> I'm not talking about "replacing" workers. I'm talking about hiring the most qualified which in a global talent pool will almost always be someone from abroad. There's no reason for a company to hire a relatively unskilled graduate domestically when they could hire someone with more experience from abroad.
What I meant with replacing was that when someone retires, you hire a new worker and hope that they immediately produce a similar value. If the company has unique skill requirements, it is unlikely that the new hire provides similar value, at least immediately. How long it takes, is a question.
Alternatively, you have hired a junior already _on top of the_ already existing senior person. Junior doesn't have so good value/cost ratio but they still contribute. But this will increase over time.
And when the senior then retires, you are comparing the value of this trained junior vs. the associated risk of random new hire. You are never replacing retired person directly with "junior", junior is just an additional less necessary investment worker.
> If you look at the workforce makeup of many large tech companies today there's a reason Indian and East-Asian talent is so overrepresented, and it's not because they lack talent. It's because if you actually want to hire the best of the best you're not going to bring in juniors from the domestic workforce and train them up.
I haven't heard yet a company that actually has produced valuable product because of it. Usually the flow has been, that some Western country has created a succesfull product, and then later the workforce has been changed. And almost always the quality has decreased. But it does not matter because the product got already decent market share, and it takes years for revenue to drop because of that.