It's possible that there's a large body of citizens with technical degrees that theoretically could fulfill those jobs, but that doesn't mean that they have the skills or the applied knowledge to perform at the standards required for those jobs. People like to poke at this argument, but any technical person knows that claiming that you know a technology (e.g: a programming language) doesn't equal to being great at working with that technology.
Every company has the right to enforce a hiring standard and most top companies will have a very high one. I don't think this has to do at all with formal education but rather with experience and skill. This applies to anyone regardless of nationality or origin.
Anecdotically, some of the best American born programmers I have met in my life, don't have an undergrad degree or dropped before graduating. They are all employed at top companies and have always managed to stay employed and keep growing their incomes steadily.
Either way, H1-B is a mess and should change for the benefit of everyone affected directly and indirectly by it. This means American workers, internation students, foreign talent and companies.
I fundamentally disagree with this statement. At top tech companies, I have come across enough mediocre hires who prepared enough for a technical interview to get "in" the company, but are otherwise doing very mundane work or require a ton of direction.
In industry, I've come across with even worse hires who couldn't even program.
I don't believe there's a shortage of talent in this country.
Do you have any experience in hiring people? East coast here and its impossible to find citizens who can code FizzBuzz. Those that can already have a job and don't come to interviews.
There are multiple thousands of very high paying security related job openings that need citizens only, because of clearances.
Zero percent unemployment: https://cybersecurityventures.com/cybersecurity-unemployment...
https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/tech-cybersecu...
The few citizens who apply to our non prestigious company are competing against a pool of talented H1Bs (not all H1Bs are body shop employees; many are graduates of fine American schools... we’re talking MIT and CMU), yet because of the pool they are in, they often come up short. The most competitive citizens tend not to want to work for non prestigious companies, so we get the less competitive citizen candidates and more competitive non citizens.
I don’t want to say this is the norm out there, because it is not, but to those who have misgivings about H1Bs (the non body shop variety), I’d be interested to hear your stories about your experiences hiring and where/how you found your quality citizen/LPR talent pools (I’d be inclined to hear from employers and hiring managers rather than anecdotal hearsay about a friend of a friend).
Just so you know, that's illegal discrimination.
By requiring a clearance they are fighting for people from a very limited pool. If they really want to fill those jobs they'd allow clearable candidates, which would allow them to pull from a much larger pool.
However I do think that is not a binary issue that can be blamed on a single cause.
There's a range of things that could affect the outcome of a hiring decision and if H1-B is one of those reasons (let's say out of bad faith someone hires under H1-B because they want to pay them less), then is obvious that there are many other factors and biases that are affecting the outcome of how technical talent is hired in the US. Croyinsm, sexism, racism, ageism, broken hiring practices, corporate politics; just to mention a few.
That's easily viewable as evidence that offer is lower than demand: even the top (presumably, picky) top tech companies have had to resort to sub-par hires.
Sorry, I realized that I missed a word there when I wrote that line. I meant:
> But this biases the playing field in favor of those immigrants graduating from American degree mills.
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2011/01/20/tri-valley-university...
Consider two statements:
A) Most immigrant graduates are of low caliber.
B) Most immigrants of high caliber have graduate degrees.
In my experience, both statements are true.
Disclosure: Immigrant, hiring manager at reputed SV company, with UG degree from my home country.
Citation needed.
In any case, here you go: https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Unautho...
You then come back with an article titled "Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population Residing in the United States: January 2014", when the discussion here is about students gaming legal immigration. What relevance does that have to the topic, again?
Its pretty clear that you've made up your mind about what the state of the world is (from various anecdata) and don't really care what the statistics really say. I will leave this as my last comment about this issue.
Undergrad is very expensive in the US, even at some public universities. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this put American graduates at a disadvantage?
If I attend a US public university and pay via loans, I'm now competing for a job with Indian and Chinese students who completed a graduate program (anecdotally, these candidates are preferred by HR and sometimes hiring managers). Alternatively, the US student can stay in school for a grad degree and take on more debt.
That's the general pattern I've seen at the big tech companies anyway. Person A is from some tiny school in the Midwest and wanted to work here but never even got an interview after graduating. Person B is from Hyderabad who just graduated with a masters CS degree and is a new hire on the team.
To be clear - I'm not arguing against immigration or blaming foreign students at all.
I have observed that people in the category B rank are willing to take less pay and deal with a ton more bullshit (politics, grind, etc.) because it's not as easy to switch employers on their visa status. Some of these kids are brilliant, others are extremely ordinary, but they got the interview and the kid from the Arkansas school didn't.