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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

Companies may have to do something unimaginable and invest in their employees who may not have the exact skill set they need and offer them training or give them time to ramp up....

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And yet that delay is antithetical to starting to work in a new area, innovating rapidly, etc. The ability to attract and retain employees from anywhere around the world is a massive advantage, and this sounds like a disincentive program.

I agree with you that training is part of the solution, but for niche applications that can be pretty hard, you're talking people who have studied for years. So if you are doing work like that, why wouldn't you set up in a country without such restrictions? E.g. Vancouver.

How about caps on the percentage of H1Bs/L1s in any company (e.g. 15%), and the ability for H1B workers to transfer employers?

"but for niche applications that can be pretty hard, you're talking people who have studied for years."

How many people that have studied for years to become experts at niche applications are being paid only $60,000 a year - the current minimum for H1B Visas? I would think that getting such an expert is well worth $130,000 a year.

Agree that 60k is too low. But 130k is too high.

Consider someone who has just finished their PhD in a relevant area. You want to employ them in your startup in e.g. Orlando, where the cost of living is much lower than SF. Maybe 80k is reasonable. But you'll have to pay a 50k premium.

Or you could set up an office in Montreal. And then your tech team will come to Florida for a 3 month code camp every December anyway...

>Consider someone who has just finished their PhD in a relevant area.

If they're hiring fresh grads, it should be an American. There's plenty of them.

No, not a generic PhD to go be sausage meat at some consultancy factory. Someone with specific skills. Who happens not to be American. There's probably one of them.

There are not. By the time you graduate with a masters or PhD you often accomplish a body of research work in a SPECIFIC field, have publications, patents. So yes you are a "fresh" grad but with 5-10 published scientific papers to your name. High tech scientific companies often don't have a luxury of choosing between multiple qualified candidates. Often you have 1-2 qualified applicants ( which takes a long time to find) who are a good fit and often they have foreign backgrounds. Why? I don't know, may be it has something to do with poor American education system? Which noone is interested in fixing it seems.

If they're this incredibly rare then I don't see why paying them 130k is a big deal.

>Consider someone who has just finished their PhD in a relevant area.

Why? The H1B is supposed to bring in high skilled labor not new grads. If 80K is the going market rate for someone with those skills then you will be able to find someone to do the job for 80K. Artificially suppressing wages is the reason you can't find anyone to do the job for the "reasonable" rate.

A pay spike will draw more people in to the field and allow wages to find their natural level.

Hate to break it to you but someone with a PhD is not a 'new grad', they have often been working in a high pressure job for ~5 years post graduation, usually required to do teaching, assist on their supervisor's research projects (lots of grunt coding), and do research and write a thesis. In this hypothetical, their value comes from having specific expertise on top of general skills.

There is no guarantee you will be able to find an American with those skills, even for $129k. If there is a long term need, and the industry doesn't move somewhere cheaper, eventually there will be more applicants. I've yet to meet any company who says 'no problem, we'll just delay that project until we can find someone'.

You could have a payroll tax on H1Bs, say 25%, that goes toward funding STEM PhD stipends, and peg their minimum salaries to be greater than the median of comparable American salaries. Though that may create a perverse incentive for companies to pay locals a lot LESS so as to reduce the overall salary bill. Needs some expert modelling...

> Hate to break it to you but someone with a PhD is not a 'new grad'

Then they'll have no problem to get a 130k jobs.

Looks like a good thing. Companies won't be able to pretend that they are fresh inexperienced workers and pay them peanuts.

>There is no guarantee you will be able to find an American with those skills, even for $129k.

You could hire an American citizen with a PhD.

>supervisor's research projects (lots of grunt coding)

Hobby projects that A) have no users so stability and usability is unimportant, B) have no one review code, or the results so correctness is unimportant, C) have no requirements to support it after the paper is written, so maintainability is unimportant all add up to shit general skills.

If a PhD has specific expertise you need then great, otherwise expect a mediocre entry level dev with a chip on their shoulder.

Disagree that 130k is too high. Thats 130k total comp. If a startup can afford that kind of payment, then I dont understand how any company requiring a specialist would not.

If you can't afford a dedicated specialist you'd pay for a consultancy firm who can lend you the specialist for a short period of time.

I have a friend that use to live in Orlando, the cost of living is about the same where I live (a major metropolitan city that's not on the west coast). If I were to join a startup as an software architect - the person whose decisions were going to make or break the company - I would be asking more than 130K. My skills aren't really that "specialized" in the grand scheme of things. If my expertise was going to make or break the company, $130K is not that much to ask.

This is an example of where $130k is too low. It should be $200k for that role in high cost competitive markets, and you would find yourself competing with more skilled applicants who only want $130k. Fixed minimums are just dumb.

Only works if you have enforceable non-compete contracts to prevent your workers from leaving after you trained them, since most employers will pay a premium to get workers who are already trained and the original employer will pretty much never give salary bumps that high year-over-year since it would quickly bankrupt them.

Non-compete clauses are unenforceable in California exactly because it's desirable in a macroeconomic sense for employees to spread their skills throughout all the businesses in the economic cluster by osmosis. Bringing back non-competes to deal with a lack of talent (especially when that talent exists, it's just abroad) is regressive.

Companies are just going to focus on remote-only work cultures until Trump forbids outsourcing work overseas altogether.

<blockquote> Only works if you have enforceable non-compete contracts to prevent your workers from leaving after you trained them, since most employers will pay a premium to get workers who are already trained and the original employer will pretty much never give salary bumps that high year-over-year since it would quickly bankrupt them. </blockquote>

If an employer won't pay an employee based on market rates, when that employee leaves, they are going to have to pay the next employee they get to replace them at least market rate anyway and on top of that probably 30% more for a recruiters fee, plus the loss productivity while they are looking for a replacement, plus they are losing a person with knowledge of the company.

I read something somewhere.

A software dev manager asked his manager for a training budget for his employees. His manager asked him, what if we spend the money on training and they leave? The software dev manager asked his manager, what if we don't train them and they stay?

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