Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?
I am attempting to gain some insight into the issue. My situation is somewhat unique in that I am self-taught without a CS degree. I'm a very experienced, diligent worker, etc, but an algorithm doesn't care about this and so getting through the filters is difficult.
However I see many discussions being posted (primarily on X) stating that it is nearly impossible for people with CS degrees (especially white males) to get an interview let alone a job. There have been mass layoffs, less money being invested etc. Many people have claimed AI is taking jobs, or that there aren't as many jobs available, yet at the same time, Elon Musk and others claim there is an engineer shortage and we must increase the number of H-1B visas in order to fill this gap. When I apply to a position on linkedin I can see that even the most Jr positions have over 100 applicants.
I know that X can be slanted, and really anything posted online must be taken with a grain of salt - but I'm seeing many people claiming to be in the same situation as myself, and most of them claim to be white males.
Furthermore, in the last two years I experienced two layoffs. In both situations it was white males let go in favor of Indian and KZ foreigners. Again - this is anecdotal and could be a coincidence, but its awfully telling that Vivek and Elon are calling American tech workers uncultured, lazy and stupid in the wake of these experiences and those that I've read about online.
I don't want to start a war here on hackernews, but I'm looking for people's personal experiences. Do they match up? Are you having a hard time finding employment? Have you been fired in favor of foreign workers? Is this racism / ageism / sexism at play or is that being overblown by political actors?
624 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 334 ms ] threadI keep applying for jobs, and recently accepted the possibility to relocate for an on site position (because staying where I am and hoping to get a remote position hasn't worked out). I just had a promising lead in Texas 'move forward with another candidate'... argh!
Companies aren't willing to train people, not even their current employees. They want their candidates to come prepackaged with at least X years experience in Y technologies for several technologies. Their unwillingness to budge created the H1B catastrophe we see now. I'm more than willing to replatform my skillset (B2C Commerce Cloud to Shopify, or Java to .NET, for example), but no one's offering.
Looking around at the big picture, it seems that most money is leaving tech to chase higher returns elsewhere. If you aren't doing AI or crypto, it feels that you're fighting over bones. The scraps were gone a long time ago.
Companies selling physical goods lead to a decent amount of jobs in every country they operate in by definition. Not so for software.
It is US big tech who has for a decade or 2 reaped enormous benefits from extracting large sums of money from non-US economies while contributing near-zero back to those economies (often not just near-zero but straight up deeply negative amounts due to externalities).
Seen from the rest of the world, the has spent the last few decades killing the software and hardware industry of everybody else through practices that feel very much like a combination of a tax on tech and an abuse of monopoly.
If you wonder, the rest of the world doesn't quite see any difference between the "unfair" practices of which US Conservatives accuse China and the practices that the US has adopted for the last 40+ years in a number of domains when it comes to becoming/remaining the dominant player in a number of fields.
Enormous net negative, and I'm lucky enough to be part of the poster child society that shows just how much better the alternative is: South Korea. And even here people still use lots of US tech (Instagram is huge), just much less of it, in every case at massive net benefit to Korean society as a whole.
Instant messaging, online payments, online shopping, second hand market place, domestic hotel bookings, email are all local tech companies. Food delivery was local for very long, now technically acquired by foreign company but run independently as local tech. Taxi apps have been local for very long, though Uber's presence is growing - but even there they got into the market by acquiring a local player and running them relatively independently afaik (less sure about this one). Even then, majority of market share is still non-Uber locals. Anything finance-related is local. Maps are local. Gaming streams was Twitch+Local but is now local only.
Despite Android enjoying >90% market share for 10+ years (now rapidly losing to iOS, I'd say among age 20-30 iOS is >40%), the only Google products that have been popular were Youtube and Chrome. Gmail somewhat.
Even the dating app market here is dominated by local players. This is the only case I can think of where the result is actually worse than if it wasn't, which is quite a feat considering just how awful Tinder and friends are.
The only US apps that dominates its field here is Instagram. Chrome and Youtube do as well but gained that purely through default and PC usage. Netflix and Disney+ are popular by virtue of original content, but sports are local players. Spotify to an extent, but again, nowhere near 90% market share like US or Europe.
For obvious reasons, most tourists and short-term foreigners here hate all of this. But frankly their opinions should be ignored. Despite being a foreigner as well it's clear as day that it's much better for everyone else.
The local replacement of Google maps is the easiest example, I've written a little about it here [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42286046
China is another country that has developed its own local apps, mainly because many global ones are banned there. Even if Google, Uber, and others had free rein, I don’t think they could compete with the existing options. The local apps are so tuned to Chinese culture, an American app just wouldn't be intuitive to them.
Do you think the local apps, aside from dating, are better than their U.S. counterparts, or is it mainly due to their strong local momentum? Could the Western apps compete in that market? It sounds like Uber is making some inroads.
> Do you think the local apps, aside from dating, are better than their U.S. counterparts, or is it mainly due to their strong local momentum? Could the Western apps compete in that market? It sounds like Uber is making some inroads.
Yes, they're better.
The first reason being what you touched upon with China. To give an example; Meta will almost never consider developing some specific feature or local integration purely for Italy, despite almost everyone in Italy using it. This is an awful situation, really, but it's just because from Meta's perspective it doesn't push the needle [1]. What if instead of Whatsapp all of Italy used ItaliApp? They'd be busy fulltime doing local integrations, things that make sense for Italians. There's nothing else for them to do. They would probably have tried at some point to go abroad, utterly failed, and from then on just focused on the local market. How do you improve revenue from a market, offering a free app like instant messaging, when you already have 99% penetration? Make people use it more. How? Useful features.
Second reason is much less enshittification. Now I think this effect would be less severe for ItaliApp, as part of this is cultural in Korea, but it'd still be there. Given ItaliApp will not turn into a trillion dollar behemoth, if it enshittifies too much, there's more chance of competition popping up. Either local, or the neighboring EspañaApp sensing an opportunity. The Google maps comparison I linked to at the bottom is the best example. US apps can be great - many years ago, Google maps used to be. They just no longer are.
Uber is gaining ground mostly through tourists and short-term expats. The biggest local taxi app took far too long to add foreign credit card support. But like I said, Uber here is still a JV, did not start out as Uber, and I'm fairly sure they still run their ops here much more locally than they do in e.g. European countries. It remains to be seen whether they'll keep on growing, but for now among locals I still put their market share at <20%. I do actually use them for a different reason; unlike the main local app, Uber shows the drivers' rating after they take your call. I haven't met anyone else who cares about this though.
[1] I actually think they're leaving a lot on the table here, but I could be wrong.
If the latter, yes, certainly. My last two employers had to hire US and Canadian developers anyway just to be able to sell to the US/Canada, so I guess it's already the case.
As far as me or my dictionary are concerned, a rubric is a category, or perhaps a chapter. :shrug:
As for Americans, I think they have to question what their taxes are doing for them? They grow up receiving a sub-standard public education, they take on an enormous amount of debt to get higher education, and when they reach adulthood, the job market unceremoniously has nothing to offer them because its all being given away to non-americans.
What's the point of a nation anyway? What's a government's job? Maybe nationhood is an outdated idea and we should all bow to corporate overlords instead.
So, yeah, my non-US taxes being used to pay for US jobs? I can live with that. But I can also live with them being used to pay for jobs in my country.
Really companies should be banned from importing more people[1] if they laid off a certain number in the last year. That way the job market would be more likely to self correct.
[1] I think they should still be allowed to hire people who are already in the country on a visa, as it's unfair to make their risk of being kicked out of the country worse. And they should be allowed to renew existing visa workers
They need to import labor because the domestic labor pool isn’t good enough. A quieter part is that people immigrating also expect less for their outputs.
