Is it so hard to get american workers? Don't they pay enough? Or why do they need foreigners?
Yes, it does, you used a figure to suit your argument, now people are rightfully asking for a more relevant figure to see if your argument still stands. So what % of developers live in USA? The rest is just purely your opinion.
More like you don't want to know, or it would turn your argument into an absurdity.
> At what thresholds would it make a difference one way or the other?
Since we can't know how many people are employed as developers, we must guess. But we can reasonably guess that if only 4.25% of the world's population lives in the US, it can't possibly have all the best developers, or even the majority of them.
Without that influx, this concentration would be impossible. If the US heavily restricts immigration by software engineers, the industry will ultimately relocate elsewhere. Europe would love to get all its software engineers back.
As to the H1-B thing, I suspect most of the people here haven't interviewed at the crummier software jobs (like at a commercial bank) but it's amazing how an entire department can be nothing but foreigners of no apparent excellence, and yet they can't "find" any citizens to hire even after interviewing them. There's heavy fraud top-to-bottom and it's going to get much worse.
The motivation for FAANG committing so much fraud using the H1B isn't really debatable. They do it to to steal money for their shareholders. The same motivation for all their tax cheating. The difference being that the H1B fraud is clearly illegal, even if it has remain unprosecuted by virtue of political bribery, etc.
And even if it was true (it's not), FAANG have enough money to train every person they want to hire from scratch. It would just cost more. Which is the entire point: they're greedy in the extreme.
It's very easy to disprove in any specific instance that there aren't U.S. programmers available to fill a role. Take a look at the H1B openings and see if you can't find some people in your LinkedIn connections that could fill those roles and don't yet work for FAANG. I certainly could for almost any role because they're almost all very generic tech jobs.
It also seems likely to be false just based on the number of U.S. programmers and the number of programmers employed by FAANG. They are very big employers but not nearly big enough to employ even a majority of U.S. programmers.
I don't think anyone in FAANG leadership believes this claim to be true at all. They all know why they're committing fraud, which is to compete against the others that are doing it too. The same reason restaurants and farms hire people that are in the country illegally.
You probably fell for the same propaganda about Americans not wanting to work in restaurants or in farms. When in reality, they don't want to compete with people being exploited.
Some companies exploit "unskilled" illegal immigration.
Some companies exploit "skilled" fraudulent immigration.
In both cases, it's the unethical theft of wealth from the population.
When the job is more than perfectly repeatable steps defined by an employer, which certainly describes the development of software, where anyone can be replaced with anyone else, there is sometimes value in specific people doing the job. People who may or may not be American.
And if not music, the same holds true everywhere. There are all kinds of Americans willing to throw themselves into a job – especially a job at prestigious company like Facebook – for minimum wage, or even an unpaid position (often known as an internship). No problem at all. It is definitely not lack of Americans willing to work for almost nothing to even literally nothing. Those people are in abundance – particularly right now with higher than usual unemployment rates.
When visa policies are tightened, FAANG companies don't decide "well, instead of hiring this Indian who passed our interview process, we'll hire an American who failed it instead". Rather, they expand their offices in places with less restrictive visa policies, like London or Vancouver.
Then once you get that office established you can bring people over on L1 visas I believe.
Simply not true for Facebook. The London office has a wide variety of different teams working on different projects, often directly on the same projects as teams in the US offices.
You may be “pretty sure”, but you are wrong. I worked at Facebook for four years including with many people from the London office. I don’t know how else I can convince you.
Facebook already has offices over there. Everywhere. They could hire tomorrow. They want slaves and slavery is what this shit is about.
This is how it works. Foreign manager bribes a US based VP and gets a inter-company transfer. Automatic L1 visa no questions ask. Then they start selling 200-500k jobs to people they know back in their home country. Those people pay a cut, maybe $50k maybe $150k to their trafficker in order to come to the US as a SDE away from their "shithole" country and make $50k.
They don't know what they are doing. Doesn't matter, SDE, manager, director, VP are all from the same country and are a fucking GANG
Source: Am American, and did not pass the interviews 2 years ago
Someone who can pass their interviews and earn $300k in SF can just as easily earn $150k in Mayberry. And that $150k goes a lot farther in Mayberry than $300k does in San Francisco.
I'd gladly work for them if Zuck promises that I can remain in Mayberry while I draw a Facebook salary.
Anyways, thankfully neither me nor my company is in the USA. If this is the reason why one can't build a diverse workplace, you built a very sad country.
Facebook wants to hire foreigners because they want to hire essentially everyone who passes their interviews, and only some subset of those are American.
edit to respond: Fine, then anyone willing to pay taxes in the US should get to work in the US.
Again, fuck the police state. People and communities matter, the state can burn to the ground for all I care.
The government should make rules that make lives better for their citizens,... other citizens have their own governments to take care of them.