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235,000 Software Engineers Can't Be Wrong, Right?
jgeelan writes "The Boston Globe has carried a report on how 235,000 engineers and computer scientistsl are calling on Congress to study the impact of the country's H1-B visa program, the recession, and the outsourcing of jobs overseas on the unemployment rate of engineers and other information technology professionals.
It's an issue that's bubbling on discussion sites all over America too, though in one case developers (Java developers in this instance) seem completely unable to agree on whether H1-B is really a contributing factor or not."
Clearly time to trot out Dr Matloff again
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.html
there is no `tech boom', never was (not since 70s at least); it's a ploy to generate cheap labour, the H1-1 campaigns part of that
The article mentions tighter limits on the number of H1-B visas granted to foreign nationals. Current H1-B holders won't be "thrown out" at all.
In short, legally and logically, it would be a very rare case where a local worker would lose his job to a H1 worker. H1 workers are hired only if the companies involved are not able to find qualified local candidates.
The job shortages in today's market is due to the prevailing bad economic climate. Let us not try to find scapegoats.
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What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
First, the math:
If somebody wrote an article asserting that 235,000 members of the National Council of Teachers of English had sent a letter to Congress I'd have just let it pass. You can depend upon English teachers to never split an infinitive, but numbers sometimes escape them. Engineers, on the other hand, have no excuse: this was not 235,000 EE's, it was the US trade association to which they belong.
Second, the subject is moot
Despite the fact that Congress authorized up to 160,000 H-1B visas per year, the Globe article points out that only 40,000 were used last year, and only half of those were for IT jobs. Look at the job sites: again, and again, and again you will see "We will|do|can not sponsor H-1B applicants." Petitioning Congress to limit the number of H-1B visas when they're not being used is kind of beside the point.
Third, they're whining
C'mon--unemployment of 5.7%? That's hardly a catastrophe--and the numbers are deeply suspect. First, not every EE is a programmer (or works in IT). Second, not every programmer is an EE--and in point of fact a lot of EEs have little business attempting to program. Much like Computer Science curricula, EE programs focused on IT tend to focus on skills that aren't in demand--and ignore skills that are important to a lot of commercial programming. Databases don't fall within the purview of a EE program--but database programming is a big part of the IT job market. If a company brings in somebody from the Indian subcontinent on an H-1B visa to write stored procedures on Oracle, does an EE lose a job? Post hoc ergo propter hoc (logical fallacy of false cause).
Fourth, what solution do they propose?
Bleating to Congress is a lovely thing for the association's executives to do, in order to demonstrate to their members that the execs deserve to be paid. But what exactly do they propose? That we track down all of these people on H-1B visas and ship them home? With their husbands or wives, with their children? Even if those children, born in the U.S.A., are U.S. citizens?
A Word from the English Teachers:
Stand up, clear your throat, and recite with me:
Perhaps, but read my other post about what happened to 14 h1-b's I worked with. I've seen it at 3 companies I've been with. Perhaps you're lucky, or perhaps my experience is atypical, but the guys I met from Nigeria were getting 42,000 as Oracle DBA's and worked about 80 hrs a week (one slept on a cot at work many days). The 14 Indians got terminated. Then 2 Indians, and 3 Chinese got treated pretty well at another project, but didn't get paid for OT, and didn't receive many of the benefits available to the rest of us. In each case these guys were brought in and mistreated by body shops. It was never the company that employed them directly, but it makes no difference to me. That shit is wrong.
They were Cobol programmers who were wazzed off because no Internet startups wanted to hire them.
We hired H1B people because US engineers were mostly more interested in jumping on the bandwaggon of the latest no-revenues-let-alone-earnings dotcom startup than working for higher wages at a profitable company. Now that times are harder they think they have the right to the jobs of the people who would work for us???
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Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Any economist will also tell you that people going to school or bumming around Europe are not considered "unemployed."
No shit, dumbass. If they were the unemployment rate in this country would be about 55% Not 6. Notice the person you are replying to said 'workers' not 'people'
Before the 90s boom, most economists were beginning to give up on the idea of a 4% unemployment rate as realistic. The only time the unemployment rate was anywhere near 2% was during WWII!
In the interim, the rate was between 5 and 7, IIRC
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Exactly who pushed congress for the H1-B visa expansion? Technology company OWNERS and MANAGERS!
By the late 90's many HR people in corporate America were complaining that tech employees were very expensive. CEOs realized that the only way to decrease the cost of technology employees was to increase the supply. Many of these companies told congress that there was a technology worker shortage in this country. Congress believed that if they didn't allow the workers to come here, the companies would go offshore.
So what did congress do? Congress extended the H1-B visa program. A classic case of the tail wagging the dog.
-ted