Is it time to retire the H-1B visa program?

[poltr1]

Not so many years ago, there was a shortage of computer programmers here in America. We were dealing with the Y2K problem at the time. So we opened our doors to immigrants from other countries who had talent in computer programming and software development. And thus, the H-1B Visa program was born. It was a good idea at the time.

In 2000, I worked on a program for a client that tracked engineering drawings and reminded them (and their managers) if a drawing was going to be late. Two years later, I'm told that a team in India will be taking my code and re-writing it in Java to be used business-wide, and that I would not have any involvement in the effort, other than the notes and code I already provided. At the time, I thought, "Great for globalization and the bottom line. Not so great for American programmers."

Somehow, the idea that companies can offshore their software development to people in other countries became all the rage. Why pay an American programmer to do the work when someone overseas can do the work for less than half the price?

And here it is, 2011. The American economy is in a recession, has been for the past few years, and may very well be on the verge of depression. We appear to have a glut of computer programmers now. So why are companies keeping American programmers like me out of work? (I can't be the only programmer in this situation.) Because the folks from overseas are still cheaper than I am, and may be able to do the job better than me because they're trained and experienced with the new technologies that are in demand.

So I'll ask: Is it time to retire the H-1B visa program? Or do we need to curtail the amount of foreign workers that come to America every year?

Or am I way off-base on this one?

Comments

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

The answer is, as usual, complex. On the one hand, it would initially push companies to hire American citizens onshore. On the other hand, it's a good bet that those same companies would hire offshore, form subsidiaries, and those jobs would be permanently lost to the economy. So it's not as simple as "close the door, and they'll hire from the pool already in."

And, of course, on the gripping hand, what's needed is incentive for companies to retrain and retain US workers, to keep them up with the times -- and for US youth to actually follow through on that job track (it's my understanding that a large number of kids are moving out of coding because of issues finding work; funny how that happens).

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

Thing is, H1B is also used for things like bands from outside the United States that want to go on tour here. Unfortunately the way the rules work means that unless you've gained a certain amount of noteworthiness as evidenced by things like album reviews in major magazines and concert reviews in newspapers and so on, you won't get a visa. Or at least, those were the rules back in the 1980s. Back then a lot of bands couldn't get visas to tour because their recordings were distributed on bootleg cassettes or by unauthorized importers. Reviews that were published in 'zines were not considered noteworthy. Etc. Got a CD review published in Rolling Stone, or the New York Times? Got a major-label record deal? Great, you get a visa. Your only recording is distributed at a dozen record shops in New York, Boston, Philly, DC, L.A., and a few other major cities, and anybody else who's heard of them got the recording on a pirated cassette copy? Your CD and concert reviews have been in newsprint 'zines like Maximum Rock'n'Roll? Sorry.

The stupid thing was that the major lobbying group for restrictions on H1Bs for musicians was the musicians' union, which mostly covers the sort of session musicians who played in house bands and on TV commercials--hardly the sort of folks who would be competitors for a punk band from the U.K.

yeah, yeah, "Cool Story Bro".

The nasty thing about the current H1B situation is that it amounts to a sort of indentured servitude for the employees in question. They're beholden to the company that sponsored them for the visa. They cannot market their skills elsewhere to get a better wage, or better working conditions, the way people who are admitted with a green card can.

Offshoring has its own issues, as many companies are beginning to figure out.

[robin-june.livejournal.com]

Another category of workers who use the H-1B is science researchers. Sometimes the scientific sub-sub-subfield is so small that the choice is between "overseas" and no one at all.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

My own unscientific view of the reason the programming job market sucks here is that it has very little to do with foreign workers here (on H1B or other programs) and almost everything to do with foreign workers over there. Ten years or so ago, the market for small custom business software applications was huge, and lots of people were employed by contract houses large and small. Most of those applications sucked -- they caused huge problems for everyone who actually had to use them, and they tended to cost the people who paid for them a lot of money. So when the Indians started offering to write software that sucked for them for a third the money, corporate America happily outsourced the whole industry in just a few years. Contract software developed in India tends to really suck; it tends to take a lawyer to believe that it meets the specifications, and the specifications seldom have much to do with what the people who will actually use it actually need. But it isn't much worse than most of what we produced domestically before. The real problem is that the expectations for software have been set so low by 3 decades of Microsoft dominance that nobody sees any reason to pay what it costs to do the job right, and if you're going to get crap, it might as well be cheap crap, which today comes from Bangalore.

It would be interesting to see some actual analysis of whether having more foreign programmers on H1B visas helps to keep some software development local by keeping costs down or encourages shops to offshore more by making them comfortable with foreign workers.