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Gates Calls for Increase in Tech Labor Supply
Randeep Igochyorjob writes "Reuters is reporting that
Bill Gates is asking for the removal of quotas for guest workers by removing the caps on non-immigrant alien workers. In a mild attempt at balance, buried near the end of the story, the article also says "Undersecretary of Commerce Phil Bond, a top Bush administration technology official, pointed out that the unemployment rate for engineers is above the national average." I'm wondering if raising wages might attract the "needed" workers from domestic sources or is Gate's request "necessary to remain competitive and innovative"."
Gates is doing this to try and save money. It's a pretty smart move considering the average salary in the US for coders is over $90k. In Canada it's more like $35k and that's CAD! I would love to go to the US and earn $65k USD per year. But I'm pretty sure I would have a hard time in Redmond, considering I am a PHP geek.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Sounds like he wants a bunch of foreign workers who wouldn't quibble over a $20,000-30,000 salary where a US coder would expect a bit more.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Maybe the american ones are too expensive?
These wouldn't happen to be faux engineers would they? The dime a dozen Ameritrain, cram all you possibly can about pointing and clicking the night before the test Miscrosoft Certified System Engineer's?
It's transparent -- companies know that U.S. software engineers are much cheaper than their foreign counterparts with the same degree of schooling. It used to be the case that U.S. engineers were better trained, but given the state of computer science education in the U.S. since the dot-com boom & bust, that is becoming less true.
I find it hard to believe that it is difficult to find qualified individuals within the United States. Especially after the last four years the industry has been through.
So what are they doing over there ?
...Because the economy just isn't destroying itself fast enough.
Should we be opposed to this? Considering that the alternative is shipping the jobs outside the US, if we keep the wage-earners inside the US, the residual income from the job will stay (for the most part) inside the US. Might not be as good as every last engineer drawing a top dollar salary, but its better than 100% of the spending going away from the US.
By the way, I want my job back, please.
one hundred twenty
is just enough characters
to write a haiku
with a Bush flunky. I feel so dirty. I'm going to take a shower now
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
Seriously though, I don't see why he cares about importing people to work at Redmond. If all he wants to do is crank out code, couldn't he offshore the project to southern Asia and have them do it there? It doesn't matter where the code is written after all, and that method avoids pesky labor laws. Or is Gates trying to take foreign labor out of the realm of just shitting out code and bring it into the realm of design, and other higher-level work that's until now presumably been performed by American workers? If that's the case, I'm getting worried about my future. How's the market for male prostitutes looking?
Let's take his job!
He believes in capitalism when it works for him. When it doesn't he cries to the guvmnt for help for his poor poor self like any welfare queen.
...'cause I probably am, after thinking this one up.
Maybe he wants to import the tech intelligentsia of other countries in order to train them to be be knowledgable in, and advocates of, Microsoft software? Give them a contract that says they'll work in the US for five or ten years, then send them home.
Side benefits including being able to seed developing nations with pro-Microsoft software development houses,
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You mean I actually have to pay my employees?
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
There will always be some IT jobs kept in the US. If anything, companies need programmers, testers, systems analysts, and program managers who understand our society and the way things work here. If you start handing those jobs out to foreigners as well, then there is no sanctuary for domestic IT workers.
The head of a corporation that's sitting on ~US$50 Billion in cash yet whines that it doesn't have the resources / capabilities (they really mean "financial interest") in fixing major security defects in their less-than-current products is whining that they need cheaper labor?!??
I'm a fairly pro-immigration guy, but in this particular case Bill Gates can fuck himself in the ass with a cactus.
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And I guess Phil Bond has tried to hire a good engineer lately? We've been trying to hire good engineers for 12 months in Seattle. Of 500 resumes, 50 got interviews but we have only hired 5. Several got better offers, including some from Microsoft.
Just because a small percentage of IT engineers are unemployed doesn't mean they deserve a job. Many of the engineers I've interviewed are unemployable. I'd jump at the chance to hire some good foreign engineers. They would get paid the same salaries as US engineers but would cost us more due to lawyers and relocation costs.
And I'd rather compete against a guy here making $50K sitting next to me than the same guy over in India making $15K.
But if you open the floodgates, then wages here will be cut in half and hardly any American college students will enter the field.
I think he does have a point. We've come to a point where our workforce sometime cannot compete with the brightest that come from other nations. I think Gates has point here, in the interests of keeping the US a leader in technology - but at the same time, I don't think this is the long-term solution. We need to do a better job of education, revamping the public school system because it isn't working across the board the way it should.
THEN we can talk about staying a world technology leader.
Microsoft is having a hard time finding skilled workers within the United States, and the lack of H-1B visas for skilled workers is only making the situation worse, Gates said in a panel discussion at the Library of Congress.
Translation: "the available labour wants more money than we want to pay."
Short term gain clouds their minds young jedi fear not. If the standard of living increases enough throughout the world they won't settle for it either. Or we will be so 'pore' we won't mind :P
Is the Redmond unemployment rate for engineers above the national average for engineers?
Or is the engineer unemployment rate higher than the non-engineer unemployment rate, nationwide?
Or is the local engineer unemployment rate higher than the national unemployment average (for non- and engineers)?
The world will probably never know.
Doesn't really help much.. all it does is force everyone else's salary down, and lower our standard of living.
Globalization is great if you want to push just about everyone down to ground level..
Immigration? Yes. Uncontrolled immigration? No.
Aha! This is how he plans to get Longhorn out before the end of the decade!
At the moment, engineers are at a low point in terms of their employment prospects and hence their bargaining position. The engineers are at their weakest now, making this the ideal time to strike.
The other part of this is that the wheels of government turn slowly. By the time this is all ironed out, there will likely be an upturn. If BG waits until then to make his request it will be both too late, and the engineers will be stronger again.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Good engineers are hard to find in Seattle. Good GUI engineers are almost impossible to find. Our CTO ended up writing most of our GUI!
He needs people who will do the kind of work that others refuse to do...quality programming.
Wealthy business owners will always complain that labor isn't cheap enough or plentiful enough. This is just more of the same, and very predictable.
As almost anyone in the software development field can tell you, there is no shortage of software developers. There is, however, a shortage of companies willing to invest in their employees by properly training them. There is also a shortage of companies that advertise open positions with reasonable requirements.
Just hop on over to your favorite job site, and take a peek. "Candidate must have a BS in Computer Science, and 20 years of experience in the following technologies: C, C++, Java, C#, Python, Ruby, Perl, Fortran, SQL, Oracle, DB/2, SQL Server, Informix, stored procedures, COBOL, point-of-sale systems, grocery store management, garbage collection, be willing to travel frequently, and willing to divorce spouse if spouse demands too much time.
Companies can then use the excuse that nobody meets the required qualifications to show the need for more H-1B visas, or worse, offshore outsource the work.
"I'm wondering if raising wages might attract the "needed" workers from domestic sources"
Some work to do (and hence some jobs) would attract many of the out-of-work engineers in the US. If Gates wants to lift restrictions on non-immigrant workers, they must be cheaper than all those domestic engineers out of work?
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
Now class, after me: "Mr Korean Sir, do you want fries with that?"
Engineering is the art of compromise.
If you have 500 resumes and you can't find 12 candidates, then you're just too damn picky. Period.
This is supply and demand folks. If you can't find the supply, then demand less. Don't screw us all by attempting to artificially increase the supply.
You are assuming they will want fries with that. They might just send as much home as possible to put their 5 siblings through the CS program.
Legally H1Bs MUST be paid the prevailing wage. I'm not sure how much enforcement the DOL does on this, and despite horror stories from Sun Microsystems, this is in fact the law.
I know in my workplace which has both H1Bs and GC/citizens, the rate of pay is the same. In fact the H1Bs cost the company more because of the immigration and relocation costs. At least for my company I think we'd rather hire locals, but as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it turns out to be very difficult to hire locals - they just aren't up to the snuff. The nice thing about hiring foreign born talent is all the preselection has been done.
The US is about immigration and building a better life for everyone, I think the H1B program should be more focused on turning 'temporary' workers into permanent residents. I think the biggest flaw in the H1B is training all these foreign engineers then kicking them out after 6 years - why not keep them in the country, it just enriches everyone.
The biggest problem comes when H1Bs are treated like revolving door visas - this is where the salary undercut, the excessive overtime (we can fire you and kick you out of the country!) abuses come into play. If you build a future for these people in the country they take part of civics better and are more resistant to employer abuses.
Entirely untrue. Over $15 billion is sent home to Mexico from US migrants every year - Mexico's 2nd largest source of foreign revenue (behind oil). H1B visa employees virtually invariably have family remaining in the old country and large sums of cash will be wired back home.
There are more than enough skilled, talented tech people in the US to fill all the jobs. There are even enough to replace the slovenly incompetents who blow enough smoke to convince the non-techie managers that they need to stick around. It has been this way for years. Shortly after my position was shipped to Mexico City and I was politely encouraged to leave the building 's CEO gave a speech about how was in dire need of good, qualified tech people. I promptly sent a letter pointing out that I was willing to relocate anywhere in the world, work any shift and reminded them that I had a perfect employment record as a sub-contractor on an project, aced every aptitude/performance test they threw my way and quickly mastered every new system/process they created. My request was ignored, so I could only conclude that 's plea for capable, productive workers was just a smokescreen so they could argue for more H1B workers. Meanwhile dozens of contractors were shown the door while the ex-Xerox salesman who got a friend to make him project manager then promptly declared backups for the mission-critical database to be an unnecessary waste of resources got to pick which 80% were laid off, then collected his bonus for reducing labor expenses.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
Another example of why US politicians aren't willing to sercure our boarders. As long as US corporations can gain a competitive advatange and still conduct operations in their back yard our sovereignty will be jepordized and our citizens will be underemployed.
...wherever they come from. The problem we all face, including MS, isn't that there aren't enough software engineers, it's that there aren't enough great ones.
If the distribution of engineering talent weren't so depressingly normal (i.e. zillions of pretty good people around, far fewer great ones) and the spread of talent distribution so wide (great ones 10-100X more productive than pretty good ones) then this might make less sense.
Presumably engineering staff working and living in the US (Redmond or elsewhere) will do better financially than their counterparts in India, VietNam etc.
What this does hurt is the local techs that want those jobs and have a zillion years of experience; they have the experience that is needed for the job, the just don't wanna settle for $25k anymore - what's wrong with expecting pay that relates to the value they'd bring the company. Hire local, dammit!
Not trying to ms-bash, but what they need is experienced programmers, not someone that got a BS cert from a boot camp.
Gates, stop trying to change a country's policy just for your company's benefit.
--- "To ignore race and sex is racist and sexist!" -- Jesse Jackson
Shake up the American Miscrosoft Certified System Engineer's by bringing in highly motivated foreigners maybe just what MS needs to start creating really good software. Lord knows Windows needs a whole lot of help.
I need more CHEAP meat for my money making machine. Something which a lot of other industries seem to have achieved in the US of A. You people have one of the most working hours per week and least amount of vacation days in the world. Crap social security. Companies with a lot of power over workers etc.
Why would that be you think?
I suggest you make it illegal for politicians to receive money in your country. You know, as a start. Otherwise you shouldn't be surprised to be handled like cattle.
But this is just my opinion.
- -- Truth addict for life.
Well companies can have 6 engineering grades, for instance, and rate the H1-Bs two grades less than they should be. Or they can hire them as contractors.
Pay people a decent wage and suddenly you'll find a glut of qualified applicants.
Phone interviews are fucking ridiculous. You can't get to know a person enough to reject them in 30 minutes over the phone.
Show a little respect, and maybe you'll find that those "pathetic" candidates actually are just not as good at being on a hot seat as your typical HR or Sales agent.
The shortage is with companies being too picky in hiring!
...one of those "underemployed" types with qualifications out the yingyang!
I know a half dozen types of Unix, but I don't know "X" Unx. Unless I lie and say I know "X" Unix, they won't even look at my resume! And knowing at least half a dozen flavours of Unix, I can probably pick up any reasonable type of Unix in a few weeks.
Or, if you know, say Java, C, Pascal and a few otehr langauges...and they are looking for C++, chances are, you can pick it up in a few weeks.
Companies are looking for too many "exact" matches since they have had the cream of the crop from the Dot-Busts period. Now that those who couldn't get jobs have moved on to something else, they are still too picky in recruiting...so although there is a surplus of techies, they can't find enough people to hire with the "exact" skill set they want. STOOOPPIIIDDDDD!!!!!
ttyl
Farrell
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I'm wondering if raising wages might attract the "needed" workers from domestic sources or is Gate's request "necessary to remain competitive and innovative"."
Actually, raising wages here in the States would make offshoring to India, China, Eastern Europe, and other lower cost locations more appealing because the cost differences between hiring a U.S. engineer and a foreign engineer increases in the favor of the foreign engineers. Raising wages make businesses that do offshore parts of their labor force successfully that much more competitive against those that do not offshore, because they have lower cost of doing business, or for that matter it makes foreign businesses that much more competitive to start with. The H1Bs also bolster these developing locations by not allowing the best and brightest to come to the U.S. for more money. Raising wages and keeping the H1Bs will keep wages high in the short term, but will ultimately result in stronger foreing competition and migration of business from the United States to other regions, resulting in lower wages here in the U.S. and fewer jobs too.
H1Bs are a mistake. They need to be done away with. Open up the labor markets now.
A 100:1 candidate to hire ratio?
If you're the hiring manager, you're fucking fired.
It's all about raising the value of their stock. Which is the same way Jobs makes his $$$ but it kills jobs but some investors wealthy.
http://www.h1b.info/
Microsoft in November 2002 announced plans to build a half-billion dollar complex in Hyderabad, India. With this new development center, Microsoft can use L-1 visas to displace further US citizen employees and will not be subject to H-1B caps. Other major companies in the US are doing the same. This is why reform is needed across all US visa types and not just for H-1B visas alone. It was through the use of these "special" visas that all of the September 11th terrorists secured admittance to the United States. There is virtually no security or monitoring of these special visa holders.
as if my length of unemployment hasn't been long enough.
Bill Gates needs to be fighting the imposition of faith-based culture or soon enough we'll be the technological equals of Tragicistan.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
When your pro-corporate agenda is rejected by the Bush adminstration, maybe it is time to get a new line of bull shit.
I like the assumption that employees on H1 visas have a different pay scale, performance reviews, etc. Unless you can provide proof that this is the case you should avoid speaking of what you know nothing about...
That's a theory, not a conspiracy.
We have what I would call an emerging tech state. Even way out here in the Bush, we have DSL and wifi, and have had it for quite some time. We also have favorable government, and many other incentives. Heck, we get a check for about $1,000 just for filling out a form, and no state income taxes. Most places don't have a sales tax, either.
