Comment by LukaAl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LukaAl | Hacker News Reader

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No, the Visa you are referring to is the O-1 Visa, it is much more difficult and expensive to obtain, but it is not subject to Visa CAP (I know it well, I'm on O-1). H-1B is for specialty worker, and they are not defined by exceptionality but by the fact that they possess a qualification for a specific job, there's a shortage of US Citizen for that job, and they receive market rate salary.

We could agree that the behavior of consulting companies like Tata or Infosys seems like cheating (basically, send thousands of application hoping that a good percentage succeed). But they are hiring for positions that require a degree people qualified; it is difficult to hire for that kind of position (primarily because you could make more money with the same qualification in different companies); and they are paying market rate salaries (or at least, that's what it is certified!).

I could agree that the current H-1B Visa system is broken, but I'm not sure that fixing it just for the perspective of highly paid Silicon Valley Bro is the best solution for the US as a whole. What I'm saying is: are we sure that this kind of cheap specialty labor is not useful for the US society as a whole? E.g.: are we sure that, if System Integration companies have to pay engineers a much higher salary, they will be able to provide prices low enough for other company to pay it? And if few companies could pay for their services, this wouldn't impact their efficiency on one side and the B2B software market on the other side?

I'm not defending the violators nor supporting the "cheap H1B" practices. Just saying that the world is a little bit more complex than that.

>there's a shortage of US Citizen for that job, and they receive market rate salary

That's not quite right. If you can't hire somebody at salary $X, then $X is not the market rate for someone in that position. The language I've heard is "prevailing wage", which can be less than the "market rate" if workers aren't making full use of their bargaining power.

This doesn't make sense to me, CS skills aren't a big fungible set that allow people to move around freely. I have a particular set of skills that I've honed over several years. These skills make me valuable at my specific job, but completely unemployable as a databases person, or an SRE, or a distributed systems specialist. It doesn't matter how much money they offer, they can't hire me because I don't have the skills. It's perfectly possible for subsets of the market to grow demand faster than the population responds by training for these skills (say by new targeted degree programs in school).

You're left with the choice of offering other native employees a pay bump to do something they don't have the skills for or want to do, or bring in foreign talent that is trained and interested, this is not a hard call at all. The problem is that "STEM" is a ridiculously broad classification to try and capture this need, clearly not all science/tech jobs are spiking in demand. At the same time, it's probably a bad idea to have the government specify sub-quotas within, say, software engineering. Government intervention like this, letting bureaucrats make arbitrary decisions on things they don't have expertise about is how you get bad rules.

> E.g.: are we sure that, if System Integration companies have to pay engineers a much higher salary, they will be able to provide prices low enough for other company to pay it?

If you can't sustain your business without illegal (or in this case legal, but certainly exploiting loopholes which shouldn't exist) hiring/salary practices then why should your business be allowed to exist. This type of thing only hurts workers.

I could contend that the shortage of engineers qualified for that job is due to scarcity created by the US immigration policies. And then I'll ask you if you can't have your super high salary without exploiting the current system, your salary shouldn't exist.

Again, I'm not saying what they are doing is right or ethical or desirable. Just challenging the different point of views.

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