alt Hacker NewsThere is an argument that the purpose of the program is to provide skilled labor which is beneficial to the economy, beyond just, but including the domestic employment rate.
I’m not sure that’s what the H-1B program is doing in practice here, it probably is replacing many skilled American born workers. But at least in theory it can both be true that domestic worker unemployment has gone up, but that contracting the program risks the global competitiveness of major US companies that net employ US workers. More analysis is probably warranted.
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I worked at BigTech, I don’t think I met a single coworker on H1B that was a “specialized top talent” whose job couldn’t go to an American citizen. I’m not saying any of my H1B visa coworkers were worse than American citizens, they weren’t better.
Now I also spent a long career in regular old enterprise dev before 2020. Definitely any halfway decent framework developer could have done the job as well as the ones who were here on H1B.
I can easily hold multiple thoughts at once.
1. As long as their unemployed qualified Americans for roles, we should reduce the new H1B visa applications dramatically.
2. I don’t begrudge anyone here on H1B and don’t support discriminating against them or cancelling their visa
3. I don’t agree with how once you get let go from a job, the clock starts ticking no matter how much money you have saved. When I was at Amazon and Amazon started Amazoning with me. I didn’t break a sweat when I was on “focus”. I played the game long enough to get through my next vest and then sat around and waited on my “get $40K+ severance offer and leave immediately or prostrate myself for a couple of more months and still be let go with 1/3 the severance amount”.
Of course I took the severance. My coworkers here on H1B were scared shitless and overworked themselves. Then again, it was my 8th job out of now 10 and I was already 49 at the time. I might have acted differently if I were younger.
The purpose of this program has always been to provide cheaper labor for companies. We have never had a legitimate shortage of qualified software engineers.