4 ms·

The change i would like to see is an auction system for work visas. If this is for extraordinary talent, the auctioning it by salary should make it more fair.

The change i would like to see is an auction system for work visas. If this is for extraordinary talent, the auctioning it by salary should make it more fair. If someone is offered a $500k/year job and another $50k/year the $500k year job is the more in demand.

huevosabio 3y ago
Yes, and increase the number of visas by 10x
vkdelta 3y ago
This won’t work. 1/ this will incentive IT and software jobs and marginalize other fields with lower pay (physics, mechanical, chemical, etc). 2/ this would mean only bigger software companies would get a chance and people would willing to work in startups will stand lower chance. What we need is a way to avoid abuse by body shops.
- light_hue_1 3y ago
  Of course this will work. We want the people who do the jobs that have the most impact on the economy. > 1/ this will incentive IT and software jobs and marginalize other fields with lower pay (physics, mechanical, chemical, etc). Why!? If those people are important they can be paid well too. There are plenty of chemical engineers that make good money. > 2/ this would mean only bigger software companies would get a chance and people would willing to work in startups will stand lower chance. Startups can pay too. In any case, most startups don't sponsor H1Bs because of the uncertainty associated with the process.
  - tomohelix 3y ago
    Do those chemical engineers make the same amount of money as a software dev with the same amount of experience? A fresh ChemE grad would be lucky to land a 120K job as a process engineer. Very lucky. An entry software job is 150K. Does this mean the a CS grad is on average more impactful to the economy than a chemical engineer? Not all industries can pay as much as software. A PhD with an extra 5-10 years of industrial experience may get a 200K salary in biotech, often less. A CS bachelor with 1-2 years of experience would get that 200K. Pay doesn't always equal the value of your contribution, especially if you compare them across different fields.
- fallingknife 3y ago
  Why are either of those things a problem? Why do we need to spread H1Bs between industries? Why do small companies who pay less deserve cheap foreign labor over large companies who pay more?
  - tomohelix 3y ago
    Because software isn't the only industry critical to an economy, others are too. You can argue that pay=value to the economy but in practice, you can't equalize value and pay across all industries. Here is an extreme example: no matter how good a high school teacher is at teaching and innovative classroom management, no school would pay them 300K a year to teach because the average salary for this role is 60k. A more realistic example is a biotech PhD scientist with years of experience and proven impact in pharmaceutical industry. You would be hard pressed to find a company willing to pay this scientist 300K a year (avg salary for principal reseach scientist in SF is 200K). Value and pay aren't the same across industries. Someone can still contribute the same value but the field they are in simply doesn't have the economic profitability required to pay them the same way software does. In fact, software is the anomaly in compensation. Making a policy that benefits only one type of industry over everything else is simply bad policy.
- adrr 3y ago
  Other fields can get an O-1 Visa to get extraordinary talent. H1B is the bottom rung and should have a floor set by marketing conditions. Body(Tata, etc) shops aren't the only ones abusing it.
- Reubend 3y ago
  Your first point is great. But I don't think the second one is relevant. The government shouldn't fight for lower paying jobs at the expense of higher paying ones. There are a limited number of visas granted each year, and higher pay is a signal from the market that a particular position is _actually_ more difficult to fill. If startups can't afford top talent, then surely they can hire American workers instead?
jltsiren 3y ago
O-1 visas are for extraordinary talent. H-1B is for ordinary people with some education or work experience, and supposedly only in situations where such talent is in short supply in the US. What is missing is the middle category: a visa based on objective criteria that lets people work in the US, if their accomplishments are sufficient that it's reasonable to assume that their presence would be beneficial to the country.
- screye 3y ago
  It's tricky. In reality, an O1 can be extremely hard to get in tech. All tech O1s that I know of are PhDs and many PhDs have been denied O1 because they worked in an applied role, in industry or immigration officials woke up on the wrong side of bed. On the other hand, even the most mundane TV actor will get an O1 without much issue. A PhD exists for a certain kind of person, and can feel like mind killer to many others...that sentiment is not new in tech. Mining papers and patents until you're O1 worthy is not impossible. It just feels like a useless detour to life, that you'd take only so you could get an O1. As someone with a couple of tier 1 papers and a decent amount of industry work, the best research is never allowed to be published.
  - jltsiren 3y ago
    O-1 can be difficult to get as a corporate employee, because the criteria are about extraordinary ability rather than career success. You have to show that you are more than the sum of your experiences. That you have individual achievements beyond what can be reasonably expected from a successful professional. That's obviously easier in fields based on building an individual brand. On the other hand, if your best works are somebody else's trade secrets, can you really demonstrate that you are exceptional?
nemonemo 3y ago
In that case, I would think the company should also show that an equivalent job is offered to non-visa worker with a similar pay. Without that, such rule would not be sustainable.
