowed in.
I completely agree. I've been working on a blog post titled something like 'How to argue against the H1-B program and not look like a Xenophobe' and this is precisely one of the points I make.
Among many changes, one of them should basically be a fast track to citizenship for H1-B holders, and not have it be tied to the employer. If they are that smart and that needed we should make it easier for them to stay.
Well the first thing you could do is to limit H1Bs to American companies (where the HQ is registered and run out of America and where the company is not a subsidiary of an international company).
When you look at the distribution of H1Bs, you'll quickly notice that most H1Bs do not go to people working for 'American' companies. Kind of defeats the purpose if you think about it.
Wow, that really sucks (there's no other word for it). Makes me realise how lucky I was to get an H1B during the recession when no lottery was needed. Since then I've moved back to Europe though, in some small part for the insecurity of the whole situation. I wish you could have had my "spot", seems like you were a lot more deserving.
Time for more companies to do engineering/product overseas then and not just open sales/marketing offices. I can't imagine having 10,000+ engineers sitting in one location/timezone where you often can't get the best talents due to visa issues be more efficient than say have three large offices with say 5,000/2,500/2,500 each in America/Europe/Asia and be done with it.
Sorry for your lousy experience with USCIS. I wholeheartedly agree with you that building your life stable is the more sensible thing to do than putting your life in the hands of a lottery!
> It took the USCIS four months to let me know that my application was not selected....
Simply being curious here - didn't Apple provide you with the case ID? Typically, when you submit an Application to USCIS, you get an ID that allows you to check your status online and maybe you would have been able to know immediately that your application was not selected.
It doesn't work that way. Imagine that USCIS receives a huge pile of envelopes. They then run a lottery to decide which envelopes to open. The opened envelopes are then processed and the employer gets an ID for those cases. Only after ALL SELECTED cases were processed (some accpeted, some rejected, some pending more info), the closed envelopes are returned to the employer. This is why it takes months (4 in my case) to inform an applicant that he wasn't selected even though the lottery is the first stage of the process.
When I went through this I was deeply involved the paperwork and the impression I had was that the whole process is far more nuanced than a computer-generated go/no-go. A minor paperwork error, DHS agent on bad day, or misunderstanding a qualification or another candidate deemed more applicable would do the trick.
Have you tried for an EB1-A green card? Contact one of these online lawyers (wegreened/hooyou), and they will evaluate your CV for free. I personally know a few (non-US) people who avoided the H1B problem this way.
I think if we ever start a second YC location, this will be the reason -- to help founders who are unable to get past the US immigration system.
It's unfortunate that our government is becoming increasingly dysfunctional at every level -- federal, state, and local governments are all failing to do their jobs. I'm glad that Canada is introducing some competitive pressure.
I think if we ever start a second YC location, this will be the reason
Please do. Tarsnap will apply to be part of YC Vancouver if it happens. (I'm assuming that if you create a YC somewhere outside of the US it would be in Vancouver, because really, nowhere else in the world is anywhere near as awesome.)
FWIW, I think there's two "markets" of which you've only mentioned one -- in addition to founders who can't get US visas, I know plenty of talented Canadians and Europeans who don't want to live in the US due to the current political climate.
Real estate is better in Montreal. Was paying 2K for small loft 700sqft in Gastown vs 1.3K for a 1600sqft loft in Old Montreal with a view of the basilica.
Startup dollars will go further here and the office will be twice as awesome. Much easier for new people to make friends and the art scene is not priced out. Montreal is undeniably more fun.
And lord, the festivals... Mind you, winter lives here but it is sunny even when it snows. Rain will tends to drive most people in BC a bit wonky.
I would say do Montreal if it is in the summer. Else BC. Or if it is about the quick plane ride to silicon valley, same deal.
I've lived in Montreal (born & raised), Silicon Valley, and currently Vancouver.
You're right that in Montreal, investment dollars will go much further, and it is a more interesting city for a young person. If you are looking for a place to incubate, as a young company, Montreal might be almost perfect. Similarly, it's a great deal for a student.
But then you have to grow up and live there.
The tech talent pool is very thin, the laws are mindbogglingly perverse, and the taxes are very high. The French/English split becomes very difficult when you think about bringing more workers over from a non-francophone country, not to mention their spouses and partners.
Just like foreign students, a YC company that's growing up will probably want to get the hell out of Montreal.
At least in Vancouver you have some kind of chance to hang around, and if you want more techies there's a reasonable local talent pool, and people from the rest of the world don't mind moving here so much.
As someone who grew up in Montreal, and moved to Silicon Valley, one of the appeals of SV is the weather. Montreal winters are long, cold, and dark. These are not conditions everyone wants to live in. Additionally, the Office De La Langue Francaise will make the life of any English company a nightmare. To top it all off, taxes in Quebec are absurdly high (especially considering the quality of social services). So while Montreal is a great city, I think it would be a poor choice for a YC office.
Well, taxes for individuals with out a lawyer or a good accountant. I think there if you spent the time making a deal with Quebec they would accomodate.
Secondly, it is cheap to hire someone for translation and companies should launch with multiple languages. It just increase the global audience for the product. I am sure YC could develop the capacity to translate the product at little cost.
Peixe Urbano, Baidu ... etc clones eat up the market that VC backed startup could accomodate for.
Winter... well try the rain in BC for a winter. Again I have no issue, I am from the Peg (Winnipeg) where it was -58 last year. It is the same weather as NYC and close to Boston (MIT, Harvard)
I know there is alot of development capital floating around.
Dude, compare average rain fall. Pointing at an outlying time period is unsciency. Lets though in total sunshine ;-)
poutine > sushi ... well not in Vancouver. Poutine is rough out there, all megabites with sesame seed pizza. It is just going to be tougher to bootstrap start ups out there.
