damn straight. all of those jobs filled by highly educated immigrants could have been filled by retrained high school dropout coal miners - take that globalism!
I'm not sure this comment appeals to anyone. The idea that day to day programming jobs are some sort of high end intellectual challenge is a myth. I think a coal miner could do what I've been doing since sixth grade just fine.
Yes, this is an important point that many deny! A lot of lower paying technical work requires just as much skill. But it's about supply and demand.
The faux intellectual vibe in programming is purely cultural due to class associations. If welders and prgorammers traded places in terms of class associations (ie, if welders earn what programmers earn and vice versa AND if welding was something you do in an office and programming was something you do in the field or workshop), well guess what? Welding would have an academic intellectual culture, and programming would have more of a blue collar culture. You'd hear complaints about welding interviews requiring memorization of chemical reaction formulas instead of practical skills. Programmers would probably long ago been unionized. Etc.
A couple generations from now, basic programming skill will no longer be so scarce that even an idiot who manages to pick some up is highly valuable. The reason programming ability is scarce is not because it's much harder, but simply historical/cultural.
ggp here. it was really meant to be a dig against levels of american investment in education and worker competitiveness.
the only reason i'm posting is that i finally completed the transition from programmer to welder and i find my new peers generally smarter and harder working. fwiw
Whoa, I would love to hear more. I'm a dissatisfied software engineer and have often thought about trying to move into a technical hands on field like welding, electrician, auto mechanic, etc, in the hopes it'd be more satisfying, or at least less boring.
(I agree american investment in education is abyssmal, and I bet gp might agree too, but mistook your comment's meaning)
i think 'smarter' was probably not the best use of words. equally smart and much more creative about getting the job done. original comment was too snarky as well, didn't really mean to hate on coal miners. it really is a false equivalence though.
starting from nothing it took about 6 months practice and general skill building to where i could work on projects and not screw them up for everyone. one nice thing about this world is that if you aren't so good, you can still pull in minimum wage if you work hard. once you get the hang of things you can build up a client base and start charging more. and if you have any kind of flair for design you can start selling bespoke pieces instead of just being a pair of hands.
after about $60/hr it gets a lot tougher. you don't really qualify for the really high-end work (i.e stainless pharmaceutical). and no insurance.
I went back to tech for .. 4 years because of the pay difference and because of insurance for me and my wife, but I'm back in the shop now because..i think my software mindset is pretty radically different than the way things are done now.
trade work is a constant challenge, and you can see your skills grow over time. faster, cleaner, more reliable, more clever. if you have a little* financial flexility and love hard work, i strongly recommend it as a second career. if i'm lucky in a software shop i get to solve a problem a day, in the metal shop i solve tens or hundreds.
[oh, sorry, should make this clear - if you start in welding/machining you can certainly make quite a decent living, have benfits, etc - i'm just talking about coming in later in life being self taught and trying to carve out a little work here and there]
Doesn't surprise me in the least. Of the coal miners and programmers I know -- only one set enjoys a subset of people who've built and wired their own homes with little formal education and even less complaint.
Wouldn't you rather have these highly educated immigrants help develop the countries they flee instead of contributing to lower domestic wages and greater world wealth stratification?
No, that doesn't mean you're xenophobic. It just means you think that people from other countries are less deserving of job opportunities than people from your country. It's still not a quality I share or respect, but it's not xenophobia.
My interpretation was that the parent commenter is against some aspect of immigration employment policy, but does not think that constitutes xenophobia.
Folks who go through the trouble of immigrating here, many of whom are reliant on their job for renewing visas, have less bargaining power with their employers. Wages lower, standards for politics and labor rights lower, and standards of living lower. It's about the death of communities and societal trust, and and has nothing to do with people thinking who deserves what.
It just means you think that people from other countries
are less deserving of job opportunities than people from
your country.
Society is a hierarchy of loyalty. Unless you're a self-absorbed, autistic, single 20 something, you have loyalty to others in various degrees. You support your family above my family. You support your company above my company. You support your neighbors above my neighbors, and yes, you should support the citizens of your country above the citizens of my country.
It's very fashionable to virtue signal that you have no loyalty to your country and that we should all live under a one world government.
I do not share that wish. I love that we do not have a mono-culture of government in the world, but have 195 different decentralized experiments happening on how to best run the world. I would hate to have a single experiment running with nowhere to look to or flee to, if it all goes awry.
But I live in one of those 195 experiments, and my fellows that share that with me, my countrymen, I support above the other 194. That's called being human.
> But I live in one of those 195 experiments, and my fellows that share that with me, my countrymen, I support above the other 194. That's called being human.
Nice try, but nationalism is not an intrinsic trait of being a human.
Even admitting biological propensity, is that really a quality to aspire to at the level of a nation-state?
Is that how we should define and measure our "human-ness"?
Ingroup/outgroup dynamics are a pretty deeply-rooted aspect of human social behavior. Maybe it doesn't always manifest itself in the form of a Westphalian nation-state, but it does point to something deep inside us that we manifest at various levels.
This sort of tactical nihilism is honestly pretty confusing to me. Borders, whether national, ideological, social, tribal, linguistic, etc. always have some level of arbitrariness to them, and yet they still represent useful categories. The house door that you lock every evening is merely a collection of arbitrary atoms arranged to separate what you imagine to be your property from others. In the framework of nations, the idea of treating citizens differently from non-citizens as being "discrimination" is an odd one. A country belongs to its people; it doesn't belong to those across the arbitrary border. We all make (sometimes arbitrary) restrictions on access to that which we value; humans who don't do that usually end up losing them to those who do.
I haven't seen anyone in this thread argue for dissolving borders or having a single world government (although a few people have been arguing vehemently against it). It's perfectly reasonable to support national borders with strong checks for safety, while still supporting an extremely welcoming immigrant worker policy.
Huh? Now it's virtue signaling to say that people from other countries deserve the same opportunities as people from my country?
Of course I don't deny personally valuing my family and friends more than strangers, but that doesn't mean I think they fundamentally are more deserving of jobs than strangers. I would personally help a friend get a job before I would help a stranger, but I still think that Americans are no more deserving of jobs than non-Americans, and I don't believe that is a contradiction.
Edit: I also don't think we should be under a one-world government, and I don't see how that follows.
The argument is that if the American government doesn't enact policies that protect and favor Americans, but rather enacts policies that equally protect and favor everyone in the world, then it is effectively acting as a world government or an international charity.
Well, we're talking specifically about the USA's own policies for immigrants entering the USA and working. I have different opinions if we're talking about military and foreign policy.
Because over the long run policies adopted by your country should be scoped to help the members of your country. If politicians/corporations can make a decision that harms our young, and then dig us out by saying there should be a fair playing ground with foreigners, then the consequences of those decisions are externalized.
> Because over the long run policies adopted by your country should be scoped to help the members of your country.
I am fairly convinced that economic protectionism is bad for economic growth, particularly in the long run. And even if I'm a direct beneficiary of a certain protectionist policy, I'd like to think I will oppose it, because it's essentially equivalent to the government taking resources from a non-protected job sector and giving them to the protected job sector.
Is no one going to challenge your first part? You mention family, neighbors, and company and completely ignored one of these is not like the others. Someone that has loyalty to family and friends is socially competent, but someone loyal to a company these days is just a sucker.
That has always been my aversion to nationalism, because to me it occupies the second group in trying not only create loyalty, but much like the company, try to usurp natural loyalty. The power of which I've seen a family member go into nationalism's deep end and strain our relationship with them because I didn't agree.
>It just means you think that people from other countries are less deserving of job opportunities than people from your country.
What's the point of even having a country if citizens aren't prioritized over non-citizens? What's the point of banding together as a nation if you don't engage in policy that helps one another? I don't feel just as entitled to a job in Japan as a Japanese citizen. Do you advocate for one world government or something?
> What's the point of even having a country if citizens aren't prioritized over non-citizens?
For jobs? We're talking about welcoming immigrants into the country to work. My opinion doesn't extend to every possible way that a nation can prioritize its own citizens. If, for instance, there's an American citizen involved in some incident in another country (plane crash, terrorist attack, unjust arrest, etc.), of course I expect the USA to prioritize that. I also expect the USA to prioritize its own economy, infrastructure, education, etc. (although I think that is for the benefit of all legal residents, not just "citizens").
At the same time, my countrymen, my neighbors, being gainfully employed has far more benefit to me directly than people on the other side being gainfully employed. And while I'd like everyone, everywhere to be prosperous and happy, the people who live around me being prosperous and happy has more of a direct effect. For one, if the people in my neighborhood are employed and decently off, that means they're less likely to riot or steal my stuff.
but is this true? as a SysAdmin (a job often done by people like me, with no education at all) I make rather more than anyone I know working as a chemist, physicist, or mathematician, at least until they got tired of the low pay and became software engineers... but in my limited experience, I could say the same about people who studied poetry, philosophy or literature.
There's a lot of talk about STEM, when as far as I can tell, the money is all in computers; the others might get you slightly above median salaries, but if they are above median, it's not by much.
I was comparing against farm workers, coal workers, auto workers, restaurant workers, care givers etc. STEM by far will provide better wages. Although the education system is not built for this (hence migrants). Politicians also would like to keep people in the above jobs because the owners pay theiere bills.
so you are saying that a STEM degree gets jobs that pay better than most jobs that don't require a degree at all?
If you compare your average non-computer industry STEM job to something in Medicine, law or business... I think that STEM, outside of the computer industry, just doesn't pay that well, and it's kind of disingenuous to advertise it as a path to financial well being to young people who are so poor that they have to look at education as a monetary investment.
I don't think you're being manipulative, but you are certainly oversimplifying the issue here. Of course everybody deserves a good job or good opportunities. But, just as such, everybody deserves happiness or kittens, or a good education. We strive for those things, generally, but we don't always hit the mark. When you make a statement like that, you completely ignore all of the other factors that matter. Ok, so somebody in India deserves a good tech job, does the American then move to India and take their place? Do they just lose their job and screw them? Do they get lucky and find another job? What if they loved that job? What if I want to move to Switzerland, do I deserve a good job there? What if they won't let me in? Do the have the right to do that? If they do, then aren't the Swiss preventing other people from these deserved jobs?
This seems like a fairly unproductive way to make your point, because I can only guess what you mean.
What I think you mean is that you can be against increased margins for corporations, and that's the reason that you're against immigration.
It's a strange strange thing to be against increased margins for corporations, without any other explanation, so I can see why many people would be confused, if that's what you're trying to say.
You're focusing on the wrong part. Increased margins for corporations at the cost of engineer pay. Companies don't need their margins nearly as much as individuals need a higher salary.
Still, I find it odd to argue that engineer pay is among the top priorities of a well-functioning economy. I'm an engineer, and all else being equal I'll take more money (it has its uses), but I certainly couldn't say with a straight face that my country's immigration policy should be based significantly on its effect on my salary.
"The overall economy" isn't as important as wages and purchasing power for individuals.
Immigration can lead to less competition and therefore innovation. Instead of people from other countries creating services that compete, they get absorbed by multinationals.
> It's a strange strange thing to be against increased margins for corporations
Is it? I know a lot of leftists who consider corporate profit margins something to intrinsically oppose. I mean, they're concerned about the consequences of those margins, but they do think the consequences are inescapable - they think rising corporate margins inherently make the world a worse place.
And yeah, that's historically driven an anti-immigration streak among labor movements, made stronger when it's not about new citizens but people operating under alternate labor laws. The deBoer type leftists of today don't carry that xenophobia, but some of them definitely still complain about H1B as a corporate subsidy.
It's not a position I endorse (if anything, I'd argue for "strengthen the bargaining position of H1B workers"), but I don't think it's terribly uncommon. I agree that the comment framing is inflammatory and unnecessary, but I wasn't surprised by the part about margins.
Why would guest worker policies increase margins? Software is pretty much the easiest type of work to offshore, and if the businesses do that they don't have to pay wages sufficient to live in San Francisco.
Please don't post like this here. Other users have been keeping the discussion above the political rant line, and we'd appreciate your help in doing so as well.
We all need to pitch in if HN is to have a chance of meeting its goal to be a home for intellectual curiosity.
Just because they have some of the highest wages doesn't mean they don't have some of the lowest too and it doesn't mean that they aren't hiring foreign workers so they can pay them 150k instead of 300k.
And even being paid 150k isn't exactly a low quality of life. After tax, and rent at $4000 a month, your leftover wage from 150k is higher than my gross salary.
QoL in California is pretty poor, considering the cost required as compared to the rest of the US. Only immigrants are willing to pay the price since for many of them, it's still an upgrade from what they can get back home.
> QoL in California is pretty poor, considering the cost required as compared to the rest of the US.
After 30 years, on and off, in the valley I agree the QoL here isn't great (when compared to Germany, France, Australia...) but way way better than anywhere else in the US.
> After 30 years, on and off, in the valley I agree the QoL here isn't great (when compared to Germany, France, Australia...) but way way better than anywhere else in the US.
No, it simply isn't. By any stretch of the imagination.
By what definition? I've lived most of my life in California (split between the bay area and LA). I can't even begin to imagine being happier outside of California. Aside from rent, I see nothing at all that is better in other states I visit.
Probably similar to yours: mostly subjective ones. I was born and raised in California and love it here. My older brother was born and raised in California, hated it, and loves it in North Carolina.
This is just wrong. You may prefer the Bay Area, and I don't think anyone here is going to argue you shouldn't, but to say that the quality of life is better is just wrong.
San Francisco is more than 3x more expensive than the metro I live in now. I'd need to earn $350k a year just to break even financially before taxes. I'd pay a lot more in federal income tax, and my state income tax is flat and in the low single digits. Call it $375k to break even on take home pay after paying for everything (rent, retirement, etc). How likely am I to make almost $400k a year? That's top 1% income nationally. That's IB money, not writing a CRUD app in JavaScript.
