How to Keep America Competitive

pkbarbiedoll writes to tell us that in a recent Washington Post article, Bill Gates takes another look at the current state of affairs in computer science and education. According to Gates: "This issue has reached a crisis point. Computer science employment is growing by nearly 100,000 jobs annually. But at the same time studies show that there is a dramatic decline in the number of students graduating with computer science degrees. The United States provides 65,000 temporary H-1B visas each year to make up this shortfall — not nearly enough to fill open technical positions. Permanent residency regulations compound this problem. Temporary employees wait five years or longer for a green card. During that time they can't change jobs, which limits their opportunities to contribute to their employer's success and overall economic growth."

Comments

Overworked?

[wframe9109]

I went to college under the impression that I would graduate with a degree in Computer Science.

In the third lecture of the intro course, the teacher discussed spending all night coding for labs and so forth, and mentioned that it would prepare us for real life.

After a quick google session, I never went to the class again.

I'm sure there are places where you aren't forced to stay late or bring your work home with you... But the trend of overworking in real life occupations CS degrees can lead to is very damaging to interest in this degree.

If I wanted to concentrate on a job over things like family and a social life, I would go to med school.

Re:Overworked?

[Skreems]

I don't know who you talked to, but that doesn't seem like a very fact-based view of the computer science field to me. But hey, what do I know? I just work in it...

Re:Overworked?

[trevorrowe]

There are jobs like that, but I have had 4 different jobs since I graduated with a BS in CS and none of them required such drastic overtime. I work on average 40 hours per week. When there is a special need I will put in casual overtime, but usually very little, a couple of hours perhaps. I prefer to spend my time at home with my family and there are more than enough jobs out there like this. Just don't plan on working for Microsoft or any game making company.

Re:Overworked?

[koreth]

Your professor misled you. Yeah, sure, sometimes I'm up past midnight pounding out code.

But then the next day I get to sleep in until noon if I want.

"How late you stay up working" is only half the picture -- there's the unspoken assumption that you arrive in the office at the same time as everyone else, which is absolutely not necessarily the case. Every single programming job I've had (I've been in the industry for close to 20 years, worked at a couple big companies and a bunch of small ones) has had flexible schedules and sane comp time policies. And this is including a couple dot-com-boom startups. Now, maybe it's different if you're at a non-tech company, but the point is there are tons of jobs out there that don't require you to spend every waking hour working.

You can burn yourself out at any job. Burnout is 90% about you and only 10% about your employer, in my experience. And the trend toward longer hours is an American disease, not a CS one; you'll probably run into it no matter what industry you enter. (That's assuming you're in the US, which of course I don't actually know, so bad me if you're not.)

Re:Overworked?

[Anonymous Coward]

This has not been my experience. I work forty hours a week and have never felt any management or peer pressure to work more; I'm on salary, so I'm not paid by the hour either. A very few of my coworkers work into the night at times, but they do everything at the last minute.

Re:Overworked?

[StarvingSE]

I have many friends, myself included, who are working and programming in the IT industry, and no one every puts in "all nighters" for work. Yes, we did in college in order to get those huge programming assignments done, but those were fun. Your group together in the lab hacking away, eating pizza and BSing never seemed like work to me. But I enjoy my work and I enjoy programming. I can see how this wouldn't be fun to someone who is just doing a computer science degree because they heard "you can earn a lot of money in that industry."

I program at work, and then when I go home I work on open source or some "on the side" programming jobs that I occassionally take. I do this because it is my hobby and career, and it is enjoyable to me. I don't do it everyday, and I do go out with my friends and party on the weekends.

This professor is either lying to you or doesn't really like the industry and has a negative attitude towards it. You need to make up your own mind. If you don't enjoy the work, you will be miserable because it is difficult. If you enjoy it, it can be very rewarding for you.

Re:Overworked?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't do into computer science unless you absolutely can't see yourself doing something better, or you really really really love computers and refuse to do something better.

Of course, you might want to do research, or start a company yourself.

But for the vast majority, a CS degree is going to ensure a life in a cube reporting to some guy with an MBA who doesn't understand what you do, and probably doesn't care.

There will always be people as good as you, who are younger, and will work for less. This will be used to keep you inline.

Re:Overworked?

[mcrbids]

If I wanted to concentrate on a job over things like family and a social life, I would go to med school.

You're kidding here, right?

Med school?

Is it possible that you aren't aware of the sometimes ridiculous hours and circumstances that doctors and nurses frequently have to put up with?

For that matter, is there a profession that doesn't come with either low pay or stressful/uncomfortable working circumstances? Let's see...

1) Airline pilot - once a great career, it's now marginal. Pilots have largely lost their once prestigious retirements, and it's difficult for even a well-trained and papered pilot to get over $50,000 per year or so.

2) Lawyer - I know a couple. They are great people, and I know them as friends. They're struggling. One of them gave up lawyering to become a teacher, and they really get sick of "he-said, she-said" family law, even though that's what pays the bills.

3) Grocery clerk - great job. Frequently has benefits, the job requires very little training, and is generally pretty low stress. Wave the groceries over the laser, take money. Bugger the terrible pay.

Take a look. Economics has an amazing tendency to level the playing field. That's the job of economy - distribute wealth - and it works well at that. Jobs that are really cool and entail lots of personal passion (EG: flying, teaching, musician) also tend to pay poorly. Jobs that pay well tend to suck for some other reason. (intense training requirements, lousy job conditions)

Ever wonder how much your garbage man gets paid? Check it out - you might be surprised!

Re:Overworked?

[Pope]

Is it possible that you aren't aware of the sometimes ridiculous hours and circumstances that doctors and nurses frequently have to put up with?

Obviously, which is why he said that if he wanted to spend more time on his job, he'd go to med school. :)

Re:Overworked?

[Jtheletter]

I went to college under the impression that I would graduate with a degree in Computer Science. In the third lecture of the intro course, the teacher discussed spending all night coding for labs and so forth

I mean no offence by this, but I think you probably made the right decision in this case. I happen to work as a programmer in a company where they don't require me to do rediculous amounts of overtime, and there are many other coding jobs that will have you working the standard corporate 8-5. What people hear about are the crazy work schedules of game developers and start-ups, but only because those are more publicized because they are more "glamorous." The state of programming jobs on the whole is not nearly so bad as those two niches make it out to be I think.

More to your point though, the people who tend to do very well in CS didn't choose the career/degree based on the job prospects and salary bases, but because they were likely already up late into the night coding for fun. If you weren't already interested enough in the field to have pulled some long coding nights for school, let alone voluntarily, then it was definitely not going to work out for you as a career choice. That's not a dig at you by any means, I had bio-chem friends that spent equal amounts of time on their assignments, and I sure as hell had no interest in staying up all night trying to balance stoichiometric equations! Bio-chewm wasn't my thing, it didn't interest me enough to put that much time into it, but I could certaintly stay up for hours perfecting a GO game engine for class.

IMHO part of the problem with CS degrees is that the computing field has become relatively glamourous in the last two decades, in large part because of the dot-com millionaire era and the large salaries that can be commanded in IT compared to other career tracks. Because of this there are a lot more people trying their hand at CS, many who hold no previous interest and are just looking at those graduation statistics with the nice high avergage starting salaries listed by major. I'm not saying that's inherently a bad thing, as it brings in others who do have talent that might have otherwise done something else, but I think there's a lot more fluff programmers getting degrees than there used to be before Silicon Valley was promising to make every geek a millionaire.

Bottom line is do right by you, whatever anyone chooses to do for work, I think it's better to go into it already liking your profession rather than choosing a career based solely on potential income levels or the like.

Re:Overworked?

[Zach978]

Well, this is exactly why America will not be competitive. We are spoiled!! The guy who lives in some shithole in India is actually willing to work hard to earn a living and live a great life...we all grew up in suburbs and went to schools where we didn't have to do anything. For the most part we'd cry and get what we want, we have no motivation to improve on our lives.

This is obviously very generalized and maybe a little exaggerated but to some extent I think its true.

Re:Overworked?

[qwijibo]

I'm a contractor so I'm restricted to working 40 hours unless they want to pay more. However, it's clear that the expectation from FTE's is 60+, more if you want to be promoted. It's also been suggested that I can work as many hours as I want, as long as I only bill for 40. I interviewed with another company that outright said they discouraged their contractors from billing actual hours worked. I'm pretty sure that's a blatant violation of federal labor law, but it's so common that no one thinks twice about it.

Re:Overworked?

[Sandbags]

Thanks to recent changes in federal overtime pay requirements, if your full time job is to write software code for a company, then you ARE subject to recieve overtime pay at 1.5X the hourly rate (even if you are on salary). This change went into effect sometime last year. There is a special exemption for programmers however as follows:

To qualify for the computer employee exemption, the following tests must be met:

        * The employee must be compensated either on a salary or fee basis (as defined in the regulations) at a rate not less than $455 per week or, if compensated on an hourly basis, at a rate not less than $27.63 an hour;
        * The employee must be employed as a computer systems analyst, computer programmer, software engineer or other similarly skilled worker in the computer field performing the duties described below;
        * The employee's primary duty must consist of:

1) The application of systems analysis techniques and procedures, including consulting with users, to determine hardware, software or system functional specifications;

2) The design, development, documentation, analysis, creation, testing or modification of computer systems or programs, including prototypes, based on and related to user or system design specifications;

3) The design, documentation, testing, creation or modification of computer programs related to machine operating systems; or

4) A combination of the aforementioned duties, the performance of which requires the same level of skills.

If you meet all of these above requirements, and are a computer programmer or systems anylyst, than overtime pay is optional by your employer.

This means most line level general coders or code anylists, and basically ANYONE who answers a phone for a living should get overtime pay. Guys like me are paid more than the stated fees, so I can't get overtime. Belive me though, as a qualified engineer, if my company wasn't paying me very well, I'd be out the door, and they know it. I'm in too high demand, and demand is increasing. I may not get direct overtime pay, but I'm well compensated for the 50-60 hours a week I put in. We also have a company policy limiting employees to a 12 hour maximum work day, and prevent employees from being in the building after 7:00PM or on weekends. Many code from home, but that's voluntary.

Re:Overworked?

[Dogtanian]

IMHO part of the problem with CS degrees is that the computing field has become relatively glamourous in the last two decades, in large part because of the dot-com millionaire era and the large salaries that can be commanded in IT compared to other career tracks. IT stopped being "glamorous" shortly after the dot-com crash in 2000/2001. Why do you think the number of students taking CS/IT courses is way down compared to five or six years ago?

Re:Overworked?

[Anonymous Coward]

Programming has become a blue collar job, and cheap programmers are a dime a dozen now. The real value in coming out of a good school with a CS degree is that you have a lot of engineering type skills (read: design and analysis) rather then just straight coding. A lot of companies I interviewed with cared less that I knew C or Java but that I would be able to apply the abstract problem solving and engineering skills I learned. A lot of people don't realize, and what many companies do realize, is that CS majors don't need a pure coding job out of college, they can quickly learn to do many of things that other types of engineers do. If you couple this with a willingness to learn the business aspect of the real world you'll be invaluable to a company.

Re:Overworked?

[Austerity Empowers]

That's the way it is, he's not lying to you, although I don't necessarily think all nighters in college are fair considering he's sharing your time. I remember 24 credit course loads and professors like that, I'd drop him like a bad habit too.

You can find 8 to 5 jobs, but the lure of higher pay will undoubtedly steer you to those other places. Of course if you did the math, you're better off with the 8-5 and spending the extra time working at mcdonalds, but most of us would consider that beneath our status.

It's not about a labor shortage, it's about "keeping pace of the industry". Someone out there is going to release a product that competes with yours, next year. You have to get your latest and greatest out by the time they do, or mgmt will have to predict reduced yearly growth (since it's all about growth, not about stability). Of course, it's more work than can really be done in a year by a normal sized team working 40 hour weeks. You can add people to the project, but there are well documented inefficiencies. Or you can make your people work longer and keep the smallest possible team. Usually that gets the results, but obviously they burn out. That's the way it really is. No amount of off-shoring or H1Bs will fix it, companies that do that are looking to cut costs on labor and to combat attrition, that's it.

All in all, we have similar hours to doctors, and 2x the operating age (usually 24-50, after which it seems like it's hard to get hired) but crappier pay. I like what I do, but given life to do again, I'd have kept the geek stuff as a hobby and found other work.

Re:Overworked?

['nother poster]

A former employer of mine had some thing similar going on, but the roles were reversed. 50-60 a week for contract employees with a bill of 40 was the norm. First time billable hours came back >40 that person got a talking to. A second time precluded a third occurance. ;)

Re:Overworked?

[pedalman]

[blockquote]I prefer to spend my time at home with my family and there are more than enough jobs out there like this. Just don't plan on working for Microsoft or any game making company.[/blockquote] Or Dell.

Re:Overworked?

[2short]

Looking at the handful of highly skilled coders I know:
    - Before age 25, all of them regularly stayed up all night coding, primarily of their own free will.
    - A few of them still do, still mostly because they want to, and get little respect/pay for it. These are in the game industry.
    - The rest, outside the game industry, get good pay and respect. They go home at 5 and stop thinking about work. Some code on their own projects, and might occasionally stay up late doing so.

Frankly, if you're a smart, capable person of college age, I would not reccomend selecting any career path if you're not already occasionally staying up all night doing whatever it is. If you're going to like doing something enough to do it 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for much of your life; then with the added enthusiasm of youth, you really ought to like doing it for about as long as you can stay awake.

Re:Overworked?

[hey!]

Actually, working long hours in a coding session is the best part of the job.

It's getting interrupted by phone calls or being dragged into pointless meetings that really sucks. Coding time is pleasure.

When you are being productive, the hours just fly by. However, chaining yourself to the desk doesn't get you into the productivity zone.

For that reason, when I've supervised programmers, I never had many hard and fast rules. Generally, I want people to take time off as soon as possible after a marathon session. I don't want them using all nighters as a substitute for slack or getting to work on things in a timely fashion. I don't want them to turn into solitary night owl workers, which means that most days they should keep normal hours, they should attend weekly and monthly status meetings, they should commit their work every day and they should keep their project records up to date.

But if the iron is hot, keep striking it. Just don't forget to commit your work frequently. Sometimes sleep deprivation makes you do strange things; you want to make sure that brilliant idea you had at 2am isn't overwritten at 6am.

Re:Overworked?

[killjoe]

One day we had an "emergency" at work. This means nobody could go home and it was all hands on deck while we tried to get the system back up. An hour or so into it I (being the useless manager) decided that I would best help the effort by getting some food for the guys so I went over to a nearby pizza shop. There were four guys there making pizzas while listening to Led Zeppelin cranked up and having a good old time of it. I was thinking to myself "if the pizza machine broke these guys would just go home or to a bar or something, they sure as hell wouldn't stay around till four AM and made sure it was working properly for the next day".

Re:Overworked?

[Anonymous Coward]

Every single programming job I've had (I've been in the industry for close to 20 years, worked at a couple big companies and a bunch of small ones) has had flexible schedules and sane comp time policies.

You must be in a part of the country where the job market is better. Around here, there are far more potential employees than positions, and so none of the companies I've ever worked for has had sane comp time policies except for the two that allowed telecommuting. Of course, one of those was bought and dismantled, and the other collapsed from politics and stupid management.

A couple jobs back I worked for a place that had great policies on paper. But the comp time request had to be approved by management, and had to be taken within 2 weeks of when it was earned, so you couldn't bank it. And you couldn't take more than a day off without two weeks notice. When management planned poorly and required six to eight weeks of overtime weeks, nobody got any comp time.

And in my current job, "core hours" are between 9 am and 4 pm. You need written permission from God to not be in the office during those hours. Even if you stayed in the office until 3am the night before getting something un-f@cked.

You can burn yourself out at any job. Burnout is 90% about you and only 10% about your employer, in my experience.

It's not that simple. Burnout is about not seeing goals, and not seeing a way to meet the goals, and about not making progress towards those goals. Employers with waffling management and no clearly communicated short- and long-term plans contribute substantially to burnout. I'm dealing with it right now, because I work for a startup that can't figure out what its business plan is, and so keeps on trying new ones on a monthly basis. The goal I was working for a month ago has nothing in common with the goal I'm working for now. As a result, I feel like I'm expending a great deal of effort for no good reason, because every business plan change has an IMMEDIATE! URGENT! RIGHT NOW! deadline, and 80% of the work I do to support it in code gets thrown away when the business plan changes again.

And of course I have a long-term plan, but see above about how there are more potential employees than positions in this area; and I'm not about to move to a place that's more butt-headedly corporate than this one.

Re:Overworked?

[dcam]

I believe that the longest working week in the guiness book of records was for a medical intern, althought there may have been a new record set.

As for lawyers, I have two in the family. Their experience has been if you work for a big company you can expect to average 70 ours a week. Incidentally this is true for an Australian firm and for the Japanese arm of a US firm.

However my wife has just graduated as a teacher. Once again the hours are pretty bad (there is a *lot* of effectively unpaid overtime at home), she is paid more than a graduate engineer.

Re:Overworked?

[jez9999]

In the third lecture of the intro course, the teacher discussed spending all night coding for labs and so forth, and mentioned that it would prepare us for real life.

After a quick google session, I never went to the class again.

Where you working now? McDonalds?

Re:Overworked?

[Anonymous Coward]

good point - same here.

Re:Overworked?

[Anonymous Coward]

Every single programming job I've had (I've been in the industry for close to 20 years, worked at a couple big companies and a bunch of small ones) has had flexible schedules and sane comp time policies.

Agreed.

Burnout is 90% about you and only 10% about your employer, in my experience.

Totally disagree. For me, burnout came from being required, by my employer, to work months at a time, around 80 hours a week, without a single day off (including weekends). My whole team of 10 burned out in the course of about 1 year. Now, I work a sane job doing very similar work, but with 40 hour weeks and maybe a week of crunch per year. Slightly less pay. I am so not burned out here.

Re:overworked?

[mrbluze]

If I wanted to concentrate on a job over things like family and a social life, I would go to med school.

How true - but at least in medicine, you always have a job, no matter what (aside from criminal charges!), and as such, if people really want, they don't have to work 6 days a week and take their work home, except perhaps during the first 2 or 3 years of work. The pay easily accommodates less work - people just have to choose that path. Problem with medicine is it's addictive (pardon the pun) - it's easy to get drawn into the game and want to get better and better at it.

However, the competitiveness of the US is more complex than number of jobs vs. number of students. The fundamental problem is that, whereas US dominance was previously based on having lots and lots of friends and doing business with them, it is now the case that the US economic model is one of dependency on non-friends, even enemies, whilst at the same time grumbling about having to do business with them.

US economic superiority is now underpinned by its military activities and decreasing control of diminishing, and possibly soon to be obsolete, oil reserves. It's an unfortunate and risky approach. If those arms fail (which it seems they are), then what will be exposed is an economy based on printing money and gambling at the Wall Street Casino. When done in excess (which it is), the economy eventually collapses, with society following soon after. And the usual course of events follows.

Essentially, America has to reinvent herself and become the forward thinking, open minded and friendly nation that she once was. There has to be a return to nation building and saving instead of exporting jobs and living on debt. That and about a 1000 other motherhood statements.

Re:Overworked?

[johnptg]

Hey Gates, how stupid do you think we are? Once again you are trying to make sure there is a surplus of IT workers so you and others like you can treat the IT workers like shit.

It is funny how he doesn't manage to explain how our wages have remained stagnant for 6 or 7 years in light of a 100,000/year job growth. Shouldn't such a demand for IT workers cause wages to rise?

If wages rose to meet the demand for IT workers wouldn't computer science degrees become popular again?

If Gates is really worried about what he is whining about in this article, the solution is in his own hands. He doesn't have to plead with our politicians to increase his access to foreign workers. He just needs to be willing to pay his workers more.

The real question is in the bigger picture. How is it that Gates and people like him have been allowed to manipulate government policy so that most Americans wages have been relatively stagnant for over a decade? This despite statistics that suggest productivity is increasing? Does our government still work for "We The People"?

Sorry about the tangent put part of this is our fault. Many Americans have been trained to think the government is the enemy. The government is not the enemy; the government is us, you and I. The government is the means through which we work collectively to protect ourselves as individuals.

For example, without government we would have to test our own food and water for poisons and toxins. We would have to band together in groups to protect ourselves from each other. We would have to find a means to force our employers to pay the wages we agreed to. Without government the individual is powerless.

So, when it comes to corporations misusing our system to keep our wages down, dump oil on our beaches, release toxins into our ground water, or some other similarly destructive behavior it is up to us to stop it. Our means to fix these kinds of problems is our government. Now we need to decide if we want to use this government to solve our problems or scrap it, start over and create a new one.

Re:Overworked?

[aybiss]

So you went to college to do something you clearly weren't interested in in your spare time, and wondered why you weren't enjoying the class as much as everyone else? Were you seriously planning to be a career geek or did you just think you'd be rich once you had the piece of paper?

Re:Overworked?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm... I wonder if this could possibly have anything to do with the Jewish-led invasion of the United States, by non-whites? I wonder if it could possibly have anything to do with the OBVIOUS IQ differences between races? I wonder if a country that is full of non-whites could POSSIBLY be as thick and criminal as any other country full of useless, parasitic non-whites?

God help us all!

Re:Overworked?

[cbacba]

A common myth that is pervaisive is that throwing more time at a problem solves it quicker. Hint, when someone isn't at peak rested awareness, they make mistakes and sometimes when debugging miss the obvious.

Sure the grandstanding, stay up all night to fix the problem looks good to fools that don't know any better but the net results is more likely to require more days and more nights to fix the additional problems injected due to fatigue. Those problems would never have existed were one to leave at normal times then come back refreshed to tackle the original problem the next morning.

In a real crunch, one stupid stay late for an evening stunt can result in two days of wasted effort trying to fix both the original problem and the additional screwups due to fatigue.

While there are people around who have no life after work, this still applies because sleep deprivation has an impact.

This is not to say all is well and can be accomplished inside of 40 hours per week. Getting a degree and learning to do something well are different things. One doesn't learn any craft by quiting every day at 5pm. Any high paying job is going to demand more than the usual 40 hrs/wk out of you. If you don't have a demanding job, you still need to spend extra time on learning the craft (programming, engineering or whatever). And, if you go into business for yourself, the work load goes up, usually to 7 days per week over the long term.

But, you never ever try to move a project along when you're exhausted or tired because you'll be moving it in the wrong direction.

Ha ha

[tkrotchko]

...and Microsoft will do anything to solve this "crisis" except spend money on it.

That's the government's job! (i.e. yours and mine) ...and meanwhile keep those cheap programmers coming from overseas, otherwise, where will the next version of Windows come from?

Re:Ha ha

[morgan_greywolf]

...and Microsoft will do anything to solve this "crisis" except spend money on it. Ever heard of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? http://www.gatesfoundation.org/default

Addressing educational inequities, especially in the United States, is exactly what they do.

Re:Ha ha

[drinkypoo]

Addressing educational inequities, especially in the United States, is exactly what they do.

I thought investing in irresponsible companies, contributing to giving people respiratory failure is what they do.

Re:Ha ha

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

What does that have to do with Microsoft? And how is that contributing to the problem Bill is whining about? I seem to remember a lawsuit a few years back attacking Microsoft over calling people who weren't engineers engineers. I seem to remember people being encouraged to not finish their CS degree so MS didn't have to pay them as much in the long run. I seem to remember twenty years of vicious market monopoly abuse. Two or three years of giving a little bit back doesn't make up for being a robber baron for twenty. In fact, I don't know if a hundred will, the way the foundation manages itself.

Re:Ha ha

[tkrotchko]

It's a great foundation, and I think they're terrific. However, while Bill Gates is a big shareholder of Microsoft, and he is the owner of the Foundation, they don't appear to be related at all. That is, Microsoft's will is not expressed via the Foundation, which is a good thing. They're more concerned with at-risk children, and the welfare of the planet, which doesn't necessary align with Microsoft's business plan.

But, I went to the link, and it doesn't mention anything about training U.S. programmers to help the crisis. In fact, if you look here at this link, http://www.gatesfoundation.org/UnitedStates/ you'll see the only thing they're trying to do is make sure U.S. students graduate from high school:

    "Significantly increasing the number of students who graduate from high school with the skills needed to succeed in college and work"

Which I find is terrific. I love that Bill and Melinda have really stepped up and helped.

However, I'm asking what Microsoft (not Bill Gates) is doing to help the situation. I would be interesting to see if they're spending more on H1-B lobbying, or actually spending money in the areas that I mentioned (or indeed any sort of Computer Science/Programmer training and encouragement). Do you know where we might find out how much is spent in those areas?

Re:Ha ha

[Anonymous Coward]

> Addressing educational inequities, especially in the United States, is exactly what they do.

Any records on the foundations addressing the inequities through Linux, OpenSolaris, OpenOffice, and other free software instead of Windows and MS Office and other Microsoft technologies?

If that's not the case, then Microsoft would *gain* from the donations far more than they spend.

Re:Ha ha

[Canthros]

If the lawsuit you speak of was in Texas, then it's probably specific to the way engineer as a title is treated in Texas. Texas law requires that all engineers be certified. It was once a relatively lax certification, but ISTR that they've tightened it up a lot, so that it's equivalent to other states' PE cert. (This even applies to software engineers, and could have been the cause of such a lawsuit.)

Re:Ha ha

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a shame that Texas doesn't also have a requirement that its governors meet basic certification standards. It would have saved the whole country quite a bit of trouble.

Re:Ha ha

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever heard of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? Addressing educational inequities, especially in the United States, is exactly what they do.

Yeah, by subsidizing the spread of Intelligent Design in public schools.

Thanks, Bill, but that's OK. Really. You shouldn't have.

Re:Ha ha

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, really. Mr. Bill is just slinging the same ol' hash we've been hearing since Sputnik.

Allow me to quote one of Mr. Bill's "suggestions" --

"Two steps are critical. First, we must demand strong schools so that young Americans enter the workforce with the math, science and problem-solving skills they need to succeed in the knowledge economy. We must also make it easier for foreign-born scientists and engineers to work for U.S. companies."

First, the political nature of most school systems simply will not allow the production of more than a few people who can think for themselves and thereby become potential political competitors.

But assuming they would, I don't see how producing more math / science skill sets would make the US more competitive. After all, some nations have very rigorous education systems (e.g. UK, India, Russia, China) compared to the US and yet fall short economically.

The single most important factor in a nation's economic leadership lies in its' ability to encourage business risk-taking. Is Mr. Bill doing something to promote THAT?

Or here's another gem --

"American competitiveness also requires immigration reforms that reflect the importance of highly skilled foreign-born employees. Demand for specialized technical skills has long exceeded the supply of native-born workers with advanced degrees, and scientists and engineers from other countries fill this gap."

Maybe Mr. Bill's considerable intellect could try examining the process of obtaining advanced degrees in the US and why it seems more appealing to the foreign-born.

What's missing, as you'd expect from someone in the business world, is any personal commitment to changing things. All we get (for the umpteenth time) is an exhortation to get little Johnny and Susie to max out their "nerd credits" for the benefit of Microsoft's shareholders.

You'd think his speechwriters would craft something more...innovative. But then, when you sit atop a $500 billion mountain, perhaps people will mistake regurgitation of Cold War education psyop for the deep thinking of a guru.

Re:Ha ha

[dcam]

I don't think we want to see Microsoft schools.

Re:Ha ha

[Anonymous Coward]

From the link you provided in your post, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provided 3.4 billion $ in education grants in the US last year.

Given that state colleges seem to offer BSCS degress for about $15k to $20k per year tuition costs (let's assume $100k per BSCS graduate), if the foundation was truly interested in preserving American competitiveness, they could fund 34,000 BSCS degrees.

The numbers don't lie: if we need 100,000 CS graduates each year and the US grants only 65,000 H1-B's, then the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is fully capable of making up the difference! Why aren't they?

Re:Ha ha

[AK Marc]

I seem to remember a lawsuit a few years back attacking Microsoft over calling people who weren't engineers engineers.

There are accredited PE (professional engineers). They whine whenever anyone gets to use the "engineer" title, as if they have trademarked the word. An engineer is a person that designs, builds, runs, or repairs an engine. Well, that's at least what it used to mean. Now it is a meaningless word meant to describe some specific vocations which no one can agree on. For instance, I know an "electrical engineer" from the UK. He'd be called an "electrician" here. Some specific professional societies don't like other people using their word, so they sued about it. I didn't follow it, but I'm hoping they lost, because words shouldn't be defined by legislation and court decisions.

Re:Ha ha

[Fulcrum of Evil]

where will the next version of Windows come from?

I dunno, India or China?

That depends upon you and the job.

[khasim]

Some people prefer to work really late in "deep hack mode".

Others prefer 8-5 job and forget about the work when you leave.

It all depends upon your personality and the requirements of the job. And IF WHAT THE ARTICLE SAYS IS CORRECT finding a job more in line with your personality should be easy.

If what the article says is correct.

Re:That depends upon you and the job.

[cayenne8]

"Others prefer 8-5 job and forget about the work when you leave."

I dunno how people get SO into their jobs. I work to earn money to allow me to do and buy things I like. I have the opposite problem. I have to work hard to concentrate at work ON work....there are so many other things in life that interest me...

But, gotta pay for those interests somehow...so, I force myself to think about work. But, man, it sure leaves my head when that door hits me on the ass on the way out!!

That being said...what we are seeing now, with the shortage of college comp. sci grads...is mostly just a delayed reaction seem from a few years ago, when all the downsizing hit, and so many tech jobs were being moved offshore...and IT salaries were being cut for the jobs that did remain.

This scared the shit outta kids in college and before I would guess. I mean, why would you consider a career in a field that took a good bit of study and effort if there was not a good paying job in the end?

I mean, if you like to hack around on computers, you can easily do that on your own time....while earning a healthy living doing something else.

If IT jobs keep getting more plentiful, and salaries start getting decent again...kids will start studying it for a career again.

Re:That depends upon you and the job.

[Anonymous Coward]

The message in the article is to emphasize innovation. Brain-dead IT jobs, regardless of the pay and availability, lack the innovation and are out of the scope of the article.

Re:That depends upon you and the job.

[TheGeneration]

*sigh*

If anything is going to cause America to fall behind in the tech sector it's the CEO's and other top execs at major companies that won't let the rest of us practice our ART the way we see fit to do so.

Re:That depends upon you and the job.

[nebaz]

I don't generally like to feed the trolls, but...
Which country works the most?

Re:That depends upon you and the job.

[flibuste]

That's a very typical American viewpoint. That's why your culture is failing. The lot of you would rather woolgather and play than be an active part of your society.

I'm not what you could call an american culture fan-boy, far from it, but that statement is so totally misinformed and glaring with ignorance that I needed to react.

I suggest you visit Manhattan offices and check how people work. Some work 12h straight, then work while commuting (2h), then sleep and come back. They are people dedicated to their work, but also an awful lot of people worried to lose their job.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, you'd collectively also rather massacre and pillage other cultures than be responsible human beings. That's why so many people from other nations hate people from yours.

People who hate people are morons, just like you. Maybe what people don't like is the way this nation is being ruled or governed? Anyway, that's temporary, not like your stupidity which sounds endless

Re:That depends upon you and the job.

[rjshields]

Actually I've found most Americans to be very into their work and enthusiastic about it, sometimes to the point of letting work get in the way of social and family life.

I'm not American and I wouldn't say I hate American people, although there are certain things I dislike about their culture (fast food, SUV culture, guns, software patents and excessive litigation to name a few).

Re:That depends upon you and the job.

[0p7imu5_P2im3]

<sarcasm>I do so love it when those outside of this extremist hellhole automatically assume that we're all Bush lovers who totally agree with everything that our government does and that we're all lazy, good-for-nothings. It really makes me want to agree with them.</sarcasm>

Democracy is never free of mistakes, but it is more likely to fix them more beneficially than other forms of government.

If you really wish to make us think about what we're doing, try asking us why even though greater 65% of us claim to be Christian, we seek to kill our enemies, which the teachings of Christ expressly condemn. Some of us here have been whispering this question because we fear for our lives. You, being on the outside, can yell it from the mountain tops without fear of reprisal.

So why don't you do that rather than assuming that we're all the same.

Re:That depends upon you and the job.

[ShieldW0lf]

Whatever. 90% of people who work in offices aren't working, they're bossing people around, leveraging people against each other, and generally making problems for people.

People in capitalist cultures have a warped idea about what work is.

Think people who are cashiers are working? 100% of cashiers are producing nothing of any value. Cashier just watches the food to make sure you don't get any unless you obey via the money-mechanism, calls the cops if you make trouble, sits on their ass otherwise.

American society embodies this wasteful shit, all symptoms of a culture where people actually feel like they're a sucker if they do anything useful without the motivation of the "long and subtle stick", and end up being willing to do anything to become the one wielding it instead of being hit by it. And of course, once they get there, the societal code says they must exploit it to its maximum capacity for personal gain or it will be taken away from them.

Anyone who is doing their job solely for money is an amoral and short-sighted individual who shouldn't be trusted with any authority over anyone or responsibility for anything.

How many hours they clock doesn't really have anything to do with it. It's a matter of perspective.

You want to see an example of it in action, look at how the interactions between Edison and Tesla played out, and how much of the foundations of modern American society came from that.

Call me a moron if you like. I'm looking forward to watching you all eat crow.

Re:That depends upon you and the job.

[ShieldW0lf]

Democracy is never free of mistakes, but it is more likely to fix them more beneficially than other forms of government.

If you really wish to make us think about what we're doing, try asking us why even though greater 65% of us claim to be Christian, we seek to kill our enemies, which the teachings of Christ expressly condemn. Some of us here have been whispering this question because we fear for our lives. You, being on the outside, can yell it from the mountain tops without fear of reprisal.

So why don't you do that rather than assuming that we're all the same.

Honestly?

I yell it because I want you to stop, of course. I don't hate people, I hate stupidity, short-sightedness, blindness, and the vast sea of people who are working hard to sustain this stupid short-sighted blindness.

I want to forgive people, turn the other cheek, and help them all live together peacefully and well, but I'd like them to take their foot off my neck first.

I also want to piss you off enough to make you reveal the underlying motivations that the existing system fulfills for you instead of having a polite discussion that never gets past the surface mechanisms to the meat of why we do what we do.

It lets me polish my view of "how things ought to be" until there's a place for everyone, so when I'm older and at the apex of my personal and political power, I might have something to say that people can actually rally behind.

Walking into a place, talking to everyone there until I understand the underlying system of what they do and why they do it, designing infrastructure to support doing it in a way that's better for every participant, then walking away and letting them run with it, that's what I do.

Oh, and you're not simply whispering to save your life. You're whispering because you'd prefer to trade your life for the lives of the people outside your country who are suffering at the hands of the mechanisms you silently help sustain.

People aren't stupid, they understand that. That's why the "terrorists" who are trying to get the US military to go home have issued public calls for attacks on Canadian energy infrastructure.

We publicly condemn these aggressive wars, yet we are still silently supporting it by shipping oil and gas across the border. Therefore, have made attacking us into a legitimate defensive tactic for those who live in the middle east.

The actions of your nation, coupled together with the exploitation of corruptibility my nations administrative process, has put me personally under threat.

Your nation is under threat because your nation IS an ongoing threat. Clean up your mess so other people don't have to and you won't be attacked. Verbally or otherwise.

Think I like having to say shit like this?

Re:That depends upon you and the job.

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

that study stems from information that is >10 years old.

Re:That depends upon you and the job.

[dodobh]

I dunno how people get SO into their jobs. I work to earn money to allow me to do and buy things I like. I have the opposite problem. I have to work hard to concentrate at work ON work....there are so many other things in life that interest me...

Some of us happen to love what we do. It stops being work, and becomes play.

Re:That depends upon you and the job.

[0p7imu5_P2im3]

There you go doing it again. I would not prefer to have my life if it means anyone had to die in my place. However, the same Bible that tells me to love my enemy and do good to them who hate me, also tells me to respect the governing authorities because God put them there. It doesn't say obey them. A paraphrasing of Romans 13:1-7; "Don't piss off the government because they'll kill you." I disagree with what my government started in Iraq. But saying that is all my God allows me to do. I can continue to support politicians that disagree with it and hopefully change it. I thank God we have a democracy, because without it, even that course would not be available.

Please, consider that the very people that you accuse may be the same people who are working for change. However, your prejudicial and unfounded discrimination just makes them want to give up. It makes them think, "What's the point? Even if I am successful, it will never be enough for these people."

Incidentally, you might want to read the post to which you are responding more closely next time. If you'll reread my post, you may notice I suggested you yell it. I didn't ask you why. It is important that you be heard. If you, and others like you, are not heard, then change will never happen.

Re:That depends upon you and the job.

[flibuste]

Dear non-american (like me), let me tell you how wrong you are on so many levels...

90% of people who work in offices aren't working, they're bossing people around, leveraging people against each other, and generally making problems for people.

If that'd be the case, people in offices would not produce anything. I don't see such a sea of immobilism...Actually, USA has the best growth rate of the so called "developped countries". There must be something happening there which doesn't involve bossing around or creating problems. Negative thoughts like yours create problems for others and don't make anything move forward and is totally counter-productive.

Think people who are cashiers are working? 100% of cashiers are producing nothing of any value. Cashier just watches the food to make sure you don't get any unless you obey via the money-mechanism, calls the cops if you make trouble, sits on their ass otherwise.

You said it yourself, and that's where the value is: "cashier just watches the food to make sure you don't get any unless you" [pay], which is exactly the added value that is looked after. Your views are totally biased, non-objective and false.

You want to see an example of it in action, look at how the interactions between Edison and Tesla played out, and how much of the foundations of modern American society came from that.

Really, I don't understand the parallel you're trying to make. Yes, Edison spoiled Tesla of most of its work, but spoilage is a sport as old as mankind and there are a lot of examples in history that don't relate to America. Even antic greece has stories of spoiling people. Again, you're trying to make a point with a biased argument, just because you hate a model you cannot understand (can't blame you, it's unfortunately the basic reaction of humans who have an average intelligence and can't really think out of the box - talk about being media-brainwashed...).

Now, you seem to blame People in capitalist cultures. I don't know what political regime you live under, but it's probably just as bad. None of the economical models applied so far make everyone happy, wealthy and in good health. Most "capitalist" countries have been doing much better than communists ones for the last century, and the few socialist countries are turning to all-out capitalism , China being the best example of that, or to arguably honest tactics like Russia jailing the director of an oil company in order to take control of the company, then use it against neighbouring countries as an instrument of economical threat.

And now, for the best part:

Anyone who is doing their job solely for money is an amoral and short-sighted individual

Do you honestly think that:

• The cashier being paid to survey the shop has any choice?
• The guys who removes YOUR trash from the streets at 4AM in cold winter have any choice?
• The woman cleaning the windows at your office has any choice?

Here's a scoop: they DON'T have the choice. They need to make a living, just like me, just like you. Everyone would rather park their butt at the beach or at the bar all day.
The more I think about it, the more I suppose you're totally misinformed and probably live very confortably somewhere where the average confyness is very low. You're probably a privilegded person in your own country, yet it's not enough for you and you'd rather spit on the hard-working people rather than introspect yourself to find out you're exactly like everyone else.

I'll tell you what: I'm proud to not be you

Re:That depends upon you and the job.

[Bastard of Subhumani]

IF WHAT THE ARTICLE SAYS IS CORRECT finding a job more in line with your personality should be easy.

Being unemployed isn't really a job.

Re:That depends upon you and the job.

[ShieldW0lf]

I will not attack you on the basis of your faith. I will only say, in my opinion, one of the intrinsic challenges that is going to have to be faced and overcome in creating a fundamental system that allows 6 billion people and growing to co-exist with freedom and happiness is going to be making it cater to Christians, Muslims, Jews and everyone else well enough that you can all in good heart set aside your divisive superstitions once and for all and come together as "one people living under a yellow star at the moment".

Re:That depends upon you and the job.

[Anonymous Coward]

Those aren't Americans, those are Republicans.

Re:That depends upon you and the job.

[h2_plus_O]

Cashier just watches the food to make sure you don't get any unless you obey via the money-mechanism, calls the cops if you make trouble

This has value. It's worth it for the employer to have someone handle the money and manage inventory.

It's easy to think that because someone isn't actually making the product, they're not producing anything of value, especially if you're an engineer (as I am). Unfortunately for folks with this view, more is necessary than just producing a good product. Without sales people or marketing people, your customers can't get your product- and until they do, nobody gets paid.

It's interesting that this view surfaces time and again on Slashdot- something on the order of 'marketing, sales, management don't add value'. If that were true, there would have to be some reason why companies hire them- and there would need to be some way to explain why second-rate technology companies with highly effective sales and marketing organizations tend to mop the marketplace floor with first-rate software engineering shops who don't. Surely vast capitalist conspiracies and illegal monopolies are more plausible explanations for why management and marketing are better-paid than you think they should be, and Windows is on more desktops than your favorite flavor, right? ...because it's just plain crazy talk to think that anybody but us geeks does anything of value, man.

Mod me troll all you want- but there's a big difference between someone delivering no value and you failing completely to understand the value they deliver.

Re:That depends upon you and the job.

[epee1221]

That's a very typical American viewpoint. That's why your culture is failing. The lot of you would rather woolgather and play than be an active part of your society.

Ever here the saying, "It takes a village to raise a child"? That's active participation in society. Are you familiar with the fundamentals of democracy? That's active participation in society.
Not that there aren't disturbing shortages of those, but there's a heck of a lot more to being "an active part of society" than putting in hours at the office. Drones may be productive, but they aren't great for innovation/progress, and they're terrible when it comes to family life.

Re:That depends upon you and the job.

[OceanBarb]

A lot of places are still trying to hire people for end user support that has been decentralized. I don't mean pulling cable to new cubicles, because that stuff has been outsourced for a long time at a lot of shops. What I mean is, can you produce database tools for managers or sales people that help them better understand their jobs and sell more stuff? This usually means having some kind of ERP knowledge and a great background in Excel and Access. Sometimes it means building web-based things on their intranets. Doesn't hurt to read a lot on interface design and also everything by Ed Tufte and similar authors. What I am talking about is the very unglamorous stuff like taking whatever budget tools they are using and adapting them for lower levels of management that don't get to play with the licensed copies of the budget stuff. Companies still haven't figured out how to hold the vendors accountable for the implementation screwups when things don't work according to plan, and so they end up fixing a lot of things. Do a few different projects like this and move around and you get a real good idea of how the company actually works and how the software and hardware tools should be working for them. It's fun, and it pays pretty well.

Hmm

[Erwos]

Seems to me that the appropriate way of handling this issue would be for the US to encourage more students to take up CS as their degree, and do more to encourage smart, well-educated professionals to immigrate here - permanently. Temporary visas and the like seem to be band-aids rather than real solutions.

I don't care where they're from - this country can only do better to have more educated folks living in it.

Re:Hmm

[cnlohfin3109]

ooorrr, disencourage people to get into the major. Im getting offers weekly from all over the states and I still have a year left of college. The "crisis" is terrible alright... I may get to work where I want to work and get paid well for it.

Re:Hmm

[Old Grey Beard]

I disagree. More workers is more of a workaround than a solution, and doesn't scale well.

A better approach is to make IT software smarter so you don't need so many employees.

(But I also agree having talented immigrants is invariably good for the host country, even though it's taking my job away or cutting my salary. Creative destruction and all that).

Re:Hmm

[Erwos]

I disagree; you need both, and I think this is actually mathematically provable (unless the cost of labor and/or technology is zero, which they aren't). In a classical output optimization problem, you've got two variables: physical labor and technology. At a certain point, it's inefficient to start substituting technology for labor, and vica versa. This is exactly why in Japan, where labor is getting comparatively more expensive/scarce than here, you see greater use of robotics/technology in output production. It's not that they're "better" than the US or Europe - they've just got a different set of variables to work with.

More technology is not always the best answer. I know that rankles some of the Slashdot crowd, but that's the way it happens.

Re:Hmm

[OldAndSlow]

How exactly would you have the US encourage folks to study CS? For better or worse, the US is capitalist, free market. So to encourage people to become computer scientists, we should increase CS salaries.

Instead, our government, at the behest of companies like Microsoft, is doing its best to suppress engineering salaries. Gates says we need 100,000 developers a year. Gates says we bring in 65,000 H1-B's a year. My experience is that H1-B's make half what citizens and green card holders make. You do the math. Why should any rational person invest $100,000 to $250,000 for a degree that lets them compete with folks who think $25/hr is a great wage?

Re:Hmm

[cnlohfin3109]

More technology is not always the best answer. blasphemy

Re:Hmm

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Not to mention- it sure would be nice to make computer science an evolutionarily viable career. Say, enough time off to find a wife, have kids, raise a family; while still keeping a salary large enough to pay for such things. That sort of thing.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Maryland offered a scholarship for those entering state schools, majoring in computer science. For each year you took the scholarship, you were bound to work in the state for a year in that field. It was gov Glendening's way of filling the need for the jobs.

Unfortunately, I took this scholarship for 4 years, only to have to leave school 40 credits shy of my degree. I've now been working in the state for over three years, but since I didn't get my degree I'm obligated to pay the whole thing back (at a reasonable interest rate).

Dirty tactic, but it worked for suckers like me!

Re:Hmm

[KPU]

Or pay for my tuition.

Re:Hmm

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

I agree. Encouraging short-term "intellectual migrants" who you work to the bone (because you can) is a very self defeating policy. It would be much more valuable to a country to encourage those folks to either become citizens or (gasp) encourage its own citizens to get degrees in computer science. The latter would be relatively simple to accomplish with a scholarship/grant program.

Cheers,

Re:Hmm

[JP205]

One solution could be to offer scholar ships for students perusing a degree in Computer Science. But yes increasing salaries would help as well.

Re:Hmm

[Erwos]

You're referring to the HOPE scholarship program. I took that scholarship, but my GPA dropped too low to qualify for it after a year. I still got my CS degree, though, and managed to fulfill my obligations vis a vis working in the state. It was an excellent program, and one of the few things that Glendening actually got right.

Re:Hmm

[StarvingSE]

It is blasphemy, because everyone knows the answer is to always add another layer of abstraction!

Re:Hmm

[VGPowerlord]

Maybe if universities didn't require Calculus I-IV for CS degrees, more people would get them.

That's why I never got one. I tried (AP) Calculus in high school and hated it.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

...and then a CS degree would be devalued.

Maybe not every concept in Calculus I-IV is absolutely critical, but I find it amazing that people will, in general, dismiss the importance of mathematics to computer science.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to me that the appropriate way of handling this issue would be for the US to encourage more students to take up CS as their degree, and do more to encourage smart, well-educated professionals to immigrate here - permanently. Temporary visas and the like seem to be band-aids rather than real solutions. You sir, are absolutely correct. Allowing educated professionals to immigrate here permanently is key. Sure, temporary visas are band-aids but it would cost these companies more money to do it the "right" way. As such, it isn't going to happen.

What is Bill's answer to the education problem in the U.S.? As if it makes a big difference anyway (the education problem is a real one but not the only nor one of the biggest problems in the larger scheme of things - but the larger problems are not what the article talks about so I will not address them in this post), Bill thinks the government (i.e. the taxpayer) should spend more on education. Get more people with degrees, that will solve it. Yeah, ok.

Bill Gates can talk about how we need to improve the education system here in the U.S. all he wants (it's true, it does need much improvement) but that alone isn't going to solve the problem. The 25% of people in China with the highest IQs is greater than the total population of North America. In India, it is 28%. They have more honors kids than we have kids. Think about that for a second.

It is becoming more and more true that degrees are outdated. In reality, more of what we need are not people with a piece of paper but more people with skill sets. To me, this way of thinking leads to the greatest possible improvement and efficiency of the education system - trade schools of one sort or another. People will need to be able to focus on their desired skill sets from an earlier age if we are to produce greater numbers of skilled workers.

True change is not easy and will be met with resistance from those who are protecting their piece of the status quo. The real answer to this problem is not just "we have to throw more taxpayer money at education to educate more people". The real answer is to change the way we educate.

Re:Hmm

[hernyo]

Right, companies should find a way to make their employees happy. Smiley face means better code.

Eastern Europeans are lucky: there is an enourmous need for programmers and employers do almost anything to make their coders happy. Also, (I think) all European countries offer 20+ days paid holiday for the employees - yep, that's at least a month. Some countries have 30 days, that's 6 weeks paid holiday. Quite enough to have a decent life.

As far as I know US laws offer something like 5 days paid holiday (not sure).

Hahaa... US coders, move to Romania! :)

Re:Hmm

[Coryoth]

The alternative is abstract algebra (groups, rings, fields, etc.), graph theory and category theory. I doubt you'd like that too much more. The reality is that CS degrees require mathematics, and lots of it. If you want a programming diploma head to a trade school.

Re:Hmm

[naoursla]

It is worse than that. Bringing in foreign workers lowers wages. Lower wages reduce incentives to go into computer science. Lower graduation in computer science does not result in higher wages as supply/demand equations dictate. Instead, we exasperate the problem by bringing in more foreign workers.

We are systematically destroying America's technological advantage by outsourcing everything we need in the name of short-term profits.

Re:Hmm

[dcam]

Seems to me if Microsoft made the career more attractive people might look into it.

When salaries go up, the shortage is real

[Animats]

There's no shortage. Salaries are too low.

As the IEEE points out, relative engineering salaries have been declining since the 1970s.

What Gates is whining about is that there aren't enough people willing to learn the ins and outs of Microsoft's software and work around its problems in the field. What he wants are cheap janitors to clean up the Mess from Redmond.

Re:When salaries go up, the shortage is real

[CrazyJim1]

Yah, Redmond isn't the place to be with a CS degree, you want to be in gaming specifically Electronic Arts.

Re:When salaries go up, the shortage is real

[Anonymous Coward]

Certainly he wants the work to be done as inexpensively as possible. Any well run business should want the same thing as those that allow salaries to grow out of control are doomed in the long run.

Among the many many mistakes made by the US auto industry was the thinking that since labor was such a small percentage of what it cost to make their product they didn't need to control it. Before long a guy running a screw gun was making $22/hour to screw in a tenth as many screws as a robot in Japan with a capitalized cost of $0.001/hour. Then our US screw gun operator himself was replaced by a robot but he couldn't fired because the collective bargaining agreement prevented it, so he sat in the break room and made $22/hour to play hearts with all the other guys who used to do robot jobs.

As much as people like you want to bleat about how much you need to make to live like a human being the reality is that there are thousands of people right now making rafts out of the empty chemical barrels we sent them our waste in, preparing to cross miles and miles of ocean, so they can crawl through a drain pipe, just for the privlege of doing twice as much as you do for half the pay and far less than half the complaining. So sit here and bellyache about how Microsoft won't pay this or that and that isn't enough money. Someone will be along shortly to make you irrelevant anyway. People like you laughed when all the manufacturing jobs were outsourced, now we see that an engineer and a programmer and even a doctor, can be replaced by a cheaper version just like the screw gun guy.

Re:When salaries go up, the shortage is real

[cnlohfin3109]

where does the ieee point this out? Ive been looking for it and ive only found things like http://www.stargazettenews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artic le?AID=/20070225/BUSINESS02/702250319 http://esj.com/it_info_center/article.aspx?Editori alsID=27 that say its been going up. If it is just survey of IEEE members... eh. Here at least (rochester mn) CS majors (good ones, C and D students obviously has a harder time) are getting paid more out of college then nursing(mayo) students.

Need to quit being so greedy and expecting 300k for a job that is not really that hard. Dont be a emo, quit whining!

Re:When salaries go up, the shortage is real

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Any well run business should want the same thing as those that allow salaries to grow out of control are doomed in the long run.

Mr. Ford proved that wrong back in 1908. Increasing salaries causes inflation, which increases the number of consumers that can afford luxury products like computers- and allows you to charge more for your operating systems.

As much as people like you want to bleat about how much you need to make to live like a human being the reality is that there are thousands of people right now making rafts out of the empty chemical barrels we sent them our waste in, preparing to cross miles and miles of ocean, so they can crawl through a drain pipe, just for the privlege of doing twice as much as you do for half the pay and far less than half the complaining.

Now there's an idea of what to do with all of those excess cargo containers China is sending us! Unemployed, overeducated Americans need to make rafts out of them to cross thousands of miles of ocean to become illegal immigrants in India! I wonder what that overpopulated country would do in that case? Something tells me they won't treat us as well as we've treated their H-1bs.

Re:When salaries go up, the shortage is real

[flibuste]

Before long a guy running a screw gun was making $22/hour to screw in a tenth as many screws as a robot in Japan with a capitalized cost of $0.001/hour. Then our US screw gun operator himself was replaced by a robot but he couldn't fired because the collective bargaining agreement prevented it, so he sat in the break room and made $22/hour to play hearts with all the other guys who used to do robot jobs

Thinking about it, I see abolutely nothing wrong paying someone $22/h plus $0.01 for a robot if the same job can be done, and the said person sits doing nothing (or other more interesting things).

If salaries don't grow, people don't eat because inflation does anyway. Your brain-washed anti-union mindset doesn't work well. The automotive industry is here to remind us of that every day. It failed miserably thinking humans are replaceable at low cost.

Re:When salaries go up, the shortage is real

[Anonymous Coward]

Thinking about it...

I'm pretty sure that phrase doesn't mean what you think it does.

