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Comment by wehere1 | Hacker News Reader

always remember: the industry's involvement in CS education has less to do with philanthropy and goodwill than it does with lowering the cost of labor over the long term

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You'd need a scanning electron microscope to detect the tiny violin playing for people complaining about labor oversupply while making integer multiples of the median US household income building up an industry premised on automating away everyone else's jobs.

Stop worrying about your wages! Your job will eventually be automated away. A basic income is sure to protect you.

There are already places that require tons of experience to even get an IT job. Complete automation and centralization of IT jobs isn't required to strongly impact American lives.

Not everyone lives in a tech hub of the country.

>"A basic income is sure to protect you."

An unplanned, unsustainable, and uncommitted allowance provided to you by a group of people that seek power and do not share your interests will meet all of your future needs.

It's like when the threat is to our own profession it finally starts to sink in.

"You'd need a scanning electron microscope to detect the tiny violin playing for people complaining about labor oversupply while making integer multiples of the median US household income building up an industry premised on automating away everyone else's jobs."

So what is the exact dollar amount one has to make before they no longer are allowed to worry about whether or not they'll have a job?

"A basic income is sure to protect you."

Given the current political climate in the US, I can only say bullshit.

High labor cost just because of skill shortage may be gratifying and lucrative for the happy few but is not an efficient allocation of resources for the wider society. Increasing the skill supply is the right thing to do.

Replace "developer" with any other profession to convince yourself.

Nah, because I'm going to put my self-interest first. Just like Google is. So I should naturally oppose this as a developer. I benefit from a low supply of people with my skill set. Do you think google cares about "efficient allocation of resources for the wide society?" Tech companies embody the complete opposite of that mindset. The tech firms most in this forum work at bring in billions, but only require a few thousand workers. And most of the cash ends up overseas, doing nothing. It's not an efficient allocation of capital at all.

The only people who care about efficient allocation of resources for the society are socialists and academics. Certainly CEOs with multi-million dollar annual compensations don't think they're contributing to allocation inefficiencies by negotiating their compensations. Neither do doctors and AMA, who we all love and respect. Neither do military leaders or politicians, who demand half the country's budget for military expenditures. Etc, etc.

Increasing the skill supply is the right thing to do if you're Google stakeholder, or broadly speaking, a capitalist. It's much more questionable if you're in the labor force.

Or, more bluntly:

Google should pay high salaries. The market will supply the skilled workers when the salaries are high enough to attract more workers.

(Google does pay high salaries. If they want more skilled workers, raising their salaries is the most efficient way to get that outcome.)

Well, it's more than just pure salary. I'm sure if they changed things so that one did not have to work crazy hours while there, they could get away with paying less.

You don't have to work crazy hours at Google. At least at the teams I was on; there were occasional reports of lousy conditions in some groups (e.g. Nest), but they were very much the exception.

They're likely betting that investing in training programs will be even more effective.

Uhh, I do NOT love the AMA.

The AMA is responsible for maximum doctor quotas that drive up the cost of healthcare.

The AMAs decision to artificially increase the cost of Healthcare literally kills people.

You'd think that, but then you'd remember that if the population isn't making money capitalism doesn't work. People need money to buy things. The big picture is that labor is being defeated everywhere and money is accruing at the top. The whole system will break down if something isn't done.

I remember talking with a friend of mine in the 90's about this and he thought we would have a revolution in this country if things didn't change vis a vis inequality. What's happening so far is the rats at the bottom of the ship are blaming the slightly different rats in the same situation for making the problem worse.

If Google hadn't been involved with a scheme that helped keep the salaries of employees artificially lower (and by extension, affecting the rest of the industry), you might have a point. But as it stands, Google's own actions means it's imperative we question their motives. After all, if Google and others hadn't done what they did with the anti-poaching scheme, would the resulting salaries be higher for all involved?

It's not as if the skill shortage reflects some barriers to entry (like the Doctor's union deciding how many people get to go to medical school). The skill shortage reflects the difficulty of acquiring the skills, the high salaries are critical to ensuring that skilled people develop their technical skills.

I don't know how much a piano teacher costs, but I know it's the right amount because that's the equilibrium.

A more efficient allocation of resources would look like getting rid of 'too big to fail' banks and decreasing the rent that the finance industry extracts.

Yes, that's why we have labour unions. The cost should be high because we demand it to be so, not because of a shortage.

