Let the economisms commence!
WSJ: H-1B Visas Keep Down U.S. Tech Wages, Study Shows
11–20 of 57 posts
Re: WSJ: H-1B Visas Keep Down U.S. Tech Wages, Study Shows
#12Crazy that an increase of supply depresses the price in a market. I have not been this outraged since I discovered water was wet. Competition makes our world prosperous. We should welcome it
There's the baby, which is highly talented people educated at elite universities overseas. Then there is the dirty bathwater, which is seat warmers hired at the lowest possible wages by "body shops" that bill them out to government and corporate customers. The first does create prosperity. The second, not so much.
There are several possible fixes: Auction visas with a high minimum. Disallow contracting-out workers on visas. Etc. It's a system that would be easy to fix at zero cost, and maybe even could be made into a source of revenue.
Re: WSJ: H-1B Visas Keep Down U.S. Tech Wages, Study Shows
#13Public service announcement: There is no such thing as a labor shortage. Having trouble hiring developers? Offer a salary of $1 million per year. Your new problem will be job applicant crowd-control. Whenever an employer reports a labor shortage they mean they can't find enough people to take jobs AT THE WAGE THEY ARE WILLING TO PAY. Lest you brand me a red shirt-wearing Das Kapital-waving pinko commie, let me lay another one on you: there is no such thing as a job shortage. Whenever anyone reports a shortage of jobs they mean they can't find anyone willing to employ their skill set AT THE WAGE THEY ARE WILLING TO ACCEPT. Any discussion of the labor market that focuses on quantity supplied, or quantity demanded, without addressing the necessarily-related price issues is ignorant at best, and very likely intentionally deceptive.
Re: WSJ: H-1B Visas Keep Down U.S. Tech Wages, Study Shows
#14Another article explaining how colleges graduate twice as many STEM workers as there are jobs.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/the-bogus-high-tech...
EDIT: (from the article) "Currently, U.S. colleges graduate far more scientists and engineers than find employment in those fields every year — about 200,000 more — while the IT industry fills about two-thirds of its entry-level positions with guest workers."
One of the reasons that SV tech firms hated Trump was because he wanted to stop the abuse of H1-B Visas.
Even Republican and head of HP Meg Whitman said she was voting against Trump. His promise to fix the H1-B Visa abuse would mean that HP would have to pay market wages for programmers and engineers.
Re: WSJ: H-1B Visas Keep Down U.S. Tech Wages, Study Shows
#15Crazy that an increase of supply depresses the price in a market. I have not been this outraged since I discovered water was wet. Competition makes our world prosperous. We should welcome it
There's the baby, which is highly talented people educated at elite universities overseas. Then there is the dirty bathwater, which is seat warmers hired at the lowest possible wages by "body shops" that bill them out to government and corporate customers. The first does create prosperity. The second, not so much. There are several possible fixes: Auction visas with a high minimum. Disallow contracting-out workers on…
Or would could enforce the law. The H1-B Visa program was intended to fill jobs for which there were no Americans with those skills desired.
There should be some sort of approval process from an institution or firm that does not have a conflict of interest with the firms applying for H1-B Visas.
Re: WSJ: H-1B Visas Keep Down U.S. Tech Wages, Study Shows
#16I feel that there are some core issues that can fix the problem:
1) Solve the Green-Card backlog issue that forces people in the backlog to stick with their current jobs. This is a major thing, that is not talked about more often.
2) Simple merit/salary based priority queue to grant VISAs.
I have never quite understood why there is this urge to entirely get rid of it instead of fixing it to do what it was originally supposed to do.
Edit: On an H1B right now, and I do think there needs to be major fixes.
Re: WSJ: H-1B Visas Keep Down U.S. Tech Wages, Study Shows
#17Another article explaining how colleges graduate twice as many STEM workers as there are jobs. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/the-bogus-high-tech... EDIT: (from the article) "Currently, U.S. colleges graduate far more scientists and engineers than find employment in those fields every year — about 200,000 more — while the IT industry fills about two-thirds of its entry-level positions with guest workers." O…
Thank you for pointing this out.
Not two weeks ago I was "hired" by a firm to do some consulting for them, during which time they extracted data on "how" to solve a problem (NLP related) and then flew in some dude form India to code the solution.
I made a decent wage. For two days.
