I have been running a fully remote company for more than 5 years now. Some thoughts that have worked for me that are related to this guide:
a) Consistent timings - the employee choose their hours but they should try to keep it consistent through the week. This is a variation on the idea of fully flexible timings where people can work each day whenever they want.
b) We do pairing exercises (~1 hour spread over a week) to increase the 'socialize' component. The pairing can be as simple as two people (A,B) get together at the start of their day and update each other on their progress. End of the week, during the sprint call A gives B's update and vice versa. This helps break the ice because many of my engineers (and me) do not socialize unless there is work happening in the background.
c) Managers should understand that most people (in my experience) begin liking remote work and then start hating it somewhere between their 3rd and 6th month. People feel depressed and miss the environment of an office. I feel like managers should keep an eye out for this dip and assist early.
How have you guys dealt with C? It’s definitely something I have felt and am currently pretty keen on getting back to the office even though it probably isn’t the best thing long or short term.
I don't have a general solution. We warn all new hires about this problem when they start. Just knowing you will go through this phase is often useful in catching the problem early. We rely on the support structure of everyone who has gone through the pain recognizing the symptoms in others early. We try to infuse some change to the working pattern of the person - like increase the 1:1 communication or have them help someone else or make them present something at a virtual brownbag or teach something to the rest of the group. These tasks help to a certain extent because new people seem to feel good when they contribute to a group. But I don't think there is any easy way other than just accepting this is going to happen and that you need to experiment your way through this problem.
This line of thinking ends up being applied only to chess, while what you are saying is true about most fields that need human expertise and judgement.
LeBron James is famous for being able to remember every shot he makes. There are cricketers who can tell you ball-by-ball plays from memory. Roger Federer remembers most of his matches. I have seen technical founders have an uncanny ability to 'remember' their code bases and figure out what to change. Boxers remember fights and sparring sessions in crazy detail. Mathematicians can do the same with papers they read ages ago.
I feel that memory and understanding co-evolve. The more you understand something, the better you remember it. The more knowledge you are able to memorize, the better you are able to understand and assimilate and create new ideas.
I am commenting because I have seen several smart people give this line about chess being about memory without realizing their professional expertise involves a great deal of memory too. In my experience, this is probably because when kids play chess, there is always this one kid trying to memorize opening and dazzle other people. Ultimately, those kids do not go on to become grandmasters. But yet, the people who lose to them think they lost because they did not memorize an opening.
"LeBron James is famous for being able to remember every shot he makes"
No he isn't, and no he can't. This is total hyperbole and he has never said he can remember "every shot" he has made. He can identify games from short sections of video, and he can remember certain memorable dunks, etc. But he can't (and no one else can either) remember every shot (including failed shots).
You are right. Upon, rereading - yes, this is hyperbole. I didn't intend that.
My point should have been that he can remember plays when triggered just like a high level chess player can remember positions when triggered. The expert's memory is way better than what ordinary people remember in almost any domain that requires human expertise and judgement.
It's easy to remember something when it has logical structure to you. A King's Indian chess opening line I can rattle off from memory: 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.e4 d6 5.Nf3 0-0 6.Be2 e5 7.O-O Nc6 8.d5 Ne7 9.Ne1 Nd7 10.Nd3 f5 11.Bd2 Nf6 12.f3 f4 13.c5 g5 etc. Every move in this sequence makes sense. White is playing on the queenside with the c5 break, and black is gaining space on the kingside.
This is a great point! But chess (and other such games like Go) vastly improves your working memory which should translate to improved performance in other tasks like coding.
> Because with Chess you can store the entire search space in memory.
That is incorrect.
Quoting from [0]
> Chess has approximately 10^120 game paths. These positions comprise the problem search space.
Typically, AI problems will have a very large space, too large to search or enumerate exhaustively.
But as Go has an even larger search space, it makes sense that DeepMind sees it as a bigger challenge.
