Comment by 908B64B197 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 908B64B197 | Hacker News Reader

These layoffs are actually great for clearing some of pool of H1B recipient who, white frankly, shouldn't have been granted visas in the first place. Keep in mind that If I want to hire: A smart graduate from EPFL, Polytechnique or ETH Zurich who interned at CERN and has contributed to the Linux kernel for a software engineering job at a unicorn startup or

A grad from a second tier "technical college" in India with a visa refusal rate of ~90% for a job doing manual UI testing and QA for a body shop [0].

my only path forward is H1! They'll both be listed as "computer related occupations" and apply for the same visa in the same quota. Does that make any sense to anyone?

Of course, my odds of getting a lottery spot for the former are dramatically lower, since we all know body shops and consulting firms won't hesitate to file 4-5 applications per seat they plan to fill out (so one can hopefully get a spot in the lottery and not get any RFE).

[0] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/silicon-valleys-body-s...

As someone who had an H1 for a brief period myself, I think two changes can fix the whole problem:

1) Allow H1 holders to switch jobs to ANY qualifying company any time after 3 months and be legally ok as long as they work at same or higher pay until the visa expires. This will prevent companies abusing visa holders. But now we get companies who sell H1 visas. So to avoid that…

2) Sort job titles (categories) by descending salary (adjusted for location) and pick the top N qualified petitions. No more race to the bottom.

Now it doesn’t matter if candidate is from CERN or fake-IIT. If a company is willing to pay above market rate even if the candidate can leave in 3 months, they are admitting that this job is not easy to fill locally - basically aligned with the spirit of the visa.

>” If a company is willing to pay above market rate even if the candidate can leave in 3 months, they are admitting that this job is not easy to fill locally.”

There’s more to it than ease of finding local talent. Hiring a citizen means you have to provide a whole host of employment benefits and follow more stringent labor laws meant to protect workers.

While it’s true the company has to pay more in salary, they often save money by not having to pay out as much in benefits. The company also gets increased flexibility and doesn’t have to worry as much about the process of ending their employment properly.

Yes, but a lot of these layoffs are happening at the unicorn startups / Googles of the world, and these people generally map more closely to your former case.

So this is just lowering the scale of the pool, but the ratio is probably unchanged - completely agreed on the need for reform.

I wonder if it could be used in the other direction: use a layoff to clear out old, expensive local citizen talent and fill the gaps with cheaper h1b or offshored labor?

H1Bs are time limited (6 years). And converting them to Green Card is VERY expensive.

It's more time-consuming than expensive. If you need labor certification because you don't qualify for EB-1, the entire process currently takes something like 3 years. And that's the ideal case, where nothing goes wrong and your priority date is current.

Well you can get advanced parole and a work permit while waiting your priority date.

you make a point about offshored labor. But idea that H1-B talent comes cheaper is completely wrong.

H1Bs work much longer hours and are willing to do alot of grunt work. They also have a harder time switching jobs. They absolutely drive wages down

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