So basically you only have open engineering positions in the same few markets that every other tech company does and then you complain when you can't find enough engineers. Engineering talent doesn't only exist on the coasts, despite startup tech culture pretending it does.

Do companies have a moral obligation to distribute jobs geographically?

Assuming that the issue is that these positions weren't remote then if they decided that they're better served by workers that live locally then they're either right and you're asking them to harm their own interests for yours or they're wrong and they're just leaving money on the table for a competitor. If they aren't harmed for giving up a competitive edge then that monopoly power to just ignore the market is the actual problem.

Either way, work visas isn't even close to the most salient problem. Restrict them and who's to say how startups will find loopholes to avoid hiring who we want them to hire. Let's just cut out all the messiness and cut them checks directly. Call it reparations for the coasts ignoring the good honest midwest American talent all these years.

> Restrict them and who's to say how startups will find loopholes

We'll just open offices in Israel, Eastern Europe, and India instead and pay 70% of a US salary. It already started happening in 2019, and avalanched during the pandemic.

The obvious response to that is to not allow companies that outsource jobs to sell in the domestic market.

And then those companies sell in other countries.

When the US banned Israeli companies from selling military IP to China, they began selling to India.

Drone tech saw a similar impact, hence why Chinese and Turkish Drone companies are outcompeting American ones in both commercial and defense applications.

Good let them.

We listed all these jobs remotely. There just aren't that many engineers who know OS Internals, eBPF, or XDP in Indiana compared to Tel Aviv or Bangalore.

That is a policy problem. Opening up more immigration makes that problem worse, not better. It should be a question that everyone asks: why do US Universities not create an adequate supply of workers to meet the demand of the market? No one seems to care and the solution is always “just do more immigration”. Makes no sense.

I worked on the policy side before I entered tech.

You can't "command economy" human capital. It just doesn't work.

Upskilling has a 5-10 year long lag time.

Immigration is the only reason America hasn't stumbled like Europe, Japan, or Korea demographically.

>Upskilling has a 5-10 year long lag time.

So what? Again, this is a pipeline problem, that can be influenced and addressed via policy. I'm not trying to "command economy" anything. It's a problem that companies, and increasingly universities, don't think that it's a huge issue there not being enough home-grown citizens to fill these roles (a claim I find to be dubious at best). That is definitely something that policy can be used to fix.

>Immigration is the only reason America hasn't stumbled like Europe, Japan, or Korea demographically.

I don't know what this is supposed to mean. You want some demographic growth target to be hit? Europe has many countries in it, but mentioning Japan and Korea implies you have noticed the birth rates there. Well, I think the wrong question is being asked in that situation as well. If people aren't having babies, why? What changed? What policy options are there to fix that problem?

Thinking that "just import a new workforce" fixes that is extremely weird to me, especially when they are coming from places that are not exactly culturally proximate to the places they are going, to say the least.

The industry is so huge thats impossible to teach every aspect of the tech industry. The universities teach widely applicable curriculum.

Companies should train employees, simple as.

They do. Companies just prefer to hire immigrants willing to work twice as long for half the pay.

I guarantee you theres tons of engineers with backgrounds in O.S./Networking that could learn those things very quickly.

I bet most people working in it learned on the job. The certainly dont teach every single specific detail of the entire tech industry in universities.

This is just gaslighting.

> could learn those things very quickly

Maybe.

We didn't have the time to risk on hiring a dud in an industry as competitive as Cybersecurity.

When competing with Israeli and Indian companies who are able to tap the Israeli, Eastern European, and Indian talent scene where such skills are much more common, we don't have the time to risk timelines falling behind.

Oh such fear mongering.

With an decent background shouldnt take someone too long to get up to speed and that time isnt going to break the company.

Its what they do in other countries. lol

You clearly have with an agenda.

But none willing to work at the wages and working conditions that company is offering.

> 200-300k base with 15% annual bonus and equity ($300k-750k when I was working at public companies. I can't speak to my portfolio company's equity practices) is not a shit wage

That was what we were offering, but we were also demanding on quality and skill required.

We ended up getting some top performers in Israel and India for a fraction, despite being ready to pay the above.

I don’t believe you couldn’t find anyone for 750k. At least throw out a believable number. Also you know very well that the majority of H1b is for generic web dev jobs and not OS internals or whatever you were hiring for.

They probably made ridiculous requirements on the listing to show they posted the job and could not find people that met the description so they could hire an H1B

> to show they posted the job and could not find people that met the description so they could hire an H1B

Kinda telling that the so called smart people who have trouble getting hired have no clue that that's not a requirement for H1B.

