The high salaries commanded by FAANG engineers right out of college motivated a lot of students to take up computer science as a major and this led to a massive oversupply. It might take a few years to cool.
MIT graduates are not going to be struggling for anything, much less for new grad jobs. They're among the most privileged humans to exist on earth by nature of their degree and admission.
I appreciate your point, and don't necessarily disagree. However, I think it is rough out there even for ivy graduates.
We have an intern from an Ivy (not MIT) that isn't getting an offer simply because my company doesn't want to hire in the US right now. They are great to work with, knowledgeable, but have no future here. They have been shopping around, and a lot of people on the team have been trying to find a place for them to go in their network, but no one is biting.
This kind of "nothing can happen to this group because they have these advantages" line of thinking has causation backwards. They are privileged because they historically haven't struggled. The privilege doesn't preclude struggle, the privilege results from lack of struggle in the past. Times change.
Tech employers are saying it's efficiencies gained in AI that led to layoffs for the past few years. Yet they have increased headcount in engineering offices in other countries at the same time.
This is also happening at small and midsize companies that ship software. It's easy to find this information, particularly for the largest companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
Like the article states, there are a number of confounding factors. But it's not AI, no matter how much founders and CEOs want it to be true.
That’s because the globally talent works much longer hours at lower salary while in US you have to pay 100k for each h1b. Let’s get rid of the ridiculous administration first and then talk about greedy ceo.
Having foreign workers filling the jobs for American companies working on US soil and sending the money home is no better for Americans than having them working in their own countries.
Say what you will about this administration, God knows they have flaws. However, they're the only one that has taken steps to actually attempt to help American workers in a generation or more. Every other one has been a revolving door of shipping jobs out or importing cheap foreign labor in.
This is rather evidence that this requirement (at least sometimes) does what it should do: it disincentivizes US branches of companies to hire foreigners in the USA by making such hires more expensive.
Thus, instead foreign branches of US companies hire foreigners. Why the complaints: now in the USA less foreigners get hired instead of US citizens, exactly what was requested.
The elephant in the room: the H1B visa and the influx of Indian workers into the U.S. labor market. Many of them are willing to work for lower wages, demand less, and have fewer rights—essentially becoming exploited labor for Corporate America. Why would a corporation hire an American graduate who won’t tolerate these conditions when an H1B worker will?
Instead of confronting the issue directly, people often sidestep it with other excuses. The reality is, if we eliminated all H1B workers, every American in the IT industry, including recent graduates, would have a job. And don’t try to convince me that a Java developer from India possesses skills that our university graduates don’t.
H-1B workers at companies such as Google, Meta or Microsoft are not treated any different, they are not taking abuse or being exploited. There may be smaller companies where this is happening though.
One of the issues is conflation of IT jobs and High Tech jobs. Those making laws don't understand the difference -- they are all "computer jobs" to them. IT does not require immigrant labor. Companies such as Infosys and Tata don't need to be operating in the US. There are plenty of US workers available to do the job.
But High Tech is different. High Tech needs the best in the world, not the best in the US. The US leads the world in tech not because the best ideas were all American but because the best people in the world immigrated to the US. Stopping this will be ruinous to American prosperity.
The seminal research paper that kicked off the AI revolution (titled "Attention is all you need") was written by 2 Indians, 1 German, 1 British Canadian, 1 Pole, 1 Ukrainian, and 2 US born people. These people came to America, worked together and changed the world as we know it. Why would we want to stop it? Has this immigration undercut Americans? Far from it. These immigrants are the lifeblood of the tech industry, and their innovations create jobs.
H-1B's are absolutely exploited. I'd personally testify to the abuses at financial companies.
Hearing threats of "If you don't complete this by tomorrow, you can expect to be back in India by next week" From one Indian to another too...
It's awful to witness it. Please don't spread misinformation that "They are not taking abuse or being exploited"
That is extremely disingenuous.
Sorry that's untrue. Top companies such as Google, Meta or Microsoft absolutely do not abuse H-1B workers or treat them any different. As I said there may be smaller outfits, or IT shops where this is happening.
You have to look harder. It's not always explicit as OP says with threats of deportation. Rather there's a huge power imbalance.
Who can we ask to stay late? Who "doesn't mind" 12 hour days? Who "doesn't mind' being on call. Who won't mind if they get a smaller bonus or raise? How about Sandeep who is afraid to say no because if he says no too many times and loses his job him and his entire family have to move back overseas with minimal notice?
That's how real exploitation happens these days. And sometimes even good managers don't realize they're doing it, because, after all, poor Sandeep even said he didn't mind! He's just a really hard worker!
You are right, unless you have been present at every manager-employee interaction you can't say it has "never" happened. But to claim that this is happening requires more than just one or two instances, right?
I used to think the same thing until I was brought in on an important legacy project that put me tangential to the "inner circle" and heard a lot of this kind of thing along with other shady practices like authoring the RFP for the government to publish so that the requirements favored the company.
You've identified the problem, but not the solution. We must make it illegal for corpos to do labour exploitation in this way and then enforce that law for immigrants and native workers alike.
Immigration is good. Creating a two-tiered job market is not.
If you just end H1Bs, then many of these jobs will move permanently overseas, there won't be a magical moment of restitution for the aggrieved American tech worker.
Unionize if you want to actually make things change for the better for all workers in your industry. You can't post your way out of this.
> And don’t try to convince me that a Java developer from India possesses skills that our university graduates don’t.
Skills? Not necessarily, but there's something a lot of immigrants possess that your university graduates don't: freedom from the weight of student loans.
I'm not from India, so I can't speak for them. Plus, I imagine that the situation in India changed over the years and it's probably not the same as when this trend started. But I can speak for myself and people I know from many other countries, including China. Most of us have had an education that is on par with a lot of American colleges and universities, but without the crushing cost.
Get rid of all immigrant workers and the industry will collapse, because your graduates need to pay off a huge debt that immigrants don't have.
> Most of us have had an education that is on par with a lot of American colleges and universities, but without the crushing cost.
> Get rid of all immigrant workers and the industry will collapse, because your graduates need to pay off a huge debt that immigrants don't have.
You went to university because you decided (in expectation) the present value [1] of the future earning were worth the college fees and the opportunity cost of getting a university degree. So, don't complain about the debt: by your decision you computed that this decision was worth it. The only thing that you need to complain about is yourself that you did a wrong calculation for such a life-influencing decision of going to college.
> by your decision you computed that this decision was worth it
> The only thing that you need to complain about
> you did a wrong calculation
Is that a general "you" or are you replying directly to me? Because if it's the latter, you need to read what I wrote more carefully.
I'm one of those immigrants I wrote about. My education, back where I was born and grew up, was both free and top-notch.
The point of my reply was to explain why "if we eliminated all H1B workers, Americans in the IT industry would be at full employment" is a disturbingly naive idea.
Speaking of disturbing oversimplifications:
> The only thing that you need to complain about is yourself that you did a wrong calculation for such a life-influencing decision of going to college.
If you think that life is as simple as that, you either haven't lived very long or were privileged enough to live in a bubble where things are so cut-and-dried black-and-white.
It's truly amazing how little you need to intrude into the privileges of an already extremely privileged group as US software developers are, to make them go full "immigrats are taking our jobs".
well, they are. outsourcing is the bigger problem. just like outsourcing decimated manufacturing jobs, now it's decimating white-collar. i well and truly hope you get fired so you see how bad the market is. no other profession has this number of cruel, judgmental narcissists not looking out for their own kin.
There are two types of H1B recipients, the type that you describe (in somewhat discriminatory terms) and the type that the program was built for.
The actual geniuses that move to America and stay here to build crazy stuff are also H1B visa holders.
We do NOT want to turn those people away. If you don’t like immigrants “taking your jobs” you are definitely not going to like the alternative reality of a brain drain. You aren’t going to like the alternative reality where there aren’t any immigrants starting businesses to hire you. Without immigration there’s no Google or Apple (these weren’t specifically H1B immigrants but still, Sergey Brin and Steve Jobs’ dad were first generation immigrants)
Again I must point out that every H1B employee that is here is physically in America buying things from American businesses. Immigrants starting businesses at a higher rate than native born citizens.
But I think it’s obvious that the program needs reform. Big companies have been gaming the system and using tricks to abuse it, and they use the visa’s restrictions to trap employees and give them below-market working conditions under the threat of visa revocation.
My proposal would be:
1. Make the visa cost more to acquire depending on the amount of employees in the program at a single company. If your company has 10,000 H1B employees your cost to add another one should be a lot higher than a small company with one H1B worker.
2. Make the visa guarantee permanent resident status to the recipient for a time period once they’ve worked for their company for ~90 days. They should have full job mobility just like a citizen so their employer doesn’t use the program as an excuse to pay below-market wages.
3. Provide a real path to citizenship that doesn’t take decades. I think that people in the country who can treat it like a long-term “forever home” will be more beneficial than ones who have plans to go back home eventually.
> And don’t try to convince me that a Java developer from India possesses skills that our university graduates don’t.