Not to mention I go home for lunch and I have a 10-minute, 4-mile commute. And speaking of home, a constant pain point I hear from Bay Area programmers on HN is that they'll never be able to buy a home. San Francisco housing is over 1,200% (percent) more expensive than my area. My home cost a few thousand dollars more than I earn in a year.
What are you spending money on that you need to earn $350k to break even?
Assuming you find a modest home in SF for $1mil your 30 year mortgage would be ~$57k a year. Property tax is ~$7k. Insurance will be <$5k. So to have a home you only need <70k. Assuming no deductions filing as a single you will pay ~$140k in taxes on $350k. This leaves you with (350-140-70) $140k a year in disposable income.
So I repeat, what are you spending money on that you need to make $140k in disposable income to break even?
It's a cost of living calculation. I earn $x,000 in my current low-COL area. To maintain an identical standard of living that comes out to $350k before factoring in California's high tax environment, and the increased federal taxes.
Don't try to spin San Francisco being the most expensive place to live in the country into me being bad with my money - I'm not. But when you make a high income in a low COL area, it means moving to any high COL area means you either take an effective pay cut in standard of living, or you need to earn an amount that is very unlikely.
> QoL in California is pretty poor, considering the cost required as compared to the rest of the US
That's certainly true for people outside of high-paying jobs (California has the highest, CoL-adjusted poverty rate in the nation), but less clearly so for those with high-paying work, who often are better off (even given local CoL) than they would be elsewhere because wages in elite fields are often higher here even compared to CoL.
Perhaps it is a case of a number without context. I have been here for nearly 18 years now and have become a citizen. I just wanted to get out of the rain of my homeland and into the California sunshine.
I guess I am part of the 42% but I was never one of the “poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. I just consider myself a proud American. 42% says nothing about how long people have been here and whether they are just a next wave building up the country like waves of immigrants from the past.
I don't know why you're being downvated. The very fact that you are being downvoted shows how many folks with xenophobia are lurking around on Hacker News.
There is NEVER a time when there are not enough qualified US Citizens.
Why? Because if I am a company, I will 100% always be able to hire enough engineers, if I just do this 1 weird trick.
And that trick is "pay every engineer 1 million dollars".
The question is always about price.
In the same way that a food shortage has basically never existed in history. Sure, there were places where the price of bread was 1 thousand dollars, and people were starving to death because they couldn't have enough food. But thats not a shortage, thats just people complaining about price!
Now, the real question you have to ask yourself, is "is bread costing 1 thousand dollars a good thing?" And when you can answer that questions, you will also be able to answer "is a software engineer costing 1 million dollars a good thing"?
Edit: my post doesn't seem to be clear.
My point that I was making is that "bread costing 1 thousand dollars is a bad thing". And that there is nothing wrong with driving down the price of devs.
My definition of shortage is "prices are too high"
The above claim that there aren't food shortages seems simply false for any normal definition.
Obviously common use just means "an insufficient amount under these circumstances", but if we wanted to be very strict we could say "a situation where not all the players can simultaneously satisfy their demand at any price". A shortage is a situation where supply is inelastic and below demand.
Everyone hiring programmers could fill their roster simultaneously if they could pay enough - if not today then certainly soon. In a lot of famines, there are X people sharing food for <X people - price is no longer a reflection of desire, because no one voluntarily leaves the auction.
I do think it's important to distinguish insufficient demand from a simple lack of supply, but the latter definitely exists.
Paying people 1 million dollars a year does not make more Geoff Hintons appear. It will increase supply, by taking it from other industries over time as people choose to go into these fields, but there is a lot of truly specialized work out there where it is just impractical to wait for the people to get years of experience. It is a gross, gross oversimplification, and a dangerous one.
The United States has well less than 5% of the worlds population. We are extremely lucky to attract the top talent from the other 95% and we need to defend that pipeline.
"42% of California's STEM workforce" aren't Geoff Hintons.
I don't see anyone arguing that exceptional talent shouldn't be welcomed into the U.S.
And I think the U.S. tech workforce is more elastic than you give credit for, especially for software skills. It's just most organizations want employees they don't have to train for their stacks, which I don't think is particularly reasonable.
Because it is fantasy, and simply disobey how the market works? Kick out all the competitors won't hike your salary forever. Companies aren't that stupid, and human resource cost is definitely on their radar and there is a budget for that. 1 million? I say once average developer costs over 200k, companies will start move jobs to other places that are still cheap.
This feels like an argument about definitions. When supply is decreased prices increase. That's basic Econ.
Now, another point to make would be about possible output versus labor costs. Ie SV will employ labor in close relationship to the output of that labor and the cost of it. Once those two values equate there is no more (efficient) demand for labor available.
That's Econ theory land though. I think this is much more about profit margins and market inefficiencies.
How is something not a shortage if noone can afford to buy it? When people talk about shortage they usually speak of some cohort's inability to acquire something, not simplistic assessments of inventory levels.
I'm all for the wage argument.... yes if you raise wages high enough they will come... but why take it to such extremes?
SV has done this to itself. It clusters around tiny, restricted geographic locations, which push out the locals, gentrify entire cities, and then these companies have the gall to complain about the cost of labor, which they helped to define the high prices of. More consideration is placed on proximity than prurient economic interests, because Business Interests Always Come First.
And for the record we've felt the engineering shortage too. Our last hiring run brought in all sorts of weirdos. Not everyone can afford to send a fleet of recruiters to the various Ivy Leagues to secure workers. Something needs to be done about that -- just not increased immigration. California doesn't need any more people.
My naive reading of the headline implies to me that 42% of Californian STEM companies should have opened offices outside of California.
I once interviewed for a company who was opening a new Nashville office because they had tapped out the talent pool around Ft. Campbell, Kentucky. It turned out they were still trying to pay Ft. Campbell salaries there. They forgot that bigger talent pools have more competition.
You can either throw small bait into a thousand small talent pools, or invest in some serious tackle to fish in the ocean. You either spend money on sending recruiters out to the dark, untapped reserves, or you spend enough to compete with the entire rest of the world on salary. If you really need the talent, and you can't afford the price tag, you have to settle into a niche that is just big enough for your company, and not worth the effort for someone bigger than you.
If you need cheap engineers, you can get them from any town or city that doesn't already have an 800-lb gorilla employer in it. But you have to go to them. If you move them to you, they stop being cheap, because your competition can snap them up as easily as anyone else.
That's the something that can be done about it. If you can't compete in California, stop trying. Go somewhere else with weaker competition. People follow the jobs. If you don't believe that California needs more people, they need to start exporting those job opportunities to places with less severe population pressures. Otherwise, the people will keep coming.
> How is something not a shortage if noone can afford to buy it?
It's just expensive. It means that some low-value projects aren't profitable and all projects are higher risk than we are currently expecting them to be.
> SV has done this to itself.
I'm sympathetic here. But if we let wages in urban centers rise, companies will be more willing to set up offices in other parts of the U.S. Or virtual offices even.
At the high end, there are no substitute US citizens. Imagine trying to find an American-born replacement for Yann LeCun. At the low end, the H1B abuse train definitely imports a lot of people with close to zero skills.
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"....At the high end, there are no substitute US citizens....."
This can't be overstated enough.
I think the immigration that is critical to the US is the high end immigration, not the low end stuff like H1B.
I'm just afraid that the chanting mobs will want to throw the baby out with the bath water. We NEED the NIW-types, we don't really need most of the H1B-types. So if the political environment is such that we need to cut loose some H1B-types to save the NIW-types... we should do so without hesitation.
H1s are not even on the same field of play as NIWs...
there really is just no comparison.
That's why it's called a (N)ational (I)nterests (W)aiver. Because everyone from the commerce department, to the congress, to the military and intelligence people all agree that we need that guy's brainpower.
Or more precisely... they all agree that we need to deny that guy's brainpower to every other nation on earth if possible.
That's an immigrant visa, not a working visa. The question was working visas someone like Lecun whom I'm pretty certain showed up here first on an H1-B.
What would you estimate as a minimum salary level for your definition of "high end?"
To me, since these workers tend to have grad degrees and are very talented, I'd peg it to a fairly high level law, medical, business, or finance worker. In short, anything less than $250k a year would get you laughed out of the building, and we're probably looking at $400k ore more.
I'm not sure what the percentages are here, but yeah, like you'd I'd guess that the percentage of H1Bs at these salary levels is very low. In short, if the H1B visa were limited to these sorts of workers, my guess is there would be no real discussion or controversy about the program.
Kind of astonishing that we award these by lottery. The whole system is really bad. Then again, it is used cynically by people who defend the program (they trot out the small percentage of very highly paid people and say "what you don't want this guy working in the US?", as if that is the issue or is in any way representative of 97% of the use of the program).
I don't think it's too high. If all you're willing to pay is 100k, I'm not prepared to believe that you're trying to hire a desperately needed, highly skilled worker, especially in silicon valley (where claims of a shortage are loudest). Not even close.
Not all H1B is "low end"." There is H1B use and there is H1B abuse. They are not comparable. I work with some extraordinarily talented people on H1B visas who would absolutely not have an US replacement if they were not here.
In my very limited experience with companies that hires H1B to fill programming jobs, it's because they can't find qualified local candidates.
All the really qualified people are in the bay area working for tech startups, etc...
So a company outside of the bay area would have to bring in H1B workers who are willing to live in the area.
I am not sure if there are costs concerns for the company in making that decision, but I figure if they were willing to hire me, they probably don't have a problem hiring local candidates if possible.
Edit: Since people want more details, I'll elaborate on the VERY LITTLE that I know. Right now consulting agencies in Sacramento, CA need Senior Ruby Devs and they can't find any. I am not 100% sure on what salary is being offered, but I am guessing around 100K. A junior dev fresh out of college can make about 40K (remember its Sacramento!). (I want to make it clear this is all hearsay, don't quote me on this)
I was told an agency that hires out H1B workers can get paid as much as $50/hr. I have no way to verify this, but this is what I heard.
Another thing is, these are short term, project based, positions --- not very attractive to people seeking a career.
They also have a constant need for .NET and Java devs.
That being said. I am very much against outsourcing jobs that could be hired locally. But Sacramento has a very small developer community, so I don't blame them for using H1B to fill the gap. But who knows... maybe it's all a ruse.
Are there really no qualified local candidates, or are there no qualified local candidates who can also solve theoretical CS problems on the spot while pretending they're not doing it from memory?
Or qualified local candidates who refuse to lie and say they only took 3 hours on the take-home exercise?
I personally think this is the real problem. Companies dismissing qualified candidates as "unqualified" because they are too lazy to evaluate candidates based on their skills, and would rather throw brainteasers at them instead.
For every 100 candidates a CS job gets, probably 80 are truly unqualified, 20 are truly qualified, but only 2 were both qualified and could pass an arbitrary list of brainteasers.
And that lie lets managers run around saying "see, we can't hire enough talent! Skills shortage!" (where "skills" means "brainteaser skills", not software development skills)
I agree with this. I think they are overlooking qualified candidates because they do not meet certain requirements. Especially in the government space.
Then they hire H1B people who look good on paper.
This to me is a huge problem. And it upsets me greatly because its unfair and counter-productive.
In the past, I've done dual-track interviewing where candidates could choose either a (paid!) evaluation project or a traditional technical interview. Even then, the vast majority of applicants could not perform at a suitable level.
Have you actually done hiring? The truth is that there really is a shortage of qualified applicants (at least, at existing prices). I've literally never met a fellow hiring manager who thought there was a surplus of good engineers.
I have never been a hiring manager, but I have been a developer asked to evaluate candidates in interviews for multiple companies, and I've seen my own employer turn away qualified candidates. I've also been an employee at companies who institute hiring policies their own current employees would not pass, and then claim new candidates are unqualified based on those policies. Neither of these are particularly unusual.
I've also been a person applying to jobs, where I know I'm fully qualified (usually because I already do the same thing in the same way for a competitor) and where I'm told "we think your a good culture fit, but we're worried about your technical abilities". I can't know exactly why they said that, but when I've showed working code they say their happy with, but I know I struggled on their brainteaser questions, it feels safe to infer.
So, I've seen qualified candidates turned away because they were "unqualified" (but they really weren't), from both sides of the table. I'm not claiming there is a huge surplus of engineering out there, but there is no real shortage either. There are enough engineers, just not enough employers willing to hire them.
This view is popular to get hashed around, since it makes everyone feel good. But the reality is that many/most algo questions being asked, are very basic. If you don't know how to use binary search or a heap to solve a basic problem, that already raises enough of a question mark that I don't want to hire you.
People always push it to the extreme and mention some very difficult algo question they were asked, and say how it's irrelevant. And if you have been asked a question like that, I agree it's irrelevant and that sucks.
But having a basic understanding of algorithms and data structures is important to writing decent software. Can we please stop pretending like expecting people to roughly know and understand the content of the freshman data structures course is some kind of unreasonable expectation?
Or qualified local candidates who just need a few weeks to months of training with Ruby on Rails because they're used to programming microcontrollers instead?
From the companies standpoint, there is a lack of local candidates who can prove they are qualified. Proving it is important because if the company gets it wrong it will costs $XXX,XXX or more and probably more than a year to figure it out. This makes them understandably risk adverse.
I know, I know, we go over this too much on HN. But... isn't half the sentence missing when you say they can't find qualified local candidates without mentioning the pay?
What positions were you trying to fill, and what pay and working conditions were you offering?
Supply and demand are not suspended just because it's tech. There's a huge amount of demand, but not much supply for highly skilled software developers at $75k a year in San Francisco. There's a huge supply at $500k a year, but considerably less demand.
Exactly. It's meaningless to discuss a "shortage" without mentioning the price offered. I say there's a shortage of new BMWs--I am willing to pay $10K for one.
Although there are companies that import warm bodies for cheap, there're many companies that hire immigrants for the same salary and perks as locals. The problem with these conversations is that we all come with anecdata.
