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.
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?