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US Job Market Visualizer

karpathy.ai

321–330 of 388 posts

Re: US Job Market Visualizer

#321
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are new H1Bs a thing anymore? Since the fee went up to $100k, I’m not aware of any companies still sponsoring hires who need a new H1B

We have hit the cap for H1B's every year and we will always do so until we get rid of the program. Cheap labor will always be in demand. A 100k one-time fee is nothing for big employers. That's 25k/year for 4 years, and if you realize that H1B's can't easily leave their job it's obviously worth it. Compare hiring an H1B that is stuck at their job, to an American who can leave at any time. You can pay the H1B a lower…

> Cheap labor will always be in demand.

H1Bs are not cheap labor. They’re almost always pricier than the alternative to the company. This is a myth that is ultimately rooted in racism more than facts. Most of the top H1B filers - big tech companies in particular - pay literally identically for the same job. They have fixed pay structures internally, in part because if you don’t, you could face discrimination lawsuits - but mostly to just not lose the competition for talent.

But the cost to the company isn’t the cost of the pay anyways. It’s also the cost in lost time of the H1B process, the fees you pay as part of the process, the costs of law firms you have to hire, the cost of time delays, the risk of the immigration process not working out. Those work out to a lot more value than 25K/year.

An H1B is also not stuck in their job - you can transfer H1Bs.

Re: US Job Market Visualizer

#322

Are childcare and kindergarten teachers really exposed to AI? In theory, we could put a class of 30 children in front of chatbots with one supervisor. But I doubt we would chose to do this as a society. If office work becomes more automated, early childhood education is actually one area I'd expect to take up the Slack. I can't imagine a situation where we have millions of unemployed former office workers but we leav…

For most working-class Americans, education is a form of job-training.

In the AI maximalist world where humans are obsolete and cannot contribute to the economy in any meaningful way, there is actually no reason for public education to exist beyond being a free day care for non-rich people. Why learn algebra/calculus at all if the AIs can do it? Why should the US invest billions of dollars into public education instead of data centers?

I hope the US and AI leaders are still "speciesist" in that they put humans first. I hope AI will cure all illnesses, unlock space travel, and lead to flourishing of humanity, not just a flourishing of datacenters. It's also possible that AI just cleave societies in half and we are all worse off for it.

Re: US Job Market Visualizer

#323
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an X account which just posts universities hiring H1B's for ~half of what it would normally cost to hire people. An 80k/yr senior software developer will always be in demand, especially if the team is already predominantly non-american

Exactly. The fact that H1B's get paid less than Americans across the board is all you really need to know about the issue. There IS no reasonable counter argument. It's supposedly a program for importing the best and brightest talent that doesn't exist in the US but somehow those best and brightest people get paid LESS than their American counterparts? It was never about the best and brightest it was always about bri…

> The fact that H1B's get paid less than Americans across the board is all you really need to know about the issue.

Except this is literally false. Every single study I’ve seen that claims this has no real evidence - just speculation without knowing the details of the jobs or the people being hired, based on their own self-serving false comparisons to make dubious claims that similar jobs are paid differently.

Since you said “across the board”, do you think Google or Amazon pay a software engineer at the starting level differently based on immigration status? No, they don’t. Literally every manager at big tech could tell you this confidently.

Re: US Job Market Visualizer

#325
post #78

It's kinda cool to see a whole lot of otherwise intelligent people who are so dogmatically and ideologically opposed to anything AI that they're going to willfully dismiss anything that AI produces regardless of utility. It's not great for them, but it's a definite advantage for people who are already in the mindset of distinguishing and discriminating information and sources on merit, instead of running an "AI bad"…

>It's kinda cool to see a whole lot of otherwise intelligent people who are so dogmatically and ideologically opposed to anything AI that they're going to willfully dismiss anything that AI produces regardless of utility. You'd probably put me into that bucket, although I'd disagree. I'm not at all against using AI to do something like: type up a high level summary of a product featureset for an executive that doesn'…

I'm wondering if you're confusing "AI" with "LLMs" here.

