With Silicon Valley Fever mounting again, it's worth looking at the trendiest companies in America. From the San Jose Mercury News a year ago, a story that go so little attention that I didn't even see it back then:
Posted: 02/13/2010 04:00:00 PM PSTUpdated: 05/27/2010 04:42:07 PM PDT
The unique diversity of Silicon Valley is not reflected in the region's tech workplaces — and the disparity is only growing worse.
Hispanics and blacks made up a smaller share of the valley's computer workers in 2008 than they did in 2000, a Mercury News review of federal data shows ...
The rest of the article shows that these statements are also true for whites as well, but who cares about them?
Women in computer-related occupations saw declines around the country, but they are an even smaller proportion of the work force here. The trend is striking in a region where Hispanics are nearly one-quarter of the working-age population — five times their percentage of the computer work force — and when dual-career couples and female MBAs are increasingly the norm.
It is also evident in the work forces of the region's major companies. An analysis by the Mercury News of the combined work force of 10 of the valley's largest companies — including Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Cisco Systems, eBay and AMD — shows that while the collective work force of those 10 companies grew by 16 percent between 1999 and 2005, an already small population of black workers dropped by 16 percent, while the number of Hispanic workers declined by 11 percent. By 2005, only about 2,200 of the 30,000 Silicon Valley-based workers at those 10 companies were black or Hispanic.
The share of women at those 10 companies declined to 33 percent in 2005, from 37 percent in 1999. There was also a decline in the share of management-level jobs held by women.
... With the number of white computer workers also dropping after 2000, Asians were the exception. They now make up a majority of workers in computer-related occupations who live in Silicon Valley, although they hold only about one in six of the nation's computer-related jobs.
In 2008, the share of computer workers living in Silicon Valley who are black or Latino was 1.5 percent and 4.7 percent, respectively — shares that had declined since 2000.
This isn't broken out in the article, but looking at the accompanying graph, you can see that the white share of computer worker employment ("programmers, software engineers, research scientists, network and database administrators and related occupations") in Silicon Valley shrank from 47.1% in 2000 to 37.6% in 2006-2008, according to the Census Bureau. That's a drop of 20.3%.
But, that's not news.
Nationally, blacks and Latinos were 7.1 percent and 5.3 percent of computer workers, respectively, shares that were up since 2000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Of the 5,907 top managers and officials in the Silicon Valley offices of the 10 large companies in 2005, 296 were black or Hispanic, a 20 percent decline from 2000, according to U.S. Department of Labor work-force data obtained by the Mercury News through a Freedom of Information request.
So, Non-Asian Minorities make up on average only 5% of the top 591 employees in each of ten big Silicon Valley firms. That doesn't seem terribly in proportion to the NAM percentages in California.
You mean, Richard Florida's whole Vibrant Diversity shtick isn't completely based on hard statistical data?!? I thought diversity was strength! ( Next, you'll be trying to tell me that Dr. Florida's gays and performance artists are less important to the economic success of Silicon Valley than pocket protector nerds!)
Maybe somebody should have looked into this before vastly increasing the percentage of NAMs in California and the whole country.
At these ten big Silicon Valley firms, the share of whites among top managers at top firms shrank only from 66% to 64% from 1999 to 2005. That seems pretty typical: white people at the top do well for themselves and are less buffeted by demographic trends than average people.
The share of managers and top officials who are female at those 10 big Silicon Valley firms slipped to 26 percent in 2005, from 28 percent in 2000.
... The Mercury News originally sought federal employment data for the valley's 15 largest companies through the Freedom of Information Act in early 2008. Following an appeals process that stretched over nearly two years, five of those companies — Google, Apple, Yahoo, Oracle and Applied Materials — convinced federal officials to block public disclosure. Data from 2005 was the most current available when the Mercury News made the request. ...
It would be fun to compare the proportion of NAMS in advertisements for these five stonewalling companies to the proportion in their executive ranks, if anyone could ever find out the numbers.
At a time when eBay was headed by one of the few high-profile female CEOs in Silicon Valley, Meg Whitman, the share of the company's managers and top officials who were female declined to 30 percent in 2005, from 36 percent five years earlier, according to federal employment data. ... In Silicon Valley companies, men and women in technical careers are equally likely to hold mid-level jobs, but men are 2.7 times more likely than women to be promoted to a high-ranking tech jobs such as vice president of engineering, or senior engineering manager, Simard and Henderson found in a 2009 study.
The researchers found a series of clues from the water cooler to the living room. Men are more likely to develop informal professional networks, like taking coffee breaks with colleagues — networks that often lead to career opportunities.
The valley's married male tech employees are more likely to follow the traditional model of having a man working full time, with a woman who stays home with the kids, than are male professionals nationally, perhaps because of the high salaries paid in tech. By contrast, tech women are overwhelmingly in dual-career couples, and many face an either-or choice — parenthood or career advancement.
"We expected a difference," Simard told the glum-looking students at Stanford, "but this is kind of like the 1950s." ...
The horror, the horror that any employees anywhere in America are still making enough money to support a family on one income. Better double those H-1B visa quotas right away to put an end to that.