There's more to location than real estate costs. If that was the main factor YC wouldn't be in the bay area. The existing talent pool and ecosystem are much more important factors. Vancouver also has the advantage of being in the same time zone as YC.
Complaining about the cost of office space in Gastown is like complaining about the cost of office space in SOMA. There are many cheaper alternatives if you don't insist on being in a trendy neighbourhood. Office space in Burnaby or Coquitlam is a lot cheaper than Gastown.
You may think Montreal is more fun but I'd disagree. I can't scuba dive in Montreal. I can't walk five minutes and be hiking in a rain forest. Even if I agreed that Montreal is more fun this shouldn't be a consideration for a YC location. YC companies will be busy working.
Saying Montreal does not have the talent is silly. It is in the most populated region of Canada.
1) Mont Royal - Hiking
I don't think scuba might be a silly reason to discount Montreal. Fact is developers will build social ties faster in Montreal. Vancouver is clique driven and most people coming at not are really not prepared for the rain. Almost like Stockholm.
Metropolis real estate with creative spaces and inspire the imagination. McGills, Harvard, MIT, NYU all in the same time zone and a quick flight.
Burnaby or Coquitlam is like any other suburb and prices are already so high any big influx is just going to highten tensions. There is a strong Anarchist movement that surfaces time to time in Vancouver as well as crippling homelessness.
Adding my +1. I left the Valley to come back to Canada, because as awesome as the Valley is, I can't see myself building a life there. As an engineer, getting a visa is much easier than it is for most, but it's still an unnecessary stressor.
> FWIW, I think there's two "markets" of which you've only mentioned one -- in addition to founders who can't get US visas, I know plenty of talented Canadians and Europeans who don't want to live in the US due to the current political climate.
+1. With my current interests and life goals it seems like I'll eventually have head down to Silicon Vally, but the idea of living in the US terrifies me. Ycombinator opening up in Vancouver would probably prevent what would otherwise be inevitable just because of the domino effect it would have. Not to mention attending Ycombinator in Vancouver would be amazing, but that's making large assumptions.
+1 please do. As an accelerator connected to US capital & experience, same language/culture, and being in the same timezone with a 2hr flight, this can only mean great things. A lot of engineers in the community here (myself included) are not necessarily willing to give up life in beautiful Vancouver to move to an industrial park in Silicon Valley.
I am a MS employee waiting to move to the US. Just so frustrated by the system. After 15 months I've fallen in love with Vancouver. I come from Australia. Yes, the winter sucks, but as Engineers we spend a lot of time indoors and it doesn't make a huge difference.
I would definitely apply for YC Vancouver. The tech community here is vibrant and growing.
If you are referring to recent proposed visa changes, you appear to be defining dysfunctional as not passing visa programs very beneficial to a tiny group of people: incubators like YC, and owners / large investors in tech dependent startups. As not a member of those groups, that's quite a stretch.
Given that I also mentioned state and local government, it should be clear that I'm referring to more than just immigration issues.
I get your point though. I'm an evil capitalist who doesn't want to fund Americans because they are unwilling to give up 7% equity, or something like that. Maybe you think that Sergey Brin and Paul Graham stole their jobs from some hard working, native born Americans.
That's the problem with zero-sum thinking. You believe that in order for a foreigner to get ahead, an American must be pushed back.
I have the opposite view. I believe that much of America's success is rooted in having an open and inclusive culture that attracts smart, ambitious, and determined people from around the world who come here and pursue their dreams. And that when they succeed, we all benefit. To me, anti-immigrant is anti-American, both economically and ideologically.
Well, in some cases it's that the people coming from overseas are willing to get paid less for the same job. The 'evil capitalist' sees this as a way to get cheaper labor.
I think that this can be alleviated without being anti-immigrant though. For example, make it easier for H1Bs to move between jobs and/or start their own businesses so that they don't have to feel so tied to the employer that they don't want to risk 'rocking the boat' too much. Or make it so that switching jobs doesn't 'reset the counter' on building up towards citizenship (or is it just a green card, I forget).
Again, it's a zero-sum thinking error to assume that there's some fixed number of jobs and therefore more people equals lower pay. I would have made substantially less at Google if it weren't for all of the foreigners making the company a success :)
I agree that H1B transfer restrictions are bad though. If people are good enough to let into the country, then they should be free to switch jobs just like anyone else.
> Again, it's a zero-sum thinking error to assume that there's some fixed number of jobs and therefore more people equals lower pay.
I'm not stating the "more people" == "less pay". I'm stating that foreign workers are willing get paid less money, regardless of what the job pool is. They have fewer options available to them, so they accept "worse" pay for what maybe essentially the same job.
Also, the amount of jobs that are available at any point in time is fixed. Jobs are created when a company has a need to fill. Jobs aren't created just because there is an excess supply of unemployed people. They don't spring into existence out of nowhere.
Do companies create more positions just to accommodate the influx of foreign workers? Or do the amount of jobs stay the same regardless?
True, but the amount of new people matters. Does 1000 people per year really move the needle all that much? How many jobs does that indirectly create?
edit: Wikipedia say that (e.g.) H1Bs are capped at 65k/year. Spread across the US, I'm curious how much this affects job creation? I could see an argument if they were concentrated in one place though.
> in some cases it's that the people coming from overseas are willing to get paid less for the same job.
Agreed that this is the case in a lot of industries, but the problem in Silicon Valley and the tech industry generally isn't the cost of workers, it's finding enough highly-skilled workers to allow companies to grow and achieve their visions.
> Maybe you think that Sergey Brin and Paul Graham stole their jobs from some hard working, native born Americans.
Straw man. Sergey Brin didn't immigrate to the US, his parents did and he came along for the ride as a child.
Nobody begrudges the success of children of immigrants to the US (which by definition is everyone but the native Americans), but middle aged, unemployed American programmers may well resent companies that claim there is a shortage of programmers whilst stuffing their IT departments with foreign visa workers who won't rock the boat or ask for a raise because their continued residency in the US depends on employer sponsorship.
