The entire program is a farce. It's the process generating the fraudulent "golly, we just can't find a US citizen for the job" claims, complete with fake ads designed to be undiscoverable.
The entire program is a farce. It's the process generating the fraudulent "golly, we just can't find a US citizen for the job" claims, complete with fake ads designed to be undiscoverable.
We have had the ability to recruit the top talent from around the world for generations. And most of that time we’re at full employment. This policy with squander that asymmetric advantage, resulting in less innovation, lower growth, fiercer global competition as the talent starts competing from local markets, lower job growth for American workers. This will get worse over generations because the first gen immigrants in h1b have kids. We will lose out on their future talent.
Is your main source of income investment in unlisted burgeoning tech companies? If not, you're arguing against your own wealth. Foreign labour depreciates the wages companies have to pay for employees. It has been shown again and again that concerning quantities of foreign labour is used exactly for that purpose, with no serious attempt whatsoever to try and get local talent. It doesn't have to be sinister, it's just what HR departments are used to doing again and again.
Do you know what stops Microsoft from building an office in, say, Czechia, hiring all the same people who were previously able to get a US work visa/green card/etc. but are now unable to, for the same labour, and paying Czech rates rather than US rates?
Nothing. Nothing, past tense, stopped them: they already have an office there.
Outsourcing happens but larger firms repeatedly run into the issue that management, admin, and local talent provides diminishing returns. Most of the larger US-based firms have standards that are built on decades of developed industry practices, something that can sometimes be missing from outsourced workforces on a cultural level. Hiring in domestically at least plants folks in environments where they can learn those processes over time. I suspect this is one (amongst many) reasons why US work visas are so single-employer contingent - you don't want talent you trained from the ground up to be able to easily leave for another role somewhere.
That’s not outsourcing. It’s off-shoring, which is (IMO) quite a bit easier and something that a lot of companies are fairly successful at.
Outsourcing is not new, yet they haven't done it to date. you cannot seriously think that visa are the only reason why they didn't to date, or do you?
> Outsourcing is not new, yet they haven't done it to date
I didn't say "outsourcing", outsourcing is where you have a different company do the thing (who may or may not be in the same country).
What I am describing is "offshoring" (specifically where it's the same company, though this is not strictly necessary for the word "offshoring").
> yet they haven't done it to date
- SEC filing, MICROSOFT CORPORATION, for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 2026, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/789019/0001193125263...i.e. 45.7% of their staff never even needed a US visa, green card, or HB-1.
The alternative, as we all know, is well educated people staying in their home countries and creating companies that compete globally, meaning more services will move overseas. I'm OK with that but I think we need to be honest with ourselves that in no way will reducing H1Bs (or similar) increase local wages or employment rates in the software sector.
Why "unlisted burgeoning tech companies"?? H1 Bs are going to big, publicly listed US companies. Which by the way, 60%+ of Americans own a stake in due to their 401ks, pensions, IRAs etc. So I think bringing in top talent from around the world could be really good for the average American.
I own a home health care agency in 15 states, software company, roofing company and real estate. I see the broad range of employment. My father was an immigrant. My mother is a descendant of the mayflower.
And I disagree that it has been show in har foreign labor depreciates domestic labor. In fact economic research has shown the opposite. If that were the case then we should make it illegal for people from West Virginia and Idaho to migrate to New York or SF.
Are you confident that globally uncompetitive wages are good for you long-term, though?
This might be very nice for some time, but if you "artificially" keep up local wage levels by limiting worker mobility you might set yourself up to lose the whole industry to lower wage countries (see e.g. European automotive sector).
European auto sector didn't loose because they didn't flood the country with enough low wage workers (which they did anyway since 2015) to compete with China on labor costs. They lost precisely because they gave up investing in local labor that made all the pricy high-end innovations like electronic brakes, self-driving and EV-tech, and entered in the race to the bottom to boost shareholder value while cutting the expensive innovation R&D. This strategy did wonders for EU auto shareholders for about ~10 years while the badge prestige carried a lot of inertia, especially in markets like Russia, US and China, but it lost most momentum in the last couple of years, as EU cars are now seen as dated, overpriced, cheaply made, expensive to fix and underwhelming compared to the new players from US and China. Nothing to do with lack of cheap immigrant labor.
US was investing in AI powered self-driving tech, China was investing in new EV motor and battery tech with advanced manufacturing automation to cut costs, EU makers were just reselling diesel engines with fancy badges hoping the EV and self-driving fad will pass. EU car industry went from decades of being the global trend setter in terms of designs and technology, to being the follower, at least in technology.
Also, a lot of the manufacturing costs in EU not just for the auto sector, is now majority made of taxes, compliance, bureaucracy and labor's cost of housing. If you import workers they'll be under the same high compliance rules, and same expensive housing pressures, unless you bet they'll accept to live in slum-like conditions in order to undercut the locals, in which case you might as well cut the facade and just advocate for return to slavery.
That's just one perspective and I disagree with it.
European carmakers are where they are because electromobility reset their legacy advantages (a lot of which they built up more than half a century ago on much cheaper wages); now the same dollar amount gets them less R&D output than in China, because engineers are more expensive, and production itself is difficult to keep competitive for the exact same reason (also why a lot of car production has shifted east into lower wage European countries long before Chinese cars became competitive).
If wages were significantly lower because of more labor migration, the industry would (obviously) be more globally competitive as well (I'm not saying that would be desirable, just that it's a given).
>a lot of which they built up more than half a century ago on much cheaper wages
Wrong, auto-sector wages back then were much higher in regards to local purchasing power (especially on the housing front) and also unions were much stronger. Now they're already lower class jobs. A VW factory worker could buy a house and take his family on vacation with a stay at home wife. Good luck with that today when you see how much housing prices have outpaced wage growth since then.
>If wages were significantly lower because of more labor migration, the industry would (obviously) be more globally competitive as well
You forget EU car makers have factories outside the EU, in places with much cheaper labor and less regulations. As do Japan's car makers.
>If wages were significantly lower because of more labor migration, the industry would (obviously) be more globally competitive as well
Well, if we just never freed the slaves, we would still have a globally competitive cotton industry.
> just that it's a given
Are ASML and Airbus selling well because they're cheap to make or because of their unique innovations competitors can't easily replicate?
The west's industry marches on high end innovative exports, not competing in the cheap nicknack market. If your western cars aren't cutting edge and innovative you failed. And they aren't cutting edge and innovative because you didn't invest enough in R&D at the right time, because you valued short term shareholder returns, basically the plague of most western corporation.
> You forget EU car makers have factories outside the EU, in places with much cheaper labor. As do Japan's car makers.
