In the good old days, it wasn't so easy to hire a foreigner that studied computer science in an American university: They'd get an automatic 1 year practical training visa, and if after a few months you saw that they were a good hire, you'd sponsor them for an H1-B, and eventually a green card. That's how many senior people that were born overseas got to their spots.

Now, thanks to low quotas, and some rather unsavory consultancy companies, the H1-B program has now become useless for this purpose, as you have less than a 50/50 chance of getting an H1-B approved, just due to quotas. So while an honest company that wants to hire a good developer will not be OK with the delays and the low percentages of hiring someone in those conditions, a mill that interviews thousands of people and will place them in third party customers as consultants will gladly just keep flooding the market with applicants that probably will not get anywhere.

TL;DR The H1-B program used to be defensible, and maybe useful. The way it works now, it only works for companies who abuse it.

H1-B visas are used by US businesses wanting to hire non-american employees. There is an annual cap set on the number of visas (65,000 for people with bachelor's degrees, and an additional 20,000 for those with master's/phd).

This year there was an even more massive oversubscription, and the visas were allotted by lottery. Certain subcategories of visa are not subject to the cap (eg. those requested by non-profit research institutions and universities, including government labs.)

They received 233,000 applications for 85,000 work visas, and have randomly selected 85,000 of them. Everyone else can try next year.

There are more people asking for a spot than spots available. There are 65,000 spots available. If that sounds like a random and arbitrary number, you're right, that's exactly what it is.

If I understand one part correctly, they opened the lottery on April 1st and filled up the entire year's allotment 6 days later.

Every year, this branch of the U.S. government gives out so many of these work visas to qualified applicants. This is one of the most common ways many foreign developers are able to apply and work for a U.S. company, by being "sponsored" by their company.

Well, they've run out of spots for 2016.

Each year there are 20k work visas for people who graduated MSc in the US and 65k work visas for the rest of world.

That means if you got an offer to work from a startup or a big tech firm there are about 23% changes you'll get the visa.