Some critics blame the government for allowing powerful Silicon Valley companies to rely so heavily on foreign-born workers on H-1B visas, which they contend has boosted the numbers of Asians in the tech workforce at the expense of other groups.
"The reason Silicon Valley is different is that those standards have traditionally been enforced in other industries," said John Templeton, whose "Silicon Ceiling" report details the lack of blacks and Latinos in Silicon Valley. "If you go to a bank IT department, or a cable television IT department, it reflects the community around it. But somewhere, government dropped the ball."
What role does H-1B play in these trends? Anybody know?
Seriously, perhaps an overall better way to look at employment than by race would be employment by U.S. citizens v. non-citizens. But that's not mentioned in this article, and I don't know if it's even aggregated anywhere. The 2010 Census refused to collect citizenship information, so I doubt if we'll ever hear much about it.
It sure doesn't come up much. From an Ibn Khaldunian perspective, perhaps that's inevitable: America has been on top of the world so long that our asabiyah is all frittered away. We now mostly just squabble amongst ourselves, minorities v. whites and whites v. whites over who cares about whites least. So these kind of divisions are pretty easy for the Larry Ellisons to manipulate to add a few billions to their net worth.
I don't understand this. Where are all the black computer geniuses you see in the movies?
ReplyDeleteHi, my name is a sooo fake Morgan Freeman. I was busy banging my wife's step granddaughter but maybe I can help you?
ReplyDeleteSteve -
ReplyDeleteWe might need a thread on this new WSJ piece:
Is Your Job an Endangered Species?
Technology is eating jobs - and not just obvious ones like toll takers and phone operators. Lawyers and doctors are at risk as well...
By ANDY KESSLER
FEBRUARY 17, 2011
online.wsj.com
Kessler sets up a dichotomy between "creators" and "servers", and then gives an overview of five different categories within "the next set of unproductive jobs that will disappear" - categories which he labels as "Sloppers", "Sponges", "Supersloppers", "Slimers" and "Thieves".
Anyway, lurking just beneath his narrative are a number of obvious topics which are near & dear to the iSteve readership.
So WTF, every single company, in every single field, in every area of the country needs to have the right numbers of blacks and hispanics? I know what the answer is to my own question. Just wish we could stop the insanity.
ReplyDelete"The share of women at those 10 companies declined to 33 percent in 2005, from 37 percent in 1999. "
ReplyDeleteThat sounds too much.
There's been some agitation recently to increase the percentage of women in senior positions in tech companies (look up the hash tag #changetheratio on Twitter), but I haven't seen anywhere near as much agitation to increase the percentage of blacks or Latinos.
ReplyDeleteModern day multiculturalism means that you are always surprised by reality when it smacks you in the face. Hey, did you know that there is only one Asian-American playing in the NBA, and I believe there are zero Asian-Americans playing in the NFL, certainly irrefutable proof that Asians are discriminated the evil racist white sports owners, hey but the NBA is 80% African-American and the NFL 70%,Uhhhhhh maybe we shouldn't inquire as to why there are only one Asian-American in both the NFL and NBA combined. I know, we will classify Polynesians as "Asians" so that there will be a lot more in the NFL, and lump the one Asian-American NBA player with all those players in the league that are from China. See problem solved, diversity reigns.
ReplyDeleteLatinos still run the corporate cafeterias. That's something.
ReplyDelete"Next, you'll be trying to tell me that gays and performance artists are less important to the economic success of Silicon Valley than pocket protector guys!"
ReplyDeleteIt should be pointed out there are a fair number of pocket protector gays.
Also... everyone I know in SV is hiring. The only problems with H1Bs is that there are too few of them, and they're visas instead of citizenships. If you're clever enough and technically inclined, you can get a job in Silicon Valley, immigrants or no. (And if the immigrants found their companies here instead of abroad, net win for America.)
Guys, let's step it up! I think Sailer is clearly hinting that we should begin bashing the Asians in Silicon Valley who are here on H-1B visas. So far I've only seen black and Hispanic bashing and even a couple of sympathetic comments directed towards Asian Americans. How can we consider ourselves to be loyal white nationalists if we don't take Steve Sailer's cue and begin bashing Asians as well. Let's also step up the condescension towards blacks and Hispanics. I expect better here.
ReplyDelete"Is Your Job an Endangered Species?
ReplyDeleteTechnology is eating jobs - and not just obvious ones like toll takers and phone operators. Lawyers and doctors are at risk as well...
By ANDY KESSLER
FEBRUARY 17, 2011
online.wsj.com"
Thanks for the tip, anonymous.
One quibble though. Kessler writes, "Fortunately, history shows that labor-saving machines haven't decreased overall employment . . ." That depends on whether you measure employment in terms of the number of persons employed or the number of man hours of labor employed. Historically, the benefit of labor-saving machines to the people as a whole has been in the form of shortening the work day (from 12 to 8), the work week (from 6 to 5), ending of child labor, retirement in old age, etc. For a generation now these benefits has ceased being distributed, the result being (ironically) stagnant or falling wages and increasing inequality. For today's two-earner family nothing could be more helpful than a six hour day.
