7 ms·

Yes it is. Every foreign employee getting that tech job is a US citizen from the Midwest not getting it. Fuck this dishonest talking point, I know people codi

Yes it is. Every foreign employee getting that tech job is a US citizen from the Midwest not getting it. Fuck this dishonest talking point, I know people coding since high school working at Toyota plants while people from overseas with entry level skill sets have employers move them to the west coast and land jobs (for whatever reason.) It’s favoritism, it’s cronyism, it’s a nation putting its own struggling people last and it most certainly is zero sum.

alephnerd 3y ago
> a US citizen from the Midwest not getting it No offense, but maybe your resume didn't reflect that you had the skills required. The companies I worked at and now portfolio companies of mine pay Bay Area market rate to both citizens and non-citizens. We hire noncitizens because we didn't find the right talent we need.
- blasphemers 3y ago
  So basically you only have open engineering positions in the same few markets that every other tech company does and then you complain when you can't find enough engineers. Engineering talent doesn't only exist on the coasts, despite startup tech culture pretending it does.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    We listed all these jobs remotely. There just aren't that many engineers who know OS Internals, eBPF, or XDP in Indiana compared to Tel Aviv or Bangalore.
    - remarkEon 3y ago
      That is a policy problem. Opening up more immigration makes that problem worse, not better. It should be a question that everyone asks: why do US Universities not create an adequate supply of workers to meet the demand of the market? No one seems to care and the solution is always “just do more immigration”. Makes no sense.
      - alephnerd 3y ago
        I worked on the policy side before I entered tech. You can't "command economy" human capital. It just doesn't work. Upskilling has a 5-10 year long lag time. Immigration is the only reason America hasn't stumbled like Europe, Japan, or Korea demographically.
        remarkEon 3y ago
        >Upskilling has a 5-10 year long lag time. So what? Again, this is a pipeline problem, that can be influenced and addressed via policy. I'm not trying to "command economy" anything. It's a problem that companies, and increasingly universities, don't think that it's a huge issue there not being enough home-grown citizens to fill these roles (a claim I find to be dubious at best). That is definitely something that policy can be used to fix. >Immigration is the only reason America hasn't stumbled like Europe, Japan, or Korea demographically. I don't know what this is supposed to mean. You want some demographic growth target to be hit? Europe has many countries in it, but mentioning Japan and Korea implies you have noticed the birth rates there. Well, I think the wrong question is being asked in that situation as well. If people aren't having babies, why? What changed? What policy options are there to fix that problem? Thinking that "just import a new workforce" fixes that is extremely weird to me, especially when they are coming from places that are not exactly culturally proximate to the places they are going, to say the least.
      - hasty_pudding 3y ago
        The industry is so huge thats impossible to teach every aspect of the tech industry. The universities teach widely applicable curriculum. Companies should train employees, simple as.
      - bluecheese452 3y ago
        They do. Companies just prefer to hire immigrants willing to work twice as long for half the pay.
    - hasty_pudding 3y ago
      I guarantee you theres tons of engineers with backgrounds in O.S./Networking that could learn those things very quickly. I bet most people working in it learned on the job. The certainly dont teach every single specific detail of the entire tech industry in universities. This is just gaslighting.
      - alephnerd 3y ago
        > could learn those things very quickly Maybe. We didn't have the time to risk on hiring a dud in an industry as competitive as Cybersecurity. When competing with Israeli and Indian companies who are able to tap the Israeli, Eastern European, and Indian talent scene where such skills are much more common, we don't have the time to risk timelines falling behind.
        hasty_pudding 3y ago
        Oh such fear mongering. With an decent background shouldnt take someone too long to get up to speed and that time isnt going to break the company. Its what they do in other countries. lol You clearly have with an agenda.
      - bluecheese452 3y ago
        But none willing to work at the wages and working conditions that company is offering.
        alephnerd 3y ago
        > 200-300k base with 15% annual bonus and equity ($300k-750k when I was working at public companies. I can't speak to my portfolio company's equity practices) is not a shit wage That was what we were offering, but we were also demanding on quality and skill required. We ended up getting some top performers in Israel and India for a fraction, despite being ready to pay the above.
        bluecheese452 3y ago
  - allemagne 3y ago
    Do companies have a moral obligation to distribute jobs geographically? Assuming that the issue is that these positions weren't remote then if they decided that they're better served by workers that live locally then they're either right and you're asking them to harm their own interests for yours or they're wrong and they're just leaving money on the table for a competitor. If they aren't harmed for giving up a competitive edge then that monopoly power to just ignore the market is the actual problem. Either way, work visas isn't even close to the most salient problem. Restrict them and who's to say how startups will find loopholes to avoid hiring who we want them to hire. Let's just cut out all the messiness and cut them checks directly. Call it reparations for the coasts ignoring the good honest midwest American talent all these years.
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      > Restrict them and who's to say how startups will find loopholes We'll just open offices in Israel, Eastern Europe, and India instead and pay 70% of a US salary. It already started happening in 2019, and avalanched during the pandemic.
      - bluecheese452 3y ago
        The obvious response to that is to not allow companies that outsource jobs to sell in the domestic market.
