Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs

Eventually yeah.

You deserve and earned them!

> There's so much frictional cost to hiring someone on an H1B visa (legal fees, admin overhead) that it's not practical if you're only hiring 1-2 employees

Very true but as you saw in my email, I have extremely experienced friends back in India who I have been able to hire as contractors without issue. No H1B - just plain old Slack, email and Forgejo. The playbook for asynchronous work is well tested and debugged by now. 2019 was a blessing.

I will concede, this doesn't work for every company - a hardware or biotech company definitely would appreciate people all being together in the same physical lab, in which case I hear you!

> the government designed it to be employer-agnostic

... but the government cannot be employer-agnostic, Michael.

The government is not an impartial, unbiased mainframe running in a DC somewhere. It's a group of people accepting and pushing policy who can be influenced, just like I am influencing your today, and you, me.

As an SMB and bootstrapped founder, you then have to choose between spending your time and efforts on being at the influencing table vs making actual design and business decisions at your startup the moment you yield influence to this group.

The bigger business simply doesn't have to make that decision. So don't help tip the scales further against yourself and SMBs like you.

That's one of my points that I was hoping to discuss in our email - that involving the government adds further overhead, resistance and expense into the system, so we should exhaust all other options before we even consider it. I personally have never seen an option that needed government intervention that couldn't be solved by the free market. I don't work in healthcare or education or finance - maybe those do require government intervention - I am entirely unfamiliar about those domains and not talking about them.

The other interpretation of being employer-agnostic is that the H1B isn't tied to a "sponsoring company" and doesn't require any of the transfer shenanigans. Sure, but the issue it isn't that way is because it's a rare "dual intention" visa in that, you are a non-immigrant who can become a citizen through the H1B. This was a feature added to the H1B to entice top quality talent. The problem with making the H1B employer-agnostic is that now you can I can start a perfectly legal, fantastic lifestyle businesses hiring H1Bs, petitioning for their greencards and immediately letting them go. As long as they can figure out a way to eat and sleep, they can now become citizens. So for it to be employer-agnostic, we need to remove the "dual intention" - the very carrot employers use (if you tough it out through all those JIRA tickets, you'll get to be a citizen!)

> I just mean on a large scale, the companies that use H1B visas will generally outcompete the ones that don't.

This is where I continue to push back. I was hoping to discuss over email but do you feel you could have built TinyPilot at either MS or Google, not as a side project but as an official product offering? I don't want to get too tied up into the specific features that TinyPilot offers - I'm using it as a proxy for a very useful, innovative product that provably solves real customer problems.

At the large scales where H1B makes sense, you as a major decision maker at the company wouldn't allow a worker with a risky status like the H1B be responsible for high impact, meaningful pieces of work. Actually, forget H1Bs - at the large scales where H1B makes sense, you would simply not entrust a single individual, H1B or not, with high impact, meaningful pieces of work.

If we disagree on this take, please say so - I am here to learn and listen.

The original intention of the H1B was to handle temporary supply shocks in knowledge work while the U.S. slowly fixed those supply constraints on its own.

If avocado toasts became an overnight sensation, the H1B was a way to provide breathing room to local avocado farms so the demand could sustain or grow (and not collapse) while they came up to speed to meet that sudden demand.

The H1B wasn't designed to be a way to absolutely wipe out local avocado farms because it's cheaper to just import avocados from Mexico.

The H1B has completely diverged from that and going in the opposite direction where it's actively and negatively impacting domestic markets. Massive corporations in Asia have grown whose sole business model is exploiting this geographical arbitrage and nothing else.

What piece of critical, useful software that has had a mention on HN can you name or recall that has come out of these many mutibillion dollar outsourcing giants?

A $60k/yr salary as a resident doctor is fantastic if you did most of your education in Asia but if you attended medical school anywhere in the U.S. and didn't have a 100% scholarship, you're starting your life off in crippling debt.

During COVID, there was an explosion of domestic coding bootcamps to address the supply constraints - this is precisely the kind of domestic corrections we, as the U.S. need to encourage and develop local talent, get them educated and motivated about tech, but these bootcamps require an investment that in Asia covers education, boarding and lodging without any scholarship. There's just no competition when it comes to cost. We in the U.S. have an extremely high quality of living and our CoL reflects that. As I wrote in my email, things we take for granted here - running water (not potable, just water that you could water your plants with), 24x7 electricity and internet - these are still unavailable where I was born, so of course, the CoL is cheaper. Way cheaper.

One might say, "OK then, free markets for the win" - that itself is a separate debate on its own.