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It's clear you are not a hiring manager. There aren't thousands of highly qualified engineers looking for work. I can't tell if this a troll post or not.
by doug_durham 1mo ago
It's clear you are not a hiring manager. There aren't thousands of highly qualified engineers looking for work. I can't tell if this a troll post or not.
- logicchains 1mo agoThey would be looking for work with you if you were offering them better pay and conditions than where they're currently working.
- whatever1 1mo agoMoney does not fix the supply problem the parent comment pointed out (at least for fields that need multi year training). Let’s say that tomorrow we need 1M nuclear physicists. How can money help? You still need to wait for the talent pipeline to divert.
- throwaway85825 1mo agoFortunately such ridiculous hypotheticals have no correspondence to reality. Most every job can be easily trained or cross trained. Mathematicians make good physicists. Nor is there some foreign pipeline of a million physicists. Such ridiculous argument exist only to perpetuate the lie of a skills shortage and deny the wage shortage.
- doc_ick 1mo agoThey may make good physicists, but not great physicists. Similar to saying I know how to drive a car, now let me win the inde 500. Things take to for specialization, even with the advent of guessing and checking machines (llms).
- throwaway85825 1mo agoA shocking number of innovations in x field are because y person brought an idea that maps from z field. Cross functional teams are important and mathematicians can and absolutely do make top level contributions to physics. One of the math problems recently publicized as having being solved by was actually just discovering that a German mathematician had published a solution in the 1950s.
- doc_ick 1mo agoOh that is true, and I’m not putting down cross functional teams. I’m just putting down the idea that a specialist in one area can immediately be a specialist in another semi related area with no extra review time.
- throwaway85825 1mo agoIf you ask specialists about their backgrounds you will find that they took different paths. The critical step is time in the speciality, not background. For any job there's never a pool of applicants who are pretrained for that exact job, everyone takes time to get up to speed. People from related fields do just as well learning job tasks. The labor market is fluid if properly incentivized. Commenters intentionally pretend not to understand because they want cheap labor and want to impoverish the American worker.
- doc_ick 1mo agoCommenter doesn’t seem to understand how much of a drift there is for specialty learning or different negative patterns specialists may have. A front end architect and a computer architect may have similar backgrounds, but a computer architect will take wildly longer to learn front end and likely have some practices to un-learn. Also I would say for certain areas, people are pre-trained for the exact job as the tools or tech between is the exact same. It’s not just commenters who want cheaper labor, capitalism wants cheaper labor.
- throwaway85825 1mo ago
- mixmastamyk 1mo agoWith training (remember that?) and practice, one could vastly improve. It’s called a growth mindset.
- doc_ick 1mo agoYou know what training takes? Time *you know what practice takes? Time
- mixmastamyk 1mo agoThat’s fine.
- doc_ick 1mo agoSo we’re in agreement? A mathematician can’t immediately be or replace a good physicist, it takes some certain time to transition.
- mixmastamyk 1mo agoIt’s an investment.
- doc_ick 1mo agoSo we’re in agreement? The time of investment for growth is the point of decision, and how long it takes to train specialists defines if it’s worth it. I.e. how long would it take to train a regular driver to drive the inde 500 vs buying a racers contract
- mixmastamyk 1mo agoWant me to agree that training takes time? Ok, but what a boring revelation. It doesn’t take much time in the grand scheme of things. I can read a substantial book each week, for example. Give a person a half ~salary and let them study and train for a month +/-, they’ll be ready to contribute.
- whatever1 1mo agoWe don’t need my hypotheticals. We saw how well the American bootcamps filled the market with completely trash talent when the market demanded a big number of SDEs. So no, money cannot generate infinite specialized talent overnight as you naively assume.
- carlosjobim 1mo agoWhy are they needed in the USA, but not needed in their home country?
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- soniczentropy 1mo agoThey ARE needed in their home country, that's why they're here. The fact is simply that the best way to help their family is to make American money
- carlosjobim 1mo agoGood to hear that their home country doesn't need any engineers, doctors or other specialists. Then it makes sense that they go to help the USA develop to that same level. A nuclear engineer surely improves his country much more by sending home some money to his mommy and aunts than by building a new power plant.
