I hire for such companies and the quality of US workers vs foreign workers who move here on visas is much different. To be fair, foreign workers who move here on visas tend to be the rich and highly educated of their own country and US workers are more distributed across SES. They also have more education on paper bc they usually need a masters or more to be eligible to work here
The compensation of software tech (especially Silicon Valley) has also gotten much higher over the past number of years in the US compared to disciplines requiring the same level of education/experience both is the US and even Western Europe. I expect this will equalize with outsized tech salaries becoming a thing of the past except for a few individuals with proven track records.
I mean, the same can be said for consulting salaries, HFT salaries, hedge fund salaries, etc., which similar to software engineering only require a bachelor's and have a similarly grueling interview process.
Why would this equalize? As long as software companies make huge profits and have growth capability which the top ones clearly do, what change would make this happen?
Some software companies are making huge profits today. Many software jobs are at companies making returns comparable to other engineering job profits. There's also a supply side. If the market is flooded with a lot of people in it mostly for the money, salaries will supposedly shrink.
we've seen that most of the people who are only in it for the money don't actually bring much value to the company. a lot of middling software engineers are actually a liability. unlike operational work, engineering needs to have a higher bar than just a beating heart and hands
Meta has done several rounds of such layoffs since the post COVID interest rate hikes and they do not have a larger employee presence abroad since then.
They also, unlike a lot of their cohorts in FAANG, don't have a significant engineering presence in India and it hasn't rapidly grown since COVID either.
Yeah the bill is due but many big corps still haven't got most of their eng to be 10x productive with AI but they're starting to run up 2-3x their salary in real (not subsidized) AI costs. So let's see what happens
A rock that sits on the ground and does nothing would have been a better President than Trump who campaigned on actively harming our economy with tariffs then did exactly what he said he'd do and look where we are now
I use to blame voters too, then I started organizing for a decade and now I rarely blame voters. I always blame the politicians and political parties instead.
When the democratic party was the party of workers (the new deal coalition), they had super majorities in both houses of Congress for multiple lifespans (1930s to 1990s for the House of Reps alone) but for the last 50 years the party has slowly become more corporate and corporate politicians campaign a certain way. A certain way that ignores the material needs of people, by ignoring these material needs they're left to campaign on culture issues. Culture issues are very finicky. For example, it's not hard to find people that like solar panels, believe in carbon taxes, want a green new deal, but also believe in abortion and are evangelical. Since both parties no longer cater to workers, they're left to chase after cultural issues.
Not going to write a whole blog post out but hopefully you know where I'm going with this: the only way to truly win back sustainable power is provide real systematic needs for every American. Needs like providing medicare for all, universal childcare, universal college/vocational training, public housing, and a public jobs programs. All these issues poll at well over >60+%, across party lines too; but they all require more taxes against corporations + elites.
Once you build a party for workers, you can do actual sustainable systematic change; but you lose this contract once you betray the workers.
Last time we did this we put a man on the moon, imagine what we could truly do with the public backing you with todays advances?
If you can't convince people to vote for you, you have to change your platform. People don't really care about neoliberalism so repackaging it as abundance just means every election is a coin flip; it also doesn't help that the democratic party leadership is just as unpopular as Trump because party members, myself included, see how weak and useless they are but somehow always have enough muster to provide corporate welfare or engage in imperialism.
> Needs like providing medicare for all, universal childcare, universal college/vocational training, public housing, and a public jobs programs
Do you remember how divisive the ACA was? Or how the Republicans have been threatening to gut it for over a decade now? They literally do not support ANY of the things that you mentioned.
You can both-sides this all day and night, but it does not reflect reality, where large swaths of unpopulated land get disproportionate representation in Congress.
People don't realize the alternative to importing skilled labor is to not have someone do that job here. The idea that so many US citizens are qualified and sitting on the sidelines while an H1B takes a higher paying job than they currently have is a fiction.
> The idea that so many US citizens are qualified and sitting on the sidelines while an H1B takes a higher paying job than they currently have is a fiction.
I have worked with a lot of H1B in general enterprise and it makes 0 sense to me why the vast majority were ever allowed in under the program. There absolutely have been exceptions to this, but in general it's been awful.
> The average H-1B household contributes $30,050 net annually — 2.6 times the $11,530 contribution of a typical U.S. household. At the state and local level, governments see a net average fiscal gain of $5,040 per H-1B household, with H-1B workers generating positive fiscal balances in 49 states. The fiscal benefits of the H-1B program are not exclusive to high-income states. The low-income state of Mississippi, for example, nets $4,600 per H-1B household — a figure that is higher than those of 21 other states.