- slaymaker1907 3y ago
  That's already supposed to be the case, but the problem is that it is ridiculously easy to abuse as companies will just do stuff like low-balling salaries and putting really specific requirements on the job posting. Instead, we really need to be giving visas to *people* and not *corporations* since this whole program is predicated on the idea that certain industries have shortages of skilled workers.
lukeschlather 3y ago
It's not though, it's for "specialized" talent. O-1 visas are for people with extraordinary talent. https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/h-1b-specialty-occupations https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/h-1b-spec... https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary-workers/o-1-visa-individuals-with-extraordinary-ability-or-achievement https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary... Originally H1Bs required $60k/year salary, which was in 1990 and indexed to inflation would be $140k. I don't think there's any need at all for a bidding process, the minimum salary just needs to be raised to $140k and indexed to inflation. (As it should have been to begin with.)
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fishtoaster 3y ago
That idea is covered in the bottom of the article. The problem is that it also biases towards much more senior roles. One scenario we generally want to handle is: a person comes to the US, gets an advanced degree in a high-demand field at a US university... and then is immediately kicked back to their country of origin. H1Bs can help that person stay here and put down roots. But a fresh college grad is never going to be able to compete in a salary-based auction like you're describing, so pretty much all young, ambitious, well-educated people will get the boot.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  Companies might be forced to hire Americans for junior software engineering positions instead of claiming they “can’t find any” qualified applicants. Fine print: qualified applicant must be willing to work at lower salaries and than their experience would otherwise demand on the open market.
  - belltaco 3y ago
    They will just setup offices in Canada instead and hire the exact same people like it already been happening a lot since the last administration. US's economy will lose out because tech workers earn and spend a lot.
    - janalsncm 3y ago
      They could try, but Canada’s talent pool is a lot smaller than the U.S.
      - belltaco 3y ago
        Canada has very liberal immigration policies for tech workers compared to the US, so the same folks that arrive on H1B to the US go to Canada instead from their home countries and are hired there by US companies. No super long green card queue, and citizenship only takes 3 years after getting a green card instead of 5. Microsoft started a large Vancouver office right across the border. For team cohesion in large teams they're more likely to hire additional folks there rather than in the US. The time zones are the same as the US. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-04-20/h-1b-workers-are-leaving-trump-s-america-for-the-canadian-dream https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-04-20/h-1b-work... https://www.businessinsider.com/h-1b-visa-rejects-moving-to-canada-2019-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/h-1b-visa-rejects-moving-to-... That'd be turbocharged if there's actual H1B restrictions or bans. Canada even started a program recently that directly targets H1B workers being pushed out of the US and it was oversubscribed very soon. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2023/07/02/canadas-immigration-rules-boost-companies-and-h-1b-visa-holders/?sh=24aa2af47dd7 https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2023/07/02/canad...
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gumby 3y ago
The gaming of H-1 visas affects other sectors than senior devs in tech! I was on the board of a school that teaches in a foreign language. We used to recruit teachers from countries where that language is used, because we followed a foreign curriculum too. Teachers look for new jobs in April/May to start in August. We used to get them H-1s. But once the H-1s were exhausted in October it became impossible to bring teachers over.
paxys 3y ago
If you want to only import investment bankers, quants, HFTs, lawyers and business executives then sure. People who fill critical gaps and add the most value to an economy are rarely the ones who are paid the highest salaries for it. What instead needs to happen is that visa officials need to be trained to understand the meaning of terms like "speciality occupation", "highly specialized knowledge", "extraordinary skill" and "lack of qualified applicants". This would automatically filter out the hundreds of thousands of H-1B applications put in by companies like Cognizant, Infosys, TCS and Wipro every year. I'm willing to bet we wouldn't even need a visa lottery if applications were just required to meet the minimum bar that the law already prescribes.
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rmk 3y ago
Many doctors in rural areas are H1Bs. They do not make 500k per year. It would be a genuine loss to us if we couldn’t attract and keep them because of changes to the system. It must be noted that many hospital systems are nonprofit and likely not subject to H1 caps though. It would be nice to hear from a doctor on this topic.
- belltaco 3y ago
  Many doctors are stuck in decades long green card wait and subject to the whims of USCIS. https://money.cnn.com/2018/06/08/news/economy/immigrant-doctors-green-card-backlog/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2018/06/08/news/economy/immigrant-doct... Many emigrating doctors are choosing to go to Canada instead to avoid this nonsense.