From what I can see, for San Francisco, the brunt of H1Bs (which is not the totality of foreign nationals, doesn't include L1s and T1s) in San Francisco in 2016 earned a salary in the 100K-150K range[1] (without accounting for extra perks like food, health and stock grants). Is that low? High? I don't know, but it seems in line with what I would have expected. Keep in mind that that's the salary, you have to add the cost of actually bringing that person to the US (lawyers, relocation, temp housing, etc.).
As for the BMW, you can get a 10 year old one for that price[2].
My problem with paying the "market rate" is that if there's a shortage, this is probably a sign that the market rate is too low.
"Is it too low?" That isn't really for me to say. Generally speaking, it isn't for the government to say either. In a market economy, the market determines this. I see no reason to put corporations in control of the immigration system, with the power to decide who is allowed to come here and what jobs they're allowed to work, just because they don't like the market's answer.
They can't find qualified local candidates in the same way that I can't tie my own shoes if I cut both of my hands off.
There are plenty of qualified candidates out there. But as you mentioned, they are mostly already working somewhere else, for someone else. In order to hire them, you need to offer more or better than they already get. That isn't all just a salary number, but almost everything has a conversion rate.
Guest workers on a non-immigrant visa are simply cheaper to employ. As are young, unmarried, childless, and inexperienced workers.
It's fundamental economics. Supply is not a single fixed quantity, but a function of price. Likewise for demand. Where they cross, the market clears. Everyone willing to pay more than the clearing price gets an employee, and everyone willing to work for less than the clearing price gets hired. If you can't find a job, you are asking for too much money, and if you can't find an employee, you are offering too little.
Companies deliberately set criteria that guarantee a local search for candidates will fail, in order to save money on labor costs by hiring an imported candidate more cheaply. That is the heart of the unease surrounding H1B laborers. If the company truly cannot find suitable local candidates, the person they do find is in a great position to ask for more pay. If they need you that much, they should be paying more than any local would even dream of asking for, right?
Does that happen? Are H1B workers paid more than their local equivalents?
> In my very limited experience with companies that hires H1B to fill programming jobs, it's because they can't find qualified local candidates.
> All the really qualified people are in the bay area working for tech startups, etc...
> So a company outside of the bay area would have to bring in H1B workers who are willing to live in the area.
So the answer to a lack of local candidates is to start reaching across oceans? How about elsewhere in the massive expanse of North America, where many people don't even need a visa or can get one much more easily?
Given those numbers.. the problem is the salary. It does not matter that it's Sacramento; it's still California. And, honestly, as a fresh out of college dev, why would I go to Sacramento for 40k when I can go to the valley for 3x that, and still come out ahead?
So apparently $100k+ is not enough money to interest the citizens. I wonder why that's the case.
By they way, the next step after not being able to hire a 60k H1B worker is usually to hire a 60k outsourced remote worker, not to hire a 150k "citizen".
Certainly $100k+ is enough to interest some citizens. But there's always the marginal citizen who would be swayed for more money.
Anecdotally, I had lots of classmates who aggressively pursued careers in finance not because they had any intrinsic interest in the field but because they heard it can pay exceptionally well. If technology had the same reputation (it's beginning to acquire it, but is somewhat behind), more of them would have pursued it instead.
Note: I'm not saying this should necessarily be the goal. Personally, I think it's fine if we import additional tech labor from around the world, and even prefer that to using wages as a carrot for more citizens.
> By they way, the next step after not being able to hire a 60k H1B worker is usually to hire a 60k outsourced remote worker, not to hire a 150k "citizen".
This article is not about H1Bs. Many of the foreign-born tech employees are permanent residents who compete directly in the same market as American-born employees.
Hiring in tech is something of a bifurcated market and there is H1B hiring both in the abusive lower-wage sector and higher-pay direct employment sector.
>So apparently $100k+ is not enough money to interest the citizens. I wonder why that's the case.
Lots of other career fields which offer more money and/or prestige? Anecdata: many of my friends with the aptitude for software dev are in med school now.
Because many of the people who could make $100k doing software could make several multiples of that doing something like finance, and be in a more respected profession to boot.
Whenever the salary question comes up, people are always quick to compare it to the country at large. But that's not a valid comparison; someone who would be a qualified software engineer isn't deciding between that and being a retail clerk. They're deciding between going into that or something like finance, where they can make many multiples of what they could as a software developer.
I think 100k is still attractive, when u can only make 50k.
Seriously though, are we really arguing why cannot everyone just get over themselves and work for Wall Street now? Only that level of vanity is worthy of an incentive, otherwise it is not worth it?
I doubt? I think HN people are not as delusional as this. 100k+ is definitely a good salary already. It is the fucking 90% percentile of the whole country. 500k+ I think you are begging the companies to outsource all code work to India.
100K+ is enough to survive comfortably while you work.
500K+ is enough to survive comfortably after you work for a moderate stint. Or to afford a significant capital investment like a small property, or to work for yourself on your pipe dream for awhile.
If people saw a path to long-term financial security which would enable them to drop the shackles of full-time employment before retirement age, of course they would flock to a profession. But they don't; they see a comfortable wage that could potentially evaporate if there is a bubble, or the field moves rapidly, or there will be a glut of people trying something similar by the time they finish retraining.
It's a risk:reward decision, and the risk is far from 0. So how much is that theoretical 100K really worth to someone looking at a very large investment to learn a new skill?
They can go to finance then. If that is what Americans need to incentivize themselves to learn Mathematics, from your description sounds like gambling, such industry already exists, that is the finance/hedge-funding industry.
The median wage from my memory is 60k a year. You make it sound like money is the biggest factor in going into STEM when a lot of kids don't even go to colleges.
The shortage is not because you don't get paid enough, the shortage is because not enough people can afford the expensive college degree.
4 years of undergrad cost me < $1000 and the same thing costs >$50,000 in the US.
I've worked on the hiring side, worker shortages in tech are 100% bs.
I was hiring for a small local company with no reputation, boring work, and mediocre benefits. This company was about 60 miles out from Chicago in a small town.
We got over 100 applicants for every software position. We didn't even pay for ads, just put stuff on the free sites.
We hardly hired anyone, but the deluge of applications allowed us to low-ball pay and be extremely selective.
The worst kept secret in tech hiring is that everyone knows it pays well and hundreds of thousands are clamoring for open positions. They are "unqualified" because nobody will train them.
This is as much a sweeping generalization as saying Americans are unqualified for tech jobs. There's an interview process for hiring H1Bs. So if you don't like their technical skills, you're free to not hire them.
Maybe your experience differs from mine, but getting lots of applications has never been the problem. Finding the handful of those applicants who can actually program effectively is the hard part. I'm consistently stunned by how many candidates either have zero knowledge of specific things they list on their resume or truly can't even write basic code in languages they say they know.
> We got over 100 applicants for every software position.
How many of them passed FizzBuzz?
Chicago outskirts is also not California. Try a software position with low pay, crappy benefits at an unknown software company in California and report back. Bonus points if you try it in the Bay Area.
If they don’t pass FizzBuzz, you try to teach them for 6 months until they do fit into your company.
Is that so hard? Training on the job used to be common, and for entry level positions it should be possible at least.
EDIT: Okay, maybe not FizzBuzz, but the lots of "10 years experience with Angular 4" and co at least, and in general sometimes testing people more on actual tasks than on invented exercises. Even in Germany in the first few weeks you can terminate employees for any reason, so you don’t need to be too selective with hiring.
Whoa there. You should definitely allow time to learn particular frameworks, but FizzBuzz is a fundamental competency issue that even hobbyists should be able to pass.
If someone can't pass FizzBuzz, they need a year or two of education to be useful as a programmer, and might never make it. Sure, you can hire someone to do helpdesk and help them try to grow into a programmer, but you can't hire a programmer who knows nothing, and then entrust them to not ruin your company, destroy your data, etc.
I've wondered how it would be to train someone using an apprenticeship model.
I read some posts here by people who took a pay cut to become bootcamp instructors (for a season or two). A lot of them mentioned the satisfaction they got by being able to create real value in someone's life...
I guess only a certain demographic of people would even want to do an apprenticeship. Only apprenticeship programs I've heard of are for lower wage jobs. So, poor people may benefit from an apprenticeship. Mid-career changers might also benefit. CS degrees would be overqualified.
It would require significant time and effort. Not possible without company support. Still, to take a mind that can't see what we see to one that can and the amount of value created as a result, might be worth it.
In this day and age, low level software jobs should be considered as blue collar jobs that replaced manufacturing. When people think about programmer in boring job, the correct metaphor is think about working class mechanic in production line, not an engineer.
I was surprised how little people in US value hard STEM education. I think think that one reason for that is that tech in peoples mind is some type programmer.
When young people ask why should I learn math because I know python, I ask them how many unemployed electrical engineers with signal processing background you know? Programmers for bean counting apps become unemployable when they get older because there is no shortage of code monkeys working for peanuts and knowing some framework from inside out is outdated 10 years from now.
If virtually none of them were hirable, that would support the claim of a qualified tech shortage. A large number of applications is only informative if they're qualified.
For all the vilifying of H1B and related visas, it is still a big burden for companies. Even big companies will use third party, specialized lawyers to deal with the bureaucracy.
In the case of H1B, there's a significant hiring lag. You apply in April and, if you are lucky, get the visa in October. Companies who abuse the system en masse (there are about 3 or 4 that do it) don't care about that and will use a shotgun approach, but if you are trying to fill a position, it's a very bad proposition.
Still, that gives you access to brains from the whole world. And yes, these brains may be willing to work for less, initially, compared to what a US citizen would get. There doesn't have to be foul play involved: they have less leverage. A similarly qualified US citizen would just name their price and tell the company to take a hike if that was not met. Restarting the whole visa process would be way more painful.
Take a look at indeed, monster, or whatever your preferred job board is. Sample the tech jobs in an area, what they want in the position, and what they're willing to pay. When I was job hunting, many wanted a surgeon at nurse prices.
If you are an unprofitable tech company, you are probably going to cry about worker shortage as a means to raise more money, and distribute that wealth as you see fit.
As someone working and doing code interviews for a large company that pays well (even by bay area standards), I think it's a lack of qualified US citizens. The number of graduates I've interviewed that can't figure out a basic graph traversal is crazy. I don't ask (or expect) them to recite algorithms from memory but even if they haven't worked with graphs before, they should be able to figure out a BFS or DFS on their own and suggest some ways to improve on it. Many of them however, cannot.
I'll also note that I don't interview many foreigners and the reason I see mostly new grads is that I'm not senior myself, so it makes little sense for me to interview senior candidates.
At the high end, there's simply a larger supply overseas. The US has a population of 300M and between them, India and China have about 2.7B people and their countries pay far, far less.
I think some might read that title and jump to conclusion. Don't. The article states that they are only foreign born, but it doesn't say anything about how they got here. It would have helped had the article made this clear, but it's likely IEEE doesn't want to step into the H1B visa abuse issue.
Whenever someone brings up H1B, everybody goes to abuse issue, but a lot of us got here as students and we still have to use H1B to work. It is unfair to just lump everybody on an H1B as a low wage, unqualified person.
They are not low wages but are getting below market salaries. If that was what you're hinting at.
I'm guessing most people working for IT consultancies and services companies are paid way below market wages. Sure, the company hiring them is billing more than that, but the employee still gets significantly lower than market wages.
The issue that many of us have, myself included, with the H1B program is that is is primarily used to suppress local wages. It is easy to say you can't find candidates if you are pricing the job well below market wages.
I am not saying everyone on H1B is as well. Yet the overwhelming majority of uses I see of H1B is to get a lower wage full stop. I do work extensively with offhsore resources and have worked with H1B's for over 20 years.
I don't begrudge them recipients for taking the jobs. My issue is the corporations who are abusing a system to make themselves more money while simultaneously destroying local talent. It is a death spiral of greed, yet they seem to be oblivious to it.
I can't say I understand this argument. Say an American company X outsources to a foreign company Y. Y abuses the system and hires a bunch of H1B and pays them pennies to the dollar. X is still paying Y dollars and not pennies right? Sure, the H1B is working for lower salary, but X's cost is still not a lot lower than hiring locally right?
I see how just shipping the jobs to India/China might have the effect you are describing, but I don't think hiring H1B holders is the same thing.
Articles like this seem to bring out people involuntarily triggered to grind their pet axe. The discussion is never enlightening. That's why I flagged.
There's an interesting breakdown of a more narrow definition of STEM vs a broader one (that includes social sciences and health sciences). I personally would be more inclined to include health sciences than social sciences, but the data is granular enough to get at this distinction in some cases.
Google and the rest could have instituted huge training programs for Americans. Instead, they imported the most fortunate from other countries, leaving behind the least fortunate everywhere.
It's 1% Americans importing the %1 from other counties. It's the most powerful and well off united in screwing the least powerful.
You don't have to dislike immigrants to dislike corporations and politicians destroying opportunity for millions of the families that literally built America.
I don't think the burden should be on corporations. Nearly (all?) every other developed country on earth has government subsidised or provided education. Where do you think all the immigrants are getting their degrees? Americans can even go to other countries and get educated for free (Germany I believe does this).
The US needs to overhaul, hell, even nationalize, its higher education system. Don't expect corporations to educate people for you.
Especially when countries like Germany have such a good history of training their own workforce through apprenticeships. I believe this is handled by the unions though, where the incentives are more in line with the workers than the corporations.
This wouldn't be necessary if we actually invested in our own citizens. I'd have no problem with it if our own population didn't have a skills shortage, but it does.
"Necessary"? Its a world market for top-end talent, we just attract the cream of the crop. Even if Americans upped their game, everyone else would probably also and we'd still be in the same situation.
This isn't true. It's a race to the bottom for cheap talent. There is definitely a race for top talent, but that comprises a small portion of all immigrants. It's all about cheap labor.
