[rat9988]

I'm not american, but it seems to me there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B.

I'm not sure anyway what is the relationship between the potential difficulty of hiring new folks, and firing current folks in USA to offshore roles, are relates.

[Rijanhastwoears]

> it seems to me there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B.

Anecdotal so hold on to your salt but in my social circle here in the US natural-born US citizens vs visa-holders self-select for types of jobs. For example, if my the starting pay is < $80k most of my natural-born American friends don't bother applying. Whereas, my visa-holding friends routinely go well below $50k when searching for jobs or "2 year internships". So, when a company posts a certain type of a job they have a certain demographic in mind already.

Not saying my US friends are uppity as much as visa holders are desperate.

[ge96]

I suppose that is "in the tech field" too, as non-tech people would be happy with an $80K job where a lot are under $50K

I will say my first tech job was $40K and now I have to have a six-fig job just because of my debt.

[x0x0]

> as visa holders are desperate

That is the point of most of these programs. If we (as a country) do h1b, those people should be on an automatic path to a green card.

[weaksauce]

you see the reason h1b is so popular with the c-suite in a lot of cases is that you get absolute loyalty to a company that holds all the power of your being allowed to stay in the us. you lose the h1b job and you have limited time to find a new valid employer to sponsor you or else you go back to your country. it's one of the reasons musk loves it for twitter.

[square_usual]

H1B transfers are easy. You aren't beholden to an employer.

[ProllyInfamous]

The "problem" is that you have to compensate natives better / treatment.

[waynesonfire]

Just look at the open roles for these companies, all India. They're not hiding it. Don't even need H1B.

[adamsb6]

There's not a surplus of American developers that can pass interview loops at top tech employers.

[Xirdus]

They are creating this very surplus by firing 16,000 people who already did. And that's on top of all the mass firings last year.

[Sevii]

FAANG has been engaged in mass layoffs for two years now. How can you possibly make the claim that there is a surplus of people who can pass the interview loops? Obviously, there isn't because they are firing people who passed those loops.

[varjag]

Quality outcomes of top tech employers are still somehow lacklustre despite all that.

[toomuchtodo]

https://layoffs.fyi/

The domestic talent exists, and companies can leverage it or be punished financially for attempting to “contain labor costs” through leveraging visa workers.

[eli_gottlieb]

Then why all the layoffs? You don't fire people you've got a shortage of.

[VirusNewbie]

Ok, then hire them on an O-1 visa. H1B is the problem as it creates a indentured servitude class that is going to work for less.

[pdntspa]

bUt wE wAnT tHe BeSt oF tHe BeSt!!!11

[dheera]

> there are enough american job seekers in CS

To be blunt: Not enough qualified ones. Look at the names of all the top AI papers of the past 3 years, not too many are American.

When you get bullied in American public schools for being a "nerd" and liking science and math, your country doesn't exactly produce a lot of state-of-the-art STEM professionals. You get a small handful of exceptional people who overcame the adversity but that's it.

The top 0.1% are perhaps mostly American-educated. The top 10% on the other hand are mostly not American. And you need the top 10% to code for the top 0.1%.

[hajile]

Producing AI papers isn't the job requirement for 99.9% of STEM jobs.

I won't talk about other fields, but American devs (regardless of race) tend to be much more passionate about computer science and (perhaps as a result) tend to be much better at their job than those from the big-name outsourcing countries.

I was tasked with finding an Indian hire a while ago. I lost count of exactly how many people I had to interview. (I spent a huge portion of my time for over a year doing interviews). We were looking for a senior developer, but settled for at most an intermediate developer. We swapped between multiple top-rated Indian recruiting firms, gave automated tests, had their interviewers ask pre-screening questions, but nothing helped improve candidate quality in any real way. I caught more people than I could count cheating answers on technical interviews (probably how they got past the screeners). We didn't even look at anyone without at least 10 years of "experience", but less than 10% of candidates could write basic fizzbuzz (and some of them accidentally showed that they were using GPT to try to code what we wanted because they didn't have a clue).

It may be an anecdote, but the sample size was quite large and we are a F500 company with the ability to attract talent, so I think its likely that we were attracting better-than-average candidates too.

EDIT: I'd add that it's not just my team. I've sat as an observer for a lot of other hiring interviews and they had the same problem. Across our company, we've had massive turnover in our outsourced India centers because the people they hired did such poor work.

[cultofmetatron]

> When you get bullied in American public schools for being a "nerd" and liking science and math, your country doesn't exactly produce a lot of state-of-the-art STEM professionals.

Its worse than that. when I lived in america, I found that being a software engineer was a dealbreaker when it came to dating most women. Imagine my surprise going to other countries and finding that my chosen profession made me high value proposition to most women.

[vineyardmike]

> Look at the names of all the top AI papers of the past 3 years, not too many are American.

There are plenty of Americans who don’t have a European names.

[tmoertel]

> When you get bullied in American public schools for being a "nerd" and liking science and math, your country doesn't exactly produce a lot of state-of-the-art STEM professionals. You get a small handful of exceptional people who overcame the adversity but that's it.

Is bullying nerds still happening? It was commonplace when I was young in the 1980s. (In fact, it was so common that it was the basis of the 1984 movie Revenge of the Nerds.) But I had thought the social status of nerds and geeks had leveled up a few times since then. Did the level-ups not happen?

[efskap]

What's an American name? Are you referring to WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) names?

[VirusNewbie]

Sorry man, American raised autists beat chinese 996 every day of the week. shrug.

I mean that in the cultural sense, not racially. ABC autists are S tier too.

[SilverElfin]

I’m not sure why you’re getting downvoted. The most important paper in the AI era was written by a team of immigrants.

[yodsanklai]

> there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B.

As an interviewer in a big tech company, it seems all candidates I interview are foreigners who often graduated in the US. Either the company discriminates (which I really doubt it does), or there aren't enough qualified Americans for some jobs. And even if there are, the largest pool of candidates, the better.

[a99p]

> And even if there are, the largest pool of candidates, the better.

More competition is not inherently "better" nor does it necessarily yield greater innovation. Trying to impose arbitrary competition as some abstract principle is just masochism.

[zdragnar]

Big tech companies are biased to sourcing from big name universities that have a lot of foreign students, and big tech companies were much more likely to go through the effort of H1B than smaller companies. As such your candidate pool is more heavily skewed than elsewhere.

[eli_gottlieb]

1) There's a very reasonable chance the company discriminates. Sorry, but once bitten, twice shy. One company gets caught at it and the whole industry develops a reputation.

2) If you've got a problem finding candidates, there's 16,000 more on the market now. Congratulations!

3) If you think there must be something wrong with those 16,000, well, that would explain where your pipeline is going wrong.

[coliveira]

It's really easy to see that big tech is interviewing only people who passed an initial filter which at this point is AI based. They're clearly filtering for some characteristics they want in a candidate, and most probably the filter is giving you the people you mentioned.

[pickleRick243]

Better for whom?

[SoftTalker]

"foreigners who often graduated in the US"

This is still the case in US Comp Sci programs. There are some Americans in these programs but it's mostly Indian and Chinese. The American kids gravitate to the business schools.

[snerbles]

The company itself might not discriminate as a policy, but some hiring managers certainly have their preferences. Or exclusively pull talent from their overseas cousin's brother's spouse's college roommate's consulting firm that is most certainly not a grift.