Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...
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.
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.
--
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
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?
.. but a shortage of competent IT workers.
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.
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...
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.
Hey Washington. Slavery ended 150 years ago. Let's not start it up again. End this program.
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
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.
it has the phrase "Must be eligible to work in the US" that is pretty much a code phrase for "We're looking for someone born outside the US who will work for whatever scraps fall off the table.
Are you kidding? That code phrase, if you talk to job hunters and recruiters, usually means green card holders or US citizens. That is the very opposite of H1Bs and other temporary workers. That phrase was rarely used until mid-99, when it started becoming more common. Today, up to half the jobs advertised have this. The growing demand for US permanent residents or citizens has boomed largely because INS has fallen so behind in issuing H1Bs that companies can no longer afford to hire and wait 6 months for H1B employees.
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
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?
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.)