Summary
Elon Musk faced backlash from his followers on X after advocating for importing “super talented engineers” to address a shortage in the U.S. tech industry.
Musk likened hiring top foreign talent to building a championship sports team and argues that there is a shortage of talented and motivated American engineers.
Critics argued there’s sufficient U.S. talent being overlooked or underpaid, with some pointing to widespread tech layoffs.
Musk dismissed claims of low wages or training gaps, maintaining a need for exceptional engineering talent to advance innovation.
Yeah, when you import your slaves you can pay them less and they’re more subservient because they don’t want to be deported. It also drives down the wages for US citizens that perform the same jobs. News flash, there are plenty of good software engineers in America. They just aren’t going to work 60 hours a week for 60k a year while the company they work for posts billions in profit each year.
If you need my skill and time to make a million dollars, I better be getting at least 15-20% of that profit. Employers can obviously afford to pay it if they can give a CEO that barely does shit 250 mil plus stock options
Elon wamts to destroy education in the US so this is to compensate for that move.
Musk replied. “OF COURSE my companies and I would prefer to hire Americans and we DO, as that is MUCH easier than going through the incredibly painful and slow work visa process. HOWEVER, there is a dire shortage of extremely talented and motivated engineers in America.”
I’Ve BuRnEd OuT aLl ThE WiLlInG nErDs hErE aNd I nEeD tO bUy SoMe FrOm OvEr ThErE1!1!
Right-Wing bootlickers continue to learn they aren’t in the in-crowd they desperately seek to join.
He’s so fucking stupid. It’s exhausting.
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, 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.
Removed by mod
So you want TWO Trumps?!
He’s not stupid. He’s abusive. He knows what he’s doing and why. He will save millions and keep the wages of his pool of talent depressed.
Bit of both, Mysk didn’t even complete his college degree. Being born into money does not, by default, correlate to intelligence
The Muskrat wants cheap engineers that will work like China’s 9-9-6.
Well he saw that the only people willing to work at Twitter were extremely desperate to stay in the country
Globalism for me but not for thee
Do I really need to login just to view a comment?
why, would you rather have a less shitty internet?
Is there a Nitter for Bluesky yet? [googles]
Not sure which comment you wanted…
For that comment, yes. It appears that the author has limited it to signed-in users only. This is one way to ensure that the Bluesky moderation tools are applied to everyone who might view / screenshot / interact with the post in question.
This is one way to ensure that the Bluesky moderation tools are applied to everyone who might view / screenshot / interact with the post in question.
What mod tools? Shouldn’t need a login to view or screenshot. Interaction should require an account but I see no reason for the others.
Completely agree. This a grab for leads by Bluesky. Not exactly something I like to see in social media platform outreach tactics…
So a bullshit excuse
Super talented = extremely desperate foreigners who’ll work 90hr weeks for very low pay.
Just in case anyone needed a translation.
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
Is there a shortage?
Or are you only looking at Bay Area hires because I see a great number of good and bad engineers in Midwest and eastern parts of the USA.
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.
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.
A shortage of engineers willing to work for Musk-led companies, maybe.
Not maybe at all. Every tech group I’m in would rather work fast food than do a 90 hour week under Musk.
I used to be in a group during the 2022-2023 era where we shared memes of recruiters who were trying to convince engineers to go to Twitter. The meme well dried up when all the recruiters were fired.
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
There is becoming more and more of a shortage of good engineers who want to work for companies associated with him I am sure. All they have to do is read about his business practices.
He believes in overworking, underpaying, and is anti-unions because he knows they would fight against the wages, policies, and work practices he wants to force against people.
Elon Musk is anti-workers. And thus, since workers are the fabric of this nation… Elon Musk is anti-america.
I seriously doubt there is a shortage anywhere in the U.S.
What I’m reading is that he wants Chinese or Indian engineers because they are as qualified as the next guy, they’re already used to insane hours and no holidays AND he can just pay them their original wage, which is peanuts compared to what US engineers make. Also once he’s done with them he can just deport them. What’s not to like?!
The broligarchs have always loved the H-1B fraud.
The future of the US
He didn’t explain to them that holders of H1B visas have to stay with the corporation that hires them or else they get deported. It’s semi-slavery. Conservatives would love it.
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…
Yep. What I don’t get is when people that are supposedly “nationalist” aren’t even patriotic enough to just open up immigration so that the talent pool stays HERE. It’s all about just short-term profits for private tyrannies and everyone else can apparently go fuck themselves, citizens included.
The ones that know about it already love it very much.
Musk is currently fighting with Laura Loomer over this and even pretended to be someone else in order to argue with her over Twitter Spaces and it is very, very funny to watch.
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.
Christ, it should be a rule never to be this pissy with people sharing information. Here’s a screenshot. Of an audio post. Not sure how much help that’s going to be, so I guess you can just read about it on Mediaite or Raw Story in a few days.
Not sure if there is something better…
“import” like it’s livestock. Strategically avoiding the word “migration”, too.
I believe it was a CEO of British Airways that referred to passengers as “self-loading cargo”, so it’s not like it’s new that the haves see the have-nots as a resource to be managed.
Lol the airline industry has some pretty good terms, my personal favorite is “wet lease”.
Mine is See You Next Tuesday.
Human Commodities
