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> * The government can give out N visas in an auction. Firms bid via legally-binding salary offers. The N highest salaries bid get the visas, and the government
by exelius 12y ago
> * The government can give out N visas in an auction. Firms bid via legally-binding salary offers. The N highest salaries bid get the visas, and the government takes a small additional payroll tax as the only fee.
This would be doomed to fail. Professional services firms can outbid basically everyone because they can turn around and bill that person out at 5x their salary.
The visas will never adhere to the workers for one simple reason: the visa process exists to benefit the companies, not the workers. The workers are not US citizens and have no leverage with the US government. The visa programs only exist because the US-based companies want them - and those companies DO have leverage with the US government.
- rayiner 12y ago> This would be doomed to fail. Professional services firms can outbid basically everyone because they can turn around and bill that person out at 5x their salary. So what? Shouldn't the companies that can create the most value from the employee be the ones that get to hire them?
- exelius 12y agoI wouldn't say that professional services firms really create the most value - far from it actually. They're just able to pay more because there's relatively little risk involved for them.
- x0x0 12y agoyet you admitted it 3 comments up. pay = value.
- exelius 12y agoIt's two different markets - professional services firms have far greater negotiating power and sales forces than individuals.
- x0x0 12y agoIf under the proposed system (h1bs granted in descending sort order of salary), product firms were losing out to professional services firms, then the product firms are free to pay their employees more. If they don't create enough value to justify paying more, well, then the system works as designed.
- exelius 12y agoThey would - but the principal benefit these sort of H1Bs provide is a communication conduit back to offshore labor pools.
- jahmaiosullivan 12y agoWell said! You'll never outbid a body shop. They'll essentially spend whatever it takes to get the workers here and bill them out for 3x whatever they paid. If you as the product company don't like it tough luck. This is because the people is the product for these companies, product companies have other things to concentrate on.
- eli_gottlieb 12y agoIf they're charging 3x whatever they paid, that pushes up prices for the companies hiring the body shops, which incentivizes finding cheaper competitors to body shops in the labor market -- like hiring domestic workers, for example. The pricing mechanisms of the market will optimize out a balance.
- tptacek 12y agoJust a random, unhelpful ping into this conversation to point out that the economics of billing out a programmer for "3x" (I assume you mean "3x the fully-loaded cost of the programmer as an FTE for the consultancy, broken out by hour") is a lot more complicated than this thread makes it sound. Companies aren't simply using those "3x" contractors as a shortcut to avoid finding and hiring full-timers. A big chunk of that "x" is business value created by the consultancy and sold to the client; the biggest chunk of that involves risk management.
- eli_gottlieb 12y agoSure, great. Honestly, I don't mind what companies want to do with contractors and contracting. I've been a contractor for a short time. If a big chunk of the 3x is business value created, great, go ahead. My only actual point here is that rather than trying to tailor a visa just for the special needs of Silicon Valley start-ups, we should be tailoring high-skilled work-visa programs for letting the market decide what constitutes high-value work, viz: work that people will pay a lot for.
- rtpg 12y agoCharging more doesn't mean you're creating more value on an intrinsic level, it just means somebody's getting richer.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago>This would be doomed to fail. Professional services firms can outbid basically everyone because they can turn around and bill that person out at 5x their salary. So what? The purpose of skilled-worker immigration in public policy is to maximize productivity, not to cater to the industry to which people on Hacker News happen to belong.
- exelius 12y agoI wouldn't say that professional services firms maximize productivity; they just have good relationships and are more effective at selling their services than an individual developer can ever be.