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Comment by diogenescynic | Hacker News Reader

Simple solution is to give visas to the applicants with the highest salaries instead of just giving these out at random.

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This is obviously the answer. Rank the H1B applicants by salary and let the most valuable in first. This will force companies to consider how much a worker is actually worth.

A variety of other non-software jobs also rely on H-1Bs: See, for instance, lab technicians. A change to highest salaries, while probably way better for the software industry, and applicants in general, would wipe out other sectors.

The system definitely needs fixing, but simple solutions often have all kinds of negative side effects.

The simple solution is to pay them more if they are so vital. Their value is directly related to their pay.

The issue often isn't that talent can't be found... it's that talent can't be found at the price the corporation wants to pay. We need to encourage corporations to pay more which should correspond to the most essential positions needed, not just find the cheapest worker.

Wouldn't that be unfair to any potential start ups that needed an H1B for some complex subject matter?

If your startup is already H-1B dependent, then I don't feel super bad. Raise more and find local talent at the market rate or go out of business--but startups aren't entitled to a pool of cheap, foreign labor via H-1Bs.

US will lose most nurses and other non-tech, but essential talent

Pay them more if they are so vital then. Or would the business really rather just go out of business instead of raising wages? And if the business can't operate without raising wages, maybe it's not a sustainable business anyways.

should we refuse visas to scientist, PhDs and postdocs in favor of some offshore worker who moves JSONs and protofuls between frontend and backend?

Yes, absolutely. Scientists are paid a pittance, so they're clearly not valuable to American society, and they should be kept out. America doesn't value science much anyway; just look at how many Americans don't believe in vaccines.

Or is it rather that Big Tech and unchecked venture capitalism is inflating wages to unsustainable levels at rate that other industries cannot keep up with? 100 -1000x growth expectations as in in SV is simply not sustainable in the long run, it's kind of obscene. May be a tough pill to swallow though on this forum.

Or just give out more visas to educated workers?

Or just train locals.

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