Discussion

The Global Move

supliminal: We are not allowed to discuss the underlying factors. So we won’t.

sergiotapia: I'm a single issue voter: who is protecting the american tech worker?We should dismantle the H1B program if we are struggling to find roles for American youth.

henry2023: Work is not charity, each H1B that comes to the US will bring twice or triple its income as US GDP.It’s a net positive for America.

shimman: What are the underlying factors? That capital within the tech industry is horribly mismanaged and that maybe we should let the public decide how technology is shaped in this country rather than a small group of people that unironically believe in monarchies and hold deeply anti-democratic views?

milkshakes: are you talking about the same public that voted in our current clowns? no thank you

zthrowaway: Don’t blame the public. If only BOTH sides didn’t give us clowns to vote for. I hope the dems prop up some solid candidates next time because the past 8 years has been a total joke.

stego-tech: This remains quite the nasty storm of a job market.* A non-zero amount of employers simply aren't opening jobs because they're all-in on AI replacing workers within the next 6 to 18 months, and have been all-in on that gambit for the past two to three years.* Tariffs are choking out domestic tech workers in non-tech companies, as those companies try to save money by farming out to MSPs and contractors instead of retaining in-house talent.* Interest rates choke out job growth across the economy as a whole, but the Fed can't really lower them since inflation continues skyrocketing due to tariffs and geopolitical destabilization* The government axed 10% of the entire bodycount from the 2008 Collapse, in the span of a year, and from within its own ranks, thus increasing competition further* The remaining folks who want to put butts in seats are being tied by their leadership into offering lower salaries for higher skills/experience, and the hiring managers still want to find a candidate that's willing to take shit pay but also not leave the second things improve* Continued datacenter buildouts and the Nth-order effects on supply chains continue to support the narrative that AI will just replace all work(ers) anyway, so there's no point trying to deal with this crisis, but aren't displacing enough jobs to spur policymakers into actually fixing the problem through increasing taxes or passing more regulations.* Ongoing deportations are hampering complimentary jobs for citizens. Research from the Obama era deportations show that for every 100 migrants deported, 12 citizens lose their jobs - meaning under the current regime alone, as many as 72,000 fewer jobs exist solely from deportation efforts since the start of their term.This is bad, ya'll. There's no "easy" way out of this either, no silver bullet to make everything all better and get folks back into job roles again. If the regime capitulates on tariffs or geopolitics (which they won't), they look weak and incompetent (which they are). If the Fed lowers rates to boost job growth, inflation will take off like a rocket because that's what Capital has been trying to engineer since 2024; if the Fed raises interest rates to keep inflation in check, the job market will crater and the datacenter boom will go bust as safer investments produce good returns again. If employers keep wages low, workers will fuck off to greener pastures the literal second they find something; if they raise wages to match cost of living and promote familial growth, they'll have to hire fewer workers and thus increase competition. Hell, by some estimates it's easier to get into Harvard than land a job right now!Shit's fucked, and until someone forces accountability and takes the L (namely the regime who started this shitshow in the first place), nothing is going to really improve.

harimau777: IMHO, the easy answer is wealth taxes and massively increased social safety net in order to bring America in line with developed countries.

Rumudiez: even when they make 6 figures, live in a tiny apartment with no furniture, and send back their whole paycheck in remittances each month?or do you mean the old motel in the scenic locale you used to go as a kid, that has since been bought up by immigrants, has AI art peeling off the walls now and has gone without basic maintenance for 30 years?

henry2023: Yeah, even then.

ryandrake: This kind of vague innuendo, excused by a belief that you're under threat of censorship, adds zero value to the discussion.

georgeburdell: Given the civil unrest during the Covid lockdowns, I’d say robust domestic employment is good policy

bootsmann: The price that has to be paid for robust domestic employment got Trump 2 elected. You can’t have a tight labour market and expect to only pay pennies on the dollar for your burrito taxi.

saltyoldman: I don't think the rich should be taxed a dime more until they route out the Fraud. What's the point of having all the rich people suddenly pay out $40 Billion next week, if that money disappears in California Homeless and Hospice crap. I don't disagree with increased safety nets but it needs to be done without people writing 50k Medicare billing lines per day.Supposedly CA spent 800k on EACH HOMELESS PERSON over the last 5 years. They could have all gotten a free home in a suburb and developer salary for 2 years instead of fraud capture.

siliconc0w: It needs to be a yes-and. We need to be better about fraud (digital ID + biometric proof on delivery of services) and we need a more equitable tax system that doesn't have the top .1% paying an effective tax rate lower than a school teacher.

jandrewrogers: The economies you want to copy are even more stagnant than the US economy. It isn't obvious why this would be a long-term improvement.

