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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

There is a shortage of applicants willing to work at what companies want to pay. If it is taking more than 30-60 days for workers to find a role, there are enough workers domestically.

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This is why H1-B visas should have a minimum salary requirement equal to 20% over whichever is greater, median salary for the role in the industry, or median salary for the role in the company (and whichever is greater, US-wide, or local pay scale).

This way, a company is always incentivized to find local talent, but when they are actually unable to, they have a path to find the expertise they need. The U.S. could relax restrictions on H1-B, lowering red tape, and removing a lot of churn that comes with the H1-B program

In general, H1B visas do have such provisions. At least in CA most jobs must provide a salary range. Even if every H1B is the lowest of the range in those postings, that alone means there are many many jobs which fit your criteria.

The ranges are way too low then. I checked H1B salaries and I found the following in San Jose (median rent approx $2200 for 1BR):

FLEXON TECHNOLOGIES INC Database analyst: $60k

DATA TRACE INFORMATION SERVICES LLC Software engineer: $65k

PRIMARIUS TECHNOLOGIES US LLC DATA ANALYST $72k

ZOOM VIDEO COMMUNICATIONS INC AI SCIENTIST $74k

HBI SOLUTIONS INC DATABASE ADMINISTRATOR $75k

BEACONFIRE STAFFING SOLUTIONS INC COMPUTER SYSTEMS ENGINEER $88k

https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=&city=san+jose&year=2...

Sort by salary ascending and you will see what I mean.

These are blatant violations. We know how much software engineers should make. Do the immigrants know they are moving to one of the most expensive cities in the US?

Taking advantage of the system !!

The good ones do and use this as a way to get through the door.

Someone should put together a package for the new administration with advertisements to target for H1B violations. I’m sure Stephen Miller would want to see it.

Almost all H1Bs have already been in the US for years on their student visas, so of course they know COL and where they are moving to.

Those you are posting look like they could be violations. But if you just visit your link, you quickly see that most jobs are in line with median salaries in the bay area.

For example:

https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries/San...

And then:

https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=zoom+video+communications+...

Those are pretty close to the median in aggregate.

> Those are pretty close to the median in aggregate.

Pretty close to the median?

Aren't these H1-B visas supposed to be for specialists? To bring in the best and brightest?

Compared to average workers, software engineers are specialists. H1B holders are often brighter than their citizen counterparts by at least one objective measure: advanced degrees holding. It's very hard to find US citizens with advanced degrees who can code well and understand computer science.

Not all H1B holders have advanced degrees, and the reason some of them do is because that’s one of the immigration pathways —- pay for a 1-2-year Master’s degree so you get a better chance of landing an H1B after you graduate. Most citizens don’t go for advanced degree because there’s no utility in them, and not because they aren’t smart.

I know this. But it is a measurable differentiator in qualification that H1Bs are way more likely to have than citizens. Many young men don't see the utility in college compared to women in the the US, but employers do.

Then it’s all the more difficult to explain why such “advanced” applicants would accept low salaries. Unless, of course, we accept the inevitable conclusion that companies are using foreign labor to suppress domestic wages.

The page you linked is filled with violations. There is no universe where an “AI scientist” shouldn’t be making the median salary at a minimum. The job titles have been manipulated so as to not raise any flags.

It doesn’t matter whether the median in aggregate is inside the range. If one person makes 60k, another makes 150k and another makes 155k you are still not paying someone enough. No American was going to take that job for 60k, that doesn’t mean you can use a visa to fill it.

It does matter though because it means the violations are likely outliers

> This is why H1-B visas should have a minimum salary requirement equal to 20% over [median]

The requirement should be at least 2x top of band.

A mere 1.2x of the median is absolutely absurd.

That's ridiculous. 20% is already enough from top of band.

And how you going to enforce this?

Require employers of each H1-B to submit (along with the hire's w-4 that they send to Uncle Sam that already includes the job's wages and benefits), the position description in the job ad, the candidate's resume, and the matching wage band the job purportedly falls into and exceeds by 20% (or whatever the required margin is). It should be trivial to automate the validation process. Then do random checks to confirm those purported facts, especially of employers who hire large numbers of H1-Bs and have past violations.

Random audits, like the IRS does.

“Labour tariffs” in the west are actually a great thing, and I support it. I’m from India. I support this for very different reasons than those expressed in this thread, but I think in the long term this would be good for India and maybe even the US. The global labour market is screwed up and some churn like this is needed to potentially fix things.

