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naraburns  nihil supernum  16d ago (text post)   26868 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

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Isn’t the more direct causation that big tech has replaced you with cheaper foreign workers? Workers who are habituated to a lower quality of life and who may intend to return home with greater purchasing power than you possess with the same wage? Who sometimes live illegally in shared accommodations to reduce the housing burden and who don’t mind being overworked because of cultural differences and who sometimes practice nepotism at your expense? Who may not have the same college debt because they fib about their education? Not that this doesn’t absolve Biden, but the reason (say) FAANG doesn’t pay more is because they don’t have to. We could have had an upper middle class utopia where FAANG sponsors high school and college programming courses and recruits homegrown talent while increasing wages but… no.

I blame the free market fetishists.

I think you are imbibing media narratives. The downward pressure on tech salaries and employment came in the summer of 2022 when banks collapsed, startups imploded, and VC money became tight.

Big tech hires from abroad because there aren’t enough top quality engineers here. We do have programs to grow talent in our own pipelines for non traditional candidates, and internally we say it’s because we’ve literally exhausted the market for engineers that can meet our standards. Google, Meta et al are largely engaged in zero sum struggles for the same relatively small pool of talent.

There’s approx 580k h1-b employees, so it’s impossible that these are all “top quality”. Even if Amazon couldn’t find workers as efficient as the h1-b’s (has this been studied?) they can hire two for the work of one and still have gratuitous profit margins left over. If there are more high wage jobs available to the middle class then wages increase. From BlackRock —

A reduction in the share of workers can lead to labour shortages, which may raise the bargaining power of employees and lift wages

Two C players means you’re just dragging down your A players even more than if you’d hired the one. We don’t want them, it would be better to just not hire.

There are apparently employers like Accenture that play games with H1-B to bring in bottom tier talent to work here and grind out garbage tier code. Big Tech is not doing this.

All 8k h1bs that Amazon brought in just last year are “A players”? How do you see two people doing the work of one “dragging down the A players”?

Amazon is not the same tier as Meta and Google. Engineer comp at Amazon is about half of what it is at Meta or Google. We reject a whole lot of applicants coming from Amazon.

C players drag down A players in lots of ways. The most obvious is making messes for the A players to clean up. Less obvious is trying to justify their existence through things like diversity initiatives and such that cause everyone to have to deal with linguistic purges and trainings and such. They also just take far longer to explain things to, and they’ll bog you down with questions they ought to be able to answer for themselves if they were smarter or more conscientious.

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