It’s one of those things… Apparently Vivek Ramaswamy, whom I’ll remind everyone was not my choice for president at any time (for a variety of reasons) decided it was a good time to put the fox among the hens by running his mouth from his own insular perspective on the need to import more foreign workers.
This is one of those things in which I’m divided. As one is.
I mean, on the one hand I think absolutely the US should get the best from anywhere else in the world. My perspective on what the best is though is somewhat different from Vivek’s. Now part of this might be self-interested perspective coming from the fact that I absolutely wasn’t the best when I moved here (I mean, sure, elite academic credentials, but honestly none of them translated into a job here. Also, sure, IQ measurements in the mumble, mumble mumble percentile, but there is a very good reason for me to doubt that IQ applies to success/achievement in the real world [If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?]) And a lot of you, particularly the leftists hate-skimming will say I’m still not the best. All of this is true, but you can’t say I don’t work hard as heck. And I believe I’m d*mn good value, considering in 40 years here I’ve never been on welfare or any other kind of assistance.
So I think sometimes “the best” should be “Clears minimal requirements and won’t go on assistance for 20 years.” Because in a time of high tech change you can’t tell if the person who is the best at digitizing whatchmacallits will be adaptive enough to stay the best when watchmacallits go out of production altogether. And there is no way to pick for “intelligent and highly adaptable” except by looking back at someone’s life.
Anyway, let’s start with my biases. Eric S. Raymond wrote a tweet that I substantially agree with which is rare, because I tend to at least have some quibbles with his takes. (And sometimes very substantial ones.) (My only quibble with this one is to take offense at finding myself lumped as a MAGA nationalist. I’ve recently come to the conclusion I’m a libertarian nationalist (for one I think libertarianism can only work here for now. And thanks to Charlie Martin for the moniker in which he includes himself.) MAGA as an aspirational direction is fine. MAGA as a movement is too much of an hodgepodge pulling in everyone to the right or even only slightly to the left of Lenin.)
This is the link if you want to read to the end and lack twittex.
He is absolutely right about all of that. But then there are things he isn’t as right about, or where it seems to me he’s groping at the problem but not quite grasping it. Perhaps because of his own innate biases. (We all have them. The best I can do is try to lay mine out.)
First, let me start by saying that I’m HARD CORE FOR MERIT IN HIRING. Not only is it important to always hire the best you can for the job, it is also important to always select for merit. Because merit breeds merit. There are other valid reasons to hire, sure. Like “I trust this person.” The US has been pushed more an more that way in areas not infected by DEI by the DEI crazy and the litigiousness of the woke. BUT regardless of good reasons, the end result of hiring for anything but merit is driving merit out. It always is. Mostly because people who are only marginally competent or barely competent, or even who are competent but KNOW THAT’S NOT WHY THEY WERE HIRED, tend to hire less competent people, because they’re afraid of being shown up. Oh, not all of them. Humans are individuals. But over time the process repeats.
So, in that sense it is important to hire the best. Yes, even if they’re from abroad.
But while we’re at it, an important caveat: When you talk about hiring the top 0.001% it’s the merest bullshit. No such things exists. No, I’m serious. THERE AIN’T NO SUCH ANIMAL.
People who are very good at that level, are very good at a specialty of a specialty. And drawers at everything else. No, seriously. At that level you’re dealing with almost idiot savants.
And a lot of them never bother developing the other needful things for the profession. So, sure, you might hire the best data cruncher that ever crunched. Or to put it another way because this is something I’m familiar with only at a distance, you might hire someone who can, instinctively create a new branch of mathematics and bend an entire program around it to do the THING you want. But they might suck at everything else. In fact, there’s a high chance they won’t fully understand or integrate what you want, won’t listen to their co-workers, will be resistant to debugging and will generally be a human interaction disaster to the point their program might be the best, but not necessarily the best for what you want.
So let’s go a step below to the best of the best who are still human. Cool beans. How do you find the best among them? Answer, you don’t. It’s not that some aren’t better than others. It’s that above a certain level it doesn’t matter. And that certain level is about the top 5%. Above a certain level you’re hiring for “feel” more than anything else.
I know this because the process this guy describes:
(Here for those with no twittex.)
for resumes is substantially the same as for submissions to a medium size magazine or publisher. Above a certain level, you can’t select the best. You just select “It’s the best for me now.” Or “I feel like it.”
This leaves the process vulnerable to people THINKING THEY’RE SELECTING FOR MERIT WHILE SELECTING FOR OTHER REASONS.
