Why is Mark Zuckerberg spending so much time and money pushing the Gang of Eight's immigration bill? Because the 28-year-old Facebook founder needs the money. He needs to hammer down his American programmers' salaries with more H-1B visa foreigners to keep his net worth up. For a terrifying moment last year, Zuckerberg's wealth dropped from 11-figures to only 10-figures. Remember, money is how these guys keep score. Zuckerberg had to endure the humiliation of showing up on the 2012 Forbes 400 list with a net worth of only $9.4 billion. There are a lot of people with 10-figure net worths (1,426 according to Forbes in 2012).
Fortunately, the Zuck is back over the $10 billion mark lately, so he can hold his head up when he walks down the street, but you have to feel for the poor guy.
Rubio has been promoted relentlessly by the media because he's non-threateningly cute, a boy band singer-dancer (the subliminally ethnic one) in a suit. He doesn't look cunning, so it's easy to still like him when he gets caught telling a another lie about what's in the bill. How can you expect a nice boy like Rubio to keep track of all those details? He means well. You can tell just by looking at his symmetrical features.
Personally, I kind of like Zuckerberg, but my approval is a pretty good contra-indicator. (I should have started the world's simplest marketing research company: just show me two new products or two new ads, and whichever one I prefer, you should junk it, immediately.)
I think Zuckerberg is, by the standards of software nerds, a good looking guy, but he increasingly strikes a lot of folks as a green-eyed, fair-skinned jerk. It doesn't help his image that it seems likely that, deep down, he's probably a Republican (he hosted a Chris Christie fundraiser). And a lot of people are growing sick of Facebook. Oh, and, yeah, there's an entire movie already about what a monster he is.
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lost in translation
Zuckerberg - sugar mountain
Rubio - blond
Just sayin'
Well, it is pretty OT, but here is a funny commercial, the idea being a Japanese company just got bought by foreigners and now they have to speak English at work (which they aren't too crazy about)
Click here
Doesn't raise an eyebrow over there. Maybe Mountain Dew could do something like this?
Yucky Zucky just comes across as a sleazy opportunist. Remember when he called his Facebook users "dumb Focks" for trusting him with their private information? I'm not sure if he's really as slimy as he seems or if he just lacks social IQ. I believe machine smarts and people smarts are negatively correlated once you control for g.
Remember when he called his Facebook users "dumb Focks" for trusting him with their private information?
Citation?
If you consider Humanity as a whole, it seems that Zuckerberg's pro-immigration stance is the better moral position. Immigration may or may not (let's not pretend this matter has been settled) be good for certain elements in American society, but it's definitely good for the immigrants.
The choice is this:
1.) fewer choices, lower salaries for some Americans
vs.
2.) Good for humanity, good for most Americans, the "right" thing to do.
"Because the 28-year-old Facebook founder needs the money. He needs to hammer down his American programmers' salaries with more H-1B visa foreigners to keep his net worth up. "
Speaking on behalf of American programmers, stop trying to help us Steve.
The highest paid programmers in the world are in Silicon Valley and New York. The highest paid programmers in Europe are in London. The highest paid in Asia are Hong Kong and Singapore.
All of these markets also have the highest proportion of non-native workers in the software industry.
In contrast in low immigration Helsinki, Tokyo and St. Louis programmers salaries are significantly lower than London, Singapore or Silicon Valley.
In this day and age there's virtually infinite demand for software developers (largely because everything's becoming automated). Any one who can competently write code can get hired almost instantly. Trust me the developers for Facebook are not exactly hurting for money.
Increased supply will have next to no effect on wages because the market is so tight. Unemployment rates for computer science majors is 3.5%.
Furthermore in case you haven't noticed code isn't exactly an expensive good to ship across borders. Whether an Indian programmer is in Bangalore or Mountain View doesn't exactly make much of a difference, he can still take your job regardless.
If anything moving programmers from Bangalore to Mountain View raises the global wages of programmers since the cost of living, and hence wages, is higher in Northern California than India.
Oh the humanity! Won't anyone think of those poor Facebook software developers. First year developers might only make $100,000 a year if Zuckerberg gets his way!
"Last week Glassdoor published its most recent software engineering salary report. Short version: it pays to code. Google and Facebook employees earn a base salary of ~$125K, not counting benefits, 401k matching, stock options/grants, etc., and even Yahoo! developers pull in six figures. Everyone knows why: ask anyone in the Valley, or NYC, or, well, practically anywhere, and they’ll tell you that good engineers are awfully hard to find. Demand has skyrocketed, supply has stagnated, prices have risen. Basic economics."
http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/27/write-code-get-paid/
No, Steve, MZ is not a good-looking guy. He's not ugly, but just to let you know (because men are not at all good at judging other men's attractiveness, he's not good-looking either. He has crappy skin and a nose too big for his mouth.
BTW, that pic you have up of Marco Rubio reminds me of just how fast he is losing his looks. Marco was a good looker, but in just the short time I've been following him (since he went up against Charlie Crist), he has lost a lot of hair and his ears have begun the middle age droop in a really big way. (Some men are very prone to the ears thing).
Rubio does, however, still have a winning smile... whatever that might be worth.
I wonder why people like Zuckerberg behave the way they do. I've come to the conclusion that they want white people to feel the sting of insecurity and alienation, as payback.
f you consider Humanity as a whole, it seems that Zuckerberg's pro-immigration stance is the better moral position. Immigration may or may not (let's not pretend this matter has been settled) be good for certain elements in American society, but it's definitely good for the immigrants.
The fallacy of utilitarianism has been recognized for centuries and proven in practice for much of the 20th century.
"Speaking on behalf of American programmers, stop trying to help us Steve."
Maybe DR has a point. Most programmers probably vote Dem anyway. Screw 'em. Bring on the H-1Bs, the more the merrier. Just clamp down on the unskilled labor.
They had the right idea recruiting Marco; how were they to know Florida elected an piece of fluff to the Senate? Because it's Florida you might say, but doesn't the Eastern Seaboard's great and good have a whole generation of relatives retired down there?
The whole Gang of 8 marketing juggernaut is starting to look like it's piloted by drunken fools. Maybe they should recruit the Winklevoss twins next. Put these WASP baddies right out of Oxygen Channel central casting alongside a leering Chuck Schumer and Lindsey! (R-Ambiguous). I think they're so arrogant they refuse to even look like they're trying.
If Sorkin and Fincher fudged the details in The Social Network they may have nailed the essence: the irony of a guy who just doesn't get people starting a social networking revolution because of his obsession with status.
I don't know if they have Zuck's number, but that would sure fit his latest obsession.
Anonymous Avi said...Immigration may or may not (let's not pretend this matter has been settled) be good for certain elements in American society, but it's definitely good for the immigrants.
I'm sure by the time this is posted it will be preceded by many responses better than mine, but let me say this.
1.) If three homeless people were moved into the house I own, it would definitely be nicer for them, if not for me, but net overall happiness would be elevated, right?
Shouldn't that be okay with me if I'm a "moral" person?
2.) The people now living in my house are going to bring down its value and cause me to lose all motivation to keep it up or continue paying the taxes. In fact, I'll probably feel so dispossessed that I'll move somewhere else and let them stew in their own juices. Before long, the house while fall in on itself due to neglect or they'll burn it down through carelessness. And then they'll be back where they started with a net loss in overall happiness, as I'll be unhappy now too.
"If you consider Humanity as a whole, it seems that Zuckerberg's pro-immigration stance is the better moral position. Immigration may or may not (let's not pretend this matter has been settled) be good for certain elements in American society, but it's definitely good for the immigrants."
The fallacy of utilitarianism has been recognized for centuries and proven in practice for much of the 20th century.
I don't know what you mean by fallacy of utilitarianism here, but the comments you are responding to don't necessarily follow the utilitarian principle of maximizing utility. In fact, they could derive from one of utilitarianism's ethical rivals, which have also been employed to derive equalist ethics.
Okay, I have mixed feelings about Facebook.
I'm kind of surprised it ever became popular. I can see how useful the data "dumb focks" put on it can be, in a myriad of ways.
But as far as some kind of innovative... thing, it just falls short. It's the kind of thing that was inevitably going to come about, but the fact that Facebook won out is probably due as much to random chance as anything else. Some butterfly somewhere fluttered it's wings, Facebook surged ahead in some minor way, and took all the share.
There are certain things in the world that are "monopolistic" by nature. Bill Gates had a famous quote in the 90's about how there was going to be one OS to rule them all or something, and he was right for the most part.
(If you want to bring up Apple and Macintosh we could have a long discussion about this.)
Look businesses wanted to have everyone use the same OS. Not 10% on OS/2 or whatever. They wanted to have everyone they hired be proficient with that OS. They wanted everyone in house to use the same word processor, the same spreadsheet. And they wanted all the people they hired to know the same apps.
Long story short, Microsoft was in the right place at the right time. The best that could be said about them is they were smart enough not to screw it up.
But something else could have happened along the way, IBM could have done things differently, and Microsoft could have been an obscure footnote that only geeky people would ever have heard of.
Same thing with Facebook. As freakishly scary as what can be done with that data, the best thing I can say about them is they didn't screw it up. As far as them having good programmers, well duh. You have that kind of money and you almost have to try and mess it up from that standpoint.
I just don't get the Zuckerberg thing. From my point of view I can go to any campus, and find someone a lot like him. In another world that individual could have been the mote of dust that the special snowflake accreted around.
So I'm scratching my head. If someone really wants a Jewish geek hero, Bram Cohen fits the bill a lot better to my mind. I don't think we've even scratched the surface with what can be done with bit torrent yet.
You get ideas about things, and they aren't always practical if you really start to make them work.
But for a long time I've been thinking about a bit torrent app aimed at competing with facebook.
I want to call it "Face-F*C&er." The beauty of it is, you don't need server hardware, you don't need anything except open source programmers. No way it could scale to what Facebook does, but in the end are there more than a couple hundred people you care about being in contact with anyway?
Then again Twitter baffles me too. Maybe I don't understand the new world enough.
Avi favors mass immigration to America? Go figure.
Speaking on behalf of American programmers, stop trying to help us Steve.
The highest paid programmers in the world are in Silicon Valley and New York. The highest paid programmers in Europe are in London. The highest paid in Asia are Hong Kong and Singapore.
All of these markets also have the highest proportion of non-native workers in the software industry.
In contrast in low immigration Helsinki, Tokyo and St. Louis programmers salaries are significantly lower than London, Singapore or Silicon Valley.
No, Steve is right. The higher salaries in those cities would be even higher without immigration. And if these jobs are so important, why shouldn't they be higher? After all, they're still lower than Wall St. and good law firm salaries.
And $100,000 for an adult male in a place like NYC is not very high.
Any one who can competently write code can get hired almost instantly.
At what salary, entry level?
As freakishly scary as what can be done with that data
What are some scary things that can be done with that data?
"Long story short, Microsoft was in the right place at the right time. The best that could be said about them is they were smart enough not to screw it up."
This is true, but you're trivializing how smart you have to be not to screw it up. Microsoft was in the right place at the right time, and had history run a little different it might just be a footnote.
But if you think that's the equivalent to Bill Gates being a lottery winner you are just wrong. 99.99% of human beings don't have the intelligence or drive to build what Gates or Zuckerberg did. Anyone who says different has never had the misery of managing a massive software project.
If Bram Cohen or Satoshi Nakamoto were put in Zuckerberg's shoes circa 2005 and given his same luck, Bram Cohen would be as rich as Zuckerberg. If you or I, or anyone else here was put in Zuckerberg's shoes, the project would have assuredly died in flames.
Gates or Zuckerberg are still on the vert right part of the bell curve. I have no doubt that if Microsoft or Facebook never happened they would still be highly successful in whatever field they entered. Cream rises to the top.
They happened to win (with a fair bit of luck) at a winner-take-all tournament, but make no mistake to even enter the tournament is hard enough to begin with.
Last week Glassdoor published its most recent software engineering salary report. Short version: it pays to code. Google and Facebook employees earn a base salary of ~$125K, not counting benefits, 401k matching, stock options/grants, etc., and even Yahoo! developers pull in six figures.
