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Comment by atlgator | Hacker News Reader

Le gasp! Maybe the whole point was to import cheap labor and force them to work for you for decades before gaining citizenship.

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I'm all for globalization, but a country should take care of its own people first.

> New restrictions intended to protect U.S. workers curb access to pool of highly skilled foreign labor

There are thousands of software engineers out of work or fresh out of school looking for their first job. Why not hire them? Lower your requirements if necessary, and train your new employees on the job. Groom them, mentor them, teach them the technologies they need to know.

You’ve addressed cost but not mobility. Citizens have agency to take their new skills and move to other companies if their wages or career opportunities stagnate. H1Bs do not have this luxury. If they switch they risk losing their place in line.

So that means the companies need to be places that people want to work? Working on important stuff, getting good benefits? Or listening to their employees when the employees warn the company that the product is bad or unethical???

Still a bonus.

This is an additional policy modification that is required on top of pay rule changes.

Because they just aren’t that good? Just because someone calls themselves a software engineer, or had a degree in computer science, it doesn’t mean they can take the place of a strong, seasoned engineer. The market is so competitive it’s pretty absurd to think anyone is being passed over because it’s cheaper to hire people on visas, at least when it comes to software engineers.

There's been a general trend of companies being unwilling to invest in workers over the past decades. And after seeing their parents get knifed in the back by believing in the "job for life" concept that worked for their grandparents, the two-way loyalty of that system is completely absent in the current generation. It's been replaced with cynicism and mistrust.

So it's kind of a prisoner's dilemma. If you're a company and you invest heavily in junior talent, they'll probably leave for greener pastures ASAP. And if you're an employee who stands by an employer who gave you an initial leg up, you'll probably get fired after an aquisition/re-org/etc, and you'll find yourself with very narrow work experience.

FAANG companies manage this with "golden handcuff" stock vesting schedules, where you'll leave 6-7 figures on the table if you ever walk, but that's kind of the problem. It's hard for small orgs to compete for decades on pure cash compensation, and they can't be trusted to provide stability for decades.

Job for life will never come back, just like wife/husband for life.

Tinder makes it too easy to switch partners when the sexual marketplace values change, and it's the same for job hunting: it's just too easy to do for both parties.

...that’s why he said to train them and mentor them.

> Why not hire them? Lower your requirements if necessary, and train your new employees on the job. Groom them, mentor them, teach them the technologies they need to know.

I think it's great if a company's willing to do that, but if they have the financial ability to pay employees to grow into the employees they need, they also have the financial ability to just pay higher salaries in the first place.

That is, this rule doesn't hurt big employers, who can both pay big salaries to qualified candidates (of any citizenship - and often can pay big salaries to qualified candidates by setting up an office in their country if it's hard enough to hire in this one) and invest in training up workers, but it does hurt smaller ones. Smaller companies, by their nature, have less funding to invest in long-term gains - they need to ship quickly if they don't want to go out of business.

Now, there may well be good reasons to conclude that that big entrenched employers are good for society and startups should face an uphill battle competing on talent, but let's not pretend this doesn't hurt small companies.

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