So, while American education sucks — I’ve been the one here raising the possibility that all the cases of plagiarism are because people at the ivy leagues and promoted into positions of power CAN’T READ FLUENTLY. Their behavior to me seems like that of an ESL trying and failing to make a policy of copy pasting sentences (because they can’t write their own coherently) sound like they were part of an original essay. I ran into this in the early oughts while teaching in college. People who sounded like normal human beings in speech couldn’t write an essay at 4th grade level coherently. That’s a failure in learning to read/write enough that you’re fluent in it. — if you’re talking the best it’s pretty damn hard to say something like “This doesn’t exist in the US.”
Is it possible? Yes, quite possible. Likely? Not in the least.
That top 0.01%? Unless you’re hiring the man who created the new quantum computer (and good luck with that) that works on two molecules of super-excited water (again, good luck–) you’re just as likely to find them in the US.
Except for– well, your search which is hell of borked, but will take a whole post to explain. Let’s say though that our HR works mostly as either a DEI factory or a way to not pass anyone on to the hiring process. At this point firing HR departments by the score and getting rid of automated computer keyword sorting might be the best fix for that. (How bad is it? Well, one cheat to get your otherwise fully functional resume passed up is to “print the add in white” on your resume. The computer reads that and passes it on, because congrats, you have the keywords. Note this has nothing to do on whether a human looking at your resume sees you’re a perfect fit. You just need those keywords, exactly. This is what’s known as stupid.)
Vivek is right that there is a massive problem with our culture. It is not what he thinks it is. I have no clue what hole he crawled out of, but if you’re basing your ideas of what kids learn and who they idolize on Hollywood’s crazy ideas, you already lost.
Again I’m going to invoke “My kids are in their early thirties, smart and geeky, and so are most of their friends.” I will actually need a full post to unpack this, so put a pin in it. But all the people saying their education was giving a medal for participation are wrong. That was MY generation and we’re in our sixties now. My kids were the generation where they “corrected” for that. Stupidly, as only a deeply screwed up education establishment can. My kids’ generation had a “tokenized” education. No, I don’t mean race and sex and… Oh, those too. The ladies’ A is a thing. BUT mostly they weren’t so much educated as they “collected tokens.” Like…. “Participate in science Olympiad, winning team” put that token in your resume. This started in kindergarten, where they assured us if our kids — in a little mountain town school in Colorado — didn’t collect the right tokens they’d never make it to college, let alone a good college. Kids were so busy doing special projects and collecting tokens for their resumes most of them never learned to read properly.
However among all kids, the nose to the grindstone, and run around like crazy acquiring “accomplishments” were a thing. It’s not their fault they weren’t taught anything substantive. And it’s outright stupid and nasty to call them slackers. A lot of these kids hit the job market with a massive case of the burnout, yes, but that’s not the same as being slackers.
Yes, I am still me, and being still me I said no, and put my little hooves down. My kids weren’t booked into three different after school activities, five different extracurricular classes, or ten different “accomplishment learning.” They still got a “resume” but that was almost incidental due to being massive geek-o-nerds. So, younger son learned Greek after bullying me into putting him in an online course. Also art. Older son got professionally published in fiction at 13. And placed second in a state singing competition. If anything we taught them by the geek-slacker model. I.e. we’d throw money, books and resources at their enthusiasms, and sometimes they achieved something/the enthusiasm stuck. Sometimes … it didn’t. They also both learned to build computers and write software, though younger son cordially despises it, I suspect for the same reason it required a lot of work from me (Look, I was a geek girl in the late 70s/early 80s. Of course I learned starter programming. I just haven’t done it since. And no, I wasn’t even doing it for the guys. In retrospect I think I puzzled a lot of them, taking my lunch hour in the computer lab and NOT on the hunt.) because he is dyslexic, and misplacing a letter or punctuation mark in a thousand-line program means sweating bullets while you proof it. (At least for novels I can be the despair of my copyeditor and have backup.)
Anyway, all their friends are more or less the same kind of kid. More or less proficient depending on parents, but good, smart geek kids. Entering their thirties. Most of them working for starvation wages, if not on those jobs that are supposed to give you exposure and training but literally pay nothing.
Now there are issues with our education, as I detailed. And there are issues with the fact we’ve banned “child labor” so thoroughly most people are having trouble finding starter jobs in their twenties.
