Slashdot Mirror
Breaking the Visa Backlog
bart_scriv writes "As anyone who has dealt with H1-B visas can attest, the process can be a nightmare of long lines, waits and inexplicable delays. In this interview, the State Department's Tony Edson discusses what's being done to speed up and expedite the process, ranging from procedural changes to the use of new technology."
It's complicated for a reason.
You know what's faster? Hiring an American.
Give me a call.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
The H-1B is a nonimmigrant classification used by an alien who will be employed temporarily in a specialty occupation or as a fashion model of distinguished merit and ability.
http://uscis.gov/graphics/howdoi/h1b.htm#what/
Speaking as someone who's been through a couple of visa processes I can honestly say that I wasn't overly bothered with the wait times. I'm completely aware of the need for border security and consider the wait times, the queues, the forms and procedures to be almost a 'rite of passage.' It's an unpleasant procedure that's for sure (I'd go so far as to describe the whole experience as soul destroyingly frustrating) but I'd rather it be there than not.
The two biggest issues that I have with the whole process were the employees, who were hands down the most unhelpful and unpleasant people I've ever had the misfortune to deal with, and the error rate (at the time of issue of my Green Card somewhere in the order of 40% were issued with a mistake on them. Come on people! There are only four pieces of identifying information present on the card! How can 40% of the cards issued have a mistake in one of those? And let's not even talk about the nine month process you have to go through to get an error corrected...)
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
1) Automate the heck out of the system. Duh.
2) Put skilled workers on the fast track for citizenship and skip this H1B visa nonsense. Any country that makes our marginal tax rates look good deserves to lose their best and brightest, and keeping those workers tied to a given employer is just plain wrong.
3) Annex Mexico. Seriously. Allegedly 30% of the Mexican work force is already here and there are an awful lot of American retirees down there. Auction off Pemex and distribute the money to the Mexican states on a per-capita basis to finance the transition to greater state and local control. Make English the official language of the unified federal government. We'd pick up some nice beachfront property. Pass the Flat Tax and return Socialist Security to its original mission of being old age insurance (kicking in at 3 years past average life expectancy, which was 65 when FDR got us into this mess) first to simplify things. Anyhow, this would reduce the workload on the INS quite a bit.
US contractors are paid by the State Department to streamline the H-1b visa workflow.
Then they go on unemployment until they realize why they can't even get a minimum wage job.
Then they volunteer for The Minuteman Project.
Then Congress passes "immigration reform" to put all illegal aliens on "a path to citizenship".
Then....
Seastead this.
1. Does the applicant show initiative, is he/she proactive?
No. (Give me a call)
2. When presented with a problem, does the applicant find a general solution, or is he/she looking for a temporary shortcut?
Temporary shortcut. (You know what's faster? Hiring an American)
3. Recommendation for hire?
Not recommended.
considering H1b visas cost about 2k not including the legal fees (goes to about 4k per person overall) and they have to be paid the prevailing wage, the issue is not that is it cheap labor. In fact it is more expensive. The question is, why cant they find people competent enough to fill those positions? obviously it would make sense to not use an H1B since it is cheaper not to.
I think there are two reasons why they cant fill those positions:
a) people are used to dot.bomb rates and want too much
b) the people who are unemployed or applied were not qualified
neither are things the people hiring can fix.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I didn't read the summary and just dove into the story, thinking it was about what Microsoft is doing to speed up production of 'Vista'.
:P
Then I thought, "it's some kind of metaphor?"
Nope, it's actually about vistas. Next time I will RTFS.
Whoo, signature!
DesireCampbell.com
In the St Louis area, my company has had problems hiring skilled programmers. Only 1 in 10 resumes come from Americans, and those tend to be quite weak. In one occasion, after looking for 8 months we got a single qualified applicant, who just happened to be an H1-B holder. Why not hire him?
Besides, some unemployment is healthy. If you've ever had an actual job, you'd probably know that there's plenty of programmers out there that are so incompetent that they create more work than they do. Those guys SHOULD be unemployed, regardless of their country of origin. Who in their right mind would want to hire a dog like that over someone with talent?
Well, at least they're not speeding things up by using offshore outsourcing of visa processing.
1- fashion model is not a specialty occupation?
2- what defines 'ability' of a model?
3- what about distinguished merit and NO ability models like XXX (insert your own answer)
etc...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
consider the obverse..
they must pay prevailing wages? where prevailing wages are 44-102k they can pay 4k in costs and 44 in salary.. where the cost of living would require the position to be closer to the 102k scale...
