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Comment by logicchains | Hacker News Reader

They would be looking for work with you if you were offering them better pay and conditions than where they're currently working.

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Money does not fix the supply problem the parent comment pointed out (at least for fields that need multi year training).

Let’s say that tomorrow we need 1M nuclear physicists. How can money help? You still need to wait for the talent pipeline to divert.

Fortunately such ridiculous hypotheticals have no correspondence to reality. Most every job can be easily trained or cross trained. Mathematicians make good physicists. Nor is there some foreign pipeline of a million physicists. Such ridiculous argument exist only to perpetuate the lie of a skills shortage and deny the wage shortage.

They may make good physicists, but not great physicists. Similar to saying I know how to drive a car, now let me win the inde 500. Things take to for specialization, even with the advent of guessing and checking machines (llms).

A shocking number of innovations in x field are because y person brought an idea that maps from z field. Cross functional teams are important and mathematicians can and absolutely do make top level contributions to physics.

One of the math problems recently publicized as having being solved by was actually just discovering that a German mathematician had published a solution in the 1950s.

Oh that is true, and I’m not putting down cross functional teams. I’m just putting down the idea that a specialist in one area can immediately be a specialist in another semi related area with no extra review time.

If you ask specialists about their backgrounds you will find that they took different paths. The critical step is time in the speciality, not background. For any job there's never a pool of applicants who are pretrained for that exact job, everyone takes time to get up to speed. People from related fields do just as well learning job tasks. The labor market is fluid if properly incentivized. Commenters intentionally pretend not to understand because they want cheap labor and want to impoverish the American worker.

Commenter doesn’t seem to understand how much of a drift there is for specialty learning or different negative patterns specialists may have. A front end architect and a computer architect may have similar backgrounds, but a computer architect will take wildly longer to learn front end and likely have some practices to un-learn. Also I would say for certain areas, people are pre-trained for the exact job as the tools or tech between is the exact same. It’s not just commenters who want cheaper labor, capitalism wants cheaper labor.

A lot of employers would have slaves if they were allowed, doesnt mean that the workers shouldn't do everything possible to prevent this and politically demand better conditions. Such as the case in the topic of the thread.

I would agree employers would likely want that, though since in the us it’s difficult for labor unions to ever be created let alone extra protections or the necessity of tips or us at-will hire/fire.

My point of your thread was disagreement with the immediate transfer of knowledge: “Most every job can be easily trained or cross trained.”

I disagree with most jobs can easily be trained or cross trained, there is more of a time sync between that.

The national government functions as a labor union through its control of the border and regulating the conditions of employment.

>I disagree with most jobs can easily be trained or cross trained

People just overestimate how complicated their job is because it makes them feel important. If anything immigrants take longer to get up to speed which is why companies usually only hire them when its cheaper. Or nepotism.

“The national government functions as a labor union through its control of the border and regulating the conditions of employment.” Woah for some reason it sounds like you’re talking about a European country, not the US where the legal age to work changes every few hundred miles. 1

“People just overestimate how complicated their job is because it makes them feel important.” I do hate to say but I also really doubt this anecdote for majority of workers. Wasn’t there a ford factory that laid off workers in favor of llm (that were trained to replace them) only then to be rehired? 2

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/09/child-lab... 2. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/30/ai-backfi...

With training (remember that?) and practice, one could vastly improve. It’s called a growth mindset.

You know what training takes? Time

*you know what practice takes? Time

That’s fine.

So we’re in agreement? A mathematician can’t immediately be or replace a good physicist, it takes some certain time to transition.

It’s an investment.

So we’re in agreement? The time of investment for growth is the point of decision, and how long it takes to train specialists defines if it’s worth it.

I.e. how long would it take to train a regular driver to drive the inde 500 vs buying a racers contract

Want me to agree that training takes time? Ok, but what a boring revelation. It doesn’t take much time in the grand scheme of things. I can read a substantial book each week, for example. Give a person a half ~salary and let them study and train for a month +/-, they’ll be ready to contribute.

What if I need someone to do the job right now? And there are such candidates available? Should I still hire an under qualified citizen?

Good thing you planned ahead and trained a person last month, so they're able to start today.

People in the recent past were not so short-sighted.

