Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says

I ran into a guy making double six figures for like the last 7 years at a known public tech company. He was literally doing the most basic DevOps (Terraform). Nothing fancy. Zero ability to program. No willingness or desire to learn programming. He was an H1B. That blew me away. How is it possible that you have a guy in the US for 10 years who never bothered learning to code doing a 200K / year job. The abuse of H1B is crazy. He told me he had "tried to find a job" but "they all require programming." I am not even a tech background and I have learned to program. Completely insane imo. This was stuff you could teach a highschool student, no degree required.

He's kinda smart though. Automating yourself out of a job is a mug's game, and not everyone wants to or should go into management.

fwiw, which is nothing. If I saw one of my employees write lazy slacker nonsense like this, I'd fire them. I read some of your other posts in this thread, perhaps the issues with the world are closer to you than you realize?

as a long-time programmer, sysadmin/sre/devops is a whole different mindset and skillset. i would be neither willing nor able to do that guy's job; i don't fault him for not wanting to do mine. clearly since he keeps being paid his $200k/year he is delivering a lot more than $200k worth of stability and uptime to the company, no coding required.

How exactly is the system being abused by this guy being paid $200k?

I think the premise the OP is pointing at is that this could be a position for a US citizen.

That doesn't explain why it's abuse, though. How does the company benefit by paying this foreigner $200k + benefits + immigration fees/legal bills compared to hiring a US citizen? Abuse is e.g. bringing in cheap foreign labor at below US market rate. This is not that.

That seems needlessly antagonistic on your part. I'm not advocating for his way of doing things, but the person described has clearly decided it's more in his economic interest to maintain a comfortable fiefdom than to engineer himself out of it. Having automated myself out of a few jobs in the past without much of a reward, I can't say his actions are irrational.