That 120K base is actually shockingly low, even putting aside the fact that Google and Facebook probably pay top of the market. The "even Yahoo" comment leads us to suspect that Yahoo programmers might be just barely in the six figures.
Those salaries aren't consistent with a labor shortage.
Anonydroid, 6:21 PM, said: No, Steve, MZ is not a good-looking guy.
Hunsdon, a fan of reading comprehension, said: Our host said, "I think Zuckerberg is, by the standards of software nerds, a good looking guy . . . . "
(Software nerds not being renowned for their physical pulchritude.)
Let these programmers stay and work out of Bangalore if they are so valuable. It will improve India's economy, reducing pressures to emigrate.
Fewer immigrants means more land, space, water, natural resources, and political self-realization for existing Americans.
Here's a citation for the zuckerberg "dumb fock" quote:
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-09-13/tech/30033368_1_ims-mark-zuckerberg-facebook-ceo
99.99% of human beings don't have the intelligence or drive to build what Gates or Zuckerberg did. Anyone who says different has never had the misery of managing a massive software project.
Is the software behind Facebook really so complex, relatively speaking?
I don't know what you mean by fallacy of utilitarianism here, but the comments you are responding to don't necessarily follow the utilitarian principle of maximizing utility. In fact, they could derive from one of utilitarianism's ethical rivals, which have also been employed to derive equalist ethics.
I'd respectfully disagree. The OP main point was that the good done to immigrants by opening the floodgates would outweigh the harm done to U.S. citizens. Classic utilitarianism.
"Utilitarianism has often been considered the natural ethic of a democracy operating by simple majority without protection of individual rights"
Or, in other words, utilitarianism is the proverbial 2 wolves and a sheep deciding what's for supper. Right now, things are shaping up so that is the Gang of 8, the American plutocracy, 2 billion people in the 3rd world, and the beleagured American middle class deciding who gets the loot.
Steve is right. The higher salaries in those cities would be even higher without immigration.
Then explain why aren't programmers in Helsinki highly native Helsinki paid more than programmers in highly foreign London?
That's a basic conclusion derived from Occam's razor. It might not be the right one, but if you want to dispute it you have to provide evidence.
Virtually all econ literature demonstrates that immigration has little to no effect on skilled labor. Unskilled labor bears the massive brunt of the wage pressure of immigration. Skilled labor demand is highly elastic, so quantity has little to no effect on wages.
If you dispute this show me one, just one econ study that shows a statically significant negative impact of immigration on programmer wages. Otherwise without evidence you're just blowing hot air.
Furthermore you're not understanding the highly globalized nature of software. (Hint: it doesn't cost very much to ship software to different locations). It's not like not giving a programmer a visa stops him from being a programmer. In case you haven't noticed there are plenty of software shops outside of America.
Regardless of whether the programmer is sitting in Bangalore or Mountain View, he's still competing in the same global software market. The same Indian programmer exhibits downward pressure on wages no matter where he's working.
Given that, I'd much rather have here paying taxes to the American government (and software developers are virtually all net tax contributors), supporting American local businesses, and generating profits for American companies and investors.
After all, they're still lower than Wall St. and good law firm salaries.
False, compare starting salaries out of school with a bachelors degree. For top software shops it's in excess of $100,00 a year. For Wall Street starting salaries for bachelors degrees are about $70,000 a year.
For law firms you have to compare the equivalent of a J.D., which we'll say is roughly equivalent to a PhD. Big law firms pay $150,000 a year, top software shops pay easily pay over $200,000 a year for starting PhD candidates.
Oh the humanity! Won't anyone think of those poor Facebook software developers. First year developers might only make $100,000 a year if Zuckerberg gets his way!
According to numbers I found at Forbes, Zuckerberg made 8 billion dollars in one year, between 2010 and 2011. And you're going to defend him by saying it's laughable that someone who helps produce the product which creates that wealth might want to be paid 0.00125% as much as he does?
How does that work?
Don't get me wrong: Mark Zuckerberg should be allowed to make as much money as he can. I wouldn't want to put some sort of cap on his salary and say, "CEOs should only be able to make $1B/year; if they complain about that, we should just take their businesses from them and give them to immigrants." He has a right to whatever salary he can command.
I just want to see the same courtesy extended to the people he hires.
We have this weird idea that whatever the current going wage for a job is, that's what it should be, and anyone demanding more is greedy. If we're talking about fruit-picking, it's a few dollars an hour, and if we're talking about STEM it might be $100K; but whatever it is, it's been divinely ordained and cannot possibly be raised without causing economic catastrophe. (Though it can be lowered, slowly, and then the new level becomes divinely ordained.)
It's weird: what ever happened to the idea that someone getting a raise was a good thing? Have we become so consumerist that all we can think of when someone gets a raise is that we might have to pay another penny for our Big Mac?
Google and Facebook employees earn a base salary of ~$125K, not counting benefits, 401k matching, stock options/grants, etc., and even Yahoo! developers pull in six figures.
I agree this is not a great salary at a top-tier company in an expensive part of the country. I was hired as an art director at a mid-sized NY ad agency in the mid-1990s at a starting salary of $125K, and with a mortgage and family I was just getting by.
I'd respectfully disagree. The OP main point was that the good done to immigrants by opening the floodgates would outweigh the harm done to U.S. citizens. Classic utilitarianism.
I don't think the OP's post clearly making a utilitarian calculus (although I can't rule it out). It could have been more rights- or equalist- based.
"The choice is this:
1.) fewer choices, lower salaries for some Americans
vs.
2.) Good for humanity, good for most Americans, the "right" thing to do."
You named one of the ways in which it is bad for some Americans (lower salaries), but you forgot to name any of the ways in which it is "good for most Americans." Was that because you're not aware of any such ways? Then why say that they exist?
"...but it's definitely good for the immigrants. "
The more third world immigrants come here, the more third-worldish America will become. A completely third-worldish America will not be attractive to anyone - not to old immigrants, not to new immigrants, not to the people whose families have lived here for centuries. The golden goose will be killed. From that point on no one will derive any benefit from its increasingly legendary existence.
"If you consider Humanity as a whole..."
The definitive killing of the golden goose (I'm now speaking of all first-world societies) would be the biggest tragedy in the entire history of "Humanity as whole". If this is allowed to happen, "Humanity as a whole" will never go to the stars, never conquer death, never discover all the laws of the Universe. We don't know if there is any intelligent life anywhere else in the Universe. The end of civilization here may become the end of civilization in the entire Universe. Forever.
If America becomes another Brazil, it will have Brazil's priorities. If as a consequence of immigration, intermarriage and differential birth rates France becomes another Algeria, it will have Algeria's priorities, standard of living, level of attractiveness to outsiders and insiders, commitment to scientific inquiry, to the arts, etc. You're on the right track in wanting to think about what benefits "Humanity as a whole". It's a noble concern. You're just wrong about what it is that benefits it.
If our species' long-term potential doesn't move you, if you're so shallow as to only only care about the pleasure/suffering ratio of individuals, consider the following:
Before Europeans and Americans started feeding Africans, there were about 100 million people in Africa. There are about 1 billion people there now. Without a first world to continue feeding Africans, their number is likely to drop back to its old level. One can think of other such examples. The killing of the golden goose, the dilution of its gold content is bad for everyone.
"...he increasingly strikes a lot of folks as a green-eyed, fair-skinned jerk."
Just photoshop his hair to have a slightly reddish tint, drop some references to Ebenezer Scrooge, and you're good to go.
Is the software behind Facebook really so complex, relatively speaking?
Yes and no. Most software (especially web stuff) isn't really complex; it's just a matter of taking inputs, sticking stuff in databases, getting stuff back out, and displaying it. The complexity comes with the size -- once a project grows beyond the point where any one person understands how every bit of it works, it becomes exponentially harder to keep it all running smoothly and efficiently. You start having a lot more bugs, duplication, orphaned code that doesn't do anything, and so on. Hugeness creates a certain amount of complexity on its own.
On the face of it, there's nothing difficult about Facebook -- as I said, you take clicks and posts, stick them where they need to go, and display them. Where you need the big brains is in things like making it scale to millions of users and still be fast enough to be useful. Fast database indexing and searching can get pretty complex, for instance. The hardest stuff is under the hood where you don't really see it.
I'm not sure anybody--apart from the ever-envious journalists/screenwriters--really hates Mark. I think for most out there it's indifference at most. Here and there he gives off signs of being a relatively grounded guy, not a coked-up arrested-development aspie like other "dot-com moguls." But admit it, you wouldn't have an opinion on him either way if he weren't rich. The big crime of that movie was making him seem more interesting than he is.
BTW the irony of Facebook in my lights is that it would have fizzled and vanished long ago if not for the games. i.e. the exertions of Chinese/Indian programmers trying to make money via the FB pseudo-platform. It's like the guy who invented the car stereo claiming responsibility for the success of conservative talk radio.
After all, they're still lower than Wall St. and good law firm salaries.
False, compare starting salaries out of school with a bachelors degree. For top software shops it's in excess of $100,00 a year. For Wall Street starting salaries for bachelors degrees are about $70,000 a year.
Your statement is misleading: bonuses account for an extraordinarily high proportion of analyst/associate total salary in Wall Street firms.
It is also inappropriate to compare starting salaries in top software shops with first-year analysts and associates. People hired into software programming positions already have several years of specialized training in that skill as a result of their undergrad education. Wall Street hires often come from liberal arts backgrounds. If they have a background in mathematics or engineering, it is still not very specific compared to the move from a CS degree to programming.
Finally, Silicon Valley is supposedly living boom times and Wall Street is supposed to be in lean times.
Then explain why aren't programmers in Helsinki highly native Helsinki paid more than programmers in highly foreign London?
Because demand is higher in London.
That 120K base is actually shockingly low, even putting aside the fact that Google and Facebook probably pay top of the market... Those salaries aren't consistent with a labor shortage.
22 year olds making $120,000 is not consistent with a labor shortage?! Okay...
Is the software behind Facebook really so complex, relatively speaking?
Besides the fact that Facebook has to maintain the scalability and stability to run the second busiest site in the world, consumes massive amounts of bandwidth and storage, built the world's leading NoSQL concurrent database, and runs some of the most complex machine learning algorithms known to man?
Disregarding all of that, the fact is that building and maintaining any large software system, even ones with simple purposes, is enormously complex.
Once a software system goes over a million lines of code (*usual caveat about lines of code as a yardstick*) it becomes extremely difficult to keep functioning. If you've never managed a truly large software system you won't appreciate just how difficult it is. (If you want a sense of the difficult I suggest reading Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man Month, about the early development of the IBM OS/360.)
The reality is that vast majority of human beings simply lack the raw cognitive material manage large software systems. That is why software CEOs are among the richest people on the planet.
Given that, I'd much rather have here paying taxes to the American government (and software developers are virtually all net tax contributors), supporting American local businesses, and generating profits for American companies and investors.
I'd rather he not be here consuming our resources, driving up our housing costs, polluting our ecosystem, and diluting our voting rights.
I recall the story of Esau. Don't sell your birthright for one day's meal.
"If you consider Humanity as a whole..."
This is what Steve and others have been talking about. The Liberal desire to have a "Worldwide Family of Man" is a status seeking morality that is quite outside normal evolutionary psychology. We have rings of altruism, that start with ourselves and immediate family, and get weaker as the rings get wider. People we share a polity with, indeed do deserve more altruism than total strangers in a land far away.
22 year olds making $120,000 is not consistent with a labor shortage?! Okay...
No, $120,000/year is not consistent with a labor shortage in a highly specialized, highly cognitive field in perhaps the hottest business segment in the country right now. That salary is on par with what first- and second-year Wall Street analysts/associates make and is less than first-year lawyers at large firms make (equivalent ages).
Let these salaries go to the moon and monopolies like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft could still afford to pay them.
But admit it, you wouldn't have an opinion on him either way if he weren't rich. The big crime of that movie was making him seem more interesting than he is.
