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Comment by chrisper | Hacker News Reader

Also many of these consultancy firms just flood the H1B application pool and then just take whoever got accepted. Very unfair.

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This is why I strongly believe that H1Bs should be given out to employees that are offered the highest salary.

Clearly there is no shortage if you are not willing to pay one of the highest salaries.

Yea, this wouldn't be perfect, but it's much better than the significantly more gameable lottery system we have now.

In addition, I hope that we can somehow figure out a way to give visas to STEM graduate degree earners over ones employed by such shops. That segment seems significantly underserved by the current system and it's resulting in a reverse brain drain away from the country even though we are investing in their education.

I'm not sure that it makes sense to target STEM graduates in this way. Most of them would receive visas based on their high salaries whereas an explicit rule would only serve to increase the number of low quality STEM degrees.

Yeah that did cross my mind, and now that it's been brought up, I'm inclined to think you are right.

I just learned that a bunch of acquaintances lost out on their H1B lotteries and will be shipped out of the country to international offices once their OPT terms end in 1-2 months. Since they were employed by strong companies, their salaries likely would have been high enough to qualify them for H1B visas under a system you propose.

Actually I wonder if entry level employees would be crowded out completely in an auction system - wouldn't it end up being all senior engineers?

I don't like the idea of further endorsing and supporting credentialism.

If you can get a high salary, then you're in demand and we should keep you. If you have a STEM degree but can't even get a good job, then I don't see any reason to grant a visa.

Having a bidding system for H1Bs would quickly resolve all these issues.

That will make company like MS/Google/FB/AMAZN, invincible. Startups are going to be starved. They will not have that much leverage to recruit desired talents.

Are you saying startups could not compete without "cheap" H1B labor?!

The H1B is explicitly not supposed to bring in cheaper labor.

I think what he means is, startups can't deal with the uncertainty and lead times the current H-1B system imposes.

Large companies just project how many openings they would have in October next year, hire appropriately, and park them in offshore offices if they didn't make the lottery. And they can afford the application fee too

An auction system would have far less uncertainty.

Big companies can afford to pay, startups are not.

I don't work for a startup, but I do work for a small business. The current system does not work for us because there is a lot of uncertainty in the application process. An auction system would actually be an improvement for us and many other small businesses.

So what? If big companies are economically more efficient, let them have the workers. Nobody should be forced to work for a poor company that can't pay up.

Plus what vostok said.

otoh, artificially allowing startups to get cheap engineers means that these or some other engineers are deprived of an opportunity to make a lot more money at Google/Facebook. Engineers are thus being exploited by unethical employers flooding the system

+1 on this. I would really like H1B's to be a bidding system. But guess who lobbies the govt?

The current system also puts small companies at a disadvantage. I work at a tiny company that pays more than the companies you listed and we have a lot of difficulty getting new H1Bs.

If we had an auction style system then at least small companies would have the opportunity to pay more and get access to foreign labor. In the current system, this is not even an option so companies like mine are disadvantaged with no recourse. Startups could always hire native workers or hire foreign workers offshore.

But then only H1Bs from Silicon Valley would get accepted, because that's where they pay the most. Other states, and even other cities in California (like Los Angeles) would suffer from the lack of opportunity to hire immigrants.

If salaries in those areas are not as high as in the Bay Area, it means there is no shortage. It just means the salaries are too low to attract talent.

There are plenty of companies outside the Bay Area that pay comparable salaries. I have first or very close second hand experience with LA, Chicago, Seattle, Colorado, and New York. If other companies want to hire foreigners they should be willing to pay more.

No it doesn't. San Fran has higher salaries across the board, to go with the higher cost of living. It doesn't mean other areas don't need devs.

Your causality is backwards. San Francisco doesn't pay high salaries because the cost of living is high; if that model obtained, San Francisco would immediately turn into a ghost town. The cost of living is high in San Francisco because of the high salaries.

I'm a big proponent of causality without directionality.

meaning?

Correlation

Doesn't involve causality. We have a saying about it.

Well, there are a few other things to add:

1. There might be a feedback mechanism between the two since high salaries could lead to high cost of living which in turn means that companies have to offer higher salaries etc.

2. The higher salaries don't explain the entire cost of living story since cost of living has risen faster than salaries.

3. Cost of living -- primarily the cost of housing -- seems to spike after certain events. IPOs, or other large liquidity events.