        alephnerd 3y ago
        And then those companies sell in other countries. When the US banned Israeli companies from selling military IP to China, they began selling to India. Drone tech saw a similar impact, hence why Chinese and Turkish Drone companies are outcompeting American ones in both commercial and defense applications.
        bluecheese452 3y ago
        Good let them.
- lp0_on_fire 3y ago
  > We hire noncitizens because we didn't find the right talent we need. (the right talent at the shit-level wage we want to pay) is more often than not the rest of that sentence.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    $200-300k base with 15% annual bonus and equity ($300k-750k when I was working at public companies. I can't speak to my portfolio company's equity practices) is not a shit wage. We needed people who understood stuff like XDP and worked on it for years. The talent pool for low level development, OS Dev, cybersecurity, networking, and some parts of ML is sparse in the US compared to Israel, Eastern Europe, China, and India.
    - fallingknife 3y ago
      The problem is that instead of building a domestic talent pipeline for high demand skills we take the easy route and grab immigrants for it. So the talent pipeline never gets built, and then we continue to be dependent on immigration. This is obviously not your company's fault because they are not policy makers, but if companies like yours were told "too bad, hire and train locally" you would get it done. e.g. I am a software engineer that currently has a TC of around $200K, and none of the skills you need, but I could easily be trained and learn any of that for a 300-750K TC at the end.
      - alephnerd 3y ago
        > companies like yours were told "too bad, hire and train locally" Companies would collapse and fail, unless the government gave a massive corporate stimulus package (probably 4-5x the size of PPE). > none of the skills you need, but I could easily be trained It would take at least 1-2 years. At that point, an Israeli or Indian startup has taken market share and won. Welcome to cybersecurity and networking.
        fallingknife 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  > your resume didn't reflect One observation I've made throughout the years of reviewing tech resumes - if I get a resume from a U.S. citizen, I (and anybody else) immediately know the difference between MIT/Stanford vs. "The University of Wisconsin" without even researching it. OTOH, I have no idea what the difference between the University of Hyderabad vs. the University of New Delhi, and there's not really a good way for me to tell. Foreign applicants actually have an _advantage_ over U.S. citizens in that the person reviewing their resume will almost certainly bin all of the resumes into the same "ok, has a degree" vs. a potentially unconscious "ah, ok, couldn't get into an ivy league".
  - jevoten 3y ago
    No wonder they can't find workers, if from a nation of 334 million, all but ~16k/year [1] are considered substandard because they couldn't get into an Ivy. Edit: More relevant is comparing Ivy undergrads (64.5k) to all US undergrads (20.3 million) [2], meaning only the top 0.3% make the cut. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League - total number of undergrads (64.5k), divided by 4, assuming a 4-year college course. [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/235406/undergraduate-enrollment-in-us-universities/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/235406/undergraduate-enr...
    - hasty_pudding 3y ago
      Agreed thats insane.
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      Our EM was from a CSU. We didn't discriminate based on educational program. But we didn't have the time to train someone in eBPF or OS Internals from scratch over months when there are competitors in Israel or India able to release the same thing in the same time period with a fraction of the cost. For certain specialities of tech, there simply isn't the skill set anymore in the US. OS Internals and Computer Networking is a great example of that.
- hasty_pudding 3y ago
  This is another dishonest talking point. With most tech jobs if a person has a computer science background they have the skills. The company is just lying to justify outsourcing.
  - FredPret 3y ago
    Getting a degree simply indicates to the market that you have the ability to learn and the mental building blocks to start learning the ropes. Until you do it, you don’t know how to do it. In other words, juniors fumble around and make lots of mistakes - that’s how they get good.
    - hasty_pudding 3y ago
      > simply indicates to the market that you have the ability to learn I took networking, os, data structures, etc. in my degree. It taught me a lot more than "how to learn".
      - FredPret 3y ago
        Looks like it hasn't even taught you that.
- bluecheese452 3y ago
  Maybe 5 years ago, certainly not today. There have been massive layoffs in tech and plenty of smart people who never broke in.
lgleason 3y ago
Exactly! The companies often prefer the people on H1B visas because the workers have to be much more subservient or risk being deported and they have leverage to pay them at the lower end of the salary range for the position/level.
- anon-sre-srm 3y ago
  Yep. This is the TCS consulting business model. Interestingly, the meat ag and farming employs (no pun intended) similar tactics with undocumented people working in near-or-de facto slavery conditions that are very dangerous. The major meat processing plants in the US advertise salaries in Mexican and Central American newspapers to encourage migration. And, the US immigration system is a Kafkaesque, Byzantine, understaffed nightmare purposefully to keep official immigration meeting socio-political objectives of appearing selective. In truth, it facilitates megacorps importing large numbers of foreign knowledge workers through official channels while criminalizing and marginalizing undocumented people to be under the thumbs of other megacorps monetizing unpleasant work society inconveniently needs to function.
light_hue_1 3y ago
This is the most clueless take here. It is so obviously not zero sum. From Google to Yahoo to eBay to Palantir. None of those hundreds of thousands of jobs would exist without immigrants. Or they would be overseas. I'm sorry for your friends who cannot get tech jobs. It's time to level up their skills. No competent developer can't find a job in this economy. Stop blaming immigrants for your own shortcomings.
