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PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   33737 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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H1Bs now require a $100k payment per year (I believe, seeing some remarks saying it might be per visa) to the government due to Donald Trump executive order, plus if you are currently overseas and hold a H1B you need to pay $100k effective immediately on your next entry into the USA if you are not within the country by the 20th of September.

As a foreign non-Lawyer I don't know how effective this is going to be/liable to be immediately derailed in the courts, but I do think it's a positive step towards ensuring skilled immigration is used for the genuinely effective instead of ye olde 'I can import a foreigner who I have more power over at a 10% discount rate to domestic workers'. I'm also deeply skeptical of the 'productivity' of the vast majority of tech H1B hires and wish them the best of luck in attempting to offshore the competencies required to make AI-powered Grindr for Daily Fantasy Sports

This may be "directionally correct" but it's too much and too sudden. This is currently positioned as a direct fuck-you to H-1B holders and the companies who hire them, with policy goals secondary. If they want to fix the abuse problem long term of companies underpaying H-1B, they can put a sliding salary tax for companies hiring under the median H-1B wage, up to a cap on the median wage. E.g. if you pay your tech guy 100k and median is 130k, then pay an addition 15k to the government.

Currently there are two problems:

  1. America has only 4% of the world's population but 25% of the GDP. We need to brain drain other countries to ensure economic dominance in the long term.

H-1B allows us to do it by attracting the best and brightest from other countries. ~100-200k H-1B holders in the country is only 0.1% of the 160M workforce, which is evidence that it is used to attract exceptional talent, for the most part. Top companies like FAANG plays by the book here, they do not generally pay H-1Bs less than local talent, they just want the best people.

  1. There's H-1B abuse in lower tier consulting companies, where they use H-1B as a source of cheaper labor.

This is the problem the administration should fix by adding taxes and fees.

The difficulty is to solve both problems at once. I don't think the program is perfect, but effectively killing it will be detrimental to the US in the long term. Yes, instituting a 100k/year fee on top for every H-1B employee will effectively kill this program.

H-1B allows us to do it by attracting the best and brightest from other countries.

Thats not what H1-Bs are for though. The EB-1A is the "genius visa", and it does not appear to have the $100,000 fee.

H1-Bs are for filling "specialist" roles that "cannot be filled by Americans", and are universally acknowledged to be heavily abused. While I have only run into a few H1-Bs in my industry, none of them impressed me with their acumen or work ethic, and frankly i would have let them go if I had control over it. The EB-1As Ive worked with though have all been frigging rock stars.

I posit there's two different worlds in H-1B, one rife with abuse and the other working-as-intended. All the H-1B workers I've met at FAANG were great workers, no different from native born Americans, and they were not paid less. We should solve the abuse problem but not eliminate the program entirely.

Thats not what H1-Bs are for though. The EB-1A is the "genius visa", and it does not appear to have the $100,000 fee.

I don't only mean rockstars or literal geniuses. It's still very worth it to brain drain the top few percentiles of labor from other countries, even if they are not geniuses. Considering we only import tens of thousands per year and there's over a billion people in the work forces of China and India, it's not a stretch to think that we are getting their cream of the crop. And to the extent that we are not, due to cheating and abuse, then that's something we should fix.

All the H-1B workers I've met at FAANG were great workers, no different from native born Americans, and they were not paid less.

Then respectfully, their jobs should be going to American workers. There is no role in any FAANG company (unless you mean NVIDIA instead of Netflix) where there are no qualified Americans. As an industry "tech" does not have any super secret squirrel sauce that you can't find employees for in most first world countries, its just about how many you can find and what you pay them (chipmaking is a different ball game of course). American universities are graduating hundreds of thousands of them every year. But its easier for a company to import H-1Bs (and even pay them the same!) who's loyalty you own and who on paper have the skills you need than hire domestic talent that might on paper need training and experience.

But a country should have labor policies that benefit its citizens, maybe even at the expense of other countries citizens, thats one of the points of being a country in the first place.

