42% of California’s STEM Workforce Hails from Outside the U.S

http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/fortytwo-percent-of-californias-stem-workforce-hails-from-outside-the-us

by teklaperry • 9 years ago

167 208 9 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

fhood• 9 years ago

Are there numbers on where (in what country) they were educated?

nxsynonym• 9 years ago

this is what I'm curious about too. Are these people who came to the U.S for college / grad school?

the report only says foreign born - doesn't mention how long they've been in the U.S for or if they came just for the job they landed.

lunchladydoris• 9 years ago

Is this a case of there not being enough qualified US citizens or immigrants being willing to work for less?

sabujp• 9 years ago

combination of all of the above + cost of living in CA

neo4sure4• 9 years ago

I think California did become the 6th largest economy in the world by just getting workers for less.

ssalazar• 9 years ago

Silicon Valley wages are the highest in the country for comparable work, so, no.

rtx2• 9 years ago

And due to Big companies being HQ there.

hkarthik• 9 years ago

QoL in California is pretty poor, considering the cost required as compared to the rest of the US. Only immigrants are willing to pay the price since for many of them, it's still an upgrade from what they can get back home.

gumby4• 9 years ago

QoL in California is pretty poor, considering the cost required as compared to the rest of the US.

After 30 years, on and off, in the valley I agree the QoL here isn't great (when compared to Germany, France, Australia...) but way way better than anywhere else in the US.

dragonwriter• 9 years ago

QoL in California is pretty poor, considering the cost required as compared to the rest of the US

That's certainly true for people outside of high-paying jobs (California has the highest, CoL-adjusted poverty rate in the nation), but less clearly so for those with high-paying work, who often are better off (even given local CoL) than they would be elsewhere because wages in elite fields are often higher here even compared to CoL.

jorgen123• 9 years ago

Perhaps it is a case of a number without context. I have been here for nearly 18 years now and have become a citizen. I just wanted to get out of the rain of my homeland and into the California sunshine.

I guess I am part of the 42% but I was never one of the “poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. I just consider myself a proud American. 42% says nothing about how long people have been here and whether they are just a next wave building up the country like waves of immigrants from the past.

winter_blue• 9 years ago

I don't know why you're being downvated. The very fact that you are being downvoted shows how many folks with xenophobia are lurking around on Hacker News.

tomc19854• 9 years ago

Or perhaps it's tech barons bellyaching about engineer wages made manifest

stale20024• 9 years ago

Those are the same thing.

There is NEVER a time when there are not enough qualified US Citizens.

Why? Because if I am a company, I will 100% always be able to hire enough engineers, if I just do this 1 weird trick.

And that trick is "pay every engineer 1 million dollars".

The question is always about price.

In the same way that a food shortage has basically never existed in history. Sure, there were places where the price of bread was 1 thousand dollars, and people were starving to death because they couldn't have enough food. But thats not a shortage, thats just people complaining about price!

Now, the real question you have to ask yourself, is "is bread costing 1 thousand dollars a good thing?" And when you can answer that questions, you will also be able to answer "is a software engineer costing 1 million dollars a good thing"?

Edit: my post doesn't seem to be clear.

My point that I was making is that "bread costing 1 thousand dollars is a bad thing". And that there is nothing wrong with driving down the price of devs.

My definition of shortage is "prices are too high"

cbr• 9 years ago

Is there any situation that you would consider a "shortage"?

humanrebar5• 9 years ago

I was about to make this point myself (maybe with different wording). It's a good point. Would the people downvoting care to explain their objections?

ianai• 9 years ago

This feels like an argument about definitions. When supply is decreased prices increase. That's basic Econ.

Now, another point to make would be about possible output versus labor costs. Ie SV will employ labor in close relationship to the output of that labor and the cost of it. Once those two values equate there is no more (efficient) demand for labor available.

That's Econ theory land though. I think this is much more about profit margins and market inefficiencies.

tomc19854• 9 years ago

How is something not a shortage if noone can afford to buy it? When people talk about shortage they usually speak of some cohort's inability to acquire something, not simplistic assessments of inventory levels.

I'm all for the wage argument.... yes if you raise wages high enough they will come... but why take it to such extremes?

SV has done this to itself. It clusters around tiny, restricted geographic locations, which push out the locals, gentrify entire cities, and then these companies have the gall to complain about the cost of labor, which they helped to define the high prices of. More consideration is placed on proximity than prurient economic interests, because Business Interests Always Come First.

qq663• 9 years ago

At the high end, there are no substitute US citizens. Imagine trying to find an American-born replacement for Yann LeCun. At the low end, the H1B abuse train definitely imports a lot of people with close to zero skills.

marcell• 9 years ago

At the high end, there are no substitute US citizens.

