The H1-B debate again

Ars Technica has an article about Bill Gates' latest statements regarding the need to raise the H1-B cap.

It is clear the debate is far from resolved, but I think Ars is going in the wrong direction. Microsoft has development offices all around the world. If they want cheap labor, they can hire and keep their employees in their home lands. Their need to hire employees has less to do with wages than their extreme need to hire people for their Redmond office. I can think of many reasons why a large software company would want to do that.

Just consider this as an example: Amazon is hiring more than 500 people right now. Many of the positions have been open for months. Even if you buy the argument that H1-B workers are simply cheap labor, don't you think Amazon would prefer to hire American workers if they could find qualified people?

I've been working for large corporations for a long time as an Oracle DBA and I have interviewed many candidates in my time. My experience is basically the same that Joel Spolsky reports about here and here.

Basically, almost everybody you phone screen or interview is someone who just read that one book and don't know any more about Oracle than what their memory can recall. I once did a phone screen where I could clearly hear the candidate typing some keywords on his keyboard, then pausing before answering my question by reading the Google results. By the third question, I was doing the search myself and even reading directly from the same pages as the candidate. It turned out to be an entertaining experience for me. I rejected the candidate, but gave him high points for his Google skills.

Believe me, it is very hard to find good IT candidates. Maybe you have luck if what you're looking for are Excel macro experts, but the highly skilled candidates necessary to carry out complex software development projects (people who actually understand pointers, recursion, algorithm complexity, etc) are rare. And if you find people who are very good at those things but live in Kenya, Brazil, France, India, etc, why not bring them over?

Having said that, I do agree that the system is open for abuse. I don't think the problem is Microsoft or Amazon or Google, though. I think the problem are some of the hundreds of consulting companies that care only about the difference between how much they charge their clients compared to how much they pay their employees. Some of them really do a good job screening candidates and do bring good people over, but some are just abusing the system.

I think the trick is to improve the quality control of the H1-B approval process. And I don't think this can be done by simply restricting the number of visas granted per year. Whether you think the cap is high, it is actually a very poor mechanism to begin with.