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Tech Czar Unimpressed With US IT Workforce
theodp writes, "'The IT work force is not skilled enough and almost never can be skilled enough,' said Robert Cresanti, Under Secretary of Commerce for Technology. So what does the Poli Sci grad and ex-General Counsel for the ITAA think is the answer? Open the gates to more foreign workers, urged Cresanti, including H-1B holders."
But since he thinks the problem is that "there are not enough engineers with the appropriate skill sets", surely the long-term solution is to adjust your training and education regime so that there are enough such engineers? Hint to start with: degree courses in fields such as Computer Science and Software Engineering should not have teaching Visual Basic.Net and Java as the primary or only focus!
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Well, I guess that's a good short-term answer, if you're not at all interested in bolstering the skills of the local fauna. Short-term answers are great for politicians, too.
*sigh*
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
Well, that's sure to encourage more Americans to get IT degrees (rolls eyes)
How about instead of H1-Bs, we fast-track green cards for people with needed skills, or is that not enough like indentured servitude?
Play Command HQ online
"We don't want to pay local workers enough".
When faced with a workforce shortage, in no other field has the answer been to import skilled labor from other countries. The answer has always been to increase pay until the appropriate number of skilled candidates are attracted.
Allowing companies to import all of the skilled labor at cheap prices sets the stage for a dangerous trend. Ultimately it will sink wages throughout the workforce as companies see they can start trying this in other fields.
The government seems to think it has to use tarrifs to protect the iron industry but actively participates in the lowering of wages in the IT field.
I sincerely hope this starts to become a bigger issue and the word gets out. Undoubtedly if other fields start getting hit, the politicians will start to feel the pressure.
10 minutes working on a sig. What a waste.
The motivation behind this is: GREED! Big American companies want cheap disposable labor. They have no concern with what long-term effect this has on the middle-class, or on the economy, as long as it keeps propping up those bottom lines and rolling in the bonus and back-dated options. If they really wanted the best that the world has to offer, to be brought here and integrated into the US economy on a permanent basis, these would not be H1-B visas. They would have a program for work-towards-citizenship. Everything else is lies and misdirection.
...i read this as "czech tsar"... and who asked him, anyway?
They will never stop until somebody makes the
They were saying this during the bottom-of-the-barrel tech bust in the early 2000's. I personally met a representative from Microsoft who claimed this at a San Diego university, and he was saying this to unemployed techies in the same goddam room. He quickly left when the question-and-answer session came.
Table-ized A.I.
As more skilled workers come to America the less appealing outsourcing looks because all the good talent will all be here in the first place. At least in the US, they'll come to expect something resembling US standards for pay and not something 1/8th of it.
Is for technically skilled people to have more children. Companies must embrace women and pregnancy, with daycare and . Only Darwin can help us here. They are the only way to increase the force of people capable and willing to be the next generation.
The severe problem of supply of staff will lead to soaring salaries of course... Simple market economics, restricted supply and strong demand. What you say? Salaries are not soaring? Doesn't sound like much of a shortage to me then.
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TOtally. Some of us would like to go back to school for paper creds and get into the IT field, but school so damn expensive. I aleady have a BA, but coming up with the bucks for even just a cert or an AA would be hard.
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
What Robert Cresanti refuses to face is that much of the shortage isnt from the dot com bust, most of us rode that out, it is more from people who were forced out during the "offshoring" boom and the waves of layoffs due to "restructuring". Many have abandonded the field in droves and have encouraged their friends and loved ones to do the same. Outsourcing which was once done as a cost saving measure is now being necessary due to lack of available domestic skills.
I worked with a team of 12 engineers that were slowly whittled away due to layoffs from offshoring out of the 8 or so I still keep in touch with not a single one has gone back into the corporate world all have either gone to small companies, independent contracting or left the field completely. You can only kick a dog so many times before it turns on you. As foreign enconomies improve and outsourcing becomes less cost effective (its already happening) companies that screwed over their domestic employees are going to find it harder and harder to do business. IMHO they are getting what they deserve.
The government seems to think it has to use tarrifs to protect the iron industry but actively participates in the lowering of wages in the IT field.
The reason for the difference?: UNIONS
You may complain about unions all you want, but without them your political ass is not powerful enough to compete with deep corporate pockets and armies of full-time lobbyists.
Perhaps we could form some kind of open-source union? Just a thought.
By the way, the Rand Corporation looked into general claims of tech/sci shortages in the late 90's, and found none. It is a scam.
Table-ized A.I.
I am an IT worker and I have no objections to a company importing as many foriegn workers as they desire for any position. However I think they should pay a tax for this.
This tax is over and above all of the other taxes they pay and should be the greatest of these three:
1) Minimum wage.
2) Median wage nation wide for the position.
3) Median income in the zipcode where the work is to be performed.
I do get pissed when I read those ads that want a MD and a doctorate in math and want to pay $46,000 per year.
VISAs are essentially an import tariff on employees.
Remember the steel import tariff Bush imposed a year or two back? the steel manufacturers were overjoyed - and rightly so; since imported steel now cost 45% more, they could raise their prices to match, and they made plenty of money out of it.
Who suffered? well, *EVERYONE ELSE*. All the companies who use steel had to pay 45% more. All their products (cars, construction materials for houses, etc) went up in price to compensate for their costs. You and I subsidized the steel industry, by Bush's decree.
Back to VISAs.
If you have demand for a skill-set and a shortfall in supply, wages go up.
Just like steel prices going up, when wages go up, final product prices go up.
So if you restrict the supply of programmers, software prices go up to compensate.
Who benefits? American programmers. They have fatter pay packets (which they notice), but most things they buy will be more expensive (which they won't notice). (Things are more expensive since the part of their cost which covers the price of the software used to make them has gone up).
So who pays? you and I, by Bush's decree.
The "solution" is to import cheap labour to further erode your citizens' desire to spend the time/money/effort getting those advanced technical degrees.
... why, in his opinion, are Americans so much dumber than citizens in other countries?
After all, why rack up so much debt from school when there will be someone else willing to do the same job for less because his school loans (if they exist) are a fraction of your's?
And isn't in the corporation's best interest to get the cheapest labour they can find?
So, the question becomes
I don't think we are. But I do believe that our government is too closely involved with business's desire to get the maximum benefit with the minimum investment. Fuck that. I want to see scholarships for advanced technical studies. Lots of them. Put your money where your mouth is. When 50% of the computer science majors can get out of school and pay off their debt within 5 years, THAT will be sufficient. Only then can he talk about how dumb Americans are.
Such broad statements don't help. I think it is a mixture of the IT industry needing more specific skills AND more people.... I don't believe that blanket H1 increases will solve the problem.
The IT industry should look inward and admit that it has done a piss-poor job of training people (and the employees have been complacent in their training demands). While many companies have training courses, most of these courses cover only general topics. Highly specific and technical knowledge takes more than a two-week course can provide, it takes months, even years to develop. IT companies somehow expect Universities to deliver these people, ready made for work. As long as employee training is considered a cost more than a benefit, the industry will keep saying that they can't find the skilled people. What these companies are saying in reality is that it is not cost effective for them to train their own employees, it is much cheaper to get foreigners trained at much lower cost and then import them. This outlook denies the fact that many employees posses the practical experience to quickly learn new skills if given the opportunity.
So what is the solution? I don't know, but the net effect of allowing more H1's will not be an overall improvement of American skills.
As far as I am concerned anyone should be able to come over here and reap the American dream just like all our ancestors did (except for the natives we forgot to kill).
In addition to the foreigners, you can avail yourself of more Americans by setting your sights lower. I've found that people that have an entrepreneurial spirit, ability to take personal responsibility of job functions, and demonstrate willingness to learn and self-study do very well in IT regardless of official degree. And they cost less.
People talk all day long about American IT workers "adapting to the market" and "creating more value" than their counterparts create overseas, but there's nothing in the universe that an American IT worker can do that someone else overseas can't do, for cheaper.
There is no adaptation that a US IT worker can aspire to, that can't be matched or exceeded or even pre-emptively achieved by workers elsewhere. Not even one.
That's exactly why Toyota, Nissan and Honda are eating the US auto industry alive: we offshored our technology to them and now they're using it against us after having turned the proverbial transistor into the transistor radio except this time in a much bigger way.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Summary: US Kids are dumb, lazy, and fat and only interested in video games and lighting their farts on fire. Jobs in the US are leaving the country. Employers are moving their hiring to China, India, Brazil, Eastern Europe. Skilled workers in the US are having a hard time gettings or keeping jobs and the US companies' salary increases aren't even tracking the cost of living increases in the US.
Proposed solution: Bring in more foreign workers to compete for the few jobs that haven't been outsourced or moved overseas?!? Have them bring their extended families with them into the US. WTF! I'm not trying to be protectionist, but... we need to improve education in the US and we need to make sure that there will be good jobs for our kids when they grow up.
I know a lot of US companies now that only hire about 1 person in the US for every 20 they hire. Do you really think it's because they're aren't any qualified workers in the US!?
Could we see a day when our kids will be leaving the US to go to China and India to look for jobs and we'll be complaining about those countries limiting US foreign workers? I believe so...
Is that both China and India are already suffering from staff shortages. They can barely get enough unskilled labour, never mind highly skilled IT staff.
r .html?ex=1301716800&en=49c0d472886e1f39&ei=5088&pa rtner=rssnyt&emc=rss
e.g.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/03/business/03labo
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15212647/
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I bet most of the US IT workforce is not impressed with the government.
Funny how that works.
1)College is just too expensive in the US now, it is *insane*
2) the government goes WAY out of its way to allow companies to offshore work or import cheap workers and has utterly killed off any expectation of a job that would justify several years hard work just to get your foot in the door and start out with high 5 figures or worse *debt* before you have worked yet. This is beyond nuts and has had the desired effect for the boss class, they can complain their aren't enough workers. Gee, who wouilda thunk that might be the outcome? To me, it looks like it was designed on purpose that way..
3)The IT industry rank and file has been utterly and completely brainwashed into not acknowledging that the globalist miilionaire and billionaire owners have very strong "unions" which are the corporate industry associations and their huge lobbying (bribery,let's callit like it is)power in DC, along with the "wall street" swine, but for some reason, workers orgs or guilds or unions are "not acceptable", even though there is nothing stopping allegedly very smart people from taking a look at where unions in the trades did well, and where they didn't do well, and adjusting how to run a union accordingly, from learning from past mistakes and historical example.
4)and most important, once again they, along with the other narrow minded people who can't learn from history, have elected the globalist party to run government. There is no two party system, there is one party, the globalists, who have two wings that exist *only* to keep their serfs divided and squabbling with the other serfs, so that no one looks upstream to where the problems are.. Until such a time as the people stop allowing that two headed hydra to run them into the ground, to rule over them, this destruction of the middle class will continue, because this is what the globalists want, a two class society with masters and serfs, which is what they always have wanted going back through history.
Very worrying indeed. But we should not be surprised because the US education system has been in "free fall" since the mid-eighties. One day, I fear that the US, like all other "major empires" of the past, will be irrelevant. When this happens China Brazil and India will matter. This is scary!
the simple point is this. The big companies want the outsource pay rates, without the outsource stigma. They basically want to outsource, but say that the jobs are local. They will pass over a thousand IT professionals that know what they are doing over the one little kid from Bangalor who printed his diploma off at Kinkos.
Hint to start with: degree courses in fields such as Computer Science and Software Engineering should not have teaching Visual Basic.Net and Java as the primary or only focus!
I think the whole tech-shortage thing is lobbyist bullcrap. But that aside, VB and Java is what businesses actually want. Where do you think the demand really is? Every developer complains about companies focusing too much on specific tools and not enough on generally ability. This is the way it is.
They want instant tool-of-the-month experts rather than train, and one way to get that is to import/export them as needed rather than wait for Americans to learn.
Table-ized A.I.
You're getting as mixed a bag with H1Bs as you are with US IT workers. In IT you can make a salary well over the national average and it's a lot easier to get your foot in the door than it is with medicine or law. I've met some very talented H1Bs and I've had to clean up after some who were complete idiots. The trick isn't so much in the volume of smart people, the trick is in your HR Department's ability to filter out the folks who are only in it for the money.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
H1-B = TREASON!!!!!!!!!!!! SHORTGAGE??????? this is HOGWASH there are thousands of young american citizens that are graduating every year from technology based programs that can fill all the positions held by H1-Bs i work at a customer site where 80% of the work force is H1-B visa holders on paper these workers have master degrees, certifications blah blah blah AND YOU KNOW WHAT THEY ARE ALL DUMBER THAN A BOX OF ROCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! they do not understand english well enough to perform their job their work is substandard and full of errors , i am always having to correct their work they cannot think outside of the box ... if its not in the documentation or the manual 99.99% of the H1-B`s I work with CANNOT develop unconventional
solutions to unconventional problem sets
they are not able to develop simple solutions that solve problems
there is a HUGE cultural void in their mode of thinking and the American way of doing things
When the fox was interviewed about the "hen shortage", he replied that we do not have enough local hens anymore, and that we desperately need to import hens from other areas...
There will always be some place in the world where people will work for less money than where you are right now.
And knowledge is easily transfered.
We have to focus on linking our technological imports with our school system. We cannot, as a nation, afford to reduce the number of home grown engineers while increasing the amount of tech we import (either through goods or visas).
If our technology imports increase 20% one year, then a significant chunk of that increase should be put into our engineering degree programs.
IT companies somehow expect Universities to deliver these people, ready made for work.
No we expect that people are paying tens of thousands to dollars for Universities to deliver an over-blown sense of entitlement and endless ability for mostly left-wing mental masturbation.
This is all the fault of outsourcing - I used to work in a callcentre for a now defunct computer company and while we did have some training, only two weeks mind, we had no incentive to fix problems. Even if we did have the skills, and it would take twenty minutes on the phone to fix, there was no reason to do that. I left when I got a better job, the last straw being my colleague being praised for fobbing people off because he took more calls than I did trying to fix things.
A rising tide lifts all boats...
There is no need for the government to "fix" shortages by importing desperate labor in the form of H-1B workers or illegal aliens. When the government "fixes" a shortage, the government is damaging the normal operation of the free market. The free market works fine without government intervention.
Regrettably, most politicians (and some journals like the "Wall Street Journal") cater to certain segments of the population and outright lie about how economic laws work. For example, many Republicans favor big agri-businesses and claim that the American economy will be irreparably damaged unless Washington allows illegal aliens to pick fruits and vegetables. Many Democrats favor ethnic pressure groups like La Raza and make an identical claim.
Journals like the "Wall Street Journal" use an even sneakier strategy. The Journal repeatedly claims that increasing the American population is wonderful because doing so increases the wealth of the nation via increasing human capital. To a point, this claim is true. Consider an economy of exactly one person. That economy is pathetically poor because one person, regardless of how smart she is, cannot be equally skilled in all areas of work. Here, when I refer to wealth, I am referring to wealth per capita (i.e., GDP per capita), also known as personal wealth. If the 1-person economy grew into a 2-person economy, we can easily imagine that the wealth doubles or triples: one person is tending the vegetable garden while the other person is protecting the grass hut from wild animals.
However, consider an economy with 100 million people. If we doubled the size of this economy, then its wealth does not double. The wealth increases by substantially less than 1 percent. After a certain population size, each doubling of the population brings a rapidly decreasing percentage gain in the wealth.
The game that the WSJ plays is to ignore this concept of diminishing returns. Further, the WSJ deceptively says that doubling the population doubles the total weath (i.e., the total GDP, not the GDP per capita). Though that statement is true, it does nothing for the actual wealth that you experience. What you experience is GDP per capita, not total GDP.
Finally, there is a trade-off between (for example) a 0.1% increase in personal wealth (i.e., GDP per capita) and annoyances (e.g., pollution) created by a doubling of the American population.
By the way, identical comments about diminishing returns apply to global trade. Onces a global free market reaches a certain size, it captures most of the advantages of a large amount of human capital. The USA loses almost nothing by restricting our free trade to only free markets, which includes (at the moment) only Western nations. We should slam our markets shut to non-free markets like India, China, and Mexico. The tiny percentage gain in personal wealth (i.e., the GDP per capita) that we get by including India, China, and Mexico is completely offset by their damaging impact on Americans in the unskilled-labor market. China indirectly erodes the quality of life for Americans in the unskilled-labor market.
