Fracture Lines

     Who would have thought the techbros and the populists would split over H-1B visas?

     One of the worst downsides to "move fast and break things" culture is that it often breaks people; as soon as computer software (and, earlier, hardware) moved from labor-of-love people who slept under their desks* to a profit-making venture, hard-crunch work with long days and no time off was more rule than exception.  It was expected.  At the best employers, it came with perks: outstanding and well-stocked break rooms, comfy "decompression areas," a tolerance for eccentricity that went way, way out.  But it does break people, and one of the reasons for the proliferation of tech firms in early/middle computers and software was people just getting up and leaving, to-hell-with-this-I'll-work-at-my-own-pace.  You can see it now in commercial rocketry/space exploration: the big core firms emit a constant churn of engineers, scientists, technicians and managers who have been ridden too hard for too long and bail out, taking their overlooked or lost in the scrimmage ideas with them.

     And to support that kind of turnover, you need a constant influx of talented, educated people willing -- happy! -- to work twenty-hour days and sleep under their desks.  Not all of them are from here, and it could be that a cozy sleeping bag under a desk looks better from Tashkent, Nairobi or Mumbai than it does from MIT.

     So the techbros are all about the H-1B visa and how it allows them "to hire nonimmigrant aliens as workers in specialty occupations or as fashion models of distinguished merit and ability." (Hint: they're probably not hiring fashion models.)  The populists, on the other hand, are not so happy about the folks from faraway places with strange accents, unfamiliar religions, unexpected complexions and unusual foods.  Besides, they themselves could have been rocket engineers or code hackers (et geeky cetera), if only it wasn't for the long hours, tricky mathematics and need to hyperfocus; it isn't fair!  --Their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers stuffed the first generation of NASA nerds and card-tricking IBM-machine hackers into lockers, and gave suspicious looks to the likes of Feynman and Oppenheimer ("not our sort," you know), but never mind all that.

     There's big mad from the populists and snotty condescension from the techbros, while the nerds doing the actual work keep on doing the actual work.  They'd get a lot more done if their bosses weren't assholes and the locals didn't keep treating them like nerds.  I know what they'll do: sleep under their desks and put in long hours, doing the work; some of them will bail out, by and by, and hang up their own shingle, and some of them will be the basis for the next generation of people who got things does, probably becoming asshole bosses in the process.  I have no idea what the various factions and personalities of MAGAworld will do, but I fully intend to pop myself some popcorn while I watch.
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* I use "sleep under their desk" as shorthand for the kind of ludicrous devotion to the task at hand that goes way beyond any paycheck: you're doing it because you love it, you love the process and you want to see how it turns out.  BTDT, and the thing is, the task does not love you back, your boss has no real grasp of the nature of your devotion and finds it weird, and once it's done, it's not yours.  You've spent months or years at it and now it's someone else's; you have nothing to fall back on while you look for the next thing.