Are you selecting based on a holistic view of merit (projects, personality, capacity to grow in a role) or are you gating based on the same-old LeetCode brain teaser exams? In the latter case there is no shortage of H1B grinders who’ve spent every day for the past 6 months memorizing the puzzles to pass your screens, even if they say nothing about raw ability.
By the time a “qualified” candidate is sitting across from you, you have already created a sampling bias simply because the population of India and China are staggering compared to the US. Wow, there are so many eager candidates from India, we must have a labor shortage in the US!
You're making a few (reasonable) assumptions based on the base rate of engineering interviewing practices in the industry. I'm not using Leetcode though a coding problem is part of our onsite process. My first screen is mostly a series of knowledge questions and asking candidates to explain projects they built on their resumes. Most candidates cannot do this. They fail to explain their own projects and fail to explain foundational concepts of distributed systems.
As an interviewer I need to be able to challenge candidates to get adequate signal to make an informed selection. My pool is computer science graduates and experienced software engineers. Most candidates fail. I haven't analyzed the distribution but my best guess is that over half of the successful candidates are on work visas.
As someone who was out of work for a large portion of 2025 and attended many interviews, I found interviewing frustrating and failed many. Only after taking a couple of months sitting down and studying fundamentals, grinding leetcode, reading the latest distributed systems literature, and practicing interviewing, I discovered that I genuinely had knowledge and skill gaps. The studying actually helped me become a better engineer. I received several offers after this intensive study period.
I wanted to make a separate comment to respond to the sampling bias question. From discussions with colleagues and analysis of companies, there is a large overhang of credentialed yet low-capability engineers in many high-population countries. For example, the top Indian and Chinese companies offer comparable salaries to the US-owned multinationals resident in their countries. These are outliers.
The vast majority of candidates for Flipcart and Bytedance simply would never be able to perform adequately. These top companies pay extraordinarily highly compared to most software engineering firms in their countries, far beyond the delta between OpenAI and a typical software engineer in the United States. The quality gradient is still there. Flipcart and Bytedance need to compete internationally, so their salaries are pulled upwards substantially.
I see a lot of Polish names in those coding websites leaderboards. It seems to be working, Polish tech industry is growing, as is India's and China's. Idk, grinding seems to work if that's your issue.
So? At least they're grinding, and we as a nation used to have that American grit. Now everyone just sits on their asses and cry "unfair" when someone willing to grind gets better opportunities.
Arguably someone at the center of the US political spectrum is right wing by any other standard. This is why someone like Zohran with policies that are otherwise fairly sensible and moderate gets painted as far left. Within that framing it seems that every policy position within the “center left” to the “far right” of US politics serves the same coalition. And any claims of American exceptionalism (we exist on our own political spectrum because we are special) just provides more control over that framing to the same dominant coalition.
Seems like the only thing left to value will be social capital. If all forms of labor are free, the only thing that matters is how many people you know, what they think of you, whether they listen to you.
Sounds like society at the moment even without the free labour thing. The world generally loves celebrities and influencers and other famous people, and I hear in some fields (like publishing) they're actively selecting for online fame/popularity so they don't have to spend as much on marketing.
The ultimate goal of project capitalism is to make ownership the only thing in the world that’s valued or valuable. The only thing that matters is how much and who you own.
Americans are so silly. Resentful of being told to do anything for their own good or the good of others because of “individual liberty”, yet so willing to lick the boot of the police state and corrupt crony capitalists. Good news for you is that Elon went in and set the bureaucrats straight, so enjoy your diarrhea and glass in your food.
“Careless People” lays it out pretty well – you either need to make the right friends in college at an Ivy League or you need to be friends with someone else who did. If you made the mistake of not being born into a family that groomed you since birth for the ivy leagues then sorry, that ship has sailed already.
By the time a “qualified” candidate is sitting across from you, you have already created a sampling bias simply because the population of India and China are staggering compared to the US. Wow, there are so many eager candidates from India, we must have a labor shortage in the US!
reply