Effectively, yes. But I attach no greater philosophical significance to that than to say drilling holes is solved because most people can go buy a nice electric drill foR $30-$40. Flying to the moon is solved, too.
I went from a full-time employee to an agency owner (literally one client and one employee for the first ~8 months). Here are some unpleasant surprises I hit along the way:
a. hiring is hard - even more so when you are small. I was lucky to start with a senior hire who had a little more experience than me. I think your first hire is more or less determined by luck.
b. delegating and trusting your hires is learned habit and takes time. I messed up badly so I don't have any tips for you.
c. you need to probably carry a larger bank balance to tide over any downs. Don't inflate your lifestyle just because you are making more money now.
d. there are several small, nagging chores that need to be done regularly (accounts, payslips, interviews, invoices, follow-ups, exit interviews, etc.). Over time, this becomes easier and you will discover good help.
e. most days will be normal but there will be a few days when you wish you had stayed as a lone consultant and there will be a few days when you are genuinely happy to be running an agency. I still struggle with this and don't have too many tips.
f. you will go through a phase where you will do almost zero technical work. The phase can last for years until you hire the right people to free you up. Just be patient - you have to navigate this phase if you want a stable business.
g. once you start and are not a failure (i.e., even if you are mediocre), you are on a treadmill that is hard to get off. You employees want to see growth and direction even if you, as the owner, may be content with a lifestyle business.
The worst recoverable mistake I unknowingly made in early days was to focus a lot more on the client and not bother about the image of my own company. We felt more like an extended team of another company than our own. I feel this is a recoverable error and that you don't need to avoid this. And as a disclaimer, I'm not in a hurry to scale so I avoided or have delayed many other problems that people more successful than me have hit.
My company maintains a very popular blog on testing. It has helped us land mutliple clients. We get a few inbound enquiries every month - usually from really small startups and/or QA directors that are looking to quickly implement test automation. After my own personal network and past clients, my blog is the most reliable source of clients. The simplest post that resulted in a client was one we wrote on how to run a Selenium test on BrowserStack using Python. The most advanced post that generated a lead/inquiry (but I couldn't close) was one on testing a Natural Language Generator.
What we write: We mainly write to make a tester's life easier and interesting - so testing, automation, tech we use at our clients and the different tools we use to test. The one other rule of thumb is that if the engineer spent more than 2 hours Googling about a problem, they should write a post about it.
Background: I established the habit as soon as I had an employee on the bench. It took over a year and about 30 posts before we saw even a little (~1k pageviews a month) traffic. It was about 18-months of regular writing (~50 posts) before we got our first client through our blog.
Pros: The habit has been a good for both my employees as well as for my business. The posts are good references for new hires and easy to pass on to our clients too. My employees also credit writing blog posts with helping them think clearer and articulate their thoughts better. We also look smart when our clients Google for something and stumble into a solution one of our engineers wrote.
Cons: The start was a slog and demotivating. Writing is still hard and time-consuming. As we grow, it is harder to sell new employees on the habit. The articles we enjoy writing barely get any hits [1].
I haven't heard of your company or blog which is a shame since I specifically seek out material and partners in this space (see my profile, would be good to work with you).
The blog efforts at my company are admittedly poor. Without a dedicated writer the focus on resources invariably ends up directed towards new product features, fixes, customer care and on other types of marketing. Our blog has become the stereotypical 'new features' blobs that I have seen many others become. The truth is writing great content takes a huge amount of time. I do think it's worth making time to do it right if you can devote the attention and resource based on not only the significant traffic bump it can bring but also the higher quality of leads.