[1] Well, except when the country fails to invest enough in education and training. It's wrong for the UK, for example, to consistently not fund enough medical students, and make up for it by importing staff educated by third world countries.
Are you and Elon saying that India’s education system and universities are just plain better than MIT, Stanford, etc? If so - why are so many studying abroad in places like Canada and Australia?
If not, then are Indians just genetically smarter than Americans, so that their pool is better?
It just seems like immigrants are willing to work more for less, so that in the future when they’re citizens, they can work less for more.
I don’t personally subscribe to that belief.
My position is more so that wealthy, powerful people stand to gain a lot by disempowering their workforce, and they’re working hard to do just that. People like Elon would love to see cheap labour and AI beset the workforce such that it had no leverage and lower wages. He has said about as much in various ways already.
I’m a little disappointed that my comment wasn’t voted down more, because I really did phrase it as my own opinion.
Reverse outsourcing. Don't send the job overseas, send the overseas person here!
Getting jobs in AI has also been hard for a lot of people as well. Many of my former colleagues who worked for a very visible company in the ML/NLP space have had issues finding good positions.
More than likely an internal hire. This is often the case if you're an external candidate.
I work in immigration and my colleagues in the industry noticed the difference in skilled immigration. It even affected the overpriced temporary housing market that mostly targeted skilled immigrant workers. Freelance relocation consultants report having their worst year on record.
I also noticed a dip in traffic but it might be caused by Google’s plundering of the web with its AI summaries. I can’t tell if the actual demand changed. I run a website that helps immigrants settle.
It’s generally accepted in Germany that things are not great right now. I could likely find matching evidence in yearly reports, but the vibe alone is telling.
Two people I know have been let go (pumps and wood sectors resp.). Another (metal construction) is getting barely more than minimum wage. There's only one dude (chemical engineer) who is doing well (nearing 100k at 5 years work experience). The others are getting by.
Politicians are still complaining about Fachkräftemangel, skilled labor shortage, but it's really a wage slave shortage.
Why is this German word thrown in without any explanation? I’ve noticed this is a common trend whenever a Germany-adjacent topic is discussed.
The short version is that there is a shortage of skilled workers that absolutely requires immigrants to fill the gaps. However when you look around there isn’t really a shortage; people just aren’t willing to work for little pay. The English term implies that there is an actual shortage.
It might please you to know just how much English other languages are peppered with.
It's probably true if you own the company, but there's also disgruntled folks who apparently got treated like shit during their apprenticeship and who snicker at their former employers or dissuade would-be prospects when their field isn't doing well (boohoo poor Porsche drivers) or when they try to advertise a craft. At least the YT comments under several blue collar documentaries/adverts say so, but I know none personally.
Then there's an ongoing crisis in construction due to widespread financing problems (need two decently paid full time earners, no kids, to afford it with some certainty and no 30+ year debt slavery at least around where I live) and assorted crafts.
An electrician friend is doing okay, but not exactly great, at barely more than 40k pre-tax per year. Another one who is farmer on the side (can't afford to live from it) makes about as much in his profession (mechanic). I.e. forget single earner family and/or mortgage.
It's difficult to gauge accurately, because statistics are complicated and/or shit and/or biased, the employment situation highly depends on region and field and things seem to be changing at a crazy pace, not least caused by the recent economic shocks (war, COVID, a decade+ of QE), problems with funding pensions/bad demography, increasing competition in core industries, high energy prices and political indecisiveness. How much each factor contributes remains a mystery to me. Wealth m/billionaires seem to be growing fine.
Personally I'm more and more convinced there's no conspiracy and things really are as bad... The Japanification of Germany. At least our debt isn't as high yet.
> Politicians are still complaining about Fachkräftemangel,
These two things can be, and in fact are right now true at the same time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_unemployment
Everyone coming from an ex-Warsaw-Pact country most probably already lived through that before. We've entered the market economy (and stopped the play-pretend) with huge unemployment and lack of skilled workers at the same time.
Related or not (Covid was a big shock after all), "rich" countries have been living way over their means for many decades now (in terms of natural resources). It's particularly wild to see people calling for a return to the "norm" that were the post-WW2 decades : that wasn't a "norm", that was the fastest growth period that mankind had ever seen (and probably will ever see) !
So now (since the 1970s) we are way over due for a correction... which is probably going to look like a few centuries of recession with a few good years (for some maybe even good decades) thrown in here and there.
I see a lot of amazing people struggling in the market right now. This is mirrored by a general slowdown in actual project spend by businesses.
Locally, there has been a very very minor uptick in activity prior to Christmas which is a historically weird time for that to happen, so I’m slightly optimistic for the new year.
But the last 12 months have been very tough.
No.
No for a lot of reasons.
There's no shortage of poor people in this country even when employment is high.
I mean, the max enlistment age in the US Army is theoretically 35 years old, but realistically they are not looking for anybody much past 25 from anything I have ever seen. Even from a machiavellian standpoint leaving a whole bunch of unemployed people from 18 to 75 just so you can scoop up the youngest 10% of them or whatever just makes no sense.
Lastly, the next war between major powers is probably not going to involve massive numbers of infantry troops from America. We fight proxy wars (Ukraine, etc) generally and if we fight another peer/near-peer country directly it's going to be missiles and drones and what-have-you, not 10 million American infantrymen marching through China.
Low interests rates fueled a startup boom into the 2010s, capturing that emerging industry within the U.S. economy. AI looks promising, but the best is yet to come, so there’s a chance to reprise the earlier success that we saw into the early 2010s.
High interest rates currently mean that failed startups (those established pre-LLMs) will more easily die off, and bad conditions for software engineering employment will re-align the tech workforce toward AI. If this is a strategy that is being enacted, then I’d expect to see favorable startup funding conditions again, such as low interest rates, within a few years, to make sure the U.S. captures the AI startup market. It’s just not time to do that yet, since we need to wait for a re-skilled workforce and for a better-developed picture of what a typical successful AI startup would look like in the late 2020s.
An economist might say that no conspiracy is required, that this is simply the invisible hand at work.
That's gonna be one rude awakening.
I have little doubt, by the way, that the booming compensation for software folks in recent years is partially a function of how few people in their mid-30s to early-40s today did CS degrees during undergrad.
For undergrads today, though, I suppose the good question is "what else is there?" (i.e. providing a path to an upper-middle class American lifestyle). Pre-med programs have long been over-enrolled with med school admissions being super competitive. Business and law degrees only matter if they come from the top schools where admissions have long been super competitive. My own kids will start having to figure this out soon, and I don't know what I'll suggest.
AI for software though? It will decimate employment in that field as soon as it's good enough. Nobody cares who or what wrote their software. It's been amusing to me to watch the software profession build the tools of its own destruction.
As far as the future, I would advise looking at professions where a high degree of human-to-human interaction is important. But certainly I have no crystal ball, maybe people of the future will be fine with getting care from a Star Trek "Medical Hologram" doctor.
Unfortunately many employers see that as a minus, not a plus.
So, my suggestion is maybe there's not a need to create a fake profile, but maybe trim yours a bit. Good luck!
And while I'm at the IC5/6 level in Product, I still worry about it, and think if I had to find a new job, sorry, fiancée who loves my beard, it has to go, or I think I'm going to have a hard time.
Good luck!
I've had some amazing experiences in my career, but I've started dropping off some of my older work. I don’t include my graduation date on my resume, for example. I have nearly 30 years of solid, relevant experience, but I need to trim it down to the last 12 years or so.
Ageism is incredibly difficult to prove. Plus, you don’t want your name in the paper as someone who sues employers; it can make you seem toxic to future employers.