huevosabio 3y ago

Yes, and increase the number of visas by 10x

vkdelta 3y ago

This won’t work. 1/ this will incentive IT and software jobs and marginalize other fields with lower pay (physics, mechanical, chemical, etc). 2/ this would mean only bigger software companies would get a chance and people would willing to work in startups will stand lower chance. What we need is a way to avoid abuse by body shops.

light_hue_1 3y ago
Of course this will work. We want the people who do the jobs that have the most impact on the economy. > 1/ this will incentive IT and software jobs and marginalize other fields with lower pay (physics, mechanical, chemical, etc). Why!? If those people are important they can be paid well too. There are plenty of chemical engineers that make good money. > 2/ this would mean only bigger software companies would get a chance and people would willing to work in startups will stand lower chance. Startups can pay too. In any case, most startups don't sponsor H1Bs because of the uncertainty associated with the process.
- tomohelix 3y ago
  Do those chemical engineers make the same amount of money as a software dev with the same amount of experience? A fresh ChemE grad would be lucky to land a 120K job as a process engineer. Very lucky. An entry software job is 150K. Does this mean the a CS grad is on average more impactful to the economy than a chemical engineer? Not all industries can pay as much as software. A PhD with an extra 5-10 years of industrial experience may get a 200K salary in biotech, often less. A CS bachelor with 1-2 years of experience would get that 200K. Pay doesn't always equal the value of your contribution, especially if you compare them across different fields.
fallingknife 3y ago
Why are either of those things a problem? Why do we need to spread H1Bs between industries? Why do small companies who pay less deserve cheap foreign labor over large companies who pay more?
- tomohelix 3y ago
  Because software isn't the only industry critical to an economy, others are too. You can argue that pay=value to the economy but in practice, you can't equalize value and pay across all industries. Here is an extreme example: no matter how good a high school teacher is at teaching and innovative classroom management, no school would pay them 300K a year to teach because the average salary for this role is 60k. A more realistic example is a biotech PhD scientist with years of experience and proven impact in pharmaceutical industry. You would be hard pressed to find a company willing to pay this scientist 300K a year (avg salary for principal reseach scientist in SF is 200K). Value and pay aren't the same across industries. Someone can still contribute the same value but the field they are in simply doesn't have the economic profitability required to pay them the same way software does. In fact, software is the anomaly in compensation. Making a policy that benefits only one type of industry over everything else is simply bad policy.
adrr 3y ago
Other fields can get an O-1 Visa to get extraordinary talent. H1B is the bottom rung and should have a floor set by marketing conditions. Body(Tata, etc) shops aren't the only ones abusing it.
Reubend 3y ago
Your first point is great. But I don't think the second one is relevant. The government shouldn't fight for lower paying jobs at the expense of higher paying ones. There are a limited number of visas granted each year, and higher pay is a signal from the market that a particular position is _actually_ more difficult to fill. If startups can't afford top talent, then surely they can hire American workers instead?

jltsiren 3y ago

O-1 visas are for extraordinary talent. H-1B is for ordinary people with some education or work experience, and supposedly only in situations where such talent is in short supply in the US. What is missing is the middle category: a visa based on objective criteria that lets people work in the US, if their accomplishments are sufficient that it's reasonable to assume that their presence would be beneficial to the country.

screye 3y ago
It's tricky. In reality, an O1 can be extremely hard to get in tech. All tech O1s that I know of are PhDs and many PhDs have been denied O1 because they worked in an applied role, in industry or immigration officials woke up on the wrong side of bed. On the other hand, even the most mundane TV actor will get an O1 without much issue. A PhD exists for a certain kind of person, and can feel like mind killer to many others...that sentiment is not new in tech. Mining papers and patents until you're O1 worthy is not impossible. It just feels like a useless detour to life, that you'd take only so you could get an O1. As someone with a couple of tier 1 papers and a decent amount of industry work, the best research is never allowed to be published.
- jltsiren 3y ago
  O-1 can be difficult to get as a corporate employee, because the criteria are about extraordinary ability rather than career success. You have to show that you are more than the sum of your experiences. That you have individual achievements beyond what can be reasonably expected from a successful professional. That's obviously easier in fields based on building an individual brand. On the other hand, if your best works are somebody else's trade secrets, can you really demonstrate that you are exceptional?