"It should be pointed out there are a fair number of pocket protector gays."
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't necessarily say that there's a fair number of them, but yes, they do exist. Pocket protector blacks - now THAT's something you actually never see.
What about Jewish numbers?
ReplyDeleteBringing all those Asians here is not only bad for white, black, and Hispanic workers but also bad for nations like India. Brain drain.
If you're clever enough and technically inclined, you can get a job in Silicon Valley, immigrants or no.
ReplyDeleteAnd you base this claim on your experience as an American white guy who got a tech job in SV in the last decade?
No, I didn't think so.
All these articles are the same.
ReplyDeleteWhites (especially white males) underrepresented = no problem, not worth discussing
Whites(above all WMs) OVER-represented = Big problem -we need government to solve it.
Foreigners taking American jobs = not worth discussing.
OT. Readers might like to visit this poll about whether London School of Economics should have invited Thilo Sarrazin to a debate.
ReplyDeleteShould Thilo Sarrazin have been invited to speak at the German Symposium?
What's interesting is how Sailer has no sense of perspective here. The people here on H-1B visas are probably only a tiny fraction of the overall American population. The do very little to shift the overall American demographic. And they're disproportionately productive, as indicated by the various charts referenced in this specific post.
ReplyDeleteSailer though treats this situation no differently than he does the millions of Hispanics who flood in illegally into the country. If someone is unable to distinguish between the merits of the two, then I really have to question how high their IQ is.
"We now mostly just squabble amongst ourselves.."
ReplyDeleteAre you really complaining about this Steve? Because people like you, though they pay lip service to the notion of citizenism, do nothing productive for the national discourse apart from provoking the very petty squabbling that you now seem to be criticizing.
"Anonymous said...
ReplyDeleteForeigners taking American jobs = not worth discussing.
2/16/2011"
Well, these "Foreigners" will become Americans one day, so the saying goes, Haha :p .
namae:
ReplyDeleteHR, clerical, software testing, middle management, all heavily female in tech companies I worked in and with back in the dot.com bubble. I think partly that was diversity goals, and partly that was the fact that having a workplace with some women around is generally a nice thing. The programmers and engineers are overwhelmingly (like 90%+) men, though there are some women.
You might be interested in these two graphs Steve. They show the demographics for H-1B Visas for the year 2005.
ReplyDeletehttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/90/H1b_demographics.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:H1b_demographics_pie_chart.svg
Two things.
1) India is by far the largest source of H-1B Visas, if we assume that 2005 is a good indicator of the general trends as of late. Countries like China and South Korea and Japan make up very little of the H-1B allotment.
2) Overall, Asia doesn't account for nearly as large a source of H-1B Visas as one might imagine, assuming once again that 2005 is a good indicator of recent trends.
Thanks for the tip, anonymous.
ReplyDeleteLL - I was going to tell you to check out the comments section - but I see now that you've already posted over there.
Anyway, as I indicated above, Kessler is skirting around a plethora of iSteve favorites - HBD & IQ distributions, rent-seeking behavior [especially by "partially inbred extended families"], H1B visas, off-shoring, the sorry state of American edumakashun, what to do about employing the barely employable [much less the manifestly unemployable], etc etc etc.
And, as one commenter just said, "You can add human Jeopardy! contestants to the list" [of endangered jobs].
""It should be pointed out there are a fair number of pocket protector gays."
ReplyDeleteDefine 'fair number'. As a percentage, my impression is that it's significantly lower than the general population (I work in high-tech).
Tech companies, especially startups, tend to expect a huge time and energy commitment from their employees. If you hope to marry and have kids and a nice house (and why the hell else kill yourself with 70 hour weeks?), it's going to work a lot better if your wife stays home, especially once you have kids. It could also work to have the wife work and the husband stay home, but that isn't too common, both for social/prejudice reasons, and for biological ones (pregnancy and birth and breastfeeding all takes a big toll on women, even if they've got someone doing the housecleaning and cooking for them).
ReplyDeleteI think Silicon Valley constitutes a very useful datapoint for evaluating the effectiveness of various models of ethnic-coexistence, or lack thereof...
ReplyDeleteMy strong impression is that S.V. has an absolutely negligible rate of "racial agitation", despite being overwhelmingly non-white yet with the vast majority of the top executives being white. To some extent, this is due to the minuscule black population of 3.5%, since blacks have a long history of ethnic-activism. But Latinos are over 30% of the population, probably themselves outnumbering local whites, so given national demographic trends, the operative sociological factors are probably worth exploring.
First, Hispanics tend to have a pretty low rate of political activism, especially of an ideological character, and tend to focus primarily on "meat-and-potato" issues. But a much more interesting factor is that their overwhelmingly blue-collar orientation means their employment status-hierarchy is almost entirely parallel to that of the (extremely white collar) whites and Asians who dominate the tech industry, and hence non-conflicting. My guess would be that for most Latinos, the most prestigious job would be that of a police officer, with being a Marine or Army officer a close second. Also quite prestigious would be the other elite public-safety jobs such as firefighter, sheriff's deputy, or EMT staff. Highly skilled blue-collar professions would also be well regarded. On the other hand, some elite professions rather attractive to high-end whites and Asians, such as corporate lawyers or investment-bankers, might be considered somewhat disreputable.
