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rayiner • yesterday at 7:15 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

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.


Replies

jselysianeagle • yesterday at 7:56 PM

> 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.

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buzer • yesterday at 9:02 PM

> 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).

kentm • yesterday at 7:28 PM

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.