Data on How America Sold Out Its Computer Science Graduates

Soham got 5 jobs. More than 5 jobs... He kept them for a while too.

We didn't lie to comp sci grads, they have the skills to DO the job, but the interview is a whole other skill that they have to learn. There is a gauntlet to be run of goofy interview questions and qualifiers. I dont know any one in the last few years who hasn't gone back to leetcode and the like to brush up if they needed to look.

Then you get posts like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079183

https://emaggiori.com/employed-in-tech-for-years-but-almost-...

Staff doing nothing or not pulling their weight is far more common than people think. Managers are resistant to firing staff, not because of HR, or emotional reasons. Rather many of them don't want to deal with the judgement of their peers (why did you make the bad hire to start with), and the judgement of their team/group. Office politics at the director level and above in a large organization is BRUTAL.

I don’t understand why we care if foreign born individuals are coding out software. We all use foreign written code daily.

Any student will look at the job prospects of their major before selecting it. We aren’t lying to them. I won’t feel bad for a student fresh out of college that “only” received a job offer for 95k, when that’s above the US median household income. I’m skeptical the lower job placement rate is due to H1B, and it might be more related to larger labor market trends.

It seems to miss foreign students?

This is using statistics to tell a preconceived story. Underlying this a notion that foreign workers are simply “imported” like they are dug out of the ground or something. How do these STEM OPT people find jobs? Guess what. They interview like everyone else does.

1: Every big tech interview I have been in the visa status is not even a question in the interview process. There is just a simple gate that “can you legally work in the US”? The hiring committee is not even thinking about visa (that’s a HR problem)

2: Are there confounders in that foreign workers are less likely to negotiate? Absolutely.

3: are there confounders in that people who come to US for study are likely already a self selected bunch who are striving to succeed? What are the typical grade distributions between foreign STEM students and US STEM students? Is grade a confounding variable? What happens if we control for GPA?

And finally does H1B abuse happen? Absolutely.

There is a lot of nuance that are not captured by surface level statistics. But nuance does not make outrage.

I applaud the courage to call out this as a problem. With that said I believe that there is a lot more nuance on this issue than the article is willing to provide, or more importantly research needed to be done to be rigorous on this topic. There definitely is some truth here about the H1B1 program in the job market. There are some companies who are absolutely shameless abusers too. I think that all of us working in the industry know that a comp sci degree alone is not enough to provide the training for many of these roles.

As an aside, I think there's another equally important issue that should also be raised along with employment. A large number of our graduate+ degrees in STEM go to foreign nationals. The issue is not providing education to foreign nationals in and of itself, but that many of these degrees (public schools) are funded by tax payers, and we are depriving our country of an educated population while educating citizens in other countries who compete with our country globally. Private schools can and should do whatever is in their mission, but public schools should have some accountability to our citizens and tax payers. We all have a right to get value for the money that we put into things like our public university system, which is supposed to be training future leaders of our country.

Of course with that longwinded answer I have to say... Tech is like the weather, just wait for a minute its all going to change anyway, so don't stress all of this.