Everyone defending H1Bs forgets why we even have an economy. America never signed up to be some hegemon that needs to compete with the entire world. America exists for the sake of Americans, not the world, first and foremost. We can help other people after that point. You get revolutions and revolutionary acts when it feels that the opportunity for foreigners and the aristocratic is exceeding opportunity for the normal everyday people born here, and that is a legitimate injustice.
Maybe we should let people work wherever they want?
The tech companies will just offshore the jobs they’d otherwise use for visas. India is a cool place. Lots of Americans would do well to live and work there. They’d probably even be a bit happier. But they can’t because of visas.
For most of human history, you were free to decamp to greener pastures. Cultural chauvinism still existed and thrived in this more porous world. Why do we accept limitations on our freedom of movement?
People are moving around a lot faster than before with cheap air travel and modern internet. Some like this new dynamic, others don't. It's an evolving situation.
Now with AI, cheap labour is overrated and all Those people want is for you to make a contract with openai/meta whatever or to break your business for them to take.
There will be no new jobs. The BBB comes with a hidden line saying that no billionaire should get sad for any reason
The only people losing the competition is those who cannot afford to pay more anyway that will need to use AI or get out of the market completely.
> America exists for the sake of Americans, not the world, first and foremost. We can help other people after that point.
But you do want to sell to all of the world, am I correct? So you basically want the pros and none of the cons?
And you also expect the rest of the world to buy an your debt? Because America as a country would be bankrupt instantly if that rest of the world stopped supporting you.
Almost every country short of Liechtenstein would be bankrupt if other countries stopped buying their debt.
As such, the argument is not relevant, unless you believe that ethnicity has no correlation to country, and India should welcome Americans just as well.
> Almost every country short of Liechtenstein would be bankrupt if other countries stopped buying their debt.
Sure but not many countries never seem to run a deficit.
> and India should welcome Americans just as well.
Somehow I've met 10+ Americans who all seem to think you just submit a form and get an H1B... Being a non resident alien is no fun.
Being forced to leave the country to renew your visa? Makes sense but there's a certain uneasiness that goes with it every time
Switching employers is much harder, because the new one needs to be willing to sponsor
The pathway to staying in the US long term is super long. If you are this talented person from India and want to make America your home, getting a green card takes over 12 years... All those years you're essentially in limbo especially with current political circumstances.
That's what people are willing to put up with to be granted the ability to live and work in the US. I'm not saying that's unfair and you cannot require such things but don't think it's a walk in the park
Anyone living, working, or otherwise contributing to society in America can become an American.
> America exists for the sake of Americans, not the world, first and foremost. ... opportunity for foreigners [...] exceeding opportunity for [...] people born here, and that is a legitimate injustice.
That is IMO an un-American statement. America is, in theory, the land of opportunity. Not only for the "right kind of people".
> That is IMO an un-American statement. America is, in theory, the land of opportunity. Not only for the "right kind of people".
The people who live here have a right, first and foremost, to opportunities. If they are vocally and statistically proving that opportunities are bad right now, the H1B needs to be pulled for their sake. It can be put back once balance has been achieved.
> Anyone living, working, or otherwise contributing to society in America is an American.
Absolutely not. If I export my new invention to Europe and it changes society, I am contributing to European society, but I am not European. If I take a visa to Europe and start doing contract work illegally, I am not European.
Look. If the government is worried with people who are already there is not because it is going to get better.
This is just populism. They want you to think you need to be saved, they want to be your figurative father
Because sometimes people need to be saved, because the current system is actually broken, unfair, and inordinately stressful.
Populism is the normal population yelling "you forgot about us." Nothing more. Where it goes from there, depends on the politicians grasping that fact, and what they offer as a solution. This is also why populists win - their clientele doesn't feel like they have much to lose; while the competing politician is yelling about abstract global principles and norms and basically saying "your situation is unfortunate, screw you; you don't get it, idiot; pull yourself up, bootstraps!"
Edit for reply: > Populism creates problems or do not solve them in order to exist.
This is just upper class elitism with a thin veneer. Upper classes have constantly, always accused the lower classes of exaggerating their problems; and have constantly, always accused those claiming to address those problems as making them up. It's also a defense mechanism - because it lets you conveniently accuse the lower classes of voting in Mr. Mustache while washing your hands of any responsibility, because the problems were made up and people are gullible, obviously.
You are probably right, my point is that Populism, and at least it, does need to perpetuate de problems, hence, no populist leader is/was ever effective.
Not an answer but an appendix.
There is common misconceptions on the definition of politics.
For the masses politics means to define policies through negotiation and prioritisation.
For politicians, it means something related to exert political power.
I agree with the point that populists have a strong incentive to not solve problems, but I'm not sure that means populists can't be effective. For example in US history FDR was arguably a populist, and I would say pretty effective. And while the US populist party imploded fairly quickly, a good chunk of it's policy wants wound up happening in the next decade or two during the progressive movement.[1]
Using the power definition of politics, it still seems to me that because the ability to exert power is only given when there is a need to be solved, a (for example) plutocrat has a similar incentive not to solve problems as a populist, and would be similarly likely to not be effective. I suppose an explanation that's consistent with both perspectives is that political leaders in general are not effective.
I had a friend that had a T-shirt with an old photo of a bunch of American Indians (I think Apache), standing with guns and other weapons. They looked rather fierce.
It said "Homeland Security: Fighting Terrorism Since 1492".
> Anyone living, working, or otherwise contributing to society in America is an American.
No. That is very much not a legal or even sociological definition. There are plenty of people who live and work in America who have other nationalities and would prefer to not be considered American, even. A lot of Americans (I am one, before you assume something else) have a weird complex where they think everyone wants to be them. But that is very, very wrong to assume.
I worded my thoughts poorly. You can become a citizen through naturalization.
The original commenter says America is for Americans (assuming they mean citizens) and I was trying to point out that not all Americans are born in America.
I did not intend to imply that everyone wants to be an American.
What’s new is the sophisticated scams and parallel industries that exist to support falsified H1B petitions.
It’s your civic duty to apply to H1B job postings. This is probably 10x more effective than using LinkedIn, which is designed to keep you in a holding pattern indefinitely.
The crazy thing is how suppressed this opinion was. You got banned on most websites for bringing this up. I credit free speech on X for bringing h1b visas into the national conversation
Any example? Unless it was completely racist, I feel like a lot of people have been complaining about H1Bs for many years without any problems. Also here on hacker news.
There's been a major shift just in the last few months. Those of us who have been concerned about this problem for years welcome them to the party, but with a bit of an eye-roll, because it's obvious that the shift wouldn't be happening if it were trucking and farming jobs under assault and not tech jobs.
I would like to know what is meant by "Computer science jobs".
To me, Computer Science would be like research type jobs. I know nothing about this field, but I expect it has always been and always will be very hard to get into this field.
Then you have these programming jobs:
IT would be working on Internal Applications for a Business. These days would usually mean supporting or in-house custom developing for things like SAP or Oracle. This is what I did, in the 70s/80s/90s it was all in-house systems. Starting early 2000s, systems like SAP. I have since retired but I know where I last worked, that company was moving these jobs outside the US. From friends still there, those moves have increased quite a bit. Maybe work could be still available in small companies.
Then there are working at startups, which is rare but gets all the press, I know nothing about this area.
Then there is working a a company that develops software for sale (like SAP), I tend to think this is starting to go the way of IT work mentioned above.
I would like to know what is meant by "Computer science jobs"
The context is that the author is a computer science professor discussing the prospects of people graduating from his program, so I would interpret this very broadly as "the sorts of jobs that a person with a newly-minted computer science degree tends to pursue."
Typically this is jobs where one's job revolves primarily around writing code.
To me, Computer Science would be like research type jobs.
These are all arbitrary labels in an ever-changing field so I'm not going to say anybody is right or wrong, but I'm quite certain this is not what others typically mean when they say "computer science jobs."
IT would be working on Internal Applications for a Business
If a person's job primarily revolves around writing and shipping code this is most commonly just called "software engineering" or "software development" whether or not it's internal software or some kind of external product offered for sale externally.
If it's internal application development, the department might typically be called "IT" but the job role would still typically just be "software developer" or "software engineer."
This is what I did, in the 70s/80s/90s it was all
in-house systems. Starting early 2000s, systems like
SAP. I have since retired
I've been at it since the late 90s. Just a baby compared to you. :D
Right so there's currently a mismatch between higher education and industry. Ideally Computer Science is a branch of Applied Mathematics primarily concerned with the theory of computation. But due to demand from students who want to get industry jobs instead of doing research, many schools have "polluted" their CS majors with more practical programming courses. This confuses the issue and doesn't do anyone any good.
A better approach would be to have separate majors targeted towards students who want industry careers. I would suggest two separate tracks: Software Engineering which would take a disciplined, analytical approach and Software Development which would treat software construction for like a fine art, akin to sculpture or music performance.
To me, Computer Science is about the theory of computation, and the analysis of algorithms, and to some degree about the design of computer programming languages.
