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Questioning The IT Labor Shortage
spiel writes "There's a piece in today's NYT which points out the flaws in the arguments for increasing the number of H-1B visas. As one of those "older workers", this puts facts and figures behind what I have long believed." It's an interesing dicussion, although I suspect like most of things, the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
Do you actually know someone in this situation or are you hypothesizing? I know many people on H-1B working in the Bay Area. One of them is myself. And I certainly don't agree with your observation or hypothesis. Sure, I whine about being a "slave" sometimes, but who doesn't? What you said about that visa is true -- they are tied to your employer and you have to get a new one when you switch jobs. It is an inconvenience, but isn't that big of a deal because if you're any good, you'd find a job in the Bay Area in a second. I've switched jobs once so far and I'm considering moving on again. When I put my resume up on hotjobs.com a couple weeks back, I got 8 calls on the first day. Try treating me "like crap" and I'll be gone in a blink, I don't have to "take it" as you put it. Most countries in the world try hard to attract talents and work hard to prevent brain-drains. America is blessed with reverse brain-drains and people here are complaining. That is very odd, don't you think? Up until high school, I attended public schools in my home country. The taxpayers in my homeland paid for my education while the US economy benifits from it, and you're complaning?
There is a shortage of managers that know how to get technical people to come work for them. However, it is not an extreme shortage because there are many instances in which good people are hired away to another company. Obviously the management of that person's new company is a little more clueful.
When managers of the companies that have good people hired away from them for better pay and better work wonder why it is that these people are leaving them, my response to them is: DUH!
These are the same companies want H1B visa people which they can shackle to the job.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
That's true, and I apologize for a hasty response.
But you're right, there are more issues attached to getting the money for college, even if it isn't exactly $30k/year, which is the point I was trying to make.
Sorry, this is a subject I'm sore about... mostly because most people in CS that I know are DEFINITELY arrogant about what it takes to know as much as they do (which is, a combination of brains, effort/dedication, and fortunate living)...
/. that got posted after this). I already did an internship (for free) for a major media company for a whole summer, and since then the only decent job I've gotten was delivering chicken. I'm too focused on school (as I do struggle a lot with keeping focused and organized, as opposed to understanding or learning anything) to become distracted with a professional job DURING school, I have inconvenient circumstances that have prevented me from finding a decent internship in my home area for the past few years (quitting school nor permanently choosing to live near school are acceptable choices to me), and AFAIK this school has no co-op opportunities. Furthermore, from what I know of the tech industry and tech jobs, it's all unappealing enough to turn me off entirely, no matter how skilled or interested I am in the material. 70 hour workweeks, cubicles, and flourescent lights are all horrifying to me. The point? It'll be a sorely missed $80k I spent on college, even though that sheepskin will probably help me out wherever I go.
I do agree, mostly. My nitpicks (and they are minor) are:
Between Pell grants and working through college, neither of these ways are easy, guaranteed ways to get the money to make it through a good CS program. I can't speak for Pell grants other than I know a lot of PRISONERS get them here, but I do know that pulling off a full-time job before/during college requires a lot of stamina. Again, easier said than done.
Also, internship/co-op programs are getting very competitive... to the point where it's like trying to get into an Ivy League school. Especially for internships, since companies are not interested in employing a programmer for just 3 summer months. It's much easier to score a f/t job outside of school or training, yet much harder to keep up with both school and a f/t job at the same time.
-UNNECESSARY RANT-
I suppose, in the end, I'm speaking out of jealousy. Right now I'm taking a full load senior year at my university, looking to graduate in May, and I'll be happy to be out of CS forever once I get my degree. I've seen none of the riches, fame, or opportunities that they speak of in the news a lot (see the other NYT article on
-END RANT-
Anyway, yes it is possible for a lot of people to afford college in the US, but there are no guarantees... and hard work does not equal success all the time. And remember the main topic of this discussion... that if these companies need tech workers so badly, why aren't they training them and hiring them from THIS country?
To your credit, they do hire lots of people without college degrees, and it is possible to just take it the long way around (although that's admittedly very difficult to pull off, wouldn't you agree) to get the college degree... but my personal bias is that it's bad enough to spend 4 years and $80k schooling for a field I won't want to work for... but even worse to have a job you don't want AND a degree you don't need, and to spend 8 years and $80k doing both at the same time.
I dunno. Perhaps CS programs just suck lately.
This is such a crock! I'm sure companies will go through the whole process of H-1B AND pay them the same rate as a US programmer instead of hiring a US programmer. Because we all know that companies don't care about labor costs. (bzzzz, wrong answer)
Hmmmm.... (checks salary)... (checks visa stamp in passport)... (checks bonuses)... (checks 1040 form)... I would appear to get paid more than most US programmers.
Guess they don't care.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Oh, shut up, mr. troll expert. Why do you assume I'm trying to troll? Now go away.
I assure you, when I move to the United States, it will be with the goal (and responsibility) of Citizenship in mind; not
coming in, taking advantage of and culturally diluting the American way of life.
We just imported a bunch of Canadians where I work (company closed their office) - and we're all pronouncing "about" like "aboot" now! Damn Canadians! At least they're learning to surf now.
Jedi Vacquero: We don't need to show you any steenkin' boches!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
And why is there a shortage of people with experience--it's the old saw of not being able to get a job without a experience and not being able to get experience without a job.
If you had read my post you would have realized I said competence and not experience. I've interned at two companies the past two years and made a decent amount of money and I am still in college (i.e. I have less than 6 months of work experience), this didn't stop me from being able to turn down internship offers from Intel.
Most of my friends who have guaranteed offers from the companies they interned with also have little or no work experience besides the classes they've taken and stuff they've done in their free time.
The problem is that a lot of people believe that once they've learned one technology that they've earned a right to stop learning. Frankly this is B.S.. I learned Java a year ago and mostly from the Internet and was working a well paid job this summer writing Java code. While at this job I picked up Perl and now have reasonable experience with it. The job market is currently tight enough for self-motivated people to gain jobs without needing years of experience as long as ythe have ability.
Not strictly accurate. The government (at the time) wanted to decrease unemployment amongst the young, and to be seen to be "doing something", so they made the decision to convert the polytechnics into universities. I'm not sure how to map this directly onto US education concepts, but the basic difference is that a university is an academic institution that can award its own degrees, whereas a polytechnic was more vocational, and franchised degree programmes from external authorities.
So what we ended up with is a system in which degrees from traditional universities (Oxford, Cambridge, London, a few others) have retained their elite status (as they have the resources and reputation to be very selective in admission and rigourous in examinations) and the ex-polys offering courses in "media studies" or "art history" or other vaguely-defined subjects.
Because it was so easy to get into a "university", and because education is (quite rightly) preceived as valuable, there was a huge influx of people, but the quality of the average graduate plummeted. Despite their reputation, people of ability from *all* backgrounds have always been able to get into some of the elite UK colleges, which are meritocratic in the extreme (for example, UCL) with others such as Durham admitting people based on their social background.
As the student population increased, the cost of supporting them while studying went up, also more people weren't working or paying taxes, and of those people, a smaller overall percentage of graduates were able to enter the workforce in graduate-level roles, because rather than studying engineering or whatever (UK Bachelors degrees are typically more difficult than US ones, but fewer UK grads take a Masters, so I guess it balances out) they had studied things that weren't relevant to industry.
Given this, it makes a good deal of sense to adopt the US system, where people can study whatever they please, so long as they pay for it themselves. The only economically viable alternative would be to shut all the ex-polys, and return a university education to only the most academically able. A third possibility is of course an additional tax on graduates, but the Labour government (currently in power, and responsible for dismantling the grant system and introducing tuition fees) remember the last time the UK suffered a "brain drain" under their rule.
(I completed a Mechanical Engineering degree in the UK, and worked part time during it).
Well, this is a crock.
First, its 'USA', not 'USia'--or are you saying that the phrase "of America" should be abbreviated "ia", and perhaps not 'oA'? (Note the abbreviation "USofA" or "USoA" have been used in the past in liew of "USA" by people trying to make the same assertion you are making.) And by abbreviating "America" with a lower-case 'a', are you suggesting that "America" the landmass is somehow "inferior?"
Second, given the history of the name "United States of America", using the term "American" to refer to a citizen of the United States is not unreasonable. Prior to the US Civil War, the US was known as "these united States of America". (Note capitalization--or lack thereof, with the "united".) The federal government governing the various united States located in America really didn't have a name--it was refered to as a matter of course either as the Federal Government, or by an apropos description: "these various united states of America."
The term "American", thus, is derived from the fact that citizens of the various states (who are refered to first and foremost as members of their local state--so, for example, I'm a Californian) also happen to live in North America.
Of course things changed after the Civil War. Canadians and Mexicans refer to themselves as such in the same way that Oregonians and Californians do. But the term "American", used commonly to refer to a citizen of the United States (note the "the" preceeding "United") stuck, in part because we still don't really have a name for our Federal Government--just a working description which we capitalize differently.
Just as soon as we come up with a real name for our country, I'm sure the term "American" will be dropped in liew of the new name...
So let's see. He pays taxes, so he is helping to build France. Of course unemployment in France is not 0% so there are a number of French citizens who are contributing less to building up France than this immigrant is.
So by this logic, as "the people who have built up their country have the right to decide", that means that France should disenfranchise the unemployed and give voting rights to working immigrants who pay taxes. Right?
I'm not saying that immigrants should automatically be granted voting rights and citizens who don't work should be disenfranchised. What I am saying is that this notion that "taxpayers built France", and thus immigrants who pay taxes shouldn't have any say is illogical as hell.
I'd hire you. The reason is that the word Banyan means something to me. Most HR flunkies can't say the same thing. That is why companies need to get a clue and start having technically informed people contribute to the hiring process. It is not a fun job but programmers, particularly tech leads, should sift through resumes an hour a week or month as well as interview prospects. (Or better yet get a decent CTO to help hire.) If not that, HR reps should be instructed to speak with a seasoned techie before they discard resumes with acronyms and names they don't recognize as well as go into interviews with a list of questions prepared by techies. If you left hiring up to HR, Zimmerman couldn't get a job in internet security.
$2200 a semester? Do they have transfer papers on the web? :)
See my other two replies to the replies for this message and see me being idiotically apolegetic. (the original act, not the apologies, are the idiotic part) Although what you did for college requires a lot of dedication, it makes a CS degree look very possible with zero funding.
That said, when I was 18, I wouldn't have been able to handle that kind of responsibility. Then again, having the money for a high-priced college got me out of that problem. And one would argue greatly over which is preferrable - a college education, or a solid brain with the ability to maturely handle a lot of responsibility. (usually the second isn't necessarily included with the first)
I doubt that's the case, though it might be what you're told.
I'm in a hiring and firing position myself, and when I have to make the tough choices, it's based simply on who fits in best around the workplace.
Literally, I once kept one guy because the other guy didn't go to company picnics. They were both equally qualified and had similar tenure; the difference was that the guy who went to company picnics had a better attitude about both the company and his co-workers. Going to company parties and stuff is very often symbolic of someone who both likes the company and the people that they spend 40+ hours a week with.
I say that if there are national or emigrant citizens that can do the job (or are willing to learn), they should get hired first.As a Canadian citizen who yearns to emigrate to the United States, I agree fully with you. This is great problem with Canada, and it is symptomatic of one of the many problems that makes me fed up with sending 50%+ of my income to Ottawa with nothing to show in return for my tax monies invested.
However, I think I may be accused of being a little bit more moderate than you are:
If there are more jobs, fine hire foreigners. But don't put a citizen in the unemployment line so you can hire a foreigner, that costing the nation more in the end (unemployment, welfare, low moral, crime...) even if your company sees a short term gain.Not true. The population of the United States or Canada isn't growing fast enough on its own to maintain the same rate of economic growth as we're used to. Therefore, immigrants are necessary to be new employees and therefore new consumers.
Immigrants start 18% of all new businesses in Canada; I'm sure the numbers are similar in the US. They're also more likely to attend post-secondary education.
My problem with immigration is the quality of the immigrants that Canada is allowing in. First off, I know a husband and wife pair who are both British doctors, and they can't immigrate to Canada, because they're not from a "downtrodden" enough country. Canada currently has a shortage of medical professionals (mostly because they complete school, subsidized by the government, then immediately head off to the warmer, freer and greener pastures south of the border). The immigrants that Canada lets in - in fact, embraces with open arms and settlement bonuses ($$) are from all-nature of third-world lands with no employable skills or capability in either of Canada's official languages. Eventually, they get jobs as gas station attendants, hotel chambermaids or convenience store clerks. And yet a pair of British doctors can't get in.
I'm all for immigration, but I want them to learn the official languages of Canada. I want them to integrate into Canadian society. And I want the preference to be given to those with useable skills prior to those allowed in because they're from third-world countries.
I assure you, when I move to the United States, it will be with the goal (and responsibility) of Citizenship in mind; not coming in, taking advantage of and culturally diluting the American way of life.
Hiring foreign help should be a stop gap measure until the nation's population can catch up to the demand, NOT general practice to lower the bottom line or to keep Uncle Joe in the country.Without immigration, the economy will not grow, and recession will be the result. Unless everybody starts having lots and lots of children.
Just choose the immigrants wisely.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
At least where I went to school, the CS program had a horrible attrition rate for the faculty. We all major'ed in computer engineering instead (more emphasis on broad engineering topics, less on real application). I had to learn everything practical on my own...
If domestic companies keep up with this eventually the problem will not just be the not enough US Trained people but what will happen is that the US people will start to leave. Americans in general tend to think that we are immune to the sort of "Brain Drain" that other countries go through, because we're America and who wouldn't want to live/work here. With that attitude in mind companies pay their workers less with not as good benefits all while convincing their employees that they are better off for it.
"Freedom of speech has always been the abstract red-headed stepchild of the Constitution"
"Freedom of speech has always been the abstract red-headed stepchild of the Constitution"
-Suck
I did have one recruitment company ask me around a dozen questions over the telephone to test my knowledge. The recruitment was for a huge company, but the questions were just plain stupid.
Examples - "Whats the significance of memory address #F0000000". "Whats the difference between Windows and UNIX PCI cards". I failed the test, and therefore wasn't interviewed, because I had no idea what they were asking for, and clearly the person who had set the questions didn't know either. A pity, as I could have gone a long way at that place.
I also had a long discussion at one interview that indicated that the interviewer knew a bit about RAID and asked me a question on that, as he'd obviously read somethig on it recently. Oh dear! Another failed interview where I failed technically, due to knowing more than the interviewer.
