Comment by whyileft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whyileft | Hacker News Reader

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> There is an acute shortage of capable, knowledgeable workers trained in the skills that industry needs.

Just like there is an acute shortage of NFL Quarterbacks that are capable of leading a team to a super bowl championship.

The problem with this skills gap myth is that we are looking for people who are better than most of their peers in the industry. The will always be a shortage of top 10% performers in the industry because the top 10% of the industry will always be the same amount.

EDIT: I should just clarify that I'm absolutely in favor of people coming from other countries to work in the US. That said, the H1B in its current form is often just indentured servitude and definitely needs to be adjusted. My statement is specifically addressing the skills gap myth.

There's also, by definition, a shortage of talent willing to work for far-below-market wages. It's in employers' best interest to address this "shortage".

Exactly. They found a way to get around the problem of paying market wages by changing the market.

Sounds more like H-1B is just 21st century legal mean for the company to chain down those employees (like indentured servants of the past).

This would only be true if companies needed better employees than their competitors. If you merely need someone capable of doing a job, there's no such limitation: it's logically-possible for 100% of software developers to be able to put a script in cron that runs a SQL query to generate a report.

Given enough time almost any very junior software developer from any amount of training could successfully complete that task. What you consider capable is that they can do it within a certain time frame and with a certain level of quality. That quality being higher than others and the time frame being faster than others.

Also, that expectation of time frame and quality level has increased significantly since 1985. The reason that has increased is because the average level software developer in 2017 can do that task quite a bit faster and of higher quality than the average software developer could do in 1985.

The definition of acceptable in any market changes with the pool of options available.

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