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Comment by KeepTalking | Hacker News Reader

Couple of random ramblings about the article

- IT jobs as in do they mean IT admins/Biz Analysts or programmers and software engineers. There is a smaller market in the area for IT admins than for programmers and software engineers. additionally, It seems to mix data between tech jobs and hotels etc.

- Why the random cheap shot at H1-Bs. Is this focused on employment or immigration ? typically in a healthy market employment trends follow immigration (employment based) trends. Seems like an effort to stir up some traffic to a poorly sourced article.

- The social media bubble? This is the first time I have heard of that term. Appreciate if they did some basic homework to see 2016 investment trends https://www.wilmerhale.com/uploadedFiles/Shared_Content/Edit...

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> Why the random cheap shot at H1-Bs.

That was not a shot taken by the article, but by people who couldn't find jobs. H-1Bs are an easy scapegoat - certainly easier to explain your lack of success in finding a job because of H-1B visa holders rather than your own lack of in-demand skills.

I think you should consider that they may well be right, and that they can't find work at a rate they expect due to H1Bs working for less. People tend to know more about their own lives than you do about theirs.

You're missing/not addressing two important points.

First, as I pointed out, it's much easier cognitively to blame an external circumstance than your own skills deficit.

Second, any sort of expansion of the labor pool will tend to depress wages. If you can't find work at a rate you expect, you need to either lower your expectations or expect unemployment.

> If you can't find work at a rate you expect, you need to either lower your expectations or expect unemployment.

While this is true, if the rationale behind H1B program is designed to supplant a shortage in actual labor skills, and not in labor skills at the company owner's desired pay rates, and there is a surplus of skills due to unemployment while H1B's continue for the same skillset, then H1B's are compounding the problem due to misuse. This is logic.

Still waiting for the day that owners are clamoring for H1B's for executives due to excessive pay and 'labor shortage'.. except executives are largely part of the same group as owners and the same people that fund the lobbyists so we all know that will never happen..

> if the rationale behind H1B program is designed to supplant a shortage in actual labor skills,

The intent of the law was to supplant shortages in labor skills, and that's the way the law is being used by most large "reputable" companies, not body shops.

I think you'd find it difficult to argue that when one of the big 5 brings somebody over on a H1b, it doesn't tend to depress the wages of engineers, as they usually only hire and recruit a highly selective (not necessarily talented) subset of engineers and compensate them extremely well.

The way the law is written allows a lot of consulting companies to game the system by bringing marginally talented labor to drive down the wages for skills that already exist in this country.

As an aside, this sort of argument against some H1-B seekers is a form of rent-seeking. You're trying to extract value from something that you inherited, e.g. your citizenship and your ability to legally work in this country, vs something you're able to do uniquely well.

There's an interesting coincidence on the front page of the Mercury News today. http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/03/25/bay-area-tech-executiv...

That's a new type of H1-B visa fraud that I had never heard of as far as I can tell from the article.

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