The American Worker vs. the Most Qualified Person: A Family Story That Punctures Paul Graham's Hiring Myth
A personal essay responds to Paul Graham's claim that 'the most qualified person should get the job' by recounting the author's grandfather's journey from a drafted 22-year-old with basic heat-treatment experience to a lead engineer on NASA's Apollo heat shield. The story illustrates that hiring for potential and trainability can outperform hiring for existing qualifications. The author contrasts this with the H-1B visa's original intent to bring in uniquely qualified experts like Wernher von Braun, who could train American workers, and criticizes Graham's view of the American economy as global, arguing instead for a corporate responsibility to develop domestic talent.
John might not have started as the 'most qualified person' but, with a little training and a lot of hard work, he became the most qualified person for the job.
- try-working
There's no such thing as an innate most qualified person. Zuck was never the most qualified to be CEO of Meta. He is now, because of what he's done. At the same time there's an infinite number of jobs he is poorly qualified for.
Strict qualification can only be measured in a extreme niche cases. You founded an area of research, so you're the most qualified to work on that at Google. You have a massive Linux project, then maybe Torvalds or his core maintainers are the only ones who fit.
But outside of that, people become qualified because of what they do, and before they did it, they were unqualified.
As an example, I'm sure there are many people at OAI and Ant who are today world experts at research and training and infra. But they became that by just doing the job. Take their same resume from 5 years ago and they may not even reach the interview if they applied for the same role. The what does qualified mean, how do you measure and define it?
Countries need to develop their own talent and individuals need to develop themselves.
- ecshafer
I have seen H1Bs used for basic Java development, Desktop Support, CRM managemetn, Marketing, Project Managers, and all sorts of basic office work. The idea its used for the best and brightest is absurd. When you also count the massive fraud in H1B, people looking for kickbacks, racial preferences, lying on resumes (I once interviewed an H1B with 4 pages on their resume, couldn't answer a single question from what I pulled out of the resume, and got overruled by the manager on the hiring board). There is a massive amount of office work that can be done by a bright high schooler or community college grad, but gets shunted off to a body shop who mass applies H1B. Several years ago Disney fired their IT staff and replaced them with H1B, this was in the news. There was obviously not a talent shortage, and plenty of American citizens can pass the A+ or various microsoft sysadmin certs that "qualify" someone for IT work.
- petcat
> An H-1B hire should not simply be marginally better than an American counterpart. They should provide such a leap forward in capabilities such that the rest of the company is elevated in their own knowledge and expertise.
This is an important thing that was recently addressed by the new $100,000 fee to sponsor an H-1B visa. It is especially impacting Indian tech workers in the US [1] since the types of roles that InfoSys and other foreign tech consulting firms are staffing do not meet the bar of "leap forward in capabilities". A US company is welcome to sponsor (and pay for) a visa for a truly exceptional worker. But not just anyone because they're cheap and minimally-capable.
[1] https://thefederal.com/category/news/h1b-visa-indian-tech-wo...
- davesque
The article doesn't address what I think are the main complaints about H-1B: that it is mostly used to cut costs and hire people who have very little freedom to switch jobs. That and all the trickery with ghost jobs meant to only give the appearance of hiring stateside. The example given is also not great. Von Braun was one remarkable foreign expert in a leadership position. On the other hand, in my experience, many H-1B hires tend to occupy low-level jobs; ironically the very ones that the author says will be filled by motivated Americans. I mean...just try working at any American FAANG. The evidence is totally in your face.
- YesBox
When I was in high school, I took a physics class. I think I scraped by but one thing the teacher said that has stuck with me ever since was "when you want to test a hypothesis, set the variables to extreme numbers". Very useful framework IMO!
If we pursued the "Most Qualified" in its truest form, then ~95%[1] of the jobs in this country would be handed over to foreigners. In isolation, this would be great for US companies. In reality, 95% of the local population would riot.
If we pursued "only hire Americans", then our growth as a country would be stunted, and we'd lose our global competitive edge.
Somewhere between is a balanced medium.
Side observation: I've noticed tech leaders/CEOs/PG have been choosing (or succumbing) to what the algorithm wants them to say or how phrase. I stopped following all of them because I can feel my emotions being manipulated whenever I read what they have to say.
[1] The USA is less than 5% of the worlds population.
- breadwinner
One of the issues is conflation of IT jobs and High Tech jobs. Those making laws don't understand the difference -- they are all "computer jobs" to them. IT does not require immigrant labor. Companies such as Infosys and Tata don't need to be operating in the US. There are plenty of US workers available to do the job.
But High Tech is different. High Tech needs the best in the world, not the best in the US. The US leads the world in tech not because the best ideas were all American but because the best people in the world immigrated to the US. Stopping this will be ruinous to American prosperity.
The seminal research paper that kicked off the AI revolution (titled "Attention is all you need") was written by 2 Indians, 1 German, 1 British Canadian, 1 Pole, 1 Ukrainian, and 2 US born people. These people came to America, worked together and changed the world as we know it. Why would we want to stop it? Has this immigration undercut Americans? Far from it. These immigrants are the lifeblood of the tech industry, and their innovations create jobs.
- GlibMonkeyDeath
"The H-1B program was started with the vision of finding von Brauns across other industries and bringing them into the US"
Is this true? I thought the the "O" visa accomplished this. H-1B is for specific worker shortages. Of course, a "shortage" from a company's perspective is "no Americans are applying for my position", which isn't necessarily because there are no qualified Americans to hire...
- redlewel
H1B is not about finding geniuses, this is O-1 Visa program.
The H1B exists to find laborers in areas where we have a shortage of qualified people in US. Given the fact that in many fields we have lots of American graduates that struggle to get jobs, H1B currently has no legitimate purpose in America. It should be abolished entirely.