Re:When salaries go up, the shortage is real

[mbrod]

Engineer's and Chemist's used to get paid more than doctors. Now I would say they get 1/2 to a 1/10th what they do.

I love the intellectual challenge of programming and will hopefully continue to do it professionally. However, knowing what I know now, the right field is medicine. It is intellectually challenging, the pay is better, and you can move around jobs easier.

Anyone asking me which carrear path to follow I tell them if you don't really really love IT or programming then go medicine. I don't see the pendulum swinging back the other way any time soon.

Re:When salaries go up, the shortage is real

[Tablizer]

Here at least (rochester mn) CS majors (good ones, C and D students obviously has a harder time) are getting paid more out of college then nursing(mayo) students.

Pay out of college does not tell you much about long-term prospects. IT tends not to value general experience as much as other fields. Plus in IT you have to constantly be learning new stuff such that your education is ongoing if you want to stay competative and flexible. And, it is more volatile. People get sick during high times and during recessions so nurses are always in demand. However, IT tends to take a big dump during recessions because upgrades are put off.

Bill Gates is always yammering for more H1B's. It costs him almost nothing to lobby for it, regardless of whether there is really a "shortage" or not. He wants cheap and plentiful labor, regardless of the impact on employees.

Re:When salaries go up, the shortage is real

[Ernesto Alvarez]

I don't recall the IEEE saying anything about the "shortage" of computer specialists. Maybe I missed it, maybe the other posters are mistaking the IEEE with the Rand Corporation.

I think you should read the paper RAND wrote. It describes exactly what everyone is talking about in this thread.

How about the 17-year education lag?

[UbuntuDupe]

How about the fact that most people have to go through 17+ years of education to do one of these jobs (k-12 + 4-year program) even though you clearly don't need that much training? Plus either get someone else to pay for it or go deep in debt at an early age. Most of the education system has very little to do with your job, and everything to do with ID'ing yourself as in the x-th percentile of intelligence, because employers can't run such tests themselves.

I mean, it's great to learn all that extra stuff, get new "perspectives", be "well-rounded", etc. I won't deny that at all. But isn't it more important that you be able to live independently first, in a job commensurate with your abilities?

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[drinkypoo]

I mean, it's great to learn all that extra stuff, get new "perspectives", be "well-rounded", etc. I won't deny that at all. But isn't it more important that you be able to live independently first, in a job commensurate with your abilities?

What you're talking about is a program that would produce mindless drones. We expose people to a multitude of content in school so that they are aware of things beyond the end of their nose.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[UbuntuDupe]

Give me a break. Someone lacking the liberal arts education required up through a four-year program is a "mindless drone" who is unaware of "things beyond the end of their nose"?

Again, I agree these things are great to have, but it's a matter of prioritization. Do you really support holding all kinds of productive people off the market, dependent, deep in debt at an unnecessarily young age to avoid the horrors of insufficient Shakespeare appreciation?

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[Anonymous Coward]

everything to do with ID'ing yourself as in the x-th percentile of intelligence

Unfortunately this is not true. I'm in the 99.9th percentile as far as intelligence (at least according to the Triple Nine Society) but I only have a Bachelor's degree and a not-very-good GPA, which is enough to keep me from going to a good graduate school. Why is my GPA so low? Because schools don't measure intelligence.

When I was in elementary school I began to realize that there is a "sweet spot" for intelligence in school. Since then I've seen more and more evidence of it. As a student's intelligence approaches the sweet spot from below, the student gets higher and higher grades. But if intelligence continues to increase past that, grades begin to go back down. (Of course there are other factors besides intelligence that can cause low grades, but the main idea is valid.) This is why "gifted" programs work -- "gifted" students actually get better grades in harder courses because the standard courses bore them to death. But even "gifted" programs have a "sweet spot" beyond which your intelligence starts to work against you. (I put "gifted" in quotes because it presupposes someone doing the gifting.)

After ten years I am considering leaving the computer field. In the jobs I've held so far, I've brought knowledge from my education and from books only to be disallowed from using it because the boss doesn't know how to use it, has no way of verifying that I'm using it correctly, and is terrified of having to find another employee who knows it too. And yet, I don't know any other way to get the job done, so I end up using the knowledge I have anyway. This makes me "disobedient." When the books and the evidence show that I am right, this makes my situation even worse. No boss likes to be proved wrong.

My mother is a math teacher. Her students always complain to her, "Why do we have to learn this stuff? We'll never have to use it!" Sadly, I find myself siding with the students: if you go to the trouble to learn, say, differential equations, you won't be able to use them because you won't be able to find a boss who understands them enough to allow you to use them.

Intelligence is an asset when you use it against the natural world. But it seems to be an enormous liability in society. So don't go thinking that employers want intelligence. They don't. They want obedience. And that is what schools really measure: people whose intelligence is below the "sweet spot" can't understand orders well enough to obey them, but people whose intelligence is above that point understand their orders too well and tend to question them, and that isn't wanted either.

That is why employers are in a quandary with engineering. Engineering demands intelligence and intelligence doesn't work well with obedience. Some of this is due to American culture, too, where, in spite of the school system, people are raised with the ideas of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," which is why many employers prefer to outsource to cultures where obedience to authority is a more important and accepted part of life.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[Maxo-Texas]

This is one of the most insightful comment I've seen on slashdot in ages.

I'm not as smart as you are but i was smart enough to realize what you are saying in my 30's and it improved things dramatically. I often get my work down in a third of the time and then quietly wait for everyone else to catch up. I no longer correct my bosses when they are hideously wrong but try to find ways to highlight facts so they can realize and come to the conclusion themselves. But if they never get it, that's okay too- they are happy and not irritated with me for correcting them.

I read a wonderful book called people smart and it said, "You get one "no" for every nine "yes"'s". I save my "no"'s for truly critical situations now and otherwise say yes. Counter-intuitively, you get more done because when people like you, everythng is easier. It's better in business to be liked than to be right.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[mp3phish]

I don't mean to be disrespectful to you, but why are you being a yes man to your boss?

That is the most ridiculous strategy I have ever heard about. I mean, there are times to bite your tung and take it, but 9 of 10? or even a majority of the time? Saying yes when you know its no should happen almost never. Maybe in extreme circumstances where you have too many battles already on your desk.

If you can't express yourself to your boss without being hated or whatever, then you need a new boss or a new job. Otherwise, maybe your just too lazy.

Not liking you because you said no is a problem your boss needs to deal with, not you. If you have one of "those kinds of bosses" then maybe a good strategy would be to train them to expect no, rather than just being a yes man.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[Eagleartoo]

Do you really support holding all kinds of productive people off the market, dependent, deep in debt at an unnecessarily young age to avoid the horrors of insufficient Shakespeare appreciation?

Dude you're a genius!

I've never met a child that wasn't interested in their surroundings. When I hear of something that I don't know about, I usually go out and check it out myself. Living in a culture that is so connected to massive amounts of information, there are certain things in life you can't avoid. It does seem to me though that there is an intentional slavery being imposed by spreading the common knowledge that you HAVE to go to college. What ever happened to apprenticeships, and if they (corporate/financial/governmental america) REALLY wanted this country to boom they'd be trying to get kids into college by the age of 14. I know that not all children could learn the necessary things at that speed, but we have a generation (to which I belong) of sh!t for brains, cram full of useless propoganda and very little education. If capitalism is so great, start them early. Get them producing incomes as soon as they are able. That's American exceptionalism.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[drinkypoo]

Give me a break. Someone lacking the liberal arts education required up through a four-year program is a "mindless drone" who is unaware of "things beyond the end of their nose"?

Most people WITH the liberal arts education etc etc are mindless drones etc etc. Giving them the material simply exposes them to more things, which gives them a chance to engage their brain.

There is simply a certain amount of cultural background that you need to make sense of the world in which we live. Educators seek to provide that background. They can only do so much within the structure of the school, but they make the attempt.

In a world in which we are continually repeating the mistakes of our forebears, I think a little more education is in order.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[b1ad3runn3r]

Isn't there a measure of advancement of a civilization that uses knowledge of things outside primary means of support for it's citizens as a basis? Thus a nation of robots gets a 0, and Ancient Greece gets a XXXX. Your suggestion would seem to have a negative effect on our civilizational (word?) maturity.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[loganrapp]

That's what two years basic general education is for.

But once I'm done with that, instead of just being able to work on my major, I'm distracted by having to take "liberal arts and sciences," which, strangely enough, only accept general education classes!

When I'm done with my general ed, I want to work on what I came to college for. As a media production major, my work doesn't end at the end of class time. I come on to campus an hour before my class and I leave three hours after it ends because it's project-based, and we broadcast them on our local Comcast station, or our local radio station (I'm doing both TV and radio, this semester).

So tell me, after I've paid my dues for two fucking years, staving off my major classes so I can only focus on "broadening my horizons," (which, aside from Introduction to Human Sexuality, is a fucking crock) - why should I have to deal with Fundamentals of Public Speaking (when I've already aced a similar class for a requirement)?

There's learning about the world around you, and then there's throwing an anchor around your neck.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[Maxo-Texas]

Answering your question: I'm being a "yes" man to the boss because (as I said above), they do what I want most if I say yes. If I say, "yes" nine times but dig in my heals and say "no" when they ask for something, they are much more likely to listen and consider my position because they like me because I've built up good will. Even better, when then is a plum special training class, a chance at promotion, or a sweet conference, I get told about it earlier because they like me and talk casually with me. They are irritated with mp3phish who is always straight with them and they don't tell him out of pure petulance.

When they do my reviews, they let my numbers slide and I routinely get excellent marks for reasonable effort while surly mp3phish gets "meets expectations" and maybe a "exceeds" if he kills himself on a project.

If you are happy and successful with your approach, then go for it. It works for you. For me, using the "people smart" things greatly improved my life. I recommend it highly.

Until I read it, I was right more but got what I wanted a lot less.

The other tips were:

Before you say anything - smile. (if male or a female with authority- dicey for females without authority). Feel it and mean it and they will often do the same. If nothing else, you feel good for a couple seconds going into the meeting.

Learn and use people's names. It is the most important word in the world to them. You validate and recognize their existance.

---

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with being a yes-man is this: your boss gives you an order and you know it isn't going to work. So, you can either refuse -- in which case you're "disobedient" -- or you can do it anyway, in which case it won't work, and then you're "incompetent." Some choice, huh?

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[Dan Slotman]

I wish you hadn't posted anonymously so that I could 'friend' you. I don't agree with all the ideas expressed in this post, but they are definitely interesting.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[drinkypoo]

So tell me, after I've paid my dues for two fucking years, staving off my major classes so I can only focus on "broadening my horizons," (which, aside from Introduction to Human Sexuality, is a fucking crock) - why should I have to deal with Fundamentals of Public Speaking (when I've already aced a similar class for a requirement)?

That particular requirement is because your school wants more money.

If you don't want to take any such classes, attend a technical school.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[FATRanger]

Really the whole saying yes thing is about being agreeable, and most of the time that is what the boss wants. I find that most questions placed upon "engineers" by managers are inconsequential and is simply helping out the manager with his/her mental-exercise-of-the-moment (to put it politely), so by simply saying yes or a qualified yes, you allow your manager to keep mentally turning the wheels and not interrupt their fantasy.

Going along in the above manner will make one more far less dislikeable and prevent you from being labelled a mr-can't-do, so that when you are asked a question that really affects the business - as in if it goes wrong you could be out of a job - you can answer honestly and have your answer be taken into serious consideration. But even in those circumstances you only have a 50% shot of being heard, that is why I recommend to people who do not care for their job to find a hobby, because not caring about what you do with your life is no way to live.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[Maxo-Texas]

Something else occured to me during lunch. I was caught a bit flat footed by your "yes man to the boss" comment but I'm a yes man to *everyone*.

Every person I have a relationship with, I get one no for every nine yes's.

A co-worker offers to do the project but they want to use a methodology I don't think is best... I let them do it they way they want to- they are doing the work.

A girlfriend offers to help me with something but is going to do it in a way I don't think is best... same thing.

I only say "no" if it is critical.

But how do you decide if it is critical? Humans left to our own judgement would promote everything to critical.

By making a hard budget that I have to say "yes" most the time, it forces me to save my "no"s with two effects.
1) People like me since I'm not arguing with them and saying their opinion, approach, etc. was as good as mine.
2) When I DO say no, they tend to pay attention since I do it so rarely. Since I respected their opinion so many times, they tend to respect mine.

You are not respected for being right until after you are dead. If you are brilliant and driven- go for it. But if you want a happy life with real respect and appreciation today, then you need to let other people be right (even if you know they are not) on a lot of non-critical stuff.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[Maxo-Texas]

Yes.

My job is a way to get them to get me money.
If I was brilliant or had a passion about something that made money, I'd do that.

But my passions is playing boardgames and roleplaying, crafting doo-dads, massage, and downhill skiing. None of those pay but I enjoy the heck out of them. I work so I can afford to do those things.

In a big corporation like mine, they even make it clear they specifically do not want you to care. It even comes up on all internal interviews. Something like "what would you do if you had a big project about 75% complete and another project was slotted ahead of it". The "correct" answer is "I'd document where i was so I could resume later and sit it aside and start on the new project." And then we both smile because we know that was the checkbox answer. You care about what management wants you to care about. If you care too much about your projects you *will* be written up and maybe even counseled (and maybe even be let go).

I cared about my first job- had it 15 years. All that work spent a few years in a box in a Dallas safe after that company was bought and has probably been thrown out. Now I don't care about programs or business any more.
I put in a good days work for a good days pay and I'm pleasant. When I walk out the door- I forget everything about my job until I walk in again.

Net results are promotions and good choice of assignements and training.

I might "retire" to a board game company or something like that tho. The house is almost paid off and I really won't have to work except for medical coverage in three years.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[Withigo]

I too found this too be an enormously insightful post, as it confirms a lot of my own personal experiences. You mention the book "People Smart" which sounds interesting. Amazon returns two books titled People Smart, one by Melvin Silberman, and another by Tony Alessandra. Both books seem to be in the same genre and topic. Which book were you refering too?
Thanks.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[Maxo-Texas]

It's only available used. Under $10 bucks.

> How to Be People-Smart by Les Giblin

Written in 1977. I stumbled across it at a half-price books. It's one of the most significant books to my happiness and success. I made my daughter read it twice (she uses techniques from it and occasionally calls me about how one of the techniques worked).

It's very lightweight. There's a 4th technique that I think I use but always forget the title of (Smile, Say Yes, Remember Names).

I did a little googling and apparently he has a web site these days:
http://www.skillwithpeople.com/

I remembered he was very successful in business and then wrote the books.

He shows up on some of the quote sites:
If you're not using your smile, you're like a man with a million dollars in the bank and no checkbook.

As long as you live, never forget that any fool can disagree with people and that it takes a wise man, a shrewd man, a big man to agree - particularly when the other person is wrong.

---

The way I see it, his philosophy is about winning the war by losing selected battles. I see references to "winning without intimidation". That would fit. You can win and they can hate you- or better, you can win and they like you and want you to win again. I get a lot of the second in my life these days.

It's layered with a firm realization that while I like "BOB" the guy in the manager slot, he is still in the manager slot and is going to be choosing who gets the good work, who gets fired, and who may already know that all of us are being let go next month. "Bob" may be friendly- but he is never my friend.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because DeVry is just as respectable as a four-year university!

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could it be that the Triple Nine Society has faulty testing methods? Why assume that the college system does
not measure true intelligence?

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[drinkypoo]

Yeah, because DeVry is just as respectable as a four-year university!

I was expecting this comment, so I will respond even though it is from an AC.

A portfolio is dramatically more important than a degree.

I know people working in media, admittedly for an ad agency but they tend to get a lot of leeway, who are not even degreed. And one person working there doing video was actually some kind of dancer; he quit to go dance again :)

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[Vomibra]

General Education requirements at my college are pathetic; most of them can be skipped by taking AP tests in high school. A quick summary:

• Two writing classes
• One oral communication class
• Three classes total in mathematics and the natural sciences (this includes remedial mathematics and introductory sciences)
• One literature class
• One non-literature humanities (philosophy, music, foreign languages, etc)
• Two social studies classes (economics, history, psychology, sociology)

These are pretty basic requirements to function as a useful member of society; your crack at "Shakespeare appreciation" shows that you didn't really understand the purpose of literature courses--to teach reading comprehension.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[Anonymous Coward]

TNS doesn't do its own tests. You can get into TNS with an SAT or GRE score, at least if the test was administered during certain years (for which a good correlation between score and IQ was established). You can also get in with any of several IQ tests.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[BonThomme]

"...I don't know any other way to get the job done"

Perhaps you're not a smart as you think you are? Smart people know there is no one right way to do something. A solution exists within a context. The context dictates a variety of constraints that must be satisfied which usually means some kind of multi-axis arbitration. Just because you personally find those other axes unimportant, it by no means makes it so. Confronting and solving those kinds of problems is the hallmark of intelligence.

In a broader sense, intelligence is the ability to successfully adapt to context. School, work, society -- sorry, that IS the natural world. Don't pretend that your failure to deal with it is confirmation that it's simply because you are surrounded by morons.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[Gazzonyx]

I just got home from stopping by work - recieving my "marching orders for the next day"; which I bitterly accepted since I will have to do it 3 more times before my boss is satisfied with the test and data that I have already shown him time after time, with backing from articles, a full working proof of concept (using VMWare on an entirely virtual network - he LOVES to test ideas on the production server, and doesn't understand why I repeatly question this...).

Anyways, I was grumpy on the drive home wondering why he wastes both of our time with me reasearching things, diagramming it out, making it concrete, and implementing, just so he CAN CHANGE HIS *^@&#ing MIND a month later, or GO AND IGNORE MY ENTIRE WORK (Why the $#%* are his personal backups now in a public data folder... Oh, right he doesn't understand FILE PERMISSIONS ON *NIX ("They're just like Windows, you know"), and WHY AREN'T THEY in the place that I documented them to be in, which HE ASKED ME to write up!?) under the guise of, "Well, we don't understand how that works". "You're right, we don't.I do."

This post struck so close to home I nearly fell out of my chair. I think that you have just summed it all up! There is clearly NO reason to do what you do well since those who manage technology don't understand it (regardless of their degrees or self proclamation), and those who understand it don't manage it! I wish I had mod points. I think that this post should be mandatory for every boss to read, and then read again. You've actually made me feel so much better now that I know that I'm not the only one that has this problem day in and day out.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[AK Marc]

In the jobs I've held so far, I've brought knowledge from my education and from books only to be disallowed from using it because the boss doesn't know how to use it, has no way of verifying that I'm using it correctly, and is terrified of having to find another employee who knows it too. And yet, I don't know any other way to get the job done, so I end up using the knowledge I have anyway. This makes me "disobedient." When the books and the evidence show that I am right, this makes my situation even worse. No boss likes to be proved wrong.

I have never had my IQ officially tested, but I would estimate it to be in the range of yours. One thing I have learned is that the only way to get along at a job is to not always be right. Even if you were always right, other people do not understand that to be possible. They make mistakes (and try to hide them). If you never get caught in a mistake, that proves that you are better at hiding them. That means, the smarter you are, the less reliable others hold you to be.

My boss asked me questions about watts to BTUs. I answered, and made a chart of it also converting to tons (because the AC was in tons, half the equipment was in Watts, and half was in BTUs). I had the answer and spreadsheet to him in under 5 minutes. He spend the next 2 hours calling multiple people to check my work. I have made frequency calculations and such that are very complicated in his presence, which he then contacts the vendors to verify the conversion factors. Am I annoyed? I was at first. However, realizing that many people answer questions they do not know the answer to as if they were an expert, I do not blame him. It is not now, nor ever was personal. It's because he's a manager, and he has been fed bad info before by others. It's his ass on the line if I give him bad info, so he'll check it until he's confident with me or the information he requested. However, after taunting me when I answered "I don't know" a few times, he's realized that I will give the accurate answer, even if the only accurate answer I am capable of is "I don't know."

It isn't personal when people think you are a moron. Look around you, everyone else is, so they would be a moron to presume that you weren't. You have to be personalble. You have to accept that you will have to prove yourself repeatedly. Don't ever be condescending. No one is ever open to an idea after they become defensive. I had a boss that didn't like me. He never listened to me. I made a really nice report "proving" that there was a simple way to save about $5,000,000 per year in communications cost. He never gave it a serious look, but I gave it to him in a bright folder. He'd have to take it out every once in a while to show me he was considering it. He'd look pretty damned stupid if I were to show it to his boss and his boss liked it (of course, that'd get me fired). So it was in his office for 6 months with him having to look at the bright folder every once in a while. But that's an example of one of the things you have to do to win them over. Don't preach. Don't lecture. Give them options and let them decide. Even if the choice is wrong, don't fight it. They are the boss. They will always win.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[naoursla]

Bah! If you have a bad boss then fire him and find a better one.

Probably not in that order though.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[Anonymous Coward]

How many ways there are to solve a problem depends on the problem. In any case, there should be reasons why one solution is favorable above another. I either know what those reasons are, or I don't. I can give reasons for my proposed solutions.

School, work, and society are not part of the natural world. They are man-made. Maybe they could be made in such a way that intelligence is useful when dealing with them.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[Anonymous Coward]

Taking a look at www.triplenine.org and from standardized tests growing up, I also would fit into the 99.9th percentile in terms of intelligence. Yet unlike you, my GPA was high enough to get into the graduate program of my choice and work for any software company I wanted to (sup former MS internship buddies).

The difference isn't intelligence, the difference is ambition. They are two different, and not necessarily correlated, things.

Oh, and you also sound like a social malcontent who has a problem with authority. If you don't know another way and your boss doesn't want it done the way you know, then learn or figure out a new way.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some schools are better than others at providing opportunities to highly intelligent people. If you live in the Northwest or the Northeast this is more likely to be true. I live in the South.

I have as much ambition as anybody. But you are right, intelligence doesn't necessarily knock you out of graduate programs any more than it necessarily gets you in. If you've got the Masters degree, hey -- more power to you.

I don't have a problem with authority; I cite authorities all the time. I have a problem with authoritarianism, which is not the same thing. Bjarne Stroustrup is an authority on C++. Linus Torvalds is an authority on the Linux Kernel. Richard M. Stallman is an authority on the GPL. All of these people go to great lengths to explain their reasoning when they make decisions. They are not into saying "because I say so." Their positions, whether I agree with them or not, are at least understandable, and when I disagree with them, I try to make my reasoning understandable, too.

But people tell me, "Figure out another way." I say, "How do I figure it out?" They say, "Somehow." People accuse intelligent people of being arrogant but what kind of arrogance is it when someone tells you, "Hey, you're the smart one, it's up to you to figure out why I'm right and you're wrong! Just do as I say! I'm not going to tell you why!"

That would make anybody a "malcontent"...

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[Anonymous Coward]

Engineers are, by nature, intelligent, conservative, law-abiders. You seem to be confusing them with some other discipline. And having gone to some of the best schools in the country and known many highly intelligent people, I can say that you have no idea what you're talking about with respect to schooling. In principle, an intelligent person might not do well in school if they were emotionally disturbed. But quite frankly, a lot of the severely emotionally disturbed intelligent people that I knew did well in school despite their emotional state. I have never met an intelligent person who didn't do well in school. Intelligent people find ways to amuse themselves, don't pay attention in class, and do well anyway. If you didn't do well in school, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you spent too much time studying for whichever Triple Nines test you cherry-picked (none of which are particular related to intelligence) and not enough time studying the information that you clearly didn't know (or you would have done well).

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

He'd look pretty damned stupid if I were to show it to his boss and his boss liked it (of course, that'd get me fired).

So pull a dogbert: hire yourself as an external consultant, charge a ridiculous fee, and give the idea to the executives. Or piss off your boss, but inform his boss that you have other ideas that could prove valuable. Are they really going to fire you after you give them $5M PER YEAR?! Collect a nice 50% bonus and get a fat raise to boot.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[nczempin]

(I put "gifted" in quotes because it presupposes someone doing the gifting.)

Why?

Does "demented" presuppose someone doing the dementing?
Does "tired" presuppose somone doing the tiring?
Does "wasted" (as in drunk) presuppose someone doing the wasting?

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[AK Marc]

Or piss off your boss, but inform his boss that you have other ideas that could prove valuable. Are they really going to fire you after you give them $5M PER YEAR?!

Yes. My boss (the IT director) was a moron when it came to IT. But he was an excelent salesman. He'd have convinced the higher-ups that my plan carried significant risk that I did not properly convey, and he was working on it to be able to get the savings without the risk. It would be evidence of my risk-taking behavior that I broke chain-of-command, and I would be fired. I have no doubt of that. You haven't worked in a truly corporate environment until you realize that helping the company in the best manner (pushing really hard to get a cost savings measure deployed) will get you fired and your plan completely ignored.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because dements, tires, and waste are not usually given to a person from a person.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

I guess the alternative is to start a competing company and grind your old place into dust. Revenge + profit is a nice way to get things done.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[AK Marc]

And how would you presume that I use my idea to build a competitor to GM (not my real employer, but a company of similar size), when my idea was a trim of the large communications budget dealing with international entities? I'm a computer guy working in a non-computer industry. My idea gives me nothing useful if I were to start my own competing company. Not to mention competing with a multi-billion dollar company is quite hard for the startups, let alone grinding them into the dust.

Further Reading

[Anonymous Coward]

For anyone interested, here's a link to my former CS professor's page on the subject containing several good articles.
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.html/

Capitalism to the Rescue!

[Syncerus]

Well, the Capitalist answer is that the shortage in qualified applications should cause the average salary within the industry to rise correspondingly. The increase in average salary then will make the IT field more attractive to college students, thus eventually solving the work force shortage.

There is no more "IT labor shortage" than there is an "oil shortage." Those who claim shortage are either disingenuous or are ignorant of basic economics.

Re:Capitalism to the Rescue!

[ShieldW0lf]

The answer is that the US has created an environment where

1) Their population is accustomed to a lifestyle that can only be sustained by having subject colonies sending wealth back to the center.

2) Their local population is not educated enough to enjoy intellectual pursuits and have been conditioned not to find them rewarding

3) Aside from these factors, their population has been in decline since the rise of modern feminism made careers and consumption more important than reproduction

4) The structure of society means that those who get educated early are specialized into getting more while those who don't get educated early are considered a poor investment, so most of the kids are born to the least educated in the population.

Americans have spent the last hundred years running their culture into the ground.

If they want to keep their societies critical infrastructure running, they're going to have to move in so much foreign population that their indigenous population, with all their social values, are in the minority. Those who were raised in the US will also be the least educated in the country. Democracy will then wipe their culture out.

If they don't go this way, their society will collapse as the baby boomers find there is no one to hand the reigns to and not enough young people to even keep the lights running.

Unless the young people in the culture take the reigns by force, the elder people will choose the first option because the old Americans with the political power care more about their personal comfort than their childrens future or their societies future, and they always have.

The IT shortage and all the accompanying noises are symptoms of this underlying rot.

Re:Capitalism to the Rescue!

[Paulrothrock]

I have two problems with that idea. First, it implies that the reallocation of resources will be instantaneous. Second, it implies that what is in the best short term interests of an entity is also in the best short term interests of society, and also in the best long term interests of both society and that entity.

Take, for example, the H1(b) temporary visas. Sure, this solves the resource shortage in the short term, but unless those people permanently move to the US, they're simply going to take their skills back home and lead to a brain drain, causing the companies that hired them and the US economy at large to suffer.

Re:Capitalism to the Rescue!

[Archtech]

"Well, the Capitalist answer is that the shortage in qualified applications should cause the average salary within the industry to rise correspondingly".

Unfortunately for everyone but the capitalists, that turns out not to be the case. Please notice the critical obfuscating function performed in the quoted sentence by the word "should". That is, the average salary *should* rise if simplistic Economics 101 formulae about demand and supply held good in the real world. As it happens, they don't. A quick look at US business reveals that there must have been an appalling shortage of ambitious, self-centred, suit-wearing chair-warmers recently - because look where their average salaries have wound up! Someone put a rocket under those suckers, and believe me it wasn't "demand". It was the utter determination of managers (yes, we're talking about managers here) to make as much money as they possibly can while the sun shines. They are aided in this quest by the remarkable fact that everyone's salaries are decided by... well, what do you know - managers!

A couple of years ago, I had an interesting little chat with a director of a UK-based IT recruitment consultancy while we were both waiting for the next conference session to begin. Among other things, he let me know that all the companies he dealt with saw programmers as "very much like bricklayers", and none of them would dream of paying a programmer more than about $40K. When I asked what would happen if they couldn't find any takers, he said airily that his clients would simply defer their software projects until they could hire programmers at "the appropriate rate". In other words, the executives in question would rather eat their own lungs than pay a programmer more than a quarter of what they themselves get.

Quoting economic theory doesn't cut much ice, especially when it is directly contradicted by the observed facts. Unlike real sciences, economics is a big sheaf of educated guesswork, elegant models in search of an application, and clever people talking themselves into important jobs and big salaries. As someone once remarked, there is no economist so distinguished that you can't find another, equally distinguished, to call him a gold-plated liar. And as someone else noted, "if all the economists in the world were laid end to end it would be a very good thing".

Re:Capitalism to the Rescue!

[ShieldW0lf]

All these temporary visas for foreign workers that make less money, they're an attempt by the rich old people to play the aforementioned both ways and keep the crisis at bay until they're safely dead and in the ground.

This is the underlying justification for those visas that overcomes all other intelligent objections.

Re:Capitalism to the Rescue!

[Anonymous Coward]

Word up. We're becoming the autoworkers of the 21st century. The execs are starting to look at us as replaceable cogs in their machine just like any other "human resource". Unless we unionize we're going to get the shaft. Within 15 years programmers are going to be just another lowly job like "customer service specialist".

Re:Capitalism to the Rescue!

[mobby_6kl]

>Quoting economic theory doesn't cut much ice [...]

Well, neither does using a personal anecdote! How do you explain the dotcom period salaries, a sudden pulse of generosity on the part of the execs?

Re:Capitalism to the Rescue!

[Anonymous Coward]

Good thoughts but I think you have it a bit backwards. In fact, my opinion is that the push for more college-level education amongst the populace has created an excess of "managers"; people with degrees who, in previous generations, wouldn't have been considered worthy of college at all, and graduate with a nice piece of paper and no meaningful abilities. Further, the culture has demonized regular work to the point where a person is considered either a manager, a specialist, or a failure.

This situation has worked well enough for years exclusively because we are able to import masses of people to do the real work. As long as we don't cut off that particular nose in an insane effort to maintain our cultural purity, we'll be fine.

Re:Capitalism to the Rescue!

[0p7imu5_P2im3]

Bill Gates and Microsoft? Ignorant of the ways a civil society and the basic tennats of law work?

Not Them!

(The word of the day, kiddies: Sarcasm.)

Re:Capitalism to the Rescue!

[mp3phish]

A-fucking-men!

Re:Capitalism to the Rescue!

[Archtech]

I'm not claiming that economic theory is completely wrong. It's just as intuitively obvious to me as to any economist that, other things being equal, demand drives supply. It's just that other things are not always equal - sometimes very much so, other times less so. Certainly, increased salaries in the Dot Com era were probably due - in part - to increased demand against a relatively fixed supply. But, then again, many Dot Com companies were sublimely confident that they were soon going to be Rich Rich RICH, so they were probably not as stingy as the managers of companies that stay in business long term.

My thesis is that, as well as demand and supply, there are social factors in play here. There is a vast chasm between programmers and PHBs, which allows the PHBs - to some extent - to treat the programmers like serfs or Untouchables. In fact, it would be fairer to treat them like lawyers, because their work is similarly demanding, and probably more important.

Re:Capitalism to the Rescue!

[clawsoon]

According to "The New New Thing", the explosion in engineering income during the bubble happened because engineers took over companies for the first time and rewarded each other.

This is what managers usually do for each other. It's what they're best at.

The reign of the engineers didn't last long.

Re:Capitalism to the Rescue!

[doktor-hladnjak]

So tell me again how unionized auto workers aren't getting the shaft right now?

Re:Capitalism to the Rescue!

[Fulcrum of Evil]

When I asked what would happen if they couldn't find any takers, he said airily that his clients would simply defer their software projects until they could hire programmers at "the appropriate rate".

This shows how out of touch your 'cruiter and his clients are.

Quoting economic theory doesn't cut much ice

Sure it does, you just have to translate: "Pay what it takes to make your strategically vital stuff go or your competitors will rape you and eat your corpse." Simple and direct.

,p>Or they're talking about some internal portal thingy v2.0. Who cares about that stuff? If you can't make a business case for it, then they're right.

As someone once remarked, there is no economist so distinguished that you can't find another, equally distinguished, to call him a gold-plated liar.

I am an amateur economist, and I'm happy to give the finger to any econ guys that disagree with me. Difference is, I'll only expound on stuff where I can verify a causal link. Especially if that link makes me money :)

And as someone else noted, "if all the economists in the world were laid end to end it would be a very good thing".

nobody ever said that. Dorothy Parker said "If all the women in Yale university were laid end to end, it wouldn't surprise me one bit", but that's not really relevant, is it?

Re:Capitalism to the Rescue!

[KillerCow]

Someone once told me that salary correlates most to level of responsibility; not skill, not demand, not value added.

It opened my eyes....

Re:Capitalism to the Rescue!

[Archtech]

"or your competitors will rape you and eat your corpse..."

I don't know about the USA, but in the UK companies are being raped and eaten all the time. No doubt refusal to face up to the facts of IT ranks high among the causes.

Re:Capitalism to the Rescue!

[Archtech]

" 'And as someone else noted, "if all the economists in the world were laid end to end it would be a very good thing".'

nobody ever said that. "

How would you know? I said it, for a start. And I am sure I recall reading it long ago. The fact that you can recall a similar Dorothy Parker quote (admittedly funnier, but then all Dorothy Parker quotes are) has no bearing on the matter.

Economics lesson for Billy

[zerofoo]

Gates must have dropped out before taking Econ 101.

A labor shortfall in a free market ALWAYS results in higher wages which ends up drawing more people into the field. Once an employment saturation point is achieved, salaries decline and employment levels off.

H-1B visas artificially increase the labor supply while decreasing wage growth. This attempt to "makeup the shortfall" will only further depress CS enrollments. Why on earth would a prospective student go into CS if the money is not there, and labor is being imported to further drive down wages?

Gates is not a stupid man - he knows these economic rules, and lowering wages is the only reason to push for more H-1B visas.

-ted

Re:Economics lesson for Billy

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and I'm told at my university that I may have trouble getting a job due to outsourcing and foreign workers in my country.

Microsoft wants india wages in the US so they don't have to outsource yet still get the potential savings.

Re:Economics lesson for Billy

[Anonymous Coward]

Gates must have dropped out before taking Econ 101.

Um, he majored in economics. At Harvard.

Re:Economics lesson for Billy

[0123456]

"Um, he majored in economics. At Harvard."

So it's no wonder he doesn't understand that 'if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys'.

I'm constantly amazed at how little 'economists' know about economics, and how poorly their predictions turn out.

Re:Economics lesson for Billy

[arodland]

There are people in the field who practice real, common-sense economics... it's just that it's thoroughly unfashionable and doesn't make for good newspaper headlines, so you don't hear about it. :)

Re:Economics lesson for Billy

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an endless debate and nobody is perfect.

While it is true that businesses want to pay less and reap maximum, they are not inclined to deal with H1-B bull, except some seasoned ones.

The reason H1-B drives (appear to)down wages is the multiple layers involved in it. The actual H1-B holder gets to see only a fraction of what the company pays in consulting arena.

As far Full Time jobs, every darn thing one does is tied to to the job description. Any significant change, it screws up your Permanent Residency (aka Green Card) application process.

Application->Department of Labor->United States Immigration Service(USCIS)FBI Name check
The above blackbox ensures that you are in a long long time, especially for nationals of India and China.
Result? Stagnant wages. The same job for years.

Why would any business NOT want to exploit this?

So much for Econ101!

Yes, I am a H1-B holder forced to consult at below market rate - Courtesy: F&** up US immigration system. Thank you very much.

Re:Economics lesson for Billy

[Shajenko42]

Funny, the college I work for tells its students that there are all these great, high-paying jobs just waiting for them right out of college.

It's a community college, btw.

Re:Economics lesson for Billy

[Anonymous Coward]

Afterwards dropping out soon after.

Re:Economics lesson for Billy

[JesseMcDonald]

H-1B visas artificially increase the labor supply while decreasing wage growth.

Rather, the requirement for H-1B visas artificially restricts the labor supply, raising wages (but reducing wealth), whereas an increased supply of visas allows the labor supply and wages to grow toward their natural levels.

Re:Economics lesson for Billy

[0xdeadbeef]

What are you, some kind of communist? Don't you know free trade only applies to capital, not labor?

Re:Economics lesson for Billy

[JesseMcDonald]

What are you, some kind of communist? Don't you know free trade only applies to capital, not labor?

It's a bit hard to tell from just the unannotated text, but I'm going to assume that was intended as sarcasm...

Re:Economics lesson for Billy

[homer_s]

H-1B visas artificially increase the labor supply

How is that artificial? Are these people produced artificially by some machine in a factory?
The only artificial thing in this scenario is national borders and the different artificial economic policies set within each of those borders.

Re:Economics lesson for Billy

[Altus]

uh... yea... and didn't he drop out to start MS?

Just sayin.

obviously he knows basic economic theory... that is why he wants what is best for his company.

Re:Economics lesson for Billy

[Anonymous Coward]

H-1B visas artificially increase the labor supply

Not quite. The limit on labor mobility creates an artificial scarcity.

Re:Economics lesson for Billy

[Lord Ender]

Wow. You win the thread. Please forward that to all of congress.

Re:Economics lesson for Billy

[Anonymous Coward]

bill knows all about economics - more so than computers.

he knows how the system is supposed to work and he also knows how to game the system for his personal advantage...

his goal...

which limits their opportunities to contribute to their employer's success and overall economic growth.

his goal is his company's financial success and he's gaming the system in order to maximize that success rather than sit and watch economics play out in a non manipulated system.

Re:Economics lesson for Billy

[Anonymous Coward]

Did he? I always thought he dropped out.

Re:Economics lesson for Billy

[Tracy Reed]

He may have majored in economics but he never graduated. And from what we can tell he spent most of his time hacking computers instead of studying economics.

Re:Economics lesson for Billy

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have thought that if you pay peanuts you get elephants, whereas if you pay bananas you get monkeys.

There is a shortage of wage slaves

[gelfling]

That's the problem. There is a shortage of people willing to work 80 hrs a week for $60K with a relocation to West Gopher Hole, South Dakota.

Blah blah blah not enough high schools teach Microsoft coding skills. Blah blah blah not enough Indians coming to America to debug Redmond's code. Blah blah blah we need more wage slaves.

Re:There is a shortage of wage slaves

[Quiet_Desperation]

Have you seen the state of some of our cities? West Gopher Hole doesn't sound so bad sometimes.

Re:There is a shortage of wage slaves

[cnlohfin3109]

not to mention im sure 60k there will put you at the top 3%. I know here in minnesota (not cities) very few make over 50k. CS majors (the ones that actually worked in college) are getting more then that right out of school.

Re:There is a shortage of wage slaves

[isaac]

That's the problem. There is a shortage of people willing to work 80 hrs a week for $60K with a relocation to West Gopher Hole, South Dakota.

No, $60k in South Dakota would be fine. The problem is they want to pay $60k in Seattle, where the median home price is >$450k.

-Isaac

Re:There is a shortage of wage slaves

[gelfling]

Well then that's the problem. If you can be a good executive assistant for that pay or a grunt level legal editor then there is no real upside to being a coder. And may I add that many many many people don't actually want to live in West Gopher. The problem with places like Sioux Falls, SD or Graham, NC is that there's nothing there.

Re:There is a shortage of wage slaves

[Anonymous Coward]

Bingo! The five years I worked at Microsoft, I couldn't afford to live within an hours drive to campus. Add the usual traffic and there were days when I would spend 6 hours in my car to work an 8 hour shift.

Not worth it.

Re:There is a shortage of wage slaves

[gsn]

Honestly, I think your point says more about the problems of real estate pricing and the cost of living in big cities than IT salaries. Salaries aren't going to change because there is cheap foreign labor available, so the housing market won't have new buyers and prices will have to come down. I hope.

Its actually pretty damn sad - I'm a physics grad student getting a nice 25k a year stipend but I lose crap loads of it to rent (in sunny Somerville, MA), and after six years of this I will not be able to afford a house in West Gopher Hole, S. Dakota because I can't save even to make a reasonable down payment. While the kids getting MBAs or going to the law school will start in the six figures (sigh - at least I won't be in debt).

So given that I don't think Math and Science salaries are about to change because there is so much cheap foriegn labor, I don't think the problem is that companies don't pay the Math and Science grads enough, I think they pay other grads too much and so you lose the smart people to the big buck fields. These are the only people who can afford the cost of living in big cities and so the few math and science people they are aren't happy. Worse several universities see the larger number of students in business and law and invest in those departments while giving the short shrift to Math and Science. Its funny because its almost exactly the opposite of what happened in India and China, where the people taking business classes were almost second class behind those in sciences even in high school.

Re:There is a shortage of wage slaves

[Quiet_Desperation]

I add that many many many people don't actually want to live in West Gopher.

Are you posting that as a downside or an upside? ;-)

The problem with places like Sioux Falls, SD or Graham, NC is that there's nothing there.

Sounds glorious. :)

How do you figure?

[powerpants]

During that time they can't change jobs, which limits their opportunities to contribute to their employer's success... WHAT?!

Work not getting done for some reason?

[192939495969798999]

I have no idea why there would be such a need for more workers, it's almost as if all the employed engineers are busy doing something else at work, like going to some website and posting comments or something... nah, that can't be it!

What about fixing the system?

[leandrod]

There are no silver bullets. But from what I see, better (more exigent) schools, truly RDBMSs (*not* SQL), functional programming, formal methods, open systems would go a long way of making people more productive, not to mention the free market perspective: just open the borders.

I am sure each one will have his own list. I would put Unicode, well-formed SGML and TeX everywhere in the list too, but I feel they wouldn't be such a huge boost to productivity.

Re:What about fixing the system?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

truly RDBMSs (*not* SQL)

Is such a thing even possible? I thought the number of pointers approached infinity as relationships increased- but then again I'm 12 years in the industry now and have not kept up with the theoretical side of things.

Re:What about fixing the system?

[leandrod]

Is such a thing even possible?

Not only poßible, ðere are several current examples, mostly as prototypes or wi some adaptation to market realities: Alphora Dataphor, MightyD, Rel, Opus, Duro.

I thought the number of pointers approached infinity as relationships increased

Ðere are no pointers in the relational model.

Re:What about fixing the system?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Ðere are no pointers in the relational model.

Without pointers, how would one link foreign keys internally to the interpreter?

Re:What about fixing the system?

[leandrod]

Without pointers, how would one link foreign keys internally to the interpreter?

One doesn't. That's what relational operators are for. In this case, the existence ones. The relational model is logical, not physical.

Re:What about fixing the system?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I think we're talking on different levels. What I mean is- without pointers, how do you create the query language engine that contains the relational operators? My understanding (obviously outdated, but then again, the link you provided didn't contain anything other than SQL and QUIL databases anyway, for which this problem still stands) is that the more foreign keys you have, the more pointers the query engine has to juggle- and that this is a logrithmic curve that rises to infinity very quickly.

Now obviously, there have been a few new tricks (otherwise, the data warehousing I do every day would require HUGE amounts of processing time on the server); but it was my understanding that a completely relational logical model would contain so many connections between the tables that it would be impossible to create a query language interpreter to handle it. While most certainly there are better languages than the ever-pervasive SQL to do this in, their context sensitivity prevents them from being efficient. Or in some cases, even possible to create.

Re:What about fixing the system?

[leandrod]

without pointers, how do you create the query language engine that contains the relational operators?

Again, you don't need pointers at all to represent foreign keys.

Re:What about fixing the system?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Again, you don't need pointers at all to represent foreign keys.

Then how do you find the memory location of the other record (or the disk location, or what ever?). Eventually, all programming in machine language comes down to pointers- memory locations where you find the data. That is what I mean by the idea that I'm talking on a different level than you are; you're talking about the high level representation that the database engine provides you, I'm talking about the machine language that the database engine is programmed in.

Re:What about fixing the system?

[leandrod]

how do you find the memory location of the other record (or the disk location, or what ever?)

You don't, and at's the beauty of the relational model. All you need are relational operators and the query optimiser.

Re:What about fixing the system?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

You don't, and at's the beauty of the relational model. All you need are relational operators and the query optimiser.

You can't even write a query optimiser without refering to memory locations. You can't write relational operators without refering to memory loacations. What you are talking about is the abstraction, not what the machine actually does, and thus you do not have a real relational model- because it can't be programmed. I guarantee you- Ingres's source code for the optimiser uses pointers. So does Oracle, SQL Server, Not-SQL, and all the others out there. Obviously you are more of a user of such tools than a builder- thus my original question is meaningless to you.

Re:What about fixing the system?

[leandrod]

You can't even write a query optimiser without refering to memory locations.

Sure indeed, but you don't store ðe pointers. Ðey are used only in memory data structures, not on disk.

I am not so naïve; I suspect ðe inverse may be true.

100,000 jobs ...

[Anonymous Coward]

100,000 jobs, fine. But how many of these *really* require a college degree in CS? I spent a few years doing consultant type work, and finally got sick working alongside "kids" (sorry) doing stints in the industry before moving on to Med, Law or Business school. There are jobs that require college level engineering, and I'm happy to occupy one, but I doubt that they account for more than 10% of the total.

Government Interference

[Inmatarian]

The problem, as I see it, isn't that the government has been doing to little, but rather, doing too much. In classic economics, when there aren't enough workers to fill the roles, salaries and working conditions increase for the valued few. People see how well they're treated and desire these jobs, and go to college to learn how to do it.

In the current state, the government fills far too many of those jobs with foreign born workers, offering them no chance to become American citizens and forcing them to work for a fifth of what American workers cost. These foreigners are abused with long hours, and then sent back to where ever they came from either when they show discontent, or what citizenship is in their sights.

The solution is to make efforts to make these foreign workers into American workers, so they can compete the same way we do. Until that happens, the wage gap will continue to be wide, and the abuses will continue.

Re:Government Interference

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed the government has been doing too much rather than too little. What should occur is that the government should not permit any foreign workers to come in. Then, as you state, salaries and working conditions increase, people see how well they're treated and desire these jobs, and go to college to learn how to do it.

American businesses will have to make a business decision; to either 1) continue to participate in the American society, where things like enforcement of contract law, good communications and relative ease of transport are taken for granted, or 2) move all operations to countries where labor costs are less, but contract law and transport become more problematic. Option 1 means businesses will be a bit short on workers in some areas for a few years, but those newly-trained workers who do plop out of the colleges in a few years will know their careers will have a far more stable future.

Currently, American businesses are bringing in so many foreign workers, who have no intention of becoming American (regardless of their citizenship status), that the society is becoming extremely strained. The same society whose business-friendly environment enabled the creation of all those businesses in the first place. I would remind them that it is difficult to conduct normal business while an invasion or civil war is taking place.

Re:Government Interference

[Inmatarian]

My only disagreement with you is on the case where we bar immigrants from coming to America. I have no problem with the immigrants becoming naturalized Americans. The issue with me is the legal status they come here under, namely H1-B. No effort is made to turn them into citizens.

What if there were no immigration quotas?

[davidwr]

Here's a thought:

What if there were no immigration quotas?

What if we let anyone and everyone except criminals, terrorists, and those incapable of working come in by just paying port fees, putting down a deposit for a return airplane or bus ticket, and showing they either had a job offer or had a month's worth of living expenses available? Give them all work-authorization cards.

In the first few years there would be a lot of wage-adjustments as certain markets like high-tech, manual-labor, and low-wage retail got flooded but in the long run I think it would be good for the overall economy. Instead of high-tech jobs going to India dragging down American wages, high-tech jobs would remain here at depressed wages but the American economy would benefit from the local employment. It would also give the few Americans who are truly lazy or underperforming a kick in the proverbial kiester if they want to stay employed.

So what if I and my fellow technocrats see wages drop to below $35,000 for starting college grads and proportionately lower for experienced programmers? If it means a more robust American economy and better cultural exchanges with the larger immigrant populations then I'm all for it.

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[fredrated]

Works if 'the economy' is more important than 'the Americans'.

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[Maxo-Texas]

If it really did work this way, a college degree would also drop in price from $50,000 for four years to $12,000 for four years. Your cars would drop from $25,000 to $19,000. Your DVD's would drop from $22 to $19.

In that kind of environment, I'd be happy to take a pay cut. The problem is corporations are making a lot of money (record profits for Exxon, a multi BILLION dollar cash chest that Microsoft can't even find ways to spend) and getting artificial laws passed to restrain trade (TV shows months behind in Australia, DVD's for $2.49 in China but $19.99 here that are illegal to re-import, etc.).

With America's relative safety and fair legal system, people with money from all over the world are bidding up our property so we are having more trouble affording to live here. (Galveston- the average house is now 500,000 dollars- their schools are closing because no one with kids can afford to live their and all the real residents of Galveston are being forced to move to the mainland, Any ski area- same problem. Any pretty area- same problem).

The question is how many hours do you have to work to get housing and a hamburger. It's been increasing for the last 9 or 10 years.

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[scharkalvin]

Do that and watch the number of mortgage forecloses go up a few thousand percent as many white collar workers can no longer afford their homes. The housing market will die out putting builders out of work as a 10 year backlog of unsold homes hits the market with no takers. Auto workers will go out of work as the market for luxury cars and suv's dries up (but think of how this will help global warming!). Maybe in a few years things will level out, but the president that presides of this disaster will go down in history right next to Herbert Hoover.

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

So what if I and my fellow technocrats see wages drop to below $35,000 for starting college grads and proportionately lower for experienced programmers? If it means a more robust American economy and better cultural exchanges with the larger immigrant populations then I'm all for it.

If everybody who has a college degree is earning under $35,000/year- and porportionately lower for experience- who exactly will pay for your more robust economy? An economy needs consumers as well as owners- or else it will collapse.

My recommendation- only trade with countries willing to pay HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES a minimum of $100,000 a year or more. Try to bring the entire world up to that level. With more money out there, inflation will happen, prices will rise, and you'll get more money per unit! It'll trash investing and dividends, but you can always go back to work....

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[davidwr]

If everybody who has a college degree is earning under $35,000/year- and porportionately lower for experience- who exactly will pay for your more robust economy? An economy needs consumers as well as owners- or else it will collapse.

I don't know where you live but outside of the coasts, most big cities have safe neighborhoods where a recent college grad earning $35K/year can do okay. Compare this to high-tech college grad wages in the $45-$50K range in those same cities today. A 30 year old with 8 years' experience earning 70% of today's wage-earner should be able to do okay. Yes, he'll probably have to move and lose all the equity in his house and the banks will take a beating on all the short-sales and foreclosures, but that's part of the transition costs. Heck, since his house will have depreciated due to many others having lower wages too, the bank may be willing to work out a new payment plan, particularly if he's not upside-down. Once the adjustment is made I think it will be good for America.

Realistically, my plan won't happen overnight. What MAY happen is that immigration and HB-1 quotas are gradually raised until they become meaningless. This will lessen the shock and may even mask it completely, resulting in wage stagnation or slower-than-expected wage-inflation rather than wage deflation.

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

but the president that presides of this disaster will go down in history right next to Herbert Hoover.

Some would say he currently is. Certainly this so-called "free trade" madness is heading in this direction, regardless of what the H-1b "labor shortage" whiners say. Anybody who thinks they deserve more than a billion a year to cut salaries is a wimp and a coward.

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[genmax]

That's a very interesting idea actually ! There was recently some article about how, though most modern economies are all about free trade _of goods_, nobody likes free exchange of labour - basically, a world without immigration boundaries. If you think about it, these are double standards ! Essentially, a country rich in production facilities and raw materials is adamant that poorer/newly independent countries afford no protection to their developing industries, but at the same time cave in to demands from their workers that labour be restricted, even from poorer developing countries whose citizens are likely to be at a disadvantage educationally.

The irony of it is that the arguments for free trade are true. Protectionism _does_ lead to stagnation - and this is true for labour as well. This is why outsourcing to India and China have taken off. Its true that managers are bastards - and its probably justified to be angry about how you're being bumped off and the work goes to some dude who works for cheaper, just so that your manager can continue to enjoy his fat salary. But, managers have always been bastards, and will continue to be so.

The fundamental problem today is that an IT guy sitting in the US can't hope to compete with an equally skilled guy working from India - the cost of living there is amazingly low. So, even if the management had morals and drew salaries proportional to the amount of work they did - it would still make sense to outsource, now to pass on the benefits to the consumer.

The answer: open your borders, woo the workers with the quality of life in a first world country, and then compete with them on home ground. I've seen people crib about H1B workers and outsourcing simultaneously. You really can't have the best of both worlds.

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I could prove that hanging you would benefit the American economy, will you purchase the rope?

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I don't know where you live but outside of the coasts, most big cities have safe neighborhoods where a recent college grad earning $35K/year can do okay.

