Good point. I think that investing in people is critical for success of a business. It's complex, but I think that the key is figuring out which skills to invest in. Too many American companies historically outsourced skilled positions, first manufacturing, then technology. These moves might have been good for short-term profits, but I think they hurt these companies in the long term. When the manufacturing and technology go overseas, it hurts not only the individual company, but also the country.Seattle or Bust wrote: ↑Tue Dec 31, 2024 10:14 pmYeah. Not only that, but these companies are also taking advantage of employees not progressing through their careers. I'm sure these people get paid the same salaries from year 1-3 before they're shipped off for their replacement. Saves the company a ton of money to not provide a 20-year career to an American worker.GL_Storm wrote: ↑Tue Dec 31, 2024 9:38 pmThe part of the law that specifies that these workers shouldn't displace American workers is simply not enforced. It may have been at one time. I'm not sure about that either way. But it's definitely not enforced now. Also not strictly enforced, if at all, is the provision that these workers should make the same prevailing wages as Americans in the same role. The most flagrant violators of the prevailing wage provision are the technical contracting agencies like Wipro, HCL, Aditi, and Tata. These companies get thousands of these visas each year which they use to operate a labor pipeline from India to the US. Microsoft and other tech companies pay them and they in turn pay the employees. Since the employees work for the agency, their compensation isn't measured against their FTE peers at Microsoft, Google, etc., but against their peers at the agency.
Using notional numbers, let's say in this arrangement that Wipro gets $100/hr for the services of Pradeep the engineer, out of which they'll pay him something like $50/hr plus the cost of his benefits package (which isn't nothing), and if he's onsite they'll then pay Microsoft in turn some sort of fee for the use of his cube or office. The agency will also pay the cost of all of Pradeep's equipment. When all expenses are paid, what's leftover is the margin. Probably, they'll need that to be at least 30%, which is tight, but it's a volume business. From Microsoft's perspective, this $100/hr cost might only be a few percentage points cheaper than they would pay an American agency for the same project, but think about how that adds up across the entire company.
I read that the avg H1B visa recipient actually makes a slightly higher salary at Microsoft than the average entry engineer... but then when you consider that they're getting 60-80 hours a week out of these people AND not progressing them through a career... it's a puppy mill.
What happened to investing in people?
As I said before I think it's complex. I don't know, but am very curious about, the proportion of the demographic change on the east side is the result of "temporary" H-1B versus a more permanent immigrant population: people who work long term for a given company, become American citizens, etc. After all, there are a lot of prominent Indian-born CEOs of American companies, right? Starting with Microsoft. And also, I believe, companies such as Google/Alphabet, IBM, and Adobe.
A nagging issue for me is this: Assuming we will continue to have a dynamic, innovative, entrepreneurial economy that will lean the world, will the people who have the knowledge and skills to accomplish this be "from here" or will they be immigrants? Musk has said that American companies need to be able to recruit from everywhere. Ramaswamy has suggested that American culture is to blame for the shortage of qualified engineers. (I know this probably should be a separate topic, but if you look at tech CEOs, they are all the product of American universities, but increasingly, were not born in the U.S. Why are people born in the U.S. falling behind in this regard? Is Ramaswamy right when he said this? “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”)
