Well, tech companies claim that they cannot find good enough workers to fill their positions. But "good enough" is a subjetive classification. I can always create a test for which you are not good enough, it doesn't matter how much knowledge you have. And that's what tech companies have done for years. They'll aways craft a contrived interview process that will classify most people as not "good enough" and use this as evidence that there are not enough workers available, so they will get the opportunity to expand the pool of workers as much as they want.
Not true IME from working and hiring at several tech companies.
They pay at top of market. They would save a ton on comp if they gave up on h1 candidates and hired the best they could find locally.
I know popular sentiment here is often that there is no real difference between these candidates, and the standards are arbitrary. That is simply it true. There are vast differences in engineering talent. Some people are truly amazing compared to the median candidate.
Every dev interview process I've been a part of has not included consideration of the applicant's citizenship status. The interview process has many flaws, but it is not contrived to tailor itself towards H1Bs at the expense of citizens. At least, not at the companies I've worked at, which are household names. At TCL or Wipro? Sure, those are blatant offenders of the H1B visa.
You said it yourself, those offenders supply talent to other companies. Many roles simply won’t be available to citizens because they’re filled by H1B abusers.
Yeah, I think the abusive companies like TCS and Wipro should be shut down. But the other companies generally pay pretty fair and use this visa system pretty normally, and they do see a shortage of qualified talent. I saw it myself as an interviewer. TCS and Wipro have a completely different quality standard (if you can call it that) and everyone knows it, plus they are cheating
Companies don't need to favor one group against another, they just need to make the process artificially hard, so they'll have the excuse that there are not enough workers ready to fill those positions.
The process is not artificially hard, imo. It's just testing you on things a college CS curriculum goes over. Sadly many many colleges in the US have a very substandard bar for teaching this subject.