No, his effort to flood our country with millions more foreigners is the game changer.
" Remember when he called his Facebook users "dumb Focks" for trusting him with their private information?" - I won't fault him for honesty.
What makes you think Zuck is a Republican? Do others agree with this? Christie is basically the Republican Democrats collect open-minded points for claiming to support. I know it was a throw away line but basically the only reason for a billionaire to be Republican these days is for them to be in oil, religious, Southern (see first two reasons), or a huge Israel supporter. Maybe now that the Winklevoi et al are democrat some Jews will gravitate towards the Repubs, but I'd be surprised.
"Is the software behind Facebook really so complex, relatively speaking?" - pulling one over on the people that came up with facebook in the 1st place was.
What makes you think Zuck is a Republican? Do others agree with this?
Do you really think we care whether someone is Democrat or Republican?
"Speaking on behalf of American programmers, stop trying to help us Steve."
Speaking as an American programmer, I think you are wrong and Steve is right. (What do you think of Norman Matloff's work on this subject, by the way?)
My suspicion is you are one of those American programmers with an ethnic agenda. I suspect causality flows the other way from what you suggest. That is, even before there was significant immigration of programmers, say the late 70s, the areas you cite had the highest salaries for programmers. It was the high salaries that attracted the immigrant programmers, not the immigrant programmers that caused the high salaries.
I think a lot of this was caused by the investment banks. They were the ones that really started trying to sell startups on bringing in cheap immigrant programmers... it didn't matter to them how good the immigrant programmers were, only that they had a legal degree and could keep the valuation formulas legal (each engineer is worth a certain amount of money in a valuation, the investment bank wants to maximize the valuation while providing as little money as possible). The places you mention had an investment bank driven environment. Those banks cared about programming and software engineering about as much as they cared about real estate when amping what lead to the recent unpleasentness. (Does software engineering even really exist? I think most that I've seen is just programming, and often not good programming at that.)
I think you will find that you are also wrong about the ease with which programming, in particular large system programming, can be offshored. The word on the street I hear is that it ends up being more expensive, due to things like having to keep two sets of managers, all the wonderous efficiency of conducting meetings over international phone lines, etc.. The inability to tell who you are talking to in phone meetings because all the accents sound the same... the amount of "speed money" that has to be paid (bribed) to get things done.
I think Marissa Mayer was right at Yahoo to make everyone physically come in and work "together" (with rare exceptions, there are times when working alone at home is productive). I think Apple is right to design their big new spaceship building so everyone "works together". And I think the implication is that software development is not as fungible as you suggest.
The Liberal desire to have a "Worldwide Family of Man" is a status seeking morality that is quite outside normal evolutionary psychology.
Is it status seeking or a rationalization for cowardice, a kind of Stockholm Syndrome?
My diagnosis from a reasonable personally sampled population is "cowardice."
How dare we thwart the needs of Facebook? What's the big deal?
Is this really a big deal?
How dare we thwart the needs of Facebook? What's the big deal?
Is this really a big deal?
Given that, I'd much rather have here paying taxes ...
If you're so smart, why don't you have a better grasp of English grammar?
////////////////////
Steve, that photo you posted of Marko Rube-ee-O is out of date. Here's a newer pic: Marco's receding hairline
A politician, at least a white one, needs abundant hair on his head to win the hearts of lady voters. Rush Limbaugh once remarked that he, Rush, had decided not to run for high office because he doesn't have enough hair to win.
Marco's sell-by date is fast approaching.
"I think Zuckerberg is, by the standards of software nerds, a good looking guy..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C65hL9d1ANM
if zuck's the face of this immigration bill, then restrictionists will lose this fight.
can't you find an illegal alien?
22 year olds making $120,000 is not consistent with a labor shortage?! Okay...
The data cited did not tie the salary to age or experience level. Even so, I wouldn't think $120,000 to be indicative of a labor shortage, all things considered.
In this day and age there's virtually infinite demand for software developers
There's certainly an infinite supply of stupidity going around.
Unemployment rates for computer science majors is 3.5%.
The great majority of people with computer science degrees are not working in computer science, so it is transparently obvious that your "3.5%" figure is a fabrication.
in case you haven't noticed code isn't exactly an expensive good to ship across borders. Whether an Indian programmer is in Bangalore or Mountain View doesn't exactly make much of a difference, he can still take your job regardless.
Exactly, Einstein. So why the big push to bring them to America?
if zuck's the face of this immigration bill, then restrictionists will lose this fight.
can't you find an illegal alien?
Yeah, Steve, I'm not so sure Zuckerberg's face, especially the cool sunglasses photo you posted, would be such a liability for the race replacement lobby.
Yes, of course hiring foreign programmers depresses wages for American. That follows from the law of supply and demand, and every economic study has found the same thing.
Unemployment rates for computer science majors is 3.5%.
The great majority of people with computer science degrees are not working in computer science, so it is transparently obvious that your "3.5%" figure is a fabrication.
Moreover, 3.5 percent is the same unemployment rate for college graduates overall. Is there a shortage of college graduates in general?
"22 year olds making $120,000 is not consistent with a labor shortage?! Okay..."
The data cited did not tie the salary to age or experience level. Even so, I wouldn't think $120,000 to be indicative of a labor shortage, all things considered.
This is supposedly the very top rate, paid by the top companies to the top people. That means the average salary is far less.
Can someone give us the average salary?
Al Gore had lost a lot of hair by the time he tied Bush II for the presidency. Eisenhower was quite bald. In France Giscard D'Estaing, Mitterand, Chirac won elections with most of their hair gone.
The more third world immigrants come here, the more third-worldish America will become.
But if America recruits the best and brightest third-worlders which appears to be the case with Indian immigrants (average IQ of 110 even after the second generation regresses to the mean)then America becomes brighter and thus more first-worldish.
We don't know if there is any intelligent life anywhere else in the Universe.
Statistically we know that there is.
explain why aren't programmers in Helsinki highly native Helsinki paid more than programmers in highly foreign London?
Have you checked the cost of living in Helsinki vs the cost of living in London?
Virtually all econ literature demonstrates that immigration has little to no effect on skilled labor.
I guess we can economics to the list of topics you mouth off on but do not really understand.
you're not understanding the highly globalized nature of software. (Hint: it doesn't cost very much to ship software to different locations). It's not like not giving a programmer a visa stops him from being a programmer. In case you haven't noticed there are plenty of software shops outside of America.
In case you haven't noticed, that is the point. Let them work in those software shops outside America.
compare starting salaries out of school with a bachelors degree. For top software shops it's in excess of $100,00 a year. For Wall Street starting salaries for bachelors degrees are about $70,000 a year.
You really, really don't know what you're talking about. Nobody with a business or finance degree gets a job with a top Wall Street firm for 70k/yr. I personally know some recent business graduates from GWU who all were offer jobs in NYC with starting salaries in the six figures. Given the cost of living in NYC, that's not actually a big income.
Median home price in Santa Clara County in March 2013:
$610,000
http://www.dqnews.com/charts/monthly-charts/ca-city-charts/zipcar.aspx
Median price in San Mateo County: $701,500, San Francisco County $839,000, Santa Cruz County $459,000
DR is a total troll and/or an idiot.
The 120 K base salary is for all programmers, regardless of age. This is not the median salary for a 22 year old.
Second, the 120 K base salary is for top-notch companies like Google, Facebook. But the outsourcing H1-B visa industry goes much deeper than that.
The average wage for computer science graduates has totally stagnated in the past 10 years and stands at 50 K/year, not 120 K per year.
Third, the H1-B visas are not only about programmers. Many other functions are also outsourced.
Either DR is, as I said, a total idiot for not writing/understanding this. OR he is fully aware of this but chooses to try to mislead the audience here.
The wages for computer science graduates have stagnated in the past 15 years.
See for evidence:
http://www.epi.org/files/charts/IT-Guestworkers_Figure-I.png.538
As you can see, it isn't 120 K base salaries. And again, remember that such figures count all programmers of all ages. NOT New hires(who tend to schew being younger).
Read more here:
http://www.epi.org/publication/gang-of-8-bill-new-it-jobs-college-degree-guestworker-h1-b/
http://www.epi.org/blog/top-10-h1b-guestworker-offshore-outsourcing/
http://www.epi.org/publication/bp359-guestworkers-high-skill-labor-market-analysis/
TL;DR:
DR demonstrates a total lack of IQ/knowledge about the issues or (s)he is misleading on purpose. But even if we take the latter view, it doesn't exclude DR being a total idiot because just a few Google searches totally destroyed his/her false claims about salaries.
The H1-B visa system is hurting American programmers and no, it does not increase their salaries and no, they do not, on average, have 120 K base salaries. And that's certainly not the case for new hires typically speaking.
The only argument against mine is this: "LOL WHO CARES ABOUT DEM NON-ELITE PROGRAMMERS BRO". But that's an idiotic argument and I'd be glad to demolish that one too.
But rest assured, DR, you're such an easy person to destroy. Please spend at least a few minutes of your life trying to understand how dumb you are and try to fix it with a Google search before embarrasing yourself - yet again.
http://www.naceweb.org/salary-survey-data/?mainindex-ql-2-header-salsurv-05022013
NACE puts the starting salary for computer science majors at $59,977, math and science majors at $42,724, and business majors at $54,234.
2.) The people now living in my house are going to bring down its value and cause me to lose all motivation to keep it up or continue paying the taxes. In fact, I'll probably feel so dispossessed that I'll move somewhere else and let them stew in their own juices. Before long, the house while fall in on itself due to neglect or they'll burn it down through carelessness. And then they'll be back where they started with a net loss in overall happiness, as I'll be unhappy now too.
Exactly. The smart money is on mass low-skill immigration to a country like the US being unambiguously welfare-decreasing in the long run, partly because of this sort of dynamic. With no border enforcement to preserve incentives to protect the commons, the commons will inevitably keep degrading until the US is no longer a particularly desirable destination; meanwhile, all future generations will miss out on the extra innovation that would have happened without the destruction of the commons.
The rational way to help would-be immigrants on a large scale is to drive improvement in their home countries. There's still a place for migration, but only the mutually beneficial sort is moral and welfare-increasing.
Zuckerberg is NOT good looking; his face is too long and his body is too short and stubby and his eyes are too big and his skin is too bad and his hair sucks and whatever attractiveness he physically exudes is negated by his ugly voice, poor body language, and hideous fashion sense especially those godawful mandals and grey hoodies. Many computer geeks are good looking; Bill Gates is good looking if you adjust for age, but Zuck is just yuck.
Now that's the spirit!
personally know some recent business graduates from GWU who all were offer jobs in NYC with starting salaries in the six figures.
Wrong. Looks like your friends are lying to you. Maybe they're talking about first year comp which is different than salary. First it's much more risky, it can be big in good years, but zero in other years. Second software shop programmers don't get as big a bonus (though they still get about $20-25k on average), but then again they work about half the hours.
Trust me I know quite a bit more than you. I work on Wall Street. The only firms that offer six figures salaries for first year analysts are hedge funds. I should know I graduated not too long ago and got lots of offers from both investment banks and hedge funds.
"Traditionally investment banks have followed a formulaic base salary raise system on an annual basis. 1st year analysts: 70k, 2nd year: 80k, 3rd year: 90k, Associate 0: 100k, Associate 1: 125k, etc."
http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/tag/1st-year-analyst-salary
The great majority of people with computer science degrees are not working in computer science, so it is transparently obvious that your "3.5%" figure is a fabrication.
Wrong. It's well documented:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505145_162-57324669/25-college-majors-with-lowest-unemployment-rates/
Moreover, 3.5 percent is the same unemployment rate for college graduates overall. Is there a shortage of college graduates in general?
Wrong. Unemployment rate for college graduates is more than double at 7.6%.
http://www.businessinsider.com/march-jobs-report-unemployment-rate-for-those-with-a-college-degree-vs-those-without-one-2013-4
This is supposedly the very top rate, paid by the top companies to the top people. That means the average salary is far less.