> Despite its relatively constrained scale, the H-1B program has delivered economic returns far exceeding its original scope. Even under severe capacity limitations, estimates suggest the program generates $7.5–$31.8 billion in annual net benefits. Native workers experience wage gains rather than losses, while companies winning H-1B lotteries achieve higher job growth, productivity, and profit margins compared to similar firms denied visas.
The fact is H1B workers are often more educated and better skilled than US citizens. In tech we care less about things like masters degrees and phds but the fact is H1Bs are more likely to have those and more likely to be appropriately skilled for jobs than US citizens. In general they are also richer than the avg US citizen in their society (that's how they can afford to move here for an advanced degree despite the currency exchange working against them)
But so is cable television designed to be addictive. So are most restaurants and ice cream parlors and grocery stores designed to get you to spend more. Most loyalty programs are designed to be addictive to get you to come back, etc. etc.
I just worry we left no levers for the public to regulate these entities and this is the worst option of very few options. Who isn't liable under this kind of logic?
The personalization component takes this a step above. Making something very broadly appealing is one thing. Targeting what will keep you specifically from turning it off is a whole new level.
So if social media removed personalization from their algorithms and only applied them broadly across large demographic groups you'd be fine with them? (Genuine question I'm curious)
Maybe. It's hard to know what kind of world that would result in.
I could well see it being so much less effective as to not be a problem. Or maybe they'd be even more effective, and if we caught them explicitly knowing that they were harming children, it would still potentially be tortious.
This would be great, yeah. Disable infinite scrolling and page caching (so that you’re not infinitely scrolling horizontally) and video autoplay too. Also add opt-out time limits and breaks.
Imagine a feed that actually just ends when you run out of posts from people you follow instead trying to endlessly keep your attention by pushing stuff it thinks you might like
If I've read all of the posts from my friends I would prefer to not see anything else, but that doesn't maximize engagement for ad platforms so
The problem isn't X domain of business is more scummy than Y. They all are. That's kind of the problem. Tech is just egregious though in it's non-reliance on physical matter, meaning anything that can be digitally rendered is instantly a world scale fucking problem.
If it were one building in one state doing this shit, no one would care, and we'd just block or tell people don't go in the building. That doesn't work with digital products that started benign, then had the addictive qualities turned up to 11. That's malice, at scale. If every ice cream parlor, or link in the ice cream supply chain started adulterating ice cream with drugs, regulators would have dropped the hammer at the site of adulteration. Meta et Al have had no such presence forced upon them due to lack of regulation in some jurisdictions, or being left to self implement the regulation, thereby largely neutering the effort.
> If it were one building in one state doing this shit, no one would care, and we'd just block or tell people don't go in the building.
Most retail environments do design their storefronts, logos, placement of products, even foods have higher than normal sugar, oil, and butter content, all in the service of keeping people coming back for more whether or not it is healthy for them.
How do we draw the line? Without regulations in place how is it fair to say companies are negligent in allowing people to become addicted to their products?
>How do we draw the line? Without regulations in place how is it fair to say companies are negligent in allowing people to become addicted to their products?
How about, "If it involves exploiting aspects of human psychology that have to be taught to be mitigated it's not allowed?". There. No more marketing. For anyone. As it should have been. My heart to the artists and creatives that'll have to find employment somehow els, because it's clear that we can't both allow for creative, artistic campaigns without big industry going and sinking a psych ward worth of researchers on making themselves indispensable.
Also, I don't find questions of fairness to come into play on the topic of "getting people addicted". If you set out to do that, that's not something we should condone. Also, if you've ever cooked, you damn well know the "oil, butter, and sugar" is not what keeps people coming back to those foods. It's that they're cheap and low cognitive load to generally make. So no, I won't even entertain the question you're asking by putting food manufacturers on the same level as bloody social media. Every time I've seen A/B or marketing tests/focus groups done by the food industry, they at least have a proper psych experimentation setup. Bloody Meta made a regular habit of A/B testing without even getting consent from the parties involved. As far as other stores with marketing and all that jazz? To be quite honest, if you bother to get a psychology degree, and you are weaponizing it against the public, I really think that deserves a life reconsideration. So refer to my first paragraph. You will find no sympathy from me for usage of psychological manipulation tactics against the unawares.
> How about, "If it involves exploiting aspects of human psychology that have to be taught to be mitigated it's not allowed?". There. No more marketing. For anyone. As it should have been.
An economy collapsing idea such as this is a non starter and you know it.
This isn't about regulation. Regulation would be welcomed because you can follow it and avoid liability.
We are now saying Meta, YouTube, Snap, and nearly every major media app (maybe Netflix and HBO next!) are liable retroactively for the past when people got addicted to the content on the apps despite that the companies did not violate any regulations at the time
Ice cream isn't engineered to be addictive. Ice cream is, for most people, actually enjoyable and costs money. If ice cream were free but you only got a small amount on random visits to the ice cream parlor then it would be engineered to be addictive.