Also consider.. if the h1b visa holder loses his job, he/she goes home.. now.. imagine you are Gary Cole looking to fill some unpaid overtime on the weekend.. who is more likely to turn Lumbergh down? the native or the visa holder? think that can't make up 4k in productivity?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Uhh... First of all, "Prevailing wage" is a red herring. If it's a factory job and everybody's making the same thing, prevailing wage is easy to calculate. If, however, it's a high-tech company and everybody is on a different payscale, it's nearly impossible.
In any case, the problem is with supply-and-demand: the availability of the H1-B visa drives the prevailing wage down, or at least keeps it from rising as it would if there were not an alternative source of workers.
As to your (b) point, H1-B visas allow employers to decide "Well, I could retrain this American, or I could get an H1-B visaholder." If there were fewer H1-B visas, then there would be more Americans retrained.
I think that the entire H1-B visa system needs to be modified: rather than having the first-come, first-served model where all the H1-B visas run out on the first day, the right to have a visa should be auctioned off. Those employers who actually need those with skills that are difficult to acquire domestically will be able to hire into those positions. But, those employers who are just getting an H1-B visaholder because they don't want the additional cost of retraining an American won't.
The other advantage of such a system is that it will give some feedback about whether there are actually too few or too many H1-B visas issued annually: If the prices fetched at auction are really high, then we could release more visas into the pool on the next offer. If the prices are low, that indicates that people are hiring H1-Bs in lieu of Americans, and we could reduce the number of visas.
Economists will tell you that a 0% unemployment rate is extremely unhealthy. Although they won't agree on the exact numbers, consensus figures of around 4-5% are usually cited.
You know you've been reading Slashdot too long when you assume the title of this article contained a typo for "vista".
It's not quite as simple as that. I worked as an H1B visa worker for a while (I have since returned home) - there were only about 20 people on the entire planet qualified for the job and they _all_ worked in our department (a highly specialized piece of software). In the bespoke software business, this happens from time to time.
Not only did the company have to spend on the order of $4K or so on the process, I was paid the same salary as my colleagues PLUS an international service allowance; I was around 15-20% more expensive than my colleagues. I'm sure if the company could have trained a US worker in sufficient time they would have because it'd have saved them quite a bit of money.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Having been through the visa process (and I'm not in a 'high demand' country like India), they do it to themselves mainly as far as workload. Part of the problem is that the people they are accountable to (the US voter) are not the people they serve (the immigrant), and INS and US Embassy jobs seem to attract more of its fair share of jobsworths and "little hitler" bureaucrats who just love to mess people around.
Take for example this. The US Embassy in London rejected my APPROVED visa application (it was an extension to a visa, and the INS in the United States had approved it, and all the embassy was required to do was to stick a new visa in my passport) because one of the forms was "out of date". So I downloaded the new, up to date form off their website. I couldn't believe it when I looked at it - it was absolutely identical to the old form, except the date at the bottom was different!
On a previous application, they rejected my application because the company I worked for hadn't filled out the form right (according to them; according to our international assignments department, generally they find a formula that works with the forms - and the forms will be processed OK by the Embassy for about 6 months, and then without warning they start rejecting them. Then they have to to-and-fro in a trial and error process until the Embassy begins accepting the forms again. And about 6 months later, the forms start getting rejected again - rinse and repeat). I had to go to London, sit in the Embassy for 4 hours.
The Embassy itself was quite interesting. You sit in this large square room, and at the end are a bunch of bank teller style windows. There is a delicatessen-style number system. You are given a ticket and wait until your number is called. Of course, prior experience with the Embassy means that you know for sure if you miss your number, they will NOT call it out again and you will be sent away - so it's incredibly difficult to do something like read a book to pass the time just in case you miss the number. There are these 'newspapers' they leave too, I think they were called "Going USA". The first half of this paper is devoted to how great the USA is (land of opportunity etc., it seemed mainly to be stories about people who wanted to immigrate to run gas stations), and how awful your home country is by comparison. The second half of this paper is dedicated to telling you how you will never, ever get a visa! So anyway, my number was called. The question?
"How long have you been working for this company"
"3 years so far"
"That's fine" (stamp stamp). "You'll get your passport back in about 3 days"
They could have asked me that over the phone rather than incurring the cost of going all the way to London, waiting 4 hours, and then sending me away.
