Immigration is about talent, not costs • Hacker News Board

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#301

Post by StylusEater » Tue, Dec 02, 2014, 7:40 PM UTC

x0x0 wrote: post #108

hnnewguy wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's absolutely no talent shortage in the Bay Area, provided you can pay But this is precisely what defines an economic shortage. There's no shortage of anything , if the price offered is right. I wonder if the discrepancy between supply and demand for labour in the Valley has to do with the fact that, unlike most other industries[1], so many companies aren't making money, and hence can't pay, but still demand m…

Right, so there's no shortage. I get that there's plenty of demand for highly skilled engineers that want to work for $80k and a tiny handful of lottery tickets. It doesn't mean we need to further help the valley avoid the consequences of a lack of investment in domestic education, or their wild irresponsibility with respect to housing and transport issues in the bay.

> It doesn't mean we need to further help the valley avoid the consequences of a lack of investment in domestic education, or their wild irresponsibility with respect to housing and transport issues in the bay.

Exactly!

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#302

Post by Iftheshoefits » Tue, Dec 02, 2014, 7:40 PM UTC

vladtaltos wrote: post #275

manticore_alpha wrote: post #86

Look HNers, let's be honest with each other. There's a lot of H1B's on here. You have friends overseas who you want to see succeed in the Bay Area. In my experience at many tech companies in the Bay Area, H1B Visas exist for one reason, and one reason only - to get skilled engineering/STEM labor -- and to exploit connections (primarily Indian/Pakistani) among these workers to continue to get cheap labor. It absolutel…

what you say may be true for web-development but afaik there is not too much PhD requirements for web-dev work. I'm in the computer vision and pattern recognition field and as you can guess from its popularity there's definitely a shortage - not just in the US but all over the world. I'm in France and in my company we are trying aggressively to hire new people in the field but everybody good is already working somewh…

How much of the CV/pattern recognition talent shortage you're describing is because of an unwillingness to consider candidates who don'match exactly. That is, do you have a condition where something like only "PhD in Machine Learning with extensive CV experience" resumes are considered when it is arguably the case that, e.g., "MS/PhD in math/engineering/physics with programming experience" would be equally able to do the work with a (very) modest learning curve to adapt to the specific jargon/processes?

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#303

Post by exelius » Tue, Dec 02, 2014, 7:41 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #259

exelius wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * The government can give out N visas in an auction. Firms bid via legally-binding salary offers. The N highest salaries bid get the visas, and the government takes a small additional payroll tax as the only fee. This would be doomed to fail. Professional services firms can outbid basically everyone because they can turn around and bill that person out at 5x their salary. The visas will never adhere to the workers…

> This would be doomed to fail. Professional services firms can outbid basically everyone because they can turn around and bill that person out at 5x their salary. So what? Shouldn't the companies that can create the most value from the employee be the ones that get to hire them?

I wouldn't say that professional services firms really create the most value - far from it actually. They're just able to pay more because there's relatively little risk involved for them.

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#304

Post by logfromblammo » Tue, Dec 02, 2014, 7:42 PM UTC

dashboardfront wrote: post #55

selmnoo wrote: post #3

> 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…

If you want your comparison to be equally valid wherever you make it, you have to use the same basket of goods everywhere you go. Otherwise, I can't tell whether you are comparing apples to oranges or pears to grapefruit.

When I look at the numbers for that basket of goods that I currently consume, and price it out for San Francisco, I find that it is completely unattainable for anything less than 3 times what I currently pay, and could be difficult to reliably source for less than a multiple of 4. That's the fact.

It does not matter that I would in reality have to substitute down to inferior goods. It would still be objectively worse than what I have now. The value of my willingness to substitute counterbalances the savings I make by substituting. If I move back to the cheaper area, I won't keep the SV basket; I will substitute right back to the best goods that I can afford.

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#305

Post by zb » Tue, Dec 02, 2014, 7:43 PM UTC

The problem with H1-B is that it's not even a speed bump for those it is supposedly trying to stop, while it's a total road block for everyone else.

If all you care about is rotating in another 19000 warm, cheap bodies every year then you have no worries: just submit 40000 applications every year and roll with whatever comes out of the lottery.

If, on the other hand, you are like the author and want to hire one particular person with a specific skill set, you have a roughly 50% chance of being able to do that in between 6 and 18 months from any given point in time. (Note that there's no way to do it in less than 6 months.)

The system works well only for the very companies that are exploiting it. I know that the US missed out on 2.5 years of tax revenue that it could have had from me had I not moved to another country that made getting a work visa trivial because of this issue. That worked out great for me, but I still struggle to see how it made America better off.

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#306

Post by jtzhou » Tue, Dec 02, 2014, 7:44 PM UTC

fataliss wrote: post #238

zerr wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agree. That's why H1B's should have a significant minimum requirement for the salary (depending on place). I'm in eastern Europe and I wouldn't even remotely consider Bay Area jobs with less than 250K annual income (base salary + bonuses). Even for other places, it shouldn't be far from that number for me to decide to relocate to US... So yes, there is a shortage of talent who are willing to work for cheap.

