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42% of California’s STEM Workforce Hails from Outside the U.S
- fhood 9y agoAre there numbers on where (in what country) they were educated?
- nxsynonym 9y agothis is what I'm curious about too. Are these people who came to the U.S for college / grad school? the report only says foreign born - doesn't mention how long they've been in the U.S for or if they came just for the job they landed.
- bluthru 9y agoDon't forget, if you're against immigration and guest worker policies that just so happen to increase margins for corporations you're xenophobic!
- convolvatron 9y agodamn straight. all of those jobs filled by highly educated immigrants could have been filled by retrained high school dropout coal miners - take that globalism!
- model_m_warrior 9y agoI'm not sure this comment appeals to anyone. The idea that day to day programming jobs are some sort of high end intellectual challenge is a myth. I think a coal miner could do what I've been doing since sixth grade just fine. See: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/95-engineers-in-india-unfit-for-software-development-jobs-study/article9652211.ece http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/95-engineers-i...
- galdosdi 9y agoYes, this is an important point that many deny! A lot of lower paying technical work requires just as much skill. But it's about supply and demand. The faux intellectual vibe in programming is purely cultural due to class associations. If welders and prgorammers traded places in terms of class associations (ie, if welders earn what programmers earn and vice versa AND if welding was something you do in an office and programming was something you do in the field or workshop), well guess what? Welding would have an academic intellectual culture, and programming would have more of a blue collar culture. You'd hear complaints about welding interviews requiring memorization of chemical reaction formulas instead of practical skills. Programmers would probably long ago been unionized. Etc. A couple generations from now, basic programming skill will no longer be so scarce that even an idiot who manages to pick some up is highly valuable. The reason programming ability is scarce is not because it's much harder, but simply historical/cultural.
- convolvatron 9y agoggp here. it was really meant to be a dig against levels of american investment in education and worker competitiveness. the only reason i'm posting is that i finally completed the transition from programmer to welder and i find my new peers generally smarter and harder working. fwiw
- galdosdi 9y agoWhoa, I would love to hear more. I'm a dissatisfied software engineer and have often thought about trying to move into a technical hands on field like welding, electrician, auto mechanic, etc, in the hopes it'd be more satisfying, or at least less boring. (I agree american investment in education is abyssmal, and I bet gp might agree too, but mistook your comment's meaning)
- convolvatron 9y agoi think 'smarter' was probably not the best use of words. equally smart and much more creative about getting the job done. original comment was too snarky as well, didn't really mean to hate on coal miners. it really is a false equivalence though. starting from nothing it took about 6 months practice and general skill building to where i could work on projects and not screw them up for everyone. one nice thing about this world is that if you aren't so good, you can still pull in minimum wage if you work hard. once you get the hang of things you can build up a client base and start charging more. and if you have any kind of flair for design you can start selling bespoke pieces instead of just being a pair of hands. after about $60/hr it gets a lot tougher. you don't really qualify for the really high-end work (i.e stainless pharmaceutical). and no insurance. I went back to tech for .. 4 years because of the pay difference and because of insurance for me and my wife, but I'm back in the shop now because..i think my software mindset is pretty radically different than the way things are done now. trade work is a constant challenge, and you can see your skills grow over time. faster, cleaner, more reliable, more clever. if you have a little* financial flexility and love hard work, i strongly recommend it as a second career. if i'm lucky in a software shop i get to solve a problem a day, in the metal shop i solve tens or hundreds. [oh, sorry, should make this clear - if you start in welding/machining you can certainly make quite a decent living, have benfits, etc - i'm just talking about coming in later in life being self taught and trying to carve out a little work here and there]
- sanxiyn 9y agoWhy not? Some people are actually seriously trying it: https://www.forbes.com/sites/annefield/2017/01/30/turning-coal-miners-into-coders-and-preventing-a-brain-drain/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/annefield/2017/01/30/turning-co...