-cp-
President Bush to Liberate Alaska
Lets outsource and opensource operating systems.
so making 20K/year seems fair
Linux...free...as in DUMB
Companies can only get away with this while H1Bs feel threatened with deportation if they speak out against their employers. The solution is to either:
- No immigration (not feasable)
- Better more permanent immigration
In the second scenario, immigrants would feel more comfortable demanding better pay because their existence in the US is not threatened by 1 boss who wants to reduce salary expenses.
Nah, I know what he means, having done technical interviews myself.
The vast majority of candidates seem to think that code is something you just write down, and that if it compiles it's good. In other words, they're not engineers, they're kiddies.
It's not a case of recruiting standards being set too high, but of education in CompSci (or industrial experience in lieu) being almost non-existent.
You can't expect companies to provide remedial education. That's what school was for --- that place where you should have been all those days that you hung out down the mall with your skate board.
We should either deport all foreign workers or open up our labor market wide to anyone qualified who will work for the least.H1b visas are bullshit anyone should be able to come to the US and work in any field or we should deport ALL illegal aliens and jail anyone who hires an illegal immigrant.
Why the hypocrisy?
There will always be some IT jobs kept in the US.
Assuming jobs move offshore because of higher domestics labor costs the total # of jobs will drop reducing the total demand for skilled workers. Either the # of skilled workers will drop as people look for other kinds of work b/c they aren't finding it in IT, or people will take lower salaries in order to get a job.
Why does a programmer, tester, system analyst, or program manager need to know anything about the customer's culture? Why not just have a few marketing/sales guys deal w/ that. You'd need support that understand the customer's culture.
who is she? leave a comment!
Sure you can't find qualified workers in the US, Bill. Seeing as how the economy is still shot after about 6 years and I know companies who were laying off employees with up to 10 years' seniority, I guess there are no more qualified IT people. They must have packed up and moved to India, I suppose.
BTW, the article's title is misleading. Gates isn't calling for an increase, he's calling for an extension to the temporary limits set on foreign workers.
And this is one of the cases where I kind of agree with Bill. There's a huge shortage of _qualified_ candidates. Folks who knew what the heck they were doing either didn't lose their jobs in the first place, or found other jobs shortly after being laid off.
You can't fix this problem with only money. If you up the salaries to generate interest in CS majors among students you will see the bubble all over again. Companies will be flooded with idiots who want to get rich quick and don't care much about anything else.
On the other hand until Green Card system is fixed raising H1-B cap will be equivalent to allowing slave labor. The issue with Green Card process is that it currently (illegally!) takes five years. During these five years you can't change jobs. This leads to all sorts of abuses on the employers' part.
If this was fixed, raising or removing H1-B cap would truly be about bringing the smart people into the country. Until then it's about slave labor, sorry, Bill.
What are you going to do when President Gates signs a decree proclaiming Linux a terrorist tool? Just a thought. Seems like this is where he's headed.
http://xs4.xs.to/pics/04481/p556222.gif
It will increase the overall quality of software. Those of you that suck will have to find something else to do.
Legally H1Bs MUST be paid the prevailing wage.
The only real effect that rule can have is to slow down the rate of salary decreases, not stop it. H1Bs can always be hired for the lower-end of the prevailing scale (for justifiable reasons, such as that their worse English skills make them less productive employees).
Then next year, the prevailing wage has gone down because it now includes all those H1Bs (and local workers competing with them). Over enough time, you reach the same point as if the rule had never existed at all.
much like they're stroking the administration by paying ultra-reactionary ultra-religious RALPH REED $20,000 per month.
i wonder what that's for. maybe the bush administration is going to expedite patent protection for microsoft.
who is she? leave a comment!
Someone needs to write a piece of software. If an Indian company can do it for $10 and a U.S. company can do it for $50. Who do you think customers are going to buy from? They don't care who makes the software as long as it works. Locking jobs in the U.S. and artifically inflating wages only makes sense if the U.S. is the only provider of a particular resource. We're not when it comes to IT, we are most likely the best provider right now (or one of the best), but by using legislation and not competition to "protect" U.S. jobs and current salary levels all we're doing it enabling foreign companies to grow stronger without the threat of strong U.S. companies with equally competive labor cost structures.
Wonderful. What a pile of steenking crap.
US business complains that they can't find top talent for low wages domestically. Why do you think that is? Because outsourcing and the previous wave of imported talent depressed wages and drove up unemployment in the field so much that it has discouraged people from taking up CS as a major (universities are reporting huge dropoffs in CS majors).
Too goddam bad. The only thing that is going to cure that is a good long period of good wage growth and low unemployment in the field. If that causes US tech businesses a little pain, well they should have thought about that before lobbying Congress for a quick fix. Business isn't under any obligation to consider external factors, but surely government is. Since they bear a lot of responsibility for creating the current situation at the behest of business, they are going to have to stop up their ears until things right themselves.
Comapnies used to treasure their talent pipelines. Now they abuse them, and run to congress when they find that the pipeline isn't full.
It makes me sick.
What is this about?
If he wants cheap labor, M$ already has outsourcing set up in India.
If he wants cheap labor here there are plenty of out of work I.T. people who would probably be willing to work for less just to have a job.
Can anyone guess what is behind all of this?
My salary has been flat since 1999, my co-workers are all terrified of losing their jobs and being unable to find another in software development and yet we need to bring in more cheap labor from overseas.
Yeah. Just the thing.
I don't know about Washington State, but on the east coast we aren't looking at a shortage of people, we're looking at a shortage of positions for people to fill.
Clear, Dark Skies
There's a theory that if you let in foreigners, they'll take jobs. That's true. Nevertheless, this is a dumb way of looking at it. There are two relevant figures:
* Number of jobs available
* Number of jobs in use
Foreigners clearly impact the second figure. The key question, however, is whether they use more jobs than they create. If we didn't have any technologists in the US, we'd have no tech industry, and while foreigners would be using zero jobs, there'd also be no tech jobs at all.
The answer is a bit more difficult to determine. Nevertheless, the types of people who create jobs are the types of people who start or grow businesses, who can more-or-less be described as intelligent risktakers. Anyone willing to leave their friends and family to give it a go in a new country is a risk taker. That leaves the question of intelligence. If we only give visas to intelligent foreigners, they'll come in, grow our economy, and net result will be more jobs, not fewer.
Skimming the brains of the rest of the world has worked brilliantly for the US economy for the past hundred years. Why give up now?
First, a master in computer science of some such field has been pretty easy to get, so most firms want this level of credential. This is reasonable. However, it does leave out a lot of people who have read all the right books, can code in many languages, can crank out code a very reasonable rate, and have good people skills.
Second, as has been document, age discrimination starts in the mid 30's. Anyone who is suspected of being over 30, and has not built up enough experience to be in a senior position, is not going to be hired.
Third, women are often overlooked and underpaid, at least with my anectodotal experience. There really is not reason for this as women are very analytical and tend to be as good at languages and math as anyone else.
Fourth, realted to the last two issues, most compaies want juniors to work incredible hours for somewhat low pay, as is shown in the video game industry. Since skill is not often valued, the ability to crank out the code is seen as the premium.
Really the H1B visas are bieng overused. They bring in kids from Europe to work at ski resorts. They bring in kids from Asia to work our computers. It is any wonder that the work ethic of American kids is so bad. They have no place to go. It is like, if all dictators goes to France when they are overthrown, where to French dictators go. A kid studies all his or her life, and gets a job, only to lose it as soon as the firm finds a cheaper way to do things. I see companies struggling to find non-US employees, who don't even show up for work, when qualified Americans are waiting for jobs.
I don't want to be anti anyone, but it is true. It seems that firms are purposely setting standards to exclude local labour. And it is not so bad, but who is fucking going to buy the products. Only the people who the firm imports? And how much money is leaving the country, on top of the current trade deficiet, to feed the foriegn families. I understand that firms must compete, and that they do not like to train, the hiring an indentured servent is preferable to a free agent, but a balance much be found. We can't all just stand around selling things to each other and creating pyramid schemes while the rest of the world creates all the cool stuff. I know that all firms say we try to get good people, but we can't. Yeah, just like it used to be impossible to get a good female executive or a good black accountant.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Cheaper isn't always better.
And thats exactly the attitude that will have everyone living in a shack.. 'its cheaper i don't care how it got to be cheap i don't care if it destroys our country, as long as i don't spend as much!'
Ever stop to think that is the reason the number of poor continues to increase and the middle class is shrinking? Good paying jobs are leaving and being replaced with walmart cashiering positions. Great.
it's a sign that you're not paying enough. If you really need them, your client needs them, and they'll have to pay. In the end the money will come out of some rich bastards pocket (your boss). We've got plenty of resources in this country, both people and goods. What we don't have is a second world economy where the poor are played against each other to enthrone a few lucky capital kings. But attitudes like yours will get us there.
What disgusts me about your company is this: You complain about not getting engineers you want, but you aren't willing to pay them what they're worth. It takes years to get the skills you want and constant effort to maintain them. Typical to HR, all you think about is the 40/week the tech puts in, not the other 40/week he's spending keeping his skills up to day. You people have road too far too long on the good graces of 'geeks' who haven't considered that extra job 'work'. People who thought it was fun designing a network topology. Now, there's so much competition for labor that there's not enough uber geeks doing it for love, and you're having to pay up for the expertise you want. To be honest, your companies standards are probably artificially high to create exactly the situation that makes it possible to let more cheap foreign labor in. This isn't some nutball conspiracy either. It's a known fact that during the 90's reports were forged to justify the rapidly increasing the H-1B Visa program.
Put another way, why should you expect to pay less for someone who maintains your most critical IT infrastructure, then for someone maintaining your most critical legal structure? Or Accounting Systems? If you can find competent Lawyers and Accountants, what makes you think you can't find competent Engineers?
Sorry to be so blunt, but that's the reality of it.
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no jobs? Thats bullcrap. I am one semester away from graduating with a masters in CS. With normal effort (applying through campus and through company websites) I have given about 6 interviews already this semester. I already have 2 offers and 2 interivews in the second round. And I am one of these foreigners who requires H1B. We don't get paid any less than an American employee, big companies, especially ones like Microsoft and Google pay everyone the same. If anything they have to pay more to sponsor visas (lawyers fees).
This has been tried and it doesn't work.
It turns out that if the people designing a product don't understand where it is going and how it's really going to be used, your product is likely to suck.
Honda's had R&D operations in the USA for years.
Tech Public Policy stuff
The faux-submitter Randeep "Igochyorjob" slipped a subtle troll trough. Brilliant!!!!
Let's see. The company I worked for in the mid-90's has since folded. The company I worked for in the late 90's folded a few months after I bailed in 1999. The huge, theoretically safe $BIG_PHARMA company I worked for laid off my entire department, lock, stock and IT department. The company I'm working for now desperately needs more people but they're afraid to hire anyone because financing is iffy.
Of the men and women I've worked with in the past 20 years, the one still in CS are the ones who learned to jump from one speciality to another - which means I've done everything from middleware to SMTP agents to device drivers - which makes it really hard to convince an HR person that not having 8 years in Visual C++ isn't a problem.
Yeah, I can see where you'd think there were lots of CS positions going unfilled due to lack of qualified applicants.
Clear, Dark Skies
That's one of my economic indicators, increased lobbying and PR spin on raising the H1B quota. The problem with this indicator however is that companies tend to think real long term on this. EMC has started PR spin on this a year ago.
"I'm wondering if raising wages might attract the "needed" workers from domestic sources or is Gate's request "necessary to remain competitive and innovative."
Government meddling with wage rates would actually increase unemployment. Having a degree in engineering should not guarantee a job. What makes an engineer more important than a sociologist or physicist? The government should stimulate innovation because that would decrease unemployment. Maybe Gate is looking for engineers who have a different mentality. No more free hand outs.
This is a bit of a turnaround for Gates, no? Microsoft's employees are already amongst the best paid and best supported. Their benefits, bonuses, and salary are significantly above average for the sector. I can't see how they'd have problems attracting coders on a monetary basis alone.
I would have considered the fact that it's not really considered 'cool' to work on MS stuff (or that most of the world's best coders and hackers are UNIX geeks) to have been the biggest problem MS has.
After I learned 25 different programming languages, I stopped counting.
Here's a hint: all the 3rd generation languages - Basic, Pascal, C, Modula, Fortran, were fundamentally interchangeable. The concepts line up just fine, only the details were different - which is why I kept the reference books handy.
C++, Objective C, Java are the same. The CONCEPTS are the same, only the grammar and the optimizations are different. Sure ObjC is going to frustrate you till you grok retain/release memory management, but a red/black tree is a red/black tree no matter how you code it.
You want different? Try coding in FORTH or APL. They were fun.
Clear, Dark Skies
When Cingular bought ATT Wireless, they laid off about 1/3rd of the Engineers, this was 2 months ago.
Yea, no engineers in America, need to outsource.
Schmucks, arnt you glad you voted people into office that want to outsource your unemployeed ass? Idiots.
So Billy Boy is looking for a new source of cheap serfs?
...I guess I'm not the only one who read this news item for the submitter's surname. It's like a good XML file: somewhat long, but well-formed.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
I have been applying for many months now, and nary a peep. I'll admit that I'm not in one of the hot areas (like Bay Area, Redmond and Boston) so they might be reluctant to fly me in for an interview. But think about it: if they can fly someone in from India, one would hope they'd be able to fly someone in from Backwoods USA.
Mr. Gates is biting the hand that feeds him. Pissing of techies like this and treating them like crap will get him exactly that: crap. Looking at his product, it appears he has been doing so for a few years now.
you could probably get a job back home. I don't think you "require" an H1-B visa to find work.
There is a real problem, though, that the world is full of idiots who spend years using a particular language and still don't properly understand it.
My rule on interviews was to have 10 "impossible" questions - really esoteric stuff like "Give me an example of a thread-interpreted language." It annoyed the managers to know end because it flustered the candidates. But I wasn't interested in whether or not the candidates *knew* the right answer, I was more interested in watching them work through the question and try to figure out the answer.
(for the curious: AFAIK, FORTH and Postscript are the only two thread-interpreted languages. Basically, they convert source code to a dictionary-based jump table. In this case, the word "thread" refers to the path of execution and has nothing to do with the modern meaning.)
Clear, Dark Skies
High tech executives like Bill Gates continue to whine that they just can't find needed talent domestically, and they need to bring in engineers from Third World countries, who just happen to make less money, and can be sent home at any time if they aren't sufficiently docile.
We all know it's about depressing American wages, but the executives claim it's just an issue of a talent shortage in the U.S.
Well, let's call 'em on it.
Let's see if they'll put their money where their mouths are.
Let companies bring in as many engineers as they want. No cap at all.
But here's the twist: not only do they have to pay the engineer the "going rate" for the position, as determined by the government, but they have to pay the *government* the same amount for the privilege of bringing in the foreign engineer.
