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Silicon Valley can't import talent like before. So it's exporting jobs

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Re: Silicon Valley can't import talent like before. So it's exporting jobs

#71

Post by surgical_fire »

shimman wrote: post #44
alephnerd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is talent though. You can't write a performant Linux runtime agent such as what Wiz did without knowing eBPF, which requires also understanding Linux internals, which requires an OS background. Why should I spend $150k training someone who has no experience from scratch for 1 year? A lot of table stakes curricula has been made optional.

It's not talent though, why are we acting like it takes critical knowledge to write java spring endpoints or react components? Very few dev jobs require critical knowledge, even then that can mostly be learned on the job. So yeah it seems like these companies that rely on massive corporate welfare + the backing of the US government don't want to pony up and pay their fair share. Why should the government provide util…

> It's not talent though, why are we acting like it takes critical knowledge to write java spring endpoints or react components?

Because typically that's not what you are hiring, even if effectively that's what you will have the engineer doing often.

I was hired for my problem solving skills. For being able to design an application end-to-end. For being able to extend a messy existing system in ways that are sensible. For being able to analyze issues and come up with ways to address them. For coming up with answers for legacy issues. Those among many other things.

Anyone out of a boot camp can write a Java endpoint using Spring. If you think that's what the company is hiring, you are sorely mistaken.

I say this as someone that was an interviewer in past jobs, including FAANG.

Re: Silicon Valley can't import talent like before. So it's exporting jobs

#73

Post by surgical_fire »

jmclnx wrote: post #8
alephnerd wrote: post #2

We warned everyone that this would happen [0] but HN fell for the populism trap. And no one on the Hill will do anything to impact services exports, especially for voters who work in maligned industries like Tech [1], Big Oil [2], and Wall Street [3] that are overwhelmingly concentrated in single party states like California, Washington, Texas, and New York and as such can't swing elections the same way an Autoworker…

Yes I say you are right, but that only proves these companies only want to hire very cheap labor. There is talent in the US, all it takes is training. Decades ago companies would train new hires out of college, but that trend ended in the 90s. Wall Street started forcing these companies to chase fast market growth and high stock prices. In many cases profit has no meaning for these startups, the only metric is stock…

> There is talent in the US, all it takes is training

Training is expensive and can fail.

That's why experience has value.

Re: Silicon Valley can't import talent like before. So it's exporting jobs

#74

Post by ottah »

abhiyerra wrote: post #54

Anecdotally, I heard some Indians in the USA working at Big Tech are moving back to India to take the skills they developed in the USA to train and organize teams in India. I’d say what India struggles a lot with is organizational skills so it will be interesting if this is true and to see what results in a couple of years. Will Indians continue on the services path or will they move to the R&D path.

I would love to see India to grow out it's tech sector to something resembling what's going on in China.

Re: Silicon Valley can't import talent like before. So it's exporting jobs

#75

Post by stego-tech »

irishcoffee wrote: post #68
stego-tech wrote: post #62

Gotta love the knock-on effect of these systems. - Don't want to pay labor enough to live (for whatever reason) - Outsource, offshore, automate, etc - Margins and revenue go up - Two to Three Years go by - Refusal to pay local living wages results in decline of product sales at local prices, feeding the cycle of further cuts rather than pay labor - Cities decline as secondary and tertiary businesses dry up due to lac…

Ever hear of the court case involving the Dodge brothers and Ford? Maybe we fucked up there, and a century later, we finally arrived at this current state. > In the landmark 1919 case Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., the Michigan Supreme Court ruled in favor of minority shareholders John and Horace Dodge, holding that a corporation’s primary purpose is to maximize profit for its shareholders. The court ordered Ford to pay ou…

We absolutely fucked up there. There definitely needs to be protections for shareholders to reduce the chance of exploitation and fraud, but part of the “free market” as it were is for shareholders to fuck off to other companies if they don’t like how one is run.

The “shareholder value” mandate is one of the greatest perversions of the “free market” out there, miles above any discourse about minimum wages or worker protection laws. Undo that decision along with the Reagan-era ruling permitting share buybacks, and you’d substantially weaken the Boardroom and C-Suite while turning off the two single biggest incentives to the current system of exploitation.