> There is a shortage of applicants willing to work at what companies want to pay

Translation: companies would rather have underpaid immigrants as indentured servants to exploit than Americans who can demand higher wages

A problem solved if visas are not associated to employers, because then an employer couldn’t hold onto the employee like this.

No. Because it still floods the job market with off short talent that is willing to work for 30% less. Construction workers arent tied to a single employer (usually) and that drops the price of labour across the board even in union dominated markets.

The simple solution is for the government to put a tax on the visa. For each H1-B the company does, they pay the government an additional $200,000 per year (or some other large, arbitrary sum). If they really need them that badly, they'll pay up. What I think happens is that they discover they don't need them quite so much.

Tariffs on visas?

Great idea

It's one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard on this site frankly. For how "meritocratic" HN claims to be, they are totally fine with basically eliminating all competition in their own job sphere.

Imagine how quickly business trust in the government would go down if the government mandated a $200k head tax on H1Bs. It's absurd and only here would anyone hear it and think it makes sense

Why is this post so heavily downvoted? Oh wait, I guess this really hit a nerve:

    > For how "meritocratic" HN claims to be, they are totally fine with basically eliminating all competition in their own job sphere.

There is always someone willing to do your job for less. Protection against that isn't anti-meritocratic, it's anti-exploitation.

H1Bs at a lot of companies (excluding the actual criminals TCS, Wipro, etc.) are not always willing to do your job for less. Many of them make more than most US devs.

Many make what you would consider laughable wages. I worked for a university in their IS department years ago, and since the university had an office that dealt with visas, they'd bring in people for what was truly a mediocre job. Salary probably $45-50k back in the mid-2010s.

But since HN is San Francisco-centric, it can pretend otherwise I guess. Some very tiny fraction earn above what US developers earn.

Most people are self interested.

Having to compete with people in the third world who have no expectations isn’t meritocracy. My dad grew up in a literal village and I remember sleeping under mosquito nets. Americans shouldn’t have to put up with the things I’m willing to put up with.

You don't have to compete with people with no expectations. You have to compete with people who: often have an advanced degree (much more common for H1Bs than citizen devs), often have financial resources at home backing their ability to move up to a more expensive economy for work without security of a job, and are often just as good if not better than you.

H1Bs are often scapegoated by these forums as being hungry to not live in poverty, but they are often the top of their respective countries by most metrics.

And most of you all do not think that we should level the playing field between, say people who went to good schools vs people who went to bad ones, or people who can barely code vs people who can code really well. Only when it's foreigners do you not want meritocracy

It’s not comparable. Both my parents have advanced degrees back in old country. But the standard of living for someone in the top 5% back home is comparable to someone in public housing in the US. If people’s alternatives back home were so good they wouldn’t abandon all their family—my family was never from anywhere besides Bangladesh going back thousands of years—to come to the U.S.

You ignored all of my comment. The point is, people here want to eliminate more educated, more likely to have financial backing candidates for their jobs. But they would bristle at the suggestion of any such thing for business success, college admissions, academic awards of any kind, etc.

People want competition on a level playing field. Most people also don’t think it’s fair for American companies to have to compete with Chinese ones that don’t have to abide by environmental protection or worker protection laws. The same is true for having to compete with foreign workers.

The country I’m from just had rioters overthrow its government. In terms of what I’m willing to put up with at work or school, I just have a mindset and motivations that native born Americans shouldn’t have to compete with.

You can’t build a more just, fair society by filling it with foreigners who perceive the minimum standard as being so much lower because of their background.

> In terms of what I’m willing to put up with at work or school, I just have a mindset and motivations that native born Americans shouldn’t have to compete with.

Yeah, sorry. I actually believe in meritocracy unlike whiny HN'ers. Whatever mindset is best should win. That's how business is. That's how academics are. That's how every serious global endeavor is.

> You can’t build a more just, fair society...

If that's all you're optimizing for, just have communism. Easy path to what you want. If you actually want people to earn according to merit, to succeed according to making big bets that pay off, or any of those cruel, unequal things, then don't have a huge blind spot when it comes to only your job and no one else's.

I will make the case H1-B immigrants actually have an advantage to citizens when they arrive. Reducing everything down to just earnings potential and mindset doesn't cover the possibility that there are not equal opportunities available to everyone. I will give an example.