The Embassy is probably even worse now. I've heard that the ones in India will reject your application unless you turn up in a business suit (but that's just hearsay, I can't substantiate that). They have all sorts of petty bureacratic rules they won't tell you - they just reject applications with nothing except a very vague reason, and you have to keep retrying until you satisfy them (and even then, after a few months, forms that were completely satisfactory are suddenly unsatisfactory with more vague reasons for rejection).
Then there's the obvious bias. An Irish friend of mine actually got naturalized as a US citizen. He's a doctor. There was a family in front of him for one of the interviews done by the INS. They got given a real grilling - not in a private interview room, but in front of everyone in the waiting room. When he got there? "Oh, Doctor Smart, yes this is acceptable" >stampstamp. It seemed like if you were a doctor, you weren't subjected to the INS Dehumanization adn Demoralization Programme.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
- Remove the job market "safety net" for falling middle class families so they no longer can support themselves even at the level of minimum wage poverty.
- Provide an outlet for frustration over the rising price of real estate relative to wages by virtue of being "illegal" -- which is a more politically defensible target than "they're taking my means of support!".
The answer can always be heard from the employers:"So learn to live like the "hard working" Mexicans!"
Seastead this.
I'd argue that the H1-B program, if properly administered, would increase jobs in the US.
When you are starting a company, or a development team, and you have a choice of places to do it, you do it where developers are (a) cheap, (b) convenient to access and (c) plentiful. Generally speaking, if you are a US company, you can have two out of three. You can go domestic and get b & c, or you can offshore for a & c.
So, a program that moves talent from offshoring centers to the US increases the probability that teams are formed in the US.
The key though is to bring in the best. The top tier US talent is not going to have difficulty in finding jobs, provided there are teams to join. But flood the market with cheap, middle-grade talent and the domestic middle-grade talent is going to feel the hurt.
If I were King of the US, I'd put a billion dollars a year into a McArthur style "genius" program, which would be like a commercial version of the "merit scholarship" programs. Every year, I'd pick the thousand top technologists I can find, and invite them to spend ten years working in the US. Every year they'd get a check for $100,000, in addition to what their employer pays, provided they work for most of the year. At the end of ten years, if they establish permanent residency, they'd get the accumulated interest on the principle as a lump some payment.
What I'm suggesting is a crass and selfishly orchestrated "brain drain".
For less than the cost of a week of the Iraq war, we'd be seeding hundreds of new technology teams annually. It's virtually certain that we'd be bringing in several people who will create new technologies, possibly even new industries. There would be a stupendous multiplier effect in US technology jobs.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It's virtually certain that we'd be bringing in several people who will create new technologies, possibly even new industries.
The problem with that is if foreign cultures were actually capable of producing people who could innovate, they wouldn't need to send people here to make money. So therefore your theory breaks down because there *are* no "best and brightest" to come here- they're all mired down by inefficient and technologically backward cultures that produce crap.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The problem with that is if foreign cultures were actually capable of producing people who could innovate
Yeah, and the Japanese don't know how to manufacture anything that isn't junk, as we all knew back in the 1960s. OK, maybe they could make decent, cheap pocket transistor radio, but not big things like cars.
they wouldn't need to send people here to make money.
This is completely wrong. They send people here to make money because we live in a place where labor is dear and they live in a place where labor is cheap. The problem is that they are starting to look for work at home, because home can no compete with the US.
Furthermore, no innovator is an island. You need a people (skilled) to turn an innovation into a business. Which is the point: you keep the skilled positions here. Finally you need infrastructure: banking, marketing and dsitribution, research institutions, venture capital etc. If the state of these things in the 1970s US was on a par with 1970s India, you wouldn't have had a computer industry develop here, no matter how many geniuses we had.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
So, if you need a Swing expert with at least 4 years of experience to be a lead on an important project, and your market has plenty of Americans with a CS degree and no experience, should you hire an inexperienced american that will not be able to perform his duties?
Either you should train that American- OR you should consider perhaps using a tool that has more of a following in the industry. OR, just perhaps, you should consider paying a large enough wage to get an American Swing Expert with 4 years of experience?
In the St Louis area, my company has had problems hiring skilled programmers. Only 1 in 10 resumes come from Americans, and those tend to be quite weak. In one occasion, after looking for 8 months we got a single qualified applicant, who just happened to be an H1-B holder. Why not hire him?
Did it ever occur to you to perhaps increase the salary to equivalent to your CEO?