Then, along comes the WSJ to deceptively talk about total wealth (i.e., the total GDP) in absolute numbers, say, an increase in total GDP of $15 billion dollars. $15 billion is an eye-popping number. However, divide that number of the number of Americans to get the GDP per capita, and you see only an increase of $50. Is $50 worth destroying the quality of life for Americans in the unskilled-labor market?
Boss: Can you use a hammer? Worker: Yes. Boss: Great. Now build me a house.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
To gauge Robert Cresanti's comments, it is important to first grasp where he comes from. So who is Robert Cresanti? He is a former Vice President of Public Policy for the BSA. Yes, that BSA. Before that, he was the Senior Vice President and General Counsel for the ITAA.
Why is this important? Both of these are groups that are all about the interests of big corporations. The BSA, in particular, protects those interests without regard for anyone in its path. So when someone of this mindset says they need to import more workers, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out where he's coming from. There are two basic ways that companies in the US could increase the number of qualified workers. One is to increase salaries significantly enough to entice capable students of pursuing a career in IT. The second is to import workers from other countries often willing to work for the same or less.
For government, the two basic ways are to increase educational funding to lower the barrier for students to pursue higher education in IT and the second is to ease restrictions on workers from other countries to work in the US.
The second option is the quickest and "cheapest" solution from both a private and government perspective. The fact that he is promoting this as a solution shows that he thinks short term and not long term. It also means he thinks from the perspective of what is best for big business and not the American worker. This isn't totally surprising considering where he comes from and who got him in his position.
After all, the president of the United States was barely able to complete school (his GPA was around C - 2.35 more precisely) ... and last time he got 51% of the votes.
The outsourcing boom is not working so well.
The number of CS grads is going down.
The US salaries are going up.
What to do, what to do, they've got us by the short hairs again... what did we do before? Ah yes.
Convince Congress that we don't have enough people to do the job, and that those people who live here suck anyway.
Let the H1B's start a-flowin'!
Salaries go down, more American students won't take CS as a degree, then we can ask for more, cheaper slave slabor from abroad! Eternal power-down cycle! Win-win! $$ for us managers!
I think the broad model should be the US university system. It doesn't have to be all private or all public, but you have real competition between schools and people can direct some of their government subsidies for education towards private schools instead of public schools.
Competition works, Government run monopolies don't. Until we realize that, large numbers of our schools are going to continue to pump out drug dealers instead of electrical engineers and web designers.
The thing is Cresanti is pursuing a classic corporate welfare strategy. I discuss this in my articles here. These visas have a market value of about $100,000 each. They cost companies a fraction of that amount. If the visas were prices appropriately, there would be no shortage--and US wages would adjust somewhat.
That's right, he's an idiot.
Let's see... Just open up all of our American corporations so that all of their precious information, applications, systems, networks, etc are built, maintained, controlled by non citizens. Many of them have no drive to get things done correctly, safely, securely. Most of them do not have a stake in the companies that hire them. Couple this with language barriers, society barriers, background barriers, and we end up with ineffective employees. I've seen it time and time again, where the H1B holder can't comprehend the simplest things because they don't understand the context around it. They've gone to school, they've taken the classes and they've memorized the answers. However, ask them to think it through, to give the full reasoning behind each feature and function, and they just stare at you as if you've asked them to quote the value of Pi to the 3 billionth decimal place. They might even know the answer, they just can't comprehend the context of the question, because we base it on what we know and have learned over the years.
Do you really want all of the companies who sub-contract to the companies who supply the DoD with equipment to rely on H1B holders? How much of a cost increase is there when every line of code, every circuit, every component has to be double and triple checked by non H1B workers to make certain that security glitches, back-doors, etc weren't introduced.
What kind of holes will be introduced into software which uses personally identifiable information simply because the H1B worker took shortcuts to get the job done, because they CAN'T say no and push the time-lines back?
I'm sorry - there's just too many things that go wrong when you introduce too many non-native employees into the mix. It just doesn't work. It's not effective. It ALWAYS ends up costing more in the long run.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
I blame schools. Secondary education is big business. There's only a handful of schools with quality programs. Here in Louisiana, many schools still teach pascal and basic. Later courses are taught by underqualified professors who've been out of the loop for years. For my C++ course, I had to constantly argue with the teacher over every program I would write because he did not know the ANSI standards. The class barely covered the first three chapters of a "teach yourself C++ in 24 hours" type book. Classes tend to "gear down" to the accomodate the dumbest person in the class, which is just wrong. I got fed up, left school, got six years experience, then came back and got a business degree.
If you're a youngster interested in computers this should tell you: get interested in something else, something that will make you money so you can follow your interest. Working in IT will never provide you with the long term career to raise a family.
...
Now doing H1B applications for X immigrant will, so study law.
You will thank me for this advice one day, and those that mod me down, you sick SOAB condemming the next generation of intelligent kids to the hell that is being an engineer in the west
threadeds blog
IT employees aren't the problem. The real problem is that Bush's appointees aren't skilled enough. There have been some real duds. Michael Brown, the FEMA director, was previously head judge of the Arabian Horse Association. Bush's early chief economic adviser, Lawrence Linsay, came from Enron. So did the U.S. Trade Representative, Robert B. Zoellick, and the secretary of the Army, Thomas White Jr. And then there's the Attorney General, Albert Gonzales, "Mr. Torture" himself, formerly Bush's lawyer.
We could probably get better people from offshore. Certainly we could find better people in the financial and trade areas. Bring in some smart financial people from Singapore or Dubai as economic and trade advisers and get the country moving.
Despite getting the solution wrong, he does have some good observations.
First, that it's too hard for international students to come to the US to study.
Second, that our compitition populates it's governement with engineers, while we populate our government with lawyers (and Poli Sci grads).
With those observations, he should realize that he is actually part of the problem. I wonder if he sees that... probably not.
Successful developing nations adapt their curricula to produce timely skills, and many are the targets of massive investment and job migration.
Meanwhile, in the face of mass offshoring, we have an increasingly undereducated population whose skills are steadily declining in value.
Visas and offhosring appear attractive short-term solutions because qualified candidates have TOO MUCH education and cost too much.
If the average high school graduate had the needed skills, we'd already have the labor at a reasonable cost.
"Before his confirmation, Cresanti served as Vice President of Public Policy at the Business Software Alliance (BSA). Prior to this, he was Senior Vice President and General Counsel for the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA). Earlier in his career, he served as Staff Director for the Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem. He was also Staff Director for the Subcommittee on Financial Services and Technology for the Senate Banking Committee. Mr. Cresanti received his B.A. degree from Austin College and his Juris Doctor degree from Baylor University."
"The Under Secretary is focused on carrying forward President Bush's vision to grow the economy... the Under Secretary's priorities are to: foster an environment conducive to private sector investment in innovation, by identifying ways to facilitate knowledge exchange between scientists and investors, which will boost our country's economic performance"
He's a republican from big business, charged with carrying forth a republican agenda "conductive to private sector investment". And what is a way in which this is accomplished? Lower labor costs. See, most people on Slashdot see America's IT performance as the number/quality of native workers. Cresanti sees it as how attractive each company's stocks are. And in this case, what's good for the goose is not so good for the gander.
Of course, in all fairness, that is a valid perspective, and isolating our market's cost structure from the rest of the world is not sustainable long-term. Thus, this results in a more short term decrease in the American standard of living, and increase in the third world's standard of living-- which no one here likes. There is of course an alternative; 97% of the wealth in the US is controlled by 3% of the population, or something like that. As Mahatma Gandhi said, "The earth has enough to satisfy every man's need, but not any man's greed."
So the bigger picture here is that we are not an island, and our standard of living is also dependent upon the standard of living of the rest of the world. But the earth is very rich in resources, and there certainly exists enough for all to enjoy a reasonable standard of living. The question then becomes, how do you redistribute the ultra-concentrated wealth in such a manner it is to the benefit of all, without the detriments of communism and forced labor, without killing incentive, risk, and drive that led to its creation? I think the happy medium is displayed in many European countries, with a more reasonable redistribution of wealth that encompasses rewarding the people who create it and taking care of the rest of society. Hell, the wealthy should be wealthy. Just perhaps to not such a large degree. How many gold shark minibars does one truly need for their 4th vacation mansion?
The core attitude that is an immediate reaction to stories like this though creates the problem. We immediately think of us, our lifestyle, etc. But we fail to acknowledge the connectedness to others; by hoarding ourselves, either individually or as a nation, we let our neighbors fall into poverty, which comes full circle when they labor for much cheaper wages and are no less human or capable. So I think the true solution is to raise the standard of living in countries we so fear for taking our jobs, for a reasonable redistribution of some of the wealth in the hands of so few, with the intent of providing a livable baseline for all and still room and reason for success and risk taking. And that is very much within our power-- our nation already has the wealth, as evidenced by massive spending in Iraq, and the concentrated wealth at the hands of so few in the population. We simply lack the will to use it to help ourselves and our neighbors. And every time the response is one of selfishness instead of compassion, at any level of society, even for us... the problem perpetuates itself. For if the vast majority of society is committed to any particular economic policy, chances
People see the free market and globalisation as such a miracle until it dawns on them, far too late, that labour--including theirs unless they happen to be the one doing the buying--is a tradeable commodity like any other.
I've noticed that a lot of Indian programmers have become fair-weather free-traders. India has typically been a socialist-leaning country and has no cultural reason to see capitalism in an almost religious-like sense that the US south does. And I don't think that has fundimentally changed such that they are a bit naive. If South Africa or China etc. suddenly become the "cheaper bucket" and decimated thier offshoring contracts, I am sure they would become the socialists that they started out as. No country has changed their spots that fast, at least not in a lasting way.
Table-ized A.I.
Several other major countries such as Australia let people into the country for job reasons while approximately 2/3 of immigrants come to the US under family reunification. In an era of cheap long distance, the Internet, and discount airfares, giving such a high priority to family reunification probably doesn't make sense (definition of "family" includes adult brothers and sisters of US citizens etc...).
The solution is to make salaries in IT go up. When that happens, people will become interested in CS and flock to it, just like during the IT boom. Granted, that will attract people who otherwise wouldn't and probably shouldn't go into CS, but that will also attract the truly intelligent who would now rather become a doctor or a lawyer because they get paid so much more. The end result either way is more domestic IT workers.
How do we make IT salaries increase? Simple. Decrease the supply of IT workers in the short-term. That means DECREASING the number of H1-B workers, not increasing them. Fewer workers available means that companies have to bid up the few available workers left. More bidding means higher salaries for IT people.
What does INCREASING the number of H1-B workers mean? That means companies have more people to pick and choose from. That means companies can pay less for their workers because they don't have to bid up. That means US college students become less interested in CS and IT. That's because they see jobs going to foreigners and the few jobs that don't go to foreigners pay poorly. That means we as a nation become more dependent on H1-B labor. That means we don't fix our problem.
(Incidentally, companies want to increase the number of women going into IT for the same reason they want to increase the number of H1-Bs. The economic logic is exactly the same.)
Its funny that you talk about the free market while simultaneously advocating protectionism. In what way are India, China and Mexico less free or more protectionist than the USA? How are they damaging you in the 'unskilled labour market'?
If someone is willing to work for $1/day, then in a free market he will get a lot of customers. That person is not damaging your 'unskilled labour market'. It means that the work he is performing is only worth $1/day. That is the definition of the free market.
You are free to disagree whether it is right or wrong, but don't pretend to understand the free market while condemning free competition and advocating artificial barriers to trade.
is the lack of any qualified candidates for Under Secretary positions
... you can never have enough of them so to calculate what only a higher level of math can accomplish in the hands of the common man.
Does anyone really think that in 50 -100 years anyone is going to need the skill set we now require for "Information Technology"?
In other words, IT can be made a great deal simpler and will be as demand increases and requires more than can be educated at the current required level of roman numeral mathmatics.
I teach the three-semester calculus-based freshman physics sequence to a lot of engineering majors to a community college. A lot of these people are intelligent enough to learn the material, but flunk out of physics because of their weak backgrounds. It's not uncommon to look at their transcripts and see them having started their community college careers by taking Math 20, which is basic arithmetic. It's extremely difficult to start from that level, and then work your way up to the level of competence required of an engineer. In addition, many of them have really weak language skills; sometimes this is because they're immigrants, but other times it's because they entered college with a sixth-grade reading level. Some of them also just don't seem to have put education very high on their list of priorities.
The net result of all this is that at my school, the total number of students who start the calc-based physics sequence every year is something like 300, and the number who finish it is roughly 30. (Some of the loss is from students who transfer before finishing, and or students who fail calculus, etc.)
There's a pretty simple solution to the problem, which is to set higher standards in math, English, and science in K-12; enforce those standards with standardized tests; and refuse to promote kids to the next grade if they can't demonstrate that they've mastered the material. Our present system is especially harmful to people who come from working-class backgrounds. They go to lousy public schools, and they and their parents get the impression that they're getting a good education. Then they arrive in college, and find out just how much they've been screwed over by our educational system.
Of course, Slashdot's readership is disproportionately composed of tech workers who are U.S. citizens, so I'm sure there will be plenty of people howling about the damn immigrants coming in and taking away our jobs. I'm none of their ancestors were immigrants. But seriously, would you rather compete for jobs against a coder who immigrated from India, and is expecting U.S.-level pay, or a coder who is still in India, and is therefore available for 1/4 of what you'd cost? If there's a problem, it's that H-1B visas don't necessarily lead to any opportunity to remain permanently in the U.S.
Find free books.
People don't make major choices about their broad vocations simply on money. Temperament and aptitude is more important. Now, within those broad vocational parameters, money matters. Someone may become an oncologist, a general practitioner, or a pediatrician based on various trade-offs between pay, workload, etc. But they aren't going to choose between software engineer and doctor - considering the vicissitudes of the labor market, it would be foolish for them to.
In particular, in the case of Mexico, if a free market existed, there would be plenty of jobs for everyone.
Combining a free market like the USA and a non-free market like Mexico does not create a free market. Combining 2 free markets creates a bigger free market.
Combining a free market and a non-free market does not create a free market. The combined market damages the operation of free-market economics in the USA. The non-free market, for example, damages the movement of wages in the the American unskilled-labor market.
Community Colleges are very affordable. I graduated from one in May. It was usually $150-$200 per class and about $200 for the books (at the bookstore, less than half using the internet). State colleges aren't much more, at least in my state (Florida).
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
How deceptively oversimplified of an argument.
How about we let shareholders hire people from abroad for management positions -- all the way to the top -- since I'm sure they'll be able to find competent people that would do the job for far less than a 7-figure salary.
Yep, I think we are restricting the supply of managers, and CEOs, and that's why some are compensated with millions of dollars. At the end, you and I pay for it.
What a terrible word, left over from the absolutist days of the Russian monarchy. I remember a time when presidents used to sneer at such stuff...
Dog is my co-pilot.
you should have stopped their, because that means their will be more of the jobs created in the US. if the better cheaper schools are overseas then fix that issue, but until that issue is fixed, keep the jobs in the US, by having as many of the skilled workers in the US.
if you don't want those types of jobs in the us, then ya reduce the workforce in that area, so the entire business leaves the US.
I for one want to compete for my job in the US, I don't want to be trying to get a visa to move to india for a job in 5 years.
so to increase the number of skilled IT, and quality stop the good workers from being in the US, and increase the desire for companies to outsource, and throw money at those without the intrest to move into the industry. Similar to trade, you can close down trade, and get a short term gain, but screw yourself in the long term.
This entire topic is one of those that no one wants to tackle head-on and correct. Part of the reason is political correctness, part seems to come from an inflated self-opinion, and another comes from the current economic climate.
First off, let's talk about political correctness. We just can't admit to ourselves that we do a very bad job of educating our workforce. Other countries are way ahead of us in terms of turning out skilled workers who excel in science, engineering and the computer field. I'm convinced that there is something to be said for countries that turn out educated robots. They may not think as creatively and freely as our students, but they at least know how to do math and think logically. I'm amazed at the number of people I've worked with, especially lately, that completely lack the ability to apply logic and cause-and-effect reasoning to troubleshooting tasks. The overall mentality seems to be "just hack at it until it works, never mind why or how." The fix to this part of the problem will be hard, because we have to undo 50 years of conditioning. Not everyone needs to be a college graduate. Some people just aren't designed for it. We need to have appropriate jobs for the wide level of skills that are out there, and not force everyone into a corporate job just because it's the right thing to do. The world needs plumbers, electricians, and garbage collectors (who all make a good-enough salary.)