Wrong. This is the starting salary paid to first year developers. Salary tends to rise rapidly for the first 10-15 years of a developer life cycle. In case you haven't noticed Facebook created 1000 new millionaires overnight. That's because with stock options tech company comp is easily above $500k a year for mid-level people.
http://www.glassdoor.com/GD/Salary/Google-Software-Engineer-Salaries-E9079_D_KO7,24.htm?filter.experienceLevel=LESS_THEN_ONE
http://readwrite.com/2012/05/22/what-to-expect-from-the-1-000-new-facebook-millionaires
My suspicion is you are one of those American programmers with an ethnic agenda.
Wrong. I really couldn't be any less ethnic. My ancestry in America dates back to the mid-1600s and is pure Anglo-Germanic stock. I strongly suspect I come from better "breeding" than anyone else on this site.
My ancestors owned this country when your ancestors were the third world immigrants. And they had to deal with your ethnic agenda. It was called "The New Deal."
Then explain why aren't programmers in Helsinki highly native Helsinki paid more than programmers in highly foreign London?
Because London is where the software is?
In a true labor shortage, truck drivers make $120K/year. See North Dakota oil fields or Western Australia mining towns, or Iraq defense contractors.
Silicon Valley has a housing shortage, not a labor shortage. If they fixed that, labor would move in from other parts of the country in short order. And it's more of a zoning issue than a land issue. There's plenty of single story buildings between the bay and the hills.
Because of the housing shortage, that $120K base salary in Mountain View doesn't go far. You need two earners with that kind of salary to qualify for a mortgage on a 3 bedroom house built in the sixties within reasonable communiting distance. Add in California's 10% income tax and your average software developer in the Bay Area is depending on striking stock option gold just to have what would be a normal middle class life in the rest of the country.
The average hourly wage of a programer is $39; in 2000 their average was $37, adjusted for inflation. That does not suggest a labor shortage. End of story.
It is still a decent middle-class wage, but I guess maybe that’s the problem. Because for all the political class's hectoring about the need for more high-skilled workers, programers are not really high-skilled workers. Their salaries, along with their standardized test scores, confirm their averageness.
So it should be obvious that this is all about profits for the tech tycoons and diversity for the media.
22 year olds making $120,000 is not consistent with a labor shortage?! Okay...
Google is supposed to be the top tech firm. The top investment banks/hedge funds/private equity firms pay twice as much for 22 year olds. Often more than 2X depending on year end bonus.
Then explain why aren't programmers in Helsinki highly native Helsinki paid more than programmers in highly foreign London?
That's a basic conclusion derived from Occam's razor. It might not be the right one, but if you want to dispute it you have to provide evidence.
I never said demand wasn't part of the equation. The demand is higher in places like SV, NYC, etc. Without immigration, the salaries would be even higher for the Americans there.
Trust me I know quite a bit more than you. I work on Wall Street. The only firms that offer six figures salaries for first year analysts are hedge funds. I should know I graduated not too long ago and got lots of offers from both investment banks and hedge funds.
You probably work in the back office or in IT.
Programming is not a well paying career. $100,000 salaries in a place like NYC is not high at all since it's not high enough to afford a wife, big enough apartment or house, and a family. It gets you a rented studio and shiny new gadgets every year - the lifestyle of a drone, not even a semi-independent man.
In fact, it's arguably not even a middle class career due to its low job security and stability. Most people have to ditch programming by their mid-30s and transition to some sort of management or executive/business role to survive in the "tech" industry:
http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/unchartered-waters/what-i-learned-from-google-you-get-fifteen-years/
"DR said...
Trust me. ..... I work on Wall Street."
Irony impaired?
Asshole.
Programming is for the most part a dead end career. The $100,000 entry-level salaries sound like a lot until you realize they're in very expensive places like NYC. And programmer salaries don't rise much above that level. So there's little upside. "Stock options" don't mean shit when the vast majority of programmers don't get huge payouts from them. It's like winning the lottery. Add to that there's very little prestige in being a programmer. You get no social status from being a programmer.
It's a dead end career that you have to leave after 15 years and transition into some management role to survive:
http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/unchartered-waters/what-i-learned-from-google-you-get-fifteen-years/
"During my interview at Google, I realized something very important: You get fifteen years.
That is to say, your half-life as a worker in corporate America is about age thirty-five. Around that time, interviews get tougher. Your obligations make you less open to relocation, the technologies on your resume seem less-current, and your ability find that next gig begins to decrease.
Notice I said half-life. By thirty-five, half the folks who started in technology have gone on to something else — perhaps management, consulting, on to roles in “the business” or in operations. Some have had a full-on career change, got that MBA and gone into management consulting, or perhaps real estate, education, or, well … retail store management. Who knows? A few might go into journalism.
Yet a few stick it out. Half of the half-life is fifty, and, sure, perhaps 25% of the folks who started as line technologists will still be doing that when they turn fifty.
But by the time you turn thirty-five, you’d better have a plan."
Chief Seattle wrote:
"In a true labor shortage, truck drivers make $120K/year. See North Dakota oil fields or Western Australia mining towns, or Iraq defense contractors.
Silicon Valley has a housing shortage, not a labor shortage. If they fixed that, labor would move in from other parts of the country in short order. And it's more of a zoning issue than a land issue. There's plenty of single story buildings between the bay and the hills.
Because of the housing shortage, that $120K base salary in Mountain View doesn't go far. You need two earners with that kind of salary to qualify for a mortgage on a 3 bedroom house built in the sixties within reasonable communiting distance. Add in California's 10% income tax and your average software developer in the Bay Area is depending on striking stock option gold just to have what would be a normal middle class life in the rest of the country."
What you wrote makes sense, but it's not that simple I think.
Kansas City is really cheap compared to San Francisco. If a 100,000 or so "tech" people moved to Kansas City, that city could absorb them without blinking an eye or raise costs. Any increased costs would probably be because of more upscale tastes.
Kansas City could support it, but there isn't a company like any of the ones we are talking about there (Yeah, I know Google wired it for fiber).
But it's never happened. You could insert lots of other cities in place of KC, where it would be a lot cheaper to live and do business. But no one is interested in moving there, either company or the individual.
You might be tempted to say it is a brainpower thing, or you need world class universities close by.
But you can't turn around in New England without bumping into a world class university, and Route 128 was never really a contender for Silicon Valley's crown in retrospect.
To me it is a case of inertia.
I think the reason the Bay Area became what it is, is because it is a nice place to live. Amenities, culture, many people like the climate and flipping a big middle finger to heat and humidity, without having real winters to contend with.
(If you think SF has humidity, go to New Orleans or Houston)
But it isn't discussed as much that without the federal government spending money, particularly in 1940 to the 1960's period a lot of the original Silicon Valley companies would never have happened, or been as successful as they were.
This "subsidy" went beyond directly supporting companies with contracts, the whole thing was indirectly subsidized by the federal research dollars pumped directly into Berkeley and Stanford as part of the research system that arose after WWII, and because the people that spent the money thought the area was cooler than Iowa State's town. Then too, in that era you could just take your degree and roll right into a mondo cool job with a defense contractor, doing things that could also be used for commercial applications. (A little different from Redstone Arsenal.)
I know HP was started in a garage in the 30's, but my take is they wouldn't have become company zero in that whole system if the government hadn't spent money in the manner and the geographic are they did then.
Success breeds success, and becomes self sustaining. Only problem is a lot of people don't seem to understand that current conditions aren't mandated by flaming letters in the sky.
I can't imagine another area in the US taking Silicon Valley's action. But I can imagine a competitor arising in a foreign country and eclipsing it. I think a lot of the groundwork is already laid myself.
It is still a decent middle-class wage, but I guess maybe that’s the problem. Because for all the political class's hectoring about the need for more high-skilled workers, programers are not really high-skilled workers. Their salaries, along with their standardized test scores, confirm their averageness.
We need to be clear about what exactly "middle class" means. It implies security, stability, independence, etc. It implies enough independence to have and raise a family. You can make enough to eat at all the trendy ethnic restaurants in a big city, but if you can't independently afford a family, then you're not middle class.
You see attempts to define "middle class" strictly in terms of superficial consumption habits, and this sort of manipulation will get worse since the real definition of "middle class" is de facto "sexist" and "anti-gay".
Add to that there's very little prestige in being a programmer. You get no social status from being a programmer.
I think there's lots of prestige in being a programmer. You tell someone you're a programmer they think SMART. You tell someone you're a lawyer they think SLEAZE. Indians are extremely snobby when it comes to status so the fact that they choose programming tells you it's near the top of the status pyramid.
Facts:
1. The median income for computer scientist occupations in the United States ranges from 70K (for programmers) to 90K (for managers). Source: US Census
2. A 120K salary is well above the average for a U.S. programmer and only goes to top tier talent in Silicon Valley. Adjusting for the cost of living in Santa Clara and Alameda Counties (Silicon Valley), even that 120K is not much higher than the nationwide median of 70K. It's roughly 80K per year. Source: CNN Cost-of-living calculator.
3. U.S. computer programmer wages have not increased since 1999, after adjusting for inflation. When there is a "shortage", wages invariably increase. Source: Law of Supply and Demand.
4. Wages for physicians, dentists, and pharmacists are higher than computer programmers. Source: US Census.
You probably work in the back office or in IT."
That would be wrong. I work in quantitative trading as a portfolio manager.
Google is supposed to be the top tech firm. The top investment banks/hedge funds/private equity firms pay twice as much for 22 year olds. Often more than 2X depending on year end bonus.
1) No investment bank pays over $150k total comp in the median year. Period.
2) Private equity funds barely hire any 22 year olds. They're only interested in MBAs or people with several years investment banking experience.
3) The top hedge funds that hire 22 year olds and pay that kind of comp represent the extreme right end of the talent distribution. To get hired to a firm like DE Shaw, SAC Capital, GETCO or Two Sigma you have to be ridiculously intelligent. The minimum requirements are several standard deviations in intelligence higher than Google or Amazon.
I never said demand wasn't part of the equation. The demand is higher in places like SV, NYC, etc. Without immigration, the salaries would be even higher for the Americans there.
And where did the demand come from? Does software just naturally grow better in the lush fields of Northern California, much like wine?
Software is frequently a highly complementary good for other software. Silicon Valley has high software demand because it's had many successful platforms, which breed demand for software to be built around those platforms.
Consider that Silicon Valley has Apple and Google, while Helsinki has Nokia. Nokia and Nokia's platforms aren't exactly demanding too much software nowadays.
Nokia, a firm in highly immigration restrictionist Finland, got crushed by Apple and Google. Both of which are filled to the brim with foreigners. Apple and Google were able to source the best talent in the world. Nokia was not. Nokia is now in the trash heap of history. End of story.
Those foreign developers that worked on iOS and Android, raised American programmer wages by launching American dominance in the mobile platform market. That has positive cascade effects for American software companies, because all else being equal Americans are more likely to be invested in American platforms.
If you want to look out for the interest of American programmers, you need to make sure that American software remains the world standard. Software, especially platform software, is frequently winner-take-all tournament. If American platforms lose to overseas platforms it will be far worse for American software engineers then a few percentage increase in labor supply.
That means that our tech giants need the world's absolute top talent to maintain their dominance in existing fields and expand their dominance in new fields.
I think there's lots of prestige in being a programmer. You tell someone you're a programmer they think SMART. You tell someone you're a lawyer they think SLEAZE. Indians are extremely snobby when it comes to status so the fact that they choose programming tells you it's near the top of the status pyramid."
Get with the times girlfriend!
Firstly it depends on what type of programming you do.These days programming is so user friendly and comes in built with kinds of modules that you really dont need to be even above average IQ to grasp the subject.
The C++ ,Visual Basic or Java I grew up with is not the same today.
I was surprised to that C is also still in demand. While I started in junior high school(probably like everyone else here) with BASIC(or gwbasic as the DOS version was called) ,high school was Pascal.And boy was it tough!
It was very spare interface and very hands on -you had to know your stuff. Linked lists would keep me awake for entire nights.
We didnt have no "Visual" Pascal,we created pop ups and apps from scratch down to the design and color of the boxes.