Yes, but many of their billions of R&D spending are still spent on (globally) very well paid (local) engineers. Not saying this is bad, but makes it harder to compete.
> Well, if we just never freed the slaves, we would have internationally competitive cotton.
The US still is the leading exporter of cotton.
> The west marches on high end innovative exports, not competing in the cheap nicknack market.
This is an overgeneralization. E.g. Several of the most successful German companies are grocery retailers (as boring and low-tech as it gets).
> Are ASML and Airbus selling well because they're cheap to make or because of their unique innovations competitors can't easily replicate?
I'm not saying you can't pay out globally uncompetitive wages as long as you're sitting on an R&D advantage, but your low-end un-innovative neighbours will catch up to you when R&D is much cheaper for them (just consider the Japanese electronics industry in the 80s/90s for example; people said the exact same shit back then until they no longer could).
>Yes, but many of their billions of R&D spending are still spent on (globally) very well paid (local) engineers.
Not true anymore. They spend more on bean counters, marketers, managers, consultants, lawyers, etc than on engineers.
>The US still is the leading exporter of cotton.
Because of imported cheap labor or because of automation at scale no country can match?
>but your low-end un-innovative neighbours will catch up to you when R&D is much cheaper for them
Only if you make poor deals where you voluntarily give them all your hard earned technology in exchange for access to their market. Otherwise Mexico and Russia would be industrial superpowers catching up to EU and the US, if all it took was neighbouring you and having cheaper labor than you.
> Well, if we just never freed the slaves, we would still have a globally competitive cotton industry.
America is the #3 exporter of cotton in the world, and the world leader in manufacturing and exporting the harvesters (John Deere, Case International) which have replaced those slaves as pickers of cotton.
The facts of the matter support your point much better than your counterfactual did (I do realize you probably did not intend to be taken literally here).
> Foreign labour depreciates the wages companies have to pay for employees. It has been shown again and again that concerning quantities of foreign labour is used exactly for that purpose
That's a (citation needed) right there.
The literature on the matter finds little to no effects of immigration on local wages. See the literature review by Kerr & Kerr:
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w16736/w167...
Key sentence in the conclusion: "The likelihood and magnitude of adverse labor market effects for natives from immigration are substantially weaker than often perceived. Within the large empirical literature looking at the effects of immigration on native employment and wages, most studies only minor displacement effects even after very large immigrant flows."
What you find in practice is both that immigrants accept lower wages, AND that local wages for natives are unaffected. Which happens because the labor market can generally take in the new labor comfortably.
Foreign labor helped build the very successful companies that have paid me extremely well.
Immigration adds to both supply and demand. It’s not at all clear that the effect should be suppressed wages.
They can help their own country with their talent, we don't "need" it to live.
You hear that a lot in third world countries where people nonlonger wanna go work.
The general idea of academia is (massive) amounts of international exchange to help ideas get spread around and, hopefully, improved upon. That is why most universities participate in student exchanges or why many academic degrees include at least one semester in a different country.
Well if you would have read just the title, these restrictions are for corporations, not academia.
I would argue this is not accurate. The Elite Overproduction theory suggests you can have too many highly educated people and H-1B requires a bachelor's at least but incentivizes higher education. However, as it stands we already have an oversupply of highly educated people. The theory predicts that having an oversupply of highly educated people destabilizes society.
I would also argue that "global talent" in practice is just creating ethnic labor castes which I would also argue is a very destabilizing structure. So I would push back on your framing that more "global talent" is always good and actually I don't believe the premise that top talent must be imported.
No one really cared when we were at full employment, the problem is that CS is the new liberal arts degree and it looks like it might only be getting worse.
Thats pretty insulting to the amount of effort required to obtain a CS degree.
Yes I know every po dunk college up and down the country added CS to their collection (because all you need is a computer lab so it goes in with degrees like Math, Physics etc).
CS even at lesser colleges requires sustained discipline in the maths, sciences, logic theory, and much more depending on the university.
Liberal Arts is a very different animal and while it can also be a very rigorous program for committed students, it has a greater opportunity for students to slack off and still graduate. It is much harder to hide and get through a CS program with this mentality and so it deserves more respect than you are giving it.
I assume they're comparing them in terms of employment value not effort required
Well if you have a liberal arts degree you might have learned something applicable to a world beyond computer programming
> We have had the ability to recruit the top talent from around the world for generations.
Right. And the practice of some of the world's wealthiest tech companies bypassing legal requirements by posting H-1B related job advertisements in the local grocery store circular and nowhere else fits that picture how?
I'm generally pro immigration, but having participated in the process, I would be willing to wager that more than half of issued H-1Bs in the past 2-3 decades had nothing to do with bringing top talent to the US. It had to do with importing cheap IT labor, which may be something we want as a society - let's have a discussion about it, I'm sure it will be civil - but isn't what H-1B was meant for.
>We have had the ability to recruit the top talent from around the world for generations.
Except these programs weren't importing top talent, but the same talent the locals have, to suppress their wages.
Good luck telling people affected by mass layoffs and getting rejections that the country need to import more talent because there's a "talent shortage".
Top talent means Nobel laureates, distinguished fellows in niche research fields, etc , not more full-stack devs and Microsoft Certified IT specialists, that's not top talent, that's average working class jobs, and the former category already has a red-carpet express-way through the US immigration system called an O-1 visa or "Operation Paperclip" in case of emergency, but H1B workers and diploma-mill grads aren't that, they're corporate welfare in human form.
In my experience H1B workers are consistently exceptional. At big tech most employees are pretty good so it doesn’t stand out, but at random fortune 500s tech teams are often led by h1bs who are clearly the most competent employees on the department even though they usually aren’t involved in management. My experience from around 5 Fortune 500 non tech companies. These companies would have big problems if they couldn’t recruit exceptional foreign workers
>In my experience H1B workers are consistently exceptional.
I never said they're bad at their job, I said they're just doing the same jobs the locals can do, nothing exceptional.
And I disagree. There are not enough locals who are able and willing to fill these roles at non prestigious non tech companies in omaha. If the H1Bs leave these companies I dont think they would be able to realistically replace them. Obviously they could find someone to take the job, I just think theyd be worse at it. Worse enough to materially change outcomes.
> There are not enough locals who are able and willing to fill these roles at non prestigious non tech companies in omaha.
Maybe those companies pay shit or offer shit work conditions?
> If the H1Bs leave these companies I dont think they would be able to realistically replace them.
What about "muh free market supply/demand capitalism"?
Because when a company can't find a worker to accept their jobs, then the government gives them a foreign worker visa to fill it, but when I can't find a job, the government doesn't give me a job or deport a foreign worker to free up a place for me, it's considered my fault or skill issue. So where's the free market capitalism there?
