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Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

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Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#161

Post by jarsin »

m_ke wrote: post #86

It's not just you. I have an Ivy league degree, worked in deep learning since alexnet at a leading startup in the space, was a CTO of a startup that got acquired and have referrals from very senior people at the top FANG companies and still struggled to get interviews. I also have research scientist friends with Neurips papers, ones that solved long standing open math problems and even they are struggling to get hire…

I could see outsourcing to Poland end up working out just as great as outsourcing to Ukraine did.

Not saying it will happen tomorrow, but would not surprise me to see Russia go in there after they get a big chunk of Ukraine and slowly gain control of it's government.

Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#163

Post by bobosha »

Glyptodon wrote: post #35

The "white males" bit is not useful/helpful. But US resident vs non is probably a bit. There are several layers to this. Layer one is that SW Eng work has always been both multi modal and that it's never been easy to get out of the trash distributions (e.g. $40-$60k "analyst" or "programmer" gigs, etc.) if you end up there. And it's also never been easy for someone to get a degree and find a job w/o having internship…

tyvm for your thoughtful answer without some of the usual histrionics on this topic.

Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#164

Post by maeil »

w4ffl35 wrote: post #97

[flagged]

The irony is palpable.

For many years, FAANGs and the likes have made billions across the world without hiring any significant amount of people in nearly all of those economies. Zero profit for the non-US countries. Take a random one, Denmark. Google and Apple sure have been making great money off of the Danes. What has Denmark gotten in return for it? Nothing. It's all gone towards (generally US) investor returns, and US salaries.

Sure, make it illegal for US companies to hire boatloads of people abroad. At the same time, other countries should ban those US companies from operating there.

Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#165

Post by w4ffl35 »

brianwawok wrote: post #157
w4ffl35 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a company is operating in a foreign nation sure. If a company is operating in America on American soil and refusing to hire Americans because they want to save a buck, they should face penalties. I do not see hiring foreigners as being pro-American.

Then make this choice when you own a company. What % of your paycheck are you willing to donate to being pro America?

> Then make this choice when you own a company

Absolutely I would.

> What % of your paycheck are you willing to donate to being pro America?

This is a tu quoque logical fallacy. I'll cross that bridge if and when I come to it, but I can tell you that I'd rather take a pay cut than hire a foreigner.

Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#166

Post by layer8 »

w4ffl35 wrote: post #140
derektank wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why, exactly? These companies have foreign customers, it seems reasonable to expect that they would also want to have foreign employees that can speak the language, work in the same time zone, etc. And the demand for those employees is unlikely to be perfectly commensurate with demand for US based employees at all times. Seems like a ban would be pretty destructive, even if some of this hiring is an attempt at offsho…

If a company is operating in a foreign nation sure. If a company is operating in America on American soil and refusing to hire Americans because they want to save a buck, they should face penalties. I do not see hiring foreigners as being pro-American.

More software companies are operating internationally nowadays than aren’t, I would assume. And publicly-traded companies are generally owned internationally to some degree. It’s rarely in the interest of a company to restrict themselves to a single country.

Furthermore, most of the hardware that you use directly or indirectly, wasn’t manufactured in the US. The globalization trend of companies, job markets, consumers, and supply chains being spread around the world will likely only grow. Most things are internationally interdependent nowadays, there’s no good reason for why the job market should be any different.

Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#167

Post by maeil »

w4ffl35 wrote: post #140
derektank wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why, exactly? These companies have foreign customers, it seems reasonable to expect that they would also want to have foreign employees that can speak the language, work in the same time zone, etc. And the demand for those employees is unlikely to be perfectly commensurate with demand for US based employees at all times. Seems like a ban would be pretty destructive, even if some of this hiring is an attempt at offsho…

If a company is operating in a foreign nation sure. If a company is operating in America on American soil and refusing to hire Americans because they want to save a buck, they should face penalties. I do not see hiring foreigners as being pro-American.

The comment is mostly talking about Silicon Valley big tech, of which exactly 100% operates in many countries.

Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#168

Post by ethanwillis »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #114

Yes, we reached peak tech employment. The market was flooded with job openings from a decade-plus of endlessly increasing VC funding. So a lot of not-technically-inclined people took bootcamps and entered the job market, and for a while there was enough jobs. But with VC funding slowly drying up, and a shaky economy, all those excess jobs are gone. But there's still a ton of people trying to get the jobs. I have two…

Well the CEOs are telling us there are more jobs than ever and they need the ability to hire more people from abroad to even have a chance at filling them.

So are there jobs or not?

Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#169

Post by maeil »

w4ffl35 wrote: post #133
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should it be illegal for American companies to operate abroad when they have international revenue streams?

[flagged]

Right, then go get out of all those juicy international markets and see the majority of revenue evaporate.

Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#170

Post by Dig1t »

ajmurmann wrote: post #156
Dig1t wrote: post #143

I work at Apple and we have a policy (new in 2024) where we are not allowed to make an offer for a manager position to a candidate unless we have interviewed a PoC or a woman for the roll. The stated goal for this policy is “diverse managers hire diverse teams”. So right off the bat we are discriminating based on race and gender. Look at the published diversity data on the Apple website, the company is now 50% Asian…

IMO the difference between "interviewed" and "hired" here is crucial. I had a similar rule at my previous job. If anything I felt the risk was that this would be abused to the detriment of the URM candidate. If you have a strong candidate coming through but haven't met the URM interview retirement yet, it's tempting to not look for a "real" candidate but just go through the motions with the next candidate who matches…

idk it seems illegal to me.. the civil rights act says in very plain language that it's illegal to discriminate based on immutable characteristics during hiring.

Break down a hypothetical scenario:

1. Post a job, anyone can apply.

2. Candidate applies, goes through the hiring process, the team likes them and wants to make an offer.

3. Not a woman or PoC so not allowed to make an offer yet.

So at this point lets say you go out and interview a woman or PoC.

a. If you like the woman or PoC and want to give them the job, then the first person was discriminated against because if they had been a different race or gender they would have got the job.

b. If you don't give them the job then you can check the box saying you interviewed the diverse candidate, but this is at best purely performative because the other outcome was discriminating against the first person.

Logically, it is impossible to have this policy and not be breaking both the spirit and letter law in my opinion.

Also the implication of "diverse managers hire diverse teams" is that the diverse managers will discriminate based on race and gender.

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