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Ask HN: POTUS Donald Trump; What this means to Silicon Valley

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Re: Ask HN: POTUS Donald Trump; What this means to Silicon Valley

#111

Post by jmolinaso »

janoc wrote: post #74
Normal_gaussian wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or easier. Hillary is a face of western corruption to much of the world. So long as Trump delegates the tech stuff properly and doesn't do anything too unusual the moral choice of the US should be easier.

Not true here in France or most of Europe, for that matter. The only people happy about Trump is ultra-right wing/neo nazi panopticon of odd figures - Wilders, Le Pen, Farage, Orban ... Really the "crème de la crème" of Europe. And, of course, Putin. The rest is worried now - people are seriously questioning what happens, for example with NATO, after Trump's remarks on not unconditionally supporting the allies. Is Tr…

True story, when in Europe the cheerers are the ultras we all get it as a sign that something is not going in the "right" (ironically right) direction.

Anyway, too many actors, too many variables too many things to come. Just wait and see!

Re: Ask HN: POTUS Donald Trump; What this means to Silicon Valley

#112

Post by internaut »

lonewolf_ninja wrote: post #57
internaut wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having watched and listened to Thiel for several years now, I came up with a pet hypothesis I call 'The Wolfian World' that I feel describes what's going on more accurately than the newspapers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884413

Quite an interesting observation and detailed comment. Are the presentations/videos available on YouTube?

If you mean Gene Wolfe's masterwork, then yes, there are interpretations/commentary available online.

If you meant the 'Wolfian World', I came up with that 2 days ago, so no.

I did clean up the essay, added some material, made it a bit more accessible to non-HN readers and put it here:

https://medium.com/@internaut_48577/peter-and-the-wolfe-b8de...

In fact about 1/4 of my comments on HN relate to the 'Technological Stagnation Hypothesis'. The TSN is rather hard to appreciate (for most people in our society it seems unbelievable, they just can't shift their mental model of a world with progress because their benchmarks for that are mostly faith based) but Peter Thiel has made many videos available explaining what it means, I think this is one of the best ones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw-rxtwhzcY

The 'Wolfian World' is merely a way to look at our world sideways through a (brilliant) work of fiction with very similar themes to Peter Thiel's Technological Stagnation Hypothesis.

Re: Ask HN: POTUS Donald Trump; What this means to Silicon Valley

#113

Post by internaut »

puranjay wrote: post #69
internaut wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having watched and listened to Thiel for several years now, I came up with a pet hypothesis I call 'The Wolfian World' that I feel describes what's going on more accurately than the newspapers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884413

Dude, turn that comment into a blog post ASAP. It needs a place where it can "live" more permanently

Here you go.

https://medium.com/@internaut_48577/peter-and-the-wolfe-b8de...

Re: Ask HN: POTUS Donald Trump; What this means to Silicon Valley

#114

Post by pavlov »

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #7
sjm wrote: post #5

I'd guess it will be a harder sell to get software developers in Europe, Australia, NZ, etc. to move to the US.

Or easier. Hillary is a face of western corruption to much of the world. So long as Trump delegates the tech stuff properly and doesn't do anything too unusual the moral choice of the US should be easier.

Hillary is a face of western corruption to much of the world.

No, to 99% of the rest of the world she's just a former Secretary of State and the wife of a former president whose era is often viewed through a nostalgic lens compared to current turmoil.

Fox News doesn't broadcast outside USA, you know.

Re: Ask HN: POTUS Donald Trump; What this means to Silicon Valley

#115

Post by Anderkent »

rimantas wrote: post #91
jedberg wrote: post #88

The only policy position he really made clear that would affect SV was that he said he would find a way to severely punish Apple for making their devices in China. Whether he follows through and has congressional support is to be seen.

No other US company makes anything in China?

Trump is not known for his consistency.

Re: Ask HN: POTUS Donald Trump; What this means to Silicon Valley

#116

Post by rubber_duck »

BatFastard wrote: post #104
janoc wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Salaries in western Europe are about half of US salaries, if you go to the East, while still within EU, a programmer could be paid as little as $15-20k/year. If you go even more to the East - Ukraine, Russia, China, India, etc. you can get very highly qualified people for even less, happy to work on a project for you. Software is one of the easiest things to outsource/offshore, unlike manufacturing or servic…

Software is NOT easy to outsource. I have been part of many outsourcing projects over the last 15 years, and I can count on one hand the number of those that have been acceptable. Outsourcing requires a completely different style of management than of a local team of developers. I have had better luck outsourcing art and animation tasks. But even there cultural barriers pop up all the time.

