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Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

thehill.com

381–390 of 571 posts

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The legal system is extremely biased in favor of those who can afford an attorney. Moreover, the more expensive the attorney, the more biased it is in their favor. It is in effect not a legal system, but a system to keep lawyers and judges in business with intentionally vaguely worded laws and variable interpretations.

Exactly. And it’s comical that the person I was debating with doesn’t understand this. Proclaimed investor in legal tech misses the biggest use case of ai in legal - providing access to people that can’t afford it or otherwise wouldn’t know to work with a lawyer

Do you have any preliminary statistics that suggest you're right? AI is mature enough that we should be able to track this.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#382

It’s much more banal than it seems. Personal anecdote: I hired an exceptional H-1B worker to a role while I worked in SF, but was legally required to first advertise their role in 2 places. We put it in a 2am TV spot and a Modesto newspaper ad. But the whole thing was a legally required farce. We already knew from months of aggressive sourcing that no other qualified candidates existed - in fact we were over the moon…

I don't get it - if you were aggressively sourcing for months, presumably advertising your job via normal channels, wouldn't that already satisfy the requirement for perm? I keep seeing annecdotes about exceptional one of a kind talent, world class PhDs etc. I think we can all agree that majority of H1Bs we work with are not those people. They are regular devs without exceptional skills (not saying no skills, just nothing especially unique). There are thousands laid of, qualified US workers that can fill those roles. You can't convince me that we have such lack of talent in tech today that massive amounts of h1bs have to be brought in.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean “fair”? What happens in the years/decades between when this hypothetical system is enacted and when the US can train up sufficient workers to substitute the labor force we currently have with H1-B? Your proposal will mean 99% of all of the H1-B allocation will go to hedge fund quants and 1% maybe go to an AI researcher, but all of the materials science (eg. Cutting edge battery tech), semiconductor f…

"materials science (eg. Cutting edge battery tech), semiconductor fabrication, neuroscience, pharmaceutical research " This is a beautiful fantasy for H-1B, that is totally disconnected from reality. What is that 1% of the H-1Bs currently? It is mostly IT and software slop jobs. Here are the top 40 employers, it isn't going to hurt research in the US to cut them to zero. Amazon.Com Services Cognizant Technology Solut…

Intel H1Bs are engaged in semiconductor research.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#384

So grateful to see this being picked up by mainstream news outlets. Anecdotally I know quite a few engineers with experience ranging from small startup to long FAANG tenures that cannot even get an interview. It makes no sense to source outside of the US when qualified American workers cannot get jobs. At some point that became a radical stance and I'm sure I'll be flamed for it here.

It's crazy. We have some job openings. 500 applications each. 95% of them are people who did their undergraduate in India and graduate degree in America. My interviews this week have been 9/10 people with thick accents, terrible answers, not sure what the hell is going on. Is it HR, is it the leadership directing HR? No idea, but it feels like the company is shooting itself in the foot. Especially a growing company w…

It's HR. HR should just be headhunting, handled externally to the company. Legal can handle the rest.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"materials science (eg. Cutting edge battery tech), semiconductor fabrication, neuroscience, pharmaceutical research " This is a beautiful fantasy for H-1B, that is totally disconnected from reality. What is that 1% of the H-1Bs currently? It is mostly IT and software slop jobs. Here are the top 40 employers, it isn't going to hurt research in the US to cut them to zero. Amazon.Com Services Cognizant Technology Solut…

Intel H1Bs are engaged in semiconductor research.

Well it's Intel... not really selling your case here.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#386
post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US needs immigrants. At the expense of the citizenry?

It is not a zero sum game (long term). Immigrants and their children have founded companies that have employed thousands of American citizens and created trillions of dollars of wealth. Stopping what has worked for your country because "…reasons…" is extremely shortsighted.

So foriegners should take potential investment money from American citizens because there business will have hired more American citizens than one founded by an American? I think it's more likely that they would prioritize figuring out to import non citizens, especially from the area of the world that they are from.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#387
post #269

A lot of these problems could be solved if H1-B's were given out in order of salary (I think there's such a proposal going around recently). And by that I mean: something like a Dutch auction. Give H1-Bs to the top 85K paying jobs (maybe normalized to SoL in the region, I'm sure the BLS has some idea on how to do it). The lure of H1-Bs is the money savings, and the fact that if you're on an H1-B, you're practically a…

It’s interesting that the U.S. picked an employer-driven model, which effectively outsources immigration selection to firms. That’s efficient for demand-matching, but it concentrates bargaining power in ways that a points-based model avoids. The practical effect of an H1-B is to act as a non-compete, punitive termination clause, and a time bounded employment contract. These are very expensive terms to ask for in conv…

But it's not like if the employee gets nothing out of this bargain. The company in exchange sponsors the visa. It's not unreasonable that they get a minimum number of years of work from the employee in exchange.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"materials science (eg. Cutting edge battery tech), semiconductor fabrication, neuroscience, pharmaceutical research " This is a beautiful fantasy for H-1B, that is totally disconnected from reality. What is that 1% of the H-1Bs currently? It is mostly IT and software slop jobs. Here are the top 40 employers, it isn't going to hurt research in the US to cut them to zero. Amazon.Com Services Cognizant Technology Solut…

Intel H1Bs are engaged in semiconductor research.

Doubtful.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#389
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This conflates high education specialists with high earnings. It’s probably not completely uncorrelated, but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates. I understand that H1-Bs are currently likely to create an abusive relationship with the visa-ed employee, but just because you have identified a valid diagnosis doesn’t mean your suggested pre…

That seems like a fair way for the free market to address things, no? If you need special carve outs, create a new type of Visa for those special cases. The immigrants are all going to be paying taxes on their earnings. If you can boost H1B salaries by an average of $20k/yr by doing a price auction, that brings govt revenue and maybe even gives opportunities to balance the budget by creating more H1B slots.

Yes and no. That's going to benefit wall street, at the expense of R&D labs where PhD researchers are paid in whip lashes.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand how exactly this particular problem (advertising jobs for PERM to comply with the law yet making sure that no applications will be received) can be fixed with a different order of issuing H-1B visas? PERM has nothing to do with H-1B, it's a part of the employment-based immigration process. The reason companies do this shit is because they claim to the US that there are no willing and able citizens or p…

This keeps coming up every so often and most commenters on HN are completely ignorant of how the immigration system works, but have strong opinions about it, therefore it seems that everything is nefarious. The real problem here is that the way the current system is set up, you have to prove that there are no citizens available for a position by listing a job and interviewing candidates. The problem with that is that…

You have highlighted the problem I was not able to articulate. This kind of requirement “open the job to local candidates and only if no one exists will we allow you to hire from outside” exists in multiple places.

It exists for internal candidates - often companies are encouraged to fill vacancies by first allowing internal candidates to apply. Obviously this creates a cascading effect where a new role opens up in the candidates old position once they fill up the new one. At some point they just need to hire externally or we will be perpetually filling up vacancies.

I wonder how every company managed to understand the cascading effect and just hire externally instead.

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