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Comment by charlesju | Hacker News Reader

The real issue is that a couple of companies are abusing the system. None of them are FAANG.

Look at the data here: https://h1bdata.info/topcompanies.php

Don't be alarmed if you don't recognize a good portion of the top companies because they're Indian IT outsourcing/consulting companies that logjam the whole system.

There really isn't that big of a problem with H1Bs. It's a great way for companies to hire additional talent and to keep students that come here for graduate school inside the country where we subsidized their education.

I think we should focus on fixing the abuse first, then lets see where we stabilize, and then do further restrictions. It's too aggressive to curtail legitimate uses of H1B when it's clear that it's being so blatantly abused.

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Many if not all FAANG companies supplement their workforce with those consultancies though. It's why I've stopped publishing profit per employee comments -- the denominator is arbitrary.

The truth is more complicated. Because these agencies have gamed the system, they effectively control some fraction of the labor market. To a degree, FAANG has to come to the agencies if they want engineers, no matter where on the experience / skill curve they land. I imagine there's also an element of reputation shielding as well -- people like yourself blame Tata instead of the companies that hire them, but the companies that hire them get cheaper labor that basically can't hop jobs. That has to be valuable, given the policies Steve Jobs shopped around for around no poaching.

I agree that the Fortune 500 are probably the primary clients of these consulting companies. I haven't dug into the problem, but I'm also willing to guess that FAANG doesn't really care about these services as much as the less technologically savvy ones in the Fortune 500.

The primary issue and ultimately the first step in solvency is still these companies abusing the system.

You can't very well stop companies from hiring other companies to solve their problems. I think that type of solution is probably impossibly hard to implement. Whereas if you simply stop these top few companies or create rules around who and how they apply, I think the problem is going to be greatly improved.

Like I said above. Lets push for solving the obvious problems first before applying pressure downstream.

FAANG absolutely are abusing the H1-B system, they’re just doing it through the staffing agencies you mentioned. Google and Microsoft in particular are notorious for their huge shadow workforce of vendors, a lot of whom come from the H1B-abusing body shops.

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