H1-B holders cant start companies anyway. It’s a temporary migrant worker visa.
1,070 karma · joined July 9, 2017
I actually read through two of the "proper economic analyses" in that reddit link since I am interested in this.
One of them wasn't an economic analysis but a summary article: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/contributions-high-.... Almost all of this article is talking about all of the problems with trying to identify the net effects of immigration and how difficult it is.
It has quotes that directly refute what you are saying such as:
"Immigration has complex, sometimes ambiguous impacts on natives. The benefits to the US economy from high-skilled immigration can be accompanied by negative effects for certain groups of natives and positive effects for other groups." Which is the opening summary of the section on effect on natives. Also,
"Borjas found that a 10 percent increase of immigrants with PhDs in a certain field lowered the wages of native born graduating with doctorates in those same fields around the same time by 3 percent"
"Researchers have also examined the degree to which high inflows of foreign-born students affect the educational opportunities of native students. Borjas finds some evidence that an inflow of foreign-born students displaces native, white male students in elite institutions"
The other main article https://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/cacounts/CC_207GPCC.pdf is more positive but there is no way you can call it a rosey picture.
Clearly, the biggest effect of immigration is on previous immigrants (currently 30% of California): "Foreign-born workers already here sustain the largest losses in real wages, losing between 17 and 20 percent of their real wage over 14 years."
It just so happens that natives (specifically who are college educated) tend to have complimentary skill sets in the years mentioned.
"Except for workers with some college education, whose real wage gain is around 6 to 7 percent, no other group experiences real wage gains or losses larger than 4 percent. This implies that even with the moderate costs of moving, in the range of 5 to 10 percent of their yearly income, native workers would not move (out of or into California) in response to immigration."
That is the support you have that "native-born workers benefit from immigration". It helped college educated natives and the rest of the population wasn't negatively affected enough to leave California. And that's based on migration data ending in 2004 and Californians have been leaving in record droves since then.
Of course, it doesn't mention any thing about the rest of the effect on natives such as cost of living increases due to crowding, strain on institutions (do you want to send your kids to an average California school?), unwanted changes in culture and politics, decrease in social cohesion, decreases (or lack of improvement) in working conditions, increases in inequality or any of the other consequences.
The average US male wage has barely moved since the 1970s during a time of unprecedented levels of immigration. If immigration is such a net benefit to native-born worker, where did those improvements go?
I'm curious if you've ever actually worked at a US company that was almost entirely Indian. I think a lot of this has to do with people's personal experiences at work.
I worked in a subgroup of Fortune 10 company that was 98% Indian (3 white people out of about 200). The amount of cronyism was really eye opening. Personal friends of the bosses were the only people hired by the parent company (others were "consultants" for an all-H1B sponsoring firms). There were fairly reliable rumors of company leaders having their own "staffing" companies that took cuts from many of the H1Bs as well. We had a number of wives (and in one case a husband) of developers who couldn't program, but would get programming jobs as personal favors - a few on each team. Our head boss was chosen because she and an executive lived in the same apartment complex and their kids played together. This is the kind of stuff that went on. I've never seen anything like it anywhere else I've worked. There was almost no accountability for people being bad at their job. Almost all had Masters degrees and a few years experience, but were no better (and usually worse) than recent college grads from the local state university.
I'm pretty sure this isn't isolated because you hear about entire departments becoming all Indian at some companies (Cisco, UHG, ect). Basically, everyone who can't stand the cronyism leaves and the Indians bosses only hire their friends or friends of friends or other Indians.
I'm sure many people have good experiences working with Indian H1Bs (and I've had good experiences when they are part of a much larger and diverse team like what you'd have at a FAANG company), but one bad experience like I had can really sour you towards what's going on.
Also, we auto-stamp the PR on the commits so we can get the context. I don't understand how anyone could make sense of a large codebase when all the commits are added with the standard inane commit messages (e.g. "fix it", "typo", "name changes", "tests") that people do when building a feature. I routinely have to look at a piece of code, do a git blame, get the PR in the commit and figure out what was being done.
Except this has nothing to do with that. It has do with a group of people that insist that everyone get behind their pet cause and use their job to promote whatever activist belief they have - and negatively affect everyone else who may not agree with them.
I'd stand behind anyone who wants to protest their companies business model - like the executive at Amazon who protested the treatment of a union organizer (which was racist and absolutely disgusting). I'm not going to get behind the culture of activism which has nothing to do with civil disobedience.
The cynic in me feels like it's a casual way for engineers to feel better about themselves.
It's no wonder to me that this "bring your whole self to work" nonsense sprung up at ad-tech companies like Google.
And by the way - the political stuff never is about anything that Google does. I haven't seen any tax law, anti-trust, or privacy protests at Google.
We have a system for resolving political differences in America. It's called elections. There is no reason why every business transaction needs to evaluated on political grounds. In fact tolerance and commerce have historically been key to maintaining a peaceful democracy.
SAX parsing is also very complex programatically. Who wants to switch on various SAX events when handling a XML document? No, we want the full thing parsed into an object.
I've spent a decent amount of time in the XML world and I've only seen people use SAX when performance was a large concern or when parsing enormous XML documents.
XML is good at some specific things, but as a general use data-interchange format it is dead as a doornail and there is no good reason to bring it back.
My personal experience makes me doubt this is the case. To give an example, my grandpa was an alcoholic and had a family of 7 and was the lead accountant at a major pharma company. Did he lack things to do?
I think the main cause of drug use is availability of drugs. That's one reason why doctors tend to be addicts more than the general population. My anecdotal experience is that the people that used drugs were not people that lacked "interesting and useful things to do", they were rich (and accomplished) kids with money to blow and drugs were always just a phone call away.