What? Many brilliant engineers were born outside the US, including one of the founders of Google, Sergey Brin.

bilbo0s2• 9 years ago

"....At the high end, there are no substitute US citizens....."

This can't be overstated enough.

I think the immigration that is critical to the US is the high end immigration, not the low end stuff like H1B.

I'm just afraid that the chanting mobs will want to throw the baby out with the bath water. We NEED the NIW-types, we don't really need most of the H1B-types. So if the political environment is such that we need to cut loose some H1B-types to save the NIW-types... we should do so without hesitation.

vinhboy3• 9 years ago

In my very limited experience with companies that hires H1B to fill programming jobs, it's because they can't find qualified local candidates.

All the really qualified people are in the bay area working for tech startups, etc...

So a company outside of the bay area would have to bring in H1B workers who are willing to live in the area.

I am not sure if there are costs concerns for the company in making that decision, but I figure if they were willing to hire me, they probably don't have a problem hiring local candidates if possible.

Edit: Since people want more details, I'll elaborate on the VERY LITTLE that I know. Right now consulting agencies in Sacramento, CA need Senior Ruby Devs and they can't find any. I am not 100% sure on what salary is being offered, but I am guessing around 100K. A junior dev fresh out of college can make about 40K (remember its Sacramento!). (I want to make it clear this is all hearsay, don't quote me on this)

I was told an agency that hires out H1B workers can get paid as much as $50/hr. I have no way to verify this, but this is what I heard.

Another thing is, these are short term, project based, positions --- not very attractive to people seeking a career.

They also have a constant need for .NET and Java devs.

That being said. I am very much against outsourcing jobs that could be hired locally. But Sacramento has a very small developer community, so I don't blame them for using H1B to fill the gap. But who knows... maybe it's all a ruse.

SilasX3• 9 years ago

At risk of opening that whole debate again...

Are there really no qualified local candidates, or are there no qualified local candidates who can also solve theoretical CS problems on the spot while pretending they're not doing it from memory?

Or qualified local candidates who refuse to lie and say they only took 3 hours on the take-home exercise?

geebee6• 9 years ago

I know, I know, we go over this too much on HN. But... isn't half the sentence missing when you say they can't find qualified local candidates without mentioning the pay?

What positions were you trying to fill, and what pay and working conditions were you offering?

Supply and demand are not suspended just because it's tech. There's a huge amount of demand, but not much supply for highly skilled software developers at $75k a year in San Francisco. There's a huge supply at $500k a year, but considerably less demand.

logfromblammo2• 9 years ago

They can't find qualified local candidates in the same way that I can't tie my own shoes if I cut both of my hands off.

There are plenty of qualified candidates out there. But as you mentioned, they are mostly already working somewhere else, for someone else. In order to hire them, you need to offer more or better than they already get. That isn't all just a salary number, but almost everything has a conversion rate.

Guest workers on a non-immigrant visa are simply cheaper to employ. As are young, unmarried, childless, and inexperienced workers.

It's fundamental economics. Supply is not a single fixed quantity, but a function of price. Likewise for demand. Where they cross, the market clears. Everyone willing to pay more than the clearing price gets an employee, and everyone willing to work for less than the clearing price gets hired. If you can't find a job, you are asking for too much money, and if you can't find an employee, you are offering too little.

Companies deliberately set criteria that guarantee a local search for candidates will fail, in order to save money on labor costs by hiring an imported candidate more cheaply. That is the heart of the unease surrounding H1B laborers. If the company truly cannot find suitable local candidates, the person they do find is in a great position to ask for more pay. If they need you that much, they should be paying more than any local would even dream of asking for, right?

Does that happen? Are H1B workers paid more than their local equivalents?

vonmoltke2• 9 years ago

In my very limited experience with companies that hires H1B to fill programming jobs, it's because they can't find qualified local candidates.
All the really qualified people are in the bay area working for tech startups, etc...
So a company outside of the bay area would have to bring in H1B workers who are willing to live in the area.

So the answer to a lack of local candidates is to start reaching across oceans? How about elsewhere in the massive expanse of North America, where many people don't even need a visa or can get one much more easily?

s73ver5• 9 years ago

Given those numbers.. the problem is the salary. It does not matter that it's Sacramento; it's still California. And, honestly, as a fresh out of college dev, why would I go to Sacramento for 40k when I can go to the valley for 3x that, and still come out ahead?

morgante3• 9 years ago

Yes. If engineers were routinely paid $500k+ annually, I'm sure more US citizens would be interested in becoming qualified.

ssambros• 9 years ago

So apparently $100k+ is not enough money to interest the citizens. I wonder why that's the case.