Hey, this is turning into uk.jobs.d, where I join in the comunal moaning on a weekly basis. And I havn't yet mentioned the 100+ mile trip for an interview that lasted 10 seconds.
The rest of my team started to leave, so I had to also deal with all the other calls as well. Eventually I left as well. I've not fully recovered since.
The same thing is happening at the new place. I test trading systems, and the people who write the software ask me why the thing isn't working. Arrgghhh! I don't have the time to do anything else!
I just want a nice sysadmin role somewhere, where I'm in charge.
So regulate all that if you must regulate something. Put caps on specific countries if you must. Regulate contracting companies - they DO tend to abusive to EVERYONE, even americans. I have several co-workers that are contractors (they are americans). They cost a small fortune to the client, the contractor himself is not getting rich ($50,000) and they have no choice because they signed contracts that would force them to not work for a competing company for 2 years.
It sound that the problem you're describing are isolated to a certain type of business. Regulate them, but leave everyone else alone. Must everyone suffer because of a few? There are a lot of legitimate company that need H1Bs, and treat their worker (foreign or otherwise) just fine.
I was burning out on college and was offered a job from a company that was desperate to have me come on board (and later when I left them, they were even trying to re-recruit me to come back, and later when my former boss from there took another job, he tried to get me to come join him at his new company). Since then I've gone on to 2 jobs actually at major universities (still no degree) and now I am on my 6th job since college and making more than the CEO here is.
/. readers don't resemble that remark).
/. and include a link to your resume in your signature. Do similar elsewhere. Do that in addition to the traditional job search functions. Most companies either won't need your skills or won't know how to recognize them. But some do, and you want to match up with them. Don't worry about the others.
I learn on the job. I learn online. I learn on the ceramic throne. I would say that some college education is important and can be useful. Much of it was useful in working with people and understanding out other stuff works (for example I took a couple courses in EE and it helped me understand the scope of hardware problems I run into).
If you are the creative person who doesn't need college to be able to develop cool stuff, you might be good hiring material (especially with some experience). If you are a mindless drone with a CS degree, you might as well move along (but most
I think you could get a job at one of those companies. The problem is that the HR mill tends to get in the way. What I would recommend is posting well thought out and intelligent comments on
Knowledge growth in a company is what you make of it. Managers generally want stuff done; they are not going to "offer" it to you; They don't pay you to learn stuff; they want it to already be known. Find out what the technological edge your company is exploring is, and go learn more about it, and volunteer to do some extra stuff related to it. One day they just might have you do that.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
No it was not an as hominem...I never played a sport, neither did I ever state that I received any scholarships (just academic grants). I think you are falling for the big cases that you see on the news and TV.
"99.9% of the rest of the metriculating students?....lowering of standards?" *Sigh*
My school and thousands others have minimum high school GPA and SAT scores...anyone (including athletes) who wants to consider enrollment has to meet those standards.
"Who said no sports in higher education?"
You did, sir! And I quoteth. "The fact that it's actually a drain on our Education dollars removes any justification whatsoever."SOURCE
Good Day now...no more to hear here.
Sig it.
It is just too damn difficult for a working person to decide they want to become an engineer or programmer.
I just can't agree with this viewpoint. While it's true that there are some courses in the typical CS/IS curriculum that end up weeding out potential candidates from the program, it's not fair to blame the program for demanding excellence from it's students.
If you're working your way through school, it's going to take longer; that's just the way it is. If you've got a hard course, you can take a lighter load that semester to compensate.
A C++ class that has 20 hours per week of work does sound a bit excessive, but even so, it's going to produce students who are well versed in the use of the language.
Dedicated students should be rewarded with better grades. In my own experience, I worked full time, and went to school for about 12 hours a week (4 courses). I spent every night during the week studying and half of my weekend (every weekend) doing schoolwork. You get out what you put into your education. It's unfortunate that those of us who have to pay for it ourselves are at a slight disadvantage, but the hard work does pay off.
(Further diatribe omitted to save bandwidth.)
Perhaps I am a moron; however, your reply to my posting did absolutely nothing to convince me that you're right and I'm wrong.
I'm not sure where Indian chip fab people come into things. Where, in my original posting, did it refer to them?
Your complete and utter lack of any ability to divide your thoughts into separate and distinct paragraphs makes me question, in approximate order, your intelligence, the clarity of your thought processes and finally your capability with the English language.
Perhaps you replied to the wrong message?
Ignore my brilliance only at your own peril.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Heheh... Well, my native accent is an Ottawa-area accent, so I sound just like Peter Jennings.
I spend a lot of time in southeastern Michigan and Western New York since I have large numbers of friends in both those places. Since I hate looking (or sounding) like a tourist wherever I go, I've adopted the general "midwestern" accent to the point that people I meet from there are surprised to find out that I'm from the Toronto area.
It makes things so much better in restaurants, especially:
Q: What's the difference between a Canadian and a canoe?
A: A canoe tips.
Sounding Canadian can mean your soup is served cold.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
As you'd indicated earlier in your posting, you were from an Eastern European country.
For one thing, your command of the English language is excellent; you write better than most people for whom English is a first language.
However, what you say is only partially true. In your case, yes, this was the routine. Obviously, you came from one of the more "civilized" of the Eastern European countries: Poland or the Czech/Slovak republics, etc., as opposed to having been from someplace like Albania.
The majority of Canada's new immigrants last year were from China. Human rights issues in China really don't concern me beyond the fact that Canada shouldn't be trading with China if we find their government's behavior reprehensible. Instead, the Canada continues to trade with China, and rather than making the Chinese government bear the costs of their unacceptable human rights infractions, the Canadian government makes me bear them by allowing huge numbers of unqualified Chinese people in, and then giving most of them settlement bonuses. Now, I have no quarrels with the Chinese people: they're human beings, and they see opportunity that they wouldn't have in China. My problem is that more than 50% of my income goes to taxes to fund humanitarian projects that can better be operated in other ways.
Essentially, the Canadian government makes me pay for the ineptitude and abuses of the governments of countries that I really don't care about.
As a young Canadian taxpayer who sees my quality of life eroded by the day through stupid socialist policies that pander to everyone but the taxpayer, I'm enraged.
I'm forced to invest more than 50% of my earnings every pay cycle into the government at all levels, and I have nothing to show for it. I have bad roads, bad schools, bad water, bad health care and the biggest farce of a military this side of Iraq. But, it's reassuring to know that my government spends money instead on schizophrenic foreign policies ("China, you're bad, but we'll still buy stuff from you."), the CRTC which ensures that 40% of everything broadcast by a Canadian radio station is a Tragically Hip song that they've already played three times that day, and giving two airlines permission to become a monopoly and then being surprised when quality of service suffers.
My government couldn't find its own asshole with both hands and a flashlight. They don't represent me, they don't represent my views, they don't even provide the services that they claim to when they tax me. Now I know what it is to feel raped.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
great points!
Exactly; explain to the average Joe, why discovering the Higgs Boson is important, in a way that is more entertaining (=ad revenue generating) than a football game (to him), without being innacurate or blowing potential benefits out of proportion, or jumping the gun (to get the scoop) on the peer-review process.
And you begin to see the problem, and the fact that there's not really much anyone can do about it. (other than state-controlled press, and a scientist-controlled state).
Jedi Vacquero: We don't need to show you any steenkin' boches!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The other thing is, the "young kids" are MUCH more likely to stay until 9, or come in on Saturdays, to help a project stay on schedule (whose fault is the schedule, really?), while the balding guy has a family, other responsibilities, and NEEDS more money. Comes in at 9, leaves at 5. Never stays later. Never reads up on Java or C# on his own time in the evenings, he's working on his 69 Camaro in the garage, or reading to his kids.
What's more attractive to an employer?
Jedi Vacquero: We don't need to show you any steenkin' boches!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
American and French citizens have a right to decide immigration policy.
If that's what you were trying to say, you should have said that in the first place, instead of going off on this wierd-ass tangent about "taxpayers" and "building this country."
People WORKING in North America.... That mostly did not study there......
The United States attracts the best talent, both in faculty and in it's graduate schools. Those Nodel Laureates also provide a powerful incentive for the best to come here to study.
There's got to be more to the story than what you say.
No there doesn't. You just have to read what I said. The pertinent part was Associates in Electronic Engineering Technologies. That's a two year degree, versus your bachelor, a four year degree.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Oh my god, get over yourself.
you couldn't live in a shoebox eating shit in Silicon Valley for $50k/yr.
Jedi Vacquero: We don't need to show you any steenkin' boches!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I don't disagree with you; I am opposed to unions, however...
I've found that usenix/sage does not, in any way, tend to 'prefer' it's members. What do I get out of my usenix/sage membership? I get a common point of reference, and I get to know what other admins make, what issues they deal with, and it gives me some more solid ground to stand on when negotiating.
I do *not* expect them to 'go to bat' for me in any way at all (like unions do). I don't expect them to DO things for me, other than to continue to bring together admins from all over. In this way, we all share our experiences and knoweldge, without actually dictating who does what.
I don't disagree with you; I am opposed to unions, however...
I've found that usenix/sage does not, in any way, tend to 'prefer' it's members. What do I get out of my usenix/sage membership? I get a common point of reference, and I get to know what other admins make, what issues they deal with, and it gives me some more solid ground to stand on when negotiating.
I do *not* expect them to 'go to bat' for me in any way at all (like unions do). I don't expect them to DO things for me, other than to continue to bring together admins from all over. In this way, we all share our experiences and knoweldge, without actually dictating who does what.
One major problem with IT workers is that they simply don' tknow what is reasonable and what is not. They do not communicate enough with each other. THIS is what is needed. Not a labor union.
When I'm gray and balding, I would *expect* to be replaced if someone younger, who wants longer hours and will work for less can do my job!
By the time I'm gray and balding (well, I'm balding already..) I plan to be working in a job such that nobody without the experience I have could DO my job. So the only replacement I would fear is from an equal.
Replacement by younger workers is what happens when you become complacent and sit on your ass.
One thing you might ask yourself (and I may just get flamed here) is why are you older and not yet in a senior management role?
/. - do you REALLY think he is a floater because he hasn't advanced to senior management? Or is the answer that he has continued to contribute because he has found a job where he can do what he wants.
Consider yourself completely flamed.
I have never seen worse than what you have written here. The truth is that technical aptitude and interests determine who is suited for a senior management role, and who is not. A programmer may be one of the best in the world, yet be totally unsuited for a supervisory or management role. Look at Albert Einstein, for example - acknowledged as one of the greatest men of the century, but totally unsuited for any sort of management position. Forcing such people into management roles is one of the greatest sins that a company can commit. You, as an employer are serving your company poorly indeed if you really have these attitudes.
Fortunately there are more mature companies that recognize the value of true technical excellence, and the fact that it doesn't come at age 22. The IBM's and Xeroxes of the world have dual ladders where individuals can advance their career either through gaining technical or management skills. I am sure that once the technical field of computing matures they will see the advantage of what REAL companies do to keep their best and brightest working in the way that benefits both the comapany and the indvidual most.
Look at the recent interview with Brian Kernighan on
You (an I think a lot of the high-tech industry as well) have a LOT to learn when it comes to evaluating people.
I mean, face it, nothing in America compares to Grenoble or Cambridge in mathemathics, physics and such scientific stuff that has no potential revenue at all.
Total baloney. Over the last 30 years 80% of Nobel Prizes have been awarded to people working in North America.
There you go, looking at California, and calling that the USA.
First of all, if you have a problem with the food, it means you haven't tried. We consider ourselves a melting pot of all cultures, which means you can get food from just about any culture. You have to look though, the best restaruants are small mom and pop operations, and they don't have an advertising budget other then word of mouth. Often the store looks dirty, but the food is wonderful. There are many good Mexican restaruants around, even in Minnesota I can find a couple, but if you head to Taco Bell you won't find it, even though Taco bell is the dominate player in the Mexican resteraunt buisness.
Don't forget too that you can cook your own. Supermarkets in the US are unrivialed with anything in the world. Some do better then others, but for most of your staples (rice, flour, etc) they can't be beat. Small specialtiy stores (meat markets, etc) make up the difference where they exist. Learn to cook your own food! American cooks tend to love tinkering with the old world recipies, and the ingreadiants to do so are avaiable, if you just try.
unions are totally unnecessary. if you are working for a company that is abusing you then leave it and find a better job. that is your way of fighting back. it's not like there are 500 of us at most companies, and the closing of one office is going to ruin a whole town. i am from and still live in michigan, so i know all about the auto workers and blah blah blah..
anyway, no, unionizing is not necessary. if your job sucks, leave it and find one that doesn't.
that's what i did, now my biggest gripe with my job is i get bored a lot.
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
1. Theorem. For any given number of computers, placed in any organisation, there is always at least one rational reason for buying more. The same thing happens with IT workers. They are providing job for each other.
2. Nobody knows and there are no means to determine, how many IT workers (or any kind of other people or things) counry actually needs.
3. Many US companies attracting foreign workers suffers from overqualification. When they needs regular coder, they find out that they can hire analyst for the same money. But good analyst can be bad coder.
4. It is impossible to grow programmers in few months, but it is possible to print more dollars, and then force others to use it with help of army, navy and politics.
5. We in USSR had similar experience. We has had one of the best intelligence services in the world. So some stupid guys in government decided that it is easier to steal designs of electronic chips than to spend money on inventing them. They stole thousands of designs. But the whole industry could not evolve beyond 80286.
Just because someone has the requisite technical skills for IT does not mean that they have the people skills needed to manage others. In fact, my experience is that the majority do not. There are exceptions of course.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
NTLug's one of the largest LUGs in the world. In Dallas, you probably can throw a rock in any direction and hit a Linux user of some sort. Many don't think their home tinkering is applicable in the workforce- traditionally, it isn't. So, they usually don't mention it on their resume (I always do so. I know it- why can't I mention it? Just because I didn't have formal training in college or at a training firm? HMPH! I learned more outside of my classes than in them!) Combine that with the fact that Bynari probably didn't do an advertising blitz or go with any major placement agencies that would have gave the positions they were trying to fill exposure. Not that I blame them for that- it's ferociously expensive to do just that. I only find a problem when they complain that there's a lack of skilled Linux developers. If they were using this as an excuse for getting H1-B visa employees; I'd be livid about it.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
One of the reasons America has so many shortages of professionals is the high cost of education!
