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At the last startup I worked at, our CTO was on a visa. To satisfy the "no one in the US can fill the CTO role", they took out an advertisement in a San Franci

• dec0dedab0de 2y ago
  CTO actually makes sense for an h1b though, it’s a high paying job that can depend greatly on the technical and creative skills of the individual and how they mesh with the company. The problem is when it’s someone pumping out code, or doing tech support for half the cost of the local competition.
  • bluefirebrand 2y ago
    No, this is backwards CTO is not such an exceptional role that you can convince me that a company couldn't find a single person in America who would be qualified to take it It's also a highly sought after role, so people would generally be willing to relocate for a role like that H1Bs are designed to fill labour shortages, where your local labour market is saturated and you are struggling to find local talent or attract talent from further away, so you can import workers Using a visa designed to fill labour shortages for an executive position like CTO is frankly an abuse of the system
    • returningfory2 2y ago
      But arguably any labor shortage can be fixed by just having way higher wages. Like if Google is struggling to hire L3 entry level engineers, can't they just offer $1 million/year salary? Then of course they will get the people they want. To me, the point of H-1B and similar programs isn't "we can't get the individual staff we need". It's rather that at a society-wide level, having more software engineers at an overall lower salary can be more beneficial to the country than fewer engineers at a higher salary. And I feel that the success of Silicon Valley kind of shows this: if we didn't have any immigrants to the US, maybe the salaries would have been higher, but there is simply no chance SV would have reached the scale it has.
      • lotsofpulp 2y ago
        > It's rather that at a society-wide level, having more software engineers at an overall lower salary can be more beneficial to the country than fewer engineers at a higher salary. Beneficial to owners of capital in said country. Not so beneficial to non owners of capital (also usually labor sellers) in said country.
        • s1artibartfast 2y ago
          It's not so binary. Economic growth and prosperity does benefit a broad swath of society.
          • mistrial9 2y ago
            btw the actual couch used by Marie Antionette is now on display at the San Francisco Legion of Honor.. a very expensive couch! at least a dozen people must have benefited economically from that couch.
            • s1artibartfast 2y ago
              They most certainly did! However, that is a pretty tortured comparison if that was the case. I think I would be harder to make such a cynical zing about the net benefit of allowing 10,000 doctors to immigrate.
              • lotsofpulp 2y ago
                That’s true, but in reality, the US chains the engineers and doctors with the specter of losing their visa and arduous paperwork over their head so that they are coerced into selling their labor at an even lower price.
                • s1artibartfast 2y ago
                  I'm the first to admit it isn't perfect, but that doesn't mean there is no net benefit. hundreds of thousands of people are paid market wages on H1B visas and many get green cards. On balance, this is good for consumers and citizens. I feel like people have a gut reaction to injustice and harm where they want to trash the whole system, not realizing that would be an even greater injustice and harm. It is a counterproductive distraction to real change and improvement. It just scratches the emotional itch of moral outrage and superiority.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
• giobox 2y ago
  This used to be fairly common for H1B roles of any level - I don't find it surprising almost no one wants to fire a colleague ultimately, so doing whatever you could to reduce the number of applicants while still paying lip service to the rules is the logical outcome, rightly or wrongly. For what its worth, towards end of 2010s USCIS were starting to clamp down on this and were being a lot stricter about the job being advertised appropriately for the role (you submit evidence of the advertisement during the PERM process).
• apwheele 2y ago
  A tell for fake firms in my local newspaper is they ask for a snail mail resume. These appear to me to be more like shell companies submitting multiple H1Bs as far as I can tell though, not legit firms saying they cannot hire any US.
  • kyawzazaw 2y ago
    real firms do this too. Pick up a local newspaper that is not well known.