America’s Engineering Talent Crisis: Elon Musk, the H-1B Debate, and My Journey

Elon Musk’s Christmas Day remarks kicked off a polarizing discussion on high-skilled immigration and Silicon Valley’s talent shortage. Is the U.S. failing its own engineering potential?

On Christmas Day, Elon Musk ignited a debate about high-skilled immigration and the H-1B visa program with a provocative claim: 'There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent. It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley.'

Elon then proceeded to escalate this into a demand to streamline high-skilled immigration, claiming the “number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low.”

The statement led to heated exchanges on X, including baseless and outright racist takes from some quarters.

Now for my take:

The H-1B program serves a broad spectrum of employers. Among the top H-1B sponsors for 2024 are Amazon, Cognizant, Ernst & Young, and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).

Amazon's use of H-1B aligns with its role as a major player in software development and cloud computing, offering salaries that closely match market rates reported by Levels.fyi.

However, for companies like Cognizant or TCS, the story is different. A typical software engineering role at Cognizant in New York City lists a base salary between $68,000 and $114,000, with TCS averaging $84,000. These figures fall well below Amazon’s compensation for equivalent roles, suggesting that the H-1B program is not solely used to attract 'super talented engineers,' as Musk suggests. Instead, it is often leveraged to bring in lower-cost engineering talent.

Critics, then, aren’t entirely wrong when they argue that the H-1B program is frequently used to hire lower-wage workers rather than the crème de la crème of engineering talent. But this raises an important question: even with these criticisms, is it realistic to fill these roles solely with U.S. citizens?

The most recent figures show a tech unemployment rate of 2.5%, which is exceptionally low. It's reasonable to assume that a significant portion of this 2.5% may face barriers to employability, such as skill mismatches or outdated expertise.

Compare this to the fact that 23.1% of all STEM workers in the U.S. are foreign-born. By sheer numbers, the domestic talent pool alone cannot meet the demand for engineers. Expecting to fill these roles exclusively with U.S. citizens is not just improbable—it’s mathematically impossible.

The question becomes - why can’t we use natural talent? And this is where I take a personal turn.

The path to Big Tech often begins at elite institutions like Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, or MIT—schools out of reach for most Americans. JD Vance outlines these barriers in his autobiography Hillbilly Elegy, but I’ve experienced them firsthand.

As a kid, I was obsessed with coding. With little formal training, I taught myself by brute-forcing through JavaScript, HTML, and QuickBasic using a pirated floppy disk from my high school. My code was terrible but functional. I even built graphers and equation solvers to “cheat” on math homework, turning in pixelated computer-printed graphs while my classmates submitted hand-drawn sketches.

Despite solid grades, I wasn’t Ivy League material. I got a full-ride scholarship to Case Western, offered because of my severe disability. But accessibility was lacking in those days, so I turned it down and attended a small liberal arts college in rural America. It specialized in the humanities, not STEM. I graduated in three years, but none of the computer science majors, myself included, could land tech jobs. The best anyone managed was a $25,000 IT role—meager even then.

Meanwhile, a peer I met online had a completely different path. His privileged background—an MIT graduate father and a private high school offering four years of computer science courses—set him up for seamless success. He entered a top-tier university and transitioned effortlessly into a tech career. His journey felt preordained; mine was a constant struggle.

After failing to find work post-graduation, I relied on prize money from a programming competition to enroll in a master’s program. But graduate school was no savior. I was shy, grappling with communication disabilities, and often stuck learning from dense textbooks without support. A tutor once bluntly told me computer science was “too hard” for someone like me, suggesting I switch to IT.

One of my lowest moments came in a graphics class. I built a game that was so good that the professor showcased it to the class, yet failed the assignment for misunderstanding requirements and omitting specific OpenGL API usages. It broke me. I shifted to box-ticking, completing assignments for perfect scores but learning nothing meaningful.

I graduated with a master’s degree and moved back in with my parents, working retail without a plan. My break came months later when I connected online with a mentor—an industry expert. His guidance motivated me to study at night, revisiting core CS concepts. Feeling ready, I reached out to recruiters on LinkedIn. One took a chance, connecting me to a FAANG company. I aced the interview and, since then, every coding interview I’ve attempted.

Like JD Vance’s journey, mine was grueling and would not have been possible without much luck or many people willing to take a chance on me.

Since then, the system has only deteriorated. Two decades ago, when I began interviewing candidates, I would ask about the most challenging project they completed in college. Typical answers included building a device driver or writing a compiler—complex, engineering-heavy tasks. Today, almost every response revolves around a group project involving a cloud API. It seems computer science programs have shifted from an engineering-driven focus to one that prioritizes business applications. Such a change does little to equip graduates for engineering excellence in the United States.

These educational and cultural shortcomings leave the U.S. failing its own top talent. This is not due to a lack of raw intelligence. A generous estimate places the 90th IQ percentile for engineering around 130, which represents about 1% of the U.S. population—millions of potential high-performing engineers.

Critics on X argue that rectifying these systemic shortcomings will take too long and that immediate solutions are necessary - as Elon posted, "if you need a school, you've lost already.” Yet dismissing long-term reforms is akin to environmentalists shunning nuclear energy because it takes too long to build plants. Such neglect perpetuates mediocrity and fuels anti-immigration sentiment.

Additionally, Elon Musk’s emphasis on recruiting exceptional engineers also reveals flaws in the current H-1B framework. By favoring lower-cost skilled labor (Cognizant) over truly top-tier talent, the program strays from Musk’s vision.

If attracting the highest-caliber professionals is truly the goal, Musk and others should also advocate for a merit-based H-1B model that prioritizes companies like SpaceX over outsourcing firms. Alongside these reforms, we must invest in educational reform which unleashes the United States’ own latent engineering potential. Ignoring either aspect risks entrenching mediocrity and creates a wedge between Trump supporters and tech culture.