Yea maybe it possible for these firms to poach top talent from tech companies, but I doubt it. Even if they pay the same prestige is worse. And employees at this level are often making a mil at tech companies, non tech just cant afford that. Much more likely that they just move all tech ops overseas.
Well, the market rejected your skills, so that's how free market capitalism works. Get good, then get employed.
But no, people only take the parts of insert preferred political flavor here that they seem beneficial to them and they discard the parts that are not.
> We have had the ability to recruit the top talent from around the world for generations.
Exactly. This is the trap that's befallen Russia and India. A future generation will look around at all the smart and enterprising children of their friends and neighbors doing world-beating research and engineering somewhere else and raising their children in a foreign land, never to return.
Cultural supremacy logic wraps back around like ouroboros. The truth is that we're all better off working together, and has been for thousands of years. The idea of "winners" is an illusion.
There are a plethora of qualified Americans with CS degrees sitting unemployed. Having worked with a lot of foreign tech workers - I’d take the Americans any day.
The H1B program today acts to undercut American workers.
There are a plethora of qualified Americans with CS degrees sitting unemployed.
There's also a plethora of people with CS degrees who can't even write FizzBuzz on their own, even given a warmed-up IDE and a partially filled out skeleton of the program. And no, this is not idle speculation, I've interviewed quite a few of these people. So I wouldn't personally put much stock in "has a CS degree" as a marker of qualification for any particular job. That applies, of course, regardless of nationality.
Having worked with a lot of foreign tech workers - I’d take the Americans any day.
Having worked with many Americans and many non-Americans over the last 35+ years, I'd say there's no general difference in ability that correlates to nationality. I've worked with dumb Americans and dumb non-Americans, and vice-versa.
> There are a plethora of qualified Americans with CS degrees sitting unemployed.
Where are all these people? Every time I post a job, I get thousands of garbage resumes.
Then let Americans create unions. If this is abuse of asymmetric power then balance it. It’s not about that though it’s about nativism, racism, and punishment of liberal elites.
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I'm sorry but even as an immigrant in the USA this is bs. The h1b program brought a lot of great talent but also depressed employment rates for american graduates in computer science that's just a fact (please don't bother asking for a link google works as well for you as it does for me).
the H1B program is mostly a wage control tool for american big tech. I'm no friend of the current administration btw, I think they are monsters, but there's no reason to lie about a program that has had incredibly damaging effects on the labor market in the US.
That's not supported by economic data or wage trends. Blocking unionization is a far bigger driver than immigration. That's why Steve jobs was trying to form a nonhiring cartel before he died.
If there's any truth to what you say, then each of these immigrant workers receive a salary which is significantly higher than their US born colleagues. They are as you say "top talent from around the world". A person who is among the world's best certainly has at least double the salary, right?
Many do. Look at the ranks of founders, context level execs, all made up of a disproportionate share of immigrants. That's also not necessary to justify the proposition that immigration doesn't reduce market wages if it increases demand. It is possible that the demand for software far exceeds software developers and we could 10x or 100x employment and demand would still keep wages the same. You need to show why the fact of salary levels and directional trends are causally linked.
> Many do.
Every one of them should have at least double the salary if there's any truth in claims of their superiority to domestic workers and any truth to the claims of a shortage of talent.
The world's top athletes and artists all have salaries in 10x - 100x of the average worker in their field. And what more: Their own countries are usually world leading in those fields also. But when it comes to migrant workers, somehow they are exceptionally talented beyond what any domestic worker could even compare to, yet their own countries aren't leading in their field. Hmmmmm....
Well, the program may be poorly executed, but don't ignore the benefits of understanding and exchange between cultures. It does have that aspect to it.
But that raises the debate ... does the US really need to export MORE of its culture at taxpayer/citizens expect ? :|
As to the pause, repeal, destruction of this program, etc., however its characterized eventually, it seems to be inline with the idea of moving much of the manufacturing that left back home as well.
The psychology experts on youtube are all lamenting the disconnection of people and communities due to internet usage and less face time.
Framing that in terms of markets, the internet has empowered people to do more themselves, and rely on direct interaction with others less.
Economic shifts are behavioral shifts at the core, and in 2026 every programmer has a staff of 1,000+ unpaid AI agents at their disposal.
We can all just download programmers now. :|
> the benefits of understanding and exchange between cultures
That's not what the program is for. If that's the goal they can create a visa program with that objective. The current one had the objective of filling positions that can't be met otherwise, and is indeed a farce and fully abused to suppress wages.
I have no doubt everyone who has abused the program, has done so to the best of their abilities.
We can count how many people are truly lamenting its loss, and follow the money.
> fully abused to suppress wages
Anyone looking at the salaries in big tech will laugh you out of the room. You think the six figure salaries for writing shitty ass Go services is _wage suppression_ ?
When they're paying $125k instead of the market rate of $200k + equity, absolutely.
Six figures isn't what it used to be. I know families making low six figures who are struggling financially because the cost of living is so high now, especially food, gasoline, healthcare, and housing.
Golly gee if only that was a sign that the market is being highly distorted by the high six figure salaries, therefore demonstrating that there's no wage suppression...
> I know families making low six figures who are struggling financially because the cost of living is so high now, especially food, gasoline, healthcare, and housing.
Let's be very honest here: the only two in there that have massively increased are housing (due to the aforementioned non existent wage suppression) and healthcare (because america can't into healthcare). Families making 50k do more than fine when it comes to food and gasoline, merely because they don't have 4k of rent to pay.
You must be living under a rock if you think the price of gas or food hasn't changed recently, or that $50k is easy for a family to live on in the US. Or that the price of gas is currently caused by high wages.
And no, I don't live in a major city where rent is $4k.
I agree. We should kick out whichever government caused the gas and food prices to rise so high.
Sure. And regardless, companies shouldn't be allowed to pay immigrants on restrictive visas below market rate.
If the "shitty ass Go service" is delivering the value that software typically does then yes. The whole reason the wages were so high to begin with compared to something like a gas station clerk is that the clerk is delivering value for at most one customer at one time.
Software allows a task that could only be done manually once at a time by one person to be infinitely replicated and scalable at speeds that no single human could do, and that value only requires one person to invest resources to develop it once. Afterwards you got that multiplier of value generated.
This should be obvious but im merely describing the miracle of computing.
So if that software is generating the multiplier of value it is entirely plausible that the company is not providing appropriate compensation to the person tasked with developing that multiplier.
Just because they are high doesn't mean they are high as they should be. Big tech companies were pulled into lawsuits several times over wage suppression tactics and ended up settling.