The majority of STEM workers by definition can't be top talent for the industry. Being a part of a world market for top talent makes sense. That's not what we have though. We don't even have enough people or average or mediocre talent. We're relying on a global labor market at the expense of our own citizens.
Seems to jibe with what I just read the other week in City Journal...
"""At a dinner for Silicon Valley executives in early 2011, President Barack Obama asked Apple CEO Steve Jobs what it would take to bring iPhone manufacturing back to America. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” the typically blunt Apple cofounder told the president. Examining Jobs’s claim, the New York Times looked at Apple’s vast Chinese operations and found that workers there not only worked for less than Americans did; more of them were skilled. To oversee production and guide some 200,000 assembly-line workers, Apple, for instance, needed 8,700 industrial engineers—positions that required more than a high school diploma but less than a full college degree. While abundant in China, these kinds of employees are harder to find in the United States. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need,” an unnamed Apple executive told the Times."""
https://www.city-journal.org/html/vocational-ed-reborn-15253...
Industrial engineer jobs went to China because the low-wage factory job they oversee went to China. Industrial engineers would be easy to find if their was demand for them.
> We don't even have enough people or average or mediocre talent.
I don't agree. I think we have far more average talent than we have companies willing to hire only average talent, particularly if said average talent does not already live within 20 miles of them.
Exactly. The labor market (yes, including tech) is absolutely overflowing with average talent. It's just that every company seems to want to hire only the top 2%. Long-term flatline wages support this--if there truly were "not enough" people, wages would rise.
Yeah, I just don't get it. It was pretty clear to me what to do when I left high school. Study, study, study. Work hard, work hard, work hard. Nobody told me this, it just seemed like the right thing to do. I grew up poor in projects in a horrible violent city with nobody to guide me. If I can do this, why can't other Americans who have a much better upbringing and supportive family structure? Which makes me think, life is too good, too easy, for the average american. Why go through the effort of studying years of math and computer science when they can enjoy life and get by on jobs that don't require years and years of dedication and schooling?
A lot of people just aren't responsible enough to do this themselves. Most people from your city probably weren't. There's probably a nearly infinite amount of factors at play there, but that's a lot of opportunities for improvement that we just aren't focused on as a nation. We're all checked out and getting sold out by our own institutions.
This is anecdata. By that reasoning why would we even have poor people if being poor drove everyone to success like it did to you? Do you actually think that anyone who workedars hard as you would achieve the same level of success? If they could, wouldn't that just then become the minimum and you would have to work harder than that to achieve more? There is clearly something else going on here.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't be proud of yourself, but if you were being intellectually honest you would realize that this is not a rational well researched stance.
This topic has been researched to death already so we're not going to break any real ground but I would ask you two things specifically:
1. When you studied hard, were you supported to study hard? Were your basic necessities covered (food, shelter) so you could focus? A lot of kids don't even have this basic level of stability in their lives, and maybe you didn't either.
2. How did you get into computer science? When I was growing up I didn't know anyone who was a programmer of any kind and wouldn't have even known to consider it had I not gotten lucky and took a programming class in highschool partly because it allowed me to drive to the community college to do it and get out of school almost half of the day. If I hadn't had transportation and money for gas it would have never happened and who knows where I would be now.
> 1. When you studied hard, were you supported to study hard?
I worked a fulltime job during ungrad and grad school (and did programming jobs on the side for about $75 per hour). I worked my way through.
> How did you get into computer science?
John Carmack mostly. I saw some guy play quake online and it blew me away. I saved money to buy a computer and pay for internet. Which lead into writing scripts and websites. Then into computer science.
I'm more interested in the process leading up to college, your work ethic definitely makes a difference there but your opportunities when you are younger affect whether you ever even go to college and how prepared you are once you get there.
How did you write those scripts and websites, did you have a computer growing up? Internet access (what little internet there was to be had then that is)?
I'm not trying to take away your achievements, but I think this kind of thinking is a big part of what is wrong with how we make public policy. We see things in a very narrow way (just human nature) and we generally have a hard time empathizing with other people and their experiences. I think if we could get over that and stop romanticizing the exceptions and start understanding better the average experiences of people in our societies, maybe we can make better decisions that allow more people to succeed.
By the way working full time through undergrad and grad school would have been tough, I ended up taking out loans myself (partly so I could enjoy the experience a little more and not work all the time, only most of the time) so kudos to you for pulling that off. I'm not sure I want everyone to have to go through that (if even they could have done that, not too many people can make $75/hr even as professionals let alone students), but there is nothing wrong with taking pride in having done it yourself.
Maybe there is when your Gini Index is in the 20's, or hell, even the mid-30's. When it's 46.1, closer to Brazil than to most other developed countries?
I have read the second article you link to and I find it irrelevant to the point you are making.
That story is how high-schoolers in Silicon Valley are committing suicide at an alarming rate. Reading between the lines some, it tells you that Silicon Valley parents (who are probably some of the most driven people in the country) are expecting their kids to be just as driven/high achieving as them. The kids cannot cope with it and take the only way out they know of.
I think this is very different from what ronnier is suggesting when he says "life is too good, too easy, for the average american." Children in SV are not average americans.
I have absolutely no issue with your policy priorities. Let's get more native-born citizens through school with skills appropriate for the modern workforce.
But the bit where this falls down is your use of "our own" in a context where it either has no meaning or has, let's just say "accidentally discriminatory" meaning. The idea that we should invest to "prevent" this situation is kinda distasteful.
These people are americans now. No, they aren't all citizens (though many are), but their kids are and their descendants will be. This is their home as much as it is yours or mine. This country built itself on the backs of imported talent, there's no valid reason for that to stop now.
A nation's government absolutely should discriminate in favor of it's own people. That's who it's supposed to be representing. In the case of the U.S., there's nothing racial about that. Opportunity for Americans is more important than opportunity for non-Americans.
And once more, you're using "own" in a sense that seems really distasteful. In what sense is a south asian engineer who's been living in Emeryville for 16 years[1] not one of "our own" people?
[1] No idea if that's a median data point, but it's probably close. When people talk about STEM immigrants they mean very long term residents who will realistically be here with their families for the rest of their lives. You want to imagine a job-jacking horde of foreign-educated people who don't speak English. The truth is rather different.
Why are you trying to make this about race? Clearly someone who has been here for nearly 20 decades is someone who ought to be given citizenship. But that has nothing to do with preferring to continue to bring in foreign workers rather than invest in American citizens who are struggling.
Americans make up only 4.3% of the world's population. Thus, even if we invest much more in American citizens, which we surely should, don't you think it's inevitable that progress in tech will nevertheless be driven largely by foreigners going forward? We could choose not to let it happen on American soil, which some of the comments in this thread seem to be advocating, but I fail to see how such a policy would benefit Americans.
> Americans make up only 4.3% of the world's population. Thus, even if we invest much more in American citizens, which we surely should, don't you think it's inevitable that progress in tech will nevertheless be driven largely by foreigners going forward?
Why? It's not like Americans were a much bigger share of the world population in the past.
A large population doesn't predict success in tech because there is no reason to suppose the proceeds of tech research will be evenly distributed per capita.
There is first the network effect, uneven distribution of financial resources, uneven availability of educational resources, the high number of societies that don't value individuality nor deviation from tradition and the norm.
(1) those who have already made it here and intend to stay, are Americans now. That's what America has always been about. Anyone who disagrees is a despicable nativist who should be deported back to Germany, England, or wherever their great grandparents came from and sign their house deed over to the descendants of whichever native americans lived there before being violently and unlawfully removed.
(2) those who have not yet made it here, we owe nothing to yet, and we certainly ought to invest in ourselves. The education system in this country is so bad it's a joke, and it's not great if we end up relying on other countries educating people and sending them here just because our own education is so awful. That is a very precarious position to be in.
(2) is a debatable position depending on one's world view. One could say that "as the leader of the free world", America should make the improvement of living standards of global citizens a priority over its own citizens who are struggling but still doing aeons better than hundreds of millions of people around the world.
It's a reasonable, defensible, globalist stance.
And it's perfectly reasonable to disagree with such a stance and make the national well-being a priority over the comparatively greater struggles and sufferings of people outside our borders. But unfortunately I think we always use smoke and mirrors and avoid facing the issue head on.
I appreciate that you have a clear and we'll articulated position for your preferences for how your tax dollars should be spent. I hope that we as a society can have open discussions and debates that welcome and encourage opposing worldviews to our own, and that we can hold a default mindset to first understand our compatriot's views, rather than first defend our own positions.
I'm not sure what you're advocating so I have to guess. Are you saying, "defund all education in the US and send the money to improve education somewhere else?"
If so, the below two points will cure you of this silly idea and any similar ones:
(A) if our money-making machine (our economy) is not well taken care of, such as by assuring its supply of skilled labor, it may deteriorate, leaving less money left over to donate to the worthy causes you want it donated to. If you don't take care of yourself first, you will be to weak to help others.
(B) The education system in the US is not lacking for money, it simply uses the given money poorly. It can be improved without spending more money.
Education is a capital investment, not a luxury consumable good.
You're also being extremely confusing. I really can't tell what you are actually advocating. Are you being intentionally ambiguous and vague? If all you have to say is that one can make an argument for anything, this is not very helpful information.
Well being called a Nazi on an internet board is a first for me, and is rather disappointing considering my general high regard of the level of discourse from people who frequent this forum. Purporting that a person whose ethnic history includes wartime internment camps would wish to perpetuate our country's penchant for prejudice is an unusal claim. Perhaps you are taking aim at the fact that my ancestors were indeed allies of the Nazis, regarding which you would be correct.
For what it's worth I consider Peter Singer (the philosopher) to be a man of strong reasoning who builds a tower of logic on top of a questionable and highly subjective statement of morality.
I believe that the decades long wave of software outsourcing to India has lifted the standard of living for many thousands of people there. I believe that the decades long wave of electronics outsourcing to China has created opportunities for rural residents there to attain upward economic mobility. I believe that these have come with a real, undeniable cost to American citizens and residents, and thus believe that an individual can justifiably be for or against such normalization of economic well being on a global scale.
>For what it's worth I consider Peter Singer (the philosopher) to be a man of strong reasoning who builds a tower of logic on top of a questionable and highly subjective statement of morality.
I rather agree. What I'm wondering is: if you're not trolling, why swallow Singer's premises, swallow his extrapolations, and then call it all questionable?
Because this is the position you're taking: that the United States has a moral obligation to invest its finite resources into immigration or outsourcing of jobs for skilled foreign workers over and above training and education for its native-born workers.
>I believe that these have come with a real, undeniable cost to American citizens and residents, and thus believe that an individual can justifiably be for or against such normalization of economic well being on a global scale.
I don't think a clear-thinking individual can really be for such a blatant violation of basic democracy. If we want America to be accountable to the Indian and Chinese masses, we should give them passports and voting rights -- then see what they want for themselves. Likewise, if we're going to invest American resources in improving the well-being of India and China, why not demand an EU-style relationship of open borders, common standards for human well-being, and residency-based voting rights?
I don't think one can really have humanitarianism without solidarity, coexistence, and shared community. To do well by someone just is to expand each-other's (legal, economic, etc) communities to include each-other. A charity/tithe of 10% or something is both traditional and good, but I think it's wrong to expand charity to the point where you give to outsiders at the cost of community ties (both within your existing community and between your community and outsiders).
Imo the distinction between equalizing the opportunity and education gap on a national level versus a global level is a topic that is rarely properly debated. Each of us (or groups of us) have our closely held dogmas based on our personal experiences (or lack thereof) and don't really engage in understanding the opposite camp's narrative or logic.
IMO either position is perfectly defensible. Helping those who are "your neighbors" (those who are more proximal to you) first is defensible, and so is helping those around the world catch up to the living standards of the developed West.
What is not good is that we continue to mask pragmatic or moral decision making with irrational, illogical, emotionally charged positions, on both the left and the right. That, I wish would change.
Maybe from a humanitarian position, but the U.S. government shouldn't be a global humanitarian project. If we are, we are pretty terrible at it. The U.S. government ought to be dedicated to benefiting U.S. citizens first and foremost. I don't think those who are opposed to this are genuinely opposed to it on humanitarian grounds either. They want to paint anyone who disagrees with them as racist or inhuamane while working on the behalf of corporations seeking cheap labor.
Luckily most people are able to read a comment from a random person on the Internet, classify it as a different opinion from theirs and go on with their lives.
I'm aware, and it makes me sad. But I think I understand why---that is, I am some form of selfish racist, ignorant and bigoted, liable to give moral cover to a return to Emmett Till-style lynchings, hiring discrimination, or perhaps unsafe working environments. I should cast aside my fear and prejudice, realize that all humans deserve dignity, and take an Econ 101 class.
In other words, I think I can understand the views I'm criticizing.
I do not get the sense that the same is true of the comment to which I replied. It seems to carry a level of tone-deafness that would be mystified by any pushback.
>In other words, I think I can understand the views I'm criticizing.
No, you've missed the very simplest critique of the US immigration system: that it takes years to decades of effort and incredible, Kafkaesque arbitrary hoop-jumping to get an actual Green Card, let alone an American citizenship. The system is legible neither to its owners (Congress) nor to its users (immigrants and visitors).
We can talk about sending "temporary" immigrants home when we've stopped making "permanent" immigrants (those on immigrant-track visas) go through hell just to turn their visa into citizenship. Let's naturalize the people we already have living and working in the country, and then talk about reforming our system for granting further visas into a nice sensible points system.
If these people all had the same rights and privileges as citizens they would simply be a valuable addition to our workforce. They for example would have no reason to accept substandard wages. If we place them in positions where they are indebted to their employer and can't change jobs they serve to depress wages.
In order of preference I would see them treated equally and made citizens, kept out of the labor pool, or left as they are.
