You can't train people for years and pay to do so. No company can afford to do that esp at these salaries.
If you ever interview for a tech company you learn quickly how many people applying for these jobs aren't qualified. It's sad but it's true
By the time a “qualified” candidate is sitting across from you, you have already created a sampling bias simply because the population of India and China are staggering compared to the US. Wow, there are so many eager candidates from India, we must have a labor shortage in the US!
As an interviewer I need to be able to challenge candidates to get adequate signal to make an informed selection. My pool is computer science graduates and experienced software engineers. Most candidates fail. I haven't analyzed the distribution but my best guess is that over half of the successful candidates are on work visas.
As someone who was out of work for a large portion of 2025 and attended many interviews, I found interviewing frustrating and failed many. Only after taking a couple of months sitting down and studying fundamentals, grinding leetcode, reading the latest distributed systems literature, and practicing interviewing, I discovered that I genuinely had knowledge and skill gaps. The studying actually helped me become a better engineer. I received several offers after this intensive study period.
The vast majority of candidates for Flipcart and Bytedance simply would never be able to perform adequately. These top companies pay extraordinarily highly compared to most software engineering firms in their countries, far beyond the delta between OpenAI and a typical software engineer in the United States. The quality gradient is still there. Flipcart and Bytedance need to compete internationally, so their salaries are pulled upwards substantially.
I never really understood the idea of gatekeeping jobs -- especially those at the very high or the very low end.
On the very high end, wouldn't you want to poach the most intelligent folks from around the world and bring them into the US? That pool of high-performers is not a big one and you're directly removing competition and silo-ing all the best people under your control.
On the very low end, those are jobs that are non-competitive and enable the low-mid-high level jobs to exist (and for those workers to be compensated better and so on). If you're looking at the US right now, a great example is to look at the agriculture industry. Farm bankruptcies increased by almost 50% in 2025 and 2026 is looking even worse. These bankruptcies in 2025 happened before diesel prices spiked by 30-40% and tariffs killed international ag-trade. A lot of those bankruptcies can be attributed to the the lack of farm workers which either cause farms to not be able to generate revenue and/or have dramatically reduced margins.
Edit: Wow, in the few minutes it took me to write my comment, there have been quite a few comments that are making the point that:
1. Companies need to pay more to get better talent.
2. The hiring process is broken and not surfacing high-quality domestic workers.
I guess my response is that I've offered and been offered compensation packages that seem to be quite strong. I worked with and know folks who have received similar or better packages and the quality of work seemed to be a bit of a crapshoot. Just "paying more" doesn't guarantee better workers (if that's even feasible or doable for the company). I'm sure that there is some sort of correlation between higher pay and better/more efficient productivity, but I don't work HR for Google or whatever so I don't have the data to specifically make a point. Empirically, my experience has been that there is a weak correlation and when factoring in $$ per work product, it becomes inefficient.
The hiring process being broken is very true. I'm not smart enough nor knowledgeable enough to even offer a fix to the problem. All I can say is that employers spend a lot of money trying to hire the best people and they still get burned/can't find a good candidate.
That is precisely the idea that was at an all time high during ZIRP - just (acqui)hire people and companies to make sure no one else has access to them. In an ideal world this should have been banned under antitrust regulations, but eh.
And now it has predictably blown up in our faces.
I was more pointing out that hoarding high-performers as a country is desirable since geopolitics prioritizes different outcomes than pure capitalism.
Optimally, the US would attract the cream of the crop, the top 5% of the world and let them roam freely inside of the American system with plenty of capital (both money and labor). I'd venture and point out that many of America's greatest technological leaps were a direct result of this kind of strategy (think WWII, the space program, computing, etc, etc).
If the lowest paid lowest responsibility job has a wage increase, then any job which requires more from the worker needs to increase their salaries, or people dip out and take the easier job for the same salary.
In reality, the example is usually something like a situation where a highly stressful and highly skilled job is maybe paying $30 per hour and the worker decides to change to a menial job for $25 per hour instead or even less.
Any talk of "worker shortages" is not just a lie, it is a lie born from evil. Born out of the current geriatric ideology of hatred against the youth of your own people, which is dominating in industrial society all over the world.
Any business which cannot pay a good salary for the workers they employ shouldn't be in business in the first place. It is better for the economy that those people work with something else. Especially since a normal worker usually has an output of 5-10 times more than what they are paid, and in efficient sectors even more than that.
That population requires a very pointed set of constraints that are super hard to find, because no one in their right mind would want to live under the systems we're building if they live somewhere without worse off already.
Globalism is just a shortcut around gaining the consent of the labor class which materializes in the form of "you can't pay me enough to implement that".
Why couldn't it mean someone young, with a reasonable education, who's willing to work at half the price and be trained over the course of years?
Ok you said it. Where's your empirical evidence?
you: where's your evidence?
If you need evidence, look at https://www.levels.fyi/h1b/?q=anthropic . Anthropic seems to need to sponsor visas for their workforce as well. Just like every other large US company.
Also all Fortuna 500 companies have offices abroad, where they use local talents already. Just like everywhere in USA there has been increase for roles that require higher security - those are for USA nationals and naturally they exclude any H1B visa holders.
Given that USA tech companies are laying off steadily thousands of software developers over last three years because of optimization efforts that they started around covid times as a push back against demands to raise salaries and freezing those salaries, the only use for H1B would be to put larger pressure on IT job pool in USA to clamp these salaries down.
Clearly this is something that USA administration has caught on as mass recruitment where a lot of those talents are not used is a security issue as it is unregulated. So, despite what other commenters are mentioning, stricter H1B is better for USA software developers, as slaves from H1B are driving salaries down.
