Comment by sophacles
7 hours ago
In my experience finding good people is hard when the entire world is on the table. Limiting the pool based on stupid concepts like "nationality" is just a jobs program for the low quality people.
7 hours ago
In my experience finding good people is hard when the entire world is on the table. Limiting the pool based on stupid concepts like "nationality" is just a jobs program for the low quality people.
As long as you don't mind people remote working then no need to limit the pool nor pay visa fees.
I live near Mt. Rushmore. When my mom was a kid, working there during tourist season was a very common summer job for high school kids. Now it's not, because now temporary foreign labor by means of seasonal visa programs, complete with housing, fills those jobs each summer instead. Are American high schoolers physically/mentally unable to do these jobs? Of course not—yet these job opportunities have been taken from them regardless, replaced with what is essentially seasonal foreign-labor indentured servitude.
Honestly, a lot fewer American teenagers want/are allowed summer jobs these days. They are all focused on doing enrichment activities that will look good on a college application, and low-wage menial jobs don't count for that.
I actually think it's a great thing to let young people from around the world have working holidays in America https://www.usit.ie/experiences/working-holidays/j1-usa/
I work in the public school system and I can definitely assure you that nowhere near “all” high school students are doing what you suppose they are doing.
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Pay better.
It’s not always about pay. In some special disciplines there are only a handful of people with sufficient training or talent. We don’t hire more Americans by cutting the candidate pool. We hire more by growing the economy with innovation, startup formation, academic research for basic concepts that aren’t commercially viable, government investment in core infrastructure and long horizon moon shots that aren’t commercially feasible.
There is only one Einstein and he wasn’t motivated by money. He was attracted to what America stood for. We are losing that
To follow up on this, US PhD programs are not generally packed with US citizens, they're frequently the cream skimmed from the rest of the world. For many subspecialties, there's just not going to be enough US citizens to do all the cutting edge work that could/should be done.
We should clip a green card to every PhD we grant.
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Ok, but those people aren't H1B's. They were on O-1 visas.
These body shop firms are not hiring world-leading geniuses, they are getting mostly-okay Java devs who will do boring scutwork for the chance at life in America.
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We could also try something that has not yet been attempted: investing heavily in developing people who show signs of talent at an early age and streaming ALL children's education according to their capabilities and interests at a young age, in order to eventually bolster the available pool of highly talented people without having to rely on poaching talent from elsewhere in the world (depriving those countries of an opportunity to benefit from the highly talented people that they sweated and paid to train).
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But it is always the pay. Corporations could easily hire American interns and train them, for money. There's millions of people that would love to leave their retain jobs for an internship at a tech company, but there's no economic incentive for the mega corps to train these people.
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Than $228k? That's what Microsoft pays an entry-level SWE right now. Where are all these qualified people for whom $228k out of college isn't enough money?
I dunno, parent claimed he can't find good people. He could hire them away from his competitors by doubling their salary if he needs them that badly.
Remember how competition was supposed to work? (psst https://conversableeconomist.com/2025/10/31/the-silicon-vall... )
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I've seen the comp packages. I'm pretty sure that's not the problem.
Same words are said by hotel owners unable to find eg. cleaning ladies for hotels over here in my small country.... touristy area (=very few locals), relatively far away from larger towns with more local population, everything is expensive there (eg. lunch and parking), and they offer minimum wage and then complain.
For minimum wage you can work in your home town, basically anywhere.. if you expect someone to spend 45minutes each direction on a bus for you and pack tupperware lunch, because there are no cheap "daily meal" restaurants around, you'll have to pay more... but hey, our government does the same, and there are always poorer countries with very desparate people.
The same applies to every other job, but you seem to not pay enough to even get someone good from poorer countries.
Just pay more, and you'll get good people, from your town even, not just across the whole country.
This might sound controversial but an office job at Microsoft is a teensy-bit more desirable to a citizen than a job cleaning motels.
Microsoft pays new grad SWEs close to a quarter million dollars. Plenty of citizens would gladly take that money if they could land the job.
Sure, but op wants 'good', how much are those people paid?
Also, how much does rent in a 20-minute-drive circle around microsoft cost? And proper health insurance?
I live in a small european country and i know quite a few people who went this route (usually it's google), and after two-three years of burnout, those people come back, because while earning less in numbers over here, they can get a normal 8 hour job (no overtime, no weekends), proper time off (25, 30 days per year, unlimited sick days of course), and still save enough that even if the social pension system fails, they'll have enough to live comfortably.
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