Second, we tend to think very highly of ourselves. This is especially bad in some sectors of IT. For a stereotype, think of your typical system administrator or developer who thinks everyone using their software or network is dumber than they are. The reality of it is that the computer field has a wide range of ability levels. Especially during the tech boom, there was a low barrier of entry, and people came from every background and education level to seek their fortune. My opinion is that anyone who thinks they know everything really ought to go back and check out what they don't know. The solution here is twofold. We need to realize that we aren't gods of everything, and the world owes us nothing. You should only be entitled to high salaries if you're truly good. Also, our profession really needs to do a better job of training. A lot of people I know are into hoarding knowledge; I guess they're afraid they won't be irreplaceable anymore if someone else knows how their mail server is configured. I help out in this effort by documenting everything I do, and actually explaining stuff to people when they ask (or have a puzzled look on their face.)
Finally, economics. It is absolutely true that businesses are importing cheap labor or sending work offshore. I grew up in upstate NY in the 80s, so I know what it's like when the worldwide labor markets reset themselves. However, there are still plenty of specialty manufacturers in this country. It's not enough to employ the entire manufacturing labor pool, but these guys survive because they make a quality product they can charge more for. What I'm saying is that change is inevitable. You are not going to convince a CIO that you're worth 80% more than the guy in India, China or wherever who's willing to work much harder than you. Also, don't forget that all but the top researchers, professors, etc. are not paid exorbitant salaries. They build up to a good living over time. A lot of college grads want $75K just out of school for entry level work. This mentality is going to keep the shift of work offshore going faster.
The bigger overall economic problem is that it's incredibly expensive to live and do business in the US. Everyone seems to need the most expensive car, house and gadgets. A lot of other countries don't have that mentality, and their workers are willing to take lower salaries in exchange for steady work. With the kind of wage pressure we place on employers, no wonder they want to replace us.
One other thing I'd like to see is the standardization of IT into something akin to a branch of engineering. All licensed engineers
"There are not enough engineers with the appropriate skill sets."
4 ,111202,00.htmlc e.php
That would be the skill set that includes an MS in Software Engineering and a willingness to work for $10/hour.
"The IT work force is not skilled enough and almost never can be skilled enough," said Robert Cresanti, undersecretary of commerce for technology
And just why would that be, Mr. Cresanti?
Lack of education? I'm sure that college costs rising 6.3% from last year for public colleges, and 5.9% for the very expensive private colleges has nothing to do with it.
Oh, but college enrollment is off. I'm sure that has nothing to do with the media drumbeat announcing that entry level engineering positions are being offshored, reducing interest in college majors leading to software and IT positions. [1][2]
Of course, even getting into these college programs requires a high school education with a strong grounding in the fundamentals of mathematics and science. This seems to be a problem area for United States high schools. [3]
Or are you just proclaiming that the US Commerce Department thinks this is an area Americans just can't compete in? Perhaps American nationals should just know their place in life and stick with "Would you like fries with that?" Hey, even H1B Visa Guy has to eat somewhere. At least your suppliers of Freedom Fries will be secure in their ability to find new employees.
1. http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2006/0,481
2. http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos110.htm#outlook
3. http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/25/news/scien
4. http://www.ed.gov/inits/TIMSS/overview.html
It's almost entertaining to see all of these indignant responses on this page, especially so, considering that the item that's two lines below on the RSS feed is 'Everyday Objects Place In A Microwave'. C'mon people: we're not exactly showing ourselves to be the brightest and best anymore, are we? If we're not bitching about Microsoft/SCO/Novell/our managers, then we're resorting to lowest-common-denominator statements about lives that we'll never understand. "In Soviet Russia" being a perfect example. Like you've got a fucking clue. My girlfriend lived under that regime. It's not funny. It never was. Stop whining about what this dude has to say. Take this guy's statement as a challenge. Fine: he says there's not enough people with the appropriate knowledge in the field: spread what you know among your subordinates. Do the intelligent thing. Stop appealing to the US/UK 'Compensation Culture' - it's no-one else's fault but our own.
Rise to it. Seriously. Prove him wrong.
I'm a school dropout. I was trained in IT support by my father, because it was the only thing that genuinely interested me, barring Art. As it happens, I took to it fairly well, and I worked hard. I now administer approximately a third of a the computers in a prominent London university. I'm proud of my job. More importantly, I'm proud of the fact that I can receive criticism and actually improve myself because of it. Since leaving school, I got in on a degree course more on good faith than on any kind of academically demonstrable aptitude. As it stands, I flourished. I graduated. I'm now CompTIA certified, alongside various other peripheral qualifications, and have a few years' experience. My measure of what makes a good technician is the ability to adapt to the job, not the politics. So people don't like you. Big deal. The ideal point to occupy is that they don't even notice you: that's when you know that you're doing your job well. Hell, mod me into obscurity if you want. I know that there's going to be some of you that will agree with me. Even if you don't voice that agreement, it'll still be there. I still have faith in our industry. I'm never afraid to say that I work in IT. If anything, I'm proud of it. Even when our industry bites us, and makes everyone that works within it look like fools to the common man.
This may have seemed like a disjointed rant, but my point is rise to the challenge. If you're finding that people coming up to work with you have got major holes in their skills, then help to plug the gaps. Show them what you need to be, to actually be a good technician/programmer/designer/whatever. Don't just carp about it.
Now, for fuck's sake, mod me flamebait before I lose all respect for you.
http://xkcd.com/313/
People don't make major choices about their broad vocations simply on money.
The hell they don't.
Any time you hear of 'labor shortage' - look through the lie and read 'cheap labor'.
Unable to get American schools to crank out highly skilled workers willing to work for next to nothing,
they just want to import near slave labor from overseas and pay in Ramen Noodle coupons.
Same thing goes for the imaginary 'Nursing Shortage'. Filling schools with hundreds of young women
who will find out the hard way about working long hours for low pay.
There Never exists a shortage of workers,
as long as you stack up the rewards people want to obtain:
$50 / hour pay.
Full benefits (medical, dental, optical, educational, spouse and children coverage).
4 Weeks Vacation.
Holidays & birthday off paid vacation too.
Forcing increased numbers into the labor pool is just a tried and true method of
keeping wages low.
Most of them don't. I went into programming because I enjoyed it. I picked it over other careers that pay more because I don't enjoy them. Generally, the people who pick a career based on money are those who do poorly. Because it is just a job to them, and not something they love to do.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Apparently, Robert Cresanti, Under Secretary of Commerce for Technology; is a bought and paid for whore giving blow jobs to Microsoft and other tech corps. You mean a politician is corrupt and using his position to make recommendations based upon the bribes of corporate interest rather than doing 'the right thing'(TM)? Oh my, I am so astonished that such a thing could happen in our great nation.
Didn't anyone tell him we have the only shiny and clean political system and are the greatest most honest dudley do right nation in the world? Didn't he get the memo telling him that we don't brainwash our children with altered more patriotic versions of history to brainwash them? Or the part where in the land of the free our government doesn't perform thousands of warrant less wiretaps on the private domestic communication of citizens not even suspected of crimes. Certainly no corrupt politicians elected with rigged voting machines.
I just hope that this nation hasn't gone so far that people actually are lulled into a false sense of security because of a few wins for the other corrupt party in the two rigged party system. Those who rig elections in this country pay the ones with (D) in the title just as surely as the ones with (R).
ever heard of the word 'outsourcing' ????
7-8-9-10-0
Millions of IT geeks exclaim "Who? Oh ... a political appointee? And his qualifications are exactly what, again?"
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
From Robert C. Cresanti's Bio on the Government website.
[QUOTE]
President Bush nominated him on November 10, 2005; the United States Senate confirmed him on March 16, 2006.
[QUOTE]
In other words, he's out to serve the interests of big business only, and doesn't give a fuck about the other 99% of the country who pay his salary.
I am a foreigner that is now in the position to hire high tech workers. In order to get here, I worked hard in the high tech field and went nights to school. I've earned my graduate degree in the U.S., spending thousands of dollars in student loans etc... Anybody who did this knows about the sacrifice involved. I interview candidates almost every day and I don't know where this guy (whatever his name is) got the idea that the American workers are dumb. I yet have to see a foreign trained worker that impressed me in any way. They are all tools developers, they don't understand the underpinnings and the principles of the Computer Science, but yes they are cheap. Well, good luck big corporations that go on the cheap. That's exactly what you'll get back: pretty much garbage that you'll going to have to rewrite. In other words going on the cheap is more expensive than hiring good (read expensive) true engineers that can do the job right the first time around.
I yet have to see a spark of initiative, innovation in a H1 visa holder. I'm sorry guys, but just go back to Bangalore or whatever and study some more. You really need to understand this computer stuff. Don't come here with your 14 pages resumes full of lies. I need people that understand what I am saying and what I am talking about. I am sick and tired of people that don't know the difference between a primary and a secondary index while their resume claims they are data modeler experts.
There will be a time when the American corporations will figure out that H1 and outsourcing is costing them more money, actually. My company, after millions of dollars of disasters, finally figured it out and they vowed to not outsource projects anymore. So, just be patient guys, the tide is turning. It's just a matter of time.
From Wikipedia,
Before his confirmation, Cresanti served as Vice President of Public Policy at the Business Software Alliance (BSA).
So his qualifications for the post was being in charge of public policy of the corporation which sues people on behalf of Microsoft to make Microsoft more money.
Very worrying indeed. But we should not be surprised because the US education system has been in "free fall" since the mid-eighties. One day, I fear that the US, like all other "major empires" of the past, will be irrelevant. When this happens China Brazil and India will matter. This is scary!
I disagree it has anything to do with formal education. Software development is largely outside of school curriculum anyhow. What specific skill or ability is lacking in our education system? Nerds will learn on their own anyhow like they did with Vic-20's in the 80's.
The problem is that companies don't want to pay for or wait for fad-of-the-month training, so they want to import them instead.
Table-ized A.I.
From the article, for those who obviously didn't read it (emphasis added):
From the Technology Administration's Web site:
---
MISSION: The Technology Administration seeks to maximize technology's contribution to economic growth, high-wage job creation [italics mine], and the social well being of the United States.
---
How does he square the TA's Mission Statement with his own public statements?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The free market is what brings these 3rd world laborers. In a truly free market we would not have jobs as 90% of the industry not service related could just be run in Vietnam or China for a fraction of the cost.
http://saveie6.com/
The USA loses almost nothing by restricting our free trade to only free markets, which includes (at the moment) only Western nations. We should slam our markets shut to non-free markets like India, China, and Mexico.
Not slam shut, but balance it out with their purchase of our goods/services. The trade bubble we are creating now by lopsided trading is huge and may lead to an ugly poppage that will make the dot-com bubble look tame in comparison.
Table-ized A.I.
People don't make major choices about their broad vocations simply on money.
Tell that to the people who left other fields to become day-traders in the late 90s, or real-estate or mortgage hustlers now. Especially in real estate, there's a LOT of money to be made until the market settles down, if it ever does.
Mortgage bankers are just paperwork-filers and middlemen. All they have to do is convince someone to pay interest rate N for their mortgage, sell it to a bank, and they make a lot of easy money. Compare that to spending hours solving a computer problem, with downtime pressure on your head.
Ahh, it's interesting to hear all the nationalism coming from so many critics of nationalism.
in the cold war, the solution to the lack of technical talent was to provide massive scholarships and subsidies for American students in technical feilds (along with generally very low cost college for everyone).
This worked quite well, not only did this subsidized generation beat the soviets, but went on to spark a technology dependant economic boom.
So why would we not use the techniques that worked before?
The method of importing foreign talent means that our techical lead will be increasingly dependant on people who may leave at any time and who may have mixed loyalties to the USA. This is a short term solution to a long term challenge, and a solution that will likely make the challenge much larger in the future as the need for a highly technically skilled workforce is only going to increase in the next 100 years.
When the country falls into chaos, politicians talk about 'patriotism'. Lao-Tzu
how is importing undereducated foreign workers going to solve the undereducated native worker problem?
It's funny that, when faced with a "shortage" of doctors and nurses, the response has been soaring health-care costs, higher pay for doctors, and more benefits to retain nurses. For example, if you are willing to work for the VA for a few years, they'll pay for your med school. Let's see that for the IT industry. There's been no politicians calling for the mass importation of Indian doctors (and there are quite a few qualified Indian doctors who will work for much less).
But, when the IT industry has the same "crisis", the response is to call for more foreign workers.
So, are we protectionist or not? (Or maybe it's because the healthcare industry has organized labor? I don't know.)
In one industry (IT), we simply push down wages with more workers. In another industry (health), we push up costs for the customers. Either way, consumers lose and businesses win.
I'm a EE grad, with multiple years of experience in programming (web and application development), open-source projects released, and even a couple of professional certifications under my belt. And I'm unemployed. I'm not feeling the "shortage" in tech workers over here.
;)
It's not like companies can't afford me (friends of mine will attest that I work for very little money), so I've no idea why I can't even get an interview or callback.
That said, I do have a 0% interview success rate
xkcdsw: the unofficial archive of Making xkcd Slightly Worse
Don't confuse greed and treason with idiocy.
Being at the top level of lobbying organizations prior to his current post, he has a vested interest in knocking the floor out from under IT workers here in America. He doesn't want to pay the $80K to $150K that skilled American IT workers demand (and IT workers ARE worth that due to the constant, constant, constant retraining; it's more demanding than medicine in that regard), he doesn't want to pay $60K or $40K either. He wants to pay $30K to people who will feel trapped in their jobs out of fear that they will otherwise be deported.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
double your asked-for pay scale, see what happens. It could be you are coming across too desperate and cheap and companies might think you might jump ship at the first opportunity.
All this talk about "what employers want" is moot without knowing what they really want. There is no specific research or studies that we can rely on. We know what us techies feel is important, but we don't call the shots. We will spin our wheels here until this is answered.
Now that thats out of the way. My personal observation is that they want instant skills in whatever is popular that month. The easiest way to get that is to comb the world for those skills rather than wait to train existing staff. This is a general trend in the economy, not just IT. I've seen it in the fashion industry thru the experience of relatives: permanent jobs are a thing of the past. Employers want faster staff turnaround to fit current needs (as they see them). The only reason companies don't actually hire more temps is because temps expect more to compensate for the instabality. They just hire in the guise of perm because it is cheaper, but that is not their real plan.
The US must specialize in fast-changing fields because commodity fields go overseas. Churn is now our comparative advantage.
Table-ized A.I.
Its funny that you talk about the free market while simultaneously advocating protectionism.
This is nothing new for the US. Just look at NAFTA, and CAFTA. "Free" trade indeed...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You still have not told me how India, China and Mexico are not free markets.
A free market is once where competition is welcomed. You argue that the USA is a free market economy and also because of that it should restrict competition? It is a funny argument.
While I agree with you that India, China and Mexico are not free economies, neither is the USA - unions, import tariffs, pork spending, govt enforced elimination of competition (anti-trust), skill discrimination (minimum wage), quotas, eminent domain, non-tariff barriers (Dubai port deal), etc, etc. It is far from a free economy. It is a govt managed economy.
We all know there are enough skilled IT people in the United States to meet demand. The real reason for all this is to weaken the United States economy, and the morale of it's workers so as to pull it down to the level of the rest of the world in order to bring on the 'new world order', or 'one world government' in which corporations will rule, instead of the people. It's not just IT, it's all sectors of the work force. Small business owners will be next up against the wall by the corporations and the world bank.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
Ok, so you have this clever idea to manipulate the market to increase the salaries of IT workers. Ever heard of "offshoring"? If it's too expensive to get the work done here, then the work goes overseas.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Just look at NAFTA, and CAFTA. "Free" trade indeed...
It is free for the US!
Prices may go up somewhat (or rather, stay up, since VISA's are the status quo), but not enough to totally negate the pay benefits from preventing your field from being overun by inexpensive foreign workers. That's because the programming costs of products are only a small component of the full costs of any product one buys, so the price hikes would be negligible compared to the effect on individual programmer's salary.
All this is besides the point, since the original claim is that bringing in foreign programmers would be the best way to compensate for the lack of sufficient skill sets in native programmers. I think that claim is dubious and flawed, since I see no evidence that foreign programmers have better skill sets than native ones; and as others have mentioned, a better solution is to improve the training of native programmers, since that resolves the problem in a way which doesn't erode the local programming profession, nor funnels money out of the country (you don't actually think those foreign programmers are gonna spend all their salary locally, do you?).
