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Comment by IlyaMoroshkin | Hacker News Reader

The US needs to improve its immigration system so that it can hire these smart engineers, from places like Europe in particular.

Right now, the current H1B system is totally dominated by Indians, who make up 70% of the intake. The scheme seems designed to undercut American salaries, rather than enhance American companies with highly skilled workers.

The scheme should be redesigned with a higher minimum salary, and a maximum of 10% of the intake from any one country.

And yes, the education system needs to change. Education should not be an 'export' - knowledge should be retained inside the nation, not sold off to foreign competitors. International students should only be accepted from America's closest allies.

Heck, education and immigration could just be overhauled to be NATO-only, with selected highly developed NATO partner countries as well.

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RE: national quotas -- it seems a bit weird that an engineer applying to Facebook would be told she can't get a job there because Disney hired too many people from her home country. Not that there aren't pockets of such weirdness baked into the current system, but this in particular is a negative consequence of what you're proposing.

I say this to reply to the first 3 paragraphs. I object to the last two paragraphs on moral grounds but have no desire to continue a conversation about them.

A ton of amazing engineers and founders are born in India, China, and South East Asia also many from Eastern Europe and Russia. How would limiting the migration of these people help the USA or companies founded in the USA?

NATO is a military alliance between democratic and semi-democratic governments it does not represent a framework for any sort of education based immigration system.

(It does, however, represent a fantastic framework for an ethnically-based immigration system, if that happens to be the goal.)

Seems fine as long as you treat whole EU as a single country otherwise, it seems unfair to people from other countries.

Just because a country is huge population wise shouldn't be consideration in who to employ.

India is diverse, it has many states with different culture and even color/looks on people.

India is more like EU and individual states are more like European countries like Germany, Netherlands. There only have very little in common with each other.

I really doubt you can identify a person from India just based on how he looks.

History is proof when meritocracy has been shunned because of these government policies, or nepotism - local companies and economy has always lost.

You're missing the very important concept of soft power. We don't need to defeat our enemies using superior proprietary knowledge. Instead we export our cultural memes to them until they're no longer motivated to be enemies. We get far more influence and respect as the destination for international students the world over, than we do as the owner of an aircraft carrier.

They have to put up walls to keep Americanism out and their own citizens in. NATO was about piercing the Iron Curtain, not building our own parallel to it.

You’re telling me it was the carrot and the stick this whole time? Genius and simple. Sounds like Kissinger.

Why should there be a limit on intake from any one country? Let companies hire who can get the job done. Else, they'll set up shop in those countries and just import the work for a cheaper rate.

Because otherwise people from the biggest countries dominate the system simply due to their high population numbers, and then distort the host society and its immigration system to suit their needs. Immigration knowledge becomes monopolised.

To put it simply - Indians, when they have established themselves, hire more Indian migrants, at the expense of others. Lookup Infosys discrimination in the USA, this is established fact.

Still not sure what this has to do with the article - the article is saying there are tons of qualified Chinese for certain jobs and barely any qualified Americans. Should the American companies do without, then? How will that help American companies compete against Chinese companies?

In terms of simple microeconomics they need to offer more pay. It's supply and demand for labor. The entire temporary visa game is practically designed to warp the economics. Step 1: hire a ton of temporary workers during boom years and more accommodating political times to up the supply of labor, step 2: demonstrate that you can't find new people with paying the going market rate in a market already dominated by those temporary workers, and hence can only continue the status quo by bringing in yet more temporary workers. Well no kidding.

US students who choose to go into other areas which are protected politically (like medicine) are responding rationally.

Also US firms' unwillingness, by and large, to train new hires is another artificial and solvable aspect of the problem.

The idea that Mike Janicek and Bob Mansfield are the only guys willing to do the work for the incredibly low fees Apple will provide while all these manufacturing engineers turn up their noses beggars belief.

OK, but the article also gives multiple examples of having to hire back the same (American) worker after they left because nobody else could do it.

So either the market doesn't work at all and cannot exhibit enough demand to cause a supply to exist (perhaps the offered pay would need to be so high that the endeavor ceases to be profitable?), in which case throwing government regulation at the market to artificially restrict supply certainly won't help anything, or companies are able but unwilling to pay high enough wages, at which point we're proposing using government regulation to punish American businesses who don't work the way we want in the hope that they concede defeat, which hardly strikes me as a pro-American position - and more practically doesn't seem like a way to make American business more competitive.

> So either the market doesn't work at all and cannot exhibit enough demand to cause a supply to exist (perhaps the offered pay would need to be so high that the endeavor ceases to be profitable?), in which case..

Perhaps not though, in which case we don't need to follow this line of thinking to the end of the world. The US isn't lacking in college students or workers, just ones willing to work in one of the hardest majors while being treated as a commodity that includes workers from developing countries.

   the article is saying there are tons of qualified Chinese for certain jobs and barely any qualified Americans.

The article makes no such case. It merely quotes Apple executives claiming that with no supporting data.

Apple has spent most of a generation offshoring all of its manufacturing. Now, they whine that people stopped pursuing manufacturing-oriented degrees (because there weren't domestic jobs anymore for them to land in)?

It's like the Menendez brothers seeking sentencing leniency "because, hey, we're orphans now!"

I know some very smart very capable Indian engineers.

The problem they face is a little like the "tenure" problem.

How would your workstyle change if you were "on probation" for a number of years? In a highly competitive situation with lots of other folks like you? Would you say "no" technically or otherwise?

And after the probation period was over, would you be changed by it?

I'm not an Indian engineer, but I've worked somewhere where there were a few rounds of layoffs. The culture really changed when everyone had to show off their own skills and compete.

