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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   34233 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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The policy is "directionally correct" but the effective date should be pushed back several months to lessen the immediate shock and the dollar amount has to be reduced to be more effective at encouraging good behavior while discouraging the bad ones.

Even FAANG can't afford 100k on top. The median total comp for an experienced engineer (IC4, IC5) is somewhere around 300k-400k and adding 100k on top of that means H-1B is effectively dead in the water. From personal experience working at big tech companies, it's not the H-1Bs that scare me, it's the off-shoring. Even at FAANG, I'm seeing entire teams getting moved to Brazil and Europe, and for head counts to only be assigned to non-US locations. Eliminating H-1Bs will only hasten this move.

Access to the us labor market should be expensive. There a lot of negative externalities associated with the kind of inequality the us has now and enacting policies which increase wages are one of the best ways to address this. As an aside if you want to understand how detrimental this program has been in terms of suppressing wages for technical professionals just go onto https://www.clearancejobs.com/ and look at how much more these roles pay compare to similar roles in other industries where hiring foreigners is mostly prohibited.

Can you quantify exactly how much the gap is? I looked around and it seems like for comparable roles at Boeing, the salary is in the ball park of median H-1B tech salary. If the difference is small, like 10-20k, then it's more appropriate to levy a smaller fee than 100k.

So either the compentencies only exist with the absolute best of the best who need to be onshored for elite FAANG activities... or they can find some random guys in Brazil to do it for pennies on the dollar?

The problem for the US is that the guys in Brazil are not spending their salaries in the US, they are spending them in Brazil. You want companies to leak money back into the national economy. A guy on an H-1B visa doesn't send it all as remittance to his home country. He's spending it on rent, groceries, gas, and coffee-flavored sugary milk from the nearest coffee shop.

Even FAANG can't afford 100k on top.

Have you seen their profits. They absolutely can.

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