I know the administration is controversial, but this is the correct thing to do for a lot of reasons.
The biggest one is the program itself is racist as hell. Microsoft is literally bringing in foreigners, paying them much less to do the same damn job.
I’ve not worked at Microsoft so I can’t speak for them, but I’ve been in tech for the last 15 years with the last 5 being in manager/director roles at at least 1 company that is a household name.
What you’re saying gets repeated a lot, but I’ve never seen it to be true. Every single H1b employee I’ve seen comp for was comparable anyone else on the team at their same level. I just don’t believe that it’s happening on the scale that people make it out to be.
Also, I don’t want to get too into it unless people are interested, but at least at the companies I’ve been at, the way budgeting for new hires and the hiring process works, the people actually deciding who to hire aren’t really incentivized to do that anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty wrong with these programs and I’m glad to see reform, but I don’t believe the underpaying thing is happening nearly as much as people claim it does.
I've been a tech manager for 21 years, much of that at a large Fortune 100 that had tens of thousands of employees from Infosys and TCS. The hourly rates we were charged for local workers on H1-B visas were $15-$30 less than we'd pay American contractors from body shops like Teksystems, and that is just what we were paying Infosys. The employee didn't see anywhere near that.
Compared to FTE the difference was even larger including benefits and vacation time.
The biggest issue though, is not the local people. The issue is that the local people are there to bridge the timezone and communication gaps so you can have three off-shore people for each on-shore. Offshore people were paid less than a third of on-shore. So the number of American jobs they are displacing, and the wages they were being replaced at, is absolutely staggering.
Maybe in real tech companies its a different story. The one time I did a direct H1-B sponsorship (later, in a much smaller company), we did pay them an equal wage.
Can you clarify? These workers were resident in the U.S. or abroad?
The local workers were resident in the US on H1-B visas. Those were the ones paid $15-$30 less. I edited my post to clarify, thanks!
Presumably Infosys also pays citizen workers shitty too. The issue here is Infosys, not h1b.
I will also add a data point for big tech. I have managed people on h1b, on o1, with green cards, and citizens. I have never even sniffed any sort of disparate treatment across these groups once hired. During hiring the bias was against h1b since it was a huge pain in the ass to arrange everything and their start date could be delayed.
Infosys has virtually no citizen workers, and the ones they have are managing entire programs - they aren't doing client work. The only reason they have any workers at all is they can't realistically change H1-B sponsors.
HR is not allowed to tell you to prefer an H1B. They can strongly hint that you need to hit your DEI quota though.
HR wasn't involved in sourcing strategy. Either I contacted HR to open a req for a full-time employee, or I contacted Infosys. For body shops there was a specific system that sent it to multiple firms, but I was usually already talking to my account managers. When doing budgets we'd submit headcount asks by type and there were some soft ratios we were expected to stay within but this was mostly the division exec and their finance partner related to keeping our ratios aligned with our charge-back rates. I never saw a number that had anything to do with diversity across contractors.
The problem isn't just whether they're hiring below market. It's that market rates themselves are impacted by there being a whole underclass of workers who can't just freely move between jobs, and has to speedrun getting a new one if they ever lose their existing ones. The precarious nature of it makes an H1-B worker less likely to speak up about most things related to working conditions due to the precarious nature of the job. And that impacts everyone else -- because the fastest way to get a big raise is by getting a new job, so there's less incentive to pay people better if fewer workers can actually move around and you can threaten the ones that can purely through the existence of ones that can't.
I don't think the solution is just getting rid of them all -- actually a longer grace period (say, a year?) would make it easier to leave abusive employers. But it should include more scrutiny on whether employers really can't find local hires in the first place, or just aren't willing to train them or work with people that have even slightly more bargaining power.
Abuse of the H1-B program is broader than just hiring people for less money right now. It's also about hiring people who won't ask for more money over a longer timeline. It's about having a whole class of workers that is uniquely vulnerable to terrorist bosses, which then gives those employers more leverage over everyone else. And it's about the large-scale market manipulation that comes with having this easily accessible.
> Every single H1b employee I’ve seen comp for was comparable anyone else on the team at their same level.
This is exactly the problem. That reasoning alone is what allows companies to outsource to save money if you think on a larger scale. If systematically every company just says, oh we can't get American talent, but doesn't increase wages to incentivize for more local talent and simply hires abroad it stagnates wages for all. There is no incentive to raise effective wages if we can just continue bringing in more people for the same wage.
