Summary
Elon Musk faced backlash from his followers on X after advocating for importing “super talented engineers” to address a shortage in the U.S. tech industry.
Musk likened hiring top foreign talent to building a championship sports team and argues that there is a shortage of talented and motivated American engineers.
Critics argued there’s sufficient U.S. talent being overlooked or underpaid, with some pointing to widespread tech layoffs.
Musk dismissed claims of low wages or training gaps, maintaining a need for exceptional engineering talent to advance innovation.
Musk doesn’t want a championship sports team, he wants a cheap, desperate, obedient source of labour.
The American Dream has long since been corrupted by the wealthy into a pipe dream for the masses that funnels more money to the rich.
Yeah, he just wants more pliant and subservient H1B visa holders that he can pay less than he’d have to offer to an American, who will be deported after 2 months if they don’t work hard enough to satisfy him.
Oh. Right.
By ‘deported’, I guess we’re now talking about ‘rounded up into mass concentration camps.’
I had a friend back a few years ago who was an H1B and it’s fucking exploitive. They made him work off his visa. And since his visa is tied to his job he couldn’t leave it. The place was toxic af.
The company was very much abusing H1B visas but unless someone at the company spoke up, it’s just business.
The place was toxic af.
What I’ve seen at such places is that they will often put some Indian into a management position and they will squeeze blood from a stone like you wouldn’t believe, flogging H1Bs (all Indian in many cases), and hiring no citizens if they can help it, other than just a token or two.
But the tokens will quickly learn their job is under constant threat if they get any notions of being uppity - the Indian H1Bs being there as a lesson that doesn’t have to really be explained…
And yeah, it’s toxic as anything.
https://insideevs.com/news/718815/production-teams-will-be-overburdened-tesla-employee/
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/politics/twitter-layoffs-visas-h1b/index.html
We’ve seen Musk use this before, after all.
shortage of engineers? are you kidding me?
I know of two first degree of separation SWEs who can’t land jobs. One worked at microsoft for like a decade.
FTFA:
Other followers accused Musk of simply not wanting to pay top talent what it’s worth.
Bingo, got it in one. They don’t want to pay american talent american wages, they want to pay all talent 3rd world country wages while they themselves pocket a 50 billion dollar contract.
He’s running out of inexperienced engineers to burn through. He statedv early on that he wanted to create a surplus of engineers to drive down the cost.
That cost being, paying the engineers’ salaries.
I work pretty closely with a lot of young engineers. My work brings them in as interns, hires them, but doesn’t pay them very well and after 2 years we have new engineers because they’ve all found better jobs. Saturating the market with talent really hasn’t worked out the way he wanted it to, because as it turns out that’s nothing new.
So now he’s gotta find a new way to pay engineers less.
So now he’s gotta find a new way to pay engineers less.
I imagine it would be something like this:
Position: Senior ML Software Developer
Join the XTesla420X family of goal-oriented, success-driven, rockstar AI/Machine Learning engineers who aren’t afraid to move fast and break things in the name of automation and mankind’s future.With no middle management, you get to be your own boss* and set your own working hours**. The only thing holding to hold you back from greatness is your own potential, and we’re ready to help you thrive in a fast-paced environment where the sky the limit and your own mortality is nothing but a temporary setback.
Requirements:
- 10 years industry experience
- No kids
- A 210% work ethic
- Intimacy with a Python
Compensation & Benefits:
- Exposure in lieu of salary
- Office vending machine
- Office cocaine (unavailable for remote workers)
- Optional unpaid vacation days on statuatory holidays
* reporting directly to Elon Mouske
** minimum 80 per week
*must relocate to shithole work site with self funded relocation where labor rights have been repealed and report to duty 6 days a week for minimum 14 hour shifts. 20 for crunch time. We make 996 look like child’s play!
And how about healthcare? Or will accepting the offer enroll me in clinical trials to have my brain implanted into a robot? Robots don’t need healthcare, pay, sleep, time off, or any of the other things fleshies need to live. Of course, the organic components, such as the brain and possibly spinal cord will require occasional maintenance, but the upkeep cost for those is minimal
POV Me after having my brain put in an Optimus robot: [Says “Kill Me” repeatedly]
It’s a common trick used in American Hiring Practices, knowingly set an impossible standard for hiring. Turn around and say “We can’t fill this position with candidates in the US, here’s the list of people we rejected. Can we get approved for hiring visas?”
