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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.
...'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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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.
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.
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
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
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
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.
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
On one hand, I will aggree that the hiring process of _most_ companies (not just large ones) is a sick joke. It's not just the bullshit requirements. (10 years experience with Windows 2000 or J2EE and the like.) It's that your average interview is just a bulshitting contest. The candidates are asked to prove one single skill: marketting. They're asked to market themselves to a PHB.
But on the other hand, the problem is simply that there aren't as many people who are mentally fit for the job.
I pretty much started myself from the nerd view point that programming is easy (and for that matter physics and maths are easy), and everyone even the janitor could do that if they wanted to. Enough years of working with other "programmers" just served to convince me of the exact opposite.
I've watched someone once try every single combination of "*", "&" and nothing on every single variable in a C program, until it stopped crashing. He never could understand pointers, and some 10 years later he still can't.
He moved to Java in the meantime, and it just illustrates that syntactic sugar can only do so much. His utter inability to understand the concept of a pointer still haunts him in Java. E.g., he has honest trouble understanding concepts like internalizing strings, or exactly how much is copied and how much is still modifiable when you pass an object as a parameter to a function.
He's by far not the only one. In fact, the majority of "idiots that know how to pad a resume" are far worse.
I've helped people debug some stupidity like passing an integer variable as a parameter to a function, and expecting that they can just set the parameter to 0 inside the function, to get the variable outside the function set to zero. Then do it again, because the whole "call by value" concept went right above their head.
I've spent hours in a meeting with people who couldn't understand the concept of key-value pairs. I was already in a mood to bash some heads in, after seeing it go around in circles around "but why does that table have only two columns? What if we need a third property?"
Etc.
Basically there just aren't that many people who are even capable of being programmers, and even less who are capable of understanding design or security. If everyone stopped hiring "idiots that know how to pad a resume", some companies just wouldn't have any employees at all.
Which I guess is Bill Gates's point. There _is_ a shortage of people capable of doing the job.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What a load of huey!
The Dubya regime has bent over backwards to facilitate employer hiring of illegal aliens. The net result is employers get really cheap labor, and the US taxpayers are subsidizing these employers. There isn't much money that these employers can kick into SS and Medicare for these illegal aliens, because they aren't really "here", and they aren't getting minimum wage. But a lot of states under financial pressure from the Feds "unfunded mandates" has brought their public health departments to the brink of bankruptcy.
I am all for immigration -- legal immigration, only. Depending upon which official is asked (and how politically correct) the number of illegal aliens in the USA is somewhere between 12 and 28 million. And while millions of illegal aliens slip across our borders, they are breaking our laws (sometimes with what they bring with them). In the mean time, persons seeking legal immigration into the USA are forced to wait years (and sometimes a decade or more) for their chance to emmigrate here.
Illegal aliens do not pass through a modern Ellis Island, and the rates of pneumonia, TB, and other diseases have skyrocketed in all the border states, as well as any jurisdiction where illegals congregate. The only way these illegal aliens can remain in the USA undetected is through identity theft and bogus identification. There is no way that Dubya or the DHS can assure the real American citizens that violent criminals, drug pushers, agents/sappers of foreign governments, or terrorists are not among those that slip across our borders.
The ever increasing clammor amongst politicians and employers for more cheaper labor reminds me of the rationale used to justify slavery in this country 150 years ago. IMHO, the Republican Party has long ago fallen from the grace they achieved in their opposition to slavery. The more politically correct term these days is "wage-slavery", and it is alive and well. How many people today don't have (and cannot afford) health insurance, let alone having both parents working only to just barely get by? Nearly all those things most necessary for survival and betterment in the USA do not get counted in the CPI (Consumer Price Index) -- things like health care, housing, heating, and higher education have been increasing at nearly double digit rates. When was the last time that the minimum wage went up, let alone at a rate that actually keeps up with the real rate of inflation?