So for example, immigrants can come to the US and have the privilege of being able to pick where they want to live because they have no attachments. This gives them a huge advantage because they pick higher income locations but especially seem to prefer being near the limited number of good high schools. Most Americans do not go to a top rated high school and do not live near one. It's not even possible for all Americans to go to a top rated high school just by definition. People going to top rated high schools have a much higher chance of going on to top rated universities which are gateways to power. Universities and high schools are just not all the same product. A Harvard degree is not the same as a state university degree. Economics alone does not capture things like that. There are real advantages things like prestige ratings give to people. So H1-B immigrants fall into a professional class which goes on to disproportionately have power with more income and more roles available in government. I think there are implications here you can surmise. Lousy education in the US is a factor here and people bristle just as much at the thought of leveling playing fields in education, even pro education people. Everyone loves rankings and prestige. It hasn't escaped my notice that elite universities have massive numbers of international, first, second, and third gen immigrants leading to a new class.

Second, another reason I don't believe immigration is meritocratic is because of what you said earlier that often immigrants are the best from their own respective country and I think that is true. They are literally smarter, we are taking the top 1% from other countries but attributing a lot of their success to just hard work. Not everyone is mentally capable of being say a medical doctor.

Third, there isn't a general global open immigration plan. Most countries are closed to immigration and I think the thought of Americans en masse migrating to a foreign place like India or China is ridiculous and everyone knows they wouldn't allow it. But I doubt America is the only place on the earth Americans could ever work. Sure, there are expats yes but nothing like on the scale of people moving to the US. So in general it doesn't really seem like this system was designed to be a meritocracy, it was designed by people at the top for their goals (cut wages, import people they like, etc) and immigrants go because they profit, but I am not sure how that's a meritocracy. It just sounds like a conspiracy.

Seems like we agree on most things. Yeah skilled immigrants tend to do better than citizens. That's why you see so many of them in top tech firms. Meritocracy isn't about levelling the playing field. It's the opposite. The best win no matter how they became the best (barring crimes). If an immigrant has less attachments to jobless / lower income areas. If an immigrant has a better education and finances. Meritocracy welcomes that, and so do I. Meritocracy made the US the capitol of the tech landscape, and it will continue to do so

yes, but I think we drew very different conclusions.

This is a good example of my theory that skilled immigrants are disproportionately the more anti-social segment of the population back home. In much of the world, 80-90% of people wouldn’t emigrate even if they had the chance (https://news.gallup.com/poll/652748/desire-migrate-remains-r...). The ones who would leave a relatively comfortable place in their ancestral country to pursue money in someone else’s country must have a particular psychology.

Good reason to oppose skilled immigration!

Yeah, get rid of people who would be cutthroat for money. Surely American entrepreneurship is not for such people. And surely America's prowess in the tech landscape is not due to such people. We all know Zuckerberg was famously not ruthless as a businessman. He did not chase money at the expense of his relationships like a horrible 3rd world immigrant would do!!

It’s one thing to be aggressive in business, it’s another thing to be a grinder who pulls down the floor for other workers because they’re grateful to have reliable electricity. America’s tech prowess is due to Americans. Silicon Valley arose in the 1960s-1970s, when America had the lowest foreign born population percentage in its history.

L O L. Lots of companies and industries from the 60s-70s completely died out (Ford / GM's American workforce for example).

The continued growth and success of the dotcom and post dotcom era companies has been on the backs of H1Bs and you know it

I mean, I can think of a lot of things businesses could greatly benefit and grow from, but would have to do without if it came with $200,000/yr price tag.

IMO this is not about wether a business can do without X. Most businesses can do without a lot of things, just more poorly. IMO this is about finding the right balance between the benefits and drawbacks of hiring foreign specialized workers.

Ranked by salary is an alternative I've heard.

A lot of things "flood the job market". In 2021, >104k degrees CIS degrees were awarded by US colleges [1]. There's a flood of young people entering the market every year, and they're willing to work for >30% less than experienced engineers because it's their first proper job.

IMO as with all things money, it's all about negotiation. Of course a lot of negotiating power simply has to do with the market supply/demand, but a whole lot has to do with policy and rules. Giving more negotiating power to H1Bs would definitely put upwards pressure on salaries.

Re: construction workers. Same problem, worker's rights. A lot of construction workers are undocumented: an estimated 20 percent [2][3]. Undocumented immigrants have virtually no negotiating power. Allowing this solid 1/5th of the workforce to confront their employer without fear of deportation would go a long way increasing compensation for the industry as a whole.

[1]: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_322.10.a...

