Hacker News Reader

Comment by ganeshkrishnan | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. Running a business is nightmare. Sometimes I wished I was in the 9-5 daily grind. Top that with asking to pay more than market rates and most startups would collapse.

44% of unicorn startups in Silicon Valley employ H1b or were started by them. And a lot of them Iran too(which was strangely banned by Trump)

View on HN

The Iran thing is too bad. Besides our governments not getting along, it's possibly the most advanced, moderate, and educated Muslim majority country in the middle east. Maybe second to Turkey, but Iran seems to have a lot more engineers.

I've known a few Iranian engineers and both of them were excellent. They didn't talk about politics either, the ones that come over here at least obviously don't have anything against the US.

I'm under the impression that people coming for work or business wouldn't have anything against the US.

Honestly, both Khomeini and Ahmadinejad did quite well in convincing many countries that Iran isn't so "moderate". And violating the Vienna Convention/embassy extraterritoriality is rarely good for diplomatic relations. There were also U.N. sanctions in place until roughly a year ago. So downplaying it as "not getting along" is a bit of an understatement. But I'm also hopeful relations will improve in the future.

How big were these unicorns before they started employing h1bs? I wouldn't count this visa as a big win for startups, because most startups can't afford to enter the lottery, even if they're going to be profitable in the future.

Are you referring to unicorn startups funded with venture capital money? Most of those companies don't have to worry about being profitable in the near short term (<2 years). Snap Inc. raised $2.5 billion dollars or so and has around 300 employees. I'm having a hard time believing a company that raised over $2 billion dollars, has 300 employees and doesn't have to worry about turning a profit will run out of business if they paid their software developers market rates.

> 44% of unicorn startups in Silicon Valley employ H1b or were started by them.

And a lot of bright and hardworking people are losing out on visas so that large chop shops can make better profits

Reply on news.ycombinator.com