MyShawdowySelf

+1 It seem glaring that american as a tough time developping the potentional of people already here

> I'm more American in attitude than most Americans I know.

I am not sure what's this "American attitude" you mention here nor which scale you are using to say that you are somewhat higher on that scale vs "most" American.

Been here for about 8 years, live in a bunch of places in the world. For me the most striking thing about the US as always been the sheer diversity of thoughts and perspectives. That and also the fact that somehow most American think they have the magical ability to know what is american and what is not.

> I consider myself a nationalist.

And a lot of american are not.

> First and foremost, I strongly believe that elected representatives should represent the best interests of their citizens and ONLY their citizens.

To a degree and with some limitation. Should we allow american companies to do morally/ecologically dubious things overseas just because we get some tax revenue ?

> The best interest of potential future citizens is not something they should even give a thought to.

So... the interest of children of american's shouldn't matter ?

> That's the question that should be asked when admitting an immigrant: "Is this person a net benefit to the citizens of this country I was elected to represent?"

The issue is of course in defining what is a "net" benefit. For some, the cultural exchange, the moral obligation to asylum seekers or relative to people already here does count like a net benefit.

It is also important to note that this view of immigration as something that should be provably beneficial is pretty recent. The wave of european (italian, irish etc...) did migrate in mass to the US without any obvious/forseeable benefit... But all in all it turned out well.

> First, it absolutely must cost more to bring in an immigrant to do a job than to hire an American. Under no situation should it be allowed to depress wages. If a citizen costs X, it should cost like 1.5x or some value like that to import the talent you need if you genuinely can't find the talent you need domestically.

Agree.

> Second, the visa should belong the the person being brought to the US. A company can sponsor them and maybe get exclusive access for some short period of time like the first year or so, but after that, the person should not have their visa tied to the employer that sponsored them. If they get a good perf review after their first year on the job, they absolutely should get an extension to stay another N years like 3 to 5, but at this point they are totally free to work for any other company with zero risk of losing their visa status if they choose not to continue working for the employer that sponsored them. If that employer wants to keep them, they'll have to pay the premium to keep them and treat them well. No immigrant should ever feel like an indentured servant.

Agree

> Third, scrutiny should be applied to all companies involved in using the H1-B program as a visa mill and to co-ethnic nepotism.

You absolutely need to make sure that companies aren't "selling" the visas. For example, someone in country X should not be able to pay or perform a favor for a company in the US to get a visa. A genuine need needs to be demonstrated and we need to make sure there is no quid pro quo.

Co-ethnic nepotism is another big one. Executives and managers should not be able to sponsor H1-Bs from their country of origin or from their religious group. If the CEO of a company is from country X and manager of the team is from country Y, then the H1-B visa cannot be filled by someone from either country X or Y. There are 195 countries in the world. Removing the United States, country X and country Y, still leaves 192 other countries from which to find talent.

The h1-b should be merit based. However people tend to know other people from the same general background, so it might be hard to distinguish between nepotism and that. I do agree with the general sentiment, any system will be abused by bad actors, we need checks to make sure those don't happen.

> Lastly, we need to focus on assimilation. I have citizenship from three countries myself and I choose to live in the US because I value US culture (or at least what it was 10 to 15 years ago).

> If I wanted to live and work in the other countries in which I could legally work, I'd move to those countries. I don't want that. I want to live and work in the US because I value US culture. If you disproportionately bring in immigrants from particular countries, you turn the US into those other countries for better and for worse. This happens both at the national level and at the local level. I don't want it at either.

> In fact, when you disproportionately bring in people from country X into a specific locality, you make it harder for those folks to assimilate. This allows the formation of ethnic/cultural enclaves. This should not happen. You should have a mix of folks from multiple countries in a place so they actually co-mingle and assimilate to become Americans. Not hyphenated Americans, but bonafide Americans that adopt America as the home and the country in which they pride themselves.

> Completely disregarding assimilation is going to kill the Golden Goose that Elon Musk values. He can build SpaceX here in American but not in country X or country Y. However, if we culturally turn the US into country X or country Y or just kill the current culture we have now with an indiscriminate immigration policy, then he won't be able to keep building SpaceX in the US in the way he has in the past. He may be able to fix the regulatory hurdles to getting to Mars with DOGE, but he won't be able to fix the culture of the country if we don't prevent the negative aspects of the change in culture. America today is already a much lower trust culture than when I moved here 29 years ago and the continued loss of trust threatens being able to get anything done together as Americans. Coethnic nepotism within a firm, for example, absolutely hurts the ability for that firm to fulfill on its mission as different enclaves within the firm fight with one another for a bigger piece of the pie instead of working together to grow the size of the pie.

Well you did warn us that you were a nationalist. So we can't be too surprise. I strongly suspect that alot people disagree what most of whhat you are saying here. But more importantly we do not need to solve/agree on those cultural problem to address the issue with H1-B

> Basically, I want to Make American a High Trust Culture Again. This has nothing to do with race or ethnicity. It's culture and it requires assimilation and a common identity.

