The US created literally all relevant consumer technology in the last 30 or so years and demand for tech talent has exploded ever since.
Having a competitve sector/ economy which regularly pushes the edge of innovation and hence expands demand (both on sell and supply side) is actually what keeps salaries up.
This logic is as deeply flawed as often as it comes up.
It’s favoritism, it’s cronyism, it’s a nation putting its own struggling people last and it most certainly is zero sum.
No offense, but maybe your resume didn't reflect that you had the skills required.
The companies I worked at and now portfolio companies of mine pay Bay Area market rate to both citizens and non-citizens.
We hire noncitizens because we didn't find the right talent we need.
You can't "command economy" human capital. It just doesn't work.
Upskilling has a 5-10 year long lag time.
Immigration is the only reason America hasn't stumbled like Europe, Japan, or Korea demographically.
So what? Again, this is a pipeline problem, that can be influenced and addressed via policy. I'm not trying to "command economy" anything. It's a problem that companies, and increasingly universities, don't think that it's a huge issue there not being enough home-grown citizens to fill these roles (a claim I find to be dubious at best). That is definitely something that policy can be used to fix.
>Immigration is the only reason America hasn't stumbled like Europe, Japan, or Korea demographically.
I don't know what this is supposed to mean. You want some demographic growth target to be hit? Europe has many countries in it, but mentioning Japan and Korea implies you have noticed the birth rates there. Well, I think the wrong question is being asked in that situation as well. If people aren't having babies, why? What changed? What policy options are there to fix that problem?
Thinking that "just import a new workforce" fixes that is extremely weird to me, especially when they are coming from places that are not exactly culturally proximate to the places they are going, to say the least.
Companies should train employees, simple as.
I bet most people working in it learned on the job. The certainly dont teach every single specific detail of the entire tech industry in universities.
This is just gaslighting.
Maybe.
We didn't have the time to risk on hiring a dud in an industry as competitive as Cybersecurity.
When competing with Israeli and Indian companies who are able to tap the Israeli, Eastern European, and Indian talent scene where such skills are much more common, we don't have the time to risk timelines falling behind.
With an decent background shouldnt take someone too long to get up to speed and that time isnt going to break the company.
Its what they do in other countries. lol
You clearly have with an agenda.
That was what we were offering, but we were also demanding on quality and skill required.
We ended up getting some top performers in Israel and India for a fraction, despite being ready to pay the above.
Kinda telling that the so called smart people who have trouble getting hired have no clue that that's not a requirement for H1B.
The midwest is not sending their best.
Assuming that the issue is that these positions weren't remote then if they decided that they're better served by workers that live locally then they're either right and you're asking them to harm their own interests for yours or they're wrong and they're just leaving money on the table for a competitor. If they aren't harmed for giving up a competitive edge then that monopoly power to just ignore the market is the actual problem.
Either way, work visas isn't even close to the most salient problem. Restrict them and who's to say how startups will find loopholes to avoid hiring who we want them to hire. Let's just cut out all the messiness and cut them checks directly. Call it reparations for the coasts ignoring the good honest midwest American talent all these years.
We'll just open offices in Israel, Eastern Europe, and India instead and pay 70% of a US salary. It already started happening in 2019, and avalanched during the pandemic.
When the US banned Israeli companies from selling military IP to China, they began selling to India.
Drone tech saw a similar impact, hence why Chinese and Turkish Drone companies are outcompeting American ones in both commercial and defense applications.
(the right talent at the shit-level wage we want to pay) is more often than not the rest of that sentence.
We needed people who understood stuff like XDP and worked on it for years.
The talent pool for low level development, OS Dev, cybersecurity, networking, and some parts of ML is sparse in the US compared to Israel, Eastern Europe, China, and India.
Companies would collapse and fail, unless the government gave a massive corporate stimulus package (probably 4-5x the size of PPE).
> none of the skills you need, but I could easily be trained
It would take at least 1-2 years. At that point, an Israeli or Indian startup has taken market share and won. Welcome to cybersecurity and networking.
Even National Labs don't do that.
In my area (not cybersecurity) I’m still seeing very serious and brand-new-to-me problems come up even after many years.
