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Comment by healsdata | Hacker News Reader

At least one company I worked at purposefully crafted these job descriptions so that no one would be qualified. They'd find the most obscure parts of our tech stack, require hands on experience with each library, knowledge of our niche, and so on.

You basically had to be already working for us to have the required experience.

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The companies are just trying to work with the flawed system that is place. Even if a role is in shortage, it’s impossible for a company by itself to prove that there is a shortage. If in the total market, there are 10000 jobs for “position X” and there are 8000 total US citizens that qualify for that role, if you are a company that has an H1B for the other 2000 positions, there is no way you can prove there is a shortage. The system requires you to put out an advertisement and prove there are no US citizens. The minute you put out a generic requirement, at least the few people from the pool of 8000 will apply even if they are employed in the same role because… drum role…people switch jobs. So even if overall there is a shortage for a specific position, there is no way an individual company can prove it when they are required to actively recruit for the position.

The system is flawed and it forces immigrants and companies to work with the rules that are set. And people who don’t fully understand the system are angry about it.

You have a good point that it's very hard to define a shortage by lack of applications, when there is always a certain amount of churn.

It would be much better to simply define this as an economic test:

1) Are the prevailing wages for a position rising faster than inflation?

2) Is unemployment in the position both low and remaining flat?

Seems hard to claim a shortage if either of those is false, and there is little gaming to be done for simple government reported labor statistics, recent news notwithstanding.

The funny thing is that prevailing wage determination is also done as part of the process and if your wages are lower than median, your application has a higher risk or audit and/or rejection. No reason why you can’t update the process to be more data driven, they already have all the information they need.

If this was to be implemented, you would see a large lobbying effort by the tech companies around how unemployment is calculated and these numbers would end up being under-reported to keep the supply of cheap labor coming in.

You will also start to see people with ties to big tech being hired to actually compile the data.

And that is worse than what you have right now?

The idea of determining skill shortages using data isn’t new, nor is it ineffective. Other countries have been doing it for a while. E.g. New Zealand

> It would be much better to simply define this as an economic test: 1) Are the prevailing wages for a position rising faster than inflation?

We don’t even know what inflation is anymore

For tech jobs, the answer to 2 is a resounding no.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/10/the-computer-science-dream...

If it's impossible to do right then we need to get rid of H1Bs entirely.

You're missing the entire point of a free labour market system. If there are 10000 jobs for "position x" and only 8000 citizens who qualify, then companies are forced to compete with each other to attract those workers. Usually by paying higher wages. Or companies are forced to train people to get qualified workers. Can't do either? Then shut down your business and retire in eternal shame for being a worthless failure.

That's the entire idea, that's what a nation is built for. A "shortage" of workers is exactly the desired result in a healthy free market nation.

It's hard for me to believe that anyone working in a tech industry hasn't seen this kind of thing happening or heard managers/owners talking about gaming the system. When people say they've never heard of it or don't think it happens, I wonder if they're incredibly naive or being evasive.

In many places it's talked about only by immigration lawyers and people who must be involved.

If you're not very active in recruiting (especially at a sizeable company), it's not hard to be outside of the circles where those conversations are happening.

This happens at a much smaller level too. We knew an au pair that the host family particularly liked, and wanted her long term. A typical au pair contract is for 1 year, maximum is 2. They worked with an immigration attorney to craft a "job" that she was uniquely qualified for, went through the whole dance, and got her into the system. She stayed with them for the next 10 years. They covered room and board, but she worked for free otherwise; getting her in the door and on the way to citizenship was her "pay".

I can’t even tell how this would be different from what is commonly termed as human trafficking.

willing participants perhaps

Curious, just based in the facts of what has been stated - does this pass the sniff test to you, not exploitative at all?

Sure but that's also an entirely different context than the one of the comment I was replying to.

I witnessed employers doing that to get people greencards too. Claim the exact combination of their stack plus experience in the domain is a requirement. Only way to meet that is to have been working the job.

This is referred to as tayloring and it is not allowed. Furthermore you have to have the experience for the job from before you started working for the sponsoring employer, so tayloring can only target your prior experience, not what you learn on the job.

> This is referred to as tayloring and it is not allowed.

Frankly, I'm going to assume that it's not allowed in the same way that speeding is 'not allowed'.

If you get caught you get audits on every single application which means $$$ to lawyers then if you fail audits you get debarred from the program

At least when I went through the process the reqs had to be crafted such that applying h-1b employee needed to possess them before the current gig so unless that has changed in the last 15y I call bullshit on your claim.

As someone who used to work in contract recruiting, hiring requirements that made absolutely no sense and were fishing for H1-B eligibility were common. I'm still adamant about the idea that an H1 should be paid at least 120% of the average salary for the position at the hiring company. If it's THAT hard to hire an American, then clearly you should need to pay more for such rare expertise.

