This is a little myopic.

Those other fields you don't mention? They use things like education (did you graduate from an Ivy?), connections (do you know these people in your niche field?), certification (do you have the blessing of a known body / board?) or even insurance (you're covered for malpractice if anything goes wrong) as alternatives.

I value software development not requiring those things, and I understand the trade-offs. Yes, I'll have to do a 5-8 hour single day interview that I may need to prep for once every 3-5 years. For 300k+ a year? I'll find a way to deal with it.

I would too even for half that but unfortunately, in Europe, lots of the fancy tech corps. are adopting the SV style mult-day take home project/on-site interview grind but only paying $65-85k/year.

I'm still thinking whether I can make it in this field till retirement(FIRE is out of the question at this pay) or if I should just change to something else while I still can.

Edit: correct statement

The all day interview thing is not new. When I finally landed an onsite interview with Bell Labs in 1984, it ran from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM with a break for lunch (that they provided). Every position I have interviewed with since then has been an all day affair.

Remember, interviewing is partly for skills, but mostly for attitude and personality. Are you going to fit with the team?

I pulled in a candidate back in 2000 that was clearly qualified for the job as far as skills, but in the interview, his demeanor was abrasive. He was so clearly superior to anyone else on the team, how could we have the temerity to question his abilities? It spiraled out of control and I had to escort him out of the interview after only two hours. It was awful.

If you're in a position in life where you need a stable salary (family, children, etc.), you'll do the same amount of prep for a FANG as for a start-up emulating a FANG. Why in the world would I put in effort prepping and take 1/3rd the total compensation is my perspective (yes, I understand the start-up lottery, and disregard it here).

It is pretty easy to find contract positions for $120 per hour, and higher responsibility/skill positions for $150 per hour. And the LLC and related insurance costs per year are trivial.

On the east coast, skilled software engineers (not programmers, necessarily) with 10+ years can expect at least $140K plus benefits as a full time employee, and it is pretty typical to see $160K.

Unfortunately tech unions are typically the ones railing against H1Bs entirely. The mere presence of H1B workers fundamentally increases worker supply (by definition). In fact it was the "US Tech Workers Union" that championed recent actions against H1B workers. And let's be honest they were not fighting to make our lives easier (by making H1B less draconion), only theirs, by reducing the supply of workers.

And while some of them will sugar coat this by pretending to care about H1B worker's conditions and all that, the truth is that as long as the US continues to be a more desirable place to live compared to many other countries, and as long as you need a job to live here, foreign workers will always tilt the equilibrium a bit towards lower wages compared to a domestic worker supply. The true solution would be if you made the path to permanent residence easy for skilled individuals so that they don't need to take these employment decision under duress.

So, I wouldn’t take the “US Tech Workers” as being representative of tech workers or tech workers unions without further research.

That is funny, I would have never thought that wealthy lobbyists would ever be against easy and mass immigration policies to dilute the labor supply. Much better for corporations to hire people who are willing to work either more cheaply or out of a sense of desperation because job demand is lower than the available/willing worker pool.

Do you have a sound logical reason for why wealthy lobbyists would go out of their way to spend money on opposing immigration?

The more power employers hold over their skilled migrant workers, the more money they can make (from not only their skilled migrant workers but also from the rest of their workforce, who are now competing with the latter.)

Xenophobia.

It is true that some other unions like the AFL-CIO have historically opposed immigration on these grounds, though.

As long as the "risk of having to leave the country" for speaking up about anything is greater than 0% the obviously-wisest thing to do is keep your mouth shut.

The labor market is something that emerges from the equilibrium of several opposing forces. We as a society decide which causal factors are 'reasonable' and which are 'unfair'.

As a simple example, you could argue that 'the wages for married individuals with kids are depressed due to the massive labor pool of single people in their 20s who can be employed for far less as long as you offer them free food and some cutesy perks like happy hours and pool tables'. Ceteris paribus, and as a pure fact of economics, this is true. Of course if you have a bigger supply of labor and hold other things constant, wages will depress, but as a matter of practical policy, we don't consider it 'unfair' that there exist single people who are competing for jobs that married people are also competing for.

But many people do consider it unfair that there exist Indians who are competing for jobs that Americans are also competing for.

This is a matter of policy and your personal sense of what is fair and what is not, not economics.

Single people tend to be younger and less experienced. They tend to be represented in entry level positions, and get paid as such.

That appears to be the reality we've been living in for a couple/few decades. Airplanes, container ships, and the internet have made the world a much smaller place.

So, immigration is generally speaking something that corporations are incentivized to want because they get more manipulatible and desperate employees?

Can we just demand that companies that hire immigrants cannot fire or lay off those immigrant employees for some minimum number of years unless they declare bankruptcy? It might decrease the number of immigrant employees corporations would hire but it would simultaneoulsy ensure a huge amount of safety for the immigrants that do get hired (and for their families).

