There’s currently a debate about whether mediocre nerds should be imported into the U.S. via H-1B or only supernerds, perhaps via the O-1 visa (both of these are “nonimmigrant” visas and yet everyone who gets one seems to end up as a permanent immigrant to the United States). The main argument supporting a massive annual influx of nerds is that Americans cannot and will not do nerd work, just as Americans cannot and will not do any hard work, which is why we need a border open to low-skill undocumented migrants.
Could the U.S. grow its own nerd supply based on native-born Americans? As it turns out, I have some experience in this area! About 25 years ago, I started “ArsDigita University”, a post-baccalaureate program in which people who had non-nerd degrees could take all of the core undergrad computer science classes in a TA-supervised cooperative open office-style environment. People just had to show up for 9-5 every day for a year and they’d come out knowing pretty much everything that a standard CS bachelor’s degree holder would know. Not a “coding camp”, in other words, but traditional CS knowledge. The big differences compared to a traditional university were (1) take one course at a time, and (2) do all of the work together in one room so that it would be easy to get help from another student or a TA.
Did it work? We ran it for just one year, but as far as I know everyone who completed the program got the kind of job that someone graduating with a CS bachelor’s would get.
As loyal readers may be aware, I’ve long been a critic of the traditional four-year college/university. Simply getting rid of summer and winter breaks would reduce the time required to get a degree and begin a career to 2.5 years. 18-20-year-olds are blessed with tremendous health and energy and shouldn’t need to take nearly half the year off. Here are some examples of my previous criticisms:
- “Universities and Economic Growth” (2009), includes a “Stop grading your own students” section
- “What’s wrong with the standard undergraduate computer science curriculum” (2004, but the curriculum hasn’t changed too much since then except for the addition of some machine learning!)
- “Teaching Software Engineering” (2001), on the magic of project-based learning when the goal is to teach people how to handle engineering projects
If we’re going to cut back on H-1Bs, though, we might need to get a little more radical. Following the lead of the Germans/Swiss, we should try to set things up so that a high-school graduate is ready to begin work in the tech mines as an apprentice nerdlet. We can have some demanding career-oriented classes for smart kids where the goal is not to get into college, but instead to get a job at age 18 and continue to develop skills that are obtained via certificate programs with independently administered exams. These would be like the current Microsoft and Cisco certification programs, but with a much broader array of options, e.g., for having learned physics, math, data science, machine learning, etc. to various levels (Coursera maybe already does this). These certifications could also help older workers who’ve maintained their skills. Instead of showing an employer a 35-year-old transcript as evidence that physics and engineering classes were taken, an applicant could show the employer 6-month-old certifications that physics and engineering are currently understood.
I’m not sure what the argument, from an employer’s point of view, for the traditional 4-year-old college experience is. For the lucky kids who get to attend a top-100 school, it’s obviously great fun to hang out with friends, attend football games, have sex with a lot of different partners, and occasionally study. But how do these experiences make a person a more effective worker? I think the answer is “generally, they don’t”. One of my former neighbors in Maskachusetts spent about $1 million on private school and college for a child who is now working as a receptionist for an HVAC company in a city that is notable for its rich concentration of marijuana and meth stores. Plainly this is something that the girl could have done just as easily on graduation from high school, consistent with the book Academically Adrift:
At the heart of the book is an analysis of data from the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), which requires students to synthesize data from various sources and write up a report with a recommendation. It turns out that attending college is a very inefficient way to improve one’s performance at this kind of task. After three semesters, the average college student’s score improved by 0.18 standard deviation or seven percentile points (e.g., the sophomore if sent back into the freshman pool would have risen from the 50th to the 57th percentile). After four years, the seniors had a 0.5 standard deviation improvement over the freshman, compared to 1 standard deviation in the 1980s.
(See also Higher Education?)
Readers: Do you think employers could be talked down from H-1B and convinced to hire American 18-year-olds as apprentices who’d spend their evenings taking in-person or online classes in advanced nerdism?
Separately, I’d love to know how COBOL-coding nerds and beautiful fashion models got lumped together:
“The H-1B program applies to employers seeking to hire nonimmigrant aliens as workers in specialty occupations or as fashion models of distinguished merit and ability“
There hasn’t been a shortage of workers since the 90’s. The 90’s were a different breed, possibly the last easy money. A lion can get into some small startups, but forget about FANG. The reality of hiring in top tier companies is a massively difficult job screening process requiring years of leet code preparation. There’s no way Elon has any trouble finding workers or even cares about politics. He says whatever wins the most engagement.
There is a continuous worldwide shortage of competent people.
