It's clear you are not a hiring manager. There aren't thousands of highly qualified engineers looking for work. I can't tell if this a troll post or not.
It's clear you are not considering the long-term effects of labor policy. If we want a stronger domestic workforce, the answer is to incentivize Americans to develop the skills we need and to train them when they do not already have those skills. Mass importing foreign labor is not a substitute for building and investing in the domestic workforce.
Btw, this is analogous to the argument for positive discrimination:
Preferentially treat one group of people (non-white/women/Americans) even if in the short term the revealed preference of businesses is to hire a different group of people (white/men/immigrants), such that, in the long term, the first group of people can develop the necessary skills to compete with the second group.
The arguments can be the same but have entirely different hidden variables that make it fine to use the argument in one context and not the other.
Also, this ignores that the government works for citizens, no matter their race. Promoting racial equality among citizens is a function that the government might undertake. Pursuing policies that favor citizens over non-citizens falls in line with that same reasoning.
No it's really not the same because we have laws against racial discrimination, but it is the entire purpose of the state to represent the interests of its citizens above all others.
You can’t get them to apply. They are already very well paid. It’s a finite pool that is not large enough. Bidding up pay won’t change that. Instead you just hire overseas.
working with what tech? you didn't answer the question to a reasonable extent. it seems odd you need to hire people into principal and "distinguished" titles, you should be promoting from senior/staff to fill those internally. unicorn hunting is an organizational problem, not a useful reflection of the hiring market
Fortunately such ridiculous hypotheticals have no correspondence to reality. Most every job can be easily trained or cross trained. Mathematicians make good physicists. Nor is there some foreign pipeline of a million physicists. Such ridiculous argument exist only to perpetuate the lie of a skills shortage and deny the wage shortage.
They may make good physicists, but not great physicists. Similar to saying I know how to drive a car, now let me win the inde 500. Things take to for specialization, even with the advent of guessing and checking machines (llms).
A shocking number of innovations in x field are because y person brought an idea that maps from z field. Cross functional teams are important and mathematicians can and absolutely do make top level contributions to physics.
One of the math problems recently publicized as having being solved by was actually just discovering that a German mathematician had published a solution in the 1950s.
Oh that is true, and I’m not putting down cross functional teams. I’m just putting down the idea that a specialist in one area can immediately be a specialist in another semi related area with no extra review time.
If you ask specialists about their backgrounds you will find that they took different paths. The critical step is time in the speciality, not background. For any job there's never a pool of applicants who are pretrained for that exact job, everyone takes time to get up to speed. People from related fields do just as well learning job tasks. The labor market is fluid if properly incentivized. Commenters intentionally pretend not to understand because they want cheap labor and want to impoverish the American worker.
Commenter doesn’t seem to understand how much of a drift there is for specialty learning or different negative patterns specialists may have. A front end architect and a computer architect may have similar backgrounds, but a computer architect will take wildly longer to learn front end and likely have some practices to un-learn.
Also I would say for certain areas, people are pre-trained for the exact job as the tools or tech between is the exact same.
It’s not just commenters who want cheaper labor, capitalism wants cheaper labor.
A lot of employers would have slaves if they were allowed, doesnt mean that the workers shouldn't do everything possible to prevent this and politically demand better conditions. Such as the case in the topic of the thread.
I would agree employers would likely want that, though since in the us it’s difficult for labor unions to ever be created let alone extra protections or the necessity of tips or us at-will hire/fire.
My point of your thread was disagreement with the immediate transfer of knowledge: “Most every job can be easily trained or cross trained.”
I disagree with most jobs can easily be trained or cross trained, there is more of a time sync between that.
The national government functions as a labor union through its control of the border and regulating the conditions of employment.
>I disagree with most jobs can easily be trained or cross trained
People just overestimate how complicated their job is because it makes them feel important. If anything immigrants take longer to get up to speed which is why companies usually only hire them when its cheaper. Or nepotism.
“The national government functions as a labor union through its control of the border and regulating the conditions of employment.”
Woah for some reason it sounds like you’re talking about a European country, not the US where the legal age to work changes every few hundred miles. 1
“People just overestimate how complicated their job is because it makes them feel important.”
I do hate to say but I also really doubt this anecdote for majority of workers. Wasn’t there a ford factory that laid off workers in favor of llm (that were trained to replace them) only then to be rehired? 2
So we’re in agreement? The time of investment for growth is the point of decision, and how long it takes to train specialists defines if it’s worth it.
I.e. how long would it take to train a regular driver to drive the inde 500 vs buying a racers contract
Want me to agree that training takes time? Ok, but what a boring revelation. It doesn’t take much time in the grand scheme of things. I can read a substantial book each week, for example. Give a person a half ~salary and let them study and train for a month +/-, they’ll be ready to contribute.
Good thing every single requirement is known in advance. It’d be a shame if things changed faster then a snail, limitations we’re fully understood, and the geopolitical situation doesn’t change by a tweet.
