politics

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.

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.

Well he saw that the only people willing to work at Twitter were extremely desperate to stay in the country

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....

And who are really indentured servitude type slaves

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...

The broligarchs have always loved the H-1B fraud.

christ it should be a rule to never post links to sites that require accounts or logins when sharing information about a discussion without also providing screenshots or a non-account mirror.

I'll break the flow of shitting on Elon (a hobby of mine, but it gets old) and say yes, we have a large number of engineers. Yes, a lot of them suck real hard. Good ones are often promoted to the level of their incompetence, others are just well-polished incompetents who know how to talk the talk. So...yes, there is a shortage. However adding more to the pool won't fix the bad hiring and promotion practices in the industry.

Also, doesn't really matter if there's a bunch in the Midwest if you can't convince any of your existing staff to uproot to some racist pro-trump place with extreme temperatures (assuming you want some level of in person interaction). Texas is only palatable because the place they're moving is Austin which is....not quite as racist. And tech bros have never had a reputation for being pro women which of course Texas is not.

A shortage of engineers willing to work for Musk-led companies, maybe. Tesla is well-known in tech circles to have awful work culture. You can only survive with high turnover like that for so long before most American engineers know that there are much greener pastures.

Yes there is a shortage, a shortage of workers who are unable to say no without being threatened with deportation and compensated with far lower non-competitive wages.

The industry is flooded with American workers though