I live on the coast- and I'm all for disolving the cities if that's what you want to do, but the point is this: If the major populace has no money, who will be the consumers for this so-called "robust" economy?

Compare this to high-tech college grad wages in the $45-$50K range in those same cities today. A 30 year old with 8 years' experience earning 70% of today's wage-earner should be able to do okay. Yes, he'll probably have to move and lose all the equity in his house and the banks will take a beating on all the short-sales and foreclosures, but that's part of the transition costs. Heck, since his house will have depreciated due to many others having lower wages too, the bank may be willing to work out a new payment plan, particularly if he's not upside-down. Once the adjustment is made I think it will be good for America.

True- but that will NOT be a "robust" economy. That will be a "depressed" economy. Now while I'd agree that one could make the argument that America needs such a depression (with associated deflation) to become competitive with the third world (that is, to become a two-class, third world nation with the majority of the people being poor and slaves to the minority rich), I'm not sure we'd WANT too- and you could not possibly call the resulting economy "robust".

Realistically, my plan won't happen overnight. What MAY happen is that immigration and HB-1 quotas are gradually raised until they become meaningless. This will lessen the shock and may even mask it completely, resulting in wage stagnation or slower-than-expected wage-inflation rather than wage deflation.

Either way, you kill inflation- and inflation is the driver of a robust economy. The result is exactly the same as if every small town in America became totally isolationist- which also, while not neccesarily being a bad idea overall, certainly could not be called a robust economy.

A robust economy *requires* that people have enough money to be both consumers and investors- otherwise inflation will fall below that magical .02% and a deflationary cycle will set in, like it did in the 1930s.

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[Anonymous Coward]

would remain here at depressed wages

While housing costs skyrocket? Sorry, working a day and a night job just to afford a tent 4 hours from the city isn't my idea of a robust economy.

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[glider0524]

Globalization suppresses normal diversification in a given country's economy. Anything that can sub-contracted out to a foreign land just disappears from this country's employment profile and those left have to cluster in to a shortening list of professions left. The jobs that are left here become either less skilled, or in management. There can be only so many managerial staff in the economy, we probably have too many as it is. The country has already lost the vast majority of its manufacturing industry; what's in store for us? Will we eventually end up a nation of nothing but fast-food burger flippers and managers for workers in other countries?

We may possibly get an overall monetary benefit as a country from offshoring, but you have to ask, who is getting that benefit?

1. Today: We produce X locally, paying a worker named 'Joe' $20 per widget object X, the employer sells X for $100, (ignoring other static production/distribution costs) the employer keeps, say, $80 of profit for every X object sold. Joe gets to feed his family off a living wage---he's not ripping anyone off or being lazy. He makes his $20/day.
2. Tomorrow: We hire someone offshore and pay them $4 per X built. The employer is not going to pass quite all the savings off to the consumer because competitive pressures aren't forcing him to. He sells each X for $90 now, raking in $86 in profit now. Now, someone in a third world country has $4 for their effort and can buy a flush toilet, the business owner/stockholders of the Widgets, Inc. company have $6 extra of profit in their pocket, the consumer saved 10% ($10) on the cost of the product. Woo-hoo! Everybody wins. Except.. Joe unfortunately now has to find another job not paying as much, possibly something unskilled like being a waiter. He makes a lot less than what he did before, now he only makes $10/day. Rinse and repeat times 10 million Joes. He took a 50% pay cut to subsidize a bunch of other people in society and across the world.

The overall net shift of wealth in America due to offshoring:

• A) Money previously being earned in wages is taken from employee workers.

Some part of it gets transferred to each of:

• B) Business owners/stockholders
• C) Consumers of the product being made
• D) Third world countries

Possibly the country as a whole might be getting a net benefit. Not have to pay money for higher wages to Americans can be seen as "net benefit" since we aren't paying our own workers more money. Maybe that is seen as a "wasteful" cost. My main beef here anyway is that any net benefit gained mainly goes to the rich. The class of "the rich" in America are mostly made up by groups (B) and (C). Jobless people and waiters (the 'recycled') are not often a part of buying consumers getting a benefit in group (C). So, it's really a net loss in economic wealth for a large group of (A) people. Like other economic theory proposed by Conservatives and Libertarians (e.g. trickle down economics), it's mostly an excluse to justify a massive shift of middle-class wealth to the hands of a few.

Of course job recycling is nothing new in the economy. A decline of something like horse buggy whip production has traditionally always been replaced by something like automobile production. I would have disagreed 100 years ago with attempting to halt technological progress, as I absolutely do now. I'm not a Luddite trying to stop technological progress, it's the lifeblood of economic growth. But the difference now from 100 years ago is that by removing a high-tech job now from the American workforce, we AREN'T replacing it with a higher paying job in a newer technological field. All other previous economic cycles had somewhere higher to grow to. The off-shoring process now replaces skilled jobs in America with lower paying and/or less skilled jobs chiefly characterized by the fact that they simply cannot be easily off-shored (being a barber, a waiter, etc).

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[Billly Gates]

Is this post sarcasm?

California is already like this and let me tell you things are getting quite bad here. Houses have gone up 400% in value and wages were cut in half during the same period from 1999 to today. I see hordes of Mexicans outside home depot on my way to work everyday willing to work for several dollars an hour and I feel bad for the honest carpenters and construction workers. Salaries have dropped from 50k a year to 14k a year also known as 8/hr for the same job. So has the price homes fell as a result? Nope. It has gone up considerable and the shareholders of these construction companies have been creaming their pants as a result.

Meanwhile I do not speak spanish fluently and its hurting my chances for finding a job. Worse those in retail and the service industry and desperately getting MCSE's and A+ certifications so they no longer have to compete with these cheap workers and our depressing my wages.

I am moving to Texas by this summer as a result. I know its bad there too with immigration but at least I can afford a home.

Prices for things are not going down with this cheap labor at all which is a bad warning sign.

Sure its great to to try to come up with these utopia worlds but when you have kids to feed your views change and its survival of the fittest.

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[LunaticTippy]

How can this work? If a billion Indians and Chinese move to the western world it would be catastrophic. There would be severe infrastructure and housing shortages, wages would be in freefall. There would be zero motivation to invest in infrastructure since as soon as another country offered higher wages there would be another migration. You'd see boom-and-bust on a scale never imagined.

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[genmax]

Would you have a billion jobs in the US for indians and chinese ? That's like saying, how would trade work - if you export trillions of tons of fruit to India, who would eat all of them ?

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am moving to Texas by this summer as a result.

Oh, great. Another Goddamn Californian.

Could you please just not? Move to Texas, that is.

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[WrongMonkey]

Just a thought: California and Texas both have similar immigration situations, but radically different housing costs. Maybe the cost of living problems in Cali have less to do with immigration and more to do with the stupid property tax schemes?

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[Anonymous Coward]

Proposition 13 , officially titled the "People's Initiative to Limit Property Taxation," was a ballot initiative to amend the constitution of the state of California. The initiative was enacted by the voters of California on June 6, 1978. It would eventually be upheld as constitutional by the United States Supreme Court in the case of Nordlinger v. Hahn, 505 U.S. 1 (1992). Proposition 13 is embodied in Article 13A of the California Constitution.

The most significant portion of the act is the first paragraph, which capped real estate taxes:

"SECTION 1. (a) The maximum amount of any ad valorem tax on real property shall not exceed One percent (1%) of the full cash value of such property. The one percent (1%) tax to be collected by the counties and apportioned according to law to the districts within the counties."

Its passage resulted in a cap on property tax rates in the state, reducing them by an average of 57%. In addition to lowering property taxes, the initiative also contained language requiring a two-thirds majority in both legislative houses for future increases in all state tax rates or amounts of revenue collected, including income tax rates. Proposition 13 received an enormous amount of publicity, not only in California, but throughout the United States. Passage of the initiative presaged a "taxpayer revolt" throughout the country that is thought to have contributed to the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980.

Some of the biggest losers under Proposition 13 were California public schools, libraries, and other city services (i.e. firefighters and police.) California public schools, which in the 1960's had been ranked #1 nationally in student achievement, have fallen to 49th in many surveys of student achievement. Police forces and fire departments were gutted because of a drastic loss of funds, and a transfer system from state income taxes to cities was enacted to partially make up for the shortfall.

California's Proposition 13 has introduced major problems of equity and efficiency into the state's tax structure (Mullins, D. "Financing urban services--local fiscal resources: the basics of a meaningful local resource structure" in Managing Municipal Change, Bosner, C.F. ed. (1994) Bloomington, IN: School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Ch. 9). An analytical approach to examining a tax policy is to apply the traditional principles of taxation, including equity, allocative efficiency, revenue yield/elasticity and administrative and political feasibility. Equity reflects the basic values of how our society determines different groups should be treated, these values include horizontal and vertical equity, ability to pay and benefits received. Allocative efficiency refers to the ways in which a tax policy influences changes in private consumption behavior. Revenue yield and elasticity refer to whether a revenue policy has the capacity to increase in the future in order to continue enabling government agencies to meet the demands of its residents. Lastly, administrative and political feasibility refer to whether a tax policy can be implemented and enforced with relatively little effort and is politically possible.

Proposition 13 freezes the value of properties at the time of purchase with a possible 2% annual assessment increase. Therefore, properties of equal value have a great amount of variation in their assessment, even if they are next to each other. Assuming that the price of a house is somewhat a determinant of a person's wealth (and therefore ability to pay) and benefit received, this feature would lead neighbors who purchased a property at different periods of time to pay a different assessment, without any relationship to ability to pay or benefits received. Overall, these qualities create serious inequities and potentially introduce some amount of regressivity into the tax structure. Similarly, Proposition 13 creates inefficiencies because it provides dis-incentives for selling property in

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[purify0583]

So what if I and my fellow technocrats see wages drop to below $35,000 for starting college grads and proportionately lower for experienced programmers? If it means a more robust American economy and better cultural exchanges with the larger immigrant populations then I'm all for it.

Spoken like a true republican!

Unfortunatly as history has shown us, paying our middle class less money does not help our economy. Due to materialism and greed, trickle down economics do not work. Lower wages simply expand the profit margins of the wealthy, which means more money that is sitting stagnant in their bank accounts. The economy is driven by the consumerism of the middle and upper-middle class. Precisely the people you are talking about cutting pay from. When their pay drops, their spending drops. And when their spending drops our economy stagnates.

Also with unlimited immigration, there would be a social crisis in the US. There are only so many jobs here that take little education and little English. All those people coming here looking for better pay will soon find themselves unemployed. Without the massive ammounts of money it takes to get a college education in America, they would be dead weight here (as there are not too many scholarships for non-english speaking immigrants with marginal educational background and no outstanding talents). Are you going to be the one to pay for their food and rent, and food and rent and school for their 6 children? Or should we simply raise taxes and let the already underpaid middle class foot the bill?

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[LunaticTippy]

Fruit doesn't have free will and the ability to move around on its own. People do. If they think that they can do much better somewhere else and there are no immigration restrictions, they will come long past the time it stopped being rational.

Hobos in the US live a life of luxury compared to the majority of the planet. Without immigration controls people would move to western countries simply for the quality of garbage and faint chance of proper work.

I am not xenophobic in the least, but I think some sane immigration policy is needed. Letting the market work it's magic without restraint for labor would be a nightmare.

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[genmax]

Yes, which is why I said that as long as you have a job offer above minimum wage, you should be let in. Currently immigrants have restrictions like needing to prove that they'll return to their country, waiting for 6 months in their home country between jobs. Let's be fair - most people here on Slashdot aren't worried just about the possibility of foreign immigrants ending up as hobos in their neighbourhoods - they're also worried about increased competition from skilled workers who'll take their jobs.

There are lots of good arguments for keeping the policy as it is - most of them based on the general theme that think of Americans first. And that doesn't make anybody xenophobic. But you have to realize that this policy is bound to come across as hypocritical to countries that have been arm-twisted by the US into removing any and all kinds of tarrifs. And it is these reduced tarrifs that account for a huge amount of the prosperity that you see around you - that's why hobos in the US lead lives of relative luxury.

You can't believe that free trade is good and free movement of labour isn't. All countries have the right to either protect both their developing industries and their citizens from competition, or neither. Believe me, free trade IS a nightmare for lots of countries and their people.

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[naoursla]

That would be great except that other countries don't do it. Try to get a job in France if you do not believe me.

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[Alioth]

Galveston, Texas? $500K? But Galveston's a run-down dump! Sure it has a couple of pretty pyramids - but other than that, decaying housing, pot holed roads, a general shabbiness. Who in their right mind pays $500K to live in a shabby dump that's also a bullseye target for the next gulf hurricane?

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[LunaticTippy]

I'm not a fan of unrestricted and total free trade either. I just have less of a problem with free trade than I do with free movement of labor. Maybe I just haven't thought about them as equivalent.

Let's say we opened all borders to workers with jobs waiting. Wouldn't the entire globe end up with most workers making near US$3.35/hour (which is the current gross global product divided by population)

Free trade is already a mixed blessing at best for many countries. It seems to benefit huge corporations mainly.

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[Anonymous Coward]

But Galveston's a run-down dump!

Was a run-down dump. The Houstonian tradition of bulldozing everything old to make room for the new has spread, and now pretty much all of the dump has been bought cheap then knocked down and replaced with almost-beachfront houses and resorts. Not all of the houses are half a million dollars, but in 2006, almost half of the houses on the market sold for that much.

Who in their right mind pays $500K to live in a shabby dump that's also a bullseye target for the next gulf hurricane?

The difference between Katrina and Galveston is that by the time The Big One hits, Galveston will be mostly rich.

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[Anonymous Coward]

Free movement of labour would be great for America. There might be a little adjustment initially, but in the medium and long term, it would create a huge economic advantage for the US and all developed countries.
There are two obvious examples that prove this - the European Union and NAFTA. Because of the European Union, there is free movement of labour among the European countries and the impact has been positive. This free movement includes movement of labour from poor countries in Eastern Europe and yet living standards in the Western European countries have not suffered; on the contrary Europe is doing better today than the last couple of decades before the EU gained momentum.
Similarly, NAFTA has made a huge contribution to both the Canadian and American economies though there is some restriction in the movement of labour.

One would like to think that today there is no free movement of labour but that is not true. Chinese labour is already here as a component of the Chinese goods that we buy everyday though they may not be physically present here. So is Indian labour embedded in our software. In a highly connected world, physical location is irrelevant.

And look at the economic growth achieved during this period of labour importation or outsourcing since 1971. The effect has been nothing less than amazing - huge increase in GDP, lowest ever unemployment and higher living standards. The proof is in the pudding.
DineshC

Re:Overworked? (MOD UP)

[PetriBORG]

Mod this guy up.

While I stuck with it, I can completely understand where he's coming from and know many people that didn't stick with it just for this reason. I've only had a hand full of times so far where I've "worked all night" for work - none of them turned out all that productive either! so point made >.

As long as you treat employees like crap

[Marxist Hacker 42]

You will only have crap employees. Maybe it's time to start actually being competitive in hiring and lifestyle as well as being competitive in the marketplace; after all, full time employees in Europe and Japan enjoy the ability to buy a home, settle down in one place, and raise a family.

Either that or it's time for the United States to realize that economics is a form of warfare for rich countries- and get serious about winning economic wars with our peers instead of wasting money losing military wars with our inferiors. If so, we'll need to realize that the international corporation is effectively a double agent traitor or the arms dealer who sells to both sides- and treat those businesses accordingly.

It's 400,000 H1-B's, not 65,000

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a recent thread on the dice.com groups recently, which showed that the actual number of H1-B's issued was over 400,000 last year. And it's been that way for several years now.

This was according to a report from the U.S. Government. The reason for the excessive numbers is that no one polices the actual issuance of H1-B's. And this doesn't count the L1-B's, which are even easier to get from what I have noticed.

I'm at work now, and don't have access to my dice account. If anyone cares to dig up the actual thread, that might be useful.

So, in short, Gates and the other CEO's are talking out of their butts.

Don't even go there, Bill

[MikeRT]

There was an article posted outside of a professor's door when I was in college a year and a half ago talking about Microsoft's problem with treating even its IT contractors right. Maybe the real reason that IT is "suffering" is that companies often don't treat their IT employees like real employees. My fiance's dad, for example, has been proven to be a strategic asset to his company, but when he had to switch jobs because the client's manager found out that he made more money than she did, his boss basically said "ain't my duty to lift a finger to find you work" until it became a possibility that a competitor might pick him up. Given his reputation, that's actually possible. Hell, the abuses that IT workers ranging from sysadmins to software engineers face at the hands of corporate bureaucrats is legendary, and many young people are turned off/scared of that! Who wants to get paid a modest salary for that, especially women? My fiance can't take the abuse from the corporate types over her which is part of the reason why she fully intends to say "fuck this industry" and become a stay at home mother coding in her spare time for fun and to teach her kids if they're interested.

And the thing is that people like Bill Gates don't even care that they are adding to this by calling for the dilution of wages even more, at the same time that many "good liberals" like Gates support high taxes, high regulations and other things that cut into the competitiveness of the average worker compared to foreign workers and reduce the wages of the domestic workers. Yes, I know I'm cynical.

Re:Don't even go there, Bill

[Stanistani]

>How to Keep America Competitive

Break up cumbersome monopolies?

Re:Don't even go there, Bill

[kconfig]

You are absolutely right. If you do even a cursory search for IT abuse/lack of respect, what sane person would want to enter this field? Even CIO magazine has numerous articles on getting buy-in/respect/etc from other peers. Hell, if an executive has to fight to earn respect at the top, what can a line manager or grunt expect. IT itself is a crazy field - while you can earn a decent living, putting up with the constant changes, lack of true respect from business peers, and too many that use technology but don't even have a basic understanding of it is a maddening career choice. Or, maybe I'm just crazy and burnt out after 15 years in the field

Re:Don't even go there, Bill

[Anonymous Coward]

why she fully intends to say "fuck this industry"

AVAST!

A sliver of hope for all geeks!

Re:Don't even go there, Bill

[tom's a-cold]

Maybe the real reason that IT is "suffering" is that companies often don't treat their IT employees like real employees.

In other words, they treat them like their other employees. The whole H1-B program is a scam to depress the salaries of American software people. I've done a lot of work in Silicon Valley and it's become increasingly clear to me that it's not about a skills shortage, it's about being able to pay a guy from (let's use a common example) India a lot less than an equivalently-skilled American would demand, and have that guy unable to leave your company without facing deoprtation, and yet have no job security. A win-win for an unscrupulous employer. No inconvenient unfair dismissal suits. No saying "screw you, I'm going to work for the competition." It's indentured servitude, plus a little "cut chicken to scare monkey."

As for skills, H1B people have a bell curve too. I have met a few great designers/coders, and a lot of schmucks who in a previous stage of IT evolution would have been COBOL drones. Everyone works hard, H1B or US citizen, but so what? My job is to clean up the product of hard work when it has been applied to piss-poor IT decisions. The real problems with IT in the US have to do with pig-ignorant short-term-obsessed management who believe contrary to all experience that free lunches exist, spineless IT managers who go along with the knee-jerk "can't afford to think strategically" mind set, consulting firms selling flavor-of-the-month solutions, and the received wisdom that IT people are in some sense interchangeable. If that's true, you're hiring the wrong ones.

It's not the H1-B person's fault. He/she is doing better by coming to the US despite the abuses, and there's the prospect of a green card a few years in the future. But it puts American professionals in a race to the bottom with respect to working conditions, wages and job security. The best thing for the US would be to shut the H1-B program down. The depressed wages provide a disincentive for anyone trying to enter IT in the US, the exploitation makes working conditions worse for everyone, and the H1-B workers who return home take the knowledge with them. If it's about money, then perhaps top executive compensation would be a better place to look for savings. Our foreign competitors don't reward non-performing execs nearly as lavishly, and there's no evidence that you get better work for $50M per year than you do for $30M. And there's a lot more savings to be found there than in putting the squeeze on IT people.

Me, I'm middle-aged and doing well in the business, but I've advised my son, who's more talented than I am, to do something else for a living since this gravy train has long ago moved on. US corporations and their kleptomanagers have already poisoned that well.

Re:Don't even go there, Bill

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

My fiance can't take the abuse from the corporate types over her which is part of the reason why she fully intends to say "fuck this industry" and become a stay at home mother coding in her spare time for fun and to teach her kids if they're interested.

In the nearly ten years since I left college, I've worked for startups, small businesses and large corporations. I wouldn't say "fuck this industry" so much as "fuck you". Out of all of the places I've worked, I've hated corporations the most. They seems to be the most impersonal, have the most ridiculous policies and the most incompetent management.

If you find yourself in an environment that you simply can't stand, then look elsewhere. There are plenty of computer related jobs in many different industries. It is very easy to fall into the trap of being unhappy with your job day after day if the pay is good enough and the work is easy. It's all too easy to ignore or overlook just how negative an impact your daily working environment is actually having on your life. In my case I was chronically sleep deprived, isolated at work (only real programmer at the office) and eventually began turning to substances to cope with just how much I hated going into the office. It was at that point that I finally decided I needed to take a good hard look at how happy I was with my life in general. I came to the realization that my job was negatively impacting just about everything else in my life and decided to resign.

If you're someone who decided to study computer science in college because it sounded interesting, then you may be content with the typical IT staff position. If you consider yourself a hacker, then stay the hell away from those sorts of jobs. The rigorously enforced policies (you must wear this, be at the office at exactly these hours, etc.) and overall mediocrity of those around you will drive you crazy. I've found that I've been much more likely to find happiness working for a smaller, very technical company (typically in the telecommunications industry, but the financial industry can be good too). Working for startups can also be very liberating as many times you find youself in a consulting position, working out of your house and on your own schedule (usually).

I guess my message is to not let one bad employer, or type of employer, get you down. If you take the time to really define what you want your workday to be like, you can probably find a job to match.

Wanna keep America competitive?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill has it wrong, but that's not surprising considering how he underestimated the internet.

Wanna keep America competitive? Hire seasoned American workers, not just green kids out of college or H-1B visa workers. America is its own largest customer, but Americans don't buy as much if its workers aren't employed in high paying jobs.

Employing cheap labor from overseas is not the answer. The foreigners just go back home eventually and build upon what they learned here, competing with our engineers while living in a shack made from straw and old car parts. Americans want and deserve a better standard of living.

CS Jobs?

[plopez]

WTF does that mean? Creating provably correct AI banking software? Or hacking together a website so that it is nothing more than 'COBOL in drag'? Or applying service packs to aging, cranky Windows boxen?

For 99% of the work out there a CS degree is wasted. For the other 1% no one respects it unless you have a Phd.

And I know I am sounding like a broken record, but I will say it again. Most of the problem is that software, including most commercial and some OSS development tools (billg, I'm talking about your crap mostly) is broken. It requires an army of programmers and support people to keep it running or get development done. You have 2 choices:

1) Find a way to produce cheaper armies of techies or
2) fix the software, fix the developent processes.

And if you read 'The Mythical Man-Month', option 1 will probably not work and lead to the need for even *more* techies. But since everyone seems to insist on using the factory model of software development (ok, there are a few exceptions) option 1 is what will be implemented.

Just FYI, gave the boss the finger the other day. I am no longer in IT. Hoooray!
You youngsters can have my job but remember, in 15 years; or less; you will be me.

Re:CS Jobs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember:

A programmer can make a user interface.
A Computer Scientist can prove it.

Re:CS Jobs?

[gawdonblue]

'COBOL in drag'

Procedure Division, Queen of the Desert!

And "Computer Science" means?....

[bluesangria]

Step 1) Define "Computer Science Employment"

Last I checked, people couldn't even agree on what "Computer Science" meant and what should be taught in the curriculum to accurately call a degree a "Computer Science" degree. Does he mean more C# programmers? More System Administrators? More help desk support? More electrical engineers specializing in micro-processor design? More mathematicians creating a new MP3 algorithm that isn't patented? WTF does he mean "computer science employment??

What if all the students for the next four years got math degrees, but couldn't do computers worth a damn? Would that help the "CS worker" shortage?? Or would it just improve our worldwide math scores?

This is news?

[J.R. Random]

A super rich capitalist wants to increase his profits by importing more cheap labor.

It will be news when a super rich capitalist says, "Sure, it costs a little more to hire American citizens, but I do that because I don't want to see this continued race to the bottom, with the level of economic inequality in this country soon to exceed that of Brazil."

Re:This is news?

[danpsmith]

It will be news when a super rich capitalist says, "Sure, it costs a little more to hire American citizens, but I do that because I don't want to see this continued race to the bottom, with the level of economic inequality in this country soon to exceed that of Brazil."

Yeah, really. They can lie all they want, but the fact of the matter is that I have a degree in computer science, now it's not from a major technology school, but it seems I can't buy a career in IT, even in call assistance.

It Takes Time

[moore.dustin]

Technology is making great leaps in availability and penetration into our society. As a result, more and more people are knowledgeable and interested in the different fields that make up the industry. It takes time for these 14 year old MySpace kids to nurture those interests and attend college for a degree. Now that kids are much more involved with the internet beyond just IM and chat, the industry will gain a whole new group of people interested in technology in one area or another.

Once the penetration of the internet and broadband reach a certain threshold (I dont know it), a more predictable market should exist. At that point, the demand for skilled professionals will be met a couple years later when the MySpace kids who have been waiting to graduate college finally do.

blameusa

[alexandreracine]

I can't wait for that tag to appear! ;)

Re:blameusa

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Mabye if we realized that international corporations owe no loyalty to any country, not even the one that they are headquartered in, there'd be no reason for such a tag because America isn't the problem. The problem is that economics is profoundly nationalistic and a form of warfare- and we've got a bunch of people selling weapons to both sides.

Re:blameusa

[JhohannaVH]

I don't have any mod points, but *BRAVO*!!!!! Seriously... good call. Now, if we could get people to realize that and STOP it, we might get somewhere. *sigh* Money money money... nothing else matters in this country (America) anymore.

Re:blameusa

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I don't have any mod points, but *BRAVO*!!!!! Seriously... good call. Now, if we could get people to realize that and STOP it, we might get somewhere. *sigh* Money money money... nothing else matters in this country (America) anymore.

It has been no different since 1945. The only difference was the discovery in the 1960s that the top level investors could get a tax credit for taxes paid to foreign governments; at which point the offshoring began. No patriotism could stop the rush for dollars after that.

Re:blameusa

[JhohannaVH]

And that right there just proves my point. *sigh* And to think... I LOVE being able to think for myself. :D

Oh, come on, Bill, you may have Aspergers, but...

[Baldrson]

There is no shortage of US engineers -- there is only a shortage of young engineers -- and of managers who see the difference between a line of code and productivity. Not one of the guys over 40 I know is making as much now as he was BEFORE 1996 and most of them have been unemployed most of the time since the year 2000 -- this during a time when real estate costs have skyrocketed along with H-1b imports.

This includes guys who were college buddies of Ray Ozzie and helped him with his CS homework. Yeah, I went to the University of Illinois and worked on the PLATO project as a system programmer.

And don't give me garbage about "keeping up on your skills" when the guys I've most closely worked with -- these obsolete aging engineers who "don't keep up on their skills" -- were doing 50K line Javascript web applications back in 1997 and couldn't get the mind-share among the "luminaries" who were all agog about Java -- and do we even need to talk about VB?

There has been a demographic collapse among young engineers because the prior generation of engineers couldn't afford to have children even if they could find a wife in one of the male saturated ghettos created by guys like you. The few young men sired by engineers are all-too-aware of what you've done to their fathers and they'll be better off going into real estate or moving out to a little plot of land in the country living an eco-friendly subsistence lifestyle.

You see they know they are from a culture that respects women's sovereignty to the point that arranged marriages are out of the question -- unlike the hoards you idiots are importing.

Well, sorry, you're obviously not idiots. You're probably suffering from a mild form of Aspergers to be so unaware of these profound social problems afflicting your subjects -- sort of like a "nobility" that just can't understand why their subjects don't eat cake and then try to guillotine them. My nephew has a fairly severe form of Aspergers but he can get along a lot better now that he is self-aware about it and the limitations it places on his judgement about human social relations. Sometimes reality makes one sound like a satirist but there is truth to what I'm saying here.

What has changed since the early 90's?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

If the old-timers can be believed, before 1995 people *looked forward* to new releases of software. Not only new products, but whole new categories of software were being created. No nation in the world could keep up.

What, exactly, has changed since then, and who was responsible?

Re:What has changed since the early 90's?

[Jack Sombra]

"What, exactly, has changed since then, and who was responsible?"
What has changed? that is pretty simple, before 95 most software changes were either very revolutionary or sorely needed

These days most new releases one or more of the following

a) Minor evolutions, aka a few nice to have, but not NECESSARY features
b) Just a way for the publishers to rake in more money. aka change the color scheme, up the version number and reword the marketing blurb

And without fail nearly all make the end developers lives either complicated or force them to have to reinvent the wheel all over again with not much benefit for the hassle

As to who is respoonsible? Pretty much everybody

This is a bad thing?

[L4m3rthanyou]

I see this as resulting in increased salaries and job security for those of us who have to work down in the trenches. um, w00t?

What's the problem again?

[TheLink]

I'm not in the US, nor a US citizen, but I thought the US companies wanted to send those jobs overseas anyway? Why should smart US students waste X years doing CS, graduate and then have their jobs outsourced or have to compete for jobs treated as "cheap labour" by companies (after all what's the H1-B thing really about)?

If the companies keep changing their minds, well too bad for them.

Meanwhile, it's supply and demand. Not enough applicants? Start offering higher salaries and better working conditions then - too bad you'd probably have to wait a while - try thinking longer term next time.

Otherwise I think they just want more silly people to rush into CS just to increase supply and keep prices down.

The real crisis is the shortage of people with competence and integrity, rather than a shortage of people who do Computer Science.

Re:What's the problem again?

[rholtzjr]

BINGO!!

I pretty much agree with all your comments. I also feel that the export of jobs from the US IT industry was a short term thought with out realizing the long term implications.

A company I left 2 years ago will not even consider an applicant unless they are willing to start at the salary range of the 1000+ offshore contractors they currently employ. The "shortage" was created by these companies that do exactly as my previous employer has done.

What????, you mean it is biting them in the a#% now???, well too bad. :)

Re:What's the problem again?

[Anonymous Coward]

...but I thought the US companies wanted to send those jobs overseas anyway?

In theory, offshoring tech jobs is a great way to lower development costs. In practice, however, there are usually huge tradeoffs in quality when going this route unless the company is prepared to make a substantial investment in setting up their overseas operation. This isn't just a "US employees produce better code" phenomenon, there are practicalities that figure into the decreased quality. For one, the turn around time in dealing with those in charge of project management is roughly one day, unless the overseas setup keeps US hours. This can be remedied by moving project management overseas as well, but foreigners are more out of touch with the US/european markets where the product needs to be sold. And don't even think about trying to practice agile development overseas...you need incredibly detailed specs that don't allow any room for interpretation (because the interpretation from someone living in a different culture is far more likely to be wrong than the interpretation of someone living in a western culture...and we all know how difficult it is to find project managers capable of writing specs to that level of detail).

Far too many small to mid-sized companies have gotten bit when trying to save money on development costs...and, as the old saying goes, once bitten, twice shy. Of course, all this could be my subjective observations as a contractor who gets paid incredibly well to come in and help clean up the disasters left behind from overseas development efforts that only produced an unmanageable code base and a product that didn't meet the evolving need for the company.

Re:What's the problem again?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is there's too much "slash and burn".

Basically, come in, and chop stuff every quarter or every other quarter.

Slash & Burn CEO example:
1st quarter: trim R&D. Naturally most customers won't notice. But of course overheads go down and profits go up.
2nd quarter: trim IT. Naturally most customers won't notice. But of course overheads go down and profits go up.
3rd quarter: trim support. You know the drill.
4th quarter: trim overall headcount worldwide by 10% (doesn't matter if the 9 people in Singapore or 20 in Paris have actually been doing well, just chop 10% anyway).

Give yourself a big fat bonus and a pat on your back for improving company profits for 4 consecutive quarters.
5th quarter: outsource R&D, get R&D to train their replacements. Naturally most customers won't notice. But of course overheads go down and profits go up.
6th quarter: outsource support. Blah blah blah.
7th quarter: outsource more "non core competencies". ;)
8th quarter: trim overall headcount worldwide by 5%.

Give yourself an even bigger fat bonus and a pat on your back for improving company profits for 8 consecutive quarters.
9th quarter: more customers start noticing and grumbling to media etc. Announce that Company X is bringing back support in-house "being always customer-oriented" (or whatever buzzword is popular).
10th quarter: board start thinking that maybe it's time to get someone else. Have a nice discussion with board.
11th quarter: Get a nice golden handshake a few tens of millions maybe?- issue an announcement saying you have achieved your goals in Company X, and are off to new challenges[1].
12th quarter: Company X welcomes new CEO onboard.

[1] Like a sipping a nice cocktail without spilling it as the waves rock your yacht.

Raise Wages and provide training.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr.Gates can afford it. I've never heard of a job an American wont to for decent working conditions and decent pay.

All this nonsense about a "talent shortage" is just that ... non sense. We've heard about a "nurse shortage" for about 80 years now. The fact is, rich hospitals and nursing homes don't want to pay the going rate for labor services. They'd like their own private supply of non-union, foreign 28 year olds (which other businesses wouldn't be allowed to steal).

It's the same with microsoft. They could easily provide training to smart young college graduates or re-train mid-career folks. Sure, it'd take a couple of years to get them productive, but that's cost business has to pay to stay competitive.

CS degrees not needed

[rla3rd]

The number of people graduating with CS degrees is not an accurate measure of shortfall in the industry. I for one do not have a CS degree, but a Masters Degree in Financial Management, and am currently taking financial engineering coursework. All my programming experience is self taught, and I develop quantitative trading strategies for an investment research firm / hedge fund. I may not be a master in any one language, but am able to put together computer models in C++, R (SPLUS), python, etc. There are many people out there who are working in software development that are not from a CS background, but with in depth knowledge of a specific field. I suggest for anyone entering the software development field to develop the understanding of a specific field, and develop your computer skills along the way. I did this, and my pay is now much higher than it would be, had if I majored in computer science.

Re:CS degrees not needed

[JustNiz]

>> but am able to put together computer models in C++, R (SPLUS), python, etc.

With all due repsect, people like you are a part of the problem. People that think that being able to hack code is the same as doing a good job.

It sounds like you are being paid for your banking/business skills, not your software development skills, which is fine. but please don't fool yourself that you can produce high-quality software. You will never produce software with the same quality as someone who was motivated to do a CS degree and who got the proper education. The fact that you didn't do a CS degree points to the fact that the subject didn't interest you as much as the subject you studied, or that you have enough training to even be aware of some of the issues.

How would you feel if you were going in for an operation by a surgeon who studied history of art but taught himself to be handy with a knife?

Re:CS degrees not needed

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey - I'm also a self-taught software engineer. I have a degree in Economics, and am interested in switching careers into the finance industry by the time I hit 30 (early 20's right now). You make financial engineering sound pretty attractive - can you suggest any books, courses, or other educational material to check out? Is most of the training done on the job, like entry-level analyst work, or does it vary from position to position and firm to firm?

Thanks,
Mike

Re:CS degrees not needed

[rla3rd]

Yes I am being paid for my banking/business skills. That does not mean that I have not studied CS, It was just not my major. The same thing could be said about physicists, chemists, engineers, etc. The software I design is integrated into a fully scalable production trading platform, where good design is a necessity, not a luxury. CS very much interested me, but I realized long ago that if I brought something more to the table than a CS degree, I'd get paid for it.

Re:CS degrees not needed

[Anonymous Coward]

This AC disagrees with the other poster who claims that you're a part of the problem.

If anything, folks like yourself are a part of the solution as you're obviously in the position to save your company the headache of hiring a full-time IT staff to write custom software. "The industry" always touts "doing more with less", and having "easy to comprehend tools and solutions" - and here you are living it by using their tools outside the industry that espoused them.

What a lot of people fail to realize is that outside the "shrink-wrap software" world (MS, Oracle, etc), there exists vast rafts of IT contractor folk, many of which write software on a client-by-client basis. They are in the "business of business" which means being flexible enough to understand things that are not IT related as solvable by whatever programming languages and support hardware are in their skill set.

In this environment, the ability to code and wield high-minded CS concepts are valued equal to, if not less than the mental dexterity required to learn a client's entire business model from scratch, for each new contract. After all, if you can't understand what the business rules are that you're supposed to code, it won't matter one itoa how well you understand predicate calculus, big-O notation, or even how buzzword compliant you are. Provided that you have a solid understanding in the same language as your team, you can easily wield a 100% correct solution on schedule, using little more than journeyman-level programming techniques. In contrast, the CS PhD over there who didn't take Econ 1001, is having a hard time keeping up despite how many times he's been published in Dr Dobbs.

In other words: the best in the contracting field are aggressively cross-trained, most of the time on the job, and on the fly. So again, you're more of an example of what works well (and even a possible indication for things to come), rather than a problem or a special case to Gates' cited "CS brain-drain".

Re:CS degrees not needed

[Richard Steiner]

With all due repsect, people like you are a part of the problem. People that think that being able to hack code is the same as doing a good job.

I am not the OP, but I've encountered plenty of people over the years who (1) did not have a CS degree but (2) were still able to produce structured, efficient, and easily supportable code. The two things are not mutually exclusive.

Yes, there are also some non-CS folks who write crappy code, just as there are also CS folks who write crappy code, but anyone with enough intelligence can pick up on most programming best practices eventually even without formal classroom exposure.

Programmers don't work in a vacuum. Not only were many of the non-CS folks I've known perfectly capable of learning from those of us who had a CS background, but some of them had picked up a lot of their good habits on their own, mainly through practical experience.

It sounds like you are being paid for your banking/business skills, not your software development skills, which is fine. but please don't fool yourself that you can produce high-quality software. You will never produce software with the same quality as someone who was motivated to do a CS degree and who got the proper education.

This strikes me as a gross overgeneralization, and I disagree with it completely. We don't know the OP's abilities, and they may or may not be related to having a CS degree.

A CS degree is nice and usually provides some very useful background, but it isn't a guarantee of competence in the field, and it also doesn't always indicate the presence or absence of native ability.

In my experience, some people simply have a natural gift for analyzing a problem, breaking it up into a series of logical steps, and creating a solution in a clean and structured manner. No degree required.

The fact that you didn't do a CS degree points to the fact that the subject didn't interest you as much as the subject you studied, or that you have enough training to even be aware of some of the issues.

Well, CS degrees have only been around for 20-25 years, and there are a lot of programmers out there who started well before then. Many of them are engineers who moved into programming, and some of them have formal training in programming as part of their engineering degrees, just not as part of a "CS" program.

It doesn't take much effort to teach the basic principles of structured modular programming to a non-CS cow orker. I've done it myself over the years, as I'm sure others have, but as I said above I've found a few people out there who discovered that sort of thing for themselves. Engineers aren't idiots, at least usually...

How would you feel if you were going in for an operation by a surgeon who studied history of art but taught himself to be handy with a knife?

I personally would pick someone with no formal education but 20 years of practical experience in the field over a wet-behind-the-ears graduate who has a lot of booklearning but no real hands-on experience outside of the academic environment.

US education isn't a good preparation.

[ErichTheRed]

The fundamental problem is this: We don't value education or hard work as a society. We're overly obsessed with celebrities, sports stars, or whatever other distraction is going on. The educational system itself de-emphasizes fundamental stuff like math and science in favor or "softer" subjects like art and literature. As a result, we turn out project managers and marketing people, not geeks.

Other cultures embrace education and drill it into kids' heads that it's in their best interest to do well. Other countries have a culture where it's shameful to fail. Not getting into a good college is a suicide-triggering event. The best students in India, China, Japan, etc. study for hours and hours a day, and come out of school knowing how to do math, solve problems, and logically work through something like an IT problem. While the US does produce _some_ people like that, the vast majority are just doing the minimum to get by. I was by no means a top student, but I do work hard. I expect people that I work with to have the same work ethic and ability to reason, and am constantly disappointed.

With these facts, I have no trouble believing that companies can't find qualified individuals to fill positions. I think some of it is definitely a ploy to use cheaper labor, but it's not all a scam.

Re:US education isn't a good preparation.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been a while since I've taught incoming freshmen, but I don't think they're being taught art and literature.

We're not teaching history, art, literature, language, music, math, science...

The answer is..

[JustNiz]

After the dot.com bust, there were a siginificant amount of unemployed programmers suddenly on the market place amd employers got used to paying artificially cheap salaries to programmers, who just took any offer to get a job.

The situation now is that employers have got used to cheap developers and now don't want to wake up and smell the coffee and pay us what we're really worth again, so the job is less attractive to those currently making career decisions. This actually benefits those of us who are already qualified/employed, as our value goes up further due to the ongoing shortage.

Its not hard to see that the next phase coming is a period of high developer turnover, as more enlightened companies offer more realistic salaries and attract developers from lower-paid companies.

Those companies that choose not to substantially increase their developers salaries will lose out by being forced to contract out. This will hurt most the companies that outsource to places like India as they consequently get further hurt by massive hidden costs due to large amounts of rework through the lack of quality in the resulting product, developers lack of cultural understanding of the product's market, lack of workable project management, and sharply rising salaries in India.

It always amazes me that employers consitently never can see the real hidden costs of letting their best developers walk out the door, and usually choose a path where they loose millions in rework and lost sales rather than increase salaries by a few thousand.

No worries

[sholden]

The credit bubble crash will fix this right up.

Ancedotal evidence

[Anonymous Coward]

If there are so many unfilled CS jobs out there, then why can't I, with 25 years experience and a relatively modest asking price, find another job?

America never was competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

They stole IP (ususally from the UK) or bullied and manipulated their way to dominance (via the WTO etc)

IT degree

[Broken scope]

At my college we have the CS majors... and the IT majors. Every year we lose CS majors and IT gains students.

IT majors do 2 programming courses and a no advanced math(no calc). CS majors have a harder dergee program and our college doesn't give a shit about us. They spend time talking about their 100% placement rate with IT major and how all the IT majors are on the management level within 5 years making six figures. Many of the IT majors have their oh so superior "I'll be your boss one day" attitudes which is only reinforced by the attitude of the faculty. It pisses me off to no end because they tout programming skills but if you asked them to do anything more advanced than simple nested for loops and method calls in java they would give you a blank look and go "huh?". Then they make a comment about their golfing skills scoff and walk away. I will plot your downfall you sonofabitch and you won't know what hit you... ahem.. sorry got a little carried away there.

The scary part is with few exception the CS majors look like stereotypical CS majors. Its really scary. Some of us go to the gym or run everyday. The problem is many of us don't and that is the ones people see. The other problem is we have a ton of primadonas. The ones who sit and basically scoff at their classes and claim to be mad hackers. The thing is they are for the most part pretty damned smart. They are to arrogant to do anything or work with other people and they will manage to get their degree and they won't be able to do jack shit in the real world because they refuse to do the mundane programming. They want glamor. These are guys who are about to graduate.

My first semester I got bored and went back and looked at all the mistakes I made registering for classes. One of them was packing my classes into 5 hour work chunks a day or having 2 classes back top back that were way to far away. I spent the next few hours writing some pseudo code. I also asked a friend of mine who is a civil engineering major if he could give me distances between all the building using all the heavily used walking paths on campus. Once I figured it out me and another CS major who was in his third year wrote the actual code up and we took it to the guy who administrates our class scheduling and registration system. He liked it, had another guy on the staff help us adapt it to better work with the database and the front end we employ and we added it. Next semester we saved countless freshman a lot of trouble. We got thanked, credited, were given good experience, I got a recommendation that will help me with any internships I apply for, and hell it was kinda fun to do.

The CS primadonas gave me disdain because I did something so simple that they could do "blindfolded", something that was below their wizardry. IT majors were still pompous arrogant assholes.

It might just be me but since the CS profession lost that bit of glamor it had we have been attracting for the most part the wrong sort of people. We need to make it so its worth the time to get a CS major again instead of making a CS major a miserable experience. That however is just my 0.02$ based on my narrow little slice of hell. Thank god I'm going to a different college next year and starting my game design degree then my masters in CS.

Re:IT degree

[Ikoma Andy]

will plot your downfall you sonofabitch and you won't know what hit you...

IT majors were still pompous arrogant assholes.

People like you are the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes. Sir, step away from the keyboard...

Re:IT degree

[Broken scope]

YAY I AM A NUT CASE!

Re:IT degree

[cnlohfin3109]

I see this in my college also. Instead of IT they call it MIS, but the idea is the same - no math or anything. Its a degree in microsoft VB who think they will own CS majors. It spawns from all the people who think "i play games on computers, ill be a computer major!" then fail out of the first two classes and switch to MIS - then being told they are smarter then the CS majors for knowing "business." As for the stereotype; everyone here knows thats wrong, personally im preparing for my spring break snowboarding in colorado, not playing WOW(gag).

Re:IT degree

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

The other problem is we have a ton of primadonas. The ones who sit and basically scoff at their classes and claim to be mad hackers. The thing is they are for the most part pretty damned smart. They are to arrogant to do anything or work with other people and they will manage to get their degree and they won't be able to do jack shit in the real world because they refuse to do the mundane programming. They want glamor. These are guys who are about to graduate.

Don't worry about those guys. Once they get fired a couple of times because they're unable to work with those "beneath them" they'll change.

First mistake - assuming they need a degree

[cstec]

Numbers like this a bogus, both assuming that a university is the only place to learn computer science, and that the only source of computer programmers are people with computer science degrees. People come to computer science with a variety of degrees under the belt, elec. eng and mathematics being very common, but forensics and even a dietician I know went on to be good developers.

Not Interchangeable

[SirGarlon]

Where are these 100,000 jobs that Mr. Gates claims appear annually? In what branch(es) of "computer science?" Application development? Database administration? Desktop support? R&D? All of these could fall under the umbrella of "computer science," but they require totally different skills and training. Here's something to consider: if a company eliminates 100 engineers from application development and adds 100 network admin jobs (for example), that's 100 unemployed engineers and 100 admin openings competing for qualified applicants. The amount of training required in a "computer science" sub-field makes jumping from one field to another prohibitive for the employee. Especially given that no one wants to go from a senior job in one branch to an entry-level job in another. This creates a lot of inefficiency in the employment market. So it may be not that our schools are inferior; it may be instead the labor market is changing so fast that the labor pool can't keep up.

Re:Not Interchangeable

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just a matter of "not wanting to".

After 25 years, I'm burned out on programming and don't want to do it anymore. I love hardware and network administrator. With children grown and house paid for, I can afford the reduced wages of an entry level position. Now, try and find an employer willing to hire me for an entry level position!

True MS Story

[Anonymous Coward]

MS visted a certain university several years ago.. A professor (and good friend of mine) asked them 'what can we teach our students to make them more employable by you?' He was told 'Not a thing'.

Sorry Bill, you shot yourself in the foot with this one.

Large costs, no security, short career, H1B

[Maxo-Texas]

Let's see..

1) Absolutely KILL yourself in college with 35 hours a week of homework for ONE Database class while your friends are spending about 12 hours a week for all homework in all classes.

2) Pay $50,000 over 4 years just like they do.

3) Graduate into a low-status job when it comes to dating (I get a LOT more action from my $500 massage therapy training than I ever did from my CS degree-- MT is a female dominated field- you can't turn around without finding three or four who want to hang out and do tradeoffs and go to conferances- and MT work is like working out 8 hours a day so they tend to be fit and they tend to also be very nice people because they deal with the public a lot-- the pay is crap of course).

4) Start with a reasonably high salary-- but after a few years, it becomes clear you need to leave the field and project lead or manage (that's me these days) if you ever want to make "real" money.

5) Be managed by people who absolutely HATE that they have to have you- they view you as a COST.

6) Never ever be understood by management (either overworked when you are stupid or underworked once you smarten up). They'll replace you in a heartbeat with crappy but cheaper labor. I.e. NO JOB SECURITY. How can you buy a bloody house when you might be unemployeed for 7 months without notice.

7) And then-- at 55-- no more work. I've known so many who were just pushed out of the field. And you need the insurance you see. (Hence also my shift into manager+tech skills).

Corporations spent the 90's and the early 00's repeatedly teaching us that they have no loyalty to us and that they are going to hire people making $10,000 to replace us.

Okay-- WE GET IT. We are leaving the field. Young pups are not entering the field in the first place. And now they complain? Screw them. I hope they have severe problems and end up having to pay $150 an hour for 5 or 6 years to get people to enter the field again.

Re:Large costs, no security, short career, H1B

[AutopsyReport]

1) Absolutely KILL yourself in college with 35 hours a week of homework for ONE Database class while your friends are spending about 12 hours a week for all homework in all classes.

35 hours a week of homework for one class? Assuming you had at least 25 hours of class a week, plus 15 hours in homework, you're doing almost 80 hours of school a week? Sounds like someone hadn't caught up to the rest of the class, or your just extremely exaggerating.

3) Graduate into a low-status job when it comes to dating.

I'm sorry, but what kind of idiot takes a CS degree (or any degree) assuming it will get him a woman? That low-status job is a lot better than a lot of other work you tend to ignore (janitors, etc.).

4) Start with a reasonably high salary-- but after a few years, it becomes clear you need to leave the field and project lead or manage (that's me these days) if you ever want to make "real" money.

There's money to be made for managers and developers (assuming that's what you are) alike. Both can have high salaries.

5) Be managed by people who absolutely HATE that they have to have you- they view you as a COST.

You're probably not a good employee, then.

6) Never ever be understood by management (either overworked when you are stupid or underworked once you smarten up). They'll replace you in a heartbeat with crappy but cheaper labor.

See last comment.

7) And then-- at 55-- no more work. I've known so many who were just pushed out of the field. And you need the insurance you see. (Hence also my shift into manager+tech skills).

This is the same for many industries. Eventually you get phased out because the young bloods have the same skills, but with less experience and cheaper salaries.

Re:Large costs, no security, short career, H1B

[Maxo-Texas]

1) Absolutely KILL yourself in college with 35 hours a week of homework for ONE Database class while your friends are spending about 12 hours a week for all homework in all classes.

35 hours a week of homework for one class? Assuming you had at least 25 hours of class a week, plus 15 hours in homework, you're doing almost 80 hours of school a week? Sounds like someone hadn't caught up to the rest of the class, or your just extremely exaggerating.

I averaged a 3.87 in my gpa. The database class- I got a C in. We had 20 SQL forms and 20 SQLPlus lisenses for 80 students. 35 students failed the class. Part of the reason I got a C was that I only got a total of 40 minutes of SQL plus time. We wrote a complete functioning database just as part of the class in pascal.
I worked 40 hours a week. I took 12 hours that semester since I knew DB was a 'weedout' course. I did 35 hours a week for that class and had about 10 hours homework in the other classes as well. For that class, I was up 40 hours straight at least once- and took a 15 minute nap before the final on a concrete bench (please wake me up guys- I was out the second I was horizontal). I slept in my car and showered on campus more than once. Doing the math- I averaged under 28 hours a week for sleep after travel time.

No exageration- it was that hard. We had two other weedout courses that hard in our degree. Typically about 50% would drop (fairly leniant drop policies- I think you had 6 weeks to drop with an "I"). Of those who didn't drop, 25% would fail and 25% would get a "D".

I put one WEEK of less than that level of effort (27 hours of studying) into calculus 3 and I was able to finish the mid term test in 15 minutes and made a 97/100. For DB, I put in an entire semester at those levels and I pulled a C.

3) Graduate into a low-status job when it comes to dating.

I'm sorry, but what kind of idiot takes a CS degree (or any degree) assuming it will get him a woman? That low-status job is a lot better than a lot of other work you tend to ignore (janitors, etc.).

It's something to be aware of. There are plenty of jobs with pay similar to CS where you won't lead a monk like existance. Going out with women is a lot of fun in a way the guys just don't provide and women in IT are rare. If you can get a good job, good pay, and 50/50 women instead of 80/20-- why not take it?

4) Start with a reasonably high salary-- but after a few years, it becomes clear you need to leave the field and project lead or manage (that's me these days) if you ever want to make "real" money.

There's money to be made for managers and developers (assuming that's what you are) alike. Both can have high salaries.

Speaking from the back end- given similar intelligence and drive, you are sacrificing hundreds of thousands of dollars in income going the IT route- or you are sacrificing much of your healthy young life when you could be playing working your ass off.

5) Be managed by people who absolutely HATE that they have to have you- they view you as a COST.

You're probably not a good employee, then.

As I said in another post here- they absolutely love me- great ratings, promotions- raises. They would let me go in 2 seconds. Just 2 years ago they laid off a bunch of great people and hired a bunch of indians under Infosys to replace them. I'm pleasant and like them on one level but at another level, I know 5) to be true. These people may like me but they are NOT my friends and will not take care of me.

6) Never ever be understood by management (either overworked when you are stupid or underworked once you smarten up). They'll replace you in a heartbeat with crappy but cheaper labor.

See last comment.

---

But really, I think that you just wanted to argue and launch a few random attacks at a stranger.

fact is:
IT SUCKS compared to many other fields where you get a lot more respect for a lot less work.
The degrees for IT are much harder to get when you consid

Re:Large costs, no security, short career, H1B

[AutopsyReport]

Fair enough. And no, I didn't just want launch an attack on you. My apologies if I came across as being obnoxious.