Let alone the fact that I am not convinced that we don't have enough talent for a good portion of the roles as advertised.
Research grade PhD level candidates doing novel work I can believe, but getting another person who writes more REST API's and dashboards or ETL jobs I refuse to believe.
> doesn't increase wages to incentivize for more local talent
Are wages too low to incentivize local talent? Tech companies already pay high six figures. What is this "local talent" doing that pays more?
Working at other places. There used to be a thing called competition - where you'd pay more to attract people to leave elsewhere. Now companies stifle this and collaborate to artificially to keep wages down.
Instead they just throw their hands up and call it quits, hiring elsewhere instead.
This doesn't mean more domestic workers get jobs though. Existing workers get paid slightly more, but also more work gets sent to overseas offices.
(This is not outsourcing. The foreign workers are still on the company's payroll, just in an office where they don't need a visa to work).
> You’ll take these low wages and be happy about it or I’ll import a foreign worker who will be happy about it. And if they complain, I’ll have them deported.
>but I’ve never seen it to be true.
it's been true 100% of the places I've worked. I can't name names on the internet.
> the way budgeting for new hires and the hiring process works, the people actually deciding who to hire aren’t really incentivized to do that anyway.
Laughs in ESG. Companies stopped reporting this in 2024, but go look at prior year results compared to US demographics.
My $0.02 here is that AAPI and African applicants have crowded out ADOS and Hispanics when you look at corporate demographics.
> comp for was comparable anyone else on the team at their same level
You're so close to getting it... keep going...
Not GP, but also not getting it. Are you referring to how they take up a slot on the team that would otherwise go to an American?
The argument is it drives down wages across the board so obviously the wages would be the same.
Op is saying that everybody's wage is suppressed to the level of the H1B holder.
There's no conflict. They can be comparable to anyone else on their team while being better than the average American developer.
Seriously. GP is accidentally highlighting the issue.
America should want fewer highly paid tech workers so those that remain are paid marginally more?
That’d be a dumb way to run an economy.
I think the H1B process gets abused by body shops. Salaries are pretty demonstrably lower there than at many other tech companies.
At Big Tech almost everyone is normalized into salary bands by level and regardless of what you or your manager does, any discrepancy will eventually decay to level unless you get the formal promotion. They do this very deliberately, because they don't particularly trust their managers and don't want the organization to devolve into sucking up to get a raise. There isn't room for discrimination, and in many cases managers don't know your immigration status anyway (at the one I was at, we weren't supposed to ask, although it often became apparent because employees on visas would have to go home to renew, or they'd have questions about navigating company policies).
Its also abused all major tech companies. The easiest way they do is by abusing Matsers->OPt->h1b pipeline
how is it abuse if they're paid the same?
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=microsoft+corporation&job=...
Idk if people don't realize you can look this up? Pay doesn't look suppressed to me....
Moreover, this is just the regular wage that doesn't take into account RSUs or stock options.
If your "household name" company is more susceptible to scrutiny, they may not have as much of a pay gap and strictly rely on a the possibility of getting the employee sent back home if they don't contribute enough being the motivating factor. But odds are there are many sub-contractors that are through agencies that are significantly underpaying and you may have not been privy to the contracts through these parasite vendors.
>> paying them much less to do the same damn job.
where is this data coming from? Engineers frequently move between Amazon/Meta/Google/Microsoft, even on H1B.
MSFT has always been one of the higher paying tech companies out there: https://www.monster.com/career-advice/job-lists/highest-payi...
> paying them much less to do the same damn job.
That isnt true. A SWE engineer working at the same level at Redmond gets paid the same band irrespective of visa status.
sure, but there's the obvious counterfactual: if those engineers were scarcer, that level would likely be paid more
But it wouldn't result in more domestic workers being hired. Those companies would just have smaller workforces in the US and larger ones abroad.
Big Tech has hired functionally every domestic worker interested in and capable of doing the job. They pay so much already.
this is just not true. the market for new grads is extremely bad. Microsoft could easily invest in more early career people, instead they're hiring more senior H1-Bs.
You said it yourself. The market for new grads is bad. AI is better for senior employees than juniors. Visas don't affect this dynamic.
Bad market for new grads is overdetermined. AI, interest rates, etc.
But a contributing fact is flooding the tech market with H-1B visas spikes labor supply, kills workers' leverage and lets companies cheap out on salaries instead of bidding them up.
Yeah but those new grads are too uppity. We tried throwing money at them, but they're more interested in productivity destroying quality of life improvements.
