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Comment by rshnotsecure | Hacker News Reader

I recently worked at a major retailer who has offices in the Bay Area.

Part of the role involved migrating the ERP and ATS system, which had employees, salary, details etc.

In the building I was in, which had incredible developers btw some of the best I’ve ever seen (and despite working on a legacy system!)...209 out of 209 were H1-B’s. Our consulting team at the time was about 20, and 19/20 of the team were H1-B’s.

The really sad part about it was as we were leaving, they were establishing a training program for junior H1-B’s with liberal arts degrees to learn programming. I have no idea how they got the visa licenses for those folks.

At the same time, they were the best people I ever worked with. But it’s not a sustainable way to run an economy.

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I thought the H-1B was supposed to be a lottery, how is any company having this much "good fortune"?

They could be "older" H-1Bs , folks from India are waiting for a GreenCard since 2010, they can renew their H-1Bs in 3-year increments (perpetually) if they have a pending application for permanent residency.

Well, the article mentions how many visas were approved, not how many were requested. Maybe there were many more that were requested, so that even with the lottery they got a huge number of accepted requests.

Right, and here’s the dirty part of this process... some applications are under hiring agencies that later push those approved to the likes of Uber who might have maxed out their own allocations.

This is extraordinarily wrong. There are no allocations. Lottery only happens for first time H1 workers. But the number represented here includes first times, renewals, transfers. etc. There is no concept of allocations

Not lottery. There are allocations (or were) per country to give it a more even spread. I know greencard applications still work like that based on origin of birth.

Also the H1B process has always felt like who can create the most compelling application. Remember this is a specialization visa and you are basically demonstrating why (a) you cannot find such talent locally and (b) the value it will add to the US economy. So large companies with creative legal counsel do have an advantage over small shops.

H1B is a lottery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Lottery

You might be thinking of the L1 visa

> The really sad part about it was as we were leaving, they were establishing a training program for junior H1-B’s with liberal arts degrees to learn programming. I have no idea how they got the visa licenses for those folks

H1b places no requirement on the degree you have, only that you have one.

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