Ive been directly exposed to the H1B candidate pool. The answer is no. It's 90% candidates with very similar sounding resumes. It's unnerving how templated all the resumes are.

You really have to have solid, engaged recruiting and screening processes in place to filter the wheat from the chaff with H1B's.

I would interview 10 H1B's, and then one domestic candidate, and the domestic candidate would outperform every time.

This is obv anecdotal, but I would not be surprised if this pattern exists across the entire H1B pool.

We do hire some H1B's, and there are some incredibly talented candidates, but only after great expense and time invested in screening and interviewing.

> I would interview 10 H1B's, and then one domestic candidate

Do you ask people their visa status during interview?

If you do not ask them about visa status, then how do you know they weren't a domestic candidate? Is it a judgement based on race/skin-color/accent?

If you do ask them this question, How do you keep that information from influencing your decision in the interview?

I never asked about visa status during interviews as that was purely an HR issue or something the hiring manager needed to deal with. My job was to assess people purely on technical ability and to a lesser degree, ability to communicate effectively (in English). We never really even bothered with cultural fit--if the person seemed decent, we gave good feedback on them. There was so much fraud to wade through, however. I got so that I could spot those "templated" resumes very quickly. It's kind of a tell when someone has worked say, five different 6-month contracts in five geographically dispersed US cities! That would be ridiculously expensive to keep bopping around the US like that! If their skillset and work was any good, they would either get renewed or find another gig in the same locale.

A lot of virtual interviews are rigged in various ways. I did 100s of tech interviews for one company in particular and even had guys who were lip-syncing for someone else who actually spoke English who was looped in to the call off-screen. The level of fraud in interviews has reached all new levels with AI tools now.

What do you count as American CS grads? A lot of H-1B holders have a degree from an American school. (Edit) If you hold an American CS degree, aren't you an American CS grad?

If you close that pipeline, you'll lose those students, and then you have to find more funding, because international students usually subsidize local students.

It wasn't until recently that I found out 40% of students at top colleges were not even American! I'm not specifically against foreign students, but 40%?

That and the H1B issue and American's not having jobs at American companies. Something isn't right.

That comes with the territory of have the vast majority of the top universities in the world. One of the things that has kept the US as the global hegemon for the last 100 years is the fact that every other country sends their best and brightest to study here, and a significant fraction of those people stay here to work.

I agree the US could do more to take advantage of its position to benefit the average American, but torching exactly what put the country in that position is short-sighted at best, categorically stupid at worst.

Colleges and Universities charge the non-local rate for international students which is considerably higher than the domestic rate (example from Georgia Tech:

In state $30,154 Out of state $53,638 International $54,814

This incentivizes them to keep more slots open for those high dollar students making it even tougher to develop a domestic workforce.

Another way of looking at those numbers is that the out of state / international students are subsidizing the education of the locals. AS long as local governments keep up pressure on the universities to not go 100% out of state, then it's by and large a win-win.

That's great, but we're not doing enough for our own citizens at this point in time.

Yes that something is the rapidly vanishing government funding for public universities.

I'm all for doing anything funding-wise that brings higher ed back to some kind of reality, even if we have to burn it all down to get there. The cost of education is outrageous and grads are not benefitting from their degrees the same way I was able to (at far less cost). We're at the inflection point there.

I feel for all human beings, but US education should be first and foremost directed towards helping US citizens. That's not racist, that's just common sense. We haven't even been doing that here! We're failing as a nation because shitty short-term profits always supersede the creation of long-term prosperity.

At one of my grad school classes, the prof could have taught the class in Chinese had it not been for me in there. And that was in the late 1990s.

Yes and no. The H-1B visa is "dual intent" [1] and you are allowed to apply for and receive a green card (permanent resident card) while on an H-1B. After 5 years with permanent residence you can apply for citizenship. It is a common path, and the intention for the majority of people on an H-1B visa.

[1]: https://isss.temple.edu/faculty-staff-and-researchers/intern...

At least from my experience it tends to be that outsourcing agencies who often supply H1B candidates are not finding the most experienced or talented people. i'm guessing that CS degrees are still better in the US on average.

Let me stop you right there: "Qualified Americans" is a highly subjective phrase. If a young person did well in physics and math in High School, are they "qualified?" Or is it really some esoteric and hard to define set of tech skills that makes someone "qualified?" There are millions of Americans who could be trained to be excellent software engineers, but we don't bother doing that anymore, because companies like the sugar high they think they are getting by hiring semi-skilled foreigners. That's the truth.

I've been all over this issue over and over again at multiple different companies and it's always the same thing--the resume has to have X, Y, and Z or the person is overlooked, despite them being more than capable of becoming skilled at X, Y, Z, K, W, R, you name it. Time and time again! And it's even worse in 2025 because now every product has 2-3 other competing products that do the exact same thing and we're supposed to be experts at all of them!

One can trap an experienced seniour dev for a few years for a price of a fresh grad which may or may not turn out to be a valuable resource and which may leave at any moment. In this context quality of the grad is not much relevant.

> And I care a lot more about what’s good for America as a whole than trying to protect someone’s income.

Uncharitably, it sounds like you think of your nation as a generic economic zone whose growth you want to continually increase at all costs, regardless of the fate of its citizens. But what is a nation, if not the people that comprise it?

Sure, that's one way of looking at it. But the truth is that there is only one force for civilization in the World today and that is America. The end of USAID illustrated something: America stands alone against the entropy of nature. She is humanity's only vanguard against ruin. The Chinese are dedicated to their own advancement, the Indians are currently bootstrapping out of poverty, the Europeans are primarily concerned with wine, cheese, and luxury goods. Fair play to all of them - may they live in peace.

But one nation, alone, fights Humanity's cause. Trump et al have cast off the mantle, but it's only another 3.5 years and we have a shot at donning it again. The nation is not for the people - or we would simply rapaciously consume its resources to feed the present. The people of the nation are not for the nation or we would consume them to fuel the engine. The nation and the people are both there to advance the principles of the group into the future. And I believe America's principles deserve to exist into perpetuity so long as they adapt to meet shifting weather.

Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.

Europe (as a whole) gives more money absolutely and multiples more in proportion to national income than the US. The US does (or did) have very good distribution networks, and that’s not liquid in a monetary sense.

I would encourage you to examine your statements on rapacious consumption of resources and people as well.

All USAID showed was now the grift machine works--most of that aid money was getting kicked back to corrupt politicians to pay for campaigns. Other monies were being siphoned off in the corrupt nations that accepted the funds. Those NGOs advertising for more "migration" were doing on the US taxpayer's own dime! So I don't know if we can draw many conclusions from it other than it created some money velocity in various forms.

America's cost of living crisis is in large part due to the huge carrying cost of all that graft--it wasn't illegal, mind you, just unethical.

Sorry, but I don't care about the self-interest of my nation in any matters that don't concern the self-interest of her citizens, much less any matters that work directly against the self-interest of her citizens—and no amount of rhetoric is going to convince me that I should think otherwise.

Clearly, you think that every tech job exists on the coasts.