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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   34265 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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There is no role in any FAANG company (unless you mean NVIDIA instead of Netflix) where there are no qualified Americans.

There are plenty of roles where demand exceeds supply, however -- essentially all the qualified Americans are already employed or don't care to be.

American universities are graduating hundreds of thousands of them every year.

About a single hundred thousand, not all of those American.

There are plenty of roles where demand exceeds supply, however -- essentially all the qualified Americans are already employed or don't care to be.

Unless you are talking about a very specific industry that I don't have any tangential relation to, this is simply not true. We are graduating more engineers and comp sci majors than are getting hired for those types of jobs, and the workforce is constantly in attrition at the other end as well in all relevant industries.

There are plenty of roles where demand exceeds supply, however

Then by the iron laws of economics, the price must increase. In this case you can make a very simple argument that H-1Bs are depressing American wages.

About a single hundred thousand, not all of those American

If you limit your pool to CS graduates, yes. But I humbly submit that essentially any engineering or math graduate can be trained fairly easily to do junior programmer job at a FAANG, and i personally know many who have taken that route. That at least triples your available talent pool.

Then by the iron laws of economics, the price must increase. In this case you can make a very simple argument that H-1Bs are depressing American wages.

I think this really cuts to the heart of why arguments about immigration policy get as emotional as they often do. What defines a "labor shortage"? Simple: when the cost of it is "too high". What defines "too high"? Government policy. What defines government policy? Politics.

When the government opens up an immigration channel that targets your vocation, you are essentially being told by power that you are getting paid too much for what you do, and you need to be paid less. When the government denies your entry into a higher paying market, you are being told you aren't worth that.

People get emotional about this.

Great point!

This part

When the government denies your entry into a higher paying market, you are being told you aren't worth that.

is kinda what people are responding to with, "But a country is not an economic zone." Like: "It's not that you aren't worth access to that higher paying market. It's just that you are part of a different community, rather than that one."

Then by the iron laws of economics, the price must increase. In this case you can make a very simple argument that H-1Bs are depressing American wages.

The price must increase unless reducing the supply of labor reduces the output by enough to make the labor not as valuable. There isn't a lump of labor to be done by programmers, who get paid inversely to the number of programmers in the field.

But if the lack of labor drops the value of the output... the output was never valuable in the first place. Say you are having difficulty hiring a database engineer, and eventually you give up and find another solution. Turns out you didnt actually need any database engineers at all.

I do actually think there is something to this, as "tech" seems to be completely infested with solutions (and programmers working on said solutions) searching in vain for a problem. Adding in more people making more "solutions" is not a cure for the condition.

Say you are having difficulty hiring a database engineer, and eventually you give up and find another solution. Turns out you didnt actually need any database engineers at all.

Certainly not. If you could previously hire a database engineer for $150K, and now it will cost $250K, and your alternate solution is costing you $200K, you did 'need' a database engineer.

But if the lack of labor drops the value of the output... the output was never valuable in the first place.

Incorrect, and known to be wrong since the time of Adam Smith - division of labor is limited by the extent of the market.

Say you are having difficulty hiring a database engineer, and eventually you give up and find another solution. Turns out you didnt actually need any database engineers at all.

This proves too much. There was a time when you could not hire a database engineer for any amount of money, because there was no such thing as a database. People found other solutions (clay tablets, books, etc). Are we to believe that there's no loss or inefficiency involved in keeping your accounts in a paper ledger rather than a database?

What about the applications that are simply impossible without database engineers? Well, if you can't hire one, you give up and do something else. Maybe you decide to shovel shit in Louisiana instead. But there was a reason you wanted to do the first thing, and the fact that it's impossible has a real, albeit hard to measure, cost.

Incorrect, and known to be wrong since the time of Adam Smith - specialization is limited by the extent of the market.

You are talking about a generalization that doesn't apply to the specific situation- right now the the specialization exists. You can pay money to get it. As an example, FAANGs poach each others workers all of the time. But if you, out of a lack of affordable specialization, turn to alternate solutions, then maybe that specialization was not actually as valuable as once believed.

Are we to believe that there's no loss or inefficiency involved in keeping your accounts in a paper ledger rather than a database? What about the applications that are simply impossible without database engineers?

Database engineer is just a job title, and maybe some certs. I know at least three control systems engineers who took much bigger offers to become database engineers because the fundamental math behind optimization is the same for both disciplines, and they are all extremely successful in their new roles. When a FAANG says they cant find an American database engineer and need to parachute in an H-1B, that is, to put it politely, bovine excrement. At best it is incompetent recruiters, and more likely a flat out lie.

You are talking about a generalization that doesn't apply to the specific situation- right now the the specialization exists. You can pay money to get it. As an example, FAANGs poach each others workers all of the time. But if you, out of a lack of affordable specialization, turn to alternate solutions, then maybe that specialization was not actually as valuable as once believed.

You're merely restating your original argument rather than arguing against what I said. Yes, it is often possible to do without and to do with less, and we did without software engineers for a hundred thousand years, and we can do with less of them now. The question is whether it's better to do with less than to have more. It is, to say the least, rare that scarcity is more socially optimal than abundance.

