At a certain level promotion is not about just doing something well. Funnily enough, his plans now are to go do other things (presumably well) without a particular sense of direction and hope that it works out.
30 minutes before boarding they no longer allow you to print a boarding pass (so you’d better be checked in and have it on your phone). I learned this the hard way when I arrived 20 minutes before a flight. However, it’s no big deal really, I caught the next flight an hour or so later since they are obligated to book you the next available flight.
I try to be there about 30 minutes before the flight now, but with boarding pass ready on my phone. The only reason I give 30 minutes is in case of traffic or if I want to grab a quick bite. If I could guarantee my arrival time at the airport it would be even less.
Wonderful to see people reinventing taxation from the first principles: "awesome country to live in, with great education and social security, but these are expensive countries, from a Tax perspective"
It's not appropriate to use the word "confiscate" in this context. If you're not satisfied with the social contract of this country, you're free to leave and earn money elsewhere.
what in your opinion the current salaries are and what they must be in order to attract enough professionals? I mean do you see a lot of people who aren't STEM professionals because they feel the salaries are too low? If they aren't STEM professionals than where they are?
I see a continued loss of excellent, experienced -- 10-15 years into their careers -- engineers from sf to Seattle, Chicago, Colorado, Boston, and Austin driven by an admixture of the poor wages in sf/peninsula compared to housing costs, poor transport plus long commute times, very high education costs for children, high daycare costs, and family unfriendly work policies. Three friends and at least nine acquaintances over the last 24 months.
Compare the housing prices of what a three bedroom condo in sf (what a 2 child family wants) vs the other cities, plus the ability for mothers to take a couple years off work. Losing 15 to 20% of your salary to save 50% or more of housing costs is often a great deal.
The Bay Area is fundamentally broken in that cities refuse to build new housing and schools. Supply is limited, demand exceeds supply, and engineers are competing against each other for that very limited supply.
So if all us engineers' salaries went up, it wouldn't help. We'd just end up spending even more to out compete each other. (Well, I guess it would help push non-engineers out of the Bay Area, but is that really what we want?)
Perhaps an interesting way to interpret what you're saying is that SF is bad enough that people no longer want to move there since all their surplus income will be consumed by housing costs (valid concern!).
But new immigrant salaries are as good as american salaries in terms of how much they can push prices up; so hiring H1-B is essentially similar to a pay cut for people (same $$, higher housing costs); following this pay cut some existing engineers will leave.
In the end you just end up with replacing some old engineers with new ones through a costly lengthy process.
This is the kind of absurd logical games one has to play in order to not acknowledge basic economics of supply and demand.
The natural solution to this would be more rail to allow people to have reasonable commutes into the city. But some critics think rail encourages sprawl and the only answer is more skyscrapers and density.
And on the other side, NIMBY's in low-density areas like Menlo Park and Atherton killed the restoration of the Dumbarton Bridge Rail (also victim of a mysterious arson recently) and are delaying electrification of the Caltrain. The Dumbarton Bridge, for example, would allow people to live on the East Bay and take direct rail into Palo Alto, Redwood City or Menlo Park, and up and down the corridor.
That's mostly orthogonal to the H1-B question - why do they hire anyone? (Most of the hires are not H1-Bs.)
I'd guess the answer is, marginally, hiring people is still good for companies. But combined with the lack of housing development, it's slowly but steadily making life worse for everyone in the Bay Area who doesn't yet own a house.
If it continues this way, eventually people won't move here without ridiculously high salary offers, and companies will be forced to expand in cheaper cities instead.
First, you simply asserted -- without any evidence whatsoever -- that the US lacks sufficient stem professionals.
Two points:
1 - plenty of stem surveys (lumping all of stem together, as you did) show plenty of available candidates as calculated by the percentage of domestic stem graduates working in stem post graduation. see, eg,
2 - if you wish to limit the discussion to sf/valley type jobs, a honest claim is there aren't sufficient already trained engineers who wish to live in sf/valley at the prices employers wish to offer who already have the desired skills. There are lots of ways to address it: pay enough so that living here isn't a financial disaster (compare housing prices in sf/nyc (much cheaper than sf!), seattle, chicago, boston, etc), solve transport problems making san jose and sf essentially separate cities, figure out remote employees, hire women (and even retain them!), train engineers, etc.
2b - even a smidge of economics will tell you it's very hard for an actual shortage to exist; there's a clear lack of evidence of wage increases (over cost of living increases) that would accompany an actual tightening of the labor market
> pay enough so that living here isn't a financial disaster
Higher salaries and higher employment levels seem to correlate with higher, not lower, housing prices.
> solve transport problems making san jose and sf essentially separate cities
How would you even address that? It's run by public agencies controlled by three counties (San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara). You need to get financial commitments from all three counties, railroad unions, state agencies like CalTRANS, etc. They're bringing BART to San Jose, so maybe things are already slowly progressing in that regard.
Do you also have to pay "thousands" of dollars to accountants? This particular bit seems to be an exaggeration, as I would imagine any tax software should be able to deal with foreign income. And with only federal income to report, this should be cheap too.
Here's an example that explains the tax rules for Canadian Green Card holders who have Canadian tax free retirement savings accounts. It all seems equitable and simple until you start reading deeper and it becomes clear that as a US Green Card holder from Canada working in the US that you probably need regular services from a tax attorney or a very sharp CPA with experience advising Canadians working in the US to keep you out of trouble. You probably only need that for this issue when the rules change but they do change and it's not the only issue that you're going to need professional advice for. The cost of that specialty advice adds up fast. http://www.serbinski.com/working-in-usa/rrsp.shtml
> Do you also have to pay "thousands" of dollars to accountants?
No, I found a good guy who really knows what he's doing up in Vicenza. But between his fee, and a day off work to go see him and get all my US stuff in order... it does start to add up.
> I would imagine any tax software should be able
Maybe, but I doubt it does it nearly as well as a competent accountant, who, for instance, knows how to read an Italian tax filing, and knows the details of the US-Italy tax treaty.
Right. It is high time that percentage change in GDP is not the sole consideration when measuring growth. While GDP will always be important, measures like Gini and HDI (or others which measure overall human "happiness") be taken into account when judging if a country is prosperous.
At a certain level promotion is not about just doing something well. Funnily enough, his plans now are to go do other things (presumably well) without a particular sense of direction and hope that it works out.