> fully abused to suppress wages
We should all bear in mind, every government program is a market price distortion, and the workers are going to keep working.
Who they work for is all that has changed.
As someone who interviews 10+ candidates per week for high-paying software engineering jobs, the US pool is not big enough to find qualified people. It feels like H1B shouldn't be needed. But empirically, we do need to invite talented people from other countries.
Saying the pool is too small or calling something a labor shortage is trimming away a bunch of relevant detail. There cannot be a shortage, only a shortage of people 1) qualified to do the work for 2) the compensation and 3) conditions you are offering. That's 3 levers to pull: Train more, pay more, offer better conditions (remote work). Particularly compensation, I have been told that's how supply and demand work.
The current crop of AI startups offer exceptionally high salaries, to the point that San Francisco rents have almost doubled over the past 2 years. Note that the most prominent AI researchers are of Chinese national origin. We can't only pay and train our way into getting talented people. We have to expand the pool internationally.
You can’t just train people and have them be good software engineers… It takes years of training to be a good software engineer (with plenty of people flunking out during the training).
Are you selecting based on a holistic view of merit (projects, personality, capacity to grow in a role) or are you gating based on the same-old LeetCode brain teaser exams? In the latter case there is no shortage of H1B grinders who’ve spent every day for the past 6 months memorizing the puzzles to pass your screens, even if they say nothing about raw ability.
By the time a “qualified” candidate is sitting across from you, you have already created a sampling bias simply because the population of India and China are staggering compared to the US. Wow, there are so many eager candidates from India, we must have a labor shortage in the US!
You're making a few (reasonable) assumptions based on the base rate of engineering interviewing practices in the industry. I'm not using Leetcode though a coding problem is part of our onsite process. My first screen is mostly a series of knowledge questions and asking candidates to explain projects they built on their resumes. Most candidates cannot do this. They fail to explain their own projects and fail to explain foundational concepts of distributed systems.
As an interviewer I need to be able to challenge candidates to get adequate signal to make an informed selection. My pool is computer science graduates and experienced software engineers. Most candidates fail. I haven't analyzed the distribution but my best guess is that over half of the successful candidates are on work visas.
As someone who was out of work for a large portion of 2025 and attended many interviews, I found interviewing frustrating and failed many. Only after taking a couple of months sitting down and studying fundamentals, grinding leetcode, reading the latest distributed systems literature, and practicing interviewing, I discovered that I genuinely had knowledge and skill gaps. The studying actually helped me become a better engineer. I received several offers after this intensive study period.
I wanted to make a separate comment to respond to the sampling bias question. From discussions with colleagues and analysis of companies, there is a large overhang of credentialed yet low-capability engineers in many high-population countries. For example, the top Indian and Chinese companies offer comparable salaries to the US-owned multinationals resident in their countries. These are outliers.
The vast majority of candidates for Flipcart and Bytedance simply would never be able to perform adequately. These top companies pay extraordinarily highly compared to most software engineering firms in their countries, far beyond the delta between OpenAI and a typical software engineer in the United States. The quality gradient is still there. Flipcart and Bytedance need to compete internationally, so their salaries are pulled upwards substantially.
I see a lot of Polish names in those coding websites leaderboards. It seems to be working, Polish tech industry is growing, as is India's and China's. Idk, grinding seems to work if that's your issue.
So? At least they're grinding, and we as a nation used to have that American grit. Now everyone just sits on their asses and cry "unfair" when someone willing to grind gets better opportunities.
Our discipline fundamentally seeks to remove “grind”. You’re missing the point.
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Yeah, that's been my experience as well.
I never really understood the idea of gatekeeping jobs -- especially those at the very high or the very low end.
On the very high end, wouldn't you want to poach the most intelligent folks from around the world and bring them into the US? That pool of high-performers is not a big one and you're directly removing competition and silo-ing all the best people under your control.
On the very low end, those are jobs that are non-competitive and enable the low-mid-high level jobs to exist (and for those workers to be compensated better and so on). If you're looking at the US right now, a great example is to look at the agriculture industry. Farm bankruptcies increased by almost 50% in 2025 and 2026 is looking even worse. These bankruptcies in 2025 happened before diesel prices spiked by 30-40% and tariffs killed international ag-trade. A lot of those bankruptcies can be attributed to the the lack of farm workers which either cause farms to not be able to generate revenue and/or have dramatically reduced margins.
Edit: Wow, in the few minutes it took me to write my comment, there have been quite a few comments that are making the point that:
1. Companies need to pay more to get better talent.
2. The hiring process is broken and not surfacing high-quality domestic workers.
I guess my response is that I've offered and been offered compensation packages that seem to be quite strong. I worked with and know folks who have received similar or better packages and the quality of work seemed to be a bit of a crapshoot. Just "paying more" doesn't guarantee better workers (if that's even feasible or doable for the company). I'm sure that there is some sort of correlation between higher pay and better/more efficient productivity, but I don't work HR for Google or whatever so I don't have the data to specifically make a point. Empirically, my experience has been that there is a weak correlation and when factoring in $$ per work product, it becomes inefficient.
The hiring process being broken is very true. I'm not smart enough nor knowledgeable enough to even offer a fix to the problem. All I can say is that employers spend a lot of money trying to hire the best people and they still get burned/can't find a good candidate.
Paying more guarantees getting more high quality applicants. It also means more applicants who aren’t high quality. That’s why you do interviews instead of choosing randomly. If a company’s hiring process is unable to select the best applicants, that’s a separate problem.
So many employers on this thread are basically revealing they have no idea how to interview and select candidates. It has never been easier to find skilled engineers, and yet they're struggling to hire.
> That pool of high-performers is not a big one and you're directly removing competition and silo-ing all the best people under your control.
That is precisely the idea that was at an all time high during ZIRP - just (acqui)hire people and companies to make sure no one else has access to them. In an ideal world this should have been banned under antitrust regulations, but eh.
And now it has predictably blown up in our faces.
I happen to agree with you that individual companies hoarding high-performers and keeping them useless is a dumb strategy and that it should have been targeted by anti-trust.
I was more pointing out that hoarding high-performers as a country is desirable since geopolitics prioritizes different outcomes than pure capitalism.
Optimally, the US would attract the cream of the crop, the top 5% of the world and let them roam freely inside of the American system with plenty of capital (both money and labor). I'd venture and point out that many of America's greatest technological leaps were a direct result of this kind of strategy (think WWII, the space program, computing, etc, etc).
The reason why increasing wages for low-level jobs is so important is that it puts upwards pressure on all wages above them as well.
If the lowest paid lowest responsibility job has a wage increase, then any job which requires more from the worker needs to increase their salaries, or people dip out and take the easier job for the same salary.
