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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."
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.