I come from a very different perspective, where IT people are treated as you would want to be (knowledgeable, not expendable, etc.). The salaries are average to high. Of course, I am from Canada so things could be much different. I have done consulting for US firms, but haven't seen the "you're expendable" mentality. Around here, there's plenty of high-paying jobs appearing daily, and I don't live in a prominent high-tech area. I also work with several aged (50+) folks who fit in quite well.

That being said, I've managed to find easy-going and well-paying work right out of university (and I didn't finish my degree). I consider myself lucky but I know I've also earned my chance. I just can't imagine a work environment where you could easily be replaced by a foreigner, nor can I consider IT/CS a bad industry to enter. Many people I know are not so fortunate to find well-paying jobs where your knowledge is respected.

Re:Large costs, no security, short career, H1B

[Dan Slotman]

When I graduated, my free time literally doubled. I don't think I had single class that averaged 35 hrs a week, but I definitely worked much longer hours to get my degree than I do in the workplace. My worst semester I forced myself to take three hours on Saturday and one on Sunday as free time. Other than that I only attended class and did homework.

I don't see anything inconsistent in the parent's story. Don't assume that everyone shares the same experiences that you do. Particularly don't assume that someone working harder than you is less intelligent than yourself.

Re:Large costs, no security, short career, H1B

[Maxo-Texas]

I am glad things worked out for you. I wish we had universal health care here (tho limited) because I think it would make us a little bit less of a cost. I get the impression that things are nicer in canada in general.

Well my perspective is skewed to america in general and texas in particular. Things are more ruthless here. The social contract we had during the 50's has been broken so many times that there is nothing left. Our executives make 400 times what the average worker does and then complain about worker wages.

In Texas if you are not a minority, female, or a medically protected class they can walk in and fire you without notice without any consequences. Similarly, there were no grants for me so I had to work full-time through school. My school was partially like that because of some kind of accredidation issue. One professor reportedly told his class, "I am sorry but I've been told only 30% of you can pass." Something about too many people graduating the program so it must not be rigorous enough. Since they were not smart enough to provide real rigor (it was just a state school) (or maybe we students were too bright-- who knows) they just made them harder with insane amounts of homework.

My experience with corporations is that they talk nice/touchy-feely until the monday you show up and you are laid off. I'm a little brighter than average and so far I've read them correctly before it happens each time so I'm still in the IT field but I have a lot of friends over the years who bought the line and got smushed.

It gets worse than just being replaced. I've had a few friends who were told to train their replacements. Because they were living hand to mouth- they typically had to.

Don't get me wrong- I think capitalism like democracy has a lot of power in it. But just as democracy and devolve into tyranny of the majority- raw capitalism can get extremely ugly. I think the US is about to swing to the left and beat up on the rich for 4 to 12 years. It hasn't before because of the abortion and gay rights issues.

Re:Large costs, no security, short career, H1B

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

1. Where the hell did you go to school? I spent about three hours a day on coursework, and I was in the College of Engineering.
2. University of Illinois tuition for Engineering was ~$3,500 a semester.
3. Who picks a career based on women? Okay, yeah some people do.
4. Not sure what you mean, I'm making close to six figures after being out of school nine years as a Sr. Network Engineer.
5. Don't work for an IT department in a non-technical corporation. Work for a technical company, eg. telecommunications.
6. See #5
7. Not sure about this as I'm just over 30. If you're that experienced and talented, it should be easy to start a consulting business.

Re:Large costs, no security, short career, H1B

[2020steve]

Looking back at my past employers, it's entirely possible to run your business in such a way that nobody wants to work for you. Treat your developers like trash, periodically fire some of them to keep the remaining ones on their toes and see what happens.

IT people are gossipy. When amongst ourselves, we'll talk about work and swap war stories about who screwed us. There are a few places in this town where I wouldn't work for $100k/year because why bother even learning their database system if you're just going to get canned in five months? I can think of a couple companies in my town who went under because their reputation and turnover rates were so bad that they'd post to careerbuilder every day and hear nothing back. They went out of business because no engineers means no product means no money means move on.

Re:Large costs, no security, short career, H1B

[Maxo-Texas]

I got out of UH with a comp sci degree in 93.

Our Engineering college had two weedout courses. Typically about 33% finished the course. Typically no one passed them the first attempt. They were more ridiculous than Compsci until the accreditation thing came up and they resolved to drive about 70% of us from the program entirely.

It ran about $1200 a semester back then after fees, books, etc. Today, it's closer to $3,500 a semester now. Since things were so brutal, no one was able to get much above 12 hours a semester so it was really a 5 to 6 year degree program for a bachelors.

Few use women in the field as a criteria- but I think they really should looking back on things.

Close to six figures is nice. I only know one person with a masters degree who makes close to six figures. I'm high five myself (tho six with my investments). I made six figures as a consultant. It was nice. 120 was a very magical level- it felt like I always had enough money to do whatever I wanted. Anyway, most of my other friends who are seniors seem to make 60's to low 80's. The lowest level of actual management at my place seems to make right at six figures. That's where I will probably be in the next two years.

I've worked for both kinds and I agree with you. IT people should just not work for any non-technical company. You will always be treated like garbage or ignored while the business people are well treated. Typical example: Open bar bowling day for the business staff to "team build". Team meeting / Lunch at a chinese restaurant for the technical staff.

Also, they don't understand anything you do so you are so tied up and straight jacketed that you don't get to do fun stuff.

I was a consultant for six years. It is VERY hard to keep contracts going. Companies only want to deal with companies (tax issues) and vendor consultants ($150 an hour for IBM guys- but most of that goes to IBM). They want to actively force an ordinary people back down to employee status.

It was wonderful during the 80's and early 90's. Then they had a bunch of tax laws passed that made it more difficult to work as an independent or small contracting house. I do remember that period happily tho. But in 2000 it became clear I needed to land as a salaryman fast. A lot of my consultant buds didn't see that and got into real trouble in 2001/2002.

The high-tech labor shortage debunked years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.html

It's CS that's the problem

[Paulrothrock]

The problem is that you don't really need a CS degree to do CS work. I started in a CS program and found out it was for people who wanted to work with theory. I switched to Penn State's IST degree. It covered a lot of the bases of technology work, from databases to software development to networking, and had enough electives that you could specialize in any one of those systems and had a strong emphasis on project management skills and teamwork.

You could basically make your own track and come out with a lot of experience and knowledge in a specific area, or come out with general knowledge of the IT world. What you don't get is a ton of comp sci theory. But you come out of it ready to get down to business.

And, interestingly, those who I've encountered that have CS degrees tend to write fairly heady code that is a lot more complex than necessary.

I've been through two major downturns

[maynard]

First in the very early 1990s, I was laid off and wound up selling boots in an army/navy store for a couple of years while the market recovered. At the time I was in my early twenties, so I consider that a reasonable outcome given my experience level and professional abilities at the time. This last downturn, from 2000 onward, I've survived well enough an remained employed in the field.

And based upon those experiences I say that there's a damn good reason people are avoiding computer science and other technical fields. The job market for this skill-set is far too volatile. I know of many people with excellent skills who can't find work. One programmer friend, who is absolutely top notch, can't find work because he is over fifty; pure age discrimination.

University students aren't unable or unwilling to learn technical skills, instead they're making a good long term bet that training up for a skill in a volatile market might well leave them unable to pay-off the mortgage on a good home, pay for their children's college tuition, or any number of other basic middle class expectations.

I would not recommend this career to anyone who wanted to work in industry. For those who love the science in computer science, then get at Ph.D and conduct research as a faculty member at a university. Get tenure. Otherwise, you'll just get screwed.

Competitive?

[Tiger Smile]

Compete. Start with educating people and allowing them to innovate. Remove restrictions that might prevent learning. People who love money will not compete. Those that love to compete will compete.

Remove software patents, and weaken software copyrights. Allow people a little room and they will stand on the shoulders of giants. Some have built condos there.

Punish companies that are anticompetitive. We need a strong nation not one where anticompetitive-ness as seen as a standard business tactic. If convicted of criminally anticompetitive acts the code involved in those products should be put in the public domain copyright & patents.

Well, that would be the extreme view, but if you want to compete you do have to be somewhat committed. One method is to prevent the impediments.

Re:Competitive?

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it amazing every time time 'shortage of CS' is discussed. With a CS degree I seem to have gone 2 years of not finding gainful employment. Sure, natural disasters hurt job prospects. Not like McDonald's recently started employees off at higher wages than entry level CS here. And Microsoft discussing a shortage? Most prospective employers look me over because I don't have 5 years+ experience in .Net or MS SQL. Guess I should just be getting use to seeing my degree hanging above this desk.

We could go the other extreme

[davidwr]

No immigration for work, except very temporary visas for people whose jobs cross international borders, like pilots, salesmen, or people whose jobs take them to trade shows, training seminars, etc. Absolutely no new immigration where the person gets a paycheck from a US address. No regular student visas either, just temporary 30-day ones for short-term training seminars. Legal and illegal aliens with jobs would be given permanent residency and all-purpose work permits others would be given visitor visas. All visitors would be tracked and deported if they worked for money or overstayed their visas and anyone paying them would be severely punished.

Let's see, what would happen a year after this got implemented:

• The illegal-alien problem would go away, as any remaining alien job-holders would be legal.
  
• Unless we had a boon in training programs and baby-making, there would be a labor shortage in certain areas as talent pool shrank. There is already such a shortage in the health-care field and for a time there was a teacher shortage.
  
• As today, high-cost jobs that can be exported will be exported, particularly "intellectual services" jobs like X-Ray-interpreters and computer programmers that cannot be reasonably protected by protectionist tariffs.
  
• The number of new aliens in this country would decline over time, leading to a loss in cultural exchange
  
• Certain high-demand sectors that could not be exported would have high wages, leading to high costs for those who used those services.
  
• If trends don't change, the US population would gradually decline due to low birth rate
  
• On the "good news" side of things, resource use would go down, as would traffic congestion and pollution.
  

Re:We could go the other extreme

[electrosoccertux]

What's the problem with any of those scenarios? I don't see one. Your reference to the low birthrate problem would go away as salaries increase. Used to be on the farm that children provided a cheap source of labor, so the more you had the better. Now with tuition for university going through the roof, they're a liability. When there aren't enough to fill the jobs, salaries would go up, and having a child would no longer be a liability.

Dang, you're pessimistic...

[Mateo_LeFou]

..but I also suspect you're at least partly right.

e.g. in the face of mounting evidence that the U.S. "intellectual property" regime is a big contributor to the stagnation of innovation, BG's opinion is that "Government investment in research, strong intellectual property laws and efficient capital markets are among the reasons that America has for decades been best at transforming new ideas into successful businesses."

The guy's recommending that we foster more innovation by buying more-completely into the rampant delusions of the "content industry" and the patent trolls.

Re:Dang, you're pessimistic...

[ShieldW0lf]

Bill is saying that the thing that keeps the US rich is that once someone figures out how to do something smart, they make other nations pay them if they wish to also do something smart, and they bomb them if they refuse to participate in the scheme.

If you're not funneling wealth into the US, they'll do the best they can manage to keep your society operating at the level of savages.

Bill understands all this stuff perfectly. He knows that the role of the corporation is to be the well mannered mobster, and that the role of the government is to supply the raw research and the muscle.

Au contraire

[bill_mcgonigle]

And IF WHAT THE ARTICLE SAYS IS CORRECT finding a job more in line with your personality should be easy.

I read it differently. Bill Gates wants more H1-B workers which he can, unofficially, work at those kind of hours. That creates a watermark in the marketplace, against which non-H1B workers need to compete for jobs. I bet if Microsoft improved working conditions and company policies (both stemming from the same dysfunctional root, most likely) they'd have plenty of folks beating a path to their door.

Folks I've known who figured Microsoft would be the right place to work straight out of college have all "gotten the hell out" after a year or two. And it's not all about the hours - Apple has a much lower turnover rate and a lower percentage of H1-B's despite inhuman hour requirements.

Part of it is cultural - the 80-hour salaried job at Microsoft might be nirvana to a particular H1-B workers, but unacceptable to a well-educated American. Not to mention a Frenchman.

Re:Au contraire

[gfxguy]

Yes - I've pointed out in another post. The same newspaper has an editorial only less than a week ago that says in 2004 the U.S. produced over 57,000 C.S. graduates. Coupled with his 65,000 H-1B visas, if his 100,000 new jobs a year is accurate, there's a 22k surplus.

Re:Au contraire

[bmajik]

I work at Microsoft.

I know very few 80hr/week employees. As in, i can't think of any right now.

Microsoft doesn't have a problem finding applicants. Microsoft has a problem finding _qualified_ applicants. I've done a bunch of interviews. We interview _way_ more people than we hire. And I don't even want to think about the people that _don't_ make it to me and don't even pass the HR and phone-screening stages of the process.

We want good people no matter where they come from. There is no particular focus on H1-B workers. Given the extra paperwork and overhead involved, and the legal restriction that they get the same pay, etc etc, don't you think we'd rather not deal with the extra hassle?

Re:Au contraire

[Vicissidude]

I read it differently. Bill Gates wants more H1-B workers which he can, unofficially, work at those kind of hours.

Exactly. Bill has not changed his tune over the last decade. Even during the middle of the last recession when American IT workers were getting laid off right and left and no one could find work, Bill still talked about the lack of technical workers. It was certainly a lie then and it's probably a lie now.

If there were a large deficit of IT professionals, we would be seeing salaries go through the roof. We're not seeing that yet. Salaries are still on par with where they were during the recession. That's not the least bit surprising with the massive layoffs from IBM and HP last year.

Re:Au contraire

[AndroidCat]

That creates a watermark in the marketplace, against which non-H1B workers need to compete for jobs.

Benchmark. A watermark would be the company name printed on their foreheads if you looked carefully. Hmm. Never mind...

Re:Au contraire

[truthsearch]

against which non-H1B workers need to compete for jobs.

The irony is that H1Bs are supposed to be used only to fill jobs for which there are no local workers available. And therefore there should be no competition. Instead, companies put out wanted ads, then corporate lawyers tell the government no qualified people applied. Then the position is filled by a lower paid person here on an H1B visa.

At least that's what I've often personally observed.

Re:Au contraire

[timster]

How do you determine who is "qualified", though? What does a degree prove these days?

And don't give me any "shows dedication" BS, either. Dedication to time-wasting is not a positive attribute, and it's the last thing needed at MS. Turn it around -- if college is useless and you hire exclusively college graduates, you might end up with a lot of people who don't have a good sense of value versus time.

On the other hand, if you live in a poor country and a college degree is your only ticket to a good life, then you'd have good reason to obtain one even if it was otherwise useless. But that doesn't mean that college graduates from poor countries are more qualified than capable non-graduates in the US.

Re:Au contraire

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Yes - I've pointed out in another post. The same newspaper has an editorial only less than a week ago that says in 2004 the U.S. produced over 57,000 C.S. graduates. Coupled with his 65,000 H-1B visas, if his 100,000 new jobs a year is accurate, there's a 22k surplus.

That's downright funny- guess what we really need is a basic arithmetic requirement for journalists.

Re:Au contraire

[CodeBuster]

I have worked for Microsoft in the past, though only as a summer intern, and although my own experience of the culture at Redmond is somewhat limited I will say that I got the impression that Microsoft is a tough, but fair place to work. The expectations are high and the competition can be intense, but the pay and benefits were very competitive and the work keeps your skills sharp. I will also say that some of the smartest people I have ever met in the workplace worked at Microsoft. The 80 hour mythical work week at Microsoft is mostly bogus too. If you meet your project deadlines and plan your time well then you can be in at eight and out at five most of the time. Of course there is always crunch time, but realistically you will get some of that no matter where you work.

Re:Au contraire

[bill_mcgonigle]

Benchmark. A watermark would be the company name printed on their foreheads if you looked carefully. Hmm. Never mind...

"High watermark" and "low watermark" refer to visible lines left by tides and storms. Figuratively they're extremes against which other measurements are measured.

Re:Au contraire

[sumdumass]

And I read it differently still. Microsoft is setting up a fall back position for it's failings. They can claim it was someone elses fault because there wasn't enough local workers or we didn't import enough workers.

The point in aguing this from microsoft's perspective is kid of silly anyways. Microsoft are the one's who kicked off the certification programs were a MCSA was prefered over a computer science degree. They are the ones who have chopped the market into segments to accomidate people with lessor educational degrees. And Microsoft is the same company claiming you save money because you don't need people with all this CS background to hack VB, administrate your computer systems and servers, to do about anything that is is claiming they need H1-B visa applicants for today.

Something else odd is that every job position created doesn't neccesarily equal one full time job. It would be nice if it worked that way but it doesn't. Quite a few of these jobs can be covered by non full time employee. So even if one person can do two of the positions being made, the numbers go form 100,000 anual jobs with 65,000 Visas to 50,000 jobs with 65,000 imported workers.And as things get less complext or more efficient then those numbers will change some more. And don't get stuck on how accurate they are, they were just thrown out to ilistrate the point. The numbers could be better or worse but we are not talking about real figures except with the number of visas made availible. Everything else is an estimate and how a person performs those jobs are esitmates.

I belive this whole fiasco is an attempt to keep the job market saturated and aviod the type of unity that would mandate 40 hour weeks with well paid salaries and benifits. It is an attempt to stop the supply verses demand issues from creating a workers market were theycan demand certain things or cause costs to artificialy rise.

Re:Au contraire

[Lord_Slepnir]

I don't know if you know this, but Microsoft hit #50 on the list of the "best 100 companies to work for" in Fortune 500 magazine. There's a strong push inside the company to acheive "work life balance"

Re:Au contraire

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on now.

You mean to tell me that when Microsoft put the ad in the paper for the job that required 10 years experience programming in 2003 Server, not one local person met that requirement?

Re:Au contraire

[Anonymous Coward]

I work near MS and from what I have seen the market is flooded with IT people looking for jobs. We recently hired for an entry level front-line IT support position and were overwhelmed with applicants, many of whom had CS degrees and were qualified for much higher level work but were desperate for a job.

I think Bill just wants to keep wages depressed, he sees the demand for IT workers increasing and knows that this means wages will go back up leading to less exploitation of workers (and thus a decrease in profits). It's a simple trade-off, more cheap foreign labor and lower wages can be maintained, or more cheap domestic labor driving up wages - Bill is trying to drum up support for for cheap foreign labor with his bullshit excuses.

I know a guy who recently started working for MS and there is no way he can afford to live anywhere near work, he is priced out of the market completely unless he moves way out to the boonies and lives in a fucking trailer. IT has created a huge amount of wealth but most of it hasn't gone to IT workers, this has totally distorted the market in many areas because the people making the big money price everyone else out of the market. I can make $75K working for MS in Redmond but that's really like earning $35K at most in actual purchasing power. If Bill really cared about the number of qualified IT workers he would be pushing for increased wages so that people in IT could actually afford a real middle class lifestyle that supports a family and home ownership. Increased wages are the key to attract new people into the field. I remember in college two of the most brilliant CS students I knew saw the writing on the wall and went to nursing school instead. You can't outsource a nurse.

Re:Au contraire

[bill_mcgonigle]

I know very few 80hr/week employees. As in, i can't think of any right now.

OK, great, what's a good average number for a leaf node employee with a product behind schedule?

Microsoft has a problem finding _qualified_ applicants...don't you think we'd rather not deal with the extra hassle?

So one of three things has to be true:

• There aren't any qualified potential US applicants
• Qualified potential US applicants by and large don't want to work at Microsoft
• Microsoft isn't paying enough to attract qualified US applicants

That last one is really redundant with the second, just being the economic facet of the second case. If the first one were true Microsoft would be the only successful software company in the US. It's not, leaving basically the second option by process of elimination. So, that's where the company should focus its efforts. H1-B is probably easier/cheaper in the long run, even if it makes your life difficult, but whatever you can do to improve the attractiveness of Microsoft is going to be best for everybody. Given that you're here on Slashdot, I'd say you're probably a good candidate to be a force for betterment.

Re:Au contraire

[Don853]

Assuming no one retires or mutinies for middle management.... I wonder, though, explicitly what majors does that CS total include? Software Engineering? Computer Engineering? Various Information Systems related majors? I know people with those degrees doing basically CS work, and people with CS degrees working on Wall Street.

Re:Au contraire

[Vicissidude]

Microsoft doesn't have a problem finding applicants. Microsoft has a problem finding _qualified_ applicants. We interview _way_ more people than we hire. And I don't even want to think about the people that _don't_ make it to me and don't even pass the HR and phone-screening stages of the process.

Oh bullshit. You're just being too picky. When HR screens all those candidates, then they already qualify for the position on paper. The interview process is there to insure that the candidate would fit the team. But, all the MS teams do is ask bullshit interview questions. Why are manhole covers round? How do I implement a list?... Those questions don't find good candidates. They find candidates that can bullshit their way through interviews by taking the first answer off the top of their head and running with it. That's the complete opposite of how good code is written and the complete opposite of a good candidate. And, that's probably why MS code is the lump of steaming shit that it is.

Re:Au contraire

[IdleTime]

Well, I do not work for Microsoft, but I came here on an L-1 visa and I'm now on H1-B until my Green Card arrives. Been waiting 4 years on it.

But, not a single time in the 10 years I have worked here, have I been force to, nor expected to, work more than 8 hours. I would never take a job that requires you to work more as it is a symptom of a mismanaged company and as such, should be avoided at all cost.

Re:Au contraire

[bmajik]

Qualified means "people we make offers to", pretty much by definition. We talk to a lot more people than the number of people we choose to extend offers to. Ergo, we have a problem finding qualified applicants.

The only caveat is that there are probably a set of people out there that would be qualified (i.e. we'd hire them) but they won't talk to us. I don't know how large that set of people is.

What I can tell you is that there are plenty of people who _do_ interview with us who we feel are not qualified to join us... at least at the time of the interview.

I've never paid attention to someone's degree status during an interview. I look at their resume and see what they say they've done. Then I ask them about it. Then I ask them a few other questions. I can't speak for the layers of recruiting that come before me - they may have an unhealthy fixation on university degrees. But I personally do not, and it's also something that never comes up amongst the other interviewers I talk to.

Re:Au contraire

[Gr8Apes]

If there were a large deficit of IT professionals, we would be seeing salaries go through the roof. We're not seeing that yet. Salaries are still on par with where they were during the recession. That's not the least bit surprising with the massive layoffs from IBM and HP last year. I used to agree with you, I no longer do. Salaries for good IT folks is far above any equivalent non-managerial salaried position. The reason I no longer agree is that I've begun realizing that approximately 90-95% of "IT" folks are unqualified, bad, and/or just plain shouldn't be in IT. I've worked in a couple of places with excellent development and IT staff. The large remainder of companies I know of both first and second hand are uniformly populated with "Idiots Guide" readers with a tiny minority of capable people. This includes all those I've interviewed, which number well into the hundreds.

Finding people who actually know what's on their resume is pretty difficult. Screening them by anyone other than another capable technical person (like, say, a manager) is how you get more substandard people.

Oh, and H1-Bs are no better on average than anyone else.

Re:Au contraire

[erc]

Microsoft has a problem finding _qualified_ applicants.

Define "qualified". I've been turned down for jobs because I didn't have experience with a particular version of a software product. I had extensive experience with version X, but not with version Y. "But the differences between version X and version Y are pretty small, especially for what you're doing!" Sorry - that was the artifical bar.

For others it's a particular language - Perl or PHP or C++, for example, instead of focusing on the thought process and problem-solving skillset. The tool itself is much less significant than the business or technical problem to be solved. I'd rather have a rational, logical thinker that knew C that I could get up to speed in a C++ environment (in most cases, C will do the job just fine) than someone who was an expert at C++ but had no rational problem-solving skills. But most hiring managers, especially in HR (where they have no clue as to technical ability anyway) just screen for buzzwords anyway. Stupid, but it is what it is, I suppose. That's why the US (which is Microsoft-centric in the extreme) trails most of the rest of the world in technology.

Re:Au contraire

[Vicissidude]

I belive this whole fiasco is an attempt to keep the job market saturated and aviod the type of unity that would mandate 40 hour weeks with well paid salaries and benifits. It is an attempt to stop the supply verses demand issues from creating a workers market were theycan demand certain things or cause costs to artificialy rise.

Actually, you've got that backwards. Bill Gates wants to tamper with the market as it currently stands by increasing the supply of H1-B workers. That would artificially increase the supply of labor, thereby decreasing wages.

And yes, you are absolutely correct that this is about creating disunity in the IT workforce. Just the threat of H1-B workers keeps wages down by making you and everyone else think twice about asking for a raise. If Gates really wanted more US IT workers, then he would be arguing for increasing their wages. That increase in IT wages would create US student interest in IT like we saw during the IT boom.

Re:Au contraire

[bmajik]

You'd be shocked at the number of people that can graduate college that can't answer a question like:

"implement $(randomly selected function in the C string library) on this white board. Use whatever language you like. It doesn't even have to be a real language if you can explain it to me and it's coherent"

You'd be shocked at the number of people that just draw a blank when you say:

"describe how you'd test a coffee maker"

These aren't especially interesting or novel questions. It's a shame you even have to ask them except that you still meet people that CANT ANSWER THEM!

As an aside, based on your knowledge of what makes a good candidate, and what makes a poor interview, what would you suggest asking potential candidates for developers? For testers?

Re:Au contraire

[Anonymous Coward]

As somebody who interviewed with Microsoft 5 days ago, I didn't get any bullshit questions like that. Those sort of questions were apparently historically used in their hiring process, though.

They did have questions like "design a caching system for Internet searches" and "write an algorithm to efficiently render a circle given a function which plots x and y" -- and on the more open-ended of the questions, they lead you with very subtle hints as to how you could improve things, or simply rap about your algorithm so that you will realize something, so that you can get it down in 45 minutes (multiple interviews of ~45 minutes apiece is the standard). These questions might also be bullshit, but on the other hand, there are limits to what you can possibly do in an interview. And Microsoft doesn't want just anybody with a slip of paper and who can pass a simple 1st-round screening string manipulation question.

While I agree that a large part of the interview process is to see if they fit the team, you're using a different definition of "qualify" here, I think, than the GP. It's one thing to have a degree in a related field, it's another to meet the standard Microsoft wants.

I got a job offer from them (two, actually). I an international, but Canadian, so I can get easier visas with no arbitrary limits like H1-B.

Re:Au contraire

[truthsearch]

No, I'm saying companies are claiming no one meets the job requirements. They simpy ignore applications for the job posting. Then fill the job by sponsoring an H1B visa and paying lower salary. I've seen it happen repeatedly at 2 major financial companies, and one of them I was in HR for a while, so I witnessed each step myself.

Re:Au contraire

[Anonymous Coward]

The same newspaper has an editorial only less than a week ago that says in 2004 the U.S. produced over 57,000 C.S. graduates. Coupled with his 65,000 H-1B visas, if his 100,000 new jobs a year is accurate, there's a 22k surplus.

The H-1B covers more than just computer science-related jobs.

Re:Au contraire

[bmajik]

I've been turned down for jobs because I didn't have experience with a particular version of a software product

That would be irrelevant for a MS product development team. Anything technology, language, or toolset specific that is true today will probably false in 1-5 years. We're not looking for people for 1-5 year tenures, we want people that learn whatever they need to learn to remain effective.

Which is why our interviews have a repuation for being $(adjective) (insert your favorite(s)). We're trying to assess what you can learn -- how smart you are, how adaptible you are, etc. What you know is much less relevant (after a certain point).

I'd rather have a rational, logical thinker that knew C that I could get up to speed in a C++ environment (in most cases, C will do the job just fine) than someone who was an expert at C++ but had no rational problem-solving skills

Of course.

That's why the US (which is Microsoft-centric in the extreme) trails most of the rest of the world in technology

That's an odd statement. How would you justify it?

Re:Au contraire

[gfxguy]

All good questions, and ones that Bill Gates should have answered in his commentary.

But since you mentioned Wall Street, you will probably find the other article very interesting, and I don't want to make you search for it. Here's a quote:

On average, American lawyers make 42 percent more than chemical engineers. At elite levels, huge pay gaps also exist. In 2005 the median starting salary for a new Harvard University MBA was $100,000. An MBA is a two-year degree. By contrast, a science or engineering PhD can take five to 10 years, with a few years of "post-doc" lab work. At a Business Roundtable press briefing, one CEO said his company might start this sort of scientist at $90,000. Does anyone wonder why some budding physicists switch to Wall Street?

Re:Au contraire

[sumdumass]

Actually, you've got that backwards. Bill Gates wants to tamper with the market as it currently stands by increasing the supply of H1-B workers. That would artificially increase the supply of labor, thereby decreasing wages.

Heh, that was what I was trying to say. Yet it didn't come out that way when I reread it. Thanks for corecting me.

Re:Au contraire

[Vicissidude]

Salaries for good IT folks is far above any equivalent non-managerial salaried position.

In what field? Look at medicine and you see some nurses, my dad for example, making $240,000 a year. He's not a manager. The average nurse with his qualifications makes $100,000. Why? There really is a shortage in his field. There absolutely is no shortage in IT. And in fact, no independent study has ever confirmed a shortage, not even during the IT boom.

The reason I no longer agree is that I've begun realizing that approximately 90-95% of "IT" folks are unqualified, bad, and/or just plain shouldn't be in IT... This includes all those I've interviewed, which number well into the hundreds.

You can find that, or people with opinions like that, in every field, including the previous nursing example. And frankly, I don't care what you say, but idiots can't make it through a good CS program. Everyone in our field with a CS degree from a good school is bright and intelligent.

However, most CS grads are not good with communications skills, so they couldn't convince you of their skills. Wow, big surprise.

Re:Au contraire

[timster]

I can't speak for the layers of recruiting that come before me - they may have an unhealthy fixation on university degrees.

Unfortunately we can't really answer the question without their input. My point is that when Bill goes around saying he can't find enough people, I want to know how hard he is really trying. I'm sure that, statistically speaking, people with degrees are more likely to be useful employees, but that doesn't mean it makes sense to use that as a filter. As an example, it may be the case that women are safer drivers on average, but few trucking companies will reject any male applicants out of hand.

I don't know the specifics at Microsoft, but consider Google, which is known for an emphasis on advanced degrees. Google is the hot company these days, so they can afford to throw away most of the applications that they get, and still find plenty of people. Microsoft's present may be their future -- when the hype wears off, and the applications slow down, they will need to change their recruitment strategy to find enough candidates. Again, I don't know how it works at Microsoft, but I think it would be very relevant. I'm suspicious because Microsoft used to be considered a hot company, so I wonder if the corporate mindset changed to fit the new climate.

Ultimately what I'm saying is that Microsoft may need more people like you, to consider more candidates more carefully. If they are like many other companies, they may have too many decisions being made by mindless HR drones. Or maybe Bill is right, but I'm not inclined to trust him on the surface.

Re:Au contraire

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at Microsoft.

Get out.

Re:Au contraire

[gfxguy]

Oh, I know that. But in the same way that Bill Gates ignores that there exist computer science graduates here in the U.S. in an attempt to lead us into believing about this great shortfall, I'll ignrore that he doesn't actually back up what he's saying with stats about how many of those H-1B visas are computer science related.

I'll even admit that a lot of the CS graduates ARE students from other countries, who then have to get H-1B visas!!! A lot of my friends at school went through getting new visas for jobs in the U.S. How many are there like that? I DON'T KNOW!!! I don't know because Bill doesn't say.

This editorial is just like any other, he's trying to write persuasively that we need more H-1B visas while more and more jobs get outsourced overseas, all the while implying there's a 35k shortfall.

Unlike, for example, the Wall Street Journals editorial website (OpinionJournal.com), the Washington Post site doesn't have feedback.

Re:Au contraire

[bill_mcgonigle]

I don't know if you know this, but Microsoft hit #50 on the list of the "best 100 companies to work for" in Fortune 500 magazine.

An anecdote: I once worked for an organization that demanded unrelated IP from its workers in IT as a consequence of not being fired. This happened to at least me and a friend. We were both younger and more naive at the time and caved (a decision I regret now). In general, the management was autocratic and internal satisfaction numbers showed it. It was ranked the best place in the state to work a few times, and, oddly enough, nobody in the large IT department was involved with that survey. It wasn't just IT - there were major contract disputes with other classes of workers going on at the same time. The point being, the surveyors were given cherry-picked employees to interview, and I'm sure for them it was a great place to work. I don't know if this surveying organization had bad methodology or if its endemic in the trade, but consider me jaded.

But, more directly - if Microsoft is among the top 50 employers and it's a great company with a great working environment and competitive pay, they wouldn't be having a problem attracting the top talent. Let's call this line of argument "counterpoint by way of Google." Perhaps reflecting on why hoards of the brightest minds are beating a path to Google's door (small hoards from Microsoft, even) would be an enlightening exercise.

Re:Au contraire

[networkBoy]

FWIW, manhole covers are round (and lipped) such that the cover can not fall down the hole.
There spoiled that question for whomever's interviews going forward.

Also FWIW I have *no* idea where I learned that tidbit but sure as shit it wasn't college. I still don't have anything on paper over a HS diploma, been in the high tech industry doing pre-production design validation on hardware for the last 7 years. I love my job and I know plenty others who want it. A degree is worthless over real-world experience. I got in on merits and overall knowledge (recruited from a small electronics surplusser). All you need is a passion for what you do and drive to do it. When asked how I thought to implement a suite of perl scripts to compile a boatload of data (a process that took at least a week using assorted hacked together excel macros and manual copy paste) in about half an hour, I replied: I'm lazy. Why waste time on such a trivial task when the machine can do it better and I can go take more data (which is vastly more fun). Bastard promoted me for that...
-nB

Re:Au contraire

[Anonymous Coward]

I got a job offer from them (two, actually). I an international, but Canadian, so I can get easier visas with no arbitrary limits like H1-B.

No arbitrary limits other than the US border guard you take your TN-1 visa paperwork to. Expect to be asked why you are taking a job in the US and not Canada. Don't piss him/her off either because they have the power to deny you for ANY reason. If they even get a hint that you are considering immigrating (TN-1's are non-immigration visas) you will be denied.

Re:Au contraire

[networkBoy]

I think you're being beaten up here because while an individual or even a small team at microsoft can write brilliant code, it seems without fail that the whole (vista, xp, whatever) is much less than the sum of its parts. Your management is seen as lacking direction, grasping at eye-candy and restrictive releases (re: DRM). I was going to just chalk you off as a poor shill then I read this:

I'll cut to the chase. I work for Microsoft. But it wasn't always that way. My first Linux distro was TAMU, and I first used kernel .98. My first unix experience was in middle school. I still have the sparcstation 10 i bought in highschool (Before I owned a Car, even). So, I may be a Microsoft sellout, but don't accuse me of making an uninformed decision :) so you're either a brilliant shill, or a good coder trapped at the slow moving mega-sloth. Go to Apple or Google and you will make a difference, stay where you are and I fear that you will not be happy.

I work in the hardware side of the world, and your company's main product gives me fits. I have no malice towards you, but I really wish all the zealots in the Linux/OSS cam would get their heads out of their individual distro's asses and produce a real competitor to your OS/Office suite. I think they are close with Ubuntu, now all we nead is a 100% compatible exchange server mimic and client, along with a powerpoint clone that's not power-bloat and we're all set.
-nB

Re:Au contraire

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the rate of retirement?

Re:Au contraire

[erc]

That's an odd statement. How would you justify it?

Which part - the Microsoft-centric, or the trailing in technology?

Microsoft doesn't necessarily have the latest, greatest, or best in technology, despite repeated attempts to self-aggrandize at the expense of Linux and other operating systems. It can be argued (and rather successfully) that Windows isn't the best choice for many server installations, and even for a significant portion of desktops - because of stability issues, draconian DRM and licensing issues designed to fatten Microsoft's and partners bottom lines at the expense of consumers, the desire to own the computer market completely instead of acknowledging that there are other operating systems around (some better than Windows) and the fact that Windows is the #1 target of malicious attacks (whether or not this is due to the popularity of Windows or that Windows has more security issues per K lines of code than many other operating systems is a matter of debate), which Microsoft could be more forthcoming about and more agile to respond.

As for the US trailing many other countries in the world, one simply needs to look at where we get most of our technology - from overseas, particularly Japan. Where is most software innovation going on? Europe, mostly - and mostly in areas other than Windows. Windows is inherently handicapped, in part because you simply can't get rid of the GUI, and this encourages a generation of point-and-click administrators and people who call themselves programmers who have little knowledge of what goes on underneath the covers (a position that Microsoft encourages, partly because their code isn't open and partly because Microsoft seeks to protect what they regard as their trade secrets), where Linux and the BSD variants encourage just the opposite. I can get FreeBSD to run in 64MB or less of RAM and in far less than 200 MB of disk space and have a fully-functional server, out-of-the-box - I don't think you can say the same of Windows, especially Windows XP and Vista.

Another indication - the US trails a lot of other nations in the number of high-speed internet connections per capita. South Korea has 100 MB to the door for most people in the larger cities, and it's cheaper to boot - while we suffer with less than 10 MB connections at twice the cost. It's not about national pride, it's not about innovation, it's about making as much money as possible, even at the expense of consumers - and that has become the defining characteristic of Microsoft, sadly enough.

Re:Au contraire

[duffbeer703]

There's a reason why Bill is a multi-billionaire. Even if there isn't a shortage of 100,000 IT workers, if we import more, all of the sudden you have more computer savvy people in the marketplace buying Microsoft products. An extra 60,000 IT workers/year represents alot of sales -- and if those workers are educated using Microsoft Dev tools, they're going to be driving the sales of more Windows, MSDN, SQL Server, etc licenses and buying more support contracts.

Also, more cheap newbie workers trained in the latest stuff keep costs down and provides a powerful incentive for companies to keep upgrading. If I run a company with apps using MFC from the 90's, I can't find those people anymore, so I'll be hiring new people writing stuff in .Net 3.0, etc.

Re:Au contraire

[bmajik]

I know very few 80hr/week employees. As in, i can't think of any right now.

OK, great, what's a good average number for a leaf node employee with a product behind schedule?

Hard to day. When i was working in devdiv, most days i got in between 9 and 10, and left around 7. When it was crunch time to get VS.NET (7.0) out the door, for a while there it was team-dinnners every nite, and people would be at work until 8 or 9. Of course, nobody got to work before 9. In redmond, at 7:59am, the main doors to buildings are still locked.

Now that I am on a different campus (in Fargo), the local culture is much different. At 8:30 the parking lot is full and at 6 its empty. Leaving the Redmond main campus at 6pm was suicide because the traffic was so outrageous. You could leave at 5 or at 6:45 and get home at the same time.

- Qualified potential US applicants by and large don't want to work at Microsoft
- Microsoft isn't paying enough to attract qualified US applicants

Yeah, one or both is likely. MS isn't the darling of the tech world it once was; you're no longer a millionaire after 7 years. The compensation structure has chnaged a few times since 2000 when people were leaving MS in droves to do startups. Many people think we made some poor hiring decisions around that time frame (after all, _I_ was hired, and my main motivation for interviewing was to get a free trip to Seattle and to mouth-off about how awesome linux was to a bunch of MSFT people :)

MSFT doesn't aim to be the pay-leader, so people purely motivated by that will probably look elsewhere.

That said, I think many tech companies have open positions and describe having difficulty filling them. Does the entire sector, as a whole, not pay enough? Are there people out there that are not working for anyone, rather than work for what they deem to be too little? Said another way, if you see that across the board, tech companies have open heads, it's hard to suggest that it is purely a Microsoft problem related to salary or other undesirability. Doesn't Google have difficulty hiring people? Apple?

Re:Au contraire

[Vicissidude]

You'd be shocked at the number of people that can graduate college that can't answer a question like: "implement $(randomly selected function in the C string library) on this white board. Use whatever language you like. It doesn't even have to be a real language if you can explain it to me and it's coherent"

As I wrote previously, that is completely opposite to how people write code in the real world. You don't take the first thing off the top of your head and start writing it down, especially without a good IDE. Testing someone on a whiteboard is the equivalent of making someone use Notepad to code. Sure, you should be able to do it, but who the hell actually does?

And unless you recently finished a CS class, then remembering a good implementation of any random C function is not going to be on the top of your head. So, it's all but guaranteed that the MS interviewer will rip apart the answer because it wasn't very good because it came about through a completely bad process. Big surprise.

You'd be shocked at the number of people that just draw a blank when you say: "describe how you'd test a coffee maker"

That's because the first thing they think is, "Wow, what a stupid question." And then, "What? Oh, he's actually serious." Then, "do I really want to work here if that is the best interview question they can come up with?"

Answering bullshit questions like that only tests the candidate's ability to answer bullshit questions. Oh, and it tests the willingness of the candidate to sit there and take stupid, insulting questions without getting up, punching you in the face, and walking out the door. Given Ballmer's temperament, that's probably a good thing for people who work with him, but that's bad for anyone else in the company.

...what would you suggest asking potential candidates for developers? For testers?

Having actually conducted several interviews for senior developers, you need to do two things: see if you like them and see if they can actually do the job. You look over their resume and verify what's listed there. You ask them about their previous positions and one major problem they encountered in each place. I then like to ask relevant questions that have come up recently in my own work. How do you version control a database? How would you deal with multiple submissions of a web page? The questions are high-level, don't require writing on a whiteboard, and are difficult enough to tell whether they're bullshitting their way through an answer or not. If they actually have something decent to say, I like them, and their resume looks good, then I recommend them for the position.

Re:Au contraire

[rrhal]

You'd be shocked at the number of people that just draw a blank when you say:

"describe how you'd test a coffee maker" Given the number of people that take the last cup and don't make another pot in the coffee rooms - I'd say a number of these people already work here.

Re:Au contraire

[Vicissidude]

There's a reason why Bill is a multi-billionaire.

Yeah, IBM was stupid in giving away a good chunk of their business to Bill Gates after Gates ripped off CP/M from Gary Killdall.

Even if there isn't a shortage of 100,000 IT workers, if we import more, all of the sudden you have more computer savvy people in the marketplace buying Microsoft products.

Not necessarily. Supply and demand works both ways. If you import a bunch of workers in one field, then a lot of workers in that field will leave. That's exactly what we've been seeing in CS over the last few years.

And further, the more technically savvy people are, the less likely they are to buy MS products because they know they can get better products for free from open source projects.

Also, more cheap newbie workers trained in the latest stuff keep costs down and provides a powerful incentive for companies to keep upgrading.

Yes, but keeping salaries down also means that students have no incentive to learning CS and entering IT.

Re:Au contraire

[bmajik]

And unless you recently finished a CS class, then remembering a good implementation of any random C function is not going to be on the top of your head. So, it's all but guaranteed that the MS interviewer will rip apart the answer because it wasn't very good because it came about through a completely bad process. Big surprise.

This is not about _remembering_, it's about deriving. If someone knows the question off the top of their head, we try something different. If someone cannot derive an implementation of a string function, they're not an interesting candidate. _Especially_ if they're interviewing for a position with the BCL or other platform/framework type group.

"Ripping apart" answers isn't something we do. Rarely does someone issue a perfect answer on their first try - both in interviews and in the real world. For almost any answer someone gives, there is some possible drawback or "gocha". What is the memory consumption of your routine? How many conditional branch statements would it require? Asking these follow-on questions are what makes it a less-worthless question, and seeing how someone thinks about the implications of their decisions and describes the tradeoffs is what makes it worthwhile.

That's because the first thing they think is, "Wow, what a stupid question." And then, "What? Oh, he's actually serious." Then, "do I really want to work here if that is the best interview question they can come up with?"

That's a fine response to have, but i'd ask you to justify it. Why is it a stupid question? Obviously, i'd ask it as an allegorical question to the problem of how to test software. Fundamentally, a coffee maker is something many people are familiar with, so its something that doesn't require significant introduction.

It's not the "best" question. It is _a_ question. And i'll ask you again - justify why you think it is a poor/irrelevant quesiton?

Having actually conducted several interviews for senior developers, you need to do two things: see if you like them and see if they can actually do the job.

We agree so far. Although i'm not sure about "liking them".

You look over their resume and verify what's listed there.

Done.

You ask them about their previous positions and one major problem they encountered in each place. I then like to ask relevant questions that have come up recently in my own work

I'm with you there. Sometimes, these are college hires. Sometimes, these are people that haven't had previous work experience.

The questions are high-level, don't require writing on a whiteboard, and are difficult enough to tell whether they're bullshitting their way through an answer or not

I find that the opposite is true -- people that are unwilling to delve into the details of an answer.. people that keep things "high level" are bullshit artists. The saying "The devil is in the details" is a saying for a _reason_.

We don't have a perfect hiring philosophy. I'm not sure where your animosity comes from, however.

Re:Au contraire

[Gr8Apes]

Look at medicine and you see some nurses, my dad for example, making $240,000 a year. He's not a manager. The average nurse with his qualifications makes $100,000. Why? There really is a shortage in his field. There absolutely is no shortage in IT. And in fact, no independent study has ever confirmed a shortage, not even during the IT boom. Nurses get licensed, and at that salary range, he should be chock full of licenses and highly specialized. IT folks aren't licensed. As soon as you license them, I'd bet you'd see a huge drop in available workers and that "phantom" shortage would be an obvious real shortage (I strongly suspect a large number of current IT workers would fail in attempting to get licensed.)

There's another aspect to nursing: the hours.

You can find that, or people with opinions like that, in every field, including the previous nursing example. And frankly, I don't care what you say, but idiots can't make it through a good CS program. Everyone in our field with a CS degree from a good school is bright and intelligent. There's another issue, a large number of IT folks I know/see didn't get a degree or didn't get one from a good school. Of those that supposedly did, a large number of them have close to zero understanding of OO, Collections, and threading.

However, most CS grads are not good with communications skills, so they couldn't convince you of their skills. Wow, big surprise. They should be able to talk tech. If they can't even communicate on purely technical issues then what good are they when they need to parse complex requirements, or, gasp, track down a requirements issue with a business user? Communications skills are part of the package when looking for people who can drive projects. No skills? No job.

Re:Au contraire

[Vicissidude]

Nurses get licensed, and at that salary range, he should be chock full of licenses and highly specialized. IT folks aren't licensed.

Uh, yes they are. The difference is that licenses aren't required in IT fields. Someone with his qualifications in IT would also be chock full of licenses and be highly specialized. But, there aren't many non-managerial people making $240,000 or even $100,000 in IT.

There's another aspect to nursing: the hours.

What about it? The hours in IT shops are just as bad or worse.

Me: However, most CS grads are not good with communications skills, so they couldn't convince you of their skills. Wow, big surprise.
You: They should be able to talk tech. If they can't even communicate on purely technical issues then what good are they when they need to parse complex requirements, or, gasp, track down a requirements issue with a business user? Communications skills are part of the package when looking for people who can drive projects. No skills? No job.

Should they be able to sell you on their skills?... No. The people with that type of communications skills are salesmen. You shouldn't expect an IT job candidate to convince you that they are the one for the job. And you shouldn't think of everyone else as shit because they can't.

Re:Au contraire

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

And unless you recently finished a CS class, then remembering a good implementation of any random C function is not going to be on the top of your head. So, it's all but guaranteed that the MS interviewer will rip apart the answer because it wasn't very good because it came about through a completely bad process. Big surprise.

Except that the functions they're being asked to implement are RIDICULOUSLY easy. Anyone who has actually done a fair amount of programming ought to be able to implement functions like strlen, strstr, strcmp, etc in about two minutes, tops. These are not tricky brain teasers - if you write real software you probably call those functions (or equivalent methods in C++ or Java or Python) dozens of times per day. So you know exactly what they do, and you've written functions a hundred times more complicated than that before. It's trivial.

I think the problem is that people go into college, do the bare minimum in their C.S. classes, never play around with programming for fun, and then expect to get a job at Microsoft or Google. Sorry, those companies are not interested in someone who just did the bare minimum in their classes and didn't take the time to actually experiment in their chosen field. All it takes is a little curiousity in the weekends, a little extra effort on some of your class projects, and a couple of summer internships, and by the time you graduate you can be an excellent programmer - if you're still enjoying it by then, companies like Microsoft and Google will be drooling over you.

Microsoft's questions like strlen are not meant to identify good employees. They're meant to weed out the people who haven't even learned the basics yet. And when the vast majority of applicants fall in that category, no wonder Bill Gates feels the way he does.

Re:Au contraire

[duffbeer703]

Yeah, IBM was stupid in giving away a good chunk of their business to Bill Gates after Gates ripped off CP/M from Gary Killdall.

That was 30 years ago dude, give it up. Are you still upset that Alexander Bell ripped off that other guy over the telephone

Not necessarily. Supply and demand works both ways. If you import a bunch of workers in one field, then a lot of workers in that field will leave. That's exactly what we've been seeing in CS over the last few years. And further, the more technically savvy people are, the less likely they are to buy MS products because they know they can get better products for free from open source projects.

Microsoft's success in the marketplace doesn't back that up. Most of the linux growth has been at the expense of Sun, HP and IBM Unix.

Yes, but keeping salaries down also means that students have no incentive to learning CS and entering IT.

No problem - the industry import more workers and automates away as much of the functions as possible. Lots of the stuff that DBAs used to do is now automated. I'm not saying that its right, just that it is.

Re:Au contraire

[sgt_doom]

Of course, Good Citizen qfxguy, that is correct, but taken with the layoffs and already existing pool of CS talent from previous layoffs and downsizing, and the non-H-1B technical immigrants who come here also, there is considerably more than a 22k surplus. But then a shortage was never the reason Bill Gates started offshoring soooooo many jobs - it was about quick and dirty labor savings. Ergo, Gates, as usual and in keeping with the other male members of his extended family, is full of crap.....(And never forget the mantra over the past 6 years ag M$: "Think China and India.")

And also don't forget how they, M$, stealthily laid off over 1,000 employees on 9/12/01 - now tell me that isn't the essence of opportunistic behavior.....

Re:Au contraire

[yakovlev]

- Qualified potential US applicants by and large don't want to work at Microsoft
- Microsoft isn't paying enough to attract qualified US applicants

Yeah, one or both is likely. MS isn't the darling of the tech world it once was; you're no longer a millionaire after 7 years. The compensation structure has chnaged a few times since 2000 when people were leaving MS in droves to do startups. Many people think we made some poor hiring decisions around that time frame (after all, _I_ was hired, and my main motivation for interviewing was to get a free trip to Seattle and to mouth-off about how awesome linux was to a bunch of MSFT people :)

MSFT doesn't aim to be the pay-leader, so people purely motivated by that will probably look elsewhere.

That said, I think many tech companies have open positions and describe having difficulty filling them. Does the entire sector, as a whole, not pay enough? Are there people out there that are not working for anyone, rather than work for what they deem to be too little? Said another way, if you see that across the board, tech companies have open heads, it's hard to suggest that it is purely a Microsoft problem related to salary or other undesirability. Doesn't Google have difficulty hiring people? Apple?

Yes, if a given industry is having trouble finding qualified applicants, then it isn't paying enough for qualified labor. The obvious way to show this is that if CS graduates were paid a million dollars per year starting out, people would be leaving other careers in droves to pursue a career in computer science. This is freshman economics at work. Now, clearly technology companies can't afford that kind of pay, but that just means that employers have trouble finding qualified applicants at a price they're willing to pay. Freshman economics says "tough noogies, you can't have more at the current price than the quantity supplied at the current price." That's how free markets work. The H1-B program is about changing the rules by finding an additional supplier of labor who is willing to produce more at the current price. The overall result of adding this new supplier will be to drive prices down and quantities up, at the expense of existing workers. Moving jobs overseas does the same thing economically as raising the H1-B cap, however the H1-B changes may come more slowly.

Now, is free trade in the labor market good for the global economy? Most economic models say yes. Is it good for the US economy? The answer is less clear, though the answer leans towards it being good for the US economy. Is it good for technology workers? Probably not, as with new competition they will have to accept lower wages.

So, don't think for a minute that there is a "labor shortage" in IT. The so-called labor shortage is just a result of normal supply and demand. Expanding the H1-B program should be viewed as what it is, and attempt to apply free trade to the IT labor market, with the result being new low-cost overseas competition for US technology jobs. Whether or not this is a good thing depends on your perspective, but adding H1-B workers is going to have a serious effect on US IT workers.

Re:Au contraire

[ShieldW0lf]

Unfortunately, most people are too busy working down at a call center trying to justify why they should be fed this week to invest in their passions.

Thus...

Re:Au contraire

[ShieldW0lf]

So... some guy whose passion is tinkering with chemicals, he's going to leave his job and go back to school and learn IT.

So he can begrudgingly do mediocre work for two years, quit because he's got 2 million dollars in the bank and is not worried about cash anymore, build a lab in the second garage behind his house and go back to his passion.

Sounds like a winning strategy to me. God bless Econ 101!

Re:Au contraire

[OwnedByTwoCats]

Yes, the supply curve does fold back on itself. At some rates of pay, paying a higher price means that workers work less, because they have all the money they need.

Re:Au contraire

[jahudabudy]

Also, a circle is the most material efficient design, is easier to put on (fewer ways to position it incorrectly), and easier to transport by hand, if such becomes necessary. I happen to have a college degree, but I didn't learn this in college, either. I learned it building forts as a kid.

Re:Au contraire

[GreenK]

What type of nurse would make that?