- Synthetic7346 1mo agoI can't tell if this is a troll post or intentionally obtuse. The comment they you replied to did say that these are the best in their country, which is why we want them. Have you heard of a concept called brain drain?
- carlosjobim 29d agoYes, I have heard of brain drain. And people here are arguing in favour of brain drain rather than hiring citizens or paying citizens better, because they say that US needs these foreign workers. That's why I ask how it comes that their own countries do not need them? Why should anybody be sympathetic to the so called "needs" of US companies hiring immigrants, but not be sympathetic to the needs of their home countries? Sympathy for companies is usually conditioned on the fact that they give jobs to locals, or at least to citizens. If they're not doing that, then who gives a fuck if they aren't able to expand or profit at a rate that shareholders prefer? But there is a class of people - most hackers included - who have had such comfortable lives that they aren't capable to even pretend anymore to sympathize with the producing class.
- binarymax 1mo agoYes, there are thousands of qualified engineers looking for work.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- lokar 1mo agoIt’s a big industry. There are many roles at many different levels of expertise and experience. Many can’t find locals.
- 999900000999 1mo agoI’m very pro immigration, but “Americans are lazy and stupid , thus unfit for hiring” isn’t a winning argument. Tons of Americans are out of work. I’ve personally seen my wages drop by at least 20$ an hour as well as the work being less stable. Gasp, you might need to train someone a bit or have employees that will say no if you ask them to work on Christmas. If I ran the H1B program it would be an unrestricted work permit with an automatic pathway to a GC after 5 years. Don’t get *convicted* of a felony and here you go.
- g3f32r 1mo ago> If I ran the H1B program it would be an unrestricted work permit with an automatic pathway to a GC after 5 years. Don’t get convicted of a felony and here you go. Why would this policy be beneficial to Americans?
- Synthetic7346 1mo agoIt benefits American entrepreneurs - they could hire from a diverse pool of people instead of waiting for local talent pools to develop? Not everyone is capable of building FAANG levels of talent pipelines to convert interns into eventual staff eng
- g3f32r 29d ago1) It benefits an extremely tiny slice of American entrepreneurs by allowing them to operate directly against the best interests of the broader American labor force? 2) This posits that there must be a large pool of highly trained and specialized Staff Eng sitting idly in other countries just waiting to be poached. What are those countries doing which is generating a huge untapped pool of labor? If that _is_ the case, then why aren't entrepreneurs in those countries capitalizing on the idle labor? --- Maybe I'm entirely too cynical - but I simply don't believe that #2 is true. There isn't a huge Indian talent pipeline just pumping out hoards of incredible world-class engineers worthy of poaching, yet America is entirely incapable of producing the same tier of engineer. I think it's purely a function of depressing labor costs at the lower end of the labor ladder and over the last ten years has actually just been an immigration pipeline with pay-to-play schemes on both ends.
- jimbo808 1mo agoIt's clear you are not considering the long-term effects of labor policy. If we want a stronger domestic workforce, the answer is to incentivize Americans to develop the skills we need and to train them when they do not already have those skills. Mass importing foreign labor is not a substitute for building and investing in the domestic workforce.
- maest 1mo agoBtw, this is analogous to the argument for positive discrimination: Preferentially treat one group of people (non-white/women/Americans) even if in the short term the revealed preference of businesses is to hire a different group of people (white/men/immigrants), such that, in the long term, the first group of people can develop the necessary skills to compete with the second group. Short term pain for long term gain.
- consensus1 1mo agoNo it's really not the same because we have laws against racial discrimination, but it is the entire purpose of the state to represent the interests of its citizens above all others.
- BobbyJo 1mo agoThe arguments can be the same but have entirely different hidden variables that make it fine to use the argument in one context and not the other. Also, this ignores that the government works for citizens, no matter their race. Promoting racial equality among citizens is a function that the government might undertake. Pursuing policies that favor citizens over non-citizens falls in line with that same reasoning.
- deleted 29d ago[deleted]
- tayo42 1mo agoHiring is such a shit show, there's no reason to assume the people doing the hiring know what they're doing. Like HR has to insert them selves into the process
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- zdragnar 1mo agoReally? Last time I was involved in hiring, about two years ago, we had hundreds of applications in a day or so. What changed?
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]