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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Well, not clearly inferior but it’s a mathematical property that if A is a subset of B then max(A) <= max(B).

I’ve hired people for a decade in tech and through that period people have been bellyaching about this stuff throughout.

The absolute truth is that if you can’t hit $500k annual income in 5 years despite trying to do so, you’re not good enough.

The H-1B workers I know are making millions. If you’re getting pushed out by them it’s because American competitiveness is enabled by this. And I care a lot more about what’s good for America as a whole than trying to protect someone’s income.