Now although whites and Asians in the tech industry generally have a vaguely positive view of the police, the military, and similar professions, they'd probably consider it rather peculiar if their college-age children decided to pursue that sort of career rather than the Harvard/MIT/Yale Law/Goldman Sachs track. So there's really minimal job competition with the local, and very heavily Latino, working-class population.
(continued)
ReplyDeleteKeep in mind that economic rewards and social prestige are not necessarily similar things. For example, police departments are generally very well paid, with a good fraction of all S.V. area police officers earning over $150K/year (including overtime), and receiving generous pensions, putting them comfortably ahead of the average tenured professor at a good university. Yet I'd guess that the vast majority of educated-elite white and Asian families would be far prouder of a son or daughter who received tenure in the Stanford English Department than one who earned far more money serving as a sergeant in the local police department; but for most (working-class) Latino families, the opposite might easily be true.
Now obviously, the number of openings available for police or similar employment is rather small compared to the entire population, but these sort of professions represent the apex of a blue-collar status hierarchy, and thus influence the thoughts, aspirations, and values of vastly more individuals than they actually employ, especially among friends, close relatives, and extended families. And for every individual who might fall a bit short in reaching that sort of dream career goal, there are lots of solid fall-back options available that can provide a reasonably middle-class living, so the track being followed is certainly not winner-take-all. By contrast, those young people who gravitate towards the lure of becoming a sports-star, rock-star, or movie-star eventually discover that for every great success there are 1000x or more totally dismal economic failures, which produces a very different situation.
Here's another way to think about it. A certain rather high-strung Asian mother might brutalize her children into practicing piano 20 hours per week so that they can marginally increase their Ivy League admission chances so that they have a shot at attending Yale Law so that they might possibly become I-Bankers or Big Law corporate lawyers or venture capitalists. Maybe her children become successful, or maybe they have nervous breakdowns or attempt suicide. Meanwhile, a Latino kid in a working-class family who dreams of becoming a police officer can have lots of fun playing soccer every afternoon, and probably not hurt his chances much. To the extent that the children in each of these situations do reach their ultimate goal or perhaps fall short into some slightly less prestigious occupation, it's not entirely clear which will be happier, will be regarded as more successful by their social peer group, or will contribute more to society as a whole.
I think there are a couple of things here worth noting.
ReplyDeleteFirst, there is a big push by Blacks and Hispanics (and White women) to take senior management jobs at SWPL companies like Apple or Google. That's going to create the mother of all spoils battles.
Second, the talented middling class of White guys is being replaced by H1-Bs. Downward mobility.
So what are we looking at? Not so much "market dominant minority" (since the jobs at the top are now "marked" by Blacks, Hispanics, and White women) as pseudo Gentry being moved out (with catastrophic results by the way for the SWPL companies, imagine Apple run by Jessie Jackson instead of Steve Jobs) and down, and the middling class gets moved down.
So you will see IMHO more "borderer" types of behavior -- giant family groups/tribes/clans with feuds, revenge, as they are both moved to poverty and have no where to run. More fight than flight.
"while the collective work force of those 10 companies grew by 16 percent between 1999 and 2005, an already small population of black workers dropped by 16 percent"
ReplyDeleteThe innumeracy here is cute. You can almost see them thinking they said something profound. Note the "while..." to start it off - it makes it seem like they are going to compare apples to apples, but then they don't. So, the total increased but the share of blacks decreased. This newspaper apparently thinks that if the total increases, the SHARE of blacks should also increase, which is deranged. Should the share of every group increase, guys?
ReplyDelete"If you're clever enough and technically inclined, you can get a job in Silicon Valley, immigrants or no."
And you base this claim on your experience as an American white guy who got a tech job in SV in the last decade?
Well, I am a white immigrant in SV and his claim is correct. I changed jobs around four months ago, and there are plenty of jobs in SV today.
Basically, they don't care if you are not an immigrant or H1B holder. They just want people with experience.
Check out dice.com or Craigslist.
The large Asian percentage in SV partly reflects the large proportion of Asians in that region of the country. Rather than look at the workers, it's more relevant to examine the managers, as these guys are drawn from across the country and reflect the elite of the nation's software/hardware sector. 31 percent Asian, 64 percent white, 5 percent NAM.
ReplyDeleteAsians are clearly doing really well. I'd note that of those Asians, the majority are Indian-American. Indians are well represented not only as workers, but also managers. The next best represented group are Chinese-Americans. Other Asians are present too, but in much smaller numbers. Some of the Asians are American-born, but the large majority are foreign-born, though many of the foreign-born studied at American graduate schools. I'm not surprised as the high Asian percentage, as it's probably no higher (maybe even lower) than the percentage at your typical PHD program.