Re:Au contraire

[defile]

And unless you recently finished a CS class, then remembering a good implementation of any random C function is not going to be on the top of your head. So, it's all but guaranteed that the MS interviewer will rip apart the answer because it wasn't very good because it came about through a completely bad process. Big surprise.

I'm sorry, but this is a perfect interview question.

Any developer, assuming they should be familiar with C and are applying for a C programming position who couldn't do this given a full specification of what the function does and a reasonable amount of time to do it in should not be hired. Period.

The interviewer isn't looking for you to answer right off the top of your head. It would be fucking surreal if you asked someone to implement malloc() and they implemented a full featured runs fast version suitable for inclusion in glibc. It also wouldn't teach you anything about the interviewee other than they have a photographic memory.

You want them to scratch their head, think aloud about the problem, re-state it in their terms, ask you questions, ask you if they can take shortcuts. Etc.

Lets say I asked the candidate that they need to implement malloc().

Lets say instead of flipping out. the candidate responds, quite comfortably, "you want the entire standard C implementation of malloc() on the white-board? We'll need a bigger whiteboard and maybe a day or two?"

You say "Why is that?"

They tell you about malloc(). How ideally it would manage memory appropriately, request it from the OS, maintain a list of allocated blocks, how it might involve recursion, tuning for various loads, etc.

You say "Oh, yeah, we don't need all that stuff."

They go "Huh?"

You explain it's for an embedded system, the caller will never call free(), and you can statically allocate a 1MB buffer for the task. If the caller needs more than 1MB it's a bug.

The candidate, after a few backs-and-forths, implements this:

#define MEMBUFSIZ 1024*1024
#define BALIGN 4

void *malloc(unsigned long size)
{
static char buf[MEMBUFSIZ];
static unsigned long boff = 0;

void *p = buf+boff;

boff += size + (BALIGN - (size % BALIGN));

return p;
}

Mission accomplished. You learned something about this guy. Even if it doesn't work, it shows they thought about the problem. Maybe they even say "you're a moron, why don't you call it something like getmem() so as not to give people the wrong idea". Even better, they're not afraid of the manager's stupid authority.

You also learned a lot about the candidate who gets livid at the sheer audacity of your request and storms out of the interview. Or becomes so petrified with fear that they won't answer at all.

Re:Au contraire

[Anonymous Coward]

"watermark" (one word) is the decoration
"high-water mark" marks the water level.

Re:Au contraire

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Gates wants more H1-B workers which he can, unofficially, work at those kind of hours. That creates a watermark in the marketplace, against which non-H1B workers need to compete for jobs

Just as a point of information, as one of those non-H1B workers, who happens to work for Microsoft, let me disabuse you of the notion that we work 80-hour weeks or that we must compete in an environment where H1B workers are made to work stupid amounts of hours. There are sometimes late nights or pushes to get stuff done, but as a regular practice, we don't and I don't know of any teams that do. I've never had a manager here fail to reject a work proposal I've made that called for more than 50 hours a week. The reason given, every time: we've got too much invested in you to let you burn out.

Moreover, Microsoft is putting together development centers around the world. Microsoft doesn't need H1B Visas in order to "...create a watermark in the marketplace against which non-H1B workers need to compete for jobs"- they just need to add headcount in Hyderabad and lo, there's job competition- which means that the motive you suggest (of artificially depressing wages so mean old Bill Gates can exploit the workers) doesn't exist, really.
Given that it's actually easier to hire abroad (where local workers can't compete) than to hire _from_ abroad (in which case, local workers can compete), the important question we face in the context of the larger discussion (around keeping America competitive) is not whether or not we should hire foreigners, it's whether we want this work being done here or there? Here, it's part of our economy, taxes are paid to us, our intellectual critical mass expands and our competitive advantages persist. There, it's fostering the growth of intellectual critical mass, which is also good for us long term, but which is preferable to us?

If you pause to think for more than a few feverish seconds, you'll realize that Bill Gates doesn't need H1B Visas- and it's cheaper and easier to hire in Hyderabad than it is to bring someone to Redmond, so why the push to let more trained IT folks into this country? Labor price isn't the motive here, it's something else. If I had to guess, based on my own work environment (My team has Israelis and Palestinians working together, Indians and Pakistanis, (I'm 1st-generation American, btw), it's a regular melting pot) I'd offer this notion: it works to hire based on talent, and talent should be what America lets its businesses hire based on. Competition makes us all better off, long term.

Re:Au contraire

[gfxguy]

No kidding!

And skip down to the bottom of the article, it gets even better:

The writer is chairman of Microsoft Corp. and co-chairman of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. His wife is a director of The Washington Post Co.

Re:Au contraire

[cfulmer]

Let's add to that a little bit -- Microsoft is having trouble finding enough qualified applicants at a price it's willing to pay. You could certainly announce that you will be starting engineers off at $200k and get all the "qualified applicants" you want within a few days. Or, you could take applicants who do not have the skill set you want and train them. There are lots of alternatives.

The "extra hassle" has a dollar figure attached to it. If that dollar figure is less than the dollar figure of the alternatives, then you go through the extra hassle. If not, you take the alternative.

Re:Au contraire

[sgt_doom]

I would agree with everything you posted, Good Citizen Vicissidude, and add several items: (1) I was a contractor off and on at the Redmond Campus and I ran into more than a few submediocre employee types (Blue Badge Bozos) that I would have never even considered hiring, so all that urban legend stuff about the innate superiority of the M$ employee is such a complete crock; (2) whenever M$ has Borged another company, the programming talent they pick up in the purchase stays on the average only several months before jumping ship, definitely M$ is not a true technoid magnet; (3) the HR process begins with scanning the resumes sent in, so they choose from those conventional zombie types who always follow the exact rules according to witless HR books and articles; and, (4) don't forget, this is the company who's first internal security system is described as the reverse-Polish security system (popularly once implemented at NSA): only the contractors and temps wore badges, while the employees didn't - therefore, if one took off their badge, suddenly every area was open to them.......[and the last time - after a six year period when I couldn't get any work through them - the contract and pay wasn't worth the trouble of prepping and showing up to do the job.]

Re:Au contraire

[HungWeiLo]

The key here is crunchtime.

I know 2 people who worked in Office and Visual Studio, respectively. These two teams arguably hire the best people in all of Microsoft. There was one time when they didn't go home for almost 3 weeks. Although, they did get a month off paid leave after the project was finished.

Re:Au contraire

[Vicissidude]

This is not about _remembering_, it's about deriving. If someone knows the question off the top of their head, we try something different. If someone cannot derive an implementation of a string function, they're not an interesting candidate.

Oh bullshit. Good development and good code isn't about reinventing the wheel when good algorithms and code already exists. It's about recombining what you know and what you have to produce new functionality that works in the minimal amount of time. Developers don't just go out and create all new code without first looking at what's already there.

No wonder MS is the way it is.

"Ripping apart" answers isn't something we do.

So, you call it "follow-on" while I call it ripping apart - same thing.

Rarely does someone issue a perfect answer on their first try

Certainly in interviews, yes. However, it certainly is possible to come up with good code if you have time to think about the solution and look at previous solutions.

For almost any answer someone gives, there is some possible drawback or "gocha". What is the memory consumption of your routine? How many conditional branch statements would it require? Asking these follow-on questions are what makes it a less-worthless question, and seeing how someone thinks about the implications of their decisions and describes the tradeoffs is what makes it worthwhile.

And that is what I was getting to. Yes, that "gotcha" is the "ripping apart" of someone's logic. You ask them to solve one problem in a completely bullshit manner in a bullshit amount of time under intense pressure from not having a job and needing one. And then, you twist things around and say that the solution doesn't address this other problem which was never mentioned previously.

And no, asking them to solve that second question based on the first doesn't make the first question more meaningful. You're just piling on the shit, requiring more bullshit from the candidate on top of the bullshit they've already produced. And then, there are other gotchas that you pull after, further ripping apart the solution, and further requiring more bullshit. You hold back on the actual requirements of the bullshit problem. You're asking the candidate to do the role of developer, project manager, and business analyst in the middle of an interview when you only first asked for a "simple C function". You make something appear deceptively simple and then ream them for not writing a bulletproof answer the first time.

That's a fine response to have, but i'd ask you to justify it. Why is it a stupid question? Obviously, i'd ask it as an allegorical question to the problem of how to test software.

Well let's see, because "allegorical" or not, it actually has nothing to do with software. If you want to know about software testing, then ask about software testing. My dad could answer this toaster question and he can barely turn on a computer. He could bullshit his way through this answer and actually convince you he'd make a great tester if he wanted.

Although i'm not sure about "liking them".

Wow. That's another huge problem with MS. I can't believe they would actually hire people that don't get along with each other. Ballmer's tantrums seem less and less surprising now.

I find that the opposite is true -- people that are unwilling to delve into the details of an answer.. people that keep things "high level" are bullshit artists. The saying "The devil is in the details" is a saying for a _reason_.

The "details" you can infer from their resume. If they were with a company for any significant amount of time, especially during the last few years during the tech downturn, then you can bet they know their shit. You want to know whether they really worked at that company, at that position, doing what they wrote they did. Your background check will catch those first two items.

Re:Au contraire

[andreyw]

Oooh, ouch... doesn't someone sound just a little bitter. All the questions asked... test one of the following a) critical thinking b) creative thinking c) solid CS foundations. If you can't manage one or more of the above, why would you consider yourself qualified?

I don't understand why some people think they can go be ``coding monkeys'' without care or thought. "But I don't need to know any of this theoretical stuff, I'm just a coder!". If you don't have sound thinking or solid CS background, you're bound to be the person whose code winds on thedailywtf. You're also the person causing numerous bugs in the code since you don't know what you're doing. You're the person who ruins performance because you don't know of any algorithims that don't run in O(n!). You are useless (worse... you're the parasite who proposes stupid ideas and shoots down normal ones "because they don't make sense to you") during design. So in the end, you're just a chair warmer. You give no useful additions to the development process.

You mean you can't tell the guy how to implement a list? Or how strcpy works? Or how to implement a tree? Wtf? If you fail to show your knowledge through these basic things, why should the interviewer trust your skill set? Because you said so on your resume? Give me a break...

Re:Au contraire

[Gr8Apes]

Uh, yes they are. The difference is that licenses aren't required in IT fields. Someone with his qualifications in IT would also be chock full of licenses and be highly specialized. But, there aren't many non-managerial people making $240,000 or even $100,000 in IT. Name some licenses that are required. I will bet I can show you entire Fortune 500 companies with IT depts without any of those licenses in existence.

The hours in IT shops are just as bad or worse. I don't want to work where you work. My last 4 years have pretty much whittled down to flex time averaging between 40-50 hours per week. I'm certainly not doing regular 12-16 hour shifts with hours changing from graveyard to morning to daytime across a month. (a nurse's hours I know at a major well-known hospital in a major city)

You: They should be able to talk tech. If they can't even communicate on purely technical issues then what good are they when they need to parse complex requirements, or, gasp, track down a requirements issue with a business user? Communications skills are part of the package when looking for people who can drive projects. No skills? No job.

Should they be able to sell you on their skills?... No. The people with that type of communications skills are salesmen. You shouldn't expect an IT job candidate to convince you that they are the one for the job. And you shouldn't think of everyone else as shit because they can't. You certainly have a large chip on your shoulder. Yes, if you want a job, you need to be able to meet the requirements of said job, which at this level includes being able to convey your knowledge to do said job. If you cannot communicate, don't expect anywhere near a 6 figure job. You're mistaken if I think people are unqualified merely because they cannot communicate. I think that when they communicate patently incorrect information several times over a relatively simple subset of a topic they claim mastery in on their resume.

As for jobs at 6 figures or above, they're plentiful, but most involve trade-offs I prefer not to make. The number 1 issue is travel - anything over 10% becomes problematic for me. Issue #2 is the type of work to be done. If I could stomach it, I'd do Documentum work, which is probably the singularly most uninteresting work tied with EJB security you could ever hope to lay eyes on. It pays really really well, though, especially if you add in administration responsibilities, primarily because anyone with the smarts to handle it well has the smarts to go do something more interesting.

Re:Au contraire

[Anonymous Coward]

H1-B is not a label for a workaholic arsehole. I have one of these indentured slavery certificates. And after YEARS of waiting for "adjustment of status", this "1st world" country fucked up the paperwork so badly I have to leave. My skills, experience, having kids born here - counts zero. My sincerest advice to any person outside the US considering coming here on a H1-B visa - stay the hell away.

Re:Au contraire

[yakovlev]

Qualified? No.

So, the unqualified people wouldn't be hired if the pay was high enough, since they could simply be passed over in favor of the more qualified applicants.

However, I have at least one friend who has a real passion for CS but went into medicine because the pay is better and he perceived the labor market to be more stable. Is he as good of a doctor as one for whom medicine is their passion? No, but he's good enough to get a well-paying job, and one that pays more than most CS jobs. If CS had paid more, he might have stayed in CS. This is why higher pay results in more qualified workers being available. People choose their career paths, and pay is a factor in that decision.

While 1 million per year MAY be so high as to produce the kinds of high-end effects you propose (early retirement, part-time work, etc.) I doubt a million dollars per year is as much money as you act like it is.

Re:Au contraire

[samkass]

Yes - I've pointed out in another post. The same newspaper has an editorial only less than a week ago that says in 2004 the U.S. produced over 57,000 C.S. graduates. Coupled with his 65,000 H-1B visas, if his 100,000 new jobs a year is accurate, there's a 22k surplus.

You're assuming the two sets (U.S. produced X gradutes and there are Y H1-B visas) don't overlap. Anecdotally, I can say that the US probably produces a substantial number of C.S. graduates that are not Americans. We then have a choice. We can ship them back to their native country, where they'll probably open an out-sourcing company and work to get U.S. jobs moved overseas, or we can open an H1-B and hire them here in the U.S. My guess is that every time we deny an H1-B visa to someone already working here, we ship an average of 2 American jobs overseas when that person leaves and strengthens an out-sourcing company.

In any case, of the three software startups I've been closely involved in in the U.S., two were started by immigrants.

It's funny, I just read the "ultra-efficient incandescent bulb" story, and the note about how California wants to ban incandescent bulbs instead of simply setting an efficiency standard and letting innovation happen. It's the same sort of thing here. We have some blanket "H1-B policy", but make little affordance for how much immigrants help the economy and how harmful it can be to educate them, give them U.S. experience, then ship them overseas.

Re:Au contraire

[ranton]

While 1 million per year MAY be so high as to produce the kinds of high-end effects you propose (early retirement, part-time work, etc.) I doubt a million dollars per year is as much money as you act like it is.

While I know that $1 million per year is just some high number you through out, I think it is odd that you do not realize how much money that really is. $1 million per year for 2 years would be more than enough for anyone to retire on if they wanted. $2 million in the bank making only 5% per year is $100k/yr. Anyone could live on that if they wanted to. Expecially if they are leaving their IT work to find a job they are passionate about, because the $100k/yr would just be supplementary. If they can live on only $40k/yr (plus their spouse's income) then their income would rise with inflation.

If $100k/yr (or $40k/yr) isnt enough, hen just work for 4 years and get double that.

--

Re:Au contraire

[Moofie]

"with a product behind schedule?"

At the risk of belaboring your point...they work at Microsoft. Your constraint is redundant.

Re:Au contraire

[Moofie]

"Ergo, we have a problem finding qualified applicants."

Wow. That's some really interesting reasoning.

So, if I go to the grocery store and examine eight melons (huh...melons...) and select the best melon to take home and eat, does that mean I'm having a problem finding melons?

You might very well be having a hard time finding applicants who are willing to work for you for a wage you're willing to pay. But that's not what Bill's saying, is it?

Or maybe it is.

Re:Au contraire

[jakosc]

Or perhaps just having a CS degree doesn't actually make you qualified for every one of those 100,000 jobs?

Re:Au contraire

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Or perhaps just having a CS degree doesn't actually make you qualified for every one of those 100,000 jobs?

Then almost none of the H-1bs should be qualified- most of them only have a 4 year CS degree from IIT anyway. Why complain about the lack of CS degree holders if the 100,000 jobs aren't for CS degree holders? I myself would rather they be SE holders- but let's face facts, maybe only 10,000 of those 100,000 jobs will really require an SE degree. The majority will require *maybe* a weekend's study in a single set of skills.

Re:Au contraire

[Quantam]

I work at Microsoft.

You are now public enemy #1 at Slashdot

Re:Au contraire

[ClosedSource]

"Qualified means "people we make offers to", pretty much by definition."

That makes it a self-inflicted problem, pretty much by definition.

Re:Au contraire

[Moofie]

Why do you think IT is different in that regard?

Re:Au contraire

[Lockejaw]

Qualified means "people we make offers to", pretty much by definition. We talk to a lot more people than the number of people we choose to extend offers to. Ergo, we have a problem finding qualified applicants.

If whether or not an applicant is qualified is defined solely by your actions, you have nobody but yourself to blame for being unable to find qualified candidates.
I suggest you redefine "qualified" in a way that is based on the candidate rather than on you.

Re:Au contraire

[ClosedSource]

"These are not tricky brain teasers - if you write real software you probably call those functions (or equivalent methods in C++ or Java or Python) dozens of times per day."

Yes, people call them, they don't implement them. Other than preparing for MS interviews, why would any productive programmer waste a minute of time thinking about it?

Re:Au contraire

[gfxguy]

No, I know that. In fact, I mentioned it in one of my other responses; but Bill Gates is just so damn misleading here, he's implying we need another 35k visas, but it's so far off the mark it's sad. There's the overlap, it's true, and there's even the fact that all of those visas don't go to C.S., but to completely ignore all the U.S. C.S. graduates is criminal in a piece like that, and in most other papers I'd have to hope that most editors would have denied him...

But then you read the bottom of the page and see that his wife is a director of the Washington Post.

That explains a lot.

Re:Au contraire

[HiThere]

That said, I think many tech companies have open positions and describe having difficulty filling them. Does the entire sector, as a whole, not pay enough? Are there people out there that are not working for anyone, rather than work for what they deem to be too little? Said another way, if you see that across the board, tech companies have open heads, it's hard to suggest that it is purely a Microsoft problem related to salary or other undesirability. Doesn't Google have difficulty hiring people? Apple?

I'm just going to speak to a part of this. If you look around you, programming is a field where one invests a lot of up-front time and effort before getting much in the way of rewards. The low-haning fruit has been harvested, AND IT DOESN'T NEED TO BE DONE AGAIN! So. If you have such an industry, and you go through boom-and-bust cycles (as we do), then people are going to be VERY skittish about making the kind of commitment that you want them to give. YOU (the company) aren't making they commitment, so asking it of them can only be seen as a power-play.

When I first started working, I was a firm believer in honesty, etc. As time went on, I observed that politics was more important than ability to do the official job. I ended up quite cynical about companies. Managers that have been delegated power to do their job instead use it for personal advancement at the expense of the staff, and appear to feel that it's their right. There are exceptions, but the exceptions aren't as personally successful (as measured in terms of the number of promotions).

This, I feel, is that nature of human politics. It's wrong to centralize power to accomplish some good end, because once centralized the power will be abused, and the good end will not be accomplished in any final way, because that would eliminate the need for the centralization of the power, which isn't to the benefit of those controlling the power.

OTOH, human society requires reliable structures in order to operate properly. 'Tis a difficult puzzle. I don't know of a decent answer. History provides MANY examples of indecent answers, but none of good ones. If you did have a decent answer, the problem would then arise of "how does one get from here to there?" This is made difficult if one imposes the condition "And don't make things a lot worse in the process!"

Re:Au contraire

[Jherek Carnelian]

$1M per year is like $650K per year after taxes, and then there are significant expenses that usually come with jobs that pay so well. Even if you think you can live on ramen and catchup, you won't if you want to maintain a job with that pay level.

Re:Au contraire

[mikael]

From the interviews I've been to, employers will always fall into one of two groups when considering questions such as these. The first group will test you on your knowledge of STL (Standard Template Library) and ask about the use of iterators to implement list traversal. These are typically research departments. The second group will test you on your knowledge of pointers, linked lists, doubly linked lists, and ask such questions as how to detect if a list has a loop or how to remove an item. These are more the actual development departments.

It's a good idea to know about both methods.

Re:Au contraire

[CodeBuster]

I was working in the Exchange Server group during my internship, which was seven years ago now (a lifetime given how often Microsoft reorganizes their product divisions), and I was never asked to work late, although I did on a few occasions in order to show solidarity with the Software Design Engineers and to get their last minute bug fixes tested before the ship deadline. It was probably not as critical for me for a couple of reasons: I was an intern and most people at Microsoft tried to be nice to the interns because they were like free temporary employees for the groups that are lucky enough to get them (didn't count against their headcount budgets), none of the small bits of code that I wrote were critical to the core functionality of the product, and finally I was only there for a few months so by the time most people were aware of me and my abilities I was already back in school and they couldn't use me again until next summer (by which time the groups had been reshuffled again anyway). The Office, Visual Studio, and Windows groups are probably the ones with the most crunch time anyway because those groups, with the possible exception of Visual Studio which contributes indirectly, constitute the majority of the yearly revenue at Microsoft. So what you say may be true, but it is probably not representative of the usual pattern for most full time employees at Redmond.

Re:Au contraire

[Profound]

Yes, jobs and wages work on supply and demand.

However, ramp up time is often 4+ years (a degree). So there is likely to be the typical boom-bust cycle in IT wages as new students are attracted to high wages, spend X years in college, graduate and only then increase employee supply.

Re:Au contraire

[Fulcrum of Evil]

So... some guy whose passion is tinkering with chemicals, he's going to leave his job and go back to school and learn IT.

Or it'll be the guy who just wants a job to fund his hobbies and family. Lord knows there are more of them around.

Re:Au contraire

[Fulcrum of Evil]

But, all the MS teams do is ask bullshit interview questions. Why are manhole covers round? How do I implement a list?... Those questions don't find good candidates.

They eliminate bad ones, though. The manhole cover thing not so much, but I do interviews, and I do ask about implementing linked lists and other basic things, just to make sure that the candidate can show me something. Advanced candidates get 'remove the current node from the list without the head pointer', and the really good ones can explain why this is stupid to even try.

Re:Au contraire

[Anonymous Coward]

While 1 million per year MAY be so high as to produce the kinds of high-end effects you propose (early retirement, part-time work, etc.) I doubt a million dollars per year is as much money as you act like it is.
Ya know... $640k should really be enough for anybody.

Re:Au contraire

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Oh bullshit. Good development and good code isn't about reinventing the wheel when good algorithms and code already exists.

Linked lists are a known complexity problem, so throwing some code out and refining it makes for good interview fodder. Presumably you won't do that in your job - STL and java both provide good implementations.

Re:Au contraire

[ClosedSource]

It sounds like the second group is just using C++ as a "better C" or perhaps they stopped paying attention to C++ in the 1980's.

Re:Au contraire

[SeaFox]

I read it differently. Bill Gates wants more H1-B workers which he can, unofficially, work at those kind of hours. That creates a watermark in the marketplace, against which non-H1B workers need to compete for jobs. I bet if Microsoft improved working conditions and company policies (both stemming from the same dysfunctional root, most likely) they'd have plenty of folks beating a path to their door.

Yup, from what I can see this entire story is just a rehash of what Gates has already said concerning H1B Visa quotas (unfortunately TFA from that story is no longer available).

Re:Au contraire

[illuminatedwax]

(after all, _I_ was hired, and my main motivation for interviewing was to get a free trip to Seattle and to mouth-off about how awesome linux was to a bunch of MSFT people :)

Gosh, off-topic, but how did that go?

Re:Au contraire

[jp10558]

That said, I think many tech companies have open positions and describe having difficulty filling them. Does the entire sector, as a whole, not pay enough? Are there people out there that are not working for anyone, rather than work for what they deem to be too little? Said another way, if you see that across the board, tech companies have open heads, it's hard to suggest that it is purely a Microsoft problem related to salary or other undesirability.

That may be part of it. But I think another part is that Tech companies don't know what they want either, or don't know how to describe it or how to interview to determine if someone meets that need.

Now, my perspective may be a little skewed as I currently work in Academia in a Tech position, but we have a moderately seinor guy leaving, and we have to fill that spot. Now, I'm not senior at all, so I only hear about the process in Staff Meetings and the like - but one constant is they know

a) they guy leaves in a month. Pretty decent amount of notice IMHO.
b) they can't get someone who will have the same skill mix exactly, so no one will be a drop in replacement (duh)
c) what does he do? What is his job description? OMG we have to get this out ASAP, we can't run without that person for too long (we won't have hired someone in a month - they are still trying to write the replacement job description).

Now, it's primarily the IT department writing the job description and doing interviews. So they should have some clue right? Not really - he did stuff and stuff worked. Everyone else did other stuff in other buildings etc.

He's spent time trying to help discuss what his job was, but he's not HR, and his talents don't really like in the hiring process or writing job descriptions.

So then we get these horribly malformed job ads - we've all seen them and laughed at them, and part of the reason is the techies aren't sure what they want or need. And then there's what they are budgeted for too.

For instance, this guy custom built some electronics for stuff, like testing powersupplies under load. But does his replacement need to be able to do that? I don't know, but I do know we have an electronics shop, so it wouldn't be the end of the world for our department if the replacement was only IT and no EE...

So, I think part of the problem is also that we have difficulty writing an ad that gets us the applicants we need.

Re:Au contraire

[bmajik]

I didn't get the first set of positions I interviewed for :)

I'd guess that was 50% me being a "normal" coder instead of a "legendary" one.. and the other 50% was my attitude.

One of the questions the HR lady asked me was

"so, how are you as a C programmer.. on a scale of 1-10?"
"9"
"Ok, what would make you a 10?"
"I donno.. i could have the lang spec memorized or something... i haven't written a C compiler yet"

Yeah. She knew that I'd be interviewing with people writing C compilers, but I was too arrogant to connect the dots. Maybe every snotty kid who's used to being "the computer guy" and who doesn't have to try very hard in school runs into reality.. I certainly did :)

The interviews didn't go very well. My up-until-then-invincible-ego thoroughly crushed, I was given a second set of interviews for a different type of position and that went much better.

Re:Au contraire

[jp10558]

I'd argue in a follow on to my previous post in this thread that there is a general confusion in saying IT work, like most other work, it's the most general term to use.

For instance, I have close to zero understanding of OO, Collections, and threading. Guess what - so far it doesn't matter. My job isn't to write code. I occasionally write scripts. My job is to pick solutions to problems and test them, and work on implementing and maintaining them. My job is to deploy desktop systems in a managed, sane method. I collaborate on system and network security. My job is to help users do their jobs. Now, this may be low level (hey, fist job out of college once I left Geek Squad), but I think you'd be hard pressed to say it wasn't IT.

And I think there's plenty of advancement in it, from desktop support to systems analyst to project management etc. Of course I don't think it pays as well as other fields per se, but I like doing it.

Re:Au contraire

[Anonymous Coward]

Having recently taken a developer job at Microsoft after being in the software industry for ten years, I have to say that so far Microsoft is the best job I have ever had -- and the least amount of pressure. They also pay less than the rest of industry. While their benefits are fantastic they do not completely compensate for the lower salary.

I think the lower salary is a hold-over from when employees made most of their money from stock options.

Re:Au contraire

[OceanBarb]

Now, is free trade in the labor market good for the global economy? Most economic models say yes. Is it good for the US economy? The answer is less clear, though the answer leans towards it being good for the US economy. Is it good for technology workers? Probably not, as with new competition they will have to accept lower wages.

The models at the simplest level show that it is good for the US economy, too, and try to show that it is good for the workers in the long run. Supposedly, the lower wages will free up capital to be invested in more profitable industries and incent the newly-freed up workers to move to industries with higher pay and higher productivity. The typical example is the television factories that closed in the US and the big pharma manufacturers that replaced them. We all know that tv assemblers can't easily shift to big pharma jobs; maybe their kids will be better off. Can't forget, though, that the models all were based on David Ricardo's model, which assumed no free movement of labor and no impact on income distribution as a result of trade changes. And that recent attempts to get those who benefit from freer trade to help compensate those who lose (by paying for retraining, etc) have not been very successful. And that changes in the risk-sharing between worker and stockholder as well as holes in the social safety net make the losses come down heavily on the side of the worker.

Re:Au contraire

[otterpop81]

The first group will test you on your knowledge of STL (Standard Template Library) and ask about the use of iterators to implement list traversal. These are typically research departments. The second group will test you on your knowledge of pointers, linked lists, doubly linked lists, and ask such questions as how to detect if a list has a loop or how to remove an item. These are more the actual development departments.

I have to disagree. Just because that may be the experience _you_ have had, doesn't mean that it's the case everywhere. I, for one, use the STL on a daily basis in a real, funded, delivered, simulation project with paying customers. However, if someone shows up at my office in 2007 and starts implementing their own linked list in my code, I'm gonna throw a fit, but I'm _not_ going to automatically think that they're stupid. I'll think that their past experiences led them to think they _needed_ to do it (Hypothetical here, don't pick it apart). Different teams have different methodologies, often with good reason. A person's background makes a huge difference in which paradigms they think are good and which ones they think less of. It's all about what exposure someone has had. Exposure to many different paradigms is, of course, a good thing. My impression is that you have had exposure to exactly one type of development paradigm, dismissing methods which are easier, but in some cases may require a bit more resources, only good for "research" and not good enough for "actual development departments." I would suggest that you carefully reconsider some of your opinions. Make some test programs. Learn something new. You just might like it, and you just might find that it could even help _you_ in your current work.

Re:Au contraire

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill's article is probably just a weak attempt to increase the supply of CS graduates who are employable at Microsoft. He writes for his own self interest--to increase the supply of CS grads and therefore decrease the price of labor for Microsoft. There is probably no shortage, he may simply be trying to drive down your salaries.

Your reference to bankers and lawyers makes sense. New lawyers at big New York firms are now making $160,000, almost twice the amount quoted above for a science or engineering PhD. http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2007/01/22/simpson-thache r-raises-the-bar/ Some of these new lawyers make significant bonuses on top of their salaries. This increase in salary is reported to have been caused by a shortage of qualified grads.

Re:Au contraire

[Vicissidude]

Me: But, all the MS teams do is ask bullshit interview questions. Why are manhole covers round? How do I implement a list?... Those questions don't find good candidates.
You: They eliminate bad ones, though.

No. They eliminate people who can't or don't think fast at answering bullshit questions. The ability to think fast does not necessarily indicate a good developer.

Re:Au contraire

[jadavis]

what we really need is a basic arithmetic requirement for journalists.

And economics. There aren't "100,000 jobs" that "need to be filled". The job market is controlled by supply and demand, pure and simple. If you make a better offer (money, environment, hours) you will attract the people you need. If you can't make a better offer, well, gee, looks like you didn't "need" that employee after all!

I am not in any way saying that it's a good or a bad policy to encourage foreign labor and/or immigration, that's a much more complex question. I'm just saying that anytime people use terms like "shortage" or "surplus" in a market economy they are trying to get the government to give them a better deal by intervening in the marketplace. Shortages and surpluses are what happen when you do not have a free market economy.

I personally have a shortage of jet airplanes. I've got $50, and I've have been looking all over for a jet airplane, and I can't find one. We have a national crisis!

Re:Au contraire

[Gr8Apes]

The core of IT is coding. Without it, there's no IT.

The claimed shortage is in software engineers/programmers of various types, which are also in general the higher paid tasks. I don't mean to diminish the other IT areas, but I don't believe there's much of a shortage in those areas with a couple of very specific exceptions.

I've done everything from System/Email/DB (sort of) administration to network/systems/integration architecture, in addition to software. I am, or was at one time, an expert in several of those fields. Unfortunately with the speed of change in technology, some of those have fallen by the wayside, obsolete and largely useless knowledge unless you wish to support some legacy crap in a dark corner of some large company.

What is interesting is how some of the mistakes of those legacy systems are repeated over and over in "new" systems, including being designed right into new software written in newer languages. Basically we either haven't learned from our earlier mistakes or have failed to solve the original problem.

Re:Au contraire

[Vicissidude]

All the questions asked... test one of the following a) critical thinking b) creative thinking c) solid CS foundations. If you can't manage one or more of the above, why would you consider yourself qualified?

No, they only test the ability to think on your feet in a high stress situation that is the exact opposite of the way code is actually written in reality.

I don't understand why some people think they can go be ``coding monkeys'' without care or thought... You mean you can't tell the guy how to implement a list? Or how strcpy works? Or how to implement a tree? Wtf? If you fail to show your knowledge through these basic things, why should the interviewer trust your skill set? Because you said so on your resume? Give me a break...

Yeah, I can tell you how to do any of that shit. The problem comes when you ask for details and want me to show you specifics. Telling someone how to implement a list or a tree is different from writing it on a whiteboard, from the top of your head, without any hints, in less than 10 minutes, with your future job on the line, getting the syntax straight, and not making any major mistakes. As I mentioned, that is the exact opposite of the way code is actually written in reality. And it doesn't tell you anything about the candidate other than their ability to think fast. The ability to think fast does not necessarily indicate a good developer.

How many software engineers actually implement any of that shit on a regular basis? Not many. If you do, you should be fired for wasting time and resources. I haven't implemented a list in years since I left college and became a productive developer, so excuse me if I think your reasoning is lousy. My skill set is not untrustworthy if I can't think fast, remember my college days, and write a complete list implementation without errors under those bullshit conditions.

Re:Au contraire

[Vicissidude]

Yeah, I did a Microsoft contract. What a joke. They bust your ass on the interview and then give you idiot work when you get in. I was amazed that most of the full time employees in the test department were there for more than five years. God, I would shoot myself.

MS employees are not smarter than everyone else. And no, their interview process does not pick the best and the brightest.

Re:Au contraire

[dave1g]

I'm tried of all the bitching about how hard it is to find a job. I dunno about this "surplus". I figured it was going to be impossible to get one given how hard it sounds on slashdot. I will graduate in may 2007 and I had 3 well paying job offers lined up last semester. It wasn't hard at all. I'm not a 4.0 or anything either. 3.53 at UT Austin. While working 10-20 hours a week working as a programmer at research lab the university runs. Surprisingly none of the offers were from Austin companies. So perhaps their is a glut here. Most people who graduate from UT want to stay in Austin. I gave up on that goal pretty quick. I had offers in Kansas City, MO Houston, TX and New York, NY. Each offering jobs that could easily pay the cost of living in those areas. And good benefits too.

This isn't directly targeted at you, but there are many posts like this and I chose yours to respond to.

Maybe I'm just good at interviews... I'm pretty certain the only reason I got only 3 offers was that my job search was very spread out over time(due to recruitment schedule), so there would have been more. I had to turn down interviews after I got the offers and after I accepted one. But I set up all those interviews pretty much over the internet. Even the second round ones had very few times relating to setting up an interview. If you are unemployed there are plenty of jobs to be found. Just look at the job boards like hotjob, monster, dice. If there were no jobs why are there so many wanted ads?

An on site interview takes maybe 3-4 hours? In one week you could arrange interviews at least 10 companies. And if you are unemployed you pretty much have tons of free time so finding time for the interviews wouldn't be hard. I had to work mine around my school and work schedule.

If you are instead complaining that your current job sucks and you would like to work some where else but don't have time to work and go to interviews then you aren't trying. Now I know the company I chose gives me 20 vacation days (4 weeks thats awesome!) + 10 or maybe 14 scheduled holidays. Most give you 2 weeks at least. Schedule 2 interviews for a day and take that day off. Try to get phone interviews, and interviews outside of 8-5.

Re:Au contraire

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Nigga, Please. Any engineer worth their salt should be able to work out a linked list algorithm in a 50 minute interview session. Probably two or three if they're variations on a theme. They should at least be able to sketch the broad strokes of something more complex, but requiring the ability to push something to completion also avoids the guys who can never finish a project.

Re:Au contraire

[BluedemonX]

I live within striking distance of the Borg, so for shits and giggles I've interviewed there.

What I've found is that I go in to some VERY depressing cube type area, where I deal with some smirking autist whose prime goal is to see how well I remember community college data structures 101, followed by how well can you guess the really clever hack I thought up in my head... something involving pointer arithmetic and some dark corner of the C language standard.

Which explains why they wrote an operating system in which anyone can send WM_QUIT to the main window and fuck the entire system. You need a balance of different mind sets.

Of course, now that Google has set the new standard (ask about string theory and search engine algorithms!) all these folks have lost sight of "can this person write productive code" and are now looking for Mr. Spock for 60h/wk at $55,000 a year.

Re:Au contraire

[andreyw]

I call bullshit. Have you actually been through a Microsoft intreview, or are you pulling things from your rear end? High-stress situation? You have an hour. In "real life", you don't sit there for hours thinking how to apply a linked list, a queue, a stack or a tree to a problem... err.. you just DO IT. It doesn't involve much thought, because it's these are such basic data structures that you use all the time. If you need time to figure out the specifics, need hints and can't work from your head to implement basic building blocks you are supposed to use.... how the hell are you qualified for the job? Now. For the questions asked a) you have more than 10 minutes b) they don't care what language it's in as long as you can explain (no really, make up your own if you really care) c) they care much more to see and HEAR you solve the problem, than come up with a flawless solution immediately. Obviously, the later is nice, but the hiring process wants to see you think. A large chunk of the problems asked (beyond the basic strlen... or do you need hints for that too?) are SPECIFICALLY worded vague - they want you to ask questions, clarify, and explain any assumptions made. There is a good reason why you're answering interactively in front of a whiteboard with a dry erase marker, and not simply turning in a written exam. So no, the hiring process does exactly what it aim to do - it separates the API and library masturbators from people who have a solid grasp on core CS concepts. A good developer is exactly the person who doesn't need a desk reference to deal with basic data structures. I call bullshit on your claim that SE don't ever implement this stuff. I do. You've never used a stack? Never had a linked list of structures? Or are you one of those weenies that hide their ignorance behind prefabbed "Collections" and templated classes available through STL? These are very useful, fast and optimized indeed and you SHOULD use them if they are available in your language of choice - but do not preclude you from Having A Clue (TM). It's pathetic that you bring the example of a freaking linked list as something you find "challenging" to do in some fixed time frame. Your reasoning is lousy because the questions posed during the interview aren't a simple regurgitation of CS 101 material. They are designed to test how well you are at coming up with algorithms. I wouldn't be surprised if for most questions asked, they expect that moment to be the first time you've ever dealt with that situation. Because you know, that's what software engineering is all about - coming up with algorithms to solve new problems, not just wanking off with Swing, WinForms and RDBMS interfaces concoting another bloated corporate tool.

Re:Au contraire

[Vicissidude]

50 minutes? What makes you think you have 50 minutes? Try 10. You've got an hour interview and this problem is the first in the list they'll ask you.

And who said it was a linked list? Pick from any of the basic data types.

Good luck trying to figure out how to implement a hash map considering it's been 10 years since the last time you implemented one by hand in college.

Further, once you get done, they are going to bitch about syntax and any specific implementation problems - despite the fact that they originally said otherwise. Further, they'll completely switch the requirements on you and then bitch that your code doesn't meet those either. Then, you'll be expected to fix those issues. At that point, they'll bitch about something else in your code and claim it doesn't address those issues either.

Oh, and you better keep your cool about doing all this on the whiteboard, the physical IDE equivalent of Notepad. You don't want to show your growing anger or nervousness, that could cost you the job you need from being out of work.

Re:Au contraire

[BrainInAJar]

That surplus isn't anywhere near high enough to drive wages down to commodity levels, and I think that's the "problem" Bill was getting at there...

Re:Au contraire

[dytin]

I was going to respond and recomend that you didn't take Cerner, but it appears that you already took one of the offers. I don't know first hand that Cerner is bad, but a few of my classmates had internships there and were fairly unhappy with the work that they were doing. Not to mention the fact that it's in Kansas City. (If the offer you got from from Kansas City isn't Cerner, then nevermind, but I don't of know any other CS compaies around there.)

Re:Au contraire

[Anonymous Coward]

H1-B are not meant only for the technology sector.

Re:Au contraire

[rtb61]

Your getting a little bit off focus. The idea was all about being competitive, only the mega rich can be so detached that they forget being competitive means starting with a base wage rate for workers in the cents per hour category. You wont to create a good lifestyle for the majority or do you want to pursue the lowest common denominator ie. how much do you feed your slaves, they are more productive if you keep them hungry.

Pursuing the most commercially competitive labour means simply squeezing down the majority for as long as you can until they revolt and then shifting your labour requirements to another country.

No folks, we are not interested in competing in who can force the most work out of the workers for the lowest possible cost, if we are looking at any competition at all, we are looking at which country can create the best lifestyle and living conditions for the majority of it's citizens possible.

I'm Australian and from memory, the majority of Australian capital cities scored in the top ten of the most liveable cities in the world, we are winning folks and greedy rich gits can GGF. Fair trade and the establishment of tariffs to ensure minimum wage, working conditions, environmental protection, safety conditions, tax (for social welfare), the humane treatment of animals, universal health care etc. are the real goals, get used to it WTO and the path to working in poverty are coming to a not to be missed, end.

Re:Au contraire

[segedunum]

Testing someone on a whiteboard is the equivalent of making someone use Notepad to code. Sure, you should be able to do it, but who the hell actually does?....Answering bullshit questions like that only tests the candidate's ability to answer bullshit questions.

Having been through a few interviews like this, I can only wholeheartedly agree. Real programming people in the real world don't keep everything in their head at any time. They think about the problem properly for a while, do some research, get their reference books out and make a good job of it. Decent hacker who can slap some code down on paper in thirty seconds != good hire, and you would think people would know this by now.

I can remember one interview I did years where I had sat patiently for about an hour and a half answering various silly questions (and one interviewer getting very animated when I mentioned Linux), and then I had to do one of those stupid things where you draw lines on a piece of paper or something. I was hungry and thirsty by that point, and I was really, really hoping this was going to be worth my while, so I just got up and left. With hindsight, this was a really good decision, and back then I put up with too much in interviews when I was starting out. I didn't even get any politeness in the interview for the time and effort I was putting in either. Goodness knows who they took on eventually, but I've found out that the company in question no longer exists. Go figure.

Re:Au contraire

[Alioth]

Grrr. Interview questions like that really cheese me off, and I usually give a smart alec response. If you'd asked me to implement a random C library function you'd get it in Z80 asm I'm afraid, and as for the coffee maker, a smart alec response like "if it's drinkable, it works".

If you really want to give someone a problem solving ability check, let them have the resources they'd have while at work. The internet. Reference books. The lack of the usual stress of an interview. What we usually do here is set candidates a short assignment a week before they are due to come to their interview, and ask them to make a short presentation about the assignment. It's much more realistic to the real working environment, and it shows (which where I work is important) that they can present ideas to management in a convincing manner.

Re:Au contraire

[Anonymous Coward]

Or how about educating Americans and not foreigners. Then you wont have to worry about them going home and starting outsourcing operations and they wont be here taking up positions.

Re:Au contraire

[Lonewolf666]

That said, I think many tech companies have open positions and describe having difficulty filling them. Does the entire sector, as a whole, not pay enough? Are there people out there that are not working for anyone, rather than work for what they deem to be too little? Said another way, if you see that across the board, tech companies have open heads, it's hard to suggest that it is purely a Microsoft problem related to salary or other undesirability. Doesn't Google have difficulty hiring people? Apple?

Another point is: Are the requirements for the open positions reasonable?

While I don't know the situation at Microsoft, I often see job offers that come with an impressive list of required experience. As in, 5 years in the field plus knowledge of two or three very specific tools.
If you insist that your applicants fulfill all this requirements, the pool of suitable employees becomes pretty small. Don't be surprised if the few that are eligible think "great, supply is low, I can demand extraordinary wages".

Re:Au contraire

[mikael]

I was interviewing for 3D visualisation positions. An R&D lab for a large multinational company was heavily in favour of using STL questions for tests, while the entertainment software companies were heavily in favour of using linked lists for the same type of tests. The latter had a distrust of using iterators for sending data down to the graphics pipeline (they believed that using iterators would require an extra function calls for each item of data sent).

I do make heavy use of templates for my C++ code, and on occasions iterators. However, as STL doesn't support trees directly, I had to write my own template classse to do this.

Re:Au contraire

[mgblst]

This is the situation where you really need to sell yourself. Talk about how you learned version A, then very quickly picked up X, and will do whatever it takes to learn Y. You have been reading about Y, and you are very excited to be finally using some of those new features. Talk about how you are very quick at picking up new applications, and have no problem in taking home and reading manuals.

Of course, you would never actually do that, and would never need to do all that, but that is what you have to do to sell yourself.

Re:Au contraire

[Anonymous Coward]

MSFT doesn't aim to be the pay-leader, so people purely motivated by that will probably look elsewhere.

As I get older the more I feel that that line is just a con. People deserve to be paid the market rate for what they do. Top people deserve the top rate. If you (or we) paid it we would have no trouble finding the right people.

I work for Nokia, and I think it's fair to say we don't aim to be the pay leader either, but frankly every company I've worked for or even interviewed with has the same line. What in an organization of several 10s of thousand are you offering then instead? I'm sure the majority of the jobs are "work" rather than supremely interesting. They may have their moments, but really, there is only so many of the nice jobs to go around, right? Much of it is just stuff that has to be done. Done well of course, but still...

Trying to keep private sector salaries down through government intervention in education is just hypocritical for large companies making huge profits from the free market.

Re:Au contraire

[gfxguy]

If I hadn't already posted so much, I'd mod you up.

Granted, when I graduated things were a bit different, but I had three interviews and three offers when I was finishing up my degree. I also worked as a research assistant at school, and the research center allowed me my own website. That allowed me to create an interactive resumé of all the graphics work I'd done. All my interviews went really well.

After I took a job, I got three more offers during my first year, and several since then. I stayed where I am because I'm happy with the location, the work, the pay, and the benefits. Not a lot of people can say that.

I think the problem we have here, though, is that a CS degree is just a piece of paper. We were marketable because we'd already done a lot of computer science work. A lot of people graduate with a piece of paper and expect $50k/year jobs right off the bat. If you can get that, that's great... but more often than not, the people that can pull that off are the ones who have a significant amount of work to show they really do know how to program. And it doesn't take a "real" job or student position, either - I have friends who wrote some shareware games that they published on their own, never made any money with it (I think one guy got $5 once) and got hired at a big name game company; they showed they had what it took.

Sure they were abused as hell, like most game programmers, but it's what they wanted.

Re:Au contraire

[jmpareja]

I think it is a problem for American companies to compete with Chinese/Indian/Philippine companies which pays very very less compared to American salaries for a job which can be done if not better, of the same quality as the American software. :-)

Re:Au contraire

[Anonymous Coward]

I can get FreeBSD to run in 64MB or less of RAM and in far less than 200 MB of disk space and have a fully-functional server, out-of-the-box - I don't think you can say the same of Windows, especially Windows XP and Vista.

What is this compulsion to run Unix on computers from the Antique Road Show... ?
Please don't tell me you saved your company money by marauding other corporation dumpsters to find some "cherry" throw aways...
I do agree! You can't run Vista on a box that has an aged 'beige to yellow' hue.

Re:Au contraire

[erc]

I do agree! You can't run Vista on a box that has an aged 'beige to yellow' hue.

And you also can't run Vista on most computers made within the last two or three years, either. I've got a 2.8GHz Compaq Desktop sitting in front of me that I bought in early 2005 (2 years old). It's plenty fast enough to run Windows 2000 or XP, but it won't run Vista! It's not the lack of memory, but the lack of certified signed drivers, and Vista won't let you install non-signed drivers. So, it's either mix and match hardware unti I find hardware that will run Vista, or buy a whole new computer. Either way, Microsoft and hardware manufacturers get a big chunk of my money and I lose.

So, no, Vista's not for me - and not for a lot of businesses that don't have deep pockets. Maybe you have a fat bottom line and don't care about having to buy whole new computers for your office every time Microsoft thinks it needs even more money, but I don't.

The point is, Linux and the BSD variants will run on almost anything, including current computers. Vista can't make the same claim. And in case you haven't noticed, bringing in as much money as possible while spending the least amount of money is the name of the game in business, or at least enough to pay your employees.

Re:Au contraire

[Fulcrum of Evil]

You should be able to build a hashmap in 10 minutes (data structure + sketch the algorithms). additional reqs men you're doing well - they often have a reason for them, and you have to do this stuff in the real world anyway.

Re:Au contraire

[nuclearspike]

I have a friend at Microsoft, a Level 2 Architect who has been a part of many interviews. He told me that I should apply. I responded "But I don't have a degree." He laughed, he said "Half the people at Microsoft don't have degrees. They don't really care about that, as long as you have experience and a love for programming. The only thing a degree will get you that you'll need in the interview is the algorithms course. Here's the book to read and you'll pass the interview, no problem."

He said one one of the questions that he'd asked interviewees was "What do you hate about C++?" and lost interest in people who said that they had no problems with it. He wanted to find people who could see the flaws and had suggestions for how to fix them.

MS software/practices may not be nearly as good as you want them to be, but the people in the company aren't nearly as sinister or close-minded as you'd apparently like them to be.

Re:Au contraire

[bmajik]

I apologize if you had a bad interview experience or didn't enjoy your tenure as a contractor.

To be fair, the interview process between a FTE and a contractor is different. The scope/nature of the questions are also different. For contractor interviews, there's more focus on what you know now and less on measuring what you can grow into, since the employment paradigm is completely flopped -- we need you to be productive today, and we don't care if you're ever able to do anything else besides what we need you to do.

You've clearly got a lot of hostility towards the company and to the interview process.

I don't mean to sound like I'm suggesting that our interview process is perfect, or that it results only in high quality hires, or that nobody good is ever turned away. An excellent friend of mine didn't get an offer, and he's fantastic. I flunked my first round of interviews, so you might surmise that i am just on the borderline of how dumb one could be and still be employable. Of course, that's not how I actually "rank" against my peers.

That said, I've worked in and out of MS, and i've interviewed people in and out of MS. The people I work with here DO tend to be smarter than people I've worked with at other places. The interview process here DOES seem to be more objective and rigorous than at other places.

The company, the company's products, the company's employees, and the company's hiring process are all imperfect. You've not convinced me that you're offering better alternatives, although to be fair, even if you were, I could only implement them in my own limited sphere of influence.

Even so, I'm not sure that your intent is to improve Microsoft more than it is to be pejorative. I can't help but think that you've got some sort of chip on your shoulder about your experience. What group did you work in? What role did you have? When was this? What specifically did you dislike?

Re:Au contraire

[ranton]

$1M per year is like $650K per year after taxes, and then there are significant expenses that usually come with jobs that pay so well. Even if you think you can live on ramen and catchup, you won't if you want to maintain a job with that pay level.

Who is talking about Ramen and Catchup? Thats a good point about the taxes, but then again I used a very low interest rate for money growth as well. Okay, I will use your $650k/yr figure but use a more realistic 8% yearly growth figure.

Lets say that you are trying to save as much as you can, but because your job entails alot of expenses you are living on $100k/yr (plus your spouse's income if applicable). That means after 2 years you have saved $1,144,000 in the bank. Then you get a lower paying job/hobby that you love and start living on $60k/yr for the rest of your life.

By the year you start this that $60k is more like $64k because of inflation. To keep up with inflation over 40 years you will be giving yourself about $200k/yr in 2047. But with an 8% growth rate and taking out your yearly income, you would still have over $1 million in the bank in 2047. That is with no other income at all.

Stay at work for 3 years and you can take out $90k/yr for life. $1,000,000 is still ALOT of money.

--

Re:Au contraire

[dave1g]

I did here some bad things about cerner but not until after I had accepted a job elsewhere.

Theres a news story from a few years back of the CEO going crazy over people leaving at 5 pm, he though they should be staying later. The memo leaked and the stock tanked afterwards.

I went with the company in NYC great benefits good pay even for NYC and its will be extremely interesting. I figure if it doesnt work out then I can always move back to Texas if i need to.

keep America Competitive - don't off-shore jobs

[jerseyjim]

Gates - and a major of major "American" corporations - deported IT jobs to off shore countries shortly after 911. My feeling is that Bush cut a deal with India to stop playing nuclear one-ups-manship with Pakistan because Bush needed Pakistan's help for his invasion plans. IT jobs flowed to India causing layoffs in the US... causing major IT publishers to down size and a few went out of business...and colleges saw their CS/IT programs decrease in enrollment...in fact an Ivy League University shut-down is IT certification programs that had been running for 15 years...and now Billy is saying, "where are the American programmers"...this is simply a PR tactic to justify sending work to India and other off shoring heavens and to bring them here to work at lower wages.

H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[queenb**ch]

What do we need to do in order to produce more IT professionals? Take a look at the list below for a few idea.

