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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.
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.
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.
And, since technical people tend to have fewer social skills and have a harder time finding mates, there needs to be a lottery amongst the non-technical people. Draw the "lucky" number, and you are required to marry a tech person.
The government will also be monitoring the bedrooms of these couples to ensure that the mandated sexual encounter per week is not avoided.
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.
How about instead of H1-Bs, we fast-track green cards for people with needed skills, or is that not enough like indentured servitude?
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I've seen H-1B abuse with my own eyes at a very large telecom. They want people they can manipulate, not full-blown citizens with real choices. There is no "shortage", just lobbyists looking for an angle. See about this Rand study:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB1505/i
Table-ized A.I.
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.
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People don't make major choices about their broad vocations simply on money.
The hell they don't.
I'm inside academia right now, and my impression of what employers want is driven largely by what I hear industry representatives say. They want our undergrads to come out of the university ready to work with specific skills. They want graduate research to focus on applications, rather than basic research. There are various weasel words for these requests, but they are pretty apparent.
I don't blame them for wanting these things: its in their naked self-interest. But we shouldn't necessarily play along.