noident: Probably 90% of my coworkers in a US tech company are on a work visa. Now that there is pressure on the H1B program, my company is investing in a permanent engineering team in India. Whether this will pay off for them in the long term is a matter of debate, but it seems like the near-term future of the US engineering team is in serious doubt.You can't just "dismantle H1B" and expect it not to backfire.

siliconc0w: Don't forget skyrocketing employer health care costs due to Government-endorsed monopoly and fraud that is the US Healthcare system. Robots don't need healthcare.

iririririr: this article said nothing at all besides the blatantly obvious.it's the usual elastic job market. yesterday BE was down because clueless employers thought saas and cloud would be good enough. it wasn'ttoday FE is down because employers think slop react is good enough. it clearly isn't.and cycles goes on.

stego-tech: > I don't think the rich should be taxed a dime more until they route out the Fraud.Kindly fuck off with that repeatedly disproven propaganda, Reagan. The systemic forcing of wasting grants because the government handcuffs itself from investing in public infrastructure or regulating bad actors is not akin to fraud, and never has been.You want homelessness eradicated? Housing as a human right, rent controls, public housing initiatives/buildouts, multi-use zoning, prohibitions on low-density housing in urban areas, all of those are things the government has known were needed for decades but eliminated wholesale due to "fraud". Now we spend the price of a literal house to keep homeless people homeless, and you want to call that fraud as well?Seriously. Fuck off, read a book, talk to people. Just turn off the podcasts and cable news for a spell.

saltyoldman: > Kindly fuck off with that repeatedly disproven propaganda, Reagan.Please don't do that, we all have opinions here.

aprilthird2021: People don't realize the alternative to importing skilled labor is to not have someone do that job here. The idea that so many US citizens are qualified and sitting on the sidelines while an H1B takes a higher paying job than they currently have is a fiction.

mixmastamyk: War: 200B now, 1.5T later.

saltyoldman: I don't disagree with solving that too. But it seems like the answer is always "TAX MORE" but nothing in our government spending aligns with the fixing the ACTUAL PROBLEMS.

mixmastamyk: IOW, tax more must be combined with spend less. And spend more efficiently, yes.

akramachamarei: In line with developed countries except, for example, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden, each of whom previously levied wealth taxes on individuals, but apparently didn't like the taste, and have since repealed.

The more useful way to think about this is competition density rather than raw job count. A market with 10% more jobs but 2-5x times more candidates isn’t a better market, it’s a harder one wearing a better outfit.

booleandilemma: The more useful way to think about this is competition density rather than raw job count. A market with 10% more jobs but 2-5x times more candidates isn’t a better market, it’s a harder one wearing a better outfit.We need to cancel the H-1B visa program. It is not helping Americans.If more Americans knew how much money was being funneled to non-Americans they would be outraged.https://sign.moveon.org/petitions/stop-h1b-visa-holders

JumpCrisscross: > If more Americans knew how much money was being funneled to non-Americans they would be outragedThe folks being hurt are, broadly, earning more than the average American. Generating outrage around H-1B, specifically, has always been difficult because it comes across as a champagne problem to the electorate. This is why broader anti-immigration messaging succeeds where targeted proposals have failed.

booleandilemma: I have worked in offices where half my coworkers were not American.The average American doesn't get to peek inside these offices and so they don't realize how bad the problem is.They see non-Americans working in taxi cabs, in landscaping, in food trucks, but they haven't seen how many white collar positions are being taken over by non-Americans. High salary positions. Management positions.It's a disgrace we're letting this happen to our own country.

mattnewton: I’d hope that average American doesn’t care about jobs they aren’t qualified for being filled by people paying taxes into their communities.

JumpCrisscross: > The average American doesn't get to peek inside these offices and so they don't realize how bad the problem isRight. They don't care how bad the problem is in an office they will never be offered a job in.> They see non-Americans working in taxi cabs, in landscaping, in food trucks, but they haven't seen how many white collar positions are being taken over by non-Americans. High salary positions. Management positionsUh, the right has been railing about Indian and Chinese born tech CEOs for at least twenty years now. It didn't land until the message was broadened. (And even then, it was cheap to discard.)

bobthepanda: If anything, the average American is feeling a lot of schadenfreude after being lectures to “learn to code” for the last two decades.

bootsmann: Its really quite impressive how massively ingrained fixed-pie thinking has become in the American public discourse and your comments show this very well. The idea that these jobs would still exist if companies were only allowed to hire Americans is delusional frankly.

mixmastamyk: The pie is open during times of plenty, not during the down times.

bootsmann: Times of plenty like the 6 years of unmatched growth the US had since covid? Where are these down times you’re talking about?