By they way, the next step after not being able to hire a 60k H1B worker is usually to hire a 60k outsourced remote worker, not to hire a 150k "citizen".

tanilama5• 9 years ago

I doubt? I think HN people are not as delusional as this. 100k+ is definitely a good salary already. It is the fucking 90% percentile of the whole country. 500k+ I think you are begging the companies to outsource all code work to India.

https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/

vaishaksuresh5• 9 years ago

The median wage from my memory is 60k a year. You make it sound like money is the biggest factor in going into STEM when a lot of kids don't even go to colleges.

The shortage is not because you don't get paid enough, the shortage is because not enough people can afford the expensive college degree.

4 years of undergrad cost me < $1000 and the same thing costs >$50,000 in the US.

slackingoff2017• 9 years ago

I've worked on the hiring side, worker shortages in tech are 100% bs.

I was hiring for a small local company with no reputation, boring work, and mediocre benefits. This company was about 60 miles out from Chicago in a small town.

We got over 100 applicants for every software position. We didn't even pay for ads, just put stuff on the free sites.

We hardly hired anyone, but the deluge of applications allowed us to low-ball pay and be extremely selective.

The worst kept secret in tech hiring is that everyone knows it pays well and hundreds of thousands are clamoring for open positions. They are "unqualified" because nobody will train them.

rajathagasthya2• 9 years ago

I don't think anyone is talking about worker shortage, but rather about qualified worker shortage.

zippergz• 9 years ago

Maybe your experience differs from mine, but getting lots of applications has never been the problem. Finding the handful of those applicants who can actually program effectively is the hard part. I'm consistently stunned by how many candidates either have zero knowledge of specific things they list on their resume or truly can't even write basic code in languages they say they know.

outworlder3• 9 years ago

We got over 100 applicants for every software position.

How many of them passed FizzBuzz?

Chicago outskirts is also not California. Try a software position with low pay, crappy benefits at an unknown software company in California and report back. Bonus points if you try it in the Bay Area.

Nokinside• 9 years ago

In this day and age, low level software jobs should be considered as blue collar jobs that replaced manufacturing. When people think about programmer in boring job, the correct metaphor is think about working class mechanic in production line, not an engineer.

I was surprised how little people in US value hard STEM education. I think think that one reason for that is that tech in peoples mind is some type programmer.

When young people ask why should I learn math because I know python, I ask them how many unemployed electrical engineers with signal processing background you know? Programmers for bean counting apps become unemployable when they get older because there is no shortage of code monkeys working for peanuts and knowing some framework from inside out is outdated 10 years from now.

SilasX3• 9 years ago

If virtually none of them were hirable, that would support the claim of a qualified tech shortage. A large number of applications is only informative if they're qualified.

outworlder3• 9 years ago

I don't think it's as simple as that.

For all the vilifying of H1B and related visas, it is still a big burden for companies. Even big companies will use third party, specialized lawyers to deal with the bureaucracy.

In the case of H1B, there's a significant hiring lag. You apply in April and, if you are lucky, get the visa in October. Companies who abuse the system en masse (there are about 3 or 4 that do it) don't care about that and will use a shotgun approach, but if you are trying to fill a position, it's a very bad proposition.

Still, that gives you access to brains from the whole world. And yes, these brains may be willing to work for less, initially, compared to what a US citizen would get. There doesn't have to be foul play involved: they have less leverage. A similarly qualified US citizen would just name their price and tell the company to take a hike if that was not met. Restarting the whole visa process would be way more painful.

mysterydip• 9 years ago

Take a look at indeed, monster, or whatever your preferred job board is. Sample the tech jobs in an area, what they want in the position, and what they're willing to pay. When I was job hunting, many wanted a surgeon at nurse prices.

mcrad• 9 years ago

If you are an unprofitable tech company, you are probably going to cry about worker shortage as a means to raise more money, and distribute that wealth as you see fit.

neo4sure4• 9 years ago

Why don't u open ur own company? And then run it without immigrant techies :)

Veratyr3• 9 years ago

As someone working and doing code interviews for a large company that pays well (even by bay area standards), I think it's a lack of qualified US citizens. The number of graduates I've interviewed that can't figure out a basic graph traversal is crazy. I don't ask (or expect) them to recite algorithms from memory but even if they haven't worked with graphs before, they should be able to figure out a BFS or DFS on their own and suggest some ways to improve on it. Many of them however, cannot.

