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Comment by lmg643 | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. It's strange to read these kinds of articles. The author doesn't seem to realize that he is describing his own personal preferences, and not anything about society at large. All you need to do is look at the top recipients of visas and you will understand what the game is.

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This brings up an interesting question. The reasoning for bringing talent over from abroad, does it make sense ethically? I'm greatly irked by the idea of a young and ambitious Indian/Nigerian/Chinese/Russian guy or girl coming here to... optimize ad targeting at Facebook, he/she should stay in India or Nigeria, because by golly Nigeria NEEDS that person much more than us. We can do fine with Facebook advertising algos working a little less efficiently, but Nigeria and India need these young men and women to actually create important, infrastructural changes. It seems highly unethical to be just siphoning the world's talent like that. India's culture of valuing education produced those competent engineers, India should get its fruits, India should use those young men and women to make India better. We're sitting here ignoring our recent graduates, they're burdened with massive debts... and we just ignore them. How about the companies that are sitting on billions spend a few dollars to train them, if they're not up to snuff? I've mentioned this elsewhere -- this is not the spirit of America that Emma envisioned, this isn't something to be proud of.

    "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
    With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
    I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

I get where you're coming from, but are you really going to base policy on that? That would be bizarrely condescending: "Sorry, it would be advantageous for our economy and for your personal well-being for you to enter our country, but we've decided you owe it to your homeland to stay." Not to mention that it wouldn't be effectual if other first-world countries didn't play along.

The genius who comes from Nigeria to the States to write some code is going to pick up skills and connections that will prepare them to go back and have a tremendous impact back in their home country. Maybe many won't; maybe many will stay here, optimize some small metric for Facebook, and be fat and happy. And that's a shame compared to the outcome where they go fix up their homeland. But hey: any one of us could go spend our lives living in and trying to improve a third world country, regardless of where we're born. Why should the folks who happen to be born there be forced into it?

> The genius who comes from Nigeria to the States to write some code is going to pick up skills and connections that will prepare them to go back and have a tremendous impact back in their home country.

But that's not going to happen. More than 95% of Indians who come here (and can stay here) will not go back to India. And that makes sense on the individual level, they're not going to find back home the safety and the quality of life they can get here so obviously they'll make the decision to stay here. But I'm not sure if we should base the policy on the liberties and considerations from the scope of the individual, we should ideally base the policy on what widely makes for a stable, safe, healthy world. I understand that a nation's job is to look after its own constituents, and nothing more, but I argue in this day and age we should recognize how interconnected the world is, and what magnificently deleterious ramifications our seemingly-benign actions can have.

> But hey: any one of us could go spend our lives living in and trying to improve a third world country.

That's going from, what is in my view, an active-bad action (siphoning talent from abroad, much to the detriment of the nations that are giving up these individuals), to a passive-okay action (letting Nigeria have its smart Nigerians) to an active-good action (we Americans going to Nigeria to make some good changes), aka philanthropy. As a nation responsible for its own constituents, we are not strictly obliged to do that, but we do -- and it's great that we do, we should continue doing it more.

Unfortunately, the individual perspective on that is that opportunities for "talent" to choose their own destiny are eradicated.

Yes, brain drain is terrible (though I can't see how it's unexpected given a global economy). However, you were born Indian/Nigerian/Chinese/Russian/American, therefore you must always work in India/Nigeria/China/Russia/US is equally terrible.

The counter argument is that once that Indian/Nigerian/Chinese/Russian guy or girl has been at Facebook for a few years they'll have gained experience and expertise they'd never be able to get at home. Thus they'll be a lot better at solving the hard problems that exist in their country. Also some of the money they get paid often makes it back to their home country and helps the local economy.

An argument to make that it should be the "young and ambitious Indian/Nigerian/Chinese/Russian" choice whether they want to leave their country or not. It's up to America to decide whether they're welcome in America or not, but telling people that they can't move to America because, according to America, their home country needs them more is way too patronizing.

*An argument could be made, it was the autocorrect, too late to edit now.

J-1 visas can come with a requirement to spend time away from the US after they expire. One of the motivations is to avoid keeping specialty workers away from their home country if their work is in demand. (How a {country,occupation} pair gets classified as in-demand is an entirely different question.)

http://www.yale.edu/oiss/immigration/common/j1scholars/home....

That's not the actual motivation. This only applies to J-1 visa holders that are, in part, funded by their original country and that country requests that they return.

Those J-1 holders make an informed deal with their country, money in exchange for time. The US is just enforcing it.

Nothing to do with the sentiments being put forward by the previous post.

Those underdeveloped countries need you too! You should move there and help them.

As someone who left one of those countries for greener pastures (Canada) your argument sounds very rude and insensitive. Why should I have to suffer for my entire life in a country that violates my rights, with a crappy economy, with poor life outcomes, with a bad educational system, with a crappy health system that will shorten my life, where my kids will grow up to have much worse lives? All because I happen to have been born there?

You got lucky and were born into privilege. It's all too easy to say that we should all just deal with our lots in life when you happen to be in the top 1% of all humans on the planet.

I think by and large most engineers understand what the game is and where most H1Bs are going.

What author seems to be saying is - status-quo is not a solution. Is there a shortage of good engineering talent(I am not talking about bottom 50%), but top 20%? I think answer is emphatically yes - worldwide.

Has US benefited from those top 20% who have managed to migrate to US? It would be foolish to say no.

Lastly, this is on official company blog. It is not politically correct to publicly lambast companies which are abusing visa system. But that does not make Author's argument weaker.

There is no shortage of talent; there's a shortage of talent that wants to earn $100 - $130k (plus 0.2% of an A-round company! Golden paper handcuffs! Whoo!) to live in sf, an area probably more expensive than Manhattan. Without being Manhattan, or having decent public services.

Do we have a shortage of talent of the type I just described? Emphatically yes. Does that mean there is in any way a shortage? Emphatically no.

So the only sense in which there is a shortage is the same sense in which those jerks at bwm don't wish to sell me an m3 coupe for $15k. ie no shortage at all.

It is interesting that one mainly hears this loud whining for more imported skilled labor from the web publishing industry. The mining, drilling, and rail industries don't make any noise that I've heard. They have high wage earners. They are higher "tech" than 95% of IT and web publishing outfits. Why is all this visa agitation coming from Silicon Valley and not from Houston?

tech is full of useful idiots stoked by the idea of cutting their wages, who haven't fully absorbed how duplicitous and exploitative the industry really is. See google, apple, linkedin wage fixing agreements. And a lack of unions.

In my view, anyone who tries to argue that there is a "shortage" of tech should disclose the compensation package they are offering for the tech positions they are trying to fill.

There was somebody complaining about a shortage of software workers on the Buffalo subreddit recently. When prodded he admitted he was offering $35K a year.

I was contacted by a recruiter. They wanted a Phd in machine learning from a top school, 3+ years experience in adtech, hadoop experience. $110k. In Palo Alto.

Aerofs -- and they've raised $5.7mm btw [1] -- is hiring engineers at an average of $98k [2]. System software engineers, presumably with more experience, get an average of $108k. In Palo Alto. Gee, I wonder why he has problems hiring?

[1] https://angel.co/aerofs

[2] http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/AeroFS-Salaries-E656975.htm

I think by and large most engineers understand what the game is and where most H1Bs are going.

Do they? Every discussion of this issue I've seen has had loads of engineers who don't work in body shops saying that they've never seen an H1B worker in a body shop and that body shops must therefore not be the ones using the visa program. (Of course, anecdotes are not data, so neither is this)

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