Well, let's face facts: in the late '90s-2001, an awful lot of people got into software startups for the money. And here in Vancouver, there are a lot of Chinese people (warning: politically incorrect commentary ahead) who are pressured by their families to go into medicine or engineering. Many of them end up in programming, and they don't particularly enjoy it - it's just a job. And it shows in the quality of their work, and their lack of interest in at-home "geek" activities such as trying out new languages, frameworks, etc.
In short, money does play a big role, particularly when intersected with cultures that place an inordinate emphasis on status and material success.
... they're called information management or information systems. I have a bright new shiny MS in Information Systems with a concentration in IM from Stevens Institute of Technology. My undergrad degree was of a similar nature.
Computer Science degrees, to my mind, are for those that are designing next gen computers, or AI algorithms, or compilers or languages. When the fruits of the CS people become commercialized, it's up to the information management people to put that new capability to work.
At least that's my take on it.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
While I might agree with the statement "The IT work force is not skilled enough and almost never can be skilled enough" if taken to mean we should ever be striving to improve the quality and skills of our workforce. However, that "more H-1B's is the solution" seems to so glibly roll off his lips, makes me think he is a stooge of big money corporate America. Corporate America wants to follow the suit of the restaurant/construction/agriculture industries and hire cheap foreign workers, instead of paying Americans a livable wage. (By livable I mean a wage that would provide the lifestyle that said corporate America has sold as the standard all Americans should strive for.)
Unfortunately our education system and our parents are to blame. We waste too much time at university repeating the same courses we should have learned by the end of high school. In my experience one spends fully 50% of ones university career jumping through general education hoops that repeat what should have been learned by the end of high school. This leaves insufficient room in a four-year program to provide the knowledge and skills, let alone any real experience that a recipient of a bachelor's degree should have when they enter the workforce. COOP education/training/internships should be the norm, rather than the exception. This helps weed out those who are only in the career field for the money, as opposed to having a genuine interest or calling for IT.
Additionally, there is little or no nod given to business skills in engineering and computer science degree requirements. Yes, there is always the MIS major, but in my experience this is shifted too far towards business, providing a very poor technical fundament, making graduates with this degree even less desirable. Hell, ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) doesn't appear to have made it into the curriculum for MIS majors in the U.S., which is where I would expect it to first appear (as opposed to engineering and computer science majors).
People don't make major choices about their broad vocations simply on money
:) 10 years of IT and I just quit to go back to med school. The whole thing depends on what you find important, rewarding, and ultimately what you want to say about yourself at the end of your life. Obviously you need to make *some* amount of money to eat and pay the bills, but there is a much smaller lower bound on this money than mass market consumerism would have you believe.
It is really what is important to the person. Some people really want the big house+car+etc... and do not care that they have a soul sucking job as long as they have the big paycheck at the end of the day. Other people need more satisfaction out of their job than just the paycheck.
But they aren't going to choose between software engineer and doctor
Wrong
-- The Genesis project? What's that?
There is no need for the government to "fix" shortages by importing desperate labor in the form of H-1B workers or illegal aliens. When the government "fixes" a shortage, the government is damaging the normal operation of the free market. The free market works fine without government intervention.
Regrettably, most politicians (and some journals like the "Wall Street Journal") cater to certain segments of the population and outright lie about how economic laws work. For example, many Republicans favor big agri-businesses and claim that the American economy will be irreparably damaged unless Washington allows illegal aliens to pick fruits and vegetables. Many Democrats favor ethnic pressure groups like La Raza and make an identical claim.
Journals like the "Wall Street Journal" use an even sneakier strategy. The Journal repeatedly claims that increasing the American population is wonderful because doing so increases the wealth of the nation via increasing human capital. To a point, this claim is true. Consider an economy of exactly one person. That economy is pathetically poor because one person, regardless of how smart she is, cannot be equally skilled in all areas of work. Here, when I refer to wealth, I am referring to wealth per capita (i.e., GDP per capita), also known as personal wealth. If the 1-person economy grew into a 2-person economy, we can easily imagine that the wealth doubles or triples: one person is tending the vegetable garden while the other person is protecting the grass hut from wild animals.
However, consider an economy with 100 million people. If we doubled the size of this economy, then its wealth does not double. The wealth increases by substantially less than 1 percent. After a certain population size, each doubling of the population brings a rapidly decreasing percentage gain in the wealth.
The game that the WSJ plays is to ignore this concept of diminishing returns. Further, the WSJ deceptively says that doubling the population doubles the total weath (i.e., the total GDP, not the GDP per capita). Though that statement is true, it does nothing for the actual wealth that you experience. What you experience is GDP per capita, not total GDP.
Finally, there is a trade-off between (for example) a 0.1% increase in personal wealth (i.e., GDP per capita) and annoyances (e.g., pollution) created by a doubling of the American population.
By the way, identical comments about diminishing returns apply to global trade. Onces a global free market reaches a certain size, it captures most of the advantages of a large amount of human capital. The USA loses almost nothing by restricting our free trade to only free markets, which includes (at the moment) only Western nations. We should slam our markets shut to non-free markets like India, China, and Mexico. The tiny percentage gain in personal wealth (i.e., the GDP per capita) that we get by including India, China, and Mexico is completely offset by their damaging impact on Americans in the unskilled-labor market. China indirectly erodes the quality of life for Americans in the unskilled-labor market.
Then, along comes the WSJ to deceptively talk about total wealth (i.e., the total GDP) in absolute numbers, say, an increase in total GDP of $15 billion dollars. $15 billion is an eye-popping number. However, divide that number of the number of Americans to get the GDP per capita, and you see only an increase of $50. Is $50 worth destroying the quality of life for Americans in the unskilled-labor market?
US IT Workforce Unimpressed With Tech Czar and wish they could vote him out of office too.
Film at 11...
One would hope that someone making assessments about IT Workforce would know that Information Sciences and Engineering are usually taught as disjoint subjects at most universities.
This is akin to bemoaning a coming shortage of pastry chefs based on the enrollment statistics of chemistry majors. (Not that I'm disparaging Information Sciences/Technology as a field of study or profession. The difference is between that which is defined in terms of something and that which is defined in terms of what it uses.)
Open the gates to more foreign workers, urged Cresanti, including H-1B holders.
Apparently the message the voters sent on Nov 7 isn't getting through to the current administration.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
You're overlooking the sad fact that not everyone has a thing that they love to do, that someone else will pay them to do. Or that they can start their own business doing.
Some of us love to do things that have no economic value whatsoever. We still have to work to eat, though, and I assure you that salary expectations play a large role in our decision making process.
Looking back, I am dumfounded that I got to be 40 years old before I figured out that folks like Milken, Boesky, the Hunts, Ken Lay, and Archer-Daniels talk a great line about the miracles of the free market, but are actuallly entirely inimical to it. What they reallly want is for they and theirs to get rich and powerful by having the market in their hip pocket. Their talk about free markets is strictly for the rubes.
We are even less impressed the the tech czar.....
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
kick the "Tech Czar" (stupid name) and all the H1-B's out of the country, cough up the cash to pay skilled people here what they're worth, and your problem is solved. we have *plenty* of skilled IT people in this country.
You should have the word "rational" somewhere in there. The very beginning is a good place :)
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
SHENANIGANS! BULLSHIT!
There is no skill shortage in the US IT world. There never was. Maybe this clown is one of those people who expect every IT person he meets to be able to Code in all languages and administer every known operating system. H1B's should only be offered to people who are the best, brightest and proven sucesses not the mediocre hacks I have met.
Message to this clown - maybe if you knew anything about the subject matter or the people you are talking about maybe I might have some respect for you. So take your H1B program, your irrelevant degree, your lobbyist money and shove them where I don't have to see or here from them again.
...all we have to do is export all the technology illiterate elementary, middle & high school teachers in the USA. Any credentialed teacher in the US that can't send email should immediately be put on a plane for Bangalore or Taipei. Within one generation, the rest of the world will be just as lazy & technically illiterate as we are...
Am I the only one that finds it disturbing that we now have 'Czars' in the United States? It may just be a title, but it may also be a 'repeat it often enough and they believe it' situation.
"never can be skilled enough" what a racist fuck. he thinks just because your forgien you can become more skilled??? what an asshole. deny kids the training and experience to become skilled then take away any chance they might have had by flooding the country with imported workers? this guy is the worst kind of cocksucker.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Simple question: how free is the market if there isn't a relatively open immigration policy? Particularly when the production and distribution of goods and services are so freely moved across borders.
Last year I went looking for a gap year job (as a part of my degree), I couldn't find a remotely challenging job and by remotely challenging I mean a job my 14 year old sister couldn't do (writing a lay persons anti phishing guide was the hardest one) companies wern't looking to develop any of the gap year students either, I asked everyone if the given job tasks would change in difficulty or content to suite the applicant. Every answer was no, if you took the job you were there to do that one thing, without chance of an change based on a persons abilities. They wern't interested in gap year students but cheap labour (All of my University mates faced same problems and we all pretty much went "stuff that")
Oh there were one or two interesting jobs, but of those, less than 60% wern't created for a specific family member in mind. My friend found a semi interesting one £4000 for ten months work, no board, no benifits. I earn more than that a year stacking shelfs part time. You cant live for ten months on £4k its not possible.
Oh and it gets worse every entry level job expects 2-3 years of job expearence in that field. How can it be entry level if you should already have worked in it for two years? From what we have been told our only real hope of getting employed is coming up with a blinder of a final year project and impressing the hell out of a small company on the open day, its that or join the services who are willing to actually train people for a job. This is in the UK, if things don't change I am really considering joining the RAF or Navy because not only is the pay great, they want university candidates to mould, rather than most companies ready made and packaged 5 year expearenced Electrical Engineer, Computer Engineer or Computer Science grad who is willing to work for the same amount as my shelf stacking job.
Open the gates to more foreign workers?
It has been my experience that once you work through the language/thick accent barrier that the foreign workers I have dealt with are no better then the other IT workers with no experience but have a piece of paper saying they know stuff, certification or degree. It just takes a little longer to realize it.
"Virtually every senior government official I met was an engineer,"
Well there is your problem, virtually ever senior government official in the US is a lawyer.
You lost the entire point completely.
The point is not to have you compete for jobs, but for the companies to compete to have you.
There will always be a need to have engineers right here doing the work. That's because the engineers who actually live here know this market and write better software for this market than someone living half a world away. The only question is: who will do the work? Americans or foreigners?
Reducing the workforce by reducing the number of H1-Bs will not make these companies leave the US. No, that'll make these companies pay more for the fewer amount of workers.
We're screwing ourselves in the long term by using H1-Bs. That shows domestic college students that CS is not a good career path, reducing the number going into CS, and increasing our reliance on foreign labor. Further, those H1-Bs then learn all about our industry and practices, making it far easier for them to return home and companies to offshore our work. The H1-B program enables offshoring.
You haven't thought this through.
There will always be a need to have engineers right here doing the work. That's because the engineers who actually live here know this market and write better software for this market than someone living half a world away. The only question is: who will do the work here? Americans or foreigners?
Reducing the workforce by reducing the number of H1-Bs will not make these companies leave the US. No, that'll make these companies pay more for the fewer amount of workers.
We're screwing ourselves in the long term by using H1-Bs. That shows domestic college students that CS is not a good career path, reducing the number going into CS, and increasing our reliance on foreign labor. Further, those H1-Bs then learn all about our industry and practices, making it far easier for them to return home and companies to offshore our work. The H1-B program enables offshoring.
Mortgage bankers are just paperwork-filers and middlemen.
My nephew wants to be a professional baseball player. The closest he got to the big times was competing for a handful of openings in Texas where he made the top 50 out of 400 players after playing baseball every day for a month. All his friends got picked up by the majors and its very frustrating for him since he's a lot better than they are. What's his current job? Pushing loan paperwork and getting a 0.001% commission on each one (he averages $10 million USD in loans per month). He makes more money than all his baseball buddies put together, he paid more taxes than what his dad makes in a year as a senior auto body specialist and he bought two houses in a year. Go figure.
Despite your insult on my education, you are the one who hasn't thought this through.
There will always be a need to have engineers right here doing the work. That's because the engineers who actually live here know this market and write better software for this market than someone living half a world away. The only question is: who will do the work here? Americans or foreigners? Reducing the workforce by reducing the number of H1-Bs will not make these companies leave the US. No, that'll make these companies pay more for the fewer amount of workers.
We're screwing ourselves in the long term by using H1-Bs. That shows domestic college students that CS is not a good career path, reducing the number going into CS, and increasing our reliance on foreign labor. Further, those H1-Bs then learn all about our industry and practices, making it far easier for them to return home and companies to offshore our work. The H1-B program enables offshoring.
What's funny is that everyone wants someone with five years of experience in .Net or J2EE, and, duh, that's not what you get from someone just out of college. They'll have the basic building blocks and not specific in-depth library knowledge or CM or software engineering skills. And just like the job ads where the poster wants so many specific skills that they certainly must have someone specific in mind but they have to post the job anyway to satisfy some bogus equal access requirement, no matter what the U.S. schools churn out, there still won't either be enough skilled kids coming out of school that have what they want.
And so it will remain that the U.S. schools are not churning out enough CS grads for Microsoft to grab the top 0.5% of them to supply its own sweat shops as their talent leaves when they vest.
On another note, who would want to go into CS/IT anyway? Too-long hours working for an employer that doesn't want you to follow any sort of process because that slows down development, or at least visible development. And they'll let you know the software requirements as soon as they themselves know it, whenever that might be. Just make it work, dammit! And as soon as you hit your late 30s, if you don't have the vertical knowledge du jour or the latest sexy language skills, you'll be replaced by someone out of school that's willing to work twice as many hours as you do (since you just picked up a family) at half the cost, and you know that there's some starving guy in India or Russia that'd be more than happy to take your job.
If I knew then what I know now, I'd have gone into business where I could hire and fire IT types to make my quarterly projections.
CS/IT types are fungible, expendable, and an overhead item to get rid of as soon as things get tight. Haven't you learned yet??
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
Good question. How open does the immigration policy have to be when the labor itself -- minus the actual body -- is so freely moved across borders?
Game... blouses.
Labor isn't moved freely over borders at all. Only the products of that labor. I challenge you to find a job in a country that you never visit.
That's short sighted. Not because pay doesn't matter - like I said, on a "micro"-scale within a career, it is an important consideration. It is because the forecast for those careers in the broadest sense is too tentative. CS could end up paying very well, like it did 8 short years ago. The bottom can fall out of IA in a couple of years. When these things happen, do you want to be doing something you are really suited for, or something that you only began for mercenary reasons to begin with?
People don't make major choices about their broad vocations simply on money.
Sure they do. Not everyone, of course, but you're kidding yourself if you don't think that there would be more kindergarten teachers and less doctors if the two had identical salaries.
Case in point: one of my roommates in college graduated with a degree in chemical engineering (from a school with a strong/respected program in it), only to become a software consultant because he had an offer to be that for a bigger salary. Seven or eight years later and he's still in IT and not anywhere near chemical engineering.
Going further afield, a ton of art and music majors were retrained by big 5 consulting companies during the tech boom to be IT consultants. I'm not going to tell you money was the sole motivator for all of them, but I'd bet it was a big one for a lot of them.
Namely being a lawyer and having obtained his "BS" in Austin Texas, he is well qualified to make this determination. I mean after all, Baylor College leads by example, possibly falsifying LSAT data to U.S. News in order to obtain a higher ranking in obtain a higher ranking. http://search.conduit.com/Search.aspx?ctid=CT32953 6&uslang=500&SearchType=SearchWeb&q=Baylor%20colle ge%20ranking
What better official could the White House recruit!
I've never meet a politician that could ... ....
... ....
>_ write a line of code.
>_ fix a desktop computer.
>_ configure a monitor correctly.
>_ figure out an email problem.
>_ understand that 15=21=25=10101
>_
I've never meet a politician that ain't
>_ a technophobic idiot zealot
>_ a righteous Luddite disciple
>_ a delusional scientist of BS
>_ a dogmatist for corporatist/greed
>_ capable of self-interest decisions
>_ going to waste taxes gucking citizens
>_ willing to sacrifice our children in wars
>_
There may be a few good politicians/appointees in government, but
there is so gucking few, I expect I will never meet one in my lifetime.
Robert C. Cresanti is obviously just another highly degreed, certified, and totally unqualified Bush appointee. Presidents and members of Congress do it to US after every election. I wish they could always appoint competent people to serve the USA public, but how could they help their self-interested privileged constituents feel important and smart. Forgive them, most only know how to guck you, me, US, our Warriors, and the future for our children.