In reality, the example is usually something like a situation where a highly stressful and highly skilled job is maybe paying $30 per hour and the worker decides to change to a menial job for $25 per hour instead or even less.
Any talk of "worker shortages" is not just a lie, it is a lie born from evil. Born out of the current geriatric ideology of hatred against the youth of your own people, which is dominating in industrial society all over the world.
Any business which cannot pay a good salary for the workers they employ shouldn't be in business in the first place. It is better for the economy that those people work with something else. Especially since a normal worker usually has an output of 5-10 times more than what they are paid, and in efficient sectors even more than that.
Why does "qualified" always mean someone who commands an inflated salary and can do the job from day one?
Why couldn't it mean someone young, with a reasonable education, who's willing to work at half the price and be trained over the course of years?
I hire new grads and experienced engineers, roughly half of who require visa sponsorship.
What exactly are you paying, do you offer remote work, do you offer training? You can find plently of excellent devs in the USA.
Pay is comparable to top companies in San Francisco. This would probably be comparable to the distribution at the company I'm at now: https://www.levels.fyi/h1b/?q=anthropic
>But empirically
Ok you said it. Where's your empirical evidence?
me: observes something
you: where's your evidence?
If you need evidence, look at https://www.levels.fyi/h1b/?q=anthropic . Anthropic seems to need to sponsor visas for their workforce as well. Just like every other large US company.
Are you hiring for in office or remote?
Then pay more or modify your requirements. Stop chasing unicorns.
We're paying top of market and compete with frontier labs. Your recommendation is to exclude candidates who require visa sponsorship?
This is a load of shit. There are millions of people out of work in the US and it's likely that tens of thousands of those are perfectly qualified developers. Assuming your expectations haven't been completely warped, your real problem is that modern hiring as a process is completely broken as a result of multiple factors.
Both could be true. Just because millions are out of work doesn’t mean every specialty has sufficient domestic talent pool. No one says we should recruit only domestic talent in sports.
H1B does not cover high talents - these are available to anyone who have barely any college education and only 40-60% of H1B visas are used in IT - rest are used elsewhere. Pretty much the claim about talents here is missing the point entirely, unless it is used in combination of "young talents", which is applicable to almost anyone studying, but 90% of them are nowhere near genius level talents, that like I mentioned before H1B simply does not cover, unless someone is lucky and employing geniuses by paying them peanuts in salary because of H1B.
Also all Fortuna 500 companies have offices abroad, where they use local talents already. Just like everywhere in USA there has been increase for roles that require higher security - those are for USA nationals and naturally they exclude any H1B visa holders.
Given that USA tech companies are laying off steadily thousands of software developers over last three years because of optimization efforts that they started around covid times as a push back against demands to raise salaries and freezing those salaries, the only use for H1B would be to put larger pressure on IT job pool in USA to clamp these salaries down.
Clearly this is something that USA administration has caught on as mass recruitment where a lot of those talents are not used is a security issue as it is unregulated. So, despite what other commenters are mentioning, stricter H1B is better for USA software developers, as slaves from H1B are driving salaries down.
You’re under including categories that while not identical are reasonably included in the argument that the domestic employment pool isn’t large enough for the talent. Dismissing “low level Java devs” ignores the fact that such skills are actually a small percentage of the available workforce.
I used to be optimistic that we could train displaced coal miners to code. This was tried in the 2010s and did not work. There is a distribution of aptitude in different subjects.
Imagine how much effort it would take to train a league of Google engineers to be NFL players. It's far better to use a recruiting pipeline of people who self-select for the role and have achieved rounds of selection for their talent.
> the US pool is not big enough to find qualified people
This is absurd. It's because you're absolutely unwilling to invest in domestic candidates and train them. You and every other employer. You are shooting yourself and your peers in the foot through this stinginess.
> It's because you're absolutely unwilling to invest in domestic candidates and train them.
I'm all for companies doing this, but the pipeline needs to be improved as whole, meaning we need to have candidates that already have enough prior education so that there's more of them that can be trained more quickly. And one way to address that is to make the entire public schooling system better through better funding, starting all the way from kindergarten through to the university system.
Just to understand your recommendation, I should create a software engineering training for candidates who do not require work visa sponsorship, but who couldn't pass the original interview, for my small software team?
And do this to avoid hiring a Chinese or Indian candidate with a master's degree from an American public university?
It's always somebody else's responsibility, isn't it? Not yours.
You haven't shared your recommendation. What is it?
You’re simply outcompeted by other employers. Get good.
NVIDIA, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Amazon, Microsoft are outcompeted because they hire from H1B visa pools? This is your assertion?
You’d get more qualified Americans applying if you offered more money.
We pay on par with the most in-demand employers in the San Francisco Bay Area, all who also hire people who require visa sponsorship. Anthropic hires many H1Bs and O-1s.
Good for you! What I said is still true.
It's demonstrably not. NVidia, Anthropic, OpenAI, Jane Street, the National Basketball League, Bridgewater, Apple, etc, all sponsor visas so they can recruit the best. Raising pay for basketball players doesn't reward exclusion of global talent.
What demonstrates that the market for programmers is not subject to the basic laws of supply and demand?
I can guarantee you that there are enough US citizen/resident programmers to meet your hiring goals. I can absolutely believe that your company can't afford to pay what it would take to meet your goals with only US persons. But "we want more than we can afford" is very different from "there aren't enough."
I don't understand why you keep mentioning other companies. What does the fact that a bunch of big companies all sponsor visas have to do with the fact that there's no such thing as a labor shortage, just companies wishing they could pay less and hire more, and acting on that wish in various ways?
The company I work at pays a similar distribution to the H1B salaries offered by Anthropic: https://www.levels.fyi/h1b/?q=anthropic .
> I can guarantee you that there are enough US citizen/resident programmers to meet your hiring goals.
You can't make that guarantee. These companies spend lots of money to hire immigration lawyers to sponsor visas and process H1B -> Perm processes. The market would absolutely reward a participant who could bypass this headache and hire only people who do not require visa sponsorship. But the counterfactual has been tried. Many startups do not sponsor visas and they get outcompeted frequently.
I can make that guarantee. You're telling me you wouldn't have enough people if you hired away every single employee of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft? Because that is something you could do with enough money.
Labor isn't some magic thing exempt from supply and demand. Pay more, get more. It works.
If you can't afford to pay more to get more, well, that happens. We don't always have enough money to buy everything we want. The fact that I can't afford a Cirrus Vision jet is unfortunate, but it doesn't mean there's a shortage of jets.
Except this doesn’t make sense if the argument is that there are a ton of unemployed CS people sitting around. The labor market is like any other market.