Lets compare...
A year in American University: 30,000+ US Dollars
A year in Australian University: 4,000 Australian Dollars (2,500 - 3000 US dollars)
Not only that, but here the government has a loan scheme, where they pay for you to goto University, and you pay them back later, NO INTEREST!
Factor in how fast the IT industory is expanding and ofcourse there are shortages!
BIG SHORTAGES!
Another factor is that accreditation.
I am very capable with most aspects of IT, yet because I have not yet finished my degree, I can't get a good job, yet, with these shortages, I should have no prob! Employers are also too stubborn!
Next take in the 'resistance' factor, where many businesses refuse to grow with the rest of the IT world, how many businesses do you know running Linux?? That atleast have a Linux computer in a dark corner so they can atleast SEE the tech before they reject it?? Not many!
There are so many factors contributing, and no-one will take any responsibility and no-one is trying to fix the problem.
Only this year have they finally started integrating the courses here with the industory, to help knockout the transition period (from student to employee) because the change is big!
- There is no work, there is no work...
- Damn, it worked for Neo!
-
I don't think you know exactly what an H1-B Visa means: -The "employee" can only work at the company sponsoring their visa -There is little to no chance that they can get citizenship any quicker than just applying themselves -A company can decide at any point that if they don't want the H1-B that they can send them back This has the effect that these people are not given any real opportunity and are scared to ask for raises etc, because they can be sent back to their country at any time with no job. That is why some people call it slave labor. I don't think anyone would complain if these people were granted citizenship and did not live in a state of fear. The new citizen would feel empowered enough to be paid his/her fair worth and would not be undercutting others out of fear.
For one thing, dope, it may have escaped your notice, but it is, in fact, possible to get a job and get rich without having gone to Oxford. Indeed, some people have achieved it without a university degree at all!
And on the other hand, you might want to do a web search on the subject of "alumni preferences" before you assume that having generations of forebears at the same school doesn't matter in the American meritocracy. Three words: George Dubya Bush.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Dartmouth College.
I went to grad school there.
As you say, whenever their football team beats Harvard, donations go up. (They make more in donations than tuition, and that is saying something.) The education provided is quite good, but behind the scenes people are aware which side the bread is buttered on.
Of course they are not very open about it. I understand that a lot of schools who are really known for their football teams are truly a lot worse. But coming from a Canadian school the contrast struck me.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Actually, Linus Torvalds is 30. His birthday is December 28, 1969.
--
Technology workers are... a group of working class people who are foolishly squandering their powerful position in the labor market by not unionizing.
Bullshit. If there is a labor shortage, then that means I can get up and leave if I'm being mistreated and have antoher job like *that*. <snaps fingers> Unions were necessary in the past; today they are nothing more than an old boy's club which drives up the prices on automobiles, aggravates our school systems and generally causes havoc wherever it goes. Unions (in their current form) should be illegal.
<sarcasm>We need more imported CEO's, too! You should see what the cost of labor is to get one. It is ridiculous, and an obvious sign that the specialized training required to be a CEO is just not being taught in schools. My own company has only 5 executive VP's out of its 15 employees. Our product just won't ship until we get more 'players' with leadership, moxie and backseat driving.</sarcasm>
Sarcasm aside, there are a few other things that the NYT didn't mention. First, the surplus they talk about was early on a product of the crash in biotech, who they lump as 'science guys'; later, it includes the recession, too (which hit middle management harder than any of us). Second, there is a big problem getting good coders.
They are treated terribly by their school peers and the media. In a previous job I occasionally dealt with reporters, and they are universally either Old Media snobs who see computer people as the dork stereotype, or New Media snobs who actively look down on 'mere techies' as mere servants (ignorant of the true nature of lit crit) who maintain the Internet they built.
And high schools do suck. They insist on mandating 4 years of gym and English. They move everyone in lock step through the grades, grading you more on attendence than performance. If you do try to learn, you are ridiculed by your fellow students. And if you learn past the all-important Lesson Plan, you are ridiculed by the teacher, too. Teachers are more worried with telling you what heroes they are and complaining about their pay than they are with actually teaching you something. I know this isn't true everywhere, but ask yourself what percentage of classes fit this stereotype. Mine is about 75-80%-- but your mileage may vary. Anything over 25% should be an emergency-- but the big argument right now is if anything needs to be done at all.
</rant>
so report the "gross misuse" to the INS and stop bitching. If the employer lied on the application he broke the law and will be punished accordingly.
I am sure there is misuse, just like there are people marrying americans just for the green card. So, if there is a problem with the H1B situation at all, it might be with the enforcement.
I for one, refuse to judge an entire program based on the few that abuse it...
I've got news for you. $50k is the median salary for a family in the U.S. That's right, if you have two children and earning $50k/year (sometimes that's with two earners together bring in that much, with latchkey kids who come home with no one to greet them or supervise them after school), you are very squarely in the middle class in the United States. Statistically, 50% of the families will be earning more than you, and 50% of the families will be earning less.
Comments about how $50,000 as a starting salary is "not enough for a US tech to survive" is the sort of things which cause the rest of the country to regard us as spoiled brats. And you know, perhaps they're right.
The New York Times did a case study of 4 "middle-class" families and how they worked to make ends meet, and what their dreams and aspirations were. It was entitled "The American Middle, Just Getting By", and it was published on August 1, 1999 (front page of section 3). I strongly recommend that techies either download it from the NY Times web page (for $2.50), or go to the library and look at it in the archives (which is better 'cause it's free and the NY Times archives doesn't have the color pictures that went with the story). It's guaranteed to give you a better perspective about how the rest of the country lives. Non U.S. techies I suspect will; also find it revealing.
OK, you might want to hire people with huge degrees but for what I saw, even as a Prof, I learnt most of my job on the fly, where it was the most challenging and valuable.
I had an interview with an American company, last year, andthe guys kept asking me theoretical questions which I *do* hate.
When working with another american company I got classified amongst the "experts" so, it just depends on who leads the interview as it works when you get interviewed by somebody who has the same culture as you but not in another case.
We are quite different, not especially better or worse than one another, you know ?
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
INS requires that the employer pays at least 90% of prevailing wages for the position. So there definetely is NO sweatshop conditions here. You are in no way required to live in employer-provided housing (in fact, I don't know any employer that even offers housing!) and as far as being kicked out of the country when the visa expire, that is the whole point of being a temporary non-immigrant worker isn't it? So I really don't know what your point is.
Are there contracting companies abusing the H1B laws? Probably. But they are breaking the law (feel free to report them) and in now way represent the majority of the H1B workers. I understand it is tempting to look at some abuse and say H1B is bad, but you should know better.
As far as shortage of IT workers, well, you can argue that there is no such thing. But I would reply to you that there is a shortage of qualified IT workers. That's right. This field is fast changing. You have to keep your skills up to date.
Lastly, I'll just say this: slashdot is not a US-only website. People from all around the world read this stuff. And the biggoted comments you and others have been writing on here are disgusting. Should I judge all americans based on your one comment (like you seem to judge all H1Bs based on a few)?
Here you have Slashdotters who get all outraged about the DMCA et al. yet are quite happy to trample on us poor filthy stinkin' rotten furrriners (as they say around here). What an incredible double-standard.
Firstly, I'm in the gunsights of most of this group. Not only am I just a young puke, but I'm a foreign one at that, in the USA, on a visa (L-1 not H1-B, but that's not the point).
In the company I work for, I do not see any of the problems that everyone alludes to. Firstly, my company MUST, by law, pay me the going rate. They cannot pay me less than an equivalent US worker. (In fact, with my International Service Allowance, I am paid more that my immediate co-workers with the same experience). Where I work, I have seen no evidence that foreigners are treated any different to their US-born (not US-indigenous - we only have ONE so-called "native Indian" working here, and she's only half-native) counterparts.
Some complaints about foreign workers are somewhat valid - I wish some of my fellow foreigners spoke better English - but I'm willing to give and take, work with them, and understand them. For someone who can understand C++, Perl, Java, Linux, and the Windoze NT GINA module, it really *isn't* that hard to do. I don't complain about it. After all: how many Americans speak foreign languages that well? I have met very few US citizens who can speak any foreign language (and Spanish would be useful down here). It's like the old joke:
What do you call someone who speaks many languages? Multilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks only one language? American!
What I see here is mainly thinly veiled prejudice. I dare any one of you people whineing about foreigners/young people (and even worse!) young foreigners to actually say all this to my face. In the anonymity of a Slashdot comment, it's easy to slag off your fellow HUMANS.
That's right -- the immigration process *is* dehumanizing. Here I am, being called an "alien". I don't in fact come from somewhere in the vicinity of Alioth, I come from planet Earth. Strip off the skin - whether it's white, yellow, black or brown - and we are all exactly the same underneath.
Can't people understand that the United States is *built* on immigration? The cultural mix is what made America what she is today. Friends back home - in fact, I used to say this myself - say that the US has no culture. In the time I've been here I have learned that the US has an incredibly rich culture. Most of the world is represented here!
I don't intend to stay in the US forever but it's certainly given me a new (and much more positive) opinion of people who immigrated to MY home country.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
OK, I'm a Canadian IT worker. I'm currently looking at job offers from the states. I've got 5 yrs of experience. The offers I'm getting start at about 80K, for companies with names like Electronic Arts, among others.
My observations:
1) The US is a great place to look for work *after* you have some cool experience to your name. You need to have done something if you want the good offers, because there's so many people that if you don't have the experience getting the interesting projects that intice other employers to give you the cash is hard.
2) They like to see someone who has been tinkering before they started getting paid for it. Geeks who were in it since they were 10 are more interesting then people who became geeks after reading about how much money there is in computers.
3) There are jobs out there for >30s, they're just different ones. I didn't get one of them and someone came to me afterwards and said "frankly we liked you, we thought you were great technically but we really want someone over 30". They're just different. More planning and leadership, less "what's the second byte in this TCP packet mean?".
4) It really helps to have a cool project under your belt. Something every second interviewee hasn't done.
I did this 2 yrs ago as well, best offer was 45k. What a difference a couple of years of experience makes.
Also it should be noted that it is much more of a pain in the butt for a US company to hire a forien (even Canadian) worker. I know I compete at a disadvantage vs US workers for this reason.
Just thoughts for what they're worth.
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Yes, unions do get higher wages and better working conditions for their members, that is absolutely true, and that's why you loved the union. But unions accomplish this feat by
Anticipating your response: no, the higher prices charged by union workers do not get made up in higher productivity. If that were true, we wouldn't need strikes and laws to protect unions because every employer would want to employ them, or the employers that did would win in a competitive market.
In an economy with unions, yes, try to get in one: it's legalized robbery, and you get to keep the loot. But in the voting booth, vote against them.
I have to dissagree.
First, draining India's best brains does not do much for India or the wages of those who stay there. Money sent back home can help, but nothing helps India more than people who work to improve things there first hand.
Second, everyone should look after their best interests without infringing on the rights of others. Companies are importing these people as SLAVE LABOR. They noticed that they can press them into situations that violate US labor laws out of fear of deportation. This should not be tollerated.
Third, people notice when they are steped on. Garbage in Garbage out. You don't think these folks really give a damn about their oppressors, do you?
That said, unions do suck. Enforcement of current laws should be adequate.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The H1-B need is one of the biggest frauds perpetuated by corporate America.
I'm not questioning a shortage of IT workers with specific skills, what I question is the desire of Corporate America to supply itself with guest workers.
One of the PRIMARY principals of the capitalist economic model is supply and demand. When demand is high and supplies shrink, COST is supposed to increase. In other words, if business decides that computer skills are important and the pool of skilled workers shrinks, the COST of those workers is supposed to increase until the wages paid for those workers is high enough to attract more workers into the field.
Unfortunately our friends on Wall Street only want to play the capitalism game with their customers, and not with their suppliers. Instead of pushing wages higher, offering paid training to non-IT workers interested in a high-wage job or other things that involve dollar costs they've decided to skip capitalism and instead import guest workers.
Meanwhile, they're extremely eager to get Congress to enact all kinds of trade restrictions the MINUTE foreign businesses want to export products or services to the US or they start to hurt local profit margins.
If US businesses want more computer workers and they're so important to their business processes, THEN TREAT THEM THAT WAY. Pay huge salaries. Bonuses. Stock Options. Cars. Window Offices. Secretaries. Free training programs to get "obsolete" IT workers or even other intelligent people into the IT field and up to speed on the tech that their business needs.
In other words, throw money and prestige at IT people the SAME WAY YOU'VE BEEN DOING IT FOR MARKETING DROIDS FOR YEARS! Part of the problem is that many businesses are controlled by marketing dorks who think that marketing is the most important thing in the whole world and that they need to protect their own. Unfortunately the business world has decided that technology is also critical, and they need to start sharing the wealth/power/privilege with the IT class.
The social problems with immigration I think are also great. If you move US workers into high-paid IT jobs you move US workers out of less-well-paid jobs, which creates demand and opporunity for people working further down on the food chain. In other words, you end up creating opportunity for the underemployed and underprivileged.
By allowing immigrants to take skilled jobs you prevent that opportunity movement, AND you create opportunities for the new workers to become permanent residents, who then bring in family members who compete for low-skilled jobs with the same people who would have otherwise move up.
Are you serious? "Hard Working Americans", with the exception of the Native Americans that my rather dishonorable and shameful ancestors here hunted down, are all descended from IMMIGRANTS. Yep, every last one of us. (again, except the N.A.s) Do you remember hearing about America "The Melting Pot" in grade school? Or how about the statue of Liberty-- "Bring us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses" (please forgive me if I misquote!). That is how this country is built. As an american, I say let 'em all in, dammit! Anybody who wants in! Make this country really FREE again! And let it work the other way, too-- because with all the stupid laws here, I'm thinking about leaving.
I may be a descendant of a lot of conquering buttheads, but I am most certainly descended from immigrant stock. And so are you. (Assuming you're not a native american)
I know for a fact that many companies do not use the H1-B correctly. Just because the INS "requires" proper compensation, doesn't mean it happens. Several jobs back, I had an employer that was trading stock options for decent salaries- and it looked like a good deal, up until they blew their IPO all to hell. This company also had several H1-B visa employees. I don't think all of them had stock options (though they were appropriately entitled to them...). One of my good friends left as soon as he had his green card to work in a better work environment for dramatically more pay. Don't believe everything that the people are telling you about it. There's no real shortage of workers- just that the companies whining about a shortage have unrealistic expectations (Such as number of years of experience that imply a lack of understanding of how long something has been in existance, etc.) and can't fill the positions because of the same.
