4 ms·

I agree with you in the short term. But I think that the long term absence of employable Americans may be caused, in part, by the programs that make it easy to

by geebee 18y ago

I agree with you in the short term. But I think that the long term absence of employable Americans may be caused, in part, by the programs that make it easy to hire foreign nationals instead of Americans in engineering and science. There are a lot of really smart Americans working in law, finance, medicine, and so forth. Do you think these folks are too dumb to work in software? Or are they just rationally responding to a market glut, driven in part by the presence of the H1B program? I think our policy has driven young Americans out of engineering. To just consider the few Americans who did get these degrees is shortsighted. You have to consider the eighth graders, high school students, and first year college students who have been deterred from entering the field. Because we controlled the wages of engineers with a visa program, but not finance or legal professionals, we deterred our own from going into these fields (creating a more severe shortage, necessitating more visas, creating an even worse shortage, until we had finally reached the point where Americans were no longer even remotely interested in this field). Basically, America "foreignized" engineering to the point where we no longer have a home grown, self sustaining engineering profession. This has left us extremely vulnerable - even if we do offer the visas, there's no guarantee we can staff these jobs in the US anymore. By the way, I do think that a robust home-grown engineering field would be enhanced by the presence of many foreign born practitioners. But I think we pushed it to the point where actively undermined the careers of young Americans in engineering, and the next wave of students voted with their feet. Yes, allow in talented engineers. No, don't leave the level so high that Americans are deterred. A bit of a shortage that causes wage growth and stimulates interest would be a good thing. Just remember: once bitten, twice shy.