My point is you're asking for visa changes to directly benefit, well, you. With most likely only tenuous benefits for others.
And frankly, I do believe that Google -- and yes, YC too, viewing YC as somewhat of an umbrella organization of the companies it has incubated -- bear a certain responsibility to Americans that importing foreign workers has helped you sidestep. There's plenty of engineers here who can't / don't want to make large life sacrifices to live in the bay area. Where is your (or Google, or YCs) leadership on things like: community problems in the bay area (housing, transportation), education, engineering pipelines, etc. Google and YC's diversity numbers are pathetic [1], and that lack of diversity represents lots of potential employees that are already here.
Given the way you defend your proposed changes is to claim opposing them means you think foreigners are stealing jobs or some such stupidity, I think it clarifies our positions.
I think you misunderstood my point about YC and Google -- they would not exist without their foreign born founders. If you think the existence of Google is only of tenuous benefit to others, then I don't know what to say :)
I'm saying the marginal benefit of 5k founder visas is of tenuous benefit. Nobody (I assume?) is debating the value of google's search engine, or thinks like book search / digitization.
From the demographics, it's quite clear that SV has no problem with non-whites. And if you compare the graduation demographics in technical disciplines with hiring demographics, you'll see that all groups are fairly represented.
If certain groups of non-whites are not receiving the education required to contribute in SV, that isn't the responsibility of SV to fix. That's the job of the government and the schools. And it's on the communities where those underrepresented minorities grow up to change their toxic cultures so they don't look down on being educated as "acting white."
Nice talking points, both of you. However, neither of you are actually addressing how to design the immigration system to function as a positive-sum game for both Americans and immigrants.
This is a discussion that needs to be had, because the current immigration system is tilted, like so much else about USAian government right now, towards "give the capitalists whatever they need and if everyone else survives that's good".
For instance, as I proposed upthread, if the H1B system was really about bringing in high-skill workers to fill shortages, visa allocation would go by auction, with the bids being proposed salaries. For N visas, the N proposed jobs for immigrants with the highest salaries get the visas, and the salaries are then legally binding.
This design is absolutely nothing like the current H1-B system, which is why most of the top users of H1-B visas are Indian outsourcing firms.
Then why make it about auctioning and highest bidder? It's a US visa for people to work in the US in hopes of benefitting US citizen. Then why not limit H1Bs to US companies (HQ in the US and not subsidiaries of international companies) only. Solves your stated problem of how the H1B system is currently misused without favoring big corporations over startup companies.
>Then why not limit H1Bs to US companies (HQ in the US and not subsidiaries of international companies) only. Solves your stated problem of how the H1B system is currently misused without favoring big corporations over startup companies.
Because I'm not favoring big corporations. I'm favoring workers.
Very true!
Just to think that today a Sergey Brin or an Alexander Graham Bell or a Jerry Yang or a Pierre Omidyar might not have been able to start their billion dollar businesses that employ millions of Americans, if they just happened to have not won a LOTTERY.
The system has always been broken. But it gets more and more broken as time progresses. Sad.
> I believe that much of America's success is rooted in having an open and inclusive culture that attracts smart, ambitious, and determined people from around the world who come here and pursue their dreams.
Agreed. But who decides who fits that criteria [smart, ambitious, and determined people]?
Today - it's money and tomorrow it'll be the same.
And you know, everyone who's not xenophobic, enjoys living in a diverse community and philosophically believes people should be able to live wherever they want.
Pretty much every country has limits on immigration. It is hardly unique to the US. There are different cultures and traditions in the world. It takes for people to adjust to a new country and the country to adjust to them.
Actually white Americans don't seem to mind immigration from fellow white-majority countries, especially if it's from the developed ones. But that's an understandable phenomenon.
They don't now only because there isn't a lot of it, so it's not a political issue. How many recent German or French immigrants are there in the US? Not enough for anyone to notice. Back when there was large-scale immigration from Europe though, a lot of people minded, and formed parties specifically to agitate against the Irish/Poles/etc.
You see that now in Europe. UKIP isn't complaining only about muslim immigrants (though they complain about them loudest), but also about continental-European immigrants, especially eastern Europeans. I suspect something similar would happen in the U.S. if there were a large influx of European immigrants.
The internet is a good example of a culture than can exist if you do away with artificial barriers between groups of people. Modern immigration policy is not inherently correct and it wasn't devised during an age of hyper connectivity.
If the Internet had to ensure housing, food, and transportation would be available for every participant, we would be a lot more selective about granting access. Open borders made sense in the age of unsettled land, and they make sense when the marginal cost of delivering everything (i.e., only information) is nearly zero.
>If the Internet had to ensure housing, food, and transportation would be available for every participant, we would be a lot more selective about granting access.
Unfortunately, the US doesn't ensure anything at all for its own citizens, other than their God-given right to accumulate capital in unlimited amounts.
Whom should you select to let into your country? The same people you select as employees, only more so.
We use "skilled migration" as a proxy for what we really want, which is people with good genes. If you have skills and good genes then you'll enrich the country not only in this generation but in all future generations to come.
So an ideal immigration policy would involve some combination of testing for intelligence, physical fitness and (dare I say it) good looks.
There are plenty of untalented natives in any country. I do not think the government is particularly good at spotting talent. We should just let everyone in IMO.
Besides, "talent" can mean many things. Is the Mexican mother who can't speak English and doesn't have a college degree (maybe not even high school), but can make BAD ASS food and is capable of raising a family of 5 talented?
Strawman. Vivek Wadhwa scolded Democrats for not taking a deal proposed by the Republicans whereby 55K diversity visas in exchange for startup visas. [1]
Startup visas have nothing to do with diversity. It has to do with enriching the US economy. Nothing wrong with that. I support the startup visa moment, but not at the expense of other visas. We should be giving more visas - not less or the same amount reclassified.
