Posted on 12/28/2024 6:39:57 PM PST by conservative98
There’s a raging debate on X right now about H1B visas and Vivek Ramaswamy is getting slammed for suggesting American culture is bad and thus can’t product high level talent that top tech companies want.
Let’s start back from the beginning:
THE HILL – Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, co-chairs of President-elect Trump’s new “Department of Government Efficiency,” are defending the tech industry’s reliance on foreign-born engineers as the incoming Trump administration prepares to crack down on immigration.
Musk and Ramaswamy both pointed to a lack of engineers stateside.
“The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” Musk wrote in a Wednesday post on his social platform X.
When another user suggested the Tesla and SpaceX CEO was denying opportunities to Americans, Musk argued that the poster’s understanding of the situation was “upside-down and backwards.”
“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,” the tech billionaire said. “HOWEVER, there is a dire shortage of extremely talented and motivated engineers in America.”
This is where Ramaswamy steps into it, blaming tv shows that promote ‘mediocrity’ on a culture that can’t product top talent:
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:
Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.
A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.
A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.
(Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).
More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”
Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.
Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.
“Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.
This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.
That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it.
This didn’t go over well with everyone…
Even Nikki Haley chimed in, saying there is nothing wrong with American culture…
The press secretary for DeSantis also suggested the problem isn’t American culture, but mass immigration and quoted Governor DeSantis:
Vivek isn’t wrong that we have a problem with American culture but it’s not what he suggests. It isn’t TV shows and movies that produce mediocrity. No, this has a lot to do with the breakdown of the family, with the inability or unwillingness of parents to push their children to excel academically instead of endlessly playing video games or sitting in front of a TV. Also many of our schools have big problems producing excellence as well. But I think it all starts with the breakdown of the family, ie. fatherless children and single mothers working multiple jobs to make ends meet while their children are at home doing whatever they want. And this is a product of the Godless left.
But that being said, I don’t know how much that really plays into this problem of top-level talent. It may have some effect, but I also agree with fact that mass immigration is a big culprit, in that it provides the cheap labor that companies want. This is a battle we’ve been fighting for decades, not just against the left, but against the Chamber of Commerce types in the Republican party for decades who want the left’s version of immigration so they can reap the benefits of cheap labor.
Look, I have never disagreed with merit-based immigration, especially when it comes to top level talent. We want the best and the brightest no matter where they are from as long as they are willing to assimilate. But we want it on our terms.
Let me quote the Great Mark Levin from over a decade ago:
"And what do we the people want? We want our border secured. And let me go even further. Let me make it absolutely clear to every foreigner outside this country.
This country belongs to us; it doesn’t belong to you. It doesn’t belong to the 7 billion other people all over the world.
You see the way it’s supposed to work is we decide who gets to come here. We decide the standards. We decide the requirements. We want to know who you are. We want to know what you’re going to – (ready for this one?) – contribute to this society, not take from this society.
You see because I want to make it very very clear to the left, to the media and even some ‘Repubicans’ and even some TV and radio hosts.
There’s nothing compassionate about the downfall of America! There’s nothing compassionate about the hollowing out of our society! There’s nothing compassionate about bankrupting our children and grandchildren, destroying our school system, destroying local law enforcement and hospitals, what’s been built up over 200 years.
It’s one thing to export our viewpoints, our economic ideas, our governing ideas. But it’s quite another to import the views, the culture and the destitution of the third world. Because that is national suicide. And any thinking person who is not playing politics, who’s not a demagogue, who’s not a propagandist, any thinking person regardless of party, ethnicity, or anything else knows I’m right!
This isn’t about voting as far as I’m concerned. This isn’t about pandering to this group or that group as far as I’m concerned. This is about preserving what’s left of this Republic."