H1B and L1 didn't really kick into overdrive until 1999 onward. Even back then, before the tidal wave of foreign workers, lots of Asians were managers and workers in SV.
I wonder to what extent the high proportion of white managers reflects whites being older and being around longer. I'd say not much, when you consider the white percentage only dipped 2 percent over 5 years. Which isn't that bad. I bet a good percentage of the "whites" in SV are Russian, Israeli, or European. Maybe Iranian, maybe not.
At 3 percent of the managers, Latinos are doing really badly. I'd wonder how many of those are real managers, as opposed to diversity managers. For blacks, being only 2 percent of managers isn't good either, but at least blacks aren't super well represented in California's population to the extent of Latinos. In comparison to Latinos, the black underrepresentation isn't that bad.
A lot of the prominent names in technology are Jewish - Mark Zuckerberg, Sergei Brin, Larry Ellison, Steve Balmer, Jeff Skow, Michael Dell, Andy Grove. Many of these men were entrapranuers and built companies up from very little. Some of the prominent people are Indian (Khosla, Jha) or Chinese (Jerry Yang of Yahoo, the Nvidia founders) too.
What's interesting is how Sailer has no sense of perspective here. The people here on H-1B visas are probably only a tiny fraction of the overall American population. The do very little to shift the overall American demographic. And they're disproportionately productive....
ReplyDeleteNot productive. Destructive.
Each H-1B probably keeps a white baby from being born.
It would be fun to compare the proportion of NAMS and women working in upper management at the San Jose Meucury.
ReplyDelete"Anonymous said...
ReplyDeleteSailer though treats this situation no differently than he does the millions of Hispanics who flood in illegally into the country. If someone is unable to distinguish between the merits of the two, then I really have to question how high their IQ is."
Because they directly compete with US for jobs, dipshit.
***take Steve Sailer's cue and begin bashing Asians as well. ***
ReplyDeleteNice trolling Yan Shen.
"imagine Apple run by Jessie Jackson instead of Steve Jobs)"
ReplyDeleteWhen, exactly, did Jesse Jackson ever show any interest in running a computer company again?
When the SV workforce grew, the % of NAMs was supposed to grow too, because, you see, SV was supposed to hire only NAMs until their share of SV jobs matched their share of CA's population (i.e. 50%).
ReplyDeleteYeah, most whites probably aren't smart enough or academically inclined enough to work in SV. Most Koreans aren't smart enough to work in their own local version of SV either, but I don't see Korea or Japan or Taiwan or Shanghai importing mass numbers of smarter foreign programmers. They prefer their own native-born dullards to more dynamic foreigners because. I wish we had a government and corporate culture that thought the same.
ReplyDeletehttp://exiledonline.com/how-meg-whitman-failed-her-way-to-the-top-at-ebay-collecting-billions-while-nearly-destroying-the-company/
ReplyDeleteMeg Whitman, probably the highest profile female CEO, failed quite remarkably at eBay. It was only the initial rising name and brand of eBay that kept things afloat.
The article linked highlights some spectacular failures on her end. It also blasts her political aspirations.
I think right now we're seeing the real net positives of citizenism(if it also implies that skilled immigration can exist under it).
ReplyDeleteA larger talent pool from immigrants and their direct descendents all over the world all having a net positive benefit for the United States. There are negative kickbacks as some of that money goes to China or India in remissions.
The vast majority of the corporations listed seem to be from 80s and before so it likely has an older, traditional management structure.
What about the stats for internet startups? Much of their talent are recent and from younger generations.
"First, there is a big push by Blacks and Hispanics (and White women) to take senior management jobs at SWPL companies like Apple or Google. That's going to create the mother of all spoils battles."
ReplyDeleteAccording to?
"Second, the talented middling class of White guys is being replaced by H1-Bs. Downward mobility."
As a previous poster reiterated, there are plentiful jobs. H1-Bs have the consequence of pushing some of the lesser skilled/experienced out.
Wikipeding the depression claim, I found this nice note that "A 10 percent immigration-induced increase in the supply of doctorates lowers the wage of competing workers by about 3 to 4 percent." Likewise the H1-Bs of Sun Microsystem from that Wiki article states that it employs at most 5% as having temporary visas.
Its likely that H1-Bs are negligible, although to be fair these figures seem to be a bit older.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w12085
The Disparate Impact legislation should be strictly enforced upon those bigoted companies!
ReplyDeleteThe NYT Pundits.
So there's really minimal job competition with the local, and very heavily Latino, working-class population.
ReplyDeleteThat must be why the Iberian elites and Mestizo/Meso-Americans in Mexico have such great synergy.
So many commenters here pointing out that whites should just buck up and accept the competition. Well I've lived in one of these tech paradises, and I can tell you how Indian H1-B's get by. They go find a two bedroom apartment and stick 4-6-8 people in it, and with no furniture at that.
ReplyDeleteMany white Americans don't want to live like that. They want to, ya know, have a life. Which is partly I suspect why whites are more underrepresented in SV than in the tech industry as a whole.