[3]: https://limos.engin.umich.edu/deitabase/2024/05/28/undocumen...

"Allowing this solid 1/5th of the workforce to confront their employer without fear of deportation would go a long way increasing compensation for the industry as a whole."

It is strange to read this all typed out in earnest like that. Housing costs triple over night for the win? We'll all be homeless but those of us in construction will get a boost (or decreased competition from low cost imported labor).

> Housing costs triple over night for the win? We'll all be homeless but those of us in construction will get a boost (or decreased competition from low cost imported labor).

Your discourse is sensationalist and unnecessarily agitated. Paying workers a fair wage wouldn't triple housing costs, that figure is completely made up.

> We'll all be homeless

It also wouldn't lead to complete homelessness.

Precisely! The real discussion is how much would it decrease supply and what impact on the homeless rate would occur per unit change in labor input cost. Discussion of good/bad/better/worse is fruitless. We need data. But you take the first step by acknowledging these are related costs and social outcomes that exist in a delicate equilibria. Many would just say to heck with unintended consequences it's a matter of principal or ideological mandate. Gotta break a few eggs types.

Yeah it's fair to say that if suddenly a huge influx of people show up causing downwards pressure on wages then that can happen. Though I feel like construction work is a place where there is legitimately more limits to how many people who are willing to work in that industry (even if you paid me double a SWE salary, I'm not working in scaffolding all day) locally.

I do think that if you don't tie the visa to the employer, then it's _less interesting_ for an employer to recruit people from abroad. Especially for companies whose entire business model is "get cheaper IT labor, locked into mandatory service, in exchange for being an entryway to the country".

Like if you despise those shops, then you really should be lobbying to get rid of the employer lock-in.

First, GP wrote:

    > A problem solved if visas are not associated to employers, because then an employer couldn’t hold onto the employee like this.

Then you wrote:

    > No. Because it still floods the job market with off short talent that is willing to work for 30% less.

In many highly developed countries in the world, visas are not associated with an employer. We don't see people clamouring to post about it on HN. Why? Because the number of visas offered to skilled migrants is relatively limited.

Second, you wrote:

    > Construction workers arent tied to a single employer (usually) and that drops the price of labour across the board even in union dominated markets.

How can you be sure that this is true? Do you have a "natural" experiment where two similar areas in the US have construction workers where area A has workers tied to a single employers and area B not? Else, how can you say this with such confidence?

Source: I managed projects bigger than you can imagine as a very young person. I traveled between the United States, China, the Middle East and the Caribbean.You have to take my word for it, as I can't and wont dox myself. I might as well have a PhD on this subject. I don't care if you believe me or not, but what I say is true.

That is absolutely what these kinds of Visas are NOT supposed to be addressing.

> There is a shortage of applicants willing to work at what companies want to pay.

That and companies are just hilariously bad at finding workers they want to hire for nebulous reasons. I have no doubt even if my company hired 95% of the workers it had marked down as "no hire" they'd be able to squeeze a salary's of value worth out of each of them (well, if management is competent, which it tends to not be). I'm sure those of us who've been around long enough can all attest to some side of seeing form of this dysfunction. I'm more than happy to reject them for selfish reasons, of course, like "I don't want this person on my team" or "this person seems like an asshole" or "I don't want to teach this person their third language after java and typescript". Etc.

I mean there are terrible interview candidates out there, but the people who literally can't code at all tend to be easy to filter out.

I'm curious if there's any way to observe the salary margins that separate the top of the labor market from the bottom. Surely there are. That would probably give a big signal as to how much undue attention is given to, e.g., Senior vs Junior developers and American workers vs H1Bs. I'd put money that some of this complaining about lack of labor is actually not wanting to hire fresh grads and eat the cost of training when they'd be just fine. (Also the H1B thing, but that's already discussed to death)

Okay, I have interviewed hundreds of people in the last decade, and I can tell you that most are not good enough. There are companies that are downright abusing H1B for wage suppression, but as a startup founder, I will try my hardest to avoid hiring people who I have to squeeze their salary's worth and still get mediocre results (nothing to do with citizen or not - I had this experience with a Canadian contractor - just not worth it).

I have been successful in liberating money from VCs and create jobs, and I want the best people that money can buy. Turns out, there are great American and non-american candidates who are willing to work for the money I can offer. Also in my experience, I hardly even get resumes from Americans for backend jobs. Frontend is different and I get a LOT of American resumes. Our frontend engineering, PS, CX, Sales and Marketing is all-american, and backend is a mix of american, greencard, H1b - because thats all I get in the resume pipeline.

