> According to this Joint Venture Silicon Valley report, 74% of Silicon Valley tech workers are foreign-born immigrants. A decade ago, 36% of Silicon Valley tech workers were born abroad. In 2000, only 29% were.
> Tech industry employment has increased from about 300,000 jobs in 2007 to 400,000 in 2016, so even though we created 100,000 engineering positions in the last decade, we’ve also displaced 88,000 domestic engineers.[1]
> American tech workers are getting pushed out, and they aren’t coming back
If the downward pressure on salary in American software jobs is so extreme that salaries frequently go all the way to zero, while there is a countervailing upward pressure on salary among Indian no-job-yets, why do we say it's "categorically false" that there is a downward pressure on American software salaries?
[1] Note that this is what you expect from a pricing shift, not an increase in the value created by the work. The quantity of software labor purchased has gone up and sellers are being forced out. If the driver of increased quantity-of-jobs were increased value created, you would see sellers entering the market, not leaving.
Yeah. A lot of people are leaving because of the housing insanity. That doesn't mean they're leaving teach and losing their jobs. There is zero evidence for that.
This isn't evidence for any impact on jobs. It's evidence for the mismanagement of the Bay Area and California as a whole.
Our immigration system targets skilled workers from abroad, and brings in a lot of them. It's a far more "rational" and less confusing system than the US, but also explicitly geared around bringing in skilled workers as permanent residents and it brings in a lot of them.
The downward pressure on compensation rates is real. Apart from exceptions in FAANG type companies, salaries here are often 1/2 of the rates of US employers, and it isn't because we're a lower quality product.
As a result a large % of us just move south to the US on a TN visa, or take remote jobs from US employers. Because the disparity in compensation is very high. And it's in large part because the market here is flooded with talent from abroad.
Tech begets tech, tech jobs beget tech jobs. Personally, I think we are not remotely close to “peak software” in particular.