Two decades of experience for someone looking for a VP position is a different story, with different challenges.
reach out to former coworkers or friends and ask for referrals. YMMV, but I do not think it is at all that bleak.
The only guaranteed way for the interview stage was through referrals.
I never found cold applying to be particularly useful, even during the best hiring times, so I always read these accounts of how bad the market is because someone sent their resume to X number of companies to be a bit useless in judging the market as in my experience that never really worked.
On that note, being in a larger city and doing in-person networking is a much different game than trying to apply online from afar. Plus, I've heard a lot about how useless online applications have become due to AI, ghost jobs, bad HR practices, etc. It makes me wonder if returning to the "come in to the office and drop off an application" days would be better for everyone.
I moved AUS->UK for family reasons, didn’t start applying till we landed and settled. Had a remote contract signed within two months at “big tech” for 97th percentile income locally.
20ish apps total, only 5ish got past resume screening, bombed one, turned down two, one couldn’t afford me, one accepted, no referrals, only applying for Sr IC roles, ~30yo, ~10yoe, no dei, admittedly have a degree unlike op
All up I was left doubting the jobs downturn, anecdote ofc :shrug:
Networking is the best way to find jobs nowadays. Bar none.
> The massive downward revisions to jobs data are set to continue: latest from PHL Fed has early benchmark indicating jobs DECLINED in Q2 of this year while the initial monthly job reports estimated gains of 653k - the labor market's strength is a fiction..
https://x.com/RealEJAntoni/status/1867368092902601195
Building interfaces and menu systems etc feels very similar to frontend web development. Much of the domain knowledge transfers when it comes to programming. Mainly my skills transfer to gameplay development and debugging. I make small games and only just recently released my first commercial game, which has only sold two copies.
I think the major thing stopping people from just going their own way is healthcare coverage. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)
I wonder if I can hack a business model that somehow provides healthcare but also gathers together sourced projects, and freelancers to bid on building them, while also getting healthcare. (And if you opt out of healthcare, you can take the difference. Maybe.) It may not result in 100% employment, but it could potentially provide a source of income while looking for something more fulltime. And I would help coordinate, while also vetting people.
Also, not sure if related to the difficulty in tech, but it might depend on your ethnicity, and not in the way you might think: https://fox11online.com/news/nation-world/major-us-companies...
I think a lot of engineers just want to engineer. Leading a startup quickly becomes mostly business stuff like finance, marketing, sales, hiring, etc. You need a business model, not just tech know-how. Starting your own business is definitely not the same job as staff engineer at an established business. It’s not for everyone.
IMO, people want way too much fucking money.
Looking at the numbers for the decline in spending power over time is sobering.
i agree. Tying healthcare to employment limits things in several ways. What if, instead of starting my own business, i wanted to work 2 different part time jobs for 2 different employers? Maybe 1 of them is a rather low-paying job at a non-profit, and another is some tech-related job...well, even if enough of my poay is covered between both jobs, what would i do about healthcare? Yes, i know about the Affordable Care Act, but its been watered down by the powers that be who don't care about proper healthcare for everyone, etc. I think if the ACA in its original form were to have been launched, maybe it would have set us on a better trajectory - at least for more universal coverage which isn't tied to employment...then, at that point, Americans can choose their own adventure from an employment perspective (assuming they have the proper skills for whichever career adventure they undertook) - either work for someone else (or work for several different bosses), or work for themselves.
Not that great. And it's not that cheap.
You're better off working somewhere, quitting, using the COBRA (1200-2k+ for fam), when it runs out getting another job, quitting, rinse repeat.
There are several layers to this.
Layer one is that SW Eng work has always been both multi modal and that it's never been easy to get out of the trash distributions (e.g. $40-$60k "analyst" or "programmer" gigs, etc.) if you end up there. And it's also never been easy for someone to get a degree and find a job w/o having internships, years of part time work or other experience, or connections.
Anecdata, but a solid number of my CS graduating class more than a decade ago who were more than good enough to work in CS struggled to figure out how to find a first position if they didn't happen to have gotten internships, worked in the field before graduation, etc. While the best off got Google or MS internships that the majority of my class didn't even apply for. And even then, the majority of the jobs were for 4+ years of experience.
Add to this over the past decade many outfits have started to hire substantial numbers of overseas remote workers. For the most part, I think many companies fill their junior and slightly up roles with outside of the US remote workers. This has mixed results, but it's usually cheaper to hire several foreign remote workers over one domestic worker, and particularly in cases where time consuming grunt work is needed it can work reasonably. In some ways the H1-B doesn't matter because you can always hire remote foreign workers. The main issues I've seen relate to there being a substantial management load to deal with the amount of stuff lost in translation. I've personally had a better experience w/ South American contractors than Russian/Ukrainian/Slavic or Indian, I think because the timezones match better, English/Spanish/Portuguese seems to be easier to navigate linguistically, and the workers have seemed to better understand what we've needed and been better at showing initiative for some reason.
Then layer AI on top of this and relatively reduced hiring.
I do not think it's a good time to be looking for work, and with every year that's gone by over the least decade it's been worse for junior/early career roles especially.
I haven't seen white males being let go in favor of foreigners, but I have seen a lot of limiting hiring to a few seniors and filling the rest with overseas to save money. AI is only exacerbating. As is the fact that nobody really seems to have money for hiring. So is the desire to hire people who are magically already perfect and spun up for a role, no matter how niche.
In general, I think "white male" is a red herring.
But to your other point, I think any perceived layoffs of white males at tech companies is just correlation with their overrepresentation in the software engineer population.
Whites are 41% of software engineers [1], but 57% of the US population [2], so they are under-, not over-, represented.
[1] https://www.careerexplorer.com/careers/software-engineer/dem...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
Agreed. A friend interviewed at Stripe in 2019 (ish, but before the pandemic) and he said every single person he saw at their SF office was 25-30 and white male. And it wasn't a small building and he was given a tour of a good bit of it.
The CEOs are scared that if AI ends up working, then they will be left behind by competitors who invested in AI. So every CEO must invest in AI according to game theory.
Indeed. That was even communicated officially by several companies during their layoffs (including Google, iirc).
The problem is that I work best as a lone wolf, and that's not how software is done nowadays. For good reason, I might add, so I am not complaining.
Don't make my mistake and learn your soft skills.
https://gavinhoward.com/2024/06/my-programming-journey/
https://gavinhoward.com/2023/02/why-i-use-c-when-i-believe-i...
If I could go back, I would have started working in C and building (reinventing) all the other ideas. Building your own language and compiler surely is the just fruits of an earnest programming life.
It's not unlike plain Javascript where code patterns become the unit of work [1][2], where keywords in other languages would otherwise suffice.
The shelves have books on C and Deitel, hacking, drawing, and architecture too. I hope some of them sort of combine. I don't know the recipe to bring about a kernel hacker, but hope it can all be absorbed in a decade or two.
[1] Reliable Javascript (2015)
[2] Javascript Patterns (2010)
> Got engaged. Made a stupid mistake on my wedding day and was left at the altar. I deserved it.
What happened?
[1]: https://gavinhoward.org/2023/06/let-me-cure-your-impostor-sy...
it is nearly impossible for people with CS degrees (especially white males) to get an interview let alone a job.
My friend, if you think it’s bad for white men, just wait till you hear what it’s like for black women. 2+ year job searches, for black tech workers, were the norm even in the pre-COVID economy.
It’s terrible for everyone who isn’t in a position to take advantage of geographic arbitrage. And even that, for a worker, is unstable… look at how fast the bastards RTO’d people as soon as their real estate holdings took a hit.