Secondly, while we may benefit temporarily from the cheap talent of Indian workers, of those who go on to start their own tech companies in the US, more than least half will offshore work to the home country. This is a technology transfer and is one reason why we now have a $900 billion trade deficit.
US college students respond very efficiently to financial incentives, and the message they have been receiving from the tech industry for at least a decade is that they are easily replaced by foreign workers. 10-15 years ago many of the smartest college students went into tech. But in the last decade the number of American comp sci grads has fallen by half.
As a previous poster reiterated, there are plentiful jobs.
ReplyDeleteThere are plentiful jobs? The ability of people on the left to tell themselves incredible lies never ceases to amaze me.
Basically, they don't care if you are not an immigrant or H1B holder. They just want people with experience.
ReplyDeleteYou're cracking me up. The one thing they do NOT want is people with experience. If you're older than 35, they have no use for you. If you knew anything at all about the tech sector you'd know that much.
I am a white immigrant in SV
Then you are not a white American in SV, and you therefore prove my point.
Check out dice.com or Craigslist.
You don't come across as very intelligent.
My strong impression is that S.V. has an absolutely negligible rate of "racial agitation", despite being overwhelmingly non-white yet with the vast majority of the top executives being white.
ReplyDeleteDespite? Surely "because" was the word you were looking for there. Who do you think is going to do all this "racial agitation"?
Also... everyone I know in SV is hiring.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it's easy to get hired if you have loads of experience. It seems the main impact of H-1Bs is wiping out the entry-level jobs.
From my perspective there are too many Blacks and Hispanics still employed in Silicon Valley.
ReplyDeleteYou see unlike the author of the Mercury piece - I know what I'm talking about. Blacks and Hispanics are just not appropriate for information systems jobs - too dumb. Women on the other hand can be just fine - but they don't seem attracted to the work.
I taught computer science classes for several years. I never had a good Black or Hispanic student. I did have a few who were ridiculously under-qualified (that means stupid). I remember a Black guy who was enrolled by his company for the fifth time in my introductory data communications class. Even if he had gotten a passing grade from the college he still could never pass the Microsoft qualification test.
On the other hand in one data base theory class my best student was a woman. Almost no women took such classes, so she was doubly memorable.
I also managed and hired a lot of programmers and DB administrators in my day job. I wanted Chinese coders but I could never get enough of them - they were in great demand.
I inherited two Black programmers - both of whom I fired largely for incompetence but also in part for inappropriate behavior. Almost no one else among the technical managers I've known had ever seen a Black coder. I'm sure there must be a few somewhere outside of the movies - or maybe not.
Maybe the reason there are so few women coders is because good coders often don't talk. In the marketing areas there was always a buzz of conversation going, but my coders sat behind a closed door in complete silence staring at a screen all day long. At least some coders seek out such jobs so they won't ever have to talk to a fellow worker. This personality type seems to be much more common among men.
So the Silicon Valley employment stats look about right to me.
Remember when my ancestor Abraham Piersay first brought Black slaves to America he did so for their natural advantages in agricultural work not data processing. Silicon Valley used to be an agricultural center and I imagine a lot of Blacks and Hispanics had work there once. No more.
Albertosaurus
Part of the problem is that whites are fleeing Silicon Valley because they're either unwilling or unable to compete academically with the Asians there. See this article. Sailer would be wise to blog about it if he wants to fully comprehend what's going on in the Silicon Valley area.
ReplyDeletehttp://wsjclassroom.com/teen/teencenter/05nov_whiteflight.htm
I question that guy's comparison to "a bank IT deparment." I was involved in litigation involving a California bank's IT department, and all the managers were white males, all the technical people save 2 were male. The two women were asian. There were no blacks.
ReplyDeleteI can't judge Kessler's thesis here, but I remember one story he wrote in the WSJ around '02, recalling his attempts to run money. He said that when he'd solicit institutions, the response he'd get was, "what's your conflict?" I had always suspected it was all about insider trading, and he confirmed it.
ReplyDeleteH1B and L1 (intracompany transfer) have been a disaster for the American programmer. Programming used to be a really good career until it got foreignized under Clinton and Bush, from the late 90s onward. It's also correct to say that even when H1Bs become entrapranuers, they offshore a lot of work to Bangalore and Shanghai. That doubly screws the American programmer.
ReplyDeleteSome people seem to think it's just the middle, working, and lower classes that are under economic assault. Not true - even those from the educated affluent classes are in trouble too. We're all pretty screwed in the long term. A combination of mass immigration, "guest" worker programs, and free trade-driven outsourcing are going to really drive our job market into the ditch.
Sometimes I wonder why our government hates us so much.
As to the H1-B situation, my best friend works for the Labor Department. He is smart and hard working - not a typical Fed at all.
ReplyDeleteHe was at one time in charge of policing the H1-B visas in the SF Bay Area. At that same time I was managing the MIS group at a Russian telecom start up. Most of the software engineers (all of mine) were here on H1-B visas.
My friend's initiatives were slightly humorous. The Labor Department's attitude toward the H1-Bs was confused and irrelevant. They understood so little about the industry they had no consistent effect. They were never sure if their mission was to stamp out the injustices of private industry or if it was to aid the skilled labor shortage or was it to protect the domestic labor force from unfair competition.
