8 ms·

This 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

by jrs95 9y ago

This 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 ago
Yeah, 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 ago
  A 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 ago
  This 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.
  - ronnier 9y ago
    > 1. When you studied hard, were you supported to study hard? I worked a fulltime job during ungrad and grad school (and did programming jobs on the side for about $75 per hour). I worked my way through. > How did you get into computer science? John Carmack mostly. I saw some guy play quake online and it blew me away. I saved money to buy a computer and pay for internet. Which lead into writing scripts and websites. Then into computer science.
    - s73ver 9y ago
      So you had support while you were able to do those things. Most of the people you were disparaging don't.
    - okreallywtf 9y ago
      I'm more interested in the process leading up to college, your work ethic definitely makes a difference there but your opportunities when you are younger affect whether you ever even go to college and how prepared you are once you get there. How did you write those scripts and websites, did you have a computer growing up? Internet access (what little internet there was to be had then that is)? I'm not trying to take away your achievements, but I think this kind of thinking is a big part of what is wrong with how we make public policy. We see things in a very narrow way (just human nature) and we generally have a hard time empathizing with other people and their experiences. I think if we could get over that and stop romanticizing the exceptions and start understanding better the average experiences of people in our societies, maybe we can make better decisions that allow more people to succeed. By the way working full time through undergrad and grad school would have been tough, I ended up taking out loans myself (partly so I could enjoy the experience a little more and not work all the time, only most of the time) so kudos to you for pulling that off. I'm not sure I want everyone to have to go through that (if even they could have done that, not too many people can make $75/hr even as professionals let alone students), but there is nothing wrong with taking pride in having done it yourself.
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  Look what happens when we stop making things "too good, too easy": https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/sunday-review/push-dont-crush-the-students.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/sunday-review/push-dont-c... https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-silicon-valley-suicides/413140/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/education/edlife/overachievers-student-stress-in-high-school-.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/education/edlife/overachi...
  - gpawl 9y ago
    There's a huge middle ground between "Being #2 is failure" and "no need to ever try to do anything"
    - eli_gottlieb 9y ago
      Maybe there is when your Gini Index is in the 20's, or hell, even the mid-30's. When it's 46.1, closer to Brazil than to most other developed countries? Then I'm not so sure.
  - Veelox 9y ago
    I have read the second article you link to and I find it irrelevant to the point you are making. That story is how high-schoolers in Silicon Valley are committing suicide at an alarming rate. Reading between the lines some, it tells you that Silicon Valley parents (who are probably some of the most driven people in the country) are expecting their kids to be just as driven/high achieving as them. The kids cannot cope with it and take the only way out they know of. I think this is very different from what ronnier is suggesting when he says "life is too good, too easy, for the average american." Children in SV are not average americans.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
seanmcdirmid 9y ago
"Necessary"? Its a world market for top-end talent, we just attract the cream of the crop. Even if Americans upped their game, everyone else would probably also and we'd still be in the same situation.
- corporateslave2 9y ago
  This isn't true. It's a race to the bottom for cheap talent. There is definitely a race for top talent, but that comprises a small portion of all immigrants. It's all about cheap labor.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    The H1B salary numbers outside of Indian body shops don't back up that claim.
    - corporateslave2 9y ago
      True. But the body shops are a huge percentage of all H1Bs
      - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
        They are a significant percentage of H1Bs, but not even a majority of them.
        corporateslave2 9y ago
        I don't have the energy to argue this
        seanmcdirmid 9y ago
        Ya, facts are like that. Easier to argue on feelings.
        deleted 9y ago
ajross 9y ago
I have absolutely no issue with your policy priorities. Let's get more native-born citizens through school with skills appropriate for the modern workforce. But the bit where this falls down is your use of "our own" in a context where it either has no meaning or has, let's just say "accidentally discriminatory" meaning. The idea that we should invest to "prevent" this situation is kinda distasteful. These people are americans now. No, they aren't all citizens (though many are), but their kids are and their descendants will be. This is their home as much as it is yours or mine. This country built itself on the backs of imported talent, there's no valid reason for that to stop now.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jrs95 9y ago
  A nation's government absolutely should discriminate in favor of it's own people. That's who it's supposed to be representing. In the case of the U.S., there's nothing racial about that. Opportunity for Americans is more important than opportunity for non-Americans.
  - ajross 9y ago
    And once more, you're using "own" in a sense that seems really distasteful. In what sense is a south asian engineer who's been living in Emeryville for 16 years[1] not one of "our own" people? [1] No idea if that's a median data point, but it's probably close. When people talk about STEM immigrants they mean very long term residents who will realistically be here with their families for the rest of their lives. You want to imagine a job-jacking horde of foreign-educated people who don't speak English. The truth is rather different.