I'm not against H1-B, only it's gross misuse- which, is what is going on here!
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Recently I realised that at 30, I was quickly turning into an "older worker". sometimes in the bid to save money, the older workers are looked upon as a drag on the budget. they take more vacation, more insurance, more pay, and generaly don't take as much crap as younger workers looking to make a good impression. Anyone who works in a large corporation knows that skill set is not a top priority for upper management. Not having those skills themselves makes them un-qualified to recognise ability in someone else. why not fire the 10yr vet, before he can retire, and hire some fresh faced MCSE out of school, at half the pay, then find out 6 months later that he is full of shit. It happens. Believe it. Keeping your skills curent is not that hard, but the level of ass kissing required to maintain your position, not to mention climb, is unbearable.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
The West Coast median salary for experienced software engineers was $71,100 in 1999, up only 10 percent (in constant dollars) from 1990. This pay growth of about 1 percent a year suggests no labor shortage.
I don't think that suggest that there are not much "imported" workers. I mean, lets face it, I live in Canada and I am making MUCH less money than that. And that's withouth counting that I actually make Canadian $$ as opposed to US$$.
That's how the US based company can bring outsiders working for them. So I don't think that this argument stands.
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear"
Speaking as someone who was on a H1-B for about a month (until my green card came through):
Yes, the minimum salary specified by the INS for a particular position is quite low, and companies are happy to pay that. But the company that sponsored my H1B paid everyone like shit, and that didn't change until I quit.
However, my current employer has more H1B workers than my previous employer (I was the only one) and salaries here are much higher for everyone. Remember that we foreigners (at least the H1B candidates) aren't idiots, and we can tell the difference between an H1B sponsor offering 40k and an H1B sponsor offering 70k as well as any red-blooded American. Result: companies that pay better get first pick of the H1B candidates, just like they do for US residents.
--
--
E_NOSIG
Oh I agree completely. However it was made clear that this is in fact TRUE for ALL institutions, a point that I disagreed with.
I'm not sure about your "real focus" point on education. You have to ask the question of the type of press involved. If an institution develops a new process of engineering and publishes a paper on it, why would the national press be interested in it? Only scientific circles give a damn abou it. If it is trully revolutionary, you can be sure that the college's PR dept will DEFINETLY tout its own horn. My college for instance had a huge sports program, that brought millions into the school. Its the entertainment. Many students complained about the budget but failed to read of the press releases put out by the school and on their website. What students/the community did not see where the numerous talk shows/books/papers/documentaries that their professors wrote/starred on. Its true, that maybe sports should not have all the limelight, however it is what brings the dough in.
Sig it.
Amen! You described my situation perfectly. It must be just a case of bad timing.
/. drone away about "you over 30 guys should quit bitching and keep up with the technology". <crotchety grandpa mode> I have Forgotten more languages and technologies than you will ever learn, Sonny </crotchety grandpa mode>
God knows I am getting REALLY tired of hearing some of the younger folks on
The ugly truth for many in the over 30 tech crowd is that the things that should make us very valuable to employers are driving them away: experience with learning new technologies, many successful and failed projects under our belt (never underestimate the educational value of a failure), a history with the technology, a love of technology apart from (or in spite of) the payoff, and a keen sense of what will and will not work.
Why they don't like us:
- we tell them their half-assed ideas really ARE half-assed and cite specific historical examples to back it up
- we do value our families and "off" time. Why the heck else are we working? To line a CEO's pocket and to get that ever so infrequent "attaboy"?
- we love the technology and have been into it since before it was "cool" to be a techie. We were the weirdos they couldn't understand and couldn't get along with in high school, and still can't.
- we do complain when we find out that some kid fresh out of a tech school, with no real problem solving skills, no real people skills, no real understanding of the foundations of the technology, and no knowledge of the problem domain come in and make MORE than we do!
I could go on and on, but just read the other "hey we are over 30" posts and you will get the idea. The above poster got it right: for most of us older tech worker the biggest problem is our timing; we were born on the wrong side of the boom... the boom we helped create.
Sigh!
IV
"These laws they're passing won't even compile anymore, let alone execute." - anon
Nope. H1-B's are not about immigration - they are about supplying corps with lots of young, underpaid workers, and keeping programming salaries down, too. I'm all for immigration, but H1-B's don't keep the "talent" (I put talent in quotes because I've worked with a few H1-B's in my day, and I was underwhelmed), they supply training for other countries such as India, and then send 'em back to their country in a few years. I'm all for PERMANENT immigration, but that temp shit has got to go. Those folks are holding down your salary and my salary, and then, when the corps have used them up, they get sent back, and then they will be begging for more H1-B's. If the corps weren't such pieces of shit, they'd be asking for EXTENSIONS to the H1-Bs that are here, or giving out green cards to those that are here...but no, see, the H1-B's that are nearing their end of term are wising up, and asking for more pay, etc...the corps want new, fresh, naive, H1-B's! The USA was built on immigration, not temp workers...if you bring people here to work, they ought to be given the opportunity to stay here, I say. The current system is about screwing both the U.S. citizen and the foreign national and the corps reaping all the benefit.
Most US schools are quite a bit cheaper than 30K per year. Especially, if one starts at a junior college and transfers to a four year university. When I was at Wright State University (back in 1990), the cost was US $90 per credit hour, which makes 3 quarters of 18 credit hours something like 5k (books and dorm not included). However cheap that might be, I dropped out and only finished a two year degree from Sinclair Community College where the tuition for in county residents was $30 per credit hour.
Typically only private schools charge those figures over 10k. Also, most (not all) of the big name schools in the states are state universities which means that residents of that state will pay little for the education while folks from other states will pay through the nose, so in those instances you might have someone paying big bucks for a sheep-skin, but when you consider they could have moved to the state, worked for a year to get residence status and saved tens of thousands, I'm not very sympathetic.
The H-1B (and more recently abused J-1) were not
meant to be immigration channels, although
both employers and employees are
using about 90% of them as such. This leads to
abuses of immigrants, employers, and competing
Americans all around. Recognize reality,
and treat it appropiately.
Try instead: ...but a shortage of inexpensive IT workers.
You're right about that, but that's just because all the incompetent IT workers demand too much money, and are actually paid too much money thanks to incompetent management (which there is also a shortage of, as mentioned in another post).
vr
When I look at people like Linus Torvalds and Abigail (Perl programmer) I am reminded that what built the USA was the willingness to accept the best and brightest from everywhere else.
Now here is my proposal:
Before people say I am crazy, think about it. Under this plan hiring an immigrant costs more. You have to pay a salary that competes with other employers, and you have to pay immigration fees as well as a sunk cost.
Your willingness to pay is sufficient proof that the person is good and you truly cannot be fill it with an American. As long as jobs go begging, the US is willing to skim the cream of the crop. Very little bureaucracy required. It just works...
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
$50K isn't that great if you have to live in an area with a high cost of living, which happens to be where many of the tech jobs are. I could make substantially more money in New York City or Silicon Valley, but my standard of living would decrease.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
H-1B visas are... a way to create a class of workers who don't have the same constitutional rights (or what's left of them) as the average American citizen and will be beholden to the companies that hire them not only for their job but for their continued residence in the US.
Before I start I guess I should proclaim that I am a student on an F-1 visa and if I do end up wotking here it will be on an H-1B visa.
Now here goes. There are several indicators that there is a labor shortage in IT for competent developers.
- There is a perception that the IT pool of workers has increased but this is primarily due to the fact that a ever since the 'net boom there has been an increasing pool of unskilled/semi-skilled workers (HTML jockeys, Javascript whizzes, SQL lords with no DBA knowledge, Visual Basic dukes) while the supply of
- real developers has remained stagnant or dropped. Skim the resumes on Monster.com or Geekfinder or any of those other sites and the amount of people with the aforementioned trivial skills is large but those with experience in writing C/C++/Java, DBAing Oracle/DB2/Sybase, creating distributed components in COM/CORBA/EJB, etc is relatively small.
From my experience most of the foreigners being hired usually have M.Sc's,Ph.D's or years of experience doing serious development before being hired in the U.S. This means they usually make more money than the trivial skillset IT workers (HTML/Javascript kiddies) and this is beginning to create a xenophobic cult in the IT industry who feel they should unionize, save their precious jobs and get the foreigners out.By establishing common standards, a guild system could be of benefit to foreign and domestic workers, as well as the public at large and employers who are willing to pay for the excellent service they receive.
In principle this might be true. In practice this isn't how these things work. Unions and guilds tend to promote the self-interest of their current members. That self-interest lies in restricting the supply of workers.
You can see this in the ferocious opposition of Unions to immigration, free trade, and the consistent preference for measures that would restrict the supply of workers in their field. This is a big reason they support restrictive liscencing laws, many times unrelated to the actual job at hand. It's why they support minimum wage laws, to keep unskilled workers from competing for jobs.
An IT guild would probably work to restrict access to the IT field. If it were a strictly voluntary organization, I might support it, but the history of that sort of thing is clear. The AMA restricts the supply of doctors, for example. In the long run, it's bad for the industry, because it politicizes the workplace and makes things unnecessarily rigid. In principle a guild could be a good thing,but I don't think it would be in practice.
How can you take a nation seriously that provides college scholarships for people whose only talent is throwing a ball whilst wearing enough padding to keep them safe in the event of a car crash?
Yep, no one has ever gotten an academic scholarship in America. Ever. Nope. Never happened. Only football players.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
I guess I'm confused as to what the issue is with older "balding" workers having it so tough. Why would an employer want to fire his most experienced employees for a kid?
Why indeed! Yet they do, all the time. It's real simple - they can pay you less, so there's more in the kitty for the manager to take home. After all, if you can't do the job in the time allotted because it was optimistic by a factor of 3 you'll probably work all night. I'll say mangement didn't listen to our estimates and go home. Except in rare cases, you'll find that nice manager home in bed while you're still debugging his greatest project victory.
They can also pump you up with promises about the groovy new stuff you'll learn, projects you'll do etc., and not knowing any better you'll believe them. That hype becomes part of your pay. When you're around a bit longer, you realize how many of those promises are empty and stop working 60 hr weeks. They don't like older workers for the same reason the Army doesn't want 30 yr old recruits - the older guy will question their orders instead of blindly obey.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
I disagree with your claim that this is a non-sequitur. He might not be very detailed in his reasoning for his solution, but this is not a non sequitur. Non Sequiturs occur when writers fail to show clear connections between their premise (starting point) and conclusion. This has nothing to do with his solution to a given problem.
As I'm sure your aware Non sequitur literally means "it does not follow." It refers to a conclusion that does not grow logically from the evidence.
If he were to say that students in the US are not interested in becoming scientists and thus the us education system is the reason we have so few scientists, the I would agree that it is a Non sequitur. However I do not believe that is his premise.
[*] and Ross Perot wondered what that giant sucking sound was... let me tell you about that giant sucking sound - of my graduating class of 300 engineers, over 200 are in the US right now, either in grad school or employed and making thousands in worthless paper options. Life - don't talk to me about life.
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Hey, you went to the University of Minnesota too? No wonder I failed Calc twice.
>One thing that would definitly help is to have professors that can speak English worth a damn. A requirement to teach at an American University is a firm grasp of English and the ability to speak it coherently.
There *are* guidelines of what is expected of a professional engineer. In fact, there is an entire designation for it. It's called a Professional Engineer's license, and it's available from each state. The requirements are basically:
When you have completed all of this, you then get to stick the P.E. designation on your business cards.
This designation needs to create a field for software engineers, however. Right now, it doesn't really cover any fields (via testing) that have sprung up in the last 20 years.
Regards,
Stephen
The interests of foreign workers ARE irrelevant. If life in India or wherever is a low-wage hell, stay home and fix India.
More to the point, it'll benefit the rest of society because prices for IT services will be cheaper.
Hey! So would slavery, are you interested in that?
The economic crime here is the LABOR is supposed to be about supply and demand, like everything else. When the demand increases and the supply shrinks, prices go up. Cheating this by diluting the supply pool is of course the behavior we've come to expect from companies that also demand protective tarrifs when their profit margins are threatened by foreign products.
This malarky about keeping wages low is the most laughable argument I've ever heard - where I work, most H1-B holders make more than the US programmers, and all are paid $70k at a minimum - no one is living on Ramen in this biz folks.
Its pretty simple - if there is no shortage, why are Monster.com and Dice.com filled with unfilled posts? Either the older tech employees aren't interested in taking these jobs, or they aren't qualified. Either way, we need to go outside the US to fill these positions.
Oh, and before you piss all over Indians and other immigrants, remember that these folks are running half the silicon valley comapnies now - they aren't just at the bottom rung. Jobs for Americans (or whoever else is qualified) are being created by these people you are naively pissing all over.
Well speaking as somone who just got turned down for a job because they wanted someone over 30 (landed another job in the same unit though, because they liked my techincal chops) I find this hard to buy.
:)
Admitably the jobs you get over 30 are different, (more planning and social skills, less hitting head against computer keyboard, is this a *bad* thing?) but they are out there. If you're not getting them offered to you, maybe you should go take a course or two in planning/project mangment.
You don't get paper delivery jobs offred to you etiher you know
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On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Unions don't have to be corrupt, they are simply a way for people to group together for a common goal. There are good unions and bad unions, a union is just a political organization designed to serve a group of workers.
The leader's of the industries, in groups like the BSA, RIAA, MPAA certainly have no problem banding together for common goals, why should the worker's feel they are better served by not organizing?
In the American system, people are more powerful when they are organized into lobbies and special interest groups, and I've yet to see a way to change it. Even campaign finance reform can't alter these groups ability to influence the votes of their members. (I'm a political realist, campaign finance reform is probably not going to happen, anyway.)
A union is like a political party, whether it is good or bad depends on what kind of leaders are voted in. The right to have a union, like the right to be part of a political party, is a good thing. In fact, it is part of our constitutional freedom of assembly.
When the recording artists got the "work for hire" clause that the RIAA foisted on them repealed, they did it by unionizing, even if they didn't call it that. How will tech workers affect things like DMCA without organizing?
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
If memory serves me correctly, Linus is either 30 or 31.
Now, he was well under the age of thirty when he wrote the first Linux kernel....
My, how time flies....