Software Engineering is about the efficient[1] production[2] of larger-scale programs that adequately meet the need[3].
Software Development as a separate topic... maybe, for some things like games and UI. I don't really see it as a separate field, though.
[1] "Efficient" is actually a lie, but the sentence was already long enough as it is. I really should have said "somewhat less inefficient". You can never make it efficient. (The fundamental problem is that brain-to-brain transfer of technical information is slow, inefficient, and lossy.) But if you don't control the inefficiency, it's going to destroy your project.
[2] Production and maintenance. Larger-scale software also tends to be longer lasting; if you don't build something maintainable, you fail.
[3] This does not mean bug-free! But it means that the amount and severity of the bugs do not destroy the usefulness of the software.
Like many in the AI space, Farid said that those who use breakthrough technologies will outlast those who don't.
"AI" professor tells everyone to use "AI". With the usual fatalism that nothing can ever be done about anything.
One option for example would be to fire all "AI" professors. Another one would be to outlaw "AI", just as nuclear energy was outlawed in Germany and DDT was banned worldwide.
Even if it was a good idea - how would you draw a boundary between AI and the rest of computing? In the end you'd have to go full Butlerian Jihad and prohibit computation in general, or at least limit allowed computing power.
This will of course be the policy set by physics once we have exhausted all the easily accessible energy reserves: limited everything power. Nature will conduct Butlerian jihad with no great zeal or ardor, but with just patience.
That's going to take a very long time, there's massive amounts of solar, geothermal, and wind energy left available. Hell, natural gas is a waste product of oil drilling.
Engineering and construction type careers in general, anything involving "capital investment", are very sensitive to market conditions. That is, future expectations. Very boom and bust, dependent on credit.
I'm a CS professor and this is not really what we are seeing. I'm not at Berkeley but it's an R1. Yes, students on the lower end of the GPA scale are having a harder time finding jobs. But in terms of my program's ability to place students after graduating, the vast majority have been placed.
It's important to also note that some who have not found a place did so because the thought they could find a better salary by holding out for longer. So yes, probably average post-grad offer is going down, that's true. But it's definitely not true to say "everybody is struggling to get jobs"
We see the evidence in the article of "everybody struggling" is:
-Berkeley students haven't gotten as many internship offers and their salaries are not exceedingly high (but they are still getting offers).
- He claims his son is struggling.
I dunno, maybe he is right but this doesn't sound exactly like Armageddon.
Also this: "it's going to be a great career. It is future-proof — that changed in four years"
Huh? How is it not still a great career? Just because Berkeley grads can't get insane salaries right out of college? Also, how was is ever future proof -- I've been constantly retraining on technologies for 30 years.
This article is just soundbites, nothing to see here.
Fix the curriculums so I can justify restarting a new grad hiring pipeline in the US.
CS (along with ECE/EECS) degrees have been watering down their curriculum for a decade by reducing the amount of hardware, low level, and theory courses that remain requirements abroad.
Just take a look at the curriculum changes for the CSE major (course 6-3) at MIT in the 2025 [0] versus 2017-22 [1] versus pre-2017 [2] - there is a steady decrease in the amount of table stakes EE/CE content like circuits, signals, computer architecture, and OS dev (all of which are building blocks for Cybersecurity and ML) and an increased amount in math.
Nothing wrong with increasing the math content, but reducing the ECE content in a CSE major is bad given how tightly coupled software is with hardware. We are now at a point where an entire generation of CSE majors in America do not know what a series or parallel circuit is.
And this trend has been happening at every program in the US over the past 10 years.
I CANNOT JUSTIFY building a new grad pipeline in cybersecurity, DevSecOps, CloudSec, MLOps, Infra Silicon Design, or ML Infra with people who don't understand how a jump register works, the difference between BPF and eBPF, or how to derive a restricted Boltzmann machine (for my ML researcher hires) - not because they need to know it on the job, but because it betrays a lack of fundamental knowledge.
I can find new grad candidates with a similar profile at a handful of domestic CS programs (Cal included), but (Cal specific) someone with a BA CS from LAS who never touched CS152, CS161, CS162, or CS168 isn't getting hired into the early career pipeline for a security startup when they took CS160, CS169L, or CS169A because they are "easier", or isn't getting hired as a junior MLE if they didn't take all the more theoretical undergrad ML classes at Cal like CS182, CS185, CS188, and CS189. And even worse if they are a BA DS without a second fundamental major like AMATH or IEOR.
> Give me a new grad with strong fundamentals, a love of programming, and an interest in the domain and I'll teach them in sixth months whatever they missed in college that's relevant to the job
I 100% agree. A lot of core foundational classes that at the very least build the mindset of how to problem solve are not offered or have severely reduced the curriculum and content offered.
> until the implication that it's learning the nitty-gritty details that's important.
Not what I meant. What I mean is you can't understand or ramp up on (eg.) eBPF without understanding how the Linux Kernel, syscalls, and registries work. If you don't have the foundations down, I can't justify spending $120k base plus 30% in benefits and taxes hiring you out of college.
> These are kind oddly specific criteria
I'm giving random examples from individual portfolio companies
> Are those really things you think new grads need to know
This is the kind of curriculum a new grad from Cal (be they on F1 OPT or a citizen) are competing with when my portfolio companies have hired new grads.
There is a level of mathematical or hardware-software maturity that is built into top programs abroad that make it hard to justify hiring new grads domestically.
In Israel, India, much of Eastern Europe, and China - all universities follow the same curriculum as defined by their Ministries of Education.
I can find new grad candidates with a similar profile at a handful of domestic CS programs (Cal included), but someone with a BA CS from LAS who never touched CS152, CS161, CS162, or CS168 isn't getting hired into the pipeline for a cybersecurity vendor when they took CS160, CS169L, or CS169A because they are "easier".
Your ideal candidate needs to know: assembly, trivia about the history of eBPF, an obscure data structure specific to a certain field. As a bonus you would like them to know a little electrical engineering, and written on OS kernel as well?
Are those really things you think new grads need to know? I'm not sure you could find more than a handful of mid level or senior engineers with familiar with more than 2/3 of that.
This reads to me like things you know, that you think everyone should know.
Why not details on the network stack? Or database design and internals? Why not file systems specifically?
Those are much more relevant to the majority of modern development that the differences between bpf and epbf.
There might be advantages to increasing the amount of hardware and low level courses in the curriculum. But, I am pretty sure that is not the primary reason for young graduates not being to find jobs.
It is for us in the cybersecurity space and the fabless design space (eg. RISC-V SoC). My portfolio companies have moved all hiring to Israel, CEE, and India as a result.
The only people we might consider hiring in the US are veterans from cyber related MOSes because they come with the right learning mindset and have enough practical skills to ramp up if there are skill deficiencies.
I was going to agree with you until the implication that it's learning the nitty-gritty details that's important.
I can teach someone the details on the job. Give me a new grad with strong fundamentals, a love of programming, and an interest in the domain and I'll teach them in sixth months whatever they missed in college that's relevant to the job.
However I've noticed that the fundamentals are so watered down, even at top-tier schools, that young devs like that are harder and harder to find.
That’s a different group of skills than are required to build and maintain a CRUD app with complex regulatory requirements at 1m TPS running on a fleet of virtual hosts which are geographically remote from each other. And someone who is great at going deep on hardware may not be good at that role.
Asserting that the way it was done in the past is the best way will always get agreement from some, but the needs of industry change over time.
Send me their resumes to my username at protonmail.com then. I'll be the judge to decide whether or not they have the skills needed to justify a US hire.
I have most of the skills you list, and I am extremely confident I could fill in the gaps within weeks.
Given your presentation here, I'd like to know where you work so I don't accidently end up working for you, or with you. The elitism is at an 11. We're not special, we just have a skillset that isn't exclusively webdev. BFD.
Sadly, not enough CS exposure (or not communicated the right way).
At your stage, I'd recommend staying at your current job and doing an online PT masters like GT's OMSCS in order to bridge the CS gap, while also building the YoE to make the jump. In this market, landing where you are at right now is a feat unto itself.
I'm also not sure about your citizenship based on your background - most companies (especially early stage) are hesitant to hire and sponsor early career (despite what HNers say).
This is the huge trend I’ve noticed on the last ten years. I too would love it if CS students studied more operating systems, networks, and computer architectures. Software engineering is very much an apprenticeship and we’re building real things. Few of us will dabble in academic domains but we all dabble in large complex stacks, often times distributed.
It's not like hardware and low-level jobs were booming either. If anything, universities have been adjusting to requirements of the market whether it's right or wrong.
Learning computer architecture is fine and good and useful, but in a secondary fashion to help understand the main tool people in CS use. However, it is not the core of what makes computer science "computer science", or even the main thing that makes CS grads hire-able, despite the common misconception that computer science is about computers.