I'll also note that I don't interview many foreigners and the reason I see mostly new grads is that I'm not senior myself, so it makes little sense for me to interview senior candidates.

At the high end, there's simply a larger supply overseas. The US has a population of 300M and between them, India and China have about 2.7B people and their countries pay far, far less.

Overtonwindow• 9 years ago

I think some might read that title and jump to conclusion. Don't. The article states that they are only foreign born, but it doesn't say anything about how they got here. It would have helped had the article made this clear, but it's likely IEEE doesn't want to step into the H1B visa abuse issue.

vaishaksuresh5• 9 years ago

Whenever someone brings up H1B, everybody goes to abuse issue, but a lot of us got here as students and we still have to use H1B to work. It is unfair to just lump everybody on an H1B as a low wage, unqualified person.

denzil_correa• 9 years ago

What percentage of H1Bs are "low wages"?

DamnYuppie2• 9 years ago

The issue that many of us have, myself included, with the H1B program is that is is primarily used to suppress local wages. It is easy to say you can't find candidates if you are pricing the job well below market wages.

barrkel• 9 years ago

Articles like this seem to bring out people involuntarily triggered to grind their pet axe. The discussion is never enlightening. That's why I flagged.

dalbasal• 9 years ago

I suspect a lot of triggering is voluntary.

masondixon3• 9 years ago

Very true. Its like bike-shedding.

geebee6• 9 years ago

I highly recommend following and reading the link to the full report. Here it is again.

https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/foreign-...

There's an interesting breakdown of a more narrow definition of STEM vs a broader one (that includes social sciences and health sciences). I personally would be more inclined to include health sciences than social sciences, but the data is granular enough to get at this distinction in some cases.

cloudwizard2• 9 years ago

I was CTO at 2 startups during the first Internet boom. I was getting resumes from janitors that were offering to be trained.

I had to hire most of the teams from Canada.

drpgq• 9 years ago

As a Canadian, that's kind of depressing.

similarfark• 9 years ago

Google and the rest could have instituted huge training programs for Americans. Instead, they imported the most fortunate from other countries, leaving behind the least fortunate everywhere.

It's 1% Americans importing the %1 from other counties. It's the most powerful and well off united in screwing the least powerful.

You don't have to dislike immigrants to dislike corporations and politicians destroying opportunity for millions of the families that literally built America.

aantix• 9 years ago

I've never thought of the idea that Google/Apple/Facebook could have funded their own Dev Bootcamps..

You're right, total missed opportunity for them.

Veratyr3• 9 years ago

I don't think the burden should be on corporations. Nearly (all?) every other developed country on earth has government subsidised or provided education. Where do you think all the immigrants are getting their degrees? Americans can even go to other countries and get educated for free (Germany I believe does this).

The US needs to overhaul, hell, even nationalize, its higher education system. Don't expect corporations to educate people for you.

s73ver5• 9 years ago

I do think most of the burden should be on corporations. They're the ones that need the talent.

bluthru2• 9 years ago

Especially when countries like Germany have such a good history of training their own workforce through apprenticeships. I believe this is handled by the unions though, where the incentives are more in line with the workers than the corporations.

jrs958• 9 years ago

This wouldn't be necessary if we actually invested in our own citizens. I'd have no problem with it if our own population didn't have a skills shortage, but it does.

seanmcdirmid4• 9 years ago

"Necessary"? Its a world market for top-end talent, we just attract the cream of the crop. Even if Americans upped their game, everyone else would probably also and we'd still be in the same situation.

corporateslave24• 9 years ago

This isn't true. It's a race to the bottom for cheap talent. There is definitely a race for top talent, but that comprises a small portion of all immigrants. It's all about cheap labor.

andreasklinger• 9 years ago

I assume OP means that education (to become "top-end talent") could be more widely available in the US.

jrs958• 9 years ago

The majority of STEM workers by definition can't be top talent for the industry. Being a part of a world market for top talent makes sense. That's not what we have though. We don't even have enough people or average or mediocre talent. We're relying on a global labor market at the expense of our own citizens.

fageyogurtspoon• 9 years ago

Most expensive talent != top-end talent

ronnier2• 9 years ago

Yeah, I just don't get it. It was pretty clear to me what to do when I left high school. Study, study, study. Work hard, work hard, work hard. Nobody told me this, it just seemed like the right thing to do. I grew up poor in projects in a horrible violent city with nobody to guide me. If I can do this, why can't other Americans who have a much better upbringing and supportive family structure? Which makes me think, life is too good, too easy, for the average american. Why go through the effort of studying years of math and computer science when they can enjoy life and get by on jobs that don't require years and years of dedication and schooling?

