Maybe it’s time to reevaluate whether your perspective is worth sharing, or perhaps some time is needed internally to reposition what you think you know
> but the BBC is one of the most impartial sources available.
I almost spit out my coffee in laughter reading this. Entirely ridiculous assertion. You are completely blind to the fact that the BBC is insanely partial by picking and choosing what it reports on and what it doesn't. This is just level 2 detection of bias that you aren't reaching, imagine all the other things you're missing.
You’d need to have literally infinite resources if you wanted to avoid a situation of having to pick and choose what you report on.
What matters is that all sides of the debate get representation. And the BBC does this almost to a fault.
The ironic thing is the fact that BBC is so good at doing this, everyone feels their voice is marginalised and then complains of bias.
So when people call the BBC “biased”, and as ferociously as you have, what they’re actually saying is “the BBC airs too many opinions that oppose my own biases”
I’ve never worked with an H1B software engineer from India that was anything but mediocre. I know they exist and my sample size isn’t huge but at least 3-4 of the H1Bs I’ve directly worked with in the past decade were completely unnecessary and could have been filled by a US citizen
I think perhaps part of the point being made is that the ratio should not be the same. We should be bringing in higher-than-average and exceptional talent via these visas. If we're just mirroring the skills and talent level of the native workforce, we should be drawing from the native workforce.
I don't buy the argument that there's a big shortage of talent for these jobs in the US, especially in a job market like there is right now.
Having said that, I do know quite a few people who have been in the US on H-1B visas, and many of them are exceptionally skilled. I think those are the kinds of people we should be granting H-1B visas. I also know quite a few H-1B holders who I wouldn't ever want to work with again, and there are too many people in that group. Not saying there aren't plenty of US citizens I wouldn't want to work with ever again, but that's a separate issue.
> A very large majority of all software engineers are mediocre
I think my HN karma right now would be over 1,000,000 if it wasn't for all the downvotes each time I've said this same thing. I ballpark 95.87% of all SWEs are mediocre-to-less-than-that. I have 30 years of experience behind me to back this up :)
This "10x engineer" jazz is really just someone who is good-to-very-good compared to the rest of the crew
Mediocre means average. Most people will fit into average. If most H1B are average programmers the ratio wouldn't be equal just based on cultural differences / language and other baseline factors added.
Funny seeing your user name. When I worked myself to get ultimately nowhere but money that spends so quickly, the first thing that went was my music creation time.
Having children later in life is much harder/different than having them younger. You don't get to go back.
Your children are only children for a very short time. You don't get to go back.
Not earlier commenter but their username is a reference to “ableton live” which is music production software. Not “able to live” which is just a one letter difference
Insanely short sighted. If all you need to do is "intercept potential threats" instead of dealing with a real threat when it becomes apparent then just send a balloon.
It's crazy that you're acting like this is some kind of policy failure for the US, when this administration has been telling Europe it shouldn't rely on the United States at this level. This isn't some "gotcha" that you're describing, it's exactly what the administration wanted europe to do. Wake up and start innovating instead of being the Disneyland for American tourists.
Us Europeans are just baffled by the fact that this ‘administration’ wants this. The EU is a big economy that’s relatively easy to deal with. Why would you alienate us?
But yeah so far Trump has been relatively true to his word, as far as it goes. Not really practically but going further down the road of a dare I say fascist outlook. I think Europeans still can’t believe it’s happening, much less intentionally so.
You are effectively saying that Europe should be a vassal state to the US and cannot have its own laws. Europe has a different vision on privacy and competition. The regulation asks for e.g. Apple are peanuts compared to what China asks. Apple bends back over to please China, but if Europe has some requirements for doing business part of the US do the tired trope “US innovates, Europe regulates”.
We have too many problems at home to be daddy with a credit card.
First, this is rich for a country living on borrowed money (that they can only get away with because the rest of the world uses it as the default currency).
Second, a lot of the problems of the US are caused by the lack of proper wealth redistribution, lack of efficient health care (no, the US doesn’t subsidize European healthcare, European countries spend far less on healthcare with better outcomes). It’s not solved by throwing lifelong allies under the bus and trading the for some dictator friends.