I agree that I think the "white male" thing might primarily be getting pushed by white nationals on X (and since I'm a white male, my experiences will of course relate to white males). That's why I'm curious about demographics.
Vivek didn't call out white males either, he called out Americans and bashed our culture while stating we need more foreign workers. I understand the point he and Elon are attempting to make, but I believe they simply want cheap labor. If the market is so bad for Americans, why do we need more immigrants in tech?
"Corporate America Promised to Hire a Lot More People of Color. It Actually Did. The year after Black Lives Matter protests, the S&P 100 added more than 300,000 jobs — 94% went to people of color." - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-e...
A BestBuy & McKinsey leadership program open only to non-whites - https://web.archive.org/web/20220927170605/https://corporate...
London Mayor’s Transport Team Bans Whites from Internships - https://thenationalpulse.com/2023/05/21/london-mayors-transp...
Mind you these are official, openly stated policies. If this is what they admit to, imagine what they do more discreetly. And it's not just hiring - it's a "pipeline problem" - whites, especially non-Jewish whites, are the most underrepresented group in the Ivy League, by a significant margin - https://archive.org/download/ivy_league/ivy_league.png (2023 data)
Also worth noting the original headline for your linked piece about Best Buy is "Best Buy, McKinsey partner to develop diverse leaders" (ah, the progressive radicals bringing down our country... McKinsey!) and your linked piece about the London transport team comes from some sensationalist outlet I've never heard of, whose founder appears to be writing articles about how "Jill Biden's White House Christmas decorations are predictably ghastly." Not sure I trust that as an unbiased source.
Glad we could move on from "it's not happening" to "it's happening and it's a good thing" expediently.
> Not sure I trust that as an unbiased source.
The article you distrust links (at the start of the 2nd paragraph) to the official government website advertising that internship, which states, verbatim: "You must be of Black, Asian and minority ethnic background, defined as having some African, Afro-Caribbean, Asian or other non-white heritage"
https://web.archive.org/web/20231002080147/https://tfl.gov.u...
Fresh grads in most other fields aren't doing either, but at least they aren't oversaturated as badly as CS is. Only ones doing fine are medical and social work professionals.
With 20 years experience you'd get through our semi-automated processes and get an interview if the skill sets and employment history matched - regardless of a university level experience.
Are you sure it's the degree that's holding you back?
I'm not advising you lie, as it's fraud, but just adding that over here it would be incredibly rare to ask for proof of academic qualifications from 20 years ago when recruiting such an experienced hire.
I myself have around 20 years experience, I have a degree but god knows where the certificate is and additionally the university who issued it no longer exists.
Although my degree is adjacent somewhat it is not in CS. I've never been asked to show it to anyone, never asked a hire for theirs either.
1) I work at a large company everyone in the US has heard of. When I walk in the public areas of the company or at lunch, it looks like we are based in Mumbai. There is no "diversity", it's one country in particular, which is India. (Funnily enough, this demographic isn't reflected in management)
2) I overheard the 4th level (above me) manager complaining to another manager that his department (he oversees the whole floor, let's say a bit under 100 employees) has 30+ open reqs, and HR has only given him a few resumes (unknown what time period this refers to). The last interview I gave was to an H1B who had an audio link in his earbuds to someone who feed him answers to my technical questions.
3) I have 20 years experience, yet this job pays the same amount I was making 10 years ago. There is effectively zero negotiation for salaries. They will happily let you go vs bargain.
4) A previous mega-corp I worked for, GE Healthcare in Wisconsin, looked like India on campus. Utter lack of diversity. I recently got a job solicitation from an Indian recruiter for $40/hr for C++ development at this location.
I think it's very clear that the cat's out of the bag about how to evade high-paying tech salaries. Set the parameters to discourage Americans from hiring, create a bottleneck so that your open reqs last longer, then use their extra-legal powers (unfettered access to congresspeople) to claim they are falling behind profitability, but if they just had those wonderful H1Bs everything will be ok.
Do you find that Indian managers hire their own?
I'm assuming you're not Indian.
I applied to FedEx affiliated company for SWE, and everyone except upper management was Indian. I was shocked.
Incidentally, there is a completely orthogonal concern that almost nobody is aware of: that Indian children are essentially being forced to study tech or medicine in order to get high-paying jobs in the west. This essentially erases their culture and robs the children of any freedom of identity. From single-digit ages they are being forced (under threat of discipline) to provide economic security for their parents. That is sickening.
What are you referring to here? Care to share some sources?
Yes that's what it seems to me based on many of the things I've read (not in this thread)
How did you detect that?
1) While A.I. may now be only adding 10-20% of productivity gains, the rapid pace of improvement leaves open the possibility that tha gains can be soon much more than that. So, instead of scaling your company now, if you can afford to, wait out a bit and see where this goes.
2) Even though much of BigTech is clawing back WFH, startups aren't as much. And once you introduce WFH to your culture and processes, it is hard to reason with the idea that you should pay $200K/year for an engineer when it can cost you a fraction (possibly 20-50% of that) to hire them remotely from another country, when also nowadays most of these remote employees are more than willing to work in EST/PST timezones. This used to be the case before COVID, but now many more startups have accepted and adapted to the idea of WFH.
3) While advanced skillsets and deep experience is necessary in many (but not most) startups, and while these skills are more difficult to find in India or Pakistan, the reality is, for many, many tech companies, most of the work doesn't require top-notch skills. You don't need a top 99% percentile in frontend engineering skills for a 1-year-old "name whatever category" app. And with the recent rise of focus on profitability, frugality, and the difficulty in fund-raising, being cognizant of cost per talent is now a thing.
I think Elon and Vivek's comments are more nuanced than they are taken. Elon, given he's at the cutting edge of engineering, must be having difficulty hiring top-99.9%-percentile talent against BigTech, and wants to open the pool of these types of talent from elsewhere. I don't think he wants H1Bs for React Native engineers. I am interpreting his comments as "I want to suck-in all A.I. researchers into America".
If they are, they have the platform to provide that nuance. Take a look at the public H1B data for Tesla (disclaimer it doesn't tell the full story), it does not seem like they are vying for the top-99.9%.
It seems odd we're giving billionaires the benefit of the doubt. They are positioning themselves to win, and that's totally fine in the system we're in, but let's not assume they are friends of the working class.
X Corp pays 150k for swe i in san francisco.
I'd be happy with the starting salary, but not there.
a. Note that "outside of the US" covers more than India and Pakistan. Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc. all have sizeable research or R&D centers in France, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, UK, etc. Most of these countries have engineers of a level comparable (better by some metrics, worse by others) to US engineers.
b. I've known several top-notch programmers from India. One of them is an important contributor to the Linux kernel, another to the core of Firefox. I have no clue how common that is, but be wary of stereotypes.
Except, you get what you pay for.
If someone is good then they are able to compete for more highly paid positions and therefore aren't working for 20% of the salary.
So in the end you shoot yourself in the foot, especially in startups where crappy code leads your team to work at a snails pace as your code becomes a spaghetti tangled mess. Then, once it does you end up hiring the expensive guys to come in as consultants to try to get back to what you could have avoided in the first place. Then you have to hope that in the meantime you haven't had any major security issues...
While this approach is self-serving, it makes sense. He could acquire that top talent today if he was willing to pay for it—people would leave their current jobs for a pay upgrade. But he's not willing to do that. So, he needs more candidates.
Market is rough right now for sure but I also want to share some flags I’d personally note when looking at your website / LinkedIn.