If you trust or respect any politician to do patriotic, ethical, and honorable deeds (in these days and times) you're a fool and/or dogmatist.
IOW, politicians/appointees (and career-manager federal employees) will never do hard working USA Citizens any god-dang favors or what's not right for themselves. If a politician/appointee or career-manager goes to prison, we can only hope their cell-mate is named "Broomstick Bubba or Butch."
Guck'em all, and always vote'em out, for a Free, Beautiful, and Better USA.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
... Linus Torwalds would be an "unskilled worker", Ton Roosendaal an inexperienced dropout (with no experience in Java) and Steve Jobs a nutcase. We've heard it all before. As soon as demand rises a tad and payment get's normal again, the rubbish-talkers crawl out from under their rocks. They're all over the place again nowadays. It's all politics and commercials. I've come to ignore this upper-white-trash completly.
No need to waste a second of your time with these idiots.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The Bush administration is placating big business by giving them a way out of paying workers what they are worth by expanding the market. Seems reasonable. We all benefit from lowered costs for industry right? (well at least some of us do, but that is a different discussion)
My only question is why aren't we looking for cheaper alternatives for another segment of the labor market? Aren't we hearing in the news regularly about overpaid management? How are we going to get companies to start looking for genius executives from other countries who can help fill the positions that we just can't seem to fill at reasonable wages (i.e. shortage right?). Maybe their management education is as good as ours and maybe they are more ethical too (the quality argument).
Don't you think corporate America will get behind that one? And if they did, that what would we do then? We sold out our manufacturing so we could have knowledge workers. If we sell out the knowledge workers, then what? Better hope you are a business owner because in the end they are the ones who win. You can't buy cheaper goods without a job. The U.S. does not have a corner on ANY market: knowledge, entrepreneurship, or anything else.
So let's up the ante and start the outsource-executives movement!
Most IT workers I know are pretty unimpressed with the Bush administration.
There's millions of Indian programmers employed by American companies.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
US IT Workforce Unimpressed With Tech Czar.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This is incoherent gibberish: if there is a shortage of a good (in this case IT labor) in one place and a surplus in another place (i.e. India) then a government that allows free movement of the good from the surplus location to the demand location is facilitating a free market. It is the artificial imposition of borders and boundaries that you would like to have that impede such travel that hamper any kind of free market.
Reality is: tech-monkey skills are cheap and easy to acquire, as witnessed by a hundred million perfectly-qualified folks in China, Korea, India etc. IT skills in the US are vastly overpriced, if anything or otherwise the free market wouldn't be moving the demand for these skills away from the US.
Does "Libertarian" really mean "mentally retarded moron" or does it only look that way?
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
because if the bodies are restricted from moving freely but the owners of the products can move their stuff freely, it's not really a "free" market is it. People in India can't just move to another country where they get a better deal... heck, even as a US citizen you can't just move to Canada to get a better deal on employment without special permissions... so the Human Capital is not a movable resource. "Business" then is a shell moving game to move the product where the labor is cheapest while staying on the move to keep the local populating from ever catching up to the standard of living where you're selling the product. It's not all bad, but it's not a "free" market, governments all over the place play favorites with which citizens will be allowed to move the goods across the boarders. And those rules make it very unfavorable for new entries into the market.
The big hurdle in making software that does what a business needs is in finding out what the business needs its software to do. Trying to get requirements and user commitment from the business as an IT person is the big obstacle, and has been the failing point on the majority of projects I have seen.
Hiring people from another country is certainly not going to help that.
Pulling in consultants from our own country, speaking our own language, often causes enough of a communication and process familiarity gap to magnify the problem.
So the thought of trying to salve over this issue with this insane solution indicates to me that this guy is trying to do something entirely different.
Of course, the fact that he's a politician also tells me that what he's fundamentally trying to do is fill his pockets, or fill an intern. Or perhaps both.
Because skills in the US don't matter as long as employers are spending BILLIONS in Asia to 're'-source their jobs there. Would YOU go get a CS degree if you were 50% sure that 50% of the jobs would be moving to Asia in the next 10 years? I would not and neither should you.
Oh my goodness, this is outrageous. If there arent enough educated workers we need to educate more american workers, and this means more funding of pell grants for higher education. This would increase the supply of tech workers in the US. It would be good for US workers as well, ensuring more of them can get a good education and apply themselves in high tech fields, and more well off. But the wealthy dont want that. They dont like the higher taxes on the wealthy that this would result in to help the middle class, and they would rather bring in poor workers from other countries, and keep the US workers poor too, rather than allow US workers to get an education and to become more well off. They dont like the middle class and it seems their ideal society is one like India, masses of poor starving people, and a very small extremely wealthy elite, and little in between. I am sure they can pay indian workers much less. They dont care about the middle class or the american people in general, all they care about is profits and greed. This allowing of immigration will hurt the US and push it further in the direction of a third world country like India. It will not lead to more prosperity for americans, or will it solve Indias problems. These practices actually can do a great deal of harm to the economy, reducing spending power of consumers.
With all due respect--I think the main qualification that US employers are looking for is someone on the masters' level with ten years experience, who is willing to work for minimum wage and no benefits.
My take on it: watch the military, and then watch the military gut the B1B program.
Once there are so few US engineers that the military is forced to pay six-digit re-enlistment bonuses, congress is going to get the shit out of their ears (for a moment) and start slashing.
~
What he's really saying is the same old "two for $5!" mentality: having cheap labor would help the economy (because the profits would be higher... so be advised that "cheap labor solves all problems" assumes you believe in trickle-down). He's actually NOT saying a thing about quality. This was already shown the last time there was a "shortage" of programmers. What there was, in fact, was a shortage of people who knew how to vett business concepts.
The reality is that those people who have been suckered by low-cost "wow-they're-just-the-same-as-here-or-even-better! " foreign skilled labor have learned the hard way what Michael Porter said over a decade ago: the people in the firm have to have some connection to the markets they serve in order for the company to create and maintain a competitive advantage. So: fine to outsource overseas lower-level customer-irrelevant jobs to markets those employees have zero familiarity with -- um, assuming you're not trying to cultivate internal talent and that you actually do have such jobs. Strategically idiotic to outsource leadership, creative control, or customer-interactive jobs.
Well, I haven't ever gone looking for a job in another country, but my (US) employer currently has 3 programmers living outside Mumbai working for them. That's in a company of 10-15 people. My last employer had hundreds.
Every day they go to work halfway around the world from us, they check out the code from our servers, do their programming, then check it back in. The product of their work zips around the world several times per day, and when they're done we sell it. Then they provide the end-user support.
Game... blouses.
On anything other than quickly consumed/disposed of items, I shop for quality. Of course, I also avoid eating fast food twice a day, so maybe I'm not the greatest example of the average American.
Fill in your four or five-letter word of wisdom here _ _ _ _ _.
We know the limitations of being that overseas employee. First, you are almost certainly working for a contractor. That's an added middleman taking a slice of your income, right there. That middleman is also controlling the flow of information. The employee is not able to pursue other opportunities within the company.
In other words, the process has been outsourced: the employee per se has not been able to circulate in anything like equal terms within the labor market. The different is quite significant.
My first impression was that the grandparent poster was promoting an incoherent libertarian line, but in fact he moved closer to my position when he wrote:
The USA loses almost nothing by restricting our free trade to only free markets, which includes (at the moment) only Western nations. We should slam our markets shut to non-free markets like India, China, and Mexico.
There are a couple things wrong with this, though. Many Western nations are also heavily subsidized - the basis for saying that Mexico is a less free market than France is highly questionable. He's wrapping a generally viable protectionist stance in libertarian drag, but to do so he has to avoid scary words like equivalent labor markets.
I do think immigration has to relax quite a bit, too (partially for selfish reasons - I'm in an international relationship, and visa issues are daunting.) It is so obvious that labor boundaries are being used to preserve cheap labor in parts of the world. (Do you know how hard it is to get even a tourist's visa to the US from China? It's ridiculous - but I could easily start another rant on this topic. Suffice it to say that they experience of traveling to the US is a major contributor to anti-American sentiment.)
Lack of admin and programming staff are due to 2 majot causes:
1) Buggy and hard to manage systems. Needing an army of techies to support the desktops and systems is a sign of poor quality software.
2) Better development environments. I don't know how many thousands of hours over the years I burned because my development tools were riddled with bugs that either confounded the debuggin process or forced time consuming work arounds.
And yes, MS is a poster child for both of these problems. But other commercial vendors are just as guilty. The best experiences I have had have been with OSS development tools. I spend more time crafting a solution and less time fighting my tools set.
And as always when you read these articles, they make the tacit assumption that labor is a fungible commodity. Well, I doubt it. Even on a manufacturing floor I have seen huge differences in productivity and quality between workers.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
so to increase the number of skilled IT, and quality stop the good workers from being in the US, and increase the desire for companies to outsource, and throw money at those without the intrest to move into the industry. Similar to trade, you can close down trade, and get a short term gain, but screw yourself in the long term.
The good workers are here (and there, too). Companies can't really outsource and expect good results - it's a crapshoot. Anyway, I think that tightening the supply of H1Bs is a great way to increase dev salaries. I'm tired of people whining that they can't get a decent tech that knows everything for the median salary locally. They don't know what they want, aren't willing to pay for it, and neglect it when they have it.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Business wants cheap labor. It has nothing to do with "skill sets" - which these morons wouldn't understand if you paid them anyway, as anybody who has ever looked for a tech job knows.
They stop supporting universities and trade schools. They also treat the tech grads they have miserly - as they have since the dot.bomb. They make sure the tech employment market slows down.
Wallah! No more tech grads.
Now they go to the government and say, "We don't have enough tech grads! Let us import cheap labor."
Suckers.
Again, if you don't understand the underlying motives of humans, you'll never understand how things work in the real world.
Go see the movie, "The Departed" which illustrates the point. Jack Nicholson as Frank Costello has a great line. Told somebody's mother is dying and "on her way out", he replies: "You all are. Act accordingly."
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Since some CIO's CTO, and CFO's salaries rival the incomes of entire IT departments why not start off shoring and sourcing these positions, oh off course in the name of providing better returns to shareholders while reducing key-person dependencies. Maybe we'll see a big decline in MBA's, not to mention reinforcing some of the medical benefits some of these greedy executives have sucked out of the people that work under them.
Cresanti said U.S. colleges and universities are not enrolling enough engineering students, resulting in a dearth of information technology professionals.
...he urged opening the gates to more foreign workers, including H-1B holders.
Agreed. The question is why?
That's why! Let's face it, there is only one reason why industry wants more H1-B's: they are treatred as slave labor. They work for less money, they work longer harder hours and they face the threat of visa cancellation and being shipped back to their own country if they complain/refuse to comply. Don't quote me any goddamn studies, I have seen it with my own eyes in the industry. I myself have been laid off and 2 H1-B holders were hired to replace me. Would they do that if they had to pay each one as much as they paid me?
Now, people in general and those that qualify for college in particular are not stupid! When they see the erosion of salaries in tech fields they naturally gravitate away from those fields. If industry wants more and better tech talent then they must pay more.
"The IT work force is not skilled enough and almost never can be skilled enough," said Robert Cresanti, undersecretary of commerce for technology, in an exclusive interview with eWEEK editors. "There are not enough engineers with the appropriate skill sets."
Agreed. But, once again, why?
I am an electrical engineer with 30 years experience. I recently worked with a new mechanical engineering graduate. He needed help with a design he had been assigned. While working with him I was amazed to find that I, with a BSEE degree and 30 years out of school, knew more about static forces and how to calculate them than he, a BSME barely one year out of school, did. Why?
Well, as we talked, I found that his curriculum included web-page design,Java programming, technical writing and a host of other, ancillary classes. But it was very weak on math, physics, chemistry, static/dynamic forces and everything else that I had come to associate with engineering courses. And his was not a no-name school! This was Youngstown State University.
When I attended Ohio State University 30 years ago, I was given a very solid background in theory. Math, Physics, Chemistry, Fields, and a host of other subjects were required for every engineering discipline. Hell, I never even saw any electronic or electrical courses until the 3rd year of a 4 year curriculum. So fully half of the engineering curricuclum, shared by all engineering degrees, was in basic scientific theory.
Because of that, I have never had any trouble keeping up with changes in the workplace. Most of my career has been spent doing embedded microprocessor design, something that didn't even exist when I graduated 30 years ago. When I graduated in 1975 the engineering magazines were all just starting to rave about the very first microprocessors from Intel (I think the 8008 had just been released).
Today's technical degrees are all designed to make graduates immediately useful with today's technologies when they get out. But, in doing this, they completely ignore the huge rate of change in today's technologies! A good foundation in the basics will make for graduates that can adapt to and use whatever new technologies might be developed in the future. I myself am living proof of that.
Robert Cresanti, undersecretary of commerce for technology, is in a perfect place to correct some of this. Unfortuantely, Robert Cresanti has absolutely no interest in correcting it. No, his solution is to let other countries develop the talents and skills America so desperately needs and then import them.
I predict bad times for the USA, very bad times indeed!
Screw him and the ITAA horse he rode in on! He's nothing but a corporate shill who wants to destroy yet even more American livelihoods. He just wants to allow cheap high-tech coolies into this country. There are plenty of skilled workers available. They are older (strike 1). They won't work long hours for low pay (strike 2). They are mobile (strike 3). The IT job market wasn't what it was prior to the dot-com collapse and probably won't recover for a long time. But it is telling that this fucktard says we need more H1-B's. So that means there are jobs out there. Now the trick is to find them.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
An ideal IT work force is one that can do anything technically, with zero cost of labor, and zero elapsed time. Thats the ideal state from a business viewpoint, but not from the point of view of hourly workers.
Yet... companies want engineers to get paid by the hour, which effectively removes our incentive to meet that ideal state. Why is that? Economic control... It allows companies to enslave engineers...
The 13th amendment: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Slavery: = control
the state of being under the control of another person
work done under harsh conditions for little or no pay
the practice of owning slaves
Jurisdiction: = control
the authority to apply the law
the power to exercise authority
Territory within which power can be exercised
Hypothesis: Any commercial activity will migrate to where power can be exercised and work completed under harsh conditions, for little or no pay. Call it, "virtual economic enslavement".
If a US company can offshore, they can exercise economic power there (contracts and wages) and so can arrange for work to be done under harsh conditions for little pay. So, a US company (registered under US jurisdiction) are allowed to use virtual slavery and realize economic benefits from that approach (again under US jurisdiction)
Question for the Commerce Department: Why should any student enter any field where virtual economic enslavement is already a real possibility?
Because Dad scraped a living on Massa's IT plantation, does not mean his children have to!
I would respond to Mr Cresanti that we are a nation of laws and men, because becoming an engineer is to volunteer for economic slavery. Frankly sir, potential engineers are not that stupid.
If you wish to encourage software engineering make it a profession with legal privilege (private law) like medicine, or accept the fact that the US will not be able to compete in software technologies much longer (an economic death sentence IMHO)
Economic slavery may never be solved, nor are its effects unique to IT. Millions of illegal immigrants work under harsh conditions for little pay in the US. Not because we don't notice them, its because they are economically controlled slaves and so our economy chooses not to notice them. Imagine if the slave owners had simply, gone and got fresh slaves and claimed that the 13th didn't apply because they were H1B's or "foreign workers" etc, does that make it ok? err... no... I don't think so.
Companies only exist to make a profit, an unfortunate truth. The successful companies have zero morality or ethics, they do have marketing and image and lawyers and politicians. The successful companies approach a slavery based production process. Always have, always will, its simply the open market effect of the law of supply and demand.
Companies have figured out how to enslave engineers legally, (off-shoring, repeals the effects of the 13th). Our only practical political defense (and its a weak one) is to vote politicians out of office who support laws or efforts to enslave us. It's a weak tactic, because supply and demand is an inexorable economic force, it may be avoided temporarily, but it will win in the end.
A much better (and lower long term risk) strategy for software engineers is never to work as an employee, form your own companies and use your technical skills to compete against those that try to profit from your economic enslavement. Patent everything you do. Charge whatever the market will bear. Of course companies that want to just "use" mere IT people, hate that idea. Great, ya gotta love stick
There is no god; get over it already! Never exchange a walk on part in the war, for a lead role in a cage.
Have you seen the job requirements for Taiwanese companies? Even the salesman are required to have Masters degrees in Science, in case they are asked to describe the physics behind their new product...