Here's my solution:

1) Poll all current welfare and permanent disability recipients. See how many are interested and capable of learning to perform IT work.
2) Instead of continuing to pump money into a system that only perpetuates poverty, educate the people who are both interested and capable. Get them a CNA or MCSE and help them get their first job. After the first paycheck, government assistance ends since at that point you should be a) getting paid and b) have health coverage.
3) Increase funding for science and math teachers from elementary school to high school. We can use the money that we're saving from the public assistance programs to fund this.
4) Increase funding for music and art. While most people don't realize this, there is a strong connection between math and music as well as science and art in the human brain. Researchers are still trying to work out exactly what it is, but studies show that there is definitely a link for most people.
5) Raise instead of lower the requirements in order to graduate high school. One of my friends has a daughter who just started high school this year. The only math requirements for her to graduate are two semesters of math. What this means is that they're only required to take and pass Pre-Algebra I & II. Since most everyone on here are IT pros of some kind, I'm sure you're aware that this doesn't cut it for college. Algebra I & II, Geometry, and Trig should be the minimum requirements, IMHO.
6) As a corollary to #5, we need to raise the requirements for science as well. Her school district only requires two semesters of science. What this really means is that you take a semester of earth science and you take health class. IMHO, you should take Biology I & II, Chemestry I & II, Anatomy & Physiology, and Physics.
7) They do require 8 semesters of English, however, I can tell you that what passes for papers in many of these classes is laughable. I have a friend who teaches freshman & sophomore composition at a local university. The level of literacy among these kids is...horrific. I've helped her grade papers and seen things like an entire 3 page paper that was a single run on sentence. These kids do not know the difference between things like "to", "too", and "two". I cannot count the number of times I've seen someone write something like "I'm going two the store." "There", "their", and "they're" is another one that they don't seem to be aware of. Then there are the kids that write papers like they send IM and text messages, "UR 4 real?"
8) Ditch "no child left behind" philosophy. This blatantly ignores the fact that some of the kids *need* to be left behind. If they cannot keep pace in a regular classroom, they need to be sent to remedial classes until they are on a par with their peers. Keeping them in the regular classrooms has a negative effect on the kids who do their work and keep up. All this has done is resulted in a dumbing down of the entire curriculum. Here in Dallas, the school district recently published an article proclaiming their pride in the fact that only 25% of the graduates last year were functionally illiterate. They're proud of this figure because it's down from 33% last year. That means 1 in 4 high school graduates cannot read and write well enough to fill out a job application at Wal-mart. They cannot add and subtract well enough to make change for a dollar. That is absolutely shameful and how anyone in their right mind can take pride in that is beyond me.

2 cents,

QueenB.

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

In what part of America do CNA's get health insurance? Oh, wait -- you meant Novell-type CNA's, a job that many welfare recipients would require years of pre-training to begin to qualify for, and not Certified Nursing Assistants, a job that actually is a common stepping-stone up out of welfare for many. Great plan!

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[VGPowerlord]

5) Raise instead of lower the requirements in order to graduate high school. One of my friends has a daughter who just started high school this year. The only math requirements for her to graduate are two semesters of math. What this means is that they're only required to take and pass Pre-Algebra I & II. Since most everyone on here are IT pros of some kind, I'm sure you're aware that this doesn't cut it for college. Algebra I & II, Geometry, and Trig should be the minimum requirements, IMHO.

Things really have gone downhill. I graduated from High School 10 years ago, and while you were required to take two semesters of Math, they had to be (depending on your math level) Algebra I and Geometry or Geometry and Algebra II.

Personally, I also took Trig and Statistics, but that's just me.

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[klept]

I was going to make a comment, but it would not have been as detailed and well thought as your post. Thank you . I would just add that there actually is plenty of talent out there and always has been. Of course these people are over 30, and in the Microsoft mentality that makes them not qualified. Another point is that when there is a slump in tech, all the qualified graduates are left wo jobs and basically are never absorbed by these firms. Real life example. Dot com boom late ninties I knew this guy who had graduated on a scolarship from UCLA in Elec Engineering. Problem was he graduated in the early ninites when no one was hiring. He finally wound up the head of data processing for the County of LA and that is his career. When I have joked with him in late ninites about getting a dot com job, he replied quite seriously that they would consider him too old in his late twenties. That was at a time when they were grabbing any new grad off the street even if he had a philosophy degree from some fifth rate college. The real problem is the management and leadership of these organizations. And Gates of Microsoft is one of them. Of course his solution is just to import foreign help, because they can work for Microsoft at what is the equivalent of less then minimum wage. Yeah I know they get paid 80+k a year. Devide that by 100 hours a week and see what you get. Of course my guess is that Gates being around Ballmour and Clinton all the time assumes Americans are dummies. I know differently. From what you wrote, I think you do too.

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[drinkypoo]

3) Increase funding for science and math teachers from elementary school to high school. We can use the money that we're saving from the public assistance programs to fund this.

There are two problems with the teaching of math and science in school today.

One is that most teachers understand neither. They learned to do math the same way we are teaching it - by rote. This leaves them with no actual understanding of math, just a larger arsenal of mathematical tools to apply to problems. It's not really mathematics, it's computation. They didn't learn to actually perform scientific experiments, although they can explain every step of the scientific method to you and grade your essay without a cheat sheet. So what they are teaching is really not math and science, but the appreciation of math and science.

The other is that even the teachers who do know something are hog-tied by the regulations. The instructor must follow the curriculum and must make sure all students pass standardized testing. When a child doesn't want to learn, the instructor is blamed and has to put their effort into the problem - I'm not implying that such students should simply be ignored and left to fall by the wayside, but it's horribly unfair to support these children at the expense of others.

Actually, if you want to talk about money, THAT is an issue that should be raised. I know this is a confrontational belief, but I think we need to stop spending so much money supporting "special needs" students. We spend multiples of the money spent on the average student on students who simply will never come up to the level of children we are therefore neglecting. I think that this is simply wrong. Today we have the technology to detect many developmental disabilities before birth and a parent has the choice to have the child or not. Thus, I feel it is wrong to force others to shoulder the load. If you want to have that child, and be responsible for it, that is fine with me. Your beliefs or your heart may require it. But to then expect me to shoulder the burden is quite frankly unconscionable. And to penalize other people's children, well, that's downright mean and quite selfish.

The sad truth however is that the educational system is not about educating children to the best of our ability. It's about producing good little drones that will go and do as they are told. Unfortunately, this trend's ever-increasing prevalence has produced a nation of sheep who, for the most part, are utterly incapable of putting their brain to the purposes for which it was intended.

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[Metasquares]

A discrete math course, if offered, will also help prepare people planning on going into CS tremendously for college. AP Calculus is useful too because it helps students think about limits and asymptotic analysis.

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[Atanamis]

The other is that even the teachers who do know something are hog-tied by the regulations. The instructor must follow the curriculum and must make sure all students pass standardized testing.

My mother in law is a Biology teacher with a background in Microbiology and Genetics. She has been asked to leave both private and public schools for the crime of failing honors students who don't learn the material. I've never sat in her class, but the criticism has never been that she is a poor teacher. Rather, it is that she will not lower her standards enough. She will allow any student to retake any test, with the provision that the new grade completely replaces the old. You can retake test one 5 times, until you have it completely memorized. Still, students fail.

Is the proposed solution to provide additional tutoring (she stays late after school every day willing to tutor kids who need it)? Is it encouraging only people willing to do their homework to take honors classes? No, the proposed solution is to reduce standards on the top level classes so kids with dreams of becoming a doctor do not feel discouraged. When parents and administrators value grades above learning, everyone loses. My mother in law will be looking for a new job at a school that will not expect her to pass people who are not willing to learn the material.

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[HAKdragon]

While I agree with most of your ideas, I should point out that many places require a certain amount of employment time before benefits are offered. At my current job, for example, you have to put in 3 months before health coverage and retirement plans become available to you.

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[VGPowerlord]

A discrete math course was offered, but I took AP Calculus instead, which I ended up hating... although that might have been more of a teacher thing than the course matter.

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Coming to the US got so difficult, even as a CS student with excellent capabilities.

You need to go to an interview, fill out an endless amount of forms with everything about yourself and your education,
wait 4 hours outside in the rain, pay around 500 US$ of fees, etc. And no, I am not from Iran, I'm German ;)

It seems all qualified people are discouraged to come to the USA with these new Visa regulations.

Did I mention that you need to pay 15 EUR per call to schedule the interview appointment :$

http://www.usembassy.de/germany/visa/info_service. html
http://www.usembassy.de/germany/visa/processing_fe e.html

I hope most computer science conferences I am going to are not going to be in the US.

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[Lord Ender]

5) Raise instead of lower the requirements in order to graduate high school. One of my friends has a daughter who just started high school this year. The only math requirements for her to graduate are two semesters of math. What this means is that they're only required to take and pass Pre-Algebra I & II. Since most everyone on here are IT pros of some kind, I'm sure you're aware that this doesn't cut it for college. Algebra I & II, Geometry, and Trig should be the minimum requirements, IMHO.

There is no courses called "pre-algebra II" or "trig." High school math for college-bound kids in the US usually goes like this:
grade 9: Geometry+Trigonometry
grade 10: Algebra II
grade 11: Pre-calc
grade 12: Calc
College-bound kids typically had Algebra I in middle school.

Mediocre students (some of whom go to real college, some to community college, some to career training) are usually a year behind, so their high school math is:
grade 9: Algebra I
grade 10: Geometry+Trig
grade 11: Algebra II
grade 12: Pre-calc

The rest, I believe, take some sort of "remedial math for monkeys" courses over and over until they pass with the minimum requirements to graduate.

So, your idea of what is in the HS curriculum is wrong. Don't worry. Most students get geometry and trig on the first or second year of HS.

Of course, if you ask me, this is all a crap curriculum from a earlier age. Today, kids should be learning set theory, probability, discrete math, statistics, logic, and personal finance. Forget calc and advanced algebra! The (very small) number of people who can use that will get it in college. Stats and logic are useful to EVERYONE, and should be taught to everyone!

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[Coryoth]

One is that most teachers understand neither. They learned to do math the same way we are teaching it - by rote. This leaves them with no actual understanding of math, just a larger arsenal of mathematical tools to apply to problems. It's not really mathematics, it's computation.

I think this really is a pertinent point that is not being addressed. Most importantly it is particularly bad in elementary/primary school where teachers are quite likely to be math averse - and the students are getting their first exposure to mathematics. I think an interesting case study is Finland. In the late 90s Finland decided they needed to seriously improve their students math and science, and began a major program to do this. On of the major features of that program involved getting as many elementary/primary school teachers interested in math as possible. For teachers graduating teachers college at one school the number of elementary teachers who took university math courses went from around 10% to more like 80%! The result is that Finnish students are not among the very best in the world at mathematics.

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[grassy_knoll]

These kids do not know the difference between things like "to", "too", and "two". I cannot count the number of times I've seen someone write something like "I'm going two the store." "There", "their", and "they're" is another one that they don't seem to be aware of. Then there are the kids that write papers like they send IM and text messages, "UR 4 real?"

[obligatory]Well, at least they're qualified for /. [/obligatory]

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[blahplusplus]

"4) Increase funding for music and art. While most people don't realize this, there is a strong connection between math and music as well as science and art in the human brain. Researchers are still trying to work out exactly what it is, but studies show that there is definitely a link for most people."

Binary and art are related as well, think about black and white on a computer screen filled with pixels, its ENORMOUSLY helpful to teach art with because you have the whole spectrum of paint/colors to use to show that when you take a color gradient from while to a color, or dark to a color, you can tell actually SHOW THEM with VISUAL examples how shapes are created from very small dots and "merged dots" of color or DISPERSED color. Using digital palletes to merge colors is enomrously helpful.

Math is really all about the abstractalization of light, shape and color. Kids are NEVER taught that though. That the "true math" is the WORLD, and symbolic math (1,2,3,4) is really just the points we choose out of geometric space and plot in an area somewhere and then label it with a number and connect the number (plot-points) with lines.

The number line can be better understood as a NUMBER PLOT in a direction with a ratio (reflection/radian/radii(?) point) between numbers. It wasn't until I merged the concept of binary (black/white) on -- off with dots in a piece of paper that I finally understood how shapes are made. They are made of very smalll merged dots of different shapes and sizes and colors, and that you can learn how to draw shapes by understanding how something is distinct from something else in a binary fashion.

In art on a 2D plane: There are only edges and boundaries, and fields of dispersed dots (gradients).

So it's not just music and art, ART and GEOMETRY, Binary number system mapped onto 3D (many stacked 2d planes) planes of dots, that are eithe "there" (on), or "not there" (off), understanding space as an "unfilled area" (off) is totally enlightening.

Imagine being able to show people that you were taught math in a very limited sense, that when somebody told you about counting what they really were talking about were nodes, planes and lines in 3D space, what math is really all about is shapes of binary nodes (on or off) with rays cast between them (lines). And that when we add or subtract what we really are doing is reflecting the number one or a group of ones at certain angles or vectors using a vector mirror.

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

"I've helped her grade papers and seen things like an entire 3 page paper that was a single run on sentence."

Not a Steinbeck fan?

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[roscivs]

So, your idea of what is in the HS curriculum is wrong. Don't worry. Most students get geometry and trig on the first or second year of HS.

HS curriculums vary widely from state to state. What he describes may be accurate in his area. In my High School (not too many years ago), the curriculum was:
9: Algebra II
10: Geometry
11: Trig
12: Pre-Calc (or AP Calc for the "smart kids")
I believe Algebra II was the district's minimum requirement for graduation; the school's minimum requirement was up through Trig.

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[jahudabudy]

5) Raise instead of lower the requirements in order to graduate high school. One of my friends has a daughter who just started high school this year. The only math requirements for her to graduate are two semesters of math. What this means is that they're only required to take and pass Pre-Algebra I & II. Since most everyone on here are IT pros of some kind, I'm sure you're aware that this doesn't cut it for college. Algebra I & II, Geometry, and Trig should be the minimum requirements, IMHO

I disagree, and here's why: graduating high-school should not simply be viewed as a pre-cursor to a college education. Students should have the option to take more math & science in preparation for college, sure. But the kid who just wants to graduate high-school so he can at least have the satisfaction of achieving the goal he was forced to work towards for 10 years, then go work in his dad's mechanic shop, why does he need Trig? A surprising number of kids have no interest in and/or ability to go to college. Why force them to prepare for it?

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[queenb**ch]

Actually, in the school district I mentioned, they DO NOT, repeat DO NOT have to take Algebra I and II. They get some lame watered down version which is called Pre-Algebra. Geometry and Trig are NOT, repeat NOT required classes.

I didn't typo, I'm not wrong and I didn't stutter. If you like, I'll give you the phone # to the school district headquarters.

2 more cents,

QueenB.

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[queenb**ch]

A surprising number of kids have no interest in and/or ability to go to college. Why force them to prepare for it?

Because even if you don't go to college, you still shouldn't be a dumbass.

2 cents,

QueenB.

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[Lord Ender]

How in Bob's Name can you possibly spend an entire year on trig? a2+b2=c2, sin, cos, tan... You could fit everything you need to know about trig on to a business card.

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[qbwiz]

I believe that in my high school, the Trig class also dealt with probability and pre-calculus (mostly just limits).

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[HungWeiLo]

If stats and logic were understood (even partially) by more than 10% of the general public, the world economy and political landscape would collapse in a week. The world evolves around the fact that a subset of people take advantage of the remainder of the world based on the fact that they do not understand stats and logic.

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[alissy]

So we're looking at 8 semesters English, 8 semesters math, 8 semesters science. Now there's also foreign languages, social science, history, fine arts, gym, and god forbid you screw up in one class because then you might not have room in your schedule to make it up. I'm all for raising academic standards -- lord knows we need it -- but let's be reasonable.

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[DoctorRock]

Or - we create a voucher system for private schools, making education competitive.
There's nothing on your list that a vital, more responsible system wouldn't fix.
Then of course, we'd have all of those well-educated voters out there...

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[Lord Ender]

Do you think? It seems to me that in a democracy, where we are ALL bound by the decisions of our ignorant majority, the ability to use superior education to control the masses is enjoyed by FAR fewer than 1% of the population. The rest of us are still subject to the poor choices of the other 90% of the population.

If you have any advice on how I may use my educational advantage to live a privileged life, I'm listening. The best I've come up with so far is to invest heavily in index funds so that I only have to work for half of my life, and spend the rest living off the interest of my investments (a strategy my less-educated family regards as a simple "gamble").

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[jahudabudy]

I don't think never having been exposed to anything past basic algebra makes someone a dumbass. I don't even think being unable to grasp anything past basic algebra makes someone a dumbass.

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

My high school had:

Grade 9: Algebra I
Grade 10: Geometry
Grade 11: Algebra II
Grade 12: Trigonometry and Pre-calc

I transferred to that school. Some kids had the opportunity to take Algebra I in grade 8 and each of the other classes ahead of time (the school I transferred from didn't offer that). Of the half-dozen students that took Algebra I in grade 8, one went on to study Calculus in grade 12 (through a nearby University. The high school paid for the tuition).

All students were required to take Algebra I and Geometry to graduate. Interestinly, the school I transferred from had the same requirements and offered the same classes. That was 15 years ago.

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[ghoul]

In India to graduate high school you have to take 2 national level standardised exams - One after class 10 and one after class 12. Till Class 10 you have 10 subjects the whole year- English, Hindi, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Math, History, Geography, Civics, Economics and a third language (my school had the choice of Sanskrit and French - I took Sanskrit) as well as compulsory Music, Art, Yoga and Physical Ed classes (mostly playing soccer, basketball or tennis recreationally no organized sports). After giving the exams in these subjects depending on how well you scored you will get to choose Science (Engineering track), Science(Medical track), Economics track or Arts track . In each of these tracks you will have English and Math(including Calculus except in Arts where there is no Math) and 3 more subjects. People survive this while at the same time preparing for college entrance exams as college entrance is not based on High school scores (for professional colleges). Sure Indian kids suck at sports and have low social skills as they dont have time for organized sports or dating but they sure are much more prepared for college level acaemics. Its these kids against whom American kids have to start to compete so its time to toughen up the US curriculum and fail kids without mercy if they cant keep up. The most ridiculous thing I have heard is passing a kid who obviously hasnt learnt the material so as to not hurt their self esteem. WTF. If a kid cant be bothered to learn enough to pass the minimum requirements his/her self esteem needs to be hurt - in fact the self esteem needs to be taken out to the woods and shot. Respect and self respect are earned not a right.
If the curriculum isnt toughened up the Indian kids will take the jobs - either here or in India through outsourcing. No amount of racist immigration policies can stop that.

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[queenb**ch]

And your post quite proves my point. Math is about more than learning to do math. It's about learning logic and reasoning, among other things.

2 cents,

QueenB.

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[jahudabudy]

Math is about more than learning to do math. It's about learning logic and reasoning, among other things.

But only advanced math. Basic algebra and geometry, which are currently required for a high school diploma, obviously don't teach any of these other skills. Your arguments have convinced me that all students must learn advanced maths, or be doomed to mouth-breathing moron-hood.

Let's see some scholarships.

[khasim]

And by "some", I mean enough to address at least 10% of their claimed "shortfall". If they really want to convince me, 20%+ would do it.

School isn't cheap and not many people want to invest the time and money in a CS degree when they believe that the jobs will be outsourced before they've paid off their college loans.

So, get rid of the worry about the loan by offering scholarships. Lots of scholarships. Every year.

Translation from Bill-speak

[boyfaceddog]

The USA (Microsoft) really (REALLY REALLY)needs all (EVERY SINGLE ONE) of the schools to buy more PCs (AND NOT MACS).

Self interest never lies

[Dobeln]

Let me be the first to say that I am Shocked - Shocked! - to see Mr. Gates advocating the importing of low-cost labor in the very field where his company is a major employer.

In any case, claims of "labor shortages" should always be taken with a grain of salt - or two - when coming from prominent industry representatives.

Another way to keep us competitive...

[ErichTheRed]

Besides improving education, here's another way to keep us competitive:

Stop inflating living standards beyond sustainable levels.

Especially where I am (NY Metro,) it's impossible to find an affordable house and work in a field where salaries aren't rising faster than inflation. A 50-year-old two-bedroom house on less than 1/4 acre of land is still going for $700,000+ in some areas around here. Everyone has to have the most expensive car, the most expensive clothes, the best vacations, etc. Most of them do this by borrowing way more than they can ever pay back on credit cards and home equity.

These same people then turn to employers demanding high salaries to fuel their lifestyle. Employers see a labor pool on the other side of the world much happier with 10% of these salaries, and rationally choose to go with them. Why is this a surprise?

The only long-term solution for this is to cut people off from credit. Make it incredibly expensive to borrow money, and teach people to live within their means again. Low-level secretaries and coordinators at companies shouldn't be driving a new Mercedes and wearing Prada shoes.

Re:Another way to keep us competitive...

[canUbeleiveIT]

Honestly, I can't see how most people can afford to live in some places. In the early eighties, my older brother had 252 square foot, one-room apartment in Manhattan that shared a bathroom with two other units. Cost: $500/month. His salary as an editor of a magazine: $21,000/yr. Work week: > 70hrs.

At the same time, I was earning $26,000/year as a grocery store clerk in the midwest, working 40hrs/wk, living in an 1100 square foot apartment for $385/month, which included heat and laundry.

When I see the average home prices in places like Boston, San Francisco, NY, and Los Angeles, I wonder how anyone could afford a house. For the love of God, the mortgage on $700,000 is around $4500/month. For that amount, one could live in a veritable mansion in our area. Something on the order of 5500sq/ft, on a golf course, 5 acres, and monthly blowjobs included.

Re:Another way to keep us competitive...

[Anonymous Coward]

What planet are you from? I think you'll find that, here on Earth, it IS incredibly expensive to borrow money. It doesn't teach people squat.

That ain't a bug, thats a feature...

[dr_dank]

During that time they can't change jobs, which limits their opportunities to contribute to their employer's success and overall economic growth.

How does jumping jobs contribute to their "employer's success"? The whole point of an H1-B is, not only to get comparable labor for a deep discount over local labor, but to have leverage to squelch dissent. Don't like the Bataan Death March-style working hours? They yank your H1-B and send you right back to where you came from. With family back home relying on the money being sent back as well as the dangling promise of eventual permanent status/citizenship, the H1-B worker is trapped.

The actions of Gates and those like him in the industry chop away at the breeding ground for the next generation of CS/IT professionals. Farming out those bottom rung positions to save a buck is coming home to roost.

Re:That ain't a bug, thats a feature...

[buzzzz]

You have misread that statement. H1B Visa holders can in fact transfer to other jobs without going through the quota. It's not even an issue.

The article is talking about Green Card applicants not allowed to change jobs. Essentially, people whose Green Card (immigration) applications have been approved wait for the "Priority Date" which is when there turn will come. This is typically a wait of 5-10 years during which a person who has qualified for being a permanent US resident cannot change jobs and has several other issues. You might want to read http://immigrationvoice.org/index.php?option=com_c ontent&task=view&id=56&Itemid=25 if you are interested.

I have posted this elsewhere on the thread but I find that people are in general unaware of this issue. This is completely separate from the debate on how many H1B's to allow. This is about people who the US has already allowed to become permanent residents. But rules ask that the person stay in the same job without promotion, without the spouse being permitted to work for nearly 5-10 years. It benefits no one and only hurts future residents and citizens. If lesser people should be brought into the US, that should be done. But once someone has been offered residency, I do not understand how making his/her life painful for several years helps anyone's interests.

The usual BS

[overshoot]

I've been reading this bull for over thirty years. Every year, some group or another projects engineering job growth in the USA to vastly outstrip the number of available engineers, regardless of the engineering unemployment rate.

It always turns out be published by large employers (who would love to have higher unemployment rates to keep salary competition under control) and universities (who of course want more paying students.) It also usually involves funny bookkeeping, such as five different defense contractors all assuming that they'll get a contract and all planning to staff up accordingly. Multiply by the whole economy.

In the Gates piece, he curiously segues from "IT employment" to "CS degrees" without mentioning that most of the projected IT jobs don't require CS degrees, and in fact that a CS degree would likely get you turned down as overqualified. How curious -- that would put you in the "unemployed CS" market, depressing CS salary competition.

Who'd have thunk it?

Something wrong with the math?

[gfxguy]

Or at least misleading?

Indeed, in the article, Bill Gates claims 100,000 new jobs annually, and 65,000 H-1B Visas, and that is "not nearly enough to fill open technical positions."

But that's only true if his goal is to fill them all with H-1B workers. How many U.S. graduates in CS are there anually? He doesn't say!!!

A quick google only provides stats for some specific schools, and a few other things that don't say.

Re:Something wrong with the math?

[gfxguy]

Sweet JEBUS, I've found it!

From the same damn newspaper, only last week...

In 2004 American colleges and universities awarded a record 233,492 undergraduate S&E degrees, reports the National Science Foundation (NSF). That was up 38 percent from 169,726 in 1990. Within that total, some fields have expanded rapidly. Computer science degrees have doubled since 1990, to 57,405.

So, in other words, Bill wants cheap labor, seeing as how, with 65k H-1B visas and 57k+ US graduates, there's a surplus of over 22k potential employees. He misleads us into believing there's a 35k shortfall.

Gates and Balmer must go!

[cmacb]

And my comments which were FUBARed by WAPOs website:

Could we first pass a law that would prevent anyone else from Microsoft from using the word "innovation"? They have practically worn the word out and it only serves as a sick joke these days that one of America's most successful companies (in money terms at least) continues to use an attribute they lack to describe themselves.

Yes, innovation is important to America, and the world, but what does Bill Gates mean by "strong intellectual property laws and efficient capital markets"?

IP laws are intended to help get new ideas off the ground by promising an inventor, but more importantly a manufacturer, at least a chance on return of their investment in production of a new product. But software patents have turned this system on its head, with more patents issued than anyone can keep up with, and in some cases on almost trivial concepts, we have the opposite effect, namely that someone can invest significantly in a new product only too find out that the proceeds belong to Microsoft.

Efficient capital markets? Like one where hardware costs continue to go down while software costs continue to go up? Where Steve Balmer can suggest that the world needs a $100 PC, while omitting that he'd like to see $1000 worth of MS software running on it?

What Gates and Balmer want is a parody of "The Al Franken Decade", and we are living it too. These two men, and their company want to continue to rest on their accomplishments from the 80's (which were significant) while the rest of us struggle with software that doesn't work, old disks we can't read and laws that threaten to put us in jail if we code up anything that might work against their retirement programs. The MS decade is OVER! Long since in fact. Deal with it Mr. Gates, get back to your charity efforts. (and PLEASE, take Balmer with you!)

Another year another H1B visa push

[Anonymous Coward]

Same time every year, (just as H1bs come up for discussion).

Feb 2004:
Reforms demanded as H-1B visa limit reached
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5161069.html

April 2005
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5687039.html
Gates wants limits scrapped on H1bs

March 2006
Bill Gates says H1B needs more freedom.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/03/17/AR2006031701798.html

2007, Gates talks out of his ass.

They want more H1Bs, it helps reduce the short term cost of programmers, lets them keep a cap on their salary bill and increase their profits. It fucks up the normal supply-demand market that drives people to go to University, but what does he care, he can always fill the shortfall with more imported programmers.

Mod Parent up - Re:How do you figure?

[Malc]

They changed the law in the mid to late 90's when I was on an H1b. Now people on a valid H1b can change jobs and their new employer sponsor them afterwards (last I heard a few years ago was that it is just a formality). Before that, they had to go through the whole H1b application process, which didn't make it impossible to change jobs, just awkward (probably easier than relocating a new H1b hire in to the US though).

Re:Mod Parent up - Re:How do you figure?

[buzzzz]

The TFS is talking about people in the green card process. After applying for your green card it can take from 5 to 10 years to actually receive it. During that period the person cannot change job without restarting the application process and his dependents (children/spouse) cannot work. There are exceptions to this but it is without doubt an extremely painful process.

Here is a link that discusses this problem: http://immigrationvoice.org/index.php?option=com_c ontent&task=view&id=56&Itemid=25

With increasing opportunities in the rest of the world, including third world countries, I would imagine that fewer of the best people would like to jump through so many hoops to get immigration.

Based on domestic needs, whatever immigration policy the US decides on... once the country has decided how many immigrants it needs and of what type, it must treat those it selects with value and compassion. Else they will lose most except the ones ready to go through the grueling process.

While I understand the debate regarding visa numbers, I do not understand how making it more painful for those that you do allow helps anyone at all. The opposition to making life easier for those who the country has selected to be on the path to legal immigration and citizenship boggles my mind.

Re:Mod Parent up - Re:How do you figure?

[Malc]

Yes, I didn't fancy the green card + citizenship route. That's a decade commitment. I ended up going north and in under 6 years became Canadian. I'm choosing to stay here because it's now my home, but with the status I've acquired, I have the freedom to travel and live elsewhere as I please. This isn't possible until citizenship is acquired. This kind of freedom is important to me, and I didn't want to give it up for the length of time required by the US. I think you're right though about how immigrants (or to use legalese, also non-immigrants) who are committed to the US are treated.

How to keep America (Non) Competitive...

[wtansill]

From TFA:

Today we know that these elements are outweighed by a single critical factor: innovation.

This from Microsoft -- one of the best-known companies in the field for fostering innovation. Stacker? Netscape? CSS? ODF vs. OOXML? Hmmm...

Two steps are critical. First, we must demand strong schools so that young Americans enter the workforce with the math, science and problem-solving skills they need to succeed in the knowledge economy. We must also make it easier for foreign-born scientists and engineers to work for U.S. companies.

Mr. Bill of course does not realize that the first thing he mentions, better education, is largely negated by the second -- more "foreighn-born scientists and engineers". So -- I should go to school for many years, and rack up sizable amounts of debt to pursue a job that will be outsourced to India, or that will be given to the holder of an H1-B visa rather than me, as the visa holder can be had more cheaply... Yes -- this makes perfect economic sense to me.

American competitiveness also requires immigration reforms that reflect the importance of highly skilled foreign-born employees. Demand for specialized technical skills has long exceeded the supply of native-born workers with advanced degrees, and scientists and engineers from other countries fill this gap.

Of course demand exceeds supply. Because companies do not want to pay the wages commensurate with the educational and experience levels of US-born applicants. "Our American workers cost too much. Let's rework the immigration laws so that we can hire some cheaper labor from foreign countries!"

The United States provides 65,000 temporary H-1B visas each year to make up this shortfall -- not nearly enough to fill open technical positions.

So please, congresspeople, raise the visa limit so we can get more people that we can abuse with low pay and long hours!

Permanent residency regulations compound this problem. Temporary employees wait five years or longer for a green card. During that time they can't change jobs, which limits their opportunities to contribute to their employer's success and overall economic growth.

OK -- I don't get this. This hurts Microsoft .... how, exactly? If the visa holder can't change jobs, that means that MS "owns" them, so I do not uinderstand the complaint.

Last year, reform on this issue stalled as Congress struggled to address border security and undocumented immigration. As lawmakers grapple with those important issues once again, I urge them to support changes to the H-1B visa program that allow American businesses to hire foreign-born scientists and engineers when they can't find the homegrown talent they need.

Thus virtually guaranteeing that there will be no home-grown applicants since it will not be economically viable for them to study for any job that can be outsourced on Bill G's whim.

Sorry, but it sounds like more of the same corprate blather to me.

Re:How to keep America (Non) Competitive...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget to read the bottom:

The writer is chairman of Microsoft Corp. and co-chairman of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. His wife is a director of The Washington Post Co.

Sadly this reminded me of this speech:

When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed.

I will go forth and call out that the real cost of the "expensive US labour" is NOT the wages but the payments to copyright cartels(MPAA, RIAA) as well as patent trolls and patent pools who produce nothing but red tape and cost. THAT is the real cost of business and why in 10 years all businesses will demand patent-free and open-source software(because of competition from rest of the planet who doesn't care about our inefficient copyright, patent, and legal system?)

Instead of investing in 'toll-road cartels' we should be investing in LABOUR where real innovation happens. Sadly Bill thinks that importing cheap 'input goods'(cause that's what they are to him) will somehow produce innovation. He should go play golf instead of trying to act like he knows what he's talking about.

Media's Fault

[adavies42]

This (like most things) is the media's fault. The media spent two or three years in the post-bubble and post-9/11 recession panicking about the shrinking IT sector and how all the CS grads were going jobless. Surprise, surprise, no one majored in CS. Add four years' lag, and what do you get?

Re:Media's Fault

[Beyond_GoodandEvil]

This (like most things) is the media's fault. The media spent two or three years in the post-bubble and post-9/11 recession panicking about the shrinking IT sector and how all the CS grads were going jobless.

Sorry, as someone who graduated in '01 w/ a BS in Chemical Engineering it isn't the media's fault, to paraphrase Chris Rock,"Mike Wallace wasn't stopping companies from returning my phone calls." From Sept. 01 to March 02 the well was dry not even lame ass temporary lab tech jobs were available(the Chemistry/Engineering equivalent of help desk work).

Re:Media's Fault

[adavies42]

Yes, but overhyping it in the first place, then whining about it for years after the problem was gone, created a public perception that CS was no longer a smart field to go into, a perception which I bet is still in place.

Strategic Advertising

[v3xt0r]

What we need are people like Phillip Morris to go out and put cute tux ads near all the candy in liquor stores so that kids will become subliminally addicted to computer science.

Solution in my opinion.

[955301]

Industrialize software development. It's still a science right now and not an engineering practice.

We're the only industry where the person who designs the product also works on creating it. This is a collosal mistake for the exact reason this article points out - there are not enough skilled hands to squander on the unskilled aspects of development.

The architect should never create class diagrams. The developer should never change the architecture. The Programmer should *never* change a method signature or add a new method or class.

Then the architects can be masters, the developers bachelors, and the programmers high school graduates.

*That*, my friends will cause an explosion in the quality of software development. If the developer has to design to the method level and get it right, reuse will become the way of life, not just a novelty. Typing can be learned in high school, as can method level programming.

If programmers are simply tackling a string of homework assignments from their point of view of simplicity (here's a problem method, fill it in) they can be more like carpenters and less like jacks of all trades.

Re:Solution in my opinion.

[Srin Tuar]

The first mistake you are making is a very common misperception, and that is a big part of the reason why most software development sucks.

Design and Implementation of software are one and the same. There is no physical "building" stage for a program, because it has no physical component. The blueprint is the finished form. Trying to artificially separate them is only going to cause delays and inefficiencies. Modelling software design after bridge construction is a recipe for failure.

If you are a designer, then when you are finished designing, you should have a working product, otherwise you need to improve the tools and libraries you use. If you can create a design then foist it on to programmers, then you really arent designing anything. Instead you are coming up with detailed design requirements, and they are doing the real design. When they encounter reality and change the de facto design to make it actually work, you won't even know about it.

If think you are a just programmer who cannot design, you cannot really help but can only get in the way. In a creative field, simple repetitive implementation tasks are best replaced with small shell scripts. (or simple code re-use stemming from good design)

The second mistake you are making is thinking that there is any correlation between someone's degree and their ability to create software. After having interview, hired, and reviewed programmers for 6 years now, I don't even consider education as a factor anymore. It is the least predictive field of any in a resume.

Re:Solution in my opinion.

[xeno-cat]

Just to put a fine point on what the other poster said, construction phase of software development is already automated, it;s called compile time. Everything else *is* archetecture and design. So really, the build phase is already free.

Kind Regards

Re:Solution in my opinion.

[Yogs]

You clearly don't do this for a living. There all always trade-offs, corner cases, performance considerations, and other things that can be important to the architecture of the system, and are impossible to get right without being familiar with the details. Once you are there looking at the details, it almost always takes less time to do it yourself than it takes to explain it in sufficient detail, even to someone on your level. We don't need more low skill level developers, we need more high skill level developers.

Traditionally, architects write code that's used by a lot of other code, or whose side state-full behavior is important to a lot of other code. People with lesser titles do work that doesn't impact the system as widely. But, at the end of the day it's all code, and programming, development, and architecting are less descriptive of different kinds of work than they are of the esteem that work is held in. You clearly esteem education, which is fine, but I'll tell you it correlates only marginally with the ability to actually design a good system.

People complain about software all the time, and fantasize about silver bullets, but the reason software sucks is that its design is way, way more complex than anything that's industrialized. The ability to code in such a way that promotes reuse is one of the most important attributes a developer can have. Still, reuse can only reduce a problem so much, and in the end software is complex is because you, the business, ask us for complexity. Cookie cutter solutions don't satisfy... see the failure of every touted 4GL. Software in particular will stay complicated as the cost of change in software is lower than anything where you have a lot of physical product to scrap. That's also why people will complain about software more than anything else, because in the end it's as much a problem of getting people to agree as it is to build a product.

Re:Solution in my opinion.

[Anonymous Coward]

We're the only industry where the person who designs the product also works on creating it. This is a collosal mistake for the exact reason this article points out - there are not enough skilled hands to squander on the unskilled aspects of development.

Creating software isn't the same as creating a building or some other physical product, no matter how comforted that analogy makes your little brain feel. There are no "unskilled aspects of development", because any such aspects will be immediately automated out of existence.

Re:Solution in my opinion.

[955301]

You know, I can almost imagine a construction foreman telling an inspector the same thing you just told me. And yet buildings don't collapse on themselves regularly. That is unless there aren't inspections or tradecrafts.

And if you think I don't know what I'm talking about, please explain why most software projects still fail after over a decade of practice. You're observations are characteristic of people who do not understand industrialization. NOBODY in an automobile line's engineering team welds like the welder on the assembly line. And they don't send the engineer down to weld the most difficult parts. Instead, if something's difficult, they send it back to engineering to fix the design. An architect who feels the need to do some things themselves because it takes less time is unskilled at conveying a plan adequate enough to offload the work to the appropriate member of the team.

And I wholeheartedly disagree that software is harder than anything industrialized. The proof is simple. Boeing builds aircraft. The aircraft are made of hardware and software. Your assertion is software is more complex than the hardware and software, which is impossible. Therefore, I assert that architecting, designing and building an aircraft is more complex than writing a piece of software. And yet it's news when one falls from the sky and a crashing computer isn't.

You have too much bad experience for you own good, and your response resembles the initial responses that men had to women learning to type (used to be a male only profession). Yet once they learned, typing became a "lesser" skill. It's possible for software to be easier too.

No architect would be able to write a persistence layer better that the rote programmer who specializes in writing nothing but jdbc & dao code. Or design it better than a design who specializes in designing the persistence layer. Period.

It seems so foreign because it's not an industrialized profession.

Re:Solution in my opinion.

[955301]

I see what you're saying, but you are misunderstanding me as well. The ultimate goal is that the partitions in education I described are focused on the role as oppose to how they are today. You *have* to be a master to be an architect because that's the level an architect must operate on. You have to be a bachelor to design properly. You learn how to program small tasks at a high school or vo-tech level. This is not how it is today, I agree; however, if your roles are properly enforced, the programmer *must* kick a bad design back to the designer. Your example of the programmer reworking a design is exactly whey these things fail all the time. They are breaking from their role when this occurs, in the same way a seamstress breaks their role by changing the design of a garment at the sewing machine.

Again, You are talking about education as it exists today, not as industrialized levels - there *is* a correlation between the skills of an electrical engineer, an electrician, and a blueprint specialist and their education. *that*, my friend, is where software needs to be.

Unless you are saying it's easier to design & build an aircraft than it is to write software?

Re:Solution in my opinion.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, my company does something similar (architect, sr. engineer, jr. engineer roles). In fact, architects work at such a high level that (in theory) they are supposed to have the knowledge to design any type of system (of course in practice, architects specialize).

The high level architect approach works well on huge, diverse projects. For example, systems on the order of the international space station, GPS satellite system, etc. Other posters mention that an architect should be spending the majority of their time writing code, but I disagree. I can think of many cases where there is enough architecture to be designed to keep a full time architect busy without having him write code all day-- you get more value from the architect by having him focus on the architecure. (I don't for sure, but I doubt Microsoft's chief software architect spends most of his day writing code.)

Re:Solution in my opinion.

[Yogs]

I accept that aircraft, the space shuttle, etc.. are insanely complicated, and aircraft contains software as well as hardware. You should accept that operating systems, for instance are extremely complicated. We have no real way of measuring respective complexity. It doesn't matter much which is more complicated. I wouldn't presume to tell Boeing how to make a plane. You shouldn't presume to tell me how to make software.

I have had some good experiences, some bad. I'm not a cynic, or even a grizzled veteran. I am just someone that tries to learn something from each experience.

Every experience I've had tells me the following things:

1. Problem solving skills matter, experience with specific APIs doesn't. Experience with problem areas does help, but not as much as good problem solving skills in general. People with really good problem solving skills are rare and invaluable.
2. Good code, good in code comments, a good wiki, and good tests matter. Specs, diagrams, and long documents don't matter.
3. The more responsibility is distributed horozontally (peers working on semi-independant subsystems) rather than vertically (architects handing off their castle in the sky for someone else to build), the less communication overhead, the less misunderstanding, the better the team atmosphere, and the better things work.
4. The fewer layers of communication overhead there are between the users who have needs of a system and the developers who build features to meet there needs, the better the resulting system will meet the users needs and not become a tangled mess of inflexible, nonesensical requirements.

Returning to planes, let's imagine someone told you in the course of a few weeks that your plane needs to hold 5X as much cargo and be able to take off and land with half the runway, and in icy conditions, and by the way you have to reduce the engine noise by 20%, make the cockpit intrusion-proof against high explosives, and build in a ground based override in case the plane gets hijacked anyways, and build in a plane based override in case the ground systems get hijacked (and no, we don't see that the requirements are contradictory, sort it out!). How many planes would be falling out of the sky now?

Well of course, boeing wouldn't try to do that. We in software are asked to every day because the consequences of our planes falling out of the sky just isn't nearly as bad 99.99% of the time. We still should push back more than we do, but have some respect... we're not chimps at typewriters trying to save our jobs, we're skilled professionals tackling very hard problems and more angry about everything broken in the process (mostly imposed by those with no ground level experience trying to impose their vision) than you will ever be.

Re:Solution in my opinion.

[955301]

That's not the construction phase, sitting down and writing code into methods that were created at design time is the construction phase. There is nothing comparable to compile time in the readily available analogies.

So one more time, in order for software to not suck, it needs to be specialized into trades. And the trade members should *never* do the jobs of the other trades. That will permit them to focus on their trade and become more efficient than anyone who generalizes in all trades. *That* is when software will become far superior than to date.

The problem is once a trade is identified (jdbc specialist, text to speech specialist, parser specialist) there is a tendency to automate. However, there is still integration time spent which validates the trade. You cannot automate *everything*.

Re:Solution in my opinion.

[955301]

I agree. This is what happened to engineering. If you are a large organization, you have engineers in house. If you aren't, you hire out to a separate engineering firm with several clients. We will have arrived when Software architecture bears similiar characteristics - A software architecture firm with several clients.

Re:Solution in my opinion.

[955301]

I have the capacity to tell you how to make software, I make it as well.

Listen to yourself!!!! In 1, you assert that problem solving is better than specialization, and yet you say in the same breath, people with good problem solving skills are rare and invaluable!

that *is* the definition of a practice ripe for industrialization! Craftsmen are rare so move from a craft to a process.

Regarding 2, you are complimenting software dev in fire-fighting mode. The real efficiency is in a mix of the two. You don't create a spec just to create a spec. You create it to dictate what the software should accomplish.

Here are the things missing in your perception of process based industrialization of software. It's my opinion that these are part of what causes you to dismiss it as better than just having talented problem solvers who happen to be disciplined people:

* Your build must fail if the design of the software doesn't match the requirements spec. This is automatable.
* Your build must fail if your code test coverage isn't 100% of the unit testable code.
* Your architect must *never* write a piece of code.
* Your designer must only write code to solve difficult problems which haven't been solved before.
* Existing code where past problems were solved (including proof-of-concept code from the previous bullet) must be easily searchable by the programmers.
* The designer must create all methods (not fill them in, but produce the method signatures).
* If the programmer adds or removes methods, the build must fail. The design must be kicked back to the designer.
* The programming team should have a shared person to consult if they run into a lack of knowledge (eg, what is the best way to discard a socket connection these days)

If you write software this way, by the third or fourth project this team would produce exceptionally high quality code. It doesn't matter if the requirements spec changes because the build stops until you put it in line with the new changes, so iterations are supported. The designer who has their first project kicked back a hundred times will be better the second go around. The programmer who never has to solve a problem, but simply has to look up a solution and shape it to fit the occasion will master their domain.

This is where software needs to be.

Re:Solution in my opinion.

[955301]

we're skilled professionals tackling very hard problems and more angry about everything broken in the process (mostly imposed by those with no ground level experience trying to impose their vision) than you will ever be.

Last thought - you are a bag of wind if you think you can make an assertion like this without ever having met me. If you get rid of bullshit comments like this your remarks would be far more respectable.

Re:Solution in my opinion.

[Yogs]

You and I have very different opinions about the way the process should work, doubtless based on very different experiences. The opinions you expressed matched those of managers I've met with little experience in software. I mentally slotted you in that group, and I was wrong. Please don't take it personally.

My experience has primarily been with business web applications, which is nothing special, but a good way to pay bills, and an endeavor that a large fraction (the majority I'm guessing) of developers are involved in. I do have strong opinions based on that experience. That doesn't make me a blowhard.

I'll admit to not understanding the majority of your last post. I don't want to start another round till I understand it better.

Let's take this off slashdot... I doubt we'll agree, but I do think we might have another couple interesting rounds of discussion and maybe we'll both learn something. byogman (at) gmail (dot) com.

Re:Solution in my opinion.

[xeno-cat]

You are wrong.

      Writing code is the same as blue printing. Builders construct whatever is blueprinted, exactly to design specification. The compiler does this job in computer science. Both builders will report errors to the designers.

      Coding will never be as you describe, for the reasons I describe.

Re:Solution in my opinion.

[955301]

I disagree. There is a one for one between the text of a program and the object or byte code. So there is no difference between the two phases. They have merged. The reason the software industry is broken is because too many people have your opinion about it. The design should design class, sequence, activity and deployment models until the *empty* code compiles but does nothing and is in the proper form to deploy. When a section of the system (eg, deployable artifact or package) reaches this point, it should be handed off to the programmer who then fills in the parts they specialize in and refers to a library of past solutions. If they don't understand the design or the notes in the comments aren't complete enough for a single or few methods, they talk to the designer.

And at this point, I'll call you out. I have three high school students with introductory java programming skills and excellent typing skills working with me on a project. This works. But it's important that the programmers don't think it's part of their job to screw with the class's methods - they look at each method as a homework problem and I get to stay up in Enterprise Architect and push out models and eat crow when I assign them to something that won't work. When I get to the point where I can scale this up to ten's of people, I'm going to test hiring further out of town - I think there is *huge* potential in the rural US and high school graduates to fill in the demand for good software.

It's been 20 years and CS still gets no respect.

[LuisAnaya]

Let's see... who in their right mind would go for a career that:

• The amount of money you get does not equal the amount of time spent unlike other careers
• You age sooner than a super model, you're considered "over the hill" after the age of 40 if you're still doing technical work.
• You seldom get paid to keep yourself current, some companies do, others do not. Most of the time, you are stuck with a technology segment while the world around you changes every 5 years. It was a hard time for me to move from Mainframe programming to UNIX/C, and it is going to be another hard time for me if I ever decide to move to Web/AJAX/Java development.
• Your job is in jeopardy to be outsourced or being forced adjusted for cheaper labor.
• ... and you can't take overtime because you're considered "a manager".

Really, who wants to deal with this crap? I'm sorry, but until conditions do not improve, it's going to be a tough sale to college students to go for CS's. People asks me about it and this is what I say: It is lot's of fun if you like it but at the end, you're better of going to business, med or become a lawyer if you want to get the moolah". Personally, I moved from software development to technical pre-sales and I could not be happier. I sometimes wondered if I should've gone for an MBA rather than my MS in CS. Oh well..

It's the "Bush Boom"!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the economy going badly? Thank a "Fiscal Conservative"!!!

Want to pay taxes on your health care? Thank a "Fiscal Conservative"!!!
Want to watch the American industrial industry move overseas? Thank a "Fiscal Conservative"!!!
Your tax dollars being used to build bridges to nowhere? Thank a "Fiscal Conservative"!!!

Re:It's the "Bush Boom"!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course that would be true, except the economy is doing gangbusters. Unemployment is as low as ever, wages are rising, inflation is low. The economy is doing as well or better than at any point in my lifetime. The only period that compares is the mid 90's, of course that was in the middle of what most people knew was a "bubble". The only question was when the bubble would pop...low and behold it popped in 2000, and then the "pop" got blamed on the man who took office as President in January of 2001.

Re:It's the "Bush Boom"!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool. Next time I'm flaming someone in a forum and want to illustrate the old saw, "Correlation does not imply causation," I'll just deep-link to your post on Slashdot. Thanks!

H1B Upsides and Downsides

[nomad63]

Yes it is a thorny issue. H1B has its upsides and down as any other matter. I, for one, was the holder of those highly coveted 65,000 H1B visas at one time in the past. If I do not have single dime in the dot com boom time in the silicon valley to my name right now, I owe it to that H1B> I came here from Canada, without knowing much, or heck, nothing, about what H1B entails. I was placed in Atlanta GA, at the time where all those people in Silicon Valley, who were making obscene amounts of money on IPOs, were farming their low level, day-to-day operations to where I worked. I was stuck with this company, Syntel, one of the biggest abusers of H1B visa, because the owner/CEO (they are publicly traded) was indian and had a large pool of available candidates. I met with some of these people. Some were sharp and US should be happy to have them in the workforce here but some others I have met were really the bottom of barrel.

US does not have a good system to justify these people. Most "engineers" these H1B abusing companies bring in, are/were brought in to, first learn than contribute to the projects they were supposed to be assisting from the get go. And nobody was saying anything. Mainly because, they needed to fill the desks with warm bodies. In my opinion, lots of these highly coveted H1B positions did not do any good to US economy but was a boon to the abusers of these visa holders, such as Syntel, Tata etc. They were able to fill up their coffers without much effort.

H1B to permanent residency was a good promise as long as it floated. But in my case, less than 3 months before my, so-called, labor certification got approved by the dept. of labor, I got canned by the second company who held my visa and I found myself, facing deportation. Fortunately, I had a girlfriend at the time, wife now, who is a US citizen and we had to take our marriage plans way in advance. So, if these people are really useful and contributing in the positions they hold, I think US should do something to speed up this process and should not hold them tied to the employers. Otherwise, DOL, should have a possibility to can the visas of some and send them back. And before the approval of H1B visas, I think something as substantial as a degree from an accredited foreign college should be a requirement to prevent the abuser companies, bringing in the riff-raff as experts.

Re:H1B Upsides and Downsides

[Anonymous Coward]

I went to college for a second bachelors in CS.
I developed an emerging technology that was purchased by GM and put into use.
(I did not own the technology)
I was promptly layed off and the work outsourced to India.
I never worked as a programmer again though I've tried applying for many jobs.
I switched to I.T. 7 yrs ago and only got hired for I.T.
Companies only want to pay small for programming and H1-B visas happen to fit.
The only way to get companies to direct hire college grads without experience is to stop the visas.
This is the only way to create a need enough for recent no experience grads.

Being Underpaid Due to Government Intervention

[reporter]

A shortage of labor is a normal part of a free market. So is a surplus. Shortages and surpluses are powerful economic forces that correct the underpricing and overpricing, respectively, of labor.

There is no need for the government to intervene by importing desperate labor from either India via the H-1B visa or Mexico via an open-border policy. The free market, by itself and without government intervention, will fix the shortage or surplus. Wages rise, and the shortage disappears. Wages fall, and layoffs occur -- thus fixing the surplus.

Washington does not intervene to fix the labor surplus (which is leading to massive layoffs) in Detroit. Why should Washington intervene to fix a labor shortage?

If Microsoft paid the market wage for computer programmers, then plenty of programmers with the "right" skills would apply for Microsoft jobs. The problem is that Microsoft refuses to pay the market wage. The market wage is not what Microsoft management considers to be the right wage. The market wage (and the market working conditions) is the wage (and quality of working conditions) at which the supply of labor meets the demand for that labor. The market wage is the intersection point of the labor-demand curve and the labor-supply curve.

The bottom line is that Microsoft (and many other American companies) refuse to pay the market wage. So, they want government to intervene in the free market so that Microsoft can pay below-market-wage salaries.

Re:Being Underpaid Due to Government Intervention

[transonic_shock]

The completely free market will move the development shop entirely overseas. It is happening now although to a lesser degree.

Re:Being Underpaid Due to Government Intervention

[Dan Slotman]

The company I work for has ~300 developers in the United States and ~45 in India. Among managers I've discussed it with, developing modules in India is widely regarded as a mistake. There is no push to export more, and I hear rumors of schemes to move the India modules here.

Re:Being Underpaid Due to Government Intervention

[bcrowell]

There is no need for the government to intervene by importing desperate labor from either Hawaii via the H-1B visa or Mexico via an open-border policy. The free market, by itself and without government intervention, will fix the shortage or surplus.
How about rewriting your statement this way:
There is no need for the California government to intervene by importing desperate labor from either Texas via the H-1B visa or Nevada via an open-border policy. The free market, by itself and without government intervention, will fix the shortage or surplus.
A free market would be one in which both goods and labor could move freely, all over the world. If the government keeps most Indians and Mexicans out of your workplace, then the government is artificially subsidizing you.

Washington does not intervene to fix the labor surplus (which is leading to massive layoffs) in Detroit.
Right. Washington doesn't intervene there, but it does intervene when it comes to India and Mexico.

The free market, by itself and without government intervention, will fix the shortage or surplus. Wages rise, and the shortage disappears. Wages fall, and layoffs occur -- thus fixing the surplus.
Supply and demand will operate to find some equilibrium. What equilibrium they find is influenced by government intervention. If the government wasn't artificially preventing Indians from working in the US as easily as US citizens can, there would be a different equilibrium, in which the price of labor in the US was lower.