    - jrs95 9y ago
      Why are you trying to make this about race? Clearly someone who has been here for nearly 20 decades is someone who ought to be given citizenship. But that has nothing to do with preferring to continue to bring in foreign workers rather than invest in American citizens who are struggling.
geebee 9y ago
You might be interested in a RAND study (a historically very pro-immigration institute) that considers this subject. It concludes that the reason US citizens and people who are free to choose their profession in the US avoid these degrees because they can earn more with more stable career paths elsewhere. In other words, the aversion to STEM among elite US students is rational. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/issue_papers/2005/IP241.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/issue_papers/2005...
- gpawl 9y ago
  We're not talking about elites, we're talking about average. There will never be enough 'elite' students to go around.
cloudwizard 9y ago
In US HS, the grades are going up but the world rankings are dropping. Our kids are not being prepared to be competitive. https://qz.com/1032183/no-wonder-young-americans-feel-so-important-when-half-of-them-finish-high-school-as-a-students/ https://qz.com/1032183/no-wonder-young-americans-feel-so-imp... https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/07/17/easy-a-nearly-half-hs-seniors-graduate-average/485787001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/07/17/easy-a-nearly... https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/sei/edTool/data/highschool-08.html https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/sei/edTool/data/highschool-08.html FYI - It may not look like much on the graph but the US is 2 years behind the top rankers.
- gpawl 9y ago
  I'd like to see that graph expanded to distributions, and weighted by population. I'd also like to see China and India and Russia on that list. USA is big enough to be an above average nation and a below average nation combined. Israel, that ranks significantly below the US on that chart, has perhaps the largest technology industry per capita in the world.
  - eli_gottlieb 9y ago
    >Israel, that ranks significantly below the US on that chart, has perhaps the largest technology industry per capita in the world. Which runs largely on olim hadashim (new immigrants) from Western countries and the former Soviet Union.
gpawl 9y ago
Even if education was the same everywhere, the most talented would tend to flow toward the areas of highest opportunity, and employers and customers will pick (their judgment of) the best performers. Either the best here will compete with the best there, or the best there will come here (or vice versa)
nostrademons 9y ago
Is it that we aren't investing in our own citizens, or that they aren't taking advantage of the opportunities that those investments create that are open to all? I went to a top liberal arts college, and majored in physics for most of my time there. Within the physics major, every single student was either 1.) An immigrant 2.) The child of an immigrant or 3.) Jewish. It was similar - though a little less pronounced - in the CS and math majors. Most of my friends there were from comfortable middle-class American backgrounds, and most of them majored in English, music, history, or psychology. Many of them are struggling financially or still dependent upon financial support from parents, 12 years after graduation. The American educational system is such that you can largely make your own choices from college onwards (and to a limited degree, in high school too). This is a great strength of America, but it also means that sometimes people make choices that don't work out for them. The native-born citizens I know that invested heavily in learning math & computers when they were teenagers are doing great, even if they came from dirt-poor backgrounds. The ones I know who figured there would always be a job waiting for them, even if they came from very comfortable upper-middle-class backgrounds, are barely scraping by.
- xsmasher 9y ago
  I feel like there's a cycle where parents who struggled want their children to have practical careers; parents who had success in practical careers want their children to "follow their dreams;" then the cycle repeats.
jdavis703 9y ago
Both me and my sister received full scholarships (poor family + smart genes I guess). She got a degree in creative writing, I went the IT route. Part of the problem is that most STEM jobs just aren't fun...
gopalv 9y ago
> This wouldn't be necessary if we actually invested in our own citizens. So much this - I know of this from my own life. I got a state funded CS education for around 500$ a year (if my family had been poorer, they'd have paid me to study) - it was a good one, because I keep going back to my annotated Sedgewick. Graduated with zero debt, with an open source project I was working on for years which meant that I spent the first few years of my work life knowing I could take risks (not that I did take too many). In the Bay area now and seeing clearly the impact of an expensive education on people's choices - not everyone needs to be a college graduate, however putting an expensive price tag on it means that only people who are sure they can get a financial return on their education will take up that risk. There is a chilling effect on women, who are expecting to be discriminated in the industry, driving them to other vocations where they don't expect to incur similar challenges with financial gains or professional advancements. In fact, purely from a state investment point of view, CA is getting my tax dollars to spend while my college barely gets anything back from me. I really wish my kids would get a similar springboard to start their life off without an albatross around their neck, but they are probably entering a system which is probably going to maximize immediate financial returns from them instead of expecting them to be late bloomers becoming productive over time.

