Where have all the white American SWEs gone? Yes, you guessed it H1B abuse.

It shouldn't even be hard to understand this but some people want to ask this question just as race bait. There is a reason why white Americans SWEs (and Americans in general) are decreasing at big tech companies, and not at average companies or innovative start ups like OpenAI. It's because H1Bs are cheap as fuck. Companies are required to hire H1Bs are the "prevailing wage" which is not calculated based on what that company pays, it's calculated based on the average pay for the region (and level). Since big tech companies generally pay much more than the "prevailing wage" of the region, they are able to pay H1Bs significantly less than what they would pay an equally qualified US worker. The salaries of all H1B workers along with the level and role they are hired on is publicly available. You can easily cross reference this and see H1Bs are usually paid marginally above the "prevailing wage." Obviously there are outliers of exceptional H1Bs competitive enough to be paid as much as a US citizen. But generally H1Bs is a cost savings for big tech companies. So why are unicorns like OpenAI not replacing workers with H1Bs? Well, one, smaller shops are outcompeted in the H1B lottery by all the applications large tech companies submit, and two, these companies primarily focus on innovation and not cost savings during their initial years.