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Comment by yieldcrv | Hacker News Reader

no OP, but I can answer one way:

the US has very many visa programs, including half a dozen to a dozen work visa programs

this one particular visa program is politically radioactive, as if it is the only work visa program, and it doesn't accomplish its stated goals in hardly any way

until that can be settled I think and the program ironed out, it should be hampered to closed off, a moratorium

I would like to see the H1B program used to its original (and still codified) standards - highly in demand professionals that couldn't be sourced in the US so easily and are exceptional. The minimum wage for what such a professional would be paid was set in the 1980s, to $60,000 for someone with a master's degree, when it was exception. This minimum would be around $156,000/yr today. Okay, let's do that, that makes sense

if its politically radioactive to even just suggest that, all the more reason for a moratorium on that program, to me

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For reference, I was an H-1B holder. My starting salary (straight out of college after finishing my master's) in one of the big tech companies was $95k base pay, this was 13 years ago. From my perspective, the visa program worked as intended.

It was not intended to hire fresh grads with zero experience though and your example shows that it had already been broken 13 years ago.

In what way do you think it worked as intended?

13 years ago you should have been ineligible by both base salary and scarcity, until you were a senior architect in some specific niche and commanded a greater base salary

Or on a different work visa

Exhibit a b and c

I’m not saying you aren’t supposed to be here, I’m saying fix that program. The US shouldn’t be training talent and kicking them out. We should be training and keeping talent.

H1B doesn’t do that well either.

> In what way do you think it worked as intended?

If I recall correctly, just my base was 20-30% higher than the prevailing wage that the government publishes (big tech bubble people forget how wages look like outside of big tech). In exchange, my employer hired someone with a graduate degree that knew C/C++ well enough to contribute immediately (I also did an internship with them a year prior).

> 13 years ago you should have been ineligible by both base salary and scarcity

I disagree. I don't believe my wage was lower than what a US candidate would get (from what I've seen at big tech, HR dictates wage brackets so same position translates to roughly same wage) and it is more expensive for a company to hire internationally. To me this means that they were unable to fill the position domestically. Later in my career I was involved in interviewing and the candidates were barely able to code (small sample size though) so either I was unlucky (after all, a lot of people apply even when they maybe shouldn't; some may have had a bad day), or the talent pool is indeed pretty small. I guess systems programming is a specific enough niche?

> I’m not saying you aren’t supposed to be here, I’m saying fix that program. The US shouldn’t be training talent and kicking them out. We should be training and keeping talent.

H1B was the only option available to me that allowed me to kick off the naturalization process so no issues there for me as well.

None of the things you perceived are what I think the H1B should be for though

so I can see how we're talking past each other

in neither my model or the current model, a salary percentage over what the government publishes has nothing to do anything. that's not a factor.

your wage being lower than what a US candidate would be paid for that role is not a factor either.

regarding the talent pool, I think you have it backwards to rationalize how it benefited you, companies are often looking for candidates in many places and then retroactively decide whether to accomodate special circumstances such as visa sponsorship

I'm glad you felt valued, empowered, had a nice compensation package, and a naturalization path you were looking for

now to my model: in 2013 the minimum salary for the H1B with a master's degree should have been ~$113,000. Solely based on the 1989 $60,000 number adjusted for inflation. if the company wouldn't have justified that for their inability to fill the position domestically then it still shouldn't have occurred. or systems programming was that valuable and would have pushed up salaries faster because of the actual shortage.

It's poorly labelled.

Highly in demand professionals are eligible for O1.

H1B is the base work visa for those that aren't covered by a trade deal or haven't completed a US university program, or have and completed OPT.

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