Visa programs at least put those workers on US soil, where they are taxed and generate downstream employment.
Being a better place to live also remains a US competitive advantage.
As one example, Chinese AI labs struggle to recruit, despite China producing ~80% of all authors on ML papers at top conferences.
They have opened offices overseas rather than leaning on visas, as most researchers do not want to live in China.
The whole H1B debate boils down to whether to import Indians or not because India is the only country that has a huge population with a decent percentage of > 115 IQ people while at the same time being a dump that motivates people to put up with horrendous working conditions abroad.
China to her credit has created jobs aplenty for young graduates. Countries like Armenia or Georgia might have bright youngsters but their numbers are too small.
I’d disagree with the percentage of > 115 IQ being “decent,” but they make it up with numbers and, frequently, faked test results.
But regarding your main point about the choice: if you DO choose Indian, that team / department / company will EXCLUSIVELY hire Indians from a particular Indian region and ethnicity going forward, under, as you state, horrendous working conditions. So choose wisely.
While your ideas on education have great merit, “STEM” majors have become increasingly popular in recent decades: the US produces enough STEM graduates to fill industry needs, and most US universities are far more rigorous and highly ranked than almost anything in India.
Community colleges also offer associates’ degrees in IT and/or software, which can produce capable graduates.
The main result of ending or dramatically reducing H-1B would be more US citizens with steady, taxpaying employment.
An initial substitute for the preferred feedstock of H-1B Indians would be the many thousands of laid-off tech workers from the past several years.
Another potential substitute would be underemployed graduates of the past several years. When I purchased a computer at MicroCenter about a year ago, the checkout clerk informed me that he had recently obtained a Computer Science degree from Ohio State and was unable to find professional employment.
This corroborates former blue-check and now suspended user “DRG”‘s response to Elon Musk:
https://x.com/HellenicVibes/status/1872047251675382092
“My son graduated with honors with electrical and computer engineering degrees in 2023. He can not get an interview, let alone a job. Any white male he knew in college can’t get jobs either. Many are currently working in data center jobs that don’t require their education.”
“… a city that is notable for its rich concentration of marijuana and meth stores.”
Fall River? New Bedford? Bridgeport!
Do the billboards on the highway into a city tell what industry runs the economy? If so, my random survey…
Portland OR — weed.
Philadelphia — torts.
The primary reason for the H-1B visas is because tech companies need cheap educated cogs, who will not jump to another machine that offers a higher salary for the cog. This is valid for any company that is more than 50 employees, when it is necessary to switch to a process driven model because of complexity. Only the leadership and board are important, everybody below are cogs (STEM, accounting, cleaning and etc) and are considered expendable and replaceable. Employers should definitely be able to be convinced that training local STEM cogs is easier and more cost effective than hiring H-1B cogs. It would allow the employers to get the cogs at a low labor cost and prevent the cog from leaving unless they bought out the cost of their training. Companies could also offer courses in how to obey and not be a loose cog in the machine. Housing for the cogs would be provided in soviet style panel buildings. It would be also much easier for the STEM cogs, because they would not require a large student loans and anybody that is able and willing to learn the STEM material would be accepted. Critical thinking is not really required except for a small number of engineers and leaders at the top to manage all the cogs below them. A good cog with AI assistance should be able to handle all the requirements of any company in the US. For the engineers managing all the cogs, traditional four year degrees and graduate school would be offered at a few select technical Universities and only for the students that demonstrate greater than 130 IQ and have the finances to pay for the full cost of the education, no government loans or funding would be available. This would be an excellent way to lower the total cost of post secondary education in the US, 90% of post secondary schools in the US are 4 year baby sitting institutions requiring government funding that could be saved. The top 10% would be all private schools, with no government funding provided, reserved for the top students who have the intelligence and financial means. Online STEM courses available at MIT opencoursewear and Stanford online and others are better than most other courses taught in person, these could be adopted by companies at very little cost for training. STEM education would be at zero cost to the student cog.
The only visa’s required would be O-1, to handle the exceptional cases. STEM graduates need to realize that they are just blue collar cogs that are good at math, they are not equivalent to lawyers, doctors or finance.
This proposal should be forwarded asap to Elon Musk at DOGE
Won’t work sir .
The American business would probably increase outsourcing before it could figure out how to get low wage American “native” cog .
For the price of 1 cog , you could hire 4 in India .
My controversial opinion is that in next 10 years immigration to US from these cogs would reduce …so please just wait it out ..
Also some of the comments above are so subtly racist 🙁
PS: no I don’t live in America and have not taken your jobs .