I'm not against people living motivated and interesting lives, but I just think you are vastly oversimplifying a major public health problem.
If you work on a team, that just isn’t going to fly. I can’t imagine the toxicity of an environment where someone constantly was calling out other people’s code as being “bad”.
Debt is perfectly good metaphor for the collection of issues described. Just like one can get into financial debt via student loans or reckless credit card spending, tech debt can be accrued many ways.
Additionally, talking about the origins of tech debt also misses one big thing - many of us primarily work on other people’s code. We inherit the debt, so it doesn’t matter how it gets there.
So much to takeaway from that post. For me it is 1. Its important how you structure your code (flags and global state can wreak havoc on a program) 2. No matter how bad your code base is - it can at least be functional if you have good testing
Seriously, haven’t they don’t studies that most of these revolutionaries are actually not very smart people. How does risking your life for a cause have anything to do with being correct about an issue?
It's ironic to see the same people turn around and say that the internet is a public utility and service providers shouldn't throttle content or filter content.
> people have come to actually TRUST big corps to be more morally responsive
That is a pretty outlandish statement to make without something to back it up. I'd love to see an actual poll if people trust Google and Facebook to police what is moral. Last time I checked there was a poll that said people are more afraid than ever to say what they feel in public. https://www.cato.org/publications/survey-reports/poll-62-ame...
> would you like to see what concept of digital town square the UK or the US government would produce
This is a straw man. US Government struggles to build a basic website - they aren't going to build a "digital town square". On the other hand, I don't think it's unreasonable for the government to have clear policies on a person's legal rights to use large platforms to discuss what they want without fear of being de-platformed.
Actually you didn't. Pointing out a single feature that benefits them while ignoring all the others is not a cost benefit analysis.
> Your note about young people subsidizing over-60s is a red herring.
And this a straw man. Actually, no - its wrong.
I worked on Obamacare for 2 years. I think it's a decent law a vacuum. I can't possible pretend its good for young people. It's good for my 60 year old aunt who has diabetes who thinks she pays too much for insurance but actually is getting the deal of a century considering how much health care costs.
Obamacare did little to slow health care spending (another long story) but it did work to spread the costs around - mostly to young people.
So that's why they vote for policies that exclusively benefit Boomers. Gotcha!
Have you considered that maybe Millenials just don't understand how money and taxes work?
I was talking to my friend the other day that lives in California and didn't know what Prop 13 was. He was a state champion debater in California but didn't know how property taxes worked in the state. I was shocked. If that's the slightest indication - most millennials have absolutely no idea how money and taxes work.
I've talked to friends about zoning, depreciation laws, capital gains taxes, backdoor Roth laws ect. They don't even have a clue.
Do you think that insurance for a 60 year old is 3x as expensive as a 30 year old for health care? The government MANDATES that to be the case. Who do you think pays for that?
Obamacare mandates that a 64 year old get charged no more that 3x a 27 year old.
The Boomers basically took all the wealth in this country and regulated everyone out of it. There are so many issues that are good for the country and good for millenials that never seem to gain traction. Student loans reform for instance or Housing (especially zoning and property tax laws e.g. Prop 13).
Here is a good link to what I'm talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh6hesHk6yE&t=1250s
I think it's already a done deal. Millennials aren't as young as they seem (over 30) and as the own a minuscule percentage of US household wealth. The numbers are incredible.
"Indeed, at a median age of 35, Gen Xers owned just 9% of the nation’s wealth in 2008 — less than half what boomers had at that age. And millennials will have to triple their net worth in the next four years to catch up to Generation X at 35, and increase their wealth sevenfold to catch up to boomers at that age." https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-depressing-chart-show...
The funny thing is that across that millennials seem to love politicians that HATE them.
Obama's big thing was Obamacare which was basically a tax on the young (force them to buy insurance to subsidize capped insurance rates on older people). Bernie's big thing is expanding Medicare and Social Security.
So, I don't see things changing any time soon.
No, I hold an accurate view of them.
Differences matter and the difference between two Han Chinese is not the same difference between a White person and a Somali refugee no matter how much you pretend it is.
America was not always a multi-cultural society. It was a society for the white man. This was explicitly stated by every president from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson. Our frontier spirit was largely driven by claiming land for the white man away from supposedly barbaric and inferior races. Go read a history of the Mexican-America war if you want to dive into how much racial solidarity played a part in us winning that war. You like others want to make it seem a lot less homogeneous than it was by talking about Irish and Italian immigrants (of which I am one).
Similarly, China is not a multi-cultural society and neither is India. I'd encourage you to actually go to these places. When I went to India I had to stay in a barricaded hotel with bomb checks. I had people requesting to get a picture with me as I was so unusual every time I went out.
And as for why I think America was successful at innovating earlier in the 20th century? I think it has a huge part to do with a tremendous culture of education and learning, as well as huge amounts of investments.
Just to give an example, the Apollo project was 2% of GDP! Just think about that. Can you imagine research investment happening at that level?
But somehow China a country with even more Xenophobia and nationalism is catching up to us. And the U.S. used to have more Xenophobia and nationalism in the past and was also substantially more innovative.
Maybe the real problem is that the U.S. (all the way up to the top) has become anti-intellectual. We have completely dumbed down our culture so that children today want to be basketball players instead of astronauts. Our schools and government explicitly oppose meritocracy. There is just too much money in junk media and junk education that its never going to be fixed and instead we have to bring in more immigrants.
Security by obscurity only matters if you aren't secure in the first place. It can be a good extra layer of protection, but the worst examples of security mishaps I've seen are because people find the security unnecessarily burdensome and so they bypass it entirely. So in that way obscurity in that case has a real cost.
Counting cars instead of people again. You should work for the department of transportation.