The tech companies should report how many software engineers of various age groups they employ and also should report how many people with H-1B visas they employ.
Trump's policy sounds like affirmative action for US citizens.
Yes, the H1-B visa system need to be policed so it's not used entirely to drive down wages of local specialized employees. I'm under no allusions that foreign H1-B workers have any right to work in the US, but neither do unemployed US citizens -- which is what Trump is advocating. This is blatant pandering to those working class voters who have been forced out of the US economy for macroeconomic reasons. Trump's message is for the working class, despite the fact that he is specifically talking about the H1-B program in this instance.
In any case, Trump has no evidence that he will be capable of lobbying Congress better than corporations do. He even complains in his immigration policy document[1] that "Completion of a visa tracking system – required by law but blocked by lobbyists" has allowed foreign citizens to overstay their visas.
A vote for Trump is a vote to show frustration with the current political system, not a vote to fix the current political system.
For anyone who wants a radically different idea from a presidential candidate, look towards Lawrence Lessig[2].
It's hard for average American IT workers to compete with H1B when many of latter carpool, share houses, and are willing to work for less.
Sure they pay income taxes, but over $22 billion gets remitted to india from U.S. That's remittance of after tax wage alone. Total IT expenditure is likely in the hundreds of billions if you include Indian subcontracting firms, u.s. investment in India, etc.
Look, I don't like Donald Trump. I also recognize there are many talented H1B out there that play vital role. But current implementation of H1B is completely broken.
A lot of H1B positions in the U.S. has nothing to do with U.s companies' global competitiveness, because many of them are employed in service sectors like insurance companies.
As I understand it (this is from his website), Trump's proposals are
1) Increase prevailing wage for H-1Bs
2) Requirement to hire American workers first
I actually don't see here a "right to work" for US citizens, only a requirement that they be hired prior to issuing a visa for a non-citizen/permanent resident. There are no details here, and how this is implemented is all important.
First, what would the minimum wage floor be? Market rate plus a percentage? Personally, I'd say that in high cost regions like SF, if the salary is less than $150k a year, it should be dismissed with contempt. I know this would cause sticker shock to employers, but when the median price of a house is well over 1 million, I'd say the minimum salary should be at least 200k, and probably more (this is in SF/Silicon Valley, it could be lower elsewhere). The reason I say this is that if the worker can't afford a buy a house and support a family in the region where the job is located, then you have a wage issue, not a skills issue. Keep in mind, we're talking about changing the normal hiring rules for employers seeking supposedly high skilled, highly educated workers who can't be found at any (reasonable?) wage. I understand that many jobs pay less, but we don't talk about a shortage of cashiers so critical that the US government needs to create a special visa for cashiers, even though employers would absolutely love to pay their cashiers less.
The issue of hiring a US citizen or permanent resident first is also all in the details. Suppose a programmer being interviewed for a junior web developer position does a great job on fizzbuzz, and can implement code to find all subsets of a set of integers that sum to a prime number at the whiteboard, but stumbles a bit trying to write code to find the sub matrix with the largest sum in an NXM matrix. Would this mean that the company can say attempted to hire a US citizen first? Alternatively, suppose that programmer completely failed fizzbuzz?
Personally, I like (but haven't fully considered) the approach of setting a very high minimum salary level, and then making it unlimited or setting the cap very high. To me, very high is, like, 250k ore more.
If we want to survive and grow as a nation we need to become a nation of entrepreneurs. We need to get back to a moment in time when that was part of our DNA and people were hell-bent to make things happen. The kind of drive that resulted in this nation is gone today, the vast majority of us are neutered versions of what we could have been or should become.
By promoting the message that we can't create businesses, innovate and grow the economy without importing talent (through H1B's and other programs) we are, at the same time, telling our own population "you are useless in the new economy and nothing whatsoever will come from you". Which, of course, couldn't be farther from the truth.