Sure it is, most of the problems I've seen described fall squarely in to "we went cost cutting all the way and got shit results - who could have guessed". If you hire cheap devs even by local standards then you get cheap devs, add to that the lack of proper management like you said because it would cost to do it properly and you get crap. Tech giants all have teams all over the world and it works OK, but they pay top rates for local standards and have proper management chain top down.

You can save money by outsourcing, but if you try to minimize expenses at all costs it shows in quality.

Re: Ask HN: POTUS Donald Trump; What this means to Silicon Valley

#117

Post by throwaway1892 »

padraic7a wrote: post #109
cs02rm0 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tread carefully; while I suspect most of Europe doesn't care too much about Trump, the media and rest of the left wing in the UK labelled anyone pro-Brexit as ultra-right wing / neo Nazi types - they're still being called uneducated and racist by presenters on TV as I'm typing this. Then the vote for Brexit won a majority. They're not all scum at the extreme end of a political spectrum. If France goes down the same n…

The media are not the left. While individual publications might be exceptions to the rule generally the media are to the right of centre in Europe.

I don't where you get that from, but in France, most of the media are left-center left, with a few to the right.

Re: Ask HN: POTUS Donald Trump; What this means to Silicon Valley

#118

Post by SergeAx »

janoc wrote: post #64
rubber_duck wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Because the salaries of US-based programmers would rise? Because companies would be more motivated to train locals instead of importing foreigners? Or it just speeds up outsourcing.

Exactly. Salaries in western Europe are about half of US salaries, if you go to the East, while still within EU, a programmer could be paid as little as $15-20k/year. If you go even more to the East - Ukraine, Russia, China, India, etc. you can get very highly qualified people for even less, happy to work on a project for you. Software is one of the easiest things to outsource/offshore, unlike manufacturing or servic…

Reality check: decent developer in Russia earns $30k/year net, which means ~$40k gross. Really good ones are $50-60k/year net.

Re: Ask HN: POTUS Donald Trump; What this means to Silicon Valley

#119

Post by gspetr »

janoc wrote: post #74
Normal_gaussian wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or easier. Hillary is a face of western corruption to much of the world. So long as Trump delegates the tech stuff properly and doesn't do anything too unusual the moral choice of the US should be easier.

Not true here in France or most of Europe, for that matter. The only people happy about Trump is ultra-right wing/neo nazi panopticon of odd figures - Wilders, Le Pen, Farage, Orban ... Really the "crème de la crème" of Europe. And, of course, Putin. The rest is worried now - people are seriously questioning what happens, for example with NATO, after Trump's remarks on not unconditionally supporting the allies. Is Tr…

You are out of touch.

Silencing people you don't agree with by calling them misogynist, racist, sexist, etc. and expecting them to convert to your side does not work.

Marginalizing them does not work.

Not in Europe. (Brexit)

Not in the US. (President)

This strategy is 0 for 2.

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

Not only that, but you are also wrong on facts. There is no unconditional support of NATO allies by the US. See article 5:

"It commits each member state to consider an armed attack against one member state, in Europe or North America, to be an armed attack against them all."

Consideration of something is not unconditional support.

Re: Ask HN: POTUS Donald Trump; What this means to Silicon Valley

#120

Post by ohyes »

olalonde wrote: post #81
wkoszek wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You confuse skill with high salary. If you're a part of HN community and work for a startup with some seed funding, good luck with (a) finding people (b) paying them $150k. Not sure how you the want government to evaluate chemical, mechanical, aerospace etc. engineers. Right now it's formal education, since I think it's hard to do it objectively otherwise. For software engineers you expected USCIS will look at our ..…

> You confuse skill with high salary. Skill is too difficult to define objectively and it's probably not what you should be discriminating on anyways (in a purely economic sense). What you need to go for is "valuable" (scarce and in demand) engineers and salary is a decent proxy for that (more so than formal education). You also don't want the government to "evaluate" engineers because doing a good job at that would…

But unfortunately salaries fluctuate across the country. The same engineer might make 100k in Cleveland and 150k+ in Silicon Valley. What might make sense is having the h1b attached to the immigrant, no strings attached for 5-10 years. Firms would make sure to pay them market rate, because they don't want them to walk, and additionally would only hire actually necessary workers, because they're making the same as anyone else in the country.

The real issue is that h1b establishes a time period of essentially indentured servitude to the employee.

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