We try to make business costs deductible because business means more employment, goods, and services in the US. That's only true if the economic activity IS in the US though. One patch on this problem is for only native born labor and associated costs to be deductible. No matter how it is structured on paper [including separate incorporation and billing back as a service] outsourced and insourced related expenses shouldn't be deductible. In fact, it wouldn't be a terrible idea to make all foreign services and goods exempt from tax exemption.

Ridiculously subjective. High skilled indian workers? Low skilled workers who replace high skilled americans is the norm not 'highly skilled workers.' In the raw they are average alongside other sources of starting and unproven labor but we didn't have shortages 20yrs ago and haven't at any point in the decades of replacing american workers with cheap insourced and outsourced labor since then. Worse Indians have infected management and even executive ranks and they are racist, intentionally hiring other Indians, claiming they are better at math [whether the positions actually require it or not] and calling Americans and those they see as low caste as lazy and lacking the same work ethic.

I can see his young account belongs to him. I'm thinking this isn't your first account.

Support engineer is a $65k-$70k/yr entry level gig. If you define 'good work' as $200-300k+ in the valley then maybe but for every one of those there are tens of thousands of six figure gigs in tech that normal people consider 'good work.'

"this is all fantasy, do you even work in tech?"

No offense kid but what are you, twenty? I was discussing and debating some of the most famous names in open source and tech on this very site before anyone with an eight digit UID was born.

Labor and costs associated with foreign workers whether insourced on visas or outsourced operations [and I mean all expenses related to outsourcing which disregards paper structuring like self-dealing trust law] shouldn't be deductible. I'm a fan of 0% taxation for a corporation that is sourcing and hiring entirely domestic workers because they are investing everything back into the US economy... same reason the shareholders don't pay themselves dividends.

"Even before AI, going to a boot camp might have gotten you a $30k salaried position at a shitty software mill somewhere in Bumblefuck, South Dakota. And only if you were lucky."

Nah, a bootcamp/cert would easily get you an entry level enterprise position paying $65-70k and many places trained those new hires anyway... assuming you left Bumblefuck, South Dakota. In fact, they almost certainly wouldn't hire someone without a degree in bumblefuck because they only need 3 guys whereas the enterprise can afford to hire 20 for a year and only end up keeping 5-10.

This did get more and more difficult as the market flooded with H1Bs and churn culture.

"Demonstrable experience beats paper, full stop."

This. And that is exactly what demonstrable means. The little tech quizes everyone does really don't tell you much. Everyone I've known who is really gifted in tech is on the spectrum/adhd and/or has social anxiety... not only will they be answering a different question than you meant to ask but whatever their performance certainly won't reflect the hyperfocus they'll have on a real work task with an open book. If they have varied experience in blue chip land or small shops [which always mean varied experience] you'd be crazy not to hire them regardless of interview. If they've had a big role but only one... make that a six month contract; if the old dog wakes up he'll be fantastic and handily crush agism.

More than 20years wearing various tech hats with a heavy emphasis on security, code, and *nix. I've had the same experience and not only does it go the wrong direction but it will helpfully "summarize" code and loop and give up on paths just to circle back around and repeat "fixes" which have already failed.

"The weak job market has everything to do with pandemic-era over-hiring and current economic uncertainty"

The uncertainty is a big effort to spin the inertia of rampant inflation and recession we were in as the consequence of policy just a few months old; it's purely political in hopes of recovering the midterms. Hate the current politics for other reasons or say it's yet more inertia and credit the last guy, but the trendlines are pretty solid in the US.

Still, if they don't do any reform of tech labor/immigration it'll probably stay rough going forward. Obviously we never really had a shortage of bodies and domestic has better SNR on talent. Laying off a 100k workers and importing 100k new ones each year for the last couple decades has definitely helped stagnate wages and made it harder to find that signal [because the layoffs always follow business logic instead of tech talent]. Stanford degrees... that used to guarantee jobs but only due to ignorance. That's almost as bad as the current obsession with skills in place of talent. Talent can acquire skills almost as quickly as new hires can adjust to a new workplace. Sorry, you'll hire 10 to find one talented worker and there is no getting around needing an experienced and proven talented worker to get work out of them all while finding the one.