And The Government falls for that bullshit guaranteed… after some donations to the Super PAC of course.
There are obviously easily exploited loopholes to enable H1B visas especially for a couple of businesses that hire the most H1Bs.
As long as most countries in this world have median wages well below 33% of the US there will be rampant outsourcing / under the table labor / vastly lower comp H1B roles.
If you truly try to minimize your cost of living the cost to live in the US is surprisingly cheap. Most shit we buy is optional. Rice and beans are cheap, you can find people giving away clothes, transportation can be very cheap and a simple pay as you go phone can be very cheap and be your access to the internet and is fully functional. You can make enough with a job that just pays minimum wage to send enough money home and feed an entire family without yourself worrying about being homeless or going without food.
Immigrants tend to try harder and put up with more bullshit than natives because things are that much better here than back home. Hell, we have food pantries! That’s basically unheard of in most of the world. Billions still struggle to put food on the table outside of the US and western europe. I relied on food pantries as a kid to survive in poverty. My wife is from a third world country and couldn’t believe people would just give food to those in need freely.
I’m not here to bash on immigrants, i’m just pointing out that even the poor in the US generally have more privilege than they could possibly realize. The vast excess of the top 10% in the US is crazy, and the .1% here are so egregiously overcompensated it should probably be criminal.
You can make enough with a job that just pays minimum wage to send enough money home and feed an entire family without yourself worrying about being homeless or going without food.
presses X to doubt
Musk likened hiring top foreign talent to building a championship sports team and argues that there is a shortage of talented and motivated American engineers.
There’s not, it’s just they want good wages and working conditions
As an employer the way to get cheaper workers that accept worse conditions is flood the labor pool. With the cost of an American education, H1B’s will always take less. Not just from foreign countries, but also from “better” countries with free education.
This isn’t just bad for the tech sector, it’s bad for everything that requires an advanced degree.
Yeah the more I’ve learned about H1 visas the more they stink. You set up your entire life and your employer can destroy it all at any time by firing you. So they take pay cuts, extra hours, extra duties, demands to sleep in the office, just horrible shit that American employees won’t stand for.
All we need to do is extend it to a 2 year rolling period for the individual. If you lose your job you have 2 years to get the next one. And employers have to wait 5 years before they can bring in another H1b employee if they fire one. After 5 years give them a green card.
Even simpler fix, actually. If they genuinely can’t find anyone else, set the wages of the people they hire to a mandatory 5x industry median or 500k, whichever is larger
If they genuinely can’t find anyone else, set the wages of the people they hire to a mandatory 5x industry median or 500k, whichever is larger
Trump tried something very similar to what you propose: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2024/08/19/trump-h-1b-visa-wage-rule-gives-clue-to-second-term-immigration-policy/
He didn’t explain to them that holders of H1B visas have to stay with the corporation that hires them or else they get deported. It’s semi-slavery. Conservatives would love it.
That’s the only way to keep salaries depressed, which is why they’re brought in. If they could switch jobs, there’d be competition among potential employers and the salaries would increase. The whole H1B scheme is a filthy racket. It depresses the wages of non-H1B workers, it exploits those on an H1B visa, and there’s a whole cottage industry of faking recruitment campaigns before showing that a company was “forced” to fill a critical skills shortage with an H1B holder. For example, the qualifications can be written so that only people on certain Indian of Chinese computer-science courses can have the required coursework. Not that the applicant necessarily took the course, though: there’s another cottage industry in India and in China of people doing exams on someone else’s behalf.
And then there’s industrial espionage…
Yep. What I don’t get is when people that are supposedly “nationalist” aren’t even patriotic enough to just open up immigration so that the talent pool stays HERE. It’s all about just short-term profits for private tyrannies and everyone else can apparently go fuck themselves, citizens included.
Why work for a man who expects his workers to work “hardcore” for 80 hours a week without any overtime pay?
Sounds like exploitation to me.
Well to answer @Gork@lemm.ee’s hypothetical - someone who hates Elon might run a simple cost benefit and still decide two brutal years of making no money is worth having a big T(esla)/SpaceX on their résumé.
Which is unfortunate because it would be good to see a revolt that led to a kinder leader of those companies.
