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I posit there's two different worlds in H-1B, one rife with abuse and the other working-as-intended. All the H-1B workers I've met at FAANG were great workers, no different from native born Americans, and they were not paid less. We should solve the abuse problem but not eliminate the program entirely.
I don't only mean rockstars or literal geniuses. It's still very worth it to brain drain the top few percentiles of labor from other countries, even if they are not geniuses. Considering we only import tens of thousands per year and there's over a billion people in the work forces of China and India, it's not a stretch to think that we are getting their cream of the crop. And to the extent that we are not, due to cheating and abuse, then that's something we should fix.
Then respectfully, their jobs should be going to American workers. There is no role in any FAANG company (unless you mean NVIDIA instead of Netflix) where there are no qualified Americans. As an industry "tech" does not have any super secret squirrel sauce that you can't find employees for in most first world countries, its just about how many you can find and what you pay them (chipmaking is a different ball game of course). American universities are graduating hundreds of thousands of them every year. But its easier for a company to import H-1Bs (and even pay them the same!) who's loyalty you own and who on paper have the skills you need than hire domestic talent that might on paper need training and experience.
But a country should have labor policies that benefit its citizens, maybe even at the expense of other countries citizens, thats one of the points of being a country in the first place.
There are plenty of roles where demand exceeds supply, however -- essentially all the qualified Americans are already employed or don't care to be.
About a single hundred thousand, not all of those American.
Then by the iron laws of economics, the price must increase. In this case you can make a very simple argument that H-1Bs are depressing American wages.
If you limit your pool to CS graduates, yes. But I humbly submit that essentially any engineering or math graduate can be trained fairly easily to do junior programmer job at a FAANG, and i personally know many who have taken that route. That at least triples your available talent pool.
The price must increase unless reducing the supply of labor reduces the output by enough to make the labor not as valuable. There isn't a lump of labor to be done by programmers, who get paid inversely to the number of programmers in the field.
But if the lack of labor drops the value of the output... the output was never valuable in the first place. Say you are having difficulty hiring a database engineer, and eventually you give up and find another solution. Turns out you didnt actually need any database engineers at all.
I do actually think there is something to this, as "tech" seems to be completely infested with solutions (and programmers working on said solutions) searching in vain for a problem. Adding in more people making more "solutions" is not a cure for the condition.
Incorrect, and known to be wrong since the time of Adam Smith - division of labor is limited by the extent of the market.
This proves too much. There was a time when you could not hire a database engineer for any amount of money, because there was no such thing as a database. People found other solutions (clay tablets, books, etc). Are we to believe that there's no loss or inefficiency involved in keeping your accounts in a paper ledger rather than a database?
What about the applications that are simply impossible without database engineers? Well, if you can't hire one, you give up and do something else. Maybe you decide to shovel shit in Louisiana instead. But there was a reason you wanted to do the first thing, and the fact that it's impossible has a real, albeit hard to measure, cost.
You are talking about a generalization that doesn't apply to the specific situation- right now the the specialization exists. You can pay money to get it. As an example, FAANGs poach each others workers all of the time. But if you, out of a lack of affordable specialization, turn to alternate solutions, then maybe that specialization was not actually as valuable as once believed.
Database engineer is just a job title, and maybe some certs. I know at least three control systems engineers who took much bigger offers to become database engineers because the fundamental math behind optimization is the same for both disciplines, and they are all extremely successful in their new roles. When a FAANG says they cant find an American database engineer and need to parachute in an H-1B, that is, to put it politely, bovine excrement. At best it is incompetent recruiters, and more likely a flat out lie.
You're merely restating your original argument rather than arguing against what I said. Yes, it is often possible to do without and to do with less, and we did without software engineers for a hundred thousand years, and we can do with less of them now. The question is whether it's better to do with less than to have more. It is, to say the least, rare that scarcity is more socially optimal than abundance.
Do you think that we would be better off with five software engineers total in the US? If not, then your implicit argument is that there is such a thing as "peak software engineer" and we're past it. So far, you haven't presented any evidence for this.
The point is not about database engineers in particular. To be pedantic, I don't think I've met a "database engineer" in FAANG for at least a decade, so I don't know that they even hire database engineers.
Great. But, they were already doing some job that was worth doing. If an H1B is parachuted in for that job rather than the database engineer job, does that make you feel better?
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