Besides, some unemployment is healthy. If you've ever had an actual job, you'd probably know that there's plenty of programmers out there that are so incompetent that they create more work than they do. Those guys SHOULD be unemployed, regardless of their country of origin. Who in their right mind would want to hire a dog like that over someone with talent?
Somebody who realizes that a good programmer can be trained to do anything?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Near as I can tell, economists as a class are a bunch of traitors willing to sell their research to the highest bidder. It would be a miracle for them to perscribe economic decisions that supported a middle class, let alone an economy that actually supports people instead of people as resources to be consumed by the rich.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
How many of these workers being imported do you suppose are working in the areas of science and math? 2? 3? There is no shortage of skilled labor in the IT area, so why import workers? So they'll work for less, that's why.
The process of getting a visa is not meant to be a punishment. It's meant to introduce you to our country by showing you what it's like to be a citizen.
DMV
(or DPS for us Texans)
Until you have stood in line, and felt the mind-numbing soul-sucking near-lethal apathy of waiting to get your driver's license or anything else from those godforsaken offices, or waited to pay local taxes... you cannot truly be prepared for the US.
The visa application process is merely to weed out the weaklings, so that they don't keel over and die HERE when suddenly faced with our lines.
Do not confuse "Freedom of Choice" with "Free Will".
considering H1b visas cost about 2k not including the legal fees...
$130.00. Cheap at twice the price!
We hire H1B engineers because finding an experienced signal integrity engineer who wants to work in flyover country is pretty damn tough - and that's with above-industry salaries.
It's a shame, too, because you guys who won't consider anything more than 200 miles inland are missing out.
IT guys I don't know so much about - all of them (except for the freakin' loud Scottish guy) that I see around my building are from the US.
-h-
What about about Marxist Economists then?
-b
What about about Marxist Economists then?
To a large extent they're JUST as corrupt- the only difference is that their highest bidder is The Party instead of a Corporation. There is no difference between encouraging a totalitarian government with promises of economic freedom that are never fullfilled OR a totalitarian corporation with promises of economic freedom that are never fullfilled.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
You got me..
I really thought that for a minute..
CHEERS to you !!
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
This isn't a troll. This is why it is supposed to be hard. You're SUPPOSED to hire an American First. That is the law surrounding H1B visas. That it isn't enforced doesn't change that fact.
We hire H1B engineers because finding an experienced signal integrity engineer who wants to work in flyover country is pretty damn tough - and that's with above-industry salaries.
Have you thought about going to the local state university and funding a scholarship or two to make some homegrown ones? Or didn't it occur to you that businesses that do this get to set the cirriculum and end up with more sales as the lower achieving class members end up working retail (and knowing YOUR product!) or for your competitors (and knowing YOUR product!).
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Just joking really!
To your question, there is a difference: One is Communism, the other Facism.
I have had some economics training. One of my profs used to say that he'd get interviewed on the news and to provide a balanced approach, he'd be on a panel with an absolute wing nut.
I think that in general there are professional economists (typically with the brown cordorroy sports jacket and brown tie) and the "pundits" who dress very well. You might think that that is a shallow comment, but it speaks to the idea that some mean to describe and some mean to persuade.
The pundits are the ones who use neoclassical economics ideas and turn them into a justification for any old thing. Seen that alot in the current administration. And you know that they are not just wrong, but they are mis-applying the theories to support ideology.
Professional economists are more interested in ideas than ideology. I'd bet, for example, that most professional economists in the US would avocate socialized medicine because the costs to society as a whole are lower. A pundit would argue that consumer choice and the market place are the best way to allocate scarce resources. Nevermind that there are externalities galore, informational asymetry, and empirical evidence to support socialized medicine.
Professional economists attempt a difficult thing: modeling real life. Pundits are paid to advocate some position. Not the same.
Cheers,
-b
in sufficient time
You sound like a true rareity to me- one for whom the H-1b visa did as it was advertised it was going to do. I think the keyword is right there- in sufficient time. Just about any business can sponsor a scholoarship for a graduate student to learn just about anything in America- given 4 years and $40,000. Perhaps that's what we need it to take to get an H-1b.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Just joking really!
I didn't catch that, because I'm not. I'm incredibly pissed that the promises of true capitalism (cottage industries, you can do anything you like) and true communism (the state takes care of all of your needs in exchange for a relatively minor portion of your time, and you can still do anything you want) are lies.