Heck, even the CEOs can read write and count!
Because the job to naming new Big Government job titles was outsourced to H1B's from the former Soviet Union.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
is in highly skilled Under Secretaries of Commerece. I think we should immediately begin an H1B program for them. Our Under Secrataries of Commerce are obviously overpaid. Look how much more they make than foriegn Under Secretaries of Congress. Our Under Secrataries of Commerce are obviously not as productive as the foriegn ones. They are holding the economy back. For proof of their hinderance, just look at the rise (or rather fall) of the standard of living of the median U. S. citizen.
I believe the U.S. isn't doing enough to fix the problem. The problem is being avoided. Why not give incentives for people that want to get a Computer Science degree or any IT type degree for that matter? College is overpriced, many people just don't go because of that. Instead of ignoring your own people and bringing in others, why not make your own people better?
I have a PhD in computational science from on of the top schools in the country and have over 10 years of real experience and I am constantly turned down for contracts because I am overqualified. Most managers don't want well educated and trained employees. They want cheap, disposable, moderate quality, medicore workers.
This is actually a complicated subject. As hard as it is to find a tech job, it's equally hard to hire a good tech employee. For example my employeer spends thousands and thousands of dollars scouring college campuses for good software developer tallent. A lot of the people we find are Indians who've come to study in this country as a means of entering the American workforce. We hire a lot of them - not because we want to find H1B type people, but because there're not that many Americans in these CS departments, period. As a software developer, I hate the extra competition (obviously) but I also see how hard it is to actually find good employees, even as we're prepared to pay well. I am not sure if H1B is the answer or not, but I think the real challenge is that very few Americans are actually interested in pursuing a rigirous CS degree. When they do, it's because that's where their passion lies, and they make amazing developers. But they're few and rare. My sole point here is that as unpleasant as the "Tech Czar" comments are, there's at least something real behind them.
Mock Tech Interviews & Free Resume Review
The comment that we "almost never can be skilled enough" is quite accurate, and it's due to a curious phenomenon in IT hiring. The current example is that headhunters are now seeing job reqs that ask for three years experience with Windows Vista.
This isn't at all a new thing. I've worked with computers for about 3 decades now, and this has been a part of job hunts for as long as I've been looking for jobs. It is a source of a bit of humor, but if you're facing the HR guys that don't get the joke, it's not quite as funny.
It is a bit funny that someone would suggest more H-1B visas as a solution to this problem. Does he think that there are people in India with three years experience with Windows Vista? Of course, if his background is in IT management, he probably does think that.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Quote: by Lemmy Caution (8378) Alter Relationship on Sunday November 19, @02:48PM (#16905990)
(http://localhost/)
People don't make major choices about their broad vocations simply on money. Temperament and aptitude is more important. Now, within those broad vocational parameters, money matters. Someone may become an oncologist, a general practitioner, or a pediatrician based on various trade-offs between pay, workload, etc. But they aren't going to choose between software engineer and doctor - considering the vicissitudes of the labor market, it would be foolish for them to.
I'd say "You must be new here", but that's so beautifully written, almost believable, you must be in fact a very skilled troll, or HP PR guy. My hats off to you.
Lemme see... Real world comparison:
Engineer, PhD, ~90 hrs week, salary, maybe occasional pitiful bonuses, competing with H1Bs for whatever he can get... Drives a 5 year old Volvo. Hopes to avoid the next round of layoffs.
Doctor, specialist, ~40 Hrs a week, no competiiton, regular repeat customers, Golf on Friday.
Drives a new SLK, keeps the Porsche in the 3 car garage for weekends.
OK, after venting a bit, I think I see what he was getting at.
Economically, it's probably idiocy to do much else.
BUT---Not everyone SHOULD be a medical doctor.
I have met PhDs in several disciplines that shouldn't be allowed near anything.
Do we have any hard evidence that having a free market, where Indian or Chinese programmers were favored over American ones -- however 'overpriced' the Americans might be -- helps America? We seem to be taking on premise that a completely free market helps the First World, but I'm not sure why this is. The WSJ crowd never seems to explain exactly the reasoning and evidence for this claim; it's treated as holy writ, beyond all question. And if there's one thing that I really dislike, it's claims that aren't allowed to be questioned.
So what if Americans are "overpriced" compared to workers in areas where basic working conditions aren't guaranteed? That's not a level playing field; it simply guarantees that if Americans want to compete, we have to drop to that level. Why should we allow this? If it doesn't help our economy, why are we implementing economic policies that help China and India, at our workers and our economy's expense?
Simply saying that 'so-and-so doesn't facilitate a free market,' doesn't automatically make it a bad thing. Maybe we don't want a completely free market, if it means we're going to have to compete directly with countries that treat their workers as disposable units. We need to think about the ultimate effects of our economic policies on our citizens, in the long term, and back it up with convincing evidence and research instead of just polemics.
I'm open to both arguments here but convinced of neither; there seem to be a shortage of factual arguments when it comes to foreign and domestic economic policy, and I don't think that helps anything.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
...fine. Currently there is no law that says I have to work for slave wages...or at all.
...probably lifted from Ghandi or something, but I find it fairly insightful.
If I don't work, I can sponge off the government.
Currently I do better working, that sponging, but I've already cut back the work I do because once I hit that higher tax bracket, it just doesn't make sense to keep going.
If they bring in H1B's and destroy the value of my services, it will make more sense for me to sponge, and I will. I won't have money and things, but I'll have freedom to pursue my interests.
Eventually the H1B's might realize that they are slaving to subsidize our government, our corporations, and the people they displaced, and in turn say "screw this", and head home.
I've heard this in a song...cant remember which:
"No longer lend your strength to that which you wish to be free from"
As things sit, we can only be exploited voluntarily. Don't volunteer for exploitative situations. Don't buy from companies that exploit people. If enough of us do this, exploitation becomes unprofitable and ceases.
Don't let them scare you into giving up your life for some paper and junk.
Where you live HP needs a lot more technical staff but are too tight to put any on - it is a US company attitude problem not purely a US skill shortage problem. In this case any questions about the expensive Designjet plotters are fobbed off with "That's Barcelona's problem - we can't help you, we won't even forward it on or give you contact details" - and the division there doesn't have enough staff to answer questions.
The way business is done by many US companies is causing this. Labour cost should not be such a big deal in IT where you can have one employee per couple of million in capital infrastructure costs.
I've never worked in the USA - a friend who did found San Francisco a stupidly expensive place to live but a pleasant place.
On the doctor's side, don't forget the quarter-million dollar debt he's got right out of school, the ridiculous amount of insurance he has to carry, and the ridiculous number of laws and state regulations that he has to know and comply with.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I'm tired of people whining that they can't get a decent tech that knows everything for the median salary locally.
I'm tired of those same ignorant people asking for such ridiculous qualifications as 10 years of C# experience and then telling Washington there is a problem because they can't find someone that fits that profile. The policymakers in DC like this Cresanti fool don't have any real practical knowledge about the areas in which they exert power, but are quite content to do whatever the loudest voice (i.e. the ITAA and their ilk) tells them without the first inkling of the consequences of their actions on the American people.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
But seriously -- we keep outsourcing our technology and brainpower, and then we're shocked -- shocked that, over time, these selfsame practices come back to bite us in the ass. <sigh>
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
It has been known for decades. It seems like everything to do with IT at the federal level is out of date, and out of whack.
Ever work with civil servants? If you managed a bunch of federal IT workers, you would have a low opinion of USA IT workers also.
But, I have worked with engineers, and techies, from the USA and abroad, and in my experience, USA engineers and tech workers are as smart as those from anywhere. At least in the corporate world.
Yeah but think about it. That one person would be incredibly rich
simple, fast homepage with your links: http://www.ngumbi.com/
What if what they love to do is make money? And yes, I'm serious. I'd say generally most people aren't very passionate about the job they're in, so why not at least go for something that has a relatively comfortable work atmosphere and pays well. For a lot of people work is just that thing they do most of the time to pay the rent. Also, IT workers != programmers.
I might be wrong, but I'm neither new nor trolling. (And I'm not wrong.)
I know a couple doctors in their internships and residencies, and they would kill for a 10 hour work day. And they both drive crap cars. Granted, when that's all done, things get better - but not that much better.
"Cross-specialization" actually hurts a candidate in the American market nowadays.
It can, but for the companies that make this an issue: screw them.
I was contacted by headhunters for a position at one of the two largest railroads in the US not so long ago. In addition to the finance (4.0 GPA) and IT background, I've got the CISSP, CISA, CIA and various tech certs (e.g. Cisco, Solaris, etc.) plus risk management certification and a CFA in process. I'm no slouch. I decided to go thru the interview process at this railroad as they've got serious management turnover and it'd be a great opportunity.
In my first interview in the second round, I got accosted by some finance director for not "being in the bubble" (WTF?!!). She showed me a diagram of the company org chart and made it clear that I wasn't someone who fit inside one of those bubbles. "You see, people here FIT inside one of those bubbles. Not many of them. I'm having a HARD time right now understanding which bubble you fit into. It sounds as if you fit in many bubbles, and that just doesn't make sense to me."
I spanned across bubbles. Apparently at a Fortune 25 company, having cross-functional expertise is prohibited. God forbid executive management thinks that way... if they do, it's time to run, not walk, from their stock.
Besides the fact that her observation was absurd (my younger brother is the cross-functional manager between marketing and IT for a Fortune 25 company and can attest to the fact that cross-functional people either occur in companies or they fail), it pointed out that that the railroad she worked for would be in chapter 11 except for the fact they're a protected monopoly.
So if you're able to be cross-functional in your expertise, don't give it up. Screw the companies that don't appreciate it - trust me on the fact that 5-10 years of management underperformance in those firms will result in those executives being shown the door. And even if not, who cares? If you're cross-functional, you're worth something, and you deserve to work for a firm that has a clue. Let the others become part of the food cycle or whatever. The point is that the problems we're dealing with are in this area, and critically need people to look outside their cubical to solve them.
Don't forget how the US saved Europe's butts in WW-II and WW-I (as my grandfather pointed out many times). American GIs were able to fight, fix jeeps, dig trenches and handle any task thrown at them. They didn't over-specialized and become rigid, useless individuals.
The workers that are needed to handle new technologies need to be grown where the need is. A lot of computer technology is designed and built here and a partnership between technical companies and local colleges would help the supply of properly trained workers. While I was programming microcomputers in C++ they were still teaching pascal in colleges. I never could figure it out. Guess if Microsoft's new operating system's kernel can only be worked on by Microsoft employees, all we have to teach the masses is Visual Basic. I hope I am joking. I have discontinued all use of Microsoft products in my company.
I agree. This is government cluelessness at its finest.
As for the dearth of engineering students, if you actually go and examine our college and university curricula and compare them to the skills needed in engineering disciplines, they are intentionally designed to drastically reduce the number of candidates in their programs at any one time even during times of rapidly increasing salaries and low unemployment. I've worked in almost every engineering discipline that exists (nuclear to electronic to mechanical and in-between, and every IT related one) and all my projects, none of them small, were under-budget, well under-schedule, and defect free even twenty years later. That was both as a senior team member and immendiately thereafter as project manager. I know precisely what you have to know to succeed. I've also taught engineering, computer science, mathematics, and related fields at the university and for the US Navy from the '70's. There exist more requirements to achieve the degree than are required in actual practice; they only exist as a gateway filter just as they have also existed for decades in the fields of medicence and computer science, to give two firmly documented examples. I still scout engineering prospects and mentor them through our so-called education system (I just found a potential mechanical engineer last week, and female to boot) which is another bone of contention but I will table that for another discussion.
Frankly, what I see are, again, rational actors. It is far easier to get degreed in another discipline entirely with less effort, much less risk, and with much higher returns than engineering Almost any 'light-weight' degree with an MBA is sure to get your foot in the door [I use the term light-weight advisedly]. Doubling down a degree with law school is another fine technique for maximal returns on investment. Sure, if as an engineer you invent the next great thing, don't get taken to the cleaners by patent trolls, financiers, or lawyers, and get your IPO off the ground into high-flier territory, you might become rich beyond the dreams of avarice. This is increasingly rare these days, especially for increasingly risk adverse Americans. More than a third of new IT startups are by immigrants (and of those more than a few H1-B holders I might add). That should tell us something. I am most emphatically not returning to the market. I will spend my remaining days 'playing' if you will testing hardware and software, thinking things up, and staying away from 80 hour work-weeks which were ever counter-productive.
Lastly, take the number of reported engineers with a huge grain of salt from India and especially China. Auto mechanics, electricians, and other 'blue-collar' jobs (I hate that term!), are counted as engineers. This isn't to put down auto-mechanics or others in those categories, I value their skills very highly even if I don't use/need them. It is simply observe that comparison of data sets requires absolutely comparable sampling/counting techniques. Not that I expect that to ever happen in econometrics or sociometrics! Epidemiology has a lot more practice at it and they can't even agree on techniques.
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
When you're in baseball, you're working for peanuts. Not everyone makes mega-millions per year starting out.
(BTW, it's $10m x 0.001% = $10,000 per month.)
Let's see... Just open up all of our American corporations so that all of their precious information, applications, systems, networks, etc are built, maintained, controlled by non citizens.
The Romans did it, and look where they... oh wait.
rd
I'm sorry - there's just too many things that go wrong when you introduce too many non-native employees into the mix. It just doesn't work. It's not effective. It ALWAYS ends up costing more in the long run.
I agree, and it's as much a national security issue as any other. All goods and services paid for with tax dollars should be mandated to be performed and produced by Americans, or the highest percentage American produced offered in bidding on the government contract.
rd
The free market cuts both ways.
If there are a million capable people willing to do the work for $12,000 a year, only held back by artificial barriers, then the fair wage is not $80,000 but $12,000.
The fundamental problem is that we have many protections against slavery, pollution, child labor, unreasonable working hours, health care, etc. while the people are are competing against do not- or they have them much less expensively than we do. For example- health insurance is so much cheaper that it is less expensive to fly to india, get the complex surgury done, and spend a 2 week vacation there afterwards- than it is for the *deductable* back in the united states for the same quality care.
In part this is becuase the US doctor is paying $50,000 in malpractice insurance, $25,000 taxes on their income, $70,000 for their house and family, and $24,000 for their mistress. The same indian doctor is paying roughly a 5th of each of those amounts.
Wages *are* equaling out RAPIDLY. At the current rates of inflation- within 8 years the wages for similar positions will be the same in china, india, and the US. Imagine the shock to retiring people in those countries who have saved maybe $5,000 to retire on and suddenly everything is at US prices.
Likewise, even now- there are many hidden costs to using overseas workers and H1B workers- usually communications skills. Things have to be *very* formal- and even a single question can cost you a 24 hour turnaround.
In 2012- things start to get very nice in the US for US workers.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
And he has degrees. So what? Has he any REAL experience in the IT field? Whom has he worked for? What has he done? Besides sit on his ass and throw more US jobs out the window? Or perhaps he is a terrorist hoping to farm out jobs to non-Americans so that they can invade our country, dismember our culture, and rob us blind? Bitter? Who? Me? Just because I've been unemployed for nearly 6 years AND HAVE OVER 30 YEARS EXPERIENCE IN IT! but can't find a job in my home state, let alone any moderately sized city within 50 miles of here. And this clown wants to have more foreigners come in and take MY JOBS! IMPEACH HIM! ARREST HIM AND CHARGE HIM WITH TREASON! Or, simply, remove his citizenship from him, seize his assests, and throw him out of the country. Then he can get a visa to work here. What we don't need is to have more H1B visa's and temporary imported workers. We have more than enough already unemployed IT folks to fill the jobs we've got. Besides, the last "foreign" consultant that called me asked if I had a visa. I inquired where the job was, and he responded, "St. Louis, MO". When I informed him that I lived an hour south of that job-prospect, was a US Citizen, and didn't need a passport to travel in-state, he kept repeating "Do you have a passport?" I guess understanding English was not included in his cirriculum. But I think a 2x4 to the back of his head, MIGHT drive home the point.
A list of fallacies about the future of engineering/IT and they're rebuttal:
Foriegn students are smarter.
First, would you like to compare the average student at IIT to CalTech or MIT? Don't compare some engineering student at IIT to a liberal arts student at Yale (I think we all know how they turn out).
There aren't enough skilled Americans.
