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Comment by exdsq | Hacker News Reader

95th percentile seems... crazy high?

If you're not already offering 95th percentile for a job, how do you know you can't hire anyone locally to do it and why do you need a H1B?

But salary isn’t necessarily correlated with rarity of talents right? Perhaps you’re in a rural area and trying to hire someone with specific cryptography experience and a PhD - they might not warrant a 95th percentile salary for a senior developer out of grad school yet you may need to hire internationally to find someone

> Perhaps you’re in a rural area and trying to hire someone with specific cryptography experience and a PhD - they might not warrant a 95th percentile salary for a senior developer out of grad school yet you may need to hire internationally to find someone.

If you can't find someone in the area at a lower price, then yes they warrant a higher salary until you do find someone nationally. That's how salaries are set. Why are you looking internationally before you look nationally?

'Couldn't find someone to do it at what we wanted to pay them' isn't the same as 'couldn't find someone to do it.'

> Why are you looking internationally before you look nationally?

You look at a larger pool of people who already want to move to anyware in the States, before a much smaller pool of people who want to move to your specific rural area.

But I don't think that's in compliance with H1B is it?

so in essence H1B is really about restricting mobility into the States then

> so in essence H1B is really about restricting mobility into the States then

No, if we wanted that we'd just not have it.

The H-1B is (like other employment-driven non-immigrant visas) about meeting the labor demands of capital in the US, with restrictions on it notionally about limiting/mitigating some of the adverse effects on domestically-resident labor.

If they wanted to restrict mobility... why have it at all?

like some people interpret it, to only let "good people" in

> Couldn't find someone to do it at what we wanted to pay them

what's wrong with this? Who are you to say these people need to be paid more or companies need to spend more?

> Who are you to say these people need to be paid more or companies need to spend more?

I'm just telling you what H1B is.

I've been in the US on a visa myself for what it's worth.

You'll just have to look nationally before you look internationally.

I’m just a little salty because I’m trying to move over from the U.K. and it’s a bit of a pain :P

Can you work remotely? I've worked all my career for North American tech companies remotely from the UK.

And it shouldn't be a pain! When you do get a job you know you'll be earning 95th!

So I’m actually already working remotely on around ~$100k in the U.K. my partner starts her postdoc at Stanford next summer and I can get a J2 to move across but I think I’ll need to quit this work until I get a work permit out there? If there’s any sort of workaround I’m really keen to know of it!

I think you can work normally on a J2. You need a 'Employment Authorization Document' but I think that's just a formality and is easy to do. I think there's some funny rule about not 'supporting' the J1 holder though, so I don't know if you can earn more than her which you probably would if she's a postdoc? I'm not a lawyer - you should instruct one.

Yeah I think I will, thanks for the help though! Don’t want to ruin her postdoc for a few months salary...

> But salary isn’t necessarily correlated with rarity of talents right?

No, but requiring a high salary is a disincentive for companies to seek or continue with H-1B without genuinely exhausting local alternatives.

Now, personally, I think H-1B is fundamentally a bad idea and the visa category should not exist at all and prefer a radically different approach, but if you accept the premise of the H-1B, high salary floors make perfect sense as a way to improve the alignment of incentives with the notional purpose of the program.

Minimum salaries for H1Bs are already location-specific [0]:

Compare the salaries between Broadwater County, Montana [1] and NYC [2] for further evidence.

[0]: Per https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary... :

> The employer/agent will pay the H-1B worker a wage which is no less than the wage paid to similarly qualified workers or, if greater, the prevailing wage for the position in the geographic area in which the H-1B worker will be working.

[1]: https://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?code=15-1...

[2]: https://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?code=15-1...

If no one in an entire country is willing to accept $X to do $Y (in any location), the business needs to increase $X. The whole point of hiring an employee is bc $Y represents more net business value than $X. If $X > net business value of $Y, the business shouldn't be hiring for that role.

Businesses love these H1B visas because overseas candidates are willing to accept less $X since the visa represents significant value to them, but barely costs the business anything (before the recent changes). This results in artificially holding down $X for U.S. citizens, so removing incentives for businesses to take advantage of this is a good thing.