Unions are a good thing if you belong to one. However if you are unemployed or a consumer they are the worst kind of evil. Every one is employable at the market wage. Unions destroy the market wage by artificially inflating it. Higher wages mean higher prices which hurts the consumer (read: non union workers). If you don't like your job, leave. If you don't make enough money, get another job or learn a new trade. I am 23 years old and I have had almost 20 jobs. Learning something new is easy. The last 10 jobs I've had have paid over $10 an hour the last 5 jobs have paid over $15 an hour and the job I have now pays $30 an hour.. in the next 6 months I'll double that. Being in a union is as bad as collecting welfare! When I worked in a paper mill for a while (non-union) the union guys were lazy, bitchy and ungrateful. Myself and 5 other non-union guys were threatened with bodily harm daily and worked harder than anyone else.
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What about kids who play sports? What are you going to do for them? "Oops, sorry. After High School, you have no hopes of continuing on your education...just join the footbal league".
Its great to generalize and say that schools should not be in the business, but its funny how none of the research points to ANY schools that live with sports and has a high academic standing. Balances between the two CAN and are made with many instiutions. Sure its easy to SAY "let's throw sports out the window." You cannot do it though. I should have been more clear...the alumni don't donate money to the school for the sports complexes etc...they donate it other NEW multi-million dollar chemistry buildings and psych buildings, BECAUSE they are still interested in maintaining/improving the school's tradition. It "corrupts the institutions???" How?
" Then, you have to show that the Alumni money would dry up without the sports angle when there's no reason to believe this whatsoever"
SURE there is! If I went to Virginia Tech and I had a blast, got well educated, graduated and got a successful job, I would be very fond of watching the team in all sports events. They have a pretty good football team and being within the spirit of the school, I would have gone to all their games. You would be proud to hear people/friends/business partners/ say "wow...looks like VA tech has a good team this year" (or the opposite). Regardless, they would know the school through the team and know the academic background of the school. If that school removed its funding, and sports fell through, the schools tradition of excellence would disappear in the eyes of the alumni. Sure they would continue their academic excellence, but they would become just another one of those tech schools. Sports can be VERY benefitial to a school...it keeps alumni and donors happy.
Sig it.
The article in question misses something key in my experience, both as a TA/lab assistant and an IT worker/manager
You can't "make" an IT person. You can't take some random smart person and teach them programming. It does not work that way. The truly good (programers, sysadmins, etc) have soemthing. They have an intrinsic grasp of how things work that cannot be taught in my experience. If you've ever taught programming you'll know what I mean. I was a TA for 2 years for a first year programming class. I could tell within 5 minutes after sitting down with someone in the lab for the first day weather they would excell or not. And it didn't matter how much time myself, the prof or anyone else spent with the student, if they didn't "get it", they weren't going to. We might be able to get them to a passing grade, but they would never be someone who could go out into the work force and be an independant worker. Some of these people I've since bumped into in the field and they are doing web page design with Front Page.
So it's not simply a matter of saying "oh gee, well we need to bring more people into first year computer science" there is a deeper personality issue. We need to encourage this personality trait. And frankly the people who have it *have* to use it. They are the people who did volenteer projects before it became profitable to be an IT worker.
For what it's worth, those are my thoughts.
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On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
After about 90 hours(at a 3.2 GPA, I didn't exactly flunk out) I took my first sysadmin job and eventually got into programming. I haven't gone back to finish my CS degree. From my experiences, I can see how our universities are contributing to the labor shortage. It is just too damn difficult for a working person to decide they want to become an engineer or programmer. And that's a shame because I think there are lots of people who only find this out later in life.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
- You should emphasize the words cheap here. Otherwise you almost flamebaited me.
A few points:Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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USia suffers from a strange dichotomy in that on one hand it has a lot of scientific research done there and a lot of Nobel prize winners, yet on the other hand it seems to produce fewer scientists per head than many other nations. If you look at Nobel prizes for USian scientists, how many of them were born and educated there, and how many were lured there by a higher wage?
The USian education system is geared more towards sports than education in many cases. How can you take a nation seriously that provides college scholarships for people whose only talent is throwing a ball whilst wearing enough padding to keep them safe in the event of a car crash? But it seems that colleges think that their importance is measured by the success of their football team rather than by the success of their graduates.
I think that USia needs a lot more H1-Bs to make up for this lack of homegrown talent. And indeed, as more and more people find that they don't want to work in an industry which demands they devote their life to their job, foreign labor will be the only way to get workers.
If you hadn't spent all that time having your head bashed about on the football field, you'd be able to do your own math.
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Unfortionatly, what they are looking for is cheap, experienced, freshoutacollege-but-an-expert, competent individuals. Unfortionatly, no matter what I do, I *cannot* make a buncha negative numbers add up to one no matter *WHAT* I do.. Hrm, maybee that imaginary number thing.. ;-P
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Dr. Norman Matloff's web site, giving a great deal of information and opinion on the matter, is here, at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.rea l.html.
I work in Investment Banking IT, and am within sight of the big 50 myself. My advise to anyone working in IT, no matter what your firms line of business is to diversify your skills.
Learn all you can about the business! I have twenty years experience as a Software Engineer, with firms ranging from AT&T Bell Labs to Dow Jones but even so I just finshed a Masters in Quantitative Finance.
Two years at night school sure sucked big time, but if my employer kicks me out the door tomorrow I'm not too worried about finding another job.
Adding a business side qualification to a track record in programming really helps strengthen your position. And when push comes to shove and bodies are flying out the door its all about setting yourself apart from the rest of the crowd.
Think in basic terms - how useful you are to your employer? How many hats you can wear? Are they all "cut from the same cloth" - that is, do you only have strong tech skills, but lack management, presentation or analytic skills?
In the end, no matter how good or shitty the economy, or how many H1B visas are being offered this year or next its all up to you.
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The visa issue has gotten way out of control, and only serves to undercut our nation's ability to train and improve upon its existing workforce.
The problem? Too many hiring managers and headhunters focus on keywords instead of skills such as the ABILITY to learn new languages and techniques. I was an HP3000 programmer who was lucky enough to find a job in an AS/400 shop because the manager realized that the job functions were similar, the business relationships (working with app users) were similar, and that learning a new OS and developing language skills was something I had already done in the past, so learning their system wouldn't be difficult.
Technical skills can be learned. The ability to work effectively within an organization, and the ability to learn new skills as they are needed, are just as important, if not more so, than x years of VB/C++/Java experience.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I had a thought:
What if the influx of programmers increases the total employment base of programmers, thus allowing companies to employ more programmers, at lower salaries, so that individual employees do not have to work such disgusting hours. Then the older programmers could stay in the field and still maintain a family lifestyle. Given the current economic boom, I think the salaries of programmers is somewhat inelastic, meaning that an increase in supply will not affect the salary in a direct proportion. Total salary across the industry rises, and college students see opportunities in an industry that has become a stable working environment. True, some people like the 80-hour work weeks in companies that pay little but offer stock options that could be worth nothing or millions, depending on the luck of the draw, but I suspect that as programming becomes a more mainstream profession, and loses some of its mystique as the public becomes more computer literate, that we might actually get an increased interest in the field by "normal" people who don't want to risk their house and their marriage on their career.
As with most economic theories, the timing is everything, so this could fail miserably, but I think there is some chance of this having a positive long-term effect. I just hope the experts looked at the details, instead of just bowing in to short-term demands from companies with a strong lobbying influence.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
My point, was that Dan Hayes is generalizing ALL US academic institutions. I don't think that that is appropriate. Sure Sports players get more recognition.
Think about why though.
Q.Who enjoy's sports?
A. Average Joe Sixpack
Q. Who covers the Sports that Joe likes?
A. National news agencies who need money from people like Joe.
Its a brutal circle but here is the way I see it. You have to ask about the type of news that is needed. School's use their sport's programs to get into the limelight, so people can see it is there. Everytime Notre Dame (for ex.) kicks some butt, someone out there will most likely want to be "cool" and purchase a Fightin Irish product. The school gets the money back from that little item.
Science is a different kind of news. It has to be generalized/glorified to the average person. If a paper is published about a new kind of engineering product that makes something easier to produce but does NOT affect the world's hunger problem, then it will stay amongst the scientific community. It is there, but it is harder to find. You're right...it is a societal quirk, but oh well. IMO, low-income/low-middle-income people don't care about science or its advances unless it better's their lives.
Q. "Who's popular or respected for being valedictorian?"
A. Ironically ours (at a VERY respected private school), later became a "Professional Wrestler.
Sig it.
This is the funniest thing I've seen this week. And I *am* an American and graduated from an American Football Factory... er... University.
But you have to consider the advantages that a unionized IT labor force would have. Perhaps union is to loaded a word, how about a professional giuld of IT workers.
They could impose hiring restrictions on who the companies could hire, no more hiring cheap foreign nationals to avoid paying for someone's experience.
They could make IT companies hire and/or keep older workers, no more getting turned out to field when you don't know the lastest language (even though you could learn it in a month).
They could give worker's a decent working day, nothing wrong with the occasional clock wrapper, but 70 hour weeks are insane and exploitive.
They could use a guild structure to offer an employment path that doesn't go through college, but instead focuses on on the job training, which many geeks prefer to dry textbook learning.
Something to think about, someday you may not want to work a 70 hour week, you may have a family, you may grey hair or be balding, do you want to be replaced by an undercutting youngster or foreigner?
My friend, you have obviously never worked a day of hard labor in your life.
I worked as a concrete layer for two years, after I dropped out of school. Being part of a Union, I was entitled to work everyday (or not, I got between 15 and 30 dollars an hour.. I didn't really HAVE to work everyday), be tought the ropes by people who were not only in the business for a long time, but were accomplished teachers. Also, I had the opportunity to go to conferences on advanced techniques (like coloring concrete, making it look like marble and other stones, patterning, generally artistic stuff) and meet new people all over the world.
Unions are a GOOD thing. They protect the employees and help the employers get good, qualified employees.
Next time, keep your trap shut when you don't know what the hell you are talking about.
Rami
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rJames.org - illustration
Workers with experience (regardless of age) are more valuable (and thus worth more money) at any position, including an entry level one. Any competent manager knows that. With experience (and just to piss off the kiddies, I'll be very explicit and say WORK experience) comes (for most) a wealth of knowledge and wisdom that doesn't translate to a resume.
The average 40 year old with 15 years of experience is worth more than the average 21 year old if their technical knowledge is equal. Problem is that the 40 yo probably knows his rights and can't be molded into a 70 hour week serf.
The fact is that in the US discrimination in hiring policies based on factors such as age, race, etc. is ILLEGAL, as are mandatory 70 hour work weeks. The point isn't well you can go get another job. Sure, we all can, there's always an unfortunate few who don't know better who'll fill the gap. The rest of us need to take a stand because they cannot.
My grandfather died at 59 from lung cancer, after working in coal mines for years. His union didn't take 30 minute smoke breaks. They worked long and hard for what wasn't much of a wage, even at the time. Most of us here spend what he earned at starbucks. That union fought to get the workers protection and health coverage because their jobs were killing workers. Strikes give the unions a bad image, but they are a necessary evil given the overwhelming evil embodied in large corporations.
Are we for corporations or against them? I know the union's stereotypes, and some are deserved, but if it's them or the corps., I'll take the unions.
I didn't say the person knew everything, clearly knowledge is an asset. I said someone who can "figure it out".
Let me give you an example: We had some new computers set up that needed to get out our (Microsoft) proxy server and check POP3 mail on the Internet. I heard a lot of talk over the wall about how they couldn't get it working--about 3 hours worth. When I went into the server room, I saw the tech rebooting the server and calling the consultant who set things up.
I went to one of the client machines: DNS server wrong, default gateway wrong, browser proxy settings wrong. Fixed those and we are good to go.
I'm just a programmer with only the most basic knowledge of networking, yet I fixed this problem in less than 10 minutes because I'm competent.
Having someone around who can answer all questions is an asset. Having people around who depend on that asset long-term is a liability. Especially so if the Answer Man is supposed to be, say, programming, but can't find time to do it between all the tech support calls.
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No I judge American employers, not employees of any nationality, stripe, citizenship or residency. I couldn't care less who does the work - really. H1B, Americans or mental patients hammering away randomly. The point is, if anyone wants to actually know, and stop taking offense at the facts, is that:
Many 'contractors' abuse or outright break the law. The fact that there is so much pressure to open the floodgates is a good indicator that the difference is much more than 90% and there is no enforcement. And why is that? because employers are making out like bandits and employees are scared of being booted. Remember, there are 10 guys waiting for everyone who is here.
Employers want something for nothing and see this as a way to get it.
Employers have absurdly unrealistic expectations because:
a They don't know what they're doing
b They are trying to compress the work of several people into the hiring of one
c They merely mouth the customers' statement of requirements w/o thinking if it's possible
d Do in fact discriminate against people not fresh out of school.
That's my point. Not that we should bar all or some H1B's - because again I couldn't care less who does the work if it's quality work. No - the point is that the justification that all of the suits parade up to Congress as reasons for expanding H1B are absolutely completely fucking bogus.
Did any of you people work in IT in the NY Metro Area say between 1984 & 1994? Well if you did you were one of the lucky ones because in that time 30,000 IT people lost their jobs or were 're-jobbed' at significantly lower salaries. Why do you think last year's total bill for Y2K was so high? Because all of those COBOL jocks went into Y2K remediation contracting at 3x what their employers felt was equitable to pay them.
Stop taking offence when someone points out that there is no real labor shortage. Because there isn't. There isn't unfulfilled demand for 347,000 tech jobs or whatever today's agreed upon statement is.
No No No.
There is a shortage of people willing to be treated like shit. There is a shortage of people who will stand up for their rights and tell an employer, 'well no really - it really sounds like a shitty offer no matter how many options you give me'. There is a shortage of people who will work under uncertain conditions.
Now sure, all of you can crow about; whining about skills about whatever the fuck you want. More power to you. IF you think that you will always get the best job or the best assignment and command whatever rate you whimsy up just because you feel you have the best skills you are delusional plain and simple. This is a generation of people who have seen nothing but boom times since they learned to jerk off and their response to everything is to pound their chest and scream about how fucking smart they are.
On the one hand you have a bunch of people trying to force the issue and get H1B opened up because they want the opportunity. Great. That's a noble goal and as a second generation child of immigrants I applaud.
On the other hand you have a bunch of people who place themselves at the top of the food chain and dare anyone to knock them off.
Now think about this very very carefully. Isn't that divide and conquer? Do you think employers aren't laughing their asses off looking at a very group of very highly paid people working with a much larger group of low paid people. Where's the risk to the employer? Well I'll tell you it's not with them. It's with you. And you. And you.