- bluthru 9y agoWouldn't you rather have these highly educated immigrants help develop the countries they flee instead of contributing to lower domestic wages and greater world wealth stratification?
- baddox 9y agoNo, that doesn't mean you're xenophobic. It just means you think that people from other countries are less deserving of job opportunities than people from your country. It's still not a quality I share or respect, but it's not xenophobia.
- meesterdude 9y agoFWIW, I read the parent comment as sarcasm, not a serious proposal of xenophobia.
- Ar-Curunir 9y agoI think the parent comment was saying that being against those policies will get you branded as a xenophobe. The tone was meant to elicit sympathy.
- baddox 9y agoMy interpretation was that the parent commenter is against some aspect of immigration employment policy, but does not think that constitutes xenophobia.
- olewhalehunter 9y agoFolks who go through the trouble of immigrating here, many of whom are reliant on their job for renewing visas, have less bargaining power with their employers. Wages lower, standards for politics and labor rights lower, and standards of living lower. It's about the death of communities and societal trust, and and has nothing to do with people thinking who deserves what.
- pdx 9y agoIt just means you think that people from other countries are less deserving of job opportunities than people from your country. Society is a hierarchy of loyalty. Unless you're a self-absorbed, autistic, single 20 something, you have loyalty to others in various degrees. You support your family above my family. You support your company above my company. You support your neighbors above my neighbors, and yes, you should support the citizens of your country above the citizens of my country. It's very fashionable to virtue signal that you have no loyalty to your country and that we should all live under a one world government. I do not share that wish. I love that we do not have a mono-culture of government in the world, but have 195 different decentralized experiments happening on how to best run the world. I would hate to have a single experiment running with nowhere to look to or flee to, if it all goes awry. But I live in one of those 195 experiments, and my fellows that share that with me, my countrymen, I support above the other 194. That's called being human.
- neo4sure 9y agoNo that means you're blowing things out of proportion. Immigration and guest worker policies do more than just increase margins for corporations.
- model_m_warrior 9y agoIndeed they also help keep wages and demand of American workers down.
- ksk 9y agoJobs can't be "taken" they have to be "given".
- neo4sure 9y agoIndeed wages for STEM related work is better than the average JOB.
- lsc 9y agobut is this true? as a SysAdmin (a job often done by people like me, with no education at all) I make rather more than anyone I know working as a chemist, physicist, or mathematician, at least until they got tired of the low pay and became software engineers... but in my limited experience, I could say the same about people who studied poetry, philosophy or literature. There's a lot of talk about STEM, when as far as I can tell, the money is all in computers; the others might get you slightly above median salaries, but if they are above median, it's not by much.
- neo4sure 9y agoI was comparing against farm workers, coal workers, auto workers, restaurant workers, care givers etc. STEM by far will provide better wages. Although the education system is not built for this (hence migrants). Politicians also would like to keep people in the above jobs because the owners pay theiere bills.
- epistasis 9y agoThis seems like a fairly unproductive way to make your point, because I can only guess what you mean. What I think you mean is that you can be against increased margins for corporations, and that's the reason that you're against immigration. It's a strange strange thing to be against increased margins for corporations, without any other explanation, so I can see why many people would be confused, if that's what you're trying to say.
- tomc1985 9y agoYou're focusing on the wrong part. Increased margins for corporations at the cost of engineer pay. Companies don't need their margins nearly as much as individuals need a higher salary.
- epistasis 9y agoIf that's true then his comment was even less productive than I thought. The commenter didn't even mention the "part" you think I should focus on.
- bluthru 9y agoThat's what I was implying. Corporations can exploit a social issue to drive down labor costs.
- baddox 9y agoStill, I find it odd to argue that engineer pay is among the top priorities of a well-functioning economy. I'm an engineer, and all else being equal I'll take more money (it has its uses), but I certainly couldn't say with a straight face that my country's immigration policy should be based significantly on its effect on my salary.
