I have a friend whose university in Florida is trying to hire a professor for a specific field; they are having an incredibly difficult time finding someone domestically. Only two candidates showed up, and both were apparently terrible, and not a good fit for a teaching position.
A recent college grad may not be able to actually do the work that these universities are looking for.
>they are having an incredibly difficult time finding someone domestically.
Part of this is we broke the pipelines in United States to domestically produce such talent. Foreign student visas made these jobs extremely unattractive for domestic students with options because of low pay + debt load while making them extremely attractive to foreign students because until recently, many people around the world were willing to do whatever for US visa.
Even if you pay foreign workers the same, which I doubt is true, it’s still a form of labor suppression. These workers have completely different expectations than native born workers. My dad grew up in a village in Bangladesh. My aunts and uncles were college educated professionals from affluent families, but their apartments (in the 1990s) were like NYC housing projects. So my tolerance for grinding for my job is completely different than that of most native born Americans. And I got my citizenship in high school. I can’t imagine what it’d be like if I was trying to keep my H1B. How hard could you get Americans to work if getting fired meant they had to move to Bangladesh?
Look at it this way. Except at the tippy top, employers aren’t looking to hire “the best.” They decide what the role is worth, and then select from the pool of people willing to work for that level of pay. A de facto path to U.S. citizenship for someone and their kids is basically a form of non-cash compensation for H1Bs. So even if the cash pay is the same, the foreigner worker is getting more value than the American worker. The effect is the same as if the government kicked in an extra $50,000 a year (or whatever) to the paycheck of foreign workers but not American workers. So if the role pays $100,000, it will draw a pool of foreign workers as if it pays $150,000 a year. So, at every level of job, the American worker is competing with more qualified and motivated foreign workers, because the job simply is worth more to those workers.
For a long time, I faulted Americans who didn’t teach their kids to “learn to work 16 hours a day” like my dad taught me. But I have kids of my own now, and they don’t have the mentality of someone who is a generation away from having to take a boat to school during monsoon season. And that’s probably a good thing that we should want as a society.
> There is a reason American families move away when Asian immigrants move into school districts
Here, you equate "American families" to "white families." Your source (below) says that Hispanic and black student enrollment didn't change, just white enrollment. Maybe there are other factors?
"First off, no statistical relationship existed during those years between Asian American student enrollment and that of students from other groups, such as African Americans or Hispanics"
> they don’t have the mentality of someone who is a generation away from having to take a boat to school during monsoon season.
Are Asian immigrants in the California suburbs (the location of your source study) coming from this type of poverty?
I edited the post because I decided it was a tangent and wanted to make room for a point that was more relevant. I’m happy to address the point on the merits.
> Here, you equate "American families" to "white families." Your source (below) says that Hispanic and black student enrollment didn't change, just white enrollment. Maybe there are other factors
The article says that there was no “statistically significant relationship” for other races. That doesn’t mean you can infer that people from other races didn’t move away. It could be that there simply weren’t enough hispanic and black families in the sample to draw an inference. The study looked only at affluent school districts in California. There’s not a lot of black and hispanic students in those school districts to begin with. And the white families are much more likely to be wealthier and have more freedom to move.
I suspect the trend would hold true for affluent native-born black and hispanic families too. There’s just very few school districts where you have affluent asians living alongside affluent black or hispanic people. In fact, I’m not aware of any. I live in a county with a lot of affluent black people, adjacent to the most affluent black-majority county. My daughter is the only Asian in her class, which is otherwise about 70-30 white/black.
> Are Asian immigrants in the California suburbs (the location of your source study) coming from this type of poverty
My dad’s family was actually affluent landowners. That’s just what most of Asia was like until very recently. My sister in law is Taiwanese. The communists killed much of her extended family during the revolution.
> It could be that there simply weren’t enough hispanic and black families in the sample to draw an inference. The study looked only at affluent school districts in California. There’s not a lot of black and hispanic students in those school districts to begin with. And the white families are much more likely to be wealthier and have more freedom to move.
It could be that, but the study itself doesn't show that at all. It actually shows the opposite. Hispanics were, by far, the largest subset of students in the study. In the Central Cities area of the study, Asian and black student population was about even.
> For a long time, I faulted Americans who didn’t teach their kids to “learn to work 16 hours a day” like my dad taught me. But I have kids of my own now, and they don’t have the mentality of someone who is a generation away from having to take a boat to school during monsoon season. And that’s probably a good thing that we should want as a society.
These days I think it's clear your dad had it right. Your stance seems to be that protectionist and isolationist policies will keep citizens safe from international competition, but how long will that last in a Capitalistic society? And how will that prepare them for the future when the competition inevitably arrives.