jrs958• 9 years ago

A lot of people just aren't responsible enough to do this themselves. Most people from your city probably weren't. There's probably a nearly infinite amount of factors at play there, but that's a lot of opportunities for improvement that we just aren't focused on as a nation. We're all checked out and getting sold out by our own institutions.

okreallywtf2• 9 years ago

This is anecdata. By that reasoning why would we even have poor people if being poor drove everyone to success like it did to you? Do you actually think that anyone who workedars hard as you would achieve the same level of success? If they could, wouldn't that just then become the minimum and you would have to work harder than that to achieve more? There is clearly something else going on here.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't be proud of yourself, but if you were being intellectually honest you would realize that this is not a rational well researched stance.

This topic has been researched to death already so we're not going to break any real ground but I would ask you two things specifically:

1. When you studied hard, were you supported to study hard? Were your basic necessities covered (food, shelter) so you could focus? A lot of kids don't even have this basic level of stability in their lives, and maybe you didn't either.

2. How did you get into computer science? When I was growing up I didn't know anyone who was a programmer of any kind and wouldn't have even known to consider it had I not gotten lucky and took a programming class in highschool partly because it allowed me to drive to the community college to do it and get out of school almost half of the day. If I hadn't had transportation and money for gas it would have never happened and who knows where I would be now.

eli_gottlieb5• 9 years ago

Look what happens when we stop making things "too good, too easy":

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/sunday-review/push-dont-c...

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/education/edlife/overachi...

ajross2• 9 years ago

I have absolutely no issue with your policy priorities. Let's get more native-born citizens through school with skills appropriate for the modern workforce.

But the bit where this falls down is your use of "our own" in a context where it either has no meaning or has, let's just say "accidentally discriminatory" meaning. The idea that we should invest to "prevent" this situation is kinda distasteful.

These people are americans now. No, they aren't all citizens (though many are), but their kids are and their descendants will be. This is their home as much as it is yours or mine. This country built itself on the backs of imported talent, there's no valid reason for that to stop now.

jrs958• 9 years ago

A nation's government absolutely should discriminate in favor of it's own people. That's who it's supposed to be representing. In the case of the U.S., there's nothing racial about that. Opportunity for Americans is more important than opportunity for non-Americans.

galdosdi3• 9 years ago

I agree with both of you:

(1) those who have already made it here and intend to stay, are Americans now. That's what America has always been about. Anyone who disagrees is a despicable nativist who should be deported back to Germany, England, or wherever their great grandparents came from and sign their house deed over to the descendants of whichever native americans lived there before being violently and unlawfully removed.

(2) those who have not yet made it here, we owe nothing to yet, and we certainly ought to invest in ourselves. The education system in this country is so bad it's a joke, and it's not great if we end up relying on other countries educating people and sending them here just because our own education is so awful. That is a very precarious position to be in.

hkmurakami3• 9 years ago

Imo the distinction between equalizing the opportunity and education gap on a national level versus a global level is a topic that is rarely properly debated. Each of us (or groups of us) have our closely held dogmas based on our personal experiences (or lack thereof) and don't really engage in understanding the opposite camp's narrative or logic.

IMO either position is perfectly defensible. Helping those who are "your neighbors" (those who are more proximal to you) first is defensible, and so is helping those around the world catch up to the living standards of the developed West.

What is not good is that we continue to mask pragmatic or moral decision making with irrational, illogical, emotionally charged positions, on both the left and the right. That, I wish would change.

masondixon3• 9 years ago

These people are americans now.

Wouldn't "our own" as used earlier also include "these people"?

I think you are injecting context which was never there in the first place.

dropit_sphere2• 9 years ago

These people are americans now. No, they aren't all citizens... ...This is their home as much as it is yours or mine.

I don't...look. All I want to say is: I hope you're aware that you're making enemies with statements like this.

mc322• 9 years ago

The valid reason is that we are underutilizing our own underprivileged groups, be they women, first nations, blacks or rural whites.

That said, we should find a balance where we both attract highly skilled foreign talent and develop our own in-house talent.

michaelmrose2• 9 years ago

If these people all had the same rights and privileges as citizens they would simply be a valuable addition to our workforce. They for example would have no reason to accept substandard wages. If we place them in positions where they are indebted to their employer and can't change jobs they serve to depress wages.

In order of preference I would see them treated equally and made citizens, kept out of the labor pool, or left as they are.

As a citizen the current situation seems be the least preferable option and I see no reason things ought to stay as they are.

