Because the person they are importing is probably brighter than you. If you're talented and smart you come to the US and likely the Bay Area (or west coast) to work in tech. Why? For the same reason that baseball players all end up in the US and Soccer players end up in Europe: they all want to play against, and with the best in the big show.

All the H1B's I have worked with are whip smart, hard working, and in general amazing people. I cant say the same for all my localy sourced colleges. The tragedy of the economics in most of these cases was that they were making the same amount of money as their peers and not more...

In a lot of cases companies are getting a Steff Curry or a Lionel Messi and paying them the average of the rest of the team...

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ApolloFortyNine 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

>All the H1B's I have worked with are whip smart, hard working, and in general amazing people. I cant say the same for all my localy sourced colleges.

Anecdotally myself, I've worked with great ones yes, but the majority aren't incredible.

In the tech arms of banks you can see a lot of what I would describe as at best regular software engineers, nothing special.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-h1b-visa-middlemen-c...

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kelnos 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> All the H1B's I have worked with are whip smart, hard working, and in general amazing people.

That's surprising; for me, H-1Bs have run the gamut, with a range of talent and ambition that's pretty similar to the range of talent and ambition I see with US-born workers. And I think this is perhaps the problem: your experience should be the norm, if the H-1 visa program is functioning properly, but I don't think that's the case.

Among my friends who have been on H-1Bs, they tend to be high performers, but that's just selection bias at work.

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deadbabe 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you paid $20k more, you would have the more talented locals applying.

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zer00eyz 4 days ago | parent [-]

India, China, both home to a billion people.

Mathematically if we collected all the brightest people from both these nations, say the top 5 percent of their population thats 100 million people in that pool to pick from.

The entire population of the US is 350million.

Comp sci went from something people did cause they enjoyed to something they did cause they thought it was a pay day: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ocpf0g/oc_...

We ran out of talented, passionate people a long time ago.

There is also a cultural problem in America, one that buisness and staff are afflicted with.

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/no-inventions-no-inno...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=At3256ASxlA (pay attention to Noyce in Japan and the article he wrote... think about intel today, compare it to the above article).

I don't think Noyce's take as a business owner is far removed from the above take from the prospective of staff.

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deadbabe 3 days ago | parent [-]

So you’re going to pay an extra $100k a year per foreign national just to hire them when a domestic employee would be cheaper and pretty much the same.

	▲	zer00eyz 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> and pretty much the same The top 5 percent of India and China is a pool of 200 millon people. The top 5 percent of the US is a pool of 17 millon people. If your looking for talent and not looking to other nations your going to come up short.

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4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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