H-1B visa: It's everywhere you want to be! For now

[Phillip V]

If I am travelling half the time, why do I need to live in one of those areas?

At least 25% of the time, engineers need to work alongside and learn from each other in the office.  A junior engineer will not be able to effectively execute and mature if they start off from home, and senior engineers need to train up and lead their teams face-to-face at least 25% of the time.

[The Minsky Moment]

I think you are wrong about the doubt. Having more people willing to come do complex engineering work at half the cost certainly depresses salaries for American workers. I know this because *I HIRE THESE PEOPLE*. And I certainly consider the costs of a foreign worker when deciding what I am willing to pay.

That's an individual hiring decision.  The questions are what impact all of these hiring decisions and the complex interaction of those decisions with the economy have on the overall labor market.

[MadImmortalMan]

If I am travelling half the time, why do I need to live in one of those areas?

At least 25% of the time, engineers need to work alongside and learn from each other in the office.  A junior engineer will not be able to effectively execute and mature if they start off from home, and senior engineers need to train up and lead their teams face-to-face at least 25% of the time.

Dude, I can give you a list of people as long as my arm if you take off the moving to a terrible city requirement. Why don't you just pick somebody local and train them? I could teach a high school grad all those skills in less than a year if I pick a smart one.

[Phillip V]

If I am travelling half the time, why do I need to live in one of those areas?

At least 25% of the time, engineers need to work alongside and learn from each other in the office.  A junior engineer will not be able to effectively execute and mature if they start off from home, and senior engineers need to train up and lead their teams face-to-face at least 25% of the time.

Dude, I can give you a list of people as long as my arm if you take off the moving to a terrible city requirement. Why don't you just pick somebody local and train them? I could teach a high school grad all those skills in less than a year if I pick a smart one.

Corporate masters don't want to train anybody more than a few weeks.

Depending on skill/experience, I can possibly get rid of the location requirement, though Dallas and San Francisco are also options.

[DontSayBanana]

Corporate masters don't want to train anybody more than a few weeks.

Depending on skill/experience, I can possibly get rid of the location requirement, though Dallas and San Francisco are also options.

Those are pretty low-end skills, to be honest.  Give me a month to brush up on my Linux and I'd have those down pat, and I'm not graduating until May.  Also, spoken like somebody who doesn't understand his own hiring requirements in not knowing the distinctions in various SQL flavors (or how little they actually mean to 99% of query writers).  Even people who learned SQL during a MS Access class could write adequate SQL queries in MySQL.  I'd go further than MIM to say those could be trained in 6 weeks and have enough mastery not to require task-level supervision within the year.