Neither are these companies getting lots of cheap labor and keeping the difference for themselves and their shareholders.

And, more importantly, why should I care if it's an "efficient allocation of resources" when the alternative is that I no longer get a decent wage?

Oh how quick we forget that we bitch about $35k/year H1Bs

This sounds like fixed pie logic to me.

My intuition is that the Pareto optional solution is one where nearly everyone is proficient in engineering. I see engineering as the new reading/writing. I think an engineering literate society would be more valuable and stable than our current society is.

Programming is sufficiently hard enough, wages will always be higher than most other professions. If I could make this money just about any other way, I'd likely give it a go. But either be a PA, a doctor, or one of the lucky few who graduate law school and make good money (and I think PA's make less than most programmers I know).

Otherwise be a programmer.

$35k/year developer on H1B

Most developers aren't on H1B. There's what, tens of thousands on H1B, and hundreds of thousands of tech workers. While it's true some developers are underpaid, they are few in number and presumably of little significance on the prevailing developer wage.

This stuff is funny to read. There are two cases:

1. H1Bs in "tech" do not affect salaries of those not on H1B so it is irrelevant that there are those who come to the US on H1B and make $35-50k/year in tech because it does not affect the market for $80k-250k/year jobs i.e. Old Navy, Gap and Banana Republic are totally different markets, Old Navy's $10 t-shirts and $25 jeans does not move upmarket and cannibalize GAP's $30 T-shirt and $80 jeans which in turn does not cannibalize BR's $120 T-shirts and $200 jeans - ask whoever shops for clothes in your family.

If that's the case, we should applaud Google generating more $35-50k/year tech workers and we all should be baffled by those complaining about H1B tech imports (the number of them is rather low compared to the number of 35k-50k workers training programs would generate so if we need those workers before we train ours we should lift the caps on H1Bs)

2. H1Bs in "tech" does affect salaries of those not on H1B because it eats into the market market for $80k-250k/year jobs. In which case having a flood of $35k-50k/year workers is a problem regardless if they are coming in on H1B or from ITT Tech/GoogleJobsTrainingSchool.

I would suggest we should really pick one and be consistent.

Or maybe, Google just wants to train people to work on their platforms rather than moving to a competitors. I doubt google has the intention of hiring the people that graduate from these programs, they just want people to learn google apis so that they use their products over competitors.

This can be seen through how companies sponsor hackathons, the courses they create on websites like udacity and so on.

Then what are they supposed to do, stop growing? Sure they could stand to raise wages for existing workers across the board (and they should) but that doesn't solve the labor supply issue.

Maybe some of these grants can go towards retraining existing engineers who need to acquire new skills.

> Then what are they supposed to do, stop growing?

I never understood growth for the sake of growth mentality. Isn't that what's killing the planet, broadly speaking?

Certainly unrestrained resource extraction and financialization of the entire economy- generating wealth for a select few with complex financial instruments that has no real purpose for the general public- are bad. But surely much of tech does provide some benefit to society. What happened to software is eating the world?

But is Google doing that? And does it have to be Google?

I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly. I'm not praising Google in this story- I think they're doing this strictly for business reasons- but I still think it's a positive action even if it's motivated by the bottom line. But it's inevitable that them, just like most other giant companies in the black, are going to expand sooner or later, and they will need more workers. So there's not much you can do about that. If it's not Google or Apple hiring, it's going to be Tesla or SpaceX or Kiva or these guys (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/technology/a-start-up-sug...)

My main point is trying to stem the demand for more workers, whether H1Bs or American citizens, is futile. And even if somehow American firms stopped demanding more tech workers, firms abroad will be as well. So why not try to train more people to become workers?

Why do they need to continue growing? They're already what, 80% of online ads?

Google will just continue to move into more markets and moonshot projects until either the shareholders revolt or the government applies antitrust. But if not them, some other organization will need tech workers, and are you going to ask them to stop growing? See this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15461924

Hey, better than supporting H1B exploitation.

Well put. In my eyes this is simple math,they're investing now and are eliminating fees and adjustments for inflation in the future. The pool of workers will be bigger and all of the workers will be of somewhat same skill level which will eliminate the need for higher salaries + larger equity shares in order to get a high skilled worker. Their shares in the future will certainly be more valuable then 1B now, and this incentive will allow them to dictate the market.

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