- tomc1985 9y agoWhy not? Wage competition is a legitimate byproduct of increased immigration
- ben_w 9y agoWhy would guest worker policies increase margins? Software is pretty much the easiest type of work to offshore, and if the businesses do that they don't have to pay wages sufficient to live in San Francisco.
- icantdrive55 9y agoThey have conditioned us well. Hell--I can't even bring up Unions here. And people wonder why the talk that Trump spewed got him elected. (I said talk. I know he, and his posse, probably won't do much.)
- dang 9y agoPlease don't post like this here. Other users have been keeping the discussion above the political rant line, and we'd appreciate your help in doing so as well. We all need to pitch in if HN is to have a chance of meeting its goal to be a home for intellectual curiosity.
- lunchladydoris 9y agoIs this a case of there not being enough qualified US citizens or immigrants being willing to work for less?
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- sabujp 9y agocombination of all of the above + cost of living in CA
- neo4sure 9y agoI think California did become the 6th largest economy in the world by just getting workers for less.
- ssalazar 9y agoSilicon Valley wages are the highest in the country for comparable work, so, no.
- neo4sure 9y agoSory I meant to say didn't
- Veelox 9y agoI just took it as sarcasm
- 43gg43g32g 9y agoJust because they have some of the highest wages doesn't mean they don't have some of the lowest too and it doesn't mean that they aren't hiring foreign workers so they can pay them 150k instead of 300k.
- Overtonwindow 9y agoI think some might read that title and jump to conclusion. Don't. The article states that they are only foreign born, but it doesn't say anything about how they got here. It would have helped had the article made this clear, but it's likely IEEE doesn't want to step into the H1B visa abuse issue.
- vaishaksuresh 9y agoWhenever someone brings up H1B, everybody goes to abuse issue, but a lot of us got here as students and we still have to use H1B to work. It is unfair to just lump everybody on an H1B as a low wage, unqualified person.
- denzil_correa 9y agoWhat percentage of H1Bs are "low wages"?
- corporateslave2 9y agoOver 60% easily
- vaishaksuresh 9y agoThey are not low wages but are getting below market salaries. If that was what you're hinting at. I'm guessing most people working for IT consultancies and services companies are paid way below market wages. Sure, the company hiring them is billing more than that, but the employee still gets significantly lower than market wages.
- DamnYuppie 9y agoThe issue that many of us have, myself included, with the H1B program is that is is primarily used to suppress local wages. It is easy to say you can't find candidates if you are pricing the job well below market wages.
- vaishaksuresh 9y ago
- barrkel 9y agoArticles like this seem to bring out people involuntarily triggered to grind their pet axe. The discussion is never enlightening. That's why I flagged.
- dalbasal 9y agoI suspect a lot of triggering is voluntary.
- masondixon 9y agoVery true. Its like bike-shedding.
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- geebee 9y agoI highly recommend following and reading the link to the full report. Here it is again. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/foreign-born-stem-workers-united-states https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/foreign-... There's an interesting breakdown of a more narrow definition of STEM vs a broader one (that includes social sciences and health sciences). I personally would be more inclined to include health sciences than social sciences, but the data is granular enough to get at this distinction in some cases.
- cloudwizard 9y agoI was CTO at 2 startups during the first Internet boom. I was getting resumes from janitors that were offering to be trained. I had to hire most of the teams from Canada.
- drpgq 9y agoAs a Canadian, that's kind of depressing.
- similarfark 9y agoGoogle and the rest could have instituted huge training programs for Americans. Instead, they imported the most fortunate from other countries, leaving behind the least fortunate everywhere. It's 1% Americans importing the %1 from other counties. It's the most powerful and well off united in screwing the least powerful. You don't have to dislike immigrants to dislike corporations and politicians destroying opportunity for millions of the families that literally built America.
- aantix 9y agoI've never thought of the idea that Google/Apple/Facebook could have funded their own Dev Bootcamps.. You're right, total missed opportunity for them.
