Why Don’t the Tech Bros Just Hire from MAGA?
Decoding the DOGE-MAGA civil war.
1. MSG
I remain fascinated by the intraparty MAGA–DOGE fight. The MAGA position seems to be:
Elite college-grad Americans are bad because they’re woke or whatever.
The Forgotten Men of MAGA are every bit as smart and capable as those fancy elites with their precious “degrees.”
The DOGE position is:
Tech companies need more engineers than America colleges can produce.
Therefore the government needs to open the throttle on the H-1B visa program so they can import more foreign engineers to work in Big Tech.
Because I care, I have come up with the solution. Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and Peter Thiel can just hire the Forgotten Men of MAGA! 👆
On January 19, Trump will hold a “victory rally” in Washington. I assume that tens of thousands of patriots will attend. Why not have it double as a recruiting event for Tesla/Twitter/SpaceX, a16z, and Palantir?
I am not a professional head-hunter, but why couldn’t these folks do the jobs as well as someone from India? Just because they don’t have a degree from some woke “elite” college doesn’t make them stupid. This is America! And there’s nothing the American worker can’t learn and master in no time flat.
Obviously, I’m kidding. The problem here is that the actual positions of MAGA and DOGE are different from what they say in public. They are, roughly:
MAGA: We hate elite college grads because they’re woke, or successful, or whatever.
MAGA: We deserve to get all the same stuff those elites have, even if we don’t go to college, or live in an urban area.
MAGA: What really gets us going are super-rich guys who hate elite college grads as much as we do. We get to live vicariously through them. Fantasizing about having power like they do makes us feel less impotent and aggrieved.
DOGE: The hippies I see on Twitter and who live near me in Palo Alto are super annoying. I hate them.
DOGE: Why do the worker bees at my company want to get paid so much? Don’t they realize how lucky they are to get to work for me? I’m inventing the future and they get to watch. Also, I find it annoying that these NPCs will leave my Super Awesome Company for some other gig just because it pays more. That’s disloyal to The Future.
DOGE: I would like to import engineers through H-1B because I can pay them less (which lets me put more resources into inventing The Future) and they can’t leave me for another job (thus wasting the time I have invested in them).
DOGE: Why no, I have never met a guy named Cletus from Alabama who has a high school education and a Confederate flag bumper sticker on his truck. I have no idea what such a person might be like.
DOGE: Just theoretically, would I hire Cletus to work at my company?