If I have to cut costs, I will have to cut the team in US and move the jobs to a low cost region regardless of their citizenship status.

>> If I have to cut costs, I will have to cut the team in US and move the jobs to a low cost region regardless of their citizenship status.

Read that sentence again. If you're hiring an American team in the Us, and cutting in the US, it's not regardless of citizenship - unless you're abusing the H-1B program

"Not good enough" or not good enough to pass your leet code gauntlet that has nothing to do with the day-to-day role?

Because those aren't the same thing. Also don't discount interview stress - I read that psychologically the most difficult thing to do is be on stage in front of people and do complex math problems... which is basically what live coding tests are.

I hate leet code gauntlets too but I don't see what it has to do with hiring immigrant workers. No matter your status you are equally vulnerable to failing a code gauntlet test.

Math problems usually have one right/wrong answer. Many interview 'challenges' have multiple ways of doing something correctly. Without necessarily knowing any more about the context of a problem beyond a few sentences, you work with what you've been given. You can deliver a working solution but if it's not the way they were expecting... you're out of the running.

You really haven’t done much math, have you. Even 2+2 can be solved multiple ways.

I hate leet code and it's ilk, and I don't want anyone to go through that useless stuff. But I believe a good engineer can suss out another good engineer in a conversation or two. At least that has been my experience with people I have hired and people those people have hired.

When you hire anyone, there is always some bar of "good enough". It is different for different orgs and even people, but it is there. Otherwise you'd end up hiring the first candidate you encounter, no?

I wonder what your investors would think if they found out you can't manage and need to 'hope you find suitable talent' and that you are incapable of growing it?

> I wonder what your investors would think if they found out you can't manage and need to 'hope you find suitable talent' and that you are incapable of growing it?

Not hiring mediocre talent is a key part of management.

Every company talks about finding talent. VCs are very familiar with this because many startups don’t have familiarity with this stuff. It’s not surprising to have a VC help hire for roles the startup is unfamiliar with hiring for. An investor is not someone’s boss. Once they’ve handed over the capital, they’re very invested in making sure that there aren’t any blockers to the company’s success.

They know how I work, because I'm on the board and constantly update them. I built this company from slides to 5M ARR in 4 years. Granted, I have made hiring mistakes - good engineer, bad attitude that affected the team, good engineer not bought into what we do, one or two mediocre engineers that I couldn't suss out. But I've rectified them and have found good engineers in reasonable time.

Unfortunately you have to take my word for it. Not sure how you assumed I cannot manage with no context.

> Okay, I have interviewed hundreds of people in the last decade, and I can tell you that most are not good enough.

Me, too. I straight-up disagree; I think interviewing is just so broken it gives a false impression of quality issues in the labor pool. Realistically if you have a handful of core skills you can ramp up to basically any problem with enough time. That's time on the order of months, maybe, not years. Companies just don't want to bother training anyone anymore. Why bother when you can just complain endlessly and hope some politicians throw cheap labor your way? In that sense you're absolutely right, but the whole "quality" thing is completely unrelated.

> I have been successful in liberating money from VCs and create jobs, and I want the best people that money can buy.

I think people seriously overestimate the difference engineer quality makes. Most products can be built with mediocre talent. I'm sorry, that's the truth. We all love to have strong opinions on who we should hire and I say "almost anyone, just throw meat at the problem". Most problems are solved with time and not cleverness.

Startups are definitely more sensitive to quality, but startups don't make up much of the labor pool, and they don't pay competitively with much larger companies that don't need the quality.

I'm being a little hyperbolic here—you do need people with experience and ability to see red flags to lead the flock—but not by much.

This is the truth that peoples egos can't seem to handle.

Add in that in the search for the perfect candidate that has all 16 bullet point requirements you'll come across folks who have, say, a solid 13 of them, but they'll get passed over waiting for the perfect candidate to come around. Which can take many months... years even. In the meantime you could have been bringing up one of those 13-point candidates getting them up to speed on those 3 missing bullet points. And you'd likely have gotten to a desired level of productivity faster than by waiting for that perfect candidate while wringing your hands that there just aren't enough qualified people out there.

I don't think anyone is saying wait for the perfect candidate. No one is perfect and no one checks all the boxes. That would be a fool's errand. But most good engineers can differentiate between a good (not superstar) engineer and a mediocre/bad engineer in a couple of conversations. I really have not seen anyone optimize for a mediocre candidate, nor for a superstar. Superstars come by with luck or with tons of incentives (money, stock, tech or whatever is their itch).