anonfromsomewhe 3y ago
if US citizen with all best resources in the world for entire lifetime, is losing opportunity to some 3rd nation, maybe he/she/they is not competitive enough?
greatpostman 3y ago
Yup, people love to deny this but it’s true
gourabmi 3y ago
I think it is more about leaving their comfort zones. One might have to move out of their towns / states to access resources that the US has to offer. Dozens of US states offers so much support to their students studying STEM. You can defer education loan payments. There is so much federal aid. There are dirt cheap colleges if you want to get vocational education and start working quickly. But all of these are not available in one city. They are spread across the nation. Globalization is a two way street. If you want the best of what the world has to offer, the best of what the world has to offer will arrive at your doorstep. That includes human resources.
probablynish 3y ago
> Every foreign employee getting that tech job is a US citizen from the Midwest not getting it. This concentration of high paid tech jobs would not exist in the first place if it weren't for the foreigners. Look at the number of tech startups founded by immigrants. More broadly consider that if a different country became the global hub for top tech talent, capital would go there, and that country would become the home of high paid tech salaries. The main input into a tech company is 'human capital' (hard working, highly intelligent, people) - Americans benefit from the spillover effects of having their country be the global nexus of human capital. BTW, India is seeing significant upwards pressure on tech salaries and a boom in the number of domestic tech companies and jobs. This is at least partly spurred by restrictive American immigration policies forcing Indians to go back home. Purely economically speaking, I don't think America is the winner here.
cyberax 3y ago
> Yes it is. Every foreign employee getting that tech job is a US citizen from the Midwest not getting it. That's simply not true. The alternative is often just not having this job at all. A tech startup without employees can just fail, without creating any jobs. And the guy from the Midwest will be worse off in the end.
8note 3y ago
The US citizen from the Midwest could move to California and make a startup; they aren't gated by having a job beforehand. On the other hand, if all the foreign talent congregates elsewhere, the Midwest kid will need a visa to compete with them. The non-zero sum is that having all the people in one place makes more opportunities than if they weren't together.
retinaros 3y ago
america hegemony exists since the germans rocket scientists immigrated to work at nasa. the tech sector is the same story.google pretty much created the web revolution and it was a russian immigrant leading it creating millions of jobs. the next big moment was musk, an immigrant with tesla.
thenaturalist 3y ago
I think your reply is the perfect example of the malaise of the general public discourse on most topics these days which seems to be far less informed by scientifically established laws and principles rather than by personal anecdotes. Let me preface my writing by saying that I am neither a US citizen nor a tech worker currently employed or aiming for employment with a US based firm. I am a first generation immigrant in a continental European country who faced no barriers in charting my career in tech. I deeply believe in and have experienced meritocracy. So let's go at it one by one. > Every foreign employee getting that tech job is a US citizen from the Midwest not getting it. That is simply not true as the distribution for demand and supply of tech talent within an economy is hardly ever matching perfectly temporally. Either there is more demand than supply or more supply than demand. Also upskilling everyone in the Midwest does not work just that quickly. That is how the world works. Your argument is not rooted at all in basic macroeconomics, rather, it seems to me, in wishful thinking. No country other than the USA is better at playing that macroeconomics game through talent oriented immigration laws. Has been for the past 200 years, will be for the next 200 years. I'd bet on that. > Fuck this dishonest talking point, I know people coding since high school working at Toyota plants while people from overseas with entry level skill sets have employers move them to the west coast and land jobs (for whatever reason.) Said people you know must either not have the chops you claim they have, not know their market value or not have the required mobility for the purpose of securing said jobs (i.e. moving out of the Midwest to the economic hotspots of the US). Giving you the benefit of the doubt that indeed subservient immigration is an economic niche of it's own, there is no chance that practice alone saturates the demand for tech talent. How many SWE positions in every other HN thread alone require citizenship, timezone presence or offer no assistance with immigration? > It’s favoritism, it’s cronyism, it’s a nation putting its own struggling people last and it most certainly is zero sum. While a populist, assertive statement, I think it is lack of widespread education & upskilling initiatives (which literally everyone else outside of the tech sector has incentives for: what would Toyota, Walmart, literally everyone else stand to gain from more educated citizens leaving the Midwest for higher paying jobs?), greed and fiscal pressure (I've promised my VCs 200% growth YoY, so I need SWEs stat from literally anywhere NOW, can't wait for these folks from the Midwest to upskill within 2 years) and generational change (those HS friends chopping away at Toyota might not have applied in their early years when remote work was as prevalent as it is today. It will be a totally different game for a Midwest child growing up in a tech inspired household today). Lack in speed of upskilling/ education, fiscal economic pressure and glacial pace of generational change is literally what every other nation is facing. Time is always the scarcest and most critical factor. And that's why it's not zero sum. In the long run, no economy is bound to employ more people in tech both domestic and foreign than the USA and that is a massive, massive achievement - and based in simple macroeconomic rules, not some emotional anecdotes.