To your question, there is a difference: One is Communism, the other Facism
:-) I like you- you're completely correct....mine's based on effect to the average citizen, in which case there is no difference between communism and facism other than who is giving you the orders.
I have had some economics training. One of my profs used to say that he'd get interviewed on the news and to provide a balanced approach, he'd be on a panel with an absolute wing nut.
We seem to have quite the bumper crop of the later in recent years- either trying to convince you to give away more of your income in taxes in return for services, or that hard work will make you rich, neither of which is true. The services and the riches seem to never materialize.
I think that in general there are professional economists (typically with the brown cordorroy sports jacket and brown tie) and the "pundits" who dress very well. You might think that that is a shallow comment, but it speaks to the idea that some mean to describe and some mean to persuade.
The man in the suit is always trying to sell you something; else he would not be wearing a suit. Hacker's Ethic Rule #4.
The pundits are the ones who use neoclassical economics ideas and turn them into a justification for any old thing. Seen that alot in the current administration. And you know that they are not just wrong, but they are mis-applying the theories to support ideology.
Saw a lot of it in the last 3 administrations. Heck, in fact, I've seen nothing else in my conscious, adult life; and the lies go all the way back to 2nd grade for me. Work hard, and you will be rich.
Professional economists are more interested in ideas than ideology. I'd bet, for example, that most professional economists in the US would avocate socialized medicine because the costs to society as a whole are lower. A pundit would argue that consumer choice and the market place are the best way to allocate scarce resources. Nevermind that there are externalities galore, informational asymetry, and empirical evidence to support socialized medicine.
Yeah, but thanks to the pundits, I have to wonder if the excess taxes for socialized medicine will result in anything real as far as quality is concerned- or just the same set of people getting rich at our expense like in Hillarycare (I thought that was funny- they called her a Marxist, but what self-respecting Marxist would design a socialized health care system that left the HMOs in charge?).
Professional economists attempt a difficult thing: modeling real life. Pundits are paid to advocate some position. Not the same.
Yeah, but there's another thing that has been bothering me- I've yet to see any "Professional Economist" come out against Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage- DESPITE 30 years worth of real data to the contrary (it's been that long since the United States ran a trade surplus). It seems to me some parts of the model need some *serious* reworking, thanks to the pundits misusing them to destroy the middle class worldwide.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Have you thought about going to the local state university and funding a scholarship or two to make some homegrown ones? Or didn't it occur to you that businesses that do this get to set the cirriculum and end up with more sales as the lower achieving class members end up working retail (and knowing YOUR product!) or for your competitors (and knowing YOUR product!).
Interesting that you should mention that. The engineering program at my local university exists almost entirely because of a huge endowment that my company made. We fund many scholarships and hire at least a hundred interns every year, just at one site - and rougly 75% of those interns receive job offers upon graduation.
However, a degree does not make experience, particularly in the area of signal integrity engineering. Even so, we have hired interns as full time engineers - three of them in the past five years. However, it's not possible to have a well-developed signal integrity program without engineers who have many years of experience.
Since you obviously aren't familiar with the field, I can tell you that, typically, a signal integrity engineer stays with the same company for years - often for his or her entire career. Experience is precious in the field and companies work to keep those engineers.
As far as the donating business setting the curriculum, that's not really true. The curriculum, at least for a BSEE, is fairly standard from school to school and is set to meet the standards of the ACE. Speaking from experience, there is very little room in an undergraduate engineer's schedule to provide meaningful university training in a specific field. We do use internships and co-op programs to fill in knowledge that we require, but a year-long internship is not the same as a year of full-time work experience - and it's nothing like the 5+ years of experience that we really look for in a simulation engineer.
Fortunately, we can use H1B visas to make up for the lack of experienced engineers who don't want to leave the Bay Area or the Pacific Northwest.
-h-
Actually I'm in the Pacific Northwest- and I remember in MY undergraduate degree, which had almost nothing to do with what you're looking at (I'm a software engineer) we *still* used Tektronics osciloscopes...and Microsoft operating systems...and HP computers and calculators...Mentor Graphics chip programmers and ASIC designers...Orcad circuit designers...Microsoft UML and project managment tools. All of which had a huge influence on the cirriculum offered; if that's the only thing available in the lab that's what you are going to use. I'm absolutely certain all of these companies not only got good engineers out of the program- but also made quite a few sales to lesser companies that other graduates went to.