C was a welcome relief but interestingly, even it was much better user face( not some its own interface ,you would use notepad or some other processor for your program content) ironically it was considered more powerful as it was much closer to assembly language.
Now I am not even talking about programmers are self taught but who major in computer science in college
I am just not sure how apt they are in the problem solving department, a couple of smart college kids I know who were majoring in CS hadnt heard of the classic towers of babylon problem, variations of the three triangles composed of asterisk or had any idea what linked lists were.
However they do have electives such as game design, iphone apps and such fluff.
For sure this is a mid tier university but I dont remember seeing anything hard core course even in lower tier colleges.
As for Indians, Indians maybe snooty but for middle class Indians being a programmer isnt really a big deal. It seems that Americans are far more impressed if someone is a programmer but Indians know the score.Pretty much everyone they know has some knowledge of programming so they are less awed.
Indians are more impressed by graduates of military academies than a degree in any STEM field!
Even a junior officer has far more stature among Indians than a guy with an MBA and Phd who earns 10 times as much.
Nokia, a firm in highly immigration restrictionist Finland, got crushed by Apple and Google. Both of which are filled to the brim with foreigners. Apple and Google were able to source the best talent in the world. Nokia was not. Nokia is now in the trash heap of history. End of story."
I think Blackberry got slaughtered worse than Nokia.
What Blackberry had going for it was its rep that "Serious" people used Blackberry.Indeed it was choice of instrument of the State and Department employees.Who can forget the ignorant media fawning over Obama's blackberry.
In the end, iphone's interface and its prolific apps proved that "serious" people may not be so "serious" after all.
One thing blackberry still has going for it is that its probably the cheapest brand name pda out there which is why its still more popular in the third world.
The new Nokia Lumia isnt bad and in some ways quite comparable if not more elegant than iphone though it had to go degrade itself(in the view of many techies) by incorporating Windows.
Finns are smart enough so I dont think it is a lack of engineering talent that did them in.
They like blackberry got left behind in the apps race really. That and design. Apple has some of the best designers in the world(which is just as well as Mr Jobs background was in design).
Also there marketing department seemed to be just terrible.At some point they had just given up.
Finns do need to import talent but of different sorts.
I know,I know htc and Samsung Galaxy are more flexible and open source than the tyrannical Apple.
But outside of techies-who cares?
1) No investment bank pays over $150k total comp in the median year. Period.
Yeah they do. I worked at a bulge bracket firm right out of college. I got paid more than 150k in total comp my first year.
That would be wrong. I work in quantitative trading as a portfolio manager.
So you're a quant. Quants are tools. You guys might as well be in the back office. Meathead sales & trading guys have more status than you.
Nokia, a firm in highly immigration restrictionist Finland, got crushed by Apple and Google.
No, it's more like Nokia got crushed by Samsung, a firm in highly immigration restrictionist South Korea.
Those foreign developers that worked on iOS and Android, raised American programmer wages by launching American dominance in the mobile platform market.
No they didn't. Foreign developers did not single handedly do it nor did they start it. The platforms that dominate do so due to the network effect which is completely independent of foreign developers or anything to do with the software itself. Windows became the dominant OS platform not because it was good software, but because of the network effect. It has nothing to do with the software itself, so foreign developers are completely irrelevant.
If you want to look out for the interest of American programmers, you need to make sure that American software remains the world standard. Software, especially platform software, is frequently winner-take-all tournament. If American platforms lose to overseas platforms it will be far worse for American software engineers then a few percentage increase in labor supply.
Software and platform standards are the result of the network effect, not the quality of software.
And for ordinary American software engineers, it doesn't really matter who owns the platform standard. A programmer in the US doesn't benefit over a programmer in the UK in developing software for Windows just because Windows is owned by an American.
And if having the platform be "American" is so critical, you don't need immigration to have it. There are natural structural network effect reasons that will allow for an American standard, and you can always employ trade policy if you want your own standard.
So you're a quant. Quants are tools. You guys might as well be in the back office. Meathead sales & trading guys have more status than you."
Meoww! Whats with the cattiness gentlemen? Quant or no quant he is still a portfolio manager.
I doubt meathead sales and trading guys have more status though to be sure they can make a lot more money.
We are all adults here so we have to acknowledge a job where you can make lots of money does not neccesarily lead to stature.
for eg a plumber,carpenter or pest control guy with his own business vs a liberal arts college professor.
It is still a decent middle-class wage, but I guess maybe that’s the problem. Because for all the political class's hectoring about the need for more high-skilled workers, programers are not really high-skilled workers. Their salaries, along with their standardized test scores, confirm their averageness.
Exactly. That's what I keep saying: we're not talking about the brilliant guys who come up with new solutions and algorithms that create massive amounts of value for their companies. Those guys are overwhelmingly American and European, and when one does emerge in another country, there's this thing called the Internet which will allow him to connect with other really smart people and be successful from wherever he is. They'll always be fine, just like the top artists, the top writers, the top inventors, and so on.
We're talking about guys who slog away 9-5 in code factories, writing chunks of code that each do one simple task, the programming equivalent of assembling parts in a factory. Or they test and debug programs, running them over and over and trying to track down issues to the offending line. Or they know one program or operating system well enough to work their way through a checklist of troubleshooting items when something crashes.
For instance: let's say your web site is hosted at a big hosting company like Rackspace. Your site goes down, so you call tech support. You get a Tier 1 support guy, who has a checklist of things to ask you (did you reboot?), and really knows nothing beyond that. These days, you're lucky if you can understand his English. If he gets to the bottom of his checklist and the problem is still there, he can bump it up to a Tier 2 guy, who will know more. If the problem persists, or you have a lot of clout, you can eventually get up to a Tier 4 guy who will be a genuine whiz.
We're not talking about Tier 4 guys here; they're rare enough that their numbers and salaries don't matter. We're talking about the Tier 2-3 guys, who have some training, probably a college degree, and expected to be able to raise a family with it. DR would have us think the entire industry is populated with Tier 4 guys in major demand, but it's not. It's mostly code monkeys trying to make a living. The question is whether we want American code monkeys or foreign ones.
If American platforms lose to overseas platforms it will be far worse for American software engineers then a few percentage increase in labor supply.
You should stop opening your mouth and removing all doubt. Is it bad for Americans that the most popular operating system for Internet servers is Linux, created by a European, rather than the American product Windows? Of course not, Americans have used it to build the Internet and create massive amounts of wealth. If an Indian company creates a great software product, we'll use it too. As you yourself pointed out (perhaps the one true thing you've said), software is fungible.
When that happens -- or there's any evidence that it's likely to happen -- be sure to let us know.
4. Wages for physicians, dentists, and pharmacists are higher than computer programmers."
The former professions are immigrant heavy as well. There is something else going on with regard to programmer salaries than just immigration.
I personally find Rubio less sympathetic. He doesn't seem to have any redeeming qualities. Of course, Zuckerberg's clone sock-puppetry sites aren't helping in this respect.
How programmers vote.
I'm a programmer, and not too concerned with foreign competition right now (I've had Indian coworkers at pretty much every job). My interest is in restricting unskilled immigration, since I suspect they don't benefit the public good as much as they cost.
I think there's lots of prestige in being a programmer. You tell someone you're a programmer they think SMART.
They think SMART NERD. Mostly the nerd part. No, there's no prestige. Yes, people say things like, "Oh, you know how to do that? Wow, that's really amazing; all I know how to do is check my mail and pay my bills." But it's so far beyond them that they see it as more of a parlor trick or a savant thing than a profession, as if you announced that you make your living juggling chainsaws. It ends there; they don't invite you to the best parties or try to set their daughters up with you.
Anonymous wrote:
"And for ordinary American software engineers, it doesn't really matter who owns the platform standard. A programmer in the US doesn't benefit over a programmer in the UK in developing software for Windows just because Windows is owned by an American."
I think he had a point with that. If all the source code for the OS were in Chinese, and all the GNU and Open Source stuff were in Chinese we would be at a serious disadvantage.
"And if having the platform be "American" is so critical, you don't need immigration to have it. There are natural structural network effect reasons that will allow for an American standard, and you can always employ trade policy if you want your own standard."
Now you might have a point with this. As important as the Chinese market is and will be, most of the world is going to find it much easier to deal with English as a foreign language compared to Chinese.
And I don't see any other language kicking it out at this point, even if China were the economic engine of the world. At this point it's not going to be Russian, and I see no signs of a Spanish language country becoming a tech leader.
Exactly. The smart money is on mass low-skill immigration to a country like the US being unambiguously welfare-decreasing in the long run,
Actually, it will likely increase welfare dramatically - oh, you meant "welfare" in the sense of "well-being," not in the sense of "the dole."
A lot of posters have discussed smarts and programmers.
Depends on what you mean by smarts.
Feynman was smart. Von Neumann was smart. A whole lot of other guys over time.
Specifically in computer science, guys like Turing and John McCarthy were smart. I could add others.
Mark Zuckerberg is not smart by the standards I judge these things by. More like Bill Gates, smart enough to scheme his way to the top in a game that is rigged to have one winner, a game where schmoozing and the drive of avarice count for more than true brainpower.
Now to be more general, if someone has a Phd in Physics and tells me they work in string theory they are smart (maybe crazy and stupid in some ways too). If someone has a Phd in Math they are smart, and will probably be a kickass programmer if they can bring themselves to slum.
Don't get me wrong, there are some really smart people in computer science, including some who didn't get pedigreed at various institutions.
But smart? Don't make me pull out the XKCD comic. Oh heck:
http://xkcd.com/435/
Just replace purity with intelligence and it works.
I'm a programmer, and not too concerned with foreign competition right now (I've had Indian coworkers at pretty much every job). My interest is in restricting unskilled immigration, since I suspect they don't benefit the public good as much as they cost.
You apparently have a job. Your Indian coworkers have taken positions that should go to Americans.
Would you feel differently if you were out of a job?
"The reality is that vast majority of human beings simply lack the raw cognitive material manage large software systems. That is why software CEOs are among the richest people on the planet. "
Lol. Software ceos are the richest people on the planet because a new copy of software has zero marginal cost. Designing a very complex software system isn't inherently more difficult than building a car, but it's a lot cheaper to create two copies of Windows than two F150s.
Is the software behind Facebook really so complex, relatively speaking?
Lots of software teams could build a Facebook-like product for a few thousand users, but it to scale to hundreds of millions of users is a huge challenge.
Anonymous said, "If you consider Humanity as a whole, it seems that Zuckerberg's pro-immigration stance is the better moral position."
We the people of the United States call Americans who think like that, who put the interests of the world (as they conceive them) ahead of our own, traitors.
They think SMART NERD. Mostly the nerd part. No, there's no prestige. Yes, people say things like, "Oh, you know how to do that? Wow, that's really amazing; all I know how to do is check my mail and pay my bills." But it's so far beyond them that they see it as more of a parlor trick or a savant thing than a profession, as if you announced that you make your living juggling chainsaws. It ends there; they don't invite you to the best parties or try to set their daughters up with you.
Computer programmers are seen as nerds because they ARE nerds (generally speaking), not because they are programmers. By being programmers at least they're seen as SMART nerds; if they became lawyers they'd be seen as SLEAZY nerds, and would alienate the ladies even more.
Thanks to people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, most people associate programming with $$$ so they leap to set up their kids with programmers, especially if you're descent looking. Indeed because most programmers are nerds and many nerds are ugly, a good looking programmer is considered especially hot because expectations are so low and because they are a triple threat: looks, money AND brains.
The Liberal desire to have a "Worldwide Family of Man" is a status seeking morality that is quite outside normal evolutionary psychology.
It's just evo psych (which after all can also justify adultery and rape in some interpretations)--most sophisticated moral systems hold that we owe more consideration to certain persons. For example, parents owe a special duty of care to their own children as opposed to the children of strangers for a number of reasons. One is that every child (well, group of siblings, anyway) deserves to have an adult (or two) who will champion their interests above those of others. The theoretical alternative, where all adults care impartially for all children would be a disaster in practice and terrifying dystopia even if it worked.