I've often seen this happen. A few years back I applied for a job at a startup where I checked a lot of the boxes, but not all, but some of the boxes I checked were difficult to come by - never heard anything back. Six months passed and I was contacted by them, would I be interested in interviewing? I was and I ended up getting the job. Later when I asked about the position being open for so long I was told by one of the people involved that there were folks who were waiting for the perfect candidate to come along and finally, after many months, they were convinced that the perfect candidate probably didn't exist. So yeah, there's at least one instance of it where I know for sure that's what was going on and I've seen others where I'll watch a job listing keep appearing for several months.

So they learned their lesson and hopefully don't make the same mistake again. We are in anecdote land now (both yours and mine), I don't know what's more common. Behavior like that (waiting for long for perfect candidate) can cripple or kill businesses

> Most problems are solved with time and not cleverness.

Yes, because given time someone clever would have came in and fixed it.

It's like doing push up in the elevator and believing that arriving at the 100th floor is due to doing push ups.

The GE, IBM, Intel, Boeing are few examples that didn't believe in quality - and not just people apparently, and their problems aren't getting solved with time.

Eh, I just don't see it. GE and IBM and Boeing are solving the problems they want to solve. Management dysfunction can't be blamed on low-quality workers. Anyway, I'm a little reluctant to draw the parallel with Boeing because I simply don't know what kind of work goes into that sort of engineering. Maybe cleverness is a big part!

> Yes, because given time someone clever would have came in and fixed it.

I can't emphasize enough how much software engineers overestimate the value of their own cleverness. Bugs are fixed with persistence, in my experience—I've used "cleverness" to find only a handful of bugs across my entire nearly two-decade career. I don't want to say I'm "the best engineer on the team" or anything like that, but I dependably fix the bugs that are put on my plate regardless of how frustrating they are to crack, regardless of what tools I need to bust out to get the job done. Debuggers, printf, valgrind, core dumps, packet captures, profilers, repls, disassembly, whatever's necessary. But all of these take persistence to reach for and use to crack the case. Experience is a short cut, but that's a very different thing than cleverness, and you very directly pay for that experience.

Not to mention if I see "cleverness" in a code review you're gonna bet I'm gonna comment and ask you to make it less clever unless that cleverness seems to neatly solve a problem. Even then, commenting is absolutely critical.

Time, not cleverness, is the key.

Hell, the joke used to be that being a software engineer is 80% googling. Now that barrier's been lowered even further with chatbots: you can literally ask it to find the bug, explain behavior, fix the bug, etc. It doesn't take much competence to correct the output. All it takes is not giving up when you see problems.

Well everything you've written suggest to me that you're clever, or maybe that shouldn't be the word, but somewhere between smart and wise.

And a lot of people aren't that.

Your examples didn't fail due to quality - they failed due to horrible management practices and worshipping at the altar of the MBA philosophy.

They definitely failed due to quality - problems caused by their horrible highly-paid managers and directors.

I worked at GE. A lot of thier software dealing with the transportation industry back then wasn’t technically complicated. There were just a lot of business rules and regulations they had to check for.

My vertical was railroad car repairs

https://public.railinc.com/sites/default/files/documents/CRB...

Most developers aren’t doing “hard things”. Not even at BigTech

It's not at all about doing hard things. It's simply the number of things to be done and how they interact with each other. You are absolutely right that these are technically not hard problems, but they're still hard design problems that keep changing very frequently

I am confused why you included GE. Do you think their aerospace products (jet engines and such) or medical products (MRI machines) are low quality? They are pretty much top three globally in those areas, and very innovative. And how about the Boeing 787? What issues do you have with that?

GE was the granddaddy of the financial engineering shenanigans that have hit the others in the list. If we’re looking for a simple villain, it’s “Chainsaw” Jack Welch.

>I think interviewing is just so broken it gives a false impression of quality issues in the labor pool.

I've been in a team where hiring requirements have emerged through the filter of HR almost unrecognisable. Naturally, they're still objective requirements, so qualified candidates are filtered out before ever meeting someone who could judge if they're qualified. It gets noticed, but nothing happens. Of course it doesn't: you're stepping on important toes.

That's how it tends to work. Candidates are filtered out by non-technical staff, including openly using programs that filter out CVs missing keywords. In smaller companies, this even gets farmed out to third-party recruiters that have poorly aligned incentives.

