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I remember being a naive college student and hearing about a "software engineer shortage." I was too young and dumb to understand that meant that the owners of

I remember being a naive college student and hearing about a "software engineer shortage." I was too young and dumb to understand that meant that the owners of companies that needed software engineers wanted cheaper labor and that I was to play a part in the devaluation of engineering labor by helping supply exceed demand, thereby allowing company owners to commodify software labor to ultimately pay wages proportional to hours worked rather than offering a share in company ownership, which allows for compensation proportional to company success. If H1B's were legitimately about labor shortages, it would be required that all companies fire/layoff their H1B's first. I am pretty liberal, but market dynamics are market dynamics, and I am surprised I haven't seen more anti H1B sentiment to bring scarcity (and therefore leverage) back into the labor market. A lot of the history of racial atrocity has been a direct result of desperate (and therefore exploitable) foreign labor de-valuing incumbent labor and the following retribution to the weaker vulnerable foreign laborers, rather than the harder work of solidarity and demanding a fair share via things like trade unions/guilds.

sinatra 3y ago
Usually it’s much easier to be liberal when doing so doesn’t cost you meaningfully. I’d encourage you to evaluate for yourself if your stances are truly fair and if you’re truly liberal considering how painful it is for an H1B to lose their job vs you. It’s also easy to say “but H1Bs get exploited!” Considering how many H1Bs come here, maybe they’d rather face this exploitation vs staying in their own country?
- rhelz 3y ago
  In a free market, there's no such thing as a shortage. This isn't a 1980's soviet grocery store. The market for programmers is not centrally planned. Its one of the least-regulated markets extant today. So anybody complaining about a "shortage of programmers" is just a cheapskate. In a free market, what signals to us that more of something should be produced? Buehler? Buehler?
  - feedforward 3y ago
    I spent much of 2020 trying to find things like bread in US supermarkets. It's funny how people harken back to Russia 40 years ago as if I was not walking through empty supermarkets four years ago.
    - rhelz 3y ago
      There was only a shortage because it wasn't a free market, i.e. nobody wanted to make the dick move of raising the price of bread or toilet paper, because it would cause hardship. If the prices had been allowed to rise, supply would have equaled demand very quickly, and the shelves would have been stocked as ever. Of course, some people wouldn't have been able to afford them, so we needed some external, non-market mechanism (rationing) to keep prices lower.
      - DinaCoder98 3y ago
        [dead]
      - ptero 3y ago
        There is no such thing in the US as a truly free market. While rising prices for the toilet paper would have quickly solved the shortage situation it would have elicited the wrath of local and national authorities. And those authorities can make life hell for anyone trying to charge whatever the market will bear.
        rhelz 3y ago
        > There is no such thing in the US as a truly free market. Just like there are no circles in the US which are exactly 1.234 meters in diameter. Yes, the concept of a "free market" is an ideal, like the concept of a circle is. That doesn't mean that there aren't instantiations of either one which are closer to the ideal than others. The market for programmers is one of the freest there is. We don't have guilds limiting how many people can be programmers (like, e.g. the American Medical Association does for doctors.) And we don't have unions forcing arbitrary seniority rules, or uniform pay scales. And government regulation varies from state to state, but most states are "at will" states--you can either quit or be fired at any time for any reason. You don't have to provide any minimum amount of vacation. The market in programmers is way more free than, say, the market in automobiles or airplanes, where there are all kinds of regulations about safety, etc. But if you can't afford a Ferrari, or a private jet, that doesn't mean there is a Ferrari shortage, or a private jet shortage. And if you can't afford to pay market wages for programmers, that doesn't mean there is a shortage of programmers either.
- comte7092 3y ago
  >it’s much easier to be liberal when doing so doesn’t cost you meaningfully I’d go so far as to say that is almost part and parcel what a “liberal” is almost always
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    That applies across the board, and I suspect is a personality trait independent of political alignment. I've witnessed people on the right who were against handouts or abortion until they were personally impacted. When there is a real personal cost, a good chunk of people become surprisingly flexible about their politics, or spectacularly fail to resolve the cognitive dissonance and resort to "My circumstances are different."
    - datavirtue 3y ago
      I have seen people on the left preach about banning guns until they got into an argument with their neighbor and ran over to my house to borrow a shotgun. I still don't know why I let them have it. I never got it back.
    - nicbou 3y ago
      We all hold beliefs that were never really tested. You never know how strong your principles are until they are treated by circumstances.
bb88 3y ago
I was a contractor for a large financial institution -- one you've heard of. They fired a number of their employees during a layoff a year before my contract ended. They did it, not because I was cheaper (my contract certainly wasn't) but because they could get rid of the bottom 15%. And company rules limited my contractual ability to remain on. I was kinda shocked at this. "Why wouldn't you keep the people you hired on over the contractors? Don't you hire the best?" It turns out they hired to fill seats, not to hire the best.
- lostmsu 3y ago
  Perhaps what causes this is managers who want to level up usually do so by commanding ever larger groups of people. And when they hire for that scenario they don't really care what kind of people they hire.
  - bb88 3y ago
    Those are "castle builders". But I've also seen people hire bad people to be tossed to the curb for an upcoming 5% across the board layoff.
piyuv 3y ago
Since when “migrants are stealing our jobs“ is a liberal take?
- wenebego 3y ago
  When people preface a statement with "Im pretty X, but ..." the statment usually isnt X
resource_waste 3y ago
> I remember being a naive college student and hearing about a "software engineer shortage." This is real and it still is real, these positions don't pay over 200k for a 4 year degree because there is an abundance. >I was to play a part in the devaluation of engineering labor by helping supply exceed demand, thereby allowing company owners to commodify software labor to ultimately pay wages proportional to hours worked rather than offering a share in company ownership, which allows for compensation proportional to company success. Wow slippery slope fallacy. The medical field has no commodity workers and they aren't given ownership. Anyway, seems like an axe to grind rather than the reality of things.
dukeyukey 3y ago
> If H1B's were legitimately about labor shortages, it would be required that all companies fire/layoff their H1B's first. Not necessarily. If I knew the chances of me being able to stay in the US we're that much lower because of that law, I'd be far less likely to apply in the first place, hence worsening the labor shortage.

