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Comment by edverma2 | Hacker News Reader

Does America need to produce the talent or can they import it?

America could import it if the current administration wasn’t so hell bent on repelling global talent through inflicting great cost and uncertainty upon the talent

Even this forum can’t decide whether skilled personnel are a boon because they positively contribute to the local economy, or a negative because they undermine employment prospects for locals.

I don't know about this forum, but mainstream economics (and quite a few of the more niche approaches, too) is pretty much all in favour of open immigration for all skill levels.

I don't think you can say that. They are neither for or against, they make (or try to make) predictions what happens in either case. Who benefits and who loses is not the same in those cases, it's not linear. If you wan to be "for" or "against" you have to take a side. Doesn't mean they don't have opinions too, but two economists that each favor different outcomes may still agree on the methods of their field.

Economists generally point out that the world would be a lot richer with open borders. You can of course argue about whether its desirable to be richer.

https://www.economist.com/the-world-if/2017/07/13/a-world-of... (https://archive.ph/TFS4G)

Net benefits are positive from open migration.

Not just net benefits when you include the foreigners, but also just netted over natives.

Except for the guys receiving the lowered salaries. And all the other problems of migration, when some destinations are WAAYYYY more desirable to live in, even jobless, than others.

You guys are very selective, either not even bothering with links, or carefully selecting that one particular piece of paper supporting your PoV. Which of course looked at only very few if not even just a single variable, and (by necessity) failed to account for the breadth of reality.

Quoting single papers is always a sign of desperation. That's not how anything works, when given a broad question. Studies are extremely specific! In comparison, the question here is as broad as it can possibly get for an economics question.

Discussions such as here are only worthwhile when the parties don't care about "winning" and use debate club methods.

So where are your links?

I think the policy is “immigrate your complement.”

There really is a big difference betwwwn needing to import engineers to create high end chips and WITCH companies using h1B to get cheap contractors to do enterprise dev or any software development except something really specialized

I worked at a US college that had a big semiconductor engineering and manufacturing engineering program. They were about 20-30% international, but the program wasn’t huge.

Frankly, it’s shitty work. Software is where it’s at. Hardware people get paid peanuts and work really hard. When you’re a master of a particular technology, you get discarded when the next thing comes along. Ask the people at Intel or IBM. The best jobs are the execs and the tradesmen.

They cannot produce it (in large quantities) and it's getting harder and harder to import talent.

Well, they can't import it any more.

The talent is already here, the employers just need to pay better.

And attract them away from what? What are these skilled people doing? Does a photolithography skill set enable you to moonlight at some other gig such that they're here and keeping their skills fresh and we're just not noticing?

Software. Talk to anybody in the hardware space, and compare their experience to software.

Hell, the only two people I see in this thread that claim hardware experience are saying that it's a better career move to switch to software.

Software is easier, pays better, and has far better employers. Until hardware companies realize the situation they've created, they will lose their workforce to greener pastures.

Software has also benefitted from a massive tax subsidy relative to hardware, as the latter requires a massive capital investment. Hardware requires expensive real estate, and benefits from saving the spending, whereas software can exist on debt and small footprints.

That may have been the case prior to section 174, when you could invest massively in something, write it off as a loss, and then pivot to reusing it profitably, but now I think that all R&D efforts are equally discouraged.

You're right that the delta has been reduced, but producing physical goods still requires much more capital outlay (which is still disadvantaged).

Seems like everyone forgets that the USA literally invented all these things. In fact some of the Americans who invented these technologies and processes are probably still alive, if not a bit older and retired. Photolithographic semiconductor fabrication was invented in the United States. Americans invented the transistor. Americans invented the integrated circuit.

I’m pretty sure the USA would do fine in the semiconductor industry in a short while if it was economical (i.e it stops being profitable to undermine American workers with cheap overseas labor).

I was a fab tool owner. My last paycheck in a semiconductor position was in the mid-200s. I went into software and make double that in the same metro. Same level of responsibility. I don’t even work in machine learning.

To take your photolithography example though, I know someone who went litho tool owner -> camera team at Apple -> Meta reality labs. FAANGs want semiconductor process engineers just so they can spend all day yelling at underpaid Asian vendor semiconductor process engineers who are doing the actual work.

A lot of highly skilled people are perfectly happy to stay at their job earing 60% of what they "could" be making because they have other priorities that don't involve increasing shareholder value.

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