On the national level, yes, the educated, the elites, the successful have a duty to defend the interests their less successful or less gifted compatriots. A libertarian pseudo-solidarity with whichever foreign sweatshop happens to be cheapest this year is not a good ethical substitute and in fact is indistinguishable from the crassest self-interest.
The famous "radical" moral philosopher Peter Singer (actually, a rather uninteresting ultra-utilitarian) holds some like the OP's universalist position, but he's very much in the minority among moral philosophers.
Cennbeorc
Feynman was smart. Von Neumann was smart. A whole lot of other guys over time.
Specifically in computer science, guys like Turing and John McCarthy were smart. I could add others.
Mark Zuckerberg is not smart by the standards I judge these things by. More like Bill Gates, smart enough to scheme his way to the top in a game that is rigged to have one winner, a game where schmoozing and the drive of avarice count for more than true brainpower.
Richard Feynman's IQ was tested at 125. Bill Gates IQ was tested at 170, despite the fact that Bill Gates was tested when IQ tests were much harder (the Flynn Effect).
That's why Gates at his peak the richest man of all time and Feynamn was just Feynman.
Even a junior officer has far more stature among Indians than a guy with an MBA and Phd who earns 10 times as much.
Uh no...Indians are all about the money. Nobody has more status than someone who makes 10 times as much.
You apparently have a job. Your Indian coworkers have taken positions that should go to Americans."
Should go? SHOULD go? In all of this hystria over Zuckberg and h1b. Has anyone actually conducted a serious study as to these immigrant programmers are NEEDED vs WANTED?
ie are there enough native born programmers who are qualified for the job or ? If yes, please provide the stats and make a strong case that indeed these jobs ARE being taken away from the middle clas and let the opposition use it to defeat the bill.
Well..does anyone know if there are enough Americans who are qualified?
Or is this just more of the usual populist rabble rousing by "son of the soil"(ahem Rice University MBA) Scots Irish Steve types.
Three Bay Area counties had the fastest-growing populations in California over the past year, according to new data from the state.
San Francisco, San Mateo and Alameda counties all had growth rates of more than 1 percent between January 2012 and the beginning of this year, according to Department of Finance figures released Wednesday.
Statewide, the population grew by nearly 300,000 to 37.97 million, which was a 0.8 percent jump.
In The City, the population grew 1.1 percent, adding 8,800 residents. San Mateo County added more than 7,800 people, and the Alameda County population grew by 18,500 people. According to the state agency, the Bay Area is the fastest-growing region in the state.
The largest cities in the state are, in order, Los Angeles, San Diego and San Jose.
Of the 482 cities in California, 444 had gains in population while 37 lost residents. Just one — Amador, population 182 — stayed the same.
Read more at the San Francisco Examiner: http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/bay-area/2013/05/sf-other-bay-area-counties-among-fastest-growing-california#ixzz2SWn1p3Ua
Median home price in Santa Clara County in March 2013:
$610,000
http://www.dqnews.com/charts/monthly-charts/ca-city-charts/zipcar.aspx
Median price in San Mateo County: $701,500, San Francisco County $839,000, Santa Cruz County $459,000. True but 500,000 again in Orange County in the south which doesn't have the Bay Area salaries. In the OC is the foreign Chinese market driving up housing in Irvine or a real wealthy Chinese buying a house in mainly white Newport Beach.
I'm a programmer, and not too concerned with foreign competition right now (I've had Indian coworkers at pretty much every job). My interest is in restricting unskilled immigration, since I suspect they don't benefit the public good as much as they cost. That's true, take Santa Ana versus Irvine. Santa Ana has all the negatives with low skilled immirgation. Kids on the free and reduce lunch programs at 77 percent, gangs, low education level 10 percent with a B.A. and so forth. Irivne is the fastest growing city in Orange County, now 3rd largest at eith 220,000 or 231,000 depending upon the census reserach. The high schools do better than the average in the area, and only 4 percent of kids in Irvine have kids before 20 years old versus 41 percent in Santa Ana.
Bren built his first house in Newport Beach with a $10,000 loan, in 1958. He began his business career in 1958 when he founded the Bren Company, which built homes in Orange County, California. In 1963, he and two others started the Mission Viejo Company (MVC) and purchased 10,000 acres to plan and develop the city of Mission Viejo, California. Bren was President of MVC from 1963 to 1967.[12] International Paper bought Bren Co. for $34 million in 1970,[13] and then sold it back to Bren for $22 million in 1972 following the recession.[14] Bren took the proceeds and in 1977 joined a group of investors to purchase the 146-year-old Irvine Company. Bren was the largest shareholder of the resulting consortium, owning 34.3% of the company and received the title of Vice-chair of the board.[15] By 1983, he was the majority owner of the firm[16] and was elected chairman of the board. By 1996, he had bought out all outstanding shares to become the sole owner.
By 2005, OC Weekly wrote that Bren "wields more power than [Howard] Hughes ever did, probably as much as any man in America over a concentrated region—determining not only how people live and shop but who governs them."[17] In 2006 the Los Angeles Times wrote “[s]imply put, Orange County looks like Orange County...because of the influence of [Donald Bren].”[18] In an interview in 2011, Bren summarized his real estate investment strategy: “What I learned was that when you hold property over the long term, you’re able to create better values and you have something tangible to show for it.”[19] Forbes, in its 2012 edition of, "The 400 Richest Americans", ranked Bren as the wealthiest real estate developer in the US with an estimated net worth of $13 billion. One of Romeny's biggest money supporters, a lot of Republican wealth is the real esate business.
Mark Zuckerberg is not smart by the standards I judge these things by. More like Bill Gates, smart enough to scheme his way to the top in a game that is rigged to have one winner, a game where schmoozing and the drive of avarice count for more than true brainpower.
Right. More skilled at recognizing what people wanted and would use, and making the deals to acquire it or position their product well, than in the programming itself. That's not to say they were bad programmers, but Windows and Facebook didn't win by being the best products; they won by being just good enough and in the right place at the right time with the right corporate connections.
Gates got started by writing BASIC for the Altair. That wasn't such a big deal; several people wrote a BASIC for it. The difference was that Gates did it strictly for the money, while the others did it for fun and kudos. Nothing wrong with doing it for the money, but that shows how forward-thinking he was -- most people in the industry thought of it as a geeky hobby, not something you could make money from. MS-DOS and early Windows likewise were nothing special, compared to the alternatives of the day such as CP/M, but he had the foresight to make the deal to get them loaded on PCs - something even IBM didn't recognize would be a big deal -- and that was enough to swamp the competition until the Internet made it possible for the old home-brew attitude to surface again through open-source projects.
It's like every other industry: the best-selling car isn't the best car, the Big Mac isn't the best cheeseburger, and the biggest blockbuster movie probably isn't artistically the best. You don't become filthy rich staying in your lab or workshop trying to create the perfect product; you do it by coming up with something that's good enough and getting it out the door before someone else does. That's more true than ever with these ad-revenue social media web sites, where it's all about volume -- gaining a critical mass of people who will pressure their friends to use it.
Computer programmers are seen as nerds because they ARE nerds (generally speaking), not because they are programmers. By being programmers at least they're seen as SMART nerds; if they became lawyers they'd be seen as SLEAZY nerds, and would alienate the ladies even more.
Thanks to people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, most people associate programming with $$$ so they leap to set up their kids with programmers, especially if you're descent looking. Indeed because most programmers are nerds and many nerds are ugly, a good looking programmer is considered especially hot because expectations are so low and because they are a triple threat: looks, money AND brains.
This is funny stuff. Reading your first paragraph, I thought you were serious, but by the time I got to the second one, I realized you were just having fun. Good one, saying women think good-looking programmers are especially "hot." I'll be chuckling about that one all day.
If you live in a world where programmers are more pursued by women than sleazy lawyers are, please send me a ticket; I want to move there.
"Zuckerberg is NOT good looking; his face is too long and his body is too short and stubby and his eyes are too big and his skin is too bad and his hair sucks and whatever attractiveness he physically exudes is negated by his ugly voice, poor body language, and hideous fashion sense especially those godawful mandals and grey hoodies. Many computer geeks are good looking; Bill Gates is good looking if you adjust for age, but Zuck is just yuck."
I was with you until you said "Gates is good looking if you adjust for age..."
In what universe would most women think Bill Gates was ever good-looking? Clean-cut, yeah, but "good-looking"?
Computer programmers lack the social IQ to realize how hot they are to women; hence all the self-hatred from the programmers on this blog. And your lack of self-confidence is why us women won't talk to you (except for here), NOT your profession.
If you consider Humanity as a whole, it seems that Zuckerberg's pro-immigration stance is the better moral position.
No, ikt doesn't.
Good for humanity, good for most Americans, the "right" thing to do.
No, it is bad for most Americans in the sort run, and it is bad for humanity in the long run.
If you subsidize the less-productive and tax the more- productive, as you propose, then the per-capita human productivity will necessarily decrease, and humanity will be worse off.
The fallacy of utilitarianism has been recognized for centuries and proven in practice for much of the 20th century.
Right. As it is usually applied, utilitarianism involves splitting up goods to increase average happiness in the present. The negative effects on the future production of goods is generally ignored.
It takes social IQ to know who is good looking and since that seems to be in short supply in the male dominated hBD-sphere, let me help you out: gates is good looking.
Right. More skilled at recognizing what people wanted and would use, and making the deals to acquire it or position their product well, than in the programming itself. That's not to say they were bad programmers, but Windows and Facebook didn't win by being the best products; they won by being just good enough and in the right place at the right time with the right corporate connections.
The reason us rich folks are so bright is because in order to become stratospherically wealthy you need to be good at BOTH creating a product AND profiting from it. Being hyper-good at two things takes high g. Gates is a genius because he's both a brilliant programmer AND a super brilliant entrepreneur.
Uh no...Indians are all about the money. Nobody has more status than someone who makes 10 times as much."
Truth by assertion unsubstantiated with facts,statistics or even anecdotes , my favorite type of argument!
I was born and brought up in India for much of my life and spend a lot of time around Indians and Indian Americans.
What special insight do you have in the Indian community that compels you to share with us your "wisdom"
". Whether an Indian programmer is in Bangalore or Mountain View doesn't exactly make much of a difference, he can still take your job regardless."
Well, for us non-programers, it is vastly preferable he take your job in Bangalore. See your Micro-Econ textbook -- externalities.
But in the real world, not tecnolibertopia, Indians are doing both, using H1-B labor as an bridge to offshoring jobs.
Since we seem to have some programming experts here, who claim that 'anyone who can write code can get hired instantly', can they explain why tech job openings, at least in SoCal, often list expertise in 6 or more languages and/or platforms and/or frameworks? I mean, if 'writing code' was an instant ticket to a job, why the overkill on job requirements? Wouldn't a company be willing to hire a bright person who has shown facility in one or two languages, on one or two platforms?
@linda
you seem to have wandered in accidentally from the two marriage related posts and comments board that Steve put up recently. either way, please stay a while even if you end up giving us nerds cooties.
I'm wondering how Nokia could become a world leader in cell phones at all, given that Finland has always been low immigration. Or for that matter, how could Bill Gates found Microsoft, or Jobs and Woz found Apple, when they were hampered by a historically how percentage of foreign born in the American population?
(Oh, btw, Nokia sold 61.9 million phones in the last quarter of 2012, Samsung sold 62 million (South Korea, not a big immigrant community there). Apple sold 42 million. Reports of Nokia's death are greatly exaggerated.
factis said: "Even a junior officer has far more stature among Indians than a guy with an MBA and Phd who earns 10 times as much."
Uh no...Indians are all about the money. Nobody has more status than someone who makes 10 times as much.
Are you Indian? I would guess that as a socially perceptive Indian with a PhD, Dr. Van Nostrand is pretty well aware of his own status among fellow Indians.
Anyone with extensive experience with foreigners eventually discovers that it is very difficult for an outsider to fully grasp the status structure of a culturally alien group. Haven't you ever met a bright, mostly assimilated foreigner that can't quite pass the cultural Turing test?