They vacillated among these and other possible missions.
The notion that the government is responsible for any bad results in Silicon Valley is preposterous. The engine that drives the nature of the information industry is the ROI on talented personnel. Trust me, real government types don't understand this at all.
I also used to supervise accountants and account clerks at one point in my career. The best account clerks are more productive than the average one by maybe 5%. But as is well understood in the industry, the best coder can easily be two or three times as valuable as an average one.
It is fairly common for a really good coder to produce twice as many lines of working and debugged code and the normal guy sitting at the next desk. This is why IT managers hunt for stars. They hunt in this country and they hunt abroad.
The normal corporate wage structure has trouble with this. Base salaries and bonuses are based on the assumption that everyone is pretty much the same and the boss deserves more.
Not so. I recommended my best coder for a higher salary and bonus than I made. This is not uncommon in IT shops.
The range of value among IT single contributors is simply huge. Civil servants don't get it.
Albertosaurus
Well, believe it or not, some in SIlcon Valley Google think that Irvine Ca is a good city for some of their new jobs at the Irvine office. It has low crime Goggle states stated and of course the population is over 36 percent asian now and a life span of about 84 years. Lib whites hate Irvine even if its 36 percent asian since its so suburbian but with asians gaining influence things might changed. Irinve is ony 2 percent black and only 9 percent hispanic.
ReplyDeleteThe Disparate Impact legislation should be strictly enforced upon those bigoted companies!
ReplyDeleteThe NYT Pundits.
new link
As a computer programmer I've worked with many Indians and Chinese who are here on H-1B Visa's. It's very clear they are low-skilled and paid low wages because they have the 6 year employee sponsorship hanging over their head. But, I think the main reason we have so many H-1B's in the U.S. is because the Multi-culti crowd loves replacing the white middle class with Asians.
ReplyDelete"Bringing all those Asians here is not only bad for white, black, and Hispanic workers but also bad for nations like India. Brain drain."
ReplyDeleteOh please...You sound like you've been brain-washed by the Liberal Media. These H-1B workers can barely program a simple IF statement. Example: IF coupon=1 then savings=20%...that's about it. Once they get citizenship they then use the Family Reunification part of the 1965 Immigration Act to bring 50 of their uneducated brethren here to work at Wal-Mart, McDonald's, Target, etc. and thus take jobs away from American teens and seniors. It's a disgrace the H-1B Visa. That's why India LOVES the H-1B and keeps threatening to take the U.S. to court at the WTO if we try to reduce H-1B Visas. Definitely no brain drain.
"No, I didn't think so."
ReplyDeleteYou're right, I got my tech job in Austin, not SV. (My paychecks still say Silicon Valley Bank on them, though. And I'm a white American male.)
"As a percentage, my impression is that it's significantly lower than the general population (I work in high-tech)."
Typically, you can't tell until you meet their boyfriends. It's not uncommon for people to not believe me when I tell them I'm gay. I wouldn't be surprised if it's lower than the general population, but also suspect it's higher than people think. I've seen studies suggesting many gay men have more feminine brains (when it comes to the mental aspects that are sexually dimorphic) but it wouldn't surprise me if those guys are femmes.
"Yeah, it's easy to get hired if you have loads of experience. It seems the main impact of H-1Bs is wiping out the entry-level jobs."
I got my job with a smile, a smattering of Ruby, and a degree in Physics. The definition of "entry level" is rather fluid when you're talking about high-tech fields.
"But as is well understood in the industry, the best coder can easily be two or three times as valuable as an average one."
Only two or three?
ReplyDeleteSevern said...
"Basically, they don't care if you are not an immigrant or H1B holder. They just want people with experience."
You're cracking me up. The one thing they do NOT want is people with experience. If you're older than 35, they have no use for you. If you knew anything at all about the tech sector you'd know that much.
Shit, I could have sworn that my year of birth was in the 1950's. Then there are my buddies who are in their forties and so on. Damn, those beer goggles are fucking bad.
"I am a white immigrant in SV"
Then you are not a white American in SV, and you therefore prove my point.
Nope. Never pretended to be. However, I am drawn from British stock.
"Check out dice.com or Craigslist."
You don't come across as very intelligent.
I think you have not looked in a mirror recently.
The libs sure have a way of targeting anything productive in this country and destroying it by infecting it with diversity. I think they know its bullsh*t and destructive, they're just following their "evil empire" narrative and fulfilling it in a way they can pressure whites to go along with (after spoonfeeding them lies through the schools and media), while patting themselves on the back for helping out the "poor brown people".
ReplyDeleteIt is pretty clear that at the margins, the availability of H1Bs depresses salaries for Americans.
ReplyDeleteIf H1Bs were not available, employers in the US would have to bid more for the available employees and would have to spend more on training them.
It is also pretty clear that the availability of H1Bs allows employers to avoid non-high IQ minorities but still claim that they support diversity.
So, what is there not to like?