alephnerd 3y ago

> a US citizen from the Midwest not getting it No offense, but maybe your resume didn't reflect that you had the skills required. The companies I worked at and now portfolio companies of mine pay Bay Area market rate to both citizens and non-citizens. We hire noncitizens because we didn't find the right talent we need.

blasphemers 3y ago
So basically you only have open engineering positions in the same few markets that every other tech company does and then you complain when you can't find enough engineers. Engineering talent doesn't only exist on the coasts, despite startup tech culture pretending it does.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  We listed all these jobs remotely. There just aren't that many engineers who know OS Internals, eBPF, or XDP in Indiana compared to Tel Aviv or Bangalore.
  - remarkEon 3y ago
    That is a policy problem. Opening up more immigration makes that problem worse, not better. It should be a question that everyone asks: why do US Universities not create an adequate supply of workers to meet the demand of the market? No one seems to care and the solution is always “just do more immigration”. Makes no sense.
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      I worked on the policy side before I entered tech. You can't "command economy" human capital. It just doesn't work. Upskilling has a 5-10 year long lag time. Immigration is the only reason America hasn't stumbled like Europe, Japan, or Korea demographically.
      - remarkEon 3y ago
        >Upskilling has a 5-10 year long lag time. So what? Again, this is a pipeline problem, that can be influenced and addressed via policy. I'm not trying to "command economy" anything. It's a problem that companies, and increasingly universities, don't think that it's a huge issue there not being enough home-grown citizens to fill these roles (a claim I find to be dubious at best). That is definitely something that policy can be used to fix. >Immigration is the only reason America hasn't stumbled like Europe, Japan, or Korea demographically. I don't know what this is supposed to mean. You want some demographic growth target to be hit? Europe has many countries in it, but mentioning Japan and Korea implies you have noticed the birth rates there. Well, I think the wrong question is being asked in that situation as well. If people aren't having babies, why? What changed? What policy options are there to fix that problem? Thinking that "just import a new workforce" fixes that is extremely weird to me, especially when they are coming from places that are not exactly culturally proximate to the places they are going, to say the least.
    - hasty_pudding 3y ago
      The industry is so huge thats impossible to teach every aspect of the tech industry. The universities teach widely applicable curriculum. Companies should train employees, simple as.
    - bluecheese452 3y ago
      They do. Companies just prefer to hire immigrants willing to work twice as long for half the pay.
  - hasty_pudding 3y ago
    I guarantee you theres tons of engineers with backgrounds in O.S./Networking that could learn those things very quickly. I bet most people working in it learned on the job. The certainly dont teach every single specific detail of the entire tech industry in universities. This is just gaslighting.
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      > could learn those things very quickly Maybe. We didn't have the time to risk on hiring a dud in an industry as competitive as Cybersecurity. When competing with Israeli and Indian companies who are able to tap the Israeli, Eastern European, and Indian talent scene where such skills are much more common, we don't have the time to risk timelines falling behind.
      - hasty_pudding 3y ago
        Oh such fear mongering. With an decent background shouldnt take someone too long to get up to speed and that time isnt going to break the company. Its what they do in other countries. lol You clearly have with an agenda.
    - bluecheese452 3y ago
      But none willing to work at the wages and working conditions that company is offering.
      - alephnerd 3y ago
        > 200-300k base with 15% annual bonus and equity ($300k-750k when I was working at public companies. I can't speak to my portfolio company's equity practices) is not a shit wage That was what we were offering, but we were also demanding on quality and skill required. We ended up getting some top performers in Israel and India for a fraction, despite being ready to pay the above.
        bluecheese452 3y ago
- allemagne 3y ago
  Do companies have a moral obligation to distribute jobs geographically? Assuming that the issue is that these positions weren't remote then if they decided that they're better served by workers that live locally then they're either right and you're asking them to harm their own interests for yours or they're wrong and they're just leaving money on the table for a competitor. If they aren't harmed for giving up a competitive edge then that monopoly power to just ignore the market is the actual problem. Either way, work visas isn't even close to the most salient problem. Restrict them and who's to say how startups will find loopholes to avoid hiring who we want them to hire. Let's just cut out all the messiness and cut them checks directly. Call it reparations for the coasts ignoring the good honest midwest American talent all these years.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    > Restrict them and who's to say how startups will find loopholes We'll just open offices in Israel, Eastern Europe, and India instead and pay 70% of a US salary. It already started happening in 2019, and avalanched during the pandemic.