- Veratyr 9y agoI don't think the burden should be on corporations. Nearly (all?) every other developed country on earth has government subsidised or provided education. Where do you think all the immigrants are getting their degrees? Americans can even go to other countries and get educated for free (Germany I believe does this). The US needs to overhaul, hell, even nationalize, its higher education system. Don't expect corporations to educate people for you.
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- bluthru 9y ago
- jrs95 9y agoThis wouldn't be necessary if we actually invested in our own citizens. I'd have no problem with it if our own population didn't have a skills shortage, but it does.
- ronnier 9y agoYeah, I just don't get it. It was pretty clear to me what to do when I left high school. Study, study, study. Work hard, work hard, work hard. Nobody told me this, it just seemed like the right thing to do. I grew up poor in projects in a horrible violent city with nobody to guide me. If I can do this, why can't other Americans who have a much better upbringing and supportive family structure? Which makes me think, life is too good, too easy, for the average american. Why go through the effort of studying years of math and computer science when they can enjoy life and get by on jobs that don't require years and years of dedication and schooling?
- jrs95 9y agoA lot of people just aren't responsible enough to do this themselves. Most people from your city probably weren't. There's probably a nearly infinite amount of factors at play there, but that's a lot of opportunities for improvement that we just aren't focused on as a nation. We're all checked out and getting sold out by our own institutions.
- okreallywtf 9y agoThis is anecdata. By that reasoning why would we even have poor people if being poor drove everyone to success like it did to you? Do you actually think that anyone who workedars hard as you would achieve the same level of success? If they could, wouldn't that just then become the minimum and you would have to work harder than that to achieve more? There is clearly something else going on here. This doesn't mean you shouldn't be proud of yourself, but if you were being intellectually honest you would realize that this is not a rational well researched stance. This topic has been researched to death already so we're not going to break any real ground but I would ask you two things specifically: 1. When you studied hard, were you supported to study hard? Were your basic necessities covered (food, shelter) so you could focus? A lot of kids don't even have this basic level of stability in their lives, and maybe you didn't either. 2. How did you get into computer science? When I was growing up I didn't know anyone who was a programmer of any kind and wouldn't have even known to consider it had I not gotten lucky and took a programming class in highschool partly because it allowed me to drive to the community college to do it and get out of school almost half of the day. If I hadn't had transportation and money for gas it would have never happened and who knows where I would be now.
- mc32 9y agoThis is a failure of both our educational system and our culture. Our educational and cultural systems both underscore soft majors in the liberal arts realms and don't make STEM cool to average students as they might in China Russia or India. Kids care too much about fitting in rather than making it in life with hard skills. You will have thousands working service jobs in LA with hopes of making it in entertainment. You don't see that emphasis in STEM in the US.
- masondixon 9y agoI've always wondered about this. People never really talk about it, but I see the "cool" factor as pivotal. Smart social people want to be bankers, lawyers, doctors, management consultants, not STEM. With the internet everyone has had the ability to learn programming for ages, and it really hasn't dramatically changed much. People are just not interested in it at some point.
- CrazyCoin 9y agoI want to keep this not politicized but is there merit to the argument that immigrants are taking jobs away from other STEM majors who are from the U.S.? To find out we would need to look at STEM job growth for a year, then look at the number of STEM graduates, then look at how many STEM graduates go to work in their field, then see if after 52% of the jobs are subtracted see if there's enough left for the recent graduates. Also immigrant graduates would also have to be taken into account.
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- moultano 9y agoWhy would we expect a global company to hire even a majority from the US?
- f4rker 9y agoThanks Congress.