My ignorance here is the result of working at a major university for three years.
It shows - you can barely spell. Pity you didn't complete your education.
It's funny how many of the bigoted comments are coming from functionally illiterate people who are trying to keep the foreigners out. Somewhat proves a point about the shortage. Ironic, isn't it?
w/m
It has moreover been my experience that most hiring managers wouldn't know one of these people if they bit them on the ass. Not that that would particularly endear you to your interviewer mind you. And since they never invented a test for hacker nature, this situation will probably not improve.
So if you have hacker nature (And you know who you are,) the chances of you working on a team with anyone else who has hacker nature are pretty slim. The chances of you taking over from anyone who actually knew anything about programming are even slimmer. The chances that you're taking over from someone who was bluffing and bailed out before the shit hit the fan are pretty good.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
True, but that's just the common starting salary for techies. I've heard stories of people with only a 4-year MIT Undergraduate degree getting six-figure ($100,000+) salaries in Silicon Valley --- fresh out of school with no experience! People who complain that techies aren't getting paid enough don't get much sympathy from me, when compared against what the rest of the country is earning. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I'm very grateful that what I happen to love doing happens to be something which is in high demand, and so therefore I can command a somewhat higher salary than friends of mine who work just as hard, and who have more years of education than I, but whose vocation happens to be in music or theatre. Most musicians I know would be thrilled to earn as much as $50,000/year, even if they had to live in New York City. It's imporant to keep a sense of perspective in these things.
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.. but a shortage of competent IT workers.
This is actually a fairly simple issue. The lawyers and MBAs are waging war on the techies. Our society does not value technical work in the least, despite all the recent geek chic and all the lip service paid to technical work. That is why lawmakers have reduced it to the level of migrant fruit picking. There can be no labor shortages in America, because our economy is brutally efficient. If demand outstrips supply, price will rise, which will attract more supply. Obviously all engineering positions can be filled by Americans if corporations are willing to pay enough. But engineering salaries have risen to a STAGERRING AVERAGE $60,000/yr, so the government, all lawyers, will keep them uppity engineers in their place by replacing exensive american engineers with cheap foreign ones. And surprise surprise... smart young American college students see that the profession has been ghettoized and avoid it like the plague. The cycle begins anew.
The interesting aspect of our predicament is that engineers are such sheep to allow this to happen in the first place. Other professions, notably law and medicine, have achieved "guild status". For instance, health care costs are once again spiraling out of control (roughly 20%/yr right now). And yet the notion of importing 200,000 indian M.D.s (for $50,000/yr each) would seem laughable. Why? The answer is simple-- the AMA. Doctors pay into the AMA, and the AMA protects its members from the lawyers, who would otherwise replace the doctors with migrant fruit pickers, under pressure from the CEOs of health management conglomerates. Engineers have never been smart enough to handle the societal aspects of their profession.
This is not simply a financial issue. Many purists in slashdot-land will ignore my rant, preferring instead to concentrate on their craft. But the organizational issues surrounding the engineering career tend to destabilize the profession in our country. You notice that there are very few practicing software engineers in America over 40. Yet in my experience, the profession could dramatically benefit from more attention to experience and learned process, especially in the area of quality. American software, while supposedly innovative, is very low quality compared with other commercial engineering products (japanese cars, swiss watches, airplanes). I think that once the current mania surrounding "internet time" fades, much software engineering that currently takes place in America will instead move to countries that produce higher quality engineering products because engineering is accorded a guild status and people see it as a lifelong career, rather than a stepping stone to management like in America. Anyone interested in further exploring this subject might want to look at: http://www.programmersguild.org
of 24 yr olds with 15 yrs experience in a technology 3 yrs old & willing to move 3,000 miles away to work 90hrs/week to earn 67K @ a company with a 50-50 chance of being in business in 6 months! The truth is, is that as soon as they understand you're over 30 they start to cough and mumble about "well this probably isn't a real good fit for you..."
It's not about skills or availability. It's about power and control. It's about exporting your development risk and the hell with the people. It's about bringing a bunch of guys over from India, cramming them 10 to a house, paying them shit and kicking them out when the visa expires because at any payrate they're getting paid better here than there. So what if your code is shit. By then the "contractor" has moved on to another customer who's thrilled to get work done at apparently half the rate of anyone else's bid.
Being someone in the US on an H1-b... and also Indian... it is dissappointing to read the opinions of people on a site like slashdot. I agree that a lot of things mentioned against the H1-b program are true... but not in entirety.
... the IIT.. I know of the kind of salaries that are offered to certain groups of people. Salaries (we are talking 100k+) that suddenly turn the whole idea of CHEAP labor on its head. That is not to say that there aren't companies that don't hire people who can't communicate, program or think... and put them 10 in a room ... take away their passports ... the list goes on and on... But it is wrong to generalize. FYI Linus Torvalds (who I'm sure ranks amongst the Gods on slashdot) works on an H1-b.
... as it knew that it meant they would suffer losses. All this goes under the misunderstood term called "Globalisation of markets". Well why this hyposcrisy of goods market v/s labor market
... having worked in England for a few months ... I came to the realization that a lot of indians speak better english than the british and americans.
... and they need to be punished severely... to set precedents... They are the phoney companies that often go by the name of "consulting companies" (they are called "body shoppers" in india). They are the companies which get people on H1-b's then put 10 people in a house, make them sign phoney documents... take away passports ... prepare false resumes of people .... the list goes on. These are the people who need to be taught a lesson. They are the ones who misuse the H1-B program.
There are 2 sides to every fact presented so far...
1) US companies hire indians for cheap labor.
Yes... a lot of them do... BUT a lot of them don't. Coming from one of the best know Indian Universities (in the US)
2) It is sheer hypocrisy to argue that CHEAP LABOR is bad... For years the United States (and the G-8) has been forcing developing countries (called third world countries here) including India, into opening up their markets so that they could flood the indian markets with cheaper and better goods. Goods that the Indian public wanted but were too expensive coming from indian manufacturers and sometimes just not available. The local industry cried foul
I know one can't equate goods and people but I'm just making a point.
3) Amusing that someone said that Indians can't communicate in english... on the contrary
4) Workers on H1-B are tied to their employers for their visa! I'll agree that it is true for some of the immigrant workers, but not at all for the smart ones. One of the biggest concerns that companies sponsoring H1-b's have, is that the employee could find another job in the US and the company would have spent money on his visa. The H1-B is transferable, i.e. if I find another better paying company (which generally has no problem getting the H1-b transferred) then I'll move. So no employer can pay a good immigrant worker below industry rates and get away with it.
Well if everything is as I have said... what is the problem... well there are a lot of black sheep out there
I do hope that people of the US realise that immigrants are what built this country what it is. The reason the US is so powerful a nation is because the most ambitious, hard working people endured many hardships to come here and build this nation what it is over the centuries.
so don't live there. $50k is a VERY good in the midwest U.S. where I live, where 80K buys a very nice house. There are tech jobs everywhere. I work at a startup, with stock options, casual environment, exciting work, etc...
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
There should be almost no restrictions on people who immigrate to this country becoming citizens. My wife is Thai, the process we have had to go through to get her her temporary green card was a nightmare, and she still isn't a citizen.
So, I'm very much in favor of an increase in immigration and especially an increase in naturalization, I would just like to see it tied to the possibility of citizenship. (My wife's cousin is getting in on an H-1B herself.)
It is true that people (including people in unions) can be duped into believing that increased immigration is bad for workers. That doesn't mean unions are by their nature anti-immigrant, it simply means that propaganda has worked.
As an IT worker, I'm a bit tired of a lot of these obnoxious new laws that are passed, like the DMCA or UCITA, whereas tech workers seem powerless to influence the legal system. If tech workers organized, they could change that.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
I hate this argument that companies are making that they can't get enough IT workers in the US. Boo-Hoo! It's called supply and demand. If you want qualified individuals then you have to PAY for them. Wow, what a revelation!
It's like trying to get a new porche for the price of a Yugo.
IMO there are some legitimate needs for H1-b's but the need has been vastly overstated by HR people trying to get something for nothing.
(rant off)
.my sig is waiting for it's H1-b to be approved
The job market at the moment is such that a competent IT professional who feels they are being mistreated can find another job at higher pay in less than a month in most cases. I'm all for geek solidarity but if I feel exploited I won't need a union to get satisfaction. I'll just say "Here's the root password, good luck to you all!".
This is a bowel disruptor, and you are just full of shit. - Spider Jerusalem
Quoth Alioth:
Here I am, being called an "alien". I don't in fact come from somewhere in the vicinity of Alioth, I come from planet Earth. Strip off the skin - whether it's white, yellow, black or brown - and we are all exactly the same underneath.
To quote the Giant, 'you keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means.'
It appears we have yet another victim of the Hollywoodization of US culture.
BTW, I agree with all of your other points. Diversity is strength and the US has been built on the strength of immigrants ever since the first Europeans gave smallpox to the natives.
Oops, that's another discussion all together...
First I'd like to respond by saying:
HAHAHAHAHAHA!
"The USian education system is geared more towards sports than education in many cases"
Really Mr. Trollman? Name a case. You do not even LIVE in the US, and yet are proficient on its Educational system? Colleges cannot afford to just lay importance on sports teams. There's a little thing called US NEWS College Rankings that colleges strive for. If they don't make the grade and get a poor ranking, they will get a poor turnout, and thereby go out of business. Sports is only a way to attract money from Alumni. Trust me...been there, worked there. Its the money that allows the school to build buildings and support research.
This supposed shortage of labor is nothing but a mirage created by the industry. They know that most workers know how much their jobs are really worth, when foreign laborers really do not. This is merely a way to entice cheap foreign laborers over to the US. Nothing more and nothing less. One thing that the article did not mention, was the average starting salary of a foreign national VS. that of a seasoned US industry person.
TRollin Trollin Trollin...keep those comment's rollin...DUMBHIDEeeeeeeeee.
Sig it.
- - - - - - - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
From the US corporate point of view foreign workers are ideal; many come from countries where corruption is common place, so they are not likely to report it to the authorities if they see it. Even if they do report it - they can be deported before they could testify. A lot of US employers yearn for the days when it was legal to own slaves, and an emigrant on a work visa is as close as they can get; they'll work long hours without complaining - they're so afraid of losing their job they'll put up with anything the company does to them.
try this to skip the login
circa75.com
I agree. I left my home country to come to the U.S. because of human rights issues. It's the lack of some real basics that keep many countries screwed up: democracy, education for all, human rights. The people who might be able to help aren't given a chance because of corrupt governments (no democracy) who don't have to respect human rights in order to maintain power, and because of populations for the most part who don't know any better (no education). You mentioned India and China - both have populations in the billion range. The technically literate ones are few relative to the total population, they just seem numerous to countries with 1/3 the population, like the U.S. And you can't build a big tech industry without a thriving underlying economy to employ it.
The answer? Right now, there doesn't seem to be one. It's going to take multiple generations for some of these countries to sort themselves out.
A big gaping hole in the IT field that other fields have right is Internships. I believe them and push them, yah that 21 year old prodigy can setup a linux box in 42 minutes with ever service you may need and locked down but can he support something like AVS or some proprietary bank ssl links over weird older networks? Prolly not.
F /...
Internships are great, you give someone a Junior title (which seems to have been forgotten to exist)... hire them for a 3 to 6 month period. You don't pay them much, they work hard because they know they are going to end up with real world experience on the resume and a good reference. And hey if they internship goes great you hire them on for a good deal more money. Either way you both win.
How many Junior Unix Admin positions have you seen open recently? We always have some open where I work, its good for them and good for the company.
---
Solaris/FreeBSD/Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
A former colleague of mine was saying the same thing about Australia. Industry (mostly IBM, apparently) lobbied the government to allow more foreign workers in to address the supposed IT skills shortage. In actual fact, there are a large number of qualified native residents, but it's cheaper for large companies to employ foreign workers (who are prepared to accept signifiantly lower salaries) than it is to employ Australians. It's therefore in the industry's interest to exaggerate the skills shortage, as it enables them to lower their payroll costs. Unethical, yes, but it makes good business sense to the bean counters...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Also, what about the tremendous proliferation of job sites and other high-tech recruiting solutions since 1996? I'd like to get some stats on that. Are Monster, Techies, etc etc etc making a dent in the hiring process at all?
Can your IM do this?
One problem I have with this article is the fact that it is using 1996 data. People from that period know that even back in 1996, the economy wasn't that great and finding jobs was hard. Also, the idea back then was that the quick path to riches was through the old MBA route. The only people in CS back then were the people who really, really loved the field.
... they will grab anyone who can produce code. They have products they want to get to market but can't, because they don't have to people. Maybe Intel and Microsoft don't have as much of a problem but I can guarantee you that small companies here are hurting because of the shortage.
Things are so very different today. The MBA is out, tech is in. Enrollments are up I'm sure, because my own college is operating beyond normal capacity (lots of part-time instructors). All the money seekers are in CS, so 2000 data is very different form 1996. Starting salaries for many college graduates I know are 60k+. This is in contrast to 1997 (when I last graduated) where the lucky ones were the ones who got ~40k salaries.
From my own experience, finding good people here (Boston, USA) is tough, especially if you're a small company. I've worked with companies that had 50% vacancies because they couldn't find people. They aren't even trying to hire college graduates now
Sadest part is that they are looking for people with the 'older' skills. C, C++, HTML and basic HTTP understanding would often go far in some of these places. They are willing to train. There just aren't enough good people to go around.
I personally have had major employment difficulties over the past 2 years. I used to offer high end networking/troubleshooting for a Banyan reseller, and I was one of the best (if not the best) doing the job outside of Banyan in the UK. I had major UK companies renew significant support contracts with us just on my skills alone. Banyan's software was Unix based, so needed a lot of Unix skills.
The Banyan market collapsed (like Banyan themselves) and the company I was working for changed their tack. I left the place (for a well needed rest) and decided to look elsewhere.
In the following 2 years I've spent 9 months or more not working. No-one wants to know me, despite the fact I have the ability to learn. Is it just that I'm too old (over 30) or that my skills are not valid anymore?
One factor is that many of those doing the recruitment and interviewing shouldn't be doing so. I attended one interview with an operations section of a major company. I was interviewed by an utter moron. His only technical question was on how to count words in a file under Unix (pah!). The other questions were 'Have you heard of , where was a little used propriatory tool. The rejection letter stated I no Unix skills, despite the fact I had been working with the system for 10 years.
