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Comment by glennpratt | Hacker News Reader

> H1B has been/is being abused by all companies (big and small)

I don't see this exactly.

I have worked with multiple, brilliant visa holders. Many of them have moved on to bigger and better things. Presumably paying a huge amount in taxes for the privilege.

Most software developers I know are not making what I would deem suppressed wages, especially in the current conditions (and I don't have an SV job). Most firms I know would hire more people, but instead are contracting with firms and individuals outside of the US.

I suspect that's going to ramp up more.

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I have worked with brilliant H1B holders and also with manifestly mediocre ones. And even a couple "net negative" employees.

To the best of my knowledge all of them played the game diligently and got their green cards, and many of them got their citizenship. Good for them, and in many cases good for us.

But I absolutely did not see any greater level of talent among the H1B's than any other cohort in SF/SV.

While I'm very happy to work with people from all over the world, I do think that H1B has been used to get a lot of people in who aren't any better than your local City College grads. In addition to that being radically against the national interest, it's also really unfair to the "brilliant visa holders" you have had the good fortune to work with.

The problem in the US, as I understood it, is that there is shortage of workers in IT [1]. To me, it sounds like turning off the stream of potential workers, without fixing the underlying issue. With the current rules (85k H-1Bs a year), it would take 10 years for immigrants to fill all the spots. There may be a lot of untapped talent left in the US (based on under-representation of women, that's a discussion for another time), but somehow, the vacancies are not getting filled - what gives?

In addition, it seems that even currently, H-1B program has rules to make sure the wages paid are fair [2] - if they are not, it sounds like a problem with enforcement, or with how prevailing wages are calculated. To me, based on [3], it does not look like calculating the prevailing wage is the problem.

[1] "In the past three months, U.S. employers had about 918,000 unfilled IT jobs, according to IT trade group CompTIA." - https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-got-talent-just-not-en... [2] "Employers must attest to the Department of Labor that they will pay wages to the H-1B nonimmigrant workers that are at least equal to the actual wage paid by the employer to other workers with similar experience and qualifications for the job in question, or the prevailing wage for the occupation in the area of intended employment – whichever is greater." - https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b [3] https://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?code=15-1...

You have to realize that there really isn't a "shortage" of workers in the computer science field. Companies like to pretend like there is, but really it's just about pressing salaries in the long run. I have a friend here where I live who is a well-qualified java backend dev, not completely socially inept but who couldn't find a job in two months now after his previous company didn't renew his contract. This is not an outlier, I have spoken with lots of software engineers who had trouble finding work even in the next big city here, despite 50+ "open" positions. In reality, most of those spots are either a) nonexistend, the company just wants a stream of new applicants in case they can get their hands on a cs master for like 2k/month or b) pro forma because they're required by some policy to open the position to outsiders to fulfill a quota. In my experience the lack of IT workers is bullshit and anyone perpetuating it is either unknowing of the real world or acting in malice.

"Here" we tend to say that there's always shortage of __specialists__(senior, ninja, shaman devs).

Isn't that nearly always the case, in every field? I know guys on landscaping who say the same about senior workers who know how to deal with more exotic plants. In education this phenomenon is a huge part of why poorer schools suck, experienced teachers move to the suburbs as soon as possible.

The problem is that it is anecdotal. I have been frequently approached by my skip level manager and asked if I know anyone that we could hire since we have headcount that's open for months (this was MSFT) and we won't be able to work on everything we wanted to. This is also something I heard from other people (managers) as well. So now how do we measure if the shortage is real or not? Your gut feeling?

There is no shortage. They just want geniuses for paltry wages.

They can already get geniuses for paltry wages, it's called "outsourcing". I feel that a lot of people operate with the assumption that a person needs to be in the USA to "steal someone's job" - that's not the case, and hasn't been for a while.

But, we don't have to argue about what we think is happening - there's data available at https://www.bls.gov/oes/tables.htm. It should be possible to see how wage growth in tech compares w/ other sectors. My hypothesis is that without shortage, wage growth would not outpace other industries.

> I have worked with multiple, brilliant visa holders.

I don’t disagree one bit. I think immigrants contributed and continue to contribute tremendously to the US economy. But at the same time policies should not be used to suppress wages by the “C” suite class. By paying low salaries it increases profits for the companies and contributes to income inequality

This isn’t going to have any impact on the number of H1B visas that are awarded. There’s a cap at 85k/year, and most applications get rejected. This is just going to result in the available 85k/year slots being awarded to the intended pool of high-skilled industry specialists, rather than those people being swamped out by a mass of applications from companies that see this as an opportunity to hire cheap labor. I have had a colleague who was probably making $200,000+/year sent back to his native country because all the king’s horses and all the king’s men (and all the king’s immigration lawyers too...) couldn’t secure them a continuation of their work visa.

Want to know how I know you work for a good company?

Be grateful! Not all of us are so lucky!

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