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Comment by naveen99 | Hacker News Reader

what’s interesting is that there aren’t enough medical student seats in the usa to fill the residency spots in the usa. Why is it that other countries have more medical student seats than residency seats ? It’s because medical schools have quotas, whereas they don’t have quotas against over represented groups in residency.

Same reason we don’t have enough engineering seats in the usa and use H1B to fill in engineering positions in Silicon Valley. Colleges have quotas, Silicon Valley doesn’t.

Schools have quotas, reality / the market doesn’t.

If you look globally, you don't even need quotas. The world is approximately 65% Asian, so is the student body at magnet high schools with merit based entrance tests. the world is approximately 5% African.

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> Same reason we don’t have enough engineering seats in the usa and use H1B to fill in engineering positions in Silicon Valley. Colleges have quotas, Silicon Valley doesn’t.

Lower tier engineering schools have room. And anyone can start a program. They're just filling seats with other things, like master's programs. But they'd rather have undergrads. And the ranking of these schools would increase as they got better students. The simple problem is not enough people want to major in engineering. The situation is the same everywhere (China/India are just bigger). But those places can't raise salaries to resolve it. US tech leaders clearly can.

The H1B helped keep this from resolving itself the normal way, i.e. where companies have to pay more to attract people to the field. I think it also relocated a big chunk of the developing world's tech growth to the US, so American executives could be the ones who benefited from it (yay for them). So it makes the domestic shortcoming worse in two ways.

> The simple problem is not enough people want to major in engineering.

Or can. A lot of schools are happy to admit almost anyone, but will have 1/3 of incoming freshmen transfer to other majors after a year.

> I think it also relocated a big chunk of the developing world's tech growth to the US, so American executives could be the ones who benefited from it (yay for them)

Employees too. It lowers the wages a little, but creates a much bigger market where software for the world is built in America. So there's more competitors. It's not uncommon for American companies to have half of their revenues in international markets but way less than 50% foreign employees.

Built in America by the same people who would have been building it elsewhere. If US workers could be hired for those jobs they could just skip the H1b part and hire domestically in the first place. And I think you are hugely underestimating the effect on salaries. But as for bigger market benefits to domestic workers, this requires H1b's to not be handed out fast enough to keep up with the growth of the market (which I think is finally happening recently, hence the big salaries in SV). But this is the same supply and demand effect we would have gotten without the H1b program in the first place.

> Or can. A lot of schools are happy to admit almost anyone, but will have 1/3 of incoming freshmen transfer to other majors after a year.

Definitely agree about this part though. A big reason some countries can achieve higher number of grads or better ratios of one kind or another, is with a dumbed-down program that requires mostly memorization and teaches nothing in depth.

I'm not sure how you count over a billion people in Africa as 5%.

That only works out about right if you're still on the 3/5ths compromise, but accidentally apply it twice.

Oh wow, thanks for correcting me. my numbers were off by a lot. I guess Africa is closer to 15% of the world population.

Probably better to just think of every one as individuals.

Global wealth Numbers are interesting though, https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab...

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