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Comment by garyfirestorm | Hacker News Reader

That is amazing! However I would like to point out, H1B is not only for Silicon Valley. There are many automotive companies which require foreign talent in specialized fields. Very smart people with multi-disciplinary knowledge are nowhere to be found in auto sector. Signal Processing and vibrations and programming and control systems understanding etc. is required to deal with things like active noise control which is now a need in auto sector. The Canadian Automotive R&D is not as good as in US. Also, there's no way we can work remotely. So our fates are still determined by 'lottery based skilled visa' allotments.

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I believe the proposed solution to the H1B issue was to simply increase the minimum wage for H1B's to $140k. If a company is bringing over top-talent that is irreplaceable; surely that salary is justified. Otherwise, they probably don't need you as bad as they say they do.

Raising wages combats the symptoms (wage depression) but not the cause (lack of mobility).

The only way to truly solve the issue is to tie the H1B to the person and let them work freely in the US after a short time.

How would that solve the symptoms? And why is that the cause? I think the actual issue is that there aren't enough top-talent individuals in the country already; meaning the real cause is actually our broken education system.

Opening the flood gates might solve the issues of select individuals and some companies, but it doesn't solve wage depression.

Most people in the industry believe that the best way to increase your income is to change jobs. How often would you change jobs if failing to secure a position resulted in your near-immediate ejection from the country? Probably not often, and that's the situation that many H1B workers are in.

The general belief is that H1B workers are underpaid because they have less flexibility in the labor market. While they can move jobs, it's somewhat tedious and requires both companies to work together to make the transition. It's not impossible, but it's certainly not easy.

If there were less friction involved with moving jobs, people on H1B could shop around for a better positions without worrying about their residency should things go wrong.

140k might sound great in silicon valley. its enormous amount of money for a place like detroit. i am sure they will pay some of the people that sort of money to keep them here. but think about all others who will go back to their own countries and create new startups that will compete with the US industry.[1]

[1]http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/02/news/india/snapdeal-india-ku...

Yeah this fixation on Silicon Valley is dumb. The worst affected will really be other industries. Small wonder that Lofgren who is a Bay-Area Representative is the one sponsoring the auction system. Many Si valley jobs for which H1Bs are hired are generalist in nature. And it is for generic programmer jobs that you have potential for wage abuse. But outside Si valley, for much lesser wages, companies rely on highly specialized skills. So specialized that often these are jobs-for-life without much transferability. Think about skills in microbiology, materials science, etc. relevant to specific products in specific companies like P&G, Dow, etc. These employers and employees will be majorly shafted if legislation is made with just Silicon Valley in mind.

The whole notion of pay big $$s if the specialized skills are worth so much is wrong because these companies have smaller budgets for personnel than plant.

The fixation on Silicon Valley isn't dumb when wages were deliberately suppressed by Google, Apple, Adobe and others. The big tech companies really do want to keep salaries low and H1Bs can help them with that, along with paying for the really smart people that they can bring in too.

Except that Google, Facebook, Cisco would gladly sponsor you for green card - if they're gaming the system they would surely try to string you along until you've used up your H1B renewal before doing that?

If you start out making much less than other candidates, even after many years of CoL raises you will still be making less.

Source: drastically underpaid for my experience because I was an idiot.

At one of the big Silicon Valley tech companies? Google at least has a policy that promotions & annual raises normalize to level-defined salary bands, i.e. if you have a higher salary coming in relative to your coworkers of equal skill, you will get smaller raises until your salaries equalize.

Google also had artificially lower salary bands by colluding with other tech companies to not fight for talent.

Well, true, and I'm not exactly happy about that...but that cartel was eventually broken when Facebook refused to play ball.

The point is that Google purposefully tried to keep the wages low. If not for FB, they would have never changed the practice. I have zero trust in Google for doing the right thing regarding salaries.

You don't have to trust in Google, only in self-interest. The reason FB broke the cartel is because they felt they could pick up some talented people by paying more. The reason Google normalizes salaries is because it negatively affects morale (and hence productivity & retention) when you have people paid dramatically different amounts for equal work. The reason big tech companies sponsor green cards is so they don't have to use up their H1B quota on you, and can instead get new H1Bs. They may not be doing it for your benefit, but that doesn't mean that you don't benefit from it.

The fun thing is that it also probably reveals a bunch of other problems, like the issue of admission of wrongdoing in settlements.

No, never moved to California. I'll defend that one as not a mistake, though.

Yes, everyone wants to keep their costs low. Especially software companies because most of their expenditure is on personnel. However, in meat-space companies like pharma, chemicals, etc. plant, hard goods, etc. cost more than personnel. A senior-level manager often cannot pay $30k extra just to match Si valley salaries in an auction because they don't have so much room on personnel.

