Not startups. 100k is like 75% of base comp in most bay area startups
Among BigTech, maybe like ~20 companies will be willing to pay this per employee.
I dont know of a single person here on a visa making less than 150k salary. They get the same stock, bonus and benefits that every one else gets.... it's well over 300k to have that staff member when all is said and done.
You're not adding on 100k a year, you're adding on 100k for a 3-6 year employee.
Even if that works out to 20k a year, it's pocket change in the grand scheme of things.
All the H1B's I have worked with are whip smart, hard working, and in general amazing people. I cant say the same for all my localy sourced colleges. The tragedy of the economics in most of these cases was that they were making the same amount of money as their peers and not more...
In a lot of cases companies are getting a Steff Curry or a Lionel Messi and paying them the average of the rest of the team...
Anecdotally myself, I've worked with great ones yes, but the majority aren't incredible.
In the tech arms of banks you can see a lot of what I would describe as at best regular software engineers, nothing special.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-h1b-visa-middlemen-c...
That's surprising; for me, H-1Bs have run the gamut, with a range of talent and ambition that's pretty similar to the range of talent and ambition I see with US-born workers. And I think this is perhaps the problem: your experience should be the norm, if the H-1 visa program is functioning properly, but I don't think that's the case.
Among my friends who have been on H-1Bs, they tend to be high performers, but that's just selection bias at work.
Mathematically if we collected all the brightest people from both these nations, say the top 5 percent of their population thats 100 million people in that pool to pick from.
The entire population of the US is 350million.
Comp sci went from something people did cause they enjoyed to something they did cause they thought it was a pay day: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ocpf0g/oc_...
We ran out of talented, passionate people a long time ago.
There is also a cultural problem in America, one that buisness and staff are afflicted with.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/no-inventions-no-inno...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=At3256ASxlA (pay attention to Noyce in Japan and the article he wrote... think about intel today, compare it to the above article).
I don't think Noyce's take as a business owner is far removed from the above take from the prospective of staff.