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.
Yeah, when you import your slaves you can pay them less and they’re more subservient because they don’t want to be deported. It also drives down the wages for US citizens that perform the same jobs. News flash, there are plenty of good software engineers in America. They just aren’t going to work 60 hours a week for 60k a year while the company they work for posts billions in profit each year.
If you need my skill and time to make a million dollars, I better be getting at least 15-20% of that profit. Employers can obviously afford to pay it if they can give a CEO that barely does shit 250 mil plus stock options
Musk replied. “OF COURSE my companies and I would prefer to hire Americans and we DO, as that is MUCH easier than going through the incredibly painful and slow work visa process. HOWEVER, there is a dire shortage of extremely talented and motivated engineers in America.”
I’Ve BuRnEd OuT aLl ThE WiLlInG nErDs hErE aNd I nEeD tO bUy SoMe FrOm OvEr ThErE1!1!
Right-Wing bootlickers continue to learn they aren’t in the in-crowd they desperately seek to join.
Super talented = extremely desperate foreigners who’ll work 90hr weeks for very low pay.
Just in case anyone needed a translation.
And who are really indentured servitude type slaves
I was “lucky” enough to be around during the dot-com meltdown and seeing H-1Bs still being used/abused, even as so many citizens were being cast away. This scam has been around for quite some time. The cap was 115K in 99 and 2000.
Perversely, when the bubble really started taking its toll, the cap was 195K from 2001-2003.
During much of this time period, you’d look around and see 200 people applying for one cruddy junior/intermediate type of software engineer position. Why the cap was not zeroed out in emergency legislation tells you all you need to know about anyone looking out for Americans who work for a living.
Companies claiming things are so dire that they just cannot find the local talent are so very full of it. If they were the least bit genuine, they’d be paying HIGHER wages to the people they do bring in on a visa and they’d be lobbying for permanent status, not this six year max thing.
Now if Elmo was talking about basically being a worldwide talent scout to bring people here with full citizenship status AND being paid top dollar, we’d be talking something different, but if he’s talking about more H-1Bs, it’s the same old shit as it ever was…
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.
The ones that know about it already love it very much.
He’s so fucking stupid. It’s exhausting.
Well, I’m not sure I’d call it stupid, exactly. He wants indentured servants, cheap. It’s about accruing more power and wealth to himself.
Now, our government should be set up to STOP unregulated capitalism like this, but at this point, it’s been captured by the capitalists, and they are basically there to give a huge assist to capitalists instead.
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Bit of both, Mysk didn’t even complete his college degree. Being born into money does not, by default, correlate to intelligence
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So you want TWO Trumps?!
Well, not in this case. In this case, Musk is absolutely right. Probably what he would actually be if he hadn’t gone full to the weird dark side.
What I’m reading is that he wants Chinese or Indian engineers because they are as qualified as the next guy, they’re already used to insane hours and no holidays AND he can just pay them their original wage, which is peanuts compared to what US engineers make. Also once he’s done with them he can just deport them. What’s not to like?!
The broligarchs have always loved the H-1B fraud.
The future of the US
Musk doesn’t want a championship sports team, he wants a cheap, desperate, obedient source of labour.
Ah yes, the American dream.
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.
All the way since the first company arrived here—the Virginia Company, that is. A handful of OG tech bros who found themselves a land of unrestricted resources and no boss around. They just needed some customers. And thus began immigration.
“That’s why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it! -George Carlin
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.
Even worse when the company exploits the caste system. Since most Indian migrants still believe in that shit.
I used to contract at MSFT back during the 360 3RR era, me and my boss were reworking the support phone tree process flow, because it was wholly inadequate and had many infinite loops that a caller and support agent would end up in…
But yeah, during that, I routinely saw Indian H1B contractors being viciously abused by their higher ups in the caste system who were full time employees.
I tried to call out some of this, and HR’s line was literally that it was not politically correct of me to criticize this, because well thats just normal in their culture.
Its fucking disgusting.
MSFT has an entire company culture of its own caste system of various kind of contractors who are basically all lied to by recruiters telling them if they work really hard they’ll become full time employees with much better pay and benefits… in reality, that almost never happens, because project managers are all full time, and will routinely sabotage their own projects if the alternative is to actually keep a team on long enough that they’d become full time.
As a recent example of what I mean by this:
Halo Infinite.
MSFT hired a whole team of temp contractors to overhaul the engine that Halo ran on, to massively upgrade it.
By the time significant Halo Infinite production began, basically all of these people who rewrote the engine now were on to some new contract, some other company.