H1Bs are supposed to be used only if you can't find domestic talent. So it makes sense that something scarce would be expensive.

But it’s recursive. If something is that scarce, all the comps will already be high. It doesn’t seem necessary that marginal labor should be required to come in at the 95th percentile.

Exactly why h1bs we’re never intended to be used for marginal labor.

“Marginal” here means “the next increment from what is currently exchanged”; it's a standard term in economics.

You seem to be using it in a very different sense.

Normally, those high comps would motivate people into earning the credentials for taking that career path. But you can't address local scarcity in this way when the law incentives you to instead import cheap labor from abroad.

On the other hand, people willing to work for half of what they should earn are also scarce.

I'm not sure which of these two situations occurs most often with H1Bs.

That's kind of the point. It's meant to discourage use unless necessary.

This means discouraging immigration correct?

could it mean lowering salaries across the board?

downvoted, hmm.. I'm just wondering what's going to give. maybe department budgets will just go up?

It means discouraging employers using an H1-B when they haven't actually looked at hiring locally, or using an H1-B to hire "cheap" labor because the employee has no leverage and can't really quit as easily as a US employee.

I'm not saying that I agree with "discouraging immigration", I'm stating the likely purpose of this change.

What is wrong with hiring cheap labour again? Could it be that company should fix their hiring practices and produce higher quality product, instead of the state making laws that equate "cheap" with "low quality"? So the gov should tell companies how to use their money now?

There is nothing wrong with hiring cheap labor and everyone is free to do it without applying for an H-1B visa. However, the H-1B law had passed specifically with assurances that it won't be used to hire foreign cheap labor and this is why the law specifies DOL certification ensuring that the H-1B workers are not hired at cut-rate. If you don't like it then nobody forces you to apply for H-1B.

I'm not applying to any visa thank you. I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy. The work visa was clearly created for America's economic interests, but now it's about not hiring cheap labor somehow? As if cheap labor is principally damaging to America? I'd like to see the evidence. Why would a law be passed with those oddly specific assurances if not that some people think cheap labor is bad?

Sorry, your argument does not make sense to me. If I understood correctly you assert that if importation of cheap labor via H-1B program is prohibited by law then it means all cheap labor is bad from the POV of the law authors. I believe if you thought more than 15 seconds you could have found some logical faults with this.

Why would foreign cheap labour be bad? And local cheap labour is OK? An foreign "not cheap" labour is also OK? It seems to imply foreign or cheap is bad, the combo doubly so, to the degree that it needs to be restricted.

The most obvious reason I see is that foreign labor cannot vote while domestic can. Since both compete for the same jobs the politician supporting foreign labor is risking losing votes. The more expensive is the labor the less votes it represents and politicians can get away with supporting "highly specialized" foreign labor as the money they get from employers of that labor outweigh the votes they lose from the domestic highly specialized workers displaced by the foreigners.

Discouraging H1B abuse, which has run rampant if you look at what larger corporations have been doing recently and for the past few decades. H1Bs should not be used to enable firing someone because someone from another country is willing to do the job for much less. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2490610/this-it-worker...

It may just mean that tying immigration to employment invites abuse. If one wants to support immigration per se, it would be better to just bring in X number of people per year by whatever criteria you want (could even be skills or education based, who knows), and then give them total economic freedom within the US.

That's the broader Trump Administration policy it's part of, yes, but this could potentially be one of the more lasting components should Trump be replaced, because it's eminently sensible if you accept that the basic overt purpose of the H-1B is good and the basic structure of the H-1B is a good way of serving that purpose.

Yeah 95 is high compared to today. Even FAANG aims for 80-90% of market compensation today. Even FAANG will have to shift stock vs cash compensation for all workers (including american) because of this.

For small to medium companies, I am guessing many will be forced to try remote work in other countries because of this.

If it’s for profession and level, it’s crazy high. If it’s just profession, it seems meaningless.

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