>We should be giving more visas - not less or the same amount reclassified.
True, but you should also be doing more to exclude the people who don't have visas, which is the main reason the US immigration system is currently broken.
I lived in the US for a few years, did everything legally, queued up at embassies, paid endless fees, and saw that everywhere I went I was surrounded by people who had entered the country illegally and the US government wasn't doing a fucking thing about it.
Eventually I decided "Fuck it", because if the US government is more interested in letting in a gazillion unskilled, non-English-speaking manual labourers who have already shown a complete disregard for its laws than it is in letting in me, then the US isn't a country that deserves me.
While it would of course lower afasd's blood pressure to relax and let it go, his question needs to be considered. Anyone telling law-abiding would-be American immigrants to wait their turn comes off as either oblivious or downright malicious if they tacitly condone, um, "extralegal" immigration. As an American, frankly, it's embarrassing.
I agree that would be hypocritical. I didn't tell him to wait his turn though, I told him I support open borders.
If he wanted to come into this country illegally, I personally would have no problem with it. Maybe then though, he'd see that those people don't have it easy since they obviously won't be getting high-end engineering jobs like that and will realize they are no threat to anyone whatsoever.
It's also comparable to GPL compliance too. The companies that do open source their code and comply are leaning on the FSF to make sure their competitors are also held to the same standard. If the FSF let them off, then why should anyone spend any effort complying?
It was more the moral outrage that happens when you do the right thing and see other people getting away with doing the wrong thing.
It's like if you went to a supermarket and paid for your groceries and saw that you were the only person paying. Everyone else was just walking in, shoplifting, and walking straight out, and the managers weren't doing anything to stop it. That's not a supermarket I'd choose to keep going to.
Immigration is very important for all countries, but assimilation takes time. (If you believe in the country enough to want to immigrate there, then the existing culture must have some value.)
Ask Syria, Iraq or South Sudan, how they are enjoying their open borders. Meanwhile, Iceland, Japan and other countries are doing fine. Arguably, they could be richer if they allowed in more immigrants, but I'll take the rule of law over the chaos of uncontrolled borders.
Meh, as a visible minority I'd rather the open borders than the opposite. The Nordic countries, Japan, and others with historically xenophobic and anti-immigration attitudes have a "stronger" rule of law, and the illusion of fewer social ills, because they don't have to deal with the discomfort of a heterogeneous population.
And now that immigration is increasing in these places the amount of racism being exposed is shocking, even when compared to the USA where racism has been front-and-center for decades. Hell, just look at HN threads whenever Muslim immigration to Sweden/Norway comes up, it's like Stormfront on steroids.
Your argument has been levied against just about every immigrant population that's made its way into the US. The Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Chinese, all of whom were subject to enormous racist and xenophobic backlash, much of it under the guise of some vague notion of cultural integrity.
All of the above populations have integrated into American society and in fact the US would be markedly poorer - economically and culturally - without them now.
There's a small amount of schadenfruede I feel when I look at the struggles going on right now in previously-closed countries as they experience large-scale immigration for the first time. For years they tsk'ed tsk'ed at the US (and Canada) for their social upheaval, as people came to grips with living in a heterogeneous society, and criticized us for the many examples of blatant racism and xenophobia. Now that they're going through the same thing it makes me sad to see people from these very countries spouting the same justifications and views as Jim Crow-era America, as if they've learned literally nothing for themselves while observing us in judgment this whole time.
Was it a love for Native American culture that caused the original European settlers to come to the US? No, it was raw opportunity. Unless you're talking about Native American culture, then ALL culture in the US was constructed by immigrants.
Even Native Americans were immigrants as they crossed the Bering land bridge ;)
Actually, American Indian culture had developed a way of life that preserved a beautiful land in a sustainable manner, while much of the world was embroiled in war, feudalism and disease. True, there were inter-tribe rivalries as well, but the land was relatively peaceful and undeveloped compared to what Europe was experiencing with the Seven Years War, Protestant-Catholic Wars and massive civil wars at the time. I don't think the early Europeans necessarily understood Amerindian culture, but they were definitely the beneficiaries of it. If American Indians had executed a more cogent immigration policy, the transition to a modern economy would probably have been easier for the natives.
Of course, much has changed since then -- with finite resources like fresh water and land in good climates being consumed in many attractive countries.
I don't think it's necessarily a bad strategy. The coalition to pass immigration reform is a mixture of immigration-rights activists on the left-ish side of the spectrum, and business advocates on the right-ish side of the spectrum. If you produce some cutouts narrowly addressing the staffing needs of some of the more influential businesses, they drop out of the coalition (because their own needs are satisfied) without the overall system having been really fixed.
(Plus, philosophically, I don't really support more H1B-type programs. If immigration is to be expanded, it should be proper immigration, not tied to employers, with a reasonable path to citizenship.)
H1B is the only reasonable way a middle-class citizen of another nation can move to the US. Unless you can come up with a reasonable overnight replacement of that program, a lot of people will, rightfully, push for its expansion and not the other way around.
I don't think "overnight replacements" are a good way to improve immigration; a series of quick hacks is largely what got us into the current mess.
As for a specific replacement, I'd support a Canada-style non-sponsorship-based points system. Although I think there is something to be said for just randomness as well, such as expanding the Green Card lottery. Many of the immigrants who made large contributions to U.S. society/economy did not come in already highly educated/skilled, so I'm not sure it's a long-term advantage to restrict immigration to primarily people with strong pre-immigration skills/credentials. Short-term yes, since it fills shortages in areas of the economy, and I think a points system is a good way of handling that without the unsavory employer-tied aspect. But longer-term the "American dream" idea is that people should be able to gain those skills after immigrating; you can come in without already being the kind of person who can command six-figure job offers, and work your way up. Historically that's where a lot of the benefits of immigration have come from.