If we don't have enough tech talent from within it can only be because we have failed to develop it. And this, in turn, is due to many factors, some straightforward some not so much, some common sense, structural, cultural, financial and political.
Yes, there's a lot of fix. And no, professional politicians are not going to be able to do it.
Why? Because the fitness function of a politician is wrong for a long term approach to solving difficult problems. Problems that might require pissing off loads of people in the interest of emerging in a better position at the end of the process. Sometimes in chess you have to sacrifice your queen to win the game many moves later. The naive player isn't comfortable with such a sacrifice. It takes a good teacher (and experience) to learn why that might be a good move.
The right thing to do is to launch a massive effort to make our population the most entrepreneurial and technical people on the planet. And that's not easy. And that will take a lot of effort and time.
Politicians, due to the nature of their fitness function, cannot and will not do this. The moves they'd have to make are career-ending in the context of having to survive elections every two, four or six years. Adapting to natural selection, for their kind, takes the form of pandering for votes during campaigns and laying low until the next election.
Few pay the price for not accomplishing anything of note. In fact, while in tech we are lauded for trying, failing, pivoting, again and again and again until we succeed, in professional politics a single failure can end a career. And so doing nothing at all is better than trying.
One could very well argue that the politician fitness function isn't really optimized for the benefit of anyone but the politician and the ecosystem or tribe they belong to. This is THE huge problem with the idea of having a professional political class. They are rarely good for anything other than getting themselves from election to election. Some do nothing in between, some create problems and a lucky few are in office through economic booms they had nothing to do with yet are quick to take credit for when elections come-up. The politician is a parasitic organism with few benefits.
I've always thought this country needed to make a shift from being ruled (yes, ruled) by a professional political class to being governed by term-limited representatives with "skin in the game" and consequences attached to performance at various levels. And, yes, I really think that in the age of technology and global commerce and at a time when we are about to step into 20 trillion dollars in foreign debt we need tough-as-nails business people at the helm. The guy (or gal) who only cares about surviving elections WILL NOT FIX OUR PROBLEMS. EVER.
I firmly believe we are living a moment in time when if we do not get our education, finances, economy and our industrial base in order nothing else will matter over time. We can't think ourselves invincible. We can't think we are going to last forever. We have to work to maintain position in the world and we have to make the right decisions. We have to EARN IT, others, China, will not give us or grant us our position. We earn it or we suffer a fundamental negative chang...
Want more minorities, women, men who are either unskilled, unemployed and want to work, get back into work?
Have companies work with the colleges, universities and have the right teachers training the skills companies want in people to hire.
Then cancel, yes cancel all the H1Bs and ask them nicely to leave. Make it a offense for companies to hire undocumented workers. Put that CEO/Business owner in jail.
Then lower taxes.
You'll see a net benefit of those out of work whoever they are (black, white, latino, asian - all US citizen). Either go back to school, get into employment or start a business.
You'll see companies start hiring actual American people to get back to work.
Tax receipts will go up.
The welfare state will actually go down, drastically.
Less social programs and the deficit may actually go down.
Students may actually start to pay back Student loans, by being in work.
The flow of money will stop being sent abroad, will actually go back into the towns, cities where it belongs.
Remember. Companies employ local people. Those local people need services. Those services pay for cleaners, cab drivers, waiters/waitresses, all these types of jobs. Taxes also go to the city and pay for lots of other jobs.
It's like an eco-system. Look at when JKF lowered taxes.
I remember reading somewhere, CEO's were getting tax breaks because jobs were going off-shore. This is crazy. They should get bonuses for having American Employees. They should be in prison for going off-shore. How many towns/cities in the US have been destroyed by CEOs for profit?
Trump's position paper on immigration is by and large an appeal to the worst nativist sentiments lurking across the political spectrum [1]. Read on balance it is a call to end the very idea of America as a land of opportunity for aspiring people around the world, yearning to be free.