1. You have experience in a lot of technologies, which sometimes is good, but can also be the case where you don’t have expertise in any of them. 2. According to LinkedIn since 2016 most of your gigs were about a year long. You also had a lead engineer gig that lasted eight months. I’m sure you put more info about it in your resume but it’s a pretty big flag considering that it spans not only the downturn but boom periods as well. 3. No well known companies in your list. I know it sucks that pedigree matters so much in our industry but it does. 4. Political posts / complaining on LinkedIn. Having dealt with political stuff at work (from both sides of the isle) it’s such a pain in the ass that my risk management alert kicks in. 5. I see you’re in Denver. Are you applying only for remote gigs? Sadly, a lot of companies are doing RTO and probably not in your area.
Hope this helps a bit. Hope things improve for you soon.
Linking to Jack Posobiec’s tweets and complaining about being called a racist on hacker news, on your linkedin account, just makes you look radioactive. And dumb: linkedin is for hustle porn; 4chan, twitter and their derivatives are for online political warfare. Your inability to distinguish between these shows that you will likely act inappropriately in a professional environment. It shows you don’t know your audience at all, which are the people whose money you want.
And then there’s the age-old question of whether you want to be right, or be liked. It’s not really your responsibility to educate your coworkers on socio-economic-political realities, and they likely don’t come to work to hear others’ opinions about it. But you are shaping an online persona that advertises such a service.
I’ve gone through long stretches of looking for work and fear another in this market environment, so I do sympathize. But you gotta button up. And don’t just shape a better image of a pleasant coworker–actually be one. I’ve worked with too many this-is-your-brain-on-social-media types, of all political persuasions, and it’s miserable.
It's really fun (no sarcasm) watching all of you people jump to the wrong conclusion as you judge my motivations and reasons for posting this though.
Aside from seeing a few posts and knowing he's right wing, I don't even know who Jack Posobiec is. Politics isn't my main thing. As I stated above, I am "socially apolitical". I have my opinions and my affiliations and I mostly keep it to myself unless it benefits me to do otherwise.
1. > No expertise in technology:
Strongly disagree. I'm an expert in python, javascript, c#, application development, object oriented programming, agile, communication, and much more. I guess this isn't shining through on my profiles. Will have to find a way to fix it. There are many companies who value a generalist skill set.
2. > 2016 "gigs"
I had health issues starting in 2016 which derailed my career. I took what I was able to get and was still able to progress. I was promoted from eng I to eng II prior to the health issues. Later I was able to land a job as VP of engineering.
3. The lead engineer (VP of engineering) role that I had was a complicated situation - I performed my duties well and was rewarded handsomely. Working for startups doesn't always end well. From there I took time off to work for myself and you're correct, that's when the downturn started. Had I known AI would be released and jobs would dry up, i wouldn't have taken the risk of starting my own company at that point in time.
4. I havent worked for huge companies my entire career, much of it has been for start-ups but Enova, DoubleClick and Threadless are actually well known. Enova is a huge corporation and DoubleClick (one of my first jobs) was purchased by Google which is what lead to them becoming an ad company. Threadless has declined in popularity, but at the time it was extremely popular and well known. Other than that as I said, startups. Idiotic to judge a person based on whether or not the company is well known.
5. I haven't "complained" on LinkedIn. Regardless, i have deactivated my LinkedIn account, which I had planned on doing for the last month. Thanks for giving me the motivation to do so tonight. It is a silly echo chamber that has never lead to anything positive for me. I didn't even have an account until a few years ago so it will not be missed. It's clear that maintaining a LinkedIn social media account is a career hazard. That's the most useful thing your unsolicited feedback has turned up.
6. > political posts
Political posts online prevent me from working? That's absurd. My politics haven't even been stated aside from my position on H-1B and globalism. I should be allowed my political opinions without fear of reprocussion from a biased hiring manager such as yourself, but i really haven't even put any out there other than this post.
I have political opinions, and I am registered to vote, but I'm "socially apolitical" aside from a small amount of activist work I've done which hasn't been broadcast on the internet.
I don't bring politics or religion to the workplace.
It's like if a user does something wrong in your app, you don't blame or explain to the user what they did wrong. You figure out how to improve your UX.
I came to similar conclusions from your public profile. The defensiveness of your response would be a 7th red flag.
This website is part of my public profile. Allowing people to shape an incorrect narrative of myself on this website is not something I will be doing. Especially when it is coming from anonymous posters who haven't shared their professional credentials.
> you have to correct your online appearance
Obviously I am continuously looking to improve my "online appearance". I disagree with the feedback I've received here. People's emotions are running high on a hot-button topic (immigration and job market woes) so in other locations in this post I'm being called a racist and a conspiracy theorist - I am taking everything here with a grain of salt and doing damage control as anonymous accounts sift through my various online profiles and offer up unsolicited advice. Defending one's position is pretty standard in this situation.
Correcting disinformation ("complaining on linkedin", "no expertise in technology", "political posts", "you're a racist", "you're a conspiracy theorist") is part of maintaining a public profile on the internet.
Lastly, as I stated in my response to the alleged hiring manager with regard to my expertise in technology:
> I guess this isn't shining through on my profiles. Will have to find a way to fix it.
Given how competitive the job market is right now, you have a PR issue. It's important to take a deep breath and recognize that people are trying to offer you objective advice.
If you're not willing to improve your public profile, you can't expect to receive interest.
Have you ever had a friend in a terrible relationship, where everyone can see how bad it is except for them? You have a problem with your public image. If you don't think it accurately portrays you, then clean it up. From your post, it seems like you're involved in really interesting projects—why sabotage your good deeds?
Deleting your LinkedIn profile seems a bit extreme. You should be creating it in a very polished way. All you need is one job to come from it or to catch the eye of one recruiter.
You have to play the game. That sucks, but the freewheeling days seem to be over. Play the game or accept you are making the rock you're pushing uphill heavier.
Deleting LinkedIn isn't extreme in the least. I hate the website and I'm better off without it - its a dying social media platform and i only had the account because a former employer forced me to create it. I am sure wpyou wisuph you could scour it for intel, but I had intended to delete it for months and was only using it to promote my personal projects and my other accounts, and apply to jobs. I monitor all of my sites with Google analytics and was getting very little traffic from LinkedIn, and none of the job applications I put out with LinkedIn panned out due to it being over saturated with applicants - as I said, worthless.
Furthermore, I am correct about H-1B. It is a broken system. This has been acknowledged by businessmen and lawmakers alike on both sides of the aisle. Posting about it on LinkedIn isn't political or complaining. I happen to be connected to extremely influential people. If my posts reached them and swayed their opinion to my side or even got them thinking about it: mission accomplished.
To reiterate, I didn't ask for advice, I asked about OTHER people's experiences as they pertain to racism, ageism and sexism - the fact that people jumped into my personal profiles and started offering up unsolicited commentary reveals their true motivations: trolling. Very unprofessional. Ill-informed "advice" rejected.
I don't need the internet to think for me, it's why I didn't ask, but thanks for contributing to the entertaining echo chamber.
i've worked with many, many recruiters over the years, and only a handful who weren't actively interfering with finding a good dev / company fit.
between that, automated resume filtering and linkedin's requirements to serve linkedin before serving anyone else, we're all living in a situation that would be hilariously ridiculous if it wasn't so sad.
I completely agree that we need a disruption on the hiring front. The entire hiring process is broken.
Age discrimination has been a real problem in tech for a very long time, this isn't new at all. Yet, somehow, it feels like it has gotten progressively worse over time. There are companies where you have the young (25-ish, just out of school) comprise the majority and the managers are just a few years older than that. They simply do not want to see "Mom" or "Dad" join the team.
You are going to find very few 40, 50 or 60+ year old engineer in those environments. Their experience and capabilities do not matter at all except for a few domains where they almost have no options (RF electronics, signal/power integrity, embedded systems, gov/mil, etc.).
