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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   17457 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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Like most things this is just people getting into semantics arguments, when they likely agree with each other.

The MAGA people: yes to high skilled immigration. Yes to operation paper clip, and draining the rest of the world of their geniuses.

The tech people: same.

But there is a contingent of people who, when they say “high skilled” mean: useless Indian code monkeys, “IT consultants” and the like. Anybody who has worked with these people has had the following experience:

  • They lie about their abilities

  • They’re rude

  • They lie about when things are going to be finished

  • The work they do produce is low quality

This also does seem to be something unique to whatever system Indian uses to educate its population. It also seems to be demonstrated by the fact that India, despite supposedly being full of “high skilled” tech workers, hasn’t produced any high tech companies. There is no Indian OpenAI, spacex, Tesla, Google etc.

When the MAGA right hears “H1B” or “high skilled tech workers”, this is what they’re thinking of. They’re fine with Werner Von Braun coming here. They don’t want an endless stream of people who are claiming to have skills they don’t have, in fields where our own workers are apparently struggling to find work (although I doubt the truth of that as well: tl;dr skill issue).

I mean, if you find a foolproof (in the adversarial sense) way to assess how well someone would perform at a high-skilled job, you would be a billionaire overnight.

There is no Indian OpenAI, spacex, Tesla, Google etc

Because all the ones with enough chops end up at Google. Like Sundar :-)

66% of Infosys h1bs make less than 100k.

https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=infosys&job=&city=&year=2024

I think it's fair to say that Infosys doesn't actually believe any of those will perform well at a high skill job.

It's just trivially easy to spot h1b body shops. A salary floor and a ban on companies who have been exploiting them from getting more would be simple and effective.

Oh absolutely. I would certainly endorse a salary floor of $150K or even higher.

I mean, if you find a foolproof (in the adversarial sense) way to assess how well someone would perform at a high-skilled job, you would be a billionaire overnight.

No, you wouldn't, because it would have disparate impact out the wazoo, which means it would be illegal.

If Indian workers are so bad, why do tech companies keep hiring them? I'm not buying that it's because of nepotism. Different groups of Indians don't even seem to like each other much, and these companies have shareholder meetings and boards of directors. They face competition in the marketplace. And in my experience, when programmers have one common belief that seems to be contradicted by the market, the market is always right. Two examples: 1) you used to hear from programmers that they were massively underpaid relative to their value to their employers and 2) more recently, they claim to be more productive working from home, which doesn't appear to be true for most people. Why should I believe these anecdotes about Indian nepotism? Many other industries have the phenomenon of hiring only Indians. Maybe it's just comparative advantage.

Tech Companies, and, in fact, a lot of companies don't actually face competition. What they face is nonsense. What is bizarre is Elon being on team H1B when he just fired 80% of his people and service got better. The fact is, tech has been bloated for decades, we could eliminate almost all H1Bs, replace them with directional state U grads, and then fill in those direction state U grads with HS seniors and do fine.

...If labor laws allowed that. H1Bs are largely cause by credentialism and lawsuits. If the lawsuit pressure ever turned against H1Bs (aka a Soros level operation cracking back on claims that no American could do the job) there would be like 1000 H1Bs issued a year.

What's a directional state U grad? Even if there is bloat (I'm not sure I agree. Twitter has been extremely buggy and full of bots since Elon Musk took over.), it still helps companies to give them more people to choose from.

What's a directional state U grad?

A directional state school is typically a non-premier public institution within a state. They often have a cardinal direction in their name such a as "Eastern Michigan" or "Southern Illinois University" they also may be indicated by a city such as University of Virginia Arlington or University of North Carolina Asheville. These tend to have less competitive admissions than the flagship campus, but still generally screen for competent 18 year olds and have decent enough instruction that grads from their tech programs can do the kind of monkey grunt work the bottom 80% of H1bs appear to be doing.

Twitter has been extremely buggy and full of bots since Elon Musk took over.

You have rose tinted glasses, it was much worse before he took over. Particularly the bots. Perhaps you enjoyed the BlueAnon bots?

It was explained to me by a Brazilian H1B after he told a story about being offended by corporate DEI efforts thinking he needed help- Indian devs mostly suck, but they're so so so much cheaper that just fixing mistakes is more cost effective.

Indian developers are a lot cheaper and most jobs don't require a genius. There are plenty of boring repetitive tasks in tech and often the really talented people aren't good at these tasks because the best developers tend to get bored.

The model that works is two high skill developers in the west managing 8 lower skilled devs in another country. The two high skilled devs will complain endlessly about having to manage "low status" people and review code instead of writing their own but the truth is that Indians are often far more cost effective. The all Indians are awfull trope is exaggerated. There are plenty of awfull Indian devs but there are also high skilled Indian devs.

The argument is not “Indians aren’t capable of doing technical work” since that is obviously wrong. It isn’t even “there are no high skilled Indians”, since that is also obviously wrong. It’s that India is not uniquely predisposed to producing technical geniuses in a way that would justify the number of allegedly “high skill” Indian men who come to the United States and Canada.