Then respectfully, their jobs should be going to American workers. There is no role in any FAANG company (unless you mean NVIDIA instead of Netflix) where there are no qualified Americans. As an industry "tech" does not have any super secret squirrel sauce that you can't find employees for in most first world countries, its just about how many you can find and what you pay them (chipmaking is a different ball game of course).

You sound like a trade union organizer. A lot of American dominance of the world economy relies on the fact that it's not generally encumbered by trade union deals (and it has lost the race in the industries where unions are dominant, like shipping, car making and teaching). What you're proposing is basically a massive country-sized white-collar union.

What you're proposing is basically a massive country-sized white-collar union.

Yes, we have a name for that: a politcal party. We could create a new one, or maybe just get one of the existing ones to pick up the idea in exchange for support at the ballot box.

I'm not sure where the idea that politics has to be about high-minded ideals instead of basic collective self-interest, but its crept in somehow and is disastrous in its effects.

There is no role in any FAANG company (unless you mean NVIDIA instead of Netflix) where there are no qualified Americans.

There are plenty of roles where demand exceeds supply, however -- essentially all the qualified Americans are already employed or don't care to be.

American universities are graduating hundreds of thousands of them every year.

About a single hundred thousand, not all of those American.

There are plenty of roles where demand exceeds supply, however -- essentially all the qualified Americans are already employed or don't care to be.

Unless you are talking about a very specific industry that I don't have any tangential relation to, this is simply not true. We are graduating more engineers and comp sci majors than are getting hired for those types of jobs, and the workforce is constantly in attrition at the other end as well in all relevant industries.

There are plenty of roles where demand exceeds supply, however

Then by the iron laws of economics, the price must increase. In this case you can make a very simple argument that H-1Bs are depressing American wages.

About a single hundred thousand, not all of those American

If you limit your pool to CS graduates, yes. But I humbly submit that essentially any engineering or math graduate can be trained fairly easily to do junior programmer job at a FAANG, and i personally know many who have taken that route. That at least triples your available talent pool.

Then by the iron laws of economics, the price must increase. In this case you can make a very simple argument that H-1Bs are depressing American wages.

I think this really cuts to the heart of why arguments about immigration policy get as emotional as they often do. What defines a "labor shortage"? Simple: when the cost of it is "too high". What defines "too high"? Government policy. What defines government policy? Politics.

When the government opens up an immigration channel that targets your vocation, you are essentially being told by power that you are getting paid too much for what you do, and you need to be paid less. When the government denies your entry into a higher paying market, you are being told you aren't worth that.

People get emotional about this.

Great point!

This part

When the government denies your entry into a higher paying market, you are being told you aren't worth that.

is kinda what people are responding to with, "But a country is not an economic zone." Like: "It's not that you aren't worth access to that higher paying market. It's just that you are part of a different community, rather than that one."

Then by the iron laws of economics, the price must increase. In this case you can make a very simple argument that H-1Bs are depressing American wages.

The price must increase unless reducing the supply of labor reduces the output by enough to make the labor not as valuable. There isn't a lump of labor to be done by programmers, who get paid inversely to the number of programmers in the field.

But if the lack of labor drops the value of the output... the output was never valuable in the first place. Say you are having difficulty hiring a database engineer, and eventually you give up and find another solution. Turns out you didnt actually need any database engineers at all.

I do actually think there is something to this, as "tech" seems to be completely infested with solutions (and programmers working on said solutions) searching in vain for a problem. Adding in more people making more "solutions" is not a cure for the condition.

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Then by the iron laws of economics, the price must increase.

Yes. At some point, however, the price will exceed the value of the work, and the work just won't get done. You see this with minimum wage employees getting replaced by kiosks as the minimum wage goes up; at the top, I expect you'll simply see progress crawl to a halt (and no, that's not a good thing).

If you limit your pool to CS graduates, yes. But I humbly submit that essentially any engineering or math graduate can be trained fairly easily to do junior programmer job at a FAANG, and i personally know many who have taken that route.