I would emphasize something along the lines of an HtDP approach developed by Felleisen et al. which goes beyond just the coursework in the HtDP book [0]. It extends into several core courses and in fact much of the core CS curriculum was being overhauled by Felleisen until Northeastern unceremoniously decided to dumb down the curriculum to satisfy some idiotic administrative idea of "market fit" and the desire to homogenize content across their expanding network of satellite campuses. When the curriculum was implemented, companies became very hungry for NU CS graduates, esp. given their experience with them during co-ops.
CS curricula are sadly being bootcampified, because that is the will of university administration.
I hate to say this but it is not just the curriculums.
A lot of teachers are just plain out bad at teaching. For quite a lot its not their fault, they were taught flawed pedagogy and just blindly follow what they know like trained monkeys despite how ineffective it is.
If you've ever heard the phrase, "if you are not struggling, you are not learning", you know that quite a lot of people have been twisted by the beast that is education. Such tools usually follow and originate in actual torture techniques, but that is obscured purposefully to the unwary. Paulo Freire's pedagogy follows this.
There is no longer any place in academia for competency, or accountability. Its been destroyed and sieved for decades, and eventually there's no turning back. You hit a critical point. That unfortunately, in my view, is where we stand today.
All except the top 0.1% of the competent people were driven out through social harassment, the remainder eventually conformed to the lower demands because they made the pool of people who remained looked bad. There is no economic benefit to good teaching, and most teachers overall fail, and even the good ones fail too because education is a sieve process and poisoned students coming in may not overcome the adverse effects despite perfect effort and knowledge (which is rare). I'm not saying all do, but the vast majority with few exception, remain poisoning minds; and those are people who can't be fired and must be waited out to retirement.
The same thing happens with any government organization where you can't fire such chaff, and these teachers who are often unfit in the profession are who get to teach your children, and determine whether they become engineers or other productive members; that is unless you spend hundreds of thousands on a private school of repute (which are rare, and highly selective).
The dominant pedagogy has gone by many names, by-rote teaching, lying to children, common core... aimed at depriving people of the most basic skills needed to get to the end-point.
The system certainly won't be refining any Einsteins, it will be destroying them before they even consider picking up Differential Equations at 16. They won't have the background to even get interested because the curricula has been turned into a torture machine and their prospects poisoned before they knew it.
A few years ago we hit a critical threshold, mostly silently, for credibility that there will be economic benefit. School Administrations have done the unacceptable, moved goalposts, and done everything in their power to incentivize the 'forever' student.
Families today have watched those that have gotten those degrees (at around a 1-3% pass rate) unable to get jobs, they aren't seeing the economic returns, and the debt crushes those people. This is why there are fewer children today. The group of your most productive people are fallow.
CS has one of the highest unemployment rates at around 70% according to BLS data. ECE pass rate while somewhat better (but not much) requires mind-destroying classes, compressed into time that no working adult would be required to work (>40h/wk), and perfect recovery from the sophisticated torture techniques used which destroy any intuition.
Education today is more about hobbling the student with trauma so they'll remain a student forever, while maintaining the lie that they can have a better life if they complete something they do their best to prevent sometimes through quite arbitrary means.
Math is taught from Algebra in K-12 on, following a lying to children approach. The good teachers who buck the trend and excel competently are so rare you might find only 1 in a county, and they have not been rewarded; in fact they've been passed up for higher credentialed peers who couldn't teach.
There comes a point where you just have to gut everything and go back to the way things worked. A working system. For teaching that's a first-principled approach following the greeks, where every teacher must follow it without exception, with strict requirements to maintain those standards and psychological support for students who may have had such trauma imposed.
The last thing that should ever happen is an Algebra student getting to Trigonometry and immediately failing because they were taught a flawed version, and Geometry was passed, but not a 'true' Algebra, and by that point you can't go back because that Algebra professor burnt the bridges on a lag (without accountability).
The problems we face today are largely self-inflicted, through blind destructive people who won't stop unless someone else stops them, and they have removed any ability to stop them non-violently following Tolstoy's philosophy, and utilizing existing structure not unlike any other parasite/cancer that tries to kill its host.
Evil people are those that are blind to the consequences of their actions and continue regardless. History has a lot to say about how this impacts the fall of empires, and we will be living through a fall; and proper education has been purposefully withheld to create environments of people follow a complete compromise, succumbing to systems of control.
Agreed. I think we're a shrinking group though. Many got into this profession for high pay and easy work, which is understandable, but not that the shine has worn off they're regretting the choice. Those of us who enjoy the work will remain, but we shouldn't be glad to see the change.
We desperately need programmers with any sort of skills.
The pay is not as good, but the companies are more stable (generally) and the benefits are fine. Mostly remote work for programming. You'll have to deal with bio people too. Family friendly.
Where are you looking? Startups? The larger firms aren't really looking for those degrees with bio, at least in the SW side. If they are, I would ignore that requirement and apply anyways. Most of these firms have bad HR departments that will throw a Caesar salad in with the job requirements, lol. Just be warned, the pay is lower.
I can only speak for a few companies that I know of here, but not really, no. Programmers are really needed. Now, you're going to be working on firmware and with chips (C, BASIC, python, etc), so it's not the stuff that may be in vogue these days at FANGs. Also, yeah, again, the pay is lower.
Maybe the internet is complete. Programming was not that big until the internet came along. Writers started writing for web sites, some of them even started learning to code. Huge hoards of people were needed to "build the internet" as we know it today. That process has IMHO been stabilizing for a while now. Every local restaurant has a web site of some sort - some even have an event calendar that is updated regularly. It's not just Google and Amazon, the electronic version of the entire world has been built out. Payment systems are in place - even hobbyists or crafters can take payments online. It took 30 years with countless dead ends and restarts in a number of areas, but we finally have a stable functioning internet with common development tools and practices. Maintenance of this thing is going to take fewer resources than building it took. It kinda makes sense that jobs are getting harder to find.
I've been working in product development and embedded software most of this time, and I don't see too much change.
The internet != all software jobs. I don't think the internet can be complete anymore than an economy can be complete, but sectors can be mature and/or commoditized. Software is definitely not mature, but AI makes people think it is commoditized (it's not).
It's probably more cyclic than systemic and related to the larger economic trends, federal monetary policy, and growing protectionism. But tech is outsized in the economy, so I'm not sure which one is the horse and which is the cart.
The high salaries commanded by FAANG engineers right out of college motivated a lot of students to take up computer science as a major and this led to a massive oversupply. It might take a few years to cool.
https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/computer-science-major...
"Between 2018 and 2023, the number of students majoring in computer and information science jumped from about 444,000 to 628,000."
Around 40% of MIT graduates are now in CS https://alum.mit.edu/slice/conversation-new-computing-dean-a...
Further, COVID has reduced a lot of friction for remote work, so now there is also global competition for these jobs.
MIT graduates are not going to be struggling for anything, much less for new grad jobs. They're among the most privileged humans to exist on earth by nature of their degree and admission.
I appreciate your point, and don't necessarily disagree. However, I think it is rough out there even for ivy graduates.
We have an intern from an Ivy (not MIT) that isn't getting an offer simply because my company doesn't want to hire in the US right now. They are great to work with, knowledgeable, but have no future here. They have been shopping around, and a lot of people on the team have been trying to find a place for them to go in their network, but no one is biting.
Corollary: if MIT graduates are struggling to find jobs, the market conditions must be really bad for graduates.
I challenge the premise. They’re doing fine. They’re getting $600k a year to work at OpenAI and HRT
Or working at cable companies watching for alien timing signals.
This kind of "nothing can happen to this group because they have these advantages" line of thinking has causation backwards. They are privileged because they historically haven't struggled. The privilege doesn't preclude struggle, the privilege results from lack of struggle in the past. Times change.
I wouldn't be so sure.
What’s the details here? Seems like they’re getting the same elite jobs as always and think of people like me as insects/“NPCs” that have no merit?
they should eat lazily applied adjectives!
Tech employers are saying it's efficiencies gained in AI that led to layoffs for the past few years. Yet they have increased headcount in engineering offices in other countries at the same time.
This is also happening at small and midsize companies that ship software. It's easy to find this information, particularly for the largest companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
Like the article states, there are a number of confounding factors. But it's not AI, no matter how much founders and CEOs want it to be true.
It's the pursuit of lower cost employees.
That’s because the globally talent works much longer hours at lower salary while in US you have to pay 100k for each h1b. Let’s get rid of the ridiculous administration first and then talk about greedy ceo.
Having foreign workers filling the jobs for American companies working on US soil and sending the money home is no better for Americans than having them working in their own countries.
Say what you will about this administration, God knows they have flaws. However, they're the only one that has taken steps to actually attempt to help American workers in a generation or more. Every other one has been a revolving door of shipping jobs out or importing cheap foreign labor in.
>>sending the money home is no better for Americans than having them working in their own countries
I'm sure they are spending majority of their income locally, the same way as American citizens: buying chinese goods and mexican food.
Us government is losing tons of taxes if H1B immigrant is replaced with overseas worker.
> while in US you have to pay 100k for each h1b.
This is rather evidence that this requirement (at least sometimes) does what it should do: it disincentivizes US branches of companies to hire foreigners in the USA by making such hires more expensive.
