Indians steal American jobs on H1B, they steal our people's money through scam call centers. I think it's time we cut off all immigration from India till they sort out this mess and repay all the money our citizens lost. Also, as a tit-for-tat, we should cancel all Indian H1B's and send them back.

Putin should STFU. We will pull out of that frozen craphole as we did in China, and then he can let his crappy Russian puppet companies like Yandex cater to their public. or we should sanction the living crap out of all major Russian companies (do they even have any) operating in North America and the EU.

The Indian government: "We hate the Chinese government but that certainly doesn't stop us from using their policies to control our own people. Also, did you know we are the world's largest democracy?". I feel very glad I don't live in that ultra-nationalist shithole anymore.

Exactly. The fact that people think a local software company in a small city could compete with a FAANG is beyond ridiculous. Based on post like that one I can see that most SWE's who work at small, local shops have no idea what big tech is like.

Moving to a richer also means all basic needs like food, housing, education, etc. also go up (or way, way up like in the Bay Area, NYC). It is just not that simple that moving to a richer area and getting paid more means someone will have more savings.

Companies do not see it that way. Even pre-COVID when working in the office was the norm, the salaries for the same role differed based on where the office was located and was totally dependent on the cost of living of that area. This point of "why should my pay go down if the company makes the same profit from my work?" question has begun popping recently with the shift to remote work.

This is absolutely incorrect when you are talking about FB! FB pays the highest wages on average in comparison to Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. I have friends at FB who have in the last few months have moved out of the Bay Area to work remotely from medium and low cost of living locations. They reported a max 15% reduction to their base salary and got to keep their four-year stock grants without any reductions. On the lower end, A senior SWE at FB with 5-6 years of experience makes $190,000 in base pay, gets a 15% year-end bonus on that base pay, and gets an annual stock grant of $160,000. Bringing their total compensation to $378,500. Source: https://www.levels.fyi/company... Now if someone moves to a lower cost of living location like Rochester, NY, they are going to get a 15% reduction in base pay, taking their base to $161, 500, their 15% bonus now becomes $24225, and assuming their stock grant hasn't reduced based on real life data points that I have, this brings their total compensation to $345, 725, and this is the lower end of senior engineer salaries at FB and not average or top of the band. Now, I have worked for local companies in Rochester, NY, no employer there pays that sort of a base salary (forget stock grants) to anyone who is not a director or VP of engineering with 15-20 years of experience, let alone some newly minted senior engineer with 5-6 years of experience. Companies in low and medium cost of living areas do not pay salaries like these to their engineers unless there happens to be a FAANG or big tech company office in that city (newsflash: there aren't many). Keeping aside the salary debate, the engineers at FB working on challenges dealing with very high scale that only few companies can boast of, along side the plethora of specialized teams there that work on OS kernels, compilers, AI, and AR/VR. Your local software company in the US doesn't deal with those kinds of challenges and do that sort of work, and neither do they even remotely pay that kind of money. So to think that local companies will poach FB talent just because FB might reduce base pay by 15% is beyond ridiculous.

You do know that H1B's are capped at 85,000 per year and they have to go through a lottery, right? Amazon can demand as many H1B's as it wants to, but at the end of the day they'll have to stick to a cap and also go through the lottery which they have no control over. Also, USCIS has recently changed H1B lottery rules, now before a company can even enter a petition in the lottery, USCIS has to approve that petition for it to even enter the lottery in the first place. The days of getting rubber stamped H1B's ended when Trump entered office. The visa that companies in the US now use to get cheaper labor is now the L-1 visa. There is no 85000/year cap for L-1 visa, no lottery of any sort. The company can just transfer a foreign worker from an international office to their American offices and have them working for up to 7 years. L visa holders have to be tied to the same company, they can't transfer their visa to another company like H1B holders. Since 2017, US companies are increasingly using L1 visas over H1B.

Go to websites like /r/cscareerquestions on Reddit and see the salaries entry level engineers are getting at FB outta college. I have seen interns who got return offers get 110-120K$ base, 40K $ stocks, and at times anywhere from 15-50K$ as signing bonus, bringing up the comp to a total of 160K$+ each year. Compare this to Infosys that pays 65K$ and you can see the difference.

For these companies? Nope. The factor here is the interviewing process of SV companies. Recently I was told to pick a date for Microsoft in September for my onsite interviews. I was told that the technical interviews would go all day and I had to give between 4-5 technical interviews, before and after lunch. These interviews are hard and split into multiple stages right from 2-3 rounds of phone screens/online tests and then an entire day of onsite interviews. This eliminates most of the candidates, so they need more people to make the hiring numbers. Where do they get these numbers from after they're done interviewing Americans? H1B's.

Yes they started this in 2017, right after they and TCS were investigated by USCIS in 2016 for visa fraud. The should have been slammed hard but suspiciously at the same time the chairman of the group that owns TCS made a multi-million dollar donation to Carnegie Mellon(when the IIT's in his own country could use the money way more than a university with billions in endowment) and a few weeks after this all charges were dropped, stinks of lobbying and $$'s being thrown around. Basically their asses were lit on fire after Trump got elected and they knew they had to change somewhat, hence Infosys began US hiring(they pay is okay not great tbh) and that very year the number of H1B's being filed got reduced by 40,000, some say they'll file for even lesser H1B's in 2018.

There is a slight bit of misinformation here. Most anti H1B people think all H1B's == the types working in sweatshops like Infosys. There are workers on that visa in places like Google,Facebook and many start-ups where : 1) The foreign worker has to pass multiple rounds of technical interviews just like an American hire. Whereas the interviews in H1B abuse sweatshops like Infosys are a complete joke. 2) The foreign worker in these places is paid 6 figure salaries which correspond to the highest bracket for entry level wages in tech in that area, the American worker at the entry level at these places gets the exact same pay. For people like these H1B's make sense, for people like the ones at Infosys , no it doesn't. I saw your comment on the O-1 visa in this thread, and I'd like to say O-1's are very, very hard to get, and if we went by that then it be just very few people coming in to the US. What Trump seems to be doing is wanting to eliminate the Infosys types workers that are coming in droves on the H1B visa. The money these companies put in into lobbying is making it harder to make any reasonable changes to the program and these companies are responsible for things like Disney workers losing their jobs to H1B's. There have been some positive changes recently like mass issues of RFE's to companies to prove to USCIS that the job indeed requires specialization and is paying top dollar, since most of the sweatshops type H1B's I see are paid 60000-65000$ compared to H1B's in top companies being paid 120,000-150,000$. A lot of the companies who are unable to pay top dollar have stopped hiring H1B's as result, since USCIS is demanding a lot of paperwork to approve or extend an H1B visa. I talked to an Indian worker at a well known Silicon Valley company about this last month , he welcomed it saying "It's good for people like me because we are truly skilled workers and makes immigration easier for us, since companies that abuse H1B's have completely clogged up work based immigration in the US".

Japan is a shitty example. It's a country that had a national isolation policy for centuries, forbidding trade and contact with the foreign world. They want to keep their homogenous aspect of Japanese culture which is a leftover from their past and that's why immigration there is so darn hard.