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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"."
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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"
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.
This has nothing to do with finding the best employees and everything to do with finding the cheapest employees.
SF = big city = high cost of living + California = even higher cost of living. If you were making 38k in a more rural area, you could live quite comfortably.
Last I heard the average salary starting out for coders in the US is $51k. I don't know where you got that $90k figure, but if you can remember let me know so I can tell my boss.
Question everything
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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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
It's his job to make money for Microsoft. The dot-com boom earned some low quality workers large salaries because they were (or seemed) computer savvy.
:(
I do feel bad for the talented and/or hardworking ones who got taken for ride after ride with startups...
But face it, there are foreign workers willing to work harder for less money; tech workers in the US are generally spoiled IMO (with many exceptions)... In '89 you could be virtually ensured $50k/yr with a MSCE.
The market's adjusting, and foreign labor is generally cheaper now.
I say let the genuinely talented or hard working into the US and give 'em a green card. I think it would make our country a better place (though defining 'talented or hardworking' would be tough).
(I don't limit the above opinion to tech workers... construction, engineering, professor, janitor, cabbie, whatever).
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.'
It's a two faced, dishonest system at the moment... immigrants can get in and when their visa expires noone looks for them... 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.
Businesses are pushing for cheap labor, and citizens are generally pushing for less competition for jobs... the immigrants get caught in the middle
In a technical field it is very easy to reject candidates in a phone screen interval - total lack of knowledge, unwillingness to solve problems, lack of interest in the job, all these things can kill you within 45-60 minutes.
I think a technical quiz phone screen is a total B.S. way to determine the potential value of an employee. You are attempting to quiz somebody on formulaic stuff most of which can be found in 5-10 minutes online anyway. The real value of an employee comes from skills that cannot be demonstrated in 30 minutes, but rather how they handle complex issues like influencing the attitudes of their coworkers, solving issues that are complex blend of personal relationships and technical problem, whether they have a good sense of when a problem can be solved vs. when it should be left alone.
Quizing people on off the cuff regurgitated technotrivia on the phone is unfortunately easier that really understanding what kind of employee they will be, so it is the path people tend to take. But it isn't the way you get the best employee. It's how you get somebody with a the ability to sound knowledgable on the phone.
Mod the parent up. So many people and companies say they want smarts but what they really want is a narrowly defined skill set.
To Mr. Gates: there are plenty of smart people out there. They may not have the exact skill set you're looking for so spend some of that cash M$ is hoarding and train them.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
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.
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.
As almost anyone in the software development field can tell you, there is no shortage of software developers.
I have a good job as an SDE, and my experience is the opposite. My team has been understaffed for months, and we've been aggressively trying to hire people. Very few make it past the phone screen. Half of candidates we phone screen cannot give a convincing answer to "what is the different between a linked list and an array?"
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...
Let me quote my office mate who was phone screening a candidate the other day. "We're not too concerned that you know the exact languages we use, we believe that smart people can pick up our technologies without too much trouble."
I've got sympathy for you if you're out of work. But from where I'm sitting, the software developer shortage is real.
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 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.
I agree, soundbite culture will not allow you to use the figure that most closely represents reality. You have to face the fact that most of the media is in a ratings arms race as to who can tell the most evil story. The median is far more representative of most peoples experience, its just far more exciting to talk about the average which represents no one but leaves everyone feeling dissatisfied with their lot in life.
On the other hand you could ask why 5% of the population is paying itself millions of dollars and creating this false average value. But that would be "communism" and that is as we all know a bad thing.
I say that whatever king Bill says is law, its for the econonmy stupid, for freedom and free trade. All you whining middle class workers just have to face economic reality - you are worth nothing. What the economy needs is cheap labour from abroard and if King Bill cant have it then all of your jobs will have to be outsourced to India - thats the real agenda here.
In a way he has a point, if his business wants to compete and remain the most profitable software company in the world then he has to use the cheapest workforce he can find. Sadly that means that the US i.t. worker can look forward to a future of declining saleries and job opportunities. As people often point out the US economy is the most sucessful in the world and has achieved this status by lightly regulated raw capitalism.
Its time that IT workers retrained as telephone sanitisers, hairdressers and middle management executives (burger flippers). After all thats what happened to the steel workers, ship builders, coal miners, semiconductor fab workers, Car workers, metal workers, electronics assemblers.
Whats so special about your job that it cant be exported to the third world like all the others?
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
I think *you* are the one who needs a reality check.
The industry is hot *if* you live (or are willing to move) to the right area (and pay exhorbitant real estate prices) *and* you have the right skill set *and* you have the appropriate level of experience (not too much, not too little).
Where are the entry level jobs? Where are the jobs for 50-year-olds who still want to program? Why do kids see the job environment for IT people (and engioneers in general) and decide, "I think I'll study Business"?
While there are certainly some people that fit your description, most of the internet-boom-ITers who weren't any good are now out of the industry. The problems with IT unemployment go far deeper than your "blame the victim" mentality allows you to see.
Here's a clue: Bad things do happen to good people, and your broad brush is grossly unfair.
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
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.
Fine, then let them immigrate properly.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If you are a normal immigrant or a citizen, you don't have to worry about immediate deportation when your boss threatens to fire you.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.