I am not saying that age discrimination is the only filter being applied, of course not. That is, however, likely one of the main filters for a large group in the application pool.
The other problem seems to be that a massive portion of the job posting on sites like LinkedIn seem to be fake. I have seen reports claiming that the number might be as high as 80%. These postings are fake for a lot of reasons. One of them, at least in the US, are rules/laws that require posting a job opening even when you have already identified someone you will hire (or retain) for that role. Companies have to be able to show they evaluated N applications before declaring they will hire someone from the inside or retain/bring-in an H1B.
This is terrible and --while there is no indication that this will be an objective-- I hope the new administration gives this issue some thought and modifies the rules of the game to create a real market for jobs, one where opportunities are fair for everyone (whatever that metric might be).
For example, people have been told to go study coding all the way back to the Obama administration (maybe earlier, I don't remember). So, lots of people did. And then they were dropped on their collective heads. No offense to anyone, but, if the US is telling its young to study CS, H1B visas should have become rare and exceptional. Nothing else is fair.
There are other problems, of course, many problems. One of the is that university CS programs in the US and elsewhere, well, suck. People come out of programs with their degrees and are incapable of writing code. In the US, they can argue with you about Socialism and Karl Marx, and they can't code shit. They are taught what I call "coding by library". I am going to stretch and suggest that the vast majority of them would drown if you gave them C and a raw embedded system and asked them to implement a neural network or a genetic algorithm (and many other things). Give them Python and Pybullet and they are all geniuses. Brilliant.
So, yeah, education has to change. A CS/Engineering degree should consist of three years of core, from the ground-up, subjects and one more year specializing at a higher level. Yes, that means that the $50K students are forced to pay for bullshit non-degree topics must go. They are a waste of time. General education should happen in high school, not university at $30K to $50K per year.
You should be able to graduate with a solid CS foundation in three years, a generalist, if you will. Anyone wishing to specialize should be able to add one year to their BS degree for this purpose and a Masters after that.
About two years ago I helped a recent CS graduate prepare for an interview. What I learned from this single data point was astounding. It is embarrassing that our universities are doing such a horrible job in preparing people for their futur...
But the standard curriculum I'm familiar with always includes courses where you need to use C, or similar low level languages, to write an OS, compilers, networking stack, etc. And at least one course focused on a system language as a pre-req for those. The push for more practical coursework I think is perceived to have come from industry, which generally would rather have someone who can string some python packages together to do something quickly than someone who's never touched python but can write a compiler or OS from scratch.
That said, I do think it seems like ML topics should fit into standard coursework (wasn't really a thing when I was in school - AI was maybe an occasional elective or grad topic). It seems pretty adjacent to parallel and distributed computing (don't remember if that was optional or required) and statistics, which was not precisely part of CS curriculum, but occasionally discrete math/algo/grammar track adjacent in practice.
But I have trouble seeing how that could fit into 3 years. It's hard to parallelize the intro series of courses that build up to the "fan out" to he higher level courses/reqs, (though maybe stats/ML intro could fit early) and once you hit the fan out, 3 courses take about 80/hrs a week for most of a semester. IMO if you're wanting foundational knowledge and not the "patch Python packages together" it's hard to compress.
One thing that is happening is non-CS degrees with weaker requirements to get to people skills, like BAs in technology and computing, that focus much more lightly on CS and just have a solid amount of "practical" coursework, e.g. "here's how to use the most common Python ML libraries and Django, BTW this would be a great thing to double major in with Bio."
There are plenty or published articles discussing why the mega-interviews became a thing when employers started to realize CS graduates could not develop software.
And then there's the H1B argument. If our educational pipeline is delivering people with solid skill sets, hiring H1B's should be rare because you could not justify it.
Better yet, given the cost of higher education in the US: Why are universities not graduating the absolute best professionals in the world? Every single H1B hire is one more data point in support of the idea that our universities are not doing a good job.
Before someone mentions pay, I looked around and there seem to be multiple studies indicating that H1B's are getting paid on-par with US workers.
Once again, if an H1B hire is justified, it means our universities did not produce candidates with competitive skill sets. Then, why are we paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for these degrees and financially enslaving people for decades?
IMO many of them suffered not from being poor at stuff like writing a compiler or foundational CS (because I think some of them were better than me), but not really having a way to translate those core skills to jobs that wanted specific skills that differed. I've had fine luck getting jobs in languages I've never used, but so far as I can tell (a) most people don't even try because they believe requirements are requirements, and (b) it's less and less common consider deviation from "requirements" okay, particularly without connections of some sort.
For non SW engineer engineers it seems worse - I know a good number who've ended up starting unrelated businesses (e.g. making furniture) because they couldn't find a job within a year or so of getting a degree. Or who got masters degrees just to work for $40-$60k a year for 5+ years before finding a way to get paid better.
I do not buy the H1B argument. While I think hiring remote foreigners is now widespread and often an even more economic alternative, I have, for my whole life, seen positions written to be excessively niche, posted in places where actual job seekers will ignore or not see, and applications rejected to hire H1B hires, whether for traditional engineers (chemical, mechanical, etc.) or SW developers. My dad used to enjoy pointing out job ads that weren't supposed to get applicants in papers and magazines.
That said, there's a large mix of H1B hiring types. But most of what I've personally seen and witnessed has not struck me as savory. Every shenanigan in the books gets used - label a SW eng role as "programmer" or "IT system tech" role, muddle whether the comparative pay does or doesn't include benefits valued correctly, reject applicants for inane reasons to get the more "perfect fit" non-American.
I completely agree. However, we have not had that (lots of concepts) for decades. Universities are largely ideologically monocultural now. This isn't education, it's indoctrination.
And, when you include the fact that students are paying tens of thousands of dollars for all of their non-major courses, this quickly turns into a tragedy. Most people take decades to pay off their student loans.
General education needs to happen in K-12. There are plenty of cultures around the world where high school students graduate with impressive (compared to average US) cultural background and exposure.
Sometimes flipping things around can be useful. Nobody in their right mind would suggest an English or History major should be forced to take a solid year worth of CS coursework as a condition for obtaining the degree. Why is the reverse OK? It is not. We've just come to accept it.
Here's another thought experiment: Imagine I was allowed by the Department of Education to grant Bachelor degrees in CS while focusing 100% on CS coursework. My four-year graduates would absolutely destroy anyone from a university who wasted their time with non-STEM courses. They would be brutally better candidates for every job. It would be a truly unfair advantage. That's how our current system is damaging our young professionals. They are forcing them to waste a year of their lives on stuff nobody cares about when hiring.
I would speculate that what you’re seeing is society in general being much more of a monoculture than it used to be. Extremes still exist, but they are far fewer than they were 100 years ago, when people couldn’t even use certain water fountains because of the color of their skin.
Maybe the point you’re getting at is that universities used to be edgier—it was more of an environment for challenging the status quo and not being afraid of controversy. I agree that it’s extremely not like that anymore, to the point that even guest speakers on campus are frequently boycotted or threatened.
I think it may be indoctrination in a systemic way, but not as a conscious, active effort. I don’t think there’s a secret group of people deliberately making universities more monocultural with that as the intended outcome. But I recognize that a process may have naturally led to this regardless.
> General education needs to happen in K-12
I think there’s value in extending general education beyond what public schooling offers, which isn’t much. Public school really fails to engage students in meaningful and interesting ways. People graduate hating math and thinking it’s stupid and pointless because they’re never given context as to why it’s interesting, or shown all the cool things math allows us to do. Universities can engage people in topics they wouldn’t normally consider, and that’s where the value of general education comes in. My partner is a great example of this—she got to attend a series of university lectures when she was in high school, covering a broad range of topics designed for her age group to help them figure out what interested them. She attended a physics lecture on dark matter, and it genuinely sparked an interest in a topic she had previously found hideously boring. She now has a PhD and a prestigious career in that field, and it never would have happened without that generalized exposure that universities provide.