I have this problem too - both as an employee and as a remote-only employer. I work as QA - not as a developer, though. I also work in a different timezone. I have found people start paying attention and valuing you once they start seeing you as a normal human who happens to work elsewhere and not as a "remote entity". I have tried these adjustments and I think they help:
a) make an effort to share things other than work - interesting articles you read, participate/respond in watercooler chats, post side-projects you may be working on, your favorite hobbies, post when you are stepping out and are back again, etc. This is counter-intuitive and not a direct solution, but you end up seeming like a human rather than some remote contractor. Once that happens, people start taking more interest in your work automatically.
b) get to know your colleagues, start meetings with a little bit of small talk, explicitly ask for feedback and don't hesitate to speak up if your team takes a decision that is not very remote-friendly (I've messed up plenty here!). Many teams will go out of the way to integrate you if you tell them how.
c) try writing summaries at the end of each day, week ... even if nobody is paying attention initially. Daily summaries are private and for standup while I record weekly updates on some internal wiki. I like cartoons, so I typically include some cartoons in my weekly summaries.
d) attend standup and come prepared. Your updates should be much longer and much more detailed than someone who is not remote. Days you miss standup, you should try posting your update on Slack.
e) turn on your camera for all meetings. It's another one of those habits that make remote workers much more 'real' and relatable.
f) make sure you have good audio/video and Internet connection.
This article has a random sprinkling of numbers that really do not give you the big picture. Here is some context about the outsourcing industry in India. Good stats to know (assuming the media is right):
1. the entire IT outsourcing industry is ~$150 billion large and employs ~3.9 million people.
2. the top 7 largest IT companies employ ~1.3 million people
3. I cannot calculate the exact revenue of the top 7 companies because they are part of larger groups (e.g.: TCS, Wipro). But the Top IT companies headcount and revenue
a) Infosys: ~200,000 employees ($10 billion revenue)
Stories like these come around routinely in the April-June timeframe (every year!) around appraisal time. This '56000' number is simply a random quote 5% of the entire workforce of the top 7 companies. I have seen different media outlets report the numbers as 28,000 this year to 200,000 in 3 years. Honestly, they don't know nor do I.
FWIW, I run an outsourcing testing services firm in India. I am too small to feel market trends. However, I have been reading and talking and interviewing several candidates across India. I can tell you that the tension has been palpable for the last 8 months or so. Many senior folks are feeling a quiet sense of desperation. I don't know if the media sentiment started the tension or if the ground reality is indeed going to force layoffs of senior employees.
The Reddit data set on BigQuery is excellent. My side project is tangentially related to the fact that the Reddit data set has normal folk commenting. I have been using Reddit comments to help writers research and find what normal people say about any topic [1]. So far, I have had little luck in incorporating the comment scores and coming up with something more useful than the standard bag of words search techniques[2]. I am currently working on making a more interesting/creative writing prompts ... again based on the Reddit data set.
One problem for data geeks to solve: Reddit data fits nicely into a graph structure and not so nicely in table form. It would be fantastic if someone put the Reddit data set into a graphdb and made it open.
I'm an employer that allows near 100% remote work. Remote work comes with its own set of trade-offs that need to be managed. These are the trade-offs I see with my 10-employee company in India:
Pros:
a) I can hire experienced people from anywhere in India
b) My employees do not waste time in traffic.
c) I have fewer personality conflicts to deal with ... but this could just be a side effect of being really small (~10 employees)
d) Being in the services business with all my clients abroad, my employees develop better remote working skills
e) I save on office rent
Cons:
a) It is hard to hire junior people to fit into a remote-only team in India. The 0-3 year experience crowd in India prefer being part a group and have a collegiate culture. I do not blame them - I've seen the 'in office/onsite' culture work well for them. But it hurts me as a services business because I get better margins on more junior folk.
b) Many senior people do not want to join my company - it doesn't 'feel' busy, they would like to have better visibility into their direct reports, etc. This wasted so much time during the phone screens that I have had to list 'we are a distributed team' as a con on our careers page.
c) The lack of office space is a major downer for a lot of people who would like to bring their relatives and show off a fancy office with dressed up colleagues.
d) I have heard these genuine complaints often - "we do not really know our colleagues", "we do not get together often enough", etc. I sometimes worry that we may not end up being very cohesive.
e) Remote work in India is interpreted by some candidates as 'easy work'. And it is interpreted by many people in their social circle to mean 'no work'. E.g.: "I have this errand in the middle of a weekday. Come with me. You work from home anyway."