@disevad
Actions of Western corporations will have only a limited effect in blunting two key factors driving Indian migration:
1) The Indian’s all-consuming desire to escape India
2) The massive boost that an Indian male receives on the arranged marriage market for having a possiblity of migration to the West, which results in a massive dowry to ensure that the wife’s family will have a foothold in the West, particularly the US.
@Faucian Bargain
>Actions of Western corporations will have only a limited effect in blunting two key factors >driving Indian migration:
>1) The Indian’s all-consuming desire to escape India
I disagree vehemently. Western corporations are all that are driving this h1b shenanigans for various reasons (they get cheap subservient labor pool with decently high IQ & good cultural values to not create a ruckus in the american society…)
Separately, Look at migrations from korea/japan,china , it was quite significant even when their economies boomed. took it like 10 years or so for the emigration to cool down. The same thing will happen with India in the next 10/15 years (I am optimistic…).
>2) The massive boost that an Indian male receives on the arranged marriage market for having >a possiblity of migration to the West, which results in a massive dowry to ensure that the >wife’s family will have a foothold in the West, particularly the US.
completely irrelevant.
Actually, on the 2nd though a combination of what Pavel said & Philg proposes might work. But it requires reforms for the American business – would they consider it worth pursuing?
On a personal note, I hope there is a time during my lifetime when Americans line up for work in India 😉
@disevad
Which of my comments come across as subtly racist?
It was not my intention for any of my comments to be racist.
I am an immigrant to Canada, so I am taking away jobs from Canadians, not Americans.
The main issue could be that STEM students in North America are taught that they have the freedom to think and they will be able to use their great knowledge to make key project decisions. This will only happen in small companies or if they successfully move up the corporate ladder and eliminate their competition along the way. In big organizations/companies most STEM employees will work on very specific parts of a big project, for this they just need to learn to apply specialized knowledge to solve straight forward problems, creative thinking will be reserved for the very small percentage of employees leading the project. I do suspect that most of the H1-B employees are much better at solving the straight forward problems and not worrying about being creative vs US employees. The H1-Bs help keep the wages down, otherwise STEM employees would demand higher salaries, it helps provide a surplus of STEM employees, the cultural fit of H1Bs to large organizations is also a big benefit. To the tech company leadership and the stock market this is extremely important to maximize profit. Any cog that has not progressed to a thinking position and is over 50 years old is useless and will be thrown away and replaced with a younger cog.
By moving the education of STEM employees to corporations from liberal universities, the required fundamentals can be taught much more efficiently and will also show the value of following the process of large organizations over creative thinking which is only reserved for the leaders of the organization.
Large organizations have to be process oriented, to design and build a complex machine like a car, spacecraft, aircraft or mobile phone, requires a few designers that make the big overall decisions, the rest of the employees are the cogs that enable the organization to produce the complex machine. If every employee (aka cog) started thinking creatively (aka loose cog), the organization / company would be a big mess and nothing would get produced.
On top of all of this, AI will reduce the number of the regular STEM employees required. An engineer that knows how to apply AI to solve the standard problems that come up over and over again in most projects will be more productive than an engineer without AI.
We are well on our way to the world described in the novel Metropolis.
Regarding disevad’s response:
1) Although most Western corporations have far more open positions in India than in the West, this has not changed:
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/12/08/even-by-the-standards-of-poor-countries-india-is-alarmingly-filthy
2) Notwithstanding his conclusory statement, Western citizens and leaders are guaranteed to fail unless they understand that Indians are operating on completely different customs and culture.
@pavel I was not referring to your comments specifically – actually, they were well thought out…
It would be interesting next decade or so, I am an optimist.
Do not discount American High Schools. Many teach programming classes which could culminate in Olympiad – style projects. Also, there are solid vocational school concentration in computer programming and computer security for high school students, where students can get scholarships to continue education for associate or bachelor degree. Vocational school concentration is 4 years of programming study in place of high school, with more practical curriculum then typical CS baccalaureate program. Unfortunately it comes with average math and humanities classes, but now some more flexible program allow pairing solid vocational school programming with advanced HS math / English classes, which is hard due to them not being co-located.
Do you think employers could be talked down from H-1B and convinced to hire American 18-year-olds as apprentices who’d spend their evenings taking in-person or online classes in advanced nerdism?
Aa pointed out by the Google heretic, free women don’t choose nerddom, so the answer is no.
@disevad: “they get cheap subservient labor pool with decently high IQ & good cultural values to not create a ruckus in the american society…”
But the Indian H-1B immigrant’s chain migration have, for decades, created a quiet ruckus by ripping off the US taxpayer by committing all kinds of income tax, payroll tax, Medicare, and worker compensation scams.