It’s just that in my line of work, on-the-job experience is far more important than academic credentials over the long term. That’s why the perfect career scenario for a professional in my field five years out of college includes the following:
1. Six years of work experience (that means 1+ years in an internship or co-op program).
2. A master’s degree completed on a part-time basis (you can’t do it full time and get the work experience), or at least a partially completed M.S. with graduate courses directly related to our line of work.
3. Professional licensure (which requires an minimum of 3-4 years of applicable work experience).
I don’t hire people from top STEM programs and/or those with 4.0 GPAs and/or those with more academic credentials than I can count.
I also don’t hire H1B visa holders, either. :-)
It makes sense in engineering, often, to require on the job training, because
1) in theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, they’re not
2) there are all kinds of hands on issues and how-tos that never get covered in a classroom, and for which you need flexibility to think, not just do a lookup table or canned-software answer
3) “engineering” is extremely broad, and a mechanical engineer .ne. civil engineer .ne.
chem engineer, shading into materials science.
But, engineering isn’t the only field in which H1-Bs have been brought in.
Musk has asked for H1-Bs for engiineers for Tesla, but some of the other H1-B requests were for video game reviewers and English teachers.
AYFKM?
I have long said that IT and related fields are really a gray area that touches on electrical engineering technology and computer science. In some jurisdictions a “computer engineer” or “software engineer” isn’t even considered an engineer for professional licensing purposes.
Missed this response; your later query of my personal list now sounds reasonable, not trool-like.
Apologies for that specific retort.
No worries at all. You’re a good, veteran Freeper!! Cheers!
You are certainly entitled to think that I am the problem, but I have created thousands of high paying American jobs as a result of this crazy work ethic. I didn’t ask others to work that hard, I only drove myself that hard. As an example, General Electric was also trying to create one of the products I developed in a startup, spent literally billions on the effort, and they failed. I came as an immigrant, didn’t fail, and created 1500 jobs just on that one. As I said, I worked very hard, but I didn’t force or even ask others to so as well. I don’t see that as a problem unless you think people shouldn’t have the opportunity to have high paying jobs.
The problem is when people get worked past the the bone and the managers laugh about it and pocket the profits.
And then make up lies which are pushed as hard as the ‘racism” angle to cover up the mass rapes of underaged girls by Pakistanis in England.
Funny you should mention, for example, GE. Jack “Neutron” Welch said, “We didn’t give them lifetime employment, we gave them lifetime employability.”
Which was and is an utter bald faced lie: even as he negotiated for $2 million/year FOR LIFE after he retired — at least until his wife’s divorce lawyers got ahold of it (he gave her “lifetime marriageability” too, leaving her for, IIRC, the editor of Harvard Business Review, who had interviewed him, and who was, again IIRC, only 42.)
Or you have the running mate of the runner-up GOP Presidential nominee to Trump in 2016 Carly Fiorian, who said in public “no American has a right to a job.”
And Elon Musk is without human excuse. I excoriated Microsoft a number of years ago for hiring H1-Bs when they had $52 billion in cash which they literally had no idea how to deploy, so they paid it stockholders (executives) as a one-time divident. They could have invested it in T-bills or similar and used the risk-free interest to pay the American programmers.
But Elons is the richest human ever to have walked the face of the planet, and the H1-B databases shows he has hiring H1-Bs for quite pedestrian engineering jobs, in the roughly $85k - $95k salary range. Absolutely no business need in this world or the next, it can only be raw greed and entitlement.
The problem isn’t just that they’re lies; they are lies that are so baldfaced, that even a Democrat or a two-year old would blush from shame at the thought of them.
I am glad that you have had success through hard work; but others are driven to work, and not only are given none of the benefits, but are discarded like husks — the equivalent of the legendary robber baron factory owner looking at a workman dismembered by a piece of equipment and shouting at him, “Stop bleeding on my floor!”
Signing off before I keep myself up another two hours.
Have I ever told you about the time I got 20 minutes sleep on Easter Sunday?
All young boys, need to explore and experiment, not sit in class listen-learning.
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