Oh my, I would be curious to know what kind of company offers you such a high living standard in Easter Europe for you to throw any opportunity under the insane amount of 250k... If I agree that you need more in the SV to live comfortable than probably anywhere else in the world, 250k$/year is an insane amount of money.

A decent home in a good school district is around $2.5m in the Bay Area, so $250k before taxes might get you qualified for a mortgage (provided you saved $500k for a down payment). $100k, while above U.S. median household income, would not go very far in the Bay Area.

Even in Eastern Europe, there are places with very high standards of living for talented developers, such as Prague or Warsaw. With the EU, Berlin, Vienna and Munich are now possible as well and have a very high standard of living.

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#307

Post by exelius » Tue, Dec 02, 2014, 7:45 PM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #296

exelius wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * The government can give out N visas in an auction. Firms bid via legally-binding salary offers. The N highest salaries bid get the visas, and the government takes a small additional payroll tax as the only fee. This would be doomed to fail. Professional services firms can outbid basically everyone because they can turn around and bill that person out at 5x their salary. The visas will never adhere to the workers…

>This would be doomed to fail. Professional services firms can outbid basically everyone because they can turn around and bill that person out at 5x their salary. So what? The purpose of skilled-worker immigration in public policy is to maximize productivity, not to cater to the industry to which people on Hacker News happen to belong.

I wouldn't say that professional services firms maximize productivity; they just have good relationships and are more effective at selling their services than an individual developer can ever be.

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#308

Post by Retric » Tue, Dec 02, 2014, 7:46 PM UTC

codegeek wrote: post #180

rayiner wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My parents came here for various reasons, but one of the straws that broke the camel's back, so to speak, was my dad giving in to paying a bribe just to get telephone service installed at his house. Where I come from, Bangladesh, that is just how you do things. And the institutions you have to deal with were created by people who think that's okay. I think non-immigrants take for granted how amazing, and fragile, it…

"But I don't want to have so many immigrants that we can't turn them all into Americans. I want immigrants who respect womens' rights, consider racists to be social pariahs, find corruption to be intolerable, embrace gays, etc" If I understand you correctly, you are making the assumption that things like respecting women's rights etc. are primarily an American virtue and not as much with other cultures ? I would agre…

The core problem is bribery is both a way of life for more than 1/2 the worlds population and a huge economic drain. If you mix say 200 million people from China and 200 million from India you would quickly end up with yet another society where bribery is the norm.

Granted the cap on immigration is probably well below the cultural assimilation rate, but just because we could accept say 2 million people a year does not mean 20 would not be a huge problem.

On top of that the US has a huge investment in infrastructure roads, bridges, railroads, water, sewage, schools, etc which needs to be expanded when increasing the population. So, while allowing lot's of doctors to emigrate is probably a net gain, adding migrant workers is probably a net loss to the economy on average.

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#309

Post by ambrood » Tue, Dec 02, 2014, 7:48 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #206

manticore_alpha wrote: post #86

Look HNers, let's be honest with each other. There's a lot of H1B's on here. You have friends overseas who you want to see succeed in the Bay Area. In my experience at many tech companies in the Bay Area, H1B Visas exist for one reason, and one reason only - to get skilled engineering/STEM labor -- and to exploit connections (primarily Indian/Pakistani) among these workers to continue to get cheap labor. It absolutel…

>There's standard, normalized ways immigrants have come to the US for a long time now. And what are those? If you are being honest why not just say "We don't want any more immigrants". Because H1B is the only way to immigrate to US. Its great that your parents got a shot a new life and now you want the door to closed. PS: I am a naturalized US citizen, if it matters.

He's referring to the Ellis Island of course.

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#310

Post by danudey » Tue, Dec 02, 2014, 7:49 PM UTC

manticore_alpha wrote: post #86

Look HNers, let's be honest with each other. There's a lot of H1B's on here. You have friends overseas who you want to see succeed in the Bay Area. In my experience at many tech companies in the Bay Area, H1B Visas exist for one reason, and one reason only - to get skilled engineering/STEM labor -- and to exploit connections (primarily Indian/Pakistani) among these workers to continue to get cheap labor. It absolutel…

> We also don't need any more of the divisive ethic-neuveau-ghettos we're seeing in the south bay, cupertino and east bay with communities insulating themselves rather than assimilating.

This just smacks of exclusionary racism. Like, 'us white people don't need folk from other countries coming over here and associating with each other, eating their own food and speaking their own language'.

You might be surprised to learn that if you're moving from another country, it's highly beneficial to your adjustment to be around other people from your area; in fact, it can accelerate assimilation because they have a source they can turn to for all kinds of cultural, bureaucratic, or social questions, so they don't have to re-learn everything from scratch.

Admittedly, that still doesn't change your original claim of 'we don't need cheap foreigners coming over here and taking American jobs', or the inherent racism there.