461–470 of 487 posts
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In Australia, 7-11 was paying staff minimum wage then demanding half of it back in cash. Literally mugging their own staff.
A lot of fly in fly out workers too. They make good salaries but have to spend a massive chunk of it "renting" accommodation off their employer.
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In grad school i was one of those TAs teaching science to 1st/2nd year university kids. Let me tell you, i was horrified and could not believe these kids paid $50k/year to attend these essentially "baby sitting" classes with high school level information.. at most. 95% kids knew nothing IMO and were planning to go to med schools, i pissed off many of them (as i later discovered) by not giving them anything higher tha…
One of the things that annoyed me was the love of multiple choice tests We said "multiple choice" only to the foreigners and the most uptight profs. They're properly called 'multiple guess' by American students.
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The elephant no one seems to talk about is: Why are universities not accepting more "local" grad students? In my experience, it was the standardized tests. I was completing an undergrad in math while attempting to the GRE. Meanwhile I heard stories of students in other countries essentially focusing on the GRE as their undergrad equivalents weren't as time consuming/rigorous.
Trust me the people who spent all their time focused on the GRE don't make it to decent grad programs. The elephant in the room isn't why aren't more universities accepting 'local' students. No department would choose a foreigner over a local. You wanna know why? How much the student is going to cost them. Foreign students never qualify for in-state tuition (well at a state school anyways) and right off the bat are m…
That's not really true. The basic problem is that while a foreigner can take a US PhD and apply for a fairly prestigious job in their home country, an American with a US PhD gets their career stuck in a rut. Multiple post-docs, for low salaries and long hours, followed by a desperate rush to find a job in a national lab, an industrial lab, or academia. There are hundreds of applicants for each permanent job, and even if you get a permanent job, you're not really guaranteed job-security (tenure). Many "permanent" jobs are even on soft money, which means if you fail to bring in enough grants (and grant rates have fallen dreadfully low in recent years due to Congressional budget cuts), you're a "professor" who can't pay for food or housing.
American academia relies too much on having legions of cheap grad-students to do much of the footwork, and then throwing those "students" out of science entirely when they graduate. It also relies on Congress actually funding the NSF, NIH, NASA, etc. at rates proportional to how much science is being done, which of course nowadays Congress steadfastly refuses to do.
American science careers are in crisis because the career model has become based upon exploitation: getting as much cheap labor out of as many people as possible before throwing them away.
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There aren't a ton of job for PHds in chemistry, biology, chemist, math etc. They end up working at hedge funds or web developers or things not necessarily related to their PHd. Look at big pharama and see how much they spend on R&D or basic research. Its a very small percentage of revenues.
You are clearly outside of the field. There are tons of jobs in the biotech industry for qualified graduates. The issue is finding people with appropriate scientific and industry backgrounds. This is why h1bs are hired. I don't care what color you are and where you come from. If you know your stuff I will hire you.
My wife worked in biotech. It's very easy to find people with the appropriate undergrad and Master's degrees. It's hard to find someone with a postdoc in exactly what your company does. Unfortunately, the firm wanted to do exactly that: any advancement required going back to academia for a very precise degree/research program. There was no system of internal training or advancement at all, and as a direct result, the firm is (still) chronically understaffed, chronically overworking its employees, and frankly not at all a good place to work.
Thing is, that's your problem as a biotech firm, since the doctoral and postdoctoral job track was never meant to produce workers for industry. You really ought to just take people at an earlier stage of their career, train them for your unique needs, and advance them over the years. While doing so, you should also provide competitive salaries, reasonable hours, and job security.
Oh, and respect for basic safety. None of this "if a chemical fire starts, see if you can put it out before pulling the fire-alarm" crap I've heard about.
Lastly, if we're going to talk xenophobia, why should a firm in the Northeastern United States receive visas to hire a Serbian postdoc (educated in one of Europe's many cheap, publicly-funded university systems!) instead of hiring and training up an undergrad from Nebraska? Are Nebraskans less deserving to "immigrate" to the Northeast than Europeans?