As a citizen the current situation seems be the least preferable option and I see no reason things ought to stay as they are.
In fact basically destroying the H1B system as it stands is probably the best first step. The bigots that make up 40% of America would probably support it and our idiot in chief would probably sign it.
Then we could replace it with a system whereby these valuable people have a sane opportunity to come here permanently and compete on even footing with natives when the wind changes with at least lukewarm support from the business community eager for more employees.
> This country built itself on the backs of imported talent
No we didn't. We built our country on the exploitation of poor european factory workers, chinese "slave" labor and african slaves.
This country wasn't built on "talent". It was built on exploitation of CHEAP or free labor.
> there's no valid reason for that to stop now.
We stopped it many times in history to protect AMERICANS. Go read about immigration history rather than propaganda we are forcefed. European immigration was stalled to protect american labor. Chinese immigration was stopped to protect american labor. And if you think about it, even american slavery was stopped to protect american labor.
Immigration wasn't all great. Throughout US history, it led to lots of turmoil, displacement and heartache.
Nothing is all great or all evil like people with agenda like to believe. There are pros and cons to everything. The skewed "pro-immigration" policy the past 50 years has gutted american labor and american society. We need a more rational policy.
And the fact that america/american government shouldn't favor AMERICANS over immigrants is pure rubbish. It's neoliberal fantasy. As a nation we have gone too "left". We need to correct our trajectory lest america fall off the tracks entirely.
> > This country built itself on the backs of imported talent
> No we didn't. We built our country on the exploitation of poor european factory workers, chinese "slave" labor and african slaves.
I think they mean exactly what you wrote. Replace 'imported talent' with 'immigrant talent'. Europeans and Asians FOB, willing to work for peanuts.
The rest is just blatant hypocrisy and fear-mongering. There's too many people, the borders to invisible these days. There is no throwing up literal or figurative walls without fueling direct revolt further.
Get with reality, yo. Or invent a time machine and vanish. Honestly, with ideas like that, you won't really be missed.
"Immigration wasn't all great. Throughout US history, it led to lots of turmoil, displacement and heartache." Get a grip on your self. It was never good for the natives amricans. Anyway, the current issues of the country are not immigrant made. That's a fantasy fox world view.
You might be interested in a RAND study (a historically very pro-immigration institute) that considers this subject. It concludes that the reason US citizens and people who are free to choose their profession in the US avoid these degrees because they can earn more with more stable career paths elsewhere.
In other words, the aversion to STEM among elite US students is rational.
Even if education was the same everywhere, the most talented would tend to flow toward the areas of highest opportunity, and employers and customers will pick (their judgment of) the best performers.
Either the best here will compete with the best there, or the best there will come here (or vice versa)
Is it that we aren't investing in our own citizens, or that they aren't taking advantage of the opportunities that those investments create that are open to all?
I went to a top liberal arts college, and majored in physics for most of my time there. Within the physics major, every single student was either 1.) An immigrant 2.) The child of an immigrant or 3.) Jewish. It was similar - though a little less pronounced - in the CS and math majors. Most of my friends there were from comfortable middle-class American backgrounds, and most of them majored in English, music, history, or psychology. Many of them are struggling financially or still dependent upon financial support from parents, 12 years after graduation.
The American educational system is such that you can largely make your own choices from college onwards (and to a limited degree, in high school too). This is a great strength of America, but it also means that sometimes people make choices that don't work out for them. The native-born citizens I know that invested heavily in learning math & computers when they were teenagers are doing great, even if they came from dirt-poor backgrounds. The ones I know who figured there would always be a job waiting for them, even if they came from very comfortable upper-middle-class backgrounds, are barely scraping by.
I feel like there's a cycle where parents who struggled want their children to have practical careers; parents who had success in practical careers want their children to "follow their dreams;" then the cycle repeats.
Both me and my sister received full scholarships (poor family + smart genes I guess). She got a degree in creative writing, I went the IT route. Part of the problem is that most STEM jobs just aren't fun...
> This wouldn't be necessary if we actually invested in our own citizens.
So much this - I know of this from my own life.
I got a state funded CS education for around 500$ a year (if my family had been poorer, they'd have paid me to study) - it was a good one, because I keep going back to my annotated Sedgewick.
Graduated with zero debt, with an open source project I was working on for years which meant that I spent the first few years of my work life knowing I could take risks (not that I did take too many).
In the Bay area now and seeing clearly the impact of an expensive education on people's choices - not everyone needs to be a college graduate, however putting an expensive price tag on it means that only people who are sure they can get a financial return on their education will take up that risk.
There is a chilling effect on women, who are expecting to be discriminated in the industry, driving them to other vocations where they don't expect to incur similar challenges with financial gains or professional advancements.
In fact, purely from a state investment point of view, CA is getting my tax dollars to spend while my college barely gets anything back from me.
I really wish my kids would get a similar springboard to start their life off without an albatross around their neck, but they are probably entering a system which is probably going to maximize immediate financial returns from them instead of expecting them to be late bloomers becoming productive over time.
This is a failure of both our educational system and our culture. Our educational and cultural systems both underscore soft majors in the liberal arts realms and don't make STEM cool to average students as they might in China Russia or India.
Kids care too much about fitting in rather than making it in life with hard skills. You will have thousands working service jobs in LA with hopes of making it in entertainment. You don't see that emphasis in STEM in the US.
I've always wondered about this. People never really talk about it, but I see the "cool" factor as pivotal. Smart social people want to be bankers, lawyers, doctors, management consultants, not STEM.
With the internet everyone has had the ability to learn programming for ages, and it really hasn't dramatically changed much. People are just not interested in it at some point.
I want to keep this not politicized but is there merit to the argument that immigrants are taking jobs away from other STEM majors who are from the U.S.? To find out we would need to look at STEM job growth for a year, then look at the number of STEM graduates, then look at how many STEM graduates go to work in their field, then see if after 52% of the jobs are subtracted see if there's enough left for the recent graduates. Also immigrant graduates would also have to be taken into account.
I think everyone here is ignoring a very important statistic within the article: "data shows that 25 percent of high tech companies founded between 1995 and 2005 have at least one immigrant founder". Would you rather have these companies be based out of Asia entirely?
I was recently speaking with Demis Hassabis and he recommended looking for startup funding in California but continuing to work out of London. More and more companies are gravitating towards this general template (not London specifically). Would you rather have some low level Stack Developer working at Airbnb on an H1B build the next Billion dollar startup in the Bay Area or out of Bangalore?
Yes, hiring someone with an H1B might cost a company 10k less per annum. But what would it cost America to not have these foreign workers want to work in California altogether? Besides, it isn't fair to build such an impressive hotbed of thought and progress and then try and wall others out of it.
In my experience this is not always a positive. I've seen several cases where a foreign born representative is offloading people from (country of origin) because dumb managers still think it's the height of the offshoring era and foreign = cheaper. Relatives and friends and anybody the rep knows from the old country get first in line, and they just lie or exaggerate experience. If they even need to.
I've watched those foreign people get hired even though they walked into the interview without even Googling the product or development environment specified in the ad. Not that this is new or exclusive, mind you.
Nevermind that nobody thought about onboarding these people, there's no documentation, and the resulting product takes a sharp nosedive as work is handed over. These foreign people were promised cheap, and that keeps the investors happy.
This is no slightly against those workers. I've taught these workers and one guy had his head in his hands saying, "Oh my God, the legal liability we're being exposed to here" upon learning of deep design flaws that cheaper labor was somehow going to magically fix.
More workers is not necessarily better- in any sense. It's just more workers. In a capitalist system, that's not necessarily good for anybody except management.
I would also say that it isn't quite fair to try and concentrate all of the thought and progress in one small area. Not fair to the rest of the world, and not fair to the area which has to suffer increased cost of living because of it.
Note: This post is in no way, shape, or form arguing against immigration. Immigration is great. I'm more saying that we should try and spread around the SV effect, so that more places can prosper, and one place isn't strained so much.
I actually was hoping Trump would kick out all Indians from US ever since I heard of the story of Snapdeal founder (he didn't get h1b, came back and started a company in India). Even if a few who come back starts their companies, it is good for Indians in every way. I look forward to the day we Indians can stop relying on other nations for their jobs.
>>Would you rather have these companies be based out of Asia entirely?
>>Would you rather have some low level Stack Developer working at Airbnb on an H1B build the next Billion dollar startup in the Bay Area or out of Bangalore?
As somebody who stays in Bangalore, I can tell you this is already the case and has been for a few years now.
Back then when I started my career there was a mad rush to move to US in most young people. Today coupled with a impossibly long green card wait, and uncertainties associated with a job on a Visa for most smart people moving to US isn't even an option. I know a lot of smart people for whom moving to US isn't even in their list of priorities.
In the past decade start up ecosystem here has become very good. Starting companies is no longer social or economic taboo in India/Bangalore today.
US people think outsourcing was bad for them? Imagine competing with start ups and their funding, which are operating at 1/10th the budget of any city in US.
Every time H1B related stuff comes up, I make the same simple suggestion: just inflation adjust the minimum H1B salary from when the law was passed in 1990. 60K dollars in 1990 is about 110K now. This should be able to see a lot of support from different groups because:
1. It makes a clear appeal back to the original intent of the law.
2. It would most likely end most of the perceived abuse/misuse of the law, which occurs at lower salary ranges.
3. It will not prevent tech companies that actually do cool stuff like Google & co from hiring, since most of their hires probably start over 110K now.
I also think that the impact on American workers in this salary range from H1B is pretty low. Many companies with salaries in this range are always hiring provided you have the skills.
> I also think that the impact on American workers in this salary range from H1B is pretty low. Many companies with salaries in this range are always hiring provided you have the skills.
Actually most companies that you are referring to want tech salaries to decline. One of the best weapons against high tech salaries are H1B visas and offshoring.
Do you have any empirical evidence that H1B is an effective "weapon against high tech salaries" in the income range that Google pays?
I think that whatever is going on in the lower end of the market, there is still a substantial shortage of labor in the higher jobs that cannot be made up domestically anytime soon. Higher end jobs tend to have a much less elastic labor pool because fewer people can do the work.
Whatever the impact is for tech workers, for the general public it is definitely a bad outcome to have perpetual labor shortages at tech companies; it just means that they get their products/features/bug fixes/other improvements more slowly.
Anecdata, Google is in the process of long hiring freeze. The recruiter told me that there isn't a shortage of candidates, there is a shortage of slots to accommodate them. Several other companies as well, big or small. There might not be a substantial labor shortage that you might assume. Things are changing.
I think that's a start but specifically because $110K is nearly entry level in silicon valley it ought to be significantly higher. $150K would probably be enough to stop it from holding wages down.
A great side effect of this is that it pretty much makes H1B not viable in the Midwest or other areas where we probably ought to be trying to develop more talent
Getting an H1B worker is significantly more expensive than someone domestic at the same salary. You have to pay lawyers a bunch of money, the employee can't always start when you/they want, and worse, right now the chance of actually getting an H1B is only something like 1/3. So there's a 2/3 chance that after all of the work of interviewing for this person, paying lawyers, holding a spot for them, they will never actually be able to work for you.
At any rate, I would like to see some empirical backing for those who want to raise H1B salaries higher than inflation adjustment.
The side effect you think is great, is actually really bad. It's not a question of developing more talent, it's the fact that people move to the coasts for jobs. All this really does is disadvantage companies not in NYC and SF, and make it more likely that they will have a labor shortage they can't make up, and pack up. This isn't reflective of anything though, except basically regional inflation (it's not simply that salaries in NYC and SF are so much higher because the companies there are the most productive and therefore deserve the H1B slots more, the salaries are partly inflated because cost of living is also super high, i.e. a dollar is worth less).
I'm sure a $15 an hour national minimum wage would do a pretty good job of that. Especially since that's nearly the median income in the poorer parts of the country.
This has nothing to do with immigration policy. Our kids in the US are simply not studying STEM subjects, period. We are not keeping pace with the rest of the world. I'm currently taking lower division engineering requirements in a California community college, and perhaps 20% of my class are native born, English speaking American kids. There is just no respect for it whatsoever, in a culture where it's funny or cool to think math is stupid. We are completely finished as a society. What rises to takes it's place who knows, but there's no way a country can survive like this.
That's funny how everyone here is against the trumps wall meanwhile every time H1B is mentioned no one has problem with people calling for "kicking them to India". Quite sad.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadthe report only says foreign born - doesn't mention how long they've been in the U.S for or if they came just for the job they landed.
See: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/95-engineers-i...
The faux intellectual vibe in programming is purely cultural due to class associations. If welders and prgorammers traded places in terms of class associations (ie, if welders earn what programmers earn and vice versa AND if welding was something you do in an office and programming was something you do in the field or workshop), well guess what? Welding would have an academic intellectual culture, and programming would have more of a blue collar culture. You'd hear complaints about welding interviews requiring memorization of chemical reaction formulas instead of practical skills. Programmers would probably long ago been unionized. Etc.
A couple generations from now, basic programming skill will no longer be so scarce that even an idiot who manages to pick some up is highly valuable. The reason programming ability is scarce is not because it's much harder, but simply historical/cultural.
the only reason i'm posting is that i finally completed the transition from programmer to welder and i find my new peers generally smarter and harder working. fwiw
(I agree american investment in education is abyssmal, and I bet gp might agree too, but mistook your comment's meaning)
starting from nothing it took about 6 months practice and general skill building to where i could work on projects and not screw them up for everyone. one nice thing about this world is that if you aren't so good, you can still pull in minimum wage if you work hard. once you get the hang of things you can build up a client base and start charging more. and if you have any kind of flair for design you can start selling bespoke pieces instead of just being a pair of hands.
after about $60/hr it gets a lot tougher. you don't really qualify for the really high-end work (i.e stainless pharmaceutical). and no insurance.