Thus, instead foreign branches of US companies hire foreigners. Why the complaints: now in the USA less foreigners get hired instead of US citizens, exactly what was requested.
The elephant in the room: the H1B visa and the influx of Indian workers into the U.S. labor market. Many of them are willing to work for lower wages, demand less, and have fewer rights—essentially becoming exploited labor for Corporate America. Why would a corporation hire an American graduate who won’t tolerate these conditions when an H1B worker will?
Instead of confronting the issue directly, people often sidestep it with other excuses. The reality is, if we eliminated all H1B workers, every American in the IT industry, including recent graduates, would have a job. And don’t try to convince me that a Java developer from India possesses skills that our university graduates don’t.
H-1B workers at companies such as Google, Meta or Microsoft are not treated any different, they are not taking abuse or being exploited. There may be smaller companies where this is happening though.
One of the issues is conflation of IT jobs and High Tech jobs. Those making laws don't understand the difference -- they are all "computer jobs" to them. IT does not require immigrant labor. Companies such as Infosys and Tata don't need to be operating in the US. There are plenty of US workers available to do the job.
But High Tech is different. High Tech needs the best in the world, not the best in the US. The US leads the world in tech not because the best ideas were all American but because the best people in the world immigrated to the US. Stopping this will be ruinous to American prosperity.
The seminal research paper that kicked off the AI revolution (titled "Attention is all you need") was written by 2 Indians, 1 German, 1 British Canadian, 1 Pole, 1 Ukrainian, and 2 US born people. These people came to America, worked together and changed the world as we know it. Why would we want to stop it? Has this immigration undercut Americans? Far from it. These immigrants are the lifeblood of the tech industry, and their innovations create jobs.
H-1B's are absolutely exploited. I'd personally testify to the abuses at financial companies. Hearing threats of "If you don't complete this by tomorrow, you can expect to be back in India by next week" From one Indian to another too...
It's awful to witness it. Please don't spread misinformation that "They are not taking abuse or being exploited" That is extremely disingenuous.
It sounds like you object to the exploitation rather than to the H1-B.
don't be asinine. h1-b is what enables this exploitation
Sorry that's untrue. Top companies such as Google, Meta or Microsoft absolutely do not abuse H-1B workers or treat them any different. As I said there may be smaller outfits, or IT shops where this is happening.
You have to look harder. It's not always explicit as OP says with threats of deportation. Rather there's a huge power imbalance.
Who can we ask to stay late? Who "doesn't mind" 12 hour days? Who "doesn't mind' being on call. Who won't mind if they get a smaller bonus or raise? How about Sandeep who is afraid to say no because if he says no too many times and loses his job him and his entire family have to move back overseas with minimal notice?
That's how real exploitation happens these days. And sometimes even good managers don't realize they're doing it, because, after all, poor Sandeep even said he didn't mind! He's just a really hard worker!
Yup. Even if they are treated equally, and everybody has the same chance of being laid off, they have more to lose than permanent residents.
I've never worked at those companies. But to say that it _never_ happens there is a bit of an absurd thing to say.
You are right, unless you have been present at every manager-employee interaction you can't say it has "never" happened. But to claim that this is happening requires more than just one or two instances, right?
I used to think the same thing until I was brought in on an important legacy project that put me tangential to the "inner circle" and heard a lot of this kind of thing along with other shady practices like authoring the RFP for the government to publish so that the requirements favored the company.
You've identified the problem, but not the solution. We must make it illegal for corpos to do labour exploitation in this way and then enforce that law for immigrants and native workers alike. Immigration is good. Creating a two-tiered job market is not. If you just end H1Bs, then many of these jobs will move permanently overseas, there won't be a magical moment of restitution for the aggrieved American tech worker. Unionize if you want to actually make things change for the better for all workers in your industry. You can't post your way out of this.
> And don’t try to convince me that a Java developer from India possesses skills that our university graduates don’t.
Skills? Not necessarily, but there's something a lot of immigrants possess that your university graduates don't: freedom from the weight of student loans.
I'm not from India, so I can't speak for them. Plus, I imagine that the situation in India changed over the years and it's probably not the same as when this trend started. But I can speak for myself and people I know from many other countries, including China. Most of us have had an education that is on par with a lot of American colleges and universities, but without the crushing cost.
Get rid of all immigrant workers and the industry will collapse, because your graduates need to pay off a huge debt that immigrants don't have.
> Most of us have had an education that is on par with a lot of American colleges and universities, but without the crushing cost.
> Get rid of all immigrant workers and the industry will collapse, because your graduates need to pay off a huge debt that immigrants don't have.
You went to university because you decided (in expectation) the present value [1] of the future earning were worth the college fees and the opportunity cost of getting a university degree. So, don't complain about the debt: by your decision you computed that this decision was worth it. The only thing that you need to complain about is yourself that you did a wrong calculation for such a life-influencing decision of going to college.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_value
> You went to university [...]
> by your decision you computed that this decision was worth it
> The only thing that you need to complain about
> you did a wrong calculation
Is that a general "you" or are you replying directly to me? Because if it's the latter, you need to read what I wrote more carefully.
I'm one of those immigrants I wrote about. My education, back where I was born and grew up, was both free and top-notch.
The point of my reply was to explain why "if we eliminated all H1B workers, Americans in the IT industry would be at full employment" is a disturbingly naive idea.
Speaking of disturbing oversimplifications:
> The only thing that you need to complain about is yourself that you did a wrong calculation for such a life-influencing decision of going to college.
If you think that life is as simple as that, you either haven't lived very long or were privileged enough to live in a bubble where things are so cut-and-dried black-and-white.
It's truly amazing how little you need to intrude into the privileges of an already extremely privileged group as US software developers are, to make them go full "immigrats are taking our jobs".
well, they are. outsourcing is the bigger problem. just like outsourcing decimated manufacturing jobs, now it's decimating white-collar. i well and truly hope you get fired so you see how bad the market is. no other profession has this number of cruel, judgmental narcissists not looking out for their own kin.
There are two types of H1B recipients, the type that you describe (in somewhat discriminatory terms) and the type that the program was built for.
The actual geniuses that move to America and stay here to build crazy stuff are also H1B visa holders.
We do NOT want to turn those people away. If you don’t like immigrants “taking your jobs” you are definitely not going to like the alternative reality of a brain drain. You aren’t going to like the alternative reality where there aren’t any immigrants starting businesses to hire you. Without immigration there’s no Google or Apple (these weren’t specifically H1B immigrants but still, Sergey Brin and Steve Jobs’ dad were first generation immigrants)
Again I must point out that every H1B employee that is here is physically in America buying things from American businesses. Immigrants starting businesses at a higher rate than native born citizens.
But I think it’s obvious that the program needs reform. Big companies have been gaming the system and using tricks to abuse it, and they use the visa’s restrictions to trap employees and give them below-market working conditions under the threat of visa revocation.
My proposal would be:
1. Make the visa cost more to acquire depending on the amount of employees in the program at a single company. If your company has 10,000 H1B employees your cost to add another one should be a lot higher than a small company with one H1B worker.
2. Make the visa guarantee permanent resident status to the recipient for a time period once they’ve worked for their company for ~90 days. They should have full job mobility just like a citizen so their employer doesn’t use the program as an excuse to pay below-market wages.
3. Provide a real path to citizenship that doesn’t take decades. I think that people in the country who can treat it like a long-term “forever home” will be more beneficial than ones who have plans to go back home eventually.
We have O1, EB1, EB2 for the "geniuses that move to America and stay here to build crazy stuff".
That's not what the majority of H1B is used for.
Take it easy there, Michael Moore, next thing you’ll be asking for universal healthcare.
I guess we'll see soon if this theory holds. If the 100k per year fee is truly implemented, H1B will be mostly dead.
There is a loophole where companies hire H1B-type employees in their offices in another country and then move them to the US offices.
>> don’t try to convince me that a Java developer from India possesses skills that our university graduates don’t.
You mentioned it, the skill your graduates don't have: willing to work for lower wages
> And don’t try to convince me that a Java developer from India possesses skills that our university graduates don’t.
Everyone defending H1Bs forgets why we even have an economy. America never signed up to be some hegemon that needs to compete with the entire world. America exists for the sake of Americans, not the world, first and foremost. We can help other people after that point. You get revolutions and revolutionary acts when it feels that the opportunity for foreigners and the aristocratic is exceeding opportunity for the normal everyday people born here, and that is a legitimate injustice.
Maybe we should let people work wherever they want?
The tech companies will just offshore the jobs they’d otherwise use for visas. India is a cool place. Lots of Americans would do well to live and work there. They’d probably even be a bit happier. But they can’t because of visas.
For most of human history, you were free to decamp to greener pastures. Cultural chauvinism still existed and thrived in this more porous world. Why do we accept limitations on our freedom of movement?
People are moving around a lot faster than before with cheap air travel and modern internet. Some like this new dynamic, others don't. It's an evolving situation.