It’s that India is not uniquely predisposed to producing technical geniuses in a way that would justify the number of allegedly “high skill” Indian men who come to the United States and Canada.

The second part of the argument is that Indians, being from a poor and less developed country, are obviously more willing to move to the US than people from Europe, China, Japan and elsewhere.

If Indian workers are so bad, why do tech companies keep hiring them?

I've heard it alleged that they are paid substantially less than American born workers, even guys on the same team in adjacent cubicles. Does anyone know if this is true?

At least in my $BIGTECH company, there are internal equity guidelines within roles. If you wanted to pay them substantially less, they would have to be systematically be promoted less.

Does that apply to contractors?

Employees only.

I don’t know that it’s unique to India- third world corrupt countries just seem bad at this. I’ve not heard nice things about Nigerian workers either.

The exceptions seem to be post soviet countries, but the Soviets for all their many flaws knew how to produce people who actually did stuff, even if it wasn’t reflected in their people’s standard of living.

It also seems to be demonstrated by the fact that India, despite supposedly being full of “high skilled” tech workers, hasn’t produced any high tech companies. There is no Indian OpenAI, spacex, Tesla, Google etc.

Nowhere other than the US and (to a much lesser extent) a handful of East Asian nations (China, Korea, Taiwan and Japan) have produced major tech companies. China only produced them because of local ownership rules and heavy state backing. Japan and Korea have big hardware companies but are bad at software, Taiwan got lucky with chips but has little else.

So really it’s the US and China.

There are kind of too many to list that disprove your point. Germany has BMW, festo/festool, SAP, Siemens, etc etc. England has rolls Royce and BAE, and honestly countless others. France has Dassalt, Ariane, and Airbus.

I mean it honestly just goes on and on.

My point is that India is implying a radical claim, that their country is uniquely full of highly desirable high tech genius workers. France, England, Germany, etc. aren’t making that claim and yet they appear to have high tech companies.

China could make that claim, and if they did it would be valid. China has tons of high tech companies (although some might claim it is stolen technology, but whatever).

India has no high tech companies, and it seems to follow that since they have a high population and still not innovative companies, they must be uniquely bad at innovation. There should be VERY FEW (if any?) Indians coming to the US on the claim that there is no America alternative.

That isn’t the case. It seems like something else is going on.

Ariane? The space company with 3 launches in the past two years? That's a smaller manifest than SpaceX last week.

Is your point that there are no high tech aerospace companies in France?

No; Arianespace is clearly a high tech aerospace company. But the phrase you responded to was "major tech companies", and if you'll forgive my moving the goal posts back to that, retaining ~1% of a market vs a competitor you got decades of head start against is not "major".

SpaceX accomplishments are of such magnitude that Arianespace once called them "a dream" (derogatory). It's cool that they can still reach orbit, but they're just not in the same league ... and what's most damning is they have no plans to fix that! They're not like Blue Origin, with big plans that are just running late; their remaining market is a political sinecure, so they're content with it. They're not a company you want to name to contest the differences between US and EU innovation, they're a company you want to name to demonstrate it!

I’m not comparing US and EU innovation. I’m saying that India, despite having a billion residents, has little to no high tech or innovative companies.

Ariane is not necessary to make my point. You’re arguing against the words here, not the point.

How are BMW or BAE the equivalent of Google or Amazon? The former are legacy industrial manufacturers, akin to Ford or Lockheed.

I Amazon is the yard-stick you are measuring by, the US (with Apple and Amazon) and South Korea (with Samsung) are pretty much the only games in town.

FAANG is dead, long live AAS.

Does India have an equivalent to Ford or Lockheed?

Because I’ve ridden in many Tata cars and…it doesn’t seem so.

I think it’s that they have a high population, have English as the de facto national language (since southern Indians refuse to speak/learn Hindi), and are poor, which drives emigration.

For the second point, we can even look at this place. I can’t name a single ethnically Chinese poster here (I’m sure there are one or two), but there are many Indians / South Asians. Chinese people may emigrate to the West today once they’re wealthy when they want to buy citizenship / a bolt hole somewhere, and some PMC Chinese families send kids to study in the US, but smart Chinese engineers wouldn’t even know where to begin in terms of emigration if they didn’t study in the West.

Nokia, Thales, Bosch, Ericsson, BAE, SAP, ASML, Logitech, Et Al would all like a word.

If Thales and BAE count as big tech, then so does Lockheed and Boeing. There’s no equivalent to FAANG.

Yes. The largest best companies are in the US. But a decent chunk of the second best are in Europe.

If Thales and BAE count as big tech, then so does Lockheed and Boeing. There’s no equivalent to FAANG.

How many billions in assets and net revenue, or thousands of engineers in it's employment, does a company have to have to be considered "big tech" in your eyes? Netflix is a relative small-fry by said metrics, and arguably not even a "tech" company (they're more of a movie studio) when compared a company like BAE or Lockheed.

Are you limiting "tech" to software companies? Otherwise I'd point to a few European examples like Nokia (pre-acquisition) or Ericsson or AMSL. Acquisitions are also probably skewing your count.

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