It makes perfect sense. I interview unemployed CS people all the time. Some excel at interviews and some don't. I was unemployed for many months myself. As an interviewer I don't see a strong correlation with unemployed status and ability to pass a rigorous software engineering interview.
The labor market is like any other market, which means there’s no such thing as a shortage, just supply and demand.
The solution is staring you right in the face: Move your business to a country where these "qualified people" live, hire there and serve that market instead.
I should tell my leadership team to move a company whose business relationships are in San Francisco, to other countries? All to avoid sponsoring people on work visas? And offshoring a business is superior to hiring people from other countries?
They made a mistake to make their company in San Fransisco, since it obviously is a pitiful backwater compared to the superior technology hubs of the world where all the greatest and leading talent comes from. You'd want to have your business there if you want to stand any chance of being in the forefront.
Besides, moving a business is a whole lot easier than uprooting people and their families and putting pressure on the local population.
I don't buy your claim of "high-paying". If you don't pay as per US resident and urban standards, good domestic candidates obviously won't bother applying.
That sounds like a serious systemic issue. What are US candidates lacking that you find in candidates elsewhere?
for interviewing 10+ candidates a week, that is just a BS claim - USA is nowhere that small
There's never a labor shortage, only a compensation shortage.
If you're doing 10+ interviews a week, likely you work in Big Tech. And that means several things have happened before you even interview a candidate, specifically screening by ATS, AI systems, recruiters and hiring managers. There are perverse incentives (eg recruiters putting people in the pipeline to boost their numbers) and there's also massive discrimination, particularly age discrimination.
Tech companies in general want to hire grads or near-grades in vast quantities, particularly from the more prestigious US colleges. You get to 40 and suddenly you don't make it through those initial pipelines before you get to interview the candidate. They're not suitable in some way. And over 50? Forget about it.
And if you do make it through these filters, you may still get filtered for not being a "culture fit", which is just code for "not like me". And if the employee pool already skews young, male and from those same colleges, "culture fit" is just a thin veneer that reinforces discrimination.
I dunno, I don't work in Big Tech and I feel the commenter you're-replying-to's concerns. There is some sort of mismatch if my pipeline is this empty and this many qualified applicants are jobless and unhappy about it. Comp is fine and people can live wherever they want, but there is no way my team is going to meet its goal of doubling in size by the end of the year.
I am also not sure the world is quite as discriminatory as you paint it as. I'm over 40. I'm a woman. It's a mixed bag; most places I interviewed during my last job search were very normal about everything. One place rejected me because I "can't thrive in a high-ambiguity environment" and I'm just like ... the interview consisted only of leetcode questions with one right answer, that I got right, so ... just say "our investors are all Republicans and I don't think we should be hiring trans people, yeah we clocked you btw." But it's honestly a lot more rare than I had expected going into it.
I don't really know what's going on with tech right now, or what the future looks like, but despite AI, despite not being fresh out of school, it all feels pretty normal to me. The ZIRP days seemed about the same as things feel now. What's changed is I can ask Claude "what would this crazy design look like?" read it, run it, and say "ewww, no, yeah I knew that would be terrible" without investing the week to write it myself. I am not sure that spells the end of our field.
> There is some sort of mismatch if my pipeline is this empty
The mismatch may just be that you have no idea how to set up your hiring tools or operate your hiring process.
Your empty pipeline is telling you that your comp is not, in fact, fine.
It’s really that simple. If you’re not getting enough qualified applicants then you need to make your offer more attractive. That could involve culture, work environment, or perks, but the biggest thing is pay.
Of course a company’s ability (or willingness) to pay is not unlimited so that may not be a possibility. But then you have to accept that you’re not able (or willing) to pay what it takes to meet your hiring desires. That’s ok. I am not able (or willing) to pay what it takes to meet my luxury-sports-car desires either.
There is an apparent contradiction: you’re offering good pay and not getting many applicants, but there are a ton of jobless programmers. How to square that? The former is something you’re directly experiencing, the latter is something you’re hearing through the grapevine, maybe getting some broad numbers for. The obvious conclusion would be that the jobless programmer situation is not nearly as bad as people say.
> only a compensation shortage.
This is said all the time, and don't get me wrong, I like "compensation" as much as the other guy, but to me this just sounds like a race to the bottom (or sky) for companies.
It's great for those compensated for sure. But what happens once the companies with deepest pockets, FAANG and such, pay the most and drain the job market, what happens to all the other companies then? It raises the bar significantly for any new startup, makes it ever more impossible for any boring, middle-of-the-road company to find anyone remotely capable. Ultimately growth of the tech sector is limited by the number of people you have available, regardless of how much you pay for them. If anything, another country with more potential talent could even surpass the one playing alone in its own sandbox.
I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, and maybe in an economic downturn it's even a good thing, I'm just saying that it doesn't come with no tradeoffs.
If your business (including your startup) relies on paying sub-market wages, that's a "you" problem. You're not entitled to underpay employees because your business can't survive if you don't.
I see this with startups all the time. Cofounders get 30-50% equity with preferences and then want to hire a lead engineer as a first hire... with 0.5% equity and a $100,000 salary.
Big companies already do a lot to pay as little as they possibly can. AI is just the latest foil to suppress wages.
Oh I don't disagree. I don't think of it in terms of entitlement, I think of it in terms of growth and competitiveness.
What I disagree with is "it's not a labor problem, it's a compensation problem" framing.
I think it IS a labor problem, and also a compensation problem. Compensation itself only solves for the local maxima.
When I see a comment like this, all I can say is that I don't believe you. You are a liar.
Do you interview people?
Not being "qualified" is simply a euphemism for not willing to work for the low wages we'd like to offer to offshore talent.
look harder.
doubt.
"qualified" : adj , willing to work for 60% of market rate.
Most developers are still overpaid from the pre-AI boom, so this sounds about right.
Which has an easy solution: you want to be part of the program, the state announces your opening nationally and internationally. That way the state knows exactly how many are applying and why
More state control? Isn't that haram around here?
I prefer state over corporate all day of the week. I have legal pathways to force the state to do things... I do not have for corporate for the same thing.
In the UK, we simply removed that requirement, so company doesn't have to give evidence of shortage and also we set the wage limit to a quarter of median earning for given profession (Labour government increased it to just half now). This means corporations have no incentive to hire local workers as it is vastly cheaper to hire (and exploit) immigrants, as they don't have means to pick and choose once they are in the country. Meanwhile local people can't find work and have to battle increased rents and pressure for access to public services. All by corporations who are very shy when it comes to paying taxes.
oh and that entry level web developer on lowest band is actually a senior systems engineer? Worry not, Home Office don't check that.