So… nobody in the actual main game dev team can figure out how the overhauled engine (now called SlipSpace) works, they can’t ask any of its actual devs for help, they spend a few years trying to develop the game on it, game is buggy as fuck and difficult to work on… and eventually give up and start redoing everything on UE5.
This all happened because MSFT higher ups wanted to penny pinch the development of the foundation of their biggest IPs next game, by using contractors instead of higher paid FTs, and in the end, it cost them enormous amounts of time an money on something they ended up abandoning anyway.
(I mean, there’s much more to the story of why Halo Infinite’s development was fucked, such as totally rewriting the story of the game midway through development, but the dumpster fire with the engine development is almost entirely due to MSFTs temp vs FT caste system and short term cost avoidant, thus long term cost maximizing management culture.)
Holy shit, is this why California’s ban on the caste system failed? Because companies are leveraging it against H1Bs?
Surely it’s that the ones in the minority believing that promote each other and make everyone else’s life hell.
By ‘deported’, I guess we’re now talking about '
rounded up into mass concentration campsbeing administratively relocated to alternative living accommodations.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!
MALLC!!! - Make America Look Like China.
So real it hurts reading it.
Intimacy with a Python
I mean, it helps either way you read it
He’ll buy you a horse! He’ll fire you if you tell him it’s a garter snake.
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]
No middle managers is pretty attractive ngl
If the CEO is Musk, I’d take as many managers between him and me as I can.
Does it have to be a python? Does a colubrid count?
So now he’s gotta find a new way to pay engineers less.
Well, except scams like the H1B is a pretty old way of setting that up…
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.
This is usually what tech bro ‘innovation’ boils down to.
I know a guy who’s basically the Goku of computer networking. Listing his accomplishments would doxx him. It took him months to find an escape route out from where he was at.
“import” like it’s livestock. Strategically avoiding the word “migration”, too.
Human Commodities
I believe it was a CEO of British Airways that referred to passengers as “self-loading cargo”, so it’s not like it’s new that the haves see the have-nots as a resource to be managed.
Lol the airline industry has some pretty good terms, my personal favorite is “wet lease”.
Mine is See You Next Tuesday.
I know most people will write this off as him being an idiot, but I believe he’s doing this to distract from his involvement with the government. It’s all theater to distract us from what he and the politicians he’s heavily involved with are actually doing. Add in his involvement in the tech trade, and it’s actually really disturbing what he may be doing.
Ya’ll are not reading between the lines here.
“The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,”
The “AND super-motivated [sic]” is key here. By “super-motivated” he means working 80-100 hours for shit pay.
Yeah, both American citizens and H1Bs area getting tired of this shit.
On another vein, his government “positions” listing
“We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.” for “zero pay”.
Is code for, “I want corporate lackies for this job.” Corporations will pay it’s reps to “work” in these government positions and basically lobby. No one else will bother because normal people got mouths to feed.
It’s not really “between the lines” when he’s been straight up shouting exactly that for years. He’s been very vocal about it at least since he bought Twitter, “keeping only the most talented ones who really want to work” and it turned out that only the immigrants who can’t AFFORD to leave stayed for shit pay.
Another fun thing about H1B holders is that, in their home countries, there are often kickbacks and indenture schemes that mean that they’re spending the first year of their working life in the US paying back someone for “arranging” the work. So if they quit, they’re in debt to the mob, and if they don’t return, their families are at risk.
I’d love to see the entire program scrapped. It’s such bullshit, and always has been. If there is some real talent that is just somehow so rare it cannot be found here, then give people full citizenship after they’ve been scouted for and found. With absolutely ZERO strings attached to any company. If they are so very rare and such high caliber that Americans are somehow lacking, then why on Earth wouldn’t we want them to STAY here and thrive and contribute long-term to this country? Hell, they might even found a company or two…
Instead, we have them stay here six years max on the H-1B and paid less than Americans. WTF? I thought these people are so sought after and so rare, etc…we are going to send them away after six years?
Scrapping the whole system would force us to finally fix our education system and stop intentionally raising unskilled people who leave college with $100k of debt and are still unqualified for a job.
Almost all of the HB-1 sponsors in my workplace are making 100k+. That may be lower than the average pay for that position in some cases, but it’s definitely not starving anyone.
Thank you
He’s right though. One of the reasons the US is so technologically dominant is because of the brain drain. Of course there are also employers and employees who abuse and try to game the VISA system. That is also true.
I feel like people are talking over each other. The top 0.1% of talent goes to the US because the US has better growth opportunities and better prospects than any other place on earth. It’s not just about sourcing talent. It’s also about denying competitors that same talent.
The Muskrat wants cheap engineers that will work like China’s 9-9-6.
Well he saw that the only people willing to work at Twitter were extremely desperate to stay in the country