I rarely comment but this story makes me happy enough to do so. I'm a former H1-B with an American Masters degree in STEM. I think this conviction will go a long way in making the system fairer.
Here is what happened. H1-Bs must be legally employed all (well most of) the time they are in the USA. To get past that rule, these H1-B shops act as employers and then farm out the employees to other companies. Employers need to pay H1-Bs at least the prevailing wage that is mentioned in their H1-B application. This employer did not. Instead, they reduced wages when the employees were on the bench. That is the violation that they have been convicted for. So this conviction is not that much about H1-B's replacing American workers as much as it is about an unethical employer paying his employees less than the promised wage.
Usually, people who join this kind of shop are people who have not been able to land a direct employer on their own and desperately want to stay in the USA. This judgment will go a long way in correcting the system because now all shops (and there are many!) that run this scam will close down. That, in turn, will decrease the number of people who end up applying for H1-Bs without a real employer. Hopefully, that will improve the perception around genuine H1-B VISA holders.
I am in the same boat (bachelors + masters from US universities and on H-1B).
I've been in the US for almost 10 years now since undergrad and have put down roots (friends, acquaintances, credit history, etc). It is very unfair for us to be put into the same bucket as body shop labor from India. I personally know several people who were forced to leave the US because they didn't get chosen in the H-1B lottery.
There needs to be a new visa that caters specifically to those in our situation. USCIS needs to let the consultancy companies and body shops compete among themselves for H-1B and stop screwing law-abiding international students who have devoted 4-6 (or more) years of their lives to living in the US, who suddenly might lose everything they've worked for because of the H-1B lottery.
Serious question - I don't in any way intend this to sound inflammatory. If you've been here almost 10 years and have set down roots, why haven't you just applied to be a citizen? It sounds like you want to stay, and frankly, it sounds like it would be good for us to have you. Is there something holding you back beyond just personal preference? (Or are you already in the process but haven't completed it?)
IIRC, an H-1B can't apply to be a citizen, you have to be a permanent resident to do that, which you can only do from an immigrant visa. The H-1B is a "dual purpose" visa, which is a non-immigrant visa that doesn't require you to leave the country before applying for an immigrant visa, but you still have to qualify for one of the immigrant visa categories and make it through any source-country-specific backlog for that category. (And the vast majority of tech-industry H-1B's are from India, which is also near the top for waiting list length in many of the immigrant categories -- including all but one of the Employment-based categories.)
Foreigners can't apply to be a citizen just because they've been here for 10 years. The US immigration system is so f*cked up and the current administration favors illegal immigrants over legal ones.
The most common pathway for those who complete their studies in the US and want to remain in the country to work is to obtain a work visa (H-1, L-1, TN, etc) under employer sponsorship. And then, some of these visas permit immigrant intent i.e. your employer can sponsor your green card even though you're technically on a temporary worker visa.
I'd love to get permanent residency and possibly citizenship. The framework in place right now is tedious and frankly, outright hostile to those of us doing everything right to remain in this country. Thankfully, I'm not from one of the countries with huge visa backlogs - I can only imagine their pain.
One thing that helps at least is that the H1B lottery cap doesn't apply to students who got a graduate degree in the US. ie there are unlimited H1B visas for people in that boat.
But then only H1Bs from Silicon Valley would get accepted, because that's where they pay the most. Other states, and even other cities in California (like Los Angeles) would suffer from the lack of opportunity to hire immigrants.
If salaries in those areas are not as high as in the Bay Area, it means there is no shortage. It just means the salaries are too low to attract talent.
There are plenty of companies outside the Bay Area that pay comparable salaries. I have first or very close second hand experience with LA, Chicago, Seattle, Colorado, and New York. If other companies want to hire foreigners they should be willing to pay more.
