That may be true, but remember; founders are much important to YC's bottom line than the employees that those founders who become successful may or may not hire later.
Ehhh, that's pretty cynical. I don't want to blindly support YC, but this seems fairly debatable. YC wants to give founders resources to succeed. One necessary resource to succeed is employees. Given the current tech hiring climate, I wouldn't be shocked if more foreign employees leads to a measurable and significant improvement in their bottom line. I think you will need to make a few too many assumptions to argue that one is definitively better for their bottom line.
Perhaps one appeal of this approach, though, is that this effort aligns better with legislator's "bottom line" - if you look at their bottom line as job creation.
So for a rather refreshing change, tech employers should be honest. There is zero engineering shortage; instead, they want to use h1bs to drive down the prevailing wages. There are also plenty of very skilled mid-career engineers who have left the valley for the midwest because of the better net financial situation when a starter home doesn't cost $1.1m. If valley employers paid better, or got their shit together and pushed the governments here to allow affordable housing, they'd have plenty of engineers available.
I do believe talking about H1Bs for employees (non-founders) and its effect of driving down prevailing wages is somewhat off-topic.
I myself am an Indian citizen. I studied in Boston, moved to California with an upperclassman and started a company during my OPT. The company is fairly well-rooted while bootstrapped, but doesn't have massive funding in place yet. Towards the end of my OPT, I tried to apply for the H1B just because I wanted to continue working on the company I started, and because I'd come to call California home.
Are you suggesting my team find an American engineer of equal skill take my place in the tiny company I started for the no-salary I was earning, as cofounder? I'm confused.
As it stands I didn't get through the H1B lottery two years in a row, and am now pursuing this O1A visa, although this being my first startup (and job) out of college my track record is a bit sparse.
h1b is flat on topic: see comments below. The act of legislating is trading between competing interests; various people are attempting to use startups as a whole to get self-serving visa changes with zero to negative benefits to the majority of the members of the startup community: non-founders.
On to you: your situation is the exception to the common use of h1bs. You're probably a giant minority. The common use as far as I know of h1bs is to hold down wages of engineering. Microsoft and yahoo laying off engineers while simultaneously applying for h1b visas trivially demonstrates the lie in the "engineer shortage" nonsense.
Employee friendly changes to h1b visas could include many things: removing the tie between the sponsoring company and the employee (so if he or she is underpaid he or she can easily switch jobs); or aggressive investigation of prevailing wage requirements (oops there goes Infosys' business model); or 5+ year bans on h1b applications post layoffs. But bluntly, I think we have more than enough visas already. I'd change my mind if I saw engineering wages rise, concerted action on the part of ceos to help control housing costs, and concerted action on the part of ceos to help fix US education and increase the domestic engineering pipeline; or concerted action on the part of ceos to police visa fraud (see infosys, or epic systems, etc).
Theoretically, the H1B application requires evidence that the employee is receiving market-standard pay for the role fulfilled. However, there's a gradual effect over time of course when there's a lot of expats who are willing to work at the lower bound of that pay. So Re: H1B, I pretty much agree with you, and I think immigrant employee visas need to be restructured to really punish the Wipros/Infosys' that just import manslaves that are fed change to output code, lowering the average engineer's pay.
I was raising the point regarding my position because that seemed to be the thesis of the article -- for people more in my position than for employees of companies on the scale of Microsoft, etc. We are not entering the US with the objective of taking other people's jobs. The only reason I applied for the H1B was because it was the legit path with the most reasonable chance to get cleared. I think it's the wrong kind of visa for a founder to attempt to get, there just isn't a better one.
So YC and people like me are hoping for a visa similar to the O1A, except right now that is expensive to file, vague in the conditions that need to be cleared, and usually needs you to foot a fat lawyer bill too. And it's a bit of a stretch to be applied to founders. Essentially, the existing visas are all hardly different from 10-15 (or more) years ago, times have changed, and the government has done nothing to accommodate the changes in the economy.
yeah, but we both know that evidence is farcical. Epic System's practices are pretty well documented. And just this week, I was hit up by a recruiter looking to pay "up to 120k" for a data scientist with 4-7 years experience, ms/phd, and experience with hadoop and large-scale stochastic optimization. It's not hard to figure out why someone's paying for a recruiter to try to fill a job with a stupid low salary.
Refusing to support companies asking for friendly visa changes for free is employees' best bet at getting said companies to support employee-friendly changes.
Re: the one I know the most about, "removing the tie between the sponsoring company and the employee (so if he or she is underpaid he or she can easily switch jobs)" This is partially done already in AC21: http://immigrationroad.com/green-card/ac21-portability-chang...
The key word is portability, which is a much, much weaker tie between the sponsoring company and the employee, both in terms of job title/salary and switching employers.
However, it's incomplete because employer-based (EB) green card applications aren't portable, so there's still a horrible incentive system there that has a huge negative impact on H-1B-affected wages. Green card portability was included in S744, the comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) legislation, that just failed.
That said, these are all legislative changes. With the failure of CIR, it will be more than a few years before another major effort is attempted on immigration, and at least until January 2017 until even small immigration reforms will be proposed in Congress.
Flatly, there is no chance of any legislative effort succeeding in coming months or even years.
^ This is the exact debate that should be avoided for startups to be successful in driving through ANY change through DC.
I don't know enough to say what the correct position is on H-1Bs, but I know that many people believe strongly in both sides. We're too small a community to solve the problem here, so all we can do is be caught up in it and have our proposals die like flies on a spider's web.
The debate is going on already. Businesses either will or won't be able to buy themselves a self-serving change. But that debate is at a level much higher than that which the startup community can influence.
When I say we in this case, I mean the HN crowd and similar. We as in Americans can debate this issue all you like. But if I want a startup visa, then I want to avoid getting caught up in the H-1B debate.
As an employee, I don't particularly want a startup visa: I'm neutral to slightly negative on the idea. But certainly we -- as employees -- should get something in exchange for support. That's how the legislative process works. Bluntly: you're attempting to use support from the startup community to actively buy the change you want while, as employees, we get nothing in return.
