Comment by mrkurt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrkurt | Hacker News Reader

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H1B visas are all kinds of broken, but I don't believe there are an excess of qualified American citizens for most software jobs. In fact, it's so hard to get an H1B now that I don't think they're having much effect on "jobs available to Americans" at all.

I've never run a huge tech company, but even when trying to hire 10-50 engineers it's been a real slog trying to find good ones. We built one of the least biased hiring processes imaginable, promoted jobs to largely American audiences, and the pool of applicants was still hugely unqualified. We found ~2 qualified people per ~1000 applications.

American tech companies _do_ train American talent, I'm a product of this. I think you're overestimating how good we are at training software devs, though. It's not a fast process, it's not very scientific, and it doesn't seem to "take" for most people.

What was your training experience like?

Hired as junior dev for super cheap, got a lot of great mentoring at 3 different, then learned enough to keep progressing on my own.

A family member had the first half (mentoring, foundation to learn from) but didn't go anywhere. It's part of why I think it's so hard to train people at what we do. It's not at all clear what set of skills make someone good at software.

>> Hired as junior dev for super cheap, got a lot of great mentoring at 3 different, then learned enough to keep progressing on my own.

Yes, and I'm saying that there should be a similar path for American citizens who want to get into tech. There is more than enough money in tech to hire and train American workers.

We're talking about companies with a combined market value that is more than the GDP of Russia.

I am an American Citizen. As is my brother. We're about as white bread Oklahoma kid as they come. The path is there, it's just really freakin' hard.

It just takes so long before someone realizes software might not be from them.

You can be a great programmer yet a completely terrible developer. But you need the base programming skills and theory first. Then when you get into the real world you realize the slog is crap and you don't enjoy it.

I think there's plenty of room for a code technician type of job which should proliferate in today's environment. Move the good and motivated ones to engineering.

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