Doubtful; I make more money than you, and I only make high liquidity investments, so I came away looking pretty nice the last time (too young to have made any money from 2008 though)
A lottery among the academically qualified students would produce a class with many fewer African American, Native American and Latino students which would be politically untenable. Those cohorts score much worse than caucasians and asians on standardized tests.
The data is pretty shocking and closely guarded by the testing people who believe they'd be asked to shut down altogether if it got out.
This would only happen if you set the threshold too high. If Harvard wants to be an institution with lots of AA, NA and LA students then just set the threshold at a level where these groups can enter the lottery.
A lottery at any threshold will create a student body biased away from blacks/natives/latinos, since the entire bell curve of their SAT results is to the left of whites/south Asians/east Asians. (Unless the top students stop applying, which is an unacceptable outcome for any elite school.)
A lottery appears to be a reasonable solution but it has a problem. The admissions system has two objectives - selecting students according to criteria that Harvard deems important and second, giving the public perception of selecting quality students. If it was publicly known that getting was a lottery, then the perception of quality takes a hit.
I mean, if we really have this many "perfect on paper and equivalent" students applying, toss out everyone who was less than perfect and then run the lottery on the cream of the crop.
Imagine if the lottery produced only White and Asian males being accepted. The meltdown and tears that a even a less than 0.01% event would cause prevents the lottery concept. I personally agree that a lottery is a valid suggestion but I don't think it would ever happen, at least completely random without "supervision"
How could a lottery produce such an outcome with tens of thousand of people in the pool and thousands being chosen? Set a threshold to get into the lottery (say a SAT score of 1200) and then choose at random.
Such an approach will likely encourage diversity as people who think they don't have a chance under the current system will apply.
In Harvard wanted to stay a top school, they wouldn’t set the lottery threshold to 1200, they’d set it to 1500, with minimum 4.0 GPA. They’d still have a huge pool of applicants, but it would likely end up with a class around half Asian, which is what they are explicitly trying to avoid.
If Harvard can be a top school despite accepting people with scores of 1200 (which it currently does) then why can't it come down to this level for everyone and run a lottery?
I am a hiring manager at an SV tech company. I have interviewed and hired many engineers on H-1B visa. They all, in my understanding, posses the required " theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge in a field of human endeavor". The number of such hires definitely fill the biggest conference rooms I have seen. Also, when I attend reputable tech conferences, many speakers I meet are on H-1B.
That being my experience, I don't think the claim made by OP is true. Evidently, we have different understanding of what constitutes specialized skills. Why is a good developer not considered to posses "specialized knowledge in a field of human endeavor"?
Because that should be table-stakes for the profession.
And too many H1-Bs are just awful. I don't necessarily blame them individually, but it's a perverse suboptimal system.
If I ever run my own business, I'm going to put a 300-800% price hike on any work where I have to interface with Tata or Cognizant, or ATT Global Services, or the other kinds of consulting bodyshops that currently employ the vast majority of H1-Bs. At least for non-repeat business. Find a decent team and giving them normal rates or better would make sense, but there are others you wouldn't touch with a thirty foot pole made of rolled hundred dollar bills.
It is just not worth the headache dealing with that caliber of people, and the cultural impedance. Unless they are willing to pay through the nose.
> Because that should be table-stakes for the profession.
By your definition, most of the 736 players who played in FIFA 2018 world cup few weeks ago do not posses any special athletic skills - they merely posses skills that are table-stakes for their profession. Yet, most reasonable people would not hesitate to call those players elite athletes.
What I am trying to point out is that H-1B is not about finding that outstanding developer. These are people who have a high level of skill in a specialized occupation.
Edit: you expanded on you original one-liner with anecdote. I am quoting the one-liner I was reponding to here.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that educated, competent workers in useful fields are exactly the kind of people you would want to have immigrate and become permanent citizens. So the whole H1-B charade is rather stupid from that perspective- if they are really effective workers that cannot be found domestically, why put them into a shitty indentured servitude?
You deal with too many sub-par people that tick a certain box, and your estimation of people that tick that box naturally goes down. There are very good people that are chained at companies with H1-B visas, but it is hard to battle what Bayes' Theorem tells you.
The main problem I have with H1-B visa use cases (or at least my perception and understanding, based on the fact that I regularly see 8x2 grids of H1-B visa application stacks that go as deep as 2 novels posted as required by law at my work) is that they're mostly a vehicle to reduce wages or arbitrarily discriminate against otherwise qualified native applicants.
In the former case, H1-B visa holders are basically 100% dependent on their employers for continued employment - if they lose it for whatever reason, they get deported. This leads to flagrant abuses on behalf of the employers - demanding overtime & lower wages that they couldn't demand from those employees' domestic counterparts.
