This is wrong in a lot of ways. Here are the top four: 1: If you don't want entitled folks with big egos, create a hiring funnel that roots out entitled folks

This is wrong in a lot of ways. Here are the top four: 1: If you don't want entitled folks with big egos, create a hiring funnel that roots out entitled folks with big egos. Compensation has very little to do with it. 2: H1B folks often work very hard, but that's not always because they're just incredibly humble. H1B visa holders often don't have as much career choice as US citizens or green card holders, and their visa status is tied to their employer's sponsorship. They can't easily hop to a different job if the workload starts to crush them. Employers know that, and adjust workloads accordingly. Call it what it is: coercion. 3: Squeezing work out of underpaid engineers is a great way of accomplishing a subset of tasks (like staging and applying software updates to cloud VMs each week), but it's a terrible way of accomplishing other tasks (like designing and implementing an automated system to replace those manual updates). People who are underpaid and swamped with work will often go into "survival mode" and just ask for a very detailed spec and implement the spec by rote. That style of work leaves little room for ideation, autonomy, and creative thinking, which is essential for some tasks. 4: It's plain shitty to knowingly underpay engineers and think that gives you the right to squeeze more work out of them.