That is not true for all nations. Australians can apply for an E-3 visa, which is essentially an indefinitely-renewable H-1B with fewer restrictions and no lottery.
This is a repeat of the same story that happened the last time H-1B limit didn't meet the demand for visas. US tech companies, most notably Microsoft, opened "offices" in Vancouver. What happens next is that those employees will work for 1 year in Canada, and then will become eligible for L-1 intra-company transfer back to the US, side-stepping the H-1B quagmire.
Though as long as demand for H1 visas remains high, this cycle will continue with new recruits replacing those qualifying for L1. Inevitably some of these people may wish to remain in Canada, or form their own startups there. Seems to be a big plus for Canada regardless.
Problem with the L1 is that as I understand it, if you are on a L1 you can't apply for a green card or a H1B to stay more permanently in the US. So you are basically wedded to the company you have the visa with.
L1 is almost identical to H1b except for two main things, L1 grants your spouse an L2 visa which make him\her eligible to work in US unlike H1b\H4 nightmare, while on H1b you have more freedom applying for other jobs (if the companies are willing to transfer your visa) without going through the lottery again, unlike L1 which you get stuck with the same employer unless another company is willing to go through the lottery hassle with you.
in short, Pick your poison.
Exactly this. And if they are classified as Executives and worked overseas for three years, they can basically immediately get green card upon arrival in the US.
Wow! I had no idea the Immigrant Investor Program (IIP) worked that way in Canada![1] Basically you just give the Canadian gov't an $800K, interest-free loan and you get residency? Maybe I'm not reading it right, but you don't invest your money, the gov't invests it for you? And it's guaranteed?
I thought it was more like the US system where you had to invest money in a company of your choosing. If the company went under, tough.
The interesting thing is that the US program has an annual cap of 10,000, but hasn't reached it in the last few years. In Canada there was a backlog of tens of thousands of people.
As someone in the Sisyphean green card system (processing taking forever for the initial application, 6-7 years to go after that for the actual green card, best case); I am really glad that Canada is offering better alternatives. I bet if they emphasize this angle (quicker permanent residency for non-contract employees), they will get a decent amount of talent that otherwise is stuck grinding away in Silicon Valley for the same employer.
To anyone of Indian nationality seeking a job in North America, and interested in permanent residency – strongly consider the Canada alternative, for education as well as jobs. Unless the weather means a lot to you, ask your company if they have a Canada office where you can work when you start out. Things will be way easier.
My wife and I are seriously considering moving to Canada after she graduates from college. We love Washington, but the Green Card system is just awful. We estimate it will still take us 3-4 years till we get ours (we're Brazilians on EB-3 - side note: I never thought I'd regret dropping out from grad school, but now I do, every single day). Until then, our stay here is at the mercy of not getting laid off.
Being at the mercy of anyone is never a great idea, although it might be a regrettable necessity sometimes. So just so you know, after your adjustment for status is filed, and pending for more than 6 months, you are supposed to be able to port the green card to a new employer. Read up more about this process, and be ready to use it if necessary at the appropriate time.
But definitely, weigh the costs and benefits, and do seriously consider Canada.
There is a cost-benefit tradeoff to every decision. Analyse the tradeoff, and make your decision.
Less glibly, it might be worthwhile to target companies who already exist in SV/Seattle. I find it hard to believe that Facebook (the example given in the article) forced its engineers to accept a 50% pay cut to go to the Vancouver office.
Just to second derefr's point, that's 6+ years where you MUST stay at that job and your employer knows they don't have to keep you happy. I've heard more than a few stories about this being publicly discussed when deciding who works on some unrewarding slog. Imagine spending the better part of a decade knowing that if you want to do more than, say, Sharepoint upgrades you'll have to do it in your own time.
Can anyone realistically make a meaningful impact in a big company in less than 6 years, especially when one is just starting out in the industry?
Also isn't it only fair that if a company that's gonna spend all this money on changing your fortunes forever (i.e. sponsor your green card), then it should be able to get as much value out of you as it can? So the burden falls kinda on the employee to make the best of that period and propel her career.
Leaving aside the somewhat patronizing nature of your comment ("can anyone make a meaningful impact in < 6 years", "changing your fortunes forever"), I'm simply glad there is more choice for employees out there regarding who to work for, and am advising people to take a hard look at it.
If I work my ass off for 1, 4, or 6 years, I would much rather it be for an optimal outcome, regardless of who my employer is, or where they are located. If Canada is possibly offering a better deal, people should know about, and look seriously at them. This might even possibly lead to happier and more productive employees. Don't you agree?
Sure; mostly because that's seven years where you have no chance of getting a "horizontal promotion" by switching employers. Meaning, then, that your career trajectory is completely at your employer's whim--which usually means "stagnant."
And it's perfectly fine to disagree on that context. Using that as a reason to downvote a comment is pretty much an abuse of your downvoting power. But carry on.
Vancouver guy here. I work for a media company as a part of a ~60 member software team. The fact is that probably less than ten people in the team are actually from Vancouver. Several of them are people who lived in the US on H1B visas that they couldn't get renewed. They come here "temporarily" but then like the lifestyle and stay.
I totally agree that the messed up US immigration system has benefited us here. I have experience with both immigration systems and the process in Canada was much easier than the US.
Yea, I recently started looking at one of those high-demand fields permanent residency programs that Canada offers. Looks pretty inviting and very little hassle as compared to the US immigration.
The main reason that companies like Sony Imageworks are in Vancouver is that the BC government pays hundreds of millions of dollars a year in subsidies to VFX studios if they relocate to BC. The subsidy trade war has been covered for years by blogs such as VFX Soldier (http://vfxsoldier.wordpress.com/).
Stop this "immigration control" craziness. The reality in the US is sometimes, that it is easier for low-skilled immigrants to live in the US, than it is for high-skilled immigrants.