The recruitment agencies, who handle the majority of posts, are even worse. Most don't know their arse from their elbows.
That would be a disaster. I am not against immigration, but uncontrolled immigration would cause severe problems and result in a violent backlash against "foreigners". The United States already has enough problems with illegal immigration from Mexico. Not that I blame the Mexicans, the Mexican economy sucks and I would do the same thing if I was a Mexican.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The point is that the statistics that say that the median salary for computer programmers is $50K are misleading if a large proportion of the jobs are in areas with high costs of living. Salaries can be substantially lower for computer jobs in areas with an average cost of living.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
$50K in the silicon valley is the poverty line. Average rent in San Jose for a 2 bedroom is $2000 a month.
$2000*12 = $24000 a year.
Now, take taxes out of $50K/year (About $1500 a month net)
$3000*12 = $36000 a year.
That only leaves $12000 a year to survive on. A thousand dollars a month, extra. Now I know my bills are well over a thousand dollars a month, and I am single (soon to be married - love ya sweety) and have a car payment, and a motorcycle payment, and a cell phone and my bills amount to about $1500.
$50K a year is a bullshit job for a family of 4 in San Jose.
nerdfarm.org
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
I think the article is dead on. Case in point:
I saw a quote from someone at Bynari Inc. whining about how they couldn't find people with Linux skills in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. So I submitted a resume. Not too impressive, 2 year Computer Science degree, 2 years tech support, 2 years Unix administration (HP-UX, AIX, SCO), 3 years using Linux almost exclusively at home. The guy was complaining about having to train kids fresh out of high school, so I figured I would be a good catch.
I never heard back from them.
Now maybe I just write a shitty resumé, but the way the guy was talking they were hiring anyone who had even heard of Unix.
I wonder how many people they have working on visas right now...
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
Hey Washington. Slavery ended 150 years ago. Let's not start it up again. End this program.
I think you are mistaken. First it's really the Labor Dept that determines all this not INS - but that's just a side note because I made the same mistake in my original post.
I don't know how the numbers are computed, but they are specific to where you live. For example, I live close to Philadelphia but my employer is based in Pittsburgh (only a few hundred miles apart) - they applied with both labor departments and the numbers were different (I obviously made more than both).
While I don't remember exactly what the number was, I felt it was very realistic for where I live. It might even be a bit higher than what most people I knew in the field made - at least the people with my experience level.
And it is more than 90% of that number that the employer has to pay, unless the rules changed since 1998.
The Silicon Valley wages (and living expenses) is an entire different can of worm. I don't know why/how people (H1B or not) put up with it.
Having been in a similar situation, I can strongly sympathize with your scenario.
However, one thing I think you left out of your post is the effects of being the "answer guy" for an organization. Eventually the stress of having to know / figure out all the answers (i.e. do all the work) for your idiot cow-orkers (DNRC!) will cause burnout. Once you've burnt out, you're going to either find a new job, or run your current one into the ground (perhaps by giving wrong answers to people...). Either one will have some impact on your employer.
If you leave, then they lose your "knowledge asset", and someone else will have to get off their lazy butts and learn what you knew. Typically this takes a while... (I'm still not sure that the place I left due to this has recovered. I do know that they went through 2 managers and 2 head tech's in about 3 months...)
Even if someone else there can pick up the slack at the company, it's been my experience that desertions happen in groups, and typically the ones with clues leave together. It makes sense, especially if you figure out that the company will drop Mr A's work on you after he leaves, unless you do as well.
But, that's just my opinion...
I am dyslexia of borg - your ass will be laminated.
The 10% margin is just a MINIMUM, and I was only mantioning it to disproof the "100 indians living in squalid conditions working for pennies" type of argument. The truth of the matter is that most H1B get the same salaries as their american counterpart. That is certainly my case since I make more than 150% what I should be making. Knowing more or less what others around me make, I am definetely on the high end of the spectrum.
As far as what you call the "veto power", that is something you KNOW about when you get the job! You are a free person! You can go get another job (the new employer can also get you a H1B) or you can leave! I am in that same situation, and I don't see the problem. I was not tricked into the situation I am in, I had other opportunities, but I chose to be an H1B worker. Why is everyone assuming that any of us have a problem with it?
I agree that it shouldn't be a racial issue at all. But the pejorative tones a lot of the posters (including the one I responded to) have regarding these foreign workers (with a special hatred for indians it seems) is disgusting... It has no place in this discussion.
Well, at least when you get married you won't have to make that motorcycle payment any more.
8)
Excuse me Mr. Flamebait, but I wonder if you've ever even heard of CalTech and MIT. Unquestionably the two best scientific institutions in the world, barf none. I happen to work at one, and can say that yes there is ALOT of 'homegrown talent' as you call it. I would aggree that our (my ?) society doesnt place the pursuit of science in the limelight as it does things that are obviously more appealing to the masses like sports and entertainers, but show me one that does, ok? Consider it a challenge...
use Signature::Witty;
What's happening in the IT sector is that many occupations are being downgraded and deskilled. Time was when being a "computer programmer" was a job that needed serious training. But in a society where many, many people get some kind of post-highschool training and computers are ubiquitous, it's not such a big deal to learn Java or XML anymore. A lot of people in the IT sector, dazzled by the world of stock-options and IPOs, are missing the broader trend: many programming-type jobs are rapidly becoming *relatively* low-skilled occupations. The analogy is to 19th and early 20th century clerks, who used to be the backbone of the financial and accounting sectors --- these were "black-coated workers," that is, socially respectable and basically white-collar workers, who were nevertheless low-paid, to the point where some blue-collar occupations had a much higher take-home than them. The key to this process was the way in which the position of the clerk could be rationalized, monitored and relatively "automated," in the sense that there was little craft-type skill necessary for the job. A more recent example comes from occupations that do their work over the phone: new technologies for monitoring productivity and performance make it easier for employers to rationalize the work-process and de-skill the job, to the point where wages get driven down.
The fact that companies prefer H1-Bs over American workers (who won't work the long hours given the money, benefits and job security on offer) is a strong sign that this shift is happening in the IT sector too. This is perhaps a hard fact to swallow for young IT workers who think that their all night cubicle coding marathons mean that they are programming geniuses in the dynamic new economy, instead of just replaceable wage slaves working insane hours to no purpose. :)
Ever feel like you've missed every goddamn boat that's come in. The boom in the seventies and I'm in high school, the eighties University, the early nineties recession (horray low pay), the late nineties boom too old. Fuck fuck fuck.
:wq
H-1B visas are... a way to create a class of workers who don't have the same constitutional rights (or what's left of them) as the average American citizen and will be beholden to the companies that hire them not only for their job but for their continued residence in the US.
Technology workers are... a group of working class people who are foolishly squandering their powerful position in the labor market by not unionizing.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
I work in an office that really needs my skills. However, because of a monumental array of "protective" immigration measures, it took me several months to secure the required papers, medical exams, and official approvals to even be able to work here; since she didn't already have a job with a French company, my wife isn't even allowed to do _any_ work by law (figure that Catch-22 out...) We are both well-educated and extremely capable individuals in our respective fields (I'm a computer scientist, she's a biochemist.) Yet, in the name of preserving jobs for French citizens, we're forced to either not work at all or constantly jump through administrative hoops until blue in the face. (My papers need to be renewed in one year, a process I do not look forward to.) Being an immigrant is a hard, often unrewarding process, and it takes some real guts to even think about it in the first place, much less do it.
I understand perfectly the logic behind such strict requirements for employment as a foreigner, and realize that we (Americans) use the exact same way of thinking. If a spot can be filled by a full citizen of a nation, then that citizen should have precedence to said job, right? The problem lies in the fact that the citizen isn't always the most qualified for the position; indeed, truly skilled and driven workers rarely complain about immigrants in the workplace (if anything, they thrive on the diversity it introduces.) It's the mediocre, the uninspired, the clock-puncher who worries about losing his or her job to somebody who actually wants to _work_. On that note, if there's anything they can tag to that potential replacement to discourage their hire, they'll do it. Immigrant. Woman. Kid. Dinosaur. Hispanic. This is FUD at it's purest, most base form. When faced with somebody who the weak worker _knows_ will be a better employee than themselves, the immediate reaction of that person is to find some way of discrediting or disqualifying that person. This results in bad hiring practices, discrimination, reduced productivity, and a less dynamic and exciting workplace overall.
Intelligent, capable individuals don't complain about immigrants and immigration. They understand that with immigrants come new ways of thinking, new talents and abilities, new cultural experiences, and the unique opportunity to learn a great deal about a place that they will very likely never visit in person. Weak, selfish people see immigrants as a threat to their cushy, do-nothing jobs, and as such, want nothing to do with them. It's as simple as that.
I'm only experiencing the smallest sliver of the discrimination that most immigrants go through, but it's already increased my respect for other immigrants tenfold. People who are strong enough to leave their native country, whether voluntarily or even more so as refugees, deserve a far higher degree of respect than they receive.
An American AC In Paris
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
There is a shortage of smart capital in the US, not a shortage of "IT workers".
Seastead this.
You'd think if we really valued skilled immigrants, we wouldn't use the H1-B visa to subject them to the whims of their employer. Rather than all this smoke and mirrors about a labor shortage, lets remove the requirements that say an immigrant has to stay with their sponser or be deported. After all, the worker is still in the market and filling those badly need jobs, and a skilled worker should have no problem paying the fees of the immigration bureaucracy.
Out gosh, then they'd have to pay them the market wage, which of course will naturally rise in a supply shortage. Corporations want it both ways: the free market to reduce costs (and get away with shit they wouldn't otherwise), but they want a tightly regulated market (in their favor) of immigrant workers.
Just to clarify this, an H1-B visa holder would never be granted citizenship directly. The first step would be to get a so-called green card, which allows permanent residence in the United States, regardless of employer. If the "alien" then lives in the U.S. for five years without committing any significant crimes, only then can s/he apply for U.S. citizenship. Pretty much anyone who applies for citizenship will get it, assuming they pass the test and basic requirements. It's getting the green card that's the hard part.
I don't think people who don't live in the Bay Area realize how bad things are out here.
A friend of mine who is a post-doc at Stanford found out that $50K/year qualifies you for SUBSIDIZED housing at Stanford. Being a lowly post-doc, my friend makes far less than $50K.
Subsidized housing, BTW, is around $1000/month for a one bed/one bath.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
How many of you graduated from college and got your current job(s) as a result of having a degree? On the other end of the stick, how many of you either chose not to take college, or dropped out and went directly into the marketplace?
I am one of the latter. Contrary to what some people have been saying here, the United States education system is NOT satisfactory. I was stuck in classes that took way to long to complete, and learning material that had little or no relevance to what I was looking for in a career.
I dropped out and went straight into the job market. Since then I have had two jobs, both of them have not payed me very well at all. I don't regret that though, because I was able to learn years worth of material in a matter of months since I was learning in the type of environment that suits me best. ie. a stress driven free-form world where you literally have to teach yourself new material or you'll drop off the face of the earth.
Now, if I had continued my education, I would just now be graduating from college with a degree. No doubt I'd snap up a job in no time, however, I doubt that I would have at my disposal all of the knowledge that I have learned, self-taught, on my own.
I am curious to know how you got where you are now. It is a complicated issue, does the education system hamper knowledge for people with right-brained intelligence patterns? No doubt, there are many things I would have learned if I had sticked with college that I do not know now. I'd have to ask myself if I'd be just as personally happy doing it that way, or the way I did. I, like I said earlier, do not have any regrets. I feel like I have accomplished something by driving myself.
The final question would be this. Given the position I am in now. What is the likelyhood of me dropping off my resume at any of of these tech companies that are hurting and scoring a job. What kind of salary should I expect? Most important to me is this last one, how many jobs out there maintain your interest? In your experience have your jobs been lackluster in freedom to grow, or have they been roomy? What is the average 'hurting tech company' going to offer me in the way of knowledge growth and creative interest?
V
I tried in a previous job. Unfortunatly I spent so much time at work doing what I was supposed to do that there was no free time. I lacked the money to invest in new equipment for home, or to spend on training courses (which I couldn't attend as I was working). And I needed my personal time as well.
Sorry - but I just hope you can't find anyone for your positions - you don't deserve to.
But even more importantly, what would Brian Boitano do?
- Check the troll sids for announcements of trolls.
- Post your "This is a TROLL!!" message as early as possible.
- Watch everyone ignore you and post replies anyway.
- Feel worthless.
Y'see, trolls aren't there for the kind of person who reads "This is a troll" posts before replying. They're not there for the kind of person who reads anything before replying. They're there for the trigger-happy, compulsively responding types who form the overwhelming majority of slashbots.You may also be pleased to know that responses to a troll dated after the first "It's a troll" post get double troll points; you've boosted Dan's score substantially in this thread.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
This number was no more than 25,000 in 1998 due to all the backlogs.
25,000 is a tiny fraction of H1-B holders? Sounds closer to 1/3 at least. Still, are H1-Bs necesarilly supposed to lead to citizenship? The way I understand it, they are temporary work visas. If immigrants choose to take them, then they should do so with the understanding that it may not lead to citizenship and that they may not even stay the full 6 years. These things are not supposed to be permanent. They are ment to address the supposed shortage as a temporary stop-gap measure. Unfortunately, since education still sucks rather badly in this country, they may end up needing permanent workers simply because the government would rather spend it's money on corporate welfare than on helping the people of this country get a good education.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
And the fellow who immigrated to France to work is also a taxpayer--so this is a dumb argument at best.
Plain and simple, people from other countries are more than happy to work for about a third we do and IMHO they tend to work harder and more effectively as well. The line big business is sending Congress is obviously false. But on the other hand it is simple economics and I can't blame them. They want to be competitive so they have to run as lean as possible. Do I like it? That's a completely different story.
--
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
25: ten.knilrevlis@wkcuhc
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
". Such shortages can be erased only by raising wages to attract those with needed skills who are now working in other fields -- or by importing low-paid workers"
I'm waiting for an H1 to come through myself. I'm certainly not low-paid. I'll be making more than the "West Coast median salary for experienced software engineers", and I'm only 25 with just a very fews of experience.
Thank you for this link its very informative on this issue (much more than most of the posts in the thread).
The point by point refutation of the industry position is both detailed and mostly very depressing. I have seen the skill escalation going on in job descriptions and agree that this is going to eventually end up with the companies losing qualified applicants who could contribute to their success.