My quick bandaid bill would: 1) Any H1b holder can switch to any job as long as it comes with at least ten percent pay increase. 2) Any H1b holder gets an automatic green card after x years or paid y in federal+state taxes, whichever comes first. 3) Hiring company pays 80pct salary for the extent of the Visa, come hell or high water. You _really_ need that visa? Fine, prove it by taking on more of the risk instead of foisting it on the poor visa holder who came to help you.

These pressures are why I can barely bother landing a software role anymore.

I'm competing with people that have real pressure to study these algorithm brainteasers, switch into system architecture mode, and then switch into behavioral mode.

"Oh thats cute you spent 45 minutes a few times a week doing a brainteaser? I just did 600 of those in a month, and rehearsed what my quirky but culturally similar hobby is."

the what now?

This is out of control. Yes, I am competing with H1B's that have 60 days to figure it out, no, that doesn't make "immigrants" the problem, this is a symptom of a system broken in several ways, from public policy to tech private sector norms.

What's the contest here? Who's most desperate, most willing to sacrifice their life and health for pennies on the dollar?

Seriously. I'm a middle aged guy with kids and parents to take care of. I'm not in a position to spend 30 hours / week doing bullshit puzzles & memorizing an algo book for crap that is basically irrelevant to my job.

You know what I'm good at?

- Spotting the bug before it happens, by watching how the team interacts and who is checking their work...

- Parsing client requirements and finding what matters

- Duct tape engineering so we can hit a go-live date when everything else is a smoking pile of delayed dog-shit...

- Talking the client into dropping a feature that we can't deliver and pivoting into something we already have...

Generally of far higher value than some brain teasers...

Yes, that is what's so wrong about it. If the whiteboard leetcode monkeydance was somehow relevant to job performance, it'd be annoying but ok. Given the complete irrelevance, it is just a sign of a profoundly broken industry that doesn't understand what job performance is about.

It bugs me when people say "the bar is high". No, the bar isn't high, the bar is sideways and outside in the parking lot of the stadium.

Personally I have never and will never give a whiteboard algorithm trivial pursuit interview. Doing my small part to bring some sanity here (Silicon Valley). I read the resume and talk about the actual past job experience with the candidate. It works wonderfully well. Never made a bad hire.

The market values my skills, but I have to do this stuff on my own now. You can make more than big tech will pay you by building in the crypto assets sector by yourself. In the recent past it was just side-gig consulting at an hourly rate or trying to do bug bounties.

Now you can just hang out on Telegram or Wechat and learn what people need, get paid completely in Tether from people all around the world. Invest in that ecosystem, or get dollars, whatever you want. No, wait times for anything.

In order you need to learn: 1. Basics of web dev (mostly front, not much backend for Blockchain) 2. Ethereum & Solidity 3. DeFi programming

I run a youtube channel on DeFi and Blockchain development:

https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCZM8XQjNOyG2ElPpEUtNasA

I also have courses on how to become a blockchain developer and how to build arbitrage flashloans. I recommend first following my free trainings:

http://eattheblocks.com/bootcamp

http://eattheblocks.com/flash

EVM is good to know for an ongoing career, but more practically building wallets, exchanges, algorithms, trade routing systems, data visualizations, ad space on a website that provides utility, ad space on a bot that shows pricing data to a chat room, a better gui that happens to take a cut of transactions when people use it —- these are all options

so many things, so much, so easy

harder to focus as the space moves at light speed

I don't have high hopes for ever receiving a green card: https://medium.com/@happy_sushi_roll/the-endless-wait-for-a-...

I mean, it wouldn't be fair if folks could simply skip the line by going to a third country.

Well, I highly doubt American companies are pushing for this treatment. They benefit the most from getting whoever they want to hire however they want to hire them.

So, you must be implying that this "treatment" is coming from a non-corporate entity?

> that there is a bedrock of people they are allowed to treat this way puts a hard ceiling on your own compensation.

This argument is strange, because you are implying that it is the corporations that are kicking people out. But, I am not sure that aligns with their incentives.

So, if the corporations are not the ones kicking the desirable people out then why would losing that person force them to put a hard ceiling on others potential compensation?

I am not sure I follow the logic.

> I can't believe this is how interviewing works in this field.

I 100% agre. It is broken. But, I also think we are not being honest as to why. If we think logically (and game-theoretically) then it is easy to assume that these corporations have a huge incentive to engage in this behavior. Could it be that they have a sea of choice beyond anything the tech industry has ever had before?

E.g. a citizen can decline an offer in order to negotiate it up, but if the clock is ticking on your h1b, then you wouldn't want to get called on that bluff.

The limitations don't seem to dissuade H1b applicants, so companies like that they have more control over those employees without decreasing total supply.

Does not mean I never used much of this knowledge I have needed at some points. But by that tine I had to refresh the knowledge again...