H1B = Organised mafia
U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers
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Re: U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers
#372I'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…
> 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.
Josh, what's needed in US is a simple plain work visa, without any pretence of "high levelness" - something that was common in all Western countries before immigration alarmisms became a such a severe thing.
For the society to accept immigrant workforce, it needs to become more open and less xenophobic again.
The primary reason for messed up immigration systems across the Western nations has nothing to do with the labour market, but plain closet racism of unwashed masses that uses all arguments above as a cover.
Re: U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was hyperbole to show the effect of supply and demand More and more I notice how similar software engineers are beginning to sound like the "Made in America" factory workers who said China could never do their job. Never take the present comfy situation for granted
Anyone who thinks China is not full of extremely talented software engineers does not know anything about China.
So how come there is 0 tech innovation coming from there?
Your statement is absolutely false covered by facts.
Re: U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
By this logic, any increase in productivity is bad because it reduces labor scarcity. That's just not how it works. > if we dropped 10 million software engineers in Silicon Valley from around the world, guess what? Guess what, we'd get a lot more overseas clients as they wrestled with the labor shortage abroad. (Although, the real problem would be the humanitarian crisis in housing 10m more in SV overnight, ha)
>any increase in productivity is bad because it reduces labor scarcity Isn't it? Increases in productivity, normally called automation, must reduce labour scarcity unless demand for the product is proportionately increased. There are plenty of sectors where this is exactly what happens, and some where it isn't.
> Increases in productivity, normally called automation
That is a wrong assumption to start with. Inventing the wheel wasn't automation.
Re: U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, wealth inequality increased because we stopped taxing rich people.
The US didn't have an income tax at all until the 20th century, at least at the federal level
Rich: having wealth or great possessions; abundantly supplied with resources, means, or funds; wealthy: a rich man; a rich nation.
Not sure how income tax would apply to that
Re: U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, wealth inequality increased because we stopped taxing rich people.
Wealth inequality has increased mostly due to the massive expansion of the global economy, which was a large benefit to capital owners and was a detriment to US labor (whose wages were artifically very high in the post WW2 decades). Global labor competed, capital benefited. Federal Reserve policies since ~1970 have also overwhelmingly favored capital, asset holders, and not workers. The US tax code has gotten more pr…
There's been another major shift as well. This [1] graph is critical. There were more self employed workers in the US in 1948 than there are today. The population since then has increased by more than 220%. And the trend increases the further back you go. I mention 1948 only because that's as far back as FRED's data goes! The US used to be a land largely driven by self employment.
We had large numbers of mostly independent economic centers populated with local businesses owned and operated by local individuals. In many ways it's something akin to what you can find in many parts of the developing world today. And it's awesome. But as the economy 'globalized' we've reached a point such that an urban business streetscape in California can very often look effectively identical, in terms of businesses in operation, to one all the way on the other side of the country in New York. You're never going to have anything even vaguely resembling economic equality when a handful of companies control immense amounts of the entire economy.
This also distorts governmental systems since extensive wealth means the reach of companies is practically unlimited. Civil servant versus a company sitting on billions of dollars with international connections spanning the entire globe and the best legal and public relations teams that money can buy? That's not even David vs Goliath, that's ant vs foot.
Re: U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers
#377I have extensive experience working in the industry for the past 13 years, but I don't even have a bachelor's degree. Am I screwed?
Re: U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers
#378I'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…
H1-B mandates a lower than competitive wage that the recipient's get stuck in, this isn't the same situation as women / minorities gaining access to the workplace unless their access came at a mandatory much lower salary.
Re: U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dude, just … no. It's not about signaling or positive sentiments. All human beings are equal. Being born in one place doesn't make you special or entitles you to a job. US citizen or whatever-country citizen, all that matters is what you can do. Meritocracy, you know. If someone else can do the job better than you or me, they should be hired. Being born in the US or gender or anything else you can think about shouldn…
By way of a thought experiment: If all human beings are equal, is this a necessary and sufficient condition to let a homeless person stay with you for a night? Assuming this is an option for a relative or friend. Why not willingly give up your job now? Surely someone can lay claim to your job on some merit basis. If you have children, do you distribute your time and affection in proportion to merit? I don't see why I…
> I don't see why I should give up my hard won comfort -- won collectively by my ancestors, neighbors, compatriots, myself -- to strangers. It's natural to accord special status to yourself, then to some close kin, ..., then to fellow citizens, then to the rest of humanity.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a colleague once. Basically he was making the argument that people work hard to pass on something to their kids, and we shouldn't discourage that. Also that generations of people were working for their own nearest, why should that be wrecked in favour of a new regime?
There probably is something natural about helping your closest first. But nature is not in itself a reason for thinking something is right.
The problem for me is we are talking about excluding people from voluntary agreements. If some guy from a foreign country comes to my country and manages to agree a deal with some employer, why on earth do I have any right to stop that?
Any consequences of that agreement on my wellbeing are indirect. The arguments always go via the market, speaking to the effect of changing supply and demand. It's like when the "wrong kind of people" move into a neighbourhood, lowering house prices. What reasonable complaint does one have, other than if those people in themselves do something unreasonable like littering?
There's lots of things people can do voluntarily that might hurt me indirectly. Suppose everyone decided to speak Esperanto instead of the local language. Do I have a right to stop them? No. Would it have an enormous cost to me? Yes. Would it be convenient for me to use the law to force them? Sure.
So while I can understand that people are worried about immigration, I've yet to hear a reasonable argument to restrict it.
Re: U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers
#380I'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…
>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…
Now you have households with both working and they can't afford to have kids
This strikes me as ridiculous as a broad-brush, general statement. It's not that Americans can't afford to have kids, it's that they incentivize different things than they did in the past. I don't deny that real wages haven't risen because of the supply of workers and dual-income families, but c'mon. There's been an increase in professional married people that want it all, and these DINKs refuse to sacrifice anything materially to have children. They have lots of adult toys and other conveniences, but somehow can't find the money to raise a child.