I would like to know if anyone has refuted any of the author's points successfully or if the industry and polititians are simply trying to ignore the points the author makes in hopes that no one will notice.
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People quite naturally are dismissive of anything they can't do; "If I'm not good at it, it must not be important."
Jocks are well thought of by society because they are able to function under intense pressure.
The lessons I have learned in athletics throughout my life have been very useful to me in intellectual pursuits.
How come people on Slashdot are all for freedom except when this subject of allowing foreigners into the US comes up?
It would be good to see to it that people are paid reasonable wages, so that competition is fair, but (IMHO) it's unethical to prevent them from doing their job because they don't have the right passport.
Their passport is a completely irrelevant document as far as their skills are concerned.
Compete on skills, not birthrights.
I dunno, maybe the kids who play sports can get through school just like the overwhelming majority of other students do. What about the kids who play chess?? How are they ever going to get to school without those Chess Scholarships?! (Oh, no Chess Scholarships? hmmm...)
It's corrupting for the focus of an academic institution to be Athletics. It gives you people like Bobby Knight and "students" like you have at many big Football schools who can hardly read.
You throw out a lot of smoke about how it keeps donors happy, blah, blah, blah. Show me one once of justification that it's a net positive to the school. And, don't give me the cooked books from the Sports Communication Deptartments who count that fancy fieldhouse as a benefit to the school.
I wonder how the donors at Harvard are kept happy with their modest sports programs?
-Jordan Henderson
Say what you will negatively about the USian education system, but at least any American with a bit a gumption can go on to college, and make a better life for themselves. You work a part time job, you take out student loands, eventually you get a degree and you get a better job and you've made something of yourself, due to your own hard work, it's the American way.
Contrast that with, say, Britain, where forget about going to someplace like Oxford unless you've been to the right public (an oxymoron, they're public if your family's been going there for a few centuries, what a grandfather clause) school and you're a landed peer.
Another hint as to why America's productivity far exceeeds the UK, we encourage strivers and self made people.
Instead of giving foreign workers H1Bs, which bind them to a company, why not give them green cards? That way, they don't have to worry about working for slave wages and companies will have to pay prevailing wage. Competition for jobs will be based on capability then, not nationality.
There's actually a petition going around supporting this, signed by luminaries including non other than Linus Torvalds himself. You can find the link at:www.immigrationreform.com.
Then again, why would the US want to import the smartest and brightest of the world's talent?
I know I shouldn't bite, but are you really this bloody stupid?
But liberal revisionist is rampant in USia, and has been since the 60s when the liberals managed to work their way into the educational system. Their policies of guilt have been written into every "history" textbook in an attempt to suppress the truth - that your "Native Americans" are no more native to USia than we are.
Using that argument, we should also argue that humans are not native to any region of the Earth, except from a narrow strip of savanna in Africa. That is, we are all African--and arguing that anyone is "native" to Europe or Asia or whereever is as stupid as arguing that "native Americans" aren't native to America.
While there is a grain of truth to the assertion we are all African, I believe it's not unreasonable to presume that any group of people who settle a region previously uninhabited by humans, who create in relative isolation a unique culture--and who evolve physiological differences because of their environment and relative isolation--could be argued as "native" to that land.
Hense, native Americans. Hense, Arians. Hense, Asians.
As a native American, the "crime" that was committed against our people is twofold. First, significant damage was done to native American culture as foreigners who arrived in America after years of isolation did significant cultural damage, as well as killed a number of my relatives and ancestors. Second, laws were enacted which (even within my relatively short lifetime) discriminated against native Americans. (For example, my mother was not legally allowed to drink alcohol in Arizona until the late 60's, dispite being well over drinking age. Or that one policy that California batted around when creating the California Indian registration laws was to tattoo the registration number (mine is 69065) on Indian's forearms in order to expite recognition.)
I will be the first to agree that there is a lot of "liberal bullshit" out there with regards to native Americans. But this ain't it.
Indeed, evidence that white men lived in America some 10,000 years ago has been suppressed by the liberal establishment because it contradicts their position on this matter. Don't be fooled by their fables.
One skull, hotly debated as to if it looks like Jean-Luc Piccard--and this is evidence that whites were in America 10,000 years ago? What is clear is that people were here 10,000 years ago, and--white or not--they had a unique hunter-gatherer culture which was wiped out when the Spanards and later the English arrived here.
agreed. That is misleading. Plus, students in areas where I live read these surveys and say "I should make $50,000 right out of school. In reality, an entry-level programming job is low/mid 30s here.
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
You do have a point. I have the same feeling sometimes.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
This reminds me of 'long ago', about '92 I think it was. I was getting ready to finish my first degree, an Associates in Electronic Engineering Technologies. All the professional industry magazines that I was reading kept proclaiming what a shortage of technical workers there was. I was so excited to be earning a degree in field with such a demand.
I graduated with about 20 other guys. I got lucky and landed a job in a union shop where I got about $10/hr. The best the others could find were some jobs paying $7/hr. As a point of reference, the job I had to get through school was as a security guard. I sat at a desk and had people sign a paper when they came in. I made $6/hr.
It's been said often, but never loudly enough. The shortage isn't of qualified workers. The shortage is of qualified workers who will give their services away for free.
Why isn't there a shortage of qualified CEOs for technical oriented companies? If colleges aren't putting out enough people who know how to program, how are they putting out enough who know how to manage programmers? Someone should argue before Congress that the increase in H1-B for technical workers should be tied to an increase in H1-B for management positions.
A popular mechanic was so busy that he couldn't handle all his paperwork, so he hired a secretary. She wasn't qualified to keep the books, so he had to hire an accountant. Before long, he needed an office manager. It wasn't long before the accountant noticed that the company was running in the red, so the office personel had a meeting to discuss ways to cut the budget. The first suggestion came from the office manager. "I know," he said, "let's get rid of that guy out back."
A professional guild would go a long way toward establishing guidelines for what should be expected of a professional engineer and what are acceptable working conditions. I shy away from 'union', because the term has become to be synonomous with 'racket', and very few engineers want to deal with having a second boss (I've worked in a union shop, and that is exactly what a union boils down to). The guild would set guidelines for behaviour versus negotiating contracts. You could still work 70hr weeks, but it would be understood that you were working more than what is reasonable (which it is!!).
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
One of the things which this guy's analysis leaves out is there are many different types of "I/T Workers", and what might be true for one class of techies might not be true for others. There's a big difference between someone who is a systems programmer, an SAP R/3 or Oracle Financials Business Programmer, an Oracle DBA, or a Web HTML/Code Fusion/PHP jockey.
So when we talk about there being plenty of "older programmers" in the U.S., do they have the right skill set? Are they willing to learn the latest stuff? It doesn't help if we have a lot of mainframe programmers, for example. I remember one fellow in particular who thought that $30,000 for a web server that ran on an IBM mainframe was cheap, and wasn't it cool that he could put his project web page on the mainframe? I didn't have the heart to tell him that that much money would have purchased several cheap Unix/Linux boxes for which Apache would be free.
I also think that the issue of "ageism" is a red herring. (The "I can run a web server on a mainframe guy" wasn't over 30.) There are plenty of younger programmers who don't know what the heck they are doing; there are also plenty of really smart people who happy to be fairly light in their years (take Linus Torvalds, for example; he's well under 30). Similarly, there are plenty of older folks who stuck in the mud, not willing to learn anything new beyond the Cobol of their youth, and there are also those folks who might be chronologically young, but who are always willing to learn the latest stuff, and who have the benefit of learning certain lessons the hard way, and whose hard-earned experience is extremely valuable. It works both ways.
Speaking as someone who has been on both sides of the management/technical fence, it's not so easy to find competent engineers. Sure you can pay more money, but that isn't necessarily going to do it. In the Silicon Valley, companies are paying huge amounts of money for engineers, and from what I can tell, they still have large numbers of positions going unfilled.
As for me as a purely technical engineer, I'm not particularly worried about having foreigners compete with me for jobs. There will always be a need for really good, competent engineers. The real risk comes to those who just know how to do HTML, or just know how to futz with Microsoft Front Page, and who calls him or herself "an I/T worker". When the oversupply of I/T workers hits (and it will --- give it 5 or 10 years), those folks will be out of a job, because if you're still only doing HTML jockeying when you're 45, you have rocks for brains if you think that your seniority means that you deserve more money than the someone fresh out of college who can do the same thing. Companies pay people for what their jobs are worth, not just because they've warmed the same seat in a company for 15 years. (Or at least, they should. The reason why many engineers I know dislike unions is because they haven't figured out that this seniority pay thing is abhorrent to most engineers. That concept might work for the Teamsters, but not for engineers.)
It is true that a lot of people use the H1B status as a "springboard" towards an employment-based green card. And it is true that changing jobs while that application is in process would basically mean starting over - which for some people (like nationals from mainland china perhaps) it might be a problem.
:)
Basically everything you said is true
In a way I am like that as well since my company is applying for a green card on my behalf as well. Basically, it is in their interest. They value me as an employee and want to keep me for a long long time. You can only be an H1B for up to 6 years, so the green card is the only way they can do it. Works for them, works for me. Everyone is happy. But unlike the chinese person, should I choose to quit (or should I get fired) I'd go back to Belgium and not give a second thought about the green card...
So, like you said, everyone has their priorities, but considering what the H1B is intended to be (temporary and non-immigrant), I can't say that I feel that it should come in the balance when we're judging the program.
I have to say that there is indeed a huge shortage of competent IT engineers in a number of different fields. One cannot lump all IT professionals together. For example, where I work we desparately need engineers with strong embedded and TCP/IP experience, people with board layout experience, and so forth. One can't take a COBAL or Visual Basic programmer and throw them onto a VxWorks embedded networking project that deals with things like PPP stacks, L2TP, PPPoE, virtual routing, and so forth. It requires specific experience and it isn't something most of us can learn overnight. By the time someone comes up to speed with networking, the project will be done.
We have had a difficult time getting resumes in Silicon Valley. So we ran some ads in a few large technology centers in India. We got 800 resumes, with at least 60 of them being quite promising. Now before someone says I'm just another person who went through the H-1 visa process, let me say that I was born and raised in what became Silicon Valley, and my family goes back to the 1850s in California.
In the networking industry (i.e. embedded development) I have found that most of the programmers are Indian, at least 90%. This goes for the last three companies I have worked at and for every one I've interviewed at. Even companies like Cisco has trouble filling positions, and the makeup there has a huge Indian population.
One of the reasons for this is that in India getting a computer engineering degree is held in the same high regard as someone over here getting a medical or law degree.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
And if you don't believe it, try this simple test:
Is there a person in your office who always seems to be able to get the hardware/software to do what (s)he wants? Someone that all questions percolate towards when no one else can figure it out? Someone who is good at "researching issues"?
That person doesn't possess any special magical powers, they are simply competent. By contrast, the other people are what? Incompetent, yes.
That's not to say you shouldn't ask questions for fear of looking incompetent. But if all the questions come from a large subset of your employees and go to a small subset of your employees you have a problem with competency.
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I have worked with a lot of H1 workers. Here is what I have gathered so far.
I have noticed that in general they are not hackers, in fact, 99.4 percent of them are basic non imaginative coders.
They do not always have a degree in Computer Science or IT or any computer related fields. The H1B requirement I am told is a bachelor degree plus 3 years experience or a Masters Degree. It doesn't matter if they have degree in nutritional science or botony, as long as the experience is in IT.
Their three year experience in 70 percent of the cases is fake. The INS doesn't verify that what they list on their resumes is correct. They believe what the candidate or the company submits to them.
Have you ever thought that if the united states doesn't produce more than 30,000 IT people a year, how does india produce 200,000? Yeah they have a billion people but over 70 percent of them are illiterate, That leaves 300 million educated, with not enough universities to go around for everyone. No how many genuine IT workers they produce per year? 15,000. So have you ever thought how many fake application are submitted by Indians every year to get H1 visas?
The INS and the US embassies abroad need to establish a test for IT workers, not unlike the test for P.E. in the US. Only those workers that pass the test should be allowed. Background checks are a must. A certified degree in IT field should be required, not just any bachelors or masters degree, because we can get US works with the same qualifications too.
What happens when the economy starts lagging and these H1 holders have now become green carders? They fight US citizens for the jobs that are not there any more. So lets not make them citizens or green carders, lets make them go back after their visa expires.
So yeah lets increase the quotas but lets watch who comes in and who goes out.
Increasing salaries industry-wide isn't going to increase the pool of talent
Not this year or next, but in 5 years you will see a big increase in the number of graduates in the high paying field. It's all their in the graduation rate statistics.
This is why the H1-B program is fundamentally bad for the US. It weakens the educational institutions that are needed to support a modern economy. By importing large numbers of foreign workers we are hurting our society as a whole because of the effects on our educational system.
Today, anybody can learn the hottest technologies (e.g., Linux, Win32, Python, Perl, VC++, C++, UML, Java, Apache) by going to the web and doing stuff on their home computer. They can even make a name for themselves by contributing to, or leading, open source projects. That's different from the past, where learning new technologies required expensive hardware and software, and where documentation and information was scarce; in the past, the primary institutions that could provide professional training were companies.
Systems and software jobs these days require that everybody on the team has a good understanding of techniques and tools out there that are relevant to the problem. That requires that each and every one stays informed and up to date with their field. That's a hallmark of professionalism. People who apply and expect the company to figure out what they need to know and retrain them accordingly are turned down not because of the time and expense of retraining, but because the notion that the company should provide training for widely available technologies is seen as unprofessional: it suggests that the employee would lack the initiative and interest to function well in the long run.
Neither are green card holders. You have to live in the U.S. for five years with a green card before you can apply for citizenship.
Frankly, given this later article on SlashDot, it's pretty clear that the notion that US schools are not keeping up is bullshit. Or are y'all saying that High Schools in the United States are so good that people can be hired directly from them, while Colleges are so poor that they can actually set back someone's High School experience?
Or is this simply a case where High School students and H-1B Indians work cheaper than someone frol College--and the lack of College graduates in scientific fields reflect the fact that many people in High School know their chances of landing a job after getting a College education is less than their chances of landing the same job out of High School because of cheap employers?
"I'll move to another company. I can do this on H1B, it'll take 3 months"
I heard that the H1 process in CA was slow, but really? For a company that has already handled H1's, an H1 transfer can go through in 2 weeks. My original H1 took 6 weeks total (Nebraska processing centre).