Why? Well, ask some of the 10million+ undocumented immigrants. They can live a better life in the US compared to their home countries, even undocumented. Tech workers or even middle-skilled workers take more issue with being "illegal" or "undocumented".
I think all immigration restrictions have to be put on the stand. Are they practical? Do they have a measurable benefit (beyond some hand-waving about supply and demand)? Do they have measurable negative impacts?
This is a complicated topic that I've been waffling on responding too.
The situation around h1b visas is messed up. But the mess is multisided. First off, there is a large amount of unemployment in this country in the IT sector (especially around older workers) and no apparent desire to fix it. Second, there are "sweat shops"/consulting bodies milking the system to under pay for what is often basic/menial work like CRUD development/etc. Third you have the specialists at the whim of (2) and the number of allotted slots.
I think both (1) and (3) need to be fixed at the expense of (2). Any company bringing over labor that is basic and can either be filled by outsourcing contracts or simply training local labor should pay the price. Tata, IBM, Wipro, etc are at the top of that list.
Seems one of the easier fixes would be to rank H1B applicants by salary rather than doing a lottery. It's supposed to be used for highly skilled workers, so I don't see why people would have a problem with it.
Companies would have a problem with this system because H1B is ostensibly about high-skilled workers who would be paid loads of money anyway, but as the statistics show, like most everything else involving employment and American state policy, it's actually about keeping labor cheap.
Has anyone here been hired by or hires engineers for an american company which has an office in Vancouver? Would you be kind enough to talk about you experience
I don't know about the first, but as for how easy it is to find decent paying jobs, quite easy. There's a whole list of local companies that hire in the regular ways ( meetups, referrals, resume cold calls ) and most multinational companies will phone interview & let you know if remote work is an option (it invariably is for most teams)
The sad part is that this H1B visa cap will not be raised in the near future as the process is a part of the so called immigration reform (Dodd and Frank bill). Why someone would club legal and illegal immigration together is beyond my understanding.
Been there, done that.
I had the same experience back in 2008, when the economy was on its peak --before it crashed miserably--
back then I got an offer from Microsoft to work in their new Vancouver development center aka(MCDC). The plan was to get everyone who is stuck waiting for their H1b Visas to start working immediately (because Canada is awesome) while testing their luck with the lottery and in worse case scenario working for a period of 1 year to qualify for L1 visa, the plan was working great, actually many people ended up loving Vancouver and decided to stay there and not go to US at all, however after the economy crashed, the H1b demand fell pretty sharp for the next 3 to 4 years which made the whole development center purpose unnecessary, in addition to significantly slower hiring and layoffs in that time frame.
So, now I see the same thing happening again, and I worry if this is just a déjà vu, hopefully not, fingers crossed.
Just a personal example, a friend of mine was looking for a web dev position in Montreal for months until he found some low paying crappy job, he then decided to move to Vancouver and found a job within 3 weeks!
Vancouver job market is burning hot and startups are having difficulties hiring, I read some even consider setting up offices in Montreal.
In response to a question about why the Montreal Python user group was so popular, I was told (by a member) that it's because there are fewer large companies for developers, so they need to network to find jobs at smaller firms.
It is important to point out that Montreal is in Quebec, which controls immigration into the province (while Canada actually issues the paperwork). Thus the process getting into, say, Vancouver or Toronto is somewhat different than getting Montreal - French is far more important, as is being young, or having children. Some countries, such as the US and some South American ones, have reciprocity arrangement where you can enter with a CV and a job offer. Others, such as European ones, can take 4+ months and require a bit of "paperwork gymnastics" to pull it off. And there are quotas and categories which have appeared and disappeared over the recent past.
As far as I can tell, it's way easier than dealing with the US although one must be "careful and correct" when doing the paperwork.
Regarding the Canadian visa situation, how easy is it for a non-resident senior Java dev to find a job in Vancouver and get sponsorship for a visa? Here in UK most companies will not even consider applicants who are not residents.
As a young programmer within the Vancouver dev community, I can say that everyone from the UBC CS program to the local meetup scene to the local incubators, including GrowLab/LaunchAcademy, Invoke and Wavefront have done an exceedingly great job and preparing for this increase in business in Vancouver.
Would this experience be any different for an American trying to work in Canada, or somewhere in Europe? I haven't tried it, and honestly don't know. But the tone of your comment is a little aggrieved, as if a non-US citizen should of course find it easy to get his dream job in the U.S. My Dad recently sold a house in Canada, and he can't get the money out of the country for six months. Why? Because he's not Canadian. The rules in Canada were written to benefit Canadians, not well-off guys from the U.S. who want to be able to move money easily. It's the same with jobs. If your dream job is in the U.S. you can always try to immigrate, I suppose. At that point a lot of these issues would go away (and I am sure that's not much easier a road).
I've found it odd that for so long there hasn't been many Vancouver branch offices of Silicon Valley tech companies as it seems like a perfect fit. Vancouver offers cheaper employees, the same time zone as Silicon Valley, and an attractive, livable city* perfect for luring talent.
It's good to see that things are finally changing, even if for some companies it seems they're setting up purely for immigration purposes. Hopefully even if these US immigration issues pass, these companies will realize the advantages Vancouver offers and continue to stick around.
* Highest rated North American city and 15th overall according to Monocle Magazine's 2014 Quality of Life city rankings.
Is there a Big Data / NLP / Machine Learning scene in Vancouver? I rarely see any Data Scientist positions being advertised in Vancouver?
I am a foreigner with a PhD in applied NLP from a US university and I have been looking at such positions in other tech hubs like Vancouver, Montreal, Berlin, etc.
But these types of jobs only seem to be in the Valley. I work in the Valley and I like it here but I want to move to a place where I can have a stable immigration situation.
US immigration may be cumbersome but the most interesting jobs in Big Data seem to be in the US.
> Is there a Big Data / NLP / Machine Learning scene in Vancouver?
