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As an H1-B I can say that I'm paid the local market salary for my skillset. And so is my wife.
When supply goes up price goes down. Logic 101 says that H1-B immigrants lower "the local market salary".
If someone is smart and wants to work in the US there should be no barriers to doing so. I don't deserve any job or salary if someone else can do it better or cheaper. We are all human beings in the sense of our right to fair work and wage. Who wants to wake up in the morning and think "thank goodness some lawmaker is forcing someone smarter/better than me to live in poverty so I can have this cushy job"? PG is right…
The amount of people in this thread who seem fine with that kind of thinking is really disheartening. So many programmers whose salary seems to be their guiding moral principle.
Paul Graham is fighting for his side. I hope any developers here are smart enough to fight for theirs. He's arguing that the same companies who colluded illegally to drive down the wages of the "best" programmers, now have no interest in lowering their wages when they're arguing for increased immigration. LOL.
And you can't claim that Facebook now wants to bid down wages - your assertions rely on using a company's past actions as evidence for their future choices.
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"the idea of pg lobbying to flood the market with cheap programming labor is not only demonstrably wrong" He wants the top programmers in the world to be able to come to the USA. But my suspicion is he has very little concern for your above average, but not great, USA born programmer whose wages are threatened by corporations that exploit and abuse the H1B Visa program.
> But my suspicion is The principle of charity would ask you to suspend that suspicion in the absence of clear evidence for it (in which case it would be more than a suspicion).
The irony of this is that the old USSR would not allow their highly educated people to leave, fearing brain drain. Then the US does not allow highly educated people in. And of course there was the post-WW2 gold rush to grab as many german scientists and engineers as possible, and I don't think the results of that for the US and the USSR are in dispute. It's like the other irony that we use tariffs to 'protect' domest…
And the tragedy is that the majority of voters don't understand this, when it would only take a few hours of econ 101 to teach.
All: much of this thread is of low quality, below the standard that Hacker News discussion should adhere to, because it doesn't engage with what pg's essay actually says. It merely uses it as a trigger point for passions about other things, like H1Bs and Infosys. In other words it goes on a generic tangent, and generic tangents are the vectors we most need to avoid if we want discussions that are substantive instead…
The best, strongest interpretation of PG's essay merits far less charity than even exists in this thread. There is barely anything of substance in the whole piece, and the parts that are substantive are just so far out of line with the empirical data we have regarding this issue as to be baffling coming from somebody with the cache of PG. If I were not being "charitable" I'd use words like "peurile," "ignorant," "tra…
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When supply goes up price goes down. Logic 101 says that H1-B immigrants lower "the local market salary".
Only for fungible types of workers. Programmers, software engineers, data scientists, product managers, designers, etc aren't like farm or construction laborers. These skills aren't commodities.
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every tech worker's salary will drop significantly if the United States allowed more open immigration laws. But think about this - what would have happened if elon musk, vinod khosla,Sundar Pichai See, this is just crazy. Why would you or I or anyone want to make ourselves materially worse off, so some guys we've never met, and who couldn't care less about us, can become richer than the dreams of avarice? Politicians…
The thing you are suggesting leads to a frighting conclusion. Are you saying that you are against people like elon musk from doing what he does ? He wasn't born into wealth and was middle class just like you and me but was just too damn smart. The free market rewarded him for his smartness and we are all better off because of it. Yes he became really rich but the net sum of wealth he provided in return has made every…
Prove it. This is just neoliberal dogma and is contradicted by empirical research that shows that economic growth is awarded to the super rich while the middle and lower classes slip backwards.
Class warfare means that Elon Musk is lowering my wage. I don't give a fuck about paypal or spaceships. I want affordable food, housing, healthcare, childcare, and other basic necessities. These are no longer available to the majority of the population because of an artificial scarcity imposed on us by the ownership class run by neoliberal ideologues like Elon Musk.
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Well, there is a doctor shortage, particularly in the general practitioner space, where salaries are much lower than specialist medicine; likewise, while there's not a shortage of lawyers, oversupply has pushed down wages (and pushed would-be attorneys out of the market), and law school enrollments have fallen appropriately. Comp-sci salaries are really, really good , to the point that a single experienced developer…
My point was less that we bring in the big guns by poaching them from these other fields, then that we address the issue the way it's traditionally been addressed, which is to let the market take care of it. If these development jobs are really magnificent engines of wealth creation, then pay more to hire for the positions and more qualified people will appear. If, as you point out, there's now a lawyer glut, and now…
Subclause (II) of section 1182(n)(1)(A)(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act is amended by inserting "median" before "prevailing wage level".
This would at least prevent companies from using the lowest possible wage tier in the BLS data.
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The best, strongest interpretation of PG's essay merits far less charity than even exists in this thread. There is barely anything of substance in the whole piece, and the parts that are substantive are just so far out of line with the empirical data we have regarding this issue as to be baffling coming from somebody with the cache of PG. If I were not being "charitable" I'd use words like "peurile," "ignorant," "tra…
I think you are proving dang's point. Instead of challenging assumptions and conclusions, all you've done is call the post "peurile", "irrational", etc. I didn't particularly like the use of "anti-immigration people," but there is certainly a way to charitably interpret it. You would interpret it as just so - a phrase he's using to refer to people opposing loosened immigration policies, which unintentionally is a poo…