``Firms get creative to work around visa bottlenecks'' is an article on Career Journal Asia which talks about how big companies like Google, Microsoft and Intel cope with H1B visa bottlenecks. Most of these big companies can afford to wait a year if their hires for this year (FY 2008) did not make the H1B lottery. In the mean time the new hires either stay in school or in another country where the company has operations. Microsoft for example plans to have a new development center in Canada. Big chip makers also have operations in India and China and temporally locate new hires who did not make the lottery in those places.

Unfortunately not a lot of mid-sized and small-sized companies can afford to take such measures to secure the foreign new hires. The growing cost of legal expenses for H1B visas and the uncertainty in securing a visa for their hires are making the small companies shun away from foreign technical workers.