>> India is a cool place. Lots of Americans would do well to live and work there.
Would be interesting to see US people to live there on $30k salary.
Lots of Americans live on that right now. It would go further in India.
What's the problem with Indian visas? At least on a cursory glance looks straightforward
Nothing. American workers will rarely consider offshoring themselves. Which is a shame.
You are mistaken. The US doesn’t exist for the sake of Americans. It exist for corporations and corporations only.
Now with AI, cheap labour is overrated and all Those people want is for you to make a contract with openai/meta whatever or to break your business for them to take.
There will be no new jobs. The BBB comes with a hidden line saying that no billionaire should get sad for any reason The only people losing the competition is those who cannot afford to pay more anyway that will need to use AI or get out of the market completely.
> America exists for the sake of Americans, not the world, first and foremost. We can help other people after that point.
But you do want to sell to all of the world, am I correct? So you basically want the pros and none of the cons?
And you also expect the rest of the world to buy an your debt? Because America as a country would be bankrupt instantly if that rest of the world stopped supporting you.
Almost every country short of Liechtenstein would be bankrupt if other countries stopped buying their debt.
As such, the argument is not relevant, unless you believe that ethnicity has no correlation to country, and India should welcome Americans just as well.
> Almost every country short of Liechtenstein would be bankrupt if other countries stopped buying their debt.
Sure but not many countries never seem to run a deficit.
> and India should welcome Americans just as well.
Somehow I've met 10+ Americans who all seem to think you just submit a form and get an H1B... Being a non resident alien is no fun.
Being forced to leave the country to renew your visa? Makes sense but there's a certain uneasiness that goes with it every time
Switching employers is much harder, because the new one needs to be willing to sponsor
The pathway to staying in the US long term is super long. If you are this talented person from India and want to make America your home, getting a green card takes over 12 years... All those years you're essentially in limbo especially with current political circumstances.
That's what people are willing to put up with to be granted the ability to live and work in the US. I'm not saying that's unfair and you cannot require such things but don't think it's a walk in the park
> As such, the argument is not relevant, unless you believe that ethnicity has no correlation to country
What ethnicity do you think Americans are?
Absolutely, US software industry wouldn't be nearly as large as well-paying without (allegedly useless) US domination over the world
> America exists for the sake of Americans
Anyone living, working, or otherwise contributing to society in America can become an American.
> America exists for the sake of Americans, not the world, first and foremost. ... opportunity for foreigners [...] exceeding opportunity for [...] people born here, and that is a legitimate injustice.
That is IMO an un-American statement. America is, in theory, the land of opportunity. Not only for the "right kind of people".
> That is IMO an un-American statement. America is, in theory, the land of opportunity. Not only for the "right kind of people".
The people who live here have a right, first and foremost, to opportunities. If they are vocally and statistically proving that opportunities are bad right now, the H1B needs to be pulled for their sake. It can be put back once balance has been achieved.
> Anyone living, working, or otherwise contributing to society in America is an American.
Absolutely not. If I export my new invention to Europe and it changes society, I am contributing to European society, but I am not European. If I take a visa to Europe and start doing contract work illegally, I am not European.
Look. If the government is worried with people who are already there is not because it is going to get better. This is just populism. They want you to think you need to be saved, they want to be your figurative father
Why is populism popular?
Because sometimes people need to be saved, because the current system is actually broken, unfair, and inordinately stressful.
Populism is the normal population yelling "you forgot about us." Nothing more. Where it goes from there, depends on the politicians grasping that fact, and what they offer as a solution. This is also why populists win - their clientele doesn't feel like they have much to lose; while the competing politician is yelling about abstract global principles and norms and basically saying "your situation is unfortunate, screw you; you don't get it, idiot; pull yourself up, bootstraps!"
Edit for reply: > Populism creates problems or do not solve them in order to exist.
This is just upper class elitism with a thin veneer. Upper classes have constantly, always accused the lower classes of exaggerating their problems; and have constantly, always accused those claiming to address those problems as making them up. It's also a defense mechanism - because it lets you conveniently accuse the lower classes of voting in Mr. Mustache while washing your hands of any responsibility, because the problems were made up and people are gullible, obviously.
That is true but you miss one thing. Populism depends on having problems. If people feel safe they don't need a strong hand in control.
Populism creates problems or do not solve them in order to exist. That's why there is a need to create "the enemy".
That is exactly why people tolerate to-be-dictators like the evil-mustache guy. People needs to be afraid. Populism depends on fearmongering.
This is why people like the evil-mustache German guy was able to work on his platform to have absolute powers.
>Populism creates problems or do not solve them in order to exist.
Why is this unique to Populism? Most forms of power or organizations in general rely on there being a problem to solve.
You are probably right, my point is that Populism, and at least it, does need to perpetuate de problems, hence, no populist leader is/was ever effective.
Not an answer but an appendix. There is common misconceptions on the definition of politics. For the masses politics means to define policies through negotiation and prioritisation. For politicians, it means something related to exert political power.
I agree with the point that populists have a strong incentive to not solve problems, but I'm not sure that means populists can't be effective. For example in US history FDR was arguably a populist, and I would say pretty effective. And while the US populist party imploded fairly quickly, a good chunk of it's policy wants wound up happening in the next decade or two during the progressive movement.[1]
Using the power definition of politics, it still seems to me that because the ability to exert power is only given when there is a need to be solved, a (for example) plutocrat has a similar incentive not to solve problems as a populist, and would be similarly likely to not be effective. I suppose an explanation that's consistent with both perspectives is that political leaders in general are not effective.
[1] https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5361/
Does your stance apply to native Americans or is it exclusively about immigrants?
I had a friend that had a T-shirt with an old photo of a bunch of American Indians (I think Apache), standing with guns and other weapons. They looked rather fierce.
It said "Homeland Security: Fighting Terrorism Since 1492".
I've seen the same, but I'm not sure what the logical conclusion would be if you extrapolate out to current times.
your stance of "get here first or if someone's already here take what you want from them" doesn't seem that different from the GP you're refuting.
> Anyone living, working, or otherwise contributing to society in America is an American.
No. That is very much not a legal or even sociological definition. There are plenty of people who live and work in America who have other nationalities and would prefer to not be considered American, even. A lot of Americans (I am one, before you assume something else) have a weird complex where they think everyone wants to be them. But that is very, very wrong to assume.
I worded my thoughts poorly. You can become a citizen through naturalization.
The original commenter says America is for Americans (assuming they mean citizens) and I was trying to point out that not all Americans are born in America.
I did not intend to imply that everyone wants to be an American.
Hilarious implication that this visa is a new phenomenon
I didn’t see any such implication.
What’s new is the sophisticated scams and parallel industries that exist to support falsified H1B petitions.
It’s your civic duty to apply to H1B job postings. This is probably 10x more effective than using LinkedIn, which is designed to keep you in a holding pattern indefinitely.
https://h1bvisajobs.com/
If that is the actually the main problem, then the cost of H1Bs are now high enough to economically favor locals.
The crazy thing is how suppressed this opinion was. You got banned on most websites for bringing this up. I credit free speech on X for bringing h1b visas into the national conversation
Any example? Unless it was completely racist, I feel like a lot of people have been complaining about H1Bs for many years without any problems. Also here on hacker news.
There's been a major shift just in the last few months. Those of us who have been concerned about this problem for years welcome them to the party, but with a bit of an eye-roll, because it's obvious that the shift wouldn't be happening if it were trucking and farming jobs under assault and not tech jobs.
I would like to know what is meant by "Computer science jobs".
To me, Computer Science would be like research type jobs. I know nothing about this field, but I expect it has always been and always will be very hard to get into this field.
Then you have these programming jobs:
IT would be working on Internal Applications for a Business. These days would usually mean supporting or in-house custom developing for things like SAP or Oracle. This is what I did, in the 70s/80s/90s it was all in-house systems. Starting early 2000s, systems like SAP. I have since retired but I know where I last worked, that company was moving these jobs outside the US. From friends still there, those moves have increased quite a bit. Maybe work could be still available in small companies.
Then there are working at startups, which is rare but gets all the press, I know nothing about this area.
Then there is working a a company that develops software for sale (like SAP), I tend to think this is starting to go the way of IT work mentioned above.
Typically this is jobs where one's job revolves primarily around writing code.
These are all arbitrary labels in an ever-changing field so I'm not going to say anybody is right or wrong, but I'm quite certain this is not what others typically mean when they say "computer science jobs." If a person's job primarily revolves around writing and shipping code this is most commonly just called "software engineering" or "software development" whether or not it's internal software or some kind of external product offered for sale externally.If it's internal application development, the department might typically be called "IT" but the job role would still typically just be "software developer" or "software engineer."
I've been at it since the late 90s. Just a baby compared to you. :DCongrats on making it thru and retiring!
Right so there's currently a mismatch between higher education and industry. Ideally Computer Science is a branch of Applied Mathematics primarily concerned with the theory of computation. But due to demand from students who want to get industry jobs instead of doing research, many schools have "polluted" their CS majors with more practical programming courses. This confuses the issue and doesn't do anyone any good.