- ishan_dikshit 9y agoI think everyone here is ignoring a very important statistic within the article: "data shows that 25 percent of high tech companies founded between 1995 and 2005 have at least one immigrant founder". Would you rather have these companies be based out of Asia entirely? Also see: https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2016/03/17/study-immigrants-founded-51-of-u-s-billion-dollar-startups/ https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2016/03/17/study-immigrants-fou... I was recently speaking with Demis Hassabis and he recommended looking for startup funding in California but continuing to work out of London. More and more companies are gravitating towards this general template (not London specifically). Would you rather have some low level Stack Developer working at Airbnb on an H1B build the next Billion dollar startup in the Bay Area or out of Bangalore? Yes, hiring someone with an H1B might cost a company 10k less per annum. But what would it cost America to not have these foreign workers want to work in California altogether? Besides, it isn't fair to build such an impressive hotbed of thought and progress and then try and wall others out of it.
- anonemouse145 9y agoIn my experience this is not always a positive. I've seen several cases where a foreign born representative is offloading people from (country of origin) because dumb managers still think it's the height of the offshoring era and foreign = cheaper. Relatives and friends and anybody the rep knows from the old country get first in line, and they just lie or exaggerate experience. If they even need to. I've watched those foreign people get hired even though they walked into the interview without even Googling the product or development environment specified in the ad. Not that this is new or exclusive, mind you. Nevermind that nobody thought about onboarding these people, there's no documentation, and the resulting product takes a sharp nosedive as work is handed over. These foreign people were promised cheap, and that keeps the investors happy. This is no slightly against those workers. I've taught these workers and one guy had his head in his hands saying, "Oh my God, the legal liability we're being exposed to here" upon learning of deep design flaws that cheaper labor was somehow going to magically fix. More workers is not necessarily better- in any sense. It's just more workers. In a capitalist system, that's not necessarily good for anybody except management.
- s73ver 9y ago
- quicknir 9y agoEvery time H1B related stuff comes up, I make the same simple suggestion: just inflation adjust the minimum H1B salary from when the law was passed in 1990. 60K dollars in 1990 is about 110K now. This should be able to see a lot of support from different groups because: 1. It makes a clear appeal back to the original intent of the law. 2. It would most likely end most of the perceived abuse/misuse of the law, which occurs at lower salary ranges. 3. It will not prevent tech companies that actually do cool stuff like Google & co from hiring, since most of their hires probably start over 110K now. I also think that the impact on American workers in this salary range from H1B is pretty low. Many companies with salaries in this range are always hiring provided you have the skills.
- awkwarddaturtle 9y ago> I also think that the impact on American workers in this salary range from H1B is pretty low. Many companies with salaries in this range are always hiring provided you have the skills. Actually most companies that you are referring to want tech salaries to decline. One of the best weapons against high tech salaries are H1B visas and offshoring.
- quicknir 9y agoDo you have any empirical evidence that H1B is an effective "weapon against high tech salaries" in the income range that Google pays? I think that whatever is going on in the lower end of the market, there is still a substantial shortage of labor in the higher jobs that cannot be made up domestically anytime soon. Higher end jobs tend to have a much less elastic labor pool because fewer people can do the work. Whatever the impact is for tech workers, for the general public it is definitely a bad outcome to have perpetual labor shortages at tech companies; it just means that they get their products/features/bug fixes/other improvements more slowly.
- tanilama 9y agoAnecdata, Google is in the process of long hiring freeze. The recruiter told me that there isn't a shortage of candidates, there is a shortage of slots to accommodate them. Several other companies as well, big or small. There might not be a substantial labor shortage that you might assume. Things are changing.
- aphextron 9y agoThis has nothing to do with immigration policy. Our kids in the US are simply not studying STEM subjects, period. We are not keeping pace with the rest of the world. I'm currently taking lower division engineering requirements in a California community college, and perhaps 20% of my class are native born, English speaking American kids. There is just no respect for it whatsoever, in a culture where it's funny or cool to think math is stupid. We are completely finished as a society. What rises to takes it's place who knows, but there's no way a country can survive like this.
- qbaqbaqba 9y agoThat's funny how everyone here is against the trumps wall meanwhile every time H1B is mentioned no one has problem with people calling for "kicking them to India". Quite sad.