Immigration is about talent, not costs • Hacker News Board

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#351

Post by mbreese » Tue, Dec 02, 2014, 8:41 PM UTC

gjm11 wrote: post #339

logfromblammo wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 curr…

I agree that there's a big transparency benefit to using the same basket everywhere, but I don't think that actually gives the most realistic answer. Imagine that every day, for every meal, you eat spaghetti carbonara. You'd be almost as happy eating linguine with pesto, but you happen to have a slight preference for spaghetti carbonara. Now you move somewhere else where, for whatever reason, spaghetti is 100x the pr…

> because later on you can move out of San Francisco, sell that house, and get the money back again

You obviously didn't own a house in the US about 5-6 years ago...

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#352

Post by x0x0 » Tue, Dec 02, 2014, 8:42 PM UTC

drpgq wrote: post #284

ryandrake wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my view, anyone who tries to argue that there is a "shortage" of tech should disclose the compensation package they are offering for the tech positions they are trying to fill.

There was somebody complaining about a shortage of software workers on the Buffalo subreddit recently. When prodded he admitted he was offering $35K a year.

I was contacted by a recruiter. They wanted a Phd in machine learning from a top school, 3+ years experience in adtech, hadoop experience. $110k. In Palo Alto.

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#353

Post by jakevn » Tue, Dec 02, 2014, 8:43 PM UTC

DINKDINK wrote: post #332

jakevn wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies can take advantage of situations for profit, and that's their right, but the argument needs to be qualified so that we aren't speaking past one another. Are we talking about "should be able to" or "it's the right (for whatever definition of right) thing to do"? I'm going to go with the latter since I have little opinion on the law. For example, a company has the right to ask its programmers to work 80 hours…

"Should companies be taking advantage of low wages in other countries instead of paying market value?" If someone leaves a programming job in India to take a programming job in the USA, they're implicitly saying, This is a better deal for me. The only unethical/anticompetative practice was that someone created an artificial barrier (often pushed through legislation because of xenophobia) to keep "others" out. If you…

I don't want to draw the line simply because I think it's too much a matter of opinion.

To me, it's not about widely applicable ethics. I think companies should have the right to hire people from other countries and pay them low(er) wages. Or at least, they should have the right until there's some agreeable line that can be drawn (unlikely). I simply would lose respect for that company because I think the decent thing is to pay wages based on merit.

I believe paying wages based on where someone is from is on the same level as squeezing as many hours as possible out of your workforce. In my eyes, it's irresponsible and not respectable.

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#354

Post by Nursie » Tue, Dec 02, 2014, 8:44 PM UTC

Iftheshoefits wrote: post #302

vladtaltos wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think there is absolutely a tech hiring culture that discards people who don't have the exact right experience. And it's awful. A good coder with lots of general experience can adapt. An awful, useless hack can sit in a sector and look valuable to a prospective employer while actually being a huge net drain.

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#355

Post by DrJokepu » Tue, Dec 02, 2014, 8:45 PM UTC

DrJokepu wrote: post #52

selmnoo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

An argument to make that it should be the "young and ambitious Indian/Nigerian/Chinese/Russian" choice whether they want to leave their country or not. It's up to America to decide whether they're welcome in America or not, but telling people that they can't move to America because, according to America, their home country needs them more is way too patronizing.

*An argument could be made, it was the autocorrect, too late to edit now.

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#356

Post by molmalo » Tue, Dec 02, 2014, 8:46 PM UTC

malandrew wrote: post #298

barrkel wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got a H-1B visa. I was living in Ireland at the time. But, as it turned out, I never moved to the US. It was for a compiler position at Borland. I ended up working remotely for the next 6 years or so, first for a year as a contractor at a 6 figure Euro rate, then later as a salaried employee after I moved to London. They flew me over two to four times a year to keep up to date with the team. I collectively lived ov…

I'm a software engineer and green card holder from Brazil and there is nothing I want more than to see many of my friends who work in Brazil have the opportunity to come here to work in a great industry. That being said, both you and the anon person you replied to are right about the situation. The position you came to fill is a relatively rare skill here in the US and it helps the US to bring in talent from abroad,…

> Alternatively, I would be okay with eliminating the lottery and giving visas out on the basis of the premium companies are willing to pay over the salary a domestic worker would be paid. If your company is willing to pay 2.0x foo for a position, then you will get the H1-B visa ahead of a company only willing to pay 1.5x foo. The floor would be set at something like 1.1x foo.

That would only help the largest companies, and would put the relatively new and smaller companies at a disadvantage...

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#357

Post by AnthonyMouse » Tue, Dec 02, 2014, 8:46 PM UTC

dllthomas wrote: post #249

PeterisP wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A rather obvious premise is that there is some limit of immigration that is in the best interest of current US citizens . Average human brains are not a scarce resource as seen by all practical evidence - globally, they're being manufactured at near-record numbers, they're a sustainable resource that we can make more in the future, they're not fully used (9 million of them unemployed) and we're okay with deliberately…

Arguably the incarcerated, and more tenuously then unemployed, are not "average human brains". I'm not sure I'd actually argue that but it seems worth addressing.

Incarceration is much more highly correlated to your parents income level than their genetics. Unemployment is primarily a skillset mismatch problem. Becoming a newspaper pressman looked like a solid career choice in 1995, not so much twenty years later when those 18 year olds are 38 and unemployed. Not foreseeing the rise of the internet is hardly strong evidence that their brains are defective.

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#358

Post by otoburb » Tue, Dec 02, 2014, 8:47 PM UTC

kmonsen wrote: post #334

geekam wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have said this before here and I will do that again. What hurts the market is L1 visa. H1 visa holders are almost in the same boat as local talent. Why? Because there is a government dictated minimum prevailaing wage that companies have to adhere to. I am yet to meet an H1B who is earning less than his/her peers (within an area, experience, skillset and education). However, I have met a lot of L1 visa holders (prim…

This is very, very true. L1 seems like a good deal since your spouse can work, but ends up being really bad since you have no negotiating power at salary adjustment time.

The L1A is better than the L1B because of the faster permanent residence processing times, mainly due to the fact that the L1A holders can file under the EB1C category[1] and avoid the long Labor Certification from the Department of Labor[2].

[1] http://www.immihelp.com/l1-visa/l1-visa-h1b-visa-comparison....

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_certification

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#359

Post by freeqaz » Tue, Dec 02, 2014, 8:50 PM UTC

malandrew wrote: post #298

barrkel wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got a H-1B visa. I was living in Ireland at the time. But, as it turned out, I never moved to the US. It was for a compiler position at Borland. I ended up working remotely for the next 6 years or so, first for a year as a contractor at a 6 figure Euro rate, then later as a salaried employee after I moved to London. They flew me over two to four times a year to keep up to date with the team. I collectively lived ov…

I'm a software engineer and green card holder from Brazil and there is nothing I want more than to see many of my friends who work in Brazil have the opportunity to come here to work in a great industry. That being said, both you and the anon person you replied to are right about the situation. The position you came to fill is a relatively rare skill here in the US and it helps the US to bring in talent from abroad,…

How would you enforce what market rate is? What prevents a company from saying that market rate is something absurdly low?

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#360

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 02, 2014, 8:52 PM UTC

msie wrote: post #159

manticore_alpha wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to say this, but in your position I'd suggest you collude with your employer to fake a degree.

And you just said: "There's standard, normalized ways immigrants have come to the US for a long time now." But for this guy's sake you'll make an exception? Is that because he won't form an ethnic ghetto?

[deleted]