The imported worker, on the other hand, is a more efficient and compliant machine. Maybe if we make those youths as poor as the workers we import, they'll eventually learn some gratitude.
[dead]
> sure, but there's the obvious counterfactual: if those engineers were scarcer, that level would likely be paid more
There's another option: without a sufficient workforce, the projects just happen somewhere else. Then the local market stagnates, and you end up with very little competition between employers. And the salaries go down to match.
This is not a conjecture. The European tech sector is experiencing exactly this phenomenon. Even in large tech companies, the salaries for the same positions are about 50-100% higher in the US.
Correct!
Employers benefit from regulations that exist to benefit employers. We should have completely open borders or actually do what's best for citizen workers.
Employers would have to pay more competitive wages if the candidate pool was smaller. Then there is the free legal services given to some workers and not others, that leaves less budget overall for compensation.
How about the contractors working for Microsoft?
You can't work as a contractor on H1b. You need to be employed full-time.
They would be employed by another company, and contracted to Microsoft. This is the arrangement for the majority of H1-B employees in general, but I do not know if Microsoft does this.
Tech companies do not generally do this for their product teams, but may do it for their internal IT and reporting systems.
and how much pressure do they feel to raise the band over time when theres a constant stream of people coming in form another country who accept anything presented because its still higher than back home
> paying them much less to do the same damn job
Do you have any evidence to support this claim? It is not true. Tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, Meta etc. do not do this and they have no need to. They just need the top employees, and lots of them.
You want to know who does this? Companies like Disney and other IT type jobs who hire H-1B workers then lay off citizens and have those citizens train the immigrant workers. There is no reason for H-1B workers in IT departments. But there absolutely is a need for immigrant workers in high tech companies. How else do you ensure your employees are the best in the world?
> program itself is racist as hell
why is it racist to find workers willing to accept a lower wage to do the same quality work?
The problem with H1B and some of the other employment visas is its really difficult or impossible for the worker to change jobs. JD Vance calls them indentured servants. I suspect the situation for actual indentured servants is a bit worse but in any case the workers dont have a lot of options at their disposal. They cant just leave without losing their visa. So their “choice” to work for less money isn’t really a choice at all.
Now is the answer to make things worse, as they’ve been doing (removing the 60 day grace period after losing a job)? Or is it to liberalize the program. Maybe increase standards but make it easier for workers to move jobs?
If it were me, I would make companies "bid" on the visas, where their bid is the salary (including all benefits, minus ALL expenses) they will pay the employee.
Employers who really need employees for high-skilled work would thus get visas. Employers who want to underpay their foreign labor will not.
The auction or bid for H-1B would lead to only Big Tech being able to hire them.
Other uses of the H-1B (e.g. French teacher https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=french+teacher&city=&... ) wouldn't be able to compete. There are also places in rural America where the only way to get doctors and nurses ( https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=nurse+practitioner&ci... ) is to hire them from abroad (the other option is to close the facility as insurance reimbursements aren't high enough to pay more).
Auctions are great because it's harder to game than a lottery. If a company truly believes there is a shortage of rocket surgeons and they need to access to the global market of these specialists, they can bid high. No hand wringing about not being able to find American rocket surgeons (willing to work for low income country pay scales). No stuffing a lottery with tons of entries - bids incentivize applicants to not waste slots. No worrying that a Federal department made the wrong decision on total supply, price, or who the recipients are - auctions self-adjust and update.
Auctions are bad because need is not entirely measured in money. Highest bidders win is not egalitarian. Sometimes we do want to subsidize rocket surgeons visas for disadvantaged parts of the country.
My concern with such approaches is around the "all skilled labor is lumped into the H-1B visa", be it needing fluency in French and a teaching certificate or a PhD in data science with a focus on economics - its the same pool of visas.
We keep saying H-1B. There used to also be a H-1A visa and an H-1C visa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1A_visa
What if, instead of trying to solve the H-1B visa problem from companies that have gone through the roof for visa applications ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Top_H-1B_employers_b... ), instead split off all the jobs that are classified by the BLS as 15-0000 ( https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes150000.htm ) and move them to a new section ... Lets call it H-1D.
Within the H-1D which is for tech jobs (just like H-1A and H-1C were for healthcare while they were active), it can have a different pool size and requirements and for that one could require a certain base pay and have an auction on top of that.
https://www.uscis.gov/archive/h-1c-registered-nurse-working-...
