Reply #4: There are plenty of competent Americans to hire. The foreigners they get are not that good.

[AdHocSolver]

A few years ago, I worked at this company that brought in Chinese engineers to "learn the business" as they were planning to open a plant in China. I was hired to "fix" and improve a program that was written in-house. The original author had left and his code was pretty bad.

Initially, I was teamed up with an American engineer to help me with the application logic. He was a real competent guy and a joy to work with. Along the way, there was some shifting of management, and the American engineer was replaced with a Chinese import. The Chinese engineer was not only way out of his league, he was obnoxious as well.

China and India do NOT send their best and brightest to work in America. They send their mediocre engineers to the U.S., the guys who would be unemployed at home, to get jobs in the U.S., since American managers, as a group, are often technologically challenged, and don't know who is skilled and who is just getting by, anyway.

I worked for several years in the computer field. I worked in both business computing and engineering environments. I worked on software that ran the gamut from superb to downright ugly. More often than not, the quality of the software related directly to the technological competence of management. Where management was knowledgeable, which was a rarity, they selected competent programmers and gave significant direction to the effort.

More often the managers overseeing computer technology were technically challenged, sometimes seriously so, and the result was a seriously flawed product. Pie-in-the-sky software specifications, absurd delivery due dates, inadequate tools, cost overruns, product delivery way behind schedule, and often some seriously stressed programmers.

There is another reason that engineering and software managers like to hire H-1B's. Just as employers like to hire illegal immigrants who don't dare complain about bad working conditions, H-1B's would not dare to question the competency of their boss' decisions, since being sent home with a bad reference would be significantly bad for one's career.