Which is why I brought it up- perhaps in 5-6 years you'll start seeing graduate students come out with that experience, if your company keeps going the way they have been. The more of this sort of thing your company does- the more experience the graduates will have and the less you'll have to rely on importing them from other states and other countries.
It just bugs me (being in an industry where the H-1b is much more commonly misused to reduce costs) hearing about these companies complaining that there is nobody trainable- and then to a large exent doing nothing to remedy the situation.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Except that in practice, H1B visa workers in the IT industry never get paid what their native-born counterparts get paid. As another poster in this thread pointed out, "prevailing wage" is hard to compute for IT companies where pay scales vary widely... and the standard practice at companies where I've worked is, the management always low-balls the estimate of "prevailing wage" when looking to hire H1B visa workers.
It's this disparity between the letter of the law and the actual practice of the law that has a lot of IT workers like myself steamed up.
Another related practice is the hiring of "perpetual contractors." It's so much easier to have a work force made entirely of disposable people, even if it means paying a small premium (higher hourly wages) for the flexibility of being able to get rid of someone at a moment's notice. (And let's not forget that most contractors get no benefits, or typically poor benefits if they work through a consulting company.)
Um, if you paid attention to the section of the grandparent post (which I helpfully emphasized in boldface), you'd see that the grandparent poster was talking about incompetent people who should remain unemployed. Sorry, but if someone is incompetent, it usually isn't because of lack of training, but typically because of lack of raw talent. There are plenty of incompetent programmers out there, and I wouldn't want them on my team in the hopes that they might actually rise to the level of skill where they'd be useful.
Yeah, a "good" programmer can be trained to do anything. I guess in my vocabulary, "incompetent" typically precludes an assessment of "good."
As for why there is a glut of incompetence and mediocre talent out there, I suspect it has a lot to do with all the degree mills running full tilt during the dot-com boom.
Um, if you paid attention to the section of the grandparent post (which I helpfully emphasized in boldface), you'd see that the grandparent poster was talking about incompetent people who should remain unemployed. Sorry, but if someone is incompetent, it usually isn't because of lack of training, but typically because of lack of raw talent. There are plenty of incompetent programmers out there, and I wouldn't want them on my team in the hopes that they might actually rise to the level of skill where they'd be useful.
At which point you've created a self-fullfilling prophecy, is my point. If no company is willing to put in the time/money to turn incompetant people into competant people, then how can they possibly expect to be able to hire competant people? I don't believe in ingrown talent for coding, aside from a few autistics (which other people would most certainly call incompetant due to their lack of ability to interact with customers). Give me 8 years, and I can train ANYBODY to code adequately. Of course, I'd start them out on an interpreter, and only slowly move them up to modern OOP programming....with stops at assembly, scripting, state machine theory, database normalization, database denormalization, procedural, RPN, SP, and multithreading along the way.
Yeah, a "good" programmer can be trained to do anything. I guess in my vocabulary, "incompetent" typically precludes an assessment of "good."
All good programmers start out as incompetent programmers.
As for why there is a glut of incompetence and mediocre talent out there, I suspect it has a lot to do with all the degree mills running full tilt during the dot-com boom.
I would agree with that. Most of them skipped some of the neccessary steps I mentioned above. But the important part is- so do most of the foreign degree mills, such as IIT. I'll bet that among H-1bs you'd be hard pressed to find somebody who can code MOD 2 in assembly in any less than five instructions.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
You know, I can see why some of the other comments on this article got a "Troll" moderation, but I really fail to see how this comment is a troll.
In short, this poster is correct -- the original intention of the H1B visa was to import unique talent that could not be found here. I'm going to disagree with sakusha on the scope of that -- s/he seems to think that this was primarily to lure native speakers of other languages here for foreign language instruction, and I don't think the scope was quite that narrow. (Specifically, there are foreign-developed technologies that we'd like to have here, and providing a path for foreign workers to come here to help us get up to speed on those technologies is a good thing.)
I'm sure there are those who would take exception to the suggestion that H1B workers are paid far less than their American counterparts, since the law says these workers are supposed to get paid the same... However, the reality doesn't match the letter of the law, as most employers who hire large numbers of H1B visas can play fast and loose with their estimates of a "typical salary" for any given position might be. And if an employer advertises for applicants for a position, but the posted salary range is far lower than what most Americans would be willing to work for, the employer can use the lack of response to the advertisement as evidence of a lack of skilled talent.
