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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
You think Microsoft doesn't pay for "proper health insurance" for their workers?
It's 100x better than the failing public system I have in my rich EU country.
>and still save enough that even if the social pension system fails
In which country is that so? 40h is more or less standard for full-time everywhere I've been so far in white collar careers.
You're proving my point. Paying more, beyond a certain point, doesn't increase the supply of "good" people. It just moves them around. After that the work starts going to overseas offices.
> 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
Usually with several hundred thousand dollars in the bank. Financially they're at least 10 years ahead of their peers who stayed home. And that's after paying the higher rents and health insurance in the US.
You're paid good money here for 37.5 hours per week, for ~10 months per year, sure the net number is higher in US, but calculating what's left over per hour of work is not that much in favour of US, especially considering what you can buy with that. One of the friends who worked there (google in sf) spent over 80hours per week in office, something like that is not just unheard over here, but also illegal. He was basically working two jobs there while being paid for one.
And yes, of course at some point (when you earn enough to live comfortably) your priorities become free time and other things, but again, that means that the company needs to pay more, to get another person to split the work. That's why everyone who did that says that the experience was great but that it's not worth it, neither financially nor health-wise.
In which country? I'm also in Europe, but never seen such low working hours. Maybe some nordic country?
I'm interviewing for a major french company now and their work week is still 40h and money isn't amazing at all.
So can you share this utopia where I can make great money for 37,5h/week?
There is only one Einstein and he wasn’t motivated by money. He was attracted to what America stood for. We are losing that
We should clip a green card to every PhD we grant.
Clipping a green card to every PhD is probably political non starter. As American, I'd be very leery of such a scheme.
>Clipping a green card to every PhD is probably political non starter. As American, I'd be very leery of such a scheme.
There is actually bipartisan support for trying to make it easier for PhDs to stay - both parties have repeatedly introduced legislation to help with that - but it seems to keep getting derailed by arguments about other aspects of immigration reform.
Maybe you disagree and I never considered getting a PhD but from what I understand, the workload has gone from hard to insane. If you are saying PhD only work with 18 hour days, 7 days a week, alright I guess.
>There is actually bipartisan support for trying to make it easier for PhDs to stay - both parties have repeatedly introduced legislation to help with that - but it seems to keep getting derailed by arguments about other aspects of immigration reform.
BTW, I've seen the legislation, it gets derailed a ton because many voters, myself included, believe it would just backdoor into Universities happily taking money for people to get PhD in low demand subjects to get the green card.
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.
H1B is for cheap java devs.
What I'm suggesting here is going to require serious investment on top of what should IMNSHO already be made, because we're talking about creating 3 parallel class streams for different tiers of ability. 3 sets of lesson plans, 3 very different kinds of student with different goals and ways of approaching life. They can't just throw that at one teacher and expect success, but their current track record suggests they would sure and damn well try.
There are several reasons my mother burned out from the classroom, and she's one of many many many such cases: low compensation, vast amounts of unpaid work time developing lesson plans and grading when not in front of students, larger class sizes and no aides to help handle the stress and chaos of another 20 teenagers on top of the 25 you already had in the room, corporatization/enshittification/growing lists of demands placed on teachers to shoulder more classes or pericurriculars, and so on. Hell, I know one (1) current schoolteacher, and they're also presently burned out and on leave. Could just be a coincidence, I guess!
There's been plenty of incentive for people to learn to code or study other skills to get a job in tech. Why do they need extra handholding on top of that? If they could do it, they would.
That's not to say more can't be done to strengthen early childhood education or reduce the cost of college. But it's unrelated to whether big tech companies hire foreigners or not.
Why? That means any education not directly useful to employers won't be funded at all. Not how you build a society. Education should be funded by taxpayers and society because it benefits society. "Taxpayers" includes companies too, not only individuals.
> and work training expenses
They already do. Every company trains employees on their own processes and systems. New employees aren't productive for several months.
> should be allowed to import 0 labor for any reason
Then the work goes abroad. Or these companies don't grow. (Referring solely to tech companies, not outsourcing body shops).
> Employers would have to compete for the best employees, driving wages up.
I understand if you say outsourcing body shops are a problem here. Tech megacorps pay a king's ransom in wages. They've already driven wages up. Any citizen not already working there either doesn't want to for any amount of money or is not good enough.
These people don't exist. Not for Big Tech roles.
You already hit the nail on the head - companies don't want to spend money. You think they like paying new grads (citizens and foreigners) $300k? Why would they do it unless they had no choice?
American policy should be to increase the total number of jobs not restrict where we hire from. We can and should increase our population to 1billion people. If China can employ that many so can we.
American policy should help average Americans, not corporations. There's a larger wealth disparity now than ever. Importing millions of white collar jobs to suppress wages only exacerbates that.
Where I agree is that most Americans could be paid more and would be id employment law, antitrust, were enforced and union busting was reversed
Remember how competition was supposed to work? (psst https://conversableeconomist.com/2025/10/31/the-silicon-vall... )
Instead work is either not done (less revenue for the company to expand), or is sent overseas. If management gets more comfortable with work going overseas it becomes a very big problem for domestic workers.