Trump is at least taking a step in the right direction by changing the H1-B lottery system to favor more highly paid and skilled candidates, but as you say to remove the current rampant abuse it should be made mandatory to pay more than the market rate for the position.

Personally I'd just scrap the H1-B program altogether, and let the free market sort it out. H1-B is almost as bad as simply exporting jobs via outsourcing. Laws should be made to benefit US citizens, not US companies and shareholders.

H1B is worse than exporting jobs via outsourcing. With outsourcing we are only competing with other countries for jobs, but with H1B we get to compete with other countries for housing (in our own towns) too.

With outsourcing it's basically impossible to compete since the country being outsourced to has lower salaries for a reason - because they have a lower cost of living and people can afford to accept lower salaries. If you are a US citizen facing US cost of living (housing, real estate taxes, college costs, healthcare, etc, etc), then how can you compete with someone who can afford to do the job for way less ?!

At least with the H1-B they are paying US taxes and spending at least something in the US economy, but outsourcing is also taking US corporate profits, mostly coming from US consumers, and sending it overseas to benefit a different country!

Trump has said that US companies should be more patriotic in their hiring, but nothing will happen without changes to the law or tax code.

>nothing will happen without changes to the law or tax code

Agreed. We need to incentivize the corporate behavior we want and disincentivize or ban the corporate behavior we don't want.

I do feel a bit bad for H-1Bs. When you think about it, we’re pulling so much top talent out of India. If the U.S., Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and Germany weren’t giving out these visas so easily, maybe India would be in a better position to develop its own economy, infrastructure, and institutions, instead of exporting its workforce. Their best engineers, consultants, analysts, all leaving to work in Western corporations like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Deloitte, PNC Bank, Chevron, Shell, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, EY, KPMG, PwC, IBM, Oracle, Apple, Qualcomm, Uber, Cisco, Salesforce, Tesla, Adobe, Intel, Nvidia, Bloomberg, Dell, Visa, British Petroleum, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, LinkedIn, VMware, ServiceNow, Snowflake, Intuit, Morgan Stanley, Capital One, American Express, Stripe, Cigna, meanwhile, their home country loses the people who might be solving real domestic challenges. It’s not ideal. Maybe India could’ve used a few of them.

Not seeing the "top talent" part at least from the H1B I have worked with which is probably in the hundreds at this point.

i am 0/60 lol

I mentioned those companies above because I’m not sure how to go about arguing it. This is a 40 year long struggle that no politician or president wants to talk about. We have gotten to the point where the companies I listed are 70 percent Indian <Fannie Mae, Freddie>. H1B abuse is clearly rampant, but it’s, I think, a nepotistic hiring spree they are going through. How is Fannie Mae 70% Indian? They can’t hire that many H-1Bs. How is Deloitt, and all the companies listed the the same? We are being colonized I’m trying to appeal to the masses.

The companies do that because they already had an applicant from abroad for this role they accepted. And now they must wait out the period for job posting to be live before inviting the applicant.

The law itself is pretty idiotic. Why would an employer give up a well accustomed well proven candidate for the sake of some random guy, waste money to recruitment and cross fingers that the employee would actually join and perform ?

It is like giving up a lottery ticket you have won for another lottery ticket.

Also, the law mandates certain compliance steps which the employers do. There is no expectation that they should actually hire someone else unless the compliance steps are violated. So everything is working exactly as intended.

This PERM process and law has harmed countless american citizens and employers both. Citizens end up applying for jobs they are not going to get and HR wastes time on resources over candidates they are not going to hire.

A better solution would be to hand a greencard to any immigrant who has worked for 5 years and has earned a certain high salary as proven by the W2.

This whole circus can be gotten rid off if you ask me.

>A better solution would be to hand a greencard to any immigrant who has worked for 5 years and has earned a certain high salary as proven by the W2.

Huge non-sequitur. Why is this better? Better for whom?

Better for everyone because the talented H1B employee is no longer shackled to their employer and can leave demanding a higher wage and raising wages for everyone.

Well you just answered why they don't/won't do this.

The H1B employees being shackled and thus having little to no leverage to demand higher compensation or better working conditions is (from the point of view of the companies abusing the system) a feature of the system, not a bug.

Well, which is exactly why we should do this

> can leave demanding a higher wage and raising wages for everyone.

This is simply not believable. More competition for a limited resource (jobs) means lower wages, not higher wages.

I guess you’re proposing eliminating the h1b program to raise wages. That would maybe work but our companies would theoretically be less competitive globally. If we’re going to allow immigration based on professional skills then these people should be fast tracked to having the same employment rights as natives otherwise it creates a subclass of workers that depress wages because those that belong to that group will be too risk adverse to ask for more money knowing that they’ll likely have to leave the country if they get let go.

Yes, eliminate H1B.

>otherwise it creates a subclass of workers that depress wages

Again, we can just skip the middle-man here and fix wages by ending H1B.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

It's the same with most job adverts in the UK, written to satisfy the 3 week listing requirement before the job can be offered to a foreign national.

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