He undoubtedly was a faste progrmmer than me, but fuck if we both didn't get used. I live in a state that thinks the word union means that General Sherman is fixing to burn down the capital, so there's little to no recourse. And I am hesitant about even writing this given how shadily I was treated.
Needless to say, there are many reasons why DT was elected, but one of the primary ones is because he promised a thousand times if he promised once that he would slow the tide of incoming labor to shore up the lessening of wage depreciation.
I also love how ten years ago the Department of Labor "projected" that STEM career growth would continue unabated for many years, and yet now I can't find a job writing code for literally anyone beyond the example I mentioned earlier.
If this is the future, we are completely and totally fucked. Save your pennies folks, you're going to need the copper. Oh, and don't forget to make sure to keep taxes off the rich and the jobs outsourced so the poor Americasn can take it in the ass until the next "public servant" gets elected and doesn't do what they said they would.
Meanwhile, I'll be teaching 7 year olds to code hello world (if I am ever lucky enough to actually get a GD job that isn't flipping burgers or pouring sweet fucking tea) while pining for the research position I spent more than three decades in school to be smart enough to do.
God Bless America, and all of the nations "she" serves.
Re: WSJ: H-1B Visas Keep Down U.S. Tech Wages, Study Shows
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Competition makes our world prosperous. Competition only increases efficiency if the price of a good is currently inflated. Labor is likely under-priced as a good relative to other expenditures, like property and the means to production, so an increase in competition for jobs does not necessarily equate to a more highly functioning society.
You're ignoring the creation of new goods via reinvestment of profits. In any case, for a given good if there is any profit at all being made (which...well, there should be otherwise the producers wouldn't exist) then the price of the good is (I will borrow your language) "inflated" and has room for competition to be brought down. There's a lot of stuff wrong with your claims, I don't know where to begin...
Profits aren't automatically inflated margins. There are healthy margins, and there are inflated margins. There are even margins that are so thin that it's unhealthy, as in the airline industry.
Now, to loop back around to your point about investment; either party having additional capital will allow that party to further invest.
That is true in the case of formalized businesses, like the ones your thinking about, who can further invest in capital goods.
However, it's also true of more informal businesses that you're ignoring, specifically, the employed individuals themselves.
Employees are in the business of services -- they perform some labor, be it mental or physical, and are paid for that labor. Formalized businesses are their customer.
Profits that those employees obtain are also capital which can be invested -- whether that investment is in their health, their happiness, their residences, their educations, buying tools, the stock market, creating new businesses, affording time to raise and educate their children, and so on.
Theories of economics which ignore that the employed are also themselves informal businesses are disjointed, and fail to explain the totality of economic growth and investment.
Re: WSJ: H-1B Visas Keep Down U.S. Tech Wages, Study Shows
#19Public service announcement: There is no such thing as a labor shortage. Having trouble hiring developers? Offer a salary of $1 million per year. Your new problem will be job applicant crowd-control. Whenever an employer reports a labor shortage they mean they can't find enough people to take jobs AT THE WAGE THEY ARE WILLING TO PAY. Lest you brand me a red shirt-wearing Das Kapital-waving pinko commie, let me lay an…
This seems like an argument that can be used to argue that shortages cannot exist for anything you can buy. The same rough argument could be used to argue that food shortages cannot exist.
I'm pretty sure the word shortage already implies that there is a shortage at the market price, not at an arbitrary price.
Re: WSJ: H-1B Visas Keep Down U.S. Tech Wages, Study Shows
#20Public service announcement: There is no such thing as a labor shortage. Having trouble hiring developers? Offer a salary of $1 million per year. Your new problem will be job applicant crowd-control. Whenever an employer reports a labor shortage they mean they can't find enough people to take jobs AT THE WAGE THEY ARE WILLING TO PAY. Lest you brand me a red shirt-wearing Das Kapital-waving pinko commie, let me lay an…
This seems like an argument that can be used to argue that shortages cannot exist for anything you can buy. The same rough argument could be used to argue that food shortages cannot exist. I'm pretty sure the word shortage already implies that there is a shortage at the market price, not at an arbitrary price.
> I'm pretty sure the word shortage already implies that there is a shortage at the market price
"Shortage at the market price" seems to be a somewhat incoherent concept. The market price is the price point at which the supply and demand curves intersect. Other than a discontinuity in either supply or demand such that the curves pass without intersecting (which makes the market price ill-defined), demand equals supply at the market price.