I worked at a large financial institution in the US and here's how it worked there: They made heavy use of remote Indian contractors. When they needed to fill an on-site position, they wrote the job ad to require experience working on their proprietary software. No Americans had that experience unless they were already working there, so they could plausibly say they couldn't find qualified Americans and bring one of the offshore contractors in on an H1B. Realistically any experienced developer could do the job, it was standard enterprise Java. The Americans don't even have an opportunity to compete for that job despite having the requisite skills because of the games the company is allowed to play.

Or you may fail at interviews because for you it’ll be conducted in English vs their native language. Not a hypothetical. At least an anecdote. Old colleague casually admitted to this despite company policy.

Also note that most interviews are known to be more extreme than the actual job needs: e.g. leetcode is the interview; random CSS manipulation is the actual job. I wonder how hard would it be to teach a top 15% high schooler in America to do that stuff.

Top high schoolers can develop algorithms. The average high schooler can manipulate CSS, no problem.

Right. Most software engineering isn't the sort of hard-to-source skilled labor that the H1B program was intended to provide. Until we can be honest about that and have a real healthy debate about allowing the sort of mid/low skill labor that smart high schools can do, our immigration will continue to suck and breed resentment on all sides.

NB I'm pro-mid/low skill immigration. But these H1B conversations are intractable without first pointing out that, if the goal is low/mid skill immigration, then we need to fight for a new visa class aside from the H1B.

I think it would be ridiculous to attribute your performance to generalized guesses at work ethic across entire nations and their extremely heterogeneous education systems, yes.