If there's an oversupply of talent in tech then are H1Bs no longer being awarded?

Seems like a constant gripe about talent shortages but then conflicting stories about how to filter an overwhelming supply of talent.

I'm honestly curious how both can be true. Who's lying, or is it simply unwillingness to train local talent?

Related:

https://elaineou.com/2017/03/10/technical-interviews-from-th...

> 2. A bill for 5 typewriter ribbons and 24 pencils totalled $9.85. If a typewriter ribbon costs $1.25, what is the price of a dozen pencils?

> The IBM Programmer Aptitude Test is from 1960 (? I think. It’s tough to read the date on the mimeograph). Is it just me or have technical interviews gotten much harder?

> I interviewed for a programmer job at Facebook several years ago, and one of the questions I got was, “Given a set of obstacle coordinates, write a function that finds the shortest path between two cells for a knight on a 3-D chessboard while avoiding the obstacles.”

> I remember this question because it was one of the few that I managed to solve. Probably a half-dozen others ended in fumbles. Not surprisingly, Facebook didn’t give me an offer.

https://elaineou.com/2017/08/26/the-mystery-of-the-vanishing...

> Some time ago, we compared technical interviews from the 1960s to those of today: They’ve gotten much, much harder. I suggested that the last few decades of lax immigration have invited overseas talent to raise the bar – it was unfounded speculation at the time, but some number crunching shows it might be true.

> According to this Joint Venture Silicon Valley report, 74% of Silicon Valley tech workers are foreign-born immigrants. A decade ago, 36% of Silicon Valley tech workers were born abroad. In 2000, only 29% were.

> Tech industry employment has increased from about 300,000 jobs in 2007 to 400,000 in 2016, so even though we created 100,000 engineering positions in the last decade, we’ve also displaced 88,000 domestic engineers.

I'm suddenly curious what other fields are staffed by 74% foreign-born immigrants.

According to Purdue, the first computer science department in the US was established there in 1962, so of course in 1960 IBM wasn't that selective - they couldn't hire CS graduates. Maybe math majors.

Also, I don't know when CS degrees became common among programmers, but it didn't happen right after they were invented, I'm sure.

Did anything in the material I quoted, or in the remainder of either article, refer to CS degrees or CS graduates?

It's an example of conventional attributes which didn't exist then because the whole field was unformed. It seems like that would inhibit specialized aptitude tests - if you're hiring math or whatever majors back then (not that it doesn't happen today) you can't ask them about linked lists or sorting algorithms.

Not to mention, a vast number of people who could be good programmers wouldn't have had access to a computer before a first programming job, even if they had a college degree. Today it's much safer to assume that if someone is any good, they will have been exposed.

But nobody's talking about interviews that ask for conventionalized CS material. The point is that the interview questions are more difficult. They aren't especially more computer-focused.

I wasn't asked more difficult questions in 2007, when I got my first programming job. Several years on, we had some discussions about what kind of questions to ask candidates. One place I applied to more recently had a flowchart reading test that must have been from the punched card era.

So I don't concede the point, anyway.

But, the examples above definitely do compare more and less computer focused things.

> Seems like a constant gripe about talent shortages but then conflicting stories about how to filter an overwhelming supply of talent.

> I'm honestly curious how both can be true.

There's an overwhelming number of applicants. That says nothing about their qualifications.

I don't know what Big Tech's numbers look like, but when I did hiring, the percentage of applicants that were even remotely qualified was usually in the single digits.

> There's an overwhelming number of applicants. That says nothing about their qualifications.

People explain away Google's high false negative rate, and desire to not do anything about it, by claiming they receive such large numbers of qualified applicants that it isn't worth caring about false negatives. How does that narrative jibe with the "talent shortage" or what you stated here?

Sounds like an education/ training problem then?

There's a certain amount of innate talent involved in any profession, so additional training and education is unlikely to help. No amount of education or training would ever turn me into a professionally successful artist, for example.

Perhaps there is just a small group of people who apply for every job and are continually rejected. Whereas most good people aren't really applying for any jobs or very few.

There's an oversupply of people with great credentials, CVs, references and self-promotion skills and there's an undersupply of people actually willing to do the work.

Talent shortage is a myth. Companies place themselves in the worst locations which are the least accessible places in the US (extremely high rent and commute distance) and then wonder why they only get a modest number of applicants.

Also, I’ve noticed many companies are terrible at highering

> "Seems like a constant gripe about talent shortages but then conflicting stories about how to filter an overwhelming supply of talent."

There is an overwhelming supply of people who claim to be talented but there is a dreadful shortage of those who actually possess it.

I think there is also an inability to define "talented" in an objective and consistent way.

And the first group is applying for every job out there whilst the second is too discerning.