This could allow for regulating tech job immigration differently while minimizing the impact to French teachers or medical professionals in rural America that have no way to compete with Big Tech salaries.
The reason I think this is more likely doable is that it works the same way that the H-1A and H-1C visas did before to address one section of the skilled labor visa applications.
It sounds like these changes won't even touch H1B
Well it does impact h1b because h1b has a maximum time of 6 years unless the visaholder has an approved green card application. So, by blocking new green card applications (at least the most common path) this effectively puts a ceiling on the number of H1B visaholders.
H1B visa's are a modern form of indentured servitude. The employer knows you can't quit, and if they fire you, you have 6 weeks to somehow find a new job (which is already hard if you are a US citizen or green card holder) or you have to leave the country.
Because of this, H1B workers have no choice but to accept bad pay and working conditions.
Lower wages with the same quality is an MBA fantasy. The old saying "you get what you pay for" applies to tech as well as any other topic.
Paying people less because they came from somewhere else and can get away with it, sounds a bit exploitative to me.
The employer knows full well that they can pay workers on a visa for less and they have them on a metaphorical leash (in the UK it was 5 years before they could apply for permanent residency).
I've seen this happen personally, I've seen an English engineering manager keep the Indian employees behind by telling them they couldn't leave and he wouldn't have dared said the same thing to me and didn't.
One of the Indians (who I think lived in the UK for a while) said to me in the morning after the incident while we were grabbing a morning coffee "You can see now why the British had India for so long", I took that to mean that he thought that Indians are more placid. I have no idea if that is the case generally, but he certainly thought so.
Unrelated to immigration but not for stupid managers. Friend of mine was promised a raise which was basically an adjustment of compensation.
He was fed up and he went to a meeting and he had to hear "what are you going to do about it?" Manager knew his wife was pregnant and wanted to use it, or I suppose it was it. He told he would pack his stuff and leave. So he did. He packed his stuff, shared the news and another senior manager rushed after him to bring him back to his team with the raise.
I left the company few years ago but now and then I think about it. How someone can be so opportunistic with to the point of trying to abuse someone about to be a father for few thousands of dollars that do not even belong to him. And EVEN if he got a bonus or something it would have been much much less than that to the point that, if it was me, I would be so ashamed to admit that.
Possibly he would have done that with anyone in a special situation. And I am sure this is more common than not, but how f'up it is to hide behind "it is just business" cover to act like this.
I decided to leave a company before my probationary period, and the HR woman was visibly angry with me; she was one of these lifers at the company.
Some people just identify with the company and/or like the power they get through the position.
Congratulations. Your trolling level is out of this world.
The most racist part of the program is the per country quotas. Right now they are granting EB3 for Indians who applied in 2014 while EB3 visa for the French from 2024. So that's an extra 10 years Indians are stuck in limbo. And, no, this is not just because there's more Indian's immigrating.
It's 100% based on country of birth. What do you mean?
It is not based on race, but nationality. If you are an Indian but are a citizen of Singapore your quota will be based on Singapore quotas, not based on you being ethnically an Indian.
It's actually based on country of birth. If your parents were French but were living in India when you where born, you will be in the India quota, even if your nationality is French.
>And, no, this is not just because there's more Indian's immigrating.
yes it is right? am i mistaken here?
They'll just hire them from abroad and have them work remotely as contractors...
Let them and it is better that way anyway.
Why? At that point it just sounds like the goal is to keep Indians out instead of creating equal footing for American citizens or whatever.
I fail to understand how it is racism to support offshore hiring. Does that not help the local economies of remote workers? I am not sure what the admin is thinking and why they are making such decisions but for people who want to stay where they are it is king great.
Also why are you singling out Indians? Are you racist against other nations?
Is this bait?
Yes, it is racism and xenophobia. That’s what the current government is pushing for
You're implying that the guy married to an Indian, who named his son Vivek, is somehow racist against Indians?
If there were a billion Englishmen trying to immigrate here and drive down wages, we'd be against that too.
> it just sounds like the goal is to keep Indians out
Bingo.
This is a pre-midterm messaging move aimed at shoring up support with young men who voted for Trump in ‘24. The chances that the policy even lasts more than a few months is slim.
Oh please, US citizens have been getting a raw deal for decades, I lived and worked in the Bay for years and years, my Indian colleagues were no more talented than the US citizens coming out of US schools. You clearly weren't part of that world if you can make claim to the contrary.