    - bluecheese452 3y ago
      The obvious response to that is to not allow companies that outsource jobs to sell in the domestic market.
      - alephnerd 3y ago
        And then those companies sell in other countries. When the US banned Israeli companies from selling military IP to China, they began selling to India. Drone tech saw a similar impact, hence why Chinese and Turkish Drone companies are outcompeting American ones in both commercial and defense applications.
        bluecheese452 3y ago
        Good let them.
lp0_on_fire 3y ago
> We hire noncitizens because we didn't find the right talent we need. (the right talent at the shit-level wage we want to pay) is more often than not the rest of that sentence.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  $200-300k base with 15% annual bonus and equity ($300k-750k when I was working at public companies. I can't speak to my portfolio company's equity practices) is not a shit wage. We needed people who understood stuff like XDP and worked on it for years. The talent pool for low level development, OS Dev, cybersecurity, networking, and some parts of ML is sparse in the US compared to Israel, Eastern Europe, China, and India.
  - fallingknife 3y ago
    The problem is that instead of building a domestic talent pipeline for high demand skills we take the easy route and grab immigrants for it. So the talent pipeline never gets built, and then we continue to be dependent on immigration. This is obviously not your company's fault because they are not policy makers, but if companies like yours were told "too bad, hire and train locally" you would get it done. e.g. I am a software engineer that currently has a TC of around $200K, and none of the skills you need, but I could easily be trained and learn any of that for a 300-750K TC at the end.
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      > companies like yours were told "too bad, hire and train locally" Companies would collapse and fail, unless the government gave a massive corporate stimulus package (probably 4-5x the size of PPE). > none of the skills you need, but I could easily be trained It would take at least 1-2 years. At that point, an Israeli or Indian startup has taken market share and won. Welcome to cybersecurity and networking.
      - fallingknife 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
commandlinefan 3y ago
> your resume didn't reflect One observation I've made throughout the years of reviewing tech resumes - if I get a resume from a U.S. citizen, I (and anybody else) immediately know the difference between MIT/Stanford vs. "The University of Wisconsin" without even researching it. OTOH, I have no idea what the difference between the University of Hyderabad vs. the University of New Delhi, and there's not really a good way for me to tell. Foreign applicants actually have an _advantage_ over U.S. citizens in that the person reviewing their resume will almost certainly bin all of the resumes into the same "ok, has a degree" vs. a potentially unconscious "ah, ok, couldn't get into an ivy league".
- jevoten 3y ago
  No wonder they can't find workers, if from a nation of 334 million, all but ~16k/year [1] are considered substandard because they couldn't get into an Ivy. Edit: More relevant is comparing Ivy undergrads (64.5k) to all US undergrads (20.3 million) [2], meaning only the top 0.3% make the cut. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League - total number of undergrads (64.5k), divided by 4, assuming a 4-year college course. [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/235406/undergraduate-enrollment-in-us-universities/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/235406/undergraduate-enr...
  - hasty_pudding 3y ago
    Agreed thats insane.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    Our EM was from a CSU. We didn't discriminate based on educational program. But we didn't have the time to train someone in eBPF or OS Internals from scratch over months when there are competitors in Israel or India able to release the same thing in the same time period with a fraction of the cost. For certain specialities of tech, there simply isn't the skill set anymore in the US. OS Internals and Computer Networking is a great example of that.
hasty_pudding 3y ago
This is another dishonest talking point. With most tech jobs if a person has a computer science background they have the skills. The company is just lying to justify outsourcing.
- FredPret 3y ago
  Getting a degree simply indicates to the market that you have the ability to learn and the mental building blocks to start learning the ropes. Until you do it, you don’t know how to do it. In other words, juniors fumble around and make lots of mistakes - that’s how they get good.
  - hasty_pudding 3y ago
    > simply indicates to the market that you have the ability to learn I took networking, os, data structures, etc. in my degree. It taught me a lot more than "how to learn".
    - FredPret 3y ago
      Looks like it hasn't even taught you that.
bluecheese452 3y ago
Maybe 5 years ago, certainly not today. There have been massive layoffs in tech and plenty of smart people who never broke in.