And lo and behold, the ultimate competition is already here and it's not even foreign people, it's AI that is even cheaper than foreign people!
Monsoon season is here, we should all be looking for our boats.
Yet you can throw a rock and hit ten candidates for doctrinal STEM programs. I have no doubt that there are needs in specific areas. But that’s why the process described in the article permits exceptions.
In theory, you could trust USCIS to identify areas that have real need. But that process hasn’t been reliable in decades: https://spectrum.ieee.org/stem-crisis-as-myth-gets-yet-anoth... (“Salzman spoke of the latest data on STEM graduates and jobs, reiterating that STEM programs turn out at least 50 percent more IT graduates every year than there are U.S. job openings. He also said that if the H-1B program is ramped up to the numbers that are being advocated (up from 85 000 to 185 000), that worker oversupply could possibly increase to the 90 percent mark or more.”). Note this article was written before the impacts of AI, etc., started being felt. So things are even worse now.
I was going to post the same comment. The old 'no one wants to work' complaint which almost always translates to 'no one wants to work for super low pay'
Probably enough to live amongst the lower middle class till carpetbagger real estate speculation and the general clown economy push you back to the rust belt shithole from which you came.
Pay more. They will find someone at the right price. They are unwilling to find someone at the pay on offer.
We should stop listening to institutions (corporate or academic alike) demanding quality at the lowest compensation bound possible, leveraging visas for labor to accomplish this. Pay the talent, develop the talent, or go without the talent.
First, Florida killed tenure. You get reviews every 5 years and can be fired if they don't like what they see.
Second, Stop WOKE, means that Florida gets a say in what I teach.
So Florida took away the most important (and for many maybe only) attractive part of the job: academic freedom.
Almost half of Florida faculty are trying to leave. So yeah. Of course they get the bottom of the barrel. That's all that's left for them. With the ability to get a job almost anywhere else in the world you'd have to have extreme circumstances to consider Florida.
This is absolutely a factor; New College lost half its teaching staff when DeSantis took a wrecking ball to it over ideological disagreements, Florida is not a great place to be in the field right now.
I’d add that Florida higher education pays below average vs. nationally and the state is dealing with some serious cost of living issues at the moment (e.g. insurance).
It really depends upon the positions you're hiring for. For professors, you are looking at talent at the long tail. Top people in a particular field will be randomly distributed across the globe. The restriction that Florida is putting on universities means that they cannot go after top talent for professorships or researchers if they aren't in the United States. That's a problem. We want them here teaching our students. We want them making their research contributions here where we can profit from it.
Nope, he's just corrupt and had enough dinners with tech leaders to be convinced to put aside his anti-immigrant stance on this issue. Funny response, though.
A nice relocation package to a sunny climate would be pretty attractive to many qualified U.S. residents in the northern states.
Why are universities not creating a talent pool for their self-sustainment? Many of us have had to suffer through college lectures of dubious real-world application and near-incomprehensible accents. I am not alone when I realized that I could just enter the tech world with self-study, self-promotion, and applying to open positions.
They say, "those who can, do - those who can't, teach", and I believe it. Maybe the real question is: Are universities going the way of the physical newspaper, the personal blog, the dinosaur...?
> Many of us have had to suffer through college lectures of dubious real-world application and near-incomprehensible accents. I am not alone when I realized that I could just enter the tech world with self-study, self-promotion, and applying to open positions.
So instead of getting the credentials required to authoritatively say what does and does not have real world applications, you dropped out, removing yourself from a qualified labor pool? Do you think the deep engineering knowledge and practices to solve hard problems is overrated?
No degree required outside of a HR checklist.
CS students are not necessarily qualified outside of academia in the real world. H-1B just means you jumped through the hoops of credentialism to be a "qualified" candidate. Many universities require you to have a CS degree to work as an tech employee, so they shut out many qualified candidates. Their loss, and eventual downfall.
>Do you think the deep engineering knowledge and practices to solve hard problems is overrated?
Yes, extremely overrated. The emergence of AI is at least proof that "deep engineering knowledge" can be easily summoned by a prompt. The practices are on their way to automation. The hard work has been done.
> The emergence of AI is at least proof that "deep engineering knowledge" can be easily summoned by a prompt.
Gee, I wonder what the academic backgrounds of the theorists and engineers who made that possible is. Probably no advanced degrees and no people on sponsorships right?
The credential is of questionable value, it’s a checkbox to enable international folks to buy their way in via educational visas and to soak US students for student loan debt that can’t be discharged. It’s gating economic outcomes, not an objective measure.