Corporations have been pulling this scam for forever. Governments too.
Department budget doesn't allow for a new Desktop PC ? Call it a "data collection terminal."
Just change the words to the ones you like, and cash those checks, easy as flying a kite ! :D
That's true, but what's new about it is the scale. It's called Boriswave and since Labour have not scrapped it, should be called Keirwave or Andywave.
The PERM process is a bit ridiculous. If followed in the spirit it was written, then PERM would be restricted to top-tier professions.
My own PERM would have had no chance of passing certification.
There are valid criticisms to be made of the current immigration system but saying "this sucks" adds nothing and is of zero value. Here, let me help:
1. Doing layoffs at the same time as hiring temporary workers is antithetical. Which is it: you can't find someone to do a job or you have too many workers? Yes, jobs aren't completely interchangeable but large companies like Microsoft hire generic software engineers. Retrain;
2. the H1B->GC funnel where H1Bs have no pre-country quota but GCs do creates a massive backlog for India, in particular, and allows companies like Infosys and Tata to keep "temporary" workers in indentured servitude for decades;
3. Despite safeguards, it's clear that temporary workers get underpaid, particularly at the outsourcing companies, so visas are used to suppress labor costs for both citizens/residents and temporary workers.
Try saying something like that.
They were also often doing basic stuff, like database programming. Even in AI, most of what they produce didn't have marketable value. So, I don't buy that they couldn't find or train anyone here to do the job.
"golly, we can't find a human being for the job, we'll have to use AI"
all that is left is to hire that human that will use AI and do job of whole department of people we did not hire...
In my experience finding good people is hard when the entire world is on the table. Limiting the pool based on stupid concepts like "nationality" is just a jobs program for the low quality people.
As long as you don't mind people remote working then no need to limit the pool nor pay visa fees.
I live near Mt. Rushmore. When my mom was a kid, working there during tourist season was a very common summer job for high school kids. Now it's not, because now temporary foreign labor by means of seasonal visa programs, complete with housing, fills those jobs each summer instead. Are American high schoolers physically/mentally unable to do these jobs? Of course not—yet these job opportunities have been taken from them regardless, replaced with what is essentially seasonal foreign-labor indentured servitude.
Honestly, a lot fewer American teenagers want/are allowed summer jobs these days. They are all focused on doing enrichment activities that will look good on a college application, and low-wage menial jobs don't count for that.
I actually think it's a great thing to let young people from around the world have working holidays in America https://www.usit.ie/experiences/working-holidays/j1-usa/
I work in the public school system and I can definitely assure you that nowhere near “all” high school students are doing what you suppose they are doing.
Sure, but the ones who might plausibly end up junior SWEs at Microsoft are.
Yes, perhaps now that they don't need to compete against all of India, they might actually have a chance at that.
Pay better.
It’s not always about pay. In some special disciplines there are only a handful of people with sufficient training or talent. We don’t hire more Americans by cutting the candidate pool. We hire more by growing the economy with innovation, startup formation, academic research for basic concepts that aren’t commercially viable, government investment in core infrastructure and long horizon moon shots that aren’t commercially feasible.
There is only one Einstein and he wasn’t motivated by money. He was attracted to what America stood for. We are losing that
To follow up on this, US PhD programs are not generally packed with US citizens, they're frequently the cream skimmed from the rest of the world. For many subspecialties, there's just not going to be enough US citizens to do all the cutting edge work that could/should be done.
We should clip a green card to every PhD we grant.
Exactly this. And these talents are both sufficiently scarce, valuable and not included in o1 visas that it makes sense to expand h1b by 10x
I mean, we also break a lot of PhD programs because due to glut of foreign workers, the work environment is hell. I've known several citizens who dropped out because it was 996 type environment and since they didn't need to visa to remain in the US, they could just move on.
Clipping a green card to every PhD is probably political non starter. As American, I'd be very leery of such a scheme.
What does it mean to "break a lot of PhD programs"? Research is competitive, and hard work. Yeah, there are easier options, but in the long run, the countries with the people willing to work their butts off academically are going to outperform ours if we can't get their best to come here and work their butts off here.
>Clipping a green card to every PhD is probably political non starter. As American, I'd be very leery of such a scheme.
There is actually bipartisan support for trying to make it easier for PhDs to stay - both parties have repeatedly introduced legislation to help with that - but it seems to keep getting derailed by arguments about other aspects of immigration reform.
Ok, but those people aren't H1B's. They were on O-1 visas.
These body shop firms are not hiring world-leading geniuses, they are getting mostly-okay Java devs who will do boring scutwork for the chance at life in America.
O-1 is a strictly regulated visa. Limited to Nobel Prize winners, Influencers, and Underwear models.
H1B is for cheap java devs.
We could also try something that has not yet been attempted: investing heavily in developing people who show signs of talent at an early age and streaming ALL children's education according to their capabilities and interests at a young age, in order to eventually bolster the available pool of highly talented people without having to rely on poaching talent from elsewhere in the world (depriving those countries of an opportunity to benefit from the highly talented people that they sweated and paid to train).
We already do this.
Is there something preventing this right now?
Political will and priorities. It seems like there's always money and enthusiasm for another war, but not to pay for uniformly decent schools with reasonable class sizes and happy, fairly-compensated teachers. Sounds too much like the S-word, probably.
What I'm suggesting here is going to require serious investment on top of what should IMNSHO already be made, because we're talking about creating 3 parallel class streams for different tiers of ability. 3 sets of lesson plans, 3 very different kinds of student with different goals and ways of approaching life. They can't just throw that at one teacher and expect success, but their current track record suggests they would sure and damn well try.
There are several reasons my mother burned out from the classroom, and she's one of many many many such cases: low compensation, vast amounts of unpaid work time developing lesson plans and grading when not in front of students, larger class sizes and no aides to help handle the stress and chaos of another 20 teenagers on top of the 25 you already had in the room, corporatization/enshittification/growing lists of demands placed on teachers to shoulder more classes or pericurriculars, and so on. Hell, I know one (1) current schoolteacher, and they're also presently burned out and on leave. Could just be a coincidence, I guess!
But it is always the pay. Corporations could easily hire American interns and train them, for money. There's millions of people that would love to leave their retain jobs for an internship at a tech company, but there's no economic incentive for the mega corps to train these people.
Tech megacorps already hire interns and pay them very generously. Like annualized 6-figure pay.
There's been plenty of incentive for people to learn to code or study other skills to get a job in tech. Why do they need extra handholding on top of that? If they could do it, they would.
That's not to say more can't be done to strengthen early childhood education or reduce the cost of college. But it's unrelated to whether big tech companies hire foreigners or not.