Edit: actually, what job do you have in mind that never changes? Honestly it sounds relaxing
The current admin will be gone or dead soon. “Beef prices” are not a factor in the tech industry.
Just a generation or two ago we went to the Moon. Now, you refuse to train an intelligent person with overlapping skills.
Not just a closed mindset, but pure defeatism.
Why even get out of bed in the morning, right? Might as well give up now.
Back to reality—I have an acquaintance who started work at JPL and finished her degree while working there. But according to you it’s just not able to be planned for! Thankfully defeatists are not in charge in Pasadena.
Good thing people aren’t affected by beef, by eating it, getting diseased from it, or from sick from other people eating it. And nice choice picking 1/3 of the options.
This is not me refusing to train someone, but acknowledging there is a time sink cost for training that may not pay off in the need to make a project, or the person could up and leave which good for them.
Thank you for accelerating my argument to 1000 when I was just going the speed limit and seeing the warning signs for the problems up ahead.
Yes, you repeatedly tried to refuse training as a possibility. My initial statement was relatively conservative so can’t be easily disproven, but you made many attempts anyway.
Others discounted the exaggerated emergency above so no need to repeat. And we know training worked for centuries up to my example of two years ago. Most people don’t study exactly what they end up doing and learn as they go. The US has a couple hundred million workers. All which point to training being more economically efficient than importing from abroad except in extreme cases.
Your closed-mindset, anti-worker ideas and position continue to harm the economy and wages. Enjoy the fruits of your war on the middle class, having to live in a luxury bunker.
(Oh and gas and steel prices don’t materially affect tech either.)
You must've mis-read my statements. My position is there is a balancing act between training specialists vs hiring already pre-trained specialists depending on changing requirements. To the contrast of your conservative approach, I'm looking at the middle road or the in between options.
Training does work, and I agree most people don't study 1:1 what they end up doing. For cases where work is immediately required however and an Inde car needs to be driven next week (say the og driver got sick), a pre-trained Inde car driver would be better to be hired then not race and take months to train the replacement.
My "closed-mindset, anti-worker ideas" of wanting unions, the best people for a job, and wanting diversification of staff I suppose do go against your "halt everything and only train Americans" conservative position.
I suppose you have nothing new to offer to this conversation and will never hear me out with an open mind, so I bid you and this thread adieu.
(Gas && steel prices affect construction of llm data centers, regular data centers, fuel for travel to work, expansions of hardware, supply chain for ordering technology, and so on...)
I can't tell if this is a troll post or intentionally obtuse. The comment they you replied to did say that these are the best in their country, which is why we want them. Have you heard of a concept called brain drain?
Yes, I have heard of brain drain. And people here are arguing in favour of brain drain rather than hiring citizens or paying citizens better, because they say that US needs these foreign workers. That's why I ask how it comes that their own countries do not need them?
Why should anybody be sympathetic to the so called "needs" of US companies hiring immigrants, but not be sympathetic to the needs of their home countries?
Sympathy for companies is usually conditioned on the fact that they give jobs to locals, or at least to citizens. If they're not doing that, then who gives a fuck if they aren't able to expand or profit at a rate that shareholders prefer?
But there is a class of people - most hackers included - who have had such comfortable lives that they aren't capable to even pretend anymore to sympathize with the producing class.
I’m very pro immigration, but “Americans are lazy and stupid , thus unfit for hiring” isn’t a winning argument.
Tons of Americans are out of work. I’ve personally seen my wages drop by at least 20$ an hour as well as the work being less stable.
Gasp, you might need to train someone a bit or have employees that will say no if you ask them to work on Christmas.
If I ran the H1B program it would be an unrestricted work permit with an automatic pathway to a GC after 5 years. Don’t get *convicted* of a felony and here you go.
> If I ran the H1B program it would be an unrestricted work permit with an automatic pathway to a GC after 5 years. Don’t get convicted of a felony and here you go.
H1Bs create new companies here, we continue to attract the smartest people here.
However each company would have to weigh the risks of bringing someone to the US and they then walking away.
We could even change it so instead of a 100k fee, you have to invest 200k in US bonds which only mature after 5 years. Of course even if it doesn’t work out you still get your money back.
1) It benefits an extremely tiny slice of American entrepreneurs by allowing them to operate directly against the best interests of the broader American labor force?
2) This posits that there must be a large pool of highly trained and specialized Staff Eng sitting idly in other countries just waiting to be poached. What are those countries doing which is generating a huge untapped pool of labor? If that _is_ the case, then why aren't entrepreneurs in those countries capitalizing on the idle labor?
---
Maybe I'm entirely too cynical - but I simply don't believe that #2 is true. There isn't a huge Indian talent pipeline just pumping out hoards of incredible world-class engineers worthy of poaching, yet America is entirely incapable of producing the same tier of engineer. I think it's purely a function of depressing labor costs at the lower end of the labor ladder and over the last ten years has actually just been an immigration pipeline with pay-to-play schemes on both ends.
Hiring is such a shit show, there's no reason to assume the people doing the hiring know what they're doing. Like HR has to insert them selves into the process