What? Somehow I think you’re overthinking this. There is no conspiracy. International students have helped to get us to where we are. Could we use some course corrections, sure, but you’re throwing the baby out with the bath water. Don’t believe me, ask the CEO of your company, or any Fortune 500, or your stock portfolio about the need to have the best talent in the U.S.
You said it right there: the only people it’s important to are corporations and the stock market. Do I care if those gains are not realized because immigrants cannot be used for this use case? I do not. Their incentives (line go up) are not my incentives.
I hope the doctor I am seeing this morning has an undergrad+, same with my tax guy, and the guy that designed the bridge I am crossing and the road I am driving down.
Yes but we're on a tech form discussing specifically a person who dropped out of college to go into tech, a field that at the moment doesn't have any need for a college degree. They didn't remove themselves from the qualified labor pool by their choices.
Florida has passed a ton of legislation attacking professors. Academics aren't terribly excited to move to a state where leadership sees them as an enemy.
Not at all - I can't see how you're coming to that assumption. And even if that were the case, it still doesn't follow that somebody who has coworkers with (I'll charitably add a word for you: Strong) strong accents can't have an opinion that strong accents are a problem in critical communication.
Wow. The amount of quasi-xenophobic comments in this tread is nuts. They are also a bit misguided.
You don't hire a professor at a R1 school just to teach math101. You hire them they can build a research lab or otherwise help to advance the frontier of the field (cancer, stats, etc.). The talent pool in several of these fields is very very small for Americans, because the brightest just go (used to go?) to work to finance or tech. So if you say you can't bring any bright foreigners, you are constraining yourself to a lower talent pool than other countries, and thus will pay a price (in less research, in no foreign students applying and thus no $$ from them, etc etc)
There's different visa's for gifted people to come into the US. The H1B is not intended for this purpose you claim. The brightest won't be affected by this.
If you are in early career (i.e. graduated your PhD within the last 5 years) you are extremely unlikely to get the gifted people visa. The standard approach is to just get the H1B (not the lottery stuff for tech companies but the non-lottery one for hiring faculty at universities). Ask any foreign MIT professor hired early in his career and they went through H1B (and later on, they are more reluctant to move into a place like Florida..)
I just can't believe that anyone could be aware of the state of India - its infrastructure, culture, etc - and think we desperately need to bring in millions of people from there to build our country in the same manner.
> "The H-1B has long been abused by IT outsourcing firms sponsoring middle skill workers for underwhelming pay," said O'Brien, "Unfortunately, the proposal, as currently written, would go much further than trimming back the questionable uses of the visa at state schools."
This is a fair take but maybe a pause is just a pause. Considering how big of problem visa abuse is in education in multiple countries, these organizations taking a break to review things and start to take it seriously is probably a good thing.
This is a popular issue in Canada, Australia, and Europe too. There's obviously some need for reform. You just can ask people who work at these institutions. Not everything is an American republican-bad thing.
I actually disagree that just because something is a popular issue necessarily means there's need for reform, people are perfectly capable of driving themselves into a frenzy over something that, when actually examined, is functioning appropriately.
Well this isn't a new issue to me, I've been talking about H1B reform for a decade now before Tiktok ragebait existed. Mostly based on my experience trying to immigrate to the US and speaking to immigration lawyers. This isn't new and there's endless real examples of poor enforcement. The situation here is even worse in Canada regarding education Visas, it's a giant backdoor for loose immigration.
The visas in the US around education are even more liberal than they are for STEM jobs (which IMO is a bit exaggerated online), there's less or no cap limits in edu and the organizations can sponsor people easier than companies. IT abuse is the big ticket item while no one really talks about education. Both need better enforcement.
I'm not pretending not to understand anything, I'm genuinely unconvinced that's a particularly pressing issue. The actual material downsides strike me as minimal, especially as compared to the upsides, the costs of enforcing any change, and especially as compared to the amount of attention it gets.
I recognize that it's an issue elsewhere and that there are abuses and there is need for reform. But my point stands. The modern Republican party, especially in Florida, is generally not interested in reform to make citizen's lives better. Nearly every time they are given the benefit of the doubt, it's a benefit that should not be given them.
> According to a records request obtained by IFP, O'Brien said at least 315 of the 1,300 H-1B petitions approved between 2017 and 2022 were for physicians, PhD scientists or STEM faculty.
Yeah, we don’t want no stinkin doctors. Our healthcare is cheap as it is. /s
Born in San Francisco at Mt. Zion, now Zuckerberg Chan, to parents and grandparents born in Berkeley. What have immigrants ever contributed… looks around… oh.
Why stop at nationality. California for Californians! Pretty bad take.