by jrs95 9y ago

This 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 ago

Yeah, 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 ago
A 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 ago
This 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.
- ronnier 9y ago
  > 1. When you studied hard, were you supported to study hard? I worked a fulltime job during ungrad and grad school (and did programming jobs on the side for about $75 per hour). I worked my way through. > How did you get into computer science? John Carmack mostly. I saw some guy play quake online and it blew me away. I saved money to buy a computer and pay for internet. Which lead into writing scripts and websites. Then into computer science.
  - s73ver 9y ago
    So you had support while you were able to do those things. Most of the people you were disparaging don't.
  - okreallywtf 9y ago
    I'm more interested in the process leading up to college, your work ethic definitely makes a difference there but your opportunities when you are younger affect whether you ever even go to college and how prepared you are once you get there. How did you write those scripts and websites, did you have a computer growing up? Internet access (what little internet there was to be had then that is)? I'm not trying to take away your achievements, but I think this kind of thinking is a big part of what is wrong with how we make public policy. We see things in a very narrow way (just human nature) and we generally have a hard time empathizing with other people and their experiences. I think if we could get over that and stop romanticizing the exceptions and start understanding better the average experiences of people in our societies, maybe we can make better decisions that allow more people to succeed. By the way working full time through undergrad and grad school would have been tough, I ended up taking out loans myself (partly so I could enjoy the experience a little more and not work all the time, only most of the time) so kudos to you for pulling that off. I'm not sure I want everyone to have to go through that (if even they could have done that, not too many people can make $75/hr even as professionals let alone students), but there is nothing wrong with taking pride in having done it yourself.
eli_gottlieb 9y ago
Look what happens when we stop making things "too good, too easy": https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/sunday-review/push-dont-crush-the-students.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/sunday-review/push-dont-c... https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-silicon-valley-suicides/413140/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/education/edlife/overachievers-student-stress-in-high-school-.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/education/edlife/overachi...
- gpawl 9y ago
  There's a huge middle ground between "Being #2 is failure" and "no need to ever try to do anything"
  - eli_gottlieb 9y ago
    Maybe there is when your Gini Index is in the 20's, or hell, even the mid-30's. When it's 46.1, closer to Brazil than to most other developed countries? Then I'm not so sure.
- Veelox 9y ago
  I have read the second article you link to and I find it irrelevant to the point you are making. That story is how high-schoolers in Silicon Valley are committing suicide at an alarming rate. Reading between the lines some, it tells you that Silicon Valley parents (who are probably some of the most driven people in the country) are expecting their kids to be just as driven/high achieving as them. The kids cannot cope with it and take the only way out they know of. I think this is very different from what ronnier is suggesting when he says "life is too good, too easy, for the average american." Children in SV are not average americans.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

seanmcdirmid 9y ago

"Necessary"? Its a world market for top-end talent, we just attract the cream of the crop. Even if Americans upped their game, everyone else would probably also and we'd still be in the same situation.

corporateslave2 9y ago
This isn't true. It's a race to the bottom for cheap talent. There is definitely a race for top talent, but that comprises a small portion of all immigrants. It's all about cheap labor.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  The H1B salary numbers outside of Indian body shops don't back up that claim.
  - corporateslave2 9y ago
    True. But the body shops are a huge percentage of all H1Bs
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      They are a significant percentage of H1Bs, but not even a majority of them.
      - corporateslave2 9y ago
        I don't have the energy to argue this
        seanmcdirmid 9y ago
        Ya, facts are like that. Easier to argue on feelings.
        deleted 9y ago

ajross 9y ago

I have absolutely no issue with your policy priorities. Let's get more native-born citizens through school with skills appropriate for the modern workforce. But the bit where this falls down is your use of "our own" in a context where it either has no meaning or has, let's just say "accidentally discriminatory" meaning. The idea that we should invest to "prevent" this situation is kinda distasteful. These people are americans now. No, they aren't all citizens (though many are), but their kids are and their descendants will be. This is their home as much as it is yours or mine. This country built itself on the backs of imported talent, there's no valid reason for that to stop now.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jrs95 9y ago
A nation's government absolutely should discriminate in favor of it's own people. That's who it's supposed to be representing. In the case of the U.S., there's nothing racial about that. Opportunity for Americans is more important than opportunity for non-Americans.
- ajross 9y ago
  And once more, you're using "own" in a sense that seems really distasteful. In what sense is a south asian engineer who's been living in Emeryville for 16 years[1] not one of "our own" people? [1] No idea if that's a median data point, but it's probably close. When people talk about STEM immigrants they mean very long term residents who will realistically be here with their families for the rest of their lives. You want to imagine a job-jacking horde of foreign-educated people who don't speak English. The truth is rather different.
  - jrs95 9y ago
    Why are you trying to make this about race? Clearly someone who has been here for nearly 20 decades is someone who ought to be given citizenship. But that has nothing to do with preferring to continue to bring in foreign workers rather than invest in American citizens who are struggling.