A better approach would be to have separate majors targeted towards students who want industry careers. I would suggest two separate tracks: Software Engineering which would take a disciplined, analytical approach and Software Development which would treat software construction for like a fine art, akin to sculpture or music performance.
To me, Computer Science is about the theory of computation, and the analysis of algorithms, and to some degree about the design of computer programming languages.
Software Engineering is about the efficient[1] production[2] of larger-scale programs that adequately meet the need[3].
Software Development as a separate topic... maybe, for some things like games and UI. I don't really see it as a separate field, though.
[1] "Efficient" is actually a lie, but the sentence was already long enough as it is. I really should have said "somewhat less inefficient". You can never make it efficient. (The fundamental problem is that brain-to-brain transfer of technical information is slow, inefficient, and lossy.) But if you don't control the inefficiency, it's going to destroy your project.
[2] Production and maintenance. Larger-scale software also tends to be longer lasting; if you don't build something maintainable, you fail.
[3] This does not mean bug-free! But it means that the amount and severity of the bugs do not destroy the usefulness of the software.
It's all of that. When I was in college, the programming degree was called Computer Science.
Like many in the AI space, Farid said that those who use breakthrough technologies will outlast those who don't.
"AI" professor tells everyone to use "AI". With the usual fatalism that nothing can ever be done about anything.
One option for example would be to fire all "AI" professors. Another one would be to outlaw "AI", just as nuclear energy was outlawed in Germany and DDT was banned worldwide.
Even if it was a good idea - how would you draw a boundary between AI and the rest of computing? In the end you'd have to go full Butlerian Jihad and prohibit computation in general, or at least limit allowed computing power.
> limit allowed computing power
This will of course be the policy set by physics once we have exhausted all the easily accessible energy reserves: limited everything power. Nature will conduct Butlerian jihad with no great zeal or ardor, but with just patience.
That's going to take a very long time, there's massive amounts of solar, geothermal, and wind energy left available. Hell, natural gas is a waste product of oil drilling.
Engineering and construction type careers in general, anything involving "capital investment", are very sensitive to market conditions. That is, future expectations. Very boom and bust, dependent on credit.
I'm a CS professor and this is not really what we are seeing. I'm not at Berkeley but it's an R1. Yes, students on the lower end of the GPA scale are having a harder time finding jobs. But in terms of my program's ability to place students after graduating, the vast majority have been placed.
It's important to also note that some who have not found a place did so because the thought they could find a better salary by holding out for longer. So yes, probably average post-grad offer is going down, that's true. But it's definitely not true to say "everybody is struggling to get jobs"
> But it's definitely not true to say "everybody is struggling to get jobs"
Most people don't speak or write literally about this kind of subject.
We see the evidence in the article of "everybody struggling" is:
-Berkeley students haven't gotten as many internship offers and their salaries are not exceedingly high (but they are still getting offers).
- He claims his son is struggling.
I dunno, maybe he is right but this doesn't sound exactly like Armageddon.
Also this: "it's going to be a great career. It is future-proof — that changed in four years"
Huh? How is it not still a great career? Just because Berkeley grads can't get insane salaries right out of college? Also, how was is ever future proof -- I've been constantly retraining on technologies for 30 years.
This article is just soundbites, nothing to see here.
Fix the curriculums so I can justify restarting a new grad hiring pipeline in the US.
CS (along with ECE/EECS) degrees have been watering down their curriculum for a decade by reducing the amount of hardware, low level, and theory courses that remain requirements abroad.
Just take a look at the curriculum changes for the CSE major (course 6-3) at MIT in the 2025 [0] versus 2017-22 [1] versus pre-2017 [2] - there is a steady decrease in the amount of table stakes EE/CE content like circuits, signals, computer architecture, and OS dev (all of which are building blocks for Cybersecurity and ML) and an increased amount in math.
Nothing wrong with increasing the math content, but reducing the ECE content in a CSE major is bad given how tightly coupled software is with hardware. We are now at a point where an entire generation of CSE majors in America do not know what a series or parallel circuit is.
And this trend has been happening at every program in the US over the past 10 years.
I CANNOT JUSTIFY building a new grad pipeline in cybersecurity, DevSecOps, CloudSec, MLOps, Infra Silicon Design, or ML Infra with people who don't understand how a jump register works, the difference between BPF and eBPF, or how to derive a restricted Boltzmann machine (for my ML researcher hires) - not because they need to know it on the job, but because it betrays a lack of fundamental knowledge.
I can find new grad candidates with a similar profile at a handful of domestic CS programs (Cal included), but (Cal specific) someone with a BA CS from LAS who never touched CS152, CS161, CS162, or CS168 isn't getting hired into the early career pipeline for a security startup when they took CS160, CS169L, or CS169A because they are "easier", or isn't getting hired as a junior MLE if they didn't take all the more theoretical undergrad ML classes at Cal like CS182, CS185, CS188, and CS189. And even worse if they are a BA DS without a second fundamental major like AMATH or IEOR.
[0] - https://eecsis.mit.edu/degree_requirements.html#6-3_2025
[1] - https://eecsis.mit.edu/degree_requirements.html#6-3_2017
[2] - https://www.scribd.com/document/555216170/6-3-roadmap
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Edit: can't reply so replying here
> Give me a new grad with strong fundamentals, a love of programming, and an interest in the domain and I'll teach them in sixth months whatever they missed in college that's relevant to the job
I 100% agree. A lot of core foundational classes that at the very least build the mindset of how to problem solve are not offered or have severely reduced the curriculum and content offered.
> until the implication that it's learning the nitty-gritty details that's important.
Not what I meant. What I mean is you can't understand or ramp up on (eg.) eBPF without understanding how the Linux Kernel, syscalls, and registries work. If you don't have the foundations down, I can't justify spending $120k base plus 30% in benefits and taxes hiring you out of college.
> These are kind oddly specific criteria
I'm giving random examples from individual portfolio companies
> Are those really things you think new grads need to know
This is the kind of curriculum a new grad from Cal (be they on F1 OPT or a citizen) are competing with when my portfolio companies have hired new grads.
TAU - https://exact-sciences.m.tau.ac.il/yedion/2021-22/computer_s...
IITD - https://www.cse.iitd.ac.in/academics/btech_links/curriculum....
Uniwersytet Warszawski - https://informatorects.uw.edu.pl/en/programmes-all/IN/S1-INF...
Babeş-Bolayai University - https://cci.ubbcluj.ro/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Curricula-...
There is a level of mathematical or hardware-software maturity that is built into top programs abroad that make it hard to justify hiring new grads domestically.
In Israel, India, much of Eastern Europe, and China - all universities follow the same curriculum as defined by their Ministries of Education.
I can find new grad candidates with a similar profile at a handful of domestic CS programs (Cal included), but someone with a BA CS from LAS who never touched CS152, CS161, CS162, or CS168 isn't getting hired into the pipeline for a cybersecurity vendor when they took CS160, CS169L, or CS169A because they are "easier".
These are kind oddly specific criteria, no?
Your ideal candidate needs to know: assembly, trivia about the history of eBPF, an obscure data structure specific to a certain field. As a bonus you would like them to know a little electrical engineering, and written on OS kernel as well?
Are those really things you think new grads need to know? I'm not sure you could find more than a handful of mid level or senior engineers with familiar with more than 2/3 of that.
This reads to me like things you know, that you think everyone should know.
Why not details on the network stack? Or database design and internals? Why not file systems specifically?
Those are much more relevant to the majority of modern development that the differences between bpf and epbf.
There might be advantages to increasing the amount of hardware and low level courses in the curriculum. But, I am pretty sure that is not the primary reason for young graduates not being to find jobs.
It is for us in the cybersecurity space and the fabless design space (eg. RISC-V SoC). My portfolio companies have moved all hiring to Israel, CEE, and India as a result.
The only people we might consider hiring in the US are veterans from cyber related MOSes because they come with the right learning mindset and have enough practical skills to ramp up if there are skill deficiencies.
I was going to agree with you until the implication that it's learning the nitty-gritty details that's important.
I can teach someone the details on the job. Give me a new grad with strong fundamentals, a love of programming, and an interest in the domain and I'll teach them in sixth months whatever they missed in college that's relevant to the job.
However I've noticed that the fundamentals are so watered down, even at top-tier schools, that young devs like that are harder and harder to find.
That’s a different group of skills than are required to build and maintain a CRUD app with complex regulatory requirements at 1m TPS running on a fleet of virtual hosts which are geographically remote from each other. And someone who is great at going deep on hardware may not be good at that role.
Asserting that the way it was done in the past is the best way will always get agreement from some, but the needs of industry change over time.
This is a non sequitur. I know plenty of people with world class low level chops who can't hired right now. This is about market forces.
Send me their resumes to my username at protonmail.com then. I'll be the judge to decide whether or not they have the skills needed to justify a US hire.
I have most of the skills you list, and I am extremely confident I could fill in the gaps within weeks.
