Comment by kentm
7 hours ago
> They flood the H1B lottery, crowding out (imo) more deserving high-skill folks.
I really wish this was quantifiable in some way -- I have no way to tell if this statement is accurate.
I've worked with some very skilled H1B that definitely deserved to be here. If companies like Infosys or Cognizant are taking "slots" that could be filled by people like those H1Bs, then I'd consider that a big problem. Companies like these are not doing "highly skilled" work.
Edit: I kinda wonder if the "highly skilled" value judgement is a holdover from the era where people thought you were a genius if you touched a computer.
> "If companies like Infosys or Cognizant are taking "slots" that could be filled by people like those H1Bs, then I'd consider that a big problem."
It's hard to get data, but this is precisely what appears to me to be happening.
There's a limited number of slots by country. These companies specifically target those slots. I've worked with these folks (who are wonderful people, to be clear), and also had multiple friends with very niche, in-demand skills need to leave the country.
I don't have the data, but at a micro level, the system does appear to simply be set up backwards.
Remember that H1B is a lottery. If you are skilled you will be around the skilled people who won the lottery. But most of the jobs aren’t going to those people. The lottery treats a job at Google and a job at WiPro as being the same in terms of odds.
> If you are skilled you will be around the skilled people who won the lottery.
But it's a lottery that's truly random then there's no reason to believe that those that won the lottery would necessarily be highly skilled, right?
Anecdotally, over the course of my ~15 yrs of experience in the industry, I've definitely met some brilliant people on H1-B visas but I'd put that estimate at around ~30% or so, the rest were just people of average skill / talent doing work that a US citizen could be doing.
Again, just my personal observation, others may have wildly differing estimates based on places they've worked at.
If H1b were about getting the most talented, it wouldn't be 75-80% from just one country and another 10% from a second country. I'd expect it to be very evenly distributed.
3 replies →
I mean that each employer petition on behalf of a worker is selected randomly. But, prior to the petition, the workers are hired by the companies in a non-random fashion. That’s important to keep in mind because I think a lot of people are like “oh the H1Bs I met working on AI at Google are super smart, so the program must bring over the best of the best.” But the system treats an H1B petition from WiPro the same as one from Google. Because the system is a lottery, it can be true that there are super smart H1bs working at Google and also that most of them are doing jobs many Americans could be doing. The lottery system makes the bar quite low and the spread very wide.
> The lottery treats a job at Google and a job at WiPro as being the same in terms of odds.
This actually changed this year. Applicant gets 1-4 tickets depending on their pay relative to job/area. So $500k Google engineer has quite a bit higher chance than $100k WiPro one.
Of course it still has issues (Google probably has 1-2 possible applicants for that position and would prefer all of them, Wipro has 100 and cares more about what % of them pass).
Fair. I think there's a discussion to be had on whether it should be a lottery, but I don't think that discussion is feasible in the current political zeitgeist.
The people that deserve the jobs are Americans. It doesnt matter if a foreigner is more skilled--the American people don't want to complete for jobs in a global labor market.
What is an American if not a temporarily foreign worker ;)