lgleason 3y ago

Exactly! The companies often prefer the people on H1B visas because the workers have to be much more subservient or risk being deported and they have leverage to pay them at the lower end of the salary range for the position/level.

anon-sre-srm 3y ago
Yep. This is the TCS consulting business model. Interestingly, the meat ag and farming employs (no pun intended) similar tactics with undocumented people working in near-or-de facto slavery conditions that are very dangerous. The major meat processing plants in the US advertise salaries in Mexican and Central American newspapers to encourage migration. And, the US immigration system is a Kafkaesque, Byzantine, understaffed nightmare purposefully to keep official immigration meeting socio-political objectives of appearing selective. In truth, it facilitates megacorps importing large numbers of foreign knowledge workers through official channels while criminalizing and marginalizing undocumented people to be under the thumbs of other megacorps monetizing unpleasant work society inconveniently needs to function.

light_hue_1 3y ago

This is the most clueless take here. It is so obviously not zero sum. From Google to Yahoo to eBay to Palantir. None of those hundreds of thousands of jobs would exist without immigrants. Or they would be overseas. I'm sorry for your friends who cannot get tech jobs. It's time to level up their skills. No competent developer can't find a job in this economy. Stop blaming immigrants for your own shortcomings.

anonfromsomewhe 3y ago

if US citizen with all best resources in the world for entire lifetime, is losing opportunity to some 3rd nation, maybe he/she/they is not competitive enough?

greatpostman 3y ago

Yup, people love to deny this but it’s true

gourabmi 3y ago

I think it is more about leaving their comfort zones. One might have to move out of their towns / states to access resources that the US has to offer. Dozens of US states offers so much support to their students studying STEM. You can defer education loan payments. There is so much federal aid. There are dirt cheap colleges if you want to get vocational education and start working quickly. But all of these are not available in one city. They are spread across the nation. Globalization is a two way street. If you want the best of what the world has to offer, the best of what the world has to offer will arrive at your doorstep. That includes human resources.

