Hacker News Reader

Comment by NCG_Mike | Hacker News Reader

As someone who worked in the US with a H1-B, in my case it was because you'd not find someone with my particular skill at that point in time. I was also paid more than the employees at the company I was contracted to work at - because of my particular skill and I'd taken a pay cut to move to the US.

This is what the H1-B is/was supposed to be like. It does seem that it has been abused.

View on HN

> in my case it was because you'd not find someone with my particular skill at that point in time.

That's how the program is sold and it's incredibly easy to game. Require 10 years of Swift experience and suddenly the candidate pool is dry. Generally most, if not all, IT job postings list an unrealistic and fictitious skill set.

> I was also paid more than the employees at the company I was contracted to work at

The cost of a Full-time Employee is usually something like 140-160% of their salary. So a contractor making 120% more than an FTE is still cheaper for the employer.

>That's how the program is sold and it's incredibly easy to game. Require 10 years of Swift experience and suddenly the candidate pool is dry. Generally most, if not all, IT job postings list an unrealistic and fictitious skill set.

Can't such abuse be avoided by requiring the "winning" candidate to show that he indeed has 10 years of Swift experience?

To whom?

You were the only person in America that could do that exact task? What were you doing?

Objective-C with AppKit on MacOS 10.0. Even Apple had problems finding people and they'd bought NeXT (where my experience was from).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com