I went back to tech for .. 4 years because of the pay difference and because of insurance for me and my wife, but I'm back in the shop now because..i think my software mindset is pretty radically different than the way things are done now.
trade work is a constant challenge, and you can see your skills grow over time. faster, cleaner, more reliable, more clever. if you have a little* financial flexility and love hard work, i strongly recommend it as a second career. if i'm lucky in a software shop i get to solve a problem a day, in the metal shop i solve tens or hundreds.
[oh, sorry, should make this clear - if you start in welding/machining you can certainly make quite a decent living, have benfits, etc - i'm just talking about coming in later in life being self taught and trying to carve out a little work here and there]
It's very fashionable to virtue signal that you have no loyalty to your country and that we should all live under a one world government.
I do not share that wish. I love that we do not have a mono-culture of government in the world, but have 195 different decentralized experiments happening on how to best run the world. I would hate to have a single experiment running with nowhere to look to or flee to, if it all goes awry.
But I live in one of those 195 experiments, and my fellows that share that with me, my countrymen, I support above the other 194. That's called being human.
Nice try, but nationalism is not an intrinsic trait of being a human.
This sort of tactical nihilism is honestly pretty confusing to me. Borders, whether national, ideological, social, tribal, linguistic, etc. always have some level of arbitrariness to them, and yet they still represent useful categories. The house door that you lock every evening is merely a collection of arbitrary atoms arranged to separate what you imagine to be your property from others. In the framework of nations, the idea of treating citizens differently from non-citizens as being "discrimination" is an odd one. A country belongs to its people; it doesn't belong to those across the arbitrary border. We all make (sometimes arbitrary) restrictions on access to that which we value; humans who don't do that usually end up losing them to those who do.
Of course I don't deny personally valuing my family and friends more than strangers, but that doesn't mean I think they fundamentally are more deserving of jobs than strangers. I would personally help a friend get a job before I would help a stranger, but I still think that Americans are no more deserving of jobs than non-Americans, and I don't believe that is a contradiction.
Edit: I also don't think we should be under a one-world government, and I don't see how that follows.
I am fairly convinced that economic protectionism is bad for economic growth, particularly in the long run. And even if I'm a direct beneficiary of a certain protectionist policy, I'd like to think I will oppose it, because it's essentially equivalent to the government taking resources from a non-protected job sector and giving them to the protected job sector.
That has always been my aversion to nationalism, because to me it occupies the second group in trying not only create loyalty, but much like the company, try to usurp natural loyalty. The power of which I've seen a family member go into nationalism's deep end and strain our relationship with them because I didn't agree.
What's the point of even having a country if citizens aren't prioritized over non-citizens? What's the point of banding together as a nation if you don't engage in policy that helps one another? I don't feel just as entitled to a job in Japan as a Japanese citizen. Do you advocate for one world government or something?
For jobs? We're talking about welcoming immigrants into the country to work. My opinion doesn't extend to every possible way that a nation can prioritize its own citizens. If, for instance, there's an American citizen involved in some incident in another country (plane crash, terrorist attack, unjust arrest, etc.), of course I expect the USA to prioritize that. I also expect the USA to prioritize its own economy, infrastructure, education, etc. (although I think that is for the benefit of all legal residents, not just "citizens").
Are you aware that there are negatives to this, or just that they're not important to you?
There's a lot of talk about STEM, when as far as I can tell, the money is all in computers; the others might get you slightly above median salaries, but if they are above median, it's not by much.
If you compare your average non-computer industry STEM job to something in Medicine, law or business... I think that STEM, outside of the computer industry, just doesn't pay that well, and it's kind of disingenuous to advertise it as a path to financial well being to young people who are so poor that they have to look at education as a monetary investment.
It's naive. Good intentions, but naive.
What I think you mean is that you can be against increased margins for corporations, and that's the reason that you're against immigration.
It's a strange strange thing to be against increased margins for corporations, without any other explanation, so I can see why many people would be confused, if that's what you're trying to say.
Immigration can lead to less competition and therefore innovation. Instead of people from other countries creating services that compete, they get absorbed by multinationals.
Is it? I know a lot of leftists who consider corporate profit margins something to intrinsically oppose. I mean, they're concerned about the consequences of those margins, but they do think the consequences are inescapable - they think rising corporate margins inherently make the world a worse place.
And yeah, that's historically driven an anti-immigration streak among labor movements, made stronger when it's not about new citizens but people operating under alternate labor laws. The deBoer type leftists of today don't carry that xenophobia, but some of them definitely still complain about H1B as a corporate subsidy.
It's not a position I endorse (if anything, I'd argue for "strengthen the bargaining position of H1B workers"), but I don't think it's terribly uncommon. I agree that the comment framing is inflammatory and unnecessary, but I wasn't surprised by the part about margins.
Hell--I can't even bring up Unions here.
And people wonder why the talk that Trump spewed got him elected. (I said talk. I know he, and his posse, probably won't do much.)
We all need to pitch in if HN is to have a chance of meeting its goal to be a home for intellectual curiosity.
After 30 years, on and off, in the valley I agree the QoL here isn't great (when compared to Germany, France, Australia...) but way way better than anywhere else in the US.
No, it simply isn't. By any stretch of the imagination.
San Francisco is more than 3x more expensive than the metro I live in now. I'd need to earn $350k a year just to break even financially before taxes. I'd pay a lot more in federal income tax, and my state income tax is flat and in the low single digits. Call it $375k to break even on take home pay after paying for everything (rent, retirement, etc). How likely am I to make almost $400k a year? That's top 1% income nationally. That's IB money, not writing a CRUD app in JavaScript.
Not to mention I go home for lunch and I have a 10-minute, 4-mile commute. And speaking of home, a constant pain point I hear from Bay Area programmers on HN is that they'll never be able to buy a home. San Francisco housing is over 1,200% (percent) more expensive than my area. My home cost a few thousand dollars more than I earn in a year.
No thank you.
Assuming you find a modest home in SF for $1mil your 30 year mortgage would be ~$57k a year. Property tax is ~$7k. Insurance will be <$5k. So to have a home you only need <70k. Assuming no deductions filing as a single you will pay ~$140k in taxes on $350k. This leaves you with (350-140-70) $140k a year in disposable income.
So I repeat, what are you spending money on that you need to make $140k in disposable income to break even?
https://www.redfin.com/city/17151/CA/San-Francisco/filter/ma...
Don't try to spin San Francisco being the most expensive place to live in the country into me being bad with my money - I'm not. But when you make a high income in a low COL area, it means moving to any high COL area means you either take an effective pay cut in standard of living, or you need to earn an amount that is very unlikely.
That's certainly true for people outside of high-paying jobs (California has the highest, CoL-adjusted poverty rate in the nation), but less clearly so for those with high-paying work, who often are better off (even given local CoL) than they would be elsewhere because wages in elite fields are often higher here even compared to CoL.
I guess I am part of the 42% but I was never one of the “poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. I just consider myself a proud American. 42% says nothing about how long people have been here and whether they are just a next wave building up the country like waves of immigrants from the past.
There is NEVER a time when there are not enough qualified US Citizens.
Why? Because if I am a company, I will 100% always be able to hire enough engineers, if I just do this 1 weird trick.
And that trick is "pay every engineer 1 million dollars".
The question is always about price.
In the same way that a food shortage has basically never existed in history. Sure, there were places where the price of bread was 1 thousand dollars, and people were starving to death because they couldn't have enough food. But thats not a shortage, thats just people complaining about price!
Now, the real question you have to ask yourself, is "is bread costing 1 thousand dollars a good thing?" And when you can answer that questions, you will also be able to answer "is a software engineer costing 1 million dollars a good thing"?
Edit: my post doesn't seem to be clear.
My point that I was making is that "bread costing 1 thousand dollars is a bad thing". And that there is nothing wrong with driving down the price of devs.
My definition of shortage is "prices are too high"
There are also situations where the supply of employees is kept artificially low (security clearance, taxi medallions, etc.).
Obviously common use just means "an insufficient amount under these circumstances", but if we wanted to be very strict we could say "a situation where not all the players can simultaneously satisfy their demand at any price". A shortage is a situation where supply is inelastic and below demand.
Everyone hiring programmers could fill their roster simultaneously if they could pay enough - if not today then certainly soon. In a lot of famines, there are X people sharing food for <X people - price is no longer a reflection of desire, because no one voluntarily leaves the auction.
I do think it's important to distinguish insufficient demand from a simple lack of supply, but the latter definitely exists.
My definition of shortage is "prices are to high". And I think that it is always a good thing to drive prices down.
Obviously bread costing a thousand dollars is bad. That's why I used it as an example.
Similarly there is nothing wrong with trying to solve the dev shortage (meaning prices are too high), by importing more devs.
The United States has well less than 5% of the worlds population. We are extremely lucky to attract the top talent from the other 95% and we need to defend that pipeline.
I don't see anyone arguing that exceptional talent shouldn't be welcomed into the U.S.
And I think the U.S. tech workforce is more elastic than you give credit for, especially for software skills. It's just most organizations want employees they don't have to train for their stacks, which I don't think is particularly reasonable.
Seems like a feature not a bug to me.
Obviously it is ridiculous to pay people 1 million dollars. In the same way that it is ridiculous to pay a thousand dollars for bread.
Now, another point to make would be about possible output versus labor costs. Ie SV will employ labor in close relationship to the output of that labor and the cost of it. Once those two values equate there is no more (efficient) demand for labor available.
That's Econ theory land though. I think this is much more about profit margins and market inefficiencies.
I'm all for the wage argument.... yes if you raise wages high enough they will come... but why take it to such extremes?
SV has done this to itself. It clusters around tiny, restricted geographic locations, which push out the locals, gentrify entire cities, and then these companies have the gall to complain about the cost of labor, which they helped to define the high prices of. More consideration is placed on proximity than prurient economic interests, because Business Interests Always Come First.
I once interviewed for a company who was opening a new Nashville office because they had tapped out the talent pool around Ft. Campbell, Kentucky. It turned out they were still trying to pay Ft. Campbell salaries there. They forgot that bigger talent pools have more competition.
You can either throw small bait into a thousand small talent pools, or invest in some serious tackle to fish in the ocean. You either spend money on sending recruiters out to the dark, untapped reserves, or you spend enough to compete with the entire rest of the world on salary. If you really need the talent, and you can't afford the price tag, you have to settle into a niche that is just big enough for your company, and not worth the effort for someone bigger than you.
If you need cheap engineers, you can get them from any town or city that doesn't already have an 800-lb gorilla employer in it. But you have to go to them. If you move them to you, they stop being cheap, because your competition can snap them up as easily as anyone else.
That's the something that can be done about it. If you can't compete in California, stop trying. Go somewhere else with weaker competition. People follow the jobs. If you don't believe that California needs more people, they need to start exporting those job opportunities to places with less severe population pressures. Otherwise, the people will keep coming.
It's just expensive. It means that some low-value projects aren't profitable and all projects are higher risk than we are currently expecting them to be.
> SV has done this to itself.
I'm sympathetic here. But if we let wages in urban centers rise, companies will be more willing to set up offices in other parts of the U.S. Or virtual offices even.
The definition of a shortage is "prices are to high".
My post was countering the dumb meme that I always see which is "there isn't a shortage of devs, companies just don't want to pay high salaries".
What? Many brilliant engineers were born outside the US, including one of the founders of Google, Sergey Brin.
This can't be overstated enough.
I think the immigration that is critical to the US is the high end immigration, not the low end stuff like H1B.
I'm just afraid that the chanting mobs will want to throw the baby out with the bath water. We NEED the NIW-types, we don't really need most of the H1B-types. So if the political environment is such that we need to cut loose some H1B-types to save the NIW-types... we should do so without hesitation.
there really is just no comparison.
That's why it's called a (N)ational (I)nterests (W)aiver. Because everyone from the commerce department, to the congress, to the military and intelligence people all agree that we need that guy's brainpower.
Or more precisely... they all agree that we need to deny that guy's brainpower to every other nation on earth if possible.
To me, since these workers tend to have grad degrees and are very talented, I'd peg it to a fairly high level law, medical, business, or finance worker. In short, anything less than $250k a year would get you laughed out of the building, and we're probably looking at $400k ore more.
I'm not sure what the percentages are here, but yeah, like you'd I'd guess that the percentage of H1Bs at these salary levels is very low. In short, if the H1B visa were limited to these sorts of workers, my guess is there would be no real discussion or controversy about the program.
Kind of astonishing that we award these by lottery. The whole system is really bad. Then again, it is used cynically by people who defend the program (they trot out the small percentage of very highly paid people and say "what you don't want this guy working in the US?", as if that is the issue or is in any way representative of 97% of the use of the program).
High-end immigration was the original purpose of the program, no? But it's since been abused.
All the really qualified people are in the bay area working for tech startups, etc...
So a company outside of the bay area would have to bring in H1B workers who are willing to live in the area.
I am not sure if there are costs concerns for the company in making that decision, but I figure if they were willing to hire me, they probably don't have a problem hiring local candidates if possible.
Edit: Since people want more details, I'll elaborate on the VERY LITTLE that I know. Right now consulting agencies in Sacramento, CA need Senior Ruby Devs and they can't find any. I am not 100% sure on what salary is being offered, but I am guessing around 100K. A junior dev fresh out of college can make about 40K (remember its Sacramento!). (I want to make it clear this is all hearsay, don't quote me on this)
I was told an agency that hires out H1B workers can get paid as much as $50/hr. I have no way to verify this, but this is what I heard.
Another thing is, these are short term, project based, positions --- not very attractive to people seeking a career.
They also have a constant need for .NET and Java devs.
That being said. I am very much against outsourcing jobs that could be hired locally. But Sacramento has a very small developer community, so I don't blame them for using H1B to fill the gap. But who knows... maybe it's all a ruse.
Are there really no qualified local candidates, or are there no qualified local candidates who can also solve theoretical CS problems on the spot while pretending they're not doing it from memory?