> US citizens have been getting a raw deal for decades
Agree. Isn’t it odd that the H1B and offshoring aren’t being touched? Just green cards? The kind that gives employees leverage with employers?
This is a messaging move. We need immigration reform and a pro-labor movement in America. This is crumbs to peasants.
> This is a messaging move. We need immigration reform and a pro-labor movement in America. This is crumbs to peasants.
Couldn't agree more. I can see the admin flailing in trying this, the fact they didn't go farther just means there's an opportunity for the midterms.
When I was working at a large tech company, most of our teams were foreign-born. And we were specifically scouting for the US citizens for ITAR projects.
And this only got _worse_ as more and more advanced STEM degrees in the US go to foreigners.
I hate the Trump administration and I don't know that I agree with this latest thing, but at least if they're outsourced to India then at least the company has a bit less leverage over you. I think in the current system employers can hold your H1B visa over you like a Sword of Damocles.
I've never had to worry about visas, so this is just stuff I'm getting from visa-holding friends, but that always seemed a bit scary.
> this is the correct thing to do for a lot of reasons
The chances that this lasts for even a few months beyond the midterms is zero.
It's hard to believe the administration is for this for any sane reason. It's just payback for Microsoft hiring someone the government doesn't like.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/26/trump-microsoft-lis...
Huh, there are other Indian IT vendors in list like Tata, Wipro, Cognizant and Infosys. MS is not alone in this. It'd be payback if it was about Microsoft's business/contracting with government.
There's not a single reason to assume this administration is acting in good faith in any scenario. The correct way to look at all actions by this administration is to ask yourself, "how does this help trump?" Most of the time it is money (or staying in power => more money), as it almost certainly is here. He's looking for a payout for selectively targeting microsoft. That's it.
And when trump does something which clearly hurts himself, you have to remember that he is fantastically stupid, undisciplined, and insane.
Picking your least favorite companies and applying it to them only is not the right thing to do. Laws and regulations, when not applied equally, are weapons.
> The biggest one is the program itself is racist as hell.
Can you explain how its racist?
It's definitely not the correct thing to do. I don't see why you would start by making an example of a company like Microsoft where starting salary is six figures than a company like Infosys which employs a similar number (median salary at Microsoft for H1B workers is $177k vs. $93k for Infosys)
https://h1bgrader.com/compare/infosys-limited-vs-microsoft-c...
There's some real ways in which it's unfair. As a software engineer in Seattle I've quite possibly lost $100-300K to the H1B program over the past 10 years. It's not a problem though, I don't need anyone's protection from Microsoft.
I don't even really need protection from Infosys, but I do think that if Trump were serious about protecting me he would start with large companies where the median H1B salary is under six figures. Not making an example of a company that may objectively not even be a bad actor when you look at their salary ranges.
> I don't even really need protection from Infosys, but I do think that if Trump were serious about protecting me he would start with large companies where the median H1B salary is under six figures. Not making an example of a company that may objectively not even be a bad actor when you look at their salary ranges.
Enforcing existing regulations and supplying the resources for the agency to effectively audit the already existing category of H-1B-dependent employers (https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62c-h1b-depende... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B-dependent_employer ) could be an approach taken.
This is a lie.
I know people that work for FAANG as immigrants in the US, and I myself worked for one.
They made as much as anyone else there.
There are so many senior leaders that rose through the ranks at MS from India and the rest of Asia that the claim is simply laughable. They wouldn't tolerate being paid any less than American natives themselves nor would they tolerate their immigrant subordinates being paid less than natives.
> program itself is racist as hell. Microsoft is literally bringing in foreigners, paying them much less to do the same damn job
This is not racism, it is abuse of the visa system. It can happen to any race.
That’s liberalism not racism.
(In the economical sense, not in the political sense)
Not going to be evenly applied though, just another stick to hit with.
I sponsored an employee and that's not how pay works, in fact you have to tell them how much they are making and you have to pay them your average. The example given by the US government is a level one software developer makes on average 110k but your company pays on average 115k then you have to pay 115K and it has to be submitted to the government. So the answer to whether H-1B workers are paid less is: they are legally required not to be, but the system relies on employer attestation first and enforcement second. Companies get caught abusing this when the get audited but H-1B laws require they be paid the same.
More like MS forgot to pay into administration or family slush fund.
Every company is doing what Microsoft pioneered years ago. Yet only MS is facing the consequences.
Oracle. Apple. Any Fortune 500 company. They have the same playbook.
well you know what happens now right? they become remote contractors and get paid even less