Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

H1b should be a bid salery to play not first to apply. That is we will allow x of them, when you sponser someone you commit to paying them some salary for the full term - no layoffs (you get fire for cause but that is a legal thing they can take you to court for , and the courts can force you to give back pay if it wasn't a good cause) , you should know your budget can afford them. , someone who really is the best , offer them a million dollars to be sure they get in , just a warm body , if they don't get in who cares.

There are ways to abuse the above, but note they can always quit.

View on HN

Add "automatic green card at the end of three years if sponsored again by the same employer".

Otherwise, the job would just be extremely cushy. Work the absolute bare minimum not to give cause for dismissal, and you're untouchable for the duration.

...If your goal was to force companies to hire native citizens wherever possible, and only H1B workers when absolutely necessary, that might be the point.

Companies should vet their emplopees better than that before hiring. Though there is potential to fire for cause if someone who should be able to do the work in 40 hour weeks isn't getting it done.

note that I added a 40 hour work week qualifier above.

one possible option to prevent ghost job posting for visa is to force employers to share the hiring month, salary, qualification and annonymized resume of the H1B/GC employer with all those they interviewed or applied. This will give closure to those applicants that didn't get the job.

You're halfway there. H1Bs should also require payment to the government of $250k/year. Style it as a fee or a tax or whatever.

This means small companies may not get good talent that value things besides salary (wfh, perks, fun project) and will have to compete with corporations for people who only cares about money. This may (or may not) impact startups

Same as ever though, this is tangential to H1B.

Stop it, no one "values things besides salary", and you know it.

I get your point, but if that were completely true, no one would work in the videogame or embedded software sectors. They pay dramatically less, especially early in career.

I value a good manager, a fun team, an actual PTO policy I can use, and cool projects to work with at about $40,000 a year. Salary is valuable but it is not the only valuable thing.

Salary is the most valuable thing, however. Because I would happily take a salary of 1 billion dollars with an awful manager and a no-fun team. And, conversely, I would never take a job with the best people on planet earth for a salary of one dollar.

Well, of course, you can make up hypotheticals. I used to say that you couldn't pay me enough to work in NYC. But of course I didn't literally mean that I wouldn't take FU money for a couple years to work there (not doing anything criminal etc.). But that wasn't going to realistically happen.

If you were offered a job with an awful manager and a no-fun team for $250,000, and a job with the best people on the planet for $249,999, which one would you choose?

Right, naturally the extent matters, but it's still the most important statistic when doing cost analysis.

Also, other statistics are just wage in disguise. Work-life balance refers to working less, which means a higher wage. PTO is also just working less, which is a higher wage. WFH means less driving + lower cost of living, which is an effective higher wage.

If you can't live off of $40,000 a year, you are not taking that job. I'm not saying there aren't people already independently wealthy and "working" for fun but those are an infinitesimal exception.

I think they mean that they will take a job with those benefits for 40k less than a job without. I assume generally they are looking at positions that pay substantially more than that.

That's only 99% true, but the 1% of exceptions will get an egregiously disproportionate amount of attention and concern.

If you people only valued salary you'd all be in sales :)

I hired a developer who just wanted a cushy job and I offered him a cushy job.

I offered 4 day work week, no on-call, no overtime, but paid less than their previous employer (because I couldn't afford it).

I am sure lots of people value things besides salary.

Changing the work hours doesn't technically affect "salary" but it's a change in wages. I think your example mostly reinforces the point, but we should be using the word "wages" to be clearer.

You effectively offered them a higher dollar/hour rate. And depending on how much they value their free time, that's more $$ in their figurative bank.

I don't think I even paid them more per hour. The problem was that all the other companies only want to hire full time programmers, so I was able to hire them by offering a job with fewer hours.

Also, they complained that their previous job was super stressful because the sales people kept making promises to customers that were really hard to keep ("of course we'll implement this in two weeks") and so they were constantly scrambling to meet impossible deadlines.

Are you serious? I know quite clearly that people do value things besides salary!

Of course people value things besides salary, but if there was no salary or the salary would not be enough to live off, none of those things matter in any way. So first and foremost (unless you're a billionaire's son) is salary, for everyone.

Perhaps so, but in our highly-compensated industry, that is a very low bar! Your point may be technically correct, after you have sliced it so finely, but it is no longer very interesting.

I mean, that's not entirely true.

Mostly true, yes. A monthly pizza and beer party won't make up for lack of salary, but extra PTO that I can use can.

Like...if I had the choice of a job that offered $200K/year but only 2 weeks PTO, and another offered only $185K but 5 weeks PTO, I'd take the latter.

Honestly I'd love a company that gave 4 weeks PTO with the option to take up to another 4 weeks unpaid.

Fidessa is pretty famous on Wall Street for paying lower salaries but being much more fun to work for. They have tons of at-work and after-work events (with and without alcohol). There are lots of people who stay at Fidessa for much less money than they could make at another firm.

I'd argue that most workers value several things over salary. Very few people are trying to maximize their income at the expense of everything else. They tend to limit their job searches to places near their families. They apply to jobs they'd enjoy doing or at least wouldn't mind vs jobs they'd hate but which pay better. They don't apply to jobs that pay well but are also highly dangerous. etc.

Money > everything just isn't how most people see the world.

Maybe software-adjacent people applying to startups, but in general, this obviously can't be true. Relatively low-paying but high-status jobs, like FBI agent, military officer, elected official, judge wouldn't exist, nor low-paying passion work like social worker, wildlife conservation, most non-profits, low-paying jobs that are simply fun like most musicians, pro athletes in unpopular sports. Plenty of capable, talented people who could be making more money choose not to.

Not sure if it meant to be joke but I do value things besides salary. I literally accepted offer with 40% drop recently. Salary is important and it doesn’t make sense to work for free. But after some threshold increase is salary doesn’t change life drastically. But not spending 40 hours doing boring stuff changes life a lot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com