Mathematics is about 25,000. Engineering is 145,000. But most of these people either already have jobs or are headed for postgraduate degrees also.

(and most of them couldn't cut it in a job that actually required software skill... but then, neither could most CS graduates)

At some point, however, the price will exceed the value of the work, and the work just won't get done.

Which is a perfectly acceptable business tradeoff.

You see this with minimum wage employees getting replaced by kiosks as the minimum wage goes up

Yes, and I have happily stopped any transactions I would ever have with these sorts of places. I'll still patronize my more local chains (in the vein of In 'n out but better), or even national ones (like Chick-fil-A) that don't treat their employees like cogs. Same with grocery stores. If a business can't cope with rising costs of labor than it deserves to go under.

at the top, I expect you'll simply see progress crawl to a halt (and no, that's not a good thing).

Gonna start an engineering smug war here, but as I see it "tech" progress has already meaningfully ground to a halt outside of LLM babble, and even that is debatable. Ever better targeted ads do not leave the world better off. Recruitment pitch to all of you young programmers stuck in FAANG limbo- go look outside to those clunky old manufacturing, transportation, energy, and industrial companies. They are desperate for good embedded systems engineers, and you can do some fantastically cool shit that will actually make measurable differences in the average person's life.

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All the H-1B workers I've met at FAANG were great

Honest question - how many of us have to endure the consequences of the rampant abuse so that FAANG can get their Good Ones? What's the break even point at a societal level?

Good question, can you quantify the consequences of rampant abuse?

I have some ideas, but this isn't an exhaustive list. That said, maybe it's a useful starting point.

  • Fresh grads having limited prospects because entry level jobs are filled with H1-B holders, despite those fresh grads existing and ostensibly being qualified.
  • A culture that rewards regulatory evasion at the corporate C-level
  • Having to personally do extra labor to un-fuck the work done by unqualified H1-B holders who probably wouldn't be here if their sponsors weren't able to treat them as de facto indentured servants.

I'll try to reply to the first point since the other two aren't really quantifiable.

I think currently the new grad situation in tech is predominantly caused by two factors: over-supply due to A LOT of recent CS grads and AI having a disproportionate impact on the lower tier of tech jobs. H-1B has always existed and I've not seen evidence that companies are hiring a lot more than they did several years ago. So new grads are mainly not finding jobs right now due to an over-supply issue and AI rather than competition from H-1B.

However, I'm not saying that just because H-1B's impact on new grads is limited, we shouldn't try make their experience better by fixing it. I recognize this is a problem. As you may notice in my first comment here, I advocated for a sliding tax that specifically targets the lower compensation band that will improve new grad's competitiveness against similarly skilled H-1B applicants.

What are these people in FAANG actually delivering? These are enormous mature companies frequently built on gigantic revenue streams from services that are only taking up like 10-15% of their headcount to actually maintain. Giving the best of the do-nothing largesse positions to foreigners is insane.

I think probably part of why they maintain the large headcounts is because they're run by people who have absorbed the lesson of some of the early wave of tech companies, which is "never stagnate, never become too focused on a steady source of income, since it's temporary". So they use headcount to experiment with novel approaches to money-making in order to avoid becoming the next Intel or Yahoo.

For better or worse, the enormous data processing facilities and technologies that FAANGs built in order to run their marketing, e-commerce, and data analysis also formed an important part of the technological groundwork and infrastructure necessary to deploy AI at scale. The FAANGs did not plan this, though, they just knew that they needed to be able to crunch and store data on scales previously never created (outside of maybe something like the NSA).

What are these people in FAANG actually delivering?

Ads.

Giving the best of the do-nothing largesse positions to foreigners is insane.

They're not do-nothing largesse positions. They may be futile attempts to build the next doomed project that will be canceled shortly before (or after) release (or maybe that's just Google specifically), but they aren't sinecures.

Toodling around on fun ideas since the actual revenue is secured elsewhere is pretty sinecure adjacent

They're "fun" for the VP running the show. They're less fun for the guys working on something useless.

Working on a doomed project is not fun.

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