They can still hire devs. They just need to pay more. Total comp is not adjusted for cost of living for doctors, salesmen, traders, bankers, attorneys, and managers. Why do you expect it to be adjusted for software developers? This is less than intuitive for me.

It's a way of justifying keeping salaries as low as possible for engineers, but somehow managing to cough up more money in some locations. An equally good engineer in Chicago should be worth the same amount as an engineer in SF, but they're paid less... simply because the employer has more negotiating power in both cases. In both cases, the employer pays enough to give the engineer a reasonably good living for the local cost of living, because that's what's needed to incentivize them to work... a natural minimum incentive. If engineers demanded more, they'd get more.

Why the hell should he be paid the same amount of money? It's a different location, different demand for engineers — this just makes no sense.

Some people think that employees should be paid somewhat proportionally to the amount of value they provide to their employer. If you accept that, then a good engineer should always get about the same amount of money, regardless of the cost of living, because they always produce a similar amount of value for the company.

Value is subjective: it's determined as agreement between seller and buyer. Engineer of the same ability is more valuable for an average SF company than an average Chicago company.

> different demand for engineers

That was the point that was made upthread. Lower demand -> no shortage -> no need for H1B.

Yes, and it's the same point I'm trying to defend against a communistic idea of some kind of universal "value" of labour which is equal regardless of location or circumstances.

I don't know if that is true. A cursory glance at compensation statistics seems to indicate wide regional variance in the compensation in all these professions.

And, for me at least, intuitively it makes sense as well, but I don't want to argue intuition here.

Arguably the effect goes the other way: engineers are more productive in SF, so they're worth paying more in SF. (If that weren't the case, then you wouldn't be able to pay engineers enough to want to live there while still making s profit.)

So the GP's policy would still fit the spirit of the H1B program, which is to allow slots for high-output roles.

Do you have any numbers at all to back up your belief that proximity to the Golden Gate Bridge somehow increases developer productivity?

The reason I gave in the post: if it were not the case, you could not bid a high enough wage to both a) make a profit and b) produce a discretionary income attractive to engineers.

If you want a further explanation of why that is, then I would say that it's the proximity to related talent and investors adapted to this kind of work.

Edit: In case it wasn't just a clever attempt at synecdoche: it can't be proximity to the Golden Gate bridge per se that increases productivity, because the North Beach/Marina/Marin tech jobs pay less than SoMa and SV tech jobs.

Well sucks to be those states. If those states want to compete, then maybe they should offer hire salaries. Why do they "deserve" to have cheap employees, but not other areas?

You're aware that not every H1B is a developer right? Your proposal would change the whole basis of the program in a way that doesn't seem particularly thought out.

What about people who are botanists, or harpsichord teachers?

Easy fix -- give the visas to the highest paid people in each job category. After you've gone through each category once, do it again for the next highest paid. Eventually you'll run out of harpsichord teachers and so the more popular categories would keep getting filled until the quota was reached.

Then you get highly paid people and you get a nice cross section of skillsets, and it incentivizes the companies to pay the highest wage for that skill.

Who decides on how to clump the categories?

Why not just auction off the visas?

You could have separate categories for non profit and academic positions.

But for positions in private industry, I don't care. If you really, really need a foreign employee over a domestic one, you will need to pay the H1B premium, competing with everyone else.

It's more fair than a system based on luck, or arbitrary criteria of review board or something guaranteed to be games and manipulated.

But the goal of the system isn't fairness, it's to provide needed skills to American businesses. It sounds like you're looking at this from the perspective of a job-seeking foreign national, but that's not actually a constituency here, they aren't American, don't vote, and our government is not intending to help them with this program.

The supposed point is to make sure American companies can compete. The idea of only allowing the very highest paid foreign workers in, and them all being software developers, has literally nothing to do with that goal.

"The supposed point is to make sure American companies can compete."

I don't really care about this, either. I care more about American people than American companies. Companies, American or otherwise, are doing fine.

Is there a shortage of botanists or harpsichord teachers if they are paid less than software developers? This is not obvious to me.

I know plenty of people who went from biology (I know it is not botany exactly) to tech because there are /too many/ biologists.

Universities already have an unlimited quota for H1Bs, so at least the teachers can get it.

Hmm, cite? People I know at universities aren't on H1B visas.

https://www.uscis.gov/ilink/docView/PUBLAW/HTML/PUBLAW/0-0-0...

