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This is a great move. The current H1B program made no sense at all. If I wanted to hire: A smart graduate from EPFL, Polytechnique or ETH Zurich who interned a

• ianmobbs 6y ago
  The changes described in the article do not change your hypothetical whatsoever.
  • 908B64B197 6y ago
    It does indirectly. Hiring for the later will hopefully cease to be cost effective. But the former should still be worth it.
    • ianmobbs 6y ago
      Why do you care whether or not it's cost effective to hire a foreign UI tester? That has zero correlation with whether or not its cost effective to hire someone with experience at CERN. Your hypothetical lists 2 different profiles that would be hired for vastly different jobs, and it seems like you only care that one of them is fucked over - is it just a strawman for racism? Can you point to any actual examples of CERN interns being passed over in favor of foreign UI testers?
      • username90 6y ago
        > Can you point to any actual examples of CERN interns being passed over in favor of foreign UI testers? They both compete for the same H1B visas so it has happened a lot of times. The H1B at Tata getting 70k a year took a spot from a software engineer at Google earning more than twice that. That is how lotteries work. Raising the wage requirement will mean that the actual talent will have better chance to get in. And yes, a lot of Googles new engineers comes from India, that is a good thing, the bad thing is companies like Tata abusing the system to get low paid labor into US.
        • dyslexit 6y ago
          > Raising the wage requirement will mean that the actual talent will have better chance to get in. How does this follow?
          • username90 6y ago
            Lets simplify and say we have 1 spot and 2 applicants. Mediocre engineer with a sponsored job for 70k. Great engineer with a sponsored job for 140k. With no salary requirement both has equal chance to get in, meaning the great engineer has 50% chance to get lose the position. With salary requirement at 100k the mediocre engineer will no longer get sponsored leaving the great engineer as the only applicant left and thus guaranteeing that he get in. Edit: With the old requirements bringing in mediocre engineers was still profitable, with the new requirements it wont be since the salary cap is set at a very high percentile.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • throwawaygh 6y ago
        There is one H1B lottery, so the two DO compete in the same lottery. And yes, I've absolutely seen excellent colleagues making north of $200K leave the country because they didn't get an H1B visa.
    • sequoia 6y ago
      That’s the point, and the intended effect. They don’t want you to look overseas for the manual UI tester or whatever, they’re saying “that’s not skilled enough to warrant granting a visa based on a claim you can’t find someone in the US to do this job.”
• dmode 6y ago
  The changes has nothing to do with the problem you are trying to address
  • tlear 6y ago
    In the new wage rules one will not be cost effective at all. It changes everything
    • dmode 6y ago
      That's not true at all. The engineer from India will simply be re-classified to L1 with a reduced wage requirement. While the grad student will require a much higher wage requirement. In the end it will actually turn out worse for someone trying to hire the engineer from Switzerland
      • username90 6y ago
        You can't just reclassify people to L1, there is a reason there is such huge demand for H1B.
        • bduerst 6y ago
          Yes you can. All you need is for the company to have a foreign branch somewhere outside the U.S. That's it.
      • dodobirdlord 6y ago
        The person re-classified as L1 will no longer be competing in the lottery with the hypothetical CERN engineer, and the odds of an application to hire that engineer succeeding will increase.
• zerr 6y ago
  So all the doors should open for the person with a rich family background, while the poor one should stay in poverty?
  • chmod600 6y ago
    The H1B program was not designed to alleviate poverty around the world. Maybe there should be such a program, but H1B is probably not it.
  • lonesword 6y ago
    What about an Indian student who did a masters from ETH/EPFL, interned at CERN, and _then_ applied for an H1B visa? Will it mean that the said student is from a "rich family background"?
    • zerr 6y ago
      Background or not, he/she would certainly enjoy much better quality of life compared to the above mentioned profile in India.
• outworlder 6y ago
  > A grad from a second tier "technical college" in India with a visa refusal rate of ~90% Colleges are unrelated to visa refusals.
• temikus 6y ago
  Quotas are per-country. Your scenario doesn’t change either way, no?
  • dodobirdlord 6y ago
    Sorta, everyone draws in the lottery from the same pool of available slots, but no more than 7%/year can go to applicants from each country. This will have the largest impact for high-salary applications from India and China, but it still increases the likelihood that any high-salary application will be accepted.
  • what_ever 6y ago
    There are no quotas by country for H1B. Those are for Green Cards allotted per year.
• harichinnan 6y ago
  There are two issues here. American companies need workers with multiple skillsets. Your one app startup that thrives on user unwittingly selecting location on might need a highly qualified European graduate with experience at CERN. But the average utility company needs help maintaining their database and make sure they are billing users correctly. They would need a QA tester from India. There's a real shortage of those jobs too in America. You could argue against work visas and wait for 400K Wall Street exceutives switching to testing jobs. You could imagine a market where software engineers are paid Google salaries at utilities. But overall poor people would suffer at the expense of few highly paid developers.
• cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  All that will happen now is the manual UI testing position that would have been hired in the US will now be done back in India as companies scramble to deal with this situation. They'll probably do the work for even less, companies and teams and infrastructure will expand in India to do the work, and taxes and spin-off benefits to the US economy will be lost. Or alternatively (and quite likely) we'll just hire that potential candidate up here in Canada; growing our tech industry further and competing with American workers in the same time zones and language as you, with a just-as or better educated work force, and a for lower cost to the employer and in a culture that on the whole appreciates immigrants more. The US Visa system sounds completely broken, but this doesn't sound like a good fix. I suspect the way forward is a skills-based immigration system (combined with a robust refugee and compassionate family reunification system) like in other western countries, but that is likely not going to be politically possible from either party down there.
