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Comment by wkoszek | Hacker News Reader

You confuse skill with high salary. If you're a part of HN community and work for a startup with some seed funding, good luck with (a) finding people (b) paying them $150k.

Not sure how you the want government to evaluate chemical, mechanical, aerospace etc. engineers. Right now it's formal education, since I think it's hard to do it objectively otherwise. For software engineers you expected USCIS will look at our ... GitHub accounts to evaluate it?

H1B as it is OK. Unfortunately big firms figured you can DDoS the application system and flood it with applications, get some people, underpay them and use them to replace more expensive and more qualified US people. This is a problem and it needs to be solved.

Read this article as an example: http://www.infoworld.com/article/3004501/h1b/proof-that-h-1b...

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> You confuse skill with high salary.

Skill is too difficult to define objectively and it's probably not what you should be discriminating on anyways (in a purely economic sense).

What you need to go for is "valuable" (scarce and in demand) engineers and salary is a decent proxy for that (more so than formal education). You also don't want the government to "evaluate" engineers because doing a good job at that would mean, pretty much by definition, selecting the very same engineers companies elect to hire.

But unfortunately salaries fluctuate across the country. The same engineer might make 100k in Cleveland and 150k+ in Silicon Valley. What might make sense is having the h1b attached to the immigrant, no strings attached for 5-10 years. Firms would make sure to pay them market rate, because they don't want them to walk, and additionally would only hire actually necessary workers, because they're making the same as anyone else in the country.

The real issue is that h1b establishes a time period of essentially indentured servitude to the employee.

I would advocate for using standardized test scores. If you're a smart dropout, even high school dropout, you could take the tests within just a few weeks.

Perhaps there does need to be some kind of flexibility for people who are not native English speakers. For example, a very high math score should be able to compensate for low verbal scores.

Using degrees seems like the worst possible option, since the standards are so low these days, and the trend is for the standards to go even lower.

Australian skilled worker visa sounds similar. Points come from low age, language exam, degree, training, years in the industry, etc. For technical skills, you pretty much submit your CV (packed with easily recognisable keywords...)

> standardized test scores

I think H1Bs should only be used for highly skilled specialist roles with a minimum pay grade like 150k (adjusted for local cost of living). In that scenario, a standardized test would either be no more useful than measuring by degree possession, or would not be able to aid the search to employ highly skilled niche specializations.

I am personally upset because my employer successfully hired an unskilled and unqualified H1B "masters degree" (who also is not fluent in English) to perform the duties equivalent to a 3rd year computer science student. Either this person should have never been hired, or if they should have been hired, they should have been hired by a better employer. Either we imported a bad candidate, or we imported a good candidate and squandered his talent for work we should have hired literally any fresh BS in CS candidate for. Of course, my employer is happy because he's paying less than fair market value for entry level work. This has undisputedly displaced a local citizen from work.

What upsets me the most about this is that there is a company willing to pay to import a 150k+ highly skilled, rare, and valuable candidate and my employer may have been responsible for blocking that.

I agree with most of your points. If the current application system is modified to prevent the 'DDoS' by the big firms, it would solve most of the H1B issues and automatically fix a lot of things.

What would probably work is - increasing the visa application fees quite significantly if a company is applying for more than X applications a year.

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