nostrademons 18y ago
I went to a liberal arts college where 50% of students never take a math or hard science course. Many of them are lawyers or financiers (well, ex-financiers ;-)) now. I don't think this is at all a rational response to economic incentives. There was just a thread among a bunch of young lawyers in the alumni network, giving advice to another alum who was thinking of going to law school. They seem significantly less satisfied with their jobs as lawyers than I do with mine as an engineer. They don't make appreciably more money either. Many of them would love to do engineering - if it didn't involve math. If you ask them why they didn't learn more math in high school & college then, almost all will say that at some point, they fell of the train and just "didn't get" math. I think the problem is more that good engineers are too successful. They have every incentive to remain an engineer and zero incentive to train the next generation. This has gone on for about two generations, which means that the pipeline of home-grown American talent is just about dry. I would kinda like to teach. I come from a family with three generations of teachers on my mother's side. I like working with kids. But there is no possible way that I could rationalize giving up a six-figure Google job where I can get in to work at 11:00, the feed me, I get cool data to play with, and everyone sees my work, for a $30k/year teaching job where I work from 8:00 AM to 4:30 PM, have homework, and deal with parents who threaten to sue me. I think a major difference between Asian cultures and here is that teaching is a high-status profession in Asia. Here, the assumption is that people become teachers because they can't get hired anywhere else, and they're paid accordingly. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as everyone who can get hired elsewhere chooses to work elsewhere, and the only math/science teachers you get are the ones that can't hack it in industry or academia (& a couple saints that just don't want to work there, for any amount of money).
- plinkplonk 18y ago
  "a major difference between Asian cultures and here is that teaching is a high-status profession in Asia. Here, the assumption is that people become teachers because they can't get hired anywhere else, and they're paid accordingly." At least in India, many people become teachers "because they can't get hired anywhere else, and they're paid accordingly." This is particularly true in Engineering/Science/Mathematics. Most teachers have zero industry experience, have never worked as engineers, have never done any significant engineering/science etc etc and do choose teaching because they couldn't hack in the industry. [except for a few really good teachers at say the IIT's - which have their share of terrible teachers - but you could find equivalent folks in say MIT]. As you said "(& a couple saints that just don't want to work there, for any amount of money)." So maybe you are talking of China/other parts of Asia?
  - nostrademons 18y ago
    Yeah, I was mostly talking about China, as that's (half) my cultural background. I think it applies in Japan/Vietnam/Korea as well, knowing some Japanese/Vietnamese/Korean families.
- geebee 18y ago
  We'll see if the collapse of the financial industry encourages more young Americans into engineering. That said, I actually went to law school (Columbia) for one semester before dropping out and enrolling in a PhD program in engineering (at Berkeley). The law school is, of course, about 95% American, whereas in the Engineering school, I became very accustomed to being the only person in the room who spoke English as a first language. I think it's great that Engineering is a profession where you are likely to work alongside people from all over the world. But I think it's bad that it's become(ing?) a profession where you're unusual if you're a native Californian in graduate programs with names like "The University of California". I'll say this - in spite of all the hand-wringing, I don't see even the slightest commitment from Berkeley to bringing in more Americans. And as long as they can wave the magic wand and get more students from overseas, neither they or the employers who want to keep this pipeline will ever bother finding ways to get more Americans into the field. As for law: yeah, they may be unhappy, but I earned 75K/year my first year out of Berkeley at Sun Micro. Kids from the law school were starting at $125-150K/yr. I actually disagree that the Americans you mentioned can't learn math. I didn't take my first calculus class until I was 24 years old, and I got A's all the way through. The incentives just aren't there relative to other fields. And as long as we import hundreds of thousands of H1B workers ever decade, it won't be. Now, we're getting a good sense of what happens when you destroy a homegrown profession and replace it with foreign nationals.
gaius 18y ago
Because we controlled the wages of engineers with a visa program, but not finance or legal professionals, we deterred our own from going into these fields This is the key, really. Why should only engineering in general and computer programming in particular be "special"? Why isn't the US importing medical doctors (for example) hand over fist? There is a very deliberate attempt to treat programming as not one of the "professions" but as labour.
- potatolicious 18y ago
  It's R&D versus labour. You don't want to import labour (e.g. doctors), but you want to import as much R&D personnel as you can get your hands on (this includes other professions such as biologist, physicist, etc). The idea is that depriving, say, China of doctors doesn't really accomplish anything except generate more sick Chinese people, which doesn't really pose a major strategic advantage to the US. The only incentive to import them is if there is a major shortage locally (and so far there isn't). On the other hand, depriving China of engineers can give a significant competitive boost to the US. The more researchers and developers you import the higher chance you have that something that would've been invented in a competing country is invented here instead.
  - gaius 18y ago
    But the typical H1B isn't in R&D - he's cranking out code for a large IT shop. The R&D side of things is taken care of with academic visas. If the US is short of doctors and dentists - and it is, otherwise their salaries wouldn't be so high - then there's no economic reason not to import them.
    - barry-cotter 18y ago
      Medical and dental wages are high in large part due to licenture, same as lawyers. They all have guilds, where a union also certifies, so they limit supply to the benefit of incumbents and the detriment of potential entrants and clients.
      - 18y ago
robak 18y ago
It is American kids choice to study "Women studies" vs. relatively much harder CS. Why immigrants should be blamed?

by geebee 18y ago

nostrademons 18y ago

I went to a liberal arts college where 50% of students never take a math or hard science course. Many of them are lawyers or financiers (well, ex-financiers ;-)) now. I don't think this is at all a rational response to economic incentives. There was just a thread among a bunch of young lawyers in the alumni network, giving advice to another alum who was thinking of going to law school. They seem significantly less satisfied with their jobs as lawyers than I do with mine as an engineer. They don't make appreciably more money either. Many of them would love to do engineering - if it didn't involve math. If you ask them why they didn't learn more math in high school & college then, almost all will say that at some point, they fell of the train and just "didn't get" math. I think the problem is more that good engineers are too successful. They have every incentive to remain an engineer and zero incentive to train the next generation. This has gone on for about two generations, which means that the pipeline of home-grown American talent is just about dry. I would kinda like to teach. I come from a family with three generations of teachers on my mother's side. I like working with kids. But there is no possible way that I could rationalize giving up a six-figure Google job where I can get in to work at 11:00, the feed me, I get cool data to play with, and everyone sees my work, for a $30k/year teaching job where I work from 8:00 AM to 4:30 PM, have homework, and deal with parents who threaten to sue me. I think a major difference between Asian cultures and here is that teaching is a high-status profession in Asia. Here, the assumption is that people become teachers because they can't get hired anywhere else, and they're paid accordingly. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as everyone who can get hired elsewhere chooses to work elsewhere, and the only math/science teachers you get are the ones that can't hack it in industry or academia (& a couple saints that just don't want to work there, for any amount of money).