In fact basically destroying the H1B system as it stands is probably the best first step. The bigots that make up 40% of America would probably support it and our idiot in chief would probably sign it.

Then we could replace it with a system whereby these valuable people have a sane opportunity to come here permanently and compete on even footing with natives when the wind changes with at least lukewarm support from the business community eager for more employees.

awkwarddaturtle2• 9 years ago

This country built itself on the backs of imported talent

No we didn't. We built our country on the exploitation of poor european factory workers, chinese "slave" labor and african slaves.

This country wasn't built on "talent". It was built on exploitation of CHEAP or free labor.

there's no valid reason for that to stop now.

We stopped it many times in history to protect AMERICANS. Go read about immigration history rather than propaganda we are forcefed. European immigration was stalled to protect american labor. Chinese immigration was stopped to protect american labor. And if you think about it, even american slavery was stopped to protect american labor.

Immigration wasn't all great. Throughout US history, it led to lots of turmoil, displacement and heartache.

Nothing is all great or all evil like people with agenda like to believe. There are pros and cons to everything. The skewed "pro-immigration" policy the past 50 years has gutted american labor and american society. We need a more rational policy.

And the fact that america/american government shouldn't favor AMERICANS over immigrants is pure rubbish. It's neoliberal fantasy. As a nation we have gone too "left". We need to correct our trajectory lest america fall off the tracks entirely.

geebee6• 9 years ago

You might be interested in a RAND study (a historically very pro-immigration institute) that considers this subject. It concludes that the reason US citizens and people who are free to choose their profession in the US avoid these degrees because they can earn more with more stable career paths elsewhere.

In other words, the aversion to STEM among elite US students is rational.

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/issue_papers/2005...

gpawl6• 9 years ago

We're not talking about elites, we're talking about average. There will never be enough 'elite' students to go around.

cloudwizard2• 9 years ago

In US HS, the grades are going up but the world rankings are dropping. Our kids are not being prepared to be competitive.

https://qz.com/1032183/no-wonder-young-americans-feel-so-imp...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/07/17/easy-a-nearly...

https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/sei/edTool/data/highschool-08.html FYI - It may not look like much on the graph but the US is 2 years behind the top rankers.

gpawl6• 9 years ago

I'd like to see that graph expanded to distributions, and weighted by population.

I'd also like to see China and India and Russia on that list.

USA is big enough to be an above average nation and a below average nation combined.

Israel, that ranks significantly below the US on that chart, has perhaps the largest technology industry per capita in the world.

gpawl6• 9 years ago

Even if education was the same everywhere, the most talented would tend to flow toward the areas of highest opportunity, and employers and customers will pick (their judgment of) the best performers.

Either the best here will compete with the best there, or the best there will come here (or vice versa)

nostrademons• 9 years ago

Is it that we aren't investing in our own citizens, or that they aren't taking advantage of the opportunities that those investments create that are open to all?

I went to a top liberal arts college, and majored in physics for most of my time there. Within the physics major, every single student was either 1.) An immigrant 2.) The child of an immigrant or 3.) Jewish. It was similar - though a little less pronounced - in the CS and math majors. Most of my friends there were from comfortable middle-class American backgrounds, and most of them majored in English, music, history, or psychology. Many of them are struggling financially or still dependent upon financial support from parents, 12 years after graduation.

The American educational system is such that you can largely make your own choices from college onwards (and to a limited degree, in high school too). This is a great strength of America, but it also means that sometimes people make choices that don't work out for them. The native-born citizens I know that invested heavily in learning math & computers when they were teenagers are doing great, even if they came from dirt-poor backgrounds. The ones I know who figured there would always be a job waiting for them, even if they came from very comfortable upper-middle-class backgrounds, are barely scraping by.

xsmasher• 9 years ago

I feel like there's a cycle where parents who struggled want their children to have practical careers; parents who had success in practical careers want their children to "follow their dreams;" then the cycle repeats.

jdavis703• 9 years ago

Both me and my sister received full scholarships (poor family + smart genes I guess). She got a degree in creative writing, I went the IT route. Part of the problem is that most STEM jobs just aren't fun...

gopalv• 9 years ago

This wouldn't be necessary if we actually invested in our own citizens.

So much this - I know of this from my own life.

I got a state funded CS education for around 500$ a year (if my family had been poorer, they'd have paid me to study) - it was a good one, because I keep going back to my annotated Sedgewick.

Graduated with zero debt, with an open source project I was working on for years which meant that I spent the first few years of my work life knowing I could take risks (not that I did take too many).

