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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.
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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.
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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.
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."
...'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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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'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."
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.
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.
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.
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"
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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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.
When your pro-corporate agenda is rejected by the Bush adminstration, maybe it is time to get a new line of bull shit.
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-
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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.
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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.
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.
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 live in Seattle. I don't code, I'm a PM - but I know plenty of out-of-work coders who aren't even offered an interview because they don't have the right bullshit "keywords" on their resumes. Some of the people I know can write assembly, build synthesizers from scratch, and handle kernel mode Windows coding. Guess what? They aren't finding jobs. It's not because they "aren't looking hard enough", it's because they're being offered $40-50k for $70-80k worth of work, and they won't take that shit.
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.
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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.
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.
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
Two key differences between IT workers and steel workers, ship builders, etc. IT work is generally high skill while auto work and coal mining is not. The IT industry is generally not burdend by shortsighted unions. Absent the unions, no assembly line worker would be making $25/hour with full benefits. And so, the jobs go somewhere else where there are no unions. IT jobs have wages that fluctuates wildly. Entry level is cheap. But there's also tremendous value in experiance; someone who knows the product or codebase is worth a lot more. It's amusing how outsorucing is playing out. Some stuff is being brought back to the US where they pay more, but they get the value of stability. On the other hand, India is starting to be undercut by China and other places where workers are willing to work for less.
And to put this in the context of the article and Mr. Gates' comments, we can either bring the workers here (and have the benifits of taxing them and having an educated population) or we can send the work there. Either way, it's a global marketplace for labor and we can compete, or become obsolete.
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