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Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

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Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#321
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just silly... even if you're a nationalist, isn't the prospect of bringing over talented people from foreign countries to work in America and help our companies profit plus deprive their home countries of their skills a really, really good thing?

No, it's just a way to bring in cheap labor, and bring salaries down. That's it. It's very rarely the case that there's genuinely no one here that can do the jobs. It's widely know that companies are making no legitimate attempt to hire a citizen. I'm not saying this is a good move, and I'm not commenting on the morality of it (ie. who says someone from another country shouldn't be competing for your job)

How is that possible, given that these people are paid above the prevailing wage?

That's literally one of the requirements for the Visa, the minimum has been repeatedly raised to address this problem.

So? Want to explain that to me?

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something isn't adding up here, even in areas with high COL people are clamoring for jobs like that. I'm not saying it never happens, something just doesn't sound right. Also, the vast majority of people on H1-Bs that I've worked with are quite... average. It's nothing against them, but I doubt they were blowing people away in the interview. Many of them do have better attitudes, though. That's not to say that there…

Off-topic, but just a tip. "could of" is never correct (nor is "would of" or "should of").

Or could-have, which I think is more applicable in the sentence you're correcting. Or am I missing some obscure grammar rule?

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Foreign nationals account for 81 percent of the full-time graduate students in electrical engineering, 79 percent in computer science, 75 percent in industrial engineering, 69 percent in statistics, 63 percent in mechanical engineering, 59 percent in civil engineering, and 57 percent in chemical engineering.” — https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/02/americas-stem-cri...

College courses aren't necessarily zero sum if SV would considering hiring from state universities.

Thanks. The reason I quoted this statistic is because I was surprised that there aren’t more Americans interested in taking advantage of the excellent education in STEM.

Could it also tell us something about interest in the field generally?

We also see significant immigrant ratios in entrepreneurial ventures: "Immigrants are “almost twice as likely” as native-born Americans to become entrepreneurs, according to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation." --- https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2018/10/25/55-of...

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#325

Anyone who thinks this is good for the US is stupid. In the era of remote working, all this will do it hasten the retreat of software engineering from the US. Facebook and Google do not care where their employees live, they want the best in the world. This will just mean that jobs will truly flee the US. Right now the US is winning because of such a high concentration of talented software engineers compared to the re…

Facebook and Google could have converted their entire software dev workforce to Indians in India any time they wanted. But they didn't, I wonder why hmmmmm.

Because all the best Indian software engineers went to US grad schools and then went to Silicon Valley. It sounds like you don’t live in Silicon Valley.

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#326

My common sense frustration here is how can the US possibly have a critical shortage of developers on languages that are 20 to 50 years old? We have the third highest population in the world and claim to have excellent education, and these are high paying jobs at 2x-3x the national average yearly income. So what qualifies the shortage? Is it like agriculture where Americans are too entitled for the work? Are American…

The shortage is false, a form of gaslighting, artificially created so that corporations and academic institutions can keep costs low and suppress wages by flooding the US market with cheap labor that also bypasses usual employment standards available to US citizens. Eric Weinstein has done some really good research into this. 'How and Why Government, Universities, and Industry Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scien…

Are you talking dev or academia? I read the paper and I'll give you my dev focused response. The paper is focused on phd supply in academia and the most recent dates referenced are the last 1990s. It has brief discussion of knowledge workers but not really devs. It's not relevant for devs in the us at least since the dot com boom until now.

There's a giant shortage of capable devs. i'm from the us in case it matters to you but in my 25+ years as a professional engineer across a few fangs, midsize and several startups all those companies wanted to hire every capable dev they could find. Microsoft used to have 5k plus openings when I was there and the other fang had similar. We hired all over the world and the us. We never hired as many as we wanted. New college students grads could make over 100k and we still couldn't hire all we wanted.

I worked on creative, original software. I think there is a hiring area that could be impacted by large number of immigrants in tech and that is more IT like positions. There's an oversupply in my experience of people that put software packages together, keep the it infrastructure of a company running - those are crucial jobs too, just like devs writing original software, but there's a lot fewer people in it support and maybe that's part of the issue.

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#327

My common sense frustration here is how can the US possibly have a critical shortage of developers on languages that are 20 to 50 years old? We have the third highest population in the world and claim to have excellent education, and these are high paying jobs at 2x-3x the national average yearly income. So what qualifies the shortage? Is it like agriculture where Americans are too entitled for the work? Are American…

The shortage is false, a form of gaslighting, artificially created so that corporations and academic institutions can keep costs low and suppress wages by flooding the US market with cheap labor that also bypasses usual employment standards available to US citizens. Eric Weinstein has done some really good research into this. 'How and Why Government, Universities, and Industry Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scien…

I read the paper but I did not see any indication of wage depression.

Here are the trends I am observing from the comments of this thread:

* Immigrants in the US on visas earn less than US citizens. I have seen no data on this. How much less do immigrant software engineers earn as a percentage?

* Any evidence discrediting knowledge worker shortage is centered on academics. I am a senior software developer with 20 years experience at one of the largest and wealthiest employers in the US. Despite that I have no formal education in the subject matter. I am either entirely self taught or in some other disciplines trained by the military. So it seems, from my perspective, centering the discussion to academics is just a distraction.

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's a valid reason as to why it's being done (to prioritize Americans out of work) The "Fixed pie fallacy" [1] is probably both one of the most important tenants of modern policy-making, yet it's rarely explicitly discussed or debated. Cyclone_, your thinking relies on this fallacy, namely that if one person is working a job, that's one less job available. [2] In reality, there is quite a bit of empirical resea…

If globalization and automation are so good at job creation, why did the American manufacturing workforce collapse? Economies are complex, counter-intuitive feedback machines, but the "supply and demand" model fits the last 40 years of data, while the "floats all boats" model really doesn't. "Lump of labor is a fallacy, honest!" sure sounds like the kind of opinion I could get a good penny for if I were an enterprisi…

If globalization and automation are so good at job creation, why did the American horse buggy workforce collapse?

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#329

The Silicon Valley was built on the backs of H1-B workers. There’s the bay wouldn’t be the technical hub without access to the global workforce.

That's simply not true. SV was built in the 60's thru the 80's long before the H1-B visa program started in 1990.

A little too specific, if you change "H1-B visa" to "immigrants" its most definitely true.

Re: Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

#330
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just silly... even if you're a nationalist, isn't the prospect of bringing over talented people from foreign countries to work in America and help our companies profit plus deprive their home countries of their skills a really, really good thing?

Not if your conception of the nation only includes white people...

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