So if the going rate for an engineer with a certain amount of experience in a particular city is $50,000 per year, the company has to pay the engineer $50,000, and they have to pay the government $50,000, too. The money they pay the government will be used to fund enforcement, so the companies don't play games.
That way, companies can get all the talent they want, but they have the incentive to hire Americans, because the foreigners cost them twice as much!
You got trolled.
It's all about raising the value of their stock.
Yes, that's right. People invest money in companies hoping to get their money back and earn a profit. They are not giving the money to charity. CEOs are hired to provide a return on the investors investment.
Which is the same way Jobs makes his $$$ but it kills jobs but some investors wealthy.
Investors start/fund companies that create jobs. Companies are in no way bound to provide employment to anyone.
To the rest of your post... you are not thinking globally. U.S. companies and U.S. labor are in competition with foreign companies and foreign labor for foreign and domestic cusotmers. If demand for tech jobs is high (which Bill Gates says it is) and supply is low, then the costs for labor will be high. So limiting H1-Bs keeps wages high. That's great for those people who have jobs... for the short term. But since all of the skilled foreigners are now no longer working in the U.S. for U.S. companies, they're going to be working for foreign companies for less money, selling their services to domestic and foreign customers for less money and effectively beating U.S. companies in the marketplace. As U.S. companies lose they will reduce the # of jobs they need, meaning U.S. employees will lose their jobs. As demand drops off for U.S. labor, wages will drop as well. The end result is that you have strong foreign companies and a weekend labor market in the U.S.
So, Bill Gates, richest man in the world (almost), who made his fortune with the help of American developers, now wants to bring a million Indians in to destroy the U.S. software industry as a job prospect for his own countrymen. What a guy! Let me add a few thoughts worth contemplating:
1. If Americans are supposedly so stupid compared to Indians, why exactly was it American engineers who developed the transistor (Bell Labs), the airplane (Wright Brothers), the light bulb (Thomas Edison), most of the foundation of modern computer science, the Unix operating system and the C language, Minix (upon which Linux was based), BSD, Java, the laser, the space shuttle, the satellite (yes, the Russians were first with the dog, but we leapfrogged them and our technology was much, much better -- also, Russia was stealing American technology throughout the cold war to help them compete), the nuclear submarine, the skyscraper, steel reinforced concrete, a vast number of modern medical procedures, the atomic and hydrogen bombs (those German physicists were aided by many American physicists and engineers), the atomic power plant, the Apollo Moon shot (most of the engineers were Americans, don't get started on Nazi rocket scientists...) and the personal computer? I could go on, but considering India's main claim to fame is the supposed invention of the number zero, and that it was a cruddy little third world country until the tech boom (and the technology WE GAVE THEM)... Well... You see my point. India's claim to have the best engineers in the world is pure hubris and fantasy.
2. If Bill G et al were REALLY concerned about producing more computer science graduates, they'd give kids a reason to enter the field instead of destroying their job prospects. But they're not. What they're concerned about is cheap, easy to exploit foreign labor. They don't care whether the foreigners are any good at programming at all; it isn't just IIT grads coming over, you know, it's the losers, too. And unlike Americans, they have lie-packed resumes that are impossible to doublecheck.
3. If these guys get their way and wipe out the computer science field for Americans, my people will figure out a new way to survive. We'll go into government, or civil service, or start our own local companies and bulletin boards, or turn to hacking like our Russian jobless counterparts.
4. I think it's very interesting that corporate America is so determined to wreck things for the very people who are best positioned to take revenge, whether it's by contributing to open-source and destroying the proprietary market, starting a company to directly compete, or going berserk and writing the next generation of viruses. It seems a little nuts to me, but then, nobody ever said suits had any common sense.
5. This ought to clear up the question of how committed Bill Gates et al are to "developers, developers, developers". I like the guy who suggested Bill G fuck himself with a cactus. That was perfect. My only gripe is, what about the poor cactus? I think he should use a cattle prod instead. It's the high-tech solution.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
What evidence do you have that "there must be plenty of unemployed quality people out there eager for a job" other than "everybody knows it?"
I'll tell you, even here in Utah -- not exactly the silicon valley of the midwest -- it seems like I always have 2 or 3 friends trying to hire someone for the past year. And it's been much longer since I've known anyone good to be out of work longer than a month.
The problem that the DOL used to face (I say used to, because the new programs will be fixing this to some degree) is that there are no set job descriptions.
That is to say, you as an employer could make up any reasonable (or somewhat ludicrous) job description to justify the low wage you'd be paying an employee. How do I know? Well, one of my previous employers made up a crappy job description, in order to put me at a salary on average, $20,000 less than the area I was living/working in (for the same type of work).
The interesting thing is a new program called PERM, which is for Green Cards. Under PERM, the number of valid job descriptions has been chopped to 1/10 what it used to be, and especially for Green Cards, they are extremely rigid. If they feel that a U.S. citizen can do your job, they will reject the application, even if you have already spent six years training an employee.
-- Joe
One of the things that annoyed me when I was in college was the large number of CS students who were doing CS to make "mad money". They weren't very good, but they were able to limp by one way or another, and ended up getting well-paying jobs just before the tech bubble burst.
Since I'm in the tech industry, I naturally would like my wages to go up, but I'd also like my coworkers to be competent. Depressed wages will drive away some domestic talent from entering the field, but it also will drive away a good number of the not-as-talented who want the relatively high wages we get.
I'm not sure if we really do have a shortage of talented tech workers or not, but I do know that at least a portion of those unemployed tech workers were not that talented.
The parent post is correct, in that there is an intrinsic bias in treating 'skilled' 1HB workers differently then completely unskilled laborers. The parent post is also class biased, and most likely covertly racist.
Isn't it just as unfair to unskilled workers in the US to allow a flood of people who are directly competing for the same jobs? If the cost of skilled work goes down because of allowing anyone to migrate, doesn't the same thing happen to all workers, no matter what they are paid?
For example, if we had a policy that limited unskilled workers, the cost of food would increase because the cost of farm labor would go up. People who have a legal place in the society could demand and get higher wages, since they could form unions. Of course this would lead to more people becoming Democrats, and the ruling Republican junta would be forced out of power.
Yes, I used a word that implies that the US is ruled by a self-serving, thieving, power mad clique that perpetuates its illegal rule by illegal means. It is just possible that the proposed change in policy being discussed here is an example of how this corrupt process works. Gates donates to the Republican, party and he gets something that benefits him at the expense of tens of thousands of other citizens. All in the name of "competitiveness". Meanwhile, he gets richer because everyone else gets poorer. Its called class warfare, and the rich are winning.
Bill Gates and George Bush are perfectly happy for you to be sleeping in a cardboard box if it gives one of their rich cronies an extra $100 a year. Wake up, or you will be lucky to be eating canned dog food. The unlucky will be eating out of garbage cans...
Bob 1: And uh, oh yea, we're getting rid of Michael Bolton and Samir Nayeenanajar.
Peter Gibbons: You're getting rid of Michael and Samir?
Bob 2: Yea. We'll bring in some cheap workers from overseas. Standard procedure.
*both Bobs nod*
[/Office Space]
The Peanut Gallery, Ubergeek, Biblically Sober
NCAAbbs.com: Thousands of fans, Hundreds of teams, Just one place
As usual with such a topic, the latent anti-immigrant sentiment of the American programmer shows its ugly face again...
Why don't you guys complain about Open Source as reason for losing your jobs? After all, everybody using Open Source means that proprietary software companies can't pay their employees anymore. And, Open Source software is written all over the world, by all those pesky foreigners...
So, why don't you complainers go and "buy American"? Idiots.
If you want to keep the American economy competitive, you should welcome lots more H1s. Because if you don't, they go and start the next big companies in India and China, and they are smarter as you whiners and they will produce better software than what some whiny, lazy-ass Americans produce. There are more smart people outside the US than inside.
Real programmers don't whine.
Believe me, they're not happy with the current state of affairs with respect to the H1-B program in the USA. It's not too hard to see a collapse in domestic born electrical engineers in North America. I'd guess it's over 50/50 when you get to the hardcore EE stuff, based on my experience with FPGAs. Is this a good long term strategic position to take? You tell me.
:shrug:
One thing that is always in demand is good people though. The inconsistant piece is the location of the work FOR good people.
Doesn't affect me either way, I'm Canadian. We've got our own problems here.
..don't panic
Do they count all the high-paying execs at MS as high-tech workers?
The big three Indian outsourcing firms have around an estimated 150,000 people working for them. The current H1-B visa limit is 75,000 (and it's full). So it's pretty clear that what is really desired is a lot of cheap labor, here in the U.S.
Personally, I think Gates' claim is a smokescreen in order to simply "compromise" and "settle" for a significant increase in the H1-B limit.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
You should have followed the job to Mexico City. I took a job voluntarily here, including a pretty big pay cut, and have never been happier.
You're a suburbanite.
We interview A LOT of people. I do mean A LOT. We've been doing about six five-hour long interviews _a week_ over the past several months.
Unfortunately, people don't know jack and we can't hire them because they'd only slow us down.
Microsoft processes a good percentage of all its revenue through a tiny office in Nevada. Why Nevada and not Redmond? Well, Nevada doesn't charge B&O taxes (or some other business tax) like Washington does. This saves MS _hundreds_ of millions of dollars every year. Meanwhile, Washington state has the 4th largest class sizes in the US, and the teachers are the lowest paid on the West Coast.
Once again, Gates has proven that talk is cheap.
-- Mace only makes me hornier.
Interesting scenario. However, the rupee is going up while the dollar continues to decline. Once China stops pegging the value of its currency to the dollar, the yuan will go up while the dollar will decline further.
My point? Even if foreign companies get good enough to compete with US companies, they won't be able to compete on cost as the dollar declines and comes into equilibrium with their currencies.
If you create artificially high supply of workers by enticing foreigners here, then less domestic students will enter computer science courses. Eventually, those foreigners aren't going to want to come here because they'll be able to make just as much money in their own country. Then we'll be double-screwed because we won't be able to get foreign or domestic workers.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Greetings,
I work as a systems architect for a very large company in Silicon Valley. The problem is not that there are a large number of unemployed programmers out there. There are. The real problem is the lack of qualified programmers if you want to do something serious.
The company I'm working for has about 100 engineers in various capacities. Nobody there has less than five years of experience, nor can we hire anybody with less than that for the work at hand. There are a number of positions open because the QUALITY of the dingbats showing up is appalling. It doesn't matter if they come from recruiters o by themselves. We are in a period of rapid expansion, the promotions (upward or lateral) "from within" are filled and we can't play musical chairs with the people we already have. And we can't find qualified engineers.
(Clarification: we have about 100 engineers, *not* counting the web guys. I mean real engineers and/or computer scientists and/or equivalent. Also, the really good web guys are equally hard to come by from what I understand.)
Gates' contention in this article is that MS can't find qualified applicants; they aren't after body counts but after quality. We are in a similar position: if qualified people showed up, we'd hire them on-the-spot! We've need at least 30 more engineers and we can't find them. We aren't advocating more H1-Bs, like Gates is. We are, however, desperate to find qualified engineers wherever we can. They can be Indian or Martian for all we care.
H1-B visas are a bandaid for the problem: producing more qualified engineers. We need to create a business and professional environment that promotes the growth of the qualified labor pool HERE. The article, and a lot of posters, are missing this point.
Cheers,
Eugene
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
H1B visas should be drastically cut with an onerous method of getting someone approved for a H1B position.
The current method of providing a 1/2 page job advertisement with impossible skill requirments just to qualify an already know offshore worker is unethical and should be made illegal.
Those job ads are easy to spot since they are much larger than other ads and they have 2 or 5 impossible skills only a few hundred people have.
A good interview question - how many comments do you write per week on Slashdot? If the average is greater than 1 per week, you are an addict and should be fired and then shot.
Visa programs do seem to have a turnkey policy, and they often hurt US-based companies more than help them. I'm from around NYC area, and pretty familiar with financials (work at one major one). In an effort to meet quotas for minorities, some companies feel great about getting minorities on board but then get shafted after a few years when the new trainees return to their home country with a ton of cash and experience (and probably proprietary info as well).
I have one Indian acquaintance who has a girlfriend back in India, and he'd go either here or there if he knew he could land a good job to support (and marry) her. Is it just me, or should I question his commitment to a company due to his circumstances?
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
...so it's only natural that Gates is complaining that there aren't enough really smart and talented techie people out there. eh.
...because you never know who you're dealing with.
An experienced developer with 5+ years of heavy development experience even if it is not exactly in the same environment you want will be much more productive than the 'hot shot' developer with 2 years experience in the exact environment you want.
Engineering companies know this, why can't IT shops and software companies learn this?
Take me, for example. I combined some fairly standard academic CS fields (AI, language processing, etc) with Japanese. And, presto, the number of US-based competitors I had for some positions is in the double digits. And English/Japanese bilingual engineers aren't exactly suffering a crush of supply in Japan -- thats why they brought me over here. I probably have email addresses for half of the bilingual natural language researchers in the US, and the most common way people get hired is to start with someone you already know who does it and ask "Say, give me somebody". When the hiring dynamic works like that, you don't have to slice $10k off your salary and work EA-style hours to have a chance at getting the job for 3 years before it gets moved to Bangalore sans you.
We techies can't stay mired in the industrial production mode where we're moderately skilled labor which is essentially fungible. Any tech position which fits that description will see its salary decline asymptotically to nothing, guaranteed. And don't expect the government or unions to protect you like they spent a lot of the last century protecting the guys at the GM plant or in textiles (by the way, any time you think you've got it rough, take a look at those guys) -- the economy is globalizing and you can either get on the train or get crushed by it. There are like fifty zillion different occupational specialties which we just can't bloody find enough people to do -- I know one employer who would throw $80,000 at someone capable of designing a UI in Arabic (and being able to work in the office efficiently) if he could just find that someone.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
If tech companies could make more money by paying tech workers more and/or hiring more American tech workers, they would do this because it was in their best interest. Unemployment among tech workers shows that they cannot do this. On the other hand, if they could hire somebody with comparable (or even better) skills, pay them less, and make money, then they would do that. The market says that these unemployed workers do not have the skills to get the salaries they want, but that H1-B's do. So let the market speak instead of limiting what American companies can do because of anti-immigrant worker feelings.
All of the talented techie people won't go near his garbage software company.
Sorry Bill. If you can't schmooze technology talent here in the US, you certainly won't be able to schmooze technology talent in the rest of the world.
You shit on them, don't you remember? Where were you when the rest of the world was asking you for help?
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
"Eager for a job" != "Willing to go anywhere to get it".
The Bill of old was decidedly apolitical and non-whiny. The new Bill is just another whining corporate executive using his position of power to extract favors from the federal government.
