Hacker News Reader

Comment by chris_money202 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft employs more than Software engineers.

Its Azure Hardware division that manages its first party silicon and its deployment has a huge hardware and electrical engineering presence. These fields don't have as many people in America in them, because Software has paid so much more for the last two decades, why would anyone go EE when they could go CS and make 2-3x more. In other countries, these degrees were paid similar so there is a larger pool to pull from then in America.

You can't train a software engineer overnight to be a silicon engineer

View on HN

Middle america is full of experienced EE's making $100K a year. After 20 years at the same company.

And they are good at it.

That's true. Problem is a lot of the time Middle America is comfortable and doesn't want to move out to the valley or Seattle.

Remote work makes that easier now, but with silicon / EE its not always the most optimal way to work.

Middle America EE is also not building data center class chips or infrastructure most of the time, would it be easier to get one of them up to speed, yes. But it's the equivalent of throwing a front-end engineer into C or embedded programming or vice versa.

At that salary, you're just proving the "why go EE when you can go CS and make 2X more" argument, at least if we're talking about a 20+ year senior dev/architect type.

I agree. Specialized engineering is very different from software, you can't easily replace that expertise.

My question is more on software roles, those CRUD or React component roles, where the work can be done remotely. Instead of Americans filling those positions, companies may/will simply hire those engineers abroad.

They may. I think the government should probably tax the diff in salary in those cases. The problem is, that is probably incredibly hard to define and pass as legislation or whatever has to be done.

H1B and offshore jobs can be beneficial to America though, and that was why the program started. Sufficient guardrails just never went up and now there is opportunity for some abuse. But that abuse isn't across the board, there is still beneficial H1B and offshoring going on mixed in with abuse.

"I think the government should probably tax the diff in salary in those cases"

How would that work if the remote people were employed by a different company that was given a contract by the home company to provide certain pieces of software or specific computing services?

Hey man I'm just a software engineer now, I can't speak on public policy.

My best effort, the contract is a red herring, we only care about the company that employs the abroad remote employees which is the contractual company in this case. If that contractual company is also abroad, we tax (tariff?) the contract.

What grounds would you have for putting a tariff a specific contract between two parties? Is it not the case that tariffs need to apply to categories of trade and to countries?

The laws are outdated, tariff laws were written when trade was physical goods. The US heavily trades in services present day. But I don't need grounds because the conversation has been about establishing said grounds.

> You can't train a software engineer overnight to be a silicon engineer

But but but I was told that unions will force employers to retrain folks instead of laying them off.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com