281–290 of 637 posts
Honestly this is a good thing. Right now the H1B is a bullshit immigration program for cheap engineers from India and China designed to depress wages in silicon valley. A change is sorely needed, this is not big enough but it's definitely a step.
Honestly this is a good thing. Right now the H1B is a bullshit immigration program for cheap engineers from India and China designed to depress wages in silicon valley. A change is sorely needed, this is not big enough but it's definitely a step.
The idea that those on H1B visas are bringing wages down for software engineers is a popular one. Is it supported by data? If it isn’t, this is just thinly veiled xenophobia. Personally, I think the more diverse groups have an opportunity to come to America legally, the better.
WSJ > https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-look-at-the-h-1b-visa-pro...
Fortune > http://fortune.com/2017/02/15/h1-b-silicon-valley-wages/
Science Magazine > http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2015/05/economists-h-1b-vi...
I particularly appreciate the part where you passively-aggressively calle me a xenophobe not knowing I'm an immigrant too. Classy move.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree 100%. A handful are awesome. Many are doing software for the wrong reasons and most are generating mountains of shit code.
>A handful are awesome. Many are doing software for the wrong reasons and most are generating mountains of shit code. (I know nothing about this topic but) Wouldn't that also be true of the general US population, and programmers in other countries? and etc... i.e. Sturgeon's law? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea that those on H1B visas are bringing wages down for software engineers is a popular one. Is it supported by data? If it isn’t, this is just thinly veiled xenophobia. Personally, I think the more diverse groups have an opportunity to come to America legally, the better.
I think when you're contesting a well known economic principle (increased supply tends to decrease prices given equal demand) the impetus is on you to prove the claim. That said, this would be difficult to demonstrate with data because the effect manifests as salaries growing slower than they would without H1Bs. Obviously, there are a million other variables involved, so without some kind of controlled study it's unl…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea that those on H1B visas are bringing wages down for software engineers is a popular one. Is it supported by data? If it isn’t, this is just thinly veiled xenophobia. Personally, I think the more diverse groups have an opportunity to come to America legally, the better.
Look at it from the other direction: large companies have fought giving H1-B workers better protections. They wouldn’t be doing that if they weren’t profiting from workers with less negotiating ability. That’s also my position: don’t ban them, give them flexibility to switch jobs like everyone else so companies can’t hold the threat of deportation over them if they want a better deal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>To prime your intuition a bit, consider how woman and minorities more than doubled the work force from the 1960s to 1990s with no loss in jobs or lowering of wages. You do realize there hasn't been a raise in real wages since the 70s when you account for inflation right? Coincidentally during that same time period the income gap exploded because the wealthy had plentiful cheap labor and were able to pocket the produ…
That's super interesting, I didn't know that about hourly wages. I tend to think of income gaining from 1950 to 1990 and flattening from the mid 1990s to now. Though it does look like total compensation (adding in benefits) did actually increase recently, they don't have anything for back to 1960. So maybe the story is that wages stayed flat, but benefits accounted for most of the income increase. Not an economist so…
I'm trying to understand exactly what is changing. From the article are they just switching the order of the two lotteries? They aren't actually raising the number of visas offered, right? This just has the effect of allocating more of the 85,000 visas granted to those with a Master's degree or PhD, right? I'm sure the universities that heavily recruit international students to their graduate programs will love this.
Actually it says the 20,000 is only for Master/PhDs, so this could reduce the total number of H1Bs issued if there are fewer than 20,000 Master/PhD applicants. Otherwise the effect is more Master/PhD H1Bs and fewer others.
I've worked with a few H1-B holders in Silicon Valley and they're awesome. A great improvement would be to allow H1B holders to change jobs easily (maybe after a year). It's too easy for them to get stuck in not great situations. It would be great for everyone if they could move to better fitting jobs, especially for startups who have trouble running H1-B programs. If you are, like me, a software engineer, you should…
When H1s are used to displace American workers at a lower cost, I am not sure “cheering all immigrants” is warranted. Some, but definitely not all. The Disney firings happened. And it has happened in many other places that aren’t as famous. When Disney has H1s displacing Americans who were already doing the job, that isn’t a “shortage,” which is the single purpose for which H1B was created. I am not disputing the val…
Honestly this is a good thing. Right now the H1B is a bullshit immigration program for cheap engineers from India and China designed to depress wages in silicon valley. A change is sorely needed, this is not big enough but it's definitely a step.
I've posted that before, I'll repost that here From Michio Kaku[1]: "The United States has the worst education system known to science. Our graduates compete regularly at the level of third world countries. How come the scientific establishment of the US doesn't collapse. If we are producing a generation of dummy. If the stupid index of America keeps rising every year [...] how come the scientific establishment of th…
That number sounded really high to me and I went looking for information to refute it. Turns out 50% may be a rather modest estimate today:
Foreign Students and Graduate STEM Enrollment https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign...
> The report found 81 percent of full-time graduate students in electrical and petroleum engineering programs at U.S. universities are international students, and 79 percent in computer science are.
The Disappearing American Grad Student https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/education/edlife/american...
> The dearth of Americans is even more pronounced in hot STEM fields like computer science, which serve as talent pipelines for the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft: About 64 percent of doctoral candidates and almost 68 percent in master’s programs last year were international students, according to an annual survey of American and Canadian universities by the Computing Research Association.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think when you're contesting a well known economic principle (increased supply tends to decrease prices given equal demand) the impetus is on you to prove the claim. That said, this would be difficult to demonstrate with data because the effect manifests as salaries growing slower than they would without H1Bs. Obviously, there are a million other variables involved, so without some kind of controlled study it's unl…
Software engineers are being hired at much higher rates than any other profession in the US and that has been going up for decades. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
WSJ > https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-look-at-the-h-1b-visa-pro...
Fortune > http://fortune.com/2017/02/15/h1-b-silicon-valley-wages/
Science Magazine > http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2015/05/economists-h-1b-vi...
There's huge age discrimination at work in the tech industry, and older, very qualified workers struggle to find good jobs because tech employers prefer young and naive serfs.