His H1B spiel has to be understood in that context .. it's fine to discuss if the program is abused. It's fine to criticize mass immigration, to maintain security, to advocate reasonable limits on the rate of immigration so as to not overburden social services etc. But what he is doing is pitting aggrieved minorities against each other, peddling the lie that "foreigners are stealing your jobs" to the worse off, and "foreigners are stealing your taxes" to the better off.
Quite honestly, Trump was winning me over in many ways before this. We do have too much political correctness, it's great that someone is speaking against special interests, we should make better international deals, we were stupid to arm rebel armies in the middle east etc. In most of his speeches he had come out in support of legal immigration, but looks like he has gone full nativist now. Too bad, he just lost my vote.
If his policies are implemented, we will destroy what PG eloquently describes below [2].
There is such a thing as Americanness. There's nothing like living abroad to teach you that. And if you want to know whether something will nurture or squash this quality, it would be hard to find a better focus group than hackers, because they come closest of any group I know to embodying it. Closer, probably, than the men running our government, who for all their talk of patriotism remind me more of Richelieu or Mazarin than Thomas Jefferson or George Washington.
When you read what the founding fathers had to say for themselves, they sound more like hackers. "The spirit of resistance to government," Jefferson wrote, "is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive."
Imagine an American president saying that today. Like the remarks of an outspoken old grandmother, the sayings of the founding fathers have embarrassed generations of their less confident successors. They remind us where we come from. They remind us that it is the people who break rules that are the source of America's wealth and power.
We no longer live in the industrial era in which workers were pretty much interchangeable. Workers are not interchangeable at all. Zuckerberg has already hired everybody in the USA whom he deems suitable. If he cannot import the additional people whom he believes to be suitable, he will simply have to put his engineering shop there where these people are; just like IBM has already done.
> Zuckerberg has already hired everybody in the USA whom he deems suitable.
First you have evidence of this statement I assume.
Moreover, Google has opened a very large office in NYC in one of the very largest office buildings in the city. Facebook, (and Amazon and Microsoft and Apple) have much smaller offices for engineering staff.
When Facebook and other firms replicates Google's efforts in NYC, I might become more convinced that "Zuckerberg has already hired ...."
Oh please! Facebook is considered total crap by almost every engineer i know. Nobody i know wants to work there. Seriously all these zukerberg ass kissers on HN are pathetic.
16 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 38.2 ms ] threadWe hear a lot about diversity, but nothing about AGE. Why is that?
Yes, we learned that moderation is keeps things in balance, and we are going to choose not to work in that kind of environment.
Yes, the H1-B visa system need to be policed so it's not used entirely to drive down wages of local specialized employees. I'm under no allusions that foreign H1-B workers have any right to work in the US, but neither do unemployed US citizens -- which is what Trump is advocating. This is blatant pandering to those working class voters who have been forced out of the US economy for macroeconomic reasons. Trump's message is for the working class, despite the fact that he is specifically talking about the H1-B program in this instance.
In any case, Trump has no evidence that he will be capable of lobbying Congress better than corporations do. He even complains in his immigration policy document[1] that "Completion of a visa tracking system – required by law but blocked by lobbyists" has allowed foreign citizens to overstay their visas.
A vote for Trump is a vote to show frustration with the current political system, not a vote to fix the current political system.
For anyone who wants a radically different idea from a presidential candidate, look towards Lawrence Lessig[2].
[1] https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/immigration-reform
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/politics/who-is-lawrence-lessig-and-wh...
*edit to clarify the "working class" reference, despite the article not touching on working class.
It's hard for average American IT workers to compete with H1B when many of latter carpool, share houses, and are willing to work for less.
Sure they pay income taxes, but over $22 billion gets remitted to india from U.S. That's remittance of after tax wage alone. Total IT expenditure is likely in the hundreds of billions if you include Indian subcontracting firms, u.s. investment in India, etc.