Imagine how much effort it would take to train a league of Google engineers to be NFL players. It's far better to use a recruiting pipeline of people who self-select for the role and have achieved rounds of selection for their talent.
This is absurd. It's because you're absolutely unwilling to invest in domestic candidates and train them. You and every other employer. You are shooting yourself and your peers in the foot through this stinginess.
And do this to avoid hiring a Chinese or Indian candidate with a master's degree from an American public university?
I'm all for companies doing this, but the pipeline needs to be improved as whole, meaning we need to have candidates that already have enough prior education so that there's more of them that can be trained more quickly. And one way to address that is to make the entire public schooling system better through better funding, starting all the way from kindergarten through to the university system.
I can guarantee you that there are enough US citizen/resident programmers to meet your hiring goals. I can absolutely believe that your company can't afford to pay what it would take to meet your goals with only US persons. But "we want more than we can afford" is very different from "there aren't enough."
I don't understand why you keep mentioning other companies. What does the fact that a bunch of big companies all sponsor visas have to do with the fact that there's no such thing as a labor shortage, just companies wishing they could pay less and hire more, and acting on that wish in various ways?
> I can guarantee you that there are enough US citizen/resident programmers to meet your hiring goals.
You can't make that guarantee. These companies spend lots of money to hire immigration lawyers to sponsor visas and process H1B -> Perm processes. The market would absolutely reward a participant who could bypass this headache and hire only people who do not require visa sponsorship. But the counterfactual has been tried. Many startups do not sponsor visas and they get outcompeted frequently.
Labor isn't some magic thing exempt from supply and demand. Pay more, get more. It works.
If you can't afford to pay more to get more, well, that happens. We don't always have enough money to buy everything we want. The fact that I can't afford a Cirrus Vision jet is unfortunate, but it doesn't mean there's a shortage of jets.
Besides, moving a business is a whole lot easier than uprooting people and their families and putting pressure on the local population.
If you're doing 10+ interviews a week, likely you work in Big Tech. And that means several things have happened before you even interview a candidate, specifically screening by ATS, AI systems, recruiters and hiring managers. There are perverse incentives (eg recruiters putting people in the pipeline to boost their numbers) and there's also massive discrimination, particularly age discrimination.
Tech companies in general want to hire grads or near-grades in vast quantities, particularly from the more prestigious US colleges. You get to 40 and suddenly you don't make it through those initial pipelines before you get to interview the candidate. They're not suitable in some way. And over 50? Forget about it.
And if you do make it through these filters, you may still get filtered for not being a "culture fit", which is just code for "not like me". And if the employee pool already skews young, male and from those same colleges, "culture fit" is just a thin veneer that reinforces discrimination.
I am also not sure the world is quite as discriminatory as you paint it as. I'm over 40. I'm a woman. It's a mixed bag; most places I interviewed during my last job search were very normal about everything. One place rejected me because I "can't thrive in a high-ambiguity environment" and I'm just like ... the interview consisted only of leetcode questions with one right answer, that I got right, so ... just say "our investors are all Republicans and I don't think we should be hiring trans people, yeah we clocked you btw." But it's honestly a lot more rare than I had expected going into it.
I don't really know what's going on with tech right now, or what the future looks like, but despite AI, despite not being fresh out of school, it all feels pretty normal to me. The ZIRP days seemed about the same as things feel now. What's changed is I can ask Claude "what would this crazy design look like?" read it, run it, and say "ewww, no, yeah I knew that would be terrible" without investing the week to write it myself. I am not sure that spells the end of our field.
It’s really that simple. If you’re not getting enough qualified applicants then you need to make your offer more attractive. That could involve culture, work environment, or perks, but the biggest thing is pay.
Of course a company’s ability (or willingness) to pay is not unlimited so that may not be a possibility. But then you have to accept that you’re not able (or willing) to pay what it takes to meet your hiring desires. That’s ok. I am not able (or willing) to pay what it takes to meet my luxury-sports-car desires either.
There is an apparent contradiction: you’re offering good pay and not getting many applicants, but there are a ton of jobless programmers. How to square that? The former is something you’re directly experiencing, the latter is something you’re hearing through the grapevine, maybe getting some broad numbers for. The obvious conclusion would be that the jobless programmer situation is not nearly as bad as people say.
The mismatch may just be that you have no idea how to set up your hiring tools or operate your hiring process.
This is said all the time, and don't get me wrong, I like "compensation" as much as the other guy, but to me this just sounds like a race to the bottom (or sky) for companies.
It's great for those compensated for sure. But what happens once the companies with deepest pockets, FAANG and such, pay the most and drain the job market, what happens to all the other companies then? It raises the bar significantly for any new startup, makes it ever more impossible for any boring, middle-of-the-road company to find anyone remotely capable. Ultimately growth of the tech sector is limited by the number of people you have available, regardless of how much you pay for them. If anything, another country with more potential talent could even surpass the one playing alone in its own sandbox.
I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, and maybe in an economic downturn it's even a good thing, I'm just saying that it doesn't come with no tradeoffs.
I see this with startups all the time. Cofounders get 30-50% equity with preferences and then want to hire a lead engineer as a first hire... with 0.5% equity and a $100,000 salary.
Big companies already do a lot to pay as little as they possibly can. AI is just the latest foil to suppress wages.
What I disagree with is "it's not a labor problem, it's a compensation problem" framing.
I think it IS a labor problem, and also a compensation problem. Compensation itself only solves for the local maxima.