I admit I have never been a fan of Microsoft's products and I think they used lots of dirty tricks achieve their monopoly. But, I was never a big MS basher and had some grudging respect for the way they achieved their success without favors from the government.
But, Microsoft's exponential growth phase is behind them and despite consistent earnings and profits, their stock price has been flat for about three years. They even tried buying back stock which hasn't helped. Something has to be done.
The old Bill would have been stalking the halls of the company coming up with some way to "cut off the air supply" to the current tech leaders (e.g. eBay, Google, Linux). Instead he has resorted to calling the competition commies and is flying to Washington to whine about how unfair it is that he can't import all the cheap foreign labor he wants.
Well, boo hoo, Bill. Google is growing like crazy and not having any trouble recruiting. Why don't you resurrect some of that old ruthlessness and quit your whining.
I have read threads above complaining about the quality of applicants. The answer is not try and get some better ones from overseas, BUT Education.
Problem is that education costs money. The politicians wont like that. They rather open the gates to immigrant workers. Which come in pre Educated.
Think about this though, if there are 500,000 programming positions and only 400,000 skills programmers then they will be paid a whole lot more than they would if there were 600,000 skilled programmers competing for the same position.
If the govenment invests in more education then over time the amount of skilled programmers available will balance out with the positions available. This has the net effect of lower pay rates. Which I think is what every employer wants.
I've worked with enough knuckleheads from both sides of the world to suggest a different source for the problem. What we need is an increase in the average quality of code. If I can pay for an idiot from Bangalore or an idiot from good old USA, and either way there is a 50% chance that the code is going to suck and fail, and a 50% chance that the code will work... barely... but still suck then I'm better of paying for the cheapest idiot. If there were a way that I could guarantee good product then it would be worth almost any price. But a lot of things would have to change for that to happen:
I wouldn't mind the H1-B visas, if the government would impose a tax which would make the imported workers more expensive than the local workers.
If bgates really needs the "qualified" workers, then let him pay for it. And use tax money to train the local workers.
India replies with its 10 nuclear missiles, 5 which hit their Pakistani targets, 4 which land on Indian territory and 1 which lands on a Chinese city - more news at 10 p.m.
We need to send all these H1B people packing as it stands today! You know why not offer the TALIBAN or OSAMA positions on WALL STREET networks!???!?! Christ, we have all but turned over our infrastructure to INDIA - the people we can LEAST trust to do the work. I mean really - did we learn NOTHING from 9/11 ??!?!?!?! I fear for this country, and I for one will be dancing in the street singing shouting and LAUGHING MY ASS OFF the day the next 9-11 type strike happens.... I just hope next time it takes out ALL of WASHINGTON DC!!! An we would have done it ALL *TO* ourselves BY OURSELVES!
If foreign labor is cheaper then they should hire foreign executives, say I bet an Indian can be found that will take Bill's or Steve's job for less than a tenth even a hundredth of their incomes.
The US immigrant policies have really bad problems; politicians get votes if they're 'tough on immigrants'... they get $ if they're 'ignoring the illegal immigrant problem.'
As for immigrant policies and whether to allow immigration or not, I have one question, and depending on the answer to it maybe another, to ask anyone against legal or "illegal" immigration:
1. What American Indian Tribe are you a member of?
If the answer is none, then,
2. What American India tribe signed your, or the ancestor of your's who immigrated here, papers?
Personally I believe in open borders, that a person should be able to work and live wherever they want as long as they don't violate someone else's rights and they can afford it. Actually I don't, as I don't believe in borders which are nothing more than imaginary lines drawn on paper.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Excuse me. Until you show me something that says otherwise, I'm going to assume what my HR tells me, that most immigrants aren't family folks - they're single. $15 billion back to Mexico is a drop in the bucket - and I'm sure it's taken into account when deciding how much economic aid to give Latin America. People making minimum wage aren't saving money and sending it home. They're making enough to survive. Sure, tech workers are making more than that, and they are sending some back home, but that's why we have a limit on the number of visas. Let 'em come. This country was built on the idea of open immigration, and it didn't hurt us when the doors were open.
Don't forget Boeing is in Seattle area. There you have a lot of Engineers with and average salary around $65k a year. Maybe even higher since most anyone with less than 10 years was laid off (avg age at the company is ~48). And there is an extra thick layer of management their too with six figure incomes.
And Boeing complains about Airbus. Hey, what about the new Airbus A380?
FalconShould there be a Law?
By maintaining caps on visas, we encourage outsourcing. Here's a logical-extreme thought experiment: we remove all limits on immigration, and every engineer in the world decides to move to the U.S. As a result outsourcing ceases because there are no engineers outside the U.S. to outsource work to.
TFA says "Congress capped the number of non-immigrant visas for skilled professionals [to] ensure more jobs for home-grown tech workers." But the economics don't work that way: by capping visas, they move jobs overseas. I'm cynical enough to believe that was the real intent, since the corporate owners of our politicians want to preserve a healthy outsourcing market.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
I've seen candidates misuse subclassing so many times
There is no consensus on when and where to use subclassing. OO is a dark grey art. Perhaps a better approach is to ask WHY they subclassed the way they did. That way you get good thinkers even if they don't always reach the same conclusion as you. Good software design is much about weighing the different probability paths of future changes and forcasting the impact on code.
Table-ized A.I.
It wouldnt be so bad if H1 replacements were actually good.
As far as Indians are concerned, I assure they are not. I'm an Indian F1 student and so are most of my friends. All my friends who have got a job, have got it through some Indian recruiter.
These recruiters basically create a fake resume for the student(or anyone) who wants to get a H1. They show 5+ yrs exp and whatever skills that are needed for the job. And finally the H1 guy gets paid a lot less.
Best part about this scam is, even if you are from another stream(say Chemical Eng, Mechanical Eng), the recruiters will 'train' you and get you a job.
Then you might ask how can such a person survive in the job. Well I've seen MANY people, including some from Mech eng get a job for a position that wants 6 yrs exp, and no one has got fired. That means the management and most of the collegues are equally qualified.(ie not at all). And lets face it, to 'blow enough smoke' as you put it is not rocket science. (I liked that expression and that why I replied)
I dont know about any numbers, but since an overwhelming majority of Indians that I know from several Univs have gotten jobs like this, I'd say atleast 1/4 of H1's are such 'qualified' individuals. Add to that I've met some H1's directly from India, and they didnt exactly impress me.
And guess what, to survive in the US, I've started approaching some recruiters... I'll be H1 before this year end.... thats the only way to pay my debts off.
I dont mean to say Indians are horrible programmers or anything like that. There are lots of good Indian programmers that US companies could use, but the people who are getting hired are certainly under qualified.
RMS is our Lord and savior.
nuf sed. Fuck Gates.
Bill Gates is right. There is a shortage of labor at the price he'd like to pay. Similarly, there's a shortage of $1/gal gasoline.
The 5.7% figure that is mentioned is the unemployment rate for those in the CS field. This number sounds low but unemployment rates don't convey the employment condition in a particular field because those who change lines of work no longer get counted. For older, unemployed programmers, this is their best option. They no longer count as unemployed programmers but as employed retail store clerks. I know dozens of ex-coworkers who've lost jobs in their 40s and 50s. I've read many posts on slashdot claiming only 2nd rate programmers and engineers are pushed out. Those expressing such opinions seem to think their own skills are of such high quality that they will be spared such a fate. I guarantee each of these ex-coworkers I've referred to entertained similar notions. At this time, no accurate assesment exists of the underemployment problem in the USA.
Electronic circuit design was my first career after college. I watched manufacturing being outsourced in the 80s. By the late 80s, it was clear that the engineering work would also be outsourced. I retooled myself to be a software developer and have been doing that for more than 10 years. Now, the same thing is happening to this line of work.
When these high paying jobs leave the USA, the incomes leave too. People with lower incomes eventually have to consume less. Tough times lie ahead for many Americans.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
... I can tell you that there are a ton of H1's who get brought into the country, not because employers can't find talent, but because they're willing to cut every corner necessary. I've seen cases where a firm will stick 5 to 6 of them in a single apartment for the duration of their contract. They take it because it's their way out of a bad situation, and I can't fault them, although it sucks for the US born worker.
There are quite a few H1-B shops (a bunch of them in Edison, NJ particularly) which bring underskilled workers over from India and Africa in droves and stick them on projects to hope that they'll pick their skills up quick enough to perform adequately on their projects before they're fired. Then, once they get a few of these projects under their belts, they can charge just as much as US citizens because they have the experience that college grads who were born here lack.
It used to be that an employee would be brought in at the entry level and allowed to learn and apply the tools of his trade. Nowadays, that seems to be primarily the domain of the immigrant worker.
I spoke recently to a local employer about an entry level position. They wanted a college grad DBA with Visual Basic, Linux, PHP, MySQL, SQL Server, and C++ experience. They were offering a entry rate of $2100 a month and wondering why they had such a hard time filling a position. When I told him to look at what he was looking to pay, he seemed genuinely offended. I'm sure the position will stay open until the next wave of H1s can come through.
Suppose he leaves those million Indians in India, where they work for much cheaper because housing and other expenses are much lower. Since they have the Internet in India, it's easy for corporations to send programming work over to those million instead of giving it to to American workers. By leaving the million in India, we make life harder, not easier, for American programmers.
If those million come to America, they have to buy houses and cars at American prices, and get loans and mortgages at American rates. Now that their living expenses roughly match yours, they need a salary that roughly matches yours. They're habitually frugal, so it's lower, but not ridiculously mind-bogglingly lower, as it would be if they'd stayed home. Living here, they're a much smaller competitive threat than if they stay home.
Their actual nationality doesn't matter much - what matters most is where they are living, which determines their expenses. If you could go to India and work there (which you could, were it not for Indian labor laws regarding immigrants), you'd enjoy about the same competitive advantage they get by staying home.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Where is the -1, Moron flag when you need it?
I wouldn't bother applying for a job unless I knew it paid a bit more than I make now (or had some other benefits).
Maybe you're HR folks should (and the many other larger companies that seem to be suddenly shy about saying how much they think a job is worth) try letting folks know at least what the salary range is, and you're company might (if they aren't trying to underbid the job) get some candidates better suited to the job.
I know that these policies are often set in HR rather than by the group with the work, which is a rather different problem than there not being enough qualified candidates:-(.
Anyway, the last time we had an open position here, the pay range was clear, and we had plenty of qualified candidates.
"IT companies have been bleeding workers for the last five years. During that time, new college graduates have also been unable to find entry level work. There are excellent workers in both of those groups. "
Now, now. That's not the "./" party line. You're suppose to say that "it's all their fault", and good riddance to people who only do it for the money, or something like that.
What American Indian tribe are you part of?
FalconShould there be a Law?
Why shouldn't engineers from around the world have an equal chance to compete?
I say let anyone live and work anywhere in the world, and most slashdot commenters should be ashamed.
Dear traitor: You wrote your entire post on a entirely outsourced computer that you gleefully purchased.
A good troll needs to be more subtle. You get no brownie points.
So, err, jealous?
The reason India has the best engineers in the world is not because they are smart or Americans are stupid, its because their government put a lot of money into the tech industry, schooling systems, and training.
While our government takes away money from schooling and the tech industry.
1. Exactly when did "India" make this claim? And if the programmers are so bad, why are you worried about them? Is it the number zero that scares you?
2. It's in Microsoft's best interest, as a corporation, to hire good programmers. Why would they not care if the people they employ are "any good at programming at all"? What do they expect the new employees to do, print money directly?
3. This we agree upon. Good luck to your people.
4. Oh, I get it. The suits don't have any common sense because if they piss you off, you're going to write viruses to destroy them. I say you cut out the middleman, and write viruses to destroy the Indians directly.
You get to pick up women at family reunions.
Fight Spammers!
This issue of immigration needs to be clarified. Immigration is good. ILLEGAL immigration is BAD. Those are two very different situations. Those illegals are spiting in the faces of those that are going through the long processes of immigration.
...Well, then again... if nothing is done about our current immigration problem - you might very well have an idea in the coming years...
Try living in southern california. I live outside of San Diego and I've seen first had how illegal immigration has HURT our communities. In terms of depressed wages, the drain on hospitials, schools, and on the list goes.
$15 Billion. Thats $15 Billion we don't have in our economy anymore. It's not fueling business, employment, or consumer spending.
I'm tired of *uninformed* people making statements like 'open immigration' - 'no borders' without knowning the implications of those actions. You don't even have a clue what devestation those policies would exact!
I have been told that colleges don't really teach OO design - it's just one of those skills you pick up. I think is is very irresponsible of them, and companies shouldn't put up with it.
I guess it depends on the school. I'm in college now taking Java, my last class there, and OO is stressed in it. OO was part of the curriculum in Database Design and Systems Analysis as well.
FalconShould there be a Law?
And so, therefore, make them legal, specifically so they aren't limited to the border areas, and they can move freely and work where there is work.
Nice job on the moderation there.
1. And here I thought Minix was written by Andy Tanenbaum. (notice the NL in that domain?)
Most of the stuff you are talking about is, with all due respect, old stuff. I'm not going to argue about whether or not Americans are stupid or not (it's a rediculous generalization), I think it's entirely possible that a new generation does not have the level of education than the one before. I think we can all agree that your ancestors where great. You will have to prove yourself.
2. Sure, Americans never lie on their resume. I'll give you that one.
3. How about you don't sit back and wait for Microsoft to do the right thing? It's easier than ever to create 'the next big thing' in your garage/basement. For example, you can get an FPGA development kit for under a $100, with which you can do just amazing things. Quit your fucking whining and start doing something.
4. Getting a little desperate to have a good argument, it sounds like.
5. Instead of silly personal attacks on people, how about this; why don't you dedicate some energy to see how you can help to get a government in place that is for the people and not the corporations. You realize that it is your government that is _very_ supportive of Microsoft, and that that government was (supposedly) democratically chosen.
"Eager for a job" != "Willing to go anywhere to get it".
Then that's not eager enough in my book. Meanwhile, there are some people who are eager enough for a job to go to the other side of the world to get it.
At any top tech company, you're going to find not only people from all over the world, but also from all over the country. Woody Allen once said that "80% of success is just showing up".
The filesystem is the package manager
I couldn't agree with you much more. My experience with job hunting a couple of years ago resulted in me learning to absolutely hate recruitment agents. It came down to a couple of main things:
Combining these two made things incredibly frustrating, because if you don't fit into the artificial mould they've been trained to identify, they're afraid of you.
One of my biggest problems at the time was that the small company for which I'd worked was eaten and dissolved by another company for its intellectual property before the main product had been released. Recruitment agents didn't care about commercial experience if it's not on a product that was actually released, irrespective of the product.
I did come across one agent out of about ten who seemed to actually know what he was talking about, but unfortunately by that time I'd already organised things myself.
