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Comment by hasbroslasher | Hacker News Reader

Overseas competition? I'm not sure what you're on about now - it's currently the hardest[1] time in history to get an H1-B with Cheeto man in the White House. Also I think that USA-born and educated developers are still significantly more sought after because of language barriers. If you've tried to get a job in tech recently you'll notice that... it's pretty damn easy.

Honestly it sounds like you're paranoid about your job security and externalizing it. "It's ML, no it's foreigners, no it's the aliens!" I'm a programmer, not a psychologist, though, so don't take my word for it. You can have a look at the sklearn docs though, good place to start on your ML quest.

http://scikit-learn.org/stable/

[1] Not intended to be a factual claim, just a point about the current political climate

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H1B? No I don't care about that. I just think it's a bit concerning that the only things keeping this cornucopia full are the circumstances of a language barrier that's only relevant because foreign software companies largely aren't yet competitive with those in the US, and that no-one's fully cracked making remote work a thing on a large scale. That's a tissue-paper thin barrier protecting the wages of 95+% of the people employed as software developers in the US who aren't doing anything remarkable.

My job security's fine as long as all these dumb "Facebook for Dogs", mid-sized software company doing nothing all that amazing (so: 99% of mid sized software companies), and "Non-software-company software division" jobs that comprise a giant percentage (almost certainly the vast majority) of US development jobs remain in the US (or other expensive OECD states). I'm just not certain why they would remain here, in the medium-term. It's not paranoia so much as "gee, why the hell am I paid so much?" The reasons seem pretty weak, which... isn't comforting. It's not like I'm curled up shaking in the corner over it, though.

That last paragraph is funny as hell, and I get what you're saying. I guess I'm just more pessimistic about anyone solving the problems of the language barrier and remote work soon - as with ML, once we truly have global, language-agnostic communication and physicality is irrelevant the world will be a very different place.

I guess my overarching point here is that global economics is one of the more dizzyingly complex things you can choose to worry about so I tend not to.

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