sinatra 3y ago

Usually it’s much easier to be liberal when doing so doesn’t cost you meaningfully. I’d encourage you to evaluate for yourself if your stances are truly fair and if you’re truly liberal considering how painful it is for an H1B to lose their job vs you. It’s also easy to say “but H1Bs get exploited!” Considering how many H1Bs come here, maybe they’d rather face this exploitation vs staying in their own country?

rhelz 3y ago
In a free market, there's no such thing as a shortage. This isn't a 1980's soviet grocery store. The market for programmers is not centrally planned. Its one of the least-regulated markets extant today. So anybody complaining about a "shortage of programmers" is just a cheapskate. In a free market, what signals to us that more of something should be produced? Buehler? Buehler?
- feedforward 3y ago
  I spent much of 2020 trying to find things like bread in US supermarkets. It's funny how people harken back to Russia 40 years ago as if I was not walking through empty supermarkets four years ago.
  - rhelz 3y ago
    There was only a shortage because it wasn't a free market, i.e. nobody wanted to make the dick move of raising the price of bread or toilet paper, because it would cause hardship. If the prices had been allowed to rise, supply would have equaled demand very quickly, and the shelves would have been stocked as ever. Of course, some people wouldn't have been able to afford them, so we needed some external, non-market mechanism (rationing) to keep prices lower.
    - DinaCoder98 3y ago
      [dead]
    - ptero 3y ago
      There is no such thing in the US as a truly free market. While rising prices for the toilet paper would have quickly solved the shortage situation it would have elicited the wrath of local and national authorities. And those authorities can make life hell for anyone trying to charge whatever the market will bear.
      - rhelz 3y ago
        > There is no such thing in the US as a truly free market. Just like there are no circles in the US which are exactly 1.234 meters in diameter. Yes, the concept of a "free market" is an ideal, like the concept of a circle is. That doesn't mean that there aren't instantiations of either one which are closer to the ideal than others. The market for programmers is one of the freest there is. We don't have guilds limiting how many people can be programmers (like, e.g. the American Medical Association does for doctors.) And we don't have unions forcing arbitrary seniority rules, or uniform pay scales. And government regulation varies from state to state, but most states are "at will" states--you can either quit or be fired at any time for any reason. You don't have to provide any minimum amount of vacation. The market in programmers is way more free than, say, the market in automobiles or airplanes, where there are all kinds of regulations about safety, etc. But if you can't afford a Ferrari, or a private jet, that doesn't mean there is a Ferrari shortage, or a private jet shortage. And if you can't afford to pay market wages for programmers, that doesn't mean there is a shortage of programmers either.
comte7092 3y ago
>it’s much easier to be liberal when doing so doesn’t cost you meaningfully I’d go so far as to say that is almost part and parcel what a “liberal” is almost always
- sangnoir 3y ago
  That applies across the board, and I suspect is a personality trait independent of political alignment. I've witnessed people on the right who were against handouts or abortion until they were personally impacted. When there is a real personal cost, a good chunk of people become surprisingly flexible about their politics, or spectacularly fail to resolve the cognitive dissonance and resort to "My circumstances are different."
  - datavirtue 3y ago
    I have seen people on the left preach about banning guns until they got into an argument with their neighbor and ran over to my house to borrow a shotgun. I still don't know why I let them have it. I never got it back.
  - nicbou 3y ago
    We all hold beliefs that were never really tested. You never know how strong your principles are until they are treated by circumstances.

bb88 3y ago

I was a contractor for a large financial institution -- one you've heard of. They fired a number of their employees during a layoff a year before my contract ended. They did it, not because I was cheaper (my contract certainly wasn't) but because they could get rid of the bottom 15%. And company rules limited my contractual ability to remain on. I was kinda shocked at this. "Why wouldn't you keep the people you hired on over the contractors? Don't you hire the best?" It turns out they hired to fill seats, not to hire the best.

lostmsu 3y ago
Perhaps what causes this is managers who want to level up usually do so by commanding ever larger groups of people. And when they hire for that scenario they don't really care what kind of people they hire.
- bb88 3y ago
  Those are "castle builders". But I've also seen people hire bad people to be tossed to the curb for an upcoming 5% across the board layoff.

piyuv 3y ago

Since when “migrants are stealing our jobs“ is a liberal take?

wenebego 3y ago
When people preface a statement with "Im pretty X, but ..." the statment usually isnt X

resource_waste 3y ago

> I remember being a naive college student and hearing about a "software engineer shortage." This is real and it still is real, these positions don't pay over 200k for a 4 year degree because there is an abundance. >I was to play a part in the devaluation of engineering labor by helping supply exceed demand, thereby allowing company owners to commodify software labor to ultimately pay wages proportional to hours worked rather than offering a share in company ownership, which allows for compensation proportional to company success. Wow slippery slope fallacy. The medical field has no commodity workers and they aren't given ownership. Anyway, seems like an axe to grind rather than the reality of things.

dukeyukey 3y ago

> If H1B's were legitimately about labor shortages, it would be required that all companies fire/layoff their H1B's first. Not necessarily. If I knew the chances of me being able to stay in the US we're that much lower because of that law, I'd be far less likely to apply in the first place, hence worsening the labor shortage.