I've noticed an interesting trend in various groups that I am in. People are generally anti-right-wing but tend to agree with them in areas that actually affect their lives. This story is an example of that - us in tech are plenty familiar with H1Bs, both in terms of the "talent" that it tends to bring in, and impact on the American workforce. So we know this is right. A different demographic is for example my black friends who are obviously not right-wing, except they are sick of migrants camping out in their parks and school gyms. Or my persian friends that don't love trump but are over the moon about what's going on right now.
I don't know what to make of that, it's like we are left wing in theory but right wing in practice.
You're observing the gradient between idealism and realism. It can look like hypocrisy, but people simply have multiple opinions. It says a lot that we are surprised when a person doesn't fall almost 100% on one side of the party line, because that crazy state is what we're used to.
It's just plain human to support outcomes that benefit one's self, family, friends, or community (especially if they are suffering, or losing what they were once afforded by their country or ancestors); even if you might have voted the other way if you were observing from outside, where you have the luxury to make more neutral decisions based on the big picture and long timeline.
As long as the delta isn't too gross, of course - there's where the subjectivity really comes in (How much benefit? How much harm? What does it mean to "deserve" something? Where is the line between simply deciding how your own country operates and harming others unnecessarily?)
A lot of right wing rhetoric plays into basic human tribalistic tendencies. That is what makes it so attractive to a subset of highly tribal people. And most all people do show some tribalism to a degree.
That being said it isn’t like these people are necessarily aligned on any other issues. What might your Black or Persian friends think of gay people for example?
But in the rich-poor left-right quad, only one square is strongly against importing workers, and it's on the right side. Even just looking at the right side though - it really feels like the non-rich right's opinion on this is louder than the rich right's opinion (though, of course, it is money, not volume, that directs both parties in most cases).
It sure reduced salaries for tech workers where most H1Bs went to work, didn’t it? Are you arguing we didn’t bring enough H1Bs? Are we holding it wrong?
Many big tech CEOs financed Trump's inauguration. Many donated to his ball room. Those MAGA hat wearers paying millions for access/behind the scenes policy creation are.
Adding to OPs point, Trump did a major immigration push, yet a major push to punish companies/employees who create the demand that immigrants were filling was not part of that. Imagine launching a 50+ billion dollar drug war, but only going after drug users.
The labor market for recent college graduates is very soft right now, so it seems like a good time for a pause on importing foreign workers: https://www.investopedia.com/workers-who-attended-college-ar...
I have a friend whose university in Florida is trying to hire a professor for a specific field; they are having an incredibly difficult time finding someone domestically. Only two candidates showed up, and both were apparently terrible, and not a good fit for a teaching position.
A recent college grad may not be able to actually do the work that these universities are looking for.
>they are having an incredibly difficult time finding someone domestically.
Part of this is we broke the pipelines in United States to domestically produce such talent. Foreign student visas made these jobs extremely unattractive for domestic students with options because of low pay + debt load while making them extremely attractive to foreign students because until recently, many people around the world were willing to do whatever for US visa.
And the usual: home country situation may be fine but US professor pay is better than any/professor pay in home country.
+ most countries don’t crush their graduates with nearly the same debt
+ PhDs abroad can be quicker to get making lower pay acceptable
Even if you pay foreign workers the same, which I doubt is true, it’s still a form of labor suppression. These workers have completely different expectations than native born workers. My dad grew up in a village in Bangladesh. My aunts and uncles were college educated professionals from affluent families, but their apartments (in the 1990s) were like NYC housing projects. So my tolerance for grinding for my job is completely different than that of most native born Americans. And I got my citizenship in high school. I can’t imagine what it’d be like if I was trying to keep my H1B. How hard could you get Americans to work if getting fired meant they had to move to Bangladesh?
Look at it this way. Except at the tippy top, employers aren’t looking to hire “the best.” They decide what the role is worth, and then select from the pool of people willing to work for that level of pay. A de facto path to U.S. citizenship for someone and their kids is basically a form of non-cash compensation for H1Bs. So even if the cash pay is the same, the foreigner worker is getting more value than the American worker. The effect is the same as if the government kicked in an extra $50,000 a year (or whatever) to the paycheck of foreign workers but not American workers. So if the role pays $100,000, it will draw a pool of foreign workers as if it pays $150,000 a year. So, at every level of job, the American worker is competing with more qualified and motivated foreign workers, because the job simply is worth more to those workers.
For a long time, I faulted Americans who didn’t teach their kids to “learn to work 16 hours a day” like my dad taught me. But I have kids of my own now, and they don’t have the mentality of someone who is a generation away from having to take a boat to school during monsoon season. And that’s probably a good thing that we should want as a society.