They can still hire devs. They just need to pay more. Total comp is not adjusted for cost of living for doctors, salesmen, traders, bankers, attorneys, and managers. Why do you expect it to be adjusted for software developers? This is less than intuitive for me.
It's a way of justifying keeping salaries as low as possible for engineers, but somehow managing to cough up more money in some locations. An equally good engineer in Chicago should be worth the same amount as an engineer in SF, but they're paid less... simply because the employer has more negotiating power in both cases. In both cases, the employer pays enough to give the engineer a reasonably good living for the local cost of living, because that's what's needed to incentivize them to work... a natural minimum incentive. If engineers demanded more, they'd get more.
Yes, and it's the same point I'm trying to defend against a communistic idea of some kind of universal "value" of labour which is equal regardless of location or circumstances.
Some people think that employees should be paid somewhat proportionally to the amount of value they provide to their employer. If you accept that, then a good engineer should always get about the same amount of money, regardless of the cost of living, because they always produce a similar amount of value for the company.
Value is subjective: it's determined as agreement between seller and buyer. Engineer of the same ability is more valuable for an average SF company than an average Chicago company.
I don't know if that is true. A cursory glance at compensation statistics seems to indicate wide regional variance in the compensation in all these professions.
And, for me at least, intuitively it makes sense as well, but I don't want to argue intuition here.
Your causality is backwards. San Francisco doesn't pay high salaries because the cost of living is high; if that model obtained, San Francisco would immediately turn into a ghost town. The cost of living is high in San Francisco because of the high salaries.
1. There might be a feedback mechanism between the two since high salaries could lead to high cost of living which in turn means that companies have to offer higher salaries etc.
2. The higher salaries don't explain the entire cost of living story since cost of living has risen faster than salaries.
3. Cost of living -- primarily the cost of housing -- seems to spike after certain events. IPOs, or other large liquidity events.
Arguably the effect goes the other way: engineers are more productive in SF, so they're worth paying more in SF. (If that weren't the case, then you wouldn't be able to pay engineers enough to want to live there while still making s profit.)
So the GP's policy would still fit the spirit of the H1B program, which is to allow slots for high-output roles.
The reason I gave in the post: if it were not the case, you could not bid a high enough wage to both a) make a profit and b) produce a discretionary income attractive to engineers.
If you want a further explanation of why that is, then I would say that it's the proximity to related talent and investors adapted to this kind of work.
Edit: In case it wasn't just a clever attempt at synecdoche: it can't be proximity to the Golden Gate bridge per se that increases productivity, because the North Beach/Marina/Marin tech jobs pay less than SoMa and SV tech jobs.
Well sucks to be those states. If those states want to compete, then maybe they should offer hire salaries. Why do they "deserve" to have cheap employees, but not other areas?
That will make company like MS/Google/FB/AMAZN, invincible. Startups are going to be starved. They will not have that much leverage to recruit desired talents.
I think what he means is, startups can't deal with the uncertainty and lead times the current H-1B system imposes.
Large companies just project how many openings they would have in October next year, hire appropriately, and park them in offshore offices if they didn't make the lottery. And they can afford the application fee too
I don't work for a startup, but I do work for a small business. The current system does not work for us because there is a lot of uncertainty in the application process. An auction system would actually be an improvement for us and many other small businesses.
So what? If big companies are economically more efficient, let them have the workers. Nobody should be forced to work for a poor company that can't pay up.
The current system also puts small companies at a disadvantage. I work at a tiny company that pays more than the companies you listed and we have a lot of difficulty getting new H1Bs.
If we had an auction style system then at least small companies would have the opportunity to pay more and get access to foreign labor. In the current system, this is not even an option so companies like mine are disadvantaged with no recourse. Startups could always hire native workers or hire foreign workers offshore.
otoh, artificially allowing startups to get cheap engineers means that these or some other engineers are deprived of an opportunity to make a lot more money at Google/Facebook. Engineers are thus being exploited by unethical employers flooding the system
In addition, I hope that we can somehow figure out a way to give visas to STEM graduate degree earners over ones employed by such shops. That segment seems significantly underserved by the current system and it's resulting in a reverse brain drain away from the country even though we are investing in their education.