> Nobody in their right mind would suggest an English or History major should be forced to take a solid year worth of CS coursework as a condition for obtaining the degree. Why is the reverse OK? It is not.
I would say English is definitely a worthwhile course for CS majors, due to my previous point.
> Here's another thought experiment
Yes, I agree. A university is not optimal for maximum efficiency in job performance, but that’s not really its primary goal. And I think universities are fine the way they are (minus the monoculture, the expense, and the problematic treatment of grad students, along with the publish-or-perish mentality). That said, there should also be better, more accessible mainstream options for the kind of training you’re describing.
Well, first, the government should not be in the business of student loan guarantees. This inflates costs and provides incentives for padding education with expensive coursework that nobody values.
Degrees should not force non-degree coursework on students. While I tend to discuss STEM, I am sure this could be applied to other degrees. For example, my sister got a degree in Social Work at a major US university. She had to endure courses such as Statistics. Why? Even people in STEM fields hate statistics.
Yes, of course, I agree with you regarding courses such as English being important for STEM graduates. However, it would be my requirement and expectation that high school should graduate people who are able to communicate and express themselves without having to pay thousands of dollars in university for the same learning.
> an environment for challenging the status quo and not being afraid of controversy
Sure. And yet, when you have classes like "Young Karl Marx" forced upon students in direct opposition with reality, well, what the hell is that?
If we are to speak about delivering culture, we have to talk about the Greeks, the great philosophers, the law and other matters. Art, music, history and religion with as little bias as possible. Yes, of course, teach about Karl Marx. However, any reasonable treatment of the subject would clearly have to also deliver the conclusion that these are ideas the world has tried and determined to be disastrous at many levels. To be clear, the world has still to discover perfection --which likely does not exist-- however, teaching failed ideologies at a mass scale as if it were utopia only serves to destroy society.
> I don’t think there’s a secret group of people deliberately making universities more monocultural
Correct. Of course. No, this is like a control system with no feedback that, once it started to go off the rails had no feedback loop to correct it. It just happened.
I think Niall Ferguson provides good insight as to how this happened. Here's one of his interviews:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdeFJ4WCqhk
> she got to attend a series of university lectures when she was in high school, covering a broad range of topics designed for her age group to help them figure out what interested them. She attended a physics lecture on dark matter, and it genuinely sparked an interest in a topic she had previously found hideously boring. She now has a PhD and a prestigious career in that field, and it never would have happened without that generalized exposure that universities provide.
That's beautiful and that is precisely what school should be about, K-12 and university. However, at a mass scale, it has been broken for a long time. Sure, there are corner cases, but I think I can say this is the exception rather than the rule.
My own kids have always told me they learn more from me than what their public school education has exposed them to. Having been educated both in and outside the US, I understood precisely what they were telling me. I exposed them to all of the great philosophers, discussions about all religions and open discussions about political thought and history. And I always encouraged them to not take my words (or anyone else's) as ground truth, to think critically, learn and arrive at their own conclusions. And, yes, of course, I also exposed them to STEM subjects not covered in school or before they came up in school. Business and economics were subjects of frequent discussion, because you need this as an 18 year old entering the world. Etc.
In the end, what we choose to teach our children will determine our future. If we put them on the wrong path and don't give them the skills necessary to thrive and be competitive with other...
I have heard this argument many times and happen to think it is a false argument.
Universities (in the US) are not what they used to be. They are not culturally open. They have become dangerous monoculture indoctrination centers. STEM degrees, due to their nature, are not impacted as hard as are others. People in other non-STEM paths are in full-on monoculture indoctrination programs, even if not explicitly stated.
What isn't fair is for people to attend university in the US, graduate with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and not end-up with at least two things: Marketable skills that are competitive with anyone from other countries and, well, culture.
It just so happens that I attended both high school and university abroad and in the US. My family moved about due to business when I was in school. I have perspective to offer from the UK, US and Argentina.
I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, that US education has been an unmitigated disaster for DECADES. The problem with this is that, even if changes were to be made today, it will also take decades for the results to surface.
I am an immigrant in the US. I graduated from high school with a far deeper and broader cultural foundation than I would say most college graduates in the US. This is no joke. And this is why, if I were to use a nasty generalization, Americans are regarded as dumb and ignorant outside of the US. Of course, this isn't absolutely fair, it's a stereotype, and stereotypes do not apply to the entire population. However, there are measurable elements of this. Our schools are broken, from the bottom up.
We have a country where people graduate from university actually believing that communism and socialism are good things. This sounds so fucking stupid to immigrants who have actually lived in these regimes that I cannot even begin to describe it. It is surreal to see how the US has allowed this to happen.
To go back to what you said: "Expecting hands on skills from a degree isn't fair"
No my friend, what isn't fair is to graduate with $100K to $300K in debt and have that degree be so dubious that you have to endure five technical interviews before someone considers hiring you. And, in addition to that, the jobs you could have had go to H1B's because companies can make a case that you are not adequate for the job.
We should not make our children pay for substandard education. That is not fair.
My solution is simple: Stop pretending that we are teaching real culture and fire all the ideological assholes from these universities. Nobody should be forced to pay one single cent for this crap.
Teaching should be a meritocracy. Our schools are filled with "teachers" and "professors" that are worse than YouTube tutorial authors. Why are we making our children pay for mediocrity and incompetence.
I remember one of my kids having a science teacher in middle school who actually taught his classes that the moon does not rotate about its axis. And that was not the only incredibly ignorant thing he taught. I went to war and tried to get him fired. He had no business teaching science at all. He was a Chiropractor who got his teaching credentials and they gave him the science spot because he had "Dr." in his name. Well, I could not get him hired. The union protected him. Jokes on me, he retired after 30 years on the job with full pension and healthcare benefits for life. Who knows how many kids he ruined through his "teachings".
Teachers should be paid very well and held to a very high standard.
In university STEM fields, teach STEM and only STEM. Graduate people with world class skills. Reduce the cost by eliminating that 25% of coursework that no employer cares about. If a student chooses to study non STEM subjects, sure, be my guest, they can pay for them and there are no loan guarantees for the universities (whic...
where do you think bezos, zuck, gates, jobs… went to school - fucking Argentina?!
what a nonsense drivel you wrote - quite insane!
us educational system has a lot of issues. tough to expect otherwise given the size as well as the fact that one of the two major political parties in the US likes their voters dumb - the dumber the better. but it is still the best educational system on the planet, otherwise the kids of US elite would be flocking schools in fucking Argentina (they are not and never will)
Not dumb enough to get a useless degree in feminist basket weaving on a 200k loan though..
This is such a common and tired meme. It aims to stomp on something that someone said with a nonsensical argument. A bit of shooting the messenger and an appeal to authority (the veil attack being that everything that isn't Fox News is true and pure).
Fox News has its problem, every media outlet has. And yet, 95% of so-called reliable "news" outlets lied to the entire nation for over three years about such things as Biden's cognitive problems (and much more). Be careful who you choose as your source for truth. You should not trust anyone in the media. Yes, that means FNN included.
To address your personal attack: I had better math, history, science and, yes, English scores in public high school in Massachusetts as a foreign student educated in Argentina. I could read and write better than most in my class. I knew more about history, geography, philosophy and was better at math, physics, chemistry, etc. So, say what you want, at least this one data point, as flawed as it might be, actually lived through many experiences that showed me the real differences. Later on I made sure my own children did not fall victims to these inadequacies by supplementing the substandard education (at a world level) with learning at home.