Do you think that we would be better off with five software engineers total in the US? If not, then your implicit argument is that there is such a thing as "peak software engineer" and we're past it. So far, you haven't presented any evidence for this.

Database engineer is just a job title, and maybe some certs.

The point is not about database engineers in particular. To be pedantic, I don't think I've met a "database engineer" in FAANG for at least a decade, so I don't know that they even hire database engineers.

I know at least three control systems engineers who took much bigger offers to become database engineers because the fundamental math behind optimization is the same for both disciplines, and they are all extremely successful in their new roles.

Great. But, they were already doing some job that was worth doing. If an H1B is parachuted in for that job rather than the database engineer job, does that make you feel better?

Then by the iron laws of economics, the price must increase.

Yes. At some point, however, the price will exceed the value of the work, and the work just won't get done. You see this with minimum wage employees getting replaced by kiosks as the minimum wage goes up; at the top, I expect you'll simply see progress crawl to a halt (and no, that's not a good thing).

If you limit your pool to CS graduates, yes. But I humbly submit that essentially any engineering or math graduate can be trained fairly easily to do junior programmer job at a FAANG, and i personally know many who have taken that route.

Mathematics is about 25,000. Engineering is 145,000. But most of these people either already have jobs or are headed for postgraduate degrees also.

(and most of them couldn't cut it in a job that actually required software skill... but then, neither could most CS graduates)

At some point, however, the price will exceed the value of the work, and the work just won't get done.

Which is a perfectly acceptable business tradeoff.

You see this with minimum wage employees getting replaced by kiosks as the minimum wage goes up

Yes, and I have happily stopped any transactions I would ever have with these sorts of places. I'll still patronize my more local chains (in the vein of In 'n out but better), or even national ones (like Chick-fil-A) that don't treat their employees like cogs. Same with grocery stores. If a business can't cope with rising costs of labor than it deserves to go under.

at the top, I expect you'll simply see progress crawl to a halt (and no, that's not a good thing).

Gonna start an engineering smug war here, but as I see it "tech" progress has already meaningfully ground to a halt outside of LLM babble, and even that is debatable. Ever better targeted ads do not leave the world better off. Recruitment pitch to all of you young programmers stuck in FAANG limbo- go look outside to those clunky old manufacturing, transportation, energy, and industrial companies. They are desperate for good embedded systems engineers, and you can do some fantastically cool shit that will actually make measurable differences in the average person's life.

Recruitment pitch to all of you young programmers stuck in FAANG limbo- go look outside to those clunky old manufacturing, transportation, energy, and industrial companies. They are desperate for good embedded systems engineers, and you can do some fantastically cool shit that will actually make measurable differences in the average person's life.

It's also possible to work in embedded at a contractor where nothing you do will have any impact on anyone outside the company and their direct customers :)

Any tips for learning and breaking into embedded systems roles? Code monkey stuck writing web APIs and client wrappers for retarded jeets here, though I'm about to start my masters in comp sci. Mostly C# though I can handle Python, JS/TS, and Java and I'm starting to learn Rust. I know what the hell the stack and the heap are (and that embedded often doesn't have a heap) so I'd like to believe I'm at least marginally better than most based on that sad fact alone. Also watched Ben Eater's videos on building a modern 6502 and understood most of it, I've also written a CHIP-8 emulator before.

Basically just please help me get the hell out of this, it's soul-crushing having to explain basic crap to jeets every single day that refuse to read the documentation that I painstakingly wrote for them.

Edit: Also in response to your claim that tech has stagnated - even for LLMs writing code, I think just making more powerful developer tooling would provide most of the "benefits" we're seeing from LLMs. You've been able to stand up a bunch of boilerplate for decades now (like ASP.NET controller generators). Making tools like that more powerful would create tons of developer productivity, and you don't have to worry about it hallucinating a massive security vulnerability into your systems. That won't stop the JavaShitter webdev crowd from thinking it's hot new shit though.

Ever better targeted ads do not leave the world better off. Recruitment pitch to all of you young programmers stuck in FAANG limbo- go look outside to those clunky old manufacturing, transportation, energy, and industrial companies. They are desperate for good embedded systems engineers, and you can do some fantastically cool shit that will actually make measurable differences in the average person's life.

They pay for shit compared to FAANG, in some industries (e.g. automotive, or worse, aerospace) they have more red tape than you can shake a stick at, and a lot of them are worse than your average web shop at demanding experience on particular tools. Like particular point revisions of their favorite RTOS. Mostly they're desperate for good engineers because they wouldn't know one if he hit them on the head.

Which is a perfectly acceptable business tradeoff.

Sure, but not getting the work done makes everybody's life worse.

Yes, and I have happily stopped any transactions I would ever have with these sorts of places.

Which means you're paying more, they're getting less business, and the minimum wage workers are still unemployed. The same applies for deliberately raising the cost of labor (especially if some of that extra cost just goes straight to the government); you're just destroying value and making the country (and the world) poorer.

Sure, but not getting the work done makes everybody's life worse.

Does a delay on the next app update for AI-powered Dog Grindr to pick Daily Fantasy Sports lineups make anybody's life particularly worse, though?

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