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> Cognizant and Infosys will stop the gaming the minute you detach the H-1B from the company. While I agree that people on an H-1B visa shouldn't be tied to on

by tdeck 11y ago

> Cognizant and Infosys will stop the gaming the minute you detach the H-1B from the company. While I agree that people on an H-1B visa shouldn't be tied to one particular employer, I don't think this will solve the problem at all. The lottery model will always unfairly advantage these outsourcing companies precisely because all they care about is billable hours, and the people working there are interchangeable. That's why they can afford to be relatively indiscriminate by throwing thousands of visa applications at the wall and hiring whoever sticks. Product companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft who have to actually care which individuals they hire are always going to be at a disadvantage in a lottery - their hiring bar reduces the pool of visa applicants and gives them fewer tickets. That doesn't mean that there aren't great engineers at these companies, but as a whole the system perversely incentivizes quantity over quality.

mavelikara 11y ago
> because all they care about is billable hours, and the people working there are interchangeable. That's why they can afford to be relatively indiscriminate by throwing thousands of visa applications at the wall and hiring whoever sticks. These companies apply for visas on behalf of the competent employees they have in their offshore offices. Once the employee gets an H-1B visa if the regulations are such that s/he is free to switch employers without harming their immigrant status, they will bargain for better wages. This breaks the business model of applying for lots of visas paying large fees on each of them and getting a few approved. Right now the visa fees (> 7K for just the initial application! [1]) are considered an investment by these firms, because they know that the few that sticks can be trapped into a long employment period and underpaid for years to recoup many multiples of the initial investment. Breaking this business model is what will prevent these firms from applying in large numbers (which is a DoS attack on USCIS, forcing the approval process into a lottery). Hence my original comment. [1]: https://www.uscis.gov/forms/h-and-l-filing-fees-form-i-129-petition-nonimmigrant-worker https://www.uscis.gov/forms/h-and-l-filing-fees-form-i-129-p...

by tdeck 11y ago

mavelikara 11y ago

> because all they care about is billable hours, and the people working there are interchangeable. That's why they can afford to be relatively indiscriminate by throwing thousands of visa applications at the wall and hiring whoever sticks. These companies apply for visas on behalf of the competent employees they have in their offshore offices. Once the employee gets an H-1B visa if the regulations are such that s/he is free to switch employers without harming their immigrant status, they will bargain for better wages. This breaks the business model of applying for lots of visas paying large fees on each of them and getting a few approved. Right now the visa fees (> 7K for just the initial application! [1]) are considered an investment by these firms, because they know that the few that sticks can be trapped into a long employment period and underpaid for years to recoup many multiples of the initial investment. Breaking this business model is what will prevent these firms from applying in large numbers (which is a DoS attack on USCIS, forcing the approval process into a lottery). Hence my original comment. [1]: https://www.uscis.gov/forms/h-and-l-filing-fees-form-i-129-petition-nonimmigrant-worker https://www.uscis.gov/forms/h-and-l-filing-fees-form-i-129-p...