Given your presentation here, I'd like to know where you work so I don't accidently end up working for you, or with you. The elitism is at an 11. We're not special, we just have a skillset that isn't exclusively webdev. BFD.
Hey i got address not found error for alephnerd@protonmail.com
But you can find my resume in https://momoisgoodforhealth.github.io/
Sadly, not enough CS exposure (or not communicated the right way).
At your stage, I'd recommend staying at your current job and doing an online PT masters like GT's OMSCS in order to bridge the CS gap, while also building the YoE to make the jump. In this market, landing where you are at right now is a feat unto itself.
I'm also not sure about your citizenship based on your background - most companies (especially early stage) are hesitant to hire and sponsor early career (despite what HNers say).
> i got address not found error
Whoops, I meant the new Protonmail suffix.
This is the huge trend I’ve noticed on the last ten years. I too would love it if CS students studied more operating systems, networks, and computer architectures. Software engineering is very much an apprenticeship and we’re building real things. Few of us will dabble in academic domains but we all dabble in large complex stacks, often times distributed.
It's not like hardware and low-level jobs were booming either. If anything, universities have been adjusting to requirements of the market whether it's right or wrong.
Learning computer architecture is fine and good and useful, but in a secondary fashion to help understand the main tool people in CS use. However, it is not the core of what makes computer science "computer science", or even the main thing that makes CS grads hire-able, despite the common misconception that computer science is about computers.
I would emphasize something along the lines of an HtDP approach developed by Felleisen et al. which goes beyond just the coursework in the HtDP book [0]. It extends into several core courses and in fact much of the core CS curriculum was being overhauled by Felleisen until Northeastern unceremoniously decided to dumb down the curriculum to satisfy some idiotic administrative idea of "market fit" and the desire to homogenize content across their expanding network of satellite campuses. When the curriculum was implemented, companies became very hungry for NU CS graduates, esp. given their experience with them during co-ops.
CS curricula are sadly being bootcampified, because that is the will of university administration.
[0] https://htdp.org/
I hate to say this but it is not just the curriculums.
A lot of teachers are just plain out bad at teaching. For quite a lot its not their fault, they were taught flawed pedagogy and just blindly follow what they know like trained monkeys despite how ineffective it is.
If you've ever heard the phrase, "if you are not struggling, you are not learning", you know that quite a lot of people have been twisted by the beast that is education. Such tools usually follow and originate in actual torture techniques, but that is obscured purposefully to the unwary. Paulo Freire's pedagogy follows this.
There is no longer any place in academia for competency, or accountability. Its been destroyed and sieved for decades, and eventually there's no turning back. You hit a critical point. That unfortunately, in my view, is where we stand today.
All except the top 0.1% of the competent people were driven out through social harassment, the remainder eventually conformed to the lower demands because they made the pool of people who remained looked bad. There is no economic benefit to good teaching, and most teachers overall fail, and even the good ones fail too because education is a sieve process and poisoned students coming in may not overcome the adverse effects despite perfect effort and knowledge (which is rare). I'm not saying all do, but the vast majority with few exception, remain poisoning minds; and those are people who can't be fired and must be waited out to retirement.
The same thing happens with any government organization where you can't fire such chaff, and these teachers who are often unfit in the profession are who get to teach your children, and determine whether they become engineers or other productive members; that is unless you spend hundreds of thousands on a private school of repute (which are rare, and highly selective).
The dominant pedagogy has gone by many names, by-rote teaching, lying to children, common core... aimed at depriving people of the most basic skills needed to get to the end-point.
The system certainly won't be refining any Einsteins, it will be destroying them before they even consider picking up Differential Equations at 16. They won't have the background to even get interested because the curricula has been turned into a torture machine and their prospects poisoned before they knew it.
A few years ago we hit a critical threshold, mostly silently, for credibility that there will be economic benefit. School Administrations have done the unacceptable, moved goalposts, and done everything in their power to incentivize the 'forever' student.
Families today have watched those that have gotten those degrees (at around a 1-3% pass rate) unable to get jobs, they aren't seeing the economic returns, and the debt crushes those people. This is why there are fewer children today. The group of your most productive people are fallow.
CS has one of the highest unemployment rates at around 70% according to BLS data. ECE pass rate while somewhat better (but not much) requires mind-destroying classes, compressed into time that no working adult would be required to work (>40h/wk), and perfect recovery from the sophisticated torture techniques used which destroy any intuition.
Education today is more about hobbling the student with trauma so they'll remain a student forever, while maintaining the lie that they can have a better life if they complete something they do their best to prevent sometimes through quite arbitrary means.
Math is taught from Algebra in K-12 on, following a lying to children approach. The good teachers who buck the trend and excel competently are so rare you might find only 1 in a county, and they have not been rewarded; in fact they've been passed up for higher credentialed peers who couldn't teach.
There comes a point where you just have to gut everything and go back to the way things worked. A working system. For teaching that's a first-principled approach following the greeks, where every teacher must follow it without exception, with strict requirements to maintain those standards and psychological support for students who may have had such trauma imposed.
The last thing that should ever happen is an Algebra student getting to Trigonometry and immediately failing because they were taught a flawed version, and Geometry was passed, but not a 'true' Algebra, and by that point you can't go back because that Algebra professor burnt the bridges on a lag (without accountability).
The problems we face today are largely self-inflicted, through blind destructive people who won't stop unless someone else stops them, and they have removed any ability to stop them non-violently following Tolstoy's philosophy, and utilizing existing structure not unlike any other parasite/cancer that tries to kill its host.
Evil people are those that are blind to the consequences of their actions and continue regardless. History has a lot to say about how this impacts the fall of empires, and we will be living through a fall; and proper education has been purposefully withheld to create environments of people follow a complete compromise, succumbing to systems of control.
I’m still desperately looking for an out from this industry.
The layoff and market conditions helped me realized just how useless my career has been.
I knew I never wanted to work professionally in software, but it was the only thing accessible that pays well.
Even now it’s the only thing keeping me afloat, so I don’t see any way out but slow painful [career] death.
I'd do software (or other engineering work) even if I was paid the same as a cashier. It's just enjoyable work. Horses for courses.
Agreed. I think we're a shrinking group though. Many got into this profession for high pay and easy work, which is understandable, but not that the shine has worn off they're regretting the choice. Those of us who enjoy the work will remain, but we shouldn't be glad to see the change.
I like software, just not in any capacity anyone would pay me to work
Come to Biotech!
We desperately need programmers with any sort of skills.
The pay is not as good, but the companies are more stable (generally) and the benefits are fine. Mostly remote work for programming. You'll have to deal with bio people too. Family friendly.
All biotech jobs I've come across require at least a few years of experience specific to biotech.
I have 30 years of software development experience, but none with anything health related, so I never get a response from any biotech applications.
Where are you looking? Startups? The larger firms aren't really looking for those degrees with bio, at least in the SW side. If they are, I would ignore that requirement and apply anyways. Most of these firms have bad HR departments that will throw a Caesar salad in with the job requirements, lol. Just be warned, the pay is lower.
I've got a bit of restaurant kitchen experience. The Caesar salad doesn't scare me...
Yes, that's been more my experience as well (though I'd guess my profile is a little less compatible than yours anyway).
>> We desperately need programmers with any sort of skills
I doubt you are hiring people without education degree in biology.
I can only speak for a few companies that I know of here, but not really, no. Programmers are really needed. Now, you're going to be working on firmware and with chips (C, BASIC, python, etc), so it's not the stuff that may be in vogue these days at FANGs. Also, yeah, again, the pay is lower.
I'm in the same situation: there is no way out unless I'm ok to cut my income to 20% of current IT job.
I feel you. I don't hate computers, but the insecurity of late is unsettling.
These types of headlines should always end with "for those who cannot or will not move."
There's plenty of jobs - just not always in the most popular areas.
Would you like to move to Bangalore? For local salary, of course!
Maybe the internet is complete. Programming was not that big until the internet came along. Writers started writing for web sites, some of them even started learning to code. Huge hoards of people were needed to "build the internet" as we know it today. That process has IMHO been stabilizing for a while now. Every local restaurant has a web site of some sort - some even have an event calendar that is updated regularly. It's not just Google and Amazon, the electronic version of the entire world has been built out. Payment systems are in place - even hobbyists or crafters can take payments online. It took 30 years with countless dead ends and restarts in a number of areas, but we finally have a stable functioning internet with common development tools and practices. Maintenance of this thing is going to take fewer resources than building it took. It kinda makes sense that jobs are getting harder to find.
I've been working in product development and embedded software most of this time, and I don't see too much change.
The internet != all software jobs. I don't think the internet can be complete anymore than an economy can be complete, but sectors can be mature and/or commoditized. Software is definitely not mature, but AI makes people think it is commoditized (it's not).
It's probably more cyclic than systemic and related to the larger economic trends, federal monetary policy, and growing protectionism. But tech is outsized in the economy, so I'm not sure which one is the horse and which is the cart.
No, but the core software may very will be written.