Look, I don't like Donald Trump. I also recognize there are many talented H1B out there that play vital role. But current implementation of H1B is completely broken.
A lot of H1B positions in the U.S. has nothing to do with U.s companies' global competitiveness, because many of them are employed in service sectors like insurance companies.
1) Increase prevailing wage for H-1Bs 2) Requirement to hire American workers first
I actually don't see here a "right to work" for US citizens, only a requirement that they be hired prior to issuing a visa for a non-citizen/permanent resident. There are no details here, and how this is implemented is all important.
First, what would the minimum wage floor be? Market rate plus a percentage? Personally, I'd say that in high cost regions like SF, if the salary is less than $150k a year, it should be dismissed with contempt. I know this would cause sticker shock to employers, but when the median price of a house is well over 1 million, I'd say the minimum salary should be at least 200k, and probably more (this is in SF/Silicon Valley, it could be lower elsewhere). The reason I say this is that if the worker can't afford a buy a house and support a family in the region where the job is located, then you have a wage issue, not a skills issue. Keep in mind, we're talking about changing the normal hiring rules for employers seeking supposedly high skilled, highly educated workers who can't be found at any (reasonable?) wage. I understand that many jobs pay less, but we don't talk about a shortage of cashiers so critical that the US government needs to create a special visa for cashiers, even though employers would absolutely love to pay their cashiers less.
The issue of hiring a US citizen or permanent resident first is also all in the details. Suppose a programmer being interviewed for a junior web developer position does a great job on fizzbuzz, and can implement code to find all subsets of a set of integers that sum to a prime number at the whiteboard, but stumbles a bit trying to write code to find the sub matrix with the largest sum in an NXM matrix. Would this mean that the company can say attempted to hire a US citizen first? Alternatively, suppose that programmer completely failed fizzbuzz?
Personally, I like (but haven't fully considered) the approach of setting a very high minimum salary level, and then making it unlimited or setting the cap very high. To me, very high is, like, 250k ore more.
By promoting the message that we can't create businesses, innovate and grow the economy without importing talent (through H1B's and other programs) we are, at the same time, telling our own population "you are useless in the new economy and nothing whatsoever will come from you". Which, of course, couldn't be farther from the truth.
If we don't have enough tech talent from within it can only be because we have failed to develop it. And this, in turn, is due to many factors, some straightforward some not so much, some common sense, structural, cultural, financial and political.
Yes, there's a lot of fix. And no, professional politicians are not going to be able to do it.
Why? Because the fitness function of a politician is wrong for a long term approach to solving difficult problems. Problems that might require pissing off loads of people in the interest of emerging in a better position at the end of the process. Sometimes in chess you have to sacrifice your queen to win the game many moves later. The naive player isn't comfortable with such a sacrifice. It takes a good teacher (and experience) to learn why that might be a good move.
The right thing to do is to launch a massive effort to make our population the most entrepreneurial and technical people on the planet. And that's not easy. And that will take a lot of effort and time.
Politicians, due to the nature of their fitness function, cannot and will not do this. The moves they'd have to make are career-ending in the context of having to survive elections every two, four or six years. Adapting to natural selection, for their kind, takes the form of pandering for votes during campaigns and laying low until the next election.
Few pay the price for not accomplishing anything of note. In fact, while in tech we are lauded for trying, failing, pivoting, again and again and again until we succeed, in professional politics a single failure can end a career. And so doing nothing at all is better than trying.
One could very well argue that the politician fitness function isn't really optimized for the benefit of anyone but the politician and the ecosystem or tribe they belong to. This is THE huge problem with the idea of having a professional political class. They are rarely good for anything other than getting themselves from election to election. Some do nothing in between, some create problems and a lucky few are in office through economic booms they had nothing to do with yet are quick to take credit for when elections come-up. The politician is a parasitic organism with few benefits.
