I can't keep silent on this anymore. Watching the catfight between MAGA and Musk/Ramaswami is really raising some ugly tropes, most of it out and out nonsense on both sides of that divide. For some background I have been a software engineer for over 30 years. During that time I have witnessed the rise in popularity of onshore outsourcing to H1B engineers. Others may surely have their own interpretations but I'd like to share my experiences on the subject.
When I started in this field, H1B engineers were not that common, I'm not sure when the program started, but I don't recall meeting any at all in my first year or two on the job. My first job in this field was as a government contractor in Washington D.C. for one of the many government agencies headquartered there. All of our engineers were US citizens or residents. On our team of about 30, there were a small handful who were from foreign countries, I remember an engineer from South Korea and another from Russia, but both were green card holders or citizens, neither was an H1B. I believe all others were American by birth. Both of those engineers were excellent engineers as were many on our team. I was of course very new, and would not count myself at that time to have been among the elite of our team. It took me many years to rise to that level.
In any case a similar dynamic seemed at play for the next year or two. Some time within the next few years I met my first H1B hires, all from India. I became close friends with one in particular named Raj. Like many of his fellow H1B gentlemen, Raj was a pleasant fellow and I enjoyed his company, he used to come over to my house to cook dinner for my family. Raj was fresh out of college and frankly had zero professional experience prior to this first assignment of his. To that end, he always seemed lost in nearly every task. He wasn't dumb by any means, but just had not really learned the language he was supposed to be an expert in.
In a moment of personal candor he had confided in me that his only experience was a three week training course he completed just before getting on the plane to the US. While at the same time, I along with most of the team had been working in the language for years. He also told me how much he was being paid. It was shocking on one level, and on the other made sense.
As much as I liked Raj, I have to admit there were difficulties. He could do almost nothing on his own, I sat next to him in a small "programmers pit", he was almost constantly interrupting me so I could tell him how to do some relatively simple task. It got to the point that the constant interruptions were preventing me from completing my own assignments. Be that as it may, I never complained or said a word to anyone about it. But the department manager did notice, and one day a few short months after Raj arrived, his contract was terminated. I drove him home that day and he fell to tears in my car. It was heartbreaking. It must have been very upsetting to fail on one's first assignment, thousands of miles from home and knowing he had very little job flexibility.
As time went on, I met more and more H1B programmers, but the story was usually the same. They were often recent grads with little to no experience. They were not dummies but the fact is, regardless of one's talent level, it takes time and experience for even the best of us to rise to what I'll call here journeyman status. And therein lay the problem with the H1B program, the problem that gives the lie to Elon Musk's and Vivek Ramaswami's elitist screeds against US tech workers.
In general these engineers usually (not always but more often than not) lack the necessary experience to be as effective as they should, but they have one advantage to the corporate titans running the enterprises where they work. They work cheap. At a time when even a first year engineer's starting salary was in the $70-80k range in most of the country, these engineers were working for about $40k. THIS is the reason Musk et al really want more H1Bs. Not because they are more talented, but because they work cheap, and are easily exploited because they can't just hop to another job if things don't work out, period and full stop. They are essentially indentured servants with little recourse.
Generally H1B visas run three years and while some can be renewed (once), most are not. So just as they are rising to professional level, they leave and take their experience with them. I don't see the Trump DOGE team complaining about that. The fact is they don't care. They would rather have a minimally competent engineer they don't have to pay much and who is too vulnerable to complain or take any kind of action, than a seasoned veteran who has the choice of moving on if conditions become uncomfortable.
Am I saying that all H1B hires are green or incompetent? No not at all. I've met many who were quite capable and fine programmers, and even the majority of them who lacked experience struck me as likely to become seasoned pros with time. But I never noticed a preponderance of talent that I did not see equaled or surpassed from domestic engineers of the same experience levels.
They are not smarter, they are not more capable, and they certainly are not more experienced. What they are is cheap and pliant and that is ALL that the DOGE crowd and their fellow tech bros care about. And it is all they ever will.