probablynish 3y ago

> Every foreign employee getting that tech job is a US citizen from the Midwest not getting it. This concentration of high paid tech jobs would not exist in the first place if it weren't for the foreigners. Look at the number of tech startups founded by immigrants. More broadly consider that if a different country became the global hub for top tech talent, capital would go there, and that country would become the home of high paid tech salaries. The main input into a tech company is 'human capital' (hard working, highly intelligent, people) - Americans benefit from the spillover effects of having their country be the global nexus of human capital. BTW, India is seeing significant upwards pressure on tech salaries and a boom in the number of domestic tech companies and jobs. This is at least partly spurred by restrictive American immigration policies forcing Indians to go back home. Purely economically speaking, I don't think America is the winner here.

cyberax 3y ago

> Yes it is. Every foreign employee getting that tech job is a US citizen from the Midwest not getting it. That's simply not true. The alternative is often just not having this job at all. A tech startup without employees can just fail, without creating any jobs. And the guy from the Midwest will be worse off in the end.

8note 3y ago

The US citizen from the Midwest could move to California and make a startup; they aren't gated by having a job beforehand. On the other hand, if all the foreign talent congregates elsewhere, the Midwest kid will need a visa to compete with them. The non-zero sum is that having all the people in one place makes more opportunities than if they weren't together.

retinaros 3y ago

america hegemony exists since the germans rocket scientists immigrated to work at nasa. the tech sector is the same story.google pretty much created the web revolution and it was a russian immigrant leading it creating millions of jobs. the next big moment was musk, an immigrant with tesla.

thenaturalist 3y ago

I think your reply is the perfect example of the malaise of the general public discourse on most topics these days which seems to be far less informed by scientifically established laws and principles rather than by personal anecdotes. Let me preface my writing by saying that I am neither a US citizen nor a tech worker currently employed or aiming for employment with a US based firm. I am a first generation immigrant in a continental European country who faced no barriers in charting my career in tech. I deeply believe in and have experienced meritocracy. So let's go at it one by one. > Every foreign employee getting that tech job is a US citizen from the Midwest not getting it. That is simply not true as the distribution for demand and supply of tech talent within an economy is hardly ever matching perfectly temporally. Either there is more demand than supply or more supply than demand. Also upskilling everyone in the Midwest does not work just that quickly. That is how the world works. Your argument is not rooted at all in basic macroeconomics, rather, it seems to me, in wishful thinking. No country other than the USA is better at playing that macroeconomics game through talent oriented immigration laws. Has been for the past 200 years, will be for the next 200 years. I'd bet on that. > Fuck this dishonest talking point, I know people coding since high school working at Toyota plants while people from overseas with entry level skill sets have employers move them to the west coast and land jobs (for whatever reason.) Said people you know must either not have the chops you claim they have, not know their market value or not have the required mobility for the purpose of securing said jobs (i.e. moving out of the Midwest to the economic hotspots of the US). Giving you the benefit of the doubt that indeed subservient immigration is an economic niche of it's own, there is no chance that practice alone saturates the demand for tech talent. How many SWE positions in every other HN thread alone require citizenship, timezone presence or offer no assistance with immigration? > It’s favoritism, it’s cronyism, it’s a nation putting its own struggling people last and it most certainly is zero sum. While a populist, assertive statement, I think it is lack of widespread education & upskilling initiatives (which literally everyone else outside of the tech sector has incentives for: what would Toyota, Walmart, literally everyone else stand to gain from more educated citizens leaving the Midwest for higher paying jobs?), greed and fiscal pressure (I've promised my VCs 200% growth YoY, so I need SWEs stat from literally anywhere NOW, can't wait for these folks from the Midwest to upskill within 2 years) and generational change (those HS friends chopping away at Toyota might not have applied in their early years when remote work was as prevalent as it is today. It will be a totally different game for a Midwest child growing up in a tech inspired household today). Lack in speed of upskilling/ education, fiscal economic pressure and glacial pace of generational change is literally what every other nation is facing. Time is always the scarcest and most critical factor. And that's why it's not zero sum. In the long run, no economy is bound to employ more people in tech both domestic and foreign than the USA and that is a massive, massive achievement - and based in simple macroeconomic rules, not some emotional anecdotes.