Do you trust our government? Because we don't.
252 karma · joined February 17, 2013
Of course America doesn't have IE's, they stopped hiring those people in the US 30 years ago.
Any thoughts HN?
People are upset about using immigrant labor as price competition to depress wages and capture middle class income to be transferred to the wealthy.
We all see this all the time--companies hire legal immigrant labor or import H1B's to pay 80% of the prevailing wage, meanwhile a massive and unnecessary management structure compensates itself lavishly.
This is a classic "commons" problem. It's advantageous for any individual company, but when everyone does it, it leads to the tragedy of the commons. In this case that tragedy is the collapse of the American consumer. He's being attack by high health costs, food costs, energy costs, regulatory burden, grift from financial institutions, education costs and he has no more money to spend at Waltmart-- the guys who caused the problem in the first place.
Die a little inside when something you labored on for 18 months ends up being sold for half cost on Woot.
That's just me though...
I got the heck out of there. That being said, the founder Daniel Robbins is a nice guy and taught me a lot.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732335320457812...
Welfare programs of any type are only viable when the ratio of payers to payee's is high. They're desirable at this level. However, entitling every citizen to money which for he does not have to work for exposes the government to UNLIMITED liability as humans are free to create more humans at any time they choose. We cannot expand the GDP any time we would like, in fact paying people not to work removes the excess value of their labor from the GDP (assuming there was a job for them).
When you total up Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid debts the United States is completely broke. Something on the order of 100 trillion dollars of future liabilities. We can't even afford our modest socialism we have now.
TLDR? The numbers don't work.
The skill sets for a good programmer and a good sysadmin overlap somewhat. But you can make MUCH MORE MONEY writing software. In the early 2000's when I was a sysadmin jobs in my area were paying 40k-60k a year. Programming jobs were paying 60k-100k. So basically, poorly payed IT positions select out anyone who could actually do a good job at them because those very people can make more money writing software