> There is a reason American families move away when Asian immigrants move into school districts
Here, you equate "American families" to "white families." Your source (below) says that Hispanic and black student enrollment didn't change, just white enrollment. Maybe there are other factors?
"First off, no statistical relationship existed during those years between Asian American student enrollment and that of students from other groups, such as African Americans or Hispanics"
> they don’t have the mentality of someone who is a generation away from having to take a boat to school during monsoon season.
Are Asian immigrants in the California suburbs (the location of your source study) coming from this type of poverty?
EDIT: As has become traditional, rayiner edited the original post when it was proven completely false. Here is the article that "proved" their point: https://www.the74million.org/article/fear-of-competition-res...
>As has become traditional, rayiner edited the original post when it was proven completely false.
This is really egregious internet-style arguing.
That's fair, but it is the same story over and over with this user. At some point, it needs to be called out.
I try not to edit after I see a response. I just do it to refine my thoughts, usually within 10 minutes of posting.
I edited the post because I decided it was a tangent and wanted to make room for a point that was more relevant. I’m happy to address the point on the merits.
> Here, you equate "American families" to "white families." Your source (below) says that Hispanic and black student enrollment didn't change, just white enrollment. Maybe there are other factors
The article says that there was no “statistically significant relationship” for other races. That doesn’t mean you can infer that people from other races didn’t move away. It could be that there simply weren’t enough hispanic and black families in the sample to draw an inference. The study looked only at affluent school districts in California. There’s not a lot of black and hispanic students in those school districts to begin with. And the white families are much more likely to be wealthier and have more freedom to move.
I suspect the trend would hold true for affluent native-born black and hispanic families too. There’s just very few school districts where you have affluent asians living alongside affluent black or hispanic people. In fact, I’m not aware of any. I live in a county with a lot of affluent black people, adjacent to the most affluent black-majority county. My daughter is the only Asian in her class, which is otherwise about 70-30 white/black.
> Are Asian immigrants in the California suburbs (the location of your source study) coming from this type of poverty
My dad’s family was actually affluent landowners. That’s just what most of Asia was like until very recently. My sister in law is Taiwanese. The communists killed much of her extended family during the revolution.
> It could be that there simply weren’t enough hispanic and black families in the sample to draw an inference. The study looked only at affluent school districts in California. There’s not a lot of black and hispanic students in those school districts to begin with. And the white families are much more likely to be wealthier and have more freedom to move.
It could be that, but the study itself doesn't show that at all. It actually shows the opposite. Hispanics were, by far, the largest subset of students in the study. In the Central Cities area of the study, Asian and black student population was about even.
> For a long time, I faulted Americans who didn’t teach their kids to “learn to work 16 hours a day” like my dad taught me. But I have kids of my own now, and they don’t have the mentality of someone who is a generation away from having to take a boat to school during monsoon season. And that’s probably a good thing that we should want as a society.
These days I think it's clear your dad had it right. Your stance seems to be that protectionist and isolationist policies will keep citizens safe from international competition, but how long will that last in a Capitalistic society? And how will that prepare them for the future when the competition inevitably arrives.
And lo and behold, the ultimate competition is already here and it's not even foreign people, it's AI that is even cheaper than foreign people!
Monsoon season is here, we should all be looking for our boats.
whether you work hard or not, AI will destroy you, so enjoy life while you can
More than hard work, the key trait is grit. Because yes AI is going to upend everything and we need to be prepared to deal with what that brings.
Yet you can throw a rock and hit ten candidates for doctrinal STEM programs. I have no doubt that there are needs in specific areas. But that’s why the process described in the article permits exceptions.
In theory, you could trust USCIS to identify areas that have real need. But that process hasn’t been reliable in decades: https://spectrum.ieee.org/stem-crisis-as-myth-gets-yet-anoth... (“Salzman spoke of the latest data on STEM graduates and jobs, reiterating that STEM programs turn out at least 50 percent more IT graduates every year than there are U.S. job openings. He also said that if the H-1B program is ramped up to the numbers that are being advocated (up from 85 000 to 185 000), that worker oversupply could possibly increase to the 90 percent mark or more.”). Note this article was written before the impacts of AI, etc., started being felt. So things are even worse now.
> Only two candidates showed up
Untenured position in Florida - I'm guessing the pay was not great, no?
I was going to post the same comment. The old 'no one wants to work' complaint which almost always translates to 'no one wants to work for super low pay'
Junior professors get absolute poverty wages these days. Junior administration hires get paid more at most universities.
I don't know what the pay structure was. I can't even begin to guess at what sort of salary band a college instructor would be in, in any state.