I don't like the idea of further endorsing and supporting credentialism.
If you can get a high salary, then you're in demand and we should keep you. If you have a STEM degree but can't even get a good job, then I don't see any reason to grant a visa.
I'm not sure that it makes sense to target STEM graduates in this way. Most of them would receive visas based on their high salaries whereas an explicit rule would only serve to increase the number of low quality STEM degrees.
Yeah that did cross my mind, and now that it's been brought up, I'm inclined to think you are right.
I just learned that a bunch of acquaintances lost out on their H1B lotteries and will be shipped out of the country to international offices once their OPT terms end in 1-2 months. Since they were employed by strong companies, their salaries likely would have been high enough to qualify them for H1B visas under a system you propose.
This idea is still predicated on the 'magic number' that the government has more or less randomly picked to be the number of H1B visas in a year. This number is, of course, far smaller than the number of family and other types of visas.
Making it easy to switch jobs will also go a long way in making this system much better.
Right now, the consultancy firms flood the application pool hoping to get few selected. They eat the cost of sending all the applications because they see it as an investment - they know that they can milk the few who get selected for many years and recoup many multiples of their initial investment.
Tying the H-1B to the employee not the employer will put an end to such abuses.
This would make it easier to game, especially for wealthy immigrants who want to buy a visa to get a green card.
Also the H1B visa is for hundreds of different job classifications at different prevailing wages - are you saying there should be an auction for each? How will visas be distributed fairly amongst them?
Those people are a small portion of H1B visas, if at all, and all it means that instead of a %50 to %100 chance that they get it 'this year' doing it, it's a %100 chance. They also have other options like an L1 visa which is another %100 chance in a year and then can get a green card at the highest priority level as an international executive afterwards. Or they can open a mcdonalds franchise somewhere in a bad part of america and get a E visa for a $500k investment. The wealthy have many options to immigrate. And if they are wealthy they can do this with real corporations too since wealthy people have wealthy friends.
Gamebility by the 'wealthy' would be the least of their worries in this case. Most H1-B abuse are body shops such as infosys. 'Price' auctions would be a good improvement for employees, although it would concentrate the visas into places like SF & NYC even further.
On top of that, a US passport isn't attractive to the already wealthy. The US has high income tax rates relative to many other places and you can never escape it by moving out, unlike all other citizenships in the world. The already wealthy would move to london, monaco, switzerland or maybe dubai if their goal was wealth preservation.
Less than 7% of approved H1B visas last year were with Infosys, HCL, and Cognizant - the three major H1B abusers. The remaining 93% were legitimate hires that would be priced out by the wealthy if there were a way for the wealthy to buy their visas.
Just because there is a problem that doesn't justify moving to a solution that destroys it. It's better strengthen enforcement so that fines can be used to make it expensive for abusers (like what happened in the article), rather than price out talent that isn't just in finance or high paying fields.
The wealthy can already buy their way into a US visa. I am in an immigrant community where this happens. Quite frankly, I think those programs should also be expanded.
Wealthy immigrants can obtain investor visa easier outside of the H1B pool (EB-5).
There is no reason why H1B should be distributed fairly, because the US has a green card lottery that is diversified across various jobs and countries anyway.
The EB-5 requires starting a company and employing 10+ at >$50k/yr, meaning it costs $500,000+. Do you honestly think the H1B visa will bid higher than $500k/yr for base pay for the employee?
The lottery evenly distributes amongst the positions based on demand. By switching to wealth, you're creating a system that only the highest-paying job categories will prevail.
But most of the people use a regional center [1] to park the $500k is a big real estate project like Hunter's Point Shipyard in SF or Hudson Yards in New York with no additional yearly cost.