Re: Silicon Valley can't import talent like before. So it's exporting jobs

#76

Post by simianwords »

kadabra9 wrote: post #58
simianwords wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s less this but more that talent diversity is present elsewhere. You need constant supply of talent and a good ecosystem that sustains it. Focusing talent only in a small geographical area has its own risks.

Talent diversity willing to work for lower salaries is present elsewhere. That's really what it comes down to.

Yeah so? Willing to work for lower salaries is tied to the dynamic of having more supply of labour.

What alternative do you propose?

Re: Silicon Valley can't import talent like before. So it's exporting jobs

#77

Post by _DeadFred_ »

alephnerd wrote: post #9
kadabra9 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how this is always framed as a "pipeline and talent" problem issue (its not), when it's really a "pipeline and talent at salaries I want to pay" issue.

[flagged]

Our best programmer was a surfer kid who started programming at 15 on his own.

Software companies invented whiteboard hiring questions in order to determine which random average person could be trained to be a good developer. It's wild to see how dogmatic you all have become today.

Re: Silicon Valley can't import talent like before. So it's exporting jobs

#78

Post by mrguyorama »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #45
rayiner wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The language people use is funny. When companies offshore skilled factory jobs to foreign countries, they call that "offshoring." But when it comes to programmers, they call it "going where the talent is." They act like programmers are in a different class than machinists.

Homie you’ve been around here long enough to know that that is exactly the case Software developers view themselves as an entirely different class than skilled blue-collar laborers precisely because of their access to capital It is explicitly because a single engineer can go out and get money from a capitalist and a single machine shop operator cannot go out and get money from a capitalist that makes the distinction…

The vast vast vast majority of programmers do not have access to capital.

But they eat up the propaganda about how they totally could just happen to get that capital and run a one man software business and make a billion dollars.

Which is why they spent all that time and energy insisting they didn't have to unionize, because they were super important and could totally negotiate better than anyone else, especially a giant group of programmers, and now are panicking because dumb middle managers want to replace them with LLMs entirely.

Very predictable.

Re: Silicon Valley can't import talent like before. So it's exporting jobs

#79

Post by spwa4 »

yodsanklai wrote: post #67
palmotea wrote: post #13

> If tech talent can’t come to the U.S., American companies will go where the talent is. LOL! They're going to send the jobs where the wages are cheaper, and that's exactly what they're doing. IIRC, my employer stopped offering new H1-B sponsorships in most cases, after they opened an office in India (10+ years ago). They didn't open the office because they had a hard time hiring in the US. They opened it because the…

At a given level of skills, the company will favor the cheapest employees. At a given level of salary (e.g. US market), the company will find the best possible candidates (most of them are foreigners, for simple statistical reasons). Maybe there's a confusion that an "US" company should somehow be loyal to the US. This isn't the case, big publicly traded corporations work for the shareholders. They don't own anything…

At this point it no longer matters. Thanks to Trump, they have no choice. We can discuss nefarious motives all we want, and they may even exist, but they don't really factor in at this point.

Re: Silicon Valley can't import talent like before. So it's exporting jobs

#80

Post by spwa4 »

alephnerd wrote: post #19
palmotea wrote: post #13

> If tech talent can’t come to the U.S., American companies will go where the talent is. LOL! They're going to send the jobs where the wages are cheaper, and that's exactly what they're doing. IIRC, my employer stopped offering new H1-B sponsorships in most cases, after they opened an office in India (10+ years ago). They didn't open the office because they had a hard time hiring in the US. They opened it because the…

I'm in the cybersecurity space and we largely shifted hiring and funding to Tel Aviv. Israeli [0] tech salaries are comparable to Atlanta [1] and Dallas [2], yet we get better talent across the board - less bootcamp grads and more people with a background in OS and algos. [0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/israel [1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/atlanta... [2] - https…

That's because Israel gets to import "a certain kind of people" from everywhere around the world who are trained. We all know why they leave the places they come from ...

Sucks for people born in Israel btw.

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