nemonemo 3y ago

In that case, I would think the company should also show that an equivalent job is offered to non-visa worker with a similar pay. Without that, such rule would not be sustainable.

slaymaker1907 3y ago
That's already supposed to be the case, but the problem is that it is ridiculously easy to abuse as companies will just do stuff like low-balling salaries and putting really specific requirements on the job posting. Instead, we really need to be giving visas to *people* and not *corporations* since this whole program is predicated on the idea that certain industries have shortages of skilled workers.

lukeschlather 3y ago

It's not though, it's for "specialized" talent. O-1 visas are for people with extraordinary talent. https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/h-1b-specialty-occupations https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/h-1b-spec... https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary-workers/o-1-visa-individuals-with-extraordinary-ability-or-achievement https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary... Originally H1Bs required $60k/year salary, which was in 1990 and indexed to inflation would be $140k. I don't think there's any need at all for a bidding process, the minimum salary just needs to be raised to $140k and indexed to inflation. (As it should have been to begin with.)

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fishtoaster 3y ago

That idea is covered in the bottom of the article. The problem is that it also biases towards much more senior roles. One scenario we generally want to handle is: a person comes to the US, gets an advanced degree in a high-demand field at a US university... and then is immediately kicked back to their country of origin. H1Bs can help that person stay here and put down roots. But a fresh college grad is never going to be able to compete in a salary-based auction like you're describing, so pretty much all young, ambitious, well-educated people will get the boot.

janalsncm 3y ago
Companies might be forced to hire Americans for junior software engineering positions instead of claiming they “can’t find any” qualified applicants. Fine print: qualified applicant must be willing to work at lower salaries and than their experience would otherwise demand on the open market.
- belltaco 3y ago
  They will just setup offices in Canada instead and hire the exact same people like it already been happening a lot since the last administration. US's economy will lose out because tech workers earn and spend a lot.
  - janalsncm 3y ago
    They could try, but Canada’s talent pool is a lot smaller than the U.S.
    - belltaco 3y ago
      Canada has very liberal immigration policies for tech workers compared to the US, so the same folks that arrive on H1B to the US go to Canada instead from their home countries and are hired there by US companies. No super long green card queue, and citizenship only takes 3 years after getting a green card instead of 5. Microsoft started a large Vancouver office right across the border. For team cohesion in large teams they're more likely to hire additional folks there rather than in the US. The time zones are the same as the US. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-04-20/h-1b-workers-are-leaving-trump-s-america-for-the-canadian-dream https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-04-20/h-1b-work... https://www.businessinsider.com/h-1b-visa-rejects-moving-to-canada-2019-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/h-1b-visa-rejects-moving-to-... That'd be turbocharged if there's actual H1B restrictions or bans. Canada even started a program recently that directly targets H1B workers being pushed out of the US and it was oversubscribed very soon. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2023/07/02/canadas-immigration-rules-boost-companies-and-h-1b-visa-holders/?sh=24aa2af47dd7 https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2023/07/02/canad...

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gumby 3y ago

The gaming of H-1 visas affects other sectors than senior devs in tech! I was on the board of a school that teaches in a foreign language. We used to recruit teachers from countries where that language is used, because we followed a foreign curriculum too. Teachers look for new jobs in April/May to start in August. We used to get them H-1s. But once the H-1s were exhausted in October it became impossible to bring teachers over.

paxys 3y ago

If you want to only import investment bankers, quants, HFTs, lawyers and business executives then sure. People who fill critical gaps and add the most value to an economy are rarely the ones who are paid the highest salaries for it. What instead needs to happen is that visa officials need to be trained to understand the meaning of terms like "speciality occupation", "highly specialized knowledge", "extraordinary skill" and "lack of qualified applicants". This would automatically filter out the hundreds of thousands of H-1B applications put in by companies like Cognizant, Infosys, TCS and Wipro every year. I'm willing to bet we wouldn't even need a visa lottery if applications were just required to meet the minimum bar that the law already prescribes.

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rmk 3y ago

Many doctors in rural areas are H1Bs. They do not make 500k per year. It would be a genuine loss to us if we couldn’t attract and keep them because of changes to the system. It must be noted that many hospital systems are nonprofit and likely not subject to H1 caps though. It would be nice to hear from a doctor on this topic.

belltaco 3y ago
Many doctors are stuck in decades long green card wait and subject to the whims of USCIS. https://money.cnn.com/2018/06/08/news/economy/immigrant-doctors-green-card-backlog/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2018/06/08/news/economy/immigrant-doct... Many emigrating doctors are choosing to go to Canada instead to avoid this nonsense.