Where are these skilled Americans? I refer again to the $100 million contract my shop gave to a big IT firm. They set up shop in Smyrna GA, Cobb County west suburb of Atlanta.
From May 2018 to Aug 2019 they brought in about 100 people, most employees but many contractors also (mostly TEK for them). Most were in the $100k- 120k per year range. Tops was about $350k. A few were in the 60K range.
I would rate about 5 of the 100 competent in IT. Unfortunately the competent few were not in management, which has a lot of turnover because they could not find competent management.
About 13 of the top 15 management they went thru were natural born citizens.
The 100 were a mix of Natural Born citizens (about 50-60%), 10% Naturalized citizens, 10%, Green care 10%, H1b 10%, illegals 10% (round percentages obviously).
Why could we not find competent IT workers?
Please give your technical background or is this just your opinion as to how many were competent. You don’t name the big IT shop. It can either be most employees or most contractors but it cannot be most employees and most contractors. As the word “most” implies over half of the makeup of the total group is over 50%. You do not give your background in the company. So I don’t know your skill set to be an objective judge as to whether these people were “competent”. Of course if the project(s) were not up to satisfaction it could be deemed as incompetent. However this does not speak of the product delivered. Too much subjectivity in a vague post.
My theory from what I have observed is at least 95% of the IT jobs are advertised for 5+ years experience in all areas as they want someone who knows scripting, system administration, backup and recovery, storage management etc. and be on call . There aren’t many Americans who can fulfill all these requirements so they get discouraged from applying or they apply , and get the job , and get abused trying to meet the requirements and called incompetent. IT is ever changing and companies don’t invest in the employees anymore. So then they bring in an H1B who often lie about their qualifications and also fail in the job or ticket their way through their job by opening calls with vendors for everything but then they are already here and have started the playbook on how to game our system and they don’t go home. Incompetence in IT management is pretty standard in my experience.