Unless you are one yourself, it's just silly that you would lecture DVN about what middle-class Indians think of each other's professions.
-The Judean People's Front
Bring in the programmers! Because I need more gadgets, for entertainment and distraction, before I die.
"Richard Feynman's IQ was tested at 125. Bill Gates IQ was tested at 170, despite the fact that Bill Gates was tested when IQ tests were much harder (the Flynn Effect)."
I really question how well that test for Feynman was testing say, above 130. It may just have been calibrated for the 70-130 set. There may also have been questions that were actually wrong that Feynman got right. Have you read any of his books? The guy was brilliant. Not every brilliant person applies himself to making money with a monomaniacal vengeance.
Look at Steve for example. If Zuckerberg offered him say, a trust fund offering him $200k p.a. on the condition that he wouldn't write about HBD or immigration any more, I'm absolutely sure he would not take it. Well, at least pretty sure. Maybe somewhat sure. I don't know, it probably depends on how the panhandling drive went.
You apparently have a job. Your Indian coworkers have taken positions that should go to Americans.
Should go? SHOULD go? In all of this hystria over Zuckberg and h1b. Has anyone actually conducted a serious study as to these immigrant programmers are NEEDED vs WANTED?
...
Well..does anyone know if there are enough Americans who are qualified?
Or is this just more of the usual populist rabble rousing by "son of the soil"(ahem Rice University MBA) Scots Irish Steve types.
There are 17 million Americans unemployed. Damn right those positions should go to Americans. In fact, I'll see you one further: They MUST go to Americans. We will not tolerate foreigners telling us who can enter our labor market.
We are seeking a 50-year moratorium on immigration. A few years of a break from immigration will give us ample evidence as to how capable Americans are as workers.
In this day and age there's virtually infinite demand for software developers (largely because everything's becoming automated). Any one who can competently write code can get hired almost instantly. Trust me the developers for Facebook are not exactly hurting for money.
And thus another possible justification for the H1-B system is demolished.
I wonder why people like Zuckerberg behave the way they do. I've come to the conclusion that they want white people to feel the sting of insecurity and alienation, as payback.
Because Zuckerberg came up from the friggin streets man!
Someone asked - is the software behind Facebook really so complex, relatively speaking?
Not as far as I can see. Its only doing what the web already does, cross linking stuff. Its how all that gets packaged together thats inventive but thats very little, if anything, to do with advanced software.
Richard Feynman's IQ was tested at 125?
I doubt it Richard Feynman said his IQ was tested at 125. His way of saying he could hardly care less.
I'll believe that we need an influx of H-1Bs when I no longer see so many internet postings about unemployed 40, 50 and 60 something techies who can't even get an interview, much less a job. Rampant age discrimination is not consistent with a tight labor market. As for the canard that older workers don't have the requisite skills, under conditions of scarcity one would expect to see firms (re)training new employees to meet demand. There are lots of former aerospace engineers and even superfluous lawyers with the IQ to do the work.
I'll believe that we need an influx of H-1Bs when I no longer see so many internet postings about unemployed 40, 50 and 60 something techies who can't even get an interview, much less a job. Rampant age discrimination is not consistent with a tight labor market. As for the canard that older workers don't have the requisite skills, under conditions of scarcity one would expect to see firms (re)training new employees to meet demand. There are lots of former aerospace engineers and even superfluous lawyers with the IQ to do the work.
Regarding the Gates and Feynman discussion, from what I understand Feynman's childhood IQ test was probably calibrated so that a perfect score was in 130-140 range (About 1930 would be my guess). In other words, even if he missed nothing he would score at most 140. Gates took a much more modern IQ test (the SAT) and got a 170, or 1590 on the pre calculator enhanced SAT, with a perfect score on the math sub-test of 800. Paul Allen has said that although he was very smart, like in the top 1/10,000th of the population for math, Gates was noticeably better maybe the top 1/100,000 or even higher. Gates wrote an algorithm as a Harvard undergraduate that held a speed record for a quarter century and wrote a paper in mathematics as well before droping out.
Gates has said repeatedly that Feynman was the person he most admired intellectually growing up. From what I understand Feynman knew college level mathematics at 15, and was a Putnam Fellow in 1939. Feynman was taking graduate course in physics at MIT as a sophomore. His graduate admissions score to Princeton in math and physics were apparently the highest the university up until that time had ever seen, although he did poorly on the humanities portion. Feynman was also viewed as the smartest of the young guys at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, although Schwinger who was viewed as even smarter by some people at the time, choose to work on the Radar project at Harvard-MIT instead.
I'll believe that we need an influx of H-1Bs when I no longer see so many internet postings about unemployed 40, 50 and 60 something techies who can't even get an interview, much less a job. Rampant age discrimination is not consistent with a tight labor market. As for the canard that older workers don't have the requisite skills, under conditions of scarcity one would expect to see firms (re)training new employees to meet demand. There are lots of former aerospace engineers and even superfluous lawyers with the IQ to do the work.
Here, here!
In all of this hystria over Zuckberg and h1b. Has anyone actually conducted a serious study as to these immigrant programmers are NEEDED vs WANTED?
They are obviously "wanted" by somebody. Nobody on Earth is actually "needed" though.
DR said ... I work in quantitative trading as a portfolio manager.
Then it's doubly strange that you keep pretending to be some sort of expert on the computer industry. You really don't have the faintest idea what the job market is like for the average 40 yr/old white IT guy.
It seems like there is a fairly common antipathy towards the idea of IQ and everything it entails, by very smart people who have not studied the concept much. A lot of smart, accomplished people like to think that it is something intangible, unmeasurable, possibly with the addition of drive and hard work that is primarily responsible for their success. When they look up the rarity of their own IQ score and see the diminished field they are competing with, it can douse their ego a bit.
Feynman may have been an example of this stance. I remember reading about how he derided the Brazillian system for its emphasis on rote learning. Ironically, an understanding of IQ might have led to the idea that it was not the teaching style that was to blame, instead it was the raw IQ of the students that made rote learning the only real possibility of imparting something to the students.
software shop programmers don't get as big a bonus (though they still get about $20-25k on average), but then again they work about half the hours.
Trust me I know quite a bit more than you. I work on Wall Street. The only firms that offer six figures salaries for first year analysts are hedge funds. I should know I graduated not too long ago and got lots of offers from both investment banks and hedge funds.
Sounds like you're not as bright as you think you are then. If you were you'd have been offered a decent salary. Speaking as someone who works in IT in NYC, the hours are very long and the 100k salary is "normal" for people with a decent education in this town. It's not the hallmark of genius.
I'll believe my flesh-and-blood friends with business degrees over some anonymous blowhard on the internet who has already displayed his tenuous grasp on reality.
Should go? SHOULD go? In all of this hystria over Zuckberg and h1b. Has anyone actually conducted a serious study as to these immigrant programmers are NEEDED vs WANTED?
A study? The number of smart people in this country means that immigrants are NEVER needed. For anything.
Americans DO NOT HAVE THE SKILLS to take these jobs. Above average Americans prefer to study liberal arts, drink beer, learn the combat ritual called "dating" and to fornicate as much as possible during their college years, while above average Chinese and Indians slog and study code.
The very few intelligent Americans with enough perspective (lack of insularity) to succeed in the global markets tend to join investment banks or hedge funds. (Still! Survey what the 2013 graduates of Stanford are planning on doing.)
And we see where that got the world.
Americans DO NOT HAVE THE SKILLS to take these jobs.
If they don't have the skills, it's because you don't want them to have the skills. If you would pay them the market rate, they would acquire the skills. It's a tautology.
"Silicon Valley has a housing shortage, not a labor shortage."
Absolutely right. I know a number of native-born American programmers from the silicon valley area, people who have lived there all their lives, who have left the bay area in the last decade or so because family housing is sub-par compared to elsewhere in the US, if not just outright unavailable. It's just not a place people want to settle-down into any more.
It's not just housing. Lots of other things, child care, preschool...
Silicon valley was largely built in maybe the late 50s and 60s. Before that it was fields of fruit trees. It was called the "Valley of Heart's Delight". But the Valley got full sometime around 1980. And lots of people are surprised by how many people (some types of Americans in particular) despise living in places like New York, Hong Kong, London, or WhateverMegaPlex.
"Until the 1960s it was the largest fruit production and packing region in the world, with 39 canneries."
Amazing how fast things can change, isn't it?
Americans DO NOT HAVE THE SKILLS to take these jobs. Above average Americans prefer to study liberal arts, drink beer, learn the combat ritual called "dating" and to fornicate as much as possible during their college years, while above average Chinese and Indians slog and study code.
Above average Americans can be taught the skills required for most of these jobs within a year.
Should go? SHOULD go? In all of this hystria over Zuckberg and h1b. Has anyone actually conducted a serious study as to these immigrant programmers are NEEDED vs WANTED?
A study? The number of smart people in this country means that immigrants are NEVER needed. For anything.
So true. We are now the beneficiaries of 300 years of skimming the very creme de la creme from other nations. Moreover, the Northern European peoples have never wanted for technical expertise and innovation.
There is plenty of talent right in in the USA.
Did gates really score 1590 on the SAT? I know he scored 800 on the math, but I've heard conflicting accounts about his verbal score.
As for Feynman, yes he was great physics/math student but how much of that is IQ and how much is malcom gladwell's 10,000 hours of practice rule? If Gary kasparov can become a world chess champion with an IQ of 123-135, then why can't Feynman be 125. Not every Genius (big g) can be a genius (small g) just as not every NBA player can be tall.
"... why the overkill on job requirements?
It's often a scam. They don't want to hire an American, but want an H1-B or want to get the H1-B they already have on a greencard by "proving" that there are no Americans who can do the job (because no one responds to their add). So they offer exactly what their guy already sitting there has, plus maybe some other things that might reduce interest in the position description (like making it apparent it's an H1-B sweatshop).
No one calls, bingo, America must be saved from this horrendous lack, the paperwork sails through. Immigration lawyers have made some embarrassing movies about how to do this.
"Wouldn't a company be willing to hire a bright person who has shown facility in one or two languages, on one or two platforms?"
Usually no. It's become like the Hollywood movie business. Thow a team together, crank out a product in about two years, then everbody goes their own way, on to the next job. Companies no longer invest "in a person". They don't trust their employees to stick around. And the employees don't trust the company. (The average programmer in silicon valley changes jobs, or is forced to change jobs, on average every two years, at least that's what I last recall.) So the company wants everything up front. The problem comes about when they need something that doesn't yet exist in quantity and have no capacity to buy it. It just can't be brought for any price. They just can't get there. Lots of tension.
Are you Indian? I would guess that as a socially perceptive Indian with a PhD, Dr. Van Nostrand is pretty well aware of his own status among fellow Indians. "
Thanks JPF! But I think you are misled by my handle LOL. I think you are British(?) as most Americans are familiar that Dr Van Nostrand is one of the more educated alter egos of the character Kramer in the sitcom Seinfeld!
I dont possess a Phd sadly sadly as I didnt want to stay that long out of the job market!
I'll believe my flesh-and-blood friends with business degrees over some anonymous blowhard on the internet who has already displayed his tenuous grasp on reality."
I do find it hard to believe a six figure salary is all that difficult in NYC , its not like you can live like a king in that city of all places. For say a 100k usd/pa salary, After taxes and rent in a a pretty small and spare apartment, you are left with what 38k?
Having said all that a portfolio manager if dealing with tech stock would really know his stuff.If you are dealing a large amount of money(possibly 100s of mil or even billions as he is working in Wall Street) then you need to know which way the market is going in order to advise your clients accordingly and for that you need to know the ins and out of the industry.
But still just six figures is a big deal in NYC? Sorry DR, Im not sure you have it right there.
Here's a bit about 'the valley' from one of two guys who wrote the best bit of productivity software ever. Both, from their surnames at least (Hearn and Holdaway), 'old stock' Americans.