Or qualified local candidates who refuse to lie and say they only took 3 hours on the take-home exercise?
For every 100 candidates a CS job gets, probably 80 are truly unqualified, 20 are truly qualified, but only 2 were both qualified and could pass an arbitrary list of brainteasers.
And that lie lets managers run around saying "see, we can't hire enough talent! Skills shortage!" (where "skills" means "brainteaser skills", not software development skills)
Then they hire H1B people who look good on paper.
This to me is a huge problem. And it upsets me greatly because its unfair and counter-productive.
Have you actually done hiring? The truth is that there really is a shortage of qualified applicants (at least, at existing prices). I've literally never met a fellow hiring manager who thought there was a surplus of good engineers.
I've also been a person applying to jobs, where I know I'm fully qualified (usually because I already do the same thing in the same way for a competitor) and where I'm told "we think your a good culture fit, but we're worried about your technical abilities". I can't know exactly why they said that, but when I've showed working code they say their happy with, but I know I struggled on their brainteaser questions, it feels safe to infer.
So, I've seen qualified candidates turned away because they were "unqualified" (but they really weren't), from both sides of the table. I'm not claiming there is a huge surplus of engineering out there, but there is no real shortage either. There are enough engineers, just not enough employers willing to hire them.
People always push it to the extreme and mention some very difficult algo question they were asked, and say how it's irrelevant. And if you have been asked a question like that, I agree it's irrelevant and that sucks.
But having a basic understanding of algorithms and data structures is important to writing decent software. Can we please stop pretending like expecting people to roughly know and understand the content of the freshman data structures course is some kind of unreasonable expectation?
(That was me a few months ago.)
What positions were you trying to fill, and what pay and working conditions were you offering?
Supply and demand are not suspended just because it's tech. There's a huge amount of demand, but not much supply for highly skilled software developers at $75k a year in San Francisco. There's a huge supply at $500k a year, but considerably less demand.
From what I can see, for San Francisco, the brunt of H1Bs (which is not the totality of foreign nationals, doesn't include L1s and T1s) in San Francisco in 2016 earned a salary in the 100K-150K range[1] (without accounting for extra perks like food, health and stock grants). Is that low? High? I don't know, but it seems in line with what I would have expected. Keep in mind that that's the salary, you have to add the cost of actually bringing that person to the US (lawyers, relocation, temp housing, etc.).
As for the BMW, you can get a 10 year old one for that price[2].
[1]: http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=Software+Engineer&city...
[2]: https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sfc/sss?sort=pricedsc&ma...
"Is it too low?" That isn't really for me to say. Generally speaking, it isn't for the government to say either. In a market economy, the market determines this. I see no reason to put corporations in control of the immigration system, with the power to decide who is allowed to come here and what jobs they're allowed to work, just because they don't like the market's answer.
There are plenty of qualified candidates out there. But as you mentioned, they are mostly already working somewhere else, for someone else. In order to hire them, you need to offer more or better than they already get. That isn't all just a salary number, but almost everything has a conversion rate.
Guest workers on a non-immigrant visa are simply cheaper to employ. As are young, unmarried, childless, and inexperienced workers.
It's fundamental economics. Supply is not a single fixed quantity, but a function of price. Likewise for demand. Where they cross, the market clears. Everyone willing to pay more than the clearing price gets an employee, and everyone willing to work for less than the clearing price gets hired. If you can't find a job, you are asking for too much money, and if you can't find an employee, you are offering too little.
Companies deliberately set criteria that guarantee a local search for candidates will fail, in order to save money on labor costs by hiring an imported candidate more cheaply. That is the heart of the unease surrounding H1B laborers. If the company truly cannot find suitable local candidates, the person they do find is in a great position to ask for more pay. If they need you that much, they should be paying more than any local would even dream of asking for, right?
Does that happen? Are H1B workers paid more than their local equivalents?
> All the really qualified people are in the bay area working for tech startups, etc...
> So a company outside of the bay area would have to bring in H1B workers who are willing to live in the area.
So the answer to a lack of local candidates is to start reaching across oceans? How about elsewhere in the massive expanse of North America, where many people don't even need a visa or can get one much more easily?
If you want to see how stark the difference is, look at the compensation calculator gitlab developed: https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/
By they way, the next step after not being able to hire a 60k H1B worker is usually to hire a 60k outsourced remote worker, not to hire a 150k "citizen".
Anecdotally, I had lots of classmates who aggressively pursued careers in finance not because they had any intrinsic interest in the field but because they heard it can pay exceptionally well. If technology had the same reputation (it's beginning to acquire it, but is somewhat behind), more of them would have pursued it instead.
Note: I'm not saying this should necessarily be the goal. Personally, I think it's fine if we import additional tech labor from around the world, and even prefer that to using wages as a carrot for more citizens.
> By they way, the next step after not being able to hire a 60k H1B worker is usually to hire a 60k outsourced remote worker, not to hire a 150k "citizen".
This article is not about H1Bs. Many of the foreign-born tech employees are permanent residents who compete directly in the same market as American-born employees.
Hiring in tech is something of a bifurcated market and there is H1B hiring both in the abusive lower-wage sector and higher-pay direct employment sector.
Lots of other career fields which offer more money and/or prestige? Anecdata: many of my friends with the aptitude for software dev are in med school now.
Whenever the salary question comes up, people are always quick to compare it to the country at large. But that's not a valid comparison; someone who would be a qualified software engineer isn't deciding between that and being a retail clerk. They're deciding between going into that or something like finance, where they can make many multiples of what they could as a software developer.
Seriously though, are we really arguing why cannot everyone just get over themselves and work for Wall Street now? Only that level of vanity is worthy of an incentive, otherwise it is not worth it?
https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/
500K+ is enough to survive comfortably after you work for a moderate stint. Or to afford a significant capital investment like a small property, or to work for yourself on your pipe dream for awhile.
If people saw a path to long-term financial security which would enable them to drop the shackles of full-time employment before retirement age, of course they would flock to a profession. But they don't; they see a comfortable wage that could potentially evaporate if there is a bubble, or the field moves rapidly, or there will be a glut of people trying something similar by the time they finish retraining.
It's a risk:reward decision, and the risk is far from 0. So how much is that theoretical 100K really worth to someone looking at a very large investment to learn a new skill?
The shortage is not because you don't get paid enough, the shortage is because not enough people can afford the expensive college degree.
4 years of undergrad cost me < $1000 and the same thing costs >$50,000 in the US.
I was hiring for a small local company with no reputation, boring work, and mediocre benefits. This company was about 60 miles out from Chicago in a small town.
We got over 100 applicants for every software position. We didn't even pay for ads, just put stuff on the free sites.
We hardly hired anyone, but the deluge of applications allowed us to low-ball pay and be extremely selective.
The worst kept secret in tech hiring is that everyone knows it pays well and hundreds of thousands are clamoring for open positions. They are "unqualified" because nobody will train them.
How many of them passed FizzBuzz?
Chicago outskirts is also not California. Try a software position with low pay, crappy benefits at an unknown software company in California and report back. Bonus points if you try it in the Bay Area.
Is that so hard? Training on the job used to be common, and for entry level positions it should be possible at least.
EDIT: Okay, maybe not FizzBuzz, but the lots of "10 years experience with Angular 4" and co at least, and in general sometimes testing people more on actual tasks than on invented exercises. Even in Germany in the first few weeks you can terminate employees for any reason, so you don’t need to be too selective with hiring.
But yeah in general I agree with you.
But not everything has to scale rapidly. Many businesses scale slowly over decades, centuries or millenia.
I read some posts here by people who took a pay cut to become bootcamp instructors (for a season or two). A lot of them mentioned the satisfaction they got by being able to create real value in someone's life...
I guess only a certain demographic of people would even want to do an apprenticeship. Only apprenticeship programs I've heard of are for lower wage jobs. So, poor people may benefit from an apprenticeship. Mid-career changers might also benefit. CS degrees would be overqualified.
It would require significant time and effort. Not possible without company support. Still, to take a mind that can't see what we see to one that can and the amount of value created as a result, might be worth it.
I was surprised how little people in US value hard STEM education. I think think that one reason for that is that tech in peoples mind is some type programmer.
When young people ask why should I learn math because I know python, I ask them how many unemployed electrical engineers with signal processing background you know? Programmers for bean counting apps become unemployable when they get older because there is no shortage of code monkeys working for peanuts and knowing some framework from inside out is outdated 10 years from now.
For all the vilifying of H1B and related visas, it is still a big burden for companies. Even big companies will use third party, specialized lawyers to deal with the bureaucracy.
In the case of H1B, there's a significant hiring lag. You apply in April and, if you are lucky, get the visa in October. Companies who abuse the system en masse (there are about 3 or 4 that do it) don't care about that and will use a shotgun approach, but if you are trying to fill a position, it's a very bad proposition.
Still, that gives you access to brains from the whole world. And yes, these brains may be willing to work for less, initially, compared to what a US citizen would get. There doesn't have to be foul play involved: they have less leverage. A similarly qualified US citizen would just name their price and tell the company to take a hike if that was not met. Restarting the whole visa process would be way more painful.
I'll also note that I don't interview many foreigners and the reason I see mostly new grads is that I'm not senior myself, so it makes little sense for me to interview senior candidates.
At the high end, there's simply a larger supply overseas. The US has a population of 300M and between them, India and China have about 2.7B people and their countries pay far, far less.
I'm guessing most people working for IT consultancies and services companies are paid way below market wages. Sure, the company hiring them is billing more than that, but the employee still gets significantly lower than market wages.
I don't begrudge them recipients for taking the jobs. My issue is the corporations who are abusing a system to make themselves more money while simultaneously destroying local talent. It is a death spiral of greed, yet they seem to be oblivious to it.
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/foreign-...
There's an interesting breakdown of a more narrow definition of STEM vs a broader one (that includes social sciences and health sciences). I personally would be more inclined to include health sciences than social sciences, but the data is granular enough to get at this distinction in some cases.
I had to hire most of the teams from Canada.
It's 1% Americans importing the %1 from other counties. It's the most powerful and well off united in screwing the least powerful.
You don't have to dislike immigrants to dislike corporations and politicians destroying opportunity for millions of the families that literally built America.
You're right, total missed opportunity for them.
The US needs to overhaul, hell, even nationalize, its higher education system. Don't expect corporations to educate people for you.
"""At a dinner for Silicon Valley executives in early 2011, President Barack Obama asked Apple CEO Steve Jobs what it would take to bring iPhone manufacturing back to America. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” the typically blunt Apple cofounder told the president. Examining Jobs’s claim, the New York Times looked at Apple’s vast Chinese operations and found that workers there not only worked for less than Americans did; more of them were skilled. To oversee production and guide some 200,000 assembly-line workers, Apple, for instance, needed 8,700 industrial engineers—positions that required more than a high school diploma but less than a full college degree. While abundant in China, these kinds of employees are harder to find in the United States. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need,” an unnamed Apple executive told the Times.""" https://www.city-journal.org/html/vocational-ed-reborn-15253...
I don't agree. I think we have far more average talent than we have companies willing to hire only average talent, particularly if said average talent does not already live within 20 miles of them.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't be proud of yourself, but if you were being intellectually honest you would realize that this is not a rational well researched stance.
This topic has been researched to death already so we're not going to break any real ground but I would ask you two things specifically:
1. When you studied hard, were you supported to study hard? Were your basic necessities covered (food, shelter) so you could focus? A lot of kids don't even have this basic level of stability in their lives, and maybe you didn't either.
2. How did you get into computer science? When I was growing up I didn't know anyone who was a programmer of any kind and wouldn't have even known to consider it had I not gotten lucky and took a programming class in highschool partly because it allowed me to drive to the community college to do it and get out of school almost half of the day. If I hadn't had transportation and money for gas it would have never happened and who knows where I would be now.
I worked a fulltime job during ungrad and grad school (and did programming jobs on the side for about $75 per hour). I worked my way through.
> How did you get into computer science?
John Carmack mostly. I saw some guy play quake online and it blew me away. I saved money to buy a computer and pay for internet. Which lead into writing scripts and websites. Then into computer science.
How did you write those scripts and websites, did you have a computer growing up? Internet access (what little internet there was to be had then that is)?
I'm not trying to take away your achievements, but I think this kind of thinking is a big part of what is wrong with how we make public policy. We see things in a very narrow way (just human nature) and we generally have a hard time empathizing with other people and their experiences. I think if we could get over that and stop romanticizing the exceptions and start understanding better the average experiences of people in our societies, maybe we can make better decisions that allow more people to succeed.
By the way working full time through undergrad and grad school would have been tough, I ended up taking out loans myself (partly so I could enjoy the experience a little more and not work all the time, only most of the time) so kudos to you for pulling that off. I'm not sure I want everyone to have to go through that (if even they could have done that, not too many people can make $75/hr even as professionals let alone students), but there is nothing wrong with taking pride in having done it yourself.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/sunday-review/push-dont-c...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/education/edlife/overachi...
Then I'm not so sure.
That story is how high-schoolers in Silicon Valley are committing suicide at an alarming rate. Reading between the lines some, it tells you that Silicon Valley parents (who are probably some of the most driven people in the country) are expecting their kids to be just as driven/high achieving as them. The kids cannot cope with it and take the only way out they know of.
I think this is very different from what ronnier is suggesting when he says "life is too good, too easy, for the average american." Children in SV are not average americans.
But the bit where this falls down is your use of "our own" in a context where it either has no meaning or has, let's just say "accidentally discriminatory" meaning. The idea that we should invest to "prevent" this situation is kinda distasteful.
These people are americans now. No, they aren't all citizens (though many are), but their kids are and their descendants will be. This is their home as much as it is yours or mine. This country built itself on the backs of imported talent, there's no valid reason for that to stop now.
