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Comment by jarsin | Hacker News Reader

Yup cant stand journalism today. Straight up mouthpiece for the rich.

Why did they not ask the company what the wage for that position is. How many people in Chicago did they interview. Did they interview anyone over 50 who has that exact experience? Did they approach anyone currently working in similar jobs and offer them raises and other benefits to entice them over?

Truth is the Company did none of those things so the good loyal journalist won't ask those questions.

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The problem is that you think they went out and investigated this topic then wrote about the results of their investigation. In reality, they had a narrative and agenda they wanted to pitch and then went out to find confirmatory evidence, while largely discarding contradictory evidence.

Relevant: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

You're talking as if there are only two parties here: owners (rich) and tech workers (not rich). But tech workers are well above the average US income. The unspoken group in your argument is the consumer, who on average is poorer than the tech workers. Lowering tech wages with H1B visas helps the consumers as well as the owners, because it makes the marginal tech product less likely to fail.

You might still think that the workers have the strongest claim. But as with most protectionism, there's more to consider.

You seem to be assuming that lowering tech wages will lead to more participation by labor overall, but I think that it will instead just lead to companies lining their coffers with the savings realized by replacing an equal number of positions with lower-paid H1-B workers.

I feel there's an apples-to-bytes comparison in there, given that the marginal cost for another instance of the same software is negligible.

This is especially true when you're talking about the non-institutional "poor consumer", as opposed to a company having customized or proprietary software made just for them.

> Did they interview anyone over 50 who has that exact experience

probably not. Why would they interview that person for what sounds like an entry level position?

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