Comment by yodsanklai 4 days ago
> there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B.
As an interviewer in a big tech company, it seems all candidates I interview are foreigners who often graduated in the US. Either the company discriminates (which I really doubt it does), or there aren't enough qualified Americans for some jobs. And even if there are, the largest pool of candidates, the better.
Big tech companies are biased to sourcing from big name universities that have a lot of foreign students, and big tech companies were much more likely to go through the effort of H1B than smaller companies. As such your candidate pool is more heavily skewed than elsewhere.
All the conspiracies theories can be put to bed by walking into any engineering department (maybe outside of biomedical engineering…which makes me think this may be related to how Americans demonize math) and observing that the majority of students are foreign or maybe second generation immigrants.
This ratio gets worse because American students are disproportionately more likely to follow up their engineering undergrad with law or business school, so even if they may be engineers they’ll get into business and/or something like patent attorney going forward.
There wasn't any demonization of math when I was in school, but no shortage of "you can grow up to be anything" and "do what you love" rather than "get a job that will pay for doing all the things you love".
There's nothing wrong with being a librarian or getting an MA in Museum Studies, aside from the price of getting the degree and the low odds of getting a job without waiting for someone to die so another position opens up.
There's a reason you won't find a lot of foreign students pursuing them, though.
The conspiracy here is that somehow US spending on primary/secondary education ranks among the top, yet we are unable to produce competitive college students. And we mask this very serious problem from directly rippling into our economy by... importing students and workers.
1) There's a very reasonable chance the company discriminates. Sorry, but once bitten, twice shy. One company gets caught at it and the whole industry develops a reputation.
2) If you've got a problem finding candidates, there's 16,000 more on the market now. Congratulations!
3) If you think there must be something wrong with those 16,000, well, that would explain where your pipeline is going wrong.
> There's a very reasonable chance the company discriminates
I don't see how this is even possible. There would be a memo from the CEO to 1000s of recruiters asking them to favor foreigners? that would leak immediately.
It's really easy to see that big tech is interviewing only people who passed an initial filter which at this point is AI based. They're clearly filtering for some characteristics they want in a candidate, and most probably the filter is giving you the people you mentioned.
Businesses, the consumers who buy their products, and the global workforce.
The global workforce benefits from higher salaries and higher demand for labor, not from zero- or negative-sum moves of jobs from one place to another.
"foreigners who often graduated in the US"
This is still the case in US Comp Sci programs. There are some Americans in these programs but it's mostly Indian and Chinese. The American kids gravitate to the business schools.
The company itself might not discriminate as a policy, but some hiring managers certainly have their preferences. Or exclusively pull talent from their overseas cousin's brother's spouse's college roommate's consulting firm that is most certainly not a grift.
> And even if there are, the largest pool of candidates, the better.
More competition is not inherently "better" nor does it necessarily yield greater innovation. Trying to impose arbitrary competition as some abstract principle is just masochism.