Re:Being Underpaid Due to Government Intervention

[Anonymous Coward]

Forgive me if this is an ignorant question, but aren't border/foreign worker restrictions impediments to a truly free market? So rather than being a true shortage of workers, it's an artificial shortage created by laws.

Now I'm not suggesting that these types of laws are bad or need to be changed, but it just doesn't seem like a valid argument to say that this shortage is simply due to free market forces.

Re:Being Underpaid Due to Government Intervention

[rlp]

> Washington does not intervene to fix the labor surplus (which is leading to massive
> layoffs) in Detroit. Why should Washington intervene to fix a labor shortage?

Could it be cause politicians are paid off to do so?

Re:Being Underpaid Due to Government Intervention

[Fulcrum of Evil]

A free market would be one in which both goods and labor could move freely, all over the world. If the government keeps most Indians and Mexicans out of your workplace, then the government is artificially subsidizing you.

Shocker! The government maintains some semblance of stability in the country and nominally works for the behalf of its citizens. Tell me this: Why shouldn't government policy favor Americans over Indians?

Anyway, your example sucks: there is a more or less free labor market within the US (only real barrier is relocation).

Re:Being Underpaid Due to Government Intervention

[bcrowell]

Tell me this: Why shouldn't government policy favor Americans over Indians?
That's a standard argument for protectionism. There are also lots of standard arguments for free trade as well. You're oversimplifying by pretending that a restrictive immigration policy favors Americans. It favors some Americans, and hurts others.

Anyway, your example sucks: there is a more or less free labor market within the US
That was the point of my argument, which you don't seem to have understood.

Shortage of true CS engineer, yes programmers no!

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a real problem finding competent computer science engineers that understand hardware well enough to do the deeply embedded programming needed for reliable drivers, real time control and digital signal processing and for the next generation of computer design. These CS engineers are as comfortable with assembly language as with java or C#. Many are fluent with solder also.
In the non hardware realm there is a wide range of programmers who can write code in various higher level languages. These programmers range in skill from the software engineer who can write an entire data base in 25 lines or less to the high school student who has problems with "hello world."
Obviously the salary for the most highly skilled CS engineer needs to reflect the skill of that worker. Meanwhile, companies want to pay the most highly skilled worker at the same rate as the high school drop out who failed a class in programming. Hiring offshore doesn't solve this problem. It merely insures we will have an ever increasing supply of mediocre programmers (this assumes the ratio of exceptional to mediocre is the same offshore as onshore) to keep salaries down while the most talanted people leave the field to make money somewhere else.
If we want to stay competitive, we must insure our brightest engineers and programmers have a reason to stay in the field and receive the respect (and compensation) their skills deserve.

Universities don't want more domestic CS students

[Anonymous Coward]

The CS graduate admissions folks at Virginia Tech told me they couldn't admit me (even though I had just breezed through their own undergraduate program in just one year) the year I applied because "we have so many students from overseas who would have to return to their home countries if we don't admit them."

I'm not too surprised they were thinking that but it shocked the heck out of me that they felt comfortable saying it.

Annoyed me so much I went to a different VT department, got another one-year undergrad degree and an offer to teach there.

Fundamental problems

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read job ads, you'll notice a large number of them contain requirements that applicants have an unrealistically long list of highly specialized buzzwords in their experience, but they aren't willing to pay for it. From my experience, most companies don't need that long list of buzzwords (which is one reason why they aren't willing to pay more), as long as you have a few fundamental skills, but the list persists because many managers are dreamers and the ones who aren't are afraid that they don't know what they need or that people will lie on their resumes so if they ask for the 10 times more than they need and get only 10% of what they ask for, they're still ahead.

To solve this fundamental problem, you need to train managers and hiring managers to figure out what they *really* need instead of listening to the fad-of-the-day sales hype department. How on earth are you going to do that?

Another set of problems has in many fields (e.g. Oracle admins, Unix admins, SAP, etc), you can have all the training and certificates in the world, but until you have *years* of real world experience you won't get anywhere. Open source operating systems and languages and the ability for people to gain experience on their own time without spending a fortune has helped. But since it's not real world experience, so unless an employer is *willing to take a chance on you*, you're SOL. Apprenticeships go a long way to solving this problem, but they aren't wide spread and if they exists they're usually only available to students and not people out in the field (e.g. COBOL programmers with 30 years experience), so this limits the growth. And even in the case of student apprenticeships, they really aren't emphasized, so most students tend to ignore them (why should I waste one year if I could earn money sooner?). No idea how to fix this cultural issue.

Relating to the COBOL programmer example, it's not fashionable in the US to be continuously learning, but technology is a field where it is a must.

Finally, it has to do with the american culture. In countries like India, China, Korea, and Japan, if you say "My son is a star athlete and an accomplished actor", the natural response is "He must have failed in science and technology.". In the US, if you say "My son had the highest mark in the Math Olympiad and won a scholarship to MIT", the natural response is "He must have failed in sports and fitness and has no business sense." Dilbert cartoons only worsen the belief that programming jobs aren't anything to be proud of and that the life of a programmer is boring and purely political.

Things have improved dramatically on this front in the last 10 years, but there's still a strong cultural bias in the US towards jocks and entertainment stars instead of the sciences. But until this changes, you won't see people lining up to be programs. It's just not culturally fashionable.

Well DUH!

[Anon-Admin]

If they want to know why, all they have to do is look at the career possibilities.

#1) Unneeded: IT is seen (By the C-Level executives) as expensive, overpriced, overstaffed, and overhead. It is one of the first departments to get hit with layoffs when times get tough.

#2) No promotion/raise: The only way I have gotten a promotion or a raise is to change jobs. 5 years of working for a company, working to better the systems and protect the company assets. When the Manager moved up (to the GM spot) I put in for the position. I am told that I am not qualified. Strange, you would think that 10 years management experience, PM classes and 2 years towards a MBA would qualify me.

#3) Respect: When problems occur, IT is the first to get blamed Do I even need to explain this one?

#4) Cost Cutting: IT is the only field I have ever worked where you can and do get asked to take a pay cut while doubling your work load.

#5) Knowledge and training == 0: This is one of the few fields where people are paid for what they know, only to have the critical decisions made without their input. How many of us have been overridden by a C-Level Exec? Ex: "I have decided that we will be a MS Windows shop from now on. I need you to replace those 8 old HP9000 oracle servers with this new quad processor Windows server." --- Real example!

#6) Education: Most realize that after 4 years in college, they enter the workforce 7 years behind the curve. Experience is everything!

Re:Well DUH!

[Anonymous Coward]

"I have decided that we will be a MS Windows shop from now on. I need you to replace those 8 old HP9000 oracle servers with this new quad processor Windows server."

Considering... HP9000 are now unsupported by HP, and Oracle even admits the majority of their sales are deployed to Windows servers.

Are you sure that the C-Level exec was the one who was wrong?

Re:Well DUH!

[Maltheus]

I love your number 5. I don't really care about outsourcing and I feel the pay is adequate, but having non-technical people dictate technical solutions is the worst part of this career for me. When it's not like that, I really love what I do.

Re:Well DUH!

[Anon-Admin]

HP 9000's are not "unsupported" the HP 9000 rp7440 Server (HP-UX 11i) is still a live (Supported) product.

Ok, Look at it this way

We will be replacing these 8 old 16 processor (1Ghz cpu's) HP units with a 4 CPU Windows box.

reasons for dramatic decline ..

[rs232]

All that article is about is an attempt to get more H-1B allowed. There isn't a shortage of IT staff, what there is a shortage of is cheap IT staff. The average IT job here pays less than a bus driver (£16k average). Oh, by the way Bill gets to say 'innovation' six times.

If there is a decline of people going into IT, maybe it's because of the following reasons. People don't want to spend their entire productive life sitting in a room endlessly reinstalling, configuring and fine tuning software that performs the same task as last year, only to discover their carefully put together toolkit of usefully utilities don't work anymore because you decided to change the OS and move the icons around for no great reason. Also my MCSE is deemed void at the end of the year and I have to fork over another £2,000 grand to get re-certified.

And then consider the flip side -- TEOLAWKI

[phunctor]

With the disaster that is our education system, our economy is instantly and totally screwed when and if we hit the tipping point where the able foreign worker has someplace better to go. On that day we become incapable of maintaining a technical civilization. We only do it now by raiding the global brain pool.

Spain was once the foremost of nations. They sank under the weight of a political vice called "particularism". There were this-Spaniards and that-Spaniards arguing about their special rights and privileges, but there weren't enough just plain Spaniards to mind the store. Remind you of anyplace you live?

--
phunctor
Execute a "graduate" from the "School" of Eddumicashun today.
Replace him or her with a retired engineer carrying a taser and authorized to use it.

Crazy Idea!

[TheGeneration]

You know, they pay CEO's really really well and there are no shortage of people trying to get those jobs.

Maybe, I know this is crazy, but MAYBE execs should consider paying tech people better, treating them better, providing them the equipment they need, and stop letting their HR and Marketing wonks get in our way. Gosh, crazy!

As long as American executives are willing to hire talentless (yet, well educated) foreigners because they're "cheaper" and continue to disrespect the science and art that tech work is they'll continue to have trouble finding talented people willing to do this job.

Execs always forget the art part of these jobs. You can have all the book smarts in the world, but unless you have actual talent your not going to be a very good engineer. Most of the H-1B's I've met are book smart, but haven't got any natural talent. When I talk to them it becomes obvious that they are only in this industry for the money. If 5-10 years ago they had heard that nerf herding was going to get them an American visa and a high paying job they would've studied that instead. Somebody needs to tell execs that it's time to stop pinching pennies, and time to start thinking about what REALLY makes a good tech worker.

upside down logic

[deadtree9]

Bill Gates knows for a fact that the reason there is this perceived glut (real or not real - I don't know the answer) of unfilled IT jobs in the US is not due to immigration, but due to the failures of the US to properly educate our children. (I specifically don't say the school systems because the parents, not the teachers, are the ones to blame. But that's another subject.) The Gates Foundation (Bill and Melinda's Charity) focuses on world health issues, as well as educational issues. He knows first hand that the current system of educating children is not keeping pace. I guess I don't understand how the solution is to bring in foreign workers as opposed to improving and incentivising better science education?

Hey Bill!!! Where are these jobs???

[Anonymous Coward]

If these jobs exist, they are certainly not in the Boston area, otherwise I'd have one of them. I'm stuck doing something I don't really enjoy and am forced to continue looking for a job I want to have as opposed to a job I have to have.

I think Billy Gates just wants to hire more H1-B folks to improve his bottom line and he's probably not getting a large enough share of the H1-B pie from the US Government.

Bill Gates Wants IT Salaries Lower

[ProteusQ]

That's the alternate headline. It's basic economics that if there's a labor shortage, wages go up. But Bill wants to stay a billionaire, so he'd rather pull an Al Gore and create hysteria rather than acknowledge certain facts. Double IT salaries, or even just double benefits, and its doubtful that the shortage will continue.

nice idealisim.. reality sinks in

[way2trivial]

the basic problem with your points are the assumption that we MUST churn out more IT, to the detriment of all other employment fields.

1- and if the answer is none?
2- how many people recieved health insurance with the first paycheck? often there is a 30-90-180days before health insurance starts.
3- there is no savings at point of beginning.... it is YEARS down the line if it works. Investment cannot come from savings which follow years later.
4- perhaps the correlation is not, the existance of music and art makes people math smart, but rather, math smart people are also people who appreciate music and art.
this is akin to saying, people who know how to swim are wet.. so throw a non-swimmer in a pool and they will/can swim..
5- how the hell do you do that with the NCLB? seriously, one of the reason some other countries do so very well on standardized testing, is that they DROP underperforming students from educational programs, leaving the mid to reasonably behind for testing and highschool.. they leave children out.... some kids are that stupid.
6- physics? to graduate from highschool everyone should have a semester of chem II and physics? it's not practical.. not everyone needs these classes.
7- here I'll agree with you. The most important argument and flaw in the system I see.
8- here I'll agree with you almost wholeheartedly.. it's not a philosphy, it's an unfunded federal mandate.. a major distinction. To keep getting the federal dollars for school systems, schools must get 100% of their kids in line, and to do so- they get no additional money where needed- they just lose funding &control in some cases, of their own educational program.. The result has not been dumbing down of an entire curriculum, it's been the refocusing of the entire curriculum to being 'program the kids to pass the standardized test'

First step is, balancing the need of more IT professionals vs. other professions.

I think you'd do a lot better training welfare recipients/disabled types in medical technician training.
IT training requires a lot more mental capacity & attitude than some people have.
blood draw tech, orderlies, nurses assistants, dental assistants, etc.. a slot where life saving is not key...

Re:nice idealisim.. reality sinks in

[sumdumass]

here I'll agree with you almost wholeheartedly.. it's not a philosphy, it's an unfunded federal mandate.. a major distinction. To keep getting the federal dollars for school systems, schools must get 100% of their kids in line, and to do so- they get no additional money where needed- they just lose funding &control in some cases, of their own educational program.. The result has not been dumbing down of an entire curriculum, it's been the refocusing of the entire curriculum to being 'program the kids to pass the standardized test'

This is a catch 22. The reasons funding is at the elvel it is today is because people promised results. It isn't because someone was sitting there and think what if they had more money. So saying it is an unfunded mandate isn't exaclty honest even though it apear this way on the surface. Then when you compare the outcome of the school systems that spen more money per child to the ones who spend less per child, you see a trend of less money sowing more results.

Think of it this way, I hire you to mow my lawn. I paid you in advance and It isn't being done. First you claim it is because the increased cost of gasoline. I give you more for fuel. Then you calim it is because hte equiptment is broke, I buy you new equiptment. Then you claim the grass it too high and the equiptment won't cut it properly, so I buy you aditional equiptment. Sooner or later, I am going to drop you in favor of someone who will actualy get the job done. Even If i have to get a court order requiring your employies to come over and do it under pain of imprisonment or higher your employies directly and thereby bipassing your control.

This is the same setup. And what it proves is that there is no direct relationship with money and the problems associated with educating kids. And each comunity has different problems too. The unfunded mandate isn't an attempt to get new results, it is an attempt to make people honore the result they previously promised. Adn the biggest problem comming from it is that the idea of what the problems are/were was completly wrong. This is why when we are demanding result that were promised in the past, we are seeing oposition in the form of not funding the projects.

Part of this is the attitude of "pay me more and you will get more work". Not all teachers have it but I have noticed it directly being stated when school districs are up for contract negotiations and the lackluster test scores are being used as an excuse for not paying them what they are asking. And the biggest falicy here is that it either implies we have been paying them for not doing the job in the past, or that they are promising something they cannot deliver.

Another part is the "It isn't my fault" syndrone. This condition exists when people are in a habit of not admiting their own short commings becaus it is easier to blame it on others. Others usualy share some liabitity in it but not to the extent of the failure. Telling the school I'm doing everything, it is their parrent's fault for not taking an interest in their childs education is really saying I'm doing everything but working around the parrent's lack o concern.

In the end, we have promises with not results, we have excuses with no results and we hav resentment that someone is demanding results. But at least now that someone is demanding results, any future money allocated will go to what is needed instead of waisted on excuses and promises that cannot be delivered.

This is an over simplification of the problems in the educational system. But these two are big enough parts of the problem that they stand out.

And expecting result for money already spent isn't a bad idea.

Re:nice idealisim.. reality sinks in

[jahudabudy]

The problem with your philosophy is the definition of "results". You (and others) define it as "higher test scores". But that's a bad criteria. It's actually quite hard to both educate a student and teach them to pass a standardized test. Countless studies have shown that standardized tests only measure the students ability to take that test. So, in order to receive funding, schools must teach students how to pass tests. Which means they can't spend much time actually educating the students. Which means the intelligent kids get overlooked - they are already passing tests. So the vast majority of a teacher's time is now spent teaching stupid or apathetic, or both, kids how to pass a test. And when the kid simply CAN NOT or WILL NOT learn, the teacher is blamed for "not teaching", when in fact what happened is the student didn't learn. There is a huge difference, and only one of those can the teacher control.

Re:nice idealisim.. reality sinks in

[Mulkiatsch]

6- physics? to graduate from highschool everyone should have a semester of chem II and physics? it's not practical.. not everyone needs these classes.

In Bavaria, we have got three kinds of schools. One of these, which is called Gymnasium, is meant to prepare you for University. (There are ways around it, but those only qualify you for a particular field of study. Finishing Gymnasium qualifies you for any University degree whatsoever, and most University students have finished Gymnasium, as far as I know). We don't use a course system as American highschools do. Up to the 10th grade, everyone is required to pass largely the same courses, including music, chemistry, physics, math, history, German, English, economics, sociology, another foreign language and more. University students are expected to be at least minimally knowledgable in topics outside their field of study.

In my opinion, we still have far too many University students (especially in CS -- but that is a topic for another day), so it is certainly practical to expect students to take physics classes. Not only practical, of course, but probably a good idea, anyway. Our system may not prduce the best computer scientists -- I don't know about that --, but at least it doesn't produce horribly narrow-minded people. (Well, it does, but that doesn't change the fact that it hints at the right direction.)

Disclaimer I: Unfortunately, I don't know much about the US' school system, so my explanations may be misleading.

Disclaimer II: I personally finished Gymnasium about two years ago, and our school system has been reformed lately. My statements may not be completely accurate now.

Re:nice idealisim.. reality sinks in

[RyoShin]

here I'll agree with you almost wholeheartedly.. it's not a philosphy, it's an unfunded federal mandate.. a major distinction. To keep getting the federal dollars for school systems, schools must get 100% of their kids in line, and to do so- they get no additional money where needed- they just lose funding &control in some cases, of their own educational program.. The result has not been dumbing down of an entire curriculum, it's been the refocusing of the entire curriculum to being 'program the kids to pass the standardized test'

I've always found this kind of philosophy disturbing. No Child Left Behind withholds money from those schools that "fail". Many states require schools to pass various standardized tests or risk losing money.

These things cause such things as schools graduating students with laxer requirements, teachers helping students cheat on tests (or cheating themselves), and so forth in order to get more money.

To me, this seems backwards. If a school can honestly graduate all their students and pass standardized tests, it tells me that the school has enough money. Not that more money should be withheld for them for this, but they are either financially capable or able to cope otherwise.

Schools that do poorly should be the ones getting money- while the money itself won't fix the problem, it could go a long way to fix the real issues the school has, such as lack of supplies, technology, current textbooks, and competent teachers.[1] Of course, reversing the requirements will cause schools to hold back more students or tell their students to just fill out "A" for every question on the tests in order to get more money for football jerseys or something. So the answer is that funds should not be given according to results of tests, but the standard need of the students.

Figure out what an average student would need to succeed (including proper teachers), calculate the cost of that, and add in a bit of overhead. Then give that, per year, to the schools according to headcount. Once more, some schools will flub the numbers, but it will be harder to do.

[1] Some of the teachers that are hired for the public school system are borderline incapable of teaching; I'm sure everyone on Slashdot, especially the parents, has a horror story. I'll give one of mine, actually told to me by my mother: I have a younger brother, graduating high school this year, who I have generally considered a pest. Despite that, he excels in things like math (he has a competitive attitude, especially versus me, so he could have worked hard to outdo me in math, but I digress), and does rather well in his math class. Well, except that his teacher doesn't think so. As in most classes, the calculator is banned for tests (a rather stupid idea IMO, but that's another topic), and he consistently gets high scores to the point that the teacher gives him low grades despite getting answers right, because he can't believe my brother can get the right answers on his own, even after he does observed "make-up" tests.

And yes, my folks (and other parents) have complained to the administration, but this particular teacher heads the high school football team, which is generally lucky to even win its own homecoming game, so little has been done against him.

Re:nice idealisim.. reality sinks in

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Schools that do poorly should be the ones getting money- while the money itself won't fix the problem, it could go a long way to fix the real issues the school has, such as lack of supplies, technology, current textbooks, and competent teachers.

You named one thing that is actually a factor. Most of what causes schools to fail is out of the control of those schools - it's a question of environment and parents. Sorry about your little brother.

Re:nice idealisim.. reality sinks in

[tholomyes]

Not going to go through every point, just a couple.

1. Then take this same philosophy and apply it to every other field where we possibly need workers.
2. So amend the statement to read "after 90 days" instead of "after the first paycheck". Although in my experience, many smaller employers have pretty crappy health care plans.

4. It's more of a neurological connection than a sociological one. They aren't saying "people who are good at Calculus can also distinguish Monet from Manet", but there is actually a connection in where the activity centers in the brain are . Hofstadter's book, "Gödel, Escher and Bach", goes a long way to illustrating a lot of the cognitive similarities between the fields of physical art, musical art, and what one could call scientific art.

The bottom line here is that, if nothing else, the creativity nurtured by art and music are immensely valuable in all fields.

5. You create separate program tracks, perhaps, so the whole class doesn't suffer for the needs of a few. One of my favorite proposed alternatives is to have a skills-based system that students can advance through at their own rate. So maybe I'm only in seventh grade, but I'm skill level 12 in math and doing pre-Calculus work. But the premise of restricting what kids can learn, and how quickly, is flawed. Yes, they can learn it on their own if they're really that motivated, but they will still have to go to class and do the busywork, which is a waste of time and talent.

Re:nice idealisim.. reality sinks in

[sumdumass]

The problem with your philosophy is the definition of "results". You (and others) define it as "higher test scores". But that's a bad criteria. It's actually quite hard to both educate a student and teach them to pass a standardized test.

Please define what you mean by educate? Is it getting people to think a certain way? Educational In my book is giving instructions about different topics to people and expecting them to retain it. You can check how well it is working by giving them a test. Is there something I am missing?

Countless studies have shown that standardized tests only measure the students ability to take that test. So, in order to receive funding, schools must teach students how to pass tests.

Well, If the information they are supposed to know is on the test, then exactly how is this bad? I can see were you don't cover everything on a test and some things might be lacking but if the questions are structured correctly, you can cover the basic enough to ensure they have the ability to answer the other missing questions. If a student is supposed to know who the 16th president of the United States is, And they don't then how would you check on them. Further, if they don't know, who's fault is it? Is it the student's or the teachers? were they actually instructed on it? And if they weren't then why are we paying these teachers for?

Which means the intelligent kids get overlooked - they are already passing tests.

This happens. It is unfortunate but is a sign of why we need testing and checkups on the progress of the learning institution. Smart kids getting passed over means they don't know what they are doing as a school compared to a school that can teach both smart and dumb students. But in a real life scenario, Which is worse? A smart student passed over to be discovered later or a dumb kid just being passed over then eventually dumped into society without the skills necessary to do much? Which one is more likely going to be a burden to society? In an ideal world, neither would be passed over. And the schools who are worried about passing them over seems ot be the ones who would dump the dumber kid into society. If they actually cared enough about it, or at least more then using it as an excuse to fight results, the school would take steps to ensure neither kid was overlooked.

So the vast majority of a teacher's time is now spent teaching stupid or apathetic, or both, kids how to pass a test. And when the kid simply CAN NOT or WILL NOT learn, the teacher is blamed for "not teaching", when in fact what happened is the student didn't learn. There is a huge difference, and only one of those can the teacher control.

I refuse to believe a student is stupid. They might have impairments they cannot control or they might have handicaps that prevent them from learning. There might even be kids that because of social presure don't want to learn or rebel and just scribble the answers on the test in any order possible. I was always that person. But these kids can be identified, placed in classes more appropriate to their situation and something can be done about it. And if a school has enough students with a low enough score they are in position of losing their funding or control, then they have enough student to justify a smart class, a regular class and even a remedial class.

This isn't necessarily just a problem with the teachers. A situation like this could be as much a problem with the administration. Say you have three classes per grade with a mix of advanced students, regular students and behind students. You combine a grade lower with the advanced students and give one teacher to over see them, This frees up another teacher, you place the regular students with one teacher and have the extra teacher bounce between the behind kids and the regular kids to pick up the slack if any occurs but still provide the extra support to th

Huh?!

[greysky]

From the article:

During that time they can't change jobs, which limits their opportunities to contribute to their employer's success and overall economic growth.

Am I the only one that finds this statement just a little backwards?

Re:Huh?!

[wellingj]

as in you can't go from jr developer to sr developer wich would give you more direction in the company an posibly use your skill set to greater effect.

Is that for the common good?

[davidwr]

"If I could prove that hanging you would benefit the American economy, will you purchase the rope?"

If you applied this principle to everyone, then people would basically kill themselves at the end of their careers or when they became a permanent drain on the economy due to injury or chronic illness.

Such societies are not unknown in history. It's my understanding that in some ancient societies, particularly nomadic ones, the infirm were left to die.

What you advocate is a regular "self-culling of the herd" for the benefit of the survivors. This theme has been played out over and over again in science fiction. If you don't assign a high value to human life, this becomes an acceptable way to run a society.

Re:Is that for the common good?

[Kiaser Wilhelm II]

This philosophy was exposed and practiced by the ancient Greeks (as well as countless other societies). Plato had the same thoughts (The Republic).

The idea that the individual must be protected at the cost of the health of society is a relatively new concept that came about with liberal democracies and protestant Christianity.

Any talk of "culling the heard" should be seen from the most rational point of view. Don't get your personal drama or ego involved because you are repulsed by the idea. Unfortunately, most people are not equipped to participate in the discussion because they are tethered to their own egos and their humanist pragmas.

Insider Perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm one of those legal aliens working in the US on an H-1B visa. My hours are fairly regular, and I consider myself to be well-paid.

I don't see myself as stealing a job from a US citizen. We've had several open positions in our group, but could not find qualified candidates. The few resumes that we received were pitiful. And all we required was proficience in C and some Win/Unix skills.

My company, as far as I can tell, is grateful for its H-1B workers, and would like to keep me.

They filed my green card application four years ago, and we haven't heard anything since, except a "45 day notice" one year ago, which is a bureaucratic laughing stock in itself. It essentially says, "we know that this process is taking too long, and that by the time we get to it, most labor certification requests are obsolete, so if you are one of the exceptions from the rule and still want us to continue processing it, respond ASAP, before we throw it away unlooked-at."

My visa expires next year, at which point I'd be tolerated in the US due to my ongoing application, but I would not be able to re-enter the US. I would be forbidden to travel, held hostage in the country. That doesn't make me feel very appreciated. I'd rather say sayonara and move on. (And good riddance, some of you will say.)

In related news, the market for US citizen software engineers is just dry. Defense companies and contractors are sucking up all they can, because the number of projects with "citizens only" requirements has exploded in the past few years.

Dumb statistics...

[SCHecklerX]

I didn't get a degree in computer science or information technology. Neither did any of the people I work with, or some of the best IT people I've met.

You don't really need to go to school specifically for IT, unless you are attending a trade school. University-wise I've seen some of the best IT folks come from backgrounds in Physics, English, Engineering, Mathematics, and even History.

For entry-level IT, you really don't need specific training. And those who grow in the field, at least in my experience, grow because they have a more diverse background, not because they focused on programming, administration, networks, or whatever. People do the job because they really enjoy it.

Personally, I have done quite a bit in programming, networking, systems administration, and database management. Lately, and mostly because of my career focus on information security, I am growing more into project management and even people management roles. These take advantage of the other skills I've always tried to keep intact. Namely writing, planning, and communication.

In summary, I don't think we have nearly the shortage that Mr. Gates is complaining about, and I think we are better off with people who are not studying a computer-specific discipline. There isn't as much a need for computer scientists (the real theoretical folks, I'm not talking about ITT Tech or Devry training here) as there is for operations and infrastructure architects.

Re:Oh, come on, Bill, you may have Aspergers, but.

[Anonymous Coward]

You see they know they are from a culture that respects women's sovereignty to the point that arranged marriages are out of the question -- unlike the hoards you idiots are importing

Mind your language, you racist bastard. How is (arranged marriage == not respecting women) ?

Tough Truth

[flyneye]

When it all boils down,it doesn't matter whether potential immigrants can get in and work.
It really is all about us.We need to fill these jobs with U.S. citizens or there will continue to be a shortage of help.If no one sees these IT jobs as being within grasp or that they will be automatically filled with cheap foreign labor,there will never be anyone to fill it.
Put half educated people in,they will pick it up in time.The low quality of worker will create a demand for better education.
          However if we don't change anything we will get more of the same;Investment that could've stayed will leave when the green cards expire along with any money they earned.We will stay sub par in education and lose even more potential.We also need to pay more attention to who we listen to.Getting helpful advise from Gates is a bit like using John Dillinger as a money courier.
Am I just crazy or is the rest of the world kinda 'tarded?

west coast??

[buhatkj]

every time i see an article like this i wonder, are people on the west coast just drowning in tech jobs or what? over here in PA it seems to be pretty competitive....
perhaps its just that i dont work in healthcare, which seems to be the only industry that matters here...

Re:west coast??

[finkployd]

I've found two (both pretty good) options in PA. work for one of the many universities or telework for an out of state company.

I did option one for about 7 years, started option two last summer.

Finkployd

Re:west coast??

[Dan Farina]

I agree. I work in Palo Alto right now, and there is no want for jobs...everyone I know has been easily been hired, and competition for the hire of software engineers seems pretty fierce.

Re:west coast??

[buhatkj]

i like your option 1. that's an angle I've not yet really tried. all the same, I wish we had some more high tech industry in PA. I hear New York's tech industy is developing, at least that way I could stay on the east coast.

Why study hard for IT?

[n0tWorthy]

Being an MBA in Marketing or Sales is where the money is at. IT folks are seen as a black hole of money and get no respect. I know my kids aren't interested in getting a CS degree. They see me working way too many hours and the sales guy down the street can take them skiing every weekend if they want to tag along. If you want the big bucks it's clear that big business will reward you in the business degree jobs and treat you like a leper in IT no matter how much your last project added to the bottom line.

Re:Oh, come on, Bill, you may have Aspergers, but.

[Creepy Crawler]

---There is no shortage of US engineers -- there is only a shortage of young engineers -- and of managers who see the difference between a line of code and productivity. Not one of the guys over 40 I know is making as much now as he was BEFORE 1996 and most of them have been unemployed most of the time since the year 2000 -- this during a time when real estate costs have skyrocketed along with H-1b imports.

The economy dictates prices and quantity. Go read Econ textbook 101 and find out why. Baldrson is right on mark.

---And don't give me garbage about "keeping up on your skills" when the guys I've most closely worked with -- these obsolete aging engineers who "don't keep up on their skills" -- were doing 50K line Javascript web applications back in 1997 and couldn't get the mind-share among the "luminaries" who were all agog about Java -- and do we even need to talk about VB?

Yes, yes, yes. The javascript webapps. I remember those. Those were the ones that you could do online e-commerce, but by changing the URL at the price=200.00 to a smaller number, you could get things realllly cheap. Good thing there was no validation on those CLIENT side webapps. I made a few bucks on their incompetence.

---There has been a demographic collapse among young engineers because the prior generation of engineers couldn't afford to have children even if they could find a wife in one of the male saturated ghettos created by guys like you. The few young men sired by engineers are all-too-aware of what you've done to their fathers and they'll be better off going into real estate or moving out to a little plot of land in the country living an eco-friendly subsistence lifestyle.

Im seeing that very action right now. My dad's an engineer for a large firm, and he spends much more time at work than he ever does at home. And then when he's at home, he's tethered to that damned cell phone. Im going into chemistry, yet also am trying to get into radiology (medical). Business, law, and medical is where it's at.

---You see they know they are from a culture that respects women's sovereignty to the point that arranged marriages are out of the question -- unlike the hoards you idiots are importing.

Heh heh heh. The women will find that out easily enough.

---Well, sorry, you're obviously not idiots. You're probably suffering from a mild form of Aspergers to be so unaware of these profound social problems afflicting your subjects -- sort of like a "nobility" that just can't understand why their subjects don't eat cake and then try to guillotine them. My nephew has a fairly severe form of Aspergers but he can get along a lot better now that he is self-aware about it and the limitations it places on his judgement about human social relations. Sometimes reality makes one sound like a satirist but there is truth to what I'm saying here.

Aspergers is a made up ailment UNLESS diagnosed by a mental healthcare professional: eg. a psychiatrist.

What happens is most women were driven from the sciences into more fluff jobs. Along with that is the loss of respect granted by working in intelligence based jobs. I know women who are secretaries, nurses, teachers, "philosophers", massage therapists, and the like. Do I sound sexist? Well, probably, but MY girlfriend is a biologist and does respect me. I respect her for the same reasons.

misbehaves on k5 as: The Amazing Idiot

Re:Oh, come on, Bill, you may have Aspergers, but.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because in most cultures of arranged marriages, you can get married to a 12 year old girl in exchange for a goat?

Reduce "Intellectual Property" Barriers

[openright]

A "Computer Scientist" is reinventing things that another company did, where the works are copyrighted for 90 years, and obsolete in 5 years.
Open-source is all about reinventing things in a way where the "Intellectual Property" Barriers are reduced.
A Chemical engineer is helping the company look for the most profit effective drugs, and then charge as much as the patients can pay, with less regard to helping society.
A Musician that had a really big hit may never innovate again, as they struck the lazy lottery, and perhaps the grandchildren don't need to work for things either.
New technologies for sharing information are attacked and often forced to stop development, as this sharing is a threat to the business model of those that broker information.
Long dead book authors works could have benefited society by falling in the public domain. But in an effort to protect Mickey Mouse for yet another 20 year extension, much information bystandards are falling away in usefulness and possibly lost.

If the publishing and patent monopoly barriers were reduced, innovation could more easily flourish.

Re:Oh, come on, Bill, you may have Aspergers, but.

[junglee_iitk]

You see they know they are from a culture that respects women's sovereignty to the point that arranged marriages are out of the question -- unlike the hoards you idiots are importing.

I was with you (almost) until that point. I was under the impression that it is insightful, then it all turned into -1 ramble.

Are you so narcissistic that you cannot appreciate a different culture? Sorry, strike that. Are you so narcissistic that you have not tried to know your competitors?

I know, people have lost job, and frankly speaking, America should have been better if H1B visas were special cases. But you sir, have directed your frustration from a process (H1B visa) towards the outcome (hoards of so called idiots). You sir, are lucky to be in America.

Be capitalist or not be capitalist. Accept competition or do not.

All these CS graduates should get jobs?

[vlad_petric]

Good lord ... There's so many dumbasses that graduate at tier 1/tier 2 universities.

Re:Oh, come on, Bill, you may have Aspergers, but.

[Baldrson]

Yes, yes, yes. The javascript webapps. I remember those. Those were the ones that you could do online e-commerce, but by changing the URL at the price=200.00 to a smaller number, you could get things realllly cheap.

That's pretty humorous but I seriously doubt those "web apps" were written by people who had experience with business process reengineering as did the guys I'm referring to. Such security flaws are taken care of by server-side validation stored procedures as a matter of course. Web browsers weren't the first database clients you know...

He's right, and he speaks the truth

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, if we all worked for peanuts 16h a day while being whipped at random for encouragement and prodded and seared with burning hot steel rods, we'd have the most competitive industry.

I'll rather starve than get burnt again in IT. I only can wonder on the depth of the levels of cynism of most 40+ yr IT workers... Congrats industry! You have managed to push away your most skilled workforce. Competitivity my pants.

its a problem of incentives...

[Anonymous Coward]

Money/Security:

When I was a kid we were told that science and engineering were the future and you'd never have to worry about employment in those fields. After the dot bomb kids know the score. There is no money or security in software. If your company can save $0.50 shipping your job overseas they have a fiduciary responsibility to the share holders to do so (or so says Wall Street) - and kids know it.

Women:

Its tougher to meet women in engineering, and when you do meet women, they are suddenly uninterested after finding our your major is (in my case) computer engineering. SEven my wife (with a degree in electrical engineering) had said she would never to date an engineer before she met me.

Re:Oh, come on, Bill, you may have Aspergers, but.

[Anonymous Coward]

He did not mention anybody's race.

If you want more people to pick IT

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in IT and have for nigh on 20 years. At this point in time I would not recommend that anyone consider a career in the field.

There are two main reasons: crappy pay and sweatshop conditions. I do not believe there is any other industry in North America where you are expected to have a degree, work in excess of 40 hours a week on a regular basis and do it all as a regular employee making $40K.

Consider the following exerpt from the BC Employment Standards Act.
The following provisions do not apply to high technology professionals:
Part 4 [Hours of Work and Overtime] , other than section 39 of the Act;
Part 5 [Statutory Holidays] of the Act.
( http://www.labour.gov.bc.ca/esb/hightech/regulat.h tm )

Section 39 is a single sentence:
Despite any provision of this Part, an employer must not require or directly or indirectly allow an employee to work excessive hours or hours detrimental to the employee's health or safety

( http://www.qp.gov.bc.ca/statreg/stat/E/96113_01.ht m#section39 )

In summary, high tech employers can demand as many hours as they want, do not have to pay overtime, and do not have to pay stats. They are, however, prevented from (knowingly) working their employees to death. Thanks Liberals!

I'll say that I have encountered few potential employers that try to exploit these rules to the fullest (EA does have a very large presence here) but I think the fact that these are what the government considers to be the Standard clearly illustrates the sweatshop nature of the industry.

As for pay. Consider an average high tech worker (Nigel) and an average government employee (Elmer):

Both graduate from high school:
Nigel goes to college (-30K/yr)
Elmer goes to work for the govt (+40K/yr)
For the sake of comparing apples to apples, they are both reasonably frugal and banking 25% of their income (obviously kids or lifestyle will impact this but it is a wash if you assume they can somehow afford to have the same lifestyle)

After 4 years, Nigel graduates.
Now Nigel and Elmer are both 23.
If Elmer has 46K in his RRSP. He's gotten a few raises (COL + seniority) so his income up to about 45K.
Nigel on the other hand is 120K in debt and, if he is lucky, finds a 40K job.

Another 5 years:

Elmer and Nigel meet up for their 29th birthdays

Elmer is sticking with the plan: he now has about 140K for retirement and he's making 50K.
Nigel is also making 50K and he's paid down about 40K of his student debt so he is only 80K in the hole.

Another 9 years:

By age 38, Nigel has paid off his student debt and is making slightly more than Elmer (if he is lucky). Elmer, on the other hand, could retire tomorrow but he might as well max up that government pension. Besides, at this point, Elmer has so much vacation and seniority that he never has to be there when things are busy so why quit?

So why don't more government employees retire at 45? The answer is pretty obvious if you consider the difference between the lifestyle of a student and a 20 year old with a $40K salary and a month vacation.

If I had it to do over, I would go the civil service route for sure. As for Mr. Gates, if he wants to find more IT workers, he should start by looking inside his wallet: I suspect that's where most of those "qualified professionals" are hiding.

Re:Oh, come on, Bill, you may have Aspergers, but.

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you name a few of such cultures? Have you even ever met any guy you are referring to?

Talk about ignorance.

Age discrimination

[SirGarlon]

Now, try and find an employer willing to hire me for an entry level position!

You're absolutely right, age discrimination is rampant and a huge problem for the workers.

If there were really a huge labor shortage, employers wouldn't be able to afford to discriminate against people like you.

If you want to fix math education .. Immitate!

[TheNarrator]

Ok I'm sick of the education debate in this country. It's all about who to blame. It's been going on for 40 years. Give up people! Just go find a country with a good math/science program and copy them exactly. For instance, Singapore has some of the best math performance of any country. All of Singapore's math instruction materials are in English. Just go get the whole curriculum, import a few teachers to get the program started, and just do math the same way they do math from Kindergarten on.

Good Liberal????

[monopole]

Gates a "good liberal"? The richest man on the planet, malefactor of great wealth, robber baron incarnate, a convicted monopolist, begging for more scab labor, a liberal? Just because he spends a fraction of his income on charity for PR purposes. The guy who overwhelmingly gives to republican candidates and PACs including George "macaca" Allen? The one who got the federal monopoly lawsuit thrown out by the incoming Bush administration?

If he's a good liberal...

Re:Good Liberal????

[Anonymous Coward]

He meant good neoliberal.

Outsourcing

[jawahar]

Isn't outsourcing resulting in wage slavery in developing nations?

Re:Oh, come on, Bill, you may have Aspergers, but.

[Baldrson]

Be capitalist or not be capitalist. Accept competition or do not.

The US made a choice not to be capitalist with this little thing called "The New Deal". It basically was a way to deal with the centralization of wealth by nationalizing collective bargaining trade unions. This was done to avoid the alternative, genuine capitalism, in which there is a use fee paid for property rights as the primary source of government revenue. Guys like Gates like that Deal because they don't want to be taxed on their net assets but they don't like the other side of the Deal which is that there is a de facto Union with a picket line that consists of the US border.

Fine... break the New Deal and correct the mistake of not charging a use fee for property rights that would not exist in the absence of government -- but don't break the back of the working man with immigration before you shift the tax burden off him.

CS is a great degree, if you like being spat on.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why bother with obtaining a CS degree anyway? All it does it put you squarely with the pack of starving dogs trying to scarf up scraps of work in companies that arn't going to Beijing or New Delhi. Yes, you might get lucky and get the senior sysadmin job because of the MCSE/RHCE/CCIE, but the second management finds someone cheaper, expect to find your stuff boxed at your desk the next morning.

The CS degree has only one use, and that is a prerequisite to law school. Being even a top IT guy in a business just makes you a master sargent, while you are forever under the command of the "butter bars" (second lieutenants) -- the law department guys. They say jump, you better jump, or your job goes poof because you were not SOX compliant. The two years spent in law school are the difference between being nobility where people listen when you speak (as well as having a real job, real money, and a car/SUV people don't snigger at behind your back) versus being the guy working 60-100 hours a week, forced to drive a jalopy, and waiting on the people fresh out of law school hand and foot.

You want a SO, a decent car, a house where you are not living in a neighborhood with gunshots going off nightly, and a chance at people of the opposite sex? Take law school. You want 100 hour a week, no respect, with co-workers urinating on you, blaming you for any computer problems, then firing you for someone cheaper when they get the chance? Graduate CS. Yes, the two years of law school and the bar exam are a pain, but being able to afford a nice car while your classmates who graduated CS and are working four times as long as you do, still driving ten year old Metros, makes it worth it in the end.

Self-fulfilling prophecy

[rkhalloran]

"Invest four years/many $$$ in a CS degree, then watch the work go to an H-1B worker anyway because he's willing to do it for half what you're asking." Hmmm, I think I'll take door #2, thanks.

If you pay them, they will come.

[otis wildflower]

Want to reverse the slide out of CS?

How about well-paid full time permanent positions?

Of course, it's cheaper to hire overseas, so if US nationals can make more money or be happier at non-CS careers, WTF is there to attract them? The girls? The glamour? The machismo?

Re:Oh, come on, Bill, you may have Aspergers, but.

[Baldrson]

you racist bastard.

Oh, did I forget to mention the caste system?

Oh, puh-lease.

[GoneSouth]

American corporations have made it known for years that their mission is to outsource every last American IT job to cheap offshore facilities. Couple that with long hours, little opportunity for career advancement, and few other job perks associated with other fields (ever hear of a programmer getting a company car? going out for dinner on a suppliers tab? attending a company golf tournament?) and it's little wonder that college students are not attracted to the field. Let the corporations crying about IT worker shortages eat cake!

Of course, the tools are boring.

[delire]

You can hardly blame the lack of interest in computer science given the prevalence of Windows in education. What on earth about Windows could possibly inspire an inquisitive mind with the desire to learn? Windows is closed source, lacks any customiseability (you know, playing around to see how stuff works) has no proper stdout and half the problems are best solved by waving a rubber chicken at the screen.

You can't expect kids to want to invest time in a marketplace whose default technology is so uninteresting, one monopolised by a greedy mega-corporation that evidences no real interest in the development of computing in general. In fact, it's quite the contrary. Kids exposed only to Windows will quickly realise there's more fun and/or more money to be had elsewhere. Frankly, an MA in Continental Philosphy or Quantum Physics would be more fun, provide more room to make a niche while feeding the brain to greater heights.

If you want kids to take an interest in anything you have to give them the right to tinker, and you have to give them the tools - no strings attached. It's idiocy to soley expose kids to a shrinkwrapped OS at school. Even Apple is better, albeit still with many strings. Be sure to expose them to a BSD, Linux, and Solaris, microcontrollers, network concepts and portable programming languages while still in high-school. Just a taste is enough.

Computing != Microsoft Windows. There's a world of cool stuff out there.

Astounding....

[NoOnesMessiah]

Bill Gates whines about losing out on technically competent workers when his OS actively seeks to enable the feeble-minded to feel like they understand computers when many of them still won't upgrade their (trial) anti-virus application when it expires. Furthermore, his company aggressively punishes any new company or technology that might stand in the way of their bottom line or displace their products..., "just keep them dumb and purchasing upgrades, we'll buy or kill anything new that gets in our way." (Go find AdminSpotting if you don't know what I mean.)

Now mix in an education system where football is more important than math, physics, or science, add an "I'm entitled to be constantly, persistently entertained" attitude in our 12-24 year old population, and I think we have a recipe for self-destruction. It's a good thing China is set to kick our collective ass over the next 20 years. We're going to need to shed some of that complacency somehow.

Now what was it that Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz said? Something about "bloody, apathetic planet..."

Anyway, I think the whole point is; "Waah waah waah, Bill. You helped break it. Now why don't you try fixing it. Start with our schools. And do something about the federal deficit while you're at it."

F%#$!@g whiner.

totally and proven false

[Anonymous Coward]

If this were true, there would be a current and evident shortage of computer scientists, which is not the case.

We would be seeing dramatic increases in pay and benefits for existing CS grads in the USA. The papers would be full of current and active ads with hundreds of job postings. Instead we have seen the opposite since the late 1990's.

Now for the reality...the goal is to bring foreign talent into the US without dragging in a bunch of losers or protected industry workers with them. Hence the USA does not want open immigration--that would bring in the great unwashed hordes--as well as accountants, CPAs, lawyers, etc....even socialists and/or democrats.

Rather, the goal is to bring in scientists, not so much for the talent, or to fill a need, but to keep the wages and benefits under control, or dropping, for the current pool of US scientists.

The talent goes where the money is.

[bcharr2]

The old adage is true. The talent goes where the money is - with one new caveat. In an economy such as ours, if the money is pretty good everywhere, then the talent goes where the working conditions are superb. In other words, corporate culture counts for a lot (just ask google). It enables you to recruit and then retain the most qualified applicants. Of course, that only works if there are actually qualified applicants for the available positions. But what if the talent pool simply isn't there? For the answer to that, we have to probe a little deeper. The problem for computer science is that the corporate culture has been pretty universally acknowledged as being so poor for so long time that many qualified individuals are simply avoiding the career altogether. Twenty years of nightmare stories about the caffeine fueled all night programming push that leads into the 100 hour work week until program launch problem had a hand in that (the stories actually being true didn't help matters either). A constant bombardment of stories that convince an entire generation that there is no future in the computing because there will be no jobs for Americans in a few years hasn't helped either. But I can tell you that if the money AND corporate culture were there, you would not have to convince students to pursue degrees that would find them employed at your company. They would beat a path through the CS department of their chosen university and right to your front door. What microsoft should be doing is revamping the image of programmers to be jobs where you work flexible and sane hours, and then convincing young students that there will be high paying jobs for them for many years to come.

Re:Oh, come on, Bill, you may have Aspergers, but.

[Creepy Crawler]

---That's pretty humorous but I seriously doubt those "web apps" were written by people who had experience with business process reengineering as did the guys I'm referring to.

Im sure they didnt. I've seen real professional engineers who do the work of what a whole office could do. It's just amazing to watch those special guys do work in their element.

Im just reaffirming the point that the drive towards the bottom never really was near the top. Those many sites (I knew about 20+ of them during 1997-1999) all had those kinds of problems.

7 years of experience, technical architect

[forgoil]

If someone wants to give me a job in Minnesota, you can find my detailed info by pressing my name in this post.

Just so you guys know, I want to go over there:)

The article is lying...

[RecycledElectrons]

We do not need to import 65,000 H1B visas to fill our need for CS degrees. We need to hire the Americans who can do the jobs.

Andy Out!

Re:Oh, come on, Bill, you may have Aspergers, but.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you even know what a caste system is? Or are you reading biased stuff like this or this

The caste system was there. It is illegal to use cast as a criteria for anything. Caste system is still there at many backward places, but somehow I doubt there are many "hardcode" believers of castism coming to US. Castism is just ad hominem usage.

And by the way, castism is a news because people want to sell it.

Hire women, blacks, people from state Universities

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Additionally, managers in silicon valley have a track record of strong bias in favor of graduates from a single-digit list of colleges, and of Caucasian, Oriental, or Indian descent males.

(The university business is particularly blecherous since the actual pioneers of the information age were almost entirely NOT ivy-leaguers, and had more than a sprinkling of non wasp-males among their number.)

If you include women, blacks, American Indians, Hispanic-descent citizens, various "halfbreeds", and graduates of other fine universities (especially state universities) - rather than reserving them to support (or janitorial) positions, there is no shortage whatsoever.

But there's another part of this: You have to PAY them on the basis of performance, respect their opinions, and avoid filing the serial numbers off their ideas and crediting them to the stars from that tiny pool of ivy-league whites and orientals. If you hire them and then systematically abuse them and pay them 2/3 of what you pay the in crowd, they'll burn out and drop out.

(I watched this happen to an exceptional talent. Woman. Part Amerind. State universities. IQ so high a psych professor had to roll a special test to estimate it. Four degrees, one advanced and from a top U, in diverse subjects (computer science among them). Sharp as a tack and total grasp of the subtleties of software engineering. Yet administrators systematically ignored or rejected her ideas or credited her colleagues for them when they were finally accepted. Last straw was in a windows application development shop when she found out the clueless-about-Windows-programs unix people she was teaching were paid more than half again what she got. She left the field.)

Traffic

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

Is why I don't work up north. I have had friends who offered to get me in at several Seattle Tech companies, and I would rather make 25$ / hr right here, 5 mi from home than make 30/hr, and spend 20x longer comuting, loose income to fuel, loose time with my family & friends, just to work with the only real perk being software discounts that I would no longer have time to use.

I did work in redmond about 9 years ago (it was really bad then, I can't imagine the drive now) doing some contract work when I was a kid. I basically abandoned it due to the commute, and I was just south of auburn at the time.

If they build a base in Dupont, I am on it like white on rice though... 8')

Re:Traffic

[Anonymous Coward]

lose

Wages?

[hernyo]

Btw, what's the usual salary US programmers can expect? For example, zero or five years of experience.

You don't need a CS degree

[teflaime]

to pump out code. I know lots of programmers who don't even have technical degrees. Everything Gates says is just an excuse to beg for more H1B visas and put those of us who can do tech work (but refuse to be stupid about it) in the bread line...

Hey guys,

[wjeff]

instead of wasting your time posting comments here, where everybody already agrees with you. Try posting your comments on the Washington Post's website where people who really need to be convinced might see it.

Oh yeah, try to use intelligent arguments, and facts, instead of just yelling "Gates is full of s##t!"

Try paying them what they're worth

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh god, not this again.

Jesus christ, people, those prospective CS students aren't idiots. They see the falling salaries and increased outsourcing, and they're going into something that will pay better. I'd advise my son to do the same.

Bringing in more temporary foreign workers is obviously going to make this worse. Continued or increased downward pressure (via cheaper labor) on software engineering salaries is going to reduce the motivation to get a CS degree here.

If those foreign workers were going to stay, they'd want the same wages we do. They're not though, and who can blame them. They get to underbid us, take the money home in a few years to a wildly different economy, and live like kings (or at least extremely comfortably relative to their friends neighbors that didn't serve time in the US engineering market). I'd do the same thing if I was in their position.

So if we're going to pay for those foreign skilled workers in terms of economic impact, let's keep them. That is, let them work here only while they're in the (hopefully expedited if they're really in such critical demand) process of becoming citizens. Now that guy probably contributes to our economy for the rest of his career. Of course since it will cost these guys just as much to live here and send their kids to college as it costs us, your big company doesn't get cheap engineers this way; but that's not supposed to be the point, right?

H1B = Illegal worker exploitation

[crucifixxio]

I have been on H1B for 2 years now and it is my choice to come over and get an advanced degree and work here but there are lot of issues which are pushed below the carpet which many are not aware of. 1. Many of the H1Bs are illegally benched without pay once they land here if they don't have projects and they are completely bewildered as it is a new country and culture and realties and utility companies don't give consideration for you losing your job or not being paid (and rightfully so). Bills have to be paid. 2. A lot of companies especially in India where I am from outrageously misuse the H1B and also the L-1 visa (which is an intra company international transfer) by giving some salary back in India and giving paltry pay in the US which is illegal in many cases because the department of labor requires employers to pay atleast the prevailing wage. 3. There are many 'body shoppers' or contract consultants especially in New Jersey who completely abuse the H1B populace whom they recruit abroad. They never give the visa papers to the employees (so that the employee cannot transfer the visa to another firm if they want to which is perfectly legal any number of times), with hold paystubs/W-2s (which is required for transfer) and generally treat people as slaves at their mercy. I know even well known giant software corporations in India who are doing this at this very moment. 4. If an H1-B worker is fired/laid-off, s/he is considered immediately out of status at the very instant unless they have another job and the visa transferred to that job before losing the current job. Lot of companies grossly misuse this clause of H1B as blackmail (happened with me too) which keeps the employee at a high stress level in many places. Again, I don't wish to generalize this to all H1B workers as probably most of them are very happy in their jobs and are leading a full life here but there are lot of workers who are suffering. The only agenda that people like Bill Gates have is to exploit the cheap labor that come streaming in the form of wide-eyed foreigners with a fistful of dreams and not give these jobs to Americans who know their rights and are willing to fight for fair pay. I say these inspite of being a foreigner and at the risk of sounding hypocritical because I think the whole H1B and L1B visa system is flawed and needs a complete revamp which the big corporations like M$, Intel, IBM etc will never allow because corporations are for making a profit and not charity houses.