plinkplonk 18y ago
"a major difference between Asian cultures and here is that teaching is a high-status profession in Asia. Here, the assumption is that people become teachers because they can't get hired anywhere else, and they're paid accordingly." At least in India, many people become teachers "because they can't get hired anywhere else, and they're paid accordingly." This is particularly true in Engineering/Science/Mathematics. Most teachers have zero industry experience, have never worked as engineers, have never done any significant engineering/science etc etc and do choose teaching because they couldn't hack in the industry. [except for a few really good teachers at say the IIT's - which have their share of terrible teachers - but you could find equivalent folks in say MIT]. As you said "(& a couple saints that just don't want to work there, for any amount of money)." So maybe you are talking of China/other parts of Asia?
- nostrademons 18y ago
  Yeah, I was mostly talking about China, as that's (half) my cultural background. I think it applies in Japan/Vietnam/Korea as well, knowing some Japanese/Vietnamese/Korean families.
geebee 18y ago
We'll see if the collapse of the financial industry encourages more young Americans into engineering. That said, I actually went to law school (Columbia) for one semester before dropping out and enrolling in a PhD program in engineering (at Berkeley). The law school is, of course, about 95% American, whereas in the Engineering school, I became very accustomed to being the only person in the room who spoke English as a first language. I think it's great that Engineering is a profession where you are likely to work alongside people from all over the world. But I think it's bad that it's become(ing?) a profession where you're unusual if you're a native Californian in graduate programs with names like "The University of California". I'll say this - in spite of all the hand-wringing, I don't see even the slightest commitment from Berkeley to bringing in more Americans. And as long as they can wave the magic wand and get more students from overseas, neither they or the employers who want to keep this pipeline will ever bother finding ways to get more Americans into the field. As for law: yeah, they may be unhappy, but I earned 75K/year my first year out of Berkeley at Sun Micro. Kids from the law school were starting at $125-150K/yr. I actually disagree that the Americans you mentioned can't learn math. I didn't take my first calculus class until I was 24 years old, and I got A's all the way through. The incentives just aren't there relative to other fields. And as long as we import hundreds of thousands of H1B workers ever decade, it won't be. Now, we're getting a good sense of what happens when you destroy a homegrown profession and replace it with foreign nationals.

gaius 18y ago

Because we controlled the wages of engineers with a visa program, but not finance or legal professionals, we deterred our own from going into these fields This is the key, really. Why should only engineering in general and computer programming in particular be "special"? Why isn't the US importing medical doctors (for example) hand over fist? There is a very deliberate attempt to treat programming as not one of the "professions" but as labour.

potatolicious 18y ago
It's R&D versus labour. You don't want to import labour (e.g. doctors), but you want to import as much R&D personnel as you can get your hands on (this includes other professions such as biologist, physicist, etc). The idea is that depriving, say, China of doctors doesn't really accomplish anything except generate more sick Chinese people, which doesn't really pose a major strategic advantage to the US. The only incentive to import them is if there is a major shortage locally (and so far there isn't). On the other hand, depriving China of engineers can give a significant competitive boost to the US. The more researchers and developers you import the higher chance you have that something that would've been invented in a competing country is invented here instead.
- gaius 18y ago
  But the typical H1B isn't in R&D - he's cranking out code for a large IT shop. The R&D side of things is taken care of with academic visas. If the US is short of doctors and dentists - and it is, otherwise their salaries wouldn't be so high - then there's no economic reason not to import them.
  - barry-cotter 18y ago
    Medical and dental wages are high in large part due to licenture, same as lawyers. They all have guilds, where a union also certifies, so they limit supply to the benefit of incumbents and the detriment of potential entrants and clients.
    - 18y ago

robak 18y ago

It is American kids choice to study "Women studies" vs. relatively much harder CS. Why immigrants should be blamed?