The solution for this is good testing and QA not fear mongering Americans into hiring immigrants.
On the other hand, if your attitude is that you now know your stuff and you’re done learning, that isn’t going to produce the best outcomes for you.
> Testing and QA
Business processes can’t take the place of experienced judgement.
This is utterly incorrect..
Testing and QA are techical processes run by engineers.
Where did you get your degree ? Your knowledge of tech seems extraordinarily limited. Theres solutions to your problems you're not even aware of.
One observation I've made throughout the years of reviewing tech resumes - if I get a resume from a U.S. citizen, I (and anybody else) immediately know the difference between MIT/Stanford vs. "The University of Wisconsin" without even researching it. OTOH, I have no idea what the difference between the University of Hyderabad vs. the University of New Delhi, and there's not really a good way for me to tell. Foreign applicants actually have an _advantage_ over U.S. citizens in that the person reviewing their resume will almost certainly bin all of the resumes into the same "ok, has a degree" vs. a potentially unconscious "ah, ok, couldn't get into an ivy league".
Edit: More relevant is comparing Ivy undergrads (64.5k) to all US undergrads (20.3 million) [2], meaning only the top 0.3% make the cut.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League - total number of undergrads (64.5k), divided by 4, assuming a 4-year college course.
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/235406/undergraduate-enr...
We didn't discriminate based on educational program.
But we didn't have the time to train someone in eBPF or OS Internals from scratch over months when there are competitors in Israel or India able to release the same thing in the same time period with a fraction of the cost.
For certain specialities of tech, there simply isn't the skill set anymore in the US. OS Internals and Computer Networking is a great example of that.
With most tech jobs if a person has a computer science background they have the skills.
The company is just lying to justify outsourcing.
Until you do it, you don’t know how to do it. In other words, juniors fumble around and make lots of mistakes - that’s how they get good.
I took networking, os, data structures, etc. in my degree.
It taught me a lot more than "how to learn".
Interestingly, the meat ag and farming employs (no pun intended) similar tactics with undocumented people working in near-or-de facto slavery conditions that are very dangerous. The major meat processing plants in the US advertise salaries in Mexican and Central American newspapers to encourage migration. And, the US immigration system is a Kafkaesque, Byzantine, understaffed nightmare purposefully to keep official immigration meeting socio-political objectives of appearing selective. In truth, it facilitates megacorps importing large numbers of foreign knowledge workers through official channels while criminalizing and marginalizing undocumented people to be under the thumbs of other megacorps monetizing unpleasant work society inconveniently needs to function.
It is so obviously not zero sum. From Google to Yahoo to eBay to Palantir. None of those hundreds of thousands of jobs would exist without immigrants. Or they would be overseas.
I'm sorry for your friends who cannot get tech jobs. It's time to level up their skills. No competent developer can't find a job in this economy.
Stop blaming immigrants for your own shortcomings.
Globalization is a two way street. If you want the best of what the world has to offer, the best of what the world has to offer will arrive at your doorstep. That includes human resources.
This concentration of high paid tech jobs would not exist in the first place if it weren't for the foreigners. Look at the number of tech startups founded by immigrants. More broadly consider that if a different country became the global hub for top tech talent, capital would go there, and that country would become the home of high paid tech salaries.
The main input into a tech company is 'human capital' (hard working, highly intelligent, people) - Americans benefit from the spillover effects of having their country be the global nexus of human capital.
BTW, India is seeing significant upwards pressure on tech salaries and a boom in the number of domestic tech companies and jobs. This is at least partly spurred by restrictive American immigration policies forcing Indians to go back home. Purely economically speaking, I don't think America is the winner here.
That's simply not true. The alternative is often just not having this job at all. A tech startup without employees can just fail, without creating any jobs.
And the guy from the Midwest will be worse off in the end.
On the other hand, if all the foreign talent congregates elsewhere, the Midwest kid will need a visa to compete with them.
The non-zero sum is that having all the people in one place makes more opportunities than if they weren't together.
Let me preface my writing by saying that I am neither a US citizen nor a tech worker currently employed or aiming for employment with a US based firm.