How can we know if candidates are qualified? We never see most of them.

It's hard to imagine many things worse for productivity than bad hiring processes. But it's all just accepted.

Screw the company -- sure, maybe they can build a product with mediocre talent. But I don't want to work with mediocre devs, because they make my life harder.

I'd much rather wait for someone I want to work with, than hire the first person that is "good enough".

> I think people seriously overestimate the difference engineer quality makes. Most products can be built with mediocre talent. I'm sorry, that's the truth. We all love to have strong opinions on who we should hire and I say "almost anyone, just throw meat at the problem". Most problems are solved with time and not cleverness.

I'm surprised that your experience here is so different from mine. The best engineers I've had are capable of things that the average to below average ones could likely have never achieved, even with an order of magnitude more time.

I don't think it comes down to cleverness as it does inventiveness. There are dots that great engineers can connect that often nobody else could spot. They also need less process, and a large number of people with all of the coordination overhead does not linearly scale.

Most products can be built with mediocre talent. But no one actively goes after mediocre talent. And yes, startups are more sensitive to this, I really had to let go mediocre people because it affects everything. Throwing meat at the problem for long enough time really screws up the product. Even at a very large company that I worked for, innovation ground to halt after a decade of this thinking, because systems that started simple enough, got complex over time in part because of market and primarily because of mediocrity. Adding things became a nightmare, because we threw meat at problems for a long time.

Maybe what you say has worked for your situations, but it really never worked for me over my experience, and it just was a downward spiral over time every single time.

If workers are mediocre, management needs to be top notch to deliver great products.

If management is mediocre, workers need to be top notch to deliver great products.

The odds you'll land at a place that have both are vanishingly low. It also takes a lot of work, money and interest to turn a big ball of mud around and no one gets a prize for that, people get a prize for churning out features and bugfixes, so this is what you get, specially because most large scale rewrite projects are utter and complete failures.

Each can compensate for the other only to an extent. We don't need top notch, we need good. Most large scale projects may fail, but we ended up assembling good people for all the rewrites. Five of the six projects were successful (in production with objectively better metrics). One failed due to underestimating the operational complexity of a piece of technology.

You’re right, most people are not good enough, and the H1-Bs are worse.

That is a sweeping statement. They (or should I say "We") are no worse than anybody else. If your point is that "worse" people should not come in to the country on H1B because H1b is meant for "better" people, I will probably agree.

most are not good enough

What is the basis for your claim? Unless you've followed up with those you rejected in order to gauge their performance on comparable tasks, you're just talking about confirmation bias.

I've never heard of anyone actually producing objective measurements of hiring practices vs. actual worker performance. I've just heard a hundred different versions of confirmation bias. Maybe Google has some useful data. I know that they dropped GPA requirements when they looked at data and found that it had no impact on job performance...

> That and companies are just hilariously bad at finding workers they want to hire for nebulous reasons. I have no doubt even if my company hired 95% of the workers it had marked down as "no hire" they'd be able to squeeze a salary's of value worth out of each of them (well, if management is competent, which it tends to not be).

Isn't it ironic that a comment making fun of companies for not hiring workers who can barely contribute above their salary's value, in the very same sentence blames management for incompetence. Well, guess what, managers are hired workers too, so if you apply the same principle to them, this is what you get.

What you suggest makes sense from the "homo economicus" point of view, but the result will be a barely functional hellhole riddled with incompetence (at least this is what it will feel like from within.) Can we blame people for being "selfish" and not wanting to work in this kind of environment?

> Well, guess what, managers are hired workers too,

I didn't comment on hiring "managers", did I?

> Can we blame people for being "selfish" and not wanting to work in this kind of environment?

I did cop to this behavior, right? I do agree. It makes my life easier rejecting candidates. I'm just saying this complaining over lack of quality talent seems like the corporate equivalent of feigned helplessness rather than an actual problem.

> There is a shortage of applicants willing to work at what companies want to pay

If you want the best candidates, it makes sense to have a wider pool of recruitment.

They're not hiring "the best". They want compliant serfs who are trapped with the promise of a greencard sponsorship someday.

There's a shortage of applicants with the skills that companies need. Engineers, like most qualified workforce, aren't interchangeable.