But I am guessing that Florida is, in general, not the most desirable place for academics to be.
Probably enough to live amongst the lower middle class till carpetbagger real estate speculation and the general clown economy push you back to the rust belt shithole from which you came.
Pay more. They will find someone at the right price. They are unwilling to find someone at the pay on offer.
We should stop listening to institutions (corporate or academic alike) demanding quality at the lowest compensation bound possible, leveraging visas for labor to accomplish this. Pay the talent, develop the talent, or go without the talent.
This. There is rarely a shortage of qualified people.
It's usually companies who hide behind 'we use data from HR to ensure we pay market rate'.
Paying market rate doesn't make people change jobs.
And that HR data is effectively wage suppression collusion across organizations.
You're leaving out what happened in Florida.
First, Florida killed tenure. You get reviews every 5 years and can be fired if they don't like what they see.
Second, Stop WOKE, means that Florida gets a say in what I teach.
So Florida took away the most important (and for many maybe only) attractive part of the job: academic freedom.
Almost half of Florida faculty are trying to leave. So yeah. Of course they get the bottom of the barrel. That's all that's left for them. With the ability to get a job almost anywhere else in the world you'd have to have extreme circumstances to consider Florida.
This is absolutely a factor; New College lost half its teaching staff when DeSantis took a wrecking ball to it over ideological disagreements, Florida is not a great place to be in the field right now.
I’d add that Florida higher education pays below average vs. nationally and the state is dealing with some serious cost of living issues at the moment (e.g. insurance).
Exact same thing happened in Indiana after they instituted tenure review and ideological standards for teaching.
It’s kinda like it’s the purpose of these laws to dismantle public higher education.
It really depends upon the positions you're hiring for. For professors, you are looking at talent at the long tail. Top people in a particular field will be randomly distributed across the globe. The restriction that Florida is putting on universities means that they cannot go after top talent for professorships or researchers if they aren't in the United States. That's a problem. We want them here teaching our students. We want them making their research contributions here where we can profit from it.
Trump disagrees with you: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5601588-trump-h1...
The host interjected, “Well, we have plenty of talented people here.”
“No, you don’t,” the president replied. “No, you don’t have certain talents and people have to learn.”
Yup. Trump is a 1990s Democrat.
Nope, he's just corrupt and had enough dinners with tech leaders to be convinced to put aside his anti-immigrant stance on this issue. Funny response, though.
No, he’s just wobbly on immigration.
A nice relocation package to a sunny climate would be pretty attractive to many qualified U.S. residents in the northern states.
Why are universities not creating a talent pool for their self-sustainment? Many of us have had to suffer through college lectures of dubious real-world application and near-incomprehensible accents. I am not alone when I realized that I could just enter the tech world with self-study, self-promotion, and applying to open positions.
They say, "those who can, do - those who can't, teach", and I believe it. Maybe the real question is: Are universities going the way of the physical newspaper, the personal blog, the dinosaur...?
> Many of us have had to suffer through college lectures of dubious real-world application and near-incomprehensible accents. I am not alone when I realized that I could just enter the tech world with self-study, self-promotion, and applying to open positions.
So instead of getting the credentials required to authoritatively say what does and does not have real world applications, you dropped out, removing yourself from a qualified labor pool? Do you think the deep engineering knowledge and practices to solve hard problems is overrated?
>credentials required
There are no credentials required.
>authoritatively say
Experience beats credentials.
>qualified labor pool
No degree required outside of a HR checklist. CS students are not necessarily qualified outside of academia in the real world. H-1B just means you jumped through the hoops of credentialism to be a "qualified" candidate. Many universities require you to have a CS degree to work as an tech employee, so they shut out many qualified candidates. Their loss, and eventual downfall.
>Do you think the deep engineering knowledge and practices to solve hard problems is overrated?
Yes, extremely overrated. The emergence of AI is at least proof that "deep engineering knowledge" can be easily summoned by a prompt. The practices are on their way to automation. The hard work has been done.
> The emergence of AI is at least proof that "deep engineering knowledge" can be easily summoned by a prompt.
Gee, I wonder what the academic backgrounds of the theorists and engineers who made that possible is. Probably no advanced degrees and no people on sponsorships right?
The credential is of questionable value, it’s a checkbox to enable international folks to buy their way in via educational visas and to soak US students for student loan debt that can’t be discharged. It’s gating economic outcomes, not an objective measure.
What? Somehow I think you’re overthinking this. There is no conspiracy. International students have helped to get us to where we are. Could we use some course corrections, sure, but you’re throwing the baby out with the bath water. Don’t believe me, ask the CEO of your company, or any Fortune 500, or your stock portfolio about the need to have the best talent in the U.S.