  • dcolkitt 6y ago
    > Or alternatively (and quite likely) we'll just hire that potential candidate up here in Canada; growing our tech industry further and competing with American workers in the same time zones and language as you, with a just-as or better educated work force, and a for lower cost to the employer and in a culture that on the whole appreciates immigrants more. I'm virtually certain that Canada will not have a single tech company with the market cap as large as the tenth largest US tech company within in the next 25 years. If anything Canada is actively losing ground against the US tech industry. In the past it used to have RIM, Nortel, Bell North and Corel. Today the largest Canadian tech company is "Constellation Software". And the reason for the decline is simple. Canada's best and brightest don't go into tech. They go into real estate and property development to extract value out of the insanely overheated housing market. And ironically this ties back to the immigration discussion. One of the major contributing factors to the housing shortage is because of Canada's aggressive pursuit of wealthy emigres. The housing market in places like Vancouver has turned into a slush fund to launder the money of CCP party members and other third world kleptocrats.
    • cmrdporcupine 6y ago
• digianarchist 6y ago
  Wouldn’t the Swiss grad be better served applying for the O1A visa?
  • sjm 6y ago
    O-1 visas are an incredible pain to apply for, and you need to prove at extension requests how you've "remained extraordinary" during the time you've actually been working. As far as I'm aware, no graduate would be eligible unless they've produced some kind of world renowned thesis. Let's say you join Google as a SWE on an O-1. If you just perform your duties for the duration of the visa, you won't be able to extend. You'll have to, during the visa, continue to do something "above and beyond" (in SWE, maybe tech talks/events, host conferences, etc.) and show proof of all of this, plus obtain written documentation from employers about how amazing you are. It's not for everyone. The O-1 works for internationally regarded film directors who want to move to the US and produce work here, but it doesn't work really well for software development.
    • asadlionpk 6y ago
      O1 is not as painful as people think. I just got my 2nd O1. Didn't do much "above and beyond" in last 3 years. Or maybe I just got lucky.
      • 908B64B197 6y ago
        Would you care to give context? I see O1 mentioned rather frequently but I never saw it used in recruiting.
• rmk 6y ago
  For "exceptional" people, there's the O-1 visa category. But candidate no. 1 likely would not qualify. You seem to think that the H1 program should place candidate 1 over candidate 2. Let me give you a counterexample: Suppose you are hiring candidate 1 to write an app that will help you single men find hot women to date in a 5 mile radius in your 4-billion dollar, VC-backed startup. The second candidate is being hired into the body shop that has been contracted to develop a UI for a CAT scan machine produced by a major healthcare company. Now tell me who should be preferred. It's possible to make many value judgments like you and I have done, but at the end of the day they can't all be incorporated into the immigration law. Making the market the arbiter of what's valuable appears to me to be the least bad option, and strengthening that is the best, given the constraints. It still won't make the law conform to everyone's tastes, though.
  • alixander 6y ago
    The scenarios you’ve posed doesn’t make candidate 2 any less replaceable. Maybe candidate 1 is needed for whatever advanced AI the dating app uses, but there’s many non-foreign options for the function candidate 2 is performing at ImportantCorp.
    • lonesword 6y ago
      Yes, I think what the parent comment intended to say was that the UI for the CT scan machine is more valuable for the society (and hence candidate 2 should be given preference) than the fancy AI algorithm that goes into the dating app, even if it would actually take an ETH grad to come up with it. Yes, super subjective, but that's the point - it would be difficult to account for these things in the law.
  • nullc 6y ago
    > You seem to think that the H1 program should place candidate 1 over candidate 2. The bodyshop spams the program with a zillion and one replaceable cogs (from the perspectie of the bodyshop). So if you compare C1 with all of the alternative C2 options submitted by the bodyshop, the C2 selection is many times (even hundreds of times!) more likely to get picked.
• thecleaner 6y ago
  Its weird that people always link the "low skilled" worker to India and the highly skilled one is always someone from US or EU. Lets keep in mind that some of the most skilled engineers in the tech industry are also Indians and it might just be that the one comitting code to the Linux kernel ks also a skilled graduate from one of the top institutes in India and doesnt get a visa because of the H1B rules. Just because you're European or not Indian doesnt mean this system will benefit you.
  • 908B64B197 6y ago
    Truth is, a lot of the current spots in the quotas are awarded to outsourcing firms from a single country. I didn't want to specifically name the firms. Naming countries in my comment was insensitive.
• kamaal 6y ago
  You are answering your own question. If you had a job that could be done by both types of people you describe, why would you pay 4x extra for the former? Why should the guy who can write operating systems spend their time doing work that's below their skill and training experience? And if this person is ready to do this, why is the latter person held responsible for this? >>They'll both be listed as "computer related occupations" and apply for the same visa in the same quota. Does that makes any sense to anyone? Yes, because they are being hired to do the same job. Hiring Captain America as a guard at ToysRUs doesn't change the job description of a security guard. It just means Captain America make a bad decision to work the wrong job.
  • 908B64B197 6y ago
    > Yes, because they are being hired to do the same job. Is it? One could do both jobs (Advanced ML & QA) but I'm not sure the other could. Question is: Should the job of guard at ToysRUs be considered a specialty occupation?
    • kamaal 6y ago
      Are you even a serious programmer? Throughout my whole career I've never a had phase where I've done fixed set of things. Nor has my academic training proved to be enough to provide me for all the skill sets I needed to do those jobs. Continuous learning is how our field works. Its not just ML or any thing, tomorrow if some thing new comes up, we need to learn and work on that as well. We don't exactly toss out our workforce and re hire kids every time Kubernetes makes a release.