I guess I don't know what they're working. 70+hr weeks was my reality at a shitty company that progressively got shitter as time went on. I watched over half the onshore staff quit. Management loved it because it reduced the budget. It wasn't until customers started to complain that no one was around during normal working hours did they try to hire more people. But by then no one wanted to work there so they just brought in a bunch of H1 people. The work the new people produced was C- level stuff. I quit shortly after that.
I agree we should be doing things better with STEM and a focus on education. But I think people are starting to wake up to useless college degrees. My personal experience with H1 is it isn't about a shortage of qualified people.
This has been what I've largely witnessed. There's this thing where people applaud Indian workers thinking they're super smart because of things you hear like "To get that qualification in India, you have to be the top 10 out of a million people who apply, and all the applicants study 100 hours a week" blah blah blah.
Not to sound like a jerk, but a lot of the Indian workforce IMO is kind of like their sporting performance, not that great -- actually, pretty bad for the size of the population. And companies don't generally hire them or outsource them because they're better, but simply that they're cheaper because supply of bodies is immense. Even if they knowingly are kind of crappy, some business leaders will just assume "they will grow into it" and become as good as local talent.
It tends to not work out well from what I've observed. There's an easy business case in theory around cost savings, but then companies feel pressure in terms of revenue growth because the talent and culture isn't there (hate to generalize, but Indian folks are seldomly innovative charismatic leaders) and the output is to your point rather mediocre. Then the spiral continues where revenue gets pressured so guess what's next, they need to cut expenses more!!!, so guess who's gonna keep getting hired into the spiraling downwards workplace environment? More fresh off the boat people; and who's going to leave? The experienced people who know what they are doing but has seen their workplace satisfaction continue to diminish and feel they have no future at the company because they see things change where people aren't paid what they're worth, but instead leadership just going after the cheapest talent.
Because there's a difference in timing (you can save money faster by hiring cheaper people, as opposed to the issue around revenue which tends to lag) many leaders who manage for short term - and many do - are incentivized to do this when managing to the next quarter, or few years, before they are inevitably replaced but they get their payouts before riding off into the sunset.