I'm approaching another job search now, and I'm doing everything that I possibly can to avoid going through recruitment agents. Granted that this means being much more aggressive in directly approaching the organisations I want to work for, and calling in favours from a few friends, but I just can't be bothered dealing with thicko's unless I really have to. If you want a good job, it's worthwhile getting to know some of the people in the business beforehand, and asking for them to bring you into the loop at an appropriate time.
Just as a further note on this, recruitment agents are agents for the employer, not the job-hunter, however crappily they actually do it. Employers are the people who pay the agent if they supply someone who eventually gets a job. The irony is that many employers I've spoken to (including several friends) seem to feel exactly the same about them as I do. Sometimes I wonder how many of them manage to survive.
There are also conflicting interests for agents not to put you forward for a good job if they already have someone who they think is better, and if they think they can get you into another one instead. (That way you end up with a worse than ideal job, but they get two commissions.)
God, somebody's already said this, but nobody's pointing to Econ 101: Any increase in aggregate supply lowers prices. Period.
Yeah, yeah, I know /. is affiliated with Yahoo TechJobs ... but I'm thinking all these job-related posts, and more, would fit perfectly in an "Employment" topic. /. could then be a forum for techies looking for work, as opposed to the usual job site.
...
Unless you know of any forums already, for techies talking about looking for work
Global warming is neither science, nor politics. It is a religion.
So where did your family emigrate from? When?
I am tired of short-sited, hypocritical idiots.
I do live in SoCal. Looks fine here to me. I am certain the area I am in has significantly higher (per capita) illegal immegrant population than does San Diego.
Why don't you read a few economic texts that deal with, oh, say, labor costs and the economy? In particular, why don't you pay attention to what percent of farming costs are related to labor?
15 billion dollars is not even a percent of what illegal immigrants have contributed to the American economy by taking jobs that would have either not been taken, or would have required unreasonable wages to convince an american to take (10-12 dollars/hr is not reasonable for zero skill labor). Does it create local problems? Sure. So does urban poverty. Grow up. San Diego bitching about... jesus. Go live in Gary IN and get back to us in a year.
A lot of people posting here need a reality check.
I'll be blunt: If you are in the industry and don't have a job right now, you either suck, interview poorly, or are trying for positions you aren't qualified for. The industry is hot right now and there are loads of great opportunities.
Too many people came out of the late-90's with inflated egos...
There's more to this than just the economic analysis (and whatever anecdotal evidence you may have with your given company or companies). As a general rule, bad things happen to nations that fail to look within for the resources they need to perpetuate (though I'd rather not push the energy resources aspect of this at the moment). In particular, a move to abdicate the proper development and subsequent use of intellectual talent has an instant demoralizing and chilling effect on the future population, which one way or another will work itself into the culture of that generation. A powerful message that the men in charge would rather get somebody else to do the job than own up to their responsibility of making it unnecessary.
You're looking elsewhere for people who, ultimately, retain loyalty to their nation of origin (with the exception of those who're seeking asylum, or some other pretty unusual circumstance). When it comes down to it, they may respect and admire the characteristics of the nation that employs them, but if it became feasible to set up shop back home at a reasonable quality of life, national pride dictates they'd probably take it. If the benefactor pushed strongly for this kind of importing of brainpower, then they may inadvertantly find themselves creating a significant foundation for such a large scale transition. So while it may work out just great for the export nation (at the cost of spending a generation of its own talent beyond borders), it eventually leaves the import nation with a vacuum that can't be easily filled.
Heck, the Roman empire's sole strength was its military (let's admit that it had few other redeeming qualities), and at the end of its effective lifespan it was relying on foreign mercenaries. I'm sure it seemed like a great cost-benefit proposal to the powers that be, probably because there weren't enough of them considering the subtle and/or long term ramifications. It wasn't really even that this strategy wasn't effective in the near term; it was that the citizenry just stopped caring about or respecting the premises of the nation's eminence. That's something that can't be bought and sold so easily.
MS has very high standards. Getting the top 10% means that 90% don't cut it. If you're in that 90%, you will not get hired at MS whether or not the goverment increases skilled-labor quotas.
The problem with that 90% is that almost all of them think they belong in the top 10%...
Yea, remember years ago when Walmart used to advertize "Made In USA"? Now it's all "Made in China." I don't recall where it was or what the exact figures were but last year I read where if Walmart were considered a country it'd be one of China's biggest trading partners. And now Walmart's even opening stores in China.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The first properly documented mechanical flight on a heavier-than-air machine was performed in France by Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian. This page has a lot of information about it. In all fairness, Here's the dissenting view. In the American rebuttal to the claims of the backers of Santos-Dumont, they admit, en passant, that the French Clement Ader was actually the first to fly.
I don't mean to discredit the Wright brothers as aviation pioneers. Also, I won't enter in the discussion of "who invented the airplane", because the fact is that the design was being perfected for a many years by a number of groups.
As a Brazilian, I am very proud of Santos-Dumont's contribution, especially as he was a sort of "open-source/open-access pioneer" also. While the Wright brothers applied for patents for their inventions, Santos-Dumont published openly the plans of his most successful aircraft:
The filesystem is the package manager
MSFT stock options no longer have the same pull they did in the '90's? Finding it hard to bring in the employees when the new kid is the one that can promise its employees that their options will make them overnight millionares? Feeling the pressure to compete with the upstart operating systems but finding that the company just can't maintain a technological erection the way it could a decade ago? Is the problem that Microsoft just isn't really getting laid the way it used to? Maybe Ballmer wasn't really the infusion of corporate viagra that your company needed. Maybe you should go back to the old mistress for some advice on what to do when your company gets older and its ass gets flabby. Maybe that's the real problem here...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Now, I'm rather cynical here; I believe that we are a country made of immigrants, and it would be very hypocritical of me to demand a closed door policy. Sadly, others are not so 'open' in their thoughts, even though few Americans have more than a handful of generations behind them. I'm 4th Gen, myself. How about you, reader?
Ahh, much the way I feel. There's a question I like to ask those who are against immigration, "legal" or "illegal" which usually leads to another one.
1. What Native American Indian tribe are you a member of?
Most of the tyme it's "none", it so then I ask,
2. What NDN tribe signed your, or the ancestor of your's who immigrated here, papers?
Forget open borders, remove all borders.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Yep, so long as they have no pride in their work or any professional ethics, Bill will get them. I've been to university; I've seen the sort of people that apply to MS for work, and the sort that don't.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Should we be opposed to this? Considering that the alternative is shipping the jobs outside the US ...
You're taking the bait like a real sucker. Corporate America knows that offshore outsourcing of software development does not work. There is no cost savings by doing it. They hide this fact and then use the threat of offshoring development jobs to scare the uninformed into accepting H1Bs as the lesser of two evils. It's bullshit, and you shouldn't fall for it.
Dig a little deeper into that link you provided, and you'll find this FAQ about Andy Tanenbaum, which includes this info:
So yeah, Minix was written by an American who happens to live in Amsterdam.
In all honesty, I support the idea that a country should protect its local labor market. I think it would be dangerous to completely eliminate the quotas. However, I do think that the USA could benefit more from foreign workers if it fixed some kinks in its immigration system. I have seem scientists in highly strategic projects loose nights of sleep wondering the next steps that they need to take to renew a visa. The currently system is just too complicated and cumbersome and there are a lot of loopholes. In certain ways, it sometimes hinders legitimate immigration while it rewards people who are taking advantage of the system.
It was through the use of these "special" visas that all of the September 11th terrorists secured admittance to the United States. There is virtually no security or monitoring of these special visa holders.
No terrorist entered US using H1 or L1 visas. They entered USA using student visas - it was easy for Saudi citizens to get student visas.
I cannot understand your motive for implying terrorists came to US using H1 or L1 visa. I find your allegation similar to the "Iraq has weapons of mass destruction" argument.
Tat Tvam Asi
Once China stops pegging the value of its currency to the dollar, the yuan will go up while the dollar will decline further. My point? Even if foreign companies get good enough to compete with US companies, they won't be able to compete on cost as the dollar declines and comes into equilibrium with their currencies.
You may be underestimating the wage difference between China and the US. It is VERY big. Currently the wage for a qualified software developer in China is ~US$5000/year. Do you honestly expect the Chinese Renminbi to appreciate 1000% or the US$ to depreciate 90%? That is the stuff of financial meltdown and wage parity between tech workers in the US and China due to exchange rate changes is really unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future, if at all.
And the peg and its effect on wage/trade parity is not as cut and dry as some would have. Much of the manufacturing in China will not be greatly affected by a revaluation of the Renminbi as many of the contracts for raw materials and sales are written in US$. The only impact it will have is on the local cost components which are not a large percentage of the equation. This is because much of the manufacturing in China is done by foreign companies - its not as though lots of Chinese companies are manufacturing lots of Chinese products and exporting them to the US, much of the exported manufacturing is done by US companies who have offshored their manufacturing plants to China - once again the US/Renminbi rate has little bearing here as everything is basically denominated in US$. Which means that even if the peg is removed the US$/Renminbi exchange rate is unlikely to change as much as simple trade surplus based economics suggests it will, more likely is that the Chinese central bank will no longer need to buy huge amounts of T-bills to maintain the peg and this is likely to cause more pain than gain for the US economy and US$ - Walmart will still be able to sell cheap Chinese made stuff, there will still be a huge wage disparity between the US and China, but interest rates in the US will surge as the foreign debt is no longer underpinned by huge foreign purchases of T-bills
If you don't do anything other than whine on Slashdot this will pass.
I'm well aware of how many foreign workers there are in my office. I'm also well aware of how inexpensive they are despite how much their contracting companies charge (someones getting rich). What I'm constantly reminded of is just how bad they are through lack of experience, lack of understanding of business systems, lack of communication skills...
If I actually worked on sofware development (I do, but the company won't label me as such) I would be absolutely terrified at this development. He, and his friends, have easily a billion dollars to invest towards killing your paycheck. What do you have in defense? What's your counter arguement?
And take a clue from the UAW history. Unionizing software development might stay the course for a period of time, but at a great cost to the end consumer, the national industry, and of course corporations and human lives. Realize that the first thing you will be are pseudo-terrorists.
Eventually, Gates will win his case in the current environment. Unless you can prove the added value of having local workers then the American Software industry (from an employment point of view) is effectively dead. And as locals leave the industry, the industry will leave the nation and we will lose what little technical edge we may have today. We will become consumers of not only VCR's but of Technology and IP.
It's ironic that companies protect IP in the country, but when everyone they hire to develop the IP lives outside of the country, they may not be able to protect that IP over international borders.
What else, uncle Bill wants to pay engineer at minimum wages. And the only way to get that wage is to have more engineer hacking..err, coding for less
So yeah, Minix was written by an American who happens to live in Amsterdam.
;-)
Okay, I stand corrected. Thanks for pointing that out, I knew I was walking on thing ice there
Money and Attitude...
Let's talk about the obvious one first - money. Foreign workers are happy to come over here and work for half of what American workers know they need to be able to survive in this country. Foreign workers often get put up in extended-stay type places by the company and are given a company car, so they have no living or transportation expenses. They are also frequently given per-diem allowances for food... Intangible compensation is cheaper than cash compensation, dollar for dollar, because the company doesn't have to pay payroll taxes on the money spent on lodging, food, allowances, and so on. American workers will not accept living in a hotel and driving a cavalier and a lower salary because it is not the standard of living that Americans have become accustomed to. To a foreigner from the third world, however, that Crossland Suites may as well be the Taj Majal and that Cavalier is the coolest goddamn thing they've ever seen. Plus, they send most of that 25K/yr home to their home country so when they go back in 3 years, they'll be the richest person on the block. Works great for the company, works great for the "guest" worker, but American workers are screwed...
Which is a nice segue into the next point - attitude. Since I am involved in hiring, I get to interview probably 100-200 candidates every year. What I can tell you, just as a concrete observation of candidate attitude, is that American programmers still hold the attitude that they somehow deserve 1999 rates with few or no fluid responsibilities (other duties as assigned) in the job description. The hard truth of the matter is that it's not a labor supply shortage, but rather that the supply demands compensation that is too far above what the job is actually worth without offering anything in return. This is especially so with new graduates, so we have basically stopped interviewing them alltogether.
We know what we are willing to pay for a job, and we routinely offer what we believe is fair compensation to all applicants, regardless of citizenship status (our "guest" workers are paid the same as citizen workers), and 95% of citizen workers decline our offers. We also routinely reward excellent performance with very large raises (up to 15%/yr if someone deserves it) and bonuses (up to another 15%, again, if someone deserves it). What we will not do, however, is pay $50K/yr for a fresh graduate with no experience and an attitude that the $50K is just for showing up and everything else is extra. I actually had one candidate, fresh out of a second tier 4-year CS program, walk into my office, look me right in the eye, and tell me he thought $100K would be a good starting point to negotiate up from. I nearly soiled myself..
Oh, and our top programmer/architect in the office earns more than $200K, but she (yes, SHE) writes damn fantastic code and documents it well and is a wonderful team lead whose team makes its milestones every damn time and without fail. We have actually had customers who have said they will not do business with us unless she is on the review panel for all of the products they purchase from us.
Sorry, that was a bit of overkill. I shouldn't post on 4 hours sleep in 30... :)
Yeah, well, most of us don't have the chance to compete. We live in whatever country we live in and are subject to the living expenses of said country. I can't live on a $5,000 chinese salary, because I might have to pay my $1,200/mo fucking shitty studio apartment rent (which is expensive, because it's in a tech heavy city where there are actually jobs to be had).
When I can buy a house for $50k and a gallon of milk for a nickel, we'll fucking talk competition. At the moment, it's just a bullshit excuse to blame the "victims" by saying "you're not as cheap as some slave labor in china, so go fuck yourself".
1. If Americans are supposedly so stupid compared to Indians, why exactly was it American engineers who developed the transistor (Bell Labs)
... Well, sort of wrong.
:-)
You're acutally right with that one.
the airplane (Wright Brothers)
They came up with the classic wing profile we still use today. However, there where others flying before that. The german Otto Lilienthal for instance. And it was a french guy who built the first fully functional aeroplane. But again the USians where better at marketing (which is what counts in the end). BTW: Otto Liliental isn't even mentioned in wikipedia (which I find astounding).
the light bulb (Thomas Edison)
Wrong.
Heinrich Göbel and his glowing bottle was first. Edison only ripped him, did the marketing and made the money. As usuall, the german guy was smart enough to invent, but to dumb to make money of it. Same with the Telefax (Fax). Siemens said no, AT&T said yes. And it was a german inventor who asked siemens fist. Stupid idea. You never go to Siemens with an invention. You go to an US company.
most of the foundation of modern computer science
Wrong.
