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.