11–17 of 17 posts
There are plenty of experienced software engineers, aged 40+, many with families, who could do the jobs that Zuckerberg & co. want done. We hear a lot about diversity, but nothing about AGE. Why is that?
I'm sure Zuck and those like him would argue its because engineers over 40 just aren't a good "cultural fit" in today's tech companies.
Want more minorities, women, men who are either unskilled, unemployed and want to work, get back into work?
Have companies work with the colleges, universities and have the right teachers training the skills companies want in people to hire.
Then cancel, yes cancel all the H1Bs and ask them nicely to leave. Make it a offense for companies to hire undocumented workers. Put that CEO/Business owner in jail.
Then lower taxes.
You'll see a net benefit of those out of work whoever they are (black, white, latino, asian - all US citizen). Either go back to school, get into employment or start a business.
You'll see companies start hiring actual American people to get back to work.
Tax receipts will go up. The welfare state will actually go down, drastically. Less social programs and the deficit may actually go down. Students may actually start to pay back Student loans, by being in work.
The flow of money will stop being sent abroad, will actually go back into the towns, cities where it belongs.
Remember. Companies employ local people. Those local people need services. Those services pay for cleaners, cab drivers, waiters/waitresses, all these types of jobs. Taxes also go to the city and pay for lots of other jobs.
It's like an eco-system. Look at when JKF lowered taxes.
I remember reading somewhere, CEO's were getting tax breaks because jobs were going off-shore. This is crazy. They should get bonuses for having American Employees. They should be in prison for going off-shore. How many towns/cities in the US have been destroyed by CEOs for profit?
His H1B spiel has to be understood in that context .. it's fine to discuss if the program is abused. It's fine to criticize mass immigration, to maintain security, to advocate reasonable limits on the rate of immigration so as to not overburden social services etc. But what he is doing is pitting aggrieved minorities against each other, peddling the lie that "foreigners are stealing your jobs" to the worse off, and "foreigners are stealing your taxes" to the better off.
Quite honestly, Trump was winning me over in many ways before this. We do have too much political correctness, it's great that someone is speaking against special interests, we should make better international deals, we were stupid to arm rebel armies in the middle east etc. In most of his speeches he had come out in support of legal immigration, but looks like he has gone full nativist now. Too bad, he just lost my vote.
If his policies are implemented, we will destroy what PG eloquently describes below [2].
There is such a thing as Americanness. There's nothing like living abroad to teach you that. And if you want to know whether something will nurture or squash this quality, it would be hard to find a better focus group than hackers, because they come closest of any group I know to embodying it. Closer, probably, than the men running our government, who for all their talk of patriotism remind me more of Richelieu or Mazarin than Thomas Jefferson or George Washington.
When you read what the founding fathers had to say for themselves, they sound more like hackers. "The spirit of resistance to government," Jefferson wrote, "is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive."
Imagine an American president saying that today. Like the remarks of an outspoken old grandmother, the sayings of the founding fathers have embarrassed generations of their less confident successors. They remind us where we come from. They remind us that it is the people who break rules that are the source of America's wealth and power.
[1] https://www.donaldjtrump.com/images/uploads/Immigration-Refo...
Trump's policy sounds like affirmative action for US citizens. Yes, the H1-B visa system need to be policed so it's not used entirely to drive down wages of local specialized employees. I'm under no allusions that foreign H1-B workers have any right to work in the US, but neither do unemployed US citizens -- which is what Trump is advocating. This is blatant pandering to those working class voters who have been force…
1) Increase prevailing wage for H-1Bs 2) Requirement to hire American workers first
I actually don't see here a "right to work" for US citizens, only a requirement that they be hired prior to issuing a visa for a non-citizen/permanent resident. There are no details here, and how this is implemented is all important.
First, what would the minimum wage floor be? Market rate plus a percentage? Personally, I'd say that in high cost regions like SF, if the salary is less than $150k a year, it should be dismissed with contempt. I know this would cause sticker shock to employers, but when the median price of a house is well over 1 million, I'd say the minimum salary should be at least 200k, and probably more (this is in SF/Silicon Valley, it could be lower elsewhere). The reason I say this is that if the worker can't afford a buy a house and support a family in the region where the job is located, then you have a wage issue, not a skills issue. Keep in mind, we're talking about changing the normal hiring rules for employers seeking supposedly high skilled, highly educated workers who can't be found at any (reasonable?) wage. I understand that many jobs pay less, but we don't talk about a shortage of cashiers so critical that the US government needs to create a special visa for cashiers, even though employers would absolutely love to pay their cashiers less.
The issue of hiring a US citizen or permanent resident first is also all in the details. Suppose a programmer being interviewed for a junior web developer position does a great job on fizzbuzz, and can implement code to find all subsets of a set of integers that sum to a prime number at the whiteboard, but stumbles a bit trying to write code to find the sub matrix with the largest sum in an NXM matrix. Would this mean that the company can say attempted to hire a US citizen first? Alternatively, suppose that programmer completely failed fizzbuzz?
Personally, I like (but haven't fully considered) the approach of setting a very high minimum salary level, and then making it unlimited or setting the cap very high. To me, very high is, like, 250k ore more.
We no longer live in the industrial era in which workers were pretty much interchangeable. Workers are not interchangeable at all. Zuckerberg has already hired everybody in the USA whom he deems suitable. If he cannot import the additional people whom he believes to be suitable, he will simply have to put his engineering shop there where these people are; just like IBM has already done.
First you have evidence of this statement I assume.
Moreover, Google has opened a very large office in NYC in one of the very largest office buildings in the city. Facebook, (and Amazon and Microsoft and Apple) have much smaller offices for engineering staff.
When Facebook and other firms replicates Google's efforts in NYC, I might become more convinced that "Zuckerberg has already hired ...."
We no longer live in the industrial era in which workers were pretty much interchangeable. Workers are not interchangeable at all. Zuckerberg has already hired everybody in the USA whom he deems suitable. If he cannot import the additional people whom he believes to be suitable, he will simply have to put his engineering shop there where these people are; just like IBM has already done.