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Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

Isn't a H-1B a form of indentured servitude? As in, if you change jobs you lose your visa?

If yes, you don't get the competent ones but the cheap ones who have no choice. The good ones work on their terms for whomever they please.

Edit: combine that with kls's answer about incentives, and you see why this visa system isn't quite working.

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H-1Bs are transferable, but like any employment-based visa in the US short of permanent residence, it's tied to and requested by your employer.

What visa do you think exists for the "good ones"? Unless you're an "alien of extraordinary ability"--think major league athlete, widely published researcher, well-known artist, or successful serial entrepreneur--there is no other visa that lets you roll in and work under whatever arrangements you please.

> If yes, you don't get the competent ones but the cheap ones who have no choice. The good ones work on their terms for whomever they please.

I'd say that this is partly untrue. You can get get a O visa if you're an "alien of extraordinary ability". Usually this means that you have already published articles in your field .

Now, if you want to hire someone who is good, as in has a lot of potential, but doesn't have the credentials to prove it, the H1-B is the only way to get him/her quickly.

Since a lot of companies want to hire great fresh out of school candidates, the H1-B is the shining solution.

you can "transfer" your visa although it is not called that officially. IIRC You have to file your petition with the new employer but you don't have to go through the lottery again

The same applies for Americans working in Europe as highly skilled migrants. A company sponsors your visa, and when that job ends (like the company shuts down, for example), you must go find another company willing to sponsor you. Or if you're fortunate, as with Americans in Netherlands, you can start your own business easily and get a freelance visa.

But the point is the same - you work at the place that sponsored you, or you risk having to go back home.

Well, for some reason nobody's complaining about Western Europe immigrants taking US jobs...

It appears to be a difference between immigrant (with permanency) vs transient skills. There was a time when society needed itinerant skilled workers. Now we have the infrastructure to train, en masse, our workers. While skipping the training step is nice, hence the permanent workers, H1-Bs appear to bring mostly unskilled, or low skilled workers into the country under the banner of master masons, so to speak.

H1-B, as championed by Microsoft and embraced by many large companies, was clearly used as a tool to replace market wage tech employees with low wage immigrants. Microsoft's arguments before Congress were fully debunked, and many of us who have worked for two decades in US IT have seen the reality.

Plus, over the last 15 years as what we do with and demand from computing technology has expanded exponentially, the knowledge gap between management/hiring managers and IT workers has grown to the point where management often has no clue at all about how to spec a job or how to filter/evaluate a candidate. This has led us to the alphabet soup that is job specs - the "what did our last guy do before he quit? yeah put all that on the list of requirements" problem.

So it's not just an H1-B problem; it's much bigger. But it probably results in a feeling of futility on the part of hiring managers, leading them to think, "well since we're basically guessing at this hiring thing, we might as well hire the cheapest we can get."

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