You and I are going to have to agree to disagree. I've seen quite a few sorry cases cross my path in the past, and although it's possible to break some people of bad programming habits, it's impossible to teach some things if the student is simply incapable of learning them. You can cure someone of ignorance, but you can't cure stupidity.
I have a big problem with your definition of "incompetence." For example, in the above quoted passage, you speak initially of incompetence in the programming domain, then you speak more generally about "incompetence" in the social-intelligence domain. These are two separate domains which you are conflating. If someone lacks social skills, you don't put them in a customer-facing role.
Depending, again, on what you call incompetence. The problem is, you don't seem to acknowledge that raw talent (which for programmers equates to general and mathematical intelligence) is a huge component of competency. You can't really teach someone to be smarter, although it seems to be true that people can "train up" various kinds of intelligence in their own brains.
The primary factors in the development of intelligence are genetics and the early childhood development years -- two factors that you have no control over when evaluating a candidate.
Unfortunately, employers in the United States are prohibited from administering intelligence tests. And as previous studies have shown (sorry, don't have the Slashdot link-o-matic for this), incompetent people are usually too incompetent to realize that they're incompetent, yet they usually do well because they are overly-confident in their own skills. Because of this, employers have to resort to domain-specific aptitude tests, which discriminate against otherwise talented candidates who lack experience with a specific API or a specific coding style.
And what you've just described is a college Computer Science curriculum, more or less. (And a few of the things you mentioned have a kind of "buzzword" feel to them, which makes me think these are things you find specifically useful but which should be covered as part of a more general curriculum. For instance, RPN -- assuming you meant Reverse Polish Notation -- is a specific subset of various notations and syntaxes that can be used in programming languages.)
An employer should not be expected to provide the foundations of a computer science degree. Unfortunately, most degree mills have programs that focus on "practical knowledge" and which gloss over general-but-useful information, such as determining the efficiency of an algorithm and expressing it in O-notation; hence, such degrees dilute the meaning of degrees issued by more prestigious institutions with more rigorous academic standards, so employers' standards have fallen as a result.
So, yeah, if you're an employer and you have 8 years to waste on teaching someone from ground zero, great. Most employers don't. An employer should be expected to train people up on the domain-specific knowledge they need, such as operational knowledge specific to how the company does business.
You als
Well thanks for the support, but I don't think I quite got my point across. The intent of H1-B was not to just import talent that is not found in the US, but to import talent that could NEVER be found in the US. Foreign languages were specifically raised as a reason for implementing H1-B visas, you must have native speakers educated in a foreign land to teach the native accents and expressions properly. Of course this could equally apply to any specific technology that is exclusive to another country, say for example, if Latvia had a worldwide monopoly on some specific machining technique to make some device, then you'd need trained Latvian machinist immigrants if you want to make those devices in the US.
But this does NOT apply to IT skills. Anyone in any land can learn the same programming languages and concepts, and besides, most computer systems are designed (if not built) in the US anyway, we have a headstart on the technology. Importing C++ and Oracle programmers from Bangalore makes as much sense as the fabled importation of coals to Newcastle.
You and I are going to have to agree to disagree. I've seen quite a few sorry cases cross my path in the past, and although it's possible to break some people of bad programming habits, it's impossible to teach some things if the student is simply incapable of learning them. You can cure someone of ignorance, but you can't cure stupidity.
The biggest cause of stupidity is instructors who fail to realize that there's more than one way to learn. I've run into a few of those myself in my career- and every time, by finding a way to break down their assignments to something they could handle, they excelled. Unfortuneately, I have had, at times, managers who did not support this idea- at which point I would give you some credit. You can't cure stupidity if your superiors are so infected with it that they thing any project that takes longer than four months is a failure.
I have a big problem with your definition of "incompetence." For example, in the above quoted passage, you speak initially of incompetence in the programming domain, then you speak more generally about "incompetence" in the social-intelligence domain. These are two separate domains which you are conflating. If someone lacks social skills, you don't put them in a customer-facing role.
Well, you don't unless you want to teach them social skills. I thought my Asperger's would forever be a barrier to working with customers- until I was placed in a role of having to examine 60,000 Access databases on 4,638 customer machines for an upgrade to Office 2002 from Office 97. Now I include that experience on my resume- along with some very nice e-mails from some of the later customers. (And yes, to a certain extent stupidity played a role there as well- about 40,000 of those MDBs were named db1.mdb and had nothing in them).
