Yes, it's common in game companies to hire people with strong engineering experience into basically QA positions, where they—surprise—end up "helping out" on st

Yes, it's common in game companies to hire people with strong engineering experience into basically QA positions, where they—surprise—end up "helping out" on stuff above their pay grade. A way of avoiding this would just to be to have an absolute salary threshold. Say, all H1B job offers must have an $100k+ salary. That would allocate them to the parts of the economy where workers are actually severely lacking, and valuable enough to the companies that they're willing to pay premium prices to get them. Alternately, make it a bidding system instead of a fixed number: there are 50,000, or 100,000, or whatever H1B visas, and they go to the companies that offer the highest salaries (thus indicating the highest demand). If you claim that there is a lack of workers in an area but you aren't willing to pay more than $60k, then I'm going to be skeptical about just how much of a critical skills shortage there is.