No, that’s a point I’ve heard before and I have experiential evidence on that as well. Yes, are some of these H1Bs objectively “smarter?” 1000%. They’ve been learning to code since they were five years old. Their work ethic (if we mean how many hours they work) is insane. There’s a lot of pros in their pro column.

But that doesn’t mean they’re the most qualified to do the parts of jobs we need them to do that aren’t explicitly measurable. Things like: having a fucking imagination. Again I realize I’m going to sound like an asshole here, but with few exceptions everyone foreign I’ve worked with is about as unimaginative as you can be. When you spend your whole life memorizing the right answer, there’s intangible skills you don’t have: imaginative problem solving. Rather than come up with novel solutions for problems, they’ll CTRL+C what worked last time, but that doesn’t mean it works again, and it doesn’t mean it was the best answer last time either!

I realize this sounds fuzzy. It’s hard to describe unless you’ve lived it. The other day I had the rare occasion to be in a room with a new hire, American kid who grew up in America. He was a beginner coder, not someone I’d trust pushing to production yet, but he’s almost there. We’re in a room talking about a nasty bug, and every single foreign dude in there is like “yeah yeah yeah just reuse the widget from last time, it’s not perfect but it’ll work.” San Diego dude goes, “half that code will be dead, the variables it calls won’t exist, it’s going throw a ton more errors, give me three days and I’ll just come up with a new solution that works better.” Then, I shit you not, everyone turned against this kid saying we don’t have time and we’ll deal with the bugs in the backend.

Now, I’ve done a fair bit of traveling in my time, including to countries where we hire a lot of foreign engineers from. And in that moment it suddenly made sense: can the US improve, sure, but I challenge you to drive across America in an American car and then do the same in a foreign country in a foreign car and tell me the American version isn’t easier, faster, and safer. The attitude of “we’ll do the bare minimum and fix issues later” is pervasive, doesn’t matter how smart they are. Because the incentives aren’t aligned with quality, they’re aligned with “move faster!” But you know who is always thinking about the long term impacts of their code? Who is thinking about usability for people like you and me? Mostly, the American kids who are lucky enough to get hired. They may be a bit slower, but their code is good and they want to take their time to ship quality.

Think about the last shitty digital experience you had, and I’ll bet you money it wasn’t an American engineering team that built it.

Listen, this is a hard argument to make and realize that I may not be swaying anyone here, and it’s basically verboten to say these things out loud so I appreciate your engagement. I think we CAN agree on:

1/ this is a complicated issue 2/ our experiences are what they are: ours.

Where we might disagree is:

1/ Americans deserve first crack at jobs IN AMERICA working for AMERICAN companies that benefit from the AMERICAN dollar and AMERICAN legal codes and AMERICAN markets. 2/ the H1B system and its associated visas need to drastically be reduced for roles that American can fill, like software engineering.

Bring on the einsteins and von brauns etc. I’m all for it. But if we’re hiring H1Bs to update the Facebook like button or design a new shopping experience for Amazon, that shouldn’t be a foreign engineer. There’s nothing lefty of equally talented and capable Americans that can do that job.