BUT I can tell you from observing this group that any of these kids given half a chance JUMP on it, and work their *sses off to be good.
No, they probably won’t be any good to begin with. But they learn. And they work very hard at learning.
Which brings us to–
What is better for those top of the top people? Picking a generic “genius” from across the world, from a culture that has its own drawbacks, and trying to fit him in your company? Or picking someone who knows nothing but is eager and has tons of potential and who will when fully trained be exactly what you need?
Yes, there are problems in the way, such as you can’t give them IQ tests. But I’m sure you can give them “placement tests” to figure out how they fit in your company and it would take a trained psychologist to know the difference. Same with establishing basic literacy and numeracy.
Also, I’ll fully agree with you companies shouldn’t have to teach employees the basics.
But the thing is hiring from overseas is not painless EITHER. Look, I’m not singling out Chinese and Indians. I too come from a culture where you hire your cousin over anyone else. There are reasons for this, deeply baked into the culture, like the opposite of high trust culture.
And I’m not going to say every overseas-hire does it, because that would be a lie. BUT a significant portion of them does it, because culture is sticky and takes an extraordinary individual to overcome.
So the price of hiring ready-trained and far more compliant with orders (the training is often different, though. Particularly in medicine) from overseas is to see entire departments flip to that ethnicity only. Which wouldn’t be a problem except that: see dictum: hire for any reason other than merit, it degrades merit.
Also I have many complicated opinions on women in corporate culture (several posts waiting on that) but I can promise that there are women who are more than pulling their weight, and hiring from deeply misogynistic cultures (which includes a lot of Europe, you’ll find, beneath the happy talk) will make them be overlooked/mistreated. As well as a lot of the native born males.
In addition to that: I’m not a nativist. It would be extremely weird if I were. But I’m just going to say it: you can’t treat the people of your own country worse than you treat foreigners. You do that and you’re setting yourself up for large scale revolt.
For decades now I’ve heard from friends in technical fields about their departments being eaten from the inside by hiring foreigners on work visas, who work for less and do whatever they’re told no matter how outrageous (or borderline illegal) in the name of the visa. And how those imports, once secure and with some power run the natives out.
I’ve heard (and seen it, even 20 years ago, coincidentally (?) in companies that then foundered) enough that you know there is not only truth but widespread truth in it.
Combine it with what is shaping up to be a lost generation, say 25 to 35 (with some older outliers) due to stupid child labor laws, competition form illegals and work visas at the bottom, flooding of the market with “imports” from above and driving down wages, and our incredibly broken education system, and you have a cauldron of resentment.
Which is why Vivek stomped on a fire ants nest.
That is the measure of resentment going on.
Look, again, this is self interested me. I have an audible accent. I could get rid of it, but it would eat my writing time, and I’m in my sixties. Writing the books is more important.
And Obama’s policies of race-division have already made it so that my American-mutt sons get asked by total strangers what their race is. On the street. Out of nothing.
What I don’t need is crazy people pinging off the oddness of our behaviors (my family, the rest of you. Come on, we’re Odds for a reason) and deciding we’re foreign interlopers being treated to the GOOD jobs. (Or paying jobs, at all.)
What we don’t need is a wave or riots and lynching. And I’m here to tell you that’s quite likely. Just judging from the reaction to Vivek’s running his mouth.
So, we need to clean house, peeps. If you can, teach your kids yourself. Make sure they’re literate and FLUENT at reading and writing. (And if you’re not, find someone who is to teach them. Hint, get boys old comics to see them between picture books and real books. It bridges the fluency gap and has more complex stories.) If you can’t, teach them yourself anyway, after work. And as a culture, let’s can DEI and HR, shall we?
Meanwhile, Mr. Ramaswamy kindly shut your trap. You’re right we have problems, but your solution is going to destroy everything and get people killed.
And Mr. Musk, sure, you can have your 0.01% top engineers from abroad. As soon as you explain to me how you’re discerning their excellence at that level. Ouiji board? Tarot cards? Because at that level you CAN’T and I don’t care how smart you yourself are.
Sure, though, they’ll be what? 10 people for all your companies. Go ahead, import them.
But train yourself some smart local kids meanwhile. You might need them when the geniuses crap out.
The rest of us: Yeah…. we have a lot of clean up to do. Because I don’t want riots. I don’t want lynchings. And I don’t want epic, all consuming cultural clashes. So.
Let’s get busy building under and over and around. Because when it all blows we need structures in place to take the weight.
According To Hoyt 