Not a big one; I could think of one or two companies but it's nowhere near e.g. NYC. But that's just specialization, just like there aren't many advertising businesses in SF.
It's probably not as hard as you imagine. I would say look for jobs and let your employer figure out the H1B and file for employment-based green card for you once you arrive (good candidate with your background and credentials). You'll have six years to figure something out.
Simon Fraser University has a well-regarded NLP group. That might be a good place to start networking if you were looking for something in Vancouver...
"B.C. boasts more than 600 digital media companies, employing about 16,000 people and generating $2.3 billion in annual sales, according to the commission"
While $2 billion is obviously a lot of money in real terms, think about what that is when you compare is to the collective revenues of Bay Area tech companies.
I am a Canadian-American, and I wish Canada actually did more to exploit US immigration dysfunction. Unfortunately, I think the weather gives Canada a bad rap. I'm not even joking, Canada needs a tropical island. That's really the last step to really compete with sunny California.
Is there any reason for these companies not allowing work from home if they don't have office in respective countries or in the respective country offices? The B1 USA for meetings and discussion is easy to get it as long as you have necessary letters and proof.
Is anyone in Vancouver hiring? Perhaps there needs to be a "Who's hiring in Vancouver" thread, along with information on whether they will hire non-Canadians / non-Americans stuck in the Valley due to the immigration limbo.
Let market demand and ability to pay tell how many H1s come in
But, with a twist..home country has to have a similar program for US workers wanting to work that country so that the economies of both countries have a chance to rise due to flexibility of worker immigration
- B.C.'s tech industry has many exploitative employers
- B.C.'s tech market is underpayed, below national average.
- B.C.'s living cost on average exceeds the average salary.
- B.C.'s high real estate cost results in many house poor population.
- B.C.'s political party places far more labor rights on nurses and people cutting down trees.
- B.C. has a problem of bleeding talent to other provinces because of above reasons.
Yeah, I was raised in Vancouver and like the lifestyle enough, but moving back is a complete non-starter. Vancouver's tech salaries are lower than other Canadian metro areas, which are themselves far lower than US salaries.
I'm literally making 3x more here in NYC than a similar position in Vancouver. And housing prices (purchase, not rent) are scarily not that much lower than Manhattan.
The general small size of the tech industry also means that if you don't like this underpaid arrangement you're not exactly a very abundant job market. Vancouver is a huge employer's market, which works out great for founders, but not great for employees.
Vancouver is a lovely city - I have a lot of sentimental attachments to it - but the economics of it for employees is nonsense.
Partially agreed. I found Vancouver very lovely (Stanley Park is quite nice) yet very expensive (cost of living) and relatively low paying. I would need a company there to "sponsor" my visa (as an American) but I don't want to take an massive pay cut.
Certainly Vancouver's winters are milder than anywhere east of the Rockies, but the flipside is that you have to put up with rain, rain and more rain. After living in Vancouver for five years I moved to southern California where the weather was fantastic. I'm now in Melbourne, Australia, which is considered by Aussies to have cold winters but as a Canadian I just laugh whenever I hear that.
Apart from the weather I'd say that a more legitimate reason not to move to Vancouver is the insane cost of housing, the most expensive in North America. For this reason alone I would never consider moving my family back to Vancouver.
I've had both Scots and Canadians complain about how cold Melbourne gets. The problem isn't so much that the temperature drop doesn't get below freezing very often, it's that we don't build for the cold. Another friend says that he knows a German who, when she visits someone's house, shakes an inner wall with her fingertips and says "you guys can't build houses for shit". The ironic thing is that we have some of the most expensive housing in the world, in terms of cost vs average annual income.
This all being said, the current winter we're in has been particularly weak - lots of warm, sunny days. It's not the usual dreary, rainy Melbourne winter.
This. I'll take NYC winters over Melbourne any day. And yes, so many Aussie tradies are flat-out incompetent, don't give a shit and are quite often thieves (have a lot of stories about contractors coming back to the site after completion to steal water heaters and such).
I'm from Australia. Can definitely say housing is cheaper than Vancouver. Vancouver has been flooded by Super Rich Asians from China dumping their money in property and sky rocketing the prices for property. Can't get a 2 bedroom for less than $750,000.
Sure you can, maybe not in the tiny downtown peninsula. Mid-rise along Mid-Main or Fraser, or some of the towers around Joyce goes for $500k. (Still a lot, but not that lot. I've moved to London and it's a lot more expensive than Vancouver.)
+1 on the housing, it's a major factor. We came over in 2001, so basically got lucky, but today it's a real issue. More and more people are being pushed out to the suburbs in the Valley, and then having a pretty bad commute into downtown. Mountains and sunshine are nice, but that's a real impact on quality of life for a lot of people.
Yep, I've lived 10 years London and now 10 years Vancouver and it's comparable. It's probably even nicer in Vancouver, as we have a ground pool and air conditioning here, while in London those were more of a rarity. Vancouver does get a very grey and miserable November, but the Spring/Summers are usually very good. It's a cliche, but I've often done the 'ski in the morning up the mountain, swim in the sea in the afternoon' May/June. That's got to be good, right?
Sure, we love it and we're lucky to have lots of choice on where to live in the world (UK/US/Canada docs now). Just vacation somewhere with less rain or more sunlight in November if it gets to you.
Flights aren't that cheap here, but we usually just drive down to Seattle (2h) and fly to Vegas/Maui/SoCal for a good deal from there.
Temperature is only one factor. Another big one is humidity. Seattle is the 7th most humid city in the US, which can make 45 degrees feel like 30 and 80 degrees feel like 95. This is why Seattle weather is miserable year around except for a fe weeks in late spring and early summer.
Not to mention the constant rain, of course. Drizzle, they call it.