geebee 9y ago

You might be interested in a RAND study (a historically very pro-immigration institute) that considers this subject. It concludes that the reason US citizens and people who are free to choose their profession in the US avoid these degrees because they can earn more with more stable career paths elsewhere. In other words, the aversion to STEM among elite US students is rational. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/issue_papers/2005/IP241.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/issue_papers/2005...

gpawl 9y ago
We're not talking about elites, we're talking about average. There will never be enough 'elite' students to go around.

cloudwizard 9y ago

In US HS, the grades are going up but the world rankings are dropping. Our kids are not being prepared to be competitive. https://qz.com/1032183/no-wonder-young-americans-feel-so-important-when-half-of-them-finish-high-school-as-a-students/ https://qz.com/1032183/no-wonder-young-americans-feel-so-imp... https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/07/17/easy-a-nearly-half-hs-seniors-graduate-average/485787001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/07/17/easy-a-nearly... https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/sei/edTool/data/highschool-08.html https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/sei/edTool/data/highschool-08.html FYI - It may not look like much on the graph but the US is 2 years behind the top rankers.

gpawl 9y ago
I'd like to see that graph expanded to distributions, and weighted by population. I'd also like to see China and India and Russia on that list. USA is big enough to be an above average nation and a below average nation combined. Israel, that ranks significantly below the US on that chart, has perhaps the largest technology industry per capita in the world.
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  >Israel, that ranks significantly below the US on that chart, has perhaps the largest technology industry per capita in the world. Which runs largely on olim hadashim (new immigrants) from Western countries and the former Soviet Union.

gpawl 9y ago

Even if education was the same everywhere, the most talented would tend to flow toward the areas of highest opportunity, and employers and customers will pick (their judgment of) the best performers. Either the best here will compete with the best there, or the best there will come here (or vice versa)

nostrademons 9y ago

Is it that we aren't investing in our own citizens, or that they aren't taking advantage of the opportunities that those investments create that are open to all? I went to a top liberal arts college, and majored in physics for most of my time there. Within the physics major, every single student was either 1.) An immigrant 2.) The child of an immigrant or 3.) Jewish. It was similar - though a little less pronounced - in the CS and math majors. Most of my friends there were from comfortable middle-class American backgrounds, and most of them majored in English, music, history, or psychology. Many of them are struggling financially or still dependent upon financial support from parents, 12 years after graduation. The American educational system is such that you can largely make your own choices from college onwards (and to a limited degree, in high school too). This is a great strength of America, but it also means that sometimes people make choices that don't work out for them. The native-born citizens I know that invested heavily in learning math & computers when they were teenagers are doing great, even if they came from dirt-poor backgrounds. The ones I know who figured there would always be a job waiting for them, even if they came from very comfortable upper-middle-class backgrounds, are barely scraping by.

xsmasher 9y ago
I feel like there's a cycle where parents who struggled want their children to have practical careers; parents who had success in practical careers want their children to "follow their dreams;" then the cycle repeats.

jdavis703 9y ago

Both me and my sister received full scholarships (poor family + smart genes I guess). She got a degree in creative writing, I went the IT route. Part of the problem is that most STEM jobs just aren't fun...

gopalv 9y ago

> This wouldn't be necessary if we actually invested in our own citizens. So much this - I know of this from my own life. I got a state funded CS education for around 500$ a year (if my family had been poorer, they'd have paid me to study) - it was a good one, because I keep going back to my annotated Sedgewick. Graduated with zero debt, with an open source project I was working on for years which meant that I spent the first few years of my work life knowing I could take risks (not that I did take too many). In the Bay area now and seeing clearly the impact of an expensive education on people's choices - not everyone needs to be a college graduate, however putting an expensive price tag on it means that only people who are sure they can get a financial return on their education will take up that risk. There is a chilling effect on women, who are expecting to be discriminated in the industry, driving them to other vocations where they don't expect to incur similar challenges with financial gains or professional advancements. In fact, purely from a state investment point of view, CA is getting my tax dollars to spend while my college barely gets anything back from me. I really wish my kids would get a similar springboard to start their life off without an albatross around their neck, but they are probably entering a system which is probably going to maximize immediate financial returns from them instead of expecting them to be late bloomers becoming productive over time.