Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. It's strange to read these kinds of articles. The author doesn't seem to realize that he is describing his own personal preferences, and not anything about society at large. All you need to do is look at the top recipients of visas and you will understand what the game is.
This brings up an interesting question. The reasoning for bringing talent over from abroad, does it make sense ethically? I'm greatly irked by the idea of a young and ambitious Indian/Nigerian/Chinese/Russian guy or girl coming here to... optimize ad targeting at Facebook, he/she should stay in India or Nigeria, because by golly Nigeria NEEDS that person much more than us. We can do fine with Facebook advertising alg…
Immigration is about talent, not costs
71–80 of 644 posts
Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs
#72> Just a few hours later, Vox published an article titled These tech interns are probably making more than you are where they shared a tweet showcasing candid salaries at various tech companies, some larger, some smaller: That is a kind of a bullshit argument though isn't it, that "hey look, the interns (supposedly half-able, incompetent newbies) are getting paid so high!! We have such wonderful salaries in tech!" It…
> When you're "making 90k" in the valley you have the quality of life worth 30k in a midwestern city. Not true at all, yet this is constantly repeated like it's fact. Look up indifference curves and consumption bundles. You're ignoring microeconomics. For anyone that doesn't assign excessively high utility towards housing size, 90k in the valley is a much better quality of life than 30k in a midwestern city. This is…
Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs
#73Seems like the sensible solution would be to auction off the immigration quota slots. Decide on some number of business/talent based visas to be issued each year. Then do a rolling auction of the visas. If a person gets a visa, comes to America, but then does not like their job and goes home, the company gets a prorated refund. If the person stays more than five years, they get a green card automatically and are free…
The unstated premise behind your comment, and indeed this entire debate, is that there is only so much "room" for immigration in the US. This leads us to arguments about how large the quota should be, how it should be divided, etc. This is a flawed assumption. The US has nearly unlimited room to accept immigration, and on average every single immigrant we accept would increase the size of our economy. Immigrants are…
Yeah, bull. Not even.
Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs
#74Maybe this company hires for talent and not costs, but every place I've been hires for both, so to pretend costs aren't factored in seems to be an oversight.
My personal experience is that it is generally true that H-1B is used by companies to get the same level of expertise with reduced cost, and to me the issue still stands that for every immigrant that gets hired, an American is potentially out of job. The worst I saw this was at a genetics lab, and while we would fly people in from all over the country, we had a sizable percentage of H-1B's.
Perhaps there is some other math that I haven't seen that shows a H-1B worker ends up contributing to the local economy by a factor, but the primary offset I see with that is most of the time they are sending large portions of their money to their home country, because they may be able to get their wife here but the rest of the family is still OCONUS.
What it all boils down to is a disruption in the standard accepted economic model in this globalized world. Companies aren't forced to be "patriotic", and will seek to optimize profit (and if that means hiring better talent from elsewhere at a cheaper price, so be it). This outlook though, conflicts with what I understand of the history and purpose of corporations. In the days of the British East India company (on of the first "Company's"), the monarchy retained the right to revoke letters patent or royal charter, because the corporation was designed to profit the country and not just the corporation.
This idea seems to have been lost and we live in an age where neo-tech globalized fuedalism seems to be around the corner because it has been lost.
Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs
#75Seems like the sensible solution would be to auction off the immigration quota slots. Decide on some number of business/talent based visas to be issued each year. Then do a rolling auction of the visas. If a person gets a visa, comes to America, but then does not like their job and goes home, the company gets a prorated refund. If the person stays more than five years, they get a green card automatically and are free…
The unstated premise behind your comment, and indeed this entire debate, is that there is only so much "room" for immigration in the US. This leads us to arguments about how large the quota should be, how it should be divided, etc. This is a flawed assumption. The US has nearly unlimited room to accept immigration, and on average every single immigrant we accept would increase the size of our economy. Immigrants are…
The unstated assumption underlying the assertion that "the U.S. has nearly unlimited room to accept immigration" is that culture, and institutions arising out of that culture, doesn't matter. That's false. Culture and institutions are what make the U.S. worth immigrating to in the first place.
And I say this as an immigrant. My parents didn't leave their lives half a world away to come here for the weather.
Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs
#76Seems like the sensible solution would be to auction off the immigration quota slots. Decide on some number of business/talent based visas to be issued each year. Then do a rolling auction of the visas. If a person gets a visa, comes to America, but then does not like their job and goes home, the company gets a prorated refund. If the person stays more than five years, they get a green card automatically and are free…
The unstated premise behind your comment, and indeed this entire debate, is that there is only so much "room" for immigration in the US. This leads us to arguments about how large the quota should be, how it should be divided, etc. This is a flawed assumption. The US has nearly unlimited room to accept immigration, and on average every single immigrant we accept would increase the size of our economy. Immigrants are…
Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. It's strange to read these kinds of articles. The author doesn't seem to realize that he is describing his own personal preferences, and not anything about society at large. All you need to do is look at the top recipients of visas and you will understand what the game is.
I think by and large most engineers understand what the game is and where most H1Bs are going. What author seems to be saying is - status-quo is not a solution. Is there a shortage of good engineering talent(I am not talking about bottom 50%), but top 20%? I think answer is emphatically yes - worldwide. Has US benefited from those top 20% who have managed to migrate to US? It would be foolish to say no. Lastly, this…
Do we have a shortage of talent of the type I just described? Emphatically yes. Does that mean there is in any way a shortage? Emphatically no.
So the only sense in which there is a shortage is the same sense in which those jerks at bwm don't wish to sell me an m3 coupe for $15k. ie no shortage at all.
Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs
#78That's a static and simple perspective though. In the real world ceterus is not parabus. Widening your search net to include people educated and experienced elsewhere has value. "Production" is not limited by a simple demand-price function, but by ideas and execution. There are also a lot of "impossible to measure but undeniably there" effects brought on by trade in goods, migration of people and such. Hubs have a vibrancy to them that have been obvious to observers since ancient times. People are not commodities like coal or lead. Price dynamics are real, but the don't capture everything. There is a rising tide element that is almost certainly substantial. The industry's success, creates opportunities for employees.
I'm not American, so I don't have a dog in this. But, it seems to me that the US got to where it has gotten to by being a dynamic hub sucking up the vibrant and ambitious of the world.
Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of them are worthless; of any given intern class at a first tier technology company (e.g., Apple), only ~1-5% will actually be offered a full time job. Those 1% are worth every penny, but you simply don't know who they are until you give the entire intern class the opportunity to demonstrate their abilities.
> Most of them are worthless They are almost never worthless. Small startups who are not experienced with interviewing may get a few bad apples, but companies like Quora (and the others on the list in submission article) don't make those mistakes. Sure, they may not all be Alex "Im-a-core-dev-for-Pypy" Gaynor's, but generally they'll be worth every penny of that 90k and another 90k more.
Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. It's strange to read these kinds of articles. The author doesn't seem to realize that he is describing his own personal preferences, and not anything about society at large. All you need to do is look at the top recipients of visas and you will understand what the game is.
This brings up an interesting question. The reasoning for bringing talent over from abroad, does it make sense ethically? I'm greatly irked by the idea of a young and ambitious Indian/Nigerian/Chinese/Russian guy or girl coming here to... optimize ad targeting at Facebook, he/she should stay in India or Nigeria, because by golly Nigeria NEEDS that person much more than us. We can do fine with Facebook advertising alg…
http://www.yale.edu/oiss/immigration/common/j1scholars/home....