It actually is a constant drizzle, though only in the winter. Rarely do we get proper rain. It's one of the few things I miss from Atlanta's weather. Frankly, Seattle's climate really is very nice compared to much of the United States (say, the entire East Coast and the Midwest). It is not as nice as chunks of the California coast, but I'll take my lower cost of living over the Bay and my 15 minute commute over the terrifying sprawl that is LA. I can't really make an argument against San Diego, though. Every time I've been there it's been beautiful.
I've been living in Seattle for 1.5 years and I have a hard time with this "we rarely get proper rain" everyone says. I've seen proper rain countless times. Sometimes it really pours. I thought I'd be able to walk around in the drizzle and not get very wet, but my experience is that it's not really drizzle and I get soaked after a number of minutes outside.
In Atlanta many afternoons in the summer include a 3pm thunderstorm. Downed trees, washed out roads (I'm looking at you, Ponce de Leon where you branch off to Decatur), and plenty of thunder and lightning. You'll be positively drenched if you're outside in it at all. Seattle rarely if ever sees rain like that.
A drizzle does mean there is actively water coming out of the sky. You will get wet, but a single layer rain jacket with a hood is sufficient to mitigate that. I suppose YMMV.
This is highly subjective. Looking at the list[1] you really need feet on the ground to evaluate it correctly. Seattle/SF might be technically more humid than other cities, but they get coastal breeze and constant air movement. Anything with dense treelines (SE US) or in a valley might have lower humidity but stagnant air means sweat never evaporates and even businessmen run around w/ pit stains. It's prob just lack of residential AC that makes it seem hot at times, but it's definitely got nothing on a VA/GA/MD summer.
The drizzle combined w/ high latitude create very dark winters though.
(hm can't edit) Anyway, I thought about it more and realized the rain (100% humidity I suppose) probably skews that figure. When it's sunny, it's actually quite dry here as evidenced by my hair staying put, where on the east coast, I'd normally look like a chia pet.
Having lived in Mississippi and Seattle for 4+ years each (Seattle it was more like 8), windchill is much worse in Mississippi than it is in Seattle. In Seattle, you can pretty much leave your window open year round and have a nice sleep. 70 is considered hot in the summer; 40 is considered cold in the winter.
Now Mississippi: hot humid summers, cold humid winters. Life pretty much sucks outside of Fall/Spring.
Edit: in the interest of keeping people away from Seattle, I take everything back and agree with parent.
I'm really not sure if you trying to scare people off or are really serious. Po's law is confusing me now.
Spring and fall are really nice in Seattle, Summer is to. It is just the start of November until around March where the rain rolls in...why don't you just look at the statistics, the numbers don't lie:
Of course I'm serious. The weather in Seattle is so bad that Seasonal Affected Disorder (SAD) is a very common phenomenon. That's right: people get depressed because of the dark, wet and dreary weather there. I think that fact alone speaks for itself.
As icing on the cake, your "the more people who don't want to live in Seattle, the better" attitude is yet another reason not to live there. Basically a form of "just leave me alone!" syndrome. They call it Seattle Freeze. You can look it up if you haven't heard of it before (although that's unlikely).
You are exaggerating, if you just look at the charts, rain falls off from January and is quite reasonable by late March/April. It doesn't really pick up until November. So you are talking about around 3.5 months, and anyone from Fairbanks would tell you "that is nothing."
There is a big problem with sun drenched Californians coming in with bay area equity, driving up real estate in Seattle, and road raging around with their "got to get somewhere quickly" attitudes. Locals don't appreciate it, and it has been that way since the 90s at least.
Its not "just leave me alone" but its more like "losing you is no big loss to us." I've lived in the Bay Area and found it quite inferior: bad traffic, bad air, lack of weather diversity (kind of sunny all the time, at least south of the city). But whatever, we all have our preferences.
I think the person was talking about Canada in general. Many of the tech sector locations in the east coast (Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo) do tend to go to -20 or -30 quite frequently in the winters!
Toronto rarely even gets to -20c in winter, the average low is -6c in the coldest month (January). Ottawa/Montreal is slightly colder and much snowier though.
When i lived in Toronto -20c was relatively common in the winter. It might only be a 3-5 days each winter, but it happened pretty regularly. -30C was really rare.
Apparently Toronto has 22 days per year where the temperature drops to less than -10c.
Toronto does get to -20c in the winter it just isn't that common unless you include the windchill factor then it isn't that unusual to be in the -15 to -25 range (and very occasionally into the -30 to -35 range).
Toronto absolutely gets that cold in the winter and in the dead of winter it often gets colder than that (Jan, Feb). The spring and summer are quite sunny and pleasant though.
Source: Torontonian.
The article specifically said that the company was redirecting him to Vancouver, not just Canada. For that matter, one can look at pretty much any coastal location below the Arctic Circle and say with a pretty good confidence - "I probably won't experience 20 degrees below zero there" (well, one exception comes to my mind: Vladivostok).
I wouldn't be packing my swim trunks and sunglasses if I were being redirected to Southern Patagonia, on the basis of hearing that Buenos Aires has nice beaches.
They didn't tell us that Vancouver was "the warmest major Canadian city" when they were telling us that we were being relocated here. All we knew was http://i.imgur.com/X2l9uxU.jpg
Now imagine this, you worked your ass for for a total of nine years to get your masters and PhD, and you spent countless hours honing your skills and finally you get a dream job that merges awesome research, top-level engineering, and working on a product that millions of people use every day. And then it all goes tits up because of a lottery.
A. Fucking. Lottery.
The problem for people like me is that, if I want to work in the US, I have to go through a lottery that will keep me in uncertainty for months. Then, _maybe_, if I'm lucky enough, I can relocate only to have the same thing looming a few years down the line. I cannot build a life around such uncertainty. I cannot built a future like that.
So, I'm staying in Europe. Not having been born in the US means that a lot of jobs are just not open to me, not because it's impossible to get them, but simply because the hassle is just not worth it anymore.