I think the trick is that apple has to create a really great culture for everyone, even folks with special situations. The recent articles about apple's internal tools groups makes me wonder[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22804607

There's nothing in the article to imply that these "smart engineers" exist in Europe, is there? Nor is there anything to imply that the US education system has the ability to produce them.

But they certainly exist, and are being trained, in China.

> Nor is there anything to imply that the US education system has the ability to produce them.

Are you serious? Maybe you mean has the capacity or willing students or something?

Because if you're saying US education is somehow inferior to Asia or whatever, then you have been misled. US schools produce exactly what US firms demand of their graduates. Industry quite literally sets the demands for degrees in engineering. Asian education is memorization and rote practice. If that actually worked for students other than the top 1 percent or so who will excel in any system anyway, we'd do it too as it's so damn easy to teach that way.

I am going by the claims in the article, which are very specific about how China is, empirically, far more successful at producing engineers skilled in this particular discipline than the US. Perhaps the US education system is capable of it, if it tried. (Actually, almost certainly the US is capable of it, there's nothing about geography or ethnicity or law to prevent it.) But the US does not, nonetheless.

It seems a lot of people are discussing something which is related to immigration but not related to the topic of the article.

>China is, empirically, far more successful at producing engineers

This is baffling. The article is lamenting the fact that industry has been outsourced. There are few American engineers because there are so few American engineering jobs left. The American education system produced something like half of all new technology in the 20th century. Americans are obviously not less capable of being engineers than Chinese people.

  the claims in the article, which are very specific

Hardly. Their entire research for that content in this article is just offhand comments by Apple executives -- the most biased possible source.

Immigration should be thought more in terms of importing educational budgets. If a skilled laborer immigrates, you’ve gained access to their skills while not paying for their education; effectively importing the cost of whatever it took to educate them.

H-1B is a temporary work visa. You’ll be happy to know there is already a per country cap on green cards. Maybe there should be a per country cap on the path to citizenship of undocumented immigrants also ? Otherwise Indians may just overstay their visa and use that ?

> education and knowledge should not be exported

Not sure a country that bans export of knowledge has much knowledge to export to begin with. I suspect you are more interested in a one way valve for knowledge and brains. You can get in but can’t get out. But with a per country cap for both knowledge and brains ?

People ask me why I don't want programmer unions. This is why. This will be in the top 5 things on their agenda.

Not interested in making America some sort of loser fiefdom operated by the inadequate who need regulation because they cannot compete. No way.

Besides, if Europe is so great, maybe there would be this massive collection of great tech companies there. Instead, 49 square miles in America has produced more economic value in tech than any European city.

> Not interested in making America some sort of loser fiefdom operated by the inadequate who need regulation because they cannot compete. No way.

Only if ability to compete is defined as accepting a much smaller wage for the same job with the same skill level.

The way you get 'fiefdoms' is by helping companies build up enormous piles of profit without paying their workers well.

America is a beautiful land of opportunity for folks in tech. The exploited/exploiter dichotomy is a problem for someone whose primary advantage is being a native English speaker and located in the US. That sort of engineer is already been commodified away by the thousands by remote engineering teams from Gdansk to Lahore to Manila. He has one more generation while the young Asians start up as native English speakers and everyone gets used to remote workers.

On the other hand, the engineer whose primary advantage is his engineering is super-charged by focusing on where he provides comparative advantage.

Yeah, it turns out updating your Coldfusion website to display a notice on Sunday is something a child can do, and making a scalable backend for Dropbox's storage requires immense expertise. If you're the first guy, the writing is on the wall. If you're the second guy, the less time you spend on things that don't require your skill, the more valuable you are.

Has it? Or is that like saying 2500 square miles of Delaware has produced more economic value than half the globe, let alone the rest of the US?

Companies started in SF, grown in SF, serve the world. SF engineers with SF money in SF offices made that. These mythical super-Europeans we're supposed to pin our hopes on have nothing to show for it but Jetbrains, Deep Mind, and SAP (successful companies, yes, but three countries' worth to match one tiny piece of land).

No disrespect intended. They run things in Europe the way they want to. But regulating to ensure only immigration from Europe is not in America's interests.

I have no disagreement with your final sentence, but I still take issue with attributing purported value created by people in the vicinity of SF with SF itself and concluding that the key to that sort of success is how SF is run.

Delaware, a state of somewhere around a million people, has "over half" the companies on the S&P 500. That's like $15 trillion in market cap. That's a reasonable sized stock market for a billion people in the wider world. Should we conclude that everyone should emulate Delaware in how they organize their society? If they did do that, should we expect that the rest of humanity, unleashed, could produce $15 trillion in value for every million or so people? If they can't, does that mean they're inferior or failing to follow the example of Delaware? Not to put too fine a point on it, what about the Cayman Islands?

Edit once more: and, "SF engineers" and "SF money"? Come on!

Are you saying I'm attributing Silicon Valley's achievements to SF? I wasn't intending to do that. I was talking about solely SF companies because that illustrates the point on its own, but we can make it the SJ-SF-Oak CSA if you'd like. But that sort of blows Europe's tech companies out of the water. I wanted to keep it in the range of comparison.

I didn't write "Silicon Valley", and I didn't notice you saying "Silicon Valley", until now.

Maybe you could clarify with some examples of the companies you're talking about, in SF, that mostly draw on local talent and resources.

Who cares if 70% are Indians? I would guess there are far more Indians seeking H1B. I do agree that H1B is broken- perhaps abolish H1B but streamline the process of becoming a citizen for in demand tech workers?

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