Many companies have policies requiring that all jobs have to be posted both internally and externally before being filled. The intent is to prevent Sam the VP from just slotting his buddy into the job. At the end of the day, Sam the VP is just going to slot his buddy into the job but now you made a whole bunch of people apply for a job that was never available to them.
Same thing happens with H1B/PERM, except now it's the law requiring it rather than company policy. The company already has someone doing the job today, but legally they have to post the job and interview a certain number of candidates to prove there is no US citizen that can do it.
> The company already has someone doing the job today, but legally they have to post the job and interview a certain number of candidates to prove there is no US citizen that can do it.
Posted obscurely in a corner of the cafeteria, but exposing my salary to anyone who cared to look. They were never going to hire someone else, and we all knew it, but the charade had to be played.
Very much so - I worked at a place that tried to make all testers easily transferable between teams because apparently testing is testing. Except they didn't go so far as to do it for the team that tested some ancient Fortran application running on obscure hardware because it turns out that testers can be specialised.
H1B has evolved into a bizarre collaborative scam between the government and tech corporations; there is, in fact, a US citizen who can fill any software engineering role a US company has.
It's an outrage once you work at these companies and behold the sheer dysfunction and they're all getting paid wages native American citizens would take.
It's also an outrage how much leverage companies have over their H1B employees (especially from India, etc).
If you have any long-term H1B coworkers from less-favored nations, I guarantee you there's a heartbreaking story they have to tell you if you ask.
I work with a super high-performing guy with a Masters degree who has been at my company for 15 years and gets treated super poorly by the company. He still is probably 10 years away from getting a naturalization interview and has no hope of switching jobs in the meantime (and has children that are citizens...).
If they have direct family members that are citizens they should skip the wait apply through the family path, although they would need to be on good terms with said family member as they have to vouch for their welfare payments for 10 years
At least it that way about a decade ago, as I’m realizing things might have changed since then
The model that Americans would take any job if the wages were high enough is simple but obviously false. For manual labor there's no amount of money you could pay Americans to be farmworkers. For desk jobs there's no amount that'll overcome Americans' cultural belief that you can't do math unless you were born as a special sort of person who is "good at math".
> For manual labor there's no amount of money you could pay Americans to be farmworkers.
If you don't think Americans are willing to pick fruits and vegetables, go find a farmer, have him put a sign at the edge of his property that says "Free fruits and vegetables, you pick them yourself" and watch how quickly the field is emptied.
This is obnoxious pedantry which is ignoring the parent's obvious actual point: food obeys a demand curve just like every other product, and what the parent clearly meant was that, at the labor price native Americans would want for these jobs, the resulting food price would be such that not enough people would buy the food to make it worthwhile.
And while this may have been idle speculation a few years ago, we now have pretty solid empirical evidence: when food prices increased by 10-20%, even in the middle of the fastest-growing wages in decades, the country had a collective temper tantrum.
1 million/year? There’s definitely an amount that’d allow to find enough workers locally. The other question is how much would the produce cost and how many people would be willing to pay.
Well that's probably part of the problem. You have to live within commute range of the work to do it, and people don't want to live in small towns or Central Valley CA unless they're in the respected local landowner class.
I know there are people who do part-time work in oil fields or fishing ships, so that's always possible if you want to move to North Dakota or Alaska temporarily.
I don't know about the rest of the nation, but in the American Southwest, there's a distinct socio-economic class of "migrant farmworker" with a long tradition. And it's a Hispanic cultural tradition.
There would be basically zero chance of anyone in my urban high school, or circle of friends, to turn around and say "I'm going to be a migrant farmworker when I graduate!" and it's unclear whether any non-Latino could even achieve such a career. GP indicated that urban/suburban living wouldn't be possible. You'd certainly need to move around, and you'd be an outcast if you didn't speak Spanish, if you weren't nominally Catholic, or celebrate holidays like a Hispanic. Your children would come to learn Spanish and cultural customs, but they'd still be outcast because of racism. You'd have a weird relationship with the overseers, because they'd be more like you, so neither side would really accept you.
(Sub)urban White kids are usually groomed to go to college and get a white-collar or office job, and the dropouts do some kind of tech vocational path, or end up doing clerking minimum-wage to get by. So you have a spectrum of white/blue collar, but there's no path to "migrant farmworker" or other sort of laborer, because my people Just Don't Do That. It's unthinkable.
Even agrarian Native American communities have a huge problem with "brain drain" there, because the opportunities on the Reservation are zilch, unless you want to work at a casino? So young Natives dream of leaving at the first chance, going into the city, and assimilating, losing their culture, because it's a survival thing. Their agriculture isn't sustainable, no matter how you slice it--what are they going to do, hire from outside?
Since the 80s we've had White people who said that migrants come to steal our jobs. Or they say they're taking jobs no American wants. But realistically, even if American wanted those jobs at those wages, they couldn't have them, because of the ethnic hegemony in certain industries.
I see. Yeah, that's tricky. It's less of "I don't want to" moreso than "I literally* cannot move". I'm paying off a house and moving to another state to pay rent on top of that mortgage ruins the point. For 200k, sure. But I know that's not realistic even if I was the best farmhand.
*Okay, I can "literally" talk with family about selling the home. But I do just need some steady work during the downtimes. I'm not at a point where I feel I want to uproot my entire lifestyle, career, and livlihood just to do blue collar work.
that may be manual labor but it requires skills, and comes with real risks.
and mines have a lot, like a LOT, of labor laws behind them. you know, the whole sending 10 year olds down the shaft thing and then literally covering up what went wrong.
100% on your last sentence. There is a massive misplacement of ego in our fellow countrymen that loves to posture as an arbiter of morality and rationality, but has no pomp left over for their individual upward mobility. Very very bizarre and self defeating.
