[wolfgke]

> Do you really think there aren’t Americans that could fill those roles? Of course there are but it would cost more.

"Shortage" means that even if you pay insane salaries, you will not get a qualified employee. Thus a thought: make it a requirement for H1B workers that they are paid, say, 3 times what the average of a typical salary for a related job is. This way companies can solve their shortages via H1B, but they will only do it to stop shortages of qualified workers (for an insane price) and not to reduce costs.

[jldugger]

By your definition, is it ever possible to have a labor shortage? As long as there's one qualified individual who doesn't already work for you, there should be some "insane salary" that would entice them, no?

[wolfgke]

> By your definition, is it ever possible to have a labor shortage?

Yes, it is quite possible, though not common. Centrally jobs, where you need highly intelligent people with qualifications that only very few have (and are insanely hard to get) or an insane amount of experience.

Think of people with decades of experience developing chip architectures from ground up (example: Jim Keller).

Think of willing to apply mathematicians of Field-medalist quality to work on your insanely hard problems (example: Microsoft Research (Station Q) applied Michael Freedman to work on the mathematical foundation for topological quantum computers; or it is well-known that Terence Tao also does consulting work for the NSA (source: http://www.smh.com.au/good-weekend/terence-tao-the-mozart-of... )).

Or think of gurus in AI/machine learning of an above-ordinary-human level of competence.

[jldugger]

And how many visas do you think this "literal world expert" definition would allow? 200?

[wolfgke]

> And how many visas do you think this "literal world expert" definition would allow? 200?

I can only do Fermi estimates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem ) on this kind of question - which surely many people on HN can do better than me.

But I am aware of companies that actually do have this kind of problem (not in the extreme of my previous post, where I exaggerated my point somewhat to make it more marked):

They are looking for some kinds of people with some very specific and rare qualifications who are rare and hard to find and if they really do find such people, they of course pay such people really well. In other words: Their problem really is finding such people and not the money. So in this case there is a shortage of people and not of money.