The midwest is not sending their best.

> We hire noncitizens because we didn't find the right talent we need.

(the right talent at the shit-level wage we want to pay) is more often than not the rest of that sentence.

$200-300k base with 15% annual bonus and equity ($300k-750k when I was working at public companies. I can't speak to my portfolio company's equity practices) is not a shit wage.

We needed people who understood stuff like XDP and worked on it for years.

The talent pool for low level development, OS Dev, cybersecurity, networking, and some parts of ML is sparse in the US compared to Israel, Eastern Europe, China, and India.

The problem is that instead of building a domestic talent pipeline for high demand skills we take the easy route and grab immigrants for it. So the talent pipeline never gets built, and then we continue to be dependent on immigration. This is obviously not your company's fault because they are not policy makers, but if companies like yours were told "too bad, hire and train locally" you would get it done. e.g. I am a software engineer that currently has a TC of around $200K, and none of the skills you need, but I could easily be trained and learn any of that for a 300-750K TC at the end.

> companies like yours were told "too bad, hire and train locally"

Companies would collapse and fail, unless the government gave a massive corporate stimulus package (probably 4-5x the size of PPE).

> none of the skills you need, but I could easily be trained

It would take at least 1-2 years. At that point, an Israeli or Indian startup has taken market share and won. Welcome to cybersecurity and networking.

I am unpersuaded as I have never heard of a company that collapsed and was replaced by foreign competition because they couldn't get enough H1Bs. But even if this is correct, the best that should get you is N visas for the next 2 years and then no more because you will have built the local talent pipeline you need by then.

I replied to OP saying "only hire domestic" for every role.

Even National Labs don't do that.

Nothing in tech takes that long to learn if you have someone with a decent background in the subject...

False - many critical edge cases only come up once every couple of years.

In my area (not cybersecurity) I’m still seeing very serious and brand-new-to-me problems come up even after many years.

So even with your experience these are still occuring periodically. lol

The solution for this is good testing and QA not fear mongering Americans into hiring immigrants.

It’ll be very good for you to stay in learning mode after your degree.

On the other hand, if your attitude is that you now know your stuff and you’re done learning, that isn’t going to produce the best outcomes for you.

> Testing and QA

Business processes can’t take the place of experienced judgement.

> Business processes can’t take the place of experienced judgement.

This is utterly incorrect..

Testing and QA are techical processes run by engineers.

Where did you get your degree ? Your knowledge of tech seems extraordinarily limited. Theres solutions to your problems you're not even aware of.

> your resume didn't reflect

One observation I've made throughout the years of reviewing tech resumes - if I get a resume from a U.S. citizen, I (and anybody else) immediately know the difference between MIT/Stanford vs. "The University of Wisconsin" without even researching it. OTOH, I have no idea what the difference between the University of Hyderabad vs. the University of New Delhi, and there's not really a good way for me to tell. Foreign applicants actually have an _advantage_ over U.S. citizens in that the person reviewing their resume will almost certainly bin all of the resumes into the same "ok, has a degree" vs. a potentially unconscious "ah, ok, couldn't get into an ivy league".

No wonder they can't find workers, if from a nation of 334 million, all but ~16k/year [1] are considered substandard because they couldn't get into an Ivy.

Edit: More relevant is comparing Ivy undergrads (64.5k) to all US undergrads (20.3 million) [2], meaning only the top 0.3% make the cut.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League - total number of undergrads (64.5k), divided by 4, assuming a 4-year college course.

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/235406/undergraduate-enr...

Agreed thats insane.

Our EM was from a CSU.

We didn't discriminate based on educational program.

But we didn't have the time to train someone in eBPF or OS Internals from scratch over months when there are competitors in Israel or India able to release the same thing in the same time period with a fraction of the cost.

For certain specialities of tech, there simply isn't the skill set anymore in the US. OS Internals and Computer Networking is a great example of that.

This is another dishonest talking point.

With most tech jobs if a person has a computer science background they have the skills.

The company is just lying to justify outsourcing.

Getting a degree simply indicates to the market that you have the ability to learn and the mental building blocks to start learning the ropes.

Until you do it, you don’t know how to do it. In other words, juniors fumble around and make lots of mistakes - that’s how they get good.

> simply indicates to the market that you have the ability to learn

I took networking, os, data structures, etc. in my degree.

It taught me a lot more than "how to learn".

Looks like it hasn't even taught you that.

Maybe 5 years ago, certainly not today. There have been massive layoffs in tech and plenty of smart people who never broke in.