Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

I have to put out a ghost job req and interview every person applying within reason for every green card a direct report is applying for. I have to show there are or aren’t any residents or citizens that can fill the job

The main problem is: even if the interviewee knocks it out of the park, is an amazing engineer, I still am not interested in firing my OPT/h1b team member who can still legally work for 2-3 years. So while I will deny their green card application and not submit it, I also won’t hire the interviewee

Wait, this isn't clear to me. Are the interviewees citizens? So you're interviewing citizens to prove that there aren't any who can fill your jobs but even when they clearly could fill the job you don't hire them? Seems like the requirement of proving "there are or aren’t any residents or citizens that can fill the job" is going to be near impossible for the government to enforce

At the last startup I worked at, our CTO was on a visa.

To satisfy the "no one in the US can fill the CTO role", they took out an advertisement in a San Francisco newspaper classifieds so they had evidence that they attempted to find a US citizen / permanent resident CTO.

Obviously there were no applicants.

CTO actually makes sense for an h1b though, it’s a high paying job that can depend greatly on the technical and creative skills of the individual and how they mesh with the company.

The problem is when it’s someone pumping out code, or doing tech support for half the cost of the local competition.

No, this is backwards

CTO is not such an exceptional role that you can convince me that a company couldn't find a single person in America who would be qualified to take it

It's also a highly sought after role, so people would generally be willing to relocate for a role like that

H1Bs are designed to fill labour shortages, where your local labour market is saturated and you are struggling to find local talent or attract talent from further away, so you can import workers

Using a visa designed to fill labour shortages for an executive position like CTO is frankly an abuse of the system

But arguably any labor shortage can be fixed by just having way higher wages.

Like if Google is struggling to hire L3 entry level engineers, can't they just offer $1 million/year salary? Then of course they will get the people they want.

To me, the point of H-1B and similar programs isn't "we can't get the individual staff we need". It's rather that at a society-wide level, having more software engineers at an overall lower salary can be more beneficial to the country than fewer engineers at a higher salary. And I feel that the success of Silicon Valley kind of shows this: if we didn't have any immigrants to the US, maybe the salaries would have been higher, but there is simply no chance SV would have reached the scale it has.