Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavanky | Hacker News Reader

I just moved to a new company so I can talk about the H1b transfers. When you apply for a H1b transfer, currently it is taking 8-9 months before you can get the final approval. You can however work for the new company while this process is going on.

That said, you (or your employer) can pay about $1k which sort of puts your application at the top of the pile. If you go down this route, you end up getting the approval in about 2 weeks.

There are reasons why people choose premium processing. For example if they have to go out of the country within the next 6-8 months, it is best if you have the H1b approval documents with you.

View on HN

Shouldn't this system allow USCIS to hire the adequate staff to handle the premium applications on a separate load than the regular pipeline? They seem to be shutting this down to help the regular H1-B application pipeline, that means all applications were being handled by the same staff, which seems silly.

Depends if $1k is commensurate to the additional work needed, and if they can find enough staff to hire to put the money to good use. At least one of those failing to be true seems fairly likely to me.

Also depends on whether the $1,225 fee was used to pay for H1-B processing at all, or simply used to cover other USCIS expenses.

Yes, I probably should have wrote something like "commensurate to the amount of work/money USCIS's structure requires before it will process the application." I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone argue that USCIS operates at near-optimal levels of efficiency ;)

There are insane amount of H1B applications (I think there were over 200,000 last year). Ofcourse they use the lottery to process about "only" 85,000 of them.

This does not include H1B transfers and other stuff USCIS handles.

This is the government. Everything goes slow.

I don't know the exact details of DHS and UCSIS but typically, the number of employees is set by the Federal Budget and the have may have limited flexibility to hire more.

To do something like that there would probably have to be special language written into the budget and it would have to be approved by Congress.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com