Good thing every single requirement is known in advance. It’d be a shame if things changed faster then a snail, limitations we’re fully understood, and the geopolitical situation doesn’t change by a tweet.

Edit: actually, what job do you have in mind that never changes? Honestly it sounds relaxing

Can’t plan ahead one month? Give me a break, you can do better than that.

Tell that to ever changing gas prices, steel prices, or beef prices.

*let alone anything tech wise

The current admin will be gone or dead soon. “Beef prices” are not a factor in the tech industry.

Just a generation or two ago we went to the Moon. Now, you refuse to train an intelligent person with overlapping skills.

Not just a closed mindset, but pure defeatism. Why even get out of bed in the morning, right? Might as well give up now.

Back to reality—I have an acquaintance who started work at JPL and finished her degree while working there. But according to you it’s just not able to be planned for! Thankfully defeatists are not in charge in Pasadena.

Good thing people aren’t affected by beef, by eating it, getting diseased from it, or from sick from other people eating it. And nice choice picking 1/3 of the options.

This is not me refusing to train someone, but acknowledging there is a time sink cost for training that may not pay off in the need to make a project, or the person could up and leave which good for them.

Thank you for accelerating my argument to 1000 when I was just going the speed limit and seeing the warning signs for the problems up ahead.

Yes, you repeatedly tried to refuse training as a possibility. My initial statement was relatively conservative so can’t be easily disproven, but you made many attempts anyway.

Others discounted the exaggerated emergency above so no need to repeat. And we know training worked for centuries up to my example of two years ago. Most people don’t study exactly what they end up doing and learn as they go. The US has a couple hundred million workers. All which point to training being more economically efficient than importing from abroad except in extreme cases.

Your closed-mindset, anti-worker ideas and position continue to harm the economy and wages. Enjoy the fruits of your war on the middle class, having to live in a luxury bunker.

(Oh and gas and steel prices don’t materially affect tech either.)

You must've mis-read my statements. My position is there is a balancing act between training specialists vs hiring already pre-trained specialists depending on changing requirements. To the contrast of your conservative approach, I'm looking at the middle road or the in between options.

Training does work, and I agree most people don't study 1:1 what they end up doing. For cases where work is immediately required however and an Inde car needs to be driven next week (say the og driver got sick), a pre-trained Inde car driver would be better to be hired then not race and take months to train the replacement.

My "closed-mindset, anti-worker ideas" of wanting unions, the best people for a job, and wanting diversification of staff I suppose do go against your "halt everything and only train Americans" conservative position.

I suppose you have nothing new to offer to this conversation and will never hear me out with an open mind, so I bid you and this thread adieu.

(Gas && steel prices affect construction of llm data centers, regular data centers, fuel for travel to work, expansions of hardware, supply chain for ordering technology, and so on...)

If you don't want to be seen as against a thing, don't argue against it repeatedly.

Also your phrasing needs a lot of work. I recommend the Dale Carnegie books on communicating with others.

We don’t need my hypotheticals.

We saw how well the American bootcamps filled the market with completely trash talent when the market demanded a big number of SDEs.

So no, money cannot generate infinite specialized talent overnight as you naively assume.

Why are they needed in the USA, but not needed in their home country?

They ARE needed in their home country, that's why they're here. The fact is simply that the best way to help their family is to make American money

Good to hear that their home country doesn't need any engineers, doctors or other specialists.

Then it makes sense that they go to help the USA develop to that same level.

A nuclear engineer surely improves his country much more by sending home some money to his mommy and aunts than by building a new power plant.

I can't tell if this is a troll post or intentionally obtuse. The comment they you replied to did say that these are the best in their country, which is why we want them. Have you heard of a concept called brain drain?

Yes, I have heard of brain drain. And people here are arguing in favour of brain drain rather than hiring citizens or paying citizens better, because they say that US needs these foreign workers. That's why I ask how it comes that their own countries do not need them?

Why should anybody be sympathetic to the so called "needs" of US companies hiring immigrants, but not be sympathetic to the needs of their home countries?

Sympathy for companies is usually conditioned on the fact that they give jobs to locals, or at least to citizens. If they're not doing that, then who gives a fuck if they aren't able to expand or profit at a rate that shareholders prefer?

But there is a class of people - most hackers included - who have had such comfortable lives that they aren't capable to even pretend anymore to sympathize with the producing class.

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