"After ClarisWorks 1.0 shipped, Liz and I moved to Portland, Oregon. Why? Liz had grown up nearby, and each time we visited her family there, it was harder to leave. The Pacific Northwest is really a wonderful place to be, in countless ways. We also wanted to get away from Silicon Valley high prices and crowds. (Of course that's hard to believe, in retrospect - houses in the bay area now cost many times what they did in 1992.)"
Then there's Steve Jobs nostalgia for apricot trees.
DVN:Should go? SHOULD go? In all of this hystria over Zuckberg and h1b. Has anyone actually conducted a serious study as to these immigrant programmers are NEEDED vs WANTED?
Ben Tillman:A study?
DVN: Yes. A study.
Ben Tillman: The number of smart people in this country means that immigrants are NEVER needed. For anything.
DVN: Really? For sure there are a number of smart people.But are they capable? Do they have the skills?The knowledge? The expertise?You have ignored my question altogether.So you will forgive me from your answer or lack thereof,if I conclude that the answers to all questions above is a big fat NO.
Americans DO NOT HAVE THE SKILLS to take these jobs.
Ben Tillman:If they don't have the skills, it's because you don't want them to have the skills.
DVN: LOL, who is "you" in this equation. And why doesnt "he" want them to have the skills?
Ben Tillman: If you would pay them the market rate
DVN: What is the market rate? And how can that be determined?Seeing how immigrants were involved in the tech sector from the get go?
Ben Tillman: they would acquire the skills.
DVN: So instead of acquring skills that get them a job with a lower salary than they deserve (due to those meddling immaggants!) ,they make a well thought out,meticulously planned and utterly rational decision to go into debt by taking obscure liberal arts courses where they get ask guys like me if I would like a biscotti with that grand latte?
Ben tillman: It's a tautology.
DVN: You can use any fancy word you want, its not going to fool people into believing that you are smart.
If Gary kasparov can become a world chess champion with an IQ of 123-135, then why can't Feynman be 125.
IQ and chess ability are probably less correlated han you think.
Ben Tillman: The number of smart people in this country means that immigrants are NEVER needed. For anything.
DVN: Really? For sure there are a number of smart people.But are they capable? Do they have the skills?The knowledge? The expertise?
The best way to find out is to end immigration.
Dr. Van Nostrand said: Thanks JPF! But I think you are misled by my handle LOL. I think you are British(?) as most Americans are familiar that Dr Van Nostrand is one of the more educated alter egos of the character Kramer in the sitcom Seinfeld!
I dont possess a Phd sadly sadly as I didnt want to stay that long out of the job market!
I am not British, I just don't watch much TV:-) I was merely hamming it up in my response to Pete Wrong. Well, I suppose I am a diaspora Brit of sorts if you count the Anglo-Celtic ancestry (Welsh/Cornish/Scottish southerners) on my goyisher side.
-The Judean People's Front
Asians and indians actually enjoy programming and thus do a better job than whites of equivalent IQ, many of whom would rather be doing something useless like writing the great American novel.
As exemplified by this comment, these foreigners just exude contempt for ethnic Americans. I really don't think it is in our best interest to let have them in this country. They will discriminate against us."
I am not one to deny that Indians can be pretty nasty and racist in their attitudes towards whites (and blacks). And yes they do practice nepotism in a rather brazen manner.
Both are strong arguments against a MASS immigration of h1b Indians or Asians.
But they are effective arguments only if a certain ethnicity doesnt benefit disproportionately due to the visa scheme (ie diversify the portfolio to include qualified Europeans,Russians,Argentines,Arabs(christians preferably,Iranians,occasionaly African such as Ethiopian or Kenyan etc)
This way its much more difficult nepotism.
And make citizenship requirements more stringent for h1b types.
Of course family reunification has to end.It is a total sham
All these criteria enable greater chances of assimilation.
All these American nativists think citizenship falls from the sky like manna onto the laps of Indian immigrants in particular.Nothing could be further from the truth.
Pretty much every Indian student and employee I knew lived in mortal terror of the INS (later Homeland Security) of not following the proper procedure.
I knew a couple of guys who couldnt get their green cards because they had taken less than 12 credit hours in a semester during university.
Another's social security records showed that he had worked 25 hours often on campus as student when as an international student you are not allowed to exceed 25.
My one sister became a citizen in 2006 ,after a 10 year long wait(and later married a white American-she didnt want to marry him earlier as like she didnt want it to look like a green card marriage!) while another left the country on a 2 month expired student visa and couldnt go back as she had filed the proper paper work.
Now I am not making excuses for any of them including my sister-rules are rules-but please don't go around telling me that it is really a piece of cake to get a citizenship or even a green card
I am probably more pissed off with the Mexican sense of entitlement to citizenry than any of you.
I would appreciate if you would not count as a supporter of mass amnesty or mass legal immigration
There is some good news for immigration restriction types from India atleast.
Indian government and corporations are desperately wooing their diaspora and pleading with their fresh graduates not to leave their shores.
For sure, starting salaries in India are much lower but they are higher than they used and keep increasing higher than the cost of inflation.
Even a lower salary goes much farther in India.
Of course there are drawbacks,one that comes to mind is that that you have to drive a crappy car due to ridiculous import taxes(upto 120%) on foreign cars.The public transport system except in some big cities is absymal as is the horrendous traffic and pollution.
Americans DO NOT HAVE THE SKILLS to take these jobs.
This is so obviously false it's laughable. First of all, if Americans don't have the skills, despite having most of the universities and the previous generation of skilled people who could impart the skills, why would that be? It could only be because people with the aptitude have noticed that they aren't wanted in that field, because the corporations are hiring elsewhere.
But also: if these skills are so rare here and so impossible to start teaching again, why would they be so common elsewhere? Why can IBM go to India and setup a big call center and staff it in a matter of weeks -- and then move it to Bangladesh the next year because wages are a few cents lower there, and then to Somewhereistan the next year?
Whether you're pro- or anti-immigration, it doesn't make logical sense to say these jobs are so difficult that we can't train enough people to do them out of a population of 300 million with double-digit unemployment, and yet we can go to any third-world country and find plenty of people who can do them on the equivalent of a high school education. It's just plain stupid.
You have to really hate Americans to think that adds up.
@Cail corishev
The answer to your post above is simple.For sure Americans ARE capable of gaining the skills requiring
But the perception is that they currently lack them.
Note I said perception. I have asked this question many times and have yet to recieve a definite response? Do native born Americans CURRENTLY have the skills that will preclude importing foreign programmers ? Yes or No.
I am talking currently not 4-10 years down the line.
I dont know if you wished to indulge in some hyperbole but I am pretty sure the immigrants being imported have much more than a high school equivalent education.
People are going to Bangladesh, or whathaveyousthan because those skills are not available there.
You see,its not so complicated!
And never attribute to malice what you can to ignorance. I dont understand why the poster needs to hate Americans to reach the conclusion he does.
Ascribing such powerful emotions to those who disagree with you does no good, especially if he may genuinely be misinformed or reach an incorrect conclusion
FYI I agree with him and I certainly dont hate Americans.
As exemplified by this comment, these foreigners just exude contempt for ethnic Americans. I really don't think it is in our best interest to let have them in this country. They will discriminate against us.
I love just letting these guys talk. No better testament to the idiocy of letting these beggars anywhere near our property. Their resentment and jealousy drips from every sentence, even as they imply that their interests are actually our interests.
I mean, if it isn't apparent that they're really trying to help us, that they have our best interests at heart, I don't know what is!
"Asians and indians actually enjoy programming and thus do a better job than whites of equivalent IQ, many of whom would rather be doing something useless like writing the great American novel.
As exemplified by this comment, these foreigners just exude contempt for ethnic Americans. I really don't think it is in our best interest to let have them in this country. They will discriminate against us."
Many Indian immigrants have hostile attitudes towards white people. It comes out constantly in these kinds of insulting comments. But then they argue to the death that they must be allowed to live in our societies. I guess that applies to a lot of nonwhite groups.
We see here on this blog that Jewish and Indian posters in particular never miss a chance to take the side of any issue that harms white people.
I'm a young person and don't know too many older folks (some, but not too many) in the field. But the unemployment rate for programmers is very small.
" am not one to deny that Indians can be pretty nasty and racist in their attitudes towards whites (and blacks). And yes they do practice nepotism in a rather brazen manner..."
My sister works (as one of the few non-Indians) in an Indian-owned company, as a progammer. Her employers are ok, but in the midst of a depression and high-jobless era, they bring in more Indians from India. Indians and Russians are hired at the nearby SOcial Security offices more readily than native born Americans. The weirdest thing is not the tribalism of the Indians (dot not feather)for a certain amount of ethnic networking is expected (whites have the same rights to do it), but the so-called Americans in decision-making positions, keeping all this going on.
I am not against Indians being here at all. I like a lot them. Most appear to be self-selected, well educated. However, once they beoome more than a few, they congregate and make no secret of being pro-Indian. Edison, New Jersey anyone? So why exactly are we supposed to be so welcoming? I mean--why? There's a billion of them back in India, an inexhaustible supply, and you're telling me they are often racist towards whites and yet think as many should come to white countries as they think should come?
btw, my sister is friendly with a black lady progammer at her place of business. A young Indian guy, just arrived from India, greeted the black lady in the parking lot with the cheerful affirmation that she must look good to black men because she is heavy and they like big women. She and my sister were too shocked to respond at first. In retrospect it was kind of humorous. After all, he'd only just arrived. Actually they didn't see him around for too long afterward.
While I don't expect groveling gratitude, a little acknowledgment would be nice--the US invented and built the computer industry, and then opened its doors to a bunch of "foreigners" it really never needed, mainly for the benefit of a very few rich people. But Indians benefit. And THEY resent US?
The ironies increase incrementally, like a computer program.
While I don't expect groveling gratitude, a little acknowledgment would be nice--the US invented and built the computer industry, and then opened its doors to a bunch of "foreigners" it really never needed, mainly for the benefit of a very few rich people. But Indians benefit. And THEY resent US?"
As Benjamin Franklin said one makes friends not by doing favors for them but having them do favors for you.
Far from Indians grovelling to you, you (a economic and military superpower) as being percieved as grovelling towards them.For sure this leads to resentment and contempt from the beneficiary- its human nature.
THis NGO mindset is prevalent not just in the corporate world but the state ,defense and education departements as well.
The sorry results are there for all to see.
I say by all means shut off immigration from India- it would appear that neither really NEEDS the other.
You will avoid the less desirable effects of Indian presence you mentioned and India would arrest its brain drain.
Win win
I like Americans in decision-making positions, keeping all this going on.
I am not against Indians being here at all. I like a lot them.
Immigration Consultants in Mohali
We see here on this blog that Jewish and Indian posters in particular never miss a chance to take the side of any issue that harms white people.
This is the intersection of free speech and diversity. It happens wherever free speech and diversity come together. Every time. It's kind of beautiful to watch, really; Whites complain about Blacks, Jews, Indians, or Hispanics, then the target (or allied) group responds in kind against Whites, but usually escalates the acrimony. And back and forth it goes. Throughout the process, none of the non-Whites seem to understand that they're taking diversity out back and shooting it in the head.
Free speech, diversity, harmony - pick two.
DVN: What is the market rate? And how can that be determined?
It's determined by allowing the market to operate without government interference. Immigration is government interference.
DVN: So instead of acquring skills that get them a job with a lower salary than they deserve (due to those meddling immaggants!) ,they make a well thought out,meticulously planned and utterly rational decision to go into debt by taking obscure liberal arts courses where they get ask guys like me if I would like a biscotti with that grand latte?
Listen, asshole. If you give Americans incentives, they will learn anything you want them to. If you import people to disincentivize them, it means you do not want them to learn those things. There are 6 million Americans with IQs of 130+, and if you can't get them to work for you, then YOU are the problem.
ben tillman spewed:
Listen, asshole. If you give Americans incentives, they will learn anything you want them to. If you import people to disincentivize them, it means you do not want them to learn those things. There are 6 million Americans with IQs of 130+, and if you can't get them to work for you, then YOU are the problem.
DVN: Lol, you are an angry man.calm down, wipe the froth of your chin and the screen.
And again ask yourself why you are unable to answer my question.
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