Comparing getting an American to uproot themselves from their entire community to move to the Bay Area for a job vs. someone on the other side of the world who is looking to get into America just aren't the same. Ultimately, H1Bs are used to lower the working standards of Americans and enrich tiny pockets of existing regional capital holders.

Regional wealth inequality in America has not gotten better as Silicon Valley has gotten richer and brought in more foreign labor. At some point, the people making money hand over fist need to show how they're improving the situation for Americans instead of just saying "trust us, bro."

The AI discussion hasn't helped Silicon Valley seem more in touch with "flyover" states either. It's pretty clear there's a lot of disdain and hostility from Silicon Valley towards the "average" American.

The best people I worked from (in the bay area) were from Switzerland, Germany, the UK, France , Israel, etc.

Were they on H1Bs? Most I knew from similar countries in the Bay Area wouldn’t have been.

But these visas aren’t about best, btw. They’re about none available. The goalpost has moved to “none available for my price in the most expensive place on earth.” In my experience, the overall effect of these policies was hiring foreign masters students who were more exploitable over American undergraduates who would require the same training. The graduate pipeline, where domestic students were being warned off during the early 2000s already due to poor working conditions, became a credentialism excuse which was also exploited by researchers.

Again, we keep coming to these tertiary arguments which don’t deal with the issue: domestic born Americans are unhappy with their outcomes. Immigration is about the dumbest solution to Americans not being able to afford kids I can imagine. If that’s Silicon Valley’s best solution to a biological imperative, I expect things to only get worse. No, dorm-style housing that requires two tech incomes is not the American Dream. Please look at housing costs in San Jose before asking for more exploitable labor.

They all eventually became permanent residents and citizens. But they all start off as h1 or the one that lets you stay a while after finishing a PhD. Some switched to O-1 (or whatever the extraordinary talent one is).

I’ve worked with some amazing Austrians who had to go to 3rd country for a year waiting for the lottery.

I've worked with amazing people from all parts of the world. I'm a bit uncomfortable with bucketing my coworkers' abilities by ethnicity like this though.

But I am American: most of us couldn't even guess our own ethnic origins after a couple generations, especially if our ancestors weren't affluent. That fundamental difference in worldview makes all these discussions so difficult.

Yeah, maybe Open AI did some bad engineering instead of this being AGI? What's the consensus on the engineering level at Open AI, again? Every anecdote I hear is a bunch of children discovered fire and can barely keep the lights on from a business perspective. Maybe if they ban others from competing with them they can find a business model... I think that's suspicious, personally.

That so few people are asking for the requirements given shows how much we want to be God that created Man. It's so silly.

The HDMI cables are a lie anyway with how many versions I've owned. I'm sick of squinting at the writing on the wires. Just buy new ones.

I don't know if much has changed based on my professional experience. For me, the code was always the fast part. The hard part was figuring out what to do. Maybe others had more mechanical coding jobs, but I've been pretty baffled by those who think producing more text (email, code, or docs or whatever) with less understanding is any sort of gain. Seems like the same sort of braindead thinking that would make someone think the fast typer is the the best programmer.

The context from working in a Valley startup funded by YC and run by one of their former executives is they are not seeing the talent they once did despite mining the same sources. There is little self reflection to consider the Silicon Valley offer has changed versus the talent itself.

I literally said, "we're all adults here," and I was corrected. The new batch of Cal grads are children, they said -- which is an indictment of all US graduates and not just Cal for some reason. Or maybe the startup funders are just like the ancient Greek writers who complained kids today don't want to work.

Sounds like your brain was cooked by sound bites over reason and statistics! Culture war indeed!

In fact, we see this now in Silicon Valley where 80% of workers are foreign born. Not a representative group of Americans by any stretch, and we see a lot of negativity towards folks Silicon Valley will never interact with as a result. And who are the wealthy bigots? Not the richest people in the history of the world. No, those other bad folks in the poor states who deserve it. They aren't under-represented.

I’m afraid I can’t parse much of what you’re trying to convey. I can say that we’re talking about science granting right now, not silicon valley jobs. Nobody was talking about wealthy bigots, that’s all you.

Well, yeah, management sees a weak labor market and imagines the ability to fire all those troublesome engineers. Remember, especially in recent years, tech management is made up predominantly of grads from a select set of "elite" universities, whose caliber is determined mostly by how rich the parents are. It's no surprise we're in a moment of extreme labor disdain. The idea engineers with years of education are as fungible as manual labor has been tried again and again with the same results. LLMs won't change that.

> It's no surprise we're in a moment of extreme labor disdain.

So sad to think that a generation or two ago, everyone wanted to emulate the HP Way. Now all of that is gone and unless you are a superstar, you're just a commodity to be managed, and extinguished when the time comes.

Sorry, going to have to disagree with you there friend. It is not the case that everyone wanted to emulate the HP Way. The HP Way represented the best of Silicon Valley thinking, and if you read the book, you will see that even those guys were an outlier.

I remember that there is a passage in the book where the HP guys go and meet with other leaders of American corporations, and most of them felt that they did not have any kind of obligation back to society. I am a huge fan of the HP Way, but they were unusual, and not the norm.

That and the large technology companies don’t really have many ideas for new software or features that will make them more money. Can only increase profits by reducing costs.

15 YOE, here: Well, I just interviewed between October - Decemeber of last year, and since then, the company I joined has gone full vibe-coding and is changing to AI interviews. So...