alt Hacker News> H1-B is stupid on its face. You're seriously telling me that this software engineering job absolutely cannot be filled by an American? That doesn't pass the laugh test.
The job description is a senior full stack product developer fluent in all programming languages and frameworks. Salary is $70,000/year. Somehow they can never find Americans to fill those jobs. They'll go on Linkedin complaining that Americans are too lazy and don't have the right hustle culture and talk about made up concepts like work life balance when the bosses demand 100 hour work weeks without overtime pay.
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Link the job description because I don't believe this is real.
> Salary is $70,000/year
The lowest allowed limit for such a job is around $140k in areas like Seattle.
Our competitors in another country will have no problem building those products.
Then they'll be sold in America to American consumers.
Then our industry deflates, because we can't compete on cost or labor scale / innovation.
If we put up tariffs, we get a short respite. But now our goods don't sell as well overseas in the face of competition. Our industries still shrink. Eventually they become domestically uncompetitive.
So then what? You preserved some wages for 20 years at the cost of killing the future.
I think all of these conversations are especially pertinent because AI will provide activation energy to accelerate this migration. Now is not the time to encourage offshoring.
That seems low. Is it a corporate strategy to set a low salary and when nobody local fills it (because it's below the competitive rate) they get to hire H1-B?