Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

"That’s right. Facebook and Google brought in 900 and 2,800 H-1B employees, respectively, with salaries of $140,000 and $127,000. Cognizant? 3,300 at $72,000. Tata? A whopping 16,435 for a (relatively) paltry $70,000 – literally less than half what Facebook paid."

I still think a good first step is to require a salary for H-1B workers at 10x single person poverty guidelines for the local area[1]. Another measure of base salary would probably work, but something that requires a salary that discourages the body shops[2]. According to the legislation and goals of the program, the people we accept have the talent to be worth this salary[3].

1) https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2016-01-25/html/2016-01450....

2) http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2016-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx - the top 10 has a lot of consulting / body shop firms

3) http://www.dol.gov/whd/immigration/h1b.htm "The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States."

Sorting the visas by salary will work just as well. Right now there is a random lottery choosing who gets the visas, where the Indian body shops are known to "oversubscribe" to it.

Also, after a verification that the Visa recipient is working at the given salary for at least two years, then the they can apply for green card irrelevant to who their current employer is (as long as they are employed and earning at least similar salaries to what they did when they got the visa).

Switching jobs (as long as it is the similar profession/pay), should not reset the Green Card process. This will remove the current defacto "Indentured servitude" state that most H-1B visa holders find themselves in.

There are many ways to improve the current system (without changing the quotas), to benefit the country itself, and not large corporations, but right now there is no direct personal incentive for lawmakers to do that.

> Sorting the visas by salary will work just as well.

And it makes sense for the federal government too. Higher salary = higher taxes.

> Sorting the visas by salary will work just as well.

I would rather have a explicit floor to make sure that simply increasing the numbers allowed doesn't put us back in the same situation or tempt companies into collusion.

>Sorting the visas by salary will work just as well.

what abt TCS working around this with paying high salary for the first year and then lowering the wage following year.

If you have easy H-1B transfers (which we do), then this is not an issue since the H-1B worker would have no motivation to stick on in a lower wage job.

You are assuming this worker is hireable by other companies. Most of the body shops train people in a very specific and often obscure technology and they cannot work as general software engineers. e.g. my cousin was trained in COBOL and while he was smart enough to develop other skills, most of his co-workers did not. They are tied to the job. Many are even grateful simply for the opportunity to 'come to America'.

Well, if a company is willing to pay top dollar for a year to hire a candidate for a specific skill, I'd say that the specific skill should be in high demand. So it would be easy enough to find another employer in need of that skill.

> if a company is willing to pay top dollar for a year to hire a candidate for a specific skill

No, the case was tcs hiring someone for top dollar only to get a h1b. You moved the goalpost, sigh!.

its not allowed and would blacklist them.

The problem with sorting by wage is that it gives a massive advantage of SV companies vs even a place like Seattle. They already have to pay higher wages, so a premium on top doesn't hurt as bad.

If it's a lottery system, why not charge 25k per entry or something? It's affordable even by a smaller company is they really want the person. It's affordable by the big tech companies who are being honest about their H-1B visa requests. It puts some hurt on Tata and the like by making them pay through the nose for trying to game the lottery.

Or you could restrict the number issued per company, at least until others have their share. Say every company gets 1500 max, then you bump that up to 2000 for those interested. keep going like that until you exhaust the quota.

Actually, I don't see a big problem with SV companies getting the lion's share of H-1B visa allocations if they are for the highest paying jobs. I would argue that this would ensure that everyone is better off -- workers in Seattle area will see their wages increase while SV companies have (properly) high-priced access to the talent that they claim they cannot get locally.

DoL already has a process for determining prevailing wage for a given location. There is no reason why "sorting by wage" can't mean "sorting by ratio of wage to local prevailing wage".

This could be SO easily circumvented. Just open an office in another location (a subsidary, perhaps) and have it do the hiring at the prevailing wages at that location.

This is not so easily circumvented. If an employee on H-1B transfers to another location, the employer is required to file an amendment to the H-1B petition and go through the prevailing wage determination again. From USCIS website [1]:

  You must file an amended H-1B petition if your H-1B
  employee changed or is going to change his or her place of
  employment to a worksite location outside of the 
  metropolitan statistical area (MSA) or an “area of intended 
  employment” (as defined at 20 CFR 655.715) covered by the 
  existing approved H-1B petition

[1]: https://www.uscis.gov/news/alerts/uscis-draft-guidance-when-...

I have been advocating for just that: awarding visas to the the highest bidder. It is very simple yet effective.

One other thing is necessary: to attribute visas every month instead of once a year.

Here is my paper on the issue: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_yEsHOtzN3yZ3JoYXlTdDh0R0k...

I'm not sure that highest bidder is a good idea. Makes it very hard for smaller companies, e.g. startups, to compete with Google et. al.. Don't really know a good alternative tho. Prevailing wages are pretty easy to game to a significant degree by tuning the job title.

Why does a startup need H1bs? Smaller you are the easier to find local talent.

Huh? That may be true for some generic website/application startups. But if you're going for something requiring a lot of domain specific knowledge, I can't agree. There's more than a few fields with few enough experts that one can remember them all.

A concern I have when I see the suggestion to simply set a higher salary floor. There are foreign workers for many other job types (translation, chef, specialty craftsman) that likely fall far short of what we consider a fair base salary in tech. These are exactly the sort of foreign workers, however, I'd imagine we WANT coming in, since they are by definition specialty and non-replaceable.

Would they still have an avenue into the country, without precluding their use to only those with the money to pay exorbitant salaries? (I don't actually know the visa system well enough; I'm curious if they could use a different visa type or something of that respect)

Otherwise I'd worry about the unintended side effects of such an approach, notably because as mentioned above, the problem seems to be more one of the semantic requirements of visa-ship being abused than just salary requirements at the root of the problem. (the latter is certainly happening, but doesn't seem like the core, better worded.)

I am speaking only for STEM workers. That is where the biggest conflict lies.

It does seem a bit odd to mix cultural folks in with STEM for expressing a need in the USA. I would rather see them separated.

> (translation, chef, specialty craftsman) [...] I'd imagine we WANT coming in, since they are by definition specialty and non-replaceable.

If the ostensible goal of the program is to bring in people for low-supply positions (but short of individual O-1 visas) then isn't salary a reasonable not-too-game-able way to measure that?

Potentially, but at the exclusion as I say of anyone who simply doesn't have those sort of funds. Can a local food business afford 100k+ for a chef? It appears to me that this would disallow many smaller businesses from being able to utilize specialty or cultural labor. Thus my suggestion to address violations of the intent of the law; yes, more game-able, but actually gets at the root of the problem.

This looks at demand-supply in a vacuum. You also have the other demand-supply curve: will people be willing to pay a huge premium for, say, authentic foreign cuisine? Probably not as much as would be needed to make this system work.

Those who missed the thread on the Disney outsourcing may want to see this and its parents. Note the video that proves that firms are deliberately posting phony job ads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10970166

There are moves afoot in the UK for a minimum salary required for a visa.

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