What skill sets? He's not even identifying any specific skills. It's not like I use analysis or quantum mechanics at my job on a daily basis. I think we've all hit the nail on the head by saying corporations are just too cheap. They want 'skilled' workers (their wording not mine) to be as cheap as the non-skilled workers. Wow, there's great economic insight from the Department of Commerce! Okay so every CS department isn't teaching Lisp/Scheme to incoming students, I doubt that's what he's talking about. Oh, and don't whine about american students not having math skills. The average math major has studied so much math the only place they could use it is as an actuary or quantitative finance (another kind of actuary). Frankly, that's a couple of college courses for the mean student at best.
Americans are lazy.
So let me get this straight a brainless poly-sci grad from some Ivy who has no formal training (and probably no managerial experience in the private sector) has become the IT czar for the Commerce department. Yeah, he's really qualified to make such broad sweeping generalizations. However, I'd like to point out that someone in a 3rd world country is less likely to waste (have the oportunity to spend) their one shot at higher education on a Women Studies degree. How many Nobel Laureates does the US produce compared to the rest of the world? So it's not like our best can't compete. I guess those hordes of Chemistry students from India and China aren't flocking to basic research. In other words, there's no point in studying Chemistry, Physics, or Math unless you want to do into research (industrial or academic) for a living.
As a final note, I really wish Robert Cresanti would hold a open forum so I could reply to his assertions in person. Someone needs to set the record straight.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
China is not a free market. Combining a free market and a non-free market by allowing desperate labor from the non-free market to flood into the free market is not "allowing the free market to work". Combining a free market and a non-free market creates a (much larger) non-free market, not a free market. The reason that desperate labor exists in a non-free market like China (or Mexico) is that the government has damaged the operation of the free market. This desperate labor, if it is allowed to flood into the free market, represents a form of indirect government intervention (i.e. intervention by the government of the non-free market) into the free market.
The economic laws of supply and demand work properly only in a free market.
Also, illegal aliens from Mexico damage the operation of the corrective forces of supply and demand in the unskilled labor market in the USA. Wages and working conditions remain permanently depressed due to the illegal aliens.
You mean 0.1% (one-tenth of one percent). 0.001% of $10,000,000 is $100.00.
In my opinion the responsibility of Government is not to prevent change (which is impossible), but:
1) Try to achieve the best or least evil change for its citizens
2) Try to keep the change at rate/speed that citizens can cope with.
However the US gov seems more interested in serving entities other than its citizens.
But the US citizens seem to be quite clueless.
So I guess you could say I partly agree with the Tech Czar on the problem. I don't agree with the solution though.
Lastly: immigration is actually a good thing - it is the main way you get to pick your citizens and other people living in your country. You want immigration not of the cheapest, but of the best. Spend your time figuring out what the criteria for "best" is for long term.
Once you get enough of the "best" people, even if the rest of your system/stuff is crap a lot of the best will still want to apply to get in.
Hey, I'll have a degree in both either way. The only way International Affairs could go away would be if the world was all one big company. My translation skills will be useful as long as A) the entire US doesn't become fluent in Japanese, Spanish, and Russian B) the rest of the world doesn't become fluent in English.
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
> Companies can't really outsource and expect good results - it's a crapshoot.
I used to work for a US company, and they outsourced parts of their maintenance engineering to a company called, I think, Adacel, based in Australia. I thought their work was excellent, and IIRC some of my peers thought likewise. The bug fixing turnaround time was very quick (helped by the time zone difference, I'm sure).
I expect some people will disagree with me, but hey...
Max.
Pay me a decent wage and I will move back to the USA. Until then central Europe pays better after cost of lives is factored in.
Outsourcing happens because there is not enough available people in the right place at the right time, not because prices are lower. Outsourcing began happening massively in 1998.
Our problem is not unskilled workers.
Our problem is unskilled politicians - who come no where near to the level of professionalism and skill "statesmen" should describe.
This solution (increasing H1B) makes the problem worse, suppressing salaries and discouraging new grads from going into engineering. The H1B program has many flaws that make it practically designed to artificially suppress wages.
Instead, U.S. education should be bolstered, permanent immigration should be increased for workers with these skills. See this post for more details and what should be done.
even as a US citizen you can't just move to Canada to get a better deal on employment
That's not really true. Under the Canada/US FTA, all you need is a job offer to move and work between the countries if you're a citizen of either Canada or the US. Mind you, that only applies for "skilled" job categories last I heard.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Thanks! You just gave me my new .sig!
You are correct, though.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
This is when our current form of government fails us as Americans. the tech Czar asshole relies on contributions from lobbyists.
He's just getting paid by companies that want cheap IT labor. Well... hopefully karma bites all these assholes in the ass.
I left Welch Foods because they were looking to outsource to Wipro. I put off "trainig the remote team" for months. I found a job that had an easier commute and left. Last I heard they do not get Oracle/Unix support as effecient as they used to. Also forget about innovation! I wrote a lot of innovative tools there. My friends that hung around a little longer then I did mentioned
that the remote India team doesn't innovate anything. If there's a problem, they don't fix it, they must wait until IBM, Oracle, or
Redhat comes up with a fix. HAHA! It's not cheaper either, they endup getting projects worked and reworked and reworked again and again.
If we continue to loose good paying jobs overseas, then we will rise up and fight back.
You have to understand that the education system in the United States is in large part directed by feminists ideology. The traditional grade, middle, and high school environments are geared towards the female gender. Studies have shown that girls/women learn better in our current system of sitting down, being calm, and listening to the teacher talk for long periods at a time. This is counterintuitive to the way males learn. Males learn more by "doing" than by being lectured to. It's no wonder why our country ran a spike of ADD cases in the past two decades. Psychologists were to quick to point out that males were disrupting classrooms and the like due to some mental illness when in fact it was their natural behavior as males to react that way.
But then feminism is so ingrained in our society now in other forms (i.e., family law) it's no wonder smaller things like educational inequalities are often overlooked on a grander scale.
This is because working in operations-based (system/network admin/engineer) IT in the US basically sucks. Most companies have unwieldly hours and pager duties and require more out of their employees than they should. Additionally, they are underappreciated because, as the Czar says "they can never know enough", which sounds so incredibly condescending that it reminds me of the latest from Yahoo, where (as I read it) 15-20% of the workforce will be laid off to meet some business objective of being #1.
Why don't people want the sort of career where they will be strapped to a pager, and discarded when the leaders screw up? I can't possibly imagine, how's about the problem being with the career path itself. Normal, college kids percieve IT in the marketplace as a very difficult career path, and most of those people choosing a career path think about the things they want to be doing such as:
1. finding someone to marry
2. spending time w/ or raising a family
3. pursuing interests
NOT how they can get internet access everywhere they go so that 'just in case' something blows up at work they can fix it. Which is truly how IT is structured (at least the operations type) for most small/midsized corporations, and even a quite a few large ones.
This sort of 'try harder' mantra comes without any true understanding of the marketplace, which indicates that the basis of his research is flawed.
just the response is wrong.
Lets get a few things out of the way first.
First of all, the people advocating an expanded H-1b program aren't doing it out of patriotism. They are doing it to reduce labor costs.
On the other hand, there is not nearly the kind of barriers to moving those jobs to the lowest wage countries that there was twenty years ago. So, would you rather compete with a foreign worker for a job, or have the entire facility move overseas?
If we look at this from the point of natinal, as opposed to corporate or labor interests, we have to look at it terms of the mobility of jobs under free trade. The size of the program should be such that it maximizes economic gains within the US. This is probably the level that maximizes employment within the US.
The problem with the H-1b program is that it is an invitation to technology transfer. We bring a foreign high tech worker in for six years, enough to gain all kinds of valuable experience and first hand knowledge of US company techology, then we kick the experienced worker out and invite an inexperienced one in. If the problem is a lack of trained workers, this practice is irrational -- unless the purpose of the program is to depress labor costs by moving jobs overseas.
The program should aim to keep experienced and successful foreign workers in the US, in fact encouraging them to put down roots here. If there is a shortage of expert workers, in no case should an experiencd one be made to leave and so make room for an inexperienced worker.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You are missing a major part of the equation...standard of living. US tech workers are not overpriced, to use your word. Standand of living and currency value in this country are way above the countries which we outsource to. Eventually what will happen and has happened in the past is that all this outsourcing will have a positive effect on the country that we source for labor until the standards of living, currency value, and other economic measurements raise to the point that it is no longer viable to outsource to that country. Then we move on to the next country. Outsourcing is purely about profit, nothing else and if hospitals could outsource doctors they would.
Time makes more converts than reason
It's a really small percentage of a very big number that bring in a lot of bucks per month. I just work on a help desk where I make enough money to afford an apartment in Silicon Valley.
OK, Mr. Cresanti, so the US is lacking in IT workers with the "appropriate skill sets."
Pray tell, then, what are the appropriate skill sets? What, you don't know? You just know that the IT-industry lobbyist who took you out for a lobster dinner and lap dance last night said we don't have the right kind of people in the US, and we need to allow cheaper workers in. He must know, because he's getting paid so much by the big IT brass, right?
Oh, wait, is the "appropriate skill set" something like eight to ten years of developing a particular part of a particular kind of application in a particular environment using a particular set of tools? Then BS, because you don't learn that in school.
From where I sit, I see thousands of experienced IT people getting laid off every month for the last five years. I don't see any of the employers who are crying labor shortage looking to scoop up even some of these people.
I don't see many employers striving to hire new college grads who lack experience, but have demonstrated ability, for purpose of mentoring them to be the next generation of leaders. (Oh wait, we are doing that with foreign workers, I forgot).
Cry me a river, Mr. Cresanti, but until you have some specifics to back up your argument, at least do us the favor of crying in private.
I think a lot of the "falling behind" Cassandras intermix the two arguments. The US has had a vigorous enoguh production of engineers and scientists to supply technology creation needs. But studies about falling behind in scientific literacy means that a large fraction of US population cant effectively use it. For example most store clerks would be clueless in billing their customers during a computer failure because thay lack the math skills to tally a bill. Not that the customers would understand them either.
I disagree. As a Computer Science guy myself, I say leave salaries exactly where they are. IMHO, the IT boom was what got us into this mess of having talentless programmers in the first place. That and programmers from the defense industry mixing with the rest of the coding population. The last thing in the world you want is to make it difficult to spot the people who do it for fun in the middle of a huge pile of people jumping at the chance to make more money. Besides, the smart hackers who feel the need to pursue cash eventually become entrepreneurs anyways.
I *so* agree with the original poster!
... but they probably didn't even think to put them in one when they wrote it up either. If we were slightly larger, I bet they would turn to "H1B workers" as a possible solution -- so I definitely can see how this all comes about.
In my current job position (title of "network manager"), it seems they create the job description as they go! Somebody gets the idea that "Hey, it would really be good if our computer guy understood how to do such-and-such on the computers!" and next thing you know, I'm pulled from my office into entire afternoons of training classes on things I'll probably never use again.
What they can't seem to grasp is that your I.T. staff isn't supposed to know *all aspects* of all the specialized software a company uses, or even 1/10th. of it, in many cases. It's the job of I.T. to make sure said software is properly installed and functioning for the employees who DO make good use of it every day.
I've already been asked to learn how to do AutoCAD drawings (despite no drafting or previous engineering experience!), how to program shop equipment that punches holes in steel beams (old MS-DOS based PC inside the piece of industrial equipment, so once again, they decide it's something I.T. should handle), and how to do cost-estimates for jobs in a industry-specific piece of software we use for the purpose. (Heck, I'm still not even sure what the different grades of steel look like, much less have any kind of knowledge of how long our shop takes to do certain processes to metals.)
It's not that I'm unwilling to learn new things. If they decide I should work on one of these tasks, I go and do it. But we're a small business with nobody else to take care of all the computers but myself and an outside consultant who comes in once a week. IMHO, they're foolish to waste my time with these tasks.
But again, it comes down to dollars and cents. They can't cost-justify hiring an engineer who can actually use AutoCAD properly, when the only real reason they need it is to make drawings of customer parts to be fed into another program that runs a burning table/cutting torch. So they figure "Ah, another task for our I.T. guy to do for us!"
I had no idea they'd need these things based on my job description
The Under Secretary of Commerce for Technology is not skiled enough for his postition and apparently can never be skilled enough .. maybe we need an H1B worker to step in for him
The solution is Web 3.0: rewrite cooperative video games so that while the user thinks he is pursuing aliens on level 12 and lighting farts, he is actually solving a partial differential equation optimizing the consumer choice of fabrics for womens' purses.
Then we write a fat paycheck to the kids with a letter of thanks. Economic equilibrium restored!
To see the math, consider that you can make about $10-15/hr doing really menial labor. Let's compromise at $12.50 (when I was in high school and college many many years ago, I made over $20/hr waiting tables, but let's be conservative.) So you work 40 hrs/wk during summer vacation, that $12.50 * 40 * 13 = $6500. Annual tuition at my Alma Mater is currently $7460.24, so you've got a little ways to make up during the year (when I was at school there it was cheaper. You could make all your tuition during the summer and work during the year for beer money). That leave a shortfall of $960.24, which you'll have to make during the year. You'll need to make an extra $24.62/week (or work 2 hours per week) during the school year to make up the difference. Work 10/wk, and you have your beer money still.
Yes, I know you have to eat and live somewhere. Live at home. Yes, it sucks to live at home, but suck it up! This is your future. I know plenty of folks who lived at home to save $$. Can't bear to stay at home? Living in my fraternity house currently costs $500/month, which includes rent, food, utilities, cable, phone, internet, beer. Everything. You can do better with a cheap apartment+ramen, but really it's not necessary to live like that. Anyhow, you can make, working 10 hours per week at $12.50/hr, right about that $500/month figure.
So yes, it is possible in the year 2006 to work your way through college without taking on any debt in the US and A. You may not have the same experience as some rich kid going to some small private liberal arts college, but there's a dirty little secret out there: employers don't give a hoot where you went for undergrad. It's basically "You went to a top 5 school" or "You didn't". So if you go to an expensive school that isn't Harvard, Yale, Stanford, or MIT, you just wasted about $100,000.00. I'm just sayin'.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
In my undergraduate CS classes, they were all theory, but all had an implementation component. Some classes were taught in C++, some in Java, some in LISP/Prolog/etc. (guess which classes those are?), and yet some other classes let you implement in your choice of language as long as it's available on the CS instructional machines (I used perl once when I was pissed at the TA).
When you're teaching algorithms, you can teach in any language. The graduates will know both the theory and the languages, having their cake and eating it too.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I mean, really. You give me a math problem and a tolerance, and I can get you your answer within the tolerance, and get it quick. Even if you have your symbolic answer, eventually you're going to need the damn answer as a number within a specific tolerance anyway. Otherwise, what use was finding the answer? And how will you store that irrational number once you've got it?
Biggest waste of 3 semesters I can imagine. I learned enough calc in high school to get this far in life. I don't foresee needing any more.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Not content with offshoring everything that can be offshored, big business now wants to import people from those same places, to do the jobs that can't be offshored.
I know it's considered paranoia if you think "they" are out to get you personally. What about when "they" are out to get a large group/class of people, that happens to include you?
Yeah, you'll feel right at home there.
Nothing against Spain, of course. It's my favorite European country. I'm just used to milder weather.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
The other element is cost of living, as well: housing, in particular. The costs of mortgages in the housing boom in the US is in every produce made there. It's the inflation-that-dares-not-say-its-name.
Except that "these idiots" are highly placed and have the ears of the administration and Congress who write laws allowing idiocy. Ignoring them, while more palatable than listening to them, is a losing proposition. The better response is to listen to what they have to say, understand their idiocy, and use it to fight them. That at least gives you a chance. Capitulation to idiocy is idiocy in itself.
That is all.
Outsourcing started long before 1998. Manufacturing has been offshoring jobs since the 70's. It was done then to save money and it is done now to save money. However, up until the last year or two, we were the number one manufacturing country in the world. Right now, we're still number two behind China. Why didn't we lose that position twenty years ago? Why aren't we number twenty or thirty on that list? Because there are business advantages to staying and producing in the home market.
Not all jobs will be offshored. That is true in manufacturing and that's true in IT. There are significant business reasons to have a set of engineers right here, right now, who know the society for which they are designing products, who truly know the problems they are trying to fix, and know the appropriate measures with which to fix them. It doesn't matter how expensive their work is, companies will NEVER offshore these jobs. However, companies certainly can and will bolster their ranks with foreign H1-Bs.
