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While Andrew Ng is devastated that an H1B worker and their family has to pack their bags and return to their home country, one American worker will have the opp

While Andrew Ng is devastated that an H1B worker and their family has to pack their bags and return to their home country, one American worker will have the opportunity to enter the job market and feed his/her family. EDIT: Unfortunately, we find ourselves in a situation where many engineers on HN are H1B workers themselves or start-up owners/affiliates who benefit and profit off of H1B workers so it's obvious that I'm against the tide here. For all the haters, tell me why my company needed to hire a large group of QA engineers to do manual GUI testing when this does not really require much more than a high school GED, if even. Honestly, look deeply past the corporate lobbyist agendas and your own personal biases and tell me H1B policies are not effectively a ploy to get around cheap labor. Yes, they are great when used properly to find rare and top talent but anybody who has worked in the industry knows this is rarely the case.

fzeroracer 6y ago
The lump of labour fallacy is just that, a fallacy.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- president 6y ago
  Yes, in a vacuum. It ignores the fact that at a given point of time, there are only a limited number of jobs in the market.
  - fzeroracer 6y ago
    No, you've managed to completely misinterpret how the lump of labor fallacy works and fell for the fallacy again. Job demand is elastic. If tomorrow X of all immigrants who held a job in the US left, that doesn't mean X jobs open up. You're losing X customers and Y investors where Y is a subset of X. Jobs are not a zero-sum game and H1B does not exist just to take away jobs because inevitably some of those people will go on to create more jobs and companies in the US. Again, I will repeat: The lump of labor fallacy is a fallacy for a reason.
    - president 6y ago
      You're straying away from the point and overcomplicating things. When a company has an open position and it is filled by an H1B worker, an American worker has lost that opportunity. That's zero sum. Whether or not H1B workers are going to go on to create more jobs has no bearing. You could say the same thing about the American worker that lost that job opportunity. You realize that just because something is named a "fallacy" doesn't mean it is one. Economists have bias too and are often employed/used by lobbyists to sway analysis.
nine_zeros 6y ago
> While Andrew Ng is devastated that an H1B worker and their family has to pack their bags and return to their home country, one American worker will have the opportunity to enter the job market and feed his/her family. And the H1B will also take their monetary capital (above average) and work potential somewhere else. Which means, one lesser person paying rent, one lesser person buying local produce, one lesser person buying American cars, one lesser person paying taxes, one lesser internet connection, one lesser cellphone connection, one lesser purchaser of iphone. Not to mention, the loss of productive work done, years worth of training that makes up that individual all lost. How many jobs do you gather were lost by removing a productive individual now?
- president 6y ago
  A homeless person out of a job is not able to pay taxes and contribute to the economy either.
rantwasp 6y ago
yeah no. that’s not how life works. we like to believe that we are all equal and interchangeable but the reality is that if you’re comparing the quality of people that come in on an H1B in tech with the average joe in the US you’re going to have a brutal awakening. most people that have the skills have a job.
- pluto9 6y ago
  The H1B worker isn't competing with the average Joe, he's competing with the Joe who's qualified to do the job, but didn't get it because the employer preferred someone with no leverage who can be easily controlled and underpaid.
  - rantwasp 6y ago
    do you know how expensive is to bring someone on an H1B? the relocation itself is >50k. The salary has to be in the same range as the other workers in the same position. It’s literally more expensive to hire someone on an H1b. why would big tech so this if average Joe is qualified and could do the Job?
    - pluto9 6y ago
      50K seems incredibly high for a relocation. Do you have a source on that? What are the expenses that add up to that amount? All that aside, that's a one-time cost. H1B workers can be kept in limbo for years, since employers can apply for their green cards (or not) at their discretion. > The salary has to be in the same range as the other workers in the same position What constitutes "the same position"? Call the H1B a "systems analyst" instead of a "software engineer", and voila, you've got a much lower paid position, even if the job duties are the same in practice. > why would big tech so this if average Joe is qualified and could do the Job? I'm not a fan of arguments of the form "why did X do Y if Z?" because answering them requires knowing unknowable motives and other factors that your opponent couldn't possibly be privy to. But since we're using those arguments, I've got one for you: If H1Bs are more expensive, why did Disney famously lay off huge numbers of IT workers and make them train their H1B replacements in the process? Kind of hard to argue that they couldn't find suitable American workers when they were already working there.

