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Comment by TuringNYC | Hacker News Reader

The H1B system is supposed to be for shortages. In a real economic shortage, prices are supposed to go up. If salaries are not going up, it is not a real shortage.

I think there is a shortage, so I'm proposing increasing salaries. Accounting firms are not competing with tech firms necessarily, they are competing with the market for accountants (lots of accountants go into other fields because they cant find work at a suitable rate.) Their business model should not be to underpay workers, it should be to pay workers high enough to attract them and charge customers appropriately.

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> Accounting firms are not competing with tech firms necessarily, they are competing with the market for accountants

Yes, I'm not disagreeing with this. However if you put ALL H1Bs in a single pool, and they go to the highest bidder across all industries, then yes, accounting firms are competing with tech firms.

> accounting firms are competing with tech firms.

I think GP's point is that that's the way it's supposed to be. The shortage of accountants could be due to some combination of:

1. There are not enough people with the physical / mental / psychological capability to be accountants in the US

2. People with the physical / mental / psychological capability to be accountants are choosing other jobs; perhaps because they pay better, or are more fun, or have better work/life balance, or whatever.

#1 is a reason to steal^W import capable people from other countries; but I doubt very much that's the source of accounting's problems. It's almost certainly #2. In which case, if accounting firms want more accountants, they should make the job more attractive: pay more, have better hours, etc.

Correct, this was exactly my point. The last thing is -- if the Accounting Firm business model doesnt work w/ fair wages, then the firms need to re-think how much they charge ("lets abuse desperate foreign workers" isn't really a good business model.)

but it does not need to be single pool for auctions to work - each category of work could have their own individual auction.

Entirely possible, but that's not what was suggested.

I think there would also be debate around how the quota is split between categories. I highly suspect that are much few Foreign Law advisors or Psychologists attempting to get H1Bs than there are "IT/Computer Professionals" (and many less positions available for them); giving each category an equal split wouldn't be fair either.

I'm not saying there isn't a way, but it would have issues too.

Seems like a trivially solved problem by introducing industry-specific segmentation.

Your company has to declare what industry segment they're in when submitting annual returns anyway (here), not sure if it's the same case in the US.

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