These norms are not set by individuals, but by a system of financial analysts, shareholders (think large pension funds, etc.), etc.

> this fixation on Silicon Valley is dumb

The tech industry accounts for the vast majority of H1B visas: http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Category.asp...

"vast majority" still excludes tens of thousands of people. These are real people with real families and real jobs in real companies, not just some statistical data points.

So a fix for 90% of the problem is out because it's bad for a small percentage? Everything is a trade-off, a solutions for the vast majority of cases outweighs the inconvenience on a small minority

Uh ok. You can slice up 90% in many ways. But why choose to cut it such that you lose 100% of other industries? That sounds quite effed up.

"lottery based skilled visa" sums it up.

I am not assuming that you are in Detroit. I used to work remotely for an Automotive company in Detroit for their telematics unit. Some colleagues I know commute from Windsor.

Lottery based skilled visa means that there's many more skilled people on the other side, and less spots for them. Unless you have a way of quantifying extremely small differences in skill (and keeping the process balanced), I don't see how you feel a lottery is unfair.

Points based system is the right way of quantifying skills & it seems to be working well for Canada.

for ex: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/express-entry/grid-crs.asp

Anything else than pure salary can be gamed. We are for better or worse a capitalist society so lets use the one currency we have to determine who is most needed instead of making up new currencies.

Why don't we just allow more of them to become Americans?

This. We can happily allow millions of illegal immigrants in to work as seasonal farm labor, or import unskilled refugees from war-torn, ideologically questionable areas, that become a drain on social services, but we throw up barriers for well-educated people who will immediately start contributing, if we'd let them. It's nuts.

Hear, hear! I am firmly in the camp of the people who are really ticked off about illegal immigration, but in addition to stopping that, I've always thought that we should be increasing _legal_ immigration as much as possible.

I'm so sick of people copping out and trying to have it both ways. Bring in the immigrants who want to work, especially if they have skills. Filter out the gangbangers and the terrorists as much as possible. Win-win. Today we have the worst of both worlds.

That your first adjective to describe war zone refugees is unskilled says more about you than anything else.

Not entirely true. Companies like Infosys, cognizant, Accenture spams the visa applications with huge amounts, causing the H1B visas go into lottery process (if applications exceed the 85k visa availability). And for this spamming they deserve to be blamed. These companies alone file more than 100k LCAs each year. LCA is the first step before applying for H1B. This is a major issue for students who pursue Masters in US Universities, gain very special skills and have to leave US because they couldnt get the lottery. There's a difference between skilled people and talented people with specialized skills.

edit: one can write good programs, other can invent frameworks

The Masters in US is gamed too. Many of those students are the ones who could not clear the campus interviews of Infosys, Cognizant or Accenture when they were in the college for Bachelors. So they come to "study" MS in the US so that they can get into the H1B system easily.

As far as I know, the MS hires do not posses any special skills. Most of them fake their experiences to get into the companies. There are specific "one room consultancy" companies setup in the US to hire these MS graduates in OPT, fake their resumes, run their fake payrolls and push them to an employer.

"The Masters in US is gamed too. Many of those students are the ones who could not clear the campus interviews of Infosys, Cognizant or Accenture when they were in the college for Bachelors. So they come to "study" MS in the US so that they can get into the H1B system easily."

I don't mind a bit of cynicism but this is absurd. Why the hell is "study" in scare quotes? It's a pretty standard thing for fresh graduates to better their chances for employment by getting higher degrees.

"As far as I know, the MS hires do not posses any special skills."

Maybe you should keep your speculations to things you do know.

I think you're being making the classic mistake of using your narrow experience range into making far larger proclamations based on speculations and innuendo. As an employer in silicon valley myself, I would definitely look upon a resume from a person with a Master's degree from US more closely than someone coming off of the infosys/wipro train. That is not to say that there's a clear yes or no either way but having an MS from a US university is at least one positive signal among other signals I'd look for in a resumé.

How about IITians from India, getting high quality education for free using Indian tax payers money and moving to US.

Someone coming off the free education that the Indian government provided using Indian tax payers money should keep quiet and should be ashamed of himself to be called a silicon valley employer.

You are welcome - An Indian tax payer.

"user: throw2bit" "created: 2 hours ago"

"You are welcome - An Indian tax payer."

I would have thought about dignifying this childish tantrum with a response if you at least had the decency and guts to write this under a real name.

you are partially right about the 'gamed' system and contractors gaming the process. However,'the MS hires do not posses any special skills. Most of them fake their experiences to get into the companies.' this is not entirely true.

Well, the car companies and other companies need to open up offices where tech workers want to live as some firms have already done. Sorry, but a lot of tech people don't necessarily want to live in Detroit or parts of Michigan. They do want to live in SF, Boston, NYC, DC.

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