No worries, most of the seniors have already been axed and either outsourced or replaced with H1Bs.

I'm not confused at all. 3 out of the top 5 states for homocides are the most gun restricted in the nation. Relaxing gun laws correlates directly with reductions in violent crime. As for the other two states they have very strong stand your ground laws and there are 1.5-3 million self-defense instances using firearms per year and those homocides are one of the best arguments for the right to bear arms

Fantastic. With 1.5 to 3 million gun defenses a year and that 'gun homocide' rate includes ATTACKERS who are killed by the victims.

Perhaps in your country when someone stronger comes along every woman, child, elderly person, or smaller man simply becomes a victim but here we proudly stack the attackers into that 'homocide' stat.

That and there are between 1.5 million and 3 million successful gun defenses per year in the US. Even the anti-gun lobby refusing to count incidents where the crime was prevented metric still has more incidents than gun associated homicides.

When a woman prevents a man from beating her to death by using a gun in self defense, that is counted as a gun homicide. The lower rate in disarmed nations is reduced by the women, children, elderly, weak, etc who are beaten, robbed, and murdered by any stronger man who comes along. I shutter thinking about how many female officers must be raped in the UK where even the police are unarmed.

I'll take the higher gun deaths and lower violent crime/homicide.

Last I checked people killed by guns are no more or less dead than those killed by other tools and overall homicide rates tend to go up when guns are banned.

In contrast gun related self defense estimates show even the worst accounts tallying more defense incidents than deaths with typical estimates between 1.5 million and 3 million self-defense instances per year.

Lets compare citizens killed by foreign invaders and mass murder of heavily armed civilian populations by the state vs mass murder/subjugation of populaces which have been disarmed. I think you'll find both virtually non-existent in states with heavily armed populations.

Already the models refuse to assist at professional levels on the basis that it would somehow be dangerous to enable novices to act with professional capacity. There is nothing magical about having the resources to train these models or to gain professional level skills in any given field that confers ethical or moral responsibility.

It's gun control all over again and the answer is NOT to withhold capability from people, it's to empower good actors to defend against the bad ones and distribute power widely to keep central authorities in check.

"once people realize the LLMs are not going to replace actual thinking persons, anywhere where the outcomes matter"

Come on, with that UID you are old enough to know better. Remember when people started calling distributed systems 'clusters', then calling internet connected clusters 'cloud', then because everyone was desperately trying to attach some sort of meaning to this buzzword is slowly started to mean internet connected clustered systems WITH AN API.

Remember how everyone who went through this evolution knew that these were still insecure, third party, leveraged, internet connected systems with mixed client data and were highly insecure on top of costing WAY more than any enterprise scale deployment and definitely more than whiteboxing prosumer gear yourself? Did the masses wake up and realize this or did they just lay off the more experienced people who kept pointing out what they were doing was a terrible idea and gloss over all the major disruptions and massive breach after breach?

What about when all the 'automation' and 'infrastructure as code' frameworks were being pushed and experienced admins pointed out that enterprises let software back for 5yrs or more so it doesn't disrupt the underlying business and avoid homegrown code and scripting as much as possible? Yeah, they laid off those more experienced people and now pretty much every fortune 500 is running shitty code written this morning and gets breached all over the place, has enterprise wide and network wide disruptions, etc... Hell some of the early adopters don't even remember what stable systems looked like so they aren't mad about it.

No Ox, 'people' aren't going to wake up and realize the tech is shit and doesn't really work for anything but datamining with a high degree of skepticism and human review of the results. They are going to deploy it anyway and the same people telling them it is a horrible idea are going to have to make it work somehow and build all the guardrails in the world around it while people try to make it more functional, then as soon as those people thread the needle and document it they'll be laid off and replaced by H1Bs.