I know a fair number of Silicon Valley "townies" and they are not trying and failing to get into tech companies. Only the Asian ones with tiger parents are even considering it.
The hippie aligned ones just want to get infinite degrees in something natural like forestry management. The rest are nurses or civil servants if they want a career, or real estate agents or artists or game streamers otherwise.
If anything I think younger Americans tend to go for the kind of vulgar Marxism where everything bad is caused by "corporations", and women in strongly prefer work that comes off as being good for society, which means they won't even consider it.
Same for me of course; I work in tech because I was on the computer too much, not because I was greedy and looked up good careers.
> there is, in fact, a US citizen who can fill any software engineering role a US company has.
Right now I suspect you're probably right. But 2 or 3 years ago?
If you're right then why would companies want to go through all of the extra paperwork and hoops to hire an H1B right now? Maybe the answer is "they can pay less"? But I'm not sure if it's actually all that much less than they could pay someone who's been looking for work for six months to a year or more.
You would be surprised how hard can some managers negotiate 10% salary change during hiring, despite the fact its not their own money, or anyhow useful for their work. I talk multinational mega corporations here. People just want to be good employees(TM) or at least seen as such.
At large tech companies, the pay is entirely driven by level and rating; so there's no savings in salary; just added costs to comply with the directive.
It's endlessly frustrating that the US government wants to centrally plan my hiring decisions.
Bizarre? Supporting business's whims is mostly what the government has existed to do for the last forty years. What's bizarre is that people expect our country to function normally when this is so blatant.
Yes, there's been mild movement away from this insanity, but we're still miles to the right of what actually supports the people who live here.
H1b isn't about "experts", there are other visas for that (eb1 or o1). H1b's purpose it to find talent after search has been "exhausted" locally. That is rarely done in good faith.
Also back in the day, we would say we need X new staff, corporate would encourage us to advertise and interview, but when it came to extending and offer they would tell us we can't increase head count. Happened over and over till I left.
I have never started the interview process before there was a headcount approved[1]. I have never had anyone push back when I said "I'll worry about that when the headcount is approved, because I got things to do"; but then I can't recall more than a handful of times anyone wanted me to front-run the recruiting process with a fishing expedition. Have things really become that shitty?
[1] To be fair, sometimes the headcount disappeared for various reasons, but that's not the same as "meh...just have a look around and jerk some peoples chains".
In Europe jobs have to be published. Even if there is no intention of filling it from the public. And companies also publish bullshit jobs which are used to manipulate regulatory requirements if needed (eg. if you want to hire a foreigner, you must prove you couldn't fill the position locally - by publishing it for 3 months).
No. If you publish it, you have to give an estimation of the salary, but that's the only limitation, at least in my country. Companies have internal guidelines, like in mine, you can't hire a relative to your own department, but the job i got wasn't on a public listing, it's my agent who gave my CV to my current team leader, he was interested, organized an itw, then 3 month later i hoped to my current job (and i am way better for it).
It is law, just not in every European country, but it's definitely not unusual.
And yes, companies often go with the lowest common denominator across Europe to avoid any doubt when dealing with multinational people. In my personal case it could be reasonably claimed that laws of 5 different countries apply to me based on citizenship, registered residence, actual places of work... Of course my employer wants to be covered.
> At the end of the day, Sam the VP is just going to slot his buddy into the job but now you made a whole bunch of people apply for a job that was never available to them.
Nowadays, in tech, it's all about who you know rather than what you know.
This has been true in any area of human activity since forever. If you have a choice to work with someone you know/worked with previously and someone completely new, who may or may not be as good as advertised... Who would you hire? When your future bonuses/promotions and maybe job itself depends on it?
This is all a function of interviews sucking right? Leet code is essentially completely independent from dev skill. Projects take too much commitment and time from the team and devs.
So, what option do teams have? Just hire the people that your good devs say are good is honestly the most effective practice that I've seen.
Honestly, even referrals are sucking for me in 2023/4. Referral would almost always mean I at least talk to someone on the hiring team
. Now it's been maybe a 40% chance I even get a recruiter call?
I've recently witnessed a situation where VP hired someone he used to work with This VP is not the best judge of talent. The guy barely does any work, and rarely responds to messages. He'll send me a scheduled slack at 8 AM. I reply. I don't hear from him all day. It's incredibly frustrating, since we had better candidates.
> but legally they have to post the job and interview a certain number of candidates to prove there is no US citizen that can do it
I've got my first job after moving countries in Europe, despite this (very similar but it was 6 weeks IIRC) limitation being in place by law, within a week. Consulting body shop through which I was billing per day, and the umbrella company took 20% cut.
It seems its trivial to circumvent this kind of rule across the globe, and TBH what kind of state employee team would go over every single foreign first hire in given region, all the evidence and check its validity, gather all the details. Heck police ignore smaller crimes below certain threshold, states have no real processing power to handle this well.
For H1B/PERM, I remember they had to post it on the wall in a public place. Our company posted the jobs on the wall in the lunch room at our office. It has every information including the salary. I guess things have changed a bit since the early 2000s?
> Sam the VP is just going to slot his buddy into the job but now you made a whole bunch of people apply for a job that was never available to them.
...except now the recruiting and HR can report these candidates and interviews on their metrics, candidates had a hope of finding a job, and Sam has a bulletproof explanation in case if anybody asks why his buddy was hired. Win-win-win.
Same thing happens with H1B/PERM, except now it's the law requiring it rather than company policy. The company already has someone doing the job today, but legally they have to post the job and interview a certain number of candidates to prove there is no US citizen that can do it.
Terrible situation for all involved.