Or are American firms just trying to leech off other countries' public education systems while not paying into making the American system comparably cheap and accessible? How come the undergrad from Nebraska has massive student-loan debt, while the European postdoc has been earning net income since grad school?
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>while his senior counselor and strategist thinks there are too many asians in Silicon Valley The idea that you can have "too many" of any type of person is about an un-american as one can be. Somehow Trump has no problem with 'too many' chubby white supremacists in the white house. Oh right, whites get a pass on everything. Its only non-whites that have to worry about being too high profile or too successful as to n…
I'm tired of this "un-american" nonesense. I remember when it was "un-american" to oppose the Iraq war. Not wanting to be inundated with foreigners is a valid political position whether you like it or not.
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"Everyone can learn how to code, it's not a real science." Yes but not everyone who learns to code can get a job coding. Not everyone can get into Google or Facebook just cause they learned to code. The software engineering interviews don't test your ability to code, they test your ability to problem solve w/ data structures & algorithms.
If you live in middle America flyover country it's hard to get any tech job. And the H1-B program is making it a lot harder.
Mind, that might have something to do with middle America having defunded its state university systems, making skilled labor difficult to produce. We live in an economy where gluts of unskilled labor are a very bad thing for productivity, and it's about time state governments got that through their damned heads.
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We've been drifting in this direction for decades now... if someone else wanted to take the wheel, why haven't they done so already? Sure, Putin wants to be the daddy, but he just doesn't have the industry to get there. Other than him? It's like the rest of the world believes the hype, even more than we do. Or maybe the hype is true?
China certainly is doing a great job at this and Trump's dismissal of the TPP means China just get a major leg up in its regional ambitions. The US still is an 800lbs gorilla, but it got there by making a lot of aggressive globalization, immigration, military, and investment moves. Now we have an administration that is against all those things and is run by a man who has a cult of personality behind him and can do 'n…
You mean, ignoring the Second Great Depression that, outside America's richest metro areas, never ended and is still ruining lives right now?
Oh yes, other than the unbearable, unfathomable misery of tens of millions of people, we're doing great!
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>Consider someone who has just finished their PhD in a relevant area. Why? The H1B is supposed to bring in high skilled labor not new grads. If 80K is the going market rate for someone with those skills then you will be able to find someone to do the job for 80K. Artificially suppressing wages is the reason you can't find anyone to do the job for the "reasonable" rate. A pay spike will draw more people in to the fiel…
Hate to break it to you but someone with a PhD is not a 'new grad', they have often been working in a high pressure job for ~5 years post graduation, usually required to do teaching, assist on their supervisor's research projects (lots of grunt coding), and do research and write a thesis. In this hypothetical, their value comes from having specific expertise on top of general skills. There is no guarantee you will be…
You could hire an American citizen with a PhD.
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Your assumption is that the startup will have a chance of growing only if it has access to H1B. Why would local talent not be enough for that startup?
That is not my assumption at all. It is about casting a wider net. In an ideal world, the talent a company needs is available instantly and locally. But the world isn't ideal. Sometimes the talent is available instantly but not locally. Startups can't afford to train and develop developers as much as big companies can. It is in the interest of the startups to hire quickly and to hire as close to the profile they want…
That's a utopia for employers, but it's a dystopia for workers.
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Well, and given that the premise of H1-B visas is that "we literally couldn't find a local who could do this", I'm OK with that. Outside the Bay Area, you're probably not going to pay a frontend website programmer $130K on an H1-B. You're not supposed to, though! You can find plenty of that talent already in the country. If you need specific PhD-level STEM skills that you haven't been able to find locally, you're pro…
There are many loopholes with this logic, although I can see how the "free market will fixit!" philosophy is so common. The unavailability of required talent does not magically make it economically feasible to pay more for that talent. Especially the process of hiring new employees is an expensive and slow process. The vitality of American businesses depends critically on the availability of great talent at a reasona…
If the vitality of American business depends critically on keeping high-skilled labor as cheap as possible, then capitalism is a failure and we should throw it in the trash-heap of history.