For context: I’m not bragging, I’m not officially a software engineer by title and I only fell into BigTech three years ago at 45. I did a slight pivot to get in. I’m still paid less than an equivalent mid level software dev at my own company.
Not that I’m complaining I work remotely from - all over the US.
The Slack channel is anonymous via a Slack workflow that posts on your behalf. As part of the workflow, it allows you to self identify your ethnicity and location.
If you stymie immigration, what’s to stop companies from just expanding their overseas offices?
I don't think immigration is a cost free win for America in 100% of the cases. I am worried we are creating a caste of elite immigrants and their progeny who occupy the country's most elite positions and we're prioritizing foreign education to the detriment of US citizens. We have no reason to make things more competitive here if we can just import people from another country. It's bizarre to do this on a lot of different levels.
I think we should do what China is doing with their own citizens and try to make Americans more competitive and then we could talk about skilled immigration.
As an American citizen you wouldn’t want to be considered a “diversity hire” would you?
And holding up China and Japan as exemplars of economic development is not the winning argument you think it is…
yes. ~350M vs ~7B (1.2B China, 1.1B India) means more elites in the bigger population. I am talking only about immigrant visas, not foreign offices. I have no problem with foreign offices hiring people from that country. I do take issue with continuous importation of elite-skilled people. This is doubly so if our education system relies on importing the best people rather than home growing them or trying to remain competitive. There is evidence Americans are declining in STEM right? we should try to reverse that.
I am less concerned about the short term economy as I am with turning the US into a global free for all for the best that US citizens can't possibly compete with presently. It could turn into a death cycle for current Americans. Surely that isn't sustainable or healthy. No doubt, dropping H1-B numbers would lower GDP but we should build it back more sustainably.
And until this year, any CS grad that spent time practicing interviewing and could “grind LeetCode” for six months could get a job in tech. College teaches nothing that helps CS grads be employable at most companies.
Other countries graduate more prepared students because they don’t believe in the bullshit that college is meant to make you a “better citizen of the world” and they prepare their graduates with useful skills
My theory is that it could open up more space in the top graduate schools and undergrad for Americans who didn't make the cut otherwise. Maybe we can improve on this. We could work on making standard education a little harder too to fill the gap we would need. It's going to be hard competing globally though. We may need to bring people in but I believe the numbers we have are very high right now. I would like to see the mean of america become more educated and richer and more skilled as opposed to just the extremes.
BTW, click on the time on the post to reply when the reply link isn’t available.
You should think that, though: their presence is helping reduce wages, including yours. The fact that labor in tech is relatively well paid compared to other fields is entirely irrelevant.