I think LLMs are the equivalent of someone with a PhD in English literature and a few other things, and can be very intelligent and literate without being particularly good with numbers.

On the other hand you have plenty of machine learning numbers that are absolute beasts at everything number-related. I'm assuming you wouldn't put George RR Martin in charge of building your datasets.

Re: US Job Market Visualizer

#326

What struck me as interesting was the bachelors degree jobs on average pay 8k more per year than a masters education job.

I would speculate that careers that require Master's degrees tend to be more saturated, and the result of that is qualification creep. Examples of this include teaching, social work, library sciences, etc.

Re: US Job Market Visualizer

#327
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are new H1Bs a thing anymore? Since the fee went up to $100k, I’m not aware of any companies still sponsoring hires who need a new H1B

We have hit the cap for H1B's every year and we will always do so until we get rid of the program. Cheap labor will always be in demand. A 100k one-time fee is nothing for big employers. That's 25k/year for 4 years, and if you realize that H1B's can't easily leave their job it's obviously worth it. Compare hiring an H1B that is stuck at their job, to an American who can leave at any time. You can pay the H1B a lower…

People applying for H1B visas are getting partially compensated in the right to legally reside in the US rather than in money. The right to legally reside in the US is something that a lot of foreigners want badly, and are willing to accept otherwise-poor compensation for; and by definition it is not something you can pay an American citizen with.

Re: US Job Market Visualizer

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every year US absorbs 120k+ H1B+L1+OPT new visa holders. Considering there are 1.9M software engineers, market has to grow by 5% every year just to stand still. Add US graduates and you are talking about 10% growth required just to maintain employment. It's not realistic long term. Congress/president should pause H1B visas or hike up fee to 200-500K so that only truly exceptional talent are allowed in. Right now it's…

So immigrants are in fact taking away the jobs? Do you have the same opinion of illegal immigrants jumping the border and taking jobs from average Americans? I find this argument extremely funny because when immigrations are taking the white collar jobs, you guys get anti immigrants, tighten the visa stuff, but when blue collar and low level jobs are taken by illegal folks you turn and blind eye and noone is illegal…

I honestly don't see that much hypocrisy on this point. People in tech who are supportive of expansive rights for foreigners to immigrate to the US generally ground their argumentation in either claims that it's immoral for the US to limit immigration (the view characterized by the slogan "no one is illegal on stolen land"), or claims that they benefit from immigration even if they are competing for jobs with immigrants. And often the people making these claims are socially adjacent to immigrants in their workplace or other social circles.

Meanwhile, the people in tech who oppose immigration often do bring up the same argument you do - that it's bad to allow immigrants to compete with blue collar American citizen labor even if this competition would make some things that these white-collar tech workers buy cheaper - or ground their opposition to immigration in negative effects of immigrants on American society that aren't directly related to competition for blue-collar jobs (generally, that the presence of large numbers of immigrants has bad cultural or political consequences for the US as a whole).

The political fight over immigration among white-collar tech workers I think has more to do with battling moral claims, or different visions of what the US should look like culturally and politically, than it does over purely-materialist job competition concerns that they are hypocrites about when the job competition is happening to blue-collar workers.

Re: US Job Market Visualizer

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The study doesn't say it went into the 1%'s pockets. It says it went to 2 places: 1) The salaries of corporate employees 2) Shareholders and capital owners Regarding number 2: "Shareholders" would include anyone who owns any stock at all, including a lot of middle class people with a simple S&P 500 ETF in their portfolio. And the increase in productivity allowed more people to become capital owners, AKA entrepreneurs…

#2 only works if the public is allowed to invest when the new technology is in its early stages, which is currently not the case. Microsoft went public in 1986 at a valuation of $2.3 billion (in today's dollars). What's OpenAI / Anthropic going to be worth by the time they IPO? $1 trillion? $2 trillion?

Eh, buying and holding the S&P 500 (the Vanguard Bogleheads strategy) has allowed a lot of people to retire early.
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