And this isn't about just one country outside the US. For example, I have friends in Singapore, Italy, Spain, Germany and other places whos kids can run circles around your average US-educated high-school graduate.
> where do you think bezos, zuck, gates, jobs… went to school - fucking Argentina?!
One would think that before someone decides to make a comment like that they would take a few minutes to actually educate themselves and understand what they are about to say. Go learn about the people you listed there and understand.
Your insulting comments about Argentina (or nations other than the US by extension) is precisely why people around the world have formed certain opinions about Americans. You lack perspective, culture and knowledge about what you owe the rest of the world. Be humble, learn a little history and understand the shoulders you are standing on. If the history of the modern world is a meter long, the US is responsible for approximately 1 millimeter of it, if that.
Here, I'll give you a push-start: Go read about the history of the artificial heart, heart bypass surgery and blood transfusions. And, while you are at it, make a list of science, engineering and cultural contributions from around the world for some perspective.
You can believe anything you wish. Or you can make an attempt to understand reality and be a part of the solution. I want things to change for the better. It appears that you actually believe we have the best system of education. Well, I am not sure what to say other than: You are wrong. We might actually have one of the worst.
if you believe this and your children are here in the US that would be borderline child abuse to subject your own flesh and blood to the worst educational system…
I said FoxNews mostly because you are tauting word-for-word party-line garbage without any thought of your own on the matter.
people from all over the world come to the United States (including yourself and myself) to get educated. Absolute best higher education schools are here. If polled random 100 people from developer nations to name 10 non-US universities roughly 99 of them would stop at like 6.
shitting on US education is ring-wing garbage you are trying to sell and you should not be selling it cause no sane person will be buying it.
First of all, your right-wing characterization is wrong, insulting and distasteful. You have revealed much about yourself when choosing to take this approach instead of having a conversation, so I do not expect you to apologize. So be it.
It is really interesting to me to see just how common it is for some to attempt to attack ideas or discourse by making such accusations. The parallels to the story from Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperors New Clothes" and even Plato's Allegory of the Cave are impossible to ignore.
Once again, the most recent examples of the delusion being the massive lies and deception around Biden's mental health, the southern border and the crime it brought into our nation, to name just a few. These are truths that stand on their won, regardless of where they might be printed, heard or viewed.
> I said FoxNews mostly because you are tauting word-for-word party-line garbage without any thought of your own on the matter.
Again, you make assumptions and deliver insults. It appears one cannot possibly be critical of the Emperor, who actually is naked, without being accused of all sorts of things. He is naked my friend. Can't you see?
> if you believe this and your children are here in the US that would be borderline child abuse to subject your own flesh and blood to the worst educational system…
No, you are wrong, and what you are saying is a ridiculous stretch. You are not thinking.
I want education in the US to improve for all children, because a better-educated people will improve things for everyone. The only way this happens is if we are honest and critical. Thinking that education in the West is, as you put it, the absolute best, is like being chained in Plato's cave confusing shadows for reality.
> If polled random 100 people from developer nations to name 10 non-US universities roughly 99 of them would stop at like 6.
I would suggest you stop here. What is being revealed about you isn't good at all. Either you are young and not ready to understand or confused, and maybe both. There are amazing universities all over the world, in both developed and developing nations. Yes, the US might have some of the most recognizable names in the world. And, in most cases, with good reason. Yet, that does not mean the world is a barren wasteland. In fact, some of the most prominent companies in the US are loaded with people who graduated from schools outside of the US, people who have driven innovation and wonderful things for decades. Don't take that approach. It is wrong and misinformed.
US education has problems that can be fixed with the right approach and incentives. This is not insurmountable, it simply requires recognizing the issues and acting in the best interest of future generations and the nation.
US education has problems that can be fixed with the right approach and incentives. This is not insurmountable, it simply requires recognizing the issues and acting in the best interest of future generations and the nation.
If you came here to discuss and said this to begin with - the conversation would have been a lot different. This is what I mentioned couple of times, there are problems. however, you said that US is one of the worst which is why you had to read a bunch of stuff ... not sure I have to tell you this but there is a very slight difference between US education has problems that can be fixed with the right approach and incentives vs. "US education system is one of the worst" :)
The results we obtain do not align well with the money we spent per student. Not to mention the ideological crap we shove into their minds, particularly at the university level.
And the problem is that it isn't getting better.
Things need to change, and do so quickly. Like I said in one of my prior comments, these are issues that take a generation or more to yield results. If we don't fix this quickly, we are going to have very serious problems in the coming decades. And, the only way to solve these problems will be through the promotion of immigration of university graduates from other countries. There's nothing wrong with that other than the huge disservice we will do to our students.
The world is a competitive place. Nothing should stand in the way of our system of education reaching for and demanding excellence.
EDIT:
I have to add this.
One of my son's friends decided to go for a Masters in Mechanical Engineering. Since I was a mentor at our local high school robotics team, she asked me what I thought about one of the schools she was kind of set on attending. I took one look and begged her to not do this. Her Masters was going to cost her THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS.
How? Why? This is insane!
Mechanical engineers graduate every day from excellent universities around the world at a cost between zero and, maybe, one tenth of what she was facing. And they are just as capable as anyone else.
Well, the sales people did a good job on her and she took that path. Years later she told me just how sorry she was not to take my advise.
How does an ME degree cost $300K? How is it possibly worth it? How did we allow the system to degenerate to such a level that it is legal to do this to our young?
No my friend. This is a disaster. This is really bad on many fronts. It needs to be fixed or we will pay the consequences in the long run.
I had two courses that, as part of their curriculum, had a couple lectures to teach me how to write a resume. One of them was a 200-level English Technical Writing course; the other was a 300-level CS course. I had never had an actual job, yet somehow I wrote a better resume than my peers; many of them completely half-assed theirs. In the speech/comms 101 course, apparently I was the only one who had ever synthesized an argument or done any sort of critical thinking prior to that class.
I frequently got told that it was unusual for me, the CS student, to be doing well in various courses. My physics E&M prof asked me how I was able to do so well, better than the engineers and physics students. My math profs asked me why I was taking math courses for fun.
CS courses generally were a joke; a prof told me he had been trying to figure out how/where he was failing in his teaching content, until I showed up and it was clear that the problem was not with the content, but with the quality of students. I am pretty certain the majority of folks who took the C programming course still don't know how to work with pointers.
In-state tuition was still ~$15-20k/yr.
I got quite frustrated by my peers. They just didn't seem to care about the content or technology. I'd internally think "why are you even here then in this degree program"? It was clearly frustrating to the profs, it was frustrating to me, etc. At the time, my peers would especially be loud/demanding that the profs put in more work in education, and to some degree struck me as rather entitled. I would tinker a bit beyond what was required in the curriculum / syllabus, primarily because it was fun and interesting, not motivated by any sort of desire to get ahead, etc.
The state of education is not great I agree, but imo somehow we have created generations of students who don't care or are less able to do critical thinking, and certainly that impedes and/or unravels the progress any educator could hope to do.
Thanks for posting this. I agree with everything you said.
Real problems are never about a single magical variable that fixes everything. They always consist of sometimes complex graphs of parameters (issues, control points, rules, laws, politics) that need to be address to a sufficient breath and depth to make things change.
I am intrigued about ideas such as eliminating the Department of Education. I haven't really given it any thought, so I can't speak about this to any depth, for or against it. I do, however, reject big government (that does not mean "no government") and tend to believe that the more you rip out of government claws the better off you might be.
When I get vocal about the state of US education it is easy for many to only think about my criticism only applying to top tier schools. That's not the case at all. The problem is systemic, and it starts with the sad state of the K-12 education.