Finally, the security situation also arisen because the US did not want European militaries to become too powerful and has pushed a lot to be dependent on the US and US tech. For instance, countries have to buy US fighters for nuclear sharing, etc. The primary exception is France because they never wanted to be reliant and have their own nuclear force, etc.
Also let’s not forget Article 5 was only invoked once (by the US) and we were happy to help, because that’s what friends do. We have been in Afghanistan for over 20 years as a result and a lot of our soldiers died and were injured.
> The fact that you can't understand this is exactly why this administration is doing this.
> because you believe that excellence is not worthy of being rewarded. Your culture has the mindset that excellence is not a product of hard work and determination, it's a product of luck and nepotism, so any hint of excellence gets taken away and diminished.
This administration does not believe in rewarding excellence, hard work, or determination. It’s an administration by the most malicious, incompetent people who have ever led this country.
I don't know why Europe wants so badly to be reliant on the US. It's bad for them, it's bad for us. It's embarrassing for Europe that Ukraine is relying on the US instead of Europe for defense. It's embarrassing for Europe how little they contribute to NATO. The US isn't a partner, it's a caretaker. And as they say, if someone provides what you need, they also have the power to take it away.
Outsourcing your defense is stuupiiid.
Europe should be thanking Trump for waking them up to the reality that has always been the case through his boorish negotiation.
Defense is a bit like advertising or finance. It has some aspects of a zero-sum game and a negative-sum game. All the money you invest in it is wasted. But if your enemy/competitor chooses to waste more money, you may be in trouble.
From an European perspective, the entire purpose of NATO from 1992 to 2022 was to prevent wasting too much money on defense. Because, for some reason, Americans were willing to do it instead.
Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and the calculus changed. Now European countries are rebuilding their defensive capabilities, while Russia is still bogged down in Ukraine. Given the lack of credible short-term threats, limiting defense spending was clearly the right choice until 2022.
Also it makes sense to have a capability only once within an alliance. If the US has the command, space and air capabilities, why would anyone else need to have this. You can add to their capability by buying F-35s and hosting their air bases.
Now that we are not allies anymore we need to wastefully build up our own command, space and air capabilties resulting in duplicated effort.
>> Ukraine is relying on the US instead of Europe for defense.
Is it? Especially in 2025.
It is embarrassing how little of (very old) heavy equipment USA provided to Ukraine. North Macedonia provided same amount of main battle tanks as USA, Poland provided ten times more. And zero fighter jets.
Anyway, people of Ukraine are thankful for any support and USA was the biggest donor during first years of the war.
So it’s true that Europe/Canada spent less, but it comes with a bit fat asterisk that the US also wants to project power in the pacific/Asia, whereas European defense is primarily focused on avoiding Russian aggression (+ peace missions + supporting the US in various operations to give them more legitimacy).
Europe should be thanking Trump for waking them up to the reality that has always been the case through his boorish negotiation.
That credit should go to Putin, European spending has grown rapidly since the annexation of crimea.
The credit the Trump should get: stop buying US weapons as quickly as we can and focus on non-US alternatives. It’s going to take a while, but US material has certainly become less attractive.
You sound like a cynical junior engineer. As a tech lead I have to review thousands of lines of code from human engineers and let me tell you it’s no different than reviewing llm code
As a senior engineer, I can say I probably wouldn’t like working with you.
For a dev worth paying for, the crucial details of some code is discussed prior to the PR in a way that the PR review becomes an afterthought. You can follow this process with an LLM but the PR review is still brutal. It doesn’t do what you say and it doesn’t learn (in a deterministic way a good human dev does).
High performing teams do not have many changes nor comments in a PR (on average, obviously).
As a tech lead I have reviewed code written by junior engineers and written by AI, and there is a very clear difference between the two.
You also seem to be missing the point that if vibe coding lets your engineers write 10x the amount of code they previously could in the same working hours, you now have to review 10x that amount.
It's easy to see how there is an instant bottleneck here...
Or maybe you're saying that the same amount of code is written when vibe-coding than when writing by hand, and if that's the case then obviously there's absolutely no reason to vibe-code.
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/britains-bbc-...
Maybe it’s time to reevaluate whether your perspective is worth sharing, or perhaps some time is needed internally to reposition what you think you know