I am in an immigrant community where the EB5 is used. It does not cost $500k/year and it is an investment rather than a expense so it is not all comparable to the H1B program.
We're referring to what it would cost for bad actors to abuse the system. Someone was saying that switching to a biddable H1B visa would solve problems because it's just like the EB5.
You're aware that not every H1B is a developer right? Your proposal would change the whole basis of the program in a way that doesn't seem particularly thought out.
What about people who are botanists, or harpsichord teachers?
You could have separate categories for non profit and academic positions.
But for positions in private industry, I don't care. If you really, really need a foreign employee over a domestic one, you will need to pay the H1B premium, competing with everyone else.
It's more fair than a system based on luck, or arbitrary criteria of review board or something guaranteed to be games and manipulated.
But the goal of the system isn't fairness, it's to provide needed skills to American businesses. It sounds like you're looking at this from the perspective of a job-seeking foreign national, but that's not actually a constituency here, they aren't American, don't vote, and our government is not intending to help them with this program.
The supposed point is to make sure American companies can compete. The idea of only allowing the very highest paid foreign workers in, and them all being software developers, has literally nothing to do with that goal.
SEC. 103. SPECIAL RULE FOR UNIVERSITIES, RESEARCH FACILITIES, AND GRADUATE DEGREE RECIPIENTS; COUNTING RULES.
Section 214(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1184(g)) is amended by adding at the end the following new paragraphs:
(5) The numerical limitations contained in paragraph (1)(A) shall not apply to any nonimmigrant alien issued a visa or otherwise provided status under section 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b) who is employed (or has received an offer of employment) at--
(A) an institution of higher education (as defined in section 101(a) of the Higher Education Act of 1965 (20 U.S.C. 1001(a))), or a related or affiliated nonprofit entity; or
(B) a nonprofit research organization or a governmental research organization.
Easy fix -- give the visas to the highest paid people in each job category. After you've gone through each category once, do it again for the next highest paid. Eventually you'll run out of harpsichord teachers and so the more popular categories would keep getting filled until the quota was reached.
Then you get highly paid people and you get a nice cross section of skillsets, and it incentivizes the companies to pay the highest wage for that skill.
> Hopefully, that will improve the perception around genuine H1-B VISA holders.
This. As a fairly paid H1B (I have discussed salary openly with my American coworkers), I always cringe when stories like the Disney one come up, because I feel like the next day a couple of them are going to be saying, "Ugh, there's the H1B that's taking our jobs away".
For this reason, I hope all the fraudulent H1B companies are pushed out of business with strict penalties. Also I really wish there were some sane laws around H1B (sorting priority by salary relative to prevailing wage, untying employers from the visa, etc.)
I think it is yet another point showing how broken our immigration / vIsa program is. This sort of blackmarket style operation would never have existed in the first place if the talanted non US (calling them aliens seems dehumanizing and encourages the us vs them mentality) workers could easily and affordably get permission to work here
We don't know. There those who in it and there are some who are brought in on different terms and then the rules changed on them. Anyway this will make it easier to enforce because both sides can prove their point by showing bank records of payment. By give the employee sufficient leverage and the employer criminal penalties, it puts the employer on guard to do things correctly and legally.
A much better solution would to remove any barriers an H1B worker has to shop for a better job. If we want to live an egalitarian society, it's in our collective interest for immigrants to earn as much as the rest of us. That only happens when we dismantle systems that provide an incentive to exploit immigrants.
You're describing the entire framework of immigration, from green cards to citizenship, which already exists. You can say the H1B component should be removed, but business leaders will cry bloody murder if a whiff of that legislation ever crosses the transom.
The main problem with the current system is that there is no way for a H-1B holder to progress to a Green Card without employer sponsorship. This puts all the power in the hands of the employer with such sponsorships difficult to get these days.
A better solution would be to allow a H-1B worker in good standing to convert to a green card after 4 years without any kind of employer sponsorship needed.