America was never a "high trust culture".

> Our motto is e pluribus unum, not e pluribus pluribus.

It's interesting that you seem to read the exact opposite of what "e pluribus unum". It's a celebration of differences... The belief that unity doesn't require uniformity or common identity. That hyphenated Americans can live together without having to drop the hyphen. In fact, that's another thing that very "american" and different from European. The concept that out of the many can emerge the one and that both can coexist...

I strongly suspect that you are mixing culture and values...

I worked at FAANG andhave burned out, and i know alot of friends who also have... with varying degree of severity.

I would say pretty frequent. I am not sure if the incidence of burn-out is higher for software engineer vs other profession. Anecdotally, both academia and entrepreneurship seems to also have a very high incidence of burn out.

My guess is that the mix of a highly competitive field, mixed with poorly defined evaluation metrics mixed with skewed(winner-take-most/all) reward system does create a lot performance anxiety and psychological pressure.

I have never worked at a smaller company, but i am not sure it's any better for the majority of people. You just get paid less for your troubles.

I don't think the size of the company truly matters. I think it's a proxy for one's position in the importance hierarchy within the companies. The higher one is, the higher one can command/shape its experience to include things like autonomic, interesting work, respect etc... etc... And those factor influence more the burn out situation

That's fair. I guess i was hoping that the customer experience would improve naturally as in most other sectors.

> it overwhelmingly benefitting non-URM women

This is sadly a reality that is difficult to talk about.

I would even go further and say that we have a tendency to benefit the "least" minority of the minority. Hiring a black or Hispanic or women from MIT is from my perspectives not really what this work should be about. Those outliers already have enough opportunity, but tend to be the one benefiting from most efforts. I would love to see deeper investment like 3 or 4 year before college in more at risk communities.

> This is a disingeuous point of comparison, because this is a behavior that can easily be corrected.

As someone commented bellow, that's incorrect. Modern sleep science seems to indicate that people have different circadian rhythm, which correlate with different energy and alertness level at different time of the days. Sure it's easy to set an alarm at 8 AM, but it's not easy to be at 100 % for some people at that time. I think there is even a movement to make school start later to combat those effects.

> How is it in any way fair for me to be disadvantaged in the hiring process for something I cannot control?

I can't pretend to understand your experience on DIE but at the risk of repeating myself... this is not what DIE is about... you don't get browny point because your are a minority or get point taken away because you not a minority. It's about providing the best condition for EVERYONE to express their best potential and then select the best one.

> This sounds like a question asked in bad faith. Rather than analyzing hiring outcomes by background, does it not make a lot more sense to analyze hiring decisions based on interview performance, totally independent of race/language/gender/etc.

I do not follow your reasoning here. You mentioned that you witnessed "ONE" case where a candidate was accepted despite having "HALF" of the reviewers no hire decision.

Where i work, those case go to deliberation and usually we would have the candidate come back for a second round of interview, or even depending on the seniority level send him to specialist reviewer. Generally, those case are a result of miss-calibration of the interview loop : like for example having an experience network/kernel specialist ending up in a generalist loop designed for entry level.

I do not know how things work in your company : You are making the case that one experience is an example of DEI gone bad... My point is that if you want to make that point, a statistical analysis of similar case is the only way to know for sure. Just saying that someone with so so performance on half reviewer got in is simply not enough...

Again... more data of 1... At my company DEI was very VERY much targeted by the layoff...

> By this process we should just drop hiring bars altogether.

I don't think the parent comment is negating the need to hiring bars. IMO two important points :

1 - DEI and hiring bars are not opposed to one another. Actually well designed DEI program are meant to make sure the hiring bar are free of un neccesasary blockers.

2 - I think that mostly what the parent comment was trying to say, "hiring bars" is a nebulous term thrown around. Every team "saying/thinking" they have ha hiring bar doesn't mean that there actually have one. Just rejecting 99% percent of the candidate doesn't imply a good hiring bar... since you might selecting the bottom 1%...

Ok...

Genuinely, if you have a point to make i am happy to hear it and discuss it.

> Its whole premise is alleviating racism in the workplace

No, as a non american living in the US i find american obsession with race fascinating.

DEI is about every characteristic on which human can differ and how those difference play a role in the work place. Race is of course a factor , but so are neuro divergence, language, culture, gender and sexuality. Hell even things like "Don't schedule a meeting before 9 AM" is a form of inclusion for the non morning people.

> yet its practical effect is giving certain races a favorable edge in the hiring process, independent of merit.

Then that's a badly designed program. However the other side of the equation, if there some aspect of the workplace ( such as say every important meeting are at 8 AM) are needlessly preventing certain people of expressing their talent... we should also look into it.

> Most recently when he hired an engineer from one of these "favorable races" even when half of the interview panel recommended a no-hire.

Yeah sounds like a problem. Maybe look into the statistics to see if usually those type of candidate would have been rejected.

> Having actually worked at big tech companies with DEI initiatives, there have been many instances when we have had to lower the hiring bar to meet diversity requirements.

