cplanas

If I remember correctly, the majority of H-1B holders (around 2 thirds) are Indians. Adding Chinese, it gets up to 80%.

PD: I just checked the numbers. I found this: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/data/h-1b.... Indians and Chinese make up to 90% of H-1B petitioners.

In some European countries, like Denmark, students get a salary.

I lived in DK, and as shocking as it sounds, it's true. Just a nitpick: the law is not exactly against "non-white" people, but about "non-Western". African-Americans would count as Western, Russians would not. But in effect, the policy affects mainly Muslims: it was probably designed with that in mind.

Beyond this experience with that financial institution, was it hard to get a job after your travels?

Not directly, but they will facilitate using more performant paradigms.

> MRI Ruby was slow and problematic.

Why problematic?

On the slowness, I would agree that Ruby is slower than many languages, but as an interpreted language this is -up to a certain point- by design, or at least an accepted part of the trade-off one accepts when he takes a programming language. Moreover, Ruby's natural competitor is Python, not -say- Clojure; and I wouldn't that Ruby is significantly slower than Python.

> It sounds more like some regulatory capture has happened which is keeping prices artificially high

This. Not sure if it's a system bug, or a feature: the system may have been designed for this to happen.

In my company, "team lead" is definitely a management role: an entry-level one, but still management. For technical tie-breaking we have a different position, "tech lead".

The current trend may not be an aberration, but it should be feared.

Or Shopify. Or Zendesk. Or GitHub.

Is it, though? Most of adults are "forced to be around peers" (offices), and yet, they still struggle to make friendships.

No. As far as I know, exceptional ability is really exceptional. Being a very senior engineer in, say, Google Zurich doesn't really qualify. For an O-1 you need to have received nationally/internationally recognized prizes; published media in major publications...

https://www.wegreened.com/o1-visa

> There's also a talent gap. From my experience, a lot of tech workers in Vancouver simply couldn't meet the bar for the stricter US immigration.

Really? It doesn't seem to be this way to me. The academic requirements are, I believe, the same: a degree. I think in the US you also need a job offer (for H1B), but that hasn't been hard to get for a software engineer in the last 10 years.

The real "bar" for US immigration is a hard limit on visas, which are resolved via lottery. Your "ability" on winning a lottery doesn't say much about your talent for engineering.

Note: I moved from Europe to the Bay Area, I'm a bit familiar with the process.

The most famous "cheap" European airline, RyanAir, is substantially worse than Norwegian. And personally I find Norwegian better than WizzAir, easyJet or Vueling.

Really? In my experience, they were the best "cheap" airline, by far. Their airplanes were pretty comfortable, compared to United, Alaska, or Spirit, to name a few.

I don't know about severity, but Norway is the European country with the highest infection ratio, after Italy and tiny Iceland. As of today:

- Italy: 1 case per 3.996 inhabitants - Iceland: 1/4.285 - Norway: 1/6.710 - Denmark: 1/9.081 - Switzerland: 1/10.035 - Spain: 1/14.831 - France: 1/23.292 - Germany: 1/30.160

I am astonished by the comments I am reading here. One commenter suggests that Spanish newspapers are not viable because of "low literacy rates". Another assumes that newspapers in Spanish are directed to immigrants. I knew that there was a certain level of prejudice against Spanish-speakers in the USA, but I thought that the kind of people that reads this site would be better educated than that.

Uh? What? As a citizen of the EU, I would be extremely disturbed if the EU cared much about non-EU countries. The EU should care as much about Russia and (soon) the UK as the USA cares about Canada and Mexico.

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I know: that's why I wrote "for different reasons". I understand that in the case of Kon it feels more unfair, as he had a great career before his death; of his 4 movies, 3 are typically considered great/masterpieces. Kon didn't use his whole potential in the same way that James Dean did; Anno and Iwai are a bit more like Nicholas Cage.

Oh, wow. How did you manage to interview Hideaki Anno?

Despite the fact that his best works are anime TV series, I always thought Anno was one of the best filmmakers alive. His works in the 90s are absolutely amazing, particularly Evangelion and Karekano. He is a complex artist on many sides; formally he is the first (and mainly only) modern anime director: he uses the long-shot substantially less in favor of close-ups, which are just harder to use (almost anything can be OK-explained by a long-shot, while close-ups are pretty limited semantically). Aesthetically he is very original, with how he plays with music (Haendel in Evangelion 22, Beethoven in Evangelion 24, Bach in the "sex scene" of Karekano) or my favorite aesthetical treat, the use of text.

Love and Pop, and then Shiki-jitsu were a very promising start for him as a live-action filmmaker... but unfortunately, it looks like personal issues got to him. In the 90s there was a trio of Japanese filmmakers with similar approaches and amazing talent: Hideaki Anno, Satoshi Kon and Shunji Iwai (who is also the main actor in Shiki-jitsu). For different reasons, none of them seems to have used their whole potentials.

As a European, I disagree. I spent most of my time playing videogames, and my childhood was during the 90s. Maybe because I was city kid.

No doubt about that, but which is the reason to make a lottery out of it? "An engineer with Harvard education making 150k against an engineer from a lesser university abroad making 60k. Mmmm... impossible to decide. Let's flip a coin."

> [eliminating the lottery] I imagine that would be politically unpopular.

Why? I'm in the US with a work visa and the idea of having a lottery to decide who is allowed to work in the US is absolutely insane for me. It just does not make sense.

Restaurants closed at 2PM? That's when most of Spaniards start having lunch...

Nobody wants to. In fact, doing no lunch break is considered a privilege. Nobody wants to work from 9AM to 8PM, even if you have three break hours at lunch. That's time you lose for being with family, friends...

No. If it's good enough for companies like Zendesk or Shopify, is probably good enough for you. And if your "web" somehow gets to the point in which Ruby/RoR can't make it scale, congratulations for becoming the next Twitter and then you can migrate to something else.

> A thing I noticed when I was away is how stupid and mundane Danish everyday local politics look

That's... surprising. I lived a few years in Denmark, and what characterized the country for me was the extreme anti-immigrant tone of the media and the politics. Now I live in the US, and what is happening with the current POTUS seems pretty moderate to me in comparison.

Actually that's my five cents on the "reverse culture shock": now I empathize much more with the situation of the immigrants back home.

Netherlands is a different country that applied very different immigrant policies. Pretty bad ones, I would say. The fact that Netherlands immigration policy may be a failure does not imply anything about the US one, or about immigration as a whole.

In Spain at least, "estadounidense" is the standard for "American".

Which is the ethnic slur?