Depending, again, on what you call incompetence. The problem is, you don't seem to acknowledge that raw talent (which for programmers equates to general and mathematical intelligence) is a huge component of competency. You can't really teach someone to be smarter, although it seems to be true that people can "train up" various kinds of intelligence in their own brains.
Ah, you're coming at it from THAT angle. Well, you'd probably call my 11 year career only mediocre programming- I have almost *no* mathematical talent, but my talent is more poetical- I can read code and know when something doesn't feel right. There's more to talent than just mathematics- which I see as just another language with arbitrary axioms, which pretty much describes every computer language I've run across.
The primary factors in the development of intelligence are genetics and the early childhood development years -- two factors that you have no control over when evaluating a candidate.
A good instructor can take any combination of the two- and train a savant ability where none existed previous. I've even started with 50 year olds and taught them to code well enough to be on my team- I don't let them have a whole lot of creative control though.
Unfortunately, employers in the United States are prohibited from administering intelligence tests. And as previous studies have shown (sorry, don't have the Slashdot link-o-matic for this), incompetent people are usually too incompetent to realize that they're incompetent, yet they usually do well because they are overly-confident in their own skills. Because of this, employers have to resort to domain-specific aptitude tests, which discriminate against otherwise talented candidates who lack experience with a specific API or a specific coding style.
They could replace both of those with funding a good postgraduate ciriculum in what they need, then hiring the graduates of that ciriculum.
And what you've just described is a college Computer Science curriculum, more or less. (And a few of the things you mentioned have a kind of "buzzword" feel to them, which makes me think these are things you find specific
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Actually, thanks for the clarification... although I still think the "bootstrapping" rationale is valid even for IT. Let's use your Latvian machinist example as a starting point; presumably, after we'd had Latvian machinists here on H1-B status for a number of years, there would be some absorption of the basic technology and talent to use the technology here in the U.S. After some time, there should be no more need to hire these famed Latvian machinists, as the technology and requisite skills would have been absorbed and taught to U.S. workers.
To bring this back to IT, suppose there's some new programming technology or methodology that isn't currently well understood in the U.S. -- a technology or methodology that was developed in another country. Naturally, you'd want to import the people who have these skills using H1-B visas. I don't think the H1-B visa regulations were meant to bar guest workers who have skills that could be learned by an American -- only to allow guest workers who have skills that no American currently possesses. Naturally, once the knowledge transfer takes place and a pool of domestic workers with this new skill is developed, you should no longer be relying on a pool of H1-B visa talent.
If 99% of your population were able to just get by on a MacDonald's job filling french-fry orders and living in a 6x9' apartment it would still give you a 1% employment rate. What it doesn't consider is the fact that they're in jobs that suck, at least partly because the higher jobs don't pay shit either as they've been filled by H1B's who work double hours unpaid overtime for slightly more than said fry-fry job pays...
IANAEconomist however I did study this at College.
The ideal balance is referred to as the Non Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU).
This is essentially the level of unemployment at which the inflation rate holds steady and is a function of many aspects, one of the most important being job security (or insecurity). This is the magic point at which all wage pressures and spending controls balance out to maintain the stability of inflation (which can still be >0 just not changing).
It's one of the figures that few people can agree on so 2% - 6% have all been banded about, also as it has a sociological basis it also means that it will vary over time and location.
In essence if you are less than this value people will demand more money (as there are other jobs out there) and wages rise, causing inflation to rise in a spiral so 0% unemployment is a good way to cause serious problems in the country.
As an aside there are a number of people looking at how social welfare programs impact this calculation, especially true where the welfare programs are generous, although there are no solid conclusions aside from a very general opinion that good social welfare (a la Scandinavia) is a good thing.
All good programmers start out as incompetent programmers.
Sorry to butt in on your argument, but it's a pretty pointless one. The real issue you two should be arguing isn't one of competency or not, it's one of experience. The original poster whined that there weren't any Swing programmers in his city with 4 years of experience applying to his job. The suggestion was to hire an inexperienced programmer and teach him/her to use Swing. Or to raise the pay to the level necessary to steal a swing programmer from another employer (and I'll add a third option:*shock* *gasp* offer to relocate a programmer to the area). (or at least offer to accept resumes from out of state employees... I can't count the number of jobs I applied to that I called to follow up only to find that they trashed my resume simply because I wasn't "local" even though I was more than willing and able to relocate myself out of this humid pit of a city)
All good programmers start out as inexperienced programmers. Refusing a good programmer because he hasn't got 10 years of experience in C# doesn't help anyone.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.