I call bullsht!

[Anonymous Coward]

> This issue has reached a crisis point.

If the demand for software developers is high, then the wages should increase. If the wages increase, then more people will enter the field. It's called a free market. Look it up.

The reason why everyone is leaving the software field, from college students to middle-aged professionals is that the demand for software engineers is at an all time low due to outsourcing. Outsourcing --> firing existing engineers and lower wages --> college students waking up and choosing a different field.

No one is going to enter a field that they know will not provide a means of living for 50 years. Most C.S. students in America and Britain are from India and China, and most of them plan to go back after getting the degree because that's where the jobs are.

H-1B visas should have never been granted in the first place. It only encourages a brain drain in the U.S. H-1B visas also allow employers to greatly abuse their foreign employees. It's a scam to serve politicians and their corporate pimps.

Stop bitching and moaning about there not being enough qualified professional software developers. Developing software correctly is hard. It takes decades to become truly good at it. And I personally know of a dozen highly qualified professionals who have left the field all together because of outsourcing. Treat developers like crap and what do you expect? It's not like being a developer is considered a sexy job, and it won't get you laid. So the stability and income were the only thing drawing people into the field. Now that they are gone for good, the people are also leaving.

As far as keeping America competitive, it's already too late. The software industry has gone the way of manufacturing, and like manufacturing it ain't coming back. The only thing America has left is the service industry, and when you think of America, you think of good service, right?

One last rant. The society that controls the infrastructure of the Internet and other computer based technologies will be the superpower of this century. The only question is whether that country will be India or China. File that under national security.

Re:Oh, come on, Bill, you may have Aspergers, but.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this retard modded so high? He has offered nothing of significance and is completely ranting? What does respecting women have to do with arranged marriage? There was an article on CNN.com with video the other day talking about how American girls are over-sexualized by the media and see their worth as a sex-object. The guy who posted this is clueless and he probably has difficulties in this economy because of his cloudied thinking.

God, Slashdot, you can do better than this.

What if we let 6+ yr olds work full-time jobs?

[Anonymous Coward]

"In the first few years there would be a lot of wage-adjustments as certain markets like low-tech, manual-labor, and low-wage retail got flooded but in the long run I think it would be good for the overall economy. Instead of low-tech jobs going to China and Mexico dragging down American wages, low-tech jobs would remain here at depressed wages but the American economy would benefit from the local employment. It would also give the few Americans who are truly lazy or underperforming a kick in the proverbial kiester if they want to stay employed."

Ya know ... there is a reason why we as a nation have agreed that not everything which can be done to improve corporate profits will be accepted by corporations doing business with our country.

And in case you think I'm pulling a Jonathon Swiftism here, I'll remind you that we used to let 6+ yr olds work full-time jobs.

The real story

[dcam]

Blah blah blah

Need more CS students

Blah blah blah

More H1-B cheap labour needed

Blah blah blah

He is just asking for one thing: cheap labour. More CS students == larger market of programmers == lower pay. H1-B == more cheap people.

Shortage in every field?

[yaminb]

Is it just me or is there a shortage in every field?

I'm in Canada, and this is what I hear

Doctors...shortage
Massage therapists...shortage (saw there is one in British Columbia for some reason)
Engineers...shortage
Trades people...shortage
Nurses...shortage

So what jobs are people doing?
Is this not a general problem of an aging rich population. There's just not enough people to do all the work that needs to be done to satisfy our rich western lifestyle. Thats why we need immigrants/illegals/h1b visas.

Now on another level, there is software engineering. Every company I've worked for can't find enough good engineers. Would they hire older people? Nope. Would they hire someone in a different specialty and retrain them? Nope? Would they locate to more urban locations where there's more people (New York, Toronto...) Nope. It's as if these companies want to defy all the normal rules of business. They expect the worker to be everything for them.

So what is a smart Canadian/American supposed to do.
1. Work in the medical profession where there is always a job (doctor, dentist, pharmacist, nurse, teacher...)
2. Get a nice comfortable government job
3. slave away in a field where you wakeup one morning and see Alcatel laying off 12000 people; outsourcing jobs to India/China and not earning nearly enough money when compared to a doctor; real lack of vacation time; Sure there's a chance you'll work for the right startup and strike it rich, but for 99% of people, it'll just be another regular job.

But then again...why should all the development for the information age be in the United States or Canada?

National health care

[DeadlyBattleRobot]

Decouple health insurance from employment.

No One Wants a Degree Only to Be Outsourced

[patachon]

From "The Impact of Offshore Outsourcing on IT Workers in Developed Countries" by Benjamin B.M. Shao and Julie Smith David. Communications of the ACM (February 2007/Vol. 50, No. 2): p.93:

"We are currently witnessing a significant paradigm shift to offshore sourcing. Many companies, large and small, are pursuing these initiatives earnestly. When work sent offshore can be done in a timely fashion with high quality and lower cost, companies facing intensified global competition and trying to maximize their profits have little choice but to outsource some of their IT needs overseas. As global market dynamics keep driving companies to acquire IT services from locations that provide the most cost-effective solutions, offshore outsourcing will remain a viable option on the corporate strategic agenda."

If I were a lawmaker

[hey!]

and somebody gave this testimony before my committee, I'd be dying to ask these questions.

(1) If the US is critically short of expert technologists, why is a program that kicks its particiapants out after six years the answer?

(2) When an engineer enters the US as a junior engineer, and leaves after six years to return to his low wage country, aren't we sending expertise in US technologies, products and business practices with him? Isn't the H-1B program better designed for accomplishing technology transfer than it is for enhancing the expertise available within the US?

(3) If you don't think transferring technology to low wage countries is a bad idea, does this mean you are planning on taking jobs away from the US work force and give them to overseas workers?

----

Personally, I think the H1-B program would be great, as long as it finished with permanent residency. It doesn't create more competition for US workers, because you simply let in fewer new H-1Bs to make up for the ones who stay.

This is something that organized labor and its political friends need to wake up to. In a global economy prices for wages are going to drop, as are prices for things that have considerable labor in their costs. It could be a net win for US labor, or a net loss, or a wash. But if the jobs go overseas, it will certainly be a loss. Where jobs appear to be heading overseas, it's better for US workers that we bring the people who would do those jobs here.

Outsource all white collar and blue collar jobs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, since all the blue collar manufacturing jobs went overseas,
just send all the rest of the white collar jobs overseas.

USA Citizens just don't get it. Globalization is not just
about bringing Up third world economies,
the USA can expect to go Down economically as well.

Capital can flee any expensive place (like high USA labor costs) to
much cheaper places (like iPod factories in Asia).

What will the USA do?

Grow wheat, corn, & cows, and maybe make movies, songs, and trouble.

The USA is good at all those things, I say Go With Your Strengths!

Re:Oh, come on, Bill, you may have Aspergers, but.

[x_Curious_x]

I'm one of those aforementioned "young engineers" who was one of "The few young men sired by engineers are all-too-aware of what you've done to their fathers and they'll be better off going into real estate or moving out to a little plot of land in the country living an eco-friendly subsistence lifestyle." (Dad is an Electrical Engineer for Defense contractors). The parent post is very right. Yes things were hard. Dad got laid off a couple times from cuts in defense spending.

The message from him and from the behavior of these places he worked for, was always be your own boss. Hell in school they emphasize so much now how you're going to get screwed, there's no loyalty, and basically you better have your wits about you and multiple plans if you want to succeed consistently in the cut throat world of corporations. I entered college in fall 2001. A CS major. I went all the way to 500 level courses and switched to IT between sophomore and junior year (MIS). Reason being dad was always like, "you don't want to be the worker bee your whole life and have other's take credit for your sweat." the message always was be your own boss, understand you're a liability and not an asset to the big man, and take control of your destiny. My dad's 80 - 100 hour weeks and underpay are all a testament to that.

A buddy of mine just got laid of as well and only was out 10 months in the working world. He's an Industrial Engineer. Moral is us youngins are privy enough to the position we're in as being disposable in the working world. The ones who are intelligent enough to see that will always be looking to get the experience needed to make better moves, not waste their time working for someone for crap wages and broken promises, and crazy hours(a person shouldn't let their employer punk them like that IMHO).

Bill Gates is a DROP OUT!!!!

[ps3udonym]

Always nice to hear critical advice from someone who didn't even come CLOSE to finishing their degree. Nice.. VERY nice!

Sorry, being rich and stealing your first product from others (even if they refuse to take you to court, hint hint, nudge nudge), doesn't give you license to comment on the state of Computer Science.

as a slashdot economist and sociologist,

[hxnwix]

I feel qualified to offer my opinion on this.

All regulation is bad. All government is bad. All laws are bad. Therefore, we should let the Indians in; all of them. The market will sort it out. If that means 10 indians per square foot living in America - that's OK with me. It's just how the market sorted it out and the market is never wrong.

Re:as a slashdot economist and sociologist,

[frank_adrian314159]

Yes! Profound insight! (At least from the Slashdot Libertarian point of view.)

immigrationvoice.org for greencards

[Anonymous Coward]

Please checkout www.immigrationvoice.org for details and stories on people suffering
due to the immigration policies.

Immigration Voice is formed by skilled labor who
applied for greencards and are suffering long waits (in the order of years)
due to outdated immigration policies.

Did you ever suffer at the same job because you are not allowed to change
your job because of government rules?

I request everyone to take look at this site with open mind.
Understand the suffering of the people who are playing by the rules
just like American citizens but with lots of hassles in life.

PS: I am not a coward I just don't have a login here.

Re:immigrationvoice.org for greencards

[buzzzz]

Here is the specific link http://immigrationvoice.org/index.php?option=com_c ontent&task=view&id=56&Itemid=25 to the article describing the issues in detail.

As I have pointed out elsewhere, this is separate from the debate on how many H1Bs should be allowed. This is about people who have already been allowed and approved and are on the path to becoming green card holders/citizens. They have to wait for over 5 to 10 years without being able to change jobs or having their spouses work.

We should not be too surprised

[suitepotato]

After all, America's CS world is torn between teaching logic and symbolism which are the foundations of computational science but there's a very big lack of talent for expressing and expounding upon the real world applications thereof, and on the other end being hip and trendy and teaching scripting languages that are all hawt and leet. Not a lot different in the world of math and physics either. We're pushing an idea in society that if it doesn't grab your attention and have applications and ramifications so obvious that even the short attention span children of today can grap, then it is not worth it.

We should be doing everything we can to reverse this starting with trying to sell the basics in a way that is entertaining and sinks into memory. Unfortunately, the old CS material is drier than the Valley of the Kings and less entertaining than Gigli. Grand assumptions are made about what should be a priori taken as known beforehand, and when people trip they get trampled by the class. Our teaching system is NOT geared towards keeping the herd together, but leaving the stragglers behind to be preyed upon by doubt and dismay. Society reinforces their doubts and puts across to them that keeping with it isn't worth it and their labors and efforts will not be appreciated.

Sadly, the higher educational world doesn't get it any more than the mass culture world does. And on the malady plays. To think you ever wondered why so much software and computer engineering seems to either suck or be totally alien or both.

Best summary on the subject, from UC Davis prof.

[Animats]

Read this Congressional testimony, by Dr. Norman Matloff at UC Davis. It explains the whole "programmer shortage" scam.

competition?

[doktorjayd]

i thought bombing the crap out of any country that doesnt act the way america wants was the plan?

You listened to academic? Regarding industry?!?

[bADlOGIN]

One of the quickest things I learned after only a few months out of college is that the guys sitting in the ivory towers of my university were there for a reason: they didn't know a thing about working in industry. Many had never spent any time actually applying knowledge and skills from the piles of degrees they had earned, or had only worked 20+ years ago in some corporate research lab (read same environment as academia). Like my compilers instructor who went off about how the Ariane 5 rocket failure would have been avoided if they had used his pet language (Haskell). The real answer is of course software testing, not silver bullet languages. That's not the type of thing you'll learn in an ivory tower setting though.

What they didn't tell you is that you need to spend a bit more money and only put forth 1/2 the effort of your CS degree (your real degree) to get an MBA so that you can deal with the dipshits who run the world. The CS degree alone lines you up for a bumpy ride at best while you put together the business sense that your engineering courses are structured in complete contrast to on your own in your working life. I would tell anyone who wanted to do CS today to minor or get a double bachelors in business (if not, enjoy a light couple of semesters and stick around to get an MBA - it's a non-thesis "masters" for cryin' out loud!).

Time to call this practice what it really is

[Whuffo]

The problem is NOT that Microsoft (or other tech companies) can't find qualified applicants. Their "problem" is more specific than that - what they can't find are qualified applicants that are under 40 and will work long shifts for hamburger-flipper wages - and no overtime.

There's plenty of unemployed people right here in the US that are fully qualified to fill these positions. If these corporations would simply pay market rates - and stop the discrimination and abuse - they'd be able to fill every empty seat with experienced employees.

On a level playing field, this is what they'd have to do. Treat the employees right or they'll go work for someone else. But these corporations don't want to play by the rules. Forget those nasty federal and state laws about discrimination and fair labor standards; they'll just pay off some politicians to create a special category of employees and call it H1B. Very handy; now they can import foreigners and use them essentially as slave labor. Yes, slave labor. If you can't quit or change jobs what would YOU call it?

Why am I not surprised that they want to expand this practice? The constant crying about "We need to be competitive" should be a warning sign.

I've got a better idea: these corporations should bring themselves into FULL compliance with all federal and state labor laws and pay their employees according to the prevailing market rate. And if they can't do this and remain competitive, their business plan isn't workable and they should either fix the problems or shut down.

Let's see now; Microsoft has a long history of legal problems because of the way they treat their employees. Now they need to increase the number of imported indentured servants to remain competitive. Nothing new here; same old story.

Why do we allow this to continue?

Confuses innovation with grunt work

[Stuntmonkey]

The article, and many of the responses here, I believe confuse the issue by lumping together too many jobs under the "IT" umbrella. Innovation is critical to our economy, but the reality is that 90% of IT people aren't innovative (just as 90% of MBAs aren't innovative in business).

Properly parsed, the problem really splits into two:

1. How do we foster innovation? For the innovative person I think it's less about proper training or incentives (they will mostly be self-taught anyway, and would do the work for free if they had to), and more about creating the conditions wherein they can succeed: Access to venture capital, access to good IP protection (and lack of overprotection), favorable regulatory environment for starting businesses with little overhead, easy ability to relocate to the US from elsewhere, etc.
2. How do we build the armies of grunt soldiers to do the non-innovative work that IT departments need? Face it, most sysadmin, database admin, system configuration, and many programming jobs require very little innovation or creative thought. They do require some training, but really any fairly intelligent person in the world could do it.

For the individual "IT professional", you need to figure out which bucket you fall into. If you're one of the 95% in the latter, the trends toward outsourcing will not be kind. Once upon a time IT departments had plenty of well-paid, secure jobs like "System Analyst". These same companies are frankly looking at their expensive IT departments and wondering if they're more problem than solution. This is no different from what happened to the highly-paid, semi-skilled US auto worker of the 1970s-1980s. Some were able to move up-market in innovative ways (specialty fabrication shops, etc.), while many are now truck drivers or working at Walmart.

Gates confuses the question by using "innovation" to argue for growing the number of CS grads we put out. Bottom line is, all the innovators are doing it anyway (or dropping out of college, as Gates did, to get it done faster). Churning out more CS grads just grows the army of grunt soldiers. And it's not clear that more grunt soldiers positively influences "innovation". Maybe having fewer grunts puts healthy pressure elsewhere in the system to improve scalability and reusability. For example, expensive IT people might encourage OS vendors to turn out products that don't require armies of desktop support people to keep machines clear of malware, registry corruption, etc. (Ahem.)

re: Microsoft and qualified applicants

[King_TJ]

Let me first say that I'm *not* a software developer myself. Therefore, I could be way off-base with my comments.

But having worked in I.T. for about 15 years (mostly on the hardware tech. and support side of things), I've observed that developing apps for the Windows platform is an exercise in frustration, in most cases. Time after time, I watched good, skilled software developers fight with quirks and "inexplicable bugs" in apps they developed using Microsoft technologies, yet they had perfectly working code when they built apps in Java, C++ and other such languages instead.

As just one example, a friend of mine used to work in software Quality Assurance for Reuters. They put out one of their major stock market applications in both a Unix and a Windows version. The Unix team generally had little going on, to the point where they goofed off, threw paper airplanes around the office, and so forth. (Occasionally, they had some "real work" to do, if they were involved in a major upgrade to the package. But support and maintenance-wise, the place was pretty quiet.) By contrast, the Windows support staff was constantly flooded with bugs to handle.

As another example, 2 developers that worked with me at a former job took on the task of constructing a labor log application. The plan was to develop it with MS technologies (the MSDAC objects,for example). They ended up with an app that seemed to work fine for months, and then would suddenly "break" when it got to particular dates of the year. Each time, debugging consisted of "back and forth" with Microsoft support people, eventually escalated to developers of the MSDAC objects themselves, who conceded *each time* that the problems found were actually flaws in their code, not ours. MSDAC objects went through numerous revisions and service packs around that time - which meant our pre-built drive images were constantly having to be rebuilt to accommodate them. Big pain in the butt.

As MS products get increasingly more complex, I can't think this has gotten any better. Rather, developers working for them are probably diving into an unfathomable mess of code spaghetti to unravel. Doesn't sound like a "dream job" to me, or one that it's easy to be "qualified" for!

opposite water?

[Bastard of Subhumani]

The obvious way to show this is that if CS graduates were paid a million dollars per year starting out, people would be leaving other careers in droves to pursue a career in computer science.

Imagine a situation where the demand for programmers is incredibly high. Salaries could get bidded up to the point where anyone who knows which side of the keyboard to sit is well into 6 figures. And by anyone I mean anyone; lawyers, pole-dancers, used-car salesmen.

Be thankful that it could never happen. Because if it did we'd still be fixing the mess they made seven years, one month and, ummmm, 26 days later.

Re:opposite water?

[Maxo-Texas]

LOL!

Very droll.

H1B calculations !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Some quick calculation shows why US govt find H1B irresistible:

Assume Avg H1B salary = $65,000.00 PA
his SSN contribution= $7,800 PA (6.2% employee+6.2%Employer = 12.4% )

Assume 40% stay till retirement( after getting green card) so for every 65,000 H1b, 39,000 return to their native country eventually before retire. SO they cannot not claim any social security benefit.

So 39,000X7,800 = $304,200,000.00 per year goes to US govt. In addition it will bring 65,000 new tax payer( Unlike illegal immigrants )

Tax amount = $1,000,000,000 PA, based upon on above salary and avg 25% tax cut. More H1B = more Tax $.)

And finally the money H1b's going to spend in US economy ( Also don't forget the dependents/spouse of H1B cannot work)!!!

Note: Above are approximate figures. Dont take it to heart!

I object

[Plutonite]

The summary says "Computer science employment". What exactly is computer science employment? A computer science degree is not meant to produce someone who can merely program and use a few technologies to produce solutions for companies. That is only a side-effect, a by product. There are tons of programmers and system engineers who never went to school, and instead get their know-how from certificate programs and self-teaching. The system works because software engineering is unlike any other engineering discipline - it is a lot more "hackable", as despisable as this may seem.

My objection is to the notion that a computer scientist is a programmer. That is not true. A comptational science, computing, even a lowly "information science" degree may by purposedly prepare someone for work in the industry, but Computer Science is not about the industry - not directly anyway. It is about the Science in much the same way that physics is about Science, and not particle accelerators. At the end of the day the scientist should belong in a lab with a whiteboard. His purpose is the pursuit of knowledge, not solutions that are particular instances of the application of that knowledge.

If America wants an edge, it shouldn't worry about competition in industry. The current laws(equal pay..etc) suffice. H-1bs do not threaten us because H-1bs do not threaten our ability to participate in science, our real advantage. Our lack of appreciation for knowledge does however, and it is this "techie" culture that we should fight.

I apologize in advance for offending millions of slashdotters, but please try to see the logic in what I wrote.

Texas governor has no power

[Anonymous Coward]

It would have been the perfect job for him. If only he stayed there :P

A skill is a skill

[Bastard of Subhumani]

Oh bullshit. Good development and good code isn't about reinventing the wheel when good algorithms and code already exists.

So what? The point is to test your ability to think on your feet. Whether the exercise is a likely real world case or not is irrelevant. If you can code it off the cuff in the allowed time, you've exhibited a basic level of competence. A competence that no matter what you think is transferable to a real-world situation. And BTW, I've heard your argument a hundred times.

Re:A skill is a skill

[Vicissidude]

The point is to test your ability to think on your feet.

No, the point is to get a good candidate for the job. The ability to think fast does not necessarily indicate a good developer.

If you can code it off the cuff in the allowed time, you've exhibited a basic level of competence.

And you've just pissed off the 20 year veteran asking him to prove that he knows what he's been doing for the last 20 years. Even if you ask a harder question, it's still insulting and tells you nothing other than his ability to think fast.

The resume is enough to exhibit a basic level of competence unless you're hiring straight out of college. You want to know whether they really worked at their previous company, at that position, doing what they wrote they did. A background check will catch those first two items. Less insulting and more useful questions can determine the third.

And BTW, I've heard your argument a hundred times.

Well, aren't you special...

Re:Oh, come on, Bill, you may have Aspergers, but.

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to brush up on your reading skills. The GP was referring to Gates and his ilk as idiots, not Indians.

There's always options.

[Anonymous Coward]

Heck, I wasted a couple of years in various IT jobs, until I got smart one day, actually sat down and thought about what I wanted and how to get it.

Result: I'm the longest-serving helpdesker I know of. Recruitment companies are falling all over me to offer jobs up to $60K because I can actually talk business to management, strategy with CIOs and tech with the rest of the IT department. I put in my seven and a half hours a day and I'm done - I have full control over any overtime and my OT rates are horrendous. I can take on a second job if I want, or project work, or just learning. I'm thinking about going back to university just for fun.

But that's not how I'm making money. I started investing last year, with no capital, no assets and no experience. Talked a bank into giving me a million bucks to play with and made 200K nontaxable profit in the first three months. I can walk away from the industry and retire any time I want.

Lessons learned:
1) You can make good money in a traditionally low-skill, low-paid job.
2) There are ways other than a job to make money, and sometimes they work even better.
3) Being able to pattern-match is good for more than just IT problems.

Re:There's always options.

[jbbernar]

Please tell me the name of your bank, so I can short its stock.

Thanks for playing.

[Bastard of Subhumani]

FWIW, manhole covers are round (and lipped) such that the cover can not fall down the hole.

A triangular one fulfils that requirement. Think agian, sparky.

There spoiled that question for whomever's interviews going forward.

Comma after "there". As to "whomever's", I suspect it doesn't even exist. Since "whom" is to "who" as "him" is to "he", it would be logically equivalent to "him's". It's certainly not in me's dictionary.

Re:Thanks for playing.

[epee1221]

A triangular one fulfils that requirement. Think agian, sparky.

Actually, constant width is the central requirement, and triangles fall short there. If you turn a triangle so that one edge is vertical and then line it up along an edge of the hole it covered, it fits through, since the altitude is shorter than the side.

Re:Thanks for playing.

[Glonoinha]

Manhole covers are round because manholes are round.

And if Clinton hadn't cranked up the H1-B limit to a third of a million (each one at the expense of an American worker) per year, we wouldn't have the tech job death spiral we are currently facing. Bush may be a dumb fuck, but at least he cranked the insane number of H1-Bs back down from 300k+ per year to the current 65k per year (to the benefit of you and I.)

Okay, Bill, that's fine

[ScrewMaster]

Permanent residency regulations compound this problem. Temporary employees wait five years or longer for a green card. During that time they can't change jobs, which limits their opportunities to contribute to their employer's success and overall economic growth.

Good.

Assuming your plaintive cries of "not enough tech workers" are actually true, my response is: just bloody deal with it. The domestic workforce will come up to speed if you stop selling them out and stop trying to take shortcuts. There are plenty of sharp Americans who will fill those positions if you'd just stop trying to squeeze them out.

Example of elastic demand

[amightywind]

Quoting economic theory doesn't cut much ice, especially when it is directly contradicted by the observed facts.

On the contrary. This fellow's behavior is an excellent example of the elasticity of demand which is a fundamental Econ 101 concept. The price of labor is simply too high for this user of "bricklayers" to participate. Let him eat his lungs! But expect him to work like a demon to find a lower price alternative. As a programmer I am all for the wage inflation that goes with scarceness of labor. But as a investor I recognize the value of H1B slave labor to corporate profits.

Now sir.

[/dev/trash]

It's illegal and immoral to pay H1Bs less.

Re:Au contraire - Bill has always been Too Cheap

[Anonymous Coward]

- The IT Job Now requires learning:
C#, Asp.Net, Regular Expressions, Sql, Oracle, Postres and SqlServer.
  Java ( JSP and J2EE ) The Java is also needed to understand what Microsoft was Really trying to do with C#.
Linux, Bash( Awk and SED )

Plus C# 2005 and Dot Net 3.0

So, Yes, Bill you're going to have to pay MORE for qualified people.
Suck It Up.

Why the shortage of CS degrees?
Microsoft exporting Jobs to China
IBM exporting DIVISIONS to India.

Programming requires a HUGE investment in learning,
But, A**holes like Bill don't want to pay for it.

That's because you pay for shit

[DrusTheAxe]

First rate talent at Third rate prices.

Not exactly going to snarf up the kind of talent you're looking for (or need).

Microsoft prides itself on paying at the 67th percentile. In case you haven't looked, the stock price has been FLAT for 7 years now. Not a growth stock, and no (regular) dividends like a value stock.

Even if the work life is reasonable (and it can be, in some divisions), you're not going to find bright, driven, capable and experienced people at those rates.

Forget about college pukes. Be deathly afraid at your poor and declining ability to hire and retain people with 5, 10 or 15 years experience.

The senior, experienced, savvy developers.

Forget being millionaires. How about being able to pay the mortgage?

No. Unless Microsoft radically changes compensation (upward) for those who truly deserve and aid (and not merely politicos who appear to), Microsoft's declining market presence is heading on a downward and accelerating slope.

You don't get good talent at shit prices.

Re:Oh, come on, Bill, you may have Aspergers, but.

[mochan_s]

Maybe my experience is different but I've worked with some of the older programmers. I've worked with someone with PhD in mechanical engineering and had turned into coder in the last 10 years. He's only older in age and not even with a good college background on computer science because I suspect it's started with learn java in 21 days. Sorry but knowing mechanical engineering does in help in writing web applications.

What is killing computer science in the university level in the US is the penis stench. There is absolutely no joy in a computer science class. It's full of boring ugly people. As a CS student, I was amazed how easily everyone found girlfriends and dates and I had to go to such lengths to even have some interaction with girls. CS as a subject is utterly fucked.

You have no idea of what arranged marriages are. In India, the men hardly interact with women to the scale that happens in the US - kinda like a big computer science department :)

But, ultimately, it has to be realized that if you don't let software developers in the US, the companies will outsource jobs to them. If you won't let companies outsource jobs as well, then the foreign developers will themselves form companies and make software to sell. What's the best out of the three?

Even though they were colonized the British, the Indians never learned the English charm. I doubt American actors are mad that a lot of acting jobs are taken over by British actors. But, however, local software engineers absolutely hate, and I mean HATE HATE, their Indian counterparts.

High-Quality Outsourcing a Myth

[curmudgeon99]

Why do we allow this myth to be repeated. Have you been involved in an outsourcing project? They suck! The quality is not there. I have been involved with a dozen and everytime the offshore teams write crap code. Every single damn time. They don't follow standards or requirements and we ALWAYS end up rewriting 95% of their code. Why do we let them get away with these exaggerations.

I agree. Curse the current immigration policy...

[FMota91]

As a foreigner (a Portuguese) being educated in CS here, and interested in immigrating here altogether (in my mind I have already immigrated, but that's not what the papers say), I feel that the immigration policy is what's holding me back the most. I'm 15 years old (16 in a week), foreign, a High-School sophomore and dual-enrolled in college. I could finish my high-school and graduate from college in the same year (or in consecutive years), if my visa allows me to stay here that long (I don't have a student visa, I have a J2, because I'm a minor). Then what? Do I work in one place long enough to get permanent residency? Continue on a student visa to get a master's degree? I dislike my prospects. Last week there was a man who came to talk to us in Career Success. He was a mechanical engineer. He told us that, due to the very low amount of high-schoolers who decide to go into a science or math degree, more immigrants are being educated in the U.S. in those subjects, or work in the U.S. in those subjects, but because of the immigration policy most of them go back to wherever they came from after they've learned the techniques. He told us that, because of this, the U.S. was going to sop being a world power in the future, unless they fixed the problem. My CS professor also tells us frequently how there are far too few people graduating in CS, and how companies country-wide are looking for developers, because there are simply not enough of them being educated. Anyway, I hope that the immigration policy does get revised. Sure would make my life easier. And the U.S's, it seems.

Re: effects of H-1B on supply and demand

[Anonymous Coward]

"Moving jobs overseas does the same thing economically as raising the H1-B cap"

So far, so good. But there's something else at work. H-1Bs are also used to facilitate off-shoring. Some studies have noted that they tend to use one H-1B to facilitate moving two positions off-shore, transfer knowledge from the USA off-shore, and provide a communications conduit.

H-1B cap

[Anonymous Coward]

The annual cap is not 65K but over 85K. Bill Tucker of CNN recently reported: "That's 85K visas a year. But the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service approved 116,927 applications in 2005. It approved 130,497 in 2004." and this information was available to the government but not released until after the elections. On the USCIS cap page, they reported that 6,100 unused H-1B visas from fiscal year 2006 were rolled over into FY2007.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0701/26/ldt .01.html

Re: self-made recruiting "difficulties"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Doesn't Google have difficulty hiring people?"

Yes, they, like the M$ and other executives are having self-created difficulties.

http://collectingmythoughts.blogspot.com/2007/01/3 424-too-young-to-retire-sheryl.html
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/01/too_young_t o_re.html

"I have a Ph.D. in Computer Science. I have 20 years of experience. I am 50 years old. I am unemployable. I can't even get an interview at companies like Google, Cisco, M$, Dell, HP and Apple, whose Washington lobbyists..."

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=115 318&WT.svl=column2_1

"Google's executive staff has [idiotically] concluded that interviewing takes too long and that by sorting potential employes based on grades -- largely an artificial metric in business -- they are probably missing out on many great employees they might otherwise hire. Unfortunately, Google's 'solution' to this problem is to hire people [who are capable of doing] jobs '3 levels higher' than the jobs they are hired for."

Other self-created difficulties:
* failure to recruit at more than a handful of the thousands of collegs and universities in the USA
* failure to cover interview and relocation costs for impoverished by capable US candidates
* decrease in education and training for new-hires and current employees from what firms were offering in the 1980s
* abuse of resume parsers attached to overly limited data-bases instead of hiring competent humans
* failure to include human contact name, that person's e-mail address and voice telephone number in every help-wanted ad
* failure to advertise jobs in print media across the country
* turning out products of low quality repeatedly, which repels many capable American professionals
* conduct and products that are ethically questionable, which repel many capable American professionals from seeking work at their firms (e.g. that whole "permatemp" scam, RFID, many ERP projects, body shopping)

A BSCS isn't good for anything - check dice

[walterbyrd]

It is rare that a job ad mentions a college degree at all. And when a degree is mentioned it's usually something like: "BSCS, or other technical degree, or equivilent experience." And you can certainly miss out on getting hired for a job if you are considered over educated.

A BSCS is as difficult to get as degree in engineering, but it's as worthless as degree in libral arts.

For that matter, the IT field is going down the sewer fast. Hours are long, pay is low, burnout is high. In IT, you can get liad off on a whim. Forign competition is always breathing down your neck.

I know nurses who earn over $100k/year with a community college education.

If you are going to get a degree in something, get a degree in something that requires a degree: doctor, lawyer, accountant, engineer (other than software), etc.

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is, Bill...

[macserv]

All he does is talk. He's been griping about the lack of students entering CS fields of study for a LONG time now. Well, here's a suggestion, Bill: build your own school, and make it free to take CS courses there!

That's right. Take the cash that you find in your car and build an entire major college campus. Make your own rules about who gets in, and what gets taught. Give away accredited CS instruction, and maybe fain MS employees in exchange.

I swear, if I hear Bill open his fracking cake-hole one more time, I'll vomit. He's one man who really has no need to talk; he has nearly infinite capability to just *do*.

FUCK YOU BILL GATES

[Anonymous Coward]

thats all that needs saying.

PROPAGANDA

[TheSlashaway]

If there was such demand, all us programmers would be making double and triple digit hourly rates like we did in the 90's. Now, we have to deal with unemployment, underemployment, etc... That article is a load of buull.

Only a Shortage At the Current Price

[Anonymous Coward]

There is only a shortage of engineers and computer scientists at the current price. If they were paid more, more people would go into the field, and there would be no shortage.

So stop your belly-aching, corporate America, and open up the purse strings. Just pay more, and the shortage will instantly disappear!!

Whenever you hear the word shortage, immediately think to yourself "at the current price". Businessmen are trying to get something for nothing. Everybody would like to get something for nothing. But there is no free lunch. You get what you pay for. And nothing more.

Even government doesn't get a free lunch. They steal it, fair and square, from those who produce it.

Fucking racist

[ghoul]

The 57000 CS grads probably includes 30000 F1 students so even if you give all of them H1B (many do go back) and jobs to the other 27000 and import another 35000 for the rest of the H1b quota you are still at 92000 and you have not even started counting the people retiring. In CS because of the large amounts of money as well as the long hours the retirement age is much lower and people can afford to and need to retire in much larger numbers than other fields

Re:Hire women, blacks, people from state Universit

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Additionally, managers in silicon valley have a track record of strong bias in favor of graduates from a single-digit list of colleges, and of Caucasian, Oriental, or Indian descent males.

Ahh, the requisite racial crusading jackass.

If you include women, blacks, American Indians, Hispanic-descent citizens, various "halfbreeds", and graduates of other fine universities (especially state universities) - rather than reserving them to support (or janitorial) positions, there is no shortage whatsoever.

Yeah, I'm sure that the guys who clean the floors all have CS degrees or know how to write code. Face it, half breed or no, there are enough startups out there that, should they have the ability, they'll have a good job.

You have to PAY them on the basis of performance, respect their opinions, and avoid filing the serial numbers off their ideas and crediting them to the stars from that tiny pool of ivy-league whites and orientals. If you hire them and then systematically abuse them and pay them 2/3 of what you pay the in crowd, they'll burn out and drop out.

Why treat them any differently from the whites? You think favoritism is strictly a racial thing?

Multiple Issues

[SkewlD00d]

As a 15 year veteran of both IT and Software Development in both academia and industry, there are multiple issues involved.

1. Does Bill Gates have other intentions?

   Immigration puts a downward pressure on wages because now everyone in the world is competing for *your* job. Protectionism be damned, I guess.. in the future, if you're American, you're going to be poor like the rest of the world, even if here in Palo Alto, the rent for a modest 2 bedroom / 1 bathroom is $1500 USD/month.

2. Specialization

   Applicability and focus of candidates. You need someone with a proven, focused track record who can deliver and do a reasonable job for the pay.

3. Human resources and management, specifically hiring practices of "cold-call" applicants.

   The number one task of a manager is to hire the right people ("resources" is the euphemism). Often, H.R. staff, and sometimes managers, have no clue the difference between an EE and a CS major, much less what they do. I see many messy, unfocused roles/responsibilities where a company tries to get a Windows SysAdmin to also be an Oracle DBA... the jack-of-all-trades, master-of-nothing scenario... nothing is for free. The other point is that a degree does not automagically confer intelligence nor superior work product. The fact that companies, such as google, sort people initially based on degree alone is short-sighted, but it's a cold, imperfect world and they dont have anything better.

4. Résumés are hard to validate

   Anyone can write anything they wish. The trick would be to form something of a credit bureau; a worker need not write a resume, jobs seek them. Consider asking for durable letters of recommendation, since it is unlikely your old boss will be in the same job in two years.

5. Degree of preparedness from degrees, certificates and experience.

   The university I attended was a so-called "top 50" school (which, in itself, it is meaningless to rank universities on arbitrary metrics). In the major, the circula was generally not relevant to industry (except academia), and unnecessarily difficult for the average student. Many a sleepless nights coding some stupid program that serves no useful purpose. In addition, there was a complete side-stepping of any mention of any particular platform except Linux. Gee... Windows is used in at least 75% of businesses, why not learn how to write a simple GUI application? Nope! Besides, The I know for a fact many people who graduated from the program and went on to become construction worker and police officer. Some really couldn't hack it in industry due to the fact they cant code their way out of a paper bag, they managed to graduate somehow. Still others cheated their way through, copying code and problem sets... (it happens, especially at Ivy Leagues, and worse... homework for profit, grade inflation and double-standards).

   Another fallacy is the need to educate everyone. "If everyone had a million dollars, no one would become a janitor because no one would clean shit up."

   The point is: industry and academia should work together, to create useful candidate who can pick a specialization.

   For example: create *useful* academic-backed certification paths that do not require degrees: tech support, jr. system engineers, etc. Bring back trade schools for people who do not care about Turing Completeness, and don't put them in charge of developing enterprise backup software. Bring back mentoring. The old guys know the tricks from the mainframe days (virtualization, SaaS and consolidation are rapidly dragging us back). This tacit knowledge (not specific details) are crucial to maintain.

6. High-turnover of workforce.

   With people moving around so much, one needs a way to check references with some degree of authoritative confidence. Again, job/career credit bureau(s) simplify this, as do other tools, such as l

Re:Hire women, blacks, people from state Universit

[koreth]

They would have to apply for the jobs first. At my current job (Silicon Valley area) I have interviewed perhaps fifty candidates for engineering positions. All of them were either East Asian (both sexes in about equal numbers) or a South Asian or white male, with two exceptions, an Indian woman and a Hispanic man. The latter of whom, by the way, I recommended hiring. I have not interviewed a single black person or white woman. It's impossible to display a selection bias against people who aren't in your sample set!

I'm happy to find someone who knows their stuff technically. What they look like or what accent they have is perhaps not 100% irrelevant -- it is impossible to completely eliminate my biases, though I try -- but it's far, far, far down the list compared to their ability to write code, their history of making reasonable design choices, their familiarity with the technologies they'll be working with on the job, and their enthusiasm for learning new things.

As for state universities, honestly I pay close to zero attention to the "education" part of the resume unless they're fresh out of school, in which case what I want to see is interesting projects I can ask them about. If I see someone has graduated from Middle-o-nowhere University in Wisconsachussetts, I have no idea if that's the best school in the region or some one-room schoolhouse with no electricity, and I don't care. Well-connected idiots graduate from top-tier schools all the time and smart people wind up at low-end schools for all sorts of reasons.

That said, if someone is top of the class at MIT, they probably have some measure of technical skill -- but in an interview I will use that as a starting assumption, not a conclusion. A couple weeks ago I gave a thumbs down to a guy who was (according to his resume) top of his class at IIT; he was clearly very smart and insanely expert at his narrow specialty but told me straight up he had no interest in stepping outside it, and my company requires its engineers to be able to wear different hats on a fairly regular basis. The decision had nothing to do with his school or his race or his age and everything to do with his suitability for the job.

I'm not saying the biases you cite don't exist, but they are certainly not universal in the valley. Many of us just want good people who can attack a range of problems. We'll take them wherever we can find them.

Simpler Endeavors

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as pharmacists make $100K counting pills, CS is not a viable major. Pharmacies aren't even formularies any more -- it is literally counting pills, since computerization handles flagging of dangerous interactions. Why would anybody seriously take up CS, which is MUCH HARDER, given this situation? Bill Gates complains about a labor shortage, yet his company almost single-handedly is the one supressing wage growth (taking advantage of the supposedly necessary H-1B's).

Re:Hire women, blacks, people from state Universit

[littlewink]

Woman. Part Amerind. State universities. IQ so high a psych professor had to roll a special test to estimate it. ... She left the field.

So you're saying she finally got smart!8-))

CS Degrees

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing I have never understood is why US employers seems to continually insist on a CS degree as a pre-requisite to employment. 20 years ago that might have been fine but most bright kids in America has access to a computer these days and many are cutting code, good code, in their basements just for sh1ts an giggles. So what if someone comes with a different degree so long as he knows his stuff?

I'm in Banaglore now (Re:H1-B and Student Visas..)

[Wisp]

I'm an American in Bangalore now and I think it goes deeper than just a systemic educational advantage. Its also about relative pay and a global corporate rush to spend as little as they have to.

The purchasing power of an Engineer's salary here has instantly created an upper class which has many people very motivated to enter the field. The very high pay (in purchasing power), the generally high academic standards, and the absolute cost advantage of moving operations here means Americans in the long run aren't as competitive not simply because their standards aren't high enough.

Should American educational standards be raised ? Absolutely. Addressing the rest of the dynamics at play here to remain competitive is much harder to do however. In fact all of the changes that I imagine that would be needed would require major social changes that I suspect most Americans would resist.

Business-corrupted Bill

[Sqreater]

He knows the truth. But he's been so long in business he can no longer speak truth to the world. Business has been successfully driving down the cost of technology workers over the years, even causing a decline of engineering salaries for the first time in decades. Businessmen sit around lighting stogies with hundred dollar bills and pat each other on the back over how much they have driven down salaries and benefits for the "knowledge worker" in the high tech industries. But they forget that capitalism comes from human psychology. And if you don't properly recompense humans for their efforts, and they have the freedom to not participate, they won't. Tech is difficult. It is difficult to acquire the knowledge base for entry and it is difficult to perform. It requires constant upgrading of knowledge and skills. With regard to the decline of students in CS etc., the "clever" businessmen like Bill Gates reap what they sow.

Peter Drucker, the management guru, says the USA has passed from the manufacturing age into the age of the knowledge worker. Fine, but business seems to be attacking the knowledge worker base, attempting to drive it down to a minimum wage salary level where the baseline for employment is a minimum engineering degree. If you can flip burgers at McDonalds for low wages and think your own thoughts, or drive yourself crazy in tech for close to the same wages, what does he expect people to do? And what comes after the "knowledge worker" phase of the economy? Slave worker economy?

Re:It's been 20 years and CS still gets no respect

[Stiletto]

I sometimes wondered if I should've gone for an MBA rather than my MS in CS. Oh well..

It's not too late. I've spent 8 years doing software and am now doing a full time MBA program. There are a lot of folks in my class who also have an MS in engineering, but are finding the degree wasn't worth what they thought it would be.

There's no pay/benefits/security/advancement in software anymore. There arguably never was, ignoring the few blips in the late nineties.

problem is ...

[hany]

For the sake of this post lets define following:

• customer - is essentialy educated and makes informed choices
• consumer - just consumes what's given, no questions asked, with just mild rebelions when he things some of his god-given rights has been violated (after which he is "educated" and new set of rights - smaller one - is introduced)

IMO, american/western style free-market economy successfully reeducated people from customers to consumers - that's what better for corporations (just give us your money and take whatever shit we give you in return).

But the problem is, those consumers are also employees at the same time.

And you can't have high-value-added economy with only dumb people working in it. Such employees can't be well paid thus they can't spend much.

That in itself is a negative-feedback-loop. This "dumbing down" is IMO a problem and this feedback is a corective action.

Those companies either reeducate their employees/customers or completely relocate to some other country where there is lower ration of dumb-asses in population.

From the peoples point-of-view: do not support companies which are trying to dumb you down - you'll end up stupid, unemployed, without a land and unable to buy stuff from such companies.

Can you blame him?

[walterbyrd]

He's giving away 90% of money. Poor guy, he probably only has about $5 billion left. And you want to deprive him of that? For shame.

Competitive with *who*

[whitroth]

...the hairdressers and the politicians that colonized this planet (ObRef: HHGttG)? The overwhelming part of our manufacuring base is gone, shipped overseas by CEOs who didn't want to pay union (or even decent) wages; and in the computer industry, specifically, they don't want to pay decent wages, so they hire H1-B's or ship the work overseas.

We won't even *begin* to discuss corporate training programs (they don't "waste" money that way), or the fact that the overwhelming majority of upper managers and almost all HR people wouldn't have a clue if it bit them on the ass as to what the requirements for the computer jobs they're hiring for mean, and so, rather than look for skillsets, look for specific acronyms. Oh, and we also won't point out that they're looking for someone who's worked there for a year to hire, and not facing the reality that EVERYONE takes a week or so to ramp up on that company's environment.

If he actually meant what he said, there wouldn't be one involuntarily unemployed computer person in this country.

            mark

What a load of crap

[stonewolf]

I used to be a software developer. I helped build 4 start up companies. I was laid off in 2001 and have not been able to find a development job since.

Because I have an MS degree and 30+ years experience mostly in computer graphics I was able to get a part time job teaching at the local community college. This semester the students are just like last semester and the semester before that. Less than one third are young people just out of high school, the rest are adults over 40, who have BS, MS, or even Ph.Ds in computer science, math, and electrical engineering. They have all been laid off and have all been unable to find engineering jobs for 2 to 5 years.

The older people are trying to retrain in anyway they can so they can get back to doing engineering work. They are surviving by working at fast food joints, delivering pizzas, and doing secretarial work. Most have depleted their savings.

The drop out rate among the younger people is very high. The main lesson they are learning in my class is that engineers and scientists are disposable workers who wind up on the streets at age 40, or 50 if they are lucky.

Gates wants more young people to feed to the meat grinder? Let me tell you, America's young people are not stupid. If you want more young people to work for you, you have to show them that they will have jobs when they are older. You have to employee the thousands and thousands of unemployed and under employed scientists and engineers we already have in the US.

There is no shortages of technical talent in the US. There is a huge shortage of technical jobs in the US. The very existence of the H1B visa system is proof that the US government is owned by big business.

Re:Oh, come on, Bill, you may have Aspergers, but.

[Shajenko42]

The US made a choice not to be capitalist with this little thing called "The New Deal". It basically was a way to deal with the centralization of wealth by nationalizing collective bargaining trade unions. This was done to avoid the alternative, genuine capitalism, in which there is a use fee paid for property rights as the primary source of government revenue.

Actually, it was done to prevent the opposite - communist revolution, which more and more poor people thought was the correct solution, and that capitalism had played itself out.

Essentially, FDR destroyed capitalism to save it.

Being single is a plus

[RomulusNR]

Graduate into a low-status job when it comes to dating

This tendency actually serves predatory IT employing practices. Single IT employees are better than non-single or worse, familied employees because the former have no one at home waiting for them to arrive by a certain time for dinner, a date, bedtime, child or relationship or family obligations, etc.

The single employee has no problem staying late until whenever and less issue with working weekends because there is no one at home for them. The non-single employee has dates and such set up with their SO. The familied employee has family expectations, time spent with kids, contribute to their needs, alleviate burden on the other parent, etc.

So that's another thing to add to the list: Even if you can manage to form a relationship, this will work against your IT career, and even worse so when you form a family.

Re:Being single is a plus

[Anonymous Coward]

It cuts both ways.

An employee with a family to feed will put up with more abuse than a single employee. They're more likely to take the abuse than risk a primary source of family income compared to someone without such obligations.

Here is an idea

[bryan1945]

Not to be mean, and I know this is the core of /., but how about not focusing on getting a degree in CS? Engineering is fun (I'm an EE, and working on my masters on infosec). Again, not to disparage, but I never heard on an engineer called the equivalent of "code monkey". My two best friends are chemical engineers. My wife is a bank manager. A close friend from college married a PhD in biochemistry. Heck, my dad has a PhD in nuclear physics, and my mom was a doctor. I know this is a geek (and mostly a site for those whom like to code) site, but there are a whole lot of other things you can do if you want.

Personally, I hate coding, but I can do it. If your job is so tenuous that it's getting shipped overseas, why not try something else?

White boys at Home Depot for work/day?

[JhohannaVH]

I see hordes of Mexicans outside home depot on my way to work everyday willing to work for several dollars an hour and I feel bad for the honest carpenters and construction workers.

*sidebar*

I went to Home Depot to get moving boxes Saturday. I live in San Diego, 10 miles from the border. What did I see when I went to Home Depot? 25 men standing at the entrance of the lot with their thumbs out looking for work. 10 were obviously Hispanic. 4 were of African descent (unknown if they were American, as there are a LOT of black people here not FROM here - Somalia, Ethiopia, Niger, etc). 3 were Southeast Asian, I couldn't tell which part, could have been Indian or Indonesian, I can't make that deference by driving by. But no. There were 6 white guys standing there looking for work too. The rest were a mix that I couldn't discern just by looking at them, they could have been Hispanic, but didn't look it... not my call. So, yeah... I'd say that views are changing, and there are a lot of hungry mouths to go around. :(

Sadly... I did hear someone offer to hire a bunch of them for $8.00 an hour (above minimum wage). Said offer was turned down and they waited for the next sucker that would pay them more. Now *that's* sad. Sorry, when it comes time for me to pack/unpack my moving van out of this hellhole? I'll be paying a COMPANY to do it and keeping the economy proper... not undercutting it in the grey slave trade. *snort* Which is why I'll be bribing my friends with food, beer and goodies instead! :D I'll spend more, but the loyalty is forever. :D Not to mention that they *owe* me and my hubby after all the years we've spent moving them around. :P

Re:Oh, come on, Bill, you may have Aspergers, but.

[Baldrson]

Sorry, that's just the myth. The reality is that Huey Long, a presidential contender promoting a wealth tax, was assassinated and Norm Thomas's platform was adopted in its entirety except for his Wealth Tax. FDR then proceeded to submit legislation he called "The Wealth Tax" and it didn't tax wealth but income, capital gains.... all the usual economic activities.

The communism vs pseudo-capitalism dichotomy is false and vigorously maintained.

Facts - White Collar Flight helped by MS/IBM.....

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM, MS, BMC, CA, etc are actively driving computer workers out of the industry by replacing USA based workers with India/Chinese workers.

India based workers total cost to a company is $5 to $10 an hour (10k to 20k)

That is total cost.

That equates to $4 to $8.50 for a US based worker, taking out social security, medicare, unemployment, worker's comp and other taxes paid by the employer (does not include vacation, health care, etc).

The CEOs want IT workers to work for wages comparable to that in India.

They want a software developer to accept minimum wage ($5.75) plus $2-$3 an hour to be competitive. Perspective employees do not go to college for 4 years and pay more than $10,000 tuiton/books/rent to get a job that pays $1 or $2 more than they can make at McDonalds flipping burgers.

This is why there are drastically less Computer Science graduates today.

Even increasing the wage to 1.5 or 2.0 times that of India will not get anyone excited about getting a Computer Science degree ($15 to $20 an hour) since it is significantly smaller than what other jobs pay (Teachers $25+ an hour, Nurses $25+ an hour, etc).

The IT dip since 2000 has made for stagnant wages for those employed in IT and, when coupled with higher medical costs + inflation, has led to a signficant decline in real purchasing power by those in the IT industry. A 5 percent increase in salary will not even keep up with inflaction after income taxes for most IT workers ((5 - (5 * 0.25)) is less than 3 percent inflation in 25 percent tax bracket).

How many companies will give raises large enough just to cover inflation for a year? for multiple years?

From 2000 to 2006, inflation has eroded 20 percent of our purchasing power (2.7 percent a year for 7 years) while wages are flat or declining.

Those facts are driving workers out of the field and driving students away from Computer Science.

This is what the companies want as acheived through their actions. The tangental effect of killing their own customers because third world offices have enough check labor to rarely need high cost enterprise software as well as reducing the demand for class A office space will lead to a soft market to sell their goods in high profit markets like the USA.

Lastly, startup companies which are growing companies and associated with job creation have now been mandated to offshore as part of their business plan in order to get the third round of venture capital funding. These startup companies will offshoring when they are small and have less than 100 employees.

A good book on the subject is

Outsourcing America: What's Behind Our National Crisis And How We Can Reclaim American Jobs By Ron Hira, Anil Hira

ignore him

[DriveDog]

Certainly a lot of factors are involved, but on salary alone, we can't expect a rush to get CS degrees when the money is artificially held low by bringing in H-1Bs. No H-1Bs, higher salaries, more CS graduates, eventually equilibrium without importing labor. Gates just wants more H-1Bs to keep salaries low so MS can rake in more billions. Simple. So ignore him.

Re:CS is a great degree, if you like being spat on

[infonote]

I do nit agree with you. I think Computer Science degree is extremely useful. However at the end management/marketing/sommunication skills will enable you to advance to the "A list". If you have management/marketing skills, you know what is happening in the business world and be proactive. You can then take study to change career before you are forced to.