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Immigration is about talent, not costs

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Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#581

Post by terranstyler »

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 is one thing in your post I must particularly disagree with:

> There's absolutely no talent shortage in the Bay Area, provided you can pay (and your ideas are interesting)

I can generalize that "there is no shortage of anything provided you can pay". You can get a BMW in Cuba, a skyscraper in NY and what ever you want where ever you want, it's just much more expensive.

Still, there are shortages and high prices are indicative of that.

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#582

Post by davidw »

thedufer wrote: post #456
davidw wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By this logic, we should not allow people to have more than two children, or else the surplus children will grow up and take the jobs. Because there are only a fixed number of jobs to go around, right? I read last week that the bureau of labor statistics determined the number: 309,219,419.

I don't know what logic you're using, but it didn't come from my post. As I pointed out elsewhere, I didn't make any value judgments. I claimed, essentially, that someone taking a job hurts others who may have competed for that job. I did not claim that there's any need to protect them, with legislation or otherwise.

> someone taking a job

The problem is that you're thinking of "a job". The economy is composed of many, many jobs, and is fairly dynamic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#583

Post by vladtaltos »

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 myself have electronics engineering background (telecommunications sub-specialty), 5 others are similarly with ee backgrounds and 3 or 4 people are from applied maths departments. I believe we have only 2 mechanical eng people and the rest is CS guys.

It's not resume or education background bias. However, if you're going to pay in the 150k-200k euro range to somebody, you naturally want them to have relevant experience. After ee undergrad, I majored in signal processing and then got a phd in cv. Hiring people in the hopes that they'll become useful is being done but not excessively in a way that it is counter-productive ( eg. we're not hiring number theorists but accept applied maths guys - one new hire (one of our immigrant workers) has a very cool phd thesis on probability and the data he worked with came from CERN experiments - so it's not CV or PR at all - pure math applied on physics experiments... but he's smart and experienced enough that after only 3 months he's already doing substantial contributions )

cv/pr is not a field where you have a 'modest learning curve' if you hire people to do research - you really need at least a few years of research experience for working on state-of-the-art problems... otherwise, you're paying people to develop their research skills at a very high premium. that should be done at a university...

maybe I'm biased - I always consider this H1B problem in terms of research work - not regular stuff where what you need to do is 95% engineering and 5% research.. this is my bias. but it is also a valid example for H1B discussion in contrast to dismissing all H1B immigrant workers as 'cheap labor' for doing engineering tasks with low requirements.

The US is a country spanning a large continent - maybe that is the reason for many of the racist rants I've seen here on this discussion - it doesn't have many neighbouring countries ( and at odds with all of them except maybe Canada? ) and most US citizens don't leave the states to work in other parts of the world. If you have a whole continent for a country it's easier to find a job in a different part of it than moving to a completely different culture. And so this sort of causes people who don't travel much to have a conservative view of 'immigrant' labor. EU is definitely not perfect and has many problems to solve - but at least, in my opinion, opening the borders for quota-free worker exchanges lets people to hire from a richer pool of talent and helps reduce culture clashes and racist viewpoints in the long term. I'm feeling very lucky to get to know many different cultures from all around the world. I wish you could also have a taste of it too...

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#584

Post by davidw »

fargolime wrote: post #369
davidw wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have too many people in the US as it is. Do you know how many children are born every day in the US?

Not offhand, but how is that relevant?

If you want to complain about "too many people", don't you think babies factor into that, somehow?

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#585

Post by UK-AL »

dashboardfront wrote: post #208
UK-AL wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your average friend is likely to want a close to market price for that room. Relying on friends is not a way to plan an economy. A lot of people won't have friends willing to let them stay.

That's not what I was saying at all, but alright. If you're interested in the topic, look up utility curves, income effect, and substitution effect in a microeconomics textbook. It'll probably have a much better explanation than I can communicate through text (unless I start making graphs, which would be a bit time consuming). Here's a copy paste of my explanation on reddit though (where this topic also constantly co…

I think you need a certain amount of sq ft regardless. Most people aren't going to trade living in a tiny room for more stuff.

Your living area is probably No.1 contributor to quality of life.