They train a fraction of the actual labor force. Why should the social cost of job training be put onto taxpayers and individuals, and why should employers be allowed to import labor? Employers should foot the bill for any and all education and work training expenses, and should be allowed to import 0 labor for any reason. Employers would have to compete for the best employees, driving wages up. It's not rocket science.
> Employers should foot the bill for any and all education
Why? That means any education not directly useful to employers won't be funded at all. Not how you build a society. Education should be funded by taxpayers and society because it benefits society. "Taxpayers" includes companies too, not only individuals.
> and work training expenses
They already do. Every company trains employees on their own processes and systems. New employees aren't productive for several months.
> should be allowed to import 0 labor for any reason
Then the work goes abroad. Or these companies don't grow. (Referring solely to tech companies, not outsourcing body shops).
> Employers would have to compete for the best employees, driving wages up.
I understand if you say outsourcing body shops are a problem here. Tech megacorps pay a king's ransom in wages. They've already driven wages up. Any citizen not already working there either doesn't want to for any amount of money or is not good enough.
Companies are going to spend as little money on everything as possible, labor included. If importing labor wasn't cheaper, they wouldn't do it. It's cheaper than the alternative of training Americans to do the role.
> It's cheaper than the alternative of training Americans to do the role.
These people don't exist. Not for Big Tech roles.
You already hit the nail on the head - companies don't want to spend money. You think they like paying new grads (citizens and foreigners) $300k? Why would they do it unless they had no choice?
Sorry but I’ve hired hundreds of people. Not everyone is motivated by pay. I’ve successfully recruited people that turned down hiring pay for better title, project type, flexibility for family reasons, and been unable to recruit people with higher pay.
American policy should be to increase the total number of jobs not restrict where we hire from. We can and should increase our population to 1billion people. If China can employ that many so can we.
What you mean is the pay wasn't high enough to convince people to do a particular job, not that you couldn't find qualified people. Alternatively, you could have made 1 role into multiple, so things like 'work life' balance weren't impacted. This would cost the employer more money, so obviously can't be considered.
American policy should help average Americans, not corporations. There's a larger wealth disparity now than ever. Importing millions of white collar jobs to suppress wages only exacerbates that.
Your presentation is a false choice. It is both the case that corporations have to much market share, employment bargaining powers, anticompetitive collusion and immigration isn’t the main cause of harm to American workers. It can also be simultaneously true that specific roles and industries have unique characteristics. It can also be the case that some jobs have a maximum market pay rate based on the economic activity connected to the job (a job as farm worker picking strawberries can’t pay $100m because no market for strawberries would exist at the price needed to pay that salary). It is also the case that many people aren’t motivated by money.
Where I agree is that most Americans could be paid more and would be id employment law, antitrust, were enforced and union busting was reversed
Than $228k? That's what Microsoft pays an entry-level SWE right now. Where are all these qualified people for whom $228k out of college isn't enough money?
I dunno, parent claimed he can't find good people. He could hire them away from his competitors by doubling their salary if he needs them that badly.
Remember how competition was supposed to work? (psst https://conversableeconomist.com/2025/10/31/the-silicon-vall... )
So the competitors also pay more. Existing workers, domestic and foreign, get paid more (hurray). But it doesn't mean more domestic workers get jobs.
Instead work is either not done (less revenue for the company to expand), or is sent overseas. If management gets more comfortable with work going overseas it becomes a very big problem for domestic workers.
I've seen the comp packages. I'm pretty sure that's not the problem.
Same words are said by hotel owners unable to find eg. cleaning ladies for hotels over here in my small country.... touristy area (=very few locals), relatively far away from larger towns with more local population, everything is expensive there (eg. lunch and parking), and they offer minimum wage and then complain.
For minimum wage you can work in your home town, basically anywhere.. if you expect someone to spend 45minutes each direction on a bus for you and pack tupperware lunch, because there are no cheap "daily meal" restaurants around, you'll have to pay more... but hey, our government does the same, and there are always poorer countries with very desparate people.
The same applies to every other job, but you seem to not pay enough to even get someone good from poorer countries.
Just pay more, and you'll get good people, from your town even, not just across the whole country.
This might sound controversial but an office job at Microsoft is a teensy-bit more desirable to a citizen than a job cleaning motels.
Microsoft pays new grad SWEs close to a quarter million dollars. Plenty of citizens would gladly take that money if they could land the job.
Sure, but op wants 'good', how much are those people paid?
Also, how much does rent in a 20-minute-drive circle around microsoft cost? And proper health insurance?
I live in a small european country and i know quite a few people who went this route (usually it's google), and after two-three years of burnout, those people come back, because while earning less in numbers over here, they can get a normal 8 hour job (no overtime, no weekends), proper time off (25, 30 days per year, unlimited sick days of course), and still save enough that even if the social pension system fails, they'll have enough to live comfortably.
>And proper health insurance?
You think Microsoft doesn't pay for "proper health insurance" for their workers?
It's 100x better than the failing public system I have in my rich EU country.
>and still save enough that even if the social pension system fails
In which country is that so? 40h is more or less standard for full-time everywhere I've been so far in white collar careers.
> Sure, but op wants 'good', how much are those people paid?
You're proving my point. Paying more, beyond a certain point, doesn't increase the supply of "good" people. It just moves them around. After that the work starts going to overseas offices.
> I live in a small european country and i know quite a few people who went this route (usually it's google), and after two-three years of burnout, those people come back
Usually with several hundred thousand dollars in the bank. Financially they're at least 10 years ahead of their peers who stayed home. And that's after paying the higher rents and health insurance in the US.
Not close to that much left over, a lot of money is spent in USA, you're in a foreign country and you spend money on tourisy stuff, plus you're usually "alone" there, and spend more in bars, restaurants, etc.... many came home with very little left over (except a nice line in their CV).
You're paid good money here for 37.5 hours per week, for ~10 months per year, sure the net number is higher in US, but calculating what's left over per hour of work is not that much in favour of US, especially considering what you can buy with that. One of the friends who worked there (google in sf) spent over 80hours per week in office, something like that is not just unheard over here, but also illegal. He was basically working two jobs there while being paid for one.
And yes, of course at some point (when you earn enough to live comfortably) your priorities become free time and other things, but again, that means that the company needs to pay more, to get another person to split the work. That's why everyone who did that says that the experience was great but that it's not worth it, neither financially nor health-wise.
>You're paid good money here for 37.5 hours per week
In which country? I'm also in Europe, but never seen such low working hours. Maybe some nordic country?
I'm interviewing for a major french company now and their work week is still 40h and money isn't amazing at all.
So can you share this utopia where I can make great money for 37,5h/week?