Zuse (german) and von Neuman. Zuse built the first functional computer of the kind we use today. (Seperation of CPU and RAM)
the Unix operating system and the C language, Minix (upon which Linux was based), BSD, Java, the laser
Don't know about those. Maybe you're right with that.
the space shuttle, the satellite (yes, the Russians were first with the dog, but we leapfrogged them and our technology was much, much better -- also, Russia was stealing American technology throughout the cold war to help them compete)
The germans the americans gatherd up were better than those the russians could muster. In fact all you've mentioned is based on stuff from Werner von Braun and what he developed before and during the 'Third Reich'. Watch (or read) "The Right Stuff" - there's nice one-liner with someone saying "Our germans are better than their germans." Quite fitting actually.
the nuclear submarine
Wrong.
Otto Hahn (german scientist). (the nuclear part)
German 1st WW Reichsmarine (the submarine part)
the skyscraper
That one's correct.
steel reinforced concrete
Wrong.
Rudolf Steiner (austrian) and the inovative architects he gathered to build the second "Goetheanum". Which is the oldest steel reinforced concrete building in the world. And it still is considered by experts as the one that makes best architectural use of this type of material.
a vast number of modern medical procedures
Those being? You're making a very vague filler statement here.
the atomic and hydrogen bombs (those German physicists were aided by many American physicists and engineers)
Aha. Heary, heary. Ever heard of Oppenheimer?
the atomic power plant,
Didn't we have that allready? Otto Hahn?
the Apollo Moon shot (most of the engineers were Americans, don't get started on Nazi rocket scientists...)
Yepp. Let's call them german rocket scientists.
And why not? It actually is true. Take that from someone who's father and grandfather have worked with the NASA (Orbiter) and Grumman Aircraft (Lunar Module).
and the personal computer? I could go on, but considering India's main claim to fame is the supposed invention of the number zero, and that it was a cruddy little third world country until the tech boom (and the technology WE GAVE THEM)
India was a high culture a few thousand years ago with writing, math, abstract currency and all that comes with it at a time when Europe was inhabited by hairy grunts barely capable of walking upright. And don't forget: America is something like a european colony - just as europe is very much something like an american colony. So I wouldn't get to worked up about what "WE GAVE THEM"...
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
"Lower the pay of US professionals to $50,000, Ballmer suggests, and it won't make sense for employers to put up with the hassle of doing business in theThird World. (Kent Hollenback, a spokesman for Microsoft, declined to say what the company pays employees.) "
o ry445480235.asp
http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/2003/12/28/st
Determined by whom? I'd be interested to see where that data comes from.
However, that's rarely the major issue here. The "salary" paid for a particular position can mean much or little, given that the salary of an employee represents a fraction of the amount of money paid for the employee. Things like 401K, health insurance, various taxes and so forth, have to be paid by the employer for each employee... assuming that those benefits are offered to the employees. I have no idea what the requirements are with repect to an H1B, but I wouldn't be surprised if the costs were less to pay for the relocation.
Uh, no. No it isn't. I didn't immigrate anywhere, and I have never held that the US has a mission to make life better for everyone. Besides, if you go with that logic... and forgive me, but that logic is specious in the extreme... then how does one square the idea of "building a better life for everyone" with the effects of job loss and displacement of an American-born worker who loses a 12+ year career to downsizing, only to have his former emplyer clamor for an H1B to replace him? What about the student in college who works to bring in a Bachelor's degree, only to find that she can't find any job that pays enough to justify the hours she's going to have to pull to "compete" with H1Bs who will pull 80-hour weeks?
Incidentally, your comment about the locals not being "up to the snuff"... I wonder if your regions' IT employers ever worked with the region's education sector to encourage the improvement of the local prospective IT workers' skillsets. I find that people will lift themselves up, if they are given an inentive to do so. If all they see are people losing their jobs, having their salaries cut, being forced by the threat of both to work huge overtime period with little or no overtime pay, well.. can you blame them for not wanting to get into that game?
Last thing: Having an H1B in the country does not automatically "enrich everyone", and thinking so is too simplistic. Having a foreign IT worker in town will do nothing for the former IT professional that the H1B replaced, for example.
Believe nothing, not even if I say it, if it violates your sense of reason -- Buddha
I am warning you if you advertise a highly technical IT position expect hundreds of resumes to start flooding you. Most of these will be from highly qualified people. The first task is to "weed" through them. Pick out just those with M.S. or pH.D's and lots of certs. Then from those pick out one who have relevent real-world experience and now you have a stack that you can work with. Oh yeah, they might want more than $10,000 a year so I guess I see Bill's point.
Then that's not eager enough in my book. Meanwhile, there are some people who are eager enough for a job to go to the other side of the world to get it.
There are a hell of a lot of two-earner couples in this country. It's not just the moving, it's also often that the spouse is already employed, so you would have to find two jobs there.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Just look at the CS programs at the top engineering universities - they are filled with immigrants. Although, most probably have green cards or what not, the majority are 1st or 2nd generation immigrants. These are the type of people that many of the software shops like Microsoft complain about the lack of (Google complained about the lack of talent too, when commenting on their inability to double their staff).
By opening non-immigrant labor pools, it increases the amount of labor at this caliber available to U.S. companies. Face it folks, American secondary education just doesn't emphasize math and science enough to produce enough engineers for the demand. No, i'm not talking about IT people with some ABC certificate or can program in X language, but engineers that have been trained to solve problems formally. People who have solid quantitative skills. These are the type of people (from my experience) that many of the software companies are looking for. This is evident through the type of questions companies like Google and Microsoft are asking at interviews.
You also seem to have a certain amount of life experience in that area.
Um, sorry, I have to disagree with you. Regardless of the rhetoric, they want code monkeys that will work for peanuts and do sleep-deprivation tricks. IBM Austin's recent reqs was for college grads, not any industry veterans that know how to create software due to something called, oh I'm searching for the word... experience. Those with your, "solid quantitative skills" are out of luck if they're past their twenties.
Go ahead, vote Republican. Enjoy the new Depression.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
"That means, that in order to stay competitive we need to INNOVATE."
Tell me ONE THING we can innovate from an information standpoint that cannot be copied overseas and mass produced dirt cheap.
This situation pretty much leaves us with our only option jacking up the income rates of people who have to be onsite for something and swapping money between each other to make the economy run.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
"The whole idea of the H-1B visa thing is, don't let too many smart people come into the country. The whole thing doesn't make sense," Gates said.
Yes and we are so stupid here in the United States. All we do is watch movies and buy videos legally or illegally.
There are coders out there that I know and are friends with and have pretty decent consulting jobs and they work with unix/linux. They don't want to work with crap software from Redmond.
Bill is so degrading and he thinks he is such a genious and great person.
Why would anyone want to work for an unethical ran company like his. I would rather code for open source - at least my work has a better chance of living and improving and not just ditched because some genious thinks it isn't where he wants to take his company.
Maybe this would be one way Linux will win - by taking all of Microsoft's talent away. I never even thought of this happening but I guess it is a possibility.
I think you are going to see a whole new kind of revenue stream coming from open source.
"Gates Calls for Increase in dirt cheap Tech Labor Supply who are willing to work 20 hour days under sweatshop conditions"
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Sorry to say that, but being a programmer is in a way similar to being a (professional) sportsman. Your career lasts a definite, short lifespan and then you have to find yourself another job.
Good programmers are young programmers because coding takes enormous concentration, quick thinking and ability + desire to work long hours with little or no rest. You can do that before thirty, but hardly after forty. And in this field experience is also shortlived. Who cares if you had experience coding in late '70-ies, since almost everything changed since then?
Same, BTW, is true of sysadms and most techies. There are some exceptions, of course, but these are guys who have a very rare talents and/or personality.
So, sorry folks, but if you want to be a pure techie your whole life you either have to be a top-notch one or you are going down the slope. At some point you have to branch into fields like project management where experience really counts, age is an advantage not a problem and your technological insights are a cutting edge you have over "pure management".
I went that way and I never looked back.
People like myself who went into IT (B.S. of CS), who are caught up in an expensive, if not troubled, education system because we listened to corporations, who after creating a craze, try to 180 on it, are the people who these laws are protecting. Whether faults with education or the market, we have been left out as the bastard children of incompetent parents.
I really look forward to being one of the care takers of the previous generation; I am your future.
Puh-lease! After graduating #2 in the entire class at Penn State in their "wonderful" Information Sciences & Technology Bachelor program with a 3.9 QPA guess how many offers I received? Zip, Zilch, Nada. Oh yeah plus the 8 years of experience in the field... (cue: Crickets Chirping)
Now I know PA isn't the heart of IT, but I exhausted every avenue and still barely eeked out a semi-decent position. I hear about how we need more overseas labor, and we "wish" we could find local skilled labor, but we just can't... Bullshit.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
The problems you mention are a direct result of what I call "database hiring". Database of candidates can't measure their personality, intelligence, dedication to work or honesty. But it can contain a list of fields about various software packages/environments/tools they know, it can have a list of diplomas, certificates and training attended, it can have neat "experience" fields measured in years.
Now, a typical HR would start the process by click-building a query through his "talents database" clicking what the employer wants. You don't have it, you are not selected (literarily, as in SQL "SELECT").
That's how laundry lists you complain about get created. Result? Numerous examples of guys who have great CVs, with tons of diplomas and certificates who are just too dumb to really perform in the real world.
At the same time one of the best programmers I know never even went to college. Guess how far his CV is going to get through "database hiring" machine. Luckily for him those who worked with him know how good he is so he is not unemployed.
Dehumanizing the hiring process through "database hiring" produces dehumanized, McEmployees rightly called "human resources" (not persons). It's great for an assembly line, it's bad for anything requiring even a tad of creativity or above average intelligence.
Unless you're living off your stock interest, or own a company, you're going to be POOR in the future.
Another example of the middle class going by by.
I work for a fortune 500 companies, and I see all types of things. I also worked 7 years as a consultant, so I saw one or two things there. It is not a vanishing work force MS is caring about. It is a cheap workforce. I also would be willing to bet if you looked at the majority of the tech people that have been laid off for a significant time. They are individuals with lots of experience. I know when I noticed the end of consulting, as I knew it. I could get no one to hire me due to the salary I made. I had to fib and say I made 30 grand less, just to get the interviews. I ended up taking a 40k cut just to get a job. I see now companies post "Entry Level" positions with things like 7 years of c++ experience, 3 years of .Net experience, for 32k. They already have a person in India that will take the job, but they have to post it here for a certain number of weeks to get that person here.
That is what this is about. There are plenty of tech people that cannot get a job. They could be bringing in more college hires. This is about two things.
1) Money. They want to pay less for more. Thank you Walmart LOL.
2) They want people they can work until they fall over and will not go to human resources or sue.
In my opinion
*deep in Bill's Bunker in Redmond*
"Well, Steve, are the shipments of slaves arriving
on schedule ?"
"Nah, that damn terror war is slowing the flow and
those Indian bastards are catching on fast !"
"What we need now is more cash. Yes. More. I must
have more !!! *foam*"
"Chill, Bill. We're squeezing everything we can
out of those sad lamers already... We might get found out too."
"For what ?!?"
"Erm, well we could raise salaries and get all the americans or europeans we need too."
*choking noises*
"Raises !?!? Over my dead body !!!"
"Hmmm *lowers voice* that might be an answer..."
"What ?"
"Nothing, your filthyness, nothing *big smile*"
Yes, you are correct sir. You win the bonus round.
Of course, I'd probably refuse to hire you because if you get this upset over a missing "ed" you'd probably be impossible to get along with in the work place.
BTW, I've been programming in FORTH since 1983.
Clear, Dark Skies
You'll never be able to compete on wages with Indians or Chinese ... So better find another job
or start a revolution against the Fat Bastards.
"Bill Gates."
"Gooood !"
You can get someone experienced for $35k ... *shudder*
Bill Gates knows he could overfill his employment rolls if he simply pays more.
But he doesn't want to pay more.
The man who has $80 billion to his name doesn't want his payroll to be an extra 2% of his corporate expenses.
He'd rather import people and leave you and your family in the street.
Why do we let these guys live? They're not necessary to the process. Once they strike gold, their job is done.
I say we outsource Bill Gates.
Same here in Europe... Africans all over the shop
destroying jobs and lowering salaries.
Can't wait for civil war...
Please, Mr Mod, go fuck yourself.
You need it.
Thank You.
India was a high culture a few thousand years ago with writing, math, abstract currency and all that comes with it at a time when Europe was inhabited by hairy grunts barely capable of walking upright
The irish were making artefacts on par with the best ancient egyptian art around 3000 BC.
Not bad for grunts that could barely stand up...
And btw, I've seen the quality of Indian software.
It's laughable.
How do you suppose those "prevailing wage certificates" are written? At universities like the University of Houston, they don't bother to do the research - they merely list the opening and accept the application of the individual they want to hire. Yes, that's right: they already know who they're going to hire when the H1-B position is posted. No need for others, no matter how qualified, to apply. H1-B's are not hired by qualifications, they are hired by name.
"Then that's not eager enough in my book."
Those who say things like the above frequently live such a modular life that their entire existance can be packed up and moved with little more than 2 days notice. They frequently either still live at home or rent a bedroom in a shared house. The only real impact to people outside the individual in these situations is a new phone number and possibly longer trips to visit friends and family. There's usually no spouse, no kids, no pets, no 24 foot truck full of furniture and belongings, etc.
The fact that they'd need to find an equally rewarding (financially and task-wise) job for their spouse, pull their kids out of school and move them as well, sell their house (it just took me 9 months to sell mine), find new housing in a new city (families of 4 need more than a shared house), pay for moving costs, trips to interview as well as to find housing or an advance apartment, etc. never enters into the picture before offering such "advice". Costs for finding and moving to the new job can easily run $15,000-25,000 or more. I know that I can't afford to be that eager to find a job in another city. And, that assumes you pick the right city the first time.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
Where on earth did you get that figure?
Sure, some coders get $90K and even more, but I think that is far from average.
Hasn't msft been screaming that F/OSS is killing jobs for USA developers?
Articles like this make it seem like msft is only creating jobs for overseas workers.
And here is my passage into the country. 1) I was interviewd in India to work for IBM research. 2)They (IBM) filed applications with Dept. of Labour in which they had to state my pay and also they had to give the prevailing market rate of this job. And what they pay me had to be more than the market rate (even if marginally so). 3) I get my pay checks and they deduct SS Tax, Medicare tax - But I cannot collect either of them (except if I die or get amputated) because I have to contribute 40 points to SS. But the maximum I can contribute per year is 4 points. So I have to be in the work force for 10 years to get this (4 points times 10 years = 40 points). But my H1 is valid only for 6 years. 4) I spend on buying a car, buying everthing I need for my living from the scratch. So my expenditure in the US (atleast initially) matches closely to my income. You can do the math on how much it would cost to start a life in a different country. 5) I was the Indian geek that all the fellow colleagues amused over, and they were friendly and they respected my work. Just like anyother place in the world.
