In my neck of the woods, there's the H1Bs we bring in as full time employees, and the H1Bs our vendor companies (i.e. outsourced work) bring in to fill roles for us.
The H1Bs we bring in as full time employees are meeting our normal hiring criteria. In some cases, they were hired on a different campus, and brought to work with us via an H1B transfer rather than hire. Company policy is that if you are on a particular pay grade, you get paid based on which campus you work out of. So the cheaper labor is on those other campuses, and H1B transfers tend to be higher end performers the company wants to keep around by allowing some mobility between campuses.
For the vendors, this is a bit different. H1Bs here are people the vendor company (HCL, Infosys, Mindtree, Tata) wants in our time zone to "assist the client during working hours". So folks that manage teams of individual employees for a client, and support the client when they have specific issues that need to be escalated. Instead of hiring those local, they tend to import employees from the primary campus. With the H1B restrictions in more recent years, they've been more willing to hire local employees for the folks that do work for the client directly, but they're expecting Indian work culture which can create problems, and so many of the people doing the actual work are in India, and very few roles are local at all. Classic offshoring.
But this is a larger corporation where labor policies are more strictly enforced internally for the sake of large contracts and being able to work with governments.
For us, being a very small company and having our own in-house developed tools and libraries, and using hand layout, even US degreed engineers had a learning process to go through. It took me a month or so to get with the system to start being productive. I don't recollect that being any longer for the 2-3 H1B1 degreed engineers we had. Actually, I suspect they came up to speed faster because they were super motivated and could often be found in their office after hours learning.
One of the things I've seen is that India has a
glut of folks that went into college for engineering roles, but the domestic engineering industries can't absorb them all. So yeah, I can get that there's a lot of skilled, hungry engineers willing to migrate to find something. Especially if it means one of the better H1B positions where they get paid local market rate (like companies
are supposed to be doing), and can use the pay to help family back home. Many of these go on to get their green card.
But when you have companies that are just offshoring mid-level office work, we lose those roles locally, and then the company will import their own labor back into the local economy and depress wages for whomever is left. My partner is one of the few local workers for one of the above vendor companies, and so if she was able to do the work full time at a company rather than an offshoring company, she'd be making 35-50% more and have better PTO and sick leave. *sigh*
The other problem I think is hiring criteria is increasingly automated and disconnected from roles, and we're seeing the junior roles available shrink, meaning fewer folks even get in the door than in the past. "We need to make data driven decisions" is both smart, and a plague on modern companies that do a lot of engineering, because it means they overlook many people they shouldn't, and then complain that they can't hire locally.