(Disclosure against interest. I came to the US on an H1B and then won the Green Card Lottery. I am also white.)
It is fairly common for a really good coder to produce twice as many lines of working and debugged code and the normal guy sitting at the next desk. This is why IT managers hunt for stars. They hunt in this country and they hunt abroad.
ReplyDeleteI'm really not seeing why America is supposed to accommodate these people in their quest for "stars", and none of the pro H1b crowd here are even attempting to address that question.
What about diversity of intellect!
ReplyDeleteHas anyone else noticed the gross under representation of the stupid in posts such as software developers and fusion reactor designers.
Surely something should to be done to adress this blatant discrimination, prehaps a quota system or something.
Stop whining about Asians competing with whites for jobs in Silicon Valley. Most of the readers of this blog aren't smart enough to work in Silicon Valley in the first place. If smart whites don't mind the competition, then low IQ whites shouldn't whine like little bitches about something that really doesn't even affect them to begin with.
ReplyDeleteIt's obviously better for low IQ whites if high iQ whites do better rather than do worse. That's just called looking out for your own kind...just like you're doing in your post above. Looking out for your own kind by seizing on any and every excuse why America should pack itself to the brim with more, more, more, more immigration of your own kind in preference to the riff raff from south of the border. (Not that you're a "racist" or anything, oh no.)
Actually the ratio of productivity of really superstar to average coders can be as much as 100:1. Richard Stallman in his salad days taking on the Lisp Machine commercial development teams is a well documented example.
ReplyDeleteBut raw coding prowess isn't what makes or breaks commercial software development. They can afford to have a hundred average Joes in most cases. It's programming management that counts.
H-1B jacks everything up for American programmers because they are indentured servants willing to live ten-up in a one room apartment. Even if Americans did that they still couldn't meet the tax advantages. So kids that would be good programmers go into other professions. Meanwhile each H-1B who stays (roughly half) brings in five to ten relatives, many of which will be stupid, statistically speaking.
Professulas love foreign students because they are servile and do not make the professulas work for their paycheck. The professullas don’t care about students, they only care about their grant grubbing parasitism at taxpayer expense. They want all their students to be commy nutty ochronosers like Obama, not get real jobs. So many foreign born professullas fled to the USA because we are better but then they have the audacity to insist we become like the places they fled.
ReplyDeleteUPI June 6, 1992 Sovern took over at Columbia after student protests of 1968 and New York's fiscal problems in the '70s resulted in less financial support for the school, a situation made more dire by recent federal government budget cuts. . . But Columbia will be looking for a new president in a period troubled by criticism for destroying records that were being reviewed for improprieties. Universities in general have been under greater scrutiny for how they charge the government for federally sponsored research.
Surely Joking Feynamn p 215 "If I ask you a question during the lecture, afterwards everybody will be telling me, 'What are you wasting our time for in the class? We're trying to learn something. And you're stopping him by asking a question'."
The Independent October 2, 2010 New charges for 'Dean of Mean' over slave students David Usborne Pg. 32 WHEN STUDENTS at St John's University in New York received a work assignment from Dean Cecilia Chang, the chances were it had less to do with learning than with preparing her lunch - or shovelling snow... specifically targeted students with scholarships, many from overseas, saying they would lose them if they didn't fulfil the household chores she ordered.
Melbourne Age July 15, 2009 Foreign students 'slave trade'; Colleges exploit quest for residency Nick O'Malley, Heath Gilmore and Erik Jensen Pg. 6 THOUSANDS of overseas students are being made to work for nothing - or even pay to work - by businesses exploiting loopholes in immigration and education laws in what experts describe as a system of economic slavery. The vast pool of unpaid labour was created in 2005 when vocational students were required to do 900 hours work experience. There was no requirement that they be paid.
Washington Post March 31, 2006 Most See Visa Program as Severely Flawed Mitra Kalita D01 In a working paper released this week, Harvard University economist George J. Borjas studied the wages of foreigners and native-born Americans with doctorates, concluding that the foreigners lowered the wages of competing workers by 3 to 4 percent. He said he suspected that his conclusion also measured the effects of H-1B visas. "If there is a demand for engineers and no foreigners to take those jobs, salaries would shoot through the roof and make that very attractive for Americans," Borjas said. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers-USA says H-1B salaries are lower. "Those who are here on H-1B visas are being worked as indentured servants. They are being paid $13,000 less in the engineering and science worlds," said Ralph W. Wyndrum Jr., president of the advocacy group for technical professionals, which favors green-card-based immigration, but only for exceptional candidates.
San Jose Mercury News June 26, 2006 Monday Tech visas come with obligation for valley leaders Mike Langberg Pg. 1 Norman S. Matloff, a professor of computer science at UC-Davis and a longtime H-1B critic, counters that claims of low unemployment among engineers don't count underemployment... A former software engineer now working as a teacher or a real estate agent doesn't count in the statistics... employers unwilling to hire older engineers, even if they've retrained themselves... The AFL-CIO, in a February position paper, argued that H-1Bs and other loopholes allow employers ``to turn permanent jobs into temporary jobs.