He's making a comment relating to outsourcing, the first name is Indian, and the second name is a mangling of the phrase 'I got your job.' I have a feeling you don't get irony.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
The average Salary (for coders) in Canada is not $35k. I pulled these numbers right off the government of Canada website:
What you can expect to make (Average Hourly Earnings ($/hour)):
$24.97
Which works out to somewhere around $52,000 CAD.
Maybe you just need to find a new job if you think all you can get is $35K... I'm well above the average listed here, but then again I'm not just some PHP coder either.
>>Microsoft is having a hard time finding skilled workers within the United States
Translation:
"Microsoft is having a hard time finding skilled workers within the United States who are willing to work for minimum wage, or less."
Thank you for saying what I was going to. Where I live right now is not my residence, it's my HOME. We've put down roots. To move for a new job would men giving up extended family, close long-term friends, neighbors, church, etc. We've spent years finding doctors, barbers, plumbers, electricians, etc., whom we really like, and we'd have to start that all over again.
There was a time when I'd move wherever the work was, but no more.
Maybe not a union, but something more like a lobbying organization. Something to counter the corporations that exporting US jobs as fast as they can - all with the help of the USA government.
The USA has the best congress money can buy, and companies like msft have nearly infinate resources to lobby congress to provide tax incentives to export USA jobs.
Maybe the situation needs a little counter balance?
It sucks to have a college degree, and 25 years experience, and earn less than the janitor.
It makes more sense now why microsoft pulled their support for the gay rights bill in Washington state -- they needed to throw a bone to the conservatives so they could get what they wanted in this arena.
Whether or not we like it, Offshoring is here to stay. There is a reason Gates and others want to remove this restriction...we (the IT community) make pretty good money, and for the most part, we are grateful for it (at least those of us who have been laid-off before are. But I see far too many good coders who are turning down work because they don't pay enough...according to them. We take the lower paying jobs and then jump the first time something that pays more comes along. We all do it. Foreign laborers are more grateful for their employment and are reliant upon the visa restrictions that they don't go anywhere for several years. I know...I work with a good number of foreign laborers. The problem is this...things are getting expensive here in the US. I make what I did in 2002, and it is harder to get by now because everything is more expensive. Am I going to get a raise? Unlikely. Could someone in Manila or Bangalore do my job for 1/5 the cost? Yes. Thanks to VPN's, faster networks, email, VOIP phones, and all the great technology that has moved us so far forward we may have very well done away with our own worth.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
that especially in the US, most companies are driven by bean-counters who can't put a price on the lack of something (in this case, the lack of future support/rework/expansion costs because software was well designed/implemented in the first place ).
Companies repeatedly hire cheap labour because the direct costs are less, but end up paying massively more in hidden money and time later to straighten stuff out that experienced developers wouldn't have done.
We engineers have also allowed management and ourselves to devolve the whole job description of a qualified/experienced software engineer into the term 'coder'. I've noticed many posters here use that word too. We shouldn't do that to ourseves, at least, and should work to change that attitude in the management of our own companies.
Spoken in the true spirit of failing to understand basic economics.
There is one, and ONLY one fair compensation for goods and services: what somebody is willing to pay and what somebody is willing to accept. There is no entitlement to any more, there is no requirement to charge any less. There is nothing else that is fair, nothing else that is economically efficient, nothing else that is just.
Is $12/hour excessive for picking apples? The only answer to this question is "depends - are people in Maine willing to pay more than $1.25 cents a pound for apples picked in Washington?"
A market free of restraints, corruption and monopolies has never failed to set a fair price and provide the most efficient and equitable distribution of any good or service.
By the way, why are those who argue that "illegals fill jobs at wages nobody else will take" invariably the same people who complain that the minimum wage isn't high enough?
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
I think job seekers will stop listing more skillsets than a person can possibly earn in a lifetime, when employers stop demanding more skillsets than a person can earn in a lifetime. I've seen job ads with more than 30 skill sets specified.
People here who think H1-B visa are good for economy and are ignorant and completely blind to what is going on.
1. H1-B visa are built on the fact that a company can hire foreign persons when they can't find qualified US workers. This is crap, there are so many qualified unemployeed workers out there there is no reason for H1-B visa's. US workers have to get it through their thick heads that just because you had average skills and got paid $70k during the dot-com, you think you should get paid $85k now even though you are not that good. You were overpaid and now the market is where it should be. Someone coming out of college should not be making more than $35 - $50k at most. Unless they have amazing skills, but most don't deserve $70 - $80k. Get your ego's in check. If you want that money, go into consulting don't waste business's time asking for unrealistic wages. Also, I feel for the IT workers that are really good and have to take a 30% pay cut. Unfortunately, that is what every market faces. Don't live beyond your means and it won't hurt as bad. I took pay cuts twice and never lived beyond what I could afford so I was fine.
2. Its all about money. H1-B visa's is an excuse to pay foreign nationals lower wages than a US counterpart. That is it. Instead of shipping it overseas, they would rather bring in a foreign programmer and pay them 30% less than a US counter part because they don't know any better. To them, it is a lot of money. Yes, some may get the same pay or even more pay than a US counterpart, but let's be honest here and say that is a small minority.
This is not about economics, this is not about free trade, this is not the utopian American way. It is greed and finding loop holes in the system. Dot-Coms crashed this steady company growth. Now companys have hit plateau's and can not keep meeting previous year's numbers. If you made 10 million year 1, 12 millions year 2, and then 500 million year 3, how can you keep rising when you can increase your customer base? So what do companies do, find ways to keep that level up and that means outsourcing, lower pay, lower benefits, essentially explotational tactics.
Don't believe for one minute that this is helping 3rd world countries, helping US, helping foreigner's, exhibiting the american way. It is all about the new God - Money.
I'd say C and C++ are about 10% similar. That 10% is for the similar syntax. C and C++ are also about 10% similar to Java, in my opinion (because of the syntax).
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
So what? India has not signed a retirement benefits recipricocity agreement with the US and probably won't until India straigtens up its act.
Think of the upside, though. You can work in the US for 6 years, save a bunch of money, and retire a rich man in India. You may have to skip the buying a car part, though.
Check out Concord, CA. Hispanic population has skyrocketed. White population has declined drastically. As a result? The city budget is out of whack, crime has gone up, social services are being taxed. Drive down Monument Blvd, what was once a nice area, and you'll find no less than 50-100 Mexicans standing around waiting for someone to pick them up, despite the "Do not pick up day laborers" signs all up & down the streets. At night, it's no longer safe to walk down the same street. This is a street where I'd run over to Jack In The Box with friends when I was a kid. Thanks to the Mexican gangs that have come into the area along with the growing Mexican population, it's dangerous to be out.
The schools have also suffered, thanks to the influx of non-English speaking families, and the Bush Administrations "No Child Left Behind" act.
Article here
I no longer buy the 'they come here for a better life" crap. They flood here because the United States is a huge cash cow for them. Plain and simple.
Note the submitter's name: Randeep Igochyorjob = "I got your job".
Great Troll !!!
if they get pulled over for speeding (after paying 10 years of social security and other taxes), they're deported without a chance to return.
The cops are under orders to ignore visa problems; it's too much paper work. Rich businessmen make the rules and rich businessmen want their cheap labor to show up on time.
By the way, if they've paid 10 years into social security, they can receive retirement benefits regardless of citizenship.
Even if Gates wants to hire the best people, at high salaries, it's damn sure that thousands of other companies will be bringing in the cheapest warm bodies they can find.
I don't think the government is capable of evaluating each H1B hire and his or her salary, and the availability of similar US workers. Nor is it desirable to try to get the government to do so.
So the only solution is to keep a cap on hiring.
I think the solution is to auction the existing H1B visas to companies. Companies who want cheap H1B workers will not be willing to bid high for visas, because that'd defeat the purpose. Companies who want foreign workers and intend to pay them high wages - ie, the companies who are truly interested in hiring the world's best - will be willing to make high bids for visas.
So if Microsoft really wants to hire the world's best, they can place high bids on a large block of H1B visas.
The revenue generated this way could then be pissed away by the Bush administration and the GOP-led congress.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
How much do I need to offer for someone who can answer basic questions like that? I can't seem to find someone at any price.
One of my favorite interviews had this gem:
Me: What are some differences between Java and C++? (He claimed expert-level skills in both on his resume)
Him: Java is a dumbed-down C++.
Me: Well, we all have our opinions. Would you care to elaborate on your answer from a technical perspective?
Him: Oh, c'mon. It's just common knowledge.
Me: I'm going to suggest that you not give that answer if you ever decide to interview for a Java position in the future. I've really enjoyed speaking with you for these last 4 minutes. Have a nice day.
I can think of about a dozen right answers to that question. I wasn't even sure that there was a wrong answer until he gave me that one. Who cares about memory mangament? Who cares about virtual machines? Who cares about platform independence? Who cares about pointers? Who cares about bounds checking? Not when we have "Java is a dumbed-down C++".
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
No one foresaw the depression in the 1930's would happen. As humans we blind ourselves to any potential catastrophe that may occur.
Even though everyone knew the tech stock market was a bubble people acted as if it were not and thus the NASDAQ's great decline even in the face of a known bubble. Who predicted the NASDAQ would fall as far as it did when the bubble burst? Name one person?
Arrogance - the great civilization killer.
Having just read through the article, I see it says:
"Congress capped the number of non-immigrant visas for skilled professionals at 65,000 in 2004 and 2005 in an effort to increase border security and ensure more jobs for home-grown tech workers.
That is a third of the 195,000 work visas issued annually during the high-tech boom years from 2001 to 2003."
Is it just me or was 2001-2003 *not* the high-tech boom years? As far as I can remember the boom years ended around 2000. So that means that while engineers were getting laid off by the many thousands, companies were hiring ~200,000 H1B's annually?
I keep reading that over and over here. About how IT workers can't keep expecting to earn $90K/year right out of college.
When I look at the job boards, the only jobs I see available, above $10/hour, are for people who have at least five years of recent and verifiable experience in a long list of very speicialized skills.
I know several well qualified IT professions, who have left the field to become mechanics, truch drivers, etc.
Check out Tecoloco for jobs in Central America!
Hey, let's let microsoft really save some cash and outsource the whole upper executive echelon.
I would like to call for an increase in CEO and computer software company supply.
We need more Computer Software companies - particularly OS and API vendors, particually Office Application Vendors. There is simply nowhere near enough variation and competition in this market.
So, you can open the floodgates on foreign workers, as soon as you rescind ALL international trade barriers on computer software, including IP law, and undo every consolidation move (corporate merger) in the software industry over the last 20 years.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I am presently working at a university with graduate students from USA and foreign countries. These students are here to do research and fill positions that USA students do not apply for. Many of them come to the USA in hopes of finding permanent jobs and becoming USA citizens. They have to start with H1-B visas, and with the cap, and because of their non-USA citizenship, they have trouble finding jobs. I am sure that many would accept low salaries in order to find anything, just like many of the out-of-work /. readers.
These students are considered the best from their respective universities, and graduate in the USA with some of the best grades as engineers with Masters and PhD degrees. As a mentor for many of them, I would like to see them get jobs in the USA.
Changing or removing the H1-B cap would give these students a better chance at jobs, and after gaining citizenship, they would also be competing for jobs and salaries the same as any of us. However, during the initial years before citizenship, they will probably be working at inferior wages and keep the salary rate down for the rest of us.
Should students that we have educated at USA universities (including tuition waivers and research salaries) and who ultimately will make good citizens, be given a different visa from the normal H1-B so that they don't have to fear deportation and do not have to accept the lower salaries that hurt all engineers?
Should companies be required to show that they have published the jobs sufficiently and so that qualified people from the USA can compete for the jobs? Publishing job requirements that only their "already designated" foreign employees can meet, circumvents the competition and the intent of the H1-B visa, and allows the employers to claim that there are not enough USA applications to fill the jobs.
Hey if we're going to open up the work force on the top end to foreign workers, then we need to get rid of the minimum wage as well.
Go live in Gary IN and get back to us in a year.
And you think there's any less illegals in IN than in SD?
I dont mean to say Indians are horrible programmers or anything like that. There are lots of good Indian programmers that US companies could use, but the people who are getting hired are certainly under qualified.
While perfectly qualified Americans, who can speak and write proper (American) english are unemployed, no less. Wonderful guys. Thanks a whole lot.
I'll be laughing my ass off when China or some small, over-populated impoverished asian country takes over, and India's little bubble of it's own busts, and you guys are all in the same boat as we are.
It's a race to the bottom and nobody but the wealthy wins.
Check out the relationship of Agualia(sp. just outside of Morelia), Michoacan, Mexico and Redwood City, California, USA. 80% of the town's income is from expats. Similarly, I worked for a landscaping company in the '90s. Every man except for the foremen worked 6-7 months in the US and then took the money they had earned home to finance the farms or ranchos they left behind. They were replaced alternately with their relatives and neighbors who had worked down south in the respective seasons. (Planting, sowing, reaping, tilling)
Chinese, Indian, and US wages do not have to become equal before it becomes unprofitable for US companies to stop shipping work to China or India. In fact, shipping work overseas becomes unprofitable long before equality is reached. Even today, 44% of companies say outsourced projects did not save any money. 25% of the companies have brought functions back in-house after realizing they could be addressed more successfully and at lower costs. If costs go up in China or India at all, then it's likely US outsourcing would stop.
I was specifically speaking about IT in my previous arguments, but I will address your manufacturing statement now. Raw materials are not the main cost in manufacturing in any developed country. Labor is. China is not a developed country yet, but it is quickly getting there. I've already read of cases where Chinese factories are having problems getting the cheap country workers that they've historically relied upon. That means wages will start going up, independently of any currency move. When you have salaries increase in China, then the prices of those goods will increase and less Chinese goods will be sold in the US. That will become more evident once the peg is released and currency differences come into effect as well.
There is also the logistical problem of creating goods for a market halfway around the globe. With oil over $50/barrel, shipping prices for large goods, such as cars and refrigerators, can outrun savings on labor. Shipping prices for smaller goods may still be profitable, but certainly less profitable. We've already seen decreased manufacturing sent to China.
Then that's not eager enough in my book
Why should we have to uproot our families, sell our homes, and move hundreds if not thousands of miles just to get a job? Stress is increased, children are traumatized, taxes, forwarding mail, getting a new bank account and all those things are a hassle for a year or more after the move.
Heck, you send jobs to India, why can't you give a job to someone who works in another town than your corporate HQ?