This is not what the data shows [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. Also, the efforts of many US firms recently to grow their India and LATAM presence [6] demonstrates this is for cost reasons, not a lack of qualified workforce. Companies will hire contractors from IT outsourcers and similar to launder the labor cost cramdown operation. IT unemployment is ~6% [7], why are we issuing any H1Bs beyond exceptional, highly compensated talent (~$300k-$500k/year and up)?

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-cognizant-h1b-visas-... | https://archive.today/jaXNo

[2] https://www.epi.org/publication/new-evidence-widespread-wage...

[3] https://cis.org/North/Unlikely-Sources-Confirm-Wage-Suppress...

[4] http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2015/05/economists-h-1b-vi...

[5] https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/h1b.pd...

[6] https://stig.net/latam-outsourcing-destination-us-companies/

[7] https://www.wsj.com/articles/it-unemployment-hits-6-amid-ove...

I mean, If I have an India or LATAM presence, why would I hire in the US at all, even H1Bs? Unemployment rates mean nothing if its a skills job. Eng #1 is not the same as Eng #2. You can see this plainly in interviews. Our hit rate for engineering is roughly 1 in 20 - purely based on the skill match. So 6-7% unemployment might as well mean they are not good enough?

Indeed, it's why policy will be an important component, just as tariffs can be used to stoke domestic production (to bring outsourcing costs to domestic cost parity). I.R.C. §174 touches on this with an amortization delta between US and non-US based development and R&D cost accounting, for example.

https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/tax-and-accountin...

> Beginning in 2022, all costs related to R&D must now be amortized over five years for US-based companies or 15 years for non-US companies.

With regards to "not good enough", maybe expectations (as a hiring manager or org) are unrealistic? Very subjective, so I find this topic to be difficult to argue effectively. I am not unsympathetic to the fact that hiring is hard, but the evidence of bad faith behavior at scale is undeniable and requires accounting for. If we're going to live in a socioeconomic system where people are forced to work to survive and there are little, if any, social safety nets, domestic employment must take priority over potential profits and economic gains of owners and similar controlling interests arbitraging labor cross border (or importing cheap labor) imho. As a founder/business owner, I can appreciate you're optimizing within your local minima.

It is indeed subjective. But since I have hired both good american and non-american engineers consistently over long periods, I tend to think it is not unrealistic.

I completely agree large scale abuse of the program must be stopped. No country can afford to have large influx of new population that hinder their own(however "own" is defined in a country) progress. Borders are a thing (for better or worse) and invoke extreme emotions within society, and that must be accommodated and not ignored. I say this as an H1B employee and I see this play out a lot more radically in my home country

Even if you have an India/LATAM presence, the higher end of workers from those countries are still mostly migrating to other countries for higher salaries. So you still need H1Bs because you aren’t getting that person in their home country.

Up the skill tree, companies often really get what they pay for, so the saving on offshore work is that they were overpaying for some lower skilled tasks, but not the higher skilled tasks (it’s a world market for top talent).

Not really. Countries like India are very large (population-wise) and have a very thriving domestic technology scene with a LOT of good talent. Not all of them want to migrate to other countries just for money. For the CoL in India, they are very well paid.

It is a level thing, even when I was working for Microsoft china, we could get lower level talent for cheap in India and China. But as the level rose, the costs became similar, and eventually the pay scale would flip (you could get a top level engineer in India, but they started costing the same or more than similar engineers in the Bay Area). So a $100k equiv engineer was cheaper, a $1 million equiv engineer was often more expensive. It really is a world market for talent at the high end, and the Bay Area has more of the top.

> If it is taking more than 30-60 days for workers to find a role, there are enough workers domestically.

This makes no sense, even if I agree with your first statement.

Not every company is willing to completely retrain a worker for something outside of their core competency. Lots of candidates simply aren’t competent, or even reliable employees. Lots of companies would rather a position go unfilled than make a bad hire that is very expensive to fix.

    > outside of their core competency

I don't mean to point a finger at you, but this term is basically a weasel term at this point... because the "core competency" grows as large as necessary for these companies to complain that they cannot find qualified candidates. In truth, they are not willing to train people missing some skills at the fringe. The original post from someone who works on satellite tech (surely dual-purpose to create killer robots, or whatever) decided to throw into the "core competency" mix that good/solid linear algebra was required. What a farce. I am sure that less than 1% of their work requires it. You can just have one PhD on the wider team that writes all that codes... well, sketches it out, then everyone else integrates it or refines it.

Your entire comment could have been “that phrase is subjective”.

Every company makes lots of subjective decisions during hiring, I agree.

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