Yes. As a US citizen, I, and many of my college cohort, spent many years unemployed during that time period, despite applying to thousands of positions.
The reality is that businesses hire attorneys to create a legal fiction that I and my peers are unqualified so that businesses that desire it can hire H-1B employees.
Shortages are, always and everywhere, a pricing phenomenon.
I agree with the above comment. During that time period was the height of my tech career. The remarkable number of open positions didn't lead to the kinds of wage increases one might expect, perhaps some, but what I mostly encountered was a lot of highly specialized roles that I wasn't qualified for because everything has to be "just so" in order to be hired on because companies refuse to train or allot time for training, just brief "ramp up" periods that are do or die.
Nowadays, since I'm in my 50s, I'm disqualified from being able to work in tech completely. Mind you, the age discrimination is hidden behind me not being perfectly qualified for whatever role due to not checking some technical skillset. Never mind that I am still sharp, have a great deal of experience, and can do whatever is asked given a decent target to aim for. None of it seems to matter, it's purely ageism eliminating me from getting interviews now.
I do think we here in the US passed some kind of inflection point where the damage done by H1B labor finally killed the tech career path in the sense that all of a sudden, entry level jobs simply vanished, never to return. I'm sure that H1Bs reached some critical mass that triggered that extinction event.
The job market in tech in the US has been absolutely brutal since at least 2023.
> I do think we here in the US passed some kind of inflection point where the damage done by H1B labor finally killed the tech career path in the sense that all of a sudden, entry level jobs simply vanished, never to return. I'm sure that H1Bs reached some critical mass that triggered that extinction event.
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> The job market in tech in the US has been absolutely brutal since at least 2023.
Why do you think H1-Bs are to blame over AI hype coupled with Section 174 tax changes[^1]? H1-Bs have been around for a long time, so I doubt it's the culprit for layoffs and lower hiring since 2023.
Do you think it's possible you were overestimating the skills in your particular cohort?
Being more senior, my world of coworker and colleagues has been a mix of highly skilled people, largely in the AI/ML space. There are many H1Bs among them, but there has been no difference in the ability of the US citizen subset and the H1B subset in getting jobs.
Even closer to the entry level, the H1B pool all came from very competitive and elite universities, and all of them also had advanced degrees.
I do believe the market for fresh out of college software engineers without much specialization is tight, but I also don't see many H1Bs in that category either (but again, that could just be because of my own cohort I'm surrounded by). A PhD from NYU/Harvard/MIT with an undergrad at a place like IIT or Tsinghua is not in the same talent pool as newly graduated undergrad students from a standard US university.
So you're saying all a CS grad has to do is go back in time and get a degree from MIT and they're golden, right?
Let me explain something: When I graduated from High School in Upstate NY in 1991, 3 of my fellow grads got accepted into MIT that year. From that one school! The odds of such an event taking place in the 2020s has to be vanishingly small to impossible. The high-end schools like MIT have not scaled up to match the enormously scaled up demand for education, not to mention how expensive the tuition has become. So it is simply impossible for everyone who wants to be engineers or computer scientists to attend some elite school nowadays. The competition for seats must have increased 100 fold since the early 1990s!
The reality is that businesses hire attorneys to create a legal fiction that I and my peers are unqualified so that businesses that desire it can hire H-1B employees.
Shortages are, always and everywhere, a pricing phenomenon.