I've always thought this country needed to make a shift from being ruled (yes, ruled) by a professional political class to being governed by term-limited representatives with "skin in the game" and consequences attached to performance at various levels. And, yes, I really think that in the age of technology and global commerce and at a time when we are about to step into 20 trillion dollars in foreign debt we need tough-as-nails business people at the helm. The guy (or gal) who only cares about surviving elections WILL NOT FIX OUR PROBLEMS. EVER.
I firmly believe we are living a moment in time when if we do not get our education, finances, economy and our industrial base in order nothing else will matter over time. We can't think ourselves invincible. We can't think we are going to last forever. We have to work to maintain position in the world and we have to make the right decisions. We have to EARN IT, others, China, will not give us or grant us our position. We earn it or we suffer a fundamental negative chang...
Want more minorities, women, men who are either unskilled, unemployed and want to work, get back into work?
Have companies work with the colleges, universities and have the right teachers training the skills companies want in people to hire.
Then cancel, yes cancel all the H1Bs and ask them nicely to leave. Make it a offense for companies to hire undocumented workers. Put that CEO/Business owner in jail.
Then lower taxes.
You'll see a net benefit of those out of work whoever they are (black, white, latino, asian - all US citizen). Either go back to school, get into employment or start a business.
You'll see companies start hiring actual American people to get back to work.
Tax receipts will go up. The welfare state will actually go down, drastically. Less social programs and the deficit may actually go down. Students may actually start to pay back Student loans, by being in work.
The flow of money will stop being sent abroad, will actually go back into the towns, cities where it belongs.
Remember. Companies employ local people. Those local people need services. Those services pay for cleaners, cab drivers, waiters/waitresses, all these types of jobs. Taxes also go to the city and pay for lots of other jobs.
It's like an eco-system. Look at when JKF lowered taxes.
I remember reading somewhere, CEO's were getting tax breaks because jobs were going off-shore. This is crazy. They should get bonuses for having American Employees. They should be in prison for going off-shore. How many towns/cities in the US have been destroyed by CEOs for profit?
His H1B spiel has to be understood in that context .. it's fine to discuss if the program is abused. It's fine to criticize mass immigration, to maintain security, to advocate reasonable limits on the rate of immigration so as to not overburden social services etc. But what he is doing is pitting aggrieved minorities against each other, peddling the lie that "foreigners are stealing your jobs" to the worse off, and "foreigners are stealing your taxes" to the better off.
Quite honestly, Trump was winning me over in many ways before this. We do have too much political correctness, it's great that someone is speaking against special interests, we should make better international deals, we were stupid to arm rebel armies in the middle east etc. In most of his speeches he had come out in support of legal immigration, but looks like he has gone full nativist now. Too bad, he just lost my vote.
If his policies are implemented, we will destroy what PG eloquently describes below [2].
There is such a thing as Americanness. There's nothing like living abroad to teach you that. And if you want to know whether something will nurture or squash this quality, it would be hard to find a better focus group than hackers, because they come closest of any group I know to embodying it. Closer, probably, than the men running our government, who for all their talk of patriotism remind me more of Richelieu or Mazarin than Thomas Jefferson or George Washington.
When you read what the founding fathers had to say for themselves, they sound more like hackers. "The spirit of resistance to government," Jefferson wrote, "is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive."
Imagine an American president saying that today. Like the remarks of an outspoken old grandmother, the sayings of the founding fathers have embarrassed generations of their less confident successors. They remind us where we come from. They remind us that it is the people who break rules that are the source of America's wealth and power.
[1] https://www.donaldjtrump.com/images/uploads/Immigration-Refo...
[2] http://paulgraham.com/gba.html
First you have evidence of this statement I assume.
Moreover, Google has opened a very large office in NYC in one of the very largest office buildings in the city. Facebook, (and Amazon and Microsoft and Apple) have much smaller offices for engineering staff.
When Facebook and other firms replicates Google's efforts in NYC, I might become more convinced that "Zuckerberg has already hired ...."