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.
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 which of course Texas is not.
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.
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.