fzeroracer 6y ago

The lump of labour fallacy is just that, a fallacy.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
president 6y ago
Yes, in a vacuum. It ignores the fact that at a given point of time, there are only a limited number of jobs in the market.
- fzeroracer 6y ago
  No, you've managed to completely misinterpret how the lump of labor fallacy works and fell for the fallacy again. Job demand is elastic. If tomorrow X of all immigrants who held a job in the US left, that doesn't mean X jobs open up. You're losing X customers and Y investors where Y is a subset of X. Jobs are not a zero-sum game and H1B does not exist just to take away jobs because inevitably some of those people will go on to create more jobs and companies in the US. Again, I will repeat: The lump of labor fallacy is a fallacy for a reason.
  - president 6y ago
    You're straying away from the point and overcomplicating things. When a company has an open position and it is filled by an H1B worker, an American worker has lost that opportunity. That's zero sum. Whether or not H1B workers are going to go on to create more jobs has no bearing. You could say the same thing about the American worker that lost that job opportunity. You realize that just because something is named a "fallacy" doesn't mean it is one. Economists have bias too and are often employed/used by lobbyists to sway analysis.

nine_zeros 6y ago

> While Andrew Ng is devastated that an H1B worker and their family has to pack their bags and return to their home country, one American worker will have the opportunity to enter the job market and feed his/her family. And the H1B will also take their monetary capital (above average) and work potential somewhere else. Which means, one lesser person paying rent, one lesser person buying local produce, one lesser person buying American cars, one lesser person paying taxes, one lesser internet connection, one lesser cellphone connection, one lesser purchaser of iphone. Not to mention, the loss of productive work done, years worth of training that makes up that individual all lost. How many jobs do you gather were lost by removing a productive individual now?

president 6y ago
A homeless person out of a job is not able to pay taxes and contribute to the economy either.

rantwasp 6y ago

yeah no. that’s not how life works. we like to believe that we are all equal and interchangeable but the reality is that if you’re comparing the quality of people that come in on an H1B in tech with the average joe in the US you’re going to have a brutal awakening. most people that have the skills have a job.

pluto9 6y ago
The H1B worker isn't competing with the average Joe, he's competing with the Joe who's qualified to do the job, but didn't get it because the employer preferred someone with no leverage who can be easily controlled and underpaid.
- rantwasp 6y ago
  do you know how expensive is to bring someone on an H1B? the relocation itself is >50k. The salary has to be in the same range as the other workers in the same position. It’s literally more expensive to hire someone on an H1b. why would big tech so this if average Joe is qualified and could do the Job?
  - pluto9 6y ago
    50K seems incredibly high for a relocation. Do you have a source on that? What are the expenses that add up to that amount? All that aside, that's a one-time cost. H1B workers can be kept in limbo for years, since employers can apply for their green cards (or not) at their discretion. > The salary has to be in the same range as the other workers in the same position What constitutes "the same position"? Call the H1B a "systems analyst" instead of a "software engineer", and voila, you've got a much lower paid position, even if the job duties are the same in practice. > why would big tech so this if average Joe is qualified and could do the Job? I'm not a fan of arguments of the form "why did X do Y if Z?" because answering them requires knowing unknowable motives and other factors that your opponent couldn't possibly be privy to. But since we're using those arguments, I've got one for you: If H1Bs are more expensive, why did Disney famously lay off huge numbers of IT workers and make them train their H1B replacements in the process? Kind of hard to argue that they couldn't find suitable American workers when they were already working there.