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Comment by chickenfeet | Hacker News Reader

Good. We need to ramp down H-1B - there are plenty of out-of-work STEM majors here, there is no need for importing more foreign workers.

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I remember my commencement ceremony by a C-level Sun executive, where he rambled to a class of 600 graduating from STEM fields about the need for more H-1B workers. You could hear the crickets chirping, as Sun never sent a rep to any career fair, and most of us did not have a job offer lined up

One of the things I like about working in tech is the absence of the "they terk ur gerbs" type crap.

If you're out performed by an H1B you need to step up your game not worry about H1Bs. If you don't have H1Bs they will just out compete you from another country. Did you notice the manufacturing sector leave?

Turns out working hard is a bit more important the graduating from a prestigious school.

How does one have a STEM degree and not have a job? Do they not know about craigslist? Career fairs? Recruiters? elance? etc? Are they somehow physically disabled that prevents them from taking a day labour job? Are they unable to find their library and open a book on Javascript? Ruby? Python? C? C++? UNIX? TCP/IP? HTTP?

Perhaps the real reason they do not have a job is that they feel work is 'beneath' them. Like how can you not find a job... I have a high school education and I get called twice a day, in Vancouver not SF...

Canadian's have TN visas, which sidestep the H1-B fiasco.

Why haven't you tried out Seattle yet? Usually it's higher pay and everything is cheaper.

No degree, no TN visa.

TN isn't dual intent.

Out-performed? How about it being cheaper for companies to hire and maintain... It's not about quality at all, it's about saving money.

Hiring the cheapest programmers available generally doesn't work out well, especially if they are cheap and experienced.

Holding your nose up high and refusing to work for the prevailing wage generally doesn't work well, get a job, do something awesome for low pay, leverage that into something that pays well.

While most people were paying thousands of dollars a year going to school I was getting paid to learn tech working a shitty tech support job. While most of my colleagues were graduating, I was buying my first house at 22. (Yes, as tech support pay grade, no startup millions). Before tech support I was working at a warehouse stacking boxes and doing other day labour.

Don't complain about H1Bs work harder, faster, and smarter than them. An H1B is no different than any other motivated competitor.

> Hiring the cheapest programmers available generally doesn't work out well, especially if they are cheap and experienced.

It works out just fine on quarterly earnings reports so it works out just fine.

How about it being cheaper for companies to hire and maintain

Don't forget about being able to effectively deport them on a whim if they voice any objection over their treatment.

Have you ever been threatened with being fired?

Try this, ask for a pen and a piece of paper, write your resignation letter, sign it, hand it back to them, and walk out the door.

9 times out of 10 you won't get to the door, half the time you'll have a pay raise by the time you get back to the office.

You're a huge valuable asset that the company has invested lots of money in that knows how things work. They want to shave pennies not lose investments. Act accordingly.

Uh. What? Did you intend to reply to someone else?

That's a vast generalization. Although cost is part of it the other side of hiring STEM graduates to do rote "Enterprise" work has its own tall challenges. You either get intelligent people that hate the job and move on or you get normal people that take time to learn, insist on doing limited things and are generally not very motivated to produce work that is vastly above the quality that you get from hiring the alternatives.

So for the managers who have to deliver working things to their clients, hiring H1B saves money and generally due to their predicament these people are more willing and flexible to work beyond their assigned loads to cover up any knowledge deficiency. From the manager's perspective it works out better.

Oh and no one cares if your code is top quality (whatever that means) - if it is reasonable quality and if it works it's all good. And that's because not many non-H1B written products they have seen are all free of problems - so why pay more for something that works equally well as the one you can pay less for?

That's basically the reality of it. The rock star US born, US educated SV programmer myth only applies to a limited section of the programmer populace - rest of us all are normal people who can get it to work reasonably well.

> How does one have a STEM degree and not have a job?

This can't possibly be a serious question. In today's perpetually feeble job market, there are talented folks everywhere with STEM degrees (and experience too) who are unemployed, under-employed, or working in jobs unrelated to their field of study.

I think it's a serious question, but with a pretty easy answer.

People with STEM degrees who don't have jobs are stupid. There are no "talented folks" with degrees and experience that are not stupid and don't have jobs.

There are fucktons of jobs for STEM people that aren't being fulfilled because of the lack of suitable candidates.

People with STEM degrees who don't have jobs are stupid.

That is probably the dumbest assertion I've ever read on HN.

> How does one have a STEM degree and not have a job?

The S part of it includes disciplines such as Psychology, Sociology, Food Science, Political Science that have their own employment cycles. The E part includes civic engineering and electrical engineering that have very different cycles from the rest of the technology industry.

> One of the things I like about working in tech is the absence of the "they terk ur gerbs" type crap.

That's better than the "We no terk ur gerb, we kreate moor gerbs!" crap (such as in the upper right of the page at https://www.facebook.com/competeamericaorg ).

> there are plenty of out-of-work STEM majors here, there is no need for importing more foreign workers.

Is there a citation for that?

First, read this post and understand. If there was a true shortage, wages would be increasing.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-19/only-rich-know-wage...

That is across all fields. Do you have a citation that they are not increasing in STEM positions? I would argue that fast rising housing prices in both NY and SF are in part due to fast rising salaries of tech jobs in both areas.

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