[harichinnan]

Agree. H1B goes to some sketchy companies and for jobs that replace Americans. The lottery is the culprit here. Companies that face skills shortage don't get enough H1Bs.

Many H1Bs like myself were educated at taxpayer expense in their native countries. US essentially gets them for free to help fuel silicon valley and other tech hubs.

Skills shortage is real. If you are in a position to hire people, you would understand. You can't train people to perform at a silicon valley interview level no matter how much money you pour into training courses. Proper education from a university is needed to clear the high bar for most people. Free college education like in government run colleges in India would solve some of the skills shortage.

[throwaway537383]

Talent shortage is real, but it's not because people can pass the SV interviews. Blind is full of stories of people who go on to work at a FAANG after a few months of LC. Proper education has nothing to do with it - the way hiring is done by them has been cracked years ago (there are even books about it). It's because most companies don't like to train and they want to pay pennies to new engineers.

I am an immigrant myself, but I don't think the US gets anything for free when it gets an educated H1B. It's a trade off, you get more opportunities than any other country can give you. It's up to you to be able to identify them.

H1B fraud is pervasive at this point and it needs a major reform. I have friends who work in immigration and it's obvious that some schools in India (JNTU for instance) are diploma mills that teaches nothing and ends up with people who should never have a degree to begin with. They exist just to ship people to the US through networking. Then there is the fraud where people from different countries come do their masters at Maharishi International University (or similar) and, once again,study nothing and get a degree. Finally the cherry on top is a lot of the people who were in H1Bs become rich by creating staffing companies bringing more H1Bs and paying them pennies. The government only does a bit of enforcement really. One of the few good things Trump did was to enforce the rules more.

Most H1Bs need a lot of training to be productive. I have worked with many. The H1B program - when it comes to STEM - was created to bring very educated people (think top universities with good grades, IIT and similar). Unfortunately, the many who should not have gotten one in the first place, create the problems for the ones who should truly qualify to get an H1B.

[baskire]

There’s no skills shortage. Just an unwillingness to take a risk on someone outside the normal profile.

I’ve done interviews where we passed on a candidate who’d be educated and onboarded within 1.5 years. Except nobody wanted to take that risk as we’d rather hire the person who can start today.

If there was no h1b program, we’d of hired that American and trained them.

[scarface74]

And as soon as that person got trained, they would jump ship.

[peteradio]

What skills shortage have you witnessed?