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Comment by valuearb | Hacker News Reader

The "depressing wages" point is dumb. These engineers will still be part of the labor pool, they'll just be doing work for our foreign competitors. And HP can still hire them, do you want them to just open up more space in Bangalore, or would you rather those wages go to US based locations?

And it's not a zero sum game. One of my H!B hires had unduplicatable skills and created about 20 high paid jobs in our company. Other H1B hires enabled a contracting firm I worked for to get a large contract that kept 7 other people employed.

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Did you read the article? Many tech jobs can't be done effectively in India or overseas with low quality labor for any number of reasons. The 250 American workers for Disney had their jobs replaced in the US, not by overseas workers.

> "These engineers will still be part of the labor pool, they'll just be doing work for our foreign competitors"

Well, let them work for Samsung instead of Apple then.

> "One of my H!B hires had unduplicatable skills and created about 20 high paid jobs in our company."

The point of the H1-B visa is precisely for those cases where there are no Americans that can do the job, so your hire follows the law. But then if it such a hard to find job, then the scarcity implies the person should get a higher salary, especially if he/she created "20 high paid jobs for our company."

Letting them work for Samsung lowers our standard of living.

Please explain.

> One of my H!B hires had unduplicatable skills and created about 20 high paid jobs in our company.

That type of thing was the original intention, and I think most people would be okay with that.

But a gigantic majority of H1Bs are not used to fill positions that require unique skills. If 99.9% of H1Bs are abusing the system to avoid paying market wages then the system is broken and it needs to be fixed.

> do you want them to just open up more space in Bangalore

Yes. We have higher wages for our higher standard of living. As you said, it's not a zero sum game and all things are not equal.

and someone like this smart person in your example would now be highly unlikely to get an h1b visa with the current lottery system. once you introduce a lottery, it's no longer about hard to find skills, it's about how can you churn out most applications to win most visas. i'll be looking for the elimination of the lottery system in any proposed fixes.

> One of my H!B hires had unduplicatable skills and created about 20 high paid jobs in our company

Can you give details so it can be judged if this is true, and if so how common/relevant it is?

He was a japanese physicist, lost his job when Supercollider project canceled. Instead of going back to Japan, I was able to hire him as lead graphics engineer on a Macintosh imaging product, he was super creative in developing unique graphics effects and his product became our biggest and most profitable. The company grew to 140 employees, his team was 20, but it's reasonable to think about a quarter of the workforce was tied to it given it was about a quarter of our revenues.

Sounds like an excellent use of H1B; but I'm sure it's not a common one.

Was he making as much as an American? Also did he get huge bonus for the excellent work he did?

So how much were you paying him? (Last week?) there was an article about someone trying to double the H1B minimum wage to $140k; surely if this physicist is as important as you say he is, you were compensating him around that figure, no?

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