1/ The Fairness of High-Skilled Immigrants Act, 2019, or #HR1044/#S386, which would've removed country caps on green cards in the US for Indian and Chinese nationals, particularly bringing the wait time for Indians from 150yrs to ~10...
2/ ... was blocked in the Senate by Sen. Dave Perdue after bipartisan support in the House. If you were Indian and moved to the US for an undergraduate degree in 2001, you'd be 36, have spent half your life in the country and not have a green card.
3/ You might be married with kids but if you lose your job, you might have to leave your family after paying for a college degree and 14yrs worth of usually fairly high taxes. Isn't that absurd?
4/ Despite being Indian, and a beneficiary of this bill, there are problems with this bill. One, most Indians in the backlog are not high skilled tech workers, but cheap outsourced labour from IT consultancies like Wipro and Infosys.
5/ Two, without a smoother cap removal transition plan, this would essentially flood the green card quota with Indians for the next ~10yrs, throttling competent candidates of other nationalities.
6/ If those two issues are fully addressed, I this bill will be unanimously favored and @sendavidperdue will let it pass and hopefully Trump will sign it!
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In the last 20yrs, "study CS and work in tech" became a "path" to wealth
Now:
—BigTech did layoffs, aren't hiring
—Tech job postings are ~40% of '21
—Startups often prefer tenured hires
—Huge pipeline of CS majors: 40% of MIT
Winter is coming for software engineering.
🧵
1/5
Beyond that, there seems to be less and less whitespace for software to create value in people's lives. Compare how much time we spent with tech in the year 2000 as a society vs 2024.
Companies are trending to being smaller and more efficient, not large and IBM-like.
2/5
It's not there yet, but AI is also slowly and steadily eating away at jobs humans used to do. LLMs will only write more code over time.
BigTech fueled a lot of the hiring with their consistent 20% YoY growth but they realize revenue doesn't come for free anymore.
3/5
My #1 tip for engineers navigating the rough hiring market is to uncover hot startups you may not know.
Reach out to the junior VCs with an email asking them who is doing well and whether they're hiring!
Some budding superstar startups compensate handsomely for talent.
1/5
Most engineers who are graduating college wrongly assume:
— Startups don't pay well
— Most startups can die suddenly (you usually have a healthy forewarning)
— Startups won't sponsor visas
— Lack of job security
These are usually false.
2/5
"Why would they help me?"
VCs are incentivized to help the startups they invest in (and are on the boards of), and hiring is one of the ways they can help.
Keep in mind, they'll likely only recommend companies in their firm's portfolio so you want to ask many
3/5