You said it right there: the only people it’s important to are corporations and the stock market. Do I care if those gains are not realized because immigrants cannot be used for this use case? I do not. Their incentives (line go up) are not my incentives.
It why, if you have a job, have a job. Good luck with the wind powered vegetable farm. Hope you or anyone you care about need any advanced sciences.
What year is this comment from? Having an undergrad college degree has been a near worthless credential in tech for at least a decade.
It may surprise you to learn that there are other fields besides tech.
I hope the doctor I am seeing this morning has an undergrad+, same with my tax guy, and the guy that designed the bridge I am crossing and the road I am driving down.
Yes but we're on a tech form discussing specifically a person who dropped out of college to go into tech, a field that at the moment doesn't have any need for a college degree. They didn't remove themselves from the qualified labor pool by their choices.
Florida has passed a ton of legislation attacking professors. Academics aren't terribly excited to move to a state where leadership sees them as an enemy.
> A nice relocation package to a sunny climate would be pretty attractive to many qualified U.S. residents in the northern states.
The weather-climate might be nice, but the political climate is less so.
And frankly, depending on the time of year and where you are in Florida, the weather climate is atrocious, too.
> and near-incomprehensible accents.
Where do you work that none of your coworkers have accents?
>Where do you work that none of your coworkers have accents?
How did you make this jump?
> Many of us have had to suffer through college lectures of dubious real-world application and near-incomprehensible accents.
From here; the implication seems to be that it's only in college lectures that people are faced with strong accents.
Not at all - I can't see how you're coming to that assumption. And even if that were the case, it still doesn't follow that somebody who has coworkers with (I'll charitably add a word for you: Strong) strong accents can't have an opinion that strong accents are a problem in critical communication.
Wow. The amount of quasi-xenophobic comments in this tread is nuts. They are also a bit misguided.
You don't hire a professor at a R1 school just to teach math101. You hire them they can build a research lab or otherwise help to advance the frontier of the field (cancer, stats, etc.). The talent pool in several of these fields is very very small for Americans, because the brightest just go (used to go?) to work to finance or tech. So if you say you can't bring any bright foreigners, you are constraining yourself to a lower talent pool than other countries, and thus will pay a price (in less research, in no foreign students applying and thus no $$ from them, etc etc)
There's different visa's for gifted people to come into the US. The H1B is not intended for this purpose you claim. The brightest won't be affected by this.
If you are in early career (i.e. graduated your PhD within the last 5 years) you are extremely unlikely to get the gifted people visa. The standard approach is to just get the H1B (not the lottery stuff for tech companies but the non-lottery one for hiring faculty at universities). Ask any foreign MIT professor hired early in his career and they went through H1B (and later on, they are more reluctant to move into a place like Florida..)
I just can't believe that anyone could be aware of the state of India - its infrastructure, culture, etc - and think we desperately need to bring in millions of people from there to build our country in the same manner.
Make it make sense.
Millions? Look up how many H1Bs are issued every year.
Hint: it’s low 6 figures, some years falling to 5 figures.
India’s Ministry of External Affairs counts 5,409,062 [1]. IIRC they have a big party every year to celebrate.
[1]: https://www.mea.gov.in/population-of-overseas-indians.htm
> "The H-1B has long been abused by IT outsourcing firms sponsoring middle skill workers for underwhelming pay," said O'Brien, "Unfortunately, the proposal, as currently written, would go much further than trimming back the questionable uses of the visa at state schools."
This is a fair take but maybe a pause is just a pause. Considering how big of problem visa abuse is in education in multiple countries, these organizations taking a break to review things and start to take it seriously is probably a good thing.
Giving Republicans the benefit of the doubt is nearly always a losing proposition
This is a popular issue in Canada, Australia, and Europe too. There's obviously some need for reform. You just can ask people who work at these institutions. Not everything is an American republican-bad thing.
I actually disagree that just because something is a popular issue necessarily means there's need for reform, people are perfectly capable of driving themselves into a frenzy over something that, when actually examined, is functioning appropriately.
Well this isn't a new issue to me, I've been talking about H1B reform for a decade now before Tiktok ragebait existed. Mostly based on my experience trying to immigrate to the US and speaking to immigration lawyers. This isn't new and there's endless real examples of poor enforcement. The situation here is even worse in Canada regarding education Visas, it's a giant backdoor for loose immigration.
The visas in the US around education are even more liberal than they are for STEM jobs (which IMO is a bit exaggerated online), there's less or no cap limits in edu and the organizations can sponsor people easier than companies. IT abuse is the big ticket item while no one really talks about education. Both need better enforcement.