This would bring the US in line with other developed countries that typically allow temporary workers to convert to permanent residents after a period of time independent of their employer.
Guess what the user meant is to make it easy for people on H1B to switch jobs which currently isn't. This makes so many employees to be at the jobs though low paying so as to keep their status in US.
You can, but if you have a green card application in process, you'll have to start all over again, unless it was in its final stage. This can easily put you back by several years.
The fundamental problem is that US simply doesn't have a well-designed skilled worker immigration track, the way e.g. Canada or Australia do. H1B fills that niche in practice, but it was clearly not designed for it, and so there are all these warts.
You realize that a person doesn't have to belong to the Illuminati as a precondition to lobby for special or opaque legislation, right? The only precondition intent needs is a conflict of interest.
Look at Intuit. A number of years back, California piloted a program that simplified filing tax returns for people opting to take the standard deduction. They would mail you a form that was prefilled so you could simply sign it and mail it back. Intuit lobbied to kill it and won. No laws were broken. They were simply acting in the interest of their shareholders.
The American Immigration Lawyers Association is one of many lobbying groups that represents 13,000 members. Many of these members help the 80,000 some H1B applicants through the process and can charge legal fees in the ballpark of $10,000 to do that. Assuming all 80,000 applicants spent $10,000 in legal fees, we're talking about ~$1bn market on top for that type of work alone. In the grand scheme of things, it's not a lot, but it's one component that can create a conflict of interest.
Let's assume the AILA is an upstanding group and all of the lobbyists they hire are ethical boy scouts. They would never influence our legislators to intentionally complicate laws to serve their members. Instead, they would recognize that it's in our nation's best interest that our immigration systems are robust, thorough and comprehensive. They'd also emphasize that their members provide a critical service to sherpa honest immigrants through this thoroughly comprehensive system.
You don't need to be behind a ridiculous conspiracy to influence legislation to serve your best interests. These days, you're way better off being transparent and operating under an ethical framework.
As a Canadian expat in Qatar, who is on a third lap around the world, I can assure you that there are many excellent and terrible places to live in the world. This fixation on America that I keep seeing everywhere is absolutely baffling. Maybe I should check it out ;)
So this conviction is not that much about H1-B's replacing American workers as much as it is about an unethical employer paying his employees less than the promised wage.
Though, the two are deeply entwined. If you prevent this kind of exploitation, using H1-B's as a source of cheap labor (and thus cheap American worker replacements) becomes less feasible.
I like the concept but I can see a few potential problems with the idea.
Firstly this would give universities the power to print green cards. That's a power they probably shouldn't have.
Secondly I really don't think there is a shortage of scientists or mathematicians so STEM is probably a suboptimal group to apply this policy. I personally know a person with a masters in geophysics who drives for lyft. Ask a recent biology major about their job prospects, etc.
I work for this such type of consulting shop abroad (first world), supposedly best in the country and earn same as average Uber driver.
I think the model is not limited to the US. There are plenty of people willing to have abroad experience, but it does demotivate you to certain degree.
I can imagine market geophysics specialists is extremely tiny.
Thank you for clarifying. I think one of the biggest problems with immigration in the U.S. is that citizens aren't that knowledgeable in the H1B approval process, and tend to attribute these abusers to all H1B sponsors.
a) Consistent timings - the employee choose their hours but they should try to keep it consistent through the week. This is a variation on the idea of fully flexible timings where people can work each day whenever they want.
b) We do pairing exercises (~1 hour spread over a week) to increase the 'socialize' component. The pairing can be as simple as two people (A,B) get together at the start of their day and update each other on their progress. End of the week, during the sprint call A gives B's update and vice versa. This helps break the ice because many of my engineers (and me) do not socialize unless there is work happening in the background.
c) Managers should understand that most people (in my experience) begin liking remote work and then start hating it somewhere between their 3rd and 6th month. People feel depressed and miss the environment of an office. I feel like managers should keep an eye out for this dip and assist early.