In the latter case, I work at one of the various companies that prides themselves on having an extremely high hiring bar. Of course, this doesn't really mean we hire the absolute best, it just means that we toss a lot of applicants in the bin because they weren't able to put on as good of a dog and pony show as expected - our interview process does not even kind of resemble what people at my company do on a day to day basis, or even measure the skills it takes to really succeed. So, of course, when we exhaust the local talent pool through arbitrary pickiness, we just add in the labor pool from abroad, rather than just... you know, reconsider our hiring standards and maybe give people who are already here, qualified, and looking for a good job one of those good jobs. This in turn dilutes the labor market - people who would have gotten that cushy job through merit are pushed down into positions that don't require as much luck to get, and the people who would have gotten those jobs are pushed into the jobs where you pretty much just have to chat up the interviewer, and so on.
This whole inane process is pretty much the cause of the absurdity of the American tech industry, where you either get super lucky and wind up in a lower-mid 6 figure job with crazy benefits, or you wind up in a mid- to low- 5 figure job where your boss both shits on you constantly and simultaneously doesn't really understand what you're doing day to day anyway. There's a middle ground, but like barely if my last job search is anything to go off of.
> Personally, I'm of the opinion that educated, competent workers in useful fields are exactly the kind of people you would want to have immigrate and become permanent citizens. So the whole H1-B charade is rather stupid from that perspective- if they are really effective workers that cannot be found domestically, why put them into a shitty indentured servitude?
I don't disagree with you on these points.
My disagreement was to the unsubstantiated assertion by User23 that the number of engineers who qualify for H-1B in spirit and letter would be a handful.
There are 265 million professional soccer players according to FIFA* and 736 were in the world cup. If the US accepted foreign developers at the same rate, that is 0.00027%, then of the 14.6 million that would be 41 individuals rounding up. So yes, they would comfortably fit in a large conference room.
You are misreading that document tremendously. It states that 265 million people are actively involved in playing football, not professionally, just playing in any way. That number includes "professional footballers, registered players over the age of 18, registered youth players under the age of 18, futsal players, beach soccer players and unregistered occasional players".
I don't think the violations of H1-b law are coming from the clause you quoted.
It's coming from the parts about:
1) the employer must try to hire Americans first for the job and needs to be able to show that they haven't been able to hire Americans for the job
2) if the employer laid off people in essentially similar jobs recently before or after the H1-b application, the application is not supposed to go through
3) they need to pay the H1-bs the same wage as similar non-H1-b people at the company, or the prevailing wage of the area (whichever is greater)
I have personally seen all of these violated, would not be surprised if the vast majority of H1-bs are violating at least one of them. It's violated intentionally and everyone is doing it, because they can hire H1-bs cheaper and they have better retention (or less job mobility). Frankly it's a disgrace.
I personally am not anti-immigrant and would prefer the immigration laws to be more efficient, and spread the immigration over a wider range of jobs, instead of disproportionately affecting my profession (software engineering).
#1 - the employer must try to hire Americans first for the job - is not true. The employer need to only attest that the employment of H-1B non-immigrants does not adversely affect working conditions of workers similarly employed.
#2 - if the employer laid off people in essentially similar jobs recently before or after the H1-b application, the application is not supposed to go through - is also not true. Although, it is true that H-1Bs cannot be used to break a strike, lockout etc.
#3 - they need to pay the H1-Bs the same wage as similar non-H1-b people at the company, or the prevailing wage of the area (whichever is greater) - is true
I think you are confusing the employment-based green card with an H-1B visa (the employer must attest to #1 and #2 to apply for EB green cards).
They are requirements of the Labor Condition Application (LCA), and the LCA is a requirement for the H1-b, so it is correct to talk about them as requirements of the H1-b. It's not a green card thing. http://www.visapro.com/resources/article/h1b-labor-condition...
LCA is a requirement for H-1B, and thus you are right that it is correct to talk about requirements for LCA as requirements of the H1-B. But, you are wrong that those listed by the GP are indeed requirements for LCA. From the link you posted:
The Labor Condition Application (LCA) contains basic wage
and location information about the proposed H1B employment.
The LCA contains the rate of pay, period of employment, and
work location.
It also contains four standard attestations that the employer
must make.
Those four are listed in the link I posted earlier [1]. 2 out of the 3 the GP listed do not form part of the attestations.
Again, are you confusing LCA [2] with labor certification [3]?
Technical ability alone does not qualify one for an H1b visa. You need to be above and beyond what is able to be sourced in America. Specifically, the skills need to be so advanced that you cannot find any American workers to fill the job.
I imagine this test would discredit nearly every H1b software hire.
>Technical ability alone does not qualify one for an H1b visa. You need to be above and beyond what is able to be sourced in America. Specifically, the skills need to be so advanced that you cannot find any American workers to fill the job.
> You need to be above and beyond what is able to be sourced in America.
One workaround tactic I've read claimed on forums is the requirements stipulate that the candidate must work with offshore business analyst teams in their native language, which is not English. I can't believe it would be that easy, though. If that actually passes muster with federal immigration review, then these more stringent rules are just a paper tiger and political bluster.
It will discredit nearly every H1b in industries (like tech) where workers switch jobs often and are more competitively compensated. That’s what the system is intended to curb.
I find that all “best practices” are a lazy way to avoid justifying a position. Often the advice is almost always incorrect or situational, but the claim maker hasn’t done the work to understand why.