I am a first generation immigrant in a continental European country who faced no barriers in charting my career in tech. I deeply believe in and have experienced meritocracy.
So let's go at it one by one.
> Every foreign employee getting that tech job is a US citizen from the Midwest not getting it.
That is simply not true as the distribution for demand and supply of tech talent within an economy is hardly ever matching perfectly temporally. Either there is more demand than supply or more supply than demand. Also upskilling everyone in the Midwest does not work just that quickly.
That is how the world works.
Your argument is not rooted at all in basic macroeconomics, rather, it seems to me, in wishful thinking.
No country other than the USA is better at playing that macroeconomics game through talent oriented immigration laws.
Has been for the past 200 years, will be for the next 200 years.
I'd bet on that.
> Fuck this dishonest talking point, I know people coding since high school working at Toyota plants while people from overseas with entry level skill sets have employers move them to the west coast and land jobs (for whatever reason.)
Said people you know must either not have the chops you claim they have, not know their market value or not have the required mobility for the purpose of securing said jobs (i.e. moving out of the Midwest to the economic hotspots of the US).
Giving you the benefit of the doubt that indeed subservient immigration is an economic niche of it's own, there is no chance that practice alone saturates the demand for tech talent.
How many SWE positions in every other HN thread alone require citizenship, timezone presence or offer no assistance with immigration?
> It’s favoritism, it’s cronyism, it’s a nation putting its own struggling people last and it most certainly is zero sum.
While a populist, assertive statement, I think it is lack of widespread education & upskilling initiatives (which literally everyone else outside of the tech sector has incentives for: what would Toyota, Walmart, literally everyone else stand to gain from more educated citizens leaving the Midwest for higher paying jobs?), greed and fiscal pressure (I've promised my VCs 200% growth YoY, so I need SWEs stat from literally anywhere NOW, can't wait for these folks from the Midwest to upskill within 2 years) and generational change (those HS friends chopping away at Toyota might not have applied in their early years when remote work was as prevalent as it is today. It will be a totally different game for a Midwest child growing up in a tech inspired household today).
Lack in speed of upskilling/ education, fiscal economic pressure and glacial pace of generational change is literally what every other nation is facing.
Time is always the scarcest and most critical factor. And that's why it's not zero sum.
In the long run, no economy is bound to employ more people in tech both domestic and foreign than the USA and that is a massive, massive achievement - and based in simple macroeconomic rules, not some emotional anecdotes.
This narrative is purely a lobbying effort.
Where, exactly?
Unemployment rate among STEM graduates is half of that of the general population [0]. Salaries are also substantially higher [1], and keep getting higher [2].
[0] https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23315/report/stem-unemployment...).
[1] https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23315/report/stem-median-wage-....
[2] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25433814-000-most-ste...
So the unemployment rate in your first article is not relevant, missing labor participation rates etc.
The second article is about median wages of people who are already in jobs categorized as stem. Same with the third, which is also only about the derivative.
> Where, exactly?
The most prominent segment can be found by dropping the engineering and tech. Biology, math, physics, chemistry, etc. However even in engineering we find that the top grads move into software or finance.
I would appreciate it if you were to provide some hard numbers to back your conjecture that immigration is the reason for these cases of "underemployment", like you call it.
> However even in engineering we find that the top grads move into software or finance.
Software engineering is notorious for being one of the markets with the most H-1B visa holders, yet you are saying that most "top grads" move into it for better wages?
Here is some data that tries to at least look at this question: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/06/does-majoring...
The gross number is only 1/3 of stem degree lead to stem jobs. But that includes quite a bit of soft degree's, still in the ballpark of half of all graduates not working in their field.
> software jobs
Yes there is higher demand for software which is met with higher wages and drawing underemployed people with other degrees as well as immigration. The immigration restriction argument is that increasing that part of the equation will lower wages and increase corporate control of their workforce.
So an alternative way to meet that demand is to hire us citizens who have those qualifications or a related degree that could be trained.
Another good one. We hired a person with a MechE degree with experience working at JPL into our customer support because they are so in love with the area because of easy access to winter activities (snow shoing, skiing, etc).
Imo your narrative amounts is simply not grounded in reality.