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Caps on high skill immigrant workers might be worth the tradeoffs, but I think we as a society should acknowledge they are serious tradeoffs.
Let's say the US has X amount of specialized talent and thus they can only do Y amount of productivity with in a year. If companies in (or investing in) our country are so productive and there's enough market demand that they want to do creation over Y, then limiting access to talent over X puts a cap on growth.
Now I know, the general response is "because those jobs should go to the locals!" but the thing is, talented local people already have jobs. If they're hard working and capable, then they're mostly already doing their part in achieving Y (or doing something else in another industry) because companies want them.
As any hiring manager knows nowadays, the job pool is mostly incompetents, liars, lazies, addicts, or otherwise unwanted because of a serious flaw. It's the same way that dating apps like Tinder are mostly used by the unpleasant and unwanted, the good ones are already picked through. Of course just like the apps there's often some amount of pickings but they're limited and get scooped up quick of course and we're still overall limited to Y production. Even during periods of layoffs, companies don't tend to fire their best talent, they fire the weaker ones so even picking through those is still trying to find a diamond in the rough.
Now maybe that's what we as a society want, jobs programs for the lazy drug addicted idiots being put in roles above their worth, and we're willing to sacrifice efficiency in key industries for it. And maybe it's worth it if we put hard limits on economic growth and only allow Y production no matter how much market demand exists. Maybe it's worth it in the same way that some leftists felt promoting some minorities above their skill level was worth it.
But that's a discussion with some hard tradeoffs is it not?
This is a false premise on a number of levels. Productivity is the value generated per worker. Production is the total amount of goods and services created. Production is a function of a number of different inputs - labor, capital, land, etc. If a company needs to increase production in an environment with a constrained labor market, it can do that by increasing productivity. In other words, investing capital into technology, automation, and other labor-saving improvements. Production can also be increased by offshoring low-value components of the supply chain to other countries, like mineral extraction, textile manufacturing, etc. Of course as we have seen this needs to be done judiciously to avoid building our own competition in unfriendly countries.
If your new venture is creating more value than whatever these people are already doing, do the capitalist thing and poach them. That's the free market at work - businesses with higher margins can afford to attract labor from companies or industries that are generating less value. That's part of how productivity increases, generating more value per worker by having workers move to higher value positions.
The vast majority of employees are "on the market". Just offer them more money. It's that simple. People hop jobs all the time, especially in hot industries like tech. Even if they aren't officially looking, it's easy to put the word out that you're hiring and have your staff refer people into your hiring pipeline. What's more common is that companies have unrealistic expectations - they want 90th percentile employees at 50th percentile pay and mediocre benefits.
This is a bullshit false dichotomy. How about just incentivizing the 72% of STEM grads who don't work in a STEM job to actually work in STEM, if we have such a skills shortage?
This number includes social science majors (for whom there are no jobs in their chosen field) and people who work in management (who would not necessarily be better off as ICs).
Where are you getting that from? This would be a rather unconventional use of "STEM". Not saying you're wrong, but finding out would require a lot more clicking into his link, than I can do right now.
It is a fair criticism, for whatever reason the census bureau decided to include social science and psychology in STEM. They do have a very nice visualization though, by clicking on the major it shows the percentage of employees who end up working in STEM jobs, and highlights their placement in different job groups. For computer science and math, it's 51.1%. Engineering is 51.5%. For physical science majors, it's only 27.6%. Those are pretty grim numbers that aren't explained just by management being excluded from the stats.
This, of course, mirrors what any engineering or chemistry grad would tell you if you just...walked around and interviewed a bunch of seniors at local state university. Ask them if they have job offers and what they are in and at what number. Lots do not. Even your 'B' students that have done an internship often will only have 1 pretty mediocre offer. And if you don't get an industry offer within 6 months of graduation your likelihood of ever getting one drops off pretty significantly.
On top of that, there is also the large cohort of "retired" engineers. We use this term sparingly because almost none of them have retired voluntarily. They were all let go for being too old and given a BS reason, and no one else would hire them because they are too old (and also given BS reasons). Sure, they just have 3 decades of industry experience being wasted while they run an online CNC custom parts website, but he's 50 freaking years old and wants 6 figures to work 40 hours a week with standard sick and vacation! Insanity!
I knew traditional (non-software) engineering was screwed up, but I thought they were less youth-worshipping than tech, not more.
A company I used to do jobs for had a pretty good team that churned out steady work and a decent number of patents a year. Nothing that makes a practice, but a good client. They had a 56 year old guy on the team that was clearly slowing down, but still was sharp, just not 8am-8pm shift sort of on his game. But he was the best at helping me draft their patents. Any questions, go to Richard. Richard picks up the phone every time and always can clarify a point with a helpful few sentences, and then go on to point out some more things he thinks were not explained properly in the specs they sent over (almost always correct). So this guy was still a good engineer, and outstanding communicator. One day they submit a spec and his names on it but he doesn't pick up. Ask another guy, "oh Richard had to leave." That sucks I say. Something about being in the bottom 30% of deliverables 2 years in a row.
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