In the Bay area now and seeing clearly the impact of an expensive education on people's choices - not everyone needs to be a college graduate, however putting an expensive price tag on it means that only people who are sure they can get a financial return on their education will take up that risk.

There is a chilling effect on women, who are expecting to be discriminated in the industry, driving them to other vocations where they don't expect to incur similar challenges with financial gains or professional advancements.

In fact, purely from a state investment point of view, CA is getting my tax dollars to spend while my college barely gets anything back from me.

I really wish my kids would get a similar springboard to start their life off without an albatross around their neck, but they are probably entering a system which is probably going to maximize immediate financial returns from them instead of expecting them to be late bloomers becoming productive over time.

mc322• 9 years ago

This is a failure of both our educational system and our culture. Our educational and cultural systems both underscore soft majors in the liberal arts realms and don't make STEM cool to average students as they might in China Russia or India.

Kids care too much about fitting in rather than making it in life with hard skills. You will have thousands working service jobs in LA with hopes of making it in entertainment. You don't see that emphasis in STEM in the US.

masondixon3• 9 years ago

I've always wondered about this. People never really talk about it, but I see the "cool" factor as pivotal. Smart social people want to be bankers, lawyers, doctors, management consultants, not STEM.

With the internet everyone has had the ability to learn programming for ages, and it really hasn't dramatically changed much. People are just not interested in it at some point.

CrazyCoin• 9 years ago

I want to keep this not politicized but is there merit to the argument that immigrants are taking jobs away from other STEM majors who are from the U.S.? To find out we would need to look at STEM job growth for a year, then look at the number of STEM graduates, then look at how many STEM graduates go to work in their field, then see if after 52% of the jobs are subtracted see if there's enough left for the recent graduates. Also immigrant graduates would also have to be taken into account.

moultano• 9 years ago

Why would we expect a global company to hire even a majority from the US?

ishan_dikshit• 9 years ago

I think everyone here is ignoring a very important statistic within the article: "data shows that 25 percent of high tech companies founded between 1995 and 2005 have at least one immigrant founder". Would you rather have these companies be based out of Asia entirely?

Also see: https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2016/03/17/study-immigrants-fou...

I was recently speaking with Demis Hassabis and he recommended looking for startup funding in California but continuing to work out of London. More and more companies are gravitating towards this general template (not London specifically). Would you rather have some low level Stack Developer working at Airbnb on an H1B build the next Billion dollar startup in the Bay Area or out of Bangalore?

Yes, hiring someone with an H1B might cost a company 10k less per annum. But what would it cost America to not have these foreign workers want to work in California altogether? Besides, it isn't fair to build such an impressive hotbed of thought and progress and then try and wall others out of it.

anonemouse145• 9 years ago

In my experience this is not always a positive. I've seen several cases where a foreign born representative is offloading people from (country of origin) because dumb managers still think it's the height of the offshoring era and foreign = cheaper. Relatives and friends and anybody the rep knows from the old country get first in line, and they just lie or exaggerate experience. If they even need to.

I've watched those foreign people get hired even though they walked into the interview without even Googling the product or development environment specified in the ad. Not that this is new or exclusive, mind you.

Nevermind that nobody thought about onboarding these people, there's no documentation, and the resulting product takes a sharp nosedive as work is handed over. These foreign people were promised cheap, and that keeps the investors happy.

This is no slightly against those workers. I've taught these workers and one guy had his head in his hands saying, "Oh my God, the legal liability we're being exposed to here" upon learning of deep design flaws that cheaper labor was somehow going to magically fix.

More workers is not necessarily better- in any sense. It's just more workers. In a capitalist system, that's not necessarily good for anybody except management.

s73ver5• 9 years ago

I would also say that it isn't quite fair to try and concentrate all of the thought and progress in one small area. Not fair to the rest of the world, and not fair to the area which has to suffer increased cost of living because of it.

Note: This post is in no way, shape, or form arguing against immigration. Immigration is great. I'm more saying that we should try and spread around the SV effect, so that more places can prosper, and one place isn't strained so much.

bluthru2• 9 years ago

Would you rather have these companies be based out of Asia entirely?

Well I want to see the entire world become prosperous instead of wealth continuing to concentrate and stratify at a global scale, so yes.

nonamechicken• 9 years ago

I actually was hoping Trump would kick out all Indians from US ever since I heard of the story of Snapdeal founder (he didn't get h1b, came back and started a company in India). Even if a few who come back starts their companies, it is good for Indians in every way. I look forward to the day we Indians can stop relying on other nations for their jobs.

kamaal• 9 years ago

>Would you rather have these companies be based out of Asia entirely?
>Would you rather have some low level Stack Developer working at Airbnb on an H1B build the next Billion dollar startup in the Bay Area or out of Bangalore?

