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.

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buzer 9 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> 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).

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jselysianeagle an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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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hajile an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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rayiner 43 minutes ago | parent [-]

I would expect tons of H1Bs from former soviet bloc countries that have incredible math and science education. The fact that the H1B program isn’t clogged with Russians and Ukrainians is evidence something is amiss.

	▲	novok 12 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You'll notice it follows a population distribution of the world, with higher weighting from less developed countries. Soviet bloc people are not a high %age of world population and also tend to be captured more by europe since it's closer. People from developed countries tend to have less incentive to move on top of that. Indians have a further advantage of already knowing english on top of that and you get our current distribution of mostly people from india, china, canada (proximity, easy TN visa and english), europe with significant slavic representation and then everywhere else in the tech industry.

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rayiner an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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kentm 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.