As I see it, I live in a part of the country with a lower cost of living, I have a cable modem, I have a computer, a phone, a compiler, a refrigerator that keeps soda cold. I have everything I need to perform 95% of software development jobs. And I am probably in the same price range as you would pay some firm in India for an FTE.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Not to mention work in this country is almost always on an "at will" basis, where they can fire you at any time. Make all those changes, spend all that money, show up, and -- oops! We don't need you after all.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Exactly. I'm also surprised that someone hasn't yet responded with the tired "It doesn't matter, you should be willing anyway if you really want a job" response. Of course, ask them to move to Bangalore or Shanghai or Argentina or somewhere like Nome Alaska from the Bay Area or New York (where so many of the high horses seem to be ridden) and suddenly a double standard shows up.
We are lazy and to be blamed if we won't move 1000 miles for a job, but make it 5000 and make the location somewhere undesirable for living their hip urban lifestyle and their own willingness goes down pretty sharply.
I personally would face divorce if I asked my wife to move to any number of "good" job cities.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
You need to let a bunch in, even if their wages are significantly less than Americans, just so we can (as a country) continue to attract some of the world's best and brightest.
How many more of the world's best and brightest are there? I wonder if the best and brightest are really applying, or just people desperate to get out of their country. In the 1970s we were getting some truly world class individuals. Most of the H1Bs I come across these days are pretty much on par with the average american. We have plenty of average people already, thank you very much.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I'd mod you up if I could. This is exactly correct. The parent poster is either a college student or recent grad, or one of those losers who has no life outside of work and lives a completely liquid existence, staying in a rented room or studio apartment with no responsibilities at all outside of work and no ties to his community. If one wants to live that way, that's fine, but don't expect the rest of us to do it. If everyone did this, there would be no society (at least not after a generation or two). Or is his philosophy that tech workers should have families and reproduce, and only the managers should have that luxury?
No one in this country should be so desparate for a job that they'd be willing to pack up and move to anyplace at all just to work. That's why you don't see anyone, even in tech workers, who are that desparate. When things get that bad, they just leave the industry and find something more rewarding to do with their time. Then, these assholes who run the tech companies complain that they can't find enough employees.
I think we should close our borders to all tech workers from overseas. If they want to do software engineering or whatever, they can set up their own companies in their own countries. Meanwhile, American companies should only be allowed to hire American tech workers. If they can't find enough at the salaries they want to pay, that's too freakin' bad. If this causes the whole economy to crash, that's fine with me. I just want the history books to accurately describe what caused this disaster: that the corporations were too cheap to pay tech workers what they were worth, fired them at the first sign of trouble, and used unethical methods of keeping their salaries low and their jobs miserable, while fattening the paychecks of the executives. And all the while, hypocritically proclaiming that we should encourage more young people to go into these professions without worrying about the pay rates or working conditions. And then, amidst the chaos and anarchy, the corporate executives will be captured by angry mobs seeking revenge and burned at the stake, torn limb from limb, or some other fitting punishment.
You can agree with Bill, but it doesn't matter how much tepid coffee you put in the mug, it isn't going to get hot.
H1Bs are not the best and the brightest anymore. There are a few good ones, a few bad ones and most of them are average, just like the unemployed IT workers in the U.S. Why not just hire unemployed IT workers instead?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
MOST immigrants move to the United States, become Americans, and contribute to our culture and nation. Chinese people, Japanese people, Europeans, Russians, and tons of other groups move here and become a part of this country. And it's great. It's how things are supposed to work.
SOME Indians -- a minority -- do the same thing. And that's great too. They immigrate in the traditional, non-guest-worker way, and they're just another group of immigrants, just like all the others who came before them.
But the majority of Indians who come here are coming over just to snatch a job, work for a few years, then fuck off home when it's convenient for them. The money they make here goes a long way back there, and they have no intention of passing that up. THIS is the problem.
It is completely unfair and wrong to allow temporary guest workers to come into this country and take jobs that SHOULD be reserved by law for people who are citizens or who are going to be citizens. If our government worked for US, that's how things would work. But it works for corporations, and so things are a bit different.
If we don't allow guest workers to come here, and they stay home, GOOD. If corporations open up shop over there, GOOD. Who cares? They weren't going to give US those jobs, anyway.
Bottom line: If you're not moving here to live FOREVER, you shouldn't be permitted to help corporations ruin the livelihoods of the people who DO live here permanantly. You shouldn't be allowed to undercut the salaries of the people you're replacing, engaging in unfair competition. And don't tell me how much H1-Bs make, either -- I know plenty of them, and they're making peanuts. Not only that; most of the ones I know have no health insurance or benefits. And lots of them group up and share apartments, so don't tell me any nonsense about them buying houses. If any Indians are buying houses, it's as an investment so they can sell it at a profit before they take off.
Most countries, by the way, don't let this sort of thing go on. I notice you mentioned Indian laws which don't allow us to do the same thing THEY are allowed to do. It's a trade issue, and it should be addressed.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
You are correct about Minix. Sorry about that, my bad. But, IT was still based on Unix and BSD, which were developed here, so I'm not completely unmanned.
Unix came from Bell Labs in New Jersey, and BSD came from Berkeley, California (the B in BSD).
You said: "think it's entirely possible that a new generation does not have the level of education than the one before. I think we can all agree that your ancestors where great. You will have to prove yourself."
Well, that's some nasty speculation. But America still has one of the highest literacy rates in the world, right alongside Europe and Japan. Also, most of us DO end up going to college (yes, including technical subjects). If you're trying to say less of us are going to graduate school, well, it's possible that more of us have decided it isn't worth the vast expenditure of money and time considering we're not likely to get hired, anyway. This does not make us less bright, though. If anything it implies a certain thrift.
You blathered like an asshole: "Quit your fucking whining and start doing something."
Which is what I said Americans were going to do to cope, now, isn't it? READ THE FUCKING POST.
As for your point number 5, today my government (which you have so little respect for) told Mr. Gates to go fuck himself on the visa issue. So I guess it isn't ALL bad around here.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
FANTASTIC! Thank you!
As for the poster to whom you were replying, I take back my comment about not knowing Minix was invented in Amsterdam. Ha, ha, ha... Beautiful.
I owe you one, man. Thanks!
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I should point out that the German rocket scientists and the nuclear physicists involved in your rebuttal had already emigrated to the United States and were, therefore, AMERICANS.
It is frequently forgotten by the rest of the world, especially Europeans, that there ARE no actual "Americans" in terms of race or creed. ALL of us, even the native Americans (Navajos, etc) came here from someplace else.
The only thing that identifies us as Americans is that at some point, our ancestors chose to come here. And once our ancestors came here, we proceeded to invent a large number of the things the rest of the world now takes for granted. Things like THE INTERNET.
So pardon me, but it really burns my ass when people dismiss us as stupid. When Europeans call
Americans stupid, considering that 77% of us are of European origin, and therefore are *exactly* like them, the irony is usually lost on them.
Let me restate my original point in a way you might be able to be comfortable with (and this is actually how I think about this issue).
Americans, and by extension Europeans (because we really are one culture when you think about it) generated the vast majority of scientific, mathematical, and technical advancements of the past five hundred years. Prior to this, most of the advancements were performed by Greece, Rome, Egypt, and the various Arab cultures they traded with.
Indians "invented the number zero", built pretty palaces, and maintained a culture in which the vast majority of people were dirt poor and served a fabulously wealthy elite. Their unjust system of castes endures to this day, although after contact with the West, the system is fading a bit.
Greece, in the same time period, invented or significantly advanced philosophy, natural science, mathematics, the concept of democracy, and building methods so sound that many of their buildings still stand to this day.
IF, as many people love to slanderously allege, Indians are naturally smarter than Americans (and by extension Europeans, Greeks, Romans, etc) why is it that their culture was so primitive until the British conquered them? Why is it that even today, their literacy rate is so low? Why is most of their country so poor? Why don't most people there have indoor plumbing, for crying out loud? Why do large segments of their population cook their food over fires made from COW CRAP, and see nothing wrong with that? National Geographic is pretty interesting; I watched a rural Indian woman pick up cow shit with her hands, pat it into a log, carry it in, and then prepare and cook food over it (without washing her hands) and eat it (with her hands, no forks or spoons).
Sure, they had pretty palaces and the number zero. But we had indoor plumbing, steam power, science, mathematics...
My point is not that Indians are worthless, but rather that they should consider being a little more humble, a little less arrogant, and stop yammering about how they're naturally brighter than the rest of us.
I eagerly await your reply. "Hairy grunts"? Socrates was a hairy grunt? You're nuts.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Hi JBellis;
Since this is slashdot at this point I am supposed to say something like "oh ya, I'm rubber your glue" pointing out that my anecdotal account is better then your anecdotal account.
I don't doubt that your account of the job market in Utah is true. I know as a programmer I have avoided taking jobs with companies in regions without a diversity of tech employers. Perhaps other people have done this too resulting in an abnormally low I.T. worker to employer ration in Utah.
Who knows?
My opinion is based on working in the Washington D.C. area, having met a lot of good people out of work for very long periods of time, and reading very gloomy job market forecasts in a variety of places.
Take it for what it is worth and be thankful for the situation you have where you are at.
Arrogant? HTF do you get that from my post? It seemed to me that the parent was suggesting that once the current Remnimbi peg was removed, exchange rate changes would lead to wage parity between China and the US. In my view its unlikely that wage parity could ever occur as the financial dynamics of the world would have to change so dramatically that there would be complete meltdown of the global economy which would cause such dislocation that wage parity would be the least of people's problems.
Who predicted the NASDAQ would fall as far as it did when the bubble burst? Name one person?
Sure. Robert Pretcher. But there were plenty of others, David Tice, Kurt Richenbacher, I'm pretty sure Dr Doom and Gloom Marc Faber thought it would fall further (it may still), even Steve Roach Chief Economist of Morgan Stanley predicted the fall.
I may well be arrogant but I think you may have missed the theme of my post.
Gates struck deal that gave him a natural monopoly. There were other operating systems for the 808x family around and any one of them could have been the predominant one shipped by IBM with its PC. Any one of them would have formed a natural monopoly on that platform and made the owner rich.
Such monopoly profits are called "economic rent" which everyone with any sort of mental faculties about economics, including such staunch advocates of laissez-faire capitalism, as Milton Friedman recognize as the most appropriate source of tax revenue. Since economic rent is subsidized, rather than taxed -- due to the abandonment of the principles of Henry George -- Gates was given state support as he imposed a horrible operating system on the world and became its richest man as a consequence.
Like any welfare queen -- it corrupted his character which wasn't that good to begin with.
So now he, like the rest of the loons running the software industry, think having more fingers writing more code is the way to create good code -- and he's salivating over the virtually endless supply of fingers that can type out so many lines of code that no one will be able to figure out what is going on with the damn OS anymore.
Seastead this.
hours from 11am til 1am. I have no time for school, and no money to just quit my job. The old Catch-22 as it were.
Because you can hire creme of the crop at below $100K a year. That's why. And in my experience this is precisely why H1-B's on average are WAY better than US people. They come from the countries in which education systems kinda work.
That might work, but you'd need a tax of 50K/H-1b.
I have two words for you: Payroll Taxes
Same facts, but from a different view, ...interesting.
s id-1093499,curpg-2.cms
From
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/m
Gates may find opening the H1-B gates toughAdd to
URMI A GOSWAMI
TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ SATURDAY, APRIL 30, 2005
NEW DELHI: Bill Gates has opened the proverbial Pandora's box on the contentious H1-B visas issue - giving hope where there seems to be little.
So will the average Indian skilled worker be living their American Dream soon? While Gates has a track record of getting his own way most of the time, this time round it may be somewhat difficult. The Bush administration isn't taking the bait, instead claiming that there isn't a shortage of technical skilled workers in the US.
While Gates may have articulated the desire of many an Indian skilled worker, what are the chances that the system of annual quota for H1-Bs will be thrown out of the window? The most likely scenario is an increase in the annual cap. The current annual cap stands at 65,000 with an additional 20,000 cap exempt visas, taking the total to 85,000. The highest number of H1-Bs allowed in a year has been 195,000, at the height of the IT boom.
Compete America, a coalition of over 200 corporations, universities, research institutions and trade associations - of which Microsoft is a member - has been lobbying the US Congress to raise the annual cap. The introduction of a provision for 20,000 cap exempt visas for foreign nationals, with master's and PhD degrees from US universities in the 2005 Appropiations Act was largely a result of their lobbying.
Technology companies have consistently maintained the need for larger number of skilled workers, and in the absence of qualified Americans, the need to throw open doors to foreign workers. The administration seems to hold a view that is divergent.
Commerce Department undersecretary for technology Phil Bond cautions that unemployment among US computer engineers regularly exceeds unemployment in other industries. US government figures showed 5.7 per cent of information technology employees were out of work last year as against 5.5% of all workers.
Bond may well be right, but the H1-B visa covers sectors beyond IT. America is facing shortage of nurses, medical doctors, and teachers. But traditionally, both in India, which has been the biggest user of the H1-B, and in the US, the issue of the H1-B visa has been seen as one that affects the technology sector.
Areas that are feeling the pinch of a lower cap are education (teaching) and healthcare. Teaching, both at the higher education and school level, and healthcare were areas where the demand increased appreciably between 2001 and 2002 fiscal years.
According to a report of the US Department of Homeland Security, the only three industries in the top 10 which increased between 2001 and 2002 were: colleges, universities, and professional schools (20 per cent); elementary and secondary schools (20 per cent); and general medical and surgical hospitals (22 per cent).
According to experts, these are the areas where problems will be faced because of a lower cap. This too is primarily because the US is facing a shortage in both areas. As a matter of fact, shortage in the healthcare sector has been termed as "severe".
Experts feel that unlike the tech companies, players in these fields don't really know much about lobbying for immigrants or highly skilled workers.
So, while the US administration is not taking the bait, the US Congress is willing to give Gates a second thought. The feeling being, if their is a demand, then raising the cap could well be an option. In the meantime, the 20,000 cap exempt visas mandated by the Appropiations Act are yet to be issued.
I wanted to let you know why I made you a foe.
Dude, your friend/foe ratio is 1:5. You got similarly stupid reasons for all the other foes you've made?
There is no shortage of skilled workers in the United States; however, there is a huge shortage of cheap skilled workers in the United States. American companies like the idea that if the employee gets any selfish ideas like "retirement" or "pension" they can always pull the VISA. No danger of having to pay unemployment. Politicians like the idea of the H1-B visas because that can be turned into allot of free and favorable PR. The only ones who don't like it are the millions of tech workers born and raised in the United States that could not afford to go to school, learned to learn on their own (schools hate that and do everything they can to discredit the practice), and had to start work as a dishwasher because some H1-B visa DuDeS can take their place.
DEY TOOK ER JERBS!
If you are putting people through an 8 hour humiliation-athon and theres still more to come I'd say you pricks can piss off. Only in "The Land of The Free" where the ability to people like shit can be granted to anyone with a deep enough wallet.