Relevant part:

SEC. 103. SPECIAL RULE FOR UNIVERSITIES, RESEARCH FACILITIES, AND GRADUATE DEGREE RECIPIENTS; COUNTING RULES.

Section 214(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1184(g)) is amended by adding at the end the following new paragraphs:

(5) The numerical limitations contained in paragraph (1)(A) shall not apply to any nonimmigrant alien issued a visa or otherwise provided status under section 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b) who is employed (or has received an offer of employment) at--

(A) an institution of higher education (as defined in section 101(a) of the Higher Education Act of 1965 (20 U.S.C. 1001(a))), or a related or affiliated nonprofit entity; or

(B) a nonprofit research organization or a governmental research organization.

Fascinating, thanks!

This would make it easier to game, especially for wealthy immigrants who want to buy a visa to get a green card.

Also the H1B visa is for hundreds of different job classifications at different prevailing wages - are you saying there should be an auction for each? How will visas be distributed fairly amongst them?

Those people are a small portion of H1B visas, if at all, and all it means that instead of a %50 to %100 chance that they get it 'this year' doing it, it's a %100 chance. They also have other options like an L1 visa which is another %100 chance in a year and then can get a green card at the highest priority level as an international executive afterwards. Or they can open a mcdonalds franchise somewhere in a bad part of america and get a E visa for a $500k investment. The wealthy have many options to immigrate. And if they are wealthy they can do this with real corporations too since wealthy people have wealthy friends.

Gamebility by the 'wealthy' would be the least of their worries in this case. Most H1-B abuse are body shops such as infosys. 'Price' auctions would be a good improvement for employees, although it would concentrate the visas into places like SF & NYC even further.

On top of that, a US passport isn't attractive to the already wealthy. The US has high income tax rates relative to many other places and you can never escape it by moving out, unlike all other citizenships in the world. The already wealthy would move to london, monaco, switzerland or maybe dubai if their goal was wealth preservation.

Less than 7% of approved H1B visas last year were with Infosys, HCL, and Cognizant - the three major H1B abusers. The remaining 93% were legitimate hires that would be priced out by the wealthy if there were a way for the wealthy to buy their visas.

Just because there is a problem that doesn't justify moving to a solution that destroys it. It's better strengthen enforcement so that fines can be used to make it expensive for abusers (like what happened in the article), rather than price out talent that isn't just in finance or high paying fields.

The wealthy can already buy their way into a US visa. I am in an immigrant community where this happens. Quite frankly, I think those programs should also be expanded.

At $500k+. Surely you don't believe that H1B visas should cost that much for skilled talent to come to the U.S.

Wealthy immigrants can obtain investor visa easier outside of the H1B pool (EB-5).

There is no reason why H1B should be distributed fairly, because the US has a green card lottery that is diversified across various jobs and countries anyway.

The EB-5 requires starting a company and employing 10+ at >$50k/yr, meaning it costs $500,000+. Do you honestly think the H1B visa will bid higher than $500k/yr for base pay for the employee?

The lottery evenly distributes amongst the positions based on demand. By switching to wealth, you're creating a system that only the highest-paying job categories will prevail.

I am in an immigrant community where the EB5 is used. It does not cost $500k/year and it is an investment rather than a expense so it is not all comparable to the H1B program.

We're referring to what it would cost for bad actors to abuse the system. Someone was saying that switching to a biddable H1B visa would solve problems because it's just like the EB5.

That's one way of doing it.

But most of the people use a regional center [1] to park the $500k is a big real estate project like Hunter's Point Shipyard in SF or Hudson Yards in New York with no additional yearly cost.

[1] https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/permanent-worker...

This idea is still predicated on the 'magic number' that the government has more or less randomly picked to be the number of H1B visas in a year. This number is, of course, far smaller than the number of family and other types of visas.

http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number...

That's a start.

But why not just give them to the highest bidder?

How do you value equity? Are H1-Bs not allowed to join early stage startups then?

Making it easy to switch jobs will also go a long way in making this system much better.

Right now, the consultancy firms flood the application pool hoping to get few selected. They eat the cost of sending all the applications because they see it as an investment - they know that they can milk the few who get selected for many years and recoup many multiples of their initial investment.

Tying the H-1B to the employee not the employer will put an end to such abuses.

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