[1] No idea if that's a median data point, but it's probably close. When people talk about STEM immigrants they mean very long term residents who will realistically be here with their families for the rest of their lives. You want to imagine a job-jacking horde of foreign-educated people who don't speak English. The truth is rather different.
Why? It's not like Americans were a much bigger share of the world population in the past.
There is first the network effect, uneven distribution of financial resources, uneven availability of educational resources, the high number of societies that don't value individuality nor deviation from tradition and the norm.
(1) those who have already made it here and intend to stay, are Americans now. That's what America has always been about. Anyone who disagrees is a despicable nativist who should be deported back to Germany, England, or wherever their great grandparents came from and sign their house deed over to the descendants of whichever native americans lived there before being violently and unlawfully removed.
(2) those who have not yet made it here, we owe nothing to yet, and we certainly ought to invest in ourselves. The education system in this country is so bad it's a joke, and it's not great if we end up relying on other countries educating people and sending them here just because our own education is so awful. That is a very precarious position to be in.
It's a reasonable, defensible, globalist stance.
And it's perfectly reasonable to disagree with such a stance and make the national well-being a priority over the comparatively greater struggles and sufferings of people outside our borders. But unfortunately I think we always use smoke and mirrors and avoid facing the issue head on.
I appreciate that you have a clear and we'll articulated position for your preferences for how your tax dollars should be spent. I hope that we as a society can have open discussions and debates that welcome and encourage opposing worldviews to our own, and that we can hold a default mindset to first understand our compatriot's views, rather than first defend our own positions.
Completely agree with (1).
If so, the below two points will cure you of this silly idea and any similar ones:
(A) if our money-making machine (our economy) is not well taken care of, such as by assuring its supply of skilled labor, it may deteriorate, leaving less money left over to donate to the worthy causes you want it donated to. If you don't take care of yourself first, you will be to weak to help others.
(B) The education system in the US is not lacking for money, it simply uses the given money poorly. It can be improved without spending more money.
Education is a capital investment, not a luxury consumable good.
Nobody takes the positions you're taking in earnest sincerity. Nobody. Well, maybe Peter Singer does.
For what it's worth I consider Peter Singer (the philosopher) to be a man of strong reasoning who builds a tower of logic on top of a questionable and highly subjective statement of morality.
I believe that the decades long wave of software outsourcing to India has lifted the standard of living for many thousands of people there. I believe that the decades long wave of electronics outsourcing to China has created opportunities for rural residents there to attain upward economic mobility. I believe that these have come with a real, undeniable cost to American citizens and residents, and thus believe that an individual can justifiably be for or against such normalization of economic well being on a global scale.
I rather agree. What I'm wondering is: if you're not trolling, why swallow Singer's premises, swallow his extrapolations, and then call it all questionable?
Because this is the position you're taking: that the United States has a moral obligation to invest its finite resources into immigration or outsourcing of jobs for skilled foreign workers over and above training and education for its native-born workers.
>I believe that these have come with a real, undeniable cost to American citizens and residents, and thus believe that an individual can justifiably be for or against such normalization of economic well being on a global scale.
I don't think a clear-thinking individual can really be for such a blatant violation of basic democracy. If we want America to be accountable to the Indian and Chinese masses, we should give them passports and voting rights -- then see what they want for themselves. Likewise, if we're going to invest American resources in improving the well-being of India and China, why not demand an EU-style relationship of open borders, common standards for human well-being, and residency-based voting rights?
I don't think one can really have humanitarianism without solidarity, coexistence, and shared community. To do well by someone just is to expand each-other's (legal, economic, etc) communities to include each-other. A charity/tithe of 10% or something is both traditional and good, but I think it's wrong to expand charity to the point where you give to outsiders at the cost of community ties (both within your existing community and between your community and outsiders).
IMO either position is perfectly defensible. Helping those who are "your neighbors" (those who are more proximal to you) first is defensible, and so is helping those around the world catch up to the living standards of the developed West.
What is not good is that we continue to mask pragmatic or moral decision making with irrational, illogical, emotionally charged positions, on both the left and the right. That, I wish would change.
Wouldn't "our own" as used earlier also include "these people"?
I think you are injecting context which was never there in the first place.
No one cares if Mexico or India or China or South Korea "use their own".
But if American wants to "use their own" we need to have a hug sessions about how racism is bad.
I don't...look. All I want to say is: I hope you're aware that you're making enemies with statements like this.
Luckily most people are able to read a comment from a random person on the Internet, classify it as a different opinion from theirs and go on with their lives.
In other words, I think I can understand the views I'm criticizing.
I do not get the sense that the same is true of the comment to which I replied. It seems to carry a level of tone-deafness that would be mystified by any pushback.
No, you've missed the very simplest critique of the US immigration system: that it takes years to decades of effort and incredible, Kafkaesque arbitrary hoop-jumping to get an actual Green Card, let alone an American citizenship. The system is legible neither to its owners (Congress) nor to its users (immigrants and visitors).
We can talk about sending "temporary" immigrants home when we've stopped making "permanent" immigrants (those on immigrant-track visas) go through hell just to turn their visa into citizenship. Let's naturalize the people we already have living and working in the country, and then talk about reforming our system for granting further visas into a nice sensible points system.
That said, we should find a balance where we both attract highly skilled foreign talent and develop our own in-house talent.
In order of preference I would see them treated equally and made citizens, kept out of the labor pool, or left as they are.
As a citizen the current situation seems be the least preferable option and I see no reason things ought to stay as they are.
In fact basically destroying the H1B system as it stands is probably the best first step. The bigots that make up 40% of America would probably support it and our idiot in chief would probably sign it.
Then we could replace it with a system whereby these valuable people have a sane opportunity to come here permanently and compete on even footing with natives when the wind changes with at least lukewarm support from the business community eager for more employees.
No we didn't. We built our country on the exploitation of poor european factory workers, chinese "slave" labor and african slaves.
This country wasn't built on "talent". It was built on exploitation of CHEAP or free labor.
> there's no valid reason for that to stop now.
We stopped it many times in history to protect AMERICANS. Go read about immigration history rather than propaganda we are forcefed. European immigration was stalled to protect american labor. Chinese immigration was stopped to protect american labor. And if you think about it, even american slavery was stopped to protect american labor.
Immigration wasn't all great. Throughout US history, it led to lots of turmoil, displacement and heartache.
Nothing is all great or all evil like people with agenda like to believe. There are pros and cons to everything. The skewed "pro-immigration" policy the past 50 years has gutted american labor and american society. We need a more rational policy.
And the fact that america/american government shouldn't favor AMERICANS over immigrants is pure rubbish. It's neoliberal fantasy. As a nation we have gone too "left". We need to correct our trajectory lest america fall off the tracks entirely.
> No we didn't. We built our country on the exploitation of poor european factory workers, chinese "slave" labor and african slaves.
I think they mean exactly what you wrote. Replace 'imported talent' with 'immigrant talent'. Europeans and Asians FOB, willing to work for peanuts.
The rest is just blatant hypocrisy and fear-mongering. There's too many people, the borders to invisible these days. There is no throwing up literal or figurative walls without fueling direct revolt further.
Get with reality, yo. Or invent a time machine and vanish. Honestly, with ideas like that, you won't really be missed.
In other words, the aversion to STEM among elite US students is rational.
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/issue_papers/2005...
https://qz.com/1032183/no-wonder-young-americans-feel-so-imp...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/07/17/easy-a-nearly...
https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/sei/edTool/data/highschool-08.html FYI - It may not look like much on the graph but the US is 2 years behind the top rankers.
I'd also like to see China and India and Russia on that list.
USA is big enough to be an above average nation and a below average nation combined.
Israel, that ranks significantly below the US on that chart, has perhaps the largest technology industry per capita in the world.
Which runs largely on olim hadashim (new immigrants) from Western countries and the former Soviet Union.
Either the best here will compete with the best there, or the best there will come here (or vice versa)
I went to a top liberal arts college, and majored in physics for most of my time there. Within the physics major, every single student was either 1.) An immigrant 2.) The child of an immigrant or 3.) Jewish. It was similar - though a little less pronounced - in the CS and math majors. Most of my friends there were from comfortable middle-class American backgrounds, and most of them majored in English, music, history, or psychology. Many of them are struggling financially or still dependent upon financial support from parents, 12 years after graduation.
The American educational system is such that you can largely make your own choices from college onwards (and to a limited degree, in high school too). This is a great strength of America, but it also means that sometimes people make choices that don't work out for them. The native-born citizens I know that invested heavily in learning math & computers when they were teenagers are doing great, even if they came from dirt-poor backgrounds. The ones I know who figured there would always be a job waiting for them, even if they came from very comfortable upper-middle-class backgrounds, are barely scraping by.
So much this - I know of this from my own life.
I got a state funded CS education for around 500$ a year (if my family had been poorer, they'd have paid me to study) - it was a good one, because I keep going back to my annotated Sedgewick.
Graduated with zero debt, with an open source project I was working on for years which meant that I spent the first few years of my work life knowing I could take risks (not that I did take too many).
In the Bay area now and seeing clearly the impact of an expensive education on people's choices - not everyone needs to be a college graduate, however putting an expensive price tag on it means that only people who are sure they can get a financial return on their education will take up that risk.
There is a chilling effect on women, who are expecting to be discriminated in the industry, driving them to other vocations where they don't expect to incur similar challenges with financial gains or professional advancements.
In fact, purely from a state investment point of view, CA is getting my tax dollars to spend while my college barely gets anything back from me.
I really wish my kids would get a similar springboard to start their life off without an albatross around their neck, but they are probably entering a system which is probably going to maximize immediate financial returns from them instead of expecting them to be late bloomers becoming productive over time.
Kids care too much about fitting in rather than making it in life with hard skills. You will have thousands working service jobs in LA with hopes of making it in entertainment. You don't see that emphasis in STEM in the US.
With the internet everyone has had the ability to learn programming for ages, and it really hasn't dramatically changed much. People are just not interested in it at some point.
Also see: https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2016/03/17/study-immigrants-fou...
I was recently speaking with Demis Hassabis and he recommended looking for startup funding in California but continuing to work out of London. More and more companies are gravitating towards this general template (not London specifically). Would you rather have some low level Stack Developer working at Airbnb on an H1B build the next Billion dollar startup in the Bay Area or out of Bangalore?
Yes, hiring someone with an H1B might cost a company 10k less per annum. But what would it cost America to not have these foreign workers want to work in California altogether? Besides, it isn't fair to build such an impressive hotbed of thought and progress and then try and wall others out of it.
I've watched those foreign people get hired even though they walked into the interview without even Googling the product or development environment specified in the ad. Not that this is new or exclusive, mind you.
Nevermind that nobody thought about onboarding these people, there's no documentation, and the resulting product takes a sharp nosedive as work is handed over. These foreign people were promised cheap, and that keeps the investors happy.
This is no slightly against those workers. I've taught these workers and one guy had his head in his hands saying, "Oh my God, the legal liability we're being exposed to here" upon learning of deep design flaws that cheaper labor was somehow going to magically fix.
More workers is not necessarily better- in any sense. It's just more workers. In a capitalist system, that's not necessarily good for anybody except management.
Note: This post is in no way, shape, or form arguing against immigration. Immigration is great. I'm more saying that we should try and spread around the SV effect, so that more places can prosper, and one place isn't strained so much.
Well I want to see the entire world become prosperous instead of wealth continuing to concentrate and stratify at a global scale, so yes.
>>Would you rather have some low level Stack Developer working at Airbnb on an H1B build the next Billion dollar startup in the Bay Area or out of Bangalore?
As somebody who stays in Bangalore, I can tell you this is already the case and has been for a few years now.
Back then when I started my career there was a mad rush to move to US in most young people. Today coupled with a impossibly long green card wait, and uncertainties associated with a job on a Visa for most smart people moving to US isn't even an option. I know a lot of smart people for whom moving to US isn't even in their list of priorities.
In the past decade start up ecosystem here has become very good. Starting companies is no longer social or economic taboo in India/Bangalore today.
US people think outsourcing was bad for them? Imagine competing with start ups and their funding, which are operating at 1/10th the budget of any city in US.
1. It makes a clear appeal back to the original intent of the law.
2. It would most likely end most of the perceived abuse/misuse of the law, which occurs at lower salary ranges.
3. It will not prevent tech companies that actually do cool stuff like Google & co from hiring, since most of their hires probably start over 110K now.
I also think that the impact on American workers in this salary range from H1B is pretty low. Many companies with salaries in this range are always hiring provided you have the skills.
Actually most companies that you are referring to want tech salaries to decline. One of the best weapons against high tech salaries are H1B visas and offshoring.
I think that whatever is going on in the lower end of the market, there is still a substantial shortage of labor in the higher jobs that cannot be made up domestically anytime soon. Higher end jobs tend to have a much less elastic labor pool because fewer people can do the work.
Whatever the impact is for tech workers, for the general public it is definitely a bad outcome to have perpetual labor shortages at tech companies; it just means that they get their products/features/bug fixes/other improvements more slowly.
A great side effect of this is that it pretty much makes H1B not viable in the Midwest or other areas where we probably ought to be trying to develop more talent
At any rate, I would like to see some empirical backing for those who want to raise H1B salaries higher than inflation adjustment.
The side effect you think is great, is actually really bad. It's not a question of developing more talent, it's the fact that people move to the coasts for jobs. All this really does is disadvantage companies not in NYC and SF, and make it more likely that they will have a labor shortage they can't make up, and pack up. This isn't reflective of anything though, except basically regional inflation (it's not simply that salaries in NYC and SF are so much higher because the companies there are the most productive and therefore deserve the H1B slots more, the salaries are partly inflated because cost of living is also super high, i.e. a dollar is worth less).
I would be very surprised if the "H1B prevailing wage" for any meaningful technical role in the SF bay area is less than $100k.
[1] http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?code=15-11...