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The American Worker vs. the Most Qualified

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Re: The American Worker vs. the Most Qualified

#71

Post by ecshafer »

utokyoberkeley wrote: post #65
ecshafer wrote: post #18

I have seen H1Bs used for basic Java development, Desktop Support, CRM managemetn, Marketing, Project Managers, and all sorts of basic office work. The idea its used for the best and brightest is absurd. When you also count the massive fraud in H1B, people looking for kickbacks, racial preferences, lying on resumes (I once interviewed an H1B with 4 pages on their resume, couldn't answer a single question from what I…

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> People not realizing that code is about the easiest thing in the world to ship back and forth between different countries: if a company is hell-bent on being cheap, they'll outsource rather than bring someone in.

We can tariff software, I just need Trumps phone number to let him know.

Re: The American Worker vs. the Most Qualified

#72

Post by nightpool »

xnx wrote: post #62
nightpool wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you interviewed any of these candidates yet? I doubt that you have 500+ real candidates. My experience in the past 12 months of hiring is that you'll have maybe 10 "qualified on paper" candidates, and 490 AI-generated profiles.

Hard to be too mad at the applicants when a similar percentage of the roles might also be fake.

That might be true if you're applying for a megacorp like AWS or something but hard to feel like that's a valid argument when you're applying to a company with 2 open roles.

Re: The American Worker vs. the Most Qualified

#73

Post by wakawaka28 »

GlibMonkeyDeath wrote: post #12

"The H-1B program was started with the vision of finding von Brauns across other industries and bringing them into the US" Is this true? I thought the the "O" visa accomplished this. H-1B is for specific worker shortages. Of course, a "shortage" from a company's perspective is "no Americans are applying for my position", which isn't necessarily because there are no qualified Americans to hire...

That isn't what it means to have a shortage. In many cases Americans are discouraged from applying for these jobs. They can overspecify the criteria or be overly skeptical about your resume, write the job listing poorly, or hide the job listing entirely. What a shortage really means from their perspective is that they can't find enough workers for the price they want to pay (as opposed to what they can afford). However, I don't find that satisfying. I might have a legitimate business idea that would work only if I could find 100 great engineers willing to work for far below average. That would be considered insane in isolation, but if several large companies get together and issue the same complaint like "We can't move ahead because there are not enough engineers in our price range" then they call it a shortage. But I don't think American workers should have to tolerate these people flooding the market just because they can make money by doing so lol...

Re: The American Worker vs. the Most Qualified

#74

Post by cucumber3732842 »

ecshafer wrote: post #61
phainopepla2 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have seen H1Bs used for basic Java development, Desktop Support [...] Working in non-FAANG corporate America, these types of roles are the only thing thing I've ever seen H1B hires used for. They've run the gamut from incompetent to quite good, but none have ever been the "best and brightest". It saddens me that the left no longer seems to care about protecting American workers.

There are a lot of office / IT jobs that can be done by anyone with an education. Instead of a team of H1B from TCS doing BI dashboards, why not a bunch of local college kids? You dont even need a CS degree, any business degree student can do that with a couple days of training. Hell an associates degree should be more than enough. Companies used to hire local people, give aptitude tests and place people.

They don't hire americans because Americans don't come with the "right" culture for what bad managers want in these roles

Re: The American Worker vs. the Most Qualified

#75

Post by wakawaka28 »

solidsnack9000 wrote: post #17

It's not a matter of economics, corporate policy or belief in people -- it's a strategic matter. A country needs a secure and stable pipeline for personnel as much as for any other strategic asset. A country also needs to keep up and learn from other countries. That means working with and integrating technologies, ideas and, yes, personnel from other countries. It's a balance thing and Anduril has a hard job in tryin…

It's funny how the loyalties of imported "talent" are not front and center in any discussion of how their presence is "strategically important." I think we are getting strategically shafted by lax immigration laws.

Re: The American Worker vs. the Most Qualified

#76

Post by bluGill »

glitchc wrote: post #6
skmurphy wrote: post #2

Conclusion: "There is plenty of international talent that can and should be leveraged in the appropriate places and the proper ways. There are many instances where you’re going to want to hire a leading expert in a technical field. But most jobs, the qualifications are a core technical and subject competency combined with diligence and a willingness to learn. [..] We need to encourage a corporate mindset that believe…

> But most jobs, the qualifications are a core technical and subject competency combined with diligence and a willingness to learn. [..] > We need to encourage a corporate mindset that believes in the importance of building up the American talent pool to tackle not only the challenge in front of them but the array of challenges that the future will bring. It's tough to square this noble thought with what's actually h…

When nobody is going to work for the same company for decades what is the point? This is both management's fault for not valuing the people they have (it is very common for cost of living raises to not match inflation or much less increased value as people get better), layoffs; but also workers for looking for a new job (only partially because of the above) when they have one.

I think in the ideal world 30-60% of the people who retire from your company should have started there just out of school. Much less than that and you don't get the value of experience built up over time. Much more and you miss out of good ideas others are doing. However there are many ways the world will never be ideal...

Re: The American Worker vs. the Most Qualified

#77

Post by bluGill »

topspin wrote: post #60
glitchc wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But most jobs, the qualifications are a core technical and subject competency combined with diligence and a willingness to learn. [..] > We need to encourage a corporate mindset that believes in the importance of building up the American talent pool to tackle not only the challenge in front of them but the array of challenges that the future will bring. It's tough to square this noble thought with what's actually h…

> How does one convince business leaders to bring it back? There are precisely 1.0 ways to do that: make all of the alternatives more expensive. That's it. Nothing else will move the needle. I don't believe it is possible: every policy one can imagine, short of establishing a GULAG system to compel compliance, has powerful opposing interests, including workers themselves. It would require the sort of comprehensive an…

Every system I can imagine as a real unintended consequence that is worse than what we have. The ideal should move to needle back - but there is no way to make that happen that isn't worse than where we are now.

Re: The American Worker vs. the Most Qualified

#78

Post by cucumber3732842 »

utokyoberkeley wrote: post #65
ecshafer wrote: post #18

I have seen H1Bs used for basic Java development, Desktop Support, CRM managemetn, Marketing, Project Managers, and all sorts of basic office work. The idea its used for the best and brightest is absurd. When you also count the massive fraud in H1B, people looking for kickbacks, racial preferences, lying on resumes (I once interviewed an H1B with 4 pages on their resume, couldn't answer a single question from what I…

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Re: The American Worker vs. the Most Qualified

#79

Post by [deleted] »

ecshafer wrote: post #71
utokyoberkeley wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> People not realizing that code is about the easiest thing in the world to ship back and forth between different countries: if a company is hell-bent on being cheap, they'll outsource rather than bring someone in. We can tariff software, I just need Trumps phone number to let him know.

[deleted]

Re: The American Worker vs. the Most Qualified

#80

Post by sobellian »

cyberax wrote: post #49

Let me put it this way: the US school system sucks. It produces great drama artists, athletes, and marketing specialists but not STEM professionals. You can see it here: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=37 - just 6% of US school graduates go to study engineering (there are almost no foreign-born students doing bachelors in the US). This has been the case since forever. So more than half of the STEM gradua…

The US is a big country so it's hard to generalize. But if you take the "default" US culture, it has been either ambivalent or hostile toward nerds for a long time. People who rightly point this out get shouted down as being anti-American (see Ramaswamy's infamous post). They shouldn't shoot the messenger. They should help their kids tinker with cool garage experiments.
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