I don't think that is really true though. People aren't becoming addicted to grocery stores, ice cream parlours and restaurants, or even cable television to nearly (any?) degree. None of those are engineered to addict you in nearly the same degree or magnitude.
I haven't seen anybody making any claims about social media usage leading to clinically meaningful addiction. So why are you asking for evidence of that?
Also fwiw I'm not in favour of regulating social media, but I am in favour of bringing lawsuits to companies who engage in societally harmful behaviour, and punishing them financially.
No. It's been established that social media use can produce addiction-like behaviors, that it uses mechanisms similar to gambling and substance addiction, and that a subset of people experience significant impairment as a result of social media consumption. It's still debated if it should be classified as a form of Substance Use Disorder, which is what the term "clinically meaningful" refers to, but the debate is more a matter of classification and semantics, not if the issue exists at all. And not what people are referring to in the context of this case and discussion.
If you're interested in the topic further, you could consider reading 'Toward the classification of social media use disorder: Clinical characterization and proposed diagnostic criteria', which should shine some more light on what people are referring to as "addiction" in this circumstance :)
If you're interested in the neuroscience, consider reading "Neurobiological risk factors for problematic social media use as a specific form of Internet addiction: A narrative review".
Believe it or not, you might find the answer to that question inside the paper I shared with you called "Toward the classification of social media use disorder: Clinical characterization and proposed diagnostic criteria".
I’m not asking about the criteria for establishing new disorders. I’m sure there are many.
I’m asking why all this fuss about the social media companies and not the video or causal game companies?
Nobody’s ever written a paper about Candy Crush addiction?
Everyone seems very excited to throw Meta and others in the bucket with Big Tobacco, and I don’t see how in the world that makes sense without much stronger clinical evidence on the harms of social media to non-mentally ill people.
> I’m asking why all this fuss about the social media companies and not the video or causal game companies?
Because of the scale of the observed harm.
There is plenty of documented evidence of the harms of social media to otherwise non-mentally ill people, particularly with vulnerable demographics like adolescents and teenagers. At this point you're just playing dumb because you most likely work for big tech and are running interference. They aren't gonna give you a raise for it man, cut it out.
Probably not looking in the right places then. The over 50s are a prime candidate (also for Facebook addiction, but largely reposting nonsense from cable news).
It needs enough revenue to fund its operations. And most people won't pay for such a website, so if you want one place where most people you know are, then...
Come on, don't hand wave over the obvious. Think about how much it would actually cost to run a social media website that competes with the big social media on the core product of sharing and communicating with friends. It would be extremely realistic to build something that's both free and sustainable with just regular ads, as was done decades before.
(EDIT: to clarify, I don't mean to build an alternative monopoly, I mean to build alternatives that are big enough to survive as a business, and big enough to be useful; A few million users as opposed to the few billions Facebook and Youtube (allegedly) have)
The reason it's hard to imagine such a thing today is because the tech giants have illegally suppressed competition for so long. If Google or Meta were ordered to break up, and Facebook/Youtube forced to try and survive as standalone businesses, all the weaknesses in their products would manifest as actual market consequences, creating opportunity for competitors to win market share. Anybody with basic coding skills or money to invest would be tripping over themselves to build competing products which actually focus on the things people want or need, because consumers will be able to choose the ones they like.
> Think about how much it would actually cost to run a social media website that competes with the big social media on the core product of sharing and communicating with friends.
It would cost tons man. You don't understand the scale these apps operate on at all. Meta has their own data center footprint that rivals AWS or any other cloud company and they had that before AI, and it's not just all to run ads on. On demand photo and video streaming and storage for free for all of humanity is incredibly expensive.
Social media with only millions of users is basically worthless because it won't capture enough of an average person's circle to be useful to them
> On demand photo and video streaming and storage for free for all of humanity is incredibly expensive.
Maybe you missed my edit? I specifically said not a clone of the monopolies, but a competitor big enough to be a sustainable business. The economics of a monopolist's empire are irrelevant.
> Social media with only millions of users is basically worthless because it won't capture enough of an average person's circle to be useful to them
There's so much wrong with this statement. First of all, I will never meet anywhere near a million people in my lifetime. A regular human being's real social connections won't be anywhere near that big.
But even if it is (or users want to discover/follow random people), it doesn't take a computer science genius to discover how to interoperate between social networking apps. Meta and Google would never do this, but that's because they're anti-competitive monopolists; if you're a startup trying to gain marketshare and win on your product's quality, interop with other networks is a no brainer. We probably don't even need regulation to require interop, as the market will see it as a useful thing to develop on its own.
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