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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

R&D is exactly who H1B is supposed to be for - ie. highly skilled, specialized, and educated positions. Not regular SE jobs.

If you look at your Googles, your Facebooks, your Microsofts, you will find a glut of H1B's working regular SE jobs, such as maintenance and feature development. That's exactly who H1B's are not supposed to be for - and that is the issue.

Mega corps laying off huge engineering teams while simultaneously importing more H1B's tells you everything you need to know. Follow the money, as they say.

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Most companies call a significant amount of their SWE work as R&D. R&D isn’t always “inventing totally new things” but rather closer to “an investment of resources in which there is some amount of novelty and for which the outcome is uncertain”. A lot of SWE qualifies for that, even software that we’d consider fairly mundane and un-exciting.

H-1B is for regular skilled immigration, those with bachelors degrees or equivalent, e.g. regular software engineer jobs. For more highly skilled, specialized, and educated positions there exist O-1, EB-1, and EB-2 NIW visas.

you are wrong because H-1Bs pay just as much as regular SWE jobs by law (companies file LCA)

Guarantee it's below average at most outsourcing firms. They may play games like advertising a position as a "junior engineer" but require 10 years of experience and then bill clients for a senior engineer but, knowing the billing rates for several vendors, there's absolutely no way they pay market rates.

I am all for cracking down on abusers and scammers, especially body shops.

but it is not the reason to get rid of the entirety of H-1B program, as some people advocate here.

This thread is about suppressing wages...

How is paying the same == suppressing?

Because you'd have to pay more to attract somebody local who's happy at another company.

You understand that immigration is fundamentally different from standard supply and demand? Immigrants create both supply and demand. Producing more eggs doesn't increase the demand for eggs.

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