But, bringing in H1-Bs lowers wages for everyone in IT. That's an incontrovertible truth. That's supply and demand at it's finest. Bringing in H1-Bs and lowering wages for IT workers discourages US college students from studying CS. You can certainly attempt to argue that point, but the evidence from the last six years would go against you. You want to see more US students in CS? Then, raise the wages and get rid of the H1-Bs. It's very simple.
Yeah, and how many good people who love CS instead chose another career path over the last six years because of the lack of jobs? How badly did that hurt us?
How many truly smart people who would be good at anything chose to go into law, medicine, or business school instead of CS? How badly did that hurt us?
Yeah, sure, you get a lot of talentless hacks who go into a field when salaries go up. But, you also miss some great people as well.
And no, this isn't all about greed and money. This is about providing for their families, bringing home the bacon, and affording American pie. You can't live in this country without a job.
The rest of us...we're just a labor market to be manipulated by people like the Tsar and the college presidents -- no matter how well we do ours
Don't forget that doctors can work right up to retirement. But engineers over the age of 50 are constantly replaced by new engineers coming out of school.
Of course, the solution isn't to stop waging unnecessary wars, stop giving the rich tax breaks, and start funding our educational institutions properly. Obviously it would be foolish to make high tech a viable career path for U.S. citizens by cutting back on H1B visas so companies see the U.S. work force as a valid labor pool again. Offshoring jobs and importing cheap labor helps the economy! Well, not the U.S. economy, not from the point of view of the middle and lower class, but who cares, right?! All those H1B visas make the corporations richer by reducing their labor costs, and who doesn't want that? So what if trickle down theory trickles the money to another country entirely? Corporatism has replaced capitalism -- long live the Chief Officers!
Jerk.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
Not buying it. The average CS student makes around $45k a year out of college, significantly higher than the average for other degree-wielding graduates. And after a few years and a switch of employers, they're making $55-65k a year, again, much higher than the average. You can't convince me that those wages are too low to provide for a family, because my dad was a nurse, and our family managed just fine on quite a bit less than that.
Besides, who says a change in career direction is bad for you?
I think long-term, we're all much better off if everyone enjoys their profession.
Yes, $45K if you can land a job.
Further, just because you get that job now, doesn't mean you'll keep it. There's an army of potential H1-B workers itching to come to America, undercut your salary, and take your job from you.
Further, that $45K, $55K, or $65K of salary is peanuts compared to the money that doctors, lawyers, and businessmen make.
So, much profession would a smart student, capable of great achievement in any field, choose? The profession with H1-Bs beating down our doors, keeping its wages low, and making it questionable whether it offers lifetime employment? Or the profession where they can make a fortune over a lifetime of guaranteed employment? Hmmm, I don't know...
From the statistics, fewer and fewer students are choosing CS. That answers my question for us. Love only goes so far.
I'm in the midst of a job search right now, and frankly, I'm having no trouble at all. I get interested replies to almost every email I send, and right now, I'm just trying to figure out which employer has the nicest work environment. That said, I know my stuff, and I've gotten pretty good at standing out in a pile of resumes, but finding a job and keeping it certainly aren't an issue for me at this point and time. And I'm really not going to feel terribly threatened by foreign workers until I start seeing them posting blog entries on the finer points of metaprogramming. And even then, this form of protectionism tends to ultimately be a hidden transfer payment. IE, your employers, and by extension, the consumers of your services don't get anything in return for the higher costs they're eventually forced to pay. The theory, of course, is that better job selection outweighs the costs, but the only people who actually believe that are the people who are worried about their jobs. You'd be hard-pressed to find legitimate economists preaching that line. I still think we're better off focusing on specialization, and letting cheap labor have the Java jobs we don't really want anyways.
Now if you want to frame the argument in terms of the increased cost of taxpayer-funded infrastructure required by an influx of people, then you have a stronger case, because now those H1-B visas are actually affecting the guy who works at McDonald's and the doctors, as well as the programmers.
The doctrine of mutual advantage makes some assumptions of basic standards: all the producers need to be playing by the same rules, or what seems like 'competitive advantage' is really just uncompensated negative externalities. (E.g., if you have two chemical companies, and one is located in a place without any environmental restrictions and the other in a place that requires cleanup, the products of the dirty company will probably be cheaper -- but that's not really an 'advantage,' like more efficient production would be, it's just creating costs that will have to be paid for by other people, later on.)
Free trade within a region that has some overarching government or authority to ensure that all firms play by the rules makes sense -- it means that everyone can buy goods from whoever does the most efficient job at making them. However, allowing firms who don't play by the same rules access to the market, without paying penalties, just puts legitimate firms at a disadvantage.
If there's some salient, convincing counterargument to this, I haven't heard it. Just saying "free markets are great!", without explaining how they're going to prevent the eventual demise of our economy due to trade/current-account deficits when we can't compete with other countries who place a lower value on human life than we do, isn't cutting it.
Adam Smith and the rest of the classical economic texts all look great on paper, but there seems to be a lot of faith required to just assume that because it appears to be a simple, elegant solution, that it will produce a society that's a nice place to live. I don't think I have that sort of faith. I'd like to know exactly how the free market is going to save us, and how we're going to maintain our standard of living into the future, by allowing everything except service industries to migrate to other countries, and importing hand-over-fist. I remain unconvinced that such a system is sustainable.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The marketplace is being rewarded for shipping technical work offshore for desperately lower wages than here in the US, displacing existing workers. This discourages students from entering the field, reducing the available domestic workforce and pushing business to ship work offshore for desperately lower wages, lather/rinse/repeat...
The "Wal-Mart syndrome" has already succeeded in driving a large amount of manufacturing work offshore, now IT. If said "IT Czar" wants to seriously encourage the domestic workforce, make it less desirable to offshore the work so the locals see it as a viable career choice. If the H-1B supply of underpaid labor was to be constrained, more work might be "insourced" instead. Supply and demand.
Is it:
"Shortages and surpluses of labor are normal -- and powerful -- forces in a free market"
or is it
"many Republicans favor big agri-businesses and claim that the American economy will be irreparably damaged unless Washington allows illegal aliens to pick fruits and vegetables. Many Democrats favor ethnic pressure groups like La Raza and make an identical claim."
So are you for the market? Or for state intervention?
If you are pro market, how do you justify artificial scarcity in the labour market by not facilitiating foreign workers's access to that market?
You get so embroiled in your arguments that do not realize the amount of contradictions you are ejaculating in you senseless posting coated of pseudo sensible gibberish.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
That is the point that many guys around here do not understand.
The markets have not starred and atripped flags strapped around them, even if the market is made of US consumers.
One should support markets as a matter of principle if you think that economy is not a zero sum game (which by now can be taken as almost a scientific certainity).
If jobs go away from the US you are getting new potential costumers with more money in their pockets. There is a new oporutnity there were there was none before...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You wanna know why you are overpriced?
You are fat. You are overeatting, and that costs.
You have been using inneficent gas guzzlers and driving like there is no tomrorrow. That costs.
You keep your heating running no matter what during the winter and your aircon 24 hours per day in the summer. That costs.
You keep buying the greatest and latest gadgets, without regard to if you need it or not. That costs.
Not few people have 2 or 3 houses in the US middle classes. That costs.
I could go on, but hopefully you get the picture. Blaming the disparity of incomes in an "uneven" field is completely disingineous when clearly the profilgate lifestyle most USians follow are rendering them uncompetitive in some fields. You should be looking closer at home when dealing with why you are not competitive and stop blaming others (even if you may have one or two points there).
You assertions that USians have to drop in "level" (whatever that is) is complete nonsense. If you want to compete you may (you will) lower your expectations. That may vary from accepting jobs that pay a bit less (no, you don't need a PS3, an Xbox and a Wii) to losing you job and never ever getting one again doing the same.
Well, guess what, is the way it has always been and it is the way it will always be.
An USian whinning about free markets is one of the most disgusting things to contemplate. The country itself was in no small measure founded as a response to British commercial restrictions and also if there is a country that has benefitted from international commerce is the US.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If I don't work, I can sponge off the government.
Assuming you're American and male, how is it you think you could do this?
rd
It's fun to learn new stuff, but to be an EFFICIENT worker you need to master the skills so you can make the company's resources better. Of course most small business don't WANT their IT structure better, they just want somebody that can make due.. but ask yourself, what skills are you learning that are useful elsewhere? My experience is that the guys that do "whatever their asked" get the shaft when raise time comes.. the company grows a little bit more and hires "pros" at the skills you used to struggle with so now you're not the "team player" you used to be. while it's not necessarily the companies "duty" to improve your career, if working there isn't improving your resume with marketable skills then it's a dead-end job... you won't get pay at that place to compensate your experience, and you won't have experience that's useful to market to somebody else.
All the bums down at the shelter get checks every month...not sure what program. Enough to get by on, with the free bed and meals.
Not an opulent lifestyle, by any stretch, but superior to slavery.
All the bums down at the shelter get checks every month...not sure what program. Enough to get by on, with the free bed and meals.
Not an opulent lifestyle, by any stretch, but superior to slavery.
Ok, I have heard of the small check, and I'm also not sure what program that is. The bed and meals are privately run and supported by private contributions for the most part, perhaps a small daily stipend from local welfare for a few weeks for new people, and US citizenship required.
Food is donated, like cereal and donuts in the morning, and volunteers help cook in the evening. The homeless shelter residents wash the dishes and clean up.
There usually is a time limit like six weeks for a homeless shelter, good for once a year, which is based on that temporary local welfare stipend.
All in all, it is a temporary measure to help someone find a more permanent spot, like a room in the Y, but of course many don't want anything more permanent and return to the streets when their six weeks is up.
Definitely not anything resembling sponging off the government.
rd
Checks from welfare amounts to sponging in my book...even if they are small. Don't know about the limits, but I see the same guys down in the park, year after year, so they have something going on. In my hobo fantasy, I'd be toting my laptop and availing myself of free wireless internet and books in the libraries, and could doubtless devise other ways to sponge, given the free time I'd have.
Even without checks or meals, bums still avail themselves of government infrastructure (parks, sidewalks, libraries, police protection) for free. They survive, and don't contribute. Were I to join them, at the very least I'd go from giving the government a few grand a month to giving them nothing, thus voting the only way that really has any impact anymore.
I agree, they're sponging and contributing nothing. Good news blurb today that a Ga. poultry plant that had most of its work force repatrioted to their home countries is now busing in homeless and felons on probation to work.
Any of these guys that can't keep from committing more crimes instead of working for a living, I'm all for repatrioting them to cheap cells in the desert.
I agree with your points over all. I think most do.
rd
That may be good news...a goodly percentage of felons and a greater percentage of homeless have mental problems, though. Might not be a good idea to stick theme all in a factory full of sharp objects. The underlying idea is sound though...get the illegals out and put our citizens to work. Getting locked up is the ultimate form of sponging, I suppose.
You'd be hard-pressed to find legitimate economists preaching that line.
At this point in time, I'm hard pressed to find any legitimate economists at all. They all seem to be paid to be shills for the corporations.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Says the bitter marxist hacker.
Ask first what actions made me bitter. Could it be being forced out of private industry and into public service due to a recession in 2001 that left my family cold & hungry for THREE YEARS before I found a job in government? Nah, couldn't be that....Could it be that during those three years I was turned down for burger flipping jobs because I can speak Cobol, Java, and VB but not Spanish? Nah, couldn't be that....Could it be because I lost my entire life savings attempting to keep my house during that time? Nah, couldn't be that.....
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
And that's the fault of the economists? Seems to me that I recall the economists mostly all denouncing the Internet Bubble of 2001, with the "head economist" correctly calling it "irrational exuberance". Frankly, bitterness is no fun for anyone -- you or the people you interact with. Hell, I can see you're bitter over the Internet, from a single sentence. Are you certain you weren't hired because people get a hint of that in the interview, and nobody wants to work with someone who's got a chip on their shoulder? The Bubble screwed over a lot of people, but it wasn't any one person or organization's fault. It's seriously not worth getting bitter over. Shit happens, but it really only gets messier if you get upset and jump up and down on that pile of shit.
Apologies, rather, I meant the Internet Bubble of 1998-2000, which had a huge role in causing the recession in 2001. Failed to hit "preview" on my comment. :-/ Course, I suppose I also don't need to point out that 9/11 and the additional effect that had on the economy also wasn't economists' fault.
And that's the fault of the economists?
The fault of the economists is their irrational religious belief in markets.
Seems to me that I recall the economists mostly all denouncing the Internet Bubble of 2001, with the "head economist" correctly calling it "irrational exuberance".
But what they seem to fail to understand is that such bubbles in the market would not exist without the market.
Frankly, bitterness is no fun for anyone -- you or the people you interact with. Hell, I can see you're bitter over the Internet, from a single sentence.
The bitterness came later- what came first was the insult and the lie. The lie that the market would reward hard work, and the insult that Americans aren't smart enough or work hard enough to deserve to work.
Are you certain you weren't hired because people get a hint of that in the interview, and nobody wants to work with someone who's got a chip on their shoulder?
In the later interviews, most certainly. In the earlier interviews before I understood the insult and the lie? I wasn't bitter then.
The Bubble screwed over a lot of people, but it wasn't any one person or organization's fault.
Agreed. It was the system's fault for not being good enough to prevent irrational behavior. When I have an operating system that is behaving incorrectly, I patch the kernal to fix the problem. It's time we patched the economic system to prevent the consolidation of wealth, which is the main bug in the system.
Shit happens, but it really only gets messier if you get upset and jump up and down on that pile of shit.
And unless you're willing to shovel the shite, place it into a composter, destroy it and make fertilizer, all you have is just a pile of shit. My bitterness has a point- revolution is neccessary.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Right, bitter marxist hacker. I'd almost forgotten.
Here's the thing. And any legitimate economist could have told you this. (i.e., if it was a lie, it was a lie you told yourself. If anything, economists said the opposite.) Hard work won't prevent your job from being outsourced. Anyone, anywhere can work hard. Hard work is not a scarce commodity. But not everyone is skillful. Especially not everyone in India. You may not be able to export janitorial jobs to India, but the tech industry's equivalent of menial labor you most certainly can. But you'll find that all of the really good jobs in the tech industry are still right here in the US. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are pretty much the only companies in India that have genuinely skilled employees, and only because they have the "prestige" that is required over there to hire the genuinely skilled people. In other words, don't suck, and you don't have to compete with foreigners for your job. (For the record, you can work hard and still suck.) Maybe it's just that I'm not bitter, but I don't find that situation terribly insulting. That's just sort of how the world works.
Also, I know I've said this before, probably even on Slashdot, but it bears repeating. Revolution is simply not a realistic weapon against a nuclear power. So long as there are nuclear weapons, the military has absolutely no choice but to prevent revolution by any means necessary, with any force necessary. The world cannot afford nuclear weapons in the hands of revolutionaries. You can only change the government of the United States from within, through the electoral process that already exists. Unfortunately for you guys, nobody elects people they don't like. And nobody likes Marxists. Except other Marxists. You've got at least two generations to go before the stigma of cold war communism wears off a bit, and if you guys can't manage to learn how to come off as nice guys instead of assholes by then, well, you have a long future of bitterness ahead of you.
So long as there are nuclear weapons, the military has absolutely no choice but to prevent revolution by any means necessary, with any force necessary.
The easiest way to prevent revolution, is to not act like a bunch of priviledged asshats to begin with. Skill and hard work are worthless, is the message that everybody needs to hear. People in India are just as skilled as people are here. If you think skill will prevent your job from going overseas, you're a naive shithead.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
And what caused the internet bubble? Could it have been CHEAP LABOR imported from overseas combined with stupid trade policies?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Um, not really. No. Try incredibly bad business plans, mind-bogglingly stupid venture capitalists, and millions of clueless people investing in companies that were hemorrhaging cash, yet somehow expecting that their stock would continue to grow at huge rates. Meanwhile, companies were hiring people left and right, with those salaries largely powered by the strength of the stock, and the growth of their neighboring companies. When it became clear that the stocks were grossly overvalued, the price plunged, necessitating major layoffs across the board, and further exportation of labor in order to maintain some semblance of the previous level of operations. Cheap imported labor wasn't the cause, it was a symptom. Alan Greenspan was absolutely right to blame "irrational exuberance." Don't get me wrong, cheap foreign labor causes its share of problems, but it didn't cause that particular problem.
If it wasn't for the stock market (which in and of itself is a giant con) there would have been no way to invest in those companies to begin with. If venture capitalism was illegal, there would have been no bubble to burst.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
-sigh-