Comment by jlebar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jlebar | Hacker News Reader

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> It absolutely, positively hurts local labor - naturalized citizens - etc. Without a doubt.

I think there's little question that increasing the supply of engineers reduces their price -- our salaries. We can argue about whether it's a small or a large effect, and whether it goes away in the long run due to macroeconomic effects, but it's certainly there. So you're arguing against a straw man here.

But more to the point, it's short-sighted and selfish to judge policy decisions solely based on their effects on your salary. Especially since those of us in tech are, by and large, ridiculously well-compensated.

Setting aside the benefits to the immigrants themselves, highly-skilled workers who emigrate to the US are a /fantastic deal/. We paid nothing to educate them, yet they come here and grow the economy and pay taxes. All of these new people have to buy housing, food, medical care, and so on. It's literally free economic growth.

> We also don't need any more of the divisive ethic-neuveau-ghettos we're seeing > in the south bay, cupertino and east bay with communities insulating themselves > rather than assimilating.

This is borderline racist. "/We/ don't need any more of /them/, especially if they choose to live apart, rather than become Real Americans." If the alternative is living near people like you, it's no wonder they tend to stick together.

> But more to the point, it's short-sighted and selfish to judge policy decisions solely based on their effects on your salary. Especially since those of us in tech are, by and large, ridiculously well-compensated.

Maybe it's selfish for you, but what about the ~50% of STEM grads who can't find a job in their industry? And wages are stagnant for STEM workers, and lowering for CS workers. Hundreds of thousands have been laid off in the last 5 years, particularly faced with globalisation and outsourcing.

It sounds like you're being selfish in your own way here by saying people shouldn't judge policy decisions based on the effects on their salary, because a lot of people in your country aren't as comfortable as you are in terms of pay.

>Hundreds of thousands have been laid off in the last 5 years, particularly faced with globalisation and outsourcing.

You could also make the argument that allowing women into the industry hurts the wages of male programmers.

Women have been allowed into the industry for a century+ :S If you mean attracting more women into the industry, supposedly the demand is so high that it wont affect any wages. Wages should continue to increase because of a lack of supply! Oh wait...stagnant for a decade...

http://www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages-mi...

> what about the ~50% of STEM grads who can't find a job in their industry?

According to the Census bureau, 74% of STEM grads don't work in STEM [1]. I was pretty surprised to read this, until I looked up what the Census bureau considers to be STEM [2].

You can see from this graphic that CS, math, statistics, and engineering majors all end up working in STEM in relatively high proportions. It's the psychology, social sciences, biology, and (to a lesser degree) physical sciences majors who are dragging this statistic down.

This isn't as surprising to me; indeed, if you hover over the labels in the graphic, you'll see that a lot of bio majors go into health care and education -- not surprising -- and that psych and social science majors go into a wide variety of fields -- again, not surprising or particularly relevant to this debate, I think.

Coming back to people with CS/math/engineering degrees, you're right that about 50% are not employed in STEM-related fields [3]. However, we have zero reason to believe all of these people "can't find a job in their industry". Surely some of them voluntarily work outside STEM.

Note that CS/math/engineering majors have significantly lower unemployment than college grads as a whole [4]. Note also that this 50% fraction is significantly higher for CS/math/engineering than it is for any other group of STEM majors; the next highest is physical sciences majors, of whom only a quarter work in STEM.

In fact, the only groups of people I can find who work "in their fields" in a greater proportion than CS/math/engineering majors is non-STEM "science- and engineering-related" majors working in health care (presumably these are human biology majors and the like), and education majors working in education.

Looking at this data, it's really hard for me to believe there's a problem here. Lots of people don't work in the field that they majored in. This is true for CS/math/engeineering majors, but not as much as most other majors.

One more thing:

> a lot of people in your country aren't as comfortable as you are in terms of pay.

This is exactly my point, actually. Any time you make a decision like this, some people will be hurt, and others helped. But rather than judging this policy decision based on its effect on a particular group of people (almost always, it's "people like me"), we should consider its effect on the country as a whole. As I said, highly-skilled immigration is free economic growth, and a fantastic deal for the country as a whole.

[1] http://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2014/cb14-130....

[2] http://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/stem/stem-html/

[3] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iEhflMxiWCbQvFyVJiRL...

[4] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AcxdY__ls_F8P-rURtt_...

Of that group of STEM majors not in STEM, how many do you think could work in a STEM field after going through a professional masters program? Clearly, some do, but it takes a lot of money and valuable time. If under greater pressure, I'd imagine a lot more established tech companies would recruit with a masters program in exchange for a several year commitment. Some places do, but if it were harder to recruit, it is a fair guess more places would.

I'm not really sure what to think about those sorts of arrangements. If I were an employer, I'd greatly prefer skill-based immigration, excluding questions of exploitation, and that's the point, particularly when referring to STEM as a whole.

I like the visualisation in [2]!

> However, we have zero reason to believe all of these people "can't find a job in their industry"

We do, from the same datasource I believe. I'm copy/pasting from another reply i made here.

"Some data from the economic policy institute (this is the first place i could re-find it): http://www.rit.edu/news/pdfs/CHE_Hira.pdf

Of the 50% of engineering graduates not working in engineering, 40% of CS grads not in CS, (35% of these two groups, total, are working in totally unrelated fields), ~50% are not working in their fields because of pay and conditions, 37% are not working in their fields because they can't find work, and 10% are not working in the field for another reason. The 37% probably aren't the people who moved into management consulting."

You don't feel that there's a problem, based on the data you found. And you might be right, if you don't look at it at a macro-level. The big picture is confusing, however. Companies and government are crying out for more tech workers. They're all lobbying for an easier way to bring workers to the US (my country, Ireland, are also doing this). But wages for computer scientists, across the US, are flat. They've been stagnant for a decade. If some proportion of CS grads do not go into CS, typical market dynamics would suggest that the lack of supply will drive up wages, and entice them into the field. This isn't happening. In fact, some sizeable proportion can't find their first job, out of college, and don't work in the field again.

Something is amiss.

Another copy/pasted this from another reply of mine:

"Lastly, there's a large supply of unemployed CS graduates in the US: http://www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages-mi... "

>Especially since those of us in tech are, by and large, ridiculously well-compensated.

Tech workers maintained the middle class, while most jobs saw stagnant growth. I would not say ridiculously well compensated.

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