> there's less or no cap limits in edu and the organizations can sponsor people easier than companies.
Why is this necessarily a problem?
The abuse and lack of oversight which I already mentioned. Pretending to not understand issues in an attempt to dismiss them is not a helpful tactic.
I'm not pretending not to understand anything, I'm genuinely unconvinced that's a particularly pressing issue. The actual material downsides strike me as minimal, especially as compared to the upsides, the costs of enforcing any change, and especially as compared to the amount of attention it gets.
I recognize that it's an issue elsewhere and that there are abuses and there is need for reform. But my point stands. The modern Republican party, especially in Florida, is generally not interested in reform to make citizen's lives better. Nearly every time they are given the benefit of the doubt, it's a benefit that should not be given them.
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I couldn't agree more!
So obvious no one read before commenting.
> According to a records request obtained by IFP, O'Brien said at least 315 of the 1,300 H-1B petitions approved between 2017 and 2022 were for physicians, PhD scientists or STEM faculty.
Yeah, we don’t want no stinkin doctors. Our healthcare is cheap as it is. /s
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Teach college? Without tenure and where the govt will attack you if you say the "wrong" thing?
This is how you end up with fewer citizens who are qualified to teach other citizens.
In a hypothetical job that had all those perks you desire, you would then agree H1B should be banned and the jobs should be for Americans only yes?
Don't change the subject, do you agree the US political system should prioritize the interests of Americans over foreigners?
Can hiring a foreigner actually benefit Americans more than hiring a citizen for the same job? (it's nuanced and case dependent)
In example, who's going to teach Americans how to run chip fabs?
Great news. We need this in all companies as soon as possible. American jobs for Americans.
Born in San Francisco at Mt. Zion, now Zuckerberg Chan, to parents and grandparents born in Berkeley. What have immigrants ever contributed… looks around… oh.
Why stop at nationality. California for Californians! Pretty bad take.
We don't want any more immigrants, and we don't care whether they contribute or not.
You control nothing but your vote, if you vote at all. Best of luck to you with your struggles and shortcomings.
I've noticed an interesting trend in various groups that I am in. People are generally anti-right-wing but tend to agree with them in areas that actually affect their lives. This story is an example of that - us in tech are plenty familiar with H1Bs, both in terms of the "talent" that it tends to bring in, and impact on the American workforce. So we know this is right. A different demographic is for example my black friends who are obviously not right-wing, except they are sick of migrants camping out in their parks and school gyms. Or my persian friends that don't love trump but are over the moon about what's going on right now.
I don't know what to make of that, it's like we are left wing in theory but right wing in practice.
You're observing the gradient between idealism and realism. It can look like hypocrisy, but people simply have multiple opinions. It says a lot that we are surprised when a person doesn't fall almost 100% on one side of the party line, because that crazy state is what we're used to.
It's just plain human to support outcomes that benefit one's self, family, friends, or community (especially if they are suffering, or losing what they were once afforded by their country or ancestors); even if you might have voted the other way if you were observing from outside, where you have the luxury to make more neutral decisions based on the big picture and long timeline.
As long as the delta isn't too gross, of course - there's where the subjectivity really comes in (How much benefit? How much harm? What does it mean to "deserve" something? Where is the line between simply deciding how your own country operates and harming others unnecessarily?)
A lot of right wing rhetoric plays into basic human tribalistic tendencies. That is what makes it so attractive to a subset of highly tribal people. And most all people do show some tribalism to a degree.
That being said it isn’t like these people are necessarily aligned on any other issues. What might your Black or Persian friends think of gay people for example?
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Hiring more H1Bs is actually a right-wing position, not a left-wing one. It helps reduce overall wages.
But in the rich-poor left-right quad, only one square is strongly against importing workers, and it's on the right side. Even just looking at the right side though - it really feels like the non-rich right's opinion on this is louder than the rich right's opinion (though, of course, it is money, not volume, that directs both parties in most cases).
It sure reduced salaries for tech workers where most H1Bs went to work, didn’t it? Are you arguing we didn’t bring enough H1Bs? Are we holding it wrong?
It’s an elite position.
I’ve never seen a MAGA hat arguing for more (or any) H1Bs - quite the opposite.
Many big tech CEOs financed Trump's inauguration. Many donated to his ball room. Those MAGA hat wearers paying millions for access/behind the scenes policy creation are.
Adding to OPs point, Trump did a major immigration push, yet a major push to punish companies/employees who create the demand that immigrants were filling was not part of that. Imagine launching a 50+ billion dollar drug war, but only going after drug users.