Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

H-1B visa shift may favor tech companies

sfchronicle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 143 posts

Re: H-1B visa shift may favor tech companies

#61

Post by ori_b »

jedberg wrote: post #47
oh_sigh wrote: post #9

Why not just go to an auction system, where the group that is going to give the highest salary gets the visa? You could adjust it for CoL so all H1Bs don't end up in SF and NYC. What would be bad about this system?

I thought this too, until it was pointed out to me that not every H1-B is an engineer. For example, if you want to bring in someone to teach a rare foreign language at a University, they have a qualifying special skill but they certainly aren’t making the six figure engineer salary.

Rank on how far above the prevailing wage it is.

Re: H-1B visa shift may favor tech companies

#62

Post by cthalupa »

hughperkins wrote: post #28
ilarum wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In such a system, maybe only experienced hires would get visas and fresh graduates wouldn't.

And that's bad because?

Unless we implement a new visa for graduates of American universities we experience brain drain. We would be exporting American educated individuals to other countries rather than making use of them ourselves.

It also doesn't account for the fact that H1B isn't just for engineers. Not all highly skilled professionals get paid salaries commensurate with the IT and CS industries.

So now we also need to split it by job type.

There's a lot of overhead involved in getting this proposal to just be as good as the current system, and even more to make it better. If we do all that, sure. But I'm not sold on the idea that we would.

Re: H-1B visa shift may favor tech companies

#63

Post by wenc »

belltaco wrote: post #30
tracer4201 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The problem with this argument is that you're assuming that there's more offer than demand, when in fact is the opposite. I fundamentally disagree with this statement. At top tech companies, I have come across enough mediocre hires who prepared enough for a technical interview to get "in" the company, but are otherwise doing very mundane work or require a ton of direction. In industry, I've come across with even wor…

>I don't believe there's a shortage of talent in this country. Do you have any experience in hiring people? East coast here and its impossible to find citizens who can code FizzBuzz. Those that can already have a job and don't come to interviews. There are multiple thousands of very high paying security related job openings that need citizens only, because of clearances. Zero percent unemployment: https://cybersecuri…

Have been on the hiring end here and have a strong preference for citizen and LPR hires. Even so, finding the right talent is challenging because we’re not a famous tech company. All the talented kids who are citizens want to work for cool companies, and we’re not one. Also statistically very few citizens go to grad school in STEM fields, and we’re looking for folks with graduate-level education in our field. Our salary rates for citizens and non citizens are identical.

The few citizens who apply to our non prestigious company are competing against a pool of talented H1Bs (not all H1Bs are body shop employees; many are graduates of fine American schools... we’re talking MIT and CMU), yet because of the pool they are in, they often come up short. The most competitive citizens tend not to want to work for non prestigious companies, so we get the less competitive citizen candidates and more competitive non citizens.

I don’t want to say this is the norm out there, because it is not, but to those who have misgivings about H1Bs (the non body shop variety), I’d be interested to hear your stories about your experiences hiring and where/how you found your quality citizen/LPR talent pools (I’d be inclined to hear from employers and hiring managers rather than anecdotal hearsay about a friend of a friend).

Re: H-1B visa shift may favor tech companies

#64

Post by throw3322 »

oh_sigh wrote: post #9

Why not just go to an auction system, where the group that is going to give the highest salary gets the visa? You could adjust it for CoL so all H1Bs don't end up in SF and NYC. What would be bad about this system?

With a salary auction system, it looks like startups will be at a disadvantage, as several have said. I wonder if investors should put in more funding to allow each startup to pay a higher salary closer to the market rate of the talent they aim to hire.

Investors or at least the LPs should be able to shoulder much more risks than average startup employees, and they should have a relatively higher preference for equity over cash than employees.

Re: H-1B visa shift may favor tech companies

#65

Post by throw3322 »

Merit-based visa system used by Canada and Australia should be preferred.

It is better for the country (more fluid job market; more long-term high-quality immigrants who will contribute more to social security and other social needs; increased competitiveness of companies and startups; larger tax base), the immigrants (more freedom to change companies), and the Americans (less need to compete with people accepting low wage to gain corporate sponsorship of a future permanent visa; more funding for social security).

Re: H-1B visa shift may favor tech companies

#67

Post by rajeshpant »

maxxxxx wrote: post #4
mavelikara wrote: post #3

> The Department of Homeland Security wants to switch the order of these lotteries, it said in a notice of the proposed rule change, which would — somewhat counterintuitively — improve the odds for those highly educated workers > ... with a master’s or doctoral degree from an American college or university This is a welcome change. But this biases the playing field in favor of those graduating from American degree mi…

Staffing companies should get no H1 visas at all. They are the biggest abusers.

Although staffing companies have abused the visas but given the way industry is structured, staffing companies do fill a lot of positions for contract workers & consulting roles. Strictly speaking in terms of law they should be able to hire people on visa as well.

The most idiotic thing here is giving a visa to a company based on lottery. As the original comment pointed out, there should be a point system where you are graded based on education and experience.

Re: H-1B visa shift may favor tech companies

#68

Post by conanbatt »

jlarocco wrote: post #58
drivebycomment wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perfect example of how companies only want free markets when it benefits them. There are many cases where corporations show hypocritical behavior, but this criticism seems off the mark as the companies actually do want free market in this case (i.e. free labor market where they can get a labor from anywhere), and in this case, they are not getting it (there's a lot of legal barrier making it difficult to import lab…

No, the free market solution would be to raise wages to attract more people into the industry. There's nothing stopping them from doing that, but instead they're lobbying the government to let them import workers.

Your definition of free market requires legal restrictions on labor.

Re: H-1B visa shift may favor tech companies

#69

Post by conanbatt »

oh_sigh wrote: post #9

Why not just go to an auction system, where the group that is going to give the highest salary gets the visa? You could adjust it for CoL so all H1Bs don't end up in SF and NYC. What would be bad about this system?

Why put this restrictions at all? There is no sense in trying to fit in highly skilled labor to a quota.
Post reply on HN