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#586

Post by threatofrain »

halflings wrote: post #192
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…

> "H1B Visas exist for one reason, and one reason only" ; "it's simple reality" ; "Without a doubt" ; "It happens all-the-fucking-time" ; "There's absolutely no talent shortage in the Bay Area" Presenting something as a fact doesn't make it one. You're basically saying that American tech companies should only hire Americans. That the facebook, Google, Mozilla, ... shouldn't hire smart people from other countries. As…

The commentator was not discussing immigration wholly; they are discussing H1B. There are some good reasons to suspect why H1B is an unfair tool. For example, H1B immigrants cannot easily switch employers, and do so with some appreciably elevated risk or cost. Or the fact that H1B wages are enforced by law, rather than competition, and that it's very difficult to bring legal action. If H1B immigrants could switch around without consequence to their immigration or employment prospects, then this wouldn't happen, but I suspect that companies wouldn't support something like that.

I think that employers already have the edge on workers in general because they have more information, and because many Americans feel that specific talk of income is invasive or rude, and thus American workers don't really cooperate with each other for strategy; or at least it seems tech workers don't.

The specific economic impairments placed upon H1B immigrants, even if written by sincere and well-meaning hearts, unfortunately means that these people are ripe for exploitation without much serious legitimate recourse. I think that assets and opportunities which may be profitably and predictably exploited (and well known in our case), will probably be exploited up to the border where it's no longer profitable to exploit.

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#588

Post by scalayer »

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…

Fear based ethnic favoritism is xenophobic by definition. Abstracting that with immigration policy, visa types, foreign labor law, etc to influence the effect doesn't change that.

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#589

Post by ownagefool »

d3fmacro wrote: post #544
danudey wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many tech companies apply for H1-B visas for developers who are unable to speak any English at all? Your post has such an overwhelming air of nationalistic, racist sentiment. "These foreigners come over here, they don't even speak english, and they take all our jobs". The reality is that most of the foreign developers I've met speak english and communicate at least as well as other developers we've hired here, an…

you are accusing someone else of racism but at the same you make this comment "not all H1-B visa holders are dirt-farming Indians who read Ruby on Rails for Dummies in their native language and got tired of farming themselves out on glance for $10/hr. A lot of them are from well-educated western countries" . So only western countries engineers are well educated but Indian developers are dirt-farmers ?

That doesn't actually have to mean that all Indian developers are dirt-farmers, which is hyperbole itself, it's just playing to a stereotype to make his point which was the opposite. I'm not sure you should really cling on to the racism card.

From the same vien I'm from the UK but have been approached a couple of times by US companies wanting me to relocate. Typically they tell me money is of no concern, they just deperatly need good people. I'm not convinced they'll save money or get better results by shipping me over from London but I suspect this has more to do with ignorance of the recruiters than malice or conspiracy.

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#590

Post by anjc »

jlebar wrote: post #519
anjc wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But more to the point, it's short-sighted and selfish to judge policy decisions solely based on their effects on your salary. Especially since those of us in tech are, by and large, ridiculously well-compensated. Maybe it's selfish for you, but what about the ~50% of STEM grads who can't find a job in their industry? And wages are stagnant for STEM workers, and lowering for CS workers. Hundreds of thousands have be…

> what about the ~50% of STEM grads who can't find a job in their industry? According to the Census bureau, 74% of STEM grads don't work in STEM [1]. I was pretty surprised to read this, until I looked up what the Census bureau considers to be STEM [2]. You can see from this graphic that CS, math, statistics, and engineering majors all end up working in STEM in relatively high proportions. It's the psychology, social…

I like the visualisation in [2]!

> However, we have zero reason to believe all of these people "can't find a job in their industry"

We do, from the same datasource I believe. I'm copy/pasting from another reply i made here.

"Some data from the economic policy institute (this is the first place i could re-find it): http://www.rit.edu/news/pdfs/CHE_Hira.pdf

Of the 50% of engineering graduates not working in engineering, 40% of CS grads not in CS, (35% of these two groups, total, are working in totally unrelated fields), ~50% are not working in their fields because of pay and conditions, 37% are not working in their fields because they can't find work, and 10% are not working in the field for another reason. The 37% probably aren't the people who moved into management consulting."

You don't feel that there's a problem, based on the data you found. And you might be right, if you don't look at it at a macro-level. The big picture is confusing, however. Companies and government are crying out for more tech workers. They're all lobbying for an easier way to bring workers to the US (my country, Ireland, are also doing this). But wages for computer scientists, across the US, are flat. They've been stagnant for a decade. If some proportion of CS grads do not go into CS, typical market dynamics would suggest that the lack of supply will drive up wages, and entice them into the field. This isn't happening. In fact, some sizeable proportion can't find their first job, out of college, and don't work in the field again.

Something is amiss.

Another copy/pasted this from another reply of mine:

"Lastly, there's a large supply of unemployed CS graduates in the US: http://www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages-mi... "

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