> there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B.

As an interviewer in a big tech company, it seems all candidates I interview are foreigners who often graduated in the US. Either the company discriminates (which I really doubt it does), or there aren't enough qualified Americans for some jobs. And even if there are, the largest pool of candidates, the better.

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a99p 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> And even if there are, the largest pool of candidates, the better.

More competition is not inherently "better" nor does it necessarily yield greater innovation. Trying to impose arbitrary competition as some abstract principle is just masochism.

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zdragnar 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Big tech companies are biased to sourcing from big name universities that have a lot of foreign students, and big tech companies were much more likely to go through the effort of H1B than smaller companies. As such your candidate pool is more heavily skewed than elsewhere.

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drecked 11 hours ago | parent [-]

All the conspiracies theories can be put to bed by walking into any engineering department (maybe outside of biomedical engineering…which makes me think this may be related to how Americans demonize math) and observing that the majority of students are foreign or maybe second generation immigrants.

This ratio gets worse because American students are disproportionately more likely to follow up their engineering undergrad with law or business school, so even if they may be engineers they’ll get into business and/or something like patent attorney going forward.

	▲	circus1540 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The conspiracy here is that somehow US spending on primary/secondary education ranks among the top, yet we are unable to produce competitive college students. And we mask this very serious problem from directly rippling into our economy by... importing students and workers.

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coliveira 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's really easy to see that big tech is interviewing only people who passed an initial filter which at this point is AI based. They're clearly filtering for some characteristics they want in a candidate, and most probably the filter is giving you the people you mentioned.

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pickleRick243 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Better for whom?

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mattnewton 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Businesses, the consumers who buy their products, and the global workforce.

	▲	eli_gottlieb 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The global workforce benefits from higher salaries and higher demand for labor, not from zero- or negative-sum moves of jobs from one place to another.

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eli_gottlieb 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

1) There's a very reasonable chance the company discriminates. Sorry, but once bitten, twice shy. One company gets caught at it and the whole industry develops a reputation.

2) If you've got a problem finding candidates, there's 16,000 more on the market now. Congratulations!

3) If you think there must be something wrong with those 16,000, well, that would explain where your pipeline is going wrong.

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yodsanklai 12 hours ago | parent [-]

> There's a very reasonable chance the company discriminates

I don't see how this is even possible. There would be a memo from the CEO to 1000s of recruiters asking them to favor foreigners? that would leak immediately.

	▲	ipaddr 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They pay the top Indian firms for candidate referrals. And a CEO would say we need more diversity and make that a company goal.

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SoftTalker 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"foreigners who often graduated in the US"

This is still the case in US Comp Sci programs. There are some Americans in these programs but it's mostly Indian and Chinese. The American kids gravitate to the business schools.

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snerbles 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The company itself might not discriminate as a policy, but some hiring managers certainly have their preferences. Or exclusively pull talent from their overseas cousin's brother's spouse's college roommate's consulting firm that is most certainly not a grift.

	▲	12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]