Since we are throwing random samples of 1 on the internet, having been involved into some of those initiative at a large big tech company : Not lowering the bar was pretty much always top of mind, and we always made sure to be fair to ALL candidate.

Most of the initiative where around reaching a larger pool of candidate (for example reaching out to more school than we use too) and also addressing what looked to us like information deficiencies : Someone in an IVY league school for example just by osmosis will absorb a lot of the what/why/how companies look for in an employee and therefore can better show the required characteristics.

Every generation of engineer always feels like the engineer after them are somewhat the consequence of lowering the bar... We used to think this when we started recruiting outside of ivy league, then we started lowering the importance of formal education at all ettc... etc...

You would be amazed at the difference good interview preps makes to someone who was never exposed to it.

> What it really fosters in a company is resentment, both due to hiring bar changes and also as the actual DEI job function is mostly useless but gets paid quite a bit

From experience, those type of feeling are usually a consequence of lack of information and exposure of what actually goes on in the meetings. You mentioned you worked at the companies with those initiative, but i am not sure how many time you have actually been involved in the design of those programs.

Tech jobs in large tech companies is very competitive job. Everything is always framed as a competitive advantage and can sometime wrap one's perceptions. Companies spend a bunch of moneys on all kind of weird stuff.

And finally let me be clear, i am a software engineer myself. I do believe that pretty much anything HR does that's not purely the day to day of employee is a grift. Hell the bigger the companies, the more grift around : from management "training" that somewhat requires fancy restaurant. Team building exercise that somewhat require a bunch of very introverted engineer to go to a concert non of them are interested in etc... etc...

DEI is not different, yes grifter gonna grift and some people are just in it for themselve.

So can DEI be better/ more efficient : yes, is there a lot of virtue signaling and fakeness around yes, are we somewhat lowering the bar because we like having diverse people around NO, and for having witness the difference that those program can be in the lives of young and new people in the industry... i think they worth keeping around even if a better more pragmatic form.

I am gonna venture to guess that you never really either interacted with people from those populations.

> I suggest empowering women who don’t want children to not have them.

Let's first get this out of the way. The men don't want children at equal rate. No need for grand plan about empowering women (what ever that means beside just increasing everyone, both men and women economical outlooks) : just make contraceptive and sexual education available.

> If we look at the developed world, it is clear the total fertility rate will settle far below replacement rate (2.1) and child labor will dry up when women are educated and have robust access to family planning.

Correlation and causation etc...etc... I might introduce you to orthodox jews, some Mormons and Muslim communities which don't really follow those models.

> By all means, open your wallet to pay these kids a living wage.

ahah yes, personal solution to systemic problems... Following this logic, we should all be silent about everything.

> Perpetual labor shortages are a better outcome than surplus labor and lives of suffering, most especially children suffering.

I don't buy the premise and this sounds like a false dichotomy to me. Just treat people decently and don't participate in system which involve children doing back breaking jobs.

> Hope is not a strategy.

And whatever you are proposing is ? The idea that it's easier to somehow curb the population growth a whole group of nations instead of just having proper international laws to regulate child labour seems both crazy and reversed.

Polution control won't solve child labor, instead child labour, women right and polution growth will be solve by better economical outlooks. And that start by having people actually make living wages...

In the final anlysis the problem is not that deep. To paraphrase Gates, those conditions continue because the market wants it, and the public opinions doesnt particularly care. You are wellcome not to care, but to invent poorly constructed argument to make you sleep better at night.

West African here too. This is too simplistic, and a problem can have multiple guilty parties. There is enough blame to go around.

> we, not they, commit these boys and girls to these activities, of our own volition.

We can judge people's choices without taking in consideration the context and the options that they have. The alternative to not sending those young people to work is them starving, or not going to school.

> if child labor is bad, we don’t need mars and the rest of the world to tell us so. we should be civilized enough to get ourselves out of the ongoing era of barbarism and brutishness that has plagued the continent. fuck!

Child labor is the best solution within a see of worst solutions to a complex problem. Having talked and knowing people in similar conditions, every parent naturally wants they kids to have an easy and better life. That's not being civilized it's just being human. Saddly those parent can not afford the luxury of giving that to their parent.

> it’s a fucked up society that looks to hold an external party responsible for ills within itself.

The economical situation in African countries is complex and multivariate. And yes the governments are usually corrupt and ineffective. But the failed policies of international bodies such as the IMF or world banks, the complicity of european banks in money laundering. The meddling of international companies that are happy to support which ever dictatorship du-jour suit their needs best are definitely not helping.

> it’s not the business of mars (m&m makers) to ensure that no children are exploited during the production of the cocoa beans

They made it their business by participating in it.

> americans shouldn’t eat their chocolate with some trepidation that they might be eating the body and blood of a 5-yo.

No... It's a personal choice. If some people can become vegan out of compassion of animals, we should be able to avoid chocolate out of compassion our fellow human beings even if they happen to not be from the same country.

So your solution to not treating children baddly is to not have children? Seems a bit strange instead of just ... you know pay people a descent wage so they don't have to put they children in arms way