[screye]

At the end of the day, a union is merely one of the ropes that workers can tug at to maintain leverage.

Doctors don't use unions. They instead artificially limit supply by erecting massive barriers to enter their workforce. This keeps them in demand. Software contrasts this with an open-door policy. On top of that, all white-collar labor jobs barring software involve serious licensing requirements as further gatekeeping.

Lawyers maintain leverage by making sure the it's Lawyers all the way up. No MBAs, people-persons or bean-counters controlling their profession. This means that the workers control important intangibles like customer relationships & hidden information ...both of which make you irreplaceable. Software instead pushes technical people from the stable-and-monetarily-rewarding positions by making the management-track entirely distinct from the working professional (IC). At the same time we obsess over building tools and systems that make everyone replaceable and automate ourselves away.

Immigration is another form of leverage. Tech being majority immigrants, means that they lose all leverage in what they can ask for when the ultimate guillotine is held over their heads. Do tech workers vote as a block on matters of immigration to improve their leverage ? No.

Work culture & pressure to conform can also be a type of leverage. If someone likes being well groomed, then professions that expect you to spend those 30 minutes getting perfectly ready are not cumbersome, it is leisure. Afterwork drinking ensures a good social life, but also ensures that everyone leaves work together at 5. It excludes, yes. But if you fit into that clique, then the conforming is effortless and the leverage comes for free. Consulting & finance are some examples of such businesses.

Tech isn't the only broken business. Restaurants & game design are broken for similar reasons.

Unions have their place, but a nation-wide tech worker union is a logistical impossibility. All too often, other levers are over-looked. Tech has made its bed : "learn to code. be a college drop out. get PMs to do the boring work and let them be promoted faster. I will let a glorified secretary be my manager. we will never put my community's 'legal' immigration priorities over those of the greater social issues I 'facilitating illegal immigration' my tribe asks me to commit to....and so on. No we have to lie in it.

[siva7]

> Doctors don't use unions. They instead artificially limit supply by erecting massive barriers to enter their workforce.

That's not true. Not sure about US but in many european countries doctors are organised in strong unions. There is otherwise no artificial supply limit initiated by doctors or hospitals.

[aauchter]

In the US, while the AMA is technically a trade group and lobbying organization, it's goals/methods are similar to those of a union. It's often referred to as the Doctor's Union.

[slt2021]

One can argue that on the day when USA becomes actively hostile to immigration -> it will start losing tech dominance.

Continued immigration in the USA is vital to maintain business as usual, for one basic reason: It is too damn expensive for US Gov to give great education for everyone. Starting from daycare to college - if you sum up cost of raising a kid in private daycares/preK/schools/colleges it will be > $1M.

Account for probability 1/100 of a kid being gifted/talented in certain area like IT, and you are looking at spending $100M to get one gifted specialist. Just one!

It is much cheaper to cherry pick and import foreign talent and give them education at top tier places like Ivy leage/MIT/etc.

[screye]

To be clear, I am not against the H1B. I am on an H1B myself.

I am opposed to the vagueness around everything having to do with legal immigration. If you want to import the top talent of the world permanently, then make it easy for them to get a Green Card and regain leverage. Let them start startups, let them spend longer durations between jobs so they can figure out that one brilliant idea.

Lots of people exploit the H1b brute-forcing every single grey-area loophole to get here. Many aren't even well-educated. On the other hand, the MIT/Ivy League straight shooters follow the rules and find themselves locked out of any future in this country. Other 1st world nations have fewer immigrants, but the process is transparent, cleaner and has well defined boundaries.

Yes, import the top talent of the world. But the H1b does more to kneecap them than enable them.

[tekknik]

> raising a kid in private daycares/preK/schools/colleges

The gov doesn’t pay for private education, they provide infrastructure for a free, public education instead. Some cities give vouchers if parents choose public over private but it does not pay the entire tuition.

The actual cost to educate a kid using public infrastructure is average $15.5k/year/student, which brings the total cost per pupil to $186k. Given there’s about 50 million school age children in the US, that puts total cost at $775 billion a year, or a total of $9.3 trillion.

We can easily afford it.

[myko]

> will never put my community's 'legal' immigration priorities over those of the greater social issues I 'facilitating illegal immigration' my tribe asks me to commit to

I wasn't really sure what this is getting at. H1Bs?

[screye]

The H1b is the blunt all-purpose-tool of the era, but having more specific policy objectives is more productive.

The murkiness of the current H1b allows anxiety which companies can exploit.

A dual-intent, 5-50 yr green card wait-times, lottery system with underdefined qualification criteria has to be seen as a terribly drafted visa. Replacing with it clearer messaging and more predictable rules (predictable doesn't mean looser) would return a lot of leverage to tech workers. The weird rules of the H1B mean that every I know has violated some under-enforced parts of their H1B at some point. Every once in a while it gets enforced, and someone's life gets uprooted. The 2 month deportation timeline is joke, when it takes 3 months to catch up on leetcode.

The visa doesn't even have to be more permissible. Just a more sensible & clear.

[tekknik]

The lottery is a control on the influx of immigrants, which countries use to keep immigration controllable.

Reading over the rules (it’s not clear what you mean by “rules”) they all seem clear to me. What examples do you have of unclear or nonsensical rules?