As somebody who stays in Bangalore, I can tell you this is already the case and has been for a few years now.

Back then when I started my career there was a mad rush to move to US in most young people. Today coupled with a impossibly long green card wait, and uncertainties associated with a job on a Visa for most smart people moving to US isn't even an option. I know a lot of smart people for whom moving to US isn't even in their list of priorities.

In the past decade start up ecosystem here has become very good. Starting companies is no longer social or economic taboo in India/Bangalore today.

US people think outsourcing was bad for them? Imagine competing with start ups and their funding, which are operating at 1/10th the budget of any city in US.

quicknir4• 9 years ago

Every time H1B related stuff comes up, I make the same simple suggestion: just inflation adjust the minimum H1B salary from when the law was passed in 1990. 60K dollars in 1990 is about 110K now. This should be able to see a lot of support from different groups because:

1. It makes a clear appeal back to the original intent of the law.

2. It would most likely end most of the perceived abuse/misuse of the law, which occurs at lower salary ranges.

3. It will not prevent tech companies that actually do cool stuff like Google & co from hiring, since most of their hires probably start over 110K now.

I also think that the impact on American workers in this salary range from H1B is pretty low. Many companies with salaries in this range are always hiring provided you have the skills.

awkwarddaturtle2• 9 years ago

I also think that the impact on American workers in this salary range from H1B is pretty low. Many companies with salaries in this range are always hiring provided you have the skills.

Actually most companies that you are referring to want tech salaries to decline. One of the best weapons against high tech salaries are H1B visas and offshoring.

quicknir4• 9 years ago

Do you have any empirical evidence that H1B is an effective "weapon against high tech salaries" in the income range that Google pays?

I think that whatever is going on in the lower end of the market, there is still a substantial shortage of labor in the higher jobs that cannot be made up domestically anytime soon. Higher end jobs tend to have a much less elastic labor pool because fewer people can do the work.

Whatever the impact is for tech workers, for the general public it is definitely a bad outcome to have perpetual labor shortages at tech companies; it just means that they get their products/features/bug fixes/other improvements more slowly.

jrs958• 9 years ago

I think that's a start but specifically because $110K is nearly entry level in silicon valley it ought to be significantly higher. $150K would probably be enough to stop it from holding wages down.

A great side effect of this is that it pretty much makes H1B not viable in the Midwest or other areas where we probably ought to be trying to develop more talent

quicknir4• 9 years ago

Getting an H1B worker is significantly more expensive than someone domestic at the same salary. You have to pay lawyers a bunch of money, the employee can't always start when you/they want, and worse, right now the chance of actually getting an H1B is only something like 1/3. So there's a 2/3 chance that after all of the work of interviewing for this person, paying lawyers, holding a spot for them, they will never actually be able to work for you.

At any rate, I would like to see some empirical backing for those who want to raise H1B salaries higher than inflation adjustment.

The side effect you think is great, is actually really bad. It's not a question of developing more talent, it's the fact that people move to the coasts for jobs. All this really does is disadvantage companies not in NYC and SF, and make it more likely that they will have a labor shortage they can't make up, and pack up. This isn't reflective of anything though, except basically regional inflation (it's not simply that salaries in NYC and SF are so much higher because the companies there are the most productive and therefore deserve the H1B slots more, the salaries are partly inflated because cost of living is also super high, i.e. a dollar is worth less).

seanp2k2• 9 years ago

Yep re: rust belt. Fix cost of living or find a way for all the other markets in the US to come up to where CA is (don't do that).

ajju• 9 years ago

$60K is the minimum salary for a H1B visa, it is not the minimum salary for a H1B visa in a technical position.

I would be very surprised if the "H1B prevailing wage" for any meaningful technical role in the SF bay area is less than $100k.

aphextron• 9 years ago

This has nothing to do with immigration policy. Our kids in the US are simply not studying STEM subjects, period. We are not keeping pace with the rest of the world. I'm currently taking lower division engineering requirements in a California community college, and perhaps 20% of my class are native born, English speaking American kids. There is just no respect for it whatsoever, in a culture where it's funny or cool to think math is stupid. We are completely finished as a society. What rises to takes it's place who knows, but there's no way a country can survive like this.

qbaqbaqba• 9 years ago

That's funny how everyone here is against the trumps wall meanwhile every time H1B is mentioned no one has problem with people calling for "kicking them to India". Quite sad.

42% of California’s STEM Workforce Hails from Outside the U.S

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