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Comment by ibains | Hacker News Reader

I have a startup, 4 in US, 10 in India - top tier engineers. I just hired my first H1B - while we pay well - bidding and salary escrow will just favor the big 5 - they are starving startups of talent in bay area any way. Investors want me to get traction with $2M, our needed engineers are at $600-$800k comp (300 base) how do I make it work?

Regulation has unintended consequences. As an example trying to save retails investors from fraud means IPOs are fewer and large investors get all the growth.

Not to make this political, but highly educated and highly paid “employees” voting for “career politicians” and “bureaucrats” seriously overestimate their understanding of issues and competence. They are missing data points and should lean to minimum regulation.

Recent changes asking H1 to be paid >40th percentile of salary instead of 17th percentile seems sensible and enough.

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> Investors want me to get traction with $2M, our needed engineers are at $600-$800k comp (300 base) how do I make it work?

Are you admitting that you want to hire H1B in order to find cheaper people?

If you can't find any local people to employ, then either you put your hand in your pocket to afford international or you can't afford to do business and your business model is broken.

No, I’m saying that the parent comment suggesting bidding is not a good idea.

I’m hiring an H1B since that person has the right skills, and I’m hiring Americans as well (who might take lower salary and stock options initially). Putting something like auction for H1B means another competitive advantage to big tech over me.

>> Business model is broken

For startups, yes you’re working with constraints that seem impossible - you should encourage people to do hard things and build businesses, not give up - this is still US.

And yes I hired 10 engineers in India, and they’re paying taxes there. I’d rather hire them here and have them pay taxes here. In next few years, the founding engineers will start their own startups in India and not here, I want them to do startups here.

We’re screwing up by reducing supply of engineers, reducing supply of housing in US, and starving startup ecosystem.

Aren't all startup business models "broken" (unprofitable) in the early stages? That's why they require so much investor money to grow to the point of profit.

If you can't run your business legally then you shouldn't run it.

We could make the same arguments to argue for startups not having to follow health and safety law because it makes it harder to be profitable.

Have you run a business before?

I don't know what point this question is trying to make?

Are you asking me if I know how hard it is to run a business while following the law? I'm sure it is. Do you think that absolves you from following it?

You’re talking as if laws were sent by god, we made laws to serve us, not the other way around. We should change them to be sensible.

Also, if all businesses were required to be profitable from day 1, you’d have none. You spend on R&D to build a product, then sell it, then make money.

You know nothing jon snow

> We should change them to be sensible.

You’re not asking to change it - you’re asking to completely misappropriate it to undermine local labour prices, when its intention as created by the people is to bring in specialists that can’t be found in the US.

There's nothing wrong with tapping in on a cheaper labor, and that has nothing to do with "business model being broken". Ambitious ideas need a lot of money, you take investment, depending on your finances, you contract some work abroad. A lot of startups made it work, eventually they brought people on H1B, but don't mix up their initial stage with later stage.

Business model doesn't have to work initially. Facebook didn't have one for a long time.

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