[screye]

> keep immigration controllable

And a lottery is the best way to do it ? Points based systems, merit based systems or even seniority based systems make a lot more sense. How is complete and utter randomness (lottery) the best answer ?

> unclear or nonsensical rules

    You have to find a new job with 2 months or leave the country

Tech recruiters take 1 month to get back for screening, and the full loop can take a good 2 months start to finish. Add months of leetcode prep and weeks of negotiation, and it practically makes it impossible to get your own job back if you ever have to switch jobs.

    Spousal work visas can take 6 years from start date in ideal circumstances.

Even the best companies take 1 year to start applying for your perm. The application process to enter the waiting queue takes 3 years. After entering the queue (i140), you have to wait 1 year to apply for spousal work and 1 more year to get that approval. This whole time you cannot switch companies or cities or even move to another track eg: SWE -> Manager/PM/DS, because you will need to redo multiple steps in the process.

    Greencard queues are now 25-100 years long for certain countries.

Indians, Chinese and Mexicans are effectively banned from ever becoming American citizens legally. All while the US does zero diligence when it comes to asylum seekers and illegal immigration at the border. Remember, the goal is to keep immigration controllable !

    Going back to school in the US is technically illegal.

An H1b is a dual intent (immigration possible). The student visa (F1) is a non-immigrant visa. I know cases where students were denied F1 because they decided to go back for a PhD after being on an H1B.

    Can't have any secondary income.

Want to moonlight as a musician ? Nope. Want to sell an app? Nope. Want to start a startup ? Nope. Hilariously, people do all 3 through illegal means which the US Govt. enforces just randomly enough that the rule followers feel eternally suffocated, and those who choose to accept that breaking-rules is inevitable, live in constant moderate-fear of tomorrow being the day the US govt. will raid your house.

I'd go into all the irritating bits of the H1b if I had hours, but the H1b can effectively be summarized with this video - https://youtu.be/mKc32jQIY0w?t=88

[tekknik]

> And a lottery is the best way to do it ? Points based systems, merit based systems or even seniority based systems make a lot more sense. How is complete and utter randomness (lottery) the best answer ?

Because you’re building a system in which you have preference over others. While we need high tech workers, it’s unfair to only invite them first.

> You have to find a new job with 2 months or leave the country

You are here on a work visa. While I do think it should be a bit longer, rationally if you got a visa to work for a specific company then your visa should be invalidate at the end of that employment. The visa was granted because the company said they needed a particular skill set and they couldn’t find it in the US. This doesn’t mean once that job has ended that this skill set is still required in the US.

> Spousal work visas can take 6 years from start date in ideal circumstances.

This does sound odd, but is in line with how slow the US gov is in my experience. I remember for my wife's citizenship we were looking at around 6 years for them to simply process the paperwork and perform an interview.

> Greencard queues are now 25-100 years long for certain countries.

This one is very understandable. Given green card applications have been skyrocketing since the 2000s, and only ~1mil are granted per year. Then you have people like me who have priority, who as a citizen request their wives green cards (and ultimately citizenship), which takes another slot away.

Securing the US border is something I'd also like to see done, but that's a highly politicized discussion that's off topic here.

> Going back to school in the US is technically illegal.

Well as a student you are not providing much / any value to the US, at least not yet. I can see why they keep these separate, as on an F1 you are here using our schools and our educators, our research, and could potentially take that back home. Meaning we see no value. An H1B does not give you the permission to use any of that, and again is only because a company could not find the talent within the US. An H1B can be more viewed as the US exploiting you for gain, whereas an F1 can be more viewed as you exploiting the US for gain.

> Can't have any secondary income.

An H1B was granted, again, because that person had a skill that was not able to be found within the US. Many people think H1B visas are granted to anybody and everybody that's smart that wants to live here. If you're a webdev from another country, and we have webdevs sitting on the bench, you should not get an H1B visa and should have any existing one revoked. It is a US first policy.

[ahzhou]

> Doctors don't use unions. They instead artificially limit supply by erecting massive barriers to enter their workforce. This keeps them in demand. Software contrasts this with an open-door policy. On top of that, all white-collar labor jobs barring software involve serious licensing requirements as further gatekeeping. Some doctors do, however, collectively negotiate with hospital administration. The payment / profit sharing schemes can be very different depending on the hospital and what a particular group wanted.

You can get totally socialized profits at one place and totally performance-based at another.

[whiplash451]

The comparison with doctors is irrelevant because there is a fixed amount of conditions to fix (and hence a fixed demand for doctors) hence the capping, while there is no such thing for software engineers.

If there was a sudden influx of 5000 doctors, we’d end up with 5000 doctors seating idle.

I doubt the same would happen with 5000 engineers.

[myroon5]

There are large countries with more than twice as many doctors per capita as America:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

Hundreds of thousands more doctors could work in America without any sitting idle

[vineyardmike]

> If there was a sudden influx of 5000 doctors, we’d end up with 5000 doctors seating idle.

I think we'd actually see an uptick in the amount of americas getting treated for their conditions. And a decrease in the number of doctors that work over 60hrs a week. But maybe not, there are a lot of Americans that need help.