Being fired means you lose healthcare and much needed benefits and of course a paycheck and all of that stuff, right? If you're going to take this wildly cynical approach you should at least do a more proper comparison....
I think forcing this comparison shows a lack of empathy for how compromised of a position the H1B really is.
If I lose my job I have unemployment insurance, cobra benefits, personal savings, and I don’t require another employer to sponsor my visa. If I lose my job the most likely outcome is I find another one after searching a few months.
If someone on an H1B visa loses their job the most likely outcome is they are forced to leave the country.
Well, truthfully I don't really care all that much about it any more than I do any other problems that people generally experience. It's even more tragic that someone has an H1B means other folks don't - aren't their lives even worse for not having the opportunity that someone else does? Can the H1B visa holder even compete with the person denied the H1B?
The reason I wrote this comment is because the OP itself decided it was warranted with this cynical comment to suggest Americans don't work hard because oh if they get fired well they just find another job but the H1B visa holder gets gasp deported. But this itself diminishes the stresses and experience of those who don't find that other job, or don't find that replacement tech job, or any other devastating affects that someone experiences from job loss. Yea you might have a few months of COBRA benefits, but then what? You might not even have any savings because of some emergency that occurred. What's worse, being deported after a couple of months or becoming homeless in America? What if you're deported to Australia or Japan? Why are you or others assuming a happy ending for someone laid off in America but assuming the worst case scenario for an H1B visa holder and then comparing the two in that way?
I mean worst come to worst you can drive Uber full time until the market recovers? And this is certainly not an option for H1B.
Unless Americans does not want this type of job, which actually validates your cynical interpretation of OP's comment. Meanwhile a lot of illegal immigrants are happily driving for Uber and plenty more will be if they can do it legally.
> I mean worst come to worst you can drive Uber full time until the market recovers? And this is certainly not an option for H1B.
Why can't the H1B visa holder also just be deported and drive for Uber in their home country full-time until the market recovers?
> Meanwhile a lot of illegal immigrants are happily driving for Uber and plenty more will be if they can do it legally.
As a capitalist I'm all in favor of driving wages for workers to as close to 0 as possible. If Uber is $1 for me instead of $15 that's great. I don't think our unions or blue-collar workforce are in favor of that though.
> Being fired means you lose healthcare and much needed benefits and of course a paycheck and all of that stuff, right?
I think there's some law that lets you stay on health insurance for a few months at least, and you can save up as a countermeasure to the loss of the paycheck. Bad as it is it's not comparable to getting deported after a couple of months.
Hard to say how directly they can compare, and it probably depends on the individual situation and of course their line of work and other such items. In the woe-is-me olympics they both seem pretty awful and, one might even say, competitive in terms of how awful they are. Maybe being deported means you go back to France or Canada or something.
> I think there's some law that lets you stay on health insurance for a few months at least
Yes, but often you will have to pay the full cost in order to do so, which will be difficult for many people after having lost their source of income..
This only remains true so long as open weight models lack significant utility.
Access to compilers was almost as controlled as access to LLMs to prior to the GNU toolchain and Linux putting a C compiler and unix (ish) machine in the hands of anyone who cared for one.
The problem is compute and memory. I think OpenAI bought RAM supply mainly to choke the ability of consumer hardware to run open weight models (that hit the memory bottleneck before other constraints). Now there's a shortage in other components as well. I don't see how local AI can compete in usefulness.
Perhaps there will be a lot more people who can write software as well as I can weld metal.
Welding is peculiar in that becoming a professional welder takes a great deal of time and effort (and probably some talent that I don't have), but becoming a terrible welder can be accomplished by anyone in a couple of weekends, and there is great utility in being a terrible welder. Well worth the investment of a couple hundred dollars and a couple weekends.
With LLMs there is now much more utility in being a terrible programmer too. A couple of weekends yields real return on the effort now.
It's an extension of pretending that developer productivity can be measured in lines of code per day, as well as the managerial blindness to the fact that code can have negative value.
The decision makers who are the target audience for these metrics value "objective" data. They value the appearance of being quantitative, but lack the intellectual tools to distinguish between quantitative science and pseudoscience with numbers bolted on.
reply